Red Pill | The Lifestyle Optimization Formula Session #11
Session #11 | Preston Ely
Welcome to your eleventh module of the Red Pill.
All right! Welcome to the Red Pill and we are going to just quickly get into this and continue talking about diet, an aspect of physical freedom.
I just came across a very interesting quote the other day and I forget who said it. Actually, no, it wasn't a quote. It was something a friend of mine passed on to me and it said, "Sometimes freedom doesn't necessarily mean being able to say yes to things. It means having the power to say no."
A lot of people are victims to their appetite and they don't have the power to say no; they're not free to say no. So, we do experience freedom in a positive way when it comes to dieting.
So, let's get right into it. We're going to talk about high protein, low carb, and I'm not going to get into this scientifically mainly because I don't know much science. But I will tell you this, if you want to be healthy, you want to look good, and you want to feel good, just do it.
Just take my word for it. High protein, low carb.
Let me just scroll up a little bit here. As a matter of fact, let me just bring this towards the middle. High protein, low carb. There are two different types of carbs. I'm sure you probably know this, but it never hurts to get this into your brain again.
Sometimes, I get this confused: simple carbs and complex carbs. The basic things you need to know are that simple carbs are bad, complex carbs are good. Some examples of simple carbs would be soda, candy, junk food or anything that's white.
Don't eat it for the most part. White sugar, white flour, anything white, including cocaine. Just don't do it. It's not good for your body.
Actually, before I get into... Well, let's go and finish. We have complex carbs which are good for you; things like whole grains, fruits and vegetables and beans; we'll talk about the whole grains here in a second.
But first of all, when you're having a meal, whatever protein it is, and you should have a protein in every meal, whatever amount of protein it is that you choose to have, chicken, fish, beans, whatever the heck it is –the protein should be about the size of a deck of cards.
I know you're used to having proteins the size of your leg, but no, boy, no, okay? The size of a deck of cards.
What you basically have to start doing is training yourself to eat smaller meals, which is why we're going to talk about how you need to eat 5-6 meals during the day. You are also going to get really, really hungry.
Whatever carbs you decide to eat, should be about the size of your fist. It's a good, easy way to figure out if you're eating the right amount or not.
So, here's the deal. Simple carbs raise your blood sugar levels and basically signal the body to stop burning fat and start storing it. High blood sugar levels are a factor for heart disease. That's not what you want.
What you want is complex carbs and the most popular are whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and beans. Personally, except for my cheat days or my cheat meals or whatever, I don't eat whole grains.
Contrary to public belief, if you look at the government's food pyramid, you need 9 servings of whole grain or 8 servings of whole grains or something absolutely ridiculous. The first things you need to know is whole grains are not necessary. You can do without them.
I choose to get all my carbs from fruits and vegetables, mainly vegetables. And the thing with whole grains is this, you've got your regular grains like white pasta, white rice, white flour-type products, and they're not good because they make you fat, they raise your blood sugar.
Well, whole grains still raise your blood sugar, just not as much. That's why people recommend whole grains. But I recommend no grains at all.
I don't eat potatoes. I don't eat pasta. I don't eat rice. I don't need any of that stuff. And it keeps me skinny. It keeps me feeling good. It keeps me light on my feet.
It’s up to you, but if you're going to have whole grains –size of your fist, that is it. So, that's it for carbs. My recommendation is if you are going to have whole grains for dinner, makes sure that it's early on, like around 6 o'clock, definitely before 8 o'clock at night.
You don't want a bunch of heavy carbs in your body while you sleep, okay?
All right, caffeine. Here's what you want to do with caffeine. First of all, you want to limit it, okay?
Caffeine does three bad things to you. And remember, knowledge is power. It does three bad things to you.
It increases your cortisol levels.
You have it down here; it increases cortisol levels, which is basically... Your body naturally produces cortisol, which basically it's that juice that shoots through your body that puts you in fight or flight mode, okay?
But, if there’s too much of it being produced in your body, it has very negative effects:
- It destroys bone and muscle
- It increases your appetite
- It makes weight loss harder
- Increases risk of cancer
- It weakens your immune system
So, the cortisol deal is pretty much the worse thing about caffeine.
But the other thing about caffeine is that it dehydrates your brain. So, especially if you have problems focusing, or if you have ADD, high levels of caffeine are really not a good idea because you need your brain fluid and operating at optimal ideal levels, okay?
One to two cups of coffee a day, okay. Personally, Monday through Friday, and sometimes on the weekends, I start my days with one cup of coffee, okay? And I enjoy it.
So, remember, the whole thing with everything, is moderation. Don't go killing yourselves. If you drink eight cups of coffee a day, it's going to be pretty difficult to cut down to one cup of coffee in the morning.
I always recommend, wherever you're at in something and then wherever you want to be at, start your changes incrementally, okay? So, go one week from eight cups to seven cups. Go the next week from seven cups to six cups.
Wean yourself off of things gradually and then add beneficial things into your life, gradually, as well. Don't go from never working out to working out six days a week. Go from never working out to working out one day a week. And then just gradually train your body to get used to these things.
I don't ever drink soda, ever and I don't recommend you doing it either. Don't ever take any diet pills at all. You don't need them.
If you do all these other things that I'm going to tell you, you will lose so much weight, it is ridiculous. I'm at the point now where I can put on weight and get rid of weight at will. If I wanted to lose fifteen pounds in one week, I can do it. So, stick with me.
For caffeine, drink green tea. Just switching to green tea will cause weight loss. Just by making that switch, from coffee to green tea, you'd probably lose ten pounds just from that alone, okay?
People think coffee makes them skinny when in all actuality, the opposite is true. Coffee actually makes you fat.
So, drink green tea and this is the only place that you want to get your tea from: Teavana.
Remember this about tea; you don't want the bags. You don't want tea in bags. You know what I'm talking about? What you want is loose leaf tea. You want loose leaf tea and preferably from China.
Teavana is definitely the way to go. Don't get your tea from the grocery store. Don't even get it from an organic store. That stuff that you get, just the regular, like the Lipton tea bag, that stuff is, literally, the stuff that's freaking swept off the floor that doesn't get to go into the good tea, which is the loose leaf tea, okay?
So, definitely, get your tea from Teavana.
This guy Dr. Chaseler, he observes that the caffeine craving is, and I'm just going to quote him here, "Is a complete Catch-22."
The other bad things about caffeine are that it dehydrates your brain; it causes irritation, sensitivity and anxiety. So, if you have any mental disorders or emotional instability, test reducing or eliminating caffeine and see what happens. That would do a lot towards this.
The Catch-22 is when caffeine is used to promote wakefulness, wake-fulness, to compensate for a lack of sleep. But we use caffeine to make up for our sleep deficit that is largely the result of caffeine. So, caffeine causes insomnia.
And you definitely do not want to be drinking any caffeine after like 3:00 to 5:00 PM, whatever. Experiment and see what works for your body. And so, keep in mind, one or two cups of coffee, fine.
Would it be better for you to have absolutely no coffee? Yes, it would, but you have to do what's right for you.
Let me just see here. So, here’s my personal caffeine consumption, this is my personal regimen, okay?
No soda, ever. I have one iced coffee in the morning, which I would be better off without, to be honest with you. Sometimes, I go through seasons with absolutely no coffee whatsoever. And it's interesting to note that during those seasons, I realized that I don't need it. So, that's kind of a weird thing there.
And I have one cup of green tea sometime after lunch. So, that's caffeine, just try to limit it. You know, caffeine is the most widely abused drug in the United States. And it is a drug, it's a stimulant; it kind of makes you antsy and then it only gives you energy for like an hour or two, so try to limit it.
Now let's talk about water; your body is made up of anywhere from 50 to 80 percent water, and that's depending on who you talk to. It's constantly losing this water through urination and sweat; every system in your body depends on water and your job is to replace that lost agua with the purest agua possible.
And what you need to do is to start thinking of your body as a machine. I personally would not dare put regular gasoline in my 7th Series BMW, and I would never dare put regular oil in it, it gets only the very best or it doesn't run well, right? I value my car.
So the real question is how much do you value your body? You have to live in it your whole life; you don't get to trade it in.
How much do you appreciate it? How much do you appreciate your body; how much do you respect yourself? I'm telling you right now, the amount of exercise you do, the amount of, the level of your diet, will tell me how much you think about yourself. It really will.
So, water –you need to drink water that is as pH balanced as possible, and these are the top three waters that are pH balanced: There is this water on that website I gave you the other day; I think it was phmiracleliving.com or whatever it was that I gave you in the last module.
He sells a brand of purified water that I'm going to start experimenting with, but for now I drink Penta and Fiji and the reports show that Evian water is even more pH balanced than those two, so a good idea would be to possibly rotate those throughout.
I never, and I mean never, ever, ever, ever drink tap water. I don't want to scare you or anything but the government puts stuff in that water, stuff like chlorine, and stuff like fluoride. There was even a report that one of our leaders, I'm not going to mention who, was going to put things in our water that would sterilize men to reduce the world's population.
Wake up, okay? Things like this are real, and just to go down the rabbit trail real quick, the world's population is the biggest problem right now; that's why China limits you to one baby. It's the world's number one biggest problem and I'm telling you, Google it.
Google "sterilized men water," or put it in YouTube or something; do not drink tap water, ever. And really you’ve got to try to get these brands of water right here because all the rest of the waters are total crap; Dasani, Aquafina, generic bottled waters –you might as well just drink tap water, okay, I'm just saying.
So if you don't have enough water in your body, you are going to experience fatigue. If you don't have energy during the day, one of the biggest things you can do is drink more water.
You are going to have more difficulty thinking and focusing. You’ve got to keep your brain lubricated; your brain needs water. If you have a weak immune system, you're going to get kidney stones and obesity.
Whereas, if you have a water balance you are going to have less of a chance of kidney stones, you are going to have a less chance for, well you are going to have your joints lubricated, it prevents colds and flu, promotes clear thinking, weight loss, etc.
So, how much water should you be drinking? There’s a little bit of a controversy when it comes to that. You've heard about the eight by eight rule – eight, eight ounce glasses per day?
Stick to that if you want, that's probably about the amount that I drink, but I have recently been talking to some health and wellness people who say, "No, that's not what you want to do. You don't want to force water into your body."
And then there is this other line of thinking which is to drink when you are thirsty and basically, the reason is if you have too much water, you're damaging your kidneys, it hurts your kidneys, and your kidneys are very important.
So, you know, this is one of those things where you have some people on one side saying drink as much water as possible. I just read an article the other day about a couple who died from drinking too much water, they were doing a radio station stunt; the contest was like who could drink the most water without urinating in two hours or something like that.
So they drank something like two gallons of water within an hour period of time, a two hour period of time and they died. Your body can't process that much water. So, drink when you're thirsty, at least do that, at least drink when you're thirsty.
The amount of water... Oh and the other thing that you can do just to regulate whether you’re drinking enough water or not? I'm drinking a pint of water right now, as a matter of fact.
Pay attention to your urine.
If your urine is clear, you have enough water in your body. If it's real yellow, if it's like real dark and colorful, you do not have enough water and you need to drink more water. So that's an easy way to tell the right levels right there.
And the amount of water you drink, really, is going to depend on you. It's going to depend on your personal diet and exercise. If you eat plenty of water-rich foods like fruits and vegetables, then you're going to need less water.
If you don't sweat very much, you'll need less water. And then the converse is true, if you sweat a lot, if you exercise a lot, you’ve got to drink a lot of water and rehydrate. If you don't eat a lot of watery fruits then you'll need to drink more water.
So, that's that. Drink pH-balanced water and drink plenty of it.
Let's talk about greens. This is one of the most important things that you could do. Dark, leafy, green vegetables are pretty much the most important and healthiest foods that you could possibly put into your body.
The problem is they're also the most tasteless and un-fun to eat. But as time goes on, and you get rid of all the processed foods and all the junk food, you learn to appreciate eating healthy, and actually, it starts to taste pretty good. You just happen to have your body trained to eat the wrong stuff.
So, leafy, green vegetables are the most nutrient-dense food that alkalizes your body. Green, leafy vegetables, dark green leafy vegetables like spinach and what-not, they're one of the best things you can to do to pH-balance your body. It alkalizes your body.
It prevents sickness, gives you energy. My personal green regimen is this; this is what I personally do: I start off every day with a scoop of Green Vibrance. And if you are not taking Green Vibrance, I’ve said it a million times, you hate your life.
Green Vibrance is a little expensive, I'll admit it. So, go get that money. Go get the money.
In the morning, I take a shot of wheatgrass. Wheatgrass has the vitamins and minerals equal to like two pounds of vegetables. Wheatgrass is one of the number one… Doctors recommend wheatgrass when you get cancer. That's how powerful this stuff is.