Selects Edition – How to Eat Yourself Smarter with Dr. John Berardi

Founder of the world’s largest online nutrition coaching company, Precision Nutrition – Dr. John Berardi

I invited amazing business owner Dr. John Berardi on the show, not only to hear about how he grew to over 50 employees, but to give us the research on how we can be smarter, better business owners.
Our health, and mental state affects our business, and I wanted to know the simple changes we needed to make to get into a peak state. You won’t want to miss this!

Check out PrecisionNutrition.com for more info!

Intermittent fasting book: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting

Nutrition for kids: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-nutrition-for-kids

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Are you ready for something different today? I've been doing research, over a hundred millionaires that I've been interviewing, especially for this book coming up. One thing that I noticed that I thought was really interesting is less than ten percent of them are either overweight or obese. I thought that was interesting especially because you hear the reports that over fifty percent of America is overweight or obese. I was trying to find out more information on this, especially because personally I know that I work better when I eat better. Since you guys are all business owners, self-employed, entrepreneurs, I wanted to bring you some more information on maybe what we can be doing to make ourselves better. Right? Better, faster, stronger, superhuman. So I actually brought Dr. John Berardi on the show. He's going to be talking all about that. Not only the nutrition side of things which is a little bit different, he also talks about how he grew a huge nutritional business, in a huge multi-million dollars, and he's amazing at that too. I got to ask him a ton of questions about that. It's packed with information, with small tweaks and changes you can be doing in your personal life or in your business to make a big difference. So it's a little different, and I hope you like it. Take care.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and today I'm really excited to have Dr. John Berardi on the show. He owns a company called Precision Nutrition, and as I was writing my book, I was trying to find out more information, especially research driven scientific information on how to be better business owners by what we eat and how we exercise. He was highly recommended by many, many people. He actually was named one of the twenty smartest fitness coaches by Livestrong dot com. The other thing is, apparently he also helped train UFC fighters, one specifically George St. Pierre who I adore. You guys know that. We're really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, John. 

John: Thank you for having me. This is a real honor to be part of this. I just appreciate you reaching out and giving me the forum to share some great information with all of viewers and listeners. 

Jaime: Awesome. What I'm going to do and we're going to do this a little bit differently than I normally do. Normally we only talk about business, but at first we're going to talk about business with John because he has a ridiculously amazing company that I know you guys want to hear about, and then we're going to shift focus and talk about health and nutrition, something that most business owners like to ignore as much as humanly possible. Why don't we first talk about, because you're a nutrition, fitness coach, all that sort of thing, and you've could've sort of stayed small. What made you decide to go ahead and make this much bigger?

John: Well, you know, really it was just the impetus to help more people. You know in the fitness world, things are kind of small. Your reach is kind of small as well, and you see this tremendous turnover in let's say personal training in particular. People, the average life span of a personal trainer doing that particular work is like two to three years, and then they realize either "I'm getting burned out" or "I can't make a good enough living doing this if I want to have a family and sort of meet the basic human needs that a grownup has once they grow up." 
Jaime: A grownup.

John: They leave the profession. You know for me that wasn't really an option. I've always loved health and fitness but I really wanted to make it something sustainable, something that was a viable business, and something that helped me to reach out and help as many people as possible. Rather than the twenty or thirty people that were my one-on-one clients, you know, could we help twenty or thirty million people get moving in the right direction toward their health and fitness goals? That's, Precision Nutrition started very small with myself and my business partner, Phil, and we're up to fifty full time people. We have clients in a hundred different countries, and every year we coach about eight thousand people online through our coaching programs, but then our reach beyond that is a lot more. I think we just looked at the stats the other day as an organization, and in the first half of this year, there's been, I think it's six million people who come to our website. It's just this opportunity to amplify what we do, and that gets me very excited because all this information that's available, that I have the training and all the people I work with have the training to understand and then sort of share. The average person doesn't necessarily get access to. Instead what they get access to are media headlines, hidden agendas, and a lot of other stuff that we'd rather help them avoid. 

Jaime: See this is perfect. Okay. One of the questions now that I have, especially starting out new, how did you have the mindset to go "Yeah, I'm going to go from twenty or thirty people to twenty or thirty million because that sounds like a good idea?" What did you, did you have a background in business, or what made you think so big? 

John: No, I didn't have a background in business. In fact, quite the opposite. Both of my parents are immigrants; they came to the US from Italy. They grew up in a tiny, tiny town, like a no running water in the house, no electricity kind of town, just in the mountains. That's really my background. I don't come from any kind of business training. I'm the first person in my entire genetic and family lineage to even go to university. For me, I don't come from that kind of background, but I fancy myself kind of a bright guy, and I'm extremely passionate about what I do. The one thing that has always been sort of a knack for mine is just communication. When I was involved in fitness and nutrition early on, fortunately I had a really fantastic mentor when I was a teenager, so I started doing this when I was like seventeen years old. I put my way all the way through school, training clients, you know training people that's the way I paid for my university education, my grad school, the whole deal. Sort of combining that passion with sort of a natural knack for communication, both in writing and getting up in front of people and speaking, I just realized we could do more. We could help more people, and we could amplify this. Then sort of a secondary, kind of interesting business thing came out of it which was in fitness there aren't career paths for people. You know, you basically if you love fitness, you go become a personal trainer. Right?

Jaime: Done. That's it.

John: You'd be amazed. You look around, and you'll see some personal trainers who basically just have the equivalent of a weekend certification, and they're often mocked among the fitness industry. You also look at some of the better fitness facilities, and there's like a bunch of PhDs who are working as personal trainers because they're people who loved education, but there was no other path for them. You either went and you became a professor, or if you just loved helping people change their lives, you went and became a personal trainer. It's kind of a weird blend, right? So for us, we felt like we could create the opportunity for these really talented, really passionate, really skilled people to find a career path in doing what they loved to do, but doing it at the highest level of quality. It's kind of a little bit of both.

Jaime: Wow. That's amazing. You're helping other people actually continue on their career paths too. Not only are you helping people, and the fitness transformations on your website are ridiculous, which everyone should check out the link and look at that, but you're helping people actually have better lives which is amazing. The question though that I have is how long ago did you start? And what did you do at first, especially with no real business background? 

John: Yeah, well, we sucked at that beginning. We were really bad.

Jaime: That's what I want to hear. Thank you. 

John: It was, you know, my partner Phil and I. He came from a tech background, so he has a degree in systems design engineering from a university in Canada called Waterloo, which is if you want to call it like the MIT of Canada. He approached me back in 2000. He said "You know what? This whole web thing is going to take off." You have to remember at this point everyone was on dial-up. It was nothing like what we have today. He's like, and I had just been making a name for myself, just writing about my research in a way that the average person could understand rather than in an academic stuffy way. He contacted me and said "Hey we need to build you a website and sort of feature this information that you share. I'm into health and fitness, but I know that tech thing, so let's do this." At the beginning, I was like "Nah, no one's going to ever do that." 

Jaime: Talk about being that guy. "That's not going to take off. Come on."

John: The internet? No one's going to be interested. Well at the time I was contributing to some online sites, but it was still dialup. I remember having to read, I was reading textbooks while I'd wait for web pages to load. I'm like "I don't know about all this." Fortunately he convinced me. We started our first website in 2002. We didn't know what we were doing. We just loved it, and we just put free articles on the web. Slowly but surely over the next couple years, we grew our mailing list. Again at the time, it was just sign up for a free mailing list. That was it. That's what you did, and people actually did it. There wasn't like big spam worry and all this kind of stuff. I think it was maybe the first three years, we had grown our mailing list to about eighty thousand people, and not knowing what we were doing, and not even having any products or services to offer during that entire time. We were just literally giving free information. For business startups, this is not the way to do it. We were both still students at the time, so we had a little bit of income pieced together from other places. This was just a hobby and a passion project. Then in 2006 we actually incorporated, and we started offering products and services. We started getting some business training, so going to seminars and finding mentors and that sort of a thing. Then we realized "Whoa, we have this mailing list of a hundred thousand people." That's basically to a new online business, it's pure gold. We just had no idea. We weren't very good at this in the beginning, but like anything else, beginners by definition aren't very good at things that they're just beginning, right. You have to get a little bit of coaching and a little bit of mentorship, and once you get that, if you choose the right ones, and you direct your energy in a purposeful way, things can happen. 

Jaime: So tell me this. I love that you started such a long time ago, but I know a lot of people are like "Well, he started when there wasn't so many websites online. Of course he got eighty thousand." You know what I mean? Why don't we go through this? I actually have a good friend of mine who's a personal trainer and doing clients and starting out online because she's realizing the exact same thing. There's only so far you can get. She's amazing at what she does, has amazing clients, charges as much as she possibly can, but now needs to know where to go. What advice would you have for someone like that who's really trying to get out of the rat race of dollars for hours? 

John: Well, you know I mean really this is really fundamentally a different business really, so if you're a fantastic one-on-one personal trainer, there seems to be this sense that well, I'll just pivot and do the online thing. For a lot of people, it's a huge mistake because you go from being with people everyday in person, physically active, kinesthetic, to sitting on your butt and working on a computer. Right? It's a nightmare for some people. You need to first, and any good business will do this. They'll do personality profiling to determine fit for role. They'll decide are you fit for this work, or this role in this type of organization. For example, we through our coaching programs, we coach a lot of people every year. We have an awesome group of coaches that work with them. Every time we put out a call for applications for coaches, it's overwhelming. Last time we put out an application call there were 800 applicants. There were people from everywhere. These are NFL, NBA, NHL strength coaches who are tired of that game wanting to come do this, but for some of them it's a poor fit. Although they're fantastic, talented, awesome people, they would never like doing it this way. My first piece of advice is make sure you understand what pivot you want to make because if she really is good at training people in person, she may want to continue doing that and look down that pathway because there are ways to amplify there. You can start a semi-private training studio. You can hire some coaches to work underneath you. You can do sort of one-on-one coaching where you do it sort of mobile where you go to people's homes. There's ways to amplify and grow a bricks and mortar business in personal training very effectively which still allows you to get what presumably she loves which is that in person interaction. Right? So I would encourage a lot of people not to do the internet route simply because it may not be fit for them. They may be here sitting working in this capacity, and it's just soul sucking for them, and they hate it. They're like "Why did I ever switch?" You know? I've seen that happen before, and it's a shame. You have to really understand what you're getting into. Now if you do have the personality for it, and this is a great fit, then the idea is, to start to, it's a slow leverage process from the clients that you have that are passionate about you right now, locally in terms of geography to sort of this more global thing where you go online. It's sort of using those people to help advocate for you in a broader spectrum. Now one of the simplest, real actionable things that helped grow our business early on was to actually write for websites with a lot of traffic. Right? So in the early days of the fitness industry and particularly like the strength area, there was a website called T Mag, T dash Mag. It was called, short for Testosterone Magazine, and it was for young dudes who were just hungry for this kind of information. It was the only site like it, and if you were to publish an article on that site, then link back to your website, you'd get five or six thousand click throughs just from that single article. Nowadays that's amplified. There's all kinds of opportunities like that. So having people, so writing for other websites that will send back to your site is obviously a great way to get started because there's all kinds of sites like that. That's one of the early ways to start getting traffic. I feel like there's this transition period. If you're earning a good living and helping people right now, in person, you can't just stop and go online.

Jaime: Some people wish they could, but yeah. No money.

John: Unless, if you have an angel investor who's going to finance the first twenty-four to forty-eight months, you know. It has to be a slow transition. It has to be building up some attention and exposure. The idea of writing a blog nowadays is awesome, but you have to get people to come to that blog. As you know, there's ways to do that. It's not just if you build it, they will come. Anyway there are a couple of really important concerns with this, and it's not just the fitness world of course. It's any other transition from offline to online that people just need to ask themselves "Am I really signing up for what I think I'm signing up for?" You know?

Jaime: It's so funny because I got out of a corporate job because I hate sitting in front of the computer all the time, and I went to do local business coaching. I traveled around to meet clients. I was like "I have a degree in IT, and I don't have a lot of time. I should really go online." Then I ended up sitting in front of my computer. That was a long time ago. It's different now, and it's funny that you say that because for me that makes it a little bit different, and I can get up and do whatever I want, if I really want to. That does really fundamentally shift on whether or not, especially someone who is so active to go right into this. That's what actually a good transition over to talk about nutrition because a lot of us entrepreneurs especially online entrepreneurs are sitting on our butts all day. We're like, and we're so busy. One of the things that I ended up doing for research for the book was I surveyed everyone, and you'll get a survey in just a little bit. A survey on what type of, tons of questions but one of them was about what their diet is. About fifty percent of the people were like "I eat really clean. I eat vegetables and meat and not a lot of processed stuff." Then the other fifty percent were probably like "Diet? Like, what?"

John: Right.

Jaime: I have one person who said "I have the entrepreneur's diet which means eat as much as you can whenever you can." 

John: Yep.

Jaime: How do we manage that? You know. You're busy. You have children, all that fun stuff, but your focus is nutrition. What about for someone who doesn't have that as their main focus? What should we do to try and help our nutrition? 

John: The first thing I think is that it needs to be defined as a priority in your life because if it's not I don't want to sit here and bang you over the head about how to eat better because it's not going to work right? Okay, it's going to be a waste of both of our time. You'll pretend and nod and say "Oh yeah, yeah, I should be totally doing this." But if it's not one of your top two or three priorities in your life, it's not going crowd out all the other stuff that's competing for your attention. You know I can only share my experience but I have two young children. I run a medium sized company of fifty full time employees. I also take my health and fitness very seriously, so really when I sit down and I say "What are my priorities? What are the things that are yeses in my life?" Then everything else has to be a no when it competes. Those three things are in no particular order is my family, so it's my relationship with my partner and my children; my organization and all the people that work with it and all the people that we help; and then my own health and fitness. Those are my three. Every day of every week I need to look at my checklist and say "Have I stuck to what I've defined as and I believe are my really core priorities, my really core values?" Then like I said, everything else, everything else is a no, right? If it's not my family, my business, or my own health and fitness, then it's a no. The neat part is you can intertwine them. After we get off this interview today, my daughter's waiting for me; I'm taking her to the track. We're going to do a running workout at the local track. It's great time that we spend together.

Jaime: She's like three though. Isn't it?

John: She is three; she loves it. She totally loves it. I mean this is not me "Come on, honey." "But Dad, Id rather?" She's grabbing at my ear "C'mon Dad, we got to go to the track today." You can intertwine these, but again, you know I don't want to make this a big philosophical thing because there are some strategies here that we can use, but if you're an entrepreneur, and you haven't defined health and fitness as a priority yet, then really there's no need to carry around all the guilt about not doing it. Just let that all go until the time comes that you're ready to make this shift. Because when you are, I can tell you this, it will make a huge difference in your life. It will add hours to your day in terms of the energy that you can bring to your work. It will bring clarity of thought. It will bring more comfort in your own body, and I don't mean that in that "I love my body" kind of a way, but I mean it in a way that you will be able to tune better into the signals that your body's giving you, so that you can learn when the best time for you to work is, learn when the best time for you to rest is, and you can really respect those cues. One thing we teach in a lot of our coaching programs is what some people have called intuitive eating. I don't necessarily love the phrase, but it's basically paying attention to your hunger signals. It's one of the best ways to control your energy intake, your diet, without counting calories and doing all those annoying things that just suck doing. People always joke back, rightfully so. "Listen, if I listen to my body when it told me what to eat when to eat, I'd eat huge cheesecakes every day right. That's what my body's telling me." The fact of the matter is of course it would right now because you don't know how to tune into those signals. You need a little bit of coaching and a little bit of training on how to do that, not a lot. Usually it takes about one or two weeks of us working with specific cues for people to actually tune in to physiological signals, understand what they mean, and then respond to them in the world. Again this is one of the advantages of paying attention to health, fitness, and nutrition, to making it a priority. It's this sort of integration of self, right. You become this person who understands yourself really well, not just everything from the neck up, but the neck down as well. Then you can bring that to your work, and you can rest appropriately, and you can exercise appropriately, and you can work appropriately. It gives you more focus and clarity, just you feel better, right. These are some of the advantages of doing it, but it takes everyone their own path to get to this place where they're ready to start. 

Jaime: Okay, I love that. I'm glad you went into the benefits. I think that's the thing. It's really easy to ignore and to feel crappy and be like "Well, I don't even have time to work on that." The whole point is to gain clarity and gain time. You've probably heard the quote that Richard Branson said to "What's his best productivity technique," and he said "Work out." Those things are things that we probably know mentally but we haven't actually made that shift to try and go "Okay, this week I should do it." A lot of the times, and I'm being honest, I'll work out and do really, really well, then I got a foot injury and stopped for a long period of time. It's so hard to get back on, and because I've got issues, like with "Well, I tried it, and last time it didn't really work," and all that other stuff. All that head junk gets in the way, so even if I feel like I make, a foot in the sand, I'm ready to do this, it might not work out. What advice do you have for someone like that? 

John: A lot actually. 

Jaime: Good.

John: Really you have, you just said the perfect thing. "The head junk gets in the way." The head junk is what always gets in the way. It gets in the way of doing your best work. It gets in the way of getting fit. It gets in the way of having a great relationship with your partner or your kids. It's always head junk; it always comes back down to that, right. For us, the way that we coach is, you know you've heard it said minimum effective dose and that sort of thing in the past, but I think that sort of fetishizes it a little bit. Really what we're talking about, we're talking about choosing habits that a human being could actually do and sustain in the long run. Because what most of us do when it comes to fitness, in particular entrepreneurs who like projects, is we make fitness a project. We make it this big huge thing. I'm going to devote the next x period of months to fitness. Right? Then I'm going to solve my fitness problem in that time, and that's it.

Jaime: Darn, you're telling me exactly what it.

John: This, forget the fact that I have to pay almost no attention to my children during that time, or that I can't actually have a meal with my partner, or that I'm going to have to neglect my staff and my business during that time. I'm going to solve fitness now, and then I'll get to my other projects again. When has life ever worked that way? The only way to do this is full integration. It's to find the things that you can do and sustain. The one thing that you can do today for the next two weeks to sustain and then build on that next. That's the only way human beings change, and it's the only way human beings can actually sustain effort in the long run. When people come into our coaching programs as an example, I'll give you the first two habits that we give them. They're always super disappointed because they want this to be huge. They want to feel like their ass has been kicked on day one, and this project has begun. What we do is we start them on a basic exercise practice routine. We have them practice exercises. It doesn't take very long, just a few minutes a day. You don't even need to go to the gym. You just devote ten or fifteen minutes to this exercise practice. You can just get up from your desk. It looks like you have a little space behind your chair. You could do that, alright? Then what we do is we start them off on a fish oil supplement and a probiotic supplement. Okay?

Jaime: Okay.

John: So why fish oil and probiotics? Because most people are deficient in omega-3 fatty acids which fish oil contains. The other thing most people starting out in a new fitness routine have is totally wrecked gut biosis. They have lots bad bacteria and not very many good bacteria in their stomach, so it makes their digestion poor. It actually influences mood. One thing very few people realize is that there's this constant dialogue between your gut and your brain. Some people have actually called your stomach your second brain because it produces a lot of the same hormones and neurotransmitters your brain does. If your gut bacteria is out of alignment, things like cognitive test scores go down. Depression goes up. It's totally crazy, and to people who aren't studied in this field, it sounds really wacky, but it's true. Science over the next five years is going to bear this out, and in ten years we'll all be talking about the brain and our guts. By fixing the bacteria, probiotics give us those healthy bacteria, and by fixing our omega-3 deficiencies, things like motivation go up within a week, motivation to exercise. Depressive symptoms go down. Skin clears up. People start to lose body fat because their metabolism increases, and they start to digest their food better. Less bloating, discomfort, stuff like that. Cravings go down for sugary foods in particular. If all those benefits are possible from one little tiny intervention, we don't need to change your diet on day one which is what most people think they have to do. Right? Well, I'm going to have to cut out the sugar, and I'm going to have to stop this caffeine, and I know I'm going to have to eat more fruits and vegetables. Then there's the protein thing, and then they just go through this unsustainable list of twenty things that would be impossible for a real human being who's busy and has a real life to do. Right?

Jaime: But we're entrepreneurs, we can do anything. C'mon, let's go. Yeah.

John: That's right. I'd rather you spend time on your business. If you're not going to spend it there, read the great works of literature or something. Don't spend all your time working out and worrying about counting calories and doing stupid nutrition things that aren't necessary because it's just not worth it. It's really what's the least amount of time can we spend on a few simple interventions that I know you can sustain no matter how busy you get, no matter what kind of shit hits the fan over the next couple of weeks. Once you've built them into your schedule, it's easy, easy, easy, right? You just know it's like brushing your teeth now, and then we can maybe add another small one. We do this, it's the drip by drip approach. The next habit after that we actually teach people to start tuning in to hunger cues. The first, the next habit after the ones I just talked about is we teach people to eat until eighty percent full. It's a strategy where you learn to listen to your own hunger cues, and stop eating before you're stuffed which is how most people eat, until they're stuffed. Again it sounds like when are you going to give me those nutrition hacks that I need to whatever, and the answer is they come. We coach people for a year long coaching program, but it's drip by drip. We're teaching you the most important things in the most progressive way. In nutrition it's funny because in the workout world, most trainers have figured it out. If you go to the gym and you've never worked out before, the last thing a trainer's going to do is give you the most complicated exercise possible, put the most weight on the bar, and say "Here, just do it like me." Right, someone who's been doing it twenty years of their lives. But in nutrition, that's how it's been taught. Here's the diet you need to follow which is really a hundred small changes in your daily life. Now just do it like this. It's giving the most complex thing to do with the most load on day one. Nutrition has to be taught the same way exercise. Let's just do a few minutes of it on day one, so you're not too sore tomorrow. Let's do the most simple exercise possible, so that you can learn simple plus simple plus simple equals complex. So that's how we teach nutrition. We call it our progressive model of nutrition. In the workout world, puritization is another way of calling it. It's this idea of dripping habits over time, and then all of the sudden you wake up a year later, and you're like it wasn't that hard. I didn't have to stop hanging with my kids. I'm in the best shape of my life. What happened?

Jaime: This all sounds too good to be true. What about someone that's a self-proclaimed sugar addict? Right, I am addicted to sugar. I don't know what it is. Whenever I have a little bit, I want more and I ignore that eighty percent full and all that crazy stuff. I've done, I've gone six months, a year without sugar, but as soon as I have it again, I just want more. 

John: Yep. Two things. One, you don't have to stop eating sugar. 

Jaime: Okay. Perfect.

John: That's the first thing. It's absurd. I mean seriously absurd. Anyone who gives a piece of advice that is never eat sugar is not being true to themselves because every human being will eat sugar at some point. This is the gap between expertise, "I'm being an expert and I'm going to tell you what an expert should tell you now," and actually living a real human life. I'll give you an example of that. I just did an interview for Today's Parent magazine on nutrition of course. They were asking me what parents should feed their children. I said, "You know what? Instead of doing that article, let's do something different. Let's do what one of the world's top nutritionists feeds his children."

Jaime: Good.

John: Me, right? Because there's a difference between me standing on a podium and saying everyone should and what I actually do when there's something at stake. When there's something at risk, what do I feed my children? There's something at stake there; these are my children. I'm not going to give them something that's risky, and I'm certainly not going to give something that's impractical. When I put my expert hat on, it's really hard to get down to that level of granularity, that real level. The first thing is anyone who ever tells you never to eat sugar or any other food for that matter is just bullshitting. Because they have eaten it; they will eat it. There's actually a good time to eat it, after you exercise. There's this whole sort of science of looking at how your body tolerates different nutrients at different times of the day. After you've done a hard exercise that's depleted glycogen which is a sugar that's in your muscle. Okay, so high intensity interval exercise, strength training, all of this depletes the carbohydrate, the sugar that's in your muscles. After that, after exercise, is the best time of the day if you're going to eat sugar to have it. We're stacking the deck in our favor. If you're going to eat sugar, you eat it then. It's also like the carrot and the stick philosophy. You don't get your sugar until you've exercised. 

Jaime: Right. I could do that.

John: That's the first thing. The second thing is sugar cravings are actually a function of hormones and neurotransmitters and a host of other things that are in the body, in some cases maybe potential deficiencies. What we like to do is we fix those deficiencies. This is part of my conceptualization of what we call nutrition triage. The idea here is that when people try this nutrition project, they read a new diet book, they find a new coach, whatever, it's this whole overhaul mentality. "I'm going to do Paleo now. I've got to get rid of all these things. I've got to start eating more of these things." Whatever. "I'm going to not even wear shoes anymore." They just go down the whole path.

Jaime: Hard core. If we're going to do it, we're going to do it right.

John: Yeah, but it's possible to start Paleo. In fact many, many, many people do that and every other type of diet, vegan or whatever else and still feel horrible even if you're trying your best. Right? In fact many people get into that place. They feel horrible. "I'm doing all the rules, and I still feel crappy." What's going on? Well, it's because they didn't use a triage process. In an emergency room, they look for the people with the worst problems, and they help them first. If you got into an accident, and your head was hemorrhaging, and you had a little cut on your finger, we're not going to try and treat them all at the same time. You get the head thing first. With nutrition the biggest problem for most people is that they're deficient in a few or many nutrients. There have been a couple studies published recently showing that ? this one study in particular that I have in mind looked at two hundred and seventy athlete diets, so these were athletes that were trying to eat well ? not a single one of them was complete in all the essential nutrients. The minimum number of deficiencies was three, and the maximum was fifteen. We basically have this population of people trying to eat well, and they're still deficient in vitamins, minerals, nutrients. There's been a lot of follow-up studies, and even when I was a grad student, we had this group of, every year we taught a class of 250 fourth year exercise and nutrition students. One of the assignments was to do a diet record. They had to write down what they ate for three days and analyze it. Over the years that I taught that class, I compiled hundreds and hundreds of student records of nutrition. Again these are people who should be eating better. There was not a single complete diet in the mix. 

Jaime: Even when people who know who tried on purpose. Okay. Good to know. I'm glad I don't feel as bad anymore. 

John: No, no one should feel bad because it's almost impossible to do. So this is the first step in triage. Get rid of deficiencies. I'll tell you why that's important. There were two cool studies I ran across a few years ago. One was in prison inmates, and what they did was they just gave them a fish oil capsule and a multivitamin each day. Then they looked at cognitive performance, violence, antisocial behavior, all the things that you want to be better in prison. There was like a sixty percent reduction in violence and antisocial behavior from just doing that. So the question is what's magical about a multivitamin and fish oil? Nothing. What's magical is not being deficient in stuff. When you're deficient, brains don't work right. Bodies don't work right. So what they thought was "I wonder if this would work with kids." They gave kids the same, fish oil and a multivitamin. ADHD symptoms way down. Cognitive test scores way up. Antisocial behavior, violence change for the better. It's just one of these things where for any entrepreneur who's like "How do I use nutrition to feel better tomorrow," step one get nutrition deficiencies removed. You've got to get rid of them. It's not getting rid of sugar. It's not getting rid of caffeine, or drinking more water, or even eating more vegetables. It's what is the thing that's broken in your brain right now because you're not getting enough of a particular vitamin or mineral. Let's fix that. We can eat more of those foods. You can take a supplement. However you want to do it. When we work with coaching clients, that's one of the first things we do. The nutrition triage is get rid of deficiencies. Literally within two, three weeks, people are feeling better, losing weight, looking better, feeling more energetic, and we didn't have to change what they eat. I didn't have to tell them once, no you need to eat less of something, or drink less alcohol, or whatever. Then from there, this gets back to your sugar question, they're like "Wow, my sugar cravings went down. I wonder why that was. We didn't even do anything with sugar." You're like "Well, it's because you had a deficiency in this vitamin or mineral." Then you know it becomes this really beautiful sort of relationship with sugar or food. Right? You're like "Sugar the best time to eat is after working out. I crave it way less now." Now it's a choice and not a compulsion. 

Jaime: That's a big switch, a choice to compulsion. Tell me how I do this though. Is it as simple as just taking a multivitamin and fish oil, or do I have to find out what I'm actually deficient in? Because I know I just did 23 and Me DNA testing which I think is really awesome, but is there anything that I can do to find out what my deficiencies are? 

John: There's a couple ways. One way is actually just to plug in your diet to FitDay or Livestrong dot com, and they've got these calculators, and you just write down everything you eat for a full week. A footnote, this is a pain in the butt to do, but it's an option. 

Jaime: Okay, that's what I was going to say. I'm too busy. Okay, go.

John: Write down everything you eat; plug it into this calculator. It will tell you what you need more of, what you're eating too much of, whatever. Next you can hire a dietitian. They could do the same thing. One of the ways that I think smart dietitians would do this is rather than having you write down what you eat, which you'd have to do the same thing, and they'd analyze it for you, and you'd get a human coach giving you instructions, is just to take pictures of what you ate. Nowadays with smart phones and the apps that are available, if you just got out your iPhone and snapped a picture of every single meal you ate, sent it to your dietitian, they could do that analysis really easily. Makes it much more simple. At Precision Nutrition when we coach clients, we actually just screen with a basic questionnaire. We ask them a few questions about the things that we know that most people are deficient in which are water, protein, essential fatty acids, and certain vitamins and minerals. It's like six questions on a questionnaire when they come in as a new client. Then from there we know what they probably need to focus more on, and we just give them recommendations around that. It's really quite simple. You probably need some guidance unless you want to go that route of writing everything down and plugging it in somewhere. 

Jaime: I'm like "No, no, no, not me." Good to know. That's really interesting. The funny thing is that I started getting into health and nutrition. I do karate, and I'm trying to work on my black belt, trying to be in peak, optimal state for my business and all this stuff. I started doing intermittent fasting, and then I started reading about maybe women shouldn't do it. I started actually reading The Bulletproof Executive, and now I have Bulletproof Coffee and all that sort of stuff. Tell me more, because I know you know a lot about intermittent fasting. Is it a good idea, or is it a bad idea?

John: Yeah, well to begin with, we published a free online book called Experiments with Intermittent Fasting about a year and a half ago now. It's become a sensation. Over six hundred thousand people have come and checked it out. It was basically me putting myself to the test on intermittent fasting. Now people that know my history know for a long time I've fallen into the camp where most clients should eat small meals frequently throughout the day. Now some people absolutely hate that approach. Some people love that approach. It's a highly individualized thing, but it was a general approach that we knew worked well for most of our clients. Then there's been all this noise about fasting on internet, and a lot of people getting fairly good results. Now there's always a caveat there, if you really look at the fine print, it's usually young dudes getting good results. Guys in their twenties and you. 

Jaime: No, no, no. 

John: The most vocal proponents of intermittent fasting are young dudes in their twenties who maybe don't have a lot of family demands, maybe don't have a lot of professional pressures, and those types of things.

Jaime: Thank you.

John: they also don't have the perspective to realize they are not the center of the universe, and that there are other types of people in the world who may not benefit from everything that they think is awesome. 

Jaime: That's where I've heard it. I'll go to a conference, and they're like "I'm doing intermittent fasting," and I'm like "Oh that sounds cool." I'm just interested in everything, so I try things, and I don't know. So far it's been okay, but I don't know very much about it which is why I'm asking.

John: In the nutrition world, it's the most popular thing to do is that when you find something that's worked for you is to do always, everyone, and forever. Right?

Jaime: Yep.

John: Vegan changed my life. Therefore, it's for everyone. It's for me for always and forever. It's just a mistake. I mean it's not the way anything works. You're passionate; you feel awesome. You've got your deficiencies removed. You lost weight. You have more energy. So you are going to stand on the rooftops and shout it out for the world to hear. This is why it's great to find a coach sometimes, someone who actually knows how to evaluate things. Nevertheless, there's a lot of noise about intermittent fasting, so I wanted to put it to the test. I did about six or seven different fasting protocols because there's a whole bunch of different types. One type you can eat nothing every other day, and then whatever you want every other day. So you just don't eat some days, then the next day you eat as much as you want, then the next day you don't eat at all. It's called alternate day fasting. There's something where you fast a little bit every single day. It's called sixteen-eight fasting. You'll fast for sixteen hours, then eat within an eight hour window. There's one type of fasting where you just fast randomly every once in a while you just won't eat for a day. It might be once a month, twice a month, whatever. If done properly, it's cool. Doing it properly is difficult, challenging. For someone beginning nutrition, there's a great chance they're going to screw themselves up. If you don't have a history of practicing good nutrition, there's a very good likelihood that you're going to screw things up and screw yourself up. Anyway, I did a whole thing on it. I documented my bloodwork; I took photographs. I documented mental clarity, and how I thought it might enhance my thinking and focus and how it might detract from that. I just put everything in the book. It's totally free; people can read it online. We just wanted this to be a resource for the world that everyone could access without any barrier to entry. You don't have to give an email address even to get access to it, you literally go to the site; you start reading immediately. Anyway, I think for me the bottom line is this, intermittent fasting is particularly attractive to entrepreneurs because they hate taking breaks to eat. Right?

Jaime: You know us well.

John: Most entrepreneurs, with daily intermittent fasting for example, you might not have your first meal until two or three PM. Some people wait until four or five PM. Literally they wake up, drink green tea or water, whatever the case may be, coffee, and then they just fast until the evening time then they have a big meal, and if you're doing it properly, you would have a really healthy meal full of nutrients and good stuff rather than just crap. That's the other danger with fasting. People use it as "Well, I can eat whatever I want now because I've been fasting all day," so now you're massively deficient in twenty nutrients, and you don't end up feeling better. You end up feeling worse. It's really attractive psychologically, but it just simply doesn't work for everyone. In my experience, for men under the age of fifty, it works in about seventy-five percent of cases if you have some coaching. You can make it work. For women, it's like thirty-five percent. It's because women are basically designed to be sensitive, hormonal machines.

Jaime: Whoo!

John: That are intended to make babies, right? Ultimately if being fertile is important for the propagation of the species, then women's hormonal systems are very, very delicate to energy balance and nutrient deficiency. Women will lose their menstruation. They will actually have this rebound fat gain. All these kinds of things will happen when their hormones are off and when there's a big nutrition deficiencies. That's why for a lot of women, intermittent fasting is tough because again without coaching, you just end up eating too little and going for too long between meals. Then your body starts to sense into this and says "We need to find a way to adapt." The way to adapt is to down regulate everything that makes you a woman. You actually start producing less estrogen.  You start producing more testosterone. You stop menstruating. All these things happen. Then when that happens, for a lot of women you get things like polycystic ovary syndrome which is, it's a weird diagnosis, but nevertheless, you see women growing facial hair. They start gaining body fat, get male pattern fat distribution. It's not what you want, right.

Jaime: This is bad. Oh no, we need to stop talking. No, we're not going to do that. I think that's been really interesting for what you have, especially because I started looking at your site. You have specific coaching for men and for women, which I think is a really cool thing. As you're telling me this, I'm like "Yeah, I'm reading sites that are very pushed towards men, especially a lot of learning how to do karate and all that other stuff is a very male centered thing." It's kind of interesting to actually pay attention to that stuff. Thanks for scaring me. I appreciate that. 

John: No problem. Here's the glimmer of hope, right. There are people who know what they're doing, and all you have to do is spend a little bit of time and learn from them. In the fitness world, there's, and in business as well, it's the same, you know, the high-achieving women will go to the men's sites because they're like "that's where the good, juicy information is." There's this also but we have to respect the equal but different philosophy, right. When it comes to nutrition and exercise, we are hormonally different. Thank God. There are some concerns. When I say concerns, I don't mean worries. There are things we need to think about and things we need to be sensitive to. It's a good question to ask. Is this information targeted to men or women? Not all information has to be gender specific, but if it's a huge group of guys champion a particular idea, and you don't see a lot of women around, you at least have to ask the question. What would happen in women who did this approach? The intermittent fasting thing is great, and it's not to say women shouldn't try it because with proper coaching and what we call outcome based decision making, which a simple way of saying it is "How's that working for you?" This is a great business question as well. 

Jaime: Yes, it is. 

John: I always used to say "No matter how elegant the plan, we should occasionally look at the results." Right? That's your business, and that's your body. That's what a good coach is trained to do. To help you formulate a plan for you, and to be that objective eye that can look and say "How's this working for you?" Know what to measure to determine that. 

Jaime: Because as entrepreneurs just in general we're like "No, I can do it, whatever, push through." You know "I'm going to make this work, no matter what," and sometimes we're not paying attention to some of the cues that are coming up. Anyway, we're really good at sole focus and not paying attention to things that we probably should. Awesome. I know we have to start getting wrapped up, but I need to ask you my last question. I'd love to have you back on the show again, and after this you can tell me where we can check out your stuff because I have to check out your coaching program. Tell me first what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million? Choose business, health, whatever you like to answer the question. 

John: It's a great question. I could go on and on about this one in particular. When it comes to sort of the one action, can I give one nutrition and one business? 

Jaime: Ooh, please. Yeah.

John: Alright. The one for nutrition is start paying attention. That is the place to begin always. Just start paying attention. Whether you follow the Paleo diet or the vegan which most people think is opposite. Whether you start taking fish oil or whether you start drinking less coffee. Whether you start eating sugar after exercise or at every meal of the day. The simple act of paying attention to what you're eating makes you care more about it. And for anyone listening in particular to this podcast, it's obvious that when you start caring, you'll start doing something about it. You're here because you care about learning about business and being successful. For people who start to pay attention and start to care, changes happen. You'll start thinking more about it. You'll start doing more about it, and meaningful changes will come down the pipe. On a nutrition front, that's really it. Whether that mean writing something down, taking a specific action, my suggestion there would be as small as possible. Take the smallest action that will have a meaningful outcome with your food and exercise, and start paying attention to that one thing. You have my permission to ignore everything else. That's the one on the nutrition and exercise front.

Jaime: Thank you. 

John: On the business front, that's tougher for me because I don't know where everyone listening in is coming from. I don't know where they're at, if the are business owners themselves or if they want to get started. I'll give a piece of advice I gave to someone just this morning already, someone who's starting a new project. He's a really talented, really bright guy who's a friend of mine, and he's starting a new business teaching people how to use social media effectively. He's very, very good at this. What I told him because he's in a sprint right now, he's basically I've been brainstorming like crazy, trying to get this outline done. I'm going to be next week filming, and he's trying to get this whole thing done in a month. My advice to him was "Take a deep breath, and make sure that you're going to spend enough time making this better than even you think it could be." We all have those limitations in our head about how good we, like I'm going to make this awesome, but there's a secret upper limit in our brains about how awesome we can make it. So my advice to him was take enough time to make sure this is going to be better than even you think you can make it. Hopefully he'll take that advice, and he'll have a world changing product, not just one more piece of something to throw into the internet ecosystem.

Jaime: Thank you. That's something we don't hear a lot, but that's exactly what this podcast is all about, that sort of that top level, how do you get to that amazing top level, and that's how you do it. Because we can even stop ourselves from getting to that top level because we have head junk too. That's an amazing piece. Thank you so much. Where can we find out more online? We'll definitely link up to your website and all that stuff, but you can promote whatever you'd like to promote right now. 

John: Sure. I'd like to keep it really simple, and I'd just like people to come visit us at our website, at Precision Nutrition dot com. When they arrive, right on the home page, they can check out one of our free courses for men and women. We have free five day courses for men, women, and for fitness professionals, so for your friend that might be interested in changing up her business a little bit. So wherever you fit in, the five day courses for men and women are basically how to get started. What are the simplest actions you can take today over the next five days to start eating better which will hopefully in turn lead to looking better, feeling better, performing better, having greater relationships, and the whole deal? Then for fitness pros, it's how do you help your clients more. Precision Nutrition dot com, take one of our free courses. It's really easy. We're not going to try to sell you anything. We just want to provide really good free information that you'll in turn pass on to others that need it as well. 

Jaime: Perfect, and that's why you came so highly recommended to me over and over and over again. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll definitely link everything up. Thank you so much, and hopefully I'll have you back on again soon. 

John: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Jaime: That was a really fun interview, and it really helped me notice too the more small incremental changes I make, the better. I love it, having people on so that way I can ask them questions that I specifically have, so I hope you enjoyed me asking him all the questions that I really wanted to know. Hopefully it was beneficial for you too. Did you see what he said though? He said, "Number one for nutrition, start paying attention." Really start paying attention. That's actually what I'm doing, that's one of the biggest things. Start paying attention. Number two is what he says is making your product, your business better than even you think it can be. Now that's sort of an amazing statement. After this goes off, I want you to think about that a little bit more because that's an amazing statement. Our brains will stop us from doing something that we don't think exists, so really shoot for that. There's so much more out there in the world. There's so much more that you can be doing with your business than even you think you can do. But you can. I hope you really enjoyed that episode. If you want more of these, definitely go to Eventual Millionaire dot com. You can find all information, the transcripts, tips and tricks, all that fun stuff. So have an amazing week, and enjoy. Take care.

Tags: Business Growth, Business Scaling, Dr. John Berardi, Idea Validation, Mastermind, Mentor, Mentoring, millionaire interview, productivity

Categories: All, Best Life, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Featured Millionaire Interview, Mentors and Mastermind, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

Learn More