 In this episode of Mime Pump, we answer questions asked by listeners like you. What they do is they go to the Mime Pump media Instagram page, post a question under the meme. They totally comment their question. That says qua. We pick the questions and then we answer them. But the way we open the episode is with our introductory conversation. This is where we talk about studies, our lives, random stuff, and we mention fun facts, our sponsors. Here's what we talked about in this episode. We start out by talking about the weekend. Adam and I went to go speak at the event held by Jason Phillips. This was for coaches and trainers. We had a lot of fun, which led me to making a post that is very controversial. I called out segments of the fitness industry for providing information that was either bad or very confusing. And I think I ruffled some feathers. Then we talked about blue light blocking glasses and why you should not wear nighttime blue locking blue blocking glasses during the day. You don't want to block all the blue light during the day. If you wear daytime blue light blocking glasses, you want to get the ones that are designed for daytime so that you get some blue light because it's what keeps you awake. You block it all. You might find yourself getting drowsy at work. Now, our favorite company for daytime blue light blocking glasses, but they also offer night ones is Felix Gray. Felix Gray glasses are clear. They're not orange or red. They don't change the color of everything. And they look good. And we have a hookup for you. If you go to FelixGrayGlasses.com, that's F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y, glasses.com forward slash mine pump, you'll get free shipping and free returns. Then I talked about China's Monkey Pig. They're having a good time over there. Oh yeah, they're experimenting, which reminded us of the promotion that ButcherBox is having right now. Bacon for life. I'm glad it reminded you that. You can actually go, these aren't Monkey Pig bacon. No, not no monkey, just pig. Yeah, just pig. Good, clean bacon, healthy stuff from ButcherBox, which delivers grass fed meats to your door at very low prices. They eliminate the middleman, bring it right to your house. We got a hookup for you again. It's bacon for life, free bacon in every single box for the life of your subscription plus $20 off your first box. Here's what you do to get that hookup. You go to butcherbox.com forward slash mine pump. Then we talked about the vegan influencer on Instagram that went carnivore and improved their health. Hey, whoa, what's going on here? We talked about the Joe Rogan episode where Chris Cressor debated Wilks on veganism versus eating like an omnivore. Unfortunately, Adam and I didn't watch it. Justin did. So we gave us the rundown and I got annoyed. Then we talked about how Dave Asprey might be jumping the shark by exposing his butt hole to the sun. I guess he's one of the latest people to fall prey to that, uh, that sham. Then we talked about an article on decriminalizing sex workers. So we had a nice discussion there and then we got into the questions. The first question was, uh, how can you get a better mind to muscle connection? So this is your ability to really feel the muscle you're trying to work. So we talk about techniques to help you do that. Next question. This person wants to know if diet breaks are helpful for people who have cut out calories multiple times in their life or has cut calories, I should say multiple times in life. So we talk about diet breaks. The third question, this person wants our opinion on the set point theory. This is the theory that says that your body has a body weight set point and it's very, very hard to move outside of that. And the final question, this person wants to know what we think of the health at any size movement. Also all month long, your favorite program, the bodybuilding and physique and bikini competitor inspired program maps aesthetic is 50% off. Now this program trains your entire body. It's designed to have you focus on areas of your body. You want to develop and sculpt. This is an aesthetically driven program. In other words, it's a program driven by what you want to look like. It's half off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to maps black.com and make sure to use the code black 50 BLACK 50 no space for the discount. I like Harbinger shoes on you. Do you like them? Yeah, they're actually pretty snazzy. What are they called? The startup. Yeah. Okay. Do you know why? I was gonna put it out there. I was like, I got some brand new Jordans. I like Jordan Harbinger's. That's why I like them. Can you slide right in, huh? I never have to tie my shoes again. I tied them once. And look at this. Look, watch ready. Yeah. Boom. Zip, zip, zip, zip. I mean, that's snazzy. Yeah, that's convenient. That's all I do. Never been a K Swiss fan, but right. I like those. Never say never. You know, I've never been a tie my shoes every time I got to put my shoes on kind of guy. You know what I mean? So the fact that I have something that's almost as good as Velcro straps makes me happy. Definitely a step up for you. Hey, what did you think about our little trip we just took? Oh, yeah. A Z. That was a good time, dude. I missed you guys. Yeah, we were up at Jason Phillips' event where he had a lot of online coaches and trainers and bigger than I thought it was going to be 130 or something people. Yeah, I thought we were going to be speaking like 20 people. I probably would have. That's thanks, Jason. Yeah, for that, by the way. We're not the only one by the way. A little surprise, huh? There were like three other speakers who were like, yeah, I thought there was like 30 people and I show up as this huge room. I mean, I would have combed my hair or brushed my lips for it if I knew that. I showed up at... Wait, how do you brush your lips? You just brush your teeth? I brushed my lips in my teeth. You don't want to have clean teeth and dirty lips. Don't brush your lips if you're listening. I'll tear your lips up, dude. Yeah, but you gotta brush your lips, too. Really? Yeah, and never brush my lips before. Yeah, that's fucked. Maybe you'd smell better if you did. Really? Yeah. Oh, man. Your mic would be more presentable for me. It doesn't take long to comb my hair though, so I save a lot of time there. You use one chopstick to comb your hair. But I did. I was up there and I was like, oh, shit, this is a little more formal than I thought it was going to be. And I was like in like pajamas all weekend. Yeah, we were in sweats. No, it was great. There was a... We met a lot of really cool people, a lot of... I love meeting trainers. I always love meeting trainers. They're the light of the fitness industry. I even said that on my talk. So you guys didn't go up there all gangster style with Moscow Mules this time? No, we really did that at... We were up different times, too. I opened up the first day and Sal opened up the second day. So they were like, okay, let's put the best guy up first to open. We really need to draw him in. Yeah, heavy hitter up front. That's what Jason told me. Because the first day, they started at three, but they knew that half the people weren't going to show up till the second day. Throw Adam up here real quick. I'm not sure he's putting me first. Thought I was going to say something profound, or if he was hoping that everybody else would clean up my mess. No, you did a good job, dude. You did a very, very good job with your talk. I think we communicated what we went there to talk about very well. There were other good speakers up there. I thought Jill's talk was great. She's polished. She presented some great information. She was very, very professional and prepared. You could tell she's done that many times. Yeah. And then we had dinner with some of the attendees. That was a lot of fun. I always liked meeting people and hearing about their journey with their business and what they're doing. So what was the ratio of mind pump listeners there? Everybody was a listener. Like every person. Yeah. At one point, Adam asked- I think there was, because I think I had two or three that are now listeners that weren't. So they hadn't heard of, there's two or three. When they raised their hand, when you asked, it looked like the whole room. Raised their hand, which was really, really cool feeling. But it was a blast. We had a really, really good time up there, meeting all those people, having those great conversations. And again, I want to stress this that the trainers and the coaches in the fitness space, you are the light. You're the ones doing the real work. Everybody else is helping sometimes and most of the time. Detracting. Missing everybody out. Yeah, you know what I mean? Which just takes me to my post. How about that controversy? Oh boy, are you stirring the pot right now. Oh my God. You know the funny thing- Anytime you jab academia specifically, I think- I mean, nothing hurts your feelings more than someone to say that your eight years of school is almost worthless. Yeah, no, let's see. That's not exactly what I said. You know what I said? They're going to quote that now, man. That's how you made them feel. That I know. Let's be honest. This is what I said. Although, I mean, here's the thing. I don't know. I feel like things have to change. We do live in a time now though, and this is the truth. Let it offend you or not, whatever. That everything that you learned in that doctorate, you can Google now. 20 years ago, that wasn't the case. 20 years ago, that information was held behind paid walls. And if you wanted to learn that, you had to go to a university and you had to sit in classes and lectures. But we absolutely live in a time now that a PhD could get in and argue with me, throw studies, throw something they learned over eight years at me. Yeah, theoretically. And within 30 seconds, I can Google and cross-reference that and probably learn that information. Well, theoretically, you could. So the applications, you know, the utmost importance these days. Yeah, I want to be clear. I mean, theoretically, yes, you could learn everything that someone else learns, but it would be difficult right now. Because when you go to a university, it's put together for you. You have professors and you're in deep study for hours a day. So I don't want to take that away. Don't backpack. No, no, no. I'm going to be very clear. I don't want to take that away. My argument is this, is that if you're studying fitness or nutrition science, but you have no or little experience training people, then you cannot train or coach people. And yes, you're better than the person who knows nothing, but you're barely better than Google. And what I mean by that is you have all the information, just don't know how to communicate it, and you don't know how to coach it. And I'll make this argument right here. A psychologist or a therapist or counselor would communicate and help someone with nutrition and training better than a researcher or scientist in the fitness and nutrition field who doesn't have experience coaching people, because so much in the trainers that are listening who have experience, no, exactly what I'm talking about. So much of what you do isn't necessarily all the wonderful information that you know. It's how you communicate it, knowing when to communicate it, and when not to communicate it. Oh, the irony of the post, and of course, none of the models and the entertainment side people would have the balls to get on there and have dial-up. They know they're full of shit. Right, yeah. And it probably just ruffled some feathers with some of the academic community. But the irony of it was, I was reading your thread and the people that were commenting, and there was two PhDs in particular that were offended by what you said and were kind of coming at you a little bit. And so I actually clicked on both their Instagram pages just to kind of see what kind of stuff. One of them wasn't talking fitness at all. It was just somebody who went to school that long and felt offended by the post. The other one, though, was somebody that was communicating fitness. And ironically, just less than 20 posts ago, she's rocking and promoting insanity in beach body work. So I just felt. Face and point. Exactly, I thought of how funny is this that of all the great PhDs out there that are providing good information, the one of the two that you offended that got on there and said something is an advocate for beach body. And to me, that just goes to show you that you could spend all that time in school and then decide you're going to communicate health and fitness information and you're promoting a shit program. Yeah, and here's the problem. I think a lot of the reason they got offended is for the following. They don't understand so much that they think that knowing carbs, proteins, fats and calories, knowing exercises and technique and form is what makes you a trainer or coach. They're so wrong. That's like not even 5% of what makes a trainer or a coach truly effective. Yeah, you got to know those things. That's the basics. But that's the small that just that by itself will make you an ineffective and terrible. In fact, you'll only confuse people or hurt people, which is this is what happens when fitness academia that doesn't have experience coaching and training people, when they try to coach and train people either through their social media or in person, what they end up doing is confusing people or they end up teaching the wrong things or they end up teaching the right things the wrong way. And this causes problems. So here I am a trainer with 15 years of experience and I've had this happen to me many times. I'm sure you guys have this as well, where they come to me, a client comes to me, who just got advice from fitness academia who just read an article or their friend studied and talked to them and they come to me and I got to fix it all. I got to fix it all and be like, well, okay, technically what they said is true but here's why it doesn't apply to you and no, this is not really how that works. It's just, and I can use a million or one different examples. I mean, I could look, studies will show, for example, that if you replace a calorie food with a zero calorie food, like let's say you take someone's soda that has sugar in it and replace it with artificial sweeteners, technically they should lose weight but that didn't happen in real life. In real life, with practice, people end up replacing that with other foods. Coaches and trainers know this, researchers don't, researcher will look at it and go calories switched out, yes, that should definitely work, do that, you'll lose weight. They don't, they don't lose weight. Now, we do have studies that support that and show that as well but also through experience. Before these studies even existed, as a trainer I knew this. Every time I had a client replace their soda with diet soda, they lost no weight. Yeah, and too, I wanted to kind of think in terms of the academic side of things of what it is good for and what the best intention is. Really, it's developing and creating the methods and the different theories out there to have the hypothesis go through that studying process of creating the lab, creating the environment to see how this plays out. So then the coach and the trainer can then see if that even applies towards their specific client that has their own variables or even bringing in. So you need somebody out there in the field to be able to really pinpoint what direction a lot of these theories should go towards. If you're a researcher or a scientist in the fitness and health field and you have no experience training anyone and you have no desire to train anybody, your value is research and that's it. The trainer and your research, by the way, is extremely valuable. I want to be clear. I'm not saying you don't have any value. You have tremendous amounts of value. Your value is to the coaches and trainers, not to the average person. The trainer and the coach's job is to look at your research, take that research and distill it and purify it and present it if applicable to the client. By the way, combine it with their experience and wisdom that they have training and coaching people. Now, can a researcher become a great coach or trainer? Absolutely, through experience. What I'm saying doesn't apply to them. What I'm talking about are the people that we see on social media and these influencers who are PhDs who have no experience training anyone. Or very little. Or very little and they're giving advice and you read the advice and oftentimes are reading it going, why? You just confused everybody. What did that come from? Let me look, Adam, you managed a lot of trainers. Right. How many times did you get the trainer with the master's degree in kinesiology and they come in and be like, I'm going to just kick ass and be a great trainer and how often were you disappointed? Always. That was the, it took me a while before I stopped hiring that way. I mean, when you first get in a position like that and you think, okay, I want to build a team of really smart, capable trainers. Of course, I started to seek out all the kinesse degrees and masters and PhDs in the field to hire them and thought, man, these guys will be and these girls will be incredible. And a lot of times, not most of the time, almost all the time, what you find is they can't get out of their own way. And they have all this information and knowledge and they spent all these years in school learning all that. But what they didn't learn in school was how do they communicate that to the average person? And so they're really, when you get them as somebody who's managing them as a team, they're no different than the kid fresh off the street who's just learning about nutrition and fitness. It's just you're teaching them different things. I'm spending time with that kid trying to educate him and then also teach him how to communicate that information. I'm still doing that even with the PhD. And it's just a little more challenging because what ends up happening with them is that they almost have too much information. And it took me a really long time, too, because like you, not to Sal's level, I mean, Sal really likes to read studies. Early on in my career, I did. And I would love to read something that was new and then I would be explaining it to my client. And what you ended up finding was you get a lot of paralysis by analysis with your clients when you do this. And the desired outcome is that they changed their life. They changed their behaviors for the better because of you as a coach. And what I was doing more often than not was overcomplicating that process by trying to sound smart. And that's why I talk about, too, on the show a lot that I used to scoff at things like walking. Because if you were to measure how many calories does walking burn and what does that constitute in your overall journey to fat loss and in comparison to all studies of lifting or circuit training or staying in a major calorie restriction, what is that? And so when you look at it like that, walking means nothing. But what I learned over years and years of messing up and not changing people's lives was, oh, shit. That's a great place to start for many people because it's something that they can start to implement into their lifestyle that sets them on the trajectory of changing behaviors and habit. And holy shit, instead of communicating the Krebs cycle, which I used to love to do, to sound smart to my clients, I realized like, wow, just getting them to implement, moving every day a little bit more started a great foundation for me to build on and then coach them up from there. I'll give you two examples of questions that a client would ask and how somebody who's extremely educated with no experience or little experience might answer versus a trainer with lots of experience and how they would answer. So a client comes up to you and says, hey, what rep range builds the most muscle? Now the academic with no experience is gonna say eight to 12 reps. Clear, study show, eight to 12 reps builds the most muscle, which is true. That is true. Now here's how the trainer would answer it. That depends which one are you training in now. Because if the client has been training eight to 12 reps forever or for six months, then guess which rep range is not gonna build the most muscle. The eight to 12 rep range. Now even though studies show and head-to-head comparisons, that rep range builds more muscle than the other ones. But what it doesn't show, what studies, those studies don't show is that the novelty effect is massive. And when you take someone who's been training eight to 12 for a year and you move them into one to five or 15 to 20 reps, then they build more muscle. Here's another example. Client comes up to a trainer or to the academic with no experience and says, hey, what kind of cardio should I do? I wanna burn the most amount of body fat. They will say, hit cardio. Studies show conclusively that hit cardio burns the most body fat. What the trainer is gonna say is this. Well, it depends. Let's look at your stress level. Which one, by the way, are you most likely to do more of? Do you, would you like intense cardio or do you think you're more likely to just go walk every morning? Because that makes a big difference. There's a much different, there's a very different. Yeah, what is sustainable? Element of coaching. The training and coaching experience is almost everything that makes you successful as a trainer or coach. The information doesn't. We don't have an information problem. This is what people, this is why I use the term it's a little bit better than Google. Because we live in an age of information where the average person could pull up all the applicable information that they need but we're no better off. You know, they did a study years ago in a small town. Here's a great example. It's the study where they passed a law that said that all restaurants need to display the calories of all of their meals. Because they thought, oh for sure, if people just had the information, they would eat less. They'd make better decisions. They'd make better decisions. If they saw that this meal had 500 more calories in this meal, that they would, because they're more informed, people would lose weight. Okay, they did this study and what ended up happening was people actually ate more calories. Now why did they eat more calories? Now as a trainer or coach, I know why. Because I know here's what happens to the average person. And by the way, I would have, this took me years to figure out. I know that the average person looks at a menu and instead of saying, wow, that's 500 more calories. I shouldn't eat that. They're thinking, wow, that's only 500 more calories. Let me get that. That's the difference. It's that psychology and the coaching. This is why I said a psychologist or a therapist would be more valuable to helping someone with nutrition or exercise than a nutrition or fitness scientist with zero experience coaching people because it's that element right there. And that's what I'm referring to. So when I say that the fitness academia is contributes to the bad information in the industry, I don't mean they don't have any value. Their value is research, which is extremely valuable to trainers and coaches, but their value is not to communicate that stuff to the average person. So speaking of communicating information in science so that average person can understand, I got asked by Shauna the other day in regards to blue blockers. Now it's become extremely popular, especially in our space. It's now becoming hip and trendy where you're seeing a collabs with fitness influencers and now everybody's jumping on the blue blocker bandwagon. And I know there's a lot of companies that are popping up all over the place. And I remember when we first signed with Felix Gray, we did our due diligence on the research and the science that they were putting into developing theirs. And yes, they were at a higher ticket price, but it was because of all the research that they were putting in and the quality that they were producing versus just writing a trend and ordering some blue blockers from Alibaba, flipping it and putting your brand, which a lot of these guys are doing. And her question to me was, is blue light is not... Now this was because you were wearing them. Right, and during the day. And that was the question that she had asked is that she goes, I thought that blue light isn't all bad and why would you wear them during the day? Because wouldn't that throw off your circadian rhythm? And how do you explain that in layman's terms to the average person that the type that is being blocked out with those daytime glasses they have versus what's healthy and right for you? Yeah, no, that's true. So blue light does encourage wakefulness, which is why blocking it at night helps with sleep. It makes us alert. And some exposure to blue light is natural. You want some during the day. Now the problem is the type of blue light that's emitted by electronics. There's a wavelength of blue light that can be damaging to the eyes. Now you don't want to block all blue light. Like if you wear, let's say you wear the nighttime Felix Gray blue blockers, that block most blue light. Not necessarily a good idea to wear the nighttime ones all day long because it may make you drowsy, make you feel sleepy. You don't get those wakefulness effects from blue light. That's why they have daytime ones. The daytime ones block out the harmful ones that cause eye strain and potential eye damage but they allow the other blue light that you want during the day that keeps you awake. And this is an important thing to understand because if you are on a computer all day long and you're getting eye strain, just wearing pure blue blocker glasses might not benefit you as much. You'll definitely block all the blue light but you also might find that you get drowsy. Right, if it throws off your circadian rhythm to her point, that could be, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. Correct. So what you want are daytime blue blocking glasses which block the damaging blue light rays but not the other ones. So your brain doesn't think you're in the dark completely. Your brain thinks that it's still light outside and then when it's nighttime, you switch to the ones that block all blue light or most of blue light. So that's the difference there. Now speaking of science, you guys hear about the Chinese monkey pigs? Wow, yes. No, I did not. Tell me about it. Bro, so... Is this more Alex Jones stuff or is this like verified? No, man. So according to a new scientist exclusive, this is an article. This is like the glowing rats thing, right? The first ever piglets with cells from monkeys have been born in a Chinese lab. So what they said was that this is the first report of a full term pig monkey chimera. So this is a state key laboratory of stem cell and reproductive biology. Do we have a picture of this? No, we don't. No, we don't. Now the researchers final aim is to grow human organs inside animals. So that's the idea. The idea is to... Oh, there we go. You've seen that with rats, right? They grew like an ear on their back. Yeah, on their back. Dude, how fucked up is that? Well, so the idea behind all this, that why they're doing this is so like you said, they can grow organs. So somebody who needs a lung or something will be able to transplant it from this animal into a human. Yeah, so they'll be like... They're just harvesting, basically. Yeah, so there'll be like a human heart inside the pig or human kidneys inside the pig. And then, you know, oh, we need them. You take the pig and then you kill it. China is off to the races. Yeah, you know, it's... So you know how many things have been created, but they'll... No one's talking about the potential side of it. Oh, I know. Imagine if you have some... Let's get there already. You have some weird ass fucking... Fucking pig soldiers. Yeah, no pig habits. You know what I'm saying? You get a human heart growing in a pig and then you don't realize you get some of the fucking pig traits. Just walk in and see your spouse on the ground fucking snorting their food off the ground. What the fuck are you doing? Why are you in the mud? Get out of the mud. What the hell's wrong with you? Hungry for slop. Yeah, you know, it's funny, stuff like this kind of trips me out because a lot of times they'll put it out in the name of like helping people, but it's kind of like they're hiding their true intentions, which is to do some weird... Masking it for the overall genocide of the human race with these like Chimera hybrids. Speaking of pigs, you're going to be excited about this. Okay. You know that ButcherBox brought back their bacon for life. Yes. This is my favorite one they've done. Like dude, seriously, I told you guys... How often do you... My morning... Like every morning. That's my breakfast. I just have a cup of coffee and bacon. It's like my go-to. Typical trainer's diet. It's so easy. Boy, how things have turned, changed the fitness space. You know how they used to be considered the most unhealthy thing? If you had bacon and coffee every morning. Ah, they're going to die. I kind of do it just, you know, to be an antagonist. Do you stir your coffee with your bacon? Like it's a... I mean, no, but I definitely down it, and then I'm on the road, you know, I'm often... Well, they're bacon's high quality because bacon comes a lot of different, you know, there's a big range of like super... Not healthy bacon and then there's far less. Yeah, could you guys get in when the last time they ran this though? I mean, I was in, like, and so I'm getting it still. Well, because we work with them, they send us shit all the time. Like I got a free, massive turkey. Do you guys got the turkey too, right? I deep fried it, yeah. You did it already? Yeah, I plan on smoking for Thanksgiving. Oh, you're going to smoke it, huh? You're going to smoke it, yeah. I'll be interested to taste that. Yeah. No, we deep fried it. They sent like, I think it was a good 16, 16 pounder plus, that was a nice size one. Peanut oil again? Yeah. So we do, every year now, well now, it's becoming like this tradition that we do where we do one oven-cooked turkey and then I'm responsible for the deep fry, which is pretty easy. It's not tough to... Keeps it really amazing. Well, it traps all the juices in right away. Do you have to like season it? You don't do anything. You can. So this year I did do a little bit of seasoning, but they actually, I mean, it's deep fried, right? So it's dropped in fucking oil. And then it's... You get that crispy layer and then kind of juicy inside it. What do you do with the oil afterwards? What do you mean? You just save it and throw it away or what? Yeah, yeah. Do you know those people, if you put it on Craigslist? Run cars and stuff like that. Yeah, they'll come pick it up for free. Really? Yeah, they love that shit because they have these weird cars that... Have you ever seen these cars? I have. Oh, they smell like french fries. French fries are behind them. You're just like, what is that? Yeah. There was an actual gas station that they remodeled so that you just like bring your vats of oil there and people would go there and fill up their car that were like that in Santa Cruz. You imagine picking up your date? Yeah. Didn't they... That was like a thing for a minute and then it fell off, right? Yeah. Like why... Was it the smell? Is that why it's... Ethanol? Is that what they use? No, no ethanol is what they actually put in gas. That's made from corn. Okay. Yeah, they just use any vegetable oil. They just burn the oil. They just... Yeah, I don't know how it works. But I mean, so why didn't it get any more traction? Why is it not... Yeah, no. Vegetable oil, I don't know. Is it not very efficient? Can't give very much horsepower out of it. Oh, I can tell you why. Same reason why ethanol is full of shit. It's you're... We're turning food into gas. It's the funniest thing ever. We need more gas. I know what we can do. Make our food into gas. Wait a minute. That seems kind of weird. Are we supposed to eat that stuff? I think it's also... I think using the waste, the vegetable oil waste, and turning that into gas kind of makes sense. But don't you have to clean it or something? Yeah. I don't think you just throw it in with like bits of food. You're just finding out here and there. First thing you need to know about diesel cars can be converted to run on vegetable oil. Okay. It might not even be legal in California anymore with the stringent laws on... Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't exist anymore, that one gas station that was there. Like, they completely took it out. Dude, speaking of food, did you see that one vegan influencer who was on social media? She went carnivore for 30 days? Wow. Did you hear about this? No. It's completely on the other end of the spectrum. Okay, so... So, what made her do that? So, I'll read an excerpt from the article. It says, Elise Parker, who has over 200,000 Instagram followers and over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, explained her decision on Instagram. In the past, she revealed that she decided to try the carnivore diet after hearing about all of the health benefits from friends who switched from vegan to eating only meat. And then she explained, I had my own fair share of health struggles and eventually reached a breaking point while I was willing to try anything to function properly again. Anyway, so she did this, and she said she had exceptional results. Like, she ate this way and just felt amazing, had tons of energy, and a lot of her health problems. Now, I'm going to... Was she, like, super deficient? Obviously, yeah. Well, yeah, I'm going to, again, I'm going to... Same argument, right? Right, it is the exact same argument that I would make on the reverse. It's rarely ever the diet itself. It's more about what you weren't doing previously. It's... She was probably lacking in a lot of the nutrients that meat provides for her. So then when she switched over to that, oh my god, the body is responding and saying, thank you. The same is true to the people that run these carnivore diets or keto diets, and then make the switch over to vegan, and they're blown away by the response. This is the body screaming at them. When are we going to stop being so fucking dogmatic about all these diets, and use that as the takeaway? It's like, oh, wow. Maybe it's not one or the other that's demonizing them. It's going, oh, maybe my body does need some meat. Maybe it needs some vegetables. How about give it both? Hey, how about both? Yeah, how about balance? There are for sure individuals out there that will benefit from eating only meat. There are for sure individuals out there that will benefit from eating just plants, and then there's definitely, this is most people, who will benefit from eating both, and sometimes this changes. So she might have benefited from eating vegan for a little while, but then at some point she might have developed some deficiencies that are filled by the one food that she didn't eat for years, which was meat. So now she feels amazing. What I hope for her is that her takeaway is what you're saying, Adam, that she's realizing not that she needs to eat carnivore, but rather why don't I throw in some? Why don't I do both? Yeah, why don't I throw in a little bit of meat into my diet? I heard the same thing. I think it was Rick Rubin, who was a producer, went from vegan to carnivore diet right away and had the same experience. And it just, again, it just totally speaks to that point. You're going so extreme. You're depriving your body of nutrients. It is craving. Talking about this discussion and debate, did either of you guys watch The Wilkes and Chris Presser? I was gonna bring that up. Yeah, I think I was listening to it on the way over here and yesterday. How far in are you? I'm like three quarters of the way in. I really, I almost stopped after the first quarter of it just because I was getting so irritated because it was so combative for no reason. And I get it because I think the guy, Wilkes, who came on was, it was a response to Chris Presser going on before and debunking the whole film. And so I'm sure that that got pissed them off. And he came in with that kind of energy in terms of trying to just basically politically twist words and things that he said and he said it in a way that wasn't very specific to the actual facts he was trying to present and it was just all these little nuanced items and things that weren't big movers at all in terms of pushing his agenda forward. So I didn't get any real value out of like, well, what are you trying to say? Why is meat bad? And he couldn't answer that definitively. Yeah, I haven't listened to it, but I've read about it. So this is my opinions based off of what I've read, not what I've listened to. But from my take, it sounds like Wilkes was just a better arguer and debater. Well, come on, we know Chris, dude. Yeah. Chris is so fucking, I mean, I remember the first time we had him in the studio, he's so quiet and soft spoken. Right. Like you can't throw, you know, throw a Sean Baker or a Lane Orton or a Lane Norton or a Paul Sadeem. Throw one of those guys in there with somebody who's going to be like that. I mean, you can't put Chris. Well, plus when it comes to debating on a public stage like that, it's not, the person with the right information doesn't necessarily win. A better debater. Yeah, it's the person who can argue better, make you look different in particular light. Politicians are experts at this. And if you know how to argue debate and you have that and you understand that, sometimes you can win a debate even though you're wrong. Oftentimes you can. And I think it sounds to me like that's what happened. Like he was just frustrating that he was focusing on small things. There was a mistake Chris made and that's all he kept focusing on. Yeah. And kind of changed the narrative. I heard he made such an impression on Rogan though that Rogan talked about pulling Crescer's first one down. I'll have to see if towards the end, if there's anything super compelling. But as far as what I've listened to, Chris Crescer was very balanced, presenting information correctly. Like there was nothing like that outrageous in terms of what he was trying to argue. The other guy was like James, he was like just coming at him in terms of trying to paint a picture of him not being a professional in the field. That was his entire motivation. That's politics. Yeah. That's 101. Which he doesn't have either. And he kept referencing all these people in the film to bring them on. And it's like, look, you're doing the same thing. So for me, he didn't win me over. Sorry, that wasn't compelling at all. Yeah, no, that's politics 101. You discredit the messenger and you discredit the message. Right. And they do that all the time. It's a very, very smart tactic. I'll tell you that if he did that well, he was very smart in that debate. Oh yeah, he did. Yeah. And you get to understand his goal. He came in with a game plan and it worked. Right. And here's the goal. The goal of people who are just morally against killing animals, and I don't blame them. This is their belief. Their goal is not to be right. Their goal is to convince people not to eat animals. So if you think killing animals for food is totally immoral, many of them rank it up there with killing humans, then it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong. It doesn't matter if it's not as healthy. I just don't want people to kill animals. And so that could be a strong driver. Now, Justin, I read a lot of people were actually really upset with Joe. Did you get the sense that Joe didn't, that did kind of a disservice to being a moderator? Did he not come in and interject and be like, okay. I think who is upset? Was it the people that were more for meat, the meat side of the argument? Because what he did do, I remember it was something over dairy. He kept stressing the point of there being two out of three people worldwide had a dairy intolerance. And so I was trying to tie in that point with inflammation. And then Chris Crescer was trying to debunk that in being correlated with inflammation. Those being two separate things in terms of that being a potential cause for cancer. So they're- Oh, I see what happened. So yeah, so they got in the weeds with that a little bit. And Joe was trying to- Joe was kind of confused because he was like, well, one plus one might equal two. Like if people have an intolerance, it might be something that may contribute towards this cancer. But then that wasn't like in the study. The study was in regards to colon cancer. And so it was, he's like, well, if that's the case, there should have been other forms of cancer that came out of that if the intolerance was a contributor towards that. So anyway, it just got into the nuance, into the woods. And yeah, there was like some stuff. I think he was trying to play advocate towards the vegan side. Maybe he felt a little guilty about bringing Chris on to completely bash it before. I don't know. I'm totally reading into it, but yeah. I'm gonna try and listen to it so I can comment a little bit better. But yeah, my opinion just based off of what I read. Yeah, we need to. I mean, we've got a ton of people. We should do a follow-up on it. Yeah, because I'm not finished. For sure. For sure. And speaking of influencer, did you guys see Dave Asprey? Just, he's just jumping the shark left and right right now. Did he do the asshole thing? Yes. The tanning around. The perennium sunning? Two posts. Two posts about it where he's sitting there. I thought for sure that was people just trolling. No, dude. That's a real thing. No. Where they lay on their back naked. They put their legs up in the air, baby style, spread their butt cheeks. This is the position. And then they do this has to be like an article from the onion. And then people like ran with it. Like it was real. I feel like it. But you got a guy like Dave Asprey who has got a, you know, multi-million dollar, maybe even more. It might even, it's I think probably the hundred of millions dollars business promoting health. And he's posting on his Instagram twice. And it's a picture of him spreading his ass, getting tanning his butt. And that his butt, his butt hole. Yeah. You know what I mean? Because apparently that sun in the hole. Was it buttholes bleaching a thing? Now all of a sudden what are you trying to make darker? For porn stars. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It made sense for that. Yeah. You know, I feel like that's the worst place to show and get off to the world. To get a sunburn. Anyway, speaking of buttholes, did you see the whole sex workers thing that they're trying to decriminalize that? Oh, no. It was just an article. It was a big article about trying to make the case of decriminalizing sex work. Did you read it though? I mean, it's a, it's a very compelling case. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Economically speaking, they say that they already have all the proof to support that you're talking about double digit numbers in reduction to, you know, violence on women. Of course. It's the, this is the thing people need to understand. It's the black market that is the cause of most of the big problems with a lot of these industries. And this includes the sex worker industry. Now, there's a few things I think you should consider when you're trying to regulate something like this or you're trying to pass regulation on it. It's the number one, is it bad for society? Okay. We can make an argument that it's bad for society. Then you move to the next thing, which would be, is it hurting people? And you might, you can make the argument that it may hurt the person who's doing it or whatever, although that's voluntary. And then the final question you asked is, are there victims? Now, are the victims, if it's voluntary and it's two adults within a regulated environment, if people agree to it, there aren't any victims? And also the fact that there's a black market for it shows that there's a huge demand for it. And since it's people who are voluntarily doing it, and if we can regulate it so that it's not with children, because that's out of there. Of course, if it's with kids, that's a whole different ballgame. But if they're both adults, no one's hurting each other, even though you might don't agree with it, and I personally don't like it, I don't like the fact that people do it, I know that banning it is the black market creates way more problems. Do you know how many rapes occur within this circle in this community? Like what percentage? Because from, they made it sound like too that it also, every city or town that they have, that they have tested this in, that it reduced rape too in general. So the percentage greatly went down. Well, now why do you think there's higher rape percentages when it's illegal versus when it's legal? Think about it, if you're the kind of person that goes and pays for a prostitute on the black market, you know she can't go to the, she's not going to go to the cops necessarily, or she might not go to the cops. You're dealing with her pimp maybe. And by the way, pimps exist because it's illegal. If it were legal, there's polices involved, it's a regulated industry, and it's far less likely that you're going to get those kind of problems, just like the drug, you know, the whole drug war. So your theory is that because they think they can get away with it, like, okay, I'm not going to pay this girl, I'm going to rape her, she's not going to go squeal because she's doing something illegal. Just statistics show that, statistics show that. Now, if it's regulated, like if you, when they look at the statistics on places, like in Nevada where it's actually, you know, sanctioned as parts of the town that allow it, and it's regulated. Oh my God, way less disease, you know, they're tested all the time, you have to wear a condom, there's, you know, there's laws around it, protecting it, of course, you can tax it. Not something I would necessarily support, I don't think it's a good thing, but I think making it illegal, especially when there's no victim involved in the sense that they're voluntary adults, I think that's kind of, I think it's kind of crazy. But yeah, I do think there should be regulation, like I don't, I wouldn't like to see a brothel pop up in my neighborhood or right over here. I think Nevada kind of did it right where they said, okay, you can do that, but it's got to be way the fuck out here, away from the city or whatever. I think that's... Well, I wonder too, if like the trafficking, you know, from other countries and all that would go down being that, like it's available, like in that, and it's regulated right there. Well, you're operating within the framework of a legal system. You're less likely to, you're not breaking the rules. Once you're already breaking the rules, and you're already operating within that framework of the black market, like all kinds of shit, you know, goes out the window. Now, that being said, if you regulate it too much and make it so crazy that it's impossible to operate as a business, you'll still have a black market. Just like in the East Coast, like in New York City, for example, there's a huge black market for cigarettes because they're... Heavily taxed. So taxed so high that the incentive is to smuggle them in from other states and then... Well, that's what we've seen even with the marijuana. There's still a massive black market for marijuana because there's so much taxation going on. It's like anybody that's been around weed long enough and then goes and buys from a club, it's like, oh my God, I go in there, I buy a couple of eights and some stuff, and I walk out, it's paying 200-something dollars. You can get freaking an ounce of weed from somebody on the black market for that price of good stuff. Now, I mean, logically, it's weird though, if you think about like, you and another woman could agree to have sex for free and... Or film it and turn it into porn and exchange money and you're fine. You and her could agree to have sex for money without filming it for porn or whatever, and it's illegal. Very strange. It's a very strange... I think that the way that the laws are immoral, I think that they need to definitely change. So when you read articles, I read articles like this, I totally agree. I don't agree with it. I don't think it's great for society, but it exists. And again, I think if they regulate it, it's probably better off. First question is from Dan Pei. Or sorry, from Dean Pei. How can you get a better mind-muscle connection? Create your Wi-Fi. Boom, you get the dad jokes coming. It took five months. I've been practicing. Oh, you know what I was sleeping on that one? You know what I just reminded me of? Because we're missing this. Doug, I took a picture of it. I haven't sent it to you yet. When we were hanging out with Chase and Josiah, Chase bought a road? Rogue. No, no, no, no, right. A road. Amazing mixer. Yes. That is like easy to use. It sounds better than the one we have. And really? Yes. And it's got buttons that do things like applause and it makes funny sounds. Yes. Laugh and the tch-tch. Yeah, that's what made me think of that right after. That's right. Sorry. You wanted that. I'll check that out. No, I'm sitting here. Doug, for sure, it's good. We needed that for the joke you gave. So mind-muscle connection, why would you even want to search for this and what is it? So the mind-muscle connection is your ability to really feel the muscle that you're trying to work, to really contract it and extend it through full ranges of motion with exercise. It's like doing a barbell row for your back and you feel it in the back muscles. Not just when you're sore the next day. I think people confuse mind-muscle connection to think, oh yeah, I get sore in those muscles the day after. No, that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is while you're doing the exercise, do you really feel in the fullest sense the muscles that you're targeting and that you're working? I actually think this is where there's a lot of value to practicing flexing. Totally. I mean, that's all it is, right? So if you have the ability to flex and feel a certain muscle on your body with no resistance and weight, you've got a good mind-muscle connection. It's easy. I mean, if you put weight on somebody's back and tell them to squat down 100 times, you'll feel it in your muscles for sure, whether you feel it that day or the next day, you're absolutely going to feel it. So that's not necessarily a great mind-muscle connection just because you feel it there. The idea is that you have that kind of control. What's cool about this is as you start to work on it and develop it, you can really change how effective an exercise is in particular for what it's designed for, for example. Like, so you can really just think about activating the muscle that you want to work in a moment. I'll use an example like a seated row. A seated row we know is a dominant back exercise. But you can, by flaring your elbows and really concentrating on your rear delts, you can, and letting your shoulders roll forward. Boy, you can really put a lot of emphasis on the rear delts, but to the average eye that's watching you do the movement, they may not even be able to tell that much of a difference in the exercise, but you can really put, change the emphasis on where you feel it. You can make them pecs dance, you know what I mean? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm doing, say I did the side effects, Doug, when we get the thing, then you'll be able to do that. You know what I mean? It's like doing a squat and being able to feel it more in my glutes or doing a squat and being able to feel it more in my quads with little change in form. Simply by, with my mind, I'm able to connect to and emphasize particular muscles. This is an important thing that you should learn with resistance training, because this is what's going to allow you to sculpt and shape your body as you see fit. And when you first start working out as a beginner, your mind and muscle connection is so bad that even the most basic exercises you don't feel in the target muscles, like I would always laugh at when, when I first had, first started training, I have clients do a tricep press down, they tell me things like, I feel this in my abs, or I feel this in my back. Like, huh? Or chest, or my, it's bizarre. It's a tricep press down, who you talking about? Plus, I think too, like in terms of the overall function of it, like you can adjust on the fly too. And I know I brought this up on a different podcast we did before, but when you are lifting weights, to be able to have access to specific muscles that will help you to resist forces is another attribute, you know, that you'll benefit from with your performance, not just to be able to flex and, you know, be able to create a better pump, but also to be able to, you know, resist these forces and have better performance. Well, we just talked about this. So if you, whoever asked this question, if you haven't listened to last week's episode, where we talked about the benefits of bodybuilding, this is one of them. And one of the things that there's a lot of emphasis in a bodybuilding program is isolation type exercise. So this is where, this is where you can work on that. And when you do isolation exercises to work on the mind muscle connection, weight becomes arbitrary. It doesn't matter how much weight you're doing. In fact, you should do something really light and slow it down, focus on the tempo, focus on the squeeze and being connected to it. The mistake I think a lot of people make is they're trying to work on this mind muscle connection. At the same time, they know that lifting more weight makes them stronger and build more muscle and they're a bit conflicting, especially when you're trying to learn to get better connected. So you got to let go of the kind of the ego lifting, lighten up the load substantially and really concentrate on feeling it where you're supposed to. And then again, you know you've got this down really well when someone could say, hey, flex your rear delt. Hey, flex your tricep. Hey, flex your chest. And you can flex your lats. And you can do that without any resistance whatsoever. That means you have really good control of that muscle. And what we'll do that is really light weight and slowing down the movement and concentrating. And isolation movements. Isolation movements, as you said, are perfect for developing a better mind muscle connection. And then there's the portion of a repetition that's most important to focus on. Now the whole rep is important. So full extension, like if I'm doing a curl, full extension would be my arm opening all the way. Full contraction would be me squeezing my arm all the way up at the very top. Now that full contraction is a great place to focus on when you're doing exercises to develop a better mind and muscle connection. So let's say you have a terrible connection to your chest. You don't feel it when you bench press. You don't feel it when you incline press. Try doing a cable fly and really focus on the squeeze part of the fly where you hold the squeeze for three to four seconds. That portion of the rep is the most important for developing the mind muscle connection. And you'll find that if you have a terrible mind muscle connection, it's that portion right there that you have the most difficulty activating. So if you can't feel your glutes, same thing. Isolation movement, squeeze the glute. And it's fully contracted position. Squeeze the hell out of it. Then go through the movement again. And really what you're looking for is feel. As Adam said, it's weight is arbitrary. It's all about the feel. How do I feel this? Can I feel the muscle work in the entire time? Is all the work being done on the target muscle? And it's a very important skill to develop. It helps you shape and sculpt your body the way you see fit. It's also important for correctional exercise. So if you have imbalances, being able to feel muscles work is real important. Oftentimes when you have a movement pattern issue or an imbalance, part of that is you just can't feel the muscle. It's not doing much. It's not doing much when you're trying to do certain exercises. So connecting to it helps. All right, our next question is from Laura Ashley. Do you think diet breaks are helpful for someone who has cut calories multiple times in life? I think diet breaks are helpful if they're not diet breaks. It depends how you use them, right? So if you're using... And this is just based off of working with lots and lots of people. So the studies will show that having a break in your diet, in other words, rather than always being... Let's say you want to lose weight, right? So you're at a calorie deficit. That means you're eating less calories than you're burning. That's essential for fat loss. So let's say you're doing that for three weeks and then every three weeks you do one to three days where you bring the calories up so that it's at maintenance. So you're eating as much as you're burning or maybe even a little bit above that. So you're eating a little bit more than you're burning. Then you go back down to your deficit and you repeat that cycle. Studies show that you'll burn more body fat and lose less muscle or no muscle if you do it that way. It seems to have a better effect on the metabolism because the metabolism tends to want to slow down when you cut your calories. So less of that happens when you do diet breaks. Now my experience as a trainer tells me this. When they're scheduled diet breaks, they encourage binging when the break comes around. So I'm restricting for two weeks and I know, oh my God, in 10 days I got my diet break. Uh-oh, in five days I got my diet break. Two days I got my diet break. Boom, I get to the diet break and it becomes, I tend to lose control. So this is more speaking to like cheat day mentality. Exactly. That's exactly what the diet break is. I was reading it more like they've been, you know, in a restricted calorie deficit for a long period of time. And at that point I would say yes, you know. A longer, yeah. If it was like in a long gated period of time where you need to interrupt that by bumping up your calories, I would see a lot of benefits. No, that's a good point. Yeah, it's a little bit of a loaded question because of that. Because I don't know exactly who I'm talking to when I answer this. I would be very careful answering it because I wouldn't want to encourage somebody to, yeah, you should take a week off and they plan that when they go to Cabo or Hawaii and they drink and eat like crazy and like, yeah, I'm on my diet break because mind pumps is good for me. Like, no, I don't think that's a good step. But what we talk about on the show a lot, I feel like, is the benefits of running mini cuts and mini bulks. And, you know, if your main goal is to lose body fat and to reduce, you would spend more of the time in cuts and less time in bulks. But no matter what your goal is, you should weave in and out of them. And more frequent than not. Like the biggest mistake I think I see with people that are trying to lose body fat is they go on these six, eight, 12, 24, you know, week-long diets where they're in a calorie restriction. And, yeah, it doesn't take very long. In fact, the studies show that it takes about two to four weeks before the body really starts to adapt and slow down to this new calorie maintenance. So to keep that from happening, one of the best things that you could do is to go back to like what Sal said, as you move back into a maintenance to a surplus for a little while and then move back. And, you know, we could sit here and talk all day long about what is the most ideal? Like how long should I be dieting for? How long should I be bulking? Well, there's going to be an individual variance with everybody. But typically, if I have a client who wants to lose body fat, I'll never let them really run longer than four to six weeks tops. That's a long time of a pure calorie restricted diet before I at least give them one week of surplus. And when we do that, it's a very calculated surplus. It's not, I tell a client, oh, you've been good for four to six weeks dieting. You get a week off to be off the diet. No, it's okay. You've been eating 1500 calories for the last four weeks consistently. I want you to run a surplus for this week. What does that look like? Well, instead of 1500, I want you at 17 or 1800 calories every single day for a week long. So, and we do that for a week and then we go back. And so I'll intermittently do that. And you can do that as frequent as every two weeks or so for somebody's trying to do that. I probably wouldn't stretch longer, like I said, than about four or six weeks consistently in a diet before I at least give you some surplus days in there. Yeah, but doing the whole like, Thursday is my diet break or next week I'm off the diet. That way I can go back on it. Promotes bad behaviors. It does. It promotes bad behaviors, which is the most important thing you want to consider when you're trying to eat healthy. Here's the other thing too. I see people doing these cheat days or diet breaks and that's the way I'm interpreting it, right? I see people doing that. The same people that do that are the same people that eat the same amount of calories every single day. Whenever you're trying to eat healthier and you're counting macros and calories, one strategy that I've used in the past that makes it more long term effective is to try to mimic real life a little bit more closely. And real life rarely looks like 1500 calories every single day. Typically it looks more like 1700 calories this day, 1300 calories this day. Right, fluctuates. Yeah, so you might want to do that if you are tracking your food or whatever. Try fluctuating throughout the week and really at the end of the day what you want is the whole week, the total weekly calories should look the way you want them to look. But allow yourself some fluctuations because at some point you're going to go off counting all these calories. And when you do, you don't want it to be such a big shock that I went from eating the exact same food all the time the same calories every single day to no guidance at all. Yeah, you want to know how to weather the storm. That's it. Next question is from Lenka Kravarykova. I'd like to hear you guys talk about set point theory. It's been a while since we talked about this. Yeah. Explain what it is first and then we can go into. So the theory says that your body has a body weight set point that, you know, is the most comfortable. Yeah, it's set by your physiology, your genetics. So let's say your set point is at 200 pounds. Anything you do to move yourself outside of that 200 pound set point is going to be very, very difficult. And then at some point, your body will just fight you to bring you back to that whatever your set point is. Sounds like a convenient excuse to give us. Yeah, here's where. There's some truth to this. There's some truth to this. There's definitely a, and, you know, we used to define something like this with semantotypes, right? Showing the endo, ecto, and mesomorph, which I know that's also been kind of debunked. But there is some truth that that your bone structure and physiology shows that you'll probably land somewhere around here. But that can be- There's a huge range. Yeah, and that can be completely manipulated and changed. And is it hard for somebody to move north or south of that? Well, yeah. I mean, we had this kind of good discussion slash debate the other day on the show about, is it more difficult for somebody to build muscle or burn body fat? The truth is, it's difficult to go outside what feels very natural and comfortable for you. There's a multitude of factors, for sure, in terms of that. Besides just, you know, the genetics you're handed in terms of like, can I efficiently burn fat? Can I effectively, you know, is it easy for me to build muscle? Like, there's going to be a lot of factors involved in that that, you know, we still need to explore. But here's why I think the way that they explain it though is bullshit, because the, look at the average American, for example, the average American, when controlled for height, is far heavier today than they were 60 years ago or 70 years ago. Now, our biology didn't change. It wasn't our genetics that caused us to gain way more weight now. It was our lifestyle. Yeah, it's chronic overeating. It was our lifestyle for decades. Yeah, there's definitely a range. Like, I don't think I could push my body above 220 pounds. I don't think I could drop my body weight below 120 pounds, right? That's 100 pound weight range right there. I think a lot of people think that they think that they, they use the theory of set point as oh, you know, I'm just, you know, let's say a guy who's six foot, who weighs 240 pounds, doesn't lift weight. So it's mostly body fat, you know, and he's like, oh, that's my, my set point. It's about 240. No, it's not. Yeah. That's not there. That's not, don't blame that on your set point. That's your lifestyle. Right. Your lifestyle is what puts you at that, at that, at that body weight. There's a huge range and we did not evolve. Look, we did not evolve fast enough in the last 60 or 70 years to account for the additional 50, 60 pounds of body fat that a lot of people tend to store. Sure. I do think too, like with epigenetics and all these things they're finding too with like passing on, like gut, gut biome and all those kinds of things that they do. They're finding new things that are a contributing factor to this whole process that is interesting. But it's again, to your point, I do think a lot of people use it as a crutch more than anything else. Well, not only that, but also speaking to the point of being a six foot, you know, three big guy, the bigger you are, the bigger that range is. Yeah, more loose, more capacity. If you were a female and your mom and dad, both were five foot three and you end up being four, 11 or four foot one and about a hundred pounds, you know, your range is going to be something like 80 to 120. You can kind of predict how you're going to look. Right. 80 to. You say four, one, four foot one. Four, 11, I say. Oh, okay. Yeah, you're going to be, you're going to, your range is going to be much smaller. Right. You're going to be probably never going to see less than about 90 pounds. And you'll probably never be more than about 130 in that range. And if you're a six foot, three guy who's, you know, to what you were saying, South 240 or 280, you know, your range is going to be way greater than 100 pounds. So it's all, it's all relative. Well, this set point theory a while ago, and you'll see it happen again, I'm sure, was used as a selling point. So though a while ago, this theory came out and it was not popularized because the theory got popular. It was popularized because diet books and supplement companies came out and said, we will change your body's set point. That was what they're selling. That's what was their marketing that your body has a set point. Now people, this resonates with people because for a person, your lifestyle and your behaviors is set. Psychologically, it's set. You like to live a particular way. It's hard to change your behaviors. Right. We know this. We're all hard wired in our habits. Right. So here's this marketer that's saying, hey, we can change your set point. You know how hard it is for you to lose any weight? And it resonates like, you're right. It's so hard for me to go below 220. So and but wait a minute. This supplement is going to change my set point. So now naturally, my body weight's going to be 30 pounds lighter. I'm going to buy that. And I guarantee it'll happen again. I guarantee that marketers will use that again. But no, it absolutely doesn't work that way. The reason why we feel like we have this hard set point is because your behaviors tend to be pretty hard set. This is why it's hard for people to lose weight permanently. Because it's not that the weight loss is hard. It's the behavior change. It's so unfamiliar. Yeah. You don't want to get there. You don't change the way you live every single day. That's a hard thing to do. So if you want to talk about like lifestyle set point theory, I'm on board there all day long. Right. Talk about a physiological set point. And it's not doesn't work. Well, no, especially since that we can change your metabolism like crazy. I mean, it's free flowing already as it is. How many clients have you guys taken on? And you know, you get them and they're not gaining or losing and they're just kind of staying the same and their calorie intake is 1300. You know, and six months, a year later, they've been with me and I've got them eating 2700 calories. I didn't, I didn't change. And they haven't gained weight. Right. I haven't changed much about their physiology other than adding a bunch of lean body mass on them and getting them to lift weights on a consistent basis. And we've completely manipulated their metabolism and changed their new set point. If their set point when they first got me was somewhere between 1300 to 1500, well, now I think that same person had doubled it. I mean, that's a huge difference. And this is why resistance training is, is in my opinion, the best form of exercise for fat loss long term because it's so hard to change how we eat. It's so ingrained in our behavior. It's easier to ask somebody to lift weights three days a week than it is to ask somebody to totally change the nutrition. So if we can speed up your metabolism, just gives us more room and it means that you change your nutrition less. You still probably got to change your nutrition. I don't think I've ever worked with a client that I got them loose tons of weight and they didn't have to change anything about their nutrition. Right. But you got to change it less than you would had you not sped up your metabolism. Yeah, just a marketing gimmick. Next question is from Amelia Jude, R.D. What do you think of the health at any size movement? False. Yeah. Just it's flat out fucking false. It's totally at any size? That's not. No, that's not true. That's false. Can you be bigger and be healthier than somebody who's skinny? 100%. Totally. 100% I can have somebody who is let's say 30 pounds of body or 30% body fat, which is heading up towards the quote unquote obese area, right, for a male at least. And I could have that person and they could definitely be technically healthier than the same size or the same height male who's at a 5% body fat. So what they're doing, what they're intaking, drugs, mental stuff that's going on, their behavior. I mean, there's so many factors that constitute what makes us healthy or unhealthy that absolutely you can be bigger, a little bit heavier or carry more body fat than somebody else and technically be healthier. But to say that health at any size is a crock of shit. So it's a general statement to make. If you are morbidly obese or even just obese for that matter, you're unhealthy. And you're unhealthier than the version of you that is 20% less body fat. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. So there's definitely a range that your body weight can be and you can have equally good health. Like you could be a man with good behaviors, good eating habits, good exercise at 18% body fat or you could be at 10% body fat, good behaviors, good exercise, everything's the same except you eat more when you're 18% than you. And you'll find that your health is pretty much the same. It's pretty damn good. But at some point, regardless of your behaviors, at some point when you gain so much, you gain too much body fat, at some point your health always suffers. Now you can definitely be morbidly obese and be healthier than and be morbidly obese and be less healthier. But a morbidly obese version of yourself is not gonna be as healthy as a healthy version of yourself. That's not morbidly obese. The only thing I agree with this is that basically like you shouldn't be determining somebody's health based off their aesthetics. I mean, it's a good indication that some things are going right in terms of body fat and overall composition. But there's a lot more factors to being healthy than just looking good. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that just everybody in every shape and size is healthy. You have to determine that for yourself and then go through the whole list of what are all those markers look like? There's a line here. There's a line here. You absolutely, like what Sal was saying, I allow myself to fluctuate. I've been as... And the irony of it is when I'm on stage and probably what the average person... Oh my God, he's ripped. And that would be this greatest expression of health. No, I'm unhealthy at 3%. Probably I'm more unhealthy at 3% than what I am at 17%. So there is definitely a wide range here. But if I kept going, to 20%, 25%, 28% body fat, no. No, I'm not healthy anymore. And that is... And the way my body looks at that point is a reflection of my health. I'm not taking care of myself nutritionally. Therefore, I'm carrying an excessive amount of body fat in my body. I am no longer a healthy version of myself. And the way I look is a reflection of that. There is a line here. And it's... And I understand where this movement came from because I know that we shouldn't be judging. I know we shouldn't be idolizing women that are on Calvin Klein ads 20 years ago that were probably smoking cigarettes and starving themselves. They're just as unhealthy as the newest Calvin Klein article where the girl is on there and probably 280 pounds. Neither one of them, though, are truly healthy. Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. I get the sentiment. You want people to focus on their health and not necessarily on their size. That's 100% true, by the way. That's something that I promote all the time. If you chase health, then your aesthetics will follow. And if you chase aesthetics, oftentimes, you'll lose your health and then the downstream effects of that or you'll lose your aesthetics. And, you know, Justin's right. You can't look at some... I mean, we learned this about performance. You guys, you know, in mixed martial arts, there was a fighter, Fedar Emilianenko. This guy was undefeated for a long time. He looked chubby. Looked like a chubby dude. He'd get in the ring or the cage with dudes that were shredded and he'd put them to sleep. He'd knock them out or break their arm or whatever. Oh, look at our guy here in San Jose, the four-time champion. Shane Velazquez. No, not Kane. Well, Kane's an example, too. Has one... A new boxer. No, he's... How can you not think of his name right now? He's a black guy and he's... Super MIR. Come here. I mean, one of the best... Dominate. Oh, yeah. Not only is he dominant, but he's known for his cardio. So his endurance is incredible. His strength is incredible. He's healthier than what he probably looks aesthetically. There's definitely a health at a large range of sizes. That's what they should say. It doesn't sound so cool though, because it's not very marketable to say that. But the reality is there is good health at a range of sizes, but there isn't health at any size. At some point, excess body fat, body fat is a hormone-sensitive tissue. There are effects from having too much body fat on your body, regardless of your diet and exercise, and having too much of it will negatively impact your health, regardless of... Yeah. And again, I'm not like... I think that we should all strive to be better, like the better version of ourselves. So I always think that that is going to come out like you said. When you're bettering yourself, your body is going to be a reflection of that. So I do feel strongly about that. I just want to... Like, you know, if somebody is unhealthy and they're working on themselves, like, you don't always know the full story either. They may be like way more healthy and been improving what... Totally. You know, they started out with. And so, you know, like you just... To me, like these general statements are so irritating because it becomes like distorted, you know, and then the message becomes like the sort of movement to, you know, well, I'm this size and I'm good, you know, and it just becomes a complacency thing. Well, and it's a very dangerous message, I think, for the generation coming up. I used to keep this article. I wish I remember the stats off the top of my head. I know they were extremely alarming, though, on if you were under the age of 10 and you were already in the obese category, which by the way, what people think is obese and what really is obese is alarming in itself. I mean, we have what, 60% of our country is already considered clinically obese. Well, I know overweight. I think obese... Is definitely up there. ...is definitely up there. ...is definitely up there. ...is definitely up there. ...is definitely up there. No, no, no. Obese is not over 50%. Wrong. We looked that up. It's up higher than that? No, it's lower than that. It's only like 30-something percent. Look it up. Wait, wait, wait. Less than 30% of Americans? Oh, no. I'm telling you that there's more than half the Americans are considered clinically obese. Right, right, right. That's what I'm saying to you right now. Yes, yes, yes. So you... And I used to have a study that I had kept on my wall by my office at the gym and it talked about if you were under the age of 10 and already clinically obese, how many years that shaves off your life if you're under the age of 20, if you're under the age of 30 and it had this like, you know, obviously the younger you are and already in that category, the more damaging this is for you long-term. Oh, dude, girls are starting puberty way earlier because their body fat is so high. It's a hormone-sensitive tissue. Boys are getting estrogenic signs and lower testosterone as a result. I just looked it up right now. Clinical obesity is almost 40%. Overweight is a majority. So there's like overweight and then obese is a higher percentage. Okay. Obese is 40%. Are they basing that off BMI? Because, you know, I have an issue with that. They do. And that's a good point. They do because, I mean, obviously they're not going to go around testing. Right. Well, they could. They should. They should. They're going off of body weight. But generally speaking and looking at trends, it's relatively accurate. Here's the more accurate part. The numbers going up. So we know that for a fact. We know that it's interesting. Yeah, we're going the wrong direction. We know that. I mean, God, when I first became a trainer 20 years ago, they called type 2 diabetes adult onset diabetes. That was what they taught us. They said there were two types of diabetes, type 1 and adult onset diabetes. The reason why they called it adult onset was because- No kids had it. Your lifestyle gave you diabetes as an adult. They changed it to type 2 because so many kids started getting it. It was silly to call it adult onset. And they said, oh, this is now type 2. And again, why I don't like a message like that. If we're already skewed in that direction, and that's something that we've watched just in the two decades of us training clients, like where are we going to be 10 years from now with a message like this letting young kids that are growing up think that it's okay and you can be healthy at all sizes. You're right. You need to communicate- It's not a great message. What needs to be communicated is in hate your body, your overweight, your obese. Hate your body. It's, hey, you're obese. Let's love your body. Let's take care of it in the realest sense. And then let's watch what that looks like. Love yourself by improving. That's it, totally. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our free resources, books, and guides. They cost nothing. You can also find the three of 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.