Live Ask Me Anything #1 - Topics Covered:
- The Ketogenic Diet (02:48) - How Excess Fruit Can Cause Heart Disease (17:10) - Cholesterol (14:08) - Intermittent Fasting (21:09) - Lifestyle/ Behavior Changes (26:48) - Live Q&A (36:31)- Can I have Dairy on a Keto Diet? (36:32)
- Are there different types of Red Meat? (38:16)
- Fat-Free Cheese? (40:38)
- Cashews and Turkey Bacon (41:32)
- What should I do for Pre-Workout? (43:04)
- Is Beef that is labeled Grass-Fed all good? (44:21)
- How to make Alcohol "Healthy" (45:25)
- What about Brown Rice or Jasmine Rice? (47:02)
- Is LaCroix ok? (48:19)
- What about riced cauliflower? (48:46)
Listen to the Podcast:
Show Notes and Resources:
- The Perfect Paleo Powder - Fat Loss - LaCroix Water - Zevia (soda substitute) - "Tripping Over the Truth" (Cancer and the Ketogenic Diet) - Clovis Culture Tribal T-Shirts - Butcher Box: Grass-Fed Beef Delivered to your Door - Tennessee Grass-Fed Beef - Found My Fitness: Dr. Rhonda Patrick - Dry Farm Wines: Paleo/ Keto Friendly Wines - "The Plant Paradox" by Dr. Steven Gundry - "The Keto Reset" by Mark Sisson - Robb Wolf's Keto Masterclass - Keto Mojo: Blood Ketone Monitor
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
What's up, everybody? Justin Nault here. Welcome to my first ever Facebook live!
Ask me anything. I have never done one of these before, so we're going to see how this goes.
Basically, I'm going to hit the top questions that I received. It's an "Ask Me Anything", but I took the questions beforehand. I started taking questions on Monday, and I was getting a lot of repeat questions, which I figured would happen. You know, it's the way things trend. People are talking about different diet trends on podcasts, news sources, whatever. A lot of the questions I got are very similar. I'm going to touch on four or five of the primary questions that I got.
The number one question that I got on all social media and texts and everything was the ketogenic diet. We're going to discuss the ketogenic diet. I'll give you basically a crash course of it. I'll tell you my favorite parts about the ketogenic diet, also to whom I think the ketogenic diet is right for.
I'll also explain where I think people are going wrong with the ketogenic diet. It's very easy to make mistakes and do things incorrectly and actually have it. I mean, I guess it could negatively impact your health depending on how poorly you do it. We'll talk about the ketogenic diet, which will lead us to my number two question, cholesterol.
If you lower carbohydrates and eat a bunch of fat, will your cholesterol skyrocket and go through the roof? It is not true. We'll clear up that misconception about cholesterol. I got a lot of questions about intermittent fasting, and I'm going to talk about it quite a bit. We'll run through it pretty quickly. It's fantastic, and I'll tell you why. I'll let you know how to do it correctly.
The other thing that I want to touch on is just lifestyle changes. It seems to be pretty difficult for a lot of people to get their nutrition under control. I think that a lot of that spawns from people starting fitness first while nutrition is second; for me is a mistake. Basically, we will talk about the ketogenic diet, cholesterol, intermittent fasting, and lifestyle changes. It's going to be fun.
Before we dive in, let's do all the cool stuff. Like, or share. Don't click on the like button; that's boring. Click a reaction, heart, the little wow guy. I like it when that guy talks. I like that.
Alright, so we're gonna dive right in. I'm going to pull this up on my page and share it on my personal page. If you want to do that too, I think you can share it directly to your page so you can broadcast it to people. Let's see. Yeah. I shared it to my timeline, do the same, share it to your timeline so we can talk to a lot of people and figure some of this stuff out.
Let's start with step one. That's going to be the number one topic that we have, which is the ketogenic diet. The keto diet has a ton of misconceptions around it. I kind of blame podcasters, honestly. There's a lot of guys like Joe Rogan, Brendan Shaw, and all these really, really popular podcasters I like. I'm one of their fans.
I like them. I like everything they're doing, but they talk about the ketogenic diet as if they're doing it when they're really just following a low carbohydrate diet. Let's talk about the difference between Keto and paleo. I own a paleo nutrition company. Let me start by saying that too, for people who don't know me.
My name is Justin Nault, and I am the founder of the Clovis culture. I invented all of the formulas for the Perfect Paleo Powder. I'm also a Certified Nutritional Therapist. I am a Certified Specialist in Sports Nutrition. I've worked with dozens and dozens of clients with nutrition and fitness in a one-on-one setting. I worked with professional athletes and MMA fighters, that kind of thing. I build custom plans for people who want to improve their lives in one way or another based on their goals.
We'll get credentials out of the way, all that nonsense. I don't really care much about credentials, but some people do. So cool! That's how I can give you some advice, right?
Keto versus paleo. I eat a strict paleo diet for four or five or six years. Paleo is you're just removing unprocessed foods. You don't have soy, you don't have any grains, you don't have dairy, and paleo doesn't actually limit carbohydrates or sugar. That's the big difference. Paleo is not automatically Keto, and Keto is not automatically paleo. So let's kind of break that down, right? I believe that you should eat a paleo-friendly diet. Where Keto and I differ is Keto does allow dairy because dairy is very high in fat. It works well for a ketogenic diet. People compare the ketogenic diet to Atkins. Let's dive into that as well.
Low carb is not the same as ketogenic. You are not ketogenic unless you are in a state of ketosis. In the beginning, it's going to be difficult. An average American person eats about anywhere from 300 to 600 grams of carbohydrates in a day. Literally, it's 300 to 600. It's the biggest macronutrient in America. You're talking 300 to 600 grams of carbohydrates. If I had put you on a strict ketogenic protocol, I would have you 30 grams or less. For females, probably 30 grams or fewer. For males, I might even take you to 20 grams or less. I mean, you're talking 10 to 20 times fewer carbohydrates than an average American eats. This is not a low carbohydrate diet. A low carbohydrate diet is anything, 100 grams net carbs and below.
If you don't know what a net carbohydrate is, you take total carbohydrates on nutritional backs. Just below it, you're going to see dietary fiber. Take total carbs minus dietary fiber; you end up with net carbohydrates. These are usable carbohydrates; your body can't digest fiber, so it doesn't count. There's a long story there you've got bacteria. It does digest it, but your gut bacteria is not a part of you because the inside of your stomach is actually outside of you; mind-blown, right? It's crazy! Think of a tunnel going through water. You're not in the water; you're in the tunnel. Anything in your digestive system is not actually in your body until your body allows it to pass into your bloodstream, and it's in your body, right? Your bacteria digest fiber.
Net carbohydrates = total carbs - dietary fiber
I'm going to have you under 30, maybe only 20; a low carbohydrate diet is anything under 100. Now, to be clear, you can eat a diet that has less than a hundred grams of net carbohydrates. You probably will lose fat, especially if you were eating 300 to 600 grams of carbohydrates.
This all or nothing approach where people are like, "man, I need to go and eat no carbohydrates at all because I'm Keto", and you were eating 600 grams of carbs. Good luck! You're going to fail. I'm just telling you; that's what it is. I deal with people every single day. The compliance rate is incredibly low when you make a massive jump like that. If you don't need to lose 20 pounds in two weeks, I regularly do with people. You know, I'm going to cut 11 pounds off of an MMA fighter next week.
I'll probably do it in three days. It's incredibly easy to cut weight off of people. If you're willing to be very, very strict, but it's not fun, that's the difference. If we're talking about lifestyle change, it has to be sustainable, right? If you're eating 300 grams of carbs, switch to 100 grams of net carbs, see how you feel, and just take it from there. That's Keto versus low carb. I recommend a low carb, paleo diet; no soy, no dairy, no gluten, no grains, no beans. Just go strict paleo, take it under 100 grams of net carbohydrates, and see how you feel. The Ketogenic diet is used in my practice. I use it therapeutically. If you're dealing with an autoimmune disease, leaky gut or some severe problem, then I think you should do a ketogenic diet.
The ketogenic diet has been proven to help epilepsy in children, Alzheimer's, and cancer. Check out the book called "Tripping Over The Truth", the metabolic approach to cancer. It is absolutely mind-blowing how you can essentially be cancer just through the ketogenic diet. This is proven over and over, but doctors aren't allowed to say it because of bureaucracy. It's horseshit, but whatever.
Anyway, that is ketosis. Now you get into a state of ketosis when your body is burning fat for fuel, but your body can't burn fat directly. It has to convert fat into something called ketones, which is why you see a lot of companies now selling exogenous ketones. If you think you're going to buy exogenous ketones, shove your body into ketosis and burn fat.
It's not going to happen; you're going to burn the ketones. The ketones will be in your bloodstream. If you prick your finger, you take a blood strip and see what your ketone levels are at. Your ketone levels will be jacked because you just drank a bunch of ketones. You're not taking your body fat, converting it into ketones and burning it. You're just wasting your money. I hate saying that because I know founders of companies that sell ketones, and they're great people. They're trying to help people, and their products are actually excellent if used correctly. I use them with athletes a lot. When you first go Keto, you're going to hit what's called the Keto Flu. You're going to detox from carbohydrates, all carbohydrates to sugar. This is one thing that I want to clear up real quick about the ketogenic diet.
I had somebody talk to me about how they were eating the ketogenic diet. They were like, "Oh yes, I'm in ketosis. And I only eat chicken and Brown rice." Well, my eyeballs kind of popped out of my head. I said, "You're literally 50% of your diet is carbohydrates. What are you talking about?" People don't know. They think that there are healthy carbs and unhealthy carbs, right? All carbohydrates are sugar—all of it.
Eventually, at some point throughout the digestive process, they are going to be converted to glucose and pushed out into your bloodstream. Now glucose is going to fuel muscle cells. It's going to fuel fat cells as well. Sugar makes you fat. Fat doesn't make you fat. Now we're going to get there, but I need to break this down with the ketogenic diet. In the ketogenic diet, you can't just cut carbs and say, "I'm keto", right?
If you want to get to a state of ketosis, you have to cut carbohydrates, yes. I said you want to be under 30, maybe even 20 for guys, net carbohydrates per day.
The other thing that you have to do is there are two sources of energy, right? You have carbohydrates, and you have fat. These are the two things that your body can burn for fuel. Now, if you have them at an even plain field and you just go and drop all your carbs, your body's going to have a severe lack of energy. What's going to do? It's gonna start breaking down into muscle tissue and a process called gluconeogenesis. It's going to break down your muscle tissue to create glucose that it can burn. What you have to do is if you're dropping the carbohydrate content, you have to increase the fatty acid content. I'm talking about healthy fats, like, polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats. You're talking about avocados, coconut oil, grass-fed butter, grass-fed beef. Grass-fed butter is the only exception I make to dairy because there's no lactose in it.
It's a long story. We won't get into all that, right? If you're decreasing your carbohydrates, you have to increase your healthy fats. You have no choice, or your body's just not going to work correctly. That's where people get screwed up. They say I'm Keto, and I eat almost no carbohydrates. Then, you find out they're eating 30 grams of fat a day. For me, if I'm ketogenic, I'm eating somewhere between 150 to 160 grams of fat a day; you're talking 70%, 80%, 90% of your entire daily caloric intake is fatty acids. It's challenging to do, and it's not fun. You have to watch your protein intake as well because of gluconeogenesis. You have to limit protein mildly; I'd say maybe 20 or 30% of your daily calories. Your carbohydrates are going to be under 10% of your daily calories. Fats going to be skyrocketed 70, 80, 90% of your daily calories.
It's pretty tough to do. You really don't know if you're in ketosis unless you're pricking your finger and doing a blood draw. There's a company called Keto-Mojo. Keto-Mojo has gotten us to the point where you can do it for a little over a dollar a day, I think. But if you're using precision extra, which I also use when I was in nutritional ketosis for like two months or something. It was crazy. I was doing draws every single day. People get the pee sticks. The pee sticks are entirely ineffective. The pee sticks only measure extra ketones that you don't need that your body's flushing out. It's kind of useless, honestly. Unless you're pricking your blood, you don't know if you're in ketosis, and you don't know if you're on a ketogenic diet. That's all there is to it. It's a little tricky. I'm gonna give you my best resources for this. The first guy I would look up is a friend of mine; his name's Robb Wolf. Now, I will put any resources that I give you during this little session in the comments section. If you share this to your page or anything, we can provide you links to all these things.
Robb Wolf has a keto masterclass. I'll give you a link. If you just look up Rob Wolf, Keto masterclass, that's probably the best resource that I can give you because Rob is freaking brilliant. He's a mastermind in everything; into Jiujitsu and beats me up, and it's unfair. Anyway, so check out, uh, Rob Wolf's keto masterclass. It's fantastic. He also will break down the importance of electrolytes, which a lot of people miss, and the ketogenic diet.
The other one is Mark Sisson just came out with a book called "The Keto Reset." Check out the keto reset. It's fantastic. Mark has a lot of stuff, really geared towards runners. If you're a distance runner, this will explain how you can literally change your life by becoming fat-adapted. My fighter, my MMA fighter, man, she felt like she had the first week, and I gave her exogenous ketones to help her get through it, just to feel a little bit better. A week later, she's coming back to me, telling me no matter what my coaches do, they can't make me tired. I'm running 10 miles. I'm running sprints uphill, rolling three times a day. I'm doing strength and resistance training and just feeling great.
You will reach the tipping point. That's another big problem with the ketogenic diet. People don't give it enough time. They're like, "Oh, I used Keto for five days, and I felt crappy. That Justin guy is full of sh**." That's what happens. It's just, no, man. You're just kind of being lazy. I don't know; that's a tough diet. That's the thing that I have my approach to working with clients. It's like, man, if you don't want to do it, I'd tell you to move on. Find somebody else. Sorry. I'm not the guy for you. I'm not a motivational speaker. You know, I'm just trying to tell you what works.
So Robb Wolf, keto masterclass. Mark Sisson, the Keto Reset. As I said, you're going to eat a lot of fat in the Ketogenic diet.
This brings me to my next most asked question leading up to this AMA, cholesterol. Cholesterol is wholly misunderstood. In the US today, there are still people who think that fat causes heart disease.
People still think that. That's the real stuff for real.
Anyway, here's what happens. So you have doctors, you have nutritionists, personal trainers. Personal trainers, especially, are like the worst for this. Let's say you've been a personal trainer for 10 years, right? You got your certification in 2008. So that means the textbooks that you read, the Science probably came from the early nineties, if not the eighties. Textbooks are usually 15 years behind cutting edge science. This is a fact 10 to 15 years behind easily, right? Suppose you're studying nutrition sciences, or you're taking advice from somebody who got their degree in nutrition sciences a decade ago. In that case, eight or 12 years ago, we have exponential growth in technology. Everybody knows this. Taking nutrition advice from decades past is literally the equivalent of saying, "I'm going to send a picture message with a rotary phone. I'm going to pick up the receiver, take a selfie, then I'm going to send this picture to my mom", right? That's what happens if you're trying to look up nutrition studies from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
We couldn't even look at a human cell under a microscope till the seventies. Don't quote me on that. I don't remember what year in the seventies. The whole food pyramid and all that stuff. It's a science from the 1950s, the 1960s Science that's been proven and debunked repeatedly. If you're not looking at nutrition science of the last five years, just don't enter the nutrition space and advise people. Don't do it. If you share this and have a personal trainer out there, let him read nutrition studies. Go to pub med, read the studies from the last five years on cholesterol.
Please, if you have a doctor, a nutritional therapist, a personal trainer, anyone who tells you to eat less fat because it's healthy, fire them. Now! Fire them, and find somebody new.
Here's the difference in cholesterol. The cholesterol that clogs your arteries and is scary and gives people heart attacks. They are lipids. They're fatty acids in your system, but they are not ingested. I'm going to say this twice, so you grasp it. You cannot ingest the cholesterol that clogs your arteries and causes heart attacks. You can't ingest it; that cholesterol is not ingested. There are multiple types of cholesterol. We have HDL, LDL, VLDL. There are these different lipoproteins that are in various sizes. The bad cholesterol that causes heart disease it's actually created in your liver from glucose. Glucose has carbohydrates. The most notorious for this is fruit, fructose.
You have high fructose corn syrup. It's poison. Coca-Cola, it's high fructose corn syrup. Don't drink that, right? High fructose. The fructose portion of that is molecularly identical to the fructose that you find in fruit. Fructose literally means fruit sugar, right? You will get heart disease faster by eating fruit than eating red meat. I don't know care what the health documentary on Netflix told you. It's a vegan propaganda film. You can look it up easily debunked, right? You can't ingest bad cholesterol. There's a process called lipogenesis. Lipo is fat; genesis is the creation or new—the creation of new fat. Now lipogenesis is the creation of new fat from molecules that are not fatty acids, other than fatty acids, namely glucose. Fructose fruit sugar is processed directly in the liver. It's the only one that goes directly to the liver.
There's glucose and fructose. Fructose just shoots directly to the liver and is processed there. Your liver can handle like 60 grams of fructose before it starts pushing you out into your bloodstream as V L D L; Very Low-Density Lipoprotein. This is the most dangerous cholesterol particle known to man. This is the one that creates foam cells that sticks to the lining of your arteries, and tiny cracks cause heart disease. This is a sugar issue. Okay? Red meat does not cause cholesterol in your arteries. It doesn't! It doesn't clog your arteries. If you can find any scientific data that backs that up, send it to me. The problem is you're running studies that are correlation versus causation.
Most of the studies that show any connection between red meat and heart disease it's a correlation because these are survey studies. At the end of the week, someone's saying on Monday, I ate this, on Tuesday, I ate this, on Wednesday, I can't remember what I had for lunch two days ago. You know what I mean? It's an insane way to do Science.
It's ridiculous. It's just correlation. There is no causation. The causation of cholesterol is too many carbohydrates. I've spent time, just outside of Duke University in Raleigh, with a guy named Dr William Cromwell. I spent five hours with him in person, and he's one of the top five cholesterol experts alive on planet earth today. He told me; clearly, 10% of your calories or less should come from carbohydrates. Nothing more. You do not need carbohydrates to exercise. Many people think that I can't work out if I don't have carbohydrates, simply not true. You don't need them. There are three macronutrients; fat, protein and carbohydrates. The only non-essential macronutrient is carbohydrates. You can remove carbohydrates to live a long, happy life. Never eat a single gram of carbohydrate. Fat and protein are essential. You die without them.
This is another misconception about cholesterol. Cholesterol is required for every single function in every single cell in your entire body. So without cholesterol, you can't blink, smile, drive a car, you can't kiss your significant other. You can't do anything without cholesterol; you die. It's that simple, right? You die without cholesterol. Cholesterol is also responsible for at night while you sleep. It creates all steroid hormones, right? Testosterone being one for guys. If guys think they have low T, I'm going to go to a low T center. Whatever, man, just start eating some red meat to increase your cholesterol intake. That's the good cholesterol, HDL, High-Density Lipoproteins. The kind you need for everything to function. That's the other thing. Cholesterol particles are different from cholesterol, but that's going to get real Science. We'll save that for another AMA another time.
Outside of cholesterol, so we touched on number one, the ketogenic diet. We touched on number two, which is cholesterol, which is very interesting. The other thing that people really want to know about is intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting has become like a crave man. There are so many people doing intermittent fasting, and I hear about it all the time. I've experimented with it with outstanding results. Again, with intermittent fasting, there is an issue with the length of time, compliance and sustainability in the long term. The problem with the long-term is intermittent fasting can be pretty difficult. If you Google intermittent fasting, you're going to find probably the bodybuilding approach is the most popular that is the 16:8 split, right? That as you fast for 16 hours and you eat all of your calories within an eight-hour window, that's pretty tough to do. It really is. I mean, literally, there's only eight hours of the day that you can cram in all your calories. The other issue that I see with this is people don't eat enough, right? Calories are important. All your macronutrients are essential. You need food, especially if your goal, like if you're trying to build muscle or something like you absolutely need to eat all of your calories. You can't miss out on that. You don't want to starve yourself. The 16:8 split is pretty difficult.
Instead of intermittent fasting, what I find to be fantastic is something called Time-Restricted Eating. It's also known as T R E (Time-Restricted Eating). Time-Restricted Eating is like intermittent fasting, but a little bit different. It's basically, instead of looking at the amount of time you're fasting, you're simply looking at the amount of time that you're eating. So what they've found for maximum benefit, like to start getting benefits, is about a 13 hour fast. You're eating all your calories in an 11 or 10-hour window. You'd be surprised that that extra two or three hours of eating time makes things much more manageable. If you want more information on Time-Restricted Eating, I suggest you look Dr Rhonda Patrick, and she is fantastic. My company Clovis culture supports her Patrion monthly. I have the honor of talking to her on a personal basis. We've discussed cholesterol and all sorts of things. She's fantastic. Look up Dr Rhonda, Patrick; all of her social media is @foundmyfitness. I will tag her in this, so you can check her out, but she does podcasts and all sorts of work with Time-Restricted Eating. Time-Restricted Eating just has benefits across the board. I'd suggest doing that and maybe try an 11-hour Time-Restricted Eating window. Eat all your calories in 11 hours.
Now, the other thing, time-restricted eating is fasting, not as long as a 16-hour fast. I would try time-restricted eating, but remember the fasting time you're talking straight water fast. There's a lot of people who will use things like black coffee or electrolytes within an intermittent fast. They wake up in the morning, and they'll drink black coffee, or maybe add some pink Himalayan sea salt to a glass of water, and drink those electrolytes. That's all fine. Rhonda explains that black coffee really does activate digestive enzymes, which can hinder the metabolic process of fasting. There may be slightly less benefit. I don't know if you're getting 90% or 80% of the benefits. I'm not really sure, but just keep in mind if you're practicing time-restricted eating and the fasting window is shorter, then try to make strict water fast. It's tough. It's tough for me too. I love coffee, and I'm a complete coffee addict. Check out time-restricted eating. I'll tag Dr Rhonda, Patrick.
Think about things we touched about it touched on is the ketogenic diet, cholesterol and intermittent fasting. If you can take a low carb paleo approach (which, remember, low-carb paleo, I'm talking less than a hundred grams net carbohydrates is not ketogenic), you combine that with something like time-restricted eating, then you are going to lose fat very quickly. If you combine a ketogenic diet and time-restricted eating, it's insane. I've done a rapid fat loss protocol with many people, and the average weight loss in 14 days is about 15 pounds. I mean, I'm talking, you can cut a pound of fat a day off yourself very, very quickly.
The more weight you have to lose, the faster you're going to lose weight. If you're obese or feeling helpless or anything like that, and you're willing to just say, "you know, the next four weeks, I'm going to be strict as hell. I'm going to combine a ketogenic diet with time-restricted eating or straight up intermittent fasting." Hit me up if you want to do that, by the way. Leave me a message or a comment or something, and I can give you a protocol to do that. You will drop away so fast. It's staggering, and it actually, your body wants to weigh-off. You don't have to worry about things like stretch marks or loose skin, or anything like that. You only get loose skin and stretch marks if you're losing weight in a very, very unhealthy way.
It's biochemistry; if you're doing it correctly, you're giving the body what it needs to heal itself. You can drop a crazy amount of weight. You're not going to have stretch marks. You're not going to have loose skin, but if you sit there and go, I'm going to eat 600 calories a day and starved my body. You got no chance. You have absolutely no chance. Remember these things; it is so much strict. Low-carb Paleo is the most sustainable for sure. The ketogenic diet pretty difficult, not necessarily for everybody. Intermittent fasting, pretty difficult, time-restricted eating more sustainable.
Let's talk about lifestyle change. Let's get into that. We have the ketogenic diet, cholesterol, intermittent fasting, and now we get to the part of lifestyle change. A lifestyle change will be the most challenging part of this talk because I'm huge on self-discipline. I'm really big on not making excuses. I'm really big on not listening to societal pressures. So, the way that I feel in general, this is a mindset approach, right? If I want to take advice from somebody, I will take advice from the 1%. I'm not going to take advice from the 99%. It's just not the way I operate.
What happens when you try to make a lifestyle change? Right? Let's talk about this because I've been going through this for six years now. When you make a lifestyle change, especially if you become a certified nutritional therapist, which is something that I have done. Anytime you sit down at a table where there is food involved with anybody, especially your family, they are going to tell you how wrong you are. They're going to tell you what they read. They're going to tell you what they saw on Facebook. They're going to tell you what their sisters, sisters, mother said. They're going to tell you all this crazy horse sh** that they have no evidence of, right? They're going to beat you down. It is much more challenging to be healthy with your nutrition in American society than to be unhealthy. It's way easier. Trust me. If you're eating like sh** like everybody else, you have an easier time. No, one's going to bust your balls about that. Right? I catch hell all the time for the way I eat. It's very, very difficult.
So don't listen to your grandma. Don't listen to your Auntie Sue. Don't listen to whoever is giving you nutrition advice. This is why lifestyle changes are so difficult. I call them societal pressures, right? You need to be willing to ignore societal pressures. You need to be ready to say, "Hey, I hear you. Thanks. I get it. I'm going to do my thing. You do yours."
This is a decision that you make. So with health, if you're not at a point where you're fed up, a significant lifestyle change might be difficult. You have to be willing to just say, "No, I'm done with this." which is why I tell people right out of the gate who want to work with me. I said, "Listen, I don't care what you look like naked. I care if you outlive your parents; would you like to outlive your parents?" That's it. I'm never going to see you naked.
I don't care about this, right? I don't care if you want abs. I don't care at all. This is really tricky because you have to get into the right mindset. If you're doing this for health, if you have kids, if you have twins, worry about those twins. What's mommy will be like, when those twins are 30 and now they have grandkids that grandma can't play with. You see what I'm saying? The bikini's don't matter to me. That's the biggest thing.
The other issue that I see with lifestyle changes is what I call celebrity copycats. I get this all the time from dudes, CrossFit dudes. CrossFit dudes are the best. I'm not being sarcastic at all right. CrossFit dudes come to me, and they want to have cheat days. Well, I have a cheat day. Yeah. I'm clean, you know, most of the week. Then I have a massive cheat day, and I'm like, okay, that's cool. I don't cheat days, man. They get upset. They actually get upset. Have you seen The Rock? The rock eats seven large pizzas on Sunday and a plate full of brownies. When you are a six-foot-six Samoan, that's 260 pounds of solid muscle. You can eat seven pizzas and brownies, but when you're a 150-pound white dude in skinny jeans, you don't get to tell me that you're going to do what The Rock did. You just don't get to do it.
Lifestyle changes. Let's talk about how to actually do them. I'm teasing people. I know I get it. The lifestyle changes you have to remember that it's like low-carb paleo versus ketogenic. It's the all or nothing approach. If you're eating the standard amount of carbohydrates, 300 to 600 grams of net carbohydrates a day, don't jump to 20 net carbohydrates. And be like, "This is going to be awesome. I'm going to do this forever." That's like a new year's resolution where you're like, "I'm going to start working out." So you go to the gym for the first week, two hours a day, six days a week. Then you can't walk, and you quit, and you never do it again. Right? It's the same thing with nutrition.
Take us in bite-sized chunks, right? If we say, maybe you just go paleo and don't restrict carbohydrates. Let's start with that. Throw a little fruit in there. Some sweet potatoes, whatever you want for carbohydrates, and then gradually pull it back. Maybe a paleo diet, and you're eating 200 grams of carbs, then you get to a 150, then you get to 100, then 75. Work your way down. This is a lifelong goal. You see, if you're going for a lifestyle change, it has to be lifelong.
It's not about I'm going to go ketogenic for four weeks. And then I'm going to reward myself with cheesecake. It's why you would do that to yourself? It just doesn't make sense, and it's not sustainable. We're trying to find ways to be sustainable. The way that you do this is you have to start making small decisions in all aspects of life. I'll give you a weird example. I take an ice-cold shower every single morning. It's the first thing I do, and it sucks. Every time it sucks. It's horrible. When it's 11 degrees outside, and I take the cold knob, I got old school, two knobs. I just do the cold knob, and I stand under that, and I freeze my butt off. It's horrible, but I do it every single day. Why? Because one, when you're done, you feel fantastic. You feel like you drank a cup of coffee, but it's always terrible.
I've made a decision that this is something that I'm going to do. If I'm working that day as an entrepreneur and some silly issue comes up, it's empowering. When you have decided to do something and do it every day, consistency is key. If you say, I'm not going to eat 300 grams of carbohydrates today. I'm going to eat 200 grams of carbohydrates, and you do that for seven days straight, and you feel pretty good about it. Then the next week, you're gonna say, now I'm gonna eat a little fewer carbohydrates, right? It's just the consistency of making positive decisions all the time. I get this question a lot, right? People like to tease overweight people. I don't. It bothers the hell out of me when people do because they say this person is 300 pounds. You would have thought that at 200 pounds, they would've thought, "Oh man, I better get a handle on this." But it's it doesn't!
You see yourself in the mirror every day; it's slow, incremental changes. I'm at work today, and this person brought doughnuts. I'm going to eat one doughnut. Then two weeks later, that person brings doughnuts again. I'm gonna eat a doughnut and a half. I'll need two doughnuts. Then I'm going to skip the gym today. Then, you know, I bought some groceries to go home and cook, but they kept me two hours late at work. I'm going to grab Wendy's this time. Those little small decisions add up; that's the issue. You can make good decisions all the time, or you can make bad decisions all the time. It's going to be one of the other. That's the thing.
I ran into people that tell me that they eat perfectly.
I'm like,
"Okay, what was Monday like?"
"Well, Monday, someone brought something to the office, and it had something; that's different."
"Okay. What was Tuesday like?"
"Well, Tuesday morning, you know, the kids had trouble getting to school, so I just grabbed a bagel".
"And hh, okay. What was Wednesday like?"
"Wednesday, I a salmon salad. Bam. I eat healthy all the time."
It's tough. It's not their fault. I understand life happens. It's very tough, but you have to make the decision. The biggest thing with lifestyle design is the decision that you have to make, right? If you want to start meditating, don't start meditating for an hour a day. You're not going to do that. Do 10 minutes every day for 10 days straight and do not skip it no matter what; start there. If you want to read every day, read for 20 minutes a day, don't read a novel or say, "I'm going to read three books a week."
The same with nutrition; just start making better choices. You have the rest of your life to get healthy, right? Unless you're in some dire consequence where I don't even know, I don't even want to get into that because that gets wonky with curing diseases, with nutrition. We're not allowed to talk about that stuff. I think what I'm gonna do now is since I've gone through the ketogenic diet crash course, we talked about cholesterol. We talked about intermittent fasting. We've talked about lifestyle change. I'm just looking at my notes over here. What I'll probably do. We're about 35 minutes into this. I might wrap it up here soon, but I like to do some actual Q and A.
First and foremost, again, if you enjoyed this, like it, share it, click those little crazy emoji things. I don't know what else to do. I need to be better at this. Leave me comments, what you liked, what you didn't like. I'm also going to take all the resources that I did name.
Robb Wolf, Keto Masterclass.
Mark Sisson, the Keto Reset.
Dr Rhonda Patrick.
We talked about Keto-Mojo, all of these things. Any recommendations that I gave, I will put in the comments. I'll give you a direct URL to those. Also, let me know when you would like to see me do these things. I think I'm going to do it every Wednesday, at 6:00 PM Central, but I might do two a week. Maybe I'll do two a week. Depends on how many questions I get.
All throughout the week, I'd like to have people send me as many questions as they can think of. Just send me anything, via Facebook message, via the Clovis page, Justin Nault pages. If you know me well, text me. Don't be upset if I don't respond.
The reason why I'm doing these AMAs is that I don't have time to respond to everyone anymore. I have decided that I'm never going to charge for Nutrition information, and I own a nutrition company. That's a little weird, but my products, right? Just if you want to support, go buy my products at clovisculture.com. I'm going to spread as much factual scientific information as I can, and I'm going to continue to do it for free. The only way for me to manage that is to stop answering people directly because it's just gotten to be way too much.
Just hit me up, and if I get a ton of questions, I'll start doing them twice a week. Maybe I'll do a Monday, Wednesday or Tuesday, Thursday. I don't know. I'll figure it out some days, but we'll do this again because it was really fun. Share this with all your followers, do all that fun stuff and let's talk questions.
We have one right here, Courtney.
"Hey Courtney, how are you?"
Question: Can I have dairy on a Keto diet?
Answer: Yes, you absolutely can. I explained in the beginning that Ketogenic does not mean paleo. Paleo does not mean ketogenic. Paleo does not restrict carbohydrates. Ketogenic does restrict carbohydrates. Paleo says no dairy, while in Keto, dairy is allowed.
Be careful, right? Grass-fed butter is fantastic. I think grass-fed butter should be considered paleo as well. There's no lactose in it. Grass-fed butter Kerrygold is a great brand, but some other brands are popping up everywhere. Be careful with dairy because a lot of dairies comes from feedlot cattle. Remember antibiotics, hormones, all the really crappy things that you don't want to eat; those are fat-soluble. They're stored in the fat of the animal. That's the real difference between feedlot cattle and 100% grass-fed cattle; all the toxins in their diets are stored in their fat. Don't go get like Cracker Bell Cheese at Kroger. Just don't do it. You can get grass-fed cheese. The other thing you can do is sheep's milk cheese or goat milk cheese.
You will not notice there's a difference in taste. I'm telling you. It's not gross. Yes, you can have dairy on a ketogenic diet.
"I can't wait to order pre and post-workout."
"Thank you. That's awesome. Please do that."
Here's what I'll do for you guys that are here. Don't share this because, well, yeah, let's just go for it. Just use promo code Justin10. There you go. It'll give you some discount on your purchase. Let's go ahead and do that. iamclovis.com and use promo code Justin10. You'll save some money cause I love you guys for being here. Thank you so much.
There was another question from earlier, red meat, right?
Question: Different types of red meat?
Answer: So yes. I mean, I guess there are different types of red meat.
This is where you get into the scientific studies that are horseshit, the causation versus correlation where they're like red meat causes cancer. Well, if you're studying Oscar Meyer, salami or bacon or something like that, yeah. You're going to run into some serious problems. If you have red meat from 100% grass-fed, I get my grass-fed beef from a farm here called Tennessee Grass-fed. So if you're in Tennessee, Tennessee Grass-fed is in Clarksville. They're amazing. They deliver to Nashville twice a week. I get a whole freezer. I buy a quarter of a cow a time. My family splits it up. You get fillets, you get ground beef, get everything. 100% grass-fed beef. That's what you're going to want to stick with. If you go with red meat, either that or wild game. We're in Tennessee, a lot of people hunt.
I have some game meat in my freezer at the risk of getting politically correct people mad at me. I have a lot of meat that I have procured myself that I eat. I know exactly where it comes from. That's the thing you just have to be careful with quality because I agree with people in the red meat issue. You don't want to eat red meat from feedlot cattle. You really don't want to. The grain-fed versus grass-fed debate again comes in the fatty acids. The fatty acid profile is entirely different. It's loaded with toxins, hormones, antibiotics, anything that they're injecting in the cow is stored in the fat of the animal; it's fat-soluble. If you take like a big juicy feedlot, ribeye steak, that's all marbled and pretty. You're taking in a lot of hormones, the same actually goes for non-red meat like chicken, and average like Purdue chicken breast has about five doses of your average birth control in terms of estrogen. It's pretty gross, right? Literally, one chicken breast can contain as much as five doses of birth control in estrogen. You're getting some serious hormones put in your body. It's really, really horrible.
What else we got? You guys have any questions? Because I'm going to watch this little comment thread here. There's 16 of you, 17 of you. Oh my God. This is crazy. This is like playing a gig or something. If you have any questions, ask them. Whoa.
Hey, Jackie's excited.
Hi Jackie.
The ketogenic diet, cholesterol, intermittent fasting, lifestyle change. Do you guys have any questions about that? Or do you have any questions about anything else? Okay.
Question: Is fat-free cheese okay? Isn't it high in protein?
Answer: Yes, of course. Um, but why does that matter? Right. We also talked about with the ketogenic diet and paleo and all these things; fat is your friend. Fat is very good for you.
If you're going to use dairy products, go full fat. This goes for milk as well, whole milk. If you can get raw milk, it's actually illegal to sell. You got to get it from a farm that we know. Whole milk, go with whole milk. Don't go with skimmed milk. It's just stripping all the nutrients out of this. If it's feedlot dairy, you don't want to eat it at all. If you're going to eat dairy, go with full fat. Always go with full fat. You're fat-free. You should take the words fat-free out of your vocabulary unless you want to die young. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Unless you want to die young, remove the words fat-free from your diet. Okay. Awesome. Cool.
Question: Tell me about cashews and Turkey bacon.
Answer: Okay. Turkey bacon? No. Cashews? Maybe, it depends. You need to run experiments on yourself, right?
If you eat cashews and have any stomach issues (which you might) because they are a lectin source. Let almonds cashews, a lot of these really popular nuts. They have lectins, and lectins stick to the lining of your gut, and they deteriorate the lining of your gut. The lining of your gut is only one cell thick. This is the way it works. This is your gut lining, right? There are tiny little cracks here, and they're supposed to let nutrients into your bloodstream. Now lectins disguise themselves because they look just like healthy proteins. They stick to the lining of your gut in the inside, and they wedge it open. Oop. Now all of a sudden, you have this; this is called a leaky gut syndrome, where you have a permeable gut lining, right?
Now you have full proteins and full food items that are not fully digested that get into your bloodstream. That causes an autoimmune response. Your body literally attacks itself. That's where inflammation comes from. If you ever have fibromyalgia or lupus or Crohn's or IBS, any of these things, all start with inflammation. It is an autoimmune response. It's an autoimmune disease. Do you want to deal with autoimmune issues? You need to lower inflammation, you need to reduce carbohydrates, and you especially need to remove lectins. If you want to learn more about lectins, look up a book called The Plant Paradox. The Plant Paradox is fantastic. It's about as close as I get to my philosophy on all things nutrition. So look up The Plant Paradox. I'll put it in the show notes here.
Can I scroll up? Yeah.
Question: My go-to energy source pre-workout has been some type of carb. If I plan to eat 10% carbs, what the best fuel pre-workout?
Answer: The Perfect Paleo Powder. Pre-workout in strawberry paleo-friendly bam. I suck at selling stuff that was so sarcastic. That's paleo pre-workout. Honestly, black coffee if you don't want to buy my product, which I assure you will change everything for you. If you've been taking pre-workout supplements, you're going to try mine. It's going to change your life. I can make you that guarantee, and we have a money-back guarantee. If you want samples, hit me up, we'll figure this out. But up until I created a pre-workout, I literally just told people black coffee; that's the way to do it. It depends; you really don't need carbohydrates, especially if you're trying to lose fat. I mean, I do a lot of workouts fasted. I will do intensely. I'm talking 400-pound deadlifts with zero food in my system. It's not that hard. You can get through it. You can perform the same way. It's going to give you incredible health benefits.
Don't load up on carbohydrates before a workout. Don't do that. If you do want to load carbs, do it on the backend. If you were to work out fasted and deplete muscle glycogen, then boom, hit some carbs in like a 90-minute window after that workout. Slam some carbs. That's the way to do it. If you're in a carb lobe, do it on the back end. Okay.
Question: Is beef that is labelled grass-fed all good?
Answer: Okay. Here's the problem. The USDA did away with all grass-fed labelling in 2015. There is no regulation for grass-fed beef whatsoever in America.
This is so disheartening. It drives me crazy. This should be illegal. This is why I go to local farmers again, Tennessee grass-fed. Tiffany, if you're here in Tennessee, look up Tennessee grass-fed; they're fantastic. They'll deliver it to you. It's really tough if you don't know the farmer. You really don't know what the hell is going on because it's the Wild West. They can label whatever they want.
For example, don't buy free-range eggs. You can have a million chickens in a coop, all on top of each other, shi**** on each other's heads. There's one little window that closes and shuts, and that opens for five minutes a day, and not a single chicken leaves that coop. You can call that free-range; never get free-range poultry. Pasture-raised is the only thing you can do. Get a pasture-raised chicken. This labelling stuff is insane. I have an article called grass-fed gimmicks, iamclovis.com/blog. You can find my article on grass-fed gimmicks.
Let's see what else we got.
Question: What about alcohol?
Answer: Okay. My favorite topic, bam. This is my house, and I have a fully functioning bar behind me with just about everything you could want. There's more than the drawers. It's pretty cool.
Now I have paleo wine on that side of the room. Dry farm wines. Dryfarm wines.com. Check them out. They ship paleo-friendly wines to your house at about 24 bucks a bottle. It's fantastic. I know the founder, Todd is amazing. Todd White, if you ever see this, Hey buddy, love you. Send me some wine, and it'd be cool. Alcohol. If you don't want to do dry farm wines, which is a delivery service and you can't just walk out to the store and get it.
Very dry red wines. I don't recommend anything under $10 because you're really going to be mainly drinking chemicals. The sweet spot seems to be about $16 to $24. Really dry red wines were low Cabernet, Malbeck, those kinds of things. Don't get sweet wines. The same goes for all alcohol. All unflavored distilled alcohol is zero carbohydrates by default; vodka, bourbon, 100% of Agave Tequila is my favorite. It is the only alcohol that you could make an argument about is kind of healthy. It's really not, but it's the least harmful; 100% of agave tequila. The only acceptable mixers are water and soda. That's it. If you get 100% of agave silver tequila, mix it with soda water and lime. It's delicious. It's not sugary. It's not sweet. Get used to it, but trying to change your life for the better. So alcohol again, all distilled liquors and really dry red wines.
What else we have here? We have any other questions popping up.
Question: What about Brown rice or Jasmine rice?
Answer: No. Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope. No. This is a giant misconception.
One thing that drives me nuts is I don't know if you've ever done any research on centenarians. These are people who live to be over a hundred years old, right? All these people around the world that have the blue zones; people that live to be over a hundred, they all eat rice. They all eat rice, Asians. They only eat rice. If you're Eastern European, you're not going to digest rice because you didn't involve the same way. Your genetics are entirely different. Now that's one. Two, the most damaging part of rice is what's called the endosperm. I believe. I think so. The outer coating makes the rice Brown.
What are these Asians have in common? They say these people live to be a hundred years old, and they live on a diet of mostly rice. This is white rice, the wheat aspect of it, not the wheat, whatever: the whole, the husk. I can't remember what they call it, but the outer shell that makes it brown is strict. That's why they eat white, sticky rice. White rice is so much better for you than brown rice. Now I don't recommend eating a lot of rice because it's incredibly high in carbohydrate and has almost no nutritional value. There's really no reason to eat it, but the misconception of brown rice versus white rice always go with white rice. Again, read the book, The Plant Paradox. That'll talk about this.
All the lectins and gut damaging items are contained in the outer layers of those rice grains.
Question: Is LaCroix okay?
Answer: Yeah, for sure! LaCroix is okay. Let me go back to alcohol. If you're talking about tequila and LaCroix is delicious. So yeah, that's totally fine. LaCroix is great.
Another company, I can't remember the name, but I met him. The founder of Zevia is fantastic. Zevia really tastes like straight-up soda. It's much sweeter than LaCroix, but LaCroix is excellent.
Question: What about rice cauliflower?
Answer: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely, go for it. I would much prefer that you're eating rice cauliflower than you are eating actual rice. Just be careful with ingredients; green giant and all these guys. They do a lot of these.
There are so many vegetables out there just for fun. Next time you go to a grocery store, take a bag of vegetables and go, "these are vegetables, this looks delicious." Especially if it has any kind of seasoning, start reading the ingredients on that shi**. It will blow your mind what they put in bags of frozen vegetables. If you pick up vegetables or a bag of broccoli and it doesn't say ingredients, broccoli, period. Put it down and don't touch it because it's loaded with chemicals. It's really sketchy. So rice cauliflower, yes. I recommend you make it yourself or just check the ingredients. Get used to checking ingredient labels because it's scary what they sneak into foods. It really is. Most brands are pretty good about it. Rice cauliflower, go for it; that's awesome.
We're 49 minutes into this thing. We've done almost an hour of the first AMA. Thank you guys so much for being here. Click the little like button, click that happy face or click the heart button that makes me really happy. Share this, put it on your pages or whatever. I mean, we've gone 49 minutes. Why don't we just see if we have any other questions? Do you have any further questions? Hit me up right now. If I don't get questions here in a minute, we'll probably call it, but, uh, thank you guys so much for watching. My name is Justin Nault. I'm the founder of the Clovis culture and inventor of The Perfect Paleo Powder. Check out iamclovis.com.
Question: Where do I get my haircut?
Answer: Elan hair and skin in Spring Hill, Tennessee. I see Janine and she is incredible. Call them.
Is that it? We just got haircut questions now. That's what this has come to. Thank you.
Thank you, AMA, again. I'm going to do this at least once a week. Maybe twice a week, depending on how many questions I get.
Email is support@iamclovis.com.
You can find me on
Facebook - Justin Nault.
Instagram - @justinnault
Twitter - @justinnault.
You can find everything else through Clovis culture, iamclovis.com, click on all the links. Go like all our pages and share this.
Hi mom, that's my mom there. That was adorable. Thanks. But yeah. Thank you guys so much. This was awesome. So again, everything I touched on, I will put some links in what I'll call the show notes, basically just the comment sections. We'll fill you in, we'll give you all the resources you could possibly need and hit me up directly.
Let's talk. If you're having trouble with anything, or are you really feeling overwhelmed, just give me a shout. I love working with people now again; I'll probably tailor this to answer your questions during the AMA sessions. I'll try to schedule these. Let me know what schedules work for you guys when you would like to see these. We'll do more so I can answer as many questions as I can. Remember, I'm going to do nutrition consulting for free, and this is really the only way that I can manage it. If you think it's cool that I'm doing this, please support it. Please talk to your friends about it. Please send me enough questions to sustain this and keep doing it because I really want to. It makes me very, very happy. I've done many things in my life, and this is, hands down, the most fulfilling work I've ever done.
I love you guys. Thank you very much, and I will see you next week or sooner.
Question: Can you buy my shirts?
Answer: Yes, let's do that. iamclovis.com.
You can buy this shirt, this exact shirt you can buy on iamclovis.com.
Please buy it, and that'd be a huge support. When you walk around, you do your walking advertisement for me, right? Please do that; that'd be killer. Thank you so much, Jackie. I love you. Thank you, everybody.
Like share, ask me questions for next week. We will do it again and come to my house and drink with me by my Jack Daniels barrel. Thank you, guys. I appreciate every single one of you. Thank you so much. I don't know. I don't know how to stop this thing. Let's see. Oh, finish. That works. Bye, everybody. Thank you so much.
