Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Saturday School EP. 31 - Nutrition Simplified For Beginners

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Class is BACK in session. Today Mark Bell and Andrew Zaragoza do their best to get rid of some of the confusion around diet and nutrition by asking and answering some of the simplest questions to the more complex issues people face. Some of these topics might be yesterday’s news to you, but they used to be on your front page. We’re tying to make this as easy as possible for everyone to join us on our journey to being Jacked and Tanned! 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

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That's buying three boxes. And then you get a fourth one free. If you can be like or you can be like in SEMA, grab all four watermelon flavors or you can get a variety of all the other ones. I've been having chocolate every single night. It's like my little like before bedtime snack and it keeps me hydrated throughout the entire night. Again, that's at drink LMNT.com slash power project. Head over there right now. Yeah, I think that's that's at drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Head over there right now. I think that's pretty good. Just a total hypothetical. Let's say that your background has Sacramento. My background has some

cool powerlifting thing or my invention of the slingshot. And Seema's background has whatever he wants to associate with. Nigeria, Jiu Jitsu, whatever. Big old old penis big old giant black dawn swinging around what is that in the background nah it can't be a giant black cock i mean they wouldn't no that's a giant i think it's yeah it's a giant black and then he would turn around and be like that's just a normal, that's normal. It's a torpedo. That's just what I have.

That's what I'm working with. Life size. Yeah. That's one hell of a way to start off Saturday school. Oh, shit. Yeah, I guess we can start there. I thought we were talking about nutrition. Yeah.

We're talking about dicks. Well, I mean, animal protein. That's right. Yeah. That's one animal there. Good enough for Paul Saladino. Good, I mean, animal protein. That's right. Yeah. That's one animal there. Good enough for Paul Saladino. Good enough for me, right? Maybe.

Not me, but that's all you. But yeah, it's been a while, again, since we've done Saturday School. Mm-hmm. I think the last time. Time to re-pop that cherry? Can it be re-popped? I mean, born again, fresh cherry. Can it be some other type of fruit?

Yeah. Why has it always got to be a cherry? I don't know. I never got that talk, so I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what's going on either. Anyway, I think today would be good. You were talking about us just kind of kicking it and talking about nutrition. I just wanted to throw something out there real quick before we got into going back and forth on some of the topics that you have for today. I kind of just, I fell upon this a couple of years ago when I was writing the war on carbs.

And I remember like just hearing so many people say there's no cookie cutter program out there for everybody. And I have to disagree with that. Look, man, three sets of 10 in the gym of different exercises would work great for everybody. And I have to disagree with that. Look, man, three sets of 10 in the gym of different exercises would work great for everybody. And it would certainly work a lot better than zero sets of zero. So three sets of 10, a bench squat, deadlift, and various movements would be fantastic for anybody to implement into their lifestyle. People abstaining from eating large amounts of processed foods, that would be good universally. Somebody getting on a ketogenic diet would be good universally. Somebody going on a carnivore diet would be good universally. Yes, there's some exceptions. There's some people

that don't have a gallbladder that might struggle with eating large amounts of fat. There are people that have been bit by a Lone Star tick and have meat allergens, right? So of course, there's always exceptions to the rule, but I'm talking about in general. And in general, most people could really truly benefit from just having better health practices all around. So I believe that there are cookie cutter programs. I think here's the ultimate cookie cutter program, which you shouldn't have a cookie cutter program for dieting because then it makes you think about cookies and you're like, when do I get this cookie? one gram of protein per pound of body weight. So if you weighed 200 pounds,

you would have 200 grams of protein. Then we would go half that amount in grams of fat and half that amount in grams of protein. So now if you weigh 200 pounds, we're jumping down to 100 grams of carbohydrates and 100 grams of fat per day with 200 grams of protein. Now you can write that out and I believe it comes out to be close to 2000 calories. And that should be a good starting position for you.

If you weighed 300 pounds, you might do something similar. You might go 300 grams of protein, 150 grams of fat and 150 grams of carbs. Now look, it's not foolproof. It's not going to automatically work for everyone right away, but it's a great starting position to go from. And you might have to just vary it a little bit. So maybe lower your fat calories a bit, maybe lower your carbohydrate calories a little bit, just modify it and make sure you weigh yourself. I think weighing yourself every day, every other day, if you have trouble with weighing yourself and it causes a lot of problems, maybe you weigh yourself a ways to have fun every day, figure out ways of getting some deep, decent sleep. And when it comes to your calories,

figure out ways to not overeat. One of the number one ways to not overeat is to start to get rid of processed foods. Processed foods can lead to overeating. So limit them. Then you might want to incorporate something like protein leveraging. You may want to incorporate having some things in your diet that are maybe not necessarily considered to be that healthy, but are kind of on this weird borderline,

such as utilizing artificial sweeteners, which you might find in your protein powder. You might find that in your Coke Zero. You might find that in your chewing gum, but chewing gum, Coke Zero, and your protein shake are all things that are not offenders, in my opinion, of you gaining any more body fat. And we're really just trying to figure out how can we get through every single day

without over-consuming energy? I believe the two main energy sources to focus on are carbohydrates and fats. In terms of protein, protein is pretty stagnant in terms of you're just going to go about approximately one gram per pound of body weight, give or take some here or there, depending on body fat percentages and how big you are versus how small you're trying to get versus how big you're trying to get and so forth. But anyway, that's that for that. Let's kick this thing off and let's get this thing rolling. Huh, Andrew?

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you kind of kicked it off very well because what I wanted to start with, which is like a nutrition education period, you know, you had mentioned you were on a flight recently and you kind of gave a little mini seminar and it's just, it's still baffling to me, you know know because i'm still figuring stuff out as well but like what i mean you you said i think nutrition science is kind of like really far behind in regards to everything in general like other things are researched so well

and yet we're still like we can't get this information out there um so yeah in in my head we're talking right now to those same people on that airplane, you know, in regards to, like, what about the, you know, South Beach diet? Like, what's going on with that? But you did bring up artificial sweeteners. And, you know, we can find a study that's going to, you know, agree or disagree with any argument. That's going to, you know, agree or disagree with any argument. But somebody that we both look up to, Ron Penna, said, like, no, you should you guys should be taking in all the artificial sweeteners that you can. And I've had this, like, I guess, ideology where I didn't want to welcome soda.

That's the main one into my household. Like, that's just what like no way am I going to have, you know, my kids drink this sugary drink. No way am I going to have this. And then I seen Coke Zero and I'm like, okay, like it probably, who knows what it tastes like. It probably tastes great. What's in it? Okay. It's got artificial sweeteners, but it's got zero calories. Like I'm so conflicted, right? But then I tried it and I liked it and I've been having a lot of success with it. I've put it on my Instagram and I've had numerous DMs from people saying like that has solved my sweet tooth. Because of Coke Zero, I'm now able to have dinner and not want to grab something else extra. moms and stuff. They freak out when they see artificial sweeteners. And I haven't really heard you talk too much about artificial sweeteners, but what's, you know, what's your stance or like, what's your advice when somebody is looking to, you know, slim up, drop some pounds and, um, maybe they're like, well, shit, maybe I should look towards these, uh, zero calorie drinks. There are many, many levels to, uh, trying to be healthier and being healthy.

And people usually don't start out getting organic grass fed raw this and raw that right off the bat. Right. Like it's usually takes some steps. And the more that you learn about food, maybe the more that you value food and maybe you're like you know what it just is helpful for me to invest and spend a little bit more money and a little bit more time getting what i believe is the best possible foods for my system however the main thing that we're trying to combat for most people not for every single person because not everyone struggles with this but a large percentage of the united states and a large percentage of the world is over fat. How do we get fat? How do we become fatter? Our Coke zeros are not doing that to us.

Our Coke zeros are not making us fatter. Diet Pepsi is not making us fatter. Now, what you could assume is you could say, look, I see a lot of fat people like they're real big and they always have a diet soda, right? We could say the flip side of that and can say, look, man, the guys that are really lean in the gym, all I ever see them doing is lifting weights. They don't do any cardio. That does not mean that cardio is useless. That does not mean that the only way to get lean is through lifting weights. So a lot of times we're seeing a lot of these things or hearing a lot of these things from people that we would consider to be experts or people that maybe they're not a doctor, but maybe they look like our boy Encema. Maybe they look incredible, right? They have an incredible physique.

And sometimes that can be confusing because sometimes people like that are like, I don't know, man, I don't pay much. Encema is very diligent about his nutrition, but there are people that aren't, and they're still very lean. So it leaves us to be very confused a lot of times. When it comes to artificial sweeteners, what I would say is no calories, no harm. That's something I heard from Greg Doucette. I'm not sure if he took it from somewhere else. But I would have to agree with that because if we go from the top down, the top thing to worry about for most Americans

and most people in general is the overconsumption of energy. The overconsumption of energy is going to, the overconsumption of calories, we can call it that, is that is going to be the number one reason for your weight gain. We're taking in too much and we are putting out too little. And over a period of time, we're going to have an accumulation of body fat. The accumulation of body fat, ironically enough, is what allows our body to hold on to more pollutants. And that gets us to our next phase of the number one thing you would probably want to focus on in terms of your health would be, well, let me figure out a way to be less fat. Let me think about a way to have my brain be less fat in terms of thinking about food nonstop. And there's a lot of different ways to shut some of that down and shut some of that up.

think of a bunch of different ways that's going to allow me to get through each and every day without being in a caloric surplus. That can mean chewing gum, that can mean soda, diet sodas, crystal light, all kinds of variations of different things. Jell-O has like 10 calories, usually has artificial sweeteners in there, protein powders, all these things can be super effective towards us maintaining a healthy body. But if we continue to gain body fat every day and we continue to get bigger because we are making poor decisions with our nutrition every day and we end up in this caloric surplus, we will gain body fat. When you gain body fat, you now open your body up to other harmful diseases, illnesses, and all kinds of other things such as pollutants like these like xenoestrogens and all these

different things that we hear so much about, you know, how the crops are treated, these plastics and all these things that people make such a big deal about. I don't think that they're not a big deal, but I think that they're a bigger deal when you're 400 pounds. One of the best ways to detoxify your body is to lose body fat. So you hear people talking about, I'm going on a cleanse, I'm going on a detox. The best way to do that would be to lose body fat because most of the research that I've heard of, keep in mind, I'm not a researcher. I'm not a doctor.

I'm not a professional bodybuilder. I'm not a professional of really much of anything. I'm just somebody who's been around for a long time and rubbed elbows with a lot of great people and have heard a lot of great things when it comes to nutrition. And I try my best to absorb these things and then relay them out to you. I'm not always 100% correct, but as far as the information I have, this is where those xenoestrogens and some of these things will sit is in our fat cells. So if we have

an ability to lose that body fat, so that's kind of the hierarchy. And yes, would it be healthier if you went with the omega- it be healthier if you went with, you know, the omega three eggs? And if you stayed away from artificial sweeteners, aspartame, sucralose, and all these different things, would it be helpful? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Maybe there's somebody out there saying, look, man, I got a lot of research on the gut microbiome and that is destroying you and that's not great what i would say is get things in order first don't be fat figure out a way to be less fat and when i say don't be fat i feel like i can say that because my entire family has been fat i've been fat before so i'm not saying it in a demeaning way i'm saying in a way that you can understand it the best

because i think sometimes like, hey man, you need to try to be skinny. You don't need to try to be something that you're not, but also you don't need to blatantly be way overweight. And that could be different for you. You could simply just go from, can you get from 270 to 250? You know what I mean? Like, come on, dude. Like we, you can get there. I'm not i'm not fat shaming you i'm not trying to make you feel bad But you know in your heart that you could lose 20 pounds, you know in your heart you could lose 20 30 pounds A lot of times once you get momentum towards losing some of that weight You're encouraged and inspired and you're like, you know what if i'm being honest, I probably need to lose another 20

But if you're 40 pounds less than you have been before, and you just ride out the rest of your life that way, I still think that's a great choice. A lot of the research shows that when you lose about 10% of your body fat, that you end up getting a lot of great health benefits from that. We see a lot of people, I think, thinking that they need to lose 100 pounds or 80 pounds. But if you weigh

300, we're just asking you to get down to 270, you know? And what I would like to see for people is for people to feel better, not just feel better in their day-to-day and sleep better and so on, but I'd love for people to feel just a little ounce of the things that I have felt from training. This is why I'm so excited about it from training and from new and from some nutrition. And in my experience, I have not noticed personally anything harmful from artificial sweeteners. Now, let me just kind of finish by saying like, of course anything could be harmful if we're talking about dosage,

you know, if we're talking about, you know, drinking 15 Coke zeros every day, it's dosage, you know, if we're talking about, you know, drinking 15 Coke zeros every day, it's probably not, you know, you should probably drink some water. You know what I mean? Like two or three every day, probably not a huge problem. If you're not responding well to caffeine, maybe you need to like, you know, find some caffeine free ones, or maybe you need to wean yourself away from it. But I still don't think it's that big of a deal. I don't think it's as connected to cancer and all these different

things that people want to associate it with. The number one thing that you can do for yourself, if you struggle with this particular thing, is to work on your body fat percentage, bringing your body fat down. Once that's down, now we can start to make other decisions if we feel like it would be wise for us to only drink water. But like, look, man, everything is polluted. Everything is polluted. You can make an argument that the water that's in the Coke Zero is healthier for you than what's in your Fiji water or than what's in your Dasani or whatever. I would say that that like, that would not surprise me at all. If I think Coke owns Dasani, like it wouldn't surprise me at all if they cared more about the water that they use for their Coke

more so than they care about the regular drinking water that they sell. Like it wouldn't shock me. So that's my stance on that. Like if you find things that have artificial sweeteners that don't have a lot of calories in it, I say go for it if it can be utilized to assist you to keep your weight down. Yeah. So in summation, you would say being overweight is more harmful than sucralose, aspartame, artificial sweeteners yeah and i'm just i'm not talking about like there's also some proof this is where things get really confusing there's also some proof that being overweight is heart protective in some way which shit man now i'm now we're really confused but i think we all know what we're talking about like over like over fat like you have

excess i'm not talking about you got a little spare tire i'm not talking about you you held on to a little bit of weight from college or even from the pandemic like i'm not really talking about that kind of thing um but what i am talking about is is as you're an adult you're now 30 40 50 60 pounds heavier than you were when you were 18 or 19. Now, if you were really thin, like, you know, now we're kind of talking about some different stuff. But in general, if you start to really get that distance, and a good way for men, sorry, ladies, I don't have a stat for you. But a good way for men, if your waistline is measuring, you know, 40 or above, it's just time to make some changes. It's time to tighten that up a bit and see if,

I'm not asking you to turn that into a 34 waist, but can we keep it under 40? Let's keep it under 40 for as long as we can. Maybe even make it a goal as you become 40 or 50 to get it down to 39, 38, just like whatever you think you can handle. So we've mentioned zero calorie, you think you can handle. So we mentioned zero calorie. You mentioned some low calorie dense foods. How can somebody enter this amazing world of a calorie deficit? And is that even the goal, you know, when it comes to their diet? I think the leveraging of protein is huge. Protein versus energy. This is a book that's written by Ted Nieman. It's called P, energy. This is a book that's written by Ted Nieman. It's called P, it's called the PED diet, I believe. And he talks often about P versus E, protein versus energy. Ted is of the belief that protein is not a great energy source for human beings. And so protein, while it's not a freebie,

perhaps it is almost a freebie. And so how can we eat less in a day? How can we be less fat? Let me go over three ways that I think you can be less fat. Or three ways that you can end up eating less and controlling your overall energy balance. Not allowing yourself to overeat every single day. This is, in my opinion, the simplest way. We got protein would be the kind of hierarchy of needs there. Protein forward, make protein the priority.

If you don't like meat, then that does not have to be a huge problem for you, but I still would suggest finding sources of protein and keeping protein as your main source. The reason is, is that protein can fill us up. Protein can help satiate us. I've done another podcast previously on protein leveraging. I believe it was a Saturday school that was done early on. You could check out that episode and listen to that and you'll get a lot of great information from that. But protein can be satiating, it can help with cravings, it can help keep our hunger

at bay, and it can help you overall to gain control over your diet. The next thing that we'd have in there to keep you from overeating every day would be exercise because exercise is going to help you with some sort of energy balance. Protein and exercise. And then the third thing would be fiber. So we just did three things. The training obviously is not part of the food, but we have protein and we have fiber. Those are two things that we can eat in large amounts, won't really have a negative cost for what we're trying to do every day. And these are all things that will fill us up. These are all things that will satiate us.

Human beings are in search of a specific amount of protein every day. How much protein? I don't really know that's why i always just say one i don't think anybody really truly knows um i know that you can get along just fine without one gram per pound of body weight but you have to eat something and so eating a eating uh eating a good amount of protein every single day one gram per pound of body weight is usually where I recommend that people start. And then in terms of fiber, maybe you have two or three servings of vegetables a day. If you feel like you digest vegetables, you know, keep in a decent amount of them to help keep you full. I personally don't eat a lot of vegetables. I'll eat them maybe once a

day, once every other day. I'm just not, I just personally don't love them. And I personally don't think that I really need them. You could disagree with that. That's totally fine. I'm open to that. But exercise is going to help you control your energy because it's going to allow you to put out some energy. And in addition to that, it's going to keep you from eating

so the great thing about training is that you're not going to be eating a bagel while you're training most likely if you or if you're like me you know 10 years ago maybe maybe you would because you'd have a bench bagel right but in general it that's going to be something that's going to uh it's going to be an appetite suppressant in some ways. And sometimes after training, you're not even that hungry. Also, what I'd say with training, when it comes to lifting weights, remember lifting weights is like an insurance policy for our metabolism, where it's going to really be beneficial to us in the future. We put a lot of energy into it at a particular moment,

and we don't see how it's going to reward us. Just like that money that comes out of your paycheck all the time towards insurance, and it never seems to pay off. And then the one time you get hospitalized or a family member gets sick, it pays off big time when those insurance bills come, right? When the holidays come is when your insurance policy is going to pay up. When, when, uh, you know, grandma makes your favorite, whatever it is. And when aunt so-and-so makes these killer meatballs or whatever, you're going to be able to enjoy those things because now you have more muscle mass on your body and your metabolism is slightly changed. So putting on muscle mass is a huge component of all of this. And what it will lead to is it will lead to you being able to burn more calories in the future. So I think most of that is fairly simple to understand.

And then on top of that, just staying on top of some simple 10 minute walks every single day. It seems reasonable to me. It doesn't seem reasonable to me for people to, um, have spent the amount of hours and time that I have in the gym. So I totally understand that part, but lifting weights two or three times a week sounds totally reasonable. I think every, I'm not even talking about necessarily lifting weights, but some form of resistance training, you could be lifting with bands, you could be lifting with your own body weight. Any of that was acceptable and any of that can be great, but something other, you know, more resistance than just like yoga, you know, take something a little bit, a step further than, than just that. And then the recommendations I made towards,

you know, eating more protein, the 10 minute walks, these are all things that everyone can do. So with a calorie deficit though, um, are people going to be hungrier? Yeah. So you have to be careful with a caloric deficit. And this is why I personally don't like to count calories. Um, because they, because they will not only will they, not only can they lead to you being more hungry, they can also lead you to be less than what you normally are because you're maybe not at an optimal amount of calories every day.

I think the main thing to get used to whenever you're switching to a diet, and if you're going to consider some of the things we're talking about today, the main thing is to get used to the food. Get used to these foods. Get used to, again, you can kind of pick your protein, but I'm a fan of meat. And then beyond meat, I would go with maybe some vegetables and then fruit and or starchy carbohydrates. And that would,

that's your list. That's your, maybe some dairy, maybe some cheese can handle milk. That might be okay. Yogurt, cottage cheese, things like that.

But that's get used to those foods because it's very difficult just off of those foods alone to make yourself fat unless you start getting creative with it and you start mixing a lot of eggs as well, start mixing a lot of things together. Watch out for fat calories because they can just jump up there real quick. If you make a big omelet and you throw bacon and cheese in there, you might be dealing with 50, 60 grams of fat. That might not be a desired thing for you. If you do that three, four or five times a day, that might be a really huge amount of calories. But in my opinion, a great place to start with

calories is to go one gram per pound of body weight in terms of protein and then do half that in your energy sources, which are carbs and fats. From there, you can start to make a decision. How am I feeling? What am I weighing? Am I heading in the right direction? Am I heading in the wrong direction? In my opinion, it would be odd for you to be heading in the wrong direction, but if you were, I would tweak either the carbs or the fat pick one or the other not necessarily both and uh and then kind of go from there and see continue to see how you feel every day you said meat and then you said beyond meat and then you went on but i was like he doesn't mean beyond meat the actual like artificial right no god no no uh what about some

of these um i'm gonna use the word, although they're not extreme, but extreme diets, carnivore diet, keto diet, vegan diet. Does somebody need to be super religious with their diet? Do they have to, like, all right, Mark says I should probably go, you know, keep my calories in check. So I'm going to get rid of all my carbs. Therefore, I'm going to go carnivore or I'm going to, you know, load up on fat, not worry about, you know, that sort of thing. Or, of course, you know, vegetarian and vegan and just get rid of everything fun. I mean, everything useful. But, yeah, does, yeah, like what's that all about?

You know, like does somebody really have to, like, that's it? As of today, I am now following a ketogenic diet. If you're just looking to lose some weight and you're not in a competitive mode and you're not trying to have some physique that was way better than something you accomplished before, it's not anything in the bodybuilding or fitness realm. Your nutrition should, should not feel that difficult. your fitness realm, your nutrition should not feel that difficult. It really shouldn't be that difficult. We have to look, you have to solve the problem on the level at which it exists. Where is your problem? What is your weak point? Is it 7 p.m.? Is it 8 p.m.? When you're at home with your wife and kids and you're not around coworkers and friends and around people that know you as the lifter or the fitness guy and the family or whatever.

And then next thing you know, you're rummaging through the cabinets. Regardless of what you're eating, you're probably just eating something that you don't need at that point. At that point. And you're probably. Maybe just haven't learned. To trade things out. Switch things out for something better. Is always a good place to start.

But ultimately switching things out for nothing. Is actually the place that you want to end up in. For most people. You don't want to end up with any sort of eating disorder. But if you just ate dinner. You don't need anything else. I know that you might feel comforted from eating something else, but can you start to talk yourself into making better decisions? Can you say, you know what, every Wednesday and Friday, I'm going to have something a little extra after dinner.

Like, can you, you know, now you're like, now that sounds more reasonable to me. Okay. Two days out of the week or three days out of the week. Um, you know, there's, there's seven days in the week. So if you can have more good days than,

than bad days or, uh, more better days than you do days that aren't as good, uh, then you're headed in the right direction. That's a good start, but do you need to do it all the time? Does it have to be every night that you have a drink? Does it have to be every night?

Alcohol is a huge thing that holds people back from their weight loss journey for multiple reasons. Sometimes it's just excess calories, but a lot of times those drinks can lead to, potentially lead to you eating foods that you're not supposed to. You kind of get like almost like the munchies sort of sometimes from drinking. So you just have to be, you just have to be really careful with the decisions that you're making. But what is like, if you really want to lose weight and you have a significant other, roommate, whatever, and every night around eight, nine o'clock,

you find yourself, you know, eating a bowl of ice cream. You have to tell somebody and you have to say, Hey, you know, like you saw me going through those, you know, those, uh, Ben and Jerry's ice creams last couple of days and weeks or whatever. I really, I need to, I need to cut that out. Can you help me with that? Now, ultimately it's best to be able to control yourself and to not, not need anybody else's help, but it can be really helpful. Maybe that person's like, yeah, you know what? Me too. Maybe your significant other is like, yeah, I need to stop messing around with that bullshit too. So I'm in, you know, let's, let's do this to finding somebody else to do it together with. My wife is very, is pretty health conscious. So that's always really helpful for me.

And I just think, you know, like what are the triggers? Are the triggers that you sit down and watch TV? Maybe you need to like not sit down and watch TV at that time. Or again, maybe you need to just do it less. Maybe you can go for a walk before you do it, or maybe you can make a better choice and maybe just have something that would be less harmful, like a protein shake, which would primarily be just protein, no sugar and no extra calories and not a lot of fat. But that can be pretty scary though, right? Like, hey, significant other, like I need help with, you know, this ice

cream habit that I have when we watch movies or whatever, because you don't want to hear the answer of like, yeah, I'm going to help you. Cause you're like, well, I really want my, my damn ice cream, but it can be super helpful. Now this, this, this top or this question just kind of came to me right now. And it might be a little controversial, but like, even when you go to the doctor and you fill out one of those forms, like do you have you had like anybody on your side of the family have cancer, diabetes or whatever? You hear that all the time. Oh, diabetes runs. It's hereditary in my family.

And I don't know if you know anything about this, but is being overweight hereditary? There's obviously genetic components to everything. there's obviously genetic components to everything um i mean there's there's definitely huge genetic components to things i think some people are apt to store more fat in certain places than others um but i do think i do think environmental is a huge, is a huge factor. So you could have genetics that would lead you to be like beefier. But what would really trigger that is poor nutrition. I think for the most, when we're talking about people being like, there's clinical things that can happen to people.

There's clinical things that happen to children that are like, really, there's clinical things that can happen to people. There's clinical things that happen to children, um, that are like, they're only like 10, you know, and they're really, really, so I don't know much about some of that stuff. Like that to me doesn't make any sense. I'm like, there's just no way that some of these kids that have these problems are, maybe there is, again, I don't, I don't know a ton about it, but I have empathy towards that. And I don't want to try to tackle that particular, uh, subject, but I do think we have genetic propensity for everything, like nearly everything, like motivation, um, intellect to a certain degree. I think that we're all capable of learning a lot of the similar things, but maybe not at the same speed. But I do think that nutrition is a trigger for a lot of stuff, a trigger for disease, a trigger for being obese. say that like my family, like my family has a history of being heavy. You would also look at a lot of my family members and you'd be like, well, they're not nearly as fat as I thought you

meant, you know, but a lot of it's because everyone has reeled it in because everyone has created a better environment for themselves. So there hasn't been anybody in my family that can't lose weight. Like they've all been able to lose weight. Even my mother who basically died from being obese, she was able to lose weight, you know, in times when she, when she needed to, um, she just had a really hard time from a, uh, mental standpoint of, of staying on point with that and being able to, uh, I guess you'd say like follow through with it. But for the most part, you know, if somebody I think that a lot of times it's easy to blame something on your genetics. But I also would say that it's really rare to be like overly like way, way overweight just based on your genetics only. genetics only. So I think that everyone can lose weight. Everyone can be in better shape. How much better shape, you know, that could be very heavily determined on your genetics.

Yeah. You nailed it on the head. That's really what I wanted you to say is, you know, I have heard people's like, oh, well, my family's big. So that's just the way I'm going to be as well. And we've said it before on the show and you said it and i've you know like my family is italian so like whenever i used to bring up like a lower carb style they're like how do you can't do that we eat pasta like we don't have to eat first of all there's nothing wrong with pasta necessarily but all the oil and we're cooking it like we're cooking the meatballs in a pot with tomato sauce and with sausage. And then we're mixing the, it's so fucking good now. Yeah. And then we're eating garlic bread and then we're having Caesar salad with it, which people don't even recognize a lot of times their salad has 50 grams of fat. It's like, you're done 50 grams of fat.

Can't afford to do that. And, but here you are thinking that you made a little bit better. Oh, I'll load up on a little bit more salad. And it's like, man, you're really screwing yourself over because you maybe just didn't realize the amount of calories. And I'm not saying that fat's bad for you either. It's just, there's just a lot of calories in there. Yeah. I was trying to be the change over Easter weekend. Bring in just a shit ton of coke zeros and like the all the zero calorie uh sodas nobody said a damn thing other than like the next day my sister was like dude everyone really dug those and nobody could tell the difference

i was like hell yeah that's what i'm talking about yeah you know what you can surprise the shit out of people you'd be shocked at how many uh just really fucking good drinks there are and foods um i like zevia's quite a bit not so much just their soda but they're the tea that they have these are really good yeah they're freaking amazing you bring those over to somebody's house they'll like blow their mind and and maybe they don't participate in drinking any of them maybe you drink them all yeah then you're set um there's uh there's chalk products, which they make peanut butter cups, which I'm a huge peanut butter cup fan. They taste like fucking peanut butter cups.

They're dead on. Those things are great. They don't, they're not absent of calories though. You know, there's no, there's really not a lot of free rides except for when it comes to

artificial sweeteners. It's kind of an amazing thing. It's like, man, it's kind of, they're kind of a gift in some way. What I would be cautious of when it comes to artificial sweeteners is having them be a trigger for you. So for some people, they could potentially be a trigger.

But if you should be smart enough, you should understand what your triggers are. Is this going to lead you to being like, man, I really loved having something sweet. I want to have the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. More recently, another company came out, I think it's just called Unreal, and they make M&Ms, they make peanut butter cups, they make like a milk chocolate, they make a couple of things that are like dark chocolate. Again, it's not free of calories, but it has less calories than most stuff and go buy a couple bags of this shit and tell me that it doesn't taste good tastes fucking awesome yeah so if you need to if you need to you know kill a craving like

that's a great way that's a great way to handle it and another great way to handle a craving if you don't have like diabetes or some sort of disease of some kind, and you're not older and sick in some way, just go crush the shit out of your cravings. Go smash it. You know, you want pizza, take a note of it and say, you know what? But push, push the craving aside for at least a moment, like show some sort of mental toughness and maybe even think of a way that you can kind of earn it. Say like, you know what?

Man, I'm really dying for some pizza. Don't fall for it on that Wednesday. Wait till that Saturday comes, you know, or wait a couple, as many days as you can. And then hammer as much pizza as you can possibly eat. Hopefully the craving's gone for a week or two. And then hopefully you can revisit another one. The only thing you have to be worried about is usually when you wake up from those things, like the next day you have a little bit of like a carb hangover and then your mind is still

in the gutter. Kind of your mind is still thinking dirty thoughts about your food. in the gutter, kind of your mind is still thinking dirty thoughts about your food. So you need to be really kind of careful and cautious that that next day. Um, the way I usually have done that is the way I navigate that is I would crush just a shit ton of cookies. If I really, I don't really do this anymore. This took me like a decade to get past a lot of these things, but I used to just, I would just crush, I would just crush, I don't know, 20 cookies or something. Right. And then the next day would be like kind of a gray

area day where I would, if I felt like eating something, let's say like an English muffin or something, I would eat that in the morning, but I would still eat relatively healthy. I would just have some bullshit in my diet that normally wouldn't be there. The next day would be a little tighter. And by the time we got to day number three, I was kind of back on point and back on plan. What happened was, is after doing that for a pretty long time, I just got sick of it. I was like, this, all this stuff to kind of counteract that one day is just kind of dumb. So I'm just not going to do that anymore. So rather than doing that, I usually just try to have a more reasonable, if I'm going to cheat at all, I try to do something more reasonable.

It's like, I go out to eat with my wife. Um, we eat dinner. Maybe I eat some bread that they serve with the meal. Um, maybe I eat a couple of things or just a little off plan. And it's like, there's like, I don't know, have a little bit of wine, but there's hardly any harm at all. Like, what did I do? I didn't go backwards, but I just didn't move forward. So if you're going to cheat, a great way to look at it is how do I just make sure that I don't go backwards?

For a lot of people, the only thing that they can do is continue on the plan because anything that they do that's a deviation from the plan throws them way off. And so you have to understand who you are in order to continue to have diet success. What do you think are a few things that people aren't even aware that are affecting their diet? One thing right there, I was just thinking of like they're maybe trying to be too restrictive. A couple other things that we talk about on the podcast all the time, they're not getting enough sleep. Therefore, the next day they're crushing that Ben and Jerry's and they're just like, what the heck? I thought I decided I was going to be on a diet. But things

like that, that maybe people aren't really even considering when it comes to their diet. I'm not a big fan of being a fun seeker necessarily, but you are i'm sorry being like a happy seeker you know seeking happiness um however i do think it's a good idea to like try to force some fun on yourself you know like you could uh you could feel sad depressed lonely any of those things and play songs that match up with that or or you can play some uh sir mix a lot baby's got back and be all fired up and think it's fun and funny um you can get around other people that are who who makes you smile you know who makes you laugh text them say hey dickhead you're a piece of shit you know and see what they write back like just how how can you, the reason, the reason for that is

that we're, we're, you deprive yourself of so much. Like if you're just on a carnivore diet, all you're doing is eating meat and you're waking up early and you're training and you're doing all this shit all the time, your life becomes really monotonous and there's not, it's real, like, try to have more fun, try to have more love, try to have more. And the more that you can kind of give to other people, the more that you'll receive back. And the more that you receive back, the easier it is to manage stress and the more resilient and the stronger that you can be.

But a big area where I think people fall off is they restrict their calories or they restrict their particular macronutrient too harsh for too long. And they say like, I'm on a keto diet and this is the way it's going to be and I'm not eating any carbs. But if you keep thinking about carbs all the time, you would just be best off just throwing some in there here and there. Just, I don't know, pick a reasonable amount. It's not going to kill you to have 30 grams of carbs or 50 grams of carbs here or there. But I think maybe what people are missing is the fact that I think your body works in a very delayed fashion. I think that when you find yourself with Ben and Jerry's and Doritos and you having yourself a little cheat meal party.

I think that you can look back a couple of days and see that you fucked yourself somewhere. Whether it be too much training, like you might have spent 90 minutes in the gym training on Saturday and now here you are, you're screwed up with your diet on Tuesday. You may have trained really hard for five days in a row and you may have kind of over-trained, over-stressed yourself. And now, and now you're, now you're just kind of paying the price for it because your body's like, Hey, we don't, we don't, we don't like what you're doing, man. You're not giving us enough. And then all the stresses of life, uh, really tidal wave your ass when you're already a little bit, maybe you beat yourself

up with something positive, with running, with lifting. Those are all great stresses, but to your body, it's all the same. It's just, you just abused the shit out of yourself. You didn't allow yourself to recover from anything. And now, now you have stress at work. You got stressed with a relationship. You got stressed here or there and just

it's an awful place to be because you end up with or it can be interpreted as an awful place to be because you end up with a lot of anxiety of like how you got into this spot

you're like I thought I was doing stuff really good for myself and now I'm really all these things have huge impact on our food choices and so I would look back and try to,

this is something that Hani Rambad teaches quite a bit. If you're new to this game, and this is a big game of nutrition and fitness, then you need to learn how to play it as quickly as you possibly can. And I suggest that you write everything down that you can. Everything that you can track, just track it. Like I've never been a huge

fan of necessarily tracking calories, but there was a point where I wrote down everything that I ate. I wrote down every supplement that I took. I still have the training logs from it. I wrote down my best lifts. I wrote down how much I used on a lat pulldown. I wrote how much I did with a tricep rope. I wrote down how much I did with a hammer curl versus a regular curl. And I just, it seems like a lot of craziness and a lot of crazy work to do that. And I definitely can admit that I went in really, really far. But I also learned a lot. If you want to learn the quickest way, you don't have to ask

me questions. You got to ask yourself a lot of questions. Is this the best way to do these things? Write down the stuff and then see what your results are from that. And if you keep falling off the wagon, quote unquote, you need to get on a diet that there is where there isn't a wagon. You need to get on a diet where there isn't a wagon. You need to find a path that maybe has less resistance to it. Because if you're trying just to lose 20 pounds and you're 100 pounds overweight, the resistance to lose 20 pounds, while it may be very difficult to get momentum heading in the right direction. It should actually, when you look back at it and you did lose 20 pounds, normally when you ask those people, how'd you lose 20 pounds,

you're making some great progress. Normally they're like, actually it was pretty easy. That's usually what they say. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that they, they went all in on it and they really tried to learn as quickly as they could talk to anybody that's lost a hundred pounds and you'll be shocked at how much information they know. You'd be like, Holy shit. They got like a PhD in nutrition, uh, with, uh, skipping all the bullshit you got to go through in school. Absolutely. So I guess the last thing I have,

and if you have other stuff, please, uh, you know, go ahead and keep going. But something that you kind of started the episode with, which was like kind of where to get started, but somebody listening right now, like literally what's the next step for them? Like what's step one? Is it, all right, turn this podcast off, go to the store and hit the grocery store? Is it watch the other Saturday School episodes where we talk about nutrition? Is it follow someone else on YouTube? Write a list of goals? Is it write whatever diet they want to follow and then go study more on that? What should they do now? I think my suggestion would be that step one is to figure out a way to move. If you're not currently moving, um, walking a couple of times a day for 10 minutes. I know some people have like foot problems and ankle problems and people that are heavy

have like knee problems and just, it's not, it's very, can be very difficult, uh, for them. So maybe because of that, maybe you find something in the gym that you can do for five minutes ten minutes maybe you can do an elliptical or maybe you can do something else so i always like to see people start with movement i just i i think the psychological stuff surrounding food is just a massive barrier of entry for anyone to control when they clearly, when they, when they very clearly have had,

have struggled with it their whole life. You know, um, that is a very, very like, that's going to take a long time, but for us just to ingrain a little bit of exercise into your life, it's not going to take any longer than like two weeks.

If you do it for two weeks straight, you'll, you, you might be quote unquote cured. You might have your RX to get you headed in the right direction. Um, it's not going to solve all your problems walking twice a day or three times a day for 10 minutes.

Um, but it's a good start in the right direction from there. Yes. You have to start to be aware of the foods that you're purchasing from the grocery store. There's so many different ways you can tackle all of these things. The easiest way, in my opinion, if you don't want to get too caught up with calculating stuff and getting caught up in numbers, is just to buy stuff that doesn't come packaged and doesn't have nutritional information on it. You know, I mean, sometimes the meat will even be packaged at the store and still have

nutritional information on it. But I'm talking about like processed foods, like rather than worry about the 80 calories that you get from your goldfish, just goldfish just aren't there. It's not it's processed food. It can be part of a healthy plan, but I don't think it's a great place to start. I have seen people start with that and they count calories and they still do really well. But I think trying to nitpick and find all these like little cheat codes and cheat ways of doing things, I don't think is a good way to start out.

So buy fresh foods, buy meat, buy vegetables, buy fruit. fresh foods, buy meat, buy vegetables, buy fruit. If you're somebody that can if you're somebody that wants to gain muscle and train in the gym and stuff like that then maybe you grab a hold of some potatoes and some rice and stuff like that too. But it's pretty simple. I think it's fairly simple. You're trying to be protein minded try to be protein first so when you do go to fairly simple. You're trying to be protein minded, try to be protein first. So when you do go to the grocery store, you're going to be buying a chicken and lean cuts of steak and maybe some bacon, maybe some eggs.

I've done, you know, I've done a lot of different styles of diet, a lot of different styles of eating when it comes to like keto carnivore type stuff. a lot of different styles of eating when it comes to like keto carnivore type stuff. And ultimately through eating Piedmontese, I've learned that just cutting back on those fat calories has helped me to be way leaner than I ever have before. I'm not talking about cutting the fat calories out because that would be a huge mistake, but just cutting them back. I was probably eating two, 300 grams of fat every day without question. And maybe even sometimes even more because I was eating like fatty ribeyes and bacon and cheese and things like that. And since that time, you know, since the time that we've met up with some of the people at Piedmontese and had them sponsor the podcast and stuff, Piedmontese steaks for those people that aren't aware, they're just a lot leaner, a lot leaner steaks.

You know, take a take a ribeye from Piedmontese versusaks, for those people that aren't aware, they're just a lot leaner, a lot leaner steaks. You know, take a ribeye from Piedmontese versus a regular ribeye. It's at least half the amount of fat, which would, you know, cut down the calories tremendously. So still always be cautious of the overall amount of food that you're eating. The only things that I would say might be free are very, very lean sources of protein that aren't accompanied by other calories. So that would be like a whey protein shake, egg whites, nonfat cottage cheese, nonfat yogurt. Some of those things kind of fall into that category. Maybe a chicken breast, maybe turkey, maybe very, very lean sources of red meat.

And then your other freebies would be vegetables. Like eat those things, eat lean proteins and eat vegetables until you are going to fucking explode. You know, just eat them. Like, if you're not used to vegetables, you're not used to eating large amounts of protein, just be cautious. Take your time going into it because you're going to blow your asshole out. I don't want to see any more blown out assholes. You know, I'm tired of people blaming me for it.

Tired of getting those DMS to prolapse buttholes. Yeah. Really getting to be brutal. That's not good for anybody, but those are all good places to start. Uh, when you go to the, when you go to the grocery store and then just also give yourself some sort of

out some kind, like, you know, don't think like, I'm just going to start on Monday and I'm never going to look back. You think about looking back right from the beginning, you know, don't think like, I'm just going to start on Monday and I'm never going to look back. You think about looking back right from the beginning, you know, so you don't have to get set back. You know, just when you start this mission on Monday that you claim you're going to do, maybe you're like, you know what? On Thursday, I'm going to take, I'm just going to eat like a cheat meal.

What's my first cheat? Like, think about, you'll be so excited. That'll be your main focus, which is kind of ridiculous because you're only on a diet for like three and a half days. Right. But that'll be your focus. Like, well,

what am I going to eat on Thursday? And then Saturday morning you wake up and eat some fucking cocoa pebbles or something, you know, and get back onto your, see Andrew's all excited and get back onto your shit. Just definitely not cinnamon toast crunch. No. Yeah. That's too much. No, that was great, man. Get back onto your shit. Just definitely not Cinnamon Toast Crunch. No. Too much.

That was great, man. Thanks for all the information. I don't know if you have anything else to add, but that shit was gold, man. I think that's it, man. Pretty simple stuff. I want to finish off with, this is from Alan Watts. This is, I think, a little bit related to what we're talking about today. Why do you want to be better? The reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren't. That hurts.

That's very hurtful. Thank you, Alan Watts. No, I just think that if we knew what was best for us we would probably be doing it and there's something that's holding you back that's not allowing you to do the best for yourself I would like for everybody listening to this

today just try to think about like what is that what is your yin and yang what is that there's some sort of fucking negative something or other somewhere that's not allowing you the freedom that you want. Cause if, if you could lose weight and be in this tremendous shape that you think you really want to be in,

um, you would be doing it, but there's some somethings you're scared to do it. You don't believe you're worth it. There's something, but if you can find some answers to that, then I think you'll be heading down the right path because then you actually know what's best for you.

Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.