Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How My Coaching Helped Matt Lose 24 lb. in 24 Weeks

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

In this episode, I sit down with Matt, a busy professional in his 50s, who lost 24 pounds in 24 weeks with my body transformation coaching program. Years ago, Matt read ⁠Bigger Leaner Stronger⁠ and learned the fundamentals of diet and training. Despite understanding the principles, he had always struggled to turn them into sustainable habits, particularly when it came to dieting. That’s why he turned to coaching for guidance. Matt’s journey wasn’t without challenges: He recovered from surgery, navigated a demanding job, and managed a work schedule that required frequent travel. But with his coach’s help, he overcame these obstacles and achieved remarkable results. In this episode, Matt shares how he stayed consistent despite his busy lifestyle, tackled setbacks, and built sustainable habits that worked for him. Tune in to hear Matt’s story and learn how commitment, combined with expert coaching, can help you reach your health and fitness goals—no matter your age or circumstances. --- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (08:09) Before/after (20:37) Nutrition tips (29:55) Travel & diet (35:36) Alcohol & treats (43:48) Beliefs & barriers (49:34) Training setup (52:37) Cardio (56:04) Enjoying workouts (59:13) Supplementation --- Mentioned on the Show: ⁠The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation⁠ ⁠Whey+⁠ ⁠Coaching Page⁠ ⁠Lead the People Podcast by Matt Poepsel

my sort of confidence that I could stick to my workouts, hit the nutrition, which is what has fallen apart for me in the past, you know, was off the charts. And even while I'm there in Denver, we're like going back and forth through the app and saying like, okay, this part worked great. I gotta modify this. And it feels again, like having that coach in your corner,

you know, for me, it made all the difference to not only break through that original plateau of a little bit of weight loss, but to develop the knowledge and the confidence to be able to handle some of the different sort of surprises that you know that happened. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. And Happy New Year, which is belated by the time you're hearing this,

but it is January 1, when I am recording this introduction to the episode, so happy new year. And in this episode, you are going to be hearing from Matt, who over 24 weeks lost 24 pounds, and some of that was achieved on his own. He read my book, Bigger, Lear, Stronger, and he started there, started getting results, and then transitioned into my one-on-one coaching service, or I should say Legion's one-on-one

coaching service. My sports nutrition company also offers coaching. And as you will hear in this episode, Matt had various obstacles he had to overcome in his transformation, like for example, traveling for work. He travels a lot for his work. And so he's had to figure out how to maintain his workouts, how to maintain the right eating habits while traveling. He had kidney stone surgery and had to work around that there was a bit of recovery there. And he had to figure out how to rediscover his love for fitness and how to figure out a regimen that he genuinely enjoyed

at age 53, which can be different than when you are 25 because your motivations change and what you are willing to subject your body to changes and in some cases what you can subject your body to changes. And so in this episode you're going to hear Matt's story from him of course he's gonna share the ups and downs of his journey he's gonna talk about what worked well for him what did not work so well for him what modifications he had to make to your standard prescriptions for diet and training and supplementation and how he worked out a lifestyle that works for him that allows him to achieve

and maintain his body composition and health goals for the longterm. Before we get going with today's episode, I need to tell you about my one on one coaching program, which might be for you if you are feeling like no matter what you do to eat better, no matter how much you work out, no matter what supplements you take, nothing seems to work. And I know what that's like. I've been there. It can be very frustrating. It can even make you feel a little bit crazy. You try and you try and you try

and then when those things don't work, you try something else. You jump onto the new diet, the new workout plan and then when you give your all to the newest things that don't work, you finally feel like giving up or maybe you can muster the will to keep the cycle going but either way, you remain stuck. And this is how people can go to the gym for years,

how they can eat well, at least well enough, they can take good supplements and still look more or less the same as when they started. And today, I'm going to give you the solution. I'm going to show you how to get unstuck and finally out of that vicious cycle once and for all. And it starts with this. The biggest thing that I see

with the people that we help is this. They are often missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle. And I bet it's the same with you. You are probably doing a lot of things right. However, there's probably something you are not doing right that is giving you most of the grief. For example, maybe it's your calories or macros, maybe it's your exercise selection, maybe it's your food choices, maybe you're not progressively overloading your muscles. Whatever it is though, here's what's important.

Once you identify what that one thing you're missing is, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress. And this is exactly what my coaching team has done for over 3,000 men and women of all ages and abilities. For example, they did it for Sarah, one of our clients who lost 21 pounds and six and a half inches off her waist in just 90 days.

And in her words, quote, "'I'm in the best physical appearance of my life at age 45 and I have more energy and confidence. I feel like I found the secret to success. And we also did the same thing for another client, Andy, who cut 11 pounds of body fat and over four inches from his waist while also gaining over 50 pounds on his key lifts.

And he did those things also in just 90 days. And in 90 days, we helped another client, Jen slash four inches from her waist, add 30 pounds to her squat and cut almost 15 pounds of body fat, all while eating foods she loved. And in her words, quote, rarely feeling hungry. Now I could go on like that literally for hours but in almost

every success story first and foremost we helped our clients figure out that one thing that made all the difference for them. It's kind of like typing in a password to log into your computer. You could have all the letters, numbers, symbols and so forth right except one and then what happens? You can't log in, right? But as soon as you get that last remaining character right, voila, you are in business. And so if I've learned anything from the thousands of success stories that we've racked up over the years, it's this. You too are probably just one major shift, one important insight, one powerful new behavior away from easy street or at least what feels like easy street compared to the street you've been

stuck on. And if you want some help figuring out what that one thing is, that one thing that's missing for you, then my one on one coaching service might be for you. And of course it could be a couple of things, doesn't have to just be one and we don't charge extra for that either. And so if you want to see if my coaching service is right for you go to bylegion.com slash coaching that's b-y-l-e-g-i-o-n dot com slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call so my team can learn about you, your goals, your lifestyle, and then, so the both of you can determine if the program is right for you.

And by the way, there are people we speak with who are not a good fit for the program. That does happen, but we almost always have other experts and other resources to refer them to. And then, if the program makes sense to you, you sign up and you show up every day, you do the work, and then we guarantee your results or you get your money back. So again, if you are still listening to this and are even remotely interested in what I've said, don't put this off for later and then forget. Take the first step now. Schedule your free consultation

call over at bylegion.com slash coaching. Hey, Matt, thank you for taking some time out of your afternoon, maybe morning. I don't know if you're actually West Coast, but take some time out of your day to come talk to me. My pleasure, Mike. Love it. Love it. Yeah, I'm here on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So I'm East Coast firmly in the afternoon for this conversation. Nice. So these discussions, as I was saying offline, I like them to be just kind of an open-ended discussion of, in this case, your fitness journey. And maybe we could start with

a kind of a snapshot, before and after kind of results snapshot, just for people listening so they can understand that for context. And then from there, we can maybe go back to where you were at before you found me in my work, what were you trying to do, what was working for you, what was not working for you, and then we'll just kind of move forward from there.

Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, I had this big fitness goal that I had over the summer of last year. My son and I, we climbed Grand Teton, which was amazing. We were able to summit and it was great. But then as I came down off the mountain, that was in July, had a winter, a long winter. This would have been into 2024 of reaching for the snacks,

doing the off schedule eating. A lot of, you know, it gets dark here doing the off-schedule eating. A lot of, it gets dark here, a lot of emotional eating. It got to be about May and I thought, I just don't really feel great in my body. I'm not really where I want to be when it comes to fitness wise. Since that time, in terms of a little bit, I started on my own and then eventually going pretty deep with

some of the different products and services that I've enjoyed from your world. I dropped 24 pounds in 24 weeks and have just really felt great about it. It's really been an incredible journey in the most recent bit. That's fantastic. And how has your performance in your strength training progressed over that period? It's probably the biggest surprise because the reason that I started losing weight as I was just really coming into the spring, fresh mindset. I lost the first five or seven pounds because I was never like tremendously, I could tell by looking at myself that I was not in great shape,

but I hadn't really totally fallen apart. The first five or seven pounds came off and I hit this plateau and I thought, I cannot seem to lose any more damn weight. I don't know what's happening here. When I started to say, you know what? You don't know how to eat. You've never learned about any of the things when it comes to nutrition, these things. I said, I'm going to have to find some help.

When I came to start to look more back into, I went right back to bigger, leaner, stronger. I started looking at all these things. And I thought, I'm going to really learn how to eat. This is going to be great. But there's a long way of answering your question, which is that the actual strength benefits and the changes to my workouts that I was able to make

as a result was probably the biggest surprise for me. Because I thought, I know how to lift. Come on, I got Arnold's encyclopedia from the 70s and 80s. Like, I don't know what I'm doing in the gym. Turns out I didn't know anything. So that's a big fun part of the journey as well. Yeah. No knock on Arnold's book, but I remember, I mean, I was in my 20s when I first went through that book and started trying the workout programs. And if I remember,

even the novice program was, I don't remember the volume, like a high volume, high intensity program. That was the novice program. And then the advanced program was essentially impossible. I don't think I ever got to it. I think I got, I attempted the intermediate and even in my twenties, you know, when you're physiologically invincible, I couldn't do it. At the time, I didn't exactly know why. Now I know why, but I... Well, and that was what I was experiencing too, because I went back to what I knew. You know, so when you think about, I went to high school in the 80s, and I like graduated like toward the end of the 80s, and so this was Arnold's heyday.

And so, pick up the book and all the other muscle heads were all lifting the gym, getting good results, but still didn't know what the hell we were doing. Right? And then I come back to it all this time later and I'm 53 now. Just because you know something from the past doesn't mean it's the best fit. I started to realize I'm not necessarily getting the gains that I want anymore. Going from a plateau of being a little bit marshmallow-y to reasonably fit, that part I could do on my own okay, but I never had confidence. That's when I said, you know what?

I got to go back to this book that I had on my shelf from, you know, at that point, it had been a long time ago, which was was bigger, leaner, stronger. So I love to talk about that. So it was it was it was I can remember the moment that I went down to my basement, I grabbed it because I'd had it for quite a while. I had to look it up, but I picked up my first copy in 2017. And I started looking and I thought,

this is exactly right. There's only one problem. It's completely overwhelming. To me, I was like, I don't have the time necessarily to absorb all of this great information. I got the big job, you know, my family's grown now, but I'm just like constantly busy. I said, I wonder if Mike's got something

that can help me even more than the book. And only this year was the first time I went and found everything from meal plans. And I was like, okay, this is, yep, I can see where this would help. And then I found the coaching and I thought, you know what, I'm gonna look into this. Yeah, I've tried to make the book

as easy to apply as possible. That was really my focus, especially with this most recent fourth edition where I rearranged it even and made it clear upfront that if you just wanna skip to what to do and you don't really care to even understand why you're doing it, although I'd recommend that you get around to learning the why

because you don't wanna be completely in the dark. You don't to feel like this is a black box and even if it's working. But if you just want to get going, then just read these chapters, download the bonus material, all the workouts are in there, meal plans are in there, you can get going. But if you want it to be even more convenient and just take all the guesswork out. That's why I mean that's why I launched the coaching service in the first place is I would personally get asked often if I took on clients and because I started Legion early on that was 2014 I think was year one my work quickly piled up on that side. And so I just couldn't justify even to myself taking the time and then how do I even price that? And so that's how it came about though.

And it really is, I think, an underutilized shortcut in just many areas of life is just seeking out people who you feel have proven their expertise and you feel have a system that is going to help you get to whatever you want to get to. And then can you pay money to just make it a lot easier, take a lot of work off of your plate and just make it faster? And you nailed it right there. There was so much misinformation out there. And I knew from back being exposed to your work in 2015, cookbook with 2017 when I purchased my first copy of Bigger Leaner Stronger, I was like, this makes total sense. I'm using the stacked app. I'm doing all this stuff.

And I'm like, this totally is a great fit. When it came back to this more recent time and I thought, okay, I need to get back and bone up on this again. I've forgotten everything and I don't feel like I ever really did learn how to eat properly. It wasn't anything to do with the information, it was just trying to assimilate it into my life. I thought, I've got a coach to help me with my keynote speeches.

I've got health coaches that are like a massage therapist to help me with some headaches I've been having. I thought, man, why am I not willing to pay? I'd never heard about the service. I thought when I looked at it, I said, you know what, this is a total no-brainer because I want my performance in all aspects of my life to be super high. It would just fast-forward me through

these parts and the biggest thing came back to confidence. Mike, I got a lot of dumb-ass questions. Knowing there was somebody on the other end of the line, I could say, can I ask you a question off the wall here? It was exactly what I needed. And it helped me not only just break through that first plateau, but it carried a lot of surprises with me. I could go on and on about it.

I mean, that's asking questions is another good point, especially if somebody is spending a fair amount of time consuming other material, whether it's watching YouTube videos or consuming content on social media, specifically health and fitness content. And the reason I say that is because you had mentioned there is so much misinformation and a lot of the most effective, I guess you could say, misinformation is marketed well. That's one of the reasons why it is so effective. And so it's naive to think, for someone to think, that because, let's say,

they're a smart person, they're well-educated, they even understand critical thinking, that they are not going to be susceptible to the misinformation. That's a little bit naive because, again, the best misinformation is very well marketed. A lot of it really does quote unquote make sense. A lot of it has a scientific air about it and you can find, if you go down those rabbit holes, you can find a lot of expert consensus even on this misinformation. And so it can be difficult to sort through if you're a layman, especially if you're time crunched and you don't really care

to spend large amounts of time researching this just because you like researching it. You just are trying to get to a goal and you want to get there as efficiently as possible. And if you just want to know as much as you need to know to get to your goal, to get into good shape, to stay in good shape. And maybe from there you can make some optimizations. But again, I'm just putting words in your mouth, that this is what I'm hearing. And I understand it because I've just seen it so many times, especially with people who are busy, that if they can skip having to sort through a lot of the misinformation, if they have someone they can go to and say, hey, so I heard this, just give me the quick answer.

Nope, that's not correct. Here's why, great, thank you. Next thing, what about this carnivore diet thing? Well, here's why I don't recommend it. Okay, great, thank you, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, 100%. And I think it's one of those situations where when you look at how much information is out there,

a lot of what gets peddled is like there's some new breakthrough. And yet our bodies haven't fundamentally changed. Something they aren't telling you or? Yeah, oh yeah, exactly. Here's the thing we've discovered. And I thought, you know what? I don't necessarily,

I know there's advancements in techniques and these things, but I wanted a coach who would almost protect me from a lot of like the good new stuff and new techniques versus the old stuff, kind of the bombastic stuff, right? More than anything. So the first thing, so what had happened was this. So I got to the point where I was like, okay, I definitely feel super at home with all of Mike's writing, thinking. I like the meal plans, but I think I'm going to make the investment to go ahead and to help myself break through and I want somebody in my corner the way I have in these other parts of my life.

And so I think it's really just going to be the good fit for me. So what had happened was this was so, um, when I first started working on again and I didn't, I wasn't in great shape, but I never really felt out of shape. So when I say I lost 24 pounds, it was, you know, this is a pretty big progress for me. I didn't have a lot of extra weight to lose. I had that amount of weight to lose. And I started to get to the point where I was like, okay, May is fine. June, it was just toward the end of June. I said, I'm making the commitment. I've gone ahead and I've signed

up. I get introduced to my coach and I asked her, I said, how are you going to get me putting on a little bit of lean mass, continue to thin out? I've hit this plateau. She said, well, you're going to eat real food, you're going to sleep. What are you talking about? You're going to train. You're going to do what I tell you. I said, this is fabulous. This is absolutely fabulous because I totally believed it. But what I didn't have, Mike, was the confidence that I could figure it out on my own. And it wasn't because your information wasn't good, it wasn't because I'm not disciplined. There was just this blockage of saying, I don't have the time,

the energy to experiment. I want fast results. Man, I really thought, when she had told me, she said, I'm going to put your workouts into this app. I thought, did you not hear me when I just said I had Arnold's Encyclopedia? I know how to work out. She's like, no, I'm going to start doing these workouts.

I thought, I have not worked out this hard in my life. Now all of a sudden, I've got set times of rest in between my sets, I've got workouts, exercises I've never done. I'm doing nothing ridiculous. I'm not in there for more than 45 minutes or so. But I was like, this is what it feels like to actually know what you're doing in the gym. Again, that bit of confidence came as a total surprise to me because I thought I knew that part.

I knew I'd learned from the nutrition side. I was just blown away how it all fit together. Let's talk about the nutrition. What approach worked for you? Because it sounds like you're busy. It sounds like there might be traveling also if you're doing keynote speeches. And so can you talk to us about how you took

what if you think about what I've put in my books which I've tried to give people a very flexible system that it's not one size fits all but at least it's one size fits many that you can massage. But then of course, with coaching, one of the benefits is we get to know you exactly, your circumstances, your preferences, and then play with things until it's exactly the way that you need it.

So can you talk to us about the nutrition and what did you have to work through and what did you find worked best for you? Yeah, my coach Heather, she started me off and she said, we're going to try some things. We're going to see how you respond. Knowing that we're going to dial things in. This had to do everything with my own eating preferences, where I still experienced any challenges

with trying to stick to certain parts of the program. I tend to be a very regimented person. For me, it's a little bit easier to stick to a plan once we've established it. One of the first things that she had to do was learn my dietary situation restrictions until I'm vegetarian. Then I have eggs and cheese and these things, and that really opens it up quite a bit,

but there are still some restrictions there. The first thing that she did was build me a meal plan and say, you're not going to necessarily love all these different options, but we need to try to see sort of what you like and what you don't. Before I had met her, I was consuming probably four or five scoops of protein powder a day, just almost using it like a meal replacement. She's like, you got to stop that. You can have a little bit, but we need to get you onto real protein. You need to have soy and dairy and all these things. So setting my targets, I use my fitness pal as my tracker.

She can see all of it. So it's able to carry over into the app so we can see where am I at with my tracking. I'm weighing in every day at this point and setting targets for these things. What I come to find is that I'm learning about my habits. I see when I thought peanut butter had good protein in it, it comes at a cost of- That's a joke that I've recycled on social media a number of times.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but peanut butter is not a good source of protein. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not a good source of protein. But when you're a high school wrestler in the 80s, you live off of it, those things kind of die hard. And then you're like, oh, I just put it between these two pieces of healthy bread.

Guess what? You know, when you start dialing in your macros, it's starting to figure out like, oh, wait a second, I got to change some of these things up. The other thing that really changed for me immediately was looking at snacks. Yes, have to have snacks. I'm so regimented that I try to have my snacks at 10 o'clock, well, 8 o'clock, 10 o'clock, same, 2 o'clock, just keeps it round and easy for me. But what changed Mike was that I start with protein in the snack.

She got me onto things like cottage cheese as an example with some berries, or having a little bit of nonfat yogurt with half a scoop of protein powder in it, just try to knock that up even just a little bit more if I feel like I need to close the gap on some protein. Things that I never thought, snacks are not for my entertainment.

They're really about trying to round out and break up the hunger, sure, but also with a thoughtful plan. The last thing I say on protein is being able to go in and actually pre-configure what I know I'm going to have for dinner or for an after-dinner snack to work back and say, oh, that's actually not going to fit. I need to change that a little bit or have half of this portion or something.

Really helped me to understand how to dial in, was otherwise mindless eating or overeating in certain places or just not being as strategic about it. The high protein snacking is a great tip for anyone struggling with snacking. There's nothing wrong with having snacks, but like Matt said, it's best if it's part of your plan. You know that around this time of the day, for me, I like to have a snack after we do

this, around three or 3.30, because I eat lunch around, I have a salad with some stuff and it's some chicken, whatever, around 12.30. And then I'm going to eat dinner around 6. So I like to have something in the middle. And I'll have a snack also after dinner. I like to do that, like a higher carbohydrate. I'm doing overnight oats these days. I find that having some carbs, it's really a mixed meal because it's some carbs with some almond milk and some protein powder mixed into it, like overnight oats style. And I find that that can help with sleep.

And my guess with that is because my diet is, it's probably about 250 to 300 grams of carbs per day, which sounds like a maybe higher carb diet to some people, but it's really not, especially if you're physically active. Like 200 grams would be considered a low carb diet to some people, but it's really not, especially if you're physically active. Like 200 grams would be considered a low carb diet actually, like in terms of sports nutrition. And so I find that having that mixed meal about an hour or so before bed, that it can improve my sleep quality.

And a reason for that is that definitely is a thing and I'm guessing based on blood work from what I've seen is that it just keeps my blood sugar levels a little bit higher while I'm sleeping because if your blood sugar gets too low, and I don't have problems with low blood sugar, but if it does start to get toward the low of what would be, it's still within the range of physiological normal, that can disrupt sleep. And so that's a snack that I have. But coming back to what you were saying is that if you're going to snack, if you can

include protein or make that protein the staple of the snack, it can just go a long way in supporting your body composition, helping you get enough protein, and preventing overeating, especially overeating of dietary fat, which is most readily converted into body fat and which is just not very filling as a primary macro in a meal. Right, yeah, and it just gave me so much more confidence to be able to know sort of what I was getting into, and it just learned a lot about foods

I had been consuming naturally when I started typing them in and saying like, oh my gosh, this is actually going to throw me off in some other way if I keep eating this way. That was pretty important. But you also bring up a great point about sleep. She was asking me, how are you sleeping as we're making these changes?

I thought, what an interesting question. But it's a good one, because if we're doing something that disrupts our sleep, then we're not getting that recuperation that we need, or we're not going to stick with something, or we're going to be more prone to be tired, and then you're reaching doing something that disrupts our sleep, then we're not getting that recuperation that we need, or we're not going to stick with something, or we're going to be more prone to be tired, and then you're reaching for something that you probably didn't want to,

and all these kinds of things. Factually, it increases hunger. Yeah, there you go. So it's like, so it led me to ask her one of these questions. So here's another reason why I was glad I had a coach. I have a question. I don't exactly know how to Google it. I said, does it matter the timing of which I eat,

hit my accounts, because I like to be able to unwind after I'm done on all the Zooms and I've had my dinner, and I wanted to just have something to look forward to to relax. Another great example, instead of reaching for ice cream and cookies and cakes, I found a yogurt bar, one of these yeso type yogurt bars. A hundred calories, but it's got a little bit of protein in that, but it feels like a sweet treat. It's great. All of a sudden, I'm like, wow,

okay, I don't miss the other thing. I've replaced it with something else. I might end up, the very last thing I might have before I head off is to have a man or an orange or two. You're like, okay, great. You got room for it. It tastes good, whatever. I asked her, I'm like, does it matter the timing? I heard you're not supposed to eat, you know,

before you go swimming, does it matter? I think when you eat before you go to bed. But it was just one more thing of being able to say, you know what, I've got somebody at my fingertips who get my question answered, whatever it is. And I just, I really benefited from that. Yeah. And for anybody listening who doesn't know, no, it doesn't matter.

If we're talking about body composition, it doesn't matter. Now, if you eat a large meal soon before bed, it's probably gonna disrupt your sleep, but we all know that, we've all experienced that. So otherwise, it's eat more or less on the meal timing schedule that works best for you. And again, if anybody listening is having any sort of sleep issues,

if you suspect that if you generally eat a lower carb diet, which is, again, let's say you're between 200 and 300 grams of carbs per day and you're fairly active, you may find that adding a smaller mixed meal about an hour or so before bed that's primarily carbs, ideally kind of slower digesting carbs, can help with sleep. Even rounding it out, I can think about one of the very first conversations we had when she said, run down your list of what you're taking now from supplementation,

nutrition, vitamins, all these things. I said, well, I am over 50, so I'm taking a centrum silver. She started laughing. I'm talking about more. We got on this topic of Omega-3 and she said, well, you're vegetarian, so let me send you a link to this vegan version of an Omega 3 that my clients seem to like. Wow, great. That's one less thing I have to worry about.

Well, we have it on a list actually, I would like to be able to produce that product. It's just on a list of market research just to make sure that the economics can even work. But if I remember, is it an algae base? Is that? I think that's right. Yeah. And so little things like that of being able to say like, I'm not exactly sure what

all I'm supposed to take in and then how to pull it together. One of the other things you mentioned, so traveling. So this is where you see these disruptions to life, like whether it's the holidays coming up, whether it's travel. So I ended up on this trip to Denver. And so I told her about it and I said, yeah, I'm going to Denver. I want to make sure I've already planned out. I'm not going to be able to go to my normal home gym, which I love. I'm going to have to go to the Purple Gym, but it's okay. I got a nationwide membership for this thing. I've already looked it up. I know where it is from the hotel.

I got a rental car. We started talking about, okay, what are you going to do about your nutrition? Now she's like, okay, I've done the search. Here's the local health food style stores that are going to be near your hotel, and we're talking about strategies, and here's some restaurants that probably have some decent stuff. So we're strategizing before I even get there. How much more confident am I that I'm going to stick to my plan when I looked ahead of time?

I even went on Google Street View to make sure I knew what these things look like to make sure that it's all good. I was like, my confidence that I could stick to my workouts, hit the nutrition which is what has fallen apart for me in the past was off the charts. Even while I'm there in Denver, we're going back and forth through the app and saying, okay, this part worked great,

I got to modify this. It feels again like having that coach in your corner, you know, for me, it made all the difference to not only break through that original plateau of a little bit of weight loss, but to develop the knowledge and the confidence to be able to handle some of the different sort of surprises that, you know, that happened.

And how did you end up handling your nutrition on that trip? Just because travel, and that's a common disruptor. Yeah. So I'm not from the West Coast, but there was a Sprouts, which was a store. So I went into Sprouts, which was almost like a little bit like a Whole Foods or something, a little bit more localized, and found that they went straight to their,

they had protein packets that were like not the full canister because I'm going to have to fly home. I was only there for a day or two. But I got exactly what I needed there, got a lot of the fresh fruit and the vegetables that I could put in my hotel fridge. We talked about that. When I did have to hit a restaurant, it was, we had already talked about which meals to do that based on

my schedule and it all fit together so nicely. Now, imagine I'm flying home, I haven't weighed myself in a couple of days because I didn't have a scale, and I'm actually looking forward to weighing myself. I actually imagine I'm flying home, I haven't weighed myself in a couple days because I didn't have a scale, and I'm actually looking forward to weighing myself. And I actually lost weight on that trip, where normally I would have been eating hotel room service and getting the extra slice because I've had a long day and all these kinds of things. All that was by the boards. I stayed on track.

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to stay in shape for the rest of our lives, then head over to Amazon now and pick up a copy of the little black book of workout motivation and enjoy. How have you handled alcohol? Is that do you drink and if so, how did you work that in? Yeah, so unfortunately for me, I had quit drinking back in 2020, so I've not had that to contend with. For me, the biggest challenge was, again, the sweets. Okay, that was my next question, and is how did you work in treats without letting it get out of hand?

Well, and on the alcohol thing, while I don't drink anymore. What I do like is that I've seen on your site and a lot of different places where if you are going to drink and you still count that intake and you know what's in it, you can accommodate for that. You can't just drink everything or you can't just eat everything, but you have to account for these things. But I think a lot of people are worried that it's going to be so restrictive. And the reality is that you have to put yourself into a deficit, which I learned how to do, but not such a deficit that it's going to lead to the binging, the rebound of whatever you want to call it.

And so I learned better how much was enough and how to stick with that and sustain that. And if I did have a situation where I was going out for a work meeting or something, that I knew how to be smart about that and maybe pull back a little bit earlier in the day, make a better, healthier choice, have the salad instead of the pizza, whatever it might be. Or if I feel like having pizza, fine, have a pizza, pizza, who cares? But don't blow your whole week just because you had one night out. Absolutely. And with the sweets, so you mentioned the Yasso bars. That's an easy solution for something tasty,

a little bit better macros, low sugar, lower calorie. Were there any other accommodations for maybe treat meals or cheat meals or any other types of sweets or things that you felt like you just needed to keep in your plan? Not 100%, although almost the opposite. Where she had asked me, like, you've been on a deficit here for a little bit. Have you had any sort of plans around treating yourself to something?

I said, no, I hadn't. I've just been sticking with it. She said, well, at some point, you've made so much progress, you really need to think about how are you going to bring it back, still count it, you've got to have it within your numbers and everything, but you don't want to be in a situation where you restrict yourself too much, and then all of a sudden you go through several days of a bender, so to speak. So I remember sending her a text saying,

I had a piece of cake, I'm so excited. I happened to be in New York and I wanted to have a slice of cheesecake since I was there. She's like, it's great. She's helping me celebrate the fact that I had accounted for it and everything and I planned for it. I look forward to it. I enjoyed it. Those are all fine things to do. Having been in deficit for so long, going back to maintenance and then later on,

we'll talk about even bulking and all these things. But for now, I'm still just really enjoying being in my body and knowing how it feels when I feel tighter and feeling like I'm confident because I know what I'm going to do and I execute my plan and I look forward to getting on the scale the next day. Those things weren't happening before I had met her. I probably could have got there on my own. I certainly had your information,

but as quickly and with all the deviations, no. It's funny that you mentioned that regarding not even feeling the need to celebrate until after some point a period of time, you're like, okay, I want some cheesecake. So I'm going to have the cheesecake and that'll be my celebration. That is just a common experience for people listening who are maybe new to this or haven't even gotten started yet and are concerned that it sounds so constrained and it sounds like many people they think that they, yeah, okay, good for you, Matt, you were able to do it, but they wouldn't be able to stick to a plan, even though they know they don't

have to be perfect, but stick to a plan with the sufficient amount of discipline to get results. Again, I'm just going to say if people listening, I've seen this so many times over the years where people have gone from really even maybe the complete opposite of what you're talking about, of proper nutrition, like in every way, alcohol, terrible food all the time, to exactly what you are talking about,

and they never thought they could be that person. coming back to this point of confidence and understanding those seem to be just the key factors like they for the first time they felt like they actually understood how nutrition works they understood the first principles the the 20% that gives you 80% it made sense to them they understood how to put it into into practice they put it into practice. They put it into practice. They started seeing results. And from there, they just naturally lost their desire to eat and drink like they were previously and not out of a place of compulsion or self-loathing or anything negative, really just positive where they're just going in this direction now and they like this direction more. 100%. And that was what had happened for me when I quit drinking. I realized that my morning routine,

where I get to sit and read and do some meditation, it's just a really beautiful way for me to start my day. I enjoyed that so much more than feeling groggy because maybe I'd had a few the night before. And so I just cut it all out and have not missed it. Mike, it was like flipping a damn switch and no interest in going back. I will say with the food, it's been a little bit different when I do feel like I'm stressed or the days get a little shorter here with time changes and all this stuff. Then there's that nagging,

come on, just have the extra slice of cake or thing. That's been with me a little bit longer. But feeling like I'm on a plan, I'm on a program helps. I'll tell you that something else happened during my coaching that I hadn't expected. I developed a kidney stone, ended up having to have surgery.

Here I am talking to my coach saying, oh, hey, guess what? This has happened. I can still go to the gym. I'm not in a ton of discomfort, but I got to modify. Again, how would I have navigated that on my own? Absolutely no idea. The way it happens is when you're going through your workouts, you have these sort of down periods. What do you call them? When you take a week where

it's a little bit less intense than the seven weeks or so. Yeah, like a deload. Yeah. Yeah, deload. Perfect. Exactly right. So I said, you know, I got a deload coming up and I'm about to have surgery. What do you think about using my recovery week as a deload? And so again, just navigating this and she's helping me take the pressure off of myself to say, you know what, lives to lift another day, let's get you healthy. What could you do? What dietary restrictions do you have?

Are you going to be able to maintain your health? You got to have plenty of protein as you're in recovery, helping me navigate all this stuff. Even things that I knew I was going to get out of it to the benefit, it was important. But then navigating surprises or things like known trips that are going to just be unusual. It was really for me, I'm so glad that I made that investment to be able to say,

you know what, I've got somebody who can help me figure out and navigate the context. Because again, there's great information. But if you have to apply the context on the fly like that, that's a lot to ask without somebody who's an expert who's kind of been there, done that, who knows you now and understands your strengths and your blind spots and can help you navigate. And you've mentioned that you only

have so much energy and cognitive bandwidth that you're willing to apply to or that you really even feel like you have left after you've done all the things that you really have to do. And so that's also where it can be, I think, very helpful to have somebody else. So then, because at least I can speak personally, and this is probably some universal human experience, that as our energy levels and our cognitive bandwidth

decline, we are less inclined to be that solution oriented type of person who initially acknowledges that no matter what the circumstances are, there is an optimal solution here that we can find out. Now, maybe we're gonna have to make some changes, we're gonna have to accept some sort of compromise because of some thing. We can't do exactly what we thought we wanted to do. No problem.

But there is some way to move forward. But again, it can be hard to maintain that mindset when stress levels are high, energy levels are low, maybe sleep is not great, cognitive overhead is high. Again, speaking personally, I've been there. I know how that is. Well, and sometimes it can happen over extremely long periods of time. I have this newfound notion that really has occurred to me recently, and it's all about our beliefs.

And I have this saying now, that beliefs break down barriers. And for me, the barrier that I was experiencing was my health. I can remember going back several years, I was talking to a friend of mine and we were getting older, we were in our probably mid-40s, and I talked about going to the gym. He said to me, he goes, what are you going to keep going to the gym? You're a high school bro, what's happening?

Something in my mind was like, yeah, you know what, you're right. I thought, what a mistake that was to buy into this thing. I actually love going to the gym. When I was actually in my winter this time, and I had put on some extra weight, I was having some headaches and I had tried everything. I tried everything from getting the scans and doing the stuff, and even tried acupuncture, it wasn't working.

I finally went to a massage therapist, and she totally got me straightened out. So I'm doing like so much better. But she happens to be a competitive female bodybuilder. So she would inevitably talk about something at the gym and I thought, you know, I can miss the gym. She said, yeah, why don't you go back to the gym? I tried to sheepishly say, well, I had this conversation with a guy a couple of years ago,

he talked me out of it. She goes, are you insane? She's like, there's 60, 65 year old guys that are just crushing it because they've made fitness their priority. And I said, you know what? I'm going to try. Well, I got to tell you, Mike, so I've been going back every month. I go once a month to keep these headaches away of mine. I went in recently.

She said, how old are you again? I said, 53. She goes, you've got the body of a 38-year-old. Your pliancy, your physiology, she goes, I see a lot of bodies. And what you're doing with your coach there is working. So I was like, I'm so glad that I bought into a new belief system, which is that we will age and that's going to happen. But how we choose to feel in our bodies, the vitality we have, the experience we have going to the gym.

I love going to the gym now to be able to just, I can't put up weight like I used to, but I don't need to because I'm in the body I have now, and I want to be happy with it and for it to feel the way that it feels. It was just amazing to me that just because I had let my guard down a little bit, a belief snuck its way in that wasn't serving me, and I got to replace it with something that fundamentally changed my behaviors and helped me break down those barriers that were preventing me from

showing up the way I wanted to in life. It's a powerful example of how one bad idea accepted had so many negative knock-on effects. And that happens to all of us in various ways. And it's something that I've commented on a number of times just in social media posts, just kind of thoughts I've had about these things and things that I try to stay aware of myself. Like, for example, I think it's smart to not make any big,

certainly irreversible decisions when we're not in a good head space, if we're angry, if we're sad, if we're under rested, if we're super stressed, get a good night's sleep, eat a good meal, have a good workout and then return and then see, you know, what kind of decision you might make under those circumstances. And also this point of ideas that is something that I've tried to keep in mind for a long time now actually and just be conscientious about

the ideas especially if we're talking about deeper like kind of almost principles or that coalesce into a philosophy of life, so to speak, and make sure that these ideas have been audited and haven't just been accepted in a moment of weakness or maybe even unexamined because some authority said it. And so anyway, I think that's a great example of just a moment where if you would have rejected that, and it doesn't matter now because you figured it out. Yeah, it's one of those things where I've talked to people before that said, well, I see the female bodybuilders and I don't want to look like that, so I'm not going to the gym.

I'm like, oh, don't worry, you can go to the gym. You're not going to look like that. But it gets in there to think like, oh, but what happens I think a lot of times is I've studied beliefs. And in fact, this entire new speaking program working on is all about beliefs because it really comes down to the fact that we have this confirmation bias, right? We start to tell ourselves the things because it's easier to preserve our beliefs about ourselves, for example, than it is to change them. And the other is self-preservation because all of a sudden, if I had to take responsibility for the shape of my body or the fact that I don't know how to eat the way I was a couple

months ago, then it forces you to have to kind of look in the mirror and say, like, you need help. You need to work on this. And it's one of those things where when the belief shifts, then the behaviors fall in line supernaturally. But a lot of times we focus on the behavior. Well, my workout didn't go so well, or I was doing them for a couple of weeks and then I fell off.

What's the core belief below that, that works more important than your physical fitness? There have been times even recently where I've been so busy at work that I might have skipped a workout. What belief is being fed when it comes to prioritizing anything above my health. Then you have to fall back and say, how did that get in there?

What are we going to do about this? What are we going to change this up and get ourselves to the better place and be more conscientious, as you mentioned, about those choices. Everything comes down to those beliefs. Sometimes we have to revisit them. Don't let other people write their beliefs on our wall. That's exactly what happened to me with my well-intentioned friend. You know, he was basically making a comment about himself of saying,

like, I don't like going to the gym, so I'm not going to do that. Well, that's fine for you, but I love going to the gym. So don't do that to me. Right. Absolutely. Let's talk about your training now and how how did you set that up? And you can go where you want with that. But for example, how many days per week? And what modifications did you have to make through the program? How did you make that work when you were traveling and so forth?

Yeah. The first thing we did is we talked about goals. Like what are your goals? And I talked about wanting to develop lean muscle and be able to continue to lose a little bit of weight, but put on a little bit of mass. So we talked about that wear on your body. I said, well, I'm pretty wide in terms of through my shoulders, but I could add some more definition mass there.

I said upper chest has always been a problem for me. I don't know what it is about my workouts or my body type. I've never had that upper shelf kind of situation. So she just takes it all in. She's like, okay, great. I'm going to program a workout for you. She goes, we're doing five days a week because I asked for it. A lot of times, four days a week is perfectly fine.

You can do three days a week if that's what you got. But for me, I said, you know what? I like the regularity of Monday through Friday. Going every day, it's a great way for me to start my day. It fits into the stage of life that I'm in because my kids are grown now, and I'd like to have a five-day split, and totally fine. So then when we started looking at the different types of workouts, I said the other thing was I want to make sure that I do the upper shoulders here just below my neck.

I used to have more definition there than I had before. Okay, let's put that in there. All of a sudden, started doing these different types of workouts. Now, when I went to the gym, I had to tell her, I said, they have a free bar for flat barbell press, but they don't have a bench that allowed me to do this for for incline press. Okay, no problem. We'll switch over to dumbbells. So having conversations about equipment and the layout of the gym and all these kinds of things just to help navigate like how do we put together a workout that's aligned with your goals? We have

tons and tons of options. Like even if you only have body weight, there's so many things you can do, right? And my gym is not a big gym. It doesn't have all this specialized equipment. I don't need it. And the reality is that it worked out really well to be able to use that five day split to start. And did you do any cardio or was it just strength training?

Yeah, cardio, I do have a Peloton bike, which I like. I like to run on the road. I like to be outside. So, cardio, I do have a Peloton bike, which I like. I like to run on the road. I like to be outside. So, you know, she mentioned to me that the, I had made the mistake of thinking, well, I need to do the cardio to burn calories in order to lose weight. And she's like, no, you do cardio because of your heart.

It's got the word cardio in it. I thought, oh yeah, that's right. It's like I'm gonna sound like the dumbest person on the planet. She's like, no, no, but you know, you need to be able to have the cardio to make sure that you have, you know, strong heart. So heart. So she said, I don't really care what you do, but you're going to do it three days a week at least of 20 minutes, whether it be on a treadmill or outside on the

road or on the bike, it's all fine. It all goes right into the app and she can see it. And there was a time back in 2017, I had to look it up. When I picked up your book, the reason was because I had just finished a bunch of triathlon work. I was successfully completed Ironman, which I was incredibly proud of. I knew I never f-ing wanted to do it again. It was a one and done goal for me.

I said, well, now that I've finished this big goal. You're not addicted to pain then, that's what you learned. No, the pain was okay, but I'm like, what am I going to do? Go further than that? No, thank you. But that's where I had picked up your book because I was like, okay, now I want to get my physique looking a way that I want it to.

I'm done with these road miles and swimming and all these things. So for me, it was really great to be able to sit down and say, well, these are my goals. I want to be able to understand that cardio has a place, and I'm very comfortable on all that equipment now because of what I had been through, but I didn't want to go and pretend like I had to pound the pavement for what I had done. It was very welcome for me to hear that. Between the nutrition, a little bit of light cardio,

five days a week doing workouts. The other thing that I had never done, I don't know how I escaped this, was doing any sort of real supersets and just trying to make efficient use of working certain muscle groups. So for the first time, what shows up in my app are doing like two different things back to back and doing a quick little superset for this. I thought, oh, this is very interesting. So having a chance to do warmups, again, something else I never did.

But as soon as she put it in the app, then I was like, well, I'm doing this because I want to do the things that are being set out for me. So very simple things. There's nothing elaborate, I would say, about the workouts, but they were very specific in the sense that I could see my weights, you're tracking my reps and my weight going up and up, having predetermined rest in between,

and depending on the size of the muscle group, sometimes it could be as much as a minute and a half, sometimes it's only a minute, and just really feeling like, hey, you know what? I almost feel like an athlete when I'm doing this program. She set up for me. It really motivated me to say, I've got a plan you know walking in I'm looking at my phone between sets making sure I'm on the timer and

all these things and it just felt like incredibly rewarding to say like I kind of know what I'm doing here. I can remember going through this whole experience myself and so I totally understand and even now I still I track all of my workouts, I plan them, that's just, I prefer that much more than just going in with saying, okay, this is gonna be an upper body day, or this is gonna be a push workout or a pull workout, and I'm gonna kind of figure it out as I go.

The experience is more positive enough, the planning that I still plan my workouts. It's just the way I like to do it. Yeah, and it was a really great collaboration for us to talk about how is it going? How is this working? How is this exercise working? Are there any modifications in these sorts of things? But I'll actually even peek at the workout the night before just to have it in my mind before I go to bed and I'll actually look forward to it. I thought, man, this is really very, very different from where I had been only six months ago. The weight came off,

the mask started to show up. I think that I'm not going to be on the stage anytime soon, and that wasn't my goal. But I think knowing that those first level of establish a foundation of fitness, and the most important thing was education. You know, and she said, I'm here to teach you. You know, you're not necessarily here to be with me forever, but this is to help you get that jump start,

to learn about what works for you and what doesn't, to help you set, you know, goals, and to modify those goals over time as you make progress. And that's exactly what we've done. That point of looking forward to workouts modify those goals over time as you make progress. And that's exactly what we've done. That point of looking forward to workouts is something else that I think is worth pointing up briefly, just because that is the way that it should be.

When you have your program set up well, and that means well for you, and that looks different for different people, then are you going to enjoy every workout? No, but you're always going to enjoy having worked out and you should enjoy most of your workouts. You should actually look forward to most of your workouts. You should enjoy doing most of your workouts.

And if you're not, and you know this, but I'm just saying this for people listening, if you're not there, it's not because there's anything wrong with you. It's just because you don't have your program set up yet, in the best way with you. It's just because you don't have your program set up yet that in the best way for you. And, you know, that so that's, that's also how it should be with nutrition as well. You should be looking forward to as a rule, there can

be exceptions. And occasionally, it's not the case, but generally, you should be looking forward to and enjoying every meal that you eat. And it's important to take the time to figure out how that actually looks for you, both on the nutrition and training side. It's important and having a good coach makes it a lot faster and easier, but it's important to get there because that's what is going to make it a lifestyle. If it doesn't get there, if you only look forward to and enjoy maybe 20% of your meals and 20% of your workouts, no matter how much discipline you have, eventually compliance

is going to suffer and then that can just become a negative feedback loop that leads to quitting. So, the goal, of course, is not just to get into shape, good shape, it's to stay in good shape for the rest of our lives. And that requires a lifestyle and it needs to be enjoyable. It has to be. You could think of it like a relationship. Like you have to genuinely enjoy most of your time together or it's just not gonna work.

Right. And it has to evolve. And I think the other thing that happened, we had our first eight weeks together and we were doing a very specific workout and she checked in with me to say, is it time to switch up? Normally, I switch up my clients at eight weeks. We don't change things dramatically.

We're not saying we're going to switch everything. But a lot of times people can tend to get bored with the same workout over too long. I said, you know what? I'm actually not bored with this one yet. We've just navigated my kidney stone issue. Let's go another two weeks with this one yet. We've just navigated my kidney stone issue. Let's go another two weeks with this existing plan because I like the confidence of I know these exercises and I'm not mentally drained by, oh, geez, I got to go do the same thing again because of what I had gone

through." So she said, okay, great. And then we switch up to a new one after those two weeks. So we went a little extra with it. And then all of a sudden, I enjoyed the learning process for the new ones and feeling soreness in new places and having the challenge. So it's almost like rekindling the relationship with the exercise routine. That was very reassuring to me just to be able to say, if I had been bored and saying, I'm kind of tired of this one, again, having somebody to help say, let's juggle this up a little bit and still stay in line with your goals. Or perhaps you've hit a new sort of level and now you want to go to that next level.

Well, now you got to work different muscles or work them differently or whatever it might be. Can you talk to us about supplementation and how has that, like what role has that played? Yeah, what happened was I started to have a change in that I take the protein powder before I work out because it's really early in the morning. I don't want to mess around with meals too much. And so that's the first time that I'll have some protein before I, about 30 minutes before I head to the gym.

And she had sent me articles from your site that were helping me understand the timing of protein, the timing of carbohydrates, for example. And so I'll have a protein shake and a banana, in my case, about 30 minutes before I go to the gym. When I come back, now I'm eating real food. Now all of a sudden I'm having some eggs with feta, whatever it might be, these types of things, trying to make sure that I don't believe it's

quite as important on the timing on the other side of it, based on what I remember reading from your work, but it does matter. Yeah. If you had some protein before, if it's quite as important on the timing on the other side of it, based on what I remember reading from your work, but it does matter. Yeah, if you had some protein before, yeah, it would matter more if you did not and then you were training fasted and then you'd wanna eat some protein

probably within 30 or 60 minutes. That's what it is. Or if you work out later in the day and you've probably got protein in your system already, I remember reading that too. So demystifying that helped me navigate that. That was important. And then I do take my supplementation,

whether it be a little bit of creatine, whether it be magnesium, lysinate, whatever it is, I take that before I work out. So I just get all that right out of the way. I hit the workout. I never feel like I have a full belly. I don't feel sluggish at all. I do take an intra, like BCAAs,

for while I'm sipping on it it while I'm in my workouts, and then I'll finish it up after the workout just to kind of put that behind me. And then I really just eat regular food the whole rest of the day. I mentioned I might have a little bit of extra protein powder with some yogurt if I feel like I need to close the gap on some protein target, but I don't always do that

because I don't always have to. And I've been really comfortable with that, trying to, fortunately my system hasn't reacted negatively to any of. And I've been really comfortable with that, you know, trying to fortunately, my system hasn't reacted negatively to any of the things I've put in it. And just knowing that I'm getting the right things in there has really helped. You mentioned a Mega 3 supplement. Is that something that you still? Yeah, I do. I still take it in the morning at the same time that I'm taking my Centrum Silver. So It's one of those things where you try to stay on top of all that. I read the labels as best I can. Between that and hitting the specific whey proteins,

I'm very particular about the whey proteins I like. I like them to mix well. I don't like to put them with oat milk or any other dairy. I want them straight with water. I don't want them to be chunky. It's like the whey plus has really helped me sort of figure out exactly which flavors I like and the consistency I like.

Cause the last thing you want to do is have to choke something down before you, you know, go to try to have a hard workout. Not interested. Yeah, yeah. The whey plus that we get a lot of, a lot of positive feedback on that product, but also specifically from people who like to mix it.

I'm one of those people with water. I just don't care. I guess, almond milk, whatever, it's only 30 to 40 calories per cup, but I just don't care to really, I try to drink as few calories as possible. Generally, I like to eat my calories. And so I'm one of those guys.

I want it in water, and if it doesn't mix well and it doesn't taste well in water, it's not for me. And so personally, I've been invested in that process of making sure that this is good and not just good for naturally sweetened and flavored because a lot of naturally sweetened and flavored powders don't taste good at all. So we've really worked hard to make ours taste good by the normal standards, which are set by the artificially sweetened and flavored products, which can you just have a big flavoring advantage with the artificial ingredients.

And there's been this massive sort of focus on really candying up these proteins. And I didn't need that either. I like, I don't need the gummy bears. Yeah, true. Yeah. You don't need literal candy chunks in your protein powder. Oh, the brands, the brands with the candies on some of them. And I'm like, that's not what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in something that, you know, tastes reasonably good and has the right, you know, clean mix for me. So, and like you, if I am gonna drink my calories, I like to have oat milk in my coffee. So I'd rather have it. that tastes reasonably good and has the right clean mix for me. And like you, if I am going to drink my calories, I like to have oat milk in my coffee. So I'd rather have it. But it's just the convenience of it. I really like the whey protein is probably my one thing that I'm the most picky about

with everything else. But supplementation was something that I felt like, in this case, my coach added to it by having me introduce new things like the magnesium glycinate and the omega-3. I had been taking a multivitamin just because commercials, I probably should. And whey protein is something that I had some experience with. So I've been very comfortable with that. And one of the things that I think is really important is that as I've accomplished the goal of hitting those targets, communicating with the coach, hitting the mass targets, I found that my clothes didn't fit so well anymore. Like none of my belt.

Now you have an excuse to buy a new wardrobe. So I did. I went and I ordered one of these online tailor things and I got the clothes shipped to my house and I was putting them on on and my bride, she was looking at the cut of these things. My kid walked in and my oldest daughter and she looks, she goes, you need to give your coach a raise. You look great. I started to laugh. I said, I'll be sure to tell her you said that. But it was really gratifying to say,

I don't have to worry anymore about the winter pounds and am I going to be a little tight in my pants anymore? Those days are long gone and I don't want to go back. I've learned how to eat, which I think is going to be huge. Even as I continue to age and I have to modify my workouts, I'll look to preserve a certain amount of mass. But to me, knowing how to eat and to feel great when I wake up,

that's been the biggest surprise for me, is just how differently I feel having learned how to eat and to feel great when I wake up, that's been the biggest surprise for me, is just how differently I feel having learned how to eat the right way. Yeah, it's a total game changer. But we're coming up on time. Is there anything else that I haven't asked that I should have, or anything else that you'd like to say before we wrap up here? Well, I think the one thing that I'm so excited about was,

I have had so much exposure to you over the years. I look back and I got your cookbook in 2015. You think about was I have had so much exposure to you over the years. I look back and I got your cookbook in 2015. You think about it, it's almost 10 years ago. I might have been the first edition then. You've been there the whole time. But I think that what I really, the point I was making is that there's so many different on ramps and you pick the one that's right for you.

So whether it's I'm looking for meals, I'm looking for the app that you provide that helps me track my workouts, whether it's the book, which is just so full of great information, or the meal plans or the coaching. It's like everybody's different, and everybody's at a different place. And so I really just give you a ton of credit for having all the different on-ramps to this type of vitality and the level of fitness that we have. And for me, even for me as one person, what really was working for me before changed as I changed, but knowing that you had something for me, I just really benefited from it.

And I just really thank you for it. Well, I'm flattered. And that was that was the plan. So I'm glad the plan has worked fairly well. We've reached a lot of people and continue to reach people and continue to write articles and record podcasts and release books and that exactly was the thinking is trying to meet different people where they're at and see if I can... It was actually even one of the reasons why I started Legion. So the question was can I make the type of products that I actually

would want to take and if I can't because the economics don't work or whatever then I just won't do it. Okay, so yeah, I can do that. And then can I use supplements to bring people in who are looking for supplements who actually don't understand that supplements, like we say, are on the home page of the website, you don't actually need any supplements to build muscle, lose fat, get healthy. Now the right ones can help, but you don't need them. So I understand people though

They hear a lot of things about supplements and a lot of people think that supplements are more important that they are than they are And so okay fine They're going and looking for a protein powder because they think that a whey protein powder is gonna make a big difference in terms of muscle growth No, it's not unless you're drastically under eating protein and the whey protein powder is going to help you eat enough protein. But can I bring that person in and say, okay, I have a whey protein powder and it's a high quality whey protein powder, and here's why you should buy my whey protein powder over another.

But more importantly, can I use that to then bring them over here and show them now, let's talk about nutrition though and let's help you understand what you really need to know and what you really need to do. It's not the whey protein powder. It's everything that we've been talking about in this episode. And so that has worked fairly well too. We're bringing people in that are looking maybe even for a quick fix or a miracle pill and helping them understand that doesn't exist. And let's reframe what this product actually is. It's just supplementary by definition.

And then what you're really looking for, the real magic pill is learning the basics of nutrition and meal planning and training and so forth. Yeah. And when everything's under that umbrella of high quality, well researched, you know, I already had the trust. I just, I actually just went on your site saying, I wonder if there's something more that I'm not seeing that I'm just not familiar with. And once I saw there was, it was like, no brainer, done. Love it.

Well, this was a great interview. Matt again, thank you for taking the time. Keep up the good work. And again, thank you. Thank you, Mike. Really appreciate it. Keep up the good work and again, thank you. Thank you, Mike, really appreciate it. Before we close out today's episode, I need to tell you about the protein powder

that I use every day. It is called Whey Plus and it's from my sports nutrition company, Legion. Now, Whey Plus is a naturally sweetened and flavored 100% whey isolate protein powder made with antibiotic and hormone free, truly grass fed milk from Ireland that is gentle on your stomach, it is easy to digest and it doesn't cause bloating or discomfort. Whey Plus contains 22 grams of protein per serving with 12 grams of essential amino acids

and 5.5 grams of BCAAs and it contains no artificial sweeteners, flavors, food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk, and no lactose and no added sugars. And I know the Irish dairy bit sounds like marketing puffery, but did you know that research shows that Ireland produces some of the healthiest and cleanest milk in the world?

For example, Irish dairy cows graze for an average of 240 days per year, eating a diet that is 90% grass. And that pasture-based system not only sounds great, it results in great milk, in healthier milk with more protein, with more beneficial unsaturated fatty acids and omega-3s, and more vitamins like E, beta-carotene and biotin. And as you can imagine, higher quality healthier milk means higher quality healthier whey that is made from that milk. And all of that is why Legion has sold

over 1 million bags of Whey Plus and why it has received over 9,000 five-star reviews from verified buyers over on Amazon and Legion's website. And right now you can save 20% on your first order of Whey Plus and anything else you might wanna buy in Legion's store by going to buylegion.com slash Wey that is B-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com slash W-H-E-Y and using the coupon code MUSCLE at checkout. And if heaven forbid you don't like Wey Plus or you don't like anything else

that you buy from us, simply let us know and we will just give you your money back. You don't even have to send the products back to us. So again, go to buylegion.com slash whey, try whey plus, risk free and see for yourself why it is one of the most popular, truly grass-fed whey protein powders in the world. And don't forget to use that coupon code muscle to save 20% on your first order. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit,

which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, Mike at muscle for life.com muscle F O R life.com and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback.

So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.