262: How Healthy Habits Can Transform Your Body More Than Any Diet with John Berardi, PhD

Today’s Guest

John Berardi

In this episode, Ted interviews Dr. John Berardi. John is a legend in the health and fitness industry, having written for Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness and Testosterone Nation. He’s worked with George Saint Pierre, the champion MMA fighter and been to the special training Nike camp to work with professional athletes. Dr. John Berardi is a voice of reason in an industry that is often full of extremism and hype.

He’s here today to talk to you about nutrition but he’ll bring a different perspective. He has a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry, but he has gone a different direction and moved into habit change psychology.

John explains in this episode why he went that way, why it’s not a nutrition problem and why the fitness industry is failing you: it’s about changing your habits.

Also, he shares how you can start to get a hold of the information you need, and the habits and goals you should be focusing onto completely change your body and your health for the long-term. This episode is a master class in nutrition.

You’ll Learn

• John’s journey of higher education starting in exercise and nutritional biochemistry (5.03)
• What John’s company Precision Nutrition do (7.42)
• What lead John to start transforming real people’s lives (14.38)
• The power of habit-based nutrition coaching (17.04)
• John’s successful framework for reaching your fitness goals (19.51)
• How to build a better you, one habit at a time (23.01)
• Why you should be able to follow your workout and nutrition programs on your worst day(26.20)
• How the fitness industry has benefited from failing people, preventing them getting lasting results and creating a dependency (29.04)
• How the “almost nothing” way can help you change your life (35.15)
• The power of strategic daily practices to achieve your goals (38.28)
• Why a little bit of knowledge can be a block to people taking action (41.14)
• The reason micro-biome, genetic and blood testing can be a complete waste of time and money (46.05)
• How to increase the odds of reaching your goals by 80% (47.50)
• The power of coaching (51.12)
• Why people fall into the trap of thinking fitness and nutrition can be changed or improved by getting more information (54.20)
• The real reason braking bad eating habits is so hard (56.24)
• Am I a nutritional agnosticism? (1.00.35)
• Is your diet a cult? (1.06.22)
• The importance of choosing the right diet plan by comparing similarities (1.09.05)
• John’s upcoming book on the reliability of genetic testing (1.16.40)
• The opportunity cost of getting distracted by fads instead of focusing on the fundamentals (1.118.00)

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Connect with John Berardi:

• Website
• Definite on sugar
• Intermittent Fasting 
• Facebook

Ted’s Takeaway

We like to think about nutrition as being about what to eat, how many calories, how much protein vs. how much carbs etc. That knowledge can help you, but what John teaches is behavior change for a long-term approach. People can be successful in losing fat, but the problem is keeping it off. We do a terrible job of that, and some people have trouble losing too because they can’t reign in their behavior.

So Ted’s takeaway today is to start thinking about whether your behaviors are conducive to your goals when it comes to your health.

Step 1- Keep a food journal

Step 2- Look at the triggers that cause you to overeat

Step 3-Understand your food environment

Step 4 –Start paying attention to those things and be mindful about it.