By Kristine

They say its Autumn here in Melbourne but today definitely felt like a winters day with a top of 13 degrees. By the time I got home from work I felt like eating something warm and hearty however my fitness goals at the moment don’t allow for foods with sauces. But that doesn’t mean I can’t give it to someone else to enjoy.

So I went about preparing a Tagine’s from one of my favourite Moroccan cuisines for my dear man who was getting home from another late day at work.

Beef and Prune Tagine

Ingredients:

15g butter

500g of grass fed beef chunks

300g of organic diced tomatoes

½ cup of button mushrooms

Small handful of slivered roasted almonds

1 cup of water

½ cup of prunes

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp of crushed ginger

½ tsp of lemon rind

1 garlic clove crushed

Cooking Instructions:

1. Put the butter, beef, tomatoes, water, slivered almonds and mushrooms in a deep pot and bring to a boil
2. Turn the heat down and simmer for an hour
3. Soak the prunes in boiling water for 20 minutes and drain the water
4. Sautee with butter the garlic, ginger, cinnamon, lemon rind and prunes in pan
5. Add the prune mixture to the beef and cook for a further 10 minutes until the sauce is thickened.

Pumpkin and Spinach with Pine Nuts

Ingredients

2 cups of diced pumpkin

1 cup of spinach leaves

¼ of thinly sliced onion

1 tablespoon of pine nuts

Coconut Oil

¼ teaspoon cumin

¼ teaspoon coriander

dash of cinnamon

½ teaspoon of lemon rind

1. Heat the coconut oil in a medium heat pan
2. Sauté spices and onion and add the pumpkin, pine nuts and lemon rind
3. Coat the pumpkin with the coconut oil and spices and cover with a lid to allow the pumpkin to cook faster
4. When the pumpkin is softened add the spinach leaves
5. Remove from the stove once the leaves have wilted from the heat

By Kristine

The two leading causes of obesity in the western world are, in my opinion, the over consumption of trans-fats and sugar.

Sadly, due to disguised ingredients, you might not even be aware you’re eating them even if you have sworn off them for life.

The Modern Diet

When you take a walk through the supermarket what do you see?

Most of the supermarket is filled up with canned, boxed, and processed foods. Supermarkets have entire aisles filled with junk foods. Crackers, cookies, cakes, chips, candy … all these things are placed in key areas in supermarket that are designed to entice us to buy them. You can’t go to the checkout counter without being confronted with several varieties of chocolate, candy, and chewing gum. It’s enough to make any health fanatic have a fit of rage!

The thing is, we ALL know (or should know) these foods are bad news; however some of us decide to eat them anyway.

These foods are completely devoid of nutrients. However, some customers have been getting savvy to companies’ sugary trickery, so companies have started fortifying these ‘foods’ with various nutrients to try to attract people to buy them. Basically what this means is that companies are adding synthetic compounds to refined sugar products to give them the appearance of being healthy. For example, Coco Pops are filled to the brim with sugar, but Kellogg’s now market them as having “added calcium”.

Sugar and Calcium – everything a growing body needs… Kellogg’s should be ashamed of themselves, marketing these kinds of cereals to children.

In other words, it has become increasingly less obvious to the consumer that these foods are nutritional nightmares. Energy and sport drinks, or better yet, that ridiculous ‘vitamin water’ filled with sugar, are another example of sugary junk foods in disguise.

In the modern supermarket the chocolate and lolly aisle would be a better place for commercial breakfast cereals due to the horrendous amounts of sugar content. These aisles may as well be called “the unhealthy aisle” or the “dessert aisle”.

This is very alarming as the problem is even worse than it appears on the surface. Trans fat and sugar both make their way into foods that people wouldn’t expect. If you want to see this in action, take a browse down your supermarket’s soup aisle and take a look at some of the labels. Do you notice sugar in the labels? No? Look again.

Things like “sucrose” and “fructose” or pretty much anything that ends in -ose represents a sugar, whether ‘natural’ or artificial’.

So why is sugar in minestrone soup?

When we cook these things at home, we don’t add sugar to them. I’ve never seen the words ‘add sugar’ in any soup recipes (or maybe I just buy healthy cook books?) So why is it in these packaged foods? Because it adds shelf life, makes products taste nicer, and is more addictive to our taste buds.

The unfortunate fact is the majority of consumers are completely clueless about what’s in the foods they are eating.

Trans-fats are equally as bad (if not worse).

Trans-fats often find their way into foods that on surface value appear to be healthy. Things like granola bars and even breakfast cereal can contain trans-fats. Look for anything that is “partially hydrogenated”. This is “code” for trans-fats. Once you start reading labels, you’ll be shocked at how many foods contain both of these ingredients. That’s why I tell my clients and readers, if it’s in a packet, don’t buy it.

What do we mean by sugar?

The issue of carbohydrates and sugars can be confusing.

The negative reputation associated with all carbohydrates is not justified. To sort out all the confusion lets break carbohydrates down into two groups:

• Caveman Carbs
• Modern Carbs

Caveman carbs are easy to identify, just ask this one question,

“If I was a caveman or woman, could I eat this food?”

Modern carbs are the total reverse. They are all the foods that we did not have access to as cave-people.

Refined “Natural” Sugars

Natural sugar occurs in things like fruit (fructose) BUT don’t get tricked into thinking the isolated version of fructose is good for you- its not. Processed refined sugar for the most part comes from whole foods (which includes fruit).

This processing creates its’ own product. We know these by many names such as:

• Table sugar
• Corn syrup
• High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Agave Nectar
• Sucrose
• Brown Sugar
• Organic Sugar
• Low GI Sugar

They are all refined sugars and all have the same impact on blood sugar and insulin despite which plant, fruit, or lab they come from.

While real whole fruit contains fructose sugar, it also contains a range of important nutrients and fiber. When we isolate the fructose portion from the food, there are no nutrients and no value despite the fact that ‘fructose’ came from fruit. Additionally, an apple has roughly 5 grams of fructose. Compare that to a 600ml bottle of US Coke Cola with 67.5 grams of pure sugar!

If you want more evidence of the dangers of fructose, look up ‘NAFLD’ which stands for ‘Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease’; which incidentally, is mostly affecting children in the US.

Fructose is not metabolized in the muscle, (unlike glucose); it’s metabolized in the liver. Compare that with ethanol (the kind that’s in alcohol): 10% of ethanol is metabolized in the brain (that’s why you get drunk) and the other 90% is metabolized in the liver.

That’s also why after years of heavy drinking people develop fatty liver disease because the liver has had to store too much ethanol in the form of fat in the liver.

However the onset on NAFLD is far more rapid as fructose can be easily consumed at rapid and large quantities. That’s why a high fructose diet causes NAFLD in a very short period of time.

Note: In Australia Coke is flavored with cane sugar. If it ever becomes flavored with HFCS, you will see the incidence of NAFLD rise.

The reality is our bodies don’t require sugar to function; the body has the ability to breakdown fat and use it as energy. A diet filled with sugar is not how the human body was meant to eat. It’s unnatural to the way we were designed. As a result, too much sugar can cause all kinds of health problems, such as obesity and diabetes and suppression of the immune system.

The focus then is to consume only unprocessed, natural caveman carbohydrates. These foods have the nutritional content still intact.

What’s wrong with sugar?

Refined and processed sugars have been stripped of their fiber and all of its nutritional value. This leaves a substance that has empty calories which means that it does little for our bodies except give us a short-term burst of energy which spikes our blood sugar and insulin and lowers our immune system.

It’s also important to understand that a spike in blood sugar will lead to a crash in blood sugar. This is what I refer to as the ‘sugar cycle’.

The worse part about it all is it is how common it is in foods. As mentioned above, it can be found in nearly everything. Most packaged foods are filled with sugar. And what’s worst is that it is in foods that we wouldn’t expect such as pasta sauce and canned soup.

They do nothing for us nutritionally except add extra calories. As we’ve learned, any sugar that isn’t burned off or stored in the body ends up getting converted into fat. In other words, refined sugar is a nightmare.

Sugar is an addictive substance.

Something that I found extremely interesting was a recent study by graduate student Maglie Lenoir and her colleagues at the University of Bordeaux in France, which showed that rats given a choice between highly sweetened water and intravenous cocaine overwhelmingly picked the sugar water!

Alain Dagher, M.D., and colleagues from the Montreal Neurological Institute also found that Ghrelin, the appetite hormone, worked on regions of the brain involved with reward and motivation. These are the exact same regions implicated in drug addiction. In fact, cocaine and nicotine can affect the same areas of the brain as junk food.

Think about that next time you think about going through a drive through!

Other research has also shown that rats can become quite dependent on sugar and act exactly like addicts when it’s taken away – shivering and shaking and exhibiting typical symptoms of addiction and withdrawal.

Everyone knows sugary junk foods are bad for them, so why can’t they just give it up?

From studies such as these one can gather that sugar is clearly an addictive substance. This is one of the reasons why refined sugar is in so many products, and don’t think for one second that food manufactures don’t know this. They do, and they will continue to monetize human addictions.

For the record, my advice is always to go cold turkey on refined foods and sugar and give them up completely (if you hadn’t already guessed).

If you’re feeling like something sweet, at the very least, have it homemade or freshly made by someone. Packaged sugary foods are off limits. This includes the majority of breakfast cereals!

Maximus Mark

Reference link:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12055324

http://maximusmark.com/2011/05/sweet-poison-the-sugar-show/

Janet has been training with us since 2007. I made this short video of her journey from 2006 to 2011… CHECK IT OUT!!

You will notice a big difference from 2009 to 2011 – Its around the same time I went on a learning rampage (BioSignature, PICP and SCTS course with the Poliquin Institute) AND Janet took a much needed year off competing.

Knowledge and hard work always pays off,

Believe it,

Mark

“I started training with Mark in 2011 after getting to a point where I was tired of looking after my own training and nutrition as well as everyone else’s! As a personal trainer and health coach myself for over 13 years I know all the ‘facts’, but that doesn’t mean I can always be objective or motivated.

As I’ve had several stages of feeling that way, Mark is actually about the 6th or 7th trainer I’ve worked with to achieve my personal goals, I go through phases where I’m happy alone and others where I know I need support.

I chose to work with Mark because I knew him from various courses and had noticed that he was very observant, asked smart questions in class, and seemed to care about his clients well being beyond just the physical results. Furthermore, in various positions I’ve held in the fitness industry I’ve mentored hundreds of different trainers, and so I like to think I have an eye for who is a cut above the rest!

What I found is that Mark takes personal training to a level that most trainers possibly don’t even consider. His approach is very holistic, in that he took the time to regularly check in on how I was going with nutrition, lifestyle, stress management, even business management. All of the things which do play a part in whether or not you might stay on track or slip off path a little.

Two things that especially stood out to me in working with Mark were how accommodating he was of me bringing my toddler to training sessions (she loves it!) and also one occasion when he sent me an email that was very relevant to where I was emotionally with dealing with old food and body image issues. I don’t think there are many guys out there that either get where women come from when it comes to body image, or want to!

Mark’s workouts are challenging, fun and varied, and his training is result based. I was able to check a few pretty cool strength goals off my list. To be honest my jaded view of the fitness industry is that most trainers see it as a means to some undefined end and are watching the clock, but to Mark helping people IS clearly the end game and the way he presents as a PT shows that.”

Kat Eden

High-performance Coach for Women

www.womanincredible.com

5 Things I Learnt About Training Last Year By Erros Chiodo

 1. Deadlifts Rule!

If you have been to any decent gym in your city you have probably seen someone perform a deadlift, but not necessarily well!

If you are part of the elusive deadlifting club I encourage you to stay a member like I have for the past 8 years as the rewards will be great. Deadlifts are probably the most fundamental and primal of all movements within the gym. No other lift gives you the same raw strength increases whilst putting slabs of muscle onto your back, legs and traps. Pretty much every muscle of the body is involved in deadlifting, causing a great plasma shift of blood into the working muscles.

A large plasma shift induces boosts of anabolic hormones testosterone and growth hormone. You can also generally move more weight with the deadlift meaning there is far greater nervous system activation than any other lift, leading to more strength and muscle gains. Deadlifts have a great transfer to other lifts within the gym, I have seen my clients improve on other back exercises like barbell and dumbbell rows as well as squats because of them. Deadlifts strengthen the posterior chain like no other exercise providing great strength and stability all along the spinal column and through the hamstrings.

Honestly who doesn’t like being able to comfortably lift 200 plus kilos in gym? And if you don’t.. That’s fine you can stick to doing cable concentration curls in the corner!

Erros Deadlifting 255kilos /561 pounds :

 2. Strongman Training For The Off Season

If you are not sure what the sport of strongman involves, its basically lifting a variety of heavy things in different ways. Without going into too much detail on all the different events and competition process, I can say that there are definite benefits one can derive from implementing strongman training techniques.

Around 2 years ago I made the transition from natural bodybuilding competitor to strongman trainer. As much as I loved getting up on stage painted brown and in tiny Speedos the sport just wasn’t for me. Don’t get me wrong I loved the training and discipline involved in attaining such a physique. It’s ironic that the best thing I did for my ‘bodybuilding’ was strongman training.

You see strongman training involves many different compound movements, not just barbells but exercises like truck tyre flips and atlas stone lifts. These events get the fast twitch muscle fibres firing at an unbelievable rate as well as massive metabolic increases through repetition and strength conditioning.

Strongman training gives a muscular thickness and density like nothing else. During the period last year where I was preparing for Melbourne’s Strongest Man I solely performed strongman type training for 3 months. With an increased calorie intake over this period I put on significant amounts of strength and eventually took out the under105kg amateur title at the competition. Post competition I started dieting down and had significantly more muscle mass. If you spend the entire year working in this 8-12 rep range and performing isolation exercises, there is no reason for your body to grow bigger and stronger. I literally performed no isolation exercise for over 3 months to no detriment, if anything, I gained significant benefit. The take home message from this is:

• During the off season perform predominantly heavy compound movements combined with strongman event training if you have access to the equipment

• Cut the conventional bodybuilding high rep and isolation training during this period

• Make sure calorie intake in increased to ensure you have adequate energy for training and recovery

• As you lean down notice the difference!

Mark (winner of U90 kg’s) and Erros (winner of U105 kg’s) Melbourne Strongest Man

Watch this clip of Erros competing in the axel deadlift at Melbourne’s Strongest Man:

3. Over Train For More Gains

‘Over training?! What do you mean? I thought overtraining was bad..’

Well you would think so wouldn’t you? But this isn’t always the case. Hypertrophy is an adaptation to biological stress and the greater the stress the more the body has to adapt. When you are in an over trained state it would be symptomised by loss of motivation to train, depressed immune system and mental state, loss of appetite and decreased strength.

You may be wondering how this could possibly lead to drastic physique and strength improvements?

As I’m sure you know the body is an amazing adaptive machine, which can be frustrating as it may halter long term gains in strength and size.

The body tends to adapt very quickly to a training stimulus so people often find themselves stuck in plateaus, unable to make the gains they once did. One way to break through this rut is to have a period (around a week) where training volume is increased drastically until one reaches an over trained state. This puts the body into a state of shock, so that the physical recovery processes have to work overtime to get the body back to normal.

This recovery process is optimised by having a complete back off from training with no exercise for a minimum of 5 days.  As a result super compensation takes place, leading to increases in strength and muscle size.

Charles Poliquin, one of the leading strength trainers in the world is a great advocate of implementing over training for maximum results. This can be seen in his ‘super-accumulation’ program.

4. Cut The Cardio For Fat Loss

Taking a look at the picture below pretty much sums up this entire argument.

For the stubborn bodybuilder that would rather train like a mouse in a spinning wheel, I’ll explain why.

Excessive cardio can cause muscle fibre conversion which is not beneficial for a strength trainer or bodybuilder. As the body adapts aerobically, muscles start to oxidize fat in order to produce as much aerobic energy as possible. There is a conversion of fast twitch IIb fibres to IIa and eventually type I (slow twitch). This is bad because fast twitch fibres have the greatest potential for growth and strength. Increased muscle mass is also related to an increase in metabolic rate and so eventually a lower body fat %.

Cardiovascular training also has a detrimental effect on the central nervous system. Repeated low intensity aerobic activity confuses the brain, so when it comes time to recruit a maximum number of muscle fibres for a lift it may not be able to due to aerobic adaptations. It has also been shown that cardiovascular training decreases insulin sensitivity, meaning the body does not effectively drive nutrients into the muscle cells due to a lack of insulin receptors. All that cardio you are doing may in fact be making you fatter, not leaner.

What are the alternatives?! Well there are plenty. HIIT (High intensity interval training) is a great as the body performs maximal efforts for short periods of time.

This emphasises fast twitch fibre recruitment and a longer period of raised metabolism. Circuit resistance work such as complexes are another great alternative as they keep the body in an anabolic state while sending your heart rate through the roof! The main thing which should be manipulated in order to attain a lean physique is diet. Eat quality food, hit the weights hard and you’ll be lean in no time.

Mark and Chris dong 60 seconds of hell… High intensity cardio!

5. You Need To Have Bad Workouts

No-body wants to have a bad workout, hell having one is probably likely to ruin your day. We are all human and things generally don’t always go to plan. We may walk into the gym with the will and determination to take on Goliath but external and internal factors such as sleep, work, stress and food intake can stop us in our tracks.

If we never had bad workouts then we would never really have amazing one’s either. You can’t expect to walk into the gym everyday and blast through Pb’s, it just isn’t going to happen. It is from our worst workouts we learn the most because we can sit back and reflect on our mistakes. We can see where we need to improve and what we have to do differently in order to prevent it happening again. If you don’t have a trainer or coach you must be your own biggest critic otherwise who else will?

Bad workouts also teach you to listen to your body, and with time you will begin to see the patterns and cues so that you know when to take a rest day. Having said that, some of my best workouts were on days where I felt very average and was sure I was about to have a mediocre workout. The greatest trainers always test the physical boundaries of the body and sometimes it just doesn’t workout.

Instead of being down for having a bad session, the best thing is to do is remove yourself, reflect and learn.

Erros Chiodo has spent the last 6 years training with Mark, so it was a natural progress for Erros to join the team here at Enterprise Fitness. To Celebrate, Erros is giving away FREE Personal Training sessions to 5 lucky people. All you have to do is email your full name, date of birth, and mobile number to info@enterprisefitness.com.au and answer this question: Why do you want Enterprise Fitness to train you?

The 5 people with the best answer will receive a free training session with Erros!

Conditions:

Must be over the age of 18

Must live in the Melbourne area

email info@enterprisefitness.com.au now… don’t miss out!

Erros is also the co-founder and co-owner of Power1 Nutrition. Visit http://www.power1nutrition.com.au/ for more information. Facebook: www.facebook.com/Power1NutritionAustralia

At the moment I’m working towards doing my first Figure competition. As we all know the food you eat for your competition prep can be rather restrictive and makes it tricky when having guests over or if your cooking for two.

As cooking tasty food is something I enjoy, especially when I get to eat it, I would be quite grumpy if I had to do a ‘chicken and broccoli’ diet for 12 weeks.

Here is a fresh and tasty salad that has all the right ingredients to keep you on track with your goal and you can add the dressing and extra flavours to your guests meals or that special ‘other’ that you’re cooking for.

Chicken Salad with an Asian twist

500g Chicken

1 can organic Coconut Milk/ or Fresh

1 grated carrot

1 cup of bean sprouts

1 medium sized cucumber halved and sliced

1 capsicum thinly sliced

¼ cup of fresh coriander chopped

¼ cup of fresh mint chopped

X1 tablespoon of sesame seeds

Dressing

1 tablespoon of sesame oil

Juice of one lime

1 teaspoon of red wine vinegar

Optional

Cashew nuts

Roasted Dukkah (gluten free)

Cooking Instructions

Poach the chicken in the coconut milk for approx 10-15 minutes or until cooked. Remove the chicken from the coconut milk and set aside to cool

When the chicken is cooled shred the chicken into thin long pieces

Put all the salad ingredients and herbs together in a bowl and mix through evenly

Put your salad aside before mixing the dressing, cashew nuts and Dukkah through

Put the shredded chicken on top of the salad and sprinkle with sesame seeds

Now everyone can enjoy a yummy, tasty and healthy meal together! Enjoy!

Kristine

These were the fitness entry requirements for Tough Mudder

10km run

25 push ups

6 pull ups

45 metre swim

Sweeeet!! I’m in!! I probably need to increase my running sessions but otherwise I should get through.

When I don’t have any set goals around my fitness (training for the sake of training) my training normally consists of a mixture of HIIT resistance training/Crossfit style training, strength training and trail running. I train to be stronger, faster, fit and feel awesome.

So all that being said here is what I did to prepare for the Tough Mudder:

Three Trail Runs a Week

These were about 8 km runs on an unstable terrain and included going off track to do some uphill sprints on the side trails. I never do steady state cardio, besides the fact that I find it absolutely boring and un-motivating. Steady state cardio is only useful if your goal is to do endurance sport such as a marathon. As far as fat loss, building strength and speed, steady state cardio is useless.

(above) Trail running… Tough Mudder Style!!

Strength Training

Twice a week I attended a Strength And Conditioning class at Dominance held by Murray Ballanden and learnt how to incorporate kettlebells into my workouts which helped to increase overall body strength and target weak areas such as my upper back and core. Murray is a great coach and loves working with people on repairing their injuries and correcting the imbalances (and like Mark is very particular about perfecting technique).

Strength Training consisted mainly of Plyometric and explosive movements such as clean and press, dumbbell snatch, overhead barbell press, torsanator, spider-man push-ups, jumping lunges, Farmers Walks, Pull Ups. I structured the reps and sets in a manner that I was training mainly fast twitch fibres.

I still incorporated Deadlifts, Squats, Cyclists squats and weighted lunges to maintain overall body strength. I trained these exercises at a general rep range of 8 to 12 reps.

The goal for training was to be fast, fit and strong to be able to run the distance of the 20km as well as complete all the obstacles. And at that stage I didn’t really know exactly what the obstacles were going to be so I felt I had to cover al bases.

DIET AND NUTRTION

Generally speaking my diet is Paleo and mainly consists of meat (lots of meat), fresh vegetables and healthy fats such as fresh coconut milk, coconut oil, organic butter, avocado and seeds. Carbohydrates are mainly sweet potato, pumpkin and berries. Of course on the weekend I include a few tasty treats but as a rule of thumb they must be gluten free (listen to Marks gluten podcast here to understand why).

My food intake remained basically unchanged. However due to increasing anaerobic activity I did increase my carbohydrate intake and had either sweet potato, pumpkin, berries, or a couple of figs directly after training. Figs contain high amounts of potassium and the glucose will be directly absorbed by the muscles aiding in recovery. (Figs after training only applies to people who have a lean body type and the goal is not weight loss).

I do occasionally enjoy a glass of wine over dinner on the weekends or when I catch up with friends but leading up to the Tough Mudder I eliminated alcohol as I do notice a difference in my training, energy levels and mental clarity even with one drink and I wanted to be feeling 100%.

SUPPLEMENTATION

It’s no secret I use Poliquin’s brand of supplements. I’ve been supplementing and training for awhile and I have to say that I have only started to notice the benefits of taking supplements since using his brand. Reason being they have a higher and purer concentration then the average grade supplement.

For recovery I used Glutamine and Glycine; both are amino acids and assist recovery.

The supplements I like to use on a daily bases are:

Vitamin C

Multi-Vitamin

B vitamin complex (in the Poliquin brand this is called methylators 3.0)

Fish Oil

Magnesium

Vitamin E

CLOTHING ATTIRE

I knew it was going to be wet and muddy so I wanted clothes that were still light besides being saturated.

My shoes needed to be comfortable and light as well and most of all they needed to stay on inspite of the mud pits trying to suck them off.

I wore Skins, and a Dry Fit top. The shoes I opted for were Barefoot Merrells made by Vibrim and they were fantastic!!

I purchased this shoe 3 months earlier as I was finding my feet were very heavy on my trail runs using Asics. I now keep my Asics for training at the gym and Merrells are for exploring nature I simply love them!

It’s a funny sensation to begin with to feel the rocks under your feet when you run and not having the same support you do from your average runner but it definitely feels more natural once you get used to them.

ON THE DAY

My start time for the Tough Mudder race was 12:45

Instructions from the event organisers was to be arrive 2 hours early prior to the race to allow for registration and parking.

Breakfast was at 07:00 and I ate my usual- Meat and Avocado with mushrooms.

I made some chicken mince burgers the night before with coconut milk and grated carrot and ate them a few hours after breakfast. I opted for a high fat, high protein approach.

The aim for this is to still have high protein but with fats to slow down the digestive process and keep blood sugar nice and even. Mark also noted that I didn’t need to carb load or do anything like that.

Mark suggested the perfect pre race meal would be organic rice crackers with ABC spread on them. This combo is perfect as it has slow digestion carbs that don’t have an immediate impact on blood sugar and the fat from the ABC spread will further slow the digestion and fill me up so I would be sustain thought-out the race.

YUM!!! I love ABC spread! I just wanted to layer that stuff on! But I didn’t. The worse thing would be to get indigestion during the race. I had about 5 crackers in total.

Mark added electrolytes to a bottle of water which I drank slowly over the morning before the race. This definitely helped keep me hydrated throughout the race. He also used the FAT Tool on my calves with a warming cream. I have to say, I think it really helped. It released the muscle fascia around my calves and shins which helped me not get shin splints on the run. It also (almost instantly) improved my flexibility.

I also took Beta Alanine and BCAAs before the race.

THE RESULTS

I have to be honest and say that I was very happy with my preparation for my first race.

I was very comfortable in what I was wearing both with clothes and shoes. I felt hydrated and energetic throughout the whole race and only stopped at one water station. While others scoffed down bananas throughout the race I felt I had no need to and kept running.

The only thing that slowed me down was the banking up of people towards the end of the course making me hold out a little bit longer to get to the end.

My favourite part of the race was seeing my man’s face in the crowds about half way through and he just kept popping up everywhere right through to the end. He made sure I had the right supplements before and after the race and that I was eating enough of the right foods, he was patient and supportive with my increased training even though it took up more of my time and he never complained about me getting up for my early morning runs.

I’ve received a few queries about training for the Tough Mudder so I hope this article has helped to answer a few questions. The best advice I can give you if are wanting to do the Tough Mudder course or a similar race or competition is, don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today. 

If you need a push in the right direction with either your health or fitness goals we can definitely help you.

Contact us at Enterprise Fitness 1300 887 143. Or, if you want to chat to me directly my email is Kristine@enterprisefitness.com.au

Thai Papaya and Avocado Salad

Mark and I recently came back from the most amazing holiday in Thailand!  Textbook! Yes the ones you see in the movies where you’re on ‘Cloud 9’ and every day is a new and exciting adventure.

One of the salads we experienced was so good I just had to share it with you and perfect for the warm weekends we’ve been having.  

Ingredients

½ firm papaya seeded and diced

½ cup of chopped dried figs

1 firm avocado seeded and diced

Juice of 1 lime

1 tablespoon of fresh coriander chopped

Lightly mix all the ingredients together so the avocado and papaya don’t turn to mush and it’s ready to serve.

This salad is beautiful with Cajun or BBQ chicken or fish

Enjoy!!

Kristine

My day as a Tough Mudder…

As we arrived at Philip Island and parked the car I could see the Tough Mudder participants almost finishing their race…they looked tired and muddy and ready for it to be over. Eeekkkk!!! I’m here finally! The day had come around so quickly and I had no idea what to expect and was hoping I had trained properly for it.

12:45 was my start time.  As I jumped the first wall and stood in the ‘pen’ with 600 other ‘Mudder’ participants I listened to the commentator give us our send off speech. “Tough Mudder is a challenge” he said, “not a race. It is about camaraderie and helping your fellow team members complete the race and get to the finish line.

The course went for 20km with a mixture of running and 28 obstacles to challenge you. As he spoke about the obstacles ahead it definitely seemed you needed a team to complete them and I signed up to do the race on my own!

Oh well! I’ll just have to make friends and ask for help. And off we went! Some charged into the course, others jogged and walked their way in. It was easy to look around and watch what others were doing but I thought, I’ll keep a steady pace and do what’s right for me and sure enough I ended up passing others by as they ran out of breath and tired themselves out early in the course.

Obstacle 1- Berlin Walls

After a 4 km run I arrived at the Berlin Walls that was approximately 3 metres high and made out of wooden planks. You had to pull your body up with no assistance to get over it. I found it quite easy to jump up and pull myself up. (Training tip: do lots of pull-ups!)

Obstacle 2- Arctic Enema

This was a deep plunge pool filled with ice. You had to swim under some wooden beams to get to the other side. With no hesitation I thought, okay its time to get wet and now the fun starts! I could feel my heart rate instantly increase from the coldness of the water. It was ice cold! But once I was out I felt very refreshed and ready to keep running.

Obstacle 3- Berlin Walls

We hit the Berlin Walls again. It took a bit more effort to get over the top being wet and a little fatigued. One of the other Tough Mudder Participants helped to pull me over at the top of the wall. Awesome!!

Obstacle 4- Devils Beard

This was a shallow mud nest with netted ropes shadowing it in which you had to climb through. I was happy I had worked on my core strength to get me through.

There was a lot of running in between obstacles. People were starting to slow down and there was a bit more walking among the group. I just thought this is only early in the course. I better keep running.

Obstacle 5- Walk the Plank

I saw this Obstacle on the Tough Mudder website when checking out the course and thought it looked scary. I’ve never been much of a water baby. I am a Gold Coast girl but never took up surfing and always preferred to stay and jump the waves as opposed to ducking underneath them. But I knew I couldn’t hesitate so off the 5 metre plank I jumped (again) into the freezing cold water. With my heart rate up again from the shock of the cold water and probably from the jump I was out of breath trying to swim and ended up swimming on my back to get my breath back. A couple of the participants close by had to get rescued by lifesavers which I was very happy to see as I was struggling to keep myself above the water let alone try to help someone else. Once I settled my breathing I swam to shore with much difficulty from my shoes also weighing me down.

Ahhhh….back on dry land and quite happy to keep running and dry off.

Obstacle 6- Mud River

This was exactly like quick sand. You had to keep moving so your shoes didn’t get sucked off your feet.  There were a few deep holes which left people toppling over and ending up face first in mud. Wahoo!! No one told me they had free beauty treatments as well

Obstacle 7- Grease Lightening

A steep slippery slide into a lovely mud pond. I tried the best I could to stay upright but I ended up sliding down sideways and went head first into the pond. Ha!

Obstacle 8- Berlin Walls

I’m sure these walls were higher than the previous ones and I was very grateful for the assistance from the other Mudders to get over the other side.

Obstacle 9- Boa Constrictor

Narrow smelly pipes you had to slide your way through. And I’m not sure if they were smelly from the mud or because more than one Mudder decided to ‘let one off’ while going through the tunnel. Or was I just the lucky one that had the Mudder infront of them…fart..oops! Well they did J

Obstacle 10-Bale Bonds

Hay bale climb where you became king of the mountain once you got to the top. I pounced up this one! Might have been cause I saw my fiance’ standing by watching

Obstacle 11- Spiders web

This was a large roped web you climbed up and over and down.  Makes it a bit tricky having a few other people climbing up at the same time but it was pretty easy. Definitely helped being little and nimble. Obstacle 12- Firewalker

I’m one of those people that hold’s her breath when walking past a smoker. Well this was another story all together. The smoke was so thick you couldn’t even see through it at one stage. Eyes watering while trying not to inhale I made it through without too much damage I think; although my throat was a bit sore the next morning.

Obstacle 13- Hold your wood

This was exactly as it sounds. We held a wooden log over our heads. Some walked but I decided to try and catch up a bit as we were delayed at a couple obstacles from having to wait in a queue so I ran ahead till we came to ANOTHER mud river. Being little can have its advantages for being quick and fast but this time the water almost went over my head which didn’t help much when trying to carry the log over head as well. Lucky the deep water didn’t last the whole way through.

Obstacle 14- Mud Mile

I had just seen Mark who told me I had been going for 1 hr and 45 min. Awesome! I’ll smash through the next couple obstacles and be at the finish line in no time. However my enthusiasm was stumped when I arrived at the next obstacle to see no movement amongst the Mudders. We were standing at a full stop for about 20 minutes waiting to start our mud river walk. I was already freezing standing there all wet in the cold. When we started the walk through the river I just wanted the people at the front to go faster! It was like a traffic jam moving in slow motion. I was thinking about my brother Jason who is in the army and does this all the time!! Now that’s Tough!

People were jumping out of the river and running along. I did think about it but knew if I did then I couldn’t honestly say that I completed every obstacle. So I persisted through the cold and soldiered on.

Obstacle 15- Twinkle Toes

By the time I got to the next obstacle I was cold and stiff and shivering and the next obstacle was walking across a single wooden log over yet another mud river. The people ahead of me kept losing their balance and falling in which didn’t give me much confidence especially cause I was shivering but as with all the other obstacles there was no hesitation. I focused ahead of me and put one foot in front of the other and got to the other side without getting wet. Woohoo!!

Obstacle 16- Tyre Mountain

A pile of tyres that you climbed up and over without much effort. It was nice to have something not involved with mud or water

Obstacle 17- Funky Monkey

I normally love monkey bars and use them quite regularly with my Playground Workouts. But when I went to swing on these bars I found with my gloves being muddy and wet, left me without much of a grip AND the bars would turn towards me when I held onto them. Gave it a good go and then SPLASH!!! Into another cold muddy river I went.

Obstacle 18-Turds Nest

This was another roped spiders nest that wasn’t too hard to get across and I was quite happy to keep dry.

Obstacle 19- Everest

All I could see ahead was a crowd of Mudders standing there at what looked to be an oversized skateboard ramp. There were Mudders at the top holding their hands down trying to lift the Mudders up and over the wall. But from all the wet, mud and slime people were having a hard time sprinting up high enough to get hold of the wall.

I gave it about 5 attempts and slid down on my ass all 5 times. I touched the fingertips of my fellow Mudders up the top of the ramp but my muddy grip wasn’t strong enough to hold onto them to get me over. We could be here for another couple hours! The support crew brought us cellophane sheets to keep us warm and I was chattering and humbly accepted the kind offer.

Finally a team of Mudders decided to think outside the box and help get all of us over the wall. They build a pyramid with their bodies and one by one we climbed over the wall. Awesome!!

Obstacle 20: Electrotherapy:

The event organisers made this challenge sound the most dangerous and scary. My friends who had heard about the event all told me to be careful of climbing the electric fence but sorry to disappoint everyone but all I felt was a tiny little spark and that was it. Haha!! Either that or I was so glad to make it to the end I didn’t care about anything anymore.

And…Finish!!! I had completed each and every obstacle in the Tough Mudder Challenge and made it to the end. I was a Tough Mudder and had an awesome time being one.

There was an awesome team spirit amongst the Mudder crew and I was proud to be Australian.

I definitely recommend the event to anyone who is up for an adventure and challenge for you as an individual or to do as a team.

Stay tuned for training and diet tips to help you compete in the next Tough Mudder!

For training with Kristine email, Kristine@enterprisefitness.com.au

Tough Mudder shoe pile

Have You Ever Wondered How Sports Models or Figure Competitors Get in Shape?

SOLD OUT – Email info@enterprisefitness.com.au to be put on the waiting list

I certainly have. I wonder why more of them don’t end up in hospital with some of the diets, training and cardio regimes they follow…

I’ve been consulting and training female figure models and natural bodybuilders for a number of years and some of the “diets” and “training programs” I’ve seen are ridiculous and down right stupid…

I’m the guy that will tell you everything you have heard about health, fitness and comp prep is wrong… then back it up. Don’t believe me?

Check out some of the guys and girls I’ve trained and consulted for:

2 time Ms Olympia and 3 time Ms Australia, Janet Kane

He got rid of the useless supplements I was using – and this actually caused me to drop 2 kilos of fat within a week!

 Started Getting Results That I Only Had Dreamed About – Aidan Guyett

I Feel Myself Getting Fitter and Stronger Each and Everyday – Carley Smith

2 time INBA Mr. Australia, Tristan Boyce

I could go on but I think you get the point…

Let’s cut to the chase here; I’m known for two things, my no BS attitude and my passion for health and fitness. I’ve combined these two traits and put together a seminar packed with information you can take away and use to get the results you’ve been working so hard for.

The seminar isn’t JUST for people who want to compete… It’s for anyone and everyone who is passionate about their health and fitness and wants to look like they can compete.

Results speak for themselves so I’ll let a couple of the members that attended the last seminar tell their story.

Story 1: Lisa Callingham: Can’t Believe How Unhealthy My First Comp Prep Was:

I did my first figure competition in May of this 2011 and was pretty amazed at how unhealthy my prep felt. I really thought there must be a way of achieving the look you need for competition without sacrificing my health and risking metabolic damage and so on, so decided to look for another way.

As a long time subscriber to Mark’s podcasts and info I knew that he was a great source of information on training and nutrition, so decided to investigate his online training program.

I would love to train with Mark in person, but as I live in Sydney the only possibility was to work with him online – and I’m so glad I did.

Mark provides you with everything you need for your specific training and nutrition goals – we had a specific time limit too – I started with Mark 10 weeks out from my competition and he guided me to be completely ready for Comp Day. He answered every question I had about my training or nutrition (and there were lots!), and always got back to me really, really quickly, and to that end I just placed 2nd in the IFBB State Championships Master’s Figure.

I learnt so much about proper nutrition, hormonal balance and the importance of other factors like sleep and supplements on how well I trained, allowing me to get the results I wanted. I also went through Comp prep full of energy with a smile on my face, which was completely different to the previous time where lack of food made me listless and miserable!

I can’t recommend Mark highly enough!

Lisa Callingham

Story 2: Victoria May: This Was About a Lifestyle

I came to get help from Mark after a very turmoil year that saw my eating and binging spiral out of control after competing. I was at wits end not knowing how I was going to get my body back into gear when I got the tip that Maximus Mark was the person to see. So I made the call and went and saw Mark..

From the moment Mark opened his mouth, everything made sense.. I was not going to be put on another stupid starvation diet, I was not going to be put on a ridiculous training plan… This was about improving everything from the inside out.. so that I would never have to diet another day in my life in order to stay lean nor would I have to do endless amounts of cardio to stay lean.. This was about a lifestyle.

It is hard to describe how grateful I am for what Mark has taught me, I have never in my life felt better, full of natural energy – yep that’s right, I don’t touch ANY fat burners or energy drinks or caffeine, its a daily natural high I sit on, I don’t get bloated anymore, I feel amazing, and I am not spending my whole week training! I do only what I need to which is very minimal in order to stay at a lean and at a healthy weight.

My mindset towards eating, training and supplementation has completely taken a 360 degree flip.. I absolutely recommend if you are feeling trapped and controlled by food, or training or you have obsessive behaviour about it; that you speak to Mark about what you can do.. I promise .. you wont ever regret it!

Victoria May

Champion Sports Model

Firstly we love running seminars so it would be our privilege to have you attend. Topics that will be covered:

• Evolutionary eating
• The truth about supplements
• Why farming is the over looked factor to health
• Why gluten makes you fat, dumb and infertile (check out the video from our last seminar on gluten)
• How to put a contest prep together
• The ‘Be X Do X Have’ formula for success
• Plus much, much more

Mark talking about Gluten

ACTION TAKER’S BONUS!

For the first 12 people to sign up they will also receive a closed door training session with Mark and the Enterprise Fitness team.

ACTION TAKERS BONUS #2

The Enterprise Fitness Cookbook eBook : 29 Recipes approved by your Personal Trainer!

My lovely fiancé Kristine is the best, healthiest cook you will meet! Ok I’m a little bias, but trust me, we receive emails every week from clients telling us how much they love Kristine’s recipes

ACTION TAKERS BONUS! #3

Step by Step Supplement and nutrition Blueprint to smash through any plateau

This is not for sale online. Only available to personal clients and people that attend our seminars. It doesn’t matter if you forget everything I say in seminar, follow this hand out and you will get in shape!

ACTION TAKERS BONUS! #4

Q and A with the 2 time Ms Olympia Janet Kane.

You get to ask Janet anything you like!

When?

Saturday, May 12th

Register at 9:45 am

Start 10:00 am sharp

End: 5:00 pm

Where?

855 Doncaster Road,

Doncaster, Victoria,

Quest on Doncaster

www.questondoncaster.com.au

Check it out on Google Maps here: http://maps.google.com/

Click the link below for further information about directions:

http://www.questapartments.com.au/Accommodation/72/australia/melbourne_suburbs/quest_on_doncaster/Location.aspx

How much is this investment to good health?

SOLD OUT – Email info@enterprisefitness.com.au to be put on the waiting list

Early bird rate: $147 (Paid in full before April 21st)

Regular rate: $247 per person (Paid after April 21st)

The seminar is limited to the first 20 people to pay in full. The first 12 people to pay in full will receive bonus 1#: A Closed door training session with the team at Enterprise Fitness. Do not delay, this always books outs. 

How to register?

To register and make a payment simply click here

Making a payment and registering online is simple and secure. We use a program called 1shoppingcart which is used by over 25,000 businesses worldwide. We do this to ensure your payment is 100% secure.

What other trainers who have attended say:

Mark’s Eat Your Way To Ab’s seminar was the most relevant nutrition information I have ever received. It provides useful & applicable detail to all who attend, regardless of background or training experience.

Whether you are stuck in the 80′s food pyramid or a hard-core Paleo fan, Mark’s insight into the “why’s” of his information is what makes you sit up & take notice.

Backed by real world experience, I would challenge anyone to follow Mark’s advice & NOT see results.

As a trainer, type 1 diabetic & absolute nutrition enthusiast – I would highly recommend Mark’s Eat Your Way to Abs for all.”

Wes Brinckley

2 X Ms Olympia and 3 X Ms Australia, Janet Kane

“When faced with the task to come in harder with much leaner legs for this comp and improve over the last comp, I was very hesitant to remove the cardio as Mark had wanted. There was no logic that I could apply from my experience that would give me the confidence with this plan, but with the sheer confidence I had in Mark’s knowledge, I trusted the result would come.

“In previous comp prep, I was used to doing 45 min cardio at 5 am (before the kids would wake) and then a grueling 2-hour weight session at 9, immediately followed by the second cardio session of 30-45 minutes.

The third cardio session would be somewhere in between doing the home reading with the kids after school and cooking the dinner. And all this was done at least 12-16 weeks out from a comp.

“Needless to say this comp prep did not have all that cardio included. Sure I trained incredibly hard in the gym and in the kitchen, and I literally swapped the cardio with more sleep and happier moments with my children.

I also felt much more calm and balanced and surprisingly still maintained a higher level of carbs up until the competition than I had in previous times.

“Having the weekly measurements, I was able to see the incremental changes in my body and that the program was working; seeing these changes, I became more confident in Mark’s plan as I am very results focused. If I were only to judge by the scales, then I would have ditched the program as there was not a whole lot of change in the body weight. Gratefully my body-fat was dropping, lean mass remained the same through the whole process and the targeted sites of my legs were also significantly dropping. I was very happy.

“Now that Mark has a process to eliminate the excess cardio and only use cardio as a final prep, WHY would you do it any other way?

“Thanks Mark – you truly are a trainer with exceptional knowledge and the results are there for all to see on stage”

—Janet Kane, Ms Olympia, Ms Australasia, 2X Ms Australia, 2X INBA All Females winner

Nothing We Did Seemed To Work… Until I Met Mark and Kristine

“As a Personal Trainer I had attended a number of courses on mainstream nutrition. I always walked out with unanswered questions and could never manage to shed my last 5kg myself, let along teach my clients to do the same. It was extremely frustrating. On top of that I was dealing with a husband and 2 children that were constantly getting sick, and I had no idea why! Nothing we did seemed to work.

I met Mark at the Australian Institute of Fitness; he was 1 of my coaches there. I instantly warmed to him; my gut instinct told me this was someone I needed to stay in contact with. And I was right. 18 months later, Mark was conducting the “Eat Your Way to Abs” seminar. Attending that was a no brainer. I had already attended a number of nutrition courses and had no results. Having looked at the people that consulted with Mark, I knew that I needed to be at this seminar. Not only did I attend, but took 5 people with me the next time he conducted this seminar.

At this seminar I had all my questions answered. I had a light bulb moment and everything made sense to me, regarding nutrition. Within 4 weeks of attending the “Eat Your Way to Abs” seminar the first time, I dropped 6kg! AND improved my lean muscle. On top of that I learned why my family was constantly sick; we were all intolerant to Gluten. I took us all off Gluten (yes including the kids!) and nobody has had 1 dose of antibiotics since then! It’s been 4 months. To give you an indication, my children took turns on antibiotics, 1 week each, and my husband had Tonsilitis fortnightly! So to be free of illness for 4 months is massive in our home.

I have implemented everything I have learned, and continue to learn, from Mark, with my clients too. They too are seeing some amazing results! My business has skyrocketed with all the success stories we are seeing. We always had results, we just have them faster now!

I highly recommend consulting with Mark and Kristine. You will not be disappointed! They are a wealth of knowledge and make it so easy to learn from them. They make you feel welcome and always take the time to answer any questions and provide you with the information to help you move forward. Not consulting with this couple, is doing yourself and your business (if you are a PT) an injustice.”

Just wanted to say thanks!

Just wanted to say thank you again for pointing me in the right direction with nutrition, I have attached a picture to show you the effectiveness your Eat Your Way To Abs seminar has had on me.

Warm regards,

Reece Adams
WON Fitness

A big thanks to you!

You know your stuff and I have really benefited from your help.  I now understand a hell of a lot more… How to eat, stay lean, get stronger and put on muscle at the same time.  I have set a goal to compete in June next year on the Gold Coast for the Asia Pacific Championships.  I know I can come in leaner and more muscular on the day without a ridiculous ‘bulking up’ (fattening up) phase in between!

You have been a great coach, a great help to me and now I am more confident than ever.

Anthony Cutajar, Realm Training

For more success stories click here

If you’ve attended our Eat Your Way To Abs Seminar you would have tasted our gluten free Fruit and Nut cookies.

This is another simple fail proof recipe that cannot go wrong and takes minimal time to prepare. You can also freeze the cookies and they will be just as good when you’re ready to defrost and eat them again.

Even though they are gluten free they are still very high in sugar so definitely enjoy them as a cheat meal or as Mark requests….”I need them for recovery after strongman training”….haha!! Sure babe

Gluten free cookies being mixed into one bowl

Gluten Free Fruit and Nut cookies

Ingredients:

250g of shredded coconut

¼ cup of dates, chopped

¼ cup of dried apricots, chopped

¼ cup of sultanas

½ cup of chopped nuts (macadamias, almonds, walnuts)

1 400g can of condensed milk

Cooking Instructions:

Preheat oven to 160c and line baking trays with baking paper

• Mix dried fruit, nuts, and coconuts together
• Add the condensed milk and mix through thoroughly.
• Make roughly shaped cookies with hands
• Place in oven for 20 min or until slightly golden and firm to touch.
• Let the cookies cool before removing them from the pan.

Enjoy!

Kristine

Hey, hey, it’s Maximus Mark, co-owner of Enterprise Fitness. Today I’ve got to drop some truth bombs. But first let’s lay the groundwork…

Coke a Cola, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Hungry Jacks, Burger King, Safeway, Coles and mobile phones are not normal.

They are all apart of the social fabric that we call life… Common, but not ‘normal’.

Picture this… An Aussie Rules Football field…

If we start from one goal post and walk all the way to the opposing goal square, that distance represents the past two million years of human evolution. The tiny, single, little goal square on the other side represents the last 10,000 years of human evolution. In other words, industrial farming and grains becoming ‘apart’ of the human diet.

Now here’s the interesting part, the last millimetre, (yes, one of the most insignificant measurement you can think of) represents the last 100 years of human evolution.

What happened in the last 100 years?

Coke a Cola, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Hungry Jacks, Burger King, Safeway, Coles and mobile phones, trans-fats, Canola oil, HFCS and GMO just to name a few.

Most people live their life on the last one millimetre. Then they develop modern diseases such as diabetes, heart attacks, lung cancer, food sensitivities, auto immune disease, etc, etc.

Let’s go back just 40,000 years ago, back before industrial farming. We ate based on what was available to us. You know the foods; things that were hunted, fished gathered or plucked. We ate real foods and real foods don’t have labels, they’re not cool and they’re certainly not ‘in vogue’. Let me define real foods with some basic principles:

• Would a caveman have access to this food?
• Would I be able to eat it 40,000 years ago?
• Is it hunted, fished, gathered or plucked?
• Foods without labels (e.g. vegetables)

So…

We live in this world with marketing presenting itself as fact, where the more you spend on a handbag, the higher on the social ladder you must be and a world where we have no idea where our food comes from. This is a relatively modern invention of man and has only been possible in the last 100 years.

We eat things that could not be made in our home kitchens. For example, imagine making High Fructose Corn Syrup or Red Dye 29 in your kitchen? It’s not possible. Yet we consume it like its going out of fashion.

McDonalds launches a new burger and we race to ‘try it’ with their new thick shake flavour. News Flash! Those flavours were made in a lab, they’re not even real, yet we wear a badge of honour as being ‘one of the first’ to try it (watch fast food nation, a movie based on the unknown facts of the fast food industry).

Someone say insane? No wait! That was the voice in my head…

So the point is health is your birthright.

Actually let me scream it from the mountain tops… HEALTH IS YOUR BIRTH RIGHT!!!

So if health is your birthright and you’re finding yourself becoming unhealthy it may be because you have been brought into false truths about the way you should live and eat. Many of our beliefs come from the excessive marketing and ads parading foods as a status item or a tool to fill an emotional void. We confuse marketing with health, or maybe it’s that we replace health with convenience.

Coke tells us that we can “Open Happiness” and now give us the ultimate status item, a coke can with our name on it. For the children of the world, they’re taught that happiness comes with a toy from McDonalds so if ever they’re feeling blue; a happy meal is just $4.95 away.

Anyone growing up in a western society is taught from infancy that processed food is normal. Coming back to the football field analogy; processed foods represent one millimetre of the field.

So here I am, basically standing in the face of western society saying that nothing it stands for is ‘normal’ or healthy or the way we were intended to live for optimal health.

As Sean Croxton from Underground Wellness would say, “how do old foods cause new diseases?”

So there comes a point where you have read enough “7 steps to fat loss” articles and you have to take on a new identity.

This is where most people fail. They do all the right actions but fail to become the person who maintains a healthy lifestyle. This is why diets don’t work.

To gain lasting results, to become a healthy person, you have to think differently. Simple!

So Mark, how do you become a healthy person?

So here’s the formula taught to me by both Dr. John Demartini and Brad Sugars. It’s called Be X Do = Have.

Most people just focus on the have. Example; I want to be 8% body fat with a 6 pack. Here’s where they go wrong;

They focus on the have first. DON’T focus on the have, focus all your attention on the “BE”. Ask, WHO do I have to be to achieve the material result. Then the “do” will take care of itself and you will get the have.

So there, I’ve done it again, gone all deep and stuff and I didn’t at all touch on what foods you should eat. If you want what foods you should eat download my free diet and nutrition program from www.eatyourwaytoabs.com.au … that’s why its there!

If you enjoyed this article be sure to check out these articles and podcasts:

The Law of 10%

Have you Improved

Socially Unacceptable To Be Healthy

Podcast: Power Hour with Mark

Maximus Mark Ottobre

SEMINAR WITH MARK: 12th of May 2012! Click here for more details!

Moroccan Chicken

This recipe is one of my favourites at the moment to make when I’m cooking for guests. Besides the fact that its quick and easy to whip up; its also easy to double, triple etc and you can use it for leftovers or lunches for the next day.

It really is one of those foolproof ‘safe’ recipes that never seems to go wrong.

We’ll start with the Marinade

• 2 tsps cumin
• 1 tsp of cayenne pepper
• 2 tsps paprika
• 1 squeeze of lemon
• Half cup of chopped flat leaf parsley
• Half cup of chopped fresh coriander

Ingredients

• 6 Chicken Thigh cutlets
• 1 400g of organic canned chopped tomatoes
• 1 brown onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 cup of chopped mushrooms
• 1 red capsicum chopped
• ½ cup of dried apricots

You need a large pot with a thick base or a casserole dish for this recipe.

1. Put all the ingredients together for the marinade and evenly coat the chicken with it and place in the fridge for four hours
2. Brown the chicken till golden in the pan and set aside
3. Cook the onion till golden
4. Add the garlic, mushrooms, red capsicum and apricots and cook for 5 minutes
5. Add the canned tomatoes
6. Add the chicken
7. Turn the heat down and let simmer for about 20 minutes
8. When the chicken has cooked through and you have a nice thick and chunky sauce serve

You can have this with steamed vegies or try green beans with almonds for something different. Enjoy!!

Kristine

Many figure and sports models around the world all have the same problem…

When they are in the “on” season, they are really on, training hard, doing cardio, taking their supplements, saying no to junk food, timing their meals perfectly, etc, etc… Basically they live like a well-oiled machine regardless of the pre-comp approach they take.

But in the “off season”… well… That’s a whole another story. Basically they get fat and worst of all, they become unhealthy (really unhealthy). They develop an unhealthy relationship with food and think, “I can eat whatever I want because I’m in the offseason.” Of course, they are human like everyone else and suffer the consequences (AKA. They develop a fat arse).

Why does this paradoxical situation happen?

I believe the root cause is the identity one takes on when they become a ‘figure athlete or sports model”.

Let’s take for example Christianity. If apart of your identity is that you’re a ‘Christian’ then you will probably go to Church every Sunday, say your prayers, celebrate religious holidays and chances are you might even believe your brand of religion is the way to go.

I am not putting a moral stance on the above saying its right or wrong. It’s what that person believes and from beliefs we shape our identity of who we are in this world. They are things we believe about ourselves to be true.

Once people identify themselves as a “figure athlete” or “bodybuilder” they forget they were first a healthy person who liked to train and look good all year around. (That’s why most people compete right?)

They forget that whey protein really doesn’t agree with them, or that that the glucose after training is actually making them fat, or that the fat burners they are on are actually causing them early stages of adrenal fatigue and causing them not to sleep.

The purpose of this article is to focus on what I believe to be one of the most damaging beliefs for the female competitor and replace it with a more empowering truth.

The damaging belief is:

There is an on-season and off-season diet (or any mention of an off-season/on-season approach)

After years of doing one-on-one consults with females I have come to the conclusion that this mentality really damages them…

When someone competes once (yes just once) they identify themselves as a ‘bodybuilder, figure chick or sports model.’ They compete once and it lasts with them the rest of their lives in the form of an identity shift which can go hand in hand with a figure chick/sports model eating disorder.

How It Works

Well as previously stated, they compete once. Majority of the time they are on horrific diet plans and cardio regimes that I wouldn’t even wipe my arse with. But that’s another story for another day.

After the comp because they are so depleted (and hungry) they eat everything in sight. They beat themselves up for days and days wishing and hoping they had more self-control. Newsflash, self-control is not the issue! You were starved and told to exercise. Your adrenals are wiped and it’s going to take some time for your metabolism to kick in again… That’s if you get off the fat burners.

From this belief rises a very unhealthy relationship with food. They believe when it’s the on-season, they will be perfect (and they are). But that also means in the off-season they can eat whatever they want… Foods they wouldn’t normally be caught dead eating for no other reason than they are not competing. But don’t worry, “one day” they will compete again and when they do, then they will be ‘good’ with their food.

In my experience, one day never happens because they have done too much damage mentally, spiritually, emotionally and of course physically. It’s hard to recover and so I hear things like:

“I’m allergic to gluten and get really bad skin when I have dairy, but that doesn’t matter, I’ll cut it out when I’m competing”

It’s insane. When did looking good become more important than health? Maybe I’m the only one in the industry who thinks this way?

You can quote me for saying this; HEALTH is a side affect of looking good, but looking good is not a side effect of health.

Perhaps now you can see my perspective as why the ‘on-season/off-season’ mentality is so damaging.

Instead of believing in the off/on season, replace it with:

I am a healthy person who eats healthy foods all year round that build and nourish my body. When I CHOOSE to compete, I only have to make the slightest changes to my healthy lifestyle. I am in shape all year around.

If this article resonates with you, write the above out and put it somewhere you will see it everyday (like the toilet).

A quick point on males; it’s rare that males have emotional problems with food. It’s possible but not as likely. Males are more ‘logically’ driven creatures trying to ‘fix’ things whereas females will emote their problems.

My pre-comp philosophy is quite simple; Get healthy first. Then make changes to an otherwise healthy diet. This means foods that were created in the past 100 years (eg. McDonalds, processed foods and soft drinks) are certainly off the list 99% of the time.

When people compete for the first time they become part of the bodybuilding community. That 10 to 15 minute experience of getting up on stage can last a lifetime. For me there is nothing sadder than to see someone compete only for 2 weeks later for him or her to put on 15 kilos of fat. To me it speaks about their identity. At the root of every competitor (the ones who do it naturally at least) should be a health… (But then again, I would be indulging in the thought that people train and eat for more than just looking good.)

And don’t mistake this as an attack on bodybuilding and figure competitions; you’re smarter than that. It’s a distress signal to first time female competitors out there that your prep comp doesn’t have to be unhealthy… You just need to know what you’re doing.

A chicken and broccoli diet with 1 to 2 hours of cardio 12 weeks out from competing is not a diet or training plan; it’s a recipe for disaster.

Maximus Mark Ottobre– Find out how you can learn from me in seminar! Click here

P.S. Read part two, How To Shift Yourself To Health  

P.P.S. If you like this, you will love our seminars! Click here for more info

We all like yummy food! So here is a quick cheat sheet to give you a few alternatives you can use to make your food work for you.

Stay tuned for more cooking ideas to help give you plenty of variety in your food and keep you lean, strong and healthy all year round.

Happy and Healthy Eating

Kristine

By Kristine

A little while ago Mark entered into Definition 352 Strongman Competition for under under 90kg. He smashed through it and came 1^st place! I reckon it looked way too easy and next time he’ll have to do the under 105kg!

Being a proud girlfriend of her much loved hero I made him a cake of some of his favourite ingredients, Macadamias and Raw Cream and all gluten free. Check out the recipe!

Ingredients

¾ cup unsalted Macadamias

¾ cup gluten free self raising flour

¼ cup gluten free cornflour

2 teaspoons gluten free baking powder

4 tablespoons of baking stevia powder

130g organic butter (very soft)

3 eggs separated

¼ cup full fat raw milk

Icing

200 g full fat raw cream

1 teaspoon of stevia

½ teaspoon of vanilla essence

1 cup of desiccated coconut

1. Preheat oven to 170 c fan forced
2. Grease the base of round baking tray- about 20 cm
3. Place the macadamia nuts into a food processor or high speed blender and process until nuts are finely crushed
4. Sift the flour, cornflour, and baking powder into a large bowl
5. In a separate bowl beat the stevia and butter until fluffy and creamy and add the egg yolks and beat well
6. Add flour mixture and crushed macadamias and yogurt and stir well. It will be a thick mixture so persist until all the ingredients are stirred in.
7. In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until stiff and they form peaks then fold into the cake mixture.
8. Pour the batter into the tin, spread evenly in the pan with a spoon and bake for about 30 minutes or until a knife or skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
9. Let the cake cool outside the oven for about 5 min and then turn over onto a plate or rack

When fully cooled you can put my man’s favourite part on…the icing!!! Actually I think he just loves cream fullstop!

The icing is very simple!

I would opt to purchase an electric mixer if you do a lot of baking cause if you’re anything like me I get so impatient. I think my workouts at the gym are intense enough.

1. Pour the cream into a deep bowl, add Stevia and Vanilla essence and beat until the cream goes thick and you can form peaks.
2. Spread the cream evenly on the top of the cake and around the sides.
3. Then carefully spoon the desiccated coconut on to the side of the cake, the whole way around.

It can get a bit messy so make sure the plate under the cake is larger then the cake itself to catch any coconut droppings.

Hope everyone enjoys the Strongman cake made for my man who won the under 90kg in the Strongman competition in Melbourne

Kristine

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arthur Jones, Steroids and lots of Muscle!
Some would call it the “Golden Age of Bodybuilding”

In this Podcast Randy Roach and I discuss the history of bodybuilding. Randy is the author of Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors which is a three volume set, each over 600 pages.

We discuss Arthur Jones and the whole Nautilus thing, I ask Randy if Arthur didn’t use the Mentzers for their experiments and used an average Joe, would you think they would have gotten the same results? Randy’s honest and frank answer will surprise you.

We talk about Arnold and the impact he made. Did he deserve the credit?

And of course we talk about the drugs at the time. Randy really says it as it was. How much drugs did they really use?

One thing is for sure, this interview is a MUST download for any muscle head (or fitness fanatic).

Download the show here: http://maximusmark.com/media/historyofbodybuilding.mp3

Or click the play button at the bottom of the page

Right click and select save link as to download to your computer.

Note: If you are using FireFox web browser, you may experience problems downloading… This is out of our control. Try using Safari of Google Chrome for hassle free downloading

Download from iTunes or search Maximus Mark on iTunes

To purchase Randy’s books click here or search Amazon; ‘Muscle Smoke and Mirrors’. Remember there are two volumes available, make sure you grab both!

Maximus Mark

Like this interview? We have plenty more! Click here

By Kristine Coffey

Over the Christmas period while visiting home and catching up with family and friends one thing I got told a lot was, “well I think you need a balance”.

The definition of balance in the dictionary reads as;

1. A state of equilibrium or equipoise; equal distribution of weight or amount
2. Something used to produce equilibrium; counterpoise.
3. Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behaviour, judgment, etc.
4. A state of bodily equilibrium: He lost his balance and fell down the stairs.

So in saying this…does eating healthy the whole week and then binging on every type of food you can put in your mouth sound balanced?

Does consuming copious amounts of alcohol to where you lose control of sense of self, morality or your actions sound balanced? Does the sense of guilt over your actions off going overboard sound balanced?

If I read the above it sounds like my lifestyle is in perfect balance and it is the things I love and enjoy that keeps me balanced mentally, physically and emotionally.

Is it because I care about what I put into my body that makes me unbalanced? Is it because I prefer to take time to cook and prepare healthy meals that not only benefits my health goals but also assists me in managing my time and professional responsibilities?

Maybe it’s because I love to feel energetic, strong and mentally focused, and squeeze as many things as I can in a day to help me move forward with my goals. But should I apologise for wanting things in life that you just have to work hard for?

When did Pizza and a Bag of Chips become so important that one thought they could never enjoy their life if they had to give up those things? When did junk food take precedent over our health and what is good for us? When did we stop caring about what we put or not put into our bodies and just cared about how it made us look on the outside?

We take such good care of our material possessions so they maintain good condition and last longer, why are we so careless with ourselves? We spend so much time clothing and dressing the ‘outward us’ what does the inside look like?

I eat the foods I want and feel great! I enjoy the occasional wines with my friends without going crazy and still feel awesome enough to train hard, feel fresh enough to enjoy the day and not feel awful because I’ve blown all my money.

The lifestyle I have gives me the results I want all year round and with always more room for improvement. So tell me why I would give that up and waste time going backwards and live what others may say is a ‘balanced’ life.

Kristine

The following is a transcription taken from an interview with Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth and Maximus Mark Ottobre on veganism, vegetarianism, industrial agriculture and its problems.

Due to the nature of transcriptions we cannot guarantee accuracy, spelling or grammar. We think we’re doing pretty well to bring you both audio interviews and transcriptions with world leading authority on health and fitness free of charge. If you’re able to edit transcriptions free of charge, we would love to hear from you.

 Mark: This podcast is proudly brought to you by www.maximusmark.com and www.enterprisefitness.com.au

Hey folks! It’s Maximus Mark. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Lierre Keith. Lierre is the author of “The Vegetarian Myth” which is not just about vegetarianism but the whole farming and agricultural system. It’s an unbelievable book.

Lierre has broken up the book into three main parts – moral, political and nutritional vegetarianism. It is an amazing read and I highly recommend it. Thus the reason I’ve been pumped all week for this show. Lierre has spent a whopping 20 years as a vegan; her actual experience with vegetarianism/veganism is why many consider her to be the leading authority on vegetarianism and its problems. Twenty years is enough time to know if something works.

Lierre has always stood for justice and compassion, and after writing the “The Vegetarian Myth”, Lierre has been able to study the broad of the world’s food supply. She offers insight and wisdom. I believe she has definitely some of the answers in regards to what should be done with the world’s food supply, a very important topic for anyone who eats.

So with that said, let’s welcome today’s guest, Lierre Keith. Welcome to the show.

Lierre: Well, thanks for having me on.

Mark: First question, probably most obvious, can you please share with our listeners your background, your story, why you’ were a vegetarian, and after twenty years you found it unsustainable?

Lierre: First of all, I was a vegan, I was never a vegetarian, all or nothing for me.

I became a vegan when I was 16 and I think like a lot of people who decide to try that out the reason is because I met some other vegans and they have some very compelling arguments about why veganism was a good thing to do.

It seemed from this package that I was presented that if I simply remove animal products from my diet, I could do all these great stuffs. I could improve my health. I could save the planet. I could stop animals from being hurt. I could provide food for hungry people. So it seems like a really simple thing to do to solve all of those problems.

So I took it up, with a fervor of a teenager and I did it for twenty years, and the reason I stopped this is because my health failed catastrophically, there are way too many deficiencies, and there are way too many problems with this diet for it to be sustainable in the long term and I found that out to my great detriment.

That was one of the reasons why I wrote the book. I really don’t want others people to suffer the way that I did, it’s really not for any good reason at all. You’re not doing anything good that this diet claims that it does and you will in the end damage your body.

Mark: Before we get to the ‘meat and veg’ of this interview, I just want to get some background on few topics. One of the topics, not a lot of people obviously think about this, but let’s start with the soil. A lot of people don’t realize that soil is very, very alive or at least should be alive. What does soil eat?

Lierre: Soil, we think of it as this insensitive dirt and it’s not. I mean one tablespoon of soil can contain over a million different living creatures. A handful of soil can contain over a billion living creatures. A meter of topsoil can contain over a thousand different species of animals, so, yes, it’s hungry.

So depending on which little critter you want to look at they eat all kinds of different things, but all of these together, make healthy soil. So you need plants and at this point, you need animals, and you need both of those to make healthy soil, and its bacteria that breaks it all down.

Jessica Simpson, not the smartest cookie in the jar, but even she knows you got to eat meat!

There is a great quote by James Nardi, (soil scientist) he basically said that it’s the bacteria in the soil that is constantly renewing our earth and without them there would not be life.

And yes, they need to be fed, so, they’re eating all the other biological matter that falls upon them and a lot of that is cellulose of plants and also animals. We all play a role in that cycle, keeping that soil fed. The thing is we owe we owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and to the fact that it rains, so when you take away that soil, it means that land life is essential over and there’s nothing for us.

All those biological processes will go to a halt and there will be nothing left. So no animals, no plants, no bacteria. Life in the ocean might continue, but certainly land life, that would not be possible without soil.

This is why I think a lot of indigenous people have these concepts of the soil and plants as our parents, grandparents and our beloved kin; because plants and soil together created the topsoil and they also created that oxygen-rich environment that were really cradle for animals like humans. It’s true, they’ve worked on it for millions of years and finally the planet could support animals.

Our lives are very precarious, we are dependent on these millions of other creatures that we can’t even see and by doing agriculture we’ve been destroying all of that and that’s one of the big problems right now.

Mark: Just so we can give definitions for our listeners who might not be familiar, the difference between normal soil and the topsoil, can you differentiate the difference between the two?

Lierre: Topsoil is like the top inches, like 6 to 8 inches of soil, that’s almost all the biological activity happens. Topsoil can be a lot deeper, like in the prairie situation, in grasslands, they have incredible plants, they do an amazing job in building topsoil. So that topsoil can be 8 feet deep, 10 feet deep, 12 feet deep, in forests it’s a lot thinner and in other kinds of polycultures that would be even thinner because there’s not a lot of biological activity going on.

But underneath that is just a subsoil, kind of minerals and clay and rocks, stuffs like that, not a lot of biological activity. But it is on that top chunk, that’s where everything’s going on, and that of course is part of the problem because when we do agriculture we’re destroying that which means we’re destroying all the biological activity, destroying all those creatures and we’re making the planet much less fertile every single day by doing this process called agriculture.

Mark: Yes, absolutely. I put some quotes from your book, I wanted to share;

“Manure is not a biological waste but a gift”,

and the other one that really stood out to me was “what do plants eat, that just don’t happen and eventually the question has to be answered, fossil fuel or the manure one.”

In comparison, the soil is virtually eating as you said, dead animal matter to regenerate and get all the good stuff. But today, you make reference to literally eating oil and gas. Can you explain to the listeners exactly how we’re actually eating oil and gas?

Lierre: Well, one of the main nutrients that plants need in order to grow, animals so they could grow, is nitrogen.

You probably heard the concept of amino acids as the building blocks of protein, right? Well, the building blocks of amino acids are nitrogen, so every living creature needs a lot of nitrogen in order to literally just put itself together.

Plants draw that from the soil there’s a few plants that do help build nitrogen in the soil, that’s sort of an exception. By large; plants get it because either the cellulose of other plants or animals die. Then their bodies decompose by these bacteria, and then the plants take up the nitrogen again and are able to grow.

So that’s where nitrogen generally comes from, and I’ve talked about the nitrogen cycle and that’s just this circle of birth and death and things breaking down and being taken back up by the next living creature.

The problem is that when we do agriculture, we clear the soil, you have to plant the annual crops and it that process the soil is exposed every time you do that you’re destroying some of it.

This is actually a biological emergency at this point, basically there’s no topsoil left. We’ve used it all, we’ve skinned the planet alive. By 1950’s, all major grain growing regions of the world were played out. What happened then was this phenomenon called the “green revolution” and the green revolution figured out a way to make nitrogen in a laboratory, in a factory and then apply it to the ground that have been stripped off its nitrogen by agriculture. So you could apply this other fertilizer and that will provide the nitrogen that plants need.

Sure it does that but it is an incredibly energy extensive and extractive process. So you use gas and oil as the feed, it takes tremendous pressure to do this and a lot of heat, gas or oil to actually produce this so the nitrogen comes out of this. So you apply this huge industrial process, very energy extensive and at the end of the day you get nitrogen fertilizer, and its very powerful stuff.

So they use that everywhere now and those super duper green revolution crops have been bred and now they’ve been genetically engineered, they have very short stem and they produce very little cellulose compared to their wild progenitors and what they produce instead is this great big seed so they were able to quadruple the amount of grain being produced because of the nitrogen fertilizer, it is way more potent than anything that we’ve come out from a barn. So it’s not like the manure, it’s not like anything else.

At this point, somewhere between half and two thirds of the people alive on the planet are only alive because of this process they call the “Haber Bosch” process, those were the two people who invented it. Haber was a German scientist and the other guy Bosch was an engineer and the two of them together figured out how to do this.

The original reason was because Germany needed nitrogen to make bombs, so there’s this huge overlap between war and agriculture, in many, many ways, these are the same process.

They invented this process for war, they went on to use this for agriculture and now this is what is keeping all the grain being produced right. All the grain being produced right now can only be produced because of those nitrogen fertilizers. So, the real problem is that gas and oil do not reproduce, these are non-replicating resources and this is one of the things that this culture doesn’t want to face because it’s scary.

What’s going to happen if that gas and oil run out?

Well, we’re already on the downside of peak oil. Peak oil was probably 3 years ago. We’ll never going to have that much oil again. What are people going to eat when this run out because the soil is done, there’s nothing left for the plants to eat naturally in the soil. The only way you can get it is by applying these horrible fertilizers and this was not a plan for the future. We’ve been on a draw down for 10,000 years by wrecking the soil and as a fallback position figuring out just technologically how to extract nitrogen from the world.

Again, the fuel’s going to run out, we’re putting ourselves in trouble as species. There are some hopeful things; as an entire species we got to have to make some decisions about what we’re going to do next because if we don’t stand now, we’re headed for some pretty ugly scenarios, things that are already unfolding around the world.

When society fails and collapse, it’s really ugly. Agricultural societies always collapse because they’re always destroying the soil. This is a process that’s been set in motion 10,000 years ago, historically, you can look at every single continent, every place that’s agricultural followed that same pattern of collapse. We are not going to be an exception.

We extended this for another 50 years by figuring this out with the nitrogen fertilizer but the same end awaits if we don’t wake up to what we’re doing. Just to put a number on this, the average farm in Iowa right now uses anywhere between 3 and 4 thousand tons of TNT for every acre. That’s a vast amount of fertilizer, that’s how much energy goes into it and the state of Iowa alone uses 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year in terms of energy, because agriculture is a war and that’s what it takes to fight the planet.

So that’s the nitrogen picture, it can be a little overwhelming but there is hope, but we’ve got to state the problem first.

Mark: You wrote in your book that it takes four calories of energy to produce one calorie of food. Am I getting that correct?

Lierre: Yes, but it could be even worse, sometimes it can be as much as a ten. Then when you add transportation cost, it can be over a hundred.

I live on the west coast of California, you can get organic peas from China. It’s completely insane! What are people doing shipping peas across the Pacific Ocean and they are called organic, which make them crazier, the amount of energy in every one of those peas, they embodied energy. That’s insane! What are people thinking? It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Mark: All for the corporate good. I loved another quote in your book;

“So you’re an environmentalist? Why are you still eating annual monocrops?”

There’s a lot of listeners out there who probably never heard of monocrops or really know much about the whole farming process, can you explain what monocrops and perennial polyculture is?

Lierre: First we have to talk about what agriculture is. It takes piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, down to the very little bacteria, important life producing bacteria, all that gets cleared off the land.

So you have this bare field and then you plant it for human use. Couple of things happen right away, one is you destroy the topsoil when you clear it like that, and the other problem of course is that you push all the plants and animals off it, and they’ve got nowhere to go.

That’s a nice way to say extinction.

We are now leaving 200 species of animals every single day going extinct. This is just horrifying. The planet is just being gutted, being skinned alive, drawn into quartered, I don’t even know what metaphor to use at this point.

The point is that you take this thriving biotic, lush, dense community, all of these different creatures working together – plants, animals, everybody – working together, you clear all off, you destroy it and then you plant it to human use.

So what’s being cleared off is the perennial polyculture. So perennial means “plants that live a long time”, and the polyculture just means, poly is many, so it’s “many plants”, so you got this all different kinds of plants and they’re all working together, and they work together in really amazing ways. They form communities. They communicate, they help each other. They send each other messages, they send each other nutrients, they send each other chemicals when they need them. They protect each other in the community.

The more you know about this, the more in awe you must be. It’s just incredible what’s going on out there. So all of that is happening and one of their main goals of the perennial polyculture is to create more soil. That is what makes land life possible. It’s the work of those plants and they’re really good at producing soil, that’s one of their main jobs and they’re good at it.

That means that they take carbon and they build their bodies out of it and they build their roots, and they build their stems, and they build their leaves and then they die and all of that gets recycled into the soil. So, they’re building soil.

The problem of course is that humans are doing what they call agriculture. So you clear away all those plants, all the deep-rooted plants, that dense communities of creatures and you just plant one thing. That thing is going to be an annual, so, instead of being a long-lived plant, it’s a short-lived plant.

Now, in nature, there are generally two kinds of plants. There are perennials and annuals. Perennials, like I’ve said, their role is to create soil. One of the ways they do that is they have really deep roots. So, a tree has way deeper roots than your head of lettuce or corn and the reason that they have those long roots is because they live a long time and that means they have the time to build roots. If you’re going to live ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years, you have plenty of time to stretch out, stretch down and make this deep root structure.

The annuals only live a brief 2 or 3 seasons and then they die. There’s a time limit, the timer is on, from the moment that seed sprouts, they got just a really brief amount of time to reproduce.

The whole point is to make that seed, that’s their only reproductive strategy. So they don’t live a long time, they have short roots. They don’t grow very tall either, they can’t, they don’t have the time to do that. All their focus is getting that seed out because all their biological resource has gone to the seed, it means the seed is bigger. An annual seed is bigger than perennial seeds.

The disaster here is that humans found some of them enjoyable to eat and so in the service of what we get from eating grains, we essentially killed the planet. Agriculture has blundered every continent except Antarctica and taken what it can take, which is all of the topsoil, all the plants, all the animals have been removed and it’s just now miles and miles and miles of wheat or corn or soy.

So that’s an annual, it doesn’t live very long, and the monocrop part is, these are monocultures. If you’ve ever driven through any of the grain growing regions of the world, I’ve driven across the United States 2 or 3 times now and it’s all you see. It’s either wheat, or corn or soy depending on what state you’re in.

It’s horrifying because it’s a clear cut of the grass forest. I mean that should be a prairie, there should be 25 plants per square meter and there aren’t. There’s one crop for miles and miles. All of that life has been eradicated and this was not a plan with a future; there is no way for those plants to rejuvenate the soil, all they do is take.

Some people said that we’re mining the soil and one of the things that we’re mining is minerals. It’s that only deep-rooted plants that can get minerals out of the deep substrata of the planet.

Our planet is a rock and there’s soil on top of that but to get down to where minerals are, to get down into that rock, it takes really deep roots so it’s only plants like trees or perennial grasses that have roots that are that deep.

Corn, wheat, soy or lettuce; none of those can do it. All they do is take minerals out of the soil so this is why they said mining the soil, literally taking the minerals out, they can’t be reproduced. Nobody else can get them but those deep-rooted plants.

So that’s the role of perennials, they hold the soil in place, literally. They draw more minerals every time by holding that soil, they are a great big sponge for water, every time it rains they can absorb the water, then they hold it for the whole community so there’s water there, that means there’s life, biological activity can happen, the bacteria have their water, if its too dry the bacteria die, so the soil just turns to dust.

Now the annuals do have a role in nature, it’s not that annuals’ bad. But they’re the first responders; so the image I like to use is if you cut your skin, you had an accident in the kitchen with something like a knife, you would stitch your skin together, stitch the wound and then put a Band Aid on and eventually your skin will knit back together.

That’s what annuals do, when there’s a disaster in nature, like a flood, or a volcano or a fire, the soil is bared. Well that’s an emergency for the planet, and the annuals are the first responders, they spring to life, their seeds maybe waiting for a hundred years for their moment. They cannot compete against the roots of the perennials; but the moment the perennials are gone because of one of these natural disasters, that’s when the annuals spring to life and their job is to simply cover that soil until the perennials can knit back together just like your skin does.

So annuals have a place, but it’s not a big place there aren’t a lot of annuals in nature mostly because the planet has to be covered for the soil to be protected, for the topsoil to build and it got to be covered all the time with those life-giving plants.

The annual monocrops of course are a system that nature doesn’t recognize as a natural system and there’s no way to sustain it. The only way to sustain it is by doing the things that humans are doing now, applying fossil fuels, using, tractors, fences and ultimately great deal of energy because that is the only way to fight that constant pedal against the perennials that would like to take the planet back and create more life. That’s their job, that’s what they’re here for and every time you do agriculture you’re fighting a battle against those perennial polycultures. One of the reasons we take up so much energy.

Mark: So essentially, monocrops aren’t supposedly grown naturally and humans have to fight an uphill battle with all this energy, TNT, all you’ve said before, to grow those monocrops, yeah?

Lierre: Yup. That’s exactly the problem.

Before we had fossil fuel, before humans had figured out how to use fossil fuel and build those machines, before the industrial revolution, what humans use instead are other humans.

This is why agricultural societies always end up slave societies because anywhere from 80-90% of the population has to be enslaved to provide labor and also draft animals come in handy. That’s the way it was done before, what it needs.

Everybody mentions Athens as the great birthplace of democracy, 90% of the population in Athens were enslaved. And you can talk about the year 1800, that’s the year the fossil fuel age really began but in the year 1800, three quarters of the human beings alive on the planet, solely three quarters live in some form of slavery.

For anybody to have leisure time, it meant that a whole bunch of other people have to be enslaved and that has been the pattern for 10,000 years; these highly stratified, hierarchical, militarist civilizations.

That’s what it requires for anybody to have time to do the arts and sciences what we think of when we say civilization, it means a whole bunch of other people had to be immiseration and kept in these horrible conditions in a back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk.

I don’t see this as a good positive notion in human history and Jarrod Diamond says that agriculture was the biggest mistake that the human race has ever made. In part because it’s unsustainable and in part because it destroys human society. It made us hierarchical, militarist and violent and all that great stuff that we’re fighting, it goes back to this living pattern that’s based on draw down of natural resources and the inheritance of unsustainability and violence that’s required to do that.

Mark: Just a theoretical question on that one, if there was no agriculture today, none of it ever happened, would you think we would have advanced with modern luxuries that we have today (like cars and television, etc)… Do you think that would still happen or advanced the way we have. What’s your opinion on that?

Lierre: I don’t think so. I think that indigenous people who are living in harmonic balance with their natural environment, the living community around them, they have different technology. They don’t need to make those kinds of technologies.

They have technologies that are spiritual technologies, they have technologies that are about getting what they need to survive without hurting the land around them.  That’s a very different kind of technology than the technology of the agriculture which is technology’s domination.

So, I think that they’re very different, they’re going to touch very different paths in terms of what you need and how you think you’re going to get it. I mean, like a lot of people say, “Beavers make dams, so what’s wrong with dams?” My response to this is, well, when beavers make dams, what they create are wetlands. (And) wetlands are the most species rich habitat on the planet. So they’re making way more life when they build a dam, I mean, an extraordinary thing happens when beavers build wetlands, in contrast to the dams that humans make.

We create deserts behind our dams, we kill the forests when we make dams, completely different. So, I would say that, yes, there are ways to use technology and humans always make technology, we are tool building animals; but what kind of technology?

Is it technology that’s inherently democratic, that anybody can learn to make, anybody can learn to use or is it technology that requires hierarchy, that’s going to require the destruction of your environment which means if it’s going to be a violent process it’s going to require a military because people don’t willingly give up there’s tree and there’s soil and there’s water and there’s fish, and everything that’s destroyed by industrial processes like mining.

The only way that I think we’re able to have this industrialized world is that we live behind a military barricade so we outsource the violence to other places, poor places and we pretend that it’s not happening, but it is happening. (And) right now, people in China are dying to get the rare earth metals that create the magnets for windmills. (And) they say, “Oh we’re going green, we’re going to build windmills,” just amazingly destructive process just to get those rare earth metals, create toxic floods all over land, so people in China literally dying so that we can pretend we are going green by making windmills.

It’s not moral, and it’s not just, and it’s definitely not sustainable. I think we’re going to have to look past that military and really acknowledge the cost of this way of life.

There’s a basic value problem here, does the world exist for us to use or are we simply one more participant which is we need to take our place again as life-affirming participants in those biotic communities.

Otherwise, we’re all dead. It’s kind of a grim choice at this point, you know… We’re out of time.

Mark: Yes, for sure. Let’s just switch gears for a second, let’s talk a bit more about grains.

After reading your book, grains not only seem like a bad health choice but obviously one of the most destructive crops to the planet. Let’s set up this question with a couple of quotes that I pulled from your book.

“The Surfeit of US grain and starvation in poor countries are not inverse but proportional.

Why should people in Cambodia be dependent on the US for basic sustenance?

It costs a farmer $3 to grow a bushel but only fetches $2. The difference is paid by the federal government.

So we now we know that corn is cheaper to buy than it is to sell and obviously the difference is made up by the US government.” Can you please explain why the US government subsidizes corn and how does it effect on the rest of the world?

Lierre: Yes, this is a real problem. There’s essentially 6 corporations that control the world food supply. That should scare people. Six corporations control the world food supply.

Companies like Continental, Cargill and Montsanto. Continental and Cargill for instance, they each account for 25% of the grain, so 2 corporations control half of the grain around the entire planet. That should be terrifying.

Cargill is the third largest privately held corporation on the planet.

There are 5 companies that control 75% of corn and there’s 4 that control the soybeans.

So it’s a monopoly, because they have the monopoly, this is what they’re able to do, they can drive the price of those grains below the cost of production, which is to say that no matter how hard the farmers try they cannot keep their head above water, there’s no way.

So what will happen is they are always having to produce more, just try to make ends meet. So, every year there’s more surplus and every year they get less money for it. So of course the next year they have to do the same thing.

(And) hand in hand with this of course, there’s more fertilizer, there’s more industrial processes, this endless battle to try to make the four-seed plants to produce even bigger seeds and shorter stems and now with genetic engineering; which is kind of its own nightmare, that’s what’s going on.

Economically, these poor farmers there’s no way for them to do this, they will be out of business immediately. (And) that monopoly power means that those corporations can make the price that low. So, what happens is the US government steps in and gives subsidies to the farmers and that is a direct contribution right into the profit margins of those corporations. It didn’t use to be that way in the United States. We used to have a completely different kind of farm policy because they recognize that those surpluses are always going to work against farmers.

So, that all changed and now it’s just all about corporate profits. I think part of the reason is way more people used to farm, I mean half used to live in farms that long ago, now farming is a statistically insignificant occupation in the United States ‘cause it’s left 3% of the population.

So people don’t have a clue on what’s happening on farm country, but what’s going on is actually suicide. Suicide is the number one cause of death of farmers right now in United States and in other countries that’s true as well. But that’s how grave the situation is, no matter how hard they work, they can never make back their production cost let alone left money to live on. So then the government kicks in of this money because of the farm policies put forward by these corporations.

You’ve got to understand through the guiding hand by the government, you know, it’s a giant corporation. (And) then, there’s these huge surpluses and then you get two things out of that, one is you get factory farming because the grain is so cheap you can feed corn to and you can torture them, and create this hell for animals, but you will get cheap meat in the end.

And the other thing they do with the corn; it’s called agricultural dumping. They go to poor countries and they flood the market and destroy the peasant farmers off their land, out of business and into urban squalor. (And) this is what really had created these gigantic slums around cities in the third world.

It’s all about the profit of these corporations and their goal is to drive those farmers out of business and they’ve been very successful.

The moment that NAFTA was passed, within two years, I think there were 2 million farmers in Mexico went out of business and what that meant was now they have nowhere to go and they’re starving.

And if people in United States want to understand why there’s a problem at the border between the US and Mexico… That’s why. Where else are they going to go?

They’ve been driven off their land, they’ve got no way to support themselves, they’re starving! What options do they have?

This is true all over the world, in Philippines, in India, these horrible corporations are destroying everything as fast as they can by having these cheap, very, very cheap food stuffs, and it destroys the local food supply economy, and that’s exactly what it’s intended to do, and it’s very successful.

Indian farmers, they drink poison to die, they take the toxic chemicals that are supposed to put on the land. They have had mass suicides. They all do it at once to try and get someone to pay attention.

If you talk to top food and democracy activists around the world, that’s the number one problem, this cheap agricultural dumping.

The odd part that in the United States, all these progressive environmentally minded people think that this is the way we’re supposed to be doing that somehow that cheap grain to put starving people.. They got it exactly backwards, all the major hunger organizations, all the democracy movements, say exactly the opposite.

Get your stupid corporations out of our country. You’re killing us all, you’re destroying our life ways, destroying our traditional cultures, and you’re just creating these millions of people in misery now all for their profit.

On every level again… it’s just, it’s unjust, it’s miserable, and it’s just destructive. This part we really have to get right. This we’ve got wrong for 30 years now, we’ve got it simply backwards, and so again the agricultural dumping… it’s a human right violation so we just got to make this stop.

But it means we have to face the power of these six corporations and name the man behind the curtain,

The amount of power they have… Why do they have this power? Why have been they able to destroy everything? Why everybody so passive about this process, cause the same thing happens here in the United States. People were pushed off their lands and they have to go to urban environment and that’s the reason why, so they were able to drive that price so low.

Mark: Just to put a summary to what you said;

The last place on earth where you want cheap US grain to go is somewhere like Cambodia or third world country cause the fact that when they do get that grain, the farmers can’t compete with the price of the US grain and people start to buy US grain they eventually go out of business, they can’t support their family and that’s obviously an industry for the country that’s going to produce revenue for the farmer and the community. (And) because US and people keep sending cheap grain; its basically destroying the whole economy of that country. Is that correct?

Lierre: That’s absolutely right. That’s what’s happening around the world.

Mark: This question might be a little redundant but lets get a summary of it;

One of the vegetarian myths is that agricultural foods are foods of peace and justice. With that said, can you explain the grain cartel which you pretty much you already have, Who they are and what role do they play in the world’s food supply to put a summary on that question?

Lierre: Yeah, well, they just got this vast profits, they don’t get mentioned very much but they’re pretty much in control of everything.

I mean they’re all owned by the same people, whether they’re McDonald’s, whether it’s your Vegan Morning Star hamburger or fake burger, whether it’s your ‘Slik Soy Milk’, whether it’s the almonds that you got, it’s all owned by the same people.

This is why it doesn’t really matter what you buy.

If you think you’re buying that vegan soy thing as some kind of response to end world hunger or corporate world domination, you’ve given money to the people who created problems.

So, it doesn’t really matter whether you eat McDonald’s or you eat the vegan soy burger, it’s all the same people.

It’s all one industry; they’re completely hand and glove with each other, and they control everything. They control all the food around the planet. This is going to be a huge battle, we’re going to have to face the facts here. It’s way bigger than just, well I eat this food and not that food.

They have an amount of power that in his wildest dreams; Julius Caesar could not have dreamt of. It’s really scary and anybody who has that kind of power has the money and they own the government essentially. So we’re going to have to face this and we’re going to have to fight it because they’ve done the same thing everywhere. They’ve done it in rural communities here in the United States and they’ve done the same thing around the world.

Mark: One thing that people don’t realize is whether they do buy McDonald’s or whether they do buy that veggie burger, they are still actually supporting the same people and that was something that I wasn’t actually aware of until I’ve read your book.

It’s absolutely true that the money is all funneled to the same spot. You try to fight the battle, try to do the right thing, but then you realize it’s a whole other issue that no one was actually even looking at and for me, that’s one of the biggest take homes that I got from your book.

One of the other quotes that I would like to share is;

“Just as war need soldiers, the civilized needs slaves.”

I know you spoke before about ancient Athens and how the grains need slaves. That pretty much is still happening today except that we use machines with farming, is that right?

Lierre: Yes, in industrialized countries, we’ve been using machines now for about hundred/hundred fifty years to do that work. So, that’s why only 3% or less than 3% of the population is needed now to grow food, it’s because we’re using fossil fuels.

(And) this is also another problem for people in poor countries because they cannot afford that equipment, they cannot afford the gasoline to keep them running and so they get these horrible bank loans;

The IMF had a huge program, so it was their goal to get everybody hooked on farming machines so they can give people bank loans to buy them and then they have to pay them back.

You know this happens when they can’t actually sell their grain in the market because the prices have been driven so low. This is another way that farmers all around the world have been led down the rosy path of destruction is because the bank loans and the IMF, trying to get them into high tech farming.

That animal will heal itself and it will reproduce itself, in contrast to tractor and once the tractor stops working, you’re done. These are traditional ways that people used to do things which has been another disaster for indigenous and traditional societies around the world. So, where am I going with this? Did I answer your question?

Mark: It was about the slaves, they have…

Lierre: Oh, the slaves. Yes, yes. Right now, there are certainly agricultural slaves. These are they that are catch crop so a lot of labor is involved. In chocolate, for an instance. (And) it’s really hard to know whether chocolate you’re eating has slave labor on it or not but any of these catch crops that come especially from tropical countries, you kind of have the slavery involved in it. Even here in the United States, what happens to the migrant labors is just really horrendous, it has been for a hundred of years.

Mark: Would things like the Goji berry be slave labor?

Lierre: I’m sorry, what did you say?

Mark: The Goji berry or what they call the…

Lierre: Oh yes. I don’t know about that one in particular. That would be worth looking up. I don’t know where it grows but if it’s always some kind of catch cropping, you sort of assume that there’s either slave labor or something close to it. The people, they were driven until they drop, and some of the child laborers as well. That’s where it’s all coming from and that’s been true… ever since, it’s been true. So again, there’s that 10,000-year time frame but that’s what it does to  human societies as well as the planet. It’s really a destructive process.

Mark: Grains, they’re not only bad, obviously we’ve spoken about how bad they are for environment and everyone. What’s your opinion on grains? We have the USDA food pyramid and things like that where they promote eating grains. It is completely ridiculous. What’s your opinion on grains as a human product for digestion, for our diets?

Lierre: Some people call the food pyramid the food tomb because its choked so many people at this point. They’re doing this massive experiment in this country where they decided for some pretty stupid reasons that we should eat this high carb, low fat diet. It’s been an absolute disaster for public health. Diabetes now is so widespread, they can’t call it adult onset anymore, because children are getting it. You have a 10-year old with adult onset diabetes.

Why? We used to eat eggs and bacon for breakfast and now what does everybody eat? It’s cereal and skim milk. It’s nothing but sugar. The human template was never meant to handle that amount of sugar. So you got a whole bunch of problems which has cascaded into these chronic and degenerative diseases like heart disease and cancer and autoimmune diseases, and all of these are essentially caused in the end by this agricultural diet.

One way that we know that for sure is to look into archeological record. You got all the hunters and gatherers and they’re tall and they’re long, and they’re strong and their bones were beautiful and they were disease free, they got all their teeth. Agriculture began, bam! The next set of skeletons that you dig up were six inch shorter, their teeth are falling out of their head and their bones are brittle with diseases and inflammation.

So the moment people pushed the agriculture, their society just collapses. The question is why do people do this? It’s back breaking labor for really bad nutrition, why would anybody do this?hat’s an interesting question if you want to talk about that. But back to the grains, no, I don’t think it’s edible. I don’t think people should be eating this product, number one, it’s way too much sugar.

So you got this huge influence surge and now you’re on this instant roller coaster ride because you got too high or too low blood sugar. Your brain can only function within a very, very small range of glucose, the moment you overload your system, it’s an emergency.

So, all these chemicals come into play. Insulin has to grab it out of the bloodstream as fast as possible and shove it into the fat cell storage and then everything get inflamed. Another problem with insulin is it actually triggers the growth of cancer. Two things we know about cancer, insulin triggers it and what cancer eats is sugar. So the moment that you’re eating one of these high carbohydrates and of course, you’re going to get cancer across the population. That’s what triggers it and that’s what it feeds on.

Mark: One of the worst things I’ve seen in western medicine is they hook people up to glucose and insulin, for the people who have cancer, which is completely ridiculous.

Lierre: Right. We have this concept “diseases of civilization”. There are no corresponding diseases in hunters and gatherers, okay? So, it’s diabetes, it’s heart disease, cancer and then all those autoimmune diseases, they do not exist in the hunter and gatherer population, they only come into play when we started doing agriculture.

What we’re doing is we’re hurting the human genome, we’re hurting the human template by eating foods we were never intended to eat, so there’s way too high sugar and they are also high in a bunch of substances that will trigger various disease processes. So plant leptines for instance may be the cause of a lot of autoimmune diseases. They are substances that look very much like different tissues in the human body.

For instances, protein in wheat. That looks like cartilages in joints and this one of the reasons why people get rheumatoid arthritis, it’s from things like wheat and that’s why you if have an autoimmune disease you should never eat gluten again as long as you live. It’s definitely a factor. I say that to someone who has an autoimmune disease, I had to learn about this ‘cause my life depended on it, so, yes, you got to go gluten-free.

But the high sugar creates all the inflammation in blood vessels, and this is ultimately what creates heart disease and atherosclerosis and stroke. All of that is really created by the high insulin diet. (And) it’s also responsible for a lot of the other kinds of problems we’re seeing in the United States, when they talk about this “obesity epidemic”.

Well, if you’re eating these high carb diets, the insulin is the fat storage hormone, that’s what it’s called, one of it’s jobs is to pull sugar out of the bloodstream to keep that glucose level where your brain won’t collapse and then shove sugar into the fat cells and you can’t get it out. As long as you have high insulin levels, you can’t access the energy that you have stored.

This is why you can look like you have a lot of energy stored in your body, but you can’t access it, you’re exhausted all the time and you don’t know why, and people call you lazy and they call you these horrible names and it’s not your fault, you did what the government said and that’s the result. You’re exhausted and you’re sick. It’s ideological, people have to face what’s happened.

Mark: I tell all my clients, they’re not going to burn fat as long as they have high insulin.

Lierre: I know and there’s no way to access that energy. I feel really bad for the children ‘cause I know that they are having to face all kinds of horrible things in school like teasing and the kids feel terrible, they’re exhausted all the time.

Nobody’s telling their parents the truth about this. Nobody’s actually offering these kids what they need. That’s one problem with the grain based diet is that you’ve got way too insulin and the sugar.

The other problem is that it’s displacing other foods that we should be eating instead. You can only eat so much food in a day, so if you’re eating all this kind of high sugar essentially empty calories it means that you’re not eating what humans need. (And) one real fact about humans is we really have big brains and we have very small digestive tracts and that happened to evolve the human genome.

We look back in history, there’s this moment where our predecessors; all of a sudden their brains get really big and the digestive tract shrinks. What happens in that moment is that proto-humans learned to eat nutrient dense foods and that is animals.

People say, “Oh gorillas are mostly vegetarians,” blah, blah, blah. Yes, they got way smaller brains that they got gigantic bellies because of this huge digestive tract. We don’t have that, so, we’ve got to eat nutrient dense foods and that’s animals.

The foods that hunter-gatherers societies treasured the most, the sacred foods around the world are the organ meats. So if you compare muscle meat to plants, there’s at least 10 times more nutrients in the muscle meat. But if you compare muscle to organ meats, again, there’s at least10 times more nutrients.

So, those were really the foods that gave them this great big brain, things like liver, heart, stuff that we don’t really eat in the United States anymore but it’s a crying shame, ‘cause it’s the foods we really need.

So there’s all these things we’re not getting, so we’re not getting the Vitamin A and D, we’re not getting the high minerals that we need, we might not getting enough protein.

(But) when you eat a diet that includes all these nutrient dense foods, that’s what leads to perfect health generation after generation, having those nutrient dense foods. We’re going to have put this back on our diet if we’re going to end this public health crisis going on right now.

Mark: For sure. I’m going to ask you this question, you are obviously… you’re a vegan for 20 years, and when I hear people say, it’s bad to eat meat or you shouldn’t eat meat because it’s bad for you. How would you answer that statement?

Lierre: Well, it really depends how it’s said…

If it’s really hostile then there really is no point to discuss it.

But if they really want to understand this then I would talk about the things that humans have to eat or we die. (And) those things include proteins, they are amino acids that are essential, we can’t produce them, we can only eat them, there are essential fats, essential fatty acids, we have to eat them we cannot produce them.

(And) then you got all these fat soluble vitamins, Vitamin A and Vitamin D, and K2. Again, you can produce some Vitamin D if you’re in a very bright, sunny climate with overhead sunshine but it’s not really going to happen for most of us so you really do have to eat it, and it’s the same with Vitamin A. You can eat phyto-vitamin A such as carotene and vegetables but they have to be converted into real Vitamin A, and humans are not good at that. In fact, a whole bunch of us can’t do it at all.

Those people are called obligate carnivores. If you are from a coastal people or an island-dwelling people and it may be you. Your ancestors may have stopped making the enzymes because they have so much in your food, they don’t need to do it anymore.

Well, now you’re not living on that nice island anymore, and you think you’re going to get it from a carrot, you can’t. Vitamin A and Vitamin D and all the minerals that are in bones and bone marrow, every traditional people had to eat bone, they made broth, or they figure out how to eat the bones themselves.

It was for the minerals, we need all those minerals for our brain to function, for our eyes to function, for our reproductive systems to function, we’ve got to have high mineral diet.

You’ll not get any of that from grains, you only going to get it from meat. So if you look at it just biologically, leave the ideologically side out for a second, look at it biologically, what do we need? Our needs are not met by grains. They are only met by nutrient dense animal foods.

The other problem is that if you’re eating all that grains it’s going to displace all the really good food and there’s actually no thing as essential carbohydrate. So we need fat, we need protein but every last molecule of sugar that your body needs it can actually produce.

You don’t need to eat any of that. You don’t even need to eat fruit. Glucose that your brain needs your body can make out of fat and protein, so there’s really no reason to eat those foods at all. It literally shows we didn’t actually eat them until very recently.

Archeological evidences are also quite clear, they have fossilized human waste that they found in archeological sites. So, what were humans eating? What’s in those fossilized waste? There are things like bones, and feathers and obviously meat. What’s not in there was grains and in some of them; there’s not even single molecule of plants. So they didn’t eat any plants.

The final evidence is look at the cave paintings.

It’s all animals or people hunting animals. There is no cave painting of an apple tree. There’s no cave painting of a head of lettuce. It’s all animals and hunting animals. It’s quite clear what people were doing. Plus with all these weapons lying around and you got the carcasses and bones that have the cut marks from the weapons, it’s an overwhelming amount of evidence.

It’s an orgy of evidence.

(And) when you’re a vegan or a vegetarian, you have your own creation in that world. When I was a vegan we had our own reality that people where vegetarians.

Its completely different from the facts, if you think people where vegetarians there’s no evidence for this at all, we wouldn’t have survived, we would not have these big brains and we would not survive if we had not been eating those nutrient dense foods.

Mark: I’ve been taught once before that vegetarian in one of the native Indian tribes actually means ‘poor hunter’ when they translate.

A lot of vegetarians, they would go to things like protein powders and thinking that they’re making up their protein requirement with either a soy based protein (and of course everybody knows the problem with soy) or whey-based protein.

We know that soy is bad news, but do you see any problems with the whey protein powders to supplement with that?

Lierre: It depends, because I know there are some whey-based protein powders that are heated at a very low temperature and that’s what you want to aim for if you’re going to use that products for any reason.

If it’s done in a high temperature, you’re destroying your proteins. You’re destroying the chemical structure of those proteins and you turn them into really toxic substances by using high heat, high pressure. So you don’t want to get whatever is the cheapest.

If for some reason you feel like you need to eat whey proteins like a protein supplement get the low temperature ones and just be very strict about that because you don’t want to be eating really carcinogenic toxic substances come out of heating whey at temperatures that would never have existed in nature.

If it’s a long slow process, then it’s probably intact. Dairy products, dairy proteins are very beautiful and they’re very fragile. (And) they’re easily damaged by heat, so that’s why it’s really important to get the low heat kind. But really for most of us, we really just eat foods. There’s not really any reason for us to be eating these industrially manufactured products. We should just eat real food.

We should have good food and we should eat that food and we don’t need the other stuff. I understand that sometimes medically necessary, you have a certain kind of lifestyle, but overall we really need to get back to honest food, from real farmers.

Mark: I’ve got a lacto-vegetarian friend and she ask a lot of questions, she eats all organic, local produced, do you see any health risks with the lacto-vegetarian?

Lierre: Yes, you’ll last a lot longer than a vegan will cause at least you’re getting some of the fats and some soluble vitamins but ultimately it’s still almost impossible to eat that diet without overloading your insulin receptors. So, it’s just way too high carbohydrates. It’s impossible to get the proteins that you really need without overloading. You can only eat so much cheese in a day.

Cheese is a lot of fat and not that much protein so unless you’re going to eat 12 eggs a day, but you’re really going to get sick eggs. Eventually, the insulin’s going to kill you, you’ll get hypoglycemic and eventually you’re going to be diabetic and then you’re going to have all the problems that excess insulin causes, the inflammation in your blood vessels and the heart disease and all of that, cancer, all what’s brought on by the high insulin level.

So it’s not an appropriate diet for human beings. I’m sorry ‘cause I know people are very attached and clearly I know how people can be very attached to these kinds of diets. It’s very hard to absorb this information, when you’re that attached to something that seems moral, seems like you’re doing the thing that you’re called to, you want more justice, more compassion in the world.

The values are not the problem and I always try to be clear about this, the values are not the issue, compassion and justice and sustainability, anything that questions human entitlement, only values are going to get us to the world we need. So it’s really not the problem, the problem is just purely information.

Mark: Yes, for sure. Where do you see the world’s food supply going? Do you think it’s going to get worse or there’s something we can do?

Lierre: Here’s were I see hope…

In the United States, if we took all the agricultural lands that’s essentially east of Mississippi River, and we put it back into the kind of grassland that they would vastly prefer to be, the United States would immediately in the first year, will immediately become a net carbon sink. That’s how good plants are at building soil and destroying carbon.

If we did that on only 75% of the world’s trashed out rangeland, that’s a lot of land, that’s 75% around the globe, it would take about 15 years we would sequester all the carbon that has been released since the beginning of the industrial age. This is the only hope that I see for global warming.

We’ve got to let that grass come back. We’ve got to reestablish the prairies that have been wiped out. 99% of the prairies on the planet have been eradicated, 99%, that’s just complete habitat destruction around the globe and it’s all because humans want to do agriculture, that’s what’s growing in there instead.

So, we’ve got to put those prairies back, it’s really the only hope that we have. (And) having done that, grasslands cannot exist without ruminants, both of those ‘people’ play a role in making those communities work, so without the grazing actions of animals, without the manure, and the urine for fertilizer, all of the things that ruminants do, the grasslands will actually turn into desert, so you got to have the ruminants back on there.

(And) of course the role that people play in this is that we eat the ruminants, and the ruminants eat the grass, and then the grass eats the dead animals, and all that goes around in a cycle. (And) that’s the role that humans, and wolves, and bears, apex predators, that’s their role to keep the grazers in check.

We could restore all that and we could have really great nutrition for humans once again. We could be participants in this soil community instead of being parasites, and then the question of those how many people actually support doing this.

The interesting thing is in a lot of places, there wouldn’t be any less food and I say that because there used to be on this continent, North America, there used to be 60 million bison, and the Europeans settlers came, they wiped everything out, they traded in those 60 million bison for 40 million tortured cows, so it’s less food, at the end of the day, and the place has been trashed.

I mean, it doesn’t even make any sense. My little mantra here is that we have to repair, restore, rejoin.

We have to repair those polycultures, restore the animals that need to live there and then rejoin as members of those biotic communities once more.

(And) the other good thing about this is that farmers who switch from annuals to this kind of grass-based farming system, and they do things like grass-fed beef and grass-fed bisons, a lot of them in the very first year can turn a profit.

Now remember that growing corn or soy from Monsanto, you will never turn a profit, you are only there as a surf, paid by the US government, but the moment that you switch within the first year literally, these people can make a profit.

So, we don’t even need the government, the people just start doing this. We need to understand the problem, we need to understand that there’s a solution and then create this consumer network to help those farmers get started, to get them out of that surf-dump and get them back into doing the honorable work that they want to do, working on their land-feeding people. That’s what farmers want to do, that’s why they are called into it.

(And) it could be done, we can repair the planet. So, I do see a lot of hope here but it’s hard because the institutions that control everything on the planet are on the wrong side. We are going to have to fight political battles, it’s way bigger than just what I decide to eat, a fine thing to look into ethical decisions that go into food.

(And) I’m glad the vegetarians had made food a political issue, that part they get right and this is a good thing, people need to be examining this and certainly, we all need to get involved in stopping of factory farming.

Anybody with a conscience should recognize that. But there is hope here in our planet, there’s hope for this project of repair and there will be plenty of foods for humans as well. Yes, that’s what I hope and I think we have to understand that as a political program.

Mark: As a take home step, just buy all your foods from a local farmer?

Lierre: That would be great because those farmers need help, especially if you can pre-pay. That is why a lot of what I buy is in bulk; like half a cow and we’ll pay 6 months ahead.

There are people all over who wanted to switch into this kind of farming or they’re young people who want to get started at it and if they know that there’s a market demand, they can go ahead and do it. So, yes, I’m a big believer in those kinds of local network.

The more we can get the word out, how healthy this food is, how it helps repair the environment, and how it makes justice for farmers and for local rural communities and there’s no reason not to do this, we can do it now.

I’m a big supporter of the Weston Price Foundation, they’ve been fabulous at getting those farm into consumers networks and place. For people that don’t know Weston Price, its www.westonaprice.org, you can look up your region, your country, your area, they’re going to tell you where the good farms are.

There may be some other resources that you know around your area but that’s a really good place to start, and all the Weston A. Price people are very, very happy to help. So, they’re good people to call, email them, they’ll help you.

Mark: For all the Aussies listeners what you can do is go to Google, search for ‘rotary farmers markets’. You’ll find heaps of things, a rotary farmers market in pretty much every area around Australia.

(And) that’s where I met my local farmer and I order half a cow raised exactly the same way you said, and it’s grass-fed, and it’s absolutely fantastic. He packs and cuts it for me and here’s the kicker, it’s actually cheaper.

Its definitely putting a step in your own individual way towards helping the planet, and you’re getting meat that’s grass-fed, awesome meat and you’re supporting your local community and your economy, so it’s a win-win and you’re not giving money to the people who are perpetuating the problem, so it makes sense on every single level to buy from your local farmer.

Lierre: It’s a great thing and a lot of them will let you come visit, so, if you have any questions about, are the animals being treated well? This is the question for me always especially coming out of my vegan background but it’s great because you can go visit and you can see how happy are these animals are, and if they don’t look happy then move on, but they do, on the grass they’re eating, there are chickens running around having fun, everybody’s having a good time, so, you can see the way they live and everything looks happy and the soil looks good and the plants are lush, it’s what it should be.

We all think farm, I think we have this ideal image but you can find those farms, they are there. (And) they are doing a good thing, so, it’s worth it. You get to travel a little even if you pay a little more, it’s well worth it.

(And) the benefit you and your family in terms of health, especially if you have children, I don’t see any other options, I mean if you’ve got kids, you’ve got to learn about this and try to do your best with it.

Mark: Another tip that I do as well from the farm, if you actually ask them for organ meats, they’ll pretty much give it to you free.

Lierre: Yes! (‘Cause) nobody wants them.

Mark: I’ve got 2 livers sitting in my fridge, grass-fed livers and they’re probably about 20 kilos each. I got them all for free.

Lierre: Yes, they’re huge.

Mark: So that’s another thing, saving money.

Lierre: Yes, you got to be a little bit more creative. I don’t know how it is where you are but in the United States, most people have forgotten how to eat organ meats, you have to be really like “ethnic” to still be eating organ meats. (And) it’s insane. It’s the most nutrient dense part of the animals. It’s great. I eat liver twice a week so I had to learn how to do it but I did and it’s well worth it. Actually if you have chronic health problems, you can find just incredible amount of healing in those foods.

Mark: You think there’s a cap on how much liver someone can eat per week?

Lierre: I’ve seen on the Weston A. Price website, where people debate how much is good, how much is bad. I’m sure that 2 or 3 times a week it’s fine. I don’t know if you want to eat it everyday, you’re eating a lot of it, but I eat twice a week and that seems to be fine, I don’t want any more than that so I leave it there.

I don’t think we need to get too upset about it. Most people’s Vitamin A and Vitamin D levels are so low right now, it would really be a good thing to increase them, and we haven’t really touched on Weston Price but he’s a dentist who traveled around the world, trying to find out what diets made people healthy over generations.

(And) one of the things he found was that the healthy people, they had Vitamin A and Vitamin D levels in their food that were something like 10 times more than what the average American was eating and this was in the 30’s. So this has dropped dramatically, so you can imagine now it would be like 20 times or something. So, eat liver. Learn to eat liver.

I know it’s not an easy thing if you’ve never done it but you can start with Jewish chopped liver with onions. It’s actually quite nice, very mild, that’s how I started. I worked my way up, I will admit that I do eat it raw right now, I got really hardcore about it, but that’s how I started. It makes a really nice pâté, even kids will eat it. Yes, it’s a good thing to learn, you need to relearn those traditional eating skills.

Mark: You touch on something before; 10,000 years ago on an agriculture farm, why did people do backbreaking labor? What was the motive?

Lierre: There’s this great quote from Colin Tudge at the London school of economics and he said, “The real question is why anybody took it up when it’s so obviously beastly.” Love that quote, obviously beastly. Well, there are different theories that none of them really match the physical evidence.

What I learned in school when I was a child was the world got too crowded, people had to figure out how to make more food per acre. Well, agriculture does that certainly because you are pushing everybody off that land but the archeological evidences doesn’t back up that.

If hunger was the driving force, you would see those half sized/staved skeletons in record before agriculture. People would have shrunk already, and they have disease, and they’re losing their teeth and there will be signs of malnutrition and illness, there aren’t. That doesn’t happen until after agriculture.

That doesn’t really work as an explanation.

The only explanation I’ve ever read that makes sense is the fact that grains contain opioid substances and they are addictive, so people did it because they got addict and that to me is the reason to destroy the planet. I get the driving force behind those kind of addictions. I can’t eat grains because my autoimmune diseases especially gluten grains and I know how addictive that is. Wheat just calls my name and everybody in my family the same way.

You can’t just eat one, you have to eat the entire plate. I can’t eat just a slice of bread, I would eat the whole loaf, once I get started there’s no stopping it. (And) you talk to people, “What do you binge on?” Nobody says hard boiled eggs. Nobody said steak. We know what people binge on, its cookies and cake, it’s the carbohydrate stuff and it’s because there’s a number of chemical reasons for that but one of the main reasons is because of those opioids. So, if you’re eating 2, 3, 5 or 6 times a day, you don’t notice how addictive it is, you just kind of crave it all the time.

That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me because people will do anything for their addictions and I think that’s probably why, my guess is that’s what drove this, ‘cause nothing else makes sense to me. Addiction that was the reason.

Mark: That makes a lot of sense. That’s the first time I heard that but that makes a lot of sense. So, do you have any final thoughts or anything else that you would like to share before we wrap up?

Lierre: Just that it’s not too late for this planet. I mean, we may be losing 200 species a day and it’s too late for them, but resistance is possible. We’ve got a lot that we have to face and that we have to fight and we have to overcome but it’s not too late and I was just speaking in Maryland which is in the eastern seaboard in the United States, and it was this wonderful experience I got to have…

There was a local farmer who has 5,000 acres and he decided that he didn’t want to farm all of it anymore. He’s going to donate a thousand acres of it, he didn’t know what to do with it and so some of the local people who were very radical environmentalists worked with him and they restored the lands to a native prairie and they did very little, all they had to do was stop farming, and the plants came back.

Some of those plants have not been seen in 3 or 4 generations, so the meadow reestablished itself almost instantly. (And) the real miracle is that there were birds that came to live in the meadow. Some of these birds have not been seen for a hundred years in that part of the country. All you have to do is give them food and give them some habitat and they will find it.

(And) I was so moved, and I got to go and see this. I was just so moved to know that life wants to live and if we just help it a little bit, if we stop this destructive process and decide that we are going to make a place for our whole family that we can all live here again, and be part of this. I don’t know what else we can want really, this is the most beautiful planet that I could ever dream of and I think that we just have to fight for what we love.

Mark: That’s a really great message as well. Thank you so much for taking the time out, that’s probably one of my favorite interviews ever done, so, really thank you.

As I said before the call, your book is an absolute contribution to the field of nutrition. I’m sure my listeners will get a lot of great value, your insight and the way you explain the issues, everything is absolutely brilliant.

So, I really want to thank you for doing the research that you’ve done, putting the information out there that you have and from the perspective that you’ve done it because I don’t know if anyone else is doing it quite like you, so, thank you and keep up the good work.

Lierre: Well Mark, thanks for having such great questions and from the bottom of my heart, thanks for having this radio show because somebody has got to get the word out. We’re at the end here and we’re in a crisis and I’m just really glad every time I get to do one of these interviews, thank you.

Mark: Thank you. My pleasure.

Hey guys it’s Maximus Mark, and all I can say is whoa! What an interview! That was Leah Keith, author of “The Vegetarian Myth”. I cannot highly recommend her book enough. Its “The Vegetarian Myth” you can grab it on Amazon or you can go directly to www.maximusmark.com and hit the store button and get through my links there. Yes, I do get a little bit of commission there but it’s not a lot, it’s exactly the same price when you buy it through my store or if you buy it through Amazon directly, getting it through my store would be awesome because that could help me read more books so I could provide you guys with even better interviews.

So again guys, do share this with your friends, get on Facebook, share this, ‘because this information is really important.

What we’re talking about is not just how look good and get in shape (which definitely buying foods from your local farmer is a step towards that)…

We’re talking about a bigger picture here, about the environment, about sustainable farming and what to do about it.

The thing is not a lot of people understand this. There is no a lot of good information about the topics that Lierre and I discuss in this interview so make sure you share it.

Tell them to go to www.maximusmark.com and download the vegetarian interview as well as other podcasts too. Check out my iTunes channel and if you guys want any one-on-one help with me, click the “Brain Picking Session” and if you want me to do a whole diet, whole nutrition program, supplementation, program and training program; click on the personalized training tab.

So I’m still taking clients at this stage but get in early. ‘Til next time, train hard, supplement smart and eat well. (And) if there’s a particular topic you want me to do on a podcast just let me know.

Speak to you soon.

Maximus Mark

Open Burgers with Cauliflower Mash, Recipe By Kristine

Ingredients:

• 500g Organic Beef Mince or Kangaroo Mince
• 1 whole egg
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• ¼ cup of spring onion
• ¼ cup grated carrot

Instructions:

• Preheat the oven to 180c fan forced or cook on a medium heated pan in batches
• Put all the ingredients together and mix through ensuring the spices and meat are combined evenly.
• Make into firm large balls and then flatten on baking tray.
• Bake for 20 minutes or approx 5 minutes each side on a medium heat pan

To assemble the burger:

1. Use large lettuce leaves as the base in place of bread
2. Meat Pattie
3. Tomato
4. Beetroot
5. Bacon
6. Egg
7. Top with home made Tomato Salsa from Coffeys Kitchen

For the Cauliflower Mash simply steam your cauliflower. When the cauliflower is soft, remove from the stove and place in a blender or a food processor with 50g of organic butter and blend until pureed. It tastes just like mash potato

Happy and Healthy Eating!

Kristine