DO THIS Every Day To Melt The FAT AWAY & BUILD MUSCLE | Sal DiStefano

We've now identified one metric that can predict all cause mortality almost better than almost any other single metric. So I tell people avoid those foods because it makes it really hard for you to connect to the signals that your body's telling you because these foods are so good at overriding all those signals. Sal Di Stefano, welcome to the show, man. Thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. So the book is incredible, super excited. What can people do from working out, nutrition, whatever the case may be, to burn that belly fat, to live longer, to be in better shape, add muscle? Yes. What's the key? So as you know, my experience, um I don't have tons of experience in media. Um I mean, now maybe a little bit. at this point you do. At this point I do, but Number one podcast in health and fitness space, the book Resistance Training Revolution, so that people know. so I So um but before that was about two decades of training and working with people. And when you do that long enough, and I really care about helping people, you start to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And what we tend to focus on maybe too much in the fitness and health space are the mechanistic actions. And And that's important, you know, like proteins, fats, carbs, calories, you know, what exercise and kind of work out and that kind of stuff. And that is important, um but I What I try to do is I look at all that in the context of the average person, um not in the context of I'm talking to a fitness fanatic or someone who's hyper motivated because that motivated state of mind tends to fade like all feelings do. Also, uh people are very busy nowadays, very sedentary, but also very busy. I mean, if you look at people's schedules, you and I remember when we were kids there were no play dates, you just went out and played with your friends and everything's scheduled now. So it's like everything's scheduled, super busy, super sedentary. We're also surrounded by hyper-palatable, easily accessible food. Um and we grew up in an environment where we learned how to value food for its palatability and and enjoyment and its accessibility or convenience. So, that's kind of what we're battling with and we got to understand that context before we really recommend what people should do because if we make the wrong recommendations, it's not going to work. And we know this. Um people fail at like 85% of the time when it comes to long-term success. What's the main thing? What do people either what's the myth that they got involved for and then they find out it just isn't true or is there something else? Like why such a high failure rate? Yeah, well, the big reason is how they go into it. Um and and I started the same way. This is how most people start on a fitness routine. It starts from a place of for lack of a better term, self-hate. Um I'm fat or in my case, I'm skinny. I don't like the way I look. I I want to change who I am, but it's kind of this negative motivating factor, which you have to move out of into a self-love state of mind like I'm taking care of myself. Otherwise, at some point you'll stop. You can't hate yourself forever. I mean, how many times have you heard someone say, you know, you have a friend who's who was on a workout routine or or following a diet and then you you see him a year later and go, "Hey, how was that program going?" And they say, "Oh, I had to stop cuz I just wanted to enjoy life." I mean, on its logically it's insane to say that, right? Uh taking care of yourself improves all aspects of your life and yet this person says, "I want to enjoy life so I stopped." Mhm. Well, what do they mean? Well, it was coming from a place of self-hate. Exercise was a punishment. Uh nutrition was restrictive. Also, I shouldn't have eaten that. Go to the gym. Beat myself up. That kind of stuff. So, that's one of the factors. The other factor is the approach. Um what we've learned how to just the average person has been told to value exercise mainly by its calorie burn. Um, and that's so wrong because the amount of calories you burn while you exercise is actually the least important thing. All the things that exercise provides How is that possible? So, we'll probably get to the calories in calories out debate at some point. It's probably not the place to start, but how is it possible that I'm not just in the gym to burn calories? Okay, so first off If if I want to lose my belly fat for instance. Yeah, so calorie burn is important, right? In order to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you take in. Now, that's a very simplistic uh, way of saying it. It's true, but it's more complex than that. But, let's just start with the simplistic formula. You got to burn more than you take in. The calorie First off, the calories you burn while you exercise really isn't that much. I mean, you work out for an hour really hard, you'll burn like 400 calories. Okay, so it's not a ton. And if you work out two or three days a week consistently like most people will, it's 800 to 1,200 calories a week. It's not making a huge impact. So, that's number one. But, the main factor uh, and is the reason why that's not that important is we're ignoring the most important aspect of exercise, which is how does this get my body to adapt? And then, what does the adaptation mean? That's very important. If we look at exercise from an adaptation perspective, then we can start to judge exercise and say which one in the context of fat loss, which one is going to speed up my metabolism, okay? Which one is going to teach my body to burn more calories on its own? Because that is a much more sustainable approach. I mean, if you're burning more cal- Like right now, I'm sitting here talking to you. If my body's going to burn more calories cuz I've trained it to do so, that's far more effective than me going out and manually trying to burn calories with my workouts. Also, if you do the wrong kind of workout and pair it with calorie restriction, you can actually teach your body to do the opposite. You can actually teach your body to become more efficient with calories. AKA, you can slow your metabolism down, which in the long run makes things much more challenging. And we see this. This people do this all the time. When you look at the average person's approach to weight loss, calorie restriction, lots of calorie-burning cardiovascular activity, for example. Yeah, cardio and starvation, baby. Yes. Let's [ __ ] go, my man. Yeah. And what you see is this initial weight loss, which is usually comprised of some muscle and some body fat. And the And the muscle loss isn't because you burn the muscle, but rather your body was actually learning how to be a more efficient cardio machine. It actually pares muscle down. Which if you're trying to get lean, that's bad. It sounds good, efficiency. I love efficiency. Yes. But in this case, it's terrible. It is. I mean, if we were hunter-gatherers, uh and food was difficult to come by, you want an efficient metabolism. You want a metabolism that doesn't require a lot of uh energy. But if you live in a modern society with lots of food, you want a faster metabolism. So, that's the best buffer that you could possibly create. it up? Right. You build muscle. Build muscle and fuel the building process. Because first off, more muscle burns more calories. Now, I'm sure there's people watching rest. all the time. All the time. Now, I know people watching right now are going to are going to say, "Well, you know, a pound of muscle only burns an additional 10 calories or whatever." Which by the way, isn't inconsequential if you gained 5 lb of muscle, 50 calories a day, over the course of a year, that could equate to 7, 8, 10 lb of body fat. So, over the years, you're going to you're not going to gain as much weight, or you'll lose uh that much weight. But it's more than that, right? When you're sending the signal to build muscle, and you're fueling your body to do so, you burn more calories even without additional muscle, because there's a range of calories you your body will burn with the same lean body mass. We actually have this kind of flexibility, more versus less efficiency, if you will. So, you don't need to gain a ton of muscle. I mean, if you gain 5, 10 lb, which wouldn't make you that much bigger, you would just feel much tighter. But, that signal is there. We need strength, we need muscle, and you fuel your body with enough protein and enough calories, appropriate levels of calories to do so, your body doesn't feel like it needs to be as efficient, and you and you actually teach your metabolism to burn more calories. So, the old way, the weight loss you see on the scale happens faster, but then you plateau very hard, and then you're left with the conundrum of do I I got to add more cardio? I got to cut my calories even more? Now, if you do it the right way, the weight loss on the scale starts a little slower, but then you see this kind of snowball effect. And and I've seen this many times, at the end of a 30-lb weight loss journey, you eat as many or more calories as you did when you first started, which I mean, for obvious reasons, it's a very sustainable approach. Now, I can eat more than I did when I was at a higher body fat percentage and maintain my lean body. And so, those are some of the things that we need to consider when we're communicating uh nutrition and and fitness. Um but again, that's the mechanistic portion of it, which I talk about, but there's also the behavioral aspect, which I think is uh either as important or more important. we move on to the behavioral, I want to really just restate exactly what you said super simply for people at home that are going to do this. So, number one, getting into the gym, most people think of as getting on a piece of cardio equipment. So, you're on the treadmill, the elliptical, whatever, you're, you know, like sweating your ass off. Yeah, yeah. Which So, when I got lean, so I ended up dropping 60 lb. I did it through I was lifting, so that was a big part of the victory, but I was absolutely doing starvation and cardio Yeah. and I got lean and lean was amazing but I lost so much muscle it was crazy and it was misery. I hated every second of it. I have freakish discipline so I did this for two years. But the idea of living there was just a non-starter. It was like because I was seeing progress I could keep doing it but you know eventually it was like yeah I'm not going to do this forever. So we want to get you in the gym in a new way. This is going to be resistance training. You're going to be lifting to use sort of traditional words. We'll get more into that later but you're going to be lifting whether it's bands and you're getting the resistance that way or whether it's you know a bench press or squat whatever. So you're going to go in you're adding muscle you're adding muscle because that is going to give you the ability to burn more calories even at rest even though it's not you know some gigantic free freakish number. Um and we'll probably get into things like it's also a sink for glucose which is hugely transformational. But also when you're sending your body the signal to add muscle you're saying we need this strength. To get that strength it's okay to burn calories. We're going to give the body the calories that it needs. So now I'm not having to like ratchet down my calories in order to burn the additional calories. I'm burning them by giving my body the signal that I don't need to be as efficient with my metabolism so we can call that dialing up my the speed of my metabolism if you will. Whereas if I go in and I'm doing cardio I'm sending the body a similar stress signal but it gets it's in an opposite direction. So I'm saying hey you have this stressor you need to adapt to it but this stressor is saying don't add muscle shave muscle because the muscle's expensive. I'm going to put you in these sort of long distance needs so you're going to need to be more efficient with the calories. So now if you're eating the same you could be moving yourself backwards. So you could be working your ass off to add fat which is terrifying but is what a lot of people do. It is. It's a very well said. It is a That's literally me parroting your book. Just in case people think I'm clever, I am literally parroting. Yes, that's 100%. All right, my friend, I have a big announcement. My incredible and talented wife Lisa is about to launch her new book Radical Confidence. In it, she has managed to perfectly capture the process of how to go from feeling lost and insecure to taking control of your life and doing amazing things despite feeling fear. Sometimes a lot of fear. Now, let me tell you, nobody knows Lisa better than me, but when I read Radical Confidence for the first time and heard her describe what it was like for her to go from having these big exciting dreams as a kid to then as an adult scheduling her life around the TV shows that she wanted to watch or how lonely and isolated she felt instead of pursuing her dreams, it was brutal for me. I would never say though that it was worth it for her to go through all of that just so that she could write something down that allows others to avoid it, but I will say that at least she was able to capture the strategies that she used to break out of that rut, find her voice and begin doing incredible things despite her insecurities and fears that she wasn't going to be good enough to achieve great things. Order your copy today because if you act now, you can claim the bonuses that Lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com. Then, once you've done that, we'll get back to today's episode. All right, guys, read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life. Peace out. And a couple things that make this even more, uh, I guess attractive for people. You don't need to do a lot of strength training to get those results. If you're burning calories manually all the time, the more the better. With strength training a couple days a week or 3 days a week is enough. It's plenty to elicit those responses in the body. And you talked about losing muscle. Here's something that's very fascinating about that. If you You just lose or gain muscle, there's a lot of things that happen in your body to make that happen. And one of them is your body organizes its hormones in a way to do so. So, if you're a man and you're telling your body, "We need to drop some muscle." your body will organize its hormones to do so. What does that look like? That's interesting. Looks like you just gave me the chills. Yeah, it looks like lower testosterone, right? You get a higher, more consistent cortisol uh response. Your insulin sensitivity starts to change a little bit, right? More muscle improves insulin sensitivity. In fact, studies on obese individuals show that you if you just have them gain muscle and lose no body fat, they have significant improvements in insulin sensitivity. In women, uh their estrogen progesterone organize to reduce muscle mass. Growth hormone changes as well. On the flip side, if I tell my body to build muscle and I feed it to do so, it'll organize its hormones in a way to build muscle. What does that look like? A youthful hormone profile. So, this is why studies show that strength training is the most consistent way to raise testosterone, for example, in men. It also, and here's something that's even more interesting, increases androgen receptor density. So, these are the receptors that testosterone attaches to. And this is probably even more important than your testosterone levels. In fact, there there was a study that tried to Really interesting. Yeah, they did a study where they were comparing men and their testosterone levels and athletic performance and strength gains. And they were also looking at androgen receptor density. And androgen receptor density was a better predictor of strength and muscle gains, right? So, strength training literally opens up more androgen receptors. It's trying to make your anabolic hormones even more effective and anabolic. So, people are constantly looking at ways to become more youthful. Hormones are great way to do that. Strength training literally tells your body to organize them in a way to do so. So, it's uh the benefits are so far reaching. You know, you talked about storing glucose. So, here's something that's really interesting. I know you'll like this. Strength training has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to stop or halt the progression of the beta amyloid plaques that are so associated with Alzheimer's, right? In fact, I think it's the only non-medical intervention to do so, and at the end of the study, actually looked like it may have been reversing some of those plaques. This was a study done out of Sydney, Australia. And they were quite blown away. One of the the theories is has to do with insulin sensitivity. You as you probably already know, some researchers refer to dementia and Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. So, what you do when you build muscle is you create a larger tank to store you know, glycogen or glucose. But it also muscles also extremely insulin sensitive. So, your body just utilizes insulin better as a result. So, building muscle is a great way to do that. And another study just came out of Sydney as well recently that showed that strength training reduced all-cause mortality better than any other form of exercise. And cancer risk. This is so crazy. So, I've heard people say this a gazillion times, but I really think people are letting this go over their head that if you look at the efficacy of diet alterations and exercise the impact on things like cancer, longevity, uh hormones, like all of it, it it is so much more profound than the most effective drug that it's like if you had a drug that improved your metrics the way that exercise improves your metrics, it it would be like a blockbuster, trillion-dollar like thing. But because we can't just pop the exercise pill, people leave the most obvious solution on the table. Yeah, um one of the best parts about it is that the improvements continue the longer you do it. Whereas with medications or drugs, you know, for example, when they compare exercise to antidepressants for mild to moderate depression, okay? So, this is the most common form of depression. Very similar results when it comes to relieving uh the symptoms of depression. But as you follow the studies, you start to see that exercise actually starts to do better. Now, why is that? There's no down-regulation of receptors. Your body doesn't adapt to exercise the same way it adapts to medications. You know, it's like when you drink caffeine, you get this buzz, drink it every day, it starts to lose its efficacy. Exercise actually improves over time. If Anybody who's worked out consistently and appropriately, and I I do want to be very clear, appropriate is important here. All forms of exercise can be applied in a proper and all forms All forms of exercise can be applied in a proper and all forms of exercise also have value. I also want to say that cuz I know we're talking about strength training and I make the case that strength training in the context that we're painting is the most effective form. But all forms of exercise have a lot of value. They all need to be applied appropriately. What's appropriate? So, even cardio, you're not throwing shade on it, you're just saying you got to be thoughtful. Yes. Um it has to be it's based on the individual. What's your fitness level and your ability to recover? What does your current lifestyle look like? Is this adding too much stress to your body, the right amount? Is it improving the quality of life? And you can always adjust your workouts accordingly. So, it has to do you have to do all those things. Um but yeah, when it comes to improving all health metrics, mental, psychological, and physical, as you follow along, as you continue the process, it gets better and better. There's no medication that does that at all. Almost all start to show reduced efficacy and people need to change medications and you know, what's going on here. So, yeah, 100% and I like to talk a lot about strength training mainly because you don't need to do a lot of it to get a lot of these effects and these benefits. And it's because, Tom, I trained people for so long and I was I did a really good job of getting people who never worked out to do it forever, right? That's the I'm trying to look at how do I get people to do something forever, okay? The best I got was two or three days a week out of people. It's just I couldn't turn the average person into a fitness fanatic. You know, it took me 5 years to figure that out, but I'm like, okay, Mrs. Johnson is not going to be a personal trainer like I am. She's not going to live in the gym. I got to figure out a way to get the best results for her in the two or three days a week that she's going to, you know, spend time exercising. And it was strength training, by far. Nothing came close to it. You know, when we talked about the metabolism effects, there's a a study I quote in the book that was remarkable. It's the uh the study done on the Hadza tribe. Yeah. Really crazy, right? So, this is a modern hunter-gatherer tribe uh out of northern Tanzania. And they live the way that we lived thousands and thousands of years ago. So, they don't have any electronics, they hunt their food by throwing something at it and running after it for miles and miles. They gather uh so, far more active uh than than we are. And scientists went down to study their metabolisms and they used some pretty sophisticated processes and they said, okay, how many calories are these hunter-gatherers burning every single day? And the results came back and was pretty remarkable. Not very much more than the average western couch potato. Almost almost identical, in fact. Now, you might think to yourself like, how is this even possible? They're moving so much and the average western couch potato literally sits down most of the time and barely takes 3,000 steps. Like, what's going on? But, if you look at uh things from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Our bodies we wouldn't have survived if we burned if our bodies learned to to 6,000 calories a day as hunter-gatherers. You can't find 6,000 calories uh as a hunter gather. Their bodies adapted to that type of activity which included a lot of walking and running, you know, like again, running after animals until they collapse. We run for distance very very well. So nuts. I don't think people in a modern context really appreciate that there is one thing that the human as an animal does, set thinking aside, we can track your ass down. We do two things really well physically. And I say we as a species because the average person is really bad at these things because we stopped doing them, but we throw with accuracy. A kid will throw with better accuracy than any other animal. And we can outlast or outrun almost anything. Now, the problem with running is it's a skill that we all lose probably around the age of 12 when we stop, you know, playing at recess or whatever. And you also mean at distance. Cuz in a sprint a cheetah is going to [ __ ] us up. At distance, it's distance. 100%. We can out track, right? Outlast. Not in sprint, we're terrible at sprinting. But we lose the skill because we stopped doing it and then we're 34 or like, "Hey, I want to lose weight. Let me put on my running shoes." And we go run and just the biomechanics technique is terrible. That's why running is associated It's the highest injury risk of all forms of exercise because of the repetitive nature and because nobody treats it like a skill. Nobody says, "I'm going to go run. Let me practice running." They say, "I'm going to go run until I'm tired." Which anytime you're learning a skill, the worst way to learn proper technique and form is to do it until you're fatigued cuz technique goes out the window when you're exhausted. And I you know, I remember when I first pieced that together, I was hiking up in the foothills by where I live and people would run by me and as a trainer it's hard not to notice biomechanics, right? So I'm oh, that you know, their feet are pronating really bad or really strong anterior pelvic tilt and that person is going to hurt and this person And then this person ran by me and just looked beautiful, like a gazelle. And I thought, man, you know, we evolved to run. Why are Why do we run so terribly? And I said, well, that's when it dawned on me. We don't treat it like a skill. We just put on our shoes and go run till we're tired. It's about just working out. It's not about the fact that this is an actual skill that we need to figure out and learn. This is one of the reasons why the way I teach strength training is as a skill, not necessarily as a workout. So, when I tell people go to the gym, I don't say, um, you know, train your legs until they're tired, until they're they burn, or until you're shaking. I say, practice squatting. Practice lunging, right? I don't say go get your shoulders hammered. I say, practice the skill of the overhead press. Practice the skill of a lateral raise, or a bench press, or a row. And over time, that produces better results, because people treat it like a skill. They practice it, rather than work out with it. And, you know, I I can't stress this enough. An exercise done properly will provide so much more value than an exercise practiced or performed improperly. Like, so Besides the the risk of injury, which that's obvious, it just gives you so much more. Even at lower intensities, done properly, you're going to get way more bang for your buck, or time spent in the gym. So, I I encourage people, and I write in the book, don't go to the gym and work out. Go to the gym and practice these exercises, and try to get good at these exercises. And then you'll naturally add resistance, or weight, or, you know, heavier resistance bands, uh, as you continue to progress. But practice those movements, get the skill, and that'll just give you so much more, so much more results. Yeah, definitely haven't heard people talk about that. That's really interesting. You go into detail in the book about things that are really quite counterintuitive. So, bringing that background to the Hadza and the way that they the one of the important things in the book that I found so compelling is this idea that this is about adaptation. And so, you're going to go into the gym and you're going to do something. It's going to inform your body in in the direction in which it needs to adapt. So, if you're giving your body the signal that hey, I'm an endurance animal, I need to be extraordinarily efficient with my calories, you're going to look like a long-distance runner. Mhm. Very slender musculature, lean, but very slender musculature. If you are focusing on explosion, the ability to deal with weight, you're going to look more like a sprinter. Yes. And when you mentioned that in the book, I was like, oh damn, like that's real cuz a sprinter who's running and a long-distance marathon runner who's running, they don't look anything alike. No, nothing. And And I do want to be also very careful. If we judge exercise by the people that perform it at the highest level, we're also looking at people who genetically were born to also perform at very high level. So, like if you look at like Michael Phelps, someone may say, wow, if I swim a lot, I'm going to get a really long torso, long arms, short legs, and right and a flat wide rib cage. So, we got to also be careful with that because we can look at the top athletes, but what we're looking at are also genetic anomalies. Um nonetheless, yes, lots of distance running will teach your body to become efficient with calories. Sprinting or things that require strength and power, the primary adaptation is muscle and strength, the side effect of which is a higher calorie burn. Now, when we talk about adaptation, it's important to separate adaptation from recovery. Okay, this is very important because people confuse the two. They think recovery is adaptation. Now, they often happen simultaneously or right around the same time, but they're not the same thing. So, like if I got a piece of sandpaper and rubbed the skin raw on the top of my hand, the first thing my body would do is recover. It would heal the skin that was rubbed off. The second thing it would do would be to make that skin a little thicker so that it it would withstand the same insult better next time around. And if I continue that process over time, I'll develop a callus on my skin. Exercise is the same. No matter what exercise you do, the recovery process is different from adaptation. And the reason why I'm communicating that is people get stuck. They get trapped in what I like to call the the breakdown recovery trap, right? They go to the gym, they get sore, then they the soreness goes away and they go back to the gym and they get sore again, and they never improve. And they they don't know why. Why am I not really getting stronger? Why is nothing really changing? I'm working out hard, I'm getting sore, it's real intense, I'm recovering, but then I'm going back to the gym and I'm not really seeing lots of progress. You're not giving your body the the opportunity to adapt. You're just focused on recovery. And when it comes to exercise, there is a best dose. And it's kind of like a bell curve, right? So, on this end, too little, I'm not going to get much of a response. In the middle, perfect amount. Like it's the perfect dose, my body's responding, it's it's recovering, it's adapting, I'm progressing. On the other end is too much. And you can always tolerate more than what is the optimum amount. So, in other words, people tend to and now I'm talking more to the fitness fanatic, but people tend to do what they can tolerate, not what is optimal. So, they'll work out and get great results and they'll think, "I can do more. I think I can do more. This I feel good." And then they do more, and then they do more, and they actually get slower or less results. damage. It's just too much. It's too much and they're actually not optimizing, they're just doing what they can do we find that for the average person that's, you know, trying to get um I don't know, the more idealized physique, not a bodybuilder physique, but Sure. Healthy. Yeah, exactly. Healthy and fit. Yeah. and you know, speaking to that um a healthy, fit body displays what most people want to look like. So, you don't you won't look extreme, in other words. The extreme bodies are not healthy. Those are extreme performance. Like a top NBA player or football player or athlete is not optimally healthy. They're just incredible at performance. Optimal health is a little different, right? It's it's it's lean, but you're not shredded. You've got good strength, good mobility, um you feel good. So, how do we know that we're doing the right amount? You feel Well, I just said it. You feel good. First off, after your workout, you should feel better than you did right before. You should not feel like Really? Absolutely. Man, I've been doing That part I have been doing wrong forever then. Yeah, well, so here's the deal, Tom. You are your discipline is extraordinary, obviously. You're the kind of person that you'll just It's You're not going to stop. You're going to keep going. You're going to push yourself. And there are mental and psychological benefits to pushing yourself to a limit. So, I don't want to say that there's no there's no benefit to training that way. But for the average person, that should be few and far between. So, I think it's good. You should definitely push yourself sometimes. But most of the time, you should feel better at the end. You go into your workout and afterwards you're like, "Oh man, I feel great." What another way to know, especially in the first, I'd say maybe 3 years of exercise, is strength. If you're getting stronger, you're doing a lot right. It's hard to get stronger and to have bad nutrition, poor sleep, you know, incorrect or inappropriate exercise. So, if you're if the strength if your weight on the bar or if you're able to do more reps or you feel more stable in your exercises, if you're noticing that, you're probably doing a lot of things right. But really, you got to judge it by how you feel. You need to feel better. I remember when I pieced this together as a trainer. When I first became a trainer, I would get cancellations from clients when they would be tired or you know, they call me up and say, "Hey Sal, I had a rough night last night. I'm really tired. I think I need to skip today's workout." Or "My back's I think I tweaked it yesterday, and so let's skip today's workout." Later on as I became a more effective trainer, I had the opposite. People would call me and say, "Hey, um I know we're not having a session today, but I'm really stressed out. Do you think I can see you?" Wow. Or "Hey, my back is not feeling so good. I know we're not supposed to work out today, but can you see me so that we can make my back feel better?" us again? That that is for sure. Like just speaking to back pain for a second, whenever somebody tells me they have back pain, I'm like, "You need to be deadlifting." Now, you have to be careful cuz you can definitely get yourself in trouble with deadlifts, but my back only hurts if I skip deadlifting. But if I'm deadlifting with proper form and a weight that's appropriate, to use your words, then I'm good. And so my natural inclination when I when I'm in pain, my natural inclination is to figure out is there an imbalance here? Is there something that I've been slacking on? It isn't like, "Oh, I bet I'm overtraining." Yeah, strength makes us resilient. Strength is what makes us mobile. Mobility comes from strength. Immobility comes from weakness. Now, we tend to think it's tightness. I'm tight. I need to become looser. That's part of the formula. You know, if you're really loose, but you lack strength, you're actually your injury risk is through the roof. You have terrible stability. You can cause yourself a lot of problems. If you're tight without a lot of strength, same thing. Good full range of motion, appropriate and balanced strength is what prevents pain. It's what makes your joints move optimally. Joints move in a way to where your your body essentially moves in the most efficient way it can with what it's given, okay? So, if you're weak or not strong enough or not stable enough to move in the optimal way, your body's going to take option B and then maybe option C and it gets the job done. But over time, like a a sliding door that's that's slightly off track, over time what happens to that track, right? It gets worn down, you start to see problems. So, strength properly applying strength training and appropriate strength training makes you, you know, bulletproof to pain. You move better. That's how you build That's how you build real functional flexibility. You know, I get people upset sometimes cuz I say that proper strength training is the best way to improve functional flexibility. People are like, "What do you mean? I thought strength training made you tight." No, it doesn't. Full range of motion with good control and good stability strengthens entire ranges of motion, right? Because you want to own ranges of motion. I don't just want flexibility. I mean, I have a 18-month-old son and I could put him on the floor and I could take his foot and put it by his head and put him in the splits, but he's not very stable. I mean, you put any load on him and he's going to hurt himself, right? Not that I've tried. I haven't put any any barbells on his back yet. Uh but if you're strong within a full range of motion and you're on the floor and you're playing with your kids or you're twisting or you whatever, you own that full range of motion, you're you're not going to hurt yourself. You're very strong. Um and that's what proper strength training with you. Now, the the reason why we see people who sometimes lift a lot of weights look so tight is because they don't train properly in that context. They train in short ranges of motion, you'll see this bodybuilder sometimes, to build muscle, uh but because of those because those ranges of motion are short, they build strength in that range of motion, then what's outside of that range of motion is imbalanced. So, their body learns to move in this kind of limited, tight, you know, what they used to call muscle bound range of motion. So, you know, I I I really try to break through the myths and the stigma that surrounds strength training cuz there's so much around it. You know, for a long time, Tom, there were no studies that were done on strength training and health and longevity. There were none. There were performance studies, but not on health. All studies for health and longevity revolved around cardiovascular activity. You know, 30 to 60 minutes of vigorous cardiovascular activity. And of course for health benefits, right? Like I said, any form of activity done properly will improve your health. But there was nothing for strength training. There was nothing. In the last 15 to 20 years, though, there have been lots of studies and they're finding incredible results. It's one of the best forms of exercise for heart health. Who would have said strength training is good for your heart, right? I had a a cardiologist on my podcast who said, "This is how I recommend all my clients or all my patients Resistance training. Yes, because of Not cardio? No, and he says, I mean, literally, cardio is the word for heart in Greek. I know. Now Now he says, "If you're only going to pick one form of exercise, if you only have time to do one, do strength training. Then if you can add another one, add the cardio." Wow. He says, "Walk every day." heard that before. It's I mean, it's you're going to start to see this more and more as the studies start to support this more and more. What is that, my friends? I have huge news for you about one of the most exciting and important projects I've ever worked on in my life. As you guys know, it is my mission to help teach people about how to build a mindset and the skills that they're going to need to live an extraordinary life. And over the last few months, I've been working hard behind the scenes to create a brand new tool that will help you do exactly that. It's called Project Kaizen, and I'm proud to announce that I'll be bringing it to the world later this year. Project Kaizen is a web 3-based game-like experience that is a story-based world that's going to allow you to get inside, build an avatar that is aspirational of who you want to become, and then take the path of the warrior seeking continuous improvement inside of a story world and game experience. All right, my friend, I cannot tell you how excited I am about this amazing new project, which I think ushers in a whole new form of entertainment, and I want to meet you inside of Project Kaizen and help you have fun with these ideas of always getting better. All right, click the link and join me in Discord, and until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Um Do you know what the mechanism is? Like, why would getting strong help your heart? Especially because now I'm privy to just I've heard you talk about this so much, but you said there was a guy that you used to watch train, and he would just like, "Oh, I've got a second." He would like bang out a few sets, and you were like, "But no, how do you really train?" He's like, "No, that is. I just when I have a second, I'll jump in for you know, three reps or whatever. Yeah, conditioning and longevity uh are related, but not exactly the same thing. So, like, if you look at extreme distance runners or extreme endurance athletes, you actually start to see uh declining health in their hearts. There's lots of damage. Lots of damage. Yes, like like or any extreme athlete, okay? Um you start to see declines in longevity. Now, we associate cardiovascular activity with heart performance, which is why we think it's the best way to exercise for heart health. And it is a good way to exercise for heart health. But I think the reason why strength training is showing now to be so good for heart health has to do with its ability to keep you lean. To just keep you from uh storing too much body fat, visceral body fat. And and and look, uh although it's not going to build stamina and endurance like other forms of exercise, you do build some stamina and endurance. I mean, do a set of 20 reps of the barbell squat and tell me you're not, you know, breathing really hard. So, you still do build that. Um and again, when we're talking about longevity, it's different than just performance. I love walking. I This is what I always recommend to people. I just tell people walk every single day. And I I teach them to inject it into their daily routine, so it's not a scheduled workout. It's more likely to be consistent. And that's where I see people get great health benefits because, you know, 10-minute walk after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 30 minutes a day, um and they get great longevity effects uh as a result. But yeah, when it comes to the brain, the heart, functional flexibility, strength training is uh incredible. And uh and I'm sure you're familiar with this. One metric we've now identified one metric that can predict all-cause mortality almost better than almost any other single metric. And it sounds silly, but it's a simple grip test. It's a strength test. Do you think that's a proxy, or is there something about actual grip strength? Like if I just work my grip, would I be good, or that's like a No, I think it represents overall uh strength of the body. And so, when you're weak in your grip, that tells us a lot about your body um and your health. Uh and declining muscle mass is is huge as we get older. It's probably one of the main reasons why we have declining health as we go. Loss of mobility, insulin sensitivity goes down, hormones start to change, our body's ability to burn body fat really starts to change and get go for the worse. We have the the brain effects. You know, speaking to the brain effects, strength training is more complex in its movements than other forms of exercise. Like it's not like the same thing over and over, like if you swim, or you bike, or you row, or you run. There's at least, I mean, I could probably name 100 strength training exercises, and I'm sure there's, you know, 100 or 500 more. And there's five different ways to perform each one. When you're doing strength training, you're moving in different planes. You're training your proprioceptive ability. I have to You're going to have to tell people what that means. Proprioception is knowing where my body is in space, right? So, if I do six different exercises, well, one of them is going to have me lifting something overhead. One of them might me have me doing a horizontal movement. I may be rotating or stepping to the side or stepping back or stepping forward. It involves lots of balance and lots of focus from the brain. It's harder to check out when you're doing strength training. You know, when you're doing a hard set of push-ups or or rows, you're doing it. You're in it versus checking out when you're doing other forms of repetitive exercise. So, and I think there's benefit to that as well, but when it comes to training the brain, moving the body and training the muscles in a way that is appropriately strenuous in different planes of of motion, it trains the brain. It keeps that brain your brain's ability to do those types of things youthful uh and effective. Whereas, if I stop doing those things, you lose it. That old adage, you know, you don't use it, you lose it, it's super true. Your body prunes things off that it doesn't think it needs. So, I mean, in fact, that the the population that really benefits from strength training more than anybody is the older population. The the the results they get are profound. I mean, Isn't there some crazy correlation between muscle mass and longevity? Huge. I Just strength training alone, when they just did a large study comparing cancer risk, reducing cancer risk in different forms of exercise, strength training blew all the other ones away. It was like a 25 or 30% reduction in cancer risk. That's what I'm talking about, man. With that, if there was a drug that could give you a 25% reduced rate, haha, I'd eat them like Skittles. I Oh, absolutely. Uh and then all-cause mortality was something like 50 or 60% um from strength training. It It's If you think of the things associated with aging that we know tend to be terrible, it's uh loss of mobility. Mhm. I can't go up the stairs anymore. I can't reach up above my head anymore. I can't close the hood of my car or the trunk anymore. Um, it's uh risk of injury. Uh, I used to train a lot of doctors and I remember they used to have the saying, you know, you break your hip and you die of pneumonia, right? How do you break your hip? Well, you don't have the strength which strength contributes to balance. You fall, your bones are weak because you've lost muscle. Losing muscle means your bones are getting weaker, by the way. Is that because you're not putting your bones under pressure? Yeah, muscles anchor on bones. If the muscle strengthens, the bone strengthens. Anything that makes muscles stronger will make bones stronger. Anything that makes muscles weaker even if you're not putting it cuz I always thought the the bone is like your cuz when you curl, you can feel that in your forearm. Like you could tell that bone is like, "Whoa, I better like really have the ability to control this." Yeah, it's both. It's both. So, like anabolic hormones that that improve muscle mass also tend to improve bone mass as well. is this like the third time I thought, I really want to put a point on that. You said something earlier that I've never thought about before, that the mechanism your body is using to make these changes is hormonal. So, when you put your body under stress, the response is one of hormones, which is going to guide adding of muscle, losing of fat, whatever the case may be. And that's interesting. You're really manipulating that hormonal milieu, which is fascinating. Because when I think about like, oh, you need to get your hormones right. Like, the thought that my lifestyle could lower my testosterone or raise my testosterone. As a guy, I pay like a lot of attention cuz I make a I make a value judgment about my testosterone levels, if I'm completely honest. It's like, if something raises my testosterone, it is good. And if it lowers my testosterone, it is bad. Yes, uh it's vitality. It's your body saying reproduce, we're healthy enough to reproduce. Testosterone gives a man and woman and women drive and and motivation. to testosterone as a female hormone, which is I think really important to reinforce. It is. It's uh we we associate with men, but low testosterone women give them the same effects that low testosterone men will have. So, low drive, low energy, um low motivation, low libido, higher body fat, less muscle, less strength, less energy. Estrogen is also important in men, just like in women. Low estrogen in men can cause depression, anxiety. So, we need to have There's a balance that we need to have it in in the the it looks different for men than it does for women, but you still want appropriate levels. Now, strength training is not going to take your testosterone uh to to anabolic steroid, you know, levels. It's not going to move outside of the range, but you can significantly increase your testosterone within the natural range just by telling your body you need more muscle. Cuz it's the signalers, right? It's the It's what tells your body to do what what what you need it to do or what you want it to do. So, yeah, it definitely changes that. And testosterone has been declining in men now for decades. Dude, I mean, we could really derail into some like more philosophical areas cuz yeah, I mean, I I'm curious, what if you had to give me a couple of quick headlines, like what is it that's causing this societal-level decline in testosterone? My best guess, from what I've read and to in the people that I've interviewed, has to do with our activity diet, and um chemicals that we're exposed to, xenoestrogens, plastics, uh birth control, uh these types of things seem that seem to be like because it's getting in the water? Getting in the water, and I also heard this theory from someone. I thought it was very interesting. When women are on birth control, they tend to desire mates that have lower they have signs of lower testosterone. You see, now you're getting into the interesting stuff. Yes. Have you seen those studies, by the way? Yeah, and the rat like a woman who's ovulating, they'll take a man's face and they'll digitize it to make it slightly more more masculine or slightly more feminine. So, signs of more versus less testosterone. Mhm. Woman ovulating will want the higher testosterone sign. The woman a woman who's not ovulating, the lower testosterone. Birth control puts you in that lower range. Um so, one theory, one contributing factor may be that the widespread of birth control has had women start to prefer to Sexual selection. Yeah. You're selecting for Yeah. men with more feminine cues. It's so fascinating. I know. It's early days and I know the comments now are blowing up, but like that to me is is interesting. It's very complex. Yes. This is not a And and I think we don't think we should ignore it. I think we should look at it. Have you looked at the divorce studies on this? Yep. Yeah, when a when a when a husband and wife or partners meet and she's on birth control and they get married and then 3 years later or whatever, she goes off cuz they want to have a baby, there's a spike in divorce. Mhm. So, it's almost like she says like, "I don't like you anymore." I don't know. Like people really need to think about that. When so, Lisa went off birth control not because we wanted to get pregnant, but just that when her gut issues started, that was like one of the things that got flagged like, "Hey, if you're on birth control, you should get off it." And I I started reading all the studies and I was like, "Oh, like do I need to like worry?" And so, it was really interesting to think through that and start looking at that. There is I mean, we're doing these really grand experiments at at a pretty big level on hormones, whether it's, you know, like you said, just we're being exposed to things that we would not have been exposed to for thousands of years that we're ingesting chemicals that that wouldn't have ingested for thousands of years. Like, I take um an antihistamine every day and have for like 22 years or something. And it's like there's no way that there was no consequence to that. And so eh And look, I'm grateful cuz my allergies were out of control. It was miserable. Uh but it I have to be honest that I'm taking this exogenous substance that it's it's having some impact Yeah. and that it probably isn't going to all be good. Yeah, it's it's probably cumulative and it's there's a lot of factors that are playing into us. But but it's well documented and it's been happening for decades. Mhm. Like like the average 30-year-old today has testosterone levels of like the average 50-year-old maybe 40 years ago or something like that. Oh, whoa. Yeah, it's really it's actually substantial. It's a pretty big difference. Um I don't know if you've seen the grip strength tests of college-aged males. I didn't know they've been tracking this. Yeah, there was a they did it in the '80s and they did it again relatively recently and the guys' strength is like significantly lower than it used to be. working on farms and on cars. You've mentioned this before. So, my mom's effectively husband uh he's just like gorilla strong. Yeah. And I'm like, he never works out but he's a mechanic. Yeah. And so, dude is just like Popeye forearms. He's a beast. Yeah. And I'm just like, like, how do you get so strong? But he's just working with his hands every day. Every single day. Probably some muscle fiber hyperplasia going on where muscle fibers split and become, you know, you get more muscle fibers through this kind of prolonged experience. You know, you ever meet like a I mean, maybe he's like this, but you meet like a 60- or 70-year-old guy who worked blue-collar his whole life and doesn't work out anymore but still, you know, it's like, "Wow, why your forearms look like that and your hands feel like brick?" My dad's like that. My dad, since he was nine, he he grew up poor. He was in in Sicily. Worked since he was a child. And he's He doesn't work anymore, but I mean you grab his hand and it's like you're you're shaking a a 2 by 4. That's crazy. Yeah. But, you know, along those lines, too, um the stigma with strength training has negatively affected women. I mean, we're talking about muscle and strength and all this stuff. And what tends to happen when you talk like that is there's a a woman listening or watching who's like, "Oh, no, I I I just want to I don't want I don't want to look like a mechanic. I don't want to Every time I hear that, I want to laugh out loud. Do you know how hard it is to add muscle? You will never accidentally add too much muscle. Not once, never. Well, see, and what happens when we say that, cuz I used to say that, which is true. But, what people would then say to me is, "Well, I've seen pictures of women that just They're more muscular than you, Sal." And they worked so hard to get there. And if they're bigger than you, they took drugs. It's But, it's even more than that. And here's what I like to explain, cuz this this really illustrates it, okay? I'll ask you, besides going to NBA games, in real life, go to the grocery store, go to the airport, go to a restaurant, how many times in your life have you seen anyone that's 7 ft tall? Jesus, I don't know. Once? I mean, less than 10, for sure. Yeah, you remember it. You probably remember it cuz it was so rare, right? There's a spectrum of height, right? And on one end, you have dwarfism. On the other end, you have like 7-ft tall humans. Both are pretty rare. The vast majority of us are in the middle. Okay. Muscle-building genetics are like that as well. On one end, you have genetic, uh you know, medical issues. On this end, you have bodybuilder, you know, muscle-building genetics. No myostatin gene. You walk up the stairs, your calves get bigger. Super rare. It's It's super, super rare. And if you're this person, you know. It's like if people ask you all the time if you lift weights, and you don't, right? Most of us are over here. You could train like a pro bodybuilder. You could take all the anabolic steroids you want, and you won't look like a pro bodybuilder. That That blows people away. That's how impactful those genetics are. So, for women who are watching this, like you can lift weights, you can get to the point where you're working out 6 days a week, you're lifting, you know, hard and heavy, and you're feeding your body, and you'll just develop a really sculpted physique. You're not going to get freakishly big muscles or look masculine or whatever. You'll just get really sculpted, and you'll have a metabolism that's on fire. You'll be able to eat more than most guys and burn it off, but that's that's about it. Now, what does 2 or 3 days a week going to give you? A fit body. Fit and healthy. With less work. With less work than than what was required before. You're not going to wake up the next day because you know, I did Oh, I did curls. Now look at me. Damn, Sal. Doesn't work that way. I wish. I wish it did. I know. Totally. Now, there was something in the book that you talked about that when the chapter heading came across, I was like, "No, Sal. Come on. You know better than this." And by the end of the chapter, I was like, "Oh my god, he's right." Intuitive eating. Yeah. And I respond violently Yeah. Or I did before reading your book. How about that? I respond violently to the idea that people should eat uh intuitively. And then I realized by your description, it is exactly what people should be doing. So, how do people get there? Yeah. So, in The reason why in when people hear the term intuitive eating, there's uh usually a violent response or like a that that can never work is because you can't you don't have If your intuition is based off of limited or no information, you don't know what you don't know, and off the fact that you've learned your whole life to value food for its palatability, well, now your intuitive eating is based off of that. So, people think, "Well, if I eat intuitively, I'll just eat donuts and pizza all day long." Well, yeah, because that's where we're starting. So, you can't go from where you're at now to I'm just going to intuitively do this as if there's like this magical ether I'm going to reach up and grab the answers. It doesn't work that way. We have to first We have to move into different stages of learning before we get to that point. So, there's and this has been talked about in many other arenas and I like to communicate this cuz it applies so well here. There's four stages of learning with anything that you go to learn. The first stage is you're you're unconsciously incompetent. So, you don't know what you don't know. You get into something for the first time. You want to go learn how to ride a skateboard or you want to learn how to do art or play an instrument. You don't know what you don't know cuz you you have no idea. So, then you get in there and then you move pretty quickly to the next stage which is unconsciously incompetent. Okay, all this stuff like I don't know any of it, but I'm aware that I don't know any of these things that I had no, you know, awareness of before, right? The third stage is conscious competence. That's where you have to consciously think and act in a way that makes you competent. So, I have to consciously okay, uh I need this much protein. Okay, this food has, you know, this these carbohydrates, these fats. Here's where my calories are. This is going to make me feel this way. This is going to improve my performance. Okay, I'm stressed. I tend to want to eat this way when I'm stressed. So, you're in that conscious competent stage. But, if you do that long enough and you practice long enough, then you move to the intuitive stage which is unconsciously competence. Okay? So, you if you ever watch a kid learn how to walk, you can clearly see them go through these different stages, you know, if they're unconsciously incompetent, then they're consciously incom- then they're consciously competent. A kid has to think about every step and you know, now I walk now, I don't think about walking. It just happens, right? That's the stage where intuitive eating um is. Now, how do I get there? Well, first you have to identify all of the values around food, all of them. And we're we're only really aware of a couple or maybe just one. How good does this taste? How is it and and how enjoyable is it? In fact, most people most people in modern societies have never really felt hungry. We haven't. Insane. You know, hunger kicks in like 48 to 72 hours with no food. How many people have gone 48 to 72 hours and it wasn't a medical emergency without food? So, what we connect hunger to is actually cravings. Cravings are very different than hunger. Cravings are not attached to my body needs nutrients and needs calories. Cravings are attached to emotions, feelings, uh my environment. Am I stressed? Am I anxious? Am I happy? Am I sad? Is it the movies? Am I at a birthday party? Am I having fun with my friends, right? That's cravings. That's not hunger. So, we have to identify or or decipher between the two. We also have to understand all of the other values around food and appreciate them. And the fitness space does a terrible job with this. The fitness space communicates food very mechanis- ver- from a very mechanistic point of view. Proteins, fats, calories, carbs, eat this to get this result as if we're robots. Like, here's your meal plan. I used to do this as an early trainer. Oh, you want to lose 30 lbs? No problem. Here's your meal plan and then and then you'll do great. And then for some reason, nobody's ever able to stick to it. As if we're not complex, emotional, behavior-based creatures, right? So, what are the values around food? Well, we we've already identified the palatability. That's an actual value. There's nothing wrong with that. Enjoying food for the sake of its how it makes you feel is a real value. There's also how does it fuel my body? So, physically, how does this affect my body? There's also connecting with people. If you've ever cooked a meal with your spouse or um hung out with friends you haven't seen in a while and had a maybe a a dish that you guys enjoyed when you were in college or whatever, you know what that's all about. There's also can it help me escape or distract myself? What's my relationship to food? And then you also want to look at impulsive behaviors. We all have behaviors that operate just under awareness that tend to be impulsive. And identifying those is key to being able to uh eat intuitively effectively. Once you identify those impulses and create space between you and the action, then you can change how you react to those you create that space? So one, what is an impulse meaning like I go for ice cream or you go for chips? Yes. That's what we're talking about? Yeah, so um everybody has that trigger food, right? For me it is chips. I like potato chips are my absolute favorite. And my trigger is is boredom. If I have nothing to do, then I'll reach for this distraction of this food that, you know, whatever. So I've identified that and so one thing that I did for myself, here's a here's a a strategy um that I've taught a lot of clients to do is I'll say, "Okay, first off, don't tell yourself you can't have something." Like I understand the sentiment and I get the validity in that. Like I I can't have this food because it's bad for me. I get that. But our psychology doesn't work very well with that. Extremely disciplined people can do that. Most people are not that way, though. So you can say, "I'll have it. I just got to drive to the grocery store and get myself a single serving bag." And all that does, I mean, the grocery store's only a mile and a half from my house, all it does is it creates space between me and the action. So the impulse kicks in, I want those chips. I'll drive to the store. I'll put my shoes on. actually let yourself do that? I will, but usually I don't, right? I I'll I'll I myself, but nine out of 10 times I'll be like, "Eh, I want it, but not that bad." Yeah, and then I'll deal and I'll have that space in between me and that impulse. But, all those things that I identified, those all have value and all of them can contribute to an improved quality of life and health. Like, enjoying a meal with somebody and connecting over that meal, it also improves your health, even if that meal is pizza and beer, okay? I mean, there's studies that show that poor relationships are as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes every single day. Right? So, there's value in that. But, there's also value in its physiological effects. How does it affect my body? And then we also need to pay attention to all those feelings that we have around that food, because then we can really start to value foods for the real values that they provide for us, you know, like like I never loved vegetables. I I just wasn't a fan of vegetables as a kid. Uh but, later on as I started to look at how foods really affected my health gut health issue issues, I identified that well-cooked vegetables really does magic for my gut health, for me in particular. Over time, because of that connection, I now crave or want to or desire to eat well-cooked vegetables. Dude, facts. As I've gotten older, like eating well feels awesome. Even when it's not food that I love, like my thing, I love ice cream. That is tasty as hell. But, if I eat a bunch of it, I don't feel good and I want to feel good. And you have to be you have to make you have to bring awareness around all of this in order for you to start to make these decisions both con- first consciously and then subconsciously. And by the way, anybody watching right now who thinks, "Oh, yeah, right. Like, I'll never crave I'll never want to eat broccoli over pizza or whatever." The food industry has been doing this to us forever. I mean, watch a beer commercial. There's hot girls in the background, You're at the beer all They're trying to make associations all the time to get you to enjoy that particular food or beverage according to its associations. Um there's foods that we we have good experiences around as adults that we liked as kids, but objectively are gross. That's so true. Like I Like when I was a kid, if I got sick, uh my mom would take me to my grandma's house. And I'd be at my grandma's house for the day. And my grandmother would buy the grossest Like no offense to if there's anybody who works at this company cuz I know there's people like it. Chicken in a biscuit crackers. Oh god, I love those. Okay. It's a cracker that literally tastes like chicken soup, right? so weird. It's delicious. So when I was When I was a kid, I ate those when I was sick. Now as an adult, I love them and I know it's the association. If you introduced those to me now, I'd be like, "What is this disgusting cracker?" But it's that association. So this is a This is very powerful and we can work with this. Okay, so what do the strategies look like? Well, number one, don't eat distracted. So don't eat in front of the TV or your phone or your computer. You have to be aware while you eat. By the way, that alone will reduce your calories by about 10 to 15%. That's nuts. Studies show that when people eat distracted versus non-distracted, there's about a 10% 10 to 15% difference in calories. Okay, so that alone will reduce your your food intake or your your caloric intake. But also what it does more importantly is you're focused on the food. How is this making me feel? Why are What are my feelings leading up to this? Am I anxious? Am I bored? Am I depressed? Am I really happy? Um so no distracted eating. Number two, don't eat too many or try to avoid heavily processed food. Here's one rule that I make for people. Let's avoid heavily processed foods. Now, someone may ask why. You know, why is that? Are they just inherently less healthy? Not necessarily. Yes, for the most part, but not necessarily. Mainly, it's because heavily processed foods have been so well engineered to overcome all your systems of satiety. Everything that tells you to stop eating, you're full. They've engineered these foods so well to overcome that that you will eat more. It will make you eat faster. It will induce a more binge type behavior because of how And believe me, the engineering that goes into these things is insane. It's the flavor and the crunch and the wrapper and the powder leaves on your fingers and the aftertaste and like all this stuff is accounted for when they make these types of foods and they're so good at it that they've done some really good studies where they've taken groups of people and they And these are controlled studies. So, food studies are tough cuz they're often observational and there's so many things that can influence, you know, how food affects us. But, they've done controlled studies where they'll take people and they'll put them in rooms. This room over here, whole natural foods. This room over here, heavily processed foods. They also control for macros, so similar proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. And then they tell people, "Just eat as much as you want or as little as you want." Then they watch them. They count the calories. They count all that stuff. Then they switch them. Okay, now you go in this room and you go in this room. The difference in caloric intake is 5 to 600 calories. That's huge. 5 to 600 more calories a day from consuming heavily processed foods. Whoa. Okay. In fact, if you look at the obesity epidemic, we've tried to connect fat to it and then we've tried to connect carbs to it and then we've tried to connect sugar to it. Really, the the the strongest correlation is heavily processed foods. As that's made up more of our diet, obesity has followed right along with it. So, I tell people, "Avoid those foods because it makes it really hard for you to connect to the signals that your body's telling you because these foods are so good at overriding all those signals. So, just cut those out. By the way, that will result probably in about 4 or 500 calories uh reduced in your diet naturally. In fact, I used to tell clients as a as a effective way to get them to uh to reduce their calories, I'd say, "Eat as much as you want, just don't eat heavily processed foods." And they'd be like, "Really, I can eat as much as I want?" Yeah, absolutely. Just don't eat heavily processed foods, and then they'd lose weight, and they'd think we did some kind of magic. It's like, "Actually, you just you ate less, you just didn't realize it." So, that's the second thing. Okay? The third thing is to write down how you feel before, during, and after. Now, I know it sounds kind of tedious, but why are we writing things down? Writing is a very effective form of thinking, and it moves reactionary processes in the brain to the frontal lobe, right? The big meaty part that is the the part of the brain that helps us think logically and act appropriately. So, writing down does help bring awareness. So, I tell people, "Write before" and it doesn't have to be anything long, a sentence. Kind of tired. Or, you know, while I was eating it, "Ooh, really enjoyed it." Or, "Not that good." And then afterwards, "A little bloated, you know, some energy." Or, uh "Neutral, feel like whatever." But, all we're doing is we're bringing awareness around this stuff. And then you follow that process. And then what you do, this is the last step, is you start to make changes. And the changes that you make have to be meaningful, so they have to be challenging, but they also have to be realistic in the following context, forever. So, you have to say to yourself, "What's one change I can make in my diet that is going to be a little hard, but also I think I can do for the forever?" It has to be those those two things. And also, put yourself in an unmotivated state of mind when you make that decision. Like, don't decide things like that when you're hyper motivated, cuz we tend to over, you know, we overestimate our abilities always. So, okay, is this realistic forever when I lose motivation or whatever? And whatever that is, it's fine. Doesn't matter how small the step is. It could literally be an extra glass of water or, you know, single serving of vegetables once a week or whatever. I don't care what it is, just start there. And then do it consistently. You'll start to see results right away just from being aware of this. But then what will happen is that one change will become natural and habit, and then you take the next step and you do another change. And you'll find that over time those those steps become bigger and the changes become more grand. Now, what does this lead to? Balance. This leads to balance. This is the difference between going to a party and getting offered a cookie and saying, "I can't." And saying, "No, thanks. I don't want that." Big difference. Big difference. If you want to eat in a way that's healthy, you're going to stay consistent forever. If you want to. If you feel like you have to force yourself, if you feel like you have to constantly say, "I can't." You know, which is a very strange thing to say. Of course you can. Who's saying I can't, right? If you're in that state, eventually eventually you'll stop. Eventually you're going in the opposite direction. And the opposite direction looks like you're rebelling, you know, it's like, "I didn't just eat one cookie. I ate a whole box of cookies." And it's great, right? You you again, you get this balance. Sometimes I'll have beer and pizza with my friends. Most of the time I don't. Right? Sometimes I'll enjoy a glass of wine. Most of the time I probably won't. And you get this nice balance. And why do I talk about this so much? Why do I mention intuitive eating so much? Because eating needs to be stress-free and it needs to feel natural. You know, in my space, the fitness space, there's a lot of these um fitness fanatics and physique competitors and bikini competitors and people obsessed with their body who eat very dysfunctionally. Now, they look shredded, right? They look great if you look at them on Instagram, but it's about counting macros and everything has to fit in the right calories. There's no balance. They'll avoid parties, they'll avoid vacations, they'll avoid They'll take their food with them when they go places. This isn't a This isn't a great This is orthorexia, right? It's a It's also dysfunctional. And it's not very healthy. It doesn't feel very good. Um you want to have this this relationship with food that feels relaxed and feels balanced. And it does take a little bit of time and training, but that's the only way to do it permanently. There is no other way to do it. The other ways are through sheer obsessive discipline. Good luck. Most people aren't like that. Um or dysfunction or you go on and off, which is what people experience. They go on a diet, off a diet, on a diet, off. There is no diet, right? Like that famous scene from The Matrix, there is no spoon. I think of that all the time when I talk about intuitive eating. Dude, this is incredible. The book, The Resistance Training Revolution, is absolutely fantastic, man. Thank you. Where can people stay up to date with you? What's the best way to connect and learn more? So, I'm on Twitter now. I I I was on Instagram, but now I'm on Twitter. You can find me on on the podcast Mind Pump, so you can find us anywhere you find uh podcasts. And then the book, The Resistance Training Revolution, anywhere they sell books. So, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, pretty much anywhere. And in the book, I also give people uh example workout routines and kind of break it down for people on on what they can do in the most effective way possible with the the least amount of time. Mhm. I love it. Boys and girls, I vouch for Sal and the boys at Mind Pump with everything that I have. They are phenomenal. Everything they say is true and real. It's nuanced, as hopefully you just saw over this conversation. It's incredibly effective. Definitely get the book if you are at all interested in improving your life from a physical perspective, it's really fantastic. It runs contrary to a lot of things that people say because it's real and it's not a gimmick. Uh so, check it out. And speaking of things that are real and not a not a gimmick, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Most people, you know, searching for health-related topics or trying to lose body fat, trying to balance your blood sugar. But I have other issues that I'm dealing with and I we need to have a positive mindset that our body and our mind are malleable.