 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So Jason Phillips impressed me. Yeah, he really impressed me. I was really excited to introduce him to you guys. Yeah, really smart dude, really cool guy, but really smart dude. Very knowledgeable with nutrition. I was very impressed. Super connected in fitness too, right? Like he's worked with some of the best of the best. In lots of different arenas, CrossFit and bodybuilding. It's so refreshing to see a guy that has built a business around the CrossFit community and been a part of it, trained CrossFit for a very long time, has had tons of podium athletes and teams involved with CrossFit, but yet still will express some of the pitfalls that come with it. And it's just so refreshing to hear somebody like that because I feel like so many of these guys that have attached their business to CrossFit defended to its death. Like, oh no, it's this, it's just like, no, why can't, it's okay that you like it, you do it, you're around it. He's still a big critic. Right, but then also see all the problems that could come from it also, right? There's always gonna be a cause and effect next. And he has the right mentality, like his business, he's really addressing a lot of individual needs, coaching-wise that I feel like that's a big monster to tackle and he seems to be doing a good job tackling. Oh man, I really hope that we, and I know we're working on this with him, is working a way out to partner up in a way with what he's doing over there nutritionally because we just, we don't have any desire to get into the one-on-one coaching world or nutritionally giving advice to individuals which is what he has been building for a long time now and has been very successful in it. So. He has, and if you haven't heard of him, get ready, cause you're gonna be hearing a lot of this guy. He's about to like blow up in a big way. Like again, very smart dude, very connected. You know, we're impressed by a lot of people we meet, but this guy really impresses to the point where he came to record a podcast with us and we wanted to do videos with him as well. So we did some YouTube videos that are causing a lot of- Those are taking off, man, they're doing well. They're causing a lot of controversy. Me and him talk a lot about IIIFOM in the videos. We talk about Paleo for CrossFit and a few other things, Adrenal Fatigue or HP Axis Dysfunction. So in this episode, you get to hear about Jason Phillips. You get to hear about his business. You get to hear about nutrition and his experience, coaching thousands of people through nutrition. It's a great episode. You're gonna enjoy it. We get into CrossFit. We get into the dieting with CrossFit. We get into all that stuff. All of it. So, great episode. You can find him on Instagram at jasonphillips underscore IN3. You can find his website, IN3nutrition.com. He's got a great blog on there as well. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Jason Phillips. Dude, so I'm super excited to have you in the place right now. And we're just talking off air that we wanted to get on the mics as soon as we could because we always do this where we meet somebody for the first time and we blow our wad, right? We start talking about all the great conferences and everybody goes like, oh man, I wish we would have heard that. It's like messy. We really didn't fuck around much with Jay. I mean, he's only been in here for about five minutes. We lit the mics up right away so you guys could listen to all of us get to know each other for the first time because we have a lot of mutual friends. We do. Yeah, I didn't realize. We were just finding out. Yeah, I didn't realize that Josiah is your workout partner. You're mentoring Cody Boom Boom right now. So we got a lot of same circle there, Jay's a good buddy. How long do you and Jay go back? Jay and I go back earlier this year, really. So Baderos and Craig connected us. Oh, okay. Craig Valentine. Craig Valentine. And so I feel like they're the connectors of the universe. Those two guys know everybody. In fitness, right? In fitness, yeah. I don't think we've met them. They don't know us. No, dude, you guys need to meet them. Really? What is your, you know, I wanted to tell it to somebody who actually knows Baderos pretty well or has been around him. What's your thoughts on him? I think that a lot of people would be surprised how reserved he is. So like you look at his media and you probably think he's like out there and extravagant and like then you're around him and he's the most soft spoken, like humble dude. Oh wow. Yeah, like you'd probably think that he's the person that takes the center of the room all the time and very few words are spoken in his presence. I've found this out with a lot of these characters that have this loud, crazy, fun personality on YouTube or on their Instagram or with that. Then you meet them in person that a lot of times they're the opposite. So have you guys seen the YouTube ads with Billie Jean? No. Like the big black guy that's been into like marketing and it's like Billie Jean is marketing. No, I haven't seen that. Dude, just look up his shit because it's so outrageous. And he does this like skit where he's the wolf of Wall Street but he's like the wolf of marketing or something but it's really well produced. And so you look at him and you're like this motherfucker must be crazy. Everybody I know that's met him says he doesn't say a word until it's like his turn and then it's switch was flipped and there he goes. And then he's like, he's in character. We just have these young guys in here the other day. Yeah, these YouTube celebrities and fitness guys. Yeah, Connor Murphy, he's like 20 years old. He's got like two million people following him on YouTube. And if you look at his YouTube, his whole, he's built it off of this like, you know, these skits that he does. He basically walks up to random girls. He's using charisma. He takes his shirt off. Yeah, he's ridiculously handsome. He's shredded and he's got this crazy outgoing personality where he just walks up to random girls and asks them stuff and then he ends up kissing them and he videos all of it. Super introvert in real life. Yes, no shit. He doesn't make eye contact. He even says it. He's like, I'm an introvert. Yes, says he would never do that with girls. I wonder if being on camera or knowing you're about to, you know, present yourself like an act. Well, I wonder if it gives you permission, if it almost gives people permission to be something else. You know what I'm saying? I think that's what it is. Cause I'm relatively introverted. If you met me out, like you'd be like, that guy never talks, but you know, get me on a podcast. You get me on stage. I'll go for days. Like I think it's, it is, it's that permission that you need to just go and to, to drop whatever's in your head. But man, like I, I for the longest time didn't want to fucking be in front of anybody. I hated public speaking. And now I'm like, get me on any stage I can be. Wow. Well, tell us your story. So how did you get into all of this? Like, man, it's a, it's a crazy fucked up story. So I feel like there's so many people that are listening that have at least heard it one time. So I'll try to, I'll try to spin it a little bit differently. I got into fitness differently than most people, right? So I was 18, 19 years old. I was an athlete. We'll use that super loosely. I was playing golf. John Daly is an athlete. Hey, Tiger Woods making us come back to it. Most challenging sport I've ever fucking done. It is the hardest thing in the world. The most frustrating thing in the world. But, but I was that, I was pretty good. I was nationally ranked and had college scholarship offers, took one local to my house because of a girl, shocker, 18 year old hormones, right? Thinking clearly. Oh, damn girls. Thinking perfectly. All business. Yeah. So stayed close to the house, but right after school tore my labrum and I have no idea how I just went in the gym one day and got pinned under a 95 pound bench and couldn't move. I was like, yeah, that's probably bad. It was really the first time I'd ever lifted like my golf coach was trying to get me in strength conditioning. I was a skinny kid. And in that process, like got in the gym to do rehab at the same time got approached by Abercrombie to do modeling and was like, how the fuck do I look like these guys? Cause they were like, you got to show us your abs. Like, you know, when you, when you come out for your photo shoot make sure your abs are on point. Like I don't fucking have abs dude. Like I'm a golfer, I ate cheeseburgers, right? Like I literally every day after high school went to Taco Bell KFC and like, like Taco Bell KFC, like it was a, they were joint venture. And there was like a meal that I would get. Same thing. Like tacos, chicken fingers, potato wedges. Clearly it was impactful in my life cause I remember it. Right, right. And so, you know, I started doing all this research. Like, how do I get abs? Like do I do a lot of cardio? And my, my pediatrician at the time was like, read all the fitness magazines cause it's all diet. And I'm like, oh, okay, great. Like here I am, like mac and cheese and chicken fingers and now I'm supposed to eat salads. Like, great. So I read all these articles. It's like, don't eat this, don't eat that, don't eat this. And really there was this giant list of shit that I couldn't eat, but no education as to what I should be eating. Before I knew it, like a meal to me, dude, was two rice cakes. Like I remember I was working at Best Buy. My lunch was two rice cakes. Oh man. And supermodel diet. Right? It was some kind of diet, dude. It was the, it was the Killier testosterone level diet. And so, but it really developed full-blown anorexia. Oh, you did. Yeah, like it was full-blown anorexia. It was two days away. Okay, well, you don't hear that a lot. No, not at all. And what a crazy story for that to happen. How, I mean, at what point do you know this? Obviously you're talking about it now, like looking back. So I was two days away from my mom and my doctor having an intervention. So like he, my pediatrician invited me to go work out with him at the gym on like a Tuesday. And like afterwards there was a, there was like a hot tub or something there. And he was like, oh, like, you know, it's good for recovery, like just come hang out. And like he, he could tell with me, like I was almost embarrassed, like take my shirt off, dude. Mind you, I'm 118 pounds. Wow. Like 59, 118. Wow. Skinny as a rail. And he was like, clearly could tell something was wrong with me. And, you know, so they were, they were two days away. And then I met a trainer at my gym. You're 19 right here? Let me get, sorry. 19. 19, okay, you're 19. So at this point you have no idea that this is a, you're having an issue with food. No, like to me it was normal, dude. And like if I told you stories, dude, it was, it was fucked. Like I would have dinner with my family. I would, I mean, it would be healthy. It'd be like chicken, rice, green beans. And I would like almost beat myself up for actually eating food. I would go straight to my room and I would do crunches. Thinking like, oh, I just put fat on my body because I eat food. Can't work this off. Food was, yeah, like that's, that's what I thought. Food was the enemy. Did you have this personality where you're like, I have a goal, I'm going to attain it no matter, whatever costs. And was that what you applied towards diet? And do you think that led to it? Or was it more of a control thing where you felt things? It was a control thing. Because I definitely was not a hard worker growing up. I was probably the laziest kid known to man. So yeah, which is really ironic because now I think I credit, this is a really fucked up thing to say. So I hope nobody takes this out of context. But like I went through that period of time and you learned so much discipline. Like you're focused so much on one endeavor. I think that's why I'm successful in business today. Is like I learned how to block out all the noise and just to like myopically focus on one thing. That's not a crazy thing to say. I think the most successful people can take challenging situations and take the positive from it. Like this is what I got out of it. Not that it was a positive situation, but it's made sure we are now. Yeah, because I would never want anyone, like I would not wish that on my worst enemy. It was the, and to be honest, it's a nervous system disorder, right? Like I would be remiss to say that I don't still have anybody image things going on in my life today at 33 and somebody that leads education around, you know, nutrition and implementation. Do you think going through that made you a better communicator to clients? 100%. I think actually, I would argue a lot of the reason for my success is the empathy I have for the relationships that clients have with food. Especially as a male to have gone through that. Not a lot of men have gone through that. Or at least want to talk about it. I was gonna say, I won't say that not a lot of men have. Not a lot of men talk about it. So, because I've been so open about it, I have a lot of men in the fitness industry, names that you might be surprised about that have come up to me and have opened up about it. And then like, dude, I went through that shit. Well, you know what, now that you say that, I believe this because we've, and we talk about this in the show all the time, like, you know, there's some of these Instagram celebrities that are 3% body fat, like fucking year round. Yeah, well, that's a whole another thing, right? We get into like, because I'm sure we're gonna talk about diet at some point, right? Those back loaded images. That's so fucked up. And are they really 3% year round? Or are they showing you pictures and talking like a three month span? Right, right. That's a real thing too. No, both of those, I think are big things. I think you've either got one, the guy who actually really does say that way and is actually technically unhealthy, and then you have the other ones that are faking it, that they're doing it the other way. Well, men, we tend to ask for help at a much lower rate than women because we're conditioned to think that it's weak. We're pussies or whatever if we ask for help. Or we just don't even know that that's an option. Like, I don't even think it's a problem. I don't even think it's an option, or it's a problem. Especially if you're suffering from something that's been labeled a female disorder like anorexia. Now, if you say bigorexia, you might have more guys stand out and be like, oh yeah, I stuffed my face with all this food and I took all these weight gainers. That's what I did, right? I had an eating disorder as well. It wasn't anorexia, it was the opposite where I would stuff my face to try and gain weight. Doesn't make it any different, but I could definitely see how it would be difficult for a man to come out and say, hey, I've got this disorder that female models talk about having. Well, it's really interesting because I think that for me coming out of the disorder, I don't ever think I looked in the mirror and said, I'm anorexic, right? And so at the time, when I created the recovery, my hormones were fucked. Like I literally, at 2 p.m. every day, I could not stay awake. Like if you paid me to stay awake, I couldn't do it. Just cortisol resistance probably. Just cortisol was fucked, testosterone was fucked, everything was bad, right? And so the only job I could get that I could hold was opening up Gold's Gym from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. because I'd wake up, right? Cortisol through the roof, just enough energy, like looking back on it now, cortisol was probably really low, but had just enough adrenaline to go on. And so I was opening the gym 5 to 11, one of the trainers saw what I was doing to myself. She's like, you never fucking eat. And so this bodybuilder would come in every day, like around four o'clock and I'd be like, I wanna look like him. And he was leaning, he was getting ready for his contests, he was getting ready for nationals or something. And she's like, well, she's like, I do his diet and I do his training. And I was like, can you do that for me? Cause that's what I wanna look like. And she's like, yeah, absolutely. You gotta go home and you gotta eat 4,000 calories. And I literally, no, I didn't fucking question it. Like that's the fucked up part. I was like, seriously? And she's like, yeah. Oh shit, you went one of course. I went zero to a hundred real quick, like. And so this is before my fitness pal and all that shit. And I went to Barnes and Noble that night, bought a calorie counting book, wrote out a 4,000 calorie meal plan and followed that shit for like the next three weeks. And I looked in the mirror and I wasn't fat and I'm like, holy fuck, this food thing's not so bad. And so I don't ever like now I look back and I'm like, well, yeah, I was anorexia and my parents, you know, or I was anorexic. My parents tell me, yeah, you were anorexic but at the time I didn't have the awareness. Okay, so- There was a total disconnect, complete disconnect. Complete disconnect. To be able to, cause you have to, for the listeners to comprehend this, for somebody to go from not eating anything to then eating 4,000 calories overnight is robotic. It's disconnect like I'll do it. Yeah, it's literally action without any emotion. Like there's no emotional attachment to it. Wow, so you start doing that? So I started doing that. That was super impactful in my life, right? Obviously I was a business major at school cause I feel like that's what everybody does coming out of school. And I was like, okay, I found something I care about. I found something that I'm super passionate about and this shit saved my life cause I was in a downward spiral, man. I was depressed. I had body image issues. I didn't like, I mean, I had a, I was gonna tell a story. Like there was this girl that like I had chased in high school. All of a sudden she wanted to like date me and I like, I pushed her away cause I was so like had such bad self image, self worth. And so I transferred to Florida State and majored in extra science with a concentration in fitness nutrition. And I said to myself, I'm like from this day forward, I'm gonna pay it forward. And I've been coaching people literally ever since. Oh wow. Cool. Now this is a great story first off as you tell it, obviously it's coming from the heart. It's very honest. But also because objectively speaking, if somebody were to look at you, the average person, they see this fit, good looking, dude, you were a model. And for you to say, I suffer from these things, I think it's very powerful because it helps communicate to people that it has almost nothing to do with how you actually look. There is no objectivity there. Were you able to look at yourself objectively at all during this period of time? Never did. Not once. I look back on pictures now and I'm like, that's not how I perceive myself. Isn't that crazy? But I would argue people that don't have full blown eating disorders still have some body dysmorphia. It runs rampant. I think we all do. I think we all do. We all need coaches in every facet of our life because it's not just diet, right? Like we all label the diet industry to be like, if I have a cheat meal, I fucked it up. Well, you spend an extra $100 outside of your budget. Did you completely fuck your budget? Yeah, it's off of what you anticipated, but you don't think the end of the world of it. Yeah, if you eat an extra 100 calories, all of a sudden the world's gonna end. So did you start to actually enjoy the food like as you went through the 4,000 calorie process? So there was still fear and there was still trepidation and I tell the story in my book, right? And so then I went, like when I went to Florida State, I was like, okay, great. I can eat a lot of food. I'm not gonna gain fat. I can be quote unquote normal. But then all of a sudden my buddies are eating like Chipotle and they're eating pizza and I'm like, fuck, like, that's bad food, right? I was still labeling food as bad because I didn't have any education really. And I'm like, that's terrible. Like what's gonna happen if I eat Chipotle? I'm gonna wake up fat tomorrow. And so I avoided it. I avoided it. And finally, like three months into being at school, I was in a situation where I had to eat the Chipotle, right? Like it was either look like a fucking weirdo and like starve myself or just bite the bull and eat it. And so I did and I swore up and down. Like it's like vivid in my memory. I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and be fat and woke up, first thing looks in the mirror, abs are still there. And it was like, it was this trust building process, right? And so I had to do it with Chipotle. I had to do it with pizza. I had to do it with like pretty much every food, man. And so there was definitely a connection there but it was like a trust building process. It's interesting. I remember distinctly for myself, there was a moment where I was over a friend's house and we were doing like pushups and stuff and I had my shirt off and there were two mirrors and one would reflect off the other mirror. And so I caught a glimpse of myself off of the back mirror. So it was from an angle that I never see myself from. And in that moment I was able, because I didn't recognize myself in an instant, I was able to objectively see myself in an instant. It was a very surreal moment for me. Cause most people will never get to that. You know, you don't, it's very difficult to, it's very difficult to separate self-image from body image. We identify so much with our body that that's what we think we are. And we would do it with our thoughts. We'd do it with a lot of things, but especially our body that for that instant when I was able to see this body that I for real quick wasn't able to identify as mine so I could objectively look at it. And all of a sudden I said, oh shit, I'm muscular. Which I had never thought before. I had never thought that before. It was a very strange feeling. So everything you're saying is totally resonating. Tons and tons of sense. So you- And you didn't have a disorder at that time. So think about it with somebody who like already perceives really shitty things about themselves, right? And then flip the script on that. And it's like, well, what if you see yourself in that very objective point of view? And it's like, there's a little bit of fat on the oblique, right? Which inevitably we're all gonna have unless we're like contest lean. Like, holy fuck, now you're fat, right? Now all of a sudden the thoughts they run rampant in your head. And like, that was a vicious cycle, dude. It was an ugly time. So after college, did you go into the virtual world and start coaching online? Did you do a lot of one-on-ones? Did you work for a chain? So back in college, I got the golf bug again. And I was like, man, I'm gonna walk on Florida State. They were powerhouse in the golf space. And they were like, no, we don't do walk-ons. And I'm like, all right, fine, I'm gonna turn pro. And so I got my game back together. I was good enough, I turned pro. I actually spent a year and a half on the mini tours, like Hooters Tour. Had a little success early, yeah, right? Like, you would think it was true. Here we go. It was a quick way to go broke to be completely honest. Like, it was- A lot of hot wings. Yeah, a lot of wings, a lot of travel, a lot of wasted money. Oh, I see, Andy, yeah. You know, looking back on it, I was like 22. It was a quick way to grow up. And when you gotta live on the road by yourself at 22, you grow up pretty quick. And so I did that and looking back on it now, that was a pretty defining moment for me because I kept choosing fitness over golf. Were you as muscular as you are now? So right now I'm like 190. Back then I was probably like 170. But you gotta think, right, at 59, 170, they were like, oh, this guy's fucking Ronnie Coleman. I know, because it's not typical, right? You see all these golfers. They're not real like physique, you know, driven. No, well, which ironically now you're starting to, you're starting to see more of it. But back then it was unheard of. And I kind of chose fitness over golf. And like I remember, you know, tournaments, people would be out practicing on the range, three and four in the afternoon. I'm like, fuck, I gotta go to the gym. I gotta go to chest day, which like no golfer should ever do chest day, right? Like it's the worst thing. You get the most like restrictive thing for your swing, but I'm like, I gotta have a good chest. And like, so some of the eating disorder, it wasn't eating disorder, it was a body image disorder. It was kicking back in. I'm like, man, I can't look like a golfer. I gotta look the way I wanna look. And so probably contributed to me sucking and ultimately losing all my money. So I did that, you know, kind of bounced around. Yeah, like went out to LA, like did the trainer thing out there. Do you remember the show, The Workout on Bravo? Yes, dude. So I went out there for season three. Were you on the show? Oh dude, I'll tell you a good story. Oh my God. All right. So I was literally like my golf career was coming to a close. I'm like laying on my futon in my apartment in Orlando. And I see The Workout come on. And I'm like, those guys fucking suck. I'm like, I'm a better trainer than that. I'm like, I should be on that fucking show. Pretty much everyone on TV. Isn't that the cast? It wasn't Greg Plip from that cast? Was it? Okay, so I'll tell you, yeah, like I ended up hooking up with Greg like a little bit later. So I call them. And I'm like, and this is like, this is my MO dude. Like, and this is like, I tell the story, one, cause it's really funny, but two, like people that listen take fucking action. Like if you really want something, go fucking get it. So I call them and I'm like, hey, I feel like I should work at your gym. Like are you guys hiring? And they were like, yeah, like I will come make your gym better. They were like, ah, like, whatever, like send us a resume. So I sent them a resume and I don't know if it was like the pro athlete thing or something, but something caught their eye. And they were like, oh, like this is really cool. And so I get on the phone with them and they interview me and he's like, cool, like I'll talk to you Monday. We'll talk about like what it looks like coming out to the gym and, you know, when you move here, you've got a job. Cause I bullshitted. I'm like, yeah, I'm definitely moving to LA. I had no fucking clue when I was gonna move, how I was gonna move, but I'm like, this will be rad. And so I call him Monday and I'm like, is so-and-so there was a dude and they were like, no, he doesn't work here anymore. And I had like, I had just gotten done for 48 hours telling the world that I was moving to LA to work at this fucking gym that's like on a TV show. Right, like telling my mom, I was super pumped and they were like, yeah, like he doesn't work here. And I'm like, oh, well, no worries. Like, you know, he told me I was gonna work there. So I'll see you Monday. When should I come out? And they were like, oh no, like we're, we're putting a freeze on that. Like we're not hiring and I'm like, fuck. I'm like, no, you don't understand. Like, you know, and I was like, at this point, I'm like, what the fuck do I do? So I'm like, no, you don't get it. Like he, you know, it was all good. Like I get it. Like you won't hire anyone else, but I need to come out there. And they were like, no, like, you know, I'm sorry, like we have some internal shit. And I'm like, fuck. So like, how do you hack that? Right? So I, this is back in the days of Myspace, right? And so I go on Myspace. I find Brian Peeler. He was like one of these, like the bald head of guy from North Carolina. And I'm like, hey man, I'm gonna be in LA next week. And I'm training for a bodybuilding show, which I wasn't. And I was like, I need you to work. I need you to train me and kick my ass. Cause you know, I'm running low on energy. And he was like, all right, it's 350 bucks. And I'm like, great, done. So book a flight, fly out there. Like the whole purpose of me being in LA for 48 hours is to go in and train with him for an hour. Wow. Go in, start working out. I didn't even give a fuck what we were doing. But I was like, for 60 minutes, I talked about why I should be working there. I walked out of the gym with a job. Yes. And so, so awesome. So I left there, got my job, moved my shit out to LA. Actually offered me a spot on season three, but the contracts were miserable. Like there was a statement in the contract. We can take your words out of context. Wow. And I'm like, that would be like me saying like, so and so is a dick. And then they just like take another statement where I said, Jackie is a, and they like put the two together. Jackie's a dick. No motherfucker, those are two completely different statements, but they can totally. And I've heard horror stories of shit like that. Oh dude, they wanted like, they wanted residuals on like any money that you made. Like it was bad. They wanted like, they wanted to give you like 1000 bucks a month too. Like it was bad. But it was cool to be around the environment. Greg Plitt came out. You know, he was around, not very much to be honest. And it was so staged. It was all dude, it was so bad. And I didn't sign any of these so I can talk anything. She had some light on that shit. I just remember the main girl just hooking up with all the straight girls. And that never happened. Like, well, it happened. Like they hooked up, but she never turned her. Like they hooked up, but it wasn't like a, it wasn't a thing, right? It just, it happened like once and they built this whole storyline around it. It's like, wow, she's a cougar. Wow. How much of it was bullshit? And how much were these guys? Really? I literally, I walk in one time and there's a camera on and Greg is, he's standing in a doorway looking into an office and they're filming him from the office. So like it's like he's talking to somebody in the office. But there's no one in there. Nobody in the office. And then like there was something one day where he took his shirt off like filming a client and there was no cameras around. And the producer's like, oh, that's really good. Can you do that again? And so like they went back out and like re-enacted it. Yeah. So how long were you there? And then yeah, they weren't. So I was there for like, I was there for like a year, you know, realized, hey, it's hard to really make enough money in LA. And so then I like, I bounced around, man. I took a corporate gig in DC. I opened up my own business in Orlando. Actually went back out to LA. And then it kind of came full circle. I trained a bunch of guys on the PJ Tour. Why, why all the place? Why Orlando, DC? What, what's with the? Dude, you'll find like I just fucking love to travel. Like I just feel like I'm a little bit nomadic. And I mean, I could give you all the places. Like I had a corporate gig in DC. Like it was a, like, have you heard of the chain of export out of Chicago? Export, sounds familiar. Sounds very familiar. They're a big, so yeah. Anyone in Chicago knows who export is, right? And so they opened up a DC office. And so I ran their PT department. That's what got me to DC. My sister happens to be the executive assistant to the owner of all of export. So that's how I got hooked up there. So what keeps, okay, now that's a, that's a good little probably story right there is that you have a connection like that. And yet you're, you're still not involved in it. What, why not? Involved with export? Yeah. Dude, it's corporate, right? Like so I, I went in the very first month there. I like, I sold more training in, in a pre-sale than they had ever had sold in the whole month. And they're like, oh, let's, let's work you up the corporate ladder. Like let's take you to Long Island. And I'm like, ah, like this just isn't, it wasn't fulfilling man. It was like, it was sales. It wasn't interpersonal connection. And like now that I'm like in a position where I can look back on my life and be like, why did all this shit happen to me? I realized nothing was ever personal enough. Nothing ever had enough impact. And I live like a million, you know, you and I were messaging yesterday. And like one of the things you said to me was like, clearly I've had an impact on people's lives. Like that, that statement meant more to me than you'll probably ever know. Because I live so much to create impact. And so like looking back, all of these things happened and I moved on beyond all of them because I wasn't having the ability to create impact the way I wanted to. Who created a impact for you? Man, I look back. Obviously the trainer that, you know, that got me out of anorexia, I don't know as though like, it sounds super cliche, like my parents, right? Because now that I'm old enough and I understand finance and all this shit, I realized how poor we were growing up. And I realized how I had every opportunity that the rich kids had. And like my parents strapped themselves to give me a fucking good life and to give me the opportunities I potentially needed to succeed. And I think that inherently that was built into me to where I will sacrifice every ounce of my being for the people around me. Do you remember when you put that together? Like when you, because rarely ever as a kid as you're going through that, do you put that together? Right, we're normally selfish. We normally think that the world revolves around us. Our parents have all these things. I need, I need. And then you look back now, like was there a pivotal moment for you where you realized like, holy fuck, I didn't realize that my parents really didn't have all that. And they really did fucking sacrifice everything for me. I think it was the first time that, you know, like when, like going out of college, like my mom, you know, she's like, get a credit card, I'll pay it, right? And I remember getting to the point where I looked at the credit card statement and I'm like, you're making minimum payments. Like something's off here, right? And then to the point where one day she was like, hey, I can't pay your credit card bill. Like can you pay it? And I was like, I started like the wheel started spinning. I'm like, oh, something's weird here. Like you've never told me no. And then I just started like, I think I started looking deeper into things than I ever have. But there's not, there's not one pivotal moment where I'm like, ah, that was it. Like that did it. I have a pivotal moment where that I attribute to my success today. Like we, Badros calls it my Thanksgiving miracle. So we've all heard like the Christmas miracle, right? Right, right. So three years ago, this past Thanksgiving, I was broker than you could ever imagine. Woke up, is that a word broker? More broke? We'll go with it, right? Like I said it and I was like, it's terrible. I just sounded really bad. I used to like try to call it a day exactly. We just make words up here. So I woke up, I was on a ski vacation and I woke up in the morning and I looked at my bank account and I was overdrawn. And like Thanksgiving day, checks don't clear, like can't deposit money. Like nobody could bail me out of this. And mind you, I have the longest running streak with getting Starbucks than I think any person in the world might have. And so I had to go get my morning americano. Like it was non-negotiable, like how to do it. So not only could I not afford that, but I couldn't afford the Thanksgiving dinner I was supposed to be buying for my girlfriend and I that night. I'm like, fuck, what do I do? And so like we're in the grocery store that morning I happened to look at my bank account again. For whatever reason, like Thanksgiving miracle, a $500 check cleared and I had money in my account. And like I literally remember like how fucking shitty I felt that I couldn't afford something. And I was like, never again. And I knew that success was a function of value. Went home and just was like, whatever I have to do to serve this world, I'm gonna do it. And anyone that knows me knows I'm not short on work. So at the peak of my coaching career before I scaled and brought in other coaches, I worked with 167 clients. And anyone that knows, these are one-on-one dude. And so everyone that works with me gets a 20 to 30 minute phone call every 10 to 12 days. And I was literally taking calls 20 hours a day. I bet. I had to, right? But it was, I have a very hard time if someone sends me an email and they're like, I need help. I know that there's not that many places out there that are giving the level of help that I feel like you deserve, right? Like you guys don't agree. There's some decent resources out there, but a lot of internet coaches are taking your money. And I'm like, no, that's not what we're doing. So I can't see you go to those people. I'm gonna work with you. I'll find a way to get in my schedule. I'll sleep an extra half or half hour less. And then I was like, all right, I gotta scale. And that was like the genesis of our business. Talk about the challenge of that. A lot of people have a hard time scaling from that. It's one thing to build a, you know, six figure business for yourself. And then it's another thing to build yourself a company or a business where you have ultimate employees. What was that like? So I'm massively thankful for my first employee because if she hadn't done a good job, I'm not sure the business would be where it is, right? She was Project X. If she fucked up, I may not have had the trust to bring in other coaches. And so I brought her in. I was like, oh, can I really teach somebody the skill set they need to be a good coach? And I think that number one, I've done a good job identifying people with enough empathy to be good coaches. And so people were like, well, how do you hire? I hire good people. I don't hire skill sets. I hire people. So she was a good person. I taught her the skill set of nutrition coaching. And of course, maybe in the control freak I am, I oversaw everything for 90 days. I'm like, I wanna see all the prescriptions going out, all the communication, all the results coming in, blah, blah, blah. She crushed it. And so then I brought in another one, same process. And we've been fortunate enough to do it. Now, I've never given up a client to another coach. So for me to go from 167, today I coach personally 50 to 60 people, which is still a lot. And most people standards, but to me that's nothing, right? I was on calls for three hours before I came over here this morning and then I'll go sit in the airport for another five hours and do it. But that's like normal day for me. Ask my wife. She'll be like, he's always on the fucking phone. But that was how we did it, man. It was a massive trust thing for me. Wow, how do you find balance? My wife and my kids. So I became instadad earlier this year. My wife had three kids before we got together. And so I became a stepdad to three kids. Dude, how old were they? 11, nine and six. Talk about that transition, cause I'm divorced and I have a girlfriend now that lives with me and my kids half time. I could only appreciate that challenge of moving into like you had no kids and now you got three. So there's a lot of challenges. But there's a lot of reward too, man. It is, it's really cool to see a kid very happy. Like I've always found my gratification of making other people happy, like back to like high school years. You know, like having the girlfriend that like you buy a gift for and she's super excited, right? Like I always thought that was the coolest thing in the world, not because I was gonna get laid, but because it was just cool. It was genuinely awesome. Like I've always wanted to, I've always wanted to be that kid that bought their parents a house, bought their parents a car, right? And you know, I can say that I've paid some mortgage payments for my parents and that we've helped out with their cars. And so that's super cool to me. Seeing my kids light up or seeing the step kids light up, like when we do things for them, it's priceless, dude. So it's given me another level of work ethic that I didn't even know was within me. And that's scary for a lot of people because I'm a hustler. But there's balances, right? So over the summer, when I wrote our, I wrote our education platform, I wrote our level one manual, the most time intensive thing I've ever done. Like I would wake up in the morning and fortunately they like to sleep in. So I'd be up at five, I would write to like nine or 10, they would all wake up, I'd spend the day with them. And so I was basically like five to 10, non-negotiable, that's my writing time. Now all of a sudden they're back in school. I gotta get their asses out of bed at 6.30, right? They don't fucking leave the house till 7.30. So I'm like making breakfast, making sure their shoes are on, jackets are on like fucking Oregon. Like, you know how that goes, right? And so we get them out, then we come home, the 11 year old, he goes on the bus to go to middle school. So I gotta get him out the door at eight o'clock. And then it's like, all right, well, I gotta go work out at 8.30 because if I wait till the afternoon, I'll just be exhausted and I won't get it done. So I've lost like my morning creative time, realistically, right? And I've had to find another time. And that's just, in the past it was, I never would have lost that. So things like that, you quickly learn that you've never come first. You know, you do family dinner, guess who eats first, right? Guess who's plates get made first, right? The kid's plates always get made first. And if there's- Kids are like little dictators in the house. They totally are. Like if I, like we make, we make fucking, like we'll make chicken, right? And like it'll, like my wife will bake it and marinate it and I'll look at it and I'll be like, I need, I need 10 ounces to hit my macros. And I'm like, I am how much they're taking. I'm like, you little motherfucker. I'm like, if you take more than that, I'll fucking kill you. Take that fork and just stab it over. Don't fucking take that piece. But I'm like, I need 10 ounces or like, you know. And then of course, like if they take more, I can't get mad. I gotta fill in like an extra two ounces. Where do I get 16 grams? Dad gets the biggest piece, right? That's the rule. No, my kids are, because my girlfriend would make this big, like elaborate dinner. And then my daughter will look at him and be like, I don't like this. You know, my son, and my son will like eat it, but like plug his nose. Okay. I can eat it. That's great. Yeah. And I'm like looking at her like, don't take a person like this kids. Yeah. Kids are just a little dictated. Brutally honest. Oh, dude. Yeah. Let's talk about your nutrition philosophy or kind of the cornerstone. Like what separates your philosophy or your company's philosophy with nutrition, how you approach it versus other people. So I've tried to narrow that down and I continue to think about it. I think it's going to be an evolving thought process for me. You know, it's very cliche to be like, well, we customize, right? That's not new. I think that for me, like what it comes down to is the implementation. I think that there's so much knowledge out there. I think realistically, any person listening to this could go to the internet, Google and find every answer they need. But it's, how do you fit that into your lifestyle? How do you, how do you do it with a date night? How do you do it with, well, I want to drink beers on Sunday for football. How do you like, how does all this, how do all the pieces fit together? That's where we've excelled. We've taken individuals that don't have the knowledge, we give them the knowledge and we also provide the implementation and the support, because inevitably you're going to fuck up. You know, inevitably you're not going to be motivated. Inevitably you're going to get injured or you're going to travel or you're going to have a business meeting. How do you handle that shit? We are the 24 seven on demand coaching service. We basically build a concierge service, right? Where I've got athletes, they'll go to lunch and they'll be like, text us and read a picture. Here's a screenshot of the menu. What do I get? And it's like, well, I mean, you know, every macro site will be like, I'll just find something to fit your macros. That's not what they want to hear. They want me to help them guide them through. So I'm going to ask a couple of questions. We're going to figure out what they normally eat, right? And we're going to figure that out. What did you eat earlier? What did you eat yesterday? But that little accountability piece dude, that text message being there in that one moment, it took me what, five seconds in my day, that moves them forward on a level that they never would have moved forward on. Who's more challenging to coach a professional athlete? Because I know you're talking about MMA fighters versus like your average person. Well, an MMA fighter is probably the easiest person because they're coming to me in a camp and they know that if they miss weight, like there's a pretty significant financial penalty, right? They're going to lose half their purse. So they'll eat whatever. So they will eat dog shit if I told them to do dog shit. I mean, the final week before a fight is never fun, but they suffer, they're used to it. So I wouldn't say that they're hard. Pro athletes are, they like to rely on their talent. I think the difference, like I just started working with a guy in the NBA, won't say who, but he came to me, he's really successful, made a lot of money last year. He's like, I want that LeBron type money. And he's like, I know the difference is dotting my eyes, crossing my T's. Super successful, but you could get somebody that's like my pro golfers on the PJ Tour. They're like, whatever, I swing golf club. Getting them to be compliant is relatively hard. So I'd say it's 50-50, man. Like you've got the same issues with pro athletes that you do with regular people. Yeah, and as far as sustainability, do you find like a stark difference with that with athletes versus just coaching your average person? Trying to think, because I think that inevitably I could tell you, I could give you the really good examples of pro athletes and I could give you the really shit ones and then I could give you the really good examples of regular people and the really shit ones. And I think that there's always this line of demarcation where people are complacent or they're not. And it's the same with pro athletes, right? And so you'll get, you know how it is, you see the regular people that become successful and they're like, oh, this macro thing is easy. I could do it on my own. And then they leave you and then they come back three months later and they're like, oh, okay. I didn't know as much as I thought I knew. It's the same with an athlete. Any CrossFit athletes that you deal with at all? Or anybody? Oh, okay. Talk about that what that's like. Yeah, so I mean, I've, last year, I think I had 12 people at the games, maybe more. That is probably the single hardest one. And... Why? Because CrossFitters have this thing where they think CrossFit should be all about looking good and as we all know, to achieve low levels of body fat, you need to be in a somewhat of a deficit, right? To sacrifice some performance. Which will sacrifice performance, which at the levels of CrossFit and the levels of exercise they're doing now. So we're looking now at intensity, but we're looking at intensity at volume, right? Intensity at high volumes is going to fuck your hormones up, undoubtedly. So now you've got, and there's a really controversial statement out there. I won't say who said it, but everybody will recognize it, that people should get to a low level of body fat before they become competitive. I think that statement's bullshit. I think that's actually the root problem of most of the CrossFit issues that come to me. So I get people coming to me all the time. Well, I'm only eating 1200 calories so I'm not losing weight. So that statement in its absolute form, right? If you told a woman, let's say she's 150 pounds, she might have a better chance at high volume gymnastics at 135 pounds. Undoubtedly she needs to lose some weight. If you tell her that two weeks before the open, right? And she's only eating 1600 calories and tell her, well, you need to be lighter for your gymnastics. What is she going to do? Compromise her strength and everything. She's going to eat less calories. She's already in too much of a deficit, right? We know that. But in her head, she's going to be like, fuck, I'm going to eat less calories. They're going to eat 1200 calories. Now it's going to happen. You're going to suck shit worse. You're going to make your hormonal profile worse. You're going to exacerbate all the underlying issues. So then by the time that you do get to me come June, you're going to be in a pretty bad place. It might take me a year to fix you before we can really get back into things. How do you back people out, because we talk about this on the show all the time and it's somewhat controversial, although it's becoming more accepted now where we'll get competitors that'll come to us, bikini competitors, bodybuilders, whatever. And they're eating, just the metabolic adaptation. Their bodies are burning very little calories even though they're doing lots of cardio and they're eating very little and they can't figure out why their body just won't respond anymore. How do you, what is your approach to backing people out of that? I know it's definitely an individual thing, but are there some general guidelines at you? So the first thing I think is, so in our education platform, we live by the quote education drives compliance. So when I'm teaching coaches how to coach, I'm telling them first, you need to educate your clients. If you go into a situation and you tell a client, hey, listen, I'm going to raise your calories irregardless of the outcome because we have to restore maintenance calories. And you don't tell them they might gain weight. They're going to send you the middle finger and be like pigs out, right? They're going to go back to the asshole that would starve them. I definitely will reverse diet them out. And the reality is, and I wrote an article on metabolic adaptation and reverse dieting, there's three potential outcomes. One, someone's going to hyper respond. You start increasing those calories. They haven't been metabolically adapted very long. They're going to start losing weight, right? And those are the people that trainers love to be like, hey, look, I increased so and so's calories and they're fucking shredded. Like you got a really good situation thrown your way because it's not always going to work that way. The other outcome is you're going to increase their calories, biofeedback markers, physiological responses are going to improve, right? They're going to sleep better. Their hunger response going to improve. They're going to get their sex drive back. They're going to have some energy, but the weight's not going to change. Body comp might improve a little bit, but weight's not going to change. That's a decent one to deal with, right? Then you're going to get the people that are fucked, right, that you reversed diet them. You know you have to get the calories up. It's non-negotiable. They're going to gain some weight. So I always tell the example of how the woman come to me from Oregon. She came to me and I was like, yeah, it's going to be a while before we can lose some weight. She was eating like 700 calories a day and this is like, she did like exercise tapes, like Taibo. Like five of them a day. And I was like, if she wasn't like cooking or working like with her husband, like she was working out. She felt like she constantly had to be moving. Took us like a little over a year to really finish the reverse diet. And she gained like eight pounds. So here I am like telling somebody that comes to me for fat loss, hey, by the way, yeah, you can eventually lose some fat but it's going to take you over a year for us to even start and at that point you're going to be even heavier. And you may put some weight on a little bit. That's the fucking hardest thing in the world to tell a client. But we had that conversation on the front end. I earned her trust from day one. I told her what was going to happen. I told her that I have the long game in my best interest and her best interest, right, at heart and that she had to trust the process. I had her read articles, I sent her stuff. So we created a level of education for her. She trusted the process through and through and we ultimately hit her goal. The education piece is so important because we hear terms like metabolic damage and I think people feel like something's wrong with their body when in reality their body's acting exactly the way it's supposed to. It's actually doing a very good job adapting. We were not born to be fucking stage ready, right? That's not why we were put on the face of this earth. Some people maybe they should be because they look damn good doing it but that's not what we were put on this planet for. So what about helping with the hormone profiles or what about exercise wise? Do you may place more of a focus on like straight set resistance training to build muscle mass? So you asked about crossfit, right? And the one thing I try to do with crossfitters I try to get them to do less crossfit. And you want to talk about a fucking battle, right? Cause they're like, well I came to crossfit. That's how you lose fat. Look at the top level crossfitters, they're all ripped, right? Like why is that not going to work? By the way, top level any athlete is the worst representation of, yeah, example of what to do. They're only the one percenters, man. Yeah, but you can't tell anybody that they're on TV, right? Like they're on TV, they're the face of crossfit and crossfit has sensationalized. You know, they're starting to move towards that's the appearance of what a crossfitter should be. But you go in the average person in crossfit, look at our culture today, right? Western culture, we overcapinate, we overstress, we under sleep, we under recover. Oh, and by the way, let's take the most intense modality of training known to man this day and let's throw that on top because that's not enough stress in our life. Let's just add a fuck ton more stress, right? Yeah, more intensity. So, and then let's eat less calories and let's create zero recovery and let's just bash our hormones and that's essentially what's happening. So again, I have to educate them. I have to teach them what's happening with intensity, understand what happens at intensity, get them to pull back. When I can get them to pull back and trust it, we always have success. But a lot of times, man, it's reducing the intensity. It is doing things like straight sets, taking some of the higher forms of cardio away initially, not saying they can't go back in, but initially, it really comes down to stress, right? The fundamentals of transformation are stress and adaptation, period. You intentionally impose a stressor, your body has to be able to facilitate an adaptation. If you've reduced your ability to facilitate adaptation, you will not get said adaptation, which could be fat loss, which could be hypertrophy, which could be strength, whatever it is. And we're all intentionally compromising those things with under recovery, right? Or unintentionally compromising those things by not recovering, not sleeping. We don't realize it, right? We're living in the sensationalized culture of hustle and work and more intensity. Well, and don't you feel like those type of people are the ones that gravitate to those type of workouts? 100%. I mean, oh yeah. I always say on the show that it's like- Look at the pictures on Instagram, right? It's like the people that don't need to be doing that are doing it the most than the people that could actually use a little bit of that in their life or not doing it. The way I explain it to people is, when you're that type A individual, when you're go, go, go all the time and you're getting that cortisol to rise all the time and your body's starting to become resistant to that cortisol as an adaptation response, getting it to go higher will temporarily make you feel good. And so you get a lot of these people who are like, what are you talking about? These high intense workouts make me feel amazing. You feel awesome. I feel great. And you actually will gravitate towards them because you get that immediate feedback, not realizing that like insulin resistance, you're dealing with a situation where you're not feeling your cortisol. So if you keep pushing it up higher, you'll start to feel normal, but eventually that runs out and you get to the point where you're absolutely screwed. I mean, I've seen some people that were, I mean in terrible situations. And for people who deny that this can even happen, I mean, we've done studies on POWs. It happens with drugs too. Think about it. Think about what drugs. The first initial drug, whatever it may be that someone's taking, it's like, I get all these positive effects. So that leads me to do what? More. And then I get the more. And then you just end up chasing it like crazy, trying to get that feeling. Meanwhile, you're doing all this damage to your body. I think that's where people just have a hard time connecting that. Well, and the sad thing is, you're talking about cortisol, it sometimes gets worse before it gets better, right? And so then you take somebody who's been doing a lot of intensity and you're like, hey, I need you to do less intensity. I need you to eat more. Well, what happens initially? They get more tired. Of course. They're like, what the fuck? I thought this was going to help me. Why am I more tired? Well, think about it, right? Like your body's natural state to recover is what? It's sleep, right? We recover the most when we sleep. Like our cortisol rises, our growth hormone rises. That's when we're in a position of actually recovering. Well, what the fuck do you think of fatigue responses? Your body's saying, hey, motherfucker, I need to recover. Like you need to do more of this shit to sleep. And I'm finally not stressed enough. I finally am not putting out so much cortisol. I'm finally not fight or flight. I'm not my sympathetic nervous system. I actually want to live parasympathetic. I want to be rest and digest. I want to sleep. That's a good sign. So people that are pulling back on your training and on eating more and you're like, I'm more tired. Great, you're going down the right rabbit hole. Keep going. You'll lose the fatigue. You'll be in a good place. I tell people that the only way out is through. You have to go through it. You can't avoid it by, say, okay, I'm gonna avoid some of the withdrawal or the symptoms of, at some point, you're gonna cut the substance off, whatever that may be, whether it's intense exercise, drugs, alcohol, whatever, and you're gonna feel your body go through that period of adaptation. It's gonna feel like shit. Yeah, I mean, it's like you mentioned with drugs, right? Like you pull out of drugs and you got that withdrawal. I mean, with cortisol and training is a little bit different, but it's that same initial just feeling like shit. Well, the tough part I find when I'm working with people with this is that they compare, they don't realize that the human organism, and I say organism could encompass all things, emotional, physical, whatever, that it is a constant changing state. And what they do is they say, well, I am working out very little. I'm only working out twice a week. Normally I was working out five or six days a week, so I'm not doing too much. But the problem is that they're comparing their current workload to a previous state that their body may have been in when in fact, right now, your current state, that is too much. If it's too much, it's too much. And sometimes that means two days a week is too much. Did I work with a guy that was so, and we did saliva tests on him, right? And we looked at, we can call it adrenal fatigue, we can call it HPA dysfunction, we can call it DHA to cortisol ratio. Whatever the fuck you wanna call it, it exists, right? There's lab values around DHA and cortisol. We looked at his DHA cortisol ratio, it was so fucked, he was borderline stage four adrenal fatigue, he was deep stage three, right? We made him not train at all for eight months. Like zero, like you could go in and maybe ride the bike under zone one, if that even exists, right? For like 20 minutes. And this is a guy that at his peak, I think in like 2012, he placed top 20 in the world in the CrossFit Open. Oh shit. Like so this guy was like a legit athlete. And we took him out of training for eight months. And the first month, dude, he was like relieved. It was like he was waiting for somebody to be like, oh, finally, I don't have to train, right? But he, you know, classic mentality, like, you know, the other, Sal to your point, the other one is people are like, oh, I'm only training twice and versus six times, right? Well, if you're only training twice, but now all of a sudden, like you're also working five more hours a day. You know, you're working seven days a week. You're caffeinating triple what you used to be doing. You went through a breakup, right? All these things, they factor into your ability to recover, your ability to perform. They're responsible for cortisol production. They're responsible for hormonal output. And everything comes back to those things. Now I also find that people in this state, you know, again, whatever you want to call it, I like to use HPA axis, you know, dysfunction. In that state, I also find almost every single time some form of intestinal hyperpermeability, or otherwise known as leaky gut. How do you work with that? Or do you test for that? Do you do things like a pinner test or? So I have, I actually brought a hormone specialist onto my staff because we get so many like that. And I put him through the FDN course so that we have the ability to test in-house. Actually, the facility I'm looking at opening is an area where we're looking to go deeper into that. You know, it's not the primary thing that we jump right into. Whether the lab test shows it or not, we know that the treatment is ultimately going to be relatively the same, right? Reduce in stress, change your dietary intake, change your output. So I'm gonna try to manipulate what I can first. And most of the time, the insurance won't cover it. So that's the reason we don't go the lab test route first. That being said, if we're not creating compliance, or if we're still not seeing results, 100%, I go straight into the lab test. And you're right. I mean, I think that it's almost like they go hand in hand. They go hand in hand, man. And people don't realize that your gut's your second brain, you know? And so if you're just abusing yourself from a stress point of view, if you're abusing yourself from an exercise point of view, which really are the exact same thing, you're crushing your guts too. Now, let me ask you. So you've been in fitness now for a while. Yep. It wasn't that, cause I'm not that much older than you. It wasn't that long ago, where if I said something like HPA axis dysfunction or, you know, intestinal hyperperimidability or leaky gut, and I said that in a fitness circle, they'd laugh me out of the room. 100%. The wacko, woo woo, you know, wellness guy. You were a holistic guy, right? Like, cause holistic used to be such a bad connotation. Oh yeah. You're natural. You're a fucking granola. You smell bad. You're from Oregon, right? You're from Oregon. Like, and, you know, it's, yeah. Like now I think that people, that's what I'm saying. But at the same token, I think people, we're gonna see it shift too much in the next five years where everything is gonna get played. Of course. It's like hip. It's already happening right now. It's like keto, right? It's like, yeah. And then we called the keto supplement thing before it ever happened. As soon as keto hit, we were like, leave it to the fitness industry. We're gonna have a supplement to get you into ketosis. So we called it. Was it keto that brought the supplements in or was it the supplements that made keto sexy again? Because I started seeing the supplements pop up and then everyone under the sun. And I like, It's true cause keto's been around for a long time. This keto diet, where the fuck have you been for the last 30 years? Right, right. Like, I'm only 33 years of age and I've seen it come and go at least twice. But things go in cycles, dude. I remember, like, I don't know if you guys have been in the bodybuilding world like for, you know, like George Farah, the prep coach, right? And so when George got really popular, he was right before him, Dave Palumbo was really popular. Oh yeah. And so Dave was the keto guy, right? And so everybody was prepping on keto. All of a sudden George comes along and he's like, well fuck keto, everyone needs carbs. I remember picking up a Muscle Development Magazine one day and the cover, it said carbs are back. Where the fuck did they go, dude? Did they disappear? Everybody's been avoiding them. I bought that magazine. I actually remember it saying that. That's hilarious. And I mean like, you know. Everybody high fives? Yeah! Carbs. Where did they go? You know, and so, and I've been around the industry long enough and everyone always asks me, how did you get your knowledge? Well, the truth is, man, like coming up in the industry, I hired everybody I could. I wanted to learn their methods. I wanted to pick their brain as to how they worked with clients. How did they, you know, track data? What was going through their mind? Cause I wanted to see, man, like they're the experts, not me coming up in the industry. And so I had worked with like Scott Abel and Scott Abel's a big, Scott Abel's a big high carb, low fat guy. He was a wrestler, right? No, no, Scott, Scott's from Canada. Okay. Yeah, and he, I mean. Was he from that whole, was he from that crew? Muscle camp. Okay, I know, okay. Yeah, back with like a CEDO and when they were all traveling around the world. He's the cycle diet guy. He's the guy that like, if you ever hear a CEDO talk about somebody ate a whole cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory and got leaner the next week, that was Abel. And so. It's funny cause bodybuilding with all of the bad things that it's done and brought to the, to the fitness industry, there's also a lot of very fascinating, interesting. They were the ones out experimenting first, right? They are the ones that were taking the risk. That's it. That's it. You, if you read like some Vince Garanda's. Oh yeah. From way back in the day, you're talking about, you know, way back in the, in the black and white days pre-steroid era, Vince Garanda's talking about increasing your cholesterol intake and getting stronger. You know, and we're hearing that cholesterol kills you. And you know, of course now we have studies showing that if you do bup your cholesterol intake, you will get stronger. You know, all these different things. So very fascinating. You know, as far as carbs are concerned, I responded very well to eating lower carbohydrate, mainly because I had probably some leaky gut issues and I had a lot of food intolerances with foods that contain carbs. But it's important to also note that there are some people with HPA axis dysfunction. You cut their carbs, they get thyroid problems. Forget about it. They get thyroid problems. Some of them get thyroid problems. If you've got HPA issues, you should be putting carbs back in. So the guy I told you about that we made take eight months away from training, at the peak we had him on 500 carbs, right? And if you think about it, what's the shut off mechanism to cortisol, right? It's insulin. And so what are we trying to do? If your cortisol is jacked all day because you're constantly fight or flight and you can't shift to parasympathetic, what are we looking to do? We're looking to shut off cortisol as much as we can. It's true because you get, feed them motherfucker some carbs. It's true because you could raise, you could raise growth hormone and cortisol still rise. Absolutely. That'll drive it down. And that's where, for the internet marketing crowd, that's where Kiefer's back loading was predicated on, right? Like it was, well, have protein and fat at breakfast. You'll stop the anti-catabolic, or you'll stop the catabolic nature of cortisol, but you'll keep growth hormone elevated. So you've got an anabolic environment. Cortisol stays elevated, it's catabolic, but you've got protein and fat to spare the muscle. So it'll instantly attack fat because cortisol is non-selective. That was the thesis, right? In not so many words of carb back loading. It didn't take quantity into account, so I don't think it went very well. No, I think a lot of bodybuilding science is, one plus one equals two, and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it equals three, but they've, I mean, a lot of times they point in the right direction. Things are always moving, they're on the cutting edge. And I think people want to dispute it because pro-bodybuilding is usually sensationalized by steroids. Sure. But you look at the natural scene, like Joe Kuzemski, Lane Norton, like I think they're the first two I ever heard talking about macros. Lane was for us, for sure. Right, and so, you know, and Lane learned from Joe. And so I think that they were the first two to really talk about macros. Macros are, they've been around a long time because of those guys, but they're really becoming sexy like the last three or four years. Even that's starting to go too far though with the IIF way I'm proud and the, how do I fit these pop tarts and donuts? I'm sure you've heard of us bashed that stuff before, right? Well, so it's interesting, so people come to us all the time, they're like, what's your approach? Is it macros? And I'm like, well, everything comes down to quantity. Listen, like if you eat 500 calories of salmon and broccoli, you're gonna be metabolically adapted. If you eat 5,000 calories of salmon and broccoli, you're gonna be fat. Like calories do matter. Sure. Like, so to say that macros are the only thing that's important is completely false. But then it's like, can you eat pop tarts and donuts and get stage shredded? Yes, it's been proven. But the stage shredded equal epitome of health. Fuck no. There you go. Right, so I operate, I'm like, and I don't know if you guys have seen this concept that I put out, I operate in the triangle of awareness. And so I say there's somebody that has performance goals, they have aesthetic goals, or they have longevity goals. And they're three very distinct points with three very distinct sets of goals and subset of non-goals within them. So if you're telling me, and you're coming to me as an athlete, let's use my fighter next week. Your goal is to win your UFC match. Don't give a fuck if you wanna be 100 years old. Because you're not gonna be 100 years old. You're gonna take a lot away from that. I really don't care what you look like when you're fighting. If you win, you collect your paycheck and you win knock out of the night, I did my job. If you come to me to win a bodybuilding show, do I want to keep you healthy? Of course I do. I want you alive on that stage. I don't get, you don't win the show. Philly didn't win the Mr. Olympia because he bench presses more than Kye Green. Or that he's healthier. Right, like you don't. There's no biomarkers involved. But if you wanna be 100 years old, you're not gonna try to catch pass in the NFL. You're not gonna try to get on a bodybuilding stage. And so where every person that's listening right now has to take a step back and be like, all right, where am I? Because if I say I want performance, I'm a crossfitter. If I want performance, how much cosmetics do I want? How much longevity do I want? So how far away of that definitive point of performance do you want? It's funny because the very act of competing at a very high level is anti-longevity. So bad, dude. Matt Frazier is not gonna live to be 95. No, they've done autopsies on long distance, ultra marathon runners who suddenly die at the age of 45 and their hearts look like they're 80 years old from the oxidative damage. 100%. So what I like to tell people is, because the average person, most people who are listening right now have no desire to compete at those types of levels. Most people listening just like, look, Matt. Which is why they shouldn't be taking advice or information from them. That's right, amen. They just wanna look good. They wanna feel good. They wanna be able to work their job, be successful and all that stuff. And I like to tell people, look, if you're really healthy, you're gonna look fucking good. You're not gonna be stage ready. You're not gonna be, but you're gonna look fucking amazing. Look, being stage ready feels like shit, right? Like, it's not a fun place to go. Like, even being photo shoot ready is not a fun place to go. It's amazing the perception that people have because of the lights, the stage, the cameras, the, you mentioned Instagram earlier, right? People will be stage ready and they'll take a picture. Oh, look at me. I feel like a million bucks. You don't? Let's get a camera on you the last seven days. Let's see how many times you've exploded on someone or like just a fucking dick, right? Hungry and I sleep well. Yeah, like you don't feel good, so. Yeah, it's that, and the other thing too is if you develop a good awareness and connection to your body to understand what your optimal health is, then that becomes your home base. And it's a good home base. Where's that middle point of all those three attributes? It's a good home base because when you're an extreme competitive athlete or you're pushing your body to these crazy limits, your home base is health versus extreme, because I see this all, we see this all the time, right? Extreme performance, extreme body composition. And then when I'm not competing, there is no home base and it's fuck all. It's all of a sudden you see these people off season and they're not recognizable. Well, and it's like, we live in this comparison world, which it's social media has made it super easy to do. And so you look at Instagram and so people think, well, the picture of health is abs. And as a female, it's probably not the truth, right? Some are genetically gifted with a set point low enough where that is the truth, but as a female, it's probably not the truth. And so now you get these females out there that think the picture of health is abs. And so they're chasing abs as their picture of health when in reality, they need to chase set point, right? They need to understand that every navigation away from set point is going to come with some sort of adaptation, some sort of internal compromise from their body. And so again, like going back to the education piece, you can get a client to understand where their set point is, where they're comfortable navigating from set point as a lifestyle perspective, then I think that you're probably going to win long term. The point to that is that it's good for you to put stress on the body occasionally. As long as you have a good solid home base and you understand where you want to return, the problem that most people have is they find that stress and they attach themselves to it. They identify with it and becomes dogmatic about it. Like that's my approach because they had some sort of success with it because the body adapted, it changed, it showed them some sort of a response. Now I'm fucking married to it. Well, dude, in CrossFit, we see that in two ways, right? One, you get the idiots that go in and they think Paleo's a good diet for CrossFit. Like, you're going to tell- Ooh, talk about that. That's a great controversial discussion right there. Paleo's the single worst diet for CrossFit. Ooh! So, like that's a true statement. That's spicy. And here's the thing. It's funny that it's controversial because it's scientifically- It's just factual and actually, go ask Rob Wolf. He would say the same thing. And actually, if you read, what is it? He actually talks about it in that book. That, you know, there's not enough carbohydrate in the Paleo diet to fuel glycolytic exercise. Period. CrossFit is glycolytic in nature. So, but here's what's happening is, and you guys talked about it two or three episodes ago. You talked about like, you know, your map's anabolic and the transition like in your programs, right? And how like when you start to adapt and there's like this adaptation phase that you change the stimulus. Well, in CrossFit, you get into CrossFit. Everything is adaptation. And so it's really the brain is learning. And I've gone on record and I think that you would create the same level of results at 500 calories that you would at 5,000 calories because it's all in neurological adaptation. You're learning how to snatch. You're learning how to clean and jerk. Mostly people have never squatted. They've never deadlifted. They've never run. They've never done a 20 minute AMRAP, right? So like you get into a 20 minute AMRAP and you get the person that's like, oh, I'm good at exercise. I'm gonna fucking blow this out of the water. Two minutes in, they're laying on their back and they can't even finish 20 minutes, right? But learning how to pace yourself is an adaptation. All of these things are happening for the first eight or nine months. They're neurological adaptations. Well, if you're eating a paleo diet and a calorie deficit, guess what's gonna happen? You're gonna lose weight. You're gonna be shredded. You're gonna leverage a little bit of cortisol and you're gonna feel great. The problem is they all hit this wall at eight or nine months in. And they're like, fuck, why did I just get weaker? How come those 50 pound PRs are 10 pound regression? How do you deal with people that you don't understand it? How do you deal with people that you know deep down inside and you need to get away from CrossFit but they absolutely love it. You've gotta be in struggle, right? So, I mean, I've spent the last four years majority CrossFitting, right? I know for me, and I somewhat fit that mold, right? Because for all my life, I flew in last night, I'm on a red-eye home tonight. Like, think about what that does. Just that alone has a stressor to the body. Let alone the fact that I'm up at five working today up until, you know, whenever. Putting CrossFit on top of that is just fucking stupid. But you're addicted to that, like, you know, kind of hormonal response. You catch yourself sometimes, like, when you get back, you want to go to, and you know better. That's rare that you recognize that. A hundred percent, right? And actually, so one of the things Josiah and I talked about this week, because we've been working out and I told him, I'm like, dude, like, I need you to tell me to shut the fuck up half the time and that we need to just like power lift and we need to not do anything super high intense. Not that power lifting is low intensity. I mean, I get the whole intensity being, you know, relative to load on the bar, and he was like, all right, I got you, you know, but I needed that accountability. Otherwise, it's, you know what else is for busy people? It's easy to go to CrossFit class. It's easy to show up, shut your brain off for an hour and do whatever the fuck they tell you to do. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to be motivated because as soon as you're there, you have to do it or you look like a fucking douche, right? Like you got to do the workout. That's why it's so appealing to athletes. It is. It's sort of that process. Like you remember that, like showing up for practice. Telling what to do is competing. Yeah, it definitely feeds to that. So that's the first thing though, right? Is that whole neurological adaptation phase with CrossFitters. The other one is high level CrossFitters. And so I built this model, you know, theoretically, we all know they should be periodizing their training, right? You should periodize, they should, yeah, theoretically. Trust me, that's a fucking big F. I should show you something. Dude, I, did you watch the, and I love Rich Froning, but did you watch his, the last Netflix series? I didn't even, I didn't realize until him. And then we had Jason CLEEP on the show and he also confirmed this. I didn't realize these fuckers were training that intense three times a day. Oh, minimum. That's crazy. But here's the thing, right? That's crazy. I think that, so here's the thing. Look at what Rich and Jason are doing in those training sessions. They're doing AMRAPs, they're doing EMOMs. They're doing things where they can control their heart rate and the intensity across the whole thing. They're not doing fucking 21, 15, 9, like Fran, right, thrusters and pull-ups. Which is ironically for a two minute workout will smash the nervous system. They're not doing fucking MRF. They're not doing things quote unquote, four time. They're doing it where they can control the intensity. They're living at 80%. What do power lifters do? They live at 80%. What do only lifters do? There's longevity in that. They're really just building- That's the magic number, 80%. They're just building a aerobic base, right? Within a working environment. That's why they're able to sustain the high volume. The problem is the inference that people out in the public take, is well, they're training three times a day. They're smashing themselves three times a day. So let me go to fucking three classes, compete in three classes and three different shit. I'm the motherfucker on the top of the whiteboard. I'm such a badass. No dude, like you're gonna suck on the open, right? So if they're periodizing properly, your nutrition has to match that. Because the demands of in-season crossfit, like very high intensity glycolic exercise are not the demands of off-season crossfit, which realistically is strength and skill acquisition. The demands of intense fat loss phase versus the demands of taking some time to relax and recover the hormones, completely different. Every individual needs to look at their nutrition as a much broader scope, right? And to a degree, it's all periodization. In crossfit, it's true periodization. In fat loss, there is a small element of periodization with it. And I think a lot of people overlook that. Now something I've said in the past that was actually, remarkably controversial was that when you're dealing with the body starting to adapt to too much stress that I found in my experience that women in particular seem to get into that HPA axis dysfunction that faster and easier than men do. I don't think that's controversial at all. Well, I have people, what are you talking about? And it's like, no, if I have women fast too much, if I have pushed, like their period stops, they start losing their hair at much sooner rates. They're also less resilient. Once they're in that HPA dysfunction, forget about it. Like it is a much harder process coming out. But if you think about it, right, it all goes back to pregnant women. And precursors and the ability to produce sex hormone. Obviously males have a much easier, and they're much more resilient from a sex hormone standpoint than people's are, which is all going to go back to the ability to create adequate amounts of cortisol. Pregnantal and steel is gonna be much more prevalent in a female and it's just gonna be harder to recover from. Now, when you look at, Jay, when you look at the CrossFit community and the culture around it right now, do you, and knowing what you know and dealing with as many athletes as you have, do you feel like it's getting better or worse? At the athletic level or at the kind of everyday class war? Everyday class warriors, you know, in general. I think it's getting worse because of like the statement I said earlier, I think that there's just too many people that are talking about weight control and CrossFit. And like we said earlier, go back to the whole triangle of awareness thing. Performance is so far away from cosmetics, right? There's so, like absolute performance is not defined as absolute cosmetics. Now, if you're fueling your performance optimally, will cosmetics improve? Most likely, right? But look at like, look at Matt Frazier. He is not the leanest dude at the CrossFit Games. Oh, and he won by the largest margin of victory ever last year, right? By not being super shredded. And, you know, not to use names, can I drop a name? For sure. Like, I don't want to be super controversial, but. Be super controversial. It's mine, but mother fucker, you need to know where you're at, I know. I don't want to be because like, I know that this person works with a competitor of ours and it's not a reflection of them, right? But like Brookwell's last year, she posted a picture a week out of the CrossFit Games. Homegirl was shredded. I have a ridiculous amount of respect for what she achieved because I don't think her set point is super close to shredded. Like I think she's somebody that needs to be a little heavier. Yeah, thicker. She's a thicker friend. She's a thicker girl, right? She also didn't have her best performance last year. Now, there could be a host of other things that went wrong and I'm not in her camp. I don't understand anything that went wrong, but I have to believe that what she did to get super shredded negatively contributed to performance. Especially when you're dealing with women. Fat is a hormone sensitive tissue. It is. And if you eliminate all of it in a woman in particular, you're gonna have some big problems with your hormones and then your performance. Yeah, absolutely. It's a, now, you know, what is optimal from a body fat percentage for a female to perform at a high level? I think that's super open to debate. Oh, and I think it's gonna be a reality. I think Brooke being slightly heavier, I think she'd perform a little better. And dude, she came fourth the year before that. She's clearly a talented girl. She's young, she's resilient. She'll be back this year, she'll crush it. But I think that, you know, watching that, because dude, my phone blew up. They're like, do you see this picture? And I'm like, yeah, let's just hold out and let's see performance. Because initially, my inclination was, eh, this isn't gonna turn out very well. And it didn't. How hard is that to tell someone who comes and hires you at that level and say, hey, look it, we gotta make you fatter? Yeah, so I just had a former games client reach out to me and she said, hey, I really need you to rebuild like my metabolism. Like I'm in a pretty fucked up place. And so we started going through things and sure enough, like she's just pretty messed up. And so I told her, I said, listen, like when competition time comes around, like she's shredded, dude. Like I'm like, when competition time rolls around, I might take your abs from you. Like, don't worry, I'll give them back to you after you've been on that podium, I'll give you your abs back, right? I can absolutely do that in the off season. But right now, I don't give a fuck about abs. And right now from a CrossFit perspective, we're going into December. I don't know when this will air, but you know, we're tomorrow's December 1st and we're 12, 13 weeks out of the open. Anybody that's thinking about competing in the open right now, stop caring about your cosmetic. Do you think it's the TV and social media that's driving that? Fuck yeah, right? Absolutely. Because we see these athletes that are like, Well, and I think there's this general perception that if you're lighter, you'll be better at gymnastics. CrossFit's becoming a very gymnastic focused modality. Like if you look at the regionals last year, a lot of clients do the regionals. And there's some truth to that, right? Absolutely. Well, it's relative body strength, right? Like, so Joe DeFranco's huge on relative body strength. And I think that more Crossfitters need to start understanding that concept. You know, if they had more relative body strength. Then it doesn't matter how much you weigh. Doesn't matter what you weigh, right? Because if you can overcome your body weight certain amount of times, you're going to win. And so I think sometimes they have to look at themselves and be like, well, am I just not fueling enough at this weight? And that was the case two years ago where I worked with a girl who swore up and down. She's like, I got to lose weight for gymnastics. We ended up gaining two pounds. It was the first time she ever went to the games. So. Wow. Awesome. It was just proving that. Do you ever get any backlash for this message? I'm sure it's out there, right? My clients that hire me don't necessarily backlash because I think they're on board with like what I'm teaching. Yeah, but you've been on a lot of podcasts and you've done a lot of stuff out there. Yeah, I'm sure there's people that are going to disagree with what I say and that's okay. You know, it's, I like to live in science. I like to say like, this is like, go look at the fucking physiology, like go look at the studies. It's not that hard to prove what I'm telling you. Long term living in a deficit is not going to be advantageous for a hormone profile. Like you said, fat's a very hormone sensitive tissue. Like these things are non-negotiable. Like I don't give a fuck what you want to come at me and think. Like let's talk facts. You know, the dispute would be, all right, well, let's take somebody the first time they've ever gone into a calorie deficit. Well, what's going to happen immediately in a deficit? Cortisol is going to rise. Cortisol is a powerful fucking hormone. So the first time you live in a deficit, you're going to crush it for six months and you're probably going to have the best performance of your life until you hit that wall. This is why if you go on corticosteroid, you know, drugs or whatever because you have some kind of inflammatory disease or whatever, you ask anybody who's ever had to take corticosteroids because they have some kind of inflammatory disorder and they'll tell you they feel amazing. They feel great because cortisol is powerful. Oh yeah, it's a great fit, it's a feel great hormone. Yeah, it 100% is. The problem is it's not glucose, right? When you run out of it, you can't just drink a shake. Right? Like there's no fucking cortisol shake, right? Maybe we're on to something. There we go. We'll be rich real soon. Cortisol shake. Cortisol shake. They said cortisol was bad. We're saying it's good. See, this is what you're doing. Drink it. Let's make some predictions. What do you predict the next fads? Because you're so entrenched in nutrition in this whole world. What do you think the next big fads are gonna be? I have my own predictions, but I'll let you go first. Well, high carbohydrate diets will be the next thing back. Because carbs disappear. Keto took them, Keto put them away, locked them in a closet. So they're gonna break out. You're gonna start to see fasting go away. Carbcycling is about to get really hot again. I don't know, man, I try not, I'm so antisocial. I'm so anti-fads. So the one question that I always get asked, what's the best dietary protocol? I don't know, tell me about yourself. I always say if you ask me a question. I hate that we have names for it in the first place. It's so ridiculous to me. If you ask me a question, chances are you're gonna get 20 questions in response. I wanna know who you are. I wanna know physical stature. What's your training? What's your dietary history? I wanna know so much shit about you before I'll even begin to answer your question. And I think sometimes it pisses people off because they want a simple answer. Oh yeah, they would just tell me what diet's best then. I mean, even people, I know right now there's people listening and they're just waiting for you to say something. She's an asshole. Or no, or do they just wait? It's a blueprint. Tell me what's the best one then. What's the best diet or what's the best thing I should do? So here's the funny thing. I put an e-book out like, I don't know, two years ago. It took me four fucking years to write that book. I can write a blog article, five pages, in no shit like 25 minutes. Like I'm a reasonably good writer. Took me four years to wrap my head around writing an e-book and I still don't think it's that accurate, right? Like it's the best of what I could do because I don't know how to generalize a population. So Beidros actually challenged me one time. He said, dude, I was at his like info marketing mastermind and he was like, dude, I promise you, if you had to make one diet for everybody in here, you could. And the truth is, yes, I could because I would choose the worst metabolism. I would build it for that. And then all the other metabolisms that were good enough, well, they would just have to suffer because they're living on the shit metabolism, right? So even though I can tolerate 600 grams of carbohydrates, I would have to live on this motherfucker's 200 grams of carbs and suffer and that sucks. Like that's not fair to an individual. Our intuitive nutrition guide that we put out recently, it doesn't tell people what to eat. It's literally a guide teaching people, giving them techniques and teaching people how to become aware of their body signals, how to connect to it so they can figure out for themselves what works for them at that particular moment and how to figure out as their body changes. So dude, so I would classify that as biofeedback, physiological data, right? You're teaching somebody to become very in tune with biofeedback. I am so massively in agreement with that. I had a client two years ago, she came to me, she's like, I fucking hate the scale. It drives me nuts. Super cool, dude, don't ever weigh yourself. Like we can do this. Like 14 weeks later, I get a text. She's like, hey, guess what? Like, oh fuck, like what's about to happen? Right? She's like, I got on the scale this morning. Dot, dot, dot. Fuck, what's about to happen, right? Down like something, something like 30 pounds. And I was like, yeah, because we listened to your body. Like hunger signals, sleep signals, mood, like energy in the gym, recovery. Like when you're maximizing those things, the body goes where it fucking wants to go. Now was she stage ready? No, but she was super healthy, super happy, fit, looking reasonably like good. Like to get her past that set point, would we have to start looking at other metrics? Probably, but to get her at set point or slightly below set point, it was all biofeedback. Man, healthy looks good. I wish people understood that. Like if you just were healthy, you'd look pretty fucking awesome. Absolutely. You'd look better than most people and you'd look better than you probably ever have. I sat down on the plane last night, I look across from me and they're just doing, they're like, I was fortunate enough to fly first class. And they're just, they're giving out dinners, right? And I like, I passed on my dinner and I always do. I feel like first class flight attendants hate me because I never want to drink. I always have my own water, right? I never want food. What can I do for you? You're so poor. You just shut up and let me sleep, right? Like, that's it. Like let me listen to Mind Pump and let me sleep. And so like I look across and this guy, like he, he's like, no, I'm good. I brought two pieces of fruit. And I'm like, oh, he's like, guy had to be in his 50s, 60s. But like I actually started like looking him up and down because I'm like, this guy is making a quality eating choice. Like the dude was a good looking guy, late in his 50s, early 60s, like skin was tight. Like all the markers that you would think of as somebody that quote unquote diets, I bet the guy just eats healthy, just eats healthy, right? And so exactly like healthy looks good and it provides all the things that we're all looking for anyway. And I feel like you need to go there first before you ever chase these streams, right? Of course. But whether it be that, if you don't have that foundation, you can't go to the extremes of the triangle. You'll cause way more damage. A hundred percent. So I'm gonna make some predictions because I know I asked you to make some, but I'll make some. So we made predictions in the past that protein would be added to everything which now it is. You see protein cereal, protein water, protein water. It's the magic macronutrient, right? Here's the next prediction I'll make. You're gonna see probiotics added to everything. Mark my words. You're gonna see regular foods come out with added probiotics or live cultures or whatever. So you're just a new. It's the new thing. I think you're right. Here's the thing that's funny is now you're starting to get a crowd that's out there that's saying that the probiotics are actually the cause of even more problems, which I would argue like this whole kombucha craze right now, like people are actually feeding their yeast more than actually killing their yeast. You definitely could. There's so much. Overgrowth wise. I dealt with this. There's so many things out there. I dealt with this personally. And I remember the first time I got introduced to kombucha and I remember taking one and then feeling so good, just like the fucking all the people I talk shit about. You did the same thing. So I started fucking drinking it every day because I felt great. It got worse. Yes. And then I noticed if I didn't have it, I'd feel all, yes. You're feeding the yeast. Yes. Yeah, you're just making it even worse. Crazy. So you'll start to see that. And ironically on the protein thing, what's all the research right now? It's showing you don't even need near as much protein as we've been claiming for years. Like it's not even close. No, I mean, depending on the context, obviously too much protein can be very bad for you. Fuck yeah. It can feed cancers. So do you remember Mike Davies? Yes. The fitness factory. Okay, so he was my first ever like coach. Oh wow. And this guy, his whole thing was on, what did he call it? BV value. Cause I asked him what it was. Oh yeah, bio. How do you build your diet? Well, it's on BV value. So you're telling me that the whole structure of a contest diet should be built based on the rate at which protein digests or the availability of your protein. Like that's fucking weird, right? So he's just eating whole eggs all day long. Yeah. Whole eggs. As you got close to it, as you got close to a diet, it was all like egg whites, fish, tuna and shit. And I was like, all right, whatever. This guy sent, so I was dating a girl that was a figure pro at the time. And we were both working with him and he sent us our diet. It was the same diet to the letter. I had like two or three more ounce of protein at every meal. And I actually went to the hospital one day during prep, my gut was so fucked. Like I couldn't burp, I couldn't shit. I couldn't like, I couldn't fart. Like I couldn't do anything, dude. It was so like, I was like, something's wrong. And of course I went on Dr. Google and I'm like looking up all the shit. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna die. Like I need to go to the hospital. You know, and of course like I'm in prep and I'm calorie deprived and life sucked. But oh dude, I mean high protein diets, I'm somebody that absolutely needs under, like either at or under body weight and protein. I'm the same way. Most people I find are like. Most people, and so I'm actually starting to, the literature I'm excited about and there's a faction down in Atlanta that's starting to study it, I think, is protein intake relative to like a anaerobic or aerobic capacity. And I think that you're with CrossFit and with other high intensity training modalities, you're actually gonna start to see people interplaying levels of protein there and figuring out what is best for cardiac output. How about protein fasting every once in a while? I think it's a genius idea. I think it's, I think fasting in general, assuming you're not an in season, like high level athlete, you know, again, in the right protocol, but as a whole, there's so many benefits. Oh, after finding your set point, I think it's an excellent tool, but that's the key, right? You have to be there before you. And I mean, and I've had successful people, ironically, and this is the complete fucked up application, but this is like, again, listening to an individual and working with them who are metabolically adapted, that when you're adding in calories, I don't know if you've seen, if you've worked with someone where you add the calories and they're like, I'm so bloated, I just can't eat the food. I've actually used fasting in that protocol to create a hunger response to actually get them to eat enough calories. Yeah, I do that. And I've had really good success with that as well. It's counter-intuitive because you're like, I need to feed you more, but first I gotta feed you less. You know, I think it's, it's like- You're just listening to them, dude. You're listening to them. The whole thing, dude, you're listening to an individual. You're not, you're not living on a fucking template, right? You're not living in some e-book that you wrote. Like you're listening to an individual and figuring out, just like you guys talked about, like the intuitive piece, like you're listening to your body. Your body will always tell you what it wants. Oh, love that. Jay, when did you first come across Mind Pump? Was it after Jay or was it, who are you? How do you not, right? I wish I could be like, man, this is how I came across it. Are we everywhere? Instagram for sure was probably the first exposure to it. Adam probably. He's handsome, he's so handsome. So I don't know, I don't know what the first exposure was. I know Jay created the introduction and I obviously knew about you guys prior to Jay because I was like, oh, that introduction would be amazing. And then I recently, you guys just did some work with Amanda Bucci, right? Yeah. I just connected with her a week or two ago from Daniel D. Piazza. Oh, she's a brilliant young lady. She's super smart. Charismatic, creating young lady. I did a call with her last week and I said, so are you helping her now with her nutrition sense? No, so she works with somebody and he's awesome. But I think I'm gonna record with her the week before Christmas. Actually, my wife and I are doing our baby moon in Laguna. Oh, cool. And so we're gonna hook up with her and Brian, Brian's her boyfriend, right? Right, right. Yeah, so we're gonna hook up with them, do dinner and do a whole podcast thing. But Daniel D. Piazza created that introduction. Do you guys know him? No. Oh, dude, rich 20-something. You guys, I need to create that connection for you guys. Taylor's been trying to connect to him for- Oh, perfect. Yeah, quite some time. I'll connect you guys. Perfect, we're rich, yeah. Yeah, he's a really good dude. Well, you're doing good things, man. I appreciate that. Yeah, we have the right mentality, for sure. Yeah, we love connecting with people who, you know, we feel are doing the right things for the industry. And I think connecting with all these people and having people work together is gonna elevate the industry as a whole. And this is a message that needs to get out. I think that, you know, I live by this all day. You know, I mean, I've been very fortunate to help a lot of people, but I think that the reality is 50, 60 years from now, like we're all gonna pass and we can't take any of our material items to the grave, but we definitely can leave this society in a better place. And I think that you guys would agree, a lot of what comes to us today, we're fixing the mistakes of generations past. If we can create a generation today that is doing the right thing, the next generation beyond us will spend time optimizing and fixing. And I think if we actually are doing our part and we're doing it correctly, as we're leaving this universe, we'll see a universe built on optimization versus correction. And that will be like validation that everything I've done is correct. What's the legacy right there? What's the future of what you're working on? Like right now, like your business, like, are you, do you wanna just keep it where it's at? You've got your nice team. You've got a living for yourself, or what are you trying to do? Nah, dude, the, the, I'm always working on something. Like I'm too, I'm too ADD to not. So we just launched our education platform. That's my big thing. So we opened up the Nutritional Coaching Institute. And so I look around. Explain what that looks like. What does that look like? So I'll give you kind of the, the, the background. I mean, I'll tell you how people can come into it and give like the whole thing. But you know, so I looked around, there's no nutritional certifications out there that I think are like amazing. I think there's some precision nutrition teaches amazing education. Anyone that comes out super knowledgeable, they know how to talk about food in and out. But the problem is, how do you deal with? Applying that to people. How do you deal with applying it to all the, all the situations we just talked about for like the last hour, hour and a half, right? How do you troubleshoot? You can't, like they don't teach you that shit. And what I looked around is there's nothing built on application. And I was like, fuck that. Like that's where I win. I win based on application. So our certifications are all two-fold. You come to our level one nutrition coach. Day one is science. You have to know the science to be able to speak about it. We teach you all that stuff. Very similar information as precision. And then day two is application. And so we talk about everything from like, what are you learning in the intake? Like what's the psychology behind the intake? Like how can you engage with your clients? How do you troubleshoot a client? And we spend a whole day based on application. And then our test is unique too. So it's, there you complete three 90-day case studies. And what I need to see is how did you create your intake? Like what does your intake form look like? Why did you create it that way? How did you set up a client prescription? Why did you set it up? Show me all of your client interaction for 90 days. And tell me why you were successful, why you weren't successful, what things you were reading from the clients. And if you can successfully articulate that, I think that you've shown competency in the practice of nutrition coaching. And I will certify you. Now we've built extension courses. So we have a mindset specialty course. We have a hormone specialty course. And we have a business system specialty course. And that's all of our level one. And then level two launches the end of this year. Very cool. Dude, I would love for you to come out here and host one of those here out of our place. Let's do it. I think that would be- That would be amazing. I think that would be fucking- I think our fans would love that. Yeah, I think that'd be super rad. That'd be rad. And you're definitely the type of person who I feel like at least I'm pretty sure all the boys would agree that would put our stamp of approval on guys drop the knowledge and information because this is the stuff that not a lot of people are talking about. Nobody's talking about all the individual variances. It's always about camps of doing it this way. My way's better in your way. And then trying to prove each other wrong versus no, there's, it could be a lot of different ways. Nothing's right. Like I'm never right. I'm never wrong, right? And I actually think that the foundation of nutrition coaching and application in general is state your case. Like why are you doing it this way? I don't give a fuck if science tells you everything you're doing is right, the body might prove you wrong. The body is gonna do what it wants to do. You have to have a really good reason for why you're about to do what you're about to do. And if you put that into play, let's watch the body. Let's pull a K-star, right? Let's test, let's retest. And like, so with nutrition, let's assess. Let's see what feedback the body gives us physically, physiologically. Let's reassess, let's re-implement. And that's really it is. That's really all it is. Like that's the course of my work with any client. Excellent, excellent. Thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. Great, great time, Jay. We'll be the last time we do this. Yep, definitely. And we'll go shoot some, maybe some video content. Let's do it. Excellent. Check it out, go to YouTube Mind Pump TV. We've got some awesome videos on there. In fact, I hope we have one that's up there live when this airs with me and Jason talking about some of the stuff on video. Let's do it. Excellent. Awesome, brother. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at minepumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps anabolic, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert, exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at minepumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes, and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump.