Abel James | How To Stay Paleo Anywhere & Everywhere

what's up you paler hackers welcome to the first ever video podcast super excited to get this going we decided to take it to the next level and instead of just bringing you weekly audio interviews we want to take it up a notch and bring your weekly video interviews I'm a huge fan I think nonverbals are massive in communication it's how we communicate I think that a lot gets lost when you're just listening to voices and you're not seeing people ideally we would do it in person but this is the next best thing so I'm excited this week to kick it off we got my main man the fat Burning Man Abel James here talk about what he's been up to the past six months living on the road eating on a budget eating with no food just a freezer and how to minimize your life simplify it and make it better real quick paleo XCOM is a place to be check out the forum there check out the blog post Clark danger calm for me but this is YouTube this is my home so if you search Clark danger you'll find tons of videos all right you ready for the show ready for you to hear it let's go see what my main man Abel James has to say hackers with me today is author bio hacker and host of the fat burning man show mr. Abel James himself what up Abel life is grand man what's cooking life is grand and fat burning man show I read was the number one show on iTunes and eight countries or something like that when I first started it was it was kind of nuts because it's still I'm sure you can relate to this you feel like you're just talking into a microphone at your computer yeah the rest is all kind of magic or made-up or whatever but uh yeah it was it was a friend of mine back at the beginning of the paleo days from the first paleo conference actually Dean Dwyer who sent me this screenshot of like all these podcasts and there was like Jillian Michaels and then mine was number two this is f like a couple months after I started and I'm like I didn't even know what this chart was or that you know people measured that stuff but yeah all of a sudden it just kept like going up and you know I think it was that Weekly clip of doing it for like two and a half years every single week and bringing on people who were kind of like out of the loop in some cases not in the normal circles who people hadn't heard from like the show with my mom was one of the most popular shows it was just it was fun to make it like personal and real and I've been off the grid for the past like six months and just now starting to come back and it's it's awesome okay and so I was kind of stalking my guests before the call like I always do and I I didn't notice she went off the grid for about six months or so so totally so what were we doing living I we so in we were living in Austin for the past like five six years and June we decided to sell everything including my house in cars and just travel the world for a while because we're gonna you know get old and boring and settle down and have kids sometime in the next few years probably so we're just trying to get our wiggles out and so we went to Fiji Australia lived in Bali for a while and then did a road trip of like all in North America for the rest of the time and like lived in national parks and mostly just spent a lot of time in nature a lot of time in the woods not really talking to anybody just recharging and it's been awesome so you lived it up yeah totally life was hard in those six months huh life was pretty tough well actually so this is crazy but our truck caught fire on the way to Burning Man hauling an RV it's an ironic isn't it yeah it's like the strangest addition yeah go ahead and and just like living on the road out of a camper van or out of a you know basically a tiny house for that period of time and changing your environment so often is for some people to dream and for other people a nightmare and I'd like the truth is is it's somewhere in between it's really hard sometimes but it's awesome training for yourself for your own patience for learning skills you know it's basically we had this it's a Chevy truck like a big diesel that we need to haul this toy hauler that we have that we've been living in and that's essentially learning how to drive a semi like during a snowstorm going neck-and-neck with those guys down a highway that's I see is just like that's a type of training that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't really been there but it's been cool that's have you seen the show Ice Road Truckers yeah what that so Abel James was part of the crew that's right I mean you're miss not about long now two hundred pounds and an overgrown beer and slightly breaking the stereo one of your meth addiction but you know you're right you're getting there totally cuz that's a huge problem like those truckers who are driving these massive things of machinery like you know thousands of pounds tons and they're going over these icy roads and you know one way it should be and then you know you almost incentivize driving through the night because you get paid more and you drive fast because you make it there faster I mean that's so dangerous that stuff there's no joke yeah we we've definitely felt like we were on the edge a few times so on your road trip then when you're going there I mean I'm imagining you know it's truck stop truck stop truck stop does you ever feel like you were ostracized from the big the big car League because you're in a camper and the truckers would look at you like you're the the lame kid on the schoolyard or what was that feeling like yeah in some ways in some ways for sure but my mom's side of the family actually her sister married like one of the big guys in a biker gang essentially so that was kind of a part of growing up too that was kind of fun to like slap the chaps back on so to speak and and live that but mostly it was um this camper I was pretty stoked about because I was looking like I'm a musician and I need a practice space almost more than anything else and so like having a mobile studio is really really appealing because I go out to the west coast and LA to record some times and other times in other places so I didn't even know this thing existed but I walked in it's called a toy hauler and basically it's like Nitro Circus and all those racing teams they used to fill it up with like ATVs and motorbikes but they started tripping them out with like good kitchens and like a pretty comfy place to sleep and the stuff that you would need also in base camp you know if you're gonna go on an adventure or something right but basically it's just a big box and so I took all of the guts out of it it's like totally modular and it just a big box with like almost no furniture so it encourages me to be on my feet or moving or mobile and just a bunch of my instruments in there so it's a practice studio so it's kind of like a u-haul trailer that you pull yeah yeah like again a beer trailer you make it comfy right and so it's got like carpet and it's got kind of a nice Fung Shui thing going on it's all zenned out and you know it has our favorite pictures and other things to make it feel kind of homey but it's been a really cool practice in in good habits I don't living in such a small space your musician's bachelor pad that's right you put a slow cooker in there too we do have a slow cooker yeah and it usually has well that's that's an interesting thing right cuz like my my lifestyle is such that a lot of times I'm working or writing or playing music during the day yeah I'm not really I'm not really eating and I have my crock-pot going with broth in it and so I'm even either having like teas or coffee or you know coffee with some fat in it or sipping on a lot of this time like soup or broth or some kind of light food that keeps you going and that's been a really really healthy thing for me I've been able to get away with a lot with t
hose kinds of habits yeah so when you're traveling and I guess to focus on the road trip aspect of it I mean you're on the road so you know when people come on the call or you get emails I'm sure you get tons of emails from your podcast it's always the excuses and the number one is is I don't have the time or I don't have the you know I'm on the road I'm traveling what do I do I can't eat healthy you know poor me what did you do I mean you were living that excuse for six months so we still are actually right yeah we're shooting some cooking videos and so we just decided to rent a place for like a week and this place is in the mountains of Arizona which I barely even knew existed before this but like we're right next to literally I'm looking at a jack-in-the-box they've got a cheesecake restaurant right down there and they're there is fortunately a Whole Foods and even a natural grocers in this town which is pretty cool okay so you can go there and get organic fresh produce stuff like that we've been in so many places where I mean if you guys who are listening have trouble getting good food fresh food and certainly having it be convenient we totally feel you because most most places in America and and even other countries make it really a an inconvenience to go and source awesome food if you live in you know Austin or a lot of places in California or more metropolitan areas a lot of them do have you know good options you still have to find them out but if you're living in the kind of in-between the suburbs where this the shopping malls repeat themselves every five minutes when you're going on the highway it's it's hard to find something that isn't Applebee's you know yeah for sure and so you're renting a place in Arizona and you know you're traveling a lot so what did you do like what what is how did you adapt your nutritional approach and kind of like what was it before and what is it now well it was pretty easy to have like our kitchen at home set up with everything that we needed like you just open a drawer you know exactly where it is you pull it out so it's you know a greens powder or something like that to throw in a smoothie or or if it's you know you know that you have some steaks that are waiting in your chest freezer that's great because like there are very few excuses to that road block that comes in between yeah which is like your own healthy habits so the opposite end of that is like you're in some random like your RV breaks down in some random town which happened to us a bunch of times and you're in this hotel and all they have is like you know Folgers coffee doughnuts that's how what do you do good slow move but I know you gotta just it hurts so good when in Rome in some folders man nothing like it fresh roasted single sourced organic shade-grown continue what we do what we learned to do is to get a lot of really healthy like shelf-stable fats and keep them in our backpacks and keep them in our luggage so things like those little packets of coconut mana or coconut like the coconut mealy stuff the app basically it's just coconut that's been macerated but it's all the good stuff the coconut cream little packets of that or nuts or we'd make our we'd roast our own nuts sometimes kind of make our own Gorp and then you know we did have a freezer and I think anyone who's who's traveling has at least access to something like that and if you don't and you're vacationing you can at least get a cooler so there was another challenge which is our dog and she's a 75 pound Labrador Retriever who we try to feed as much as we can raw I mean that was actually the bigger challenge than feeding us was was feeding that just the sheer amount of meat that that dog eats is a lot to handle so basically we would keep a lot of frozen meat a lot of frozen veggies and make smoothies we would make little blend up our salad because like this you don't want to have a frozen veggie salad if you can't get a fresh one so it was stuff like that it's like you can still do it you just have to plan ahead every once in a while so if we'd find a store that we really liked a natural store whether Whole Foods or just like a mom-and-pop place we'd stock up for the next two or three weeks just in case a lot of the time and then freeze whatever we needed to it sounds like when people have that excuse if I don't have the time it's not necessarily all the time but if they don't have the priority right like right right they almost like having that excuse of this is why I can't do it and they cling on to that story and they don't let it go because it makes them feel fine to keep doing the same things they're doing and no judgment there it's just a reality check it's like saying you can do it if it's a high enough priority is that kind of what you're getting at well totally because there are people who work a lot of different jobs and have very little time and fortunately I'm not usually there now although it goes in bursts but I certainly was there and I know how hard that is and I think we all do but it's something where if you don't keep your eye on the ball you're gonna get burned in one way or another it you know it still happens to me I'll go and just you know I I get used to anything that I buy any food that I buy I look at every single ingredient that's in it that's just a habit that I have and every once in a while I'll just you know look at the front it's a quick look at the back grab it throw it in in the and then when we get to get home I'm like what is this crap how did they sneak all of these chemicals into this thing that you know was so easy to think was healthy so you just have to like be honest with yourself and make sure that before it crosses your lips you kind of inspect it but the natural beaver extract right yeah exactly spoke about that last time so grand what was that Kasturi 'm I think is how you say it and it's they yeah they milk it out of the rear ends of the glands of beaver the scent glands of beavers now the good news about that you know that's just like an illustration of how out of hand things are the milking part yeah whose job is it like alright Abel you gotta go to work today you gotta eight hours of milking Duty start now I don't know if they pay them a little or a lot but to me that's still not enough do you get paid by like the bucket or do you get paid by the hour or like you have quotas to make that'll be the next podcast I think good read yeah we'll get to the bottom of this pun intended oh god you want there yeah I went there I did so okay avoiding the beaver extracts yeah you look at the labels and you look at the you know to have it and you get into it and stuff and and so do you still get fooled are you better at it or yeah you get better and better but the problem here's here's another big problem is now paleo is catching on obviously and we all kind of knew that it would anyone who is sleek present in the community anyway there's a lot of the people who are listening are and it's it's so frustrating because everything that I see almost everything I see with the Paleo name on it that's starting to pop up and all these stores and being marketed as paleo is not paleo at all you know it'll be a little paleo granola bar or paleo jerky or whatever the jerky has ten grams of sugar in it the the bar that's supposed to be protein rich and totally paleo yeah you know it has honey in it so it's paleo or maple sugar or whatever else they say cavemen ate no which is debatable and it's supposed supposed to be compatible with the Paleo diet but it's processed food just like anything else is and so I think a lot of people are being reduce the Palio in the stores now through this junk food which is which is a huge problem because paleo if it wants to get bigger needs to kind of clean up its reputation I think as as a g
roup that's just kind of mindlessly eating meat which is what a lot of the outside world thinks of paleo is what I mean yeah I mean touch on two things that I've kind of want to hit on the first is how it's growing the movement I guess and the second is kind of what is paleo so I guess to tackle the first one like I was in Costco the other day and pushing the cart and I passed by the book section and it's all it's all books it's paleo you know it's New Years it's all this stuff and it seems really clean and like they're getting really conscious about upgrading their quality and you start seeing organic in there and you start seeing you know gluten-free everywhere and you start seeing all the stuff and Costco is quickly becoming a kind of a promoter of this newer right crave of upgrading yourself have you seen that just in other stores or Costco in particular yeah you're starting to see I mean there's organic food in Walmart now and that compared to where we started yeah awesome it's still like full of a lot of problems there are still challenges there things that are you know now organic as a label is getting relaxed as is pasture is grass-fed you know you can find grass-fed meat that was not fed on grass now but is called grass-fed you know what it's like and that happens to everything so as its as its expanding now that said that's probably better than what people were eating beforehand even if they kind of fall into that whole trance sure I think it's up to us as the leaders of the movement to really say to define define the parameters and put this all into perspective because industrial food that's why I actually you know instead of saying paleo throughout my book and throughout a lot of my stuff I could see that the term itself was getting kind of confounded and so I wanted to use wild as basically it's not mine you know it's not a name that I'm trademarking and you know trying to profit from as some crazy brand or something like that it's more just like a and I think people will find this as they read the book there's industrial domesticated type of food and type of living and then there's the opposite of that which is wild which is where we all at our roots came from and we don't have to go back to ten thousand years ago or longer than that to to get in touch with some of the things that are you know common sense good healthy habits we can ask our grandmothers you know we can go back to our old family recipes that were built around fresh food and so it really like my approach is trying to encourage that as opposed to some mark some some term that marketers can really abuse because okay we're all starting to see that with paleo yeah it's almost like back in the day I remember when I was I don't know 12 or something John Deere tractor gear was getting really big like people would start Aston Kutcher was like wearing John Deere hats and the dude lives in Hollywood California you're like there's no way that guy actually like bought a John Deere hat because he's a jolly yeah totally but it was a fashion statement it was fashionable he's where's John Deere hat everywhere so everyone around you started getting these John Deere hats it was like the cool thing to get and it wasn't because you like John Deere it was because it was what was fashionable that's all like almost in a way kind of like the Walmart organics I feel like organics becoming the John Deere hat and people are just so you know it's cool it's fashionable selling and so they're stocking their stores with it regardless of if they actually believe in John Deere or organic or free range or whatever so I like I like what you're saying about kind of going beyond the label I guess to wild food and you mentioned you have we talked a little bit before the call your new book the wild diet kind of getting revamped and it's on pre-order now correct yeah April 7th it'll be in bookstores everywhere and right now you can pre-order it and we're giving a bunch of stuff away too as a okay I say yeah incentive to buy a book before you get it okay and so if I were to get kind of that like press release sheet with the frequently asked questions on there what would be the spark note version of the book like what's the premise behind it why did you write the book it's yeah so I'm sorry that's like that's two questions I guess the present what's the premise around the book not the premise the premise is that we all have the truth about food deep within us and if we're honest with ourselves we all know what fresh food is we all know that when you smell it and you truly taste it and it comes from you know of a farmer just a few doors down or in the next town it's better for you than some random stuff that was you know shipped in a tanker from Chile six months ago and then sprayed up with a bunch of wax and chemicals to make it look fresh we all we all know that and so this is basically about I hope the book said it says to people that it's a lot easier than most people are making it out to be you know like a lot of people make money and and sacrifice their own consumers health by trying to make this sound so freakin complicated but it's really really simple it's like eat fresh foods plenty of vegetables eat a bunch of different kinds of foods eat with the seasons we all know this you know when you eat meat make sure that it doesn't come from a factory farm where all of the animals are sick and pumped up with hormones and antibiotics and you know pouring with pus and blood and mucus like if you look at where your food comes from it is gnarly and dark where most of our food comes from in America so it's up to you to really revisit that and develop a relationship with your food eat it not sucking down a burrito in the front front seat of a car and your way to something else but you know using food as as a gift if you're cooking for people you love because that's it's one of the most intimate things there is and also getting people back in touch with the meal because one of the coolest things about like traveling around the world as we've been doing is seeing how different cultures treat their food and their experience of mealtime and I mean you go to Italy and and dinner is a far different thing than it is in America you know at last don't three to five hours it's five hours long it is this like celebrate its thanks giving every night and uh and and I think you know we don't need to do that necessarily but just knowing that you can every once in a while on a random Tuesday have the best time of your life and eat some really good food that's that's what heals you that's what keeps you away from being obese and sick it gets to the root of something that's that's much deeper about all of this that's really true though because that five our dinner people are hearing that and scoffing at it and staying out of the time I mean even in my head I was like who's gonna do a five hour dinner but it is getting back to what we were talking about in the start of the call the priority aspect of it you know yeah it seems like in America maybe to generalize we're all caught up in this rush of being productive and getting things done and maximizing our time and right the slowdown isn't there it's kind of like we're we're all stressed out and we don't take time to recover and so maybe a theme I'm hearing emerge from what you're talking about is taking that time and prioritizing it and getting back to before we were all so stressed out and strung out yeah we're totally strung out and all these I talked about this in my book to all the it's cool when you live without all the devices for a while that are like blurring at you all day it seems like every new thing that you get is like yeah you need to do this text message during this call right yeah yeah and I get a Skype message even though I thought I turned all that st
uff off yeah because every time you get an update they turn it back on for you whatever I'm not bitter about that at all returning a podcast and Skype is just it's true though man but yeah you you go out and everyone knows at this point the phantom bloops and the phantom vibrations in their pockets or whatever and man you get away from that for a few weeks and it's really hard to come back it's like we cuz we sold a lot of our electronics to and just kind of live literally in the woods like we didn't have cell phone service we didn't have internet we didn't even have running water a lot of the time we were carrying our water I mean it sounds ridiculous but we wanted this to be kind of an exercise of what does it mean to be alive like what is walking the walk is this is what you know this is what our I mean my grandmother had to heat all of the water for her seven kids on the stove and you don't really need to go to the gym when you live like that you know what I mean so I think a lot of us are so stressed out and now we have to kind of like force all of this lifestyle stuff into our own lives that used to be built-in so getting back a little bit away from those all those machines and all those networks that are in them and all the people who you know are kind of like taking your energy all day I'll let it like basically allow that to exist and come to peace with itself sir and then you can get your brain back sure it's almost when you're talking I thought of it it's almost like we're reacting to everything you know you wake up I check your phone you're getting the Twitter messages you're not really controlling that you're reacting to it you know you're trying to meditate you're on your iPhone you have this track you're meditating to and boom boom boom things are coming up at you you're reacting to it emails pop up throughout the day you're reacting to it we're almost in this this not creating mode but this response mode and and I think that that stresses you out because you feel like you're just this thing reacting to the stimulus around you and you cannot lose you lose yourself in that process and so I really think if it is yeah it's addictive if you feel like you're doing something when you're acting because if I can just get my inbox to zero okay that's the pass/fail mark of my day if it was a success you know one of the actually it's funny you say that because one of the things that you know made me go off the grid in a lot of ways because I was doing like I said like the two and a half years every week to narrow long show yeah and all the blog posts and all the production and all the other stuff not to mention like my normal life and the other projects and the music whatever but it got to this point where enough people were listening and writing to me and a bunch of peers you know in in the field wants work together and partner and do all this stuff and the idea of inbox zero it just became I had to face this with myself literally not something I could I could do maybe ever again and so once you get to the point of knowing that there's too much coming at you then you need to kind of re-evaluate because if it's tearing you up that much if it's if it's taking that much energy away from the other things that you could really productively be doing yeah then it's not serving you to be reacting to this stuff all the time yeah the inbox zero things kind of funny I heard somewhere where someone did this thing called email bankruptcy where you basically have so many emails in there like 600 sank RUP see yeah yeah they just declare bankruptcy and they send a you know to all their contacts an email saying hey not responding just declaring bankruptcy so we're starting fresh tomorrow okay got it good all right zero yes there's an email hat I'd like that backing your email so I'm curious then we've been talking about going off the grid we've been talking about kind of getting back is there anything this time around looking at your business looking at your calls looking at your approach they're gonna do differently that you learned oh not doing that again or you thought of who I want to implement in fluent that this time around yeah well let's let's start with the things that I'm doing right now like it used to be that when I first started I would record the interviews when I could and when they came up and that was really hard um so now I batch them like this week we rented this place to do the cooking videos like I made sure I got a haircut it's it's pretty but we're ready hence right now just in case and and it it's cool to batch it that way because I know that in a week I'm getting a lot of work done and then after that we're going to Peru for a few weeks and doing some like deeper spiritual type stuff and and exploring the world and and being able to be totally present when we were there you knowing that we're off the grid not checking email and so I think it's that it's that cycle of those two things and I mean yeah for a lot of people you're not gonna be able to just like fly to Peru for a couple of weeks and to tell everyone like hey resolve it I'm bankrupt or whatever it's I'm gonna be very honest about the fact that I've been working on this for years to get to this point where I could do that and you just have to kind of start small you know at the beginning take a day you know on Sundays I'm off limits to like pretty much everyone with the exception of family or whoever I'm with it's it's you know a sacred day and many interpretations of the word I think that you need to kind of keep for yourself in some way a day like that once a week where you can just recover from all the things that you're going through so that you can really like kick butt on Monday and look forward to it so I've been especially conscious as I build a schedule instead of letting my schedule build itself which is really tempting because it sucks to sit down and schedule everything out I have been really intentional about which days are for what where we're gonna be to make sure that it's it's what we want and then we can look forward to it and we can look forward to every Sunday when we play a game or like do something that's kind of ritualized because that's that's one of the deeper things that I wanted to impregnate into the book itself and into my work is that we all used to have this we all out of necessity a lot of the time we all used to have this but we had some community thing that connected us with the people around us in the real world that we would go to regularly and I think once we get out of schools once we get out of our our normal jobs where we switch jobs or we lose a job or something like that it's really it's hard to take that initiative to build that awesome thing for you that you know is good for you and and keep doing it again right okay and so with the book then going on this kind of what you're doing differently or what you learned anything from the past nutritional wise or health wise or lifestyle wise that you're gonna incorporate this time around yeah more than anything else it's just building the habits around what we know is already good for us I think so I've become a lot better at making sure that we get greens every day so if we don't get a salad we have a green smoothie and if it's with fresh that's great but if it's not we make sure we have frozen stuff too and we also make sure that like the fruits that we have aren't too sugary and if we're going to put like in that like it like a greens powder or vitamin C and other vitamins like making sure that you order that you order too much of that stuff in advance because if you run out of it in the middle of something else you're the like habits are gonna fall off so it actually it's it's almost like the Costco approach right like buying your your good hab
its in bulk is something that can really help you out a lot because if you have you know a bunch of pizzas in your fridge or in your freezer compared to a bunch of just like kale that's already mixed with a bunch of other veggies that you just throw on the blender it's really easy to just throw in the veggies instead of the PISA but if you're just left with the pizza it's like I'm hungry yes sir sure yeah I was just reading that book the power of habit yeah picked it up in an airport was the first book I read of 2015 nice really big eye-opener just on how we're just a bundle of habits and how if you want to change your life you need to change your habits and everything from how you work yeah it takes work it takes conscious effort and conscious work that you don't just kind of fall into better habits oops I guess I mean organic and Whole Foods it's not like you got a you got to make the effort you got to do the research you got to go for it but you got to take action and you know the habit-forming what you're talking about man that's so true like and and but the biggest point I got from that book why I'm talking about this is because it said if you want to change your life change your habits but don't try and eliminate habits you have to swap them if the exact a lateral shift because habits don't go away they just swap forms any time you eliminate something it's like this vacuum that needs to suck something into its place you know people who quit smoking now they drink a lot or people who quit drinking now they smoke a lot or or they gossip or they watch crappy television Kardashians you know like we we need these habits to swap in and swap out so did you find that with some of maybe changing habits or your lifestyle or does that resonate with you yeah the biggest thing and I'm huge unlike the habit change and that being the way to like actually live well I can't really turn the camera around right now but if you looked over there in that room yeah what see is two guitars and amplifier a saxophone a speaker and then a bunch of books so when I walk in that room and there is a huge TV because we're renting this place but it's off and we don't really watch like the channel TV yeah or whatever so it doesn't it's more just like an object there it's not something that's sucking us in as much but it's like looks cool yeah it looks cool but you the good like the guitars and the saxophone to me when I'm sitting there bored look way cooler and so it's about building that around you no matter where you are so if you're on the road I have actually dedicated a whole part of my book to this able survival pack hmm and so like there's a it's always like within a few feet of me there's like this ugly old Camelback backpack that I got you know like seven years ago or something like that but it's been with me pretty much everywhere and that thing has like all of my tonics cheese homemade supplements other supplements that I bring along for like adrenal support it's got activated charcoal if I get poisoned or diarrhea or want to whiten my teeth it's got coconut oil if I need you know some sort of moisturizer or cooking fat or whatever it's even got like this little I went into a hiking store and I found this thing for ten bucks that it's called a spice missile you can unscrew the top and each section of it has a total of like six spices in it so I always have really good like white pepper from that from one of our travels I have Himalayan sea salt really good salt I have cinnamon I have organic cocoa and then I have like this garlic seasoning that I made and then hot pepper with wherever I go with whatever it's in front of me so if you're if all you can get some places hard-boiled eggs that's okay because at least you can flavor yeah yeah yeah yeah get the cocoa powder and legs whatever you're into men that's what I'm talking about man it sounds like it goes along with a theme I'm getting is prepping in advance you know especially just a habit changing and just your lifestyle and batching things together and you know we talked about switching grocery stores and planning in advance and planning your habits out and making eliminating excuses for the person listening at home that's ready to make changes and they want to apply kind of what we're talking about do you have one or two big things that they can do right now to help either eliminate excuses or start adding in better habits totally in the morning that's there's an awesome book up by Brian Tracy called eat that frog yes the title of it which is basically about it's such a wonderful visual everyone knows that like there's at least one usually a few big pieces of gnarly ugly work that you need to do pretty much every day and that could be in your personal life your relationship life your work life whatever else but it's it's great when you wake up and you're already grumpy and your heart like dreading the day to just like jam through whatever that is if it takes ten minutes that's great if it takes thirty that's awesome too but maybe it'll take the first you know big portion your day do that one thing and get it out of the way and then basically you can coast through the rest of the day and you can use that as momentum to get a lot more done because your when you front load the things that you need to do yeah you feel a lot better so you can do that with a really ugly thing that might appeal to some people but I'll offer a contrast as well and I do this also every day is take at least a half an hour usually about an hour to myself to do I do Tai Chi and Qigong in the mornings as well as sometimes like yoga or mobility or balance type work and then also usually like instead of exercising in big ways a few days a week like I used to do now I like doing like two to five minutes of exercise pretty much every day and so getting that in there as well so that's done that the the physical movement part also the mental meditate every morning and then I go through a bunch of other like gratitude exercises and things that sound woowoo and are easy to make fun of if you don't do them but they're really hard to do and they're pretty much the best thing you could ever do not just for your own mind right but your own like health you know and and the people around you do it just makes you a better person right when you when you do this often and so I do that every single day and I do it every single morning usually without within like 20 minutes awaking up oh good it doesn't matter how much time you have like everyone has that or can make that at some point even if it's just starting with with five minutes of jumping rope or something like that in the morning like get it done and you'll feel so much better yeah yeah and then he like he said you mentioned the keyword momentum and I'm curious what do you think about quotas like lower lowering your quota something I've been experimenting with and just kind of yeah making the pass/fail mark a lot lower so you feel like you've completed something are you that I I'm a big fan of that because you know for a while there especially because that was an athlete and you try to dictate your your workouts especially as a guy as like how monstrous and painful they are yeah but if you start to actually I had Glenn James clear on my show a while back who talked about this doing it in his own life and he would go out and do deadlifts I think it was just one exercise and sometimes it was even just one rep instead of going out and doing your whole thing and he actually was able to you know up all of his or or most of his metrics that way most of his goals went up is his lifts got heavier and it's that's just such a mental thing right it's just from like it's just from the one rep but doing it like and dedicating yourself to it okay you know what I mean so it I think most of the time was one exercise you do is do
it to failure that's that's kind of what I do so basically I give my my signature workout whatever it is is like yesterday I knew that I'd be coming here and wouldn't have like a pull-up bar or something like that but in the trailer I can actually do pull-ups off the bed and so I did 27 to failure each time just twice like took like five minutes in between that something else and that was my workout for the day yeah in in addition to that like chi gong in the morning which is also a different kind of workout or whatever but but yeah if you do that that's so much better than just like kind of dreading your workout or putting your shoes out and being like I can't believe I'm doing this and then you know something happens on the way or you're late for your your class and you can't do the group thing anymore it's you know if you find yourself getting to that then it's time to switch it up and do something that's more like you said results oriented and practical in the sense that you can just get it done and feel good about it I think we need lower your quota like you said it's just one exercise or doing pull-ups to failure when you set the bar really low and you can complete it and feel like you have a win under your belt you're more likely to do that it's like it's the carrot or the stick right and yeah I found I've never really had a problem necessarily motivating myself to work out but I definitely found when I was working out it would just drag and I was yeah checking the watch and looking up there and finding more people to talk to and less time I work out I mean I go to LA Fitness that's like you know social hour over there mixer yeah it's the mixer man you know everyone by name but I found my past Phil Mark being a fifteen minute twenty minute sauna and some days I would just I would just avoid going to the gym but I said you know what you can go there and take a sauna all you have to do is sit there yeah and man as soon as you're done with that you got warmed up and you feel like moving you feel like doing some piles you feel like you don't feel like going home yet and so just something as simple as just showing up or maybe having your shoes by your bed and just getting them on and stepping outside or or setting a pass-fail mark to where it's really really low still doable alright and you'll always feel it kind of going beyond yeah like I have the 70 found the 70 pound kettlebell which to anyone who's ever worked out with something like that it's terrible it's like barbaric almost and so I found that I just wasn't doing those exercises I was doing other stuff instead and just kind of like rationalizing looking at that thing a bit like in the home right now I've been burned before but anyway what I did was basically just told myself all right we'll do you know 37 swings okay and then you know I just put it right there and in between me walking and doing something I think was moving you know boxes around or something like that and I'm just like yeah I can do 37 of those right now and then I did it again and so then I'm just like well five minutes later I'm all kind of warmed up and feeling like alright well that's not too bad then I would do you know like 21 presses with it and then do that again five minutes later and then I would cap it off at if I felt like doing that one more time and just do some like deadlift type things I would do that twice two less than failure right like with a with a more like brutal exercise like that sometimes it's better to say I can do 37 or like I can do five knowing that you can do more than that that you won't is a really good motivator sometimes yeah because you can be like psyched and just know it's almost like you've finished it already in your head sure you're not dreading those last moments that are just you know that's that's where the big injuries can happen to and for me I actually in August I was hiking with my friend pedram shojai and we're gonna be shooting a new show and while we were hiking I broke my foot making a jump and so I had to change all of my exercises and all my habits and now I'm like you know especially as I came back from injury I'm just like okay I'm gonna focus on form right not on being an idiot and doing masterless she's right right man well able to pull a phrase out of your book I've listened to show a few times just about now you always say alright we're coming up on time wanna want to respect your time get you out of here howdy how you doing folks I've never said that so we're coming up on time I know you got a book out man can you kind of give us the logistics of where we can find out more about it sounds really interesting and I mean it's what we've been talking about this whole time so where would folks go to find out more about that yeah the wild diet is what it's called and it's anywhere that bookstores will have it April 7th I think it is you can pre-order pre-order it already and then best place to find it though is wild diet book calm we're giving away a bunch of cooking gear and basically if you want my little spiel on the book it's supposed to be a diet book for people who don't like diet books it's basically written as memoirs as stories go and they encapsulate more than 50 of our like best family recipes that we got from Allison's crazy huge Mormon family my family from the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire and then combined with a lot of the people who are listeners to the show and made some really kick butt food and we eat it all the time so wild diet book calm is where you find all that good stuff awesome able and fat burning man is the podcast the number one one on iTunes I say that with no bitterness at all no maybe one day you got this man I'm on your show now so you can totally do it voodoo doll of Abel just every morning no fat burning man alright dude hey it was fun getting you on the call man really appreciate you you got a lot of energy enjoy your stuff and we'll definitely check out your book thanks you .

Video Description:

Abel James joins our host, Clark Danger, for Episode #54 of the Paleohacks Podcast.
In this episode:
- Why time off is an absolute MUST for your health.
- How to eat 100% paleo while traveling.
- Optimizing your on the road workouts.
- Ridiculously simple travel routines anyone can do.
- No excuses health meals on the go.
- Declutter your mental fog with these brain hacks.
- Brain food, healthy fats, health tips + more
Enjoy the episode!
For more Paleohacks Podcast episodes, make sure to check out http://blog.paleohacks.com/podcasts
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August 07, 2020 Tags : abel james , Paleo , Paleo Diet , Paleo Podcast , PaleoHacks , Video

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