Top 20 Coach And Successful Exit Entrepreneur John Berardi On Why Your Health Is Your Wealth On How To Optimize It (#201)

[00:00:00] Jeffrey Feldberg: Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast where you learn how to extract your business and personal Deep Wealth.

I'm your host Jeffrey Feldberg.

This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth and the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience.

When it comes to your business deep wealth, your exit or liquidity event is the most important financial decision of your life.

But unfortunately, up to 90% of liquidity events fail. Think about all that time and your hard earned money wasted.

Of the quote unquote "successful" liquidity events, most business owners leave 50% to over 100% of the deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.

I should know. I said "no" to a seven-figure offer. And "yes" to mastering the art and the science of a liquidity event. Two years later, I said "yes" to a different buyer with a nine figure deal.

Are you thinking about an exit or liquidity event?

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At the end of this episode, take a moment and hear from business owners like you, who went through the Deep Wealth Experience.

John Berardi is a Canadian-American entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Precision Nutrition. The world's largest nutrition, coaching, education, and software company. He's also the founder of Changemaker Academy.

Devoted to helping a would be changemakers, turn their passion for health and fitness into a powerful purpose and a wildly successful career. And he hosted the popular Dr. John Berardi Show on Apple Podcasts. Over the last 15 years, he's advised Apple, Equinox, Nike, and title lists as well as the San Antonio Spurs, Carolina Panthers, US Open Champ, Sloane Stephens, and two-division UFC champ, George St. Pierre, he's also been named one of the top smartest coaches in the world, and 100 most influential people in health and fitness.

He currently lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife and four children. Although they tend to escape the cold Canadian winter is by spending January to April in warmer places.

Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast, and we have a friend of the Deep Wealth community back with us, and you heard the introduction and you may be wondering. Well, what the heck is one of the 20 smartest coaches on the health side and fitness side, and one of the hundred most influential people in health and fitness doing with us today?

Jeffrey, what does it have to do with a liquidity event? What's going on? And as you've begun to hear on the Deep Wealth Podcast, your health really is your Wealth. That's where we start. Everything else really falls out from there, and JB was very gracious and he shared with us in our first episode, we'll put that in the show notes of the absolute tremendous liquidity event that he had.

I mean, he had the liquidity events of liquidity events, and that was all business. Now we're gonna hear a different side JB, which is what makes him dynamic and special out there. And this is on the health side, speaking to us from a business owner who's going through what you're going through, but insights that you're probably not gonna hear from other people other than JB himself.

So, JB welcome once again back to the Deep Wealth Podcast and for the new listeners. You know what? There's always a story behind the story. JB, what's your story? What got you to where you are today?

[00:03:50] John Berardi: Thanks first of all for the nice introduction, Jeffrey, and thanks listeners for tuning in. I'll keep it brief. I tend to be wordy anyway. So that'll be my intention brevity. When it comes to sort of framing up the business stuff, you know, I was just late teen years and I'll tell the story prior to that in a minute.

I got really interested in health and fitness, nutrition in particular, but movement and exercise and it was one of those things where I just read everything I could about it. I'm a high school student. I'm actually not doing well in high school at the time. I've spent all my time reading about this stuff and wanting to change my body for the better.

And that sort of interest, that hobby became a passion, and then that passion became a vocation. And so,, you know, I went to school, I did a pre-med undergrad thinking maybe I'll become a doctor. And that probably has to do with my immigrant parents. And what immigrant parents want for their children usually become a lawyer or doctor, get a nice good job.

You can be a respectable member of this community. But as I was going through and applying for med schools, I realized what I really just want to do is what I started wanting to do. Exercise, nutrition, food, fitness, health. I do the master's in exercise science at Ph.D. in exercise and nutritional biochemistry.

And during that time I was invited to consult at some of the top sports teams in the world, some of the biggest health companies in the world. And at that time, I started realizing, one way to frame it is that I was an entrepreneur at heart, but another way to frame it is that I was unemployable and I bought to do my own thing then I started a company called Precision Nutrition with one business partner, Phil Caravaggio that went on to become the world's largest nutrition coaching, education, and software company. We sold it about five years ago for a couple hundred million dollars. And I sit here today, retired. What we did was we built the first sort of geographically independent, software-driven online coaching program for health and fitness. And nowadays there's many of them and you hear about them and you hear about their big valuations and whatever. But back then there was no way for a person in Indiana or Manitoba or somewhere in Europe to work with a top coach.

Geographically, independent way, and in a way that may even be superior to working with a local coach.

Based on certain ways of looking at it. For example, what the web can do is it can help you track data in a way that like pen and paper won't. We created a coaching platform that we could create thousands of data points on every client and we could aggregate that over time.

When I was with the company up until that point, we had coached a hundred thousand clients to millions of pounds of weight loss. More than all the seasons of the Biggest Loser combined and times 10, you know. And we were publishing research on it. And we could actually add to the body of knowledge, I mean, it was a wonderful time in my life and a wonderful company to be a part of cuz we felt like we're making real change. And it wasn't just nutrition, it was really all the pillars of living a healthful lifestyle. It's food, of course, it's movement, it's sleep and it's stress management.

Those were really the four pillars and that's the stuff I kind of want to talk about today. That's a bit of my entrepreneurial journey. But my health journey started off different than most people would expect meeting me today because I work out a lot, I look athletic, et cetera.

But I was born super preemie. I was born really premature. I spent quite a lot of time in the hospital and growing up I had asthma, allergies. And my mom, probably rightfully didn't let me go outside very much and play sports. I was skinny and scrawny and had a lot of food intolerances and things like that.

So I was not healthy. I wasn't like a thin lean kid. I was a thin, sickly-looking kid, and that was what attracted me in the first place. I was reading this stuff and they're like, you can, you know, it was sort of like self-help on the health side. You can fix your life if you ate less of these foods and more of these foods, you would be able to manage your allergies and maybe your asthma and all these other things.

And as I did it, it worked. And the other on the flip side was I wanted to be attractive to women and so, I was like, hey, you could build muscles by lifting these weights, and if you eat these foods, then you won't be needing your puffer every time you go to the gym. And it was really like a self-help project that brought me to this deep interest in health and fitness.

Fix myself and then wow, maybe I could help others. That's really, the nickel tour of my health and fitness journey and my entrepreneurial journey.

[00:08:28] Jeffrey Feldberg: And for our listeners, JB tends to be modest and, you know, to fill in some of the blanks here, in addition to creating precision nutrition, which really knocked it outta the park on the health side. And yes, some terrific things they did on the back end from a technology perspective. But JB you won the US National Junior Body Building title, and as you said, you became athletic and you went from this scrawny kid to a muscular fellow so, you're speaking from experience, you're speaking from the trenches, and now you're at a different chapter in your life.

Perhaps you're doing different things, but maybe we can start with this. I'm a business owner. You know, I hear so, many messages now with social media and just the web in general and the internet of do this and don't do that, and then I hear conflicting information. Let's talk about what we do know. What we do know, the statistics really aren't great. Most people are not healthy, 88% so we can round it up. Nine out of 10 people have some kind of metabolic condition either right now or they're on that train and they don't even realize it somehow, at least in North America, we've missed the boat. Somehow we've gone down the wrong path and for a business owner who's saying, Look, life is complicated enough for me.

I've got stress, I've got the business. I don't have a lot of time. I go for my yearly checkup at the doctor and I get my blood taken and they put me in all these kinds of meds and the doctor's happy with me. What could possibly be wrong? And JB why don't we dispel that myth from your perspective of what is wrong with that picture and where do we start getting some awareness and what do we start looking for?

[00:10:08] John Berardi: The first thing I think about is, I'll share a strange story to ease our way into it. But as you mentioned, you know, I have gone into bodybuilding at one point in my life, and for those really unfamiliar with what that means, yes, it means getting lean and going on stage in a tiny little posing trunk and showing your tanned body.

But it also means typically you spend a portion of the year eating lots of food, training really hard to gain as much muscle as possible. And then for about 16 weeks, so, four months third of the year, you follow a very unhealthy, extreme kind of dieting way of eating where you cut out large swatches of the food landscape and you only eat a few things and you're always in a deprived sort of state, and we call it a negative energy balance, right? You're eating less than you're burning. And through that experience of having to eat so little and work out hard for four straight months without deviation, you learn things about yourself and you build discipline and all that.

But you also learn about how integral, how interrelated your food intake and your mental well-being, and your capacity to work outside of the gym, like as if thinking cerebral individuals are, they're connected. So, nowadays, if I meet people who describe certain symptoms, mental emotional symptoms I can almost predict perfectly how their diet looks because I know that while you feel like it's a mental, emotional problem when you are underfed, which means you're eating fewer calories than you need when you are undernourished so, you're getting too few vitamins, minerals, too little protein, too little water.

This isn't just, my body looks bad, this is my brain functions at a very suboptimal level. I'll give an example of this. For example, I'm married and my wife and I have a great relationship, and sometimes, oddly enough, we don't get along right.

And the first thing I think about, if I feel like she's being overly emotional, it's not what's wrong with her head, it's is anything going on with her food, and people don't always make this connection, but I know so well because I lived it during those four months of bodybuilding, dieting, and preparation. I was not my best self. I was moody and hangry but not just hangry at before a meal. Imagine hangry every minute of the waking day. And the other thing is when you are in a low energy state like that, you don't sleep as much.

You average about five hours of sleep at night. And we know how important sleep is, right? And this is, again, tied to evolutionary physiology. You can take rodents so let's say mice or rats, and you can put them on an energy-restricted diet just like a bodybuilder might be. And you put them in their cage and you put a running wheel in their cage.

And what they will do is run all night. Wait, what's happening there? They're not eating enough food, but they will run all night. They call it food-seeking behavior. Instinctively evolutionarily wired, these rats can't go run in the wild and look for food they will run on a treadmill all night long.

They will lose tons of weight to get unhealthy. It won't go well for them. This is what happens when you're dieting or underfed. You will sleep less because your body will release hormones like epinephrine and or epinephrine, and you'll feel anxious and energetic and you'll feel like you need to do something.

Now, unlike the rat, you probably won't run on a treadmill, but you won't sleep. Your mind will race. You'll find things to do to occupy your time. All this to say is how we're eating is so, intimately connected with how we're thinking and how well we sleep, and our motivation to do movement and our ability to handle stress.

And I know that not because of some research studies, although research studies validate all of this, it's because I lived a very peculiar lifestyle, where I intentionally restricted. And nourishment nutrients for four months out of every year, sometimes eight months, cuz you might do two competitions.

And you see the very profound effects on the way you feel, the way you think, the way you interact with other human beings, the way you sleep. When we talk about this stuff, I mean, sure if having a better body or maybe less medication or more time with your children or grandchildren is a motivator to you, that is wonderful.

I think we seize on that as well. But I think the core motivation realization has to be that if we don't take care of some of these aspects of our health, they will affect our ability to entrepreneurs, to lead others to show up in the world in the way that we hope to, and that no matter how much personal development effort we put in I often think that entrepreneurship, if done well, is the perfect crucible for personal development.

But no matter how much work, no matter how big our desire to improve, if our brains don't work right, because we're not feeding them correctly, if we're not moving well in our days doing physical activity, then those personal development efforts won't be as effective as we hope.

[00:15:50] Jeffrey Feldberg: So, really what I'm hearing you say JB and for our listeners, is that food is in many ways like the oil for your car. And if your car doesn't have oil, then at one point it's gonna stop working properly and it even stopped moving. And you've got a real big issue there. I would imagine JB, you had a restricted caloric diet or intake at one point, and that had one effect on you.

But I would also imagine that food was a means to an end when you were competing. And perhaps were there some foods that you were having that also impacted you psychologically and physically, that in normal circumstances you wouldn't eat it, but you're having that to build muscle or lose muscle and that food also had some kind of negative impact on you.

[00:16:35] John Berardi: I think during a diet for a bodybuilding contest, you're basically eating greens and chicken, you know what I mean? But what ends up happening is you end up when you're not dieting eating everything, and that period of discipline or restriction it builds a particular kind of muscle, a discipline muscle, right?

But no one can do it forever. No one can do it indefinitely. And so most competitors would after their diet gain 20 pounds in two weeks because all the foods that were off limits would now come in. They were on them. And the other thing is, none of it would be pleasurable because you spend four months eating only certain foods and you end up believing on some subconscious level that all the other foods are bad.

That's the only way you can get through it. Apples not good for me. They're not gonna help me get lean enough for my upcoming contest. You're going to eat all these foods. Not just apples, it's gonna be cheesecake and other things.

but you're not gonna enjoy a minute of it because you're gonna have this guilt, either conscious or subconscious about it.

Now to your question, in terms of food selections, I don't worry about those much. I think for most people getting into a good caloric balance, and that doesn't mean counting calories. And we can talk about the mechanics of this and the strategies of this in just a minute. But the first thing that we did with all those 100,000 people we coached was we just had them starting to pay attention to their food and our coaching program was built, it was a curriculum so, every two weeks there was a new practice that people had to work on for two weeks, and every day they got a lesson, they got an assignment to do that would help deepen the practice.

And people would be uncomfortable because for the first month of working with us, we never touched their food choices.

The first two practices and I'm not saying anyone listening has to do these but the ones we thought built the best foundation were number one, slowed down your eating.

And that was the first two weeks. And the second two weeks was eat to 80% full.

Again, it seems so simple and basic, but there's skill that needs to be built into, slowing down your eating, eating to 80% full. Like you have to tune into body signals, and this is what we found, most people don't know their body signals very well.

And so you spend this month paying attention to your eating in a very specific way. Paying attention to how your body responds to foods. And most people start a weight loss process, a health-producing process, by simply doing that, tuning in, paying attention to what you're eating. And then we build from there.

Then we might start looking at things like how much protein you're taking in, how much fruits and vegetables, what's your carbohydrate intake. Do you have a good balance of carbohydrates or is it mostly processed in sugary? How is your fats? So, we start building that, of course, over time, but you can't do any of that.

Without the fundamental ability to pay attention, slow down, listen to your body cues, et cetera. And I coach a lot of youth sports. Now that's where my brain goes for a lot of analogies. But you know, you think about, let's say I coach two football teams. If the kids don't know how to run, throw a ball or catch a ball, then we need to learn that first before we start drawing up elaborate place.

You have to do the basics before you can do the other stuff. There's no way to win unless you learn how to catch a ball in football or throw a ball. Same here. If you can't pay attention to fullness, hunger, if you can't slow down your eating and not do it mindlessly, then you can't do the rest.

Because it doesn't matter how much protein you have to eat. If you are eating mindlessly standing over the sink, you can't regulate that. All this to say, we really prioritize when it comes to nutrition, paying attention first, and then we start thinking about the balance of proteins, carbs, fats, et cetera.

All of this really fits together in a particular way for me. If someone wants to avoid what I talked about earlier, this situation where you're not paying much attention to your health and it affects your ability to lead, to connect, to do personal development, to have enough energy to work the number of hours you need to work, to have enough energy when you're done work, to spend quality time with the people, be met the most to you.

If you don't have any of that then here's where we go. We think about those four things. We need to regulate your sleep. We need to get you sleeping enough hours and high-quality sleep. The next thing we need to do is think about your stress management. How do you mentally, emotionally deal with the difficult moments in your life?

The third thing is we think about your food, and then the fourth thing is we think about how you move. And movements, there's a spectrum of that too, for someone who hasn't moved regularly or recently or ever, we think about movement. This is going for walks and stuff like that, and after that you can think about play, where you engage in some kind of sport, and then we think about after that training, and then we think about after that, competing so I've been at the trade to compete since I was a teenager. I've been doing that for 30 years. I continue to compete.

But that's not necessarily the exemplar or what everyone should be going for. We have to do a honest appraisal. Where are you today? Are you not moving? If so, then movement is what we need to work on.

If you're moving and you want more, then we go play.

[00:21:59] Jeffrey Feldberg: What's interesting here, if we just pause here for a moment, you've shared, I'm gonna call it six things, and really, I'm gonna call it timeless wisdom because we've heard this before, perhaps from our parents, or not from our parents, from our grandparents and so, on. And really the quick recap here.

Hey, number one, slow down your eating. Number two, eat until you're 80% full. And with those two things, like you said, you're not even talking about eat this, but don't eat that. It's just whatever you're eating, slow it down and eat until 80% full. And then you round that out with, let's make sure you get enough sleep.

And we also wanna make sure for stressful kinds of things, that you have some kind of strategy in place to deal with your stress. Food then becomes a part of that. And then movement. I mean, at the surface, it's not complicated when you look at it from that perspective. And it's providing a framework that many, many things could fit into that.

Let me ask you this. People who are listening are saying, Okay, those six things, Yeah, I could see myself doing that. But let's go to the fifth item number, which is food. JB, where do I begin? Because now with social media, there are so many different camps out there, and they say the opposite things.

You'll hear in one camp, hey, you know what? Carbs are your enemy. Just eat fat in the keto side of things. Or, hey, you know it's okay to have fat, but not too much. So, have low carb. Or you know what? Low carb isn't enough. You're not gonna be able to function on that. So, have a little bit more than low carb.

And then we can keep on going with, you know what, no animal proteins, it's all gonna be vegan, and the list just goes on and on, and they're all that opposite end saying different things, and it leaves us with our head spinning. And then you have other people that say, You know what? No one particular regime or food to eat is a one size fits all.

Literally, we all have different systems that respond in different ways, and you really have to find what's gonna work best for you, where would someone start with of, Okay, I'm gonna try this kind of eating style. And the last thing I'll add to this very complex narrative is even back from when you first started bodybuilding, I would imagine the landscape has changed because a lot of the processed foods now have all these chemicals in there that are kind of like these hidden agents within the food that we keep on eating and we don't feel hungry.

But the food just isn't the same food that it was, and it's not better. It's worse. So, you know, from an outsider looking in is, Oh my goodness, where do I even begin with this? I wanna be healthy, but I don't know where to start.

I can do those six things, but food's a big part of that. What does that look like for me?

[00:24:38] John Berardi: Yeah. And one of the things that Precision Nutrition got very well known for was being nutritionally agnostic. And I think everyone ought to be nutritionally agnostic. All the things you talked about can work for certain people in certain context, but how do you know if you're that person in that context? Without a coach, you can't possibly know without an excellent coach, you can't possibly know because there are a lot of coaches out there, a lot, and the good ones are of course, few as in any other field, there's gonna be a bell distribution of some coaches are terrible and will hurt you.

The meaty part of the bell will be coaches who have the best intentions and but don't know enough. They can't troubleshoot or they just fit everyone into a box. And then the people who fit into that box do great, and everyone else falls by the wayside. And then there's really excellent coaches at the very thinnest part of the bell curve who can actually help different people under different circumstances and contexts within different stages of their lives.

if coaching is what you seek and I think that would help a lot of people. Then that's who you're looking for. And you can't just find the first one or go off of one word of mouth. You actually have to do due diligence like you would in your business and figure out who's good at this.

But at Precision Nutrition, we were agnostic. So, we said, You can do it keto if you want, or you can do it low carb if you want, or you can do it high carb if you want, or you can avoid this or not that. But none of that's necessary.

They are all options. And the people who strongly and vehemently argue for a particular way of eating have either a financial incentive to do that, or they have no awareness of other approaches of the rest of the world.

I mean, if you think about, just this simple example inundated with low-carb messages in North America, you might believe that carbs are really terrible for health and body composition. Go to China once. You know what I mean? The average person in China eats a hundred kilograms of rice a year. Okay? If carbs were that bad as the messages we hear in North America, then the obesity and diabetes epidemic in China would be of epic proportion.

[00:26:59] Jeffrey Feldberg: Sure.

[00:26:59] John Berardi: And it's not, they're better than we are. And the only reason that health in China is declining over the last decade or so, is because we're sending our food chains over to them. Anyone who proclaims carbs are not good for you, hasn't ever left Iowa or wherever they live, I mean, they haven't even read about, not Iowa, so, really, we need a more robust set of thinkers to listen to. People who can do a comparative analysis of cultures in their mind.

You don't have to do it yourself, but you have to listen to those people who seem to have some sense and perspective, a broader perspective. Now let's talk about, okay so that's, sort of like choose your hero.

And I say heroes very deliberately cuz it seems to be what happens nowadays. We find health heroes to follow.

We have to choose our heroes more carefully. The other thing then is what do we do? So, the first thing we do is we look at protein intake. Let's just bring it straight home. Now I start there because protein's probably the most important nutrient to get right for health, fitness, and body composition at every level of movement.

From movement to play, to train, to compete. And almost no one takes issue with protein too. It's safe to start there. The high-carb people and the low-carb people all believe you need some protein. We can start there, right? Generally, if you're doing the movement stuff right, And I often think movement has to come first because the one thing is in sedentary individuals, their ability to pay attention to their hunger and appetite cues is lower. And the research bears this out. So, without some kind of movement.

And this doesn't mean you have to be a hardcore exerciser. It might mean three or four walks a week, around your neighborhood. The folks who do that tend to be able to regulate their energy balance more naturally. And this is the dream, having to calculate calories. Maybe you do that for a teeny tiny portion of your life.

You can figure out how much is in it, that size of a chicken or whatever, but having to calculate your calories and weigh your food and all of that, I mean, that's nightmarish. I can't think of a worse way to spend part of my life having the ability to just intuitively understand that I'm hungry now.

I'm not hungry now. I should eat about this much. I should stop now. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's a hardwired biological exercise. That system doesn't work if you don't move. It simply doesn't. It gets all haywire, and we see that in obesity and sedentary lifestyles. We don't match our intake to our expenditure.

When we don't move, we overeat.

[00:29:23] Jeffrey Feldberg: JBl, I'll just jump in here quickly because for our listeners, I wanna make sure that you're hearing what JB is saying. He's not saying, hey, you need to become a bodybuilder like me and be in the gym like I was at one point in my life for hours and hours at a time. JB said, Hey, take some walks, maybe a few times a week, and if we build off of that, JB I'll give you a data point of one.

Take this for what it is, and I'll give you some research that I've done and what's out there. And of course, where our listeners always do your own research. And this is not intended to be medical advice for you. It's simply us sharing your own experiences. So, I wear a continuous glucose monitor, a CGM. JB I've seen when I have a meal. And if I'm sedentary after the meal, if I don't walk, my glucose levels tend to rise, and nothing wrong with glucose levels rising, that's normal.

The body's responding. But right after the meal, if I go for a leisurely stroll, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, there's a profound impact in what's going on. And other studies have said, Hey, when you first wake up, if you can do 10 minutes, 15 minutes, even 20 minutes of some kind of movement, even walking, it has 140 to 160 different physiological changes in your body that are good for you.

Then if you don't do any movement at all when you first get up,

[00:30:42] John Berardi: Yeah. This is where I think about Okay, cool. When, I, in my field terms like biohacking and stuff like that are often mocked because they essentially mean give me a magic trick that allows Me to circumvent. The requirement to build fundamental skills. That's what hack means in our world, but I'll give you like the most bio-slash life hacky thing I can think of on this front. And it's not very impressive, I'll warn you, but you're an entrepreneur, I presume you're in a lot of meetings, just do walking meetings. And I don't mean you have to get together with the people and walk, I mean, on the phone, just put in your earbuds and go for a walk while you take meetings. I don't like low-intensity activity. I'm a master's level sprinter track and field sprinter now. I like really short, fast bouts of activity. And I like weight training. I don't like going for walks. How I do them is I take our dog out twice a day for 15, 20 minutes and then I schedule my catch ups with friends and any business meetings a walking catch-up or a walking meeting.

And that's why I tell my friends, I'm taking you on a walk with me today. And I can easily get my 10,000 steps or whatever the goal metric is a day by simply doing walking. And the other thing I would've been doing anyway.

[00:32:09] Jeffrey Feldberg: You're blending it together. You're just doing both at the same time and it works.

[00:32:13] John Berardi: I have free time in my life now. I didn't when I was running my business and the idea of having to add an extra 30 minutes of something in my day was untenable. It was already too far.

But it was like, what could I do while walking, I'm basically accomplishing the same things in the day. I'm not adding anything.

I'm just stacking. And this is a, you know, for people who have read James Clear's book and BJ Fogg's book, the idea of habit stacking is really interesting how you can put these two things together at a particular time where you trigger it in a certain way and then all of a sudden it just happens.

You just do it. I don't actually think that I'm exercising when I'm walking my dog or going on a long walk with a friend and they're in my ears, but I am. I think that's really important. Your life's busy. Yes, I get it. Then don't do it on top of your life. Do some of your life while you're also walking.

[00:33:07] Jeffrey Feldberg: And JB, I like that for the listeners though, who are saying, You know what, JB good for you that you can do that and that you can stack or blend the walking with other business activities and you're doing both at the same time. But what about me as an example? They're saying, I might be in a cold climate and it rains all the time, or it's snowing, or it's really cold, or, you know what, I'm expected to be at my desk unless it's a break or on the lunch hour.

I'm not really having that flexibility. I don't have the flexibility to be able to leave any smart strategies for those kinds of situations.

[00:33:42] John Berardi: Yeah. I mean, number one, get better clothes because you can walk in the rain, you can walk in the snow with the right attire.

[00:33:48] Jeffrey Feldberg: Drop the excuses. Make it happen. Lose the excuse.

[00:33:51] John Berardi: Yeah, and I start there because the truth is there's also some magic to being in outside in nature. And if you can walk near somewhere beautiful, that actually helps with the stress management piece.

But functionally speaking, you can't get outside. Let's say there's a real limitation, either real or perceived. Almost everyone at Precision Nutrition had one of those little treadmill desks, it's just a treadmill platform, it didn't have all the other stuff and you just stick it under your desk and you walk while you work.

The PM we bought these for our staff that sit stand desk and a treadmill that goes under it. And we gave them that option. That's another solution. A friend of mine doesn't like to walk like that. He got a Peloton bike. And he set up a little desk that sits up over it and he works there.

He's also a big football fan. I've been to his house and we've hung out and watched a day of football together. And I'm on the couch and he's on the bike the whole day, like six hours just watching football, biking. He'll get up and get a snack. He watches a football game just like anyone else would, but he's on the bike pedaling at a low intensity the whole time.

And there's all these little ways to just make it happen, I mean, if we wanna find a hundred excuses, we can. I understand some things are reality's, not excuses. And then we just have to be creative. If you're an entrepreneur, the requirement to be creative is part of every minute of every one of your days. Use those skills to solve this problem as well.

And again, we're not asking for Hercule, an effort here. This is, can you do two 15 minutes or one 30 minute, or, Hey, you're going for an extra long meeting, you know, an hour and a half meeting. What if you walk during that? That would be like bonus for the week.

[00:35:27] Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely. Or I suppose if you're in an office, and yes, these days some people are still in offices despite the pandemic. Maybe you're in a corporation and they have a big workflow kind of space. You can walk around perhaps in there while you're having the meeting or you're talking.

But let's, revisit something because you're keeping it really simple and attainable for people. And you started to go down the path JB of the macros, and you started with protein and you said, Okay let's start with protein so.

[00:35:56] John Berardi: Yeah. And I did that little divergence because these things can't be thought of separately. If you're not moving, you can go hard on keto okay? But it's gonna be very difficult to sustain. And I don't just mean to pick on keto here, I mean any way of restricted eating. It's gonna be very difficult to sustain and the outcomes won't be as positive as you want.

For the main reason of movement helps regulate appetite. Movement also helps regulate sleep and stress management. So, It's so fundamental there too. But the second thing that helps regulate appetite is eating sufficient protein, and see a lot of the story around the macronutrients so a lot of the argument people will build very sciencey sounding foundations around these things.

But ultimately what you have to do is find a way to move and eat and live your day when you're not so hungry that you eat way more than you need. That's really the secret here. The reason why some people are high on a low carb diet is because, If they try this approach, they personally may accidentally increase their protein in fat, and for their physiology that may suppress their appetite.

They don't eat more than they burn in a day. Really, it didn't have anything to do with the carbs. It had to do with the satiating effects of the protein in the fat. But we can get that without having to give up bread for the rest of our lives, That's why we start with protein. And so,, if we're moving, like we said, we generally shoot for about a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Now I don't need you to do math to do that with a real simple hack here is if you look at your hand and you look at the palm, a portion of protein, about the size and thickness of your palm, that could be a piece of chicken or a piece of fish or a piece of steak or a lean burger or whatever pork.

That portion is, that's about 30 grams of protein. For men, if you have three meals a day and you eat, two palms of protein with each meal, that's good. You're done. You don't have to calculate anything. You will be very sufficient on protein. And generally, for women, it's about a palm, And we can adjust that for larger women or smaller men or whatever. But it's a really good general way of thinking about it. Am I getting enough protein? Think about your breakfast. Did you have the equivalent about one to two palms, thickness, and diameter of protein? If not, and you didn't get enough?

That's gonna be a chronic problem if you don't.

[00:38:26] Jeffrey Feldberg: And JB, I suppose with that, we're going to put the North American notion of breakfast off to the side. For some people, it may be different, or really you can do that of having things that you would normally have for lunch or dinner. Yes. When it comes to protein, it's okay to have that for your first meal of the day as well.

Would I be on base with that?

[00:38:48] John Berardi: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Fundamentally. But you don't even have to. I mean, that's what we do in our house. Our children eat what they eat for lunch and dinner for breakfast every day. They always have. They don't know any better. One of our children a couple years back was asked we were in the US cuz we spent a portion of the year in the US by one of his teachers.

Hey, I heard in Canada they put the milk in the bowl first and then the cereal. But here we put the cereal in the bowl and then the milk. Which way do you do it? And he goes, What's cereal?

[00:39:19] Jeffrey Feldberg: Good answer.

[00:39:20] John Berardi: And we're not super restrictive and they enjoy a wide variety of foods, but we just never found, like cereal is an adequate breakfast and we have time to prepare meals in the morning, sometimes we'll have eggs and lean bacon and lean sausages and things like that. And other times they'll have a hamburger, a porkchop or meatballs or whatever, this is all stuff on the menu so, to speak in terms of, choosing a variety of things and not doing the traditional breakfast. But I mean, I don't know, what's the traditional breakfast? It's varies all over the world. And also in America, it could be cereal with milk, which is a terrible choice in general on its own.

It could be muesli and oats with protein powder in it, right? I mean, this is a very common go-to breakfast among health and fitness people. You put a scoop or two of whey protein and one scoop of whey protein would be the equivalent of the palm thing. Two would be two palms, right? It's about 20 to 25 grams of protein per scoop.

And then you put that in your steel cut oats or your muesli and you put fresh fruit in there and now all of a sudden we've tackled your protein requirements. With a very basic breakfast, a very, whatever you wanna call it, standard North American breakfast. The other reason I hesitate to be real prescriptive about specific foods is because your reaction and enjoyment of foods is so individual.

 I think there was a study out of Tel Aviv a few years back, and you're talking about the continuous glucose monitor reminded me of it. And what they did was they did continuous glucose monitoring on a few hundred patients slash participants in this study. And they gave them a wide variety of foods and they measured their glucose for a nice time course after. And what they found was that the glycemic index for those listing is a measure of how quickly carbohydrates that you eat turn into blood sugar and how big that spike goes and how long it lasts. And what they found was that in certain individuals, the very high glycemic foods, the ones that should have spiked their glucose and made them all pre-diabetic, did none of that. And in others it did. And in what they found was that and they don't have a good explanation for why, but that what we all know, we're all unique individuals. For one person ice cream would spike their glucose just like having a big sugary soda would. And in another person, ice cream would give them the glucose curve of a piece of chicken and whole wheat bread and broccoli and so, it was such an interesting, scientifically clear way of knowing what we already know, that not everyone responds to foods in the same way. Even if you wanted to say, These foods are bad, these foods are good. It doesn't pan out that way in terms of our physiological response to it. And then of course, telling people they can't eat certain foods that bring them joy or comfort or whatever feels absolutely absurd to me.

If specific food brings you a lot of joy and comfort, great. Let's just eat a moderate amount of it. That's impossible to do. If we don't exercise and if we don't have enough protein and vegetables and fruits throughout the day, it's impossible because our appetite is unregulated. So, we'll just eat too much.

[00:42:27] Jeffrey Feldberg: Now, with what you're saying, let me ask you this before we leave the protein side, and let's not go down the rabbit hole, as you said, a different kind of eating regime and eat this and don't that and being agnostic. I would imagine JB for people listening who don't have animal protein, while topic of protein, they could just as easily have plant protein instead of a scoop of whey protein.

It can be a scoop of or two of plant protein, and they're to get to that optimal mix of protein.

[00:42:58] John Berardi: Absolutely. That's right. And it's not as easy, but it's easier than it ever has been. Today, the plant let's say the supplemental proteins you can get, the protein powder you can get that are plant-based nowadays have a wide variety of plants, and they'll often add the limiting amino acid in it so you get a full spectrum of amino acids, which is really important. And then there's more food selections and they're available at every grocery store. You can eat soy-based things like tofu and you know, other things like that or not, and you can do combinations with beans and stuff.

The only way it gets trickier is that to get adequate protein from just food sources, you have to go through a lot of carbs. And it's not to say that carbs are bad, but it's just that the beans, the foods that will allow you to get adequate protein usually have more carbs. And now all of a sudden, if you add carbs on top of that, now your calorie count is gonna get high.

It's often difficult, more difficult, but with careful planning. And if you've never done it before, with a little bit of coaching at the beginning is very, very doable. Absolutely. If you abstain from eating any animal foods, you can do this. You know, it's not a problem. We've coached hundreds, thousands of people who are doing plant-based eating very successfully to lose weight, to improve their energy, to get their blood sugars in, check, all of that it's all very possible. But I'm not gonna say it's equally easy, cuz it's simply not. It's more challenging. You have to be more thoughtful, more careful, and more preparatory if you're gonna have a plant-based diet under any circumstances.

And certainly, if you're trying to get adequate protein.

[00:44:37] Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely. And again, we're not gonna go down that rabbit hole as tempting as it may be. There's all different kinds of regimes that tell us different things. JB let's do this. Let's round out the macronutrient so,. you started with protein and you made it very simple. Hey, if female, it's about a fistful or a palmful of protein.

And if you're a male, depending on how large you are as a male, might be two, possibly one palm fulls of protein from the protein. And by the way, putting people who don't eat animal protein aside, we all have this experience. I don't think you can ever overindulge yourself on protein because it's so satiating.

Try having a 30 ounce steak as an example. You're probably not gonna get through that. At least most people won't because it's satiating on that side.

[00:45:22] John Berardi: Yeah. As you say, it's functionally possible to eat too many protein calories in a day for sure. And in a meal but it's harder, it's much easier to have humongous neverending bowl of pasta than it is to have a never ending bowl of chicken breast.

 You're done after a while, it's either satiating. IV it sends signals from your gut to your brain to say, hey, we should stop eating now. Or you're just sick of the texture and taste. you know what I mean, so,, either way, it gets you done, and, but like you said, moving on, the next thing we'd look at is fruits and vegetables.

 This is where most people are often woefully deficient. The baseline recommendation is five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Only 10% of the North American population actually does that. Look at your 10 best friends. Only one of you is getting it done. And that's the next thing we work on.

How do we look at how much, whatever? We looked at the palm for protein. Now we look at your fist for fruits and vegetables we say same thing for women. It's maybe one fistful size of vegetables or fruits or some combination of them. And for men it's two you can see not only are we talking about how to build a diet, but how to build a plate.

So, You're like, Hey, here's, imagine a plate. You've got two palm portion or one palm portion of protein. Now you've got your two or your one of fruits and vegetables. And here we're not gonna be particular about organic or non-organic or local or whatever. Those are opportunities for you later once you've met your five servings a day, you know, then we could talk about pesticides and all the other stuff. I mean, if you are not meeting your protein and your fruits and vegetable requirements, then you don't have to worry about pesticides at all. You're not eating much.

[00:46:59] Jeffrey Feldberg: I see where this is going.

[00:47:00] John Berardi: You know what I mean?

[00:47:01] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah.

[00:47:02] John Berardi: So, we start increasing our intake and now we're getting vital minerals and phytonutrients and vitamins and all things we already know are in there.

And again, if you're eating three times a day, this is what you're going for. Two or one fist full of fruits and vegetables. And let's just start out where we should start out. Which ones do you like? Eat the ones that you like. Do you only like apples for fruits? Fine. Have apples, every meal doesn't matter.

As we get a little bit more advanced, if you wanna call it that, we start looking at the colors and say, Oh, we should look for a variety of colors in those fist-size portions with each meal. Why colors? Well, colors are actually like a little quick. They're like a quick rubric for what phytonutrients are in each one. You get different phytonutrients from oranges than you do from yellows than you do from greens than you do from purples. So, that's why we're just like, hey, let's make this colorful. Not just because it's aesthetic, but because there are fundamental nutrients that come with each color. That's the next thing and we're building a diet. Notice we haven't said don't eat anything yet. We said what to eat.

It's protein. It's fruits and vegetables. Ask yourself breakfast. How many fruits and vegetables did I have for breakfast? Did I have any? Did I have two fistfuls?

If not, how can I rethink my breakfast to include that? And lunch, lunch is another one that's historically kind of bad. If you're grabbing sandwiches and things like that. Usually, people get 'em at dinner, right? But it's really hard to get five to seven servings, which should be 10 to 14 fist fulls of vegetables in one meal.

It's just that there's not enough space.

[00:48:43] Jeffrey Feldberg: And JB let me ask you about that when we're talking about fistfuls of fruits and vegetables, is there a preference towards, Hey, you know what? Lean it more towards the vegetables than the fruits so as an example, if I said, You know what, I really like grapes, grapes are high in natural sugars and I'm gonna lean it more towards grapes than say broccoli or cauliflower or types of vegetables.

Is there some kind of guidance that you can give us on that or you're not making any differentiations at this point?

[00:49:15] John Berardi: I think probably the platonic ideal here be a higher ratio of vegetables to fruits. But honestly, if you're doing none of it now, then yeah, you eat grapes if you want. Now the one thing I don't like is not experimenting here. Just going grapes is all I'll eat only grapes done.

That's okay for a little bit, but eventually, you have to be grown up. Like I presume everyone listening is a full adult.

[00:49:41] Jeffrey Feldberg: A big assumption sometimes

[00:49:44] John Berardi: And as an adult, you can't be a kid about your food. You can't be a little kids do this. No, I only like chicken fingers and apple. That's what like a four-year-old, that's how they would approach their nutrition as a full adult, you have the opportunity to overcome temper tantrums and all the other things that may prevent you from trying new things and give it a try.

 At PN we wrote an article on how to eat your vegetables when you don't like vegetables. And we had flavor scientists weigh in on it. And the interesting thing is that you may not be like broccoli in one particular preparatory form, I don't know very many people who like raw broccoli just sitting on a plate unprepared.

You know what I mean? It didn't taste great. For some people, they're crazy and maybe like it that way. But there are ways of pairing things like if you squirt a lemon on a particular food and prepared in a certain way, then all of a sudden that vegetable you didn't like is delicious to you.

And part of that has simply to do with how taste receptors work. I'll give you a example. You know, I used to formulate nutritional supplements. That was like one of my first careers when I was a graduate student. And I developed a post-workout recovery drink. It was the first protein and carb drink on the market that was designed as a post-exercise recovery.

And it had a combination of ingredients that instantly made you throw up when you try to. And literally cuz when I was formulating it, each batch we would try, I zip over the sink and I would summarily throw it up into the sink.

And so, it's like, Man, are we ever gonna be able to get this thing to market?

We tried all these flavor combinations and eventually I found the flavor science team who figured out what receptor that this drink was hitting to make you throw up. And then they found a vanilla flavor that tasted like angel food cake, that when you flavored this with that particular one, it bound the receptor more tightly than the amino acids in the drink.

And then it was delicious. And this is the reason you don't like certain vegetables, is because whatever chemicals they may have bind to whatever taste receptors in your tongue in a specific way to make you not like it. We can fix that. We can put the angel food cake flavor, or lemon flavor, or put an onion in with that, or however, we need to do it.

For those folks who are really like JB, you sound like a nice guy, but you'll never get me to like vegetables. I encourage you to like Google the how do you eat vegetables when you don't like vegetables at precision nutrition. And it really lends a new perspective on how to pursue real enjoyment of these things rather than choke them down because they're good for me.

[00:52:32] Jeffrey Feldberg: Sure. And I suppose a two go hand in hand if you're enjoying it because you figured out some kind of combinations to have you enjoyed, you'll eat more of it, and it's a positive feedback loop going I'd like to taste. Okay, you know what? I don't mind having the three to six, to 10 to 12, whatever, how many fistfuls, depending on how many meals that you're having, that you're doing that.

[00:52:53] John Berardi: The other objection is just Oh, I eat a lot on the go. Where do I get blah, blah, blah. And I mean, grocery stores are in every town, you can do that, but even if you've just stopped at a gas station convenience store, I can usually find an apple and a banana there under the worst of circumstances.

One of my favorite go-to meals at a gas station convenience store. I don't have to do them very often, thankfully, is beef jerky, an apple, banana, and raw cashews.

[00:53:24] Jeffrey Feldberg: There you go. You're covering all the different food groups there with that.

[00:53:27] John Berardi: That's the worst place I can imagine trying to find food. You know what I mean? At a gas station convenience store. And even there, you can get this kind of a thing done.

 And again, like I'm just kind of staging this out as we've coached a couple hundred thousand people, like the practices are slow down, eat to 80% full, get adequate protein, fruits and vegetables with each meal. Then we work on our carbs.

And with the carbs, I think, the low-carb people are right to an extent that carbs are kind of discretionary food. You know what I mean? There is a requirement of about a hundred grams per day for brain function and stuff like that. The body doesn't love not having any carbs in the diet.

We know there's some requirement for it. We also know that most people overconsume carbs. For people very physically active, that's probably important. It's important to get enough carbohydrates in your day. But that's at the train compete stage, not at the move play stage. And there what we do is we just think about, okay your plate already has these palms of protein, these fists of fruits and veg.

Now, do we put a cupped, handful of smart carbs, right? And smart carbs to us are minimally processed carbohydrates. That would be brown rice or pasta or whole grain breads, these kinds of things, sweet potatoes, those kinds. The more minimally processed versions of what a lot of people might be eating otherwise.

And again, we look at our portions and we say, Is it a for larger men, two cupped handfuls for smaller women, one cupped handful, and now we've essentially built our plate, right? We've got palms of protein or fists of fruits and veg. Now we have our carbohydrates. For some people who may be the prescription is two cupped handfuls of brown rice or whatever.

They might only feel like they have the appetite for one, which is great because these are discretion. You know now if you're training hard, maybe you have to force that second cup tan full in, because you need that for glucose replenishment from your high levels of activity. But again, this is where we go with discretion.

Now, sometimes I'll just use an example for my life, a client who maybe has their body composition and their blood work in check, I might say, Hey, you know what? What kinds of non-smart carbs are you in the mood for? And then, hey, what if we replace one or two of those cupped handfuls with ice cream for a dessert?

You know this is on the menu too. In almost every circumstance right now, if you are a hundred pounds over an ideal body weight and you are actively trying to get your blood sugars in check and get your body weight in check, then perhaps we do this less for you not never, but less frequently. If you are an endurance athlete who's running 50 miles a week, then maybe we can do this more regularly.

So, again, it's who's the person, what's their body like, and what are they doing? But that's where we introduce the carbs. And again, yeah, I mean, for me, do this four or five times a week actually. Cuz I'm training hard and usually after my, let's say, track workout in the evening, I'll do my two palms of protein.

I'll do my big fruits and vegetables, I'll leave the cup handfuls of carbs off. And then for dessert, I'll usually make a bowl of dairy free ice cream with some mixed nuts thrown in, some dark chocolate, and some fruits. And then that's my, I call it my recovery bowl, which is a very goals oriented way of saying my dessert, my special treat.

[00:57:09] Jeffrey Feldberg: And you know what JB, what's implicit in that's worth calling out for our listeners. If you heard JB carefully, what he was saying was after his evening workout he's not just sitting around and saying, You know what? I'm gonna have, in your case, this non-dairy ice cream or this other fun snack or high carb kind of treat. You have the movement built into that, which I assume gives you that flexibility.

[00:57:33] John Berardi: And yeah, part of it's that I move, part of it's that my body composition is good. The other part of it is that I ate my protein and my vegetables first, which provide a good amount of satiety, I am not going to eat the whole pine because that would make me uncomfortably full. Doing it after I've met the other things.

 And just incidentally I don't do non-dairy ice cream because I have anything against dairy. Some people might try and pick up on that. I have a milk protein allergy and I'm lactose intolerant. Dairy does nasty things to my personal body.

So, I avoid it.

[00:58:06] Jeffrey Feldberg: And just a you know, a terrific example of, hey, my body type is different. And I suppose JB if you didn't have that issue with dairy, you'd have the regular ice cream. And what about the fats? I mean, we covered off with the protein, the fruits and vegetables, and the carbs. Does fat play a role?

[00:58:24] John Berardi: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think with this schema here, generally your protein sources, will they come packaged with fats already in them, right? Your two palms of steak or hamburger or pork is gonna have some fat there. So, your fat bases are probably gonna be covered to some extent.

And then oftentimes if you're cooking your vegetables, for example, you may do that in olive oil or you may do it in coconut oil or you may do it in some kind of oil now you're getting some fats there. And I feel like we don't go super hard at adding fats in this kind of circumstance.

We build a plate that probably represents all the foods pretty nicely. With that said, my snack example earlier, got some proteins, I got some fruits and veg with carbs from the fruits. And now I'm like that I just know that won't be a satisfying enough meal for me and it won't be enough calories for what I need to support my training that's when I'll add something like, raw almonds or raw cashews, some additional fats that are plant based. And it's really fascinating to me because nowadays I mean there was a generation of people that came up believing plant oils were really fundamentally good for you that was the oils you needed.

[00:59:39] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yes. Like the canola oils and

[00:59:41] John Berardi: Yeah. And then it moved from, Oh wait a second. Plant oils aren't all the same. Things like olive oil, which are higher in mono and saturated fats, certain nuts, things like that are preferable over canola oils,, and some of the other oils that are really high in omega six fats, which can be pro-inflammatory. To nowadays there's a whole sort of keto carnivore trend saying all plant oils are bad for you, which again is one little hack I have is I go and look at a picture of the person saying that and I see how many wrinkles they have on their face, because if they don't have many wrinkles, it means they're probably young and they don't remember they're born decontextualized to the nutritional dialogues of the past. I've seen keto common four iterations in four generations now, I'm 50. And I've been looking at this stuff since I'm 16. When people are really excited about the new wave of keto or low carb or whatever it's a bit of a yawn moment for me.

Oh, what do you think of the new trend? Oh, this again, this one's particularly fascinating because now people are, you know, demonizing plant oils and we just know that this is absurd. This is, that there's generations of research suggesting that the right kinds of plant oils are actually quite good for you in balance.

Now if we're like leveled up and we're doing high level nutritional planning, I would say then what we're striving for is like a balance of saturated fats, which you get from your animal foods generally. Monounsaturated fats, olive oil, places like that. And then your polyunsaturated fats, things like your plant oils and stuff like that.

You're trying for a balance there. I know 10 people that ought in the world that ought to worry about that. The rest of us really just need to get the fat that we get from our foods and from our cooking. And if we feel like and this is where like the fat carbohydrate interplay can happen, so, If you're someone who seems to think you do better with more carbs, then you dial down the fats a little bit in your diet, and if you're someone who seems to think you do better with fats or lower carbs, then you dial up the fats and the carbs down. And there's a reciprocal relationship. If you have both high, then you're getting too many calories.

That's where we dial it. The protein, the fruit, and veg have to be the staple that builds the foundation of your meals. And then it's, you want a little more carbs, cool. You gotta dial the fats down a little bit, don't like carbs very much, or they make you feel whatever. Then we dial those down and we bring the fats up a little bit, and that's where you can toggle. And you can see like how we're doing a reconciliation between all these fighting ideas. You can do either, you just have to be smart about the rest, what ends up happening is people will build a lot of superstitions around the way they eat, around what "works for them", around avoidance of one thing or inclusion of another thing. And these are just superstitions. It's like a major league baseball player wearing the same underwear because they won the last two games without underwear. Don't be that person about your food because the underwear thing isn't actively negative except for maybe for your teammates, the food thing can actually ruin your life, superstitions are a problem here. It's hard not to notice, or it's hard to notice your own superstitions. And again, that's where an objective eye comes in. Like a coach.

[01:03:00] Jeffrey Feldberg: And JB what's interesting here, you said something really important and that is forget whatever so, called expert, you may be listening to or watching or whatever you may be reading. The best gauge of this is how you feel and maybe you're a person that feels better with more carbs, or maybe you feel worse with more carbs.

So, you adjust based on how you're feeling. Keeping it on the positive side. When it does come to, let's call it different fats or different oils, what would be perhaps a top three to five types of oils that you'd recommend? Keep away from, don't do this, don't do that. You know, in my opinion here would be the oils perhaps you want to gravitate towards and if you're gonna include some, these would be the ones to include.

[01:03:41] John Berardi: Yeah, I mean, generally if we needed some rules around this, which I don't think most people do. If you're gonna cook with oil, you have to cook with an oil that's a bit more stable at high temperatures. If you cook with high temperatures, that is something like, coconut oil's pretty good for that.

If you cook at low temperatures, you could do something like olive oil, that's fine. If you are going to put oil on your salad or whatever, that's a great time for mono unsaturated fats like olive oil. And the rest of the time you don't have any control over it. What oils are in my steak?

I don't know. You know what I mean? And it's actually not just saturated fat in animal protein, actually, they have charts. You can find them online easily, and you're like, Oh, an egg. What's in an egg? An egg yolk. You're like, Oh, it's actually almost a one third, one third, one third mix of monopoli and saturates, and you're like, Oh why were everyone worried about eggs? It was because of the cholesterol. Oh, that's a whole nother conversation we don't need to get into. I'm not worried about that.

Even certain beef fats and things like that, you're like, Oh, wow, that's got mono and I had no idea. There's a mix in nature and this is what brings us back to the pretty fundamental tenant that I haven't said out loud yet, but you hear all the time, and maybe people are bored with it, but when you eat a variety of foods as close to their natural state as possible, I don't know.

It's like nature knew something and built in a nice mix of your requirements into it. And it's only when we start really extracting things and trying to be super sciencey and smart about it, that we mess it all up in some circumstances. For example, let's say I have anemia and I'm iron deficient, then pulling iron out of a food or synthesizing in a lab and sticking in, my body's really important.

You know what I mean? I'm not against non-natural things, but if you're just out there trying to eat better and trying to live your life a little better or feel a little less terrible in your days your food selections have to be just as close to their natural state as you can manage. And that's fairly easy to do. Did this grow on a tree? Did it come out of the ground? Did it walk the earth or fly over the earth? These are some good rules of thumb for the foods that should represent more of your diet.

[01:05:50] Jeffrey Feldberg: The less process the better. And I'm gonna take it a step further and you can call me out on this. If you're trying to avoid maybe certain types of foods, and this sounds really healthy in this one example, it doesn't have any animal proteins, but it's highly processed kinds of plants and other kinds of things, and it's really manufactured.

You're not gonna find it in nature. Maybe that's not as good as something that is from the ground or fresh from a farm, and it's less processing and involved.

[01:06:17] John Berardi: Totally. I agree. I mean, I think this is like a blanket you can lay over all the things we've talked about so, far and not be led too far astray on. The only thing is though, it becomes difficult for certain archetypes, and personality types. Hearing some of these messages like, hey, unprocessed food, or omega six fats bad.

It becomes a little binary. And then all of a sudden the foods that we most want on a subconscious or emotional level become off-limits and they become the ones that call to us late at night. And that can lead to disordered eating. It could lead to that effort moment where you're like, F it, this diet sucks.

I can't do it. The foods that I want, I can't even have. I'm done. And a lot of the health and fitness industry will have you believe that's a lack of discipline or that you are not worthy to be healthy and fit. And that's just nonsense. That's just nonsense. I mean, one of the groups of people I like working with best is people, let's say, who have an ethnic heritage that includes all kinds of foods that people in North America don't even know.

And I love working with them cuz I get to learn about their foods and then I get to help them find a place for those foods in the context of a health promoting lifestyle. Do those foods sometimes contain sugar or processing or bad fats or whatever? Absolutely. But there's room for them in any human diet.

If the human organism was frail, that it couldn't handle sugar and be healthy, we would've been extinct long ago.

[01:07:53] Jeffrey Feldberg: Sure.

[01:07:54] John Berardi: Sugar is fine. In fact, it is the preferred energy source in some circumstances. But if we're eating too many calories on a daily basis, not moving, and most of our energy comes from sugar, then we die.

And long, slow, painful, unfulfilling death, the medicine or the poison is the dose and that's really the most important thing here. I want your cultural foods to be included in your diet. I want some sugar in your diet. It tastes good. It feels good. I want some of the things that you want most in your diet.

I just need to work with you to structure it. That you're getting enough protein, you're getting enough fruits and vegetables, you're moving enough, haven't talked much about sleep and stress management yet those things are part of your life too. That you're not inclined to overeat.

If we can engineer a life that you don't have to think about your calories and you just naturally don't overeat, that's the life you want to be living.

[01:08:52] Jeffrey Feldberg: JB with what you're giving us, it's very practical, incredibly manageable in terms of what we're doing. Moderation's really key. You gave us these six easy-to-follow strategies right up front of what we can be doing. And you also saw something just now, which is a terrific segue into this.

All of us and the listeners, they're smart, they're successful, they're very capable, that if they chose to I mean they can go to the Precision Nutrition website and we'll have that in the show notes. And you have wonderful free educational series and all these PDFs that you get and you talk about the Palmful and the Fistful, and it goes on with how to build meals and they can go through all of that, but at the same time, it sounds like they also have choices.

And sometimes we undervalue the choices. As an example at the risk of oversimplifying, if I chose to, I could do my own taxes. And get to know the tax code and the tax law and look to submit that. And chances are I'm probably gonna get some audits and I'm probably gonna be missing some things, or I'm not gonna be optimizing the fewer amount of taxes that, I'm gonna be paying.

Or I can go to a professional, in this case, an accountant or a tax specialist, and get that done for me. Earlier and you said something true though, if you're gonna find a coach, you wanna find the right coach. And at a very high level, for someone who perhaps isn't doing this and is perhaps having the wrong habits and just doesn't have the healthiest of lifestyles, trying to figure this out then is on yourself.

You're the experiment and your health is in the balance here. And not just your health, but the health of you as it pertains to your family, your loved ones, your business. There's a lot going on here. Coaching could be a way to accelerate the process to getting things right and having that support system that you're probably not gonna have on your own.

[01:10:42] John Berardi: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, and this isn't a ploy to sell, I'm no longer involved with Precision Nutrition. I make no money by saying this. And it really is a broader point. If you have the means and you don't get coaching on a thing that you want to be better at, that feels absurd to me.

And again, it sounds judgemental, and I don't mean it that way. I actually mean it in this literal sense. And I tell myself that you JB Self, you want to get better at this. Why wouldn't you just find someone to walk you through it, to facilitate the process, tell you what's important, tell you not what not to worry about. Now, the thing is, I think the health and fitness industry has maybe made it mentally, emotionally hard to make the decision, because the only schema that people have for this is hiring a personal trainer. And that isn't the only option, you don't have to go meet someone four times a week at a hundred bucks an hour to get this stuff figured out.

I mean, that immediately starts to feel cost and time prohibitive, I mean, one thing that I used to do when I coached individuals was there was an option to just meet with me four times, for the first week. I would teach you the exercises and we'd talk about the food and all the other strategies you wanna work on, and then we would just have a weekly virtual check-in beyond that.

And then as you got more proficient, it would be a monthly virtual check in, you know, so, there's a little bit of front-loaded work, and then after that, I might send you workout programs or new ideas to try and then we check in on them. So, nowadays there are health coaches out there. There of course still are personal trainers.

If movement is a thing you wanna invest in, there's nutrition coaches that do it virtually. There's all these ways to get very minimally invasive coaching and afford in an affordable way. The other thing too, I mean the ultimate expression of your example there, which I like the accounting one.

I always use roofing because that's, it feels even slightly more absurd. Hey, if I need a new roof on my house, I could either buy a bunch of manuals, listen to a bunch of roofing podcasts, and I actually see a bunch of entrepreneurs doing this exact thing. Like, how do you know so, much about the ketogenic diet?

When you don't come from the health and fitness background, you don't really work out that much and you don't pay that close attention to diet. You're listening to the roofing podcast and reading roofing manuals when you should just be hiring a roofer. Like the personal training option here sometimes feels like not hiring a roofer, but hiring a master roofer to watch you roof and tell you where you're going wrong.

The actual hiring a roofer, the come fix my roof so, I can be somewhere else, is actually hiring a meal prep service.

That's the way to get your taxes done without having to be too involved. That's the way to get the roof done. Now again, maybe not for everybody, maybe geographically there's not something for you.

Maybe there's a cost issue, whatever. But one of the easiest ways to handle this is to simply hire a meal prep service that focuses on healthy, nutritious kind of options and having them deliver your meals for you.

Not saying you have to, not saying that's for everyone, but if that's on the menu in terms of cost, it's an easy way to offload a big chunk of this work.

As you were getting at, what are some ways to really make this so, easy for people? One is a coach to help you figure this out in the context of your life. Another, but this only handles the nutrition, it's not gonna move your legs for you, not gonna help you implement a sleep ritual at night that you can get quality sleep and it's not gonna help you take five minutes out of the day to focus on your breath, right?

Those are things that are required, for a robust, healthy lifestyle, but it actually takes a big chunk out of the work, right? All the preparation, clean up, and thinking about what you're going to eat. Just some options for people and for some people both will be options.

Having some lifestyle slash health coaching and then getting the meals taken care of.

[01:14:44] Jeffrey Feldberg: And so, JB some brilliant insights there from a meal service and for those that are thinking I can't really afford a meal service, or a just not an option. We don't always see it, but the question is what's it costing you to not eat healthy and you're spending money anyways on the food?

Why not make sure that it's healthy and save yourself some time? And the food prep time that you're doing right now, is that taking you out of meetings or new ideas for your business or growing it?

[01:15:06] John Berardi: And here's another solve for that. I mean, maybe if your thought is the expensive meal prep service that pays a lot for marketing and advertising to get you to hear about them. But I lived in Miami Beach in the nineties when I graduated from university.

I moved down there and I started a personal training business. And one of the girls that worked with us her and her mom were from Panama, and her mom was underemployed and she was a great cook. And so, all the guys who worked at the gym, we hired her to do our lunches and dinners for us. And she charged and whatever this was back in the day, but she charged us five bucks a meal. I mean, it was absurd not to. She would bring us a bake potato and two hamburgers and a big thing of broccoli for lunch every day for five bucks. And it was seasoned and delicious. And then sometimes she makes some really nice South American dishes for us.

But it was like, you can find someone to do this for you in a hockey kind of way. You know, someone who's underemployed is it? If you're an entrepreneur, get help. Go find some help. You don't just have to hire business to do it.

[01:16:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: And JB outside of saying, Hey, go to Precision Nutrition, and as you mentioned, you don't have any affiliation with them at this point. There's nothing in it for you. You know, If I'm listening to this, I'm saying, Okay, JB yeah, you've sold me on the idea of let me get some professional help, and maybe it's a meal prep, which is terrific, but also what to eat.

I wouldn't mind getting some help with not, I got the portion size, but what combination of foods? I don't really know where to begin and I want to get it right. What should I look for in whether it be a health coach or a fitness coach? I'll just call it a coach in general. I don't wanna be in the bell curve.

I wanna be in the tail end of the bell curve, with the absolute best that makes sense for me.

[01:16:49] John Berardi: I'll share some advice here. The first thing is just steal yourself for a vetting process. Think of it like hiring a new team. This isn't the first person I find, right? This is, I need to do a few interviews. Maybe we stopped just short of psychometric profiles, you know what I mean?

I need to do a few interviews here and I need to find out if this is gonna be a good fit. This person is gonna have purview over a really important portion of my life. Do I like them? Do I trust them? Do I respect them? You can't work with a coach you don't respect. Some of it is self-evaluation, right? What kind of person would I respect? Who would I allow to tell me what to eat? You know what I mean? That's a big deal. Tell me when to go to bed. This is like start to feel like a parental role in some respects. You can't just hire some hooligan person at the local fitness center. It's gonna be someone you respect. You gotta talk to a few people. Someone who's agnostic. I am a keto coach. Okay, cool. If potential client have your heart set on being keto, then maybe that's the right fit.

But if you don't know what's good for you, right? You haven't done the experimentation now you're just throwing darts at a dart board.

You're like, I got the keto coach. Cool. Hope it works. Hope ketos for me, now it's the second part. I would find someone you like, respect, interview, whatever. Second, are they agnostic? Are they willing? Like Some coaches won't coach a plant-based eater because they think you must eat meat to be healthy. Don't work with that kind of coach, even if you like me because they are too limited. Find a coach who can show you that they've worked with all kinds of people, particularly people like you. I don't know if I talked about Ray Dalio on the last podcast, but he's been a big mentor of ours through our precision nutrition process.

For those who don't know Ray Dalio, now it's like really a public figure and the sort of personal development space. He was the founder and CEO of Bridgewater, huge hedge fund for a really long time, one of the wealthiest guys in the world. But Ray has this believability criteria, right?

How do you know you're getting good advice? Will you have to get it from believable people? Who's believable? Number one, this person has done it before. Number two, they've done it in a variety of markets, this is his world. Have they done it when there's a recession, when there's a depression, when there's a boom?

And the third thing is when they tell you how they go about it, does it make sense? Not only is it logical, but if it doesn't make sense to you, even if they're really smart, right? And it seems like it should work, if it doesn't make sense to you, you won't be able to do it. This is the criteria, find a believable coach. Someone who's done it, who can show you they've done it with other kinds of people like you. And when they describe how they're gonna go about it, it makes sense that you can do it. This is how I think about finding coaches in any domain. Will I listen to them?

Do I respect them, trust them like them? I can't know until I interview them do they have a body of work where they can show me that they're believable, and then are they agnostic? In this particular domain, people become religious in their zeal. And I don't have any problem with religion.

But you shouldn't have a zealousness about carbs. That's how I would think about finding a coach if you're gonna find an individual to work with.

[01:20:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, some great advice. And what I like about that is really the takeaway is no one really knows what works for them food-wise or what doesn't. And spot on in saying, Hey, find someone who really works in all the different kinds of foods and the different kinds of regimes and doesn't really have a preference one way or the other.

And the best one for you is the one that has you feeling the best, and that's where you're gonna go. And make sure you have someone that, that does that. Jimmy, let me ask you this because I know we're starting to get up there in the time, although we can go, forever with your knowledge and your insights.

And this next question is just really rounding things out and then we'll bring it to a close and I'll ask a closing question. My question could be a few episodes in and of itself, but some quick takeaways because you did mention stress and two key things for your six really incredible strategies for optimizing our health and what we're doing. What would you say to stress and sleep and what we should think about in terms of some high-level takeaways?

[01:21:07] John Berardi: In my experience and in the research, if people aren't sleeping enough, then they can't manage their nutrition well. What tends to happen when we're under slept is that our appetite regulation goes haywire. We want to eat more. We want to eat more processed, simple foods.

We want to eat more sugar, these kind of things. It's hard to do one without the other is the point. People ask, what's more important, nutrition or exercise? My rebuttal is what's more important in your heart or your lungs? They work together. With sleep, it's not just a, Oh, and also this is an integral part of the whole thing. Now, if you have a clinical sleep disorder, we're not gonna solve that in our conversation today. However, a lot of people have self pointed, self design, and sleep problems. They don't think about when they need to be up. They don't back calculate seven to eight hours from that, and they don't arrange their evenings such that they can get to sleep, and that's the first thing.

I mean, we've read about sleep hygiene and those kinds of things like devices and the quality of the light that we're getting at nighttime, perhaps interrupting our sleep and stuff like that. But those are a little more granular. A part of it is what time do I have to be up. Back calculate, what time do I need to be in bed?

Have I arranged my evening so I can be in bed at that time? If not, then this isn't gonna work. You can wear all the blue blocker lenses or whatever that you need. You're not gonna get enough sleep until you figure out the back calculation there and then figure out how does one wind down now or before that, how do I start to prepare my body for rest?

And there's hacks for that. I mean, I sleep with a chili pad. That is a device you put under your fitted sheet. It circulates water that's constantly cooled and it makes your sleep temperature ideal for sleep. I love it. I'm not someone who's huge on devices. The chili pad has positively, in a host of ways impacted my sleep quality.

It also allows me to get a big, heavy weighted blanket and bury myself under my covers. I couldn't do that historically cuz it get too hot but this keeps it cool under there. That's like one example of arranging the actual sleep environment, but prior to that it's, are you in bed?

If I'm not in bed, I can't get the sleep that I need. Part of it's really just thinking about your day. Again entrepreneurs, business owners have to be pretty in tune with their schedule. This is just another scheduling activity you have to think about. Book it off on your day planner if you have to, 9:00 PM is when I make sure I don't eat anymore food. I go to the bathroom, I brush my teeth and I put on relaxing music. I can start to wind down that I'm asleep by 10 whatever. And there are strategies for that actually, Precision Nutrition now in their most latest iteration of the company also offers a sleep stress management and recovery certification and they're also putting out tons of great consumer-based information on sleep stress management. And there are a couple of great experts over there who are putting out some great stuff on sleep. Like how to really engineer and optimal bedtime routine you can get your required hours. For folks who want to dig deeper cuz we only have a few minutes left, that would be a great place.

Chris Winters and Jennifer Martin are doing some really good work. Both PhDs, both clinical sleep scientists. Both have an exercise and fitness background they know how to talk about this stuff for people who are trying to be fit. And then on the stress management side, I mean, one of the practices in our coaching program is what we call Five Minute Mind Body Scan and there's a two week block like the eat to 80% full, like the eat your vegetables with each meal. Where we have people sit quietly, focus on their breathing just five minutes each day. And people have probably experienced the mind-body scan where you maybe lay down or sit in a chair in a quiet place.

You breathe and you think about your toes, and then you think about your feet and then you think about your ankles and you just look at what your body's feeling. What do I feel in my knees? What do I feel in my thighs? And a non-judgmental way as you just go up your body and look for pressure points and stress points and pain points and relaxation points and where I feel good.

And that activity is like meditation. It's a kind of meditation for people maybe who focusing on your breath and trying to clear your mind of thoughts. You're not there yet. Don't clear your mind of thoughts. Think about your toes, think about your feet, Think about your ankles. And that five minute mind body scan maybe never has to get any more than that,

But it's promoting somatic awareness, knowledge of how you feel in your body at any given state. Practice at feeling your feelings. Okay? And also five quiet minutes of breathing.

The way that I apply this nowadays is folks don't see us on video, but you saw me sipping a tea. In the morning when I wake up, I make a tea for myself, and while the tea is boiling, I sit on the counter and I just do deep breathing and clearing my mind right as thoughts float by.

I don't grab onto them. I don't think much about them. Like, Oh, there's a thought. Let's just let it zoom out. As it naturally would. And so, that's three or four minutes of tea boiling, breathing, and letting thoughts go by in my head without having to do anything with them. And that's sort of the extent of meditation for me.

And again, you notice, I like to stack activities, I'm gonna walk while I'm doing a meeting or a friend conversation. I'm gonna meditate while I'm boiling my tea, because I feel the same things that all the listeners feel like, Hey, I don't have enough time in the day to do all those things.

Let me see which two I can put together. And that's like the beginning of a stress management practice. I don't know for the listeners who has an Apple Watch, but I was on the advisory board at Apple for a while. They had their move rings. Their watch would track your steps and your movement and all that kind of thing, and you have to close these move rings.

And that would be like counting your steps on a Fitbit or something like that. And then the next thing they tackled was mindfulness and I don't know if somebody may recall their breath app. So, it would prompt you periodically throughout the day to do a certain number of seconds of meditation light. This was Apples, like tiny habits, way of getting people to move more and to meditate, do mindfulness more. We were in a lot of meetings about a nutrition version of that. What would be the lowest touch teeny habit way of tackling food with people and they invited a really smart group of experts to come talk about that?

But ultimately this is the problem that you were hinting at earlier. Those experts couldn't agree on what that might look like. Their pet projects, their religion was strong, that they couldn't figure out a way to smooth the curve and come up with a simple thing, which was really telling about why maybe live consumers are confused about nutrition, but that Apple's version was lighter than even what I'm talking about here.

It was just, can we prompt people to just breathe, clear their mind for a few minutes each day? There's a huge body of research on why this works. And one of the reasons I like to tell people the tea thing is because it's like you're boiling on your tea anyway. You're gonna be sitting there anyway.

Maybe you're gonna be worried about a meeting that you have or the financial forecast for this quarter or whatever. What if you just didn't do those things and you just breathed and started your day with a very clear, calm mind. That pays huge dividends, not just anecdotally, but, and what that does is it actually, you know, in a lot of the research talks about this and I felt it in my life.

Being able to sit quietly and not grab onto thoughts as they arise in your subconscious and bubble up into your conscious mind is a practice that buys you more time when you're likely to react emotionally to things and gives you an extra beat before you do.

Doesn't make you a massively better person.

But we've all been in moments where a thing happens makes us feel in a way, and we just react so, quickly and then we're like, Oh, full of regret that was the thing that came out of our mouth, or that was the thing that we did. What these kinds of stress management practices do is buy us an extra beat and say, Ooh, look, I'm about to do the thing that I know I'll be embarrassed about. Maybe I won't. And that begins a deeper practice of stress management. I won't react emotionally. I won't say the wrong thing. I won't create friction in my relationships. It doesn't need to be there. And that is a big tool in stress management notice how most of the things we're talking about are pretty easy. We're talking about three to five minutes here for a basic stress management practice. We're talking about some intentional time before bed to manage a better sleep practice.

We're talking about movement where you just going for a walk. Now, for the people who are already avid exercisers, obviously, there's leveling up that we can do. This isn't the full repertoire of what we could talk about, but for a lot of people, I mean, these are, this forms the core of a health practice. And actually leading up to our conversation today, Jeffrey, I was sitting there having my tea and I was thinking about this one dilemma.

Which is, if someone only walked say four times a week, 30 minutes, that's all they did for their movement and physical activity. Do I believe that would have a profound impact on their health, their physiology, their fitness, their body composition? And I was struggling because younger me would've said no.

[01:30:31] Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay.

[01:30:32] John Berardi: Younger me would've said no, they have to do some strength training. They have to do some interval training. The research is super clear that as we get older, we lose fast switch muscle fibers and those are only built and retained through high-intensity and strength exercise. A scientist could make a very fouled argument that no, you are not gonna be as healthy as you could be without doing some strength training, some intermittent sprint kind of with recovery intervals, and then with some low-intensity work.

But if I'm thinking about the goals of the average person physically average, right? Not mentally average. You could be a world-destroying entrepreneur and still be physically average. I do think nowadays in my older years of experience and wisdom that someone could walk four days a week, 30 minutes.

And achieve the lion's share of their physical goals.

[01:31:28] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. That's incredible.

[01:31:29] John Berardi: And the reason I run this through in my own mind is because sometimes I know people can think that the advice we talked about in this podcast is basic, too basic.

 A lot of those things are for people who, for whatever reason, want to attach to fancy tools and tricks when they're a little further along the journey. I really believe on some level what most of our lives are about is there's a lot of hours in our lives. Toward the tail end we feel like it wasn't very many I'm sure, but there are a lot of hours that we're awake and what we do for work and what we do for hobbies and what we do for pleasure and what we do sometimes to hurt ourselves are all just the things we're doing while we're waiting to die.

And for some people, they love to get in the weeds of hacking their bodies, those are not the prerequisites for health though. Walking four times a week, 30 minutes, eating enough protein and fruits and veg, and figuring out the rest. Breathing for five minutes a day and making sure your mind doesn't attach to worries or even joyful thoughts and getting enough sleep that those are the requirements that's the prerequisites.

Everything else is for people who can't help themselves. You know what I mean? Who have obsessive disorders, you know, or for people who just like when you get into coffee, you need to know everything about coffee. For people when they get into, I don't know, cycling, they need to know everything about cycling, and they need to have the bike, and they need to have all the beaters and the measuring tools and everything.

That's what's happening in a lot of nutrition and fitness and health. Sadly, those are the people who get the megaphones, it's the people who are super passionate slash annoying about coffee that everyone's giving the megaphones to. And you're like, I don't need to know how to make the perfect coffee with the $10,000 coffee maker.

 I just need to feel a little better in my life.

[01:33:26] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, Some great insights, some great wisdoms. And the takeaway is, hey, we don't have to complicate it. Something's better than nothing. And to cap off JB what you're saying if you took the most sophisticated wow hacker or scientist, or health person, and they're really honest, the things that we've been talking about today.

They would say, you know what, Sure you can try and take all these crazy supplements and vitamins and there is a role and a place for that, but you can never replace what Mother Nature has done. Back to your example of an Apple, having an apple, and there's elements in there that we still don't understand from a science perspective, how they interact and what they do.

That Apple, in many instances, will beat the most sophisticated called supplement. And we're extracting things in the lab and trying to put things together. So, the takeaway for our listeners, JB listen, you're top 20 world's best coach. You work with elite athletes and teams, and you've been around and you're sharing some insights that if you did nothing else, but you did this, life is good.

And if you're not comfortable to invest all that time and experiment, you gave us a terrific platform to follow. How do I find a coach? And by the way, JB, that advice that you gave, It could be a coach for what I eat on the nutrition side or on the fitness side, or on the sleep side, or on managing stress. It all applies to what you can do.

[01:34:46] John Berardi: On the marketing side or on the leadership side. None of this is industry specific. This is how to be a human in the world.

[01:34:53] Jeffrey Feldberg: And so,, as we begin to wrap this up, and again, JB, I could have just gone on and you've been a terrific Wealth of insights and wisdom and resources. We've already had this before. Let's have another kick at the can in our first interview.

And again, we'll put that in the show notes. I'm gonna ask the same closing questions, a bit of a tradition here on the Deep Wealth Podcast.

Here's the question, once again, Think about the movie Back to the Future, and in the movie, you have that magical DeLorean car that can take you to any point in your life.

And now, JB, it's tomorrow morning. You look outside your window, and there it is. The DeLorean car is not only sitting there, but the door is open and it's waiting for you to hop on in, and you can now go to any point in your life, JB, as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would be. What would you tell your younger self in terms of life wisdom or life lessons, or, Hey, JB, do this, but don't do that.

What does that sound like for you?

[01:35:52] John Berardi: I'm pretty sure my answer, it will be different this time. And what prompts my answer is something I told our 10-year-old son in a car ride just yesterday. He said to me, Dad you and mom have told me some stories about you when you were young and how you didn't do well at school and you got in trouble a lot and were arrested and all these kind of things. that just doesn't sound like you, Like how did that happen? Like how are you different?

[01:36:16] Jeffrey Feldberg: Oh. Great question. And arrest JB Whole, That's a whole other episode. Hold on.

[01:36:21] John Berardi: Yeah, that's, Yeah, that's right. I have a checkered past and what I told him was obviously a more extensive story than I'll share here about who I was and how I changed and but the crux of it.

And I told him a really emotional story about my first and possibly my greatest mentor. But really the answer to this question is going back in time, the only thing I could possibly tell my younger self, usually I say, I wouldn't tell that guy anything cuz he wouldn't listen. But is that the difference between who you are today and who you want to become, or maybe you don't even know who you want to become, who you will become will be the quality and number of mentors that you have along the way.

[01:37:03] Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow.

[01:37:04] John Berardi: Double down on mentorship. Figure out who the smartest, the most moral and ethical, the most integral people are. And try and get close to them. Try and offer them some value, even if it's just the value as an attentive student who's willing to apply what they teach and do more of that, like more of them, show up as a grateful recipient of their wisdom and knowledge. Be critical in your thinking about the things that they teach you, of course, but just get more mentorship. It doesn't have to be paid, but just be around people who can add that kind of value to your life. If I could think of anything that would make me even greater today than I am or anything that could make me greater in the future and anything that could have made the biggest impact on the trajectory of my life, that's it right there.

I can't think of anything else. That would be my advice.

[01:38:00] Jeffrey Feldberg: Terrific advice, words to the wise all-around mentorship and that was somewhat of a theme today as well that came through it's very timely and topical. And thank you so, much for sharing that. JB what a ride you've taken us on and what you've shared and you've kept it powerful, yet simple, not complicated, and things that all of us can follow through on.

And advice not just on the personal health side, but on the business health side. We can combine them both, particularly on the mentorship side, that can just be a game changer. It'll move the dow for us on both of personal and the business side and for that a heartfelt thank you. And you know the last question as we wrap up this episode, and again, we'll have your website and everything else in the show notes.

Is your website the best place? If someone would wanna learn more about you or reach out to you, would the website be the best place?

[01:38:50] John Berardi: Yeah, probably. I mostly hide from all that nowadays, my being retired and then having homeschooled our kids for the last four ish years. I'm mostly just trying to stay out of the public and I've got nothing to sell and you know, I'm just being with them. My website is a really in the theme of simplicity.

I just made a really simple single page. Here's who I am, here's what I've done. If you're interested in my work as a health nutrition coach, go here. If you're interested in learning what I've learned as an entrepreneur and business owner, and someone who sold a company, go here. If you're interested in the research papers I publish at university, go here.

If you wanna see me run the hundred meters, you can go here. All these kinds of things. It's just a simple single page that takes people off to the different dimensions of my life if they're interested in learning more. And most of those places have a lot of great free resources. The entrepreneur and business leadership and selling a business stuff is all over at our Changemaker Academy website, hundreds of free articles there.

The Precision Nutrition website, thousands of free articles there. People can jump off just from, you know, the johnberardi.com website.

[01:39:58] Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. And again, we'll have all of that in the show notes. It'll be a point-and-click. Well, JB this is a wrap and as we do wrap this up, once again, thank you for your insights and for your wisdom. And as always, please stay healthy and safe.

[01:40:11] John Berardi: Thanks, everyone.

[01:40:12] Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me.

[01:40:15] Lyn M.: This course is one of the best investments you will ever make because you will get an ROI of a hundred times that. Anybody who doesn't go through it will lose millions.

[01:40:25] Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity

[01:40:30] Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

[01:40:36] Lyn M.: Compared to when we first began, today I feel better prepared, but in some respects, may be less prepared, not because of the course, but because the course brought to light so many things that I thought we were on top of that we need to fix.

[01:40:52] Kam H.: I 100% believe there's never a great time for a business owner to allocate extra hours into his or her week or day. So it's an investment that will yield results today. I thought I will reap the benefit of this program in three to five years down the road. But as soon as I stepped forward into the program, my mind changed immediately.

[01:41:14] Sharon S.: There was so much value in the experience that the time I invested paid back so much for the energy that was expended.

[01:41:24] Lyn M.: The Deep Wealth Experience compared to other programs is the top. What we learned is very practical. Sometimes you learn stuff that it's great to learn, but you never use it. The stuff we learned from Deep Wealth Experience, I believe it's going to benefit us a boatload.

[01:41:38] Kam H.: I've done an executive MBA. I've worked for billion-dollar companies before. I've worked for smaller companies before I started my business. I've been running my business successfully now for getting close to a decade. We're on a growth trajectory. Reflecting back on the Deep Wealth, I knew less than 10% what I know now, maybe close to 1% even.

[01:41:56] Sharon S.: Hands down the best program in which I've ever participated. And we've done a lot of different things over the years. We've been in other mastermind groups, gone to many seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, read books. This was so different. I haven't had an experience that's anything close to this in all the years that we've been at this.

It's five-star, A-plus.

[01:42:23] Kam H.: I would highly recommend it to any super busy business owner out there.

Deep Wealth is an accurate name for it. This program leads to deeper wealth and happier wealth, not just deeper wealth. I don't think there's a dollar value that could be associated with such an experience and knowledge that could be applied today and forever.

[01:42:42] Jeffrey Feldberg: Are you leaving millions on the table?

Please visit www.deepwealth.com/success to learn more.

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