Fitness Q & A 001: Digestion, Optimizing Testosterone, and Getting Started with Fitness

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

What is going on everybody? This is a new platform for the Warrior Soul podcast, and this is called Warrior Soul Fitness Q and A. And this is really going to be a weekly question and answer section for questions that were given to me off of our private Facebook group, the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy. And that's where we discuss all things fitness, nutrition, training, things to help men and some women out there to live their best lives. But when you, if you want to join the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy, it's real easy.

It's completely free. You head over to www.warriorsoulagoge.com. And when you sign up, you get a free testosterone optimization checklist and a free testosterone optimization workout. Twenty one day workout, filled with workouts that are going to help you to optimize your hormonal levels, optimize your performance, burn fat, and build muscle. And the whole point of this guys, as is the point of the Warrior Soul podcast, is to introduce veterans and anybody else who's willing to listen to tools, tactics, ideas, and practices that are going to help them to live their best lives.

I'm sick of talking about Veteran suicide prevention. We need to start talking about how we can get all Veterans to truly live. And so this is one of the ways we're gonna do that. This podcast is brought to you by F Bomb Nutrition. F Bomb makes delicious portable packets of fats, and I'm a big fan of their macadamia nut butters.

These things are awesome. They taste absolutely great and there's no sugar in them and you can carry them wherever you want to. They're really great supplements for MREs, really great things to just have on you in case you need some energy or need a meal. Well, it's not really a meal, it's a snack, but it's got some really awesome healthy fats in there and like I said, they taste great. If you want to get 20% off of your first order of F bombs, head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout.

With that, let's get into this week's and the very first Warrior Soul Fitness Q and A.

This is Chris Albert and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

What is going on everybody? I'm just going to switch my audio over here and allow a few people to get on. So this is the weekly Facebook Live for the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy. And basically what I'm doing each week is I'm taking questions that I round up from across the internet. Everything involving Warrior Soul, how to improve your nutrition, how to improve your fitness, how to improve your strength, how to optimize your testosterone levels so that you can live a happier and healthier life.

And so I'm just going to go through here, and I'll probably start with my Instagram questions. I had a few of them over here. Let's see. Alright. A few things going on here.

Curtis from the True Human podcast. He said, I've lost a large amount of muscle mass due to a severe case of anemia. I've come back from anemia, but my digestion is still off, which was a major cause of the blood loss leading to the anemia. Would it be better to continue to work on my digestive system before starting to strength train? Or is there something I can start to do to get my muscle back?

Great question, Curtis. Number one thing that I always tell people, regardless of what your goal is, whether that's to build muscle, whether that's to burn fat, whether that's to get faster, whether that's to get stronger, the number one priority is you always have to start by fixing and healing the intestinal tract. You always have to fix your digestive system first. The reason for that is this: You can't utilize nutrition unless you're able to digest it. And I know that sounds like it's common sense, but a lot of people jump beyond this step because they think that digestion is something that can be fixed by over the counter medication, or that can be fixed just by taking a few antacids or something like that.

And it's not. It's something that's extremely complex. A lot of your immune system, I think 75 to 80% of your immune system is actually located in your digestive tract. And that means that if there's damage to the intestinal tract, you are going to get damage to the rest of your body through inflammatory cytokines that get sent throughout your body. That's going to make your joints achy.

That's going to cause potentially allergic reactions, that's potentially going to cause autoimmunity, it's potentially going to cause brain inflammation, it's potentially going to reduce your insulin sensitivity. And so the prime focus, first and foremost, for any nutrition program is to optimize digestion, first and foremost. I'll get into a couple of tips on how to do this, but just understand that if you're not doing that, you're going to run into trouble. It's like building your physique on a house car. It's like anything can blow it over.

So how do you do that? How do you heal the digestive system? How do you repair it? How do you build it up? So the number one thing to begin healing your digestive system is something extremely simple, it's completely free.

Chew your food. Don't eat while you're walking around. Don't eat while you're working. Sit down for your meal. Sit there and chew that food until it's liquid.

Chew it until it's mush. Every time you chew, you're releasing enzymes. The saliva contains enzymes in it that's going to help to break down that food. Prep your food properly. If you're eating a lot of vegetables, make sure you're cutting them up, slicing them.

Let them sit there for ten minutes. What that does is it releases natural enzymes in the plant. This is a defense mechanism that plants built up. When they get damaged, they release enzymes that then release what they call polyphenols. Polyphenols are how plants heal themselves and they're very nutritional for us.

So when you let them sit there for about ten minutes, those enzymes are going do their work. They're going to make the plant more digestible and they're going to make the plant more nutritious. If you're eating grains and wheat and seeds and things like that, make sure you're soaking them and sprouting them to make them more digestible. Really, really important stuff. Make sure you're eating either sprouted bread or you can do sourdough bread.

Sourdough has an active culture in it that helps to make the flour in it more digestible. Two, make sure that when it gets in your stomach, make sure that you're not doing anything to reduce your stomach acid. And this is something that people make a big mistake on. The reason why you have heartburn, GERD, all that stuff is not because you have too much stomach acid, it's because you lack stomach acid. And when you take an antacid, for example, what happens is you end up making it to the point where you're not going to be able to absorb a lot of protein, you're not going be able to absorb your nutrients.

And that can actually damage your system, that can actually damage your stomach. A lack of stomach acid is going to cause your body to produce even more, and it's going to cause that to gurgle up. So don't take antacids. Actually, introduce some sources of acid to your stomach. A great one is apple cider vinegar.

I put a couple of tablespoons into a glass of water every morning. That's the first thing I drink. And that acetic acid in there has a lot of benefits, but one of them, it's an added source of acid to your stomach to help with digestion. The next thing is seed your intestinal tract with prebiotic foods. I've talked about this in a number of YouTube videos.

Resistant starch, right? So, one great way of getting this is Bob's Red Mill potato starch. You stick a quarter tablespoon or quarter teaspoon into sparkling water. That gives you a great source of resistant starch. Another great source of resistant starch is potatoes that have been cooked and then cooled, or white rice that's been cooked and then cooled.

That increases what's called the retrograde resistant starch. The reason why resistant starch is so important is because friendly bacteria feed on it. When they feed on it, they produce Butyrate. Butyrate is a really anti inflammatory compound that's going to help to heal that interior lining of your intestinal tract. The next thing is make sure that you are consuming a lot of probiotics.

Now, just the supplements or the pills that you get or anything like that, but fermented foods. One thing that I include in my meals often, almost every meal, is some sort of fermented, either kimchi or raw sauerkraut. Really great source of natural probiotics. And I'll include about a half a cup of sauerkraut or a good serving of kimchi on there. And she uses it as a condiment and it's got live probiotics.

I also drink a lot of kombucha. This is my favorite brand of kombucha. It's called Live Soda And that's got a lot of probiotics in it that you can use to rebuild your gut microbiome, is what they call it. Remember, we're not just a single organism, we're millions of organisms that literally been put together into one big super organism. And if you want to learn more about that, check out the Warrior Soul podcast, my interview with Doctor Rodney Dietert, the author of The Human Superorganism.

Great book, great book by the way. So another thing you need to do here is really make sure that you are getting a good source of collagen in your diet. Now, a really great way of getting collagen in your diet without spending a lot of money on it is bone broth. You just take some beef soup bones, you stick them into a crock pot, you stick a few cups of water in there, salt, Himalayan pink salt, Slice up a few vegetables in there and let it cook for eight to ten hours. You've got an amazing, awesome bone broth.

Really nutritious, good source of collagen. It's also got L glutamine in there that'll help to heal that interior lining of your intestinal tract. So these are some tips here. I'll also put a link in the comments when I'm done with this video as to different things you can do in order to heal your gut. Different techniques.

I've written a few different articles about it. One particular really good article that was on T Nation that talks about gut health and your testosterone. I put a step by step guide in there. And this is actually in the free testosterone optimization checklist that I give out when people join the Warrior for Life newsletter, which I'll put a link into the comments as well for that. Catmapman, he says, how can I get myself started?

And this is a big question that comes up. And again, I don't know you. I don't know your specific circumstances, but there's a lot of people out there wondering how do they get started in their fitness. And I think one of the problems that people have when they start something is that they always make it a little bit too complicated. What do I mean by that?

Well, they'll want to get started in fitness, but they don't necessarily want to join a gym, or maybe they can't afford to join a gym right now. So they put it off, right? Or maybe they want to start a diet, but they're in a work situation right now, where they don't have much time on their hands, and so they put it off because they think they have to prep all these meals and things like that. Well, the big thing you need to understand here is that the simple things that matter. So, if you want to get started, there's two things that you really need to do.

You need to eat better, and you need to move more. So, let's start with those. So, if you want to get started, number one, try to start by getting rid of all the packaged food that you're eating, all the simple packaged food that you're eating. At work, rather than going to a fast food restaurant, try eating a salad. At home, try preparing your meals when you're at home.

And if you don't have time to prepare your meals, look up a bunch of slow cooker recipes. Get yourself a slow cooker. These things are literally set it and forget it. You put a little bit of meat in there, you put some vegetables, you put some broth, and you set it, it cooks for eight hours, and you come home, you have a full meal sitting there for you. You can Google these things.

When it comes to physical activity, you don't necessarily have to join the gym. Get yourself a kettlebell or a couple of dumbbells. Keep them in your house. You do any exercise with those implements. You do squats.

You do kettlebell swings, do presses, you do deadlifts with them. And beyond that, even if you don't have those, you can do burpees, you can do push ups, you can do bodyweight squats, you can run, you can do things, you can walk. Right? Even if you don't want to run, you can start walking a little bit more. Maybe you walk for a half a mile and then you can do a set of push ups every half mile.

Or maybe you walk a half mile and or for an hour, and then every half mile you walk, you do a set of squats or burpees or something like that. Start simple. Start by moving more. Start by eliminating the sugar from your diet, eliminating the processed foods, eating more vegetables, eating more fruits, eating better sources of protein. And then from there, if you want to get a little bit more advanced, you can get a little bit more advanced.

But if you're not doing anything right now, doing anything at all, it's going to 10x your results. It's going to help you to burn fat. It's going to help you to build muscle. And you're going to be better off from that point than where you are right now. So don't hold off on it.

Don't keep putting it off. Start now. Take action. Write down what your goals are. Write down what you want out of this.

And then commit to it, and start moving, and start eating better. That's my advice on how to start. Let me get into a couple of other of these things here.

Okay.

So, Joey asked, How do I get a more toned abdomen using nutrition? That was a question. Now, here's the thing. Getting a toned abdomen, right? A lot of people think that they don't have a six pack.

No matter how much fat you have on your body, there's a six pack sitting under there. So there's two things to get a toned abdomen. Number one, you've got to lose the body fat in order to do it. Number two, you also have to do things to build up that area, to build up the muscles around that area so that they stick out. Because even if you don't think you have a six pack, do, maybe the muscles are just a little bit too rounded off enough to stand out, and maybe there's a little bit too much body fat around your midsection to see them.

So, it starts with two things. Yes, of course nutrition, eating better, eating the right amount of calories, making sure you're getting the proper profile of macronutrients, the right amount of protein, healthy fats, carbohydrates. Those are all gonna help you to do that. The primary thing is keeping your calories lower than the calories you're putting into your body lower than the amount of calories you're spending each day. So, you definitely want to make sure that you are not overeating.

The next thing is, kind of like what I said to the last gentleman, you gotta move more. So, that involves lifting weights, reason why I say lifting weights is because your abs are a muscle. Your abs are a muscle, they need to be built up. And the primary way of building up your abs is not with crunches, not with ab centric movements, it's with compound movements that are going to build up your core muscles. Things like front squats, where you have to do thoracic extension and your abdomen has to be there to support your spine.

Back squats, overhead presses, dead lifts. All of these things will help to build up those core muscles that are around you, are there to help to support your spine. Of course, doing high intensity interval training a couple of times a week can help to burn fat, but low intensity cardio, walking around, moving more, getting outside, doing those things. They can help you to burn that fat off. Now, back to nutrition for a second.

Number one, make sure you're only drinking water, Don't drink soft drinks. Don't drink sugary sodas. Don't drink Kool Aid. Don't drink Gatorade. Drink water.

Water is essential for you to burn fat, because unless your body's primed with water and you're properly hydrated, your body doesn't want to give up those fat cells. If your body thinks that you are in a state that you're starved of water, that you're dehydrated, it's not going to give up body fat because through our evolution, body fat kept us alive. So you need to be primed with water. Drink at least half your body weight in fluid ounces, plus an additional 10 ounces of water each day. Number two, when it comes to carbohydrate, yeah, I'm known as the keto guy, but I'm not anti carbohydrate.

But when you eat your carbs, make sure you've earned them. So if you've done a workout that day, eat a serving of carbs. If you haven't done your workout that day, keep your carbs a little bit lower. And that is a primary way that I've used to stay lean even when I'm trying to put on muscle mass. So definitely, definitely keep that in consideration.

And above all, make sure your calories are lower than the amount of calories you're putting out each day. There's a lot of information about workouts out there. There's a lot of information about training and getting lean. My YouTube channel, the Warrior Soul Agoge YouTube channel, check that out. But those are the primary things. Calories lower and move more.

Start with the basics here. If you're not on top of the basics, there's no reason to move on and say, Oh, I want to try ketosis, or I want to try this, or I want to try that. Start with the basics, and then from there, if you want to build up and you want to try keto, or if you want to try another kind of diet, or something like that, then try that. But don't just jump into something that's more complicated than it should be. Next question.

Neat Well, she said, two questions. Use keto to go from two forty to 190. Happy at 195, but I keep going down. How do I adjust my macros to stay in ketosis, but not drop weight? So, primary thing I would say here, as far as ketosis goes, most people are not going to be able to follow a very, very strict keto diet. Now, what do I mean by a strict keto diet? To really, truly get the nutritional ketosis, you are gonna have to be consuming a diet that's like 80% fats, 15% protein, and then 5% carbs. Most people can't do that for a long haul. What we teach in KetoCamp is that if you want to do this in a sustainable way, a way that you're going to be able to do for the rest of your life, that you're going be happy and healthy doing, you don't necessarily want to get the full blown nutritional ketosis.

You want to have a good balance between being able to burn fats for fuel and being able to use carbs when you need them, implementing carbs in your life in a smart manner. So, what happens first is, if you've already been through the keto adaptation phase, but for those of you who haven't, that's a period where you have to be a little bit more strict, right? So for two to three weeks, you need to follow a more strict ketogenic diet. After that, once you've gone through nutritional ketosis, and you taught your body to burn fat as fuel and to create ketones, What you can do is you can introduce a little bit more flexibility. So, one of the things that I do, particularly on days when I'm training very hard, is I'll do a pretty much ketogenic diet most of the day, a little bit higher protein than what you'd see a lot of people who are doing pure keto would be eating.

So I'd eat a ketogenic diet most of the day. I include a lot of vegetables, things like that, but mostly fats, a little bit of protein, and that sort of thing. Then the last meal of the day, once I've done my workout, once I've done jiu-jitsu, once I've gone through my workday, that last meal, I'll introduce some carbs and those carbs will be something like white rice or potatoes, a gluten free carb. And I'll usually include about 45 to 60 grams of carbohydrates at that meal. My last meal of the day is my biggest meal.

And literally, I'm what Kiefer calls back loading those carbs into my diet. Now, that does is it gives me a bit of metabolic flexibility. I'm spending most of the day just using fats as fuel. Then in order to implement a little bit more metabolic flexibility where I'm going to be able to utilize carbohydrates at certain points, I'll include some carbs later on in the day. And that's helped me out a lot.

When I was bodybuilding, that's how I went about getting really, really lean. So it's kind of like this hybridized approach. We go into that in detail in Warrior Soul Keto Camp, and it's a process that's worked, not only for me, but for a lot of my clients. The second thing Neet said was, He started lifting in seventh grade his whole life, been about power and size, and no longer wants to squat 600 pounds, just needs to be able to play on his kids. Tips on what type of workouts he should be doing.

So the biggest thing is a workout that you can sustain. So maybe you're not in a place where you want to spend two hours in the gym, or live behind a gym in an RV. I know Nate. He used to live in a gym, in an RV behind a gym. Maybe you're not in a place where you need to be doing that, right?

So with kids, with a wife, with a family that you really want to spend time with, the key is to make fitness something that you do anywhere. And so it's kind of like what I mentioned earlier. Number one, keep a kettlebell around the house. You can do squats with a kettlebell. You can do presses with a kettlebell.

You can do cardio with a kettlebell. That's something that you can do anything with. I keep a kettlebell, and I keep gymnastics rings. I can take gymnastics rings with me wherever I want to. They're easy to pack into my backpack.

You can do presses on those. You can do muscle ups. Can do pull ups. You can do all kinds of awesome things. Ab workouts with gymnastics rings.

Keep stuff like that around, right? And so that way you have no excuses. You can get outside for fifteen minutes. Excuse me. You can get outside for fifteen minutes, and you can do a quick workout and be right back inside with your family right then and there.

You can also, if you're watching TV with the family or something like that, you can get up, you can do push ups, maybe have your kids do push ups with you. Maybe you do a set of squats every time a commercial comes on. When you're at work, don't spend an hour, more than an hour sitting in your chair, get up every forty five minutes and do a set of squats or a set of push ups. Have certain rooms in your house where you put a pull up bar on the doorway. Whenever you walk through that doorway, you have to do a certain amount of pull ups.

These are just things that you could do to include fitness in your life all day long. It doesn't just have to be a two hour workout that you're doing, or a one hour workout. And science actually demonstrates that doing it in that way, where you're working out throughout the day in little bouts, actually demonstrates that it can be a lot more effective and a lot more healthy for you. So that's the route I would be going. Let me see what else is over here.

Interesting question from Raul. He said, I'm trying white sugar at the moment. 2,400 calories worth of white sugar each day. On top, I get protein shake, bran vitamins, and minerals. Salt and calcium.

Not dead yet. Going to try MCT oil next month instead of white sugar. What are your thoughts on hiring macros, mineral, vitamins, essential fatty acids, protein, and fibers from bran, but taking each one after the other, not once at all. Not all at once. Oh yeah, and the calorie stretching throughout the day, close to the required amount per hour.

Raul, I think you're making things way more complicated than they need to be, man. I mean like, first of all, like 24 out, 100 calories worth of sugar each day. That sounds like a real fad diet kind of thing. I mean, you taking the sugar from fruit? If you are, alright, cool.

If not, like, why are you doing 2,400 calories worth of sugar each day? I don't know anything about your goals or anything like that. Maybe you can send me a little bit more detail, and then I can get a little bit further into that. I'm just not sure how to answer that question, man.

See, got a couple other ones over here.

Yeah.

Not better. There's a few here.

Okay, so somebody asked, what are my thoughts on keto? And I talk a lot about the ketogenic diet. My thoughts are, it's a good tool. It's a tool. But it shouldn't be seen as anything more than a tool.

It's not a religion. It's not something that we should be dedicating our lives to, or putting everything, fighting people over, or anything like that. It's a tool. It's a tool that should be respected, and a tool that could be used more effectively at different times than others. That's the biggest thing we teach over at Warrior Soul Keto Camp is that it is in fact a tool and one you can leverage for yourself.

I think that there's a lot of people who could benefit by going toward a ketogenic diet. And that's because so many people have been addicted to sugar for so long. They've been eating far too many carbohydrates. But I also think that we're coming into a time and place where a lot of people are trying keto but are not very educated about it and they're talking about it on the internet. So we're getting a lot of really bad information out there.

So I would say if you want to try keto, explore it, make sure you're doing it the right way. We do a free keto course over at www.startketoright.com. And if you're interested in checking that out, we go through everything you need to know about ketosis, about maintaining ketosis, also getting into ketosis, how to train on the keto diet. We include cookbooks and grocery lists and things like that. So if you're interested in educating yourself on that, definitely check that out.

I'm quite fond of the ketogenic diet, I love it. I'm not so fond of a lot of the people out there talking about the ketogenic diet right now because it's, like I said, it's becoming more and more of a religion for a lot of people, and that's not what I'm about when it comes to nutrition, or health, or science. It's not about belief, it's about what works for people. You gotta treat everything like an n equals one experiment. Ernie said, You've said to know what really is going on with someone, they need to have their hormone levels checked.

What do I need to ask my doctor for to get this done? Ernie, good question. I think a lot of people, no matter where they are, no matter what profession they're in, but particularly people who've served in the US military, they need to get hormone panels done to see what their testosterone levels are at. I just wrote an article about this for testosterone nation, but when you get your testosterone levels checked, you want to get a full hormone panel. So you want to know what your estrogen levels are, what your estradiol levels are.

You want to know your total testosterone, you want to know your free testosterone. And the reason why you want to know all this stuff is because, let's say you have a normal total testosterone, but a low free testosterone. What that's telling you is that you have really high levels of sex hormone binding globulin. And you're probably doing some things with your diet to upgrade, increase uptake of sex hormone binding globulin. That includes not eating enough.

If you have high levels of estrogen and lower total testosterone, that probably means you are up regulating aromatase for some reason. That's an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen. So that probably means you're eating too many calories or you too much insulin. If you're low on total and free testosterone, that could mean cell failure. It could also mean potential traumatic brain injury.

And so there's a whole host of different things you have to pay attention to here. But yeah, you want to at least make sure you're taking a look at your total testosterone, your free testosterone. You want to make sure you're getting a look at your estrogen, at your cortisol. Cortisol's a big one. That's your stress hormone and growth hormone.

You want to make sure you're getting that checked. So yeah, total testosterone panel. Coming up toward the end of my time on here. Oh, and I'll put a link in the comments for anybody who wants to check that out too. Is there any others that came up here?

Think that's about it, and gents. Unless anybody else has any questions out there, let me know if you do.

Oh, wait. Here we go. There's a bunch more here.

So David asked, What about adequate protein intake? So adequate protein intake. There's been a big controversy on this, right? So a lot of people say you gotta stick with the RDAs, the point four to point eight grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Now that's really low.

And for most men, that's gonna be like 60 grams of protein per day. My feeling is that the RDA is not really applicable to people who are athletes or who are trying to include a lot more activity into their diets. We definitely don't need to be eating the one, two, to three grams of protein per pound of body weight, or the 300 grams of protein a day that a lot of bodybuilders are eating, but we need protein in our diet. So my general recommendation is between zero point eight and one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And a lot of science actually points to 1.1 to 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight.

Only if you're sticking within that 0.8 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight, you're in the ballpark there, and you're generally where you need to be. Best probiotic for gut. Well, number one, eating fermented foods. Number two, there's a supplement that I recommend to people with a compromised gut. It's called VSL#3.

It comes refrigerated. And that's so important when you are trying to get a probiotic. Because if it hasn't been refrigerated, if it hasn't been kept cold, all that bacteria is gonna die. It's not gonna do anything for you if it's dead. So definitely, VSL#3, if you have had a compromised gut, or if you've been on antibiotics and you're trying to recover from them for a short period of time, then it's a matter of including fermented foods and good prebiotic foods in your diet.

Lewis Mitten said, I have some thyroid problems. How can I lose weight and keep it off? I wanna lose 20 pounds because I'm about 20 pounds overweight. So, good question Lewis. Number one thing here, when it comes to thyroid issues, a big mistake people make is they dive into sub calorie diets, like really, really low calorie diets, or they dive into intermittent fasting.

I'll say this, if you have a thyroid problem, intermittent fasting or a really pure ketogenic diet probably isn't the way to go. You need to make sure that you're including some carbs in your diet.

The only thing I would make sure of if you have a thyroid problem is that you're getting a good source of selenium in your diet. You get that from Brazil nuts. You should also be doing everything that I mentioned earlier in this live to take care of your intestinal health. And then make sure you're staying hydrated, making sure that you're treating adequately, but not doing tons and tons of steady state cardio, where you're gonna be doing these death marches or things like that. That can really slow down your thyroid and can cause further damage.

So the big thing there, Louis, is yeah, make sure that you're eating a lot of good nutrient dense food, including a lot of good vegetables in your diet, a lot of mushrooms, a lot of good produce. Make sure you're getting some fruit, particularly dark berries in there. But also making sure that when you're doing your training, are, what's it called, hitting the weights, not doing a lot of long death march type cardio. And also make sure that you're getting adequate sleep, adequate rest, eight hours of sleep a night. Maybe include a meditation practice.

And I know that sounds hippy dippy, but demonstrated that mindfulness meditation can actually help to bring your body back and your balance with your brain. And that's what's going on there. A lot of times when you have thyroid problems, it's originating in your brain. So make sure you're taking care of that in handling stress and all those types of things. When you have a thyroid issue, it's a complicated issue.

It's not something you want to dive into a really low calorie diet on. It's not something you want that ketosis is going to solve. It's something that eating a good anti inflammatory diet that has good carbs, fats, proteins, and a sound exercise program is going to solve. Restaurants based on diets. How do you feel about that?

That's by Chit Meniere. Chit, I try to cook almost all the food that I eat. I think that's the top skill that anybody who wants to be fit needs to learn is how to cook. It's never been easier. We've got instant pots, we've got crock pots, we've got all these amazing things that help you set it, forget it, and just have some great food ready for you without paying much attention to it.

And so I'm a big believer in preparing our own food. I'm a big believer in sitting down for a good meal with your family. And I think that's the thing. Now, when you do eat at restaurants, the other good part about being in today's day and age is that there's a lot of restaurants out there that actually do serve healthy food. So you can get a salad at most restaurants.

You can get some healthy soups. If you're going out to a Vietnamese restaurant, a lot of people wouldn't think of pho as a health food, but pho is loaded with collagen. You get those tendons, those ligaments they put in there, the tripe that's loaded with nutrition, a lot of the beef bone broth is loaded with collagen because all that stuff has been cooking in there. So that's a great thing I like to eat out a lot of times if I'm going out to eat. And then even the noodles in there, they're gluten free rice brisen noodles.

So again, it's a great food. Bob salads, those are awesome. They've got all the vegetables, the fats, the proteins in them. But if you're gonna eat out, just try to stay away from the fast food and don't eat out often. Costs too much money as it is, and really, really try to take control over what you're gonna eat and prepare your own food.

I know there's people out there who who have to who feel like they have to eat out every day, but it really doesn't take much to take some of the leftovers you had from the night before for dinner, stick them into a Tupperware container, and take them with you to work. Takes like five, ten minutes to do that. That's my feeling on that. Strategies to deal with adrenal fatigue and adrenal exhaustion. Now, here's the thing about adrenal fatigue.

And I'll put a link over into the show notes about it. People don't actually know if adrenal fatigue is actually a real thing. Okay? Now, I see that with a little bit of apprehension myself. But the thing about there's this thing called the pregnenolone steal.

And people used to think that when you were going through a lot of stress and your, what's it called, secreting cortisol at a rate at such a high rate that it would steal the pregnenolone that was going be used to make your testosterone. That doesn't add up because pregnenolone's made intracellularly. So cells don't steal hormones from each other, and so the science doesn't add up on a pregnenolone steal. What we do know is that high levels of stress can lower testosterone and can cause a lot of problems. What are strategies to deal with potential adrenal fatigue?

Number one, get enough sleep. Like eight hours of sleep a day. Number two, if you're having problems sleeping, see to your mineral intake. And this is a big one. Make sure you're getting a good source of magnesium in your diet, whether you're supplementing with magnesium prior to bed, four hundred to five hundred milligrams, or if you're including Himalayan salt in your diet.

Himalayan salt is a great source of minerals. A lot of times people get that heart beating out of their chest kind of thing going on. And that's usually because they have a mineral deficiency. And that's really common if you're doing a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet or if you're intermittent fasting. When you lose glycogen, lose minerals or you lose water.

And with the water, you're actually dropping minerals too. So you could take a pinch of Himalayan pink salt, stick it into every liter of water you're drinking, that'll help you with your mineral intake. If you're really, really concerned about your adrenals, you could go with Chinese adaptogenic herbs. And they're doing a lot of science on these. Particularly ashwagandha has been probably one of the more studied ones.

And the reason why they're called adaptogens is because they start to bring your hormones back into balance. So taking ashwagandha every day, they've also done some anecdotal studies on it to suggest that it actually exceeds creatine in its ability to build muscle. I don't know how that works. It's, like I said, an anecdotal study, but there's a study out there on it. Ashwagandha is a great way of bringing those hormones back into balance.

Rhodiola is another one that you could do. So that's my take on the adrenal fatigue, and of course, don't drink 70 cups of coffee a day. Stay away from the energy drinks. All the crazy monster drinks that they got going on out there. James Williams said, You asked, so here it goes.

At 60, I consider myself pretty damn fit. However, I have the front belly fat around behind the obliques. Not bad, but I would like to reduce it. What nutritional adjustments do I need to make to further reduce, as I know that area is the hardest to lose from? So, number one, James.

At 60, the biggest thing that's going to prevent you from doing that is probably decreased testosterone production, and decreased insulin sensitivity. So one thing to realize is that as we get older, you don't need as many calories to go. So you're not going to need as many carbohydrates at your older age. You're not going to need even as much protein. I would mainly focus my nutrition program at your age around eating good, healthy, digestible vegetables.

And all those things I said at the beginning of this slide about cutting up your vegetables, also steaming them, make sure you're eating those. Getting some good sources of protein in order to raise your thermic effect of food and help you to burn that fat off. But also making sure that you're getting enough fat in your diet. And a lot of people don't understand this, but fats are precursors to testosterone reduction. So if we're eating a low fat diet our whole life, that eventually robs us of the raw materials we use to make testosterone and all its precursors.

So make sure you're getting good sources of fat in your diet. And then of course, doing things to really increase insulin sensitivity. So one simple thing you could do is, you can start to include a little bit of apple cider vinegar in a little bit of water every morning. That's a great way of helping out with nutrient partitioning. Fifteen minutes prior to meals, that's a good way of doing that.

And as far as things go, be patient. It's going to take a little bit longer the older you get. I'm turning 40 next year, and I definitely don't get lean as fast as I did back when I was 30, right? And it's just the way things go. So that's the biggest piece of advice I would say.

I would keep the carbs lower, keep the protein in there, just make sure you're getting good amount of healthy fats. Make sure you're getting your omega-3s in there to fight that inflammation. Gina Salvatore, she said, Good ways to regulate proper pH. The best way to regulate proper pH is going to be by eating a lot of vegetables. And eating a lot of green, leafy vegetables, and including a lot of fruits in your diet.

Those are going to help you to increase your pH. There's just stuff going on out there about alkaline water and high pH water. And here's the thing. You don't want to be drinking alkaline water because you want to, and if you listen to the beginning of this live, you want to keep your acid, your stomach a little bit acidic. The environment in there needs to be acidic, otherwise you're not going to be able to digest your nutrients properly.

So, if you're doing things to dilute the acidity of your stomach, you're also doing things that could dilute your ability to digest. And when you don't digest your food properly, that is kind of like the center of all evil. That's the center of all evil when it comes to bad things that can happen to the human body through our own doing. So it'll increase your levels of inflammation, it'll increase autoimmunity, it'll increase a whole lot of different issues. So make sure that you're eating a lot of green leafy vegetables.

If you want, you can take one of those green juice, Organifi Green Juice is a good one. That will help you to do that. But you want to make sure you're getting enough micronutrients to help you stay alkaline, rather than worrying about drinking any alkaline water or doing any tricks to become more alkaline and things like that. So I think that about covers it all. I've been on for forty five minutes.

Thank you to everybody for the questions. To everybody out there, a couple of different announcements before I come off. Number one, I just finished up our online membership community that's called the Warrior Soul Agoge. And what's gonna be in the Warrior Soul Agoge? Well, it's going to be a community for men.

We're going to be focusing on optimizing male hormones, optimizing male fitness, increasing strength, but also focusing on getting men to work on bigger goals. Getting men to work on things that are gonna help to improve their lives. And so what you'll find when you come on there, you'll find daily workouts. You'll also find a step by step program that I've created called the Warrior Soul Diet. Now this is kind of a hybridized program that I've created because the big things we're finding out there, people don't necessarily just want to go ketotic.

And I don't think they should. I think the goal for most people is to burn fat, to build muscle, to get stronger and to get better. It's not a matter of just increasing your blood ketones. So this is a hybridized type diet that I've put together that's meant to help men put on muscle and to burn fat. You're also going to find a lot of the preset programs that I've created over the years for some of my athletes and some of the people I've worked there together with.

We also have another private Facebook group that we're running out of there, and we're gonna start doing live calls. Now, calls differ from this Facebook live in that you're gonna be able to get onto a Zoom call with me. I'm gonna be able to see you. You're gonna be able to see me, and we can interact with each other and hold questions. And so the the price point for this is gonna be either $24.99 a month, or it's gonna be 105 a year.

Trying to keep that at a very low price point so as many people can join as possible and to help each other, to push each other along and things like that. If you're interested in that, you can check that out at h t t p s or h t I don't know what the h t t p part is, but it's membership.warriorsoulagoge.com. Membership.warriorsoulagoge.com. If you're interested in that, you guys can go check that out. Till then, man, I will be back here next week doing another Facebook Live.

And stay tuned for this week's version of the Warrior Soul podcast. This week's episode of the Warrior Soul podcast. I brought one of the masters of the trainer world out from underneath a rock. His name is Will Chung. He's the guy that guys like Ido Portal talk about.

He's a guy that guys like Pavel Tsatsouline talk about. But he doesn't have a website, and he makes it hard to get in touch with him for a reason. He's got a massive martial arts lineage. His grandfather was one of the big guys in Taekwondo, and he's coached a lot of pro athletes, a lot of really high end people. So I'll be releasing that episode later on today.

With that, guys, thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you all soon.