1166: Andy Morgan | How I Finally Got Shredded (And You Can Too)

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Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

We want a healthy body weight.

So this reduces our disease risk.

We live longer.

We look better, and we can do what we want to do easier.

It's easier for you to get off of the floor after you've been playing with your son and daughter, right?

When you're lighter and more muscled.

Your health is better, your fitness is better, and your longevity tends to be better.

Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger.

On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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Today on the show, longtime personal friend and one of the people largely responsible for me becoming shredded and being in the best shape of my life, Andy Morgan, host of the Ripped Body Podcast.

In this conversation, we'll dive into the specific training and nutrition he coached me in, which allowed me to get into the literally, I'm in the best shape of my life.

We also dive into fitness industry myths and nonsense, why diet beats exercise, how to create habits and systems that actually stick with you to help you improve the quality of your life.

Andy's not my trainer.

He was my diet coach.

I actually needed that to kind of get off my butt and stay off of it.

The stuff I learned from Andy was, I can't overstate it.

I mean, it's really, truly life-changing.

Y'all know I rarely cover health stuff, but I wanted to make an exception here just because I'm living proof and the results I've got have probably added at least a decade to my life, if not more.

And plus, I'm hot again, which is, you know, kind of nice.

All right, here we go with Andy Morgan.

I started getting fit pretty recently in the scheme of things, the last five years or so.

And it was because I was playing with my son Jaden on the floor.

And it took me maybe literally 15 to 20 seconds to get up off the floor at that point.

And I went, wow, I'm getting old.

And it just didn't sit right with me that I couldn't get up easily off of the floor at age, I think I was 41.

Like no spring chicken, but also not old by most people's standards.

So I was venting to a friend of mine.

He hooked me up with a trainer because I'd given him a business idea that I ended up taking off.

I worked at the trainer.

Trainer didn't let up on me.

Dot, dot, dot, best shape of of my life.

But before I was thin, I was still really strong, but I was, I had a belt line.

I had a little bit of blubber hanging over my belt.

I had love handles that I'd never gotten rid of in my entire life.

And, you know, I had clothes I bought that I couldn't really wear because they looked kind of like a fat dude in a tiny shirt, which is what they were.

And I was asking people what to do and there was no good answers.

It was eat less.

eat less takeout.

Okay.

So I started eating a ton of vegetables.

I was still gaining weight and it just didn't make any sense.

And a friend of mine who runs a podcast called Mind Pump was like, do you weigh your food?

And I was like, that's a bridge too far.

That's for OCD weirdos and bodybuilders.

That Venn diagram is a lot of overlap, by the way, but it didn't make sense to me.

I was like, that's got to be the biggest pain in the ass in the world.

Weighing your food.

I mean, give me a break.

And then a week or two later.

After checking the scale of just consistently gaining weight, even though I was literally only eating vegetables and I thought, for sure, I'm going to lose weight this week.

I just ended up weighing my food and realizing, oh my God, I'm probably eating 3,000 calories a day and I should probably be eating more like two.

And that kicked everything off.

I mean, dot, dot, dot.

I ended up asking you for a bunch of dieting advice and then I ended up hiring you or your company, I should say, as a coach.

And that was the beginning of major, major change in my life.

And I know I've been talking for a minute, so I'm going to let you jump in here, but it's hard to overstate how much you learn about your body and about food by weighing it.

And it is actually really stinking easy when you get started with it like i could hug you for a minute and then punch you in the face yeah you're going to remember the one second of the punch rather than the 59 seconds of hug more right sadly so the interesting thing you have no idea where i'm going right now no i was like okay this better have a payoff

no i just enjoy uh imagining punching you in the face my friend no so the interesting thing here is you remember all of the vegetables you were eating because you didn't particularly enjoy them yeah they were not good but then when you actually logged all your food, you realized that, oh, actually, yeah, I forgot about all of these other foods that I was eating as well.

It's just I pumped up all of my vegetable intake.

That's the thing that was sticking in my mind.

So therefore, I was thinking, no, I'm only eating vegetables.

The truth of the matter is, no, you're not only eating vegetables.

You're forgetting about those high-calorie salad dressings.

You're forgetting about the croutons in there and maybe the raisins and whatever else.

And then there's then the snacks that the quote-unquote healthy snacks that you've got from your cupboard in the back of the kitchen that the companies are sending you because they're desperate for them right to like get on your show right to be a sponsor that's right it can be very illuminating for people to track their food for a couple of weeks the other thing you probably discovered was you thought it would be a pain in the ass and it was initially you've got to learn the ux of the app right right how to use the app you've also then got to weigh those foods and punch them in and figure out how to do the search but then after about two weeks what people typically find is ah actually i only eat about 20 things right And now they're already stored.

Like, it's super simple to just log.

And by 20, I mean, that's if you count sauces that go on the salads and stuff.

And we use Macro Factor, both of us, right?

Use that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we'll link it in the show notes.

I've talked about it many times on the show before.

It's the single, the best money you'll spend all year.

I think it's like 80 bucks a year or something.

Don't quote me on that.

But yeah, it remembers what you eat.

So I have recipes in there where I just push morning protein shake and it's like, oh, two cups of milk, a scoop of this and some creatine and then a little bit of whatever.

And then it's like, yeah, that's it.

Or you can put in breakfast.

It's like, okay, chia seed pudding, yogurt, and whatever else.

And it's just, that's it.

And it just logs everything.

You're right.

It's 20 things and then you can group them up.

And learning Macro Factor, the learning curve on this is really tiny.

I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself here because what I'm trying to do with this episode is tell people, I want to convince people of a couple of things.

One, it is about what you're eating.

It's almost certainly not about your, so I sound like an a-hole when I say this, and I want you to back me up here.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it's not your genetics and it's not your metabolic whatever that you might think that you have.

Some people are hungrier than others.

I'll give you that.

The 0.1% has some sort of weird thing, thyroid thing, whatever.

But I was like, oh, well, I've always been sort of 10 to 15 pounds overweight.

So it's definitely just me.

It can't be what I'm eating because I would have been thin at some point in my life other than when I was a teenager.

And then I started counting my food and I got an appropriate number of calories calories per day.

And it was like, oh, I actually, I can't stay fat.

It's not, I'm literally not even able to.

I'd have to throw the app away and start eating pounds of Cheetos.

I had to try pretty hard to stay that chubby my whole life.

I had to try.

So a lot of people lean on these same excuses and you don't know that you're making a BS excuse at the time.

You really do think, at least I really did think, oh, I just have this certain type of body.

I'm a mesomorph or whatever, right?

I'm just naturally going to be 10 to 15 pounds overweight.

There's nothing I can do about it unless I do some extreme thing.

And that is just not really true, right?

There's a few things I want to pick out here.

First, the 10 to 15 pounds overweight.

This is what you initially had in mind.

Yeah.

But we ended up losing, what is it, something like 40, 45 pounds of fat, we estimate, based on your stomach circumferences and how tight they came in.

It's no spoiler, I suppose.

But yeah, I started out to lose 15 pounds thinking.

If I lose 15 pounds, but what you're thinking when you think I'll lose 15 pounds is you're thinking, I will lose 15 pounds exclusively in my stomach and love handles and face.

You're not thinking, I've got five pounds of fat between my organs that I've never seen and that only shows up on a DEXA scan or some sort of other machine thing.

And so, yeah, I lost 40 pounds of fat and I gained, I think it was 11 or 12 pounds of muscle.

It's hard to estimate that kind of thing.

But when I tell people I lost 40 pounds of fat, my friends are like, that doesn't make sense.

I didn't even change clothing sizes, really, until the very end of my weight loss and fitness journey in terms of like my body type.

But that fat was there.

It came off my booty and my thighs and my belly and from between my organs.

I had a lot of fat between my organs.

And when I lost that, my blood pressure dropped.

Whereas my doctor was like, I got to put you on these BP meds if this stays as high as it is.

And then when I went back, he's like, oh, you cured yourself of high blood pressure, even though you're genetically predisposed to it, because I am.

He's like, wow, that's no small feat.

So the reason I'm doing a fitness episode when I never do fitness episodes and I don't even allow guests who are health and fitness to pitch this show, is because this is probably saving my life, just given the fact that heart disease and high blood pressure runs in my family, and I don't have those anymore.

Yeah, so we should say that you're about to get a whole bunch of emails just telling me that I'm an idiot.

Well, yeah.

Yeah, this is why you don't have people like myself on, but you've had me on because we've been friends for four, five years.

We've known each other for about seven.

Yeah.

So

yeah,

here we go.

I'm going to try and not tread on too many people's sacred cows here.

Don't even feel bad.

When I did an episode about Ozempic or when I do an episode about anything, people are like, you don't understand.

I just can't lose weight.

It's actually impossible.

I feel bad, but I also know that that's almost certainly not true.

Okay, so there is no doubt that there are genetic factors and there are environmental factors here.

You just look around.

Most people are not tracking their calories.

Most people are not trying to work out hard and diet hard.

We go through phases, but you look at the average person, right?

And they're not.

You look at the population, you can see that there are some people that are skinnier than others.

Why is that?

It's because the hunger and fullness cues, the way that skew us towards higher or lower body fat percentages.

Some people can stay naturally very lean without much effort, whereas other people have to work super, super hard with that.

So there's no denying that there are genetic factors involved, but there's still a lot that we can do.

You may not get ABS lean and be able to sustain that year-round comfortably and feel great in your skin.

Some people will.

Some people are going to need to hold another three, four, five-ish percent of body fat on there to just feel good and be able to have that balance of enjoyment in their life.

Beers with the boys on occasion, right?

Still have nachos with their kids and family when they've got Friday night movie night or whatever.

But the key there is balance, right?

And the trade-off that you want to make to get where you want to be physique-wise.

If we can just back up for a second, you said this is important to you because you believe that it saved your life.

Yeah.

I just want to be clear, like, because people go, oh, you're fat shaming, or oh, you're taking this anecdotal case of you getting a six-pack when you're 44.

And you're just saying, like, hey, everyone should do this.

And look, I'm proud of where I'm at, but the real win here is reversing my triglycerides and cholesterol trend that I've had going for a decade, reversing high blood pressure that I've had pre-hypertension, to be technical, going for at least a decade.

There's no sign of it anymore at all.

And also being stronger and being able to get off the floor easily and being less aches and pains.

Like I basically reversed the biological age of my body in very obvious ways that I can see and feel.

And I'm in the best shape of my life at 45.

Now, I put the asterisk next to best shape of my life at 45 because the key to that was being in terrible shape for the previous 44 years of my life.

Okay.

So I don't recommend this strategy necessarily, but it's just that it can be done.

And screw the visible, you know, abs or whatever a lot of people think they want.

The key is there's people right now, my age, who are going on blood pressure medication when probably they just have visceral fat between their organs that if they lost it, they could reverse this trend.

They could at least give it a shot.

And let's make it more real.

You said that one of the aha moments for you was when you were.

Playing with Jaden.

Yeah.

And it hurt to get up.

You probably heard yourself going

as you stood up.

It just felt like I was doing squats when I was getting up off of a hardwood floor.

It was ridiculous in hindsight.

And then the way you felt then with Juniper just two years later must have been massively different for doing the same thing.

Yeah, it was.

And it still is.

I still play with my kids on the floor and roll around and wrestle.

And that was stuff where I was like, oh, I can't because of my shoulder.

I can't because of my hip.

I can't because of my knees.

I don't have knee, hip, and shoulder pain anymore.

Right.

It all went away.

And I wasn't big enough where that was likely caused by excess fat and body weight.

It was likely the knee, shoulder, and hip pain was because I sat all day and didn't move enough.

So this isn't just about going on some sort of crazy diet.

It's about getting stronger as well as losing things like visceral fat and the fats that harm you and reversing bad health trends.

I wasn't really into fad diets, but I was being bombarded with fat diet stuff that actually, even if I didn't do it, discouraged me.

I don't know if this is going to make sense, but if you hear this episode and you go, oh, all I need to do is weigh my food with the kitchen scale and enter it into Macro Factor.

If that doesn't sound too hard, you're right.

But if you go, What about intermittent fasting?

I've heard of that.

What about keto?

Do I need to do that?

But then there's carnivore.

What's the difference between that and keto?

I better research that.

And then also there's this other blah, blah, blah.

You just go, you know what?

And what I did is, I go, you know what?

This is there's so many moving parts to this that I don't even have time to wrap my mind around all this.

And I'm just not going to do it because I got kids.

I can't sit here and research keto, carnivore, weigh my food.

And it's like, oh, but you can actually just ignore everything and weigh your freaking food and put it in the app.

And that's all you need to do.

The rest of it is just like Instagram bro science.

So we can talk about specific fads or diets or methodologies and debunk them.

We can also talk about why there is so much nonsense in the fitness industry, the nutrition and training space.

I'd actually like to start there.

Because what we're going to do is kill someone's sacred cow that's working for them.

Yeah.

And who cares?

Who cares if we are for or against keto or carnivore or veganism?

It doesn't matter.

Why is the fitness industry so filled with nonsense?

What's wrong with the incentives?

Where instead of saying, hey, man, like my buddy from Mind Pump, hey, man, weigh your food and just keep track of it in Macro Factor.

He wasn't selling me anything.

But why then am I seeing an influencer who's doing a backflip on a trampoline?

He's like, you can only do this if you eat my protein bars.

I think people see where this is going, but I want to hear from you.

We have a massive misinformation problem right now and a misalignment of incentives.

There's a problem from the advertising side and there's a problem from the content side.

So you've just mentioned about the bat flips.

So this is now a content side.

So really three things in here.

So information that's labeled as cutting edge gets the most attention or contrarian ideas, they get the most attention.

And so there's an incentive there to come out with kind of wild statements, wacky statements, right?

Yeah.

Or you could brand it as cutting edge.

Now, let's say that you're talking about quote-unquote cutting edge science.

The problem is that cutting edge ideas are, by definition, immature.

So what this means is that we have exaggerated claims, flawed logic, and pure speculation stated as unchecked fact on podcasts and social media everywhere.

Now, this is the content side, right?

Because as a podcaster, your job, Jordan, I'm not picking on you.

I think your podcast is very good.

In fact, we have a chat where we...

I'm not sure if you want to talk about the chat.

It's fine.

We have a chat group where I send them potential sponsors and they tell me if it's total bullshit or not.

And the chat is called, is it bullshit?

And unfortunately, a lot of potential sponsors turn out to be bullshit and we have to turn them down.

Yeah, you realize you just put a target on my head from Big Supplement right now, right?

That's right.

Well, you already probably had it because you're like, hey, take creatine and protein and everything else is probably nonsense and you don't need it.

Yeah.

Maybe it's some caffeine.

Do people count that as a supplement though?

I mean, it's in coffee.

It's in Daika.

Like, I don't know.

Maybe they do.

Anyway, continue.

Yeah, so if we have a look then at the advertising side, right?

So you've just touched on that.

This chat has cost cost you over the years hundreds of thousands of dollars easily easily

so on the advertising side right people want to believe in shortcuts and miracles this is human nature because stuff is confusing and things are hard and people are very happy to sell you these shortcuts and these miracles so the miracle cures they tend to be the most profitable because they're not based in science so they fill up the advertising slots because they can afford to bid the highest on these advertising slots, right?

That's right.

And most content creators do not have the level of integrity that you do, nor are they incentivized to look too deeply into what is being claimed from their sponsors.

Because they're being offered a $20,000 check to

like.

It is tempting.

Well, when you put it that way, I usually don't ask how much they're willing to spend before I turn them down because I don't want to know.

I just, I want to know if it's good or not.

Don't tell me.

I even told the sales team at Podcast One, I go, Don't come to me and say, but they're offering this, because it just makes me feel FOMO and horrible for turning down, you know, whatever this is.

I'm already, if I, if I said no at $10,

I'm going to say no at $100,000.

It's just going to be more painful.

So just don't tell me what it is, right?

Don't tell me the price.

This is smart.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If we can't trust the influence, and then who can we trust?

But if we can't trust the Instagram algorithm to feed us stuff, what red flags can people look for to spot nonsense?

Because if somebody says, hey, take, I don't know, whatever, NAD or something like that, and I'm just picking this out of the blue.

I I don't know if it's good or not.

I'm not going to go, oh, well, that's a relatively new thing.

I don't know.

I don't even know that NAD is in the thing that this person is mentioning, right?

I just, he's saying that he uses it.

What red flags do we have that we can go, oh, that was something that Jordan and Andy said was maybe BS.

I should look into it before I hit the purchase button.

Sure.

So there are two frameworks for nutrition and training that I want to teach you.

We have them in the form of a pyramid.

And this is the hierarchy of importance for looking at things as to how they affect health and body composition.

I'll come to those in a minute.

But there are two things mainly.

First is, does it seem too good to be true?

If yes, then it probably is.

And the second thing is, does the person speaking caveat their language?

How certain do they sound and come across when they're speaking?

Are they saying, well, the research suggests that there is a high degree of likelihood that, but the problem is that these caveated statements, they're less persuasive.

Exactly.

You've had many persuasive episodes, right?

Yeah.

And unfortunately, the real scientists, the people who really respect the evidence, they will speak with this caveated language, but then they sound less persuasive.

Therefore, they get less attention.

Therefore, they aren't invited on to different shows.

That's right.

Science all across the board has this problem, though, right?

Yeah.

I remember during COVID, people were saying, well, it could be this and it could also be this.

And we know with a certain degree of likelihood it's this.

But the person who's like, if you buy this colloidal silver spray, it will protect you against COVID 100%.

That's much more persuasive, even though it's complete bullshit from Alex Jones or whatever.

Love a bit of Alex Jones, me.

They're turning the freaking frogs gay.

I mean,

is that actually one of his quotes?

Yeah, he said they're putting chemicals in the water that are turning the freaking frogs gay.

It's insane, but unfortunately, fortunately, That was something that actually does kind of make sense because the frogs, while they're not turning gay, frogs can, I forget the name for this, but if there's too many male frogs or if the pH of the water, this, that, and the other thing, they can turn into female frogs and reproduce asexually.

So it's like the one not totally insane thing that he said is one of his most famous quotes.

But anyway, we're not here to talk about that piece of garbage, human.

We're here to talk about the pyramid of nutrition, which I swear I'm going to let you explain at some point.

Well, if we can back up, there are four pillars to health, fitness, and longevity.

These are things that we all want.

There's sleep, there is stress management, there is exercise, and there is nutrition.

Now, I'm not qualified to talk about sleep and stress management.

I'm going to stay in my lane here.

We help guys

look like they lift, basically, get in good shape.

I mean, Rip Body is the brand.

That's what we do.

But the funny thing is, when you get in really good shape, all of a sudden your health is better.

your fitness is better and your longevity tends to be better, right?

So let's first think what we're optimizing for.

There are three things here.

We want a healthy body weight.

So this reduces our disease risk.

We live longer.

We look better and we can do what we want to do easier.

It's easier for you to get off of the floor after you've been playing with your son and daughter, right?

When you're lighter and more muscled, right?

Can I ask you what the body fat percentage?

I saw something that was like the healthiest male body fat percentage is between 10 and 13, which is I mean, you're shredded basically if you have that level of body fat, most likely.

Is that true?

Because that's a little bit disappointing because that's tough.

It's tough to achieve.

Yeah, no, no.

No.

I don't know where you got that.

Yeah, I saw that a million different places and I was like, oh, that almost looks like a credible thing.

I've got to double check on that.

Because if you have 10% body fat, I mean, you are like fully beach ready and probably one of the most shredded dudes on that beach.

Yeah, 10% body fat is super lean.

Yeah.

I wouldn't know.

But yeah, yeah, I assume so.

Sub 20 for men, sub 30 for women, because women contain more essential fat.

I see.

Contain.

Sorry, that's a weird way of phrasing it.

Certain parts of them contain that fat, I guess.

Yes.

That's all we should stay.

We should leave that right there.

Yes.

So healthy body weight.

That's number one.

Cardiovascular fitness.

Okay, so this reduces our disease risk.

We can live longer and we can do what we want to do easier, right?

If you have four flights of stairs that you need to get up and you're absolutely knackered by the time you get up them, out of breath, like feeling bad, like this is not good.

So we want to have a degree of cardiovascular fitness so we can do all of the activities that we want to do.

It's also going to help us live longer and strength.

So when we're strong, we look better, we can do what we want to do easier, and we can maintain independence into old age for longer.

So a healthy body weight, if we consider that, that's mainly driven by our diet.

Cardiovascular fitness and strength are developed through exercise.

And so let's talk about those things.

How do we get a healthy body weight and how do we stay cardiovascular fit and get in cardiovascular fit shape and stay strong?

I want to separate these things because one of the problems that I had was hired a trainer, worked out with trainer for, I don't even know, it was probably like a year or two years.

Maybe it was about 18 months.

And I went, why am I still gaining weight?

And he's like, well, what do you eat?

And I was, of course, I just told him I didn't have anything logged.

And I was like, oh, you know, like lots of vegetables with craploads of random Chinese sauces on them that have a shitload of calories.

Oops, didn't know that.

Salad, sure.

Oh, but it has bacon on it.

It has egg on it.

It has salad dressing on it.

And it, you know, who knows what else in it.

And even that, that was my healthy food.

That doesn't count the nights where I had pizza for dinner.

And then I had leftovers the next day for lunch.

I didn't realize how caloric all this stuff was.

So I was actually gaining weight.

Some of it was muscle.

Some of it was fat.

And then when I decided that I needed to lose the actual fat in order to lower my blood pressure,

among other reasons, basically what I'm trying to say is there's a lot of people out there who are working out like demons six days a week.

And they're like, why am I still not thin and ripped?

And that's because you're doing 20% or 30% of what you need to do.

The other issue that I'd like to cover is why you don't have to suddenly become a marathoner, because I think people assume cardio is what gets rid of fat.

And as soon as I found out that that wasn't necessary from, I think it was you, the angels were singing at that point in time because I was not looking forward to going running at all.

I'd already tried running.

I don't want to buy an elliptical machine.

I have a Peloton.

It's got clothes on it.

That's where my clothes go.

I'm not riding that thing either.

Right.

So I just didn't want to do that.

And it turns out you don't really need to do that either.

And I think that's music to a lot of people's ears.

So in order to lose weight, we need to stay in a calorie deficit, right?

The way that we can have a calorie deficit is by moving more or eating less.

Eating less is far easier and far more efficient than trying to move more.

You can't really outrun your math.

Even if you, say, do cardio two or three times a week for half an hour, medium intensity, right?

You hit the gym two to three times a week, lifting some weights, your total calorie burn from that is only going to make up about 5% to 10%

of your total energy burn throughout the week.

Because all of the rest is just what is needed to maintain your body as it is, your metabolic rate, maintaining crucial function.

And then all of the other activity that you just generally do.

So trying to then increase that even more, because most people aren't doing that anyway, right?

It's just a losing strategy because people don't have time for it.

So the easiest thing to do is to control your math, is to look after your nutrition.

And so calorie balance is that first layer of the nutrition pyramid.

So if anyone wants to Google this, the Muscle and Strength Pyramid Nutrition.

The training one is Muscle and Strength Pyramid Training.

This is on your website?

Yeah.

So we'll just link to it in the show notes so people can go and click on that yeah sure hey fluffy put down the pizza and pick up some of the fine products and services that support this show we'll be right back

hi i'm william googe a viewery collaborate and professional ultra runner from the uk i love to tackle endurance runs around the world including a 55 day 3064 mile run across the us so i know a thing or two about performance wear my go-to daily short is the core short from view it's perfect for my daily run in the gym strength training, or even when I'm taking a day off, relaxing, doing some stretching, and recovering the best way I can.

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All right, back to Andy Morgan.

I want to pause on one thing that you said that is crucial, which is you can never outrun your mouth.

There's a joke in there somewhere, but basically...

You ever go for a bike ride and you're like, oh, I tracked it on my Apple Watch.

I burned 250 calories.

Then you go to Starbucks and you get a small coffee and you're like, oh, that cookie thing looks good.

And you get that and you go, wait, hold on.

If you're entering it in a macro factor, like, how is that 350 calories?

So I burnt 250 calories, but biking for an hour and I just ate that with this tiny snack that I got with my coffee that I really didn't necessarily need.

That's one of those things that you get from weighing your food and logging your food where you just suddenly realize that you really can never out-exercise what you are putting down your gullet.

It's basically impossible.

Yeah, it's just too hard.

I was in Starbucks the other day and I thought to have a look and I think the lowest calorie item from the, let's say, delicious snack section was 360 calories.

And then the highest was something like 500.

This was in England.

They were all within that range.

And you would be lucky to burn that much if you did an hour of cardio.

And weights is even less because you're not lifting the entire time you're having rest.

You can't really outrun your mouth.

You need to learn to control your diet.

And it is still good to do some form of cardiovascular exercise, but you've got to do something that you enjoy.

So I made the mistake of

doing a marathon a couple of years ago, the Honolulu Marathon 2023.

Merry Christmas to me.

Yeah.

Don't like running.

I've never liked running.

Didn't do any running.

Just decided that, yes, I was going to do a marathon.

And my girlfriend likes to run.

I thought I'd join her.

And support her.

And I basically cried my way around.

In fact, I think it's something like the 1918 mile mark.

I did actually start crying because I was in so much pain because my knee had just given up.

Right.

And then because your name badge has, it literally says Andrew and then your number.

So people are saying, come on, Andrew, you can stop crying.

You whimper.

These people were so nice.

I'll tell you, man, Americans on average, so nice.

So nice.

This would just not be the case in England.

People would just be like, quit crying, Andrew.

Yeah, right.

So.

That was my last run.

I made it.

I did it, but I never ran again.

Well, okay, I did something with good intentions, but I needed to find a hobby that I could enjoy.

Road cycling, getting out to the mountains.

That's something I can really get down with.

So I've grown to really enjoy that.

So that's my now cardiovascular exercise.

And people also think that cardio has to be some kind of crazy, you're about to vomit level of intensity.

And it turns out that a lot of what you do in zone two or zone three, which we don't have to get into the specifics of that, but that's basically like light.

You can still hold a conversation with somebody when you're doing it is is totally fine.

And you can do that for an hour power walking down a nice nature trail or hiking and you're good.

You don't have to be doing an Iron Man or whatever or a swim where you can barely breathe in order to start burning fat or having your heart feel a benefit from it.

So these are all things that I didn't really know, right?

Because my circle of friends is full of extremists, you know, people who go, oh, yeah, you want to go skiing?

Oh, that sounds fun.

What are you doing?

Well, we're being helicoptered in and then we're going to parachute down.

And when we land, we're going to go down this thing and there's probably going to be an avalanche.

So make sure you bring a backpack that inflates and a beacon.

And I'm like, dude, I'll see you guys at the bar afterwards because that sounds horrible.

You know, or people who go surfing, but they go surfing in the Solomon Islands.

They don't just go to Santa Cruz.

So I basically thought in order to get fit like these guys, I had to start living my life like these guys.

And that's just not the case.

And I think a lot of people who are more or less sedentary have that misconception.

If you're currently not making a change, you need to think about the things that you need to dial in.

For some people, it's going to need to be far more detailed than others and far more intense than others.

But if you currently open your phone, have a look at your health app on your phone, what's your step count?

If it's particularly low, just a few thousand, well then making time for just a couple more short walks during the day.

We say to people, try and get around 70,000 steps.

That's realistic for most people if they can carve out just a little bit of time.

First thing in the morning, maybe last thing at night, or just a little like 10, 15 minute walk after meals.

I do phone calls while I'm outside walking.

And, you know, at first people go, oh, isn't that annoying?

Sometimes there's wind, sometimes there's cars.

I just literally tell people I'm outside getting my steps in.

No one has complained about this in years.

Yeah.

It's funny.

There's a friend here.

I was just at home.

I just got back.

Pete, he was telling me that he takes calls, business calls while he's jogging.

People love it.

They're like, oh, what a great idea.

No one's bothered.

Because they're not there for the perfect audio quality, are they?

They're there for the human.

And what's more human?

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Look, I won't be doing the podcast while I'm outdoors anytime soon.

So don't have to, people don't have to worry about that.

But there's absolutely no reason to sit inside and do a call.

And look, the people who are like, oh, we, we do Zooms.

You should just ask your manager if you can do the Zoom while walking.

Just tell them, you know, hey, look, I might be a little bit off camera because I'm walking.

It depends on your company, but a lot of people have done this.

And their manager goes, oh, yeah, you know, Chloe's out walking through her neighborhood.

If you're just sitting there on mute anyway, why do people need to see you?

They don't.

They really, really don't.

And that could be the difference between losing, I don't know, a couple pounds a month or not, just those extra steps.

That did a lot for me in the beginning.

Yeah, absolutely.

What you want to do is you want to make incremental changes.

Incremental changes as small and easy for you to make as possible so that you start seeing a change.

And that change could be the scale weight, the change could be the stomach measurements.

Those are really the main ways that I suggest that you start to track things.

It could be your heart rate level after you have finished a certain activity and how that number becomes lower over time.

It could be how much you lift.

This is just an obvious one, right?

Can you bench press more than you could like three months ago, right?

Is your number going up every session?

And if we think about what people should consider doing, some kind of strength training two to four days a week, some kind of cardio, two to four times a week, ideally.

If you're not doing anything right now, then once is great and is going to make a difference.

So you want to do something hard enough that you're continually improving and that can be heavier, longer, faster, or more often.

I want to go back to the logging of food.

The app Macro Factor also allows you to see how much fiber you're getting every day.

And I was curious and I said, how much fiber am I getting?

Because some days I eat vegetables and some days I don't.

And my LDL was still going crazy.

even just a few months ago.

And I was really getting nervous about it because it went down and I was like, I got this under control.

And it started to go up again.

And it turned out I was getting about 10% of the fiber per day than I needed on most days.

So I threw chia seed pudding in there, which I've recommended on the show before that we just make at home.

And after eating it every single day for a month, because it's delicious, or six weeks, I should say, I did blood work again and my LDL dropped 42 points, which is kind of insane.

I went from, oh, this is higher than it should be.

And your doctor is concerned to, wow, you did a, your cholesterol is great.

And that happened in six weeks, which is kind of a miracle.

I'm not saying you just have to eat chiazoo pudding.

That's probably a good idea if you're not getting enough fiber.

But the point is, this is the kind of thing that you would never really know unless you were logging what you ate and doing blood work, let's say every four times a year to see how healthy you actually are.

I just would never have known and I would have ended up with long-term heart issues just like every other man in my family, most likely.

It's something that people also also aren't going to tell you because it's not a very sexy thing to say.

Hey, right, have more fiber because if you have more fiber, that's going to impact your, lower your LDL levels.

Yeah.

And then that's going to reduce your coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease risk.

Ooh, that's not going to go viral, is it?

Right?

No, it's not going to happen on Instagram.

Your doctor will tell you as he writes a prescription for statins or whatever it is that you have to take from some sort of other pharmaceutical.

The point is, it's a data-driven approach instead of a feeling-based approach.

I used to be the feelings-based guy.

Should I go up and wait today in my whatever?

Sure, I guess.

I'm feeling pretty strong.

I might as well.

I feel like I got enough sleep.

I might as well.

And then I don't know what I did last week anyway, so I might as well just add a little bit more.

That doesn't work, especially when you're talking about food.

There's a video out there, I think you sent me where this guy goes over two different lunches.

It's got almonds, some sort of other stuff in there, and blah, blah, blah.

And one was like 950 calories, and the other one was 600 calories.

And you cannot tell the difference when you're looking at these two things because it's a handful of this and a handful of that and a pinch of this and a little bit of that.

And by visual, you really cannot tell.

But if you weigh it, it's a huge difference that could basically erase your calorie deficit for the whole day.

And so this data-driven approach is really what the big change is.

That was probably Ben Carpenter.

I'd like to give him a shout out.

I think he's just an absolute gem in our industry that's filled with terrible people.

Ben Carpenter, put a link to him in the show notes, please, as well.

I'll send you his Instagram later.

What you're talking about there or highlighting there is the effect of the calorie density of food.

So when we say increase your vegetable intake, what we're doing there is we're increasing the actual volume of food that you have.

And that is going to have an effect on helping you with fullness, helping us with fullness in satiety.

Let's take the extremes, right?

You're just going to eat broccoli or you're going to eat brownies.

How much broccoli, the actual volume of broccoli, would you end up eating, right?

You wouldn't be able to finish it all.

And of course, I'm not suggesting that at all, but you could very easily.

You're talking about an equal number of calories of brownies or broccoli.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

So if I have a tiny brownie and it's 250 calories, that's so much broccoli that your stomach is going to explode, essentially.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is obviously taking a very extreme example, but it's not just about the calorie content, because you could log in your tracking app, the macro fats that we've been talking about.

You could log in there and have your technically perfect calorie deficit, which is 2,000 calories in your case, let's say, but you're not going to be able to sustain it because you're so hungry.

Yes, it was delicious to eat those brownies at the time, but you're still just aching with hunger.

So what can you do?

So you've got your calorie budget.

This is the base layer of the pyramid of importance.

Just to go over this, it's calories are the most important thing.

Then it is your macronutrients.

So this is protein and then carbs and fats.

Protein is what helps repair and build the tissues of the body.

Carbs and fats are what fuel us.

Then we've got micronutrients.

So these are the nutrients in small quantities.

These are the vitamins and minerals that we have.

We can also throw fiber in there as well.

Then we've got nutrient timing and then we've got supplements right at the very top.

So we can basically forget supplements.

When it comes to nutrient timing, so the number of meals that we eat, just don't do anything crazy.

Like don't do just one meal a day.

If you're doing two meals a day or more, most clients will eat two to three meals a day.

Life stay is simple and your nutrient spacing is going to be totally fine.

So in terms of micronutrients, okay, eat your fruits and vegetables.

Try to have roughly a fist-sized portion of leafy green vegetables or other vegetables with every meal.

And you're having two, three meals a day.

When you're dieting, you might want to increase that to two fists worth of vegetables because, again, that's going to help you decrease the total number of calories that you're eating because you're going to feel fuller, right?

So you're going to have less issues with that fullness and hunger.

For your macronutrients, you're going to want to eat lean protein.

So this means like lean fish, white fish typically, poultry.

So this will be chicken, for example, without the skin on so that you're reducing the fat content there.

You want to be avoiding fatty steaks because you think of steak as mainly protein, but actually it's by calories.

It's mostly fat.

Really?

Okay.

You know, I did notice that whenever I put in even kind of a lean-ish filet, it's like, oh, cool.

59 grams of pro.

Wow.

Okay.

62 grams of fat.

That's basically my whole day worth of fat right there.

And it's, you know, that's dinner, not the whole day.

So you said 59 grams of protein and 62 grams of fat.

Even if it was 30 grams of fat, it's still more bicalorie than it is the protein.

Oh, that's right.

And that's because fat is nine calories per gram.

And so you very quickly blast through your calorie budget that you're working with here.

And

I would love to sit here and tell you that you should eat bacon and sausages and fatty steaks.

And that's going to be the thing that's the key to your weight loss.

And for some people, in some circumstances, they will find that that will work.

But it's not because there's any magic to just eating

like lots of meat.

I'm thinking of the carnivore diet here.

It's because they're not eating the doughnuts and the frappa shattinos and the big gulp cokes and all of the other stuff that was bumping up their calories there.

I see.

That's a good segue into why people think fad diets work because a lot of folks will go, oh, well, I swear by, I don't know, intermittent fasting because all this magical stuff happens during this window when you're fasting.

And then it kind of just turns out that if you skip breakfast and you eat a light lunch and then you eat a dinner, you're just getting fewer calories than if you ate breakfast, then second breakfast, then a snack, then lunch, then another snack, and then dinner, right?

You're just getting less calories because you start eating later in the day.

And it sounds like what you're saying, I was going to ask you why carnivore diet actually works.

I didn't even think about the fact that they're not eating the tons of bread with jelly on it and the, yeah, like the Starbucks drink or the milkshake or whatever.

They've cut all that stuff out.

All these fad diets, they basically just come down to fancy, overly complicated calorie restriction that is hidden inside some sort of magic formula where it's like you could only eat chicken okay but you're restricting calories by making sure you can only do this well you can only eat between the hours of noon and 8 p.m okay but you're just restricting calories by giving yourself an eight hour window instead of a 16 hour window like it all just comes down to that yes essentially and this is something that i was guilty of when i first got into the industry What we've got to remember here is that everything tends to be cyclical.

Like low-carb diets will be in, low-fat diets will be in.

They're given different names, but every 10 or 15 years, the same things come back in, right?

Paleo, then we had keto, but keto was more popular like in the early 2000s.

It was branded as the anabolic diet by Pasquale, very popular with bodybuilders at that time.

Then before that, it was Atkins, like same thing, different name.

I remember the Atkins diet.

And then you do that and you go to the doctor and he goes, hey, your kidneys are screaming.

Listen to your doctors, guys.

Like,

listen to them, right?

Listen to your kidneys.

That small scream sound you hear from your love handle is your kidney that just wants anything but an Atkins bar or whatever you've been feeding it for the last three months.

I was just about to confess, um, uh, forgive me, Father, but I have sinned.

I used to be a big proponent of something called lean gains.

What's that?

Which was Martin Birkin's idea of 16.8 intermittent fasting.

He was the guy who came up with that.

Okay.

And essentially, it's skip breakfast, have a big lunch and a big dinner, maybe a meal in between.

You're going to then burn more fat during the morning.

Your calorie partitioning is going to be better.

You're going to gain more muscle, lose more fat.

And if you pair that with intense reverse pyramid training, this is going to be exceptionally good for your physique.

I thought that had its advantages.

And there are certainly advantages to keeping things very simple with a low meal frequency.

But when calories are matched, when training intensity is matched, it doesn't seem to make a difference the thing that appealed to me was i had been on this train of this is the late 2000s early 2010s you have to eat every three hours you have to have protein every three hours otherwise your muscles are going to fall off now i was this naturally skinny guy like i worked very hard for my mediocre gains but i was so scared that when i would go on long motorcycle trips I would have a fanny pack on with a 500 mil bottle of water and a protein shaker because i didn't want to go more than three hours and i'd set a timer on my phone oh my god not even kidding right i was so bought into this like i was buying all of my myoplex proteins have my pre-workout my post-workout all of this stuff and here comes martin and he's like guys don't bother with that two meals three meals a day you're fine and you just want to train super intensely and the fact is most people don't train hard enough they don't push themselves close enough to failure and so these things worked but it just didn't work for the reasons that i thought and so I had to back out of that.

But that's where I was initially.

This is kind of how I got my start in the industry by teaching people about this lean games, this system.

And then I kind of realized that I was wrong.

You know, I'm fine with people doing fad diet stuff if it actually works.

Like if you're doing intermittent fasting and it's working for you, fine.

But just realize that the reason it's working is because of calorie restriction so that you don't beat yourself up on a day where you decide to have breakfast with your family.

The other reason it's important to know why these things work is because if you don't know why something works, you can never really modify the program to suit your needs.

It's impossible because you don't know why it's working.

So you don't know what you can change without breaking everything.

Exactly right.

So for intermittent fasting, right?

Skip breakfast.

Basically skipping breakfast is what we're talking about here.

Wait until lunch, eat your dinner.

Okay.

There's nothing magic about it.

However, if this helps you eat fewer calories and you're trying to lose weight, great.

But if total calories are the same, then there is not going to be any effect on weight loss if you were to have breakfast as well or have six meals, right?

It's not going to make a difference.

So do it if you find that it helps, but don't do it because your favorite influencer is ramming it down your throat and telling you that you have to do it.

Right.

Choose what you like doing.

What about bulletproof coffee?

That was a huge thing for a while.

Everybody I know did it.

They're like, it's making me smarter and taller.

And like, you could basically name any benefit that was available to humans.

And Bulletproof Coffee was doing it.

Yeah.

So so what was the claim?

It's like add 250 to 500 calories of originally it was butter, then it was grass-fed ghee, because obviously this can then be packaged and sold because it's very difficult to buy that from most people's local supermarkets.

And also, I think it was called brain octane MCT oil to your morning coffee.

because then you will burn more fat and it's going to give you more energy for your morning fast.

Because bear in mind, this was popular at a time when a lot of people were intermittent fasting, skipping breakfast.

And a certain number of people were struggling with that and they wanted to do something to combat the morning hunger that wasn't eat food.

Right.

Unfortunately.

The hint there was they weren't getting on very well with it, right?

Right.

So therefore they should have just had breakfast.

Now, bear in mind, whenever you change any meal pattern, for your body to get used to it, it takes five to seven-ish days, right?

So everyone's going to struggle with any new meal pattern after that.

That's kind of why it sucks after you've been on away on holiday, jet lag, it kind of messes you up there as well.

So the the idea was basically you would add 250 to 500 calories of fat to burn more fat.

Yeah, make it make sense.

Does that make any sense?

I don't know how you even make that sense.

No.

So it doesn't burn more fat.

It directly adds fat to your diet, making it harder to get into a calorie deficit and lose fat.

Because remember, fat itself is the most calorie-dense thing that we have per gram.

And this is direct fat.

And it's now liquid fat.

So food is always going to be better.

Solid calories are always going to be better than liquid calories in terms of fullness and satiety.

Oh, fullness.

Okay.

Because I was going to say I drink a crapload of whey protein between meals and stuff like that.

Is that okay?

So that is okay.

So if you're trying to sustain your calorie deficit, if you're dieting right now, which I don't think you are.

I'm gaining weight deliberately with like 200 grams of protein or something like that to get my calories in.

Great.

So if you're having something like two large chicken breasts, which will be about the size of your palm, two of those, you're probably going to be talking about 300-ish grams of weight, and then you're going to be talking about 75 grams of protein per breast, right?

So then you need to have another 50 grams, which is going to be two protein shakes.

There's nothing wrong with doing that.

Also, you're in a gaining phase.

Yes.

Your battle eventually is going to be with feeling too full.

And so liquid calories can help with that.

That's the exact problem I'm having.

I don't want to eat, but I know I need 91 grams of protein before dinner or, you know, in addition to lunch and dinner, whatever it is.

It depends on the day.

It's like, I just can't sit there and eat a chicken breast.

I'm going to explode.

But I can down an organe and get 30 grams of protein.

And then two more hours I can down, you know, work out and down another one.

And then I'm halfway more than halfway there.

I'm two-thirds of the way there.

There's a client right now, literally on Monday after his bi-weekly check-in, I said to him he had been consistently been falling short of his calorie targets by around 10% every week for eight weeks now.

As a result, he's training super hard.

The training is all on point.

He's struggling to progress and his weight is not increasing.

Why?

Because he's missing this 300 calories.

He's on about a 3,000 calorie diet.

That's roughly what he needs to gain weight at a rate of roughly three quarters of a pound per week we're targeting.

So around two and a half, three pounds per month.

But he's missing that necessary surplus.

And I've tried to get him to change his food choices, but he's been struggling with it.

And so on this Monday, I just said, look, this is what I want you to do.

Cereal crushed up into a small bowl.

Whole milk mixed with one scoop of whey protein.

I want you to have 300 calories worth of that before bed, every night moving forward.

Change nothing in the rest of your meals.

This is going to solve your problem because that is your 10% of calories.

This is your 300 calories.

It's going to be delicious, easy to eat.

I don't want you to have any guilt about it.

And then I kind of talked about, you know, we're already prioritizing the good nutritious foods.

This is not bad.

In fact, it's helping us meet our goals by providing the calorie surplus that we need, which will fuel your training, allow you to progress, allow you to gain muscle.

I think most people don't really have a calorie surplus issue.

I think most people are trying to lose fat.

Oh, before we move on, though, what do you think of these, what are they called, continuous glucose monitors?

I had one of those for a while.

All my friends with diabetes laughed at me, but I got a bunch of data.

And it was kind of interesting.

Like, wow, sushi really spikes my blood sugar.

But then I was like, what do I actually do with any of this data?

None of it was actionable.

And I had a needle stuck in my arm for a week at a time, which just felt weird.

This is a very useful piece of kit for diabetics.

Yes.

A friend of mine's son.

He's 10 years old now.

He has one.

He has to have one.

It's helping keep him alive because he's a type 1 diabetic.

This is where the technology comes from.

But now it's been marketed to healthy individuals, people, i.e.

people without diabetes.

And so the claim is essentially you have a blood glucose monitor.

You can see when your blood sugar spikes, which will be after every meal.

The brain, spoiler alert, right?

The claim is that it's going to help you with your weight management and make better dietary choices and quote unquote personalized nutrition.

The reality is, is that fluctuations in blood glucose are normal.

It ends up teaching people to fear carbs.

instead of focusing on calorie control because when we have more carbi foods carbs are sugar when we have more carbi foods, then our blood sugar will spike more.

If the whole premise of it is that you need to avoid these blood sugar spikes, then it's going to teach you to fear the carbs instead of just focusing on calorie control overall.

And it's expensive.

So it's not helping anyone other than kind of pushing them towards carb phobia and potentially disordered eating behavior.

But the tech is expensive.

You can now be on a monthly subscription model that they can get you on.

And so they can afford to have their adverts everywhere right right you've got to remember that diets and dietary fads are almost religious level further and so you have a very loud portion of the internet that will tell you that carbs are basically the devil and they will ignore and butcher all of the science like forever to die on that hill here's the thing right when it comes to this if you eat something and you do not feel good after you eaten it, don't eat it.

You don't need one of these blood glucose monitors, right?

Just don't eat it.

I see.

Well, I was just curious about that particular piece of cake because, again, I was like, what do I do with this information?

You're right.

Every time I ate carbs, it went into the red zone.

And that it was, well, eat more protein.

Okay.

But I already knew that anyway, because I eat protein all the time.

I eat one gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I think is kind of like a general fitness dude rule.

Perfect.

Is that accurate?

I know it's like 0.8 to 1.1, but I just chose one because it's easy to remember.

It kind of depends on where you're at.

If you're leaner, you need more, right?

I heard that from another friend of ours.

And I long to be in the place where I need more than one pound, one gram per pound of body weight because I'm so lean, but we're not there yet.

Yeah, so it's not really about body weight.

It's more on lean body mass.

But accurately assessing lean body mass is very hard because body fat measurement devices just don't work.

So then

we like to make recommendations based on body weight where this goes wrong though is people who are carrying a lot of fat let's say that you're obese let's say that you're 300 pounds and five foot seven you're obese at that point right i'm taking an extreme example purposefully if you were to eat 300 because you weigh 300 pounds you're having one gram per pound of body weight if you were to eat 300 grams of protein Number one, that's going to be very difficult to do.

Woof.

Yeah.

Number two, it's going to be very expensive.

So it's going to be very difficult for that person to actually sustain that diet.

You would need to drink a protein shake like every hour while you are awake to get there.

Not quite that extreme.

You'd just have like a double or a triple scoop.

Yeah, it's going to be very tough for them and it's arguably unnecessary.

So if you look down and you see your stomach rather than your knees, let's say, go with your height in centimeters.

So if you are six foot, this is about 180 grams of protein.

If you're five foot eight, then 170 grams of protein.

Five four, then about 150, 160 grams of protein.

These are good heuristics.

For someone like yourself, five of them, six feet.

Yeah, no, I wish I was six feet tall.

Now, I'm like 5'10 point something.

I put it at 175 centimeters because I can remember it.

But I eat around 190 grams of protein per pound of body weight because my wishful thinking is that I'm lean enough to need that.

But here we are.

Yeah, so you could, you're in a bulking phase right now.

So you're in a weight gain phase.

Yeah.

So whether you're in a gain phase or a weight loss phase, this also affects our actual protein needs.

You could probably go with a little bit less.

So you could probably eat 170, 180 grams of protein.

How much are you weighing right now?

165.

165.

Okay, great.

So you could probably eat 160, 165 grams of protein a day, and that would be totally fine.

But when we're dieting, having excess protein is protective of lean tissue.

Actually, you could probably eat 0.8 grams per pound of your body weight right now, so 140 grams.

But when you were dieting, you'd want to eat 1 gram per pound.

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All right, now for the rest of my conversation with Andy Morgan.

By the the way, people who are going, oh my God, math, the Macro Factor app actually does all this for you.

Because I was also like, one gram per pound of body weight, I'm not going to count this.

When you, Macro Factor, you literally say, I'm eating chicken breast.

You type it in and it says, oh, how much?

And you say, 175 grams, because that's what my kitchen scale says.

And then it says, okay, here's all the nutrients that are in there and here's how much you have left for the day.

I mean, it couldn't be made easier unless it actually grew arms and weighed the food for you.

That's the only next step that makes this thing easier.

And you can scan the barcode of your Quest protein chips, which is my new sort of obsession.

You can scan the barcode and it goes, oh, Quest protein chips, barbecue flavor.

Well, there's 19 grams of protein in here, five grams of fiber, you know, X grams of carbs, X grams of fat, and it just puts it in there.

So if people only do one thing after this episode, which is start weighing their food and putting it in Macro Factor or MyFitnessPal or whatever app of choice, then our work here is done because once you start learning about the things you're eating, I feel like you just naturally start eating less.

And then after a week and you realize you've lost two pounds or three pounds, because the first few weeks of dieting, I think the first six weeks, I lost like three pounds per week before things started to sort of slow down a little bit.

And even after that, it was like one or two pounds per week.

Water, gut content, glycogen, but you don't need to worry about that.

If you think you're losing that much and it's fat, ignorance is bliss.

That's the theme.

That was one of the themes earlier in the episode.

Go with that because it feels damn good to lose 10 pounds in a month.

The first month you're dieting and you're not starving and you don't feel disgusting and you're not eating cardboard exclusively and you're not skipping breakfast, you know, or whatever it is.

The good news with dieting, man, is like time is on your side, right?

If you just lose even a half a pound a week or a pound a week and you got to lose 50 pounds, you just diet for a year.

And it sounds really hard, but it's actually not that bad.

Because when I was dieting, I dieted initially for 10 months.

I ate pretty much whatever I wanted.

I just didn't eat as much as I wanted.

So I had a protein shake at breakfast, then I ate regular breakfast, then I went up to lunch.

And if I wanted like a burger, I just ordered a burger and then I had chicken breast and some other stuff for dinner.

And I was not complaining and I wasn't hungry and I wasn't whining.

It was not that hard.

It was just consistency over a long period of time.

And then it was like, holy shit, I can see my abs.

The level of pain involved in this is so much less than people think.

That's, I think, my main point here.

Yeah.

You also needed to have a little bit of discipline.

And that mainly starts at when you are eating out, choosing the right food on the menu.

That's discipline number one.

Ideally, you'll choose it before you get there so that you're not choosing based on hunger, but rather what you need.

So look at the menu online.

And then

discipline number two, when that food comes, if it is obviously too much, leave it on the plate.

It took me a while to get my mom and dad's voice out of my head when you leave half a sandwich on the plate and they go, there are kids starving in Africa.

And you're like, or China or whatever it was back in the 80s, right and you just go that's okay this sandwich is not gonna help them it's not getting there it's not you not achieving your physique goals because you left something on plate doesn't help anyone no no that's a good point when you start dieting you will lose more weight in the first week to 10 days than you will on average for the weeks after that and that is because you're losing water gut content and glycogen not just fat what is glycogen yeah so glycogen is uh carbs stored in your muscles along with water.

Sorry, muscles and liver.

So whenever our blood sugar is running low, we will take the stored carbs out of the liver to help bring that back up.

When we are trying to fuel our training, then we will take the glycogen directly from our muscles to fuel that training.

When we go into a calorie deficit, then we reduce our carbohydrate intake, along with a bunch of other things, and food content overall.

And so because we're eating less, the amount of poop that we have in our gut is lower.

Yeah.

And so it's weighing less, right?

You may have seven to 10 pounds in there, but now you're eating a lot less.

You got less poop in you.

And so you weigh less because of that.

Also, you're eating fewer carbs.

Luckily, I'm always full of shit.

But yes, I understand.

I understand where you're going with this.

Fewer carbs.

Yeah, fewer carbs.

So our overall glycogen levels are lower.

That's okay.

We don't need to be maxed out.

But our overall glycogen levels are lower.

And so this is something to bear in mind.

So just because you lost three pounds in the first week and then two pounds in the next week, don't get your hopes up that you lost all fat.

Now, why is this important?

Because you said, oh, no, take it.

Just have it in your mind that you're losing a whole bunch of fat.

The inverse, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You saw where I was leading with this.

Continue.

This is where people lose their minds.

They have one bad weekend, which could just be one meal.

that's got some fries and a burger and the fries are extra salty and maybe they have a couple of beers.

This might be 2,000 calories.

This might mean that that instead of being in a 500 calorie deficit, they ate 1,000 calories too much on that day.

For context, to lose a pound of fat, you require a 3,500 calorie deficit.

So what they've actually done here is instead of having their 500 calorie deficit a day, they've eaten over by 1,000 calories.

So they would, if all of that was perfectly stored, they would have gained around a third of a pound of fat.

But what happens is, well, they're now having saltier food.

They're now having more food.

They've got a bunch of carbs in there.

Boom.

their body's now holding onto a whole lot more water.

There's more gut content, more glycogen is being stored.

And so when they step on the scale, if that was a Saturday on the Sunday and then the Monday, they're up by three or four pounds.

They think this is fat.

They're like, oh my goodness, this diet doesn't work.

Dieting is not for me.

I've screwed everything up.

Oh, I can't even have this one meal.

If I can't have this one meal and still manage to succeed with my goals, what is the damn point?

Because I can't live like this.

And they're right.

They can't live like that.

Right.

If that were the case, but it's not.

But then they say, screw it.

And they just start eating like crap again.

Right.

A lot of the time.

So they say, screw it.

I'm just going to eat like crap this whole week because I'm already fat.

I'll start again later.

This happens when I eat ramen.

I had ramen today.

And I know from experience that I will be maybe even up to four pounds heavier tomorrow.

Not because I ate four pounds of noodles, but because I'm so thirsty from the amount of salt that's in that ramen that I will drink a gallon of water today and I probably will keep a bunch of it.

And then on Tuesday, I'm going to lose all of that and then some.

And it's just one of those bumps that I, it's the ramen bump.

And it happens every time I eat ramen, especially at this one place.

It just happens to be really salty and delicious.

It happens every time.

It happens with noodles a lot, but especially with salty noodles.

And yeah, at first, this was really kind of terrifying because you do this really good job all week and you're like, I'm losing weight.

And then on Monday, you're like, what happened?

I've ruined the whole week.

What you don't realize is that you spend all of Tuesday peeing it out and and then you're back to you've actually lost weight like you thought you did.

It's exactly right.

You just got to ride the diet roller coaster.

Once the habits are in place, which does take time, it's a mental game.

And that's a lot of what we as coaches help people with because the mental game is really tough because they don't know what to expect, but we've seen it hundreds of times before.

And we can reassure people that, no, no, this is how it is.

Please don't worry.

Lean in, stay consistent, just don't panic.

I found that quite useful when I was coaching with your team was going, eh, I'm feeling discouraged because five days have gone by and I'm used to the scale moving down, you know, a tenth of a pound and it just stopped.

Oh, okay.

Well,

we don't have enough data right now to panic.

Let's wait until next week.

And then by next week, it's like, oh, actually, I lost a pound over the weekend because I, whatever, salty food.

eating a bunch of other small things, eating at weird times.

Oh, I went on a flight and for some reason, flying makes me a bloated sack.

I used to think I would get fat on vacations and it turned out I was just retaining water from the flights.

And that's the kind of thing when you weigh yourself every day, you log your food.

And just from knowing, look, if you're weighing yourself every day and you see patterns, flying, noodles, et cetera, you stop psyching yourself out all the time.

But the coaching got me over those humps for that 10-month initial diet where I lost the 40 pounds.

Tell me, before I forget, I want to ask about seed oils because this was one of those things that hit Reddit, Instagram.

Don't eat seed oils.

Don't eat seed oils.

And I looked at all of my protein shakes and foods I like that were doing really well for me.

And they all have some sort of seed oil in it.

And I was like, I am, do I have to not eat these anymore?

Because that was sort of devastating.

Why did these get demonized?

And is it legit or not?

No, it's not legit.

Why do they get demonized?

Because

it is the anti-position

to.

the standard position.

So it's just contrarianism in dieting?

Thank you.

It's contrarianism.

And also, it's a pseudo-scientific justification for an otherwise unjustifiable diet, which was the carnivore diet, an extreme version of a keto diet.

The thing is, we've got decades of data showing high correlation between high saturated fat intakes and cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease, decades of data.

And you mentioned about LDL levels like right at the start of this conversation.

And your doctor warning about it, right?

There's a reason for that.

There's no big conspiracy here.

And unfortunately, people are gambling now that the recommendations of the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization, the European Society of Cardiology are all wrong.

And your favorite influencer was correct.

Right, right.

Right?

Which unfortunately now has got political.

That's true.

People are going, oh, well, if the WHO says it, it's probably the opposite.

Okay, fine, but what about the American Heart Association and the European Society of Cardiology?

Well, it's one big conspiracy from big seed oil.

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how anything works.

Yes.

So

I love that particular phrase.

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how anything works.

I should tattoo that on

myself somewhere.

This is where a fad diet will potentially kill you because these things come in and they come out and you will end up having...

I mean, I do hope that this is a fad that will disappear.

The only reason that I say hope is because, based on everything in my industry over the last like three, four decades, everything just comes in cycles and it will peter out.

It's just I'm wondering whether politics is now going to keep this more out there for longer.

The risk is cumulative and irreversible if you're eating a very high fatty animal diet for extended periods.

This has now upped your baseline risk permanently.

The permanent thing freaks me out because, I mean, I grew up in Michigan in the 80s and 90s.

I've eaten all kinds of just horrific things that were probably not even actually currently classified as food right like bologna and stuff but not real bologna just like all these cold cuts and stuff that I ate which are probably like one molecule away from plastic

margarine I mean all this all this stuff man yeah freaks me out look I would love to say that you could have bacon and sausages slathered in butter like for every meal life would be good it'd be so much tastier unfortunately calories aside macros aside, it's just not sensible from a heart health and cardiovascular disease risk perspective.

Macros, by the way, for people who don't know, protein, fat, and carbs.

And again, the app will tell you this is probably what you should be getting if you're trying to lose weight, gain weight, whatever.

For someone your size, this is a healthy amount of this.

Man, is there anything you want to leave us with?

Because I don't want to overwhelm.

There's so much more we could talk about, but I don't want to overwhelm people with, oh, and there's this and there's that and the other thing.

I wanted to bust a few myths and I wanted to get people to just try weighing their food food for like three days so that they can see how much they're learning.

And then ideally, they keep doing it.

Cause I started by weighing my, I said, I'll do it for one weekend just because I have time.

And then after day one, I went, I'm probably doing this for the rest of my life.

And that was years ago.

So for you, that was your next key step.

And it's all about finding your next key step, your next big leverage point.

What do I mean by that?

You had had something of an aha moment when you were on the floor with Jaden.

You You were like, I've got to make a change.

And you started hiring a personal trainer.

And you locked yourself in, I think, with like a multi-month package.

So then you've got the financial buy-in as well.

And that's very smart.

And also you've got this social buy-in where you respect this person.

You do not want to mess with their time.

You know that they're going to turn up at your house or call in over Zoom at a specific time of day.

You don't want to mess them about.

It's disrespectful, right?

So this also worked in your favor as well.

So then you built a habit of training.

You built out your home garage gym so that then you had no excuse because time now to travel to the gym was no longer a factor.

You made everything as frictionless as possible for you.

Right.

It was sort of that James Clear thing, right?

Like, if you want to watch less TV, unplug your TV and put it in the closet.

And it's like, you want to go to the gym more?

I was like, put a gym in my garage so that it's, I trip over my squat rack on the way out to the car.

It's like, it's there.

It better get used.

Yeah, I did a lot of that friction reducing stuff.

My trainer, who's one of my close friends now, also did something smart.

During our first few sessions, he said, yeah, I said, yeah, do you ever get people who like don't show up?

He goes, yeah, I just fire them as clients.

I'm 50 years old.

I don't have time for this.

If somebody doesn't show up, they oversleep.

If it happens once, I get it.

But, you know, if it happens, if it's a habit, I just fire them as a client.

I never work with them again.

And it was sort of his subtle way of being like, Don't even think about the fact that, oh, you're still going to get paid even if I don't show up.

Cause he's like, I will just can you and not work.

I don't care.

I don't need your money that bad.

And I was like, got it, loud and clear.

And I've only missed workouts when I'm like, I have a 103 temperature and I have to go to the ER or like, I'm projectile vomiting.

It's like, that's when I miss workouts.

That's it.

Exactly.

So your next key step after this stopped working for you, i.e.

you stopped seeing physical change.

And this took you really far, right?

Your next key step there was realizing he said, what about your nutrition?

Then you.

started thinking about calories.

Then you started logging calories.

And this gave you multiple aha moments over that next week, two, three, four, that month, right?

When you're like, God, damn, that is so much.

Yeah.

Like, I didn't realize that.

Like, wow.

Like, this was your next key step.

Now, I want everyone to think about what their next key steps are.

For some people here, it's going to be just moving more, opening the app on their phone.

their health app, looking how many steps they're doing.

And if it's under 7,000, trying to get to that number.

I know people talk about 10 and 12.

These are all arbitrary numbers, but just trying to get your step count up because most people, they just walk to their car, drive where they're going to go, sit at a desk, drive the next place, eat, et cetera, right?

There's an app I have called StepsApp.

It has a widget that shows you how many steps you have, but also it'll say, hey, one brisk walk will get you to your, you can set the goal in the app, mine's 8,000.

One brisk walk for 15 minutes will take you to your goal.

And you're just like, huh, I should probably just do that at 6 p.m.

Or it'll say, you're 50% on your way to your goal.

And you can set these little reminders that get you across the finish line, which is great, because I don't want that at 9 p.m.

I want it at 6 p.m.

when I'm sitting around going, what should I do?

Hey, if one 15-minute brisk walk would take you to your goal, oh, I guess I should go for a walk.

And that has been huge.

Cumulatively, I've done, I think, probably by now, of course, millions of steps in this app, which is just bananas.

And that small nudge, super effective, super helpful for you.

It all depends on where you're at.

Let's take my dad.

He's 82 now.

He will not change his diet.

He will not go to the gym.

He sits most of the day and he's losing muscle and he cannot walk well.

Well, what was his next key step?

What can I do to actually help him?

Well, it turns out that he used to cycle when he was a teenager.

And so he bought himself a bicycle and now he cycles around the neighborhood.

Why is this a good thing?

Because it's working out his legs.

Having stronger legs means that he's able to get himself off of the toilet and we will have independence as he advances in age.

So this is his next step, right?

Let's take a friend of mine, Pete.

Pete, he hadn't exercised since university.

He hates the gym and he's tight on time because he's got kids and he also runs a business.

Well, he used to run at school.

He enjoyed it.

All he needs to do is put on his trainers, sneakers, sorry.

And then so he can go running around the block.

Easy, done.

That was literally the next best step for him.

We work with bodybuilders on our Japanese business.

There's a guy called Takeuchi.

He wasn't making the top five in placings in his shows.

What did he need to do?

His training was actually really good.

He was paying too much attention to his meal timing.

He was taking maybe too much protein and too many supplements, but they weren't degrading his performance in any way.

The thing that he needed to do is not compete every year.

He needed to take a year off so that we could spend more time in a muscle gain phase.

And then diet instead of three months before his show.

diet seven months before his show so that he could really lean out slowly and retain as much muscle mass as possible.

That was the strategy for him.

So my point here is it all depends on the person and where that person is at at the time.

My parting advice to people is, one, bear in mind that most of what we hear is nonsense.

Use that filter of, does it sound too good to be true?

If it does, then it probably is, right?

Do people caveat the language?

Number two, Focus on the basics if you want to achieve results.

That's everything we've talked about here.

There is nothing fancy.

There is no shiny object there.

Number three, keep things as simple as possible so that you can sustain it and look for your next key step, your next key leverage point like I talked about.

Four, use data to drive your decisions.

So you want to be weighing yourself.

You also want to be measuring yourself.

If you're lifting, then you want to be tracking what you're lifting.

Not just whether you're lifting more weight, but are you doing more reps?

Are you doing more sets?

And then lastly, just know that there are no shortcuts to success.

Lasting results take time, but when you take time to get those lasting results, the results last.

They're permanent.

They stay.

By the way, I reread the books, the diet adjustments manual.

I always get the titles wrong, but we'll link to them in the show notes because I reread these every year just to get like an overview of how nutrition works and how the weight loss or weight gain works or whatever it is.

It's almost like nutrition 101 and 102 for fitness purposes and weight loss purposes in these two PDFs.

Yeah, if you go to ripbody.com slash books, then you will see the Ripbody Nutrition Setup Guide.

That's a free download.

It's also going to be bundled with an email course of the seven mistakes that people make.

Right.

Which is talking about these water fluctuations.

And I've got some nice sketches in there, graphs and stuff.

You're a talented artist with your stick figures.

The other one is, okay, well, once you've got your diet set up, once things are moving, okay, now how are you going to assess that?

And how are you going to know when to make changes and what changes to make?

That's the diet adjustments manual.

That's a paid book and video package where you can see me going over people's data.

It's not particularly expensive.

It doesn't keep me in fresh undies.

Like I don't make a lot of money off of it.

But I just wrote it because I wanted to have my thoughts out there because there's only so many people that I can help, that we can help.

So summary, one, most of what we hear is nonsense.

Two, focus on the basics to achieve great results.

Three, keep things as simple as possible so that you can sustain it.

And then always try to find your next big leverage point, your next one key step.

Four, use data to drive your decisions.

And five, there are no shortcuts.

Last during results take time, but results that take time last because the habits have been set.

Again, I know I said this earlier on the show.

If people just read those books or even skim them, because I know some of it can be like, oh, I'm not going to bulk.

I'm going to cut.

I don't need this.

Read slash skim the books, a free one.

Start with that one.

Weigh your food for even just a couple of days, ideally two weeks, but just a couple of days.

You will learn so much.

Again, time is on your side.

You don't have to do anything extreme.

You don't have to cut out your favorite foods.

You don't have to starve.

You don't even have to really be hungry.

You don't have to eat at weird times.

You just have to eat like 250 fewer calories per day, maybe 500 if you're really going for it.

And you will lose dozens of pounds without feeling like you're on some sort of weird ass diet.

And that for me was life-changing.

Like I said, it changed my appearance, obviously, but it also changed my blood pressure.

It changed my cholesterol levels.

Look, having kids, like, I want to be around for when they have kids and dying early because I didn't want to weigh my food just seemed like a really dumb trade-off.

It's been wonderful to be able to help you as a friend.

It's very difficult to work with friends.

That's why, you know, having you work not with myself, but with the team was crucial.

And just seeing your transformation, how you feel now, the pep in your step that you now have.

That's right.

Honestly, mate, it's brilliant.

I love it.

And remember, I beat you in Cornhole before I was in this kind of shape.

So now you don't stand a chance, actually.

Now it's just in the bag before you even get off the plane.

Oh, my goodness.

Small plug.

All of this, you don't have to remember it.

If you go to ripbody.com, there is an email grab there.

Enter your email address.

There's a 15-day course.

It's all free.

I don't even think I have a strong pitch in there.

I'll probably mention coaching.

Sure.

But that's going to give you everything you need and take you through the kind of the pitfalls to avoid.

Thank you, man.

And look, I know, again, I don't do shows on nutrition.

I sought out Andy for this.

You are not a hard-ass sort of marketer-seller type guy, which is the other reason that I felt it was appropriate to do this.

And everything is science-based.

There's not fad, gimmicky crap.

You don't have your face on, you know, a protein shake bottle kind of stuff.

So I hope people just take a few bits of this advice and put it into practice because you will potentially live longer.

And there's not that many things that will get you to live longer, happier, or healthier.

And this is one of those things.

And it was probably the biggest positive change in my life that I had control or a hand in creating, other than like creating my business, marrying my wife, and raising my kids.

Like this is on that tier of good decisions that have worked out well for me.

No exaggeration.

Andy, thank you so much, man.

I know it's a weekend and you're in Japan and it's a weird time.

So I really appreciate you coming on.

Honored to be on.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for everything over the years.

Want to master the art of communication?

Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators, reveals key strategies for enhancing your connections and conversations in this enlightening podcast episode.

Why do some people manage to connect with everyone else so effortlessly?

And then there's times when I'm talking to my wife and like, we cannot connect with each other.

And it turns out it's just a set of skills, right?

Like it's just literally a set of skills that super communicators know.

and that any of us can learn and become super communicators ourselves.

Looping for understanding and has three steps.

The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question.

Secondly, repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words.

And thirdly, and this is the one everyone always forgets, ask if you got it right.

And the reason why this is so powerful is because it proves that I'm listening to you.

It's really easy to stop thinking about how we're communicating.

It's really easy to stop thinking about what's going on until we get in the habit of it.

Communication isn't something that happens just one-to-one.

Sometimes it's one to many, but the same principles still hold up.

You're still having practical or emotional or social conversations.

Laughter is actually one of the non-linguistic ways that we connect with other people.

There's been studies that show that in about 80% of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to something funny.

It's because we're basically in a conversation and we're saying to someone, I want to connect with you.

Nobody is born a super communicator.

That's what feels tiring is when you feel like you want to connect and you can't, right?

This isn't a behavior.

This isn't a personality type.

This is a tool that once we learn, we can use when we want to use it.

Learn how to categorize conversations, improve active listening, and overcome communication barriers to build stronger relationships.

Tune in and transform your interactions into meaningful connections on episode 963 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

I truly cannot endorse this enough.

Honestly, Andy has changed the way that I look at health and nutrition.

I reread those books every year.

I'm not going to just say everybody needs to hire him right now, but I do think y'all should get the books.

We'll link to those in the show notes.

They are very affordable.

They really taught me a ton about nutrition.

His coaching is only for men, but the books are for men and women.

So I recommend them for everybody.

And if you need somebody to kind of hold your feet to the fire a little bit in a friendly way while showing you how to eat right, I cannot recommend the coaching enough.

Honestly, it has just been, again, I lost like 50 pounds of fat and gained 25 pounds of muscle.

What else do you need to know?

All things Andy Morgan will again be linked in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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Also our newsletter, We BitWiser.

The idea behind it is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, on your psychology, on your relationships in under two minutes.

If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show.

JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

And don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well.

It's over at sixminutenetworking.com.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

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This show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tatus Sedlauskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested, maybe getting a handle on their nutrition, maybe losing a little bit of fat, gaining a little bit of muscle, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

Huge shout out to Aura Ring for sponsoring this episode.

We'd be hyping this thing up even if they weren't paying us, but fortunately for everyone involved, they are.

So check it out at auraring.com/slash Jordan and please support the sponsors that support this show.