MW: Hey, what’s up everybody? This is Mike Westerdal from LeanHybridMuscle.com. I’m very fortunate. I’ve got a good friend of mine, Patrick McGuire, on the line today. He took time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about some nutrition strategies in the ‘Hybrid Diet Nutrition Manual’.
I want to introduce Patrick, for those of you who don’t know him. Patrick and I are friends. We’re in a business group together. We first met a couple of years ago. He’s a certified strength and conditioning specialist. He’s also a nutritionist who owns a company called Empowered Nutrition, which you can visit at EmpoweredNutrition.com, where he does customized meal plans. He’s always been one of my go-to guys that I talk to whenever I have questions about nutrition or healthy eating. Because there’s so much information out there it’s easy to get mixed messages from different sources. So, I always hit Patrick up to sort things out.
So, I appreciate Patrick being on the call. Hey, thanks for being here, Patrick.
PM: I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Mike, and I think it’s funny that you mention the “check-up from the neck-up” type thing. I always check with my professors and mentors, too.
MW: Cool, man. I appreciate it. Patrick and I have a lot in common, too. He played semi-pro football. So, we have that in common. He’s also been a personal trainer and you’ve competed in amateur bodybuilding, too, right? And done pretty well in that, I might add.
PM: Yeah, I did really well. I had a good time.
MW: He’s also a pretty well known nutritionist in the fitness industry. A lot of the experts go to Patrick for help. So, if you see a lot of the nutrition programs online, Patrick’s the behind-the-scenes guy who’s helped out a lot of the top guys in the industry. He’s definitely a great guy to have on our side over here.
PM: Thanks a lot, Mike. I appreciate that.
MW: So, how are you doing? What’s new with you?
PM: Good, good. We’ve been busy. I’ve been all over the place, helping a lot of organizations, working with a bunch of trainers off-line and online. Most recently, the newest development is working with some medical weight loss clinics and helping resolve type II diabetes, which is not necessarily the primary focus for the group we’re talking with today, but it’s a major problem out there. By using different types of nutrition programming you can avoid issues like that in the future.
And the coolest of cool that we’re working with right now is a DNA nutrition solution. Basically, it’s DNA performance for optimal health. These guys can test everything, Mike. They can test everything you can imagine. And your DNA holds all the codes. It’s like the Da Vinci Code of your body, if you will. It tells you what type of nutrition you could best use to be super healthy and perform better. And it also tells you what type of training your body would respond best to.
I think what’s really cool is that hybrid training and hybrid diet really, really help people get darn close to the information that DNA is just pinpointing. Taking you through different types of nutrition strategies through the hybrid diet, even by accident, a whole bunch of your readers and the audience are going to be able to really experience, even for just a day or a week or a month, the type of diet and training that’s going to work best for their body. Hopefully everybody’s in tune with their bodies like guys like us are. Then they can know which one to stop and stay on and make work for them, or fine-tune.
MW: Yeah, I mean, it’s all about learning your body, because we’re all different. So, you find out what works for you. You get the feel for it and get that connection. You know what your body needs without having to read or have someone tell you. So, yeah, that’s exciting stuff you’re working on. We can talk more about that later on. That’s a whole other interview and I can’t wait to hear more about these developments. That sounds really cutting edge there.
PM: It is. It’s cool.
MW: That’s all you can say, really, because…
PM: Legally that’s all I can say, too.
MW: Right. So, I wanted to ask you, I remember I was at a presentation you were giving one time and you made a quote, and correct me if I get it wrong. But, you said that “every diet will work for everyone, but only for so long.”
PM: Yeah, you’re pretty close on that. That’s an awesome memory. Because, we’re pushing eight or nine months ago, I think, since we talked about that. But, it comes down to something that I’ve always believed in and put through my system, and that is, every diet will work for everybody, but pinpointing that specific time and body composition in your life with the specific nutrition program is a hit and miss game, Mike.
I mean, you might be on the Atkins style program, which is a high fat, moderate protein and less than 10% carbs. And you might be doing that and it might work for you for a few days because it’s forcing the body to do what you’re trying to trick it into doing. But, the problem is that the body is a lot smarter than either of us will ever be. It says, “Hey, that’s not cool. That’s not the right one for me.” And it starts to taper-off and diminish results quickly unless you continue to force it and then you just start dropping calories or you start getting sick, because that’s the body fighting back.
So, being able to know which nutrition program you need is essential. For example, if you’re using an Atkins style or a Pasquali style or a Warrior Diet and it’s not what your body needs, and your body should really be using more of a balanced or zone-like approach, which is a balance of proteins, carbs and fats, carbs around 40%, proteins and fats around 30% each. If you’re trying to force it to do something the body’s not ready for, considering your body composition, you’re basically going to force yourself to either get skinny, lose muscle and fat or get fatter, or worst case scenario, get sick. We’re talking anywhere from simple sickness to major diseases.
MW: Wow! I mean, do you think there’s a correlation with the way our bodies respond to training where if we do the same routine for too long and our bodies get used to what we’re doing and stop responding to it, do you think that same thing can happen if you’re following the exact same nutrition plan for too long?
PM: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s exactly the same. I mean, unless you’re able to figure it out and pinpoint it like the DNA company that I’m working with, you’re just guessing. Even as a highly qualified nutritionist, if I sit down with you, I could probably sit with you for somewhere between 15 minutes and 50 minutes and with a small series of questions, but really just learning about and studying you, getting you to run a food journal, I could easily get you darn close to the right program for you. But, I’m still going to be wrong in some parts. I’m still going to be off. There might be micro adjustments. You might have some allergies which we have to work on later on.
So, on your own you’re, like I said, you’re guessing. Even a guy like me would still be guessing and we could put you on the wrong program for too long. A simpler solution is, rotate until you find the one that works, or just use a hybrid and mix it up.
MW: Yeah, that’s interesting. I kind of wanted to tell you what my partner, Elliott Hulse… I don’t know if you’ve actually met Elliott yet.
PM: Just online.
MW: Okay, yeah. So, he’s a pro Strongman, owns Strength Camp and he’s my partner on LeanHybridMuscle.com. We had gotten the training part down where we were just pumped about it and getting awesome results. But, I just felt like we were winging it too much on the nutrition aspect of the programs. There are so many different diet programs out there and they all seem to have their advantages. But, they just didn’t seem like something you could stay on for too long. Or, they just stopped working if you were on them too long.
So, we started experimenting and doing a hybrid approach or a mishmash where we were trying different kinds of diets on different days. And it felt like it really just kept the body guessing and we got some really good reactions and feedback. We did the food logs, like you were talking about, keeping track of everything we were doing. Logging the changes in macro nutrients and this might yield different results people, but I’m just wondering if you had any explanation. Elliott and I were happy with the results and thought it was really cool. But, we can’t explain why it happened.
I just wondered if you had any more input onto that. Why having these different days. Where one day we’d have a warrior day with fasting, on another we’d have a day with lower calories. We have a day where it’s more bodybuilding style, then a day where we’re eating more fat. We put this together into a plan after a lot of experimentation. I’m just wondering if you could give any kind of explanation on why this has been working so well.
PM: I would… I gave a review here, Mike, for what you’ve been doing and what you’ve been testing out. The theory is sound and it looks good. One of the first things I can say is I can see why you’re having such great results. It is along the lines of “every diet works for everybody for a certain, specific time.” And, it’s along the lines of trying to figure out which one works best for you. And, it’s along the lines of forcing your body to continue progressing, guessing and moving forward.
So, it’s mixing everything together, including the possible flaws of not knowing what the right one for you is. You’ve mixed it all in there, which is really cool. I’m kind of looking at days one and two. You’ve got that bodybuilding inspired type mentality and the lower fat and carbs and higher proteins. So, that is definitely…that’s a pretty standard staple.
I find that most people don’t eat enough fats, to be honest, especially bodybuilders. Think of Dorian Yates, if you don’t mind me throwing some names here.
MW: Yeah, definitely.
PM: I’m a big fan of his. He’s a UK guy; I’m a Canadian-Irish kid myself. So, that’s kind of cool. But, what’s really cool, Mike, is that he was born April 19th, 1964, and guess what? My birthday is April 19th, 1974.
MW: Oh, man.
PM: So, I like Dorian Yates. Not that I’m built like Dorian, but he was an inspiration for many years for me. And there was a time when he was getting ready for one of his competitions, Mr. Olympia. I think it was number four, possibly five. And I don’t know if you remember the pictures, but he did these black and white photos and made them look like grainy and granite, like unbelievably huge compared to the year before.
I actually got to meet him that summer and actually got to talk to him behind the scenes after some events. One of the things he did for the competition is he went on this really low fat diet with moderate to low carbohydrates, and crazy-high protein, which we all thought, hey, the high protein will literally force you to grow. Right?
MW: Right.
PM: But, his skin was almost gray and he had a lot of ingrown hairs and pock marks and the hair on his head was literally falling out as well. What it was was his fat intake was too low and he kept hip carbs too low and he kept his protein too high for too long. He went on that diet for literally eight weeks, and he said it might have been ten when he did all the math.
But, I mean, he looked fantastic, but he felt sick and quite frankly, that’s the same year that he injured himself. So, chances are, that type of diet works, but he forced his body to continue working to the point that it wasn’t healthy.
So, you’ve got that sort of mentality there, but then, you switch it up. You don’t make the guys do this for the next eight weeks or ten weeks or twelve or even sixteen weeks to get ready for a contest. You’re saying, “Guys, this works,” but tomorrow you need to have something different. And in the next couple of days, change it up again.
And you know, I see one day here, a Vince Gironda inspired program. You’ve got about 40% fat content, and that excites me.
MW: Yeah, I like that day.
PM: Yeah, and it’s something that they’ve lost in the first one to three days, on day four, as long as they’re choosing most healthy fats, they’re getting everything back. Yeah, I’m saying choose the healthy fats, pick the Omega rich ones. But, I mean it with the heart and I don’t recommend saturated fats for anybody.
MW: Right, I agree with that. If you look at the first few days, you might not be getting a lot of carbohydrates, but then if you look at the weekly summary of everything, it’s pretty balanced. It’s just different macro nutrient breakdowns per day. It’s not like you’re going an extended period of anything, like Dorian did in the example. You do need the carbs for the energy and the fat for the vitamin transportation and everything else for your organs. You can’t completely avoid any macro nutrients. But, cycling them and strategically doing this, I think, can have an advantage.
You mentioned, actually, to me, too, that you do a fasting day. I think once a week or something. You said you didn’t want the kids to see that, because it’s not a strategy for kids. But, what are the advantages to you doing that?
PM: Well, I do a fast day or a stop day. A stop day is basically no calories for 24 hours. And a good friend of mine, Brad Pilon, is just about ten minutes away here…
MW: Oh, really?
PM: Yeah, he’s the guy that wrote his PhD and a thesis on fasting and turned it into a great piece of information. We all understand in nutrition that really simply it comes down to, and you understand this one, Mike, is calories in, calories out. Right?
MW: Right.
PM: But, you know, I look at “empowered” calories in, calories out, or “intelligent” calories in, calories out. You can’t just not eat. That’s not cool. That’s not good, especially if you’re trying to build muscle. But, for anybody out there right now, and I know a lot of your audience right now, a lot of the people listening to this, are going to be offended by this and you might want to reach through the screen or reach through your phone and punch me in the face, please feel free. But, the reality is, a one-day stop is not going to cause you to lose muscle. I can guarantee you that. We have empirical data that proves it and Brad Pilon has written an entire thesis on that theory and that model, and it actually works.
I use a stop-day, Mike, for the simple fact that one, it helps me control calories without thinking about it. Because, you know me, Mike, I totally love to eat my sweets: chocolate and ice cream. But, I’m also the steak guy, too. So, give me a steak, chocolate and ice cream and we’re good for life.
But, a stop-day, the average male eats 3,700 calories in North America. And that’s pretty scary, because the comparison of that, reach into your fridge right now and grab a brick of butter. That brick of butter is one pound of fat. That brick of butter is 3,500 calories.
MW: Wow, really?
PM: Yeah. So, a stop day makes sense for a lot of people. I do it because it helps me clean my body out. I don’t necessarily do it to control my calories; I do it because it makes me feel a little lighter. You know, Mike, when I’m competing, I was eating to a watch. I had Timex that I would buy. For every contest preparation, that was my treat. I bought a cheap, $40 Timex watch, I set the timer for three hours and every three hours it would beep and that meant I would eat, every three hours, getting ready for a contest.
Calories and nutrients became mechanical for me, eating became mechanical and even now, I struggle with mechanical eating. I just feel like, oh, I’m a little tired, eat something. Oh, I’m hungry, eat something. Oh, I just finished a workout, eat something. There was always an excuse to eat and it became mechanical. There was no emotion, there was no excitement.
The stop-day, the first time I tried it was really eye-opening. One, you’re eating about 3,700 calories…Well, I don’t eat that many calories, but you’re eating about 2,500 calories less than you did yesterday. And, two, it got me back in control of my mechanical eating. I don’t just eat whenever I feel like eating or for any weird reason anymore. So, it helps with that emotional, mechanical eating. But, it did reduce the calories.
I like to fast between dinner on Sunday and dinner on Monday. Technically it could range 23 to 25 hours on my stop-day, but the idea for me is to reduce the calories and to do it during a time when my daughters aren’t around, because you don’t want people to be confused about a stop-day as starvation and not eating. That’s not good.
MW: Yeah, not cool. So, you talked about feeling better and cleaning out, does it have a detox effect as well?
PM: Yeah, sure, it does. Because, you basically have black coffee and black and green or raw teas all day long, and as much water as you can handle. And that’s it, and that’s all you have. It’s a calorie-free stop-day and if you’re going to pretend and you’re going to have a tidbit half way through the day, you just wasted it. It’s pointless because going 24 hours, you’re not putting anything in, and that’s the first thing. The second thing is you’re dipping into the fat stores. Your muscle won’t start to breakdown that fast. And what little that does start to breakdown, it’s quickly replenished with the first meal or the first drink of the next day or that night or whatever.
But, to clean yourself out, you know, the detox diets, right? Like, take this, take that, drink this fiber, eat this fiber bar and eat ten bowls of bran. Well, the reality is, that’s putting stuff in, and the more stuff you put in, the more stuff you have to take out. So, is it really cleansing or it just stuffing in more stuff that helps scrape the edges and comes out the other end? I mean, and by stuff you can use the other four-letter word that starts with an ‘S’. It’s not cool. It’s more garbage. The more garbage that goes in means, the more junk that has to come out.
You should be eating healthy and balanced. You should be eating high fiber nutrients. You should be eating high vitamin and foods every day. So, every day should technically be a detox. Everything you eat with the exception of sugars and junk food should be helping to detox the body every day. A cleanse should be clearing the body out.
When you go on a stop, Mike…if people include the stop on a hybrid, oh, my goodness, I have no idea what type of results they’re going to have. It’s going to probably blow their minds. They’re not ready for it.
By going through this hybrid diet that you put together, they’re going to get great results and by stopping, they’re just going to increase their hormone profile. They’re going to jack-up their growth hormone, they’re going to jack-up their testosterone boost and they may feel tired three-quarters of the way through. But then, the next day, you get to eat all this wonderful food again. They get to eat a high ratio of proteins or maybe they do a different stop or low calories. You almost have them on it, too, with higher and lower calories and higher and lower protein and fat intake. So, without stopping, you have them rotating through higher and lower calories, so to speak.
MW: Great. Thanks for explaining that. Could you just touch on one more thing? Bodybuilders have done this a lot where they deplete and they get low on their carbs and then they load-up before the competition, the ones that know what they’re doing, just to feel full again. Could you kind of talk a little bit about loading and even the advantages of having a cheat day built into a diet if you’re not an actual competitive bodybuilder?
PM: Yeah, I mean, it’s even better for the non-bodybuilder, because they can have a real cheat. The best scenario I can give you is one that I used to use. I used to get ready for my contests starting about 16 weeks out, and really four weeks with cleaning up. Four weeks was more of a foundational fat loss strategy. And then, I went into an advanced fat loss and a lean builder type strategy. And then I went into more of the elite get cut, get ripped strategy.
Within that, I also included a few very low carbohydrate days, literally like zero carb days. And then, I included two days of glycogen replenishment, glycogen meaning sugar. That was the higher carbohydrate day. Then, I rotated through from liquid carbs to fruit carbs to vegetable carbs to potatoes, which is still a vegetable. But, there’s a reason for it, that’s the way it goes into the body. Back to vegetables, back to fruits, back to liquid, using actually a glucose polymer, and then back to really low carbs.
The reason for this is to glycogen load. Any of those depleted muscles will get a super compensation to help pump up the muscle. And that would be really cool for anyone competing or not competing. But, during my contests, a cheat day was one thing that I always kept in my system, and that was on Sunday nights. I would have a small bucket of Haagen Daz, a protein shake and a slice of pizza. That was my bodybuilding competition cheat day, if you will.
It just soothes the brain. I mean, it lets you go. Congratulations, you have 98% compliance to your daily scheduled meals for the week, and you did a good job. And if I didn’t do a good job, I didn’t get those things. If I didn’t work hard, I didn’t get them. If I cheated on Friday instead of Sunday, I didn’t get those things on Sunday.
MW: Right. I think that’s part of the reason for putting it on day seven. It gives people their reward on Sunday, before they start the week again.
PM: Yeah, and I don’t subscribe to the whole eat, cheat and leptin release thing. I know that’s popular and slightly controversial, and actually on the scientific side, is a highly controversial discussion. I don’t subscribe to it because the data is just not there. But, in theory, leptin is a phenomenally strong product and your body may or may not release enough leptin to increase the metabolism and fat release within the body when you have a good cheat meal.
But, you need to have a lot and there’s too much sugar coursing through your body and too many calories and too much insulin and that means too much fat storage.
One of the things I like here, Mike, I know you want to ask me something. But, one of the things I like about what you’re saying here and looking at this in the review is, we’re saying, “Hey, guys, you can cheat and you can reward yourself, but it’s eating clean still.” That’s a good thing to have. It’s a really strong feature to have built into the program. It definitely is going to make people feel better about it.
I don’t usually reward with food. I try not to reward clients with food. But, it does work for most of us who have our brains under control, or if you will, our brain to gut ratio under control.
MW: Yeah, I mean, I think that part of the reason, the mental part, was a bonus as a reward. We were doing it more to refill the glycogen levels. Just having been on low carbs during the week, this was just a way to get the muscles ready for the upcoming training in the week coming up.
PM: Yeah, absolutely. I like the fact that your cheat is a fat-free product and high carbs and free protein type day. I like that it follows a very low carbohydrate day. It’s about a 10% carb day, by your notes here. That’s really good because you’re going to be able to help deplete your glycogen. If I could recommend, Mike, maybe get them to go through one of the workouts, a combination of heavy duty power exercises with a super set of a very high volume, high rep exercise to further deplete the muscles. I’d love to tell you about that strategy I used for getting ready for a contest back in the day. I used that two days before many contests.
MW: Oh, two days before? So, that would be mid week?
PM: It would be, I guess, day five and six, and then on day seven you do your loading. And man, there was a time I came out of the car and I remember this very clearly. I had an orange golf shirt…
MW: Hey, I think we lost you. Hello?
MW: Hey guys, sorry about that. We had a little cell phone glitch there. I had to disconnect, but we’re back. Patrick got cut off a little bit. The last thing you had said was… I don’t even know what we were talking about. Something about a golf shirt and you were about to tell a story.
Patrick's Competition Pics
PM: Yeah, we were talking about the days four, five and six here with your low carbohydrate, high fat, high protein and day seven metabolic loading and the cheat. One of the things I had said was that I was getting ready for contest, I had an orange golf shirt on and I was going into the theater after having one of my depletion, two day depletion with a one day glycogen loading day. I remember my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, put her hands around my arm as we walked down the parking lot and she went, “Wow!” And it was such a pump. I was so happy. It made me feel great because I was six weeks out from a contest and my arms were massive.
I have okay arms, but they were just overly big and I remember it and it was that depletion. And if I could recommend for anyone listening to this right now, is that when you’re doing the lower carbohydrate days, if you’re trying to really get a glycogen load, Mike, I’d recommend grabbing some of the hybrid training philosophies that are a combination of powerful exercise, follow it up by a super set of like crazy high volume. We’re talking one or two sets of 50 to 100 reps after one or two sets of like extremely heavy weight of just like three to six reps.
MW: Okay, that’s cool. I’ve got to send you what we’ve been experimenting with the training, too. We’ve made some changes to it. We aren’t sure exactly what days to put that in, but we had some power building type workouts with things we called hybrid finishers where you do some high reps cardio with resistance. So, this might be perfect for those days that you were talking about there. Might move things around a little bit.
PM: Yeah, I definitely would, because on those days, you’re going to feel horrible. That’s a great thing. If you feel like you’re going to throw up and you feel like you’re going to pass out because your blood sugar is all over the place, it’s actually low all over the place, if you’re getting stars in your eyes, you know you’re just on the verge of glycogen depletion, that’s a good thing to have.
Really, the combination of that power, exerting your glycogen stores in your muscles, and then the intense cardio volume-like reps and then cardio, the higher reps are going to give you more of the aerobic burning within the muscles and getting rid of…any of the type II muscle fibers, getting rid of any energy they have. And then, when you do that cardio boost around the end there, Mike, they’re going to clear out any glycogen they’ve got, for sure. So, tomorrow, they’re going to pump!
MW: Yeah, we’ve been doing this to make it even worse, at 5:30 in the morning. Elliott and I have been training with some of the guys from the gym and experimenting with them, too, as our guinea pigs on some of these new training programs. So, now we tell them when they feel like crap it’s a good thing.
PM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell them it’s all good, it’s all good.
MW: All right, awesome. I really appreciate you hooking us up, taking the time to talk to us and I’ll probably be calling you some more with some questions on the side, if you don’t mind. Patrick is the go-to guy for nutrition for Elliott and me.
PM: I’d love to. That would be awesome. And this is exciting. What you’re doing here is exciting, so I’d love to be a little more involved with what you’re doing.
MW: All right. Thanks a lot for your time, Patrick, talk to you soon.
PM: Thanks, Mike, take care.
