Weights and Plates Podcast - #2 - Where Does Your Diet Information Come From? Context Is Everything

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Starting Strength Coach and Registered Dietitian Robert Santana continues the introduction to Weights & Plates with a "plates" episode, this time about the source of your nutrition information. Where does it come from, and have you considered the source of your information? These days we are inundated with information about what we should eat and how we should train, from trainers, from celebrity actors and fitness models, from doctors, and doubly so on the internet! Often the information is conflicting, even though it's littered with verifiable facts. It's no surprise, then, that many people feel lost when it comes to making sustainable, effective changes to their diet.   What's missing is many people lack the ability to sift through the sea of information and find that which is relevant. To do that, first you need to understand the context of where the information is coming from, who is saying it, and where they are coming from.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

Welcome back to the Weights and Plates podcast. This is episode two. I am your host, Robert Santana, along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Howdy, folks. And we are going to pick it up where we left off last week. Last week, we did a lifting episode or a weights episode. Today we're going to do a plates episode somewhat. I'm going to kind of lay the foundation for that at least. Yeah, circle the square on the weights and plates

name. Yeah, I think, you know, I think we talked a little bit about in the weights episode, the history of kind of the thinking about weight training and strength training and how that's evolved over time. Sort of physical culture, basically. Yeah. And it's interesting. Like we said, there's this mythology of training that somehow like starts somewhere. Like it's not even really sure where these ideas start sometimes but they persist and they get passed down and you know we go through these cycles of thinking one way is better than another way you know high reps low reps high weight low

weight and whatever pyramids sets across all this kind of stuff and it's funny if you look in the nutrition side of things, the exact same mythology is present, right? You know, there's like, as physical culture evolves, we go through these cycles of thinking about, well, fat's good, fat's bad, low carb, high carb, you know, high protein, low protein, medium protein. And so I think weight watchers. Yeah, right. It's just, it's an endless, endless thing. And it's, you know, it'll keep going And so I think weight watchers. How do you kind of take in all of this information about nutrition that's out there and then boil it down into something simple that you can actually act on day to day and build an eating plan around that? Yeah, no. Ultimately, when you kind of get down to the nuts and bolts of all this, like you said, there's a long history of various diets that probably dates back hundreds of years, I'm sure. And one has to wonder where a lot of this comes from, you know. So, today, the mainstream one is keto,

you know, 20 years ago, that was called Atkins, you know, and there's probably some nuance differences there. But for the most part, it's the same thing. It's a low-carb diet. I remember when I was in college and I first started college, it was a cyclical keto diet. So you were in keto during the week and then you're off keto on the weekends, but it was for guys with low body fat. And then there was very low fat or ornish back in the 90s. It was a very low fat diet. Then there was paleo. There was the zone diet. There was the Weight Watchers. There's this calorie counting. And now you get all these arguments about, oh, this one's better than this one. Low fat's better than low carb. Low carb's

better than low fat. Processed foods are bad. GMOs are bad. And you get a lot of clients that are just suffering from paralysis by analysis. And the way I like to approach this is, rather than sit here and talk about how diet A is wrong and diet B is right, which seems to be the popular trend in my business these days. It seems like everybody wants to debunk and become a debunker, whether it has to do with training or nutrition. I guess it's like a mainstream. To be fair, there's a whole industry of books out there. Gary Taubes, and then the guy who's the Sisson guy for the paleo, and there's always like a debunker that's popular, you know, and they sell a lot of books.

Oh, yeah. There's a whole lot of money in it. I mean, everybody's debunking something, you know, mainstream media, it's the same thing, you know, you got, you know, people that are constantly saying, oh, this is this way. And this is that way, you know, I don't really want to get into that whole can of worms. But, you know, we live in a society of people that want to debunk other people. I think it's fair to say in 2021, that is a definitely a trend that has emerged. And it's not new. I started seeing it a lot when Instagram was a newer platform. I used to hop on there to follow other lifters and see what people were doing. When I first got involved with Starting Strength, I met a lot of the coaches through Instagram, as well as the Starting Strength website. And when I got on there and started looking at other lifters outside the circle, especially as I started competing because I wanted to get some experience with competition, I started seeing all these various opinions about training. And the diet ones I'd already been more familiar with because I went to school for it. I've been reading bodybuilding magazines about it for many, many years.

I was not as familiar with training methodologies outside of your commercial gym pseudo bodybuilding program and what I, you know, stuff I talked about in episode one, you know, Arnold and the classic types of programs, but with, you know, with diet, I was more familiar. So anyways, not to go on a tangent, I've just kind of noticed over the last seven years that I've been on those platforms and there was so much debunking of this diet versus this diet, this training versus that training. And, you know, to a certain extent, that's what starting strength is. But, you know, he has a very defined system with a thorough analysis, which makes it unique. Yeah, well, exactly.

I think the key with starting strength is that it's built from first principles. He just doesn't say, you know, hey, I've observed X, Y, and Z. And it seems to be true that you can squat more weight using a low bar position. So that would be one claim, right? But he doesn't stop there. Rip goes on and actually builds up from the ground up. Okay, So let's figure out why that might be, um, and confirm our sense data with first principles. You know, um, he wrote an interesting article. I don't know when this came out a year or two ago. Uh, I think it was called the phenomenology of barbell training. Yeah. You can go find it on the starting strength website, starting strength.com. But, um, essentially what, what Rip was referring to is the idea of using your sense data, right? The things that you actually observe in the real world based on your experience. Some people call this anecdotal data, but it's still data, right? And that's the phenomenology is sort of observing the things that happen and then using that to guide using your experience to guide your your actions, like how you how you're going to formulate a training plan, how you're going to formulate a nutrition plan. And I think that's the one thing that's missing.

And what you're talking about is like there's so much information out there. There's so many facts that you can find now because of the wonders of the Internet. But there's very, you know, you can have all of that stuff, but if you don't have the context, you don't understand how all of those things fit together into the bigger picture, then it doesn't matter. Like you find these people, like you said, that they're, they run into analysis paralysis. They're spinning the wheels because they don't know how to actually put all of these facts that they've accumulated into a practical plan that they can do day to day. Right. So that's the conclusion that I came to after reading all these opinions,

reading about all these diets. Then I got into research and started reading into all the scientific research. And there's a lot of debunking there. You know, this group of scientists argues with that group of scientists. You know, there's these guys that think, you know, being fat but otherwise healthy is not bad. These guys think that no, obesity is bad at all costs. So, you know, I just started seeing this pattern. And then what I got from all of it was, well, they're all right and they're all wrong in different ways. So, there's context. Context is a big part of this. So, a lot of these diets aren't necessarily wrong. They might be wrong for most people though, you know, or they might be wrong for you, whoever the listener is, right? And, you know, you can sit there and say, yeah, on a keto

diet, you'll lose weight, you know, but on a keto diet, you're likely to get off the keto diet, you know, same thing with a very low fat diet and a very low calorie diet, you're likely to not stick to that long-term. So what's the context, right? Just like training methodologies, right? I think a lot of the recommendation for insanely high volume, high frequency training stems from the anecdotal experience of bodybuilders in the 70s and 80s that were also taking drugs. And it's worked well for that population. You know, drugs change your physiology. And by drugs, I mean, anabolic steroids, that's what well for that population. You know, drugs change your physiology. And by drugs, I mean, anabolic steroids. That's what I'm referring to.

But, you know, I said, I think I said it last week. The context of that is that you have, you know, a person who has good genetics for the sport, most likely, and is willing to take a lot of drugs and can tolerate a lot of drugs. But most people that hire me, myself included, are not taking drugs. So that programming is going to wreck the shit out of you and you're likely not going to see results. So the same thing with diet, right? So if you go on a very low carb diet and try to train heavy, you're going to bonk. I've seen this happen a lot. Sure, there's going to be that outlier that's going to leave a comment, say, oh, I did it. But where does that come from? Again, 70s bodybuilding. If you go to Rick

Drayson's YouTube channel, this is where I first heard it. I'll give him a shameless plug. I'm good friends with his wife. Didn't know he had a YouTube channel until my friend here in Arizona told me. So, you know, God rest his soul. You know, he passed, I believe, last year. But I was listening to him and he's like, oh yeah, back in the day, you know, he used to train at Muscle Beach with those guys, Arnold and that crew. And he's like, yeah, we would just, you know, take drugs and, you know, go low carb and then we'd get real ripped and they could do these hard shattering workouts. So, you know, that's when I started, I think when I started listening to him. It's so easy.

I started listening to him and some other people. I'm like, a lot of the stuff in fitness and bodybuilding and these strength sports is, you know, has been, these conclusions have been arrived at within the context of training on steroids with, you know, pretty decent set of genetics. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's good to draw that distinction because, you know, when we talk about diet, there's just a lot of gaps of information that I see out there. You know, there's a lot of misinformation, but there's just a lot of people that don't, they don't have a basic understanding of what, you know, what diet intervention even is, what it means and the fact that there are levels to it.

And so, you know, you go to the doctor for your annual physical and, you know, he's going to put you on the scale and he's going to plug your's going to plug your height and your body weight into a little calculator, and he's going to come up with your BMI, your body mass index. And if you're like me, I'm 5'8", shade under 200 pounds. My BMI is like 30. So according to the chart, when you look at the stats, they look at me and they're like, oh, well, you, sir, are obese. Clearly. Right. Yeah, it's a point of pride but you know the reality is i'm walking around and i'm five foot eight 198 pounds and i'm i don't know 16 17 body fat you know 18 body fat something like that i'm sub 20 and i'm i'm a young healthy male um i train i condition myself? It's out of sync with what

actual health is and what fitness is. And I think we're really, to properly unpack this, we're going to have to do a whole series of episodes, right? This is a long discussion, but just to kind of hit the highlights here, that's an example of how, kind of hit the highlights here. That's an example of how in from a medical perspective, from a statistics perspective, I can be obese, but it really doesn't describe much about my actual physical condition. Clearly, that's a big difference between someone who's, you know, six foot two and 275 pounds, but 30% body fat, right? We have a very different situation there, even though those two BMIs might be equivalent. So I think that just, you know, as I'm talking to you and listening, I think the theme of this episode, it really comes back to context. And most people receive

information from probably one of three places, entertainment of some sort, whether it's movies, receive information from probably one of three places, entertainment of some sort, whether it's movies, TV, sporting events, news media, slash social media, I consider them to be the same thing, or schooling, you know, academia, and that's where a lot of this information is coming from. So when somebody sees that an individual is a clinician of some sort, I'm a doctor, I'm a dietician, I'm a PhD, I'm a scientist. I think context gets lost there. So what does a doctor do? A doctor works with people that are ill or injured or hurt or, you know, they're there to help people get physically better in one, in a way, shape or form. But typically you're dealing, doctors deal with acute situations. They deal with people that are very fucked up. So heart attack, stroke,

you know, broken arm, broken leg, gunshot wound. I mean, we're dealing with an acute situation. That is what their routine job looks like. You know, I worked in a hospital before. Routine job is, I mean, I saw a guy with a dent in his head once. It was the most bizarre thing. I didn't know a skull can do that. So, you know, when you're talking about clinicians, the majority of their business comes from people that are acutely

fucked up. Or in some cases, if you're talking about long-term care, you got people that are chronically fucked up, you know, either they're 80 years old and demented and can't really walk and they're very weak or they had a stroke or for whatever reason, they're confined to a facility. So either way, you're dealing with situations that are not normal living situations for people that are consuming this type of material, right? The average consumer is interested in, the average consumer of fitness material wants to look better naked and perform better physically. That's usually what you tend to get one way or another, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. Much of what's being taught at the academic level

is preparing you to be a clinician. So if you're going to school to be a PT, a physical therapist, that's, you know, six, seven years of school, maybe eight. I think it, how long this one girl I knew, this one girl that I knew, it took her seven years. So about seven years of school, six to eight years of school, depending on how long it takes you. And you're basically being taught to work in a clinic of some sort. And what that looks like is you're dealing with somebody that had a stroke, broke an arm, broke a leg, fucked something up pretty bad, and needs to learn how to move like a normal human being again.

If you're a dietician, you're dealing with somebody who just went to the hospital and had a heart attack, is probably going to have what you said going one ear and out the other because they had no intention of changing their diet. They just want to not die, you know, and you're going to educate them real quick and they're going to go home. And that's one of the things about clinical that I didn't like. It was too short of a visit to really accomplish anything. So it was just an introduction to diet or they were repeat offenders and they're on their third heart attack and they've gotten this before from the other dietician at the other hospital. and they're on their third heart attack, and they've gotten this before from the other dietitian at the other hospital.

But the point is you're dealing with a diseased human, and you're telling them how to eat to manage that disease. And the same thing, you know, with other disciplines. It's kind of the same sort of thing, you know. Like people don't go and hire a physical therapist because they have back pain. I mean, it's happening more now, I think. And the common complaint that I get is it still hurts. So, you know, chronic back pain and chronic obesity, you know, chronic back pain is to PT as chronic obesity is to a dietician, you know? Yeah. So basically this kind of shows a problem of, you know, a lot of people are looking to academic sources, which would be their family doctor, their, you know, their RD when they're in that

situation. And this information that they're giving you is, it's limited by a couple of things. Number one, it's in a very different context, as you mentioned, right, for very sick people. And the second thing is like, realistically, a clinician has, you know, maybe only a few minutes to interact with the patient. And so what are you going to do in those few minutes? Like you, you clearly can't steer and guide their, their, and build some basic principles for them of, um, of nutrition, right? All you can do is try to give them a few kind of highlights that hopefully they'll adhere to. And oftentimes like you have to, they're thinking about like, what can I say that without, you know, knowing that they probably will not follow up, um, what can I say that's, that's fairly,

you know, benign, right? So for instance, the, the, the, the physician who treats somebody who's had a muscle strain, right? It's like, well, you know, take it easy, right? Don't do any heavy lifting or anything like that for, and they'll give you an arbitrary amount of time, six weeks, whatever. Don't lift more than 20 pounds. Well, you know, it's, it, it may or may not be that the, I don't think a lot of times physicians are thinking, it's like, well, that's a hard, real, you know, that's a real limit that you have. I think what they're thinking is like, okay, I don't know what this guy's going to go off and do. I don't know if they have any idea of what they're doing, if they know what they're doing when they're lifting weights or exercising. I don't know if they're working with a competent coach. So I'm just going to tell them something

that, you know, is not going to mess them up and get them back in my office again, hopefully. Exactly. And so when we think about that in terms of taking advice from these people, When we think about that in terms of taking advice from these people, especially out of context, it's not so good. So when you, you know, don't listen to Dr. Oz. No. In other words. You shouldn't listen to him anyway.

Unless you're getting cardiothoracic surgery. Apparently he's very good at that. Yeah, right. But, yeah, no, I think the context definitely gets lost. So doctors, you know, they're very, very conservative with recommendations. They're dealing with people that are walking on the tightrope between living and dying. And we live in a litiginous society, so people like to sue them. I just actually got off the phone with a friend who told me that she was in a meeting at a dialysis center because she still works in that industry, a friend of mine that I used to work with in L.A. And the doctor told her that he had just gotten sued for the first time and that the people in the courtroom said that they sued him because they thought he had a lot of money and it got dismissed, obviously.

But they actually said that in the courtroom. And I'm like, people would say that in the courtroom? Like, it's okay. Then they asked if he'd take him back as a patient. Wow. Wow. So, I mean, it's just a random story that kind of ties in, but this is what's going through their head. It's like, okay, how do I minimize my liability in a sue crazy environment? And how do I minimize the risk this person hurt

themselves? Okay, don't lift more than 10 pounds. Well, the door that they're pushing open to leave the cardiac rehab centers requires about 50 pounds of force to push. This was actually published on, that's why I bring that number up. But it's more of, well, if they lift less than 10 pounds, they're definitely not going to get hurt because they lifted it, you know? So that's part of it. Right, yeah, exactly. But again, it's just understanding these people are very, very smart people. They have a lot of information in their brain, and they know how to deal with very complicated issues.

But again, they're trained clinicians to work in a clinical setting, like a hospital setting, right? And anything outside of there is not what's going to be focused on in your curriculum. It requires specialization. So, you have to dedicate time to learning that. Like for me, I'm a dietician, but most of what I learned that I teach my clients, I pretty much learned on my own and didn't really fit the context of what I was learning. So, like, you know, we tend to recommend lower protein needs when we're dealing with sick patients, you know? Sure. And when I was educated on dietary recommendations, I thought the protein was kind

of low. It was like 0.8 grams per kilogram. But again, context matters here because you're dealing with a person who's probably fairly active or lightly active at best, or somebody who's sick and not really moving, but, you know, has other metabolic effects that require a little bit more than 0.8. But do they need to eat as much as somebody who is beating the shit out of their joints and muscles every day? Or whether it's through weightlifting or playing football, right? That's going to change the situation. You're applying a novel stressor.

So it's not that the clinicians are wrong. It's that the context is lost. And then some clinicians will, you know, stretch what they've been taught to situations they don't have experience in. And that also becomes a problem. So you have, you know, non-clinicians making stuff up and you have clinicians becoming overconfident. So you have a real big problem there, you know, with their knowledge. So, you know, you'll have doctors say, oh, don't squat. Squat's bad for your knees. Okay, doctor, can you explain to me how to properly perform a squat

and explain how a properly performed squat is bad for your knees? I would like to get it. I mean, unless it's Sullivan, I don't know that I'm going to buy it, you know, that I'm going to expect a correct answer there. So, Dr. Sullivan is one of the few. Yeah, exactly. And think about it, it's right. If you're hearing this from a cardiologist, it's like, you know, maybe listen to him about your heart. And, you know, you can kind of politely, politely nod at his advice about your strength training regimen. So let's move on to our second source of information, right? The entertainment industry. Oh, yeah. So are you telling me that when The Rock gives an interview in GQ magazine that I shouldn't listen to his nutrition advice? Not any more than you listen to Arnold's. So Arnold's is actually not terrible, except that's not what he actually did.

So Arnold is actually not terrible, except that's not what he actually did. In the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, the recommendations are similar to what we tend to promote now, but that's not what they actually did. What they actually did was dumb shit. So entertainers and bodybuilders kind of fall in a similar category because what are entertainers paid to do? They're paid to entertain. So somebody like The Rock, his size is entertaining. He's a big fucking dude, you know? And if you're going to have somebody blow shit up and, you know, get in fights all the time, a big dude can do that.

Arnold kind of set that standard because the action heroes used to be smaller before him. So, you know, big dude blowing stuff up and beating people up is entertaining to a certain audience, you know? And in order to do that, he has to be big. The Rock happens to have a good genetic makeup. He almost made it to the NFL. So, you know, he's naturally a muscular guy, but then he's also a lot bigger than most naturally muscular guys. And he's probably on steroids and he's actually a bad example because I don't give a shit that The Rock's on steroids. You know, he'd be big without them. But there are guys that the guys that you really got to worry about aren't the huge guys like The

Rock because we acknowledge that, okay, Dwayne Johnson's an outlier. He's a big dude. His dad was big. He's probably on drugs on top of it. I'm more concerned about the guys. And I don't know what people look at now. Instagram's probably the closest analogy. But we talked about this in last episode. When I was getting into fitness, I read men's health, men's fitness. They had these guys with like washboard abs that were probably like 170 pounds and lean and airbrushed and tan. And my assumption was, oh, that's natural. That's healthy because men's health. Well, they're on drugs too, by the way, you know? Yeah, exactly. And that was something that took me over a decade to understand.

And it comes back to what is their job. Their job is to be on the cover of a magazine, so they need to look a certain way. So taking drugs and compromising their health in that way is no different than somebody playing football and compromising their health in that way. Getting hit all day and stomped on by 300-pound guys is not healthy, and neither is taking steroids. So that's kind of how I like to present it. It's context-dependent there. Again, the big theme of this episode is context, right? So if an actor is taking steroids, it's because he has to look a certain way on screen.

That's right, yeah. There's no moral dilemma with taking steroids to have visible abs and look ridiculous on screen because you're there to entertain. And if the steroid body is entertaining to the viewer, then guess what? $3 million and you take steroids for a couple months, why wouldn't they? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you think about too, these guys, their schedules are crazy, you know? So when Christian Bale, you know, it's like a pseudo method actor when he's got to go from you know 145 pound like you know some like weird psychopath role or something like that when he's got to be 220 for the next role and you know and it's five months until shooting right like he's got to do extreme things just

to fit his schedule and clearly the paycheck for him in the in the status it. But yeah, it's not, you know, listening to that guy do an interview and tell you how he's eating chicken breast and broccoli is not particularly helpful, right? Because again, the context of that is completely different. He's living a completely different lifestyle with completely different goals. Health is not one of them.

And, you know, he's really also, I think the other piece of context there that's true of entertainers is he needs to look good for that moment on screen when he takes his shirt off, just like, just like bodybuilders, right. They've got to look on good on the stage. You know, when they're taking, when they're doing the photo shoot, they've got to look good. That doesn't, you know, we kind of tend to, if you don't, if you're not aware of that world, we kind of tend to think that's what they look like all the time, but it's not true. That's not necessarily what they look like every day, just walking around in a t-shirt.

No. And the camera also makes them look more muscular than they are as well. People don't understand that. So Arnold, uh, when he got into Hollywood, he was 260, I think, on stage. I think that's what he competed at. And they wanted him to weigh 210. So believe it or not, when you're watching like Conan in Hercules, New York, when he looks massive to us already, he was only 210 there, which is, I mean, it's still a big dude. He's about 6'2", and he's 210 at like 9% body fat.

That's still a big dude. Right, right. It's not a small dude by any means, but the camera made him look 250 because they were concerned that if he was 260, he would look too big. So the same goes. So I remember when Rip telling me that Thor was a, you know, a casting error because he's 175. I'm like, Hemsworth looks huge in that movie. And then I, then I learned from some of my actor friends that, uh, cause I lived in LA. So I know a few people in the business. They're like, oh, no, it'll make you 20 pounds heavier, what they do with that camera.

And I remember when I got down to 165, they were telling me that I would look 185 on camera or 190. And I'm like, that's crazy. I can't believe that. I mean, I don't work in that business, but I've heard this from somebody as famous as Arnold in his book and then a friend of mine that works in the industry. So that's kind of a thing that is also not considered. They're not that big in real life or that ripped either. There's lighting, there's, you know. Yeah, exactly. There's, there's a lot of ways. And, you know, I think, uh, we kind of talked about this with, uh, Brad Pitt, right. When he shot that famous, that now famous scene in Fight

Club, it's like that guy, probably, I don't know, but I'm going to take a wild guess here. That guy probably was super dehydrated, you know, was on caffeine and cigarettes and no, you know, he hadn't touched a carb in like four days. And, uh, and so for that moment, you know, he was able to shoot that scene and the guy probably went on an IV drip right afterwards, right. You know, just to rehydrate, um, very common with bodybuilders too. I mean, you? You know, just to rehydrate. Very common with bodybuilders too. I mean, you can go on YouTube and look at bodybuilding shows and there's guys passing out on stage. There's guys having tremendous like muscle cramps mid show. It's wild. So, you know, I think it's worth pointing all this out because a lot of people, you know,

if you're not aware of the man behind the curtain in the entertainment industry, I'm not even aware of everything. But I'm aware enough, I know enough people in parts of the entertainment industry to realize that it's all an illusion. And if it's an illusion, then we can't extend what these people look like and what they do, even if they're telling the truth, right? And they don't have an incentive to tell us the truth, but even if they are, it's still not relevant to what do we do day to day in our just regular everyday lives when we sit down and we have our three meals and a snack or whatever it is. We need a different source of information in a different context to understand what we need to put on the table tomorrow and over the weekend. Exactly. And the average diet

coaching or training client has a full-time job, doesn't have a lot of time, is going to probably train two to four days a week in most cases. And they're probably not going to want to take drugs either, which is not something that I advocate for as well, unless you have, you know, if you need hormone replacement, then get on it. For full disclosure, I've never experimented with drugs. You know, I partied in college and messed around with, you know, weed and, you know, alcohol, if you want to count those drugs, I've never taken steroids at all. And if I were to try that out, I would totally disclose that because I have no reason not to. And because of that, you know, I've been training

and applying stress under the bar for almost a decade. I was telling somebody the other day, I'm like, I've been training this way for eight years now and knock on wood, I haven't had an injury to knock me out of it, but I did diet unnecessarily in the beginning. So it kind of slowed down some of that rate of progress, but it's given me a lot of information to educate others on it because much of – through that process of training for eight years and continuously trying to make progress, I started to learn how much I've been lied to or how much I – not so much that i've been lied to i learned how much i was missing from the picture that was being delivered by most um pop media and fitness uh industry publications and that was the biggest thing i didn't understand what drugs did none of my friends did drugs i never sought them out so like i didn't understand what they did all i looked at was oh look at this guy he used to be fat and then he got ripped and i'm like well how did he get all that muscle? I guess I have to train, right?

And then I'd read about all these diets, right? So you mentioned Hollywood, right? So yeah, when you're talking about an athlete or an actor, their job is not to go and work as an engineer or a banker and come home to their wife and kid and then train for an hour. Their job is to play basketball or football or get really jacked for a movie, for a Marvel movie. That's their job. So a lot of people compromise various aspects of their health for their job. There are people that don't sleep that work office jobs. That's not healthy. There are football players who get banged up all day and boxers that get hit in the face. That's not healthy. And in the context of bodybuilding and pretty much any sport, steroids are also not healthy. But you got to understand that just because these guys are heavily active doesn't mean that they're not compromising their

health in more than one way beyond just taking steroids. So for the rest of the world, though, we just want to look decent, you know, look like we train, you know, and we want to look like we train and feel better and be able to function out in the world. Like, you know, I don't want to train, you know, a 45-year-old man, father of two small children, to do a powerlifting meet every three months because I don't want him throwing his back out every time he plays with his damn kid or getting, you know, a Charlie horse in his hamstring just from, you know, bending over to pick something up. And I've certainly experienced some of that myself. So I've had to dial my training when you get really advanced. You know, I was telling you

last night between our call, you know, I only need like one heavy set a week or one heavy set every three weeks, you know, so I'll squat once I'll deadlift once I don't do very much. But part of that too, is if I did more, there's ways that I can probably do more and get away with it. Uh, something's going to suffer in probably do more and get away with it. Something's going to suffer in the gym. One lift will affect another one. And then it's really hard to do things, you know, outside of the gym. And that's something that I noticed with getting stronger and stronger and stronger.

There comes a point where you have to prioritize where you want to put your resources. So I kind of digress. I kind of, you know, kind of like went on a tangent there. But diet-wise, the way that a normal person that is not on drugs and, you know, works, typically works a full-time job and is on a quote-unquote normal middle of the bell curve type of schedule has to eat is different than, you know, a full-time actor or bodybuilder or professional athlete on steroids. You know, things change. So let's start with protein, right? So the old fitness publications would say you need three to 400 grams of protein a day or some crazy amount, right? And then low

carb is very, very popular too. You get these, you pop open a bodybuilding magazine, they tell you how ripped they got on low carb and look at all their muscles and veins and all that, you know, and you hear about the stuff they do to get on stage. But you know, that's in the context of taking drugs. When a normal person does low-carb, physical activity gets very hard, and vigorous physical activity becomes next to impossible. This is why I tend to be against low-carb diets for highly active people. And that's not just lifters. I'm talking about any type of athlete that does something that's harder than, you know, something that you can do and have a conversation while doing.

Right, right. And again, you know, when you read popular magazines that are geared to the general public, it's like, well, we know the general public is not exercising with any sort of intensity. And so if the low-carb diet is working for somebody who's trying to lose 15 pounds, it's like, well, yeah, sure. I'm sure it does, right? Because there's a lot of carb sources that people eat that are also high in calories, right? And not pounding the potato chips at night is probably going to produce some moderate weight loss in that general population that's not training. But we're interested in health and fitness, so we're going to assume that you, dear listeners, are training and actually doing exercise with sufficient intensity to gain an adaptation, to get stronger, to get more conditioned.

And so the context, again, is different. So we can't really look at general popular news articles either and popular magazine sources, even outside of the fitness industry, right? So, yeah, I think that's, I think this is a great, great starting point when we, you know, before we start to unpack all of the details of nutrition is to think about the context of the information that you're getting. And, you know, I would say, go back and think about the things that you think you know about nutrition and unpack that. Think about like, well, where did I hear that? Where would that make sense? You know? Yeah. Or would it even make sense? You know, like, is this just sort of like one of these myths we talked a lot about in

the previous episode, these sort of workout myths, like, you know, you got to do a bunch of reps to get cut. Like, where did that come from? It's just sort of this thing that's floating around in the collective unconscious, right? So I would say, like, let's put all these things on that you think you know about nutrition, put them on trial and see if they hold up and then see if you can identify where did that information come from and ask yourself, what's the context of where that source of information is coming from? What's the context? And does that really make sense for me? Which is, you know, we're going to call you an athlete, even if you're just training to look good and feel good, and you're not competing in a sport. Compared to the general population,

you, if you're listening to this podcast, are training in a capacity and so your your needs are going to be above average and different from the general population so ask yourself that context question as we start to unpack this stuff and you're also not going to be at the level of an athlete either so that's another thing we run into right you're gonna uh require an elite athlete for sure yeah yeah an athlete is training for probably i don't know six to eight hours a day they have double workouts they're several hours long they're moving non-stop throughout the day you know that's different that's not the person who goes to the gym and trains for one to three hours you know and usually it's more like one to two i'd say three hours is are outliers within the gym population gym goers are typically in there

for typically 45 minutes to two hours, depending on what they're doing. And that's not an athlete, you know, but that's still, you still require more than the sedentary couch potato eating Cheetos, you know? That's right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny. It's like you're compared to the current state of the general population that, that is pretty intense to do that, to train three to four days a week for an hour. But yeah, compared to an actual competitive athlete, that's not even close. No. Yeah, that's good. That's another nuance we need to add there. Yeah. I think that the more we talk, probably the overarching goal of this podcast is to add

context to a lot of these things because some of it is, with few exceptions, I can't say that any of it's 100% bullshit. I think that it applies somewhere in the universe, but I think context gets lost. When clinicians are talking, they're typically living in their bubble of working with sick people and people that are fucked up, you know? And when entertainers are talking, they're working in their bubble of getting a certain way to entertain and ignoring some of those variables that are involved in that when i talk i'm thinking of the guy who has to do a bunch of other shit and lifting is a small part of their life so that's really who we're trying to reach here absolutely and um you know

i think uh i think you're in good company dear listeners because um that's me you know it's like i'm a barbell coach and i do this thing professionally, but I mean, I've got a lot of other stuff going on in my life. I'm not a competitive athlete. So, um, uh, I think that's an advantage in that, um, I understand those, those concerns and constraints. So, well, I think that's a good place to leave it off. You know, like I said, there's a whole lot of stuff we got to unpack here with this nutrition episode. So, um, this is just a quick hit, um, an introduction to more to come. I think we need to go deep on sort of the, the building blocks of nutrition in the following episodes, you know, talking about, um, basic macros and strategies and like, you know, I think just maybe even learning how the body works and how metabolism works, um, would be interesting to dive into. Yeah, no, I think that'd be good.

I mean, we kind of scraped down a little bit, maybe not really a true plates episode, but, you know, kind of, uh, introduces the topic and really hammers home what our goal is here and who we're talking to. Um, I'm not talking to the academic researcher or the pro power lifter, although some of the stuff we talk about here could apply to that person. So maybe pick a different sport. I'm not talking to the pro athlete who's in the NBA or aspiring to be.

And I'm also not talking to the guy who has to get real jacked for a movie in a few weeks. I worked with one actor, but I got him in shape over a long period of time and it wasn't for a show. It was personal in nature. So, yeah, no, we're here to help the average consumer of fitness information. The average gym member, you know, the guy who has a job likely has a family and this is a maybe 10% of their life, you know.

All right. So let's wrap up here. of their life, you know? All right. So, um, let's wrap up here. If you want to find out more about Robert and wait, the weights in place business, where do you go? www.weightsandplates.com the underscore Robert underscore Santana on Instagram or weights, double underscore and double underscore plates at Instagram. Those are the three main places I check. And I'm also the nutrition forum moderator on starting strength.com. Okay. So you've got two Instagram accounts, the weights and plates and a, and your personal account. My personal accounts, the more active one I'm trying to, you know, really beef up the

other one, trying to find somebody to assign that to, because I'm really bad about it. It's good. I'll have to go follow you on that other one. I haven't done that yet. So, yeah. Excellent. Well, we will talk to y'all in a couple of weeks. See you then. you