Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Submit your questions for the podcast here
News Topic:
RESTRICT Act via Mises Caucus Twitter page
The Free Press: Trudeau’s Battle Against a Free Internet (on Canada’s Online Streaming Act, or Bill C-11)
Show Notes:
Rogue Food Conference: May 12th and 13th
9th annual IHH-UCSF Symposium on Nutrition and Functional Medicine
Questions:
Senior Fitness?
Gwyneth says:
I’m binge watching, listening, taking notes on all the Robb Wolf I can while waiting on your books to arrive. (Sacred Cow arrived, midway through it) I’ll be 70 in 6 months and am wanting to learn the best approach to making changes in my gut health via nutrition that isn’t bullshit-based (like fasting), strength training to build muscle and strengthen my bones. Oh, I’m overweight as well, have some arthritis, sciatica and other run-of-mill age related breakdowns. Where do I start with strength training? I hesitate going to gyms and trying to find a personal trainer who I can trust. I have followed HasFit for a while now and recently found Balanced Home Fitness which is right up my alley as they offer beginner workouts with a huge variety.
All I want to do is ‘move some dirt’.
Thoughts & ideas?
Thanks!
Tofu effect on testosterone
Charlie says:
Hi Robb and Nicki!
I recently moved to Asia for work and I’ve been eating a lot of tofu here. The rest of my diet is mostly unchanged with a lot of meat, fish, and eggs.
There are studies saying the phytoestrogens in tofu lowers testosterone, but there are also some saying it has no effect.
I’m not sure what to believe.
How much would you avoid eating it, if at all?
Thank you!
Body Composition
Nicolas writes:
Hi Robb, I met you in person at my CrossFit cert. in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on September 14th, 2008 when I was 29 years old.
We talked about how may eating habits were ok and suggested I follow the CrossFit meal plan.
It worked well for me up until 2017(38 yo). I’m turning 43 now and I have started to gain unwanted weight. I have slowed down on CrossFit training due to injuries but still continue to train athletically 3 days a week (2 lifting days- 1 swimming/cycling day) and still eat relatively clean however, being Italian I like my pasta and bread, especially when I visit my parents.
Should I still be following the crossfit meal plan?
How do I get my body back to a relatively lean state without training so hard?
Should Intermittent fasting be something I should start doing?
I appreciate your time and experience.
Thank you
Sponsor:
The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes
Transcript:
Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion, we’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well there’s always Disney Plus.
Robb: Welcome back, friends, neighbors, loved ones.
Nicki: Hello everyone. This is episode 147 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. Hoping you all had a fabulous week.
Robb: You’re starting off great, then you flamed out.
Nicki: Well, I’m looking at you, and then I was wondering what direction you wanted to take this. I was just going to jump into some announcements, but I thought maybe we could share what we did on Sunday.
Robb: Go for it.
Nicki: Yeah. I know most of you, or you probably heard us talk about our friends who run the Bison Ranch, Go Roam Free. Robb was in a video that we shared talking about regenerative agriculture and specifically Bison and grazing animals and all that. So Sunday or last week, we got a message that they had a bottle calf, so a baby buffalo that’s mother had died and normally, apparently when a buffalo’s mother dies, the rest of the herd kills the baby, nobody else takes it on. And so one of the ranch hands had found the mom right after she died apparently, and saw the calf there and ended up bringing it back to the house, and they have horses and stuff around the house, so they have it in a little round pen. And so we went down there because they wanted to know if the girls wanted to help bottle feed a baby buffalo. So it was-
Robb: And oh my goodness, they did. Shocker.
Nicki: Oh my goodness, they did, yeah. And she was only seven days old when we were there, and such a cutie, totally used to humans now. Apparently in the beginning it was hard to get her to even come near them to feed her, but now she’s definitely more used to humans. It’s an interesting thing though, what do you do? this animal is going to be huge-
Robb: Enormous. Yeah.
Nicki: … and does it become a giant pet? Apparently it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to reintegrate them with the herd because they miss out on all those early communication cues, how to be in the herd-
Robb: And the herd will fight the new individual, basically you have to run the gauntlet, fight everybody in the herd, more or less. Yeah.
Nicki: Yeah. So she would probably not make it. So anyway, we had a really fun day. The girls had a blast. Yeah, it was good stuff. What else? Anything else you want to share up front before we dig in?
Robb: No. No. Let’s just dig.
Nicki: Okay. Dig in. Okay. I wanted to share two events that are upcoming, just announcements. Some of you might be interested in attending one or both of these. The first is the Rogue Food Conference. It’s taking place May 12th and 13th at Polyface Farm. So I know most of our listeners are familiar with Polyface and Joel Salatin. This is a great opportunity to learn from the farm and farmers that put this type of regenerative farming on the map or made it more recognizable throughout the country. So anyway, it’s two days, farm meals, speakers. They’re going to talk about all topics that I think are on a lot of people’s minds. Billionaires buying up farmland, bug based protein, soaring chicken, egg prices in the stores and why chickens won’t lay, a bunch of different topics. Anyway, sounds like a fabulous two-day event.
I think there’s 70 tickets left, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. You can also find that if you go to roguefoodconference.com and you can find the event from there too, but it will be in the show notes. The second event I wanted to mention is the UCSF, symposium on nutrition and functional medicine. So this is the 9th annual one. Robb has been a speaker in the past. He’s not this year, but this takes place on April 22nd and it’s remote so you can tune in from wherever you are. It’s not an in-person event.
Robb: They’re always fantastic though. The topics are really on point, very… Akil is really an interesting guy in that he bridges the gap between conventional and functional medicine in a very effective way and is remarkably passionate about it, and he’s been organizing this event, I believe, since it’s inception.
Nicki: Since the beginning.
Robb: Yeah. Yeah.
Nicki: Yeah. Diana Rogers is going to be one of the speakers and I know many of you follow her and love her work. So anyway, I will again put this link in the show notes also. It’s an Eventbrite link I believe, and if you use the code RobbWolf, you can get 10% off your tickets. So both of those events will be in the show notes. And yeah, hopefully that is interesting to some of you. News topics today.
Robb: You got it right there in front of you wife.
Nicki: You want me to drive this?
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: Okay. I thought we would talk about two different topics, both again with the lens of our leaders proposing bills and acts and legislation that is pushing us more towards more authoritarianism or less authoritarianism. And as you all know, from our view, moving away from authoritarianism and towards more freedom is the path we would like to see our country and other countries take. But this first one, actually, the TikTok bill as it’s been dubbed, Senate Bill 686, also known as the RESTRICT Act. So actually when we were at the Bison Ranch was the first time that this popped on my radar because John, who is the founder owner of Go Room Free, he actually uses TikTok. He’s one of the, his… And apparently it’s does really well for them. He’s posts pictures of their food in the ranch, and I don’t have a TikTok account, so I’ve actually never seen his content, but apparently they’ve had some really great traction on TikTok and he has one of the more popular, if not the most popular TikTok account in all of Montana.
And so he had shared with us that he had been reached out to by a member of the Montana-
Robb: Department of Justice.
Nicki: … Department of Justice, wanting to talk to him about his use of TikTok. So anyway, that was the first time I’d heard of that and he was of the opinion, okay, so maybe they’re framing this bill as China’s stealing all of our data, and so perhaps they are. And John’s position was, they’re stealing my data. Shouldn’t I be the one to choose whether I’m okay with them utilizing my data if this is actually really valuable for my business. And then I guess it was Monday, or I think it was Monday, this Twitter account of Misis posted a bunch of screenshots of the actual content of this bill, and that’s when we started digging in a little further.
Robb: Well, and it had popped up on my radar a bit in that I saw various members of I believe Congress or the Senate talking about this bill. And it seemed odd that all of a sudden some folks were really, really concerned about our privacy. Yeah.
Nicki: And it’s from both sides of the aisle, which is really an interesting thing to see too, because how often do we have-
Robb: We haven’t seen anything like this since the Patriot Act.
Nicki: Exactly. So how often do we see this being lobbied hard from both sides of the aisle? And so anyway, this link that we’re going to share in the show notes is to a Twitter thread that has a bunch of different screenshots and talks about what is actually in this TikTok bill. Some of it is that if you are designated a national security threat, or this could be any foreign adversary, but as we’ve seen before, you can be a domestic person and still be a foreign adversary. They can take all of your stuff. There’s no-
Robb: You go up the… This is a good… No, that first one.
Nicki: Okay. You want me to click on this?
Robb: No, just what Misis Caucus says about it.
Nicki: Okay. So they say the RESTRICT Act is not limited to just TikTok. It gives the government authority over all forms of communication, domestic or abroad, and grants powers to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk” to national security now, and in any “potential future transaction.”
Robb: Goddamn if that’s not broad. Any risk, anything now or that might be risky in the future. And none of this, it is purposefully vague. So that, us doing this podcast could be construed as-
Nicki: And there’s no due process. If they deem you a risk, it’s an immediate-
Robb: Black bag-
Nicki: Pretty much.
Robb: … over your head and you disappear. Million dollar fine, 20 years in prison. And again, similar to so many elements of the Patriot Act, absolutely no due process. This is fucking Banana Republic. I can’t even… It is unconscionable that any American would put this forward and the people who are putting this forward swore an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. This is completely antithetical to this. In my mind, these people are domestic terrorists-
Nicki: For proposing this.
Robb: … proposing this. I am epileptic over this thing. And anybody, and I’m going to sound like a dick, but anybody with a brain in their head should be as well. This is, and I watched the slow motion disaster that was the Patriot Act rollout. And I feel like I was the only person who was like, Hey, are we really okay with this? And everybody told me to shut the fuck up, that I was anti-American. And we’ve seen how that’s gone. And what’s interesting is arguably that was very much spearheaded from the right side of the aisle at that time. Although it had significant bipartisan support. I want to say the only person who opted out of supporting the Patriot Act was Ron Paul, literally out of the whole cadre of people who showed up for that, I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s accurate.
And then again, as a reminder, this Patriot Act thing was weaponized against parents trying to just speak at school board meetings about concerns that they had about the curriculum that their children were being exposed to, and they were labeled as domestic terrorists. And that was largely shouted down. But each one of these things I see as just a near miss. It’s like the kilometer wide asteroid that just barely misses the earth. How many of those do you want to avoid?
Nicki: Yeah. And this has been likened to the Patriot Act for the internet, and that’s essentially what it is. And if you recall from a couple episodes ago, when we read the Global Digital Rights Charter, it’s completely antithetical to that, which is what that we want people to be able to have digital, the same rights that we have in the physical world in for our digital lives. So anyway, there’s a lot to this, we’ll link to it. Oh, and by the way, I mentioned that no due process. And because you might pose an immediate threat, so they just got to take you away. You can be levied a million dollar fine and 20 years in prison and forfeiture of everything you own. And again, and I don’t even think that it’s like… I can’t remember who actually is deeming you the threat, but again, it’s unelected officials that are structuring this. It’s just mind boggling. And to Robb’s point, completely anti-American. There is nothing-
Robb: It is anti-Western liberal democracy. I hope people get that. Yes, American, but everything that Western liberal democracies have been built on ranging from Japan to Hong Kong, to Europe and the United States and hopefully Canada at least at one point. And this is the trend that we see. And it’s always for our safety, always for our safety.
Nicki: And just one other little tidbit, the act also grants unlimited hiring power to positions of enforcement of this act with unlimited funds and little or no review and immunity to the Freedom of Information Act. So basically, once you are deemed a threat and you go down this rabbit hole, you’re never coming out. I really hope this doesn’t pass. And folks, I’m going to put a link to the actual bill at congress.gov and there’s a place to give feedback and contact your representative. Please do it. Click on there, you can put in your address or click a link and select your state and then it pops up all the people in your area. Send them all an email or phone call. And apparently people do, they do pay attention to the volume of calls on particular topics. And so we need to flood our representatives with, we don’t want this, you better not vote for this. And hopefully, hopefully some sanity is retained here.
Robb: Amen. Do you want my completely cynical take on this?
Nicki: Sure.
Robb: So we have this… Which you have opportunity to comment on these things all the time, but I remember when Xi Jinping was getting ready to do some real power consolidation within the Chinese Communist Party, he called for, forget what it was called. It was the sunflower thing, but it was supposed to be like everybody open up and share the concerns-
Nicki: So that you can identify the people that are concerned about it-
Robb: … everybody that was concerned about it.
Nicki: Then you get put on a list.
Robb: … and then all those people were gone. So yeah, that’s my-
Nicki: That’s pretty cynical. I don’t-
Robb: I don’t think we’re there yet.
Nicki: … I don’t think we were there yet.
Robb: But yeah.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: But not to be outdone.
Nicki: Not to be outdone. Okay, so that was going to be our news topic today, but then this morning in my inbox, I get the emails from Barry Weiss’s Free Press. So many of you who follow her probably also got this email with a link to an article titled Trudeau’s Battle Against a Free Internet. And this is the Canada Online Streaming Act or bill C-11, which people expect to pass in Canada unfortunately. And basically it’s a protectionist act to protect legacy Canadian media from having to compete with all of the online content creators. So they would be filtering and shaping the feeds of Canadian citizens so that they see government content first and then presumably filtering out anybody that is not in alignment with the government.
So people like Jordan Peterson, regardless of what you think of him, he’s got a massive following on YouTube. And in the article they talk about also Justin Bieber and how he came, his whole career was born from YouTube and his mom posting videos and she’s quoted in there as basically saying if this act passed, it would prevent somebody like my son from rising and getting, building an audience and becoming who he has become. So again, is this moving us towards more authoritarianism or less? And I think with Trudeau, we pretty much know what direction he’s pushing things.
Robb: And I’ll just throw this out there to our friends, literally just adjacent to the north because we are so far northway. It’s a fascinating thing to watch Canada play out and the United States is not much better, but there seems to be remarkably little will to push back against this authoritarianism. There really seems to be a remarkable number of folks that are… And I get it. On the one hand, it’s a more socialistic mindset and we’re going to all do this for the common good. I think that’s great when there actually is a common good in light. But I don’t see a lot of common goods here. I see super dangerous consolidation of power and it’s fascinating to watch. And man, I hope our friends and neighbors to the north, I hope y’all know what you’re doing and know what you’re given up by agreeing with and facilitating stuff like this.
Nicki: I think the ones that listen to us fully grok it.
Robb: I get it, I get it. I get it.
Nicki: I think, unfortunately I think they might be outnumbered.
Robb: Yeah, that’s the fascinating part.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: I get that. And no disrespect to folks because we know people are in really difficult situations. I’m just fascinated at how a society gets there. But like I said, we are in many ways-
Nicki: We’re not far off.
Robb: … not far off.
Nicki: We’re not far off. If this RESTRICT Act passes, we’re effed, literally.
Robb: It’s true because simply-
Nicki: Anybody who says anything that is consider… Okay, so then imagine a future COVID-19 situation and anybody questioning anything, like the Brett and Heathers we did early on.
Robb: We don’t even have to go to that thing. Just simply suggesting that non-standard of care type one diabetes management could be a threat, because it’s endangering people even though it’s not, but there’s no due process. There is no-
Nicki: Or even suggesting that, hey, we might not want a CBDC, we might not want a centralized central bank-
Robb: Bitcoin might be-
Nicki: … Digital concerted-
Robb: … a good thing as a back-
Nicki: … Currency. Yeah. So that can be considered a national security threat because they need everybody on board with the thing. So anybody who… Yeah, folks, I think you understand this is a pretty bill. So the one thing that you’re going to do today after you’re done listening to this, please go to the show notes, click the link to email your representatives and tell them that this absolutely must not pass.
Robb: And I will. Emails help, phone calls count a hundred to one is what our understanding is. And I learned this from the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. They said that emails, they matter if that’s all you can muster up, but the gal that was in charge of that related that if you could get 10 people to mount phone calls, that really mattered. So if we could get a couple of thousand people, and clearly this is going to all kinds of different representatives, so it’s going to be spread over the aggregate-
Nicki: Yeah, but if all of our listeners share with friends and family members that also would be appalled by this-
Robb: We could actually move the needle on this.
Nicki: … we could actually move the needle.
Robb: Yeah. And Goddamn, this is important.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: It really is.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: Yep.
Nicki: So thank you in advance.
Robb: The civilization you save may be your own.
Nicki: This is true. This is true. Okay. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company element. It turns out that electrolytes don’t need to be brightly colored or full of sugar. In fact, the brightly colored and highly sugared concoctions on store shelves often contain very few electrolytes, the sodium, magnesium, and potassium that your body needs to perform at its best. And that’s why we made LMNT the way that we did. All the electrolytes you need, none of the crap you don’t. So if you eat keto or low carb, if you’re an athlete, a Spartan racer, BJJ player, runner, biker, if you have an active or physically demanding job, work in hot or humid conditions. If you’re a breastfeeding mom, if you have pots or if you’re just feeling a little tired and need a natural energy boost without caffeine, LMNT is for you. You can buy three boxes and get the fourth box free. If you go to drinkelmnt.com/robb, that’s drinklmnt.com/robb.
Robb: Fantastic.
Nicki: Okay, you ready for questions?
Robb: Let’s jump in.
Nicki: Okay. We got three for you today. The first one is from Gwyneth on getting fit as a senior. She says, I’m binge watching, listening, taking notes on all the Robb Wolf I can while waiting on your books to arrive. Sacred Cow arrived and I’m midway through it. I will be 70 in six months and I’m wanting to learn the best approach to making changes in my gut health via nutrition that isn’t bullshit based, like fasting. Strength training to build muscle and strengthen my bones. Oh, I’m overweight as well. Have some arthritis, sciatica and other run-of-the-mill age related breakdowns. Where do I start with strength training? I hesitate going to gyms and trying to find a personal trainer who I can trust. I have followed HASfit for a while now, and recently found balanced home fitness, which is right up my alley as they offer beginner workouts with a huge variety. All I want to do is move some dirt. Thoughts and ideas.
Robb: Sounds like she’s been listening to John Wellborn too.
Nicki: She might be. Yep.
Robb: Gwyneth, I don’t know your movement background, so I don’t know if you know how to squat and deadlift and hinge and thrust and row and all that type of stuff. And I will say one of the fortunate things of getting a little bit older and having a little bit of resources, whether it’s wanting to learn how to play guitar or piano or learn a language, if he can pay for a coach even for a brief period of time, man, it really accelerates the process. So you might do some poking around and as big a dumpster fire as Instagram and things like that are, you can find some really competent people on there and you can see what they’re about and get a sense of who they are and how they approach things. And I do think that having somebody do an assessment of you, if you can find somebody who’s got some FRC Kinstretch background, I think that that would be all the better, but it doesn’t have to be all of that.
There’s the functional range or what is it? Functional movement screen from, oh gosh, I’m blanking on the guy’s name now, but there are other modalities out there. Paul Check has some great stuff. So if you see a check certified coach or something, but the long and short of is, I think if you had somebody just go through a couple of gym sessions with you and work on some squat, some deadlifts, some press, some pull and just make sure your form is good. Help to make you aware. Nicki and I before we started working with Sarah and Grace and both of us had some hip asymmetries so that when we were squatting, one hip was higher than the other, and lo and behold, that makes your back hurt because you’re loading your spine asymmetrically. We’ve done some pretty good work over the last almost year now with that.
And now I’ve gotten back to where I can, I can’t front squat yet super heavy, but I’m starting to chase a linear progression on that and I feel pretty good and I look pretty good. And so I had some eyeballs on my movement, found some deficiencies, did bow some workarounds and some corrective activities to try to fix that. And knock on wood pretty good. My back hasn’t gone out in eight months and motoring along pretty well. So I do think it could be worthwhile to find somebody or even a couple of different people so that you get a couple of different inputs. And yeah, it’s some money, but these are our bodies. These are the vessels that we have for the rest of our duration on this planet, and I can think of fewer places that it would be money poorly spent than making these things work optimally.
Nicki: And on the functional range conditioning website, there is a place where you can look up to see if there are any certified providers in your area, and so that might be a good place to start also, just because the assessments that they do are really, really great. And if you have any joint issues or end range issues, which we all do regardless of our age, almost everybody does just because of how we’ve lived our lives, I think it’s important to address those also. So that might be a good spot to start.
Robb: And so the balance home fitness and the HASfit and stuff like that, although there are great things like that, there are great at-home training programs, but I think having some outside eyes on you at least occasionally, and sometimes you can find a coach for, you can find somebody who’s really well established and they might be more money. You find somebody who’s new to the scene and building their practice and it can be rather affordable to get some customized programming. And then maybe once a week they do some check-in on you and they have you do some front and profile squats and deadlifts and different things like that. So the programming side becomes a little bit less important going on other than you’re following a program with a plan. That’s the most important thing. I think I mentioned this in a podcast a while back, a Huberman lab piece just made the point that for strength training it was less important what specific plan people did versus just having a plan and sticking to that plan long term.
Nicki: What do you want to share with regards to her question about making changes to her gut health? She says she’s overweight, and if she hasn’t yet read your books, maybe the emphasis on protein.
Robb: Yeah. Yeah, Wired to Eat is still probably the best one, although Sacred Cow actually covers the nutrition really, really well. The gut health thing is, again, such a-
Nicki: Big topic.
Robb: … subjective thing, a big topic, but a subjective thing too. Some people do great with probiotics and other people, it cripples them, so some people thrive on fiber and other people they can’t stop pulling. So I think that a lot of that just comes down to some individual experimentation.
Nicki: But given that she’s overweight, probably has some inflammation, she’s got some arthritis and whatnot. So I think just trying to limit processed foods, focus on protein first and just whole real foods like protein, maybe some veggies, a little bit of fruit, nuts, and just try to clean up what you’re eating-
Robb: The composition-
Nicki: … to the best of your ability.
Robb: Yeah. Good catch.
Nicki: Okay, let’s see. Our next question is from Charlie and he wants to know if eating tofu will affect his testosterone. Hi, Robb and Nicki, I recently moved to Asia for work and I’ve been eating a lot of tofu here. The rest of my diet is mostly unchanged with a lot of meat, fish and eggs. There are studies saying the phytoestrogens and tofu lower testosterone, but there are also some saying it has no effect. I’m not sure what to believe. How much would you avoid eating it, if at all? And I’m having deja vu probably because I read this three times when putting this episode together, but I’m like shit, did we answer this three months ago?
Robb: No, no, we didn’t.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: We didn’t. No, no. Charlie, I really wanted to go in and just be like, tofu socks, don’t eat it. It’ll sterilize you. But the best that I can find in the literature is that really unlikely to have effects on testosterone. It can have effects on thyroid, and so the goitrogenic of potential of soy and soy products is real, so it’s one problem versus another. But also a lot of the traditional ways of eating tofu products, it’s usually in a broth, a fish based broth. There’s usually lots of iodine around, so they’ve instinctively set things up in a way that tends to mitigate this problem. And I think an easy way to go with this is to just stick as much other protein sources into the mix as you can, and I think on that testosterone front, you’re going to be just fine.
There does seem to be a little bit of concern around say children going through developmental processes. Some of the soy isoflavones have a non-trivial estrogenic effect, and I think that for kids, you might have a little bit of a different effect here, and they think when you look at the way that kids are fed within these traditional societies, they’re not as heavy in the soy based products. So I think that there’s maybe even a little bit of a western a price, a deep wisdom within that scene that they understand that there might be some problems there, but I can’t totally throw tofu under the bus from the testosterone perspective could be a concern from the thyroid perspective. So I would just keep some eyes open for that. But also if you’re eating it more in line with the way that these foods have been traditionally consumed and just being heavy on the animal-based proteins, whether that’s fish or beef or pork or what have you, I think you’re going to be just fine as much as I would like to throw the tofu under the bus.
Nicki: Okay. Last question here from Nicholas on body composition. Hey Robb, I met you in-person at my CrossFit cert in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on September 14th, 2008 when I was 29 years old, which 2008, that was-
Robb: Right before the black box or-
Nicki: A year before the black box. Yeah, that’s going way back. We talked about how my eating habits were okay and suggested I followed the CrossFit meal plan. It worked well for me up until around 2017 at 38 years old. I’m turning 43 now, and I’ve started to gain unwanted weight. I have slowed down on CrossFit training due to injuries, but still continue to train athletically three days a week, two lifting days, and one swimming/ cycling day. And still eat relatively clean. However, being Italian, I like my pasta and bread, especially when I visit my parents. Should I still be following the CrossFit meal plan? How do I get my body back to a relatively lean state without training so hard? Should intermittent fasting be something I start doing? I appreciate your time and experience.
Robb: All good questions. And a hat tip to Peter Ritia, he categorized these approaches to diet as either like a temporal one, like the time indexing, which would be intermittent fasting composition, which would be more like paleo or vegan or keto, and then combinations of those. And then wing and measuring would just straight up wing and measuring. And clearly most approaches incorporate more or less two of those, sometimes all three. This happens to us. We go from being really, really active and hard charging and we eat at a level that supports that, and then we get a little more sedentary and we’re used to eating it a certain way, or maybe you have a spouse with a digestive issue and they have to, the spouse eats highly concentrated food and you have actually good digestion and you end up finding that you’re gaining weight because you’re eating a lot of the same foods that your spouse eats.
It is a thing that Nicki and I have been unraveling a little bit, and you just have to figure out a strategy that works for you. There’s no magic to intermittent fasting other than it’s a way of controlling portions. For some people, it’s the bees knees like, I love eating between noon and eight o’clock or whatever, and they do well with that. It puts enough of a constraint on the parameters that, that works. I do think that even within that, our basic thing of gram protein per pound of body weight, so probably about 50 grams of protein each meal, three meals a day, the society that you get from eating whole real proteins is just remarkable. So I think that that’s something that should be in the mix no matter what. The old CrossFit template was, in theory, ideally paleoish foods sliced and diced into his own ratios. The intermittent fasting piece was certainly not on the radar then, it’s interesting that Barry Sears, and this is one of the things that I think he got shockingly wrong.
He was more of the opinion that if you were to eat 16 blocks a day, you’d be better off eating one block an hour throughout the whole day and eating all day versus these discreet meals, which is completely false. There’s actually some great research that showed that even people in a caloric deficit who spread the calories out evenly, literally eating every hour, got none of the systemic inflammatory benefits that you would typically see from the calorie restricted environment. So it undid all of the benefits because they were chronically eating. We are not grazing animals, so we’re just not meant to eat constantly. Also doesn’t mean we should be fasting 22 hours a day. So there’s balances within that. So I don’t know if you should follow the CrossFit meal plan. If you had some success with that, you could go back and look at it, but you’re going to have to modify it because you’re not as active as what you were previously.
Starting with that gram of protein per pound of body weight, maybe three quarters of a gram of carbs per pound of body weight, and then fat to flavor is probably a pretty good spot to be in this whole story. If you want to drop in some time restricted eating to improve the dietary adherence and just constrain the number of hours that you can eat, no problem with that. But there’s also not going to be any magic with that above and beyond just another lever to help you introduce some calorie control, some portion control.
Nicki: And you might want to use something like chronometer and weigh and measure your food for just-
Robb: Absolutely.
Nicki: … a week just so that you can see, oh, wow, who knows? I don’t know your height and your weight and all of that, but maybe you’re eating 800 calories more than you should be eating, and it’s just because you’re in a habit of doing so and you don’t realize that you are. The other thing he’s asking Robb is, I’m wondering if you have any comments on the exercise. So he’s lifting twice a week and then doing one cardio day, essentially. Clearly, another angle to tackle this would be to add in another day or two of activity, and it doesn’t have to be CrossFit style training hard. It could be some zone do cardio. It could be just getting out for an hour long walk.
Robb: Yeah, all that stuff is good. The postprandial walk is great for helping to mitigate blood sugar responses and has some great effects in the literature. Exercise is always great for body composition, but as we’ve learned, the place you do or undo this process is at the dinner table. Yeah.
Nicki: And pasta and bread is tasty, but maybe, I don’t know how often you visit your parents. So if it’s a relatively rare thing, then I would say just go enjoy yourself and have fun. But if they’re cooking for you twice a week-
Robb: You might have to have some strategies around that definitely-
Nicki: You might have to address things. Yeah.
Robb: … where you do an intermittent fast that day, and that’s like you do protein and veggies only with your meals leading up to that, and then you get your hog on when you hang with family. Yeah.
Nicki: Yep.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: So just some things to keep in mind. Nicholas, I hope that helps. Yeah. Let’s see. Any other comments, Robb, before we wrap this episode?
Robb: I don’t think so. Just a quick reminder for folks, please do contact your representatives and let’s try to put this RESTRICT Act.
Nicki: Let’s try to bury it.
Robb: Let’s try to bury it. And we’re going to, I’m not 100% sure on the history of this, but I’m pretty sure of it. I’ve read pieces on it. In the late seventies, Joe Biden ironically penned what was then the nascent outline of what ultimately became the Patriot Act, and he started chopping that thing around in the late seventies. So this was a solution for a problem that had not yet happened, which was just a desire to fucking expand the control of the government and erode our fundamental freedoms. And it’s clearly in vogue right now for a host of reasons, like we talked a little bit about financial stuff going on and whatnot. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic at all to suggest that in many regards, the government is losing control of things, losing control of the economy, losing control of the ability to direct narratives because there is social media now and people-
Nicki: They’re independent journalists doing a lot better, who are more trustworthy by the average person than the state sanctioned media.
Robb: You look at Barry Weiss and the Free Press, they went from a absolute obscurity, and she was a credible, but not a top of the food chain New York Times journalist, Goddamn, they’re doing some of the, arguably some of the best work in journalism now. And there are other people like that. I think that the people in control are getting more and more rattled about losing control, and I don’t know, I guess maybe people who’ve worked in the government, they’re like, yeah, and this is the way it should be, and it sucks that we’re losing freedoms, but this is what we need to do to prevent chaos. I don’t know, maybe I’ll understand the way the sausage is made at a deeper level at some point, and I’ll agree with that.
Right now it strikes me as appalling and similar to early in the pandemic, we knew from the 1918 pandemic, the after action reports there, the places that were honest with people did far better. And our public health, our public officials were not honest with us at all. They openly manipulated and lied to us and continue to this day, and this just seems to be this. Again, the way that this thing is worded, it is so open-ended that anybody, for virtually any reason-
Nicki: That the government deems.
Robb: The government deems. Can be black bagged and just gone, and people will be, oh no, that would never happen. And it’s like, no, once you open up that potentiality, it always happens.
Nicki: And I haven’t read the bill from front to back, but I did see, and so I don’t know if this is true or not, but I did see a comment that someone made that in all 56 or however many pages of this bill, the word TikTok is not in there at all. So if that’s true, again, it goes back to the thing, why can’t we have bills that the title of the bill sums it up, and then there’s bullet points about what the bill will do instead of getting what we typically get, which is a thousand different things buried inside of a single bill. I think the people are tired of that. People want clear, and they want to know that they’re representatives are reading the whole thing. Some of these things are thousands of pages long and people don’t read them all. They don’t know what’s in it when they’re voting on it. And again, this is-
Robb: … thousands of pages long, they get it and they have to vote on it within six hours or something.
Nicki: Which is-
Robb: Absolutely ridiculous.
Nicki: … again not, it’s not what the people want. And so I don’t know if we’re really in this fourth turning thing or what, and everything seems crazy and tumultuous and AI and crazy authoritarianism.
Robb: Cats and dogs sleeping together.
Nicki: All kinds of crazy stuff. So maybe, I guess we just got to do the things that we can do, which arguably is not a lot because most of this stuff is completely outside the control of the everyday citizen, but-
Robb: Ostensibly right now, this is still something that we could have some influence on.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: But I would say if we shoot this one down, we’re going to shoot it down again and again and again. And when the proper catastrophe happens, when the proper emergency happens, then these folks are going to have the justification for ramming something through like this, just like 9/11 precipitated the Patriot Act. So we need to be aware of that and keep our eyes open and Goddamn push back and fight at every turn against it if we care about freedom. If you don’t, then I guess just belly up to the bar and grab your Soma and call it a day,
Nicki: The Soma. Yep. All right. I think we’ll end it there.
Robb: Cool.
Nicki: Folks, have a wonderful weekend. Can’t believe it’s pretty much April. This year is flying by. Literally flying by. All right folks. We’ll see you next week.
Robb: Bye everybody.
Where you can find us:
Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/
Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks
First, thank you for what you guys are doing. Please keep grinding!
Second, I reached out to my two Senators asking them to NOT support S.686! Since they are both Democrats I am sure I will get the standard non engaging form letter back that I usually get when I send them emails, but somewhere a tick mark was made!
Tim
Tim