Do you think there is a recipe for being in shape? People would hope that there is a recipe, but I know that just from life experience, so much is always thrown out at us. And I think people try every single thing in hopes and promises of a better body. Slimming down, becoming healthier, getting more energy.
But I don’t know, is there a one size fits all? We already have the same body. We all have the same body. Yeah. Meaning that we are all humans, we belong to the same species. Right. We have some very marginal differences, some more marginal than others, I would think. We’re not all the same size or the height, but it’s really marginal. In the grand scheme of things.
The universal principe in the recipe for being in shape
If you compare a human with an insect, there’s a big difference. When you compare humans between themselves, we are very, very close. Okay, that’s encouraging. So why would there not be a universal principle? That if we were to apply those principles, perhaps the ideal body can be achieved? Each body has its own target.
But it would be respecting a kind of harmony that is embedded in the various possibilities of our species. If only we understood this. I see many people running around, the jogging thing, going to the gym, lifting weights. And Like everything on this planet, everything is distributed. Most things are distributed according to a bell curve. But if you really concentrate on the 90% of people who make an effort to better their body. But let’s say you see very little results. And it seems unfair because some seem to do nothing and just effortlessly have a nice body. So where is the justice in all this?
These are the outliers. It’s always this bell curve, people on each extreme, people who do absolutely nothing, eat whatever, and they still appear to be in good health. But so many people are in such good health; yet suddenly at 55, they have a heart attack or they have cancer and people are very surprised.
We live in a world where people have an imperfect concept about perfect health. “He was so in shape and he was so healthy, and suddenly he had this heart attack”, you’ll often hear. What we know is that these things are building up. So something this person was doing was unhealthy rather than the opposite.
It’s not just about looking good
So do you mean something was not right in their physical fitness or just overall lifestyle? Possibly the food and other things. Without excluding that there is a default in the heart from birth or something pre-existing. Not to mention if they’ve just recently taken any types of medication or shots or whatnot that made them die suddenly. Which is happening quite a bit.
We know that in the US, the fourth cause of mortality, after heart disease, et cetera, it’s prescribed medication. So the prescription side of things, the pharmaceutical side of things, tends to get more and more lethal over time. So we have to be very vigilant on that front as well. Yes, but what I want to say is that the external shape of the body, the appearance of healthiness, doesn’t necessarily reflect the metabolic health of the person.
True. There are some very slim looking people that I know that are incredibly unhealthy and maybe because they’ve been slim all their lives, they’ve just gotten a little bit more careless and they eat the wrong things and definitely don’t work out or live a healthier lifestyle because they take for granted that they already so called look like they’re in shape.
So if everyone has the same goal, to be healthy and to preserve their health as long as possible. Because at 70, 80, 90, they do not want to be a burden to society or to family and to keep a certain independence. That’s usually the goal. I’m sure everybody wants to just remain independent till they’re dying day. Nobody wants to be a burden on anyone for any reason.
But in the west, most people spend their 20 last years burdened with disease. When we talk about life expectancy, that can be set at 80. The life expectancy in good health in our countries, it’s like 60, 65. Goodness. So it really means that you spend the last 15 to 20 years of your life just being overwhelmed by pain, arthritis etc.
Suddenly, you get the bill
So what we’ve been doing decades before getting sick is we’ve been working towards getting sick. So we’ve just been careless. We haven’t cared about what we put into our bodies or if we thought we were putting the right things into our bodies. We were misinformed about what really is good and what really isn’t. And bang, 10 years, 20 years, 25 years later, you’re sicker than anything and you wonder, how did I get here?
It’s like you are living on credit and suddenly the bill comes. So in that there is very good news. It means that you own your health. It is not something that suddenly becomes crazy or that you started to do crazy things, no. And again, we’re talking about the vast majority of cases. You are just paying the bill after a long process of accumulating toxins or malnutrition.
And people often hit panic mode. They tend to outsource their health once they realize, oh my God, this could be declining and I might be just going into a downward pit. They get scared, which is the best time to get them to outsource their health to all the usual suspects. All the mainstream healthcare suspects. And that may not the best place to look when you’re trying to get your health back into your own hands.
There’s no nutrition in there
We live in such an unnatural environment and so disconnected from our own bodies that we don’t listen to the signals anymore. And we are bombarded with food that are just misleading us. We have signals in society. And when we eat these processed foods, with additives. Only a fool would believe that there is some nutrition in these things.
So I like to look at nature. The only animals you will find in nature that are obese or sick, metabolically, are the domestic animals and of course humans. Okay, so what are they not doing anymore? They are not outsourcing, as you say, their health. They should know what to do. They should know what to eat in what quantity.
So the great message that has been out there for a long time from the doctors who are not specialized in nutrition, is never to mention food. Which is just insane. We have an epidemic of overweight people, and we know the consequences of obesity, yet no real direction is given to them. Covid or SarsCov 2 is not that dangerous for someone metabolically healthy, but will really be bad for obese people.
So it’s an underlying condition that is weakening the whole body. So being overweight makes you susceptible to many health challenges. And the advice that is commonly given is to eat less and move more, except that you cannot out exercise a bad diet. Because the good news in some ways is that 90% of your body shape literally is determined by what you eat.
Not by the amount of exercise that you do. True. I mean, you just see that in real life. There’s so many people in my life that just exercise to death, and they’re really not getting anywhere. And then there’s those that are the bodybuilders who have a different type of body type altogether, but their food is different as well. So that makes you wonder what makes more of a difference, the food or the exercise?
The experience shows that the food is making the whole difference because the body responds poorly to carbohydrates loaded food. I’m talking about grains, seeds, and everything, which is plant based. In fact, it’s actually, degraded into glucose. And most of it with very few proteins that you can use. And those seed oils, definitely not good. All of this is very inflammatory to the body.
It’s always a surprise to me that people would claim that inflammatory foods are the animal products or meat. Where’d that come from? Why do they say that? I think it’s a bit of propaganda, but is it science backed? It is absolutely not science backed.
There’s a measure that is commonly done in the blood. It’s called the C reactive protein. It’s a protein that is released in your bloodstream when you are inflamed. So if you want to test this, you go a month and a half on a meat only diet, you see the C reactive protein going to the ground. This means inflammation is heavily reduced or even has disappeared. It’s not measurable anymore, which is great news.
Whereas when you start reintroducing plants, it goes up again. So it is an objective measure. Yeah. I don’t understand how they continue to make claims in favor of eating plants. Well, I think we did talk about this before. How the agricultural industry was the one that was putting out ads for eating more fruits and vegetables and plant based foods. So there’s a conflict of interest there, obviously. It’s definitely not an objective recommendation.
We need to be very careful with who we get our information from and follow the money. Who’s paying them, and where did that information come from before we take it as gospel? Absolutely. It was driven by industrial interests and also, in times of scarcity, by the lack of meat or animal products.
But plants are an inferior food for us. And, while there’s no or little harm in eating a bit of it when you are not susceptible to molecules that are in plants. Our bodies are equipped to deal with a small quantity of it. But if your diet is composed like the majority of the standard American diet or the common diet today, which is 70% plant based, this is highly problematic.
Now, the question is, why can’t everyone afford a meat based diet? Because it’s possible to make it available to the whole population of this world. If you were to put ruminant animals everywhere, in ten years, you would have a renewed state of food for the world.
So once you quit any inflammatory food, you stop the toxins of plants in the body. I’m not even talking about industrial pesticides, et cetera. I’m talking about natural toxins in plants. And the damage from sugar that is too heavily in your blood, so this with the toxins will retain water and fat too.
Your body and toxins
To mitigate this toxicity, your body stores the toxins you cannot deal with because your liver is overwhelmed and you just have to store it somewhere to mitigate further inflammation. So when you quit all these toxins, your body can breathe again, and inflammation reduces. In this case, it releases water first and fats that are in excess. Oh, that’s good news.
So when people cut plants, you see tremendous results in weight loss. I’ve seen that. A friend of mine actually gave up all plant based food, and she just resorted to carnivore. So she was just eating fatty meat, that’s red meat, and cheese, milk and eggs. And in three days, I forgot what she said, how much? But it was a remarkably high amount of weight that she lost because she said she was just too toxic and too inflamed. She was over the moon.
She’s been at it for like a month, and she just swears by eating carnivore only. She said the beginning is really the water release. And you have litres and litres that are not necessary anymore. And then you will have this rebalancing between fat storage where some toxins have been. It will just melt away.
Now your reconstruction begins. If we go into what we are designed to eat. We would naturally get rid of natural toxins in plants. Your hormones will balance again. Toxins dissipate. So it frees the body to meet its weight goal and to be harmonious. And so the fat will be kept where it needs to be. In women, it’s around the hip, and the muscle mass will increase naturally to its natural state. Even without much exercise, if at all.
When your body is in harmony
So the key is harmony. And that harmony is what you feel when your body is in harmony, you actually start feeling good. You love waking up in the mornings, you love the energy levels. Everything feels right. So when you go animal based, you actually do not need a goal in terms of weight. Because the weigh scale can be your worst enemy.
Many people, after the first few weeks releasing water, releasing the toxic fat, et cetera, don’t see their inflammation and toxin loss changing their mass. But it’s because the fat can reduce and the muscle is being built. So the mass remains the same. But the body composition is totally different. So the weigh scale is not a measure. It’s a very misleading measure.
If you stagnate or you think you’re stagnating, and you think you’re not losing any weight. That’s probably not true. No, the only measure really is how you feel and how you look in your body composition, because you can have exactly the same weight when being tremendously fat or in shape. Muscle is weight, it weighs more than fats.
Someone needs to come up with classes on how we can be in tune with our own bodies so we don’t outsource this stuff. The more we outsource, the more we are told what to do. The less we’re really in control of what’s going on. And we’re probably not headed in the direction that we want to. So I think we all need to learn how to be more in tune with our bodies.
And that word harmony that you just said is so true. Maybe we should learn how it feels to be in harmony. When our bodies are completely aligned in the way they should be. Yes. And I think the first step is to try a species appropriate diet. Like all species on this planet, the diet our human bodies are designed to work on, which is physiologically the same as lions. We have the same digestive system.
When we eat like lions, the released toxins will free our minds from brain fog. And when I’ve seen the results by eating animal based only food, I’ve never seen anyone come back to mostly plant based. They now don’t fall for the trick of variety in their food. They wouldn’t go back to like 10% plants, even.
You’ll never look back
I’ve never looked back. I’ve gone carnivore for months now. I’ve never looked back. I’ve never looked at a fruit and a vegetable in a longing way. It just is no longer a part of my system. And the desire is not there. It’s really remarkable how we lose our inclination towards certain foods when we start eating foods that actually nourish us.
It’s because healthy people don’t feel any lack. When nourished properly we don’t feel any void. So there’s no desire, there’s no hunger for something. No, because once we have something that provides our body with everything it needs in a balanced way, then the body is just content with it. It will not ask for more. Usually the cravings was because the body is asking for more. Because it doesn’t get what it needed.
So coming back to the choice in food being superior than the choice in our exercise, right? You said it’s more important to understand what we should be eating than to be exercising like a crazy person. You cannot out exercise a bad diet. Okay, so how much should we exercise? Should we exercise and why should we exercise?
Food vs exercise
Yes. So I said 90% of your body composition is really related to what you eat. Now, coming to the exercise part, of course, exercise is not bad and is necessary because we are not meant to stay seated all day long. Right? We’ve always been active. So is it natural exercise, like walking to the store to buy whatever you need and walking to the post office? Is it just making active choices in life or is it actually going to the gym?
So there are two sides of this question. There is the exercise that is necessary to maintain your health, and walking is very good. Walking, because all of this is linked to body processes like digestion. When you walk, peristatism, which is the movement of the bowels, is stimulated. So being active is also important for your functions.
Now, ideally, I would say that replicating the movements of a farmer, of someone who lives a life that is not mechanized is probably what we need. But there’s no necessity to really go overboard because once again, I see people building muscle without any exercise.
Muscles and hormones
But if you want really to increase your muscle mass, and this is something that is interesting, there’s a whole field of medicine that is opening right now about it. A muscle centric medicine. We discovered that muscle. Muscle is the largest organ in the body. And its function is not only allowing us to move, it’s also the biggest endocrineal organ of the body.
It produces a lot of hormones. Wait, it’s larger than skin? Isn’t skin the largest organ in the body? All of your skin has muscles underlying, and you have muscles everywhere. So it’s really the largest organ. The function of the muscle, and indeed, the metabolic health, are studies that we are just starting to scratch the surface on.
But what we know for sure is that longevity is really associated to muscle mass, right? And it seems that the more muscle mass you keep as you age and the healthier you are. So I’m not talking a muscle mass that is being built by injecting crazy artificial hormones like the bodybuilders do. Because now we have to differentiate when people go into some sport discipline like marathon running or something.
If they want to be good at their sport, they have to dedicate themselves to training to be good at running and other things. If you are a power lifter in competition, you need to master the movements of power lifting, et cetera. There’s a technique to how you train.
Now, there’s no question that you should train for the technique and to be the best in your field of expertise, right? But your goal now is to win the marathon, which may not mean it is to be the healthiest version of yourself, right? So how do you get to the best version of yourself in terms of health? Well, in an urban environment, we can walk.
But now if we want to build muscle and not simply maintain the muscle, then let’s get something out of the way. I was saying that if you trained for a marathon, you should focus on your goal to win the marathon. But is it good for your health? Well, we know it’s not, because when you go into these long jogs you are sending messages.
Your body composition is determined mostly by your central nervous system. That is based on the signals it receives from your body. And if you give constantly the signal that you need to run long, the central nervous system will take it as a message that it should work towards adapting your body to this new reality.
So if you need to run long and we see it physiologically, that their body adapts to that. Okay. But in a bad way. Because when you run long, your cortisol level goes up. This is an amount of stress going up. Your body understands that since you want to run long, you need to be as light as possible, and you need to keep as much fuel as possible. So how do you get lighter? Well, it will destroy your mass where it’s not needed. Oh. This is where you see people who look so thin.
Not the sportsman’s recipe for being in shape
Look at the physique of a marathon runner and a sprinter. The marathon runner is very thin. It’s almost like no real muscle mass because their muscles are only applied towards what they’re doing on a daily basis. And all the rest is vanishing. Oh, gosh. And the bones are getting less dense to get lighter.
Is this common knowledge? Do people know this? Not really, as a study. How come? Why? Because people don’t read the real studies. But their doctors and their trainers should know. They’re experts. I mean, there is someone and probably in another episode, we can go through Dr. Jaquish. In my opinion, one of the foremost world leaders in muscle building.
He wrote a book called Weightlifting is a Waste of Time and so is Cardio. And he tells you that the population that is involved in muscle building and all this fitness exercise is probably the stupidest population on the planet. Why? Because they can’t read the scientific literature. They just don’t understand it.
But is there a scientific literature around this? Why are they told by their doctors and by their trainers and by their nutritionists to exercise and train in the way they do? And they insist that if you’re going to win the marathon, then you have to do this. Why aren’t any of them warned that with this excessive training, there are some serious drawbacks? Because, you see, the people who have been engaged in these activities for a long time, they don’t age well.
Their bodies are worn out. I’ve seen that. Yeah. And this is contraindicated. We have never in nature, in the past, in our evolution, been people who have been running for days or hours behind an animal. If we are hunters, what we would do is that we would use our minds to make traps and to catch animals that way.
We were not running behind a wounded buffalo for days. It’s not what we do. We collaborate and we make a trap. Then we get the animal. Well, if you run long, the message is to get as light as possible and keep as much fuel on board as possible. And so keeping fuel, it means that not losing as much fat as you want. So basically you’re going against your own reason that you are looking for and you usually end up being what is called skinny fat. This is normal fat cell on the belly for example. And this is not at all what you are looking for. No.
Where’s the proof
So now, if you’re asking me why this advice is out there, I return the question. Why is the advice of eating fruits and vegetable out there? Why is it repeated consistently when there’s absolutely nothing that is proving it? On the contrary. So all this information we get from the mainstream, which is not sound.
What I mean by that is our schools or our publications or our medical system, is so flawed and it’s not well studied at all. So they’re passing on this flawed information to us and that’s why so many people continue to get sick.
I have some members in my family who really believe that eating fruits and vegetables is a better way. And they’re the ones that are getting cancer. I mean, one who you know, is not well and has repeatedly had to deal with tumors and there’s a few others that haven’t done so well. So the proof is in the pudding.
But I guess the mind is just so trained that to be told or shown something else would now just be so foreign to that mind that they will not accept it. And they won’t associate their sickness with their lifestyle, with their so called healthy lifestyle. So they won’t associate that.
Maybe they got terribly sick because they were eating so many fruits and vegetables which they thought were healthy and good for them. So ordering the salads instead of the steak in their mind was the better option. Yes, it’s very sad, but they’ve been so misled indeed. And that’s abuse. They’ve been abused by our system.
How the body meets its goal
And again, it’s unfair. The literature on the way the muscle works, et cetera, is very clear. So if you want to build muscle and not simply maintain it, you need to have a good diet. A diet that’s appropriate. The body will meet its goal. You walk because you still need some activities, nothing really crazy on top of it. But if you want really to increase your muscle mass, you need again to tell your central nervous system that you need more muscle. And before even doing that, if your diet is not appropriate and the signal is given build muscle, then you need the building blocks.
So you need to eat enough protein in order to be able to build this muscle which comes from our animal based proteins. And not plant proteins because they are much less bioavailable and of course they are ingrained into toxins. The plant is trying to protect itself from its predators. And celluloid is not a digestible part of the plant. Celluloid is not at all digestible. And that is what is surrounding the nutrients, the so called nutrients that we think we’re getting. But we’re actually not getting them from the plant.
Things you can’t digest well, plants
No animal can actually digest plants. Let’s remember that only bacteria in fermentation can extract the full nutrition that is theoretically in the plants. We don’t have the digestive system that allows a good fermentation. Nobody knows this. I say this to pretty much everybody I know now, especially close family members, because I really want to bring this awareness. Nobody knows this. And it’s a very tough pill to swallow once the information reaches you. Yes.
And there’s something that is really disturbing also when we talk about protein. The currently used methodology today to measure the protein content in food is totally flawed because it’s grossly overestimating the content of protein in any food. They display erroneous measures on the labels.
Oh, 100 grams of this thing, of this whatever contains, like, 20 grams of protein. This is overestimated because of the mythology. Like 25% to 50% overestimated. So if you are using any of these applications to control your food intake and try to calibrate, usually with the goal of protein intake being like 0.8 grams of protein per kilo, which is much lower than should be, then you are missing your target by probably 30% to 40%.
So if you follow the labels, you are undernourished in terms of protein intake. I never trusted the food labels. I’m sorry. I always saw them as a conflict of interest. Why would any food company put anything but good things on their food labels? And sometimes they’re quite clever because they come up with chemical names of bad things. And so you don’t know what it is that’s in there, but it’s like a chemical name for a really terrible sugar or something, and they won’t tell you that.
The rule is, if it comes with a food label, it’s not food. Eat directly from the animal, it’s your safest bet. In labels, even the quantity of protein is derived from a methodology that was devised in 1943. Now we have better methodologies, but they don’t want to switch to a better methodology because it would mean revising all the labels and making it apparent that all these food companies weren’t telling us the truth.
Are we deficient? No, we are very deficient. Exactly. So it’s an inconvenience for them. Yes. Not even counting that even if you eat your 1 gram of protein a day per kilo, if it’s coming from plant proteins, it’s much less bioavailable.
Animal proteins are best. With plants, there’s no point in eating them because you’re not getting any of the nutrients out of it. Well, it’s inferior, for sure. So, now, if you want to hit a target, if you want to build muscle, you need to provide enough protein so that the body would say, okay, we have the resources. This is the first step. The second step is to give the signal to build more.
Building mass makes all the difference
But first, let’s address the intake of protein. I think that 2 grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass is really a minimum. Okay, so just to put things into context, if you take, like, 100 grams of fatty meat, it contains 50% of water first, then remains when you eat 100 grams, 50 grams is water. Okay. And the remaining 50 grams is divided into 20% protein and 30% fat. Okay?
So if your lean body mass, which is your body mass without the excess fat you may have for someone who is considered normal weight today, so remove 20%. Then if your body mass is 60 kilo, you would need to ingest 120 grams of protein every day to be able to build mass efficiently. It translates into 600 grams of red meat every day.
When you’re not building muscle, 1 gram of protein per kilo seems fine, but that still would mean 300 grams of red meat. Fatty red meat. Not to be deficient, not to be tapping into other muscles to feed the important muscles, et cetera. And when we say fatty red meat, we mean at least 30% fat. Correct.
So if you don’t maintain at least 1 gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, you would be deficient in protein, which means limiting the normal muscle mass targeted by the body. So now, once you have the building blocks, if you want to build muscle, you need to send a strong signal to the central nervous system to recognize the need to build more muscle. So you must go into exercises that exhaust your muscle capability, so that at one point, since you cannot lift something anymore, then the muscle sends a signal. Well, we need more muscle in this place, okay? And then the signal comes build more.
How to do it
So if we really lift weights, we must lift until full exhaustion of the muscle. Technically, it’s called muscle failure. Right? So when you cannot move the weights anymore, and now the signal has a chance to go to the body. And that should apply to everything.
So sit ups, push ups, weightlifting, input. But when you do your push ups, even with your arms, you do it as far as you can. And then up until that last push up, when you just can’t push up anymore, you know that you’ve exhausted your potential, and now your body is signaled to increase that potential. Yeah, it’s true. But you really should go into heavy weights because it’s sending a stronger signal if you want to build muscle more efficiently. But isn’t Jaquish’s thing that you do it against your own body weight through elastics.
I was going there, but I want first to make people understand how things work. Because it’s quite difficult to exhaust your muscles. So if we take an example of a power lift, which you sit on your back, you’re just on your back, and you have a weighted bar on your chest, and then you pull up. Right. Okay. And at the beginning of the movement, it’s pretty difficult to lift. But when you are at mid range, it gets easier. Right. And when you’re almost at the top, it’s like you don’t feel such a weight.
It’s because at this range of motion, when you’re almost at the top, Jaquish measured that your muscles are probably seven times stronger than at the beginning of the movement. Okay. So if you can lift 50 kilos starting on your chest and you lift up, it becomes easier and easier. Ideally, to really exhaust the whole muscle, you would be facing the necessity to have a weight that is increasing as much as you exercise.
And so 50 kilos would translate into 300 kilos at the top. So these muscle fibers that handle the top are barely exhausted when you exercise with just 50 kilos. So it’s like a conundrum, and he thought about it. And his solution was to progressively increase the weight as you move. And you can do it in several ways. Either you have some people around you who load the bar as you move. Changing the weights as you go, or some people who help you at the beginning, or something he devised, and maybe we can talk about it in the next episode, is using elastic rubber bands.
Love it because it means that as the elastic or the rubber band is extended, it becomes more and more difficult. So when you do that, not only do you exhaust all range of motion in terms of muscle, but you also prevent any injuries, because at the beginning of the movement, you have to preserve your joints. And lifting too heavy at the beginning of the movement can lead to injuries. So I think he has a very good technical solution to building muscle more efficiently.
