Mark Bell's Power Project - Your Idea of a Diet is WAY Too Hard, Eat Like This Instead

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

On episode 49 of Mark Bell's Saturday School, Mark Bell explains how most people set themselves up for failure when it comes to "dieting" and gives advice on how to eat and put diet on "easy mode"   New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   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/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

A pancake is a very delicious, amazing thing, but a pancake shouldn't be the breakfast. Your home should be like as positive as you can make it. Why have stuff that is going to potentially cause harm in the moment and in the future? Do your best to try to keep that stuff out. Teaching yourself and other people, the snacks that are around,

they're not to necessarily eat when you're hungry. They're just to eat, just to eat. If you're being realistic with yourself, how many really good workouts do you have per week? I think the answer we're going to get from just about everybody is like one or two, but you still want more when you're done. You can take the same principle and you could put that into your diet. You're going to feel pretty strong and powerful on your diet here and there. And for somebody that hasn't really dieted much, you could just be three meals into it and you could feel like you've been on it for three weeks. But just make sure you have enough energy

to do the thing that you're actually setting out to do so you don't feel like a failure. Your best bet is to set up a diet that's gonna be a little more calm, a little bit more chill. Can I have one really healthy meal for the day? And then I wonder how many days in a row can I do that? That alone might cause some change. Your food shouldn't taste like shit. And I'm so excited to

eat. And it's, I'm not eating shit that's bad. I'm eating shit that's really good for me. And every single time that I eat, I'm always like, I wonder if other people know about this. I used to think that I had to suffer when trying to quote diet. I just used to think, man, this fitness thing, this eating healthy thing, like this isn't for me. For the everyday person, what do you think is a responsible way to set goals for themselves? I think for so many people, it's pretty simple. Just get leaner. Okay. You have a plan. You have a nutrition plan, but I don't think that you should try to go into like this caloric deficit because you're just going to be hungry. Right. You said you don't want to do

too much all at once. So what's like literally just step one like people can end this podcast and go do right now cool this uh steak shake is unbelievable i mixed it up in some coffee for me me and you and it's so good it's awesome i i really really hope people understand how delicious this stuff is. I don't think anybody gets it quite yet. I don't think so. I don't think so, no. We mixed up chocolate, steak shake, which is a protein powder fortified with liver, kidney, heart, spleen, pancreas, as well as beef protein isolate, egg white protein, and whey protein.

And we mixed that up with some coffee this morning, and it's absolutely amazing. Then we also threw in from my company, Within You brand, we also threw in some chocolate hydration for a little added flavor and a little added sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium. Also, our hydration is also fortified with some amino acids as well, so you get a little bit of amino acids in the mix too to help further your hydration. But you can pick all that stuff up over at withinyourbrand.com.

And I'm excited because people just keep telling me how awesome it is, which is really cool. Like the people that have tried it. There's been a lot of people that haven't had an opportunity yet, but go check it out. I think you'll dig it. Yeah, we got links in the description. There's a promo code in there to save 15 promo code power project at checkout but yeah um i've had dudes at jujitsu come up to me and tell me like dude like what is up with that i'm like what are you talking about you know like i know they're talking about steak shake but i'm like what do you mean they're like why is it so damn good um our boy uh gormy goes

keto he he got the banana one and he's been making like a banana pudding type thing. He's been freaking out. And same thing. So it's legit, man. I don't know how you guys came up with that to have all that stuff in there and for it to taste this good. It's crazy. I'm not sure if you had a chance to listen to.

It's been advertised now on Tom Segura's podcast. He's talking about it as well as Ed Milet and a few others. Obviously like those are paid advertisement, but these are people that I've sent the product to that actually do like it. Um, for people that do follow those guys, they know that those guys don't put their name behind or they don't attach anything to stuff that they don't like. So if it's good enough for those guys, maybe it might be good enough for you as well. Just maybe.

But I got a question for you, Andrew. What you got? Kind of maybe like a I got a question for you, Andrew. What you got? Kind of maybe like a couple questions, I guess. But I guess like number one is, so your body fat percentage, I believe, went from 15%, almost 16, down to 12% recently. I've known you for a long time. You're not really a guy that loves to compromise the flavor of your food so much. So in his, you know, 16% body fat, by the way, is impressive as well, I think, you know, so people out there looking, you know, to try to shoot for some goals,

if you can get to 16, 15%, I think you can, I think you'll live, you can live a long, healthy life at that body weight. And a lot of times you can see like a bicep vein when you start getting around that percentage or maybe slightly lower. But I think that people still are convinced, especially older people, maybe like our parents and stuff. Um, maybe people over the age of 50, I think they're convinced that in order to like lose weight, you know, and we're talking about losing weight, we're talking about losing body fat. We're not really just talking about like losing weight. We're talking about losing body fat and changing your body composition. Cause who just want, like, I don't know, like

maybe there's some chicks out there that just want to be thin. I don't know. But like thin, I don't think thin is that cool. Like I'd rather see somebody look a little more sturdy and look like they can maybe throw a punch, defend themselves a little bit, you know, male or female, look a little athletic, I guess you'd say. And anyway, but anyway, going from 15%, almost 16% down to 12%, have you had a major departure from eating foods that are delicious? Or what has your experience been like? No, not at all. Now, granted, I would say my diet has evolved over the years.

It went from being okay with cereal to not being okay with cereal being like an actual food. Now, does that mean i never have it um no it might be like a little bit on top of homemade ice cream yes homemade ice cream that got me from 16 down to like about 12 okay that's that's no lie like i was eating ice cream on a regular basis ninja creamy you guys need to get one um but no like explain the ninja creamy just briefly at least real quick so you're gonna blend up a bunch like you could blend up this coffee right here put this in the freezer get it out the next day put in the ninja creamy and it'll create ice cream for you it's

unbelievable it's and you can pick like ice cream or sorbet or gelato and it mixes it up kind of differently if you play around with those different settings. It's so good. Yeah. Yeah, my favorite one so far has been using the chocolate steak shake with Fairlife whole milk and throw that in the Ninja Creamy and it's phenomenal. Yeah, for a good base, I agree. Like a Fairlife product is good. Either their milk or they do have their other proteins that are like 26 grams of protein or whatever. Those are pretty good. Yeah. Okay. So back real quick. So for me, like I was doing 10 eggs for

breakfast every day and then I would skip every meal in the middle where people would normally want to have a snack or they have lunch at work. I just wouldn't need that because I was full from the morning. And then I would go home and I would eat some Piedmontese steak, whether it be ribeye or like a bavette, like a pretty big steak. Like probably over a pound or a pound. Yeah. Over a hundred grams of protein, put it that way. No matter which way you cut it. You can only assimilate 30 grams, Andrew. Well, then if that's the case, then I'm getting more full on some calories that I'm just not going to use anyways. So just throw them out the window. I don't care. Um, so that's what I was doing for a little bit and I was weighing about 186 pounds. And then, so I, I started toning down the eggs just so that way I can make weight for a competition I did about two months ago.

And so I ended up cutting down to about 178 and then I was like around 180 when I was weighing, uh, or when I was at 12 and a half percent body fat. But what I'm getting at is I ate a lot of food, right? Like eight eggs for breakfast with four slices of toast and then steak, uh, steak and rice for dinner. Sometimes with the salad, if my wife put it in front of me, cause I'm not going to make that for myself just because I'm not the biggest fan of vegetables. And then after a really big protein shake, or like I said, the protein ice cream that I would make myself at no point did I feel like I was really missing anything because I would also eat fruit throughout the day if I wanted to. Rare occasion, I would

have like an outright bar or some kind of protein bar or something or within you steak shake, but I never like, and I would still have In-N-Out too like I wouldn't I didn't completely get rid of In-N-Out I still had that at least once a week it's just I managed it by not overeating in the middle of the day and I wasn't really hungry either if you're gonna have In-N-Out did you like go crazy on In-N-Out or was like more you tried to be more modest with it or go crazy on In-N-Out or was like more, you tried to be more modest with it or? I, so I monitored it based off of like, let's say I had my eight eggs and four slices of toast for breakfast and I had nothing throughout the day. And it was like towards the end, well, not towards the end of the day, but like dinnertime Friday night,

I would get five Flying Dutchman and an order of fries. Let's say I had eight eggs. Flying Dutchman is without the bread. Sorry, yes. Without some of the carbs, but you had some of the carbs and some of the fries. Yeah, so 10 hamburger patties, five slices of cheese

because I would get one less cheese on each of them. Let's say I had- He's picking off some calories. This is actually really important information. Like forget about the carbs and forget about the fats and the proteins

and forget about the macros. He's just picking off some calories by getting rid of the bun. And also by ordering a flying Dutchman, you're actually getting rid of several hundred calories because there's also the sauce. So the sauce itself is probably a hundred to 200 calories. The bun is probably a hundred, you know, you know what I mean? So you're getting rid of two or 300 calories with each patty that you have that's that will total up when you get five of those that would total up to be approximately five thousand calories and now you're having some some of that again with the french fries but um you're probably still you're probably still not making up for those calories that you're

and then you're ditching the cheese as well slices of cheese which is helpful too yeah those definitely add up and if and if you're somebody that has to have some kind of sauce or whatever i get it mustard fried and it's it's it's so good it's so good it's not dry it's amazing i asked for no salt because the burgers i found are kind of salty anyway and so i don't i don't ask i asked them not to add any more salt. I really liked the flavor of that. Got it. Yeah. I'm a fan of everything in and out. So I just give me all the salt. It's okay. But let's say on a day where I had my big breakfast and I had something here at the gym, like maybe you brought, I don't know, whatever it may be something you brought something in and I had something, then I would just like, I would tone down the Flying Dutchman. Maybe instead of

five, I would have four, you know? So even though I'm not tracking, I'm still keeping a mental note of it in the back of my head to be like, Hey dude, like you don't need all that food because you know, uh, if it feels Friday night, Saturday morning, I'd be doing some kind of training and I wouldn't want to feel gross for it. So like, I would kind of do it that way. Yeah. I want to like focus in on this, this idea of you don't need that much food. You don't need that much energy. We just live in a world of a lot of abundance. People that can listen to this podcast, you're living in abundance.

You have Wi-Fi. You probably have a smartphone. You have good access to stuff. You know, you have a lot of modern conveniences and some of us make more money than others. And so from an economic standpoint, every once in a while, certain things are like out of reach. And I understand that. I understand a lot of people listening, you know, can't just, I can just be like, oh, it's so easy to eat a filet, you know, every meal, because that's kind of what I do because I love that type of steak or a bavette steak. And I understand that people can't always afford a lot of these things.

But driving through In-N-Out Burger is something that is fairly easy for almost all of us to do. And there's a lot of other things we can do. We could talk about the economic side of stuff as we move along. But I want to park it right here a little bit more and talk about you don't need that much food. So try to do some experiments. You know, Andrew was eating 10 eggs a day. The 10 eggs a day didn't, like, come out of nowhere. I'm sure Andrew's had omelets.

I've had three eggs in them before, four eggs, five eggs, so on. And Andrew's, like, you know, Andrew's on the thinner side. And you're, like, I want to, you know, have a little bit more substance to me. I'm doing jujitsu now and it'd be good if, you know, maybe when I come home from jujitsu, if I had a big breakfast and then also it fits your lifestyle. Because we're going to do two podcasts a day in a lot of the days that we do stuff. Andrew's probably going to work out twice in a day or one and a half times in a day, something like that. And so that kind of fits his needs really well.

But as you run some of these experiments, just try, you know, let's say you love having, you know, four pancakes at breakfast, you know, or you love getting a full stack. Can you get the shorter stack? Like if you do these things over time, this is what I've taught my children. And I've been very fortunate that they've been influenced by it because it's tough to influence your kids on just about anything. But over a period of time, I mean, first of all, you got to teach the kid that like a pancake is a very delicious, amazing thing that could be part of a healthy breakfast.

But a pancake shouldn't be the breakfast. I think that's the mistake that some of us can make. And I'm not talking about like a three or four-year-old kid that just eats a couple pieces of the pancake. It's like that's not a huge deal. I know like a lot of little kids, they just kind of fidget at stuff and then It's like, that's not a huge deal. I know like a lot of little kids, they just kind of fidget at stuff and then they're done and it's not a big deal. And they maybe hammer some orange juice

and they had way too much sugar and way too much carbs, but they didn't really eat that much in the first place. So maybe it's not, you know, it's not any reason to set off an alarm. But I'm talking about as a kid gets older and he can start to hammer some pancakes, you say, hey, can we order some eggs with that? Hey, can, okay. You know, I know you probably won't really love egg whites,

but if you're going to eat all those carbohydrates, it's good to try to pick off some of the calories from the fat and maybe you can't get your kid to do it, but maybe you can start to do it. Maybe you can start to think about it. Maybe you can start to think about, hey, I'll order the full stack, but hey, can you hold one pancake? I don't need it. I'm just going to eat four. Can you make these small compromises in your life? When you're making a burger at home, maybe like I know for myself when I'm on the barbecue, the burger I'm getting is getting two slices of cheese on it. You know what I mean?

I'm going to do that almost every time, but I've been thinking about it more and more recently. I've been trying to pay attention. How many burgers am I going to have? If I'm going to have one kind of big burger, all right, two slices of cheese. If I'm like, man, I'm going to probably mow through a bunch of these burgers and they're fattier burgers. They're not like 90-10 or something like that. I'm going to start to pay attention to that as well. And so just pay attention.

Like how much food do you really need? How much stuff do you really need? We should document this one time. Just film me trying to leave my house in the morning. I'm stuffing every pocket with a freaking electrolyte packet uh stuffing shit down my underpants you know banana a couple oranges throwing stuff in my backpack i got essential amino acids i'm like going i'm i'm it's like uh hey how long you be gone for pal like you're going camping i'm gonna be gone until 3 PM. You know, you're like, it's

nine 30. Like, I don't think you need that much shit with you. You got a 50 pound sack. That's full of every fucking ration you can think of. And so, you know, for, for me, I am fortunate to the point where I think that I've become like a, uh, a diet, I guess I would say like diet black belt. I would say, I would almost say ninja, but I'm not a ninja yet because I still have an issue with, I really want to pack myself with a lot of food. Not so much in the morning because in the morning I have a lot of shit to do. So in the morning it's kind of easy. And even throughout the day, it's kind of easy. Even if somebody like brought me like a giant sandwich or something it was something i really loved

um like a fucking chicken parm sandwich or something like that's like one of my favorite things that's a good call though if somebody if somebody brought me that and it was from somewhere like that was like notorious i'd fucking eat the thing of course but otherwise i'd probably just stick it in the fridge and be like i'll just just eat that. If I could heat it up later and it would taste similar, then I would probably just try to wait. Even if someone brought like cookies or something, I'd be like, oh yeah, I'll hammer those like when I'm done with my day. harder for me to control. And I think that for a lot of people, that's the case. Luckily for myself, I've also made a big switch into swapping calories. You know, I don't, it's good. I'm not going to buy a big cookie. I'm not going to bring ice cream into the house. Um, if I want like frozen yogurt or something like that, um, or I want ice cream, it might be while I'm on a walk. And then I just get what, like, my family,

my family doesn't think the way that I think, you know? Like, if I was to go to Baskin-Robbins, I would get, like, a huge-ass sundae, you know? But my kids and my wife, they don't do that. They're like, they get, like, one scoop. I'm always like, what the fuck? There's no way. It's a point in one scoop, you know?

So if I'm with them, there's no way. It's a 0.1 scoop, you know? So if I'm with them, I might ask for an extra scoop, but I'm not going to get some like giant massive thing. Again, therefore there's another area to pick off calories. Also, are you eating this thing? Is this thing you're eating for pleasure or is this thing you're eating to try to get you full? Those are some different things. And then you have to kind of, you've got to sort of set your life up or the next couple hours up in a way that makes sense to where you're feeding the flame, you're giving yourself the foods that taste good, that you like, and you're also filling yourself up enough with food. And so you go to like a barbecue or you go to these like family gatherings or outings

or something like that. We talked about it many times in the show might be a good idea to eat before you go that way you're less ravenous and the calorically dense stuff that they have there. Maybe it's less of a problem if you prepared for it. Maybe before you left the house, maybe you ate a big old salad and didn't have it doesn't have tons of calories. You didn't use tons of dressing that has tons of fat on it and stuff like that. And you filled up on that, or you had a little bit of a steak or something before you left your house, a protein shake, or you did what sometimes Nsema will do, which he'll just fast, just like really won't eat. He'll just drink water, make sure he's hydrated for jujitsu and stuff like that, and maybe have some small representation of calories from like fruit or a tasty pastry or legendary Pop-Tart type thing.

But for the most part, I think he fasts going into a lot of those situations. Yeah, he fasts. I tried that, and I ended up just like going to the dinner table and never leaving the whole night because I was just way too hungry. And I think that happens to me sometimes too. I need to get her eating a little bit better. And, you know, I was like kind of saying no to a lot of things, you know, and I felt bad, but I'm like, hey, like, you are going to have every single opportunity to have foods that are not good for you. Well, I guess maybe that's not the right term, but basically I was explaining like you're going to have foods that are going to be high in sugar,

high in carbs, high in fat. You'll have your own place someday and you'll be able to do whatever you want. Yeah, but what I was saying, like on a daily basis though, like when you get to school, you're going to have cinnamon rolls there. For lunch, you're going to have pizza. I'm like, you, like the food that you eat at home is going to be the only opportunity you have to eat something fairly clean that has protein in it.

Like outside of that, like you're going to have every opportunity, so I have to be the strict one. Yeah, that's a good point. And I, before I forget, I want to mention this, like your, your home should be like as positive as you can make it. Like, this is where you're going to get all the positive stuff. You know, you're not going to tell me that you want to be an actor or actress or something, and you're not going to hear no from me. You're going to hear it in the outside world and you should be prepared for that. But, you know, saying no, or you'll never be able to learn from that teacher, or you'll never be able to go to LA, like that's not going to come from this household. And same thing with your food. Like why have stuff that is going to

potentially cause harm in the moment and in the future, do your best to try to keep that stuff out. Yeah. So that's what I was going to ask you actually is like, okay, if we can safeguard our house, it's sort of like those that are quote social smokers. Like I only smoke and I'm around the, you know, whatever people or whatever. Do you think somebody can have that approach when it comes to their diet? i'm gonna not bring it at bring it in at home it's not gonna live there but if i go to family's house and they have it i'm not gonna be super strict i'm just gonna be in the moment and kind of have fun with everybody the best thing you can teach yourself and your kids is some form of self-control

you know and and you know i always know, I always like the word reasonable, like what's reasonable, you know, like if you have, if you have a, like right now we have a rice crispy treats in our, uh, cupboard, you know, in our pantry. And, um, I mean, it's a decent size box, but it's been there for a bit now, you know, it's not like, so it seems like my kids are pretty reasonable with it. Um, will I sometimes see two or three rappers you know like i don't know why they can't throw them away but you know where i see like two or three rappers like just somewhere every once in a while yeah but i don't think it's i don't think it's a huge deal and i i think as snacks go you know a rice crispy treat doesn't have a lot of fat in it. And I don't think that

fat is bad. I just think that fat can be calorically dense. And so if you're looking at things like Cheez-Its and even like goldfish and stuff, after a while, if you eat a lot of that, it has a lot of carbs and fat. So there's just all things kind of, I'm not saying a Rice Krispie Treat is healthy by any standard, but luckily too, both of my kids are active. So that's a factor. Like, I'm not going to say anything about you eating a couple extra cookies because you played volleyball a couple times a day. And so I think the key is to teach control. And so you say, all right, well, I'll buy the,

I'll buy these, um, you know, chips or whatever it might be. But, um, you know, then you talk to him about like, Hey, when you get these chips, let's not sit down with the bag. Let's get out a bowl. Even though, you know, dad's not going to do that. Let's sit down with a bowl and you, you know, put, take a handful, put it in a bowl even though you know dad's not going to do that let's sit down with a bowl and you you know put take a handful put it in the bowl if you want more if you really want more get up and get you know get more but um i think that that is probably the most helpful thing and really trying to teach kids that these snacks that we might have around the house and teaching yourself and other people, the snacks that are around, they're not to necessarily eat when you're hungry.

They're just to eat, just to eat, just to have them. And so you don't have to beat yourself up in your head, but you should be kind of paying attention to, oh, wow, I had like four of these today. That's an extra, like I don't need, again, how much energy do you need? Are we trying to be reasonable? Would it make sense for you to have a 100-calorie packet because they sometimes sell these things in like smaller bags and stuff, or you can do that yourself,

or you just dibby out stuff. Is it okay for you to have those things? Sure, it's okay, but you just got to kind of pay attention to it and make sure it's not leading to you just not making the progress that you want. Yeah, my biggest pet peeve or whatever, my biggest problem with having, like let's keep using the potato chips as an example, is like, okay, we had dinner. You're full.

You're totally full. Yep. I can't eat no more. Cool. As I'm still eating, oh, someone's going in the cabinet to grab the chips. So like, I don't know how to fully explain that. Like, Hey, like if, if we have the chips, you can't like have them after dinner. Cause that's like a weird thing to say, but it's almost like we can't use this as, as more food. So I love what you said. Like, you're not eating this to get full. Like you're just eating it just because, and it's like, man, if those chips weren't there, like maybe she would eat a little bit more. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's tough because that's my biggest like a hurdle right now with

having any kind of stuff like that in the house. It's just like, no no i don't need to finish eating because i know i got more food there yeah and it's tough you know you have a teenager in the house and a teenage girl you know it's like um like maybe pitch this one over to mom you know what i mean like you know mom's gonna you know probably know how to communicate some of it in a different way than, you know, but that's true. But I do, I do think that, um, like aside from like body fat and stuff like that, I do think it's great to communicate with your children about, about health, you know, like, um, you know, eating 12 times a day, just from a health perspective, it's probably not,

you know, having calories 12 times a day is probably not very healthy. So let's watch the snacks and let's watch the calories that we get from Starbucks and the juices. I was just talking to a relative this morning. She was saying how she knows somebody that, you know, drinks like apple juice and a bunch of stuff like that. And they struggle with their weight. And it's like, man, if we, if we can, I mean, let's say, let's say that you were able to go back in time and you were able to go back, you know, 20 years into that person's life and just say, okay, we're going to cut out all the calories that came from, um, you know, any beverages that just had sugar in them, not even like alcoholic beverages

necessarily, just beverages that had sugar in them. It's like that might knock 20 pounds off somebody. You know what I mean? Because it could be, you know, it could be 10, it could be, you know, 20 grams of carbs here, 20 grams of carbs there. And just just over time you do that a couple times a day it's gonna add up i mean in sema in sema is like the most metabolically healthy person that we can drum up you know that we can that we can think of and he gained like 10 or 12 pounds just from having some juice around the house that's so insane it's crazy yeah i mean you know he's probably like he was he was probably eating a little extra and stuff too on top of that but like if it has an impact on him we're all going to hell yeah we're all gonna have trouble yeah and and the thing that is crazy so like you said

like let's go back 20 years ago and just cut out the apple juice let's cut out the sugary drinks um it's hard to convince somebody to like, hey, how about from now? And then in 20 years, like it could prevent it, but it's like the time thing is tough. So like going back to the eggs thing, I did that for almost a year before I really started realizing like, I think this is actually working because like I'm doing pretty damn good right now. And then, you know, I was switched down to eight eggs

and it's like it took about three months for me to notice anything and then now right right now i'm currently at six and i've been kind of monitor um like uh self-regulating i guess i'll say my body weight to where like if i want to go up i'll just add a little bit more you know like so it's been really well but it's just it just takes a takes a lot of time and patience, which none of us have. And it's really hard. It's really freaking hard. If you were to match up your lifting that you've been doing from the time you started until right now, and you were to match it up with the intensity of Stan, with the intensity of

Kenny, you know Stan Efferding you know people that don't know people know Stan Efferding so hopefully they kind of understand that that guy, he still works out to this day with a ton of intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 where would you put the intensity of your

workouts? Dude, like in whole yeah from the time you started until now yeah i mean dude i mean you still might be accomplishing the thing that you set out to do in your workouts but like from an intensity standpoint like you pushing either for like you know kind of a heavy-ish lift or you trying to really give yourself a really good signal for like hypertrophy or you're just going in and doing you know even just what you set out to do and it's like a 10 out of 10 you know but kind of where do you think you would be in comparison to someone like Stan who's so on point or Kenny Williams yeah in comparison to the strongest bodybuilder in

history I would say on a scale of one to ten, probably about a 1 to 1.5 as far as intensity. Right. Yeah. And if you're just grading it on your own scale and you're saying, fuck Stan, is it a 6 or a 7? Yeah. I would say before ST, probably 3 to 5, maybe. Maximum for me at that time, but overall, clueless as far as, you like you know i mean i got lucky if i hit like a three or a five um after st maybe more consistently at a five more recently yeah six seven yeah and

that's because jujitsu is really really hard so those are the days that you know i hit a little bit higher yeah and it might waver a little bit here and there my whole point in bringing it up is that you look great thank you you have a have a great physique. Your back is getting better. It seems like you're getting healthier. It seems like you're getting younger. And the whole point in bringing that up is not to say that we're a bunch of pussies compared to Stan Efferding, because my numbers would be low too. I don't push. I mean, you might see sets here and there where I push and Andrew's worked out with me before. Andrew knows like, we'll do that like once or twice in a workout where I just kind of go in deep on like one movement. But the whole, the whole workout, the whole time doesn't look like

that. Um, when I was getting ready for the bodybuilding show, I had, I had to concentrate a little bit more. I had a short period of time. And so there might've been three or four exercises that were pushed pretty hard. Um, and that's where it's like, okay, well, that level might have been like a seven or an eight, you know, or maybe even eight or nine. But the whole point of bringing it up is that it's consistency over time. And it's something that I was sharing with Jake the other day too. Jake worked out with me and my buddy Mike Frank at same strength. And we had a great session. We did some legs and then we followed up,

I think with some shoulders or something like that. Spent about a half an hour on legs. And we just went, we just really went all in on one set on this leverage squat that they have at Sane Strength. And then from there, it was like, let's murder ourselves on some leg extensions. We did a couple leg curls and then we were boom off the shoulders. There you go. And Andrew's

showing some footage of it right now. There's the leverage squat from, uh, Watson is the name of the company. They make some really good products. How is that? That looks pretty brutal. The thing's amazing. Uh, zero, um, you know, I got some knee and elbow sleeves on and stuff like that too, but zero pain in the knees. And sometimes some of these machines that allow you to bend and to squat low, sometimes they put weird pressure on your back. This thing doesn't because you're like leaned back in some weird way. And it seems like it's kind of put support like directly on your back, like behind your shoulders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in there like a safety squat, but you're also like leaning backward. It's a really, really interesting piece. I am definitely going to buy one. I'll have an opportunity to use that thing.

That thing's incredible. But there's my son, Jake. He's in the video a little bit. And I don't really try to film my kids and stuff like that. They didn't sign up for what I signed up for with social media. The whole workout was about 45 minutes to an hour. And my point to my son, though, was that he doesn't have to go in the gym and kill himself every day, but he should do something like this once a week,

once, maybe twice a week. If you're being realistic with yourself, how many good workouts, the people listening, how many really good workouts do you have per week? I think the answer we're going to get from just about everybody is like one or two. It's hard to have four. It's really hard. It's really hard to have four.

And you could be training for something in particular. Maybe you're getting ready for a powerlifting meet or a bodybuilding show and you feel like you're on point with those four workouts but really i think if we're being honest it's like you got one or two days where you feel like you you you trained really hard the intensity was really good and you got after it you your output was good but you still want more when you're done like fuck this is that was awesome man i want to do some more shit. You're like, oh, man, time's up, so I got to get out of here. But you're like, god damn, today was really good. You only have one or two of those days anyway, so why not kind of plan for them

and understand that the other days are not throwaway days. You're not just going through the motions, but you might have to use different protocols on those days because you might not feel like you can be as sharp or as intense. You can take the same principle and you could put that into your diet. You're going to feel pretty strong and powerful on your diet here and there. And for somebody that hasn't really dieted much, you could just be three meals into it and you could feel like you've been on it for three weeks. It can feel like a really long time. So for somebody that is newer,

you might have to put a little more pressure on yourself like every other day. Like, okay, I'm going to fast until noon. I'm not even saying it's a great practice, but just hypothetical situation to drop some calories. I'm going to fast from 8 p.m. to noon, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. For some people, that's hard to do to have like the breaks in between. But in my opinion, the breaks in between are actually really important. It's almost easier to do it every day because it's easier to get yourself set on like a schedule. And once you get into a rhythm of it, you don't want to stop it. That's why people want to do jujitsu every day. That's why people want to run every day. They're just

like, man, if I stop, I'm going to be screwed. But you also know if you do jujitsu every day, your jujitsu is going to kind of suck. So you don't want to do it every day. So if you fast every single day and you're not used to it, by the time you get to like Friday or Saturday, or maybe you get a week or two down the road, you might end up binging not being on your diet anyway. So why not give yourself the energy that you need? And if you're new to like, if you're pretty new to these protocols, Mondayay eat pretty natural foods stick with you know meat and eggs lean sources of meat if you can uh vegetables fruit maybe some dairy leaner sources of dairy and then and maybe you do uh maybe again you fast till noon or one o'clock or something like that wednesday more

relaxed men's wednesday you can have your fucking granola bar that's peanut butter and has chocolate chips in it you can have like a regular snack like bring a sandwich with you to work or something you know next day boom right back kind of the natty diet but you can see how kind of sprinkling those things in is actually usually pretty hard for people especially like because if you have those other foods in the house that are like a departure from your actual diet, then you might be departing from it all the time. I hate to sound like a broken record, but your sleep quality most likely sucks. It's one of the biggest things that we talked about on the podcast. So many guests have come on and talked about how sleep can help you

stick to your diet, stick to your workout plan, lose body fat, gain muscle, all the good things that you're trying to do. But it's hard to do because you might be snoring. And if you're snoring, that's why we've partnered with hostage tape, which is mouth tape that you can put over your nose, your mouth when you're asleep to help you stop snoring and breathe through your nose. But if you haven't been breathing through your nose this whole time while you've been sleeping, it's going to be a little bit difficult to get air through there. That's also why hostage tape has and breathe through your nose. But if you haven't been breathing through your nose this whole time while you've been sleeping, it's going to be a little bit difficult to get air through there. That's also why hostage tape has nose strips.

It's to help open up your nasal airways and make it easier to breathe through your nose when you're asleep. Now your partner won't be having a fuck with you when you're asleep because you'll be actually breathing through your nose. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at hostage tape dot com slash power project, where you guys will receive an entire year's supply of nasal strips and mouth tape, all for less than a dollar a night. Again, that's at HostageTape.com slash PowerProject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. But just make sure you have enough energy to do the thing that you're actually setting out to do so you don't feel like a failure.

I think too many people, they set their diet so strict or their expectations are so high. I'm going to do this low carb thing starting on Monday. And again, you make it three days in and you're like, I'm dying. I got nothing. Maybe you didn't do it right. Maybe it's not the right time for you to mess with that. Maybe you've never really tried a diet protocol before and it's just way too intense for you. You bit off more than you can chew right off the bat. This is a dumbass question, but you mentioned sandwiches a couple times. Is French bread an American thing, or is bread like that in France as well, like a big old loaf?

Yeah, like a baguette. Yeah, but the ones that we see in the store like sometimes they have them at the checkout line they're like the size of a football but like 10 in a row yeah they have the same yeah they kind of get the same thing they have like yeah they got you know when i i don't know tons about french culture i'll say but i've been there before and uh yeah they have you know big kind of long baguettes. They got the fatter ones and stuff. And I have heard, though, I think you saw the same clip I saw,

and the guy talked about glyphosate, how it's sprayed on our stuff that's made, stuff that we utilize for bread, wheat, and so forth, and how potentially the bread and stuff that we have here in the United States could be more harmful, could leave people more bloated, could be more of an allergy, you know, something that someone has an allergy to, potentially more so than if you're in France or Europe. They have different standards to grow.

They have different standards to grow um they have different standards to grow their crops than we do here and so it could potentially be more harmful but I just think like that stuff is like this is getting into like you're getting into like weird shit you know like you're not fat from like bread bread is actually a great carbohydrate I I'm a huge fan, I think. There are people that bread shouldn't be part of their diet because it just causes all kinds of digestive systems. People have autoimmune disorders. It could potentially be something that's not great for you. But regardless of the type of bread, I do know some people are more a fan of sourdough. It could help with like gut issues or

something like that but again i think it's like if people just get too nutty then they're like it's got to come from this bakery and it's got to be this specific way and it's got to be at this temperature you know this temperature has this bacteria and this other temperature doesn't like it's just it's uh there's just a lot of stuff going on with that and the main thing would be it's a, there's just a lot of stuff going on with that. And the main thing would be that again, bread is not a, bread's not like a meal, you know, bread is like something to accompany something else. It's, you know, like my daughter eats bread almost every day. She has egg McMuffin every morning, but my wife makes her one egg and she puts a piece of ham on top of it. And then she has, there's no butter on the English muffin that she has it on.

And it's like, I don't know, that's 90 calories from an egg. And there's a slice of cheese on there, I think, too. And there's some protein. So we're looking at like 250, maybe 300 calories. Yeah. But a good amount of protein. You know, like there's, I don't know, maybe it's not a huge amount, but it's like 10, you know, 15 grams of protein probably. And then the carbohydrates might be like 30.

And the fats would be like six. So, it's like it's pretty perfect yeah it's a pretty pretty good meal you know um holds her right over until she gets to lunch and then she you know eats i don't know the hell she eats at lunch but um so i don't think bread is a bad thing i think bread is actually like being someone that's been running a lot and stuff like that i'm kind of like fuck yeah let me get down with some bread. But then I'm also cautious to not put butter on it. Like bread and butter is.

It's your bread and butter. It's your bread and your butter. It's like the most delicious thing. But even bread, like I'm so fat that I love even just bread straight up. Like I'll just eat bread. I really like it a lot. Me too. And so sometimes I'll go to the store i really like it a lot me too and so sometimes uh i'll go

to the store and i and i'll grab a thing of bread like a baguette or a loaf of bread and my wife's like what's this i'm like i don't know i just feel like eating some bread and so i'll just eat some bread with dinner that's that's so interesting yeah so like even if i have like this is gonna sound weird if my stomach is a little bit upset i'll just have a slice of bread and it kind of calms everything down. I don't, I don't know what that is. Maybe that's just comfort. Um, but I, again, I was just building, being silly with the, uh, the French bread. Um, you've said in the past, uh, like about leaning into things that are a little bit more difficult, but then you've also said things along the lines of like play into your strengths. So when it comes to fasting, like let's super easy example. I passed 7 p.m. as when I make the worst decisions.

So then I should start my fast there. So that would eliminate the most difficult part of my day because I would get rid of it. But that happens to also be the most difficult part of the day for me to stay on track. So should somebody kind of flip flop it to make it where like, well, breakfast is kind of a pain in the ass anyways. I'll skip breakfast Monday, Wednesday, Friday or whatever it may be. Should they kind of go the easier route or should they try to mark Bella and be like, you know, I'm going to actually face the hardest part, like just head on and just tackle this like later 7 p.m. fast. You can't break the rules until you really understand them.

You know, you have to really know the rules before you can start breaking them. And I think at first, I think you have to be pretty strict with rules. And I think if you have a real problem at 7, 7, 8 o'clock at night, you know, Chris Hansen comes in and he busts you for food and not for the other shit that he busts you for, you know. Oh, what's that? A pint of ice cream? Oh, I knew it.

No, that wasn't me no i was kidding i was texting that's not you on the doordash app are you serious sir somebody took my phone fake account probably i don't know somebody hacked my phone that's what happened um so i think that in the beginning you got to be you might have to be really strict with yourself i mean that's why you know that's why i had a war on carbs. Like I just, my definition was of carbs was ice cream and pizza and all this other shit. And it wasn't, I wasn't looking at it from like a bodybuilder perspective and bodybuilders like, no, no, you need carbs. But I think the general population was probably more on my side where they're like, yeah, carbs means we get to have chips. Yeah. Carbs means we get to have bread. Carbs means we get to have, you know, all this other stuff that a bodybuilder would never even touch.

Bodybuilders, they almost only eat rice and different types of potatoes and yams and like oatmeal. They don't even, bodybuilders don't barely even eat fruit. They don't fuck around those guys, you know. eat fruit. They don't fuck around those guys. You know, they have like dark green vegetables, really lean sources of meat. And then they eat like five different types of carbs, but they don't eat like, I mean, you know, Cutler in his prime, yes, he would drink a Coke, but that's like throwing a chair off the Titanic. Like that guy just, it's not gonna make any difference. You know, like that guy was, that guy had a lot of,

that guy needed a lot of fuel. So him having 60 grams or whatever it was, 50 grams of sugar, not a big deal. The video you posted about him eating like a hundred eggs a day. I was like, what?

He goes, and then I bought a cow. What? See if you can play his voice. His fucking accent's the best he's like i'd mix some fucking egg whites with uh with some aminos sounds so disgusting he sounds like uh he didn't care like peter griffin sometimes yeah he he loved it that's the best thing about jay cutler's he you could tell i mean even when he talks about today so fire yeah he's getting jacked with egg whites i blend it in a blender with ice and a little bit of my amino acids i have two whole eggs i have two

slices of ezekiel bread i have one cup of cottage cheese and i have a bowl of grits and i have sometimes a cup of coffee or a cup of tea what are the macros on that probably 100 grams of protein and i have about 200 grams of carbs i I never really counted the calories, although I figured it was around between six to 7,000. On the drinking the egg whites, do you just do that because it's easier to down them? It is instead of cooking. I used to crack all the eggs. So I would crack 30 eggs and I would buy 30 dozen eggs at a time from a local farm. 30 dozen eggs. Some of my diets, I'm not going to lie, I was eating over a hundred eggs a local farm 30 dozen eggs some of my diets i'm not gonna lie i was eating over 100 eggs a day you laugh at that but i would buy a whole cow at a time i had a local butcher i'd walk in the butcher shop and my cow would be hanging and i'd say i want this is

hamburg this is steaks and i would buy a whole cow and then they'd have 140 pounds of chicken two freezers in my garage and i would eat five pounds of meat a day plus the eggs drink what a stud yeah an absolute stud well that kind of brings us to our next topic within here is is um so we kind of discussed like flavor you know neither one of us are believers that you have to um get rid of all these amazing flavors um I also am a believer that you can have pizza I'm a believer that you have to get rid of all these amazing flavors. I also am a believer that you can have pizza. I'm a believer that you can have ice cream. I'm a believer that, again, if you're new and you haven't done much of this yet, you're better off not touching any of that stuff because most likely you're going to break down and probably eat some of it anyway.

However, with that in mind, you might want to plan to eat that. So it's part of your plan. It's not part of you being a failure. I think that's a really important piece is that we make things difficult and then we didn't achieve them. Something that happened to me this morning, I went on my run

and I get to, when I'm done with the run, because I use an app called Morpheus, it's a chest strap. I recommend it to everybody. It's absolutely amazing. It's helped me a lot with my conditioning. Really, really awesome product from Joel Jamison called Morpheus. But my goal for the day was to keep my heart rate around 130. And I did so for an hour. So I'm done with the workout. I get to type in what was my exertion rate? How hard was it?

And it wasn't that hard. It was like, because that heart rate is low. So it wasn't hard. Things that are hard, you know, would be like me trying to keep my heart rate at like 160 or something or 150. Like that would be, that would be hard. It's hard to try to calm down the breathing and all that kind of stuff but the heart rate that i had was modest so it was easy to keep that the whole time the second thing i get to select on the morpheus app is um my performance and guess what my

performance was it's a fucking 10 out of 10 because I did what I was supposed to do. So picture you're 100 pounds overweight and you're like, I need to go on a diet. And you pick a keto diet. And you're on day three and your head's bothering you and you think it's the low carb thing and it very well could be, you're not really digging it. You get your kids to school and so on. And all these things kind of happen during the day. And you go to work and you come home at seven and you're just so hungry and you raid the cabinet and you say, fuck this. And then you order DoorDash and you get pizza and so on. And then you go into a tailspin of like, F it.

It's only Wednesday and then Thursday, Friday, and then you're trying to start over on Monday. You could have avoided the whole situation by saying, I'm going to go on a lower carb diet. This carb thing is interesting because whenever I eat carbs, it seems like, you know, I'm overeating pizza. I'm overeating these things that have carbs and fats in them. I have a sweet tooth. Sweet tooth would be like what? Chocolates, right? Sometimes people like the hard candies too. Those are actually a little easier to deal with because they don't have the fat calories that accompany things that are chocolate. And so the calories aren't like off the charts. And a lot of bodybuilders and powerlifters will sometimes utilize those things post-workout or intra-workout just to give them a little zip of energy. But if you're a heavier person and you're

trying to figure this thing out, your best bet is to set up a diet that's going to be a little more calm, a little bit more chill. Like, hmm, Huberman said, get outside, get some sun and liver king. Huberman said, right, we'll play that game. Huberman said, you know, let me get away from my phone for an hour before. So you're trying to implement like all these things. Oh, Mark Bell, you know, always talks about the three, 10 minute walks a day. Okay. Three, 10 minute walks a day. Put my phone away. Like you're trying to remember all this shit. And then you're like on a low carb diet and you're trying to just all of a sudden

smash all this stuff into your life. You have three kids, you have a job, you have a mortgage, and it's just, it's not a good fit at the moment. So you might need to just start out with something a little just easier. It might need to be like, it might need to sound ridiculously easy. Okay, starting on Monday, can I have one really healthy meal for the day? And then I wonder how many days in a row can I do that? Just have one health, one really healthy meal, one meal that I can agree that I think is healthy with the knowledge that I have right now. Can I do that? That alone might cause some change, but for some people, they might have to start to make more changes over time. And it's learning how to eat, what to eat, when to eat,

and learning how to cook. Learning how to cook is huge because your food shouldn't taste like shit. I think I might have one meal a day, especially right now I am working on getting leaner. I might have one meal a day, especially right now. I am working on getting leaner. I might have one meal a day that I don't really love just because it's like a super lean source of like meat. Like I just ate salmon when I got done with my run today. It's like that was okay, but salmon out of a can is like I could pick other stuff that I would enjoy more.

And I'm not saying that I can't eat other stuff. I'm just saying out of convenience, that's what I ate. But most of the time, my food is amazing. Like I'm eating poke, you know, rice and tuna and salmon. I'm eating steaks from Piedmontese. When I was in Bodega, I had ground beef and rice with some Alfredo sauce on it. It was fucking awesome. Kind of almost tasted like a pasta.

I got the idea from Russell Buddy. Russell Buddy made something like that. And I was like, oh, yeah, the rice can kind of act as like noodles sort of. Kind of, sort of works. And I used some of the Italian seasoning that we have from Within You with the liver, kidney, heart, spleen and stuff like that too. And it was amazing. So like almost every meal I'm really looking forward to. Like they're all – when I get done here, you're probably the same way.

When I get done here for the day and I go home, man, I'm so excited to eat. And I'm not eating shit that's bad. I'm eating shit that's really good for me. eat and it's i'm not eating shit that's bad i'm eating shit that's really good for me and every single time that i eat i'm always like i wonder if other people know about this like i know fitness people do but i don't think a lot of other people do i think a lot of people like man i fuck i'm not gonna mess with a diet like because i don't i love the foods that i love, you know? And so what you were just describing is the whole, like, um, the whole definition of do more, be more, right? Can you do the, the one meal Monday? All right, cool. Now guess what? One meal per week. You own that shit. Now maybe the next week,

could you do one and a half? Could you do two? Right. Maybe you can go there, but yeah, dude, you're right on point. So like things like like, things like the Ninja Foodi grill, it makes cooking steak super easy. I get super fired up when I click that thing on and it goes. My son, like, he starts jumping around because he knows steak's coming. It's crazy to think how, like, I used to think that I had to suffer when trying to, quote, diet. So, like, I would I would make like boiled chicken. I would have that boiled chicken and a baked potato and like mustard or something. It's like, what the fuck kind of meal is that?

With brown rice that was like, you know, kind of like trying to eat hay or something. You know, it just was not good. And I just used to think like, man, this fitness thing, this eating healthy thing, like this isn't for me. Because I can't cut it because this is healthy thing, like this isn't for me because I can't cut it because this is, I cannot sustain this type of eating. And then you learn a little bit more and dude, yeah, now it's like steak and rice. Like, dude, line me up. Like, yes, I cannot wait to go home today to destroy another ribeye, you know, or maybe a bavette today. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I'll text my wife and have her, you know, pull some steak out and let it thaw. But you're absolutely right. And every meal is like, we're

getting a little bit better. And then that compounding on top of getting healthier, like, you just, you don't want to break that. You know, it's, it's crazy to think that like, I would rather eat another steak than a piece of cake at this point. You know, like, that is insane to think that, but it's true. Because I know what it's going to do to me when I go training tomorrow morning. But for the most part, it's just mainly because I'm a healthier person now. I talked to a guy at Sai and Strength. He lost, like, 120 pounds, and then he brought his weight back up intentionally because he wanted to, like, get a little more muscular.

So he lost 120, and then he gained back weight back up intentionally because he wanted to like get a little more muscular. So he lost 120 and then he gained back like 30. His shoulders are nice and wide and stuff. He looks good. But he was mentioning that the way that he used to eat. And he was just like, I was like, someone couldn't pay you. Like they couldn't pay you like five grand a day probably to just eat fucking reckless like that he's like there's no he's like there's i he goes i i'm honestly i i really don't think there's an amount of money that would make me want to do that again he's like because i he's like i'd start out every

morning with like taco bell oh and i was like damn bro i was like those are probably some rough times and he was like yeah more depressed than you can even imagine. And he said he was on like drugs and stuff like that too. So it was a big thing for him. But he did things one step at a time. He got his diet better. He got himself away from alcohol. Like it was one – it wasn't like diet is going to be intact.

Here goes alcohol. Here goes this perfect diet, and here comes me bodybuilding. It was all stuff that he's talking about four or five years. And he's like, I still fuck up here and there. He's like, I'll have a cigarette or something. But he's like, if you see me smoking a cigarette, you know that I just messed up. But he's like, I'm not as fucked up as I used to be. That's wild.

I was like, that's good. Yeah. What type of goals do you think somebody should set? Because I'm just thinking we had Rico Rivas on the podcast where he's like, my diet starts with fish and it ends with fish. And I have, you know, whatever, like a couple of blueberries throughout the day and like 180 carbs for the entire day. And then he goes, and I hate fish. He is obviously on a war path to win as an IFBB pro. So he has a very high goal.

So he has a lot of motivation. My buddy Chris, he's a brown belt. He's trying to be a world champion at Brown Belt Worlds coming up in three weeks. Uh, he had a tiny scoop of peanut butter in his diet and he's trying to make weight. And I'm like, you know, that needs to go, right? He's like, yeah, I know. But it's like my only thing I'm like, we got to make weight in three weeks, you can have more peanut butter. Yeah, what do you like better, jujitsu or peanut butter? I was like taking that peanut butter out and then like giving your all to this competition is going to taste way better than that peanut butter. He's like, I'm on it. Again, he has another goal so high that it doesn't matter what he's eating. person, what do you think is a responsible way to set goals for themselves so that way when it comes to the opportunities to break away from this path of eating that they kind of look at it and be like, you know, like I actually, I want to head closer towards this goal. What do

you think is like a proper goal to be setting? I think for so many people, it's pretty simple. Just get leaner and you should see, you, you should see some sort of results, uh, every month, you know, it should be like noticeable. I think that, uh, there's a lot of people too. Like I have some friends that are, they're still pretty obsessed with their body weight. You know, some men that are obsessed with like, Oh man, like the scale said I weighed two 10, you know some men that are obsessed with like oh man like the scale said i weighed 210 you know or the scale said i weighed 170 like that seems low it's like yeah but you look awesome so who the fuck cares you know yeah like your your fucking shoulders are shredded your triceps are showing like you kind of have abs like what what do we look, you know, okay, you're not 220,

but when you were 220, you were fucking fat, you know, or whatever the body weight was. So I think work on getting leaner. And if you're not seeing results, like if you're not getting leaner, if you're not losing body weight, you're not losing body fat, then you need to kind of start to question your diet. Maybe the diet, um, maybe what you're currently doing just is not efficient or effective. I weigh myself every day, almost, almost every single day, sometimes twice a day, uh, just to sometimes three. No, I'm just kidding. I, I weigh

myself to really kind of like monitor like where I'm at. And sometimes it will be twice a day just because I'm interested, like, Oh, okay. Like what if I'm really full and what if I got done with a run and I'm really hydrated, you know, and what's the difference between before I run after I run and what do I weigh in the morning and stuff. And now I don't really need to probably weigh myself. I could probably just tell you what I weigh and I would be within a pound or two. I got a pretty good idea of what it is not happened to me when I was in Europe recently. Um, didn't have access to a scale for a little while. And then, and then I did. And I, luckily when I got on the scale, it was like two pounds heavier than when I left. So rather than being like, you know, usually if I went on

vacation, easily be up like eight pounds or six you know six pounds eight pounds and you know all kinds of stuff so i think a goal for your average person is is to work on is to really work on just trying to get leaner trying to get lighter trying to lose body fat and i don't think your goal just starts with just that. I think that you're, I think, I think a goal of like movement and performance is, is probably the best place to start. So rather than, rather than looking at input, like energy input, and I don't, we'll get to this in a second, but I don't think people should diet. Like you shouldn't like, okay, you have a plan, you have a nutrition plan, but I don't think that you should try to go into

like this caloric deficit because you're just going to be hungry. And obviously if you're losing weight and getting leaner, you are in a caloric deficit. But the way that I look at it is, remember we mentioned that person, if he went back 20 years and just took out the apple juice, the person's life wouldn't have been all that different. They wouldn't have been like, oh my God. You know what I mean? If you played that back in their head, it wouldn't be like a horror movie to them

where they weren't eating. They just skipped out on a couple million calories of apple juice or whatever, you know? Yeah, and then how often if you do want something we'll just use peanut butter cups because i think they're both both of us that's our favorite oh yeah you want one so bad and then you go do something you completely forget i know for sure that's happened to me and then you're like oh yeah i did want that it's like shit and i know for some people it's like that's the only thing i think about bro like

how could you forget but like that's happened where it's like i want And I know for some people it's like, that's the only thing I think about, bro. Like, how could you forget? But like that's happened where it's like, I want something and then I feel like I, like I'm not, I can't, that's it. I have to, I have to dive in because I can't freaking avoid at this point. My son will, you know, whatever, need a diaper change or something will happen and then I'll just forget about it and be like, oh shoot, that's right. I did want that thing. So sorry to cut you off. Yeah, that's a great example. I think you're trying to, for some people, again, it might be a good idea to have a day where you do eat some peanut butter cup. So you do eat something like that, but you have to be cautious on what kind of person you are. And over time, you need to work on those thoughts that you have because even for me, it's easy for me to say, oh, I'm not the guy who can only eat one bite. I could be. Oh, I'm the guy who chooses not to be the guy to only eat one bite. look at stuff on a, on a, like from a chemical perspective and you're, you're kind of have this, uh, this dopamine rush from thinking about the thing that you really love the flavor of thinking about those peanut butter cups or thinking about that pizza. Somebody brings, Hey Mark, Andrew,

bought you guys, you know, some local pizza, best pizza place in, in the world. It's a world renowned and here you go. They sit it down. We smell it like it just fucking smells awesome. Now, eating it, we're going to get like a dopamine rush when it's sitting here. We might drool because we're fat. But once we start to take a bite, once we take like bites, you don't get any more high, you know, you're, you're not, you're not like, uh, all of a sudden, you know, there's, there's not more and more dopamine where you start to get attached to is like the, the texture, like the chewing and the texture. texture and then it's all the combinations that are going on it overrides our bodies our brain's ability to slow you down because we have there's some sugar on pizza too from tomato sauce so we

have sugar we have fat and we got salt like that's the combo right there like that's the that's the thing that always blows you up, fat, salt, and something sweet. That's peanut butter cups. It's kind of almost in everything. And even like on a burger, you throw the ketchup on there and it's like game over, you know, or pickles or something like that just to give it like a little bit of like an opposing flavor, you know? Oh, yeah. You kind of need, you know, I don't know if a lot of people know this know this but a lot of times in chocolate there's vanilla utilized in chocolate just to kind of give it that it needs like a it needs like a backbone it needs like a body to it you know and that will help um kind of give it that flavor but if you can just recognize

i i know it's hard to recognize if can just recognize you get the same satisfaction out of having one slice as you do three slices or five slices. It may not really feel that way, but if you learn this and you know this, then you know that you could eat something first and get pretty full and then say, okay, I'm going to get up. I'm going to put two slices of pizza on this plate. I'm going to sit down. And even when you're done eating those, or even while you're eating those, have a, try to have a conversation with yourself and say, that was really good, but reasonably, there's no reason for me to fucking go back. You know, I, I just ate the pizza. I'm on a diet losing weight i'm making progress and i just had

i would just had an opportunity to eat pizza and i just ate it so i should be good i did that this weekend nice i did this in uh in bodega and the pizza i had was awesome was it from that one convenience store deakman's yep deakman. Dude, my daughter got some and I wanted some so bad and I stayed away from it. That pizza's worth it. Good job, though. I did fight it off. Yeah. That pizza's really good.

We had like a double cheese pepperoni thing and something else. But yeah. The pepperoni edges are like crispy, too. We ordered so much pizza and I only ate two slices because I had a salad first and I had some meat after that. I was just trying to be a good boy, but staring at all that pizza wasn't easy. But again, it's like, what's reasonable? Yes, I was with my family. Yes, I was enjoying some time on the beach, like do we have to you know do we all have to enjoy all the same stuff and then it's not the same experience anymore

or I don't I don't think so you know and I also don't think there's any two slices of pizza if I eat two slices of pizza every single day that might have a negative impact over time but if i have two slices of pizza here or there it's not a huge deal right yeah i wish pizza was similar to donuts um maybe i'm wrong here but if i have one donut it was it was a phenomenal donut if i have a second donut it wasn't as good as the first one so then i'm kind of almost chasing that again with pizza i feel like there is no law of diminishing returns and you just keep going and just like dude i'll take another pie like keep them coming um so for me uh if i was like advising somebody i would almost tell them to avoid the pizza only because those two slices aren't gonna really satisfy you and you still might be feeling like you're without if you don't

get that third and fourth slice but it is cool that you can have the two or three slices today and not be off of your plan right because of what you said you said trigger word which is caloric deficit and so like for yourself how do you monitor your calories? Because I know you don't track and you're not saying that calories in, calories out doesn't matter, but you're not a fan of necessarily counting. So what do you recommend people do? Let me answer that after I pee. Uh-oh, pee break. Power Project Family, we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast. That's why we partnered with Certified Piedmontese Beef.

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Okay. The way that I manage calories is pretty simple. I stuff myself with food. I stuff myself with protein. I'll utilize things as like a leverage. You know, I call it protein leveraging. Ted Naiman has talked about this quite a bit.

He wrote a book, which is like P versus E or protein versus energy or something like that. And he talks a lot about the science of this. And there's, you know, there's a little back and forth, a little debate on some of this stuff. But for the most part, protein is not like a great energy source for humans, for people. It is more of something that helps us with repair, repair of the muscles. So it doesn't have the same caloric load to it, in my opinion, that carbohydrates do and that fats do.

It's also not as seducing, especially when protein is mainly by itself, which would be like a chicken breast. Sometimes really lean steak is like tougher, but luckily for us with Pete Monti's, we've tell you guys all the time, it's very tender. And even when you get there in 96 for lean ground beef, it's super tender and absolutely amazing. So spending the extra money sometimes on some of these things that you're

like, oh man, I don't know, can really be helpful because these, like when you buy stuff that you're like, oh man, I don't know, can really be helpful because these, like when you buy stuff that is good quality and it's sitting in your freezer, in your fridge, or you thawed it out, you have it, you know, sitting on your counter thawing out or whatever. When you get done with work and you're like, am I going to stop at McDonald's and get some bullshit or am I going to go to Chipotle and try to figure out how to eat healthier there?

You're like, nah, I'm good. I have all this stuff at home. So do your best to stock your house up with stuff that's really nutritious, that tastes really good, things that you actually really like. If you don't like fish, don't eat it. You know, if you really don't like it, I don't think there's supplement with it. You know, if you're trying to get the fish oil or something like that and you can't figure out how to integrate some fish into your life or you only like it when it's with sushi or something,

like whatever way you need to integrate it, then integrate it in a way that is something that you enjoy. Sushi is another thing that I get an opportunity to eat quite a bit. Something to keep in mind is like Andrew and I, we have pretty good energy outputs. So we are already like addicted. He's addicted to jujitsu. I'm addicted to running. And we're lifting and stuff like that too.

So another reason for you to exercise is so that you can kind of eat more and uh i still think that even bodybuilders and even people in the fitness industry we over consume everything we over consume probably too much liquid too much food too much everything um because it's kind of like, I don't know, you kind of beat it into your head that you need all these calories and that you need protein and you're breaking down and you're catabolic and all this stuff. I do think that most of us would get along just great and get along just fine with like 10% less food and maybe even more. I'm not trying to, you know, I know there's some people out there that, you know, might be starving themselves to get particular results or whatever. So I'm not

talking about the select few that might be doing that, but just in general, like we see it all the time. People are just, I do it all the time. I'm always trying to stuff food down, but the way that I manage the calories is through protein leveraging. I really bring up the amount of protein that I eat. Recently, I've been eating breakfast a little bit more often just because like later in the day, I would get hungry. The amount of exercise I'm doing now, I am usually running in the morning because it gets hot here in Sacramento. So I'll run and then I'll lift. And so I'm like, it's kind of, you know, I don't know if I want to carry around a bunch of food or how much time I really have between, you know, running and lifting and podcasting and so forth. So I'll have some snacks. I'll have some stuff here at work that's

healthy for me. But it's easier for me just to wake up a little bit earlier, half hour earlier, get in a little meal, get in a protein shake and a coffee, and then head out for my run. And then I still feel I have, even though I might get hungry, I still have some of that energy from breakfast, you know, kind of left over. And I may not like track calories in terms of like writing them down or weighing stuff. Um, but I do track with my eyes. You know, I look at stuff. I, I tend to, I tend to eat with my eyes and I will load up my plate with so much food. I will make the biggest protein shakes you've ever seen, uh, with the Ninja creamy and stuff like that. i'll make the biggest thing of ice cream like

i do it with everything i do with yogurt i do it with it doesn't matter what it is it's like i don't know i got something wrong with me like i just i just want to like eat this massive thing and so i even with that i'm trying to be more reasonable with stuff like that because i mean i i just still have goals i still want to get leaner, like, you know, here ish, or maybe a little leaner than here is where I'd like to kind of just live. Like I, it feels really good. I'd like to be around 210, 215 pounds. I think I'm like 225. So I'm still working my way down a bit, but I think that will help my running and i think i can stay really lean without actually really you know physically tracking the calories but i try not to eat stuff

that has weight you know that has crazy amounts of fat in it so something like flying dutchman or something it has to be like accounted for you know i gotta like think about it a little bit um i think a flying dutchman has like what 20 or 30 grams of fat or something, it has to be like accounted for. You know, I got to like think about it a little bit. Um, I think a flying Dutchman has like what, 20 or 30 grams of fat or something like that. Yeah. No, I'm not sure. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. It's a pretty good, it's a pretty good chunk. And again, I'm not, I don't have anything against fat. It's, uh, just that they're calorically dense, you know? So if I'm going to do something like that, I would just be like, oh, you know, is it worth it? How much do I really like those like those um are they better than what i'm gonna cook at home you know i'm gonna take 96 lean ground beef i'm gonna pour some pork panko in there and i'm gonna throw maybe a little

bit of tomato sauce in there and some mozzarella cheese like that's gonna fucking taste awesome like that's really good quality it's a lot leaner than the patties at In-N-Out Burger. And it fits more of like, you know, what I'm trying to do right now. So if you really want to lower your calories a lot, which we already know that, you know, some sort of control of your calories, control over, controlling your calories usually means that you're hungry. But I don't think you need to be you're hungry. But I don't think you need to be hungry to be ripped. I don't think you need to be hungry to be shredded. And maybe for one person, maybe they do. And maybe for another person, they don't. But hear out my argument for

a second. When I was 330 pounds, I was hungry. Before I ever got to 330, when I was 240, I was hungry. When I was 270, I was hungry, you know, and so forth. Like, it didn't matter what body weight I was at, just like any guy, like I'm pretty hungry. You know, like if someone's like, hey, you guys want to go eat? I'd be like, sure. Like. As you're eating. Yeah. Yeah. I'm always, I'm always kind of, I'm always kind of down for it. And when I say hungry, I'm not talking about like, I guess my point is like at the leanness I am right now, which I would imagine I'm like single digit body fat-ish. And at the body fat percentage I'm at now versus the body fat percentage I was when I was 330, which was probably like 20% or something. I don't even know. But I was when I was 330, which was probably like 20% or so. I don't even know. But I was hungry.

I'm hungry in both cases. I'm hungry when I was heavy and I'm hungry now. The difference is, is I might even be less hungry now because I have more knowledge. Back then I didn't really understand. And it's actually probably a good thing because it wouldn't allow me to get as fat as I wanted to get because it was important for me at the time that I put on that amount of weight to be able to handle those big squats, squatted over a thousand pounds many times in competition and many times in training, benched over

800 pounds many times in competition and many times in training and I think I probably, for me I thought that I needed that and I think that was true, I think I probably, for me, I thought that I needed that. And I think that was true. I think I did need the extra body weight. I wasn't as talented as some of the other athletes in powerlifting where they didn't really need to gain any more weight and they were still able to get stronger. And so for me, it felt like it was important for me to bulk. And so I would just eat and eat and eat until just kind of like you heard Jay Cutler.

It was a little bit like that, but I ate a lot more fat than he did because I was getting in a different shape than what he was working towards. But nowadays, I just have way more knowledge. more knowledge. And so when I had breakfast this morning, you know, one of the reasons to have breakfast for me right now is to make me feel less hungry when I get home from the work that I do here. And so it's important that I not only have some breakfast, but I eat a little something here at some point in the day, because when I go home, I would still over consume calories. And so I'm trying to pay attention. It's like, okay, if I don't eat at all at, you know, my, my window of like trying to eat at like 6am, if I'm, if I don't eat there and then I don't eat at a possible another window of, you know, 10, 9 whatever, 930 a.m. If I miss both of those

windows, okay, cool. I'm fasting, right? Not a huge deal. But I'm going to be ravenously hungry when I'm home. I can kind of handle it, but I don't like it. I end up like eating stuff out of the fridge while I'm cooking. My wife will ask me questions or something and I'm not like super grouchy or anything. I'm not really ever that way, but I'm a little short with her and I've just, I'm thrown off a bit. And plus I haven't really fasted like that in a while. So the 18 hour fast, 20 hour fast, I haven't really messed with those in a while. So I'm not as used to those anymore. So I took, uh, I was like, Hey, let me get rid of these for a bit. So this morning I had egg whites

and, uh, probably the equivalent of like six or eight eggs. And I had two whole eggs. So it was like, yeah, six or eight eggs total and two yolks. So that brings you up to like 12 grams of fat. So that fat and the protein that should keep me full, keep me fueled for a while. And even though I went and ran, I don't really feel like I need carbs right before I run. Sometimes if I've, if I, if it's going to be like a longer run, I'm going to be out there for two hours or something. Maybe I'll have some fruit or something like that. And maybe I would actually take out an egg yolk and only have six grams of fat. Because just in my head, I'm like, I think it'll be easier for my body to use the sugar.

And it might not be, but just like my own made-up smelly science there. But protein leveraging is huge, and it's really effective. The only problem with it is that protein is satiating, and it's filling, but if you don't have protein with some fat, it's not going to be as long-lasting. long lasting. And so when you have fat, it slows down the absorption rate of your food and you're going to get, if you only have straight protein, you might get hungrier faster. The other problem with lean, especially lean sources of protein, is they typically just aren't that satisfying. They're good, but it'd be more satisfying if you had rice with it or more satisfying if you had rice and some teriyaki sauce with it.

But again, that starts to pitch you into an area where it's like, okay, that's harder to control. And then you mentioned tracking, and that's where tracking can come in awesome. But in my opinion, like a teriyaki bowl is, for someone that's serious about like what they're doing, unless you made the teriyaki bowl at home, I'm thinking like, you don't get it, man, you're not that dedicated to the game, like you shouldn't be eating a teriyaki bowl, again, I'm not saying that you can't eat one, but if you go to a typical teriyaki place, a teriyaki bowl is going to have a crazy amount

of calories, especially for some of us that lift that want to eat a lot. Yeah. And then you're going to get hungry super fast because of everything that's in it. We've had this conversation a long time ago, but there's a lot of like youtube fitnessy people that lean more on the if it fits your macro side so it doesn't necessarily mean you have to go low fat but that's typically where these fitnessy people will go is like bare minimum fat and then a bunch of carbs because it gives you more options and you're able to like fit voluminous foods in your body um but you and i have had this conversation because like when i discovered it i was like hey mark have you ever seen this like you know again like a freaking eight-year-old trying to tell you about like this new thing i found you're like yeah i've been in the game a

while um but the conversation that we had went sort of like, hey, Mark, how come people who are overweight, why don't they just track and do this? Because it seems like you can have way more fun foods. You can have the French toast. You can have oatmeal with syrup and all kinds of tasty foods and stuff. And you're like, well, those people haven't kind of made the turn to kind of really understand how to eat can you explain exactly what you mean because i just feel like a lot of people might be seeing some of these cookbooks and stuff thinking like oh like actually like yeah i'll make the high protein high carb foods that's low in fat and i'll lose that weight that way it's going to be really rare that coach greg's book helps someone help someone that's obese

you know yeah um not because the information that coach greg has is wrong like he's really smart he can help a lot of people lose weight and i'm sure even me mentioning this he's going to send me 10 10 people that have had success i i'm just sharing that a lot of times, and I'm not even aware, I got to back up a second. I'm not even aware of exactly what Coach Greg does from a diet perspective, but in knowing some stuff about his cookbook, I think he does kind of go over the macros and stuff. And those are things that are important. But a lot of times if people play this game of like riding the line a little too closely, they tend to fall off. And this is not Coach Greg's fault. This is like – this is just human behavior.

When we're dealing with diet, we're dealing with a really wide mix of things. But ultimately, we're dealing with human behavior and we've never figured like human beings we've never been able to figure out human behavior there's so many behaviors that we don't know what to do about we're like i think that guy should be killed and other people like what are you crazy why would we kill him well because he killed someone else and it's like well that's not really doesn't seem very humane. Like we should, he killed, he did something wrong and he killed somebody. So we should kill him too. Like I'm not saying I believe one way or the other.

It's just, it's, it's interesting, you know, and, and how do we handle all these different people out of all these different ideas about what foods, what foods are good for them. And I think Coach Greg and I think a lot of other people that make cookbooks and they do these YouTube videos and stuff, I think it's amazing. I think it's great because what it does is it shows people, yes, if you are diligent, you can eat these foods. French toast, like what's the problem with French toast? foods. French toast, like what's the problem with French toast? The problem with French toast is it usually has too, really has too much of both. It has too many carbs and too much fat. And again, it plays right back into the salt, the fat, and the sweetness, right? Anabolic French toast is another ballgame because now you make your French toast more with egg whites.

Now you just you just drop those calories way down. If you did anabolic French toast with like six eggs, you're looking at like 36 grams of protein just from the eggs alone or maybe, you know, 25 or something like that. And then you're also, you're getting rid of like 30 grams, you know, or depending on how many yolks you use, you're getting rid of like 20 grams of fat. Yeah. The French toast that I made for you and Seema was like under 500 calories for four slices. And I can't remember off the top of my head as far as protein. And normally it'd be at least double that. Yeah. And so like the protein content, though, was still like somewhere around 40 grams of protein for all four slices. So you're looking at 40 grams of protein under 500 calories total, including the sugar-free syrup.

You know, like it's like, wait a second. That's why I was like, Mark, why wouldn't this work? Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's really hard. It's's just difficult you know first it's difficult for somebody to deal with it's like you know it's like a sex addict has a girlfriend and then you throw the sex addict you're like hey why don't you why don't you hang out with the stripper for a little while and see if like they go back to their girlfriend again like they think not happen. You know? Something was gonna get weird for sure.

Yeah, or like a porn star or something, you know? You're like, ah, it was pretty good, you know?

It's like, you're not gonna want to go back to, and I think, again, what Coach Greg's book and a lot of other people's information is pointing to

is that, exactly what we're talking about here, you don't have to get rid of taste, you don't have to get rid of flavor, You don't have to get rid of flavor. And you don't have to be hungry. Like the whole time that you went from 15% down to 12%,

have you been like exponentially hungrier? No. No, not at all. And you've been hungry on diets before. And like, what did that do? No, it just, it makes you want to yeah eat more of the thing so like i used to do anabolic french toast when i first started i had to have eight slices because i just wasn't used to it um for me personally like i i stopped doing that style

of diet because i would walk around with my stomach cramping all day um maybe if i got acclimated and i slowly ramped up the proteins I think that might have been it where I'm having basically no breakfast to having a high protein breakfast which it was high carbs high protein like very low fat it was like a weird switch of things and it made my stomach hurt so that's really where the the eggs started coming in because I was like, well, let me try to balance this out. So I would mix like one egg in with the egg whites with the anabolic French toast. Like, well, this tastes better and I feel a little bit better, but not really. Then I went half and half and then I went, let me just ditch the, like the French toast itself and let me have just the eggs with egg whites. Same kind of feeling. I would get all gassy. I don't know, egg whites kind of hurt my stomach right now or back then and probably still do now. And then that's when I just switched

over to whole eggs because I just felt way better. And then the fat, the fat content, again, something I wasn't used to, but I was fuller longer. So I didn't, I didn't, I didn't get hungry anymore. So when I was eating the high carb, high protein stuff, I had to eat again very fast. It seemed like it burnt up really quickly. But again, that's kind of part of that diet where it's like, well, Hey, you get to eat more because your calories are low. So now I'm eating almost basically the equivalent of like three of those meals in the morning, which it, you know, it would be bad if I ate again in the middle of like three of those meals in the morning which you know it would be bad if i ate again in the middle of the day but instead of having all those little tiny meals and then kind of always feeling like i needed more i would just get the more now and then not worry

about food and throughout the day and i see that you have like some protein bars here and then we have uh like tasty pastries and we have uh the legendary what are those things called pop tarts yeah tasty pastries yeah we have those and then oh dude i gotta get you this oh sweet rolls those are good those are really good and then you have those rise bars rise bars are really good and then i gotta bring it to you guys a wrx bar dude that's incredible it's like a it's like a kind of like a meat bar oh yeah yeah i've heard of that dude yeah our boy ron penna like he posted about it and i'm like dude i have to try this it tastes like pizza it's amazing yeah they make a pizza flavored pizza and a hemp and a bacon cheeseburger good job for those guys man

that's fucking awesome if you can bring it up on the screen that's amazing yeah but you bring some of that stuff too so you're not like if you're hungry you'll probably just eat it right yeah so what what my main go-to is uh is fruit with a protein fruit dip that i make if i have that i am set i know i'm not gonna there's nothing i can run into in the middle of the day that's gonna make me go away from my plan because i really look forward to this so you have a backup so someone yes you know people around here luckily we don't like eat pizza and donuts but if someone did pull out a bunch of weird food and and you had fomo you could just eat your fruit and your dip yeah absolutely like i'm gonna go in my office and eat that yeah everybody leave me alone but yeah check this out dude they're really good i

met i started speaking to one of the owners i'm not sure their names but they do know ron penna and i'm like if you guys got the seal of approval from him then i'm on board too i love that ron is aware of every low carb everything that was ever made anywhere yeah but no this is good dude so i had this with a you know zero calorie root beer and i mean was it the pizza in the background? No, of course not. But it had the flavor. And like I got halfway through and I was just like, dude, this is like a full bar. You know, like it's a lot of food. 15 grams protein, five carbs. Thank you WRX Bar for putting this on the freaking map because it was freaking delicious. for putting this on the freaking map because it was freaking delicious. That's awesome. And for those of you that don't know about like legendary foods, like go check out their website, check out some of the stuff they have.

They have something called the Tasty Pastry and they have something called the Sweet Roll. And both of those products are really good. There's 20 grams of protein, I think, in both of them. And they are, you know, it has like allulose or something like that in there too. It's got like a net carb, you know, that's really low. But Ron Penna is somebody that, you know, he also created Quest Nutrition. He sold it for a billion dollars. And Quest is unbelievable.

And my son, my daughter doesn't really eat them that much, but my son and his friends um even one of jake's friends that's not really big into working out was like converted you know jake had him try some stuff and he was like oh my god i'm gonna switch i'm gonna eat those instead of eating like candy like that was amazing so um and then yeah there's a quest hero bar like that bar eat a quest hero bar and tell me give me the excuses that you want to go eat like a bunch of candy like those are really fucking good yeah and i think like it's kind of an added bonus that these things make you fart if i have two hero bars you have to just don't like run away so

yeah how many snickers bars could you know you could eat like five six snickers bars and i don't know maybe you feel a little weird because of the amount of sugar or something. You feel great, actually. But yeah, you're- I've had four since we started podcasting. I feel awesome. See? It, yeah, regular candy bar is not going to really, you know, bother your stomach in the same way.

I know some people listening are like, these things aren't natural or whatever. But we're trying to teach you that you don't need to be hungry. You might need to be a little hungry, but you don't need to be ravenously hungry. You're going to be hungry anyway. Andrew and I still get hungry. We know Encima is always hungry. He always wants to eat. But he's developed a lot of self-control.

He's utilized fasting. I think all of us have utilized versions of fasting. We just don't really even talk about it in terms of fasting because it's just the world that we live in. If you don't eat over the course of four hours or you don't eat in the course of five hours, I'm starving. People are like, that's fasting and starving. Like these, I think these are things that we need to get them out of our language. Starving is like, that's a pretty big claim. And there are people that are starving. So I think you should shut the fuck up when you say something like that.

Instead, maybe just be like, man, I'm pretty hungry. But a lot of times, the hunger a lot of times is fake. A lot of times you go on a walk, you drink some water. I know this is skinny people fitness talk and fat people everywhere are listening right now and they're like, oh my God, like can't tell someone to drink water. But if you can just hold on for a little bit and wait until your meal and then if, what if you can't? You know, what if you're like, man, I am really hungry. Well, have your triple zero yogurt that you have in the fridge, down one of those. And if that doesn't work, then go into your fridge, down some cottage cheese. If that doesn't work,

make an omelet. If that doesn't work, make another omelet. Like just keep feeding yourself with foods that are nutritious. And over time you'll learn, you'll start to learn to like eat less and stuff. But I don't think it's a great place to start. And that's why I'm not a huge fan of tracking because if you take away, if you take away, most people probably need like a full meal taken away from them every day

or like a thousand calories for a bunch of reasons. Probably like the number one reason is probably the fact that your metabolism and your calories, they kind of move, they move all over the place. So it's a little bit of a moving target and takes a while to figure out anyway, even if you do the best math on it possible, probably a lot of people need to go, you know, dump 500 to a thousand calories off. And that's doing that every day is kind of a lot. And so what I think again, back to what we said in the beginning is like, again, remember the apple juice thing. There's, there's so many women that have come to me and they've

been frustrated and they're like, I can't believe my husband or my boyfriend lost all this weight. All he did was like cut out beer, you know, or all he did was cut out soda. And a lot of times the women don't have maybe the same success because their diet wasn't as bad to begin with. This other guy's got the extra weight and he could. Anyway, it's amazing what some small changes can make. You know, some small changes, some small changes in your diet, uh, can lead to huge progress over time. If you stop drinking soda today or you, let's just swap, like just swap stuff out. Are you going to swap out your, uh, your Pepsi or your Coke for water? That sounds a little drastic, right?

Can you swap out some of the soft drinks that you have with some sort of diet version or zero sugar? I mean, Pepsi and Coke, these companies are putting a lot of money into these zero sugar products and i think they taste awesome i actually had a pepsi recently and i think it's better than the coke zero really it's really yeah it was really good quinn quinn uh pointed out to me and i was like no way i'm like fuck pepsi yeah and then i had it i was like she's onto something i think you're getting too lean yeah something's wrong i know i was like i think this girl's like, she's on to something. I think you're getting too lean. Something's wrong. No, I was like, I think this girl's a genius. She's like, they reformulated it.

Oh, she's a, she's a, she's working inside jobs. She's one of those people. Got it. If you have knee pain or lower back pain, the initial thought is that it's probably coming from the knee or the lower back. But have you ever thought that it could actually be coming from your feet? Most people wear shoes like this. They are narrow. They are not flat. They are inflexible. So it's almost like your feet are stuck in casts all day long.

And if you imagine that your hand was stuck in a cast all day, well, your fingers are going to become weak, but then your elbows might start feeling a little bit wonky because your fingers don't move and then it might travel up your shoulder. That's the same thing that happens with your feet when you put them in normal inflexible shoes. That's why you want to throw those out and start using some Vivo barefoot shoes. They have shoes for hiking on their website, working out in the gym. They have casual shoes like these novices right here. But the difference with Vivo is that they have a wide toe box so that your feet, like my wide ass feet, can spread and move within the shoe. They're flat

so that your feet are doing the work when you're walking, and they are flexible so your feet have the freedom to move the way they need to move so that they can be strong feet. That's why you want to get yourself some of these. And Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. When you guys get there, you'll see a code across the top. Make sure you enter that code at checkout for 15% off your entire order entire order again that's at vivo barefoot.com slash power project links in the description as

well as the podcast show notes guys look at this look at that i could stick that in my mouth do it i'm not gonna come on that's disgusting no get him yeah that's funny i swear like you were you must have been watching so last night um i was like ate dinner and i just happened i'm still hungry like dude what's going on so i had a triple zero with some raspberries blew through that really quick like damn i'm looking around like maybe it's just a texture thing because like it's all pretty soft mushy stuff so i had um i don't even know what they're called because i'm an idiot but it's like it's like a peach but it's it's crispy it's really hard. I don't know what it's called. Like a nectarine, maybe? Maybe.

Is it orange in the middle, kind of? Yeah, it's just like a peach, but it's crispy. It doesn't have apricot or something like that? Oh, apricot. Is that what it is? Yeah, apricot, apricot. I barely discovered kiwis like a year ago. That's another one that's really good.

I'll eat like 10 of those in a row nectarine is so juicy it's like yeah yeah like chew on it suck at the same time yeah you know so i had that and i'm like looking around like dang it dude why am i still i shouldn't be hungry what's going on here so i downed an entire one of these big old bottles. I don't know, it was like 32 ounces or so. And then finally, I wasn't looking around for food. It was crazy though, because I was just like, dude, I could keep going. And I'm like, I know something's wrong. Like this isn't right.

Like I should not be this hungry. And I guess I was just a little bit dehydrated. But it was funny because my move wasn't, oh, let me see what snacky foods I can get. Let me see where's the chips at, wherever it can be. Because I'm like, that's not going to help me. I need more something. So my first thought was more protein. And nothing was working.

And I just kept looking for more food. And I'm like, dude, I need to stop. And I drank a little bit. And I'm like, uh-oh, I think we're getting somewhere. Drink a little bit more and a little bit more. And it's tough because, like said like how are you going to tell somebody that's you know ravenously hungry to drink yeah but in that moment dude it saved me because after that i might have i don't know might have lost control it's crazy they say that every living thing is in search of protein and i think that as a human being, we're in search of protein,

but you're not going to find it in a bag of potato chips. You're not going to find it in a bag of Doritos, and when you eat Doritos, even if you eat a whole bag of Doritos, even if you eat two whole bags of Doritos, you're just not going to get that much protein. So you kind of like, I also believe that the human body has, in our brain, maybe depending on the person, but I think each person has about 10,000 steps in their, like in your system that if you don't get that, you're going to be riddled with anxiety and stress and you're not going to know how to deal with life.

In my opinion, that's what happens. In my opinion, that's what happens. And it may not be directly 10,000 steps, but it's 10,000 steps of energy that you have locked up in your system, whether you're a kid or whatever. Maybe it changes a little bit. Maybe the number's a little off. But I believe that every person needs about an hour of work every day. Some sort of not just like working, not just sitting at a desk working, but some sort of physical labor, one hour every day. And when you, when that doesn't happen, it sets off alarms in the body. That's my belief. I think it caused a lot of stress and anxiety and makes everything that you deal with in your life harder.

It's almost like being on, you know, it's almost like you didn't sleep. You know, when you don't sleep, like we have, we have a requirement for sleep. Human body has a requirement for movement. The human body has a requirement for protein. So you don't get these proteins. It kind of, to me, it like, maybe doesn't aggravate your body, but you're just always a lot hungrier than you should be.

And you can look at, you can look at protein as being something that just kind of, it doesn't completely get rid of the flame, but it gets rid of the roaring blaze that is your hunger. You know, it's like you're dousing it with like a hose, but it doesn't go all the way, you know, it doesn't go all the way down. There's still a pilot light on, you know, like there's still a little flame burning because you can always eat more. You can always like, sometimes you feel really insanely stuffed,

but for the most part, if you just ate a big old steak, you're like, yep, I could eat a donut. You get that kind of second stomach feeling. But when you continuously steak, you're like, yep, I could eat a donut. You get that kind of second stomach feeling. But when you continuously, when you do this over time and the whole, the whole back to the kind of the calorie counting thing, if you count calories and you just take away 500 or a thousand calories over time, that might add up to you being so hungry that you just are dying to eat more food and you can't stop thinking about, you're like, I don't want to be on this diet. I don't want to be on this diet. I don't want that food that's coming to me next. I don't want that chicken breast.

I don't want that rice. You can't think of anything else. You're like, I just want something different. I just want something different. I just want something different. But if you protein leverage and you eat foods that you actually really enjoy, you can rid yourself of being locked in this caloric prison, in my opinion. Because you're kind of still doing the same thing. It's just that you're doing it probably just very slightly.

And it's very slightly over time. Maybe for somebody that's listening, like if you're going to start out with kind of natty foods and you're going to go kind of the route of like meat and eggs, maybe there's some bacon in there, maybe there's some ham, maybe some stuff like that. And you're going to go with, you know, vegetables and fruit and maybe some dairy. Maybe have like zero concern in the beginning about how much fat is in stuff. Over time, start to look at that too. Because if you start out with like really lean shit right off the bat, and you try to do what Rico Rivas is doing for his bodybuilding show,

and not, you know, eating really low amounts of fat, sticking to things you're like, oh, chicken breast is healthy. Turkey's healthy. Ground chicken, ground turkey, rice. That's just going to be very, very hard. There's very few people that really enjoy those foods. So you might need chicken thighs. You might need ribeyes.

You might need filet and just steaks and stuff that have more fat in them. You might need the 85-15 beef rather than the 90-10 to start out. And then over time, you start to pick that stuff away and you're like, oh, yeah, I could make a small change here and I can get leaner. But like how long are you going to do that for? How long are you going to trend downward with your calories? Remember, having low calories is going to make you feel like shit. Having, you know, too low of fats is going to make you feel like shit.

And having no sleep is going to make you feel. Those are all things that will literally feel like you're walking around with like a 50-pound weight vest every day. Yeah, it's tough. Where does somebody just start though? Like, I mean, does somebody just start though? Like, I mean, is it just the fasting is cause right. You said you don't want to do too much all at once. So what's like literally just step one, like people can end this podcast and go do right now.

I think a great place to start would be, let's just talk about, let's just talk about protein. I think that, um, you need to damage your protein a couple times a week via some training, some strength training to send the signal to the body for some protein muscle synthesis. And you need to eat protein. So break down protein, eat protein. That's pretty basic. How much protein? Get close to like one gram per pound of body weight. It could probably even be like 75% of your body weight. If you're very heavy, you know, I don't think there's any reason for someone to consume more than 250 to 300 grams of protein in most cases. So even if you're 500 pounds, 250 grams like should be enough. But if you want to eat more just because you're

hungry, go for it. Because again, I don't really think that protein counts against you in terms of something that you would store as body fat. I know that there's some research that suggests something different. But again, if we're talking about lean sources of protein and you're not overeating, I think that you'll be fine. Somebody may say, oh, well, if you're not overeating, then you're not going to store anything as body fat, which could be true. But if you are slightly over, you're going to store fat first, carbs second, protein last. So approximately a gram of protein per pound of body weight, and then I would cut the other two in half. So let's just say you weigh 300 pounds.

You eat 250 to 300 grams of protein every day, and then you'd have about 150 grams of fat and 150 grams of carbs. Or if you're like, oh, that seems a little high on the fat calories, you can lower that down to 100 and you can allocate more energy towards your carbohydrate intake. If you weigh 200 pounds, 200 grams of protein and 100 grams of carbs and 100 grams of fat. And you might have to switch that up a little bit. You might have to change it around a little bit. A couple other rules is like if something doesn't have a considerable amount of protein in it, this might not be where you have to start right away. But something to think about in the future is if something doesn't have like 10 grams of protein in it, it's not really, it's not a food.

It's not a food to fill you up. It's not on the team. It's not necessarily off the team. It's not off the table. It's not necessarily off the team. It's not off the table. It's not something that you can't ever eat. But it's something that you got to pay attention to, even if it's olive oil. It doesn't matter what it is. If it's something that doesn't have 10 grams of protein in it, you want to do a little double take and be like, why am I eating this?

What is this for? Oh, it's a piece of fruit. Oh, it's to tide me over to the next meal oh it only has 50 calories okay sounds great that's a really good place to start so if you're ravenously hungry smash yourself with vegetables smash yourself with fruit i think the only fruit i can think of that like maybe you want to just pay attention to to not like just overeat would be like grapes but you could still eat grapes here and there it's not going to be a big deal like the likelihood that you're going to be so obsessed with any fruit is it's going to be very low watermelon

is great because it's mainly water any melons are great um because they're mainly water um blueberries blackberries raspberries, blackberries, raspberries, dingleberries. Any sort of berries are good. I think blueberries are the easiest, in my opinion, just because they're not always in season and they kind of suck at certain times. But blackberries and raspberries and stuff, they just turn on you fast you're like

what the fuck these were great yesterday and now they're yeah strawberries suck too this i love strawberries but they fall apart quick you know apples are good um i think sometimes we just want something like we want something want something in our mouth when we're watching TV. You know, you want something to chew on and something to do. And so that's where our yogurt and cottage cheese are great for me to eat. That's also where the Ninja Creamy, making a little ice cream thing is a good idea. And that's where also fruit is great. Like if I sit, I can sit down with like a little basket of blueberries and just hammer the whole thing. Or I could sit down with like an apple and just sit there and kind of eat it.

And it's like, I don't know, the apples, like it's sweet, kind of fills me up. And again, if I want something more, then maybe I'll make a protein shake. If I'm still, you know, quote-unquote hungry, I'm probably not even hungry, I might have like a hero bar or I might make a sweet roll. One of my favorite things to do is to microwave a sweet roll for 15 to 20 seconds.

And I will have that with a glass of steak shake a lot of times, or sometimes it might be even like a Fairlife vanilla. And I'll dip the tasty pastry or the sweet roll. I'll dip that in there. It's amazing. These things, again, a lot of these products, they used to be pretty expensive. A lot of the prices are coming down. I don't know what sweet rolls are anymore or the tasty pastries, but a lot of the stuff from Quest is available at Walmart and Target. Like it's more available to people than ever.

Quest even makes mini Quest bars. It's like 70 calories, I think. It's fucking great, you know. Throw that in your kid's lunch's like 70 calories. I think really fucking great. You know, throw that in your kid's lunchbox, 70 calories, probably, you know, eight to 10 grams of,

uh, eight to 10 grams of protein. Um, and it's a little different than chewing on a regular quest bar because the quest bar is thicker. And so those people that don't really love protein bars, we just have a lot of options nowadays. These foods, they're here to stay. These healthier options, Coke Zero saying this is the best Coke ever.

Pepsi's putting a lot of money into their Zero product as well. And I think these foods are here to stay. They're here to help us. And we're going to be able to get a lot of help. I was looking for the minis and I stumbled upon these. These foods are here to stay. They're here to help us. And we're going to be able to get a lot of help. I was looking for the minis and I stumbled upon these. These are. I love those.

I have a bunch of those at my house. These are really good. Oh, it says caramel. I thought, yeah, it is peanut butter. Yeah, no, these are like peanut butter clusters. They got peanut butter. They got caramel. They got like a coconut. They got all kinds of stuff.

And they're available everywhere now. Before, you used to have to order them and it was kind of a pain in the ass. Now, you just walk down to CVS or something and it's right there in the candy aisle. At the gas station I went to this morning. Quest bars are sitting right there. You can get them anywhere and everywhere. So, that's it, man. Those are the recommendations.

Those are the things I think that you guys can can start to do right now I'm just trying to make sure I didn't leave anything out I mean a little bit of weight training

goes a long way there's so many different resources for that we can talk about that in another podcast and we can maybe the next time we do a Saturday school

maybe Andrew and I or maybe even a podcast within SEMA we can talk about how much work do you need to really do to kind of gain muscle, you know, to be on that train of gaining muscle.

It's not nearly as hard as you think, and it doesn't take nearly as much time. It just takes focus. And it takes like dragging yourself through the mud a little bit. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. I'm at Mark Smiley Bell.

Catch you guys later. Bye.