 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness health and entertainment podcast, we talk all about nutrition. In particular, we talk about intuitive eating. This is a way of eating food where you don't have to always count things and stress out over things. And yet you're still naturally fit, lean, strong and healthy. It is a process, but it's the ultimate place to be if you want a lifetime of a lean, fit and healthy body. So in this episode, we break it all down. We break down the four stages of learning and then we break down the five steps that you can take to help yourself, get yourself to a point where you can eat healthy in an intuitive way. Now, in this episode, we provide you with a lot of actionable items, but if you want more assistance, if you want more help, if you want more guidance, you can check out our intuitive nutrition guide. Now, because this episode is coming out, we're going to make the intuitive nutrition guide 50% off. That means you can learn, you can follow this guide, learn how to eat intuitively for under $15. So it's a very, very inexpensive guide. Here's how you get that program. Go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, scroll all the way down. It's towards the bottom. Click on the intuitive nutrition guide and then use the code FOOD50. That's F-O-O-D-5-0, no space. That gives you 50% off the intuitive nutrition guide. This promotion is a flash sale. It will not be lasting long. So make sure you go check that out if you're interested. But we know you're going to enjoy this episode and get a lot out of it. So here we go. When you work with people, you work with clients as a trainer, you figure the following thing out pretty quickly. You figure out, now everything that you're doing with a client can be challenging because you're trying to get them to do things that they haven't done before, do them consistently, you're trying to help them out. But if we broke all the things up into categories of exercise, nutrition, whatever, by far the hardest thing to get somebody to change, especially on a permanent basis, diet, their nutrition. It's got to be, by far, the most challenging thing. Well, it's woven into everyday culture. Yeah, everything you're doing revolves around eating. And you really notice this, if you've ever fasted before, like how integrated eating is with all of your plans throughout the day and throughout the week. I remember as a kid, this was like, and this is before I ever knew I wanted to be a trainer, but I remember being blown away by the fact that you could eat breakfast foods or dinner foods at different times. Like I remember when I was a kid and I was at my breakfast for dinner. What? Yeah, I was at my cousin's house and it was like 5 p.m. or whatever, he said, hey, you want to have some cereal? I was like, what? Yeah. And then I remember thinking, I remember thinking like, oh yeah, you could totally do. I mean, that's an example, right? We have breakfast foods, lunch foods, dinner foods. We have foods that are based on context like there's certain things that you eat at a birthday that you typically don't eat during, like I never eat cake. Like I'm never at home just eating cake. But if I'm at a birthday, I eat cake and I like cake, right? Popcorn, usually consumed at the movies. And then there's culture. There's cultural stuff around food. There's how our emotions drive our eating behaviors. I mean, I would say our emotions probably drive our eating behaviors more than almost anything else. Whether you're stressed or anxious or happy or sad, that drives us to make choices. And so it's like dealing with nutrition is just so difficult and complex. Well, I have an unpopular comment, too, is I think that it's one of the most addictive substances that you can consume. And because it's something that is essential, it's not demonized. It's celebrated. It's justified. Yeah. And so because of that, I think that's what makes it really hard. We all need food to eat. That's obvious. And so when you have something and it tastes good, it's hard to say no to it. So it's extremely addictive. But nobody wants to point that out. Nobody wants to talk about that because it's something that we, it's necessary, right? Yep. There's a debate about that, right? Like, is it addictive like drugs are? First off, anything can be addictive. Anything can be pathologized. But the argument is, do people use food to numb themselves? Do they use food to distract themselves? Do they use food in ways that are probably not healthy in all senses? Which actually brings me to the next question. Like, what is healthy? Like, what does that actually mean? Now, for me and in my personal definition, there's the obvious. It means that you're relatively fit, healthy physically. You've got some strength. Your body fat percentage is in a relatively low percentage. And what I say relatively, there's a range there, right? It's not like you have to be shredded. It's also not obese. But there is a range of what's pretty much healthy and how it displays, displays whether or not you have healthy patterns. There's also mental, emotional health. There's health of relationships and just all of your behaviors. And so all of that really encompasses what health is. And our eating habits tends to reflect a lot of that stuff. Like, if you have bad emotional health, you're probably more likely to try to numb yourself with food or other substances than somebody who may have really good emotional health. So that's, and in nutrition is just, I think, Adam, you hit the nail on the head. Because food is so celebrated and so accessible, it's the most widely abused substance in modern world. And for people who debate that, look, if we look at the causes of death and chronic health problems, overconsumption of food or poor nutrition covers the majority of it. It really does. If you look at cancers, a good chunk of cancers can be avoided with good nutrition. Of course, obesity related diseases, chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease. That's all, most of it or much of it in the modern world is related to poor diet. The question is, what's happening? Why are we, why are people killing themselves or hurting themselves with food? And I think that's a good question. Now, I think I may kind of have the answer. I'm pretty solid on this. I'm not saying I know everything, but I think I know the answer. And I think it's really because we changed our environment so rapidly, but we haven't changed our behaviors in accordance with them. What I mean by that is, for most of human history, eating healthy wasn't like it was today. Eating healthy today requires different awareness than it did for most of human history. Most of human history, the big challenge was, can I get food? Now you have to be selective. You do. That never happened before. Yeah, you really have to be mindful of what you're putting in your body, not just for the calories, but for the nutrients and for what your body agrees with and can digest the best. So I mean, these are things that are just, these are new parameters that we will have to step back and really understand the environment has changed dramatically. And so we have to consider these things. Otherwise, it becomes a problem. Yeah, for most of human history, it was, can I get food? Otherwise, I'll starve. That was the biggest problem. And then the food that you could get was either you killed an animal, which wasn't a farm animal, it was a wild animal. You got fish or you found some edible plants or fruits or nuts or seeds, all of which are healthy. And the environment prevented us from, mostly from overeating. Food was not engineered by scientists to be so amazingly palatable that it made us overeat, which by the way, we do come with natural systems that prevent us from overeating. It's called, you know, palette fatigue. We've all experienced it where you eat so much of one food and you think to yourself, like, oh, I'm totally full, I can't eat again, but then someone brings something totally different, maybe like dessert and then all of a sudden you find yourself being able to eat again. That didn't really happen for most of human history. So then what we did, and this was, I mean, brilliant. Humans started to figure things out. We got agriculture, we started to raise animals. We developed markets. And then we solved one of the biggest problems that has plagued mankind since we've been on earth, which was not enough food. We solved that. We got way more than enough food, but we got to such a point where, not only do we have enough food, but we also have met every single desire and taste and whatever to the point now where it's not about managing my day to find food. Now I have to manage how I am with food. So it's totally different. We weren't prepared. We weren't, we're not dying of starvation, but now we're dying of the opposite. And so this requires a completely different paradigm. Oh, I also think it's a bit of a two-headed monster too, because we're not, we're moving so little. And thank God for technology, because it's blessed us with so many things. But everything that we've created has been created with the intent of making things easier for us. And I remember the first time I read this article that they had written about just 100 years ago what the average female would burn on a daily basis. And I remember it was upwards of like 3,500 calories a day. And all the research and studies point to that the average female today gains weight on 1,500 calories. And a lot of that is just because of our lifestyle, what you were doing just 100 years ago compared today. So not only has food become more palatable and it's engineered for you to want more and crave more and eat more, but then you compile that with, or you add that to, you're also moving 50% or more or less on average. I mean, that's just a recipe for disaster. So I think the first step in all of this is becoming aware. Totally. And I think that's, I spent most of my career trying to help people realize that. And even myself, I mean, this is something that took a long time as a trainer for this to come full circle even for me. There was many things, and I still am guilty of this today. I'm still guilty of being sucked into some Netflix show that I'm like binge watching for two or three hours in a row and mindlessly getting up to the kitchen and grabbing something and mindlessly continuing to eat even probably after I'm full. But because I'm so into the show, I'm distracted of what's happening in front of me. So to me, the first step to this is just learning to become aware. Well, this is one of those situations where the problem and the solution are the same thing. The problem is that we eat intuitively. The solution is that we need to learn how to eat intuitively. I know that sounds crazy, but I'm going to explain a little bit, right? So here we are, modern humans, a completely different environment, food is everywhere, food tastes really good, it's accessible, it's easy, don't have to hunt it, we don't have to run after it, we don't have to find it. It's just right in front of our faces. So it's presented us with a lot of these unintended consequences. And it starts with us literally, there's four stages of learning. And most of us are in that first stage of total and complete unawareness. We don't know what we don't know. We are unconsciously incompetent. So this is an interesting space to be in. It's like, you know, I remember the first time I went and, you know, shot a gun with my dad. My dad owns a few firearms, he took me as a kid. And the first day there, I just didn't know that there was so much that went with it. I just didn't know, cause I'd never done it before. So immediately I became consciously incompetent. I became aware of all the stuff that I don't know. A lot of people are like this with exercise, right? They never work out and they're like, oh, exercise, I just go to move and then I'm working out. And then they start doing it and they go, oh, wait a minute. There's a right way to move. There's resistance training. There's cardio, different types of resistance training. Then they start to realize what they didn't know that they didn't know that they didn't know. They realized that they were unconsciously incompetent. So a lot of us are in that stage of unconscious incompetence. We literally don't know what we don't know. So the first step is just to become aware and say, oh, wait a minute. There's a lot of stuff I don't know about nutrition. There's a lot of ways that I eat that I think I just wasn't aware about. Yeah, it reminds me of when I had never taken a lesson before in my life on how to play guitar. I just played by ear. I just would sit there and try and pick it apart myself. And I enjoyed that and I got to where I could play songs and can play things and sort of pass. But then I took lessons and it was like so frustrating for me knowing that I had sabotaged myself with these bad patterns that I had established and had thought I was thriving with. But in reality, if I would have just taken it back and learned the techniques and the way to hold my hands properly, I would have advanced way further along if I would have taken the time to really learn the entire process specifically. You were unconscious. I was unconscious. Yeah, it's like there's a story that someone told me a long time. I think it's, I can't remember where it came from but it was always fascinating to me. It's like there's a man that was born with one eye sewn shut and he was born that way. Nobody ever told him. And then finally someone says to him, hey, you do realize that you could see much more if you just cut the threads that are sewing your other eye shut. He's like, what are you talking about? I see just fine. I've always seen fine my whole life. Doesn't realize it until they cut the threads. Then he opens his eye and he becomes aware that he was unaware. Then he becomes aware that he was missing half of the world because one of his eyes was sewn shut. So the first step is awareness. Now, how do you bring awareness to how you eat? You have to slow down, stop and not be so distracted. This is the first step is one of the hardest, believe it or not. So there's a few ways you could do that. Don't watch TV while you eat. Don't be on electronics while you eat. When you're eating, pay attention to what is in front of you. Pay attention to how the food tastes. Pay attention to the emotion surrounding food. When you're ready to get food and eat, normally you might stand up and grab something, stop and ask yourself, wait a minute, why am I grabbing this? Am I hungry? Am I bored? What do I feel right now? This is not an easy process by the way. It literally, it's like learning how to walk differently all of a sudden. Right now when you walk, you don't even think about it. You take one step, you take another step, you just walk, totally unaware that maybe you're walking in a way that may be hurting your back. So now somebody comes out and expert and says, hey, actually the reason why your back hurts is because you're walking in a particular way. We need to change the way you walk. Well, first you have to realize that you're walking in a particular way. Then you have to learn, relearn how to walk, which means every time you take a step, you have to think about it. You can't just go to your automatic where you were before. So the first real, the first step into moving into a proper way of intuitive eating, because here's what happens. We're all eating intuitively based off of very crappy information. We've all been taught that the main value of food is its flavor, its taste, how much we enjoy it. Our intuition sucks right now. Totally, totally. So we're intuitively eating based off of just that. Like, oh, what makes me, you know, what tastes good? What's enjoyable, hedonistically what's enjoyable? Yeah, I mean, if you intuitively eat based off of that, you're gonna make choices that are not gonna serve you as a whole in terms of health. So bring awareness around that. Here's another thing you could do to bring awareness. Learn about macros and calories. This is a great way to start to, it used to be, at first when I first became a trainer, always blew me away when I would talk to people about proteins, fats, and carbs. And they'd say things like, oh, this has a lot of protein, right? Actually, no, it doesn't, you know? Oh, carbs, isn't that, you know, this? Or, well, what about sugars? Are sugar a carb? You know, and what has a lot of fat? I heard there's good fat and bad fat, but I'm not sure where I can find those types of things. People just don't know about those things. So one of the best steps to bring in awareness is, you know, and this is something Adam's been hammering for a long time. Well, track your food. I think it's mandatory. I think everybody has to, at one point, and I know there's camps that are on both sides of this, right? There's some people that believe like, no, I think if you just become more aware and pay attention to this, and I know you allude to just avoid processed foods, that's a great step in that direction. But honestly, it's a lack of education around this. Like you said, you're unaware of what's good, what's bad, the habits that you're doing. And so just simply tracking helps the awareness part. It's not about you need to be a slave to writing everything down for the rest of your life. It's like, hey, I'm doing this so I can look at myself and see if there's patterns. Because in my career, one of the things that I started to piece together was, there are a lot of patterns. There's a lot of things that people have in common. Like here's one that like was, you know, crippling my progress forever. I was like dialed Monday through Friday. I mean dialed nutritionally, dialed training. And then my thought was, hey, Saturday, I'd sleep in. I'd still get to the gym on Saturday, but that was kind of a looser day movement-wise and a little bit more flexible eating. And then Sunday was completely off day. And then I went, and my thought was, man, if I am perfect five and a half days out of the week, I should still be seeing great results. But when I actually started to like write it all down and calculate it, it was holy crap. That one day was actually enough to negate me continuing to see progress. Even though I was doing way more good during the week, it didn't matter, all it took was one day of lack of moving and over consumption to negate all the good work that I was doing during the week. And that just brought awareness to me and that would bring awareness to clients. And that was mine Sunday, but it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes that's a Tuesday for you. You know, it just depends on the person and you don't know this until you really start tracking and paying attention to it. My son, you know, occasionally will say things, will tell me that his head kind of hurts. And I'll say, well, maybe you're not drinking enough water. Oh, no, no, no, no, I drink enough water. I drink plenty of water. So I said, okay, do this for me. Write down how many glasses of water you drink throughout the day. And he was blew himself away. He's like, oh, I guess I'm not drinking enough water because he just wasn't aware. Podcasting brought a lot of awareness to me in terms of how I say certain things. It's like I would talk a particular way, listen to an episode and it'd be like, oh yeah, I do sound a little bit like a jerk right there. You know, I kind of did communicate that in the wrong. I would have never known that had I not recorded it and listened to it. So tracking is massive. So, and luckily, look, back in the day, it was much more of a pain in the ass. You listeners right now have no idea how, especially if you're younger than 30, you have no idea how awesome it is. When I used to have to track back in the day. A book in pen and paper, yeah. They used to have this, I forgot what the name of the book was. Just to guesstimate, yeah, the calorie calories, calorieking.com finally became a website. But before that, yeah, you just had to read a book about it. I had the book before it was a website. It was a little book that you flipped through. And it would have every food or sometimes foods weren't in there. And by the way, this is another layer to this, but you know, those are all very, those are generic numbers too. I mean, another part that was eye-opening for me. I remember this was, you know, blew my mind. You know, I began, I was tracking, I was doing all these things, but I would only track the things that I was a little worried about that I thought would be really high calorie or what I thought about. If it was good food, I'm not gonna track that. It's, I can guesstimate about what that was. I'll never forget the first time I weighed a sweet potato. Yeah, I was gonna say a big ass potato was a small one. Yeah, and huge difference. And when you look in that, exactly, you look in the book at one of those books, it would say something like, oh, a medium sweet potato is 80 calories or 120 calories, whatever. And then I figure, oh, maybe this is a large one. It looks pretty big. So I'm gonna get, what, 50% more calories I'm gonna add to that. And then you weigh it and it's like eight times more. It's like, whoa, I was underestimating like 400 calories right there. So that's happening. And I know if I was a trainer for a decade and that I became aware of it that late in the game, there's many things that clients do just assuming like, oh, I'm eating almonds. And because your hand goes in there in that jar and you grab a handful of almonds two or three times, you go, well, yeah, yeah. Sometimes I have a few almonds. Well, do you have a few? Or do you have more like 50? And 50 ends up being like 400 something calories. Like, and if you ever looked at like a small handful of almonds and a serving, which is 200 something calories, is about 25 almonds. It's like a kid's handful. Yes, it adds up real fast. I remember the first time I did this with chicken breasts. I remember being like, oh, six ounces of chicken. Okay, no problem. And then I remember one of my trainers that worked for me was like, that's not six ounces, bro. That's like 10 or 11 ounces. I'm like, what? They don't make chicken breasts that big. Sure enough, I weighed it and I was consuming like 40% more calories because I thought a six ounce chicken breast was a normal size chicken breast. Dude, I was eating fruit like it was out of style. Yeah, like before like the whole high glycemic, like everything high glycemic too, thinking it was fair game and not even realizing how much my sugar like would add up at the end of the day. It was appalling to me. And so yeah, just even that, like I had to recognize. So tracking great step for bringing an awareness. Another thing you can do is slow down. This is gonna sound silly, but it legit works. In between bites, put your fork or your spoon down. Chew your food, swallow it. Don't drink water cause water sometimes we wash food down really fast. Or you could eat with your opposite hand. You would be surprised at how much you have to like pay attention when you're eating with your opposite hand, which starts to bring awareness to kind of what's going on. I mean, we've all been there, right? Where we're distracted, we're eating so fast. Next thing you know, I look down, I'm like, oh, I ate an entire sleeve of Oreo cookies. I didn't realize. You're eating your food in your car real fast. Mindlessly, yeah. The other thing to become aware of is nutrition labels. You know, if you're somebody who, you know, intermittently has, you know, processed foods in there, which nothing wrong with that. But you need to be aware of how off those can be. I mean, these labels can be 20, 30% off from what they say FDA allows this. So, and you better believe, if something is marketing to you as a healthy food, they are gonna lean towards the lower calorie, lower fat, lower sugar number on everything. So you gotta understand that when you open up something and you go, oh, this is healthy. It's got the heart on the box and it says low calorie or whatever like that. You can't just take it and say, oh, that's exactly what it is calories. Right away, I teach clients to just factor in 25% more of whatever the label says. So if you're somebody too who does two or three things out of a wrap or out of a box or anything that's packaged, even if it is quote unquote healthy, the number that it says on there, there's a very good chance. In fact, it's more likely that it's off. And it's gonna be rounded down because that's what benefits them for marketing purposes. It wouldn't do well if they call it low calorie and it's higher than what it says, right? You know, serving sizes is another big one. Oh yeah. I remember, you know how I learned about serving sizes? Weight gainer shakes is how I first learned about serving sizes and not through food because, you know, as a kid, I was skinny and wanted to gain weight. So I'd buy these shakes that would be like, you know, mega mass, 4,000 or gainers fuel, you know, 2,000 or whatever. And I'd buy these, and I'd buy the one with the biggest gainer. Yeah, with the biggest number. If it said 5,000, I'd get that one instead of the 3,000. Oh, this one's definitely. And then I remember at home, I would have this huge, it was literally a bucket of weight gainer. I'm like, oh, this one's 5,000. This one's gonna be awesome. Then I'd take out the scoop and it was a box looking shovel. It was huge and it would be like five scoops. A sand shovel. I'm like, no wonder it's 5,000 calories. This entire bucket is three servings. And then I started to look at food that way. This is only 300 calories. What's the serving? Oh, a serving is literally a quarter of what I would normally eat, you know? That's another way to do it. Oh, I remember when I became aware of that. Mine was like when I was drinking these sugar drinks, you know, that it's like a 12 to 16 ounce can of something. And I'm like, oh, that's not bad. 160 calories, 14 grams of sugar. It's not great, but it's not bad. Oh, well, it's two and a half servings inside there. I don't think it's a serving. That's one serving to me. I don't know. Who is talking about the one? Whoever takes a 16 ounce can of something and drinks it three times, you know what I'm saying? Like, nobody does that. You open it and you drink the whole thing. But then up in the right hand corner, the nutrition label when real small, it says two and a half serving size per can. Super sneaky. Yeah, these are all things that nutrition labels and FDA allows them to get away with it. And for marketing reasons, they're going to manipulate it in every way they can. So, you know, the first stage of all this, if we're moving towards intuitive eating, is you first gotta become very aware. Totally, totally. In the second, now here's the second step. Once you become aware, once you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, it's natural for you to want to judge yourself. It's going to be very natural for you to be like, oh my God, what an idiot. Look how terrible that was. What's happened? This is so, try to avoid that as much as possible. You didn't know, now you're learning. No judgment, just observe. Just become aware because here's the problem. When you start to judge yourself, you're adding a layer on top of awareness and actually prevents awareness from happening. The self judgment is one of the biggest roadblocks to success with nutrition. One of the biggest roadblocks. The biggest roadblock being just not being aware, but judging yourself is like, it's a wonderful next roadblock. I can't tell you how many clients who would sabotage themselves because they would judge themselves. They would start tracking, they'd start becoming aware, then they'd slip up somewhere, they'd figure out they're eating too much, then they'd judge themselves, oh my God, and what do they end up doing? They go way on the opposite direction, or they start to really hate themselves, or oh my gosh, why can't I do this? Or oh wow, I didn't realize I was eating because I'm depressed. Oh my God, that's making me more depressed, which then does what? Makes you want to eat more, right? Right. Use your cycle. The only way to be, you have to become the observer. You have to become the thing behind all of it. And that means don't judge yourself because that's going to kill you. Well part of that layer is this again, another thing, I think a lot of the passion that comes from us talking on this podcast is our own shit, man. Oh yeah. I mean, I didn't think I was judging myself, but I was because one of the things that I would do is if I didn't have a perfect day or I didn't eat quote unquote good or following my plan, I would just say fuck it all. And I had many clients that had that same type of attitude. It's like, oh I screwed up, so I may as well screw it all up and just go all in, right? I already wasn't supposed to have pizza. I had two slices, may as well have eight. I'm just laughing because like Courtney had this saying that I always used to like laugh, like she had a really bad day and would come home and be like, honey, it's ice cream, alcohol, fuck it all. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's one of those nights. Yeah. It's true though. And that is a form of judging yourself, right? You're judging one decision to decide I want to have a slice of pizza right now and just shaming yourself for it and then your response to that to revolt back and go, ah, fuck it all, fuck it all, right? And that behavior leads to this yo-yo dining in the swings of up and down and up and down in these bad patterns and behaviors. That's so true. You're not gonna be perfect. Nobody's perfect. And one of the worst things you could do is be like, okay, I'm doing so good. I'm doing so good. I'm doing so good. Oh no, I just slipped up. You know what? I already messed up. I'm already, I fucked up. Let's just go in the opposite direction. Yeah, forget about it. This is a behavior that you see with people who are addicted to substances. You'll see somebody who maybe avoided alcohol for a long time and then has one drink and then their mentality becomes I've already had a drink. I've already let myself down, which is judging yourself. Now I'm gonna have a binge. That is self-destructive and you cannot possibly progress to a healthy way of intuitive eating if you're constantly judging yourself. Literally sit on the back side. And it's okay to look at things and say, ooh, that was a decision that helped. That was a decision that didn't help. There's nothing wrong with that, but the self-judgment, the negative self-judgment is what's gonna keep you from seriously progressing. Which really takes me to the third one, which is to completely redefine your motivation. The judging leads to something that's extremely negative, which is being motivated by hating yourself. Nobody has ever achieved optimal long-term health by working out because they hate themselves. It's never happened. It really never happened. You eventually break, even if you've been going for years straight. You eventually break, or you see a lot of guys who turn to anabolic steroids because of the self-hate or women. Or your body revolts. Your body rebels. It completely distorts the decisions that you make when it's motivated by self-hate. You know, if I am going to the gym because I'm disgusted with myself. By the way, this doesn't have to necessarily be a conscious thought. So it's not like you're looking in the mirror and be like, I hate you. I hate the way. But you have to kind of examine and be like, all right, am I motivated to go to the gym because I really think I look disgusting. Like I'm afraid to put on a bikini or a bathing suit or because I'm disgusting. Because if that's the case, here's what ends up happening. You're headed to the gym and you're feeling kind of tired. You're a little beat up. Didn't sleep good the night before. But because you hate yourself so much, you know what kind of workout you're gonna do? A punishing one. That's what feels satisfying, by the way. When you hate yourself, it feels good to be bad to yourself because you're gonna treat someone you hate poorly. This doesn't matter if it's you or anybody else. If you hate someone, do you wanna treat them nicely? Of course not. If you hate yourself, you do the same thing. So workouts become punishment. Nutrition becomes punishment, becomes restriction. Or on the opposite, which is, I can't hate myself anymore and I need to live my life and then it goes in the opposite direction. Well, it also can be dangerous tying it to aesthetics too because it can be very deceiving and misleading. Oh, sure. So in this, another thing that I remember, this unfolding for me too, you would eat, say, a couple slices of pizza and then you would have this bloat. Or maybe you ate something that your body's allergic to or intolerant to and so your body responds by retaining and holding water and in your head you think that, oh my God, just that little miss up. It gained all this fat all of a sudden. Right, you think you put on all this body fat and because you attach your results of, are you doing good or bad only to how you look, then you get this mind fuck of, oh my gosh, I barely slipped up and look at the way my body looks now from that the next day, like this is too hard, forget it, and then they throw their hands up. Think about it this way, it gets easier when if you can separate yourself from this, I think it gets easier to understand. Imagine you have two sets of parents, okay, both of them raising a child. One set of parents hates their kid. They hate the way that they talk, move, they hate the way that they look, how they perform in school. So everything that motivates the parents to discipline the child is coming from a place of, God, I hate this kid. I really don't like this kid and the way they're acting. Okay, now think of another, the other set of parents. Everything that motivates them and the way that they treat their child is because they love them. They want them to do better in school because they love them. They discipline them because they love them. They want them to succeed. They want them to be good human beings because they care about them. Which set of parents is gonna be successful at raising a good human being? Obviously, it's the one that, it's the pair that loves the kid. Okay, now let's flip that for a second. The other one's gonna be a psycho. Now let's flip that, in fact, the studies show that. Parents that with low love and high discipline raise psychopaths, right? Now let's flip that on yourself, okay? You hate your body. You hate the way you look. You're fat. You're too skinny. You're ugly, whatever. So because of all that, I'm gonna work out. I'm gonna diet. I'm gonna do all the stuff to change myself because I hate myself. Now let's flip that for a second. You love yourself. You wanna take care of this body because it's yours. You wanna go to the gym, not because you're disgusted and you hate yourself, but because you wanna take care of yourself. You eat not because you hate how gross you look, but rather you wanna take care of yourself. Which one is going to lead to long-term health success? Okay, now let's add another layer to that. Which one's gonna lead to long-term looking better? Is the person who's ultimately, it's gonna be healthy because they love themselves? Is that person gonna look better long-term? Or the person who treats themselves because they hate, or treats themselves in a way because they hate themselves? Obviously, health, good health, coming from a place of care, leads to good aesthetics. This is the irony of the whole thing. This is the conundrum. If your motivation comes from aesthetics, you hate the way you look, so you just wanna change your look. Eventually, you'll get neither aesthetics and you'll definitely not get health because once you have poor health, you don't look good. People in poor health don't have good aesthetics, okay? At least not for long-term. On the flip side, somebody who's motivated by self-care is gonna get a great deal of health and simultaneously, as a side effect. Yeah, it's a byproduct. Get a great deal of looking good. This is the irony of the entire thing. Even if right now you're listening and you're like, you know what, I can't motivate myself by care. I just really, it's so difficult for me. Okay, fine. You wanna be motivated by aesthetics. You'll get more aesthetics if you take care of yourself because you care about yourself. Use that as your motivation. Fine, you wanna look good. That's all you care about. Then take care of yourself like you care about yourself and that is gonna change all of your behaviors. You cannot eat in a way that's intuitive, that's healthy long-term if you hate yourself. It will not work. You have to do it from a place of care and love. Well, part of that is learning how to listen to your body. Totally. That is probably, I feel like this is the phase, I spend the longest amount of time becoming aware, getting people to track and start to point things out to them, short phase in this whole thing. Getting them to really tone in on how their body speaks to them. It's everything. It's even hard to articulate on a podcast and explain to somebody like, what does that look like? Well, it first looks by you evaluating and looking at things that you probably haven't been looking at most of all your life. At least that's how it was for me. I wasn't measuring my sleep how well it was or not. It was just, I had what I would call, oh, good night's rest, not a good night's rest. That's all, there was nothing in between or trying to attach it. Oh, I had diarrhea today, weird. Right, or exactly, stool would be another example of that. Like, oh, it's just normal that you have these weird shits every now and then and sometimes they're good ones. I wasn't trying to tie it back to, okay, what did I do the last 20, what did I intake the last 24 hours? And that goes to Sal's point about his son with his headaches, like, you know, I get a headache. Oh, I just have a headache. I wouldn't go back and go like, oh, have I been drinking water? Have I been eating? That wasn't, you just assume that these things that happen to you are just random, right? Versus really starting to look into them and question your own behaviors in the previous 24 hours. And this phase takes a while. Poor health, if it's not due to some genetic issue, which believe it or not, more often than not, it's not that, right? It's actually not super common for someone to be born with an actual genetic health issue. Most of the time poor health symptoms are from your lifestyle, your behavior, how you're eating, how you're sleeping, all of that stuff. The problem is so many of us have lived with them for so long and never learned to look at them that way that we don't even recognize it. Like, how many people listening right now get headaches on a weekly basis? It's just a part of their, it's just a part of- They just take Advil and it takes it away from you. How many people suffer from heartburn on a regular, on a semi-regular basis? So they got Tums or Rolades or something else. Or even worse, they take a prophylactic medicine and then that solves the heartburn. How many people have skin issues that tend to pop up? There's a lot of them. How many people have less than one bowel movement a day or 10 towards diarrhea? High blood pressure, like skin issues. All that stuff, puffy eyes, stiff joints, light headedness, strong body odor, halitosis, mood swings, there's another one. You ever wonder why, a lot of people don't think this. Why don't get irritable later in the day? How come later in the day I tend to get, I start to feel like I'm angry at people? Why do I get so, you ever hear that like 2 p.m. energy drop everybody talks about? Like, oh, after lunch, man, I wanna just fall asleep. These are all signs that you could pay attention to. And oftentimes you can link them up to behaviors and oftentimes those behaviors are really your nutrition. Right, one of the, I mean obviously the one that I still struggle with is the stimulant thing. Like if I'm overstimulated, I need to bring in like this exogenous stimulation to get myself moving and going. Like there's something there. Like there's something there that I need to address sleep wise or, you know, nutrition wise that I could take into account or drink more water. There's all these things you really just need to sit back and evaluate and really pay attention to your daily habits and routines. Well, what do you think? To start off, you know, you recommend what caffeine, dairy, gluten, sugar, the common offenders? Nuts, I would go nuts, dairy, gluten, sugar, caffeine, legumes, those are the common foods that tend to cause people issues. And so the key or the steps you have action wise is how do I start this process of trying to learn how my body's speaking to me is to eliminate all of them, is to pull them out and stick to a kind of a bland, straight diet for a period, extended period of time. Typically I recommend a client to do that for at least three or four weeks of doing that. And then slowly introduce one at a time and then really pay attention to all those signs that you just listed off. Dude, and then, so here's even a further step. I had a client a while ago, blew me away, this person suffered from these random kind of rashes that they would get on their elbows and on the inside of their elbow joint in the back of their knee, they'd get it on the kind of back of their neck, couldn't figure it out, would go to doctors, didn't want to take suppressive medications, didn't want to keep rubbing ointments, couldn't figure it out. So that's what we did, Adam, we cut out those foods, nothing happened. So the next step, as I said, let's look at foods that you eat all the time. Let's look at food, every single morning for, I don't know how many years, this person ate a banana, every single morning. So I said, why don't we cut the banana out? You have it every single morning for years, let's see what happens. And I remember my client saying, banana, bananas are healthy. I said, you're right, typically they can be healthy, but if they're not right for your body, then it might be causing problems. Lo and behold, the banana was causing the problems. They eliminated the banana and they stopped getting those issues. Now, why is this important? Well, I'll tell you why it's important. Besides the fact that you're gonna identify things that make you feel better, make you give you better health or whatever, what you're doing is you're associating foods to the positive things that they give you and your body. Now, why is this a good thing? Because right now, most of you listening right now, only associate food with how good they may, that it tastes and how enjoyable it is to eat. So your whole, the way you intuitively eat now is based off of just that information. Now, once you become more aware, you will actually find, and this is 100% true, you will find that you'll start to crave foods that normally you wouldn't normally think of that would be valuable because before it was all about taste. But now you start to crave foods because, oh, this one makes me feel good. This one helps my digestion. Oh my God, this one gives me more energy. And you'll actually find that you'll seek those foods out. Well, I wanna go back to the banana comment you just made because this is actually, this is what I found was very common for me too, is like, if it wasn't these common offenders, it almost always was the food that the client loved. And a lot of times it is a food that could be healthy. So I want you to explain, because I think you explain it much better than I do, like get into gut permeability and how that happens. Like how does a banana become something, or how does an avocado or one of these healthy foods, how does something like that become something your body becomes intolerant to? Like a foreign invader. So when you're eating a food over and over again, and let's say your gut becomes inflamed, for whatever reason, you have an infection, maybe your diet's off, maybe you're under a lot of stress. When your gut becomes inflamed, like all inflammation, the tissue expands. So now you have the cells of the gut that typically have a certain level of permeability, meaning that they allow things to pass through when they're supposed to. It's actually a very smart barrier, right? Some nutrients pass through at this point, others at this point, and that's how we digest food. It's a very, very smart system. But when you're inflamed, it becomes more permeable. Things pass through the gut when they're not supposed to, and the way the body might respond is by developing an immune response because it thinks it's a foreign invader. So now this food that you have all the time becomes something that your immune system reacts to, and the way that your immune system reacts is by causing inflammation, and this shows up as headaches, stiffness, skin issues, vision issues, bleeding gums. I've actually seen this become a problem with some people. So you start to develop all these immune reactions to foods that, and this is what it looks like. It's like, God, I used to be able to eat that. I ate it all the time, never bothered me. Now all of a sudden I just realize it starts to bother me. Well, you've actually developed an intolerance to that food, and that can happen to any food. And my theory to that, right, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that it's just increasing the odds because you have it so often, right? So if you eat a banana every single day or two a day, every single day, the likelihood of that becoming a foreign invader is just because of that, because it just happened to get coupled with a day that you had extreme stress or your body was inflamed or you were really sick or you were pushing beyond your limits or you were grossly overeating, and then you were also eating that food that you're always eating. Totally, so back to why it's important to figure these things out and start to value food for all the things that it can provide you, okay? I'll give you guys an example of how this works for me. When I travel, when my pump is traveling, we often eat out quite a bit. Obviously, we're traveling, we don't have time to cook for ourselves, and we try to make good decisions, but it's always eating out, and so the more burgers and fries come into my diet, way less vegetables, it's hard to get good vegetables when you're eating out, so I get way less vegetables. After about five days of this, do you know what food I crave the most when I get home? Vegetables, I want vegetables. Now, why do I want vegetables so bad? Because it helps, now if I break it down, I want it because it helps my digestion, but on a surface level, I literally crave them. I literally want to come home, and the first thing that I want to eat is a big salad or a bowl of broccoli or some boiled rapini with some olive oil on it, and it's because I've made those associations, and by the way, food marketers know this. They've been doing this to you for decades, so this is a trick you can do on yourself. It's a hack that you can do on yourself. I mean, they'll do studies where they give people ice cream, and they serve ice cream in clean toilet bowls, totally clean, brand new toilet bowls. People eat way less ice cream. Why? Because toilet bowls are mentally associated with poop or whatever, right? Why do we have beer- Yes, it was chocolate. Why do they have beer commercials with, it looks cold, it's on the beach, there's a hot girl, there's a big party. You start to make those associations with that beer. You can do that to yourself with foods simply by not just valuing the pleasure of eating that food, but also valuing all the other things it brings you, and that comes only from listening to your body. Well, and part of that is practicing this, right? So that, part of the reason why you can do that and you make that association and you actually truly do crave it isn't because the very first time you ate bad, you craved vegetables, it's because multiple times you've taught yourself, oh wow, when I go back to eating this way, I can just feel myself recover and get better and get back to normal digestion and you've done that enough times and probably not done it in enough times that you've been able to make that connection. And so part of this, all these steps, the final one, the fifth one, is practicing, is putting this into practice. It's not gonna just magically all happen for you the one time. You're not gonna like eliminate these foods, try something out and then all of a sudden, oh okay, I get it now, I can intuitively. You're gonna fail a bunch of times. You're gonna make some bad decisions. You're gonna see, but you're gonna need to practice that multiple times before this really all starts to come together. How do you get good at anything you've never done before? You have to practice it and you're gonna suck and it's gonna suck a lot. It's like learning to play the piano. There's no way you automatically touch the keys and you're just Beethoven, all of a sudden, you're awesome on the keys. You gotta practice, oh, hit the wrong key, hit the wrong key, keep practicing, but here's the payoff, okay? The payoff is this, here's what it looks like. Eventually what this will end up looking like if you practice this long enough and in my experience with clients, it's not as long as you think. It's not like this takes 10 or 15 years to do. First off, it's a continual practice so you're always making sure to remind yourself staying aware, not judging yourself, always making sure that your motivation is in the right place. This is always happening, but eventually after about a year or two, it starts to become more natural, a little more clockwork. What's the payoff? A relatively lean, strong, muscular, healthy body without stress. Imagine that. Imagine if you could walk around relatively lean. You're not gonna, this, by the way, intuitive eating is not gonna make you super shredded because super shredded is not healthy, right? So let's remember that for a second. If you wanna get super shredded, you gotta go and track everything and weigh everything. You gotta go murk stream. But you're not gonna be overweight. You're not gonna be, you're not gonna have so much body fat that you can't see definition. You're gonna be relatively lean, relatively healthy, strong. You're gonna feel good. And this will be your natural stress-free default. Imagine that. Imagine walking around, not worrying and stressing about food. Oh my God, I gotta get this protein. Oh my God, I gotta get these macros. What am I gonna, oh no, I binged. Oh no, I did this. What's gonna, it's, you're just living. You're just living your life and the result of that is a healthy, fit body and that's what happens with proper, intuitive eating. This is why I love fasting and this is how I like to teach intermittent fasting. Now it's been bastardized now and turned into a weight loss tool and a marketing tool. But this is where it has tremendous value and part of the practice, one of the best things to do when you're trying to read and figure all these signals is to break free from all of it and learn that, oh wow, I don't necessarily need to be eating every single two to three or even four hours or at lunch time or at dinner time or these things that we've actually created of these behaviors. Once you learn to fast, you do a 24, 48 hour fast and you realize, oh wow, I'm actually, once I kind of got through the psychological part, I'm actually okay right now. In fact, some people feel better and more energized when they haven't had food for 24 hours a lot of the time. So that is like how I love to use this tool is I teach clients to fast for these reasons, not because I'm like, hey, let's fast so we can lose some body fat. No, it's, hey, let's fast. So you can really clear out anything that you're taking in because you're not getting anything. And then as we start to introduce, we can really evaluate better what's going on. Yeah, it's really hard to bring awareness to your habits until you can step out and look from a different perspective. And it just helps to kind of present you with like not being in those day to day habits of just kind of falling into what your normal routine is, but to really like feel that, like I'm not eating right now and like what would I be eating at this situation? And it just allows that opportunity for you to really like take a deep look at how you operate and what you do day to day. Right, by the way, this is why fasting is present in every major religion and why it's present in most spiritual practices. And it's not to lose weight, it's to bring awareness. And fasting works for a lot of things, not just food. You can fast from electronics, try that. Try two days of zero electronics and watch how much more aware you become. You can fast from sex and find how much more aware you are around some of those behaviors. You can fast from a lot of different things. This is the proper use of fasting. Now, if you're super stuck on weight loss, you have body image issues and you just wanna lose weight, I do not recommend you use fasting because your ego or you will only turn it into a tool to bring you backwards. It'll become a weight loss tool and then it's not fasting anymore. Now it becomes starving yourself or restricting and binging. If that's you, I do not recommend fasting. But if you're not that and you're in a position where you can use it as a way to bring awareness, fasting can definitely be a very, very powerful tool. And with that, look, we record all of our podcasts on video as well as audio. That's right, you can watch us as well. We have a YouTube channel called the Mind Pump Podcast. You can watch the videos. You can look at our facial expressions. You can see how I haven't gotten a haircut in like three weeks. Go check it out. By the way, when we do our Q and A episodes, we break up the episodes by questions. You don't have to listen to the whole podcast if you watch it on YouTube. You can literally pick the question you wanna answer. Watch just that segment so you can get all the value that you want without spending time on listening stuff that you don't want to.