Ep. #403: Sal Di Stefano on Mastering the Mental Side of Dieting

Mike: Hello and welcome to the muscle for life podcast. I am your host, Michael Matthews. And this time I interview my friend from mind pump media, Sal DiStefano to talk about the mental side of dieting. Now, my books for men and women, bigger, leaner, stronger, and Thinner, leaner, stronger, respectively, include entire sections on the mental game of getting fit.

I’ve also recently published an entire book on the topic called The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. And the reason why I have put quite a bit of time and effort into discussing the softer side of fitness is this. Just knowing what to do is not enough. Just knowing how to do it is not enough.

You also need to have a strong enough why. You need to have a why that is strong enough to help you persevere through the inevitable struggles and setbacks to help pick you up. when you fall and ultimately to help you see your goals through to completion. Now, fortunately, you do not need a psychology degree or thousands of hours of counseling to accomplish this.

It mostly boils down to understanding and applying a few powerful mental strategies that effectively combat many of the mental hobgoblins that can sabotage you. And if you can do that, if you can overcome those obstacles, you will probably get the body you really want. It may take a bit longer than you had hoped, but you will probably get there.

And if you cannot overcome these obstacles, you probably will not get there no matter how long you work at it or how hard you try. It really is that simple. Now I invited Sal on the show because he is a bit of a specialist on the inner game of getting fit because he has spent the better part of a couple of decades in the trenches, working with people one on one normal, everyday people who just want to go from normal every day to fit.

And Sal really knows what the real issues people run into are and also what really solves them and also what doesn’t. So in this interview. We talk about things like the psychology of quote unquote food addiction, how to help prevent and fix cravings and binging, how to resolve body image problems, insecurities in particular, the benefits and the drawbacks of prolonged fasting, and more.

So if you are curious how to conquer the mental demons that so often demoralize many dieters out there, this episode is for you. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically by flexible dieting cookbook, the shredded chef.

Now this book has sold over 200, 000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands of men and women get the bodies they really want eating the types of food they really love, which is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know how to build your best body ever without having to follow a boring, bland, overly restrictive bodybuilding diet.

And if you want 125 of my personal favorite recipes for building muscle, losing fat and getting healthy, then you want to pick up the shredded chef today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play. Now, speaking of audible, I should also mention that you can actually get the audio book 100 percent free.

When you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do, if you are not currently listening to audiobooks, I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth into more valuable and productive activities.

So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitlybitly.com. Slash free T S C, and that will take you to audible. And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to the shredded chef for free.

All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least let’s get to the show. Oh shit. Sal’s back. 

Sal: What’s up, Mike? How you doing? 

Mike: Good, man. This is only our second time. I think you came in once to talk about HPA Access, but I think that was it, right? Or how, is this number three? 

Sal: No, this is number two.

We have so many conversations off air that I think it’s hard to, late at night when our spouses and girlfriends are sleeping. But no, this is only the second episode. You and I’ve been on together. 

Mike: Nice. The first one got a lot of good feedback and maybe one day we can have those private discussions publicly, but I don’t think today’s that day.

Sal: I don’t think that’s a good idea. Let’s keep those. Let’s keep those private, please. I appreciate you coming on a little early. I know you had to get a haircut, but it’s okay. You can let it keep growing. It’s looking good. Long. The way it is. 

Mike: My, my strategy works is just don’t care. Basically until. It gets so annoying that I have to get a haircut.

Sal: No I’ll joking aside. I’ve been enjoying watching your your social media involvement. You’ve really ramped it up, haven’t you? 

Mike: Yeah, that was one of the, one of the little things that was just an obvious place to improve. Previously, I wasn’t active on social media because I really don’t use it outside of work at all.

And I don’t like it for all the reasons that you. Probably don’t like it either. And, but it’s a mistake to just not use it. And especially when I’m already producing a lot of content, a lot of written content, a lot of recorded audio stuff, whatever. And I was like, Hey, if I can repurpose a lot of the educational stuff and just get that out more and all people have been wanting to see workouts for a long time.

So I can just post that. There’s not much to see. My workouts are boring and I’m not very strong and there’s nothing special about that really at all. But I understand for people who, at least I’m, I have the courage of my convictions. I train the way that I recommend. And so it’s cool for people to see that.

And it is so that people pick up form tips and stuff. So no, it’s been good in the scheme of things. I don’t know. The numbers are vastly improved compared to, cause I’ve really started doing it since I think, yeah, beginning of January. But in the scheme of things, I don’t know if my account is anything special, but Hey, people are liking it.

Sal: I think it’s interesting. It’s important because what we’re finding with media with new media is, and this has never happened before. People can feel like almost like a direct connection to the owner of a company that produces their product that they enjoy or of the celebrity or whatever. So it provides a different kind of value.

And the thing that I appreciate what you’re doing. As you’re just, like you said, you’re just being real on it. And that brings a lot of value. I did a talk at a gym nearby our studio here. And I talked to their staff of personal trainers and the topic was. How to use, new media to build your business.

The big misconception is that you get just lots of followers, okay, use Instagram, use Facebook, get as many people looking at you and following as possible, get as many likes as possible. And that’s actually false. That’s not the way to build business on social media, nor is it a way to use social media to augment your business.

Very few people can make, can build a business off of having a lot of people follow them. It takes a lot of people to do that. Millions of people, it’s quite rare. The more realistic approach is to really make an impact on the few thousand people that do follow you. I owned brick and mortar businesses before starting MindPump Media.

I would have done anything to have three to 5, 000 customers that I could connect and influence and talk with and provide value to, we forget that. We look at our social media, we’re like, Oh, 5, 000 followers. That’s nothing I need to get tons. So I’m just going to post all the stuff that gets lots of likes, like pictures of my butt or pictures of my shirt off or whatever, but 

Mike: Butthole.

That’s the key. It’s the butt is boring. It’s got to be the butthole now. 

Sal: Butthole picture. Exactly. Butthole models. I got that from you, but no, really, it’s about providing real actual value. And so I see what you’re doing and I think that’s going to do that. for your audience because, I know you off air and you’re, you do everything that you talk about.

So it’s it’s good to see that. 

Mike: Yeah. It’s that fuck who wrote it? Was it Paul? No, it wasn’t Paul Graham. It’s the 1000 true fans essay. Have you come across that? It went or article went all over the internet years and years ago. 

Sal: I didn’t read it. No, but I’ve heard, I’ve actually heard that term, the 1000 true fans or whatever.

Mike: Yeah. If I remember, I think it was more in the context of writing. If you could write was it a book a year or something? And if you had the essence of it, you have a thousand people who like you enough to basically buy whatever you create, you can make a good living for yourself. And again, I think it was in the context of writing, but I might just be remembering it because I was thinking myself in the context of writing books and selling books.

But when you do the math of it, yeah, just a thousand people who like you enough to buy whatever it is that you create and who continue to like whatever you create to continue buying whatever you continue to create that alone, just as an individual, while it may not make for an impressive business, but as an individual, you can make a very good living that way.

And if you could 10 X that now you’re looking at revenue numbers or sales numbers that start to become impressive, even just as a business, 

Sal: Yeah, and you have to ask yourself what you’re doing. The whole reason why, I’m doing mind pump media and all this is because deep down, my, the real purpose behind is I really do want to help people in authentic ways, really help people change their own behavior so that they can become more healthy and more fit.

Mike: Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle For Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle For Life, and Facebook at Muscle For Life Fitness. 

Sal: I just turned 40, last month, right? I’ve been in fitness professionally for 20 years.

It’s only recently that I’ve Moved into this kind of space before that I was training clients or I was training trainers who train clients and managing health clubs and working with members in that realm of business. It’s not like you make tons of money doing it. I did pretty well because I was good at what I did, but the reason why I did it is because I have a real passion for helping people.

If you look around, you look at the health epidemic that we’re trying to tackle in modern societies. A lot of people don’t really appreciate just how big of a deal this is. We talk about it like, Oh, obesity, and there’s a lot of overweight people. And you see a lot of diabetes and this and that.

But really, if you take a step back and you really examine what’s going on, it actually threatens to bankrupt some of the wealthiest countries in the world. We cannot continue on this trajectory. It’s literally that bad. Really the fitness and health industry should be able to provide the answers. To that.

I don’t think it’s going to be the medical industry. I don’t think they do a good job of that. They’re great at handling symptoms. They’re great at acute type issues, but when it comes to behavioral changes for these chronic health issues, that’s what true fitness can do. And so that’s what I’ve always tried to communicate.

And so when we started mind pump, that was the goal. Okay, how can we really provide a real amount of genuine value to people? It wasn’t, let’s see how massive and big we can get. And so the strategy was. The same strategies that I found to be successful when I had my brick and mortar business, which was, when I first became a trainer, I thought like a lot of trainers do you get a client, you get them all hyped up and motivated, and then you tell them everything they need to do.

So okay, Mrs. Johnson, you want these three pounds? 30 pounds. Here’s your meal plan. Here’s your workout. I want you to wake up at this time and do cardio. Do your weights here. Here’s what you’re gonna eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And you would just give them all the answers and you’d be like, great.

All they got to do is do what I say and they’re going to be awesome. It’s going to work for them. And you quickly learn. This is like the first few years as a personal trainer, you learn that’s a terrible strategy. Not because you’re not giving them necessarily the right answers, because a lot of the stuff that I would tell them, although some of it was wrong, a lot of it was right, definitely better than what they were doing.

It didn’t work. It didn’t work because they didn’t do it. It was too much all at once. And I wasn’t helping them on really adjusting and changing fundamental behaviors in long term ways. It was just not successful. And so I learned. Through the process of training people for two decades, a couple of different things, one was if I can communicate one thing, but do it effectively, that’s far more valuable than communicating 15 things.

In a non effective manner. The other thing was to have a level of likability in the media space. It’s a level of entertainment, personal training was likability because if clients enjoyed coming to the gym and training with me, not just cause of my workouts, but because they like to see me, they like to hang out with me.

They like to have good conversation with me. The odds that they would keep coming and the odds that they would continue to work out. And the longer that they keep coming and working out with me, the better the odds that they would do this for the rest of their life. To translate that into what I do now, if you listen to my podcast, we do give great fitness advice, but we’re definitely not the most science heavy podcast.

We give good advice, but we give the stuff that we think is real important. But what we try to do also is to try to entertain because we know that if we’re entertaining, people will want to listen to us and we’re going to reach those people That normally wouldn’t be reached by talking to, like acting like I’m talking to my peers, which you see so much in this space.

And so it’s the purpose behind what we do. And that’s the way we try to model our media. And so that’s why I commented on kind of what you’re doing with your media, because. I think that authenticity that you’re providing probably not going to get you, millions of new fans and viewers, but the people who watch it and listen to what you have to say, they’ll find a lot more value.

You make a much more of an impact on those people. 

Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. One to get to millions, I think you got to have a vagina. I’m pretty sure that’s just a prerequisite. So I’m already disqualified from reaching the yeah, you’re 

Sal: not hot enough. 

Mike: It’s a fact. But yeah, no, I totally agree that my goal was social media.

It’s cool to see the subscribers go up, but I’m more interested in the quality of the interactions. And like you’re saying, I liken it to. Email marketing, for example, you would much rather have a smaller, highly responsive list than a much larger, essentially dead list where you’ll hear I won’t call him out, but there’s a dude who released a book recently and one of the things he just promotes is how big his email list is, right?

400, 000 people. Yeah, that’s because that email list has never been scrubbed, cleaned once ever. If he were to maintain his list properly, it probably would be one half of that or maybe a third of that. So similarly with social media, I figure that I don’t want to be someone I’m not on social media just to get followers because I’m just not interested in it.

Maybe that’s just a point of I would not, I just wouldn’t care enough to even want to do it. So I’ll just be me and I’ll just do it in a way again, where I can stick To what I enjoy, which is just creating and sharing educational information. And yeah, that’s not going to get me as many followers as many other people.

As that, I would say almost in some cases, intentionally pandering to a certain type of person. Which is an archetype of millions of other people exactly like that, who you can, sure you play it you can get a lot of these people to follow you, but ultimately, what are you really going for?

Is it just have a big number or get a lot of likes? Or is it to actually make a difference in people’s lives? 

Sal: No, especially in fitness. I see a lot of people who will, these are some of the reasons why we came together and started the podcast is we would see. Certain things being communicated from the industry to consumers.

And we knew that those weren’t the things that were really making the best impact. You get a lot of the preying on insecurities. You’re fat here. Take this pill. It’ll make you skinny crash diet. This is what’s going to work for you. Do this. You’ll lose weight 

Mike: or look at me. Look at my life. Don’t you wish you were me.

Sal: And it’s alluring and it does get eyes, but it doesn’t really help anybody like a lot of the nutrition advice out there. A lot of the nutrition advice out there does not take into account the psychological component of food, food is gosh, there’s cultures created out around food, different events are characterized by different types of food.

Like you go to a birthday and there’s birthday foods, you go to the movies and there’s, movie foods and there’s, Breakfast foods and lunch foods. And there’s, we hardly ever eat because we’re hungry. That just doesn’t happen anymore in modern societies. Most people have never even felt hunger.

Everything that they think is hunger is cravings or emotion or context. And so they forget all that stuff. So when they give out their nutrition advice. It’s all about, Oh, you just got to cut your calories, count your macros. Here’s your, these foods are good. These foods are bad. And it’s okay, that’s all true.

A lot of that stuff is true. Some of it isn’t, but a lot of it is true, but you’re completely not taking into account the psychology behind, around food and why it’s so difficult. 

Mike: I’ll give you an example, Mike. Yeah. Talk about that. That’s something that, I get asked about a lot. And I can speak about my experiences working with other people.

I can speak about what I’ve read in the scientific literature, but I, and I’ve been honest about this. I can’t honestly say for myself that I know exactly what it’s like. It doesn’t mean I can’t be helpful and can’t give good advice, but that’s never been really a thing. thing for me, I naturally, I have probably even a smallish appetite.

I don’t get hungry really ever. I don’t really struggle with cravings for me, food. I can enjoy it or not. It just, it’s not really a thing to me for whatever reason. 

Sal: You’re the very rare individual. If you were a client of mine, it would be super easy to work with someone like you, you’re very objective, very analytical.

You probably look at food mostly as forms of energy. This is good. This is not 

Mike: good. I’ll eat this. I’ll eat that. And then nutrition yeah, I eat a lot of vegetables. Not because it’s necessarily the tastiest thing, but I’m like, this is very good for my body. Here are my two servings of leafy greens today.

And later I’m going to get my cruciferous and then I’m going to get my garlic and I’m going to get me, you know what I mean? But it’s not sure I can learn to like this. Broccoli as much as you can learn to stir fried broccoli, but it’s still stir fried broccoli, 

Sal: exactly. And so I’ll give an example, like if you have any trainers listening right now, they’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Like I had a lady that I trained a while ago and through doing an elimination diet, we identified. One of the reasons why she was getting certain skin rash issues, she had gone to see a dermatologist, she’d gone to see her doctor. They couldn’t really figure out what’s going on. So she had clearance to, to work with a trainer and work with nutrition.

And so we started trying to identify potential food intolerances. And for some people, certain foods can cause pretty interesting kind of auto immune ish type issues. And for her, it was a skin rash. And we identified that it was wheat. So anytime she would eat wheat, if she ate it more than two or three days in a row, she would start to get this itchy skin and then eventually it would turn into a rash.

And so we identified this and it was the hardest thing in the world for her to cut out because every morning for the last 10 years, her breakfast consisted of a bagel and it was so hard for her to break the chains. Off this food. And it sounds so simple. If, if someone like you, if you figured out that what you eat all the time is bothering you, I’m sure you probably like, cool, I’m not gonna eat that anymore.

Move on to the next thing. But for her, it was so difficult. And most people have these types of attachments and reactions to food because it becomes a part of our day to day behavior. And so you have to learn how to break those chains. And there are a couple strategies that I’ve used in the past that have been quite effective.

Mike: Yeah, 

Sal: I’ll give you some. So increased awareness tends to help. And so increased awareness around food involves most of the times when people eat, it’s a very kind of unaware, unconscious type of act. Like I’m hungry. I feel like eating this. I’ll eat that. I eat it and I’m done. And people don’t connect their food to, unless it’s an immediate reaction Oh, I ate that and I threw up.

They don’t connect it to like. Maybe some chronic fatigue or bloating. I’ve had people tell me, Oh, I just get bloated. And, I asked him what makes you bloated? I don’t know. I’ve just, I have a tendency to get bloated. And I’ve been like this for 10 years. It completely slips their mind that it could be their nutrition.

That’s causing some of these. And so awareness around food really helps. And so what I’ll have people do is I’ll have people journal and what I’ll have them do is I’ll say, okay, before you eat, I want you to write down how you feel while you’re eating. I want you to take a few notes about how you’re feeling while you’re eating.

And then after you eat, take some more notes. Now this sounds tedious and it can be, but what it does is it starts to reveal things to people. People start to notice things like, oh, I noticed. That when I’m sad, that’s when I start to crave these types of food, or I notice when I’m bored that I want to eat more of these other kinds of foods, or I notice when I eat this, I tend to be more fatigued about two or three hours later in the day.

So that’s real important. And you also want to make positive connections too. So not just negative ones, but more positive ones. Initially, when you do this kind of journaling process, You’ll actually find a little bit more anxiety around food. So I do want to give people that caveat because increased awareness will increase that at first, but then if you, as you continue it, it becomes, it starts to get better and better.

So that’s one thing that you could do. The second thing that you need to do, and I would say this probably is actually the most important thing or the single thing that will make the biggest impact is you want to be able to learn how to read your body’s signs and signals. In regards to appetite and satiety.

So am I hungry and am I full? And should I stop eating now? In order to do that, in my experience, it is very difficult to get to that point. If you eat a diet that is very high in heavily processed foods, very difficult to do now. Here’s why it’s not because. heavily processed foods are inherently unhealthy, although many of them are less healthy and less nutritious than whole natural foods.

That’s not the real reason, because you can find processed foods that are decent macro profiles, maybe made up of ingredients that are You know, relatively healthy or whatever. 

Mike: Let’s face it, all the foods we eat are processed to some degree. If you eat oatmeal, it was processed to some degree.

Sal: I’m talking about the heavily processed ones that long shelf life, they come in a package. 

Mike: Yeah. Usually flavored. Yeah. I just want to make that point of food processing per se is not bad. Food processing on the whole is actually great. We pasteurize our meal. It’s a good thing. 

Sal: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right.

I’m glad you said that. I’m using it to explain the heavily processed foods. I wish there was a different term I could use, but I’m glad you said that. But anyhow, heavily processed foods are engineered to be hyper palatable. Most of the money, the research and development and money that goes into heavily processed foods goes into how palatable they can make them.

And palatability refers to. The hedonistic pleasure that we receive from eating, said food. And that’s includes the taste. It also includes the mouthfeel, the crunch, the smell, the sound the bag makes when you open it, the color of the food, the color of the bag, the placing on the shelf in the grocery store, the associations you’ve made with that food because of the commercials or because of the context, there’s so many things that go into it, and there’s been so much research that goes into making processed foods or engineering.

Processed foods have been hyper palatable. It’s absolutely insane. And when you eat these foods, because they’ve hijacked, if you will, some of these signals of your body, it is very easy to overeat. It’s very, it becomes, it makes it very difficult for you to actually read the signals of your body in terms of satiety.

So a good example is. You’re having a big dinner with your family and you’re sitting at the edge of the table and you’re full. They’re just like, Oh my God, my stomach is full. I can’t eat another piece of steak. I’m really full. And then they bring out dessert. Now you’re still feeling this, the feeling of being full and stuffed, but something has happened in your brain where all of a sudden you have room for dessert.

Changing the flavors like that, going from salty to sweet, for example, it hijacks that. Stop signal that your brain will send you. Do you know that guy? What’s his name? Man versus food. Have you ever watched that show? 

Mike: I feel like I’ve heard of it, but I can’t say I’ve seen it. 

Sal: Okay. So this guy goes around to different restaurants and he does these food challenges, so you ever go to these restaurants and they’re like, if you can eat our 32 ounce steak in five minutes, you’ll win a free t shirt or whatever.

So he goes around the country and he does these food challenges. And in one particular episode, the challenge was to eat a kitchen sink full of ice cream. And he sits down, they set the timer, and he starts eating this ice cream. And he’s a professional eater, right? About two thirds of the way through, he starts to gag.

He gets that palate fatigue that we’ve all felt when you eat the same food for too long or whatever. And what does he do? Cause he knows exactly how to hack the system is he orders a plate of extra salty and extra crispy French fries. He eats an entire plate of French fries and then goes back to eating the ice cream and is able to finish the entire kitchen sink of ice cream.

Now he was able to win the contest by eating more food. And that is a perfect example that highlights. How processed foods kind of mess with these signals and symptoms. And so if you eat a diet that in most Americans, most people in Western societies, especially Americans, they eat a diet that is very high and heavily processed foods.

If you look at somebody’s food throughout the day, breakfast, lunch. And dinner, oftentimes the majority of the foods and meals and calories comes from and the snacks, of course, comes from these kind of heavily processed foods. So it’s no wonder that people tend to over consume. We do have a natural tendency to want to eat when food is in front of us, but we do also have these natural signals.

That tell us when we need to stop eating. There’s actually a couple of studies that support this. There was one recent one where it was actually pretty, a well controlled study. It was done, I forgot where it was done, but it was controlled to where the people were actually being given access to this food and they could be monitored.

And they divided the groups into two. One group had unlimited access to processed food, the other group had unlimited access to just whole natural foods, and the group that consumed the processed foods ate a significant amount of calories over what the group who ate whole natural foods, just because it just, that’s what they do.

And so if you can do that, if you can mostly avoid or eliminate heavily processed foods, what a lot of people find, and this is just through my own experience of training clients. What I find when I get people to do that, it’s crazy. It’s crazy, Mike. Like people start to lose weight, their body weights start to go to a more healthy body weight.

Now you’re not going to get shredded doing just that. You’re not going to become, a physique competitor or maybe achieve all your fitness goals or lean goals or whatever, but what you’ll find is that you will naturally, your body weight will naturally start to go towards a more natural, healthy body weight at the very least that makes it much, much easier.

To monitor your food intake and to eat an appropriate amount. If you inject those heavy processed foods in there, good luck, man. It’s hard. I had Chris Kresser on our podcast a while ago, and he really hammered this point home with the amazing example that I’ve recited quite a few times now on the podcast.

If I put. 2000 calories worth of plain white baked potato in front of you. And I said, okay, I want you to eat all these babies, plain baked potatoes. And I need you to eat them in less than 30 minutes. Do you think you’d be able to do it? Most people wouldn’t be able to, most people would gag. It’s too bland.

It’s not tasty enough. Pallet fatigue would kick in and we wouldn’t be able to finish it. On the flip side, if I had 2000 calories worth of potato chips and said, Hey, can you eat this in 30 minutes? That’s like a 

Mike: bag, 

Sal: right? Easy. Easy. We would do that. No problem. It wouldn’t be hard at all. 

Mike: Bag of Doritos is probably some like a bigger, right?

It’s probably 1, 500 calories. Something. Yeah. How easy is that? Like one of the guys that works with me here, he’s upset that he’s really into chips. And I know that he’s, he’ll, he’s watching football or something and say, I’ll eat two bags of chips and not even think about it. That’s easily over 2000 calories of chips.

Sal: Now imagine if you. Instead of that, he had just whole natural foods in front of him. Now, of course, he’s watching a game. So it’s a little bit of a, there’s a little bit of a disconnection. He’s not aware necessarily. Would he be able to 

Mike: do it? No way. Potatoes. You, the game is not that riveting.

Sal: Exactly. It just wouldn’t happen. 

Mike: Just to that point, you have what food scientists call the bliss point, right? And that’s like you’ve been saying, a lot of work has been put into, and a lot of money has been spent on finding what the food scientists call the right bliss point for foods.

And there’s a guy, a journalist named Michael Moss. I had him on my podcast. Podcast some time ago, he wrote a book called sugar, salt, fat. I think that’s the order. And those are the key components. Those are the key levers that they pull. So you’ll have food companies that will, they go through a tremendous amount of AB testing really is what it comes down to, to get the exact amount of sugar, salt, and fat need to go into their foods to make them maximally rewarding.

But also to combat that pallet fatigue that you talked about. So make them maximally rewarding on the where you bite into the food and you’re chewing it and it just, you just feel good and to make that last as long as possible. So as to encourage you to eat as much of the food as possible. And so the man, this is hundreds of millions of dollars that has been spent.

It might even be in the billions by now, just spent on research to make these highly processed foods. As delicious and edible as possible. 

Sal: Oh, as pleasurable as possible. But it goes even further. It’s not even just about the taste. They’ve done studies where they’ll take groups of people and they’ll have them eat ice cream, for example.

And they’ll say, okay, eat as much ice cream as you want. And one group of people, they’ll give them the ice cream in a bowl. And the other group of people, they’ll give them the ice cream in a brand new clean toilet. Okay? And clearly, the people eating the ice cream out of the toilet will eat far less ice cream.

Simply because it’s inside of it. Even though it’s a brand new clean toilet. It’s that association. So that’s an extreme example, but they go through and they’ve now identified colors. Years ago, I think it was Heinz ketchup came out. They thought it would be cool if they came out with a black ketchup.

Same taste. Everything else is exactly the same. The only difference was that it was black. It was a complete failure. Nobody wanted a black ketchup. They don’t like it. It just didn’t have the same palatability because. The color was different. Even the crunch, they even will study the right crunch and sound that something makes when you bite into it.

Now to be clear, humans for as long as we’ve been preparing food have aimed at increasing the pleasurability of our food experience. We’ve been doing this for a long time. Every culture has recipes, right? We add spices and salt and things to food. To increase its palatability. The difference is it’s now gone to a level that we could never have done without modern science.

It’s gotten to a level now where we can combine flavors, textures, and chemicals to really create these Frankenstein type foods that it’s almost not fair. And I don’t want to say it’s not fair because I think all individuals, we all have the power to make choices for ourself, but I think we need to truly appreciate the power.

That heavily processed foods have over us so that we can learn to abstain from them. What’s his name? Rob Wolf. Rob Wolf. Love that guy. He wrote a great book. And he talked about this exact subject and he actually compared it to pornography in the internet age. And he talked about how, because we have access to just unlimited supplies of pornography, the human brain didn’t evolve having that much variety.

And so now we’re finding is young men in their twenties with erectile dysfunction, which didn’t even exist before. Now what you’re finding are movements of young men who are abstaining from pornography because they’re learning firsthand the power it has over their brain, that’s what’s happened with food.

And so I firmly believe, I know, if we examine the obesity epidemic. Sure, we can look at it and say, Oh, we’re eating too much and we’re not moving enough. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Yeah, that’s what’s happening. But why? Like, why is it so hard for people to eat an appropriate amount in the face of obvious problems?

You are looking in the mirror and you’re 50 pounds overweight. You obviously. Have an issue. You obviously, your health is not good. You’re looking around and there’s people all around us. Are you fat shaming you bigot? Not at all. Not at all. But it’s true that it’s like, how come we can’t stop this?

It’s because again, we’re dealing with, heavily engineered foods and if you avoid them, your odds of success are much higher. So I guess that was a long winded way of saying like one of the steps. That I recommend people do if they want to really tackle this is to avoid the heavily processed foods because I have yet to find somebody who can, except for, you know, neurotic people like you or I have yet to find, normal people who can do well with nutrition long term who also eat a lot of heavily processed foods.

The last thing, Mike, that I recommend, I don’t recommend to everybody, if you’re listening and you have eating disorder or you’ve suffered from an eating disorder in the past, especially bulimia and anorexia, definitely don’t recommend this, but to everybody else, especially to the meat heads out there who do the opposite and force feed themselves, one of the most powerful.

single tools you can use to modify your behavior around food and really understand your true cravings and hunger is a fast, a prolonged fast. Fasting from food for 48, 72 hours really allows you to feel bored, feel stressed, feel happy, feel sad without having that food that you normally would put in your mouth.

It also allows you to connect with. What real hunger feels like, and then from a more physiological standpoint, not eating does seem to reset the, all the receptors that perceive taste and smell and all those things from food. And so what you end up finding. When you fast is that when you consume a food like a strawberry, for example, afterwards, it tastes so much sweeter and it’s so much more palatable and you find it much more enjoyable.

And so for certain people, when I’m getting them down this path, I’ll have them start with a 48 hour fast, and then we’ll Introducing foods because for some people it’s an easier approach. And, when it comes to fasting, I fast on average between once a month to once every other month for about 48 to 72 hours.

And I do it for those effects, the psychological or spiritual effects, if you will, and, fasting has been, gosh, that’s been, that’s in every. Major religion and spiritual practice for a reason. I think, the ancient spiritual leaders and mystics identified that the power behind the abstaining from one of our most Powerful pleasures, which is food.

Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I don’t fast other than skipping breakfast on the weekends, but I could definitely see that benefiting greatly if I were to be having problems with just my relationship with food. 

Sal: Yeah, no, I did it for health benefits. The reason why I continued to do it was for. Those benefits I find when I come out of a fast, I just have a different and better relationship with food.

It’s less about the hedonistic pleasure of eating and more about the appreciation of the food. I identify more clearly the difference between hunger and for me, boredom. Boredom is the big reason why I’ll eat besides being hungry. I know other people it’s other emotions. 

Mike: Yeah, I’ve experienced that.

Even if I don’t necessarily eat, I’ve definitely experienced that. Usually if I’m not. Occupied with something, which of course, then in this, when boredom sets in, my mind will flip to the thought of eating something. It’s just, did it, that’s just part of being human. 

Sal: Yeah. Oh, here’s something interesting.

I did notice from fasting. It’s funny. I was on my friend, Lane Norton’s page the other day because he wrote a post about fasting and how fasting doesn’t help you build muscle and this. And I said, he likes to dispel myths and he’s a bit of a contrarian, something that I noticed from fasting that I commented underneath.

And I actually had quite a few people respond when I fast for 48 or 72 hours and then I start to refeed and I noticed this the first couple times and I thought, this is interesting. Let me see if I keep noticing this. And I sure, in fact, I do every single time after about two or three days into the refeed, I get this.

Boost in performance that feels pretty awesome. It reminds me of, you’ve gotten yourself pretty lean before Mike. I’ve seen, you share pictures of yourself, all shredded and stuff on your Instagram. 

Mike: I got to get the like somehow. 

Sal: Oh yeah. Especially those the tidy whitey ones.

Those are great. 

Mike: That’s just for you, 

Sal: oh yeah. Everybody sees it. So w when you’ve gotten that lean, when you diet down to that lean and then you go to refeed afterwards and say, okay, I’m going to eat a little bit in excess of calories. You notice this anabolic boost, right?

That’s like the best workouts you’ve ever had. I don’t know if you have you noticed that for yourself? 

Mike: Trying to think because, it’s actually funny speaking about that. So I’ve stayed fairly lean, let’s say around 10 percent body fat. It’s hard to say, but where you don’t have much to, I don’t have much like fat to pinch anywhere for some time now, whereas previously I would maintain a bit higher and eat more food and have better workouts.

And the reason why I’m even saying this is I’ve had sleep issues on and off for the last couple of years now, actually. And I think it’s first and foremost because of extra stresses, mostly work related, which are now mostly over, which is nice, but I’ve also stayed fairly lean for quite some time now for the last few years, whereas previously I didn’t do that.

So I diet down, I would I would get as lean as. I really could get without just really suffering basically. I wasn’t trying to step on stage. So let’s say it’s down to six or 7%. That’s good enough for photo shoots and so forth. And a couple of times I tried to maintain that just because it looks cool and why not, but I found that I didn’t like how I felt at that time.

It didn’t interrupt my sleep. Per se that I remember, but I do remember only being able to eat maybe 25, 2600 calories. And I was lifting weights probably five hours a week and doing upward of an hour and a half of hit cardio per week. So I was burning a fair amount of, I was active, but to stay that lean, I couldn’t eat as much food as my body.

But as I just felt like my body wanted, and if I wasn’t a deficit still, it must have been a slight deficit because nothing was really changing in terms of weight and body composition. And then I would go back into a slight surplus. And yeah, I would feel, I don’t know if it’s just because, I had just gone through what might’ve been 8, 10, 12 weeks of dieting and then tried to maintain it.

So I was already feeling. Not bad, but not as good as usual. However, when I would start eating more, I would notice a definite resurgence in energy levels and sex drive and strength in the gym and motivation to train. I’ll probably cycle my calories is what I’ll probably do. So I’m going to, I’m going to go in a surplus on my training day.

It’s just what I’m gonna do now, because again, what I’ve done for years is. I eat the same foods every day, every meal. I don’t really care. I still enjoy them, but I would say on the whole. Okay. It’s been maintenance. My weight has not fluctuated beyond, depending on random factors, it could be as low as one 91 or as high as one 98, usually right in the middle, but I’ve been probably in a deficit.

More often than not, when you look at it in the day to day and that I’ve been in a slight deficit, probably many more days and then larger surpluses due to going to restaurants or maybe there’s a vacation here or there, like a weekend thing, so I’m going to. It just, it’s a pet theory of mine and I reached out to Eric Helms to, and I reached out also to Menno Henselman’s just out of curiosity, if they’ve run into any sort of issues with their sleep and Eric already got, I just reached out to them yesterday, Eric got back to me and he said that for him it’s, he has run into similar issues.

He said, when he’s lean, he sleeps worse. When he has more stress, he sleeps worse. And for me, It’s the same kind of issue for him as well, where I don’t have any trouble falling asleep. It’s waking up. It’s waking up sometimes after each sleep cycle. You go into that stage one where you’re almost like when you’re nor sleeping normally, you’re almost awake, but you’re not, I will wake up.

So maybe I’ll go through one, maybe two sleep cycles, come through a dream sequence, wake up, go back to sleep. Usually. Six months or so ago is even, there were some nights where I’d have trouble going back to sleep, but that was definitely more stress related anyways. Yeah. I agree with what you’re saying in terms of coming back into just eating more food and I’m going to do it again.

And it’s one of those things that I know that the research out there would suggest that E being in a slight deficit, even if it’s extended over long periods of time, really shouldn’t stress the body out that much staying pretty lean, really shouldn’t stress the body out that much. Yeah. It might be one of those things where there are just a number of factors.

Sal: It’s cumulative. But yeah it’s cumulative. If you have a high stress life and then you throw stress on top of it, it depends. It depends on the life. You should try CBD, Mike. Take some CBD before bed. Help you sleep a little bit.

Mike: That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. We’re laughing because if you want my thoughts on CBD, actually recorded a podcast on it. I’m not a fan. I think it’s a fad. 

Sal: I must have gotten tagged about 100, 000 times on your CBD stuff because of, yeah, it’s so great. You did a great job though. I think you were very objective in the way you, in the way you covered it.

Thanks. But what I was referring to before, like bodybuilders and competitors will notice this is they’ll diet into a show and then they’ll afterwards refeed and they’ll have the best workouts. Of their entire careers in that post, show 

Mike: Is that actually a thing among people who you would think are natural, at least because, you have some pretty gruesome, some pretty grim case studies out there of natural bodybuilders whose hormones were all fucked up for, upward of 12 months after shows.

Sal: Oh, I think it depends how you, yeah, I’m talking about people who do this the right way and who are healthy, but you get this almost like the super compensation effect, in endurance sports, cyclists and runners have, they’ve carb depleted and carb loaded for a long time. There seems to be this effect where if you don’t have carbohydrates for a while, for example, and then you introduce them again, your capacity to store glycogen.

Increases because your body’s overcompensating. Protein synthesis spikes a little higher when you go without protein for a certain period of time as well. It’s almost like it increases your sensitivity to protein. And so when I do these fasts and then I refeed afterwards, personally, this is my own anecdote.

I get some of the best workouts ever in that week following that fast. I’m stronger. I build more muscle. I have more stamina. And then I have a couple other theories around that. I know when you fast. You really amplify the programmed cell death and the cells that tend to kill themselves are the older ones and the young ones hunker down and strengthen themselves.

This is why fasting, they’re actually looking at fasting as an adjuvant therapy for cancer because it actually helps with that programmed cell death. But the other thing it does is that while you’re fasting, stem cells, Get stimulated. And then when you refeed, those stem cells get turned into new cells.

There was one cat study where they fasted the cats for 72 hours and then fed them again through their testing. They found that the cats pretty much replaced their immune system cells. In other words, they cycled through them. They killed the old ones and then built a bunch of new ones. So I don’t know if that’s what it is, but I do notice that after I do a 48 or 72 hour fast, it’s about two or three days after the refeed where I’ll hit PRs.

I’ll feel crazy pumps, just incredible feelings in the gym, and there’s been a lot of Anecdote around that. I’ve talked about it and I’ve written about it and I get lots of messages from people who are in the strength sports or people who are in fitness who say they noticed the same thing.

And I commented under Lane’s page and quite a few people were like, Oh shit. I noticed that too. What do you think that is? So I don’t know if there’s any science supporting it a hundred percent yet, but it is quite interesting. And it’s one of the reasons why I guess the cool side effects of a fasting.

Mike: Yeah, that is, it is interesting. It’s a nothing else. It’s just like a psychological. I guess a physiological payoff because at what point are you, I’m sure that if you’re going 48, 72 hours, it’s, there’s a point where it’s no longer enjoyable, right? 

Sal: Oh, no, fasting isn’t enjoyable. 

Mike: We got, there’s, I could probably go 24 hours and not run into too many issues, but I’m sure there’s a point where even I don’t tend to get hungry easily, or I’d be like this sucks.

Sal: Food feels good. So you’re cutting that out. Your body. When you’re not eating, it starts to tell you it wants it for me, at least the strongest hunger I’ll get is around the 48 hour mark. And then it seems to go away going into the 72 hour mark. I might get a little hypotensive.

Blood pressure tends to drop. And so if I’m laying on the ground and I get up too fast, I might get a little dizzy, but that’s a normal side effect of a fasting. It’s nothing to be worried about. There’s no real dangers. You don’t train obviously on those days. No, I go, if I do anything, it’s like mobility work or just walking.

Dom D’Agostino, he did a 10 day fast and then went and deadlifted 500 pounds, like 10 times or something like that. I don’t recommend that. I don’t feel great energy to work out when I’m fasting. And my goal while I’m fasting isn’t to like, send a signal to build muscle anyway. It’s not enjoyable in the sense that I’m not eating.

I don’t feel great. Feel quite as great, but the enjoyable aspect is I, I know I’m doing work, right? I know it’s something that seems to be benefiting me at the moment, but no, it’s not a fun thing. I don’t see how fasting, unless you do it for, maybe spiritual purposes. I know people who will do a week long fast and they’ll meditate and do all that kind of stuff, but I’m not really into all that, as far as that’s concerned.

It’s funny, you mentioned the psychological component of the fasting or the experience of it. We don’t talk enough about. You know how you really can’t separate that from the physiological stuff that’s happening. You can’t separate the what’s happening in my body from the my experience of what’s happening in my body.

It’s all kind of one, right? I was just reading this article on the placebo effect. I should send it to you. I was reading all these studies on the placebo effect and they actually did a study where they, people went in who needed a knee replacement and they took half the people and all they did was cut the knee open and sew it back up.

They didn’t even do the surgery and they had the same relief of symptoms that the people who had the knee surgery had, the actual surgery, a fake surgery actually produced. Similar 

Mike: results. There are multiple examples of that kind of stuff in the literature. There was I remember seeing one that it was, I forget the exact problem.

So the guy had a problem with his heart and normally the surgery was going to be traumatic. Splitting open the breastbone. And then this study was done decades ago, probably wouldn’t pass an ethics board now. So this would normally be a very invasive long recovery surgery. And the surgeon, the reason why he even got the idea.

to try this was what he was doing in the person’s body. And this surgery didn’t make sense to him. It made no sense. Mechanistically, why would this do anything? Why would this help this guy’s heart problem? It just doesn’t make sense, even though it’s the quote unquote, normal thing that we do. And so it was the same concept.

It was a sham surgery. He just made an incision and that’s it. And again, the guy thought that he had the heart surgery and I guess it didn’t really occur to him. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what was going to be done because it didn’t occur to him that, wait a minute, he feels too good for having his breast bones split open.

But the point is he thought he got the surgery, the heart surgery they needed to get, and his problem went away, but it was nothing was done. 

Sal: Yeah, they did another one where people who get these genetic tests, like these 23andMe tests, and they’ll be told that, Oh, you have a predisposition for anxiety or stress or diabetes or whatever.

And they did a bunch of them where they gave them fake results. And they actually find that the person’s physiology will start to meet their expectations of what they think the test said. So if you tell me, I have a high insulin or, high stress hormones. Even though that’s not true because I believe it to be true.

My physiology actually starts to match that a little bit. So trying to separate the experience from what’s happening. Good luck. And that’s why so much of successful, training or successful communication of how to get people to get more fit and more healthy. So much of it lies in how we communicate it and how we modify and alter that.

These behaviors and not just the mechanistic. Here’s what happens when you eat protein. Here’s what happens when when you eat fat and here’s what you need to do to work out. It’s never that easy. 

Mike: Yeah. Managing expectations and managing beliefs is hugely important. Makes me think of social media.

One of the reasons why I don’t like social media, particularly the fitness space is it sets so many unreal expectations aside from the weird beliefs people can. Pick up on social media, but just the expectations alone, I’d say for both men and women are so unobtainable for the average person. And there’s so much more going on behind the scenes.

I think you listened to the podcast I did recently on steroid use, right? And so there’s so much of that out there that people don’t talk about that changes everything for both men and women. It’s more of a guy thing, but there’s a lot of drug use among fitness girls too. It’s just different drugs.

Sal: Oh man. They are using low doses of anabolic testosterone, analogs, Anivar and Winstroll, and they are using these beta, agonists like Clenbuterol or Salbutamol. Yeah. It’s funny when I talk to. People in person, I’ve even communicated this on the podcast, the human brain and psyche evolved for the most part in kind of small communities and it’s totally normal and natural and unconscious for your mind to compare yourself to what it considers to be the norm.

Again, for most of human history, the norm was determined by your small community around you. Now that we have social media, And we elevate the extreme examples that are extremely rare. Think about it this way. How many six packs do you see in the real world? Turn off your social media. 

Mike: Just go to the beach, even go to the beach in the summer where you have people were already pre selects for people who might want to show off their bodies.

You don’t even see it that much there. 

Sal: No. Here’s another example. Like how many seven foot. Tall people. Have you ever seen in real life? I’ve never, the only time I’ve ever seen someone seven feet tall was when I went to a basketball game. Now, if I, all I ever did was watch basketball and look at basketball players on social media, my brain will start to believe that to be the norm.

And I will start to feel inadequate. So this is what’s happening with social media with these. A lot of people are looking at these pictures of all of these shredded Photoshopped fake individuals. Some of them on anabolic steroids, some of them on other drugs. Some of them genetic anomalies and many of them photoshopped.

And you’re going to start feeling shitty about yourself. You’re gonna start feeling very terrible about yourself because you don’t look like this 0. 1 percent of the population and your brain starts to think that’s normal. So 

Mike: how have you personally dealt with that? Cause speaking for me, I would say by Instagram standards, I look okay.

And although I can’t say I’ve ever felt necessarily like depressed about it, I don’t think it’s ever weighed down heavily on me. I’ve absolutely looked at dudes in Instagram and thought I’d be cool to look like that. That’s pretty cool. And knowing that I can never look like that unless I took a bunch of drugs.

And in some cases I never could look like that because I don’t have the muscle insertions. I just don’t have the genetics to look like that end of story. 

Sal: I dealt with what got me into lifting weights as a kid at the age of 14 was it were insecurities. I was a real skinny kid, and that’s what drove me.

Initially to work out and I got a lot of positive things from working out. It taught me, if I put in hard work today and then I get this result later on, it’s actually what helped develop my partly would develop my work ethic and how I approach, most things in life, I have this internal locus of control where, okay, I can change this thing.

If I focus on the things that I can control, but a lot of my motivation was the insecurities about my body. And it did drive me, Mike, it drove me to do things that were not good for me. I force fed myself. I took lots and lots of crazy supplements. I would blend tuna fish and chicken breasts and egg yolks and whole milk.

And I’d pound that, before bed or I drink, I’d buy these mega mass 4, 000 shakes that. That was literally the size of a bucket like a paint bucket. And the serving size was so big that there were like six servings in that whole bucket because it was 5, 000 calories and I’d pound that thing.

And I used to do that. And then I went into, and then of course, when designer steroids were a thing, when you were able to buy them over the counter, there was a period of time, there was a bit of a gray market. 

Mike: I think I missed that. When was that? 

Sal: Oh, that was I wanna say early two thousands in maybe 2000 to like 2005, maybe even 2010.

As late as then where what these really smart supplement manufacturers, small companies, what they would do is. They would research pharmaceutical drugs that companies would come up with. They would try to get approved as anabolics. And these were discarded like, Oh, we think this is going to be a good chemical.

And for whatever reason, they never pursued it oftentimes because the side effects were too strong. 

Mike: Yeah. As I say, it’s because it was like killing the mice or something. And they’re like, all right not that one. 

Sal: Or because there was a better option or whatever, or because they didn’t see any market viability because these analogs or whatever.

weren’t technically illegal because they weren’t, the way the law worked is the molecule itself has to be made illegal. So it’s like testosterone has to be made illegal. Dianabol has to be made illegal. Anadrol has to be made illegal. And so these weren’t on that list. And what they did. And I don’t know who the first guys to do it were, but I know Gaspari did it with some of his stuff.

And there was another company that made super drawl was another one or methyl master drawl was another one. One testosterone was another one. They would take these, they’d make them and then they’d sell them. These 

Mike: were for all intents and purposes, oral steroids. And you could buy them. What just in the back, the secret behind the locked glass supplement stash in the, in GNC or you bought them at 

Sal: no.

No. GNC never carried any of them. GNC, I think at one point carried androstenedione, which was the precursor hormone to testosterone, which really didn’t do much for you if you took no, these were actual designer steroids, but if you went to a local supplement stores or bodybuilding supplement stores, they would sell them.

They were per gym. Yeah. Yes. Or online you buy, that’s where I bought mine. I’d buy them online and they were designer steroids. Now they were sold as pro hormones, like DHEA, for example, but no, these were actual, and you take these things and for sure you would build my, I remember the first time I bought, the first one I took was, I think it was super drawl and I gained 10 pounds and Two and a half weeks or something stupid like that.

Most of it water. And I was super strong. I was like, Holy shit. And I messed with a lot of these things. I took a lot of these things and, I did quite a few cycles of them and did a lot of things to my health that weren’t great because it was driven by these insecurities. And at one point my health rebelled on me and I started to develop a terrible gut issues.

I even thought I had Crohn’s disease at one point and I had to re examine What I was doing, I took on a much more focused health and wellness approach and worked with some functional medicine practitioners and did some food testing and all that stuff. And that’s really what took me and turned me into who I am today.

But a lot of it was driven by those insecurities. And so 

Mike: do you still deal with that at all now? 

Sal: No, it’s funny. I am so far away from that now that even talking about it is strange. I feel like I’m talking about a different. person. I was your typical meathead driven by I got to get bigger.

I just got to get bigger. I got to get stronger at all costs. I’m so far away. At one point, Mike, when my health rebelled, I got terrible symptoms, right? I couldn’t keep any food inside my body, basically like having Crohn’s disease or colitis. And I lost 15 pounds in a very short period of time.

And, keep in mind, I was an individual at this point had identified so strongly with his body. And I tried to create the shell of this muscular person. This was a terribly difficult time to go through. And at the time I owned a personal training and wellness studio. And in my studio, I was a personal trainer.

And so I was, I’d focus on the exercise aspect, but I had somebody who did food testing and hormone testing. And, I had a massage therapist and they were all these kind of Wellness people who I consider to be a bit woo and crunchy, but I like them and the clientele like them and I could see that they provided value to people.

And so I loved having them on my team and we were all real cool. That’s one thing I will say about myself, pat myself on the back a little bit. I do have the ability to be able to enjoy relationships with people, even though I may disagree with them on a lot of things. And so we weren’t the same in terms of fitness, but I appreciated them.

And so we were friends. And when this happened with my health, I got desperate. And I turned to them and I said, I think I know everything about nutrition. I think I know everything about exercise. I’ve been to the doctors. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. Can you help me? And so they sat me down and I had to do a huge elimination diet.

I had to completely change my workouts. I started to supplement with things like probiotics. I went through a SIBO protocol, like a leaky gut protocol. In order to deal with this process, like I had to. Totally changed the focus of my training and diet from performance and muscle to, I just want to get healthy.

I just want to be healthy. I don’t care what I look like. I don’t care how much muscle I have. I don’t care how lean I am. I just want to get healthy. And it was about a year long process, about a year into it, and through that process was tough, by the way, I was so sensitive to food that. Even a hint of the wrong thing would set me off.

So I had to be very strict, about a year or so into the process, I was at a friend’s house for a pool party and I get out of the pool and I go into the bathroom and they had a couple of mirrors in the bathroom and one of the mirrors reflected into the other one. And I glimpsed a reflection of myself.

But it was from an angle that I’m not used to seeing. And so in a split second, I didn’t recognize what I was seeing. It was a very short, like split, split second, but I saw my reflection, didn’t recognize that it was myself for a split second. And in that split second, I thought to myself like, Whoa, that guy’s pretty muscular.

And then I Looked at myself. I saw that it was me and I was like, wait a minute. That’s really weird. What, how was I able to identify that with my, that I looked a particular way? And so then for the first time ever, or for that year, I was able to look at my body from an aesthetic point of view, and I was shocked.

To find that my focus on health and wellness, it actually produced a physique that had looked better than almost anything else I had ever been able to produce while taking designer steroids or while doing crazy things with weight gainers and supplements and training and all this other shit when I was completely focused on aesthetics, I actually looked better as a side effect.

Of focusing on health, that really is the catalyst for what it turned me into who I am today. And the voice that I have on mind pump all came from that. 

Mike: That’s interesting. And so now if you see it, cause you can always find people who look impressive on social media. For me, I would say for anybody who has dealt with any sort of maybe self criticism for me, It’s I am happy with the way that my body looks, it doesn’t look as good as there are many people on social media who look better, but for what it’s worth, where I think worked well for me is, I have intentionally not identified Myself and my value and my self esteem with just my physique.

You got to get there to some degree to do the line of work that I do. And, to get really lean and take once you get super lean, any guy, any, and I’d say any girl, once you get super lean, there is that point where it’s like anything else just feels fat. And so there are the standard quirks that come with, being, I would say.

Probably more into this may be one of my criticisms of the fitness space. One of the things I don’t like, I think is unhealthy is it puts too much attention on the body, just being obsessed with the body and how your body looks. And whereas I think it’s much healthier to not probably not to just take care of your body more, what you’re saying, focus on health, feel good, and.

Looking good. There’s nothing wrong with looking good, but not feeling like you’re a slave to your body where that’s all you do is you feed your body, you work out your body, you sleep your body, and you judge your emotions are tied into how you look or feel on a day to day based on, are you holding a little bit more water today?

Oh it’s a bad day. And so I’ve been maybe consciously tried to stay away from that. But it reminds me of the food stuff we’re talking about, or even Transcribed Porn. We’re all drawn to that stuff to one degree or another, whether we indulge is something else, but we all have that dark side that, that says, Hey, wouldn’t you like to eat nine bags of Doritos?

Wouldn’t you like to go on a, I think of that South park, one of the characters. was on some porn binge and there was cum everywhere. Wouldn’t you like, wouldn’t you like to do that? Maybe just consciously for me, saying, yeah, I don’t look as good as some of these other guys, but I have other things that I’m proud of.

Who cares? 

Sal: If you don’t learn to stop identifying with your appearance, that lesson will be taught to you one way or another. And the other is going to be, it’s going to be a hard way because we all get old and we all eventually don’t look good and you don’t want to be like those Hollywood actors and actresses who identify so strongly with their look that they’re in their sixties and seventies and they’ve had so much plastic surgery that they can’t blink and they’re depressed and anxious over it.

Mike: The lizards, the alien lizards. 

Sal: Yeah. Here’s the deal. Okay. At the end of the day, if you eat and exercise for aesthetics, you might get some aesthetics, but you won’t get good health. And at some point your poor health will eliminate whatever aesthetics you achieved on the flip side. If you eat and exercise for good health, you’ll get a great deal of health and a great deal of aesthetics.

So it’s actually the smart approach for aesthetics. Is to focus on good health. It’s just the only way to do it. And the only way to do it long term is to focus on that. Cause the other way doesn’t work long term. It just doesn’t. You just, if you keep pushing the aesthetics at some point, your health will rebel and you’ll lose both.

The other side of it is the motivation behind why you work out. If you’re only focused on aesthetics. And that’s the main 90 percent reason why I work out, and I eat a particular way. Much of that is driven by self hate and self criticism. I’m too fat, I’m too skinny, I don’t look good enough, so I need to change this, I need to change that.

And when your motivation to train and eat is self hate, it’s not going to direct you In an appropriate way, you start to treat exercise like a punishment. Oh God, I ate that burrito yesterday. So I’m gonna go beat the crap out of myself in the gym. Or you start to restrict your food because you deserve to be restricted because you’re a bad person.

Or then you start to binge because you give in because you don’t want to tyrannize yourself anymore and you can’t handle the guy that’s, forcing you to not eat. And so now I’m going to eat again. So you go this kind of binge restrict cycle versus. Training eating because you love yourself because you care about yourself.

Think about that. If you go to the gym because you’re trying to take care of yourself, the decisions you’re going to make are going to be the more appropriate ones. You’re more likely to train properly. You’re more likely to train intensely. When it’s the right time to train intensely. And you’re more likely to train in a way that’s recuperative.

When that’s what you need, you’re more likely to feed yourself appropriately when you’re taking care of yourself. Cause just like when you take care of your kid, I have two kids and I love them to death. Does that mean I give them cookies all the time? Cause that’s what they want all the time.

No, of course not. I’m going to give them stuff. That’s good for them. But every once in a while, I’m going to give them a cookie too. Cause I care about them and I want them to enjoy that part of it as well. So you’ll find that if your motivation is. Health and your motivation is caring about yourself.

The result of that is what most people are chasing, which is an aesthetic, healthy looking physique. And at the end of the day, now in pictures, it may be different because you can Photoshop them and you can change the tint and all that shit. But here’s the reality in person health is the most attractive thing.

So people want to be attractive. I’ll tell you what, go to a bodybuilding show, go to a physique competition, go to a bikini competition with all these shredded athletes. Go look at them in the face, in person, and you tell me how many of them look attractive. They don’t, because they’re totally unhealthy at that moment.

They’re super shredded, super depleted, probably got gut issues. Real health is the most attractive thing in real life. And the whole irony of it is, don’t chase that, chase the health, and then you’ll get all that. 

Mike: Very well said. I think that’s just like a point of maturity as far as at least fitness goes, right?

Yeah, I understand. When I started lifting weights, it was just to look good for girls. I grew up playing sports, wasn’t playing sports anymore. And I was like, yeah, I want to keep, I want to keep doing something with my body. Girls like muscles. I like girls there. I’ll start doing that. And then have gone through an aesthetics phase.

I didn’t use any drugs that I know of looking back. There were probably a couple, Test booster supplements that honestly probably had something just because I remember there was one. I don’t remember the name of it. And this was a supplement you just buy in GNC and it could just be a placebo effect, but I immediately started sleeping better.

I noticed more strength in the gym and it went away, within a few weeks. So it may or may not have had, it’s just now that I’ve been in the supplement industry for a few years and I know it goes on behind the scenes. You can get anything you want from China and then you can Get anything you want bottled and you can get anything you want on those labels if you just work with the right shady manufacturers So who knows?

Sal: Yeah, so now you have a boost your libido pills and they actually contain real Viagra, they found a ton 

Mike: of those or some natural quote unquote test booster that has just like tribulus and a few other useless ingredients, but also has a small amount, maybe if one of these testosterone analogs that you were talking about, it’s possible.

I don’t know. But my point is, I went through that test. Aesthetics phase where, Oh, it’s cool to get super lean and have ab veins. And while getting there naturally was actually straightforward, but trying to stay there, that’s where I realized this is not possible. It’s not possible unless I just going to be miserable, have terrible workouts, no sex drive.

Like eventually, like you were saying, my body’s going to rebel. And it’s just, yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to be able to take some cool pictures, but be otherwise pretty useless now. And much more along the same lines as you, where sure, I want to look good. I want to have good workouts. It’s cool to lift heavy weights for whatever that’s worth heavy for me.

But first and foremost, I want to be healthy and I want to be healthy for the long term. 

Sal: Exactly. And I loved, I love communicating from this direction on the podcast. And like I was saying earlier, it changed how I train people. Another example is. How I communicate exercise. When you work out, people view working out as a way to sweat and get sore.

So okay, I’m going to go to the gym and the whole goal is. To hammer these muscles so that they get sore, and I sweat. What I started telling people, which was way more effective, was to view exercise like a skill. So I tell people instead of going to the gym and squatting because you want to hammer your quads, go to the gym and practice squatting.

Like you’re trying to learn how to be a really good squatter. And the reason why I did that was because people, their technique and form is out the window. When people are focused just on the workout aspect, they tend to push themselves past good form. They tend to do things that are inappropriate, but when people go to the gym and practice exercise and get good at it, they get great results.

And I’d get my clients to go to the gym and they’d be like, I’m going to go to the gym and today I’m supposed to squat and I’m supposed to bench press and overhead press and I’m supposed to row and do pull ups. And so I’m going to go in there and practice them and just get really good at them.

And those are the clients who did the best year in and year out. Some of these clients I trained for 12 to 13 years and I haven’t trained them now for about four years. And they don’t have a trainer, they’re still consistent, they have not stopped working out because they have that kind of approach.

Mike: That’s great. Yeah. It reminds me of a little anecdote. I think it was a, it’s a golf anecdote reading a golf book, but it was a scorecard analogy. So it applies to anything in life. Like what kind of scorecard are you keeping? So in golf, for example when I was. Golfing a lot in Florida. I guess it wasn’t that much, maybe four to six hours a week or so, but the scorecard was quite literally the scorecard.

Like I was playing golf to get good at the game, not to go out and hang out and have a good time with people. And if I wasn’t getting better, I was not satisfied, but other people, it’s a different scorecard for them. It’s how many jokes did they enjoy with their buddies or how many beers did they drink?

And if they hit a couple of good shots along the way, Hey, that’s great. And so similarly, The scorecard can change positively and from where it is much more of a, it starts to turn into a neurosis, right? All the negative kind of body image obsession. That’s one type of scorecard that only it’s a dead end.

It really just is. Whereas everything else you’re talking about is just a totally different scorecard. 

Sal: Oh, yeah. Imagine if people went to the gym to learn the skill of lifting weights, to learn the skill of deadlifting, to learn the skill of overhead pressing and bench pressing and rowing and pull ups and, rotational movements and lunging.

And rather than going in to say, I’m going to hammer my chest, I’m going to work out my back, and I want my butt to look better because it’s fat or whatever, imagine if they went to the gym and treated them like any other skill. If you want to go learn how to play basketball, you’re not going there just to Burn tons of calories.

You want to learn how to dribble. You want to learn how to shoot. You want to learn all the fundamentals. Imagine if people went to the gym and treated exercise like a skill. How much more fit, muscular, strong people without injuries and pain we would have versus what we have now. It’s like night and day.

Mike: Very true. Very true. All right, man. I think That’s a great place to call it quits for this one. So obviously everyone can find you over at mindpumpmedia. com. You also have mind pump, your podcasts or anything else cool and exciting that you have going on that you want to tell people about. 

Sal: Yeah, we have a lot of free guides that we offer.

So like I have a guide on how to get a, increase the weight of your squat or how to develop your legs or your arms or your midsection. And I even have a guide for personal trainers to help them become more successful as personal trainers. And they’re all free. You can find those at mindpumpfree. com.

And then if people want to contact me personally, I have my own personal social media page on Instagram. That’s mindpumpsal. And that’s pretty much it, man. I, I really enjoy talking to you, Mike. You’re one of our absolutely one of the first time we met you, we had to come down to the studio.

And immediately we all knew you are one of our people. You’re one of the few honest, people with integrity in the space. And it’s rare, we’re glad we know you and glad you’re doing what you’re doing, man. 

Mike: Thanks, man. And of course I feel the same way. I consider us all friends, of course, not just peers, but I enjoy hanging out with you guys and I enjoy chats like this.

I look forward to talking to Adam and Justin as well. Thanks again for taking the time. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. Soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine.

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