The Fitness Industry Lied To You | Mind Pump on Health Theory

on today's episode of hell theory with the incredible guys at mind pump we cover their individual backgrounds in Fitness why they started mind pump in the first place how they skyrocketed the podcast stardom why cardio is terrible for weight loss and the unsexy truth behind the biggest health problems everybody welcome to health theory today's guests are Sal Adam and Justin the triumvirate behind the behemoths health and fitness podcast and mind pump they've been putting out a podcast every weekday for the last three years and are rapidly approaching episode 800 which is madness they are perpetually in the top ten on iTunes and have had several times ranked number one in the health category their unique blend of raw truth entertaining style and relatability are what make them so damn great and that's why I am excited to have them on today but what I want to know guys is that thing that makes you so interesting that blend of like the entertainment and the raw truth how did that get started why did that become the foundation of who you are being ourselves I guess yeah we you know it's funny the fitness industry now has been a monster for a few decades and it's interesting when you have people coming in and just being as real and authentic as possible and that being you know striking a chord it's it tells you a lot about the fitness industry we all grew up in the fitness industry we've been doing this for a long time and when we first met we all sat down and one of the number one things that we all connected over was to be as authentic as possible and to say what was on our mind and hopefully it would resonate and it seems like it has well is that important to you guys that well I think I think it's important to that all right none of us have talent when it comes to being on a camera figure so we really don't I mean we we got into this I mean we were all fitness professionals and that was what we were great that's our expertise it was not acting or getting on a camera or getting on video or audio and recording a podcast but what I think is so important is the authenticity of the message and then being true to ourselves and I feel like we're in a space right now where a lot of people copy each other and a lot of people are putting out a bunch of [ __ ] just so they can sell at market something in fact like the in our space the way you make a lot of money is you you build up a network of people whether that be by taking a shots or looking half-naked on Instagram or whatever it takes to draw attention to people or getting attention from people and then you take that and then you give a you support with a little bit of science and information and you try and peddle some sort of a supplement and that's been kind of the formula for like the last 15 20 years or so in our space and when we all got together we met at my house and it really was just for us to get together at that time Justin and I were working together on a business we were building an app at that time and salad Doug dubs our producer they were working on a online program and we've been kind of communicating back and forth with each other because we all knew love each other but none of us had actually all got in a room together and the first time we sat we sat in a living room just like this at my place and it was just absolute fire and what it was was this we felt that somebody needs to come out and speak the truth and at that time it wasn't about oh how we're gonna make money or how we're gonna do this it really we all had businesses on the side we already had things that we were making money so it wasn't like oh let's find a way to make a ton of money it was us expressing our feelings about the space and it was like two hours of just verbal diarrhea back and forth between all of us and I didn't know it at the time but Katrina my girlfriend had was sitting in the kitchen and she had hit record on the iPad because she said she was so enthralled by the conversation that she thought she had to record it and we ended up getting it all recorded she said to me afterwards hey I can't I caught all that she goes it was so amazing to hear all that information going back and forth and the fact that you guys all don't agree that we sit there we all came from different backgrounds which was really interesting and each one of us had an experience that was very similar but me being more from like an athletic perspective whereas you know like a bodybuilding perspective where as a wellness perspective and each one of us contributing towards that like we're all trying to seek the same truth and it it was just interesting because like each one of those issues are something that you see it's a common denominator each one of those different realms and we talking about you know what we went through with our clients and what they came in with you know with their insecurities and it's just this industry is so based off of ego and being a superhero and it's just unrelatable well that's a good point that you make are there too is that you know I think we're one of the first got like buff physique fitness type guys that came out and were really vulnerable like we came out and shared all of our own insecurities and what drove us to the it drove us to fitness and it's because we knew at that time I mean each of us have trained thousands of clients over our career where we got 15 to 20 years experience each of us and something that we I sorted to put together at least after years and years of training clients was almost everybody the it's all rooted in some sort of an insecurity whether you felt fat or you were too skinny or you didn't have muscles or girls didn't like you whatever is typically what drove you to the gym and a lot of times those insecurities drive us down the wrong paths and I think it drove us down the wrong path many a time we experienced that ourselves coming up in this industry and I'll tell you what you know the the message tells people or motivates people through self-hate so I'm going to the gym because I hate the way I look I'm eating this particular way because I hate my body and it can be quite motivating for a short period of time but think of the decisions that you tend to make when you're hating yourself they tend to be self-destructive over especially over a long period of time we all experience that we all did things to ourselves in eight particular ways that weren't the best for ourselves because we didn't like the way we looked we were insecure about our athletic performance or whatever and what we're trying to do is we're trying to flip the message we're trying to say to people look don't exercise because you hate yourself and don't eat because you hate yourself do those things because you love yourself and you want to take care of yourself and you think about that think about that for a second if if you treated yourself like somebody who cared about what kind of decisions would you make when you went to the gym what kind of foods would you eat it results in a much more consistent effective approach but it's not sexy and it doesn't get you to buy you know $100 worth of supplements like I did many times as a teenager growing up wanting to gain 1015 pounds of muscle I'd buy all these products because they promised me so many you know things just never came true what was so different was we you have like the woowoo hippie side does all the meditating and talks like that all time and then you have like the hardcore bodybuilder side take whatever it takes to look a certain way and we're trying to meld the message because there's something to take from both camps I think that's so important and that's another thing that I think is important in our space is we for marketing purposes we like to separate everybody and put them in a box like oh you're you're the cyclist guy you go over here oh you're a crossfitter oh you go over here oh you're a bodybuilder oh you go over here oh you're power lifter you go over here and my camp is better than your camp and we do things better than you do that and we always separate all of us and it's like well there's a lot to learn from everybody right yep so as an example of the sort of what I consider the darkness and then the light side so you know you're talking about that the when you're in a negative space when you have that self-hatred actually can be powerful but only briefly Adam I wanted to talk about your story one thing that I find just so interesting and so revealing is the way that people talk about themselves and the about us page and your guys is about us page is like really raw and I didn't realize that your father had committed suicide when you were young and that then your mom remarried and it was an abusive relationship how did that play into your desire to get into fitness and how has that taken you from sort of being compelled by a darker side of things and then to really find something beautiful in it well I'm the oldest of five after that happened instantly I was kind of you know thrusted into this you know father role with our parenting type role at a very young age so I think it matured me it made me really strong I think at that age it doesn't get much scarier than that then with all that responsibility so the way I look at fear is probably different than the average person I'm not afraid of a lot of things at least I'm not afraid to fail I'm not afraid of these obstacles that the average person will sit and ponder for days or get scared and not move forward in is that because you had to learn how to cope with it when you were young yeah I think so I've got stories that of you know me acting like a parent at eight nine years old which I thought was normal I didn't think it was weird you know until I got older and I look back and reflect on wow that was a little different to be put in that position but I also am very grateful for that because it's definitely turned me into the leader that I am today so I think that put me out at a young age I was out by 17 I moved to the Bay Area to get away from my hometown where I didn't feel like my life was moving and then I ended up going back to school I was going to school for kinesiology and I kind of fell into a fitness job I really wasn't into health and fitness yet at that time I was just kind of getting into working out and seeing my body change and so I was into that piece of it and what I had found was when I was working at this gym I really really liked the way it made me feel and then I had a huge passion for it because I found that a lot of the strengths that I got from being a kid that was kind of parenting at a very young age was very similar to what I had the skills that I needed with clients because many many clients would even though they're 30 40 50 60 years old and brilliant lawyers and doctors so a lot of them are in infancy when it comes to understanding their their body and health and taking care of themself and so I think those skills that I picked up at a young age ended up carrying over into me being like a really good trainer no that's super interesting out of curiosity what do you want your fan base to take away from and I'll really give this to all three of you what do you want them to take from your vulnerability and the fact that like going through your like you know I divorced and I have two kids and you guys are just incredibly open with what you've been through and it I know how it affects me and I know how it draws me to you but what what was the reasoning behind that well I think it feels really good to be yourself man that's also third therapeutic it's a stock that way we wouldn't be able to do this right here if it wasn't for that I think that if I had to be putting on a facade or acting a certain way to get attention from people or to build a business I don't know I think I think that's where people suffer from impostor syndrome because they and a lot of people do that especially in this day and age with social media and the ability to Photoshop on and edit it up stuff and make it look so cool so people are attracted to it I feel like the raw message that we put and being ourselves I mean it helps me sleep at night me feel good about what we're doing because I get to do a job where I get to be me you know there's that integrity behind it that I think we all share we just we don't want to withhold anything because I think what we experienced in this industry everything is withhold from the consumer and the wool sort of pulled over a lot of consumers eyes as far as like promises of products and quick successes and you know quick fixes and pills and I just felt like this is the only way that we can do it we have to be as honest as we possibly can and even for me like I'm super uncomfortable talking in front of people and like being on a mic and being on camera but you know that all this is part of the growth process of being a human being and trying to improve myself and I feel like for me to share that like I've gotten a lot of feedback just from people that have the same phobias and for them to kind of come to me and be like wow you know I love what you're doing and that you know you're taking this you know straight on and you might not be the best of this but every time we listen you get better and so that makes me feel good you know that I can help somebody you know with that you know I think were part of this comes from is the fact that we were trainers for so long and when you're talking about someone with health and fitness and you're talking about changing someone's diet and they're they're insecure about their body or you know they got picked on because of it or maybe they just had a baby or they have low energy whatever the case may be many times if I tell you about my issues or my particular insecurities or my vulnerabilities it makes it you feel more comfortable and able to communicate back to me and then we can start working together and it's almost like it happened by accident I remember you know as a trainer like wow the more vulnerable I am the more honest I am the more I let people in the more they let me in and the more effective I can be as an instructor I'm able to get that idea through to someone because I could I could give you a million different ways that you know or ideas or pieces of knowledge that I think are going to benefit you but if you don't if those don't resonate with you if they don't really impact you then it doesn't matter but if I can give you one just one idea that truly changes the way you live for the better then I've been successful one thing I found super profound in your story which ties into this notion that there are the BS myths that happen in the industry and then there's the real truth because it gets results in their last thing is you were at one point just an amazing shape getting stronger day by day and then something happened and suddenly you were still going as hard as you were but you were losing mass you were losing strength what what was that and and what did that teach you about sort of the cultism that it happens industry in hindsight it was the the greatest growth lesson I could ever have hoped for at the time it was torture it was absolute torture was terrible I you know coming up in in Fitness also being very insecure about my body wanting to build muscles a skinny kid growing up I did lots of things to my body that weren't the best for I force-fed myself a eight to ten times a day sometimes it set my alarm in the middle of night so I could wake up and take AB weight gain or shake I take all kinds of supplements you know everything over-the-counter that I thought would work and even things in the gray market that you know maybe ten years ago you could buy designer steroids over-the-counter so I'd take those and at the age of I want to say 29 or 30 my body rebelled I had severe gastro is I couldn't keep weight on my body I felt weak I felt tired and for somebody who had built this shell of a body around you know like I did I built this show I'm the buff strong guy I'm the confident you know energetic guy and now I'm weak losing muscle I have no energy like Who am I and I had to really self examine I had to look and see what was going on now at the time I owned a personal training studio and in my studio I had you know personal trainers like myself I had massage therapists I had a gut health specialist and the in a hormone specialist and the gut health specialist and the hormone specialists were both on that wellness side but at the time I would have considered woowoo right like I'm the fitness guy like lift weights macros proteins fats carbs calories that's it they were much more into the other stuff food intolerances you know sleep how hormones you know you know how to balance out your hormones meditation that kind of stuff and so finally I broke down and I sat down with them I said okay what's going on like I think I'm eating healthy I think I'm doing everything right I'm a fitness professional what's going on the doctor has no idea what's going on they want to put me on all these medications like what do I do and so they sat me down and we talked about food intolerances we talked about fasting we talked about getting better sleep and my entire approach to nutrition and training was flipped on its head now here's the irony the irony of all of this is I changed my approach because at the time I like to focus on was my health like I just need to be healthy I don't care about building muscle I don't care about being lean like I need to be healthy because this is this isn't good and so that's what I did I focused on my health 100% and the irony was I looked better than I had ever looked before I walked around leaner then I'd ever looked before I was strong I was fit and that was a paradigm shattering moment I think the the the the best learning lessons that we get in life are the ones that are the hardest because they forced you to really look at things in like I don't think I don't think anything else would have forced me to do that then then that what happened to me now if you guys had somebody come to you and you couldn't see them they could only type you questions you had no idea who they were what their background was anything like that and they just said they're profoundly unhappy with where they're at from a physical standpoint what are some universal principles that you can dictate to somebody that while there's no universal diet that would help the greatest number I have some things that I started to do over years and years of training people and the very first thing that I do with anybody's actually asked them not to change anything I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they try out what their girlfriends do one or they're trying out what they but their buddy does and they have no idea where their baseline is I highly recommend tools I love like you know the fat secrets or the you know My Fitness Pal type of track food trackers and I have them track just for like a week or two of consistency and like eat how you would normally eat don't try and impress your trainer and then I haven't tracked like their movement steps because I think today this is way more problem today than it was 15 years ago when I first started it's it blows my mind when we look at what the average American moves like we're somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 steps a day is with the average american steps right now but if you had a tracker on and you were to go for a walk for an hour you would surpass that so that means in a 24 hour day most people don't even [ __ ] move in an hour that's crazy so tracking your movement and tracking what you're consuming I think is huge and then instead of taking things out of the diet or adding all kinds of crazy exercise I actually like to add food nutrition nutritious food that they're probably not getting almost every single time they're over consuming on sugar and too much processed foods a lot of my ladies won't be getting enough protein and not enough healthy fats so I tend to look at somebody's food for a week and find an area where I think they're not getting enough nutrients and I first show them ok let's start to implement that put that into the diet and more often than not when you start to put good healthy foods in there it starts to limit some of the bad foods and that's without me saying take this away if you restrict people or say you can't have this from them it turns into this demonizing thing and this I can or I can't and I'm bad I'm good which I'm trying to get rid of that it's more about like let's talk about what your body needs to run optimally so you kick ass at work you kick ass in your relationship you kick ass in the gym we're evolved to made the mistake in the beginning of overwhelming our clients with too much of our knowledge and information and we want to set them on this path and get them to success fairly quickly but what we found in our careers is we have to really simplify the process and just present it in a way where they can focus on one to two things at a time and what are those big things and it's it's like the most simple things you could possibly think of sleep better nutrition choices and habits you know move and then stress management you know those types of things where it's so overlooked these days like sleep is such one of those things that we all kind of had this sort of Epiphany like of the impact that sleep really has well it sucks as an answer everybody wants to hear what I want to hear the pill tell me this we know what can I take but the truth is those are the big rocks yeah I'll tell you what you know there's there's a there's a massive lack of awareness surrounding nutrition and it's it's for a few different reasons one is it's we can't trust our body's natural systems of of signaling anymore so for example the signal of satiety like when I feel like I'm adding enough food now why can't you trust that nowadays well most diets are comprised of a majority of processed foods and processed foods are highly engineered they're engineered to override your systems of satiety I'll give you an example if I were to take you know 2,000 calories worth of plain you know white baked potato no salt no butter and I put that in front here and I said eat this in 15 minutes you wouldn't be able to do it but if I put potato chips in front of you that wouldn't be a problem most of the money that goes into designing foods doesn't go into the nutrition doesn't go into any of that stuff goes into you making them as highly palatable as possible everything from the taste to the crunch to the mouthfeel to all these different things and so it's hard to trust our systems of satiety when we're overriding them with foods that for most of human evolution simply didn't exist then you have our hunger we can't we most people don't know what it feels like to be hunger hungry and I know that sounds shocking but think about it we know that fasting is got tremendous health benefits most people have never gone longer than 15 16 hours without food their entire lives maybe 24 hours one time when they had a medical procedure or something like that right none of us that ever felt hunger so what we what we think hunger is is cravings so when someone says oh I'm starving they have no idea what that feels like what they what they're having is a craving and what does cravings come from emotion context people around you when you say the context what do you mean I think this messes up a lot of your movie popcorn go to the movies you know you create popcorn at a movie you didn't want popcorn until you walked in on that door right yeah advertisers know this and they create these associations and so then we start to crave foods based on context become aware of that you can actually change that so I'll give you an example because you can actually take this and work it to your advantage so there's a lot of things that we get from food aside from just the taste unfortunately most of us just no taste that's the one we really pay attention to but there's a lot of things we get from food how we feel our energy there's emotions attached to food and I'll give you an example I had a client a what a long time ago who was probably the most unhealthy person I've ever met my life in terms of nutrition it was terrible she didn't drink water literally like all she would wake up in the morning diet coke and then that's all she would have all day long and so we started out with changing making very basic changes to nutrition and one of them was to get her to start eating vegetables now she hated vegetables she said she gagged when she ate vegetables so over the course of the months that I trained her I taught her to pay attention to other things other signals in her body that were associated with the foods that she ate so she started figuring out that the bagel that she ate in the morning with all the cream cheese caused a little bit of bloating she started to realize that when she did have some broccoli digestion was better skin was better energy was better she just felt better overall over time that association with the broccoli actually got her to eat more broccoli she started finding that she wanted to eat more broccoli because of those positive associations so you can actually change how you perceive foods based on some of these positive signals that we get from a lot of healthy foods and look when you're eating processed foods all the time we know that the way your body your brain perceives the taste of things will change based on what you eat all the time so if you eat a lot of sugar a lot of processed sugar fruit isn't gonna taste that sweet because the processed sugar is just overriding all those you know receptors in the brain whatever things get down regulated you start to perceive things differently I tell you what you go on a 24 or forty-eight hour fast go grab a fruit grab a strawberry and see how it tastes all of a sudden it's like biting into a skittle you know it's incredible how often do you guys fast Sal's every month three first 72 hours I noticed a lot of health benefits from it initially anti inflammatory gut health you know just felt better but now the reason why fast isn't for the physical health benefits now it's the I don't know what you want to call it spiritual effects or whatever it's the breaking the chain from food because I started to realize how often I ate because I was bored or because I was supposed to eat like oh it's noon I'm supposed to grab some food and then Ellefson had all this time on my hands and like what do I do now and when I'm stressed out I feel like I want to grab something to eat but I'm supposed to be fasting today and so it really changed my relationship with food now of course fasting could also create a negative association with food so it's not like a cure-all but for somebody who came from the side of fitness where I was forced feeding myself every two or three hours which by the way is a myth that doesn't build more muscle fasting was like I mean it was it was a game changer game changer for all muscle didn't fall off my body you know I'm feeling better and then when I read I actually get stronger and feel better and I'm assimilating food better well this is fantastic so I do it now more for those effects than anything else talk to me it's so interesting that you use the word spiritual how do you have to do something to frame it as a spiritual act or how does that tie in food is a massive distraction for most people stop eating for two days and realize and then you'll realize just how much you've cope with your day-to-day stresses anxieties or issues with food take that away and you're left with your solution I have services you to be more hyper aware of everything that you're going through your body literally talks to you the way we talked about fasting I think is different than people in our own space it's and we call that when we first started talking about fasting it's like we talked all about all the benefits of it but watch how our space will market it and now it's being marketed as a fat burns solution as yeah as a fat loss frustratingly yeah it's it's it's just it's the most abused drug in Western societies 100% 100% what do most people die of you know in America it's the abuse of food it's the overeating of food it's the eating the wrong types of food think about what you do when you're born you know I mean you ever hear people tell you how much easier it is to not overeat when they're busy yeah versus when they have nothing to do dude fasting was a game-changer for me from a biological perspective it is utterly fascinating at otha G and all the other things that are happening in the body where you're breaking down the sick and malformed cells and proteins and all that which that's already amazing but then I've literally never heard somebody talk about the spiritual side before which is exactly why I do it now I'll sum it up a little bit differently and say for me it's doing the hard thing it's constantly having your mind drip on you like oh you could have that you can have it and I remember the very first time I fasted I woke up in the middle of night 2 with the worst headache ever now because it's a spiritual experience for me I wake up and I'm like it hurts to even lay my head on a pillow and so I'm like oh my god total misery like I can't think straight like I should just go have some Advil then I was like wait a second does it add Valve calories I didn't know if it had calories I wouldn't let myself do it and so I had to like muscle through because I was like at the end of this three day fast I am going to be able to say I had nothing but water for three days and that's it like that meant something to me and so not taking the advil and pushing through it became like I have now done a hard thing it's present in every major religion in the world as a practice for a reason for thousands of years and it's because of the profound benefits that has on you not just physically but mentally and spiritually it is something that is it is an absolute game changer and when you look at some of the advancements that we've made in Western societies I mean people far more people now die of too much food than too little food we we've moved away from the the benefits of being without we're never with a think about that like how many people do you know that have never gone a day without eating most people from the day that they're born has there been anything else that's counterintuitive like that that you guys have come across at almost gets a religious reaction from people when you cause like even bringing up fasting can wine some people up I got a good one for you cardio is one of the worst ways to get lean and I know I'm gonna blow everyone's mind by 9:00 right now absolutely so let me explain you know what I'm talking about so oh now you can't get around the fact that you need that there's a calorie balance or the the was it the second law of thermodynamics right calories in versus calories out so you need to be able to burn more calories than you take in in order to tap into your fat stores and become leaner and there's two ways we can look at it we can look at it either I'm burning a lot of calories manually or I'm getting to burn more calories getting my body burn more calories automatically now on a time versus time basis if we were to compare an hour of cardio versus an hour of let's say weight training cardio definitely burns more calories much more calories it's it's a manual way of doing it but resistance training does something far different resistance training tells your body to burn more calories on its own automatically now in the context of modern life where food is easily accessible it's everywhere where most of us are sedentary throughout the day you want a faster metabolism you want your body to want to burn more calories cardial also and all activity does this by the way all activity sends a signal to your body to become more efficient at that particular activity this is this is called this is adaptation so if I do lots of cardio if I get an elliptical and I go for 45 minutes or I get on the treadmill I go on there for an hour the signal I'm sending to my body is I'm telling my body to become more efficient at that type of activity which requires more endurance and it won't smear ficient with my calories because remember I'm burning lots of calories while I'm doing it now how does it become more efficient well do I need a lot of muscle to do endurance type activity no you don't need much muscle at all you just need enough muscle to keep you moving and you need a lot of endure in order to continue doing it so what you find when you do that is a metabolic adaptation where your metabolism starts to slow down now they've done Studies on this and they'll find that this is absolutely true you take somebody who's you know really really good at running and they'll burn less calories per hour than somebody who hasn't run very often they've studied modern hunter-gatherers where they find you know scientists actually win and I think was a hodza tribe if I'm not mistaken a jadi zhey a if I'm not mistaken they went in and they did some pretty sophisticated testing to test out their metabolic rates now they're very active compared to the average person or they the average Westerner and they predicted that they would be burning something like two or three thousand times the calories of the typical you know Westerner and what they found was that that wasn't true at all but you actually burned a little bit more calories a good body adapt and because their body that no no why is that why would that make sense well if you're a hunter-gatherer does it make sense that your body's gonna have you burn a [ __ ] ton of calories when food is relatively scarce and hard to come by of course not it's going to adapt now resistance training to something different because resistance training is sending a signal to the body that says we need more strength to prevent this damage that we're creating with this exercise or this stress more strength requires bigger muscle fibers bigger muscle fibers contract harder more muscle more muscle also burns more calories and so the primary signal or the primary adaptation that comes from resistance training is stronger faster metabolism the primary signal that we're sending with cardio is become more efficient with calories and increase endurance and so over time resistance training is far superior look I've I'll give an example I had a client years ago young lady who was absolutely obsessed with remaining lean and she ran about 20 miles a week so she ran you know marathons and half marathons she was active every single day and she would come in and lift weights with me about once a week but the majority of her training was this lots of endurance training now if she ate anything over 1,700 calories and she weighed about 125 pounds so she wasn't a massive person but anything over 1,700 calories she'd gain body fat now when you looked at Oliver tivity 17 and her calories wasn't that much at all but her body had adapted and I would tell her if we slowly decrease your cardio and increase the amount of resistance trend you do and try to get your body stronger you'll find that you'll be able to eat more and maintain the same body weight the same body fat percentage and over time we made that switch and we got to the point where she was able to consume over 2,400 calories a day oh and she started as she was only running 5 miles a week that's a massive difference from 20 miles a week down to 5 miles a week focused on strength Frank so she built a little bit of muscle and she was able to consume an additional 700 calories a day with far less activity now think about the average person living the average life that's learn extreme analogy for somebody Majan this young lady comes in and she's 50 or 100 pounds overweight I actually don't want her weight to drop it all in fact if a month goes by and she's been weight training and training with me consistently 3 4 times a week and she lost 10 or 15 pounds I failed that's how I look at it and that's hard to tell somebody who's trying to sign up with you and say hey I need you to lose me fifty or hundred pounds but I know if I were to lose her 10 pounds I'd say in the first week which a lot of people think would be a great thing it wouldn't be whatsoever because I'm already heading that direction I'm already starting to adapt her body to lower amount of calories and moving a ton I don't want that in fact I would like to keep her weight right about where it's at and if I and I know if I hit the sweet spot because if I've introduced weight training and I've introduced more nutrient nutrient-dense foods into her diet then she's definitely building some muscle and if she's not seeing a huge spike on the scale we're probably burning a little bit of body fat so it's probably a nice little even exchange of at the end of the month we didn't lose anyway you stayed at a net zero but we probably added five pounds of muscle and and lost five pounds of fat you're in a way better place right there than the girl who came in and did it like Biggest Loser style and I lost her thirty pounds in a month time I mean that's a great example 85% of those contestants put all the weight and some back for that exact reason yeah they actually I forgot which contestant it was but they their bait their metabolic rate had got so slow they lost a lot of weight but they were at the point where they had to consume 1200 ad a and worked out for an hour a day just to maintain their body weight which is a kind of a crappy position to be in if you're trying to you know maintain your health I mean you lose imagine losing 50 pounds and now all you can ever eat is 1200 or 1500 calories a day yeah no question I was talking to some of the contestants on The Biggest Loser like behind the scenes and they said the producers literally asked you on day one do you want to get healthier do you want to win oh no because they're two different tracks first it's like if you want to go on the healthy track you're probably gonna get bumped in the first couple vote outs but you're gonna be on a lifelong path of actually knowing what to do and how to lose weight you're just not gonna lose a crazy fast and I thought I actually respected that they were that honest that it's like this is a game show yeah so which do you want and if you want to win then we're gonna tell you how to do it right and I thought okay but that's also a little dicey in terms of all the people watching the show that think oh just go and slave myself to a Stairmaster and you know I mean I've never been a traitor when that I was a trainer when that the first season came out and men the gyms were flooded right after that this wave of people that were motivated from this new show that came out and that was a major hurdle that I had to get over because I had already known at that point that's not the healthy way like getting you to lose 100 pounds in three months is not ideal and for sure not for sure 85% chance you're gonna put it all back on and some and even the small percentage the 15 percent actually keep it off you should see the lifestyle they have to keep up they're the ones they're just they're a little more determined to keep running their body into the ground and that's the only reason why they haven't cause it's just it's inevitable that it's gonna rebound it's gonna rebel you cannot get in a fight with your body it's kind of wooden you will lose that's actually a really interesting statement that you can't get in a fight with your body you're gonna lose to that point I want to talk about like what happens at a gut level I heard you talk about you know in so many cultures you'll see like they'll do some sort of Prayer it doesn't have to be religious why do they do that so we had a who we consider the Godfather of wellness Paul check and he's been never heard that name so that's already interesting okay so yeah you've got to meet him great incredible individual extremely intelligent I'm always asking like what are you doing when he does certain things so we all had dinner and serve him his plate and he does this thing over his food for about you know 15 seconds or so you know he's not religious yeah that's why it was weird anyone who starts eating so after after we were all done we get on the podcast and I asked and I said Paul what I didn't know you were religious we were you praying before you and he goes no no because I'm not praying goes I'm asking my body if it wants this food and I'm asking the food if it wants to be eating and it goes through this whole thing and I thought to myself like well that's silly like like why would you and then I thought to myself for a second and there's a lot of wisdom in ancient traditions or cultures that have lasted for thousands of years and if you look at every single major religion they all have some kind of a practice before eating some kind of an awareness practice if you're in a highly stressed sympathetic state you're probably not going to be conducive to digesting food properly - you're gonna be in a pro-inflammatory state this is one of the reasons why I recommend people with gut issues don't eat post-workout you know we're always told that you should have food right after your workout you know it builds muscle replenishes glycogen but in in a post-workout state you know inflammation is up supposed to be it's one of the signals that tells your body to build muscle or not stuff but in that higher elevation of inflammatory markers or signals in your body probably not the best time to introduce food especially if you have good issues because when the gut is inflamed putting food in there increases your risk of things like leaky gut syndrome or developing auto immunities to particular types of foods like you know food intolerances or whatever and so it makes sense to slow down relax for a second let everything calm down and then eat the food versus what we tend to do when we eat which is I'm in a hurry I got 10 minutes shovel this down my face and go the other thing I learned from him was to not drink water with my meal which I thought was kind of strange but it immediately slows you down and it makes you chew the heck out of your food and I know you realize how often you take it like pills yeah just took you to swallow chips you chew swallow that was like one game-changers when we talk about fasting being a game-changer try eating without one time she's never digested a he's never ate a meal without fluid try it one time and just pay attention to like how much you have to actually chew your food you'd have to chew it like 30 times they actually get it all the way down that's right so so it's really that you know your state of mind impacts how you digest things you can increase your your inflammatory markers by a thought you can change how your cert your central nervous system is reacting you can change your hormone levels you so and this is all verified right I mean this is not even controversial to say anymore so it only makes sense that if you want to be able to utilize that your the food that you're eating create a good but it also created a better relationship with your food I mean if I'm constantly eating in a stress State I am creating an association or a connection to that food that may not may not be serving me so stop slow down if you're religious pray if you're not take a breath you know ask yourself or just become aware of what you're about to do and what you're about to eat and then you'll notice that your food choices will start to change and you start to feel better as you're eating yeah I never would have believed this in fact the first time I heard it I thought it was stupid I was like yeah and then Lisa was going through what she was going through and we had just talked to every doctor you can imagine heard every terrible ridiculous answer including immunoglobulin transfusions and she was gonna be doing that for six months it was just crazy town and then we finally started doing sampling of the microbiome to see like what did she actually have and how is it active and getting down to like the RNA level of what metabolites are being produced by the actual bacteria that you have and all that so getting really specific and the woman that was walking us through it a woman named dr. Helen Massey aged and she said oh Lisa do you meditate before you eat and wash it and I was like literally everything you just said like you can [ __ ] up you're like inflammatory State right with the thought you can shift out of the parasympathetic into the sympathetic and like that it actually impacts the state of your microbiome and thusly what they're producing from the food which is why the same meal one day can sit fine and then the next day caused an upset stomach oh look the one of the highest concentrations of serotonin receptors in the body is in your gut they call it the second brain the third is the heart by the way and it's funny how we always say think you know feel with your gun think with your heart or you know with your head for anybody right now who's watching this and thinking oh you guys are crazy for sure you felt butterflies when you fall in love for sure you've felt your bubble guts if you get real nervous the term [ __ ] your pants comes from something that actually happens when you get super super frightened so definitely changing your state of mind definitely will affect your gut and we know that the gut affects your entire the entire body in terms of health so how you go into how you eat and how your energy is around your meal that makes a tremendous impact no that's super crazy like all of that stuff realizing how interconnected it is realizing how important that stuff like meditation was something that I put off for a long time I just had no it felt really feminine like that's just no [ __ ] answer and because by nature I find that I'm way in touch with my feminine side like that was not the thing I struggled with right you struggled being too skinny I struggled being too weak like I had to learn to toughen up and so anything that made me feel like I was retrograding I just didn't want to do and then mark Devine the Navy SEAL it was like basically Tom stop being a jackass like hey and because of who he was and everything I just thought you know what like if this guy is telling me to pull my head out of my ass basically and give it a shot I should really give it a shot and that that has changed my life and I'll even say that it's made my business better it's for me it's the ability to get into the parasympathetic nervous system where you're calm and creative right so that alpha wave state that I get into when I'm taking a shower which is insane and my business my biggest business breakthroughs are always in the shower because I'm so relaxed and to think that I can get there you know on dry land as it were at any time simply by breathing from my diaphragm of like you know literally getting into a space for me it's when I can get into a dark space and I play the sounds of like rain or the ocean or something and I just lose myself and that is so so funny you bring that up because I had the same experience at being kind of feminine I'm coming from football and you know we kind of we just go operate off of like muscling through everything and over intensifying everything and I had a moment like that too going through wim HOF and his techniques were I mean you have to immerse yourself in an ice bath and I was trying to apply the same sort of operating system I was going off on forever where I would tense my whole body up and try it over my over power of my way through this environment and it just humbled the hell out of me I couldn't I could not breathe it felt like panic until it forced me to release relax breathe calm the system become aware of how to access that parasympathetic state and since that I figured out now how to pull those breathing practices into my life and then to business and into at home now actually have a practice in place where I can find that state and how to get there navigating it but I feel like a lot of males you know with with yoga practices and meditation it's just not very appealing and I think that's why another reason why we trying to bring it up so often on the show being you know weight lifters and but we just don't we don't address all the systems it's so funny to me like if you were to if you're a drag racer for a car and you're trying to get the most horsepower most performance out of it but then one of your systems like say your tires are completely off or not balanced or you don't have any oil in the engine but then you're talking about putting a spoiler on the car putting a turbo and I'd be like well why wouldn't you fix one of the basic systems if you really want to get this extra edge I feel fitness in your body is the same way - it's like we're always looking for the competitive edge with the latest nootropic or the latest fat burner or the pre-workout to get this edge but it's like you're not sleeping at night you're stuffing your face like crazy you're not feeding your body right you have all these other systems that are not running properly in your body it's like men you would get so much more out of your body if you actually just kind of focused and there's most of those these things are free and it's easy it's like okay I just got to go to bed or I got to meditate okay that doesn't cost me anything it just means I gotta be aware stop and do it and people if they would just learn to practice some of these things they would see the performance benefits and they'd see that most of these things would actually supersede you know whatever latest greatest pill is out that's being pushed there's that you know there's there's getting your body to adapt and then there's optimizing right and getting your body adapt requires a little bit of stress so it's okay to stress your body too you got to push your body sometimes push your mind sometimes push your spiritual practice sometimes to get yourself to grow and change but then there's optimizing when you balance everything out so that you can perform at your app is an absolute best and that happens by looking at the entire person as an organism a whole organism it's not one piece it's not just muscle endurance it's not just nutrition it's all those things it's including your state of mind including your sense of fulfillment your sense of meaning all those things when you look at all those and you optimize those and balance those you are capable of some incredible things if you just try to force everything all the time and you always are pushing adaptation by lots of stress lots of stress lots of stress well you overcome your body's ability to adapt and now you're in a state of you know trying to survive and that's not a good state to be in if you want to perform at the top so going back to those basic building blocks you guys are talking about you brought up sleep twice so how can people optimize their sleep well I think right now I think something that I had since the show had to start doing I realized that I have the lights on in my house till 10 11 o'clock at night I'm watching TV or have a computer screen in my bed and I didn't realize how much that was affecting my sleep and the ability just to fall asleep so I actually have to I put my phone away at 7:00 p.m. it gets put away by the nightstand I turn all the lights off go by candle or red light I've got red light at my house I can feel the difference there and there's night so be honest that I can't do that I'm in the middle of something I'm working I do work till midnight on some nights but I'm aware of it so for me like to optimize sleep those practices have to be in place and I you know I recommend either like an audiobook or reading right before bed I think that really helps calm the mind and I think that will help get you better sleep I have I have two kids one of my favorite things about having children is you can do these things with them and the results are very clear because kids have way less filters than adults do way less right so so I started doing this at home so I when the Sun Goes Down the lights go off and I'll put candle light on or I'll go real real dim light so I'm kind of mimicking you know natural sunlight and when I started doing that my kids went to bed on time no problem slept great woke up in the morning refreshed feeling good not acting up when I don't do that trouble sleeping my daughter will wake me up because she can't sleep they'll wake up a little bit more irritable or in a bad mood they're just not getting as good of sleepers good quality sleep so so yeah if you have kids run that experiment on them yourself and you'll see it's pretty it's pretty intense that I tried it out with my kids and we started dimming the lights down and using candle light and it just really it sets the tone so this has been one of those hacks that actually stole from salad we've applied it's been it's been doing good things for how long before bedtime so probably about an hour actually I always recommend clients an hour before bed but ideally you want to match the Sun so when the Sun Goes Down that's when everything else goes down as well and if you have to work on electronics if you have to do work on a computer wear something that at least partially blocks some of the blue light that comes from those electronics as that can tell the brain that the Sun is still out and you'll find that you know studies will show that you know changes melatonin production and sleep quality so lights go down when the Sun Goes Down put on blue blockers and then you'll find that your sleep quality should improve as a result mmm no make sense all right guys before I asked my last question tell these guys where they can find mine pump so we have a YouTube channel line pump TV and we post fitness tips on there we do interviews on there we post some funny stuff and then of course our podcast that's where we reach the most people and that's mine pump and you can find it on almost any platform and then on Instagram is mine pumps out mine pump atom mine pump Justin we also have a free but you can download mine pump and on there we the whole reason why we created s because we have almost 800 episodes and it allows you to search so you can search we've when it's really related to health and fitness we've probably talked about it at least once or five or ten times thoroughly yeah so if you actually put a topic in there you can see all the episodes where we've discussed that topic that's wicked I don't normally lie and ask an additional question but I'm gonna slide one in why mind pump and not like body pump it's a really good question and we went back and forth on it for a really long time because we knew when we first started this that we didn't want to pigeonhole ourselves into just fitness and so we didn't want to be barbell something or you know just body workout pump or something yeah which is funny because when you when you when you work in new media you know creating a niche will get you more viewers or whatever like if we called our podcast like the Kido podcast with a paleo podcast we probably would have got more downloads initially but then you're stuck right and well we all have lots of interests outside of fitness and most of them are related to health but health is such a broad you know spectrum so we wanted to come up with a name that allowed us to talk about fitness but also allowed us to have guests on and talk about politics economics is you know business religion spirituality whatever we found interesting so we had you know open that door I love that all right now my real last question for each of you what is the one thing that people could change right now today to have the biggest impact on their health but one thing okay if you can do this and this is a tough thing but if you can do this dramatically reduce or eliminate if you can your consumption of highly processed foods and that these are foods that have a long shelf life come in a box that you can you know you can keep stored for a long time simply doing that your body will start to regulate its weight more accurately in terms of health so if you just eliminate processed foods you'll find typically that you'll eat less make better food choices and you'll find healthy foods or natural food more palatable more appealing takes about a week or two of withdrawal but if you just do that alone most people will see some some pretty significant chains I think that that I speak to the step one all the time because I think that's getting worse it's becoming easier to not leave your home and have everything brought right to you so you know I know I rattled off the stat of how many steps the average person takes a day I think we're gonna see that get worse and I've I've changed somebody's body composition without ever touching cardio by just teaching them how to move more throughout their day and create more habits like around that and I don't think you should go after a generic goal like just ten thousand steps I think you should find your baseline because everyone's gonna be different and and try to increase that by ten percent a month you know ten percent a month try and step a little bit more before you knew it know it you'll be stepping three four times what you were doing before and it won't seem like it you'll see energy go up weight loss come down you won't be sitting down sedentary eating all the time this is a something that's changed my life personally and it's so little and simple is every time we if we eat out we didn't make the food we eat out we walk for 45 minutes hour right afterwards on it helps with the digestive process plus you're gonna step and move you're gonna burn calories I think it helps mitigate a lot of the damage from the food that you would consume yeah I think I mean I could go the angle of sleep again but I think just apply us a breathing practice would be immensely effective and what that does is it it really forces you to become present and it forces you to calm down and find that parasympathetic state and what that even feels like and experience that so you can you can basically give your body a chance to recover I just don't feel like people give their bodies a chance these days and we're so overwhelmed and overstimulated with everything that I think that message today probably has one of the more impactful things behind it that all right guys you're going to want to dive into the world of mind pump these guys are amazing having met them up at their own place for the first time clicking with them immediately and getting a chance to dive deeper into the world and see how real they are I cannot stress that enough these guys are no [ __ ] they give you the raw honest truth no matter what it is they're completely vulnerable they're completely themselves they debunk things in the standard way of thinking in a way that I find incredible and one thing that we didn't get to in this episode which I'm very sad about but is maybe the thing that makes me love them the most and it is that they actively seek out disconfirming evidence anybody that actively seeks out to figure out how they're wrong how they could evolve their thinking that are actually open to hearing ideas that do not match their current way of thinking and they say look either I'm gonna learn something new and that's empowering or I'm going to realize now I was right in the first place but at least they put themselves in that position to really open themselves up to the possibility of a new idea a new answer in order to evolve their own thinking so they can get better results so they can help other people get better results and by the way they give away so much content it's crazy so no matter what you want to do if you want to change your own physique you want to learn how to eat whatever the case may be they've got all of that stuff for free so check them out at mine pump media at mine pump Adam at mine pump Justin at mine pumps I'll get it it's absolutely incredible these guys are truly unparalleled in the industry and the thing you're gonna see when you watch them in their normal habitat the first half of their episode is just absolutely [ __ ] hilarious and then the second half is super deep they go way into the science and really bringing the two together and knowing that you have to entertain before you have the right to educate it's super super powerful all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary gentlemen thank you thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential