Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 484 - Meathead Meat-Up ft. Stan Efferding, Shawn Baker & More!
Episode Date: February 18, 2021Our first ever Meathead Meat-Up on Clubhouse featuring Stan Efferding, Shawn Baker, Ed Coan, Matt Vincent and special guest Co-Host Chris Bell! More Meatheads than the Piedmontese Farm in Nebraska, th...is panel discussed the amazing benefits of a meat based diet, training tips and heard from a few fans that dropped in on the Clubhouse app. Follow @marksmellybell @nsimainayng and @iamandrewz on Clubhouse to catch the next time we cast on Clubhouse! Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What's up, Mark Bell's Power Project fam?
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Hey!
Microphone check. Hey! Hey. Hey! Microphone check.
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
And SEMA.
Oh, God.
You guys sound like the same person.
I was going to say, it's bad enough.
Yeah.
On Clubhouse, people won't be able to see us.
And the person that we sound like is a drunk helicopter pilot from Hermosa Beach.
Wait, really?
Mm-hmm.
The guy used to come to Sharky's every day at like eight in the morning because we somehow
sometimes had to work breakfast.
Completely hammered.
Hammered already in the morning.
And you come in and go, hey, like every like that was his greeting.
He's all excited.
And he'd always like say hi to me and Mark.
And he'd tell us like, you know, when I get my license back, I'll take you up my helicopter.
Yeah.
And we're like, why did you get it taken away?
He's like, I crashed on Venice Beach about 10 years ago. Oh,'re like we're not going on that flight that wouldn't be and he's
always drunk so that's where you guys got the hay from kind of interesting wow that's cool that that
has a story sharky is the source of everything i mean mark this wouldn't be here if it wasn't
for sharky's because big part of the story is andy yeah that's true oh wow well it still might
be here but it might not be in the same form the sharky's still there yeah oh it's indestructible
it even burned down and it came right back so mark what was the uh i believe there was a story
where you and somebody you were lifting with at the time you guys were planning on going to hit
whatever it was and you're like you want to go get pancakes instead and then you guys just said fuck it we're not
going to the gym i try to do the same thing too when will then be now soon you gotta lower it down
yeah go away That's amazing.
Hey, am I in the room?
Am I showing up in the room here?
Yeah, you're showing up in the room.
Just click that little mute button on the bottom right.
Yeah, mute it.
And then lower the volume on your phone.
Wait.
Okay, now it's allowed.
No, it already was muted.
Okay.
Are we on live now?
Yeah, we're on.
Oh, God.
People are hearing this. Is this thing on?
Welcome to Clubhouse, everybody.
Hell yeah.
So the thing is, the volume can't go 100% down.
So if you mute it and then put it off to the side somewhere.
Yeah.
Like one or two.
Yeah.
Maybe you need a chair next to them or something.
Do they need to look at it for some reason or is that how they talk?
No, they're talking through these microphones right now it's just so that way everybody can
see that they're on yep see i can hear me you can hear me i can hear you can hear your phone yeah
so you should put your phone in your pocket or something we should explain to the people that
we're going to speak be speaking through one account right now yeah but we're all on that
stage so the entire podcast including chris bell are all speaking through Mark Smiley Bell's account on Clubhouse.
But do you guys need your phone?
I'm confused.
No.
No.
No, I guess we don't.
Okay.
If you don't need your phone, then.
That's what I was trying to get you to do.
Why is this so hard?
Do you guys, you don't hear it over here, do you?
No.
I don't believe I hear it.
No.
No, don't hear it.
It's only up one notch.
Oh, and if it's down all the way, then you're muted. No, no, no. You're down. I can't hear it. It's only up one notch. Oh, and if it's down all the way, then you're muted.
No, no, no.
I can still hear it.
But you're down all the way, but the app itself will not let you go 100% mute.
Ah.
So if you ditch your phone.
You need to play like in a box or something.
Great.
Now we've got to invent a whole new thing just for Clubhouse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could shove your phone up your ass.
Probably won't hear it so good.
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
I got the big one, so it might not feel too good.
Put it in the fridge.
I put the phone in the fridge.
That story that you're talking about, Andrew, about me going to eat instead of lifting,
that happened many times, and that was at Steve Zaretsky's house.
When I first moved to the Sacramento area, I wanted to find a, I wanted to find a place, a power lift. And I put out a
thing on elitefts.com and a guy responded to it and he's like, I got a full setup in my garage.
And so I went over to his place and he opened up the garage door and it was like there was like a glute ham raise in there a reverse hyper a squat rack and uh have you ever trained
over there yeah he he's the best guy he was always so happy remember he was great he was
he was also he was kind of a mess but he was great he was also hilarious i remember uh
just one time so he was single at the time,
and I was like, well, maybe I'll hook you up with my sister-in-law, April.
And he's like asking questions about her, and I'm like, oh, well, yeah, she's beautiful.
And he's like, well, she kind of has big breasts.
I'm giving him the rundown, you know?
And he's like, wow.
He's like, okay.
He's like, this sounds pretty good.
He goes, how about anal?
And I said, I don't know,
but I'm like, I don't think so.
And he goes, well, no one's perfect.
So it went from big boobs straight to anal?
Yeah, I know, right?
The thing progressed really fast.
How would you know that about
your wife's sister?
You'd be like, yeah, sure.
Well, we talk about all kinds of stuff.
Guess who jumped in the room?
Ed Cohn.
Ed Cohn is in the house now.
I thought he was going to lift.
The strongest man in history.
I'm driving.
Oh, he's driving.
We love you.
Yeah, well.
What's going on?
We just wanted to have you on here for today to say what's up and to see what you're doing.
You're going to the gym.
What are you working on today?
I am just doing squats with like that giant cambered spider bar.
What's your squat at now?
What's your weights you're using now?
I don't wear a belt, and I use like a lot of the different bars to squat with to save my shoulders. So whatever makes it harder, I do because then I don't and I use a lot of the different parts of the squat to save my shoulders.
So whatever makes it harder, I do, because then I don't have to use a lot of weight.
Yeah.
So are you using 225?
Are you using 405?
What are you working with here?
225?
Well, I'm just asking.
You got two fake hips, man.
You're talking about using light weights.
I want to know what the light weight is.
My fake hips are fine. i go below parallel and everything i actually think fake hips
might be uh not necessarily an advantage but i think my hips work better now than they did when
they were real you know like a cyborg yeah i mean i i feel my hips feel great there's other things
on my body that hurt but not the hips at all. Yeah, I can actually go below parallel and not have a problem.
I think I'm going to go up to 500 today.
Okay, that's good.
I just want to make sure you're still in the game.
Enough to satisfy my ego.
How has your body been holding up over the last couple years?
Have you been relatively pain-free since the hip surgeries?
Yeah, my shoulders
took a beating,
but the,
I went to that bio-accelerator
place that got
100 million stem cells.
Oh, wow. And how did that work
out? Feel good? For the
left shoulder, it worked out really well.
The right shoulder got
some improvement, but not enough, so I'll probably go back.
Very interesting.
What do you think is one of the reasons why some of these young guys have come onto the scene in powerlifting
and just kind of obliterated some of the old numbers?
What do you think is some of the difference in some of the stuff that we're seeing more recently?
Equipment and mindset.
some of the stuff that we're seeing more recently?
Equipment and mindset.
Because once somebody does it, everyone else realizes it can't be done.
Ed, do you think that maybe YouTube and things like that have sort of sparked that?
Because back when we were growing up, I bought Powerlifting USA every single month,
and I would just die to see what you were doing.
I had to know what you were doing.
That was the only source of information.
Now it's like in your face every day, somebody lifting more weight,
somebody with a new technique, a new training thing.
I think a lot of that's really.
You know what?
It seems like the guys nowadays are a little more fearless than we were.
Yeah. They just go for it.
Don't give a crap.
They just load the weight up.
They're not scared, huh?
Yeah.
What about training techniques?
It's like whoever survives ends up being the strongest.
Anything different in training techniques, you think,
that's also maybe attributing some of this?
I think their routines are a little more scientifically backed up,
and they don't overtrain and go balls to the wall as much as we did.
Yeah, the biggest thing I see is just the training frequency has changed. back up and they, they don't over trade and go balls to the wall as much as we did. Yeah.
The biggest thing I see is just the training frequency has changed.
That's something I really never thought of.
Some of these guys are squatting three or four times a week and sometimes
even more.
And that's the stuff I think they got from the,
the old school Eastern block Olympic weightlifters.
Right.
Absolutely.
But it's the load.
All those workouts aren't, aren't balls to the wall.
Who do you think the best powerlifter in the world is right now?
Do you have your eye on anybody in particular?
With body weight and everything like that,
if you wanted to go like pound for pound,
it would be Fedesenko from russia because nobody beats him
at quiffed or raw no matter what he's won like uh 30 world championships jesus yeah john uh hack is
not john hack you're right yeah yeah he's uh getting close to benching over 600 pounds i think
yeah i know his last workout he weighed 21 213. He did a 573.
Damn.
And people didn't think that you were a big bencher back in your day,
but I think you benched 585 in training, right?
Yeah.
Bro, what do you think about all these kids?
Like Mark was saying, there's a lot of up-and-coming guys.
Like you look at, what's his name, Kaler Woolum and Jeremy Avila,
and people like just smashing the deadlifts lately.
That seemed to be the lift that's gone up the most.
Yeah, they mastered the bar.
With the hook grip and all that stuff, basically?
If Jeremy had a grip, he would easily pull over 900 pounds.
That's great to say.
If he had a grip, he would easily pull over 900 pounds. That's great to say. If he had a grip, he still...
Yeah, you know, that's his only little bit of a weakness. And Kaler has knee problems, so that holds him back. Yeah. Because if he could squat more,
his legs and hips would be stronger, which would transfer over to his deadlift more, I think.
In your career, how did you handle your assistance exercises?
Did you go out there really hard?
Did you try to push those up as well as the other lifts that the heavy compound ones?
I treated like I was going into a contest
like heavy behind the neck presses and
Then over rows and pause squats and stuff like that
How often did you go super heavy yeah i'd cycle
them just like a like i was going into the meat yeah in your training blocks how often was it
that you actually went and like hit your maxes because a lot of guys do that super often i would
i wouldn't do the singles for it but i would hit really really heavy fives and triples
for that push that intensity and those percentages up high.
And what about for the main lifts?
How often did you max out with those, the bench squat deadlifts?
There you go.
Hey, Ed, a couple years ago at the Olympia, we went to dinner, and we went to a Korean barbecue place,
and I was telling you about my new carnivore diet when I first started it.
And you were like, I kind of eat meat all the time.
Let's do it.
And you just basically ate with us.
You and Haga ate with us.
And you loved it.
And then we were talking about it a lot.
You said basically that's kind of been a staple of your diet forever, right?
Red meat?
Yeah.
I've always limited my carbs.
Like I'll eat all the protein on my plate to try to fill me up and then i'll
have a little bit of carbs or something afterwards and that's still continued today same kind of
thing yeah awesome i i go by everything i did in training and in nutrition i went by feel as long
as it was working and you know i got a mirror i never had to weigh myself i knew how i felt so if those two lined up properly i was like fuck i'm doing the right
thing why do i need a scale to look at do you feel that people can get maximum results on
carnivore or should they add in some carbs you know what a lot of that is uh personal and what
works best for you yeah sure like no one can tell like you can obviously get ripped
and taking carbs and you can obviously lose body fat and feel really good without them
so almost everything works if you're gonna do it hey ed purposefully did you ever like did you ever
purposefully not get fat when you were competing and lifting?
Because that that's one thing that I saw with you.
Even when you go through all the pictures of you hitting your PRS, you were never actually the fat type of power lifter.
Whereas, like, you know, you look at power lifting these days, like a lot of guys try to gain a lot of unnecessary weight to be strong.
How do you feel about that?
He's fucking five foot three.
I mean, are you really strong?
Your training work just wasn't from body weight.
We got Matt Vincent on here, too,
talking some shit.
I think he tried to slip it in that you're five foot two,
but we all know that you're five foot three,
so that's pretty mean.
Actually, I'm closer to 5'6".
When I first met Ed, he was already my idol,
but then he just went up a bunch of notches when I realized
the strongest guy in the world is the same exact height as I am.
And that was actually a big thing for me, you know,
having somebody you can relate to.
I just never give the fuck.
That's the easiest way to get through life.
What's going on there, Matt?
Not too much, guys.
How are you?
Great.
Doing great.
You got some questions for Mr. Ed Cohn?
Do you know who he is?
He's the guy that deadlifted 900 pounds and squatted over 1,000 pounds.
Do you remember that name?
Oh, he knows it.
He deadlifted in my shoes before.
There you go.
That's right.
Magical.
Yeah, what size shoe do you wear, Ed?
11 1⁄2 to 12.
What?
Is it true what they say about the hands and the feet?
It must be, because my feet, I only wear 10.
No, every time I have to go to the bathroom and pee, I cry.
It's like Ed's missing a few vertebrae.
I think he is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I'm missing more than that.
I think my favorite story is when Ed was 16 years old, he went into a powerlifting meet,
and he squatted 500 pounds, but he was so short that they had to lift the weight off
and put it on his back, which is just incredible.
I mean, that's hard to take a weight like that.
Yeah, that was my first meet.
Jesus.
That was like my favorite story.
It was like the very first day of powerlifting.
Speaking of meet, I think we got Dr. Sean Baker on here as well.
How's it going, Sean?
Yeah, guys.
Oh, there he is.
I'm out here walking around.
A little 10-minute walk, I guess.
There we go.
Just had five steaks for breakfast.
Hunting for vegans out there.
We got Ed Cohn and Matt Vincent here,
and we're just kind of talking about some power lifting
and talking about eating some meat.
Anything new with you, Dr. Baker?
Anything different about the carnivore diet that you've seen before?
I know for a little while you bulked up and gained a lot of weight,
and then I know I think that's more recently,
and I think before that you got all shredded up.
What are some things that you've changed with the carnivore diet
to elicit some of those responses?
I ate more.
You ate more calories? It calories it's pretty straight straight you know i mean i guess i was eating more dairy and eggs a little bit of that but i mean i mean it's just you know
you gotta eat more and to get less and to get lean you just had what leaner cuts of steak basically
yeah yeah exactly i tend to do some fat cycling where i would just go three or four lean days and then, you know, add the fat back in.
That worked pretty well for me for getting lean.
I mean, are you tracking calories at all, Sean?
I'm sorry, what's that, Matt?
Are you tracking calories at all between the bulk and the cut?
Like, any idea of what you did calorically?
Well, I mean, I think maintenance for me is about 4,000.
You know, bulking is probably about 6,000.
And then probably closer to 3,000 when I was weaning out.
That makes sense.
You know, it's like you train hard and, you know, you're going to need more, right?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, with doing that, did you really feel that the leaner cuts of meat made that much of a difference
versus just that already restricted pork intake?
Well, I think that was part of it.
I mean, I think meat is, you know, it's hard to get calorically restricted when you're eating fatty meat.
I mean, it's just harder.
Sure.
So, yeah.
So, it's just sirloin or something like that.
Yeah, sirloin and fish and stuff like that
i think about every three to four days you need that fat refeed otherwise you just
you know your body doesn't like it yeah i think for hormone support you know this is an interesting
thing that uh i mean i don't know if this stands out here but he would probably yeah they're in
so you know there's been some recent studies that come out i don't know if Stan's not here, but he would probably – there is Stan. So, you know, there's been some recent studies that came out.
I don't know how – my volume is really crackling up a lot.
I don't know if you guys can hear me.
Yeah, we can hear you.
We can hear you, yep.
Okay, so nice study out of Duke University, Stefan Van Vliet, who I interviewed recently.
They did a study looking at eggs, you know, looking at whole egg consumption versus egg whites, you know,
match for protein, essentially match for cowards
and they found that whole eggs had a better effect of eliciting muscle protein synthesis
than just you know egg whites alone same thing that same study's been done with milk whole milk
versus skim milk and we're seeing that the fat has a role in muscle protein synthesis so it's beyond
just you know uh protein so we know protein is obviously important but fat has a role in muscle protein synthesis so it's beyond just you know uh protein so we know protein
is obviously important but fat has a role in some form or fashion whether it's some of the nutrients
in there or the saturated fats themselves but fats themselves interesting stuff to stu phillips i've
interviewed with another giant in protein research also it seems to agree that fat has a role we
don't know what it is yet but but I'm sure Stan could wax about
the fact that eating protein is better, you know, as opposed to like a protein supplement. You know,
a lot of us, a lot of us would use that. You know, I, I, I don't know how many gallons of
protein powder I ate over the years. I don't do that anymore, but I mean, I think, uh, you know,
protein is great, but I think the whole macronutrient the whole food is it's going to give you a better bang for your buck
how's it going there stan at rhino efforting are you there i'm there there he is vegas it's sunny
doing my 10 minute walk too oh yeah amazing multi-cast it is three degrees here in st louis
yeah i'm in a snowstorm driving on the expressway right now.
Oh, good.
Stan, I saw you doing some heavy squats, I think, yesterday, like 405 for 20 or something.
What was that you did?
Yeah.
You did sets of 20s or something?
Focus on hypertrophy more than anything, so I don't look at that as being heavy necessarily.
It's heavy for everybody else in the world.
I know, but a 20th rep, I think it feels a little heavy.
Yeah, I've just been trying to do more range of motion.
Yeah, it looked great.
What's some of the reason for the 20s?
I know that you've been a huge fan of those for a while,
and you bring them in and out of your workouts frequently.
Why do you do them?
Well, a few reasons.
One of them is just the challenge on the cardiovascular system.
I just find that that kind of training, you end up burning a lot more calories, staying at a higher,
burning more calories even after the workout, the post exercise, uh, oxygen consumption,
the EPOC. And, uh, I just find that it keeps me really lean and conditioned. I don't like to do
a lot of cardio per se. I do my 10 minute walks, but it's not necessarily for cardio. I do it for
blood sugar control and digestion mostly, and, uh, to reduce DOMS and recover from workouts.
and digestion mostly and to reduce DOMS and recover from workouts but I like to get some get my heart rate elevated and so I'll do those workouts and include
some 20s so I can dramatically get that heart rate elevated kind of like a hit
workout but not too frequently maybe twice a week the fatigue is pretty
pretty intense the systemic fatigue when you do high rep sets like that.
What do you run in between sets,
Dan? What's your rest?
I try and keep it to three minutes
if I can. It's a
hypertrophy kind of phase.
I actually use rest
as
a progression component.
You can increase sets.
How many sets are you doing with that kind of.
And also measure your rest periods as something you can progress over time.
Might start four minutes down to three and a half and down to three.
You know, Stan, I'm curious about.
It's pretty interesting.
You know, because like, you you know you you have the body of
a young man right um yet you're like 50 something congratulations by the way uh but you know do you
feel that these 20s and these reps that you're doing are allowing or what do you think is allowing
you to keep your joints so healthy because you're moving this weight smoothly and a lot of young
guys are complaining oh my joints hurt yeah me and ch and Chris know it's multifactorial. I've talked about it in my
rant, uh, keys to pain-free knees. It's a lot of what I do outside the gym.
Uh, you know, the walks, obviously I haven't missed a walk in years or a recumbent bike,
something for the knees. And then the, the nutrition is a huge component of it.
Vitamin D, the sodium, the potassium is all big.
And then I think what's most important is that people are concerned their joints will wear out
or that they'll injure themselves.
A responsibly managed progressive resistance program should take into account
the fact that you don't want to overtrain and the joints take a little longer
to recover than the muscles.
And so you just have to be patient and progress that kind of movement over time
so that the body will adapt and allow you that extra range of
motion or those extra few reps and that kind of thing let me stand let me jump in here i've got
a little bit of experience by joining yes you do so there's some interesting data you know
well i mean there's some older data looking at german athletes and mri studies and they found
this patella cartilage actually got thicker in weightlifters. Yes.
We see that, you know, the patella cartilage is the thickest part in the body.
It's about four millimeters, about as thick as it would get.
We know that resistance training, at least in younger athletes, does seem to stimulate, enhance, or improve cartilage size.
So that may be beneficial.
So I think weightlifting is great.
The other thing is we're seeing that now, and you talked about nutrition,
there are studies out there looking at synovia sites, which are the cells that produce the synovial fluid,
which lines the joint.
They are impacted by high levels of insulin to where they start to secrete inflammatory
cytokines, which will accelerate the arthritis process.
So we know that what you're doing outside of it by managing your glucose, managing your
insulin, you're probably having a beneficial effect on the joint secondarily. So I think there's a lot to that. And I've kind of gone to,
I walk probably anywhere between five and 10 miles a day with my dogs working. And then,
you know, I don't, I tend not to sit down. I've kind of, this year I've gotten to where I just
don't sit down before 6 p.m. So I wake up, I'm up, and I stay upright the whole day.
The first time I'll sit down is like 6 p.m.,
and I think that's had a beneficial effect on just a number of things.
I think it's that cardiometabolic stuff that we do outside of lifting.
I think lifting is great.
I think everybody should be lifting weights.
The muscles provide secondary stabilization around the joints.
There's no harm in lifting.
I think it's just sort of belief that you're going to wear out your joints from lifting is nonsense.
Well, just the opposite is true.
If you don't lift or have some sort of resistance training over time, then they'll deteriorate.
Use it or lose it.
So it just has to be responsibly managed.
Dr. Baker.
Good technique and good range of motion is therapy anyways.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Dr. Baker.
We also have a lot of fake joints in the room here.
Yeah.
I know you've got at least three fake joints.
Yeah.
Well, you've got four hips and a knee.
Dr. Baker, you know, with you doing the carnivore diet for many years now, have you had to implement any other foods and or have you had to use any sort of supplements?
Do you supplement vitamin D or vitamin C or and if you don't need any supplements or other food, you know, why do you think this is?
Well, I think that, you know, I think, well, I mean, no, I don't.
I mean, outside of salt, you know, we can debate whether that's a supplement or not
and whether I really need it or not.
Whether I need it or not, I don't know.
I mean, I don't use the things, and I seem to be doing well.
I mean, you know, by the metrics I'm measuring myself by, things are going well.
In fact, I feel best when I'm just on straight red meat.
You know, when I'm eating eggs and dairy and stuff like that, it's okay. But I actually feel literally the best I ever do when I'm just on straight red meat you know when i'm eating eggs and dairy and stuff like that it's okay but i actually feel literally the best i ever do when i'm just
straight up red meat i think it's just a natural human food source i mean i think that's what we
evolved we evolved on that's what evolved you think about you know what were we able what did
we have access to 100 200 500 000 years ago we had a spear and we knew how to hunt big slow-moving
animals like mammoths for what we ate so So I think that's our food source.
And you can add the other stuff.
The other stuff is conditionally beneficial, which Stan talks about,
adding in carbs, simple carbs that are easy to digest.
I think there's a lot to that because the digestive tract is our main portal of access.
That's our main interface with the world.
Most people think that our skin is what we face the world with,
but our skin is designed to keep the world with our skin is designed
to keep everything out our guts are designed to bring things in most people don't realize that
our gut you know our esophagus all the way down to our anus is a tube that we are it's actually
external to our body we're wrapped around this external environment which is that interface and
so um you know i just think i think meat is where it's at, quite honestly. But I'm very, very disturbed to see the current political climate trying to force that out of the diet.
And that's coming.
And so I think as a community, we have to recognize that and literally fight for it.
Because I think we're going to be in a fight for it.
What about eating things that are disgusting, like liver and kidneys and pancreas?
Do we need to eat some of these things?
Or in your experience, has that not been the case for you?
So this is what's not been the case for me.
You know, I've done survey data on something like 12,000 people on this diet.
Only about 15% of the people regularly incorporate in their diet, about 15%, more than once a
week.
So I don't think it's necessary.
I mean, Harvard, the Harvard study on this diet is coming out in a few months.
I've seen the data on there.
I specifically and pointedly asked them to ask that question.
And I talked to the researchers about the outcome.
They said it made no difference whether they had organ meats or not with regard to clinical outcomes,
success of getting off drugs, or any kind of deficiency status.
So it doesn't seem to be necessary for the general population.
Certainly some people claim they feel better, and I think that's completely fine.
I don't dissuade people from doing that.
I just push back on the sort of the mantra
that you have to do it to be successful or to be optimal.
I don't believe that to be true.
It doesn't seem to be true for the vast majority of people.
It seems people love those type of things, right?
This like extra, well, you have to do the organ meet
for the spinal one or 2%, whereas realistically,
maybe that'll matter for someone who's dialed in like a stamp but it's not going to matter for your average guy who's trying to figure out a way to drop 200 pounds yes well and i say
you know i i would you know like i said i think the bigger levels you levers you can pull
get good nutrition you dial it in 90 and then you add the exercise and the sleep and the recovery
and the you know the daylight exposure i mean there's there's a lot of ways to dial things in
and i think you know i think the bigger triggers for me are exercise and eating right hopefully
good sleep stan with the vertical diet um meat is a big part of it meat and eggs uh what's the
advantage of eating red meat and what's the advantage of eating eggs? Well, there's a lot of reasons, particularly with women when they're restricting.
And it's either, you know, bikini competition or just your soccer mom who's cut her calories down to 1400 a day.
They tend to suffer from the female triad.
They end up with anemia and amenorrhea and osteoporosis.
suffer from the female triad. They end up with anemia and amenorrhea and osteoporosis. And one of the big reasons for that is that the little bit of calories that they're consuming isn't
micronutrient dense enough to provide them, you know, nutrients they need to combat those problems.
And so red meat is, you know, at least three times higher in iron and six times higher in B12
and nine times higher in zinc than, say, chicken as a comparative source.
Not that there's anything wrong with chicken as a protein source, but if you're restricting calories,
you need to maximize the micronutrients of those calories or you're going to be in a deficiency.
And, you know, popping multivitamins doesn't solve those problems because a lot of times those aren't as absorbable and they
don't have the cofactors necessary for digestion. So red meat was huge for that reason, beyond
protein, all of the micronutrients that are in it. And then I could adjust the fat content for
that individual over time. Might start them with a ribeye and then move them to a leaner, like say
New York, and then eventually move them to a leaner top sirloin. As they tried to progress through their
diet and get leaner, I would be gradually reducing their fat intake over time just to control
calories. But that was huge. And then the whole eggs, you know, in the industry that I was in,
everybody was eating egg whites. And again, particularly women would end up
with biotin deficiencies. And that's for skin, hair and nails. And along with the diet suppressing
the thyroid, they end up with their hair falling out. And so we kept the egg yolks in for the
micronutrient benefit of it. And for men, the choline, which is really important for preventing and reversing fatty liver.
And so those types of nutrients became, I thought, necessary or essential, particularly for people dieting, because they were the most nutrient dense.
Do you guys think that vegetables are kind of worthless?
I mean, I don't think they're worthless.
I think I think they're conditionally beneficial.
The way I look at it, this is a paradigm I look at,
anything that displaces junk food from the diet is a net positive.
Anything that displaces meat from the diet is a net negative.
Vegetables kind of fall in the middle for me.
If you tolerate them fine and it produces a satiety effect,
which is the classic bodybuilder thing,
load up on protein and eat a bunch of fibers, vegetables, so you're kind of full.
I mean, that's the benefit.
I don't think they provide any magical nutritional things that you can't get from animal foods.
I mean, that's been my experience.
But again, for some people, they're great.
They're great for diet.
Some people like that extra fiber.
You know, I don't believe they're necessary.
Sean, what about the polyunsaturated fats?
It seems like a lot of controversy right now that maybe there's some sources that it might be better fat sources than maybe coming from beef alone.
And a lot of people are arguing online if vegetable oil is good for you or bad for you.
I know Stan said that he doesn't eat it because it hurts his gut, which is a great reason not to eat it. But it seems like a lot of the things people have been preaching over the years
in carnivore and keto about vegetable oils being so bad have not sort of panned out in the science.
I was wondering where you feel like what you feel about that and should be people be eating like
nuts and seeds and supplementing with polyunsaturated fats at all. Yeah, I mean, I certainly
I think, you know, again, it's probably contextual. I mean, where are those polyunsaturated fats at all? Yeah, I mean, I certainly, I think, you know, again, it's probably contextual.
I mean, where are those polyunsaturated fats coming from?
Are they coming from highly industrialized processed seed oils, you know,
soy oil, corn oil, things like that, where you have, you know,
all these products of high heat, aldehydes and stuff like that mixed in?
Yeah.
That's probably different than getting it from, you know, say,
because there's polyunsaturated fats in meat, which is fine fine it's hard to find a fat source in nature that doesn't
have some amount of poly all three fats monopolyunsaturated fat saturated fats from nuts
and from other even fruit has some polyunsaturated fat so all those things probably are something
or at least designed to handle i think it's when you throw in the polyunsaturated fats in the context of processed food.
I mean, polyunsaturated fat consumption is a marker for processed food consumption.
Because if you go down to the supermarket and you pick up any packaged food, it's got
some sort of highly refined wheat, often a sugar, and then some sort of, you know, industrial
seed oil in there.
And I think when you include you include that that's a problem um a lot of people like to talk about the fact that it tends to suppress ldl uh you know
production yes which you know that's controversial whether that well most people think it's a good
thing i tend to think it's more nuanced and and it's sort of in contextual so i don't you know
like i said i don't believe that polyunsaturated fat from beef per se is a problem.
I think if you're eating it in the context of soybean oil, it's probably a problem.
Yeah, I guess what I was saying is that even with soybean oil and these highly processed oils,
there are people online like Kevin Bass, for example, who kind of is a contrarian to everybody,
but he has some good points.
And he's saying, hey, according to the
science, even the soybean oil, it's highly processed, doesn't do the things that people
are saying that it does. It's not actually inflammatory at all. And so that's what,
have you gotten any information on that lately? Well, I did see some of that research recently,
and I think that a lot of people try and argue the inflammation angle sure uh i think a
more likely explanation uh well i to lead off exactly what uh dr baker said is that it's a
highly processed highly palatable uh easy to over consume food that's often associated with
those high calorie foods uh not very satiating and micronutrient deficient.
So from a starting point, that's the problem with it, is that we're overeating foods that
are highly palatable, not very satiating, and that's what seed oils are.
Now, if you want to try and get into mechanisms of action, I don't see a lot of research
suggesting that you can measure inflammation in the short term. When you look at Chris Masterjohn's explanation and you look at some of the research on blood sugars,
what you see is that the reason LDLs go down is because the omega-6s, linoleic acid in particular,
is preferentially burned when it's consumed and stored in the body.
And so the cells start accumulating more omega-6s than what the cell historically had utilized for the construction of the cell.
The problem with that long term is what we're seeing is that now you end up not burning the sugars as efficiently and you start increasing triglycerides
and hyperinsulinemia and HA1C goes up. So the concern is that the seed oils are allowing
type 2 diabetes to accelerate. And that's what Chris Masterjohn's hypothesis is. We see that in, say, people in
hospitals who are on feeding tubes. When they feed them with seed oils, they develop type tube
diabetes at a much higher rate than when they use saturated fats or omega-3 fats in their feeding tubes. So I think that's the concern.
And the problem with most of the studies is that the reduction in seed oils is, say, from 15 or 20 percent down to maybe 10 or 12 percent,
both of which well exceed the 2 percent that has been historically consumed from natural sources.
And so it's like comparing somebody who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day against somebody
who smokes one pack of cigarettes a day and asking yourself why they're both still suffering
from lung cancer.
So you have to find a sample population that had only consumed or doesn't consume those
high rates of seed oils.
That's one of the biggest concerns with the studies. Plus, they're short-term. They're
anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Seed oils can take two to four years to decline
in their amount in the body before you're back to where you know you probably should be around two percent
of your total dietary consumption so those are some of the confounding variables why it's difficult
to study these things well yeah you just gave me my my answer because i was really just looking at
i don't consume them at all but i was wondering how to explain it the other to other people
without being sort of like lying to them you know know, that's inflammatory or something. So I think a good way to explain it is that, uh, there's a lot of bad things that can happen,
you know, you know, Sean and Stan, if you guys can help, uh, some people understand,
because on this app, what I've noticed is that there are, um, a vast majority of individuals
that are plant-based and that's okay.
You know what I mean?
But, um, when a lot of people cite research on
red meat and cholesterol and red meat causing cancer, I mean, we found that there's a lot of
flaws in the way that research has been done. So I'm curious if you can help educate some of the
individuals in the audience, maybe red flags to look for when they're, you know, hearing something
that's cited at red meat causes cancer and all that type of stuff. Well, you need to look for when they're, you know, hearing something that's cited at red meat causes cancer and all that type of stuff.
Well, you need to look no further than IARC, which was a highly biased group of largely
vegetarians and vegans publishing who claimed no bias.
They claim to have reviewed over 800 studies.
It was really more like a couple dozen.
And in those studies, half of them suggested no
difference. And they were, they were epidemiology, none of them were randomized controlled tiles,
not a single one. Can you let people know what epidemiology is? It wasn't a consensus,
it was more of a vote. And even one of the members of the ADA who was participating in that council said that it was
highly biased. So the research itself, and I think that when the Nutri-Rex study came out that
analyzed all of that research, they suggested that it wasn't, particularly with respect to red meat.
And can you clarify epidemiology? And maybe processed meat, you should control your intake.
But even then, they didn't see a significant increase.
The problem with the epidemiology research, well, other than the fact that it's epidemiology,
that the percentages, when they say that epidemiology is what helped us discover that cigarettes cause cancer, the effect sizes were in the thousands of percents, whereas in this
nutritional epidemiology, you might see like a 1.1 or a 1.04. You just don't see the kind of effect sizes that would make anybody, you know,
make any adjustment to their diet over the long term and see any real benefit.
Plus, they're not looking at actual effects.
They're just measuring it against itself. And you're seeing that the percentages
are always exaggerated. And let me jump in. I've got to leave in just a second.
Sure. What I want to comment, you know, obviously, the epidemiology has a number of flaws in the way
they do that. You know, the food frequency data is very unreliable. But and so what we do is we
write that off as to healthy user bias. But I think one of the things that I think is becoming
interestingly involved, you know, there's a lot of talk around a substance called tma which is
trimethylamine uh which is then converted to trimethylamine oxide by the liver that's considered
maybe one of the leading one of the one of the mechanistic reasons for cardiovascular disease
perhaps cancer what we're seeing is you know tma is is liberated by the gut bacteria in exposure to choline, to carnitine, and TMAO.
And so what we see is when you eat meat, you have a lot of those products, the carnitine and choline,
which Stan and I have talked about. The problem is what we're seeing is only in the situation of
a dysbiotic gut do you see significant amounts of TMA produced. And so it may be that it's
conditional. So if you're putting red meat into a broken? And so it may be that it's conditional.
So if you're putting red meat into a broken gut system,
you may be liberating these sort of potentially harmful compounds. If your gut is not dysbiotic, and why do we develop gut dysbiosis?
Probably from the modern industrial food diet.
So if you remove the gut-destro destroying foods from the diet, and I would
include maybe some of these highly processed foods, the seed oils, the artificial sweeteners,
the sugars, those things from the gut, then you don't see the liberation of these compounds. So
I think, again, it's context, it's nuance. Anyway, that's my little addition.
Dr. Sean Baker, thank you so much for your time today. Where can people find out more about
your carnivore diet and what you have going on?
Just go over to meetrx.com.
I'm over there every day for an hour chatting with people.
So I got to run to there right now, in fact.
Great.
Have a great rest of your day.
Sean, have a good one, brother.
See you later.
Take care.
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Matt Vincent pants
I think you've lost probably about 80 pounds over the years,
and you're somebody who's building up business and also traveling the country.
And when you traveled out here to super training, you pulled out a bunch of meat from your truck.
And talk about that a little bit.
Talk about how you've taken this style of diet and just made it part of your lifestyle.
You know, for me, it's about eliminating a lot of a lot of hurdles that that's what works for me to be consistent.
And so, you know, me having the truck set up so that we can do the road trip type thing.
But I've got a fridge in the back to keep meat and then, you know, use a meal prep service or use someone like state classy meats or someone like that to keep it
stock. You know, it just eliminates that like, Oh shit, I'm hungry. I need to go to the drive-thru
and if it's easy enough for us to cook or have those meals, we can pull off to a gas station
and just do the meal the right way. Um's been great. And as far as traveling,
what people don't understand about people who travel a lot,
there's a big difference between traveling and being on vacation.
And I'm not on vacation.
I'm traveling.
So I can't treat every meal as a party.
It's not an excuse to go out and just eat like an asshole.
So if I want to be consistent and do all the things I want to accomplish, I have to keep those in line, too.
Otherwise, you can't disappear for an eight-week trip and then eat like an asshole.
And so this is just one of those ways that it's kept it really, really simple for me.
Maintaining a carnivore-style diet for me on the road has been very,
very easy because if I am going to stop at a restaurant, they're not going to hide fat.
Everything's going to have fat in it because it's delicious and that's how they cook things
in restaurants. I can't avoid that, but I can avoid carbohydrates. And if I'm going to pick one, especially for my body type, like I, I operate very, very
well on a low carb, higher fat diet.
Um, it does not work as well for my partner, Bonnie.
She's, she's got a much different machine that needs more carbohydrates than I do.
Um, and so it's been really great for us being able to stay consistent and me being able
to consist, can, you know, stay able to stay consistently making body composition changes.
Yeah, Matt said a lot of things there that are really important and that are borne out by the research as well.
The ways to comply with diets and meal prepping, by far, more than all other methods combined, is the number one tool for diet compliance.
And that's whether you prep yourself or you buy meals from a prep company.
I don't care. It doesn't matter.
And that's why the bodybuilding figure physique bikini industry has always really done so well with diets because they've toted around their Tupperwares everywhere.
That's the number one reason they do a lot of things wrong. But that that's the best thing.
That's what I encourage folks.
Mostly, you know, it's not even about the vertical diet.
I just talk about methods of compliance for dieting in general.
And that's the number one method more so than anything else.
What are some other methods?
Satiety is kind of the next biggest one. Protein leveraging using, you know,
having a high percentage of protein in your diet is a big one. Secondarily to that would be high
satiety foods, which is a protein, but B, there's a satiety index that measures certain foods and how long
they keep you full for. And we see that things like boiled potatoes and fruit like oranges
keep you full for a long time. And then after that would probably be your fiber,
would be your salads that you could eat if you were hungry. And those are ways that we manage
hunger. If you're not hungry and you're not tired, complying with a diet becomes really easy.
And so those are the things we focus on.
Hunger, as just mentioned, those are the strategies that you utilize, protein leveraging, high satiety foods, and some fiber.
But for energy, now, like Matt said, you have to consider who's the individual and what provides the energy.
The micronutrients are huge.
The sodium is a big component.
The potassium, as far as energy and blood sugar controlrients are huge. The sodium is a big component, the potassium, as far as energy
and blood sugar control for appetite as well. But also those micronutrients that we talk about in
the meats, the iron, the zinc, the B vitamins, those are things that you see a lot of dieting
women end up in the doctor's office getting shots for because they're so tired and deficient in
their blood tests on things like B12 and iron,
you can get them from your food. And if you can mitigate hunger and energy problems.
Stan, what about some frequent weigh-ins? Is it important to like, you know, have a measure of,
you know, how your diet's going, basically?
Also shown, yep, that's right on point. Also shown to, yep, that's right on point.
Also shown in the research, the weight control registry is the largest study of successful
dieters ever conducted.
Over 10,000 dieters who have lost over 66 pounds and kept it off more than five years.
The vast majority of them tend to weigh daily.
And it's just a good way for them to pay attention to maybe falling
off the rails. And that's not to say that some people don't, you know, aren't don't have an
uncomfortable relationship for the scale, such that when they weigh in in the morning, if they're a
pound heavier, it affects their mood, that does happen. But education is the key component there
that it's not the daily weight, it's the trend over time.
And weighing daily only helps you adjust for regular fluctuations in body water, and maybe even food bulk in the gut, or even a response to a big leg day, where your carbs and your water
are going to stick to you a little longer. Yeah, you know, to recover from that workout.
But over time, if you look at your scale every single day,
you'll start to see trends. And then you can actually, it helps you to understand that when
you have a, you're two pounds heavier one day, that's not fat, that's water fluctuation.
And over the course of 30 days, looking at the trend line helps. It also helps people who might
go off the rails. I require
or ask for daily weigh-ins from all of my clients. They send me their daily hours of sleep,
their daily body weight, and pictures of food that they eat just so that they have some sort
of reference. And then if they go off the rails on the weekend, then they're right back on track
on Monday. They can see the three or four pounds that they may have gained, most of which I'll
tell them is water and food bulk. And then by midweek, they're back down to normal. And at
least it gets them to come back to their program without, you know, just going off the rails and
not weighing at all. And next thing you know, they're 10 pounds over. Well, yeah, because people
also get a big case of the fuck it's too, whenever, you know, if they feel like they are complying,
and then it's not working, and then we'll fuck it. If it's too whenever you know if they feel like they are complying and
then it's not working and then well fuck it if it's not going to work i'm going to eat what i
want yep how important it's man it's you just have to continue to fight through and and decide
that this isn't a temporary diet change but this is a lifestyle change that you're going to
temporarily take breaks from to kind of maybe have a celebration. Exactly.
Hey, Matt, I'm curious to actually know how you went about this, because I know you made some simple changes to your diet.
And then also, Stan, I want to know what you would say for the general population.
But in the context of like somebody who's trying to lose some weight, somebody who's
trying to lose some body fat, how important would you say meal frequency is?
So I'll answer first for me. Uh, I've always kind of done, um,
I guess two or three meals. Um, the, the five or six meal bodybuilding style diet, I believe would do very well for me at any time that I have been able to maintain it. Uh, it does work,
but it's not realistic with the lifestyle that I like to live.
And because of that, I'm not going to lie to myself and try to force it. I can do something
else that makes me more compliant and happy. Um, so intermittent fasting works really,
really well for me. Um, so I usually won't eat until, I don't know, between 11 and two is usually
my first meal, depending on when I wake up. Um, the load is that day and depending on how low or how high calories felt the day before.
Sometimes I'm not hungry until 3 p.m. and I don't force eating.
For me, the big lessons that I really had to learn were portion control and stopping when I'm full because I don't know what the fuck full means i stop eating
when it starts coming out it's full you know yeah like i don't i'm more concerned with
stopping because there isn't any food remaining uh i just love food and so i always ate that way
so being able to kind of unprogram that has been big. And one of the easy ways for that has been meal prep or or even if it's like even if I get a case of like, yo, I'm hungry and I just want to eat for the sake of mouth pleasure. I'm going to just eat the food that I'm supposed to. So it's like, all right, cool. You want to just eat and be a pig? Cool. You're going to eat ribeye.
you're going to eat ribeye.
Is there anything else that you incorporate into your diet along with carnivore?
Do you eat any fruit here and there?
Do you have any thing that's sort of like, you know, off the beaten path a little bit?
Yeah, I eat quite a bit of fruit, but I mostly eat apples.
And the reason I eat apples is because I tend to get pretty stoned at night.
And that's a better solution than me eating cake and cookies.
I agree. I think fruit is
a lifesaver. It's a long time to work
through.
It's definitely been a lifesaver. It's like a bag of chips.
It's crunchy. It's nice. It's got a good texture.
It's sweet.
Stan, what do you do when you're stoned?
The only time I've ever been stoned is when I was at the Mr. Olympia and Ben White was competing and I went into his room.
And honest to God, there was like a cloud of smoke that poured out.
And he's like, Stan, come on in.
I went in and started talking
to him and he kept asking me questions. And all of a sudden the room started to kind of
dancing around and my eyes started getting tired. And I walked out of there and realized I was
done. Stan, what do you think about, what do you think about cheat meals and like a slight
breaks from a diet? What are your thoughts on that? And what do you recommend to people sometimes?
Yeah, let's, let's visit this conversation. I'll just hit some high points here. And Matt
touched on them already. With respect to meal frequency, whether you eat two meals a day or
six meals a day, if you control for calories and protein, you get similar weight loss outcomes.
Now, in the athletic realm, the International Society of Sports Nutrition would suggest three
to four evenly spaced meals a day.
They prefer four plus for athletes simply because there's no mechanism to store protein.
And those people who are training hard need that interval of protein intake.
So it's kind of a one-off for athletes.
But as for meal frequency, it's choosing the frequency that works for you.
As for no frequency, it's choosing the frequency that works for you.
You got a little choppy.
I think we might have lost you.
You walked out of range.
Oh, I did?
Yeah, you're walking so fast.
I'm sorry.
Do you got me back now? We got you back now. Yep.
Yeah. The second thought was that in the weight control registry, 78% of their dieters do eat breakfast. And so the vast majority of them are not intermittent fasting. Not that not
intermittent fasting can't work, but it doesn't work any better than continuous calorie restriction.
It's an individual choice in that regard.
And then on to the cheat meal question that you asked.
It just depends on the individual as well.
Some people might want to incorporate their favorite foods into their regular diet and just account for the calorie intake.
But others can't stick with one cookie.
They end up eating the dozen.
Correct. So you have to find out who's your client, what's, you know, how, how, how it's
their behavior. And then why are they eating? Are they eating because they're hungry? Are they
eating because they're bored? Are they eating because of stress or to have, they had some sort
of traumatic experience in their life? Yeah, there's a whole host of different reasons. And then you kind of ask
them to identify those when they go to eat. Why are you eating? And if you can consistently see
a pattern, then maybe you can address the psychological component. Do you eat any junk
food personally? Like you have any snacks or treats or cakes or anything? It's pretty rare.
And for this reason only is that from the time I was in college, you know, when I was
140 pounds, skinny kid trying to become a bodybuilder, a pro bodybuilder, if I had room
in my stomach and I could eat something, I wanted to be something that would make me
grow.
So I was usually chasing eggs, steak, milk, you know, the kinds of things that I thought
would make me grow.
And so I don't have a sweet tooth. And that's not to say that others don't. And I'm some super disciplined guy. It's just that I look at I look at food differently. I've told you, you know, I don't eat foods. I like foods that like me. And I make that decision about an hour after I eat. But I also look at them in terms of performance. And do I have an opportunity here to improve my performance? Or am
I just satisfying a, you know, a craving? Yeah, and I think a lot of it too. I think a lot of it
too really has to base on, like, what are your actual priorities at the moment, right? Like,
I'm doing what I'm doing. And I'm sharing dietary wise as I'm making a little bit of progress, but
my diet and body composition right
now are probably third or fourth on my priority list. And so if I was, if those got moved to
number one, I would do things very differently than I currently do them. I have them set up so
that this is a good, sustainable way for me to live my life every day and it never be too hard
to comply to. What would you do that's more optimal, just out of curiosity?
If my goal was body composition completely that way, I would really be strict and I would be
weighing everything. I would be probably trying to up the quantity of meal just to build more
just metabolic turnover, as well as I would change the type of training I was doing. But if I decide to
lean completely into that, that means what I'm doing business-wise, what I'm doing,
all of those things now have to take, not be priority. Because I know the amount of give a
shit that it'll take for me to comply with that lifestyle. Stan, in your experience, how quickly has it been to turn around some of the clients that
you've worked with in terms of them maybe having some metabolic disease like pre-diabetic,
diabetes, high blood pressure? Do these things, are they reversible and can you reverse them
fairly quickly or does it take a long time?
It depends on the individual, but you do get some pretty immediate results. I mean, you can resolve 95% of fatty liver disease with about a 7% weight loss.
Obviously, that doesn't happen overnight, but that's not a huge distance between where
they are.
A 300-pound person that can lose 20 pounds can realize a really significant health benefit.
And even in some of this research that recently with the healthy at every size war that's going on in the media, you don't have to have a six pack.
And there are certainly some health adverse health effects to being obese, particularly for having central adiposity,
you know, fatty liver and metabolic syndrome. But that can be dramatically improved simply with
a modest weight loss, 7 to 10 percent can improve all of your markers. We talked about that with
the McDonald's diet. The individual lost 30 pounds eating at McDonald's every day,
but he controlled his calories to 1850 and he walked 40 minutes a day. individual lost 30 pounds eating at McDonald's every day, but he controlled his calories to 1,850, and he walked 40 minutes a day. He lost 30 pounds, and all of his metabolic
markers improved. His blood pressure went down. His blood sugars went down. His cholesterol
improved. All of that happens with a little bit of weight loss, and as a matter of fact, on that
note, 95 to 99 percent of health benefits, these metabolic markers, blood pressure, blood sugar, lipids,
are improved simply from the weight loss itself, irrespective of the diet.
And I would never recommend a McDonald's diet to someone.
I don't think it's sustainable, particularly long-term, very satiating and might not provide
the ample amount of energy.
But in fact, that's the reason why any of those diets work, the 7-Eleven diet, the Twinkie diet.
All those experiments have worked because of weight loss.
And so short term, you can see results with blood pressure and just general energy and water balance.
You know, people get water retention and they get brain fog and problems with their sleep.
That can happen within a matter of days just to a couple of weeks.
Immediately, the gut health, I hate to use the term gut health, but people who suffer from IBS, Crohn's, even just excessive gas and bloating and retention,
Excessive gas and bloating and retention.
Those kinds of things can go away in just a matter of days with, you know, just stopping eating the kinds of crap that's causing that problem.
And then very shortly thereafter, with a little bit of weight loss, with some 10-minute walks, a little bit of calorie restriction, I think people will see huge results within the first 30 to 60 days. And then beyond that, you know, compliance becomes the science.
Getting somebody, as Matt said, to make it a lifestyle, make it simple, sensible and sustainable is really the goal.
And there is where I'm really cautious to say there's many paths to the same destination.
I need to listen to the client and say, you know, do you want to do the vertical diet?
Do you want to do carnivore? Do you want to do keto? Do you want to do intermittent fasting?
I'm not particular about which they choose. I just show them that all of these can work. And
here's kind of the pluses and minuses for each one in terms of compliance, satiety, energy,
sustainability, and then we manage it from there.
Seems like you can make pretty good progress in, you know, about 90 days or so.
And just imagine, and I do understand it depends on where you're starting from, but just imagine when this pandemic hit, you know, the average pandemic lasts about 18 months.
We're there-ish now.
Imagine 18 months ago, if somebody was shouting some of these instructions of hitting up a 10 minute walk and eating the way that we're discussing on the show, they could have potentially reversed their diabetes, their high blood pressure.
Some of these metabolic diseases that seem to be reversible and seem to be actually fairly simple to control.
I understand it might not be easy, but they seem to be fairly simple to control. What do you guys think, Matt and Stan, what do you guys think?
And anybody wants to jump in? What do we all think about, about something like that?
I think, I think a lot of that's really tricky, right? Because it's, you could, you could have
made some big changes, but also we've built such a society that's a reactive society, and we don't do anything on the proactive side for our health, for our lifestyle.
We're always waiting for, oh, well, I got fat, or oh, I did this, or oh, I don't feel good.
And then we wait for something to try to fix instead of getting in front of it and realizing what we could do health-wise to eliminate a bunch of bullshit down the road.
So it might be a hard sell.
Yeah. An ounce of prevention to eliminate a bunch of bullshit down the road. So it might be a hard sell. Yeah.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
And I think one of the challenges is I think that people assume that it's harder than it
is to lose weight because they think they need to take up jogging every day or a really
restrictive egg whites and tilapia broccoli diet plan.
And they just they set themselves up from failure from step one.
I think that what you've done, Mark, has been great showing people that there's a lot of options.
You know, 30 day carnivore, 30 day vertical, 30 day keto.
The more options people have, the more likely they'll find one that
can become a lifestyle for them. They're like, hey, this is pretty easy. I can comply with this.
And then given those tools in terms of meal prep and satiety and protein leveraging,
the 10-minute walks, they can see, hey, I can do this. And once they start to realize a little
bit of success without a significant amount of effort, then, you know, it becomes something that they might be able to do long term.
Stan, do you find that some people, you know, it's great as a coach to like let people do what they want to do.
But at some a lot of points and I'm not a coach, but a lot of points, people will like email me and hit me up and they're
kind of picking the wrong diet.
They want to do carnivore because they saw that Mark and I have done it.
They saw that we got in great shape, but they're like 110 pounds and scrawny, you know?
And so I actually move them to vertical, you know, like I'll say, hey, you should look
in the stands diet, go buy the book, go do this because I feel like it's a better diet
for me.
You think like a lot of people are just, they're just kind of like willy nilly choosing a diet cause it sounds good or
they saw some ad or something and then they jump on it and it's maybe not the
right thing.
And then it'll sort of sort of hammer on it because they become like so
invested in it, you know?
Well,
we live in a society that still wants magic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think so.
Yeah,
that is true.
And what you mentioned there is really when people think diet, they think weight loss. And you yeah, I think so. Yeah, that is true. And what you mentioned there is really
when people think diet, they think weight loss. And you said, you know, you had 110 pound person.
Or did you say they were 110 pounds overweight? No, 110 pounds overall.
Yeah, if you've got 110 pound person, I mean, they might want to have a different diet plan
for them. And I'm quick to identify the difference between, you know,
performance based diets that might need, you know, more frequency, potentially more protein,
and certainly more carbohydrates, if it's an anaerobic athlete, from, you know, general
population. Yeah, I think also, like a lot of power lifters, they'll choose carnivore because they want to stay in a certain weight class
or do this or that, but they're kind of like inexperienced.
So then like rather than maybe having a potato,
they'll have another steak and it's just a lot of calories.
You know, I think that people can solve a lot of these problems
by just hitting up some lower calorie foods that aren't bad for you in any way.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, at the end of the day, we know that, that calories are key.
That's the, that's the biggest, most important thing that you have to control.
And then protein being second in terms of macro components and adequate fats for general
health.
But the problem with power lifters is that they just overeat the vast majority of the
day.
They justify it as, well, I'm eating to be strong.
And it impacts their performance.
We talked a lot about this with the diets that I did for Hofthor Bjornsson and Brian Shaw
and a host of other strength athletes that at some point they get someone healthy
with high blood pressure and water retention, fatty liver, and insulin resistance,
that their performance starts to crater.
And so you've got to kind of cycle that.
You've got to diet at least enough to remedy those issues.
And then, you know, maybe they can gain weight going back into the next competition.
Are you saying being 460 pounds causes complications?
Yeah, don't do that.
But I will say this, and I don't want to get too far off track here into
the athletes particularly these very specific athletes but i will say this there's been some
400 pound power or strongmen and power lifters who have suffered from significant health effects
and then there's others some who've worked with me who uh who can be 400 pounds and and their
blood markers can still look very good.
Hofthor, when he was 440 pounds and got a blood test, his HA1C was 5.2.
His liver enzymes were only 1.2 in excess of normal AST-ALT,
which is pretty average for a weightlifting individual.
So he had his fasting glucose was 88.
This wasn't somebody who was metabolically
unhealthy. You know, there's there's there's certainly not I'm not suggesting that being
400 plus pounds is healthy per se, but compared to other 400 pound athletes who don't manage those
kinds of things with their diets and the 10 minute walks and the CPAP for sleep apnea and
those kinds of things.
It's a very big difference between the two in terms of their health markers.
Also, I mean, Haffey, you know, as long as I've known him, he's he's about as good and compliant as people can be.
Yep. And so that's why you see that progress.
You know, Matt and Stan, I want to because there's probably people in the audience that heard Stan say that I don't have a sweet tooth.
And they're probably, first off, extremely jealous of that.
But secondly, like, I want people to take away some tactics here.
So if you are somebody that has like a mad sweet tooth, right, and you're trying to diet and you're always getting reamed in because of your damn sweet tooth,
trying to diet and you're always getting reamed in because you're damn sweet tooth.
What are some things that people can do or tactics that they can have in their diet to allow them to potentially reset or maybe get rid of or make that sweet tooth a little
bit easier to deal with? Yeah, I'm not going to talk about psychologically because that's
different for everybody, but I'll tell you physiologically when you increase or get
adequate sodium and potassium in your diet, potassium binds to glucose to form glycogen in the system.
They actually help reduce the sweet tooth. A lot of people, when they have a sodium,
when they're sodium depleted, they'll chase carbohydrates. And if they get adequate sodium
in the diet, they may not be so inclined to do so. So that's one strategy that you can use
within the diet
itself. And then, of course, satiety, which we discussed protein leveraging and high satiety
foods and higher fiber is good. And then fruit would be the ultimate go to, as Matt mentioned
earlier, the apple as opposed to cookies, because fruit is full of fiber. It's full of water. It's
very low calorie by weight. And so those are some
strategies that people can utilize. And then maybe not to completely eliminate if they're the type of
person who can handle eating a small amount and incorporate it into their regular diet, as opposed
to restricting and then binging. That might be a bad way to manage that problem for some people.
I mean, everything Stan just said, again, for me, you know, a couple hacks,
because, you know, I've definitely got a sweet tooth, especially come later in the evening.
And fruit has been the biggest game changer for me,
that if I've got something in the house, like an apple has been killer,
just because, like, I found these very, very large Granny Smith apples.
I swear they weigh like two two pounds those are my favorite and uh it's it's enough to like chew and bite on
and there's a good texture and something to snack on that's pretty you know i guess um
mechanically feels good to eat it's a it's a pleasurable thing it tastes good and it's not
going to be calorically damaging for the most part. I mean, way better than the alternative because the option of me not having a sweet
tooth and being like, I'm just going to go to bed isn't happening. So I'm not going to lie to
myself and pretend that I have that level of discipline, whereas I'm going to have something.
So it may as well be an apple instead of five cookies. Well, they say kind of out of sight,
out of mind, and that can work really well. You just don't buy certain things. Don't keep it in your house. Yeah,
that can be very effective. But also I think that something like a Coke Zero or some things that are
sweetened, I think for some people, it can keep that ball in the air, so to speak, and you're
kind of still thinking about sweet food. So something that's been helpful to me is to just
go the opposite direction and just go as boring as you can possibly go.
And like you guys are talking about here, where a piece of fruit turns into like this magical, magnificent, delicious thing.
Eating a strawberry, you're like, holy fuck, I didn't know they tasted like this.
You taste every bit, every morsel of that strawberry or orange or whatever it is you're eating.
You find yourself drooling on yourself and you're like, I didn't even know this shit tasted this good.
Yeah, I put that in my salad after dinner.
I try not to eat within about three hours of bedtime because I find that it keeps my
resting heart rate elevated.
And I don't think that's a good thing for recovery.
So I try and eat more earlier in the morning and get ahead on my meals so I can eat about
three hours before bed.
But if I'm not satiated the time I go to bed, then I'm laying there hungry.
So after dinner, I eat salad as a dessert.
And it's a low-calorie salad.
It would just be some romaine lettuce, shaved carrot, maybe a little fat-free cheese.
Kraft makes one.
Stan, I'm waiting for your wife to stab you in the middle of the night.
Yeah.
Shaved carrot. Stan, I'm waiting for your wife to stab you in the middle of the night. I'll chop up some strawberries and maybe some green apple.
And I use a little apple cider vinegar.
So now you're looking at a very low-calorie salad, maybe egg whites, the one just for the texture, and a little bit of protein in the salad, even though I get that in my dinner.
That's a treatish to me.
That's a treat.
I will sit there.
And another thing is, is it can take you 20 minutes to eat a large salad like that, just
chewing.
And so the satiety effect has a time component to it, as most people know, as well as an
expansion of the gut.
Stan Effing's dessert salad.
And for dessert, we have salad.
That satisfies both. And so that's the strategy i
use this is the best thing i've ever heard on our show uh this is amazing for the rest of the normal
people out there who aren't having a dessert salad i'm making one tonight for sure thanks
dan i appreciate how much more you like your machine than me hey i will say one more thing
about blood sugar in general,
which tends to be the driver of this sweet tooth. People who suffer from hyperinsulinemia,
people have high fasted insulin, which is often not tested in blood tests. They test your fasted
blood sugar. They test your HA1C, both of which are lagging indicators for high blood sugars.
which are lagging indicators for high blood sugars.
You can have a normal fasted glucose and a normal HA1C for a decade or more while you have high triglycerides or high fasted insulin, which is causing a lot of this appetite, this
drivers of appetite.
So if I get a client that's overweight and he gets these insatiable, you know,
his appetite, it would call hypoglycemic episode where he's just voraciously hungry. And
one of the ways to identify that first is get the fasted insulin test so they can see, oh,
and insulin, the fasted insulin is normal or what
is supposedly normal by the ranges designated in those blood tests all the way up to, I think,
24. But if you're over six, you're having some degree of hyperinsulinemia that needs to be
managed because it will drive hunger. And so that's one of the first things we try and do is bring that down.
And initially out of the gate, you would reduce carbohydrates,
obviously try and get better sleep, and sleep apnea has an effect on insulin resistance.
But we'll use dextrose tablets, much like you would use for a type 1 diabetic,
or even, say, one of those little candies, those little hard candies?
Jolly ranches.
Yeah, keep a handful of those in your pocket.
And when one of those hypoglycemic attacks occurs, try and identify the progression of symptoms.
You start to sweat.
Your peripheral vision actually starts to close in. You get a
little bit of brain fog, and then you're just voraciously hungry. I mean, you cannot satisfy.
You can eat and eat and eat until your stomach is in pain from being full and still want to eat
more if you have a hypoglycemic attack. You've got to get in front of that.
So that's why the diabetics will carry around those dextrose tablets or also just little hard candies.
And if you can pop one of those, a diabetic doesn't satisfy a hypoglycemic event with 64 ounces of lemonade.
They can satisfy it with one or two dextrose tablets, just a couple of grams of sugar.
They can satisfy it with one or two dextrose tablets, just a couple of grams of sugar.
And so that we try and use that as a strategy, at least initially, along with, you know, the dietary interventions that we all just talked about, just to help manage some of those short term bursts of of of that of that.
Stan, are you getting ready to detonate?
Yeah.
Um,
also,
yeah, same,
same lines as far as Stan,
but for the rest of us who have a sweet tooth,
um,
I,
I've found that having some hard candy around is,
is a nice hack that like,
yo,
if an apple is not going to cut it for me today,
a Jolly Rancher is going to be pretty minimal calories.
It's going to be sugar. Yep. And it's going to take a long time to get it for me today. A Jolly Rancher is going to be pretty minimal calories. It's going to be sugar.
Yep.
And it's going to take a long time to get through one.
Yeah.
Yep.
Excellent.
Real quick, Matt, people just heard, you know,
people here on Clubhouse just heard Stan talk about when he wants to cut loose
and really party, he has a strawberry.
Just knowing you.
It was slightly different for me.
Yeah, well, that's what I mean. Like knowing you,
you know, you have that dirty South cooking and all that good stuff. Realistically,
how long do you think it would take thinking of your stereotypical power lifter or weekend warrior?
How long do you think it can take for someone to make, to turn that corner the way you did?
It's taken Matt a couple of years, I think, right, man?
You're still working on it. So compliance to the diet, I really didn't have a big issue with from jump
because it's such an elimination style diet that where I struggled with the kind of fits your macros things
is I'll just, if there's any type of a loophole where I can lie to myself, I'm going to do it.
And so something like carnivore or keto got rid of that for me and it made it compliant. Like as long as I don't break these rules, I'm going to do it. And so something like carnivore or keto got rid of that for me and
it made it compliant. Like as long as I don't break these rules, I'm fine. Hey Matt, wouldn't
you say it probably took you at least two years or so to really, cause like you lost weight and
then you were kind of hovering for a while and then now it seems like you have a good handle on
it. And I think that there's different levels of compliance, right? So if you're big and weight loss and moving the scale down is the biggest goal and not performance, not anything else in the meantime, then getting on board with something carnivore or vertical diet, I think is a great choice.
And just decide that you're going to have just meat and don't track the calories.
Let's just get that together first.
Let's be compliant to eating the right foods first and not overcomplicate the next step.
And then once we've got that kind of compliance, let's see how do you feel in two weeks.
And then from there, maybe then start playing with calories.
Because what I don't want to do for people is I don't make the big the big shift in diet and then also have
them hungry yeah yeah people are like at least get you used to these foods have as much as you want
but it only gets to be this that starting on monday mentality of i'm doing keto i'm doing
cardio i'm not eating any carbs for the next month you see hear people say stuff like that
and then they crash and burn quickly right right? You just change too many variables at once.
Yeah, it's
not livable because you forget the rest
of your life exists.
Has everybody on here
tried
Stan Efferding's Monster Mash?
Oh, that's good stuff. Yeah, it's amazing.
It's fucking awesome. Stan,
you've done such a great job.
You've done such a great job with the meal replacement company or the meal prep company that you have.
How did you get that started, and how has it been going?
You know, we partnered with a co-packer who had 20 years of experience.
They were a family-run organization was already had national distribution. So we
overcame a lot of hurdles right out of the gate. And then I just took my menu to them, asked them
to source the foods that I would typically eat from the same places that Costco buys them from
and had their chef make the meals that I typically ate or, you know, for the whole menu.
And then we just went about marketing.
And the Vertical Diet has been largely received through my seminars and my social media and then the e-book.
And it just took off.
It succeeded our expectations.
We're very, very happy with it.
But more so than the business success, the feedback that we get.
more so than the business success, the feedback that we get.
As I've mentioned before, I've answered over 50,000 DMs in the last two years from people all over the world asking questions and giving us testimonials
and thanking us for all of the information that we've provided that's benefited them.
So I've never been happier as far as both the business aspect and the fact that we're helping to change lives.
So it's a great, great time in this industry.
Yeah, and the taste of the meals that you have.
I mean, people need to go try it.
Yeah, they're unreal.
Is it theverticaldiet.com?
Is that the right site?
Yeah, theverticaldiet.com.
And I've got to be honest with you.
I tell people all the time when I talk about meal prep, even in my Vertical Diet e-book, I have two different menu plans, one for you prep and one for we prep.
If you want to buy our meals, great.
We'll ship them to you.
It's done.
It's a matter of convenience.
It's not magic.
It's just, you know, it's easy for you to comply.
But the big thing is, is that adding the bone broth seemed to be the game changer as far as taste.
We cook our vegetables in it.
We cook our rice in it.
And so everything's moist and delicious.
You can do that at home.
I've suggested people go to Costco and get their chicken stock.
And that's kind of the big thing that's in the Monster Mash that makes the difference that people really enjoy.
And it seems to be good for their gut health.
They digest it well.
Also adds a ton of sodium.
What's that?
Also would add a ton of sodium.
Well, yes, I have been recommending that people salt their food.
I just mean the bone broth alone.
Using that already is going to increase flavor profile just because of the sodium intake, and it's delicious.
Agreed. Agreed.
Agreed.
The other thing about Monster Mash that I found is that if you do make it yourself,
you can add in like cauliflower rice or broccoli or vegetables instead of the rice if you're
trying to stay low carb.
And with cauliflower rice, it actually tastes amazing.
It really works well.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I fully imagine for the rest of my life I will be somewhere between vertical diet and the ketogenic diet.
Yeah, same here.
There's no going back now.
Both would be very, very great for me, positive to where I think well and move well.
The meals are easy to make.
I can be consistent.
It's just so many less variables I have to think about throughout the day with the
rest of the shit I want to do. Stan, what is the vertical diet and where can people find out more
about Stan Efferding? Vertical diet, boy, it's everything. It's sleep, hydration, nutrition,
gut health, hormone optimization. The Vertical Diet 3.0 ebook is kind of an evolution of
everything that I've learned from school and from coaching and
competing and collaborating with athletes. So I just put everything I know practically into this
one document. And you can find that at Stan Efferding dot com. And my my YouTube is also
Stan Efferding. My Instagram is at Stan Efferding. I think in SEMA, I might have another question over here for you. Yeah. I, I, I can't let you escape without, um, letting you kind of, uh, dive in and tell people
about how important sleep is because like you've mentioned it a few times and you have this great
quote, which I'm definitely about to butcher. I think you said something like athletes who,
I don't know, skip their sleep. It's like they're in search of like they're in search of they're in search of 100 bills or they're
skipping 100 pills in search of pennies right yeah i think something like that it was on march
stepping over a quarter to pick up a dime yeah yeah there you go i talked about in this instance
i was talking about women who wake up but because generally it's the women who wake up at 4 a.m in
the morning to do fasting cardio stepping over 100 bills to pick up nickels because of how important sleep is for insulin sensitivity and for retention of lean body mass.
And they're killing both of those things when they when they sacrifice sleep for cardio.
And then with men, I think I said in one of Mark Bell's podcasts, if you're religiously taking your little thimble sized scooper full of creatine every single day, but only sleeping five hours, you're a fucking idiot.
I just can't stress enough how important that is.
And the CPAP for most of us fatheads who snore and wake up tired, you just have to remedy that problem.
Quality is as important as quantity. and it's just it's the
basis of everything else where where can people go to like learn more about you know what their
sleep should look like can people do like that i mean i did an at-home sleep study recently do you
have any suggestions or recommendations where people can try something like that because it's
actually really easy i hooked the machine up and i shipped it back out to my doctor and he read it.
It was pretty simple.
That's a great place to start.
Get a sleep study.
And then some people, they either can't afford it or if they're international
and have a social medical system, Canada, UK, Australia,
those people complain that it would take them a year or more to get in to see a doctor.
In those cases, I've suggested people just go online to Craigslist and grab a dream station,
a CPAP, and start using it. If you're snoring and waking up tired and your blood pressure is
elevated and your RBCs and hemoglobin and hematocrit start to climb, that's a hell of a
good time to get yourself a CPAP and start using it.
Because I don't say this about a lot of things and I don't make any money saying it, but it's life changing.
And it can happen in just a matter of days if you get a CPAP and use it.
And it is a 97 percent or plus cure for for sleep apnea.
So it's very effective, very safe.
So it's very effective, very safe.
I can't think of, you know, you'd have to go way down into the weeds to find a reason why somebody who had apnea and bought a CPAP wouldn't benefit or there could be some sort of adverse cause.
But it's important enough to me and compelling enough that if you can't afford it or aren't willing to go to see a doctor, you should endeavor to get a CPAP and utilize it.
And you use one, right?
I've been using one since 1993.
Ever since I got over 240 pounds, I've had sleep apnea.
And, you know, Jordan Faggenbaum from Barbell Medicine is 198 pounds. Is that a person's name?
Yeah, he's amazing, actually.
Yeah, and he's 198 pounds.
He competes in powerlifting.
Very fit. He can beat some power. Very fit.
He wears a CPAP.
It has to do with neck girth and restriction of the airway.
It's not necessarily just obesity, although those people tend to have greater neck girth.
But don't think that just because you've got a four-pack or something that you can't have apnea.
Part of the stop-bang questionnaire that helps to self-diagnose or doctors use to diagnose
apnea includes do you snore and wake up tired those are two of the biggest indicators
and then if you're holding your breath if you're if your spouse or significant other
can identify that you are holding your breath and maybe gasping for air at night that's a i mean
that's dead on a problem your Your blood oxygen levels go down. You
don't recover as fast. You end up with insulin resistance, high blood pressure. All of those
things should be addressed with a CPAP. Oh, also maybe if you can talk on it just a bit,
like in terms of getting a lack of sleep, people report like not able to comply on their diet as well.
They have horrible cravings.
It messes with like their workout performance.
It literally cascades into everything as far as the efforts that somebody is trying to put in.
And it just it shoots it all in the foot.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with that.
The ghrelin hormone is released.
That's your hunger hormone at a greater level.
with that. The ghrelin hormone is released. That's your hunger hormone at a greater level.
Like I said, your insulin resistance kicks up with lack of sleep. And it happens within one night.
The actual IGF-1 signaling can reduce about 50%. My co-author of the vertical diet is Damon McCune.
He's a registered dietitian, PhD, and his master's thesis was on that. And you can see it very readily. Yeah, the recovery is a huge component
of that. All of that, you know, happens in a very, very quickly with a lack of sleep.
Awesome. Well, great, great having you on Clubhouse. I guess this is right. Yeah. And
really, really appreciate your time.
If you want to drop off, you can.
We're going to continue to talk to Matt for a little bit longer.
All right, brother.
Have a great rest of your day.
Thank you, Stan.
Stan, we appreciate it.
Stan, always a pleasure, brother.
See you later, Stan.
Good talking to you guys. Thank you.
See you, Biggs.
I figured we'd let him go.
He's got to work on getting bigger, right?
He looks like crap.
He's a savage.
What a name.
Like he was doing those squats.
I said like 20 rep squats with a safety squat bar.
Just cranking them out.
I think he's 53.
But like just going like nice and easy too.
Like not doing fast reps.
Just very controlled.
It's just crazy to watch.
He's a fucking beast.
And we're online here too with another beast, Matt Vincent, who's a world champion.
Matt, what are some things that you've done in your Highland Games career to help you get stronger
and to actually be a better competitor with Highland Games?
Because it seems kind of complicated.
You're throwing all these different things.
You're throwing a telephone pole, it looks like, and you're throwing weight over bar.
I mean, you just go in the gym and just get stronger.
Does that transfer over, or do you have to do sports-specific stuff?
Sports-specific, for sure.
One of the things I really liked about the Highland Games
was that, different than other strength sports,
the implement weight doesn't change.
It's not simply a strength game.
Now, max strength seems to be a factor, but you, it's really, it's about generating power.
It's really how fast can you accelerate weight.
And so, you know, as, as a lifter going into the Highland Games, I need to ego check things
like my total so that I know that my goal is throwing further.
And I guess easiest way to describe that to people is like,
if I've got a 700-pound back squat,
and using that lift during my training is going to take two seconds for me to finish that lift,
this kind of slow hydraulic grind,
that doesn't translate to me accelerating a thing that weighs 56 pounds at all.
Um,
cause if that's the speed I move,
what's more important is how fast,
like what's the heaviest weight that I can move at two meters a second.
That made more sense for like my training.
So everything was big multi-joint explosive stuff.
There was never hypertrophy work done.
Um, was big multi-joint explosive stuff there was never hypertrophy work done um it was all just based on being able to accelerate things and tie more muscle groups together to have more flexibility
like so those are kind of the three key components for strength speed and technique are you kind of
pissed that you didn't know that much about nutrition while you're competing um you know
that's an interesting one, right? I've
definitely wondered if there would have been any longevity to my career had I known more about it
from earlier and been on top of it, because I definitely didn't do things the way I should have.
I don't know if should have is the right term, but I definitely didn't do things to the best way to make my effort the best.
Now, I had a great time doing the sport.
I'm not sure if me being a better competitor because I focused on these couple aspects makes me enjoy the sport more, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely didn't need to be as fat as I was to be the weight I was.
I could have done that with some cleaner foods instead of cheeseburgers and beer. Um,
that probably would have made a difference. I probably could have helped with some inflammation
that probably could have trickled down to a few other things. I mean, I don't,
I still think I'm sitting here with a fake knee, whether or not I dialed in my diet.
Right. But it is kind
of crazy. Like, I mean, you think about what you were able to do with, uh, I mean, nutrition wasn't
the best, but like, I don't know. I don't think people in here know exactly how many Highland
games you won. I kind of crazy that is. Yeah. So for me, uh, so Scottish Highland games is a much
different strength sport than strongman
or powerlifting so i competed uh my very first year pro was 2011 and then so 2011 through 2016
was when i was a professional and i competed 20 20 to 23 times a year wow um so that's almost every weekend from march till september and you got paid
you got paid for it too right do what you got paid for it too right yeah yeah yeah it's a uh it's a
very very fun loophole of athletics that if you can sneak into the professional ranks on highland
games uh and be if you're a top 10 dude in the country, which gets you into like Celtic Classic and
the National Championship and those type of things, the sport's more than free.
Like you'll probably make a few bucks.
But I mean, yeah, they fly us out every weekend.
They put us up in hotels and then there was prize money to be won.
It's really cool.
Is it getting more popular now that everything's getting more popular, powerlifting and everything?
I mean, I'm sure at the same relatively that everything is. But yeah i mean is it going to sneak its way into mainstream i haven't
yeah i just haven't seen it anywhere lately years yeah but it is really fun to watch it's really
cool it dude it's a great great sport i loved it to death i still very much enjoy the throws um
of of the strength sports i competed in and i mean i did everything from weightlifting
powerlifting uh geared powerlifting and strongman highland game was way the most fun also i was very
good at it so that does lend to it being more fun um the caber toss looks impossible attitude
of the sport just fit me better compared to powerlifting or strongman.
There's just too much tough guy posturing that I just didn't give a shit about.
Tell us a little bit about Hate Brand.
When did that start and how are things going with it?
Things are good, man.
That started in October of 2014.
So now, give or take seven years into doing whatever this thing is. And, um, that's
apparel company. I started then and wanted to start making some clothes that I wanted to wear
is really where it started. It started to start more with you writing something first. Like,
like, uh, was it like an ebook or something that you put out or? Yeah, it's a, it's a book. And
then we made an ebook. So I wrote a book in 2010 of how to train for the Highland Games called Training Lab.
And one of the sections I wrote about in the book is called The Hate.
And this was just this kind of personal philosophy I had that my brother and I had spoke about.
Just with athletes that we admired.
And it was these guys that just, you know, still on top still still willing to do the work
to get better that it seemed their concern was always about them getting better to their standard
and not about what had to do with anyone else so they didn't hate other people you see those guys
get up in the morning on like 4 a.m and it's you know that dude hates himself more than me that
guy's willing to put in the work he's willing to do it and so from that point on it was about like I'm all right with getting
beaten by someone better than me but I'm not willing to be outworked let me ask you this man
um because we always we had some fun conversations on the podcast about this uh but psychedelics
has anything new come three more hours have you had any new adventures
as of yet because i mean talking to your knee was one thing but has anything else happened since
we've last talked about this um i haven't i've had some really good experiences kind of um you
know holding space and sitting for some other friends for their first experience with it um
my own my own journeys have
been good and i'm feeling called again to do a bigger trip like ayahuasca or something like that
um but i mean just mushroom wise or um lsd wise in the last couple months there's there's always
good stuff that gets mined out of it but the stuff that's getting mined out of it now is kind of i guess some
smaller picture stuff like changing perspective on ideas um one of one of the things that i guess
came up that i've kind of worked through a little bit is this idea that i mean how much people i
think want to replace hard concepts with magic because it's just easier to answer that way
um and this is why i think
people it's easier for them to go oh look at sema he's on drugs right because you know it
that that answer that's fucking it's magic is what's made him that way is way easier than
someone stomaching genetics hard work consistency all things, because that's the truth behind it. And so
one of the concepts that I'm working on is eliminating any of those things in my life
that I just use magic as the answer for of why it happened. You know, what's what's the reason
Slingshot got as big and successful as it did? I can call that magic right place at right time.
But I know now long enough after being in business for myself that it's not
simply that that you don't do things for a decade based on fucking magic and fairy tale dust there's
there's actual work to it matt you do a great job with uh coming out with uh new new products all
the time and uh just new designs and stuff like that are you behind that still or do you have
somebody else assisting,
or how do you guys work it?
You just randomly dreaming up these things while you're on mushrooms or what?
A bit of everything.
Yeah, we put out a lot of new stuff.
For me, we've got a big, our customer base is a large return customer base,
and so if I'm going to keep those guys happy,
I got to keep making some new shit.
And so for me,
I still come up with the core concept and typically what I want the verbiage
on the shirt to be,
as well as what I want the design.
I've got some skill as far as the designer goes is,
you know,
in illustrator or in my skill's really better on pen and paper.
And luckily, I work with some talented guys, like my buddy Drew with Slash or Kyle with Wild Giant.
And I'm able to give them a good enough idea based on my explanation and a sketch to give them a
target to hit of what I would like to create. So where people go wrong with designers, I think,
is finding a talented designer and simply telling them,
I just want something cool.
Well, that doesn't give any direction.
And so for me, I'm trying to give the biggest target a hand
for them to land on to have success
and hit the design that I'm interested in seeing.
So if they're not producing what I want, it's because I'm not doing a good job of communicating it.
And how did you know when it was time to like hire somebody?
Cause that's a tough decision for a lot of newer people that are just starting out with business.
I think you can always just kind of tell yourself you can't afford it
because it just always feels like you're fucking just treading water man um and at least it
does for me and so then when i hired brant and brought him on as our first real media guy that
you know only works for hate and i realized like what a difference it make and what my job switched
to is now guiding the ship general direction and not having to do all the detail work,
which then frees me up to do the parts of the business, like the coming up with concepts and
staying motivated and me doing podcasts like this or, you know, traveling and still making video
content like that's the part that I need to be involved in. Whereas, you know, sitting there
and editing a video for two hours or editing photos or doing all the stuff that I need to be involved in. Whereas, you know, sitting there and editing a video for two hours
or editing photos or doing all the stuff that I was doing for a long time, I can bring more value
to the company, not doing that and paying someone else. And so that's, that's when I knew that I had
to make the switch. Yeah. You come, you come a long way. I remember talking to you years ago
when we first met and you were asking me like a bunch of questions about like how to do your drift to lift a show, you know, and, uh, we talked about it
forever and you just, you always had a good handle on it. You know, you always seem to, uh, know what
you wanted. And, uh, you know, surprisingly when it came out, it's like, man, this is really,
really good. It was really well produced. I mean, you, you do a lot of good work, uh, both in your,
in your apparel and in your video
stuff. So I applaud that. I appreciate it, Chris. That means a lot. One of these days,
I'll get some people to watch it. Yeah. Hey, all that stuff comes with time, right?
Yeah. And I mean, that's that's how it is. Like, I think that's important to like with my journey
to show people I've never had a thing go viral i've never had a thing blow up i've never
had any of that like when i first went out there and did the drift to lift a thing and filmed with
kelly and mark and um and we we did that series you know i paid for that yeah i remember yeah
you finance the whole thing out of my pocket because i wanted to tell those stories with
these rad people.
And you had a full-time job too at the time, right?
Sorry, go ahead.
I think you had a full-time job at the time that you moved out of.
Yeah, I had a full-time job that paid really well.
And for whatever reason, I still felt compelled that I wanted to tell this story and tell this side of things and showcase these people I know.
the story and tell this side of things and, and, and showcase these people I know. Um,
and for me too, it's just been such a great opportunity to build relationships with really smart people. I look up to, you know, since there's probably people in the room that
are curious, um, you have like obviously a super successful apparel business with hate.
And when it comes to something like that, you know, everyone's trying to build their own apparel business with hate. And when it comes to something like that, you know, everyone's trying to build their own apparel thing on Instagram and, and, and do that. But what do you think
are some of the, I guess, least talked about ideas that would help somebody in terms of trying to
build a business like that? Things that just, you don't hear talked about, but you know,
because you've done it. Well, I think there's a difference in
making shirts and selling apparel. Um, for example, like if you want to make apparel
and be a brand, I'm not making a bunch of shirts that say Matt Vincent on them.
You know, if I want to make shirts that support Matt Vincent and the I'm so podcast,
that's not the same as having an
apparel company you know an apparel company is something that i'm trying to play a bit more
long term and not just have pop on the success of buy matt vincent's t-shirt or you know have it be
gimmicky or any of these other type of things and that was to me you know a left or right decision
that really guides kind of the direction of the brand and i wanted something like there's no way to do a matt vincent fucking dot net
cool polo shirt and so like i needed a brand and some logoing and stuff that could be bigger than
that that still had a meaning behind it but it didn't have to be matt vincent like i don't want
to necessarily be the face of it i want it to be able to stand on its own two legs. And that's a
different, that's a different decision a business owner needs to make upfront. Like, are you selling
shirts to support you and your, your audience that likes you, or do you want to start an apparel
brand? And those are different approaches was it hard
using the name hate because i know i remember in the beginning a lot of people like that's kind of
weird i mean like why would you wear something that says you hate people and you're like no
that's not it and he had explained a lot of it out but i think like sticking with that has done
really really well for you i'm very happy it's not spelled in the traditional sense i think that would have been a really ugly previous year um but i'm glad i'm glad right it's it i think it's positive than negatives i think it's
a positive in the fact that kind of once people get it they feel part of the thing yeah exactly
and then also it's a negative because people still don't know what the fuck it how to even
pronounce it yeah i have plenty of people that,
that know me and buy the clothes and then say,
and say HV three or something else.
And I'm like, that's my fault.
The clothes are cool.
So I think like that's what gets people to wear them.
You know, they look cool.
So just despite them not knowing the name of the brand or me,
it's still working.
So I should probably figure out how to get those other two a bit more in
line.
Always good to chat with you, Matt. Where can people find you and where can they find out more
about your apparel? Yep. You can find apparel at the hate.com. You can find me on Instagram
at I hate Matt Vincent. Uh, I have a podcast, the I'm so podcast and, um, yeah, I think that
basically covers all the interesting things I do. I'm on YouTube and all the other places that we all do content.
Awesome.
Yeah, have a great rest of your day.
Thanks for coming on.
This is our first Clubhouse Potty.
Yeah, Mark, I can't wait to get you guys out here, man.
Yeah, I'd love to see your new setup.
That'd be great.
Yeah, it's going to be fun.
Catch you later, bud.
Boys, have a good day.
Take care.
All right, not a bad first show huh i don't know
went pretty well had some blockbuster guests go on there yeah not too bad i had to uh every single
time we spoke get to mute us i had to turn us i had to turn us on you know but every time we didn't
i had to mute us because we were getting feedback for some reason i'm not sure what happened i ran
a test yesterday and it worked fine. But then today
people were hearing... Is that why you're sweating
profusely over there? Yes. Jesus. Yes, that's
exactly why. Are we still on Clubhouse?
We're on Clubhouse right now. But now it's
smooth. Everybody can hear us just fine.
But yeah, so I don't know what happened.
We're actually on Bathhouse.
That was a different site. That was a cool
first go of it. That was fun. That was dope.
It's great. I really like this app.
I think it's really cool.
I think it provides a lot of information.
I honestly didn't think it was going to work at all.
We're able to hear everybody fine.
Yeah.
So the cool thing is everybody heard us just fine.
The guests, like everything sounded fine.
It's just there was that little bit of echo where I couldn't figure out what the hell
was going on.
But when we repost this on iTunes, it'll sound perfect, which is cool.
Yeah.
So you can record these and then put them back out as a podcast.
Yeah.
You're not really supposed to, but we did.
Um, Hey, don't say that on here.
No, it's just like, you have to like let people know.
And I forgot to actually put that in the description.
People know that you're recording.
That we're recording, but everybody that came on new already.
But yeah, because of, because of guests, you need to, the right permission to the guests. know that you're recording that we're recording but everybody that came on knew already but yeah
because of because of us you need the permission of the guests yeah it's sort of like uh i don't
know screenshotting like a snapchat thing yeah it's like oh you weren't supposed to do that next
time we got to figure out a way to let the audience ask some questions especially if we have people on
like that i think you can tag them in right yeah no you can so like uh wheezy wayne he was here
right at the start he had his hand up but like I didn't know what the fuck was going on.
So I didn't, you know, call on him.
But Coach House was in the audience for a little bit.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fat Jesse Burdick, he was here too.
Nice.
So, but yeah.
And then now it's, it dwindled down, but it was, it was, there's a lot of people hanging
out.
So I think this might be a new, a new platform we can take over.
Yeah.
If somebody's got a question, let's
pick them up.
That's somebody on here.
Where's Wheezy? Is he still there?
I like what Stan said a lot about the
couple of ways
to comply with the diet. He said
meal prep was
one of them. Food choices was another one.
So if you have good food choices and they're high in protein
then you end up with protein leveraging which
helps prevent hunger
and helps prevent cravings.
And he just said weighing yourself.
Yeah.
I love stuff like that
because it really doesn't have a lot to do with like,
it's not taking away a bunch of stuff from you.
It's actually just telling you what you can do
that can be really beneficial.
Yeah.
So I'm just going to go on track
based on order of how long they've been here.
So we're going to go with Chris.
We're going to let him hop on the mic.
All right. All right, Chris. Where do you go? There you go. What's going on, man? Hey, guys. long they've been here so we're gonna go with chris we're gonna let him uh hop on the mic all
right all right chris let's see where'd he go there he is what's going on man hey guys what's
going down yo oh that's pretty awesome to talk to you guys uh i don't have a question but uh i just
wanted to give uh a great shout of thanks to um both mark and ch. Thank you. And obviously Sean too.
I mean, all you guys are great.
But gosh, it was what, three years ago
when you guys were on Joe Rogan.
Man, it's kind of crazy.
So I was listening to,
excuse me,
listening to you guys on Joe Rogan and then also listening to Sean Baker.
And, you know, that's kind of what kicked my butt into gear and changed my life.
So, you know, this whole carnivore experience, dude, it was crazy.
How did it change your life?
What happened? Yeah. um dude it's crazy um how did it change how did it change your life what happened yeah um
so i turned 30 um and at that time it was like um just barely turning 30 found out that
um i had crazy high blood pressure and some health issues. And, uh, it was the weirdest, weirdest thing where I
was getting sick and my wife, I'd never go to the doctor. My wife's like, you need to go to the
doctor, figure things out. Doctor's like, dude, I can't, I can't let you leave without getting you
a prescription. You got to take some blood pressure medication. Um, I was hypertensive too And then I listened to your guys' podcast
And I listened to Sean Baker
And I heard what was going on
And trying something new
And luckily I had the common sense to go
You know what, I need to do something
Need to get things changed
And this sounds like the kicker
I'm willing
to do anything, uh, especially for myself and my family so that I can be healthy. And, uh, man,
I've, it's been three years of, of, uh, eating a meat-based diet and, uh, you know,
completely changed my health. I went from being like 260 pounds hypertensive
and now I'm sitting around, you know, 180 pounds.
That's amazing.
Great bill of health.
Yeah, congratulations.
Was there something in particular that either one of us said
that like on that Rogan show that triggered you to be like,
oh, was there something encouraging where you were like,
I think I can do that diet. I pretty much like meat as it is already. Was there
like a specific moment that you remember or something we said?
Um, just the simple things that you guys say, you know, if you know, you guys can do it,
anybody can do it. Just eat red meat, drink water, keeping it as simple as possible right um now i and here especially
hearing chris's story um you know it's one of those things where you know having ups and downs
and and then finding some sort of of diet i've always been a fat kid myself um you know growing up it was it's it was normal to be chunky um so it's always
dealing with the the fat kid inside of me it's still he's still there but um man the just the
the the uh the simple things that uh you guys were talking about and then um you know i i just
think you know the fact that you guys are doing it talking about. And then, um, you know, I, I just think, you know,
the fact that you guys are doing it, talking about it, um, and then sharing it and just
keeping it simple. I mean, even, even the cooking, seeing what you guys are cooking up,
um, especially watching, uh, smelly's kitchen level. Um, but yeah, I, I don't, I don't think it was one thing in particular.
It was just mostly the fact that
you guys were keeping it simple and
keeping it real. And then
just talking about your stories about how it's
helped both of you guys. Great.
I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for
sharing. Have a great rest of your day.
Thank you, guys. Take care, buddy.
There we go.
We got our first call out of the way.
Yeah, and then we have Mike, if you guys want to take another one.
Yeah, big Mike.
Is this a Mike you guys know?
No, I don't know.
I don't know who it is.
Gentlemen, great show, fantastic content.
I want to thank you for what you guys put out today.
Thank you.
Just a really simple question.
Have you
ever incorporated any cold exposure
into what you're doing?
I've recently got into it myself just during
this pandemic shit with
Wim Hof and the breathwork and cold exposure
combo. Just wondering if you guys have any
feedback on that or if you've played
with it at all. I'm not man enough
to do that but i saw mike
mutzel jump into a frozen pond yesterday i've seen a lot of people do it i think it does have
a lot of value to it i just have never really gotten into it yeah i've done a tiny amount of
it um just going from like my hot tub into my pool and things like that and um i don't have a
ton of experience with it but it does feel. You feel like a new person in terms of recovery when you go from hot to cold.
You have any experience with it in SEMA?
The only thing I've done is like cold showers with controlled breathing.
Yeah.
That's the main thing I try to do whenever I take cold showers, like control, slow down
the breathing.
And I think that, that does help you mentally in the morning, but I haven't like, I haven't
done any crazy ice baths or anything like that.
Bro, you just called us out.
Thanks for nothing. Now we gotta just called us out. Thanks for nothing.
Now we gotta try it. Great. Thanks.
Thanks, gentlemen. Cool, man. Have a great
rest of your day.
Let's take this one home, Andrew.
I will. Okay. Take us on
out of here, buddy. Sounds good. Thank you, everybody, for
checking out the first ever
Meathead meetup
over on Clubhouse.
Thanks for being patient with us everybody that was here
in the echo really appreciate that um please make sure you guys are following the podcast at mark
mark bell's power project on uh instagram so that we guys don't miss out another opportunity to hop
in on one of these clubhouse events at mb power project on twitter my instagram twitter and i
guess clubhouse is at i am andrew z Mr. Chris Bell, where are you at?
At Big Strong Fast, and they can follow me here on Clubhouse, too.
I'll be cranking out some stuff on here.
Sounds good.
Natty Professor.
At Nsema Inyang on Instagram, YouTube, and Clubhouse.
At Nsema Inyang on Twitter.
Mark.
At Mark Smelly Bell.
Strength is never weakness.
Weakness is never strength.
Catch you guys later.
Bye.