Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2598: The 5 Best Diets for Any Goal & More (Listener Coaching)
Fri, 16 May 2025
In this episode of Quah (Q & A), Sal, Adam & Justin answer four Pump Head questions drawn from last Sunday’s Quah post on the @mindpumpmedia Instagram page. Mind Pump Fit Tip: The 5 best diets for ANY goal. (1:38) The MOST common mistake people make with fitness & diet. (19:53) The BEST recovery tool to manage stress. (31:03) Terrible/harming tactics by mainstream media. (35:27) Creatine and depression. (41:27) The history of ginseng. (44:12) The conspiracy theory behind art. (48:36) Kids say the darndest things. (53:12) Mind Pump Recommends You Can’t Ask That on Netflix. (56:21) Train the Trainer 3-Part Bonus Series dropping May 19th! (1:00:47) #Quah question #1 – What do you guys do to keep up strength when resting an injury? (1:01:37) #Quah question #2 – What should you do if you are reverse dieting but see weight gain? (1:04:17) #Quah question #3 – Will taking NSAID’s to treat an acute injury completely negate gains from strength training? (1:06:04) #Quah question #4 – How do you see AI affecting the fitness industry? What are the pros and cons that can come of its involvement for trainers, nutrition coaches and their clients? (1:09:26) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Eight Sleep for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump Listeners! ** Use the code MINDPUMP to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is that you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don’t like it - - Shipping to many countries worldwide. ** Visit Joy Mode for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Enter MINDPUMP at checkout for 20% off your first order. ** May Special: MAPS 15 Performance or RGB Bundle 50% off! ** Code MAY50 at checkout ** Labs - Stephen Cabral Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA Creatine Supplementation in Depression: A Review of Mechanisms, Efficacy, Clinical Outcomes, and Future Directions Mind Pump #2530: Why All Women Should Take Creatine The history of ginseng in the management of erectile dysfunction in ancient China (3500-2600 BCE) Watch You Can't Ask That - Netflix Train the Trainer Webinar Series – 3 Part Bonus Series Visit Hiya for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Receive 50% off your first order ** Mechanisms and applications of the anti-inflammatory effects of photobiomodulation Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Mikhaila Peterson (@mikhailapeterson) Instagram Dr. Stephen Cabral (@stephencabral) Instagram Benjamin Bikman (@benbikmanphd) Instagram
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts of the Mind Pump podcast?
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. All right, in today's episode, we answered listeners' questions. We picked from some questions on Instagram.
By the way, you can go to Instagram at Mind Pump Media if you want to post some questions that we could pick from. But that part was after the intro. Today's intro was 58 minutes long. Now, in the intro, we talk about fitness science, fat loss science, diets, all the fitness stuff you love, plus family stuff and current events. It's a good time.
Now, this podcast is brought to you by some sponsors. The first one is Eight Sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system you'll find anywhere. It will dramatically improve your sleep. which will also have massive impacts on everything else. You'll get, you'll eat better because you feel better. You'll recover better from your workouts, build more muscle, burn more body fat.
Go check out eight sleep, go to eight sleep.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump and get $350 off the pod five ultra. This episode is also brought to you by joy mode. This is a pre sex supplement. It improves blood flow and it's shown by data to actually work. Justin loves it. He uses it every single time. Go check them out. Go to tryjoymode.com forward slash mindpump.
Enter the code mindpump, get 20% off. We also have a sale this month. MAPS15 Performance and the RGB Bundle, 50% off. If you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code MAY50 for the discount. All right, here comes the show. When most people think about changing their diet or their eating, they think about losing body fat or building muscle.
But did you know diets can have profound impacts on many things related to your health and other aspects of performance? We're going to talk about the five best diets for almost any goal. In other words, which diet is best for the different goals that we often have in our life? Let's go.
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Chapter 2: What are the 5 best diets for different fitness goals?
Choose your weapon. I love this conversation because this was something, and it was not until later on in my training career did I start to do with my clients where I took them through all, for the most part, most of the popular diets, regardless if they really wanted to or not, because I found it as incredibly valuable to- Reviewing.
Yeah, and revealing to them how each of them affected them differently and the pros and cons and realizing that there's going to be periods in your life where one way of eating makes more sense than another way. And when you look at how I know how we all personally eat, and we've been asked this, well, what kind of diet or how do you guys eat? Well, it changes.
There's times in my life when I'm getting after it and I'm trying to build and I'm focused on gaining and I'm eating a certain way. Then there's other times when I'm not doing a lot. And so I'm trying to maintain and not really lose. And then there's times where I got to be sharp. And every time I've got a different focus or goal, my diet slightly gets modified and changes.
strategic. I mean, why wouldn't you be strategic with your eating to complement your training or whatever pursuit you're doing? And to understand these diets and their benefits, I think it's a smart approach. I don't And again, you can work within the foods you're already eating to a certain extent, so it's not like that foreign.
You might add or you might subtract some, but for the most part, it's pretty easy to kind of taper that so it fits within these categories.
Yeah, I think one of the best ways to look at exercise and diet, okay? Let's just talk about exercise and diet, and we're going to get specific with diet. But I think one of the best ways to look at those two things is in the context of I want to be healthy or I want to know how to use them for the rest of my life, okay?
Because throughout your entire life, there's going to be times you're going to be more focused on athletic performance or muscle gain or fat loss or stress or cognitive performance or I need to perform at work or whatever, right? There's going to be life changes, and one of the best ways to use exercise and diet is to modify them
to maximize your effectiveness, or in other words, to improve the quality of your life regardless of what's happening, okay? And you can do this with different kinds of diets. And some diets are great for some things and they're not so great for other things, but that's okay.
In fact, that's great if you're after that one thing that it's good for and if you're not really caring so much about the other thing. Now, to be clear, all diets, so long as you hit your essentials, can be fat loss diets. Okay, so almost any diet can be a fat loss diet, so long as the calories are low enough. That's typically how these are all marketed. That's right.
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Chapter 3: Why is ketogenic diet recommended for cognitive performance?
And I want to add something because I think this is another thing that when I would teach clients, they would think that this needs to be something that you do for months or, oh, it's going to ruin. Let's say... You have a goal of building muscle and that's what you've been on, but then you also have the privilege to go speak somewhere in two days.
You switching to keto for two days doesn't ruin your performance goal. It's like you can do that for a three to five day or just a day or two and then go right back to the other diet and you're not going to lose muscle, lose your gains, not be able to get the benefits. So you can move in and out. of these diets based off of the even week-by-week or day-to-day type of changes.
That's exactly how I'm communicating here how you should use these. Now, I think if you've never done keto, do it for a little while just so you can kind of figure out how it works. By the way, when you're doing it, make sure you bump Your sodium, people talk about this keto flu. And they feel like, oh my God, I feel terrible. It's like, well, you need more sodium is typically what the case is.
Because it just pushes water out of your body. And you will lose a lot of, you'll lose weight on the scale, but it's water weight initially. But yeah, two, three days of going keto leading into an event is typically all people need. And they'll have, again, more stable levels of energy and better cognitive performance. So that's the good cognitive performance one is a ketogenic diet.
Next, we'll get to strength and power. You want athletic performance, strength, and power. Typically, this is what the data shows, about one gram of protein per pound of body weight and about two grams of carbs per pound of body weight. So a 200-pound man, 200 grams of protein, 400 grams of carbs. Fat makes up the difference for the calories. And the data just shows this kind of diet.
gives people the best athletic performance, pretty consistently.
Now, hasn't some of the data showed that you even see benefits upwards to one and a half grams of protein? Yeah. So you could push that even. This is general. That's a general protocol, but some people, especially people that do well on high protein, that digest it well, have no problems, could push the protein even to one and a half.
If we're strictly performance, strength, building muscles, you're focused.
You're really pushing that intensity to recover. I'm sure that would benefit you.
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Chapter 4: How should protein and carbs be balanced for strength and power?
And then I realized, oh, it's not because I didn't have food. It was because I anticipated eating and I didn't and I had to wait an hour. So I wasn't irritable because my blood sugar is low or because I need to have food in my body. I was irritable because I had this anticipation that it didn't happen. It had nothing to do with the fact that I was supposed to eat.
So true. So true.
So wild. And so that's a very freeing experience because if you're someone like me who used to feed myself every three hours or two hours, I felt free. I felt suddenly free from this tyrannical thing called food.
That's the other client that this is great for. And because this was also, this was me. I was afraid that if I didn't eat protein every two hours that muscle was going to fall off my body. I was certain of it. It was too when it happened, right? When I would But the weight, obviously water comes out, inflammation comes down, you get smaller, you lose a little bit of weight on the scale.
So being the insecure skinny kid, oh my God, I lost all that muscle I worked so hard for. And so I had a bit of orthorexia with the eating every two hours. Those are great clients. I used to do it with a lot of competitors since it's common in the competitive world that they think you got to eat every two hours. And it's like, no, you'll be totally fine.
If we don't eat all day today and we go right back to your routine tomorrow. And so getting those clients comfortable with that, I think is very freeing. So those are probably the three biggest cases I see fasting.
Yeah. And then lastly, overall health. Now, when you look at overall health, this is based off our experience and some data. I think a paleo diet is just generally very healthy. Uh, it's fruits, vegetables, some nuts and seeds, uh, and, and animal meats. And that's it. They don't even include dairy, but I think dairy will be okay if you can, if you can have dairy.
But with those choices, you're eating a very. very whole food based diet. You're not even eating foods that require too much cooking like grains. And in my experience, when I've had clients go paleo, overall, they feel great. They just overall, now it's not the best for performance, not the best for cognitive performance, but overall health, I think you can't go wrong with a paleo style diet.
Yeah, it just seems that it's easier to digest and you don't have as much of a reactive response to it. Yeah, for long term, it kind of hits all the boxes for you in terms of overall health.
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Chapter 5: What is the elimination diet and how does it improve gut health?
And what's frustrating about this is that you have people, um, People in the fitness space that argue against this because they don't acknowledge just how complex the human metabolism is. There's checks and balances all over the place in the human body.
And your metabolism... They also argue it's all because how resilient the body is because it can take it. Just because your body can take it and you can do it doesn't mean it's the smartest approach for a recon.
No, or you're using the example of... high-level athletes or people with really good genetics who are relatively young, oftentimes on anabolic steroids or other performance. Yeah, so, but I mean, the human metabolism has this wide range of how many calories it could decide to burn or conserve.
It could also, there's lots of other things that could determine where calories go, muscle, body fat, right? With the same lean body mass though. So in other words, the same lean body mass, your body can decide to burn more or less calories. In other words, it can become more or less efficient.
And when you cut your calories, you're sending a signal already to your body that says become more efficient. That's what happens. So think of it this way. You have a job, you earn X amount of dollars per month, and you have so many bills. Suddenly, your income cuts in half. What are you going to do with your bills? You're going to try and reduce them.
So your body immediately, when you cut calories, no matter what, no matter what, no matter how good you do it, by the way, this always happens, your body's like, okay, we need to learn how to conserve more because we're taking in less. The same thing happens with dramatic increases of activity, especially activity that doesn't build muscle, okay? Activity like high-intensity cardio.
It's just calorie burning, which is fine. But when you send that high-intensity cardio signal, the body also tries to learn how to be more efficient. So when you throw both of them at the person, and I'm not even talking about now the compromised ability to recover from the extra stress, which happens from cut calories. Yeah. It's a perfect storm. This is a huge mistake lots of people make.
They cut calories and dramatically increase activity. Terrible mistake that often results in, this is what happens by the way, I've seen this happen to trainers, is they'll do this, this pursuit of getting lean, they'll lose weight on the scale, go get their body fat test, they actually went up because they lost muscle. Or nothing happened. Like, what's going on? I'm eating so much less.
It's very common because of the urgency once they get in that state to really, they think it's going to accelerate their results. And that's the misconception.
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Chapter 6: Why is fasting beneficial for spiritual and overall health?
In, out. Doug and I had this really cool experience. We just got to do the driving experience. And one of the things I screwed up on right away was right out the gates, I spun out. And his feedback to me was, you're throttling way too much out of it. You have to ease into the throttle.
And I think, and it's such a weird dynamic because you think, how would giving it less gas get me to the point faster? More gas has got to get me there faster. No, it won't. Because the other things like your suspension, balance, steering, everything like that is, to your point, it checks and balances, says, no, that's too much horsepower, too much right now where you're currently at.
And doing that, you're just going to lose traction, possibly spin out or spin your wheels, and you will not get to point A or point B any faster that way. Actually letting off and letting it do its job will get me to that place faster. But yet your body wants to do that. Like I want more gas. That's what gets me faster.
And I think that's what people, they get caught in the same thing with exercise. It's like, yeah, I want to get to that leaner goal, so more has got to get to me faster.
You've got to fight that tendency.
you have to you do you have to fight that tendency and i think it is very natural for you to think that that's supposed to work and what's even more deceiving about the human body is the resiliency of it and that's where these coaches get wrong because and i you know it annoys me when i see the coaches and we have some in our own community that hear us tell that message all the time oh you know the mind pump guys that doesn't really apply yeah they're talking to a very specific set of community of people and it's like no bro average person
No, bro. This is everybody. Everybody has a stress bucket. What is unique to everybody is what other outside stresses besides exercise that they are adding. So they can fill that bucket up a lot quicker than others. But everybody's got a bucket. And at one point, that bucket gets so full that stressing more, which exercise is, dieting less calories is also another one.
overspills on that bucket and you're just not going to see the results and so this is everybody dude it ain't unique to a small group of people yeah and a lot and you know like when you look at the bodybuilding you know a lot of like bodybuilding physique like the competitive physique space especially the high level a lot of the information comes up from there and kind of disseminates and you get coaches that get some of it and then they're fanatical about it and they spread out a lot of the you know they get away with a lot of it for a couple reasons one
They have crazy genetics. They just do. When you get to that high level, you're talking about people who build muscle by thinking about it. They keep muscle on super low calories. They're just really good genetics. Then on top of it, they're on performance-enhancing substances like anabolic steroids and growth hormone and stuff like that, which helps preserve muscle. So they just get away with it.
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Chapter 7: What is the most common mistake people make with dieting and fitness?
Gas lamp or whatever.
So that affected it. Television degraded people's sleep. Cable degraded it even more. And then you added social media and smartphones. But sleep, boy, that right there. That's why I think... So we have partners that, uh, that focus on sleep, like eight sleep, eight sleep is best investment I've ever made by eight sleep. There's nothing as complete as eight sleep for getting you to get good sleep.
It is living, creating the environment for it. Oh, it's crazy. Have you guys seen what they're, what they did?
I wrote down some notes with the new, well, they've, they've, the,
new pod five they've upgraded some really cool stuff and even if you have you don't have a pod five even if you have the older generation like i have pod four uh they updated the software and so the feedback that they're giving now uh on the ui like the data so it's crazy so this is what it is so people don't know right so it goes over your bed and it's the temperature is is controlled by the pod five so but that's not that's not even like that's not even the beginning that's just scratching the surface by the way that makes a big difference
It will adjust the temperature based off of how you're sleeping, and it'll individualize it to maximize the temperature throughout the night to give you the best sleep. But it also measures, I wrote this down, it can detect snoring and adjust the position of the bed so it can keep you from snoring. Because snoring, by the way, really degrades your quality of sleep.
It detects abnormal heartbeats, disrupted breathing, changes in HRV, I mean, literally all the stuff that – everything, your deep sleep, your different REM stages of sleep, and you don't know this.
You just go to bed, and then based off of all these measurements, your individual measurements, it will adjust itself, and within a day or two, it'll learn how to maximize and give you the best sleep you've ever had.
This is the best part about it because – This information isn't like brand new. If you own a Fitbit or these other tools, they measure a lot of those things also. The difference is what does the average person go do with that? And the AI adjusts it for you. So it's taking all that information you're saying and it's scoring you. Oh, I had 80% here, 70% here. It's like a sleep coach. Yes.
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Chapter 8: How important is sleep for recovery and stress management?
There was a- I should look. I got to look at them. How do they translate that? That's back when dragons were flying around, dude. That must be ginseng they're drawing.
It's just got to do with- No, it was, I can't find it now. I had it written down. But it was, I believe in India, there was some recorded, something that they found that showed that people were using ginseng. So it's been used for thousands of years in Asia. Native Americans prized it in the 18th century because some people brought it here and there's also American ginseng.
It's funny. It comes in waves. I mean, do you guys remember when we first started as trainers? That was a very popular, very, very popular. It's been popular for a long time. But I mean, I feel like it makes the news for a while, then you don't hear about it for a while, then it makes the news again.
What is it about it that is it because people are similar to Create Team, they're finding other use cases for it? Like forever it's been for energy, right? That's kind of like Chinese medicines use it forever for general energy and overall health, mental clarity, vitality.
Yeah, so libido, energy as an adaptogen, improving the body's ability to... Oh, it's considered an adaptogen. Oh, yeah. It's like the original adaptogen. Look at this. The history of ginseng and the management of erectile dysfunction in China 3,500 years ago.
No, that's 3,500 BCE. Oh, my God. Yeah. Even more.
So that's 5,000. That is insane. Wow. That's insane.
They were having boner problems back then?
What does it look like? Just a bunch of pictures. Yeah, so it's good for erectile dysfunction or, you know, libido, both in men and women, energy.
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Chapter 9: How does mainstream media misrepresent protein and nutrition?
You know, what are you talking about? This is just my kid could have done this.
That's a joke. Well, the value is so made up. Like, it's all like relative to what everybody agrees to. And so it's a weird thing. And you don't realize how much like black market stuff is happening behind the scenes. And so it's like. Like a way to launder. Yeah, it could be like a million-dollar painting. You're like, wait a minute, really?
And you realize they're paying them underneath for something else as a money laundering.
Yeah, like you're selling drugs to Justin.
Yeah, yeah, that part I'm familiar with. There was a whole Netflix series on that a long time ago. I don't remember what it was called, but I'm aware of that. I'm familiar with that. It's a great way to launder money.
But the theory was that they went in just to confuse people and to make us believe as part of a larger...
project that there is no objective truth and part of that is by convincing us there's no objective beauty that art is whatever you want it to be yeah and art performances you ever seen like you ever read articles like these weird performances people do where they're like yeah this is me expressing myself or they sell the invisible art yeah yeah
It wasn't one that you just sold not that long ago. I brought it up on the podcast on Tuesday. It was duct tape banana against the wall. Or the guy who did the NFT sold for a million dollars. It was nothing. It was like space. He sold like air.
It was nothing. That's just so wild. At that point, what are you talking about? What is this? What are we doing?
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