In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I sit down with my good friend Aram Grigorian from the Real Coaches Summit to talk shop on what actually matters in coaching today. We dig into body composition and weight loss, why consistency still beats novelty, and how to think more clearly about calorie tracking without losing the forest for the trees. We also get into industry trends, client compliance, and why live, in-person events remain one of the most underrated tools for becoming a better coach. If you’re a trainer or just serious about improving your health and results, this is a practical, no-nonsense conversation you’ll get a lot out of. I also share a sneak peek at what’s coming up at the Real Coaches Summit. WARNING – you may be offended by some items that Aram or I say in this podcast. Just a heads-up, and enjoy.
In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I sit down with my good friend Aram Grigorian from the Real Coaches Summit to talk shop on what actually matters in coaching today. We dig into body composition and weight loss, why consistency still beats novelty, and how to think more clearly about calorie tracking without losing the forest for the trees.
We also get into industry trends, client compliance, and why live, in-person events remain one of the most underrated tools for becoming a better coach. If you’re a trainer or just serious about improving your health and results, this is a practical, no-nonsense conversation you’ll get a lot out of. I also share a sneak peek at what’s coming up at the Real Coaches Summit.
WARNING – you may be offended by some items that Aram or I say in this podcast. Just a heads-up, and enjoy.
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00:43 Discussion on Body Composition and Weight Loss
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things too. Increase muscle, increase performance, be it athletic or in the gym, improve your body composition. Do all of it in a flexible framework without destroying your health. Today on the podcast, my buddy AAM from the Real Coaches Summit and warning.
This may be highly offensive to some people. Um, I've known a ROM for many years. Uh, I was honored to present at the First Real Coaches Summit. I've been to it previously since then, and it is an awesome event, so I highly recommend it. And in this podcast with the irom, I thought it would be good timing because we're talking about body composition and weight loss.
And also going to live events. Um, this is a little bit more geared towards [00:01:00] trainers and personnel in the fitness field. And I thought this was good timing because of one. Uh, he's got the event, uh, coming up and I know tickets are selling relatively fast, so you wanna hop on that. Uh, two, it's the holiday season, and three, I am recording this, uh, from a mastermind.
That I am attending in, uh, Reston of Virginia. So I'm doing a little presentation today here and hanging out and learning a whole lot from my good buddy Justin Kavanaugh and everybody else here. Um, so I thought this was perfect timing. So in this episode we talk about just inside and fitness industry trends.
What's going on, what's next? You know the challenges. Of education and the pro of going to live events, which I don't think will ever be replaced by online. And I say this to someone who obviously sells online [00:02:00] certifications and education, and I have an online mentorship group and I have all that stuff, but I still think if you can get to a live event, it is definitely in your favor.
Um, we also talk about what are some of the challenges of coaching the clients compliance. Does physics still work? Uh, calories in the calories out, consistency and accountability. Um, how to track, uh, when you should track versus not tracking a little bit even about, you know, the cardio and kind of, you know, strength training.
What are kind of the debates there? Uh, should you really bother even measuring the calories that you're burning? Um, and, you know, just some general, uh, fitness trends. So, uh, like I said, uh, the sponsorship here is also the Real Coaches Summit. Uh, AROM didn't asked me to put that in. That was me. I don't make a dime off of it.
There's no affiliate link. Um, so if you go, please tell Arom that I sent you. It's an amazing event. Uh, like I said, I've presented there the first year I've attended it [00:03:00] since then. I am not sure if I'll be able to make it in April. I've got one other event I'm already doing and we'll be gone in, uh, south Padre again, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it out maybe, but we'll see.
But I highly recommend it. It's an amazing event. Everyone there was always been super cool, both from the presenters and the people in attendance. So we'll put a link for that down below.
And warning, uh, some of the stuff we say here and especially some of the stuff arom says might be offensive. Um, but that's okay. Sometimes we need to expand how we're thinking and I think this is also a, a great example for me personally, where, if I didn't know Rom and I didn't know what he was doing in the fitness industry and I just saw some of his stuff online.
I might be like, eh, I don't know about that guy. But we've been able to hang out many times in person. Uh, and he is awesome. I really respect all the stuff he is doing in the fitness industry and, uh, we get along great. So again, back to [00:04:00] hanging out with people in person, getting to know them, uh, because sometimes the little snapshots in the 32nd clips we see online are not necessarily the entire picture.
So enjoy this podcast. I'm a good buddy, aam. And. Enjoy.
Dr Mike T Nelson: How are you?
Aram: Doing well, man. Yourself.
Dr Mike T Nelson: How's the event going?
Aram: Good. Got about 10 presale tickets left and it'll go up to regular price and then it'll be regular price for the rest of the time Until then, the goal is two 80, I think I'm at one 20.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And tell us when the dates and stuff are again, so everybody knows.
Aram: Yeah. 26th to the 28th of
Dr Mike T Nelson: which month? April. April, yeah.
Aram: Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: In Vegas.
Aram: Vegas Paris Hotel. Um, so it'll be a little bit easier than Caesar's was. It'll just be literally the one elevator shaft, come [00:05:00] down to the elevator meeting room down one more el one more flight down to the eating area.
So everything will be like self-contained versus having to like, walk through the entire casino and entire hotel like we had to do last year at Caesar's. Caesar's was a cool venue. It was just, it was too big. It was too grand. So the Paris hotel's a little bit smaller, a little more intimate, and they stuck me into a separate part of the tower, so I would have a little bit more kind of conformity it's just a little bit easier to get around.
You know how it is, dude. Unless you specifically tell people, take a left here and take a right here. There's no critical thinking involved. It's like I'm getting text messages from people, like, where is this? I'm like. It's in the convention center. Where's that? There's 700 employees on the floor.
Ask one of them.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And casinos don't help by them purposely trying to make it confusing as hell.
Aram: No, they're they want you going through that maze and they don't realize that not everybody's there for leisure and they don't give a shit. They know that you're gonna walk through their food court, you're gonna walk by their gaming [00:06:00] machines, you're gonna walk through something that's gonna catch your eye.
And that's why some people hate Vegas. But other, it's yeah, I get it. I don't love the hustle and bustle of it either. But if you know what you're there for I even think for Alley's event, I stayed at the host hotel site Omni in Orlando. And I think I paid, I wanna say almost 400 bucks a night, which, you know, oh yeah.
For four nights, for three nights, that adds up. And like in Vegas, you're getting a room for under 200. So. It's just, the more and more events I go to, the more I realize that I've got it figured out. I just need people to see it once people see it, like the community that goes is gonna keep going.
Yeah.
The community that hasn't found it yet. Once they do, they'll become that new batch of people that will. And because I keep bringing new people on to speak because I keep adding things to it from a feature standpoint, like it's never gonna get dry as you gotta perform better. It's always the same eight people saying the same shit.
One room is the kettlebell swing, one, one room is the one room is the [00:07:00] FMS one room is, boil talking about something and it's always the same shit. And it's okay, well guys, we know this stuff already. We're not brand new coaches who just got NASM yesterday. Like we are people that have been in the industry for three to five years who are looking to level up our knowledge base to that next level to solve deeper client problems that are outside of teaching them how to do a hip swing.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Do you think there's still, and we're already recording, so we just started talking anyway.
Aram: Okay.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Um, do you think there's even, my argument is, I think there's even a greater need now for more in-person events, but on the flip side, for you, the one organizing the event, if somebody came to me and said, Hey, I want you to organize a live event, I'd be like, oh, hell no.
What are you crazy?
Aram: It's not, listen, like the way that I do it, there's no financial incentive for me. I don't have anything to sell. Like I'm not a business to business coach. Like I don't sell business coaching. You're not
Dr Mike T Nelson: selling your $8,000 a month mastermind on the back end. [00:08:00]
Aram: No. So for me it's if I wasn't.
If I can recoup my cost, I'll keep running this thing until I'm a hundred years old. I don't care. I like having fun. I like, I wanted to essentially serve as a yearly reunion for all of the best in the industry who know each other. Yeah. Like you can show up, Jody can show up our friends in the coaching.
Like it's a place for all of us to guarantee at least one time a year, we could all be in the same room, hang out and have some fun. So even if it's just serving that purpose alone, I'm happy. Obviously the educational component I think, becomes valuable as well. But that's we're missing that now, dude.
Like we don't have this stuff going on anymore. For us to meet up. It's gotta be because the time was right and the place worked out and everybody's got a thousand different things going on. And it's very difficult to organize that many bodies to come together. But if you put it in a place that's easy to get to, if you put it into a place that's relatively inexpensive to show up at, and then you also include all the amenities to make it very easy to stay in the same place together, [00:09:00] then it becomes.
Worth the trip versus, how many conferences have you gone to once the first half of the day runs out, you gotta go figure out where to have lunch. And then people are coming back late and then, you show up with a click of people that you showed up with and you never really branch out and meet anybody new.
So I've seen the problems for long enough to where I think I've taken care of most of them. But at the end of the day, like I can't, it's like coaching clients. You can't force them to participate in user services. Just like I can't force people to show up and integrate with the community and meet new people.
Like they're gonna stick to themselves if they, if that's their personality. But I've seen a lot of cool shit happen, dude, I've seen some cool relationships bloom. Like people have become, like lifelong romantic partners. I've seen podcasts get built with people coming together and hosting podcasts together.
I've seen people collaborate on stuff like this because of it. So the long lasting I impact is certainly there and which is cool to see that me putting my ass out on the line financially has created these [00:10:00] opportunities. But at some point, like I probably will get into mentoring coaches on the younger side of things, just to give them a, because there's nothing like, there's no low cost mentorship option.
There's nothing out there for something between 150 and 300 bucks a month that a brand new coach can stomach. Everything is a couple thousand bucks a month. Everything is super business heavy. But what I want to create is something along the lines of here, pay me 150 to $200. Let's meet once a week.
Yes, it'll be group style, but whatever. But let's talk about some of the client cases that you're having trouble with. Let's talk about some of the systems that you don't have. Let's talk about improving your payment efficiency or being able to reach out to people or create a system of follow up and keeping track of all this stuff, like just all the shit that nobody taught us that we had to figure out that dirty way, have that type of a service available.
And yeah it'll be some work on my end, but I don't like, what the hell else am I doing? Like my clients are easy to manage at this point. They all have very clear [00:11:00] expectations on what I expect from them and what I'm gonna deliver to them. And if they don't show up with stuff, I'm not, I have nothing to look at.
They're not, you're outside of me sitting there and talking about the psychological bullshit all day, which I'm burnt out on, like if prepping your food, getting 7,000 steps in a day. Meeting a protein requirement and fulfilling two days of training a week with strength is too much for you. Stop talking about fat loss.
Like I like, I don't, I at that point like go fucking go to church. Go hire a therapist. Go do something to improve your mental health because a health coach is not who you need to be hiring. Like those to me are bare minimum basics for any human being that should be able to attain that. Like I'm not sitting there telling you to do 300 minutes of zone three, four cardio a week.
I'm not telling you to strength train five days a week. I'm not trying telling you to be perfect with your macros every day. Like just can we just do some bare minimum stuff? And the fact that I like, we're having to fight tooth and nail to get that level of compliance [00:12:00] now, it just shows you, I think we're.
We have the people that are like the overachievers who don't think they're doing enough. Then we have the people that are doing absolutely nothing and wondering why they're not getting results. And then there's just no, there's no middle anymore. There's no even, like the flounders aren't even floundering.
They're either like getting caught up in like the nuance and being like, well, I need to micromanage my ingredient label to the point where I'm eliminating every food dye. And it's like, what do you worry about? Food dies for, you drink wine three nights a week. Let's take care of that problem first. And then we have the people that every single time they see a message of well, you need to give yourself more grace.
Well, that person just does nothing. Now it's well, I'm giving myself grace and I'm taking a rest. Well, what are you resting from? You haven't stressed your body out in any meaningful way. Yeah. To even require any rest, and I work with a population of people that's very specific, and that's being told that they're broken constantly.
And I work with the menopausal community and the perimenopausal community, and you see what's going on. It's, [00:13:00] the second your estrogen drops, you're dying and cortisol is gonna kill you. And fucking the, yeah, don't do those
Dr Mike T Nelson: cold plunges. 'cause that's bad. But don't exercise too hard because high intensity isn't bad.
No, wait, now it's good. Zone two is bad. Oh, but you're perimenopausal, not really menopausal. So I'm like, oh my God, dude, I actually feel bad. I have a few of those clients and I'm just like, I did the old social media type in just to see what's going on. And I'm like, holy crap, this is just an absolute shit show.
No wonder these poor people are so confused. Dude I had, I lit,
Aram: I literally made a comment on somebody's post and it was on a woman coach. She's a, I think she's like A-A-C-S-C-S or something. And apparently men are not allowed to talk about women's health, so I got
Dr Mike T Nelson: in trouble for that too.
Aram: Yeah. So I've, I'm, I've been getting that ration of shit too.
And then apparently calorie deficits don't work. Oh, right. So. Calorie deficit don't work, but GLP ones [00:14:00] do.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Physics is broke, bitch physics is broken.
Aram: And the reason why it's broken is because of insulin resistance and inflammation. Those are the things that prevent people from losing fat. So, obviously there's only so much of that stuff that I can tolerate before I have to then say something and just say something like.
I don't care how inflamed you perceive yourself to be, which by the way, you don't even know what inflammation is. How are you measuring it? What is it? How do you measure it? How do you define it? Where is it coming from? Like inflammation is not you eating too much pasta and being bloated. Inflammation is your CRP levels are high.
There's something happening inside of you internally that's not controllable by lifestyle standards, and you might need some extra help. And then let's say for example, you do have insulin resistance or you suspect that you have insulin resistance. How is that being measured and how is that being quantified and how did that come about?
Did it just happen because all of a sudden you woke up and you were insulin resistant? Or is it because you overfed yourself and you were under muscle and had nowhere to deposit glucose for 30 years? [00:15:00] So, but this population of people is being so disempowered by these messages of well, it's not you.
Yeah. It's these things. So it's well, how did you get to this place? It's chicken or the egg. If you are under muscle. Which most over 40 women, let's be honest, are if you are over fat, which again, open your eyes and look around at an airport and you'll see very quickly what the problem is. We're not, we don't, we're not sitting there, and I'm not talking about the CrossFit athlete who's 18% body fat as a woman who's working out nine days a week and eating 1300 calories, because she thinks based on diet culture, that's what she has to do to get even leaner.
I'm talking about the average American woman who can't quantify how much protein she eats, who hasn't set foot inside of a gym unless it's been inside of a group fitness class, which she goes to intermittently when she's ready to do it. And a woman who spends her weekends treating her body like it's spring break and has no quantifiable idea of how much she's actually taking in.
So every time I get this [00:16:00] argument, I said, cool, you're right. Lemme see a food log. Just show me a food log. Just show me some evidence. How many calories per day on average? You're taking it? Well, I barely eat anything. Okay. I believe that you have a high level of food volume. I believe that you grazing all day long doesn't feel like you're actually eating anything substantial, but calories are still coming in from somewhere because you can't get fatter without calories coming in your internal environment.
And I may not be able to handle the amount that you're feeding yourself, but physics is still physics. The last time I checked that switch wasn't turned off anywhere. Like it wasn't like all of a sudden we walked outside and gravity was null and void. So if gravity is still around, I would imagine thermodynamics still works.
You may not be happy with the number that you have to die it at, but that's also circumstantial based on your current body composition and how active you are.
Yeah. So if you're
averaging three thou, I was just, you, I [00:17:00] spent six days in a, in an Airbnb with my family. And it very quickly realized like, what the problem is there.
There's snacks on the kitchen island, and every single time a person walked into that kitchen, it was bag hand in the bag, handfuls of whatever, with no mindfulness whatsoever, no planned meals, nobody's eaten protein for breakfast. The only time anybody in my family, or anybody in my, in the other families that were in the house were getting protein was at dinner.
Like when they sat down to eat something that we made, which my father made shish gbas one night, and that was the only protein that they consumed all day long. And then throughout the day, it was surfing on their phone. Granted it was rainy in Florida, but like I found a gym 10 minutes away and I happened to show up there three days out of the five that I was there, or six that I was there.
So this is how most people live. And then they also have the audacity to say, well, I'm doing everything right. You're doing nothing, right? You, your results
Dr Mike T Nelson: would say otherwise. Like [00:18:00] you,
Aram: How is it that you're doing everything right, but you're 40% body fat. It just, it doesn't compute and it, and then everybody takes that as a personal attack on their character.
It's no, I'm not saying that you're fat or you're dumb or you're lazy. I'm just saying that you don't really understand what you don't understand because you don't actually have any data to back up any of the claims that you're making, but you're watching these social media idiots fucking tell you that you are broken.
And unless you take this cortisol cocktail or this hormone replacement therapy, or this GLP one drug, you'll never be able to do it on your own. Now, you know me, dude, I'm a pin cushion. I'm happy playing around with all sorts of substances, but I'm not gonna sit there and promote peptides and GLP one drugs and hormone replacement therapy on my page.
'cause I'm gonna fucking doctor.
Yeah,
that's not my scope of practice. I'm gonna teach you about nutrition and I'm gonna teach you about fitness and I'm gonna teach you about habits. Discuss all the other stuff with your doctor, but don't rush towards that stuff as the golden solution to a lifestyle [00:19:00] problem that you've spent 30 years contributing to.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Now it feels like I'm getting the next round of business. Nut jobs that hit me up on Instagram, who I don't even know who looked like they're 12 years old is, oh bro, I saw you're not promoting peptides. I'm like, yeah, okay. Number one, I have used peptides with clients through a physician starting as six or seven years ago.
So I have used them in particular cases when they're needed through a physician through research. So I'm not against them again, I haven't used them personally, whatever, but I'm not gonna go out and promote that, even if it was legal, even if all the other gray area stuff aside as this is the number one solution.
Because even with, frankly, drugs that work really well. Shocker. A lot of the professional athletes and bodybuilders who use them what do they, oh, they still train hard. They still sleep, they still eat a lot of nutrition. Yes. Those things help. I'm not saying they don't help at [00:20:00] all, but even in that case, it's not the only thing you need to do,
Aram: just it's wild to, and again, like I'm in the same camp as you are.
If we've exhausted all of the viable options and we've built a foundation of habits that we're really proud of together. Even that you as an individual, if you're a client and you're like, Hey, I love how I eat, I love my routine. Like this stuff is great. I'm gonna live like this forever.
Awesome. We've done our job as coaches. If you at that point want to graduate and start to stem out into all of these other fringe. Sciences and start to explore them on your own. Go right ahead. Go right At that point, you've earned the level of autonomy. You have skill sets, you have knowledge, you have a level of habits that I'm confident you'll be able to maintain.
Cool. Do whatever you want, but don't tell me fundamentally on social media that you can't lose fat in a calorie deficit. Yeah. It's because you've never actually been in one. Now that, again, that number may be uncomfortably low and I get that [00:21:00] and like I always use the example of the Holocaust or prison camps or bodybuilders,
Dr Mike T Nelson: Minnesota starvation study.
Aram: Right. Like how many times do we have to see evidence of this over and over again? You make somebody expend enough energy and eat very little of it, at some point their body's going to start to lose fat and it's gonna be uncomfortable. And it sucks. It sucks to be hungry, especially an environment that's so rife with food everywhere.
And it's not even food anymore, it's just flavor. Let's be honest, it's just
Dr Mike T Nelson: calories.
Aram: Pe people aren't pe we're not having to we're not running into the gas station for nutrition. We're running into the gas station to get a bag of Doritos and a 20 ounce soda for 3 99. That's the problem.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah.
Aram: Like I, people aren't running into the grocery store in between shifts to grab a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad. That's not the problem. It's this other stuff that people are mindlessly consuming that's ultra tasty, ultra palatable, and very nutrient poor that people have a problem controlling.[00:22:00]
If everybody, if the only access to food we had was shit that came out of the ground or stuff that we had to kill. Nobody's gonna sit there and have sixth and seventh servings of that per sitting. They're gonna have as much as their body needs, as much as their satiety signaling allows. You might have some people that might blow through it to some degree, but they're not gonna sit there and have five servings of sweet potato.
They're not gonna have 500 grams of ground beef. They're gonna probably stop at about four or five ounces, and that'll be fine. But people aren't eating like that. Nobody eat I don't know anybody outside of us who eats three to five times a day routinely. One day it's two meals. One day it's five meals.
Some days it's no meals. Some days it's all snacks. And you tell somebody like, Hey, how many grams of protein do you eat? Oh, about a hundred.
Yeah.
How do you know? Well, I, I don't, but I think, okay, so that same person who thinks they're eating a hundred grams of protein is also doing it with a kicker of 150 grams of fat.
[00:23:00] Because every protein choice they eat, it has four times the amount of fat that it does protein in it. Which okay, cool. That's an easy problem to solve. But if you actually stop to slip over a nutrition label on a pack of food, or if you wanted to eat any restaurant food, right? Like how many times a week do you eat out five?
How many calories are in those meals? You don't know. You don't know. And if you're, and even if
Dr Mike T Nelson: they're on the menu, I guarantee Bob the chef isn't back there following, oh wow. Karen's out there and her macros are this, so I'm not gonna put this extra two tablespoons of oil on this food.
Aram: They're just like, I've worked in
Dr Mike T Nelson: kitchens,
Aram: so have I was in food service for 10 years.
Yeah, it's a nightmare. Like I remember working at a deli and from the moment we started the grill to the moment we closed it. It looked like a fucking slip and slide.
Oh yeah. There was just, and we had three bottles of canola oil that were spray bottles that we would just squirt all over this thing all day long egg whites going on it, people that were trying to be [00:24:00] healthy, eating egg whites, cool egg whites on top of a oily ass grill that absorbs half of it.
Have fun. Trying to quantify that. But the problem is that we have a lot of women, and I'm gonna speak about women because that's who I serve. They're walking around again, over fat, under muscled. Maybe they're getting five to 6,000 steps in a day. Maybe they weigh 180 pounds. But because they're abundantly fat and under muscle, they don't have a ton of active tissue.
So their calorie requirements aren't very high. Maybe they're maintaining weight at 15 or 1600. It's so easy to blow through 1600 calories on average in a weekly, dude, I
Dr Mike T Nelson: can do that in a meal.
Aram: Right? You and I was at the
Dr Mike T Nelson: air,
Aram: I was at the airport yesterday. I had a cookie butter latte from Dunking Donuts that was at least 700 calories and I had five donut holes that were 90 calories a piece if that was accurate.
And it took me, I don't know, four minutes to destroy that. Yeah. So it's yeah, of course you're not eating much. Of course your per your perception [00:25:00] is that you're not eating much 'cause you're never full. You walk around, never satisfied, never eating any amounts of real food. And then when you do eat well, it's grass on a plate with no protein on it.
And then you wonder why you can't sustain that level of eating. 'cause there's no flavor to the food that you're making because it's either I eat whatever the fuck I want and it's no holds barred, or I'm restrictively dieting to the point where I hate myself and there's just no middle ground. Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: So either all or nothing.
Aram: And it's just, it's sad to watch this. Let's call it what it is. It is ignorance, right? Ignorance is the lack of Sure. Knowing better. It's ignorance. I don't know any better because I've never been taught, nobody's getting taught this stuff. That's why our, and they've never
Dr Mike T Nelson: been successful doing anything either is the biggest thing.
Well, and how could you be successful when that's
Aram: the, when that's the basis of understanding that you have, that's all I know. All I know is what I was taught by my mother who knew just as little or less than I did. Yeah. Who was taught by her mother, who knew is little less than that.
That's the issue is [00:26:00] is that, but then there's this unwillingness to even listen to the perspective of, Hey, listen, I know that you're struggling, ma'am. I know that you think you're not eating that much. I know that you think that everything has failed you, but have you actually tried. I really tried for about 30 days to really weigh and measure everything you ate and limited the amount of meals out per week, like li limited to one meal out per could.
Is that something you're willing to do to solve a lifelong problem? Just give it a four week chance to just get some evidence and some data in front of you and into your hands that then you can use to make better decisions. Well, I've tried tracking food and it didn't work for me. Oh, okay. So the idea that I've tried tracking food and it didn't work with me for me is like I tried to look at my speedometer in my car, but I just didn't follow the speed limit.
Yeah.
That's really what it is. It's well, maybe the numbers you were following were wrong. Maybe the calorie calculations that MyFitnessPal gave you were inappropriate, maybe. You were being too restrictive with your approach. [00:27:00] Maybe you weren't weighing things in grams, maybe you were eating out too often and that was unquantifiable.
Maybe you just weren't very diligent with actually putting stuff on a scale as much as you thought you were. Maybe. And there's a thousand pieces of human error that you and I have watched for 15, 25 year careers plus where it's impossible. And I can actually say this with a hundred percent relative certainty, it is impossible not to lose fat if you are in a deficit.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Correct.
Aram: Am I wrong about that? It's like it's almost you're gonna lose
Dr Mike T Nelson: weight. Yeah. But yes.
Aram: But it's it's scientifically physics still works mathematically impossible. If you were in a deficit to not see some. Reduction of weight on the scale. Yeah. Like you may be so fucked up internally that your body might be hanging on to fluid and there might be stomach contents and all sorts of reasons why that scale might not move down at the rate that you would like it to move down at, but it's going to move down at some point.
If you move more and eat less. It's not [00:28:00] great advice with no context to give that to somebody. But if you think about it, that's the advice that works. Move more. Energy expenditure or, and or in conjunction eat less. So I would much rather see most people move more first.
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
If you haven't tackled that, like if you're not doing a at least 60 minutes of cardio per week, start there. If you're not taking at least 5,000 steps a day, start there. Let's get you moving, because a body and motion is gonna probably burn off a little bit more energy than a body sitting around at any size.
So if you can at least tackle that issue and build that habit for a lifetime, you've already benefited your cardiovascular health, you've improved your all cause mortality. Okay, cool. Now we're moving in the right direction. And now when we, when that steam engine starts to wanna move a little bit, maybe they get a little bit motivated to start looking elsewhere to see where other opportunities exist.
But that blanket idea of I'm fucked up. You are a man. You don't understand women's physiology. You've never had perimenopause, you've never had a child. You don't know how it [00:29:00] works. Okay. I'm pretty sure that a guy delivered your baby. And I'm pretty sure your ob, GYN is a man, and I'm pretty sure your endocrinologist is a man and you're getting your HRT from him.
So, but you trust that. Okay. Just make it make sense. It's not that I'm, like, there's like this weird level of feminism attached to fat loss that I've just never seen before until recently, and they're, and it's getting very like exposed and angry. And it's like the second you say that it's not hormones and it's not inflammation and it's not insulin resistance, you're an asshole.
I'm not saying don't take GLP one drugs. If you want to take LPs, go right ahead. There's a lot of benefits to them. But how does the GLP one drug work to induce fat loss? It lowers your appetite and prevents you from eating a lot. That's it. Even if it does reduce inflammation in some quantifiable manner.
Let's watch CRP go down. Cool. How does that [00:30:00] drive fat loss? It might drive weight loss by seeing less fluid retention, but it's not actual fat leaving your body. Okay, let's see. Let's tackle the insulin resistance claim. Well, my insulin resistance is bad, and that's why I can't lose weight. My body doesn't use carbohydrates.
Well, first of all, you don't really have any evidence of that. And let's say your fasting insulin was high, and let's say your fasting glucose was high and your HB A1C was six or above. If those markers improved, they probably improved because you lost fat, probably because you started eating better, not because the drug pulled those numbers down magically, and then all of a sudden you just started utilizing more carbohydrates and started burning off fat off your, because people have this idea that like you inject this liquid and all of a sudden it starts to like work on melting your fat and then you piss it out.
That's truly
how I put up a post the other day, I'm like, do you know that almost 85 or more percent if your fat is exhaled? Oh, sure. Yeah. Then like [00:31:00] people are like, what do you mean? I've talked to like people that I know about that you don't actually sweat fat out, like you sweat some very little amount small, tiny amounts, but like you breathe it turns into CO2 and water, and you expel it that way and you breathe it out.
They're like, well, that's crazy. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't just melt off your body and leaves your skin. That's not how think about that in essence. Like you would have like slick oily skin all the time if that was the case.
Yeah.
But it's just it's watching this stuff and feeling like I'm living in a mad zone all the time.
Whereas like there, like I'm very fortunate that my population of all of followers in my audience is very reasonable and logical and they're very science based. So the stuff that I put out doesn't get a lot of shit. It's when I go elsewhere, when I start comment, commenting on other people's posts, or I go to some famous influencer and I comment on their post and then I watch.
The mafia of people that they've groomed into thinking the way that they think. If you ever go against like a Gary Breca or like a Carnivore md, if you ever go against any of these [00:32:00] people and you go and you just watch their rabid fans come after you and say well, think today. I had a guy say that nobody should be eating fiber.
What? And I'm like, okay, cool. Like why? Why? 'cause, because fiber prevents you, your body from absorbing protein and vitamins. What? I said based off of what? What are you talking about? It's just maybe if
Dr Mike T Nelson: you take an astronomical amount, even then it's a small amount,
Aram: right? Okay, cool. That has to come from a dogma that you have towards something like, what is it that you believe that fiber is so bad for?
Is it because you think that vegetables have phytochemicals in them that are killing you?
Dr Mike T Nelson: The broccoli is out to get you, bro.
Aram: But it's just if this was all true, then we wouldn't be here as humans. Oh yeah. If we're that
Dr Mike T Nelson: fragile,
Aram: we would've died. Thousands of years ago, we would've never made it this far.
Like we have survived famine and all this other stuff, and war and extreme conditions that, look at any crack head that lives behind a seven 11, like [00:33:00] if that's not evidence of what our human body is capable of under some of the worst possible circumstances, then stop talking to me about the fact that cortisol is the reason why you can't lose fat.
You might be not being able to lose fat because your cortisol is so high as a result of the stress in your life that you're not managing, which is also now turning into you making shitty decisions around food. I can believe that story all day long, but don't tell me that this mechanism that you don't even understand is the result of why you can't lose fat.
It's not the reason. It could very much be a byproduct of your behavior, but that's not the thing that's holding you back. Because I bet if I started a retreat and I invited you to a house for a month and controlled all your food intake and controlled all your training sessions and put you to bed and woke you up at a certain hour, all of a sudden after that 30 days, you would lose seven pounds that you've never been able to lose before.
And how did that happen, Sally? Is it because we lowered your inflammation and we lowered your insulin resistance and because we injected you with a GLP one [00:34:00] drug? No, we fed you less and we moved you more. We just have to find ways to do it practically for the long haul and allow you to be able to do that without actually disrupting all of your psychology.
Dr Mike T Nelson: But that's not a sexy Instagram post 'cause you didn't have any mechanisms in there bro, you gotta have three mechanisms in an Instagram post now where nobody likes you.
Aram: What's it gonna come to though? Like my that's if, for me, at least the way that I think about the world, if you told me, Hey, you could make more money if you just reached out to more people.
All right. That seems logical. Like I, I just don't, I don't pitch my stuff enough. If I pitched more based on math, eventually more people would see it. More people would wanna say, okay, cool, that makes sense. But if you come to me and say, well, you're missing this and these funnels, and if you don't do this precisely this way, yeah, you've lost me already.
But that's how most, but that's how people address fat loss. It's
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh yeah,
Aram: you have this very simple way to do [00:35:00] it. That does require a lot of depth and psychology to some I understand why people are resistant to it, because it's personal responsibility, and it's also being able to look in the mirror and say, Hey, maybe somewhere along the way I took my eye off the ball and that's what happened.
Like I had kids, I had a stressful job, my husband and I weren't doing well. And I just, at night when the kids went to bed, I snacked a little bit too much and I, they tho those are probably the reasons why I got fat. No. Nope. That's not why. Nope. It's because your insulin resistance built up and because you had all this inflammation in your body because your estrogen dropped and your testosterone fell and your cortisol came up and that's why you gain weight.
Okay, cool. Independent of calorie intake, no bullshit argument. Yeah. Including if you consider calorie intake in that equation, which nobody does ever because I, every time one of these like big figures on Instagram, starts talking about these mechanisms, I always precisely always ask them, are these considering calorie intake or not?
[00:36:00] 'cause if they're not considering calorie intake, then I don't want to ever listen to you again and. If they are considering calorie intake, is that calorie intake self-reported?
Mm-hmm.
Because if it's self-reported, also null and void because we also understand that people's food recall is dog shit at best.
So if you can do all of these studies and stick somebody into a metabolic ward and control all of their consumption, then I will believe whatever it is that you say, if you say, Hey, we put a thousand people into a controlled setting where we controlled their intake to the calorie, to the gram, we controlled their energy output and we did this for three months and this is the result we got and independent of calorie intake, all of them lost weight, then I'll tell you that calories don't matter.
But until that study gets done, which it probably never will, I will continue to die on the hill. That calories are your problem.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and we've already got, good studies from Kevin Hall and a bunch of other people now granted. It is using a metabolic [00:37:00] chamber or a metabolic ward, and you can argue that the numbers are small, but enough for statistical significance and
Aram: Right.
Dr Mike T Nelson: There's only a, if you're looking at a metabolic chamber for, basically a room that's for listeners, that's all enclosed. You're measuring everything that goes in, everything that goes out. You measure the air that goes in and out, et cetera. I think there's maybe three research centers left in the US that even have one of those that much less.
Who's gonna pay for it? Who are you gonna get to volunteer? Um, but when those studies have been done, exactly to your point, what do they show time and time again with literally no exception. O shocker. Yeah, calories still matter.
Aram: But no, it's fake news. It's fake news. It's
Dr Mike T Nelson: fake news that those are older studies, 10, no more than eight years old, like that, that those are not valid.
Aram: It's
Dr Mike T Nelson: Isn't that long ago.
Aram: And the last time you and I spoke, you made really great points about the practicality of implementing. The addition rule to people like instead of you. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to remove all of these things that we know [00:38:00] you can't control. Add all of these things first, and then hopefully by nature you'll reduce these other things.
'cause you'll start to feel better.
Yeah.
Okay. That's great and I'm totally with that, but your average person can't even do that. Yeah, that's the problem is nobody could stick to anything and I get it, like there's a reason why most people aren't walking around leaving muscular. There's a reason why most people aren't walking around solving world problems because they don't have the fucking intelligence to do it.
And there's a reason why most people don't have a ton of money because it takes a lot of work to do these things. It's effort, it's consistency, it's routine, it's constant self-development, like these are not innate human qualities in most individuals. And the further and older I get a little bit more cynical and pessimistic because I've been proven right so many times.
Like for every three women I have that lose fat, after six months of working with me, I have 25 who don't follow the plan and don't lose fat.
Yeah,
and then fortunately, they're the average. That's the norm. It's not, the norm is not successful. Fat loss and fat loss [00:39:00] sustainability, just like the norm is not financial success or emotional intelligence or intelligence of any kind.
Your average person is not that smart. They're not that motivated. They're not that inspired. They're not that hardworking. They're just waiting for the next Netflix episode to come out and the next flavor of Oreos to hit the shelf. And that's unfortunately who I see as the national average. And that might sound shitty, but again, prove me wrong.
Prove me wrong. Show up to my doorstep and show me how motivated you are at 40% body fat. Show me that you've done everything right and that you truly give a fuck about your self-care. Because I don't care about the aesthetics of any of this stuff. I know plenty of fat people who are happy, who don't give a shit about fat loss if you ask them, Hey, how?
How are you? I'm great. I love my life. I got a great family. I know I'm carrying around all this weight, but I don't give a shit. Okay, cool. You're not my audience, but if you're complaining to me about your physical condition, how you look, how you feel, and you haven't explored some [00:40:00] of these very simple options, then you have no leg to stand on anymore.
In my eyes, as far as an argument of that, you've done everything right. That's it.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. My little catchphrase of the last couple of years is it just, it all takes violent consistency and people are like, so some people email me and they're like, well, why does it have to be so violent? I'm like, because you're literally going in the opposite direction of everything and everyone else around you.
Yep. You're taking a walk, you're going to the gym, you're doing your cardio, you're doing your nutrition. You will be in most general population friend groups, that one weirdo. Yeah. But we know what happens if you fall to the average of the general population. So if you don't want to do that, yes.
Get some accountability. Yes. Get some, intelligent information and then literally just keep doing that over and over. And everyone else will tell you're crazy. Yeah. That it's [00:41:00] dumb, it's stupid. And then you get better results and then eventually they get really mad at you and eventually they wanna know, well, what did you do?
Aram: It's always that like the, I feel like the women that I work with who have the breakthroughs, right, like the quote unquote I finally saw that light bulb moment in my life where, you know, 'cause I I've converted a lot of the calories don't matter. People into the calories do matter people.
And there's a beautiful level of clarity that happens when they finally realize, oh fuck, I was eating too much.
Yeah.
You know that and I always use the example of four fish oil pills. And my coffee creamer in the morning before I start my day is already 150 calories and I haven't even eaten anything of substance at that point.
Like I've just four fish oil pills are about a gram of fat a piece. Right? So that's four grams of fat. My, my coffee creamer, if I do four servings of it, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 or so calories. So like I'm at a hundred calories before I [00:42:00] even ingest any real food. And I'm wildly conscious of what's going in.
So if I'm conscious of this stuff and I already have a hundred calories coming in, what are the people doing that aren't conscious of it?
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, they go through the local coffee fufu drive through, God knows Oreo bender with a little bit of coffee in it thing,
Aram: right? Like, that, that cookie butter latte I had yesterday with Dunking Donuts, that was 800 or 900 calories.
If something tastes that good. That's awesome and I'm really happy for you 'cause I love tasty food too, but just understand that it's gonna come with a really large consequence calorically and that's okay
Dr Mike T Nelson: because yeah, that's not a bad thing you have, that's just reality.
Aram: All you have to do is understand your individual target and budget.
Just understand if you do nothing else, right, just understand your own specific calorie budget, which is probably lower than you think it is because I usually I, I'm sure you've seen some of um, Lyle McDonald's work Oh, [00:43:00] a while. How you feel about him is irrelevant. But what I do think he does a good job of is he breaks body fatness down into categories.
And I've started doing that myself without even realizing it. Whereas like before somebody starts with me, I. I used to have them track their food for seven days before they started to get an idea of how much they ate. But I knew that was stupid because if you don't give somebody marching orders or parameters, they're just flying by the seat of their pants and there's no actual real data coming in.
So I said, fuck that. Now what I do is send me a picture of what you look like right now, send me a picture, like the same way you would at check-in so I can at least ascertain how much body fat versus muscle mass you have. And to be quite honest with you, Mike, I don't even use activity level anymore.
Like I used to apply a multiplier to it, but now I just, it's so irrelevant. The calorie burn rate that most people have are having every day like it's so low that it's almost immeasurable. And who cares That let me just look at you. If I see abundance of fat with very little muscle, [00:44:00] somewhere between seven to nine calories per pound is what I'm gonna assign as a starting point.
If I see I. Less fat, a little bit more muscle, but still fat. Maybe nine to 10 calories. If I see more muscle and less fat, we'll go like 12, 13, 14 calories per pound. But like I work with 102 women right now.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oof. That's a lot.
Aram: I've got four of them, no, sorry, six that are above 2000 calories. Six out of 102 women are capable, their body warrants them being able to eat more than 2000 calories. The rest of them are living somewhere between 14 and 1900. And these are people who are actively in a program with guidance tracking their food. So like that just shows you the metabolic capacity of most women is not very high.
Mm-hmm.
So like when they go on MyFitnessPal and MyFitness and they load in, well, I train seven days a week.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh yeah.
Aram: Okay, cool. What are you actually doing? [00:45:00] And even just something as simple as the con and this is where a lot of coaches fuck this up, and this is what I constantly get mad at coaches for doing this.
Don't take your client's word for it. If somebody tells you something, like nod your head and say, cool, that's awesome. But then observe for a little while. Mm-hmm. Before you start making these inferences to be real I wanna see what your heart rate average is when you're doing cardio, I wanna see how often you're actually doing the cardio that you said you're doing.
I wanna see what your strength training looks like. Send me a video of you doing squats or rows or presses from start to finish so I can watch an entire set to ascertain intensity. Because what I normally see, again, 98% of the time, if not more, is most people who say they're training a lot aren't most people who say they're training hard aren't.
And most people who say they're beating the shit outta themselves when they say they're ferociously training. I've watched people [00:46:00] do like incline walks on the treadmill and not break 115 beats per minute at that point. If you've been doing that for a year, yeah, you're burning calories, sure.
But you're not getting a ton of cardiovascular benefit from that 'cause your body's adapted to it already. And there's no intensification, there's no progressive overload being applied to that. And then there's still coaches that still believe like that they need to be strength training super fat women four times a week.
And they, well, nobody, people don't need to do cardio. Strength training is everything. And like I used to believe this dumb shit too, and I'm wait, hold on a second. What burns more calories per minute doing cardiovascular work or strength training? Oh, cardio does. Cool. So if the biggest problem that I have to solve is putting somebody into a deficit to get them to lose fat, why would I spend more of my time giving them strength training to do when they're so visibly fat that's the biggest problem we need to solve first.
Okay, cool. If you're gonna allocate 200 minutes a week towards exercise, let's [00:47:00] make 80% of that cardio and 20% of it weights. I'm not saying don't train with weights whatsoever. Yeah. But if you're 45% body fat, why the fuck are you training four days a week with weights and doing no cardio?
Yeah. That's, and I've watched trainers do this, coaches do this constantly because they've been indoctrinated into the idea that dieting is bad, cardio is bad because everybody's been doing too much cardio. It's what? Where are you seeing these people who's doing too much cardio?
Dr Mike T Nelson: I could never find those people.
And once in a while, I rarely, I do get a few of 'em. And like you were saying, I am like any one of my one-on-one clients will confirm this. I am an absolute stickler for what is your output? And I don't care relatively where it is. I don't give two shits. But that's why I use the rower. That's why I use an assault bike.
That's why I use a bike. That's why for cardio stuff, we're doing something that we can directly measure and progressively overload. And you're gonna post what your output was. Even if you don't like your output or it was an off day, fine, don't care. Because otherwise, like you [00:48:00] said, I have no idea. And especially in the online environment, it's very hard to equate RPE without a video.
And a lot of people are like, well, I was going pretty hard. Okay, if we know what your absolute, let's say 2K was on a rower, I can now tell you as a percentage of a max, like where you are at. Right. And again, it's not, it is not good or bad, it's just we have to have some way to quantify this. And that's what the really hard part about strength training is a couple weeks ago I did a very hard, two hour kind of upper body, meathead session at the gym.
My Garmin said, this is with an actual heart rate band around my chest, said I've burned a thousand calories. I can guarantee you that I maybe five, 600, like there is no way I did a thousand. But even in those circumstances, because it's estimated, it's making all of these assumptions based off of the movement that there's gonna be some error there.
[00:49:00] Or at least when you're doing cardio and it's on the same piece of equipment, relatively speaking, we can argue about, the calorie equipment might be a little bit wrong, but if you did an average of 200 watts this week and eight weeks from now, you can do an average of 210 watts. Yeah, great. That is an adaptation.
Not only are we burning more calories, we are getting a better adaptation. We are actually teaching your body to be better at something, and over the long term, shocker, progressive overload, all those basic, boring theories like work. But if you can't equate to it and you don't have a baseline, you don't have a way of constantly measuring it that's consistent.
You're, again, you're just shooting in the dark and I work real hard and nothing's working
Aram: well. I can, and I can also see the argument, right, why it's so much harder to quantify calories burned with weight training than it is with cardiovascular work. Because yeah, it doesn't mean you shouldn't
Dr Mike T Nelson: do
Aram: it.
No. But like cardiovascular work is a repetitive repeated Yep. Standardized thing that you're doing for a prolonged period of time that doesn't really change intensities and doesn't have any rest in, [00:50:00] in between. If you're doing,
yep.
Steady state zone two, three cardio, like you're just on an elliptical or on a piece of equipment and you can just watch your heart rate the whole time and you can perceive intensity and you have some data in front of you and you're doing the same thing over and over again for 30, 40, 60 minutes.
But when you're strength training, different muscles are firing at different rates, which, okay, if I'm doing a chest press, am I burning as many calories as I, as if I'm squatting? Probably not. Yeah. Because I have less chest muscle than I do leg muscle. And if I'm moving all of these different joints and tissues simultaneously, but then I'm also taking two or three minutes of rest in between, which I'm doing nothing during that time.
And yes, my heart rate might be elevated because it was residual from the set before, but I'm not actually doing anything in that time, so I'm not burning any more energy than I am. Right. If I was doing cardio during that time. So like these things are so hard to quantify. And really the only real measurement we have, I think to measure calories burned for the [00:51:00] average pedestrian person is having a chest strap or a wrist wearable and having them do cardio.
And now I can say, okay, cool, in 60 minutes, it's likely that if, and this is where chat GPT can be helpful. Like I know that I'm 10% body fat. I know that if I get on my air bike and I do 60 minutes at x miles per hour with my chest drop on, I'm averaging about 130 beats per minute for that entire 60 minutes.
Okay, cool. I'm a 41-year-old male that weighs 210 pounds. That's 10% body fat that worked at this heart rate, at this intensity. On this piece of equipment, what is my estimated calorie burn? 800. Okay. Yeah, maybe. Maybe relatively reasonable, but that doesn't mean that the math is just evenly the math that if I ate 2000 that day and I burned 800, that I meant effectively net 1200 calories because we don't know what all the different processes are happening throughout the day.
Either are. [00:52:00] So yes, it is math, which is. Predominantly energy in and out. But the math does get more complex, but people aren't even doing the baseline readings of any of this stuff because I don't care how many calories you burn. If you, if like these, the women that I used to work with in Greenwich, Connecticut who were doing five Peloton rides a week that were saying they were burning 1500 calories, I'm like, at this rate you'd be dead.
Because if you're only eating 1200 and you're burning 15, you're in a 300 calorie deficit, you should be pouring weight off of you every day. And you're not like you're gaining weight somehow. So how is that? How's the math thing on this? And it's just it. And it's not to call people out and tell them that they're stupid.
It's just, Hey, I know that you believe this and that's okay. 'cause I used to also, before I received this level of education, got this level of experience and have other people told me I was wrong. But I wanna be told I'm wrong. I wanna be shown the truth of my situation. 'cause then I have something to fucking do [00:53:00] about it, as opposed to walking around with my head in the clouds or my head in the sand and waiting for somebody else to tell me that they've come up with a solution to my problem.
They haven't. And, but a lot of these figureheads in industry, in fitness, and I'm, and I'll name them, I don't give a fuck. The Huberman and the Atias and the Stacey Sims and the Mary Claire Avers, these 3 million plus accounts that end up on the Oprah Winfrey show. These are not boots on the ground coaches doing the work that you and I do every day.
Yeah.
They have no fucking clue what's actually happening on the ground level because all they're doing is doing book tours at this point. These are not medical professionals. These are not people I would trust with my dog. So the problem is most average people are getting their information from those fuckheads.
And those fuckheads are talking about stuff that is so out of the league of the average person, like your average woman who's 40% body fat, doesn't need to worry about optimizing her meal timing, or worrying about her H RV at all. Like a measure of [00:54:00] recovery is, did I sleep seven hours? Okay, did you wake up?
Did you feel okay? Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Cool. Which starts with you getting your carcass in bed long enough. You could possibly sleep seven hours,
Aram: right? If you're going to bed at midnight and you're waking up at eight, after all children have already left the house and you just slept through three alarms, probably a good indication that you're not sleeping well, and it's probably because you had caffeine all the way up until the time you went to bed, and then you washed the caffeine down with alcohol and a half a fucking container of Pringles, and you had absolutely no nutrition leading into the evening.
And that's how your average person lives. And like after spending five days with normal people, a, KA, my family, I was just, I'm just looking around and and I know this all sounds like I have a superiority complex, but let's be very clear. Like you said, we are the insane people based on the average.
We're the ones who are Oh, yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Based on the average.
Aram: We're the ones who are, but inside of a fitness community. Let's put us, because let's say like the average person is down here, we're [00:55:00] up here, and then above us is the biohacking douche cunts. If we were in a room full of the biohacking, douche cunts, we would be the ones that weren't doing enough.
It's what do you mean, Mike? You're not cold plunging after every single lifting session and you're not doing repeated bouts of hot and cold four times a day at precisely 5:45 AM and then you're not precisely timing your vitamin D at 9:00 PM to maximize your sleep. Well at that point, like how insane are you and how disruptive is that to your mental health where that's all you're worried about?
Oh yeah. So it's just like how do we find and communicate this middle ground to not only people, but to get it out to coaches, to where coaches can start to speak the unsexy truth in maybe a sexier way to captivate more people into believing that the truth is actually simple.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and as much as I love research and science and I've done a fair amount of it, my new pet peeve is [00:56:00] researchers who have the best intentions, but are telling people explicit protocols, that any one of us who has worked with an individual would look at in 10 seconds and go, that's fucking nuts.
If I hear someone needs to do tabatas one more time, or now it's the Norwegian four by four, which again, those are great studies, like I'm sure glad they were done. It's amazing, the average, even in the region, four by four. I guarantee most people cannot complete four minutes for four rounds at the intensity that is prescribed in that study.
And for them to start there is insane. Now again, does that mean the study is invalid? No. Does that mean the research is bad? No, but if you've never trained anyone, you won't know that. Right? And if you've trained four people, you'll easily realize, oh my God, they can't do this. Oh shit, maybe I should change this.
But then you get all the other people who are like, oh bro, you're not going against, you're going against what the research [00:57:00] says. I'm like, you think I didn't read the research? Okay, you go do this and apply Tabata. Like in the Tabata study, I think it was, what elite was it? Speed skaters, I think. I don't think most of those elite athletes with VO two max is over 50, completed all eight rounds at 170%.
Wow. Of VO two max, right? It was designed for elite athletes not to be able to complete all the rounds for the entire course of the study. So anyway, that's my pet peeve of. Great. If you want to talk about a study, great. Talk about a study. That's awesome. But I get highly annoyed when your protocol becomes, everyone must do Yes.
Blank blank. It's ah.
Aram: So, so let's talk about this. 'cause I think this is an important point. So if we were gonna make absolute statements, which you and I both don't like doing 'cause we like painting with a lot of context, are there really any absolute statements that we can apply?
I think
Dr Mike T Nelson: principles Yes. Right? In terms of protocol. [00:58:00] It's so hard. And that's where I always feel like, and maybe you have this problem too, like I want to be helpful on social media. I want to give people something to do. I wanna make it actionable. I just don't wanna sit there and talk about mechanisms till my eyes turn, blue or whatever.
But the flip side is you then have to quantify, okay, for who and in what context and all these other. Caveat. So what I've done in the middle road is just tell people the principle they should execute and let 'em figure it out from there. And if you want like actual legit hard teaching, at least for me in most things, like maybe a podcast or longer format, great longer presentation.
Great. Um, you're probably gonna have to buy one of my products because I tried to do this with cardiovascular training and said I'm a bitch. I ended up doing a level one and a level two, and I think right now they're probably over 20 hours. And I was trying to simplify shit, because you realize I had to go all the way back to the Frank [00:59:00] Starling principle, what is cardiac output?
Because most people don't know that. And it's not their fault that they don't know it. They've just never learned it. Sure. And if you don't learn the basic principles, all the protocols, which I do give you, you won't know how to modify them for the next time that protocol doesn't work. 'cause I guarantee it's not gonna work for somebody coming up.
Aram: No. And I in the. The really tough truth is that none of this is common knowledge. No, it's not. And listen, like for your average person looking to do average things like lose a couple pounds, chat, GPT could be wildly helpful for that. Oh, for sure. It will probably give you a plan that's relatively sustainable.
That's not that hard to follow. That's pretty clear and that will get most people pretty damn far. But the problem is. Without the accountability.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yep.
Aram: And without the need to have to show up for an appointment. That's why people hire trainers. That's why people hire coaches because if they could do it themselves, they would've already, but it's [01:00:00] that constant mental gymnastics and it's the overburdening of information from various sources that has people paralyzed to even show up to do the basics.
'cause now the basics aren't being talked about. They don't work. It's fake news. This thing is better. Well, it's well, if that's better and this doesn't work well, I'm just not gonna do anything. And it just becomes, I'm just gonna keep doing what I've been doing, which is not training that hard, not eating that consistently, not sleeping that well, and then continuously saying that I'm putting effort into it, which.
By your definition of effort. Yeah. Okay. You're doing something which is better than nothing, but the something that you're doing is no longer doing anything for you. And because you're resistant to gathering any data or seeing a new perspective, you have to be okay with where you're at. And that's where the psychology has to meet the science.
Like one of the biggest fights that I have every week with my clients, especially during the holiday season, is guys, if you're not gaining weight in [01:01:00] these next three weeks, you're winning.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, for sure.
Aram: That's all I've told all my clients. I'm like, guys, check-ins for the next three weeks are gonna be super easy.
Just do the fucking bare minimum.
Yeah.
Like whatever the bare minimum is a A. Define it. And follow it and don't expect any more because I know that you're gonna be saying yes to every fucking holiday party. You're gonna be drinking more calories are gonna be less controlled, less time for exercise will be available 'cause you're gonna be traveling or family's gonna be in town.
More obligations, more stress, more overwhelm. So if you leave this three week period flat weight, or at least maybe up a couple pounds, great. You've done way better than the national average, which is now gonna start rushing into the gym in January. Or buying bullshit protocols from fucking huberman and loading up on all the supplements because they have to undo the holiday season, which by the way, comes every single year.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah let's not, it depends again, next December.
Aram: Let's not be surprised the next time things, 'cause now it's like October starts, and I've actually identified that [01:02:00] there's really three times a year where people give a fuck. It's September to October. That's like the peak I give a fuck period.
And that dwindles off because Halloween now starts in the middle of October. Oh yeah. At the beginning of October. So Halloween candy is now everywhere. Halloween parties start at the beginning of October and don't end until Halloween is over. And then immediately is when Thanksgiving hot parties start and Friendsgiving starts.
So let's throw November away 'cause that's no longer I can take care of myself month. And then obviously we know what happens in December and then January is like a very slow start for a lot of people. 'cause it's well I have to like breathe 'cause I had all this stuff to do that I committed to in January or in December.
So I need January to just chill out. So nothing gets done in January anymore either. So it's like February to March. It's. Maybe the back end of April. After what's the holiday there? Um, Easter.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Easter,
Aram: yeah. After Easter into May, because that's the, I need to get my shit together to [01:03:00] put a bikini on.
And then it's, again, June through August, nothing is happening. 'cause that's the, I have to enjoy my summertime. And then it's September, October, so that you really have February, part of March, part of April, may, September, and October. You have five months of potential compliance for the average person.
That's what I've identified. That's what I've seen happen over the last 15 years. And it's gotten worse. It used to be like seven months, then it got dwindled down to six, now it's down to five. Shit, by the time I'm 30 years into this career, it'll be like one, it'll be one month a year where people give a fuck because there's all sorts of new holidays coming up.
There's like Donut Day and National Pizza Day and National Burger Week, and we have to celebrate all these things obviously for American commercialism. And it's well, at what point do we just stop paying attention to any of this stuff? And actually just get back to the basics of self-care, which is how do I want to feel and what am I willing to contribute to this process based on my individual circumstances?
But God forbid we think [01:04:00] about any of that stuff because we have too many people telling us what to do and how to do it. That's why I don't tell anybody what to do anymore. Like on my Instagram page, it's food for thought. Take it if you want it. Yeah, fuck off. If you don't, I don't care. I'm not telling you take 7,000 steps or drink a hundred ounces of water because if I do, you're gonna go and find some dickhead who said the opposite and you're gonna throw that at my face.
You just get tons of
Dr Mike T Nelson: emails from people who are never gonna do anything anyway.
Aram: Right? So at this point, I'm like, if my content proves to you that I know what I'm talking about and eventually you need help, I'm here to help. I'm reasonably priced and I'm gonna be very good at what I do. If not, a lot of the basic advice I give you will probably take you pretty far if you actually follow it like I had, I have a woman.
Who's been just loosely following what I've told her for six months. 'cause we got on a call six months ago, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's to the nth degree, all sorts of issues internally. And she's down I think three inches around her waist and like 10 or 12 pounds. [01:05:00]
Dr Mike T Nelson: Nice.
Aram: With no, no accountability other than her just sending me a text message once a month to tell me how she's doing.
She's tracking her food. She's lifting three times a week and she's doing about a hundred minutes of cardio. That's the only thing she's changed and she's, but medical professionals told her she was broken. Functional health coaches who are fuck heads to no degree told her she was broken. And she had lost all hope.
And I'm like, you don't have, like you, your only problem is that you don't really move that much with any, with really any intensity, and you eat an unregulated amount of food. That's it. Solve those two problems, you'll be fine. And fast forward six months, she's like singing my praises. And I didn't even work with her.
I didn't charge her a penny, but she's the 1% that will follow free advice.
Yeah.
99% of people, you give them free advice within two weeks, they've forgotten it, and they're gonna DM you again in three weeks after that and say, what did you say again? Because they don't, because most people, unless they're actually paying for something, aren't gonna do it.
Because if it was intrinsically important to them, they would've done [01:06:00] it already, but they haven't. So like we're fighting this anti-science degradation of human psychology problem all at once with ease of access and over information. We, you and I can't fight that battle.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh no.
Aram: That's a losing battle for you.
And I like, that's why if we all as a collective industry can get on the same fucking page and start fighting with one or the other, then maybe we can be strong enough to then put out a cohesive message to the audience that says, Hey guys, we don't need all this fancy silver shit that you're looking at.
Like all of this stuff is baseline level. You just have to do that. And then as you earn your stripes, we can maybe intensify it more. But we all have to speak that same language. The problem is that we all, not we, you and I don't because we don't have any problems, but a lot of the lower level just coming up, coaches think that they have to stand out.
To make money. And those are the ones that are pedaling the crazy sensational bullshit. And it's either tho that information is getting disseminated [01:07:00] or the people at the top, like the huberman and all those people are getting information out to the public. And that's just way over most people's heads.
So it's like there's just no middle ground and there's never, and it's polarizing. It's almost turned into religion and politics at this point.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And then you have all the fitness influencers, oddly enough, fighting with each other, which to me is so insane. I'm like, it's one thing to have a disagreement or to have a discussion or whatever.
I am not saying you have to agree with everything everybody does. Yeah. But it's wild to me how it's either disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing to be different, to get likes to get clicks, or it's the inverse problem of just being a group of fucking parrots who just copy everything else. Then they want to come argue with you about it.
And you're like, okay, what is that based on? Like, how did you come to this? Oh, said this was the way, okay. That's your [01:08:00] argument. I why are you in my dms yelling at me about this again? Oh, you thought I cared. Oh, sorry.
Aram: Well, that's the thing is if we even try to that's time spent and energy spent away from the people that actually are listening to us.
So at this point yeah,
if I have the time during the day, which Lord knows more often than not, I do, I will engage in stupid comment arguments, battles, because it's funny to me to ruffle people's It's
Dr Mike T Nelson: entertainment. Yeah. It's why, and then it
Aram: creates more content, which I could do. I could just screen, like today, I screenshot, I screenshotted the comment of the idiot saying, fiber was bad for you, and 300 people got a laugh out of it.
Cool. I've done my job to at least give somebody something fun to look at on a Thursday.
Yeah. Yeah.
I've contributed to the positive mental benefit of most people that follow my page, but I'm not gonna sit there like you, like I had a woman come after me and say that I was anti-woman and I was a misogynist, and that I'm pro-Trump and that I don't want the Epstein [01:09:00] files to be released because of something I said about women's fat loss.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh geez. It
Aram: went from women's fat loss, which is possible at any hormonal juncture, whether you're in perimenopause, menopause, as long as you're breathing a calorie deficit will work. Yep. To I no longer support women to not only do I not support women, but I'm anti-women and I'm pro a woman beating agenda.
That's where the argument section now gets into. It's like it's no longer about anything of substance. It's just you are wrong. We are all right and we're gonna do our best to pitchfork you until you're fucking gone. And I just won't tell I won't stand for that. If you start coming at me, my knowledge base, my profession, my career to try to discredit me, that's where I'll speak up.
If you're saying stupid. Oh, for sure. If you're saying dumb shit in the comment section I'll laugh at it. I won't even respond to it. I don't care. Especially if you're not a follower. If I see that a comment was left by a pedestrian [01:10:00] and it was stupid, I'll just, I won't even acknowledge it. If I see that a follower has left a comment that's anti what I wrote, then I'll have some discussion to understand their perspective.
'cause I want to, and I'll leave an offer. I'll say, Hey. If you have a problem with all this stuff, why don't you shoot me a dm? Let's get on a phone call. Let's talk about it. I wanna learn Yeah. What it is that so that way I can be better rounded. Cool. Like now we've just solved a problem with some discourse.
But then if you ever get out of the world of like reasonable content, which is the people that I'm associated with, and you get out into the fringe. The fringe is where it's unregulated shark, infested water, and the second these people taste blood, you are now not only a bad person, but you're an evil person that needs to be taken down.
And that's what I just have no tolerance or patience for, because at that point you're no different than a fucking martyr unabomber fucking psychopath to me. If we go from women's fat loss to. Epstein files. I just don't understand how that even [01:11:00] computes. Why is that? Even I'm not a, like I had a woman once ask me what my opinion on the war in Palestine was and I'm like, I don't have an opinion on the War of Palestine.
'cause I know nothing about it.
Yeah.
I don't watch the news. I have Netflix and Amazon and I pay for streaming content that I wanna see. I don't know anybody in Palestine or Israel. I'm half Jewish, but I'm not religious, so I don't give a fuck about that. And I'm a expert in nutrition and fitness, not in world affairs.
Yeah. So
why does my opinion to you matter? And like, why do I need to be standing up for a cause that I don't even believe in if you wanted me to advocate for more protein consumption in food deserts in the United States, I'll certainly speak up about that. But what's my 40,000 follower account gonna do to solve that problem when I don't know the politicians in your area that aren't providing better systems for your impoverished populations?
And I. There's a difference between trying to do the best you can with what you got to then starting to overstep your [01:12:00] boundaries. And I think unfortunately when people get big enough, they, that megaphone just gets louder and that influence starts to take over reality. And now it's, everybody has an opinion, but not everybody needs to be expressing it.
And that's, I just, I stay the fuck out of those conversations. 'cause I don't know anything about that stuff. I don't like do I know everything there is to know about women's rights and or the suffrage movement? I don't. But I also know that we live in a time where it's cool to have muscle as a woman and dieting culture starting to get a little bit less loud, which is awesome.
And it's cool to see women embracing strength training, which has never really been a thing. So like I'm seeing some positive change. It can't all be bad. So if that's the case, then yeah, I'll support that, but I don't know about much else. And yeah, I don't have a uterus, I'll never have a child.
I don't know what it's like to have menopause, but I do know what andropause feels like. 'cause I've had that and I know what it's like to have to go on hormone replacement because my body wasn't functioning well because I did go into [01:13:00] andropause in an early age due to my behaviors in my twenties and thirties.
But it wasn't just because I was living this amazing, perfect lifestyle. All of a sudden I just got hit with all these symptoms. So I can certainly speak to how shitty it feels when your mood sucks and your sleep sucks despite trying and. You're walking around and every meal feels like it's sitting in your stomach and it doesn't move, and you have no energy and there's no motivation.
Libido is completely gone. Like I've felt like that for three years of my life. But I found HRT in conjunction with all these positive lifestyle habits. And lo and behold, I'm 41 years old and I'll have to inject myself twice a week, but at least I feel good 'cause I have all these other supporting habits.
It's a crazy fucking world out there. And I can see from both sides why it's hard as a consumer of information to be confused and also be infuriated. But I can also see that there's a side of the fitness industry that's also as confused and as infuriated because there's so much dogma that's being [01:14:00] talked about because dogma cells.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh yeah. Yeah. And usually what I've noticed in sort of true subject matter experts is. There are a handful of people who can be, I'd say a true subject matter expert across maybe a couple different fields, but they'll only do that if they're super old. They're not gonna be like 18. And by definition, everybody only has so much time per day.
So you can't be an expert on seven different things and expect to be up to date on it, so I often joke that for trivia contests and all this other stuff like you, unless it's physiology, like you don't want me on your team, I am absolutely horrible at anything else that doesn't involve physiology, death, metal, and kite boarding.
Outside of that I really don't know anything. I'm just a complete idiot, and a lot of that is on purpose
Aram: but at least you know that, that's why I love talking to you because you know exactly what lanes to stay in. And I'm, I've always, I've talked to everybody about.
To me, Mike [01:15:00] T. Nelson is one of the godfathers of this industry that I will always look up to, but there's certain shit that he doesn't even talk about because he knows it's not relevant to the broader conversation.
Yeah. Like
the beautiful part about you, Mike, is you keep your fucking mouth shut unless the right person asks you the right context and you don't share shit that's wildly unhelpful to people.
Like you said, peptides, perfect example. You've used them in certain cases in conjunction with a medical professional with all the evidence needed. I don't see you talking about peptides on your social media rampantly with a fucking coupon. No, just other to say
Dr Mike T Nelson: that, hey, there's one human study on BPC 1 57,
Aram: right. But that's, that to me is net positive because it's saying, Hey, there could be a possibility that this stuff might work. Sure. I'm not promoting it. I'm not selling it to you. I have nothing to make off of this product. So if you wanna individually experiment with this thing, great.
But I'm not co-signing it. I'm not telling you to do it. Yeah. But unfortunately. Most people don't have the integrity to [01:16:00] operate the way that you do and the way that I try to. So most of the time people are gonna say shit without thinking about it and with financial incentive behind it. And that's where I have to now say something like, I don't agree with that.
I don't agree that if you're truly an advocate for a population like the menopausal woman population, that you should be sitting in front of six different supplements with a weighted vest on shining your coupon coat across the screen. Now, if you had that same message and you gave out three or four practical things that a woman can do right now to improve her condition that you had no financial incentive to give out, I'd have more respect for you.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And if you do have a financial incentive for God's sakes, just tell the people you do
Aram: immediately. Yep. I make money off of this product. Yeah. And I think it works.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And then they can decide, for them sells. It doesn't make it good or bad, but I just. Yeah, same as you. I just get highly annoyed when the two things I [01:17:00] see are promotion from something.
They're obviously making a lot of money off that they don't disclose. And then two, when they're faced with new information, that kind of goes against the thing they're trying to sell. Oh, they either double down on it, or what I've seen lately is, oh, I was always for this, like a lot of the keto people back in the day, metabolic flexibility is a little bit more trendy and stuff now, and I've seen more than one of 'em all of a sudden be like, well, I was always talking about metabolic flexibility when I was saying you should really do a ketogenic diet.
I'm like no, you're, you never said that. I, because I watched almost most of your stuff and I never heard that word even come outta your mouth eight years ago. So it's if you, all you have to say is, Hey, there's some new information here. I've changed my mind. Here's what I think now. Cool.
Yep. It's not that hard.
Aram: No. And I think people will trust you more. And I think people will respect, like everybody fucks up. We're human science. Oh yeah. Science. The scientific [01:18:00] method is literally stuff
Dr Mike T Nelson: changes,
Aram: disproving hypotheses like that. Like it, it's saying, I think this, but I'm gonna spend five exam, five experiments on trying to say that this was wrong so that we filter out the right thing, which can change 500 different times in the next 10 years.
But like as far as I'm concerned, and to my knowledge, I don't think anybody's disproved, thermodynamics.
Dr Mike T Nelson: No. And most people, ironically, I've never taken a thermodynamics class like I did a master's in mechanical engineering. My research was in heat transfer. I had to take thermo one, thermo two, heat transfer, conduction heat transfer.
So I get annoyed when people tell me that thermodynamics doesn't work. I'm like you, ah,
Aram: well it's even just like the principles of bioenergetics. I think most coaches, like that's where your typical level one cert for any type of fitness is so woefully behind. There's still people that I know that are in the coaching industry that don't understand bioenergetics and how to [01:19:00] properly account for fuel and exercise and all this other stuff, or what's fuel substrates are being used during what exercise.
Something as simple as that. And I think, like Alyssa Lennick does a really great job of breaking that down and there are so many good resources out there, but unfortunately they're just not as loud as the bullshit. Yeah. And that's why I try to always put out like, Hey, go follow this person.
They know what they're talking about. And again, maybe I have a bias, like maybe I have a bias towards you or towards a list or towards people that spoke at my event. Everybody has a bias, but there's a reason why I put those people on stage because I trust them, because they've proven me time and time again that they're trustworthy until somebody proves me wrong.
And. They say something fucking dumb and they show me evidence that they actually have an ulterior motive. I'm gonna keep promoting people that I think, now I'm not the judge, jury, and executioner of the nutrition fitness industry either. That's Andrew Coates's role. Let him do that. But let him deal with the fucking, with the, and let go take [01:20:00] care of the doctoring of the pictures of bodybuilders.
But I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you that there are people out there that do know what they're doing. There's a lot of really good coaches. There's a lot of great resources. There's great education for coaches, but it's not easy to find because you have to shovel through all the bullshit to get there. And that's why if like guys like you and I can put out that information to other people that are younger than we are.
To streamline their path towards better information. Now they don't have to spend all their, 'cause a lot of times they'll find the wrong person 10 times before they find the right person. By that point, they might be so burnt out and broke that they don't wanna do this job anymore.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And that's also why I do primarily, I mean's I can give you 800 reasons why, but I primarily do a newsletter model is by definition you have to find me.
You have to opt in and if you don't like what I'm saying, I'll probably offend you within the first three emails guaranteed. And then you'll unsubscribe, which is fine, whatever. If whatever you like it, great. Stay around you. Get free content. [01:21:00] Like literally there's no cost to it. If you like some of 'em, great.
If you don't want whatever, it doesn't matter. But then I can communicate directly to people who raise their hand and said, Hey I'm interested and I don't have to worry about an algorithm. I don't have to worry about paid ads. And not that those things are bad. No, it just. It streamlines it. And on my end I could write to four people, thousand people, 10,000, a hundred thousand people.
It takes me the same amount of time, right? So it's a hundred percent scalable on my end. Where as, like one-on-one stuff, it always has a limit. Um, so this way it is much more scalable. So I can do that for wide variety of people. Takes me only the same amount of time too, which is nice.
Aram: And you enjoy it because it's not only, yeah, I like doing it.
It's intellectual property that I think is coming from a good place with a lot of context. People need to have the patience for long form. Yes. Which we know that people on social media don't have like I can see that if I write a 500 plus word email newsletter about some educational [01:22:00] topic, I could see that the open rate is lower.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Sure.
Aram: As opposed to if I wrote like a 200, punch you in the face, here's the thing that gets opened and listen to more. And it's, that's the sad part is like people don't wanna watch a 60 minute YouTube video breakdown of why fat is the substrate of low intensity exercise, but fat being used for exercise is not fat being burned off the body.
Like we've already lost that individual. The person who wants to know what is the fastest way to this thing isn't gonna read your newsletter or my newsletter.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Correct.
Aram: They're gonna go to dickhead with 3 million followers. Who's gonna, who's gonna say, well, if you go to my calorie calculator, it'll tell you the precise number that you need to lose fat at which it doesn't know anything.
So we, you and I can hash this out for weeks and months on end and we'll never find a solution to these problems because we're dealing with. Deep psychological issues with people not wanting to engage in the truth because the truth requires responsibility and consistency and that [01:23:00] shit you and I can't ever change for people.
Dr Mike T Nelson: No. And for a while, when I was earlier in the industry, as we wrap up here, I felt like I needed to change people to air quote, make them listen to me.
Aram: Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And now I'm like, that's a stupid idea. I'm just trying to find the people who want to listen. Yeah. And whatever issues they are gonna short out, or if they don't like me, fine, whatever.
I don't care. And then the people who want to listen, who want to, even if it's pay me $5, pay what you want for a micro lecture, whatever. Like just put some skin in the game. Yep. And shocker I'll help you. Right. If it is like going to a live event, like if there'll be multiple times if you're at a live event, I guarantee almost all the speakers, if they're hanging out.
We'll probably answer your question. And for me, like I'll answer those questions all day at a live event because I know the people paid their money, they showed up, they are not working, they're away from their friends, they're away from their family. They're doing this to get better. So I know [01:24:00] they're already bought in.
Like I will help those people all day. If it's a random dickhead who emails me on, Instagram and I don't know, never associated with them, they get my name wrong. I don't really feel compelled to give them a very good answer. Why? 'cause you haven't demonstrated to me that you're gonna do anything with the info I tell you.
And so I think over the years I've realized that's a better way of segmenting out the people who want help. Like even people who pay for your coaching. Like it's still, in my opinion, way too cheap, but it's still skin in the game that the people who are ready, who are willing to take that next step are willing to pay and to get good advice.
And then they should not listen to anybody else whatsoever and just stop listening to 800 podcasts. It's like I have a coach, I help with grip stuff. And it was funny, like people were like, I never see a post on the grip boards about this or that or what you're doing. Like why is that? And I'm like, 'cause I don't care if I have a question [01:25:00] about how to pick up the inch dumbbell.
I'm gonna call Adam and he is gonna tell me what to do. 'cause he writes my programs shocker. 'cause he can communicate it and he is done the thing I wanna do, like thousands of times. Why would I listen to anybody else when you know what I,
Aram: Because it's just not good enough. There's something else out there that I gotta be missing.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Right. And it's but if that were true, then why did you pay the expert your pain?
Aram: Because they're not following through.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That's it. It's usually, oh, I want this weird reason to justify why I didn't really follow through on the thing. Instead of just telling your coach, Hey, this last week was busy.
I fucked up. I only had protein on these two days. Okay, great. Let's figure out a plan to fix it for this week going forward.
Aram: Yeah, that's, yeah.
Well maybe one of these days I'll get to the Mike T. Nelson level of not giving a fuck about what people think. But I'm getting, now is this just because I'm old?
Well, I'm slightly behind you. I'm 41, so I still got a little bit of time and you some more
Dr Mike T Nelson: there. You got another 10 years.
Aram: Yeah. [01:26:00] So once I'm at that point, whatever, however unhinged I am now will only be worse.
Dr Mike T Nelson: There you go. That's free entertainment for all of us. Exactly. Yeah. So.
Aram: Well, I appreciate it, man.
I always loved talking to you.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, this was great. Thank you so much. And plug your vent again for everyone and your one-on-one, all the stuff you got going on.
Aram: Yeah, if you're a fitness professional of any walk whatsoever I think you should be at the event real Coaches Summit in April of next year, the 26th to the 28th at the Paris Hotel in Vegas.
Real coaches summit.com or on Instagram at Real dot coaches dot Summit. Right now, I think there's still about 10 presale tickets left as of today. Includes all meals, 12 speakers speaking across 12 different subject matters of nutrition, fitness, psychology around food and body image and stuff like that.
So there's definitely relevant and practical education being provided on stage. Mike can attest to that.
Yeah.
And it's just fun. It's just fun to be in a room of people that are just as crazy as [01:27:00] you are because nobody actually understands what the fuck we do for work. No, our parents don't get it.
Our friends don't understand like, what do you mean you teach people how to eat? It's yeah, that's. That's what I do. Like you teach people how to exercise. Yeah. So yeah, we are the crazy people who get to all be together for a couple days to realize that maybe we're not crazy and that we should keep doing what we're doing 'cause we are helping people.
So next year I hope to see as many of you there as possible. So hopefully I can continue running the event and not make myself broke over it, which is the ultimate goal.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I can say that, I was at the honor to be at the first event presenting and was there the second year and it's just super fun.
And you did a good job of taking care of all the meals. It's all in one location. I think hell for both those two things. I think it was the last day I realized I son, I'm a bitch. I've even been outside for two days. You just, which wasn't really a complaint, it's just everything was there.
You had the lunch, you had the dinner, you had the after bar, you had the presentations. And I think that's really nice because a lot of, [01:28:00] as we've talked about this a lot. The pro of going to the events is yes, being able to see the speakers and learn from them and get to meet them and ask questions, but a lot of it's the impromptu discussions you have in the hallway or things that come up over dinner or you're three drinks.
In talking about functional med with someone at the bar, like I was a few times, and telling them that their idea was crazy and then after an hour you realize, oh, that person wasn't so crazy. That was actually a good idea. I was wrong. Yep.
Aram: Yeah, that's the priceless stuff. That's, it's the friendships that you make, it's the collaborations that are born from it.
It's the relationships that you make that you can then call. The amount of phone numbers I have in my phone now that empower me to be able to have resources at my disposal that, world class educators and brains that I have. In my pocket at any moment in time is priceless that a lot of coaches don't have access to because they've never put themselves in those rooms with those people.
And that's what they're missing. And they're not, they're afraid to spend the money 'cause the money sounds like a lot, [01:29:00] but they're not considering the opportunity cost of not being there. And that's what I think like the same way that you would tell a client, Hey, you can't afford not to hire me.
Yeah.
I'm telling you straight out, if you're a fitness professional, you can't afford not to be in this room.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I'll second that, that the amount of people I can call on speed dial now and answer my questions. I would say 95% of them are because I've met them in person in some capacity. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, oh, it's just 'cause who you are in the industry and your education, whatever.
It's no, it's more because I've been going to these events since 2000. Yeah. And like just meeting people in person and getting to know them as a human. Most of the people who go to the events, shocker. They're actually pretty cool. Yeah, they're like, they're more similar to you than you realize.
'cause I think the online impression, you can think, oh, this industry is horrible. I dunno if I wanna hang out with them. But most live events, like I'd say 95% of the people are super cool. And you have way [01:30:00] more in common than what you realize.
Aram: Right. Yeah. Thanks Mike. I appreciate the opportunity as always, man.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yes, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yes sir. We hope to see you soon.
Aram: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Thank you to AAM for coming on the podcast and ranting away. As always, so always love talking to AAM and getting his opinion. And the other nice part is he is coaching people in the real world, which is great. Um, a lot of. Not to pick on the 17-year-old gurus online, but eh, they don't really work with a lot of people.
They don't have much in the background of education or um, experience. So it's always great to talk to someone who's been doing it in the trenches for many, many years and working to make the industry a better place and putting his money where his mouth is, like literally. So check out the Real Coaches [01:31:00] Summit.
Highly recommend you go to it if you can. Like I said, I've presented there before I've attended it. It's amazing. Uh, live events are always a great time just to hang out with people, get some new info. The side conversations, are always amazing too. So go to link below. It's not an affiliate link, um, but I wanted to put them on here as a sponsor to get more people to show up to his event.
And if you do go, please tell 'em I sent you, uh, even though I don't make any money off it, which is totally fine.
And if I offend you, like maybe this, uh, episode offended some people, you can just unsubscribe and that's all right. Uh, anything else? Then I can help. Please let me know. Best way to hit me up is through the newsletter list. Once you're on there, just hit reply. I do my best to reply to everyone on the newsletter.
Uh, I try to on social media, but in, in all honesty, a lot of stuff, unfortunately just due to volume and other thing else gets lost there. So best way to reach me is through the newsletter letter. So [01:32:00] thank you so much for listening. Big thanks to around for coming on here. Thank you as always for listening.
If you can do us a favor. Give us a review, a few stars, whatever you think is appropriate. Uh, it goes a super long way to helping us on the podcast get better distribution make sure the algorithms like us, all that wonderful stuff. So thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I am off to my event here in Reston, Virginia at the Mastermind with my good buddy, coach Cav and everyone else.
So we'll talk to all of you next week. See ya.
A great little actress. Yep. And getting smaller all the time.
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