The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Sal Di Stefano | Is Strength Training Best For Fat Loss?

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

For years, there has been a stigma around runners including strength training into their workouts. For fear of injury or becoming “too big,” many people actively avoid diversifying their training in this way.   Sal Di Stefano has a different approach.  He believes that all forms of exercise are beneficial when applied properly, and that whether you are a strength or endurance athlete, you should incorporate elements of both into your training.   In this episode, the Mind Pump Media host joins Nick Bare to discuss the importance of these two forms of exercise in maintaining a healthy and fit lifestyle.  Sal dives into how strength training actually raises you metabolism and can lead to more fat loss than cardio alone.  He also covers how consistency and discipline are key in optimizing your life, and how you can make changes that will have lasting effects on you health, versus temporary, short-term improvements.   More Resources: BPN website: www.bpnsupps.com Nick’s website: www.nickbare.com Nick’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness Nick’s Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition   Follow Us On Social Media! Instagram: @thebareperformancepodcast Facebook: The Bare Performance Podcast Twitter: @BarePerformPod

In this episode of the Bear Performance Podcast, the man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination. So what's happened along that process? You've learned to love the journey, right? You love the journey. Man, when you love the journey, the goals just happen. You hit milestones as a side effect, right? Because it doesn't matter. At that point, I don't care if I can lift this much weight or run this fast. I mean, that's cool. And it's great and I love it, but I don't love it as much as I love the journey. I love the journey. What does the journey consist of? Sucking at something, failing, getting better, learning, start a new journey, start it over,

do it again. Oh, the journey now involves now. I'm aging. My joints hurt. How do I figure that out? Oh, the process. Here we go. And so when you fall in love with the journey, everything else takes care of itself.

Welcome back to another powerful episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Nick Baer, founder and sales. CEO of Bear Performance Nutrition. Every week, we bring you insightful stories, knowledge, and inspiration to help you reach your full potential in life, fitness, and business. If you enjoy the message we're promoting in this podcast, we would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review on the platform you're listening to. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes that embody the Go One More

Mindset. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we have Sal DeStefano. from Mind Pump Media, the author of The Resistance Training Revolution. Welcome, brother. Hey, thanks for having me on, man. Great studio, by the way. I love the way it looks here.

Oh, thank you. I've been watching your guys show forever. Oh, I appreciate that. It's epic with the black background. It's funny, actually. I, you know, you had all the acoustic panels. And it was probably two years ago. Our team was much smaller then.

And now we have 25 plus employees. A few years ago, we had, like, three. And we were building on our first podcast studio. And I was with Trey, who's now our VP of marketing, at the time was our social media manager. I was like, we need to build something like this. So I went on Amazon and I bought all these acoustic panels. And I didn't want to take the time to actually hire someone or apply them.

So I'm just taking a drill and I'm drilling screws into these. Oh, that's great. So we didn't buy enough either. So we had this random acoustic panels all over the spot, tore them down and we eventually, you know, built this spot right here. Yeah, I know this looks a lot better. It's visually very appealing. It is, yeah.

So I know you've been in the space for a long time. Yeah. You know, I really started getting involved in the fitness space in 2012. And even those last decade, I've seen massive changes in an evolution. And I'm sure you've even seen more over the years before that. I'd love to kind of talk about to create some context about what we're going to talk about in terms of strength training, the importance of strength training, intuitive eating. When you first got into personal training, what the space looked like and the problems you identified that made you want to stay in that space.

Yeah, no, that's great. So I started, well, I started training myself as a kid. I was 14 years old. I was just instantly became obsessed with training my body. It was something I could do myself to get myself to improve and change. And it really, it just worked well with my personality. Immediately fell in love with it. As soon as I turned 18, I walked into the local 24-R fitness.

It had just turned into a 24-R fitness. It used to be 24-R-Nautilus. This is 1997. So Nautilus had just merged with Ray Wilson's family fitness to become the largest, you know, Jim Chain in the world. This is at the time when Mark Mastroff was still behind the, you know, steering the whole ship. But yeah, I walked in, 18-year-old kid, a lot of energy, super enthusiastic, you know,

met the manager. They hired me on the spot. And in those days, it was very different. The gym I first worked in had a, I remember had a women's only area, which was very, and even then as an 18 year old kid, I thought it was very strange because, you know, I'd go into the women's only area, just kind of see what's the difference. Like, why is there a women's only area? And had the same equipment that you saw in the general area. The only area, the only difference was the only difference was pink. You know, and the dumbbells were pink, which I thought was hilarious. It's funny. I walk in this small gym still and they still have the women's only area. Yeah. I thought it was so funny. I almost thought it was condescending, but I said, okay, whatever. know if they feel more comfortable working out in a place. But it was the same equipment.

So I thought, oh, there's no difference here. It's just they changed the color of the padding or whatever. But yeah, it was a blast. I loved it. Personal training really was starting to find itself as a segment of the fitness industry at that time. I mean, coaching, it always existed. But it wasn't like a big revenue producer.

Just to give you some context, right? The first club that I worked in as a trainer, I still remember the club 504, right? This is 24 Fitness on Hillsdale, still there, up in San Jose. The total revenue goal for personal training, this was a AAA, what they would call AAA club now, so it was one of the bigger, you know, flagship clubs. Total revenue for the month goal was $17,000 for personal training. So just to give you an example of how much that changed.

By the time I was grand opening clubs for them in 2009 and 2000, you know, a club like that would do well over $120,000. Give you an example of how big and how fast it grew. I was a part of some of that growth. I remember my first few months there, I was selling $7, $10,000 by myself and was kind of showing that this is something I think we should pay attention to.

And it was a lot of fun. What changed, trainers got a lot better over time. You still see this today, but you definitely saw it back in those days. were trainers really were we knew exercises we knew form and technique but really we were glorified you know drill sergeants let's you know get you sore get you sweating that's what you hired me for um i know exercises and that's pretty much it and that's how i train people for the first few years um after a few years now i i had a deep passion for helping people i really sincerely wanted

to help people um kind of develop this lifelong consistent relationship with exercise and health. I wanted people to be able to do this for the rest of their life. And after a few years, it was very clear that it just wasn't happening. I mean, people would hire me and we'd get them to their goals, but then they would stop. They'd stop working with me or something, and they'd gain the weight back, and they'd fall into that same kind of cycle. And I had an honest conversation with myself.

Like, what am I doing wrong here? And at first I thought, you know, people are lazy, right? People just aren't, they're not committed. That's the problem. But it didn't, that part didn't make sense to me either because many of these people were very successful executives and, you know, good parents and, you know, contributors to society. I mean, all in other aspects of their life, they were very disciplined, very consistent, very motivated, whatever you want to call it.

But when it came to fitness, it just, it just didn't work. And so I had to have a tough conversation with myself and say, okay, my approach is wrong. I need to reevaluate what the hell I'm doing because this just isn't working for a lot of people. And the conclusion I came to was that, well, obviously the problem's consistency. And by the way, you know, off air, you told me about a study you guys conducted to see what was the main, I guess, factor that would prevent people from, you know, getting to the goals for, you know, long term. What was consistency. That's the difference, right? The difference between a fitness fanatic or somebody who has a.

a good lifelong relationship with exercise versus the average person is consistency. So that's the thing that we need to focus on. And I was setting my sights too high. What I mean by that was I was treating everybody like a fitness fanatic. So I love fitness to the point where I made it my career, right? Most people don't love fitness that much. They like it, especially when they see the benefits of it and they do it right. But it's not something they love so much that they think about it the day before.

like, oh, tomorrow I'm working my legs out and I'm going to do these exercises. Oh, I can't wait to do that you know, three hour hike on Saturday. Like people don't think about fitness that way like we do, right? So I'm like, okay, I got to change how I communicate to people. I got to change my expectations and change my approach because these people are not like me. Otherwise, they'd be working in this space. So I need to figure this out. And over the last two decades, so I did this for two decades. they train clients, manage gyms, owned gyms.

The most we can expect in terms of consistency for the average person, the non-fitness fanatic, okay? And I'm talking about like if we do a damn good job, right?

If we do a damn good job coaching and training these people, the most we can expect is about two or three days a week of lifelong consistency if you really average it all out. Any more than that and you're looking at people

who become fitness fanatics, which are a small percentage of the podcast. population. So that's an important piece of context that we need to understand when we are trying to communicate most effective methods of exercise and nutrition and anything fitness and health related is this person, if I do a damn good job, is going to be doing this two or three days a week. So let's figure out how to make this effective in that short period of time. Most people are not obsessed with having a six pack or being shredded. They don't think it looks good, but

They just want to be fit and healthy. So let's look at those things. So what's changed in our space? I think more trainers and coaches are starting to understand that. More trainers and coaches are starting to understand that it's behaviors that they need to focus on. More than the step-by-step approach with exercise and nutrition, although that's important stuff to understand. It's the behaviors that they need to coach people through. I think more trainers and coaches today understand that they're guys.

guides, right? So it's like you're traveling up a mountain and you have a guide with you. They're not going to walk for you, but they're going to help guide you and they're going to help you avoid pitfalls and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, you have to move up that mountain yourself and to be those challenges. And so I think you see more of that today. The biggest change I would say, and I still think there's a long road ahead, is the perception of strength training in particular, especially with women. In the late 90s, early 2000s, it was a constant conversation. Like women did not want to touch weights. No, I don't want to lift weights. I don't want to get big. I don't want to get bulky. Okay. Less so today. Way less so today. But still, when you talk to the

average person, the average woman, there's still that stigma. Actually, one of the reasons why I wrote the book that I did is to kind of change that a little bit, or more, I should say. But things have moved generally in a better direction. People are more keen to the crap, the false promises don't work just as well as they used to. They still work, but not like they used to. So I think we're moving in the right direction. It's a slow process. And my goal, especially since starting the Mind Pump podcast, is to make that happen even faster. Get that fitness industry, shift the direction in the right way, make it a force for good, because for a long time it's just kind of been a part of the problem. And again, you're seeing more positive changes today than you did even back then.

Like I said, in the late 90s, it was all that. It was all that stuff. Today, there's more and more coaches and trainers that are really understanding that. There's a lot to unpack there. And my mind was just cooking. I was thinking back to, you know, we talk about the fitness fanatic, which is almost a niche, a group of people. And it's typically the fitness fanatic. that is giving information to the masses. So it's really hard for a fitness fanatic to relate to the masses of someone who just wants to work out for health

two to three times a week, which then when they're trying to guide or coach is overwhelming or not actually feasible. And I refer to this book a lot. The author is Donald Miller, business made simple. It talks a difference between a guide and a hero. And a lot of people in business

and even coaches, I could see this being fitness coaches, position themselves as a hero. It's here's my credentials, here's my authority, here's what I've done, listen to me because of that. Instead of, and that's where a lot of businesses fails, they try to position themselves as a hero.

And I mean, mind pumps, the perfect example, positioning yourself as a guide where it's, we're not the hero, we're the guy that's going to help you get from point A to point B, and people will trust that, people will like that, people want to be a part of that. And I can kind of see the last couple years how the industry has changed that way of being more guide-focused than hero-focused.

But if I think back to when I started in 2012, magazines, expos, commercials, like the bodybuilding motivation videos I used to watching college before going to the gym, that's hero-focused. That's not guide-focused. And I think that's where I'm seeing a change of people becoming more aware of, okay, let's position ourselves as this guide do help people rather than, hey, here's me with. 20 inch biceps, six-pack, and I'm benching 600 pounds, follow what I'm saying. Yeah. I'm saying.

Yeah, you have to stop trying to turn people into you, okay? Meet people where they're at if you want to really truly help them and be effective. And the fitness industry has done a terrible job of that. The fitness industry also, remember, it's an industry like any other. So industries are driven by profits. There's nothing inherently wrong with profits. Obviously, your consumers tell you what they want and what they don't want. but because there are fast and easy ways to make profits,

the thing that we got stuck in fueling or strengthening some of the issues that people that are preventing people from developing good, healthy lifestyles and good, healthy long-term habits with fitness and exercise. You mentioned motivation. That's a great place to start, right? There's nothing wrong with motivation. I mean, it's a great feeling, right? But it's a feeling.

It's like happy, sad. It's a state of mind that's with you sometimes and sometimes it's not. but people love feeling motivated. People don't need to be pushed. They don't need to drag themselves out of bed to work out. They don't need to, like, struggle to eat right when they're motivated. So everybody's trying to be motivated all the time. And the fitness industry is always or tends to feed into that. Hype, motivation, inspiration.

Okay. There's a problem with that. And the problem is, yes, it's great to be motivated, but that's not the challenge. challenges when you're not motivated. When you're not motivated, that's when you fall off. That's when you stop. That's when you eat in ways that aren't good for you. That's when you stop exercising.

So what we need to communicate more to is not the motivation and inspiration, although it's fun to hear and it's great and exciting. We need to talk about discipline and consistency. How do we develop habits? How do we develop behaviors that stick around past motivation? That's what we need to talk about. But what the fitness space has done is they've taken at some point, someone who's obese, someone needs to lose 30 pounds, 40 pounds, 60 pounds.

They get that spark of motivation. They go to buy a product and there's that, you know, fitness company praying on your motivation. And they might even find some pain points. In fact, pain points is a marketing term, right? It's a very effective way to get someone to buy something. How do we hit on those pain points? Well, they're obese. They feel ugly.

They feel disgusting. Let's talk about that. Become sexy. Be hot. You know, be awesome. because you're not right now. Oh, and you're motivated, do all this stuff. Hate the old self.

Love the new self. Let's get you over here. And that actually fuels some of the challenges and the problems. What that leads to is this what we see now, right? We do not have a epidemic or challenge with weight loss. Millions of people lose weight every single year, right? The challenge is keeping it off. Nobody's able to keep it off.

The problem is people lose it and gain it back. Lose it and gain it back. and eventually they get up higher and higher in body weight and get more and more problems. When you talk about consistency, behaviors, how do we develop those? What does that look like? Why is making goals for yourself in a motivated state of mind, for example, a terrible place to start? Not a good place to start. You ever talk to somebody who is super hyped and motivated about business and you ask them what their goals are?

What do you think you're going to be in two years? Oh, I'm going to be a millionaire. Oh, I'm going to work seven days a week. you know, 15 hours a day, right? And then the motivation wanes and then you talk to him. Man, it's hard. I don't know if I could do this. I think I'm going to quit, right?

You want to set your goals in a unmotivated state of mind. You want to say to yourself, what's realistic forever? Like, that's a good thing to ask yourself. Okay. I'm going to make some changes. The change that I make today is this realistic forever. If it's not, I'm not going to make that change yet. I'm going to move down a little bit and pick something a little easier, right?

Still needs to be challenging because it needs to have meaning. But what's a change that I can make that will last, that I feel like I can do for the rest of my life? Start there. And here's what will happen over time. Little by little, you'll make more and more changes. And little by little, you develop the skill of discipline. Discipline is a skill, as anybody who has it can tell you. You don't start off super discipline.

You develop the skill of discipline. And through that development of that skill, now you do. You develop consistency. You develop a lifelong relationship with fitness and exercise that works in balance with the rest of your life. That's the approach. That's the only way we're going to solve these chronic health issues that we're trying to deal with. We can't solve them with the motivation inspiration model. We can't solve them with the self-hate model.

It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. That's a great way to get people lose weight and gain it back. It's not going to work long term. We've got to look over here. It's not as sexy. It doesn't sound as awesome or as exciting. It doesn't have fireworks coming off of it, but this is the only way.

And it's our job to make this sound sexier than this. That's the hard part. So when you were a trainer then, how did you convey this message and how did you get people to commit to that? Oh, boy. You know, luckily, I can be pretty convincing. But I develop the language and the communication around it over time with, you know, kind of what work. Right. So somebody would come to me and say, I want to lose 30 pounds.

I'd say, okay, that's awesome. Do you have a time frame at what you want to do this by? Oh, I want to do this in three months. Okay, so here's what I'm going to tell you. There's two ways we could do this. We can do this to where you lose the weight and gain it back, or we could do this so that you can lose the weight and keep it off forever. And then, you know, you get that kind of, you know, that question to look like.

What do you mean by that? Say, well, have you lost weight and gained it back in the past? Yes. Okay. We're not going to do that this time. If you hire me, here's what it's going to look like. we're going to start with small goals that are challenging but realistic for you. In other words, what can I do now that I know I can maintain it for the rest of my life?

We're going to start there. Now, my job is going to be to get your body in a position to where it burns more calories on its own. I want to speed up your metabolism. Why? Because that's with you all the time. What I don't want to do is develop a weight loss strategy that requires you to work out every single day. Because that's if you want to work out every day, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that.

but I would like to develop a strategy that doesn't require that. Does that make sense to you? And then, of course, they would say, yes. Now, sometimes they'd have to trust me. Oftentimes, they'd have to trust me. But through that process, they would see exactly what was going on. The other part of two is I would also help the person, I would help illuminate all of the benefits of exercise and nutrition that have nothing to do with weight.

There's a lot of benefits that come from, look, let me ask you a question. You've been doing this for a long time. of all of the benefits that exercise gives you strength and fitness and leanness and everything. I bet you the number one thing you love about it now is the mental effects. 100%. You talk to anybody who's been working out consistently for a long period of time, 10 years, and they will all say the same thing. Now, we didn't know that when we first started.

We wanted big arms. We want to look ripped or whatever. But when you stick with it long enough, you start to really see the other values of it. oh man, it makes me a better father. It clears my head. It makes me feel better. I'm more, I'm less likely to feel sad or really sad. I tend to feel happier or I can handle challenging things better, right?

So there's lots of benefits to exercise and nutrition that people aren't even aware of because all they care about is the scale. So when I would get that client, they would finally hire me. And I know I'm not going to get them to lose 30 pounds in three months because I don't want to do that with them, I would help point those out to them. How was your sleep tonight? Oh, you know what? I've been sleeping a lot better. That's awesome. How's your energy? You know, I am noticing a little bit more energy. You know, you may notice a boost in your libido too. Oh, you know what? My husband was commenting on that. That's pretty cool, right? How about your skin?

You know, I'm noticing my skin. So you start to point out these small yet significant beneficial aspects of exercise and nutrition. And the person starts to see a whole, a better picture of the true value of exercise and nutrition. And then the weight loss becomes a happy side effect, right? Because I'll be quite honest with you, like you, the main reason why I exercise daily are the mental effects. And I would do it whether I was obese, whether I had no strength, whether I had a debilitating disease. I would still do those, the workouts every single day because the values are more complete. I see the whole picture. It's not just about, I mean, I've gone, look, I've been doing this for so long that I've gone through periods of my life that were,

extremely challenging. I was nowhere near PR. I looked way off my best. But it didn't, it didn't matter to me because it was a exercise as a tool that just improved the quality of my life and I understood the whole picture. So I would help get this person to understand this picture so that they could see the true values of exercise and nutrition. And that helps them develop this wonderful lifelong relationship with it. Because if you're always focused on appearance and weight and, you know, how good you look in the mirror. I mean, look, you do this long enough here. Those things are going to decline anyway, you know. You ain't going to be as ripped when you're 65 as you were when you were 25. And if that's all that you're focused on, well, you're going to,

you're going to stop. At some point, you're going to give up or you're going to become obsessed with, you know, plastic surgery and anabolic steroids and who knows what else, right? So, so that's the way that I would try to, I would guide the person in that way. And what I, what I ended up seeing through that was this wonderful consistency. I remember there was one moment. This is probably five years into my career when I started to really piece this together. As an early trainer, if a client would cancel with me, occasionally I'd get the call that would be like, hey, Sal, I'm feeling really tired, kind of worn down, really stressed out.

Would you mind if we skipped today's workout? That was a common, you know, cancellation reason or whatever. Or, oh, my leg hurts or my knee hurts or my back hurts. I think I need to skip today's workout. Then something switched. When I changed my approach, I would get this call. Hey, Sal, I'm feeling kind of down today and had a really stressful day. I know we're not scheduled to work out, but can I come in and see you?

I remember thinking, this is really weird, you know? Or, man, my back hurts. Can I come see you today? Because I know we're not scheduled. And then I realized, oh, crap, these people are starting to see the benefits of exercise that they didn't see before. rather than saying, I need to skip the gym because I don't feel good. They're saying, I don't feel good. I need to go take care of myself.

And that's when everything really started to switch. And I became, I mean, the consistency with my clients was ridiculous at that point. Then, I mean, literally people were with me for 10, 12, you know, years as a trainer. I don't train anymore, by the way. I haven't trained clients for over six years. They're all still consistent. They all still work out two or three days a week. I still talk to them.

They're all still friends of mine. And it was through that relationship building through, And I don't mean with me, I mean building their relationship with exercise and nutrition, the right way that helped develop that. Probably while you're a good business owner, you have great retention and great lifetime value. Well, I think, you know, that's a good point. And it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? It makes a lot of sense.

But it's not easy. It's easy to get caught up in the other stuff, especially as a coach or trainer. And it's very easy to get sold on the other stuff as a consumer or a client because you don't know, right? You don't know what you don't know. All you know is I don't like the way I look and I want to get in shape. And that's it. So you don't know what you don't know. And you don't know that there's a way that you could do this that will lead to long-term success.

And then there's a way that you could do this that'll lead to no success at all. It'll lead to failure. It'll lead to a hamster wheel of up and down, up and down and eventually you jump off. Nobody wants to do that forever. At some point you give up. How many times have you talked to somebody? Oh, yeah, I used to work out and do that. but I just want to enjoy my life now.

Oh, at a time. What a strange thing to say, right? I don't exercise and I don't eat right because I want to enjoy my life. Very, very strange if you really think about it because you know, as well as I do, that good exercise, good diet improves the quality of your life. You are able to enjoy it better because your filter through which you experience life is this healthier, more fit and vibrant and more mobile body. And yet, here we have people telling us they stopped because they want to enjoy their life.

What does that tell us? They went into it the wrong way, man. They had a totally terrible relationship with it to the point where they stopped because it was detrimental to the quality of a life. That just tells you right there, man, we're doing a bad job and we need to change how we approach this because if we don't, not only are we not helping anybody, we're going to turn people off permanently. And that's not going to help anyone.

Before we dive any deeper into that, I want to talk to you about why we started Bayer Performance Nutrition and how our products can help you improve your health and performance. In 2012, while I was studying nutrition in college, I was tired of searching for supplements that would meet my standards of quality and effectiveness. So after months of ordering ingredients in bulk and making products for myself, I decided to scale the operation and work with manufacturing teams to offer these formulas to you. And since then, VPN has evolved and our product line has grown.

We offer the most effective supplements that can help you improve your workouts, optimize your recovery, and supply essential superfood nutrients so you can operate at your full potential. Our products are tested for banned substances and certified by informed sport, so you have peace of mind that they're not contaminated with harmful ingredients. head over to bPNsups.com to take your health and performance to the next level. It's interesting when you mentioned, you asked the question, why do I train now? It's mental, right?

Like, yeah, absolutely. Because when I look back when I first started training in my early 20s, late teens, early 20s, it was for what I looked like. You know, I wanted to catch a pump. I'd be sitting in class in college waiting for the next hour before I could go to the gym. and get another pump and look bigger and get as big as possible. And over the years, it's evolved to this feel,

this overall health. I don't chase necessarily PRs anymore or a certain performance. I chase a feeling. And as I was reading your book and, you know, referencing cardio in terms of fat loss and weight loss and gloric expenditure, it made me think, why don't even think of running any of,

more in terms of chloric expenditure. I think of it in terms of a feel. It's his mental feeling I get from it. And it really made me think. I do want to dive into, you know, when you found down or when you realized, hey, we need to put more emphasis on strength training rather than cardiovascular training. Because at the time, I mean, I remember when I was younger, my mom would make me go sit in the back of aerobics classes.

and I watch her and all the other moms do aerobics. And at a time where it's like cardio classes, group classes, aerobics, cycling, all this cardio-based training in order to burn more calories, quote-unquote, lose more weight, short-term, not necessarily long-term. What made you say, now I'm not doing that? We're going to strength train. Yeah, it was when I realized that the value of exercise was not the, amount of calories you burn while you did it. That's what we thought. Okay. So let's back up for a second.

We've known that we've been in an obesity epidemic for at least over three decades. I think that's, that's that term has existed for at least over maybe three or four decades, right? Obesity epidemic. This is exponential growth of obesity and then of course all of the related issues that come with it, heart disease, cancer, you know, Alzheimer's, dementia, diabetes, whatever, right? So And, you know, health experts understood, and this is true, that obesity is the result of energy imbalance. This is true, right? If you take in more energy than you burn, that energy needs to get stored and your body stores it as body fat. And that's very true.

Now, it's more complex than that. There's a lot of moving parts there. But that is a law of physics. It's a law of thermodynamics. And so what the health expert said is they said, okay, here's the formula. calories in versus calories out. What we need to do is get people to increase the calories out part. So when they looked at exercise, they looked at all forms of exercise, and they didn't matter

what it was, cycling, running, swimming, resistance training, Pilates, yoga, hiking, whatever. And they said, how do we value all of these forms of exercise? Which one's the best? Oh, I know. The ones that burn the most calories. Now, it sounds logical. It does sound logical on the surface, but those of us who understand exercise much deeper know that of all of the values of exercise,

the amount of calories you burn while you do it is actually the least important. That's actually the least important factor. The most important factor of exercise is how does that form of exercise get my body to adapt? And then what does that mean? What do the adaptations mean for my health and for my fitness? okay so if we look at calorie burn while you're doing your exercise it's very clear that cardiovascular exercise burns the most calories you're not going to burn more calories uh doing you know strength training in an hour than you will running running will burn more calories running is going to burn more calories in yoga

running is going to burn more calories than you know meditative walking or anything else right so intense cardio burns the most amount of calories uh but that ignores the adaptation We got to look a little bit deeper. What about the adaptations? Well, if we do lots and lots of cardiovascular activity, our body, the reason why when you first start running, it's hard and then it gets easier and then you have to run longer and then longer is because your body's adapting, right? Your body identifies it as a stress and it aims to get better at that particular activity. So we've got to look deeper and say, okay, what is it happening in the body that's making it better at that activity? well, you're becoming more efficient.

You're becoming a more efficient calorie burning machine. What does that mean? Well, you need lots of stamina and endurance. Okay, we can do that. We don't need much strength. You don't. Your body does not need a lot of strength

to do long distance, you know, types of cardiovascular activity. So it wants to become efficient, doesn't need much strength. And what it does is it pairs muscle down. It makes you a better, more efficient cardiovascular machine, not unlike a, you know, an artificially intelligent car that adapted to your driving habits.

And if I had a car that could mold itself and I drove, you know, 350 miles a day at 30 miles an hour, it would mold itself to this one cylinder engine because that would be the most efficient. Okay. And that's kind of what happens to your body. Your body molds itself and changes itself so that it becomes better at cardiovascular activity. So you become, you gain endurance, you gain stamina, you lose. muscle and strength, which is fine because you don't need those things. And over time, you actually start to get a slower metabolism. Your metabolism actually learns to burn less calories.

This is one of the reasons why, and by the way, I do want to say this before I continue. Sometimes people think I'm anti-cardio. I am not. All forms of exercise have tremendous value, if applied appropriately. What I am is anti-not-effective uses of exercise depending on the context that I'm speaking to. In this context, I'm talking to the average person. Okay, average person wants to lose weight and is going to work out two or three days a week. Okay. So what happens is, and a lot of us have seen this, right? Okay, I want to lose 30 pounds.

Running burns the most calories. I'm going to do lots of running three days a week. I'm going to cut my calories. Oh, great. I lost 15 pounds. Uh-oh, I plateaued. What happened? Well, my metabolism slowed down.

It met the calorie, my calorie burn and my calorie intake now are meeting. So now what do I got to do? Well, I got to either eat less or move more to lose more weight. That's what the people do. Let me run more. Let me eat less. Oh, I hit another plateau. Well, at the end of this journey of 30 pound weight loss,

I'm doing a ton of running and I'm eating very little. Now I've got to maintain that forever. That's a very hard thing to do when you live in a modern society. You know, like right now, you and I could walk out of the studio and I bet you I could get Mexican food, Chinese food, Italian food, all within five minutes. And it's going to taste really good and it's going to be very inexpensive, right? If you live in a modern society, you have a lot of,

you have all this access to very tasty food. What you don't want is a slower metabolism. You don't want to be at the end of your 30 pound weight loss journey and have to take in 1,500 calories a day to maintain. It's a tough position to be in. Now, on the reverse, we can look at other forms of exercise and say, okay, which forms of exercise do the opposite? Which forms of exercise get my metabolism to speed up?

Well, above all other forms of exercise in that context, is strength training. Strength training doesn't burn a ton of calories while you do it, but the main adaptation signal that it sends to the body is we need strength. We need muscle. If you fuel that muscle with proper diet, so good protein intake, adequate caloric intake to fuel that, and you gain some muscle,

you now have a bigger engine. You now have a faster metabolism. Okay. Now, the weight loss with this approach looks different. It doesn't happen quite as quickly. So with the cardio diet approach, you get that quick weight loss and that plateau. With the strength training approach, it's more of a snowball effect.

Initially, you actually on the scale, you might not even lose any weight at first, mainly because you're getting a bit of a composition change, some fat loss and some muscle gain. So on the scale, I still weigh the same, even though I feel a little different. My body feels tighter and my clothes are a little looser, but my weight is the same. But now I'm getting that faster metabolism effect. And over time, I end up burning more and more calories and the fat loss starts to amplify. and at the end of that 30 pound weight loss journey,

it is very possible to where you could eat more than you did when you started and stay lean. A faster metabolism is an asset in modern societies. It was a liability, you know, 100,000 years ago, but today it's an asset. If I could snap my fingers and do one thing that would get everybody to be lean in a much easier way, it would be just simply speed up the metabolism. If I could just snap my fingers and give everybody a 30% faster metabolism, It would be incredible.

People would be like, oh, my God, I'm eating the same amount, and I'm just being lean. So strength training does that through its adaptation process. And that's what you need to look at when you're looking at the form of exercise that you're trying to employ. You have to consider a few things. One, realistically, how many days a week am I going to work out consistently forever? That's number one. Most people is two or three days a week. Two, what's the main goal or the main thing I'd like to accomplish with this exercise?

longevity, fat loss, you know, mobility, feeling healthy. Those things are all important to me. And then three, all right, how do I apply this all? How do I put this all together? When you consider all those, strength training becomes one of the most effective forms of exercise. Now, the problem is, is it's totally stigmatized, right? The average person goes to the doctor and the doctor says your blood lipids are off, your cholesterol is off. you're a little heavy, you got to go lose weight.

They don't think to themselves, I'm going to pick up a pair of dumbbells. They think I'm going to go run or I'm going to go swim, right? Again, better than nothing, nothing wrong with those things. But strength training, especially in the context that I just explained, if you're only going to work out a couple days a week, you're going to get way more bang for your buck. It's going to be much more consistent. And by the way, there's a lot more that goes into this that we can dive into.

For example, this is one of my favorites. there's no such thing as permanent results from fitness. I remember as a trainer, one of my favorite things that people would tell me is, they say, okay, well, if I get in shape with you, what happens when I stop? Well, then you get back out of shape. Oh, well, I don't know if I want to do this then type of deal. Right. So whatever you do to get in shape, you have to maintain.

So there's no such thing as permanent results without maintaining what you did to get there, right? But resistance training or strength training is as close as you can get. There's this interesting phenomenon, and I know you've experienced this, It's called muscle memory. The very, very strange, very well-documented thing to where, you know, if it takes you a year to gain 12 pounds of muscle through hard work and consistency and effort, and then you lost it, let's say you had two or three months where you stopped exercising and sat on the couch,

you lost all 12 pounds of muscle, and then you decide, I want to gain it back. You'll gain it back in like a month. It comes back in a hurry. That's one of the beautiful things about strength training. Now, why is that such an important thing to communicate? because the average person I said will maybe exercise two or three days a week on average. But you know what that usually looks like? Four days a week, three days a week, two weeks off, three days a week.

So now when they're taking that time off, they're not getting as much of a negative effect. In fact, there was an interesting study. It's a recent one where they compared two groups of men. One group exercised consistently every single week or I believe 16 weeks. the other group, after three weeks of consistency, would take a week off. So they go three weeks on, one week off, three weeks on, one week off. And they compared them at the end of 16 weeks. Here's what they found.

Statistically insignificant difference between the two in terms of muscle and strength gain. Okay. Now there's other benefits from exercising regularly. So I'm not saying that they're completely equal. But in terms of the metabolism boosting, fat burning, muscle building effects, the group over here that took a week off after every three weeks, was about identical to the group that was super consistent. You can't say that with almost any other form of exercise.

If your primary form of exercise is running to burn calories and you take a week off after every three weeks and you compare yourself to people who are very consistent, there's a massive difference. Because the primary benefit there is the, in terms of fat loss is the calorie burn. But when you stop, it's gone. There is no metabolism effect.

It's gone. Now you take a week off and it's like, you're gaining tons of body fat. have to really reduce your calories to make up the difference. So there's a lot that goes behind strength training that a lot of people don't understand. And again, the case I make in the book is this is the form of exercise. We need to tell people, hey, look, if you go out and do anything, if you're going to just do one thing, start there because it's going to give you the most bang for your buck by far. When I take days off from running, I see the scale and it goes up.

And the reason I connected with your book so much is because everything you're talking about, I've experienced. When I first started training, it was primarily strength and bodybuilding. You know, college, just getting as big as possible. I was anti-cardio then. And now, for everyone that knows me, I mean, I just finished 100-mile ultramarathon this past weekend, right? But I don't run for caloric expenditure fat loss. I run for performance and endurance goals, endurance training, and events.

And I built this muscle memory up over years and years and years early on. I mean from 2009 until 2017, I ran as little as I possibly could, other than being the Army. And then I went into this big endurance block. And like, I was telling you before we started recording, my last Iron Man prep, which was a year ago, I decided to take about seven months off of strength training. Because in my mind, okay, I want to have this really fast time on this Iron Man. I'm going to lose weight, which for me was the lose muscle mass, lose size, because I naturally hold on to muscle very, very well.

So I'm going to stop lifting weights for seven months in order to reach this endurance goal. So that's what I did. In the beginning, I stopped weight training, and I started losing weight and started getting smaller and started getting faster. But over weeks and months of doing this, what I saw was happening was I started holding weight in weird spots. and I was talking to my creative team. I was like, am I looking fat to you guys?

Like, am I getting this little belly? And my body composition started changing a lot. And I started feeling more tired and more fatigued. And I actually, my weight started going up, looking at the scale. After I reduced strength training, I lost some weight, but then I started gaining weight again. And my metabolism was all out of whack. And if I didn't do any endurance training or cleric expenditure for that week or a couple of days, my weight would shoot up.

And I got to a point, I realized, okay, the missing factor, and my body for me is an experiment over the years. Because I control a lot of the variables. When I change one variable, it's very evident. I said, okay, I've eliminated strength training. Let's see what happens now after that last triathlon, pulled back endurance training, increased strength training, size came back. I started feeling better. Body composition changed again. But I saw it firsthand what happened when I eliminated the strength training and went too heavy

into endurance. Yeah. And another thing that a lot of people, part of what you might have experienced was this. And really was your body just modeling itself after the signals that you were sending it, right? It was trying to become more efficient and effective at what you were throwing at it. And part of that was to lose muscle. Part of that was to slow your metabolism down so that you don't burn as many calories, right?

It's trying to make you, you know, there was this really interesting study done. I talk about this in the book on a modern hunter-gatherer tribe known as the Hotsa tribe. So they're in northern Tanzania. And they live, for all intents and purposes, the way that humans lived, you know, 100,000 years ago. So they hunt, they gather, they don't have electronics. they, you know, they don't sit on couches and watch TV and all that stuff. And scientists went down and studied them and with really sophisticated testing, tested their metabolism. How many calories are these people burning every single day?

At the end of the study, the results blew the researchers away. These tribes people who, you know, throw a spear at an animal wound and then run after it for 15 miles, who, you know, gather, who move, who go and get water and all that stuff, they burned. about the same amount of calories as the average western couch potato. And that blows my mind. Yeah. And you're like,

how is that possible? Well, okay, it makes no sense for humans to evolve to burn 7,000 calories a day in nature without modern agriculture

and grocery stores and that stuff because calories are hard to come by. Your body, their bodies, became efficient. Now, I'm not saying they were unhealthy, okay,

but their bodies became efficient. Just to kind of show you what our bodies can do. They can become very efficient. That's what that was kind of what was happening to your body. Now let's take it a step further. How does your body lose muscle?

And how does your body gain muscle? Well, you got, there's a lot of different processes that happen. But some of the main things that signal that to happen are your hormones, right? Testosterone, for example, in men is a main driver or one driver of muscle growth. Well, when your body's trying to get rid of muscle, it will model its hormone profile to do so. If your body's trying to build muscle, it will also model its hormone profile to do so. This is why strength training has been shown to be the only form of exercise to reliably raise testosterone in all men, not just men with low testosterone. I don't care where your testosterone levels are.

If you apply strength training appropriately, your testosterone levels are likely to go up. If you train your body in a way to lose muscle, you will reliably lower testosterone because your body is trying to make that happen and it has to change its own. hormone profile. In women, you see a change in estrogen and progesterone. They also have testosterone, by the way. It does the same things for them as it does for men, just lower levels. They will lose, they will drop testosterone. Growth hormone starts to change, either become more or less favorable for muscle growth, depending on what kind of signals you're sending. Cortisol starts to do that as well. So your body literally starts to model its hormones in ways to either build or lose muscle. The build muscle model is a youthful hormone profile.

right high testosterone good growth hormone insulin sensitive right cortisol is balanced and women estrogen progesterone is balanced it's a youthful hormone profile the lose muscle model is the kind of hormone profile we tend to not want it's higher cortisol lower testosterone growth hormone you know not optimal insulin starts to become a little bit more you start to become a little bit more insulin resistant right think about that now why is that the case well if you're doing tons and tons of and tons of extreme endurance training. Your body wants to get better at storing energy, right? You're burning a lot of energy manually.

So it's like, we got to be able to store more body fat. We don't want all this high calorie burning machinery. And we don't need it. We don't need tons of muscle. It's actually detrimental, right? There's a strength to weight ratio that's ideal for endurance sports. And it's usually a little muscle. If you look at like really, really high performing endurance athletes,

they don't have a lot of muscle or fat. They tend to be very, very small. And so your body was just modeling itself that way. Now, if you're training for a specific type of athletic endeavor, you have to train appropriately. So if your goal is endurance, yeah, a majority of your training should probably be endurance. But you want to throw in some strength training

to prevent some of the negative effects that you notice. And you probably had better performance as a result of it. But a majority of your training was probably still endurance training. If I'm talking to the average person who, I mean, when it comes to performance, Do they care about extreme bouts of performance? No, most people don't give a crap. They don't care if I don't care about squatting 400 pounds

and I also don't care about, you know, being able to run a marathon. I just want to be fit, healthy, and lean, and I want it to be easy as possible. I want to be able to maintain this as easy as possible. Well, the best thing we could do is put muscle on that person. Get the hormones to model themselves in a way to put muscle on. Have a faster metabolism.

All those things make it easier to maintain, easier to achieve long term. And so that's what I'm communicating to when I talk about strength training or resistance training. But I don't want people to get it confused. If you're training for a specific event, if you're training for specific types of athletic performance, what you're training for requires specific applications of exercise.

And if your main goal is stamina and endurance, strength training is not going to be the crux of your programming. It's going to be endurance type training. However, strength training should still play a small role and at least supporting some of the strength and muscle so you don't go too far off the deep end. And on the flip side, if you're an extreme strength athlete, you know, you're a powerlifter or you're a bodybuilder, yeah, the majority of your training should be around strength training, but you should also incorporate some cardiovascular exercise.

So you don't go off on the deep end on that either, right? So there's a bit of a balance. But again, for the average person, they're going to, I'll tell you what, they're not going to do three or four different types of exercise. It's not going to have it. I'm not going to take Mrs. Johnson from down the street who never worked out, needs to lose 50 pounds. she's not going to do strength training you know flexibility and mobility training cardiovascular training meditative

it's not going to do all those things she's going to do maybe one and she wants to lose weight and I want to do the biggest bang for my buck form of exercise well what I'm going to tell Mrs. Johnson to do two days a week is strength train okay let's have you do some strength training that's going to give you the biggest bang for your your time the amount of time I know you're going to spend

on exercise for the goals that you have let's start there now if you do that and you're consistent and you want to add more stuff, we can. But by far, the most effective thing you can do with that timeframe and that consistency is going to be strength training. I had Ryan Hall on the podcast a few months ago, Olympic runner, marathon distance.

And he actually had to retire during his career because his hormone levels, his testosterone, became so low because of just the crazy amount of endurance training. And going back to metabolism, I think it is interesting where people see these, Olympic level runners. And a lot of them assume they're eating 20,000 calories today to sustain that. But most of them, if you watch them at, there's full day of eating videos and diet videos

of these runners online. They're really not eating that much because their bodies become so efficient. And their metabolism has modeled that efficiency. They don't really don't eat an enormous amount of food and calories. And it's crazy to see that. I think a lot of people don't realize that's what's happened to your body with endurance. Yeah, but even to just take it a step further, look, if you're watching or listening to this, do you want to manually have to constantly burn your calories?

Or would you like your body to do it on its own? You can do it automatically. You can speed up your metabolism. Look, I've done this with clients time and time again. Gotten their metabolism to boost by 800 or 1,000 calories a day with two days a week of strength training. We're not burning seven extra thousand calories a week through two days a week of six. strength training. I'm lucky if they're burning 150, 200 calories during those sessions. Where is that all those calories coming from? Their metabolism. Their bodies are burning those

extra calories. Now, you know how hard it is to burn that many calories through activity? You how much running you have to do? By the way, there's a misconception with how many calories you burn during exercise. Although cardiovascular activity does burn the most amount of calories, it doesn't burn as much as the cardio machines would let you believe, right? You get on a treadmill or elliptical and you, you know, you type in 60 minutes, like, you're going to burn. 600 calories. You're not going to burn 600 calories. They're trying to, they're trying to sell you on that. I don't even believe my garment when it tells me what I burn after a run. No, you'll burn maybe 300. Yeah. Maybe if you're lucky, if you're working really hard. So, and why is this important to understand?

Because calorie burning is hard and calorie eating is easy, you know? You and I could go work our asses off for an hour and maybe burn 400 calories if we really try really hard. I bet you and I could eat 400 calories in less than five minutes, right? So, so the metabolism boosting side, that's the thing that we need to focus on. That's the part that's important for the average person because we've got to set them up. You know what it's like? It's funny.

You know, one of the things I used to love about personal training was learning from my clients. So I would teach them about fitness and health and they would teach me about other stuff. And I used to train a lot of really smart, very successful people, executives and surgeons and doctors

and, you know, psychiatrists. And I would ask them questions and learn from them, whatever. And I would have these very, successful, wealthy. Some of these clients were very successful and wealthy. And I would ask some questions about money. How do I build wealth? How do I build wealth? I had this one guy that I trained who he was in his 70s. He was worth quite a bit, but he didn't even have a high school education. It was very interesting. I used to love asking this guy questions. And he used to tell me, and it's funny because it's just like what we're talking about. He's to say, stop earning,

stop trying to earn so much money. Make your money work for you. Right. Like you can go out and try to earn a bunch of money per hour, but you're going to break your back doing that. There's only so many hours of the day. Take the money that you earn and figure out how to make that money, make money for you so that you don't have to do it yourself. Well, that's what I'm talking about, right? Get your metabolism to do the work for you so that you don't have to go out and do all the work for yourself. Now, if you do that and you want to go exercise a lot because you love it, that's great. Nothing wrong with that, right? But what a great position to be in when you miss days of exercise when you're only going two or three days a week you've got that metabolism

there burning those extra calories and like we talked about off air when you burn more calories and you take in the damage that diet can produce for the body is greatly reduced dramatically reduced you know they've done there's science and i hate these things because they they simplify something that's much more complex so this i i'm not advocating for this but you have these like these like scientists. There was one professor who proved, quote unquote, proved that calories were all that mattered. And what he did is he went on a McDonald's and candy diet, okay? But he ate lower calories and he burned. And he showed improvements in all of his blood lipids and health markers. He said, look, I'm eating garbage, but my blood markers are all looking better. And what he showed was

there's definitely some truth to that. It's more complex than that. But there's definitely some truth than that. If you're burning more than you're taking in, a lot of the damage that comes from diet is is negated. Now, if we can get your, if we can get your metabolism to boost, that makes a huge difference. Now you eat the, you know, occasional slice of pizza, the, you drink a soda, you eat some cake, doesn't cause nearly as much damage because your body burns it off. And people ask me, or they, they tell me, they don't necessarily ask me. They tell me, hey, you know, you could be a lot faster if you stopped weight training and strength training and lost weight. I say, yeah, you're probably right, but there's a sacrifice

to that. That sacrifice is health and feeling and performance. And I'm not chasing these massive PRs anymore. Like we've talked about, it's more mental and feel. And I love the lifestyle. I love what's been built over the years, you know,

towards it. And I am willing to sacrifice speed for health and performance and strength. And I'm just the type of person. I will always keep strength training because I believe in it, firmly believe it. into my routine. Now what I'd love to talk about,

and you talk about in your book, and I know your advocate of it, is the stereotype as strength training creates for women. Yeah. Or even guys. Like, I have some friends

who don't want to get massive or big so they stop or don't even start strength training. In reality, unless you really want to get huge, you have to try, to actually try to get huge. And then you probably still won't.

It's really hard. I remember in college, it's like, I could never get big enough. I'd train twice a day. I'd be eating 6,000 calories. I'd like limit my steps. You know, most people are trying to get 10,000 steps a day.

I'd try to keep my steps under 1,000. And I'd love to dive into the misconception of that stereotype. Yeah, that's a great one. So, well, first off, I want to comment on what you said earlier about getting you faster. We need to stop looking at high-performing athletes as the pinnacle of health. That's not. That's the pinnacle of specific. type of performance. So athletes are actually not some of the healthiest people because their

performance is extreme. An extreme powerlifter, an extreme bodybuilder, an extreme endurance athlete. They're not the healthiest that they can be because their pursuit is not health. The pursuit is extreme performance. So let's make that very clear. Okay. So let's talk about the fear of getting too big. Okay. I like to use this analogy because I think it makes more sense to people. in everyday life, okay? I'm going to ask you this question. In everyday life, forget if you've ever gone to a professional basketball game. I'm talking about just going to the grocery store, going to the airport, you know, hanging out at restaurants.

How many times in your entire life have you seen someone in regular life that was over seven feet tall? Like maybe three times. And your whole lot. And you remember it. Yeah. One was our marathon two weeks ago. I like, because you're mind blown. You're like, holy shit.

You remember it because it's so rare. I think it's only twice for me. Once at the airport and there was another time at a restaurant, you look over and it says this is a giant, right? Super, super rare. So there's this genetic spectrum of height. Way on one side is people who are over seven feet. And of course, way on the other side are people with dwarfism, right?

The vast, vast majority of us are somewhere in the middle. And it's so rare to be on those extremes that you've, probably in your entire life, maybe seen it once or twice. Maybe, right? That's how rare it is. Okay. The type of genetics that are required to become too muscular where you look at a bodybuilder or you look at somebody, oh my gosh, that's a ridiculous amount of muscle is about as rare

or maybe even more rare than the genetics that are required for someone to be over seven feet tall. Okay. So if you're watching this or listening to this, you don't have that ability. Good luck trying to get that big. You could take all, I'm going to take it even a step further. You can take all the steroids you want and you won't even get that big. A lot of people look at like Mr. Olympia and think, oh, they're just, they're so big because they take lots of drugs.

Listen, I managed gyms for decades. There were guys in my gym that took more drugs than professional bodybuilders and you couldn't even tell because they didn't have those extreme genetics. That's how rare that is. So what does that mean for most of us? For most of us, we're somewhere in the middle. That means if we dedicate ourselves, we train our asses off. we're super disciplined five days a week in the gym, perfect diet,

we'll probably get somewhat muscular. You know, we're probably going to look somewhat impressive. Like most people want to look. Two days a week, three days a week, you're just going to look fit and healthy. You're just going to look fit and healthy. That's it. So don't worry about the getting too big. Now, let's say you are somehow the one in a billion gifted, oh my gosh, I could build tons of muscle.

Well, first off, you probably already know. You probably already look like you lift weights and you don't. But number two, let's say you start working. out and you're like, oh my gosh, you look in the mirror and you're like, holy cow, I'm getting way too muscular. You just back off. It's not like it's going to, you know, go out of control and, you know, have a mind of its own. You just back off on your train a little bit. By the way, to be that gifted is amazing. When I'm talking about the metabolism boosting effects and all stuff, that just means it's going to happen a lot faster for you and it's going to be a lot more

permanent for you. So it's something, it's something you do not need to worry about, especially for women, especially for women. The average woman, 99% of women, could strength train like a bodybuilder and what they would accomplish is a tight, sculpted physique, not a super muscular, masculine-looking physique. So these fears are totally, totally unfounded. And I know where they come from. They come from the fact that the people who represent strength training in popular culture are those extremes. When I say lift weights, we think. think of the extreme bodybuilders that we see on Instagram or social media or the super athletes at CrossFit who are competing at the highest level. Those people, you are nothing like those

people. I'm sorry to say, we're nothing like those people. You could train as hard as you want. And where you'll get if you're super consistent for years is a tight, sculpted physique. So it's a, it's a fear that just, it's just not going to happen. I used to love it when people come to me. I don't want to get too big. Look at them like, man, listen, I've been trying to get too big for for years. It ain't going to happen. I promise you. You're not going to work out today

and work out and then wake up tomorrow and be like, oh my God, I knew it. It looked like Arnold. Yeah. Not going to happen.

What did you do when you were a trainer when people became discouraged because their genetic makeup, their DNA didn't allow them to make or reach results like some of their peer or other clients? You know what's great about fitness?

And you've been doing this a long time. So I'm sure this will resonate with you. Fitness is one of, one of the best yet most unassuming forms of personal growth that exists. People don't go into fitness thinking of personal growth. They think, I'm going to look better, right? And yet that's not what ends up happening as personal growth. You stick to it long enough.

There's tremendous personal growth that happens. And one piece of that is acceptance. I remember when that happened to me. I remember as a kid realizing I'm not going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was my idol, right? When I was a kid, I had posters and magazines and I want to look like Arnold. I remember realizing that's not going to happen. You know what I did?

I accepted it. And I continued to do what I did. I continued to exercise. I continued to stay consistent, right? Acceptance is a very important part of self-care and self-love. It's a very important part of the long-term relationship with exercise. And at some point, you will hit that. At some point, you'll realize you are who you are.

There are certain things you can't control. but I'm not going to focus on those things because I can't control them. I'm going to focus on the things that I can control. Now, here's what I can say with 100% certainty. Anybody who's not active, anybody who has a poor diet will get a great deal of the way there through the application of exercise and nutrition. Now, will they look like their favorite model? Probably not.

But they're going to be a lot better than they are now. And it's really, you know, this, again, talking about personal growth, it's not fair to compare yourself against someone else. You don't know the person, you don't know the lifestyle, you don't know what's going on with them, what they do. The only fair comparison is to yourself yesterday. Am I better than I was yesterday? Yes, then I'm moving forward.

That's about it. But yeah, at some point through this process, you end up learning acceptance because you have to accept. Look, I can't, I'm, look, I tell you, I was watching a video the other day. It's so funny. I was in the studio with my partners. and they pulled up a video of this female powerlifter.

Tiny, too. She's like 160 pounds. And she squatted 405, I think, for 10 reps. And they were showing me, you know, I can't do 405 for 10 reps. I looked at it. I'm like, oh, my God. You know, but does that make me not want to work out anymore because this 160 pound girl could, no, I'm still going to do my work.

I've accepted the fact that I am who I am, but I'll continue, right? So at some point you have to do. And that's the conversation I would have with people. I say, look, yeah. Are you going to look like someone else? No, because you're you. But you're going to be better than you were yesterday. So let's just keep doing this.

Let's focus on what we can control. Let's ignore the rest. That's one thing I have found, which is hard for a lot of people, is comparison, especially when they're first getting started. And I see it where, you know, after every morning I finish my run, take a photo of my watch, and I post it. And a lot of my runs are done below max aerobic car rate because I'm doing these long endurance events. And what people see is my pace.

And it's not as, it's not fast. It's still below a max aerobic heart rate. But when they compare their max aerobic heart rate and mine, they're different. They get discouraged and they're, they're comparing. I'm saying, yeah, but I've been building this for years. There's been a lot of work going into this. You will get there too. You just need to just keep putting in the work.

You'll get there. But it's really easy for people to become discouraged based off comparison. Yeah. Look, I tell people who cares. I mean, what I say? Comparison is the Thief of Joy. Yeah, I love that quote. It's very, very true.

Like, who cares if someone else is doing something else? Like, it doesn't matter. What matters is you. Are you feeling better? Are you finding value in this? Are you able to improve yourself? If the answer is yes, then you're doing great. Otherwise, who cares about the other people?

Who cares about? Because you'll always find someone better. And, you know, of course, we can make the argument that, you know, know people post their highlight reel and you don't know what's really going on and maybe they have other shitty stuff in their life or whatever who cares all of that who cares it's all about yourself you know one of the other things about fitness that I love so much is you learn how to deal with failure you really have to learn how to deal with failure I mean the first time do you remember the first time you did barbell squat you sucked I remember trying to avoid barbells yeah yeah and you probably

sucked for a long time you got to do it and you got to suck at it and you got to keep sucking at it and that's how you get better. Like, what a wonderful, I don't know, microcosm of life, right? Is you suck at stuff and you just, you got to do it and get better at it. You know, it's funny. When we started our business, mind pump, we put out workout programs. It's one of the ways we monetize, right? People buy our workout programs. And I remember when we put them out, I mean, if I look at the original ones, they're comical. I mean, we filmed them in like an Airbnb B or at the park and other videos of us doing exercise with bands with sunglasses on. We look hilarious.

But we put them out there because we wanted to get a response to see what we could do better and then try to make it better. Where do we learn that? Exercise. Now, you could study a barbell squat all you want, but you ain't going to get better at it until you go out and suck at it for a little while, right? So there's so many lessons to learn through this process. This is why, again, when you talk to people who've been exercising for a long time,

they have a different understanding of it. They stop caring about comparing themselves to other people at some point because who cares? They stop. They don't worry so much about failure. They're okay with trying things that they suck at because, well, gee, I sucked at everything that I tried the first time when I was first started working out.

And there's so much more, right? There's so much more that goes along with it. So I love these conversations because I think these are the important ones that people need to have, or at least the ones that they need to understand when they embark on this fitness journey. And that's how my fitness has evolved as well, you know, where I started bodybuilding strength training.

And I thought, well, let me humble myself. Let me try something new. I signed up for my first marathon. Horrible. It was a miserable experience. I sucked the whole way. I ran about a four-hour marathon. And after that, I said, well, let me try something else.

I'll be humbled myself again. I'm going to sign up for this Iron Man. And I've documented all this so people can see this evolution of trying something uncomfortable, being bad at it, learning how to improve, guiding people along the way how I'm making these improvements, then retesting and improving and modifying. But it's like what you said is fitness provides you the opportunity to continually humble yourself and learn and adapt. And you apply that to life. Like I have applied everything I've learned in business, everything I've learned in fitness to business. It's the same. And it is exactly the same. It's the same. And you know

what's funny about all this, what you're really talking about is, you know, there's something I like to say on my show. I like to say, the man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination. Okay. So what's happened along that process? You've learned to love the journey, right? You love the journey. Man, when you love the journey, the goals just happen. You hit milestones as a side effect, right? Because it doesn't matter. that point, I don't care if I can lift this much weight or run this fast. I mean, that's cool and it's great and I love it, but I don't love it as much as I love the journey. I love the journey. What does the journey consist of? Sucking at something, failing, getting better, learning, start a new

journey, start it over, do it again. Oh, the journey now involves now. I'm aging. My joints hurt. How do I figure that out? Oh, the process. Here we go. And so when you fall in love with the journey, everything else takes care of itself. And that's always been my goal. My goal has always been can I get my clients, can I get the people that I'm talking to, to fall in love with the journey? Because if they do, then the 30 pound weight loss will happen. Then the, you know, squatting twice their body weight will happen. Then the improve mobility. That'll all happen.

Let's get them to fall in love with this process that involves all the things that we just talked about. Me and my team were sitting down last week. We were planning out in the video for this 100 mile run. And one of the things we were talking about was that it's hard to showcase, on the internet or in line is that when I sign up for these things, whether that be a bodybuilding show back in the day when I did one in these powerlifting competitions

or these races, I don't really care about that day. I don't really care about the race. I sign up for these things to justify the process that I'm going to endure and learn from to get to that day. But when the day comes, when the 100 mile race came,

I was like, it's just another day. I've already gotten what I wanted out of this whole process, the last four months of training. I learned what I wanted to learn. This race I'm doing now is just a justification for what I just did. Dude, I'll tell you what, on the flip, on the flip side, falling in love with the goal and the destination, you will be disappointed if you do that.

There's an actual psychological phenomenon. I can't remember the term for it, but it's when somebody trained so hard focusing on a day of competition or a particular accomplishment, then they get that accomplishment and shortly after fall into a period of depression because it wasn't what they thought it was. You know, I interviewed Mark Manson. He's an author, author of the book, A Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Yeah, I love that.

I love that book. He had that. He's like, I just want to have a bestseller. And that was all he focused on. When he finally got one, he's like, I was depressed afterwards because I was like, what do I do now? Like where do I go now, right? If you fall in love with, and by the way, life is a journey. So really it's the only long term approach is to fall in love with the journey. Because if if you fall in love with the destination, you hit that destination, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

It's going to be very sad. You're going to finish your race, maybe even get first place, get your trophy, and then you're like, okay, what do I do now? But if you love the journey, who cares? I'm going to, I'm going to stay on this journey this entire time. So, you know, I know we're talking deep here, but this is a very important thing to talk about. Because if you're trying to be, if this is something you want to do for the rest of your life, that's the only way to do it. And think about it this way. Look, if you love the process of eating healthy, are you ever going to, are you ever going to have to go on a diet?

No, you just love eating healthy, right? If you love exercising, are you ever going to have to worry about losing lots of weight? Well, no, because you do it because you love it. And the weight loss just kind of happens. So the ideal situation is for those destinations that happen as a side effect of the fact that you love the process. I was even taking it back to like weight loss. You know, earlier we're talking about people lose this weight. And it's as high as and lows where it's you lose the weight, you gain the weight.

You lose the weight. You lose the weight. Because you're going after that destination. It's like you're going so hard to lose that 30 pounds. and once you hit that weight goal, it's all right, I can back off a little bit now. You didn't learn to actually appreciate and implement the changes you were making into your daily life. You were just going after that number. That's tough. That's really hard.

It's really, it's a change in mindset and understanding, right? Because if it's about the journey, exercise becomes a form of self-care because, oh, today I'm stress. out, you know what, I'm going to go in, I'm going to exercise in a way that's going to make me feel a little bit better. Or I'm tired. You know, I'm going to go in. I'm going to go easy today because I'm kind of tired. Or I'm feeling strong. I'm going to get after it today, right? It's a daily journey and you love that process. If it's all about the destination, exercise becomes a form of self-punishment. I got to beat myself up to lose that 30 pounds. I'm tired. You know, I'm going to go hard anyway, right? So you start training inappropriately. Start doing things. And also

punishing yourself through exercise or the mentality of punishment through exercise, it's not going to last very long. Nobody wants to do that forever. Who wants to punish themselves all the time? You can only hate yourself for so long. At some point you want to stop. And then, you know, go back to what we talked about before. I stopped because I just want to enjoy my life. Yeah. Right. Well, what if enjoying your life was that part of that process of taking care of yourself, right? If eating healthy is something you enjoy as part of the journey of learning and nourishing yourself and then you enjoy eating healthy. If it's all about the weight loss, well, eating now becomes a form of restriction. It becomes a way to, again, restrict yourself and punish yourself.

Well, it's no wonder people stop doing it. Who the hell wants to do that? Who the hell wants to live in that state of mind forever? Nobody can. Nobody can. Kind of leads me into what I wanted to talk about next was intuitive eating. And the part of the book, So you have the four stages of intuitive eating in your book. And to tell my story of why this resonated so much with me, because I went through all those stages. And I felt them all really hard. You know, I was telling you before we started recording,

I was about 14 years old, developed a very severe eating disorder. The point where I was hospitalized. My organs were shutting down, body stopped. I was eating maybe less than 500 calories a day for months. And finally, you know, I thought I was going in for another. routine check up. My mom walks me into an eating disorder clinic. I was like, oh, fuck, they called me. I got confronted, and I remember coming home from that appointment, an eating disorder clinic, and something switched to my head where I was like, all right, I need to make this change.

And the first thing I decided to do was I opened up the cupboard, and I looked in there, and I saw a box of pop tarts. And I flipped these pop tarts around, and on the box, these pop tarts, and two pop tarts, I saw 400 calories. And I was like, hold. I haven't, I probably don't consume 400 calories today. I made myself eat these pop tarts. I felt so guilty. And over the years, you know, I recovered from that eating disorder and I was eating healthy again just based off a feel.

And then I did a bodybuilding competition in college. And I started tracking macros and practice flexible dieting and if it fits your macros. And these unhealthy relationships with food developed again. They surfaced. And it became very controlling and I couldn't just eat based off a feel. I couldn't eat anything that I couldn't weigh or track in my fitness pal. Had to be, if it was eight ounces of chicken, it had to be eight ounces of chicken.

I remember this one time during my prep. I weighed my food already. I had my meal set. It was in my fitness pal. I ate about half the meal. And I was walking back to my room from the kitchen, I tripped and I dropped all my food. And because I already weighed all that food out, I picked up. up every piece of food off the floor, put it back on my plate so that I could eat it because

I've already counted for. This was in college. I mean, it was disgusting. I tell that story to say, like, I have seen the extremes of diet from eating disorder to restrictive eating to if it fits your macros and counting macros. And now I have this extremely healthy relationship with food where I don't track anything. I eat based off a feel and what's going to make me feel best. and if I want to indulge in something and go for dinner, like last night I went to dinner with my wife, my brother, my dad, and we grabbed some burgers and some chips and guac and some margaritas, you indulge. You have some fun, you know, but I make choices based off what makes me feel best and I can truly say now I eat intuitively, but I had to go through all those stages

to get there. Yes. And I really want to dive into that because I think a lot of people struggle with that. Yeah. So, um, it's a lot of, um, you know, Intuitive eating, and, you know, I wish we had a better term for it because it implies that we have this natural intuition and that we're going to know what we need to eat all the time. Well, that's not necessarily true. It has to be something that you develop over time and there's a process of doing this. Right now, for the average person, intuitive eating is based off of what's going to, what's the most palatable. because this is really what we've learned in terms of values of food. This is what we value food for.

It's really it's palatibility. This is what we learn in modern societies. So it's like you talk to your friend and they say, hey, let's grab some lunch. And you say, well, you know, what do you want to eat? Oh, Mexican. Oh, I don't know. That doesn't kind of sound good.

Let's try Chinese. Maybe what about pizza? Yeah, let's do that. Right. So all the values that we've placed on food really surround palatibility. How palatable is that food. But food, although palatability is a value, there's nothing wrong with that value.

There are many other values that food provides that we're just unaware of. And so you can't intuitively eat until you understand all of those values. Because otherwise your intuition is based off of palatibility. What's going to taste the best? And this is why when I say intuitive eating, some people are like confused. What do you mean with that? You know, my intuition tells me to eat donuts all day long. Well, that's because your intuition is based off of what you understand about food.

So we have to learn all this other stuff. you brought up the four stages of learning, right? And these are, by the way, these are the four stages of learning anything, not just nutrition. They start with unconscious incompetence. So what that means is you don't know what you don't know. Okay, and that's where people start off. They just, they don't know what they don't know.

So you have to move in the next phase, which is very easy to do, which is conscious incompetence. So you start learning about calories and macros and other, you know, attributes of food. And you start to say, oh, okay. you know, chicken has protein and rice has carbohydrates and then olive oils got fats and avocados have a lot of fats and there's some fibers and you start to learn this kind of stuff. You start to learn that you didn't know all this stuff. Okay, so here's all the stuff I don't know.

And then you move to the third stage, which is conscious competence. This is the tracking stage. Counting my calories. How many calories am I burning? What macros make me feel the best? Okay, I need to eat this many grams of protein. Oh, if I do, I feel this well, oh, this many grams of fiber. If I don't eat this much fiber, my digestion's off.

And so you're consciously competent, okay? And that's okay, but don't get stuck there. Because it would be like you and I consciously being competent of our breathing or are blinking our eyes. Like, you know, how stressful that would be if you had to constantly think about taking every single breath. In fact, it probably made it feel weird for you now just by mentioning it, right? We want to move to stage four, which is unconscious competence, a relaxed,

intuitive way of living with food. So how do we get there? Well, we first need to start with understanding what's in food. We also need to start to understand how food affects us in all of the ways that it affects us. So yes, there's palatibility, the enjoyment of eating food. There's also how does it affect my energy, my mood, what kind of mood am I in when I want this type of food, my cravings. What about my digestion? Do I sleep better? My skin, my athletic performance. Like there's a many, many, many things that food can affect. Start to pay attention to those things. And in the book I write, you know, I give people methods like at first it has to be a very conscious thing. You have to take notes and write things down and pay attention and be aware.

For example, you don't want to eat in an unconscious way. In other words, eating while you're on your phone or watching TV. Fact studies will show people will eat about 15% more calories when they do that. So no distractions. Just eat your food. Pay attention how you feel before, during, and after. Pay attention to those things. Start to eat in ways that you think are going to make you feel healthier,

which typically means for the average person, reducing calories, maybe increasing some proteins, increasing some fibers, having whole natural foods. Start there. Now, as you go through this process and you start to pay attention and see how you feel, also understand this. You are not eating in a way because you hate your body. So if you want to lose weight, don't think to yourself, I want to eat in a way to lose weight because I hate myself. Think to yourself, I want to eat in a way to lose weight because I love myself. Okay. Loving yourself means you're honest. So you can say, yeah, you know, I'm a little heavy probably

because I haven't really been taking care of myself. But now I want to eat in a way that I think is best for me. That's going to be good for me. I want to eat in a way that takes care. of me. Usually that means you're eating healthy food. Sometimes it means you eat like you did the other night when you go out with your friends and you're connecting with your family. Right? That's, there's nothing wrong with that either. That's also part of health. So those are that, that's the process of getting too intuitive eating. Once you practice this long enough and none of us have done this. Most of us have not done this in modern societies. Nobody taught us this, right? Again, it's all about what we craved. But once you go through this process, then you start to find that you start to,

I use the word crave, you start to crave foods for different values. For example, when I travel, like right now I'm traveling, I typically don't eat as many well-cooked vegetables. They're hard to find, right? You go to a restaurant, you're going to eat. I'm at the airport. It's not like I can find a place that's going to serve me like well-cooked vegetables, right? Usually it's missing from my diet.

When I get home, I actually crave well-cooked vegetables. Why? Not because it's the most palatable. Obviously pizza is going to be more palatable. in a bowl of, you know, well-cooked broccoli or rapini. But rather, I crave it because I know of its effect on my digestion. I actually want it. I actually want to eat it because it feels good on my digestion.

I've done that to myself, right? This is what ends up happening over time. What does this look like long-term? Balance. This looks like balance. You're out with your friends and everybody's eating pizza and they say, hey, do you want a slice of pizza? And now because you're more aware of how it affects you.

you and maybe it's just maybe pizza really messes up your digestion you get really bloated you feel like crap the next day and so you say no I don't think I want any pizza that does that mean you don't acknowledge you'll enjoy eating it now of course you know you're going to enjoy eating it but you also understand the other things that happen so you say I don't want that pizza what a different how different is that from saying I can't have that pizza right you're saying I don't want it. Or you're with your friends and they're ordering pizza and you haven't seen them in a while and maybe they digestive issues.

Not that big of a deal to you at the moment. Right now at the moment, I want to enjoy myself with my friends. We haven't had a slice of pizza in a long time. Yes, I'll take a slice of pizza. It looks like balance, right? Hey, would you like a glass of wine? You know what? Yeah, we're hanging out together.

I want to bond with my friends. I think I'd like a glass of wine. Or, you know what? I'm not feeling so good lately. I think I'd skip the glass of wine, right? it looks more like balance, probably what you experience now, where for the most part, I can guess you probably eat pretty damn healthy. But the occasional time you go out and the value of the food is less about the physical health benefits and maybe more about the mental health benefits or maybe about the bonding with the people around you, right? So when people talk about diet as being balanced, that's how you develop balance.

Otherwise, it's on or off. otherwise you're the orthorexic where everything has to be perfect or you're the person that's like that only values food for its palatibility and you didn't even pay attention to the other stuff or at least it doesn't ring a bell to you so it's all about palatibility so you always eat foods that don't serve you physically right that balance comes from understanding these things and it is a process it definitely is a process but what it doesn't look like at the end is this I'm dieting and I'm extreme and I'm restricting you know you ever wonder why when someone goes off a diet. Like, let's say someone's on a diet. So they avoid, let's say they're avoiding sugar. And let's say their favorite thing to eat is Oreo cookies. But they're like, I'm not having any Oreo cookies because I'm on this crazy diet. And then they go off the diet.

Do they have one Oreo cookie? No, they have a whole sleeve of Oreo cookies or a whole box of them. Why does it look like that? Why does it look like two extremes? Why is it that the person doesn't say, you know what? I want to have a couple Oreo cookies and they eat a couple of them. You know what's funny about that. When they eat that whole box of Oreo cookies, how do they feel afterwards?

Terrible. And they know it. Oh, my God. I've done this before, right? Why did I do that? I feel horrible. Oh, why did I even keep going? I was full, but I kept eating.

It's that relationship with food. It didn't start in the right place. When it starts in the right place, and when you develop it the right way, you start to develop this balance over time. But it does take practice. It does take practice. And by the way, food manufacturers know this. Their marketing does this to you, right?

Although palatibility is one thing that is a value in food that we enjoy, food manufacturers know that they connect their food, that they can connect their food to other things and that'll make you want to eat more or less of it as well. For example, when you go to the movies, you tend to crave popcorn. I never want popcorn otherwise. But when I'm at the movies, I want that movie theater popcorn, right? What about beer commercials? It's like, we're at the beach, hot chicks.

We're hanging out, right? you know, let's connect our beer to whatever. Would you, what about chocolate ice cream? Would they ever show a commercial, well, they're serving chocolate ice cream in a toilet? No, because you would associate it with something totally unappealing, right? So this works. Think about, here's another example.

There's probably foods that you have associated, you have positive memories associated with from childhood that for all intents and purposes probably are not that good. They probably don't taste that good, but you like them because they remind you of when you were a kid. we all have those foods, right? For me, it was spam sandwich. Like, spam is disgusting. It really is. But when I was a kid and I stay home from school and I was sick, my mom sometimes would make this spam sandwich. Well, for whatever reason, I have that association so I can enjoy eating it when I know

that the taste of it's actually not that good, right? For me, at least. So these things, we already know that they can happen. You can do this with yourself, with your nutrition, by going through this process of being aware, taking note, you probably do have to go through the process of tracking. You probably do have to become aware of macros and calories, but don't get stuck there. Move from there to the point where you start to learn what foods do to you, how I feel. This is what gives me the most energy. This is what gives me the most mental clarity. For example, I'm doing this show with you right now.

I know what I need to do before to be the sharpest before your show. I know if I'm going to work out really heavy, the kinds of foods I'm going to eat that are going to give me the best performance in my workouts. I know if I want better sleep, what to avoid in the evening, at least for my body, right? Once you understand these things,

you start to naturally crave and want the foods that serve you best. But you can't get there unless you become aware first. And that's why intuitive eating is a bit of a journey. But once you get there, it's a great place to be and it's a balanced place to be. By the way, like all the journeys we talked about today, it's never ending. Why? Because my body's always changing. Context is always changing. My needs are always changing. My body's going to respond differently to food. So as I go through this process, it's this constant balance of

learning, awareness, intuition. I was actually just having this conversation with someone in the office where you become very aware of your body, right? In the way it feels and you crave certain things. for example oatmeal like whole oats I had overnight oats for breakfast for about four years straight when I was in the army never affected me and then all of a sudden I started feeling the shift where when I would eat overnight oats my stomach would hurt

whole oats now destroy my stomach if they're ground up they don't you just become super aware of your body but I think a lot of people are stuck in that third stage of eating where they're tracking, they're micromanaging, and they don't, they don't ever see the possibility of getting out of that stage. And when you're in that four stage of intuitive eating and eating based all feel and craving things that your body needs and makes you feel better, it's hard to convey the way that

feels to someone who's in stage one, two, or three. Because people who are in stage one, two, or three never think they're going to reach that stage four. I think it's the hardest part, but knowing that you can go through it and get to a point where, like, I know what my body craves. I know I crave fruit multiple times a day. If I'm craving something sweet, I want like a pineapple because I just know it makes me feel good. I'm not craving gummy worms because I know that won't make me feel good, but I'm craving, like, nutrients. I crave nutrients, like after my runs in the morning, I'm craving something that's just dense in nutrients.

I feel fueled. I feel better. But I think that's something that's really hard to learn, but anyone can learn it. You can. And, you know, I'm glad you mentioned the gummy worms. Because there are a couple things that I think are universal for most. It's probably a good idea to largely avoid, when you're going through this process, to largely avoid heavily processed foods.

Now, here's why. Is it because heavily processed foods are inherently unhealthy? No, not necessarily. although for the most part they are less healthy than whole natural foods. That's not why it's important to avoid them. It's important to avoid them because heavily processed foods are heavily engineered to overcome your systems of satiety. They're engineered to make you eat more and they're really damn good at it.

Like most of the money that goes into a Dorito chip, most of the research and development is in making it so hyper-palatable that you end up eating more. They've done some really interesting studies around this, by the way, where they take, there's a couple that are brilliantly done where they take groups of people and they stick them in rooms. And I mean, everything's monitored and tracked. One of the problems with dietary studies is they're often self-reported. And those are notoriously inaccurate. But this one, they were observed. So they took two groups of people.

And group A was in a room with whole natural foods. And group B was in a room with heavily processed foods. So like foods that come in boxes and wrappers and that kind of stuff. And they even matched the macro somewhat. So it wasn't like it was all carbs and all proteins or whatever. It was like pretty balanced. They had the groups in there. They had them live in there.

And they said eat as much as you want or whatever. And then after a few weeks, they had them switch room. So group A went into the other room and then group B went into the other room. And they observed them. And you know what they found? Heavily processed foods leads to about 600 more calories a day in consumption. 600 more calories a day. So if you're trying to learn how to be intuitive with your body,

you probably don't want to throw foods at it that are engineered, both chemically and through even natural flavors and stuff, in ways that will hijack all of that stuff, because they do make you overeat. I like to use this example. I had Chris Cressor on the show years ago, and he used this example. I thought it was brilliant.

Imagine if I gave you five plain, no salt, no butter, baked potatoes or boiled potatoes, just five boiled potatoes, plain as hell. And I put them in front of you and said, eat all five of them. It'd be really hard to do that, right?

You'd start gagging after the third potato. Very hard. Really, really hard to do. Now, if I gave you a family-sized bag of Lays potato chips, and I said, could you eat this old bag?

You probably could. Here's the kicker. There's the same amount of potatoes in that family bag, family-sized bag of potato chips. Same amount of potato. In fact, there's more calories

in the Lays potato chips because of the oil that they use to fry the chips in. Yet you can eat the bag of chips, but you can't eat the plain potatoes. That's the power of heavily processed foods. So it's a good idea to avoid them. First off, avoiding them,

you'll probably drop your calories anyway. It was a wonderful trick I would do with clients. I'd say, don't worry about how many calories you're eating. Here's what I want you to do. Just avoid heavily processed foods, eat as much as you want, and they'd all lose weight. And they'd be like, what's going on? Then I'd explain kind of the process.

But if you're trying to learn your body and how your body, you know, craves things and what works for you, whatever, you probably want to avoid these foods that are more like drugs than foods in the sense that they get your body to, they overcome your systems of satiety. So avoid those, that'll help you along this process a lot faster. So that's kind of one universal thing I like to communicate to everybody. I had this conversation actually with Dr. Paul the other week. And it made me think of road trips.

You know, you go on a road trip, you go in the gas station. And you grab like, it's usually my wife will grab like a bag of chips or something. And as soon as it's cracked open, I know I'm not going to stop eating that bag until it's gone. Yep. You reach your hand in, you grab one. You're like, I'm done. No more. Three minutes later, open up the bag again, eat some more. And you just keep eating them. You just can't stop. And you can't, like as many, no matter how many times you say, no more, you keep open that bag up and you keep putting your hand back in there. Yep. Yeah. Yep. There's this weird belief that humans, because we evolved in nature where calories were hard to come by, that if you just put food in front of us, we'll just eat all of it. That's not necessarily true because overeating would have hurt you just as much back then as it did today. Maybe not as available, but you could still overeat, hurt your digestion, cause problems. That's death, right, in nature. So we still hit a satiety point. And with whole natural foods, you hit that satiety point way.

before you do with heavily processed foods. You just do. And there's other ways to hijack it. Like you could switch flavors. Like you could go from salty to sweet. Like how many times have you eaten a big dinner and you're stuffed? And they bring out dessert and you're like, oh, I can eat more, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So it's, and these are interesting things to become aware of and understand. Once you become aware of them, then it's easier to develop that balance with nutrition. It's easier for you to have a more. By the way, intuitive eating is probably not going to make you shredded, right? You're not going to have a six-pack from intuitive eating, but you're going to be relatively lean and relatively healthy. Now you want to go get shredded?

Okay, go track your calories and you can go on those extreme, you know, bouts. But your home base is back to being intuitive, right? Extreme performance. Yeah, you're probably going to have to track some stuff if you really want to be like the best at a particular endeavor. But what about how do I live most of my life? Intuitive. I live most of my life in this balance intuitive. unlike many people who do get shredded for photos,

they don't have a home base of intuitive, so it's either shredded or like really heavy, or it's high performance or nothing, right? I'm either training and eating like an extreme athlete or I'm not doing any of that stuff, right? So that's what we're trying to avoid here. Earlier you mentioned, I think it was before we start recording,

some controversy behind if it fits your macros and what you guys touch one. Is that because if it fits your macros, keeps people in stage three and doesn't allow them to reach stage four. Totally. It encourages the name itself if it fits your macros. And boy, did people get creative with what they could fit in their macro.

I was one of those people. Yeah. You know, like, oh, look at my bowl of cereal with cookies and this and that and there. And it sprinkle some weight protein powder on it. So now I hit my macro type of deal. It's just encouraging this kind of dysfunctional eating.

I'll say this. Like, I tell you what, there's more dysfunction in nutrition. in the fitness space than there is in the general population. That's true. I believe that 100%. 100%. There's more eating disorders, more dysfunctional body image issues in the fitness space. Now, they may look shredded and whatever, but believe me, they're not very healthy with it. And it's the dysfunction in the opposite direction. So what we're looking for is balance.

You don't, you want to be relaxed with your nutrition. What I mean by relaxed is it feels calm and easy, not stressful. You ever, you ever hang out with someone who's like a macro counter? it's not calm. It is stressful. It is no, it's got to be this, got to be that, or I take my food with me. It's like, okay, I get that if you're, you know, you're four weeks out of a show,

but you ain't got that going on right now. You want to live like that for the rest of your life. That's crazy. Orthorexia is a real eating disorder. Orthorexia is where everything has to be perfect. It's also dysfunctional also. So, yeah, that was the issue we had with IIFYM was that that they were not talking about that piece.

It was like, here's the answer. track your macros, make it fit your macros, now you're perfect. No, not really. So do you think it's an issue when, I mean, there's so many online coaches right now, right? The fitness space. And a new client goes to these online coaches, the first thing these coaches do is put them on macros. And if I was someone new to the fitness space, and I hired a coach and that coach says you have to track everything you eat and hit these numbers or you're going to fail, I'd say, well, I'm done. I quit.

Do you think that's an issue? I think it depends on who you're working with. think it's an important part of the process because people still need to know. They still need to understand, you know, what grams of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates do for them. What's the best ratios? How their bodies feel. They still need to be aware of what's in the food, but you just don't want to get stuck there. So if I'm coaching someone through this process, and it depends on the person, sometimes tracking is just too much. So I'll say things like avoid heavily processed foods.

When you make your plate, eat your protein first. You know, I'll give people like more general guidelines. But if they're the kind of person that responds well, we'll do macro tracking, figure that out.

But then slowly I take them off. Once they've mastered that and everything's great, okay, here's what we're going to do. I only want you to track on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

And then I only want you to track on Mondays and Wednesdays. And now I want you to stop tracking. And then it's a slow process of getting you more to this intuitive place. I like that. Well, I appreciate it, man.

Honestly, as I was reading your book, I connected on every level. Awesome, thanks. Of strength training and the importance of strength training. I truly believe everyone should be strength training. Even if you're endurance athlete, you need to be sprinkling and strength training in there. And then intuitive eating.

And, you know, I've gone through the journey of all four stages. Feels great to be in stage four, I will say. But I love the book. I recommend it to everyone. Thank you, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Bear Performance Podcast. Please leave a rating and review on the platform you are listening to if you enjoyed it. It helps us to grow and reach more people with the intent of changing lives through the Go One More mindset. If you are ready to take your health and performance to the next level, head over to BPNSups.com to take the first step. We offer a wide range of effective supplements to help you perform at your highest level, built on quality, and proven by results without compromise.