1166: Andy Morgan | How I Finally Got Shredded (And You Can Too)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan Harbinger Show Episode 1166: Andy Morgan | How I Finally Got Shredded (And You Can Too) Release Date: June 10, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 1166 of The Jordan Harbinger Show, host Jordan Harbinger welcomes Andy Morgan, the founder of the Ripped Body Podcast, to discuss Andy’s transformative fitness journey. This episode delves into the practical strategies Andy employed to achieve significant weight loss and muscle gain, debunk common fitness myths, and offers actionable insights for listeners aiming to improve their own health and physique.

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Andy Morgan's Fitness Journey

Andy Morgan shares his personal struggle with weight and fitness, highlighting the turning point that motivated his transformation. At 41 years old, Andy found himself struggling to lift off the floor while playing with his son, Jaden, prompting him to seek professional help.

Andy Morgan (04:38): "I started getting fit pretty recently in the scheme of things, the last five years or so. And it was because I was playing with my son Jaden on the floor, and it took me maybe literally 15 to 20 seconds to get up off the floor at that point. And I went, wow, I'm getting old."

Recognizing the need for change, Andy hired a personal trainer after a business idea he shared with a friend took off. This partnership marked the beginning of his journey to becoming the fittest version of himself at 45.

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The Importance of Tracking Calories and Nutrition

A pivotal moment in Andy’s transformation was the realization that he was consuming more calories than he thought, despite eating what he considered healthy foods. Initially resistant to the idea, Andy began tracking his food intake using the MacroFactor app, which allowed him to accurately monitor his calorie and macronutrient consumption.

Andy Morgan (06:47): "I ended up asking you for a bunch of dieting advice, and then I ended up hiring you or your company, I should say, as a coach. And that was the beginning of major, major change in my life."

By consistently logging his meals, Andy discovered hidden calories from high-calorie salad dressings, croutons, and other seemingly innocuous additions. This awareness enabled him to create a sustainable calorie deficit, leading to significant fat loss and muscle gain.

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Debunking Fitness Industry Myths

Throughout the conversation, Jordan and Andy tackle prevalent myths in the fitness industry. They argue that many so-called "fad diets" like keto, carnivore, and intermittent fasting often boil down to simple calorie restriction rather than any magical metabolic effects.

Jordan Harbinger (17:05): "Why is the fitness industry so filled with nonsense? What's wrong with the incentives?"

Andy emphasizes that despite the allure of these diets, controlling calorie intake remains the most effective strategy for weight loss. He asserts that many people rely on excuses such as genetics or metabolism, which often hinder their progress.

Andy Morgan (10:18): "There's a lot of people out there who are working out like demons six days a week, and they're like, why am I still not thin and ripped? And that's because you're doing 20% or 30% of what you need to do."

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Practical Strategies for Sustainable Weight Loss and Muscle Gain

The duo outlines a structured approach to achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight, cardiovascular fitness, and strength. They introduce the Nutrition Pyramid, emphasizing the hierarchy of importance in nutrition:

1. Calorie Balance: Ensuring a calorie deficit for weight loss.
2. Macronutrients: Prioritizing protein intake for muscle repair and growth.
3. Micronutrients: Consuming essential vitamins and minerals.
4. Nutrient Timing: Spacing out meals without extreme restrictions.
5. Supplements: Placed at the top, suggesting they are supplementary to a solid foundation.

Jordan Harbinger (25:42): "Calorie balance is that first layer of the nutrition pyramid. So if anyone wants to Google this, the muscle and strength pyramid Nutrition. The training one is muscle and strength pyramid training."

Andy elaborates on the ease of using tracking apps like MacroFactor, which simplify the process of logging and categorizing food intake. This method allows for informed dietary decisions without the need for extreme diets or exhaustive research.

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Handling Setbacks and Maintaining Consistency

Andy discusses common setbacks, such as occasional indulgences or deviation from the diet, and how to manage them without derailing progress. They highlight the psychological aspect of dieting, emphasizing the importance of understanding that initial weight loss often includes water and glycogen depletion rather than just fat loss.

Jordan Harbinger (64:08): "When you start dieting, you will lose more weight in the first week to ten days than you will on average for the weeks after that. And that is because you're losing water, gut content and glycogen, not just fat."

The conversation also touches on the importance of incremental changes and using data-driven approaches to stay on track. By regularly monitoring weight and dietary intake, individuals can better understand their bodies and make necessary adjustments without panic or frustration.

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Key Takeaways and Final Advice

Jordan and Andy conclude the episode by summarizing the essential principles for effective and sustainable fitness transformation:

1. Skepticism of Fads: Most trendy diets and fitness gimmicks lack scientific backing.
2. Focus on Fundamentals: Prioritize calorie control, adequate protein intake, and consistent exercise.
3. Simplicity and Sustainability: Keep dietary and fitness plans simple to ensure long-term adherence.
4. Data-Driven Decisions: Use tracking tools to monitor progress and make informed adjustments.
5. Patience and Consistency: Understand that lasting results require time and persistent effort.

Jordan Harbinger (83:17): "Summary One, most of what we hear is nonsense. Two, focus on the basics to achieve great results. Three, keep things as simple as possible so that you can sustain it. And then always try to find your next key step, your next big leverage point."

Andy reinforces the importance of consistency and discipline, sharing his own experiences of overcoming excuses and maintaining his fitness regimen despite challenges.

Andy Morgan (52:37): "You just have to eat like 250 fewer calories per day, maybe 500 if you're really going for it. And you will lose dozens of pounds without feeling like you're on some sort of weird ass diet."

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Conclusion

Episode 1166 offers a candid and insightful discussion on achieving physical transformation through practical, science-based methods. Andy Morgan’s journey serves as a compelling testament to the effectiveness of calorie tracking, disciplined nutrition, and sustainable exercise routines. Listeners are encouraged to adopt these foundational strategies to improve their health, enhance their physique, and elevate their overall quality of life.

For more resources and detailed guides mentioned in the episode, visit ripbody.com and explore the additional materials provided to support your fitness journey.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Andy Morgan]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Andy Morgan]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Wonderyus Special thanks to Oura Ring for sponsoring this episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[Andy Morgan]

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Show, we want a healthy body weight so this reduces our disease risk, we live longer, we look better, and we can do what we want to do easier. It's easier for you to get off of the floor after you've been playing with your son and daughter, right? When you're lighter and more muscled, your health is better, your fitness is better, and your longevity tends to be better.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional arms dealer, drug trafficker, general astronaut, hacker or pirate, and if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our Episode Starter Packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started real quick before we dive in. Gabriel, if you're listening, skip ahead at least one minute. I'm serious. Once again, don't listen to the next minute. Alright, so Gabriel Mizrahi, our velvet voiced co host, unlike my voice, right now, something's Going on is heading off on a new adventure abroad. Don't worry, he's not leaving the show, but we are putting together a surprise video montage to send him off in style. Big thanks to Amanda for the idea. If Gabriel has ever made you laugh, think or feel seen, record a short video 30 seconds or less and well, hopefully much less, upload it to jordanharbinger.com Gabe G A B E Submissions have already been trickling in and we've been watching them behind the scenes. Some are super touching, others are totally hilarious. Shout out to the listeners who dog popped a balloon on camera. That was pretty cool. We can't wait to stitch them together and surprise Gabe. And remember, this is a secret. No tagging, no spoilers. Thank you for helping us pull this off. You all seriously rock and he's going to love it today on the show. Longtime personal friend and one of the people largely responsible for me becoming shredded and being in the best shape of my life. Andy Morgan, host of the Ripped Body podcast. In this conversation, we'll dive into the specific training and nutrition he coached me in, which allowed me to get into the literally, I'm in the best shape of my life. We also dive into fitness industry myths and nonsense. Why diet beats exercise, how to create habits and systems that actually stick with you to help you improve the quality of your life. Andy's not my trainer. He was my diet coach.

[Andy Morgan]

I actually needed that to kind of get off my butt and stay off of it.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

The stuff I learned from Andy was.

[Andy Morgan]

I can't overstate it.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

I mean, it's really, truly life changing. Y' all know I rarely cover health stuff, but I wanted to make an exception here just because I'm living proof and the results I've got have probably added at least a decade to my life, if not more and plus, I'm hot again, which is, you know, kind of nice. All right, here we go with Andy Morgan.

[Andy Morgan]

I started getting fit pretty recently in the scheme of things, the last five years or so. And it was because I was playing with my son Jaden on the floor, and it took me maybe literally 15 to 20 seconds to get up off the floor at that point. And I went, wow, I'm getting old. And it just didn't sit right with me that I couldn't get up easily off of the floor at age I think I was 41. Like no spring chicken, but also not old by most people's standards. So I was venting to a friend of mine. He hooked me up with a trainer because I'd given him a business idea that ended up taking off. I worked at the trainer. Trainer didn't let up on me. Best shape of my life. But before I was thin, I was still really strong, but I was. I had a belt line. I had a little bit of blubber hanging over my belt. I had love handles that I'd never gotten rid of in my entire life. And, you know, I had clothes I bought that I couldn't really wear because they looked kind of like a fat dude in a tiny shirt, which is what they were. And I was asking people what to do, and there was no good answers. It was, eat less, eat, eat less takeout. Okay? So I started eating a ton of vegetables. I was still gaining weight, and it just didn't make any sense. And a friend of mine who runs a podcast called Mind Pump was like, do you weigh your food? And I was like, that's a bridge too far. That's for OCD weirdos and bodybuilders. That Venn diagram has a lot of overlap, by the way, but it didn't make sense to me. I was like, that's gotta be the biggest pain in the ass in the world, weighing your food. I mean, give me a break. And then a week or two later, after checking the scale of just consistently gaining weight, even though I was literally only eating vegetables, and I thought, for sure I'm gonna lose weight this week, I just ended up weighing my food and realizing, oh, my God, I'm probably eating 3,000 calories a day, and I should probably be eating more like two. And that kicked everything off. I mean, I ended up asking you for a bunch of dieting advice, and then I ended up hiring you or your company, I should say, as a coach. And that was the beginning of major, major change in my life. And I know I'VE been talking for a minute, so I'm gonna let you ju. But it's hard to overstate how much you learn about your body and about food by weighing it. And it is actually really stinking easy when you get started with it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, I could hug you for a minute and then punch you in the face.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're going to remember the one second of the punch rather than the 59 seconds of hug. More. Right. Sadly. So the interesting thing that you have no idea where I'm going right now.

[Andy Morgan]

No. I was like, okay, this better have a payoff.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I just enjoy imagining punching you in the face, my friend. So the interesting thing here is you remember all of the vegetables you were eating because you didn't particularly enjoy them.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah, they were not good.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But then when you actually logged all your food, you realized that, oh, actually, yeah, I forgot about all of these other foods that I was eating as well. It's just I pumped up all of my vegetable intake. That's the thing that was sticking in my mind. So therefore I was thinking, no, I'm only eating vegetables. The truth of the matter is, no, you're not only eating vegetables. You're forgetting about those high calorie salad dressings. You're forgetting about the croutons in there and maybe the raisins and whatever else. And then there's then the snacks that the quote unquote healthy snacks that you've got from your cupboard in the back of the kitchen that the companies are sending you because they're desperate for them.

[Andy Morgan]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like get on your show.

[Andy Morgan]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To be a sponsor.

[Andy Morgan]

That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It can be very illuminating for people to track their food for a couple of weeks. The other thing you probably discovered was you thought it would be a pain in the ass. And it was initially, you've got to learn the UX of the app. Right, Right. How to use the app. You've also then got a weigh those foods and punch them in and figure out how to do the search. But then after about two weeks, what people typically find is, ah, actually I only eat about 20 things.

[Andy Morgan]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And now they're already stored. Like it's super simple to just log.

[Andy Morgan]

And by 20, I mean that's if you count sauces that go on the salads and stuff. And we use macro factor, both of us. Right. Use that. Yeah, yeah. So we'll link it in the show notes. I've talked about it many times on the show before. It's the single the best money you'll spend all year. I think it's like 80 bucks a year or something.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Don't quote me on that.

[Andy Morgan]

But yeah, it remembers what you eat. So I have recipes in there where I just push morning protein shake and it's like, oh, two cups of milk, a scoop of this and some creatine, and then a little bit of whatever. And then it's like, yeah, that's it. Or you can put in breakfast and it's like, okay, chia seed pudding, yogurt and whatever else. And it's just. That's it. And it just logs everything. You're right. It's 20 things and then you can group them up and learning macro factor. The learning curve on this is really tiny. I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself here because what I'm trying to do with this episode is tell people. I want to convince people of a couple of things. One, it is about what you're eating. It's almost certainly not about your. So I sound like an a hole when I say this, and I want you to back me up here. I'm just going to go ahead and say it's not your genetics and it's not your metabolic whatever that you might think that you have. Some people are hungrier than others. I'll give you that. The 0.1% has some sort of weird thing, thyroid thing, whatever. But I was like, oh, well, I've always been sort of 10 to 15 pounds overweight, so it's definitely just me. It can't be what I'm eating because I would have been thin at some point in my life other than when I was a teenager. And then I started counting my food and I got an appropriate number of calories per day and it was like, oh, I actually, I can't stay fat. It's. I'm literally not even able to. I'd have to throw the app away and start eating pounds of Cheetos. I had to try pretty hard to stay that chubby my whole life. I had to try. So a lot of people lean on these same excuses. And you don't know that you're making a BS excuse at the time. You really do think, at least. I really did think, oh, I just have this certain type of body. I'm a mesomorph or whatever. Right. I just naturally going to be 10 to 15 pounds overweight. There's nothing I can do about it unless I do some extreme thing. And that is just not really true. Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's a few things I want to pick out here. First, the 10 to £15 overweight. This is what you initially had in mind?

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But we ended up losing. What is it, something like 40, 45 pounds of fat. We estimate based on your stomach circumferences and how tight they came in.

[Andy Morgan]

It's no spoiler, I suppose, but, yeah, I started out to lose £15. Think if I lose £15. But what you're thinking when you think I'll lose £15 is you're thinking, I will lose £15 exclusively in my stomach and love handles and face. You're not thinking, I've got five pounds of fat between my organs that I've never seen and that only shows up on a DEXA scan or some sort of other machine thing. And so, Yeah, I lost 40 pounds of fat and I gained. I think it was 11 or 12 pounds of muscle. It's hard to estimate that kind of thing. But when I tell people I lost 40 pounds of fat, my friends are like, that doesn't make sense. I didn't even change clothing sizes really, until the very end of my weight loss and fitness journey in terms of, like, my body type. But that fat was there. It came off my booty and my thighs and my belly and from between my organs. I had a lot of fat between my organs. And when I lost that, my blood pressure dropped, whereas my doctor was like, I got to put you on these BP meds if this stays as high as it is. And then when I went back, he's like, oh, you cured yourself of high blood pressure even though you're genetically predisposed to it? Because I am. He's like, wow, that's no small feat. So the reason I'm doing a fitness episode when I never do fitness episodes and I don't even allow guests who are health and fitness to pitch this show is because this is probably saving my life just given the fact that heart disease and high blood pressure runs in my family and I don't have those anymore.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So we should say that you're about to get a whole bunch of emails just telling me that I'm an idiot.

[Andy Morgan]

Well, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is why you don't have people like myself on, but you've had me on because we've been friends for four or five years. We've known each other for about seven.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So, yeah, here we go. I'm going to try and not tread on too many people's sacred cows here.

[Andy Morgan]

Don't even feel bad. When I did an episode about Ozempic or when I do an episode about anything, people are like, you don't understand. I just can't lose weight. It's actually impossible. I feel bad, but I also know that that's almost certainly not true.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, so there is no doubt that there are genetic factors and there are environmental factors here. You just look around. Most people are not tracking their calories. Most people are not trying to work out hard and diet hard. We go through phases, but you look at the average person, right? And they're not. You look at the population, you can see that there are some people that are skinnier than others. Why is that? It's because the hunger and fullness cues, the way that skew us towards higher or lower body fat percentages. Some people can stay naturally very lean without much effort, whereas other people have to work super, super hard with that. So there's no denying that there are genetic factors involved, but there's still a lot that we can do. You may not get abs lean and be able to sustain that year round comfortably and feel great in your skin. Some people will. Some people are going to need to hold another 3, 4, 5 ish percent of body fat on there to just feel good and be able to have that balance of enjoyment in their life. Beers with the boys on occasion, right? Still have nachos with their kids and family when they're. They've got Friday night, movie night or whatever. But the key there is balance, right? And the trade off that you want to make to get where you want to be physique wise. If we can just back up for a second. You said this is important to you because you believe that it saved your life.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah, I just want to be clear, like because people go, oh, you're fat shaming or oh, you're taking this anecdotal case of you getting a six pack when you're 44 and you're just saying like, hey, everyone should do this. Look, I'm proud of where I'm at, but the real win here is reversing my triglycerides and cholesterol trend that I've had going for a decade. Reversing high blood pressure that I've had pre hypertension, to be technical, going for at least a decade, there's no sign of it anymore at all. And also being stronger and being able to get off the floor easily and being less aches and pains. Like I basically reversed the biological age of my body in very obvious ways that I can see and feel. And I'm in the best shape of my life at 45 now. I put the asterisk next to best shape of my life at 45. Because the key to that was being in terrible shape for the previous 44 years of my life. Okay. So I don't recommend this strategy necessarily, but it's just that it can be done. And screw the visible, you know, abs or whatever a lot of people think they want. The key is there's people right now my age who are going on blood pressure medication when probably they just have visceral fat between their organs that if they lost it, they could reverse this trend. They could at least give it a shot.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And let's make it more real. You said that one of the aha moments for you was when you were playing with Jaden. Yeah. And it hurt to get up. You probably heard yourself going as you stood up.

[Andy Morgan]

It just felt like I was doing squats when I was getting up off of a hardwood floor. It was ridiculous in hindsight.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then the way you felt then with Juniper just two years later, must have been massively different for doing the same thing.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah, it was, and it still is. I still play with my kids on the floor and roll around and wrestle. And that was stuff where I was like, oh, I can't because of my shoulder. I can't because of my hip. I can't because of my knees. I don't have knee, hip, and shoulder pain anymore.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Andy Morgan]

It all went away, and I wasn't big enough. Where that was likely caused by excess fat and body weight, it was likely the knee, shoulder, and hip pain was because I sat all day and didn't move enough. So this isn't just about going on some sort of crazy diet. It's about getting stronger, as well as losing things like visceral fat and the fats that harm you and reversing bad health trends. I wasn't really into fad diets, but I was being bombarded with fad diet stuff that actually, even if I didn't do it, discouraged me. I don't know if this is going to make sense, but if you hear this episode and you go, oh, all I need to do is weigh my food with the kitchen scale and enter it into macro factor. That doesn't sound too hard. You're right. But if you go, what about intermittent fasting? I've heard of that. What about keto? Do I need to do that? But then there's carnivore. What's the difference between that and keto? I better research that. And then also there's this other blah, blah, and you just go, you know what? And what I did is I go, you know what? This. There's so many moving parts to this that I don't even have time to wrap my mind around all this. And I'm just not going to do it because I got kids. I can't sit here and research Keto, Carnivore, weigh my food. And it's like, oh, but you can actually just ignore everything and weigh your fricking food and put it in the app and that's all you need to do. The rest of it is just like Instagram bro science.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So we can talk about specific fads or diets or methodologies and debunk them. We can also talk about why there is so much nonsense in the fitness industry, the nutrition and training space.

[Andy Morgan]

I'd actually like to start there. Because what we're going to do is kill someone's sacred cow that's working for them. And who cares? Who cares if we are for or against keto or Carnivore or veganism, it doesn't matter. Why is the fitness industry so filled with nonsense? What's wrong with the incentives? Where instead of saying, hey, man, like my buddy from Mind Pump, hey, man, weigh your food and just keep track of it in macro factor, he wasn't selling me anything. But why then am I seeing an influencer who's doing a backflip on a trampoline? He's like, you can only do this if you eat my protein bars. I think people see where this is going, but I want to hear from you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We have a massive misinformation problem right now and a misalignment of incentives. There's a problem from the advertising side and there's a problem from the content side. So you've just mentioned about the backflips. So this is now a content side. So really three things in here. So information that's labeled as cutting edge gets the most attention, or contrarian ideas. They get the most attention. And so there's an incentive there to come out with kind of wild statements, wacky statements, right?

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Or you could brand it as cutting edge. Now, let's say that you're talking about, quote unquote, cutting edge science. The problem is that cutting edge ideas are, by definition immature. So what this means is that we have exaggerated claims, flawed logic, and pure speculation stated as unchecked fact on podcasts and social media everywhere. Now, this is the content side, right? Because as a podcaster, your job, Jordan, I'm not picking on you. I think your podcast is very good. In fact, we have a chat where we You. I'm not sure if you want to talk about the chat.

[Andy Morgan]

It's fine. We have a chat group where I send them potential sponsors and they tell me if it's total bullshit or not. It's in the chat is called. Is it bullshit? And unfortunately, a lot of potential sponsors turn out to be bullshit, and we have to turn them down.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. And you realize you just put a target on my head from Big Supp, right?

[Andy Morgan]

That's right. Well, you already probably had it because you're like, hey, take creatine and protein and everything else is probably nonsense and you don't need it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, maybe some caffeine.

[Andy Morgan]

Do people count that as a supplement, though? I mean, it's in coffee, it's in daika. Like, I don't know. Maybe they do. Anyway, continue.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, so if we have a look then, at the advertising side, Right, so you've just touched on that this chat has cost you over the years, hundreds.

[Andy Morgan]

Of thousands of dollars. Easily. Easily.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So on the advertising side, right, people want to believe in shortcuts and miracles. This is human nature, because stuff is confusing and things are hard, and people are very happy to sell you these shortcuts and these miracles. So the miracle cures, they tend to be the most profitable because they're not based in science. So they fill up the advertising slots because they can afford to bid the highest on these advertising slots, right?

[Andy Morgan]

That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And most content creators do not have the level of integrity that you do, nor are they incentivized to look too deeply into what is being claimed from their sponsors because they're being offered a $20,000 check to like.

[Andy Morgan]

It is tempting. Well, when you put it that way. I usually don't ask how much they're willing to spend before I turn them down, because I don't want to know. I just. I want to know if it's good or not. Don't tell me. I even told the sales team at Podcast One. I go, don't come to me and say, but they're offering this because it just makes me feel FOMO and horrible for turning down, you know, whatever this is. I'm already. If I. If I said no at $10, I'm going to say no at $100,000. It's just going to be more painful. So just don't tell me what it is. Right? Don't tell me the price.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is smart.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Andy Morgan]

If we can't trust the influence, and then who can we trust? But if we can't trust the Instagram algorithm, Defeat us stuff. What red flags can people look for to spot nonsense? Because if somebody says, hey, take, I don't know, whatever, nad or something like that, and I'm just picking this out of the blue, I don't know if it's good or not. I'm not going to go, oh, well, that's a relatively new thing. I don't know. I don't even know that nad is in the thing that this person is mentioning. Right. I just. He's saying that he uses it. What red flags do we have that we can go, oh, that was something that Jordan and Andy said was maybe bs. I should look into it before I hit the purchase button.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure. So there are two frameworks for nutrition and training that I want to teach you. We have them in the form of a pyramid. And this is the hierarchy of importance for looking at things as to how they affect health and body composition. I'll come to those in a minute. But there are two things mainly. First is, does it seem too good to be true? If yes, then it probably is. And the second thing is, does the person speaking caveat their language? How certain do they sound and come across when they're speaking? Are they saying, well, the research suggests that there is a high degree of likelihood that the problem is that these caveated statements, they're less persuasive. Exactly. You've had many persuasive episodes, right?

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And unfortunately, the real scientists, the people who really respect the evidence, they will speak with this caveated language, but then they sound less persuasive, therefore they get less attention, therefore they aren't invited on to different shows.

[Andy Morgan]

That's right. Science all across the board has this problem, though, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Andy Morgan]

I remember during COVID people were saying, well, it could be this and it could also be this. And we know with a certain degree of likelihood it's this. But the person who's like, if you buy this colloidal silver spray, it will protect you against Covid 100%. That's much more persuasive. Even though it's complete bullshit from Alex Jones or whatever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Love a bit of Alex Jones me.

[Andy Morgan]

They're turning the fricking frogs day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, it's. Is that actually one of his quotes?

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah. He said, they're putting chemicals in the water that are turning the fricking frogs gay. It's insane. But unfortunately, fortunately, that was something that actually does kind of make sense, because the frogs, while they're not turning gay frogs. I forget the name for this. But if there's too Many male frogs or if the ph of the water, this, that and the other thing, they can turn into female frogs and reproduce asexually. So it's like the one not totally insane thing that he said is his, one of his most famous quotes. But anyway, we're not here to talk about, about that piece of garbage human. We're here to talk about the pyramid of nutrition, which I swear I'm going to let you explain at some point.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, if we can back up, there are four pillars to health, fitness and longevity. These are things that we all want. There's sleep, there is stress management, there is exercise, and there is nutrition. Now I'm not qualified to talk about sleep and stress management. I'm going to stay in my lane here. We help guys look like they lift, basically get in good shape. I mean, ripped body is the brand. That's what we do. But the funny thing is when you get in really good shape, all of a sudden your health is better, your fitness is better and your longevity tends to be better. Right. So let's first think what we're optimizing for. There are three things here. We want a healthy body weight, so this reduces our disease risk. We live longer, we look better, and we can do what we want to do easier. It's easier for you to get off of the floor after you've been playing with your son and daughter. Right. When you're lighter and more muscled. Right.

[Andy Morgan]

Can I ask you what the body fat percent? There's. I saw something that was like the healthiest male body fat percentage is between 10 and 13, which is, I mean, you're shredded basically. If you have that level of body fat, most likely. Is that true? Because that's a little bit disappointing. Because that's tough. It's tough to achieve.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, no, no, I know. I don't know. I don't know where you got that.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah, I saw that a million different places and I was like, oh, that almost looks like a cred thing. I've got to double check on that because if you have 10% body fat, I mean you are like fully beach ready and probably one of the most shredded dudes on that beach.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, 10% body fat is super lean.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah, I wouldn't know, but yeah. Yeah, I assume so.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sub 20 for men, sub 30 for women. Because women contain more essential fat.

[Andy Morgan]

I see.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Contained. Sorry, that's a weird way of phrasing it.

[Andy Morgan]

Certain parts of them contain that fat, I guess.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes.

[Andy Morgan]

That's all we should, we should leave that right there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes. So healthy body Weight, that's number one, cardiovascular fitness. Okay? So this reduces our disease risk, we can live longer and we can do what we want to do easier. Right? If you have four flights of stairs that you need to get up and you're absolutely knackered by the time you get up, then out of breath, like feeling bad, like, this is not good. So we want to have a degree of cardiovascular fitness so we can do all of the activities that we want to do. It's also going to help us live longer and strength, so when we're strong, we look better, we can do what we want to do easier, and we can maintain independence into old age for longer. So a healthy body weight, if we consider that that's mainly driven by our diet, cardiovascular fitness and strength are developed through exercise. And so let's talk about those things. How do we get a healthy body weight? And how do we stay cardiovascular fit and get in cardiovascular fit shape and stay strong?

[Andy Morgan]

I want to separate these things because one of the problems that I had was hired a trainer, worked out with trainer for, I don't even know. It was probably like a year or two years, maybe it was about 18 months. And I went, why am I still gaining weight? And he's like, well, what do you eat now? Of course, I just told him I didn't have anything logged. And I was like, oh, you know, like lots of vegetables with craploads of random Chinese sauces on them that have a shitload of calories. Oops, didn't know that. Salad, sure. Oh, but it has bacon on it, has egg on it, it has salad dressing on it. And it, you know, who knows what else in it? And even that, that was my healthy food. That doesn't count the nights where I had pizza for dinner and then I had leftovers the next day for lunch. I didn't realize how caloric all this stuff was. So I was actually gaining weight. Some of it was muscle, some of it was fat. And then when I decided that I needed to lose the actual fat in order to lower my blood pressure, among other reasons, basically what I'm trying to say is there's a lot of people out there who are working out like demons six days a week, and they're like, why am I still not thin and ripped? And that's because you're doing 20% or 30% of what you need to do. The other issue that I'd like to cover is why you don't have to suddenly become a marathoner. Because I think people assume cardio is what gets Rid of fat. And as soon as I found out that that wasn't necessary from, I think it was you, the angels were singing at that point in time. Because I was not looking forward to going running at all. I'd already tried running. I don't want to buy an elliptical machine. I have a peloton. It's got clothes on it. That's where my clothes go. I'm not riding that thing either. Right. So I just didn't want to do that. And it turns out you don't really need to do that either. And I think that's music to a lot of people's ears.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So in order to lose weight, we need to stay in a calorie deficit. Right? The way that we can have a calorie deficit is by moving more or eating less. Eating less is far easier and far more efficient than trying to move more. You can't really outrun your math. Even if you say, do cardio two or three times a week for half an hour at medium intensity, right? You hit the gym two to three times a week lifting some weights, your total calorie burn from that is only going to make up about 5 to 10% of your total energy burn throughout the week. Because all of the rest is just what is needed to maintain your body as it is your metabolic rate maintaining crucial function and then all of the other activity that you just generally do. So trying to then increase that even more. Because most people aren't doing that anyway, right? It's just a losing strategy because people don't have time for it. So the easiest thing to do is to control your math, is to look after your nutrition. And so calorie balance is that first layer of the nutrition pyramid. So if anyone wants to Google this, the muscle and strength pyramid Nutrition. The training one is muscle and strength pyramid training.

[Andy Morgan]

This is on your website.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Andy Morgan]

So we'll just link to it in the show notes so people can go and click on that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, sure.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Hey, Fluffy, put down the pizza and pick up some of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by Oura Ring. You know, everyone talks about calories and workouts when it comes to weight, but you know, what barely gets mentioned is sleep. Not just how long you sleep, but the quality of that sleep. Because if your sleep is trash, your hormones are all out of whack, your body doesn't recover from muscle growth. No matter how perfect your diet is, your results are going to stall. And that's why I recommend you get an OURA ring. I've been wearing the OURA ring since the first gen. Now they're on the fourth gen. I'm still on my one gen. That's.

[Andy Morgan]

A stupid play on words.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

They don't pay me to be funny. Anyway, I've stuck with it because it works. The newest version is even more sleek, super comfortable. I only need to charge it about once a week. Sometimes I forget I'm even wearing it. You may think you know how well you're sleeping. I did. With Aura, I can test things like what happens if I wear blue blockers in the evening for an hour before bed? What if I take magnesium or tart cherry extract before bed? What if I take a warm shower before it lights out? What if I sleep with a room colder? Aura gives me real data to tell me if those little tweaks are actually doing anything. And when you're trying to lose weight or build muscle, not just feel like a zombie at 3pm, that kind of feedback is really gold. And it's not just sleep. Aura tracks stress recovery, heart rate, even respiration. Stuff that actually tells you how your body's doing under the hood. I've had friends try it and go, wow, dude, I had no idea I was that stressed out all the time or my resting heart rate was so high. And the best part is, it looks like a normal ring. It's subtle, it's stylish. It's getting more and more popular. I'm seeing it on just about everyone these days. So go ahead, give Aura the finger. Learn [e-mail] Jordan if you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of my network. The circle of people I know, like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free [e-mail] I know you don't book for a podcast. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about personal, professional use. Stuff that's non cringy, binge able, not awkward. It's not going to make you look like a glad handing weirdo. It's just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better peer. And it takes like six minutes a day. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again. It's free [e-mail] all right back to Andy Morgan.

[Andy Morgan]

I want to pause on one thing that you said that is crucial, which is you can never outrun your mouth. There's a joke in there somewhere. But basically, you ever go for a bike ride and you're like, oh, I tracked it on my Apple watch. I burned 250 calories. Then you go to Starbucks and you get a small coffee and you're like, oh, that cookie thing looks good. And you get that and you go, wait, hold on. If you're entering it in a macro factor, like how is that 350 calories? So I burnt 250 calories by biking for an hour and I just ate that with this tiny snack that I got with my coffee that I really didn't necessarily need. That's one of those things that you get from weighing your food and logging your food where you just suddenly realize that you really can never out exercise what you are putting down your gullet. It's basically impossible.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's just too hard. I was in Starbucks the other day and I thought to have a look, and I think the lowest calorie item from the, let's say delicious snack section was 360 calories. And then the highest was something like 500. This was in England. They were all within that range. And you would be lucky to burn that much if you did an hour of cardio. And weights is even less because you're, you're not lifting the entire time. Are you having rest? So you can't really outrun your mouth. You need to learn to control your diet. And it is still good to do some form of cardiovascular exercise, but you got to do something that you enjoy. So I made the mistake of doing a marathon a couple of years ago. The Honolulu Marathon, 2023. Merry Christmas to me. Yeah, don't like running. Have never liked running. Didn't do any running. Just decided that yes, I was going to do a marathon and my girlfriend likes to run. I thought I'd join her and support her and I basically cried my way around. In fact, I think it's something like the 1918 mile mark. I did actually start crying cause I was in so much pain because my knee had just given up. Right? And then because your name badge has, it literally says Andrew and then your number. So people are saying, come on, Andrew, you can cry. Stop crying, you wimp. These people were so nice. I'll tell you, man, Americans on average, so nice. So nice. This would just not be the case in England. People would just be like, quit crying, Andrew. Yeah, right. So that was my last run. I made it, I did it, but I never ran again. Well, okay, I did something with good intentions, but I needed to find a hobby that I could enjoy. Road cycling, getting out to the mountains, that's something I can really get down with. So I've grown to really enjoy that. So that's my now cardiovascular exercise.

[Andy Morgan]

And people also think that cardio has to be some kind of crazy, you're about to vomit level of intensity. And it turns out that a lot of what you do in zone two or zone three, which we don't have to get into the specifics of that, but that's basically like light. You could still hold a conversation with somebody when you're doing it is totally fine. And you can do that for an hour. Power walking down a nice nature trail or hiking and you're good. You don't have to be doing an Ironman or whatever or a swim where you can barely breathe in order to start burning fat or having your heart feel a benefit from it. So these are all things that I didn't really know, right. Because my circle of friends is full of extremists. You know, people who go, oh, yeah.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

You want to go skiing? Oh, that sounds fun.

[Andy Morgan]

What are you doing while we're being helicoptered in? And then we're going to parachute down and when we land, we're going to go down this thing and there's probably going to be an avalanche. So make sure you bring a backpack that inflates and a beacon. And I'm like, dude, I'll see you guys at the bar afterwards, because that sounds horrible. You know, or people who go surfing, but they go surfing in the Solomon Islands, they don't just go to Santa Cruz. So I basically thought in order to get fit like these guys, I had to start living my life like these guys. And that's just not the case. And I think a lot of people who are more or less sedentary have that misconception.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If you're currently not making a change, you need to think about the things that you need to dial in. For some people, it's going to need to be far more detailed than others and far more intense than others. But if you currently open your phone, have a look at your health app on your phone, what's your step count? If it's particularly low, just a few thousand, well then making time for just a couple more short walks during the day. We say to people, try and get around 7ish thousand steps. That's realistic for Most people, if they can carve out just a little bit of time, first thing in the morning, maybe last thing at night, or just a little like 10, 15 minute walk after meals.

[Andy Morgan]

I do phone calls while I'm outside walking. And you know, at first people go, oh, isn't that annoying? Sometimes there's wind, sometimes there's cars. I just literally tell people I'm outside getting my steps in. No one has complained about this in years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's funny, there's a friend here, I was just at home who just got back, Pete, he was telling me that he takes calls, business calls, while he's jogging. People love it. They're like, oh, what a great idea. No one's bothered because they're not there for the perfect audio quality, are they? They're there for the human. And what's more, human, right?

[Andy Morgan]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Look, I won't be doing the podcast while I'm outdoors anytime soon, so don't have. People don't have to worry about that. But there's absolutely no reason to sit inside and do a call. And look, the people who are like, oh, we, we do zooms. You should just ask your manager if you can do the zoom while walking. Just tell them, you know, hey, look, I might be a little bit off camera because I'm walking. It depends on your company. But a lot of people have done this and their manager goes, oh, yeah, you know, Chloe's out walking through her neighborhood. If you're just sitting there on mute anyway, why do people need to see you?

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

They don't.

[Andy Morgan]

They really, really don't. And that could be the difference between losing, I don't know, a couple pounds a month or not. Just those extra steps. That did a lot for me in the beginning.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, absolutely. What you want to do is you want to make incremental changes, incremental changes as small and easy for you to make as possible so that you start seeing a change. And that change could be the scale weight, the change could be the stomach measurements. Those are really the main ways that I suggest that you start to track things. It could be your heart rate level after you have finished a certain activity and how that number becomes lower over time. It could be how much you lift. This is just an obvious one. Right. Can you bench press more than you could. You could like three months ago, right. Is your number going up every session? And if we think about what people should consider doing, some kind of strength training two to four days a week, some kind of cardio two to four times a week? Ideally if you're not doing anything right now, then once is great and is going to make a difference. So you want to do something hard enough that you're continually improving and that can be heavier, longer, faster, or more often.

[Andy Morgan]

I want to go back to the logging of food. The app macro factor also allows you to see how much fiber you're getting every day. And I was curious and I said, how much fiber am I getting? Because some days I eat vegetables and some days I don't. And my LDL was still going crazy even just a few months ago. And I was really getting nervous about it because it went down and I was like, I got this under control and it started to go up again. And it turned out I was getting about 10% of the fiber per day than I needed on most days. So I threw chia seed pudding in there, which I've recommended on the show before, that we just make at home. And after eating it every single day for a month because it's delicious. Or six weeks, I should say. I did blood work again and my LDL dropped 42 points, which is kind of insane. I went from, oh, this is higher than it should be and your doctor's concerned to, wow, you did a. Your cholesterol's great. And that happened in six weeks, which is kind of a miracle. I'm not saying you just have to eat chia zoo pudding. That's probably a good idea if you're not getting enough fiber. But the point is, this is the kind of thing that you would never really know unless you were logging what you ate and doing blood work, let's say every four times a year to see how healthy you actually are. I just would never have known and I would have ended up with long term heart issues just like every other man in my family.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Most likely, it's something that people also aren't going to tell you because it's not a very sexy thing to say, hey, right, have more fiber. Because if you have more fiber, that's going to impact your. Lower your LDL levels.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then that's going to reduce your coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease risk. Ooh, that's not gonna go viral, is it? Right.

[Andy Morgan]

No, it's not gonna happen on Instagram. Your doctor will tell you as he writes a prescription for statins or whatever it is that you have to take from some sort of other pharmaceutical. The point is it's a data driven approach instead of a feeling based approach. I used to be the feelings based guy.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Should I go up and wait Today in my.

[Andy Morgan]

Whatever. Sure. I guess I'm feeling pretty strong. I might as well. I feel like I got enough sleep. I might as well. And then I don't know what I did last week anyways, so I might as well just add a little bit more. That doesn't work, especially when you're talking about food. There's a video out there, I think you sent me, where this guy goes over two different lunches. It's got almonds, some sort of other stuff in there and blah, blah, blah. And one was like 950 calories and the other one was 600 calories. And you cannot tell the difference when you're looking at these two things because it's a handful of this and a handful of that and a pinch of this and a little bit of that. And by visual you really cannot tell. But if you weigh it, it's a huge difference. That could basically erase your calorie deficit for the whole day. And so this data driven approach is really what the big change is.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That was probably Ben Carpenter. I'd like to give him a shout out. I think he's just an absolute gem in our industry that's filled with terrible people. Ben Carpenter. Put a link to him in the, in the show notes, please, as well. I'll send you his Instagram later. What you're talking about there, or highlighting there is the, the effect of the calorie density of food. So when we say increase your vegetable intake, what we're doing there is we're increasing the actual volume of food that you have. And that is going to have an effect on helping you with fullness, helping us with fullness and satiety. Let's take the extremes, right? You're just going to eat broccoli or you're going to eat brownies. How much broccoli, the actual volume of broccoli, would you end up eating? Right. You wouldn't be able to finish it all. And of course I'm not suggesting that at all, but you could very easily.

[Andy Morgan]

You're talking about an equal number of calories of brownies or broccoli.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, exactly.

[Andy Morgan]

Oh, yeah, right. So if I have a tiny Brownie and it's 250 calories, that's so much broccoli that your stomach is going to explode, essentially.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, absolutely. So this is obviously taking a very extreme example, but it's not just about the calorie content, because you could log in your tracking app, the macro factor we've been talking about, you could log in there and have your Technically perfect calorie deficit, which is 2,000 calories in your case, let's say. But you're not going to be able to sustain it because you're so hungry. Yes, it was delicious to eat those brownies at the time, but you're still just aching with hunger, so what can you do? So you've got your calorie budget. This is the base layer of the pyramid of importance. Just to go over this, it's calories are the most important thing. Then it is your macronutrients. So this is protein and then carbs and fats. Protein is what helps repair and build the tissues of the body. Carbs and fats are what fuel us. Then we've got micronutrients. So these are the nutrients in small quantities. These are the vitamins and minerals that we have. We can also throw fiber in there as well. Then we've got nutrient timing and then we've got supplements right at the very top. So we can basically forget supplements when it comes to nutrient timing. So the number of meals that we eat, just don't do anything crazy like don't do just one meal a day. If you're doing two meals a day or more, most clients will eat two to three meals a day. Lifestyle is simple and your nutrient spacing is going to be totally fine. So in terms of micronutrients, okay, eat your fruits and vegetables. Try to have roughly a fist sized portion of leafy green vegetables or other vegetables with every meal. And you're having two, three meals a day. When you're dieting, you might want to increase that to 2/5 worth of vegetables because again, that's going to help you decrease the total number of calories that you're eating because you're going to feel fuller, right? So you're going to have less issues with that fullness and hunger for your macronutrients. You're going to want to eat lean protein. So this means like lean fish, white fish, typically poultry. So there's be chicken for example, without the skin on so that you're reducing the fat content there. You want to be avoiding fatty steaks because you think of steak as mainly protein, but actually it's by calories. It's mostly fat really.

[Andy Morgan]

Okay. You know, I did notice that whenever I put in even kind of a lean ish filet, it's like, oh cool, 59 grams of pro. Wow, okay, 62 grams of fat. That's basically my whole day worth of fat right there. And it's, you know, that's dinner not the whole day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you said 59 grams of protein and 62 grams of fat. Even if it was 30 grams of fat, it's still more by calorie than it is the protein.

[Andy Morgan]

Oh, that's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And that's because fat is 9 calories per gram. And so you very quickly blast through your calorie budget that you're working with here. And I would love to sit here and tell you that you should eat bacon and sausages and fatty steaks and that's going to be the thing that's the key to your weight loss. And for some people, in some circumstances, they will find that that will work. But it's not because there's any magic to just eating lots of meat. I'm thinking of the Carnivore diet here. It's because they're not eating the donuts and the Frappa Shatinos and the Big Gulp Cokes and all of the other stuff. Right. That was bumping up their calories there.

[Andy Morgan]

I see. That's a good segue into why people think fad diets work. Because a lot of folks will go, oh, well, I swear by, I don't know, intermittent fasting. Because all this magical stuff happens during this window when you're fasting. And then it kind of just turns out that if you skip breakfast and you eat a light lunch and then you eat dinner, you're just getting fewer calories than if you ate breakfast, then second breakfast, then a snack, then lunch, then another snack and then dinner. Right. You're just getting less calories because you start eating later in the day. And it sounds like what you're saying. I was going to ask you why Carnivore Diet actually works. I didn't even think about the fact that they're not eating the tons of bread with jelly on it and the. Yeah, like the Starbucks drink or the milkshake or whatever. They cut all that stuff out. All these fad diets, they basically just come down to fancy, overly complicated calorie restriction that is hidden inside some sort of magic formula where it's like you could only eat chicken. Okay, but you're restricting calories by making sure you can only do this. Well, you can only eat between the hours of noon and 8pm okay, but you're just restricting calories by giving yourself an 8 hour window instead of a 16 hour window. Like it all just comes down to that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes, essentially. And this is something that I was guilty of when I first got into the industry. What we've got to remember here Is that everything tends to be cyclical. Like, low carb diets will be in that. Low fat diets will be in. They're given different names, but every 10 or 15 years, the same things come back in, Right? Paleo. Then we had keto, but keto was more popular. Like, in the early 2000s, it was branded as the anabolic diet by Pasquale. Very popular with bodybuilders at that time. Then before that, it was Atkins. Like, same thing, different names.

[Andy Morgan]

I remember the Atkins diet. And then you do that, and you go to the doctor and he goes, hey, your kidneys are screaming.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Listen to your doctors, guys. Like, listen to them, right?

[Andy Morgan]

Listen to your kidneys. That small scream sound you hear from your love handle is your kidney that just wants anything but an Atkins bar or whatever you've been feeding it for.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

The last three months.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was just about to confess. Forgive me, father, but I have sinned. I used to be a big proponent of something called lean gains.

[Andy Morgan]

What's that?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Which was Martin Birkin's idea of 16,8 intermittent fasting. He was the guy who came up with that. Okay? And essentially it's skip breakfast, have a big lunch and a big dinner, maybe a meal in between. You're going to then burn more fat during the morning. Your calorie partitioning is going to be better. You're going to gain more muscle, lose more fat. And if you pair that with intense reverse pyramid training, this is going to be exceptionally good for your physique. I thought that had its advantages, and there are certainly advantages to keeping things very simple with a low meal frequency. But when calories are matched, when training intensity is matched, it doesn't seem to make a difference. The thing that appealed to me was I had been on this train of this is the late 2000s, early 2010s. You have to eat every three hours, you have to have protein every three hours, otherwise your muscles are going to fall off. Now, I was this naturally skinny guy. Like, I worked very hard for my mediocre gains, But I was so scared that when I would go on long motorcycle trips, I would have a fanny pack on with a 500 mil bottle of water and a protein shaker because I didn't want to go more than three hours. And I'd set a timer on my phone.

[Andy Morgan]

Oh, my gosh.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not even kidding, right? I was so bought into this. Like, I was buying all of my myoplex proteins. Have my pre workout, my post workout, all of this stuff. And here comes Martin, and he's like, guys don't bother with that. Two meals, three meals a day, you're fine. And you just want to train super intensely. And the fact is, most people don't train hard enough. They don't push themselves close enough to failure. And so these things worked, but it just didn't work for the reasons that I thought. And so I had to back out of that. But that's where I was initially. This is kind of how I got my start in the industry, by teaching people about this lean gains system. But then I kind of realized that I was wrong.

[Andy Morgan]

You know, I'm fine with people doing fad diet stuff. If it actually, like if you're doing intermittent fasting and it's working for you, fine. But just realize that the reason it's working is because of calorie restriction so that you don't beat yourself up on a day where you decide to have breakfast with your family. The other reason it's important to know why these things work is because if you don't know why something works, you can never really modify the program to suit your needs. It's impossible because you don't know why it's working. So you don't know what you can change without breaking everything.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Exactly. Right. So for intermittent fasting, right, Skip breakfast. Basically, skipping breakfast is what we're talking about here. Wait until lunch, eat your dinner. Okay. There's nothing magic about it. However, if this helps, you eat fewer calories and you're trying to lose weight, great. But if total calories are the same, then there is not going to be any effect on weight loss. If you were to have breakfast as well or have six meals, right. It's not going to make a difference. So do it if you find that it helps, but don't do it because your favorite influencer is ramming it down your throat and telling you that you have to do it right. Choose what you like doing.

[Andy Morgan]

What about bulletproof coffee? That was a huge thing for a while. Everybody I know did it. They're like, it's making me smarter and taller. And like, you could basically name any benefit that was available to humans. And bulletproof coffee was doing it. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what was the claim? It's like add 250 to 500 calories of originally it was butter, then it was grass fed ghee. Because obviously this can then be packaged and sold because it's very difficult to buy that from most people's local supermarkets. And also I think it was called brain Octane MCT oil to your morning coffee because then you will burn more Fat. And it's going to give you more energy for your morning fast. Because bear in mind, this was popular at a time when a lot of people were intermittent fasting, skipping breakfast, and a certain number of people were struggling with that and they wanted to do something to combat the morning hunger that wasn't eat food.

[Andy Morgan]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Unfortunately, the hint there was they weren't getting on very well with it.

[Andy Morgan]

Right. Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So therefore they should have just had breakfast. Now, bear in mind, whenever you change any meal pattern for your body to get used to it, it takes five to seven ish days. Right. So everyone's gonna struggle with any new meal pattern after that. That's kind of why it sucks after you've been on away on holiday jet lag, it kind of messes you up there as well. So the idea was basically you would add 250 to 500 calories of fat to burn more fat.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah. Make it make sense.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Does that make any sense? I don't know how you even make that sense.

[Andy Morgan]

No.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it doesn't burn more fat, it directly adds fat to your diet, making it harder to get into a calorie deficit and lose fat. Because remember, fat itself is the most calorie dense thing that we have per gram. And this is direct fat and it's now liquid fat. So food is always going to be better. Solid calories are always going to be better than liquid calories in terms of fullness and satiety.

[Andy Morgan]

Oh, fullness. Okay. Because I was going to say I drink a crapload of whey protein between meals and stuff like that. Is that okay?

[Jordan Harbinger]

So that is okay. So if you are trying to sustain your calorie deficit.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If you're dieting right now, which I don't think you are, I'm gaining weight.

[Andy Morgan]

Deliberately with like 200 grams of protein or something like that to get my calories in.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Great. So if you're having something like two large chicken breasts, which will be about the size of your palm, two of those, you're probably going to be talking about 300ish grams of weight. And then you're going to be talking about 75 grams of protein per breast. Right. So then you need to have another 50 grams, which is going to be two protein shakes. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Also, you're in a gaining phase.

[Andy Morgan]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Your battle eventually is going to be with feeling too full. And so liquid calories can help with that.

[Andy Morgan]

That's the exact problem I'm having. I don't want to eat, but I know I need 91 grams of protein before dinner or, you know, in addition to lunch and dinner, whatever it is, depends on the day. It's like I just can't sit there and eat a chicken breast. I'm going to explode. But I can down an organ and get 30 grams of protein and then two more hours I can down, you know, work out and down another one and then I'm halfway that, more than halfway there. I'm two thirds of the way there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's a client right now, literally on Monday. After his bi weekly check in, I said to him he had been consistently been falling short of his calorie targets by around 10% every week for eight weeks now. As a result, he's training super hard. The training is all on point. He's struggling to progress and his weight is not increasing. Why? Because he's missing this 300 calories is. He's on about a 3,000 calorie diet. That's roughly what he needs to gain weight at a rate of roughly three quarters of a pound per week. We're targeting so around two and a half, three pounds per month. But he's missing that necessary surplus. And I've tried to get him to change his food choices, but he's been struggling with it. And so on this Monday, I just said, look, this is what I want you to do. Cereal crushed up into a small bowl, whole milk mixed with one scoop of whey protein. I want you to have 300 calories worth of that before bed every night. Moving forward, change nothing in the rest of your meals. This is going to solve your problem because that is your 10% of calories. This is your 300 calories. It's going to be delicious, easy to eat. I don't need to have any guilt about it. And then I kind of talked about, you know, we already prioritizing the good, nutritious foods. This is not bad. In fact, it's helping us meet our goals by providing the calorie surplus that we need, which will fuel your training, allow you to progress, allow you to gain muscle.

[Andy Morgan]

I think most people don't really have a calorie surplus issue. I think most people are trying to lose fat. Oh, before we move on though, what do you think of these? What are they called? Continuous glucose monitors. I had one of those for a while. All my friends with diabetes laughed at me. But I got a bunch of data and it was kind of interesting, like, wow, sushi really spikes my blood sugar. But then I was like, what do I actually do with any of this? Data. None of it was actionable. And I had a needle stuck in my arm for a week at a time, which just felt weird.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is a very useful piece of kit for diabetics.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Friend of mine's son, he's 10 years old now. He has one. He has to have one. It's helping keep him alive because He's a type 1 diabetic. This is where the technology comes from. But now it's being marketed to healthy individuals, people, I. E. People without diabetes. And so the claim is essentially, you have a blood glucose monitor. You can see when your blood sugar spikes, which will be after every meal, the brain spoiler alert. Right. The claim is that it's going to help you with your weight management and make better dietary choices and quote, unquote, personalized nutrition. The reality is, is that fluctuations in blood glucose are normal. It ends up teaching people to fear carbs instead of focusing on calorie control. Because when we have more carby foods, carbs are sugar. When we have more carby foods, then our blood sugar will spike more. If the whole premise of it is that you need to avoid these blood sugar spikes, then it's going to teach you to fear the carbs instead of just focusing on calorie control overall. And it's expensive, so it's not helping anyone other than kind of pushing them towards carb phobia and potentially disordered eating behavior. But the tech is expensive there. You can now be on a monthly subscription model that they can get you on, and so they can afford to have their adverts everywhere.

[Andy Morgan]

Right, Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You've got to remember that diets and dietary fads are almost religious level further. And so you have a very loud portion of the Internet that will tell you that carbs are basically the devil and they will ignore and butcher all of the science, like, forever to die on that hill. Here's the thing, right? When it comes to this, if you eat something and you do not feel good after you've eaten it, don't eat it. Okay. You don't need one of these blood glucose monitors. Right. Just don't eat it.

[Andy Morgan]

I see. Well, I was just curious about that particular piece of cake because again, I was like, what do I do with this information? You're right. Every time I ate carbs, it went into the red zone. And that it was, well, eat more protein. Okay. But I already knew that anyway because I eat protein all the time. I eat one gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I think is kind of like a general fitness dude, rule perfect. Is that accurate? I know it's like 0.8 to 1.1, but I just chose one because it's easy to remember.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It kind of depends on where you're at.

[Andy Morgan]

If you're leaner, you need more. Right. I heard that from another friend of ours. And I long to be in the place where I need more than 1 pound, 1 gram per pound of body weight because I'm so lean. But we're not there yet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So it's not really about body weight, it's more on lean body mass. But accurately assessing lean body mass is very hard because body fat measurement devices just don't work. So then we like to make recommendations based on body weight. Where this goes wrong though is people who are carrying a lot of fat. Let's say that you're obese. Let's say that you're 300 pounds and 5 foot 7, you're obese at that point. Right. I'm taking an extreme example purposefully. If you were to eat 300, because you weigh 300 pounds, you're having one gram per pound of body weight. If you were to eat 300 grams of protein, number one, that's going to be very difficult to do. Number two, it's going to be very expensive. So it's going to be very difficult for that person to actually sustain that diet.

[Andy Morgan]

You would need to drink a protein shake like every hour while you are awake to get there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not quite that extreme. You just have like a double or a triple scoop. Yeah. It's going to be very tough for them and it's arguably unnecessary. So if you look down and you see your stomach rather than your knees, let's say go with your height in centimeters. So if you are 6 foot, this is about 180 grams of protein. If you're 5 foot 8, then 170 grams of protein, 5, 4, then about 150, 160 grams of protein. These are good heuristics for someone like yourself. Five of them.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah. No, I'm not. I Wish I was 6ft tall now. I'm like 5, 10 point something. I put it at 175 centimeters because I can remember it. But I eat around 190 grams of protein per pound of body weight because my wishful thinking is that I'm lean enough to need that. But. But here we are.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So you could. You're in a bulking phase right now. So you're in a weight gain phase. Yeah. So whether you're in a gain phase or a weight loss phase, this also affects our actual protein needs. You could probably go with a little bit less. So you could probably eat 170, 180 grams of protein. How much are you weighing right now?

[Andy Morgan]

1 65.

[Jordan Harbinger]

165. Okay, great. So you could probably eat 160, 165 grams of protein a day, and that would be totally fine. But when we're dieting, having excess protein is protective of lean tissue. Actually, you could probably eat 0.8 grams per pound of your body weight right now. So 140 grams. But when you were dieting, you'd want to eat one gram per pound.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Ashamed of what you see in the mirror? Put a band aid on your self esteem with consumerism. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by Oura Ring. One of my favorite things about the Oura ring, aside from the fact that it helps me not feel like a zombie when I wake up, is how it turns sleep into this low key, friendly competition. Aura has a feature called circles where you can share your stats with friends and compare sleep scores, readiness, all that. So now we've got this little crew where we basically trash talk each other over who got the best recovery last night. I know that's. That's adulting for you. We also have this one friend whose sleep is completely unhinged. It's like one night it's four hours, the next night it's 12 hours. Somehow he still gets decent deep sleep scores, and we're like, what are you? Like, what are you, a cat? It's hilarious seeing this data pop up in the group. But, yeah, that's what makes Aura fun. Yes, it's serious health tech, but it's also a great tool for staying connected with people who are trying to feel better, live longer. You end up learning a lot about yourself and each other. And I'll admit, I was skeptical at first. I didn't want to wear a gadget on my wrist 24 7. But the aura ring just looks like regular jewelry. There are a bunch of color options. I go with stealth black because, you know, tactical. Jen's got the rose gold. Every time she sees me checking my.

[Andy Morgan]

Stat, she's like, wait, how did you.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Sleep better than me last night? Whatever. By the way, if you're trying to get your girlfriend excited about bio tracking, this makes a great gift. Just saying, forget roses. Go with rose gold. You'll look like a thoughtful wellness nerd, which I'm told is very in right now. And bottom line, if you want to take your sleep, your recovery, your overall Health. Seriously, without strapping a small tablet to your wrist, give aura the finger. Go check it [e-mail] Jordan if you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment support the amazing sponsors who make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support this podcast are searchable and Clickable [e-mail] deals and if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, shoot us an email. Jordanordanharbinger.com we're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. All right, now for the rest of my conversation with Andy Morgan.

[Andy Morgan]

By the way, people who are going, oh my God, math. The macro factor app actually does all this for you. Because I was also like 1 gram per pound of body weight. I'm not going to count this. When you macro factor, you literally say, I'm eating chicken breast. You type it in and it says, oh, how much? And you say 175 grams, because that's what my kitchen scale says. And then it says, okay, here's all the nutrients that are in there and here's how much you have left for the day. I mean, it couldn't be made easier unless it actually grew arms and weighed the food for you. That's the only next step that makes this thing easier. You could scan the barcode of your Quest protein chips, which is my new sort of obsession. You can scan the barcode and it goes, oh, Quest protein chips, barbecue flavor. Well, there's 19 grams of protein in here, 5 grams of fiber, you know, X grams of carbs, X grams of fat. And it just puts it in there. So if people only do one thing after this episode, which is start weighing their food and putting it in macro factor or my fitness pal or whatever app of choice, then our work here is done. Because once you start learning about the things you're eating, I feel like you just naturally start eating less. And then after a week and you realize you've lost two pounds or three pounds because the first few weeks of dieting, I think the first six weeks I lost like three pounds per week before things started to sort of slow down a little bit. And even after that, it was like one or two pounds per week. Water, gut content, glycogen. But you don't need to worry about that if you think you're losing that much and it's fat. Ignorance is bliss. That's the theme. That was one of the themes earlier in the episode. Go with that. Because it feels damn good to lose £10 in a month. The first month you're dieting and you're not starving and you don't feel disgusting and you're not eating cardboard exclusively and you're not skipping breakfast, you know, or whatever it is. The good news with dieting, man, is, like, time is on your side, right? If you just lose even a half a pound a week or a pound a week and you got to lose 50 pounds, you just diet for a year. And it sounds really hard, but it's actually not that bad because when I was dieting, I dieted initially for 10 months. I ate pretty much whatever I wanted. I just didn't eat as much as I wanted. So I had a protein shake at breakfast, then I had a regular breakfast, then I went up to lunch and if I wanted like a burger, I just ordered a burger. And then I had chicken breast and some other stuff for dinner. And I was not complaining and I wasn't hungry and I wasn't whining. It was not that hard. It was just consistency over a long period of time. And then it was like, holy shit, I can see my abs. The level of pain involved in this is so much less than people think. That's, I think, my main point here.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you also needed to have a little bit of discipline. And that mainly starts at when you are eating out, choosing the right food on the menu. That's discipline number one. Ideally, you'll choose it before you get there so that you're not choosing based on hunger, but rather what you need. So look at the menu online. And then discipline number two, when that food comes, if it is obviously too much, leave it on the plate.

[Andy Morgan]

It took me a while to get my mom and dad's voice out of my head. When you leave half a sandwich on the plate and they go, there are kids starving in Africa. And you're like, or China or whatever it was back in the 80s, right? And you just go, that's okay. This sandwich is not going to help them. It's not getting there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not. You not achieving your physique goals because you left something on plate doesn't help anyone.

[Andy Morgan]

No, no, that's a good point.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When you start dieting, you will lose more weight in the first week to ten days than you will on average for the weeks after that. And that is because you're losing water, gut content and glycogen, not just fat.

[Andy Morgan]

What Is glycogen.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So glycogen is carbs stored in your muscles along with water. Sorry, Muscles and liver. So whenever our blood sugar's running low, we will take these stored carbs out of the liver to help bring that back up. When we are trying to fuel our training, then we will take the glycogen directly from our muscles to fuel that training. When we go into a calorie deficit, then we reduce our carbohydrate intake along with a bunch of other things and food content overall. And so because we're eating less, the amount of poop that we have in our gut is lower.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And so it's weighing less. Right. You may have seven to ten pounds in there, but now you're eating a lot less. You got less poop in you, and so you weigh less because of that. Also, you're eating fewer carbs.

[Andy Morgan]

Luckily, I'm always full of shit. But, yes, I understand. I understand where you're going with this. Fewer carbs.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, fewer carbs. So our overall glycogen levels are lower. That's okay. We don't need to be maxed out. But our overall glycogen levels are lower. And so this is something to bear in mind. So just because you lost three pounds in the first week and then two pounds in the next week, don't get your hopes up that you lost all fat. Now, why is this important? Because you said, oh, no, take it. Just have it in your mind that you're losing a whole bunch of fat.

[Andy Morgan]

The inverse. Right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Andy Morgan]

Yeah. You saw where I was leading with this. Continue.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is where people lose their minds. They have one bad weekend, which could just be one meal that's got some fries and a burger, and the fries are extra salty, and maybe they have a couple of beers. This might be 2000 calories. This might mean that instead of being in a 500 calorie deficit, they ate a thousand calories too much on that day. For context, to lose a pound of fat, you require a 3,500-calorie deficit. So what they've actually done here is instead of having their 500 calorie deficit a day, they've eaten over by a thousand calories. So they would. If all of that was perfectly stored, they would have gained around a third of a pound of fat. But what happens is, well, they're now having saltier food. They're now having more food. They've got a bunch of carbs in there. Boom. Their body's now holding onto a whole lot more Water, there's more gut content, more glycogen is being stored. And so when they step on the scale, if that was a Saturday, on the Sunday and then the Monday, they're up by three or four pounds. They think this is fat. They're like, oh, my goodness, this diet doesn't work. Dieting is not for me. I've screwed everything up. I can't even have this one meal. If I can't have this one meal and still managed to succeed with my goals, what is the damn point? Because I can't live like this. And they're right. They can't live like that. If that were the case. But it's not.

[Andy Morgan]

But then they say screw it, and they just start eating like crap again, right? A lot of the time, unfortunately, they say, screw it. I'm just going to eat like crap this whole week because I'm already fat. I'll start again later. This happens when I eat ramen. I had ramen today, and I know from experience that I will be maybe even up to four pounds heavier tomorrow. Not because I ate four pounds of noodles, but because I'm so thirsty from the amount of salt that's in that ramen. Then I will drink a gallon of water today, and I probably will keep.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

A bunch of it.

[Andy Morgan]

And then on Tuesday, I'm going to lose all of that and then some. And it's just one of those bumps that. It's the ramen bump. And it happens every time I eat ramen, especially at this one place. It just happens to be really salty and delicious. It happens every time. It happens with noodles a lot, but especially with salty noodles. And yeah, at first, this was really kind of terrifying because you do this really good job all week, and you're like, I'm losing weight. And then on Monday, you're like, what happened? I've ruined the whole week. What you don't realize is that you spend all of Tuesday peeing it out, and then you're back to you've actually lost weight like you thought you did is exactly right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You just gotta ride the diet roller coaster. Once the habits are in place, which does take time, it's a mental game. And that's a lot of what we as coaches help people with, because the mental game is really tough because they don't know what to expect. But we've seen it hundreds of times before, and we can reassure people that, no, no, this is how it is. Please don't worry. Lean in, stay consistent. Just don't panic.

[Andy Morgan]

I found that quite useful when I was coaching with your team, was going, eh, I'm feeling discouraged because five days have gone by and I'm used to the scale moving down, you know, a tenth of a pound and it just stopped. Oh, okay, well, we don't have enough data right now to panic. Let's wait until next week. And then by next week it's like, oh, actually I lost a pound over the weekend because I whatever salty food, eating a bunch of other small things, eating at weird times. Oh, I went on a flight and for some reason flying makes me a bloated sack. I used to think I would get fat on vacations and it turned out I was just retaining water from the flights. And that's the kind of thing when you weigh yourself every day, you log your food and just from knowing, look, if you're weighing yourself every day and you see patterns, flying noodles, et cetera, you stop psyching yourself out all the time. But the coaching got me over those humps for that 10 month initial diet where I lost the 40 pounds. Tell me before I forget, I want to ask about seed oils because this was one of those things that hit Reddit, Instagram, don't eat seed oils. Don't eat seed oils. And I looked at all of my protein shakes and foods I liked that were doing really well for me and they all have some sort of seed oil in it. And I was like, I am. Do I have to not eat these anymore? Because that was sort of devastating. Why did these get demonized? And is it legit or not?

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, it's not legit. Why did it get demonized? Because it's a, it is the anti position to the standard position.

[Andy Morgan]

So it's just contrarianism in diet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Thank you. Okay, it's contrarianism and also it's a pseudo scientific justification for an otherwise unjustifiable diet, which was the carnivore diet, an extreme version of a keto diet. The thing is, we've got decades of data showing high correlation between high saturated fat intakes and cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease. Decades of data. And you mentioned about LDL levels like right at the start of this conversation. And your dots are warning about it. Right? There's a reason for that. There's no big conspiracy here. And unfortunately, people are gambling now that the recommendations of the American Heart association, the World Health Organization, the European Society of Cardiology are all wrong. And your favorite influencer was correct.

[Andy Morgan]

Right, right, right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Which unfortunately now has got political.

[Andy Morgan]

That's true. People are going, oh, well, if the WHO Says it. It's probably the opposite. Okay, fine, but what about the American Heart association and the European Society of Cardiology? Well, it's one big conspiracy from Big Seed Oil.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how anything works.

[Andy Morgan]

Yes, so true. I love that particular phrase. Everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how anything works. I should tattoo that on my. On myself somewhere.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is where a fad diet will potentially kill you, because these things come in and they come out and you will end up having. I mean, I do hope that this is a fad that will disappear. The only reason that I say hope is because based on everything in my industry over the last, like, three, four decades, everything just comes in cycles and it will peter out. It's just. I'm wondering whether politics is now going to keep this more out there for longer. The risk is cumulative and irreversible. If you're eating a very high fatty animal diet for extended periods, this has now upped your baseline risk permanently.

[Andy Morgan]

This permanent thing freaks me out because, I mean, I grew up in Michigan in the 80s and 90s. I've eaten all kinds of just horrific things that were probably not even actually currently classified as food, right? Like baloney and stuff, but not real baloney. Just like all these cold cuts and stuff that I ate, which are probably, like, one molecule away from plastic. Ugh, margarine. I mean, all this. All this stuff, man. Yeah. Freaks me out.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, I would love to say that you could have bacon and sausages slathered in butter, like, for every meal. Life would be good. It'd be so much tastier. Unfortunately, calories aside, macros aside, it's just not sensible from a heart health and cardiovascular disease risk perspective.

[Andy Morgan]

Macros, by the way, for people who don't know protein, fat and carbs. And again, the app will tell you this is probably what you should be getting if you're trying to lose weight. Gain weight, whatever, for someone your size. This is a healthy amount of this, man. Is there anything you want to leave us with? Because I don't want to overwhelm. There's so much more we could talk about, but I don't want to overwhelm people with, oh, and there's this and there's that and the other thing. I wanted to bust a few myths, and I wanted to get people to just try weighing their food for, like, three days so that they can see how much they're learning. And then ideally, they keep doing it, because I started by weighing my. I Said, I'll do it for one weekend just because I have time. And then after day one I went, I'm probably doing this for the rest of my life. And that was years ago.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So for you, that was your next key step and it's all about finding your next key step, your next big leverage point. What do I mean by that? You had had something of an aha moment when you were on the floor with Jaden. You were like, I've got to make a change. And you started hiring a personal trainer and you locked yourself in, I think with like a multi month package. So then you've got the financial buy in as well and that's very smart. And also you've got this social buy in where you respect this person. You do not want to mess with their time. You know that they're going to turn up at your house or call in over zoom at a specific time of day. You don't want to mess them about. It's disrespectful, right? So this also worked in your favor as well. So then you built a habit of training. You built out your home garage gym so that then you had no excuse because time now to travel to the gym was no longer a factor. You made everything as frictionless as possible for you, right?

[Andy Morgan]

It was sort of that James Clear thing, right? Like if you want to watch less tv, unplug your TV and put it in the closet and it's like you want to go to the gym more. I was like, put a gym in my garage so that it's I trip over my squat rack on the way out to the car. Like it's there, it better get used. Yeah, I did a lot of that friction reducing stuff. My trainer, who's one of my close friends now, also did something smart during our first few sessions. He said, yeah. I said, yeah. Do you ever get people who like don't show up? He goes, yeah, I just fire them as clients. I'm 50 years old, I don't have time for this. If somebody doesn't show up, they oversleep. If it happens once, I get it. But you know, if it happens, if it's a habit, I just fire them as a client and I never work with them again. And it was sort of his subtle way of being like, don't even think about the fact that, oh, you're still going to get paid even if I don't show up. Because he's like, I will just can you and not work. I don't care. I don't need Your money that bad. And I was like, got it loud and clear. And I've only missed workouts when I'm like, I have a 103 temperature and I have to go to the ER or like I'm projectile vomiting. It's like, that's when I miss workouts.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's it exactly. So your next key step after this stopped working for you, I. E. You stopped seeing physical change and this took you really far. Right? Your next key step there was realizing, he said, what about your nutrition? Then you started thinking about calories, then you started logging calories. And this gave you multiple aha moments over that next week, 2, 3, 4, that month, right? When you're like, damn, that is so much. Yeah, like, I didn't realize that, like, wow, like, this was your next key step. Now I want everyone to think about what their next key steps are. For some people here, it's going to be just moving more, Opening the app on their phone, their health app, looking how many steps they're doing and if it's under 7,000, trying to get to that number. I know people talk about 10 and 12. These are all arbitrary numbers. But just trying to get your step count up because most people, they just walk to the car, drive where they're gonna go, sit at a desk, drive the next place, eat, et cetera. Right?

[Andy Morgan]

There's an app I have called Steps app. It has a widget that shows you how many steps you have, but also it'll say, hey, one brisk walk will get you to your. You can set the goal in the app. Mine's 8,000. One brisk walk for 15 minutes will take you to your goal. And you're just like, huh, I should probably just do that at 6pm or it'll say, you're 50% on your way, your goal. And you can set these little reminders that get you across the finish line, which is great because I don't want that at 9pm I want it at 6pm When I'm sitting around going, what should I do? Hey, one 15 minute brisk walk would take you to your goal. Oh, I guess I should go for a walk. And that has been huge. Cumulatively, I've done, I think, probably by now, of course, millions of steps in this app, which is just bananas.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And that small nudge. Super effective, super helpful for you. It all depends on where you're at. Let's take my dad. He's 82 now. He will not change his diet, he will not go to the gym. He sits most of the day and he's losing muscle and he cannot walk well. What was his next key step? What can I do to actually help him? Well, it turns out that he used to cycle when he was a teenager and so he bought himself a bicycle and now he cycles around the neighborhood. Why is this a good thing? Because it's working out his legs. Having stronger legs means that he's able to get himself off of the toilet. And we will have independence as he advances in age. So this is his next step. Right. Let's take a friend of mine, Pete. Pete. He hadn't exercised since university. He hates the gym and he's tight on time because he's got kids. And he also runs a business. Well, he used to run at school. He enjoyed it. All he needs to do is put on his trainers, sneakers. Sorry. And then so he can go running around the block. Easy. Done. That was literally the next best step for him. We work with bodybuilders on our Japanese business. There's a guy called Takeuchi. He wasn't making the top five in placings in his shows. What did he need to do? His training was actually really good. He is paying too much attention to his meal timing. He was taking maybe too much protein and too many supplements, but they weren't degrading his performance in any way. The thing that he needed to do is not compete every year. He needed to take a year off so that we could spend more time in a muscle gain phase and then diet instead of three months before his show, diet seven months before his show so that he could really lean out slowly and retain as much muscle mass as possible. That was the strategy for him. So my point here is it all depends on the person and where that person is at at the time. My parting advice to people is one, bear in mind that most of what we hear is nonsense. Use that filter of. Does it sound too good to be true? If it does, then it probably is right. Do people caveat their language? Number two, focus on the basics if you want to achieve results. That's everything we've talked about here. There is nothing fancy. There is no shiny object there. Number three, keep things as simple as possible so that you can sustain it and look for your next key step, your next key leverage point, like I talked about. Four, use data to drive your decisions. So you want to be weighing yourself. You also want to be measuring yourself. If you're lifting, then you want to be tracking what you're lifting, not just whether you're lifting more weight, but are you doing more reps. Are you doing more sets. And then lastly, just know that there are no shortcuts to success. Lasting results take time. But when you take time to get those lasting results, the results last. They're permanent. They stay.

[Andy Morgan]

By the way, I reread the books, the Diet Adjustments Manual. I always get the titles wrong, but we'll link to them in the show notes because I reread these every year just to get an overview of how nutrition works and how the weight loss or weight gain works or whatever it is. It's almost like nutrition 101 and 102 for fitness purposes and weight loss purposes in these two PDFs.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. If you go to rippbody.combooks then you will see the Ribbon Nutrition Setup Guide. That's a free download. It's also going to be bundled with an email course. Of the seven mistakes that people make right, which is talking about these water fluctuations. And I've got some nice sketches in their graphs and stuff.

[Andy Morgan]

You're a talented artist with your stick figures.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The other one is, okay, well, once you've got your diet set up, once things are moving okay, now, how are you going to assess that and how are you going to know when to make changes and what changes to make? That's the Diet Adjustments Manual. That's a paid book and video package where you can see me going over people's data. It's not particularly expensive. It doesn't keep me in fresh undies. Like, I don't make a lot of money off of it, but I just wrote it because I wanted to have my thoughts out there because there's only so many people that I can help that we can help. So summary One, most of what we hear is nonsense. Two, focus on the basics to achieve great results. Three, keep things as simple as possible so that you can sustain it. And then always try to find your next big leverage point. Your next one. Key step four, use data to drive your decisions. And five, there are no shortcuts. Lasting results take time, but results that take time last because the habits have been set.

[Andy Morgan]

Again, I know I said this earlier in the show, if people just read those books or even skim them, because I know some of it can be like, oh, I'm not going to bulk, I'm going to cut. I don't need this. Read, slash, skim the books. A free one. Start with that one. Weigh your food for even just a couple of days, ideally two weeks, but just a couple of days. You will learn so much again, time is on your side. You don't have to do anything extreme. You don't have to cut out your favorite foods, you don't have to starve, you don't even have to really be hungry. You don't have to eat at weird times. You just have to eat like 250 fewer calories per day, maybe 500 if you're really going for it. And you will lose dozens of pounds without feeling like you're on some sort of weird ass diet. And that for me was life changing. Like I said, it changed my appearance obviously, but it also changed my blood pressure, it changed my cholesterol levels. Look, having kids like I want to be around for when they have kids and dying early because I didn't want to weigh my food just seemed like a really dumb trade off.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's been wonderful to be able to help you as a friend. It's very difficult to work with friends. That's why, you know, having you work not with myself but with the team was crucial. And just seeing your transformation, how you feel now, the pep in your step that you now have.

[Andy Morgan]

That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Honestly mate, it's brilliant. I love it.

[Andy Morgan]

And remember I beat you in cornhole before I was, was in this kind of shape. So now you don't stand a chance actually now it's just in the bag before you even get off the plane.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh my goodness. Small plug all of this. You don't have to remember it. If you go to RipBody.com there is a email grab there. Enter your email address. There's a 15 day course, it's all free. I don't even think I have a strong pitch in there. I'll probably mention coaching, sure. But that's going to give you everything you need and take you through the kind of the pitfalls to avoid.

[Andy Morgan]

Thank you man. And look, I know again, I don't do shows on nutrition. I sought out Andy for this. You are not a hard ass, sort of marketer, seller type guy, which is the other reason that I felt it was appropriate to do this. And everything is science based. There's not fad, gimmicky crap, you don't have your face on, you know, a protein shake bottle kind of stuff. So I hope people just take a few bits of this advice and put it into practice because you will potentially live longer and there's not that many things that will get you to live longer, happier or healthier. And this is one of those things. And it was probably the biggest positive change in my life that I had control or a hand in creating other than like creating My business, marrying my wife and raising my kids like this is on that tier of good decisions that have worked out well for me. No exaggeration. Andy, thank you so much, man. I know it's a weekend and you're in Japan and it's a weird time, so I really appreciate you coming on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Honored to be on. Thank you so much. Thank you for everything over the years.

[Andy Morgan]

Want to master the art of communication? Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators reveals key strategies for enhancing your connections and conversations in this enlightening podcast episode.

[Charles Duhigg]

Why do some people manage to connect with everyone else so effortlessly? And then there's times when I talk to my wife and like, we cannot connect with each other. And it turns out it's just a set of skills, right? Like, it's just literally a set of skills that super communicators know and that any of us can learn and become super communicators ourselves. Looping for Understanding and has three steps. The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question. Secondly, repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words. And thirdly, and this is the one everyone always forgets, ask if you got it right. The reason why this is so powerful is because it proves that I'm listening to you. It's really easy to stop thinking about how we're communicating. It's really easy to stop thinking about what's going on until we get in the habit of it. Communication isn't something that happens just one to one. Sometimes it's one to many. But the same principles still hold up. You're still having practical or emotional or social conversations. Laughter is actually one the of of the non linguistic ways that we connect with other people. There's been studies that show that in about 80% of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to something funny. It's because we're basically in a conversation and we're saying to someone, I want to connect with you. Nobody is born a super communicator. That's what feels tiring, is when you feel like you want to connect and you can't, right? This isn't a behavior, this isn't a personality type. This is a tool that once we learn, we can use when we want to use it.

[Andy Morgan]

Learn how to categorize conversations, improve active listening and overcome communication barriers to build stronger relationships.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Tune in and transform your interactions into meaningful connections.

[Andy Morgan]

On episode 963 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

I truly cannot endorse this enough.

[Andy Morgan]

Honestly, Andy has changed the way that I look at health and nutrition, I.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Reread those books every year.

[Andy Morgan]

I'm not going to just say everybody needs to hire him right now, but.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

I do think y' all should get the books.

[Andy Morgan]

We'll link to those in the show notes. They are very affordable. They really taught me a ton about nutrition.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

His coaching is only for men, but the books are for men and women.

[Andy Morgan]

So I recommend them for everybody.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

And if you need somebody to kind of hold your feet to the fire a little bit in a friendly way.

[Andy Morgan]

While showing you how to eat right, I cannot recommend the coaching enough. Honestly. It has just been again, I lost like 50 pounds of fat and gained 25 pounds of muscle. What else do you need to know?

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

All things. Andy Morgan will again be linked in the show [e-mail] advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter, we Bit Wiser. The idea behind it is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, on your psychology, on your relationships. In under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I.

[Andy Morgan]

Invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. And don't forget about six Minute Networking as well. It's over at six Minute Networking. I'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested, maybe getting a handle on their nutrition, maybe.

[Andy Morgan]

Losing a little bit of fat, gaining.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

A little bit of muscle, definitely share.

[Andy Morgan]

This episode with him.

[Gabriel Mizrahi]

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. Huge shout out to Oura Ring for sponsoring this episode. We'd be hyping this thing up even if they weren't paying us, but fortunately for everyone involved they are. So check it out@oura ring.com Jordan and please support the sponsors that support this show.