Well, hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Kyo savage.com. Today for the podcast, I figured I would put my audio of my 2023 Keto Con presentation here for y'all to listen to. This presentation was all about turning a passion into a lifestyle. So it's pretty much just the audio format of my presentation that I hope y'all take something of value from. I got a little emotional with this presentation. This was not designed to just be about macro nutrients or body composition changes.
I was talking about the pillars of my life that I find to be significant. I talked about parenting some families, some spirituality, just some some life stuff and turning a passion into a lifestyle as I have with the ketogenic diets and all that I've pursued through this
endeavor. So thoroughly enjoyed and appreciate the opportunity and honor to speak on the Keto Con Rank Mainstage and I hope that you take something from this presentation so that further ado sit back, relax, enjoy my 2023 Keto Con presentation. I am so honored to introduce to you Robert Sykes. Thank you. Little bit about me. I'm a lifetime natural competitive bodybuilder. I'm a nutrition coach. I'm a podcast. I'm an entrepreneur.
We've got Keto Brick Live, Savage Apparel, Keto Savage, all different types of business. I'm a husband, I'm a father and I'm a lover of life since the the topic idea of turning a passion into a lifestyle here. So I'm going to actually talk, start this conversation with regenerative agriculture. So I wasn't going to make any slides.
And then I had Will Harris. Who is the founder, CEO and brains behind white oak pastures on my podcast a few few weeks back And that hadn't gone live yet, but I was talking to him and y'all probably off me with white oak pastures. They're kind of leading the charge on regenerative
agriculture. And I was interviewing him and like three times during the interview his great granddaughter or granddaughter came into the frame with like a new hand drawn image that she gave him and said I love my grandpa or something like that. That's so sweet. And he was telling me about his form and how it's come to be.
He's a fourth generation cattle farmer and how they've changed things that went from the commodity industrialized beef protocol to more of the regenerative agriculture model. And he was telling me these three are the these three pillars are what is important with regenerative agriculture. Allow animals the right to express their instinct, behavior, restart, the cycle of nature to produce abundance like the water cycle, the microbial cycle, all those different
cycles. And then re enrich rural and local communities. So their little town in Georgia is like not a very big town. It's a small country rural town and it's all employing the people that work there and they're pouring into this community and I'm like that is pretty pretty good. I can get behind that notion of like this being a circular cycle in life in which everything benefits the next generation and it just becoming.
This thing that keeps growing and like seeing his granddaughter there, drawing him pictures, like she's going to hopefully be the next air of that cattle farm at some point and just keeps getting better and better through generation to generation. And I was contrasting that with the, you know, this is a picture of the traditional commodity beef system which is not near as enriching. Like it's very much so a commodity system. You've got, you know, cows that are bred, slaughtered, they go
through the system. It's not. Turning any notion towards the welfare of the animals, there's just no thought to the longevity of it, you know, pouring into something for the long haul. And I was thinking like this probably what a cow with his model looks like versus that of the traditional commodity beef system. You know, obviously one kind of evokes more emotion of happiness than the other. So clearly that industrialized
system isn't really optimal. Like, which of those cows would you rather be if you were to be a cow? The one on the left. The one on the right. And I'm like, surely us humans can recognize that one is superior over the other. We don't want to do things of that nature because that's just not optimal. And I got to thinking, well, what looks like that commodity beef system outside of the realm of, you know, agriculture and farming? And then it hit me, you know.
We kind of bring that on to our own self with what we do, how our systems are in place. You got people staring at their phones nonstop. How many y'all look on your phones right now? I'm looking, you know, I see on your phone, you got your camera chip, not your phone. That's okay. And people are just there. They're not involved. They're not engaged. They're not present with their kids. They're not present with their their, their, their family.
And it's like that's not any different than these cows. They're just being led to slaughter through this systematized approach that is far, far from optimal. And I got to thinking, you know, if we're so passionate about pursuing this regenerative agriculture because of all the value that that brings for these animals, better quality nutrition, better, better environments for their livelihood, better impact on the environment itself, you know, like there's going to be less, less runoff.
Less fertilizer, less negative impact. Why are we doing all these things in a similar notion in our own lives? And this graphic here evokes in my mind that commodity system taking place in our own, in our own realms as a species. You know, like we're born, We go through all this systematized, commoditized protocol that is is taking far more away than it is adding value to. And then you die like you're born.
You grow up, You go to school, you go to college, you get a degree, you go find a career path. You stay there, you work the system, you save up for retirement, Then you retire and then you die. You know that that to me sounds a lot more like the cow that was just going from the feed lot position than the one roaming the pastures and eating grass. And I realized that in life and
y'all probably have this. In your own life, you know, people that have this, it seems like everybody are struggling with three main things, their health. Their relationships and their finances. Like, very few people I know have all three of those things dialed in. Like normally you'll see people that are making tons of money, but they're way overweight and they've sacrificed their health, they've got diabetes and all their family and friends have left them.
Or you've got people that are just salt to the earth, have like great relationships, but they're living on a shoestring budget and they haven't got that aspect dial them. Or you've got people that are incredibly healthy, you know, like the pinnacle of health. But. You know, one of those other two things is not in check. So very few people seem to have all three of these components dialed in well. But life tells you that. Commodity system tells you, hey, look, you just got to balance it
all. You got to balance those components of life. That's just what you're going to have to do. But I believe balance is bullshit, you know? And I'm going to put that on a tshirt. So, like, plan on that. But I don't think it. I don't think it works. Like it just doesn't work. People are always talking about balance, and I just don't think that is the model that we should strive for. It's proven time and time again.
I mean, how many of y'all know a person that has all three of those things dialed in perfectly? I'd be one to bet that more of y'all know those that don't than any of y'all that know those that do. So it doesn't work as a system. And I introduced this topic last year with my talk. It's called tensegrity. So tensional integrity, basically the definition being a structural principle based on a system of components under compression inside a network of continuous tension.
OK, so it's not so much a concept of balance as it is. All these things are under immense pressure and they flex. They work in unison to create a more rigid sound structure, but it's all because of that tension. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. Let me kind of define and describe and build my life out with this notion of tensegrity as opposed to bounce. And then this used to be a really cool interactive graph, but when I exported it, it changed it into this.
And what this basically shows is you've got 5 main pillars. You've got relationships, health, wealth, self development and spirituality. And they flux throughout time. Like each of those could be five years, for instance. And sometimes they're higher, sometimes they're lower. They're not a balancing act amongst all of those components in which you're trying to keep everything even keeled and perfectly in balancing in unison.
And the reason I think this model makes more sense is because when you look at your own life. You can probably figure out where your time is spent, where your resources are allocated, and those those five pillars probably consume the majority of your time and efforts. You know, your your relationships, all that good stuff. So I'm thinking, all right, I'm gonna talk a little bit about my life here, but as I go through this, I don't want y'all to just have me up here talking about my
own life. Like I want y'all to dissect to your own life and figure out how this could be applicable to you, because it is absolutely applicable to us all. So I've got some pictures here. You know, I've got my son Rigel, my wife Crystal, my family, and then Keto Con here. I don't know what year that was, 2020 something, I guess, Or 2019, I don't know. Danny didn't make it this year. So I thought, well, I'm going to pay homage to my bro Danny.
I'm gonna put him on there. He's kind of out angling me in that picture. Like, his arms look bigger in that picture, but they're not really bigger than mine. All right, So keep that in mind. Let him know I said that too. But yeah, like the relationships component is so important. And we all hear this all the time. Like when you're on your deathbed, no one's gonna care how much money you got in the bank or what's your, you know, what's in your front yard, what's in your garage.
They care about the relationships. When you're dying, you want, you want the people that you love to be close to you. So I put a lot of emphasis on the relationship aspect and I think, you know, that goes beyond just family and friends, but like these conferences, these communities. Like so much of what is enriched, my life has been born out of Keto Con specifically.
Like they invited me to come speak at Keto Con 2017 when they first launched Keto Con after I'd gone pro with bodybuilding. And like that was the first moment in my life when I felt like I was truly doing what I was set out to do. Like I was interacting with people, talking about nutrition. They've come to me with questions. I was able to offer value like y'all. Pour into me and ways y'all don't even realize and you enrich my life in ways you can't even begin to fathom.
So for that, I owe you all my everything. But apart from the relationships, we got health. OK, so this is what I normally talk about in these conferences. We talk about macros, micros, body composition, and I have periods of my life where, you know, if we're looking at this five pillar tinsegrity model, there are times when my health gets a lot more of my time and resources. And like, right now, I'm in a competition prep. I started to prep 3 weeks ago. I'm going to be in prep for the
next 25 to 30 weeks. I'm eating out of a Tupperware. Everybody's eating BBQ right now. I'm eating out of a Tupperware. All right. Don't feel sorry for me, though. I this is, I brought this on myself. But there are times in my life where I doubled down on that aspect of my life. I go to the freaking extreme when I'm in a prep. Like, I don't sleep as much. I eat less and less. I train more and more. I add cardio in like.
The degree that I take things with competition prep is not sustainable and it's not sustainable for optimal health. But the fulfillment that I get when I go all in on that component of my bodybuilding endeavors provides so much value that, you know, excels past the competition day itself. So all the fulfillment that I get comes from making that a primary focus as opposed to trying to balance it all out in unison I think. That could likely be the case
for all of y'all. So maybe you have a health goal that you're wanting to do. You want to lose somebody fats? You want to build some muscle. Maybe some of these other areas of your life need to take a back burner so that you can focus on those things and get there. Because once you've once you've gotten there. You don't ever really get there so that there is no such thing as maintenance. You're either getting better or you're getting worse in life.
But once you've reached that threshold, that tier, it's easier to maintain that tier while then bringing other components of your life back in and you know, adding those back into a higher degree of significance. But for me right now, a competition prep, I'm really upping the demand that I'm placing on that pillar in my life. And that could be the case for all of y'all, depending on which pillar we're looking at.
Also, when it comes to sustainability, I'm just going to pick a put a little blurb in here about cycling through competition, prep endeavors, fat loss phases, building phases. Reverse dieting is something I've talked about quite a bit, but it doesn't really get a lot of air time because people don't like to talk about reverse dieting, but people that are here at a conference like this are often times trying to lose
body fat. And for that reason, they're oftentimes cutting calories, cutting out carbs, doing carnivore, doing keto, and they eat less and less and less with the intention of losing body fan. The problem I see happening is more often than not these people fail to reverse diets and increase that intake back up. There is a yin Yang approach here. You can't spend indefinite amount of time in a cutting
phase. With lower and lower calories, just as you wouldn't opt operate optimally if you're continually eating too much, so there needs to be a cyclical nature in that to spend time in a cutting phase to optimize fat loss. Spend time in a building phase to optimize muscle building and doing so up regulate your metabolic rates, your hormonal health and all that will make the next time you transition into a cut all the more effective. So you need to have a yin Yang approach here to.
Your body composition goals have some time in surplus, some time in a deficit, And then when it comes to balancing things out with nutrition, like I'm, I'm strict keto, I've been keto, you know, without deviation for eight years. So, like, you can certainly maintain that degree of consistency and strictness, but that doesn't mean you have to track everything to the T throughout that entire time, like when I'm gonna prep like I am right now.
I'm eating out of the temple where I'm tracking everything to the gram. I've got everything dialed in to the nth degree. When I'm in a building phase, I'm just simply making sure I'm eating at a surplus and eating enough protein and training hard. If you check those boxes, you're able to make the process more sustainable and still see continue to forward progress. So let's talk about wealth. All right. This is what a lot of people struggle with. I'm still struggling with it. All right.
So I started the business. Way back in 2016, I quit Corporate America. I was working after I graduated college and followed that commodity system. I went and worked as a train master on the railroad and went to Corporate America and was making a lot of money for some of my age at the time. But it wasn't fulfilling to me. I wasn't passionate about it. I wasn't changing lives like I am now. I was just going in punch the
clock check in the box. And then I quit all of that, went into $250,000 in credit card debt and other forms of debt and realized that probably wasn't sustainable or optimal either. So I started making businesses. Businesses that I felt I could tie in my passions to actually make a difference in life. Hence the Keto brick, the Keto Savage, the apparel like all these different realms of my life for things that I feel like I can add value.
And all of y'all have this in your own realm as well. And there's times in my life where I have to really push the needle here and other things suffer. When we were starting out, I could, I can give you all some horror stories when we were starting out. I mean, Crystal and I lived in a warehouse for three years while we were building the keto brick business. Like if you look at that 10 segrity model, that's putting a
lot of tension. In the wealth department there, because I was doing things that aren't really sustainable or certainly not optimum, but I needed to do those things to get to the next level and make forward momentum, forward progress. And because of that, other things had to take aback from. But because I did that and I wasn't trying to balance everything in unison, I was able to actually gain that momentum. And I still don't figure this,
that y'all. I'm trying to get things dialed in and get things better, improve efficiencies, and it's never. Over there is no finish line with anything in life. You just keep getting better and better and better and hopefully keep making a bigger, bigger impact. All right now, self development. This is something that I probably suffer with the most. So this is everything that falls into your interests outside of those other pillars. And for me, I love hunting.
I love procuring my own venison, my own meat. And knowing that I harvested it, I processed it, I eat it like I just like that whole life cycle process when it comes to, you know, giving my body nutrition. And I love hunting, but that's the thing that often times takes the most push back on that the most when everything else is in a stressed state because I just don't have the time to do it. But I love it. Same thing with, like woodworking. I love woodworking Crystal's being.
Hollering at me to get a garden started for a long time now I keep pushing that back to the back burner but I said OK I'm going to make a planter box. So I built that beautiful cedar planter box and as I was making it I'm like alright so I'm pretty much a carnivore diet guy and I ate keto bricks and meat and here I am making a planter box that's going to grow vegetables. So I haven't figured that one out yet, but at least the box looks good.
I also love sailing. So my whole family got into sailing several years back. They bought that little boat. My brother and I bought that from them. My folks bought that little boat. We brought it from them. And then my brother and I learned to sail. My parents still sail. My parents are actually. They retired last year and they're going to sail around the entire world. Next year or later this year, starting starting this year, To
me that's awesome. Like that's them doubling down on this self development component of their life, something they're passionate about, something they want to do to see the world and I value them. I feel like we all have those things in our life that are not really. Our relationship necessarily. They're not really our career path. They're not really our health oriented thing but they are the things that we love to do. And I think it's in healthy and important to make time for those.
But again for me that often times take the lowest priority, you know level and now spirituality. I don't want to stand up here and preach to y'all because this is the one I definitely have not figured out yet. Truth be told I grew up my my dad's an evolutionary biologist. All right, so. When many people grew up learning about Noah's Ark, I grew up learning about how whales evolved and have a little bitty toes and how they came
from walking on the ground. So like mine was a little bit different and I haven't figured that all out yet because I'm a very analytical type person. I like diving into the research, like diving into the studies and a lot of stuff. All, I mean all this stuff happened long before our time.
So there's not really any empirical scientific test that you can do via the scientific method to really hone things in and when you look at. The carnivore diet and our prehistoric beings and how we evolved from eating primarily, you know, woolly mammoths and whatnot like that all makes a lot of sense to me. But that kind of conflicts with some of the stuff that I've read about in different spiritual circles. So I have not figured this out
yet. But what I do know is that from an evolutionary perspective that I can see how that explains a lot, but it doesn't really explain love and when I had my son. 11 months ago that was a whole another story. So Crystal and I are very passionate about the ketogenic diet and lifestyle and she read. We read Deep Nutrition by Kate Shanahan. Definitely recommend that book, but it was all about how you have an epigenetic effect to your. Your, your kids.
Their kids, Basically 3 generations on the line. So we read that book and several other books, had several guests on the podcast. I was learning all about nutrition. I'm like, OK, we got our nutrition dialed in. We're going to have Rigel's nutrition dialed in. We're going to have like the most optimal, superhuman baby savage that's ever walked the earth. That's that's what we did. We were going to do the home birth thing. We're going to do like, the most minimally invasive, no drugs, no
nothing. And then we were two weeks behind having him. Like in Arkansas we're from, you can have a home birth up to 42 weeks. Beyond that, you're not illegally allowed to have a home birth. Like the midwife can't be there. She's held liable or something like them. So 42 weeks rolls up and Chris and I go to the hospital because we can't have a home birth at that point. So that's pretty heartbreaking in and of itself. That's kind of what we had pictured for our story.
And we get to the hospital and they give her some drugs, minimal drugs, trying to get things moving along that didn't work. And then 12 hours goes by and we have healthy heart rates with the Rigel and everything's going good. But they find out that he has a face presentation. So basically he can't be born vaginally with the style of face presentation that he was in. So one way you can, one way you can't his way. You couldn't like they were feeling around there and they
felt the nose and and eyes. And so as we're getting all this news, we hear things and we're getting like more and more just distraught. Anxiety is getting higher and higher. We're stressed and we're like, okay, what kind of, what kind of measures are going to have to be taken here? And she wasn't dialing at all. And they basically said that we had to do a rushed emergency C-section at that point. And y'all, many of y'all have
kids. When something like that happens and you have a plan in your mind as to how that's going to go, you have like these sensations come over you and you. You don't love anything like you love them. And I haven't seen him at this point, but I can hear his heart rate. I imagine what he's going to be like and we have to go in for this emergency surgery. He's Chris is on the table and they don't have any screens. I don't want screen. I'm too tough. I'm savage. I don't need screens, so I'm
sitting there holding her hand. They're cutting my wife open and I don't know what's going to happen. I'm sitting here praying about maybe I'm going to not have a son, maybe I'm not not going to have a wife here in a little bit. But then they cut her open and he screams, you know, I hear him scream and he's alive. And then she gets stitched back up and she's good and she's alive. So now I've got a son who I would literally take a bullet for, and a wife who I do the
same thing for. And that's all love. And I don't really know a lot in life, but I know there's an emotion called love, and I can't explain it through anything else except there being some kind of spiritual component there. So you have to have faith in something. I'm putting my faith in love, so there's that. And when you spend enough time in these five pillars, you know whatever those five pillars are for you, they may be a totally
different pillar. But you figure out what your purpose is, how you can help others. You figure out what your potential is. You start figuring out what you can be capable of, what your true potential is, and you figure out what it is that you love doing, what your passion is. And for me, I love business. I love the relationships that I've built as a result of this community.
I love my health and trying every single day to make the body that I have and the bodies that y'all have better every single day because of the the information that we're gleaming from this research and the experiments that we're conducting and just how we're choosing to live with this lifestyle. I love my little hobbies and
things like that. I love figuring out and diving deeper into the spirituality aspect and what that means for me. So as you dive into those things and as you really give yourself permission to not be balanced, I mean to really, really show you the hell with the whole balance thing. Y'all like that's any moment in my life that I've been proud of. Any moment in my life where I can look back on and be like, wow, I did something great.
Just then those all came in periods where the farthest thing from my life was balanced. Like when I look at my competition preps that I've, you know, done. I wasn't balanced at all. When I look at the relationship I have with Crystal, none of that has been balanced. Like nothing that has been great or worth telling of in my life has come during a period of extreme balance that just does not exist. And that's not a bad thing. So don't like, give yourself permission to operate on the
fringe extremes. Just make sure you have a healthy level of extremes in your life that all complement one another. I try to make my life very symbiotic in nature. Everything that I focus on, everything that I pour my time into, my efforts into, and all benefits the whole and the the whole being one of those five pillars, those 5 pillars in tandem. So definitely give yourself permission to operate on those extreme fringes at times and not try and just, you know, be
status quo. Play it safe like it's hell with planet safe, like that's no fun. So the world owes you nothing. All right? The world was here first. I saw that quote and I'm like that makes sense. You know, I look at this jocko willing mentality of extreme ownership. Like we live in an era in which everybody wants something for nothing and I just don't subscribe to that mentality. Like the world owes you nothing. Nobody, nobody owes you anything.
Like you are here, You are blessed to be here. Like when I look at Rigel's birth story thinking that he was on the fringe of not even being here, it's like, man, the fact that you're here, like what are the chances of that? Like that is that is amazing. So congratulations for being born all y'all. So yeah, take take that into consideration, but don't only just know that the world owes you nothing. Take that, take that opportunity that you are here and double down that you owe the world
everything. Like you are here for a small moment in time, just a blip in history as your life's existence, and then you're going to be fertilizing daffodil someday. So take this opportunity and pour into it. Kind of like how I started this talk with that whole model of regenerative agriculture. And these cows are out there eating grass. They're happy. They're cycling in different types of species. They're not using fertilizer. Everything builds upon the the whole unit.
And then those cows die and they make way for the next cows. And those cows are happy too. You know, like life is not supposed to be this born school, college, career, retirement, death, you know, linear path. Like that's just not fulfilling. Give the world your all. Be grateful that you're here, and double down the things that you truly believe in. I could literally drop dead on this stage right now. Hopefully I don't. But I could and I can legitimately be at peace with my life.
I could be at peace with who I am, who I've become, and the impact that I've made. Now, granted, I've got a lot more that I want to do. But when you live your life on those extreme fringes and you pour yourself into everything, whether it's your your relationships, your career path, your spirituality, your health, your wealth, all that stuff. Like if you do so and it's impacting the whole because you owe the world everything, then you're at peace with whatever
comes. And that peace, I think that's what we're all striving for. So that is pretty much my spiel on integrity and the five pillars. And honest, that's pretty much all I have. So that's me. I do have 12 minutes for questions that I do like questions. So by all means bring some questions my way. We can kind of dive into the the nuance of nutrition stuff now if y'all like, but definitely keep the cut questions coming. Let's say we got one right there.
Question. You got to explain the undieting thing a little bit. That one's a new concept. What are you talking about as far as not worrying? Just not worrying about that or alright, what's going on? Reverse dining. So let's kind of do a deep dive in this. So reverse dining is, as it sounds, the reverse of dining. So people come to me and they say I want to build muscle and loose fat like that sounds great. Everybody wants to do that thing, you know, build muscle, loose fat.
But they kind of compete for one another. So in order to optimally build muscle, you need to be consuming a higher caloric intake than you're expending. And I know there's a whole calories in, calories out, you know discussion, and that's another day's discussion. But in order to optimally add tissue to your frame in the form of lean tissue muscle mass, you need to be consuming more fuel. You need to be able to give your building box the fuel necessary
to add that lean tissue. That is going to somewhat compete for the desire to lose body fat, because in that realm you need to be consuming less so your body can burn through additional body fat. So they kind of compete for another. They definitely compete for another. Yes, you can do them, but you're not going to do either optimally.
So I recommend spending more time than not in a caloric surplus, taking in an increase of fuel intake, both ample protein and ample fat, and then training hard progressive overloading your training and then recovering. That's going to allow your body to add more tissue, and the more lean tissue you have, the higher function your metabolic weight is going to be anyways, which is going to make your next fat loss
phase more efficient. So to give you some some context here, I started my prep 3 weeks ago. I'm going to be doing a long prep. I'm going to be prepping for like 6 months. So over the next six months I'm gonna be gradually dropping my intake overall. That down regulates my metabolic rate, that down regulates my hormone function. After that cut is over, that prep is over.
I'm going to spend the next four months gradually increasing my intake back to a healthy maintenance level and then from there jump into a slight surplus to build more tissue. I'm gonna spend more like 3 times more time in that building phase than the cutting phase. And I see so many people doing the exact opposite, that they spend more time than not in a cutting phase than they do in a building phase. And that's what wrecks your metabolism.
I see so many appliance males, females, all different ages come to me and they have hormonal issues, they have satiety issues. Leptin and grillin are all jacked up and that is oftentimes simply result of them dieting more often than not. So you have to have the yin Yang there. So a good rule of thumb is to spend three times more time in a building phase at a surplus than in a deficit. Interesting. Thank you. Yep. Hello. Thank you so much for your talk.
It was very, very inspiring. My question is, for I'm a teacher. So for those of us who feel like we're just another number in the system, how do you break out of that when, like, my passion is teaching, but sometimes I feel like I'm just a cog in the machine like you were talking about. Yeah. How do you, how do you break out of that and and showcase your passion like you're talking about? So, Yup. Familiar with Jordan Peterson, maybe? You know Jordan Peterson.
OK, so Jordan Peterson is a professor, He's a Canadian professor of psychology, I believe. And he was doing just that. He was teaching. A lot of people don't like Jordan. Peter something again to whether you like him or don't. Like I do. So I'm cool with that. OK, so but he was a teacher doing just what you're describing. And then he started putting off his content on YouTube and then becoming, you know, a guest on podcast. And then he noticed that just
started taking off. So he was teaching, but he was able to teach to a much broader audience. That opened all kinds of new teaching opportunities for him. So if you're a teacher, whether you're teaching like what? What do you teach? Art. Art at what? Level can kindergarten to 6th grade. Yeah, if I was. I mean, I'm not an artist at all, but if I was an artist,
that. Disagree, but OK, I'd be putting a whole bunch of that content, you know, videotape it, put it for free up on YouTube, like some of these kids YouTube channels. Like I hopefully someday will be as as as prominent as some of these little kids YouTube channels. But they're killing it. It's because the parents want valuable content that they feel
safe letting their kids watch. So if there was like a channel dedicated to, you know, young adolescent artwork, you know, that would be, that would be where I would go with it for sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much. You bet. Do you find that since you've been keto when you're on a bulking or growing phase that you tend to put on less body fat than before you were keto when you were bulking? Yes. So I didn't put it up here and
only have this picture on here. But when I was bulking before with the carbohydrate based approach, I got to 230 pounds at my heaviest and I'm only 5. I say 5/8. My wife says 5, seven. I'm only 5-7 and 1/2 so I at 2 and 30 pounds is not a good look. And that was with me eating 6000 calories from a carbohydrate prominent diet. Now I'll eat just as many calories but I don't ever really exceed 180 hundred £85 in my building face. I'm much, much leaner.
Much, much more effortlessly so. Yeah, 100% think that you don't put on near as much junk weight when you keep the carbs out of the equation. And there's been some argument as to whether or not you're sacrificing some lean building potential without the carbohydrates. But The thing is a lot of that lean mass is coming from the glycogen, you know and the excess water that comes with eating more carbohydrates. So you that kind of skews
things. And honestly, your ability to preserve lean mass when you transition to a cut is better with keto in my opinion. So the amount of muscle lost in a dining phase with keto is minimized with keto. So in that realm, I think it kind of evens out in the wash. So yeah, you you, they're able to maintain a linear physique in the building phase with Keto more effortlessly. So I think it's a huge one in that regard.
And honestly, at my goal with this cut, I'm competing two or five competitions and I've competed before, I've gotten lean before. My goal with this prep is to be the leanest man on planet Earth, like 100%, no questions asked, Full stop, leanest man alive for that point in time. And I wouldn't have the conference to say that that's possible for me if I was not doing the ketogenic diet.
Thank you. Yep. So going back to the reverse dieting, do you have a idea of what you would generally recommend for the length of time? Are we talking about a weeks and then going off, you know, or is it months? So great question. I'm not a fan of the week's
protocol. Like I don't like anything that's very short term cuz that oftentimes you're not really gonna benefit from it. So like if you've been dieting for far too long and you do like a, you know reverse that for a week and you push the couch for a week or two and then you go back into a cut, then that's pretty much disordered eating
right there. Like you are going from a, you know binge purge Yolo not Yolo, not style of dieting which is just not great yo-yo not Yolo. So that that's not good actually this kind of Yolo so but that's not good. So I would recommend significantly more time like I typically tell my clients that have been chronically under that a bare minimum of six months of reverse dining is going to be
necessary. But honestly, more than that is better because the more time you spend in that increase, the more opportunity you have to build more muscle, which is going to make your cutting phase that much better when you do transition to that cut. So if you are reverse dieting, if you're eating that way for six months. That's not eating like shit. It's just, Oh yeah, yeah, it's quality, quality food. Like I'm eating the same thing in my building phase as I am in my cutting phase.
The only thing that changes is the quantity of those foods. I'm eating all the same high quality foods, just simply more of it. To give your body a surplus of that nutrition I as long as you need to eat my personal 3000 calories so I can eat 3000 calories and my weight will stay stable. When I'm in a surplus, I'll keep it as slight surplus. So between 32 and 3500 calories is all that I need to do to push it and build muscle but not put
on unnecessary body fat. When I go through this cut, I'm going to gradually taper from that 3000 down to about 17 or 1800, but that's going to be a very finite period of time at that low intake and I'm going to have ketogenic caloric refeeds in that window of time as well. So that kind of makes those lower calories more sustainable and then I start up regulating the intake from there. But it's going to be a very short period of time at that incredibly low intake.
So the people that are constantly eating sub 1000 calories like Rigel, my 11 month old son, he eats more than 1000 calories a day. So for anybody in here that's a full grown adult to be eating less than 1000 calories, like that's just not healthy. And you your your cut face typically lasts 2 months. My cut face was gonna be this one's gonna be about six months usually four to six months is
the the sweet spot there? Because if you diet more slowly, you'll preserve more lean mass and you won't have to, like if you have to diet really aggressively, like I lost £80 and 12 weeks before, don't recommend that for anybody. I lost a ton of muscle in that process. So I had undone a lot of the the good things that I had done in
building that tissue. So diet much more slowly, preserve as much lean mass as possible and then that's going to help you from a metabolic standpoint going forward. Thank you. Yep. Hello. Howdy, I bought your book yesterday and it's amazing. You know you. You've told me so much in the 1st 20 pages. Excuse me, I really recommend it to anybody. I've I've been hearing I've only been keto 5 weeks and I started it for weight loss. I only had about 20 to lose.
But us? I've come so far more more than that, with disease healing and dropped off meds that I never thought. I would be able to do, but my question is I'm 74 years old. I I'm in the elderly category. That's how they describe people like me. I am not elderly, however I'm in the age group that does chair exercises, you know? When I'm not here at sea level, I have to use oxygen. I live in Colorado Springs because I lost alone. Now I want to do weight
training. Where should I start so that they don't treat me like I'm my age and can't build muscle, which I'm sure I can. I don't know where to go. You can absolutely build muscle and you're not elderly. All right, so you can. What I would recommend doing is, first of all, make sure you're you're not in a deficit. Like you don't want to be in a deficit. So figure out what you or you do. The the DEXA scans out there are great, but a good rule of thumb.
For people is to simply gets. Especially as you age, do your protein requirements do increase that? You want to make sure you're eating enough fat to fuel the energy demands, but a simple 1 gram of protein per pound of lean mass is a pretty safe recommendation for the vast majority of people. So make sure you're consuming that much protein at least, and then titrate your progressive titrate your training up in some form of fashion.
So if it's just chair exercises now, in a couple months maybe it's using resistance bands. So you can get some some cheap resistance bands from Amazon and start using those resistance bands to target each individual muscle group in your body and stimulate the muscle there. Oh, I've got bands and I've one of those things on the door. Yeah, yeah, it looks like I'm gonna put somebody in bondage in my living room, but. But you know, at the Y, I'm in the silver sneakers category, so
I'm beyond that. I just, you know, I'd love to have a coach, but they look at my age and they want to treat me like I'm too fragile to lift a weight. Hey, if your coaches are treating me like they're you're too fragile, then get a different coach. You know, like, find coaches that are willing to push you because they should be pushing you. You know, like, there's no reason you can't be doing barbell squats and leg presses and deadlifts.
Like those are all good quality, compound fundamental movements that everybody can benefit from. Like obviously you want to minimize injury, but if you're doing those compound movements with the correct form and technique, you shouldn't have injury. And The thing is like muscle is, it's like a quintessential if you don't use it, you lose it scenario. So the best way to preserve lean tissue is to demand your body have that lean tissue.
So pushing the envelope with how your training is going to keep you younger and younger, it's the fountain of youth truly is. And I believe that we're all going to live along a lot longer than our predecessors, you know, So I'm planning on being a keto. Con. Well, after I'm 90, hey. Well, I look forward to seeing you here then. I believe I'm out of time. So see, I didn't pay her to talk about my book, but she did mention it. So that said, I've got a whole bunch of books.
I'm gonna be at my booth signing those books if y'all want some books. So by all means, come check them out. Happy to have y'all swing by the booth, so grateful to have y'all here. Appreciate y'all giving me your time. You are my oxygen. I can't thank y'all enough. So safe travels to all y'all.