Shawn Stevenson has spent decades of his life understanding the basics and nuances of the fuel we call food and our relationship with it. He s the author of Eat Smarter and Sleep Smarter, and also the host of The Model Health Show, a top-ranked health podcast. He's helped millions of people transform their health, their daily habits, and their mindset.
00:00:00.000If all it took was a basic understanding of food to get lean and healthy, all men would have visible abs and never need the scale.
00:00:07.980The reality, however, is that most men don't have the abs and although they may have the scale, they're not really willing to get on it.
00:00:15.740It turns out that the science of food and how it reacts with our body goes so much deeper, including the mental and emotional realm.
00:00:22.460My guest today, author of Eat Smarter, Shawn Stevenson, has spent decades of his life understanding the basics and also the nuances of the fuel we call food and our relationship with it.
00:00:34.100Today, we cover why not all calories are the same, how culture impacts our eating decision-making process, how placebos are more effective than you think in curing illness and disease,
00:00:45.600why the diversity of what you eat is just as important as how much you eat and why you are what you eat ate.
00:00:54.720You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path.
00:01:00.400When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time.
00:01:05.120You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong.
00:01:10.180This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become.
00:01:13.980At the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
00:01:21.140Gentlemen, welcome to the Order of Man podcast.
00:01:23.500My name is Ryan Mickler, and it is my job to give you great conversations with incredible men all over the world doing big things.
00:01:31.140We've got Shawn Stevenson on the podcast, but we've also had guys like Terry Crews and Jocko Willink and Chris Williamson and Cam Haynes
00:01:39.640and Matthew McConaughey and George Foreman, Ben Shapiro.
00:01:44.420The list of men that we've had on is amazing.
00:01:47.720It's a testament to the work we're doing, and it's a testament to you and your desire as a man to learn, grow,
00:01:53.380and then ultimately lead and serve your families, your businesses, and your communities.
00:01:57.980I've got a good one lined up for you today in the realm of nutrition, but before I do that,
00:02:03.160I want to talk about another good group of people over in Frenchtown, Montana.
00:03:15.180He's got a gift, you're going to hear it, for making these complex sciences around food and nutrition and sleeping very simple and practical.
00:03:25.600And he's quite literally helped millions of people transform their health, their daily habits, and their mindset.
00:03:32.520He's the author of Eat Smarter, Sleep Smarter, and also Eat Smarter Family Cookbook.
00:03:38.200And all of them explore the powerful connection between your nutrition, your sleep, and, as men, our overall performance.
00:03:47.380His podcast, his books, his speaking engagements, he continues to really inspire people around the world to finally take control of their health and lift up their energy,
00:03:58.180and at the end of the day, unlock their full potential.
00:04:16.120Well, you know, food is such an important component of health, being a man.
00:04:21.400It's the fuel that drives our body, and I think it's something that we don't really, at least I, don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about.
00:04:28.900I just eat what's in front of me, and as I get older, I'm realizing I can't eat like my 17-year-old son anymore.
00:04:38.120So I'm a little more mindful of the way that I consume food than I've been in the past, that's for sure.
00:04:46.140You know, we grew up in the 80s and 90s, and, you know, food culture changed a lot around that time.
00:04:52.240You know, it really shifted culturally to a lot of convenience, you know, and the marketing, you know, was really phenomenal
00:04:59.460and getting busy parents to, you know, essentially just kind of downgrade the process of eating together as a family, right?
00:05:11.220So right now, according to some researchers at Harvard, only about 30% of families eat together on a regular basis.
00:05:17.420So that's kind of like on the endangered species list.
00:05:19.700And along with that came convenience foods, you know, a lot of microwave dinners.
00:05:25.680You know, I know that we always had some Totino's pizza rolls in the freezer, you know, stuff that we could just pop in the microwave, eat and go, fast food.
00:06:56.780And so, what we're talking about now is having the opportunity to change our culture.
00:07:00.560And so, for me, it's just like, I think it's important for us to define and understand what culture is.
00:07:07.440Culture is a shared attitudes, behaviors, beliefs that are shared by a group of people and then passed down from one generation to the next.
00:08:07.680We have the first generation alive today that's not going to outlive their ancestors.
00:08:12.400That's not going to outlive the generation before them.
00:08:14.760This trend of increasing lifespan has reversed.
00:08:18.260And so, we have a largely unhealthy, very unhealthy culture.
00:08:23.680And so, what I want to encourage everybody today and in this conversation is to take control of our microculture in our household, first and foremost.
00:08:34.920You know, so many of us, I know the guys listening to this, want to change the world.
00:09:09.680It is, I love everything that you're saying.
00:09:13.700It is interesting in the 80s, you know, you talk about growing up and you talk about the convenience of fast food, processed food, TV dinners, microwave meals.
00:09:25.620So, it's the convenience and the cost.
00:09:27.800You know, I grew up, primarily my mom was a single mother for a large part of my youth.
00:09:33.680And every birthday, she would say, what do you want for your birthday dinner?
00:09:39.680And I grew up thinking that Salisbury steak oven or microwave dinners was the thing that I wanted on my birthday.
00:09:47.660Because I was so accustomed to these frozen Salisbury steak meals.
00:10:27.420But I think to your point, there seems to have been a greater cost associated with opting for convenience and price.
00:10:36.000And now we're paying the cost in our health, in the way that we perform, the way that we show up.
00:10:41.520Even in your book, Eat Smarter, you talk about mental performance and clarity.
00:10:45.720And the thing that one of the things that really stood out to me is how you're replicating your cells, I think is the term you use, replicating your cells constantly.
00:10:55.960And you're either replicating with good, healthy, productive cells or bad, broken and unhealthy cells.
00:11:03.060And that really stood out to me just by the food that we consume.
00:11:07.580In my university education, which I went to an expensive private university in St. Louis, or right outside of St. Louis.
00:11:18.220And in this class, this nutritional science class, that again, I paid good money to attend this class and to attend this school to get this education.
00:11:30.560I was really disillusioned about how food relates to health.
00:11:36.320Now, let me be, I want to be very clear about this.
00:11:39.640This is, this is life transforming when you get this.
00:11:43.000So I decided to go into this pre-med program because I got this programming from my environment, watching TV.
00:12:07.520The show is great, but just getting this programming, like they look like a healthy family because similar to you, you know, we families come in so many different shapes and sizes and forms and fashions.
00:12:20.580And, you know, I had, as many people do, you know, like a largely complicated, dysfunctional family.
00:12:32.000And it was predominantly, it was my mother and my stepfather.
00:12:37.360And we lived in a very, uh, volatile environment.
00:12:42.940You know, a lot of violence outside of my home.
00:12:45.780Um, you know, oftentimes again, hearing, uh, gunshots, sirens, you know, this just came background music of, of my life and also inside of my home, a lot of violence as well.
00:12:59.880And so coming from this environment and understanding that, again, we're all just trying to figure this stuff out.
00:13:08.400So making the decision to go to a university and, and, and pursue this pre-med degree was just totally outside of my realm of experience.
00:13:17.380Like I didn't know anybody who was a doctor, except when I went to the doctor, let alone, I didn't know anybody who ever went to college or graduated from college that I knew personally outside of like my teachers, or again, just people that are not close in proximity to me.
00:13:30.900And so I was fully, my point being, I was fully trusting in this education system to teach me how to do this stuff.
00:13:56.000When we were in biology class, studying the cell, it was so foreign to every student in there.
00:14:04.200Yes, we could have rote memorization and understand these different parts, the nucleus and the mitochondria, the cell membrane and all this stuff, all these organelles.
00:14:13.840We can understand it mechanically, but nobody in my class, the teacher included, understood that when we are looking at that cell,
00:14:24.400we are looking at the food that we've eaten.
00:14:31.280And in my nutritional science class, my teacher was not telling us that the food that we're talking about here is making every cell of your body.
00:14:40.860Your mitochondria is made from your menu.
00:14:44.320Your cell membrane is made from your meals.
00:14:46.820Your nucleus is made from the nutrients that you eat.
00:14:49.920You are literally, all these cell parts that we're looking at, that is food.
00:15:06.500And so I got out of that program, by the way, which again, this is all unconscious.
00:15:11.220So I got out of that program, went into business instead because of another, it was a movie called Boomerang with Eddie Murphy and another classic.
00:16:02.740But that personal testimony, when you actually implement things, is so much more powerful when other people hear what you've gone through, let alone what you read in a textbook somewhere.
00:16:14.200It is a part of the texture and the makeup of your voice and who you are and how people connect with you because it's coming from an authentic place.
00:16:27.580And, you know, I was thinking about this yesterday.
00:16:32.880I was watching something with my wife and my son.
00:16:40.800And we were looking at, you know, the world championships are going on right now in track and field.
00:16:45.500And we were looking at the 400 sprint.
00:16:48.960And I was just saying, like, man, I didn't – at the time, I didn't like being in the starting blocks for the 400 because I ran the 1, 2, 4 long jump.
00:17:03.640But because we're not that fast yet as far as, like, being able to sustain our speed for 400 meters, I didn't like coming out of the blocks with that particular race.
00:17:15.800Yeah, anything longer than about 50 yards is too long for me.
00:18:01.600I ran track to be faster on the football field.
00:18:05.340And later on that season is when the breakdown started to really manifest consciously.
00:18:12.860And I was doing a 200-meter time trial.
00:18:15.720And as I was coming off the curve into the straightaway, my hip broke.
00:18:20.300Just from running, I broke my hip because my bone density was so low because I was fueled up on fucking Tostino's pizza rolls.
00:18:31.520And every day, every single day, man, I'm either eating all this bullshit cereal, you know, these kids' cereals for breakfast, mini muffins, you know, donuts, every day.
00:18:44.340And for lunch, I'm eating a personal pizza at school, a pretzel with cheese, dipping that personal pizza into the fucking cheese.
00:18:52.380And then for dinner, you know, we're either eating fast food or my mom occasionally would make something.
00:21:12.740So much so, the physician said I have the spine of an 80-year-old.
00:21:15.740So this very old body was manifested in a very young person, right?
00:21:23.300And at this point, you know, my aspirations of playing college football and all the things that I was trying to do to get out of where I come from, it was gone.
00:21:37.540So it wasn't just the physical breakdown, it was the mental breakdown.
00:21:40.160And so just to put a bow on this background and this story, you know, for that to show up on a scan where my L4, L5, S1 disc are so degenerated, they're showing up black on the MRI.
00:23:05.400I pulled back to make the bed, and I took the sheets off, put them in the wash, put them back on the bed.
00:23:10.580And where my legs were, were worn thin.
00:23:14.860Like, the fabric was so thin because all night long, my legs are just completely restless, moving back and forth, running a marathon in my sleep, apparently.
00:24:04.940Placebo is a positive injunction that some benefit will happen as a result of taking said medication, treatment, whatever the case might be.
00:24:23.820We have, it is insane how many studies we have now on the placebo helping to, whether it's cancer tumors, blood pressure, arthritic conditions, mental health issues, anxiety, depression.
00:24:42.120There is hardly anything that we, as far as the human condition in chronic disease or acute conditions, that a placebo has not been found to benefit.
00:25:47.340And she shared this with me personally.
00:25:48.980And of course, like this is in, you know, her book and, you know, you could find this stuff online.
00:25:53.320But what she did was she wanted to see the impact that it would have on changing the environment for elderly men.
00:26:02.580So we're talking men that are, you know, over 80.
00:26:05.840And she basically got nine elderly men together and retrofitted the environment to be as if it was decades earlier.
00:26:14.440So the music that they listened to when they were younger, what the magazines were, you know, just the environment itself was now matching their younger selves.
00:27:06.580So many things improved simply based on their thinking and their perception about the environment around them and how they associate with it.
00:27:14.960It made them biologically younger, and today we know that there's a big difference between our chronological age and our phenotypical biological age, right?
00:27:24.720I got my stuff done a few months ago, and I just turned 46, and my biological age is 37.4, right?
00:27:51.560Here's the thing, and this is why I'm so grateful to do this work because I can provide context.
00:27:56.180The average person in the United States has a variability of being five years older to five years younger than their chronological age, all right?
00:28:08.360And so it's good that you are where you are and not worse, but of course there are things that getting that data back that you can make better, and there are outliers.
00:28:19.240There are people who are up to 20 years older or younger than their chronological age, confirmed multiple studies.
00:28:31.960Gentlemen, I know you're into the conversation.
00:28:33.840I'm just going to take a step away very briefly because we have our exclusive brotherhood, the Iron Council, that is now open.
00:28:40.560We opened last week, and we have a lot of men joining us right now, which means that there is a growing contingent of men who are interested in learning how to be better men, being held accountable, having the systems to thrive and elevate their lives.
00:28:56.880And when you join our brotherhood, the Iron Council, it's not just a group.
00:29:00.120It's not just some social media group.
00:29:02.340It's really about finding ways to claim who you are meant to be because most men, they just drift through life.
00:29:08.720They carry their struggles and their doubts, but they also have their victories and their ambitions.
00:29:13.780But at the end of the day, they're suppressing their desire for a purpose and connection and even growth because, frankly, the world and everybody else tells men just to do it on your own and either figure it out or already have it figured out.
00:29:26.800But when men are isolated, the potential they have withers away and dies because they have nobody to share it with.
00:29:34.520Brotherhood is where that really grows and ignites.
00:29:37.020So inside the Iron Council, you're going to be surrounded by men doing the work of men.
00:29:42.260They're going to hold you accountable.
00:29:43.780They're going to push you to level up, and they're going to walk beside you through the battles that matter most, leading your family, growing your business, serving your community, building your legacy, frankly.
00:29:56.280If you are tired of going out alone, if you're ready to stop drifting and start forging yourself into the man that you want to become, then the Iron Council is where you should be.
00:30:48.320I mean it is a bit of a subjective thing, right?
00:30:50.460When you're choosing data points and you're saying this is the thing we're going to measure.
00:30:54.360But as long as everybody's measuring somewhat of the same thing, then we can come to some sort of consensus about age health, I guess, for lack of a better term.
00:31:03.540So some of the best markers are what we consider to be these metabolic health markers, right?
00:31:09.420So this is going to be looking at cardiovascular health and performance.
00:31:13.140This is going to be looking at immune system parameters.
00:31:16.120This is going to be looking at what your hormones are doing.
00:31:19.920And in particular, like – so if you're getting this really comprehensive biological age test done, they're going to be looking at all of your different hormones, stress-related hormones.
00:31:28.160So cortisol, what's cortisol doing, your sex hormones, you know, so testosterone, free testosterone, and estrogen.
00:31:38.240How is your body converting these things?
00:31:41.100Are you experiencing higher levels of aromatization?
00:31:43.820So this is when your testosterone can actually get grabbed and stolen and converted into estrogen.
00:31:48.380And that's usually related to what's going on with your insulin levels and so how your body's processing, in particular, this impact with glucose.
00:31:58.480And so it can get a little bit complex.
00:32:02.480I've even heard things like the order in which you eat your food will affect insulin spikes.
00:32:07.720So do you eat your proteins or your vegetables first, things like this that I never would have imagined, what, just even a couple years ago because I didn't know it was ignorance.
00:32:21.200But the biggest takeaway is you are different from everybody else, all right?
00:32:26.460And so in my book, Eat Smarter, which I'm grateful, it was the number one health book in the United States when it came out.
00:32:34.420So it was like on Amazon, like it was with like Matthew McConaughey's book came out, Michelle Obama's book, like all of these like really known.
00:32:44.340But then there's this one health book, and I'm grateful for that.
00:32:48.140But it was just like I feel – I love that quote that there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
00:32:52.960And in the book, I shared this really fascinating study where they were looking at the metabolic impact or the glucose impact for test subjects eating a cookie versus a banana.
00:33:07.020And you would think that a cookie, of course, is going to spike people's blood sugar more than a banana, but it just depended on the person.
00:33:15.260And their blood sugar had a minor lift, but it just pretty much – their body metabolized it efficiently, effectively, without spiking their blood sugar.
00:33:24.340I want to be one of those kind of people.
00:33:26.080I'm sure I'm not, but I want to be one of those kind of people.
00:33:32.620And for some people, the banana would spike their blood sugar three, four times higher than a cookie.
00:33:37.980So we all have a unique metabolic fingerprint, and that can change too.
00:33:44.560That can change based on a myriad of factors.
00:33:46.900One of the biggest things that was indicated in that study was the microbial fingerprint, so the makeup of their respective microbiome and the bacteria, how it's all associating with the food that they're eating.
00:33:58.500And so that's something else to consider when we're talking about potentially – that's going to get added in, I believe, in a big way, especially in the next five years, is going to be GI testing, so gastrointestinal microbiome testing.
00:34:53.960They found that they have higher rates, higher levels of diversity in their microbiome than people who are in the general elderly population.
00:35:03.660We can increase the diversity of our microbiome starting now, like whenever we become aware of this.
00:35:10.260And I'm going to come right back to that in just a second.
00:35:12.500But they also identified certain strains of bacteria that seemed – again, this is correlation, not causation – that were showing up in these centurions that weren't showing up in the general elderly population.
00:35:29.360And so we can, like, strive to do things to support the proliferation of those bacteria strains that they identified.
00:35:37.800And so to circle back to how do we increase this diversity, because this is important for all of us, one of the studies that I shared in Eat Smarter actually found that individuals who had less diversity in their gut microbiome had higher rates of insulin resistance and obesity independent of their calorie intake.
00:36:02.120Diversity matters more than what you're consuming – or the amount you're consuming, essentially.
00:36:07.840So the diversity of our gut bacteria matters more than – how do we better put that?
00:36:17.880It matters more than having, like, certain, quote, probiotics, right?
00:36:22.780It's diversity matters more than having certain strains, okay?
00:36:28.320Now, there are certain strains, like we got Firmicutes, and we got these different classes of bacteria that are, you know, correlated with certain things.
00:36:47.300So if we want to increase the diversity of our gut microbiome, improving our metabolic health like that, we've got to simply increase the diversity in foods that we're eating, all right?
00:37:12.240And it's so proliferated, like it's so widespread.
00:37:17.280It's found in people who don't drink coffee, right, especially if they live in a household with you and you do drink coffee, all right?
00:37:25.160And it is correlated – this particular bacteria strain – and I found out about this from this world-leading geneticist who shared this with me, Dr. Tim Spector.
00:37:36.360It's correlated with better cardiovascular function.
00:37:40.680It's correlated, this strain of bacteria that loves coffee, with better cognitive performance, all right?
00:38:09.480I wanted to say when you say the food you're eating, you're taking on that food's microbiome because I can tell the difference.
00:38:16.800I've really enjoyed hunting over the past nine-ish or so years.
00:38:20.960I can tell the difference in venison or even beef based on what it eats.
00:38:26.180There's a noticeable taste difference, and I think that's just supporting the claim that you're making, which is that you're actually consuming what that species of animal or vegetation has grown in.
00:39:32.020While you're doing that, it's strange how things – we learn things that seem like they would be common sense, and then you look back and wonder why would anybody debate that?
00:39:42.740What would be the debate that you're not consuming whatever you eat ate?
00:39:48.300It just seems like such a common sense thing, but I guess, you know, the research or –
00:40:01.760Just in this one lane in and of itself, looking at conventionally raised grain-fed beef versus grass-fed beef, this was published in the peer-reviewed journal, the British Journal of Nutrition.
00:40:13.020And they found that beef from animals fed an abnormal diet of conventional grains contains up to five times less omega-3 fatty acids than what's found in grass-fed beef.
00:40:25.000And this was cited in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
00:40:27.600Reports that omega-3 fatty acids have anti-obesity effects, and it helps improve our levels of satiety hormones.
00:40:35.560All right, so just keeping that in context, we're missing out on those things because we're eating animals that have been fed abnormal diet as well.
00:40:45.500And the vast majority – last little piece – the vast majority of antibiotics used, manufactured and used in this country, it's not for us.
00:40:52.840It's being used in factory farming with our cattle.
00:40:58.380But it's not being used to keep these animals from being sick.
00:41:02.940It's being used because decades ago, it was found and it was proven that prophylactic antibiotic use can increase weight gain dramatically.
00:41:16.440I mean, you ever seen a chicken on steroids?
00:41:18.460They don't look like normal house chickens, man.
00:41:20.440Like, get a chicken breast from the store and ask me what kind of chicken that you have or your neighbor has that has a chicken breast that large.
00:41:34.660But, okay, so I want to go back to what you're saying about what you consume, not necessarily how much because, you know, there is that conventional wisdom.
00:41:43.700And I think there's some truth to this, you tell me if I'm wrong, that not necessarily that a calorie is a calorie, but when it comes to losing weight, for example, if I burn on average 2,500 calories a day, if I eat 2,000 calories, I'm going to lose weight whether I eat grass-fed beef for 2,000 calories or donuts.
00:42:05.600I'm going to lose weight if I'm in that caloric deficit.
00:42:08.980But that doesn't always obviously equate to being healthy.
00:42:12.880I see a lot of skinny people who I would say are frail-looking and unhealthy.
00:42:19.160But are there certain foods that make it harder, for example, to lose weight or create some real issues with the body, for example?
00:42:30.700One that often comes to mind is dairy.
00:42:34.560My body doesn't agree with dairy, and so I try to avoid that.
00:42:38.340I don't know if that's universally true or if that's not supposed to be something that we consume in the quantities that we do.
00:43:11.620Humans have thrived on a lot of this stuff.
00:43:15.580But let's look at natural dairy versus what a lot of people have today, which is this kind of ultra-processed dairy-like product like Kraft Cheese Singles.
00:43:28.000They can't call it cheese legally because –
00:44:07.000And so this was published in the journal Food and Nutrition Research.
00:44:11.120And the scientists wanted to find out what would happen with calorie expenditure when you eat a meal of processed foods or ultra-processed foods versus a meal of whole foods.
00:44:22.920And so in this experiment, they had test subjects to eat a sandwich and what they believed to be a whole food version of a sandwich, which was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese.
00:44:38.720So – and they had test participants to eat a meal of what they refer to as an ultra-processed version of that same sandwich, highly refined white bread and cheese product.
00:44:51.880So test subjects, and they track this because our bodies are – the primary method of us expending calories is actually through our breathing.
00:45:04.620And so, of course, we think we're burning calories like when we're sweating or whatever, which we are, but the majority of energy that we're expelling is actually coming through our breath.
00:45:54.200A metabolic – I look at it like metabolic clogs where the body is not able to kind of figure out how to process, how to expel this energy that it consumed.
00:46:06.560Now, just to be clear, this is short term, okay?
00:46:10.480Our bodies work really hard and very intelligent trying to sort stuff out overall on average.
00:46:16.780But what if you're eating like that every single day, right?
00:46:20.200And you're counting your calories and you're trying to figure out why it's not working for you, what this is when we're talking about the quality of the food, this should be obvious at this point.
00:46:35.000I went back in that book, in that program to illuminate where did this concept of calories that we're so superficially talking about, where does it come from?
00:46:47.220This was something that was in the domain of physics.
00:46:49.400This had nothing to do with nutrition.
00:46:56.000And we're taking that in the context of nutrition and initially we're using something that's called a bomb calorimeter to incinerate a food and to see how much it would heat up water, okay?
00:47:09.320And that's how you find out how many calories are in a particular food.
00:47:36.900Our body is not a calculator, all right?
00:47:39.160Some people might have heard that before.
00:47:40.640It's not just this energy in, energy out, a very clean thing.
00:47:44.660This is not to say that calories are not a valuable metric for us to pay attention to.
00:47:48.760But you've got to understand whatever is on that label telling you how many calories are in that thing, that does not indicate how many calories your body is going to absorb, how many is going to process and utilize, and also how many calories are actually in that food.
00:48:04.420Because today, what's on that label, we use the Atwater system.
00:48:08.840They're not using a bomb calorimeter to find out exactly how many calories are in that food.
00:48:12.540It's generally regarded, it's something that's generally accepted.
00:48:36.120And it could be wildly different depending on you and your unique metabolism.
00:48:39.920And so, all of this to say, when it comes to that study with the ultra-processed sandwich, what you're seeing is something called an epicaloric controller.
00:50:26.380But when it comes to metabolism, efficiency might not be the primary metric because in some regards – and I'm just going to give an example.
00:50:36.420In some regards, having a very efficient metabolism when we're eating the banana, right, and the banana and cookie,
00:50:44.240we might convert that banana really efficiently into blood glucose and spike our blood sugar because it's so efficient, all right?
00:50:54.120And so, it just – it's – even with efficiency –
00:51:01.840So, this is not to say that we don't want an efficient metabolism where we have these metabolic clogs and things are not getting processed.
00:51:08.580I would say we want an appropriately efficient metabolism, and that is –
00:51:17.200I mean – because I think about – like – so, let's use an analogy of vehicles.
00:51:22.580We could all say that maybe a Prius is hyper-efficient when it comes to burning fuel.
00:51:28.320But if I'm off-roading in the mountains camping with my family, I may not be interested in fuel efficiency.
00:51:36.300I may be interested in low-gear horsepower to get me up the mountain in four-wheel drive.
00:51:41.880So, it's a case-by-case depending on what you're – it's the same reason why in high school I played football and team dinners were like spaghetti dinners because of the carbohydrates.
00:52:39.240Maybe we're doing this standard – you know, and I come from this culture – this standard bro model of counting our calories, weighing our food, and it works at one point.
00:52:48.000And then suddenly, maybe it's five years later, like, it's just not working for me anymore.
00:52:58.120I just need to go and, you know, do more cardio, whatever.
00:53:00.280No, your epicaloric controllers have changed, and we need to make adjustments there.
00:53:07.420So, maybe it's changing the way that we're training.
00:53:09.340Maybe this is changing the macronutrient profile.
00:53:11.500Maybe it's changing the foods that we're eating because all calories are not the same, and they do not resonate with our cells the same way at all times.
00:53:21.740And so, like, it can get complex because there's a lot of factors, but some of the best data that we can get, if I'm just going to lay it all out here.
00:53:29.900We've got all this incredible self-quantification today.
00:53:32.840People are wearing all these, like, wearables and tracking this and that.
00:53:35.740You can check everything from your heart rate variability to, you know, your blood sugar with continuous glucose monitors.
00:53:42.360There's so much that we can track, and it's just – we're just getting started.
00:53:46.040You know, I'm telling you, before you know it, we're going to have stuff that is able to track, like, things that you can't even imagine.
00:57:07.000And then you start to play this – and it's – a lot of this is non-conscious.
00:57:11.560You play this game with yourself where you talk yourself into being more tired because the wearable told you that you didn't sleep well.
00:57:18.420And the wearable is far from perfect in giving you that data.
00:57:23.820This is, again, it's great, and it can give us some parameters, but it can also guide us to not listen to our bodies, which is far more powerful in giving us this feedback.
00:57:36.340This is the – what was the – nocebo or non-cebo?
00:57:40.320This is what you're talking about right here.
00:57:46.500I like that you're talking about this because I – you know, even in reading your book, at some points I was like, man, this is so deep.
00:57:53.740I don't understand about the ghrelin and the – all, you know, and mitochondria.
00:57:59.020But then when I hear you talk more about the biofeedback, and that's a much better nomenclature for what I was talking about than intuition.
00:58:08.420That makes sense because I know, for example, if I go to lunch today here in the next, you know, hour or whatever it might be,
00:58:14.080and I go get myself a double whopper at Burger King, it's going to be delicious.
00:58:29.080But if I go have a chicken breast that I cooked two days ago and I have, you know, some rice and asparagus, it may not be as amazing tasting as Burger King right away, but I'm going to feel better.
00:59:04.100You are able to think more broadly, have a meta perspective and to like zoom in and have a micro perspective as well and to decide on how do I want to feel and where I am right now.
00:59:16.560And so this is, again, very evolved capabilities that we have as humans and our ability to intuitively eat, if we want to label it that, or to have healthy biofeedback is dependent on how much static is on the line with that intuition.
00:59:37.060If my habitual or kind of cultural habits have been to eat a lot of fake ass food, and this is what my tissues are made of, my brain is made of this stuff, my intuition to go to Burger King might be a little bit off because all of this signaling, these signaling molecules, the stuff that's making my tissues,
01:00:01.000this is not what we evolved having and how we evolved to run.
01:00:07.180And so that can be off in and of itself.
01:00:09.100If we're spending all day staring at our phones, I challenge you to think about a time when you were doom scrolling for an hour on your phone and you got off like, man, I feel great.
01:00:20.040I feel a lot better than when I started.
01:00:21.620You know, like we tend to feel kind of like drunk, like if we're on our phones, staring at our phones all that time, that's going to throw off that static on the line.
01:00:31.920That's all this external focus, right?
01:00:34.400All these micro stressors in our environment, you know, there's all these messages of negativity that so many of us are getting fed consciously.
01:00:43.320This is all static on the line to be listening to what our body is telling us.
01:00:48.960And so when we have that thing of like, yeah, you know, intuitively, like my inner child is telling me that I need to go and get some ice cream.
01:00:57.400You know, my intuition is saying, Ben and Jerry, Ben and Jerry, what does that mean?
01:01:27.660All those trillions and trillions and trillions of bacteria, they have their own goals and desires and wishes.
01:01:34.160And they can be sending out messages to you that you are misconstruing as your intuition that you need to go and grab that ice cream sandwich, right?
01:01:45.840Because certain bacteria really are, they love that.
01:01:54.740So where is the information really coming from and the healthier we can get our microbiome with focusing on diversity, even when we're eating healthy, right?
01:02:07.200And we're doing, because this is what happened to me, right?
01:02:10.520I was just sharing this with my son when I was in college and I was working at a casino in St. Louis.
01:02:17.400All right, shout out to, no, I'm not going to shout them out, damn them.
01:02:22.220But I was working at a casino and one of my coworkers was, he won Mr. Missouri, like caveman Missouri, whatever, like natural bodybuilding, whatever.
01:02:32.780And it was this Nigerian guy, great guy.
01:02:37.100And he, you know, I worked out, you know, but he was like, we should work out together, whatever.
01:02:41.300So I was like, yeah, man, you know what you're doing.
01:03:22.840But just being able to like get this exposure, pick up these data points.
01:03:28.060He taught me supersets, you know, so like drop sets, was doing all this stuff.
01:03:33.740But what I was getting was this diversity of inputs.
01:03:37.240And it's very similar with the microbiome.
01:03:39.800You know, it's something that we can target is looking at not just the diversity, but also understanding that everything has its place.
01:03:48.220And we want to have a microbiome that has more what we consider to be probiotic or friendly flora that's running things and less of the pathogenic or opportunistic bacteria.
01:04:12.760And what got us into the situation where we become now there's all these like deadly or very serious antibiotic resistant conditions that are emerging.
01:04:22.740Like it's crazy because we went too far and trying to kill everything.
01:04:31.720And then, you know, we could just move on from there.
01:04:33.880And so having this haphazard use of antibiotics and whether it's the things that we're putting on our hands, whether it's the things that we're consuming, just to have a better relationship with all this stuff.
01:04:44.200Because last point, a strong, healthy microbiome is a resilient microbiome.
01:04:51.360And so learning that resiliency from my my exposure and training with my friend, like externally, we need that same resilience, resiliency internally by focusing on how do we support the proliferation of healthy bacteria.
01:05:08.940This is this is the last last piece of this.
01:05:26.260I fell into this eating, quote, eating healthy, but eating the same foods over and over again and missing the diversity to feed my microbiome.
01:06:59.320And this can be, again, dairy versions to vegetable versions to their animal, their meat versions as well.
01:07:07.640When I was working at the university gym, the university that I graduated from, I got to work with people from all over the world.
01:07:14.560And once I became aware of this, this was, again, about 20 years ago, I started asking people from, whether they're from Ireland, whether they were from Ethiopia, whether they were from India.
01:07:26.020Hey, do you guys, what kind of fermented food did you guys have?
01:08:06.640Well, we're going to move over to our exclusive Iron Council segment.
01:08:10.640But before I get to that, just let the guys know who are listening right now who are not members of the Iron Council, where to connect with you.
01:08:17.080You have the three – do you have the three books or more than three?
01:08:21.320Because I know Sleep Smarter, Eat Smarter, and then you have the newer Eat Smarter Family Cookbook as well.
01:08:28.040So let the guys know where to go and connect with you on those things.
01:08:31.900You can pick those up anywhere that books are sold.
01:08:35.300The Eat Smarter Family Cookbook is the most tactical.
01:08:37.900And I'm grateful to say when it came out, it was the number one cookbook in the United States, USA Today National Best Seller, all that good stuff.
01:15:04.340There's a dance that's happening all day with this stuff, right?
01:15:07.220So I was trained that anabolic state is just basically when you're sleeping, all right?
01:15:13.500There's some studies showing you can get a little bit of that anabolism, like when you're meditating a certain way, but it's very difficult to be in this anabolic state.
01:15:22.060These are kind of tied to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
01:15:26.580Sympathetic, fight or flight, parasympathetic, rest and digest.
01:15:31.640Really, when we're resting, when we're restoring ourselves, we're dipping our toes into some anabolic things.
01:15:38.740Strength training is an anabolic stimulus.
01:15:40.720We get some anabolic benefits, but we're catabolizing.
01:18:38.360And so, but I was talking about GLP-1 in relationship to food, in relationship to lifestyle factors that help us to regulate our blood sugar.
01:18:49.220I had no idea that this GLP-1 movement was coming down the pike.
01:20:04.980And you're upticking your aromatization where your testosterone is getting converted into estrogen.
01:20:09.880And then you come in with this, right, not to take it off the table, but if you jump right to that, chances are it's not going to work for you in the long term, especially in the long term.
01:20:37.480Are we coming in with this Band-Aid solution here that's going to work for a little while, possibly get us dependent on something, and not really addressing the root cause?
01:21:22.340And to answer that question, too, about, you know, over 40, and we were just sharing, so I haven't shared this with anybody, but, you know, doing the biological age testing, getting over 100 metabolic factors checked, immune system factors, organ function, testosterone, I'm not on any of this stuff, all right?
01:21:44.620My testosterone was at the edge of being abnormally high, all right?
01:21:51.060Not to take out the potential, like, all that stuff is an option, but what are you doing with your lifestyle?
01:21:58.800And one of the biggest factors today, and Lord knows how good my markers would have been had I not had the most stressful year of my life as well, right?
01:26:04.640And I know – these are my friends and colleagues who are like the faces of these respective diets.
01:26:09.440But the thing is, it's what's best for you right now.
01:26:14.520Your body might be screaming at you to give it some more carbs.
01:26:18.560And this can help with serotonin production.
01:26:22.000This can help with – there's even some potential in helping with testosterone and aromatization and your body not going overboard.
01:26:30.780If you're eating the right carbs for you right now, there's so many different benefits.
01:26:36.400Potentially, this could be having less carbs.
01:26:40.020And so over 40, tinker with your macronutrient ratios if you're not seeing the results that you want in your training, in your body composition.
01:27:24.240It's one of the most effective ways to really clear your body of glucose, clear your bloodstream of glucose, get it into your muscle cells, your legs, especially your calves, like a sink to soak up that glucose if you're walking after your meals.
01:27:42.560You should be getting in at minimum – and I've got studies, and I've shared this before, looking specifically at testosterone, all right?
01:27:49.7804,000 steps a day was the minimum effective dose to have a market.
01:29:12.560And I wish we would have stayed more in touch, but it's good to reconnect with him and learn a little bit more about the fuel that is our food and how we can perform at optimum levels.
01:29:34.960And an integral part of making sure that we are doing the best is fueling ourselves with the right kind of food in the right kind of way for maximum performance.
01:29:43.600So check out their family cookbook, Eat Smarter Family Cookbook.
01:29:46.800Check out Eat Smarter and Sleep Smarter.
01:29:49.140And then lastly, also make sure you check out the Iron Council.
01:29:52.460We're having some great conversations.
01:29:54.540In fact, last month, we used Eat Smarter as the book of the month, and we all talked about it.
01:30:00.740So it was good to have Sean come here and reiterate and underscore some of the things we talked about in the Iron Council last month.
01:30:07.320Check that out at orderofman.com slash ironcouncil.
01:30:11.720All right, gentlemen, you've got your marching orders.
01:30:14.180I will be back tomorrow for our Ask Me Anything.
01:30:16.800Until then, go out there, take action, and become the man you are meant to be.
01:30:24.540Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast.
01:30:27.440If you're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be,
01:30:31.440we invite you to join the order at orderofman.com.