Why is nutritional discipline so hard? Seriously? Most of us already know what healthy food and healthy eating habits look like. But why do we quit, or never even start, on our eating plan before almost anything else along our journey towards physical, mental and emotional well-being?
Nutritional strategist Dr. Mike Roussell joins Fran Racioppi live from the Sandlot Jax Fitness Festival and the 2nd Annual GORUCK Games to explain why we quit on nutrition well before we quit on exercise itself. They explore his strategy around the mental aspect of nutrition, the psychology of cravings, hedonic hunger, and all the things that keep us from maintaining nutritional discipline.
More importantly, he reminds us how simple and uncomplicated proper nutrition can really be if we’re just willing to commit to it; even if it’s not perfect. From a performance perspective, what we put into our body is often the final few details that separates the good from the great, so take a listen or watch their conversation, then make a few different decisions to improve your nutritional discipline.
Learn more about Dr. Mike Roussell on the web and on social media.
Read the full episode transcription here and learn more on The Jedburgh Podcast Website. Subscribe to us and follow @jedburghpodcast on all social media. Watch the full video version on YouTube.
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Mike, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Day two, Sandlot JAX 2023. It’s starting to fill up. This is year two at Sandlot JAX. We had the opportunity to be here the other year. We said we were going to turn it up in 2023 and going to have a whole bunch of different conversations around fitness, but I wanted to talk about some mental aspects of performance this year. One of the things that you’re focused on is the psychological aspect of nutrition. We can talk all day long about, “You got to eat this amount of macros and you got to have this amount of protein, your body weight and protein every day, and no carbs.”
This is what I struggle with because I wake up every day and I’m like, “I’m going to eat six meals. I’m going to have X amount of protein and carbs and all this and fruits.” By lunch, it’s like, “There’s some leftover pizza in there, I’m busy, and I don’t have time to do all that. Let’s just heat that up and have it.” We know it’s the most important thing but why is it so hard?
It’s such a good question of why is it so hard. I got into nutrition through athletics and bodybuilding initially. Those people are freaks when it comes to nutritional discipline. You can tell them to eat one thing for twelve weeks and they eat it, no problem. When I got my PhD, we did controlled feeding studies where you weigh and measure food for people. They come and they eat it and then you measure their blood afterward. If we do exactly this and then the blood output is that. Again, easy when you’re weighing and measuring and giving people food.
When I left all that and it was starting to deal with regular humans who are not on this mutant level of discipline or aren’t having their food prepared for them, I was like, “It’s not even about calories or the protein. It’s all this other stuff. I should have got a degree in Psychology.” Figuring out the mental side of your nutrition is one of the most important things.
One of the things that I’ve thought about a lot is the difference in our minds between exercise and nutrition. You gave the example that lunchtime comes around and you’re like, “Maybe I’ll just have some pizza because it’s there or whatnot.” If you’re going to sit down and do a workout, if you had 2 exercises left and 6 sets to do, you wouldn’t be like, “I’m good,” and then you just leave.
No one would ever do that with their exercise program but we do the nutritional parallel all the time. Why do we have that difference in our brains between this total hardcore commitment on the exercise side and then just this fleeting commitment on the nutrition side? One is bringing that awareness to people and saying so much about nutrition like food cravings that we’re so quick to give in to it. “I could never overcome these cravings. I’m just going to eat the food.” Where on the exercise side you’re like, “It’s two more reps but I’m going to push hard and make it happen.”
You’ll even do more on the exercise. Since Wodapalooza has been back into CrossFit, you’ll do so many rounds for a time in a lot of the CrossFit workouts. I’ll get halfway through the round and the time will expire and I’ll be like, “I’m already in the round. Do the extra work.” Twenty minutes later, I open the fridge and it’s like, “If I have to make that protein shake, it’s so hard. Let’s just grab this thing.”
On the nutrition side, we’re so quick not to do the extra work. Part of it is bringing that awareness to people because we’ve given ourselves a pass on the nutrition side to slack off like, “It’s okay to give it to these cravings. It’s okay to slough off on your nutrition.” Remind people that we have discipline. You have that inside of you to make it happen and it’s not that hard. That’s step one.
Step two is part of why nutrition is so complicated is because we eat for so many other reasons and generally, we’re not paying attention when we’re eating. I have a researcher friend who does a lot of hunger research with protein. On the hunger side, we have two different, there’s physiologic hunger, which is your body needs more calories. There’s this hedonic hunger which is you’re bored, you’re stressed, you want to celebrate, and all those other things.
[bctt tweet=”Part of why nutrition is so complicated is because we eat for so many other reasons, and generally we’re not paying attention when we’re eating.” username=”talentwargroup”]
I drove eighteen hours straight down here to drive this truck down and all I did was consume. I’m laughing as you say that because it’s like, “I’m not even hungry.” Yet I’m walking around like Love’s truck stop in the crap aisle, thinking about the irony of the fact that I’m driving to a fitness event and I’m rotating between Red Bull and coffee. I’m eating Czech mix and candy, and at every stop I go to, I’m grabbing more of it even though my body is, “You’re so full. Stop consuming.”
With the hedonic hunger and the overall message when you’re like, “How do we get over this?” It’s not how do we get over it, but how do we work through it? It’s a lot more giving people the tools to work through managing their appetite and discipline. It’s taking the time to say, “Why am I eating? Am I eating because I’ve only had 200 calories and it’s 1:00 and my body needs fuel to keep going? Am I eating because I’m bored and it’s a way for me to pass the time or I’m eating because I’m stressed?” I’ve come, over the years, to distinctly identify this I would eat when I’m stressed. That’s like would be my go-to.
By paying attention to how your body’s working, I can distinctly know, “That feeling in my stomach is not hunger. I’m stressed out and I’m looking for that reward,” because food gives us, pretty quickly, a good feeling of reward side of things. If we talk about the exercise parallel, there’s a runner’s high and you feel good after your workout, but it takes a bit to get there. It’s not 25 seconds in, you’re not feeling amazing with the exercise, but with food, it’s like three bites, and all of a sudden, you’re like, “This feels so much better.”
The other part of it is having the awareness of, “Why are you hungry? Why are you eating?” Knowing that you’re just chasing that feel-good piece of the food, which is not good or bad, but it all stacks up to what’s important. If you have a health goal, if you have some fitness-related goal, taking that time to pause, have the awareness of, “I’m going to eat this because I’m stressed. It’s not going to solve the stress but it’s going to make me feel good. Where does that sit in the grand scheme of what I’m trying to accomplish?” For most people, it’s an awareness thing. How do we become more aware of why we’re eating?
We eat now in front of screens we eat when we’re distracted. Even if you’re not eating in front of your computer, chances are you sit down and you’re eating a meal by yourself. You’re firing up your phone, and you’re looking at it. We just don’t pay attention enough to our own bodies which that exercise parallel when we’re training, you do pay a lot of attention to your body. People are much more aware.
We need to bring that over to the food side and become a lot more aware of why are we feeling hungry, and what are we doing as a result. Over the years, what I’ve found with people is people say, “I’ve struggled to eat junk food and all these overly processed foods. I don’t want to restrict myself.” If you go unrestricted with unprocessed proteins, fruits, or vegetables, you’re going to eat so much food.
When I was a graduate student, we ran this study and we were trying to get people to maintain their weight. It was this very high fruit-vegetable diet. They would come in and complain about all the food that they had to eat to maintain their weight. We’re like, “You have to keep eating because otherwise, you’re going to lose weight.”
This is something you never hear anyone say, but if you’re eating the right foods, you get to eat a ton and feel full and satisfied. That’s another important piece is those food choices. If you find that you’re always hungry or if you’re having trouble discipline, squashing hunger solves a lot of problems, and eating more of these wholesome foods gets you there pretty quickly.
[bctt tweet=”If you’re eating the right foods, you actually get to eat a ton and feel full and satisfied.” username=”talentwargroup”]
You mentioned the word choice. I wanted to use the word choice in this conversation because one of the things that I talk about with people that I coach in Leadership Development is the concept of performance as a choice, but our choices affect our performance. That second part is almost the more important piece of that because it’s this concept that every decision that I make, “Is it to stay up late and cut down on my sleep? Is it to go out and have a few drinks with my friends? How am I going to feel tomorrow?”
The choices we make in our diet, the choices we make in the exercise routine, you name it, all of that have a second and third-order effect on how we’re going to perform either immediately or in time. When you’re sitting there in these moments of having to make the choice, how do we revert back to knowing what the right answer is and then executing?
If we were going to say, “What’s the right answer?” the right answer is eating healthy. We all know what the right answer is, but I’m in lockstep with you on choice. I’m not a big fan of food guilt. Food guilt has become this whole thing like, “I eat this food and then feel bad about it later.” I’m totally fine. If you choose to eat that slice of pizza because it’s there, that’s fine. You just have to be aware of that choice.
You chose something fast so you could go do something else. You chose something that was a little more palatable because it tastes delicious. It’s not right or wrong, but you just then can’t be upset if you don’t get the end result because then people end up getting frustrated. I’m like, “You’re frustrated but it’s just because you keep making these choices.”
You did this. No one else did this.
It’s not a blame game. It’s empowering yourself. With food, there are so many choices. There’s so much food everywhere. All looks delicious, tastes good, and all this stuff. People feel like they don’t have a choice, but it’s this loss of choice because there’s so much. They’re not empowered to drive the ship, but I’m a huge believer in pushing back against them.
You make the decision and that’s the choice. Own your choice. It’s not right or wrong, but you just can’t be upset if you’re not getting the results. It’s because you’re not consistently taking those steps. They’re not necessarily the easy steps but they’re the steps you need to take to get your blood pressure where it needs to be. They’re the steps that it needs to take if you want to reduce your risk of cancer because it’s something you’re concerned about.
If you want to deadlift 100 or 500 pounds, it’s not going to be the easy path but you need to know that you got to make those choices. Not just say, “I couldn’t because I have all these other things.” When people don’t feel empowered with their nutrition, they just flounder. I call it lifetime weight loss. You talk to people who feel like they’ve been trying to lose weight for twenty years and so then every meal is a struggle. “What should I eat? What should I don’t?” You’re just not making any progress and it’s a terrible place to be. Trying to empower people with, “You have the choice. If you want to eat that, that’s great, but you have to know you’re not going to have access to these results.”
There’s a sense of accountability and responsibility, and both of those breed ownership. What you see a lot of people do is exactly what you’re saying. “I’ve been trying to lose weight for ten years and all these other things have affected that.” There are people who have chronic health issues that may affect that, but by and large, for a healthy person who doesn’t have any underlying health conditions, the result that you see is the byproduct of your decisions and choices. Many people are quick to blame all these other existential factors. Until you assume that ownership of the problem is when you can start to make a change.
Eating ready is straight-up hard. Exercise is easy because you can go to the gym. It’s an environment that’s set up. You go there, you crush it. Do that four times a week and you can make progress. You come here. Everybody’s about fitness, moving, and all that stuff and it’s easy. You walk out in the world and the world is out to make you move less and eat more to make that as easy as possible for you. Appreciating as well, this is an uphill battle, but as you make progress, that should embolden your drive even more because you are making progress against all these other forces. That’s something that people don’t give themselves enough credit for.
I have found in my own personal experiences when I’ve been pretty disciplined about what I’ve eaten and I’ve seen the results of that. You don’t even want the bad stuff. Every once in a while, you do you. You’re like, “I’ll crush a whole pizza.” You wake up the next day and it’s like, “That was good, but now I got to get back at it because this is going to affect if I do this again. The next two nights, it’s going to affect where the progress that I’ve made.” For me, it’s about a 5 to 6-day cycle that I’ve got to go through when I say to myself, “Cut the nonsense.”
It’s usually at the back end of something like this. You’re super motivated, you’re leaving, and you’re like, “I’m going to work out six times a week. I’m going to eat all these great things.” If you can get through that first week or so, then your body starts to change and you’re not craving all of those things. Can you talk about that timeline? One of the big things you talk about is the science behind it. I’m sure there is a science behind it that I don’t understand. The question is, what is the science behind that timeline when you make these shifts that change?
There are timelines and unfortunately, it’s not as clear cut as people think. Maybe you hear like, “It takes 21 days to change a habit.” A habit is something that’s deeply wired into your neurons. How long it takes you to then essentially rewire a different habit? It depends on how long have you been doing the original thing. It’s not a 21-day fix, 5-day fix, or 10-day fix for one specific thing.
Initially, you want to chase that feeling, the feeling better, the dopamine, or that anticipation of feeling good, of checking off, “I’m doing this. I’m sticking to it. I’m having that discipline.” That is this feed-forward effect that helps you continue. One of the things that I don’t think we’ve appreciated over time is foods that we would say are bad foods, for lack of a better term, taste good. You go and eat spinach and broccoli and it doesn’t have the same appeal.
Unless you load it with salt and cheese and all the stuff that negates the fact that you’re eating the broccoli.
Part of the shift is when you say, “I’m going to eat healthier food,” you’re literally saying, “I’m going to eat things that don’t taste as good.” That’s just the truth. McDonald’s has spent millions if not $1 billion making their French fries taste good. No matter where in the world you go, you get that taste. Spinach doesn’t have the same R&D.
I don’t think we appreciate this. Part of that shift is saying, “I’m going to eat food that isn’t necessarily as good. I’m not going to use as much salt. There’s not going to be as much flavor,” and it takes time for your palate to adapt. Part of that change in eating is that change of your taste going from this, “I’m always getting bombarded with cool ranch nacho cheese Dorito explosion,” to, “This is what regular food tastes like.” That transition takes a couple of weeks. That’s something from a taste perspective. All of a sudden, once your taste starts changing, you don’t start craving all that hyper-palatable stuff as much because you get used to it. That’s a huge underappreciated part of making that change.
The other part of change is how you feel. I had a good friend who was going up to his 50th birthday and he wanted to get to 5% body fat for his 50th birthday. He started in January. He ended up losing 37 pounds. He got ripped out of his mind. When we were talking about it afterward, it wasn’t like I was doing nutrition magic, it was basic adjustments over time and things. What was the thing? He’s one of the smartest people that I’ve known in fitness. He said, “I started feeling so good. There was no way I wanted to go back.”
Part of that too is as you start feeling better. You get this momentum after a couple of days because you start to feel better. Your energies aren’t as up and down. Maybe you’re sleeping a little bit better. If you can attribute those good feelings and tie them to the nutrition behaviors, then all of a sudden, your body’s going to want to do those things. Part of it too is how do we tie the outcome to the behavior and then that’s going to want to make us do it more and more.
Can you talk for a minute about setting goals? The example you used is one of those. I want to hit 5%. For some people, that could be a very reasonable goal. For other people who wake up and say, “I want to hit 5%,” it may be an unrealistic goal for whatever reason or the length of time that it may take may be vastly different between people. For the person who’s sitting there saying, “I want to make a change. I understand that it’s my choices that are going to do that,” they’ve taken into account everything we’ve talked about thus far.
They’re saying, “I can do that.” What’s the goal? How do you set that goal and how do you think about a realistic goal that’s achievable? Even though we may dedicate ourselves to making the right choices, we could quickly become disenfranchised with it if we’re not seeing the results but sometimes the result may be because we’re not being realistic in what we’re trying to do.
If you look at goal setting, I look at three different ways. First, I generally have people write a visceral goal narrative. You tell me what your goal is. In this case, Bill wanted to lose 37 pounds. That was what it took to get him to 5%. I have him write down, “When you’re there, what does your life look like on that day?” Longhand write out in detail how you feel. “What does your house look like? What does your body look like? What are the interactions you’re having with people to create what you will be like when you achieve that goal?” That helps people tie emotionally to what they’re trying to achieve.
That’s something they can always go back to and they’re like, “Why am I doing this?” You can read this thing that you wrote that has this direct emotional attachment to your life. That’s what keeps us going. That’s step one. Step two is you do these with target goals. It’s 37 pounds and that’s the target goal. You can say on average lose 2 pounds a week. You can say it’s going to take me however long. Setting that target goal is important because that’s what we always like to go to. One of the hardest things in human behavior is moving goalposts. With GORUCK, they call it a false finish. They’ll tell you, “We’re going to go 15 miles.” You get to 15 miles and they’re like, “Just kidding, 6 more miles. Turn around and go back.”
[bctt tweet=”One of the hardest things in human behavior is moving goalposts.” username=”talentwargroup”]
It was a great moment. One of my favorite moments in the CrossFit games was during COVID where they were at the ranch and it was this trail run. They get to the end and Matt Frazier gets to the end of the run and Dave Castro was like, “Turn around and go back.” Matt Frazier looks at him, flips him off, turns around, and just keeps running. For him, it was no factor, and everybody else was like it crushed their souls. That idea of that moving goalpost, if we get so hung up on, “It’s 20 pounds in 12 weeks,” and 12 weeks come and you still have 7 seven more pounds to lose, that just might be how it is with your body.
Did you fail?
It’s not failure. My clients like, “How fast can I do this?” I’m like, “I know the science behind nutrition and what we need to do with your body. I don’t know how your body’s going to respond though.” Part of it is applying some nutritional principles, seeing how their body responds, and then making adjustments. We could make these adjustments and you could lose 2 pounds a week. We could make these adjustments and you could lose 1 pound a week. That’s just how your body responds. Sometimes getting hung up on the timeline crushes our souls. They’re like, “Everybody else is doing this time.” That’s the failure. The target with target goals, with a timeline that’s a little bit okay with it being fuzzy.
The third piece is action goals. You can’t step on the scale and say, “I’m going to be 20 pounds lighter.” You can’t walk up to a bar and say, “I’m lifting 500 pounds.” It doesn’t work. What do you then have to do every day to get you there? You come up with a list of those strategies and you generally pick 2 or 3, usually 2, and say, “I’m going to work on these now every day.” Does it take you two weeks? Does it take you 10 days to nail having protein at every meal to get your 8 hours of sleep? How long it takes for you to nail that habit? It takes what it takes and then you layer on another one. Holding yourself to the action goals, those are the things that you have power over.
You don’t have power over the bar, but you have power over having protein after you work out. You can say, “Am I diligent in achieving my action goals? That’s going to take me to that target goal.” When I feel my motivation or my effort waning, I go back, I read the visceral goal narrative, and I’m like, “This is why I’m doing it in the first place.” That’s how I like to look at goal setting.
You’re creating the bigger vision. We lose sight of that a lot of times when we’re in the moment.
You’re looking in the fridge. You forget the vision.
It’s like, “What’s a vision? I want to be here to see my kids grow up. I don’t want to die of heart disease or some failure because I’m overweight or not in shape.” When you tie it back to that, setting that macro visceral goal is so critically important. Where are we going? We talk a lot about where we’ve come from and the evolution of nutrition and how we think about nutrition.
We’re here at CrossFit, but there are a lot of CrossFit-inspired activities at GORUCK and Sandlot, and GORUCK games. It was at Wodapalooza a couple of months ago. You look around and it’s like, “We’ve come so far from 3×10 on the bench press. My three-day routine of back and bis, chest and tris, legs, skip legs, eat the pizza, go back to chest and tris. I had a few of those days.
You sound like you’re on the fourteen-year-old weightlifting diet plan. “We’re bench pressing.”
“It’s chest day again.” What’s next as we think about nutrition? Where is it going as an industry?
I think of it in two different ways. At a large macro-population level, we’re still struggling with the same things we’ve been struggling with for many years. Over the last decade, fiber intake in America has increased by 1 gram per day. We went from 15 to 16 grams per day and the target is 36 for men. When you look at it that way, you’re like, “We are not doing that good.” Five percent of the US population meets their fiber goals for the day. We’re still dealing with these basic nutrition problems. If you’re looking at the hole, that’s one.
If we look here at like the microcosm more of what I call the crush-it crowd, people are like, “There are all these ice baths around here. We’re lifting weights. What are all the things that we can do?” we’re going to become more targeted with our interventions. You could make a morning routine that lasts you until 1:00 PM, just in time to start your evening routine.
I love listening to some people give their schedules. Mark Wahlberg talks about, “I get up at 3:00 in the morning. I do my first workout and then I have fourteen meals. I do some work and my second workout and then I talk to my kids at 7:00 AM,” and it’s like, “You did a day’s worth of stuff.”
There are so many interesting things that are happening in health and fitness. People are like, “I’ll do that and I’ll do this.” We’re in the gluttony phase and where we’re going to move forward is then saying, “Here are the measurements and markers that matter to our bodies based on our goals.” We’ll be able to more specifically and strategically apply interventions. One thing we’re learning now is athletes need a little bit less protein because their bodies become more efficient with it. It goes a little bit further. If we’re saying, “We’re not giving athletes then more protein. What are they going to need based on where they are?”
One thing I would work on with the pro athletes’ off-season and in-season is very different from a nutrition standpoint. In-season focuses a lot more on how we use nutrition to mitigate the effects of stress because stress negatively impacts muscle recovery and strength. In the off-season, it’s more about growth and work capacity.
Where we’re going over time nutritionally is becoming much more sniper-like and strategic of where we’re going to start applying all these amazing things that are being used and discovered. When I look at the things that are holding us back, it’s not necessarily knowing, “Did my genes predispose me to be a fast caffeine metabolizer or not?” That stuff is interesting, but that’s not the rate-limiting step.
I’m always interested in, “What’s the thing that’s holding you back?” it’s not, “What’s the 50 things we could do?” but, “What’s the thing that we could do that’s going to make the biggest difference?” Since we have the capacity to gather so much more data on ourselves, we need to start identifying the proper interventions based on the data we’re getting. That’s the next step in nutrition.
Habits form so much of our ability to execute at a high level. The Jedburghs in World War II had to do three things every day to be successful. They had to be able to shoot, move, and communicate, core foundational tasks. What are the three things that you do every day to set the conditions for success in your world?
Protein at every meal is a key foundational piece. I move every day. Exercise is the best drug that we have access to. Whether it’s just getting out and rocking for a couple of miles or getting in a workout, move every day. I always eat fruits and vegetables at every meal. It sounds almost cliché being nutrition and being, “Eat more fruits and vegetables,” but they provide you with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber, not necessarily a lot of calories for the amount of food that you can eat. There are a bunch of behavioral things around curbing appetite. If you eat protein and fruits or vegetables at every meal, you are 95% of the way there. You back-load in starches and grains based on your activity levels and you’re doing well. If you do those things, you’re doing well.
[bctt tweet=”Exercise is the best drug that we have access to.” username=”talentwargroup”]
You summed up the formula right there because too many times, we put everything on a pedestal. We were joking because we did a little workout here. Jake Harriman came in to be a guest, but we were about to do a workout and I said, “Do you want to join the workout?” He very graciously put a smile on his face and said, “I’ll jump in.” After we were joking and we said, “Thanks for making me do that. I wasn’t going to do anything because I didn’t feel like I had other things going on.”
Too often when we think about food and about working out, we think it has to be this complicated effort. We’ve got to write down our seven meals and figure out exactly what’s going to be in there. We have to prepare them the day before. “If I work out, do I have time to stretch and get ready? Is my mind and my body in the right place? What about all these other things?”
Sometimes it’s like, “Go over to this sandbag and do a seven-minute workout.” Eat a couple of fruits, vegetables, and protein at every meal. You don’t have to measure it all out. You don’t have to have your little Dixie cups full of stuff. Make those small choices and you’re going to see the difference. That’s it.
That guides you well. You open your fridge and think, “I need protein. I eat vegetables.” You can find those things. You look at a menu and you’re like, “What am I going to order? I need protein and vegetables.” It almost sounds like, “How’d this guy get his PhD? That’s his advice?”
I can dig into the science and you got books and a podcast. They can call you.
That’s the piece on a consistent basis. It’s that. It’s like, “I wasn’t going to do this.” People are so quick to throw in the towel, “I’m going to eat this bagel, slice of pizza, or whatever it is,” when a pretty good choice is right next to them. Choose that one even though it’s not perfect.
Mike, we got a long day ahead of us. I got to make a series of choices throughout the day as to what I’m going to consume, the volume of what it will be, and how I will feel at the end of the day. I’m sure a lot of it’s going to have to do with what I put into my body. I appreciate you starting the day with me. I appreciate everything that you’re doing in this industry because it is so critically important to understand what we put in our bodies and the choices that we make. We choose to perform, but our choices affect our performance. Thanks for spending some time with me.
Thanks so much for having me.
