The focal point of today's discussion revolves around the necessity of identifying personal impediments to one’s health and fitness journey. We emphasize the importance of introspection, urging listeners to document their life circumstances and recognize the habits and influences that may hinder their progress. Our conversation further delves into the significance of consistency, not merely in the realm of physical fitness but across all facets of life, including relationships and personal endeavors. We advocate for a long-term perspective in achieving fitness goals, highlighting that sustainable changes yield far superior results compared to fleeting, extreme measures. As we navigate through various strategies and insights, we aim to empower individuals to embrace a more balanced and mindful approach to health, ultimately fostering not just physical well-being, but also mental resilience.

Mike Bouchard and I discuss his journey into fitness and the common issues people face in their physical fitness journeys.

Mike shares that his interest in fitness started at a young age when he worked out with his dad in the basement. He also discusses his transition from a career in automotive mechanics to pursuing fitness full-time. The main issues Mike sees in his coaching are fat loss and the abundance of misinformation and quick-fix solutions. He emphasizes the importance of sustainability and consistency in achieving fitness goals. We also discuss the role of carbohydrates in weight loss and the need for portion control and balanced meals.

We discuss the importance of eating a balanced breakfast to stabilize blood sugar levels and improve mood. We also explore different diets like keto and carnivore, with Mike emphasizing the importance of finding an approach that works for each individual. Finally, we touch on the use of supplements like probiotics and vitamins, and the potential benefits of exercise as a form of self-therapy for mental health. Mike shares his personal experiences and offers advice for creating a healthier lifestyle and improving your life overall.

Takeaways:

• One must meticulously identify the prevailing circumstances within one's life to effectuate meaningful change.
• Documenting one's challenges and ambitions serves as a crucial initial step toward self-improvement.
• It is imperative to discern the habits and influences that impede personal progress and well-being.
• Sustained success in fitness and health necessitates a commitment to consistency over time.
• Engagement in physical fitness not only enhances physical health but also contributes significantly to mental well-being.
• A strategic approach to nutrition—focusing on caloric intake and macronutrient balance—is essential for achieving fitness goals.

Identify what's happening in your life.

Write it all down.

Identify what's stopping you, what type of habits are stopping you.

Who is stopping you?

What are you surrounding yourself with day to day?

The name of the game where it becomes to growing, losing body fat, building muscle.

It's going to be consistency with anything.

Building a business, a relationship, a friendship, anything at all.

It's going to be consistently putting your best foot forward.

You can get absolutely shredded and look crazy if you track your food enough.

Yes, we're all good.

Hello everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of the Breaking Point podcast.

Today we are here with Mike.

Is it Bouchard?

Mike, how do you pronounce your name?

Yeah, Bouchard.

Is it French?

Is it, Are you, are you part French?

You fully French?

No.

No, no.

Okay, cool.

I'm not any descendant.

Like I'm my, probably my great grandparents maybe.

And then that quarter Italian, quarter Portuguese, half French.

Oh, yeah.

So yeah, I can see Portuguese actually, to be fair.

That makes sense.

Mike is a fitness coach and a healthy man, in other words.

And we're going to have a chat about fitness and I've got some questions and we're going to get into some topics and sort of explore maybe what Mike's also interested in, particularly because I like doing that with certain podcast guests to see what it is that they are particularly passionate about.

So Mike, let's do the standard introduction of how you got into fitness and then we'll do a deeper dive about your past as we go a bit forward.

Cool.

So some of my earliest memories as a kid was working out with my dad down in my basement at my parents house.

I was probably, I don't know, five years old at the most and you know, working out, I should say, quote unquote.

But I always kind of love the aspect of in the gym, like everyone's just working hard.

And I grew up pretty insecure, shy, super, super shy.

I wouldn't really talk to many people.

I have my close group of friends.

And then that was pretty much it.

So through the insecurity and, you know, as the years went on, I said to myself, you know, let's, let's pick back up working out.

Let's see where I can take things.

And then one thing led to another and now we're here and continuing to grow.

So was your dad into fitness?

Was it like a.

Is a big part of the household growing up, big family thing?

No, actually it wasn't.

My dad wasn't really, you know, he wasn't a crazy bodybuilder.

He just went downstairs to exercise here and there, and I kind of just hung around him until I grew up and moved out, pretty much like we all do with our parents and family.

And I saw kind of his strength.

You know, you grew up, you're small, you see your dad bench pressing or something like, wow, one day I want to do that.

So I'm definitely, well, more, I should say, into it than most of my family and relatives and things like that.

But it came a passion years later, down the road after all that.

Okay, and what was the.

What do you think?

Was the.

Was there a particular moment or what was the motivation behind it becoming sort of such a passion of yours?

Was there a decision that you made or did you just.

Was it a process of repetition and then it became a habit?

So with that insecurity going through high school, I'm a smaller kid.

I'm only 5 foot 7.

I was 125, 130 pounds in high school.

And I used to take this course where we would sit in front of a computer electronics class.

And once we got our work done, we were able to just kind of watch videos and do our own thing.

And I had it for three hours per day.

So there was two things that I got into basically on my own research and different videos on YouTube, and that was automotive and fitness.

So I became interested in automotive and became interested in fitness and dove into the different people you find on YouTube within those relative spaces.

So I found some people out in the UK and the US that were really doing well in the fitness space.

And I saw their physiques, I saw their drive, and I heard their message.

That really related to me as someone who was almost in their shell and wanted to branch out and become confident in all the things that come with fitness, which we can get into, and took all of their advice and their approaches to fitness and saw how they carry themselves and the success that just working out brought them.

And I said to myself, why can't I do that?

I asked my buddy next to me.

I was like, hey, we should go to the gym.

And he was a bit out of shape at the time.

And I was like, look, let's just go together.

We'll go every day after school.

We worked together, so we would spend all day together, go to the gym, and then go to work together.

And we kind of just started to roll this ball.

And I started seeing results.

And once I started seeing results, I'm like, wow, like, what can I accomplish on my own with this?

How far can I take this, how far can I take my body?

What can I look like?

What kind of opportunities can arise from all this?

And from that day I was just locked in.

What's automotive?

Is that like cars?

Sorry to like go back.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

So before the whole fitness thing kind of took off, I was an automotive mechanic, so I would just fix cars.

Porsche, Audis, Volkswagen BMWs.

And I actually went to college for that, for a two year program and I absolutely hated it.

So then I said, you know, I'll make a change, I will.

I'll try to do this fitness thing.

Instead of this car industry career that I'm currently in, let's try this fitness thing.

So then I started posting fitness content online.

And you can see it, they're all there still.

You scroll all the way down on my Instagram and, and you see the insecurity and like the timidness to speak.

If, if I was ever asked to do something that we're doing today, I'd be like, I don't know, I don't know if I could speak on camera.

I don't like the way I look, I don't like the way I sound.

But over the years after doing it so often, it becomes second nature and the fear of judgment from those other people that aren't doing anything with their lives more than likely goes away.

And from there life just opens up.

Yeah, no, I agree.

And just sort of from speaking with you for a few minutes, you have kind of shocked me.

I.

You're not, you're kind of, you're a lot more considered and, and timid is not the right word, but calm.

I thought you're going to be sort of a big brash alpha male type just from looking at your content and kind of, I mean, you have kind eyes and you have a kind face, but you, you do have sort of an alpha ish face, if that's the thing.

So just in the, in the few minutes of speaking with you, you, you've.

What would you say?

You've altered my perceptions of you.

So that's really good.

And I understand where the, the motive of wanting to feel a bit more self confident.

What, what is high school like in America?

Is it.

This is not really that relevant, this question, but you know, from a, from a Brit, is it, is there a lot of bullying?

Is it not a kind place?

Is it very cliquey?

Is it like the movies?

I never experience bullying in a way.

And you know, all the much respect to anyone who has or has.

Because that's, you know, a terrible thing to experience.

But I would say it can be kind of clicky in a way where everyone has their own kind of group of friends.

We go through high school.

America is grade nine to grade 12, so you're in four years at the same school.

So you kind of develop these friend groups and then you talk to these.

Only certain people.

Every class is usually different.

At least my high school class one would be completely different people than class two and so on.

We would have seven classes a day and then plus a lunch and, you know, things like that.

But not so much bullying, but definitely a clicky group of people.

Like, there was always the popular kids, like every other high school, I'm sure.

And then there was always kind of like the outcasts a little bit, the quiet ones, the techie ones, and, you know, people of all, you know.

Yeah.

Interests in a way.

So I kind of got along with everybody.

I was very shy, but when I did need to kind of, like, make friends or talk to people, I wasn't extremely afraid to do so.

But I did gravitate to the people who I felt comfortable with being around.

And some of these people are still my friends to this day, 15 years later, almost.

Even.

Even more.

Yeah.

Is it the.

We'll move on for this.

Because you may be thinking, why the hell are you asking me this, mate?

But is it.

Is it the case that the jocks and the.

Because in.

In England, we kind of have it that, like, the football players or the soccer players are sort of at the top of the hierarchy a little bit.

But I think.

I suspect that it's slightly stronger in America because of your sort of obsession with, like, you know, the end with football and things like that.

Is it.

Do the varsity and the jocks, do they kind of rule the roost in the way that you see it in the cliche movies, or is that not quite accurate?

Not.

Not to my experience.

No.

Not to my.

Not to say that they're.

You know, that could be the case in other high schools around the country.

But my high school, it was.

There was the athletes and things like that, but they weren't stuffing kids in the lockers or anything like that like you see in the movies.

So.

Good.

No.

Okay.

Right.

That's good.

Yeah, very good.

So how old were you?

When was there a.

I kind of already asked this earlier, but was there.

It was when you were.

You were working out with your friend and you were working.

The guy that you're working with then you would work out in the, in the evenings or whatever.

When did you decide that you wanted to?

When did you think I could actually, you know, make a possible living out of this and turn this into my sort of full time role as like a fitness coach?

So a great question.

And it was almost like three different phases, right?

So the first phase was going with, with my friend after work and doing that whole thing.

And then I went from the, from high school to college for the two year program to study the automotive industry.

And then because I didn't enjoy it so much, I would study nutrition, study personal training, study content from other people, see what they're doing and how they're doing it, what success are they getting from it.

While on the train, going to class every day instead of doing my automotive homework, I was doing personal training stuff, getting my certification and everything of that sort.

Yeah, I started posting content.

One thing led to another and people began to reach out.

So someone, I would post a story about calories.

Someone would reach out, hey, like, how many calories should I eat?

I'm looking to lose weight.

Like, I need to lose like 10, 15 pounds.

And at the time, yeah, I would have liked to know, I thought what I was doing.

But you know, at the beginning of anything, we're all rookies, right?

But when those people would reach out, I would be like, all right, yeah, like I can help you out.

I knew enough where, okay, calories in, calories out.

If you want to lose weight, eat less.

And I said to them, like, yeah, we'll train you for free.

Like, I'll just help you out.

I would text them, check in forms, I would email them a workout.

Like, so far from professional.

There was no business structure at all.

I didn't even charge the first 50 people.

I bet I was just helping them out, just trying to build my name up a little bit.

But it also came from a place of being genuine and just literally just helping people get to where they want to go.

Because at that same time, I saw how it was changing myself.

I saw how I was carrying myself a little differently.

People coming up to me like, hey, like, you look great, man.

Like, keep going, this, that, whatever.

In the gym or at school.

I started becoming known as the fitness kid at, at school, at automotive school.

And one thing led to another with people reaching out.

My mom actually was like, hey, like, you should be charging these people something to help them out.

And I said, oh, all right, maybe I'll just charge them 100 US.

100 US dollars, as much as you need me, flat fee, no reoccurring anything.

I wasn't even tracking the income at the time, like just completely far, furthest thing from a business structure ever.

But that's kind of like the start of where I said, oh, like I could just get 10 more people this month to pay me 100 bucks and that will cover all my expenses.

I still lived at home.

I just, I had a car payment, car insurance rather, and that was really it.

I had to pay for gas and food.

So I started charging people that, you know, 100, $110, whatever it may be.

And then once I got out of school, I got a job as a mechanic at the time.

So Now I'm working 8 to 5 at an automotive shop near my parents house and still posting fitness content here and there.

And from there I said, all right, let's go all in on this thing on the side.

Let's see if I can get this side hustle to subside the income from the automotive work that I was doing.

So at that point everyone's just not knowing what they're doing and everyone's out of work but myself.

The automotive industry was a essential business for the whole Covid aspect.

So I just worked eight to five every day.

There was no more gym.

I worked out, worked out downstairs in my parents basement every morning at 5am, go to work at 8, go home for lunch, make some fitness content, go back till 5 and then repeat that until we figured out what was going on in the world due to Covid.

So yeah, once I developed that foundation of kind of posting consistent content, gyms open backed up and the one that I went to actually shut down through bankruptcy during the whole Covid time.

So the people who worked at that gym actually got together, opened up a small studio near the original spot actually and contacted me.

It was like, hey man, we had a mutual friend.

Hey man, we see that you're posting fitness content online.

Like we'd love to have you be a nutrition coach.

For some of the clients that come to our new gym, there was nothing in the place.

I have pictures to this day, just empty walls and concrete floors.

And I said yeah, like absolutely, that would be a huge opportunity.

I was at the gym at the time, another gym, working out, just myself.

And I remember that fire in my chest and that feeling of like, this could be it, this could be my way out of the automotive industry.

And my path to whatever may be for me through this industry of fitness.

And that was probably the you know, other defining moment of like, wow, this, this could be a thing.

This could work.

And I'm going to try it and see what happens.

And if it doesn't work, at least I tried.

I have a job now.

What's the worst that could happen?

Absolutely.

That, that's a, a great advice for anyone who's sort of pursuing like a creative endeavor.

It's too.

Well, it's, you know, it's, it's obvious because people need to live and sustain themselves, but it's to find some sort of consistent income source and then pursue your creative pursuit on the side as like a extracurricular sort of activity.

That also, because a lot of people, this is their passion, what they're passionate about and maybe what they're doing on the side or they're their main income stream, they, they're not very, what would you say, enthralled by it then.

It's a great, it's not just, it's a hobby, but it's also pursuit of something purposeful and meaningful and it regulates you and it does, you know, it ticks so many boxes.

And the.

Obviously the idea is to transfer the emphasis away from the nine to five, so to speak, and onto the quote unquote side hustle.

But that is, that is the sort of the best and kind of the only way, unless you're getting bankrolled in some other way that you can.

Because all these things take time.

Everything builds.

It's a very, very, very rare.

Especially nowadays.

Like it kind of used, maybe, maybe it didn't.

But nowadays we see these people pop up out of nowhere and then just disappear.

Like you see on TikTok.

I saw a video the other day on TikTok and it was about this guy who was saying there's like this, this white girl phenomenon where every few months is different.

Not that it's probably not relevant that they're white, but it kind of is true that this new American sort of white girl pops up.

It was the, it was the 6 foot 5 finance guy a few months ago and now it's the hawk to girl.

And then in a couple of months it will be someone else.

And it's.

And it was just quite an interesting thing.

So it isn't you have.

Nowadays you have to have sort of accrued like a backlog of work in order to be maintained as like someone in the public eye and not just sort of.

In England we say like five Minutes of fame.

I don't know if it's a solely English thing, but you have to, you have to do that and that's obviously what you, what you've been building towards and what you've, how you've got the backlog.

And another thing that I really liked was when you said that you did all the original, what would you say, sort of coaching for free.

And there, there's a, that's a great.

Is it.

I think that's not these, not saying that you thought at the time, but I think it was Chance the rapper or who gave away, who sold, who gave away all his albums, his first couple of albums for free.

And it was, it was really pivotal in him becoming the artist that he sort of became and is.

And it, and it's, there's a marketing, it's a marketing sort of tactic obviously, but it's, it's great.

It's prioritizing value over like I suppose monetary gain.

So that, that's really good that you did that.

I think that's probably a good place to.

Let's move.

Are you ready to move on to like fitness sort of talk now?

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely, yeah.

And then we will go back into sort of.

Because I'm interested to hear about your sort of like childhood a bit more and stuff because I'd like to delve into maybe where the, the insecurity possibly rooted from and then how fitness helped that.

But we can get to that a bit later.

What are people, what are the main issues or the patterns that you see people that are coming to you with today in your coaching that are cropping up quite a lot.

I would say the.

For one, fat loss is the most prominent thing right now.

Everybody, you know, wants to do it and wants to do it quick.

Which leads me to the other point where the amount of misinformation out there and the amount of quote unquote quick fixes, whether it's some crazy fad diet that isn't really going to work or a non sustainable approach, people have seemed to try everything and for a short amount of time where the name of the game where it becomes to growing, losing body fat, building muscle, it's going to be consistency with anything.

Building a business, a relationship, a friendship, anything at all, it's going to be consistently putting your best foot forward.

I like to say 85% of the time because as someone who has gone 100% into the fitness, you know, relative to myself and my goals, it's almost non sustainable to go 100% all the time every day, seven days a week.

Some might argue that I like to say it's not because one thing that I heard once before, I won't take credit for, but you want to fit fitness into your life and then not your life into fitness.

Because if you let it, and it's easy to do, so let it over, consume your life, you're going to miss out on things like eating the cake at a wedding or something random like that, or missing out on a night out with your friends because you want to hit your macros for the day.

I get it.

If you're on a strict plan and you have a goal with a deadline, like a bodybuilding show, that's something different.

But if you're the general population for going for general health, weight loss, muscle gain, whatever your goal may be, I always say 80, 20, 85, 15.

Because what I would like to see as a coach is for someone to adapt the qualities and the tendencies of everything involving fitness and nutrition for the long term.

You know, if you can do it for six years, slash the rest of your life, like amazing, anyone can get absolutely shredded in eight to 12 weeks.

But you're going to be sacrificing so much and you're probably going to be miserable at that point as well.

So one thing that, you know, for anyone listening that's looking for, you know, a big piece of advice is just play the long term game.

And that's really with anything, like I said in life.

But when it comes to fitness specifically, it is a very, very slow process.

Like if you're looking for fat loss, one pound lost, which is 2.2 kilos, whatever, you know that once a week, one pound a week is like fast results.

And that's amazing.

Clients will tell me, like, oh, I'm only down two pounds this week.

I'm like, you're down two pounds this week?

Like, that's incredible.

Like, that's, that's perfect, that's perfect trend, that's.

Nothing is gonna top that.

That's great because you're being sustainable.

You're being, you're not absolutely starving yourself and you're learning how to make it work into your lifestyle.

Yes.

The key word there for me was when you said it's sustainable.

I spoke to a nutritionalist guy and he was speaking about how the biggest problem with diets is that they're not sustainable.

So people, even if they do end up losing weight, they will inevitably end up putting it back on because it's, it has to, you have to effectively go through like a Paradigm shift where it has to be sort of COVID so you don't really see it happening but because if you have in the back of your mind, oh well, I used to eat like this and I would really like to eat like this, but I can't eat like this anymore.

There's always going to be that sort of temptation.

And what tends to happen is in life is when we're, when we're put under enough stress, we often default back to our pre learned habits.

And you know, willpower can only.

Willpower is powerful but it eventually can run its course.

So you can't rely on willpower all the time.

You have to shift your mentality around the whole thing.

And if a diet's not sustainable, so how would you go about some.

Because like the, what's it called you call it the asd, the, the American Standard Diet.

I can.

Which is, you know, to be.

We don't eat.

I don't think diets are particularly that good in Britain, but I'm pretty sure that they're worse in America.

And, and I think you guys have got all sorts of things going on.

People that go to America and eat your.

And eat American food, they often say it's, it's lovely but you can taste that it's, it's got more in it than, than we've got over in the uk which I can imagine is, is really hard.

And obviously you've got so much more options than most Western countries do.

So you're obviously working with people that eat that way a lot of the time.

How do you, where do you go from that point to lose weight?

I know that's a vague question, but you sort of get what I mean.

Yeah, 100%.

So if someone comes to me and going back real quick on the, the temptations that you, you hit that spot on.

Like temptations will always be there 100 of the time.

There's ways around it.

Sure, you don't have to buy the, the box of chocolates or whatever it may be, but no matter what, there's always going to be a night out.

You could go to an event, a takeout option, you're driving by whatever it may be.

So rewiring your brain in that way where you're saying, okay, it's not so much I can't have that.

It's just what's going to help me get to my goals is what I try to tell people.

Like what.

What's going to help you get to your goal?

What's going to make you feel better is that croissant going to make you feel gross?

So if the answer is yes, then maybe a different option.

Maybe an egg sandwich might be a little better.

Little tweaks like that.

But to answer the recent question, when someone comes to me with let's say a fat loss goal, well, normally I would do would be okay.

Let's take a look at what you're eating specifically on a weekly basis.

Write it down, track it in various apps on the app store nowadays, and let's take a look of what the macros look like, what type of foods you're eating and choosing.

Because most people, when they track their foods, or at least, you know, jot it down, they'll find that their eating an excessive amount of calories more than they realize.

So a serving of peanut butter to them might be three servings.

When it's actually scaled out and weighed and they can visualize it and say, damn, like I was having three servings of this.

I only thought it was a little bit.

So after we would take a look at their calories and the foods they're eating, I would say, all right, let's adjust the portions a little bit.

Let's make sure that we're eating a little bit more protein because it's amazingly important to have in the diet.

And let's take a look at the carbs and fat option.

And can we make them a little healthier?

Instead of having, you know, six handfuls of nuts, let's just do half of it.

And instead of having three pieces of bread, let's only do one.

Like, I will never tell people not to eat something like, you cannot have this.

You can get absolutely shredded and look crazy.

If you track your food enough.

And you can do it by eating ice cream.

If your calories are in check and you're tracking very specifically, there's, you know, the calories in versus calories out.

It's the law of thermodynamics.

So, yes, the ice cream is filled with sugar and you'll probably have a crash after and crave sugar after.

You'll probably break out in acne because of the oils and the spicy food that you're choosing to have, like whatever it may be.

But when it comes down to calories, that's the main focus I'm putting on when someone wants to lose weight.

You know, nothing too major, nothing to make you extremely hungry.

And then let's, you know, do three days a week on the treadmill for 20 minutes on XYZ, incline speed, all that.

And then from there I'll have them basically track their progress with weigh ins each week, maybe once or twice a week.

And also progress photos too.

Because the scale is only a tool.

Just like everything else that we have to get to this goal.

The scale tends to scare people and when it goes up because they ate too late last night, they get frustrated.

Oh, I gained three pounds.

Like no, you just ate three hours later than normal.

So you're full from the night before.

It's up a little bit.

Like once you go for a walk and move throughout your day, it's going to come right back down.

It's.

To gain a pound of body fat in a single day, you would have to eat an absurd amount of calories, about 3, 500 calories extra than your normal maintenance level.

So that was in a long winded answer.

I start with calories and look at their food.

Yeah.

How much do you think like the excess amount of carbohydrates are responsible for the people being overweight?

Because I'm not.

I've spoken about this before, but it's becoming more and more clear that.

So when I went to school, we were brought up on this food map, this food circle.

I don't know if you guys have in America.

I'm sure you do because it's probably American.

Yeah, but where it's like partitioned and the two big chunks, what are the two big chunks then?

The two big chunks of carbohydrates and vegetables and fruits and then you've got a little bit of protein, a little bit of fat and then a tiny slither of.

Maybe it's dairy.

Either way, the bit, the point is, is that we put too much, far too much emphasis on carbohydrates.

How much weight could someone lose if they just, if they just decrease their amount of carbohydrates that they're consuming?

I, I would think the average person would have a very successful journey just by lowering their carbohydrate intake.

Because they are the ones most likely fats are.

They add up quick.

There's nine calories per gram in a gram of fat.

So carbs only have 4 calories per gram.

But carbohydrates are very easy to overeat.

Now, how many pieces of bread could you eat in a sitting?

Right.

You can have at least six pieces of bread, no problem.

And that right There could be 600 calories and can easily put someone over their calorie maintenance and then put them in a surplus, which the body is going to store body fat, because we have an excess amount of energy, which are calories coming in.

So if you were to move carbohydrates and you don't have to remove them completely, removing them completely would be more of a ketogenic diet, if that's sustainable for you.

Awesome.

That's not really my thing.

I love pasta.

I love rice.

So if we just take a look at how much they're eating and what can we remove that's easily accessible?

So those little bits and pieces throughout the day of whatever it may be, some sugary sweets or that extra piece of bread, like I mentioned, those are the little silent killers, let's say, that can pull someone out of a calorie deficit very easily.

No one's gonna gain a ton of body weight when eating chicken breasts because you'd have to eat a hell of a lot of chicken breasts to.

To go over those calories on the same level as the carbs would.

There's no magic macronutrients that's gonna help you get to your goals.

Like, you can gain body fat by eating too much protein if it's going over your maintenance level.

Same thing with carbs.

Same thing with fat.

However, you're not gonna get, like I said, get fat off of eating too much chicken breast because you'd be so sick and full to do so.

But, yeah, Red, you'll be able to get to that point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I was.

A couple years ago, I was in Majorca as an au pair when I.

This is where I met Maria on a boat trip.

And in.

In Spain, they do this thing called a siesta, which I'm sure you're obviously aware of, where they have a little afternoon nap and they have this.

It's sort of believed in Spain that the reason they do that is because of the heat.

So everyone's like, it's so hot.

We go to go to sleep.

But when I was there, I realized.

Well, maybe when I got back, I'm not sure, but I realized that it's actually less to do with the heat and more to do with the food they eat.

Because they eat so much carbohydrates.

They're so literally in.

They do.

The Spanish tortilla is basically just potato and eggs, but lots of potato.

So they'll do.

I think it's called a boccadilla or something, which is a baguette with a Spanish potato.

And they'll eat that quite often.

And you look how many carbohydrates and how much like starch and wheat and stuff is obviously with the bread.

And then it's no wonder they're so, so tired.

But it wasn't until I was there.

And I'm sure the heat is part of it, but it's amazing is, do carbohydrates, do they sort of require so much.

What's the word?

Digestion, do they use up so much digestion power or does your body, does your stomach have to really work to digest?

Do you know?

Or is it, is that what you mean when you were talking about earlier about the car gram thing?

So not so much, but.

The.

When you eat carbohydrates, they turn to sugar.

And when your body wants to lower the blood sugar, it releases insulin from the pancreas.

And also, if you combine that with a big meal, you have a elevated insulin level.

Your body's trying to digest the protein and the fat and the carbs everything at once.

So you become very sluggish and tired.

And while your body's trying to run through this process of lowering its blood sugar down and also digesting food at the same time, protein and carbs are digested in the stomach and fats are mainly digested in the small intestine.

So a little off topic here, but if you wanted to stay full for a while, the ideal portion you would have for a meal would be a high protein, moderate to high fat meal, lower carbs.

So that way those two things are gonna digest nice and slow.

Combine it with a little bit of fiber, you'd probably be full for four to six hours easily.

But when you have carbohydrates, and especially carbohydrates alone, your insulin levels will spike and then drop back down.

And normally in the American diet, people are eating cereal for breakfast, which is mainly all carbohydrates.

So their insulin levels are.

And blood sugar will spike and then drop down below baseline and then become very tired, very sluggish, and then start to crave that energy boost that the carbs initially brought them.

And then now they're doing this.

So they're spiking and crashing, spiking and crashing because they're eating only carbs all day long with no fiber, no protein, healthy fats aren't there.

And then that's kind of the issue here, where by 10 o'clock on a normal workday, they're craving a little sweet at break time.

With a coffee.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

Some sugar or something.

Yeah.

I was watching a video a while ago and it was with A psychologist and he was talking about, he always tells his patients, his clients who suffer from anxiety that they need to eat a protein and fat rich breakfast in the morning for exactly the reason that you spoke about.

Because if you, a carbohydrate breakfast, you get that dip, you get that spike and dip.

And he said, like it, it basically doesn't recover at that point until the next day or something along those lines.

Maybe that's incorrect.

But either way, either way he was.

And give.

And given what you've just said, that makes, that makes complete sense to be fair.

You've got to get that, you've got to get your protein, your body processes protein and fats in a different way.

And obviously I don't understand the science as well as you do, but I can imagine how it sort of fortifies you against, I don't know, it just sort of strengthens maybe your psychological resilience, I'm not sure, because you're, you're not at the whim of your blood sugar, which is impacting your, your mood.

Maybe, maybe that's the keyword mood.

So that's very interesting.

Yeah.

And there is also.

Go ahead.

No, no, you go, you go, you go real quick.

There's also different choices of carbohydrate too that will help prevent that as well.

So if you eat a handful of dried fruit, that's going to be higher in sugar and then you know your insulin is going to do that, the whole scenario.

But if you do combine it with lots of fiber and protein as well, the absorption slows down and you have more of a steady increase and a steady drop.

So I will say that, that carbs aren't the enemy, but there is, you know, way around it, there's do's and don'ts in a way.

So yeah, it's about that sort of sudden impact, sudden drop, isn't it?

And the, the sharp increase and decline that you've got that maybe you've got to watch out for.

What's your opinion on things like the keto diet and the carnivore diet?

The mainstream kind of notion around it, I don't love, because some people will push the keto diet.

Some people really, any diet, if they believe in it, they'll start to push that too much.

But with every diet there's one thing in common and that's going to be, it's putting you in a calorie deficit.

Yes.

Ketones and everything like that.

And fat oxidation with the keto diet, using the fat for energy rather than carbs but if you remove carbohydrates from a diet, you're removing a whole entire food group, which, like we mentioned, most people have an absurd amount of carbs every day.

Of course you're going to lose three pounds in the first week.

You know, removing an entire food group is really what's going on there.

And same thing with every other diet.

If you chose like a paleo diet, which is more so of like natural foods, like coming from the earth, fish and meats and stuff like that, similar to what I have as a diet right now.

But when you aren't eating things out of a bag or a box, it's going to be a little more difficult to overindulge in things that are going to put you into a calorie surplus.

If you're going all paleo diet, you know, the box of muffins that were made with a thousand ingredients, it's probably off the limits.

So now you're not going to have that extra 800 calories in muffins, you know, so I don't love or hate any type of diet.

It's the approach that I want to make sure it's fit for, let's say my client or the general population that I'm speaking to online.

If keto works for you and you feel great off of it, do more of that, get your blood test done, everything like that, make sure you're good to continue.

If you know you want to have a high carb diet, low fat, high protein diet, all, by all means, if that's going to fuel your runs and your workouts and make you feel great, awesome.

Whatever's going to make you do this for the long run is what I, as a coach and person that loves this stuff wants to see.

Yeah, I did the carnivore diet a few years ago for about a month, maybe 95 months between three weeks and four, four, four weeks.

And, and the, the biggest changes for me were, for me were I lost pretty much all of the sort of excess body fat that I had.

You know, I'm a, I'm a slight guy anyway, but the sort of, the, the residue, so to speak.

I had suffered from sort of like IBS symptoms for like a long time.

And I'm really, really positive that it almost temporarily cured those sort of symptoms because of possibly repopulation of the gut microbiome in a, in a healthy productive way because there wasn't any.

I mean, I don't understand as much as I probably should do, as much as you do, how the gut microbiome work.

But that was my biggest takeaway from it was all these symptoms that I'd been really struggling with, like bad, bad bloating, awful stomach pains, all linked with anxiety and sort of mental health.

All that went away after I did that just for a month and it went away for a good at least three years, I'd say.

And then I tried it again and my body was just my.

Or my mouth or whatever was just like, nah, mate, you're not doing that.

Because I just couldn't.

I just couldn't.

My body was like just to just.

It was.

It reached its sort of breaking point, so to speak, with the whole sort of phenomenon and said you, you're.

You're not someone who's designed to only eat meat, if that is a thing.

But I, I would especially for autoimmune conditions.

It's looking like it could be quite good for possible autoimmune because I'm, I'm a follower of like Jordan Peterson and people like that.

And as.

As much as I'm not a fan of everything he says, I think the, the carnivore diet is, is quite interesting how it's not even that.

It's more of an elimination diet, how eliminating things progressively to see the way your body reacts.

And it's obviously very difficult because, I mean, I've done food diaries and stuff when I was, when my sort of stomach was really difficult and tracking these things is a nightmare because there's so much interplay and you know, I didn't.

These things have like a, A delayed impact and it's like, who knows what's going on?

Whereas if you just cut out everything and keep raw.

Not raw, keep red meat or something.

Because apparently we.

That is, apparently you don't need fiber in your diet if you don't eat carbohydrates or something, something like that.

You.

Or that there's a lot of.

Or you don't need vitamin C if you don't need carbohydrates or something.

There's.

I don't understand, but that's what some.

I've heard people say.

It's the, the raw.

Why do I keep saying raw?

I think because I associate that with, with carnivore.

But that sort of all your nutrients and you, you've got.

Obviously you can introduce organ meats and stuff like that and I know that they're really good.

What do you eat?

So I follow a diet slash approach called if it fits your macros.

80% of the time you macros are the carbs, protein and fat.

So then the micros are vitamins and minerals.

So macros make up calories.

So protein, carbs and fat.

I have set goals every day where I'll eat in a sense, like with hyphens around it, like anything I want that will be able to hit those goals.

Granted, I'm doing it long enough where I know what makes me feel good, what digests well, what's healthier.

I'm shooting for shorter ingredients lists.

Like I said, it's almost like a paleo diet where, you know, chicken, like you can see the ingredients on the plate, like this chicken, it's sweet potatoes, it's broccoli with some olive oil on top, avocado oil, whatever it may be.

So if there is a time where my friends want to go out to dinner and I want to stay on track, I will adjust the calories I consume earlier in the day so that the meal that we go out and get is going to fit within my calorie goal.

So I hit my calorie goal at least six to seven days out of the week.

Maybe there's a weekend where we go out away.

Cool.

I'm not stressed about it.

You know, if it's a weekend away, I'm enjoying enjoying that and, and we'll get back to it the next time I can.

Yeah.

I'm in a slight surplus here and there when I do go off track.

So I usually use those off track meals as like, all right, I'm in a little bit of surplus.

I'm trying to build muscle.

I've been working out long enough where I need to be in a calorie surplus pretty much no matter what, to put on muscle.

And then I basically, if I'm craving something, I'll create a meal where it will fit within my diet, slash calories, slash macro goals, and then cook it, track it, eat it.

I weigh everything I I eat.

I track it within myfitnesspal app and then pretty much go from there.

If I feel too bloated and too full, maybe I'll do extra cardio.

Maybe I'll pull calories back a little bit for a couple weeks and then go from there.

Do you take probiotics or anything like that?

Do you do vitamins, minerals, grains, 100%.

I do a men's multivitamin just as like a cheap insurance policy just in case my diet doesn't fill any gaps that I need.

So I'll take a multivitamin vitamin D3/K2 complex.

So vitamin D3 is.

Now they're considering it hormone because it's so important in the human body, carries out so many functions and it's vastly deficient in the American diet right now, probably the world, because not many people are in the sunlight anymore.

We get vitamin D from the sunlight and no one really does that anymore.

I mean, it's cloudy today, but I would still be just sitting here taking another sales call or creating content in the kitchen or something.

So vitamin D for sure.

I'll take creatine monohydrate.

Creatine is the most studied supplement out there.

It's proven to work, it's proven to be safe.

It's proven to put on muscle tissue and increase strength.

So 5 grams of creatine monohydrate every single day.

And then from there I'll do whey protein powder because 200 grams of protein a day is tough to hit with just chicken breast and, you know, steak alone.

So I'll do a scoop a day or so and then from there I'll do like greens and reds powder.

But that's really splitting hairs.

If someone's tight on a budget, you do not need any of that.

You can get your greens and your reds within your diet.

It's not a magic thing.

A lot of it nowadays is marketing and influencers and people taking commissions off of them.

So they're very.

Not needed.

Not needed, no.

What.

Before we end the light nutrition segment, what's your opinion on things like Huel and have you got Huel in America?

It must be American.

I love how I keep saying have you got it in America?

When all these things are American.

You should be saying to me, have you got it in England, mate?

Hu.

Is that.

Oh, I do.

Oh, okay.

So Jim, it's the.

Oh, it's like, what's your opinion on these, like meal shakes that claim to, to be a meal in a bottle?

So if someone's struggling to put on weight.

Awesome.

I've, I've told people to have like meal replacement shakes before to gain weight, to gain extra calories throughout the day.

Because if someone is a taller individual with a fast metabolism weighing 140 pounds, they need an extra.

I don't know the actual number, but let's say a thousand calories.

A day to gain weight.

It's.

It's tough to eat an extra thousand calories every single day.

It's tough on the gut.

It's a.

It's expensive.

It's a lot of food.

So a meal replacement shake for that individual, awesome.

Like, sounds great.

As long as it's clean and, you know, provides actual nutrients and then filled with crap.

However, on the other side of things, even a smoothie place or a restaurant that does smoothies, drinks, and all that, other meal replacement companies, if they're.

If the individual consuming it is having it without realizing it's an actual meal, that's gonna do more harm than good.

Because that should be a supplement to, let's say, breakfast or whatever it may be.

Rather, most people, I would assume, are drinking this.

Oh, it has protein.

Because marketing's so good nowadays, like, oh, it's good for you.

It has protein.

You turn around 800 calories, they go eat another 800 calories worth of breakfast and high processed carbohydrates.

And then now they're confused of why they keep gaining weight.

So depends on the individual for sure.

If someone, like I said, wants to gain weight, cool, Sounds great.

Let me know what you choose.

Let's take a look at it.

If someone's like, oh, I had a smoothie for, for a snack today.

Okay, what was in the smoothie?

Now, did that hurt us?

Did that put you over a deficit?

If that's the goal, we'd have to find out.

Yeah, it's like in Mean Girls when the main girl gives the.

The leader of the plastics those weight gain bars and she says that they're just like supplements or something, and she ends up putting on those weights.

You can't work out why.

It's because she.

She's eating those bars.

Yeah.

And.

And I.

Maybe it works the other way around as well, which is if all you're eating is drinking these drinks, then maybe you're not actually as healthy, you're not acting in a.

As healthy way as you think you actually are, because these things can't be an exact replacement for food.

Let's.

Before we've got about 10, 15 minutes left, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but let's talk about you.

And like, because it's called particularly the podcast is kind of around mental health.

Not always.

We.

But we go on many tangents and offshoots.

But would you say, I don't know if it's something that you're sort of interested in or have experience in Would you say that?

Well, would you encourage people with mental health difficulties to exercise as kind of self therapy?

The gym has helped me thousands of times.

And what it does to your mind and what it does to your body, it's unbelievable.

When you do really push yourself, you get that reward.

Like, hey, I did this thing I didn't want to do.

Even me as a professional in the space, like, I'll wake up and be like, damn, I really don't want to work out today.

I am tired.

I had calls all night, whatever it may be.

And when you do go, nine times out of ten you feel good after.

You're like, I accomplished something I didn't want to do.

So you get the reward from there.

And then if you stick with it long enough, you, you get the reward of the physical aspect.

You look in the mirror and you're like, hey, I'm not as like fluffy around the midsection, you know, I'm feeling, jawline's coming in a little bit more.

I feel, I feel good.

My skin's clear because I'm e better.

And then it starts this snowball effect where if you kind of close your eyes or at least put the blinders on and go all in and understand the long term game once again, you keep the consistency.

It can really help you out of dark places.

And I've known that from experience myself for sure.

I would 100%, 100% say that.

They're pretty high.

But I think it was Joe Rogan who said something along the lines of.

I mean, maybe I'm crediting with something that he didn't say, but either way, I heard it from him.

He said, in life, either you.

Something along the lines of either you.

There's no escaping suffering, but you can choose in which ways you suffer.

And I think exercise is a great way, is a great choice of suffering.

It's a great way to channel the sort of existential truth that the presence of suffering exists because it is going to be hard, but you are by engaging in this form.

And obviously I'm not saying that exercise is entirely suffering, but the aspect of wherever, wherever it may reside, whether or not it's at the beginning, that sort of hoop that you've got to jump through, or the leap of faith, or whether it's during the exercise, the, the sort of conviction to carry on through the, through the rep or whatever, you are preventing a different form of suffering by engaging in that suffering.

And I think that's probably because in life people tend to, people say they want to be happy, but actually they just don't want to be sad.

So.

And it's actually not the same thing.

So people would rather avoid pain than move towards pleasure.

So if instead it's all framing with these things.

So I think that's, that's really good how you said that you sort of felt you didn't have great self confidence.

Where do you think that originated from when you were young?

I think it was a self inflicted belief of everyone was judging.

There was a high level of judgment wherever I went, even though it was just more than likely all in my head.

And that was from the younger days of middle school, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old.

I would always kind of make sure, like my shirt's on straight, everything's all, you know, neat and tidy, no stains or nothing, nothing.

Like I would be so self conscious of the way I was perceived from others and it stemmed from thinking they were judging me based on what they saw.

When now as an adult I look and I think like, how foolish, because everyone's one in the same mindset of that I was or two is going about their life in such a way that they don't even think to care.

And now, you know, if I could tell my younger self one thing, I would say stop caring what people think so much because life really opens up.

And that comes with anybody looking to post content online.

Like, you know, when I've posted my first video, I'm like, oh geez, like what are they gonna think?

And now it's, it doesn't matter what they think.

Do I like the content?

Is it gonna help at least one person?

Like, can I help one person today?

That would be the goal every day.

And then from there it just starts snowballing and the people that you think are talking negatively about you disappear and you don't even think about them.

Yeah, well, I mean, a better, the best possible outcome in those scenarios would be if those people started doing something because it's just a projection.

So there's maybe something that those people want to do that they feel scared that they feel scared to do.

And it isn't just that you're doing something.

It isn't a direct attack at what you're doing.

It's more of an indirect attack at the part of them that won't do what you're doing because they're afraid of doing it.

That's what they really have the problem with.

And, you know, there's this.

I even.

Like, not even me, but there are videos that I want to put up that I'm procrastinating overdoing.

So, like, videos that you do when you just sort of talk to the.

I've gotten very comfortable in my realm of putting up videos in the podcast format that I do.

And the next step is to do videos on my own.

And I did to be.

Ironically, I did used to do quite a lot of them back in the early days when I was doing this.

But it's sort of.

It's the.

What would you say that the borders have slowly filled back up and blocked that part of me off?

And I need to sort of.

That's my next step.

And because it is quite hard to.

Because when we're doing this, I don't feel like I'm not talking to anyone.

But if I was to, like, just make direct eye contact with that camera the whole time and try and talk, it's a bit of a different thing.

So I know that's where I need to go.

But yeah, so I completely get what you mean about that, sort of.

Second to last question, I think, what are three things that someone could do today to put down to lay the groundwork for possibly becoming a healthier person?

All right, cool.

I like that question.

First one is identify what's happening in your life.

Write it all down.

Identify what's stopping you.

What type of habits are stopping you.

Who is stopping you?

What are you surrounding yourself with day to day?

You know, health is physical, but it's also mental, like you mentioned.

And if a messy room is causing you anxiety, when you see it, write that down.

Like, I need to clean a little bit more.

I need to set a time to do things for myself.

And once you write it down, next step would be to strategize how you can optimize that list that you just created.

So strategize like, all right, well, I want to get healthy because I don't feel good about myself.

Where can I go to the gym?

Who can I ask for help?

And how many days a week can I do this?

What is it that I can do?

Can I just go for a walk every morning?

Awesome.

Like, all the, like, I am cheering you on.

And then from there, execute on all of that as best as you can for the longest time that you can.

And then eventually all those things that you first wrote down are going to become just second nature.

Yeah, I'm going to wake just like you're brushing your teeth.

Yeah, I'm going to wake up and go work out.

Like, why wouldn't I?

I brushed my teeth this morning.

Of course I'm going to work out.

And then from there, you can identify more things in your life that are weighing in on your shoulders.

Once again, you reevaluate because there's always going to be something that pops up.

You know, people might look at let's.

Myself, for example.

Oh, he's got it all figured out.

And he, you know, he looks great, whatever.

He's living life.

He just came back from this trip, whatever.

No, no, nobody has it figured out, man.

Like, there's low points in this, high points.

So once you be.

Once you have those baseline foundations set of the initial kind of roundup of all the negative things, reassess and say, hey, where.

What other areas can I work on?

Like, how's my relationship with my, my family or my spouse?

Like, can I, can I have.

Be more, you know, have more compassion towards these people?

Can I allow them in and, and allow myself to feel emotions or, you know, when is the last time I talked to my friend?

Things like that.

And then from there it starts compounding and before you know it, you're on your way to having like this peace of mind, you know, more likely more times than not.

You know, we want to always have.

Just try to have a positive outlook at all times, but that's not realistic.

But if we can maintain it as long as possible.

Beautiful.

Yeah, I think that there's a, There's a great quote that is something like.

And you, you touched on it earlier.

It's better to be good 75% of the time, then great 30% of the time.

And.

Yeah, I think if you can.

One of my new favorite words is abstemious, which means balanced and not getting to.

Not oscillating too much.

And I think it's a way that I try and live my life, at least in some ways.

I understand that this is something I've spoken about loads.

But if you sort of eradicate sometimes, if you eradicate the.

I don't know what the word is, it's not irrationality, maybe it's the vibrance of life.

If you eradicate that to life, you also run the risk of living a dull existence.

And it's a really tricky balance to, to, to account for.

And I'm not.

I still haven't worked out and maybe I, maybe I never will.

But there is.

Yeah, I like that it is.

Yeah.

No, that was a, that was a good list of things to, to give people to start off with.

Right.

Final question.

You may have already.

We may have already.

You may have already answered it already.

It's called the Breaking Point podcast because I'm interested in people's kind of either lowest or highest points where there was a.

Ironically where there was a sudden change of.

Given what I just said, sudden sort of change of direction, so to speak, in a good or a bad way.

Can you think of a moment?

Maybe it was the moment that you decided that you were going to go hard at the content online fitness sort of world.

Or can you think of a time when.

Or maybe there's many.

But what springs to mind I have probably to.

I'll give you the one main one.

I have a few others too.

But the first one that came to mind I was.

It was 95 degrees out on a summer day with you know, car over my head, working on a car, aligning the wheels to make it, you know, straight down the road.

And I was struggling with this thing for about three or four hours and losing money on it because mechanics get paid in a time how fast they can do the job pretty much briefly to explain and yeah completely lost money on it.

So I'm just like asking for help with these.

The guys at the shop and just staring at this thing in this.

In the above me and I said out loud, I'll never forget it.

I'll never forget the car it was or the suspension I was putting into the car.

I looked up and I was like when gyms open up, I'm becoming a personal trainer.

I said it right out loud.

I'll never forget it.

And it was probably six months after that that I it was my last day at the shop because I built enough clientele to subside the income from the automotive.

So that was the first one that came to mind.

The other few would probably before.

Once I started automotive school, I had my dream car at the time.

I was 18, 19 years old.

I had a girlfriend at the time and I started going to the school that I started to really dislike.

The kids in there just weren't who I wanted to become the girl.

And I ended up breaking up in like the 72 hour period with no explanation.

And then I sold my dream car so I could drive to the school that I hated, so I wouldn't ruin the dream car, so I didn't want to see it ruined, so I'd rather sell it when it was nice.

Take something that wasn't as nice and use it to commute to school.

And every day on the train by myself, an hour commute, I would run to the.

The school so I could get in there first, so I could finish the test first, and I would run back to the train so I could get home as fast as possible, so I could make cooking videos and then go to work afterwards.

I did that for years, the first, you know, two, three years of school, and that was probably the lowest point where I said to myself, like, I can't do this forever, so let's see if this fitness thing can work.

So that was kind of like the first, like.

All right, all right, Mike, let's.

Let's try something.

Let's take control of what's possible here and then go from there.

Sa.