Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1720: The 8 Worst People to Take Diet Advice From

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin talk about eight kinds of people you probably should NOT take diet advice from. The 8 Worst People to Take Advice From. (2:22) #1 – Doctors. (3:20) #2 – The Government. (8:07) #3 – Science zealots. (14:08) #4 – Diet pushers. (20:51) #5 – Fitness influencers. (25:54) #6 – Bodybuilders. (29:55) #7 – Friends. (34:29) #8 – The supplement companies. (38:52) The people you SHOULD be listening to. (43:45) Related Links/Products Mentioned January Promotion (#1): NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS SPECIAL BUNDLE OFFERS January Promotion (#2): MAPS Anabolic 50% off **Code “JANUARY50” at checkout** Visit Super Coffee for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code “MINDPUMP” at checkout** Pizza As A Vegetable? It Depends On the Sauce Our nutrition labels are lying about how many calories foods have Using Vegetable Oils to Lower Cholesterol May Not Improve Longevity Mind Pump #1527: The 3 Step Solution To The Obesity Epidemic Mind Pump #1245: Why Meal Plans Suck Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Alright, it's January, everybody's trying to get in shape now, and you're probably looking for advice. Who should I take advice from? Well, I can tell you who you shouldn't take

diet advice from. In fact, this episode's all about the eight worst people that can give you diet advice. Do not listen to these people that we talk about in this episode. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Super Coffee. Now, this is coffee that's not like normal coffee.

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And then use the code January 50 that's January 5 0 no space for that discount It's the first episode of 2022 I have a good Horn noise. That's the horn noise. Yeah Now, this is the first episode of 2022. No, I have a good horn noise. That's a horn noise. No, you know what we should talk about? Okay, because this is like, this is fitness, marketing, sales, gym,

membership, weight loss season, right, January. Oh yeah. So when everybody goes crazy, everybody wants to lose weight. And a lot of people are looking for advice from other people. How do I do it? What should I do? How wants to lose weight, and a lot of people are looking for advice from other people. How do I do it? What should I do?

How do I lose weight? And so what we need to talk about is eight worst-pierced people to bake advice from. Yes, the worst people, I'll say that clear. It's a mouth, my foot, my foot. It's a dreaded eye, Jacob. The worst, the worst eight. It's to take the marbles up first.

That you can take diet advice from. These are the people that annoyed us during our fitness careers. You get a client or a member, hey, I heard someone so told me to do this. Someone so told me to do that. And it was almost always terrible of ice coming from these eight people. Numerou Uno has to be on all of our sheets, for sure.

Say it. Doctors. Yes. Oh. Okay, so. Hey, see true. So it. Doctors. Yes. Oh. Oh. Okay, so, so, So, see true. So, number one, okay, let's talk about why we're saying doctors.

First of all, doctors know their craft exceptionally well. Heavily, highly educated. I've trained lots of doctors. I know lots of doctors personally. Very well-meaning. All the ones I know, well-meaning, smart, intelligent, good people. Now, here's theaning, smart, intelligent, good people. Now here's the problem. Doctors...

Comes the shit sandwich. Yeah. Doctors have no... Unless it's their field of expertise. Yeah. There's outliers out there, and I'll throw that in the mix. True. But unless it's your specialty, doctors have almost no education or nutrition.

I believe it's a semester or a class that they take. It's very minuscule. In nutrition. So they have no nutrition training. However, what they do have is all of the authority and credibility of being a doctor, which makes them the hardest ones to counter. So challenging.

Like, I'll tell a story that it was so frustrating to me. I had a client come to me. This was somebody, I think she had to lose about 60 pounds. She hires me and I'm talking about changing behaviors and we're going to do strength training or do all stuff. And then she comes to me and she goes, oh, I'm starting a new diet. And right away, of course, my alarm bells go off and like, oh crap, all right, what am I going to have to, you know, what kind of damage am I going to have to fix here? So what is this diet, where'd you get it from?

She goes, don't worry, it's all good. I got it from my doctor. And what it was was a powder that she drank throughout the day. It was a no solid food diet. Doctor approved. It's a liquid diet. Doctor approved shakes every day to get it to lose weight. And I said, what would happen after you lose weight?

Then I go back to eating normally. I was like, oh, and now the hard part was get it to lose weight. And I said, what would happen after you lose weight? Then I go back to eating normally. I was like, oh, and now the hard part was, it's her doctor and this person has so much authority, so much education. So in order to counter that, I'm like, I have to kind of go through and be very careful with how I counter this. But Matt, that's what makes that this person,

such a challenging person to deal with. Doug, what is that phenomenon that happens? Where, because someone is in a position of authority, like a doctor, that you automatically just... Well, the halo effect? Would that be considered the halo effect? It's something like that, right? The halo effect is like, you look at a celebrity.

You, halo effect is more like a celebrity and you think that they can do no harm or wrong. Like, because they're good at one thing. Yeah, because they're so good at one thing. The doctor thing is different. Like a doctor could give you advice on probably stocks and you would probably take it because he's a PhD because he's educated and you know you went through all the schooling to get

to this position. We just put him on a pedestal for sure. Right, I think there's a name for this phenomenon when this happens. I just don't know what it is. And it's not the halo is more related to like celebrity when you idolize somebody who's like super famous and you think they're like an angel Right, you think that they're you know, they don't do any wrong, right?

But this is more like because they're in this Authority position you assume that any direction that give you is correct that there's something I forget what it's called Yeah, I expected doubt. Well, I mean again., no, no. Again, here's the thing. And you can talk to any doctor. Again, unless it's their specialty, ask them, what is your formal training on nutrition? And they'll tell you it's very, very minimal. You look at all their aid or 10 years of school,

including internships. And it's a couple courses or a few courses on nutrition. And what they learn are things like proteins, fats, carbohydrates, calories, calorie balance, and then that's pretty much it. So they have no training on working through nutrition, on sustainability, on individualizing the training, and not only that, but here's the other thing.

And this is just part of how our medical system works. Doctors, it's really hard for doctors, and the way things are structured to spend a lot of time with patients. And this is even when you're dealing with something that they specialize in, nutrition is a coaching thing. There isn't a prescription you can give someone

to solve it. This is something that needs to be worked with on a consistent basis over a certain period of time. And so what doctors tend to do when they give diet recommendations is kind of like prescription. Here, don't eat carbs or follow this or just do this liquid diet, which like I said, I dealt with that and it was really hard to overcome.

Yeah, and just to play, I mean, not to play devil's advocate, but there's definitely like some substance to, I've talked to some doctors about this and they're just, they're pretty aware that if they dull out, you know, good information, a lot of people aren't going to do it and apply it. And so I think that there's a little bit of jaded kind of perspective in terms of, you know, I know that they'll take these pills and they'll do these things, but they're not going to make the lifestyle

changes in habits. And so they get somewhat, there's, there's somewhat of a reserve to actually even bring it up in the conversation. Well, I think it also leads into our second worst person or entity that we think that you should listen to, die device from, is a lot of their information is coming from the government. Oh, so there's a second worst person or entity to listen to. If you followed government guidelines for nutrition for the last few decades, you're probably gonna be sick and unhealthy. Very sick and then. That's how wrong they were.

I mean, I, listen, when I was a kid, the official advice from the government, right? So government agencies, FDA and all the nutritional advice, was that margarine was healthier than butter. Butter's terrible for you. Eggs, don't eat eggs, only eat the whites. If you drink milk, drink non-fat milk. Now you know what's funny?

Consume 60% of your grains and carbs. Yeah, or carbs from grains, right? And now you know what's funny. Now they show very clearly, whole milk, healthier than fat-free milk. Butter, healthier than margarine, whole eggs, far healthier than egg whites. They missed on all of them.

Yeah, not only did they miss, but it was actually the opposite, right? So it's one thing to kind of be off, but it's another thing to give someone. And this is where a lot of these doctors pull from. So because they don't have a ton of nutritional advice, but they've maybe read FDA guidelines and things like that, or maybe the one semester they read the book

that was written in 1957, and that's where they're getting their diet information. And so I think they kind of feed into each other. That's part of the reason why the doctors are so bad is a lot of them are pulling from the information that's being presented by the government. Yes, now this isn't the only entity that falls prey to this kind of influence,

but the government's notorious for this. If you look at the people that run many of these agencies, many of them came from pharmaceutical companies first, so they would leave pharmaceutical companies for these government jobs, or vice first I'll leave a government job going to pharmaceutical company, or you'd see these lobbying companies having tremendous influence over these recommendations. So when you're getting these recommendations, I mean, the classic example, it's a silly example,

but it's funny. I don't remember when this was. I believe it was during the Obama administration, I wanna say, but they tried to pass new government regulations for school lunches. And one of them was that a school lunch was required to be... You had to give one serving of vegetable to the school lunch. It introduced pizza, right? Is that what it happened? Lobbyist went in and said, oh no, no, no, you know, and what they did, the

lobbyist made the case and got it that pizza sauce because tomato sauce is a vegetable. Because it's tomatoes. So now slice of pizza, it falls under those guidelines. And so now the kid is eating, oh, it's under these guidelines, right? If you look at the government regulations on the on the back of your food, right, you read the nutrition facts. Now, there's nothing wrong with nutrition facts. I think it gives us a good general guideline. But when you learn the margin of error that they're allowed, it's pretty damn big. Yeah. It's you, how much can they be off with?

I've said this on the show multiple times and I can't remember if it's 25% or 35% but it's in that range. Yeah, so even if it was 15%. Right, right. You know, you're eating a 2,000 calorie diet, that means you could be having another 300 calories, which literally can make the difference between.

Not to mention, they also, the way they write on labels, I've always thought it was so interesting, like they try and they pick a serving size that they present. And almost everything I've ever ate that has a nutrition label in the back, I've never sat down and ate the serving size. I've never opened a 12 ounce drink and had half of it. It was in like, you drink the whole thing yet, it's, you know ounce drink and had half of it. It was in like you drink the whole thing yet. It's, you know, they break up half of it and they do the serving size

or they have like a single serving of it. It's very misleading. It's very misleading because a lot of people don't, you know, honestly, a lot of people don't do the math. They don't sit down and go like, oh, I probably had two, two times this, I think. I'm not sure. Well, it's not only that, but like in the 80s and 90s fat was given the blame for obesity,

for heart disease. And so the government comes out and says, fat is bad. Okay, this was this was the general. This is a huge one. Yeah, low fat, low fat, that's fat is bad. Now we know that's totally false, but here's what happened. Government comes out with that. Food companies are like, okay, we need to change our products.

People still we need to make them so people will buy them. They need to be palatable. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna cut the fat. So in the 90s, if you went through a grocery store, like one of the biggest pieces of marketing on food would be low fat, low fat, low fat. I mean, red vines.

So you know, red vines are the licorice looking candy ready. Literally we'll say on a fat-free food. So we'll gummy bears because this is from the 90s, essentially, but what they do to make them more palerables increased the sugar. So a lot of the information was misleading, much of it was actually the opposite of what was true.

Sodium is another one. They're low sodium, low, so in the context of a healthy diet, low sodium is actually very bad for you. Collestral, they told us not to eat cholesterol. American Heart Association had to totally redact their original state. They told women to take calcium for osteoporosis, then we saw, oh, this is causing problems with the arteries and actually it's not doing anything to supplement with calcium, unless you're in a deficiency.

So the government is really, really bad in there. Again, they're so heavily influenced by special interests, lobbies, and the pharmaceutical companies. For example, here's another one, and statin drugs are very effective at lowering cholesterol. And in many cases, lowering cholesterol with statins can cause a beneficial effect. However, when you look at, and I would love for a doctor to comment on this, I've talked to many of them,

when you look at the, all the things that you can measure, by itself, cholesterol doesn't tell us a whole of them. When you look at the all the things that you can measure, by itself, cholesterol doesn't tell us a whole lot. You have to look at the whole thing, but cholesterol is very easily treatable. So it became the focus. We got a lower cholesterol, lower cholesterol. When you look at cholesterol and you don't look at everything else, it doesn't mean a whole lot unless it's super, super crazy at a range. So don't listen to the government when it comes to nutrition. Now, the next one, this one was challenging for me at first, right? So the next one is science zealots. Yeah.

And as a young trainer, I struggled with how to debate or argue with someone that would argue with me with studies. That's not the best way to lose fat atom. This is, look at this study where they have this 16 individuals and they were put on cardio and they were... Fear of you, you know, and they would use that to argue with you. And at that point in my career, you know, I was still figuring things out and didn't realize at that point the behavioral aspect and how much that plays

in a role of long-term success and that we are really robbing people by presenting these short studies all the time and using them as the standard of like, this is how you should do things. And that being said, I don't want to shit all over science. Without that, we wouldn't have gotten to where we're at today. No, I'm glad you said that.

The studies are essential. They're necessary, they're valuable. But you can't coach nutrition just based off of study. I'll give you one clear example. So this is an easy example that I like to give, right? So artificial sweeteners, they taste sweet, and they reduce or eliminate the need for sugar, which has calories.

Now, it's a fact, if you eat less calories than you take in, you will lose weight. This is one of the things you have to do. Anytime you try to change your nutrition or get leaner, now of course it's more complex than that and what you eat and how you eat and the behaviors around it and how they make you feel and all that stuff, very important. But the bottom line is, you still have to eat less calories than you burn to lose weight.

If you cut the sugar out of your diet, especially if you have a high sugar diet, voila, you cut the calories, you're gonna lose weight. So artificial sweeteners came out and were able to promise that. So then they did studies that were controlled. So what they'll do is they'll take people or animals and they'll replace sugar with artificial sweeteners count and control all the calories.

And of course, artificial sweeteners cause people or animals to lose weight because the calories are lower. Now the problem is in the real world, when people replace their soda drinks for diet, soda's or their sugary candy with sugar-free candy, we don't see weight loss. Now, why is that? Because people replace the calories with other foods. They end up eating more of other things. Now, there's debate as to whether or not that's an unconscious thing, that the sweetness from the artificial sweetener minus the calories that usually comes with it. Triggers stronger, you know, hunger response or, yeah, or the person thinks they can eat more

because now they're having a good. And by the way, that's where the science zealots will try and poke holes in the people that try to say that. That's not true. Look at this study, they, and they show that it doesn't increase this. It doesn't mess with insulin. And so they try and use it. But it doesn't matter.

They have failed to show that people on their own consuming artificial sweeteners instead of sugar end up losing weight. So it's a terrible strategy. But the science zealots will point to the studies, will point to the fact that it reduces calories, and will say, no, it's really good. But in the real world, it just doesn't work. And I think that's where the science, when you see this with the exercise too, the exercise

science zealots, right? They completely lose the context of human behavior and real life and everything is down to the study that was done in this controlled setting, which sometimes doesn't apply. So the real one. They're just hyper focused on one value they're getting from that.

Like if muscle contraction, they can test that. So based on that alone, they're gonna value whether or not your exercise is effective, as another one, and not really considering the overall systemic effect of some of these compound lifts as opposed to isolating these particular ones. Yeah, you know what, there was this one study, it reminds me of, maybe Doug can find this.

It's an old study. They took a bunch of people, it's relatively controlled, and they took half of them and they replaced their animal fat intake with vegetable fat intake. So vegetable fats typically have, you know, lower or no saturated fat. You're going to see a lowering of total cholesterol. And so at the end of the study, they showed, oh my gosh, we replaced these people's animal fat intake with vegetable fat intake and their cholesterol drop.

Wow, it's successful. But then when they followed the people longer, they found all caused mortality increased with the people leading the vegetable fats. And now we know trans fats and stuff like that have bad values. But the zealots would have pointed to that study and say it's a very effective way to improve your health, for example.

Yeah, look at it. It's good to have that in the conversation as perspective and context, but application sometimes will prove a different outcome. Yeah. Well, that's why you can't take, you can only take the study stuff and face value because there's too many other variables when it comes to the success of a client. You talked about all the, I think, two that you mentioned already,

and another one is just the time period. Even if the study is right, even if it still aligns with some of the human behaviors in a six week period of time, what someone will do and what the results you'll see in six weeks can be very, very different for a year. A year compared to that. So even if someone behaviorally can stick to something

for six weeks, the question is, can they make this a lifelong pursuit? And what is it? And so what does it even look like six months to a year from there? And maybe they have all this success in a short window, but in a long window, it completely changes. And you just have to know that when you look at these studies

and go, okay, there's some good information here. Let me take that. But then also let me take into consideration, I need to do this for my life. That means I'll be exchanging this out. What's the reality of me actually sticking to this long term? And do I want to long term? Because a lot of times people think in a short window, like, oh, of course, I can do all those. But then you say do it forever. Yeah. then you say do it forever and they go, oh, now I'll just do it until I get my goal. Yeah. That's why when people used to say to me, what's the best form of exercise?

And I'd say, well, first off, which one do you enjoy the most? Because it doesn't matter which one's the most effective if you hate it. You'll never do it. Well, you said what's that saying? You used to say all the time that an inferior program done consisting will always consistently

will always outbeat a superior program done in consistency. Yes, yes, yes. And that's so true. It's like, I mean, we pride ourselves a lot on our ability to write really good programs. We think that we write some of the best programs that exist out there, but none of that should matters if you don't follow it. Totally. And you're better off doing, you know, you know, influencer Susie's workout, but program if you stick to it consistently and you never miss, because then it becomes a superior program than you'd ours. Now the next one, and one of the beauties

of being in a professional in the fitness space for almost 24 years, I think, is that this next one we're gonna talk about, I have seen come and go and I've seen different iterations of the same thing. And I've seen it's so it becomes really obvious when this keeps happening. And these are the diet pushers or the people who say this is the diet that works, this is the diet for everybody.

They don't, there's no nuance, there's no considering individual variances. It's a one size fiddle, and they often will demonize certain aspects of nutrition or whole macronutrients, or whole food categories. It's part of their diet that they're promoting. It seems like it's gotten even more intense over the years.

I think because of social media and access to the internet and being able to pull up, you know, like your own confirmation bias, like I'm going to grab this study and cherry pick certain items out of there and place it in there to make my argument even more compelling. And it just becomes this ideology because they're so passionate about what they feel like it's bringing in their own personal life, but what they forget to remember is that everybody is individual, it has individual needs and there's lots of biodiversity you gotta consider. What do you guys think the percentage of the people that fall in this category, the diapushers, have bad intentions versus good intentions? Oh, that's a good question. Like, meeting that

there's, because here's, I do- I don't think they have bad intentions. I, well, a good question. Like meeting that there's there's because here's I do I don't think they have bad intentions. I why do you think so? I think some I think some people I think some people are out for blood start start a keto podcast on the swing up of the keto trend. I think some people write a paleo book when paleo is getting popular. I think there's some people that use it as a marketing strategy and that's their main motivation to write it. So I do think there's some people that have bad motivation which I would consider that bad motivation. Then I think there is the other side of people that mean well because let's say they did some of their own homework

or maybe we have friends that are actually PhDs that are actually pushed in certain diets like carnivore and vegan and things like that. And I think that they're intelligent, they're well read. And they follow the diet that impacted them personally in such a tremendous way that they feel in bold and to go out there and share this diet with the world. And they're smart enough to back it up.

That's right. With certain studies and arguments, right? So, and I think that the most successful examples of this are exactly that. They are intelligent, a lot of times PhDs that have done a deep dive on a specific diet. They have applied it to themselves. They've seen tremendous. And now they have the experience, the intelligence to push this diet on people. Whether they mean it to be a pushing way

or they are just, they're sharing their experience. Well, also don't you feel that they're getting rewarded for being more polarizing? Always, always. Like the algorithm, whatever it is, in terms of people just buying into this war on methodology, they, like, it just becomes something that a lot of people

glom onto because they're into the drama of it, the fervor behind it. Yeah, okay, so here's the formula for a successful popular diet, okay? Well, first off, it has to be low calorie, otherwise people won't lose weight, but that's all diets, all diets are low calorie, That's why people lose weight. But here's the formula, simple. Okay, so like one or two steps,

don't eat carbs, right? Don't eat vegetables, don't eat meat, right? It's gotta be very simple. And if you really want it to crush, say something that's counter to what people have been hearing for a long time. So in the 90s, low fat, low fat, low fat, atkins comes out.

No, eat all the fat you want, just fat, low fat, low fat, atkins comes out. No, eat all the fat you want. Just don't eat carbs. Explodes, right? You hear that for a while. Then you hear someone come out and say, vegan, vegan, vegan. Don't eat meat.

And then someone comes out carnivore, eat carnivore. It's the opposite. Explodes, right? So these are the formulas they work very, very well. But one of the main reasons why diets don't work is because in this context a diet set me going to go off. Okay, so whatever you do, think forever. So you gotta think forever, and also consider yourself as an individual. Your physiology is slightly different from the person

next to you, but your experiences and your behaviors and your relationship to food are very different from the person next to you. So there is no perfect book or diet. Now, what you can do, and here's what I like, is these PhDs with different opinions, I think it's cool to listen to them, take bits of information, see what applies to you, but nine at a 10 times following these diets, these extreme diets is gonna result in total failure.

So I would not listen. And so far to date, there hasn't been a single diet that has reversed the course of the obesity epidemic. There you go right there evidence. Absolutely. Now, the next one, I don't know what this was 20 years ago, and it's now manifested into this role, or whatever, or where they all were 20 years ago maybe, but this is maybe one of the worst group of people you can listen to and that's fitness influencers.

And it's a dirty deal. And did they just all come out of nowhere? Where were they all? Because these are all celebrity diets. Is that what it was? Remember them? That was you think they've replaced, they've replaced celebrities.

Whatever. It's right. Remember when we were kids, you go to the... I mean, history tends to repeat itself and we're creatures of habit. And I don't think there's anything revolutionary in the diet world in the last 20 years. And so, there's this huge wave of Instagram, TikTok,

you know, whatever influencers that are promoting diets in ways of eating that were were they 20 years ago. And so you guys' theory is that that was. Well, yeah, remember when we were kids, you go to the grocery store and you'd see the magazines and there'd be those those magazines that have a celebrity like, you know, this is how Cindy Crawford got, you know, stays super fit. I got a few jacked you get ready for four freeings. You've totally masturbated to her, right?

You'd need to throw it back. But you remember that, right? It was all celebrities. I was like 65 now. I'll go with your actual. Katian was the other one, right? Or how Oprah lost 30 pounds, of course she gave it back, right? So it was celebrities, but now it's fitness influencers.

The problem with fitness influencers is they have the visual evidence, so the challenge with them is they do look good, right? They do look incredible, right? So automatically you think maybe they know what they're talking about. What you don't know is that they don't know what they're talking about. 99% of the time they have no training, no education,

no experience actually working with everyday people. They have figured out a way to get themselves to look really good. And that often is dysfunctional. A lot of people don't know this. But if you look at these fitness influencers, I would bet that a good 70 to 80% of them have a, what would be classified as a dysfunctional relationship

with exercise and nutrition. I would agree with that. And I'd even go as far to say in their defense that they don't know that they don't know. And I always try when we harp on the fitness influencer goes far to say in their defense that they don't know that they don't know. Right. Right. And I always try when we harp on the fitness influencer to have some compassion because I too remember what it was like to be a 23, 24 year old trainer who was in good shape, thought he knew better and thought I was out there giving great advice.

And I just didn't know that I didn't know. So I think a lot of them come from that place again, like the other categories. I think there are some people that are vicious or have ill will to do it. And they're just looking to make money. But I like to think that a large portion of them are just young and unaware, right?

We've now, this's a brand new, even though maybe you guys are saying this is a similar tactic as celebrities, this is a brand new market though of fitness people that get credibility with never having to train a person in real life. I mean, that's kind of a crazy phenomenon. It's all about how they can be, I cut down

and went through this full process to get up on stage to show off my body. I took all these pictures, all of a sudden I get a following. Now everybody wants to know what that blueprint looks like. Yeah, sell that to me. And the credibility is 100% how they look. Yeah, it's not what they know or their experience. And to your point, a lot of times they got there

through extreme diets, steroids. I mean, you've got fitness girls that are kind of doing the consumer butt implants and liposuction and doing all these things to create this image in authority. Crazy drugs and starving yourself. I'll say this, a majority of people in the fitness industry period have some kind of dysfunction

relationship with food and exercise, which is what drove them to be in fitness in the first place, but you go with a fitness influence around, it's even higher. These are people who are just displaying their bodies, and they have no business giving anybody fitness or nutrition advice. I definitely would not listen to them. All right, the next one, this next person knows more than the last person, but just a bit more, and it's not really applicable to most people,

and that's the body builder. Now, the body builder, they've gotten shredded, they've bulked, they know exercise to a degree, they know how to work really hard and you see them work out and they perform well and all that stuff. So now it's like they're going to give diet advice. No, you're a bruised science category. Yeah, no. I think that they have figured out

how to get themselves stage ready, and they could maybe coach another body builder very similar to them, with the same kind of genetics, same drugs, same fanaticism, but man, I am telling you right now, if you are not as fanatical as a body builder, you are not gonna, their advice is not gonna work for you, because body builders, I've known a few competitive bodybuilders

have done it for years and years. Nobody wants to live that way. It is like, their foods are portioned, they walk around with tupperware, they weigh their food, their workout is their workouts are religious, everything is so regimented and dedicated 24 hours a day and their advice is gonna come across that way. Here's what you need to do, here's your five meals, here's your meal plan, do your 24 hours a day. And their advice is gonna come across that way. Here's what you need to do.

Here's your five meals. Here's your meal plan. Do your cardio twice a day or whatever. And it just doesn't work. Yeah, I feel like a simpler way to say it with bodybuilders is I feel like they have the answers to the test. They have figured out the answers to the test, but they don't know how to teach the proper formula

to the average person, right? It's like a lot of athletes that just aren't good coaches. Right, you know, like you could see a stellar athlete out there. And then he asked them their whole process of like how to get there, how I can improve and they just don't really have to do this. Right, they like sourcing. It works for me.

They have hacked into the answers for them to get to that level and it's worked really well for me, which is a lot of times there's this kind of feedback loop where they think that they know what they're doing because they help a couple more people that are like them. They get a couple clients who are in the same place or maybe the same body type or same personality type that this type of instruction works really well for them.

Same insecurities, same place in their fitness journey. And it works And so then they think oh, I'm I'm a good diet coach. I'm a good competitor Cuz I get I figured this all out and then it's that's like solidified with the way they look too So they have this perceived authority too because of these great physique So I just have a trainer that worked for me that competed at a pretty high amateur level You compete like mr. California. I think you got second at one point. It did really well. And then he became a personal trainer.

And I remember this was like six months into being a trainer working under me. And I remember sitting down with them and he goes, I did not realize, this was his literal word, something like this, he goes, I did not realize just how different people, the normal, the average person's genetics were and how they respond to exercise from mine.

And I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, I know how to work out, I know how to get my body to respond, but when I do it, apply to the average person, it's like I'm hurting people, they're overtraining, they're not responding the same. And I remember sitting down and saying, look, you work hard, but you have one and a million genetics,

obviously you're anabolicly enhanced on anabolic steroids. This is what you do all the time. You try to apply that to the average person, and it's too much, and it doesn't work. And here's a deal, like I've trained lots of people. I can't name a single person that I trained exactly the way I trained myself, right? Everybody's a little bit different.

So what I know how to do for me, I know how to do for me, but that tells me very little about how to work with lots of different individuals and what to consider when I'm working with different individuals. And this is where bodybuilders kind of fall in that category. So they know some stuff, but they don't know really how to work with lots of people. And if you talk to bodybuilders, we have coached lots of average people. They'll tell you the exact same thing. They'll say, oh yeah, I had to figure this out of people. And if you talk to bodybuilders, we have coached lots of average people. They'll tell you the exact same thing. They'll say, oh, yeah, I had to

figure this out through, you know, years of this process. And many of them, at least my experience of running around on the circuit was one of the most impressive things about a lot of the competitors I met was they have some of the most incredible discipline that I've ever met. They have the ability to tell me what to do and they will blindly follow it and do it with like a crazy crazy You don't have to consider the normal human behaviors that you get with the average person That's right. Like you can't tell that to the average person and expect them to Wake up at 6 a.m. and do this when you say and eat at this time and measure their food all the time But with bodybuilders is so fanatical

That you can give them the script and they'll just follow it, at least for 12 or 16 weeks right before a show. All right, here's the next one. This one used to frustrate the heck out of me because it's hard to battle because the people that you tend to trust the most or the people you know, they're around you, you know their story, you see their struggle,

then all of a sudden they lose weight, and it's your friend friend and your friend says, Here's how I lost 30 pounds and you're like, I know Susan. She lost 30 pounds following the celery diet and you know Doing cardio in the morning fasted. I'm gonna do the same thing, right? My friend Rachel. She does CrossFit. She looks amazing Yes, this was a hard, so many anecdotes. This is a hard one because think about as a You don't want to talk crap about their friend. Well, yeah, as a coach and a trainer, right? When you're, we're building this relationship with somebody. Like we don't have the same,

we don't quite have the same authority yet or relationship yet that this person has with their best friend who they've been hanging out with, say, for 10, 15, 20 years. And they know so well, they trust, they look out for each other. It's like, so her girlfriend telling her, or her buddy telling him that, oh my God, you gotta go try this workout plan,

or you gotta go try this diet that I've got right now, and they've seen with their eyes, like I've known Suzy my whole life, and she's always been on shape, and this is the best shape I've ever seen her, and she tells me the answer was X, and I'm like, oh my God, I've got to do this now. Real hard for a trainer to overcome that

and say it's a bad idea. This is, by the way, this is why in the supplement and diet space, some of the highest grossing products are multi-level marketing, okay? Literally, if you look at the diet space and the diet supplement space and weight loss space, these companies have become billion dollar companies because multi-level marketing relies upon that.

They hack into that accountability piece. Yeah, and you go talk to your friend and this worked for me and then they saw me lose weight and now 10 other people buy it. Any herbal life crushed. Oh yeah, I mean, they set up the entire structure so you pull in your friends and family. That's who you're marketing to to even get started.

And it's just, it is, it plays upon that fact that it worked for just this one person that I know intimately. So, you know, this must be the formula. Yeah, it is. So friends, I think, you know, and it's great to consider some of the stuff that they did, but remember you are you.

So, be very careful when you're, you know, just listening to your friend or somebody you know that lost the whole life. Well, that's the dangerous part about it, is you can have a friend who has similar goals, you guys are both, let's say, in the same situation as far as I'm overweight, trying to lose weight, knowing each other, have all these things in common, but then have just completely different metabolism and just in different places as

far as muscle mass on their body, their skill and ability to do. Yeah, hormone, I mean, there's so many other variables that make such a difference when it comes to your results and of course seeing long term results. I can't remember any time that I've met a pair of friends or pair of people in general that looked like each other or had similar goals. And I had them on similar programs and diets. It just, it doesn't work that way. And unfortunately, it's part of the reason why we avoided nutrition and diet for so long. It's not that we don't have the ability to help somebody out with nutrition.

It's that it's so individualized that we wanted to scale this thing to millions of people and we just knew that like, we can help millions of people by coaching and giving general advice, but to help somebody on a diet level, like that's so specific that we would never be able to reach every individual.

You know what, let's do the little sidetrack. What also makes this challenging is when I would see people in my gyms or clients or trainers that work for me and their clients, when I would see them follow the same routine and diet that their friend did, and they didn't get the same results. It's crushing. It's crushing because now it's like someone you know and wow, why can they do it? Why doesn't it work for me? And it oftentimes gets confirmed.

You're the loser in the group. Yes. And it gets people to stop. All to get actually, I remember specifically, one guy, he was like, dude, my buddies are building muscle and they're doing, and nothing's happening to me. He's like, it's just not for me, I'm gonna stop. And I had to have this whole conversation,

like listen, man, everybody's body responds a little bit different, we gotta find what works best for you. And luckily I'm convincing convincing I got him to stay But he would have left he would have left because he followed what his friend did and it just didn't work for him All right, this last one is one of my favorites and that is the supplement companies now Supplement companies you may think to yourself. What do they have to do with diet? Right? They're not selling me food They're selling me pills. Oh, that's where you're wrong. Look closely, look closely at the diets that they recommend.

There's almost always their supplements incorporated in the diet, and this is a brilliant strategy to sell their powders and their pills. It's like, we give someone a diet, and then at 9am, you also take this card blocker, and at noon, you take this pre-workout fat burner, and then when you're most hungry, oh, I get hungry is that 4pm, that's...

That's protein sugar after you're gone. That's why you drink this shake that kills your appetite so that you eat less, and the person loses weight because it's a low calorie diet, and they're like, this, you know, XYZ supplement. So, I blame, I know I should take responsibility, it's my fault, but I blame the supplement companies for my poor nutritional advice early on in my career,

because we went through Apex nutrition. Remember that? We got certified. My first class was taught by the founder. Through 24th Fitness, we used to have this. You would get a client, you would ask them all the foods they like, they don't like. You put in all their metrics as far as their body weight,

their body fat, their goal, all that stuff, their movement. And then the algorithm would spit out this perfect diet. It's so perfect that it would be like weird stuff. Like three quarters of an orange and two crackers and one quarter cup of tuna. Like what the fuck, who's ever gonna eat that, right? It was just counting the calories. Yeah, it would literally just, it would figure out like the perfect macro breakdown

I would give you these you're taking me back. I feel so We're a pro-off and the other thing that would do that I you know This is it was ingrained to me now the good going forward was you know They would recommend apex bars at least once or twice a day and an apex shake plus the apex Multivitam in like and it's in the plan. Yeah, it's in the diet planet. That's part of your lunch. It's, you know, if you take a step back, you have to really marvel at the brilliance of the soul. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So brilliant. I mean, it trained me to think that this is how Adam, how you put together a good meal plan. It's a food group. Yeah. And you find that out. And you start.

And so my meal plans for probably the next five years looked like that when I would write them I you know I was sold on the convenience of it and how hard it is to get protein and so I would build in bars and shakes as like that's part of a successful Healthy nutrition plan and the truth is I was completely brainwashed by supplement company to think This is how I should advise people in reality. I should my goal, in the way I talk about it today is our goal should be we don't need any supplements.

Now does that mean we might or might not use, or we may use some supplements? Yeah, there's very good chance we'll use protein powder and we'll use some of these things. But the goal should be to try and do it with food. Yeah, all whole foods and to be doing that as consistently as possible and using these things as tools On the situations where I can't not as a crutch or a needs to be in the diet. I remember you're taking me back I remember the sales presentation I learned from taking my first class Are you as you're we're gonna figure out if you're a slow Moderate or fast oxidizer and that means that you either eat a lot of carbs a lot of fat and you know in the paper burns fast

That's like carbs and logs burn slower. That's like fats and then it'll give you the perfect diet and then in the meal plan Would like you said Multivitamin in the morning Your bar in between for your snacks. Oh, you're workout. Make sure you have three branching amino acid pills before and after Oh, your goals also build muscle. We'll add two creatine pills to the before that Oh, you want fat loss, take 10 pyruvate tablets before after it was insane. And that's just, you know, again, brilliant,

brilliant way to sell supplements, but really terrible way to help people with nutrition. And supplement companies will do this. And supplement companies understand this. If you'll notice that protein powder, for example, protein powder's got lots of value if you're not hitting your protein targets, okay? We talk about that all the time, but how did protein powders really start to sell in the tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars?

How did they start doing that? They started to say you need protein post workout, right? Brilliant way to inject it into your normal routine and into your diet. Post workout, don't have food, have a protein shake, it absorbs faster, gets you to recover faster, right? Before these meals have this supplement that blocks carbs or this one helps you with fat absorption or whatever, don't take this supplement company's advice. Nutrition is hard to sell the right way, right? It's hard to sell it the right way

because it's not sexy. So if I'm selling something that says, I don't know, what's that popular food that everybody thinks is healthy? What if I sold a book, like kale makes you fat, right? Oh my God, I made a lot of attention. Yeah. I thought kale was super healthy, right?

That's how you sell these things. So those are the people you don't want to listen to when it comes to diet. Now, I think we should say a little bit about who you probably want to listen to. And I think these are people who specialize in the field of nutrition, or people have lots of experience coaching

and helping people through the process of sustainable, long-term success with nutrition. Those are the best people that you probably want to work with. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our guides. We have guides that can help you with every single fitness and health goal you can imagine. Or almost every fitness and health goal you can imagine.

You can also find us on Instagram. So Justin is at Mind Pump Justin. I'm at Mind Pump Salon. Adam is at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps and a ballad, maps performance, and maps aesthetic.

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