 In this episode of Mind Pump, we go in a different direction from what we normally talk about and promote. In fact, this may come across as a counter message, but trust me, we make our case very well. And we think that this episode needs to come out, especially right now during these weird and uncertain times. So we talk about when eating junk food and being lazy and things under those categories are actually healthy. When they are things that you're doing because they are better for you at that moment, okay? But there's a fine line there and we kind of break it down. So first we talk about what healthy actually means, how it's a sphere that encompasses many different things, not just the physical, but the mental, the spiritual relationship health and how all of those things kind of overlap and communicate to each other. How if one thing is off, it tends to make the others off as well. We talk about how to mitigate some of the negative effects of some of those things that I just talked about. We talked about the longest living people in the world and the things that they do that make them really healthy that you wouldn't normally think about. The mitigations that we talked about, by the way, are great. So we give you a lot of great tips on how to, if you're gonna eat junk food and if it's healthy for you at that moment, like things to do and if you're gonna drink alcohol, things you could do to kind of mitigate the physical negative effects, if let's say you wanna enjoy a glass of wine with your spouse. One of the things that we mentioned in there is z-biotics. This is a genetically modified probiotic that you take right before you drink alcohol and the bacteria actually create an enzyme that breaks down some of the negative byproducts of alcohol. We tested it ourselves when we drank and we felt way better the next day. So this is something you could do if you're enjoying a little bit more wine or whatever than you normally do. Take z-biotics with it. It'll help with the negative effects and because you're a mind pump listener, if you go to zbiotics.com, that's z-b-i-o-t-i-c-s.com, forward slash mind pump, you'll get 10% off any of their products. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Viori. Viori makes the most comfortable, nicest looking athleisure wear. You will find anywhere, of course, you order online, it gets sent right to your door. If you're at home right now, like everybody else is, you wanna wear comfortable clothing, but you don't wanna look like you're just wearing sweats, like you're bumming it. You still wanna kinda look good. Viori, go to Viori. Their stuff is amazing and they have a guarantee with their stuff that I've never seen before. I think it's a lifetime guarantee. If any of it falls apart or something happens, return it and they'll give you some new stuff. 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I think this episode might be controversial, although this is a message that we've been communicating for a long time, but I know it's gonna be something that's gonna stir up a little bit of controversy. Well, we haven't dedicated a full single episode just to this topic, which I think you're right. I think it deserves that. And I think we need to be clear, very clear on the point. Absolutely. It needs to be communicated properly and very effectively. And the reason why I think this is controversial is because our space, the fitness and health space, communicates very well in some ways. And one of the ways that they communicate, I think that they over-communicate are the physical benefits of eating right and exercising and why that's everything, why that's the most important thing. And I do think they do a poor job of not looking at the whole picture. They don't see what health really, really is. Well, there's too many blanket statements that are always made and it's almost like it's predictable to where they're not accounting for nuances and they're not accounting for everyday life that interrupts perfect patterns of trying to shoot for these quote unquote healthy habits of maintaining this perfect kind of health. I also think I'm very guilty of promoting that message. All of us were. Early on as a trainer. Oh yeah. I really feel like I approached fitness, very science and mathematical based. It was, you know, this is the science that supports when we do these things, this is how the body adapts and changes. Here's the math. Tilapia broccoli equals apps. Here's the math based off of, you know, your age, your movement and your goals. And you know, now it's just a matter of discipline. Can you follow it and the ones that can see the results and are happy and healthy, the ones that don't have issues, they have to work through and they're just not there yet. And that really was now I'm saying that in a way that I know that I probably didn't communicate that as a young trainer, but I'm sure that I was presenting somewhat that message. And so I think it took me a very long time to kind of see the whole picture and really start to understand too that who you're communicating to like, you know, when I'm talking to a competitor, which is a very small percentage of the population, how I'm talking about health and wellness and fitness is completely different than I am the general pop. The general pop is not looking to get on stage, it's not their sport, they have so many other aspects of their life that they value and that's important to them. And as a trainer, I think I was always trying to, you know, make them like me. It's real similar like leading like a team in business, like the mistake I made early on in leadership was very similar. I was always trying to make my staff like me. You know, these are the things that made me successful. Therefore, let me see if I can make them all be like me and it's this never ending vicious cycle when you do that of turnover on people because you're just never gonna find people that are exactly the same as you versus learning to work within their parameters and make them better. It is very much the Western medicine and scientific approach to break complex systems up into segments and then to dive deep into those segments. And that's actually a strength of the scientific approach and the Western medicine approach. If you wanna know deep knowledge about a, you know, the hormone system, for example, or the heart, you are gonna get some details. When you go through that approach. But the weakness of it is forgetting that health is a complex interconnected sphere. This is where you tend to forget. So if you go to one doctor and you have digestive issues, that doctor is going to look at them, look at your digestive issues just through their lens and really maybe not consider other things. Like if I go to a hormone specialist, they may think, well, let's test your hormones to see what's going on. If I go to a psychologist, they may think your stress and your relationships are causing your gut issues. If I go to a gastro specialist, they may look at how is your gut inflammation? Maybe your microbiome is off or whatever. If I go to a nutritionist, they're gonna look at my diet and think maybe the things I'm eating. And so we tend to forget that it's this really big interconnected sphere. That's what health is. And this really hit home for me years ago when I started to really pay attention to studies that were done on longevity. And they would show things like, okay, eating healthy and exercise definitely contributes to longevity. That was nothing shocking there. I knew that already. I would preach that all day long. But then I would see things like relationships, having good relationships. Community. Yeah, community. People who have a spiritual practice. Did you know that people who have some type of a spiritual practice, whether it be religion or meditation or philosophy, tend to live longer and be healthier even when they control everything else? Like that's weird. Like what's going on here? So all these things contribute to your health. And one study in particular, really hit this home for me. It showed that having bad relationships was as bad as smoking cigarettes regularly. Actually showed that. It actually showed if you had bad relationships, stressful relationships with the people around you, it's just as bad for you as smoking a bunch of cigarettes or having a really, really poor diet. Now, the reason why that hit home for me was it made me think back to my early days of working out and to a lot of clients that I trained who became so obsessed with exercise that they literally discarded relationships or treated relationships poorly because they were so obsessed with eating perfectly and exercising. So it's like, I can't go to that birthday. That's leg day. No, I'm not gonna go out with my friends because I never have a glass of wine. And that's what you're gonna enjoy a little bit of wine. Nope, can't go off my diet, not gonna do it. And it feels self-righteous. I think if you're stuck in that, if you're in that space. But when you actually look at the data, so many things contribute to your health and it's not just the stuff that I think is obvious. And that's why I think this episode needs to happen, especially right now, especially right now when I think I could say this confidently, collectively we're probably experiencing more stress and anxiety and uncertainty now than we were seven months ago or a year ago. I think I can say that pretty safely. Yeah, I think people are more worried, people who maybe even haven't lost, maybe you still have a job and everything's still financially secure. Maybe you're not even worried about getting sick and COVID or all that stuff, but your whole routine is different. Instead of waking up, getting dressed, getting the car, drop the kids off, whatever, you go downstairs in your pajamas, kids are doing whatever, okay, my structure's all gone. I have no schedule. It's all stress. Everything's uprooted. Yeah, it's all, so right now I think this is a message that needs to be communicated because I think it's a very important one for sure. So the question is when is eating junk food and being lazy actually healthy? Yeah, that's a great question. That's a very, very good question. I think we should dive into that. I think it's important to break down health into some of the known categories first, right? Like there's physical health, which I think that's the one that, it's easy to explain, right? That's your muscle, your function. Can you move well? Do you have good stamina and strength? Is your body fat percentage appropriate? In other words, do you have a healthy body fat percentage levels? There's a range there, by the way. It's not shredded and it's not super overweight somewhere in the middle, your hormones, your brain. There's the physical, the vessel that you're walking around in, your body. There's that kind of. There's an able body. Are you able to do activities? Are you strong, all these things like matter in terms of health? Yes, then there's mental health. Mental health would be like, how you think about things. Can you think clearly? Are you able to be calm and focused? Are you free from mental OCD or disorders or anxiety? Things like that, right? That's the mental side of health. Then there's a spiritual health. Spiritual health is like, do you feel gratitude? You could have great physical health, great mental health, but just feel flat, feel like life has no meaning, feel like there's no, you don't feel grateful for things. And spiritual practices really help a lot with that, right? Can you let go of what you can't control? Justin, you said this before, can you think outside of yourself? That's your spiritual health? Yeah, I get reminded of when we had Dr. Roy Vontogma, I think he pronounced his name, but the belief system, having a belief system in place can really drive your health in a positive direction. And I think people discount the fact that, believing in something, it really does change you physically and physiologically can do great things for you. Totally, relationship health, this one, Adam loves to talk about all the time, this is extremely important, very social creatures. Do you, are you able to communicate honestly with the people that are close to you? Do you feel like you can depend on them? Do they, can they depend on you? Do you feel validated and supported? Now, I just named four, I mean, if we wanna, we could really break down and go crazy with all, but those are the big four, right? Does physical health contribute to or influence relationship health? Let's just pick those two for example. They all do, they all bleed into each other. All of them, right? Let's say your physical health is so poor that you can't get out of the house or you're so unhealthy that you feel inflamed and irritable and angry all the time, is that gonna affect your relationships? I know this when I would get people who are super obese as clients, help them lose weight, improve their physical health. Their relationship health would improve because of it. What about if you have poor spiritual health, will that affect your physical health? You know, if you don't feel gratitude, if you feel like life doesn't have any meaning, are you gonna be, wanna be as active? Are you gonna wanna, you know, eat in ways that take care of yourself if you feel like there's no meaning to life? What about your mental health? If your mental health is down, I think everything else is gonna be suffering as well. So they all contribute to each other and the things that you do, even exercise and eating, can feed each one of those things and you gotta know which one needs more help. Both negatively and positively. Correct. I think, and what you'll find is I think there'll be like this, there's going to be a theme, like in this conversation and I really feel like moderation is the key driver in all of this because each one of the things that you just listed, there's a spectrum and there's extreme versions on both sides and I think extreme on both sides is unhealthy. Totally. No matter which one of those that you're talking about and so the real key is to learn how to have moderation through all of them and to be mindful, right? And then also not to abuse, right? So I think that's the other thing to understand too that even a good thing can be abused and I think that's what, I think that's the thing that's probably been weighing on you, Sal, because you've brought this up several times this last week that we're seeing right now in the fitness space, like we see a lot of fitness people that are scrambling what to do and understood, right? Their businesses are upended right now or they lost their job working at the gym and they're scrambling to find answers or ways to monetize and make money and they're pushing this message and what I think is important to understand is that that's them worrying about their own personal when you're thinking about who you're communicating to, the masses, trying to push people in a direction of working out, training hard, that when their mental health is completely out of whack right now because of what's going on in our world, you may not be helping. You think you may be by presenting that message but in reality that person doesn't necessarily need that and really what they need from a fitness professional right now is to help them figure out these kind of four categories that you broke down and where they need to put the most energy. Totally, look, as a trainer, when I would get the type A, and I mean real type A, everybody likes to say they're type A. I'm type A because I like to work hard. It's not a badge of honor by the way, it's a dysfunction. But let's say you're the true type A classic, overdoes everything, hyper perfectionist, works like crazy, full steam ahead at everything that they do, right? So I get that person that hires me and they're like, okay, what are your goals? I wanna burn body fat and I wanna build muscle. Okay, so how long, I've been doing, I did. I do five days a week of orange theory. I run twice a week. I've done, I did the HCG diet a couple times. I cut my calories down to a thousand. And as I'm talking to this person, I'm realizing- I do power yoga. Yeah, I realize that this person is a classic type A type personality. The way I'm gonna communicate them is gonna be very, very different from the person who they come in, they're overweight and I've never worked out before. I'm a little afraid. I don't know if I wanna do it, I don't have the time. It's not fun for me. Very, very different approach. The type A person, the way I'm gonna coach them is to be okay missing a few days of working out. In fact, that's what you need. You need to kinda take some time off. And you know what we need to do? Slower, easier type workouts. And you know it's probably a good idea for you. Sit on the couch sometimes and just watch something and just relax. Or how about you read a book, maybe a fiction. Stop reading so much nonfiction. Maybe read a book of fiction, see how that helps. Totally different way of communicating and both of them are gonna improve their health by following the tailored advice. Yeah, going back to kind of Adam's example of the spectrum and having both extremes, I think it's really important. I think people don't give any attention to where they can assess, where they actually are on that spectrum. Like where would you fall in that spectrum in terms of your workouts, in terms of your nutrition, in terms of like your relationships, like in terms of like your spiritual practices or like your belief system, do you even have one? Like all these types of things, where are you on that, like zero or a hundred? Like I'm all in. And then like figuring out to how this is where it is. It is important to then understand how to optimize and adapt and when to do what and where to come back to homeostasis. So this finding like a balance, which I know is it's kind of like a term out there that just like turns on a deaf ear, like finding balance. Yeah, what does that mean? What does that even mean? Like moderation, like this. So like being able to kind of figure out like where I could tilt the scale to create that sort of home base. And then I can stretch myself and I can come back and I could always find that again to remain healthy. This reminds me of the conversations that I used to have with my competitors. Like if I was coaching a bikini or a bodybuilder or a men's physique competitor, one of my favorite things to do during their routine when I was going through it with them is to intermittently introduced fasting days. And it would always strike this up a conversation of why? Like I don't understand coach, like why are we doing this? Like there's nothing to support really having a competitor getting ready for a show to just not eat food entirely for a day like that. They're so afraid of losing muscle. Exactly, their primary goal is to build muscle and that's why they do it. But one of the things that I would always try and remind them that this isn't just about macros and calories in and calories out. There's an other side to this beast and your mental state and your relationship and connection to food is extremely important to me. And one of my best ways to train that or teach that would be to just totally throw a curve ball in the middle of their coaching routine and be like, tomorrow you're fasting and they would freak out and then it would then give me the opportunity to speak to that. Listen, this isn't just about me helping you get to a certain point on stage. It's also about helping you for the rest of your life. And one of the things that we don't ever want to be is become a slave to this. I've got to have this many minutes. I've got to do this, I've got to do that. And I'd have to show them that like this is not going to kill your gains in one day. In fact, it'll give you a great opportunity to work inward and focus on other aspects of your health and fitness. And so I love doing that mainly too because I knew not a lot of coaches were doing that. I didn't know anybody in the space at that time that was kind of disrupting in that way where they were showing competitors to fast because I understand that there's nothing supports me scientifically for, this is going to add muscle, because that's your main goal. If you're getting on stage and presenting your physique it's all about either building muscle or holding onto the most amount of muscle and you lose the most amount of fat. And fasting just doesn't really speak to that. But what I understand is that the relationship with food, the mental health, the spiritual, all the other aspects that you're talking about right now, how much that plays a role, their overall stress, their overall hormones and everything else that goes into presenting the best version of themselves on stage. And I know teaching that during that phase is so crucial. So I love that. I'm so glad you used that example. Fasting's actually a beautiful example of what we're talking about. If you had a client that came to you that didn't like to eat, maybe has a history of anorexia, fasting's the worst thing, right? You don't tell them to not eat, that would be absolutely catastrophic. Fasting to lose weight in general is a terrible way to use fasting. Now fasting is a spiritual practice, exceptional. It's just a way to detach from something that you think you need to have every single day. In fact, it's present in every, almost every single major religion in some way. The major religions for sure, because it's a way to practice detachment. It's a tool like anything else. If I put, if there's a hammer on the table and I said to you, is that hammer good or bad? Neither, it's just a hammer. If I take it and I hit you over the head with it as hard as I can, it's bad. Now it's bad. If I take that same hammer and I build a house for you or fix something for you, now it's good. It's all in how it's being wielded and everything can be abused. Anything and everything can be abused. Can junk food, being lazy and alcohol be abused? Yes, of course, that's easy. Everybody knows that. Those things are abused quite often. Can eating super clean, exercising super consistently, being hyper, hyper focused on being perfect with everything be abused? Yes, all the time. I see this all the time in the fitness space. It's not as common, but it's not as uncommon as people would think. And so this conversation I think needs to be had on how things can be healthy and how they can be unhealthy. And I think it all boils down to how it's being used. Well, look at alcohol. Here's a great example. Alcohol, a lot of people in the fitness space will say alcohol has zero value. Okay, from a physiological maybe physical standpoint to probably right, I can't think of any muscle building, fat burning, physical health promoting, benefits of alcohol. But what if alcohol is a part of your spiritual practice? What if you're a Catholic and Sunday you go do church? What if it's the only way you get laid with your wife? It's very important. Well, I mean, along those lines, what if once a week you like to sit down with your wife put your kids go to bed, you and your wife like to split a bottle of alcohol. So it's not like you're getting destroyed or smashed and you know, you each have a couple of glasses and you both enjoy it and it relaxes you both, calms down, opens up conversation, you communicate. Now you're helping your relationship health maybe a little bit of your mental and spiritual health and are those things gonna benefit your physical health? Yeah, they are. Now it's okay. Look, you know, back to alcohol, millions of millions and millions of Americans drink alcohol on a weekly basis, very, very small percentage of them become alcoholics. There definitely is an abuse pattern and so we're not promoting that at all but something like junk food for example, let's talk about that for a second. How the hell can junk food even be considered healthy ever? Well, it usually isn't. Most of the time when people eat junk food it's not good for them. But you know, I'll give you an example of when junk food was healthy. We're all on lockdown, I got my kids. I hadn't seen my kids for almost three weeks because I had gotten sick and I wanted to be over, I had all the scary symptoms. I had the dry cough, the fever, the whole deal, Jessica had it too. And you know, I have my kids, half the time live with me, half the time live with their mom. They were supposed to come to my house. I was sick so I said no, don't let them come over here and then I waited an additional two weeks after that just to be perfectly safe. I didn't physically see my kids for almost three weeks. Very, very difficult thing. So when they came, one of the days I said, hey, do you guys wanna bake cookies from scratch? My daughter of course freaks out, she gets super excited because it's a treat. It's not like we eat cookies all the time. My son, he's 14, nothing gets him excited. So he's like, whatever. Yeah, cool idea. Yeah dude, he's always at like a level four. I don't care what happens. He's always like, whatever. So we did, we all, mixed the cookies, made them together, joked around, played music, waited for them to bake. They came out and then all of us, rented a movie together and we all ate cookies together. Now, high in sugar. I didn't get like, they're just cookies. So it's high in sugar. They're, it's got chocolate chips in them. Probably, I didn't count the macros. I wasn't looking at the calories. I'm sure I went over my calories for the day just from the cookies alone. But the health, it made me healthier that day. I felt it. I felt it in my relationship with my kids. I felt it in my soul, in my mind. And those things also contribute to physical health. Well, you have to understand the potential cascading effects that something like that has. And what that reminds me of was a hack that, I kind of fell into, I don't know, it was probably almost four years now in the podcast. So if you've been listening for a long time, you know, I've shared it. And it was a relationship hack for Katrina and I. You know, both her and I, you talk about type A people, I think we're both like this and go, go, go. And, you know, if there's an Achilles heel in our relationship very easily, can we both get tunnel vision in our goals or what we're doing at work? And one of the greatest hacks I ever found was, you know, let's organize a time where we're sitting down and listening to a book together for an hour. Now, it wasn't the actual book that we were reading that did so much great work in our relationship, just like it's not the actual cookies that are the healthy part of this, or that's okay about it. It's the process in which you gather with your family or the process in which I sit down with Katrina and we're no longer thinking about all the things in the rest of our day to distract us. We're focused on baking cookies or focused on this book that we're listening to. And then it's what happens from that and what that promotes. It would promote this incredible dialogue and deep conversation where her and I would connect on another level. Now, that's an easy example for the average person because reading doesn't sound like a negative thing or a bad thing. It's like, oh, reading more is good for everybody. But if baking cookies in the kitchen promotes something like that with your family, it's the same thing. It's just, it's weird for somebody in the health and fitness space to talk about that because it's cookies, because it gets extra calories and fat and can't be good for you. Yeah, we went through the same thing, just being on lockdown and then just the overall tension of the household. Like we all feel it, we all experience and it's, I mean, you just find yourself getting short and things like that normally would just roll off irritate you a little bit more because we're confined. Everybody's feeling that same stress and we're all kind of on top of each other. There's still things to do. There's school, there's virtual things. There's the dogs, everybody else is kind of reacting and so to have something like a treat or for us it was like a pizza night. And we kind of, we're all looking forward to the end of the night where we're gonna get this pizza and the whole household's mood was elevated. We're elevated, we're cool with talking. So again, it's, you know, this isn't a repeatable pattern of like, okay, well, this is the answer for every time we all get stressed or you know, there's other outlets. Great point. But this is something that is like, it's a treat. A treat is something that you can look forward to enjoy partaking it and it's not something that like, I'm like, this is a new button where I'm always hitting this button. It's something that I occasionally do. Very good because can you use things like junk food and maybe leisure as a way to distract yourself? Yeah, is that healthy? Sometimes it is, usually it's not. Usually it's not, sometimes it is. You know, if you're that perfect parent, you know, and you're doing everything right now and you're just, oh my gosh, I've got so much on my shoulders right now. I'm so like, I'm homeschooling my kids. I've got to worry about my job. I'm trying to create some structure at home and I'm a little worried and it takes three hours to go to the grocery store because of the lines and all the weird stuff and then at the end of the day, you put the kids to bed and you're like, I just need a break. I just need a 15 minute break. I'm just gonna eat a cupcake and just chill for a second. Fine, is that healthy? It can be. Now, is that like Justin said, if that's your button that you push all the time, every time you're stressed, you reach for a cupcake to medicate yourself. Well, that's abuse. That's different. But if you do it in the right way with the right mindfulness around it, now it can become a very healthy thing. You know, it's funny to me when you look at like lifespans around the world and you look at countries that have longer lifespans than others, you know, countries like Italy, you know, they live longer typically than people do in America. And there's lots of, well, it's because of this. Oh, here's the deal. Italians love to eat. They also love to smoke and they love drinking. They smoke way more than we do. Smoking is one of the worst things you can do for your physical health. It's really generally a totally unhealthy thing. But how the hell do they outlive us? Go to Italy and see how they are with each other. Well, look at the relationships that they foster with each other. It plays a lot of value on relationships, on community and on connecting with other people. And I believe that to be the reason why people in Italy outlive us and the studies on the world's blue zones actually show that. One of the things, when they study, so blue zones are areas in the world where a disproportionate, in comparison to the rest of the world, disproportionate amount of people live to 100, okay? And there's like the island of Sardinia, which is a part of Italy is one of them. There's Okinawa is one. There's an island off of Greece. There's the Loma Linda, California, the Seventh Day Adventist. They live a long time. There's other areas, there's a bunch of them, right? And they study them and what they try to do is find commonalities. They thought, and what they thought was, they would find like silver bullets. They thought that they would examine these cultures and be like, oh, there it is. Everybody eats. That's so much vitamin D or mega threes over here. Yeah, everybody eats a vegan diet. Everybody eats a pescatarian or everybody, and they didn't see that. They saw some stuff that was common, but it wasn't no silver bullet. But there was one silver bullet. They all had good close, and they rated highly their relationships, the people around them, every single one of them. All of them had them. The Seventh Day Adventist was part of their church. Okinawa and Sardinia and the island off of Greece, it was these people who were old, were very connected to their really tight communities. They're great grandkids, and they all had purpose and meaning. All of that, that was one of the most common things that had these people live the longest and had nothing to do with diet and exercise. Listen, be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance. Who said that? Some Stoics, way smarter than me. I was gonna say that. Profound Adam, like. Hey, mine, hey, mine. But it's fucking brilliant. Epicurus. Is that who said it? Yeah, I just remembered. That's brilliant. And I think the thing that you have to understand is that, and I'm very careful when I talk about this type of a message to my clients because as a fitness professional, it's important to that you don't just give them the green light of, oh, you know. Sal, Justin and Adam on my phone said, baking cakes and eating cookies and drinking alcohol, it can be healthy. And so you have to be very, very mindful and understand where the line of abuse and detachment comes from, right? And I think that you have to be careful of that because using it as a tool to have fun with your family and connect together and enjoy as Sal says, the hedonistic values of food together at that moment, totally awesome. But there's a difference between you having a couple of those cookies and enjoying that whole, and obviously part of the process of baking and communicating is also enjoying the actual thing that you made. So understanding the value of enjoying that and then overindulging. And that's the same thing that goes for alcohol. Like there's a time and place, like, you know, if you've been stressed out because of what's going on with the coronavirus all day, you don't know what's going on with your job currently right now, the kids are at home all day long and the house is finally quiet and you and your partner together and you're like, man, let's watch our favorite, let's be lazy, watch our favorite Netflix series and have a glass or two of wine together like that, totally understandable. Drinking three bottles of wine at that same time, different story or even more importantly, because even if you did that one time, not a big deal, running that back night after night after night, now it has control of you and you don't have control of it. And I think the reason why we avoid talking about things like this so much or we typically throw it in the category of bad is because it's easier for it to become addictive. It's easier for you to abuse it because it feels good, it tastes good. And so there's that fine line when as a fitness professional, when I'm presenting this message of, you know, I have to really know who I'm talking to to make sure I communicate this correctly. It's also the context of the time, okay? The reality is for the most part, you know, when we're running this podcast, life is normal. We're talking to people and they're on their way to work and they have normal life and it's all, you know, everything's going, right now, right now, excuse me, is a little bit different. It's not a normal time. It's weird. This is the weirdest time I've ever experienced in my entire life, right? So right now, here's what I'm seeing a lot of. I'm seeing a lot of people who are not only stressed about what's going on, but they're stressed about the fact that they're not perfect with their diet and oh my God, I think I gained five pounds and oh my God, and you know- Why are you gonna add more gasoline to this? Yeah, like what am I doing or whatever. Or I'm getting messages like this from people who are like, Sal, I need your help. Yesterday I had junk food. Like what am I gonna do? And I tell them, it's okay. You had junk food one day. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. It's okay. And considering the contents of what's going on, maybe that's what you needed that day. But here's the reality, okay? The reality is this. For the most part, I'd say the vast majority of times, healthy looks like usually most of the time you're eating foods that are physically healthy, whole natural foods. You're not overeating. For the most part, most of the time, you're consistent with your activity and exercise and physical self-care. For the most part, you're doing all the classic things that we know that are good for you. Most vast majority of the time, it's the every once in a while when you do the other stuff and you have good attitude around it and you're not abusing it, that it can also be healthy. It's when it gets flipped that it becomes a problem. Like junk food, if that becomes your only way to escape and you do it all the time, it's bad. It's not good. It's not good for you. But if you're a healthy person, and like I did the other day when I made cookies with my kids, I had no problem. I had no stress. I ate those cookies. I wasn't thinking of myself like, oh my God, I'm gonna get fat. I ate so much sugar. What have I done? I gave my kids, my kids had three cookies each. I'm such a bad father. No, 99.9% of the time, we eat very, very, very healthy. That 0.1% of the time, we need to have cookies tonight. When everybody's stressed out, everybody's worried. Let's all bake some cookies and have a good time. And let's just forget about what's going on right now. The neat thing about that too is, especially when you're talking about with kids, right? Like, because that is something that you don't do consistently. The joy that you get from it is much higher than something that you do all the time. Now it's valuable. Right, there's no novelty in it. If you do it every single night, then it's the norm and almost expected and then it's borderline abused or can be abused. Dude, I had that experience with cannabis. There was a period of my life where there was a lot of crazy stuff going on. And I was using cannabis for my gut health and I started using it on a regular basis. And I started noticing that if I used it on a regular basis, all the positive effects I was getting from it, I wasn't getting anymore. I was just getting more of the negatives. And so I started to realize it's just, I'm having it too much. I got to cut way back. And when I cut way back and utilize it the proper way, then I get some of those benefits that you hear about from cannabinoids like CBD, THC, and all that stuff. God, speaking of that, somebody just asked me, I think it was in our forum or one of my questions what I thought about like dabbing and stuff and, you know. Stream. Yeah, so that's just, it's way beyond me because if I'm being completely honest, and I'll mind you, there's very, there's always exceptions to the rule. There's somebody who has extreme, extreme crippling pain that they're in that it takes that level of medication for them to feel numb or whatever. But at that point, I have to ask myself if I've scaled to that level to where I'm using or needing that to feel the positive effects that you're saying is, does this have more control over me than I have over it? That's a good question, I think, generally to ask yourself of all of that. That's what I think on all of these things that we're talking about. Everything from relationship to spiritual to mental, talking about junk food, talking about alcohol is that's the question you always have to be able to ask yourself is like, do I have control of this or does it have control of me? And it's a very easy answer if, you know, you mindlessly ate 10 cookies after you baked them that you lack the self-control and it has more control over you then. But if you enjoyed baking cookies with your kids and you had it in moderation or it lasted over the next week and you had a cookie or two every other day, not a big deal, but you've got to be always doing those checks and balances to make sure that you're following in that moderation part of the spectrum and not on the extreme side. And there are ways, by the way, that you can make some of these things less damaging but just as enjoyable where you can mitigate a lot of the negatives, like here's an example, okay? We're talking about junk food or whatever. Let's say right now you're like, look, I wanna give myself a little bit more leeway to have junk food here and there, okay? Just because of what's going on right now, I'm not feeling good, plus it's processed. I don't wanna go to the grocery store every day and processed food just lasts a long time so I'm gonna buy more processed food than I normally do. Well, here's a couple ways you can mitigate some of the negatives. There's healthier junk food. There's processed food that's not as bad as other processed food. Rather than buying, if I'm gonna buy like gummy snacks rather than buying the one that's made out of wax and chemicals and crazy shit, maybe I'll buy the more natural one that's got maybe less calories and comes in smaller packs. This one I learned from Adam. This was Adam's competing strategy where he would put his snacks or treats or whatever in small bags portioned out. That way he knew if you wanted to eat some honey roasted peanuts rather than grabbing the whole jar, it was a baggy with one ounce. That's like a way to mitigate. I love hacks like that and I love that. I just posted on my story yesterday the recipe for my peanut butter balls. Oats tastes better than any damn cookie I've ever had and it's a quote, unquote, healthy. Adam's peanut butter balls in your mouth. Did I just say that? I didn't say Adam's peanut butter balls, I said my peanut butter balls. I think you should. Adam, this brown balls. Taste my peanut butter balls. Adam's brown nutty balls. But I mean, really all, it's peanut butter, honey and whey protein. What do you do? It makes us delicious. And oats, yeah, and you just mix it in a bowl and you make balls out of it and you put it in the refrigerator. And it's amazing and it's got. Oh, I've had these before. Yeah, yeah, I've brought them. They are amazing. Full mouthful. Yeah, it's just. Enough, I'm sorry. I only had two. That was my last one. I only had two, but I mean, and again, it's something that Katrina and I can make. It's a treat. It's something that at least when I'm getting it, I'm getting a moderation of protein in there, healthier fats, even the source of sugars coming from honey, like it's a better treat to have. So, and that's part of that mindfulness. It's just knowing that I just as easily could have grabbed a box of chips ahoy at the grocery store. Exactly, yeah. But it's, but here's the thing. What I know is both those treats will feed my soul or feed that other side of me the same way, right? It breaks up the weighing and measuring food and all that crap and like worrying about that so much. I get to enjoy the hedonistic values without it being so crappy. Plus it quells like somewhat of the tendency to then binge and go like completely off the rails. Like being a little more flexible and introducing things that like might be considered a treat but maybe a little bit more healthier version of the treat may help to kind of suppress that urge to go crazy. I think of things like the, and this is where we've talked about this and we have I think a split down the middle in our forum that we've shared like the halo ice creams. And, you know, those things are an example of that point you're making of, you know, this is I love ice cream. I've been talked about that many a times. And what's neat, if you were to eat that whole thing, a halo ice cream, they range from 280 to like, I think the highest one is, I think 360 maybe 400 calories in comparison to a Ben and Jerry's, which is 1700. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So there's a dramatic difference there. That's what I mean. You can pick, you know, beef jerky is a good example. Nuts are a good example. Dried fruit, that's not, that they don't add tons of sugar to. And then portion it out, portion it out and be, you know, realistic with yourself. Put them up in little baggies. And then when you're wanna grab something to snack on it's a better choice. It's just a better choice than a full box of cookies or a whole bag of potato chips. And look again, not demonizing one or the other, but just giving you strategies to kind of balance it, you know, out a little bit. You know, alcohol, here's a good one. Here's how you can mitigate alcohol. First off, don't drink right before you go to bed because now you've added not only the fact that you drank alcohol, which isn't physically good for you, but you've now added that you can have shitty sleep on top of it. Well, also, I mean, this is my own personal hack. It's not like that profound or anything, but I just started drinking whiskey, you know, and by itself, like not, no added anything else. Like you're just sipping on it. And so therefore it's like, you're not gonna just run through like you would making it all nice and easy to just like wash back, like with Coke. So just drink, what you're telling people is drink straight. Just go straight, go hard and sip it slow. Okay, well I'm gonna tell people if you're gonna do that you better have something like Zebiotic before to make sure that you don't get fucked up. There you go. Well, so what I do with Zebiotics, for the listeners who don't know, Zebiotics is a, it's a probiotic. We just started working with them. It's actually an ingenious invention, but it's a genetically modified probiotic that actually the bacteria consumes some of the byproducts of alcohol. So, and the byproducts that cause the shitty, bad gut, you know, inflamed feelings. Some people would say it contributes to the hangover. So you could drink this before and then have alcohol. I'm not, I'll take the Zebiotics, I'm just having one glass of wine. I'm not even drinking, you know, tons of out, just one glass of wine. And what I noticed is I just feel a lot better anyway. And I do it during the day. I don't like fucking up my sleep. You know, drinking at night, that was a game changer. It doesn't affect your sleep. Oh, I remember learning that as a young adult, you know, when you're young, you go out with your buddies, it's at night. Then the next day you feel crappy. And then I remember one time, you know, it was like a Saturday and I went, you know, down. I don't remember where it was. It was like some festival or whatever. And I was kind of drinking during the day and then allowed myself to sober up when I went to bed. Woke up the next day. I was like, wow, I feel so much better. Like, oh, I know why I slept, you know? So these are just some strategies. Here's a way to mitigate the negative effects of being inactive or lazy or unproductive. Schedule it. This sounds funny, but this is true. Schedule it. Put it in your schedule. Tonight at, you know, 7 p.m. from 7 to 9, I'm gonna do nothing. I'm gonna sit on the couch and do whatever I want. Or I'm about to surf social media. What time is it right now? 4.30. Okay, I'm gonna give myself 30 minutes. Schedule it. These are just strategies you can use. Like recess. That's it. It's just strategies you can use to help prevent yourself from turning things that can become, you can start to develop a poor relationship with and help kind of manage that. That's all. I also have one that's kind of like, I think counter-common knowledge. And that is like when I'm going to, if I know I'm gonna have a glass of wine, if I know I'm gonna have one of these treats, I'm actually, the common knowledge thing would be to have low calories or fast. Therefore, when I have the wine or I have this thing, it doesn't absorb all of my calorie. So you have the same calorie? Right, that would be common knowledge. But I actually coach to and utilize differently because I know that when I don't eat or I'm low calorie, I'm like ravenish and then I eat something that's hyper-palatable. It makes that discipline to only have so many even more challenging because my body wants more calories and this thing is really good. So I prefer to have my good meal or have whatever I have planned. And then afterwards I enjoy the treat of whatever it is because it's easier for me to shut it down because I've already kind of filled myself up on nutritious good food before I do that. And it is, it's against kind of common knowledge. You would think that it would be a smarter strategy when we're talking about calories in versus calories out to have less food earlier in the day. But behavioral speaking, I find, and I think anybody can relate to this before where you just get busy at work and you're doing things and you normally would have had lunch at noon and you totally skipped that. And now it's four or five and you're driving home from work and maybe nothing's prepared for dinner and you're like starving. You shovel it in. Well, not only that, but that's the time that you make that fast food choice. So that's that time that you reach for something quick and palatable and overindulge because you waited till you were really hungry. I utilize when I'm doing something where I'm allowing junk food, alcohol, any of these types of foods into my diet, I actually do the opposite. I still say, okay, I really want that treat tonight but I'm actually gonna eat this meal that I need or I should have first, I have that. And what I realize is then after sometimes one, I'm satisfied and then I'm like, I don't really need it tonight or I don't feel like it. Or if I still decide that I feel like it, I don't have a hard time only eating two, versus having that treat while you're also really hungry, that is going to challenge your ability to be very mindful of not overindulging. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, really the ultimate message is to understand that your health encompasses a lot more than just the physical side, your fitness, how lean you are, how strong you are, how you can move. It encompasses a lot of different things and they're all interconnected. And be kind to yourself, take care of yourself sometimes, not often, but sometimes that means you have a little bit of junk food, you maybe have a glass of wine or like Justin said, you have straight whiskey, or you sit on the- There are all the champions out there. Or you sit on the couch and you veg out on TV. Most of the time, it means you're eating what are considered classically healthy foods, whole natural foods, you're not overeating, you're active, but at the end of the day, you consider the whole sphere of health and right now are weird times and what you may need might be different than what you normally need and if you may be at war with yourself because you can't do what you do before and you think to yourself, why can't I just be as strict and crazy because times are different and maybe you need to take care of yourself a little bit differently today and again, at the end of the day, anything can be abused. So abusing anything is unhealthy, of course that includes junk food and being lazy. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our guides, resources and books, they're all totally free. You can also find us on Instagram, you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.