Protein Quality, Brain Fog after Training, Conflicting Info | THRR130

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News topic du jour:

America Trapped between hyperinflation and great depression:

 


Podcast Questions:

1. Protein combining/quality [13:30]

Mike says:

Hi guys,

This isn’t your average black beans + corn + rice (or however the vegans tell it) question, or maybe it is??? I was hoping you could clear something up for me. Every week I mix up a huge batch of: 10% milkfat cabot yogurt, 1 can coconut milk, 1-1.5 cup oats, a couple stevia packets, + some combo of various amounts of: raisins, protein powder, collagen protein, chia seeds, coconut flakes, chopped nuts, coco powder, instant coffee, etc; and then batch it out for daily breakfasts. Honestly, its awesome, on the level of some sort of non-frozen ice cream treat, and I would tend to this its at least prettttty healthy.

Question: each bowl ends up being a dense 500-600 calories, and 30-40 total grams of protein …I would usually tend to think that everything outside yogurt-protein and whey power are sort of crap-protein that shouldn’t hardly be counted, but does this crap-protein gain value when eaten in the complete amino matrix found in the animal foods? Essentially, is incomplete added to complete valuable? I feel like I always hear the combining-question in the context of incomplete incomplete.

Side question to squeeze it in; any value to all those things sitting in my yogurt for 5-6-7 days? Fermentationwise.. anti-nutrients go poof!??

 

2. Brain Fog After Training [19:08]

Steve says:

I am approaching 40 but still giving hell and setting PRs (late bloomer). I like to lift heavy, ruck, do circuit training, wrestle, play flag football. Already taking 1000mg DHA fish oil, 10g creatine, 6g salt/electrolytes, 2g magnesium malate daily. I’m 6’4″ 295lb.

Is there a way to avoid or curb the CNS/brain fatigue that follows heavy training. I work from home and have a home gym. I would love to train at about 3pm when I still feel energized. However it can feel impossible to do work after training for about 2-3 hours after. Caffeine is a no go since it will make me stay up all night. Any thoughts?

 

3. Conflicting Information – Where to Start? [26:23]

Shaun says:

I am 47 and lived a life of low fat high carb and lots of artificial sweeteners. The thing is I am getting sicker, more unhealthy and my weight is going up. There is so much conflicting information so I don’t know where to start. Every time I try to cut carbs down and dump my artificial sweeteners use my energy tanks and I end up on the cycle again. Now please don’t judge but at its worse I was using 20 plus packets of equal a day and drinking 2 litres of diet a coke today to keep energy up. Please help. Shaun from New Zealand

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Transcript:

Download a copy of the transcript here (PDF)

Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to The Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney Plus.

Robb: Never fear folks, we’re back and better than ever.

Nicki: I don’t know if they were fearing. I think they were maybe hoping.

Robb: You were fearing. Yeah.

Nicki: Yes, we are back for another episode of The Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is episode 130. Hello, hubs.

Robb: When you want the podcast, but don’t need it…

Nicki: Don’t need it, we’ll be here, but when you do need it, but don’t want it…

Robb: Something like that.

Nicki: We shall have to go.

Robb: We’re getting all Nanny McPhee on it I think.

Nicki: Nanny McPhee. If you guys haven’t watched, I don’t know, is it on Amazon or Netflix or something, but it’s Nanny…

Robb: Those of you afflicted with kids.

Nicki: With children.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Nanny McPhee is a good family flick. I think my dad is the one who found it and recommended it to us and it’s quite enjoyable.

Robb: Which for your dad is doing pretty well because he usually picks horrible movies.

Nicki: Not everybody can have great taste.

Robb: So true.

Nicki: I don’t have good taste either.

Robb: That is true.

Nicki: In a lot of things.

Robb: Clearly in spouses you are failing.

Nicki: Where are we going with this?

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Where are we going with this? Let’s see. Sleds are out. The kids have been sledding. We’ve gotten a lot of snow in the last week. It’s quite cold now. We’re down in the single digit temperatures here.

Robb: In Fahrenheit, which is pretty chilly.

Nicki: In Fahrenheit, yeah.

Robb: This coming weekend we’re doing a gig with Roam Free bison ranch and want to go into details of what’s happening with that or?

Nicki: I think we’ll just share after we…

Robb: Post script?

Nicki: Post script.

Robb: Okay.

Nicki: And see how it all goes, but it should be fun. This is the first time this has ever occurred. It’s kind of like a lunar eclipse. No, nevermind, those have occurred a lot of times, but this is the first time this thing has occurred.

Robb: Yes.

Nicki: That we’re going to…

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: It’s the first of what is hoped to be quite a few things in the coming years.

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: Coming months and years.

Nicki: Okay. That’s vague. Guys, we are on a roll today.

Robb: It’s so funny, the internal dynamic. I’m a real sharer. I’m like, “Fuck it, let’s just tell people what’s up.” And Nicki’s like, “No, don’t tell them this. Don’t tell them that.”

Nicki: We can share. Do you want to share? Let’s share.

Robb: No. Well, I was going to have you fill in the deets.

Nicki: Okay. Our friends at Roam Free Ranch have built this kick ass wheel of pain.

Robb: If you’re familiar with Conan the Barbarian where a bunch of kids are shackled to this wheel that they just push in a circle and then eventually Conan is the only kid left there. Our friend John had this idea of making this wheel of pain, which would be hooked up to a…

Nicki: He spent lots of time and even had super high end…

Robb: Some engineers.

Nicki: Help with the gears on this, but this wheel of pain will be pushed by human power, and by pushing this wheel, it spins… What do you call it? A rotisserie…

Robb: Apparatus.

Nicki: Apparatus that will have an entire bison on it rotating it and roasting it over a fire.

Robb: An open flame, yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. We’re going to be participating and this is sort of a dry run. They want to do another one next year, but kind of working out the kinks, making sure that the entire thing gets cooked adequately before we serve it to other people and all that good stuff, but it should be a fun time.

Robb: It’s going to be cold as hell.

Nicki: And cold. Super cold.

Robb: We’ll have stories of frostbite I’m sure when we come back.

Nicki: I’m sure. Yes, yes.

Okay, now that we’ve shared, because you wanted to share, what do you have for a news topic?

Robb: The guy that I found, I think his name is Brian, Clear Value Tax.

Nicki: Sounds like a cheesy handle, but this guy is solid. Solid.

Robb: There aren’t that many people that understand the implications of the Federal Reserve and money printing and inflation and potential hyperinflation or deflation. And this guy really nails it. What’s interesting is most of the people that talk about this stuff are pretty doom porn. And I think this guy’s name is Brian with Clear Value Tax. He’s super honest and he understands his stuff at a really high level.

Nicki: He’s super funny.

Robb: He has the driest humor. It is drier than a saltine cracker left in the desert for a century. It’s just hilarious. He’s been doing this thing for a number of years. He’s got 1.5 million followers. Very, very good, very accomplished, but he covers a bunch of different topics. And about a month ago, as of the recording today, what?

Nicki: We’re on November 8th.

Robb: November 8th. He did a piece called America Trapped Between Hyperinflation and Great Depression. And he goes through the mechanisms of the last say 10 years of super low interest rates, of quantitative easing, of pumping all this money into the system. And then some of the stuff that happened during COVID with the breakdown in supply chains, which finally caused, like a lot of people had been predicting, an inflationary process that could really leap out and cause some problems. But for a host of reasons, we hadn’t seen the type of inflation that we’re seeing right now. And now, man, it’s really off to the races. And so now the Federal Reserve is trying to correct that.

And the way he describes it, very reminiscent, because it’s icy right now. On our way coming and going from the gym yesterday, we saw six cars that had spun out off the road. And what happens is you start losing control one direction and so you try to correct another direction.

Nicki: You over correct.

Robb: You over correct and then you’re ass over tea kettle before you know it. And the two things that we are kind of facing right now are potentially a really hyperinflationary event and also this deflationary depression event. And as shitty as both of those would be, it’s arguable that in general the deflationary depression would potentially be the preferable the two. But it’s really asking do you want a hot poker to the left eye or the right eye. It’s going to be kind of gnarly.

And the thing that I think is interesting and a little bit scary about all this stuff is just that all of the tools that have historically been used to try to correct these things, whether upward vector or downward vector, we’re losing the utility of those tools. If the Fed over corrects and we end up overly tamping down the economy, their solution to it is going to be quantitative easing, printing money and releasing money, which immediately gets us back into this inflationary cycle. And then the danger of the inflationary cycle is that we now have so much debt on the balance sheets and the fact that interest rates are higher, The United States is really in this kind of gnarly position of defaulting on loan payments and stuff.

And I don’t really know what to do about any of this other than just being aware that it could happen and doing some resiliency planning, making sure you’ve got some extra money stashed away and some food and have good social connections. But again, I think more than anything, just knowing that these potentialities are out there is really valuable because a ton of people are going to be caught completely unaware with this. “How did this happen?” And so I think the guy is great.

Nicki: I think just understanding too, how these things come about, what does it really mean? He’s very clear. He’s got a very direct, easy to understand. He is talking about very complicated topics or topics that most people haven’t spent a lot of time steeping themselves in. And so he does a really great job making it accessible for everybody. I will say, I did see that somebody did a poll and 63% of Americans are in favor of more stimulus checks to combat inflation. That just shows you kind of our general savviness as a country when it comes to how printing money and stimulus checks are related to inflation.

Robb: And the only thing that has maybe depressed me more than the lack of knowledge around nutrition and health is the understanding of basic economics. That one could make me lose faith in humanity pretty quick. But clearly all of y’all listening, all six of you remaining, are not in that camp. But again, I think this stuff is invaluable.

Nicki: We binge watched maybe six or seven of this guy’s videos over the weekend because Robb was kind of in a…

Robb: Well, a bunch of good topics came up.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: Around inflation, deflation.

Nicki: He went through the meeting at the Fed, and Jerome Powell’s, exactly what he said, and kind of translated that for the lay person. And again, very, very accessible and solid material.

Robb: And what does it have to do with The Healthy Rebellion? Well, your mental health matters. And again, I think just understanding that these potentialities are out there, and the thing about all this type of stuff, nobody knows if one of these things is going to happen in 30 seconds or 30 years. It’s amazing that our system has been able to motor along as long as it has, but there are some folks who dismiss all this stuff like, “Oh, it’ll be fine. We’ll be okay.” And we will all ultimately be okay, but I think that we’re going to go through some pretty good rough patches and there’s going to be some significant changes to the way the world works.

And if nothing else, if people better understood what we’re facing here because of the current system, maybe they would understand some of the potential benefits of crypto and decentralized finance and having the government decoupled from the money system, which is a crazy thing to say, but there are people out there that have been advocating for this for quite some time. And when you really look at the way that it’s been mismanaged and the hell that it will unleash on many people, to be able to entertain some other alternative to this, you have to be aware of why this stuff happened the way it did.

Nicki: Nicely put.

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Robb, what’s your verdict on the chocolate caramel salt?

Robb: I really like it.

Nicki: You love it. You love it.

Robb: I know you are a fan of other chocolate iterations.

Nicki: I’m more of the mint chocolate gal, but Robb loves the chocolate caramel. We’ve gotten really good feedback on it so far for the ambassadors and partners that have already received theirs so excited to see what you all think.

Robb: There you have it, Gatto.

Nicki: You ready for questions, hubs?

Robb: Let’s do this.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Our first one is from Mike on combining proteins and quality of protein. “Hey guys, this isn’t your average black beans plus corn plus rice, or however the vegans tell it, question, or maybe it is. I was hoping you could clear something up for me. Every week I mix up a huge batch of 10% milk fat Cabot yogurt.” I had to look that up, it’s a brand. “One can of coconut milk, one to one and a half cup of oats, a couple of Stevia packets, plus some combo of various amounts of raisins, protein powder, collagen protein, chia seeds, coconut flakes, chopped nuts, cocoa powder, instant coffee, et cetera, then I batch it out for daily breakfasts. Honestly, it’s awesome on the level of some sort of non-frozen ice cream treat, and I would tend to this, I would tend to think,” I may have missed a word here, “Tend to think this is at least pretty healthy.

“Question. Each bowl ends up being a dense 500 to 600 calories and 30 to 40 total grams of protein. I would usually tend to think that everything outside the yogurt protein and whey powder are sort of crap protein that shouldn’t hardly be counted, but does this crap protein gain value when eaten in the complete amino matrix found in the animal foods? Essentially, is incomplete added to complete valuable? I feel like I always hear the food combining question in the context of incomplete mixed with incomplete.

“Side question to squeeze it in, any value to all those things sitting in my yogurt for five, six or seven days, fermentation wise?”

Robb: I’ll answer that last one first. I don’t think that there’s probably much in the way of benefit. There might be a little bit of digestion that occurs in there, maybe some of the sugars from the…

Nicki: Raisins.

Robb: Raisins and stuff like that get converted into lactate possibly, but you would need to have it in a completely airtight container and all that type of jive.

Nicki: And if he’s opening it every day to serve himself a serving?

Robb: Probably not, yeah.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: It’s probably just making a good soup or something, the longer the flavors mix, the better it tastes. I noodle on this a fair amount, and this would actually be a great one to run by Gabrielle Lyon because she’s done so much solid protein work, but one of the things to keep in mind with this is if we want decent anabolic signaling, and also if we just want that satiety signaling from protein, we need a decent amount, usually about 25 grams seems to be the theoretical minimum threshold to get that anabolic signaling. I assume that the bulk of the protein, when you mention this other stuff, the regular protein powder is probably good to go, the yogurt is probably good to go, the collagen protein, although nice to balance out the cysteine-methionine ratio, is not really adding to that anabolic mix and whatnot. This 30 to 40 gram total protein, depending on the makeup, is just barely hanging on that edge of being an efficacious dose of protein.

Another thing to consider within all this stuff is that similar to fiber blunting the effects of carbohydrate, which can be good, it can slow down the effects of carbohydrate and kind of blunt that insulin response, significant amounts of fiber can similarly blunt some of the glucagon effects of protein, which are important for appetite control and the benefits that we get from protein consumption. Given the ubiquity of the fiber and everything in this setup, that could be a problem. That’s all well and good from a theoretical perspective, but how do we know practically what’s going on? How do you look, how do you feel, how do you perform? Are you getting good energy, good cognition, not rebound hypoglycemia after this? Can you go several hours after eating this without getting significantly hungry again? And that will give you a pretty good indication of how this is working for you.

Nicki: Cool.

Robb: And I don’t know that I 100% answered the question of incomplete proteins mixed with the more complete proteins. It’s going to be a little bit helpful, but it’s the thing, again, would I be more concerned about are you hitting a protein minimum and is there enough fiber and other stuff in this that it’s blunting the effects of the protein? You could potentially end up a scenario within that protein leverage hypothesis where you’re just hungry soon afterwards and we’re not really getting the efficacy out of the protein that we would like.

Nicki: But if you tolerate it, if you’re not having blood sugar swings afterwards, you’re able to go several hours without feeling ravenous, if your body composition is where you want it to be, then it’s probably an okay thing.

Robb: It’s probably good to go. Yeah.

Nicki: It just reminded me from all of the days of your CrossFit nutrition seminars, of telling people protein powders weren’t a valid option because it needed to have a face and a soul and you needed to kill it and bring its essence into your body.

Robb: Indeed.

Nicki: Or something like that.

Robb: It’s a good thing we did all that when we did.

Nicki: You might’ve gotten canceled for that today.

Robb: I would’ve surely been canceled had we done that in this day and age.

Nicki: Yes. Okay.

All right, our next question is from Steve on brain fog after training. Steve says, “I am approaching 40 but still giving hell and setting PRs. I’m a late bloomer. I like to lift heavy ruck, do circuit training, wrestle, play flag football. I’m already taking 1,000 milligrams of DHA fish oil, 10 grams of creatine, six grams of salt and electrolytes, two grams of magnesium malate daily. I’m 6’4″ and 295 pounds. Is there a way to avoid or curb the CNS/brain fatigue that follows heavy training? I work from home and I have a home gym. I would love to train at about 3:00 PM when I still feel energized. However, it can feel impossible to do work after training for about two to three hours afterwards. Caffeine is a no-go since it will make me stay up all night. Any thoughts?”

Robb: Couple of things. Steve doesn’t mention what his chow is, so it’s hard to know what’s going on there, but Steve’s a big dude, 6’4″, basically 300 pounds, and that six grams of sodium is right at the bottom edge of what we recommend in general for normal humans, and Steve’s an ice giant. Let’s assume he’s eating a fairly higher carb diet, but he’s insulin sensitive and everything, he still might be under consuming sodium and electrolytes by like 50%. That is one of these just low hanging fruit things. I would try something like LMNT or I would do a home brew or pickle juice before, during, and after the workout. And maybe try bumping that up first to about nine grams of sodium per day. I would chase that for a bit to see what’s going on there.

If that doesn’t address things, I thought about a bunch of different things. We could do some blood glucose monitoring and see if you’re getting into a hypoglycemic event after training. And then we have to figure out, well, why is that happening? Do you need more carbs? Do you need fewer carbs? Are you not actually as carbs sensitive as what you might want to be? The other thought also is, yesterday we were down at the MAC training and there’s this cool young guy who we found out is a type one diabetic, and super chatty, really engaging.

Nicki: High school kid.

Robb: High school kid. And when he came in he was pretty doughy and I don’t think had really done much activity before and is a type one diabetic, which can be difficult to manage. And he’s really been getting after it.

Nicki: He’s hitting the weights consistently and he’s looking jacked.

Robb: Looking really good.

Nicki: He looks great.

Robb: But there’s a couple of crusty old power lifters down there that have kind of taken him under their wing.

Nicki: They razz each other all the time.

Robb: They razz each other all the time. And the one guy is probably early 60s, but he’s a big fucking dude, big guy, has a really accomplished background in strength athletics and everything. And he was like, “Listen,” he said this to the young guy, he’s like, “Listen, if you really want to get big and you really want to get strong, you need to do half of what you’re doing.” He’s like, “You’re doing step aerobics down here, not lifting weights.” This kid, they’ll do set after set after set of stuff.

And I remember when I was training, I was following, at the time, the body building magazine workouts were huge volume workouts and everything. And I made some progress, but I really stalled out pretty quickly. And then it was when I started training with these power lifting coaches, they put together a power cycle where you knew what your max was and they would project forward. You knew on the Thursday three weeks from now what you were going to hit on your squat, your deadlift, your bench, your accessories. It was all based off of percentages. And I know within Westside Barbell world and everything, people look askant at that stuff, but I got pretty fucking strong doing that. I was just a hair off of elite level as a teenager doing that. And I really only competed in power lifting for two years. And this is very much out of the playbook of what Ed Coan did.

And within that context, not every day can be a barn burner. Some days you just get in and when you’re starting the beginning of the power cycle, your squat, deadlift, and bench, it may be three sets of five at 65% and it feels like absolutely nothing. And it has to feel like nothing because you can’t go back to the well every day, all the time.

And this is one of the problems with CrossFit and a lot of the high intensity training, which some of the high intensity training has kind of bled over into strength training. Again, I said it, you can’t go to the well every single day. You need some sort of a plan. Even within the Westside Barbell context where they do different iterations of max effort training each week or every two weeks, there’s a lot of nuance in there. They do a speed day, a hypertrophy day sometimes, and then also kind of a max effort day. And those max effort lifts are rotating all the time. And they’re not doing the ampules of ammonia.

Nicki: Smelling salts.

Robb: Snorting them and headbutting the bar. You can only do that once a year, maybe twice a year. You just can’t do all that type of stuff every day that you train. Steve, you sound like a big strong dude, and I don’t want to get over the tips of my skis with this, but when you’re mentioning this just super blown out CNS fatigue at the end of the training, the electrolytes could be a thing, the fueling could be a thing, but it could also be the volume and intensity, could absolutely be a deal with this.

And I would look into some of Ed Coan’s stuff, some a Pavel Tsatsouline’s material. You might need to do some adjusting on the volume and intensity of your training because you shouldn’t be knackered after each session. With jujitsu, I used to be more that way, but I really had to learn to dial my volume and intensity down. And this is where some days people just kind of maul me, but I play a more defensive game and I don’t try to match speed for speed, strength for strength. And I started doing some basic cardio training on the backside of that. And I’m not nearly as blown out. And you’ve been doing more cardio training also and feeling better at jujitsu and not so knackered. Could be also another piece of this, is you might in the background need a little bit of zone two cardio to improve the recovery.

And again, going back to the Westside Barbell folks, those guys will drag sleds, walk on a treadmill, they’re not doing aerobic aerobics, but they’re getting into that zone two cardio space because that increased mitochondrial density improvement in your cardiovascular system can, will, does improve your recovery with the strength athletics also.

Nicki: Cool, cool, cool.

Okay, our last question this week is from Shawn on conflicting information, wondering where to start. Shawn says, “I am 47 and have lived a life of low fat, high carb and lots of artificial sweeteners. The thing is, is I am getting sicker, more unhealthy and my weight is going up. There is so much conflicting information that I don’t know where to start. Every time I try to cut carbs down and dump my artificial sweetener use, my energy tanks and I end up on the cycle again. Now, please don’t judge, but at its worst, I was using 20 plus packets of Equal a day and drinking two liters of a diet of Diet Coke to keep my energy up. Please help, Shawn from New Zealand.”

Robb: Shawn of the dead.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: What are your…

Nicki: Tricky. Tricky, tricky, tricky.

Well, he’s emailing us, so yes, there’s a lot of conflicting information, but I’d like to think that you might have found a good resource. And we’ve talked about nutrition and training for years now, so there’s lots of information in the archives and whatnot. Making any type of habit change is just challenging, but the number one thing that seems to help folks is really getting that protein on track first. You’ve got the carbs, you’ve got the artificial sweeteners, you’ve got all these things that you’ve habituated to and you’ve got years of behavior, reaching for them.

Robb: Tied to it.

Nicki: Tied to it, but we’ve got to break that somehow. And the number one place to start, at least in my mind, and what we’ve seen so many people have so much success with, is getting your protein on point first.

Robb: Because we’ve had folks that have, we’ve mentioned this in other podcasts, they’ve followed our work. They’re like, “Oh, we bought The Paleo Solution in 2010, had some great improvements, but still been carrying around the extra five or 10 pounds or what have you.” Then we would do these resets in The Healthy Rebellion, and when we broke out the food scales for a couple of days, the folks were like, “Oh shit, I’m under eating protein by 50%.”

Nicki: Even people who are consciously eating protein and think that they’re getting enough protein.

Robb: Yeah, they just weren’t. They just weren’t. And we’ve never, we’ve never, ever, ever had somebody that was struggling with body composition issues that was eating adequate protein. I’m sure there is a person out there that’s eating adequate protein and then just overeating in general, it absolutely can happen, but it is so disproportionately flipped I think the other direction that hitting that adequate protein, dense protein sources, and then thinking about your minimally processed food beyond that.

And Shawn, this is the place to start. A gram of protein per pound of body weight or a gram protein per pound of ideal body weight, three meals a day, three meals and a snack, something like that. And I would just start with that. And then if you want to do a little bit of carb capping, maybe you cap carbs at 100 grams a day. You don’t have to go Joe Keto on day one.

And then also the artificial sweeteners, I’m just not so freaked out by them like so many other people are in the health space. And particularly from a how many things are you going to change at once scenario. Adding the extra protein is probably going to be a big lift for you. I would be surprised if it’s not a significant change. And then if we just shift you to maybe some carb capping of around 100 grams a day and trying to make it on the low glycemic load side.

Nicki: Minimally processed as possible. Yeah.

Robb: Yeah, all that stuff. That’s probably going to be a big change in and of itself. And so then within that context, let’s not worry too much about the artificial sweetener use. Some people would say, “Well, he could shift to Stevia or something.” It’s like, “Sure, fine, whatever.” From a toxicological perspective and everything else, it’s possible that these sweeteners are causing some appetite dysregulation such that Shawn is tending to peel out and then maybe make poor choices, but this is where clean out the house, get the pantry squared away, make sure you’re on point with protein, and then maybe a month down the road we start trying to titrate down the artificial sweeteners or something like that.

But even then, if you’re rocking it and you’re feeling good and you’re losing weight and you’re getting the body composition you want, maybe you change that, maybe you don’t. And again, to the point about the conflicting information, there are folks that just freak out about artificial sweeteners. Early in my career, I was more of a stickler about this because we had a couple of clients that the artificial sweeteners were definitely a trigger for these folks and we had to sneak up on and we had to go really protein centric model, but just getting this person to drink water was a big lift eventually.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: This was Jorge in my first book, but it worked over time. It worked and the guy went from 400 pounds and now he’s about a buck 90 and has maintained this over the long haul. It can work. I think that those are the strategies, to pull in adequate protein, maybe some carb capping, around 100 grams a day, minimally processed foods ideally. And let’s just do that as a beginning and then we can maybe dip our toes into thinking about the artificial sweeteners.

But again, what you’re describing here is that you’re doing this wholesale change, a ton of different things, and then the wheels fall off the wagon and then we just end up with total recidivism on it. Let’s find a middle ground on that that we know generally works. Good protein, minimally processed food, little bit of carb capping to help with the appetite control. Maybe someday you go keto, maybe someday you don’t. Maybe someday you totally peel out the artificial sweeteners. And again, maybe you don’t, but let’s find somewhere where we get a month of adherence and then we can start asking questions about changing. And Shawn, if you do this, as always, please report back.

Nicki: Let us know. Yeah.

Robb: And then maybe we can provide the next step about where we go with this.

Nicki: And the only other thing I would maybe add is that if you do end up, because it’s challenging, right? You’re making a lot of changes. And even if you just do the protein change, there’s going to be circumstances and events where there’s cake or there’s this or there’s that. If you do end up having a bigger whack of carbs, go for a walk afterwards. That post meal walk can just help with blood sugar regulation. It can help with energy. It can help with just moving your body and feeling good in your body, getting outside. There’s tons of reasons why going for a walk, especially after a meal, is really beneficial. That’s a little tool to have in your back pocket.

We always like to say, “Don’t throw in the towel. You’re one meal away from getting back on track.” If life throws a curve ball or you’re in a situation where you end up eating something that wasn’t on plan and wasn’t part of the changes that you’re trying to make, don’t just scrap it all. Just know, “Okay, I’m one meal away and I’m going to go on a walk.” And that can kind of help keep people going forward.

Robb: Yep.

Nicki: Cool. Yes, Shawn, please report back and let us know how you are doing. And I think that’s a wrap for this week’s show. Please check out our show sponsor LMNT. Remember, if you want to try the chocolate caramel, which is this winter’s limited time flavor, you can grab that in the Chocolate Medley box. You get 10 of the chocolate caramel, 10 of the mint chocolate salt, and 10 of the regular chocolate salt. There’s also tons of great recipes for peppermint mochas and caramel macchiatos and all kinds of fun recipes using those winter flavors. All of them are meant to be enjoyed hot. Winter is coming, it’s the perfect time. What else?

Robb: The night is long and full of chairs.

Nicki: The night is long and full of chairs. Yes. You can grab all those at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com/robb. Folks, have a fabulous weekend and we’ll catch you next week.

Robb: Bye everybody.

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