948 Play to Your Natural Advantages

“When you really learn to appreciate fresh foods, things can taste so much better than you’re used to.”I talked about my weight loss experience a while back with my friend Abel James on his podcast Fat-Burning Man and in this episode on The School of Greatness he’s coming on as my guest to talk about his experiences in getting healthy. Abel has a pretty awesome story himself about his transition from overworked and unhealthy consultant to incredibly fit and healthy entrepreneur. Abel is an awesome guy and I got re-inspired to eat better during our conversation. I chose a clip for this 5 Minute Friday episode where he explains why every body is different and it pays to play to your natural advantages when optimizing your health. If you enjoyed this episode, show notes and more at http://www.lewishowes.com/948 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  We've got my buddy Abel James on the show. And for those that don't know who Abel is, he's a widely successful podcaster who's got the show called The Fat Burning Man, which I've been on as well and shared my story about how I lost 28 pounds in 28 days with eliminating two simple things.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  What you want to do really is find out what you can get away with, you know? If you're like play to your natural advantages. So for me, I can run marathons, but I'm a lot better at short distances, right? Just like I carry more muscle more easily. So it makes more sense for me to do a couple of squats and put on a bunch of muscle than like, try to run 30 miles a day and try to get as skinny as possible, you know? So like, kind of do this, do a similar thing with your diet. I can't, I'm allergic to, or at least I have problems with olives, which sucks. But that just means that I can eat every other food, you know what I mean? So like, find those things that you can't get away with, take those out. So for a lot of people, that is dairy.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  But like my brother, for instance, always had a problem with, with the dairy that we would get at home, the milk, the yogurt, the whatever. And it wasn't until he worked on his organic farm, when he was like fresh out of college, that he started eating fermented raw dairy, like cheeses that they made and yogurts. And also like the, even the heavy cream and the milk, he could drink it without any of the problems that he had from being lactose intolerant, getting pasteurized milk from the store. So there's something to be said for trying out like the real stuff, the best, what dairy really should be, which is not.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  You know, basically, what I described, that horror film of the industrial farms is not where you want your dairy to come from, because that stuff's straight up poison, you know?

• 2:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, man, it's tough because I love dairy. But sometimes I feel like it affects me and other times I feel like it doesn't. So maybe it just depends on the source I'm getting it from.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:21Lewis Howes?

  Like you said, and making sure it's not from like the gas station, you know?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Cheese whiz is not the same.

• 2:30Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  You know, like a fine brie from your local farm. It's just, it's a shame. And that's one of the other things I try to outline in the book is that somewhere along the line, we went from having, you know, if anyone's seen The Hobbit, all the foods that are like locked up in his little treasure chest of the best foods on earth, the cheeses, the cured meats and all that, all of those delicious, like, natural foods that actually were from farms have been replaced by crap that has the same name. So like, you go out and get cheese, you're not really sure what you're getting unless you look really hard for the right stuff.

• 3:06Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. You basically give the secret to fat loss in one sentence in the book, and you say, "Stay away from sugar and processed grains, especially in the morning." Now, what do you mean by, is this all sugar? Is this no fruit as well? Or what does that mean?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Fruit is something that is essentially nature's candy, and a lot of animals, including humans back in the day, would use fruit, the enormous amount of it that usually came

• 3:35Speaker 01

  in like the fall as a way to fatten up before winter, when it got cold. And also, things like apples will keep for a long time, which, you know, the industry has started to use against us.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  But basically... Fruit is something that should be seen as a treat or something that you use to flavor. Like a Snickers bar. Like a Snickers bar that's straight from a garden, right? Like, and once you get your palate back, essentially, most of us have blasted our palates with industrial salts and chemical flavorings and stuff like that. So if you're addicted to Diet Coke, for instance, your palate might not be able to notice right now the difference between, you know, a regular strawberry and one that's super fresh and really good. But I can, I can say that after doing this for a few years and really becoming a foodie in a lot of ways,

• 4:33Speaker 01

  once you get away from that, that, basically, the processed food that's a napalm bomb for your palate, you really wanna, you're encouraged to stick to, like, a fresh apple tastes so much better to me than a bite of a cake that might be served at, you know, someone's office party or someone's birthday. It's, it's like, when you really learn to appreciate fresh foods, things can taste so much better than you're used to. And so you get satisfied on things that you don't expect.