Robeman, today I want to talk about the ideal diet
Robeman, today I want to talk about the ideal diet. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh, and welcome to the Robeman Podcast. Oh man, welcome back to another roadman cycling podcast. It is absolutely pissing rain out the window here in Dublin. And oftentimes when it pisses rain, these are the very, very best times to record a podcast, the noise levels outside and they mount the people running beneath the window of my apartment. It's just caught by about 90% as soon as it starts pouring rain. So we're going to enjoy pretty much uninterrupted audio quality for the duration of this podcast. Hopefully, hopefully you never want to jinx it. Well, man, today I want to talk to you about the ideal diet and something called metabolic flexibility, which is the holy grail in nutrition. And I'm going to talk about a couple of ways we can achieve it and one of my recommendations of how you can achieve it. In my view quite easily. Before I jump into that, let me remind you as always about Patreon. Just pause this podcast, head on over for one minute to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch and then come back to the podcast. Patreon, it's a lifeblood of the podcast. I've been doing the podcast now almost a year and I bang on about Patreon every single day. The reason is Patreon is what funds this podcast. It's how I'm able to devote the time, how I'm able to host the podcast, distribute the podcast, reach out to guests, all this takes money and although the podcast might seem like it's grown leaps and bounds in the last year. It's very much down to your user, your listener generosity. So I humbly thank those who have subscribed so far and if you haven't subscribed yet, think about heading on over to patreon.com. It's the price of a beer once a month to say thanks and I think COVID has taught us all if we value small businesses, we need to support them if we want them to stay around. Well man, the link is in the bio. Today I want to talk about what I believe to be the optimum diet. And this is a bold claim, especially for a short form roadman podcast. And a great way you can dive in and go deeper into this. If you wanna check out Mark Sisson's interview, Mark Sisson, brilliant nutritionist, wrote multiple books on lifestyle, especially diet with his blueprint book and his keto book are about highly recommended. But he's a recent interview on Joe Rogan, which the dietary section of that is definitely recommended. So I'm gonna summarize some of the main points of this idea of metabolic flexibility and how we achieve it, because one of the ways to achieve metabolic flexibility is true ketosis. But as someone who only went around pricking his finger and checking his blood sugar after every single meal, I can tell you that ketosis isn't a way to live your life. It's not a long-term dietary strategy. Now I know somebody's gonna pull out an obscure example a friend they have who's down to jam 72 times a week and he achieves ketosis. For your normal person like I met a buddy last night for a pizza and a beer. That's not possible to do with ketosis. So for a normal person, unless you want to sacrifice your entire lifestyle and life and social life and mental health, I don't think ketosis is achievable. But it is a useful tool in short periods of time to train our body to achieve metabolic flexibility. I'm going to use the term metabolic flexibility a lot in this podcast. So briefly, what metabolic flexibility is, it's basically our body's ability to extract energy from whatever substrate is available at the time. So if we have carbohydrates available, we have machinery which it can adequately extract energy from that.
If fats are available for the time being, we have machinery which can…
If fats are available for the time being, we have machinery which can adequately extract energy from fats. So it's this ability to be able to bounce from one fuel source to the other. You can think about, remember back in the day we used to have these cars, there were half gasoline and half petrol. Now I suppose the modern analogy is electric and petrol. So if you had a button on your car that allows you to switch between electric and petrol almost seamlessly, that's what we're looking to achieve, this ability to be able to use carbohydrates and use fat as a fuel source. That is metabolic flexibility and that is to holy grail in nutrition. So if you're not a carb only diet which 99% of people listening to this podcast will consume a diet on carbs, you're never born in fat efficiently. You're getting incrementally fatter every single year and if you do try and skip a meal, the wheels just absolutely fall off for you. So you remember that cycle from back leaving cert or high school depending on where you're listening. So when you take carbs into the system, carbs are broken down into glucose that ups are blood sugar levels and then our body never wants to high a blood sugar level it's not a good place to be so insulin is released into the system to pull out some of that blood sugar it reduces it and then the cycle starts again because now we're craving carbs because our blood sugar has gone too low and this is why we're in this perpetual cycle of having to keep eating to upper blood sugar and this idea of the 11 o'clock cravings 11 z's and people carrying around fucking Tupperware tubes full of food. Like this is a new modern thing. We weren't designed to eat like this. So there's a lot of mitts around that that have sort of led us down this path, this idea that, you know, all you heard growing up, definitely that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast of a king, lunch of a prince and dinner of a pauper that you have to have this huge breakfast. That's definitely one of the mitts. Another one is like lunch hour. The idea that we need an hour in the middle of the day to ease. We're not set up that way. If you think about ancestrally how we're set up, we're set up to feast and fast. And even our storage system for fat, we're able to take excess food. Think of it by a huge Christmas dinner type feed. We're able to take all the excess calories that we don't need that day and then true in genius storage mechanism. Instead of us lugging around turkeys and potatoes and gravy in a backpack with us. We're able to eat the food, we're able to store it on our hips and we're able to bring it with us wherever we're gone so we can burn it at a stage when we're in the fast where we need it later in the day. But we've completely, you know, undermining this ancestral mechanism for storage of energy because we feast and we take in that excess energy, we store it on our hips and then when it gets time to fast, we don't, we eat again, we snack, we open our little top or where, we hit the the curve re-at lunch. And what happens is we don't give the body, when we don't give the body curves that we need all the time, we force the body to build that metabolic machinery, that metabolic structure I was talking about earlier, to extract energy from the stored fat. And one of the best ways we can do that is true intermittent fasting, which I'm going to get onto in a little second. But there is loads of different ways to achieve this metabolic flexibility. You know, I touched at the outside keto. I don't think that's a realistic way to achieve it. I find it too hardcore. We've intermittent fast on which I'm going to focus on now in a second.
You've also vegan veggie alternatives, paleo alternatives
But you've also vegan veggie alternatives, paleo alternatives. It doesn't really matter what path you choose. You're trying to get to a destination metabolic flexibility. You're trying to be able to shift between eating carbs as a fuel and having fat as a fuel source. And that flip, that switch, that's what's important to us, not how we achieve it. For me, the most workable solution is intermittent fasting. And it's this idea of restricting food, especially carbohydrates for like a 16-8 protocol. And I've spoke about cellular lethargy, like a cellular cleaning up on previous podcasts. You can go back and search that for a more in-depth on why I like intermittent fasting. But for this reason alone, this metabolic flexibility, I'm going to advocate for 16 hours fast and an eight-hour feast window. So that means you have your dinner in the evening and then you're not eating again to lunch the next day, zero calories. So you're not having a coffee with like a slab of butter in a Dave Asprey bulletproof style. You're having black coffee or black tea in the morning or water and then you're not eating to lunch. By giving yourself that 16 hours of fast, we're forcing the body to build this machinery I'm talking about. We're forcing the body to have that flexibility to say, okay, there's no carbs around, I need to figure out how to create energy from stored fat. And that's when we can break this perpetual cycle of slowly month by month, year by year getting fatter and fatter and fatter. Like we used to do this a lot, ancestrally hunter gather we used to fast and feast. And it's that genius mechanism of carrying the food around is, you know, and even where it's stored. Mark Sisson talks about this in the podcast. Where food is stored on your hips, even that in itself is quite genius because you can imagine if your body decided to store that weight on your arms or decided to store them on your neck or your upper back. It would affect posture, it would affect movement, it would affect speed. It doesn't, it stores them where central gravity is perfect. It stores it at the hips, but it's us that are fucking this up. Weird ones that are fucking up a great design feature and we're turning it into something it's never intended to be. So to achieve this metabolic flexibility, start intermittent fasting. Start out slow if you can only manage one day a week. You're going to do it on your rest day initially. Start intermittent fasting on your rest day. Then gradually build it up. And as you get a little bit more advanced, you can start using more advanced tactics like external ketones. But for the moment, I would advocate 16 hours fast, eight hours feast. Aim for one day week to start and graded adaptation, aim for two days next week, three days the week after, and you will have amazing mental clarity and hopefully you're going to achieve this metabolic flexibility in the not too distant future. Roadman, thanks for listening. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the Roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14-day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's a master's beginner advanced, there's meal plans shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you through at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day.