Carnivore Diet: High Performance Training and Building Muscle | Ep 12

hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant free md series hello and welcome to another episode of the how to carnival podcast in keeping with the plant free md series here we have dr anthony chafee all kidded up in his scrubs um again for another episode so this is episode seven and today we're going to be talking about training and this is the topic dr chad he's very well versed in as he's a former professional rugby player so dr chafee welcome ah thank you very much good to see you how are your holidays yeah they're all very good it's nice to have a couple weeks off um how are yours uh good i'm mostly working but i did get a few days off here and there so it was nice and not as busy too so that was good yeah no emergencies uh it was only emergencies we didn't have our elective list so we just dealt with the emergencies which is always fine and otherwise we you know we didn't have all the the normal daily grind which is also fine yeah yeah that would be a good relief in a way give a break um so the topic today is training and it's something that you and i have kind of talked about back and forth and when when i first met you i had some questions for you around that because obviously you've got your history of the rugby player one of the first anecdotes that i want to keep up with is that you unlike nearly everyone else i've spoken to discovered that carbohydrates before match day were not beneficial for you about that and i know you used to play faster which yeah from my experience playing sports um so can you tell us about like you know how that worked for you and how you discovered it i i don't know exactly how it started but i definitely did notice that i would feel better when i didn't eat you know so i would certainly wait several hours you know if i was training or something like that i would never eat within two hours of that but then i even noticed that if i ate within two hours they would you know or three hours or something like that i would still feel like you know there's still food being digested and it didn't feel comfortable and so i would just sort of go back less and less and less and then you know ended up sort of wouldn't eat like an afternoon or evening meal before i would go to go to training and then i was you know training from 3 pm to 10 pm and i just wasn't going to eat anyway so i'd eat something early in the morning and then i eat something late at night but for the games you know because of that i didn't want to eat too close to the meal and you know being you know a young person has just you know never liked mornings i would wake up absolutely as late as possible before i absolutely just had to get up and get ready and go to my training and or to my game sorry and so you know i wouldn't i wouldn't have time to eat so i just got used to just never eating before the games and then i i started even noticing that if i would eat later at night i would actually not even feel as good as if i lay eight earlier in the night and so forth and i would never eat before for the game and most of it started out being with that just that timing of like you know just felt like there was something that i was still digesting i didn't like that um and then i just noticed it like with with you know playing sevens you have like a whole tournament um i would feel great throughout the whole day and if you know halfway through something like that i would like eat something it would just shut me down and i would never feel as good after that and so i i never ate until all the games were done um i've known a couple people like that there was a guy uh philimone um who i played with who's actually played sevens on the fijian national team before he moved up to seattle and i played sevens with him there with old puget sound beach and he he would do the same thing so he like just refused to eat the entire day for um tournaments and things like that um i think we were the only probably the only two on the team that did that and then so you know even if i had like a game late at night say like you know evening game like a 7 p.m game or something like that you know i would i would think like well maybe i should eat something earlier and every time i did i felt worse i didn't perform as well i didn't feel as well and so i just just had the blanket hard rule like i will not eat on the day of the game and i just you know i felt much much better uh because of that you know the intermittent fasting people will say tell you the same thing you know they they feel best on their their full fast days where they have they just haven't eaten anything 24 hours that's when they run their marathons that's when they do their big endurance um you know endurance uh meats or whatever and you know if you think about it biochemically it makes sense because you know we eat carbohydrates and that jacks your insulin up insulin forces energy into cells it doesn't allow it to come out of cells and so now you've locked down all your fat stores which is your gas tank and so you can only run on the the glucose that you've taken in and so your blood sugar once that goes down you know you have a limited amount of glycogen in your muscles in your and your liver um and your people's carbo load and so forth but it's still a finite resource because you can't actually replenish that glycogen uh whereas if you are in a fasted state whereas i think of it as our primary metabolic state it's an unlimited supply because you continually replenish your glycogen and your muscles and in your liver their studies going back to 1981 with wolves looking at this you know they don't they don't carbo low before they chase caribou for 10 hours you know so how do they do it and people ask there's like well don't you need carbs to burn carbs do they have carbs like yes they do it's just like us they have blood sugar liver glycogen muscle glycogen but it stays rock solid it doesn't change no matter what they're doing it's basically here i'm sure there's a little fluctuations but it's essentially the same and so that's the thing whereas when you carbo load you have that that's a finite resource because you cannot replenish this because insulin stays up for roughly 24 hours in biochemistry textbook it's it's 24 hours the way that i'm kind of understanding it duct shape is it's like if you haven't carbo-loaded and you haven't jammed the glycogen into your cells uh which means it's almost like an open door so you can burn what the fat am i right so you burn the fat that you've consumed initially and then you can just kind of open the door and start tapping into the fat storage in your body yeah yeah exactly yeah so if your insulin is too high it shuts that down so insulin blocks proteolysis it blocks lipolysis so you can't break down protein or fat to make glucose right so you know for gluconeogenesis right so because high blood sugar is toxic to the body this is what kills diabetics right it's prolonged exposure to high blood sugar your body reacts in a defensive mechanism by increasing your insulin and that you know just to get this stuff out of your blood system and so that can be put into your cells in the form of glycogen that can be put into your liver in the same manner and it gets thrown into your adipose tissue as well your fat tissue that's not actually a good thing i mean it's a good thing in the sense that it's getting rid of this toxic element in your in your bloodstream but that's not actually what we want to do that's not a physiological uh benefit to us to do that because it's while you're getting more glycogen your shutting down a lot of biochemical systems and processes that you really need a much better energy store is your fat so people say we need to eat a whole bunch of carbs so you store up a bunch of glycogen well you're storing a bunch of fat as well so it's not just glycogen so that's not that's not a benefit uh if you're trying to you know reduce your your body fat but it's also not a benefit because you're shoving all this energy into your fat cells that now you can't access you can only access the glycogen and so you have to wait for that insulin to come down naturally and you know that can take around 24 hours and so you have the intermittent fasting people that only total once a day and they just wait out that clock on the insulin they work out basically right before they're going to eat again and they feel great and there's no wonder where they feel great because they can tap into their fat stores and get an unlimited amount of energy because you're really not going to run out of your fat stores unless you're extremely emaciated and literally starving to death people still survive days or weeks in that state so you know people with normal body habitus and fat content even if they're very lean they're they're going to be able to run a marathon or an ultra marathon without without running out of their fat stores that's not that's not going to be an issue you don't need to eat carbs and so i just fell upon that naturally um other people have done this purposefully through intermittent fasting but for me i just noticed how my body was working and i just just sort of um you know played with it until i got got the results that i wanted yeah right i mean i've sort of been playing around with it as well and now i'll eat dinner the night before and then ideally i'll train at like 12 30 or 1 pm and then i'll have my first meal after that and i feel so much better like endurance is better i feel more explosive as well um yeah just just train for longer and and enjoy it more the idea of going back is just not something i want to do yeah no i i i just feel so much better as well and you know now that i'm conscious about it and i understand and i'm thinking about it in a biochemical sort of way and you know what is actually happening you know obviously i'm not going to mess with that um i also feel better just when i'm eating carnivore uh still eating you know working out on an empty stomach i still feel better doing that but well mostly usually i e i eat until i'm full until i'm satiated and when i do i get quite sleepy and happy and contented and lethargic you know you're going in from your your fight or flight to rest and digest and so you're giving your body a signal it's like i've gotten i've gotten all this energy i don't need any more like take it easy don't expend more energy we're just going to take it easy now we're going to repair everything and so that's why i eat late at night you only need to worry about timing of your meals if you're eating carbohydrates if you eat carbohydrates later at night you're going to raise your insulin insulin opposes growth hormone your peak growth hormone production happens two hours after you go to sleep at night and so you're really going to screw up your your body's hormones in that way because you know growth hormone is a very very important hormone in your body for aging and repair and you know development and so forth so if you're eating carbohydrates late at night it's uh you're going to shut down those mechanisms if you eat carbohydrates at any time you're going to be shutting down a lot of mechanisms but that's specifically the timing part of it so i eat you know right before i go to bed i feel great when i do that i sleep like a baby um how many meals you know again sorry are you one meal a day or how many meals did i do it usually so depends on how hard i'm training um and it depends on how fatty the meal is that i have so if it's a high fat beef meal then i'll eat um usually just once a day but if i'm just training training training like uh hard if i actually have the time to uh i might do that twice a day and that that's fine um if it's if i'm getting more lean stuff i'm definitely going to be hungrier more than once a day because there's you know much less calories and nutrition in a very lean meat so you just need more pounds of meat in order to get the same caloric intake and i find that if i'm going to eat during the day and i don't want to be sort of sleepy and lethargic i'll hold myself back from you know i won't quite eat too uh to satiety i'll just i'll just eat a lot you know and enough and i'll just be like okay i'll just stop it there um and i find it works a little better sometimes i've had different experiences where i'll eat a steak but i won't eat until i'm full and it'll just supercharge me i don't know why and i just feel like i just gotta go do something i've gotta go you know kill an animal or something you know i just like i just like just charged up where it's like you know i don't know exactly what that mechanism is maybe it's just you've given yourself enough energy and your body's just like right we need more of that let's go ahead but um you know i like i generally like working out and then eating because i think it is like you know an animal out in the wild you know predator in the wild you're going your hunt you're chasing this thing down you've taken it down you've killed it and now you're going to eat it and so i just think you know physiologically you know there may be nothing to it but that's how i like to think about it and there are different you know um sort of sports medicine people and trainers and things like that that talk about this anabolic window after you uh work out that for 30 to 40 minutes after you work out your body is in an anabolic mode and so anything you put in your body your body is just going to turn that into muscle i i haven't actually looked into that very closely but that's sort of the idea behind having the protein shake directly after you work out eating something directly after you work out yeah god doesn't matter how true that is because you say bodybuilding no i have no idea somebody goes eat like coco pop straight after that train yeah well yeah but that's that's the thing and you know a lot of these these guys when i was uh playing rugby in europe like they were the trainers there were saying it doesn't matter what you eat just get calories in you and those calories will will turn into muscle i never bought that but that that is sort of an accepted theory um physiologically if you're thinking about you know an animal taking down a kill and expending all this energy to do that and then eating you know maybe there's something triggered by that but i haven't i haven't seen anything specifically to say that but i do know that i feel better when i do it and so i just do that dr chafee i remember chatting to you and you were talking about big fluctuations in your weight which um kind of it really surprised me because you're super lean and you know you're not a teenager like you know you're 42 yeah you can have these fluctuations in muscle 42 next week so all right 41. yeah 41. um yeah exactly yeah can you can you tell me about that range like just recently how heavy were you and then and then what happened when you sort of stopped going to the gym oh well well very recently um you know when i before i went to america to visit my family i was about 110 kilos and you know that was with you know working out fairly regularly three to four days a week and um and eating to satiety i sort of dropped a little bit of that because i just wasn't eating as much as i uh normally would and i didn't eat enough to you know maintain that when i was back home because i was eating eating with my family and i wasn't necessarily cooking my own meals i wasn't necessarily cooking as much as i normally would um but then i sort of made a con you know sort of saw my sort of weights dropping off a bit which i didn't want and so i i made a concerted effort to eat more uh eat enough i should say not i wasn't forcing myself but it was just actually i wasn't actually eating too when i was full previously and so i got back up till short of 110 after i left but then you know coming back to australia is quite difficult um they canceled my flight to perth so i had to go through sydney they kept me in sydney for 16 days before i was allowed to come back to perth and then i had to quarantine in perth for two weeks so i didn't have access to the gym that whole time i didn't necessarily have access to uh the amount of food that i would normally eat either and so i ended up dropping down i think it was like 103 or something like that and then just like just recently because i still haven't gotten in the gym i swear to noise myself i'm just sort of creeping down and i was like 100k i actually dropped below like 100 i'm like that is not okay like that now we're changing we're stopping that today and so i started um uh started doing more work i will start working out and then uh and just eating until i was full again um so i'm back over 100 but i'm like literally just just over 100 kgs now i you know i still look you know very muscular still the same body fat percentage it's just that you know i wasn't a eating enough to maintain my body mass uh or be uh working out enough to to stimulate those that sort of growth when i was in when i was playing rugby my weight would fluctuate wildly so when i was out of season i would eat a whole bunch and i would literally like slam on 30 pounds in a month um because i was just i went out just going to the gym because you know there's so much sprinting and running and so forth i just i really couldn't keep up with the calorie intake that i needed and so i would you know sort of out of season i would be i could be i could be 265 pounds 270 pounds and then you know sort of a couple months into rugby you know really leaning down and getting just you know you know very very cut maybe about 245 which is about 110 kilos um maybe 110 in a bit and um but you know it was it was difficult for me to maintain that unless i was going to the gym and and eating enough and so i could i could regularly drop down to around 200 pounds which is crazy you know it's like a 60 pound swing and and most of that was muscle i just i just wasn't eating enough to maintain the muscle and so yeah yeah so it was um you know just sort of be like what 90 kilos or something like that so i go from you know 120 kilos down to 90 kilos it's not what i want you know but then when i when i stopped working out to that level you know running sprinting and so forth and i was just focusing on the weights and i wasn't expending so much um energy my body was just like oh thank god and it was just like re and it just like all the you know the food that i put into it uh would just just rebuild and i would have this this rebound boom of musculature that would just sort of slam back and so yeah so i had these big screens i had i had sort of two sets of clothes um i still had some and they were like the jeans that were like much bigger uh the voice size my waist size would basically stay the same but my my thighs would just get so much bigger that i couldn't wear like jeans or pants in my in my waist size i'd have to go up several so maybe my waist size would be like sort of 32 34 usually 34. and but i would have to wear size 40 jeans just because just to get them on my damn legs like and they'd be like tight they'd be like skin tight on my thighs 38s would definitely be skin tight on my thighs and so it would be just goofy looking it would just be like it was like i'd pull the the uh the waist out it'd be look like it's like oh you're my fat pants you know and i'd have to actually fold fold it over and and and secure it down with a belt um just to get over my damn legs obviously serious muscle gain is possible in carnival absolutely that's something that a lot of people ask when they join the carnival challenge or when they're you know thinking about like traditional dogma of unique carbohydrates plus protein to build muscle absolutely no no yeah we've had people in you know in 30 days they pack on maybe like three kilos net but it's five degrees of muscle and then two kilos of fat loss and so they go from so like 1993. um yeah what what are your thoughts about muscle building in carnival well you know i mean i mean just for me like every time i i go to the gym and i work out um and you know i push myself very hard i i know how to work out i've been doing this since i was a kid you know so i i get a lot and i get a lot more out of it because of because of my diet but if i'm doing that i'm working out hard and i'm eating to what my body wants me to eat i'll put on my muscle very very quickly so you know i don't really have fat to lose at this point but i know i did that at the beginning when i did have extra fat um i was lifting up weights heavily but and i was losing fat so i was like shredding fat and stacking on muscle but my weight was like exactly the same it was just like yeah yeah exactly so i was getting a lot of muscle but i was also burning a lot of fat now because i don't really have fat um you know much excess fat to i don't have any excess absolutely i mean i could i could lean down if i wanted to go for some certain appearance but you know i'm you know my physiologically this is where this is the body fat percentage my body wants and i'm happy with that but when i'm working out and i'm meeting to the satiety you know every time i'll go back to the gym i'll be like a pound heavier you know like every time like a pound maybe two pounds things like every single time and so when i was going to america right before like i was i was really hitting the gym hard for the last couple weeks before i came here and i just noticed my weight was just ticking up and ticking up and ticking up you know what i mentioned previously that you know during covid you know couldn't go to the gym at all so i wasn't really working out and actually the previous year before that i was only going to the gym basically once a month because i just just didn't have time it was too busy and and so i got out of the habit of that and because i couldn't go at all during covid lockdowns i was just like burning to get out there so the second the gyms open back up i was back in there at least four days a week sometimes five or six and i would you know i would go you know i couldn't do my big you know three four hour workouts that i normally like to do but i'd at least go for an hour hour to two and i was eating a lot and so i went from 93 92 93 kilos to 105 kilos in five weeks and i saved the same body fat percentage so that was all muscle and so no prob probably not and and also because like you know i hadn't been working out really regularly in a year and you know a year and four months so my body was really wanting to put on weight yeah i was ready to go so you get those beginner gains where you haven't really worked out much and all of a sudden you're hitting the gym more and you're stimulating muscles for the first time they'd go yeah let's go so um you know there's definitely part of that in there um but you know even now when i'm 100 kilos or 110 kilos if i'm working out hard and consistently i would just keep putting on weight as far as the carbohydrates are concerned yeah this is this is a a long-standing myth that you have to eat carbohydrates in order to get bigger and build muscle and it is your um your your bulking phase then you go on your your cutting phase and so forth i think that is is completely uh defeating the point of all this because you know like like we said earlier you when you have high blood sugar you're stuffing in glycogen into your muscles that is a molecule and that has um you know that's the physical size right so you have you depositing these molecules in your muscles and that will bulk up your muscles okay so they'll look bigger they also draw in water so you'll have more waterways you'll have wet soggy mussels which look bigger and so you eat a bunch of carbohydrates your muscles will sort of swell up but that that's not swelling with muscle okay that's unhealthy weight and it fine it may look bigger but it's not stronger and it's and it will go away and so then when you go in your cutting phase you cut out all the carbohydrates and so forth well the glycogen just disappears the water disappears and now you're just left with the muscle that you build okay so it's not helping you build any more muscle okay in in my estimation you can you can get much better results by eating just by eating meat and i think your body just responds it just tells you how much it wants you just give it what it wants and it will rebuild you know if you force yourself to eat more calories i don't think there's any evidence to suggest that you will force your body to build more muscle as opposed to depositing fat okay and also that's what carbohydrates also do because they're depositing intramuscular fat as well which also makes your muscles look bigger so this is like when we we feed animals grains like cows grains and so forth to fatten them up and get that marbling that marbling is intramuscular fat deposition from hyperglycemia okay and so when we eat carbohydrates our muscles look like that too so they look bigger but they're they're like a wagyu beef i mean it's disgustingly unhealthy it's not it's not going to be as efficient and effective as a muscle group as it would be otherwise so when you're eating just carnivore and you're only eating meat and fat you're not depositing this glycogen you're not depositing this fat your muscles are working better you're only gaining lean muscle mass and your muscles are going to work better your body's going to work better you're better you can work harder and you'll get more out of your workout so you'll actually build muscle faster and better i've actually just started talking to you i've you know spoken to bodybuilders and things like that about this before some of them have been interested in trying it but they're like oh well maybe maybe after this this competition i'll do it because you know it's very understandable you don't want to you know switch horses in the middle of a race you know so they're just like well let me just finish this off but then generally you know once they're you know that that's sort of finished up they're not as you know you strike while the iron is hot as well right so a lot of these things so they sort of they sort of uh forget how interested they were in trying it and they just sort of got on with their life but i'm you know speaking to a couple people that actually want to try it and i'm going to help sort of coach them through their next competition with um a carnivore diet and so we can just you just show because you know everyone's saying that you have to do it this certain way but people feel miserable they they they're affecting their health they hate it and you know they're saying like hey i'm getting good results not doing that and just doing carnivore you know what do we think and so you know all the old school um bodybuilders used to do that yeah you know there's a lot of these guys steak and eggs that's it you know some of them would have like a cheat day maybe but most of them were were consistently carnivore the vast majority of of their careers you know um was that serge nubrit who was arnold schwarzenegger's body idol that's who arnold schwarzenegger idolized as a bodybuilder this guy was jacked until his death in his 70s from um it sounds like you know foul play they don't really know what's going on but the guy was ripped i mean he was doing like bodybuilding exhibitions like into his late 60s you know this guy would routinely eat six pounds of horse meat a day you know horse meat yeah yeah horseman he's french you know i don't know why he's like they're horse meat yeah so six pounds of horse meat a day and and he was just a beast you know people should look him up serge nuber n-u-b-r-e-t i believe it's spelled the guy was a just a statue of a man and you know if people watched that um that movie pumping iron with arnold schwarzenegger where they saw it on his last run at the you know mr olympia uh the guy who got second is serge and um [Music] and he just he was just like sort of a late entry just said yeah i'll come in and he just ended up getting second not even like training for it you know and um and i honestly i'm looking at that and i saw like i'm like that guy is way more jacked than arnold and i honestly thought i was like i think that guy should have won arnold was 26 in that new brit was 37. and he was yoked i mean this guy was just a just a specimen of a man you know prior to that you know that but you know arnold schwarzenegger listened to that too he ate a ton of meat he just said meat meat meat meat that's what he was doing and especially before that it was it was essentially pure carnivore they all did it and these are all the people that inspired ronnie coleman and everyone else to get into bodybuilding in the first place and so no no no you can't possibly do it they all did it your idols all did it and you know they say well they aren't as big as ronnie coleman well ronnie coleman is a very unique individual that guy was just a you know an absolute he was on some special too he was but but you know but before that he you know according to him you know he wasn't but he wasn't winning any competitions he was getting like third place and things like that and he just got tired of it he was going natural and these guys on roids are getting first and second and he's getting third and he's beating the rest of them um because he was just just a specimen as well but then he just said all right screw it then i'll just i'll just use all this stuff and then he just won everything from then on out but you know these these sort of size monsters now yeah i mean they're on a they're eating a shitload of meat um they are using copious amounts of steroids it doesn't look right it looks far from natural it looks like something that you want to attain yeah yeah i mean at least arnold like you mean that guy was you know superhuman in the sense that like that you don't see that naturally in humans um so you knew that there was some you know anabolic sort of supplementation going on there but it wasn't but it was still in that realm of reality yeah you know where someone was just a beast of a man yeah exactly you know there's just some beast of a man like okay you know i could see that that happening um but then you go past that you're just like that that's different that doesn't look natural that doesn't look normal you know and um so yeah it's weird i don't know if bodybuilding is going to get away from that and come back to a more natural look or not but um you know it doesn't either way whatever happens you know you don't need to do the bulking cutting nonsense because i think that's counterproductive i think that you're hurting yourself by putting in all this intramuscular fat and actually slowing down your muscles and your reap and and your recovery and so forth you're going to be sore you're going to hurt you're going to have aches you're going to have pain it's going to be harder and when you're healthy exactly for as long as you want get good results that's exactly that's exactly it and you won't get uh the results from the same amount of work from the same amount ever you won't be able to work as hard but you'll also won't be able to get the same results of that amount of work you know people say performance and results are 90 diet and 10 hard work but you know i disagree with that i think it's 100 diet and everything else is a product of your diet you know or function of your diet because depending on what you eat that's what that is what you're going to get out of that so if you are not eating the right things your body's not going to be working properly you're not going to be able to recover or repair your body to the same extent as you would have otherwise and you won't be able to run properly you know if you put a bit of diesel in your petrol engine you're going to kill the engine it's not going to run right you know if you put all diesel in there it's just it's not going to work at all you can think of your body like that as well if you put in the right fuel you'll get you'll get proper performance and if you put something else in there you're going to screw it up you can have a ferrari but it's going to run like crap if you put in the wrong fuel totally all right i think we'll wrap it up there that's a brilliant way to finish things off um sounds good thanks very much yeah you're very welcome it was a pleasure