Podcast Transcription: How to Become Unstoppable In 2024 Series: Part 3: Mastering Your Nutrition: The Nutrition Blueprint For a Leaner, Healthier & More Energetic Body

Ted Ryce: What's up, my friend, and welcome back to the New Year, New You series on the Legendary Life podcast! And if you haven't listened to episodes 0, 1 and 2, make sure you go do that today; it's all about optimizing nutrition for health and longevity. So, we're on episode three now.

And if you haven't checked out episode zero—well, we're calling it episode zero because it's not really about health. It's not about New Year, New You, per se. It's about my own personal story and what led me into the health and fitness business. Because I wanted to reintroduce my story to you—it's been a long time. And I know we have a lot of new listeners who may not even know this story.

So, if you're interested in how I got into health and fitness, go and listen to it because I think you'll understand where I come from in this, you know, just health and fitness and why I'm so passionate about it.

In episode one, I talk about mindset and why it's crucial; maybe the most important aspect of how you approach your health and fitness. And in episode two, I talk about exercise.

Now, today we're going to be discussing the critical role of nutrition in health and longevity. And before I jump in though, I want to talk about a controversial statement I made in episode two in the exercise segment where I said, if we're talking about...look, if I want to write a bestselling book in the health and fitness category, it's going to be about nutrition because people are crazy for nutrition.

However, the best data that we have, the strongest research that we have, shows that exercise is more powerful. Oh, I know there's some eye-rolling and some triggering happening, but that's what the data says.

However, nutrition, it's not to say that nutrition isn't important, but I'll say this: you can out-train a bad diet if you train hard and long enough.

Most of us don't have the time to do it or even realize what that might mean. In other words, you think your 45-minute gym workout should be enough to out-train your diet, but believe me, you can out-train your diet—professional athletes do it all the time.

That said, you can never, no matter how perfect your nutrition is, eat yourself into a high level of fitness. Are you with me on that?

That said, nutrition plays a critical role in health and longevity. So just keep that in mind. And that's what we're going to dive into today. And before I dive in, I also want to say this: What I'm about to share with you on nutrition, I really put a lot of thought into this because I didn't want to regurgitate what I've said before or what other people have said before.

I really wanted to share my current views on nutrition. I wanted to share also how I think about it now because it's very different than how I used to think about it even a year ago. And I'm going to share that with you. So, I've never shared this before on this podcast.

And it's based on my coaching with clients. Let me tell you, coaching people—real people—instead of just putting content out there, hoping it sounds cool enough for someone to try and then follow and then they share their experience. That's different than working with people trying to figure out, okay, how do I help this person improve their health? How do I get them on some type of strategy or a combination of strategies that lead to better health and something that they can stick with? So, let's dive in now.

Number one, energy balance is the foundation of nutrition. In other words, how many calories you eat—it's the foundation of nutrition—is more important than your food choices.

Do I hear eyes rolling or any triggering? Hope not. And in case before you—if this does have you upset—stick with me because I want to explain why I'm saying this.

What is the US and really the modern world facing? We're facing a pandemic or epidemic of obesity and pre-diabetes. I'm not going to spend a lot of time diving into statistics here, but it's just the obesity has gotten worse and worse and worse since the 80s.

And I believe it's the number one thing. If you are overweight, if you are obese, and most people are according to the statistics and according to, I mean, how many—the types of clients that I work with—even if they're exercising. Most of my clients are overweight or obese.

And when I say most, I mean 90 plus percent. It's the biggest thing that we're dealing with. And I want to also be clear that— what's driving it is eating too many calories. In other words, energy balance. We are out of balance with our food consumption. And I want to be clear about this because I used to not believe in calories. I was really stuck in the low-carb world.

I believed very firmly and preached. I don't feel like I'm preachy these days. Maybe you disagree. But I used to really preach that carbs made you fat. I believed it didn't buy fruit.

I bought vegetables, even though those have carbs in them, but I kept my carbs super low, as low as possible. And that was in the early 2000s.

And here we are in 2023, the end of 2023, and a lot of people are still stuck on that. But the point is I made this shift over to realizing that body composition and many of our health issues are caused by what scientists call overnutrition and what we call eating too many calories.

And the big shift that I made was number one, low-carb diet start, I got fat eating a low-carb diet.

And I got really—I went down a road where I was like, well, my metabolism must be broken. My testosterone must be low. There may be—maybe this is a genetic issue. I went down all those roads, all those excuses, but eventually I challenged my own beliefs and changed my diet because I was eating healthy foods.

When I got fat, I want to be clear, I wasn't eating pasta and pastries like I do now. I had, speaking of pasta, pastries, and pizza, I had pasta and pizza last night, and then I had some ice cream. I actually eat sweets more regularly now.

But when I was 24% body fat, 1% away from being obese and pre-diabetic I was eating what you might call super clean. I was just eating way too much food. Well, I'm sorry, way too many calories—way too many calories. And I want to make that distinction. I caught myself there because what I was eating was, for example, something I used to have: fatty meat.

And I would eat, you know, eight, 10, 12 ounces of fatty meat—way more calories coming from fat than I realized. Or another thing that I used to have all the time was a chicken salad with a lot of cheese in it. But there were no carbs. It was cheese, chicken, olive oil, and nuts. And I got fat eating a diet like that. Oh, and a lot of eggs.

And I say this because one of the most common things that I hear from people is that obesity is mostly an issue where people are just eating crap. They're eating junk food. "Ah, you're overweight, you're obese. You eat garbage. That's why you're obese."

However, the clients that I work with, and also myself, I wasn't eating garbage. I mean, occasionally it happened. I'm not going to say that it never happened in a ten or really 10 to 15-year span, I was low carb, strict low carb for over 10 years. But I wouldn't—I wouldn't, I'd hardly ever eat it.

And so, if you're struggling with this, you're like, "Wow, I don't know what's wrong because I eat quite healthy. I don't indulge in a lot of junk food, but here I am struggling with being overweight or obese." It's an issue with calorie balance.

And I also want to share just beyond my experience. I recently had the Twinkie diet nutrition professor on the show. Now, if you don't know the story of Mark Haub and the Twinkie Diet, Mark Haub is a nutrition professor who created this project for his students in university, where he was overweight too, and he was eating what most of us would consider a healthy diet. But he was overweight, 27 pounds overweight.

And for 10 weeks, Mark Haub ate junk food every three hours instead of meals. So, it wasn't just Twinkies to add a little variety. He had Little Debbie snacks, Doritos, sugary cereals, and Oreos. Now he didn't just have that. He also had protein shakes and a multivitamin pill, and he ate vegetables too, typically a can of green beans or three or four celery stalks, and he lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks doing that.

And when I share this story, people on social media in particular inevitably bring up, "Yeah, but you know what? His metabolic health was crap. He must've got diabetic or his cholesterol shot up or whatever, but certainly let's see his blood work. It must've been terrible." And it wasn't; his bad cholesterol or LDL dropped 20%, and his good cholesterol or HDL increased by 20%.

He reduced the level of triglycerides, a form of fat in our blood, by 39%. And his fasting glucose even improved.

So, when I share this, it drives people crazy. And maybe you're feeling like you're a little bit confused too. And what I want to tell you is the big takeaway isn't that junk food is good for you or that you should eat it.

What it really says, the message here is that being overweight or obese, regardless of the foods that you're eating, is so bad for your health. Again, there's some nuance here.

But in general, so bad for your health that it's better to cut calories. Even if you're replacing some of the healthy foods, like let's say you were like me and you're eating a lot of cheese, butter, olive oil, coconut oil, and fatty meats, even if you replace those with Doritos and Oreos and Twinkies, your metabolic health is going to improve, and you're going to lose weight.

I'll say that a different way. It's not to say that junk food is good for you. It's to say that being overweight and obese because you're eating so many calories is so bad for you that even eating junk food while you're in a calorie deficit will help your metabolic health improve.

And when I had them on the show recently, get this, a healthy diet isn't what you think it is; it's data-driven. So, we could say that his diet was healthier because he lost 27 pounds and his markers of metabolic health improved. Now, don't get me wrong, if I did this diet, because I eat quite well, even though I, you know, I had a small carrot cake today after my workout, I have a little something sweet almost every day, it's what I like to do.

If I adopted his diet, I would have problems. I would most likely have problems, way too much sugar, but where he was cutting the calories, improved his health. I hope you're with me on that.

Just understand that in the world that we live in, if you're in a world of an abundance of food, like I am in the US, then calories need to be that primary focus, and it's energy balance that we're really talking about. How many calories are coming in compared to going out?

So, number two, much less controversial, but I wanted to spend some time on that first one. We can get through this one a little bit faster, is protein. So, after I coach my clients on the importance of calories, it's time to talk about protein. I really want to emphasize, you don't want, because sometimes in my coaching program, my clients get a little confused.

They're like, "Well, I ate more calories than I was supposed to, but it was because I was trying to hit my protein." And I say, "Well, what's the fundamental rule here?" "Oh, it's calorie balance, right? Or energy balance." "Yes." So don't eat more calories just to hit your protein. But once you have your calories dialed in, time to talk about protein because protein, it's important.

So, there's this narrative in, let's say, social media, talking about carbs or talking about fat. Really, it's more about carbs, and, you know, there's this whole insulin, carbohydrate, insulin model of obesity that's been disproven over and over, and you can disprove yourself just through the potato hack diet or the master's cleanse where you drink sugary lemonade and lose fat.

But protein gets left out because this is really what it's about. In fact, I've said this many times and I'll say it again, back, let's say 10 or 15 years ago, there were a lot of studies on low-carb diets showing that low-carb diets were superior to low-fat diets for fat loss, not weight loss, because everybody knows when you do a low-carb diet, you lose a lot of water first, and then you start to lose fat.

But these smart scientists, they measured body fat loss and also said, you know what? All these low-fat diets have a lower amount of protein. So, let's measure just fat loss and let's make sure that the number of calories coming from protein are the same. And guess what?

There was no difference in the fat loss between a low-fat and low-carb diet. As long as the protein was the same, probably easier in real life for most people with their limited understanding of nutrition to eat more protein on a low-carb diet.

But still, if you're educated enough, like what I teach my clients, you can do low-carb or you can do low-fat, or sometimes you can do low-fat or sometimes you do low-carb, but you always keep your protein high. And what do I mean by high? Well, um, we're talking if you're normal weight.

So, figure out your BMI and if you're normal weight, we're talking or under 20% body fat, we're talking one gram per pound of body weight or 0.8 to one gram per pound of body weight per day. For example, I'm 184 pounds at the moment, so I would eat 184 grams of protein per day.

And if you're overweight or obese, a good way to do it is think about your ideal weight and that's how many grams you should have. So, let's say you're 240, but you're six foot one, and you know you should be 190, then hit 190.

And I'll give you another little coaching tip here. I shoot for 200 grams per day because I always undershoot it. So, I set my protein target a little bit higher. And what you can do is you can track your protein intake on MyFitnessPal or Cronometer. I use MyFitnessPal and see what you actually eat. Track it for a week.

And why is protein so important? Number one, satiety. Now there's some nuance there because, for example, I just had about maybe 14 ounces, 16 ounces water and one scoop of whey protein and guess what?

I'm still hungry. I'm thinking, hmm, what am I going to eat now? But in general, when it comes to whole food and even some people with protein shakes, it really depends on the person here. Protein helps satiate you. And that's another way of saying it helps you feel full.

The other thing that it does is it helps maintain muscle mass. Now I want to be clear here. The role in muscle mass, it's small. And it probably doesn't matter that much if you're not lifting weights, but if you're lifting weights and you have the right amount of protein, it can help you grow or maintain muscle.

But the number one is resistance training. It's not eating protein. You don't sit on the couch and say, you know what? I want to build some muscle.

And so, I'm going to have some Quest protein chips instead of Doritos and expect anything to happen for you. And the other thing again, it's small, but I think still important is protein has what's called a higher thermic effect of food. That means that it takes more energy to break protein down than it does carbs or fat.

So many of my clients also ask me, even I have a phase one nutrition plan where I help my clients lose about 10 pounds in four weeks.

And then I helped them lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 pounds in a total of 16 weeks.

And eventually my clients hit their either their body weight goal or their body fat percentage, and then it's time to maintain. And what we do is we bring protein down a bit, but we always keep protein high for the rest of your life. You want to be protein-oriented. Forget about the talk about longevity and protein and the issues. That's not what people are dying from.

We're dying because we lose muscle strength and fall and break our hip, or we don't have much muscle mass to begin with, and then we get sick, then we lose it, then it starts to downward spiral, kind of like what happened to my dad.

So, people, if you want a good life, you want to be able to do the things that you did when you're 30 or 40 at 60 or 70, make sure that you prioritize protein. Keep yourself lean and make sure you eat enough protein.

And protein becomes more important as you get older because we have something called anabolic resistance. You become more resistant to building and maintaining muscle.

As you get older, a lot of reasons for that I'm not going to get into, and we don't even understand all the reasons. Or science hasn't figured out all the reasons, but just understand that protein never gets less important as you get older, it gets even more important.

And probably protein shakes get even more important as you get older, by the way. What do you think Ensure is? It's a pre-digested, cheap protein shake, just buy a better protein shake than Ensure.

So, we talked about energy balance, we just talked about protein. Now let's talk about satiating foods. I stopped thinking about macronutrients. I really don't think about macronutrients that much anymore.

I feel like there's some instances where it is important to focus on the macros, but really, it's about total calories. It's about getting in that protein. And then it's about me making choices, food choices that aren't that carb or fat idea or junk food idea, it really has to do with is this food going to help me with my hunger?

Now, why do I say that? Very simple because again, going back to what are the issues people are dealing with? People are overweight or obese and they're pre-diabetic. That's, that's what we're dealing with.

Even in other countries that are starting to develop where they're not developing the same rates of obesity, they're having issues with diabetes because of visceral fat don't want to get into that conversation, but some there is some genetic influence here, like East Asian, South Asian, um, that develop pre-diabetes or diabetes rather at an early, uh, at a smaller fat threshold than say people from European ancestry.

And also, if you're Hispanic, you're going to have a higher risk of developing something like fatty liver. So, I don't think about fat and carbs as much as about, okay, what's going to help me stay full?

Because really what drives eating behaviors is hunger, and then we could say cravings, right? Cravings, we're not going to talk about cravings today, but even making sure that you're eating satiating foods can help you.

In fact, other things that I've noticed is some of my clients, I don't get clients who say this. I haven't heard this in a long time, but I used to have clients who said, you know, I feel like I have, like, I'm addicted to food or have an eating disorder because if I get a bag of chips, I'm going to eat the whole bag. It could be a small bag. It could be a big bag, but I'm going to keep eating.

And what I said is, listen, that food, every, I don't even love potato chips, but I'm probably going to do the same thing.

They're designed to be overconsumed. And it's not even, I shouldn't, I didn't want to open up that can of worms either. But basically, even before there were food scientists, people were overconsuming these types of foods.

So, we know, and why I say carbs and fat is because we know that there are different foods that have different effects on satiety and they don't have to do with the macronutrient makeup.

For example, I've talked a lot about this satiety index, and I share it in my coaching group regularly because it's something we come back to. And if you look up the satiety index—actually, if you want to pause this for a second—go Google the satiety index, click on images, or DuckDuckGo, whatever you're into, and you know, I'm giving my dad away all the time.

But if you want to click on images and bring up this satiety index, you'll see right away: potatoes. Now those are boiled potatoes, but they score off the charts. But what do people say about potatoes? "Well, those are carbs, don't eat those."

But if you also look at potato chips on the satiety index, whoa, a big drop-off. So, if we bake or boil potato, it's very satiating. And I'm not talking about with butter, sour cream, bacon, and fully loaded and all that. I'm just talking about a plain boiled or baked potato.

But compare that with French fries or potato chips, which have higher calories for the same amount of potato, let's say, but they're way less satiating. So, we can't think about it in terms of fat or carbs. We have to think about it in terms of satiety.

And if you do want to think about something in terms of fat or carbs, think about what's called ultra-processed food or hyper-palatable foods, which are really a combination of carbs and fat. Because what most people say is, "Yeah, don't eat carbs like donuts."

Or cookies, just you got to stay away from the carbs like cookies and donuts, go look at a donut. It's full of fat. Go look at ice cream. "Oh, that's ice cream, it's carbs." No, it isn't. It's like half of the calories are coming from fat. We got to level up this conversation about nutrition. Because people say the most ignorant things. And I don't want to—I know that comes across as super judgy.

I used to be stuck there, but that's what I'm doing with this episode and all the other episodes where I talk about these things. I want to level up the conversation regarding nutrition. I want it to be a more educated conversation.

And so please stop saying, "Well, got to, got to get rid of those candy bar carbs." Then you look at the nutrition facts and it's like, "Well, half the calories are coming from fat." And by the way, if you ever look at the nutrition facts say, "Well, that's not true, Ted. There's only 20 grams of fat here per serving, but there's actually, you know, 50 grams of whatever of carbs."

Well, fat has nine calories per gram. So that 2020 grams is actually 180 calories versus the 50 grams of carbs, which is 200. So, it's basically half and half. Are you with me on that?

So, start to make choices based on foods that help with satiety. And another example of this, if you're looking at the satiety index, look at salted peanuts. How many times have you said to yourself, you know what, "What's a healthy snack?"

Oh, I want to stay away from the chips, which is probably a good idea, by the way. And you grab yourself some salted peanuts, but you just find yourself crushing the whole thing and then still feeling hungry afterwards too. That's because they're not very satiating either.

So, we need to evolve past this conversation of carbs and fat. We need to think more beyond the macros.

And about how a food affects our satiety because again, the biggest issue that we're all facing, it's overnutrition. It's eating too many calories and our ignorance around nutrition. And sometimes it's ignorance. And sometimes, it's just, we bought into, well, marketing, you know, or people, uh, explaining things who didn't really understand things like we do now.

Can't blame the low-carb folks from 10 or 15 years ago, the research was on their side, but now it's 2023 about to be 2024. Time to move on from that.

So again, satiating foods. We've talked now about energy balance being the foundation of nutrition. Protein, because it's the building blocks for body composition.

And three, satiating foods because it's beyond macros. We need to get beyond macros. Now, number four is nutrient optimization. I didn't know what else to call this.

But you run into this issue eventually where, "Okay Ted, so I got my calories dialed in, I've got my protein on point, what else should I eat?" Well, then it becomes about, "Okay, what are our goals? What does our blood work say? What are some of our other issues? And what foods can we choose to address those issues?"

Here's an example. When I have clients who have some lipid issues, in other words, they have high LDL cholesterol or high apolipid protein B or usually both, right? Having ground flaxseed can help with that or fiber, a fiber supplement, if they're not eating enough fiber in their diet. If you're looking at boosting cognition and lowering inflammation from exercise, blueberries can do that.

If you have a blood pressure issue while eating beets, can address that. And it's not just about foods like that, which you might call functional foods; foods that have a benefit beyond their calories, macronutrients, and vitamins and minerals. It's also about timing. One of the things that I've worked with my clients on is some of my clients have said, 'Well, I feel like I'm just not, you know, this. I feel great. I'm losing fat, but I don't—I'm not performing that well in my workouts.' I said, 'Great.'

What are you eating before you go to your workout? 'Oh, well, I just have a coffee and then just, I get going.' I say, 'Well, oh, great. So, let's stop doing that. If you're going to go do any type of high-intensity interval training or lifting or weightlifting or anything like that, you're going to want to make sure that you have some carbs.'

And I would do protein and carbs, but so protein will help prevent muscle breakdown, and the carbohydrates will fuel performance, but you don't want to be showing up fasted to a workout. I'm not saying you can never do it. You can also give it a try and see and test, but for my clients who have struggles with their performance, it's like, 'Well, let's get you some carbs.'

We need to time our food better. Another thing that's worth discussing is if your goal is to build muscle, you don't really want to do two meals a day. You want to have a minimum of three meals per day. Why? Because you don't store the amino acids from protein in your body. They circulate, they go away.

You want to spike your protein, you know, your amino acid stores via protein, a minimum of three times per day. You're going to get better results again, based on the best evidence we have.

So, these are optimization, nutrient optimization issues. So, we're talking about timing, or we're talking about special amounts for performance, or we're talking about special foods that have a specific effect on, say, a blood marker or health issue.

But again, that comes after all the other stuff. It comes after you have your calories in balance, after you have your protein dialed in, after you have your hunger managed because you understand which foods help with hunger and which don't, then it's time to optimize. But what do most people do?

They start here. It's like I just had some, my spirulina smoothie that was 300 calories, and then you had your 500-calorie acai bowl with another 200 calories of granola, and you're wondering why you're struggling with weight loss because you're eating too many calories, even though the foods that you're eating, you could argue are nutrient-dense foods.

So, you got to dial those in before you start to optimize the nutrients, especially if you're overweight, if you're obese, if you're having blood sugar issues. Again, you should be exercising too, but that's not what we're talking about in this episode. You got to get the calories under control.

Especially if you've done a DEXA scan, if your body fat is higher, you've been told you have fatty liver or a buildup of visceral fat. How do you get rid of it? Again, besides exercise, well, you get into a calorie deficit. You get your calories under control.

And that's hard to do for people if you're just like, 'Well, I'll eat, you know, less bags of potato chips.' No, you got to, you got to switch things around. You don't have to give up potato chips completely, but we have to make sure that we're focused on eating those satiating foods because if you're eating like Mark Haub did, I forgot to ask him when he was on the show, but I would imagine he struggled with hunger quite a bit. I mean, that's immediately what I would think.

So, hunger is how we manage calories in real life. That's how, that's the battleground where we fight this energy balance war. Okay, so then after all that, that's when you start focusing on your nutrient optimization. Look, it's not to say that you can't do it a little bit earlier.

I just want to emphasize get the other factors under control because even if you're eating beets to lower your blood pressure, but you're overweight or obese, your cholesterol is high and your blood sugar is high, it's not going to be that big of an effect. The real issue that you want to solve is excess body fat.

So, number four, nutrient optimization. And finally, we get to supplements, the final piece of the puzzle. So again, this comes after everything else. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't take any supplements beforehand, but you really want to think about it in this hierarchy. And this is how I coach my clients. This is how I think about it myself. I don't stress out about supplements, even though I take a lot of them. And I'll share a bit here.

But I'll probably do a dedicated episode on my supplement regimen and you know, the evolution that I'm going through with understanding supplements, how to take them, but I'll, I'll share it briefly here. Supplements can be great, but they're supplemental. They're a compliment to diet exercise and mindset.

So, I'll talk a little bit about this. Supplements should be based on your blood work, your health goals, or let's say symptoms that you have.

For example, with blood work, if you have perfect blood sugar, you don't want to be taking berberine as an example, even though you read it's good. If you have good fasting glucose and a solid hemoglobin A1C, which is a long-term marker of blood sugar regulation and your cholesterol is on point, why take berberine?

Because you read a post on some blog post or watched a video saying that was really important to take. It's great for people with some metabolic, based on the research. It's great to take for people who have some blood sugar regulation issues and their LDL cholesterol is getting higher. The point is, take what you need, don't just take a bunch of stuff.

An example of taking, here's something that happens. You'll see a lot of people take creatine, but they're long-distance runners. Actually, that's okay. Cause there's a ton of other benefits to creatine that go beyond building muscle and helping, um, with high-intensity training like sprinting or weightlifting.

So, it's okay, but just don't take it because you think it's going to help your running and just don't take beta-alanine, something that's supposed to help with what you might call glycolytic or anaerobic exercise. For example, if you're doing high-intensity interval training, don't need to be taking the beta-alanine if you're doing powerlifting.

Or playing baseball. You're just not pushing yourself hard enough to be taking those things. So, it doesn't make sense.

So, some of the supplements that I take, for example, if there's no point in taking, um, what's another good one? I can't think of it. I'll just share some of the things that I'm taking right now. I have sleep issues. So, you know what I do? I take glycine three to five grams of glycine every night before bed. Helps me sleep. I take acetyl-l-carnitine

1500 milligrams a day because for a couple of reasons, feel like some of the circadian disruption that happens when I travel through time zones, for example, I came from Lisbon to Mexico, I feel like whenever I'm feeling a little bit down, I take that stuff. And also, I take it regularly because L-carnitine is supposed to be helpful with other things.

But I go out of my way to take acetyl-l-carnitine whenever I'm experiencing any sort of low energy, kind of low mood. And so why I originally started taking it was because it can help with symptoms of sciatica, so nerve pain.

So, make sure you're taking specific supplements based on your personal goals, your blood work, etc. Very important.

And what most people do is, again, they do this in reverse. They start with supplements, start choosing the foods that they think are superfoods. They don't think about satiating foods very much at all. Very few people do. Some people think about protein.

But hardly anybody's talking about calories. It's taken a long time. We got away from calories, and I'm part of why that happened, even though I wasn't creating content back in the day.

I was pushing away from calories, saying they didn't matter, saying it was all about hormones, specifically insulin and cortisol would make you fat too. None of that's true. But now we're coming back to it. We need to come back to reason. Well, you don't have to, but that's what I'm about here.

So just to recap the episode, make sure that you understand that nutrition, it's powerful, but it's part of the overall approach to health. And certainly, nutrition can't replace exercise, although it can help and can't replace working on your mindset, although you could make an argument that the food to eat can help your cognition and your mood.

But understand all of these work together. It's not just about nutrition. Although, again, if I wanted to sell a bestselling book, and I want, I want you to understand something here, if I wanted to sell a bestselling book, I would write it about nutrition.

I wouldn't talk about exercise because it's going to do way better if it's about nutrition. This idea that nutrition is so powerful, it's a marketing idea. It is powerful, but it needs, it fits in with all this other stuff that we're talking about. And a lot of what's important about nutrition totally gets lost, like the calorie balance idea.

And again, saying that exercise is more powerful than nutrition. It doesn't benefit me because I market myself as a fat loss coach. Don't get me wrong. Fat loss is important, but an exercise isn't great to do it by the way, based on the research we have and based on how many people say they push themselves so hard, but they just can't lose any weight.

So, nutrition is powerful, but again, it needs to be taken in context with everything else that we're talking about.

So that's it for today's episode. What are you liking? What are you? What's hitting home for you? What would you like to hear more of? Make sure you reach out to me on my newsletter, go to legendarylivepodcast.com and subscribe to our newsletter there. Or hit me up on Instagram or really Twitter or LinkedIn, @ ted_ryce .

Hope you enjoy this. Stay tuned for the next episode, where we're going to be talking about stress, sleep, and recovery. Have a great one and speak to you then!