207 - Cody McBroom Gives Masterclass on Eating for Performance, Fat Loss, and Longevity

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Cody Mc Broome, welcome to the show, man.

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Thank you brother. Excited to be here.

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Thanks for being here, man. For those not aware, why don't you give yourself a little bit of a background of what got you into fitness and some of the highlights along the way?

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Yeah, man. So in a nutshell, I was the chubby kid growing up and over time I just got sick of it. Most people who grew up that way, I was kind of the black sheep in my family, I guess because overweight in my family, just me, no [00:00:30] way. Yeah, it was really weird, but bad environment, bad eating habits, I wasn't overly active and stuff. Played a little bit of sports, mostly soccer and then skateboarding, snowboarding, that kind of stuff later on. But essentially, I mean, man, once you get into high school, that's when I feel like

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It starts to affect your confidence and security in that state because now I'm really trying to honestly get girls to look at me and I'm trying to date and you're going to parties. So I ended up [00:01:00] starting to lose a little bit of weight, playing soccer, tore my meniscus, gained weight, came back to play soccer again, tore my ACL, gained more weight. It was just a repetitive thing. Now, knowing what I know, I didn't rehab, I didn't train it properly, I didn't do anything. I was in high school and I didn't, I didn't even go to the gym at that point. So I graduated high school, basically recovering from an injury, insecure and overweight, not lifting weights, anything. I went out of my way to go to the gym. I would go at late hours when [00:01:30] nobody was there and just started trying to lose weight.

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And man, I just fell in love with training. I got obsessed. I ended up losing 50 pounds. I changed my degree, which both of my parents said, no, understandably, I got the fitness bug. And a month later I'm like, Hey, I need to change my degree. They said no. So I forged my dad's signature to change it over and started studying. I was actually at a community college and I was part of this. I switched over to this program that was for health and fitness, and so I ended up taking class [00:02:00] on program design, nutrition 1 0 1, nutrition 2 0 1, insurance and liability of gym owners, really practical stuff, which was cool. Later my parents found out, but at that point I was down weight. I was training people for free. It was obvious that this was going to be my thing. I met Luca, he came and spoke at my school after multiple people that I just could not relate to, but Luca came in and it was somebody that I could see a little bit of myself.

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I was a street kid, he was too. It was finally somebody who wasn't like perfectly [00:02:30] groomed and professional and he was successful. So it inspired me. I started just basically showing up at his gym and bugging him as an 18-year-old kid until he let me have an internship, which then turned into a job, and then I worked for him for seven years coaching people on the gym floor before starting my online company, and we started tailor coaching method eight and a half years ago. And so since then it's just been coaching people, online training and nutrition, mostly nutrition, and now we mentor a lot of online coaches on how to do things the right way and scale [00:03:00] their businesses with integrity and good coaching, and I love it, man. It's just really trying to pay it back to the industry that changed my life, essentially.

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Love it, man. For those not aware, Luca Hovar is, he's a big name in the fitness industry, but he is also my coach for business, so we have that in common. Just kind of learning from him. What are some of the things that early on in your, I guess, your professional fitness career interning at Vigor, assuming it might not have been called [00:03:30] Vigor back then, but under Luca, did you pick up that you still kind of use today that are big principles or values in either your personal life or your coaching life, or a little bit of both if applicable?

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Yeah, it's been vigorous since day one.

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It

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Was vigor when I was in Sylvania before I came here. They just posted a picture the other day of one of their clients celebrating them, and if you swipe, it's me doing her measurements when I was 19 years old at the end. It's hilarious. I'm actually going out there tomorrow to speak at. [00:04:00] He taught me a lot, man. I mean, there's so many little things that have stuck with me over the years. You've probably heard him say awareness proceeds change. I think I've said that a million times to clients. There's so many little principles behind just working hard, being on the gym floor before you're going online, being able to cue people properly believing in coaching first, which is a big thing him and Andy are about, but really thinking about what, and this is why I help online coaches now with our mentorship, is because there's so many people in the online space that think [00:04:30] they can bypass the part of being into training and training people and coaching people for real, not just trying to post content and scale your company right away. So I think just the principle of what really strength and conditioning is about what real training is about and doing it because you love this shit. I didn't jump into this industry because I thought I was going to get rich at the time, actually, everybody, my dad was in the oil industry, and so he was trying to tell me not to do this. He can help me, and he's [00:05:00] like, you're great with talking. You can be going to sales first. This is a smarter path for you. There

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Was not a lot of money in it back then at all. It

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Wasn't. Not a lot of people

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Is successful,

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No, and it's a hard path no matter what, but the ones who really do thrive and grow, they're really into it. And if you know Luca, man, he's into it. So that's always stuck with me and it's never changed being a constant learner and just really just working really hard, man. He taught me a lot over the years.

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Love it. So flash forward to today, and you're running [00:05:30] a very successful business tailored coaching method. What kind of structure does that have? What other things do you do besides coaching? And I know you're a podcaster, you're a speaker, but what does that kind of whole business model look like for you? Yeah,

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Man, it's changed over the years. You learn obviously and you adapt. What it started as was, I actually in my interview for the internship with Luca, actually, I told him I wanted to do online fitness [00:06:00] stuff and he was like, how are you going to make money? I was like, I don't know, but Jay Faria and Nate Green do, and those are two guys I looked at back then was like, they'd make money somehow they have to survive, so I'm going to figure it out. And he was like, train people for five years straight and then you'll have the right to go online. And so I did it for six and a half with him before I went online. But in 2017, my wife got pregnant, my girlfriend at the time, and I was like, this is my moment. I have to try to do this now or never. So I went to him and said, Hey, this is my opportunity. This is when I have to do this. And [00:06:30] so I actually quit. I, I think I gave two months. I trained some of the coaches to train my clients and left with zero. Didn't take anybody that was local or anything. I just didn't want bad blood. Don't burn a bridge that you might have to walk over later on in life. Something I heard a long time ago, and I mean, I'm going there to speak tomorrow. Him and I are close. Yeah,

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Exactly.

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I built it from scratch and my wife was on maternity leave and she never went back. I built the company, the house was in her name that we moved into when she was pregnant, and I [00:07:00] just started from scratch. And so at first it was like, I just want to coach people and I want to be able to do it on my own terms, my own way, and I want to help people get lean. That is just, for me, it's always been this driver of looking around at society and seeing people who, and this sounds very brutal, but people who are fat and they are not taking advantage of what life is, and I have all this, I was fat, so I have all the empathy and sympathy in the world, but when I get to help them, seeing them change is just so fulfilling.

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And so that was always my thing is you're leaving so much [00:07:30] life on the table, you're skipping so much because your weight is holding you back, and I just want to coach people. I ended up working with, I think my roster was probably around a hundred, maybe a couple more, and at that point I could barely work out myself. I was not sleeping. I had a newborn, I didn't know what to do, and I hired an assistant. She helped me get things organized. Then I hired a coach underneath me and another coach, and we just kept going. And at the time, you can crack up, this is my company was called Boom, boom, performance. [00:08:00] My nickname's always been Cody, boom, boom, McBroom.

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And

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So I was trying to figure out a blog name. I was like, I don't know what to call my blog. And Luca was like, oh, boom, boom, performance.

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I was like, all right. So I was writing blogs and then I just turned into my online coach company. But once I started building a team, I was like, it has to change. I don't want it named after me. I have people underneath me that are doing just as much coaching and soon more there's a process. I want it to be titled after the method. And so we changed it to tailored coaching method because everything, we didn't do group stuff. It was very one-on-one individualized nutrition and fat [00:08:30] loss coaching, and we scaled that. We had nine coaches underneath me, a chief science officer who was actually doing research for the Army and then part-time working for me. So we would get cutting edge research and education and then some people on the media side. And it was great, man. We scaled it up to that point, but at a certain point I had to make a decision of do I continue scaling and watering down the coaching and making it cheaper because you can only manage so many people online across the country.

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And [00:09:00] I knew that that wasn't the route I wanted to take. So we started basically narrowing down the qualifications and standards you had to hold to be a coach with us. And my hope was that we could keep all nine coaches and everybody would raise the occasion, but that's not how it works. And we had, shoot, I had to fire two people, three people quit. Some were for moral reasons, which I respect. They have different beliefs to me and they don't like that, and that's fine. I totally understand and respect that. But unfortunately that made 'em leave. [00:09:30] And what ended up happening is we basically leveled up our service and just tightened it up. And so now we have a smaller team, we have five team of five including me coaches, and we're very, very tight knit. It's very, very deep access oriented. And we started building out the mentorship.

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My goal was to build out a certification program, which I bought the title for in 2019. I knew someday I was going to teach people what I do. So I've had online coaching specialist certifications, the business license since 2019, [00:10:00] did nothing with it until the end of 2025 when we started mapping this out, which is really cool, but which now we still coach people. It's basically systemized and structured. We have our software, we have what we do. It's very, we don't run ads, we don't do any of that. It's all word of mouth, it's all referral. Our SEO and a EO is great, so people are just coming in the door and then I'm able to create content for online coaches to market that side of things and teach them while people are just going to naturally come because built it to what it is today. So we can kind of have both legs of the business, so to speak. [00:10:30] And then to make everything even more complicated, I decided to develop an app a few years ago, which is an undertaking. I wanted basically my own version of Train Heroic kind of, but I wanted it to be mine. And this was pre-train heroic actually. I don't know if I would've made the same decision if things like that were available.

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It is not easy, but

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I own the code to it. I own everything to it, which is great. It is my product, which is awesome. But that's kind of our low tier because there's people, as you can imagine, they do coaching with us and they get the result, [00:11:00] and they've been with us for a year and they're like, I can't afford to do this full blown one-on-one coaching forever. But they want to be involved, they want to use my program stuff. So it's an easy thing to be like, Hey, check this out, it'll help you out kind of thing. But those are kind of the legs of our business man, and at this point it's kind of just their gears are turning now. We had that upset with the coaches leaving, which was a huge dip in revenue and in morale and just trying to figure things out and then being able to revitalize our culture and our team and actually bring us closer together and start growing again was [00:11:30] this crazy year of 2025. And we did it successfully and this year has been just fricking awesome. We were able to go through that and do it the right way and we're growing and building a certain now, so

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Heck yeah, man. That's a lot.

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Yeah, it's a lot.

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So correct me if I'm wrong, you work with a mix of gen pop and bodybuilding physique individuals and performance people with performance goals, is that correct?

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Yeah, so we do kind of what I would never recommend my mentor clients [00:12:00] to do, which is like you do everything, but when I started the company too, there wasn't that many online nutrition coaches for everyday people. It was basically like you're talking to a bodybuilding.com forum guy and he's helping you prep for a show, but nutrition coaching online really wasn't much of a thing when I started. So because of that, it was almost like if you did nutrition coaching for fat loss, that was your niche. Now that is not a niche, that is not deep enough. So that's what we do. What we do is we call it advanced gem [00:12:30] pop. And what I mean by that is these people, they're not competing, they're not doing anything necessarily, but they have studied, they've listened to all these podcasts, they've read, they've hired coaches before they're into it, but they're not fresh slate, which also kind of turned into a lot of coaches.

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We worked with a ton of coaches who were like, I need to look the part since I'm a coach and I want to go through a professional system. So we ended up kind of working with a lot of those people on the performance side, to be honest, that's kind of just me for my team, it's word of mouth stuff. I know guys who are [00:13:00] doing cool stuff that are like, Hey, can you help so-and-so out? And that ended up leading me to working with a bunch of WWE guys. I've worked with some people, a lot of people in law enforcement, fire, some different special forces stuff and some CrossFit here and there and high rocks and just random stuff. And then of course bodybuilders. But even I have a couple people prepping for a bodybuilder show right now, and neither one of them are bodybuilders. They're just the one dude has done three Ironmans, he's done different types of crazy events and he was like, I think I want to check off this box

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[00:13:30] Savage.

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Let's do that next. So it's kind of all over the board.

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Love it. Yeah. Let's get into a little bit of nutrition talk. Being that you work with a wide variety of people, you have worked with a wide variety of people in the past. What are some of the key similarities? We'll start with similarities and then maybe some of the differences between let's say someone who wants to just gain a little muscle, improve their wellbeing, be a little bit more vigorous throughout the day, maybe have better lab work, fit better into their clothes [00:14:00] versus someone who wants to get jacked and shredded. And then I guess we can get into the performance aspect of it after that, but what are some of the similarities and differences between those two?

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Yeah, so the first similarity I would say just across the board is that if we just look at health first, because there's always kind this triangle that we're looking at, right? There's health, aesthetics and performance, and most people want to balance those. They're like, Hey, I really need to get healthy, but I also want to look good, or I also want to keep up with the [00:14:30] pickup basketball or the guys I used to go to college with or my family, my kids. So there's always a mix of 'em, but if we look across the board, the one thing that is a commonality that we always have to prioritize is body fat because it is the number one thing that's going to predict all cause mortality, the likelihood of you getting sick, you getting ill, recovering slower, low testosterone, high cortisol, every hormone thing we can think of.

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If you have too much adipose tissue on your body, it's going to be negative. There's a scale because if you [00:15:00] get too lean, those things also go to shit too. But most normal people, they don't have to worry about that. They're not getting bodybuilding shredded. But if we know that it's like, Hey, even if just prioritizing health, if they have too much body fat, we do have to target calories and macros first. At the end of the day, those are what's going to move the needle. If somebody's already lean, we're going to lean more into the micronutrients because they can have a deficiency in different micronutrients, vitamins and minerals. That leads to health complications later on. And then when we go into actual [00:15:30] aesthetics, it's just standardizing the process and being extremely consistent. And so what I mean by that is perfect example. One of my coaches is actually there's another guy that I actually am putting on stage. I'm helping him, I'm taking him through it, and his weight shot up today, but we're in prep, we're like five weeks out. And so he was kind of freaking out, what did you do yesterday? Legs? Where did you legs

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Inflammation?

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And he just moved down to Florida and he's like, well, there's this new gym. So he went ham because he was excited about this stuff. I'm like, dude, that's inflammation.

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But

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[00:16:00] What that does is it skews the trend normal person. I'm like, good shit. Are you crushed legs? That's awesome. But for him, I'm like, I have to predict what your weight's going to be by Tuesday next week. Literally I'm getting your weight every few days to make sure we're on pace. If we're not, you're going to go on stage and embarrass yourself and I'm not going to let you do that. So we're going to remove leg day. I have to remove leg day. When we get a certain distance out from stage from some guys, they swell up. Other people not so much. If they have a little bit extra sodium, we're going to see that [00:16:30] fluctuate. If you keep your sodium very standard across the board, your weight doesn't fluctuate even on a high sodium or low sodium, your body regulates it really well. But if somebody has sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are great, but they don't usually eat sweet potatoes, there might be a slower motility rate, so it's sitting in the gut longer.

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Maybe they don't process them as well. So then they're pulling more water into the gut because water goes into the gut to help with digestion. Fiber binds to water, and that's how it works. So there's all these little things with a bodybuilder and aesthetics. If we have [00:17:00] a deadline now I have to standardize it. I'm like, Hey, I want you really, this is why meal plans work for them eating the same thing day to day. So there's no variance that causes fluctuations for a normal person. They can't adhere to that. It's miserable and boring. So we have to look at ranges of weight because I'm not, your weight's going to go like this, but actually I was going to post it on my story. I will today. I have these scale weights of I took six clients charts from our system that shows their scale weight over the course of one to three months.

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And if [00:17:30] you zoom into 'em, it's staticky super crazy, but if you zoom out, it's like a diagonal straight line down, they're losing weight, but it's never going to be perfectly linear. So really when it comes down to the aesthetic side of things, we are just focusing on controlling all these variables so that we can actually predict how your body's going to respond, which means it's more monotonous. We have to keep things very standardized, a normal average person, we want flexibility so that we can have better adherence, better sustainability, and a variety of nutrients in the diet to help with [00:18:00] health. Does that make sense?

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Yeah, totally makes sense. In the performance realm, say somebody is looking, we'll just keep it in the realm of hybrid, hybrid trainees, someone looking to get stronger, maybe build some more muscle and let's say run. What are some of the main differences in your approach to nutrition with someone like that versus I guess we can lump the gen pop in the bodybuilding, assuming the bodybuilder's, not like in prep, just like a general bodybuilding [00:18:30] diet slash gen pop diet versus a I want to go train double digit hours, I want to have all this extra energy to repair, recover, reduce my injury risk, and so on so forth. What are some of the main differences in those two types of people?

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So the first one, well, I will say this. I think most people would assume, I'm going to say carbs, and although carbs are definitely going to be higher with the hybrid athlete, sometimes with a bodybuilder too, it's more so just how much [00:19:00] muscle do they have and how much activity is there that scales your carbs are the dial that you crank up as activity or muscle mass go up. But I also gen pop people that are just looking for fat loss. I lean towards a higher carb diet with them. Carbs are energy, carbs are fueling your thyroid, carbs are fiber, carbs are most vitamins and minerals. People just fear carbs constantly and it drives me nuts. We really help show them that you don't need to do that. In fact, most gem pop people should take a note from bodybuilders because if you want to lose weight, look at the people who do it for sport. They probably know what they're doing [00:19:30] when comes, they eat

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A ton of carbs,

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They eat a ton of carbs and usually a low fat diet.

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So

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Hybrid, we do crank that carb dial up, they're burning way more with all the running and endurance. One of the differences is the protein intake. I'm a big fan of high protein diets. I think it makes sense for most people to consume more than what the normal is. So normally it's like 0.8 grams per pound is where people say, and some people say a gram per pound, which I agree with, especially if you don't have a ton of weight to lose. If you have 50 pounds to lose, [00:20:00] maybe point eight's better, but I have a lot of people, I'm like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. Nothing bad happens. You can have up to two to three grams per pound, which I would never recommend. And there's no serious health adverse effects. There's no kidney issues. All that happens is you sweat more and you pee more. It's getting rid of it as nitrogen, but even at three grams per pound, and there's literal studies of this with Dr.

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Antonio, Jose, Antonio, he did this with people and there was no added fat gain, none, even though they were in a 400, I believe [00:20:30] it was calorie surplus. There's no mechanism in store proteins fat. Now I never go that high, but that's a great satiety tool. It's a great way to keep people full and satiated while they're dieting. The problem is when you do that with somebody who's hybrid or if they don't lower that protein, there's a few things that happen. One protein takes way longer to digest and absorb, which means it sits in your gut longer, which is why it's nice when you're dieting because it keeps you full, but that means that you're not going to assimilate carbohydrates as quickly and you might be bloated, and you probably know this when you're running a long distance and you're [00:21:00] bloated, it's not fun,

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Not

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Fun at all. So we don't want to have high intake as that. There's also a process that happens, I believe it's called gluconeogenesis. And essentially what this is is it's just trying to take protein and use it as carbohydrates for fuel, right? It's changing a amino acid to a glucose molecule, which is not an efficient process, and it's also bypassing the fact that you have carbs to use but you're not using them. So if we have protein too high, it can slow down the absorption of carbs for fuel. And also I see this a lot with people. They'll have protein higher because [00:21:30] they're afraid to have carbs. And I'm like, you would do better if we just brought those up. You still need the minimum. We don't want to lose muscle, especially for a hybrid athlete, but being able to lower that a little bit so that you can absorb more of the carbohydrates is going to be probably the first main difference that I look.

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If we change the types of carbs we're having, we're going to increase the absorption rate of those carbs and specifically if we combine carbs together. So there's a really good study by this guy named Yarn something, I can't remember his last name. I probably couldn't pronounce it anyway, but it was on performance [00:22:00] athletes, runners and stuff. And so basically what we're looking at is we have starchy carbs, which are glucose, then we have fruit, which is fructose. Fructose is predominantly absorbed in the liver, which we do need, but we don't need as much as we need glucose. And I see that as an issue too. A lot of people have a ton of fruits and veggies and they skip out on carbohydrate, like starchy carbs.

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And

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I'm like,

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Especially around training, it can be rough. You're just replacing liver lico and not really

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To

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The muscles

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And then a bunch of fiber in your gut and that's not helping us.

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But when we do combine the fructose and the glucose, [00:22:30] we increase the rate of absorption. It's a natural glucose enhancer or absorption agent essentially. So if we put those together, that makes a really good pre-workout meal. Now, if we add salt to it, we increase the rate of absorption even more. If we add caffeine to it, we do it again. Now, we don't want to have caffeine with every meal, but for a pre-workout meal, let's have starch and fruit with some salt sodium on it, and let's add some caffeine in the mix. Now we have a great pre-workout meal. It's going to absorbed and it's lower protein, lower fat, so it's digesting well and [00:23:00] quick. They do this with a lot of MMA fighters. We've done this with. We've worked with some different mixed martial arts fighters, bare knuckle fighters, stuff like that. And when you have pre-day, so you're weighing in the night before, we can deplete you, which ideally we want to be like within striking distance to avoid any type of performance loss.

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But if we do need to cut to make weight, you make weight and then you drink. You can even do this if you have an hour before the match, like orange juice, highly branched, cyclic dextrin and salt and caffeine pills crushed up in it, and it's a solution with some water [00:23:30] in it. Now you have the fructose, you have the glucose, you have sodium, and you have caffeine. It's going to absorb quickly and you can replenish really fast. So we can use this as infu. We can use this as pre-workout fuel for runners. We can use this as a post-workout fuel if you have a two a day because running in the morning and lifting in the evening. So I start mixing these carb sources together more so with hybrid athletes. And I'm also looking at really honestly just improving their digestion more because digestion plays such a big role and I think a lot of athletes forget that [00:24:00] with gen pop or even just physique athletes, really it's very similar where we're just trying to standardize the diet so we can be consistent and just chip away at fat loss.

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We can be more flexible with things. You can still have a flexible diet with hybrid training and being a hybrid athlete, but the carbohydrate manipulation is just, it makes such a massive difference, especially when you get leaner. When I'm thinking hybrid athletes, you look like an athlete too. You're not a hybrid athlete who also has 50 pounds to lose. You got plenty of glycogen stored, you're good to go, just be [00:24:30] in a good head space to run and do your thing. Once you lose a ton of weight, this is where you start implementing this stuff.

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Yeah, makes total sense. That's a very in depth breakdown of the different types of carbs. I talk about carbs quite often. I'm a huge, huge fan of high carb diets. I like carb cycling for certain guys that are a little bit more experienced. Let's look at a little bit of a case study. This is something that I run into with clients quite often. I get dms about it, I talk about it sometimes in my podcast, but let's say you have a guy coming [00:25:00] to you and he wants to chase a hybrid performance goal just like we were talking about, but he's either skinny, fat, underused, lots of body fat, looks like I call a melted candle, or he's just fat in general. Let's say 20 plus percent body fat, maybe 25% body fat. He wants to perform, but also he wants to lean out and oh by the way, he has been undereating forever basically given his body, just get through the day calories, not do [00:25:30] all this extra stuff, perform, recover, keep my injury risk lower. How would you approach that tactically? And then how would you go about reconciling that and getting buy-in for that type of person who's just afraid to eat anymore?

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So this is where I think a little bit of science to create proof and then it has to be some for hands-on coaching that almost for lack of better terms, gets them to point out and admit where they're [00:26:00] missing the mark. Because I look at this with, I think we talked about this when you're on my podcast with RIR and it's like get a client to film and then you don't even have to tell 'em what their RI is. They're like, okay, I wasn't trained hard enough.

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Very similarly, we can get on FaceTime while you're measuring your food. We can get really nitty gritty with looking through your diet. It does take time, but the good thing is that you shouldn't have to do this forever with a client. You show them and point out 90 dude, literally, I'm not even exaggerating, 99% of people in that situation or otherwise. We get a lot of those for [00:26:30] fat loss too. We get a lot of people that are like that. Men and women who say they're dieting and they're not losing weight. It is physiologically impossible for you to not be leaner. If that is the case, you can be skinny fat because you don't have any muscle, but to be overweight and have weight to lose, you're not in a deficit. You might be in a deficit day to day, but you are doing damage on the weekend.

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There's something slipping through the cracks because it is less than 1% of people who actually have a metabolic disorder or dysfunction that causes that to happen. [00:27:00] And I've worked, I mean we've worked with in my company over a thousand people on this stuff. And so we've just had so many situations where we've had to navigate this. And early in my career it was the most puzzling thing. But there's research that shows 85% of people over consume compared to what they track. So they eat more than they track or think they eat and underactive, so they burn less calories than they think they burn with their activity. And this is true even in research where they pay the participants to track accurately. So they're [00:27:30] making money to track accurately and they're still off. So part of it is not just like, this is not me saying their compliance sucks.

(00:27:36):

You're lying to me. This is saying they literally don't know how to track some of these things. There's a lot of random stuff. For example, olive oil spray says zero calories. Oh yeah. If it's not in the food log, a coach will just go like, oh, there's nothing there. I don't even know to call it out. The client doesn't think of it, so it's never spoken about. But if we don't get granular with every single thing, we literally tell clients everything you put in your mouth, I don't even care if it says zero calories, put [00:28:00] it in the log. At first, I have to fully assess everything, but if you look at the serving size, it says one third of a second, maybe one fourth, so small. I'm like, how do you spray one fourth of a second on a a olive oil? Yeah,

(00:28:13):

It's

(00:28:13):

Impossible. I

(00:28:14):

Don't know. And it wouldn't do anything. It wouldn't

(00:28:16):

Do anything

(00:28:16):

Actually make the stuff not stick.

(00:28:18):

So bare minimum, they're having a teaspoon, which is still barely enough to not let it stick on the pan. A teaspoon is five grams of fat of oil, so there's five grams, and then we can keep going online if they have seasoning. Johnny's seasoning is a good example. [00:28:30] Johnny's seasoning is from Tacoma out here, so it's always been a staple for us. It's zero calories. The second ingredient is sugar. How is that possible? Well, it's because it's one fourth of a teaspoon.

(00:28:40):

That's how they get you.

(00:28:41):

I dump it on my potato. There's no way. And I could go on and on with these examples, but people don't know that they're undereducated, which makes sense. You're not a professional nutritionist or trainer. Why would you know that? So most of the time, the first step is literally getting very granular with everything they consume and showing them all these holes. And every time we do this, they're like, [00:29:00] oh, shoot. Okay, so not only are they less disciplined on the weekends and they have a lot of calories, but they also have all these things bleeding through the cracks. So they think they're eating 1500 calories, but they're really eating 18 to 2000, and then they go off on the weekend and they're not burning as many calories, not as active. They're probably not following a solid plan, which is a big step. When they get on board with a good coach and they follow a training program that instantly increases their expenditure finally following some structure. But that's the first thing we attack is always that part. The second part is usually [00:29:30] flipping the macronutrient profile of a diet. The typical person that comes on board, if they're eating enough protein, which is usually rarely the case, they're probably also eating too much fat. That is always the macronutrient. Yeah,

(00:29:41):

Buy a lot.

(00:29:41):

Buy a

(00:29:42):

Lot.

(00:29:42):

Most protein that tastes really good has fat in it.

(00:29:45):

They

(00:29:46):

Go for chicken thighs, not chicken breast. They go for the ribeye, not the top round or sirloin even, which even sirloin, they don't buy the 96% ground beef. They buy the 85%. So they have all these things sneaking in with fats, a lot of fats, [00:30:00] and then they stay away from carbs. Most of the time even I see people that are like, they look at spaghetti and they think carbs, pizza, carbs. I'm like, there's just as many calories from fat. Have you ever watched an Italian make spaghetti sauce?

(00:30:12):

Yeah, or donuts, muffins. I mean, yeah, there's carbs. We were actually going to talk about foods with carbs in them versus actual high carb foods, and there's a big difference

(00:30:20):

There is. So we're trying to nip that too and really show them how to structure a diet to not be so high in fat and get them to not fear carbs so we can bring carbs [00:30:30] up. What's going to happen from here is carbs are more thermogenic. So you burn more calories through digestion, which is a small factor in your total daily energy expenditure. But still protein and carbs burn more than fat. So we know we're going to have a little bit of an increase in energy expenditure, especially if we drop fats and bring carbs up. Then we're going to have more of a thermogenic response because carbs are energy, so you burn them more, which means you move more naturally. So even me moving my hands while I talk, all those little things start to tick up. Your thyroid is going to be healthier when you have [00:31:00] carbs in the diet. There's other minerals like iodine and stuff like that too that help, but your thyroid's like the control center for your metabolism. So that's going to speed things up. So now we start just kind of getting them to be more of a machine, which is so funny because if you really think about it, they've done the opposite thinking that they were going to get leaner and everything they're doing is the polar opposite

(00:31:18):

A hundred percent. I see this all the time,

(00:31:21):

All the time. If somebody is very stressed, which a lot of people are in today's world, especially in your line of work and it's intentional stress, but stressful states that they throw [00:31:30] themselves into because of their role plus

(00:31:33):

Type A personalities, which just makes you high strung anyway. So yeah, it's a lot that compounds it.

(00:31:38):

So low carb diets are going to exacerbate that because having carbs helps control the cortisol response. So we have all these factors playing into our, we do have to educate them on this a little bit because if we don't, we can't just say, Hey, eat more carbs, listen to me.

(00:31:53):

Yeah, they'll freak out.

(00:31:54):

So we have to show them why this is helpful. And then as they start getting results, we're pointing it out and saying, this is why. [00:32:00] This is helping. See how your weight's dropping when we raise carbs. Let's just remember this. And now we're starting to get them to that point, and that's going to help the person who's skinny fat too, because now they're building more muscle. If your muscle is 60 to 65% water, what do you think stores that water or hydrates, they go to the muscle and they store sodium. Same thing. Stores in the muscle. So you're going to build more muscle. Fat is not going to help with muscle. There's a little bit of triglycerides that can store in the muscle, but it's not conducive to energy, conducive to, [00:32:30] it's conducive to some low intensity energy. But carbohydrates are your main brain fuel, your nervous system fuel, your muscular systems fuel.

(00:32:37):

It is the primary fuel source that we want. And it's hard to store carbohydrates as fat. This process is called de novo lipogenesis. And this is the last thing I'll say. This is a really cool demonstration and I almost wish I had, I dunno if people watch this podcast, but if you have a cup, and I did this on Instagram, I poured salt in the bottom of the cup and I'm like, this is the protein. And then I poured and it had a clear [00:33:00] cup, and then I poured water and it filled on top and the salt stayed at the bottom, right sinks to the bottom like sand. Then I have all this water that's carbohydrates. And then I poured oil and the oil rose to the top and that's fats. And I filled it up and it's sitting there and I'm like, now I'm going to go into a surplus with carbs.

(00:33:17):

So I dump the water into it, it goes through the oil, and the oil starts spilling out the side of the cup because oil rises to the top. So if you go into a calorie surplus with any type of macronutrient, your body is more likely to store the fat as the fat [00:33:30] because it's already fat. It has to go through a molecular process to change the carbohydrate into a lipid, which is a different type of cell to store it as fat, and it doesn't want to do that. So this doesn't mean don't have fats, but it does mean that carbs aren't making you fat. A calorie surplus is making you fat. And if you want to burn the food you eat, you should probably have more carbs than anything else.

(00:33:51):

And you're going to feel better. You're going to perform better, you're going to recover better. You're going to feel better away from training. I am a big proponent of high carb. I mean most people who [00:34:00] listen to the show have big performance goals. And when you underfeed it, whether it's poor macro distribution, because I see the same thing, most people eat way too much fat without really knowing it and way too little carbs. You're just not going to perform well. You're not going to feel great if you're in a calorie deficit, you're going to increase your injury risk and you're basically getting by. You're getting through the day surviving. You're not actually thriving until, like you said, you start actually getting really, really down to the details of what you're [00:34:30] tracking, becoming aware of it, and then just having the trust in the process to increase those carbs in small amounts.

(00:34:36):

Over time you start feeling better, you start feeling pumps in the gym again, and your labs probably look better and so on and so forth. So on that note, one of the things that a lot of guys I talk to struggle with is getting a really high, let's say 400, 500, 600 grams of carbs a day, which for some people listening to this, that sounds insane, [00:35:00] but just for reference, I personally sit at the computer most of the day, get 10 to 12,000 steps a day, lift weights three days a week, do a little bit of cardio. Honestly, not that much. Right now, I'm a little bit slacking and I eat 460 grams of carbs per day right now. And actually no, my coach just raised them to 4 75 and I'm basically maintaining. So it can be done. The thing is though, I eat about 200 grams of protein.

(00:35:26):

I weigh about 190 pounds, so a little higher than one gram per pound of [00:35:30] body weight, but I only eat 50 grams of fat per day. And a lot of people struggle to conceptualize how can I get all these carbs in a sustainable manner on a regular basis without going over in fat. So let's talk a little bit about some good strategies to get enough protein, enough carbohydrates, you're going high carbohydrates for performance without cranking the fat super high. And then maybe talk a little bit about foods that have carbs in 'em. You kind of mentioned 'em earlier with a pizza and whatnot. Foods [00:36:00] that have carbs versus actual carbs.

(00:36:02):

Yeah, I love this dude. And for context on this too, there's a few different factors that change because somebody could be listening and be like, that's my training split and I'm 190 pounds. I can't eat that much. Yeah, don't

(00:36:14):

Do what

(00:36:15):

I do. Yeah, you might be able to depending on if you actually trained as hard and if you actually ran as hard and all these things. But also there is a genetic component to metabolism. It's a smaller one, but there is a genetic factor. There's also muscle tissue. So if somebody has more muscle tissue and it's been there for longer, they're more likely going [00:36:30] to be able to consume more carbs. The type of carbs you have, I do think matter that is outside of the macros realm and calories and versus calories out. And I do think that matters most, but to say that and the other stuff doesn't matter is incorrect in my opinion. And just to double down on what you're doing to show people too, because I'm a hundred and seventy five, a hundred seventy six pounds, and I have about 50 grams fat too, I keep mine pretty low. If I've dieted down to get lean, I'll drop 'em to like 40. [00:37:00] It's fine with me. Sometimes it's a little bit harder to do that, but 50 is fine with me year round. I have no issue with that. But research shows if your calories are in maintenance or a surplus, you can have literally no fat and you will be fine. You should have dietetics. Research actually shows seven grams of fat is actually all human needs per day to support your fiber bladder. No shit. Shit, I did not know that.

(00:37:22):

Wow. What about hormones? Does that mess with your hormones at all? If you're natural? So

(00:37:26):

This is where the caveat kind of comes into play. Your hormones [00:37:30] are going to be predicated mostly on your total level of body fat and your total calories consumed. So when you take somebody and they have a study that showed this, they were consuming about 500 grams of carbs, I think, and it was a lot of rice crispy cereal and non-fat milk, and it didn't look like a good diet, but they had, I want to say it was like 10 to 15 grams of fat a day is all they could have, and they had zero hormonal effects, zero issues at all. They were building muscle, but it's because they were in a surplus. So this is the whole thing is like you will probably and keeping your fats lower while going into surplus, if you're training hard, [00:38:00] you're going to build more muscle that way for sure.

(00:38:01):

But also there's a point where it's like you can't even adhere to it. You don't need to go that low, but it proves a point. Your hormones are going to be fine unless you go into a deficit. So if somebody's in a calorie deficit to lose fat, then I have to be a little bit more cautious that seven gram 15 grams, yeah, that's going to hurt 'em. The calorie deficit is what's going to cause their hormones to take a hit. But having enough fats in the diet is going to slow that process down, so I won't have to worry about their biofeedback hormonally for nearly as soon going into a deficit if I keep their [00:38:30] fats up a bit. And carbs are an easier dial to turn back and forth. You have more to play with. So I like having your protein set and your fats pretty much set and mostly manipulating carbs up and down. We can drop fats a little bit within 10 grams, let's say, but to keep dropping fats down does make it difficult, especially in a calorie deficit.

(00:38:48):

It's also just impractical.

(00:38:49):

It is. It's hard

(00:38:50):

To eat just only carbs all day.

(00:38:53):

Exactly. Now, if we talk about what is the amount that your body will use for your brain, there's parts of your brainstem, your [00:39:00] axon, and it goes into the nervous system that uses it. Your hormonal system, if we look at that while going deficit, I usually say a bare minimum, 0.25 grams per pound, which is probably close to where you're at, at your weight, upwards of 0.4. Usually I see females go towards a higher end. Males can go towards the lower end. Females hormone systems are a little bit more sensitive, but if we're going to a deficit and we stay in that range, we're probably going to be fine. So it's mostly adherence, flexibility. Where do I got to be within that range to make sure that they're good on the diet? The only time we ever have the [00:39:30] issue of somebody getting too lean is when they're a competitor.

(00:39:32):

And it's usually with females because they get a amenorrhea, they lose their period, which unfortunately is part of prep, which is crazy to think, but that is, it's almost guaranteed you're going to lose your period during prep, which is not good for you. But they know it. They sign up for it basically. And I have strategies that I can try to mitigate that as much as possible, but it's rare to avoid it entirely with everybody anyway. There's plenty of this research to show as far as fats go, you can have 'em low [00:40:00] and you're going to be totally fine. When I'm looking at the diet to fill that, what do we eat with that? First and foremost, I'm a huge fan of white rice. White rice is such an easy carb to digest. You can scale it up or down and you're not adding a ton of fat. You're not adding a ton of fiber, which isn't always a good thing. People think fiber is good and it is too much. Fiber is also a problem. So you don't want to have a ton of fiber. You can have literal gut issues, but also you're just going to be bloated holding water. That's not what you want,

(00:40:27):

Especially if you already have gut issues and you're cranking [00:40:30] the fiber up.

(00:40:30):

Exactly, which

(00:40:31):

A lot of people do, whether they know it or not.

(00:40:33):

And white rice is usually a safe one with people who have gut issues too. It's just a very simple starch. In fact, look, if you really want to just copy a diet, look at the Japanese culture. There's not a rice

(00:40:46):

And fish.

(00:40:47):

Japan,

(00:40:49):

A lot of omega rich fish, a lot of seaweed, kelp, thyroid dysfunction. Hypothyroidism is non-existent over there, but they eat a lot of fresh raw fish, seaweed, kelp, all these [00:41:00] things from the sea, which there's a lot of iodine. Iodine helps thyroid. So anyway, the carbide white rice, sweet potatoes are great. I'm a huge fan of all kinds of potatoes, especially on a diet because when you're dieting, you need satiety. Potatoes are the highest on the satiety index. Here's the thing to think about with that. Nobody ever just eats plain white rice. Nobody eats just plain potato. It's paired with something. Usually you put something on it, but even when it's by itself, it's usually rice with salt. And then you have some veggie [00:41:30] and protein or something. I say that because potatoes are the highest on the satiety index. I like grass fed butter on mine with some salt. I could overeat potatoes easily. If you put that combination together,

(00:41:44):

Plus you're throwing a bunch of fat on it.

(00:41:45):

Yeah, there's something that goes on in your brain when you mix fat, car salt.

(00:41:50):

Yeah,

(00:41:50):

It's

(00:41:50):

Like most processed foods.

(00:41:52):

Yep, exactly. Yeah. There's a really good book called The Hungry Brain. It's been out for a while, but it talks about that. So it actually does impact your brain and your cravings. [00:42:00] So you got to be careful with these things. But potatoes are going to be a huge one. I'm a huge fan of berries. Any fruit is acceptable and fine. Bananas are going to be great, especially for hybrid athletes, people who need extra carbs and such. But berries are going to be usually the highest volume, lowest calorie with the highest antioxidant and highest fiber count. So you can have a salad bowl of strawberries and you're barely even touching your calories. So on the diet, that's great. And they're very, all of them are very dense, usually really high fiber too. But if I had to [00:42:30] just pick a few, and this is where it kind of goes back to the bro diet, oats, sweet potato, white rice, those are your starches. You can throw in whole green breads and stuff. And I'm a big fan of getting good sourced whole green breads. How

(00:42:42):

About sourdough?

(00:42:43):

Sourdough is great. Love it. How?

(00:42:46):

It's totally fine. Most people do well with grains honestly. But I think if I had to just pick a couple staples, it's going to be white rice and sweet potatoes. They're just so easy on most people's bodies. The downside is people don't [00:43:00] like having white rice for breakfast. So that's where oats, if you train early in the morning, cream of rice is great. It sounds like a grandpa food, but I've always done cream of rice as a pre-workout, cinnamon baking powder, protein powder, some banana nut butter. It makes basically oatmeal mush and it tastes amazing. Super, super easy to digest, and it's not something that you need meat or veggie with to be normal like white rice would be. And that's another really easy carb source to do. But I know [00:43:30] you asked about the ones that have fats too.

(00:43:31):

Yeah, just trying to get your protein. Well, we'll talk protein also, but also make it so that you're not going crazy high on fat. A lot of people don't really know. They think 85, 15 beef is lean type stuff like that. Just kind getting your entire diet put together with enough carbs, enough protein, but not cranking the fat up to a hundred, 150 grams.

(00:43:52):

Yeah, so the obvious chicken breast, like typical chicken breast is always great. I think another one is

(00:43:59):

I eat [00:44:00] grass fed 96% every single day. Usually if you get beef from a butcher too, it's really easy to get lean honestly. But 96% lean. You can get that at Kroger or Safeway, whatever you're at, whatever state you're in, they sell it really easily. So that's an easy one to get good beef in, especially because you get good iron and stuff like that as well. From that. Crete white fish is great if you're doing cod or or something. I don't eat a ton of fish personally, but that's always a good one. Ground Turkey is totally [00:44:30] fine. I don't, don't love ground Turkey. Just like a preference perspective. It's just so plain. But again, you got to get the lean stuff. You get 99%. I'm not a huge fan of ground chicken. Again, I just don't like it. But really it's like lean beef, chicken, breasts, fish if you want it.

(00:44:47):

Whey protein, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese is great too, if you like that. But Greek yogurt, non-fat is amazing. Even I'm doing a big salad bowl, barbecue chicken salad bowl thing right now. It's got sweet potatoes, chicken lettuce. We do crockpot chicken with this [00:45:00] sugar-free barbecue sauce. And my wife took just one of the ranch powder packets, just a little bit of it, and put it in Greek yogurt for me and whipped it up. And it's like I have a protein-based dressing on it with a little hint of ranch. Ranch is just a glob of fat on your salad. But it's so easy to do that. So I think a lot of people just miss these little markers. Even chicken, you're cooking chicken, you put a bunch of oil in it. I always question somebody on the oil like have you ever tried to just put a teaspoon instead of a tablespoon?

(00:45:29):

It's conditioned [00:45:30] in us to put more oil to cook something, but you'll be just fine in a non-stick pan or grill it. You don't even need to put oil on it. I do mine in the crockpot and it shreds apart. I don't have any oil on it, so sometimes it's how they prep. They don't know any better. They do veggies and they dump oil all over it. I'm like, how about we do less oil and use an air fryer and some seasoning. What can we do to make the food sources, you're choosing less fatty by just removing the fat you're adding to it.

(00:45:56):

I've talked to people who don't think it counts. They think that pouring [00:46:00] the oil or the butter into the pan, it's like I'm not just not going to count that it's getting absorbed. It's not just going away, it's getting absorbed. That goes back

(00:46:08):

To that thing earlier, just the accuracy of tracking at first and I think being

(00:46:13):

Aware,

(00:46:14):

Yeah, some people think it doesn't count, some people just don't even think to count it and it's like either way we have to teach that awareness upfront, and this is a big, especially for coaches and anybody who's trying to get into changing their nutrition. The big thing I always say at first, I ask the person, do you like the numbers? [00:46:30] Do you like tracking? Some people do, but other people are like, well, not really. I'm like, okay, we don't have to track for the rest of your life, but if we don't track properly, you'll never know how to eat without tracking to sustain the result I give you, so are you willing to do this? Which might seem tedious, but are you willing to do this to actually achieve the result you've been trying so hard to achieve for months and months and months and months? The answer is always yes, and then their buy-in's there, they know there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I don't have to do this forever. Most people think they do.

(00:46:56):

Yeah, you can't intuitively if you don't have the data [00:47:00] or the experience to base your intuition on. A lot of people say like, I just intuitively eat. It's like, have you ever tracked? If not, you probably should at least spend three, maybe four, maybe six months at least being aware of it. That way you can actually look at something and you're going to be a little off, but if you're eating single ingredient foods most of the time whole foods that are going to fill you up and you're not trying to get bodybuilding shredded, in which case most people should track, then you're going to be good, but just lacking that intuition because you just have never done it. You can't really intuitive eat that way. [00:47:30] Yeah,

(00:47:30):

It's so true. I always tell people, especially those kind of people, I'm like, Hey, let's just erase that word intuitive eating out of your brain. It's intentional eating. Even if we get you to that place, you still got to think about what you're going to eat. That's intention. You're making intentional decisions, but you have a better framework to choose from and you have a better understanding of what you're choosing so you can make the right decision. It is kind of second nature in a way, but people think when they say that intuitive et, I'm like, well, look where that's got you so far

(00:47:57):

Out

(00:47:57):

Where you want to be

(00:47:59):

With your [00:48:00] nutrition clients that are going after big time performance. Let's say they're training 10, 12 plus hours a week in multiple different domains, strength training, maybe some endurance, maybe some athletic stuff, jumping agility and whatnot. Do you use any special nutrition approach like a carb cycling or a calorie cycling approach where you give them more calories and more carbs on higher output days and then kind of vice versa or how do you go about that?

(00:48:26):

Yeah, I do at times. It depends on the person, [00:48:30] so I can think of a couple people to use an example. I have one gal right now, she is, it actually kind fell in her lap. She moved to New York and she basically somebody, she was training the gym. She does my, I coach her on both sides of things and somebody basically recruited her as a fitness model. I was like, that's pretty dope. Nice. She's doing that, so we have to train aesthetically, but she's also, she did an Ironman right before she moved out there that I trained her and coach her nutrition for, and then she is jumping into High Rocks and her partner for High Rocks is [00:49:00] this six foot four basketball player she's friends with out there. This dude, I'm like, oh my gosh. So she's trying to keep up with him, so she's training a lot right now, four days a week of lifting.

(00:49:10):

She's got three runs and two conditioning sessions, so I mean she's stacking the days. She sleeps like nine hours a day. She's on top of it. She's an entrepreneur, so she has her own schedule. She's crushing it for her. The amount of carbs I have her eating, we can't carb cycle because it's hard enough to get her to eat enough carbs just because she's small. She's barely 130 pounds and she's got muscle and she's pretty tall for a female, [00:49:30] so for her, I don't carb cycle. I just need your bare minimum to be there constantly and then sometimes I'll, yeah, and then I'll sneak in some carbs without her. I'm like, Hey, you don't have track that. It's like an intro workout car you don't have track that it doesn't.

(00:49:46):

So and then there's people who if I told 'em to eat a thousand grams of carbs, they would get it done. This dude just loves eating and so I have to monitor it a little bit and I will use carb cycling. Most research with carb cycling is pretty interesting [00:50:00] when it comes to body composition change. Most has actually pointed that there's no real benefit because it comes down to weekly total average. The only caveat there I would say is sometimes when people are going into deficit, it's actually mentally easier for them to have a really low day and then for them a high day, which is a normal day

(00:50:17):

Lifestyle wise,

(00:50:18):

So they get a little bit, it's just that novelty, that change that stimulates them. They like that, but with performance, it is very much so dictated on the output, the energy output, so [00:50:30] I find it difficult to program that with too much specific targeting because I remember working with some people that were, when CrossFit was at its prime and I had some people that were going to the games, none that podium or anything like that, and somewhere that were doing the sanction events, and so they were doing these, they'd go on a Saturday. I'm like, Hey, and this is the annoying part about CrossFit. I'm like, so what's the event? I don't know how many events you doing? No idea.

(00:50:55):

Yeah, it's a mystery and sometimes it's not these days, sometimes it's not even an actual workout. [00:51:00] It's ridiculous.

(00:51:01):

Anyway, don't

(00:51:02):

Get me started on CrossFit,

(00:51:05):

But with those people I'm like, all right, so here's your range. You got to be floating in here. Here's your sources. If you do this kind of event and you have to be back out there within 30 minutes, grab a Snickers bar. It's not anything complicated. You have the time we're going to have a meal, so there's differences there, and I would have essentially things like intra-workout carbs or a scale range and teaching them how to know, Hey, I want you having between this many and this many carbs per [00:51:30] day, so your macros aren't three 50, they're 300 to 400 rest day more towards 300 hard day 400. But if you had a really hard day and on your rest day you're still feeling like you need to replenish more and your body make it a high day, that's not a rest day. It's a recovery day, and so carb cycling I think works with a more intuitive aspect.

(00:51:50):

Not to use that word again that I just said I hate, but being able to scale it up and down and then sneaking it in when it's proper. I think if I tell somebody we're carb cycling, sometimes [00:52:00] they will go, I'm not going to have that workout shake. I'm just going to eat more food, but that's not why I'm carb cycling them. So instead I'm like, don't even track the calories. Don't worry about it. When you do these types of workouts or when your endurance running goes beyond this point, I can usually learn a person pretty well where it's like, Hey, every three miles have one of these pouches unless we're going over this many miles, I don't want you having that many, right? Have this meal before you run, drink this while you're doing your workouts or whatever it may be so that I'm just properly fueling them during the run, during the race [00:52:30] lifting session, and I've been a big fan of that even way before I got into hybrid or started coaching people through different events like that from just John Meadows back in the day, he was huge on intra workout carbs, so I was mixing up in this huge three liter bottle, dude.

(00:52:45):

I'd have carbs and hydrolyzed protein, some of the stuff I don't think you need anymore, but still I love doing a long high volume bodybuilding workout. I will absolutely add 20 to 30 grams of highly brain cyclic dextrin with some sodium, maybe some amino acids, [00:53:00] but mostly just the carbs there. It's going to blunt the cortisol response that you get post-training. It's going to help fuel your session. There's an immediate response to that. Your taste buds will send a signal because the enzymes through that process, the spike insulin tell your brain,

(00:53:14):

You don't even need to swallow it,

(00:53:15):

You don't even need to swallow. Its

(00:53:17):

Study crazy.

(00:53:19):

So stuff like that is, I'm a huge fan of that. I think it works well. Obviously if somebody's main goal is just weight loss, then it's a little bit different, but if I have somebody who's trying to get leaner and it's fat loss meaning they're like, I don't [00:53:30] care if I lose five or 10 pounds because I want to maintain every ounce of muscle and I want to perform and blah, blah, blah. I love using interwork workout carbs.

(00:53:37):

Yeah, same. I have been a huge fan of it for a while. I talk about it all the time in my podcast and I just, throughout my career in the army, I saw so many guys and honestly I was kind of this guy too at first before I knew any better, just showing up to a 12 mile ruck with a cliff bar and a plain water, like a 12 ounce plain water bottle and hoping for the best and [00:54:00] that is not enough. But that actually leads us into what I was going to ask you about next, and that is some of your principles around peri workout fueling. What are the best types of foods to eat? What's good timing, what type of workouts, how long of a workout would you consider it for versus not? Consider it for assuming the person is performance oriented, not so much lifestyle.

(00:54:22):

Yeah, this is great and I've hinted at a bunch of this stuff so we can kind of piece it together. So first tackling protein, [00:54:30] a normal workout, any type of strength lifting, workout, we got to have protein before we can break it down to a calculation on their body weight. But most people, no matter how much you weigh, you're not going to get much from a muscle protein. Synthes response. Over 40 grams is usually kind of where it caps, but you need at least 20. So I can have a hundred pound female or a 250 pound male. Both of them need at least 20. The 250 guy could probably have more than 40 just because he's bigger and he can eat it and not have digestive issues. But [00:55:00] when you start going above 50 and stuff, it's pointless. So anywhere in that 20 to 40 range, let's say for protein now if we're doing an endurance type of bout, especially in the morning when I run, I run in the mornings, I just prefer it.

(00:55:13):

I don't have a big protein. If I do, it's maybe amino acids. There's some cool research to show that mostly just BCAs. It doesn't even matter if it's whey, which usually BCAs are not something I really think are that great. Essential amino acids are better, but the [00:55:30] branch chain amino acids, because they're isolated to those, they have an effect on the brain for endurance, which is really cool. So it's mostly going to help people who have a long run and they need to mentally be able to endure. So I might throw those in, but usually I forego the protein and I'm just going to have carbs. Carbs are going to be protein sparing, and unless I haven't had protein in 24 hours straight, which never happens to me, I'll be fine and carbohydrate is going to be a better bet early in the morning, some starch, some fruit, so something simple.

(00:55:59):

Usually [00:56:00] you can even get this, some pouches even that people think are just pure fruit. Usually they have rice syrup or sweet potato puree or something in it. Usually that's enough, maybe even like a rice cake if you want, but a little bit of starch, a little bit of fruit, a little bit of salt, a little bit of caffeine, that same mixture that's just going to intake it up. Usually you don't need much if it's early in the morning it's running, but you have to assess this. Some people's digestion just can't handle too much before run. I'm the type that's like 25, 30 grams before run, I'm solid, but [00:56:30] if I have to run over four miles, I usually have something at around three and a half miles and it helps me get through to another 6, 7, 8 miles, so I can kind of pace myself with the carbohydrates on those runs. For a workout we're having the protein 20 to 40 grams we're going to have the carbohydrates really depends on really your body size and how well the leaner you are, the more insulin sensitive you are, so you are going to be able to absorb it faster and better. So for you, I might have [00:57:00] a hundred grams of carbs in a meal and you'd be totally fine, but other subject, I do it all time are going to be so bloated.

(00:57:06):

So it really depends on the person. I think anywhere between at least 25 grams, upwards of a hundred is probably going to be fine. For a pre-workout meal if we're lifting, we're probably going to want to have that at least an hour before. If there's fiber in it may be two to three hours, so the more fiber and fat that are in that meal, the further out it has to go. So if I have cream of rice with a tablespoon of almond butter just to make it slow [00:57:30] down a little bit, which we do want and some whey protein and flavoring and such, I can have that an hour before, but if I swap that cream of rice with oats that adds a little bit of fat, a little bit of fiber and a little bit of protein, I'm going to give myself an extra hour or two, so it'll be two to three hours, but no matter what, we have a little bit of that carb, that starch, a little bit of fat, that protein source, and then I'm a big fan of adding the fruit to that meal.

(00:57:51):

So if I have cream of rice or oats or anything like that, I'm going to add a banana, I'm going to add blueberries, raspberries, something, and most likely [00:58:00] a banana because it's raspberries are super high in fiber, which is great, but you don't want to add fiber, close it down to that down even more so you got digestion going on in your gut while you're trying to sit in the squat rack. That's not a good time. We don't need to be gassing up the squat rack and everybody around us. So if we can just isolate the carbohydrates, the sodium, the protein, a little bit fat, I think that's usually perfect. And then intra-workout just comes down to how lean the person is. If they're pretty lean and have a good amount [00:58:30] muscle, I'm a fan of it. If they're not, I wait how long the workout is and how high volume it is. If you're doing a power lifting based workout, you probably don't need it. Now if you're somebody who has 475 grams of carbs and it's like, why not? It's a great time to consume. You're just trying to get more carbs at this point.

(00:58:49):

If

(00:58:49):

I have somebody who is more closely like 300 grams, I usually eat about 350 grams a day. I'm probably going to have an intro workout carb if I have a high volume [00:59:00] training session. So if I'm following my typical push pull legs, push pull five days a week, it's a more of a men's physique. That's what I competed in. It is very high volume. There's a lot of set working sets, and I'm going to failure because it's not a back squat, it's a leg press and then a leg extension. I'll be fine. I'm going to go, I need carbohydrates during that session to make sure I squeeze out enough volume. So I'd like to sacrifice some of my carbs from later in the day for that session knowing it's going to help me squeeze out a few extra reps on every set.

(00:59:26):

Yeah, keeps that nervous system primed too.

(00:59:29):

Yep. And [00:59:30] 24, a lot of people

(00:59:31):

Overlook that.

(00:59:31):

That's all you need. You don't need a ton any more than that. You probably actually would get hypoglycemia and then's not a good time.

(00:59:38):

On that note, you kind of touched on it there. You are prepping for an ultra, if I'm not mistaken,

(00:59:44):

Correct. I've had a setback, but

(00:59:46):

Oh, okay. I had one of those and unfortunately it was like my setback was two weeks out from the race, so I was supposed to do it last April, trained up for it, got up to 60 mile weeks and strained my calf, [01:00:00] and honestly, I should have stopped running three weeks prior to when I did stop running one of those things. But that's what happens when you coach yourself in the future, I will hire a coach even though I know what I'm doing. I do what I want to do when I'm programming for myself, not always what I need to do. So anyway, what sparked the interest in running Ultra and how's everything going minus the setback for you?

(01:00:23):

So funny enough, I was supposed to do mine April next month. I didn't realize it was the same time as my daughter's spring break, [01:00:30] and so then I rescheduled it. They have another one in September, but luckily I got injured, so I've had back issues. So basically I rehabbed successfully from that and I can't even tell you what I did this last time. It was a few weeks ago, so I haven't ran in three weeks now, maybe four because it's one of those things where something twinges and everything sucks and it's just like your back is square one. So I've just been slowly going up. I did the leg press this week for the first time in a while and it was great. No pain. So I'm like, okay, I'm getting back and I still have enough time [01:01:00] in September. It's a 31 mile race, 5,000 foot elevation in the Olympic National Force, so it's up in the mountains and stuff in as far to the tippy top corner of Washington that you can get.

(01:01:12):

It is, I can see Canada from the channel it's called the Strait of San is this channel of water between Washington and Canada, Victoria, so it'll be epic. But what sparked it man was honestly just the whole choose hard mentality. We made that up as something to tell clients. We try to teach our clients [01:01:30] how to, essentially, one of the things we have is we call it intentional restraint, so we actually coach them on like, Hey, what is the piece of restraint you're going to intentionally embark on this week? Because if you don't train that muscle, you're screwed in life. You have to do this, and this is how you make dieting easier and not feel like you're dieting. So we have this thing, it's just like, Hey, choose hard. Choose hard now. You'll live life easier later. And we just always said that, and then it kind of was the brand thing, and then we made it the podcast and I trademarked it and one of my buddies, he is a runner, [01:02:00] and he was like, you should do this half marathon with me.

(01:02:03):

He's done ultras and stuff. He was doing it for somebody on his team to support them. Some members at his gym. He was like, choose hard man. I was like, fuck. All right. So I had 10 weeks and I got ready for it and we crushed it. My goal was I googled what's a good time for a male first time half marathon and said, if you get less than two hours, you crushed it. I was like, okay. So we got it done in an hour and 45, I think it was less than hour 50 for sure, and it was great. [01:02:30] I mean, I was sore, but we crushed it and I trained hard for it and I enjoyed running so much more than I thought I ever would. This is coming from a guy that I'm lifting hard or I'm bodybuilding and I'm walking on a treadmill incline slow.

(01:02:43):

That's just what I've done and it works for fat loss, but man, something about my A DHD and my go go go brain being out in the early morning, I live really close to Mount Rainier, so you can't not see it everywhere you turn. And so I'm running sunrise over the mountain listening to [01:03:00] usually a sermon or a podcast and it's just like that gave me stillness I've never had before and I loved it, man. So I just started getting hooked and then it just became a thing. I did that half marathon at the end of 2023, maybe 20, 24. So all a year later I'm still running, and then I just randomly signed out. I was like, what's my Miss Sogi this year? Because every year, last year it was High Rocks. This year it's going to be that. It's just one really hard thing I do every [01:03:30] year that is going to really kind of scare the shit out of me, and this one does. I haven't ran 31 miles before and it's up a mountain basically. And I also am just like, man, that's the ultimate Washington scenery experience and that's cool.

(01:03:49):

Yeah, man, I love the choose hard motto. I mean, the modern world is just, you could just never do anything hard if you want, and if you look around [01:04:00] at most people, that's where it gets you actually going out and intentionally putting yourself in. It doesn't have to be an ultra marathon, but just one example. Honestly, there's things that you could do that are hard every day like, Hey, instead of scrolling for six hours today, I'm going to actually go do something and I'm going to fight the urge to be on this addicting thing all day long.

(01:04:20):

So

(01:04:21):

I dig it, man, this one's more of a selfish question. Just I'm curious how with all this stuff you have going on, your [01:04:30] business, your family prepping for an ultra, which is definitely not a low time investment type thing, I hate the word balance, so I'm not going to ask you how you balance it, but what are some of your daily non-negotiables and some of your strategies and scheduling tactics that help you manage all the things you have going on and stay sane?

(01:04:53):

For example, when I get closer to when my miles start really cranking up or when [01:05:00] I've done multiple bodybuilding shows, when I get into the thick of it and I'm doing an hour of cardio damn near every day, I have to get very strategic with what I'm committing my time to and stuff. But year round, I'm busy, man. I'm training multiple days, four or five days a week running when I can, usually running two to three times a week on average. So it is a lot. I think that, I mean to be completely brutally honest, man, at one point I was very just ignorant. It was [01:05:30] a little bit of ego and I got it, I can do it. It's not a big deal, and ran myself into the ground. I got to a point where I was legitimately depressed. I had no strong relationships anymore.

(01:05:43):

I was working so much, I was missing moments with my family was just, I mean, we had a lot of money and I had a big company and it was cool, but I'm sitting here in this big castle by myself. [01:06:00] I get these messages from my wife and she's getting to do all this amazing stuff with our daughter, but I'm not there for it. It got to a point where I was just was lost man. Actually for me, that's what led me to finding God and a lot changed in my life at that point, and we started making shifts in the company. It was like, what am I really doing this for? How much money do I need? Because it was never about that and so pivoted a lot. Now I'm still very, very busy. I think the difference is is that [01:06:30] I rely on people.

(01:06:33):

I think over that whole time I built a couple key relationships. One is obviously my wife. I could not do it without her. She helps me with everything even to the down to how do I stay lean and really walk the walk and do this stuff while doing all this crazy shit. My wife meal preps for me. I suck at cooking for one, but she helps me with all that. She takes care of our daughter at home all the time. She goes to school, picks her up, everything. [01:07:00] So she's able to help with that stuff and I can jump in and do what I can, but that allows me to do this. And then I have somebody on my team now who is just my right hand Ariel. She is ride or die. I've flown her out here to do stuff with me, just one-on-one with our projects and everything.

(01:07:19):

But I put a lot of faith in her because you just can't do it by yourself. It gets to a certain point where I'm like, I think a coach can make a lot of money and keep it a solo show for sure. If you [01:07:30] want to build something that has a greater impact and it does require more than just what you can do yourself. Balance is never going to be there from a time perspective, but that's okay. I look at it if I love what I do in my business and really alls I really do is business and family, and then occasionally I'll do stuff with friends. But what that looks like is this weekend I'm going to go speak at Luca's with Andy and with Andrew Coates and some people I know and I'm going to go do dinner. Those are my friends. That's cool. I would rather do that than

(01:07:58):

A hundred percent

(01:07:59):

Anything else. So [01:08:00] I dunno. It's hard, man. Sometimes it's a sacrifice. Sometimes it's stressful, but I think it's always worth it. I think the part that I would just caution you and anybody else to who's an entrepreneur is when there comes a point where you start feeling lonely, too lonely, that's where I think it's something you got to shift. Like, okay, I'm doing a lot for everybody and nothing for myself, and I'm getting nothing but a paycheck in return, which I can't even go enjoy anyway because I'm just fucking swamped with work and stress. And so you got to recalibrate. [01:08:30] But I also think if you don't get close to that or at that point you don't really learn what you need to learn, I think it was all for a reason and it showed me what I needed to learn at that time. But I mean, I've been in the industry for 15 years now. I'm young for that many years, but built the company eight and a half. So I've had enough years strung together to learn those things.

(01:08:50):

Yeah, I totally can relate to that man. I've, in the somewhat recent future kind of felt like I'm a little bit, I'm working hard and I [01:09:00] feel like I can outwork a lot of people, but at the same time, what is the point? Can I potentially branch out? Can I potentially bring some people on? I did bring my wife on. My wife is now full-time for the company, which is massive. She's good at and likes all the things that I suck at and hate. So we compliment each other really, really well. And just like yours, she keeps me in check. Almost every night. She'll have dinner cooking for me, so I'll come down and dinner's basically ready and it's frigging amazing. Before we close out, [01:09:30] man, anything right now that you're super interested in that you're kind of obsessing over, whether it's a fitness thing or a hobby or some other random interest?

(01:09:40):

Right now it's been just behavior change, man, studying that. I mean, it sounds so hormo ish, but this is my hobby. This is what I love to do. So I don't do a ton of other stuff. I'll go shooting with my buddies and stuff when their schedule allows because they, I mean they got the armory. I don't, I own guns, but not, I mean just when you go [01:10:00] with somebody who is in that profession, it's an experience than that work is my hobby. But behavior change is the main thing. We teach in the first level of the cert that we're building out that will launch probably early next year. We're going to do beta runs this year. But just digging into the science of that, and it spawned just because we realized as an online nutrition coaching company, we needed that more than anything else because it wasn't the information we were giving them that would help them get the result.

(01:10:25):

It was getting them to follow the information. And so it just shifted so [01:10:30] much in what we do. And then my daughter kept growing and when she got to five, she just turned eight. But when she got to five, that was whatever it was. I don't know if this is a common thing at that age, but it shifted a lot as far as how interested she was in dad all of a sudden. And so the conversations changed and her observing what I'm doing changed and what I could teach her changed and behavior changed for people is really good parenting. So I think just watching my daughter and [01:11:00] being able to see stuff, it clicked in my coaching more. It's just been this whole evolution, which has been really fun. It's what I'm teaching tomorrow at the seminar. I'm flying out to Dallas in a few weeks to teach a few gyms. They're having a workshop that they own three gyms, but they're all meeting in one place for me to do a workshop on this. It's the mystery for a lot of people. How do we get somebody to shift the way they think and act and it's just been such a cool thing to crack into.

(01:11:23):

Yeah, a lot of people think coaching is X's and O's, honestly. Yeah, you got to know the X's and O's. You got to know the science, but there's an art to [01:11:30] it. And the art to it, at least for you and I is, yeah, I'm telling you this information, but are you going to actually apply it and figuring out what makes different people tick in different ways and how you can get your message across in a way that they're going to actually absorb it and then go implement hopefully. So yeah, man, I love that. Where can people find you?

(01:11:52):

Yeah, Instagram, Cody McBroom Choose hard podcast, which will have already come out by the time this airs with you. [01:12:00] So as we're recording this, that airs on Tuesday next week. Taylor Coaching Method is the company. So I mean, we have so much free content. I always tell you go. We have free nutrition guides, we have hundreds of blogs. I put out content every day on Instagram. We do a podcast every week. So just go consume the free content. You'll probably learn something I hope. Definitely. That's where you can find me.

(01:12:22):

Awesome man. Yeah, you are a wealth of knowledge and I greatly appreciate your time. Learned a lot from you today and I'm looking forward to chatting again.

(01:12:30):

[01:12:30] Likewise, brother. Alright,

(01:12:31):

Cody.