The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #250 - Matt Gallant & Wade Lightheart

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I'm about to have. I have been looking forward to this for quite a while. And fun fact for friends, I think I probably have to fact check this, but I think today's guests have actually been collectively on my shows the most of any guests. I'm pretty sure. You guys have been on both of my shows quite a few times and original guests. Way back in the day, even in the early days of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast, we had you guys on that show back when I was hosting it with Jen Stevens. And back then, what we loved and still loved is just how you have such a comprehensive dietary agnostic almost approach to the dietary warfare world and how you really understand that different diets work for different people. And we had quite a few episodes on digestion with you guys and on this show as well on the biohacking podcast. So I was super excited. Oh, and then before that, then I actually, I don't know if I even said your names yet. I'm here with Matt Gallant and Wade Lightheart, who I always want to call Wade Lightyear, but I will not make that mistake. I actually had the wonderful pleasure of meeting both of you in person last year at Dave Asprey's biohacking conference. So that was super exciting as well. I love when I get to meet people in real life, but the topic of today's show, so Matt and Wade have an epic, epic new book friends. Oh my goodness. Okay. So it is very appropriately titled. It's called The Ultimate Nutrition Bible. It really, really is that the subtitle easily create the perfect diet that fits your lifestyle, goals, and genetics. And this book friends, I mean, it really could be the masterclass and resource for all questions you have about different diets, about how to actually diet and lose weight, about how to pursue and apply proper nutrition, how to support digestion. It's got a whole section about genetics, which they even say in the book that they only kept in like 50% of what they wanted to have in, which makes me wonder what the original like non -edited version of this book looked like. And you can use it as a weight because it's so big and it's in hardcover and it's beautiful. So I have so many questions. I am so excited about this conversation. Matt and Wade, thank you so much for being here.

Matt Gallant:
It's great to be here. It's great to be back. Thanks for having us.

Melanie Avalon:
Yes, yes. Oh, and you guys run by optimizers, which my friends, my friends, well, my friends, my audience and my friends are major, major fan of you guys for so long. They've been taking your supplements for years and years. So thank you for that as well. So okay, to start things off, trying to side because I just feel like you guys are so familiar with my audience and likewise, but I know there's probably a lot of people here as well. And it's been a while. So before we dive actually into the book, do you guys want to both briefly tell like a short background of how you both individually got interested in nutrition and diet and how you met?

Matt Gallant:
Sure. So I did my first diet when I was 15, came home from a school one day, my uncle told me I was fat. It hurt me, pissed me off. So I got on the Atkins diet, started jogging, and I went from 190 to 147 in six months. Then I felt weak and scrawny, especially one day after I went to the beach and I saw these two big bodybuilders. So I got obsessed with bodybuilding, started training 12 times a week, did what's called the anabolic diet, which was written by Dr. Maura DiPasquale. It was a cyclical ketogenic diet. You would carb load on the weekends, be ketogenic during the week, went from 147 to 235. So that worked well. Fun fact, the first time I ever saw Wade was the night that I competed, the only time I ever competed in bodybuilding. I was 19 and I was in the juniors. Wade won the show. We didn't talk that night, but we did see each other and he was memorable. And then fast forward a couple of years later, we were both really successful trainers. I was a trainer at the gym where his mom worked out and Wade came back to visit his parents. We just struck up a friendship and then I moved to Vancouver. We were two of the busiest trainers in World's Gym downtown Vancouver. And Wade was winning national natural bodybuilding championships as a vegetarian, which was really weird and unusual. So we decided to start a business and market what Wade was doing. And it was successful. And then in 2014, we rebranded to Bo -Optimizers because really at this point in our journey, we're more obsessed and focused on health than bodybuilding. But I'll pass it to Wade to share his story.

Wade Lightheart:
Yeah, I got started when I was a teenager trying to gain some muscle. My sister was dying of cancer, and I realized that your health and your life isn't a guarantee. And I had a kind of a very narrow version of, well, if I had all these muscles that I saw in bodybuilding magazines, then maybe I could be healthier or more vibrant. And then when she passed away was my first year university, I studied exercise physiology at the University of New Brunswick and began on a quest about, well, how do you build muscle? How do you build health? How do you build strength? And I was frankly unimpressed with my university education. I felt it was very compartmentalized. It served as a good background, you know, anatomy, physiology, biology, although those sort of components. But when I would ask my professors like deep questions on performance and stuff, they really didn't have the answer. So I went on a quest and started looking at people who were producing results while also competing. And I have terrible genetics. I should never have been in a bodybuilding contest in my life. But I love the sport. To me, it was an expression of art. And it was also a really cool thing where you could run a lot of experiments and actually see the end of one result. And, you know, end of one and when that means is just you yourself gets a bad rap in today's world of double blind, peer reviewed periodicals. But, you know, over the last four years, the you know, the cats out of the bag, many of those institutions have been politicized or corrupt or the findings from it really don't apply to the individual or the conclusions they derive take so long to get there. You don't have time to wait for those new conclusions. But there is an emerging group and was back then in the bodybuilding world, which was the original biohackers. And that has now translated into the biological optimization community. I do have a little point on value hackers that I think, you know, a hack is very much like a bodybuilder taking a shortcut. You don't know what the consequences are are where an optimizer is more someone who is, you know, factoring as many factors impossible to get the desired outcome. And so for me, going along with my competitive career, as Matt indicated, had some success on that level. But I got into the holistic health clinic in Vancouver simultaneously to my, you know, the pinnacle of my bodybuilding career. And I found that many of the insights that you had on the high performance side also had insights for people who were struggling with a variety of conditions. And then the whole diet thing was always fascinating to me because really dietary strategy was solved by bodybuilders and fitness competitors decades ago. And yet I continue to see the diet guru versus diet guru and diet theory versus diet theory. And so many people would come to myself and would come to Matt and they would say, well, so -and -so says I should be on the keto diet and so -and -so says I should be on a raw food diet. And of course, him and I argued back and forth because I was a raw food guy, he was a keto advocate. And yet we knew that there were there were people that didn't respond to those diets for a variety of reasons. Notwithstanding psychological, emotional, spiritual and religious components, which, you know, maybe variants to genetics. And then genetics came into play and epigenetics came into play. And so the individual gets exposed to so much information, they get analysis paralysis. And we decided that we wanted to solve that once and for all by extracting the gold nuggets and commonalities between what makes dietary success, but relative to the goal, the outcome and sustainability. Because at the end of the day, if you can't if you don't have adherence, you don't have a clear goal. And if you don't have adherence to the strategy that's going to allow you to achieve that goal, then it's not the right diet for you. And so many people don't take that into consideration in their long term results. And we really believe that that's one of the major obstacles why there's why so many people struggle to be healthy, to live their best life. And yet there's an emerging group of people who are just absolutely killing it and taking apart those things to provide those insights for people.

Melanie Avalon:
I love this conversation so much. You mentioned how you had, you know, terrible genes and should never have been a bodybuilder. It just reminded me of one of the things I read in the book, which was actually very freeing and eye opening. And it was in the genetics chapter and you talk about how, how there's all these different genes that people can have that, you know, can set them up to be a certain way. But you say something about how like, like, don't freak out. I'm paraphrasing, but basically don't panic. You don't have horrible genes, like actually horrible genes, because if you did, you wouldn't be here. I was like, Oh, that's, that's actually really, really true. I like that. I'm gonna keep that going forward. But going back to all of the dietary wars and all the things, kind of side which direction to take this. It's so, so true about the dietary warfare. And I was telling you beforehand, when we're talking that I'm developing a dating app, for example, and it involves food. And we sat down, we were trying to find like, the one food that would be like the universal icon. And we're like, there is none. Like there's like water, like water is the I think the only thing people agree on and not even that if you're like dry fasting.

Wade Lightheart:
I actually did a lot of research in water. I've experimented with 160 plus different water systems. And when you get into water, there's a water war as well. So any field that you get into, you start running into this whole aspect. And you have to, I think it's a good caveat and I want to put on this because there's a perspective piece that everybody needs to take into consideration. And that is, number one, none of us know everything. Number two, every expert is operating within a limited field of awareness and a certain level of expertise. And oftentimes when they are explaining things, they're relying on generalizations in order to explain conceptual components. At best, 80% of that applies to the individual. And the difference between being successful on your diet and being unsuccessful in your diet is in that 20% individualization. And that's where people are getting it wrong.

Melanie Avalon:
that really makes sense. And I was talking with you guys before this as well, how in the holistic paleo world that I come from, even biohacking a bit, there's all this focus on health, which is super important. But there's also often a focus on looking at food quality and maybe fasting and when you eat and when you don't eat, but they often shy away from having a actual dietary protocol to follow that is so representative, I think, in the bodybuilding world you guys come from. And it's almost a little bit judgmental, I think. I mean, maybe I'm just saying it from my perspective, but it's kind of like, oh, no, don't diet, don't go on a diet. Really, it's not about that or it's not about calories, it's about insulin, it's about carbs instead. There's just all these different ideas. And then I just find it really interesting, and I'm talking all over the place right now, but you guys actually, in the beginning of the book, you talk about the different goals that you have that people can have when it comes to dieting. And there's a judgment surrounding some of those goals and not others, which if you step back, I don't really know why that is, because in the end, it's all about people doing what makes them happy. But people will judge, for example, if your goal is aesthetic, that's not okay. But it's okay if your goal is athletic performance. So what are your thoughts on this idea of the goals that we're pursuing, the judgment surrounding it? And is it okay to actually follow a diet purely for a specific goal that may seem superficial to other people?

Matt Gallant:
Yeah, for many reasons. And I laughed because, again, I got caught up in a lot of those theories, the insulin theory of obesity and all of these things. And fortunately we've overcome them. And just to cover a few basic things that are related to your question. One is if you get your body fat percentage into the optimal range, not into a competitive, you're super lean cut or shredded range. But a healthy range, an optimal range for you, your health will tend to improve. Your biomarkers will tend to improve. The same thing is true for building lean muscle mass. We know that it is one of the most important variables for longevity, for blood sugar management. So those objectives, whether it's building lean muscle mass or losing body fat to get into range and ideally then maintaining that range for the rest of your life, are very supportive of health, of longevity, health span, lifespan. And I think that's really important because a lot of people will eat a lot of quote unquote healthy food might be nutrient rich, rich, but maybe they're overeating it and they're gaining body fat. That's, that's totally doable on any type of diet. Some diets might be a little bit easier than others. But one of the things we wanted to emphasize in the book is that calories in calories out is real. And there's two camps in that world. One is, you know, the, the hardcore calories in calories out group, which is, it's just the laws of thermodynamics, which is true. And then there's another camp, which is believing in, no, there's these magic variables that make calories in calories out obsolete, which is not accurate. There are variables that will dramatically change your calorie expenditure. For an example, building lean muscle mass is quite possibly the number one thing that can help you burn more calories, not just from the workout itself, but from the proteins, protein synthesis from the lean body mass building that occurs. It, it requires a tremendous amount of calories. And that's one of the reasons why bodybuilders are able to get so lean for competitions, far leaner than most endurance runners or people doing a lot of cardio. So again, these are tools. There's a lot of other ways you can increase your metabolism, whether it's improving your mitochondrial health, you know, sleeping better. If you sleep better, you will tend to produce more growth hormone, more testosterone, which will help you burn more body fat. Talking about cold exposure, which can help you again, increase your calorie expenditure. So there's a lot of ways to, you know, slice the onion, so to speak. And I think looking at all of those, and we have a whole chapter on it called optimized metabolism that covers that is, is a better way of just looking at calories in calories out. And on the calories in part, one of the things that Wade and I are big proponents of is increasing your protein and increasing your fiber are probably the two easiest ways to improve everything. We know that if you increase your protein, your net calories will be decreased by 25 to 30% with your protein intake, meaning that your body has to burn 25 to 30% of that protein intake just to break it down and digest it. And then I'm going to pass it on to the fiber King, which is Wade T. Lightheart to talk about fiber and, and all the other aspects of this question.

Wade Lightheart:
Yeah. So when it comes to achieving your ideal shape, you can break it down to a couple of unique factors. There's the calories you can consume. Then there is your metabolism, how much you're burning. Okay. And oftentimes the calories, the dietary strategy that people are using is actually lowering metabolism. And you want to invert that. You want to increase your metabolism relative to your calories. So if your strategy is too aggressive, if it doesn't have long -term adherence, right? So can you live with the diet that you are following? If you can't adhere to that, you're dead in the morrow. And if you're trying to train your way out of it with, you know, endless hours of cardio, which oftentimes deplete your metabolism, then you've got an issue. So what is the biggest factor in dietary adherence? Satiety. Satiety is a fancy world for not being hungry. Hunger. And we go into this with the extensive hunger that you have to go through. And both Matt and I have gone through extensive dietary periods where we suspended our body's natural appetite. And we ran into serious metabolic problems because of it and took us a while to correct out of it. And a lot of people who become very successful in a diet actually are setting themselves up for failure. Too aggressive, too quickly, too much exercise with insufficient calories or, you know, they're using the willpower drill and their diet isn't creating satiety. And so eventually the, you know, the hunger hormones take over and you're just running the calorie roller coaster at that point and usually gain up more weight. And that's where the world is right now. The world, the people who diet now, I think the average person has been on five or six different diets in their lifetime already. And since the dietary concept really started to emerge in the late seventies, particularly, we've had a steady incline of people getting fatter and fatter and more out of shape and more healthy and life expectancies going down. And then there's a small margin that we integrated before who are getting bigger, faster, stronger, more lean, better looking, super healthy, living longer. And so you want to understand the variance between the strategies deployed and those two things. And that's what we really still illustrate in the book so that you can craft the perfect diet for you right now that you can easily adhere to it. And fiber is, I think, the unrecognized superstar in the room. Virtually, most of the population does not get sufficient amount of fiber, nor do they get the different types of fiber, which have extremely powerful longevity parameters. There was a meta analysis I posted on our website not that long ago in regarding to the different types of fiber and it can improve your life expectancy by 12 to 35%. And that's on an all causes mortality chart. So why wouldn't you incorporate these things? And I use fiber because I'm on a plant based diet, I use fiber to offset my lack of protein. If I was on a carnivore diet, I'm getting lots of protein and maybe a little fiber. And so I'm trying to offset those two things. And I use fiber as a way to feel satiated because I have a gene that actually leads me to overeat my body doesn't shut my body doesn't naturally feel satiated easily. So I have to eat either high amounts of protein or high amounts of fiber and on a plant based diet, it's hard to get that much protein in the system. So I offset it with upping my fiber and then I'm good if I do those two things but it took me years to figure that out.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm super curious Wade, because you said you first came to bodybuilding, you know, with this idea that muscle would be important for your longevity and the importance of health and then Matt a second ago was talking about, you know, the importance of anabolism and supporting muscle and all, and all of this journey. Bodybuilders, what is their life expectancy and do they have reduced life expectancy bodybuilders?

Wade Lightheart:
The life expectancy of bodybuilders is not that good. There's a reason for that. Most high -level amateurs and most professionals augment their diets with hormones, steroids, insulin, growth hormone, a wide variety of anti -catabolic thyroid medications, painkillers, you name it. If you walk into, and one of the reasons I retired, my first retirement was in 1998 after I went to the national championships and I recognized that in order to be successful as a bodybuilder, not only do you have to have the right genetics and the right training, you need to have the genetic capacity to survive this sheer amount of drugs that you were going to do in order to do that. Now, that's not a condemnation on bodybuilders because a lot of the longevity science has actually come out of what bodybuilders were doing to preserve muscle and to optimize their hormone therapy, which is what a lot of people in the anti -aging market are now doing. The bodybuilders on the extreme level were like Formula One car drivers. Formula One car drivers are taking extreme risks, driving a car at the high level of performance and then the engineer's technology that can be applied to your daily driver. Their extremeness makes the better place. The other thing is I do believe that a lot of bodybuilders have consumed high amounts of protein and undigested protein in the intestinal tract, I think is a contributor to a lot of different conditions. If you're doing this over 40, 50 years, the benefits of the cosmetic benefits of the bodybuilding diet are offset by the physiological detriments of that. What I was trying to look at was how do I find a happy medium between performing at a high level but not letting that high level exceed my capacity for living a healthy life. We broke down in the book five different categories. The reality is if you're deciding that athletic dominance or high performance in a physical field is your number one goal, and that is for a large amount of people, then you are going to make sacrifices on the longevity side in order to hit that higher arc. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as much. That's a consequence that when they interviewed all of the Olympic athletes after the Dublin inquiry, the Ben Johnson affair or whatever, and they asked them, if you knew that you could take a drug, not get caught, and that you would be guaranteed of winning a gold medal but had a 95% chance of dying in five years, would you do it? And it was an extraordinary, it was like way over 80% of those athletes said that they would. That's the mindset of someone who wants to be world class, to be a world champion. So I think that's not a mindset that the average person has. I think most people just want to be fit or be healthy or be thing, but when you get bitten by those bugs, you're going to calibrate towards those objectives and strategies that it's going to allow you to get there.

Matt Gallant:
Just add one little thing on top of everything we had said. When you're 300 pounds, which some of these pro body boulders are, some are even heavier, even though the majority of that is lean muscle mass, that produces an incredible strain on the heart and other organ systems. So on top of all the drugs and all the things they do, and in our other book, From Sick to Superhuman, we talk about the difference between optimization and maximization. And what Wade was illustrating, talking about athletic performance or peak athletic performance or peak muscle mass or peak getting shredded, that is the maximization game and you start paying the price on the health side.

Melanie Avalon:
piece, I thought it was really interesting what you said in the book about the prevalence of, I forgot the word for it, the accumulation of proteins.

Matt Gallant:
in the supercentenarians. What was the word for it? Well, it's protein agglomeration in the cells. Basically, undigested protein inside your body is incredibly toxic and dangerous. Let's start by talking about leaky gut. What is leaky gut and why is that so problematic? Well, typically there's essentially holes in the intestinal lining and the junctions where protein molecules and other undigested food can get into your bloodstream. I mean, the worst case scenario is your body generates an allergic reaction and that's literally what an allergic reaction is. It is a protein that your body recognizes as a threat and tries to fight back. Now, those are acute problems with undigested protein but currently one of the hypothesis on why people that are 100 plus pass away is that there's been this long -term protein accumulation in the cells that make the cells stop functioning properly. And I do think that's probably where fasting autophagy plays a big role. It helps your body clean some of those things, taking enzymes on an empty stomach, I think helps clean some of those things. So there's things I think we can do to counteract that but you wanna make sure you're breaking down your protein into amino acids, which is again, what enzymes do.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. And so then it comes back to it's always like you can't win because there's this focus on, you know, protein and the major importance of proteins for protein for muscle and longevity and satiety and all the things. But then also, you know, you have to make sure you're actually digesting the protein because too much is, you know, an issue. So there's never an easy solution.

Wade Lightheart:
I want to comment on that and here's that you actually illustrated something that we address in the book and that is you can't achieve all the goals that you want simultaneously and I think people want everything and they want it all and they want it all right now. You've got to look at your dietary strategy over the course of a lifetime, so the early part of your life you want to build as much muscle as possible. So focusing on weight training exercises, building as much muscle mass when you're in an optimal hormonal state and maybe over -reliance on protein at that stage because that helps you achieve your muscle building and aesthetic goals probably okay. Then as you get into middle age you're kind of moved to likely a more performance diet whether that's a performance diet relative to your work or your family responsibilities or if you happen to be fortunate like I was my you know my athletic and business career kind of tied together and so I was looking at that point you know that you had to move to a situation where you're emphasizing cardiovascular health you're looking at longevity parameters and then somewhere along that line you're making the decision am I going to use you know bioidentical hormones to augment a diminishing hormonal supply you know I've been able to kick that can down the road I haven't been able I haven't done that but I know that for some people that's going to be the different maker in quality of life so when you look at the goals is do you need to build muscle do you need to lose weight are you looking to dominate in performance do you need your brain operating at like world -class levels because your life is dependent on how your brain thinks or are you choosing longevity and most people will look at aesthetics on the first side of life performance on the second part and then everybody gets to you know how do I maintain and save or improve my health as the ravages of aging start to take you know start to you know show the show the toll on you.

Melanie Avalon:
And speaking of goals, so something I loved in the book and I got so excited about because this is how I function so much and I think there is a big misconception here in the world. So you talk about the role of dopamine in goals and I, what I find so interesting about the concept of dopamine in goals is I feel like there's this narrative out there that, so basically there's this idea that if we have a goal, we're going to achieve it and then it's not going to feel as good as we think or it'll be a momentary high and then we just won't feel satisfied. And the idea there is that we need to find ourselves and find our purpose somewhere else and not have a focus on these goals. It's more like esoteric, psychological, you need to meditate type response, whereas the way I see it is I understand that. I get a goal, I get dopamine, it feels great and then I'm on to the next goal and I really enjoy that. Like I think it's just the best journey ever and you talk in the book about this importance of basically having a never -ending dopamine drip. Like you got to have the next dopamine drip lined up and I was like, yes, I love this. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, the role of dopamine and goals.

Matt Gallant:
Yeah. So I'm wired to have a above average genetic response to dopamine. I've got very strong dopamine systems, which is very good when I'm doing good things and very bad when I've done bad things. I've been having drank alcohol in 15 years for that reason. So yeah, and understanding your dopamine system and understanding how you can generate your own dopamine drip is one of the I would say almost everybody that's super successful, but I know has intuitively figured that out for themselves. And let's talk about like, what is a dopamine loop? It really starts with deciding what's important to you. As soon as you truly decide internally, not put it on a piece of paper or put it on the wall, but you actually change your core values. You change the ranking of that thing in your own mind, in your psyche, and you decide, you know what, this is really, really important. You've just set up the dopamine loop. And as you're moving towards that objective, towards that thing that is important to you, we know that your brain is going to generate more dopamine, which feels good. It makes effort feel pleasurable, as Huberman says very eloquently. And the downside, quote unquote, of dopamine is that when you hit that goal, you will get a big spike and then you will tend to go below baseline. And the way that feels is you feel a little bit down. It's like, where's my drive? And a lot of people that have these massive, massive long -term goals, like, you know, selling a business or weight competing or things like that, once they achieve that thing and they don't have another goal lined up, they tend to feel down, depressed, et cetera. And, you know, one of the narratives in the entrepreneurial world has been the second mountain, which is kind of what you're alluding to. However, in our opinion, you know, one of the best ways of constantly being driven and motivated, which is obviously a good thing, is you want to have a sequence of goals. You want to have multiple objectives. And I used to do that as a personal trainer. You know, I rarely lost clients because as we were getting closer to their first goal, I would say, okay, well, let's lose another 10 pounds. And after that, we're going to focus on building some lean muscle mass. So I would be creating these never ending dopamine loops for them, which keeps them engaged, keeps them motivated compared to, okay, we hit the goal. Thank you. Good luck. You know, and that's it. And I'm going to pass it on to Wade because I think Wade's bodybuilding journey is a perfect illustration of how to do that tactically, step by step.

Wade Lightheart:
Yeah, thanks for that. So just to comment on, you know, when I hear those people, well, it's okay, and all that stuff. I call those the mantras of mediocrity. And yeah, that's okay. But that's not, you know, if I go to the doctor, and they say everything's normal, I'm terrified. Why? Because in the medical community, normal means that I'm going to be on a disability adjusted life expectancy at 60 years old, and I'm going to be relying on prescription medications and surgeries for the next 20 years of my life, and all causes mortality keeps going up and life expectancy keeps going down because of an overreliance on, you know, the pharmaceutical industrial complex. That's those mantras are coming out of that field. I don't want anything to do with it. I want to go into those situations. If I'm in an emergency situation, I've got a serious diagnosis on an illness. I have a car accident, something going on. For me to echo. So Matt and I have been committed to building this new model, which is the book is is essentially a compilation of 20 years of experiments and conversations that we were able to arrive at some common ground to build a new paradigm about health and vitality. And when it comes to dopamine and motivation, we're motivated as entrepreneurs and as business people and as educators, because we never lost the value that the feedback biochemical payoff of helping someone else achieve our their goals. We found that we discovered that juice back when we were personal trainers, and that juice continues to go to this day and why we created this company so we could help millions of people transform your life. And we're well on our way to that goal. And it never gets old, which is a different motivation level than maybe just dopamine alone. There's another biochemical feedback that comes in. As a human helping another human, we're social creatures. We feel something when we do that. And that's also a powerful motivation. So some people are motivated by that. For me, when it comes to dopamine, I look at my big, hairy, audacious goal. And that was for me, as a 15 year old kid competing at, you know, the Mr. Olympia, Mr. Universe. Owning a nutritional supplement company that sold products around the world and living in Venice Beach, California, I got to train next to Arnold Schwarzenegger at Gold's Gym. Those are my goals as a 15 -year -old. Now, it took me 33 years to get there, okay? So how do you stay motivated for 33 years? Well, I would work backwards from each one of those goals, so to just use the bodybuilding timeline because it was a little easier. I would say, okay, to be at the Mr. Universe, I have to win the national championship. To win the national championship, I have to win the provincial or, like, state championship. To win that, I have to go to the local, so to win the local soul, I need some muscles. To need some muscles, I need an exercise program. You know, I'm going to need, and it really went back to, I need a gym. I had to build my own gym in a barn because there was no gyms around where I would build it in the woods. So I just broke it down to the point of what could I do today, and then I set myself up is if I adhered to my objectives of that day, I got that dopamine hit. I took a step towards that goal each day. So my measurement wasn't – and I had the advantage of not having social media and all of those external influences and not having, like, you know, order on Amazon, and it comes three hours later to your house. You know, like, all of the instant response mechanisms in today's world, I think, makes it a little bit harder for people to think in a long -term format. And so recognizing that I was on the path and kept making adjustments along that path, and it was a long journey. It took me 10 years to win my first show. It took me 16 years to get to my first world championships. You know, it took me 20 years to build, essentially, a world -class company. So it's – and the outcomes are never as valuable as who you become on the journey. So those goals are merely signposts that set you directionally, and that direction needs to be in a line with your values and your emotions. If it is, you're living, what I say, a compelling life. You're happy about what you're doing and you wouldn't imagine to be anywhere else because you're in alignment with your values, and these goals become signposts of, oh, wow, I made that, and so it's a celebration, and I'm just getting started because I've got that next goal, like Matt said. We've got that next goal on the horizon. So, okay, let's progress over there. But I'm always coming back to, at the start of the day, is my daily habits, is my daily routine going in the direction of my goal, or is it hindering me towards the action of the goal? And that becomes a methodology of self -discovery and self -recalibration and also gives you the humility to go out and get help on the areas because your results are your results. Your results are a collection of the habits you develop, and the habits you develop are directly proportional to the goals that you set and the adherence to those goals that you have.

Matt Gallant:
One little thing I want to add is we also talk about like micro dopamine loops, really acknowledging the small wins, whether it's, you know, I'll give you an example, a fresh one, a good friend of mine just came to the gym for the first time two days ago, but it's been a long time and I just told him like, you know, that's a huge win. Like you're in the gym and I think a lot of people don't celebrate these small little victories, which is, you know, a great opportunity to experience those little dopamine responses, whether it's you ate the right meal, you lost the pound, you went to the gym, you ran, whatever it is that you're doing, just consciously being grateful, actively appreciating those things is one of the easiest ways to add even a little bit more dopamine and drive to the whole thing. Because I think a lot of people just have these long -term or mid -term goals, but having things that you're, you feel you're winning at every day throughout the day and we can attest, you know, we hang out a lot and I'll often say, Hey, we're winning. That is me acknowledging in that moment that whatever we're doing is, is a victory and, you know, it just helps you stay motivated and driven. It helps you feel better in the moment. So I just wanted to add that.

Melanie Avalon:
When I was reading that whole chapter, I was like in my notes, I have like written so many times. It's like, this is me. But I got really excited because I just feel like it's a system and approach to life that I mean, it works so well for me. And I just want everybody to experience it or understand it. So friends, definitely check out the book because there's so much more on it. Like some of the other things you talked about with it was like the dopamine and noradrenaline dance and how you can really do, when you're in really intense heart situations, how your noradrenaline goes up and you can actually combat that with dopamine. Is that correct? you

Matt Gallant:
Yeah, that was one of the most powerful insights I heard from some of the early Huberman podcast. And just to give everybody the science, the molecule that causes animals to quit during physical exertion is noradrenaline. In other words, once noradrenaline, which will get stimulated during times of stress, gets too high, animals, people just quit. And the antidote or the solution is generating dopamine, which then pushes down that noradrenaline and allows people to keep going well past the point of physical discomfort. And as a teenager, when I got to bodybuilding, there was a bodybuilder named Tom Platz, and he had the freakiest legs that had ever been built and silted his day. I mean, one of the greatest legs of all time in the world of bodybuilding. And he was known for pushing himself to levels of effort that maybe no other human has ever gone to. He was famous for squatting 425 pounds for 24, 25 reps. Nobody's been able to recreate a lot of his achievements and feats. And when you hear him talk about what he was doing mentally, he was creating these micro dopamine loops during his sets. And he's famous for just five more reps, five more reps. So he would break down his sets into five more reps. So literally during a set, he's creating this micro dopamine loop of, okay, I'm just going to do five more reps. And he does, you know, when he gets the five, he does it again. And he keeps going and going until his body just can't anymore. And Wade, maybe you've got some other examples. And I mean, and David Goggins is probably one of the more well known recent examples, but Wade, maybe you know, some other people that are known for that.

Wade Lightheart:
Yeah, so what Matt's illustrating is how do people get to extraordinary levels of performance, the superhuman level of performance? The Navy SEALs talk about the values and identifications that they have, like, you know, one of their mantras is the harder it gets, the better we like it. So how you define adversity often indicates the level of adversity that you can handle. That's what builds resilience. And if there's anything I would say that is common and I'm fascinated with high performance athletes, I always have been because, like, what is it that makes a person? You know, we used to watch the Olympics from the time I was a little kid and just celebrate these people who are just pushing the human body beyond comprehension. And what could we learn from it? You know, and for me, I can speak to this directly, you know, to build an extraordinary level of muscle beyond your, you know, walking around or living or something, especially if you have lousy genetics like myself, it's really hard. And so you have to develop a different relationship with pain. So I learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger that pain was pleasure. Like, pain meant that I was going to get my goal. So when I start redefining the things that I don't want to embrace through that value system of, oh, yeah, now that it's the harder it gets, the better we like it. You know, these type of psychological tricks, these become self -fulfilling prophecies to access our inner pharmacy. So if we look at the placebo effect, right, which is very legitimate and oftentimes outperforms, you know, the pharmacological effects in studies. Well, what is working there? What's working there is the absolute belief that what's what you're taking is working, which is in alignment with your values. Well, how do what is the mechanism that allows that to work is that you have an inner pharmacy in your in your own body that you can access in what every single high performance person does is they access their inner pharmacy in a way that puts them in a positive state. And I would also, you know, my partner, she's studying her PhD in psychology. So we have a lot of conversations around neurochemistry and neurophysiology. Matt and I participate in brain optimization components, and we're fascinated with the whole aspect of neurophysiology and neurochemistry. Well, right now there's a common element to kind of play to a victim type mentality across the world. And I believe that that is the actual inverse of leveraging your inner pharmacy in a negative way. Oh, you know, everybody in their families, big bone, we never been able to lose weight. Oh, you know, diabetes or cardiovascular disease runs in my life. Therefore, I better not go to the gym. I better not push myself. I might take a gym or I might have a stroke. Very seldom are those things actually legitimate. But when you keep canonizing it in your speech and your identity, you're you're adhering to a philosophy of less than. And yet there's people who have all those conditions that have a shift in their perception and then achieve high levels of health and vitality. So what changed? What changed is their values. What changed is their musts. What changed was their reasons why. And the reason those things work is because you start leveraging these neurochemicals, which are explained by guys like Huberman really well. But you don't have to know all the terminology to study the patterns of success. So if you're struggling with something in your life, whatever it is, gaining weight or building muscle or, you know, being a world class person at something, you got to go there. You got you got to find examples of people who are more or less like you that overcame the same challenges that you wanted to overcome and building in their values, their goals, their strategies, they're like borrowing off those and applying them in your own life to access your inner pharmacy of performance.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that so much. I've never heard that term before in a pharmacy. I'm going to stick with that. And thank you for commenting on the, yeah, I, the victimhood epidemic today is, I mean, that's a whole soapbox that we could go on, but it really, I just think it takes away so much from people when it comes to personal agency and the changes that they can make in their life. And there's just so much potential for people. Yeah, one comment on that. Yeah, please do.

Wade Lightheart:
The reality is, is on a certain level, we're all victims and we're all perpetrators depending on what scale that you're looking at. For example, everybody listening to this podcast or everybody that has a cell phone is essentially a perpetrator of really unfortunate things in third world countries where people are getting lithium batteries or things like that, right? So does that make you a perpetrator? Yes, it does. So should you feel bad about that or should you work on making the world a better place? There are also probably areas in everybody's life where they did get slighted. They did get a raw deal. It didn't work out for them. They didn't get the right genetics or the right economic situation or the right social situation. And so in that case, you were a victim of those circumstances. Is that going to help you achieve your goals? It's not. Nor is it beating yourself up because you have that phone. Now, there are people that are going to take up those causes and very well glad that they're doing that to bring awareness about moving to a more sane society. But when you're using whatever your current life situation as a crutch, then that's not something that leads to a society that's healthy, happy, and living their best life. It's a society that's set up to rely on other people to alleviate your own shortcomings. And that's not sustainable over time. So when people talk about sustainable living, sustainable weight, sustainable health, sustainable lifestyle, it's all gobbledygook if you're not taking personal accountability about the things that you can control and accepting the things that you can't.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, and actually probably a great example really relevant to this conversation would be it can be pretty easy to blame the processed food industry for the obesity epidemic, you know, because these foods are arguably engineered to hack our, you know, our dopamine system, our reward system, you know, taste amazing, be high calorie, hyper palatable.

Matt Gallant:
low satiety.

Melanie Avalon:
But yes, so all the things, it's all stacked against you, so it completely makes sense why we are eating them and having an obesity epidemic, but at the same time, you still have agency. And to that point, you actually talk in the book about the guy who did the Twinkie diet, for example, and lost weight. So actually, you actually even could eat the foods and lose weight if you implemented enough calorie restriction with it, I suppose. Do you have thoughts on that?

Matt Gallant:
Yeah, one of my favorite parts of the book is that section where we talk about starvation survival mechanisms. And if I was to summarize the reasons for the obesity epidemic, it's the perfect storm of ancient genetic wiring, which has one objective, survive. And we're on some level, almost all of us are programmed to overeat when we're exposed with food. I mean, that's how our ancestors made it to this point. Second, you have, again, everything you just mentioned, chemically engineers, scientifically engineered food that is calorie dense, nutrient deficient, optimized for low satiety and hyper palatable. And then on top of all that, we have incredibly easy access, easier than ever. I can pull up my phone right now and go to Uber Eats and order 10 ,000 calories of food that's gonna be in my doorstep in 30 minutes. And it is that simple, at least in my mind. Yeah, there's psychological reasons, of course, in all of these other aspects. But if I was to summarize the perfect storm that has led us to this obesity epidemic, that is it. And the question is, well, what can we do about it? I do think that, and it's gonna be a hot take, that the GLP -1 agonist is, it's a very powerful route to help overcome this genetic wiring of let's overeat when we have the opportunity to do. And we're seeing the success of it. The challenge or the downsides are, other than the side effects, when people stop, they tend to go back. And a lot of people are not learning the right habits, learning how to eat properly, adding enough protein, adding enough fiber, exercise, all of the things that creates the environment for lifelong success. So that's the downside, but I do think in a perfect world, if there was a genetic upgrade that people could do one time and completely recalibrate their hunger response when they eat, we would see probably the end of obesity. And if you look at the stats, only 3% of people make it long -term. And I think that 3% are the people that are blessed with a very good dopamine system, which allows them to be driven and motivated. And I think all three of us have that. But I do feel a lot of empathy and compassion for the 97% that are clearly struggling and haven't been able to make it so far.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting in the book how you basically had a thesis that if we can take away something from GLP1, it shows that, you know, reducing hunger clearly has a massive effect on effectiveness, you know, for weight loss and things like that. I'll be really curious the future of that, like the, if we see more intense long -term side effects or not, it's definitely the thing everybody's talking about right now. I find it really interesting. There's all this, I don't know if it's drama, but I've heard on different podcasts like Rogan and stuff where they talk about different companies responding to the GLP1 thing. Basically, they're concerned about it affecting sales for like processed foods and stuff.

Wade Lightheart:
which is interesting. It's a huge deal. So there was a book back in the, that was written called Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. And I recommend, it's a recommended reading for people to understand what happened. If you look back to the photos of people in the 70s or 50s or 30s or whatever, you do not, like you take a picture of a beach in Santa Monica in 1970, you take a picture of that beach in 2000, you take a picture of that beach now, what changed like the level of obesity and the pervasives of that is widespread. And Eric Schlosser in his book, Fast Food Nation, identified the food chemists that started to hook people on what appeared to be nutrient dense food by using chemical replacements that increased the amount of consumption of foods. So what happened is we went from, the food companies recognized the cost of customer acquisition was much higher than getting their customers to order more product. So they created these chemicals to make, to mimic key nutrients in the brain so that we would consume more of them. And that's when we went into the super sizes and the big bags of chips and the giant sodas and et cetera, et cetera, and that's gone on. And now we're starting to see the size of popcorn and soda you get in a movie theater now is not what it used to be. And I'm really upset about that personally, but, you know, cause again, I don't have that satiety gene. So when I have my feasting day where I get to have whatever I want, I want the biggest size of everything. They serve my popcorn in a pale, like in, or in a, you know, if they had a size that was like a 50 gallon barrel, I'd buy it, you know, I would. I just think of, oh, the biggest is the best. You know, the most is the best. It's the best value. It's the most satiating. If I don't eat it all, it's probably a better deal. And I'd rather have that than to run out is in my brain. But understanding that, yeah, we are living in a world where those chemicals are floating around in a lot of these foods. And interesting enough, one of the common elements of most dietary experts from a health and longevity, those are two components that I'm gonna caveat in there, is that they're saying, eat real whole foods. Why? Well, real whole foods have less pesticides, less herbicides, less hormones, less flavor agents, less preservatives, and less flavor enhancers that lead to, you know, impulsive or compulsive eating. So we're eliminating all of those unseen boogeymen that is taking you out of your system. And, you know, I just had a friend recently, to echo this point, he's always struggled with maintaining his weight. And he got some health tests recently that were very dire. And I sat down with him and I said, listen, this is a life and death situation. And if you don't get this right, you're not gonna make it. That's what these parameters. And his medical doctor, actually, when she got him, she was a friend, was literally crying when she saw the results. And so I said to him, I said, look, the guy also happens to be a vegetarian, he's got a Hindu background. So he doesn't want to violate the tenants of his religious and spiritual beliefs, which is another thing that we put in there inside our hierarchy of nutritional values. So I said, look, here's the issues that you have. You don't have enough protein inside your diet as many vegetarians struggle with. We're gonna boost that up. We're gonna increase the fiber because, you know, you're running this horrible blood sugar cycle, they're also pre -diabetic. And I said, if you follow this strategy that I've used for success in bodybuilding, success in longevity, you're gonna see a correction. There's gonna be an adjustment phase of 21 days because your body switches from carbohydrate metabolism and riding that roller coaster of blood sugar. As that stabilizes, you're gonna see your hunger go down, you're gonna see your moods go stabilize, and you're gonna start seeing productive results as your body switched to, you know, more fat metabolism as opposed to, you know, being a fat storing machine. I chatted with him last night. It's been three weeks. He's followed the thing clearly. He went through those early fluctuations at the first part of the first two weeks. And then he's like, oh my God. He goes, you know, I've done it all this week. And he goes, I actually like this. I feel really good. I didn't know it could be that easy. So most people are one or two little tweaks away from long -term adherence to the diet strategy they've employed. They're just missing these points and we cover them all in the book.

Melanie Avalon:
I was having this epiphany while reading the book, and again, while you're sharing that just now, which is that I'm like you Wade, I'd have to check my genes. I don't know if I have the same genes that you're talking about, but I just love food and eating and I literally could just eat like constantly. And I would if I could.

Wade Lightheart:
me too. Matt likes eating too. We're all confirmed foodies. That's why we're so fascinated with diets.

Melanie Avalon:
Yes, okay, same. And what I've realized is I have implemented two of these actually, you talk about in the book, actually all of them, I found the system that works for me that allows me to still experience that without the negative ramifications and for it to be sustainable for me. And so what I do is not what everybody should do, which kind of like the thesis of this or the, you know, the theme of all of this, which is fine, what works for you, but like for me, so I do daily fasting. So then I'm fasting during the day and then I'm eating at night and I get to not have to limit myself while I'm eating. And then those actual food choices. So I do, you know, whole foods, high protein, high fiber, and I do either low fat or low carb, depending on what I'm feeling that night. Normally it's low fat, high carb. What I do, and I'm so excited to read this in your book, is I eat basically the same foods. And I am so happy existing within a relatively limited choice of foods. And I'm dying to hear you guys elaborate on this a little bit because I feel like I am able to get my all the nutrients I need by existing within a world of, again, a very limited menu, but it's, you know, steak and chicken and fish. It's like meats. And then I love cucumbers and like fruit. I don't like vary it up. I don't try different things. Like I'm very happy with what I eat. So what are your thoughts on eating the same things over and over again?

Wade Lightheart:
So if you look at the bodybuilding world, why is every single fitness competitor in every single bodybuilder able to get into a body fat level that is lower than most people will ever achieve in their lifetime, even at a local show, but the worst bodybuilder or fitness competitor on a stage is in better shape than almost everybody in the real world. Well, we can learn something from them. One thing is, is they cultivate a dietary strategy that is based on getting, keeping their muscle mass and losing their body fat, which are two really important factors that people are struggling with in the modern world. So we can learn from that. And they tend to pick 12 at max, 12 winning meals. And for myself, I would pick five at five meals. And, you know, for example, I did the world championships a little over a year ago. And at my age, in my 50s, you know, I had to, I had a diet 18 months to get into the type of condition that I wanted to show up at at a world championship level. That's, you know, very elite company. And so I just ate the same things every day for 18 months and was fine. And going back to that earlier conversation, a dopamine loop, every time I had a meal, every time I got through a day, I saw that as a win, because I was really focused on that goal. And, you know, I had to win some shows to get there and all that sort of stuff. But that was the key element. And here's a fascinating statistic. The average person only has 25 meals that they go to in general. But the idea of novelty is a really big factor. Well, I get to eat anything they want. If they actually look at what they eat, it's about 25 meals is what they have in general over the course of a 30 day calendar period. And they probably repeat most of those frequently. Unfortunately, of those 25 meals, most of them don't fit within any kind of calorie strategy that you are essentially, you know, you basically those 25 meals have proven one thing that they don't work for you. And so you need to calibrate 25 other meals and the less variance you have the have, the easier it is. And I want to turn us in one of the strategies also that I employ now that I'm not competing right now, is I do fasting one day a week. I you know, so I fast, I start in the evening one day, I go the whole next day, and then I break my fast next month. So it's about 40 hours for me. And then I have one day, usually during UFC events, because when the adrenaline flows from UFC, and I'm in a social situation, both of those things trigger my eating my my manic eating response. So I have all the no no foods on that day, with my friends, and I love the social thing. And, you know, as I like to say, you know, picking out and, and just really enjoying all the forbidden foods, so that I feed that satiety, you know, that that little mechanism that wants to go off my diet, the rebel inside me that doesn't want to do those things that wants to overeat and doesn't care. I get to play that game too. And that's my feasting and fasting strategy. But Matt, he's a novelty guy, he's like literally hardwired opposite to me, he's got to have new foods, Matt, what do you what's it you do? And how do you how do you deal with that novelty demon in your own life? I think that's a valuable to piece to

Matt Gallant:
Yeah. So first of all, I grew up, my parents had the same meals on rotation. It was about a 15 day rotation, but you know, it was lasagna and then there was a seafood. And so I discovered this pretty young that, okay, you know, we're just eating these, these set meals over and over again. But as Wade mentioned, I have a very strong psychological need for new things novelty. So I tend to eat the exact same thing five days a week. Like right now, I have college genius for breakfast, tend to maybe, maybe a couple of eggs for, for lunch. And then I've been having actually a big salad with salmon for, for dinner and then some quest chips, which have incredible macros as a early evening snack and maybe a quest bar earlier in the day. So that's, I eat that pretty much every day, Monday to Friday. But what I do to satisfy my need for newness is I'll, you know, eat whatever I want, not however much I want. There's a big difference. And that's a really important point we want to hammer home is that you can eat whatever you want. However, if you don't want to gain excess body fat, you cannot eat unlimited amounts of it. So that's when I'll go to a new restaurant or order something that's, you know, maybe not as, as health conscious as I normally do. And that's it. It's really that simple. And just to highlight some of the advantages or, you know, reasons why you want to use what we call the simplest secret, there's nothing more simple than just eat the same thing over and over again. One, and Wade alluded to body builders, one, one thing that most of them do is meal prep. So it makes meal prep so much easier if you can just prepare a big batch of it, you know, a couple times a week, put it in the fridge and then pull it out. And it just makes succeeding that much easier. It's easier to eat less at each meal. You know, one of the things that was interesting as I dove into the science of it, people will eat more calories when they eat a wider variety of foods. And that's been scientifically proven easier to reduce portions. So let's say at every, you know, at lunchtime, you're eating three eggs and it's time to cut your calories. Well, you can go from three eggs to two eggs. There you go. You just reduce your calories by about a hundred calories a day. Or, you know, Stan Efording is very famous for his vertical diet. And the variable that he manipulates the most is white rice. So when he wants clients to gain weight, he'll increase white rice. And when it's time to die down, he'll decrease white rice or eat leaner cuts of meat, which is another key strategy. So for an example, let's say you're ketogenic. One of the things you can do to cut calories, which my coach Kevin Weiss was a national body building champion, world record powerlifting holder. He would just go from rib eyes down to skirts down to leaner cuts. So he's still be ketogenic, but he would reduce his calories by reducing his fat intake. It reduces decision making, which is huge. In my opinion, anything you can do to reduce the amount of decisions that you make is a win. Like if every meal you got to think, okay, what am I going to eat? As soon as you ask that question, the odds that you pick the right thing go down significantly. You'll also have less cravings and it really helps eliminate reactive diet destruction. We all know that, you know, going to the supermarket, starving or hungry is a very bad decision. And that's true in your home as well, right? If you're hungry and you don't know what you're going to eat, the odds you grab the wrong thing are much higher.

Wade Lightheart:
Yeah, and I want to add to that too, just so I'm going to break down the psychological feeling of a diet or going to a restaurant. You go to the restaurant, you're in a social situation. You're trying to adhere to your diet stuff. You do not control of what the kitchen is putting. You don't know the extra oils or extra chemicals or sugar or whatever they're adding to that. You're going through the menu trying to figure out what's on your diet. And you start to feel the anxiety going, it's like, I'm going to blow my diet. This isn't right. I don't like this restaurant. Oh, everybody's staring at me weird. If I order something less, they're going to feel it's a social interview. You go through that whole computational world, and almost no one has the ability to enter that field repeatedly before they break. So we also talk about strategies of going to restaurants or social situations or how you manage those, which is just as important for long to inherence because otherwise you get a downward spiral of the efforts. Oh, I broke my diet. Well, I broke my diet. I might as well go for the dessert. I did that. Well, I might as well have a few drinks. Hell, it's all going to hell in a hand basket this week. I'll restart my diet next Monday and just go off the rails this weekend. You know what I mean? Like those little breaks in our will by not setting yourself up success do take people out. And we do live in a world that has all these tasty, yummy, high calorie foods, these wonderful restaurants and stuff that you got to do. So you need to be able to put those in their places at the appropriate time with the appropriate strategy, preemptively planning for it because if you don't, the chances of you winning are pretty close to zero.

Melanie Avalon:
I just feel like the power of having the system and the plan in place that works for you is ultimately one of the most freeing things, ironically. One of my hacks that I do also when I am my eating window. And it's funny because it's kind of, it's actually the opposite of one of the things you recommend, but for a similar reason. So you talk about optimizing your environment and, you know, not following like foodie channels on Instagram and, you know, just not exposing yourself to all of that, that stimulus that's making you want to eat the food. The way I've hacked it, and I rarely talk about this because I realize it comes off probably as very strange, but it really works for me. So I will not look at like foodie type channels or things like that during my fast or during the day, but I do get a dopamine hit like looking at these channels, like these cakes and all these things. So what I do is I only, I look at them. I only look at them during my eating window and I look at them when I'm eating my dessert, which is my fruit. So basically I get all the dopamine hits of like looking at how they make all these different cakes and all these different things, but I'm eating the fruit, which also gives me all the dopamine. And so that's how I get to like have my cake and eat it too, except not eat it.

Matt Gallant:
Here's how you know, you're a masochist, which is something I do. I, I did a lot of five day fasting last year and on day four, day five, I'll do the exact same thing. It's funny. Cause I know some UFC fighters will do that as well. We'll start watching food shows as they're dining down and cutting weight and all that stuff. And you know, that is a form of a dopamine loop. Cause I know that in 72 hours or 48 or 24 hours, I'm going to actually eat, so I'm kind of building up my dopamine by watching all this stuff. But yeah, it's a, definitely a masochistic thing to do, but I enjoy it.

Melanie Avalon:
Pairing it when you can eat, that's definitely the masochism. The hack I found was like pairing it while I'm eating. And what's so interesting is I think I feel like that behavior to a third party probably looks very strange and like restrictive. Like, oh, she won't eat, like she's looking at the cake, but she won't eat it, she'll just eat the fruit. The way my response to that, you know, nobody has come up to me and said this to me. This is just what I'm guessing society would think about it. But we don't think it's weird to like watch those shows and eat the food. But if you watch them and don't eat it, now it's weird. So that's just my commentary on that. But yeah, so I'm all about the hacks that work for you individually.

Wade Lightheart:
I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum just to clarify. I remember when I was in my first contest diet, I remember watching a, it was a Mars bar commercial. It was a sicker commercial, because it was showing the peanuts falling into the caramel river through chocolate mountains, right? And I was starving. I didn't have the best strategy, but I had a stretch. I was in the will drill strategy back in those days. And I remember watching this and then cultivating this craving for Snickers bars. It's like, what's, what's, I didn't even eat Snickers bars. And I thought that was really unusual. And then I noticed the difference between dieting in a rural area versus a city area. I would have all these weird food cravings when I was dieting in a city area. And then I realized that there were all of these advertisements everywhere in the city that weren't present in the country about different foods that was going into the back of my brain. And being a visually oriented person, I realized that the less I dealt with the external manipulation components of advertising, there's a certain, you know, propaganda was the original form of advertising is that you're positively promoting your product and service in a light that makes it attractive to certain people's markets. But what's more attractive to our biology than food since, you know, not having enough food was the biggest, you know, problem for humans throughout most of human history. So you have to realize that those are stimulating effects. And so for me, I have to, I can't do that, but I've known a lot of successful fitness and bodybuilding competitors that that's how they get their, you know, their dopamine loops or their feedback loop or whatever makes them feel happy by watching cooking shows and, you know, all these sort of things while they're dieting. To me, that's just, I just, I can't imagine doing it, but if that's what works for someone, then you need to know that about yourself and apply it.

Melanie Avalon:
I can only do it while I'm eating because otherwise I feel way too deprived and what's funny about it though is because I eat late at night so I have like my blue light blocking glasses on so I look at all these channels but I can't actually see the real colors that they are because like I only light up my apartment with red and I have on blue light blocking glasses. I like want to know what the cakes actually look like so I take all these screenshots and I'm like oh look at these tomorrow but I but I don't because I don't want to look at them when I'm not when I'm in my fasted state. So I have a very warped image in my head of that whole world maybe something to end on because well so again so for listeners if they like definitely get this book it has I can't even express how much information is in this book and plans and science and details and how to actually find the diet that works for you and they go through all the different types of diets like keto and vegan and raw and paleo and if it fits your macros all the things so it is all in there. Something I love that you talk about oh reverse dieting which we didn't even we didn't even talk about reverse dieting which I think is really really important and helpful for people so definitely check it out for that but you talk about the role of maintenance for life and I think we keep coming back to this theme of what is actually sustainable for people I was wondering if you could just talk briefly about the the effort required for initially achieving your dietary and fitness goals and aesthetic goals versus maintaining it because it's very inspiring the percent of effort required for maintenance.

Matt Gallant:
Sure. I actually heard Jamie Foxx talk about this in an interview and he's been obviously incredibly successful at becoming very good in a wide variety of things from singing to acting to other things. And he talked about it typically requires only 20% of the effort to maintain something that it does to achieve it. And we see that even in biology when you look at the science and you see that you can maintain lean muscle mass with about a third of the training volume that it requires to build it, which is encouraging, right? Because that means that, okay, I can set a goal for three months, six months, 12 months to build lean muscle mass or lose body fat. And once I get there, it still requires some effort. And we talk about the importance of mental vigilance. And I think that's where still having a goal comes into play. You know, weigh yourself every day. Otherwise, it's all of our or most of our nature to drift off and start regaining body fat. So you still need some mental vigilance, but I mean, Wade, who's done very strenuous, long dietary weight loss phases can comment on the effort required compared to just maintaining his body weight.

Wade Lightheart:
Yeah, it's light years. Doing a competition is really tough. I think there's a lot of rewards for people to go ahead and do one so that they can learn how much power over their physiology that they have. But when you come off a diet for me, those disciplinary components, and I see discipline as a positive attributes and not a punitive thing, it's like positive constraints to achieve a desired outcome. It's easy to stay in it, but it's hard work to get there. And when you come off it, what I created is I created the alert zone. So for me, my ideal body weight is around 183 pounds. So that's a good point. I won't get into all the components of lean body mass, but it's a high level lean body mass, low level of body fat, high functionality cognitively, high functionality VO to max, basically a ketogenic type blood sugar regulation. That's what's going to be optimal for me. But given my tendencies, if if if I take a couple weeks off the gas, I'll notice my body weight will drift right up into the low 190s within a couple weeks. Like I'll gain weight that fast, I'll gain body fat that fast. So what I did is I went, okay, my top end of the range is 190. My bottom end of the range, which is in my contest condition, which is around 175 pounds, right? So you basically got a about a seven, a seven to 10 point spread. As soon as I hit either one of those zones, I know I'm in the alert zone. So if I'm down in contest diet, I know I can't stain, sustain that for a long time, and offset my own, you know, need for food or calorie, my I think my optimal health, it really has a set point of how low their body fat can go. And my body fat, I can get it really low, but it's just hard for me to keep it there. Conversely, if it goes, it goes up higher really easily, which is not optimal. So as soon as it goes to a certain point, that's usually the area I have to deal with. I simply go, okay, alert mode, I got to go hyper strict for, you know, two, three weeks to get myself back into that, you know, the zone of success. And then it's easy. So let's say I take a two week vacation at my family, which I do every Christmas, I do I go back there for at least two weeks. And you know, my parents don't have any dietary adherence, say, you know, it's Christmas time, and there's a whole bunch of calories. I'm going to I know going in, I'm going to take my body fat below my normal set point, I'm going to go get into the to the high 170s before I get there. And because I know I'm probably going to come out of it just over top of my ideal weight in the in the low 190s, you know, I'm going to be in the low 190s, I'm going to have that much of a spread of those two weeks. And then when I get back in January, I'm like, okay, January is here, time to get on the train again. And I'll go for six to eight weeks of consistent dieting to give myself the break on that side. Once I'm here, I get my spike day every week, and I'm able to maintain my my body fat levels super easily. So I have a week of spiking a day of spiking a day of fasting. And every other day is, you know, really simple, I eat the same four things every day, basically during the other days.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so curious, the same four things.

Wade Lightheart:
Same for meals. So I have a protein shake and a little bit of fruit in the morning. And my second meal is a big salad with chickpeas. My third meal is either a shake or if I'm in a rush, I'll take two bags of Quest chips. And my evening meal is literally beans and vegetables. And that's it every single day. And I love it. And I may add a little potato with it sometime if I did extra cardio or extra training or a little bit of rice on one of those meals. And that's it. And I'm happy with it. It's easy. I don't have to worry about it. And then on, you know, when, you know, the Saturday hits, I'm going to eat probably six, seven thousand calories on that day and have a great time. And the next week I'm going to be a half pound leaner than I was the week before.

Melanie Avalon:
No, I love hearing that so much and that was something you talked about throughout the book was, you know, having these, basically these mental body fat alarms in place, like having these things in place that let you know when you need to, you know, address things a little bit more tightly and, and everything. I just love that you guys have provided such a clear, precise system that will actually work for people. And I think it's a nice antidote to, or I think it, it helps with a lot of the themes that we have today, which, which well intentioned, but I think have had such a negative effect on people, which is like, you know, this health at every size movement. So this idea that we can be healthy at every size and shouldn't even worry about weight. And then the whole intuitive eating movement, which again, maybe that works really well for some people, but I think for a lot of people, like they can't just eat because intuitively they would eat all the things because like evolution.

Matt Gallant:
Exactly. We talk about the dietary boogeyman is real, and Wade and I have been doing this for a long time, and we're not immune to it. So the average person being able to, quote unquote, eat intuitively and somehow pull that off is unlikely, very unlikely. I will say, and Wade and I are both big fans of tying subjective experience with objective data, and that's how you can build a better intuitive system. For an example, if you start tracking your sleep and you wake up and you feel tired, you feel groggy and you look at your orang data or whoop data and you're at 50, 60 percent, well, you just start learning what's happening in your body. And I think that's valuable, but somehow people just magically having intuition. Very unlikely. Go ahead, Wade.

Wade Lightheart:
I think there's a caveat I want to share to everyone and they need to accept it. And that is most of our institutions and research facilities have been coerced and co -opted and compromised. So that the data that we're receiving or the messaging around the data is not really legitimate. And I think that's an extreme disservice to the population in general. And you have to look no for the food pyramid recommendations, the exercise things, the disability adjusted life expectancy, life expectancy data. If you look at what's happened in the recent years, the institutions that we relied on for information, it's obvious that they've been co -opted. And it's obvious that the population is getting fatter and fatter and fatter despite trying to diet more and more. And now we're developing these kind of what we call emotionally sensitive messaging to make people feel good about something that they shouldn't feel good about. And there's no advantage to having an unfil... Right now, the American military has got an issue on recruitments because people can't meet the physical requirements to defend the country. Life expectancy has been dropping in the population. All causes mortality is up. Obesity, which is a driver of every single negative paradigm you could have for life expectancy and quality of life. And yet we're subjected to these mediocre mantra campaigns that, oh, it's okay to be overweight. It's okay. Well, what's the cost to society? What's the cost to your family members? What's the cost of being sick and disabled and not able to work and not able to produce and being a burden to your family and feeling bad about yourself and not looking good, not being able to attract the partner that you want because you don't feel good. Messaging those people that it's okay to be that way, I think it's a huge disservice and people can criticize me all they want. They can say, Wade, that's not being sensitive. I think the most insensitive thing that you can do to people is wrapping up BS in a kind package. And that's a bunch of BS. So I'm going to leave with people. Why did we create this book? Why did we cover all the dietary strategies? Why did we reveal the boogeyman that is trying to screw people up? Because, frankly, Matt and I were pissed off at good people getting sold, bad marketing, bad propaganda on bad data, and despite their best efforts struggling and then coming to a conclusion where everyone says it's okay, that you're okay where you are. You're not okay because you wouldn't have started it in the first place if you thought you were. And we want to help people get over that hump. We know that we can do it. We know the strategies in the book that can do it. We know for a fact that 99 .99% of the people that apply the information in this book will ultimately be successful in the short term, the medium term, and most importantly, in the long term. And we believe that that will create a society that will be able to live their best lives because if you're in a healthy, fit, functional body, your ability to contribute to the world, to your family, to your community is amplified exponentially. And if you don't have those things, it compromises every single aspect of your life and everyone around you at the same time. And frankly, the least selfish thing you could do is get yourself in the best shape possible and run with it. There's a lot of different ways to slice the onion. You can choose it any which way you want. We provide those solutions for you. So we hope that people will take advantage of what we put out here. And we've seen thousands and thousands and thousands of people in every virtual case you can imagine from teenagers to grandmothers, the whole nine yards. So you're not so unique that you can't achieve success. And anybody that tells you that is frankly selling you a bill of goods to keep you less than you could be.

Melanie Avalon:
That was incredible. That was so amazing. And so now I think listeners can really understand just how incredible this work is that you're doing and this book. So friends, get it now, The Ultimate Nutrition Bible. We will put links to it in the show notes. It is so, so valuable. I can't even express. I mean, we just even barely touched on all the things that is in this book. So I just think it will be so helpful for so many people.

Matt Gallant:
to jump into, not only did we write a book that took us three years, but we actually spent a week filming all the content. So if you go to ultimatenutritionsystem .com forward slash Melanie, you can get just the book or the book and the entire video course, which is about 25 hours of content. And I do want to highlight that this is a choose your adventure kind of book. Yeah. You can read it cover to cover if you're as passionate about health and nutrition as the three of us are, or you can look at the table of content and jump right to fat loss or muscle building or health or, you know, universal nutritional optimizers, whatever interest you jump right to it and put it into your life. With that offer, you also get three free cookbooks. You get a carnivore cookbook, a paleo cookbook and a plant -based superfood cookbook. So we're kind of there to support, you know, whatever dietary philosophy you're following. We also have a reference guide summary, so we have over 750 references in the book. And for those of you that are true science nerds, we basically created a summary of every single reference. And that is an additional bonus that you get. And of course, everything is covered by our unquestioned, unquestionable 365 -day money -back guarantee. So there you go.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, that's like Christmas. That's so many things. Okay, so ultimatenutritionsystem .com slash Melanie. Awesome. I will put a link to that in the show notes. Go there now, get all those things. That's so, so incredible. Okay, so the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. And this is actually, you talk about this in the book as well. What is something that you're grateful for?

Wade Lightheart:
You know, I'm I'm grateful for my relationship with divinity, I think, whether people believe in God or they don't believe in God, the utility of believing in a divine super being that you can, you know, communicate with or compare or, you know, create some sort of observational point that is inspiring you to what you become, what you can become, or how you can overcome the challenges. I think the utility of that is extremely valuable, provided it's not my way versus the highway. In other words, whatever form that you see divinity in your role inside of that, I think it's really grateful. And inside of that, my that that philosophy has given me inspiration to overcome my challenges, my deficiencies, you know, my failings, my shortcomings, all of those things. And I think that's been really valuable. It's also inspired me to contribute to a larger human family. So I'm grateful to be a single cell in time of the human family as one single body. There's thousands of generations before me. There'll be thousands of generations beyond me. And by adopting that philosophical spiritual based belief, it inspires me to continue to grow, to continue to develop and continue to share because I see myself as part of a larger aspect over and above my individuality. And I think that the utility of that can't be expressed enough to people. And that's what I'm grateful for.

Matt Gallant:
For me, I'd say right now it's life itself. Just had one of my friends pass away and I got shot a few years ago and realized how things can change very quickly. And literally I saw my friend like about nine days ago on the sidewalk. We had a conversation and now he's gone. And life is such a precious miracle. Life is short, became a father about two years ago and seeing my daughter grow up and just learn day by day, it actually makes me feel even more grateful for life and how short things are. And Wade and I are in our late 40s, early 50s. And as Wade said earlier, life's not a guarantee. So yeah, just kind of grateful for every single day. Just feels like every day is a gift.

Melanie Avalon:
I am so sorry about your friend and thank you for sharing all of that. And both of you guys, I am just so grateful for everything that you're doing for, I mean, really you guys have inspired me for so, so long, even in my podcasting journey, cause I've been listening to you guys on different podcasts for years and years. And I remember when, like I said in the beginning, when I first had you on the intermittent fasting podcast, you know, you guys might have been our first guests on that show. I'm not sure it was so long ago now, but basically you've been a theme in my life and my, my health journey, the podcasting world, just so much inspiration. So thank you all for what you're doing. Thank you for creating this book. We'll put links in the show notes to everything. So listeners can check it out and I can't wait to interview you guys again. Hopefully see you again in person in the future somewhere. And just, I can't wait to see all the things you guys continue to do. So thank you so, so much. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.