Mindset is only part of the equation to finally stop chasing motivation. This week on Acta Non Verba, Sal Di Stefano shares why short-term diets and “hard-core” fitness methods are not sustainable and how you can strategically rebuild relationships with physical health one step at a time. During this conversation Sal and I will discuss micro Adversity, how restriction sets you up for failure, and how his understanding of science has changed the way he communicates fitness and health to others.
Sal was 14 years old when he touched his first weight and from that moment he was hooked. Growing up asthmatic, frequently sick and painfully skinny, Sal saw weightlifting as a way to change his body and his self-image. At age 18 his passion for the art and science of resistance training was so consuming that he decided to make it his profession and become a personal trainer. By 19 he was managing health clubs and by 22 he owned his own gym. After over 18 years as a personal trainer he has dedicated himself to bringing science and truth to the fitness industry. Sal is also a dedicated father to a son and daughter.
Episode Transcript
I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Sal DiStefano, at the age of 22, became an entrepreneur. He opened a wellness and personal fitness facility that offered one-on-one training, massage therapy, nutritional consulting, hormone testing, and acupuncture. Now at the age of 28, his health took a turn for the worse. The years of training with excessive amounts of intensity and the pursuit of more muscle combined with the abuse of supplements caused his body to rebel.
01:23
He lost 15 pounds of muscle and at one point actually believed that he may have an autoimmune disorder. This forced Sal to change his personal approach to fitness and he began to learn. He learned about gut health, hormone health, and how to prioritize health over appearance. Sal healed his body and changed how he communicates fitness and health to others. And that reinvigorated him with a new sense of purpose. Although this was a challenging time for him, it was literally what formed his view on health and wellness today.
01:50
It also was a spark for what created the maps programming and training system that has revolutionized the industry. And this also led to the hugely popular top ranked mind pump podcast. So thank you so much for being here today, my friend. I appreciate you. Oh, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Thank you. No, it’s incredible that actually just hit record as soon as we started talking because we came out of the gate with a lot of powerful stuff, but would you say that that’s the biggest misconception is I remember in one of your latest podcasts, you were talking about mindset.
02:19
You had all the guys there and you guys were saying how a lot of people feel like they have to almost just get their ass kicked, laying on the ground, on the floor, getting crushed to get to this place where they’re actually building muscle or getting stronger or getting better at what they’re doing. When in fact, that’s usually not the case. And it’s still the terriest in the end, right? It is when you’re looking at developing a lifelong relationship with health. Okay. Let’s just call it what it is. Right? So you want to be healthy. Maybe you think you just want to lose 30 pounds or you want to look good.
02:49
But really, if you dig deep in its purest form, it’s a relationship with health. You wanna improve your health and hopefully your goal is not just to lose 30 pounds to gain it back, but rather to have it stay off and for it to be permanent. So this is a lifelong relationship. And anytime you make a big change forever, it needs to be something that’s sustainable and it needs to have the right mindset behind it. Unfortunately with exercise and with nutrition,
03:17
Oftentimes we go into it with the completely wrong mindset. Now this doesn’t seem to be that way, or at least we don’t perceive it that way. Initially, when we jump in, because maybe it’s working right away, you know, right out the gates, we’re going to the gym and we are beating ourselves up or we are restricting ourselves with food and that does work in the short term, we lose weight. We improve our appearance. Things start to change.
03:42
However, it almost never works long-term and it’s not necessarily because of the methods, although the methods oftentimes are wrong, it’s what’s driving those methods that both makes the methods wrong, but also as a mental state that is a place that nobody wants to be in forever. So to be a little bit more specific, I’ll use some specific examples. So let’s talk about nutrition. Let’s say you’re somebody with the average person who.
04:09
tries to change the nutrition wants to lose weight. Maybe they looked in the mirror or they saw a picture of themselves or they tried something on that they hadn’t worn for a little while and they said, wow, I’m fat. I need to lose weight. I don’t like the way I look. Maybe they think they’re disgusting. They’re disappointed with themselves. And through that disappointment, disgust, they are now motivated. That’s it. I’m gonna change. I hate this. I hate myself right now or what I’ve been. I need to change that.
04:37
And so that motivates you to start changing your diet. So now when you look at food, you think to yourself, I can’t have that. I can’t do that anymore because that’s what made me look this way. And that works in the short term. It definitely does, but we got to dig a little bit deeper. Okay. Let’s start with the statement. I can’t. Right. So somebody presents to me some food and it’s not on my meal plan. Or I’ve decided now that I can no longer eat that way because I’m going to lose weight. And so I say to that person.
05:06
I can’t eat that. That’s very interesting, strange statement. If you really think about that, right? I can’t, I mean, of course you can. Who is telling you, you can’t. You are, you are telling yourself that you can’t. And what you’ve actually done is if you actually divided yourself into two people, the parent or the dictator or the overbearing coach or trainer who’s saying, no, no, no, you can’t do that. And then the part of you that you actually identify with.
05:36
is this child or this person that’s being tyrannized or oppressed. And they say, I can’t, I can’t do that. Okay. Nobody wants to live like that forever. Nobody wants to live under oppression or tyranny or wants to be forced forever. It just doesn’t work. And here’s your evidence of that. Anytime someone goes off of a diet, right? Anytime somebody tries to change their diet and then they go off, they end up saying something along the lines of, I just wanted to enjoy my life.
06:05
Like I was over it. I just want to enjoy my life. I just wanted to live again. I don’t care. Fun. It’s very interesting when you hear escaping that control or, you know, it’s, it’s like that child now rebels. By the way, when children rebel, they go way off. So if you’re somebody that tries to go on a diet, for example, and find yourself binging, go have one slice of pizza. When you go off your diet, it turns into alcohol or whatever.
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That’s because you’ve created this relationship with yourself where you’re either being or you rebel and then you’re free. Okay. So here’s the way that it should be approached. If you want a long-term approach in this particular example, I look at myself in the mirror and I see that I have body fat on my body, very different than saying I am body fat, uh, by the way, identifying with your body image is a big mistake. That is not your self image. Right? So I can look in the mirror and say,
07:02
My body is reflecting my actions. I need to take care of myself a little bit better, but you are not your body. That can go in both directions, by the way. You see fit and somatics, we’re addicted to exercise, addicted to restrictive diets. They’re also very unhealthy. They also identify strongly with their bodies. These are the people that have a tough time aging, the steroids and the drugs and all that stuff. So you excess body fat. I haven’t been taking care of myself very well, and I am someone worth taking care of. I’m going to start taking care of myself.
07:31
So now you go to the party and your friend offers you the food that the other version of you would have said, I can’t. And they say, Hey, have some cookies. And you say, uh, no, I don’t want those. I don’t want those cookies. Very different, right? It’s a very, very different mindset. Now saying I don’t want the cookies. Doesn’t mean you don’t acknowledge the hedonistic value of eating them. The taste of them. I mean, it’s no different than being a happily married man and identifying an attractive woman.
08:00
and saying, no, no, no, I don’t want to sleep over. No, I don’t want that cookie right now. Now you have power. You are empowered. It also doesn’t feel like you are being oppressed. It also opens this up. Maybe you are taking care of yourself very well and you’re following this mindset and you’re doing great. And then you go to a party, go to your aunt’s house and she bakes her famous apple pie, the one that you grew up eating when you were a kid. And you haven’t seen your aunt in a while.
08:29
And you guys start having great conversation and you want to connect over this apple pie. Maybe have a glass of wine. Now you can say, yeah, I’ll have that. I want that. You understand it’s true value. Oh, right now I’m connecting with my aunt. We’re enjoying ourselves. The value of this apple pie is the, is the flavor and the memories. And I’m enjoying it by the way. If you’ve ever gone off of a diet with the wrong mentality and it goes into this binge kind of mentality, you ever notice, pay attention if that ever happens again.
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or to anybody listening, while you’re eating the food that you’re not supposed to eat, you’re anticipating the next bite. You’re never enjoying the bite that’s in your mouth. This is why it looks like it’s so fast. Okay. Somebody with the other mentality, the one that I’m talking about, the healthy mentality, when they do have that food that they enjoy the flavor of, and they understand its true value and yeah, I’ll have some right now. I think I’d like that. When they eat it, they enjoy the bite that’s in their mouth. It’s not about anticipating what’s coming next. It doesn’t look like.
09:28
that binge type behavior. So that’s just one example of how mindset can make everything different. I’ll give you another example. Let’s say you’re at home and your water heater broke. Now you gotta wake up and take cold last hours. They’re freezing. It’s frustrating, it’s annoying, it’s irritating, and you’re pissed off. Well, what if you woke up in the morning and you said, you know what, I read this thing about cold showers and it’s got some health benefits, it’s gonna strengthen my immune system.
09:57
So I’m going to choose to take a cold shower today. Same exact things happening. You’re getting a cold shower. One you chose, the other one you felt like you were being forced. Completely different experience. Nobody likes to be forced, even if it’s you that’s forcing you, especially if it’s you that’s forcing you. Everybody likes to make choices. So the mindset around health and fitness needs to be right.
10:24
Okay. And it’s not just my opinion. Yes, I’ve trained lots of people and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, but the statistics are clear over 85% of people that get on a diet fail. It is almost guaranteed to fail if you try to change things with the wrong mindset completely. And it also leads to self judgment and a little more self hate, which was what fuel do in the first place. And it turns into this cycle of.
10:52
whatever you want to call it, failure or never really reaching this healthy place where eating right and being active are not stressful. It’s something you want to do. You perceive the pain of the exercise as great. You perceive eating healthy, not as restrictive, but rather as taking care, heal and see the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, which actually make everything better, you know, if you’re a parent.
11:21
makes parenting better. You like to go out with your spouse. That becomes better. Your libido is better. Your energy is better. You’re probably more productive, you know, all that stuff they try and sell you on fitness, but you got to have the right mindset first. Well, and like you say, it comes down to choice. That’s an empowering statement as opposed to being disempowering. I can’t have that. I’m not allowed to have that. I would like to have that, but I’m not. And just like you were saying, almost like the whole Victor Frankl mentality of there’s a stimuli and then there’s the response. If we choose it.
11:50
Even when it’s difficult, it has a lot different emotional evocation as opposed to just saying, this has happened. I don’t like this. I’m a victim. Now I just sort of push away from it. Right. And it’s, and like you said, it’s not something that’s sustainable. No. And it’s also, you know, most people when they go the wrong way, which is most people, so don’t feel bad. It’s that to you, by the way, that’s everybody that tries to motivate themselves for a big change tends to go towards the self hates self discussed and then rely on.
12:20
motivation. Okay. Here’s the problem with relying on motivation. Well, first of all, I’ve never had to talk somebody into eating right and exercising when they felt motivated. So I understand that a lure, right? If I was always motivated, this will never be a problem, but we don’t work that way, right? Humans don’t work that way. We can’t always be happy. We can’t always be motivated. We have a wide range of feelings. It’s what makes us human. It’s totally natural. People who chase a feeling, by the way, oftentimes,
12:48
are very destructive. This is a drug abuse, oftentimes has roots in that. For example, running away from negative feelings, always seeking out that good feeling. Motivation is one of those great feelings. We all can feel it sometimes, but it goes away. It does go away. It’s going to go away. So rather than focusing on being motivated and chasing that feeling, why don’t we develop a good relationship with discipline? Because discipline is a skill. It’s not a feeling. You don’t feel. And in fact,
13:18
Discipline kicks in when you’re not feeling motivated. When you’re motivated, there is no discipline. Discipline is something that kicks in. When you’re not motivated to do something, and discipline is a skill, skills are different than feelings. Feelings, I can create environments that help foster them. I can improve upon them somewhat, but I can’t 100% control them, and I can’t have a particular feeling all the time. Nobody’s figured out how to do that. Spiritual practices are almost entirely revolved around.
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dealing with our own feelings and how we perceive them. But discipline is something I can develop. Discipline is a skill, like riding your bike or balancing on one foot or whatever other skill you can think of. And skills are something that we can work on and slowly develop. And once you develop the skill of discipline, it’s with you. You have it. As long as you continue to practice it, it’s there when you need it. Now, how do you develop any skill?
14:18
Well, if I don’t have the skill of swimming and I don’t know how to swim, I don’t go jump in the ocean and then try to swim a mile, that’s going to be a terrible way to learn how to swim. I might drown, right? You start slowly. You have to start slowly. And the way to do it is to challenge yourself enough to give it meaning. If you do something that’s not challenging, it has no meaning, but don’t challenge yourself setting yourself up for failure either, because you can’t practice discipline if you just keep setting yourself up.
14:48
for failure. Okay. So you’re at this point here where you’re, and again, we’ll stick to health and fitness, although this is applicable to anything. You’re at this place here where you don’t eat healthy at all. Every time you choose a meal, it’s based off of its taste. That’s most people, by the way, you know, most people, when they talk about, what are we going to have for dinner or lunch or what I mean for breakfast? What they value most is the flavor or the hedonistic value, right? So that’s where you’re at with nutrition.
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Maybe you’re ignorant to the basics of nutrition, calories and macros and proteins, fats and carbohydrates, that kind of stuff. So maybe you just don’t know, you know what you’ve maybe heard in media, but you have no idea when it comes to exercise, you’re just not active. Okay. You have a busy life. Most of us do, but modern life is very sedentary. You got a lot of stuff to do, but very little movement doing it. Right. So sedentary and my diet is pretty much fly by the seat of my pants. I’ll eat what I kind of enjoy. That’s your starting point.
15:46
Okay. You’re not going to go from there to a man I’m eating like so healthy, intuitively, it’s super relaxed and I’m very active and I’ve got this great resistance training and cardiovascular, it’s not going to happen, right? So how do I go from here to here? All right. Let me pick one step that is challenging yet totally realistic. Okay. Something that I know I can stick to. Now here’s where a little bit of self honesty comes into play.
16:15
You got to be honest. Yeah. Also consider your current state of mind. If your current state of mind is motivated, right? If you’re having this discussion with yourself, cause you just got motivated to work out, okay, put yourself in your unmotivated state of mind. Is this realistic? Cause by the way, when you’re motivated, anything you think is realistic is never, you’re under the. Put yourself in the state of mind of not motivated. What is realistic? What is challenging at realistic? Let me start with that.
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Then do that when that becomes a part of your routine, when you feel like it’s discipline, it’s second nature, it’s no longer really a struggle, take the next step in that direction. And what you’ll find over time is you’ll move towards whatever that goal is, maybe you’ll never hit a goal, which by the way, it’s another thing we could talk about. Forget the goal, it’s really about the journey, but you’ll continue to move on this journey.
17:14
Progress you’ll see will be dramatic, but it’ll be a side effect. It’ll be a side effect of you moving along this journey of creating this kind of discipline that requires a lot of honesty with yourself and a lot of patience, just like any skill you try to learn, you’re going to fall off the bike before you learn how to ride it. But if you move in that direction, and it took me a long time to figure that out with my clients, once I was really able to train people in that way, I was able to get people.
17:43
permanently fit and healthy, permanently. That is something that most trainers cannot say that they do if they’re being totally honest. In the first half of my career, I couldn’t say that. I got people fit, you know, if they were with me for three months or six months or whatever, but I didn’t get anybody permanently there. Later on, I was able to get people permanently there and I haven’t trained people for a few years, but I’m still in contact with a lot of people that I used to train and years later.
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This is now a part of who they are. And that’s really what you want. You want to do it and you want to get there permanently. Is it take longer to get there this way? Yeah, but there is no there and it’s permanent. So what’s, so there you go. That’s exactly it. I talk about micro adversity, these small things, like you’re saying, if we give this huge goal subconsciously, we don’t believe we can do it and we hold back. But if we can get these small steps to get to that next place, and then like you said, it’s a practice. So,
18:39
Once you develop discipline in this one arena, you can take that anywhere you decide to go. It’ll bleed over and everything else. But if you can’t get discipline in one area, because we all know people that maybe physically they have certain predispositions where they just pick up a barbell and they automatically put on 20 pounds, or maybe when they first start training with that neuromuscular efficiency. But the idea is, okay, if this is something that you’re not good at, that’s where discipline will really serve you. That’s where that, when your will goes away and your motivation goes away.
19:09
That’s where you can bring it into everything from your relationship to conversations, to having that self honesty you were talking about. And even with the goal setting, I’ve got so many people that I’ve talked to where we set a big goal, we get there and then they get this achievement amnesia where now that they’ve gotten it, like you said, because they didn’t enjoy the journey, this is empty. It’s not what they wanted. This is actually a psychological phenomenon. You’ve seen athletes, uh, where they train for years to win a gold medal than they do. And they go into depression. You know, we had,
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Mark Manson on the podcast, he’s the author of the subtle art of not giving a, and he went through a depression after writing that book and it crushed, right? He reached well beyond anything he could have imagined. And he went through a period of depression. It’s really recognizing that the value in anything is not in the achievement of the goal, but rather the journey. The analogy I like to give on the podcast would be like, you know, imagine getting on a helicopter and being dropped off on the top of Mount Everest, right? You’re going to get up there.
20:08
And you’re going to see this incredible view and it’s going to be amazing, but the pales in comparison to actually climbing Mount Everest and the kind of person you will become by walking up the mountain and the people who become consistent with whatever it is that they do, but we’ll stick to health and fitness because that’s my space. If you ask them what it is that they love about it, it’s the act of it itself. It’s the enjoyment of doing the thing itself.
20:36
I mean, you can look at the side effects of it and appreciate them, but that’s not the reason why they’re doing it. It’s the act of it, of doing it itself. And, and boy, is that a powerful thing. That’s powerful in all realms of life. You know, one of the reasons why I love fitness so much, I realize this later on. It’s a wonderful gateway into self-improvement. If you do pursue it and you pursue it long-term and it’s something you really want to work on, it is one of the best
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entry points in self-improvement because the results of your efforts are objective. I’m stronger. I can move better. I feel better. It’s also very unassuming. A lot of people don’t realize that they’re going to embark on a health and fitness journey and become better people. They just think I’m going to be just, you know, get stronger and burn body fat. I bet you a lot of people would say no to fitness if that’s what they thought. If I said, yeah, you want to work out, we’re going to do this whole self-improvement thing, no thanks, I just want to get in shape.
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Doesn’t care what your beliefs are, where you’re from or whatever, but when you embark on it and you do it in a real way, it bleeds over and everything else. And it’s really because you develop that discipline and the statistics prove it. Successful people in their, with their families and business, how much higher percentages of them are consistent with exercise and pay more attention to nutrition as well. It’s like it comes kind of all together. So it is a great place to start. And again, if you’re looking for those.
22:04
permanent lifelong results. You got to look at it from the angle that I’m saying, because it’s really this book, there’s two ways people make permanent changes. One is the epiphany, which is very rare. An epiphany would be like a lifelong cigarette smoker gets lung cancer and survives. You know, maybe that’s enough of a scare for them to have an epiphany to never smoke again. By the way, that doesn’t always work. I know people who’ve had those kinds of scares and still didn’t change.
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And then the other way, the second way, which is what I’m talking about is this slow process of transformation. It’s this, you’re on this path and you move at one degree, you know, imperceptible change, maybe today and tomorrow, but you go down a year, two years, three years. You’re, you’re in a completely different place. That’s the way that most permanent changes or most big changes happen. It’s so true. And.
23:01
I love what you were talking about earlier about that internal dialogue. There’s a book called I Don’t Want to Talk About It where they talk about male depression. It really shines a light on that idea that if we had this self-hating kind of mentality, we’re yelling at ourselves. Or if you’ve ever lashed out at somebody when you’re angry and that dialogue comes out, that dialogue that you’re telling yourself is going to come around to the people that you claim to love the most. So, again, trying to beat yourself up or having this idea of torturing yourself.
23:30
not only is it not sustainable, but it’s not healthy for you. And ultimately for everybody else in your life, if you allow that to run amok. Right. And from the exercise point of view, I’ll give you the two scenarios, right? The one that person that is motivated by the self hate, right? I hate the way I look. I can’t stand this anymore. And the person who is like, you know what? I got to take care of myself. I really want to take care of myself. Okay. So let’s look at those two people. Right? So this person, the self hate person,
23:55
They’re going about it. They’re being consistent because they’re at the moment, they’re motivated by the self-hate. They want to change. They can’t stand the way they look or whatever. And then they, they mess up one day. Let’s say they go out with their friends Saturday night. They have some drinks, they eat a burrito, some pizza, and they go to bed and they wake up and they’re like, you know, I can’t believe I fell off my diet. I’m so disgusting. What’s wrong with me? I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to just sweat the hell out. I’m just going to go crazy. I am going to burn those calories off. Okay.
24:24
It’s self-flagellation. You’re, you are literally, again, you are literally punishing yourself. You are using exercise as torture and as punishment. Okay. Now let’s use the other person. The other person, they’re like, listen, I need to take care. I haven’t been taking care of myself. I need to be taken care of. I deserve to be taken care of. I love myself. So now I’m going to go work out. I’m going to start changing how I eat because I need to take care of myself. And they do that for a while. And then.
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Saturday night comes, they go out with their friends and they eat the burrito and the pizza and maybe they did have a break. Maybe something happened. They were depressed or anxious and they ate in a way that wasn’t, they were trying to take care of themselves. Maybe they were, you know, uh, finding comfort in food or whatever. It happens to all of us, right? So then they wake up the next morning and they’re like, man, you know, boy, I didn’t really take care of myself good last night. I felt terrible. I was stressed out. I’m medicated with food.
25:22
And that’s not good. Um, you know what I need to, I need to take care of myself today. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to do some yoga. I’m stressed out. I need that. And, um, you know, I’m going to do a little mobility work because that makes me feel good and I’m already under so much pressure that I need to go there and just get rid of this pressure and feel good for a second. Um, so that’s why I’m going to go take care of myself right now. Okay.
25:50
The person who decided to beat themselves up in the gym, number one, not sustainable. At some point, you’re not going to want to beat yourself up. At some point you’re going to say, you know, let’s screw this workout stuff. I don’t want to live this way. This sucks. This is torture. Yeah. Not only is it not sustainable, but from a trainer perspective, this is coming from a fitness expert. You did the wrong workout. Anyway, you overdid it. It’s not effective. The other person who went to the gym and said,
26:19
You know, I was stressed out yesterday. It’s why I did what I did. I’m going to go do the yoga. I’m going to do the mobility work. Number one, sustainable. Who doesn’t like to take care of themselves? Okay. That’s caring. It’s a, it’s a good feeling. So they did the right workout. That’s exact workout. I’ll tell them to do. If I had a client that came to me and said, Hey Sal, I know today we’re working out. Uh, but man, last night I screwed up. I ate a big pizza, I ate a burrito. I would ask them those questions. Why did you do that? What happened? Was this something you do because you were enjoying yourself or were you
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trying to distract, oh man, no, I was stressed out. I was really anxious, stressed out. This stuff happened at work. And so I was just stuffing my face with food. Uh, and I’d say, okay, you know what? We’re going to do a de-stressing workout today. Let’s take care of you. So that’s the right workout. So not only are you doing the more sustainable thing, you’re actually working on the right way, which is good. Ready for this? Better results. If you can produce better results, you’re going to get where you want to go.
27:19
better because you had the right mindset. So it’s not just, you know, oh, I know that sounds good and okay. That’s it’s also, Hey, you want to look good? That’s the best way to look good. It truly is. And just like you were saying before, it’s about that habit. So just like meditation, if I’m trying to be present or think about my breathing and I fall off, if I go down this negative cascade of emotions that say, see, I always do this and shit, I can’t believe I did that. What is that doing? That’s taken me away from what I should be working towards.
27:48
However, if I can just say, yeah, I fell off the path, I’m getting right back on and we’re making this happen, that’s much more sustainable. And like you said, it’s enjoyable. You redo it because we love our body, not because we hate it. And the side effect, I mean, here’s the deal too, okay, one is unhealthy, right? One is chasing looks or running away from how they look now to something else. The other one is I’m trying to be healthier, but just overall, okay? By the way, the side effect of good health is you look great.
28:18
It’s always the side effect of health. I mean, if you’re listening right now, right, you can close your eyes and imagine yourself in a truly healthy state, in the total sense. Healthy mind, spirit, body, you know, healthy relationships, the way I eat food and the way I view food, it’s healthy, it’s not stressful. Because my basic process of counting unhealthy can be very stressful. So not that, but everything’s very healthy.
28:46
great relationship with activity and exercise. What does that person look like? What does that version of you look like? They’re probably pretty lean, maybe not shredded. You’re not gonna be unhealthy shredded like a bodybuilder, but you’re gonna be a good lean, a good amount of strength, mobility, great posture, great skin, great energy, vibrant. You’re gonna look the way you wanna look. Now let’s go on the opposite side. Somebody who’s motivated by self-hate, who uses the gym to beat themselves up, who uses food as a punishment.
29:16
Or uses food during a rebellion, right? The binge aspect. But maybe even they’re super, you know, dogged and consistent with it. Okay. What is that person going to look like? Well, poor health eventually looks bad. Can’t run away from it. Can’t look good with poor health for too long. This doesn’t work. Can we get back to a little while? Um, you know, you might be like those fitness influencers on Instagram that torture themselves and take, oh, you know, tons of supplements and stimulants. And, you know, maybe
29:46
drugs, but they don’t look good. It starts to come out. You can’t get away from it, but the healthy person, they’re going to look phenomenal. And the reason why I communicate that, but Marcus is because I know I need to sell this idea well, because I am trying to counter the opposite message, which is easy to sell, right? It’s easy to sell. Lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It’s easy to sell, take this pill, do this crazy thing, beat yourself up because this is what you need to do and you deserve it.
30:16
I have to counter that with a message that is good, that is right, but also sells better. And that’s the one that I found. And it’s true. It’s an accurate one. So it’s honest. If you go after the healthy way, the side effect of it will always be you’re going to look better. It is. And I like how you’re able to take that no bullshit, honest approach that you’ve done in the health field and you apply it to your cognition. You apply it to political ideals. You apply it to everything that you’re doing.
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especially right now with what we’re going through. If you guys aren’t following him on Instagram, you have to find him, he’s got, he’s not only the meme lord, but even today you had an incredible post on your story talking about how this idea of, just like what you’re talking about, selling fear or selling vanity or these, all these ideas and how that manipulates people, whether it be from a political standpoint, whether it be in the news and the media. Again, we see that the media makes money off of
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fear because that keeps people attached to it. They get their advertising dollars through that, yada, yada, yada. And the way that you go through it, you just have this very straightforward, you’re like, I try to absorb truth irrespective of source and I try to be agnostic about it. I just want to find what’s true and then use that. I know that that’s what you’re doing as well with everything that you’re applying. And I think that’s pretty incredible. Where did you?
31:41
Did you grow up with like that kind of philosophical notion or did that you discover that on your own? Was that deep seated? Well, I have a great family. My parents are immigrants. They came from Sicily. They have really strong kind of old world values. Some of them amazing. Some of them not so great. I would say we didn’t have the healthiest attitude around food. Italian household. It’s a, it’s the food Olympics every time one day dinner or whatever.
32:09
But a lot of great values, but one thing my mom always did is she always allowed me to argue my point or she always allowed me to discuss certain things. So it was it was it wasn’t authoritarian in the sense I just do it because I said so. She would say, okay, well, why do you feel this way? And debate and discussion along with reading and writing are amazing, especially writing and debate. Great ways to think when you’re in your mind, you can get stuck in loops. But when you debate with.
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an open mind and you’re open to hearing the other person’s point of view. And you don’t mind if your mind gets changed. In fact, you enjoy it when your mind gets changed. Cause that means that your new opinion is better than the old one. Right. But it either strengthens your opinion or allows you to learn things you didn’t know, but it’s really thinking out loud. Right. You kind of work out your ideas. You work out the things that you’re thinking. So she allowed me to do that where I would, I would have these debates and arguments. And then, uh, really as a trainer.
33:07
You know, I had the blessing and opportunity of training just incredible people. I trained a lot of very successful, smart, self-aware people, very empowered individuals. And I loved one of the reasons why sometimes I even felt guilty charging them to train them because I felt like I got so much out of just talking with them. You know, I mean, it came to me because I helped them with their workouts, but I used to love asking them questions and having great discussions. And, you know, one person in particular stands out as this woman that I trained.
33:36
And anytime any subject came up and I had this very, my wellness studio was great. Right. We had a small wellness studio. I had several trainers and it was always an open floor of discussion. That’s the, that’s why I tried to foster. Like let’s, I know you’re, you’re over there with your client training and I’m training over here with my client, the other trainers over there. And, but we’re going to talk about a subject and have this great discussion in the gym and, and nobody is going to be made to feel like an idiot. Everybody’s going to be respectful. We’re going to make good points. Don’t get your feelings hurt. This is just, you know, and.
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It was wonderful, right? So this woman that I trained, it seemed like every subject that we talked about, she could argue it better than anybody, just with incredible reason and logic. She was so well-informed. And one day I was training her. It was just me and her in the gym. And I told her that like, man, it’s almost like any subject that comes up. You are so well-informed on both sides. Your arguments are so sound.
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What do you do? You just research all day long. How does this happen? And she said, well, this is something that I learned when I was younger. I had a mentor in my first job and they taught me this. And she said, now it’s benefited me tremendously. And she was just what I do. She goes, if I have a strong opinion about something and it invokes a lot of emotion in me, usually it’s something I feel really strongly about, right? She goes, I will find somebody who has the opposite opinion, who I also respect and believe to be.
35:04
somebody who can argue the opposite side very well and who’s open to debate and discussion. And then I’ll go and debate and discuss and talk with them, not argue, not trying to fight with them, but I want to see whose ideas stand the test of debate. And I go in there open-minded and she goes, and I seek these people out. And she goes, and I either leave the conversation with a stronger sense of my opinion, better informed, because now it’s stood the test of debate against an intelligent person on the opposite side, or,
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She goes, my favorite is when I changed my mind, because now I’m no longer wrong. I learned something. And I thought, wow, that is absolutely of the internet. And it’s not hard to find anybody online who’s willing to argue their side. And so what I did, what I would do is I would go online and I would find groups. Facebook is great for this. You can find groups on anything. You can find groups for politics, economics, science.
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feminist education or unschooling or homeschooling. I mean, you can find a million and one different groups. And I would go, and the reason why I like the groups is because it usually attracts people who really are informed. So informed on their, you know, they believe so strongly about their opinion that they belong to a group on Facebook and they’re active on it. So I’ll join these groups and they’ll often post an article or a study.
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which is great because they filter out the best studies. Like for example, here’s an easy analogy or easy explanation. Let’s say I sign up for a neuroscience group. Okay. All the people in the group are probably pretty, many of them are probably students. You might even have a couple of professors or doctors on there. Uh, and that’s usually what you find. Right. So they’re going to post the best studies. They’re going to find the best. They’re going to go through all the baloney. Just like, like if you want to see the best fitness studies, I’ll give them to you.
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Cause that’s my field, right? So I’ll find, they’ll post the best studies. I’ll read the study, but that’s not where I get the great information. The comments, then I’ll read the comments and you’ve got really smart people in that particular field or whatever the group is about discussing and debating the nuances of that study. And then what I’ll do sometimes is I’ll get on there and I will challenge or debate.
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with somebody on there. And I’ll do it in a way that’s respectful. I’ll literally say to them, hey, look, here’s where my opinion is, but I’m open to having my mind changed. Why do you believe this? Now, if you open it that way, the other person is going to be like, oh, cool. I can change this person’s mind. So they’re not going to call you names usually or whatever. And then they discuss with you and then you challenge them back. You know, that’s a good point. However, what about this? This is what I’ve heard. And you kind of go back and forth. And every once in a while, somebody gets frustrated.
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Mostly they don’t. You go back and forth and you leave with your mind being changed or you have a stronger case for what you believed in. And so I do that a lot and it really cuts down on the time that I need to research or whatever to have an opinion on certain things and it’s helped a lot. So it allows me to see kind of both sides. The other thing I try to do is I try to, if I feel very emotional about something, I can’t always do this. I’m human, but if I feel very emotional about something, I’ll
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try to identify the feeling of emotion. Oh, there it is. There’s that feeling again. Eckhart totally, by the way, he talks about, excellent person, if you haven’t watched his videos or read any of his books, great resource for that. He’s got great videos on YouTube. So identify that feeling. Oh, there it is. There’s that anger or that fear or that, you know, whatever feeling. I’ll try to separate myself. Maybe it takes time. Okay, I’m not gonna engage in this today.
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I’m going to think about it, come back tomorrow. Or maybe it’s, I can identify it well enough to put that aside for a second and then pursue what I’m trying to learn or discuss or debate. And I come out of it, um, much better off. There’s definitely subjects I’m most interested in that I can attend to do this a lot with economics is one of them. I’m very passionate about economics. Love learning. In fact, I got a Milton Friedman shirt on, right? I was going to say, I love that shirt.
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on me. I watched his free to choose series when I was my one. Oh wow. This guy’s he’s like the Carl Sagan of economics. He can he communicates in a way that you want to kind of listen. So economics is one. Politics is another one. I love science. So all the different fields of science and of course, fitness, nutrition and health are other fields I like to discuss. Although I don’t go down that anymore so far because I feel like it’s something I’ve been doing for so long.
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But those are the few that tend to what can do. And if something pops up that I either feel like I don’t have any information on, or I feel very strongly on, that’s my go-to and it works. It really does work. But you gotta be, you gotta check yourself because you gotta value learning more than winning. If you value winning more than learning, then you’re screwed. You’re just wasting your time. You’re not going to win anything. You’re not going to gain any real insight that way. Yeah. You have to value the truth more than you do.
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the victory in that case for sure. And there’s even this idea, there’s a book that’s called mistakes were made, but not by me. And it talks about cognitive bias and we see ourselves getting caught in it every day. Do you get yourself caught up in it and how do you break out of that loop when you do? Of course. Yeah, man. I mean, a big part of this is identifying that you are totally, you can be manipulated, that you can be run by your own emotions that other people can
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look at those emotions, whether it’s marketing, politicians, or just people around you. And when that happens, you’re not going to be your best self. You got to identify that nobody’s perfect. I definitely am not. Happens to me, it happened recently. In fact, we were, you know, this is a crazy year, right? So a lot of stuff happening. You know, we got COVID and the lockdowns and then we had the protests, which turned into a lot of riots and looting in some areas and it’s election year. Election year is always crazy.
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politicians and they spend directly billions of dollars on manipulating you indirectly. There’s far more money being spent by special interests trying to get you to feel a particular way. So none of us are immune to that. And this happened to me. So it happened after the terrible incident with George Floyd, which I haven’t met anybody to think that was absolutely terrible. And after that happened, you had these protests and then you started to see some riots and some looting. And
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I own, we have Mindpump Media, our media facility is in a part of San Jose that has a lot of storefront businesses. We don’t have a storefront business. We don’t have our doors open for people, but we’re there. That’s just the space that we rent. Right. So when the protests were happening and you started to see vandalism and stuff, we got a notification from our landlord and he said, Hey, probably a good idea to board up your windows. Okay.
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Board up your windows because there’s some protests going on and they’ve already been smashing windows and stuff in downtown San Jose. And so you guys might need to be careful. Right. So immediately invokes a sense of fear in me. We’re going to get targeted. We’re not bad people. We have expensive equipment. It’s going to get stolen. I know it’s covered by insurance. Feel all this, this fear. Oh man, I got to board my windows. This is crazy. Like this is not right or whatever you start to feel this way. Right. So I already had that feeling.
42:44
Because that was fearful, like a lot of people now you’re scrolling through news and social media. And there was this tweet that was being shared and it was a protester saying, right now we’re targeting the downtown cities, but next up is suburban areas. We’re going to get white people where they live. We’re going to loot their houses, burn their houses. It was essentially like, you’re not going to, you can’t hide. We’re coming for me. Right.
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Immediately. I mean, I have a pregnant wife. I have two kids. I have family and immediately fear. And then, you know, what usually comes out of fear, especially if you feel like you need to protect your family, anger. Anger. Yes. You know, okay. It’s time to stock up on ammunition. Going to buy a gun. Got to make sure the alarm system’s good. What’s going to, you know, so I can feel these feelings in me. Took over. It automatically took over. They come into the suburban areas and
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somebody that comes to my house and I’m already thinking of like, what’s going to happen. And I’m going through this real in my head and I didn’t identify it at the time. It was just, I was reacting and I was talking about it with my co-hosts, Adam and Justin and Doug, our producer. One of the things I love about my partners is they also value self-awareness. They value objective thought and looking at other sides of the argument and all that stuff. And so as I’m talking and they’re getting riled up too,
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Justin, I think it was Justin, who spoke up and said, well, hold on a second. He said, could we be being manipulated right now ourselves? And identified the fear and anger inside me. I stopped and I said, okay, hold on a second. This was a tweet. Let me do a little digging. You know what I found? The person responsible for the tweet was a white supremacist whose goal was to scare the other side into reacting.
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And I paused and I was like, of course, this is happening all the time. People with bad intentions will want to manipulate you. They’re not going to present themselves as manipulators. They may present themselves oftentimes, especially with social media, because there’s no controls who’s saying, you don’t know, they’re going to use social media oftentimes to do this, posing as the other side or, wow, look how crazy the left is or look how crazy the right is. Look what they said. How do you know that’s what they said? How do you know that someone represented?
45:09
So it got me to, oh, calm down. And I said, Holy shit, man, I got manipulated there for a second and to reacting. So that was a recent experience for me. It happens. It happens to all of us. But I think if people stopped and slowed down and looked at things a little bit more objectively, took their emotions aside, I think we would be better off. Boy, it will be tough to manipulate. If we were like that, it’d be really hard for these groups that.
45:38
you know, that have their own intentions, oftentimes nefarious, they would be in a tough position to try to manipulate you. You know, the post you’re referring to on Instagram that you were talking about, I talked about the, the emotions that they tend to trigger. Yeah. Um, which they’re typically fear, anger, or empathy, fear and anger, easy to trigger, very powerful, but also people can oftentimes identify that they were motivated by fear and anger. Like, Oh gosh, that’s
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That was ridiculous that the way I acted, I was too angry or, you know, Oh yeah, that, you know, yeah, I know, I know I’m a little over cautious and scared. You know, yeah. I know it’s my, my fear or, you know, I can tend to be a hypochondria or whatever, right? Empathy. Whoa, that’s a powerful one. Nobody ever questions their own empathy because it’s, it’s a good feeling, right? It’s a good emotion. We perceive it to be, but empathy can get us to do very illogical things that can cause a lot of damage and a lot of problems for ourselves and for other people.
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The examples I gave in that post was like the parent who, you know, the kid who keeps begging them for candy and fast food and the, oh, it’s just, it’s just, you know, they’re hungry or they just want you to make them happy. And they continue to feed their kid in a way that makes the child obese and unhealthy, but the parent rarely questions it because it’s coming from empathy, which we tend to perceive as good. This is also why people enable drug addicts or alcoholics, you know, oh, I don’t want to put my kid out in the street because then they’re going to be
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homeless, meanwhile, they’re enabling them to continue with their addiction. Right. So empathy, once it’s manipulated, that is a tough one to look at because, uh, because we never, we almost never question it. It’s from a good place. That is a favorite one among politicians. Just look at the way they name their laws. It’s the help poor people act or whatever. Right. No, it’s except it’s not helping poor people. It’s, but it feels good. Feels good to vote that one into, into law. And the, and like you say, they
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install the button so that they know what to push whenever they’re doing it. So that’s the key. And it corroborates the behavior. Like you said, it’s an enabling kind of ideal. And so that it creates that loop. It creates that cycle. And just like you were saying every election year, if you guys pay attention, you’re going to see a pattern. You’re going to see a lot of big things that happen a lot of, and let’s be honest, there’s still a long time until the actual date. So there’s going to be some more crazy shit. The October surprises are getting pushed up.
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or three months, right? Mark my words, they’re going to ratchet it up. Oh yeah. You know what’s, you know what really makes me upset about this whole thing? We had some of this in previous elections, you know, I love learning about politics and how politicians communicate and the ways that they get people to behave and operate the way they do. And you know, in the past it’s been used, they’ve tried to instill distrust in the system of democracy. And we saw that really start to get
48:31
You know, the question, the election, you know, the count in Florida, you know, and they pushed it a little bit with when Obama won, they pushed it hard when Trump won, but right now both sides are priming to use it really hard. I already hear voter fraud. If we lose, it’s because they cheated. What a dangerous precedent to set. What a, what a terrible, because no matter what happens, you’re going to see. Civil unrest and potential.
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violence and a destruction in the foundation of democracy. And it’s disgusting. And really you got to, you got to see it for what it is. You know, politicians, they’re, this is what they do. They manipulate you. They spend a lot of money doing it and they have very powerful sponsors and they can’t force us to vote in a particular way yet. I don’t know what that’s gonna look like in the future. So they’re going to scare you, make you angry.
49:27
They’re going to make you feel like you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons. They’re going to just hammer on all those things really hard. It’s no wonder we get so stressed out during these election years. Well, like you said, it’s about divide and conquer. And right now, I mean, I’m 48. This is the most divided I’ve seen this country between even people that are on one political ideology. There may be a religious splinter that separates them or masking or unmasking, or is this real or is this not? How can we…
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bridge that gap, what can we do to try to bring this back together? Well, okay. So you say that, and in many ways it is true. If you look at the base of both political parties, okay. If you look at the base of both political parties, this is objective fact, if analysis or whatever, the right has moved a little bit further, right? The left has moved very, very much farther left. Okay. But both sides have definitely gone further away from each other, which is important.
50:24
But here’s the important thing to understand. The base of both parties is far outnumbered by people that don’t identify with either party. Independence far outnumber both sides. So I’ll give you an analogy, okay. If you were to ask the average parent over the last 10 years, is it more dangerous to allow your kids to play outside alone today than it was in the 1970s and 80s? The average parent would say yes. Oh yeah, way more dangerous.
50:54
way more risk. The truth is it’s far safer statistically speaking. Less children get kidnapped. There’s way less violence. It’s much safer today or the last 10 years than it was in the 70s and 80s objectively. But why do we perceive it to be more dangerous? Well media, a lot of, we have 24-hour news channels, we have social media now. So our perception has completely changed. We hear about a kid who gets kidnapped and killed, you know, across the country now.
51:23
And it feels like it’s in our neighborhood, even though it’s far more rare, you hear about it more often. Well, here’s what happens with the two political parties. That’s all you hear. All you hear is the extreme base of either party. So in your mind, if you’re like most people, you don’t strongly identify with either extreme. If you’re like most people, you think, oh my gosh, the world is coming to an end. Everybody’s crazy. Everybody’s extreme on either side.
51:52
That’s not true. Most people are not extreme. Most people are somewhere in the middle and they do that. They do this all the time with studies. They’ll actually ask people. They won’t ask them, you know, what are easily identifiable as political questions. They’ll ask them other types of questions. You know what they tend to find? Most people are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Most people want people to be able to kind of live the way they want. So long as they’re not hurting other people.
52:22
Right. Most people are okay with that. So, okay, you want to marry, you know, a person of the same sex, or you want to utilize drugs for personal use, but you’re not hurting anyone. Like, okay, that’s, that’s, I’m kind of okay with that. It’s only not hurting other people, you know, and I gave two examples, but there’s a lot of examples. I’m all kind of okay with it. Most people are also somewhat fiscally conservative. Yeah. I kind of think that markets should be largely free. I think companies should compete.
52:50
for our dollars, I think taxes shouldn’t be super high. I’m relatively fiscally conservative. I think that, you know, for the most part, I agree with this and for the most part, I agree with this, which is a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Reality, it’s somewhere in the middle between the two parties. Most people are like that. So I think if people understood and realized that, then they would realize that what they see in here on social media are the loud, crazy people. And it’s distorting our view of what people are really like. It’s really okay.
53:20
It’s no different than what happens to young women who are on Instagram all the time and develop body image issues because what they see are these impossibly perfect bodies that are Photoshopped or plastic surgery or whatever. And they think everybody looks like that. Look at me. And I look terrible. You know, I mean, I’ll give you another example. Imagine if all you ever saw on TV or followed on your social media was the NBA. Okay.
53:50
You would think that everybody’s seven foot tall. You would. Okay. Now think back to your, think back besides going to a live NBA game. So let’s cut that out for a second. How many times in real life have you ever seen someone that’s seven feet tall? I think I’ve seen maybe once or twice and I can remember it because it was like, Whoa, that’s really tall. But if all you ever did was watch the NBA and all.
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You would think, oh my gosh, everybody’s seven feet tall. Right now we think everybody’s crazy. No, most people are not crazy. The people who are being shared and the people who are loudest are crazy. The ones on social media are crazy. Most people are not crazy. Here’s the remedy. Okay. Turn off your social media. No joke. Try this out. Turn it off for a week. Just do a week. Just it’s like when I used to tell my clients to not weigh themselves. Like don’t weigh yourself. Watch what happens. Okay. Turn off your social media.
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for one week and don’t watch the news for one week. Do your best to avoid those things. Now simultaneously, try to talk to people. So when you go out, when you go to the grocery store, FaceTime your family, FaceTime friends, FaceTime coworkers, and just to have conversations with people. At the end of it, you’re gonna be like, oh my gosh, I feel so much better. Most people are pretty normal, level-headed, rational people, most people are not crazy. I think that’s brilliant.
55:16
So I could talk to you forever. We didn’t even get into four or five of the subjects that I wanted to, but, uh, where can our listeners learn more about you, about maps, about what you, you guys are doing with this incredible, your podcast is at the very top. Where can we learn more about you? Yeah. So our podcast, you know, we combine fitness, entertainment, and humor. So we try to make communicating fitness and health something you want to listen to. It just makes it more effective. We have five episodes a week. You can find mind pump podcasts on any podcast.
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platforms. That’s the best way I would say. And if you want to find me individually, I’m most active on Instagram. You can find me at mind pump Sal. And if you want free information on how to train your legs or your core or nutrition information, we have a lot of guides that we wrote that are totally free. You can find those at mind pump free.com. Absolutely. And listen guys, Sal is not only jacked, but again, you can tell from this conversation.
56:14
very straightforward, very no bullshit. He went through a lot in his life and so he wants to push that to other people so they don’t have to go through all this disillusionment that’s out there and all this red tape that people are trying to push because like you said, the people that are trying to push the pill are the ones that are trying to push the disease in the first place. So if they’re trying to sell you a bunch of supplements or a bunch of other things that may not necessarily be what you need, then yeah, like you said, you’re probably getting manipulated in some way, shape or form.
56:41
That’s it. You’re going to hear us tell you the truth on the podcast. Um, but we do it in a way, uh, that’ll convince you. So that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to tell you the, what really helps or it really works, but listen to the podcast and, um, uh, I think we communicate it in a way that’ll get you to kind of understand and want to take action in the right way. Absolutely. So thank you so much, brother. I appreciate you.
