Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Dr. Peter Martone to the podcast. Dr. Martone has been dedicated to creating the happiest, healthiest, most well-rested tribe of people on the planet for over the past 20 years. He’s the owner of Atlantis Chiropractic Wellness Centres, and the inventor of the Neck Nest, a revolutionary new pillow that is designed to improve your posture while you sleep. In this episode, we talk about why posture matters during sleep and discuss many other strategies to get the best nights rest. Over to Dr. Martone.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• How do you define good quality sleep?
• What are the quick wins to help us feel more rested upon waking?
• What are your thoughts about sleeping position?

Get more of Dr Peter Martone:

• drsleepright.com
• https://www.facebook.com/DoctorSleepRight/

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy these interviews:

Dr Damon Ashworth – Deliberately Better Sleep
James Swanwick – Why Blue Light is Harmful to Your Sleep
Dr Michael Breus: The Sleep Doctor, Hacking Jet Lag & The Power Of When

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180Nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:00:44)

This week, I’m excited to welcome Dr. Peter Martone to the podcast. Dr. Martone has been dedicated to creating the happiest, healthiest, most well-rested tribe of people on the planet for over the past 20 years. He’s the owner of Atlantis Chiropractic Wellness Centres, and the inventor of the Neck Nest, a revolutionary new pillow that is designed to improve your posture while you sleep. In this episode, we talk about why posture matters during sleep and discuss many other strategies to get the best nights rest. Over to Dr. Martone.

(00:01:21)

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and I am delighted to welcome Dr. Peter Martone to the podcast. Dr. Martone, how are you?

Dr. Martone

(00:01:30)

I’m doing absolutely fantastic, Stu. Thank you so much. Just got off of a really cool snow mountain biking ride. So I’m energized and we’re ready to deliver. All amped up, real psyched up right now.

Stu

(00:01:44)

Oh, unbelievable. Look, I can’t wait to get into this conversation. Sleep is a big one for so many people and well, first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Dr. Martone

(00:01:58)

Yeah, no, thanks. I appreciate that. So one of my missions has always been to help people maximize their life, right? To be able to help them optimize their performance. And I was just sharing with you, I studied my exercise physiology out there in Australia, down in The Gong. And I was a professional trainer, I’m an exercise physiologist, I’m a chiropractor. So I’ve had all of this education on nutrition and exercise and being able to put it all together and really coming down to the mindset of your health is a product of your daily rituals. And your daily rituals are driven by your beliefs. So if you are not happy with where you are health-wise, whatever it may be, you need to look at how you’re thinking and who you’re trusting as your resources for your health. And really what we stand for is education on being a different voice and a more empowering message and being able to help people navigate through all of the disinformation that’s out there and being able to identify the state of health that they choose. And now we’re doing that through sleep.

Stu

(00:03:20)

Wonderful. Well, you mentioned disinformation. Very, very hard. We’ve never been, I think, in the throes of a society with so many compounding views, experts in every corner, social media shouting at us, tapping on our shoulder, trying to tell us another magic trick, sell us another magic pill. Irrespective of, I think of how you move, what you eat, how you think, if you don’t get good quality sleep, many of those pillars will start to crumble and you’ll come unstuck at the edges. I’m interested in your perception of how perhaps you define good quality sleep because many of us can maybe crash out for seven hours, wake up feeling a little bit groggy. Maybe we’ll hit the sack at 2 A.M. maybe it will be 8 P.M. There’s always been that number of, you’ve got to try and get seven and eight hours of sleep a night irrespective of whether it’s quality sleep or not. So, what are your thoughts on quality sleep? How should we be feeling if we’re well-slept, well-rested?

Dr. Martone

(00:04:24)

I think it’s important to understand, I zigzagged into the sleep industry first off. I didn’t enter the sleep industry to help people sleep, believe it or not. I had herniated my own disc with a mountain biking injury, and I had always had pain in my spine, always from day one, even being a chiropractor for 15 years at the time. So I always had pain, but I attributed it to mount biking and rock climbing on the bluffs off of The Gong. And I was always that competitive athlete and I’m adjusting patients and I always said, “You know what? I have pain, but it’s just because I have hip pain, I have shoulder pain, but it’s just because I’m so hard on my body.”

(00:05:10)

And it wasn’t until I herniated my own disc and then I reviewed 3,000 x-rays and found that holy mackerel, I didn’t have back pain all this time. I had forward head posture coupled because I was on a computer all day long and texting all day long. And because I was sleeping in specific positions that caused this forward head translation. And when you have forward head translation through the righting reflex, it states that body posture adjusts to head position. So I had this chronic psoas major muscle spasm through my abdomen that twisted my spine. And the psoas is the only muscle in the human body that attaches directly to a disc. So I had theorized that, holy mackerel, I didn’t have back pain all these years because I had a bad back. I had back pain because I had forward head posture due to the modern day lifestyle.

(00:06:11)

So I’m like, “Well, when is there an opportunity?” Because I got ADD, I’m not going to sit there and stretch my neck 10 minutes a day or 15 minutes a day or half an hour a day, which is what’s needed to bring that neck back. So I theorized listen, if I can change my sleeping position and be able to stretch it and improve the structure while I sleep, what better way to biohack the body than to do it while you’re sleeping? So, I started changing my sleeping position. And you have to understand why I did it was I may not have never practiced again because my disc was herniated. I’m not going to have surgery just because I didn’t want to have more issues, so I had to get back to it. So I said, “Listen, if I can correct the cervical curve while I sleep, then I’m going to be able to transform my entire life because I’ll be out of pain finally.” It was a theory at the time.

(00:07:05)

So, then I started to change the way I slept and my life transformed. I started having more energy. You could put a glass of water on my chest, I’d wake up and the glass of water would still be there. I stopped tossing and turning. So I started getting really restful sleep and I’m like, “Holy mackerel. There is something to this sleep position thing.” So when you ask that question, what does it mean to wake up well-rested, well to me, getting way better sleep is what we promote. It’s awakening the full potential of a well-rested aligned you. It’s that third component of the alignment that no expert speaks about. They talk about getting good rest, being recharged, but the structural improvement that you can have at night to me plays a crucial role in the three-legged stool to being able to get a great night’s sleep.

Stu

(00:08:06)

Yeah, it’s fascinating. You’re speaking to everybody when you’re talking about forward head syndrome. We refer to it as tech neck. I’ve spoken to a number of people that say we’re essentially devolving. We are becoming, we used to be taller and upright, and now we are stooped and hunched because that’s what we do all day, and I guess we’re the sum of everything that we do. Could it be as simple then as us trying to lay on our backs at night? I’m guessing no. There’d probably be some other things at hand. How might we take this path and try and test this for ourselves?

Dr. Martone

(00:08:42)

So, the way that I came up with all of the concepts that I now teach today is I based everything on law, the way the body adapts, right? A healthy individual adapts to stress in a… Well, everybody adapts to stress, but the healthier an individual, the more able they are to adapt to stress. It’s like if the Titanic sinks, some people died, some people lived, right? Well, why did some people die? Because they weren’t able to adapt to the stress as well as the healthier people. That’s why some people die of COVID and some people don’t because their systems are more functional. So when we look at adaptation, we are going to look at three laws.

(00:09:25)

The first law is Davis’s law, which states tissue remolds based on the stresses applied. Wolf’s law, tissue deposits based on the stress you… So, bone remolds based on the stresses applied. And then the righting reflex, which is body posture adjusts to head position. So when you look at all three of those laws and you put those to together simplistically, your body is like clay, and it can be molded. But the problem with it is everything is controlled by your neurology. So, you have neurological patterns that need to be broken up, even if you stretch the spine into the position. You can have a great curve and then all of a sudden when you’re not thinking about it, you’re going to walk back down into the stooped posture because neurology controls muscle structure. So, it’s a combination of putting yourself in and it’s not, and we’ll go over this, it’s not enough to just sleep on your back.

(00:10:30)

We call it the corrective sleep posture, the corrective sleep position. It’s how you use the pillow, where you put your arms because the average person tosses and turns 20 or 40 times a night because they’re in pain. And then you train the neurology to solidify the new thing, and you do that by working on your balance. So you couple sleeping position with wobble board work, working on your balance. And both of those will allow your body to stand upright if you do it consistently enough. And when I show you this position, you don’t have to stay in this position the entire night. You just need to fall asleep in this position and then let the body do whatever it’s going to do in the middle of the night.

Stu

(00:11:13)

So, tell me about the wobble board. Is that typically the cylindrical board with a ball in the middle? Do you stand in it when you watch TV? How long do you use it for?

Dr. Martone

(00:11:23)

Yeah, so you put it on a hard surface. The body, actually, I’m going to call it the Martone law, but it’s a law that exists, but it’s not really law, but we all know it. It’s called if you don’t use it, you lose it. What that means, simply stated, I’m going to take it another step, is if you support something in the body, you’re going to weaken whatever you support. Anytime you support something. If you put a shoe on and you have an arch support, that is going to weaken the arch of the foot. Anytime you support the body. So when we sit down and we use more supports in our chairs and we’re sitting on a couch and we use sneakers, that’s atrophying a specific portion of our brain. When you atrophy what’s called the vermis in your brain, you’re going to end up walking on your toes. Your body posture is going to lean forward, and then it’s like a shuffling gate.

(00:12:34)

You’ll notice older people, they don’t typically walk like this because they’ll fall backwards. They usually walk in this constricted pattern. So as our body posture, as we’re destroying the structure of our head because we’re sleeping curled up in balls because we want to feel safe, we’re starting to walk like this. So all we need to do is you work on one of those wobble boards and you’re going to fall backwards. You need to improve the balance in the back portion of the plane. This is the frontal plane, that’s the posterior plane. So you need to be able to stand upright, put your head and body in a good posture, and then just work on a wobble board 5 to 10 minutes a day. That’s all you need to do.

Stu

(00:13:22)

Okay, that’s interesting. I have a wobble board. So I put a challenge out there to anybody who has a wobble board thinks that they’re great on the wobble board, I would just say stand on that thing, get comfortable, get in the position, and then shut your eyes, then see how you go.

Dr. Martone

(00:13:38)

And then not every wobble board’s created equal. You have a GoFit wobble board that’s really, really hard. And then you have the Amazon wobble boards that anybody can do. So, the harder the wobble board. And then yeah, you close your eyes, forget about it, you’re going to kill yourself.

Stu

(00:13:54)

So, 5 to 10 minutes a day and that will be sufficient then to start training. Now, I got the wobble board specifically really not even thinking about anything to do with sleep. It was more to work on stabilizer muscles in my feet because I just figured, well, I’m getting older. I want to make sure that I’m stable and I’m balanced, and I have these little minute muscles that help me out and I don’t want to fall over and break things, but fascinated to hear how that plays into sleep. I’ll have to dust it. I’ll get it back from under the bed and dust it off. I’m into it again. Give me a reason.

Dr. Martone

(00:14:28)

Yeah, because when I put you into this position, one of the things that people feel or some of the feedback I get, they wake up and they feel like they’re falling backwards or they’re falling off a cliff. It’s because the position I need you in, your body’s not safe. So the body will toss and turn for three reasons. Number one, because it’s in pain. Number two, your core temperature’s too warm. The breathing issue is another one. And number four is because your body does not feel safe because there’s a… So we’ve always been taught go to sleep, but we’ve never been taught how to sleep.

(00:15:08)

So I grew up in Malden, Massachusetts. It was right on a busy street. There was a bus stop right in front of my house and my bed was against the window that was on the front porch. So I could remember as a kid always thinking that somebody was going to smash through the window and steal me. So I would fall asleep, curled up in a ball with pillows and stuffed animals all around me because that’s how I felt safe, and that is how I learned to sleep. And most of us feel safe. So when I put you into this position, you’re going to feel exposed, you’re not going to feel comfortable because you have this forward head posture, people have bunions, they lean so far forward. So when you’re put into this position, you feel unsafe. So that’s where we talk about using pressure on your chest, pressure over your eyes, different things that you can do to support yourself when you’re starting to fall asleep in this position.

Stu

(00:16:08)

So, tell me then about this sleep posture because I know that you mentioned side sleeping and twisting and turning and shuffling. I do it. I am a side sleeper. Couldn’t ever think about any other way to possibly go to sleep. And I jumped onto your socials the other day and you had a chart and it was a figure, and I think there maybe were nine different postures in there. And I was like this guy with a leg at 90 degrees and the hand, and one was behind a pillow, and that was me to a T. But then seeing the way that you are talking about sleeping is worlds away to how I sleep. So, I’m keen to see more.

Dr. Martone

(00:16:47)

So if we think as two individuals, and what most people don’t realize is that, and this is something that I have no idea how this concept has missed our current health paradigm. The structure of your spine plays a significant role in protecting the central nervous system. And when the structure of your spine is out of alignment, it affects the function of the nervous system. So, alignment is critical to maintain at night. If not, you’re going to compress a specific nerve, and especially in the neck, it’s called the vagus nerve. You’re going to compress the vagus nerve. You’re going to suppress vagal tone, and it’s going to give you a relative sympathetic dominant tone.

(00:17:42)

And everybody understands, oh, I’m in survival. My adrenal glands are shot. I have no energy. Oh, I started meditating, but my adrenal glands, I can’t help them. I need adrenal support. But nobody looks at vagal suppression, which is the opposite of the stimulation. So, you have these two nervous systems that are constantly in balance. You have survive or thrive, and those should be in balance. Most people, because of their sleeping position, destroy the structure of their cervical spine affecting the tone of the vagus nerve, which puts them into a relative sympathetic dominant state. And they have immune system issues, they have digestion issues, and hormonal imbalances. So when we start to look at health, not just from a recharge standpoint, we want to look at it as a structural alignment in the bed type of standpoint.

(00:18:39)

And I’m going to show you this position in two seconds, and when I put you into this position, remember all you need to do is focus on falling asleep in this position. Whatever happens in the middle of the night, just let it happen. Just fall asleep in this position and that’s the lifestyle habit. You may only stay in this position for a half an hour, then it may be an hour, then it may be two hours. But if it is an hour or two a night, you extrapolate that over a week, that’s 14 hours of putting your neck into traction a week. And then over 10 weeks, that’s 140 hours of reversing the damaging effect of being on a cell phone all day long.

(00:19:20)

And it’s important to not support the head when you sleep on your back, most people are going to be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m tried to sleep on my back. I can’t do it. I can’t breathe.” It’s because you’re closing down your airway because a pillow defined as a support for your head. And like we said before, anytime you support something in the body, you weaken it. So, what we want to do in contrast to that is we want to use distraction. So, we want to use the weight of the head off of the back of the Neck Nest is what I’m going to show you on, but the back of a pillow and it’s going to gently stretch the curve back into your neck by putting the pillow under your neck and letting the head hang off the back. I will show you.

Stu

(00:20:04)

Okay.

Dr. Martone

(00:20:08)

All right. Here’s the Neck Nest. I put the Neck Nest on the angle, and then I take the Neck Nest and I take my hands and I put the entire Neck Nest under my neck so the head is off of the back of the Neck Nest. So, the weight of my head is gently stretching that curve into the neck.

Stu

(00:20:36)

And arms and legs by the side as you are? Just like that?

Dr. Martone

(00:20:42)

Like this, like this. You don’t want to be like this. So I typically have my arms and my legs outside of the covers. So, I also use the covers under my chin to hold my jaw closed.

Stu

(00:20:59)

Oh, okay.

Dr. Martone

(00:21:00)

And then I typically sleep with my arms out because your body only cares about really your core. So if you keep your core warm, you’re going to be able to temperature regulate your hands and your feet.

Stu

(00:21:18)

So, how long did it take you to get used to that?

Dr. Martone

(00:21:21)

No, it took me a long time. But remember I said my why was so big because I was dealing with the disc herniation, and after reviewing those 3,000 X-rays and finding the pattern was so consistent based on that forward head posture, anybody that has a hip issue more than likely has a neck problem and they have a sleeping issue. It’s bar none. I’ve dealt with thousands and thousands and thousands of different people in relating their X-rays in order to get long-term results and relief. I never have back pain anymore, ever. And I had it for the first 25, for 30 years of my life, and it is because my neck is in such a good position because I adapted my sleeping position.

Stu

(00:22:04)

That’s fascinating. So that particular pillow that you have now, you mentioned that you refer to that as a Neck Nest. Now I’m guessing that that’s a specialized pillow. Can we do this with our own pillows or is it-

Dr. Martone

(00:22:20)

So, this is something that I ended up patent. That’s my design. It’s my design just based on getting other pillows and soft pillows and doing the same thing. But you can take a soft pillow and instead of putting it flat, you put it on its edge.

Stu

(00:22:40)

Right.

Dr. Martone

(00:22:42)

Right. And then you take it, you stuff it under there. Right?

Stu

(00:22:46)

Okay.

Dr. Martone

(00:22:47)

And then you’ve got that back.

Stu

(00:22:51)

Right. Okay, I’m going to try it. I will try that. What do we typically going to experience if we have been side sleepers for all of our lives, and then we’re going to try this position on the back where literally the head is hanging, but the neck is supported? You mentioned maybe we might stay like that for half an hour. Maybe we’ll wake up back on our sides again. What’s the duration to be able to really push through for perhaps the entire night to get these [inaudible 00:23:27]-

Dr. Martone

(00:23:27)

So I have some people that never thought they would be able to do it. Hundreds of people, thousands of people that said, “I’ll never be able to do it.” Within two nights, they’re sleeping on their back and they’re sleeping through the night and they can’t believe it. Then you have other people that just say, “I can’t do it. There’s no way.” And it’s really a product of, unfortunately, if somebody has ADD or they think a lot, and there are different ways to be able to help other… So remember, in order for you to sleep, you have the survival system. You need to shut that down and you need to turn on the thrive systems, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. So when we look at the parasympathetic nervous system, understanding that we grow, develop, and heal at night because that system’s turned on, how do you turn that on?

(00:24:22)

Well, first thing you can do is you can use pressure over your eyes, right? Pressure against your eyes with just a simple sleep mask creates safety. It’s like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground. That in itself will improve parasympathetic tone. Using pressure on your chest, putting a pillow over your head like I did when I was a kid, you stick pillows all around, create this cocoon or this safe environment, you’ll be able to get to sleep. A lot of times people, if they have too much forward constriction, which most of us do, that being that far back is an issue. So you can sleep with pillows, creating a slightly elevated sleeping position, and then put the Neck Nest or a pillow under your neck. But if you sleep elevated, that will help you from feeling like you’re falling backwards.

(00:25:19)

So at Dr. Sleep Right, that’s our jam. We educate people on how… We want to change the way the world sleeps. We want to help them get W.A.Y. better sleep, and W.A.Y. stands for awakening the full potential of a well-rested aligned you. So it’s not just well-rested, it’s that alignment plays a critical role in our brand because of understanding the structure that I’ve spent 25 years of my life dedicated to.

Stu

(00:25:48)

Yeah, that’s brilliant. So on the converse then, there’d probably be a bucket of things that the majority of us are doing that you would shake your head at and just think, “Well, look, if you want to wreck your sleep, just continue doing what you’re doing.” And that could be things like alcohol, caffeine, smartphone use, exercising high intensity 30 minutes before you want to try and get to sleep. Am I on the right track there on some of those?

Dr. Martone

(00:26:15)

Listen, I’m not going to sleep good tonight because it’s actually hours before you go to sleep. So, I just finished mountain biking. My heart rate, my metabolism will stay elevated. One of the issues with a high heart rate is you’re not going to get good deep sleep. So your heart rate needs to come down as much as you can control it with your breathing. It’s all metabolism. And if you stimulate metabolism, you’re going to crush your sleep patterns. So Tuesday nights, which is my late mountain biking night, I never get a good night’s sleep. I accept it. So, Wednesday I take a nap.

(00:26:53)

You understand that you’re not going to get great sleep every single night because we’re all human. This weekend I went out with my daughter on a snowmobiling adventure and I partook in having some alcoholic beverages when I came back. And I know I’m not going to get a good night’s sleep, but I build naps into my lifestyle. So yeah, it’s alcohol. It’s caffeine after noon because that keeps your heart rate stimulated. It’s eating too late. Anything that will raise your core temperature. We came up with a supplement called Deep Sleep, and it doesn’t knock you out, but what it does is it cools your body core temperature. So when you want your body core temperature to cool, and if it cools quickly, it drops you into deep sleep within that first third of your sleep cycle.

Stu

(00:27:47)

Fantastic. So, tell us a little bit more about that supplement. What are the key ingredients? Because I’m Fascinated and as we mentioned before the show, I’ve tried every supplement under the sun and love experimenting with new stuff.

Dr. Martone

(00:27:59)

And I’m not a big fan. It took me a long time to even decide to even make a supplement. And one of my issues, and the reason why I decided to make it is like tonight, it’s difficult for my core temperature to cool because I have such an elevated metabolism right now because of how much mountain biking I just finished. So, I will take Deep Sleep. So Deep Sleep has a few things, key ingredients most people know. It has magnesium in it, cools the central nervous system. Has GABA, helps serotonin be released, but has also L-arginine. L-arginine dilates your blood vessels. So if you dilate your blood vessels, most of the blood vessels are going to be in your hands and your feet and you stick your hands and your feet outside of the covers, it will just act as a better radiator for your body’s core temperature. So, it helps the core temperature drop.

Stu

(00:29:02)

Okay, fascinating. Would you advocate sauna use before bed? Because that’s definitely a bit of a thermogenic thing going on there.

Dr. Martone

(00:29:11)

So, I typically take a steam shower. I love it because it’s not the steam shower… High temperature stimulates your immune system. That’s the biggest thing temperature does. So a high temperature, if you elevate your core temperature, that’s why your body gives you a fever. Your body gives you a fever, not because it’s the virus, it’s the metabolism speeding up to elevate core temperature. But then that’s why you don’t get good sleep when you’re sick because you’re running at a high metabolism and high heart rate. So now when that core temperature drops, so you get tired or you feel somber when you core temperature drops. So if you elevate it really high and then the body’s going to cool, that’s what makes you tired. So I love that idea of being able to do a hot steam. And then during the day, people get tired right around noontime, one o’clock. That’s because your body falls as sick with cycle and your core temperature’s dropping again. So anytime your core temperature drops, you tend to get tired.

Stu

(00:30:23)

Yeah, fascinating. And you mentioned food and digestion, things like that. What do you think about our diet or eating habits? Do you ascribe to any particular way of eating in terms of the types of foods you eat or the timing of the food that you eat with sleep being the ultimate goal?

Dr. Martone

(00:30:42)

So if sleep’s the ultimate goal, you don’t want to have a lot of food in your digestive tract when you’re going to sleep. And then when you wake up in the morning, your sugar level’s actually really high and you do not want to eat when you sugar level’s high. So, I don’t eat first thing in the morning. So I typically, it’s called intermittent fasting. So I’ll wake up in the morning and I won’t eat till noon. Noon is typically my biggest meal. It’s usually a salad and it’s a big salad, like meats and potatoes. I just put my meal on green. I like to get live food within my system. And then I’ll have dinner, and then dinner will be something small.

(00:31:23)

And I’ll typically eat, which is still a little bit late, but it’s really small. I’ll either have an egg or an egg and something else. We have chickens, so I’d love to have that natural food from the environment. And so I typically eat right around 6:00, and I’m eating a small meal, but 5:30, 6:00 and I’m going to bed at 9:30. So, I’m giving myself a good three or four hours before bed to digest.

Stu

(00:31:56)

So question then on fluids, and you mentioned about three or four hours before food, I heard the other day of a 3, 2, 1 rule. You’re probably familiar with it, and it was for optimal sleep give yourself three hours to digest your food before you go to bed, two hours of no fluids, and one hour off your smartphone. How does that align with your thoughts? Because I know that oftentimes, especially as we age as well, if we’re consuming fluids before we go to bed, we can get up during the night and need to urinate. And that’s going to disrupt everything, especially if it happens multiple times.

Dr. Martone

(00:32:31)

So here’s one of the things that I think is important. So, we don’t want to be stimulated when we go to bed. But a lot of the smartphones, there’s some mindless games that people play that can actually even make you tired. There are a lot of iris programs within the smartphones that decrease the light that are going into your eyes. So, I’m not opposed to having your smartphone on when you’re going to sleep. You just don’t want it a stimulated environment. But if you’re playing one of your games, and that can be relaxing for some people. So my rule of thumb with the smartphone is just don’t be super stimulated when you’re using your smartphone. But I don’t mind the hour, half an hour, that’s good, but I can shut my smartphone up, put it away in that play mode so I don’t get any of the EMS and then go to sleep in seconds. So, I’m not really affected by it.

(00:33:35)

I love the fluid. You really, really want to be conscious on how much fluid you drink right before bed because the worst thing is you could be a great sleeper, but if your bladder is filled up, there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do. And I hate getting up in the middle of the night going to the bathroom. It’s horrible. So, you’ve got to be really conscious about food and hydration.

Stu

(00:34:01)

Any thoughts on those people-

Dr. Martone

(00:34:03)

… and hydration.

Stu

(00:34:03)

Any thoughts on those people perhaps then that A, do have to get up during the night, and B, really struggle to get back to sleep because-

Dr. Martone

(00:34:11)

Oh. Yeah.

Stu

(00:34:12)

I used to be guilty of this in terms of maybe three o’clock in the morning, and I go to the toilet, and then my mind is racing. I just feel like I’ve come out of a boardroom, and I’ve got all of these thoughts ruminating, and I cannot switch it off. And I’ve dialed into something called Box Breathing, which really helped me, but I know that so many people suffer with this, and I’d love to hear what your thoughts are.

Dr. Martone

(00:34:35)

Let me. I’m just going to ask a question. I don’t know what your knowledge is on this topic.

Stu

(00:34:42)

Yeah.

Dr. Martone

(00:34:44)

If you had to guess, when you think, what portion of the brain do you think turns on, the front portion of the brain, or the back portion of your brain?

Stu

(00:34:57)

Front.

Dr. Martone

(00:34:58)

Right? Front portion of your brain, prefrontal cortex?

Stu

(00:35:02)

Yeah.

Dr. Martone

(00:35:02)

If you remember something, what portion of your brain do you think? It’s simplistic, but what portion of your brain do you think the energy moves to?

Stu

(00:35:13)

Rear.

Dr. Martone

(00:35:15)

Rear, right? Where are your sleep centers, in the front portion of your brain, or do you think the rear portion of your brain?

Stu

(00:35:21)

In the rear.

Dr. Martone

(00:35:22)

Right? So if you want to access your sleep centers, you can’t think yourself to sleep. You have to remember yourself to sleep. So you can focus on bringing that energy back. And when you wake up in the middle of the night, it’s a very addictive time to think, because it is right in the middle. So you can think, and access your subconscious thoughts, very addictive time to think. So you can think about everything. You can solve all of your problems, and then you’re going to be like, “I just got to remember that. I just have to remember that. I have to remember that.” And once you fall asleep, you wipe the slate clean, and you’re done.

(00:35:58)

Here’s the deal. You fall asleep on your exhale in the hold, not the inhale. So if you can focus on relaxing your breath, that’s a natural pause. And then you inhale. You fall asleep in that pause, because that’s where your sympathetic tone is maximum. So focus on that breath, or try to get into the dream you are thinking about, because we want to be in control of something. You can be in control of remembering, or thinking. If you think, you’re going to stay up for hours, but if you remember, you’re going to fall back asleep.

Stu

(00:36:42)

That’s fascinating. And that talks to a bit of a strategy that I use. And you’ve just lent a little bit of science then to that, to help me understand what’s happening. So I use Netflix as a tool to switch off my thinking mind. So before I go to bed, I like to watch an hour of Netflix, trash TV. So I don’t-

Dr. Martone

(00:37:01)

That’s like a smartphone. You going to shut that off.

Stu

(00:37:04)

I know. It works.

Dr. Martone

(00:37:06)

You’re right. So it’s mindless TV. That’s okay. Because it’s calming you down.

Stu

(00:37:10)

It’s mindless TV. But if I ever wake up during the night, my strategy is to think about the mindless TV, and remember the mindless TV.

Dr. Martone

(00:37:21)

No. No. No. Remember the mindless TV.

Stu

(00:37:22)

Remember the mindless TV.

Dr. Martone

(00:37:24)

Because it has already happened.

Stu

(00:37:25)

That’s right. And I remember all of the things, and I’ll go through the story as I have watched it on the TV, and it works. And I think I heard somebody whose termed the coin visual overwriting, and it was essentially just trying to just calm this chatter down by junk, whether it be junk audio, junk books, junk TV, just trying to switch off that monkey mind. But I’ll always go back, and remember, remember, remember, remember. And I’ll go through, and I’ll remember the workout that I’ve done that day, and I’ll just go through the motions. What did I do? Which weights did I pick up? And it works. I go straight back to sleep. So fascinating. So thank you for that. You’ve added a little bit of science, and flavor to that. So I understand exactly-

Dr. Martone

(00:38:13)

It took me a long time, because I studied. Once I started getting into sleep, and it was very difficult for me to fall asleep, I tried to look. And it didn’t exist anywhere, and I had to look. And I’m like, “Listen. It just makes sense. Your sleep centers and your memories are so close to each other.” One of the reasons sleep is so beneficial in REM sleep is because it categorizes your memories. “So let me start thinking, and here’s the thing. Let me start remembering.” What I find, and I don’t know what the science is on there. It doesn’t exist, but I’m going to tell you based on anecdotal evidence, you have to have already slept on that memory, right?

Stu

(00:38:58)

Yeah.

Dr. Martone

(00:38:59)

So it has to already be filed in the whole data bank. And then once you fall asleep on a memory, you’ll go. If you keep thinking about the same memory, you’ll fall asleep faster, and faster, and faster.

Stu

(00:39:12)

Oh.

Dr. Martone

(00:39:12)

So I’m going to give you a for instance. I had a Christmas party, and there was 103 people there. How do I know that? Because I count everybody in my mind right before I to get myself to sleep, because I know I have my mountain biking friends, and there were 12 of them. I have 16 of my late friends, then there were. So I count everybody over and over, and I don’t even get to the end of it anymore, because it’s so repetitious, that I put myself to sleep.

Stu

(00:39:41)

That’s brilliant. Wow. Boy, oh boy. You got a lot of friends. That’s all I got to say.

Dr. Martone

(00:39:44)

It was a high school Christmas party. It was big.

Stu

(00:39:50)

That’s awesome. Well, look, we are coming up to time here, and I’m conscious of you as well, because you’ve got stuff to do before you’ve got to get into your sleep routine, no doubt. But question that I like to ask is personal to you in terms of your non-negotiables. What are the things that you do on autopilot each and every day that enable you to crush your day? And it doesn’t have to be sleep-related. It might just be, “I like to get up, and get light in my eyes. And I’ll have a black coffee with, I don’t know, butter in it, or something like that,” anything.

Dr. Martone

(00:40:23)

So sleep is one of my non-negotiables, as you can imagine, sleep, and sleep position, because I know that was probably my way back to health, is really being able to improve my vagal tone through getting the structure correct in my sleep. So that’s one of my non-negotiables. Also going periods of time without eating, I think it’s so important to challenge your sugar levels within your body, and in being able to deplete that liver glycogen. So your body can go into what’s called autophagy. I think that’s so important. I think we eat too much within our current culture. I stay away from, obviously I have some sugar, but I really try to not get my sugar through drinks like Gatorades, and all the juices, and all that.

(00:41:16)

Anytime you see healthy in the grocery store, just stay away from it. And a book that really stuck with me that I think was an influential thing in my mind, and it’s not in current production anymore, but it was called Eating for Beauty by David Wolfe, and he also had a superfoods book, but within that book, they took pictures of food, and there was energy. They used kirlian photography, and took pictures of food. So when they took pictures of the food, they would see a cooked piece of lettuce, versus a regular lettuce. The cooked had just more life energy within it. And then they categorized superfoods like cacao, hemp seed, goji berry, honey, and you had these foods that just irradiated just so much harnessed energy. So I really like to get superfoods within my diet on a daily basis. My big one’s honey, because I have bees.

Stu

(00:42:13)

Fantastic. Yeah. Wow. That’s great advice. Well, we have got a raft of information for our listeners here. So this is fantastic. So what’s next for Dr. Peter Martone? So we’re just at the start of the year. Obviously there’s lots of opportunity ahead of us. Have you got anything lined up?

Dr. Martone

(00:42:31)

Yeah. So my understanding of neurology, being able to look at people, and tell them what’s going on, even before I can look past somebody’s symptoms, read the neurology, and their posture, and tell them what’s going on internal even before they tell me. So we’re coming up what’s called the Neurostructural Protocol and Certification, and I’m going to start teaching that across the world. I want to get. My mission is to be able to change collaborative healthcare as we know it, to be able to improve patient outcomes, because you go to a massage therapist, a chiropractor, an MD, an acupuncturist, yes, they have different modalities on which they treat, but nobody looks at people the same way. They all look at people very different. So I want to be able to bring people together within one common lens of being able to look at people, read neurology, and structural posture, and be able to treat the same, and be on the same language when you intercommunicate with collaborative health care. So that is 2024.

Stu

(00:43:37)

Oh. That’s exciting. Well, when you said that, I looked at myself, and just thought, “Oh. Quick. Stand up straight. He’s looking at me.”

Dr. Martone

(00:43:42)

I can already-

Stu

(00:43:42)

I know. But what’s going on? So for all of our listeners then that want to find out more, they’re interested in Neck Nest, they’re interested in your communications, whether it be social media, blog posts, podcasts, all of the above, where can we send them?

Dr. Martone

(00:43:56)

So I think the best place to go, because you can find out most of, you can go to Neck Nest from there, and stuff, but my educational site is drsleepright.com, D-R-S-L-E-E-P-R-I-G-H-T. Right when you get onto the site, there’s a sleep risk assessment. Right? It determines you can take a quick quiz, and it will rank how well you’re sleeping, and how it’s affecting your health. And then a pop-up will come up, will give you a free download, which will be the Five Pillars of Sleep, just like you have pillars.

Stu

(00:44:30)

Yeah.

Dr. Martone

(00:44:31)

And that we break it out into position, temperature, timing, rest, and relax, and all that type of stuff.

Stu

(00:44:38)

Brilliant. Fantastic. Great resources. Well, we’ll put all the links that you’ve spoken about in the show notes today. Dr. Martone, fantastic conversation. Really, really enjoyed it. And hopefully at some stage, we might be able to get out on the mountain bike and go for a ride with you in the near future.

Dr. Martone

(00:44:53)

Absolutely.

Stu

(00:44:54)

Thank you so much again, and we will be in touch.

Dr. Martone

(00:44:57)

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

The post Dr Peter Martone – Why Sleep Position Matters appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Ingredients

• 4 tbsp Collagen Powder
• 1 Cup coconut milk
• 4 tbsp chia seeds
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• Top with fruits, nuts & honey

Method

• Combine ingredients, pour into cups, cover and refrigerate overnight. Top with fruits of choice.

Look for more snack recipes here

Products Used in the Overnight Chia Collagen Pudding

Pure Collagen Powder

$54.95 Add to Cart

The post Overnight Chia Collagen Pudding appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Anoop Asok and Ann-Maria Tom to the podcast. Together they are known as the Weight Loss Whisperers who focus on metabolic mastery and hormonal health to provide their clients with real results. In this episode, we discuss where so many of us go wrong when wanting to lose weight, the importance of calories versus quality of food, and the strategy to actually keep the weight off for good. Over to Anoop and Ann-Maria.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• Where do many of us go wrong when wanting to lose weight?
• How can we ensure we keep the weight off?
• How important are calories vs the quality of food we eat?

Get more of Anoop Asok and Ann-Maria Tom:

• https://anntomfitness.com/
  
• https://www.instagram.com/ann_maria_tom/

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy these interviews:

Robert Lustig: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, Weight Loss & Disease
Dr David Prologo – Discover Why Most Diets Fail in the Long Term
Dr Nicki Steinberger – How to Break Your Sugar Addiction Forever

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have, I certainly do.

(00:23)

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right, we are into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180Nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:44)

This week I’m excited to welcome Anoop Asok and Ann-Maria Tom to the podcast. Together they are known as the weight loss whisperers who focus on metabolic mastery and hormonal health to provide their clients with real results. In this episode, we discuss where so many of us go wrong when wanting to lose weight, the importance of calories versus quality of food, and the strategy to actually keep the weight off for good. Over to Anoop and Ann-Maria.

(01:15)

Hey, guys. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Ann-Maria and Anoop, also known as the weight loss whisperers to the podcast. Guys, how are you both today?

Ann-Maria

(01:27)

We’re doing fantastic. We are in the middle of winter here in Canada. It’s cold, but it’s good.

Stu

(01:37)

Exactly right.

Ann-Maria

(01:38)

[inaudible 00:01:38] here today.

Stu

(01:40)

Fantastic. Well, I really appreciate you sharing some of your time. First up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Ann-Maria

(01:50)

For sure, my name is Ann and this is Anoop and we are husband and wife. We are fitness coaches and we basically teach people how to lose weight while eating whatever they want, that’s what we do. The reason why we got here and all that dates back to three, four years before when COVID started, everyone was sick.

(02:16)

We are also registered nurses in the ER. We were working in the emergency room at that point in time. We saw a lot of younger population coming through the emergency doors with variety of health issues, especially when we were in the middle of that COVID season. One of the reasons why we started our coaching back then.

(02:36)

One of the other reasons is also just our journeys, personal journeys, which we’ll talk about here in a second, but we literally teach people how to lose weight by [inaudible 00:02:48]

Stu

(02:51)

Well, it can be so confusing because there are a number of different strategies. If you were to jump on the internet right now, you’d see that some people say it’s just all about the calories, that’s all it is. Whereas other people say, “No, no, it’s more about the quality of the food that you eat.” Whereas other people say it’s about the timing and maybe a mixture of those two as well.

(03:12)

Maybe there’s a personal aspect to it where we need to look at our own physiology in terms of our genetics and our digestive system, et cetera things like that. I guess the question then in my eyes is that where do many of us go wrong? What are the glaring mistakes that we make when we want to lose weight?

Ann-Maria

(03:33)

That’s a great question. I think the reason why most of us or most of us are not able to lose weight and where we fall apart is the part that we go all in when it comes to the diet part. We cut a lot of food, then we go into this binge-eating and then we do a ton of exercise. There is not enough balance, I would say, in what we are trying to do, and that’s where most people fall short.

(04:03)

As much as it is true that we need to be in a caloric deficit for us to lose weight, you have to make sure also that your body is ready for it. I don’t know how many of you listening this know this, but yes, caloric deficit is required for you to lose weight, but most of the weight loss happens in our brain because the brain is what regulates the weight loss.

(04:26)

Our brain is literally our thermostat, meaning it wants to keep us in homeostasis, meaning our brain always prioritizes survival over weight loss. One of the biggest mistakes people are making these days is eating very few calories, cutting too much food all at once. Whenever our brain senses too much weight loss happening, again, it goes back to when I said it tries to bring us back to that homeostasis, the vital mechanism.

(04:58)

How does it do it? By really increasing, upping our hunger cues, making those donuts in the break room feel much more enticing and yummy than it normally is. Physiologically, our metabolic rate also slows down so that we can conserve more energy and send that right back to building up the [inaudible 00:05:21]. Technically, when you are trying to ease eat less food, your brain wants to cheat more.

(05:28)

The hunger is what is going to really give you in those situations. Sometime we don’t even realize when that we are in such a drastic caloric deficit, we end up eating more at the end of the day. When you are below reaching that set points, metabolically speaking, you end up eating more to maintain that same level of hunger you had before.

(05:55)

This is why it’s really impossible for you to maintain that weight that you lost with intense calorie restriction. One of the reasons, biggest reason why yo-yo dieting is the best diet out there for weight gain not for weight loss. Yes, to answer your question, eating less food and [inaudible 00:06:15]

Stu

(06:14)

A lot of what you said makes sense because specifically I think that when we just consume maybe way less than we are used to doing and our body says, “Hold on a minute, you’re going into starvation mode, down regulate the metabolism. Let’s not move around as much.” You feel a little bit more tired because you don’t want to expend that energy because you haven’t got it coming in.

(06:36)

Then, hence as days and weeks and months go by and you feel lethargic because you’re not doing as much, your metabolism slowed down. Then, you go back to eating as you were before. You’ve got a slower metabolism and your body says, “Great, let’s start storing calories because it looks like the famine season is over.” It’s really interesting. As your thoughts then are just take it slow, take it slow and steady.

(07:03)

Oftentimes, we’ve had people in our community say, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong because I only lost a pound in weight this week.” Then I think when you extrapolate that out and you said, “Well, hold on a minute, that’s 52 pounds a year, that’s a win.” That’s not a failure. Would you agree that perhaps slow and steady wins the race rather than just going all out and just starving?

Ann-Maria

(07:30)

Absolutely, because you might be able to lose some weight with starving for a little bit, but get [inaudible 00:07:36] to happen you’re not going to sustain that kind of starving mode for the rest of your life, no one can. You are going to fall back to the habits that actually got you 100 pounds heavier or 50 pounds heavier, whatever that is.

(07:51)

Why don’t we work on those habits that actually is going to help you lose weight as a byproduct, and that is going to take time. All the fat that we have gained, that did not happen overnight, so what makes us believe that fat loss is going to happen overnight. Of course, going slow and steady is the way to go if you’re looking for sustainable weight loss, meaning keeping it off for the long-term.

Stu

(08:15)

Tell us then a little bit about these habits. I know that, and I’m sure you’ll dive into the quality of food as well, because oftentimes highly processed, ultra refined and ultra palatable foods hijack a lot of our hunger systems and just make us, they’re designed to make us want to eat more and more and more and more.

(08:40)

What habits then do you utilize with your customers that allow them to break free of any of the ingrained, unhealthy habits that may have led them to where they want to be or where they are at the moment, which is in need of perhaps some new habits?

Ann-Maria

(08:55)

I would like to break this down into three easy steps so that easy to implement. When you think about losing weight rather than going, “Okay, let me just eat salads and chicken and broccoli all day every day for the next 12 weeks.” Break that down into short-term achievable goals. The fast step of making anything easier, especially this makes sense with food is make your food or healthy food taste delicious.

(09:29)

No one wants to eat just raw spinach or just broccoli stalks all day every day. We are going to fall apart at some point. Instead of eating just sliced broccoli stalks or something, what we do is we roast it in a little bit of butter or whatever that you like to do, add some seasoning and flavor, make it a little bit more flavorful and eat it without.

(09:52)

Instead of eating like sauteed green beans that are very soggy, why don’t you eat crispy greens instead. Add some cheese or some spinach or whatnot, sorry, some garlic or whatnot on your spinach so that your spinach is not all bland. Make it a little bit more enticing so that it is giving you some kind of excitement for you to continue eating that. This one change we implemented by sauteing our broccoli with butter and things like that even our toddler eats them.

(10:24)

We don’t even have to tell to eat it, he just eats it because it tastes good. Most of us do not really eat the required amount of vegetables that we’re supposed to eat every single day, the dietary recommendations, we are not meeting them. The report says only one percentage of teens and people in their 20s are actually meeting their daily vegetable requirements, which is just think about it one person, what is it?

(10:50)

That’s my first tip, like make your food healthy food, whatever you’re eating, tastes good. The second hack I have for you is stop making these hyper palatable foods unavailable. It is not helping you in any way, even though studies have shown the link of hyperpalatable foods with the way your hunger hormones and everything else work studies have also illustrated that this phenomenon, when we make the food off-limits, we are becoming more inclined to desire them even more.

(11:26)

Rather than just viewing the heroic foods as off limits or bad, it will be helpful if we can shift our mindset to view all the foods as just neutral and then giving yourself permission to enjoy them when you physically still hungry. Restricting your foods like your favorite foods will lead to more cravings down the road anyways. Meaning you’re going to end up eating more anyways and that give you a sense of deprivation.

Stu

(11:56)

What about strategies? Because I know that hyperpalatable foods that have been specifically engineered to hit this bliss point, which just and some of the taglines, once you pop, you can’t stop and it’s true. It’s very, very hard to try and open up a bag of salty flavorsome chips and crisps and dips and things like that and stop it maybe a handful, which is typically the recommended serving size on the bag that nobody ever adheres to. How can you try and eat these foods in moderation that have been designed to ensure that you can’t?

Anoop

(12:34)

What we have done with our clients is what we call green pie method. Basically, the green aspect that’s like the green protein initiated eating. When you are starting, if you want to really have that kind of food, hyperpalatable food or something like that, start with greens if possible. That’s basically your greens are fiber rich, so it’s a longer time to digest. It just goes through intestine or your digestive system really slow.

(13:10)

Start with that and then start with the protein source next. Say like if you like some chips maybe munch on a little bit of nuts first and then have that chips so that way you’re starting with the fiber, then a little bit of protein, protein or fat, and then your hyperpalatable food. That way, the whole digestive process changes a lot that it takes time to digest and absorption and sugar spike goes down considerably. Eating, seeing food, or actually more food than before, you don’t get a fat deposition compared to eating that chips alone.

Stu

(13:48)

That’s wise word. I’ve got three daughters and when they were younger, they used to go to birthday parties. Over here birthday parties for children, probably the same in Canada, it’s just game on for all of the most ridiculous kiddie foods on the planet, chips, sweets, crisps, and lollies and everything under the sun.

(14:11)

My strategy was that I would make the fattiest omelet that I possibly could before they went out to that party, and there’d be eggs and butter and coconut oil and cream in there. We’d just whipped that up and I’d get some protein in there, put some meat in there. I’d give them this big beautiful satiating omelet before they went out.

(14:32)

Lo and behold, they only ate a fraction of what they would’ve liked to because they were simply just not hungry. I really liked that strategy. I think it worked really well.

Ann-Maria

(14:43)

It’s also crazy because when your tummy is already full already feeling satiated, then the chances of you getting attracted to and eating a lot of chips and pizza and all that is going to be considerably less. Meaning the consumption is going to be considerably less, meaning you don’t have to overdo the exercise later on to lose calories.

Stu

(15:05)

That is good. Just then back on the track, you were talking about healthy habits and you’d outline a couple. I wonder were there any more healthy habit fixes that you could expand on?

Ann-Maria

(15:16)

Yeah, the last and the third one that we already mentioned is what was the I came the green pie method. That’s one of the biggest hacks that we ask our clients to use. This can even work when you are attending parties and events. Quick little hack is that we, and we do this personally as well because we are Indians and we do attend extra big Indian parties and events where there’s long, high fatty curries and things like that.

(15:44)

What we do is we do take a supplement like fiber supplement. We don’t [inaudible 00:15:50] supplements, I’m not advocating for supplements here. If you replace that with greens and everything, that’s great, but most of the time when we are busy, we’re on the go. We mix a scoop or something of fiber supplement, we drink it, and then we attend the event.

(16:03)

Meaning that fiber is going to stay as a buffer. On top of that is going to be delayed, meaning you’re not going to feel as bloated as you would if you are not taking that fiber or whatever that is that literally preparing your body for the impact later on that happen later on. This is one of the biggest hacks we ask most of our clients to use because events and everything is going to happen no matter what, and that should not stop your results.

Anoop

(16:33)

Fiber, you tend not to eat a really heavy or fatty food, so you tend to eat lesser amount of unhealthy food when you’re in the parties or something like that, and that will help as well.

Stu

(16:45)

That’s good. Fiber definitely is king when it comes to filling up the stomach. I think changing the way you feel about food in terms of a hunger perspective. How important then to you are calories when compared to the quality of the food that we eat? I say this because I could compare maybe a can of diet soda, zero calories and say half an avocado maybe, I don’t know, 250 calories, something along those lines.

(17:18)

One of those things will contain artificial sweeteners and acids and colors and dyes and things like that. While it won’t give you any calorie load, I’m sure that it’s not doing a microbiome any good. It’s probably not great for your teeth and even from a society perspective it’s probably not great. Whereas the avocado, monounsaturated fats, fiber in there, potassium and it’s very filling as well added to something like a salad. Which side of the spectrum are you on that calorie versus quality thought train?

Anoop

(18:01)

I mean, obviously calories matter for weight loss. Basically, what we say is that if you’re eating more than your total daily energy expenditure, that’s the amount of calories your body needs for day-to-day activities and for your organ function and everything. If you’re eating more than that, technically you should be gaining weight. If you are eating less than that, that means you should be losing weight.

(18:31)

Obviously, more to that than just that calorie number. That’s the quality of the calories where quality the calories is coming from. When we say quality of calories, we usually use two terms high quality foods and lower quality foods. When we say high quality foods, what that means is it’s really low processed foods, whole grain foods, and whole foods in general.

(19:01)

Low quality foods means highly processed, highly refined, added sugars, added fat, and trans fat and everything. We prefer in general, higher quality foods are really good for when we come to weight loss because just think about the way when it’s less processed, your body basically needs, uses more calories to break down that food and digest.

(19:33)

You’re actually spending more calories to digest that food compared to that same, the low quality food. The calorie burn is more to digest that high calorie food and compared to low calorie food. Also on our first image, we use 10% of our energy expenditure for just that digestion process alone. The more higher quality food you use on your diet, the more calories burns you have.

Stu

(20:03)

I guess, from a nutrient perspective, if you’re providing the body with a whole array of nutrients that it requires to function at its best versus something that really is empty calories like highly processed junk food that doesn’t really contain any beneficial nutrients. I wonder whether that has a signaling mechanism in the body to say, the body says, “Well, hold on, I’ve got a lot of great stuff that I can use here versus you haven’t given me anything I need really, you’re just feeding my appetite, but you’re not feeding the body.” I wonder whether that comes into it too.

Ann-Maria

(20:44)

Yeah, sure because when you think about these empty calorie foods, you are feeding your body, but your cells are technically not getting any.

Stu

(20:54)

Yeah, exactly.

Ann-Maria

(20:55)

It really messes up all your hormones and metabolism and your hunger cues and all that that most people consuming a lot of processed and fatty foods, they don’t really know when to start and when to stop. I don’t know if you guys have heard about this, “I don’t really feel hungry, but I still eat.”

(21:16)

That’s really scary, that really ties down to you disrupting that hunger satiating signaling with the brain that getting disrupted with, sure, it might or might not affect the way you lose weight and store fat or anything, but at the end of the day, it’s really messing up everything. Your entire signaling that should be working the right way so that you should be, when you’re looking at a food, when you’re smelling a food, you should be feeling, “Okay, I feel hungry, I want to eat it.”

(21:46)

Once you’re being full, that should send signals to your brain, “It’s time up, we are done. Let’s stop insulin production from the pancreas and all that. Let’s stop all of that.” That’s not happening. What’s going to happen? Your cells are becoming more resistant to insulin and glucose ending up to diabetes and other metabolic disorders. It has a deeper role than just thinking about calories where it has a big impact in my opinion.

Stu (22:16)

Then, to throw a curveball into the mix and that curveball would be menopause. We have many customers who are struggling, I think from the perspective of, “I’m doing everything right, but nothing is working for me. I feel cranky and tired and wired. I’ve got weight where I’ve never had weight before.

(22:39)

I’ve tried fasting, I’ve tried keto, I’ve tried all of the different dietary interventions that are available.” How do you tackle that and is that more of perhaps a tailored supplemental approach to balance hormones as well as a structured diet?

Ann-Maria

(22:59)

Yeah, that’s a great question and you can do both. It depends on what your hormonal profile is looking at, because not every woman is going to experience the same symptoms. Some might experience it lesser compared to others. Intensity is going to be really difference here when we are talking about the symptoms itself.

(23:20)

The management will really depend on what you are feeling as a person and how hard is it for you to lose that weight. Especially when you’re entering into that menopause, our female sex hormones are all going, “Oop.” It has been up or doing this through perimenopause and menopause, everything just slows down.

(23:38)

Meaning women are going to experience symptoms. One of the biggest symptoms, and we’re going to tie this to the weight loss part of it also is the fat redistribution that happens during the time of menopause due to hormone estrogen and Protestant going influx. What happens is all that fat that has been stored in your peripheral regions go to the central area, around the abdomen, around the hips.

(24:03)

Hence most women, they say, “Oh my god, I am having this belly fat all of a sudden, which I did not have five years ago. I haven’t [inaudible 00:24:11] anything about my diet or exercise and it’s happening and I’m not sure why. This is so frustrating.” That’s one piece of it, the fat redistribution happening. What can you do to your current exercise regimen and your nutritional aspect of things to really balance that out, to really balance that hormones out?

(24:33)

Not everyone will be able to unfortunately balance it with just nutrition and exercise. Some of them will have to take supplements and there’s nothing wrong with that. One thing I would say is that if you are someone who has been exercising six days a week, seven days a week, 2, 5, 10 case steps for all these years, unfortunately that strategy is not going to work during the time of menopause because it will raise your cortisol up there.

(24:56)

What this is going to do? It’s going to steal all that hormones that is supposed to produce more estrogen and progesterone so that hormonal steal happens. Cortisol steals that hormones. That’s the biggest thing that we see in menopausal women, so cut down your exercise. Do not be scared that you are going to gain weight if you cut down the exercise.

(25:17)

You might feel a little bit of change, especially the first two weeks of cutting that exercise down because hey, it’s a shock for your body, going from 10K steps to 3K going from days a week to four days is going to be a little bit of an adjustment, but once you pass that adjustment phase, you will start seeing that weight coming off. This also ties down to the diet part of things.

(25:41)

If you are someone who has been doing keto and low carb and high protein and everything in the past, try to learn how to eat your food in balance. You need enough amount of carbs so that you get energy. Already you’re having lower energy because of your hormones, so please do not induce more exhaustion by eating less amount of carbs.

(26:06)

Another piece of it is your protein because we work with a lot of perimenopausal, menopausal women, and most of them do not only them not eating enough protein, but they aren’t consuming protein. I think the right amount of protein is also going to be crucial for you guys and also your fat, because fat is where your hormones actually produce from.

(26:27)

Cholesterol is where all the hormones are produced from in the first place, so that also goes down. You also have to eat your fat in balance. Everything has to be in balance, especially when you enter that menopausal territory. Otherwise, it’s going to be so hard to keep that weight loss [inaudible 00:26:47]

Stu

(26:47)

That’s good advice. From a protein perspective, what are your recommendations? We always think of it as, I think it’s one gram of protein for every pound of body weight kind of equation. Do you have a different recommendation in terms of protein for let’s say for females perhaps?

Ann-Maria

(27:08)

Go for it.

Anoop

(27:09)

Actually, it depends on we weight training or at what pace you are. At first we concentrate on metabolic repair, we make sure you’re working properly, and then during the pace, depending on how much of protein you were having before, we slowly increase it. Usually, the RPC is approximately around 20 grams per meal. That’s manageable size and that we also said three meals a day, 20 grams per meal, that should be a good number.

(27:46)

Again, depending on if you’re a weight lifting person, then you need more. We go by a case by case basis. One gram of protein per kilo is a pretty good number.

Stu

(28:01)

Thinking then about exercise, lots and lots of confusion in terms of the best exercise for fat loss or to increase the metabolism for an extended period of time, some people like to pound the streets and endurance exercise, ultra endurance, some people like to lift weights exclusively. Then, there’s more of an emergence of this F45 style functional high intensity interval training or a mix of everything. Where do you sit on perhaps the most effective bang for buck from an exercise perspective if let’s say you’ve got one hour to spare three times a week?

Ann-Maria

(28:46)

Yeah, absolutely. I would say do what is going to make more sense with your lifestyle and where you are at in your fitness journey. There is no one size fits all when it comes to exercise or diet. Now, especially for exercise, the type of exercise will you do is going to be depending on what your goal is. It’s going to be completely different from your friend or your mom or your dad, completely different gender.

(29:13)

It’s going to, so many factors comes into play when we think about deciding workout plans, what’s going to be the best for you. I would say if you want to, especially for women, if you want to decrease your fat percentage age and build that muscle, I would say a combination of both cardio and weight lifting. It’s the best bet because cardio is an aerobic exercise. It uses oxygen, it’s going to be helpful to burn more calories while you are working out.

(29:41)

That with the strength training, of course, strength training helped build more muscle, meaning metabolically active tissue, meaning you’re speeding up your metabolism. As females do not really have much of a muscle mass compared to men, because we do not really have a lot of testosterone going around in us, right?

(29:57)

It’s very, very minute amount, so we need to make sure that we have the optimal amount of muscle mass so that we are burning fat, optimizing our hormones, and also toning up at the same time. 150 to 250 minutes per week of cardio is what we recommend for our clients personally. Slowly add in the strength training aspect to that as well, two to three days a week of strength training.

(30:25)

I would say if you’re trying to lose weight, maybe like 15 to 20 minutes of cardio, and then you can maybe do another 20 minutes of weight lifting that should be good for three to four days, you don’t have to overdo it.

Stu

(30:38)

That sounds good. Would you categorize walking as acceptable zone two cardio, for instance?

Ann-Maria

(30:49)

Absolutely, walking is an amazing exercise. For some people they don’t like to do exercise. If you’re some person that you don’t really like the standing at one place and exercising, whatever fancy exercising is if you don’t really enjoy, you’re not going to do it for the long-term. I don’t know how many clients we had that came and said, “Ann, I don’t really like exercising, but if this is absolutely required for me to lose weight, I will do it.”

(31:17)

My question to this would be, “Would you then continue doing it once the coaching ends? If the answer is no, I would say, heck no, don’t do it. Let’s stick with what you enjoy. If that’s walking, let’s do it, but the key here is being consistent no matter what type of exercise you are doing.” At the end of the day, all we are trying to do is burn calories. As long as that goal is reached, the vehicle that we are using to reach that goal doesn’t really matter. It just has to be sustainable.

Stu

(31:46)

Yeah, that’s right. No, that does make perfect sense. Then, thoughts on fasting, fasting for weight loss. Like many dietary interventions, it’s going in and out of favor in terms of it was thought to be the pinnacle for longevity and insulin sensitivity and just a great strategy for overall health. Now, there’s chatter more about, “Well, fasting may not be great for females because it’s really disruptive from a hormonal perspective.”

(32:23)

The body doesn’t want to be in a state of starvation for too long and cortisol goes up and we really want to reduce oxidative stress and all of that kind of stuff. Where do you sit on fasting? Some people get up and say, “You know what, I’m just not hungry in the morning.” I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not. I mean personally, I wake up and I’m ravenous in the morning and I make a huge breakfast, which works well for me.

(32:47)

Other people just say, “I’m not hungry and I don’t need to eat until midday.” Which would then mean typically they would be perhaps already on a 16:8 fasting protocol anyway. Where do you sit on fasting?

Anoop

(33:04)

Regarding fasting, most of the time people are skipping a meal or more when they’re on the fasting phase, and we do not recommend that. First of all, if you metabolism is working properly, if it works as a well-oiled machine that it should be, you should be like you said, by the time you wake up, you should be really, really hungry. You probably wouldn’t think about anything rather than eating a food right away, that’s how a normal body should function.

(33:35)

Because of the way we eat, because of our work and our habits, we tend to skip breakfast or by knowingly or unknowingly we are doing, most of them are doing fasting unknowingly. Think about this, what happens when you’re fasting or skipping a meal? Ideally, your body is expecting food at that time and if you’re not giving food to your body, your stomach has digestive juices, basically those are enzymes or those are acids.

(34:09)

It’s supposed to digest that food, but now you’re not giving that food to the stomach. All that digestive uses are there just concentrated acid, it’s going to eat away your stomach lining. A couple of days, it’s going to be okay, if you keep doing that, it’s going to lead to gastritis. We see a lot of this issue by our background, our nurses, we see a lot of this happening. If you still keep on doing it and then it goes to peptic ulcer, that’s kind of a…

Ann-Maria

(34:39)

Blister formation.

Anoop

(34:41)

Yeah, blister formation, it’s like gastritis times 10. That’s what happens when you skip your meals. From a weight loss perspective, you might see results, but fasting or any kind of diet, what I ask my clients is that you should ask yourself, can you do that for rest of your life or how do you do that? For most of them would say they might do it for maybe a month or a couple of months or maybe a year or very rarely, two years or more.

(35:15)

First of all, there’s so much health-wise happening when you’re skipping a meal and also hormonal imbalance and everything that’s huge for females, especially when they’re nearing their menopausal or postmenopausal time. If you can do that for the rest of your life, there’s going to be a point where you’re going to stop doing it and start back having more food or start back eating the food you like.

(35:39)

What happens then? Most of them when they jump onto this fasting phase, they don’t think about what happens when you stop that fasting. When they stop fasting basically, they’re going to eat the food as normally they usually eat. All the weight, whatever they lost during that fasting is basically going to come back. If that’s going to happen, it’s not sustainable and why would you start doing something like that?

Ann-Maria

(36:06)

One thing that we have seen with a woman also is that they done this fasting for such a long time and it has automatically become a lifestyle. As you said before, I don’t feel hungry anymore after waking up and they’re not realizing that they’re under consuming calories now because they might have gotten into the fasting to put themselves into caloric deficit.

(36:30)

Knowingly, unknowingly that happened, now it got to the point where they calories and they’re only eating on less than thousand calories. Thinking, “Oh my god, I’m not feeling any hunger cues anymore. I just eat food just because it’s the lunch time and I have to eat it.” That’s the feeling that we talked about it’s all disrupted. Why do you want to do that when you know it’s easy to do things like this, it’s easy to look for quick fixes, it’s rather difficult to change the habits.

(37:02)

I would say start doing the difficult things. Stop looking for the quick fixes because then it is only going to prolong the pain. It’s only going to make the pain worse. I want you to think about breaking a bone as an example. You broke your bone, the faster you put a cast on, you are going to feel better. The more you sit with it’s going to get swollen and swollen, and so it’s going to get even more painful. Weight loss and doing things like that and fasting, it does the exact same thing to your body.

Stu

(37:36)

Yeah, just address the issue. A lot of this will play on people’s emotional heartstrings and put a lot of toil on them, and oftentimes at the end of the day, they’ve done everything that they think that they should be doing in terms of maybe counting and tracking calories, working out, trying to fit more exercise into their day, but at the end of the day, they’re ready to just relax, sit down with a glass of wine.

(38:06)

Your thoughts on alcohol? I know that, again, varying degrees of advice on, “It’s okay, one glass is okay all the way through to, well, actually it’s a toxin and it’s disrupting all of the different areas of your body, including sleep, including hormones, including gut health. It’s a big no-no.” Can it play a part of a healthy meal plan plan moving forwards?

Anoop

(38:38)

Alcohol, like you said, there’s all this negative aspect to alcohol is also empty calories. If you are careful about how much you consume, it can fit into a good diet plan. What we usually say is that the main thing, what happens is when people are drinking, they usually go start drinking and don’t think about food, they drink and then either have unhealthy snacks along with it or eat really unhealthy stuff after drinking.

(39:09)

There’s two problems with it. One thing, first of all, since you’re not eating, you tend to eat, drink more alcohol rather than if you are to eat healthy food and then drink. That way, at least there’s that your stomach would be a bit more fuller, so you may not feel like drinking maybe four shots instead of two if you add food, so there’s that aspect of it.

(39:34)

Another thing is that, like I said, alcohol is toxic anyways, there’s no denying that. At least if you were to have food before you drink, that way it’s kind of diluted in your stomach. If food, there’s good stuff in your stomach already, and if you were to have a fiber, that slows the absorption of alcohol. The amount of toxins get absorbed to your body reduces, and even if it get absorbed, it’s going to get absorbed in a longer duration of time rather than getting high peak.

(40:10)

All that does affect your fat absorption as well. The more calories you get absorbed right away, there’s going to be higher spike, and whenever you get high spike, a portion of that will get deposit as fat, that’s how body usually works. To avoid that, you can have food drink after food and try and choose to reduce the amount of unhealthy foods you’re having.

(40:41)

If your stomach is already food, you tend not to have much or too much too many unhealthy fried snacks, so that’s a win win for everyone.

Stu

(40:51)

It’s good. I know it can be a crux for so many people and they say, “Well, but it helps me relax.” I think perhaps mentally it does, but physically I think there’s a few different things happening there and they’re probably not all healthy. We are getting close to time. I have a question regarding your guys’ personal lives in terms of the non-negotiable habits that perhaps you adhere to every day.

(41:20)

Oftentimes, just on autopilot that make you feel great, that ensure that you crush every day. It might be things like we get up in the morning and we like to get sunlight in our eyes, or maybe we do some breath work or whatever that may be. What do the weight loss whisperers do to stay in shape both physically and mentally as well?

Anoop

(41:45)

For weight loss, the number one thing we would advise would be don’t skip your meals. I have three meals a day. If you are a person who has three meals or if you’re a person, who have four meals, have that four meals, don’t skip your meals. Like I said earlier, your bodies get ready to have that food and if you don’t give that food, basically you’re grumpy.

(42:07)

You tend to eat more heavier meal next time when you eat, so you can avoid all those if you don’t skip your meal. There’s added benefit of not having this gastritis or peptic ulcer problems. It’s all about habit formation, once you make this as a habit, maybe they say it takes at least 20 days to form a healthy habit.

(42:28)

After that, if this forms you habit, like you said earlier, when you wake up, you’re hungry already. You are not in a situation where you want to miss that meal. That’s what we aim, make the habit formation and consistency is the key.

Ann-Maria

(42:48)

Don’t think about intensity like crushing every single day doing, “One hour of workout and then I go for 10K steps, and then I eat all clean.” Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. You’re going to fall. Have realistic expectations. Do not depend on intensity, rather pay attention to consistency. You don’t have to work out one hour if you don’t have the time, but at least get 10 minutes of walking that you’re doing something and slowly that over a period of time, that consistency is going to build.

(43:23)

Once you have a great foundation with consistency, then you can work on your intensity and get to the more delicate aspects of goal, having good muscle and whatnot. Whatever your goal is, work on your consistency fast and then the other things will follow. The last thing would be just have grit. I would just have grit. Grit means not hitting that snooze button when you feel so nice and comfy, nice and warm under your comforter every single day, rather just go for a walk, not make excuses.

(43:57)

Grit also looks like it’s easy to munch on Oreo cookies sitting on the countertop, especially if you have kids saying no to that. Even if you don’t want to say no, that’s okay, but limit your intake and make some effort or take some effort to preparing some meals and make it intentional. Having grit is going to what is going to give you that sustainable long-term success that you’re looking for, and it is going to take perseverance. It is going to take passion.

(44:29)

You need to be in love with your goal. Your why has to be so strong and deep enough so that you will have the grit at the end of the day to crush that on a daily basis to get to that end point.

Stu

(44:41)

Again and again, no, I love it. Absolutely fantastic advice. Tell me what’s next for the weight loss Whisperers? What have you got on the calendar for this year? What does 2024 bring?

Ann-Maria

(45:00)

2024 is really an exciting year for us. This year, we really dove into the podcast world. We do have lots of shows booked. We are really excited to talk about weight loss, to talk about sustainable weight loss because I know there’s information about eat less and exercise more and lose weight, but I don’t enough information about, “Okay, how can we actually make a lifestyle out of this?”

(45:23)

So that you don’t have to do this over and over again and be in that hamster wheel, so that’s that. Then, we are taking on more clients than ever before because our kids in daycare now.

Stu

(45:37)

Fantastic, I’ve been there. Boy, oh boy, congratulations is a weight off your mind. Then, for all of our listeners that want to find out more about you, follow your journey, listen to your podcasts, dive into the resources that you have, where can we send them?

Ann-Maria

(45:54)

For sure. Stuart, I really want to do something very special for your audience today because what I’m going to share with you with your audience today is not something that you can find anywhere else on the internet because this is our private stuff and we only give this out to our paying clients. However, since all of you guys stayed up until very end of the show, I really want to give this out absolutely for free.

(46:19)

This is what I call the Midlife Metamorphosis kit. This is going to be everything that we talked in this podcast today. It will do a seven day workout plan with workouts that you can do under 30 minutes, three to four days a week. It’s going to be perfect for busy moms or men who really do not have that time to live in the gym.

(46:38)

Not only that, we are going to give you a list of the entire grocery list that is going to tell you exactly what food to buy while you’re in the grocery store. Also, you can navigate through your hormonal and everything with ease by losing weight and look amazing at the same time. Not just that, I know we talked a lot about protein and all those things like really building habits and all that.

(47:00)

We have included a recipe book that will have over 50 plus high protein recipes. If you guys want all of this for absolutely free of start, just go to our Instagram page, it is Ann-Maria Tom, and send me the keyword cook. It’s going to be nice and easy to remember, cook. Once again, Midlife Metamorphosis kit, send me a cook on my Instagram Ann-Maria Tom. I’ll personally send this out to you.

(47:29)

One other thing I also want to say is a huge thank you for inviting us onto your show. Please, guys if you’re listening to the show, rate this show, give a five star review rating and spread this word out there so that Stuart can produce more podcasts and bring on more guests like this, so that you guys can benefit from his show as well.

Stu

(47:51)

Fantastic. Well, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure and you are clearly hugely knowledgeable in this space with so much value to share for our audience, your audience, anybody that’s listening at this time. Definitely, for our listeners and everybody listening to this, jump onto the Instagram channel, dig in deep.

(48:11)

It sounds like there’s everything that you need, the perfect roadmap to get you where you want to be. Thank you so much, guys. Really, really appreciated the conversation today. Hopefully, I’ll be talking to you at some stage in the future.

Ann-Maria

(48:25)

Sounds good, thank you.

Stu

(48:26)

Thank you.

The post Anoop Asok & Ann-Maria Tom – The Metabolic Mastery Method appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

When you hit your thirties the act of multitasking can be at its peak. You could be juggling your time being a parent, work, family life, friends, and other commitments. With all these parts of your life as a constant juggle, your health may be the last thing on your mind.

It may feel like looking after your health is not a priority, making sure that your health and fitness is optimal is essential to maintain your quality of life. Having good health also reduces your risk of developing chronic diseases. Depending on your choices this can be a time where your health can thrive or when diseases like high blood pressure and type two diabetes begin to present themselves.

One of the important lifestyle choices which impacts your health is your diet. It is important to know that there is no one key nutrient which is the secret to optimal health and wellbeing and there is no substitute to a well-balanced diet. Saying this, four key nutrients which are important within the balance for optimal health in your thirties are protein, iron, folate, and calcium.

Protein

From the age of thirty your muscle mass deceases three to eight percent per decade (Volpi E, et al, 2004).  The rate is determined by your lifestyle choices such as exercising enough to stimulate the muscle and including exercises like resistance training.

It is also essential to include enough protein in your day to keep your muscles able to build and repair themselves. Aiming for 1.2-1.8g of protein per kilogram of body weight if you are more sedentary to up to around 2.4g of protein per kilogram of body weight is recommended for a very active thirty-year-old (website).

By structuring your meal to include around one quarter of your plate being lean meat (or alternative) / dairy (or alternative), this can help give your muscles the protein it needs. If you are time poor, including a whey protein shake can be a good way to add a complete protein source to help you meet your protein needs.

Calcium

Your bones are at their peak bone mass by around thirty years of age (website). Your bones are an active tissue and require nutrition to stay strong. You need 2.5 serves of dairy or dairy equivalents (e.g. soy yoghurt, 100g almonds, ½ cup of salmon with bones) each day which more than half of women are not reaching (health.gov). This can be 40g of cheddar cheese, ½ cup ricotta or cottage cheese, 200g yoghurt, 250 mL cows’ milk or fortified soy or plant-based milk. Other non-dairy forms of calcium include 100g tofu, 100g canned pink salmon with bones.

Folate/Folic Acid

The B vitamin known as folate or vitamin B9 is important during childbearing years. You need 400mg of folate to prevent your child from developing neural tube defects (Van Gool JD et al, 2018). Folate is important to make and repair DNA and may lower your susceptibility to heart disease (Verhoef P et al, 1998). Folate can be found in green leafy vegetables, nuts, beans, peas, fruit, wholegrains, and fortified cereal products.

Iron

Iron deficiency is common in women of reproductive age. (Cook RL et al, 2017). If your iron is low, you will feel lethargic, and your immune system can become compromised. You need 18mg of iron each day at the age of thirty. Iron is a mineral that is needed for many important functions. This includes to transport oxygen around your body.

To help meet your iron needs aim to include an animal source of iron called haem iron. This can be found in lean meat like chicken, turkey and red meat, and seafood. For health, note that no more than 350g of red meat per week is recommended to reduce your risk of cancers like colorectal cancer (website).

Seafood is a great choice for many reasons. One of these reasons being that seafood does not have the saturated fat percentage of meat. Two to three serves of seafood a week with 100g of cooked weight being one serve is recommended for health (Liu C et al, 2021).

If you are following a plant-based diet, try to pair your non-haem or non-animal source of iron with vitamin C to improve absorption. Also, try not to drink a cup of coffee or black tea with your meal as the polyphenol inhibit absorption. If you do eat meat or seafood by including a haem iron source with a non-haem iron source the non-haem iron will be better absorbed in your body.

Take home message: By looking after your health, you can make your thirties the years where your health thrives. Ensuring you have a balanced diet with all the essential nutrients it needs will help you to be able to give more to every aspect of your life.

The post Four Essential Nutrients for Women in Their Thirties appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Risa Groux to the podcast. Risa is a functional nutritionist and certified autoimmune coach. She has a focus on the root causes of her client’s health concerns and treats them naturally through proper testing and subsequent dietary and supplement treatment. In this episode, we discussed the best way to tailor your diet to your health status, the optimal place to start when wanting to address health issues, and dig deep into her dietary methodology called FoodFrame. Over to Risa…

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• How can we determine the best diet for our body?
• What can we expect from your book ‘FoodFrame?
• Where should we start when wanting to heal?

Get more of Risa Groux:

• https://www.risagrouxnutrition.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/risagrouxnutrition/
• https://twitter.com/risagroux
• https://www.instagram.com/risagrouxnutrition/

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy these interviews:

Megan Lyons – Adrenal Dysfunction: Symptoms, Causes & Treatments
Elise Museles – Healing Your Relationship With Food
Dr Steven Gundry – Understanding & Addressing Low Energy

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

(00:23)

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website, that is 180nutrition.com.au, and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:44)

This week I’m excited to welcome Risa Groux to the podcast. Risa is a functional nutritionist and certified autoimmune coach. She has a focus on the root causes of her client’s health concerns and treats them naturally through proper testing and subsequent dietary and supplement treatment. In this episode, we discussed the best way to tailor your diet to your health status, the optimal place to start when wanting to address health issues, and dig deep into her dietary methodology called FoodFrame. Over to Risa.

(01:19)

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Risa Groux to the podcast. Risa, how are you?

Risa

(01:26)

I’m doing great, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Stu

(01:29)

Oh, look, I’m really keen to delve in and listen to some of your learnings, I guess, for want of a better word this morning, because I know that you’ve covered a lot in the terms of health and wellness, and human performance at a whole. But, first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Risa

(01:52)

Sure. I am a functional nutritionist, which means I’ve been trained in functional medicine, so I do a lot of testing with extensive blood work and stool testing with everyone I work with in my office. I work from everyone from professional athletes to adults, kids, anybody with health issues. I do a lot of gut, or a lot of gut issues, blood sugar dysregulation, thyroid dysregulation, hormones, random… I’m usually the last stop when they come to see me after they’ve called the doctors and they still have this nagging cough or whatever it might be, a major health issue.

(02:30)

And I will continue to go to the end of the earth to find the cure or the source, the root cause of it. So that’s what I do. I have a private practice in Newport Beach, California. I work remotely. And I’ve been doing this for a couple decades and I absolutely love watching people heal. I feel very lucky to be able to have that opportunity.

Stu

(02:51)

Fantastic. And it is such a very interesting space as well, because we’ve been podcasting for a long time, one of the early adopters in the podcast space, and at that time, gut health was just a woo-woo word, and it was brushed under the carpet, and adrenal fatigue, and all of these terms that are becoming way more commonplace today. And essentially gut health, which has almost become the cornerstone of health now is in quite a different place to where it started. So I’m kind of keen, what drove you to become so passionate in this area and want to help as many people as you can with the knowledge that you’re accumulating?

Risa

(03:38)

I guess the very backstory, the initial story, was my complicated relationship with food.

Stu

(03:44)

Right.

Risa

(03:45)

Growing up as a kid, all the women in my family were always on a diet. There was, “These foods were good and these foods were bad,” and I thought, “The bad foods taste pretty good to me, I don’t understand. Why are these bad and why are some foods good?” And they were always trying to lose about 10 pounds. It was just this constant restriction. And so I really grew up with this not healthy relationship with food and restricting myself all the time, even though I never really had a weight problem. So I really started to dig into the science of food and what we should be eating.

(04:21)

And then when I became a nutritionist and I studied, I realized that when I first started, I would just say, “Okay, everybody eats exactly like this.” And then I realized, not everybody is the same. Not everybody’s thriving on this particular way, eating lifestyle. So, I developed my methodology. It came after many years of working with people, called FoodFrame, which is my methodology that is, people should be eating according to what their current health status is, because if they have some root causes, that’s the way they should be eating to addressing those root causes of whatever’s happening for them. So if you’ve got chronic bloating, I wouldn’t recommend you be on the vegan diet-

Stu

(05:05)

No.

Risa

(05:05)

… because your main source of protein is going to be plant, beans, right?

Stu

(05:10)

Yeah.

Risa

(05:11)

And beans are really, really high in FODMAPs and they’re really high in lectins, and that is just going to crush you. You’re going to be debilitated. So everybody should be eating very differently. And so that’s really how I came to where I am today, and I’m fascinated by the science of this. This is something that was always a mystery, and I feel like we kind of figured it out. We kind of figured out, how do we lose weight? How do we optimize health? And the two foundational issues I work on with everybody, because I realize that they either optimize health or they hinder your health, are systemic inflammation, that’s the driver of disease, and gut health. And if you’ve got two in balance, you’re generally pretty good. You’re going to prevent disease more than most.

Stu

(06:00)

How easy is it then using modern day techniques to be able to determine the health of your gut? Because again, that term leaky gut came up, and again, poo-poo, there’s no such thing as leaky gut. But then with the rise of food allergies and sensitivities with everything that’s happening, I think, with the, perhaps a compromised digestive system, leads us to believe that some doctors still don’t even consider anything in that realm, but then might start thinking along other pharmacological interventions. So if I came to you and I’m bloating and I just feel lethargic and I’m reacting to other foods, where would we start and what testing protocols might you recommend?

Risa

(06:48)

Yeah, great question because typically when you go to a GI or general internist, you’re going to get maybe four markers on a test to see if you have maybe Giardia or a couple of things they’re going to test you for. But I do a very extensive stool test, so I’m looking for 86 markers. So I’m looking for pathogens, I’m looking for bugs or worms, parasites. I’m looking for the good guys and the bad guys because some people can have just too much overgrowth of bad bacteria, and we have what we call dysbiosis, an imbalance of both good and bad gut bacteria.

(07:27)

H. pylori is very, very common, and that’s not always tested. It’s hardly ever tested, and it’s very common, it’s very communicable, so most people have it. The question is, how high are the levels if you have it, and when do you treat it? So I test for that. I test for virulence factors that affect H. pylori that show how severe your case is if you do have it at all. Then I look at things like, are you making your own pancreatic enzymes? Because sometimes you just give somebody a digestive enzyme and they’re good to go.

(08:01)

I’m looking at if there’s blood in your stool. I’m looking at steatocrit to see if you have any fat malabsorption, because sometimes it’s just that, it’s people who, maybe they’ve removed their gallbladder, they don’t have the ability to break down their fats, maybe their bile is just very coagulated and they need to de-coagulate it. And then we look at B-glucuronidase, which can affect female hormones. So everything has to do with each other. So I do an extensive test, and that stool test, it’s like gold, because it really tells you almost every single thing you need to know. It is rare that I need to do any additional testing because that usually is the one. So I love that stool test that we do.

Stu

(08:48)

So if I’m coming to you and I’ve had a test and the results have come back and it shows that you’ve got a compromised digestive system, so we’re going to need to work on the gut, maybe as you mentioned before, there’s an overgrowth of the bad guys and not enough of the good guys. Where would we start from a dietary intervention? Because you mentioned previously that maybe the plant-based diets, because they’ve got an abundance of fiber in there as well, may not be the best place to start if you’ve got a delicate digestive system. But with all of the gamut of different dietary interventions out there, from veganism to carnivorism and everything in between, and all of the influencers online who now of course are experts in any given diet, it’s just so confusing. Have you found… Is there perhaps a certain type of diet, a way of eating or particular ingredients that you’ve found to be the most beneficial for this scenario?

Risa

(09:44)

Yeah, so if you’re bloated, if you have chronic bloating, it’s usually two things, one or both, two things. One is lack of digestive enzymes, so you cannot break down your food. You’re eating this food and you’re probably not chewing it 20 to 30 times each bite because nobody does, including me, right? And so we’re counting on that acid in the stomach. We have hydrochloric acid which break down our protein. We have pancreatic enzymes that break down our fat and our carbohydrates. And if you are deficient in those things, which many people are, especially age 45 or above, but lots of things can contribute. Stress is a huge one. Antibiotic use is another one. So there’s lots of reasons why we don’t create our own digestive enzymes.

(10:28)

As we age, we produce and we excrete less and less. So that’s a huge one. So depending on your age, depending on your symptoms, if you’re having some heartburn or acid reflux, for sure I’m going to give you a digestive enzyme. Unless there’s an ulcer, I’m not going to give you some hydrochloric acid, but generally people just do immediately better with a, I have a digestive enzyme that I produce called Enzyme Max that has pancreatic enzymes, hydrochloric acid, and ox bile to help break down fats. So that’s a very complete one. Sometimes people will just take one, pancreatic enzymes, for instance, and they don’t have hydrochloric acid, so they’re still having those symptoms. So if you’re giving them a good digestive enzyme, that can usually solve that.

(11:10)

But if it’s still chronic bloating, and it’s usually paired with either chronic constipation or chronic diarrhea, I’m more leaning towards SIBO. That’s small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and that’s when I’ll be able to see it in their stool test as well. I’ll be able to see certain types of bad bacteria. I’ll see an overgrowth of that. I look at a marker called methanol bacteria, say, and that is the methane gas production. SIBO’s a little bit more complicated than that, but this is usually a pretty foolproof test versus just a regular breath test for SIBO, which can be very inaccurate, and a blood test doesn’t really show any accurate results as well. But I’m also looking for zonulin, which is an enzyme that is only found in the intestinal lining when there is leaky gut. So that’s a huge marker for me to say, “Is there leaky gut?”

(12:03)

Because when you have holes in your intestinal lining, remember, we only have one layer of epithelial cells in the intestinal lining. We have seven on the outside layer. So when you have holes in that intestinal lining, there are things, it could be stress, it could be toxins, it could be food particles, undigested proteins, it could be organ malfunctions. Bread, sugar, dairy, and alcohol all go through the intestinal lining and they poke holes because it’s very fragile. You kill the villi, you poke holes, that’s when we have leaky gut or intestinal permeability, and that’s when those things go in through the blood system and the body goes, “Who are you? You’re the enemy. You came in through the back door and our own defense system starts to create antibodies to attack.” So that creates food sensitivities and inflammation.

(12:47)

We do this enough, then we’ll eventually most likely get an autoimmune disease and we’ll start collecting them like we do anything else. But that’s one of the things I did at the very beginning of my practice. I used to test everybody for food allergies. When I realized that’s not the problem, that’s the result. I’m looking to see, are there holes in the intestinal lining? We’re not all born with these food sensitivities, right? So I’m working on the integrity of the intestinal lining, the inflammation in the intestinal lining. Calprotectin is another marker that tells us about inflammation in the intestinal lining. Well, that’s huge. So if we do have a lot of overgrowth of bad bacteria, we’re going to have probably some leaky gut and some inflammation. So I’m going to quell that inflammation while helping to heal that gut.

Stu

(13:35)

Yeah, well, there’s a lot to unpack there. And I’ve been through the rounds back in the day with SIBO treatment and I was offered two paths. So you can have the pharmacological path or we can have the natural path. And I was told at the time, “We don’t see a great deal of success at this time with the natural. The antibiotic path will be much, much quicker.” And so where do you stand on that? Because I know that everything changes and what’s right for me may not be right for you.

Risa

(14:13)

SIBO is tough. So really there are three modalities that you can use to approach SIBO. All of them are pretty much 70 to 80% successful. I have been very fortunate in my office to have a pretty high success rate with SIBO, but it’s not a quick fix. So SIBO, one of the ways that you can treat SIBO is through an antibiotic, [inaudible 00:14:42] or Xifaxan, and those are two… They’re not terribly hard on the gut compared to other antibiotics. They’re still an antibiotic, so they’re still going to wipe out your good gut bacteria, but they’re not extraordinarily harsh.

(14:54)

So if somebody is really, really, really bad with SIBO, I mean, I see cases that have gone on for years and years and years, it will typically not work completely, but if you do a round of that, let’s say 10 days or 12 days is usually the protocol, then you do that and then I would hop onto a natural protocol. Or you can just bypass that altogether and do a natural protocol. And the natural protocol looks like a supplement protocol that I use to kill those bacterias. I also will feed the good gut health. We do two weeks on, one week off, two weeks on, one week off, and then two weeks on. So in that week off, I’m feeding the good guys and then in the two weeks I’m killing the bad guys. And we may have to do that, typically I would say, maybe 85% of the time, one round works.

Stu

(15:45)

Right.

Risa

(15:46)

But if you have a severe case, I’m going to do two and maybe on rare occasions I’m going to do three. And I match that with a low FODMAP diet. So FODMAPs are, it’s an acronym standing for fermented oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, and in English, those are different types of carbohydrates that basically absorb water. It’ll create gas, and that’s why we bloat, right? And it could cause also that chronic diarrhea, that chronic constipation. So I’m going to give that person low FODMAP foods for 30 to 90 days.

Stu

(16:25)

Right.

Risa

(16:26)

Typically that’s all it takes. If you’re young and you have a mild case, 30 days, you’re pretty good to go. And you can start that low FODMAP protocol anytime you want. So six years later, you’re starting to have bloating, go on a low FODMAP protocol, see if that works without even dealing with the supplements. But I pair the supplements with the low FODMAP diet. And then the third protocol or modality is a liquid diet. This is not the one I recommend. I’ve used it a few times in my office with very severe cases, but it is not usually the favorite one because it is just… It’s called the elemental diet, and it’s just a protein that you are drinking throughout the day. That’s it. And it really is recommended for at least 21 days. So it is effective, but who can do that? It’s a very difficult thing to do.

Stu

(17:21)

And are there any mainstream perhaps supplements or products that are particularly supportive of that? And when I’m talking about mainstream products, I’m thinking about supplements like L-glutamine that have been shown or talked to be able to support the integrity of the gut lining, broths, collagens, things like everyday staples that are starting to become more popular.

Risa

(17:49)

Yeah, I’m a huge fan of L-glutamine. I have Gut Reboot, which is another product that I make that I love, and I use that as my main one for addressing leaky gut. I use it myself. I had it this morning. I have it all the time because it’s got L-glutamine, slippery elm, marshmallow root, zinc, carnosine, aloe, all these things that help heal the gut. So I’m a huge fan of L-glutamine. I’m a huge fan of bone broth if it’s done correctly. Fowl has to be cooked for 24 hours, and beef is 48 hours. So if it’s gelatinous at room temperature, it’s got the three amino acids, proline, arginine, and glutamine to help heal the gut.

(18:29)

And collagen, I’m an enormous fan of collagen. I’m all about collagen. I have my own collagens that are super clean, and they come from New Zealand actually, is where the bones come from. But I’m big on collagen because there’s so much science that shows that those amino acids are what helps to heal that intestinal lining. So those are all terrific healing agents that you can all get. You can make them at home and drink them, but I am a… That’s not going to address the killing. It’s not going to address the overgrowth. So while it will heal, it’s not going to address the issue.

Stu

(19:12)

Okay. And what are your thoughts on alcohol? At a time perhaps when we’re trying to heal the gut, many of our listeners are going to be in that group that have got busy lives and busy families and they come home wired and tired and stressed, don’t have a great deal of time, but always like to sit down with a glass of wine just to try and unwind at the end of the day. Is alcohol problematic when we’ve got compromised gut as we’ve been discussing?

Risa

(19:41)

Absolutely. So it’s in that class of inflammatory foods, plus the fact that it has, wine especially, has a lot of sulfites and sulfates in it. It’s not my favorite. It spikes blood sugar levels. There are some new wines out there, which I’m so grateful for. I’m not a wine drinker personally, but I have a million people that I work with who have that glass of wine or two when they come home. So there are cleaner wines that don’t spike blood sugar levels as much, but I favor more things like tequila, which is highly less processed and some vodkas and some scotches or whiskeys, things like that. Those will be better than beer for sure. Beer is gluten, beer is just… It’s high in carbohydrates. It’s going to spike your blood sugar level, it’s going to poke holes in your intestinal lining. It’s really one of the worst beverages out there. And wine is not my favorite as well, as I was mentioning for those reasons. So it’s not a helper.

Stu

(20:49)

No.

Risa

(20:49)

And I’m a big fan of living, right? Life is for the living. So we have to find this balance. So I would say maybe do a tequila or maybe take a break and only do it on the weekends or find another way to bring down your cortisol, whether it’s going for a walk or meditating or reading or hugging or something like that, that will bring down your cortisol from a very stressed day. Stress is not going to help the intestinal lining either-

Stu

(21:17)

No.

Risa

(21:17)

… amongst everything else, right? But yeah, so that I’m not a big fan. So I have these categories of food for sport and food for survival. That is for sure food for sport. So we want to have some sport, right, occasionally, so that would be my occasional.

Stu

(21:34)

Okay. No, that’s good to know. I think a lot of people out there will be rushing over to the bottle shop to buy their tequila for tonight.

Risa

(21:41)

Yeah.

Stu

(21:43)

You mentioned gluten, and again, this is the one word that comes up so many times in the conversations. We have a lot of active listeners who participate in, whether it be strength training, endurance training, but really, really like to get out and hit the gym, hit the pavement, get the steps in, and perhaps they’re not adverse to this low carbohydrate, or supposedly wonderful low carbohydrate, way of eating that everybody seems to be an advocate for these days. If, even from an athletic perspective, our listeners wanted to fuel themselves outside of… Or perhaps fuel themselves with the usual staples of bread, pasta, all of which contain gluten, is there an upside to consuming these? Are they bad for everybody?

Risa

(22:42)

Yeah, so this is, again, that leads back to one size fits all. If you are a heavy weightlifter or you are a runner, you are burning. You are burning lots of calories and you need energy. If you don’t have storage, if you don’t have fat storage, that’s basically our carbohydrates that we’re storing, and we’re using them for when we need them. If you don’t have a big storage, then you have to supply a new supply every time you want to have endurance. So I used to work with a woman who was a elite athlete. She was a 100-mile runner and she competed and she did not have any fat storage. I mean, she would run a marathon every morning just for a little jog, right?

Stu

(23:35)

Wow. Yeah.

Risa

(23:35)

So she needed more carbohydrates for sure. So it depends what your body composition is and how much you are using. So elite athletes like that… I’ve worked with professional hockey players who are just burning and they need lots of carbs. Now what kind of carbs, is the question. Sure, they’re going to burn through pasta and all that stuff, but it’s going to supply them with some carbohydrates. I’d love to see their blood sugar and their insulin to see how they’re processing that before I would recommend a blanket statement. But I know that I work with people who are elite athletes and they need… Their better source is going to be sweet potatoes, yams, rice, quinoa, things like that that are a little bit less processed than the pasta and the bread.

(24:28)

Now, there are some breads that you can get and you can do gluten-free, but there are gluten-free carbohydrates that are accessible to everybody. So those are things, the purple potatoes, which are really high in antioxidants, so it’s a great source of carbohydrates. And vegetables, remember, have carbohydrates. So I’m all about protein, fat, and fiber for everybody. And your carbohydrates are going to come from your fiber basically, and so choose your fiber wisely. So I would tend to go more for those kind of carbs than I would for the processed cookies, carbs, and all the processed stuff they give runners and things like that. Just eat real food. I know a lot of people, if they’re running a marathon, they’ll eat a banana, which is great. It’s got some carbohydrates, it’s got some blood sugar, I mean, some sugar, fructose, but it also has fiber, so it slows down that spike.

(25:24)

What you’re trying to prevent is a spike in blood sugar. So even if you’re an elite athlete and you’re surviving on carbs and you might be stick thin, you still might have a blood sugar dysregulation. So I’d have to look at labs to see, but that is something that I would recommend is eating real food. Nuts are a great source of carbs as well. You don’t want too many because… It’s great fat, but you just don’t want too many. But it would really depend upon the person and their activity. I’ve worked with Freddy Couples, who’s one of our all-time greatest golfers that we’ve seen. He does a lot of walking, but he didn’t do a lot of high intensity, so he didn’t need that many carbs. He did better, his performance was better when he had less carbohydrates.

Stu

(26:14)

Okay. Yeah, interesting. That’s good to know. So tell me a little bit about Foodframe. So your book Foodframe, what can we expect? Because I mentioned before that in this time where everybody has access to the internet and social media and there are advocates for every sort of diet and food has become very much a religion and there are arguments for both camps. And you mentioned that perhaps all of the camps or dietary camps are good for you or for somebody at some stage in your life, and perhaps it isn’t best to ignore or exonerate one over the other. So if I was confused about food and I had a copy of Foodframe, what would I expect after reading it?

Risa

(27:01)

So Foodframe basically highlights six different diet types. So it really covers who is it best for and who wouldn’t really thrive on this. It explains it in great detail and then it tells you, it’s got lists of foods to enjoy and foods to avoid. And I did that because just like everybody else, I used to buy the latest and greatest new diet book out there or new food philosophy and I’d be like, “I’m doing this. I’m totally doing this.” And so I would do it and I’d be like, “Nothing’s happening.” I can’t tell how many times I, me included, I went on keto and I thought, “Oh, I’m going to just thrive.” And I just did not do that great on keto. [inaudible 00:27:46] I realized, well, most women don’t, and people who have a lot of stress don’t really thrive. Men thrive much better on keto. I couldn’t even get into ketosis. I had to have exogenous nutrients to get into ketosis.

(27:58)

So not every diet type is right for every person, and that’s why I created FoodFrame, because I see it. And so if somebody comes into my office, I mean, I’m working with somebody right now, she came in exhausted, she’s gained all this weight, she’s read the latest vegan diet, saw the latest vegan food, video, or movie, and I said, “This is all wrong for you.” She was having chronic bloating, same thing. I switched her diet, she’s lost all this weight, and her clarity is so much better, her brain clarity, her energy, she’s exercising every day. She doesn’t have any fatigue. I mean, it’s crazy when you just make a little tweak according to what best suits you, right? Even when I was writing my book, my agent was saying that publishers don’t want to talk about all different diet types, they want one philosophy, they want one religion, right? And sell that religion. I’m like, “That’s not what’s good for people.”

Stu

(28:55)

That’s right.

Risa

(28:56)

So it’s really crazy that because it works for you, that’s awesome, it’s really awesome. And I think a lot of those books work for a large sect of people, which is awesome. But the other people are like, “Well, what’s wrong with me,” right? And it’s not that they’re flawed, they’re just not… It’s like, you can’t go into a store and buy a shirt that’s one size, it doesn’t fit everybody, right?

Stu

(29:20)

Totally. And I love that philosophy because typically the majority of the health books out there come about from the author’s discovery with a dietary intervention that has worked for them and has fixed their problems. And so, “I’m going to write a book. It fixed my problems, here we go.” And lo and behold, it doesn’t fix my problems.

Risa

(29:40)

Exactly. It does fit some, but not everyone.

Stu

(29:41)

It does fit… What-

Risa

(29:42)

So that’s… Yeah.

Stu

(29:47)

Tell me just a little bit about female success on keto then. Because I have been hearing a lot of people that have adopted keto, female friends that have adopted keto, and it just hasn’t worked. And you’ve been reading about hormones and the like, and fasting maybe that doesn’t work so well for females as well, so I’d be very interested to hear your perspective on it.

Risa

(30:12)

Yeah, it’s funny. I was at a convention maybe last year, a functional medicine convention and somebody very knowledgeable and had just published a book was just all about fasting. And she had great information and it was all good, and all the studies were correct and all the impact was correct. And I raised my hand and I said, “Well, what about people who have blood sugar dysregulation? If they have low blood sugar…” And she goes, “Oh yeah, those people shouldn’t do it.” And I thought…

Stu

(30:43)

Right.

Risa

(30:43)

Well, of course they can’t do it because it’s not for them. So fasting is great for somebody who needs blood sugar balance. So somebody who has diabetes or insulin resistance or pre-diabetic or they’re climbing up on there, maybe they’re more sedentary, maybe they eat some carbs, that would be good for them to do intermittent fasting. But not, if you have low blood sugar, I mean, I’ve had people come in my office and they’re like, “I’m so dizzy.” I’m like, “Of course you are, you are hypoglycemic, you cannot do intermittent fasting.” If you’re dizzy at all when you stand up, those are typically blood sugar dysregulation signs, could be blood pressure as well, so it’s not always, but it’s usually, and so I would say to that person, “You need to eat every two to three hours. Have some protein, some fats, some nuts or protein, something, because you can’t go too long without… Your blood sugars just drop too much.”

(31:47)

Then for keto, occasionally I see women that it works for. For people, keto’s covered on my book along with keto, paleo, autoimmune protocol, low lectin, vegetarian, and low FODMAT. And then I go extensively into my detox and the way of eating on my detox. But for somebody with keto, if there’s a cancer diagnosis, sugar feeds cancer cells, so I am going to suggest keto. If there’s major, if you’ve got type 2 diabetes and you’re fully, your A1C is seven or eight, I’m going to say, “Let’s try keto if you can do it.” And they’ll usually respond with that, but slowly. You put a guy on keto, nine times out of 10, they’re just going to drop weight. But also, if you don’t have a gallbladder, you are not, I would not recommend keto.

Stu

(32:51)

High fat diet’s not going to work so well for you.

Risa

(32:54)

Exactly. It’s going to really mess you up. If your sciatica on a stool test is not good or if your bile is very coagulated, we’ve got to fix that before you start doing a lot of making fat 75 to 85% of your calories.

Stu

(33:13)

Yeah, that’s good to know. Skipping breakfast. So oftentimes I’ll hear that, “I’m just not hungry in the morning, so I won’t eat till lunchtime.” And while some people almost proclaim this as a badge of honor, when I look at their health, maybe they’re carrying way too much weight. I’m thinking, “I wonder if… Is that a good thing?” Should I be waking up and should I be hungry? Is that an indication that perhaps my metabolism is working more efficiently than it should be because I wake up in the morning, I’m ravenous. I have to eat, and I eat a big, big, big breakfast. But then I have many other friends that just, “I’m not even hungry. If I don’t eat, then it’s not a concern to me.” Where do you stand on skipping breakfast?

Risa

(34:04)

Yeah, so breakfast is a great meal. I think it breaks your fast, and I think what you do for breakfast, if it’s pancakes, I’m not… It’s going to… Blood sugars. And unfortunately, a lot of our breakfast choices are high sugar, which is crazy. So I’m not a big fan of that. So given that, if we’re talking about a protein, fat type of breakfast, I think people innately, some people are not breakfast eaters. So I don’t have an issue if you want to wait till noon. Again, if you’re low glycemic, I’m going to not suggest that. I’m going to say, “Have a couple of almonds before you go to the gym, or have some almond butter with a piece of celery or a hard-boiled egg or half an avocado before you get to the gym or something so that you’re not…” But if you’re thriving and you’re not eating for that period of time and you don’t get to food till noon, I’m okay with that.

(35:01)

Unless what we’re eating at noon is a pizza with a side of fries, then I’m not okay with that. So given the fact, I mean, assuming that you’re eating real food, protein, fat, and fiber, and you’re just not hungry, there are also… I test people for ghrelin, and ghrelin is the hormone that our brain makes to tell us that we’re hungry, and leptin is our hormone that tells us we’re full. Sometimes peoples’ ghrelin can be dysregulated. So that is, if it’s a real issue and they’re just not hungry, they’ve lost their appetite, then I’m going to look into that. There are some people who don’t really eat until dinner time. They just aren’t hungry. So that’s a case where I feel like, if you’re exercising and you’re eating well, you should be hungry, right?

Stu

(35:49)

Yeah. You’d think so.

Risa

(35:52)

If you’re not hungry in the morning, you should be hungry soon.

Stu

(35:53)

Yeah, definitely. No, that make sense. So we’re kind of coming up on time, but I’ve got a couple of questions. First one is daily habits and practices, and this could be outside of diet that you see quite frequently that people are doing unbeknown to them that are negatively impacting their health. And that could be mobile phones in the early hours of the morning, so disrupting their sleep and then that would impact perhaps their mood the next day, their food choices the next day, everything like that. Or fasting, you said fasting hard and fast and prolonged fasting, again, there are camps for both of those. But I’m interested in these habits or daily practices that are becoming more popular that people are, again, putting their hand up saying, “Yeah, I’m really pleased to be doing this.” But you might think in the back of your mind, “I’d be wary.”

Risa

(36:53)

Yeah. Sleep is huge for me. I’m just like, sleep, it’s when we repair, it’s when we take inventory, it’s when we clean things out. It’s just, your body needs sleep. It’s just not negotiable, right? We need sleep, but we need proper sleep and everybody needs a different amount of sleep. Now, if you’re having 10 hours or more, something’s probably going on, right? But if you’re having less than, I mean, most guys can live with six hours of sleep, but I say, if you can do six hours of sleep four days a week and try and get seven to eight hours a couple of times or more a week, that would be great. I work with a lot of men who just pop out of bed at 4:30 or 5:00, and they’re wide open and their eyes are wide open, they’re ready to go.

(37:37)

So I’m looking at their adrenals, and when we age, our sleep schedules change a bit, our adrenals change. So, and sleeping through the night is a huge thing. So if you’re waking up in the middle of the night, it’s usually adrenals or it could be blood sugar. If you’re waking up sweating, it could be hormones or liver detoxifying. So I’m looking at all those, which I usually can see in a blood test. So sleep is huge. Water, hydration, I cannot tell you how many people are dehydrated. We drink everything but water. I don’t know why, when you walk down the beverage aisle in the market, why do we need so many choices? I’m not sure.

(38:13)

We just really actually need water. Occasionally I’ll get people in my office who just don’t even drink water. They drink everything else but water. I’m just always amazed by that. So hydration, and correct hydration is really important because here in the US, the water systems, our public water systems are just so polluted, so it’s really important to drink clean water because it’s a great source of toxins if you’re not. And then fun. Fun is really important. We are working, working, working, working, working, and our sense of fun is, “Let’s go out and trash our bodies and have six drinks and eat a pizza.” And yeah, that’s probably fun, but it’s not healthy fun.

Stu

(39:00)

No.

Risa

(39:01)

And it’s not to say you can’t go out and have a drink or two, but we tend to overdo that. So fun is unplugging, laughing, and interacting, and doing things that bring us joy and pleasure. It doesn’t have to be spending money. It could be anything, just anything. So I can tell you the virtues, you probably know them all, for meditation. I’ve been trained in transcendental meditation. I am not a big meditation person. I’ve tried to put it into my rituals. It just, for me, my head just ends up going, and maybe that’s the point of why I should be meditating, but it isn’t the way I bring my adrenals down.

(39:44)

I’m much better in a bathtub or reading a book or I’m going for a walk, things like that. So you don’t always have to do it that way, but you do have to focus on your adrenals. We have way too much simulation between… The phone is just a huge thing for us with all the stimulation, the texting, and the emails, and you’re on your computer, and the emails are… Everything’s popping. So it’s way too much for the system in the adrenal gland. So hugging your adrenals and loving your adrenals, those are all pretty key.

Stu

(40:14)

Yeah, I like it. Definitely overstimulated. I saw a really interesting post on social media the other day, and it was essentially talking to a group of teenagers who were wearing T-shirts that said, bring back the ’80s. And the comment was, in this world, take away your mobile phone, take away your internet, go back to the ’80s, stand at a bus stop and stare at your feet for two hours while you wait for the bus to come, because that’s what we used to do.

Risa

(40:44)

Right. And that’s when you’re creating.

Stu

(40:45)

That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

Risa

(40:48)

Yeah, it’s really… That’s what I’m saying about the adrenals, is you just have to stand at a bus stop and look at our shoes. And you never hear kids say they’re bored.

Stu

(40:57)

No.

Risa

(40:57)

So yeah, that’s really important. And the other one that I miss that it’s really a given, and I’m sure your whole audience does anyway, is move your body, right?

Stu

(41:05)

Yeah, definitely.

Risa

(41:05)

I don’t care, you don’t have to be a marathon runner, but you can hula-hoop in your underwear at home. I don’t care what you do, but just get into your body and move it and get the blood flowing. And it helps with mental and physical and gut and, I mean, I can’t find anything it doesn’t benefit.

Stu

(41:23)

Absolutely. No, I agree with you a hundred percent. Last question, your personal non-negotiables. So you clearly have a wealth of knowledge and experience in all aspects of health. Are there any… Or what are the non-negotiables that you do each and every day that you will not forgo for anything to ensure that you crush that day?

Risa

(41:45)

Yeah. I don’t eat any processed food. And when I say that, I mean I eat healthier processed food, but I don’t eat any… I mean, I could walk down aisles in a market and I don’t eat any of it. I mean, I do not want chemicals in my body. Now I get them because I travel and I go to restaurants and it’s just… I stayed at an Airbnb and all the chemicals that were in that house was just amazing to me. But I don’t use chemicals in my home. I drink clean water, and I cook. I cook. And if I could really encourage people to make one change in their life, it’s cook.

Stu

(42:28)

Yes.

Risa

(42:28)

Cook real food, food without labels. I do a lot of cooking when I’m home.

Stu

(42:33)

Brilliant.

Risa

(42:34)

So I travel a lot, unfortunately, but I bring a lot of food with me and I do as best as I can. So chemicals are a big non-negotiable for me. You won’t find those in my cleaning products or any of my beauty products or anything like that.

Stu

(42:47)

Brilliant.

Risa

(42:49)

Sodas and all that kind of stuff, I don’t do any of that. That’s totally non-negotiable. And I move my body, maybe not every single solitary day, but regularly. I absolutely move my body. And as I’m getting older, I’m lifting more weights, because that is integral for aging. And I don’t do gluten unless I’m in Italy. That’s the only place I’ll do gluten, but I don’t eat any gluten at all.

Stu

(43:19)

Great. Well, I think you’re walking the walk and talking the talk, so it’s clearly working. It’s funny you mentioned chemicals, and we made a business trip to the States last year, and we had a week in Chicago and we booked an Airbnb, and we went into the Airbnb and in every single room, there were two or three of these plug-in fragrance things in the wall, and I opened the front door and it felt like somebody had smacked me over the head with a baseball bat. And boy, that stuff doesn’t go away.

(43:56)

We pulled these things out the wall and just put them in a box and opened the windows and opened the doors. And this was in Chicago, so it was cold. Coming from Australia, it was five degrees or something crazy. And we just stood there with the doors open for hours and hours and hours, and we were there for the entire week, and we came away from there, and everything that we owned smelt of this particular fragrance, it was so insidious, and it just interrupted so many systems, I feel, in the body. And I wonder how many people are doing that-

Risa

(44:29)

Everywhere.

Stu

(44:29)

… unbeknown.

Risa

(44:29)

It’s in every taxi, it’s an every Uber. And when I get into those cars, I ask them very nicely to please remove that. I try to tell them if they’re open, if I get the sense that they’re open, “Those are a lot of chemicals. You shouldn’t probably be breathing those.”

Stu

(44:44)

I know.

Risa

(44:46)

It’s horrible. It’s everywhere. I mean, literally everywhere. So this is the demise, is these chemicals that are-

Stu

(44:59)

Well, that’s right. And I think people typically picture consuming chemicals, but there are other ways that we consume chemicals, right? And they can be airborne from fragrances or healthcare products. Transdermally, we can spread them on, whether it’s toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer. Boy, we’re going to be pickled.

Risa

(45:22)

Yeah. And here in the US, this is a new number and I’m sad to report it, but the FDA has approved 86,000 chemicals. 86,000.

Stu

(45:31)

Wow.

Risa

(45:31)

And it’s approved about 2,000 a year. We’re more than any other country on the entire planet, which is really sad, so we have to be diligent. And as you said, we get them through what we’re ingesting, whether we’re drinking it or eating it, what we’re putting on our skin and what we’re breathing. So there are pollutants everywhere. Our water is polluted. It’s really bad. I mean, if you think about the cancer rates that are increasing, and look at the labels of these foods that… It’s just, we’re poisoning our children, and it’s unconscionable. But at that Airbnb that I stayed at, which was a beautiful home, but the shampoos, the conditioners, the body washes, I just couldn’t do it. And on the soaps, everywhere. And then the laundry, I did my laundry there because I was desperate, I was on the road for three weeks and they had Tide Pods, and I went, “Oh, I’ll just try it.” I had to put it back in the next day because I could not wear my clothes. It smelled so bad, I just put it back in with water. And it still wasn’t [inaudible 00:46:35].

Stu

(46:35)

I know, I know. Well, we actually ended up washing our clothes in apple cider vinegar. We put that in the washing machine, so kind of wacky, but I felt better for it.

Risa

(46:44)

Oh, for sure. That’s what I would do if I had that. So it’s really… That’s where we can take action right away, is make sure your chemicals are not in your food. Make sure they’re not in your cleaning products. Makeup. There’s a wonderful app called EWG, the Environmental Working Group. I’m a huge fan of their work, and you can go on their app and scan all your makeup, all your beauty supply, everything, food, and they tell you how toxic it is.

Stu

(47:11)

Right.

Risa

(47:12)

That’s why I’m a big fan of detoxing. The average American woman comes in contact with over 200 toxins just before she’s left the bathroom each morning.

Stu

(47:21)

My word.

Risa

(47:22)

So our liver has to process those and it becomes congested. So it’s really important to clean out those toxins in our system.

Stu

(47:32)

Wonderful. Boy, oh, boy. Lots to talk about. So what’s next for you? What have you got lined up this year?

Risa

(47:41)

I’m doing some TV stuff, and we’re pitching a new book idea, so stay tuned.

Stu

(47:48)

Fantastic. And for all of our listeners that want to find out more about you, they want to read your book, they want to dive into the podcasts and the blog contents and social media, where can I send them?

Risa

(47:59)

Yeah, you can send them to my website. And social media is the same thing, at risagrouxnutrition. It’s R-I-S-A-G-R-O-U-X Nutrition. I have an online course about thyroid, which we didn’t even jump into, but I was able to reverse my Hashimoto’s, and I know the struggle of living with Hashimoto’s and an underperforming thyroid, so I have addressed that in great detail in my course Achieving Optimal Thyroid Wellness and all social media is risagrouxnutrtition.com.

Stu

(48:32)

Fantastic. Thank you so… Well, hopefully, perhaps Hashimoto’s and thyroid could be a conversation in the future, but for now, I will put all of those links in the show notes. And Risa, I really appreciate your time today. It’s been a fantastic conversation. I think I’ve learned loads. So thank you again.

Risa

(48:52)

So good. Well, great to talk to you too, Stu. Thank you so much for having me.

Stu

(48:53)

Thank you. Bye-Bye.

Risa

(48:53)

Bye-Bye.

The post Risa Groux – The FoodFrame Method appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Chad Price to the podcast. Chad is an athlete, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Kettlebell Kings, the number one supplier and community in the kettlebell space. In this episode, we discuss why you should consider including kettlebells into your workout, the best way to use them and the quickest way to get the results you want. Over to Chad.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• Why should we pick up a kettlebell in the gym/home?
• Can I get a whole-body workout using just kettlebells?
• How long should a typical kettlebell workout take?

Get more of Chad Price:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-price-16a406140/
• https://www.facebook.com/realchadprice/
• https://www.instagram.com/realchadprice/?hl=en

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview

Brian Keane – Transforming Your Body & Mindset For The Long-Term
Dr Dan Plews – Maximising Athletic Performance
Brian Mackenzie: Pushing All Boundaries Of Health & Wellness

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health.

(00:18)

Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly, do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into Whole Food Nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look.

(00:42)

Okay, back to the show. This week, I’m excited to welcome Chad Price to the podcast. Chad is an athlete, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Kettlebell Kings, the number one supplier and community in the kettlebell space. In this episode, we discuss why you should consider including Kettlebells into your workout, the best way to use them, and the quickest way to get the results you want. Over to Chad.

(01:10)

Hey, guys. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Chad Price to the podcast. Chad, how are you mate?

Chad

(01:16)

I’m doing great today. Thank you for having me.

Stu

(01:19)

No, look, thank you. Thank you again for sharing some of your time. I know you’re super busy. But first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work or your companies, et cetera, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Chad

(01:32)

Sure. My name’s Chad Price, currently, the CEO of Life Grows Green and my consulting agency, Price Digital Consultants. My background is in athletics and sports. After I graduated from Rice University, I started a company… I started several companies, but my most notable company is Kettlebell Kings, and that was a 10-year journey that I just culminated at the beginning of 2022.

(01:58)

And then, I wrote a book about that journey and starting your own business called Preparing for Battle and trying to help people get mentally prepared for what the next step is in terms of switching from entrepreneurship. I mean, switching from employee to entrepreneurship or transitioning from college or high school, wherever that is, and going into the entrepreneurship journey, having the correct mindset of doing so.

Stu

(02:21)

Fantastic. Wow, what a journey. It sounds like you’re muscled up and ready to attack pretty much anything. So, I’m keen today to touch on the kettlebell side of things because I know that it’s not very often that you get to talk to a kettlebell king and you’d be one of them, right? So, and also, cognizant of the hemp and CBD stuff, very, very interesting. But we live in Australia, and so that’s a no-no for us, unfortunately at this point in time.

(02:53)

So, I thought we’d dial into your journey with Kettlebell Kings and just kick off for our audience in terms of no doubt, we’ve all been to the gym and we’ve seen the rack of kettlebells, but they’re next to the dumbbells. They might be next to the resistance bands, which are next to the free weights, which might be next to the assisted machines. Why should we pick up a kettlebell?

Chad

(03:19)

I mean, I think just in general, when you’re talking about trying to figure out what type of functional fitness or what type of fitness or health and wellness routine works for you, I don’t think one size fits all. So, I think kettlebells is one of those unique tools that does actually apply really functionally with how you go through life.

(03:39)

So, if you are not a traditional lifter, if you’re not lifting to be a bodybuilder, different things like that, competitive lifting even, you can use kettlebells to pretty much do most of, if not all of your lifting, even if you are a high performance athlete or a competitive bodybuilder, whatever that may be, you can supplement things with the kettlebell that you can’t traditionally get from other static pieces of equipment or even equipment that’s more dumbbell or symmetrically based.

(04:09)

So, I really think it’s not a one size fits all thing. It’s more of how do I utilize this tool to the best of its ability? And the thing about kettlebells is, I think it’s a unique shape that everyone can recognize internationally. And when I think about health and wellness, I don’t think of a kettlebell being the only thing, but I think of it being the centerpiece.

(04:31)

And if you’re on a health and wellness journey and that centerpiece can bring you into a community of people who want to help you develop and take that next step and become a 1% better you, that’s really the journey that we are interested in starting. And that’s what we created with Kettlebell Kings where it’s really about that community. The kettlebell is a centerpiece of their community.

Stu

(04:51)

Yeah, fantastic. I read a long time ago, and I don’t know whether you’ve read this book, but it’s The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, and it’s basically deconstructing lots of different facets of life from a fitness perspective to try and find the minimal effective dose of any one discipline, whether it be muscle gain, fat loss, cardiovascular fitness, that kind of thing.

(05:15)

And there was a chapter in there about the kettlebell, and he essentially surmised that if you could only take one piece of equipment with you and do one exercise for the rest of your life, it would be the kettlebell and the basic kettlebell swing, between your legs all the way to over your head. And so, I was keen to understand from you, what would be the benefits then of just that stereotypical kettlebell swing, the one that people see in all of the posts and the videos? What does it do for you from a physiological perspective?

Chad

(05:49)

I think one of the things we really forget about is how functional we are as human beings and where, let’s say, our traditional athletic abilities come from and our genes. We literally used to have to climb through a more difficult terrain than we currently do. There weren’t paved roads and things that we can just roll everywhere we want to do.

(06:14)

So, our bodies are very responsive to dynamic motion with weights and with heavy things. We used to have to carry things a long way. So, things like farmers carry, things like swings, these are more natural motions that you would use if you were trying to actually achieve a goal with something heavy.

(06:31)

So, you wouldn’t use a static sitting down lift. You had dynamically use the momentum in your weight, and you would swing it up and you’d try to actually use less force, but create that dynamic chain through your body, so that you’re transitioning the weight more efficiently versus pushing or pulling the weight. And I think that’s where swings and kettlebells in general really help you is you’re doing that throughout your day regardless.

(06:58)

So, if you were to pick up a baby, you don’t pick it up like a curl anymore, pick it up, right? It’s more of a swing. And everything is more of a swinging dynamic motion. And so, I think that’s where kettlebells really help translate because those motions become tighter chains, those links and those chains become stronger, and you’re capable of more weight than you’re typically doing in your day-to-day life. And you see that if you just start in the first, I would say, a couple of months.

Stu

(07:25)

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. No, I completely agree. Back in, I’ve got three young daughters. Well, I want to say young, I mean, they’re teenagers now. But back in the day, I had twins. And I remember getting these twins out of the cot where you were bending over and picking up this weight, and then presenting the baby and carrying, and then doing that on a different side, but you really, really feel it.

(07:49)

And it was that moment in my life when I was training CrossFit style training, doing lots of core and kettlebell swings and being very, very aware of things like posterior chain and glute activation that I think sent a signal to my memory to say, “Just remember when you’re going to do any of this stuff, be mindful.” And the kettlebell taught me to do a lot of that stuff, I think just with the fact that I’m swinging this really heavy weight all over the place. And so, yeah, very, very intrigued by what it can bring with such a simple, I guess, concept await with a handle.

(08:30)

So, what I’m keen to understand is, so you are one of the co-founders of Kettlebell Kings. What made Kettlebell Kings so successful? Because there’d be a truckload of companies out there selling equipment and kettlebells in the layman’s eye would be no different to maybe dumbbells or barbells, but it seems like that you have got that secret source exactly right to create something that has become so community-driven and tapped into I think something that people really, really love to talk about and share. What was the journey that took it from maybe, I don’t know, maybe a garage startup to where it is today, which is undoubtedly one of the biggest kettlebell companies in the world?

Chad

(09:21)

Yeah, I mean, I think from the beginning, we were going on our own journey as well. So, I graduated college, I was trying to find my own… I played football in college and after hanging up my cleats, if you will, I was trying to figure out what does my day-to-day routine look like in terms of my workout and what tools I’ll use with my workout?

(09:44)

So, I found kettlebells during that journey, and I liked it personally because it allowed me to do a more minimalist workout. I could work out from home and really work out from anywhere. I like the idea of utilizing one tool in a bunch of different ways to still get a good workout in. I really found that to be something that motivated me to out even more than I would, let’s say if I went to a gym.

(10:11)

So, for me, it was worth it to go down and nerd out on exploring that for myself. And coupled with that, there was no real company at that time when we started that was using that as a centerpiece for health and fitness community. And regardless of what type of business we started, when we started thinking about the types of business that we wanted, it was always community-based. We wanted to figure out how we could create a community of people who really appreciated a product, and then we used that product to paint a better path to them.

(10:44)

So, something that actually brings value to their lives, and something that when they join, they actually feel better and are more motivated and more likely to do things that are positive for them in general. So, I think that initiative was even before the kettlebell became a part of the company.

(11:03)

And so, once the kettlebell was the centerpiece, it was now we have something to focus around and build from there. And it just became… We would call ourselves the ESPN of the kettlebell world where we’re trying to create as much content and aggregate as much content from around the world as we can and put that in one place and serve that to a community of people who find that interesting and keep doing that at a better and better pace, so that we’re actually providing value before they ever even get a potential sales pitch to buy kettlebell, for example.

Stu

(11:36)

In terms of the type of content that you were creating and distributing, was there any one section of that you think that really resonated in terms of, was it videos, instructional videos on YouTube? Was it selfies? Was it “Things like that?”, user generated content, which perhaps out of all of those pots were the most successful for you from I guess a virality perspective?

Chad

(12:09)

I don’t think anything really beats user generated content from that perspective, but I think you have to earn the right to be that hub, right? So, when ESN puts their top 10 plays on, it’s important because it may ESPN, and that’s what we want it to become in the kettlebell world. We want it to become the place where people want their news to be put out to the world in this particular space.

(12:32)

And we knew at very early on that there were very tight knit communities of kettlebell enthusiasts all around the world, all around the United States, and we wanted to tie those together. So, there was a political aspect even to getting organizations to share their information and see that we could grow the entire sport. We can grow the entire awareness around this tool by just all collaborating on different pieces of content and trying to make that a process.

(13:04)

And you collaborate with people who buy into that idea and the people who don’t buy into that idea, they sit by and watch. And as they see it working, they come and join the team as well. So, I think it’s just one of those things that once you have that goal in mind and you start going for, it’s up to you to be stuck.

Stu

(13:24)

And I mean, we’ve got a big fitness community and a number of those are owners and operators of all types of fitness facility, whether it be the CrossFit box, one-on-one personal trainers, PTs, coaches, things like that. In terms of taking the next step from a business perspective, wanting to get out of the grind of being in the business every single day without any break, but wanting to grow work on the business and just take it to perhaps a less onerous space where it can actually grow and scale. What would the initial steps be do you think that you may have written about in the book that you want to share with our audience?

Chad

(14:12)

Yeah. I mean, I consider myself an advocate for the use of digital tools in small businesses. I think a lot of times, even the most stubborn business owner, that can be a good trait to have when it comes to the perseverance needed to overcome every obstacle that you have to deal with in business. But I think you need to be able to adapt your concepts and thoughts quickly to the ever-changing digital landscape. And we always looked at ourselves as that way.

(14:42)

So, I remember when we started the company in 2012, people were like, “Wait, a minute, you’re not going to have a store? How are people going to buy from you?” And that was a new concept to people when we were talking about that. And we knew like, “Hey, that’s where everything is going.” We wanted to be the Amazon of kettlebells and people didn’t even know that Amazon was going to be the Amazon of Amazon.

(15:04)

And so, I think the goal is to stay on that wave and ride that wave and utilize that technology when you have a brand to really accelerate the company. So, there’s a lot of different things that we were able to do from even like… Nowadays, you have more advantage than any to once you have the community, there are standard operating models, fulfillment models that you can utilize that take your hands off of the fulfilling your customer side of the business and allow you to focus on the growth of the business.

(15:39)

So, I think making that a priority as a leader, that’s part of what I talk about in the book, and I don’t think that’s a skillset thing. I think that’s more of a mindset and having the willingness to foresee and to think that way. When you’re moving through the business market.

Stu

(15:56)

Was it hard for you to release perhaps some of the personal aspects of the business too? For instance, you mentioned dispatch. So, third-party logistics when you are just a number in a warehouse, whereas in the early days you get to see hands on every single order that comes through, you get to understand that maybe you write a personal note, maybe you can do all these things, you can control the delivery of that. Was that hard for you to release to just push that out to a larger business and go, well, it’s with you now. I know that we can scale with you easily, but we don’t have that personalized, perhaps stance on dispatch that we used to have?

Chad

(16:40)

It is very hard. I think that personal… It is personal when you started your own business. If it wasn’t personal, I don’t think you would really do it. I think you care about it the same way you would care about a family member or a child even in a way.

(16:56)

So, I think it is letting your business grow up, and I think that takes some self-awareness. And when you are fearful of that step, I talk about that some even in the book. I think you have… That’s why you have to measure your success and measure your goals and never really be happy with last year’s efforts and last year’s numbers.

(17:15)

So, when you have a growth mindset, there has to be a number. There has to be a milestone in which you pass and which you will take that next step. And when you set those markers, it makes it real easy. So, my partners and I probably argued for a year or two before we went to our fulfillment company. And once we went there, no one was like, “Oh, we shouldn’t have done this,” because it’s a growth path. And there was no way not to have done it.

(17:40)

The question was, should we have done it six months sooner, six months later? That really becomes relative in the big picture. The question is, are you going to take that next step to grow the business? And that’s the hard part I think for a lot of small business owners is, you make your first million dollars as a business, then you think you have something, and it’s really getting from that $1 million to $5 million to $10 million that will determine whether or not your business has longevity.

Stu

(18:05)

Yeah, absolutely. And you grew from, was it simply just a three-way partnership in the initial days? The early stages?

Chad

(18:15)

So, yes. Go ahead. Sorry.

Stu

(18:18)

I know, I was just keen on how did that scale up in terms of how big did it become? How many people did you need on the ground? Or were you able to keep that as still as small as you could with systems and services?

Chad

(18:30)

We always had a pretty tight team. It was basically two of us running day-to-day operations. And then, our third partner managed the finances and the oversaw the books, let’s say. And then, we brought on… We had tons of vendors. So, I guess if you consider vendors, we had quite a big network of people working for us. But if you’re talking about internal employees, we probably had five to six at most, but most of the time anywhere from three to five, I would say. Three to five full-time employees, and most of those are social media. And then, when we started hiring trainers, we had full-time, master kettlebell trainer on staff and things like that.

Stu

(19:14)

How would you manage the onslaught of social media commentary in terms of, you’d have DMs, messages, you have emails galore coming through, you’ve got all of these different channels that people are trying to communicate with you. And obviously, you want to give the best response to each and every customer out there. You don’t want to leave anybody hanging dry. But when you’ve got that many people online and that volume of content coming at you from so many channels, I would imagine it would be overwhelming. How did you manage that?

Chad

(19:50)

I think the mistake a lot of people companies, I mean a lot of people and companies make, as you say, is they take a reactive approach to it. They are like, “Well, we’ll see how many complaints we get.” And we never looked at it like that. We want an open communication channel. And then, we manage that stream of communication.

(20:09)

So, if you’re looking at it from, we want to open the channel and make that channel as open as possible to all of our audience, so they can communicate with us, and then that will determine how much flow we need to manage. If we need to decrease that flow, we need to increase our efficiency somewhere. We can decrease the flow from seeing repetitively the same issues over and over and over. You see what I’m saying?

Stu

(20:30)

Yeah.

Chad

(20:30)

So, the more flow we get, the more data we actually get to become a better company. And I think a lot of companies missed that, and they’re just looking at that as complaints or trolls or whatever that may be. And I think there’s nuggets of information in there if you just process that data.

(20:46)

Fortunately, for us, we always… We’re a digitized company, so we didn’t look at it as a complaint. We looked at it as, “Okay, how do we process that and turn that into a survey and turn that into some data that makes good recommendations for the business?” And that’s getting easier and easier to do now.

(21:03)

And I think people can take advantage of that with tools like AI, and just the amount of CRM integrations that we have now that allow us to completely automate and create templates and create bots that can respond and funnel people in the right direction when they’re trying to communicate with us.

Stu

(21:23)

Yeah, were there any particular standout pieces of software that you tried and tested and proved in the Kettlebell Kings, and then took that over to your companies after that? Things like Klaviyo for email, Hootsuite, all of these other tools? Any standouts for you?

Chad

(21:45)

Yeah. I mean, we did a lot. We did Klaviyo. We did HubSpot. We did Printful. And pretty much if there’s a company, we worked with Google. We were using 29 Google tools at one point. So, literally, if there was a digital tool to use to try to automate our process, we were always interested in using it. And I think that was before even the idea of kettlebells.

(22:10)

And I think that concept is because we want to provide the community with the best virtual experience that they can have. And we think that comes and goes with technology. We can’t be behind the technology curve and think we’re giving people an up-to-date virtual experience because we don’t have a store. That is how we look at the store is it needs to stay technologically advanced today, and is user-friendly as possible.

Stu

(22:35)

Yeah, it’s interesting. And I’m intrigued to see what happens with AI as well, because as technology starts to evolve, so did the communication channels that are open to us as well. And I used to get so infuriated when there’s an AI bot that pops up that you know, it’s just not going to help you, but you know you’re going to have to go through the motions for five minutes asking these rudimentary questions, when all you want to do is chat to a real person.

(23:02)

And we get that with our telcos over here as well. If I have an issue with my internet or my mobile plan, and I want to speak to somebody. Unfortunately, for the person that I finally get through to, they know that I’m probably going to be infuriated because I’ve had to go through an automated telephone system that’s taken about five minutes, that invariably either drops me off or doesn’t give me what I want, or it will take me to an AI system that asks me the question, the wrong questions.

(23:29)

And I remember back in the day when you used to pick up a phone and there’d be somebody on the other side that would just say, “Yup, what can I help you with?” And you’d get there so quickly, but obviously that doesn’t work with scale. Are you finding AI to be of benefit these days? Or are you more hesitant just in terms of not taking that full step and embracing what perhaps could become an issue if the communication isn’t right?

Chad

(24:00)

I mean, I think you have to embrace it. I think it’s more of how do you most effectively utilize the tool. That’s the best way I would look at anything is. I don’t think you can pretend like it doesn’t exist and compete against it. And I think you’re setting yourself up to lose. If whoever is a good expert in your chosen field, if they are using AI, they would technically be a little bit better.

(24:24)

So, I think trying to integrate yourself with tools that can exponentially grow and compliment your own natural expertise is the hard part of business. And I think, a true leader has to have that self-awareness to know where he needs to lean the most on, let’s say maybe AI-type of recommendation versus an experience or his own personal flavor or strategy for something.

(24:51)

I try to lean on data as much as possible and use that data to help give clear markers that can grow the business to everybody that we’re working with. So, I don’t think if you’re not using data to measure success of vendors and employees and different things like that, everyone’s working on a different measurement scale and a different bar. And that’s what I really try to cut out.

(25:12)

And I think, we live in a system now where even if we don’t technically all agree on data, we can agree how we’re going to interpret this data and utilize this type of data to move the company forward. And that’s more important than how much if you use it 20% or if you use it 90%, yeah, that’s how I look at it.

Stu

(25:30)

Yeah, absolutely, and it makes perfect sense because obviously, it’s a benchmark and we could attribute that to anything. If I want to lose weight, then I need to know what my benchmarks are. How much do I weigh now? What’s my muscle mass? What’s my fat mass? What’s my bone density? Where do I want to go? If I don’t know any of those things, then it’s going to make it pretty hard. It’s a lot of guesswork.

(25:52)

So, I completely understand where you’re coming from. Tell me about your company and the pandemic, because I know that when the gyms were closed over here and the very first thing I did was I jumped online and I bought a weight bench and 230 kg dumbbells and a 24 kg kettlebell. But that stock was probably available for about 12 hours, and then it was gone and it didn’t come back for a very long time.

(26:26)

So, I was lucky I had a little home gym set up here. Now, I would imagine with a kettlebell company, this is a super easy piece of equipment. You can ship it to your home, you can get a full body workout. Gyms are closed, we’re not allowed outside. You would’ve lost stock very quickly, right?

Chad

(26:46)

Yeah. I mean, I think we probably could have sold kettlebells for a million dollars of lease at that time. Luckily, we are moral businessmen, so we just made the stock available. But yeah, I think once they announced quarantine here in America, where people officially had to go home and gyms close, it was about 20, 30 minutes and we were out of everything.

Stu

(27:08)

Oh.

Chad

(27:08)

And then, every time we ordered, we were running into basically stock issues, stock outages the entire time. The hard part was really getting things through customs. So, we really, our sales could have been through the roof, if we could have gotten things through customs. It helped us as a business because we always had that foundation of creating a digital experience.

(27:33)

And so, we really focused on the digital side of the company and what can we offer? I mean, we had meetings that were focused on, “Okay, we cannot sell kettlebells obviously because we’re out of them. So, what is it that we’re going to offer people that really brings value?” And I think those conversations did a lot for continuing to build a brand as well.

Stu

(27:51)

Yeah, and how did you manage that from a mindset perspective? I mean, it’s so hard when you know that you’ve got an online store that offers great value, converts really well, but has zero stock. Did you have sleepless nights trying to get that supply chain pumping?

Chad

(28:11)

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was terrible, yeah. Containers, the cost of containers quadrupled, quintupled if not that. So, yeah, it was a terrible time. But the mindset of what we’ve always wanted to create and with any business that I created is this is going to be a battle. This is going to be a challenge, and it should be growing that feeling of like, “Hey, this is getting overwhelming and happening too fast.” That’s a good thing. That means that we’re getting a demand and we have obligations to meet. There’s something that we have to do. And I’ve been part of companies that don’t have that, and that sucks.

(28:50)

So, I’d much rather have problems than not have problems for any type of business, especially if they’re related to just getting inventory in. So, I think that’s just a mindset that we’ve always had, and I try to adapt it with any company that I work with.

Stu

(29:04)

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I mean, I had a million questions about kettlebells, but I don’t think I’m going to ask any of them because it’s obvious that you’ve got a hub and there’s just every single facet of content available. I would imagine, anything you want to know about kettlebell, you can find from the Kettlebell King. So, I’ll direct my audience there.

(29:25)

But I’m interested in you personally as a former athlete, you’ve got pressures of business and you clearly got that mindset where you’re writing books and running businesses. How do you stay in shape? What do you do to stay in shape?

Chad

(29:41)

I just try to stay consistent. I try to be active. I would say, at least four to five days a week. And most weeks, it’s more like five to six for me just because I’m one of those people, if I’m not sore, I’m probably going to get a workout in that day. But then, also I think for a long time, and especially since I’ve graduated, I would do what people call intermittent fasting. I don’t eat as frequently as most people do.

(30:12)

So, I eat one, maybe two meals a day. And then, I don’t eat any processed foods whatsoever. So, I literally try to eat as clean as possible. So, I think that helps me stay in shape and stay in the ideal way that I’d like to. But I’m also on my own health and wellness journey with still recovering from some of the injuries I’ve had from football and things like that.

(30:36)

So, and I go to the chiropractor every two weeks. And if I need to get deep tissue work, I’ll go get some of that done as I’m rehabbing, like some of my shoulders and sternum and things like that. So, I’m really big on functionality and trying to maximize the functionality I can for the rest of my life, I guess.

Stu

(30:55)

And in terms of new technology, things like red light therapy, ice baths, saunas, stability and flexibility over weight training, cardio, is that something that you would build into your week?

Chad

(31:12)

For sure. I’m not big on the… I’m more of, I guess you would call me a minimalist when it comes to exercise and fitness, but I do love the stability and the functionality, the stretching, all those types of things. So, I’ve really been big on that sense, especially coming from, let’s say competitive sports where you’re lifting literally to maximize how much weight you can lift and how much strength you can gain in a set period of time before you have to go into the next season.

(31:45)

The workouts I do now are much more, so that I’m completely balanced. So, my left arm and my right arm, and I’m trying to make sure that I’m more of a well-balanced human being when I’m moving through the world and really focusing on, let’s say, putting up a bunch of weight on bench press.

Stu

(32:03)

Yeah. And how do you track things? I wear an Oura Ring and I track sleep and HRV and metrics like that. Obviously, you’ve got so much out there at the moment, it’s hard to know where to look.

Chad

(32:16)

Luckily, when you own the fitness company for a long time, you become friends with quite a few trainers. So, I’ve had workouts made for me given to me by everyone you can name of. But then, there’s workouts online that I have liked or liked to do over the years. And so, a lot of the things that’s tracking for me is doing workouts that I haven’t done in a while and seeing where my fitness is.

(32:39)

I like to do that quite a bit where I use that as my milestone or I’ll increase based off of how I felt going through that workout, knowing that six months ago when I did that workout, I was really struggling on those leg kicks or whatever that may be. So, I’m really always just tinkering with my own kind of workout plan. There’s no real set routine other than continue maximizing functionality of my entire body. And right now, I would say, I’m about 95% close to my goal. And then, I really start focusing more on let’s say, building more mass possibly, and maybe put on five, 10 pounds of muscle, something like that.

Stu

(33:21)

So, tell us about putting on five, 10 pounds of muscle then. Now, you mentioned whole food approach. Now, whole food can mean different things to different people. You’ve got everything from veganism to carnivore and everything in between, where do you sit in terms of, is it an animal-based whole food diet? Or are you more plant focused? Would you supplement? How do you hit your macros for food?

Chad

(33:51)

I would just say I’m an omnivore. I just don’t eat processed food. So, if it’s not made from scratch, then I’m not very interested in it. That’s really what it boils down to. So, if it’s organic, I’m trying to get the cleanest meats I can, the cleanest vegetables I can, cleanest fruits. And I’m making anything that is a “Dish.” I’m trying to make that from scratch and use all natural ingredients.

(34:12)

So, the main thing that it is, is just as long as it’s natural ingredients, I’m down for it. I don’t really have a big sweet tooth or anything like that, so that probably helps me where most of what I eat is going to be vegetables and meat and fruits, if anything for a dessert.

Stu

(34:29)

Yeah, and supplements?

Chad

(34:32)

Not much. I’ve taken protein powder before. Not a huge fan of it, one way or the other. A lot of them can give me a little bloated feeling sometimes. But I’m not opposed to them either. So, I think it’s the same thing as, if you can find a clean natural supplement, I think that there can be benefits in that as well.

Stu

(34:58)

And so, talk to me about recovery days. You’ve got this athlete mindset, and oftentimes, in the early days when you’re a young athlete, you’re pretty much indestructible. You can go out and go to the pub and get drunk and get up, hung over and smash yourself and eat pizza and burgers, and then just repeat because your hormones are there. They’ve got your back at that age.

(35:21)

But once you hit that critical mass and you’re tipping over into your late 20s, and 30s, and 40s, and so on, then your hormones really in some circumstances can work against you, and recovery becomes really, really important and sleep being a part of that as well. Are you mindful of recovery days? You mentioned if you’re not that sore, you might hit the gym again. Have you got any set days perhaps that strictly no training, but I’m just going to go and do X to recover?

Chad

(35:53)

For sure. I mean, yeah, some days, a lot of days I have to… I want to work out just because it’s something that’s a stress reliever, I think for me as well. I feel like for some people when you get that workout in, you feel more accomplished. I want to go do more things after I workout, then before I work out a lot of times.

(36:12)

So, yeah, there are days in which I just have to have tell myself, your legs are too sore. You’re going to be sore for your next workout on Thursday or whatever. And I’ll go for walks. I’ll go play basketball by myself really. So, just literally shoot around, just get a sweat up, but not really a workout. It’s really just trying to… The way I look at is I’m trying to loosen my muscles and get a good blood circulation in my muscles, so that I’m less sore for the workout tomorrow.

(36:41)

So, instead of me looking at it like I’m missing my workout today, I’m prepping myself for tomorrow’s workout to be awesome. So, I’m making sure everything is nice and limber and get a good nice rest, and go into it like that. So, that’s how I just usually look at “Recovery day,” is whatever I can do to prepare for the next workout and maximize that.

Stu

(37:04)

Alcohol. Does alcohol play a part in your life?

Chad

(37:09)

I mean, I would say, yes, yes, it does. I drink a lot less now than I did when I was in my 20s, for sure. And that’s probably, one of the craziest things is that I don’t enjoy it as much as I did then just because the recovery, it’s crazy. The difference is crazy. I will not deny that. But I have a drink every now and then, but it’s not nearly the same as it was in my 20s. They are definitely, in my college day.

Stu

(37:38)

No, no. Yeah, I totally get where you’re coming from. I don’t drink anymore because it just makes me feel like crap, and I don’t want to feel like crap every day. I want try something and do stuff.

Chad

(37:50)

There are some days where it’s like, do I want to feel like crap? It’s like, “No, I don’t.” So, I’m not going to drink. So, and there used to not be any days.

Stu

(37:55)

I know.

Chad

(37:57)

I used to be worth it every time, but I think that’s part of life. So, I find those things interesting. I’m one of those people that I like to be an observer. And when I have emotions or milestones like that, I’m like, “I can’t believe this is happening. But I know it’s real. It is really happening.” The time has come where sometimes, I just do not want to drink because I’d rather have a good night sleep.

Stu

(38:21)

Yeah. Life can be cruel.

Chad

(38:24)

Yeah.

Stu

(38:25)

Tell us about the book because keen to, I mean, your whole life’s path of experience from athlete to business owner, to going through and understanding all the stresses and figuring out what it takes to build that framework of a successful business model that can be translatable, irrespective of perhaps the industry in terms of using these tools, tips and techniques to just build something that has resilience. What could we expect? What could the business owner, maybe the gym owner who wants to expand to something bigger and better expect from the book?

Chad

(39:03)

I think, in the first part of the book, I broke it up basically in three sections. In the first part, I tell my story and the story of Kettlebell Kings. And then, in the second part of the book, I basically have 10 building blocks or 10 sections of business. And I use some of the stories with Kettlebell Kings, and some of my other businesses to tell how these are good examples for whatever topic or point I’m trying to make.

(39:29)

In the first part of the book, I’m really using stories from my own life to try to help you start thinking about how do you can best utilize your own experiences to be the best leader you can for your business. I think self-awareness is a big thing when it comes to business. The best business relationships that I’ve had have been with other people who are self-aware of who they are, what their goals are, what their business goals are. They have clear visions than other people.

(39:56)

And they are able to not only withstand the pressure of entrepreneurship, but withstand it with a clear head and still have level of conversations and make plans and keep promises and make strategic alliances in the business world. So, I try to write about that, what taught me those lessons and how I was able to see and utilize some of that.

(40:19)

So, I talk about in high school seeing branding for the first time, not being through business, but being through a new coach, coming to my school and taking us to the state championship and the messaging that came with him as a coach. And it wasn’t just the team that was branded, it was the entire community, it was the school, it was an entire marketing campaign almost of a strategy that he came with in order to achieve this smaller or larger goal, depending on how you look at it.

(40:52)

But it was the first time that I really realized like words and pictures and mottoes mean something to people. These things, they can bring groups together and make people set their differences aside. And so, I think there’s a lot of examples like that in all of our live sports is one of the key concepts or the key stories that I use for my examples. But I think if you’ve gone through anything and been a part of anything that is worth something, you’ve had to make sacrifices and you’ve saw teams come together and you’ve seen leaders make those sacrifices.

(41:29)

So, I would lean into trying to learn and be the best type of that person that you can when you’re trying to start your own business versus thinking where you are is currently good enough. I think that’s why mindset is so important is, I think you need to have the mindset that you can no longer be who you were. You need to be better than that. You need to be this future multimillion, billion-dollar guy, whoever you think that is. You need to start becoming that before it actually shows up.

Stu

(41:56)

Yeah, fascinating. I love the fact that there’s a passion behind certain brands that people often overlook, don’t even think about. And I’ll use Apple as an example. Apple, I mean, they make beautiful products. They’re more expensive than most things. And oftentimes, they don’t do as much as other devices do. But you have people that line outside these Apple shops for days for the release of an iPhone that’s really no different than the phone that they’ve already got, and they’re so passionate.

(42:28)

And it’s understanding what builds that passion and where did that come from for maybe at Apple brand or Kettlebell Kings, or it could be a sports brand or whatever it is, whatever brands that you purchase, if you can dial into that clearly like you have, then that are the building blocks to create something really quite special in the future.

(42:52)

Fascinating. I’m fascinated by all of this stuff that just goes on, I guess subconsciously around us that drives decisions every single day that we make on automatic pilot without even thinking and its business.

Chad

(43:11)

Yeah, and I was going to say, I think that’s even the simple stuff like customer service, I think that’s where these core concepts come from. To me, the person that would pick up the phone and call me good or bad is a potential customer that would line up about the side of the store and be waiting in the rain for that goal brand. I think of that as the same beam, and I think a lot of companies missed that.

(43:32)

And even if I’m wrong, one in 10 of those people is that version. I’m still capturing one of 10 of these rabid fans that I can now go out and try to figure out, “Okay, who is this guy? Where does he shop?” And I can figure out exactly what I need to find more of him. And I think that’s what I’m looking to do regardless. I’m trying to build this fan base like Apple, regardless of what the product is.

(43:57)

There’s no such thing as me not doing that. That is a constant effort, and those efforts can be measured, and you can use digital tools to eventually get there, whether you get there today or five years from now. If you have that as your goal, you can eventually get there if you have a good product, for sure.

Stu

(44:15)

Where can people find the book?

Chad

(44:17)

Amazon. So, yeah, it’s for sale on Amazon now. You can search, Preparing for Battle, Chad Price, and it should pop up.

Stu

(44:24)

Okay.

Chad

(44:24)

But you can also find more information about me on chadprice.com. That’s probably, the best central hub to see where I am right now, what businesses I have going on. I’m actually in a big marketing preparation right now for a new launch. I’m going to be starting another book here soon, and I have a lot of marketing that I’m going to do around the messaging, around my messaging and what I’m going for.

Stu

(44:51)

Fantastic. We’ll put all of those links in the show notes. I’ve got one question for you before we wrap up, and that’s essentially, what are your non-negotiables? The things that you do each and every day to crush that day just on automatic pilot? And it maybe, you like to get up and stare at the sun for 10 minutes to reset the body, write a few notes, have a coffee, whatever they be, and they don’t have to be health related at all, but what are these non-negotiables?

Chad

(45:22)

If I had to choose one, I wouldn’t look at it as like a daily non-negotiable. But I would say, my workouts are my non-negotiable. So, even if my leg is broken, I still have to figure out something to do. The idea of just sitting and rotting away, it sounds terrible to me. I don’t like the idea of atrophy. I hate that idea.

(45:47)

So, I think that’s probably my non-negotiable. And having a healthy routine, I need to see one step is going in the right direction. One foot’s going in front of the other, and I’m heading in a direction that I believe in. And if I’m not, then that is something that I’m working on a daily basis. I’m very anal about that. I’m sure you can ask my girlfriend. But when we say we’re going to do something, this is what we’re going to do, and these are the steps we’re going to take, we’re going to get there. So…

Stu

(46:18)

Love it. Love it.

Chad

(46:19)

But I think it can be a gift and a curse sometimes.

Stu

(46:22)

Oh, look, it’s absolutely can. And I share, non-negotiable for exercise, I share that. That’s my… I feel like a cage tiger if I don’t move, lift weights, things like that. And I remember, a couple of years back, I was messing around with a friend of mine and we were doing some boxing training with some gloves and some bags, and there was a table next to us and my friend said, “Back in the day, I could have box jumped this table.” And I said, “Oh, I could do that, I can do that.” He said, “Go on then, go on.” And so, I said, “Right, I can do this.”

(46:56)

And so, I attempted to box jump, and I bailed out at the very last second.

Chad

(47:02)

Yeah, you hesitated.

Stu

(47:04)

I hesitated. And I came down on my shin and opened up my shin to the bone. And I looked down at it and I could see my bone. And I looked at my mate and he looked at me and I said to him, “I can still train upper body.”

Chad

(47:19)

Yeah, don’t worry. We’re good…

Stu

(47:22)

We’re good, we’re good. And so, for the next month or so, I was limping around the gym, but just doing all the upper body stuff. But it is one of those things that when you’re dialed into something that makes you feel that good, you just have to embrace it. You can’t let it go. You can’t let it go.

Chad

(47:37)

I tell people that all the time. I think we all have habits and I think you can have good habits and bad habits. And I try to make my, “Bad habits, good things.” So, if I’m addicted to working out, that’s better than being addicted to cigarettes. I’m balancing my human nature.

Stu

(47:57)

Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Mate, I’ve had a fantastic conversation with you. I really, really enjoyed it. Just for our listeners, so what’s next? What have you got in the pipeline? You mentioned potential book, you’ve got new business. Anything else that could be notable to talk about right now?

Chad

(48:13)

Yeah, I would say follow me on social media. Obviously, I’m on pretty much all channels at Real Chad Price or just Chad Price. And then, I’m actually going to be starting another book. I’m starting a podcast. So, I’ll be launching all that information on chadprice.com and through my social media channel. So, I think social media is the best place to follow me.

Stu

(48:31)

Fantastic. Again, as mentioned before, we’ll put all of the links and the info in the show notes together. But Chad, I’ve had a great conversation, really enjoyed it, and I wish you all the best with your future endeavors and hope that I’ll be connecting with you at some stage soon in the future.

Chad

(48:47)

Thank you for having me on. It was very nice meeting you.

Stu

(48:53)

Thank you, mate.

The post Chad Price – Finding Fitness With Kettlebells appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Ange: Satisfy your sweet tooth with these delicious healthy crap-free protein brownies. Full of real whole-food ingredients, no nasties in sight. Traditional brownies are made with refined sugar and wheat flour which as you know we aren’t fans of and cause a whole lot of health problems if over-consumed. So why not make brownies that you can have everyday!

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups black beans
• 1 large bananas (I use a defrosted frozen banana)
• 3 Tbsp Organic Cacao powder
• 1 scoop 180 Natural Protein Superfood Coconut (vegan)
• 8 Medjool dates
• 3 Tbsp desiccated coconut
• ½ cup almond milk
• ¼ cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius
2. Take seed out of dates and place in a bowl topped with boiling water
3. Soak dates for 5mins and drain
4. Line baking tin with baking paper
5. Place all ingredients in food processor and process
6. The mixture should be smooth and come together
7. Add chopped pecans or walnuts
8. Pour mixture into tin
9. Bake for approximately 25 mins or until a skewer comes out clean.

Big thanks to health and nutrition coach, fitness instructor and self-taught cook Hollie of Powered by Veggies for this recipe. You can connect with her here.

find more amazing recipes here

Related Products

The post Healthy Junk-Free Chocolate Protein Brownies appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Cody Watkins to the podcast. Dubbed the King of Transformation. Cody is a renowned online fitness coach. In 2018, he underwent emergency open heart surgery that was required to escape death. He made an astonishing comeback, winning a bodybuilding competition, just 11 months post-surgery. In this episode, we discussed the subtle art of building lean muscle while losing body fat, the importance of cardio when wanting to lean up and so much more. Over to Cody.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• What’s the secret to building lean muscle and losing fat at the same time?
• How important is cardio when wanting to lean up?
• Should we lift heavy for less reps or lighter for more?

Get more of Cody Watkins:

• https://www.codywatkinsfitness.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/CodyWatkinsFitness/
• https://www.instagram.com/codywatkinsfitness/

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview

Aaron Alexander – An Introduction To The Align Method
Rodrigo Perez – Discover the Importance of Mobility
Martin Silva – Nutritional Strategies For Optimal Performance

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition, and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:45)

This week, I’m excited to welcome Cody Watkins to the podcast. Dubbed the King of Transformation. Cody is a renowned online fitness coach. In 2018, he underwent emergency open heart surgery that was required to escape death. He made an astonishing comeback, winning a bodybuilding competition, just 11 months post-surgery. In this episode, we discussed the subtle art of building lean muscle while losing body fat, the importance of cardio when wanting to lean up and so much more. Over to Cody.

(01:20)

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Cody Watkins to the podcast. Cody, good morning, good afternoon for you. How are you mate?

Cody

(01:30)

I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.

Stu

(01:32)

No, I really appreciate your time. Well, looking at your socials and all of your online activities, I know that you’re a very busy man, so we’ll get into the questions in a second. But first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Cody

(01:48)

Yeah, so I got into fitness pretty early, 15, 16 years old. I think very typical for any male, you’re a little bit softer than you like to be, right? You got to get those abs, get it checked, and I just started, I guess, chasing the dragon, so to speak. So, I just kept pushing the size of limit. I got into powerlifting, got into bodybuilding. I did that obviously along the way. It’s really easy to get into training since that’s all you’re doing. So that’s where I kind of fell into that with my love for that, and then got into coaching, competed for 12 years in bodybuilding. Ended up having a few setbacks along the way that I had to learn to overcome, the biggest being open heart surgery. That was kind of a side blast, I didn’t see that one coming. And yeah, I had a birth effect that I didn’t know about.

(02:31)

I ended up being in stage four heart failure. My heart was like three times the size it should be, and then I got that all patched up. I ended up competing in a bodybuilding show one year later just to see if I could. I wanted to push the limit, but I like to take the reasons or excuses out for when it comes to clients because we’ll build hurdles over things that maybe aren’t. So, I figured if I could push the envelope, it would help me as a coach overall, because it kind of takes that excuse barrier now when it comes to working with people.

Stu

(02:57)

Oh, my word. So, tell me, when you had that surgery. And I’m guessing with a character like yourself. You live and breathe for working out, feeling good, moving your body. Were you ever told that you’ve got to take this super, super easy? I wouldn’t recommend that you pick up heavy weights or stretch your heart in any way? Was that on the board of the recommendations?

Cody

(03:24)

Absolutely. So, going into it, I didn’t know I had it. I had symptoms of heart failure the whole time, but I thought it was just bodybuilding. It was rough, right? I’m pushing through it, grueling along, probably maybe TMI. But man, I was throwing up probably one to two workouts a month, just thought I was lifting hard, but that was my heart not keeping up, right?

Stu

(03:41)

Yeah.

Cody

(03:42)

But anyways, when I found out, my heart valve actually ripped. I had birth defect in it. So, they were like, if this would’ve happened while you’re training, you’d be dead. And the day before I was blasting out legs, just crushed. I was six weeks out from a bodybuilding show. So, I had just DEXA scan at like 6% body fat. I’m like, “Easiest contest prep yet. I’m so far ahead of the game. This is great.” And then the next day I was in the hospital dying and had no idea, just side cast.

(04:10)

And so, they told me I could walk but not uphill. I won’t do anything. So, I was still going in person, training my clients at the time. I made them move all the weights. I just was playing a rep counter basically. I had the surgery done and when I got out, I was cautious. I was like, “Hey, what are my limitations?” And they’re like, realistically, with this heart valve, it’s mechanical, so there’s nothing you can really do for it. And I got seven plates and 28 screws in my chest. So, it’s not like I’m coming apart, but I eased back into it pretty gradual. But I still remember I was probably three months getting cleared for lifting and the surgeon was scoping out my social media or someone on his medical team has seen an old clip of me benching like 315, and they called me, I’m in the gym parking lot about ready to go train.

(04:54)

He’s like, “You can’t be lifting that.” Because I was like 60, I was at five months post op, right? And he sees me lifting 300 pounds, which obviously I wasn’t. I was still weak at that point. But man, that was like, “Oh, am I supposed to be doing this? But it was all clear, right?” I ended up reversing my heart failure. My heart shrunk down to normal size. I did that [inaudible 00:05:13] a year later, so it’s all green light on that. I do train a little bit different now. I don’t push failure, Valsalva maneuver as much, spike in the blood pressure. But other than that, it’s pretty much same old, same old.

Stu

(05:23)

That’s fantastic. That surely would have to make the ultimate meme on the internet. You push leg day to the next level.

Cody

(05:32)

I’m just glad it happened right after leg day, not during.

Stu

(05:34)

Oh, my God. So, it’s absolutely amazing to hear that complete reversal really of perhaps what were you told that you shouldn’t do to where you knew that you wanted to be and all of those learnings along the way. So, I’m keen for you then to share a little bit of your insights into, well, bodybuilders and especially competitive, they understand or you understand diet, nutrition and movement and all the recovery protocols probably more than anybody else because you have the ability to understand macros and all of your body metrics in terms of DEXA scan, body fat, muscle mass, bone density, all that kind of stuff.

(06:29)

And there’s so much information out there about choose this diet and that diet. You want to get ripped, you want to get six-pack. But ultimately, it seems to me like the weight trainers, the body lifters, the power, the competitive powerlifters, they are the scientists in this area because you’ve got it down pat and you’ve had it down pat for many, many years. Even the guys in the ’70s knew more than a lot of us do today.

Cody

(06:52)

Oh, yeah.

Stu

(06:53)

So, tell us a little bit about if you can open up on that secret, which is everybody’s nemesis, building lean muscle, but losing fat at the same time. How do we do it?

Cody

(07:05)

So, this is probably the trickiest part of the equation because on paper, in order to build muscle, we have to have that calorie surplus. In order to lose fat, you have to have that calorie deficit. So, you can do it at once. I’ll side quest and say it’s not my top recommendation because it is a slower process. It’ll keep you looking better the entire time. But if you focus on leaning down and then building, you’ll do it in probably a third to half of the time as far as an overall process to goal, but you can do it. But this one comes more down to nutrient timing. So, you have to be a little bit more specific with your spikes of surplus. So not to get too deep in the weeds, but you got to figure when you’re increasing calorie expenditure around the workout time, that’s when you need the surplus.

(07:50)

So, the body goes, oh, cool, I’m not starving. I need to put on muscle. Because from the body standpoint, it only cares about survival and excess muscle is not good for survival. It burns calories or rest. So, when that expenditure goes up, you have to spike it. So, this is where a pre and post-workout, carbohydrate timing usually works out well. So, you can increase the surplus and then all the other parts of the day usually bring those back a little bit. So, you’re trying to tap into that stored body fat for fuel while general activity and stuff is there.

(08:21)

And obviously, each person, you’d have to play with the numbers a little bit from that sweet spot, but that’s realistically where I see the best results on recomp and it’s not a huge deficit. So, if you do figure out where your maintenance is, it’s usually only going like 200, 250 under it. The further you crank the fat loss, the less you crank the muscle build, so there’s a tight rope to walk between both.

Stu

(08:46)

And I would imagine then that you would have to be very, very focused on tracking and understanding exactly what you are pulling in terms of macros and being able to understand what those foods are doing for you, working out your BMR and then your surplus or deficit, however that works.

Cody

(09:02)

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the easiest way to do that, if I was going to give the simplest pointer, I think people get online, they punch in formulas, they go for that stuff way too quick. So, if your weight’s been pretty consistent, cool, you’re at your maintenance right now. So, all you have to do, if you’re a beginner starting out and you’re not really wanting to play with the scale too much, it’s more like, “I want to tone up, maybe put on some muscle, loose some fat,” log your food out honestly for 2, 3, 4, 5 days, just get a calorie number to it. Don’t change anything. If you were going to order a large pizza that night, put it in. It doesn’t matter.

(09:35)

Get an average to where your numbers are. Now you know your average calorie burn. Then, if we take that protein number, now let’s go up to a gram per pound of lean. Even if you keep your calories exactly the same, increased protein because most people are going to be lower at that, you are going to get in a thermogenesis effect from the protein to where you’re actually at a deficit after you do that. So that should be enough to actually instill the recomp to actually happen without really changing the calorie number at that point, just switching a couple of the macros around.

Stu

(10:06)

Yeah, right. And that protein intake, obviously very important. Would you be consuming your protein intake based upon your current weight or your goal?

Cody

(10:19)

So, I like to eat for the goal, not eat for where you’re currently at. So same thing because this is where it gets started. I’ll work with some larger individuals. We’ll get people that are four or 500 pounds, that’ll come in as well, and that 500 pound person doesn’t need 500 grams of protein. That’s a little human hiding in there. So, we got aim for the target, right? And so, that would be eat for the body you want, not the body you have, and that’s what’s going to drive that pull and get it there.

Stu

(10:47)

Got it. And what’s your carbohydrate of choice? Because you mentioned just about adjusting with carbs and things like that. Are we talking, does it matter? Can we eat fruit, rice, potatoes or does it really not matter?

Cody

(11:02)

On a base level if you’re newer to it, I wouldn’t go into the weeds with it. Just count the carbs, get the numbers to it. The more technical you get, the more advanced you get. The more advanced your physique gets, the more specifics will come into play. So, if you’re an elite bodybuilder, single digit body fat, 200 plus pounds, it’s going to take a lot more to move the needle than somebody coming in like 160 pounds just getting into fitness. So, these people have a lot more leeway, so don’t go too in the weeds with it. But the carbs of choice, I like a starch, so it digests for a while. I’m not a fan of simple sugars other than around the workouts because they’re so quick to burn, they give that insulin spike and then you get that crash so you feel rather lethargic after a while.

(11:44)

The other ones don’t digest quite as quickly, so you get a little bit more sustained approach to it. Fruit, I’m not a fan of it if people are going to lean down, and not that fruit’s bad, but nobody eats an apple and gets full, nobody eats a banana and gets full. So, there are food that doesn’t have a lot of volume to it, which if you’re someone that’s, let’s just say metabolically impaired, it’s not your ideal choice for carbohydrates just from the satiety standpoint. Now, there is interesting data on fructose and sleep. So, if we were going to time that fructose before bed, it actually can help you sustain a longer period of sleep, which is kind of a cool little side benefit of it.

Stu

(12:23)

It’s funny you should say that. So, I have fruit after my evening meal because it helps sleep.

Cody

(12:31)

Exactly.

Stu

(12:32)

And it just works. It really works

Cody

(12:34)

Where a lot of people get it. So, if you have one of those continuous glucose monitors, you’ll see it. But a lot of people that wake up at that 3:00 AM time, like the witching hour, that’s your blood sugar dipping and your body’s pumping out adrenaline to get that back up because you’re just going too low. And so, if you’ve ever had those moments where you’re like 3:00 AM on the button and you’re waking up heart’s racing and all that, that’s exactly what happens. So, fructose replenishes liver glycogen, so store carbohydrates in the liver, so that’s what sustains your blood glucose throughout the day.

(13:03)

So, if you’re a guy who’s training pretty intense, if you’re depleting glycogen, the liver taps out too. So, if you don’t have enough sugar in there, there’s nothing to balance you out when your overall blood sugar dips. So, if you did do a bigger evening meal and you got that insulin spike and then the drop, all you’re going to get is a hot button, wake up at 3:00 AM with no sustainability when it comes to that.

Stu

(13:25)

Boy, they’re going to be so many people that absolutely resonate with that because I think at the moment we are very, the low carbohydrate movements, whole low-carb keto, intermittent fasting, it’s a big movement right now and very probably not the best approach then if we want to put on muscle mass.

Cody

(13:48)

No. And this is my side quest on things, and this is a knock on the fitness industry in general, a lot of people when they’re looking at bigger influencers and stuff like that, what maintenance takes and what getting their takes are miles apart. So, for me to maintain a 10% body fat physique, 240 pounds. I can eat fast food five to six times a week and do this. It is not challenging whatsoever. Getting here, way more difficult. Now sometime, you’re going to see a lot of your favorite people, six-pack abs, shredded to the bone and they’re like, “I do intermittent fasting.” I’ve competed in bodybuilding with some of these guys and I’ll tell you 10 years ago they weren’t doing it.

(14:33)

It sounds good now and they may do it very well now to maintain it, but they would’ve never got to that body in my opinion in the first place by following that protocol, somebody who’s obviously above maximum level of muscle, not like a shredded individual, but when we’re talking like a 200-pound male who’s pretty lean, he didn’t get there by restricting eating hours. You have to have a good amount of food going in order to grow like that.

Stu

(14:59)

The internet I think can be an interesting beast in terms of the messages that you see and how perhaps that plays into a part of the truth. I remember, there was a movie that came out a few years back about plant-based diets on Netflix and I think Arnold Schwarzenegger was on there and he was talking about now he’s an advocate for plant-based diet and of course people look back at what he was and think, “Oh my word, look at you, you’re a beast of a man.” I don’t think he got there with what he’s doing right now. It probably wasn’t a plant-based approach that took him to his greatest achievements, that’s for sure.

Cody

(15:36)

Exactly. Well and on the flip side, right, because I own that DEXA scan business for almost four years, so I’ve scanned thousands of people personally as far as body cuts go, and every individual that we would have come in there that was fasting, they lost a massive amount of muscle. And I’m not saying that there’s not some people that can thrive with it, so it’s not a knock. I just got to go off the information that I’ve personally seen and so I’ll leave them unnamed. But there was two individuals and they did a week long fast just for religious purposes, they want to see, but we scanned them before and after just to see what the composition came from. So, one of the guys lost 16 pounds in the week, 13 pounds of it was muscle, so three pounds of fat.

Stu

(16:20)

Oh wow, okay.

Cody

(16:21)

The other guy lost 17 pounds and 15 pounds of it was muscle.

Stu

(16:26)

Shit.

Cody

(16:27)

Two pounds. Now, granted glycogen refill when they’re done and stuff, but I got to go off the numbers. So basically, what that tells me is extended periods of fasting annihilate the lean tissue, which then impairs the metabolism. So, if you go back up to your old levels of eating now that if it was maintenance before and it’s now a surplus and now it’s going to start to stick. And so, from a sustainability standpoint, it’s not my favorite approach because the hardest thing we do is when we restrict eating windows, we restrict the ability to get enough protein in. And so, I’m not of the thought process that, okay, you’re X big, you can only absorb X amount of protein, but I am of the thought process that me or you is not digesting 100 grams of protein and is eating very well for a muscle building purpose.

Stu

(17:12)

No, no, exactly right. Preference on protein, I mean there are so many different sources. Of course, now we’ve got powders and shakes and bars versus we’ve got whole food versions and junk food versions too. What do you think on that?

Cody

(17:27)

So, this one here, I like to go personally with what digests well for the person and works well. And so chronic use can sometimes lead to allergies. So, I used to drink a gallon of egg whites a day. That was my prime source of protein, super easy, but guess what? My only food allergy is now.

Stu

(17:43)

Yeah, right.

Cody

(17:45)

So, I do the same thing now way, knock on wood, it hasn’t done me dirty. So, I do about five or six meals a day just with whey protein shakes. I only do two solid meals a day. It works better for my schedule. If you’ve been like me and you’ve been shackled to your bodybuilding restrictions for 17 years, I’m kind of sick of eating by this point. So, if I could just drink my food and get on with my day, it’s way more convenient for me. So, I knock out those two meals, lunch and dinner, everything else is in liquid form and it makes my day go way more smooth.

Stu

(18:14)

Yeah, fantastic. No, that is great advice. So, for our listeners then, they want to lean up and there is lots of conflicting advice. Some people say, well, you know what, let’s just get on the runner or do your steps, get that cardio going, like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. But conversely, perhaps if you’re just going to focus on that, you are, as you mentioned before, going to start to lose your lean muscle. When you lose lean muscle, metabolism will change in some way, shape or form. And ultimately, when people think about leaning up, they would often look to perhaps people that they’d see in the media as, “I want to look like that.” And I’m imagining that those people will be doing a lot of resistance training and perhaps not as much cardio as they think. So, what’s your take then on cardio as an effective tool for leaning up?

Cody

(19:04)

So, it’s effective when you hit a point that it’s necessary. So, your main movers when it comes to leaning out, nutrition, resistance training, and then cardio/activity. Now obviously, you want the hormones to be primed, the body primed, all that stuff, but that’s kind of intermittent with all those. As far as the movers that you have more of a direct control over, that’s it. So, I would put the emphasis on nutrition before I ever put somebody on emphasis on the StairMaster. Because what’s going to end up happening, is if you’re a tiny person, you can get on that stairs and mash an hour out and hate your life and I can burn more calories sitting in this chair talking to you. And so, we want to maximize the burden, not only when we’re expending effort to it, but when we’re doing nothing at all.

(19:47)

And so, if we can ramp that metabolism up through obviously the right nutrition strategies, but increasing the lean tissue and hanging onto as much of that through the resistance training, this whole process becomes night and day difference as far as ease.

Stu

(20:02)

So, you mentioned a phrase and holding onto this lean tissue, and again, so many different strategies and I don’t know whether you’ve read the book, The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris.

Cody

(20:16)

Oh, Tim Ferris, yeah.

Stu

(20:16)

Yeah, Tim Ferris, right. So, he had, I think it was Occam’s protocol in there, but he essentially said his case study wanted to pack on a whole heap of muscle and he did it in one weight training session a month.

Cody

(20:29)

Yes.

Stu

(20:30)

And albeit, it was the mother of all weight training sessions and he trained all body parts and he went gangbusters and then focused just on gorging himself with food. What do you think the minimum effective dose is to put on and keep lean muscle mass?

Cody

(20:45)

So, keeping one to two times every week to two weeks, keeping maintenance is beyond easy. Growing it becomes a bit of a challenge, right? So, this is where it is a tight rope. So, the best thing I’ve ever heard for it is you force the body and it reacts, you coax it and it responds. I mean if we try to force a bunch of muscle on, there’s usually a bit of side effects with it and by side effects it can be obviously XX fat gain or a surplus. This is kind of the nemesis you’ll see in bodybuilding. Just speaking from personal experience, the quicker you push that muscle gain, the more you’re likely to blow that waist out. So, if you want to keep that nice petite waste, try to put on 20, 30 pounds of muscle in year, it doesn’t present a bit of a problem. I used to have a little girl wasp waist back in the day, it was beautiful and it don’t suck it as tight as it used to. I just poke it out.

(21:39)

So, first off is like the rate you want to put it on, but when it comes to putting on lean tissue, you have to have the right environment for it and everyone will be a little bit individual with it. So, you play the cards off what you’re dealt. So, if you’re a guy right now, you come to me, you’re training three times a week, I’m probably not going to get away with two times a week to get that muscle growth we want because your body’s accustomed to a certain level of stimulus. Likewise, if somebody comes to me not working out at all, they’ll grow like a weed on one or two times a week weight training because it’s so new.

Stu

(22:10)

Right.

Cody

(22:11)

And then it’s a matter of getting that proper periodization of training in there, making sure we’re actually progressing the workouts, which is an area a lot of people don’t put enough emphasis on. They get up there, they do the work, but they don’t track metrics. They have no idea what weight they’re moving, no idea what reps are doing, and they don’t beat anything. So, if you want to make the best progress in a shorter period of time, find the days that fit your schedule the best. If you can keep four, cool, maximize that and then make sure that you are putting that effort in. So, track the weights you’re moving, track the reps and try to make consistent progress. And if you’re noticing the weights and reps increase, the only two things that can happen is you increase muscle size to do so or you make your CNS more efficient. So, your nervous system to move more weight, either one of them has a greater potential for you to put on muscle overall.

Stu

(22:58)

Brilliant. So next question then, which feeds into that, lifting heavy for less or lighter for more? Is there…

Cody

(23:10)

Yeah, and I know I get this question, so my answer would be heavier for more.

Stu

(23:15)

Oh, okay.

Cody

(23:16)

Lighter is, so I think the fallacy we get into is three to five reps for strength, five to eight reps for mass, and then eight to 12 reps for endurance. When really if we look at the body from an energy standpoint, you have the ATP-PC phase, the glycolic phase, and then you have cardio aerobic phase. So, we’re take that one out and we have one that’s dependent on carbs, which is a little bit higher reps, and we have one that’s been on creatine and ATP, that’s the lower rep range, but both of those ranges build muscle. So, if you’re someone on a ketogenic or a lower carb approach, you’re probably not going to be able to run those reps as high as someone who has carbs present because you don’t have that sort of glycogen. So that’s the first thing I would look at. Make sure that training matches the diet protocols you’re on so you can really maximize it.

(24:06)

Second thing you’d want to do is the intensity of it will be a way bigger factor than the rep range itself. So, if you go up there and provided we’re counting more than three, we want to do a few of them, but if we go up there and we’re doing six reps, super intense, you’re barely getting it up, that’s going to be a lot more effective than doing 12 reps where you’re having a conversation with your workout partner, right?

Stu

(24:33)

Yep. Yes.

Cody

(24:34)

So, we want a certain level of intensity to it, but regardless, it’s intensity and progression. So, this is where I would still fall back on the reps will not matter as much, as long as you’re tracking and making progress over time. If you do six reps over time, you do 12 reps over time, as long as that weight is increasing for what you do over a three, six, eight-month period, you’re probably going to notice an increase in lean tissue to some extent. From that point, I would always evaluate which works better for you if you’ve done both. Personally, that sweet spot I find is that six to 10 range.

(25:08)

So basically, when you can get a weight for 10, try to go for the heavier weight for at least six, build that six or up to 10, you leapfrog up and you do that until you can’t or when the body’s getting used to it, you’re not getting as sore, recovery’s getting easier, then you flip the workout. So, it’s a whole new environment, a whole new stimulus. And now, we repeat the cycle and do it all over again.

Stu

(25:28)

Perfect. And would you be pushing to absolute failure on that last two reps?

Cody

(25:34)

No. This is the balance of training, right? So, for the most part, no. The further you push that actual failure, like muscle and nervous system failure, the more likely your recovery is going to go down the tank. So, if you’re someone who’s only training two to three days a week, you can maximize that a little bit better. But if you’re a guy going up there four or five, six days a week, you can’t annihilate it every day or your nervous system’s going to go on the toilet. So, what you want to do is you want to find that balance. So, I do one to two reps in reserve. So, if I think I can get 10, I stop at eight or nine and it leaves me a little bit where I can finish the rest of workout.

(26:13)

Now, if you’re someone who’s shorter on time, you could reduce the volume, how many sets and reps you’re doing and crank the intensity, which would be more like what Tim Ferriss was doing or old school, Dorian Yates, but that takes a different caliber of person to do. So, if you’re someone who could push that limit mentally, hey, more power too, you’re right. You might be able to get away to trade less. I like that balance of where it’s still kind of fun. I don’t feel like I’m having to pep talk myself into every set I’m going into.

Stu

(26:42)

Yeah, no, that does make sense. And in order then to maximize I guess the inputs that you are allowing your body to have during that period of time, we have things like pre-workouts, we’ve got creatine and then post-workout consumption of protein shake or small meal or something like that. Creatine has been around since day dot, it’s so well studied. At one time it was thought to be, “Well be very careful, you’ve got to cycle it because it’s dangerous on the kidneys.” And now, well actually it’s really protective even for the brain. Everybody seems to be pushing that right now.

Cody

(27:22)

Yeah, yeah.

Stu

(27:23)

Where do you sit on the supplement stance and how do you use those supplements to compliment what you’re doing?

Cody

(27:30)

Yeah, I would 100% say everyone should be taking it, right?

Stu

(27:34)

Yeah.

Cody

(27:34)

So, it’s one of those things, it is so widely studied. And on the brain thing, they have it for Alzheimer’s patients getting better memory. And so, if we’ve got something that’s increasing cognitive performance, physical performance, amount of lean tissue you can put on an ear and the only side effect is you have to drink more water, that’s a pretty fair trade to me for an easy gig. So, you can probably get an extra month or two of progress a year just so if you want to take 14 months to get 12 months of progress, don’t take it. If you want to get 12 months of progress at 12 months of progress, throw it in right, five, 10 grams a day, depending on the form, get the water and take up, you’ll be good as good to go.

(28:14)

Males and females, right? And I think a lot of females kind of shy away from it because they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to get bulky,” but you have an eighth the testosterone level as a guy, it’s going to be really hard to get bulky just on creatine. So, you’ll get that one lean muscle toe and you’ll be good.

Stu

(28:30)

It’s really hard, isn’t it? Because that is a phrase that we hear so much. “I don’t want to look like a man. I don’t want to get bulky. I don’t want to look like the Hulk.” Boy, oh boy. If you knew how hard I work in the gym and the supplements I take and I can’t get there, good luck. And if you do, I want to know what your secret is and I want some of it.

Cody

(28:50)

Well, my wife, she can go up there and work me over on legs. I’ll be crawling out of there, right? She’s like, “I’m a little sore.” She doesn’t bulk up like me, right?

Stu

(28:59)

Right.

Cody

(28:59)

She’s only half my size. So, if it worked that I would love for it to work that good because I wouldn’t have had to work half as hard as I am to get where I’m at right now.

Stu

(29:07)

I know, I know. What does rest day look like? There are oftentimes a different perception of what a rest day should be. Some people think there’s absolutely nothing. “I’m just going to hit the couch and watch Netflix and we’re just going to binge-watch.” Whereas other people, they might go into the gym and they do some stretching, some rolling out, they might have a sauna and ice bath, things like that. What do you do for rest day and what do you typically recommend for your clients?

Cody

(29:34)

Yeah, so I just think of it like no weight training. It’s very few people I have to throttle back. I got some people that are a little overzealous on activity, so I got to bring them back down because if you’re someone who’s trained five days a week and maybe the weekends are supposed to be off and you’re on some 14, 15-mile hike or something like that, you’re not getting that body any downtime to recover from what you did in the week. So, it’s like a constant beat down. But for most people, if you want to go two to three-mile walk, keep the activity up, sauna, ice bath, feel free to do that. You’re going to be absolutely fine with. Just don’t hit the muscles you already hammered throughout the week, right?

(30:11)

They’ve got plenty of abuse. Let them rest. Let them get to recovery. Focus on your nutrition. Some people get a little head spinning. In that case, if 20 or 30 minutes of cardio would satisfy you from where you get that forward feeling, you feel a little bit better do that before you pick up the weights again, right? You’ve already done the damage, let them recover. You don’t grow while you’re in the gym. You grow after you recover outside the gym.

Stu

(30:34)

Yeah. No. Absolutely. That’s perfect. Preferred diet. Now again, we’re in this kind of pool of influence from internet, social media, every diet under the sun, everything from veganism to carnivore, a gazillion diets in between. Do you have a preferred diet? Whether is it whole food? Do you have cheat days? What are your thoughts on that? If somebody is just wanting to become lean, strong, healthy, improved body composition, but they don’t really know how to eat.

Cody

(31:07)

So, the first thing I would recommend to anyone is get the protein intake in because protein is going to do a few things where we don’t always have to focus on dieting. So, it increases satiety so much to the point where if you just focus on eating the amount of protein you need and eating it first, you would probably already be in a deficit and losing fat just from the food volume decreasing. The next thing that’s going to do, you need it for lean tissue. So now we’re going to ramp up that metabolism by putting on muscle. The third thing is the digestive energy consumption of protein is 20 to 30%. So, we’re essentially for some people getting StairMaster burning calories just by switching that up. And so, people often favor extreme, keto because you don’t eat carbs, fasting because you don’t eat from here to here, carnivore so you don’t eat vegetables, vegan, you don’t eat meat.

(31:55)

And the problem is every one of those has the key element of failure and that’s restriction. So, restriction leads to rebellion, and I know it doesn’t sound sexy on social media because it’s cool to do the 75-day hard and all these hard programs, but you don’t build sustainability with that. And at the end of the day, the turtle won the race. It wasn’t the hare. If you lose more weight than me in six weeks, that’s great, but if I look better a year later, you didn’t win that race because there’s no end game when it comes to fitness. So, you have to get something that you can sustain.

(32:29)

So, first step would be get the protein and take into a level that’s based on your lean tissue. So, if you’re 150, cool, let’s get 150 grams, 200, 200 grams. Focus on that. If you’re getting the weight loss you need, fantastic. If not, drop some of the carbs or the fat depending on which is easier for you to reduce or give up. So, it still feels like it’s not a punishment to do.

Stu

(32:53)

When you said that, it just had a thought popped into my mind. If there’s a delicate balance between macros hitting all of those macros and you are hitting your protein intake, which I think is really important, given the fact that carbohydrates are really demonized in the media at the moment, would it be more preferable to drop the fat because there’s more calories in fat and consume the carbohydrate as opposed to being more in the kind of keto camp and dropping the carbohydrates If body composition is your goal and you want to hit those macros?

Cody

(33:35)

Yeah, there’s always a balance to this though, right? So, if we start pulling that fat too low, all hormones are lipid soluble. So, males have a lot more leeway when it comes to this. Now, when you’re working with females, those hormones will go bonkers. So again, I come from the extreme land of bodybuilding. So, if you look at say a natural bodybuilder, they do a show and you look at their blood work when they’re done, they’ll have an amazing physique, shredded, look great, but their testosterone level is like 80.

Stu

(34:04)

Yeah, in the tank.

Cody

(34:05)

And six, eight, 10 months later it’s maybe up to three or 400. And so, their composition goes to hell in a hand basket because of the hormone levels at that point. And most of them, because it’s sexy and bodybuilding, right? When you can eat the high carbs and be lean, but they drop the fat so low that it probably is playing a much more significant factor to that. So, I don’t like to demonize one or the other. There’s always a balance to it. And I personally know as soon as I get that fat too low when I’m dieting, energy levels go through the floor, it doesn’t feel good, body feels achy, carbs I can ride it out, but you got to refill it, replenish it at the right times if you’re doing weight training. So that would be like your cheat meals, your carb spikes. And if you get the timing right on those, you actually get a fat loss benefit from them while expediting your progress and fat loss as a whole.

Stu

(34:53)

Yeah, that makes sense. So, if you had to then label each macro with a benefit, say protein, muscle, fat, hormones, carbohydrate would be what?

Cody

(35:06)

Muscle tissue. So, we got to have that glycogen. We got muscle, muscle is fuel.

Stu

(35:10)

Muscle is fuel, right.

Cody

(35:10)

So, that’s the spare tank. So, if those carbs get lower, and I’m sure you’ve had gym sessions where you get up there and you’re like, man, I feel good. That first set goes amazing and then you’re like five, six and it just feels like somebody came down and pinned it to your chest. You’re like, “Where did my reps go? I just got 10.” Well, think that if you’re like my folks growing up we had the old school trucks with the two tanks. Well, we went to switch that second tank and it was bone dry, right? So, you have to go to your carb tank and it’s puttering out and that’s because you don’t have any glycogen. So, at the same time, if you carb loaded that day, went to do that same workout the next week, you’d be able to rep those reps out.

(35:44)

And this is where tracking the strength and tracking the reps will give you more data because now you can see, “Man, by Tuesday, I’m just fading on all my sets.” So maybe you’re pushing the diet in too hard, whereas if you did a little bit more carbs the day before or even that pre-workout meal, you could crank the intensity up and it might even speed your fat loss up at that point because you were running in such a deficit prior to.

Stu

(36:05)

Okay, and timing for that. I’ve got lots of friends and they like to train fasted. I just don’t. I like to have the biggest breakfast possible and then I’ll get straight into the gym and I feel invincible.

Cody

(36:20)

Yeah.

Stu

(36:21)

What are your preferences on that and where do you sit on that protein window after exercise? Conventional advice would say you’ve got that 30-minute window, you’ve got to get that protein in. And I’ve read studies that said it just doesn’t matter as long as you’re hitting your protein intake over the 24-hour window. What do you think?

Cody

(36:41)

So, I’m more of that thought process. I used to be, and I still do a shake after I work out, right?

Stu

(36:46)

Yeah.

Cody

(36:47)

I still have it die hard, but it’s not something I’m worried about not putting on muscle is because I have to eat so much food throughout the day, it’s just easier for me to have a shake here than to wait an hour and try to eat down 10, 12 ounces of chicken or something like that. But I don’t like fasted workouts. So usually, if you’re doing a fasted workout, you’re also going up there in a dehydrated state too. So, it’s kind of a double whammy when it comes to it. Because if you’re dehydrated as little as 3%, it can affect performance 10 to 20. So, your training capacity is limited just by fluid. And so maybe you get up and you hydrate, but unless you’re drinking some pink Himalayan sea salt, you don’t have anything to pull that fluid in, so it’s not even highly functional at that point, right?

(37:28)

If anything is diluting your electrolytes, you don’t have anything to pull it in the muscle. So, carbs, I’m a huge fan of at least pre-training, I don’t like going up there with nothing in the tank. If you’re someone who you got to wake up at 4:00 AM, you’re at the gym at 4:30, you’re probably going to lose your lunch if you eat your meal and try to do that. So, what I recommend in these cases, eat like a rice cake or two in the car on your way to the gym. It’s usually light on the gut. It’ll give us enough carbs to at least get some of that workout in. They make powdered carbohydrates, not like a malted dextrin, but like a highly ran cyclic dextrin, something light on the gut that you can actually push in, do 20, 30 grams in a shake or something before you head to the gym.

(38:07)

So now, we’ve got some fuel in the tank to get that performance we need. But if we go up there fasted, we are the fuel. So, if you don’t have enough for chest aid and you’re going there fasted, it’s going to pull something and muscle tissues the easiest thing to oxidize at that point for glucose and it will gobble it right up

Stu

(38:25)

Oh, the irony in that, that’s just insane. If I decided that, “You know what? I’m going to work out on a Monday and a Wednesday and a Friday and I might do some light walking on the Tuesday and Thursday and the weekend’s just going to be a rest day or rest days,” would you recommend that I do three full body workouts or should I just work specific muscle groups on those different days?

Cody

(38:50)

I would do muscle groups or a hybrid of those. The problem with whole body workouts with a Monday, Wednesday, Friday comes down to that intensity level. So, if we’re looking like a 24 to 48-hour window to recover, unless you’re going up there and doing a 60 to 80% intensity, your legs aren’t going to be recovered from Monday to Wednesday. So, you either have a very light leg version on Wednesday and doing the upper on Monday and Friday, but what will usually benefit you the most would be doing a leg day Monday, upper body on Wednesday, and then you could do a full body on Friday, and now we’re hitting everything twice a week. Upper body usually has a little bit better recovery.

(39:32)

Now, if you’re a guy you probably don’t like two legs twice a week, more like the bro split, like back and shoulders, chest and arms, legs, and maybe a little bit of fluff, pump up stuff at the end and where you get the upper body in a little bit more frequent. But those would be the ways I would split it. I’m not a fan of full bodies usually past the beginner intro or maintenance stage of the game just because when you start splitting up that many body parts and crank it, it is rough. I mean, that’s a lengthy, intense workout. You feel white, everything’s tired. So, I’m not a huge fan of those [inaudible 00:40:08]. The intro phases like week two to four for a client coming in.

Stu

(40:12)

Okay. I know many people that don’t really train legs properly in terms of no squats, no deadlifts, no lunges. From your professional opinion, would not training legs to your full capacity impact muscle growth for your upper body?

Cody

(40:36)

Yes. So, you would get some downsides to it. And don’t get me wrong, I’m in that camp, legs is my least favorite muscle group. I’m afraid I’m a little top-heavy, but it doesn’t make it any less effective unfortunately. And so, you’re going to get a huge growth hormone spike. That itself is going to get improved muscle gain when it comes to it. But the other thing too, you got to figure from a metabolic standpoint, most people are fighting, putting on too much body fat. They need more metabolism. That’s half your metabolism from muscle right there.

(41:06)

So, it’s one of those things, even if it sucks the train, it’ll mean that cheeseburger don’t stick. So, we can build up that lead tissue and a couple more pieces of pizza a week is not making you gain any on that stomach. I think it’s a fair exchange when it comes to effort. So, suck it up for that one day a week, make them grow, get those glucose sponges developed and then you should be a little bit smoother sailing in the afternoon.

Stu

(41:28)

Oh, boy. Yeah, there are very few people that really do revel in leg day if done properly, that’s for sure.

Cody

(41:34)

It’s mostly the ladies to. Guys avoid it like the plague. The ladies, they’re like, “I want my glutes looking good.” And they run circles around. Guys on leg day, guys are like, “I want to do a couple sets of squats, leg curls, leg extensions, that’s good.” Arm day they’ll be up there 30 sets cranking it out, right? Everything under the sun.

Stu

(41:50)

Yeah, I’m often paled in comparison. There are a number of females in the gym that I go to and boy, they are so fastidious on all of the glute stuff that they do and the legs and the squats and deadlifts and I’m just thinking, “Boy, you’re strong and you’re consistent.” And I’m feeling ashamed.

Cody

(42:08)

Well, and a lot of it too, some of the glute motions, like, guys got to choke the ego up because it’s kind of fluffy. You don’t get up there and start doing a barbell hip thrust as a male and feel super confident, right?

Stu

(42:18)

No.

Cody

(42:18)

You’re like, “This is kind of an awkward lift.” [inaudible 00:42:21] the corner. I think there’s a lot of that. And then anytime you’re going up there, I don’t know, it’s just old school male ego. If you’re up there doing glute kickbacks, it’s a great muscle building exercise for the glute, but if your buddies walk in the gym when you’re doing that, they’re going to be like, “Really? This is what you’re doing up here?”

Stu

(42:39)

That’s right. Exactly.

Cody

(42:40)

That’s me working out, man. And so that’s usually where it’ll come.

Stu

(42:45)

I want to look good in the new gym shocks.

Cody

(42:46)

Yeah, exactly right. Well it’s like with me, I’m like, I’ll make sure I have to hit him because my wife’s like, “You don’t have a butt.” I’m like, okay, well…

Stu

(42:54)

I’ll prove you wrong.

Cody

(42:54)

I’m getting nitpick right here.

Stu

(42:59)

I love it. We’re kind of coming up on time, but there’s one question I wanted to ask you and potentially, it’s kind of a silly question, but unconventional tips to shed weight and people have often said, “You’ve got to eat more to lose more,” things like that. Are there anything that perhaps springs to your mind that people wouldn’t necessarily think of a great tactic if they want to lose weight quickly? Because typically you might think, well, I’m just going to pull back my calories and I’m just going to hit the StairMaster while I watch TV or something like that.

Cody

(43:37)

I think where most people are going to fail with this is they look for very complicated changes. Because again, everything is sensationalized these days. You got to think of fitness progress, kind of like a bow and arrow. You don’t just push the arrow forward, you’ve got to load it. And so, if I get slower results on the scale, but better results for the long term, I’m going to take that bet every single time. So, the three areas where people should focus before they start doing any crazy diet, any crazy exercise regime, make sure your basics are checked, right? You wouldn’t go out and get in a race car and just start driving it before you made sure there was tires on it. So, let’s make sure we get those. So, get your moving up, certain amount of steps.

(44:22)

So, if you’re only at 4,000, increase it a little bit, five or six. Water intake, make sure you’re checking that box, 96 to 128 ounces, three or four liters for you guys over there. Third, protein intake. So, go for a gram per pound of lean tissue or a gram per pound of body weight if that’s easier for you. If you do those three things, the scale, the mirror, your clothes will do something unless you were doing everything perfect prior to changing those, which is highly unlikely. From there, you can get more advanced, get deeper in. But I’m a bigger fan of doing the least amount of work for the most amount of output. So, if I can get more results for less in, 100% what I’m going to do, if you want to go spend six hours a week in the gym, two hours a day on the stairs and not make any progress, hey, more power to you. I appreciate the ambition. But if I could sit there, drink water, eat protein, and maybe work out once or twice a week and get better progress, I’m going to take that back anytime.

Stu

(45:18)

Yeah, I share that sentiment, absolutely. Okay, so final question. Top three tips, and you may have already actually just said that, but could make the biggest impact on our overall health. And it may be things perhaps that you do every day that sit outside of just the training principles. It might be something to do with sleep, something to do with relationships, something to do with alcohol, perhaps, I don’t know.

Cody

(45:48)

Oh yeah. Well, I’ll talk up three of these, so I’ll give three. Number one, alcohol will not help you reach your fitness goal. And I won’t get any praise for saying this, right? It’s just the way it is. But alcohol inhibits the body’s ability to burn body fat. So, the problem is if you’re at a body you want to maintain perfect, you can have it in because you’re not trying to lose body fat. But if your goal is to actively lose body fat and you’re throwing in alcohol, you’re pushing pause on the recording, right? You’re stuck. So, we want to make sure you reduce or eliminate that any bit you can. Alcohol also has a tendency to allow people to overeat. So okay, let’s reduce. If you’re going to do it right, instead of cutting out, that’s fine, just you’re kicking the time horizon out. Make sure you’re not intaking excess calories with it.

(46:32)

When people drink, it’s usually like cheesy fries, burger, right? All the bad things come in. The other thing we got to society now, it’s really rich and gut health, but they praise drinking a glass of wine or two at night, which is ironic because if you get a wound, what do you do? You clean it with alcohol to kill the bacteria, yet you drink it down and your gut bacteria is all hanging out there. So, what does alcohol do to gut flora? It doesn’t have it thrive. So, it could do an assortment of negative things from that. So, alcohol won’t be your best friend.

(47:05)

The second when it comes to it, you have to have a proper resistance training plan in play. I would not do cardio before resistance training in any way, shape or form. It just is not going to benefit you from a bone density perspective. Sarcopenia happens. So, muscle loss due to age after age of 30, one to two percent every year. So, if you’re 40 or 50, you lost 10, 15, 20% of your muscle tissue. You got to focus on getting that back so you can age more gracefully. And so, gravity’s not as demanding on you. You find everything else.

(47:38)

The third, and I don’t think people put enough focus on this, and this is the mental side of it, and this kind of goes down the hippie road a little bit, right? But it is what it is. I do it right, I don’t have my dreadlocks. It is the way it is. But with people in the mindset, if you don’t control where your mind is looking, it’s going to find negative because that’s what it’s prone to do from a survival mechanism. So, if you go into a weight loss regime, it’s going to find every reason why you shouldn’t do it. Every reason why it’s challenging, every reason why it’s difficult. So, what you have to do is you have to program in the positives.

(48:16)

So then, what it’s going to end up doing is you’ve hammered it with this and it’s going, “Man, he’s really annoying. He’s making me think of 10 positive things with this.” And all day. It’s going to gravitate towards finding that. So, equivalent of if you got up in the morning and stub your toe, the rest of your day would go to the hell in a hand basket, right?

Stu

(48:33)

Yes.

Cody

(48:33)

You’re like, “This day sucks. There’s traffic on the way to work.” Whatever it is, right? Versus if you get up and you start that day good, there’s a lot more likely likelihood that it’s going to go a lot better. So, what I find most effective for this is AM, PM one of the other or both, journaling, and it’s like writing down a list of things like you already have them and that you’re appreciative for. So, if you’re trying to lose 20 pounds, “I’m so happy and grateful to be 20 pounds lighter than I started my fitness journey.” And you’re going to be like, “This is baloney. I can’t believe I’m writing this down. I’m lying to myself.” Good. Do that. Because if you do that long enough, the brain’s not going to think of a reason why you can’t do it. It’s going to think of a reason why you should, because it wants to shut you up.

(49:18)

Like, “Dude, he’s so annoying. He writes down every morning, I’m just going to get him there so I can shut him up.” So instead of having a steering contest with the donuts at work, you’re like, “Those don’t help me reach my 20-pound goal.” It’s always on the front of the mind. And that mental shift goes a long way when it comes to it. It’s got to be pen and paper. It can’t be typed. There’s a mechanism to it. Don’t try to meet the brain. It’s a caveman brain. We got to go old school. It doesn’t know what a typewriter is. It doesn’t know what a keyboard is. You got to do some pen and paper type style with it. But if you can do that, switch that focus, it works out really good.

(49:50)

And there’s a study on this, and it’s a mindset matters and you can look it up. I’ll paraphrase the numbers on it a bit, but it’ll be pretty close what is in study. They took 50 house cleaners, maid people out of a hotel. They took half the group and they said, “Hey, what you do if it’s the National Accreditation for Exercise Standard, basically what they did is healthy. They took the other group, they didn’t tell them anything and then they watched them for three months. The group that they told them that the work that they’re doing, dusting and cleaning and all that stuff fits X-ray standard lost like six pounds versus a control group.

Stu

(50:22)

Wow.

Cody

(50:23)

The only thing they did different was tell them what they were already doing was healthy, causation or correlation. It’s still data, right?

Stu

(50:31)

Data, yeah.

Cody

(50:31)

Whether they are being healthier because they were told they were being healthy or whether they just lost more weight because of that. Whatever it is, I still see they lost more weight than the group that didn’t. So, I’m going to try to shift my brain in a matter that’s going to help me reach my goal rather than hurt me reach my goal.

Stu

(50:46)

That’s brilliant. That is brilliant. I think that that is the best answer to that particular question that I’ve ever had. There are so many little gems in there that people can really, especially the alcohol, I’ve never actually pieced those two pieces of information together. You’re cleaning a wound with alcohol because you want to destroy the bacteria and of course we drink it, it’s ethanol.

Cody

(51:10)

Yep. Same stuff. Exactly. So, your liver, literally, your body shuts down the ability to burn body fat. It goes, “I have to get this toxin out. Let me get rid of it.” And I come at this, I am sober, so I don’t drink at all. And I think a lot of people, because they may socially drink and stuff like that, they won’t hit it on all those points because they have an emotional attachment to it. And the only thing I’m emotionally attached to is the results. Are you getting what you want? If not, let’s carve out a path that’s there. Personally, I’ve seen way too much destruction from it to think it’s productive.

(51:45)

I’ve had a couple of family members die from it. We had a buddy that was recovering alcoholic live with us, yeah it was a nightmare. He was dead like two weeks after he was out on his own. It’s a rough thing on the extreme. Socially, it’s not going to do much for you. Nobody’s going to have a social drink and killed over the next day, right? So, I’m not saying that, but from results, the benefit perspective, you just got to weigh if it’s bringing you towards or away from your goal and look at it like that.

Stu

(52:10)

Fantastic. That is absolutely brilliant. Wow. This has been a fantastic conversation and we have so many gems here that I really cannot wait to share this with our followers. I know that they’re going to get so much value from it. So, what’s next for Cody Watkins? What have you got? I mean, obviously, we’re coming up to the holiday period. Have you got plans for the new year to do anything perhaps that you haven’t told us about at the moment?

Cody

(52:34)

Well, I got something that your listeners would probably like. So, I put together some of my best works on this and so this is a whole program system that you can go through. It’ll help you figure out where your macros are at, what you need to do, give you the ideas from that. Got some meal recipes in there too, to give you some ideas on what to eat and it’s packaged altogether. So, all you got to do for that is if you find me on Instagram, Cody Watkins Fitness, just DM me of the word Freedom 22 and I’ll send you the link for that over, hopefully get you some clarity so you can make it through this new year with a little bit more momentum and things like that. So, we can take a little bit of pain out of the process that is often far more painful than it needs to be.

Stu

(53:13)

Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. Well, we will pop that link in the show notes as well. So, how can we get more of Cody Watkins? You mentioned your Instagram. Is that the best place for everybody to find you?

Cody

(53:24)

Yeah, Instagram will be the best place. I have my Facebook as well. I’m much more active on my personal Facebook than the business one, but it’s Cody Watkins Fitness on Facebook for the business. Cody Watkins Fit for me. I don’t do anything but fitness, so it’s kind of my thing, right? So, it’s absolutely [inaudible 00:53:43].

Stu

(53:43)

Absolutely. It’s definitely your thing. Boy, you’ve answered all my questions I have today impeccably and so much more and taught me a lot as well, which is always the objective. I love it. Fantastic. So, Cody, very appreciative of your time. Cannot wait to share all of the information, everything that we’ve spoken about will go in the show notes and really look forward to sharing this with our audience. So, thank you so much mate. It’s been fantastic.

Cody

(54:05)

Totally. It’s been fantastic. Thank you.

Stu

(54:06)

Awesome.

The post Cody Watkins – Create the Body you Want appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Rodrigo Perez to the podcast. Rodrigo is a performance specialist whose movement, methodology, holistic longevity and wellness approach has helped countless athletes improve the way they move. In this episode, we discuss the importance of mobility if we want to live without aches and pains as we age. We talk about the movements we shouldn’t be doing if we have lower back problems, the length of time we should spend each day on mobility and so much more. Over to Rodrigo…

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• How should we move if we want to live a long and pain-free life?
• What exercises shouldn’t we be doing if we have lower back problems?
• How long should we spend on daily mobility?

Get more of Rodrigo Perez:

• https://www.instagram.com/holisticprohealth
• https://holisticph.com/holistica-academy/
• https://www.youtube.com/@holisticprohealthperformance
• https://holisticph.com/events/events-art-of-longevity-sumba-2024/

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview

Katy Bowman: Why Exercise & Movement Are Two Very Different Things
Keegan Smith: Desk bound All Day? Why a Standing Desk Might Not Be the Answer. Try This Instead…
Aaron Alexander – An Introduction To The Align Method

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

(00:23)

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious what I find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:44)

This week I’m excited to welcome Rodrigo Perez to the podcast. Rodrigo is a performance specialist whose movement, methodology and holistic longevity and wellness approach has helped countless athletes improve the way they move. In this episode, we discuss the importance of mobility if we want to live without aches and pains as we age. We talk about the movements we shouldn’t be doing if we have lower back problems, the length of time we should spend each day on mobility and so much more. Over to Rodrigo.

(01:18)

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Rodrigo Perez to the podcast. Rodrigo, how are you?

Rodrigo

(01:25)

Very good. Yourself, Stu?

Stu

(01:27)

Excellent. It’s funny because we met many, many years ago when Guy was involved in the business and I know that he was a good friend of yours. I have been seeing your messages on social media continually for so long and I thought I’ve got to catch up with you because I can see what you’re doing really aligns with a lot of the stuff that our audience is really, really interested in. So, first up, for all of our listeners then that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself please.

Rodrigo

(02:05)

My name is Rodrigo. I’ve been living in Australia for the last 22 years. Been coaching for 26 years. So I am Spanish, half Brazilian. Mom, is a purely Spanish person, and grew up in Brazil probably half of my life was there, and moved to Australia, was a coach there as well. Finished university there. Then exercise science and I am exercise physiologist. Moved to Australia and had a big goal to first learn English. The funny thing is just know learning the Aussie language. So I still chat with you because I was three years in Australia and I went to London. Over there I had a manager there, and then one of the gymnasiums I was working there as a swim coach. They turned to me and they said, “Where you learned your English?” I say, “Well, in Australia.” They say, “No, you learned Australian language mate.”

Stu

(03:14)

Right, exactly right.

Rodrigo

(03:16)

[inaudible 00:03:16] slow and clear. I say, “Okay, cool.” Yeah. So as I go to work, what I love, that’s very interest because when I moved to here I had so many opportunities to change career. I could work in mining, I could work in hospitality, I could be working any kind of different business now, but I had this in mind. So if I decided to leave it for good in Australia, I would love to continue what I studied. Then for me is I have so much background with fitness. Not to a lot in the sports, but for reasons. One of the big reasons was health. So a lot of problems I had on my health was as a young kid. Be a little obese kid and had to learn how to swim and learning to breathe and had to control my emotions for life. There’s a lot of bullying around.

(04:28)

So all these things just turned to my mind and how I could treat myself and how to improve it. I was learning with my journey in life. So, my experience. That took me to know more about the body and doing what I was doing back to Brazil here in Australia. Studying more, always looking to big courses, how I could learn the big courses, how I could go in Japan and US, Europe, learn all different kind of courses. For me, it’s very interesting the way I learn and I’m so quick to digest, understand on the bottom of the maths. Now if you have a maths, you have the solution down the bottom, I’m pretty quick on that way. Then I could see the big picture for everyone’s a long-term in part exercise, body stability, body strength, spine stability, nervous system. So, the many years work in different types of fitness.

(05:34)

I don’t like talking much about fitness, I like to talk about health. I think at the end of the day it’s exercise, eat, sleep, hydrate, it’s about health now, for sure. Okay, you need to get fit for this, you need to get a fit for that, you need to compete, you need to get fit. But end of the day, fitness can be totally different what is healthy. But if you get to a point, if you are healthy, your fitness is going to be very high. That’s why started to going deep into more what I could make it a bit more efficient what I was doing and more efficient exercise for my clients, how they can improve in their way. Now, how they move better or how they think sharp, how they could step up and things what they love to do. Many, many years I saw it’s way more behind than just lift weights.

(06:42)

So everyone, okay, I need to be healthy, we’re going to need lift weights. Yeah, okay. But it’s a lot of behind there now. It’s come along on how is the nervous system? What is the pathway of the nervous system? How’s your mind working to connect your body, upper body, lower body, your core? How’s your arms moving? How you sense signs for your fingers and your toes, your leg? Which kind of muscle can switch on? It’s all the awareness involved.

(07:16)

Many years I assess all different kind of people. I saw a lot of things happening now. A lot missing on a human being, as a modern human generation by generation is being changed. Kids don’t play more on the street anymore. Kids don’t play soccer outside anymore. Everything starts to be dangerous still. Like you coming from England, you know how things always change around there, like I’m coming from Brazil suburbs. But I’ve been here 23 years and I see all these things change for sure. To be in Australia, we are blessed, okay, we are a really, really good spot. Now we play we can, if you not in the middle of the city or the suburbs, west suburbs, you are just close to the beach, you can still run in the sun, you can go for a ride bike. You yourself, you’re in Byron Bay, how many things you have close by or all the kids can have around?

(08:23)

But as a generation going and the parents sometimes we get lazy to educate the kids to create all these pathways of the nervous system. Now they can get a bit more mobile or more efficient with the movements or be more connected with their own body. Sometimes it’s not just play sport that makes you that. It’s a lot more behind that. What’s first things first?

(08:49)

With that I realized, okay, I need to educate my clientele a bit different. Now in my concept, why should I load someone if that person doesn’t know how to move properly? Why should I load someone if they can’t even squat 90 degree or even below the 90 degree? Why I should give a heavy weight for someone doing a bent row if they don’t even know how to engage their scapula or if they don’t know how to retract the scapula. How they can keep the cervical stable, how they can keep the thoracic stable. That’s what people in the long term create a lot of dysfunction, because they don’t have this awareness or they’re not connecting to. But they don’t understand what it is. Okay, what means connect? I move, I walk, I jump. Yeah, but said movements, your body’s not supple.

Stu

(09:47)

That’s right. I recently read a book, another health book. I read these books all the time, no doubt, same as you. But it was talking about the whole health as a series of pillars. Obviously the big ones were nutrition and movement. But one in there that was kind of interesting for me, and I hadn’t heard of it being spoken about in a lot of detail previously, was stability. They were saying that stability is absolutely key and it is core for everything that you do, and especially as we age because our stability declines. As you mentioned before, it’s all very well going into the gym and just lifting weights, just doing these tried and tested movements and then maybe smashing ourselves in a high intensity class and then getting in a sauna and stuff like that. But if you don’t understand the fundamentals of what you’re actually doing and working on the framework of stability and movement and flexibility and mobility, then we’re missing the point.

(10:53)

I think that will start to catch up on you as we age. I’m now 51 and I’m realizing that I probably need to do a lot of work on my mobility, my flexibility and my stability to try and make myself more robust as I age. So my question to you is how should we be thinking about movement then today if we essentially want to live a long but pain-free life? Because so many people have got a bad back or my shoulders or my hips. Of course you go to the gym and you’ve just got machines and weights and classes and stuff like that. But that’s where I see that you think so differently and I can see that you’re working and training and living with everybody from the weekend warrior to the elite athlete in whatever given sport. So, what do you say to those people that are just going to the gym doing the same old workout every single day but perhaps not feeling their best and unsure where to even start.

Rodrigo

(11:56)

First, it’s not sustainability over there. No doubt that it’s not sustainability. If I’m doing this high intensity training every single day, it’s not lot of sustainability there. Even some bodybuilders when they get in their fifties they keep the muscle up, but to be honest they all suffer with the back pain. Cervical, thoracic, lower back. Don’t have one or two bony discs, they have four or five, six. So bodybuilding is probably suffering a lot. Olympic lift is the same, powerlifts would be the same too. But it’s majority of people when we talk about this just gym, gym, gym, gym.

(12:46)

Big thing when I talk about efficiency, we’re going to talk more. It is good you mentioned about nutrition because that’s other part I went very holistic and deep to make all these nerves or the nervous system work properly. I had to go towards to nutrition as well. Because sometimes what you eat can really upset your nerves, can really upset the pathway of nerves, so the information don’t cross over at the same way. The pain is your background of food, how bad you can eat, how much inflammation you have in the body, how much your gut can bloated all the time. But we can go more deep in after there.

(13:26)

Back to your question, definitely as you mentioned to you I’m getting 50, I need to look into stability, mobility and stretch. Yes, it is big I would say when you’re over 35 is a big one. 35, 40, 45, 50, 60. But the more people I assess, the more clients I’m getting into, I see the problem is not only the age. This problem is coming to the young age as well. Even the high elite athletes, sometimes they before to see me, they’ve been spending so much time doing heavy weights. Squats, deadlifts, bench press. Now, that’s the three big ones a lot of people believe.

(14:16)

You increase the power, increase the strength. But that’s all, doesn’t mean they make people supple, it doesn’t mean it’s going to teaching my athletes get a new skill or make their level going to the next step. Even putting parts all I’m work functionally, so the functional training. But a lot of people has this concept of a functional training doing a circuit, four or five, 10 exercises. Okay, five exercises. You do squats here, you do lunges over there, you do this slam ball and in front of you you’re doing swings and doing battle ropes. We made 30 seconds each you change or you’re doing one minute, you have two minutes rest, it’s a circuit, you change. Well, you got all the movement patterns there but you shouldn’t work the real movement what you need to. You don’t teach your body to have new skills.

(15:16)

Then when we work in mobility, mobility, people have tennis to think about is a stretch but it’s not really stretch, it’s a combination of the muscle flow together with the joints. It’s an open a bit more area into the joints. So we create more range of motion across there. But sometimes you don’t need to stretch all the time, you probably need strength. So you need to strengthen your body in different areas that you haven’t ever been. So squats to 90 degree, can you go in to down deep squats? But when you’re going down deep squats, first, can you maintain a good posture? What you mean, can I keep my spine up and right from the cervical way down to the coccyx? When you’re down there, can you hold there for one minute? Are you strong? Can you lift from there? So these little things is like we have small muscles around these areas. They don’t be working properly, now they need to be worked, they need to get strong in that area.

(16:26)

Part of mobility not sometimes just sit and just move the joints. You need to flow. Why? Because in each work in a myofascia, so all the myofascia release across, all these links we have in the body, so it’s links and myofascia we have across the body. So they have to create more movement, they have to get a bit more elastic around there. Then we start to create more mobility, because otherwise, as you say, after you’re 50, 55, you start getting slow. Your body don’t move that supple anymore because you just lean your work which is doing squats. I just like deadlifts. But your body don’t be moving different ways. So for people going gym every day, definitely is no sustainability there.

(17:14)

They should look into work in different parts. Not only heavy weights, not only strength, but getting parts of stability, working stability it starts to strengthen your body. You work more the nervous system [inaudible 00:17:27] and you go to the mobility as well. Big thing, what my view is, inside of the media today we all have to be careful. We have these massive gymnastics, beautiful mobility, they’re going deep or they’re bringing the leg up at the head. But you’re probably not able to do that. A lot of the people not able to do that. People like them, they probably took them 10, 20 years to do it. They’re being trained since they’re five, six years old. So they educate their body to be there but they have to understand their clients or who watch them are not able to.

Stu

(18:10)

So would the guys then, well everybody then, that is attending a gym, a normal regular gym and lifting the weights, maybe doing the circuit, should they be thinking about incorporating things like yoga and Pilates into their week? Or are there other ways to work on your stability and mobility outside of those two? They’re the most common ones/ everybody at the gym, they’ve probably got classes to do things but still unknown I think from their perspective.

Rodrigo

(18:37)

All right, so if we have to use that to make a schedule for the week, definitely. I would say don’t spend too much time in the weights. Probably two, three days a week on the weights. The other days definitely going to Pilates or going to yoga. Also, stability work, you can do a lot in the gym. Like my programs, you can do a lot of single leg deadlifts, single leg pulls, single leg push. There’s all different ways whether we can do it at the gym and be part of the weight training, but a lot increased stability and getting strong as well. First because when we work stability, we need to work a lot of the mind, we have to think to do it. As we think we have to do it and we switch my nervous system, engage more muscles so we can burn away more energy doing that way than just lift heavy. Like down on the bench, let’s do it. But you don’t switch your glutes, you don’t switch your core. But do work in stability, you can do it.

(19:42)

But if Monday through Friday, let’s say I would have some week Tuesday, Thursday do we heavy weights, going big patterns there. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I would do some yoga in the morning, Pilates in the afternoon for the other days. Mix up with the cardio routines. That’s the other thing, you shouldn’t be doing long distances, long cardio every single day. So, I call them micro cardio. So, high intensity training, how people do it while they can get off. I would say doing 10 to 15 minutes high intensity but sprints. You can do a minimum two to up to four times a week after your workout, you can do it straight away. One day a week you go for the big cardio. So, that’s when talk about zone two.

Stu

(20:36)

How long do you think that we should spend say each day on mobility? If we decided that maybe Monday and Thursday are going to be our weight training days and we’re going to go for maybe a Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday to work on that mobility and flexibility component, it would be 30 minutes? Or do we need a lot longer to really push the levers in those areas?

Rodrigo

(21:01)

I would say if you have time, when the programs are built, I’m going to launch next year, they should do be doing every day. If you have time. Now maybe some days you’re okay I’m just going to surf or I’m just going for a run today, I should spend at least 20 to 30 minutes and a good routine of mobility. So if you spend this 20 to 30 minutes, you can go up to 45 minutes if you are a big lover of mobility. At least four days a week, I would say, minimum.

Stu

(21:35)

Do we need any specialist equipment for that or could we do that literally in front of the TV watching Netflix?

Rodrigo

(21:40)

Definitely.

Stu

(21:42)

Yeah. Great.

Rodrigo

(21:42)

I love to do mine on my veranda every morning, as I call the morning routine. So we move and get the morning glory out there. So move all the parts of the body as a mobility. So loosening up the neck, thoracic, hips, spine, move the spine, scapulas, ankles, and all toes. I would say between 20 and 30 minutes if you can do every day as soon as you get up, that helps you. One thing when we talk about cortisol levels, can really up upset you in the morning, can wake up very tight. That’s one reason I like doing the mobility in the morning because if you get up in the morning you can stressed for the day before your body be dehydrated, you be so stressful, your cortisol is too high, you can’t sleep. When you get up, cortisol hits pretty high straight away and that’s why you can feel pretty stiff. You should spend a little bit of time into mobility every day. Also, mobility, it’s like any kind of sport I see mobility is sport if you want to get it better, improve and loosen, you need to practice every day.

Stu

(23:00)

Yeah. No, that’s good advice. So thinking about those people that are really focused still on the traditional weight training components. So perhaps they’ve been told that they’ve got to go in and they’ve got to use all of the big muscles, the compound muscles. So they may be doing deadlift, they might be doing squats, but they have lower back problems. So little twinges here and there, maybe they’ve got tight hamstrings so they can’t really get down properly. Are there any exercises that we flatly just shouldn’t be doing, we shouldn’t touch if we do have any sort of lower back issue at all?

Rodrigo

(23:43)

Yeah, definitely. When you talk about these problems, two movements you shouldn’t be doing, depends on how bad it is. If you have acute pain, first, don’t bend forward. Second, don’t twist the body. So if you have to bend, you should squat, and if you have to twist you should turn no. So turn your body whole body, no just twist. No, because you have the sacral and we have the S1, L5 on the top. If you twist on the top, the body don’t have been made that you twist on the top of the L5, S1. That’s when we put a lot of pressure there and really irritate the disc over there. That’s probably the most common disc problem people have when they have lower back pain. So, definitely avoid deadlifts in the beginning. Definitely avoid I would say squats, you can do it, but depend on which range.

(24:44)

It’s depending on how bad it is, but I’m big believer you can do squats on the wall with a Swiss ball giving supports for there. If you’re able to do a single leg deadlift as well with using Swiss ball as a support, you can teach the body the little hinge without loading. But heavy deadlifts you should avoid, definitely, on the straight bar should give it a break and wait for the body to get fully healed before coming back.

(25:21)

But you still need to move your body to a hip hinge. It’s a movement pattern, we need to have the hinge there and it’s one part of the lower back pain. People can get very tight around that it cannot hinge as much anymore. Or even putting your back extension is really hard because all the psoas muscles may be getting inflamed there, they can tighten up there. The core doesn’t be working properly. As you say, tight hamstring, gluteus switch off. So we need to recruit all these muscles back. So it’s not exercise we can build, it’s to have the feeling.

Stu

(26:05)

Yeah, it’s interesting because I know that a lot of those movements people will say just… One second.

Rodrigo

(26:17)

Hi there, can pick it up? I’m just in a meeting now. Thank you. I’m back. My apologies.

Stu

(26:30)

All good. No, that’s excellent. So I was just thinking that especially with a lot of these movements that we are told are very important, these big compound movements that people will often do in the gym regardless of whether they’re lifting kettlebells, do they use them or dumbbells or barbells, they’re always told to engage their core or engage their glutes. Oftentimes it’s very hard to actually know what it feels like. Engage your glutes, and I’ll say, “Well how do I engage my glutes? I’ve got no idea. Do I squeeze my bum? What am I supposed to do?” What tips could you provide to ensure that at least if we’re going in and doing these movements, we’re going to be as safe as we can and we are engaging the right muscles? Because it’s such a mystery to me to try and engage a set of muscles that I really don’t know anything about and I don’t know how to engage them. I don’t know if I’m engaging them. I don’t know, perhaps I’m setting myself up for potential injury by just not doing the right thing.

Rodrigo

(27:43)

Definitely it’s set up with the movements, a specific exercise you can do to teach your body to engage these muscles. Sometimes engage your muscles doesn’t mean squeeze the glutes. Okay, your muscles have to switch on when you apply movement and you often say, I’m a runner, I’m going to the gym to just strengthen my muscle but switch on my muscles, teach my body to switch on, because when I’m going to run and I don’t have to think, they will switch on and support me to my sport. So, that’s a big thing. That’s what I’m talking about before, I’m never going to load someone if the person doesn’t know how to move properly. Means if the nervous system doesn’t know how to talk with your muscles, if you don’t have this awareness in the muscles. So, it’s pretty hard to get in the positions to do it.

(28:41)

We talk about the core, we have two different types of core. We have embrace the core that’s more out. That’s why they showing these days have a lot of sports to do movements. But core, when you’re doing the body building and it’s a lot of isometric training. It can be two different ones because sometimes creates this stress on the core or really switch on the core very hard, very hard to lift as well. But you need to know how this core can specifically switch on, brace to make that happen. So that’s a big opinion and definitely we need to go towards neuromuscular training. So when we talk about neuromuscular training, that’s when probably mobility is like neuromuscular training, how body have to move in set areas to switch on more and stay more. That’s when we go into the component called motor control.

(29:42)

Everyone loves to to do faster. No one likes to do a little bit slow and stand about the movement or work, be more centric face to educate the body. The big thing is when we start with light weights, and depends on how many reps you’re doing. If you’re going doing heavy, say 80%, if doing kettlebells, if you don’t doing too many reps, if you’re doing one or two reps or maybe doing 10 sets, if you want to work harder, but at least you are teaching your body mastering the movement, you educate the muscles and switch on a bit more.

Stu

(30:29)

Now I know that it’s great to watch videos online. Goal state would be to book a class or a session or a consultation block with somebody like yourself that can literally guide you through all of those movements so you can get an understanding. It’s so hard to try and read about these things and then put it into practice. Now you’ve got a number of different programs, the Holistica Academy I’m particularly interested in understanding more about. Then I see workshops and retreats. So you’re doing a whole heap of stuff. If I really wanted to work on my movement, stability, mobility, flexibility, all of those things, would the Holistica Academy be a pathway to be able to actually understand all these things from an online perspective?

Rodrigo

(31:17)

Yes. Holistica Academy would be the best. So over there we have all the programs we put over there, people can assess everything. We have a program that’s called the Reset program. That’s when we talk about the net neuromuscular work. How to embrace the core, how each movement should do it. That’s what you should do in the morning together with your mobility work now. So we have a program that’s called Morning Routine, what you should do in the morning. So we have a routine with me between seven minutes up to 25 minutes or 30 minutes, how we going through together sequence of mobility. So this two programs, if you engage in one video of each in the morning, use it there, do it for 30 days and let me know how you’re going. I bet you’re going to feel way better towards to do your weight training. If you’re going surfing, if you’re going running or jiu-jitsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, swimming, you’re going to feel your body way more engaged there.

(32:26)

I build some parts with body weight strength as well so people can get a bit more smart what to do for legs or upper body, bands and kettlebells. We have a breathing pathway, so what people can learn how to breathe, how they can activate more of the diaphragm. That’s a big problem for everyone. A lot of people don’t know how they switch on the diaphragm, how they can create more stability, use the diaphragm. Diaphragm is a big one because as you talk about deadlifts, running, squats, we talk about the pelvic floor. How I can create more stability in my pelvic floor so I don’t create damage, and diaphragm is one of the big ones. So yeah, I suggest go into my Holistica Academy now you have a lot of stuff there. Then every month we launch a new thing there.

Stu

(33:19)

Okay, fantastic. For our listeners that wanted to dive into that today, where would be the best URL to take them?

Rodrigo

(33:28)

All right, so if anyone would like to know a little bit more, a lot of tips every single day, definitely go to my Instagram. It’s called Holistic Pro Health on Instagram. Holistic Pro Health. You guys can jump on my website. It’s called HolisticPH.com. Anyone, if you’d like to send me a message, you can send me to an Instagram. Can take you one or two days to answer, but at the moment I’m still answering all the message as I can. Otherwise, we have some free training and a YouTube channel, it’s called Holistic Pro Health, you should also can jump in there. The retreats is pretty nice. So the retreat usually is a 10 days full experience between mobility, movement, stability, surfing, hiking, meditation with Tom Carroll. That’s a very good experience. Next one will be on the 27th of April to the 6th of May 2024 in Sumba. Stu, you’re more than welcome to come. Man, you should come, beautiful there. Guys, I have a big surprise for next year, so I’m just working on this big project.

Stu

(34:47)

Fantastic.

Rodrigo

(34:48)

Yeah, so I have the new project coming.

Stu

(34:51)

Well, I’ll put all of the links to everything that you’ve said in the show notes, but I’m keen to dive into, you mentioned nutrition right at the start of the conversation and how you thought that was super important. Just in terms of one of the pillars that can really move the dial to decrease inflammation, to give you more energy, to allow you to sleep better. When all of those things are in place, then life generally is going in the right direction.

(35:19)

So what are your thoughts given the fact that again, it’s so confusing, everyone is pushing low-carb and keto. Then we’ve got everything from vegan all the way through to carnivore and everything in between. Intermittent fasting. A lot of these particular diets that could be trending or fad diets are going in and out of popularity. Keto was huge a couple of years ago and then people were saying maybe it’s not so good long-term, intermittent keto perhaps, maybe we need to reintroduce carbohydrates. Some people are saying that carbohydrates are not a good idea. Where do you sit in this big world of confusion in nutrition? Because I know that you’re putting it into practice, so I’m keen to hear what the experts think.

Rodrigo

(36:13)

That’s pretty cool you say there’s a confusion there. I think it is a confusion, it’s marketing. It’s ego, it’s immediate, I’m the best. So at the end of the day it’s too many things and we have just simplify. Also, what is the sustainability behind it? The more you talk about keto, carnivore, vegan, vegetarian, what’s the sustainability behind all that? But what you are missing what are you not between carbs, no carbs. Yeah, we did carbs. I think it depends on which carbs we have. A lot of places in the world, I think the big problem is coming a lot of pasta, pizza, breads, white rice. I think that’s a big problem in that area and a lot of sugar as well. So, all these turn into sugar. I think that’s a big problem for a lot of people. When you talk about dairy as well, could be a big problem because all the quality milk we get and what people get from the shop is sometimes I know these guys, they talk in the media as one is vegan and other plant-based and carnivore, get raw milk.

(37:42)

But sometimes you have to see how is the reality of everyone around. If you want to be a good educator, you need to see what’s the good sustainability for everyone. How you [inaudible 00:37:54] your supplements to help people and healthy and that’s why need to understand what I need to. What is my stage, what I should cut off, what upsets my body. Today I know what upsets my body. I know what I want eat too. My every year I try, when I get between probably April to August, it’s the months I start to get close to the winter, I try a little bit piece everything. I persist every year with then to see what’s going on and I know what I have to cut off. I know what I cannot eat all the time or maybe just once a month, things what can upset my gut or make me put a lot of fat around my waist or really can upset my cholesterol, things like that.

(38:43)

So when we talk about the exercise healing process, diet is so important. It’s way more important than a proper treatment. A treatment definitely helps relieve, improve. But treatment at the end of the day, it’s like a band-aid. You just put a band-aid on the top, doesn’t mean that’s a full heal. Your body can really create these bad habits just leaving from treatment, I have pain, I do this, my treatment. Feeling better, next week feeling pain again, doing treatment. So persist with something, it’s not sustainability, it’s not full healing. [inaudible 00:39:34] correct. So when we talk about the pillars of someone in rehabilitation or build back, nutrition is a big one. Nutrition, lifestyle, sleeping pattern, hydration, food. Yeah, a lot of food creates the inflammation in the gut, can stop all the pathway of the nerves, all the information can’t cross your body, or let the area can heal properly.

Stu

(40:05)

So what would you say then to people that are concerned about carbohydrates? Because I know that this is the big one in sports and performance. Carbohydrate is thought to be the most important source of fuel for athletic performance. Irrespective of whether you are a top tier athlete or a weekend warrior, somebody like myself that just likes to go to the gym two or three times a week. We are bombarded and told that low-carb, low-carb, low-carb, no carb. You mentioned that it’s important to consume carbohydrates. So what do you personally do?

Rodrigo

(40:44)

Okay, first my main carbohydrate comes from fruit and veggies. Veggies, sweet potato. Let’s say I don’t eat a lot of salads, sometimes. I’m the kind of person, I don’t like to be just one thing I to be able, I’m big believer more Mediterranean diets and paleo diets. So these two diets, I think they have a lot of sustainability there. But a lot of my grains, sometimes my veggies, I do have meat. So why? If you ask me, I’m O positive, that’s my blood type. It needs a lot of meat. I try don’t eat a lot of meat, I try to bring some white meat as well. I do prefer have white meat at nighttime. I can sleep away better. I prefer have fish, I prefer have eggs or sometimes even tofu. Saying all that, it’s not something I have all the time, like tofu, tempeh, I don’t have all the time. Maybe once a month, maybe twice a month. But often I have in between chicken, fish. That’s what I try to have at night times.

(42:05)

All the fatty meats I try to have during the day, 2:00, probably 3:00 in the afternoon, maybe let’s say probably. But I try getting a lot of quinoa. Sometimes, I would say maybe three times a month I probably have some rice, between white rice and brown rice or black rice. White rice, just if you haven’t any Japanese restaurants, like my partner’s a Japanese Brazilian, we educate our daughter with a lot of Japanese foodstuff. She loves sashimi. She really can be very carnivore. Sashimi is a meat, that’s her, and fruit. So I do myself on that area. I know for me, I cannot eat a lot of dairy. The only dairy I can have is a goat milk or goat cheese because the casein, it is two different types of casein. Casein one, casein type two. Casein type one, it’s a lot of very inflammatory. Type two, it’s not much inflammatory. It’s a bit more mellow. I love goat cheese, pretty yummy. I try to get it a little bit more fat so I eat probably one avocado day I would say.

(43:31)

So my diet is being pretty much balanced between, I would say around 60% between fats and protein and 40% carbs. But my carbs just way more between a lot of foods. I love red papaya, I probably eat one a day. I like sweet potatoes, I like to make mashed potatoes with sweet potato. So I thought to blend my plate like this. Sometimes, probably a couple of times in a month I had a piece of gluten-free bread, very high quality bread. I can have one or two pieces off of that, but it’s not often. People sometimes think I’m carnivore, but I’m not. That’s what I’m saying. I’m way towards more a paleo and Mediterranean diet. I have some olives sometimes because they high in fats. Probably are doing a very small bowl salad when I eat salad. I like to put some olives there because I want more fats, I want to have more protein and olives can give you that for me. But yeah, that’s how I work a little bit my own nutrition.

Stu

(44:53)

Well that’s good to hear. So we’re coming up on time, but I’m keen just to dive in again to your personal habits a little bit more just on the final question. It’s about your personal non-negotiable habits that you do each and every day that allow you to absolutely win the day, to crush the day. It doesn’t have to be movement related, it could be sunlight or gratitude, journaling, sauna, ice, sleep routines, whatever it is. What are those things that you just do on automatic pilot every day, just because you know that they make you feel fantastic?

Rodrigo

(45:34)

Smile.

Stu

(45:35)

Yeah, no one’s said that. No one has ever said that. No one has ever said that.

Rodrigo

(45:43)

It’s a big thing, get up and smile. I think it’s a big clock there. I think your day starts there.

(45:48)

So your alarm ring, even if you [inaudible 00:45:50] it, let’s go surf or let’s go to do the weights or let’s jump on the ice bar. No, it’s just smile, turn around, stand up from bed, glass of water, toilet, movement, read, meditation, I’m done. But the first thing I cannot miss, it definitely is my big smile. I think will just make your day. If you get up, straightaway in your mind, I have to do this. Have that meeting, because people have [inaudible 00:46:26] there. How many times you got up in the morning and say, “I cannot forget about this guy. I cannot forget about this meeting.”?

Stu

(46:34)

That’s right. Every day, that’s it. Well we get up, we switch on our phones. Then before you know it, the phone’s in charge.

Rodrigo

(46:39)

Yes it is. So, for me it is just turn in my bed, whatever happened, I just put a smile on my face. Now that’s just a little habit, simple, because we have to train the mind and this mind helps a lot. You have to train the nervous system as well. As soon as you’re doing that, you keep a big churning and beautiful longevity energy around you as soon as you get up. Whatever happen after this smile, the smile will come back because the gratitude is there. So it gives you this smile, already is a gratitude for your day for what you have.

Stu

(47:19)

That’s brilliant. No, it’s good. Great to hear. No one has ever said that and it makes so much sense. It is.

Rodrigo

(47:25)

It is. Remember I said to you, when I study and look into what’s behind efficiency for all day, efficiency for performance in the athletes or be efficient to make a coffee. How many people get out bed? So cranky soon as they put in the coffee outside, oh it smells, now I’m happy because I have my coffee. It’s not like that. It’s just addiction though. Sometimes you need to be yourself without this addiction.

Stu

(48:05)

It is an addiction.

Rodrigo

(48:09)

But my coffee, I have it after I’m doing everything, I don’t touch the jug, I don’t touch the machine, I don’t touch nothing. Get up, big smile, I’m still in bed on my pillow. Look in the side. Every now and then, my little one jump in the bed, probably 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 she jump in middle. Sometimes I get up and look at the side, her fingers straight away in my nose or my mouth, I look and just laughing. I say, “Little one.”

Stu

(48:37)

That’s right.

Rodrigo

(48:40)

I turn around. Just because sometimes you put it to yourself. Things like that can really upset you, if you get up and go, “I’ve got this problem here, this shit there, when am I going to do it?” Your day start from that. If you have this in your mind, your day, you’ll be hard for yourself to dealing if you’re stressed.

Stu

(49:02)

Definitely.

Rodrigo

(49:04)

That’s a big point. Doesn’t matter if you’re meditate or not. You know what I mean? For sure meditation helps you to solve dealing with problems way better. But it’s all about how you get up in the morning, how you put yourself out there.

Stu

(49:20)

That’s brilliant. Very good advice. Very good advice indeed. No, that’s fantastic. Well, Rodrigo, we’re there. We’ve finished.

Rodrigo

(49:32)

There’s one point for you. Don’t forget it guys, a big surprise. So next year we launch my first book.

Stu

(49:42)

My word.

Rodrigo

(49:44)

They’re going to say, what’s the title? It’s a big surprise. Everything, what we spoke today is going to have that plus everything, even people going to the gym every day or how’s it doing, how you schedule everything. Pretty excited.

Stu

(50:03)

Well, promise me then that when the book is ready and the book is launched, that you’ll come back on the podcast and we can talk about it because I’m very, very keen to dig into that. I’ve spoken to a lot of people that have launched books and they’ve said it is a labor of love. It’s something that has commanded so much time and they’ve poured all their energy and passion into it. I’d love to talk more about that for sure.

Rodrigo

(50:26)

I tell you what, even for me, I learned Portuguese but now everything in English, I tell you, it was an adventure. It was a massive adventure, a massive journey.

Stu

(50:38)

Oh my word. That’s fantastic. I’m so excited for you. I can’t wait.

Rodrigo

(50:42)

One thing that people say, “Oh you here now? I know it’s a lot.” I say, “Yes.” But you know what? They built something, a little bit extra love in their heart and maybe I’m really looking for the next [inaudible 00:50:55] for that first one.

Stu

(50:57)

Around what date will we be looking at seeing that on the shelves and in the stores?

Rodrigo

(51:02)

We are looking to end of March we start to press sales. So say 1st of April and May be able to start to buy.

Stu

(51:15)

Fantastic. Great. Well I’m going to lock you in the diary then for that time. I want to talk more about that. Very excited. Fantastic. Rodrigo, it has been a pleasure to dig into some of your knowledge and wisdom today. So, thank you so much. All of the links that we’ve spoken about, we’ll put in the show notes and then our listeners will be able to follow you and dial into your message and connect with you on those platforms. But certainly for me, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Rodrigo

(51:43)
Thanks Stu, was pretty cool.

Stu

(51:45)

Fantastic.

Rodrigo

(51:45)

Thanks for talking with me.

Stu

(51:46)

Thank you mate. Bye-Bye.

Rodrigo

(51:46)

See you.

The post Rodrigo Perez – Discover the Importance of Mobility appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Bronwyn Schweigerdt to the podcast. Bronwyn is a psychotherapist with a master’s degree in counseling and nutrition. She’s commonly referred to as an evocative psychotherapist who helps people reconnect to their anger and heal their relationship with themselves. In this episode, we discuss the traits that may point to an underlying anger issue, the telltale signs that we aren’t processing emotions in a healthy way, and strategies to resolve internal issues. Over to Bronwyn.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• What is an evocative psychotherapist?
• How does conventional anger management differ from your approach?
• How might we know that we aren’t processing our emotions in a healthy way

Get more of Bronwyn Schweigerdt:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronwyn-schweigerdt-3124857/
• https://angryattherightthings.podbean.com/

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview

Adam Lane Smith – Understanding & Resolving Attachment Issues
Dr Sarah Russo – A Holistic Approach To Anxiety
Rafaele Joudry – Discover The Benefits of Sound Therapy

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:44)

This week I’m excited to welcome Bronwyn Schweigerdt to the podcast. Bronwyn is a psychotherapist with a master’s degree in counseling and nutrition. She’s commonly referred to as an evocative psychotherapist who helps people reconnect to their anger and heal their relationship with themselves. In this episode, we discuss the traits that may point to an underlying anger issue, the telltale signs that we aren’t processing emotions in a healthy way, and strategies to resolve internal issues. Over to Bronwyn.

(01:18)

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Bronwyn Schweigerdt to the podcast. Bronwyn, how are you?

Bronwyn

(01:26)

I’m good. Thank you for saying my first name very well. It’s rare.

Stu

(01:32)

Oh, well, Bronwyn is a very popular name in Australia.

Bronwyn

(01:36)

I know. You have a nickname. You guys call me Bronny.

Stu

(01:39)

Bronny.

Bronwyn

(01:40)

I love it.

Stu

(01:40)

Exactly right. I think I know probably four people called Bronwyn.

Bronwyn

(01:45)

Yeah, it’s crazy.

Stu

(01:47)

I was more concerned with your surname, so I don’t think that I was too far off the track. I’ve listened to a few podcasts.

Bronwyn

(01:55)

No, I didn’t notice anything.

Stu

(01:59)

Well, look, thank you so much again for your time, but first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself please.

Bronwyn

(02:09)

Yeah, so I am a licensed marriage and family therapist in California. I came about becoming a therapist, I have an interesting journey that is comical, I guess. So I came to become a therapist later in life because I myself really, really, really needed a good therapist because I fell into a pit of depression where I was barely functioning and I was getting physically ill. So I sought out a therapist and as dysfunctional as I was and as hard as my life was, I thought to myself, I know even right now I could do a better job than she’s doing to me. And then I found other therapists and I felt that way with all of them. So I thought I’m going to go back to school and get a second master’s degree and become a therapist, and that was part of my healing journey, actually.

Stu

(03:15)

Fantastic. Well, that’s great. I’ve heard the term evocative psychotherapy used on your socials and your website as well. I don’t know what that is, so I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about how that came to be.

Bronwyn

(03:33)

Yeah, so the word evocative doesn’t get used a lot. We use provocative. Usually provocative is more making someone angry or sexual. Those are usually how we use that. But evocative, vocare in the Latin means to speak. And so to evoke someone is to help them bring those emotions that are hidden down under the surface and give them a voice.

Stu

(04:08)

Okay. And anger management. Again, another phrase that I’ve seen emblazoned across your website. I mean, why an interest in anger management per se over perhaps some of the other issues that might be prevalent?

Bronwyn

(04:27)

Oh, I have no interest in anger management. I actually have an aversion to that phrase, anger management. I hate the idea of managing anger. I’m all about healing our relationship with anger. Anger management is, “Don’t be angry. Let’s just take some deep breaths and ignore it and ride it out.” And that’s actually why I had such a horrible time with all those therapists. And over my lifetime, I’ve had probably about a dozen therapists and I didn’t find any of them to be helpful because they teach you anger management and that’s not helpful because I view anger and I think most of us do as a light on the dashboard of our car saying, “Hey, check the engine. Something’s really wrong.” And if all we do when we look at the light on the dashboard is take some breaths and wait for the light to go off, that doesn’t really resolve what our anger is trying to communicate.

(05:27)

And so I don’t like the word management because that’s usually what we do, but I find a lot of people are definitely afraid of their anger because they see it as provocative. Like now their anger’s going to explode like a volcano, and they might be violent. They might be violent with their words, they might be violent with their actions. We’ve all witnessed that. We all have a fear of that, so we tend to suppress it. And that suppressed anger, I believe is what caused my depression from hell. And pretty much everyone I know, I think depression across the board is suppressed anger. I think anxiety across the board is suppressed anger, panic attacks, mania. I have one client who had psychosis for years. Suppressed anger, addiction, compulsion, all these things that we get so caught up in. And what most therapists tend to do is manage these symptoms. Those are all symptoms of a root problem, which is usually suppressed anger.

Stu

(06:38)

I’ve noticed we’ve just come out and perhaps still slightly in this crazy three-year period where our lives have been turned upside down in as much as a lot of the freedoms that we had were taken away. A lot of the relationships that we saw as normal were then no longer existed for a set period of time. And I felt that that changed a lot of people in the way that they felt and communicated and myself included. Have you found that to be the case at the moment that you are needing to guide people perhaps to a brighter place in light of what’s just happened or what are your thoughts on that?

Bronwyn

(07:21)

I think actually the worst thing about COVID and all the sheltering at home was that a lot of people don’t get along with the people they live with. And kids going to school is actually a vacation to get away from their parents. A lot of husbands and wives, a lot of roommates, whatever, or siblings. I think it caused all kinds of anger that was simmering under the hood to come closer to the surface and people weren’t able to resolve the problem because you’re stuck in your house with these people who are driving you crazy or betraying you on some level.

Stu

(08:09)

How might we know intuitively that perhaps we’ve got an issue that we need to resolve professionally as opposed to just feeling I’m a bit anxious, I’m a bit depressed, I’m feeling a bit more uptight than usual. What might the signs be to tell us that we need to step further?

Bronwyn

(08:29)

Well, I’m not a big proponent of therapy even though I am a therapist because my own experiences with licensed therapists, and most of my clients come to me and they’ll tell me these stories and I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s everywhere.” So the reason I actually started my podcast, which is called Angry At The Right Things, is to get the principles out to the public so they can bypass therapy if they want to. They have that option and just get the greater principles out there. But yeah, I think attuning to ourselves, attuning to our anger, seeing anger not as problematic necessarily because it doesn’t have to be, not pathologizing it, but really seeing it as a barometer of something being wrong and seeing it as a problem to solve instead of ignore and take breaths until it goes away, I think is the foundation.

Stu

(09:37)

So the fundamental differences then between conventional management and your approach, how do you look on those differences?

Bronwyn

(09:49)

Well, let’s say you’re having panic attacks, which is very common, and I view that again as suppressed anger, you’re being triggered by something usually that you experienced in childhood, and so it’s a trigger. So you might experience something in the present where you’re having a disproportionate reaction to because of your history with something similar, like feeling rejected, feeling abandoned, feeling alone, those kind of things. But anyway, so I view it as that, and I don’t ask my clients, and I wouldn’t ask anyone, “Well, tell me about your last panic attack. Let’s talk about what’d you do, where’d you go?” That’s managing symptoms. So I don’t do that, and that’s what most clinicians do. A lot of therapists is like, “Well, where were you? Okay, did you take some deep breaths?” They just manage that. And those symptoms, even if you do improve them, but if you’re not dealing with the root, if you’re not improving the root cause, they will find another way to express themselves.

Stu

(11:01)

Okay. So enable to find out that root cause, which I think, I mean it mirrors perhaps what’s happening oftentimes in conventional medicine as well today. It’s very much symptomatic as opposed to getting to the root cause and trying to figure this out once and for all. Is that a series of conversations? Do you have exercises or strategies and frameworks that you like to apply gently perhaps in order to try and uncover what that issue is?

Bronwyn

(11:30)

Well, I mean at the expense of sounding like a broken record, it’s usually suppressed anger. But let’s say I was having a panic attack, I would start with, “Okay, I’m okay. My body is speaking to me right now.” And that’s not a bad thing, and I’m going to start to listen and not try to shush my body. I’m going to be a listener instead of a manager. I’m going to start to attune to myself. My body is telling me that it’s being reminded of something that’s really infuriating at some level that might be evoking feelings of shame or loneliness or betrayal. And I can sit with that and I can take it in and listen, and then I can ask more questions and really get to know what my body’s trying to tell me. So it is like conventional medicine where instead of trying to change ourselves outwardly, it’s like going into what really is the problem and treating our body as something beloved and precious and part of us and not seeing it as a problem.

Stu

(12:54)

Yeah. Well, that totally makes sense. I mean, oftentimes perhaps conventional medicine might say, “Look, take a Valium and here’s a whole bunch of them, and if you feel that way, just pop one of those and you’ll be fine,” without actually resolving that. From a time-based perspective, and I know this is going to be hard to answer, but how long does it typically take to uncover an issue and then perhaps work through the steps to try and overcome that?

Bronwyn

(13:21)

It depends how ready you are to face the issue, and that depends on your level of shame. And a good therapist will break through that shame and say, “You know what? You’re human, and you know what? Those feelings are legitimate. They’re there for a good reason. You have every right to feel angry, and that doesn’t make you bad or shameful. That’s a natural reaction you’re going to have to something that was objectively wrong.”

Stu

(13:50)

And I touched on this previously, but how do we know that we have a problem when we might just be hotheaded perhaps or type A personality. They’ve just got to cut through life and they don’t have time. They’ve got to get things done because I’m a productive human being and perhaps I’m short and sharp and more abrupt than I should be, versus somebody who has psychological issues that causes them to lose sleep and makes them become anxious could lead into panic attacks and depression and things like that. Where’s that fine line drawn?

Bronwyn

(14:39)

I don’t know that I think that we’re really that different, so I don’t know. I know your thing is nutrition and all that, and my first master’s degree was in nutrition, and people would say these annoying things. I’m sure you’ve heard them like, “Oh, well, every body’s different. We all ascribe to different diets because our bodies are so different.” And I’d always say, “Well, no, they’re not. They’re actually exactly like.”

Stu

(15:06)

I agree.

Bronwyn

(15:08)

And I think humans, we have different personalities, but the things we need are all the same. We need empathy. We need empathic relationships where we feel connected and where we can be authentic with others without feeling judged or shamed, and we all need that.

Stu

(15:29)

Yeah. No, well, that does make sense. I mean, we talk about pillars of health at 180 Nutrition, so it is nutrition, movement, mindset, and sleep. And in mindset is relationships and community and self-work, I guess. With your knowledge of nutrition, do you talk about nutrition to your clients as well? Because I’d imagine that if I’m raised on junk food and soda and caffeine and everything under the sun, that’s going to affect my mindset hugely as well.

Bronwyn

(16:14)

So I have learned to wait until the client’s ready for the nutrition component. And the reason for that is as much as I would like to love to start there is I now view it as self-nurture. And if we hate ourselves and we have a really horrible relationship to ourselves, we cannot sustainably self-nurture because self-nurture is a way of loving ourselves and attuning to ourselves. And so I find that as my clients get better internally and healing their relationship with themselves, they naturally will be like, “Oh, I started eating better. I start gardening. I start working out, and I don’t need to do any of that.” They just inherently want to.

Stu

(17:11)

Okay, how about technology? Now, I was a child of the seventies and the eighties, so I was lucky enough to experience this time where we had a lot more freedom and we got to intuitively become more independent because of that freedom that was given to us. Nowadays, I think it’s very, very hard growing up. I’ve got three young girls who are born into the digital age, and their whole life is framed around social media and devices and all of the messages that are pushed through to those devices that are, for want of a better phrase, monetized to make someone money somewhere down the line.

(17:56)

So I don’t think that they’re healthy in any way, shape, or form, but I would imagine that if you are fragile in any way, then you’d find a lot of you could console yourself in social media and lose hours and perhaps null the pain, but I wouldn’t imagine that it would be doing any good whatsoever. And also the standpoint of personal connection and human relationships as well, you become withdrawn from that because you’re in this cyber world. Do you find that technology is an issue for your patients that perhaps need more personal connection and less of that?

Bronwyn

(18:41)

I haven’t really seen that so much. I think the people who seek me out are at a place where they are seeking health, but I imagine… So I always say to my clients, it’s the ones who don’t seek therapy that I worry about most. Those are the ones who are not willing to feel their feelings. Those are the ones who are numbing their feelings with social media, like you’re alluding to, and food and everything else. Yeah.

Stu

(19:12)

It’s a bit of a vicious cycle when wrong food, no exercise, you don’t feel like sleep, you feel groggy, you don’t want to talk.

Bronwyn

(19:21)

Yeah, but I would start with the feeling the feelings piece, because people are going to find something to replace the social media with if they’re not ready to feel their feelings. It’s like addiction transfer. So you probably know that when people have a bypass surgery to lose weight, addiction transfer, a lot of them, I don’t know what percentage, the majority become alcoholics and they can get drunk so fast after you have a bypass surgery, like one little drink. But they do that because they are not ready to feel their feelings, and that’s why they were eating like that in the first place is to numb their feelings. So now they have to find something else. And I see everything as the same that we can’t start with those things. We can’t start with addressing that. We need to start with helping people feel their feelings and usually the feeling that they’re saving off the most is anger.

Stu

(20:23)

Yeah. Boy oh boy. If I wasn’t ready to reach out, but I thought that I was in a place where I probably should, but I wanted to try and just do a little bit of work myself, much understanding that you know what? I should probably meditate. I’ve heard meditation is really good. Lots of people talk about doing it. I’m not very good at it, but I should probably give it a go. Is there a framework of perhaps exercises from a mindset perspective that I could try that might help coax out these questions before I came to see somebody in more of a professional environment?

Bronwyn

(21:14)

Yeah, I mean, I’m not a big meditation fan. I don’t know if you were referencing yourself with you don’t really like it.

Stu

(21:18)

I can’t do it. I would like to, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Bronwyn

(21:21)

Yeah. Well, I actually don’t like it at all. I have a podcast where I talk about this. I’m not a fan of meditation because, at least Eastern meditation is about clearing your mind, and I don’t think we need to clear our mind. I think what we need to do is create space to reflect.

Stu

(21:41)

Okay.

Bronwyn

(21:41)

And that’s different reflection is it could be going for a walk, going for a run, going outside really allows our brains to do more reflection I have found getting outside, but it could just be creating space in our lives. It could be sitting in the morning and drinking a cup of coffee and not getting on your computer and just being at one with the coffee and just laying your brain reflect on whatever comes up, whatever comes up. And we can’t force it. We can’t schedule it, but we can create space for it to happen. And I think that our brains will naturally start to reflect on the fight I had with my husband. Oh, let’s reflect on all of that, not just what he did wrong, but maybe I can reflect on what I did wrong and why I reacted the way I did. Maybe I can reflect on this thing that happened at work this week that I haven’t given time to reflect on, reflecting on our feelings, our thoughts. I really think that’s way more powerful than meditation.

Stu

(22:48)

Yeah. I think so too. In the age of the smartphone and social media and the internet, I think just those gaps of time that we used to use for reflection and contemplation and daydreaming or whatever we want to call it, they’re just filled now because we’ve just got a gadget that will fill any void of time with some form of amusement in one shape or another, which brings me onto another question that I’m keen to ask you, and I noticed on your website that you were speaking about resilience in children. And this is close to my heart because of my three daughters, and I’m very much aware that their friends and their circle and their school, there are issues that I wasn’t aware of when I was young.

(23:51)

They’ve got a counselor at school, they have a dog that comes in, which I think they call a feelings dog or something like that. All of these things are so alien to me because back in the day you went to school and it was a bit rough and tumble, you learned, you had some laughs, you made friends, and that was school. But now it just seems like the youngsters are way older than they need to be at that age. And they’ve got these digital devices again, that are whispering in their ears and all of their friends are doing the same thing. So how would we even start to raise mentally resilient children when we’ve got all of this distraction and we’re not taught how to be parents. Nobody knows how to be a parent.

Bronwyn

(24:38)

Yes, bingo.

Stu

(24:39)

We just do our best right and it’s not easy. So I’m keen to hear your take.

Bronwyn

(24:46)

Well, man, that’s a great question. This is my biggest passion is parenting. Yeah. So I think I would start with validating your children’s anger of you.

Stu

(25:05)

Yeah, right.

Bronwyn

(25:08)

Okay. So even though there’s all these things that can screw them up, I hear all your fears of that and those are valid, but the antidote to all of that is your relationship with them, you attuning to them consistently. You have three. So I would take one-on-one time with each of them and parse that out so it’s equal. So they’re not competing with each other as siblings will do for their parents’ attention and really attuning to them and say, “Hey, what’s going on this week? How are you feeling? How are feeling with me? Have I done anything?” Or you could jumpstart that conversation and be like, “Oh, well, this happened and that made me feel this way. I’m wondering what you feel.” There’s a lot of ways to do that, but giving them time and space to be authentic and honest and when they feel angry at you or at your wife or at each other, at each other, I’m sure that’s a big one.

(26:15)

Instead of saying, “Don’t feel angry,” I would say, “Of course you’re angry with your sister. She just bonked you on the head. You have every right to be angry, but what you can’t do is bonk her back.” So really validate our kids’ feelings, because what that does is it teaches them feelings aren’t right or wrong. They’re not. Feelings aren’t good or bad because we don’t judge feelings. We can judge behavior, but we can’t judge feelings because feelings are involuntary. Why would we judge them?

(26:53)

You’re teaching them that their feelings and therefore they matter to you. So you are making them learn, “I matter, I’m important. I’m important to my dad.” Now, when you teach them that they’re going to take that with them with every other person in the world because you’re imprinting. You’re sending a template down on their young brains that they matter. And so when they’re with someone who’s treating them like they don’t matter. They’re going to feel like, “Okay, this isn’t right. I’m going to get out of here,” or “I’m not going to be a friend to this person.” So the most powerful thing we can do is attune to our children.

Stu

(27:41)

No, that’s great.

Bronwyn

(27:42)

And that takes listening, and that takes time, and that takes us getting over our own fear of anger and other feelings. We need to do that for ourselves so we can give that to them.

Stu

(27:54)

That’s good advice. Absolutely. Tell me about your thoughts on over-parenting, because I do have a bit of a gripe personally, again, and I rewind to my childhood days where children were children and adults were adults, and it just seemed to be simple. But nowadays, even in the academic circle, it seems like there are no winners and there are no losers. Everyone gets a medal.

Bronwyn

(28:21)

It’s so meaningless, isn’t it? You’re like, “Okay, well, me and everyone else got medals.”

Stu

(28:29)

That’s right. You get an achievement medal for everything. You go through the educational system irrespective of how good you are, you think you’re the best, and then you enter the workforce feeling like you are the prince or the princess, and I am entitled. I come at it from an old school perspective where you try hard, you do your best, give it everything that you’ve got, and if you succeed, then fantastic. But if somebody else succeeds above you, then maybe they’ve got talent. Maybe they tried harder. It doesn’t mean that you are a failure in any way, shape or form.

Bronwyn

(29:15)

Sure.

Stu

(29:15)

It’s just the way of the world. Should you think there should be a firm line?

Bronwyn

(29:21)

Well, no. So again, I don’t think the problem is necessarily that although I see where you’re coming from, I think the problem because people who are entitled also come from homes where they’ve never received any positive feedback or response from their parents. I mean, that entitlement is not just coming from those kids.

Stu

(29:48)

Right.

Bronwyn

(29:48)

But what I think creates the entitlement is believing it’s a zero-sum game, which I hear you commenting on that. So for example, we all as humans struggle with this, if I see a woman that I think is objectively beautiful or conventionally beautiful, my first inclination is to feel threatened by her if I’m honest, right?

Stu

(30:15)

Yep.

Bronwyn

(30:15)

“Oh, well, now I’m not beautiful because she’s beautiful. We can’t both be beautiful.” And that’s that zero-sum game showing up. It’s like this competition when it’s actually not a competition, is it? And as a parent, you can help your kids see, “Dad has love for all of you, and he sees your uniquenesses. Each one of you have to offer. It’s not a competition between you because you all have so many different things to offer. There’s no zero-sum game here.”

Stu

(30:46)

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, there’s no rule book. Just got to do what seems right. And I guess if you’re coming at it from the right place and you’re showing love and you are fair and you’re honest and you are listening, then it’s probably a good place to start, I would imagine.

Bronwyn

(31:08)

Well, I mean, there’s so many… I don’t know. You’re in Australia, right?

Stu

(31:12)

Yes. Yeah.

Bronwyn

(31:15)

I don’t know. I’m imagining this is also common in Australia, but I feel like in the United States, parents only care about their kids’ math scores. And I’m like, “What? What about art? Or what about the things that they never teach in school? Because you only have six, seven subjects. Come on. There’s like zillions of amazing subjects out there that your kids aren’t going to discover until they’re 24 maybe.” And it’s this weird thing, the zero-sum game. “Oh, well, he’s better in math. You got to do better in math.” And we do that to our kids. We create these, “Oh, if you’re not good in that, then you’re not good.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, everyone has something to offer. Everyone under the sun has something amazing to bring to the human community, I believe.” And a good parent will help their children find out what that is, what makes them unique, and what their passion is, what their unique skill set is, what their unique drive and interests are.

Stu

(32:18)

Yeah. No, it is funny that you brought that up because one of my daughters is doing advanced maths and she’s just not great at it, but that’s not her thing. She doesn’t want to pursue it, but she’s great in the kitchen. She can cook. She’s 14 and she can cook a spread for 12 people in the kitchen, do all this stuff. And she said to me, “I’m just not getting my scores at maths.” And I said, “When are you ever going to use this in life? I had to learn this stuff. I never used it. Focus on what your passion is. Focus on what you want to do. You get this one hit at this, figure out what it is, because I bet none of your friends can cook a roast dinner for 12 people and prepare all these meals and coordinate and do all this kind of stuff. That’s your thing. You’re good at that. I wouldn’t worry too much about trigonometry.”

Bronwyn

(33:12)

Oh, Stu, I wish all parents were like you. You have no idea how I’m almost stirring up right now hearing you say this to your daughter, you have no idea what you’re doing.

Stu

(33:23)

Yeah, well, I’m getting a good meal out of it.

Bronwyn

(33:27)

It’s true. You’re reinforcing it, aren’t you?

Stu

(33:34)

I just want them to be strong and be able to understand how to feed themselves and how to figure things out and not worry about the small stuff, which at an academic level, it’s just not important, at least from that sense.

Bronwyn

(33:53)

Well, but what you’re doing too though is you’re teaching them to trust themselves. And that is gold because you’re showing you trust them, and when you show them you trust them, they will trust themselves and they will not be homeless if they learn they can figure things out. And there’s so many people who they might be very, very smart, but they start a new job and they don’t allow themselves to have a learning curve because they weren’t raised in a home where it was okay to have a learning curve, to make mistakes, to trust themselves, to learn as you go. Failure and mistakes, they’re such essential parts of the human experience. And to have a parent who’s like, “Yeah, of course you’re going to fail and make mistakes, that’s natural, normal, and that’s how we learn.”

Stu

(34:48)

That’s exactly right.

Bronwyn

(34:50)

It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t do that.

Stu

(34:54)

Yeah, no, absolutely right. And you mentioned figure it out. And that’s probably my used phrase in the household when one of the girls says, “I really need to do this.” I said, “Well, look, figure it out. You figure it out. If you can’t, we’ll talk about it, but figure it out because you guys are smarter than me. You’re younger than me. You’ve got a younger brain. It works faster. You’re more able-bodied. I’m old. You figure it out and then we’ll talk about it.”

Bronwyn

(35:19)

How does that work?

Stu

(35:21)

They always figure it out. They always do. I mean, oftentimes there’s a few bumps along the way, but that’s how we learn. You mentioned we need mistakes, we need failures.

Bronwyn

(35:34)

We need mistakes.

Stu

(35:36)

So it’s fascinating. I’m fascinated by this because it’s just a mentioned before, there’s no rule book, there are pressures of life, and obviously people are fragile. We’re all fragile, and I don’t want to plant that seed that then becomes something bigger at a later date that is destructive in one way, shape, or form. I don’t know. Interesting times, that’s for sure.

Bronwyn

(36:12)

Well, I’m not sure what we’re talking about is anything new.

Stu

(36:15)

No, no. Just the tech stuff is new for me because I work in social media and advertising, and I know that it can be so nefarious with targeting of youngsters for profit. And I just think, oh, this is a terrible one. And it steals their attention. We set a curfew on mobile phone use because they use their phones for school as well now because they’ve got programs and systems that they need to use. But after 7:00 PM, that phone goes away. And one of my daughters has an issue with it. She always stuffs up. And I say, “Look, if you’re using your phone, if you’re using your phone after 7:00 PM, it’s gone the next day. Do you agree to this rule?”

(37:07)

She went, “Yeah, okay, I do.” And so it gets taken away a lot. But when it’s taken away, oftentimes she’ll come to me and say, “I’m really glad that I haven’t got my phone at the moment because I feel happier and I can think more clearly than when I have my phone.” And so at 14, that’s really neat to hear that they actually understand that there’s something happening here between this.

Bronwyn

(37:38)

Wow. Yeah. And I love that you are having those boundaries with them, but the boundary is, so essentially you’re… And I love this example you’re giving is your daughter coming you and saying basically, “Thank you for this boundary. I didn’t like it initially, and it’s still hard, but I am thanking you because I also see how it’s benefiting me.” And that’s something as parents, we need to be like, “You know what? I’m going to piss you off sometimes. That’s okay. That’s okay. It’s not my job to be your best friend. I don’t need that. I need to be not authoritarian, but authoritative. And it’s for your best. And if you don’t see that right now and you reject me right now, I’ll take the hit because I need to do my job. This is part of my job description.”

Stu

(38:32)

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I’ve said multiple times, “Your 20-year-old self will know that I was doing the right thing. Trust me, I’ll bring it up on your birthday.” No, that’s excellent. We are getting closer to coming up on time. I’m intrigued to hear a little bit about perhaps any processes or practices that you apply to yourself in order to maintain a level of resilience that you need to be your best.

Bronwyn

(39:06)

Yeah. So again, going to my podcast, my own life experiences, and even to this day, very much inform where I’m at and what I’m learning. And so I talk openly about me applying boundaries right now with my own father who’s going to be 83 in a few days. He’s a widower now. And just how it’s hard because I love him. He’s my father, but he’s also about 80% monster. And I’ve had to come to terms with that for myself and have these boundaries. So that’s an example, me just attuning to my own body, what my body tries to communicate to me. So I had very severe insomnia on and off for about 30 years of my life, and I’m 52.

(40:11)

And I think a lot of that was my body trying to tell me how angry she was, Bronwyn was, with me for betraying myself in relationship to my father. So these boundaries now that I’m having with him. On the outside, it looks really yucky to see applying these boundaries with a widower who’s 83, like I’m saying, but I’m sleeping like a baby now, and I’m at peace. And so I’m always self attuning and learning, and I’m always going to be learning. Life is if you do it well, you’re always learning, but that takes reflection. So going back to that reflection, I’ll have a lot of dreams and I wake up in the morning and when I drink my coffee slowly, I don’t do any… I used to read a book. Now I don’t even read.

(41:12)

I just drink my coffee. And I’m like, “Okay, what was my dream all about?” And I’ll reflect on it. And I think my body’s trying to speak to me through dreams at times, through insomnia, through a lot of people have headaches, migraines, digestive issues, even autoimmune that I used to believe were all related to nutrition. And now I’m like, “Oh, I think a lot of that is suppressed anger.” So I see a lot of this in my clients and as they attune to themselves and learn to not betray themselves and they learn to value and prioritize their own feelings and do what they need to do for themselves, I see those things dissipate.

Stu

(41:55)

Fantastic. The mind is ridiculously complex and connected to everything, and it really is. I hear you when you sleep, I mean, when I’ve had business issues in the past, and that’s the first thing to go is sleep. And when everything is in sync, sleep is just easy and wonderful and restorative, and it makes such a big difference in everything as well when that particular system is in tune. So I’m guessing then that our listeners can go on to your website, just tell us where can we go to listen to these podcasts? Because I would imagine there’d be some amazing conversations to be heard there.

Bronwyn

(42:43)

So I cover all of this and more. My podcast is Angry At The Right Things, and you can find it wherever you subscribe to your podcasts.

Stu

(42:53)

Wonderful. Fantastic. Well, I will put that link in the show notes today. But Bronwyn, I really appreciate this conversation. It’s been fantastic and I can’t wait to share it with my listeners.

Bronwyn

(43:02)

Thank you so much, Stu. I again just commend you as a father. You’re on a really good track.

Stu

(43:09)

Giving it a go. I’ve given it a go. Doing my best. All right.

Bronwyn

(43:13)

Yes.

Stu

(43:13)

Thanks again. Bye-bye.

Bronwyn

(43:14)

Okay, bye-bye.

The post Bronwyn Schweigerdt – Processing Emotions For Better Health appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

It’s that time of year again! Time for celebrations! You may be travelling to a friend’s or family’s place for Christmas and not sure how to plan to keep your best health during this time. Christmas lunch or dinner often includes a buffet style. It can be easy to get lost in the mountains of food. This blog will help you to navigate your way through both travel and the Christmas buffet to help you to feel your best during this season.

Travel Tips

When you go on road trips do you accept this period as an eating disaster full of fatty foods and sugary drinks? If you answered yes, then here are some easy tips to help you make this a thing of the past, the key word is preparation!

Below is a logical step by step approach of things to do before you leave and how to stick to the best choices while on the road:

1. Create a shopping list:

Buy mostly products which are long life and don’t need refrigeration. Some long-life meal options can be made from things like:

• Your favourite packets of wholegrain crackers or a loaf of wholegrain bread.
• Canned vegetables (try draining the salted water or if possible, wash the vegetables using a strainer)
• Beans (kidney, chickpeas, baked beans)
• Tuna canned (aim for the tuna canned in spring water)
• Boiled eggs -boiled eggs can be safely kept in your fridge for 1 week (store in cooler bag)
• Pre-cooked meats (keep frozen until just prior to leaving and store in a cooler bag to be able to eat the meats safely later in the day.)
• 100% nut butters

Side note on perishable items: these need to be stored at a maximum of 5 degrees and consumed within 4 hours after being above this temperature. Do not let food poisoning wreck your road trip!

Snack choices can be made from:

• Fresh fruit and to prevent any bruising package in a lunch box that fits the fruit well or buy a special container especially for that fruit type.
• Muesli bars (although check the amount of added sugar and if there are whole grains and fibre).
• Small tuna cans (around 95g and these come in a range of flavours but the flavour can add a lot of extra calories, so I suggest sticking with spring water or Italian flavours).
• Nuts and seeds (aim for unsalted, these can be bought in bulk and shared into small individual bags of around 30g or a small handful to make a serve).
• Canned fruit in water or if in juice you can wash or drain the juice before eating.
• Dried fruit (eat these sparingly as one and a half tablespoons is a serve of fruit).
• Long life soups (aim for the soup lowest in added sugar and salt (400 mg of sodium per 100 g is considered moderate salt and less than 120 mg of sodium is considered low).

Drinks:

• Long life low fat milk
• Fortified soy milk or alternative (if substituting for dairy make sure there is at least 100 mg of calcium per 100 mL of drink).
• Long life fruit or vegetable juice (aim for no added sugar).
• Water! Free of calories and so good for you, drink away!
• Instant coffee and tea bags.
• Sweetener (I recommend using stevia which comes from a plant and is a natural non-caloric sweetener).

2. How to eat when on the road:

• Plan when you are going to eat!

It may sound simple enough but when you let yourself run into ravenous hunger (otherwise known as ‘hangry’), it can be difficult to choose the healthier options you have packed over the cheeseburger with large fries and a coke. Plan your day and when you will stop for meals and snacks.

• Enjoy the travel experience

Take the time to enjoy eating. Take the scenic route and enjoy the locations you travel through. Maybe pack a picnic rug and select somewhere nice to enjoy the scenery around you.  Take the time to appreciate the meal or snack you are eating. This will decrease the likelihood of an upset stomach and foods spilt everywhere in the car. You will also be more aware when your body has had enough to eat.

Master the Christmas Buffet

Now that you have arrived at your destination, the next step is to master the Christmas buffet. You would not be the first to overindulge and plate up multiple servings for each course. Then there is the regret or sickly feeling from the experience.

To navigate your way through the Christmas buffet, here are a few handy tips:

1. Set the number of plates for each course to one.

This means you will select the foods you really want rather than trying everything and anything being served as an option.

2. Remember the half and two quarters rule.

Try serving each plate with half vegetable or fresh fruit and then a quarter protein source and quarter carbohydrate or grains. This balanced plate model will help you feel satisfied and not wanting to go for those extra servings.

3. Remember water!

Selecting still or sparkling water over soft drink, juice or alcohol means you are not drinking extra energy. Drinking with the meal will help you eat less and keep you hydrated, especially if the food choices are salty.

4. You can judge a book by its cover!

Aim to enjoy in only moderate amounts or not at all foods which are fried, creamed, crispy, breaded, scampi-style, creamed, buttery or au gratin. Try to select dishes which are steamed, boiled, charbroiled, broiled, poached or in a marinara tomato sauce base. Try looking for low fat or no fat options for dairy such as yoghurt, cheese, or milk.

Sauces are an easy way to add many extra calories without any effort at all. Aim to skip these or enjoy in moderation.

5. Take a chill pill.

We often overeat when we eat fast because it takes time for our brain to process the feeling of being full. Try to enjoy each bite of the meal. It can help to put your knife and fork or spoon down between each mouthful. Savour the taste and enjoy the experience of eating.

Take home message: At the end of the day, this time is an important time to connect with the people who matter in your life. These tips are guidance to help you to feel your best over the silly season but please remember to enjoy the experience of Christmas. Remember that if things do not go exactly as planned this is not the end of the world.

The post How to eat healthy when traveling on the road and master the Christmas Buffet appeared first on 180 Nutrition.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Natalie Kovarik and Tara Vander Dussen to the podcast. With backgrounds in dairy farming and cattle ranching, Natalie and Tara co-host the Discover Ag docuseries, as well as the popular podcast, Discover Ag. Collectively, they advocate for agriculture and help consumers understand how their food is actually made. In this episode, we discuss their thoughts on cattle and climate change, the nuances of regenerative agriculture, the importance of animal protein, and so much more. Over to Natalie and Tara.

Audio Version

Some questions asked during this episode:

• We’re told that cattle are heavily contributing to climate change, what are your thoughts
• Please explain the difference between monocropping vs regenerative agriculture.
• How important is animal protein compared to plant-based alternatives?

Get more of Natalie Kovarik and Tara Vander Dussen:

• https://www.instagram.com/discoverag_/?hl=en
• https://www.thehandsthatfeedus.com/
• https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discover-ag/id1615443750

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview

Ryland Engelhart – Solutions For Healthy Soil
Elle Russ – Optimising Thyroid Function
Nina Teicholz: How We Got It Wrong! Why I Eat Saturated Fat & Exercise Less

The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.

Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.

Full Transcript

Stu

(00:03)

Hey this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance, in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achiever long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

(00:23)

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products, too, that’s right. We’re into whole food nutrition, and have a range of super foods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

(00:44)

This week I’m excited to welcome Natalie Kovarik and Tara Vander Dussen to the podcast. With backgrounds in dairy farming and cattle ranching, Natalie and Tara co-host the Discover Ag docuseries, as well as the popular podcast, Discover Ag. Collectively, they advocate for agriculture and help consumers understand how their food is actually made. In this episode, we discuss their thoughts on cattle and climate change, the nuances of regenerative agriculture, the importance of animal protein, and so much more. Over to Natalie and Tara.

Hey, guys. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and I am delighted to welcome Natalie Kovarik and Tara Vander Dussen to the podcast. Ladies, how are you?

Tara

(01:29)

Hi. Thanks for having us on.

Stu

(01:31)

Thank you.

Natalie

(01:32)

Yeah, we’re-

Stu

(01:32)

I’m super-

Natalie

(01:32)

… excited to be here.

Stu

(01:34)

Yeah, super excited, as well. Because it’s one of these topics that I think we haven’t spoken about at much length on this podcast, but I’m really, really interested, because this whole crazy narrative seems to be changing in terms of how we view agriculture and what we should be doing and eating, and how we should be thinking. So I think that you’re going to frame that quite nicely for me with your perspective, in quite a different lens. But first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your guys’ work, I’d love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Tara

(02:08)

Yeah. I can go first. Tara, here. So I am a dairy farmer in New Mexico within The United States and I actually got my degree in environmental science. So backing up a little bit, I grew up on a dairy farm. I’m actually a fifth-generation dairy farmer. Got my degree in environmental science. Ultimately, married my husband, who is also a fifth-generation dairy farmer, and came back to his family farm, and then started practicing environmental consulting for dairy farms throughout New Mexico.

(02:34)

Along that journey, I had two daughters, and when my daughters were young, I was just seeing a lot of misinformation and kind of what you just alluded to a minute ago, just we are constantly being bombarded with information about food and farming and a lot of it is not factual, and just a lot of misconceptions in there. And so, I started building a platform around being able to share about what dairy sustainability looked like, and just kind of my work of what I was seeing on farms that I was going to, on social media and just kind of opening up our farm to people on the internet.

(03:02)

And through that journey, I ultimately met Natalie and we launched our podcast and docuseries called Discover Ag, and I’ll let her jump in with a little bit of her background, and then kind of where we have taken that podcast.

Stu

(03:14)

Fantastic.

Natalie

(03:16)

Yeah, so like Tara, I also grew up in agriculture. I actually grew up on a cattle ranch in southwest Montana, also in the United States. And unlike Tara, I guess my introduction to social media was a little bit different. I actually launched a direct-to-consumer beef business, and so that was my first kind of how I started sharing online, specifically about agriculture. My degree is actually in pharmacy, so like Tara, I also kind of got a degree outside of agriculture, and just kind of found my way back to the ranch.

(03:48)

But when I was sharing online for the direct-to-consumer beef business, I was ultimately, obviously, trying to sell beef, but I kept seeing, as we’ve been continually alluding here in just these first few minutes, a lot of misinformation. And so, I really felt called to share more broad scope about agriculture and kind of be a larger voice for things going on in the industry, instead of just selling beef. And so, I ultimately pivoted out of that direct-to-consumer beef business, and then like Tara alluded to, that journey of sharing online ultimately led me to her and launching our podcast Discover Ag.

Stu

(04:21)

Brilliant, brilliant. Wow. Beef and dairy. Well, it’s going to be a good conversation. Those two components make up almost every meal that I consume. And over the last 15 years, in this business, I’ve been riding the rollercoaster of dairy’s good, dairy’s bad, beef’s great, but reduce your beef, and all of this kind of crazy, crazy, crazy information that seems to change all the time, and is very sketchy, in terms of the foundations of where this information actually comes from.

(04:52)

So we are told, then, that cattle, at the moment, are problematic for climate change. And it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me that cow farts are causing this kind of crazy climate that is changing. What are your thoughts, in terms of this big narrative about, “We’ve got to reduce the consumption of meat, because it’s killing the planet”? Where do you go from there?

Tara

(05:22)

Yeah, so a few things. I think it is very much rooted in misinformation. Back in the day, I think it’s been like 10 years now, that we had the UN FAO’s Livestock’s Long Shadow that came out, where they said that agriculture, specifically cattle, was this huge portion of greenhouse gas emissions. That has since been kind of debunked, that essentially, when they looked at cattle, they took the entire carbon footprint from beginning to end, every piece of it, and when they looked at transportation, they took only tailpipe emissions. So you were not comparing the same thing. They weren’t taking into account what went into building the car or when the car decomposed, so you literally were just comparing two different forms of metrics.

(06:02)

And so, I feel like once that bell was rung, it has been very difficult to unring it and bring back some of those statistics that got put out there. You see Netflix documentaries, all sorts of things that still reference that original report, even though it’s been rolled back and they’ve released new data. In that same theme, I think that sometimes when we talk about cattle’s impact on the environment, we very much have carbon tunnel vision. Cattle cannot simply be put to, “This is how much carbon they produce,” and that’s it.

(06:30)

They play such a more nuanced role in our food system, and our entire ecosystem whereas cars are more of just a carbon conversation. Right? It is carbon that we are tracking from the earth, and that is ultimately going into the atmosphere, whereas cattle, and I’ll let Natalie jump in here, have a role in soil health and the consumption of byproducts from other things. There’s so many other things that cattle contribute to, that we can’t just be so focused on just the carbon number.

Stu

(06:58)

Absolutely. Makes sense.

Natalie

(07:00)

Yeah, I think as Tara was mentioning, that carbon tunnel vision is actually, I would use the word, almost dangerous, too. Because she mentioned all of the nuances that were kind of missing in that conversation, and you pair that with the result that we would ultimately be ending up cutting out meat from our diet, and I think when you pair the trade-offs of what these studies show, that around less than 3% is what our greenhouse footprint would be decreased by if we all went to that vegan, vegetarian diet. So we’re not denying that there is an impact there, but it’s pretty minuscule.

(07:37)

And then, you think about the opposite end, which I said is cutting meat from our diet, and that’s a pretty high protein diet, or pretty nutritious piece of protein that we’re consuming. And so, if you think about that trade-off of what we’re gaining for what we’re losing, I think it’s pretty dangerous to recommend.

Stu

(07:53)

So if we decided to take that information to heart and heavily reduced the consumption of meat products in our lives, I’m guess then, that that would shift over to a monocrop focused agricultural system, largely based on corn, wheat, and soy versus, perhaps, regen, which I’ve had lots of conversation around regen, and maybe our listeners are not quite familiar about what that term actually means. So let’s get into the conversation then, monocropping versus regenerative agriculture, and how that might be important to completely understand that, before we even consider to make any dietary changes. So what is the difference, first up, monocropping versus regen?

Tara

(08:44)

Yeah. There’s such a good study out there, actually, about making our diet, quote unquote, more sustainable at the risk of making it less nutritious and less diverse, of having all these different foods. I do think there is a misconception that if you give up animal ag, that you are suddenly eating all of these different types of vegetables, when in reality, our diet, currently, here in the United States at least, is a very, quote unquote, plant-based. I think it’s over 60% of our diet is already plant-based, but it is, as you alluded to, this monocropped cultures.

(09:14)

I mean, if you’re eating a plant-based meat, you are not consuming the broccoli and asparagus of the world, you are consuming the soy-based products, which are those monoculture crops. And yeah, that goes into what I kind of alluded to about the soil health and the cattle consuming byproducts, which I do think is a part of the regen conversation. And getting into the regenerative ag, Natalie and I always look at it as a spectrum, that it is not just simply like, “Yes, I’m a regen farm,” or, “No, I am not.” Both Natalie and I ultimately ship our products into the conventional beef, for Natalie, and dairy, for me. But both of our farm/ranch have a lot of regen practices that we implement, that I think would surprise people, even though it’s a part of the conventional food supply system.

Natalie

(10:08)

Yeah, going back to your question, I think what people don’t realize, if we went, like you said, we followed the guidance, the misinformation to go all plant-based, what that would mean, in my eyes, personally, is almost a removal of an ecosystem that we have naturally intact, right? And that’s what you’re asking about with the monoculture, because monoculture is going to be one big crop over and over and over again.

(10:36)

If you look at a cow out at pasture grazing, that’s not what you’re getting. You’re getting plant diversity, and you’re getting intact ecosystems that are actually working together in system. And so, if we really shifted to that different model, I feel like we’re losing, essentially, almost a piece of nature that was intended to function, at its root, how it was created.

Stu

(10:57)

Yeah. Well, it seems to me, it’s an integral part of the ecosystem that has always been there that has been uniquely designed to support and sustain life. And to take that out… I don’t know whether you guys have seen the movie Interstellar, and it’s a Matthew McConaughey movie, but apparently they have to leave the earth, because it’s unsustainable anymore, and the fields are just dust bowls, because they’ve been farmed and farmed and farmed and tilled and tilled, and there’s no life left in the soil.

(11:29)

And I kind of feel that they’re so different, there’s such contrasting visual images of beautiful, lush farmland with pastures that are populated with animals and plants, doing what they’ve always done since the dawn of time versus this very, very industrialized agriculture approach that it’s stripping the earth of vital nutrients and minerals that are required again and again and again and again and again. So from a scalability perspective, regen agriculture, with the growing population, how scalable is it?

Tara

(12:12)

Yeah, so we are actually a larger sized dairy farm here at our, still family-owned and operated, I live right here on my dairy, my backyard is our close-up pen. But we’re a larger farm and I feel like there are still things. So our cows are not out at pasture. Being dairy-based, our cows are in large open lot pens, but one of the things that we do is we actually compost all of our manure. So that way, even though we’re collecting that manure there in a pen, instead of it being out on pasture, we’re ultimately taking it back to other farms, other soils. I mean, one of the best ways to improve your soil is to include cow manure, which improves organic matter and all these other things, all these principles of soil health.

(12:54)

And so, we’re still trying to emulate that and put in those more regen practices, even on our larger scale farm, of being able to send those nutrients out to the farmers’ fields that are growing the crops to feed our cows. And so, making that system kind of like a closed loop system.

Natalie

(13:12)

Yeah. I think when you think about scaling regenerative agriculture, I think what would be most important is people need to be open to the idea that regenerative agriculture isn’t a check the box, every single farm and ranch is going to look the exact same way, every single practice is going to be the exact same way, and we’re going to scale it all the same. Like, “Right. Here’s your blueprint. Every rancher and farmer now go forth and scale your system to these plans,” because that’s just not how agriculture works. Your guys’ practices in Australia, New Zealand, are going to look much more different than in the United States, it’s going to look different than in Canada, than in Mexico.

(13:50)

I mean, that’s just a global aspect you can narrow down on how, within the United States, practices here in Nebraska would look completely different from regenerative practices in Georgia or Florida or Texas, because you have to deal with soil and weather and a lot of different things that are going to be very diverse when it comes to the landscape. And so, I do think, quote unquote, regenerative ag is scalable, I just think it has to be understood that it’s going to be scaled in different ways, and there are going to be different practices that are scaled for farmers in different areas.

Stu

(14:27)

Yeah, absolutely. So let’s talk about soil health then, because we’re told that the foods that we consume, whether it be fruits or vegetables, are less nutritious than they used to be 50 years ago, because of the minerals in the soil that we continue to over-farm, for want of a better phrase. Is that correct or do you guys have a different opinion?

Tara

(14:56)

Yeah, I have kind of dived into this topic and have found no substantial evidence to prove that. I mean, as a soil scientist, one of my main jobs was sampling our soil every single year. We would sample it at one feet, two feet, and three feet, so we could know exactly what was going on through the entire soil profile, because when you think about that root system on a crop, you want to think about where the roots are at throughout the soil profile and what nutrients they’re able to pull from.

(15:21)

And so, I think that is one of those things, I’ve seen it everywhere, that it’s like you have to eat 10 apples for it to be the same as it was 50 years ago, and there’s just not a lot of truth to that. It is one of those things that has kind of, taken, I feel like, social media and has really gone viral without a lot of substance or research to prove it.

Stu

(15:41)

That’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, it’s funny isn’t it? In the light of social media, everyone’s an influencer, everyone has an opinion. Food is like religion now, and how do we know what’s true? How do we know? It’s just this dividing scale. Similarly with diet, veganism, vegetarianism, all the way through the myriad of different diets to carnivore, at the other end of the scale, everyone’s got an opinion, and they’re all medical professionals. I just scratch my head.

(16:15)

Where do you sit in the current plant-based agenda? Because again, we’ve been through the low-fat message, we’re kind of now into more the low-carb message, and very much being berated by the plant-based messages. Everything’s plant-based, like milk with a Y, I mean, it’s just ludicrous. Oat milk, soy milk, coconut milk, almond milk, whatever. I mean, it’s not milk, but it seems to be healthy for us, so we’re told. What do you think about that?

Tara

(16:53)

Yeah, I feel like this pendulum continues to swing in all the different directions, and I do feel like, maybe, the pendulum right now is swinging… I feel like the food era that Natalie probably grew up in, that our parents and even grandparents, it was convenience. Right? We ended up moving to this very packaged, processed food. You had the TV dinner that you just were able to give your kids, and even the Lunchables that you were giving their kids in their lunchboxes.

(17:16)

And now, I feel like we’re swinging in the opposite direction of whole foods, whole ingredients, but within that, a lot of food choice. Like you said, I mean, the dairy section, quote unquote, dairy, dairy alternative, we are slapping this plant-based label on things and just calling it healthy, calling it nutritious, calling it more sustainable. I mean, I think people see plant-based, and their mind goes to sustainable, healthy, even though those two things may not be true, they’re not proven. There’s no basis for those two things, except for that we’ve been kind of marketed this label.

Stu

(17:52)

Yeah. It’s very interesting, and very hard to understand, still, which direction is the right direction. But I think whole food always, and probably protein-focused, given the fact that we’re all growing and we’re under more stress, as well. So question then, in terms of animal protein, we’re told that plants can give us all the protein that we need, and if we eat enough legumes or nuts and seeds or whatever it may be, that we get the full spectrum of amino acids and the building blocks. Although I’m not too sure that that’s quite right. How important is animal protein, do you think, in comparison to the plant-based alternatives that we’re currently offered?

Natalie

(18:48)

Yeah, so we actually interviewed a registered dietitian on our podcast this summer. We actually did a debunking series. It was kind of a fun summer series we did, where we debunked some of the anti-food, anti-ag documentaries that we felt were kind of portraying our food system in the misinformation light. And so, we brought on a registered dietitian to debunk, was it Game Changers, Tara? Is that right?

Tara

(19:13)

Yep.

Natalie

(19:14)

And she had a really interesting perspective. I really loved that episode with her. And she did confirm what you said, you can get all the protein you need from a plant-based diet, but what I think is really important when it comes to that conversation that is always left out about it, if you are talking to someone that is promoting the vegetarian or vegan diet, is that it is going to be kind of a challenge to do that. You have to supplement, you have to understand what you need, what you’re missing, the amounts. You really have to be almost super food intelligent. Right? And I think that’s promoted across the masses, whereas people maybe aren’t paying attention or maybe they don’t even have access to all the supplements you would need, and maybe they don’t have the money for all the supplements you would need.

(20:00)

And so, I think a really important thing about the animal protein is that it’s really simple. It’s very straightforward, you do have easy access to it, and you don’t have to supplement, and it has everything you need in it, so it’s just a much more simpler, straightforward, I feel like, careful option to promote to the masses when you’re trying to get all the essential proteins and amino acids you need, compared to trying to go through almost the rigmarole of almost orchestrating your diet when you’re on the plant-based diet, where you’re adding in different segments to equal what you need, whereas the animal protein is whole and complete by itself.

Stu

(20:41)

So tricky, and visually it makes a lot of sense that you’re eating these plants, and they’re beautifully colored and they’re flowing as the wind blows in the pastures and there’s a rainbow in the background, and the farmer comes out and he’s got a big smiley face versus animals and slaughter and everything. They’re two very, very distinct and quite contrasting images. But I think the reality is, I mean, you guys are farmers, that it’s probably not like that, and there a lot of industrial intervention, irrespective of whether you’re eating one diet or another.

(21:25)

In terms of things like food quality, there are so many buzzwords now that… regen is one buzzword, but grass-fed, organic. Everybody avoid grain-fed, because we don’t want any of that. Is there really a big deal, a big difference between grass-fed and grain-fed or these are just nuances that we don’t really need to be concerned about?

Natalie

(22:00)

Speaking from a beef lens, and then Tara can add into the milk, if she wants to. I think you’re kind of getting Tara and I on one of our favorite soapboxes, which is food labeling, and how kind of off course we have gotten as a nation, as a globe, when it comes to food labeling. I think it started out, obviously, with really good intentions, where we were trying to bring more information to consumers. They are now three generations removed from where food is grown. And so, of course they’re going to have questions, concerns, and we need a way to answer them. Right? Readily in the grocery store. So it makes sense to label our foods.

(22:38)

Somewhere along the way, I think we have pivoted from information to our consumers, to basically a marketing tactic and a marketing ploy. And that’s really how I see food labels now, it’s just a way for a company to sell something, unfortunately, and not really have, I guess, the consumer’s best interests in heart. So when it comes to grass-fed, grass-finished, grain-fed, when it comes to a nutrition standpoint, there isn’t going to be a big difference. If you are looking to get the protein and all the essential macro and micronutrients that you want from beef, right now, it’s shown, I mean, there are minute differences, but nothing that would want to steer you to purchase that grass-fed over the grain-fed when it comes to a nutrition profile of the beef.

(23:28)

Now, there are going to be differences when it comes to the on-the-ground practices on the operation, which would maybe be important to some people. Obviously, if an animal is grass-fed and grass-finished, they are going to consume only grass for their entire diet, which means… well, and again, I think sometimes people see that grass-fed label and associate it, maybe, with animal welfare or even how the animal was raised, and it’s not really that, it’s literally just nutrition labels, so it just means the animal ate grass.

(24:06)

That could mean they could eat it in a field or a barn or a pasture. They could eat that anywhere, and I think people just assume that it’s going to be out on idyllic green grass grazing, and that is the case sometimes, but that’s also not the case. You could have a grass-fed, grass-finished animal that as in the feed lot, right? Because it only has to do with what is in their diet. On the flip end, grain-finished are going to enter what we, in the States, call a feed lot, and so that is where some people have a concern about maybe the practices there or what that means for the food system, and they would choose the grass-fed option in opposite of the grain-fed.

(24:45)

So I think it’s really important to remember that when you see those grass-fed, grass-finished, it’s really just a diet label. All it’s telling you is what the animal is eating, it is not telling you anything else about how the animal was raised, how it was cared for, anything else about its lifestyle. It’s literally just telling you that the animal either ate grass for its entire life or it ate grass for three-fourths of its life, and then the later one-quarter of it, it ate grass along with grain.

Stu

(25:10)

I wonder whether we should be more concerned about organic produce versus industrialized, nonorganic produce, just in terms of the volume that we’re expected and advised to eat, and perhaps the pesticides and everything along that comes with that, as well. Because broccoli, for instance, it’s not an apple, it doesn’t have a shiny skin. It’s not so easy to give that a good rinse under the tap, and get whatever we might think is on there off. Do you have concerns or an opinion over nonorganic vegetables and fruits?

Tara

(25:49)

Yeah, so I’ll start by saying neither Natalie or I are organic farmers, so definitely can’t speak to everything, but I will say I think there’s a misconception that organic means pesticide-free, and what it actually means that organic has a different… There is approved pesticides for organic, but they are not synthetic. You cannot use synthetic pesticides on organics, but you can still use pesticides, they just have to be on the approved… Here in the The United States, it’s obviously regulated by our USDA our US Department of Agriculture. It’s different in every country. You’re going to have what is approved and what is not approved for organic use.

(26:22)

For me, personally, on leafy greens, this is something we studied a ton in college, you mentioned that you cannot simply just wash things off, there is a lot… and there’s a new documentary on Netflix called Poisoned that Natalie and I are going to cover on our podcast coming up in the future. But it kind of gets into some of the concerns more about contaminants and maybe foodborne illnesses, and that is something we studied a ton in college versus the pesticides like you mentioned. I had a teacher who would not feed her kids, under 12 years old, leafy greens, because of how difficult it is to wash off, and that can be organic or not.

(26:57)

Organic can still use different types of manure and if there was a pathogen in there that you could transport that, obviously, into your house, into your kitchen, into your refrigerator, and then ultimately onto your plate. And so, I feel like while I do have some concerns about leafy greens, it’s not necessarily in the pesticide category, it’s more in the overall issues of some foodborne illnesses around leafy greens, and that’s, obviously, an entirely different conversation, but I think that sometimes people confuse pesticides or organic and nonorganic with healthy or safe or all of these different things, when it really comes down to actual farming practices. Organic versus nonorganic is more of the actual on-farm management practices than anything else.

Stu

(27:43)

Yeah, that’s interesting. So question that I really wanted to ask you, given your background in dairy farming, raw milk. So we’re in Byron Bay, we live in an area where raw milk is only available in containers for bathing or pets, so it’s not allowed, so it’s not safe according to the powers that be, but it is available. There are many farms around here that you can go and you turn up with your bucket and you can get raw milk. I know that it’s a little bit different over in the the States. Some states, yes, and other states are definitely no. Where do you sit on the raw milk conversation, in terms of what you know and maybe even what you do on your particular farm?

Tara

(28:39)

Yeah, so in the States, some states, like Texas, it’s only allowed for pet food, as well. Other states, it is legalizing. A lot of states, it’s up for debate right now of whether to legalize it. I’ll give a little bit of background myself, and then I’ll come back around to the question. I actually drank raw milk for most of my life until I was pregnant with my first child and while I was going to college, I did not drink raw milk, I just bought it at the store. Since having my first child, I have switched, pretty much, just to conventional, regular milk from the grocery store.

(29:08)

I don’t necessarily buy into the camp that I think raw milk has super food powers, I think milk, in general, has super food powers, that it is a great source of protein, you can consume it in a lot of different forms, it’s a great… Every day, in my meals, I try to incorporate dairy, no matter what type of dairy it is. But at the same time, I really believe, Natalie and I both believe, we talk about this a lot of Discover Ag podcast, that we believe in food choice, and that people should have the choice they make.

(29:37)

At the same time, I think they have to, if they make a choice, need to accept a certain amount of risk. I think, as a society, we have gotten to a point where we want to assume, when we walk into a store, it is a safe food. This even goes back to the leafy greens. We want a safe food. So I think the powers at be set up a system that meant it was safe, which meant pasteurizing milk. Pasteurizing milk makes it a safer product. It is still a nutritious product, there’s some conversation of if you lose some of the nutrition when you pasteurize it. I mean, I think it’s similar to steak or if you cook fish or any of things, you may have some changes in the nutrition, but you’re overall getting a really nutritious product.

(30:13)

And so, I think, ultimately, if you consume raw milk, you have to accept that risk. I always compare it to I probably wouldn’t pick up sushi on the side of the road in a part of town I had never been or I didn’t know the restaurant or all those same things. If you’re going to to choose raw milk, make sure that your bottles are sanitized. You talk about bringing your own container to the farm, a lot of times foodborne illnesses can actually come from the container itself.

(30:40)

And so, making sure you’re sanitizing your containers or you’re keeping them in a sanitized place until you’re filling it up with that milk. Making sure you’re consuming that milk in a certain amount of time, a very quick amount of days. It’s not going to be like that ultra-pasteurized milk that can sit on the shelf for six months and be fine. You need to be consuming that product right away. And so, there’s just, I think, certain precautions that people need to take, if they ultimately choose to consume a raw product like dairy. And so, it’s not that I’m necessarily for or against it.

(31:11)

I think my hard part is, when someone contracts a foodborne illness from raw milk, which is more likely, I mean, it’s not an absolute, it’s still a minimal risk, but it’s obviously more likely if you consume a raw product, is they ultimately blame all of dairy. So if they have a bad outcome, they ultimately are turned off of all dairy, and they tell everyone they know that dairy is dangerous, and that’s not true. You are accepting a certain level of risk that’s associated with drinking raw milk, and so you need to be cautious of that.

Stu

(31:41)

Yeah. It does seem that the foods we’ve been consuming since the dawn of time are suddenly dangerous, yet all of these Frankenfoods that are coming out are supposedly safe. It doesn’t-

Tara

(31:52)

I mean, I kind of compare it to if you want a safe food, you could go in and say the cereal box, the ultra-processed cereal is going to be, quote unquote, safe. Right? There’s probably going to be very little chance of you getting a foodborne illness, even if it’s stale. Right? You’re not going to necessarily get sick from stale cereal, but whole foods that are in their natural state, we have to be more conscientious of that, and I think that it’s someplace in society we really got lost along the way, is confusing health and nutrition of what those whole products actually offer as far as nutrition.

Stu

(32:23)

Yeah. I completely agree. Have you changed your perspective on nutrition, diet and nutrition, the foods that you eat over the course of what you’ve been doing at the farms and also the deep dives that you’ve been doing in all of your social stuff, as well?

Tara

(32:41)

Yeah, I think that Natalie can jump in, I know, for me, the more that we have learned on Discover Ag, the older I get, the more I learn about farming, I am turning again, to those whole foods, and I’m trying to consume more animal protein. I have really made it my goal in the last nine months, to try to consume 30 grams of protein at every meal, complete protein. And I have just noticed, the older I get, you kind of even said, we’re always constantly growing, we’re changing our bodies, and that need for protein is not going anywhere. And so, trying to have that focus. And I would say, I think Natalie feels similarly as far as that, as well.

Natalie

(33:15)

Yeah, I was going to say, I fortunately grew up with a pretty, I don’t want to say health-conscious mom, because that’s not the angle she was coming from, but I definitely think she was doing a lot of these food practices before we were doing them now. She made her own homemade bread back then. We couldn’t have any sugared cereals in the house. She, I think, really instilled pretty good food practices from a very young age. And so, fortunately, I haven’t had to go on a food journey that maybe the typical, average American goes through, looking at what our average, standard American diet is.

(33:52)

So I feel very blessed from that standpoint that I’ve always kind of grown up in a household that it was whole foods is the most nutritious. And usually, animal protein was the first thing on our plate, and then we built our meals out around that, which is still how I eat to this day. But like Tara, the more we have deep dived on Discover Ag, and the more I talk to registered dietitians and just kind of gone into, I guess, maybe the more nutrient side, as you’re aging, especially for women.

(34:22)

It’s just really important that we’re retaining muscle mass. And so, I have, like Tara also, tried to be more conscientious of getting protein at every single meal, hitting larger protein numbers, so that hopefully I can carry more of that muscle with me into older age.

Stu

(34:38)

And it’s amazing what happens when you do start the day with protein, as well. I think it releases you from this hunger prison where you’re constantly scratching for something that keeps you sustained and satiated. But-

Natalie

(34:53)

Yeah, I was going to say that is actually one thing that we have changed, too. We’ve become pretty rigid about starting our day with an animal protein, from a meat standpoint, and then also mixing it with eggs, and that’s pretty much how we start all of our breakfasts. And I will say there are days where I don’t feel like I need to even eat lunch at lunch. And I can remember, when I used to start the day with something else, let’s say it was berries and granola or something, which still it’s not a terrible food choice.

Stu

(35:21)

No.

Natalie

(35:22)

But I definitely felt like you were having hunger pangs earlier on in the day, so there is something like that satiety point of meat and protein, how it really does fill you up.

Stu

(35:32)

Back in the day, I used to start my day with a bowl of oats and a banana mixed in, and it was delicious. And I would cycle to work, which would take me about 40 minutes, and I would be so hungry when I got to work, I’d be shaking, like hypoglycemic. I was scratching for my next fix, and it would invariably a muesli bar or a piece of fruit or something along those lines.

(35:58)

And nowadays, I do actually eat quite a lot of minced beef and I like to put eggs in that and get some avocado and veggies, as well. And it’s so satiating, so filling, and so sustaining that 2:00 will come and I won’t even be thinking about lunch, and it just goes to show that, perhaps, it’s always important to question a lot of the advice that we’re given, irrespective of where it comes from, because there may be other, perhaps, maybe other things at play, which-

Natalie

(36:39)

Oh, sorry. I was going to say, when you had alluded or had mentioned social media and information out there, there’s actually a study I came across where they had shown, basically, that if you can invoke a negative emotion, so anger or outrage, whatever it is, the virality of the piece increases by 30 to 40%, and I think people are aware of that. Right? And so, I think that’s why you see these diverse stances in society now. It’s almost like we go to extremes. Right? One extreme on one side and one extreme on the other, because we’re rewarded for those extreme stances. Right?

(37:16)

If I take this extreme stance, it’s going to upset and invoke that percentage of people on the other side that feel opposite of that, which then, as a content creator, gets my piece to go viral. Right? The more conflict we can create online, I feel like the more viral the piece, and like you said, food has now become religion, and so when you put all of that stuff together, it’s just the perfect recipe and medley for almost recommendation disaster. Right? Because you’re taking extreme stances, trying to paint it in a way that is going to evoke conflict or discussion or outrage to get the virality portion of it. And then, there’s typically misinformation just coming from maybe who’s sharing it or taking about it, or maybe there’s bias placed into it.

(37:58)

And so, I do feel like it’s really important to take that initiative. Unfortunately, to see a headline and dive deeper, and that’s really actually why we started our podcast, Discover Ag, is because we felt like there were all of these headlines and all of these, maybe, social media influencers or food influencers that were putting out all this information and all these pieces, and none of it was ever coming from the perspective of a farmer or a rancher, even maybe including a conversation with a farmer or a rancher in the article. And so, we thought, maybe we’ll take these headlines and just give our perspective on them, because that’s not being represented anywhere else in media very typically.

Stu

(38:38)

Yeah, it’s tribalism 101. And one of the things, before we dive into Discover Ag, that I wanted to ask you was the topic of cholesterol, because we are told that we need to reduce animal-based protein, because it can lead to high cholesterol, and the way to do that is to introduce more plants. And again, it makes sense visually. Clogged arteries with animal fat and things like that, but then when you dig deeper, you realize that it’s a radically different message, and there’s a lot more going on, and far deeper nuance than you could ever have imagined.

(39:17)

And also, there is lots of vested interest in the agenda that dictates where we consume our protein and the foods that we eat. Have you dived into the world of cholesterol and asked the question, how does red meat play a part in a truly healthy diet, where longevity is the main goal?

Tara

(39:42)

Yeah, so I saw something on the internet, it probably went viral, but it actually really resonated with me and made me kind of look into it more, and it was that we are blaming modern diseases on a food that we have consumed for tens of thousands of years. And I think that was so well-said, that we have been consuming red meat and dairy for a really, really long time, when you go back in the record books and look back at all the science there, and yet, these heart diseases and things that are all on the rise, are modern diseases.

(40:15)

And I think another piece of that, as well, that the meat does play into it, is a lot of the studies we look at here, at least in The United States, and I think this is similar worldwide, is when they study a diet, they look at the standard diet, and then they compare it to someone that has decided to maybe be vegan, who is then incorporating [inaudible 00:40:33] fresh vegetables into their diet. And instead, I would love to compare a person who is eating whole foods, whether that is animal proteins or fruits and vegetables, to a vegan diet, and then to the standard, classic diet that we see.

(40:47)

I think those are three vastly different things, and I think it even goes into some of it that when someone changes to being a vegan they say they, quote unquote, feel better. Well yeah, you may also be giving up sugar, you may be giving up alcohol, you may have quit smoking, you may have quit all of these other things in your health journey, and yet you are blaming meat for the reasons you didn’t feel good. And I think that is a problem with studies, I think it’s a problem with anecdotal evidence. I think, in so many different things. And so, it just goes back to that… I just don’t see a world where if you are eating a steak, you’re butchering an animal and having it in its most pure form, that that is the root. That doesn’t say that I think a hot dog is healthy for you.

Stu

(41:26)

No.

Tara

(41:27)

Maybe not all the time, at least. And so, there’s so many other factors that we’re not considering, and we know that it’s really hard to study nutrition in people, because people ultimately end up telling researchers wrong information, they end up saying they’re doing better than they really are, all these different things that go into these research studies that have led us to this high cholesterol is caused by red meat conversation, when there’s so many other layers we’ve got to peel back in order to get to the root cause of these.

Stu

(41:58)

Absolutely. Don’t blame the butter for what the toast did. Don’t blame the burger for what the fries and the soda did, it’s context. When you dig into those studies, you realize that epidemiology is very, very open to interpretation, in terms of asking people what they have consumed and what kind of lifestyle and bundling red meat in with hot dogs and all of the other processed meats, as well, it’s kind of crazy. Yeah, interesting times. Very interesting times.

(42:36)

So tell us, then, about Discover Ag. So I was blown away by the production quality that you guys put into that. It was really quite unexpected. What can our viewers expect if they go and dial in and want to find out more from Discover Ag?

Natalie

(42:56)

Yeah, so we are an every Thursday podcast, and thank you for your kind words, by the way. And we kind of alluded to it earlier, but we basically take the top three trending topics or headlines in the ag and food space that week, and we really break them down. So we’ll cover everything, we’ll cover worldwide news. We’ve covered farmer protests going on in the Netherlands, we’ve covered plant-based agendas going on in Italy, we have covered things here in the States, so really anything that is a trending headline, we cover and break it down. So there’s a lot of fun, exciting, diverse topics that we cover in our podcast, all related, basically, to the food and ag space.

(43:36)

In addition to that, as Tara said at the very beginning of this interview, we are pairing that with what we are hoping will eventually be a docuseries that could be the visual component that’s picked up on screen, where we’re actually going out to farms and ranches across the nation and kind of exploring our diverse food system and what it takes to get from out at pasture onto plate. And yeah, we have filmed two episodes now. We have filmed a cotton episode, and then our most recent one, which we’re pretty proud of and excited to get into the hands individuals would be one that we did on sheep and wool production in Montana.

(44:14)

So we try and pick maybe lesser-known parts of agriculture and kind of show what it really takes and discover the world of ag. And so, we’re hoping to bring both a visual and auditory component for people who enjoy both.

Stu

(44:31)

Brilliant.

Tara

(44:31)

Yeah, we talked a lot about the grocery store fear, misinformation, and I think one of the things, our goal with our podcast was is you see a headline that can really pull at your heartstrings or make you feel some emotion or another emotion, and we wanted to kind of take that fear out of going to grocery store. We want people to go to the grocery store and feel confident, whether they’re choosing the organic strawberry or the conventional strawberry or the grass-fed beef versus the regular beef, that they’re making a choice based on knowledge and information, and that they don’t have to make it based on fear or unknown or misinformation, that it’s really rooted in the facts and straight from the source. And we try to bring that in a fun and relatable way, including just a lot of relevant topics to what’s going on in the world today, and that’s really our goal.

Stu

(45:19)

Love it, love it. Yeah, I’d love to see that on Netflix in its entirety, because I think the message is so important and there are so many misunderstood concepts out there, everything from the question of plant versus meat, the question of I don’t want to eat meat because I don’t want to put on too much muscle, from the female perspective, all needs to be covered by people that are living and breathing and passionate and actually understand what’s happening from a grassroots perspective. So yeah, unbelievable. Wow. Good on you. Troopers.

(45:52)

So we’re just coming up on time. Interested then, from a farming perspective, which is often viewed as very wholesome and back to basics, perhaps just three top tips that you could share that you may think may have the biggest impact on our overall health. And it doesn’t have to be food related in any way, shape, or form, but just perhaps the things that you guys have adopted that have driven you to feel your best, which then allows you to do the great stuff that you’re doing at the moment.

Tara

(46:28)

Yeah, I can start, I know kind of what Natalie’s going to say, so I’ll try to say something different, but it’s probably going to be kind of similar. You talked about agriculture being kind of back at its basics, and I think that that is a lot of it. I mean, my top three tips right now for what I’m doing, I mentioned I’m trying to get more protein, I want to do that. I’m trying to lift weights, so Natalie mentioned the adding muscle. And then, movement, preferably outdoors. Getting outside, getting out there, and whether it’s just a simple walk with my daughters, that’s really important to me. I feel like those three things have become top priority for me, and I am framing the rest of my day around how I can ensure that those three things are happening.

(47:09)

And then, it does, it feels like the rest of things kind of fall into place for me, and I feel better, I sleep better. All of those other things that I also want, seem to all be tied back to kind of good nutrition, getting outside, and getting good movement. And that’s the basis of it.

Stu

(47:24)

Brilliant. Yeah, love it.

Natalie

(47:27)

Yeah, my number one, for sure, even I think beyond diet, at least for me, personally, is the outside portion. I think we have become radically disconnected from spending time outside, from connecting to nature, and I think it has taken more of a toll on us as a society than people have realized. We have always been really food and exercise focused, I would say, as a society, from the standpoint of those are very important for mental health and overall health of our body. But we lost somewhere, in that conversation, I think, nature, and I really think it plays more of a role than people are aware of.

(48:10)

And if you think about how some people wake up and they’re inside, and then they get in their car, and then they walk inside to their job, then they get back in their car, and then they go back inside to their house, and they’re having no connection with natural sunlight or soil on their feet or even noises. I think just being in nature with sometimes it being silent or sometimes experiencing the natural noises of nature. I think we will get to the point where we realize, “Oh, wow. That actually maybe is just as important as some of the food we’re putting in our body, and maybe some of the movement we’re having for our body.”

(48:41)

So I, for anyone listening that is maybe feeling called out right now by me, I think if you’re wanting to do something to feel better, I would try implementing more outside time into your schedule, whatever that looks like, whenever you can get it. I mean, there’s a lot of studies that show just even waking up with sunlight, first thing, can do drastic improvements for your mental health. And so, I really think that that outside portion, we need to get back to that as a society.

(49:11)

And then, kind of paired with that, I think one thing I have actually really been trying to focus on is consumerism and less. And so, I mean, I know that’s not really totally tied to health and wellness, but again, I think that is something we’ve become really skewed in as a society, and I think getting back to being content with less could actually go a long way for mental health and wellness, as well.

Stu

(49:38)

All right. Thanks. Yeah, I’m totally down with that. I’m very interested in the minimalism movement and how it frees up the mind. I mean, being surrounded by so much clutter and possessions and being free from that, it’s like Feng shui for the mind. It’s like an awakening, a rebirth. I love it. I love getting rid of crap. That’s great.

Tara

(50:05)

I have been getting crap is exactly how I describe it, and I feel like the more you do it, the more you want to get rid of stuff. It’s so nice you walk in your house with less stuff, it feels so freeing. I think that’s the word you used is freeing, and it is. It’s like a freedom when you have less things that are needing to be organized, needing to be put away, needing to be… I mean, just in every sense of the word.

Stu

(50:26)

Yeah, no, I’m with it. That’s fantastic. Well, we’ve come up to the end of time. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Great stuff, and really looking forward to our listeners finding out more about what you guys are doing, as well. So what’s next? What’s next for you guys? What have you got in the pipeline, perhaps, for the next 12 months?

Tara

(50:48)

Yeah, so I think focusing more on Discover Ag, our podcast, that is definitely a focus for us the rest of 2023 and going into 2024. Some big things planned there, as well as wrapping up the episode on wool that we have been editing, we are currently editing. Really excited to get that out there, and you mentioned wanting to see it on Netflix, that is our goal, as well. We’d love for it to be on a streaming platform, and hopefully see that going there with more episodes of agriculture that you may not see every day, beyond the cows and the tractors, what else is out there, as far as what is feeding and clothing us. So I think those are our two big goals here coming up.

Stu

(51:27)

Fantastic. And for all of our listeners, then, that want to find out more and dial into all of your social channels, where can we send them? What’s the best place?

Natalie

(51:38)

Yeah, so as we’ve said multiple times now, you are listening on the podcast platform, so the first place you could find us is our podcast Discover Ag. And then, when it comes to our social channels, we’re under just our names. So I’m going to be at Natalie Kovarik on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. And Tara is going to be Tara Vander Dussen on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well.

Stu

(52:03)

Wonderful.

Natalie

(52:03)

So you can usually find us under our personal names.

Stu

(52:05)

Fantastic. We will share that in the show notes. And Natalie and Tara, loved the conversation. Fantastic. Really appreciative of your time.

Tara

(52:16)

Thank you for having us on.

Natalie

(52:18)

Thanks. Yeah, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.

Stu

(52:21)

Good stuff. Thanks again.

The post Natalie Kovarik & Tara Vander Dussen: A Unique Perspective on Agriculture appeared first on 180 Nutrition.