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How To Make Sustained Weight Loss Easier | Dr. Anthony Balduzzi | Better Man Podcast Ep. 027

How To Make Sustained Weight Loss Easier | Dr. Anthony Balduzzi | Better Man Podcast Ep. 027

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know how difficult it can be. And you know what? Sustaining your weight loss after achieving your goals is even more difficult. 

Why? 

Because there are a lot of misconceptions men have about weight loss that makes this process harder. Too often, men fall into the insidious “all or nothing thinking” trap which constantly keeps their goals out of reach. Or men will rely on their willpower alone, only to run out of motivation and regain any weight they lost. 

That’s the bad news. 

The good news? 

There are only 4 weight loss levers you can pull at any time. And by creating systems around each of these levers, you can not only achieve long-lasting weight loss, but you can also make the process easier and even more fun. 

In this episode, Dr. Anthony from the Fit Father Project, who has helped over 50,000 men achieve long-term weight loss, joins me to discuss his best strategies, mindsets, and habits to simplify your weight loss journey. 

Want to make weight loss an easier and more fun process? Listen now.

The Better Man Podcast is an exploration of our health and well-being outside of our physical fitness, exploring and redefining what it means to be better as a man; being the best version of ourselves we can be, while adopting a more comprehensive understanding of our total health and wellness. I hope it inspires you to be better!

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Watch a Clip From Episode 027

How To Make Sustained Weight Loss Easier with Dr. Anthony from the Fit Father Project | Ep.27

Key Takeaways with Dr. Anthony Balduzzi

  • The 4 “Weight Loss Levers” for achieving sustainable weight loss with ease (7:33) 
  • How your thoughts, emotions, and relationships either sabotage or empower your weight loss success (13:22) 
  • The “Future Casting” trick for hacking your brain’s psychology and simplifying weight loss (14:18) 
  • How to make your default state of being healthy so you don’t have to “try” anymore (21:14) 
  • 2 of the biggest weight loss misconceptions which keep you stuck and unable to shed extra fat (22:26) 
  • The “Swapping Secret” for creating healthier habits (without relying on willpower) (28:02) 
  • Dr. Anthony reveals the most sustainable diet for men — after helping over 50,000 men achieve long-term weight loss (38:34) 
  • 3 practical weight loss strategies you can start today to feel better tomorrow (43:04)
  • The “Perfect Plate” strategy for making your dinners healthy and delicious without counting calories (even when you eat out) (46:09) 
  • Why exercising transforms your muscles into “nutrient sponges” and makes sustained weight loss easier (1:07:00)

Need help creating a system for sustainable weight loss?

For the next three days only, Fit Father Project is offering all Better Man Podcast listeners an exclusive 35% discount to join their FF30X Weight Loss Program. Sign up before the discount expires at FitFatherProject.com/mfy

Episode 027: How To Make Sustained Weight Loss Easier | Dr. Anthony Balduzzi – Transcript

Dean Pohlman: Gentlemen, welcome back to the Better Man podcast. Today’s episode, I am rejoined by a former guest. This is octor… Doctor. Dr. Anthony Balduzzi of the Fit Father Project. Welcome back.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Thanks, man. I kind of like the Octor. That’s like an octopus Doctor. that’d be cool.

Dean Pohlman: You’re the one who’s sleep deprived right now, not me. So I don’t. I don’t know why I messed that up for those. I don’t know why you would know if you’re listening or you might know. But anyways, Dr. Anthony finally joined the the father community to to match his his brand name. A few months ago. So before we started, we were talking. I asked him how his sleep was. Because I’m just anticipating, you know, baby = bad sleep and sure enough. Yeah. How is that going Dr A?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: We have a newborn, and it changes everything as far as the dads and moms listening to this, certainly know. And yeah, last night was a rough night asleep. We’re at six months sleep regression, apparently, my wife tells me. But either way, you know, it’s like it’s an interesting thing to have to be woken up in the middle of night by, like, a smiling baby who just, like, as wide alert. So there’s part of it’s like, oh, my gosh, again, this is like eight times a night. And then it’s also like they smile at you and just the amount of joy in your heart. So we’re we’re in an interesting phase for sure. And we’ll definitely be talking about sleep today, too. As it relates to to weight loss and health. That’s definitely a topic that will come up today.

Dean Pohlman: OK, sweet. Well, that’s that’s cool that she smiles. I just I remember I just remember my child. I remember Declan just screaming at me. Usually when he was being woken up, usually wasn’t excited. It’s just just like how me like what he whines. But yeah, so. So anyways, you know, I don’t know. You know, Anthony, we had you on the show, you know, a few couple of months ago, and that episode was really focused on kind of the overall goals with the Better Man podcast.

So we were really digging out like, you know, what, what really motivates you? And there was a really inspirational episode for me personally, I actually I put it in the top five episodes for the Better Man podcast season one. So if you haven’t heard that one yet, go back and listen to it. It’s awesome. But this episode I kind of want to shift gears a little bit and talk about weight loss because this is something that is such a big struggle for men. You know, we are we are we have relatively you know, we are more prosperous than ever before. We we we have access to so much information and yet, you know, weight loss, this is something that we struggle with tremendously and so many of us struggle with. I mean, you can you can probably give the the exact figure. But, you know, over 25% of people in the United States are overweight.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I think it’s yeah. I think it’s even higher than that. I mean, but yeah, I mean my my stats are certainly over 40% are overweight or obese and that’s certainly not changing anytime soon. Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: So with all of you know, with all of what we just talked about, you know, what are, what are those big what’s holding people back? So we’re going to get into that. So I want to start off by just asking what are some of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to losing weight? Because we’ve got you know, I think I think most of us when it comes to weight loss, our assumptions or our knowledge is based on what we see in pop culture or what we see on… I imagine that like most people most people’s knowledge of weight loss, you could you could find by watching Good Morning America, like the types of segments that show up there are like, well, if you want to eat less and let’s eliminate fat and let’s you know, I feel like so much of it is just just it’s either basic or it’s or it’s even just missed. It’s Miss… I don’t know, misleading isn’t the right word, but just not as helpful as some other things could be. So yeah, I’d love to just start by talking about what are the biggest misconceptions when it comes to weight loss.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Sure. And I think to start there, we need to kind of look at the landscape of where the general information has kind of come. There’s been a series of different kinds of diet fads over the past 20, 30, 40 years, you know, whether it was like originally we have the low carb Atkins kind of stuff, and then we have South Beach and then plant based makes a huge rise and now we have a rise of more Keto Carnivore happening now. And all of these different approaches, at least on the nutrition side of things, the diet side of things can work if they’re based on the principles of feeding the body with the right kind of nutrients, having enough food that you’re not hungry all the time.

The question is, are they sustainable over the long run? And that’s what really I’ve been interested in because I’ve seen so many people, tens of thousands of people lose weight and regain it back, and maybe someone listening is experiences themselves. So when I look at approaching weight loss, I’m always looking at it through the sustainability lens. And when you look at sustainability lens, then you need to also look at what are the levers that we’re pulling, where we’re pulling levers with food and nutrition, we’re pulling levers with exercise, we’re pulling levers with sleep in our psyche and rhythm balance or pulling levers with our mindset. And what I found over, you know, my work with helping many clients is that we need to have sustainable systems in all of these categories to create lasting weight loss.

What often happens is many people try to do very intense things in any of these given categories. Many people jump to the idea of, I just need to exercise a ton more to start losing weight. That’s like the January 1st thing. And yes, I can work for some short period of time, but does this fit into the overall architecture of your life? Is it causing friction in your habits and your routines? Do you actually even enjoy this stuff in the first place? So my thought process is no longer looking out there for a new mechanism, whether it’s Keto or this new kind of exercise gadget or this new type of workout. It’s looking at first off like it’s an inner reflection on:

One (1) Why is this actually important to me? And doing some of this deep motivational mindset work, because we got to get our psychology and we’re old in these new behaviors if they’re going to stick long term. So that’s primary and then.

Two (2) looking at what is my exact life right now, what, what, what, what is my demands of my work, my family, my schedule, what are the times that I have to exercise? What’s the type of exercise that I like to do? And then starting to like reverse engineer a plan because otherwise we’re kind of stuck in what many people find themselves is like trying to jam like a square peg into a round hole the square peg is every next new shiny diet book or workout, and the round hole is your life. And so my thought is what if we can actually start to make something that’s a little more tailored to you that reduces friction points. It’s actually enjoyable. And for the people we serve, primarily men and women on the mother project side to over 40, it needs to be like age appropriate, healthy on your joints, doesn’t need to take a lot of time on terms of the workouts.

So sustainability is the first big thing. And unfortunately, fitness is as much of a marketing industry as it is a helping people industry. And there’s always going to be a new shiny object that comes around the corner that’s going to be marketed as a new silver bullet panacea because we we want these things psychologically. We want there to be one simple answer about why we can’t lose weight. But it’s a multifactorial thing because weight loss is effectively managing our bodies, which means, you know, all those inputs I talked about and doing those over a period of time. So this involves your entire life. So I think this holistic perspective is a lot more helpful. And what I’d like to do over the course of this conversation is maybe break down what I think are very effective strategies, simple effective strategies in each of these categories and maybe even ways to think about it to produce lasting results.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, well, I will do my best to ask smart questions, to provoke smart, awesome replies to things. So the fads you know, so they are I agree with you on fads. On the other hand, fads are also they’re cool because they can they can keep things interesting. You know, I talk with a ton of people who are like, well, I just need to do something new or like I need to do a new workout or I need to do a new something. And, and I experienced that myself too. When I, you know, if I’m getting bored, like I want to try something new or I’m going to do instead of doing the same ten minute yoga routine I’ve been doing for the last two years, how about I change it up and do something else? So I think I think learning how to maybe balance some of those shiny objects instead of, you know, instead of just taking them and saying, I’m going to make this my life now.

Yeah. But the other part that I really like that you talked about was, you know, use the word “sustainable”. I’ve actually when I when I sat down with my team a few years ago leading into New Years in 2019, we like we we sat down, we kind of made a mission statement and the the word that came up and something that I’ve continually brought up is how do we make living a healthy lifestyle sustainable and enjoyable and… You know I kind of just answered it in the title there, but you make it something that is enjoyable. But you also you do take a look at your life like what, what are all the different demands going on in your life right now? What are your professional obligations, what are your family obligations, what are all of those things, what are, what are the things that you need to do in order to keep yourself happy? And then how do you fit in these new habits, these new practices that are going to help you lose weight? So it has to be realistic you know, it has to be, oh, yes, this makes sense. And I can I can do this. So I really like that you brought that up.

So you hinted at this. And I want to get straight into this. But, you know, most of us know that food, nutrition, sleep, exercise, these are these are super important when it comes to weight loss. But the mindset factor is something that I think a lot of us will skate over. So I’d love if you could talk a little bit more about the mindset changes that are necessary to sustained weight loss.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: For sure. And as I do that, I want to one more thing, touch on fads the idea that someone like you, Dean, who has a system in place of years of habits in general, routine in place, and then to throw something new and novel on top is perfect. That’s just engagement. But for someone who does not have this baseline foundational system established, their rhythms with nutrition, sleep, exercise, then a fad, ultimately is not based on this, the strong foundation. So this is an important architecture of how change happens because when you’re trying to lose weight of your currently not at the right weight and you know, you don’t have habits established, we need to work on building that foundation and novelty can come later. These are a lot of like hooks and ornaments on the tree, but you got to have the trunk first. And the trunk is your sustainable rhythms.

And I believe fundamentally that the that all this stuff starts with mindset because what we’re doing is we’re managing behaviors hopefully over the rest of our lives that are trending in this healthier direction. And that means that we are managing emotions, we’re managing thoughts, we’re managing our relationship to certain kinds of things. So the first thing we do inside our Fit Father program, before we even give you the meal plan or the workout, is we actually go through a fairly extensive reflection and journaling exercise to help you get super clear.

Dean Pohlman: Yes, it is. It is extensive. I’ve gone through it. I wanted to see what it looked like.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yeah, it is extensive. And the reason it’s extensive is because what we need to do is actually create positive neuro associations with the new life we want to create and actually just get very clear on the fact that this change that we want to make is going to cost us stuff. It’s going to cost us in terms of our time investment into this. It’s going to cost us potentially financially with buying different kinds of foods or equipment. It’s going to cost us with just generally the hardness of the times where we’re feeling like, oh, my gosh, this is so hard as we’re making a change. So we get very clear on the costs, we get very clear on the massive benefits that would happen if we change and we kind of do a little bit of this carrot and the stick we do some future casting, like what’s life going to look like if you don’t make a change in five, ten years and like really make that a real reality because the human psychology has a bias where we don’t like to, like, we don’t really realize like impending danger that happens like ten years from now. We’re good at reacting to immediate threats.

And so if we can actually start to pull some psychological levers and see that our current path is actually not sustainable and it actually is leading us on like a crash course, that’s going to negatively impact all areas of our life that we care about outside of just our esthetics how we look, how we feel, but how does it impact our ability to provide for our family? How does it impact our feeling of congruency with our selves, like mind, body, spirit, some of these deeper reflections are necessary because they and we actually crystallize these into a written mission statement. And the reason I did this in the program is because I saw some early research and many you’ve probably heard of, like the Harvard goal study, where basically they tracked people who graduated from Harvard. Those that wrote goals crushed it. Those that did not did not crush it nearly as much. So my thought is like when we’re trying to lose weight, there’s a lot of initiation energy that needs to happen. So let’s write a 30 day mission statement and actually put some commitment and some emotive power behind that because losing weight and getting a new healthy lifestyle analogy I like to use is like shooting a rocket into space. Like it requires a ton of energy in a short period of time to break through inertia, to get out of the atmosphere and then once you’re kind of cruising and you’re up out of there, it’s a lot easier. You have this kind of positive momentum building.

So in the first 30 days, we need to get very deep, make deep connections on why health matters and write that into a mission statement. And you went through the exercise to be curious to see like what your experience was with that. Also knowing that you’re a man who has a lot of these things, like figure it out. But I’d be curious to hear your process of the reflection that you went through doing our program.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So actually what has been what I’ve been thinking about as you talk about the process, I went to a Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within event. I think this was like 2014 or 2015 and they do this. Like, they have you think about the future and they think about what is your future going to look like ten years from now if you don’t make these changes that you want, make and the other thing is you mentioned this, this ton of inertia to get going. Tony Robbins is all about this, like, you know, this massive change, right? You have to make this massive shift in order to cause so that’s what I was actually just thinking of when you were when you were talking about that.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It’s true. We respond to plant pain and pleasure and we want to pull both those we want to think about how great life could be, but also many times when we’re kind of like stuck in bad habits and a little bit of a rut. We got to get very real about what this is going to cost us over the long haul. And that can be very motivating. We want to use that in a short period of time and set a very specific short term goal because that gives us a container for our effort. A container for effort is necessary. It’s kind of like the rocket boosters shooting down in one particular direction. That’s what a 30 day goal and mission statement, if you’re getting started, gives you.

Dean Pohlman: Mm hmm. So something that struck me when I was doing that assignment as I was going through it is the the cost. That was something that I think was unique in terms of because I’ve done a lot of these I’ve looked at a lot of these different types of, you know, planning things or, you know, plans to get started or mission statement outlines. And one thing that was unique was the what is this going to cost you? Like, what is the time that it’s going to take? What are you going to have to give up? Because because normally you’re always just focused on what is this going to do for me? Oh, if I can I’m going to start walking for 30 minutes the morning. I’m going to super healthy breakfast, I’m going to have a smoothie and at night I’m going to stretch for 20 minutes, 20 minutes before I go to sleep, do meditation and write in my journal, and then I’m just going to, you know, I’m going to fall into my pillow and just fall asleep and write, you know, and that’s that, right? That’s the dream. The dream lifestyle, maybe. But then you, you know, actually think about what you’re giving up. Like, Well, I’m giving up my time to relax and just sit on the couch and just like, not do anything. I’m giving up time that I could be spending with my wife. So I really like that, you know, that was, that was the one that was one thing that really stuck out for me as I was going through. That was, you know, it’s just part of the part of the realistic part of it.

You have to understand. Yes, there are benefits that are going to come from this. But what are the cost involved? And then the follow up question is, why are these costs going to be worth it? So you have to kind of draw out this this is something that I something similar that I do in Man Flow Yoga. But you have to you have you’re basically really establishing the basic motivation behind why you’re going to do a workout so that when you come to these things and you’re like, OK, you know what? I’m just really running low on willpower right now. So you can always kind of check back in with, oh, why am I doing this? What is the big reason why I’m doing this? And I don’t… you know, I can’t remember for sure if you utilize this. I’m I’m sure you probably do in some form or another. But you want to ask yourself why, you know, five times until you get to that, because initially you say, like, why do I want to lose weight? You know, like, well, I want to look better in the mirror. OK, cool. Why do you want to look better in the mirror? And then you get to the end of the the why series and you’re like, because I want to I want to live. I want to be here for my kids are like, I want to I don’t want to. I don’t want to. You know, in your case, you know, you tragically lost your father at a young age. And so I’m assuming for you, you know, you went through that process and you’re like, because I don’t want what happened to my dad to happen to me, like, because I want to live longer than my dad did.

So then when you do that exercise and you really get to the the soft, squishy, like, oh, this is like this is some some real shit, then you’re like, OK, now we’ve got some motivation.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yep. You have emotive power behind you when you when you actually get clear and kind of tap into this. Well, and you’ve kind of made a contract with yourself in the sense when you do assess costs, you’re like, I know this is going to cost me stuff. You’ve you’ve made that clear and then you’re able to, like, sign somethign that says. Yep. Despite those costs, it’s still worth it. And understand this, like, we have the experience, we experience ourselves in this conscious state, right in our conscious mind, but we have this subconscious mind that is like the deep well of our attachments, our self image, these deep kind of scripts. And if we tried and failed at losing weight, a lot of time, those kind of like sub subtle fears, this will all just do the same pattern over and over. Those exist in the deeper parts of the mind. And this process of actually like getting clear and diving down can stir some of that stuff up and actually give you more emotive power because every time you make a decision into the future, like that’s now the background, you have a little more power in the background that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be hard.

But if you actually write it down, crystallize it in something tangible and put that mission statement all over your house, like booby trap it, print it out five to ten times, you’re giving yourself a visual trigger of your commitment, and that can start to rewire your psychology over time because the truth is, the people who are healthy long term, it’s not hard for them. They’ve made massive mental shifts in massive routine shifts so that now their default is a new, healthy way of life that actually feels like it’s adding them up and empowering them. It doesn’t feel like that at first. There is a shifting of gears that must happen. There is friction that must happen. And so now once you kind of start this process of the emotion, now you want to pull the big levers that actually drive the most quick results and the main lever to pull there is certainly nutrition. So I think that’d be a nice place to kind of get into next on weight loss.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So I mean, you’re just you’re for me, what you’re bringing up is you’re talking about as you’re talking about the mindset is just that it takes a lot of energy it takes a lot of discomfort. I mean, that’s what change is, right? Change is hard. So it takes a lot of that to shift lifestyles, to start living a healthier lifestyle. And to me, as I’m hearing that in my gogo, wow, this is this is something I think that’s really overlooked and actually before I do want to get into nutrition. But, you know, I’m curious about you kind of we’re bringing it up, but what are some of the what are some of the the mindsets or maybe some of the you talked about relationships to certain things. What are some of these existing relationships? The things food, for example. What are some of those examples that you see in the the many, many, men / fathers that you work with? What are some of those that really hold people back when it comes to weight loss?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yeah, I tend to come to the top of my mind in the first one is probably the most common mindset that keeps people stuck in is that “all or nothing” mindset. The idea that you’re on the plan or you’re off the plan, it’s like your super committed into this rigid thing in your other honor or your office. Like thinking of your health routines is like a binary switch is either on or off. And the danger of that is the on feels very motivating. And you can do that for a certain amount of time. But even if you’re the most dedicated person, you’re not going to able to do that 52 weeks in a row. And if you don’t have the Habit Foundation, it’s inevitable that the switch ends up flipping off and it flips off. You have the kind of guilt mental loop that goes like, Oh man, I blew the diet today. It’s a cheat day. I’ll just restart next Monday and you start to get into these like big gaps and swings when that’s not actually what reality is.

What reality is, is like we are present and we have the ability to make a new choice potentially every moment. But it’s just this mental flip switch that we say that we must be all on this rigid plan or not off this plan, and it takes a while to rewire this thing. And this is why committing to the lens of sustainability from the beginning is super helpful for people and then also teaching people the tools on how to like readjust and course correct. It’s like that classic airplane analogy. It’s never flying in a perfectly straight line but it’s like course correcting constantly in the direction. And when you’re trying to lose weight, you just want to work on having guardrails to minimize those swings so they’re not massive. So the all or nothing mindset would be one of those.

The second thing is that we are ultimately coping with stress in our lives because we all have unique stressors, and most people end up doing that in a way that is harming their health. And many times food is of great culture of stress. How many people listening to this who struggle with weight have some kind of experience with late night eating of foods that are not like the best? You get home from work, you pop down the couch, you eat certain kinds of things, and then you feel like crap. And then it kind of the momentum repeats itself. Or maybe it is some kind of alcohol or cigarets or certain kinds of drugs that people turn to. That’s ultimately not great for our health. We know this, but we’re looking for some kind of stress relief.

So this is really important to know because we are always going to be looking for some kind of escapism some kind of change of our state. And ultimately, what we do want is to make this new healthy lifestyle in time a wellspring for stress release. I know me after having done this for so many years and many of our fit fathers, it’s like when you’re exercising more and you’re doing some exercise you love and it feels good to feel good, that ends up being like a place that you tap into when you’re feeling stressed. You’ll go do this instead of like turning to an old habit. So I think it’s really important to just become consciously aware of ways that we’re actually using escapism in trying to cope with stress in many ways. And are those in unhealthy behaviors. So it’d be a massive difference if like your normal thing was to cope with stress, I go ahead and I eat a bag of potato chips. If you can shift that to something that’s like not based on calories, you’ll immediately see results without making any other shift. So just something to be aware of. I think stresses stress interplays massively with these health routines. And the cool thing is as you get healthier, your body legitimately just becomes more resilient. You become more resilient to stress, and that can actually help you stay on track over the long haul.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I mean, that brings up so I love reading about behavioral science. Some of my favorite books are I have three books that I read on Repeat for habits, “Power of Habits” by Charles Duhigg, “Tiny Habits” by B.J. Fogg and “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. And something that is talked about all the time. And that is you’re not actually when you change your behavior or when you change a habit, you’re not actually changing the entire cycle of the habit because every habit can be broken down into a trigger, a craving, and what you do to alleviate that or feel better. And so what you’re doing when you’re changing up your stress eating habit is you’re not eliminating feeling stress, right? Because you’re always going to… OK, trigger, I’m feeling stressed, craving I’m going to have something. I’m going to eat some food because I know that relieves my stress. And then you go and eat something to relieve the stress, right? That’s a cycle that, you know, works. So it’s, it’s having the awareness and also having the available willpower to when you get to that in-between of I have this craving and I’m going to do this to satisfy that craving you think about, well, what’s the craving that I’m really trying to satisfy here because I’m not eating, because I’m satisfying the craving of calories. I’m eating because I want to feel less stressed so if you can use the awareness and the your understanding of how you behavior works in that moment, you can say, wait, I can do something else to feel better. I can do something else to relieve my stress.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And that’s personal power. I mean, that’s the exertion of conscious personal power in a new direction. And the more you groove that direction, the more that becomes like the default neurologic groove. Because literally, if we were to kind of break this down the craving and we could trace this into actual brain electrical activity in certain pathways, and circuits that are used over and over, and we’re actually changing that up or changing those neuronal connections when we’re doing something different. And it does take a certain degree of willpower and the willpower reservoir can get deeper when you do connect to your why and some of these deep reasons. But the most important factor is even if you’re at a point where you feel like you don’t have a lot of willpower is to create a system that creates a healthy environment that makes it far more likely you succeed at least 75% of the time.

Right. It’s environment that is that is like the massive factor. So when it comes to like nutrition we do some very tactical stuff as it relates to this example of cravings. We give people the healthy snacks to like put in your house for times when you have these cravings. So we take a substitution on the cookies you used to have and we give you something that is like a better option. So we’re not even like dramatically changing things. We’re just making like a swap that still gives you a lot of the same benefits and now you have an environmental tool that is going to be a lot more likely that you do succeed. These kinds of examples of creating a sustainable, like systematic nutrition plan that gives you clarity and gives you a track to keep on working and practicing every fresh new day helps you be successful.

So environment is massive, and I know we’re going to talk about that a lot as it relates to these different levers the nutrition, the sleep, the exercise. But, you know, this is the thing. How can we create a system tailored to your life that is going to create a healthy environment for you that makes it more likely you succeed? And then guess what? That negative momentum, which is the guilt and the old habits, can shift into positive momentum. And then you feel like you have wind on your sails, like behind you pushing you forward. And that is a very motivating feeling. Then you get into the world of intrinsic motivation where the fact that you’re doing this thing and you’re feeling good and you’re seeing results based on your effort becomes inherently motivating. And there’s some flip that happens for everyone at a different point in time. For most people, it’s like within two or three months or six months of like pushing on this stuff, it doesn’t happen automatically, but when it does, it’s because that neural groove is so established now and it’s become so much easier and you’ve seen enough results that you actually believe in yourself and you’ve seen the changes in your energy levels are better that you just want to stick on the path.

Another thing we do that’s kind of interesting, and I know this is a little out of place, but we actually encourage people to do free meals instead of cheat meals. We call them free meals, but we schedule those in, you know, like once a week. Some people do them once every two weeks, but we we want to do this regularly. Because what really happens, it’s interesting, as you start to eat more clean and healthy foods and you start to have those free meals, it gives you a little reprieve knowing that, Man, I’ve been used to having burgers multiple times a week. Now, we can have it once per week. It’s not like it’s totally gone out of my life. But as your body gets healthier and cleaner, when you do end up having these free meals, you find how horribly it ends up, right? You feel relative to the thing so now you’ve actually created a new kind of like behavioral guiding thing. It’s like, Holy crap, I’ve been doing so good on weight loss. I just eat the pizza night on the free meal. It was scheduled it was proactive instead of reactive. But today my GI system is messed up. I’m clearly holding water. Was that even worth it? And that’s a powerful question, right? And it’s not to say that needs to ever leave your life, but we’re now using your environment and your behaviors to start to rewire your own psychology through your own direct experience.

And that is the key to sustainability. You’re not following some like, yeah, we give you a meal plan to follow with all the recipes. It starts there, right? So you can actually get on a track to start creating some grooves, but ultimately becomes your own personal experience and journey and that’s the key.

Dean Pohlman: Awesome. I mean, I love the way that you explain that, that you’re actually creating you’re creating new neural path. I mean, neural pathways or whatever you want to call it in your brain that are amenable to rewriting how you look at things that you used to do for stress, relief and pleasure. Now you’re looking at it from the sense of weight. I feel bad, like I don’t feel guilty. I feel bad, like physically I feel badly. And it was because of this thing that I ate. And I think now that I know, it’s like, well, that’s like, you know, I actually was I was actually writing up notes for another solo podcast before I got on the call before we started this interview. And part of that was writing about why I stopped eating, Like, I, you know, why I stopped having my little I don’t know if they would call it we would call them binges, but I definitely had you know, I would have unhealthy food in the house, easily accessible, and I would eat it a lot and the reason I stopped was because I stopped having it in the house.

Number one, I eliminated my access. So going back to we were talking about with the environment, I did things ahead of time. I built a system or I changed my environment so that when it came time to give into this bad habit because, you know, I ran out of willpower, it wasn’t an option because I didn’t have access to it, because I had changed the environment. And then over time, I you know, every now and then I realized I had access to, you know, junk food again. And then I would have it. And then an hour later, I’d be like, oh, wow, I have a headache because I ate all that sugar or like the next day I’d be like, my poops are weird. My stomach doesn’t feel great. This sucks. Totally. I don’t want to I don’t want to do this. So I love that you. I love that you talked about that.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I want to share one more thing on that because I think it’s very relevant. There is a period of transition, like biochemically in the body, like when you’re eating all this stuff all the time. Like foods that you know aren’t good for you. It’s in a weird way. You can like kind of like tolerate it. Your body’s in just really low level of like can handle all these like high fat, high salt, processed you know, unhealthy foods. And you’ll find as your system gets cleaner, there’s a period of time where your taste buds legitimately change, especially if you’ve had sugar. It’s it could be take people like one, two, maybe three weeks where the palatability of certain foods change because you’re eating a lot of processed crap foods. It’s like putting volume level 100 on the sugar receptors and sweet receptors in your tongue and it takes time for those to rewind. So that happens. And then there’s certain time where you go back and you drink that diet soda that you should drink like a leader of a day. And you’re like, I cannot believe I used to love the taste of that. That does happen. There’s that change.

There’s also a massive change to your gut microbiome, right? The gut bacteria are being responding to the kinds of foods you’re eating. And as you start to clean that up, those guys are starting to change. And then food cravings will start to change in time. So just understand, there is a there is like the body does all this naturally without you. You need even to know any of like the science or the why. When you start putting cleaner inputs in, the body starts to change. But there is a period of a couple of weeks. It could be almost like a drug detox, if you will, but like a food detox where it can take a little bit.

Other people like I think, one sign that you’re on the right track is the stability of your energy levels. If you’re feeling like your energy levels are pretty solid, that’s a strong indicator that your nutrition and your sleep are and are in good order. We find a lot of people as they start to clean things up, even on the first week, they start to poop better and more regularly, and their energy levels, get a little bit better so that those are good like leading indicators that you’re on a good track.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, well, I like that you brought up these different time periods because so you mentioned it takes two to six months for I forgot specifically what you said, but you mentioned it…

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Intrinsic motivation kicks in around that time.

Dean Pohlman: So we’ve got to do six months for this. We’ve got this one to three week period where it takes your body time to adjust to the diet, which is great because then as people are going through it, they know like, OK, I’m in this period right now and it’s going to suffer like another week. But if I can stick to this for just, you know, another week, then I’m going to get out of it. So having these, you know, having, you know, a clear expectation of, OK, this is going to take four months or this is going to take one month instead of thinking this is the rest of my life forever, I never I can never change from the plan. It makes it a lot more achievable.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yeah. And for sure, it gets easy. I mean, just look at all the people who, like, love their healthy lifestyles. They’re not doing it because it’s hard. They’re doing it because it makes them feel great. And many of them were in rough shape. To start off. Yeah, I think it’s good to understand the roadmap of change and generally how that takes. The other thing I think to go a little more specifically, I believe if you’re going to start to like eat healthier knowing that’s a huge component of this, one of the best things you can do and preach us in our programs is to standardize your first meal of the day whenever that meal comes for you. Whether you’re someone who likes breakfast at 6 a.m., whether you like to intermittent fast and wait until noon to have your first meal. One things we do is we help you decide on what is the meal timing schedule set up that fits best for you, your just general predilections and things that you like, your schedule, et cetera, and then standardize that first meal the day and make it healthy because we’re busy in the morning. And so one awesome behavioral hook is to have a standardized healthy breakfast.

It could be overnight oatmeal, it could be some yogurt with some fruits and some hemp seeds. It could be a protein shake. It could be whatever it is for you. We give you options, obviously, in our meal plan and stuff like that. But if you can make that first meal standardized, you’ve kind of knocked out at least one third of those decision points and you have a new, healthy behavioral positive hook every single day. So no matter what happened yesterday, you have something clear that doesn’t take a lot of time to prep, that gives you energy for the rest of the day. And then the rest of the meals are going to be a lot more likely to be healthy when you have a first healthy breakfast.

We all know that’s kind of true. If we start the day off with a bunch of crap stuff or we’re on the on the back foot, it’s a lot more likely that that becomes the energy for the day. So standardizing that first meal is massively successful. And what we like to do is make it really simple where it only takes like 5 minutes to prep because you don’t want a lot of behavioral friction early in the morning. Like how many people have bought Juicers, right? Maybe you saw some commercial juicers and like you’re like, I’m going to make some juice. Living Foods is going to be great, except the damn thing takes like an hour to do. You get all the produce and then it’s like there’s just so much friction to juicing that like very few people juice long term. It’s a healthy habit. We all know it’s good for us, but there’s too much friction. So how can we make a low friction first thing in the morning? That gives you a lot of the good micronutrients you need vitamins, minerals, calorie balanced, have some protein and some healthy fats and maybe some carbohydrates if you want to include those.

You know, either way it’s like this standardized nice meal that works. And because I mentioned if you want to include the carbohydrates, I’m also a big believer. You can use so many different types of like macronutrients setups. You can do a very low carb in the framework I’m discussing today. You could do a high carb in the framework I’m discussing today. It’s important to like decide what kind of healthy foods you naturally gravitate towards and like and like build around those instead of trying to like pull elsewhere and outwards. And generally speaking, our fit father meal plan is moderate carbohydrate in basis. And I’d say that it’s just like you’re enjoying carbs. You can have carbs at dinner, you can have carbs at breakfast. You’re just getting like in the right amounts, not excessive from good sources.

So I’m not I’m definitely not a like super, super low carb proponent, although it can be effective for restoring insulin sensitivity and certain people can have really effective weight loss. It’s just like what is going to be most sustainable for people? And what I’ve found from working with over 50,000 guys is that tends to be that including some kind of carbohydrate when you want to have it is a good option, have some fruit, have some sweet potatoes, have a little rice with dinner. It’s like not going to break the bank. This idea that ketosis has been equated with the only way to burn fat is like it’s just not true, right? Josh this is an extreme metabolic state that’s created by the absence of carbohydrates for the liver and adds to basically produces ketone bodies.

You can burn fat eating hundreds of grams of carbs per day. I’m not saying it’s like necessarily like recommended, but I want to make that point because I think that is a misconception right now where like the ketones had such a marketing around it that people just think like keto is fat burning like yeah, your body burns fat to ketone bodies. But the most ripped I was ever in my life was eating a high carbohydrate diet that was very calorie controlled for a bodybuilding show. Right. Get down to very low body fat. So carbs are not going to make you fat as long as it’s in the right amounts for you and ideally and some good times.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. I mean, it just goes back to the conversation we were having at the beginning about, you know, fads, things being shiny and paying attention to them and to the point that we’re just we’re making it hard on ourselves. Then it has to be here. And the standardized meal thing, I mean, I can speak to that even without, you know, that’s just for me. I’ve had the same I’ve eggs every day. It’s really boring. My wife is like, oh, eggs again. I’m like, yeah, eggs again. And I also have a smoothie, every day. I have a smoothie every day. Every day I’m home. I actually my wife and I and my parents we went to stay at a lake house in Austin for like a little four day getaway. We drove 30 minutes, you know, out to the lake, got an Airbnb, and we loaded up the car with all of our we had a four… Declan was four months old at the time, so we had to load up the car with all this stuff.

You know, we’re first we’re first time parents. So, you know, we didn’t understand that he could be OK without everything that he used on a daily basis. So we load up the entire car and then we’re almost done. And you know, versus like, do you have everything in my car? Hold on. I got to go back and get my I got to get my blender because I’m not because if I could, you know, like for me, that that blender is part of that’s how I make my smoothies. And smoothies are just something that I do every day. It makes me feel good. But it’s also great that the routine aspect, you know, having routines is awesome for I think your mental wellbeing as well. So for me, getting up a little bit earlier than my son wakes up and my wife gets up so that I can have 10 minutes to make my smoothie, make my eggs, make my coffee, that is just that’s something that makes my day super simple because I’m getting the nutrition that I’m going to feel great like throughout the day. And also it’s great because I get some time to myself to start the morning off.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And if you put the right things in that smoothie, like you put a lot of like good high nutrient dense foods, it’s going to help your energy. And no matter what happens later in the day, you know, you got a lot of good stuff in like right here, right now. That’s what we teach in our plans is actually one prior step that we like to have people do, especially when they’re starting to lose weight, is like the first thing before whatever that breakfast comes is to like have a hydration ritual like first thing in the morning drink 20 to 32 ounces of water, like more water than you’re probably used to. The body needs water first thing in the morning. So getting water and maybe even put some trace minerals or some pinch of some pink Himalayan sea salt or something in there is like what I consider like the first blessing of the day. It’s the first positive blessing action that’s like this is going to be a healthy day. This is what my body needs right now.

And then a good standardized breakfast will take you very far. And the cool thing about breakfast is like you can do a healthy breakfast no matter where you are in the world. You can go to any rest breakfast restaurant and you could get some kind of egg preparation, some kind of omelet, some kind of berries, some kind of something to create some consistency in your routine. So it’s not something that’s like, you know, have a blender for the smoothie, too. But the idea is this can be an anchor that’s actually very easy to do. There’s many foods that people like for breakfast and many of them that work.

Dean Pohlman: Mm hmm. Yeah. Total agree with that. So I want to ask some questions, too, about we’ve talked a lot. I have a bunch of questions on my list that we’ve already answered. It’s some form of another. But I want to ask you about some simple guidelines or some practical strategies. Let’s just go let’s go with three practical strategies that guys can start doing right now to make sure that they’re eating healthier. We talked about, you know, standardizing your breakfasts. We’ve talked about other stuff for sure. But let’s get three specific strategies for things that guys can start doing, like tomorrow to start healthier.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: All right. Like and this is kind of like the process we use in the Fit Father Meal plan is like step one decide on your meal timing, schedule setup. I think the big reason that people get in trouble with nutrition is their intuition becomes reactive and they don’t have structure and our bodies actually function best nutritionally when we have discrete periods of eating and then allowing digestion to happen and we’re not constantly snacking and making blood sugar go up and down where we have discrete periods and so here’s a couple setups that work well.

One is like basically four times per day. You have breakfast around eight, lunch around noon, snack around three, dinner around six or seven that’s like a standard approach works for many people. It’s great if you want to lose weight.

Another one would be intermittent fasting. Decide maybe it’s like 11 snack at two, dinner at six. That works fine.

But actually just committing to a structure that you have times is massively helpful when you want to lose weight because then you’re just slotting in good inputs and your nutrition is now proactive instead of reactive.

The second tip I have is that you got to pick a healthy go to snack and you got to buy it and have it around the house. And ideally these are just like natural non processed foods, things like fruits, things like nuts, things like certain kinds of protein bars that don’t have a lot of like crap in them. The more like high quality ones like that could be a protein shake could be some kind of like meat or leftover pickles, whatever you like to have as a healthy snack. Like get that stick that in your house and have that for those schedule times between lunch and dinner, people run into this big problem between lunch and dinner because it is like a six, seven hour chasm of time that typically most people, unless they’re used to fasting, need something to insert and a lot of bad stuff gets inserted there. And if it doesn’t, if you just don’t eat during that time, it makes them a lot more likely you might binge out on dinner or eat a lot of other things.

So the practical tip is like decide on your go to healthy snacks. I don’t know, go to Whole Foods, go to sprouts, go to some grocery store, buy a bunch of like meat sticks, buy some turkeys, buy some protein bars, buy some nut mix something and try some things out and find what yours are, because those can actually be a consistent thing for you no matter where you are, no matter where you travel. If you just bring those go to things, it gives you the sense mentally of a consistent routine that is not location independent and, pro-tip, I would say if you can get a snack that’s not perishable, so you can just take it anywhere, which I guess the nuts and the fruit and stuff like that in the turkeys and the beef sticks, like all those things work in that thing. So that’s what I would say because that ends up taking away this dimension of reactive snacking out of your life.

Third thing is like pretty much stop drinking like sweet stuff or artificial sweetener stuff. Like primarily you want to be drinking water. You could certainly have some herbal teas, but if you’re having stuff with a lot of artificial sweeteners or just straight up sugar, it’s going to be you’re just kicking yourself in the foot. As we all know, those things don’t give you satiety. They do give you a lot of calories for, you know, a little bit of liquid, and they do throw your blood sugar into a tailspin. So that’s not a good idea.

And the final thing is, I believe the way to approach dinner and the way we teach with our clients for just the basics is to do something we call a perfect plate. So if you’re to imagine like a blank plate of food, like a big circular plate, the framework is this fill half that plate with any kind of fibrous veggie you love. Broccoli, asparagus, salad mix, you know, Brussels sprouts, you know, it could be carrots and green beans, like half of that there benefit of that. We all know that a certain amount of these good plant fibers can be helpful for your gut bacteria. They help you feel full, they help your digestive health. They can lower cholesterol and they give you some satiety benefits. So half is veggies. A quarter is any kind of protein you love. So we can sub any other protein with any other veggie here. So it could be salmon, could be ground bison, could be turkey could be pork loin, could be some kind of fish. It could be even plant based. And maybe we combine these things into some kind of like a quinoa, the black being in some kind of vegetable mix. But a quarter of that is protein. And then the final quarter of your plate is some kind of healthy carb. Or if you want to go low carb, additional healthy fats. So a healthy carb option could be some kind of rice it could be some kind of sweet potato. It could be some kind of squash. You know, we lay all this out in the meal plan of different kinds of options. But the idea is to start to figure out what your go to perfect plates are and have those regularly.

And this is a framework and you can throw all sorts of different things. It could be salmon, asparagus and brown rice. It could be ground beef, taco meat, with maybe some fajita veggies, a little bit of sweet potato stir fry. That would also hit the mix on this. It could even be deconstructed in a way and be super simple and be kind of like a sandwich if you will, with a little side salad. You get a high quality Ezekiel bread as your carbohydrate. You slide in a lot of it, a turkey, avocado, a little bit of a side salad. If you start to approach the dinner meal, with the perfect plate mindset, basically most perfect plates have around 600 calories, six, five, 600 calories. Roughly speaking, the calories aren’t necessarily important to track unless you’re someone that’s very data analytic and you want to track these things. If that’s the case, go for it.

But either way, this portion guideline is going to make sure that you’re basically eating non processed foods that will help you feel full. And you can have a ton of variety if you want in those perfect plates. And also when you go to a restaurant, the healthy, they always give you like there’s one or two default healthy things. If you know how to like read a menu that you’re like, this is like for the healthy people that want to eat like the salmon and like this bok choy and like the forbidden rice, like that’s a perfect plate. They’re always perfect plates. So it gives you a framework for eating out at restaurants as well. And it also can be applied to things like lunch, like Chipotle, that you go out to get a Chipotle bowl, you could get some salad based on this. You have a little bit of rice, you get your barbacoa and you get your guacamole for your healthy fats and you hold off on maybe the sour cream and you throw some salsa on that. Like that kind of fits this perfect plate framework it’s just a simple way to give you enough variety, enough consistency.

We need to balance these two forces to consistent with non a variety gets boring over time. We want to fall off track to variety without enough consistency is hard to actually get traction because there’s not enough structure. So frameworks are important for kind of marrying consistency and variety. And during those first 30 days or so of this thing, you’re trying out some recipes that someone like us provide for you to see what you actually like. But then ultimately what you’re doing is you and your family are internalizing it. Figure out what your go to perfect plates are. So I’m curious because I know this is something that is like the habits of successful, healthy people. What are some of your family’s perfect plates, Dean? I know you probably make something like that. What are some go-tos for you guys?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, so I’m very methodical with with dinner. You know, I have like five or six plates that I just go through. Yeah. Over and over. I will also mention that I am I have an opposite… I have my goal is not weight loss. So for me, I am I eat a lot more carbs than somebody who is trying to lose weight. But typically, I always have some sort of veggie available. I make broccoli, steam it, I’ll have it. I’ll add in some cheese, I’ll add in some salt & butter. Yep. You know, nothing wrong with with some good fat. Not at all. Totally fine. Will do. I recently started making Fasolakia a lot, which is a Greek Greek style green beans. So it’s it’s a slow roast of slow roast of tomato sauce in green beans, garlic and a lot of other good tasting stuff. Ground beef, chicken. I have a taco dish that I make that is delicious, that has a ton of peppers, veggies, beans, sometimes no, or sometimes tortillas, sometimes no tortilla. But that’s got chicken. That’s got avocado, too. There’s some more healthy fats. So those are those are a few of my my my perfect plates that I tend to do.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yeah, but you have them figured out. You have go-to meals and you’ve kind of refined them and you also have a little bit of experimentation with some more cooking like one thing we find when people who want to lose weight is actually spending the time in that beginning period. We’re investing a little more in those dinner times, like actually doing some cooking, doing some meal prep, getting your hands you know, active and making food for yourself is a very important part of this process because you learn, you start to establish habits on that front. And then the other thing to know is like there’s many ways to pave the path for a successful week. And some people find that doing a meal prep ritual one or two times per week to basically prep all of their favorite go-to foods that make a perfect plate. So maybe cooking salmon in bulk, maybe cooking chicken breast in bulk, maybe putting on the rice cooker, maybe putting some green beans and sweet potatoes in the oven and cooking things in bulk can be a great strategy.

You know, it just paves the path for success. You don’t have to do it, but it works for a lot of people. But either way, what what did we need to understand and figure out to get here? Well, we needed to actually use our awareness and a little bit of pre-planning and pre thinking to decide what are our favorite healthy foods in the categories of proteins, veggies carbs and healthy fats. And we actually have a worksheet where you go through this and you write down your three favorite ones and it sounds kind of elementary, but it’s so, so critical because if you can start to build your nutrition around healthy foods that you already love and you have simple ways to combine them that don’t take a lot of time, it’s going to be a lot more likely you’re successful.

It’s kind of like if I showed up at your door every single day at mealtime and I knocked on your door and say, Here is your favorite healthy meal, that is like calorie balance, and I hope you enjoy this. I’ll be back in 4 hours. Like, it’d be an amazing service. People would love that we can do this for ourselves in a certain sense by simply spending one or 2 hours high leverage time preparing a little bit and setting ourselves up for success. And I also want to say, too, there are no cooking ways to do this. Like I say, you’re a busy guy, maybe even a single guy. You’re not cooking for a family like and you’re open to a whole bunch of kinds of foods, man. You could crack open a can of a tin of some sardines with some mustard on the side of like some salad or some breads or some crackers, like whatever.

There’s like so many ways you can do this without necessarily needing to cook but I think it is valuable to get more invested into the process of preparing your food.

Dean Pohlman: Mm hmm. Yeah. I love so much of what you just said. So if you if you heard that go listen to it again, because that was all gold. And I just want to add some some things to what you were saying. Number one, leftovers are extremely overrated. Make more food than you need. So then you have access to healthy food that you can eat. I find that if I do experience if I do experience cravings and I’m like, oh, I want to have something really crappy right now, it’s usually because I don’t have any leftovers or I didn’t have a good breakfast.

The second thing is drinking water one tip, one thing that because, you know, most of us know we need to drink more water or maybe we don’t, but now we do. One thing that I found super helpful to drink more water is have a big-ass water bottle. Have a water bottle like this is this is what I take with me everywhere. It is a 46 ounce yeti cup of water. If I drink two of these a day or maybe a little bit more than two this day, I’m where I need to be. But if I’m just bringing around a little tiny ounce bottle of water, I drink it in 8 seconds, and then I’m and then I have no more water. So get a giant water bottle. That’s super helpful.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And keep it on your desk because it’s like the power of habit stuff. The visual cue of seeing water yeah. Is key. So just because I’m feeling passionate about this topic right now, let’s talk a little more about how water fits and nutrition plan there really a couple of times where you want to drink water. And I believe it’s it’s find a sip water. But I think it’s actually really beneficial at times to drink like a bolus of water like a lot of it at once in the morning is a good time to certainly rehydrate. And then maybe you have your breakfast meal or whatever, wait about an hour or 2 hours after you’ve had your meal where your stomach feels kind of like more or less a little empty, but you haven’t eaten yet. That is a phenomenal time to drink water. You don’t want to chug a lot of water like after you have a meal because it actually dilutes the digestive enzyme concentration. That’s your your body’s trying to create. So it’s like just a little side note, but yeah, in between meals is a great stretch. So let’s say you did have breakfast at eight and you had water first before that. You have breakfast at eight, maybe around ten, 11. You’re just cranking down half of that whole bottle or maybe even the whole thing. And then you have a next meal and you do the same kind of rhythm. And if you do that two, three times a day with a big enough water bottle, you’re there. You’re at like the eight to 120 ounces or so that, you know, most guys should be at.

And as in, you’ll figure out what your ideal water target is. As you drink more water, you will pee more. It is a part of the game. Enjoy the process of getting up, moving more and just getting used to that. It’s it’s good to continuously for us to flush the system. And if you’re, if you’re sick and tired of just boring water, try some teas, squeeze some lemon or lime into your water. I would personally avoid using a lot of the sugary mixes. And even if they’re like stevia sweetemed because it’s not always a good thing to have sweet taste constantly in the background, but there’s ways to make water a little more interesting if if you’re not good with just plain old water. But most people are to a certain extent.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So I wanted to so about the water. So I think it’s called the I forgot what it’s what, what it’s referred to or what the term is, but it’s, it’s the Japanese water protocol or Japanese drinking..

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: is it kungin?

Dean Pohlman: No, no, no, not that I’m not. Oh no, we’re not getting into that. I’m talking about we’re talking about the water schedule. But the practice is you wait until you don’t you don’t drink as you’re eating your food. And you wait a certain amount of time. I think it’s I don’t know if it’s 10 minutes or if it’s longer than that, but you wait at least 10 minutes to have water after you’re drinking [Eating]. So it’s kind of cool to hear that there is some there is a scientific reason to why you are not drinking water.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: it’s fine to have some water with your meals. Just don’t chug a lot, you know, at the same time. And that’s basically it.

Dean Pohlman: That’s cool to know, and the other thing that I was going to bring up after after your your your big nutrition guidelines spiel is people don’t get fat from eating vegetables you know? So like for sure, one of one of the biggest things that people you know, like, well, I don’t eat healthier and like take a plate, make half of that vegetables, it will be very hard for you to get fat or for you to get bigger than you are now or to not lose weight if half of what you’re eating is vegetables. So I think that’s a that’s a really underrated tip sort of speak for sure.

So I do have a couple questions, specific questions that I want to ask you. Do you need to avoid eating before bed? Because that’s something that you hear all the time. And let’s talk about it from a weight loss perspective rather than someone who’s trying to put on a book, because that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about weight loss.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yeah, it’s it’s interesting, right? I mean, they used to be the kind of health myth, I guess you’d say that, like eating before you go to bed. Like rampantly cause everything to be stored as fat. And it turns out that’s not true. Your overall calorie balance for the day is like the important driving factor. So there’s some people that eat like one meal a day, and it’s just their style, the OMAD kind of crew. And they might have a huge meal at like 8:00 and then they, you know, go to bed at like ten that’s a massive amount of food before you go to bed. And some people are successful. That said, where I’ve kind of arrived on this topic, it is it is optimal not to eat before bed, not because metabolically like it magically gets stored as fat, but because our bodies run on these circadian rhythms. And at nighttime we actually prefer and we get better sleep and we actually have better digestion if we don’t load up on a lot of food right before we go to bed.

Dean Pohlman: So when you say right before bed, how much, like what’s the timeline?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I would say optimally. Optimally three, 4 hours after before between the late meal and before you go to bed is like is fine three, 4 hours or more. But if someone’s schedule can only allow, you know, you eat dinner at eight, you go to sleep at ten like that’s OK. But here’s the concept, though, and we can kind of back into what routine is going to be optimal. Like food is activity for the body. It wakes up the entire digestive system there’s a lot of energy that’s required to break down food and heat is produced in that process. We’ve all had a big meal and then we’re like sweating afterwards or very hot. Like there’s a thermic effect to certain kinds of foods. And at night, our body actually wants to have a lower core temperature. It’s this natural circadian temperature balance that gets us in the sleep. It’s better for us to be in cooler rooms, cooler beds, and creating a lot of heat and metabolic activity before bed is not optimal from our circadian rhythm perspective. And then if your sleep is not great, you have lowered insulin sensitivity and lowered glucose control the next day.

So that can kind of snowball. So ideally what I would say is people start to eat dinner a little bit earlier or whatever time works for you, and then have a couple of hours after the fact before you go to bed, maybe, maybe like three could be a good target to shoot for. Now, that being said, it’s like ultimately what works best for your schedule and there are certain people that like, do I get home from work really late? Dinner is already my family’s already had dinner. This is the time I must have it. And then I get to bed after the fact. If that’s what you must do for your schedule, you can do that. I would say it might be a good idea in that scenario to have a slightly lighter dinner and to frontload some of those some of those calories that you might have, like dinner let’s just say it’s like 75% of what you’d want it to be and frontload some of those calories earlier in the day to have a little less digestive stress. That’s a possibility. But now we’re kind of getting into the realm of like micro refinements for this fictional mans routine.

Either way, I would say it’s probably optimal for health not to have a huge meal within a couple of hours of going to bed. You’ll probably sleep better as a result of that.

Dean Pohlman: So what if you are hungry before bed? So like for me, sometimes I just won’t have as much for dinner. Maybe I worked out, you know, that the day before or maybe the day before and I’m feeling it now. Or maybe I worked out like 3 hours before then and just like, I just need some more food. So what do you do in those situations?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Easy to digest foods would be great, you know, maybe. Maybe at night if you’re especially if you’re looking to gain weight and you can tolerate some kind of dairy, maybe you’re doing some kind of yogurt and berries or something that’s like easy. That gives you some protein that’ll keep you more full. And I would say if you’re really hungry before bed, to also look at like increasing the amount of healthy fats and protein in your dinner meal to give you an even added benefit of satiety. But if I was going to eat something before bed, it would be probably something that as is more fat and protein rich and not too hard to digest, I wouldn’t have all those big massive amount of fibrous veggies right before I go to bed. I wouldn’t have like a broccoli salad before I went to bed. I’d maybe have some nuts, maybe some nut butters, maybe some some the yogurt or something like that, or maybe some kind of like smaller fruit dessert with dark chocolate or something like that.

Not something that’s very hard to digest or not something that has a lot of volume because ultimately the volume of breaking things down is what’s going to cause a greater taxation on the system than the calories themselves. Right? The calories are are kind of fine and you can get a lot of calories in a small package if you’re getting healthy fats like some maybe like eggs in a novel, like, OK, so I’m hungry before I need to go to bed. What if I made like two scrambled eggs with a little bit of avocado? Like that could be a couple of hundred calories, some good nutrition and like some proteins and whatever. And like that’s not that hard to digest relative to a big bulky dinner with lots of fibrous vegetables right before you go to sleep.

Dean Pohlman: OK, cool. All right. By the way, guys [directed to listeners], one of your biggest feedback for me after season one of this podcast was that they’re too long. So I want to let you know, I’m aware that we are at 60 minutes and right now and we are working on wrapping this up. This will not be a two hour podcast episode, so stick with me. We’re going to get into part two in a second and focus on weight loss. and we’re also going to tell you about this really awesome cross-promotion that we are running between Fit Father Project and mental yoga. And I want you guys, if you are listening to this and you like what Doctor is putting down, I think you should definitely try his FF30X program so we’ll get into that in a second.

But I do want to touch on weight loss for exercise and a big concept. You know, most people think when it comes to weight loss, like, oh, I just need to start running more. I’m going to start running every day and I’m a lose weight. Or if I just get back and I start doing some more intense workouts, I’m going to start losing weight. And so my question for you is, does exercise wise help with weight loss? Is it necessary?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: OK, two questions there, does exercise have a weight loss? Heck, yes, it does. Is it necessary? No. And we’ve had clients lose over 100 pounds without doing any formal workouts. But they do walk every day. They do drink a lot of water and they do follow sensible nutrition plan. What our bodies really need is like is daily activity, daily movement, accumulating movement. If you look at some of the people who live longest on the planet, those centenarians, they’re not doing P90X, but they are farming and gardening and eating healthy foods. So for a long, healthy life, it’s certainly good to accumulate more daily activity. That said, exercise and the right kind of exercise can help you become metabolically healthier and fitter in a very short amount of time, particularly some higher intensity exercise that is involving all the things you basically do in Man Flow Yoga.

You’re working on strength with with like contractions of the muscles. You’re working with flexibility and mobility through natural range of motions and the process of doing all that. You’re getting some cardiovascular work. If you can combine those three things into a fast workout, then you’re going to get the greatest benefit. And I would say one thing is important to understand is you don’t need it. You need to maybe push these in a couple of times for a week and look at like what’s good with your schedule for people to start losing weight if they want to start doing workouts two to three times a week of formal exercise is plenty to move the needle in terms of I’m actually going in, I have a workout, I’m touching weights, or I’m doing a yoga workout. This is when I’m doing that. That’s enough. Because we were talking about this, you know, in a previous conversation, we’ve had exercises not about the calories burned during a given session. Yes, you’ll burn those, but you’re actually creating that calorie deficit primarily through eating healthier foods. It’s far easier to not eat that bag of chips than it is to go run an hour and burn 600 calories. Like that’s a lot of work and it’s not exactly fun for most of us.

So nutrition is the lever really that pulls down the calories. But what exercise does that actually changes your metabolism? It’s a metabolic investment. After one of those good hard workouts, let’s just say we sprinkle like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you’re getting a metabolic boost for over 24 hours your insulin is more sensitive and actually it can change the way your mitochondria legitimately function. So they’re healthier. And a lot of these anti-aging genes like these two and proteins get turned on so you want the fastest result of improving your longevity. Then do some high intensity exercise three times per week and I recommend you schedule it as a meeting like it’s on your calendar at a set time. Maybe it’s like stacked in with some other routine. So it’s not a lot of friction. And I think one of the powerful things that happens is when you do start to do the right kinds of workouts, and you see yourself getting stronger and you start to push yourself, it can reactivate that competitive spirit for many of us guys that we lose after years of not doing sports or gaining some weight. And that in itself is intrinsically in the is motivating and very good for us. So yes, workouts are helpful to lose weight, no doubt about that. What I would say is the most important thing is if you can get a walk every single day at some time, maybe you walk after dinner in the morning. Also very helpful. You don’t need exercise to lose weight, but the right kinds of workouts speed things up.

Dean Pohlman: Nice I love that answer. Yeah, it’s something I was thinking about as you were talking about that. So something I think we’ve seen in the last few years is more and more women are getting into weight training right? That’s something that I don’t think… definitely was not as popular, let’s say, 15 years ago. Yeah. And so something that you see kind of as a joke from a lot of or from a lot of them, they’re saying like, I don’t work out because of this. I work out because now I get to have more. I get to have more food. Like I get to eat more. I get to actually enjoy eating more food. And that’s because when you’re working out and when you’re building muscle in particular, your body just uses more calories throughout the day. You know, so when you workout and particular when you start to build more muscle, you just you need more calories so you can have more food, you know, and you’re definitely going to be hungrier too. So it’s not like it’s a chore to eat this extra food, but it’s also, you know, it’s easier it’s easier to eat more food without having without overeating when you do exercise more and you have more muscle.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: For sure, and literally your muscles become like sponges for nutrients after you exercise without getting a little sciency. There’s something called glut four receptors that bring glucose into cells after exercise. Those things get overly expressed on the surface of muscle cells. So your muscles become like sponges for nutrients cause they’re like, we just exercised, let us repair. And so that’s cool. You become more insulin sensitive, become more nutrient sensitive. And when you do feed calories after training your body starts to work better. So like the metabolism of someone, the metabolism and like the idea of nutrient partitioning, like when you eat food, where does it go? Is it going to fat cells? Is going to muscle cells when you’re giving your body an exercise stimulus, it’s giving your body the signal that like bring this stuff into where I want it, bring it into metabolically active tissue and you just are metabolically healthier so that’s a good reason to do it. And the cool thing too is like the like you can get amazing benefit even twice per week, of full body strength training exercise will be like is like a thousand times better than zero times per week.

And even if those workouts are only like 30 minutes, so you can get a lot of bang for a little bit of buck, there’s a huge ROI on the right kinds of workouts. And realistically, we all do have the time. We have the time to carve out 30 to 45 minutes a couple of times a week. It might be a crazy times where we can do this and it’s important to hear about these different benefits again, to create positive neuro associations about why exercise is effective. And the other second thing is like, I love about Man Flow Yoga, get a clear plan so you don’t have to be both the guy who’s creating the thing and following it. You can be the athlete, you can just show up. This is what I aim to do and you can do it and that’ll get you into a more meditative, like, mindful flow state. You’re moving your body, it starts to feel fun, and then you get positive momentum.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think that’s all. Everything you said there’s great. All right, so I want to get into part two, and we may have covered some of this already, but I’ll ask you the questions and I might deviate from them slightly. So what do you think is one habit, a belief or a mindset that is the most helpful or very helpful in losing weight?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I think it’s the idea that, like, it’s the exact opposite mindset to the all or nothing mindset. It’s the idea that today’s a fresh new day and I can make new choices. It’s this idea that, you know, no matter what you did for the last meal, you have the ability to choose to be healthier with this next thing that could be just like getting the water and filling that back up, making the next healthy meal. It’s like at any time we can start to like put another penny into the health savings account with a new investment. It’s not like all is lost based on what happened in the past. We’re always creating a new future. So that’s probably the most powerful mindset, is not feeling trapped at all or nothing and understanding that we have the chance to create a new no matter how many times you feel the diets in the past, you have a chance to create anew.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, we had. So Kelly Starret was one of my first guest on the show, and I think I asked him a similar question and he said he replied by saying, you never win fitness. You don’t just like one day you have like a great day like you. You crushed it with your dieting, with not dieting, with eating, with your workouts.

You’re like, I won fitness. Like, no, you just you have a new day and you try again and you try to do better than the day you did before if you need to do better. But it’s you know, it’s a new day. So I love I love that you I love that that story.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And track! Track things, too, because tracking is like the mile a mile markers on the side of the highway that shows you like where you’ve come and basically where you’ve been. And I think the people that track are vastly more successful when it comes to weight loss. We suggest our program members, if they’re down for it, weigh themselves every single day. Not that you see the weight decrease every single day, but that you’re pegging data to how your body’s fluctuating and changing and you’re looking for trends over time. If you can add more data to this process, it’s honestly a lot more motivating, taking photos to do any some daily weights. Maybe it’s just a waste or conference, a measurement, maybe it’s a body impedance scale that you have. But pegging some data to this process, it makes a lot more real and also gives you the ability to course correct. If things are going off track, it’s like I weight myself. I’m 3 pounds heavier today and it’s like, Why? Well, I didn’t sleep well last night and I had sushi the day before. Maybe I’m retaining some water. I know it’s not fat and I haven’t pooped in a while. Like you get to learn stuff about how your body responds to different inputs by having data along the way. So I think that’s the other thing. It’s like it is a fresh new day. This is what we’ve done. Let’s take some data and make new choices.

Dean Pohlman: So I was going to actually ask that question. What is something that you can regularly do to check in and make sure you’re heading in the right direction? In terms of weight loss, would that be your answer?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Well, it’s it’s a classic like I think it’s attributed to Peter Drucker. It’s like what which gets measured and tracked, gets improved. If your goal is weight loss and you’re not tracking the weight metric, like you’re shortchanging yourself. And that’s not to say that you were like a slave to the scale number, start to view it as data and input. So what we love is to do progress, pictures, weight and maybe some measurements. And you can choose any of those three. All of this free your call. But beginning of a weight loss journey like take some photos. And the reason I say this is they can be embarrassing or not happy. You don’t like how they look, but you’re going to be damn happy in a couple of months and years that you have something to look back on and it’s highly motivating to see where you came from.

So take photos fairly regularly and then you could take basic measurements like waist circumference if you want to improve your waistline, you could just take a belly measurement and weigh yourself and take a photo. That’s plenty enough. The other thing that’s cool is like those are almost like outcome things to track in terms of like what your biometric stats are, but you’re also going to be tracking like your workouts, like how did you perform, what weight did you use, what was the time that you did this? So like creating tracking and each one of those levers is key. So on nutrition, depending on what your personality type is, you could get very granular to like writing down what you eat and checking boxes. That works for some people. It’s certainly not necessary, but I guess this is my overarching point. Tailor the amount of tracking to your personality.

If you are a big data person, then get your get your aura ring get your woop band get whatever like pegged data all over the place. Make your Excel spreadsheets that’ll make you happy. If you’re not a data person, you don’t really care all that much. Then basically just track the fundamental biometrics to give you feedback loops you can course correct if things are going off track or see, Holy crap, I did this and this really move this week. I lost 2 pounds this week on trend. That’s fantastic. What did I do differently? Now you can actually learn what’s working for you.

Dean Pohlman: Mm. Yeah, that’s great advice. What is one activity for weight loss that is really overlooked?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Quality sleep, hands down like sleep is the is like the master regulator of our hunger appetite and metabolic hormones. It just is. When we do not sleep well, the hunger hormone in our brain, ghrelin is very high the next day, the body perceives that as stress and it wants to get immediate crappy foods and sugars in all the time. So it’s like there’s many people who are trying to pull the levers of nutrition and the exercise and they’re exerting effort here on the background of being like sleep deficient or not optimized here. So it’s like the better you sleep, the better metabolic health you will have, hands down.

And the other thing is underestimating the power of walking, particularly walking after meals and accumulating steps like brisk walking, I think is if I had to pick one exercise for myself to do for the rest of my life, it would be taking a brisk walk, something you can do for the rest of your life. It gives you time in nature as well. Ideally, you’re walking outside, so you get some sunshine, you get the peaceful relaxation of being in nature. Maybe you take a furry companion or a friend or a spouse. Whether you should get some connected time, you can stack so many good things up to walking. Walking just makes you feel healthier, particularly if it’s outside. And if it makes you feel healthier, then it’s more likely you’re going to have healthy behaviors. So sleep and walking, I guess two part answer there.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I love that we actually work with them. We do a lot of work with a they’re actually my my coach, a company called Central Athlete, and they make T-shirts that say, make walking, make walking cool again. They but but yeah, it’s so anyways. Walking. Very cool. All right. What’s what’s one thing we can do to make living a lifestyle that encourages weight loss easier?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I’d say it’s like enrolling in growing your family along that journey with you or at the very least, having them understand why this is important to you. We’ve talked about the idea of environment a lot and environments can help make it more likely we stick on it. Well, social environment is as fundamental as everything to humans. And like, you know, we’ve heard that we’re like the average of the five habits of the people around us. Well, oftentimes when we’re making a change, it’s because we’ve been in an environment that is like making it likely that we eat unhealthy food. We have a spouse that eats unhealthy food. We have kids that unhealthy food. And if you can get that whole nucleus of the family in a in a similar wavelength, it’s going to be a lot more likely to succeed long term. And here’s the cool thing. You don’t need to do it all at once. You can merely like do your thing. We have so many guys that just like follow the Fit Father program, they lose 20 pounds and their spouse is like, OK, good, you’re doing great on this kick. They lose 40 pounds. They’re like, Wow, you look fantastic. Like, what can I start doing? They lose 50, 60 pounds and the kids start eating healthier. So you just stay on your path in the family can come around.

But there’s also the benefit of having maybe a conscious conversation when you’re starting one of these weight loss journeys. It’s like, Look, family, this is important to me. Here are my reasons. And this is my mission statement. I know I’ve tried this a lot in the past. This time is going to be different, and here’s why I want to do this and I’m not. And then also head off any judgments that there may be here. It’s like I’m not asking you to change the way you live. I love you exactly as you are. This is for me and it’s on a mission. And I want to ask that I have your blessing and support in the process and everyone has different levels of family support. Some people have partner spouses, family members that are not supportive. Some people have highly supportive people. But just understanding the importance of this environment with your social circle and your close family and friends is a variable that can really help you stay on track long term if you start to create the right connection there.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think that’s an awesome that’s an awesome answer. And it’s something that, you know, that’s not that’s not something that someone would talk about normally is getting, you know, people on board. And also the theme that you just responded with, but also a theme that we’ve had throughout this conversation that this episode has been getting clear on things. So we started with talking about motivation, like, well, obviously my motivation is obvious. Why do I need to write it down? No, write it down, get clear on it or you know, I’m going to eat healthier. Well, what are you going to do? I’m just going to eat healthy food. Let’s get clear on what that what that is. What does that exact meal going to be? I’m going to start working out more.

What is the plan for working out? When are you going to work out? What are you going to do? Which workout are you going to do? Do you have everything you need? Is it all set up like getting clear on all of this stuff? Because even though it seems might seem silly, I know to me, I just grew up in I think I just grew up in an environment where like that those kinds of things just seemed really silly. Like only dumb people would need to do that, you know? And you know, the older I get, the more I realize no, just do all of that stuff, make things really clear. The more clarity you can create, the better things are going to be.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yes, because you can focus energy when you’re clear it’s like the idea of a magnifying glass or laser, like what is a laser? It’s like photons that are very like laser pointed in one direction. It can cut through whatever. So like clarity gives you ability to focus your energy. And if you’re clear enough that you can articulate your deep motivations to other people, then you have a high level of clarity. And also if you can show how it connects to them, maybe to your spouse, it’s like, Man, I want to be there to be around with you so we can actually travel in 20, 30 years. And I’m not like so fat and in a wheelchair that I can’t do these things like that gets people involved in your journey. And then of course, it’s kind of like how we teach kids everything. When in school we start off with the foundational, like ABCs Massively Clear, and as you get more competency with that, you can start constructing words and sentences. It’s the same process with our health, like we need to start like with the fundamentals and like start to build up our literacy. And then we get to a certain point and I don’t know when that is somewhere on the six month, six month mark, maybe the one year mark where you’re like, Holy crap, like I get this stuff and it’s I call it psychological teachers, They call that like unconscious competence, but we need to go through the stage of first becoming consciously competent or conscious and then consciously competent. And then as we work the planning, we become unconsciously competent. You are unconsciously competent in this health stuff because you’ve done it for so many times. Everyone here listening can become unconsciously competent if they’re willing to work through the very foundational step by step path we’ve kind of laid out here.

Dean Pohlman: Mm hmm. Yeah. That’s awesome. All right. The last big question, what is the biggest threat when it comes to men and weight loss?

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Man, that’s a that’s a huge question. I’d say like I say, OK, here’s this not having the skills to get back on the horse. And the reason I say this is because we’re playing an iterative game, iterative in a very real sense that we have every day is a fresh new day. And we’re looking to like, you know, do better but also like seasonally iterative, like no matter where you live. We have these year cycles and there’s always certain kinds of things that happen in the beginning of the year, certain things that happen in the summer, certain things happen around the holidays. And this is a rhythm that we know we’re going to be riding this roller coaster over and over again as well as interject all the just stuff that you can’t predict. Family member dies, something happens financially. Change of job move, like these are things they’re going to like disrupt this system that we’ve been talking about and looking to create. Now, the more solidified your system is, the more conscious, the more you’ve worked it and the stronger you are, you’re more resilient to those stressors. But best believe there’s going to be something at some time that takes your perfect routine, that work great for you for six months to one year and starts to change that.

So your ability to like then recommit with the same exact entry process that might then shift to a plan that works best for you based on those environmental factors is the master skill. It’s like the ability to get back on the horse is just as important as riding the horse because when it comes to our house, life is going to throw all sorts of things at us. So what we like to do with our community is it’s like this loving, welcome open door thing where it’s like we say this get it, you’re going to develop your plan now and some shit’s going to hit the fan at some point, and that’s expected. That’s OK. Here is your path to glide back forward. And the more you’re established you get to glide back forward a lot faster. And that’s how you can say you might be off the plan for like a week or a month or whatever, dealing with an intense situation or whatnot. But it’s not being off the plan for three to ten years. That’s will take years off your life. Not that you had a bad month, you know, so this is an important idea that people need to understand.

Health is about rhythms, things happen in our lives. There are even seasonal variations. And if we can understand these things, we can be a lot more successful.

Dean Pohlman: Anthony That was all awesome, guys. I highly encourage you to check out the Fit Father project. If you are looking to lose weight, if you are not satisfied with how you’ve been doing so far in your weight loss journey. Dr A. has an amazing program called the FF30X Program. I’ve gone through this myself. I’ve looked at it. It’s awesome. It’s going to go through nutrition, it’s going to go through exercise. It’s also going to talk about what I think is the most important part, which is the mindset. And there’s you’re going to get daily e-mails for 30 days just walking you through all these different ideas.

But he also has something that I think is really cool. He actually has an entire team of dedicated, dedicated team members who are there just to help you that doesn’t cost extra to to email them to get support. There you have eight people, right? Eight people who yeah.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It’s a team of at least eight are here. And I’m in there too. Also legitimately supporting too. But yeah, like this is like you’re not in this alone. And yeah, there’s some reading and stuff you need to figure out, but like we’re here to facilitate your success.

Dean Pohlman: So anyways, it’s just an amazing program, super supportive. And we do have a special promo code to help you get started. Check the I’m not sure where this is going to show up either in the, in the, in the show notes or it’s going to show up on the, the mental yoga website.

I think the link is going to be fitfatherproject.com/MFY and that’ll take you straight to what we’re talking about now, but it’s going to be a three day special. So depending on when you’re listening to this, it will only be live for a few days after the release of this podcast. And then you’ll still be able to get a deal afterwards. But the best deal is going to be right now as you’re listening to this podcast, assuming you listen to it current. So I invite you to go check that out. Again, especially if you are looking for a trustworthy resource for weight loss and when that’s going to help you do it in a way that’s sustainable, and effective and enjoyable and all that stuff. So definitely go check that out. Cool.

Well, Doctor A, thanks again for for joining me. I think this is a really cool episode. It’s a great addition to the existing episode that we have. Guys, again, if you haven’t listened to that first episode that we do with Doctor Eye and the Fit Father Project, go check it out. It’s amazing, super inspirational and thanks for all of the incredible information and motivation and insights that you added to today’s conversation.

Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You’re welcome, Dean. Thanks for having me on. And yes, just grateful to be here. And yeah, and I’m excited to see if you are if you do have a calling for this we’d love to have you in the program joining us that fit for the project. And we do have that special 50, $50 off the program deal. It’s like literally under 100 bucks less than the price of a family dinner and you get the outline that we have of your help of our team.

We’d love to welcome you into our fit Father Brotherhood. And of course also on our end side of things, we’re a huge champions of Man Flow Yoga and we love this. So we’re the we’re promoting all mentally. We’ll get to our Fit Father project list. And because this if you’re listening to Man Flow Yoga, you’re in the same tribe as Fit Father project where like men who are committed to like living better, healthier, stronger, and just being the best version of ourselves. So your like minded place and friends and Dean obviously you know you know I love you this has been great as always. So thank you bro for having me on today.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Awesome. All right, guys. I don’t want to make this any longer than it has to be. So thanks again for listening to this episode of the podcast. I hope it inspires you to be a better man.

[END]

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