 Question is from It's Not Easy Being Green. Just like there are benefits to switching up your workout routine, are there any benefits to switching up your diet? If so, what would that look like? How often would you change your diet and any pitfalls to avoid? I 100% believe this. I 100% believe this. Not Easy Being Green. Thanks. That's my voice, isn't it? Okay, so I'll talk about the psychological benefits before we can get into the physiological, potential physiological benefits. Psychologically, I think it's a brilliant thing to change up your diet. I think one of the biggest culprits, or one of the biggest reasons why people have a tough time eating healthy, or why people tend to binge, is because they stay so rigid in one particular way of eating. For example, this is just an example, but let's say your keto. So your keto diet means super, super low carbohydrates, high fat, moderate to maybe higher protein. That means I'm avoiding carbohydrates all the time. This person right here is primed for a binge. The second they go off, they go way the fuck off. They're just not used to eating different foods. It doesn't mimic real life either, real life. And humans probably evolved eating a lot of the same foods, but it was a seasonal change, right? It was like wintertime. You're probably only eating meat. Spring, things are growing. Maybe I'm eating more plants, summer. And so the foods would change as the seasons would change. So humans, I think we just operate better with a little bit more variety than the rigid, like I eat, these are my macros. This is what I eat all the time. You see some bodybuilders. Bodybuilders eat the same foods every single day and just notorious. I think that, I think there's no doubt the psychological argument is not only there, but it's extremely strong. I think the real question for me that I have is is the physiological as strong as the psychological in the situation? And I believe there's a lot of unknowns in this area still. Like we are still learning so much about the gut and it just makes total sense to me when we talk about every other system of the body, why would we not think that our digestive system adapts similarly? Why would we not think that? Every other system has an adaptation process and gets used to whatever it is that you're throwing at on a consistent basis. So if you eat the same way, if you hit the same amount of grams of carbs, proteins and fats on a very regular basis because you're following the same dry plan all the time, why would you not think that our body would become adapted to that? And if we're trying to create change, it makes a lot of sense to me. This is why I love to mess around with all this. When I teach clients, I used to, they would all, every client always said, oh, have you heard about the ketogenic diet? Oh, have you heard about this? Have you heard about that? Absolutely, we're gonna go through it all. Like I wanna teach my clients all of it and then as we're going through it, talk about the benefits, what they're feeling, whether it's pro or con, this is why you're feeling that way because you're eating this way and to teach them how to take the tools from all of these different diets. Because the reason why all of them are successful is because they're lower calorie. I mean, bottom line, the real science that supports why any of the diets are really, really successful is because they're all designed to restrict calories. We restrict calories, we lose body fat. So then it's really just about starting to look at all the other signals that when you eat this way, how do you feel? Like, does it, do you sleep better? You have better energy, are you sharper? Okay, so you like those benefits. Oh, but you start to notice that on Saturdays, I like this type of diet. For example, for me, I like to run on a weekend. I like to run a higher fat lower carb because I tend to be lazier. I tend to watch more TV or be sitting around or sleeping in and what I have found from doing ketogenic or running a high fat diet is, wow, it just curbs my appetite. I mean, I can eat a really high fat breakfast and then I'm good all day till dinner time. And I'll do that on a Saturday. I'm not running a specific diet. I've just learned from running so many different diets how that works really well for my lifestyle there. When I have a hard workout, I want to carb up. Like, so I think there's a lot of value in people going through all these different types of diets but not stopping there and not attaching it just to their muscle building or weight loss journey. There's many other things that food provides for us and really learning to unpack what you're enjoying, what you like, what benefits that you see from it. And it's okay, muscle building and fat loss can be one of those, but they're not the only ones. And so make the connection to all of those and then learn how to implement all of those different aspects. I'm sure at some point, yeah, we're gonna find like there's a lot of parallels between exercise and nutrition. It's just nutrition, it's so complex because there's other things going on like autoimmune things, things that are underneath the surface that we're just now discovering of how to treat. And I think that that puts a whole nother host of variables about what specifically will match you for the moment and then how long do I stay in that protocol? What's the time length of that? There's not enough science, I think. And so we're really relying on anecdotal, like evidence out there. Yeah, anecdotal evidence, absolutely. Okay, so that's 100% true. A lot of it's gonna be listening to your body. You're not gonna know what affects your body until or how something affects your body until you kind of go through it. Once you start to figure it out, like I know, for example, for myself, I know when to change my diet depending on what I'm looking to do. If I'm looking for me personally to be sharp mentally, I tend to go much lower carbohydrate, higher fat. If I'm looking for strength and performance in the gym, I'll eat more carbohydrates. I know how I feel when it's time to eat more fish. I know how I feel when it's time to eat more beef or more greens. And also look at the nutrient profiles of these foods. You know, like if I say right now, Omega-3 fatty acids, we all think fish because fish is a rich source. Certain types of fish are rich sorts of Omega-3 fatty acids. If I say creatine, natural creatine in food or if I say lots of B vitamins, you know, we might think red meat, for example. If I say lots of fiber, then you might be thinking more plant-based foods because animal-based foods typically don't contain any fiber. So there's lots of different nutrients and components into all of these foods, and I think that they'll all benefit you. The odds that you'll have a nutrient deficiency start to go up when your diet becomes more and more the same all the time. Because if you look at a diet, for example, that's, you know, just keto or just paleo or just vegan, you'll find that they have a tendency to lack certain nutrients depending on the variety of the food in there. But if you mix it up a little bit, the odds are that you're gonna cover all of your bases. This is why you see people who will follow a diet and they'll feel great for two or three years, and then they start to feel like shit and then realize, oh, I have nutrient deficiencies because I ate only this for so long and I lack these nutrients that were found in other foods that I didn't eat before. Now from an evolutionary standpoint, humans were opportunistic, 100%. If there was something there that we could eat, we ate it. We didn't understand agriculture until far later, so we weren't planting things. So we either killed things, pulled them out of the ocean, ate bugs, and ate the plants that grew around us. That meant, and we moved, right? We were hunter-gatherers. We literally moved and traveled. That's why humans are all over the earth. We traveled all over the world trying to find things to eat, which meant our diets consistently and constantly changed depending on the season, where we near an ocean or a lake, are we inland, are we in the mountains, are we more closer to a desert? So the human body seems to do well with a certain type of variety. Now the other part of the question is, how often would you change your diet? I don't have any science that supports any particular timeframe. This is my own personal opinion and it's a bit of a guess, but I'm basing it off of just how we probably evolved. And I would say evolve your diet or change your diet seasonally would probably be best. How, what does that look like? Okay, eat the fruits and vegetables that tend to be in season for the area that you live in. So you have your summer fruits and vegetables and your spring and winter fruits and vegetables. Meats tend to eat meat throughout the whole year, but I do like to eat more fish in the summer and I just picture, and this is again, there's no studies that support this, but I think to myself like, oh, we'd probably fish more likely to fish when it's not freezing outside or whatever. So that's how soon and often I would say to change, but definitely I've seen value. I like the idea of every two to three months, less, I don't try as hard to match seasons. I mean, we live in a really nice time now where strawberries are in season 12 months out of the year, oranges year round. Right, so although that's probably not how we originally evolved, we have that access. So I just like to throw a curve ball at my body every probably three months or so and switch it up. And so, and we used to share probably on the podcast a lot more. I think we should try and be better about just kind of sharing what we're doing now because I know these guys, I'm eating with them all the time. So, you know, I know Sal, are you off keto? Are you still running keto? I went off for a few days. Now I'm gonna go back on, but I do that. Right, exactly. So, and you'll hear that all of a sudden one guy will be fasting, one guy will be running keto or paleo, or one guy will be doing high carb or carb cycling. So we're always kind of intermittently changing. But that's the message that I think we've been trying to get across in this podcast since the beginning is that we don't subscribe to one single diet whatsoever, I think that's silly. I think that's also one of the challenges with the show and programs and everything like that is people always want us to tell them what to do. One definitive way. Yeah, they want us to tell them how to eat and the reason why we've avoided that for so long is because it is so individualized and we do recommend that you do all these different ways of eating to figure yourself out. And to do that for one person, the amount of time that would consume for me to do that is unreal. So you gotta- It takes a long time and a lot of information just to do it, help one person. One person. Let alone, you know, whole audience of people. You know, it's like, when you work with people for, you know, 10 plus years on a consistent basis and you work with hundreds of them or you work through maybe thousands by proxy, let's say you have people who work with other people and you manage them. One thing becomes very, very clear after about 10 years and it's just in your face. You can't deny it. There's a massive individual variance. Yeah, and you've seen every rule broken. I've seen them all. I mean, I remember years ago thinking I was so anti-vegan. I thought nobody could ever do well vegan. And then I had a client that legit just was a healthiest and did best vegan. I've met people on the opposite end of the scale who just do best eating carnivore, which is insane. All they eat is meat. That sounds crazy. Nope, I've legit met people who do best that way. And so, I know those are the two extremes. Most people are somewhere in the middle. I've also seen people do really well one way and then three years later, doesn't work well for them. We gotta change it because circumstances change, the body changes. So, the individual variance cannot be overstated and that I think is one of the main benefits of cycling through different ways of eating.