TRANSCRIPT
Dani:
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins, Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Dani I’m Giacomo and this is episode 186.
Giacomo:
Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode because we had a nice little content break. We were able to recharge a little bit. Hope that you enjoyed the last two episodes because it’s been really cool to put some of our athletes on the big strong plant ball team out there.
Giacomo:, Dani:
And honestly, as much as I know them, they’re my friends at this point, there are still a lot of things that I didn’t know like, yeah, and we are also going to have some client interviews.
Dani:
So quite a few of you have requested more client interviews. So I think that’s something that we’re going to be doing more of. And hopefully soon I’ll be able to interview Rachel. She’s the gal that I went down to Georgia to see her compete. And that was really, really awesome to be able to be there for the last show of our season.
And she had such an incredible transformation, like looking forward to that I could think of another few clients that I think would be kind of fun people to interview. The bummer is I hate, I hate is a strong word. I just, I have a hard time connecting with Zoom interviews. Like, do you have a hard time with that at all?
Giacomo:
Honestly, sometimes they are absolutely incredible. Other times you feel like you’re far away from the person, I feel like it helps, depending on like how on you are. It’s a little bit of a luck of the draw. Kind of like these two, sometimes we’re having the best conversations in which flow and other times it’s a little bit of a stretch. I think the same thing with Zoom, but I think it helps when someone’s used to being interviewed virtually as well.
Dani:
Yeah, definitely. Anyway, so we took the kids to the beach this past weekend, which will be a month ago from when this came out.
Giacomo:
We do with Desmond. The kid has zero fear.
Dani:
Desmond has zero fear. Like he needs to have a little bit more fear.
Giacomo:
It’s like you literally have to be like the adult.
Giacomo:, Dani:
It’s like, dude, be scared, like just to teach him some level of vigil because he is the type that would just throw himself into the ocean and be like, well, a few weeks before we went to the beach, I took him to a pool and it was one of those pools that the shallowest part was 3 ft and then it kind of slants all the way down to 9 ft or whatever.
Dani:
So I got in and I was like, hey, guys, see this line, see this imaginary line right here. We don’t go past that line. Got it because they’re short. He’s five and for like 30 seconds, I had to hop out of the pool to go grab my sunglasses and my hat and we were the only ones in the pool really. And I am not less than 30 seconds and I turn around and I just see his hairs sticking out of the water, just his little hairs sticking out and he’s like bobbing up and down.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I was like, you’ve got to be shitting me and I had to run and jump in and grab him and he’s giggling after the fact because he was not, he was scared, he was scared because that’s what I thought his reflex would have been just knowing him.
Dani:
No, no, no. And I was not happy either because, you know, there’s a degree, I’m curious like there’s a degree of if a kid is if I can see that they’re doing something where they’re going to get hurt. I’m like, if I told them not to do this and they’re doing it and they’re going to get hurt. How hurt are they going to get? If it’s like a little bit, I’m going to let them learn, I’m going to let them learn right there.
But this, this was not that you don’t, you don’t really mess around with the water. And then I thought for sure at the ocean he would remember his near drowning experience a mere two weeks prior. No, just marching, just marching right into the waves. So, yeah, but it was a super fun day pizza.
Giacomo:
You got some ice cream. I was not there for that. Probably because I’m on a cut.
Dani:
Ice cream was a bribe. The ice cream was a bribe. Them ice cream.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I did, I did, did it work?
Dani:
Yes, I was going to let them go back in the water one more time after lunch. But I knew any time you say to kids like all right kids it’s time to go. They’re just like no, just five and they don’t listen and then it’s a scene. So I was like, if you guys listen the first time I asked you to get out of the water, maybe we’ll stop for ice cream on the drive home.
Giacomo:
I kind of evil. I feel like I would have been like, yes, like I’m not doing it. I’m that kind of evil.
Dani:
No, you do not. And we’ve had this conversation. You do not promise a kid something and not follow through. It might seem like nothing to you. They remember that shit for the rest of their lives and they will remember it was you who was the liar? Ok. So anyway, what else?
Giacomo:
Dani.
Dani:
Oh, I could talk about all sorts of other stuff going on. We got Ben and Alice, our coaches both pretty deep in contest prep that’s been happening. you know, by the time this Airs crossfit we’ll have already competed.
Giacomo:
I got a hypothetical for you. Just a little fun. What do you think would happen if vegan proteins?
Giacomo:, Dani:
If all four of us bankruptcy, bankruptcy we’d go under.
Dani:
So I don’t even, you don’t even have to finish the sentence. I know what you’re saying. If all four of us prepped at the same time, we would have amazing photos for a company that no longer exists because I don’t think we could, I don’t think we could keep it going.
Giacomo:
What would be the dynamic between the four of us?
Dani:
Well, luckily, I think three out of four of us are very nice people.
Giacomo:
I feel attacked. I mean, for our relationship, I’m trying to protect you from the public. You’re not that mean Dani. You’re fine. Everybody loves you.
Dani:
Well, it’s been so long since I contest prep. Nobody can remember what I’m like when I’m prepping, you can go back and listen to some of those. I just, I don’t think we get a lot accomplished, but anyway, we’re not going to do that. So sure. Actually, I’m not sure the dang of the carrots or whatever that, that could happen some day the poll.
Giacomo:
Do you want to see all of the vegan protein coaches prepping at once.
Dani:
Let’s reframe that and ask our clients, hey, clients, do you want to continue getting results or not?
Giacomo:
Your results are ours? I think, you know the answer to this question.
Dani:
Oh God. All right. So this is, this is a topic we put on our list like last year. and I haven’t really thought about it a whole lot since we put it on the list. So we’ll see kind of where this conversation ends up taking us. But what we’re talking about today is data collection. It sounds fascinating. Right. Tell me more. you know, in the age of so many apps that track so many things and Apple watches and fitbits and the aura ring and so many th the Apple, the iphone now asking you to like
track your moods, like there’s so many ways that people can collect data on themselves. And I guess my question is, you know, is it a blessing or a curse? That’s, that’s my big question. Obviously shocking to exactly no one. The answer is going to be like, well, the boons, but I just wanna, I wanna have that discussion, I guess.
Giacomo:
Hm. I don’t even know where to begin this conversation.
Dani:
Clearly. He gave this a lot of thought before we started talking.
Giacomo:
I’m always full of thought. My first thought is I want to know what you track consistently and what you’ve tracked and what you regret tracking being, like, I wish I didn’t spend all. Well, I’m asking too many questions one thing at a time. What are you currently tracking, Dani? Go?
Dani:
Oh. my sleep. Definitely my sleep. I’m actually tracking my HR V, my heart rate variability. That’s kind
of a new one for me in the last year or so. To be tracking, tracking my weight, like, kind of inconsistently. It’s not every day but it’s most days tracking my macros again most days. I mean, I, I’ve always tracked my training, obviously, I don’t think I’m ever gonna stop doing that.
I think it would be detrimental to not track that one. Yeah, I guess, I guess that’s the stuff that I’m steps. I track my steps. That’s it. I think so. I think that’s all I Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes, it’s a gratitude journal but it’s not like, it’s not like I go back and I’m not going to do anything with it other than just read it and be happy.
Giacomo:
So this is more about data mining and collection specifically. That’s where you want to go with it.
Dani:
So, a couple of other things that I do actually track every day, I track a daily win every day. I track something that I could have done better and I do actually review that every week and then every month. So that’s everything. I mean, that actually sounds like a lot now that I say it out loud.
Giacomo:
Not particularly, I don’t think so. I thought it was more than that.
Dani:
Honestly, I track my Duolingo streak.
Giacomo:
Let’s see. Where am I at? See, it’s a little skewed here because I just started to cut so naturally. And I think this is kind of a nice segue rather than me just being like, well, now it’s my turn. I’m going to say the thing. I think it depends on what you’re doing, how much you track and how much you collect is going to be. In my opinion, it’s gonna have a lot to do with what you’re doing.
And I feel like that it depends. Response that you go back to a lot holds true because you have to learn how to let go of certain things and you have to learn to get back to certain things. Right. So, like, think of when we’re like, hey, you should flexible diet or you should be intuitively eating but like, not just completely intuitive eating and being mindful, like tracking to some degree.
And then there are other times where you should be straight up tracking, but it’s like, I if you’re trying to get to a certain goal, even though, like, you’re very familiar with knowing how many grams of weight a large apple is, for example, or how many calories you’re probably eating because you’re just so
familiar with how you eat and, and all that, if you have a aggressive goal in mind, you, you’re gonna cross a line where eventually if you’re not tracking and weighing and
measuring you’re not going to get to your goal. And you could be a little, how do I say, prideful about it? A little arrogant about it. A little lazy about it and a little bit kind of like, well, you know, this is an unhealthy thing to do. I don’t want to be methodical, meticulous and, and you might be right. But are you getting in your own way? Because if you have a very aggressive goal, you got to bite the bullet and do something for a temporary period of time, even though you might have
like worry or fear that whatever it was a past thing that you did that messed with you. There are certain goals that require you to go back and, and get to that and just accept that it does come with a set of consequences. You know, that’s kind of like where my head’s at with stuff it can get tricky because some clients are just like, no, I can’t do this. This is a trigger for me. This didn’t go, well, this is an unhealthy thing to do, blah, blah, blah.
Dani:
Well, when does it become an unhealthy thing to do? I think if you miss a day of something of tracking something, your apple watch dies and you don’t get your steps for that day. If you suddenly say, well, my watch is dead anyway. I guess I’ll just sit around and do nothing like that happens. That happens to people a lot.
So they, for whatever reason they can’t track something. So then they just, like, don’t do it at all because it’s almost like if it wasn’t tracked it didn’t happen. Wh, like, I, I think whenever that I’m always, I always think that’s very weird personally. What do you think?
Giacomo:
I think if you have a type, a kind of personality or you feel not necessarily rewarded, but you feel in control when you track the variables and you know that you need to consistently track the variables to get the desired outcome and it doesn’t happen and you can’t roll with it or you have the fear that like you might fear off. I could understand where you’re coming from but to actually coming from anyone but to actually throw in the towel and say I a lot, don’t you think it happens a lot?
Yeah, of course, it’s a, it’s a struggle. I, I’m sympathizing with being in that kind of position, but also being like, well, it is a mindset thing and it would make sense to try to not get stuck in and be in your own way.
Dani:
Yeah, if you’re the type of person who went out for brunch and you don’t think brunch was like trackable. So you don’t track brunch, but then you just like f off for your lunch and your snacks and your dinner, simply because brunch wasn’t trackable. That’s, I don’t, I just don’t think that’s a very helpful way to be that the tracking is just like a buy.
It should just be a by product of what you’re doing in your day to day life. It shouldn’t be the fact that you have to plug it in at the end of the day is the only reason that you’re actually doing the stuff.
Giacomo:
Correct. And honestly, I find being a type, a person by nature, I find that when I get very structured and disciplined and regimented and I do something the same way that it’s worse than being bored. I start to become so neurotic about it that I actually start feeling a little off. Like I have to, I don’t wanna say self sabotage, but I, I have to like, I have to do something a little bit different because it’s just so much structure.
Dani:
All right. Tell me more. I need to, let’s analyze this. What are you saying? I don’t think I follow.
Giacomo:
You don’t follow.
Dani:
I don’t think so.
Giacomo:
Say that I’m meal prepping with containers in a certain way every single day. And I’m weighing and measuring, I’m having the same foods and I do it for like 10 days in a row at some point. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is robotic. I’m legit engineering. Everything I do with no emotion and my feelings are actually starting to mess with me. I need to do something a little bit different because I’m starting to drive myself crazy.
I’m starting to feel like I’m in a s a hamster wheel. I’m doing everything exact, in the same exact way and doesn’t exactly feel good. Put it that way. So I liken that to like other things when it comes to tracking, for example, like, I don’t know, maybe logging your food once a week and having the same meals every week other than switching to logging your food every day, the snap blah, blah, blah.
Like I feel like when I do things very, very consistent and buy the books for a repeated amount of time repetitiously for a length of time, I eventually get my own way because I get bored or I just feel like I am just nonstop doing the same thing over and over again. It’s kind of like maddening personally does that makes sense.
Dani:
Not really, I’m not, I, I hear what you’re saying, but I still don’t feel like I’m like, really followed when you do the same thing over and over again, you get sick of it is that I just, that’s the way to simplify it.
Giacomo:
Yes. Do the same thing over and over again.
Giacomo:, Dani:
You get sick of it, blah, blah, blah, and a revelation.
Dani:
Everybody.
Giacomo:
Thanks. Thank you for that. I will.
Dani:
Oh gosh, go on. Ok.
Giacomo:, Dani:
What are, what are some strange things that you think you track strange things.
Dani:
I didn’t mention you track your moods.
Giacomo:
That’s not strange though.
Dani:
It’s strange, but go ahead.
Giacomo:
They have mood journals all the time. Mine just so happens to be in an app. I haven’t really, I do it.
Dani:
Why do you do it?
Giacomo:
Well, I feel like it helps make me more aware of my moods and what impacts my moods and how that changes over time. And I guess my hope is that eventually I can look at it and kind of have a bird’s eye view of a period of time, a length of time if I want to look back to a certain day, like how things affect me over time and what my general mood is on average. That’s what, that’s my hope is. I can just look at that one day.
Dani:
I am always really fascinated at what people track and why. Like I have some clients, they have the same journal. I have that commit 30. I love that journal so much and some of them track stress like every day at the end of the day, they rate their stress on a scale of 1 to 10. Some of them track not necessarily how many hours of sleep they got, but like did you get in bed when you said you were going to get in bed or did you do your stretching that day?
Like I I think that tracking these things can be really, really helpful in terms of habit building. But would you do the habit if you weren’t checking a box at the end of the day? And I don’t mean because you forgot, which is a good reason I think to track stuff yourself because if you think you’re going to just forget. Yeah, write that shit down 100%. But if you’re only doing it because you have to check it off. No, it’s not necessarily bad.
I’m of the mindset, do whatever you have to do to do whatever you have to do. But, you know, can you see yourself tracking all of these things for the rest of your life? Of course not. So, what is the ultimate goal like to get to a place where you more or less do the things you need to do to either get to or stay at your goal long term without having to put so much effort into thinking about it every day. Right.
Giacomo:
More or less.
Dani:
Yeah. Some things that I think I will always track always, I will always track my workouts. And it’s funny because that’s actually something that I think a lot of people don’t track is their workouts. Interesting. So, I mean, so many people when they come to us, they’re, they might be working out regularly and that’s better than not working out, but they’re kind of winging it when they go into the gym. They’re, they’re kind of auto regulating without the, real skill of how to
properly auto regulate yet. Meaning they’re not writing down how, how much weight they’re doing, how many reps they’re doing, how many sets they’re doing, how close to failure they got so that they can then look back at that next week to determine what they ought to be doing this week. Am I keeping you up? Am I keeping you awake?
Giacomo:
Oh, no, I’m deep in thought about all the different ways to analyze training in case you’re curious.
Dani:
So that is something for the rest of my life.
Giacomo:, Dani:
As long as I lift weights, I will always keep track of that to make sure I’m moving in the right direction or at least very, at least not moving in the wrong direction surprises me that a lot of people don’t track training because like you, I think if nothing else it pushes you to train harder, why wouldn’t you want to train with more intense and train harder?
Dani:
People think they’re training harder.
Giacomo:, Dani:
How if it always feels hard, then they think they trained hard to me that just sounds like you enjoy training.
Giacomo:
It doesn’t, it doesn’t mean that you are training harder. You’re just going in and enjoying it because you’re like, oh, I’m gonna come in here and I’m gonna push because I love training. That feels good.
But are you actually pushing for more reps? Are you increasing the weight?
Dani:
I mean, I guess the other thing is like, I don’t care how good at lifting you are or how long you’ve been lifting. It’s not possible for you to remember what you did last week. Like you can’t, you, you might be able to remember like, oh, I had APR on this and I know I did this much weight for this many reps and it was APR ok.
Giacomo:, Dani:
What about the next exercise milestones though?
Giacomo:
Are fun when you have the desire to reward yourself for being consistent? I love doing stuff like that. Part of my reason for tracking is that and sometimes I wind up letting go of it because I realize like I’m just trying to count things to feel good about counting how consistently I’m doing something. So some apps I have run that on their own. In other words, like how many years have you been training in a row? For example, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera, but like milestones
like that, but they feel it feels good to have that stuff collected. But sometimes I say to myself, well to really like count everything and feel rewarded. Maybe some of these things I I are worth letting go of like how many days in a row I’ve meditated, for example, like I tracked there for a couple of years and I’m like, this is too much work.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I’m putting time, too much work to meditate or too much work to track, too much work to track.
Giacomo:
I could be using my, my time could be better well spent. And I think that’s an argument here to construct. It’s like if the act of tracking is taking up time and there’s no limit in sight to how much you can track and how consistently you can track for the rest of your life. At what point you start to evaluate and say, is this worth my time? Could I be doing something else with my time and trust that I am in routine?
Dani:
So, ok. Yes, just very, very quickly touch on what I just said again. If you can’t remember what you did
last week in your training, you need to track what you’re doing. Sorry, you jumped ahead and I wasn’t quite finished with that yet. But, ok, so we just talked about some of the reasons why tracking might, I don’t want to say it might not be good.
It’s just, it might be unnecessary, it might be busy work. That’s the best way to put it like it might just be busy work. And we’ve talked about how busy work is a good way to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing the hard work when really you’re just doing the window dressing. So, you know, but all of that said, generally speaking, I come down pro tracking. Yeah, even though we talked about all the reasons why it can kind of be a bummer.
I think that much like flexible dieting, the ultimate goal should probably be, to eventually be able to move away from having to track everything all the time. But for the vast majority of people, they are not even in, they, they’re so not on that level yet. They have no idea how much they’re sleeping. They have no idea how much water they’re drinking or protein they’re getting or weight they’re lifting.
Giacomo:
Well tracking is the ironclad way to make sure that whatever you feel and whatever you think you’re doing isn’t what actually is because you don’t know that for a fact until you actually 100% have your head wrapped around it by looking at, like you said, like some sort of sleep tracker, for example. Right? Take me for instance, I know that I fall asleep between nine and 930.
I know that I wake up consistently at six o’clock. I know I’m getting an eight hours of sleep every day. Now, I know I can easily fall into a different pattern of old, especially during a cut where I’m going to sleep right around the same time. And I’m waking up between 3 to 5. Now, I’m gonna blur the lines between waking up at six and waking up at, at four over a course of a period of time.
And I’m gonna say myself how much sleep I, I actually getting, I could do some sort of math, simple math in my head, but to actually know how much I’m sleeping. The answer is No, I do not because my pattern has changed and I, I play out several patterns with my sleep hygiene. So, to your point, even someone like me who has focused on being a master and an expert on knowing myself, I can still fall into a trap of, not of thinking I’m doing better than I actually am or thinking.
I have a firm grasp on how much I’m sleeping because I am not tracking in this hypothetical scenario. Well, I guess it’s not a hypothetical scenario because I’m not tracking my sleep. So, there you go. Ok. Yeah, I mean, not tracking comes with a set of risks when your patterns change, put it that way and nobody in a routine. I’m sorry. But I don’t care like how high performing I don’t care how evolved you have become with who you are and what you do.
I don’t care if you’re like, you’re a pro expert, whatever at some point or another, several different patterns are going to play out, you know, bad ones, good ones, different kinds of ones in your routines and when they change, if you’re not tracking you’re not going to know what you’re doing.
Dani:
Yeah. Even something stuff that is completely out of our control, daylight savings time and the switching of that messes people up pretty badly while winters in general. Certainly the further north you are like we are, I mean, that does a number on people’s all kinds of habits, not just their sleep, all kinds of, how much are you? Like, how many steps are you getting, if it’s suddenly icy outside and you’re not getting outside, your steps could cut down by 60 or 70% do you know?
So, if you’re trying to lose weight and all of a sudden you’ve been making progress, progress, progress and all of a sudden you’re not anymore and you’re like, well, my body just gave up or, or maybe you’re suddenly burning 500 fewer calories per day because you’re not going outside at all anymore. And you can flip that for my folks down south when it’s super, super hot in the summer.
You know, a lot of times we think our bodies are these like huge mysteries and I’ve always been a fan of kind of treating yourself like your own little science experiment where like, you know, there’s that saying you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So measuring the metrics in areas that you hope to change is like step one. You know, you don’t make a budget without knowing what your income is and what your bills are and et cetera, et cetera, like you have to have those numbers, you
have to know what your spending has looked like in order to change it in a positive direction. And your body is very similar with different metrics, some easier to track, some harder to track.
Giacomo:
So let’s look at the arc over here of like the beginning of your working on yourself with tracking to like, hm, where, whatever. So, here’s how I kind of see the, the, here’s how I see it go in the beginning. You are committed, you’re tracking everything, it’s all calculated. Right. So you pretty much know what you’re doing, then you get to a point where you sort of like half tracking stuff.
Right. Because you’re deciding what to track and not to track, right. But you, and you’re like, I can still sort of trust myself to do some things. Then you get to a point where you’re like, I know that I don’t need to track everything. So I’m going to do some things just because I know that I’m in routine. But then you realize that perhaps you’re erring on the side of just thinking that, you know, better and you can keep, you can manage
everything and then you come and you course correct and you get back to a place where you’re like, wait a minute, let me do some audits here. Let me not be lazy. Let me not think.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I know better than because I know what I typically do when you’ve been very good at something for a long time.
Dani:
It’s sometimes hard to admit yourself to yourself that you have let something slip. Maybe you didn’t
even notice it was happening. So, yeah, those audits and we’ve talked about it with moving from flexible dieting to a more intuitive style of eating how occasional audits can be game changing. I think, back to a couple of years ago, I thought that I was eating like 2200 calories a day and then I logged a couple of days and it was like closer to 15 and I was like, what is going on?
So then I had to, ok, we’re going to pull out the old scale and start doing this again for a little bit to just like, get back to where I wanted to be. I knew where I needed to be. And, you know, I’m thinking back to when I very first got into fitness, like, sound like we’re going to sound so old right now.
But back in my day, you, well, I’m sure some listeners here, like, back in their days, like food didn’t even have calorie labels on it. You know, I’m serious. Don’t laugh. It wasn’t that long ago nowadays.
Giacomo:
You have like a men in black wine and you could just throw over something. It’s like this is the exact everything watch.
Dani:
Yeah, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not being facetious. I don’t remember the year, but it was not that long ago that food labels with calories had to be put on it. All right.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I’m gonna look it up in between the next thing being a kid and my mom looking at food labels. Unless I’m just making, you’re not that old, but I’m older than you.
Giacomo:
What are you talking about? I’m not talking about me.
Dani:
I’m talking about some of our listeners. Anyway, back when I first got into fitness, there was very little that you actually could track easily. So I kept a food journal but it was in a notebook and I had to look stuff up on the internet to see, you know, what, what the calorie count and the protein count on stuff was, that was one thing that I tracked.
The other thing that I tracked was basically my workouts. And how much cardio I did in like that was it. That was all I tracked for years. I didn’t track my sleep. But I remember because I worked at the bar at the time. This was before you and I even met. This was probably like 2005 or 2006. I believe one of the first wearable devices came out that wasn’t a heart rate monitor.
I forget what the name of it was, but it was a band you wore on your arm and it actually kind of looked like this microphone, this little square and it was there and it had little metal bits on the inside and it would track your calories, one of those at some point at one point or another.
Giacomo:, Dani:
What I’m thinking about, I’m thinking maybe this was very pre you.
Dani:
And my work thought I was insane. Everybody at my job thought I was absolutely insane. And they, I mean, they already thought I was insane. I was the vegan that had to go to the gym every day. But then they were like, are you kidding me? What are you like the bionic woman? Yes. Little did we know that, you know what was coming down the pipeline at us in terms of wearable devices?
I bet all of those people have wearable devices. Now, who’s the bionic person now? Anyway, I just think it’s interesting how we’re, you know, talking about tracking and how tracking has become for some people like a borderline obsession. And I think about how 20 years ago, like you kind of couldn’t track stuff that obsessively, you know, some people would literally just write down what they ate, they wouldn’t put a count on it or anything.
It was just a food journal that listed the foods that they had. So, I don’t know, I just think it’s interesting how much stuff has changed. Now. We got people not only tracking how many hours they’re in bed, right? Because I’ve learned that in order for me to get eight hours of sleep, I have to be in bed for like nine or 9.5 hours.
Giacomo:
It came to me, I was thinking about before. I’m like, this would be good for this. So, you know how you were mentioning to me there’s a whole group of people that are obsessed with living forever.
Dani:
The bio hackers. Right.
Giacomo:
And a client of mine put me on to one of, I’m put lumping him in this group. He’s sort of this eccentric millionaire selling premium kits of all kinds of things to live forever. And his premise is that he’s the world’s greatest expire science experiment. At least that’s how I’m picturing what he thinks of himself. And he’s obsessed with trying to figure out the age of all of his insides separately. So he wants to know the age of his kidney.
Dani:
He wants to not just biological age of him.
Giacomo:
No, he wants to take, he believes that you could take every different part of your body, every organ and quantify its age based on how healthy you are. And like he’s literally hacking himself to bits, tracking meticulously creating all of these systems if you will for literally picking apart every thing about him and then
quantifying how healthy it is in terms of how long it can live on its own in isolation. So like there is a limit here to what you can do mechanistically. And I think this person, right?
Giacomo:, Dani:
And he literally has a product that I forget the name of you say he’s a client of yours.
Giacomo:
No, a client of mine went down a rabbit hole.
Dani:
Oh Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. If you go on youtube and search some of these bio hackers, there’s a guy. This is insane. This is like black mirror level psychotic. OK. This is a guy who’s trying to live forever. Maybe we’re talking about the same guy. I don’t know, he gets blood transfusions from his son so he can have like younger blood. I know like you literally made a clone of yourself so that you can watch taking blood his organs.
Giacomo:
I don’t know, man, we’re getting some weird science right now. I have all kinds of ideas though.
Dani:
That’s the thing.
Giacomo:, Dani:
It’s not these people have more money than God and stupid things. Imagine if they use their powers for good, stupid stupid things.
Giacomo:
This is what happens when you have too much money and time on your hands and not a care in the world. You do dumb things like this.
Dani:
And anyway, it’s interesting. I mean, it’s, it’s fascinating.
Giacomo:, Dani:
It’s more of a fascinating like watch about human psychology until someone starts spending $1000 a month on this because they’re sold on some cockamamie idea which people are doing stuff like that. It’s crazy and that’s where it gets a little annoying and we can get salty and it’s like, you know, the simplest things you can do to, we have the episode on Biohacking.
Dani:
The simplest shit you can do to bio hack yourself and live longer is like eat more whole plant foods, exercise your body every day, get sunshine, get sleep, lower your stress.
Giacomo:
We’ll get all the listens, all the watches, we’ll help all the people, everyone wants that.
Giacomo:, Dani:
Hey, we’re just going to say to eat healthy and to sleep well and, and getting protein and left like, so I got some news for you here.
Dani:
Ok?
Giacomo:
Are you ready for this label thing? You were looking up?
Dani:
So let’s go back to the 19 sixties. In 1966 the USDA mandated that a list of ingredients have to be on food. 1966 you had to list ingredients. Ok? In 1973 the Supreme Court said that any food that was boasting a health benefit like being low fat or heart healthy or whatever, just those, just those foods that were claiming to be
healthy had to list out, nutrition facts and of which there were only a few, only those, do you know when all foods in the United States had to have a nutrition label, I guess wrong.
Giacomo:
1972.
Dani:
Well, I just said 1973 for that. So you’re extra wrong. no, 1994 1994.
Giacomo:
So you’re telling me 93 you could buy something and it was not mandated.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I mean, there might have been food that, you know, it’s kind of like how when they make a change, you have a few years to put that change into effect, there might have been stuff out before that and companies would be incentivized to do stuff like that anyway, because you’d be more likely to buy it so there was probably a good degree of stuff that was, in fact, but 94 and if it’s not mandated, people could pretty much put whatever they want on that label, right?
Giacomo:
Because there’s no system of checks.
Dani:
And so just so we’re clear you were 14 when that happened. So when I said some of our listeners probably were logging food without any, like they couldn’t log it.
Giacomo:, Dani:
There was no label, there was no internet to look this up food could be grossly exaggerated with whatever they wanted to claim on the label.
Giacomo:
There was no regulatory body enforcing anything, right?
Dani:
Well, that’s not entirely true because you just said in 1973 if somebody was making a claim on a label, then they did have to have it.
Giacomo:
If they weren’t claiming it was healthy, that they didn’t have to. So, and you don’t think that people play in the gray and do weird things like that. I don’t know. All of that just sounds whack.
Dani:
But you know, this reminds me of when you go back and look at some of the athletes in history. You know, some of the gladiator statues looking at some of the earliest bodybuilder and strong men and even circus performers and looking at their physiques before steroids were even invented, there were no food labels, there was no gym you could just go into and be like today, I’m going to lift 100 pounds or whatever there was none of that. And these people achieved incredible physiques.
Giacomo:
Sure. There’s a counter argument to that saying that everything is now not literally on steroids, like every the results just get better and better over time. But to your point, people did have some pretty exceptional results without all this stuff.
Dani:
And I just think it would be so fascinating, like, oh if some of these people had books or journals or like what, how I mean, I imagine it’s still similar stuff to what we’re talking about now. But they must have had such different systems of managing how they were doing it. There were no scientific studies saying this is the most appropriate amount of volume for hypertrophy. Like they were just doing it. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing. And that, that is a history rabbit hole.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I could go down all day find this one of those holes to bury ourselves in.
Dani:
I’m down, I’m here for, we actually collect some of the vintage muscle magazines and I think some of the stuff in there is fascinating. Awesome. And they’re not that old. They’re not, they’re not like from the thirties, but they’re like from the fifties and you had to like send away to get a set of weights from weeder and whatever, but not too far away from.
Giacomo:
We’re talking about like, obviously the context here is they did it without tracking anything concrete,
Dani:
anything super concrete. They may very well have paid attention to what time they went to bed and woke up or, you know, if they ate a lot of fruits and vegetables and we’ve created our own, you know.
Giacomo:
So without knowing anything I read in my lips is easy, normal or hard. For example, we’ve all done stuff like that. Even people who create bona fide systems say they started with stuff like that, they just took it next level.
Dani:
So again, it makes me wonder and somebody as somebody who tracks like a fair amount of stuff, like I just said, how much of it is busy work, how much of it is actually helpful and how much of it is busy work.
Giacomo:
Exactly. That’s the part where I start to draw the line. I’m like, this is taking up how many minutes and how much of my focus and I could be doing other things and more productive or hey, wait, here’s a crazy concept. Do something that you enjoy versus trying to like, be the perfect machine or the best of what you do, like, find a way to balance out your life a little more. That’s not saying to not be a hard core fitness or jock or like competitive athletes.
Dani:
Like some people got track that too. Some people are so hard up that, you know, my homework for some of my clients was like, hey, can you go watch a TV show like a stupid one too? Like I don’t want, can you just like, can you not watch a documentary? Can you not listen to a podcast?
Can you not listen to an audio book? Can you just go watch a dumb show for like 30 minutes this week? That’s your homework because they’re just so tightly wound all the time that they’re more stressed out than they realize they are.
Giacomo:
And look, even us, I don’t know how it felt for you, but I know going on vacation last year for like the first time ever since being together, we, I felt like when I really checked out from everything, I normally do how much, how tightly wound I in fact, am like how many things I do do I got back to like, do I really need to do all this stuff? Oh my gosh. What is all this stuff? I do? Oh my gosh. The amount of stress that this causes in my body. It’s like you think about that, right?
Like if you’re tracking, if you’re tracking to be better, but then when you stop tracking and you’re not worried about it, cuz you’re checking out enjoying and you’re not as stressed and you get back to tracking all of a sudden you get more stressed or you realize just how much stress that puts on your system, your process makes you more stressed out. You start to like, question like, is it worth tracking?
Dani:
I, well, I mean, I asked that question a lot and it has nothing to do with tracking whatsoever. I ask that question almost every single day about certain things. Like is the amount of stress that I am putting myself under me. Not anybody else. Like the stress that I am putting myself under to perform well in this area,
this area, this area like, is it worth it? Is it worth it? Like, am I shaving years off of my life right now? For what? Like, I mean that’s, I could talk about that for a long time.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I don’t want to get too weird and heady Giacomo knows me like she’ll get all philosophical on us.
Dani:
You know, this is it like I’ve said it before. This is it, this is the one shot deal. You don’t get a do over this. Is it so stop, look around, ask yourself these questions. How many people just don’t even bother
to ask themselves these questions and then they’re sitting on their deathbed going? I wish I wish I wish I had done this or that or the other. Like, I don’t know, man, I’ll stop, I’ll leave it there.
Giacomo:
I think we said enough about this topic.
Dani:
I think so.
Giacomo:
That was a decent way to end it.
Dani:
If anybody ever wants to. I know some of you guys listen, I know some of you guys because you tell me later you send me messages like, hey, I love it. When you go off on a rant, you just, you just let me know because I love to rant at Giacomo.
Giacomo:, Dani:
I probably wouldn’t do that to Ben or Alice Athena, but I will do it for you.
Giacomo:
My love. That’s love right there.
Dani:
That’s all right. You guys have heard what I have to sift my way through to understand what he’s trying to say.
Giacomo:
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of vegan proteins. Muscles by Brussels radio. Hit the contact button on vegan proteins and we’ll get back to you right away. Stay in touch with us on socials at Muscles by Brussels and Pat vegan proteins.
Giacomo:, Dani:
Once again, my name is Giacomo and I’m Dani.
Giacomo:
We’ll talk to you soon.
Dani:
Bye.
