Welcome to Elevate with Elsner. Join us for inspiring conversations with individuals who have transformed their lives and are making a difference through the work that they do. And now, Welcome back to another episode of Elevate with Elsner. Today, I'm sitting down with a man whose story redefines what possible when you take full advantage and ownership of your body, mind, and performance. Fraser Bayley is the founder of the Anomaly Project Elite Nutrition to the top 1%. He's a husband, a father of two, and a performance strategist who helps business athletes, high-performing entrepreneurs, executive musicians, and operators crack their biological code and get superhuman. Originally from New Zealand and now based in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, Fraser has turned his personal battle with bipolar depression, ADHD, social anxiety into a blueprint for transformation. After spending over a decade heavily medicated, he's now 12 years psych med free and thriving. He's worked with everyone from platinum selling artists like Chris Daughtry and Danny Worsnop to Navy SEALs and elite entrepreneurs. His approach focuses and fuses advanced blood work, peptides, training, and nutrition into one powerful mission. to help high achievers optimize their energy, physique, and longevity without sacrificing their edge. Blake, Matt, thank you. It's an absolute pleasure. And I just look forward to dropping some really good conversation points with Yeah, I appreciate that. And thanks for coming on here. So I kind of I kind of gave the people a little bit of a backdrop. So I don't know if you want to start from where I started, obviously, and kind of who the man was in the beginning and run with it Yeah, I mean, it's been a crazy journey. As you alluded to, I've been living in America now for 13 years. I got my US citizenship a couple of years ago, so that was cool. Grew up in New Zealand, and it's funny, man. I grew up in a family that my parents separated when I was young, and there's a lot of mental health issues and health issues in general that ran in my family. And so in many ways, I was a by-product of that. And I struggled at school. In high school, I did not do well. It was one of those examples where you're trying to put in the effort and you're still not achieving the result, right? It's embarrassing. So I would try and get B's and A's for effort. And then I was getting D's and C's for achievement. And I just felt stupid, honestly. And I thought to myself, this is pointless. I'm clearly not good at this stuff. This is clearly not my wheelhouse. Let me just go and do a blue collar job. I might as well just go work out in the workforce, blue collar stuff, make some money. And so that was initially, I left school when I was 15 years old, and that was my first sort of entry into the real world. And at that point, I had no awareness about health, fitness, none of this stuff. I smoked, I drank, I was medicated. It was like a different person in every sense of the word. And I thought to myself, What do I do? And the path of least resistance was exactly what I did. I was working part-time after school in a butchery. So one of the biggest supermarkets, one of the biggest grocery stores in New Zealand was near my high school. And that butchery department was also probably the biggest butchery department in the country. And I was working there as a student part-time after school. And I just thought, man, I've already got a job there. I might as well just ask them if they need some full-time employees. And they needed an apprentice. And so I just thought to myself, well, let me just do that. There was no plan sitting down, sort of map out your life and think to yourself, what do I want to be when I grow up? It was, let me just do that because it's the easiest path. And I started doing this butchery apprenticeship to become a butcher. And obviously, for anyone who's been in a blue collar industry like that, you'll know that there's a couple of things. One, typically the type of person that industry attracts has issues. I mean, to be in an environment like that all day long, you're not that mentally sound. I mean, most of the guys that I worked with drank a bunch, they smoked a bunch, some of them would beat their wives. I mean, there was all kinds of just violence and drinking. It was like that type of culture. And going from having mental health issues already, bipolar depression, ADHD, anxiety, all this stuff, and then going into that environment full term, I mean, you're basically putting jet fuel on a house fire. And that's what happened. So from there, from the age of about 16 through to 20, things just got more and more challenging. It got to the point where I thought to myself, I would wake up in the morning and, you know, cause we'd start work at five and I'd wake up at about four and every morning I'd just smoke a cigarette. I remember so clearly and I remember laying in bed, I'd roll a cigarette, I'd just lay in bed and smoke it and I would cry because I just hated the job so much. My life sucked and I was like, this is so depressing. And I just remember that so vividly because it's such a weird thing to do. Wake up and the first thing you do is smoke a cigarette in bed at four in the morning. Now I would be like, man, you've got problems if you're doing that. It's obviously like a canary in the coal mine. Your life's trying to tell you something. So at that point, I just thought to myself, something's got to change. Otherwise I won't be here in another year. It was that bad. And I, I quit, I walked out and, and, you know, in a, in a foolish sense, man, it was like one of those things where I left school, I quit school. I was about six months away from actually qualifying as a butcher and I quit. So like the last three and a half years, I essentially just like wasted it. And in theory, I should have really just like seen it through, got the certification to say that I've got it, but I just wasn't so much pain. I couldn't do it. And so I just walked away from it at all. All the, all the holiday pay, all the, you know, all the bonus time that you accumulate, all of it, I just like forego to everything. Cause I just immediate resignation. And, um, I remember thinking to myself, I don't know what I want to do, but I know it wasn't that. And at the time I had been going through a lot of issues with my parents. So like I was having a lot of conflict with my parents, like a physical conflict, potentially even like getting to the point of like almost like physical confrontation. And it was getting really intense. And I started to go see a psychotherapist, so a psychologist. And I will tell you, like he, in many ways changed my life. So he was probably one of the first people that I was able to really build a connection with that was able to help me see the patterns and see the conditioning and see the challenges. And he said to me, why don't you, you know, you've got all this pent up anxiety, you've got all this pent up energy. Why don't you go to the gym and just start trying to work out and see what happens. That 20 years ago, man, like we didn't have YouTube. It wasn't podcast like this. So I didn't know that working out could help your mental health. I just thought working out was for bodybuilders back then. I thought, okay, if you want to work out, it's because you just want to be a bodybuilder. Like I didn't have no comprehension. that eating well and training and moving your body could actually make you feel better. So here I was popping a bunch of medications, but I was eating like crap. I was drinking and I wasn't like training. And so no wonder I felt terrible. And so I thought to myself, well, he's been right about other things. Might as well just try this and see what happens. And so we started, I started going there and longer story short, that really kicked off this new chapter in my life where I really started to build this, this connection with this idea of the man I could create. And one of the things that I thought was quite interesting looking back now in hindsight was that the time of the day I started going to the gym. So I'd start going at about seven in the morning. And I typically found that the type of person that was going to the gym at seven in the morning was men that were 10, 20 years older than me. They had kids, they had families, they were married, they had businesses, they were like white-collar professionals or entrepreneurs. And without even knowing it, I was essentially like putting myself into like a mastermind. I didn't plan that, I wasn't conscious. It was like a gift from God at that point. So I was like, I had terrible friends that were like, Not good for me. And at this point now, a lot of my old friends that I had to cut ties with, they either went to prison and spent years in prison or some of them died. It was like that type of crowd that I was involved in. And so being around these guys that were 10, 20 years older than me, had kids, had families, were married, didn't drink, or if they did, it was like very minimal. They had businesses, they're professionals. That really started to rub off on me more and more and more. And it's almost like maybe they could see something in me that I couldn't see. Because I look back sometimes now and I think, why did they befriend me? Back then, I was like a punk. And I'm like, why would they befriend me? And I think part of it, man, is sometimes you just can tell. You can just see something in someone and you're just like, man, there's something about this person. Like they're underdeveloped, but they have potential. And I think that's often what they saw in me. And anyway, I really started to gravitate towards the health and fitness stuff. So at a certain point, I thought to myself, let me go back and study and learn this. And so I studied nutrition and human structure and function, which is a bit like physiology. And I actually passed this time. So I tried so many other things that I quit and failed, and I passed this. And that was really the start of all of this, man. And I think the reason why I've come so far and I've got such a reputation at this point is because I'm so tenacious about having fixed my own health. I knew to get off all the psych meds I was on. I've been off those psych meds for 12 years now. to get off all those things and to turn my life around like I did, I had to be, first of all, be able to hear the diagnosis from all these experts and say, I'm not going to subscribe to this. I'm going to prove you wrong. And I'm going to prove me wrong. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to be the success story. When you think that this is just a genetic condition that you're going to be medicated for, for the rest of your life, I'm going to like change it narrow. And I just had that awareness in me and I did. And so at that point I thought to myself, man, if I was able to turn my life around and achieve this level of health and production output and, and just like quality of health, um, what's possible. And so that really just propelled me down this path of self-discovery and self-mastery and just continued education to the point where I consume studies and education and information in my space every day, probably a couple of hours every day, every day. Because I get up early enough and part of my morning routine is I consume this stuff. So I'm constantly learning. And I would say it's been such a wild journey. I never thought even coming over to the US. So I was in a couple of Facebook coaching groups for fitness people because they were learning to develop their businesses. And this is 13 years ago. So back then, online dating wasn't normal. And it wasn't even that normal to have online masterminds yet. And I met my wife through the group. And initially, we were just friends. And I, I'd cut ties with all my old friends. I stopped going out. Like I was just had my own space to develop myself. And I remember just like building this connection with her. And it was one of those situations, man, where I thought if I don't come over here and just experience what it could be to meet her, it will be one of the biggest regrets of my life. I'll look back when I'm 80 years old and I will always wonder what if. And I got on the plane and I left. And I mean, dude, 13 years on, married for 13 years, two children, business. We live in the Smoky Mountains. It's been such a crazy journey. And even sometimes I pinch myself, you know, I'll be out in Hollywood shooting on music video sets with like high level musicians. And I'm like, how did, how did I get here? The guy in the butchery that was crying in bed, smoking cigarettes, how the heck is he doing this? So it's just one of those beautiful examples, man, of just being curious, being tenacious, and never just allowing anyone to tell you what your constraints are. You know, anytime you hear someone say something, you know, do your best to like be the success story that counters that narrative. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of in a nutshell. And now at this point, man, a lot of what I do is just a high level nutritional optimization stuff where, you know, we work with a range of people, man, and just try and help people like experience a lot of what I was able to experience. Honestly, that's the biggest part is like, how can I recreate what I felt and experienced in my own life and give that That's a, you know, that's a strong point because I feel like there's a lot of people that, you know, hold back information and they're scared to bring it up front or they're scared to say, Hey, um, I know my value for X, Y, and Z. So I'm going to go out and, you know, create a, uh, a living on it in a way. Um, so, you know, you obviously have this information and you're passionate about it and you turn it into a career, but the main part about it is you have so much information to give and that's kind of. I guess your mission in a way, right? Yeah. And the way I think about it, man, it's like two things. One, I just think rather than hoarding the information and being like, this is my precious. I'm not, you know, everyone's going to pay me top dollar. I just, I just share stuff. I just share it because the way I think about it is the information can be free, but the implementation, that's where you get the help. Right. And the other thing that I think about is like, Often, if we just learn these things, but we don't teach it, you don't reinforce it into yourself as much as you could. I've really found part of reinforcing these principles into myself and actually being able to achieve and stick with them at a higher level is because I teach it so much. And so in a way, it's like a gift to yourself. teaching these principles every single day. It's in the forefront of your mind. And often I'll have people say to me, you're the most consistent disciplined person I know. How do you even do that? And I'll tell you, I did not start like that. It's absolutely a learned skill. If I could take people back as a fly on the wall and watch me when I was 16 years old, they'd be like, this guy's so sloppy. There's no way he's a disciplined dude at all. And now it's totally different. I mean, it's like I think part of why I've had a number of Navy SEALs and Army Rangers and Green Berets work with me. It's because I'm like them. They often will say, dude, you could have been one of us. You're just like us. And we have that sort of level of grit and tenacity. And I love that about those types of people because you can take the person and they've already got the motivation. They just need better strategy. And I would say a lot of people, man, like at this point now, most people, like if you give them, if you put them in the right environment, they are motivated enough. You know, I think, I think people just, they're not in good environments. They're not in environments that like empower them. They're not in environments that sort of give them encouragement. They're in environments that maybe just like make them feel small or just, you know, Encourage them to play safe and they don't see people around them pushing and playing at a higher level. So that's also why a lot of what I teach isn't just technical stuff around blood work and hormone systems and brain chemistry, like the data parts of it. A lot of it is psychology and mindset and habit formation. Because what I realized, and I mean, you probably know this, is like, you can have the best tactics in the world, but if the mindset and the brain that's trying to apply those tactics is not stable and strong, you're going to hit and miss. It's hit and miss, hit and miss, hit and miss. And so part of it is like, if someone comes to me and they're like, man, I need a really good plan. Part of it is we need to get your brain really good first. We need to get you locked in mentally as well as building a good plan. Because if I just give you a really pretty spreadsheet full of stuff, useful if you are struggling, if you're arguing with your spouse and you're fighting with your kids and you're stressed out and you've got bills coming out of your eyeballs, you know, and you're not sleeping well, it's really hard to do anything well. And, um, especially, I mean, get this man, like the last, at the time of the recording of this podcast is about seven weeks left in 2025. Statistically in the last six weeks of the year, every year, people will gain on average 80% of all the body fat that they're going to gain over their lifetime. They gain it in the last six weeks of every single year. So if someone is like a hundred pounds overweight, 80 of those pounds have been gained in the last six weeks of the year back to back to back to back to back. And then the other like 20 is throughout the whole year. And the reason is because like this time of year is so much temptation. There's so many challenges, there's so much festivities and stuff. And so I tell people now is really when the mindset stuff and the habits and the mental game matters like the most, you That's so true. And not only in nutrition, but that joke that's like in sales too, like the sales slows down. Like in general, you got a joke, we got 10 months to do a year's worth of work. Or you can joke Christmas comes every six months. One of the two, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. So and thinking back on like, you know, how these achievers when you're saying it's not always like blood work or like nutrition, like you're saying, you've got to get clear about what you want. That clarity part is massive. You can't you just can't go anywhere if you don't do that Yeah. If you I know. Part of the reason why I'm able to continue to push through and do everything that I do is because the vision that I've painted in my mind of what I want to create in my life is so compelling. And it's not something that you just think up by accident. You have to be intentional. Like you have to sort of ask yourself, if I had no limitations and there was no constraints, what would I want my life to look like? Like who would I, what would I want to look like? What would I want to be doing every day? What would my whole day look like? Where would I be? And then you sort of reverse engineer that. So part of it is then you say to yourself, okay, if that person is in great shape and they're really healthy and they're like a CEO, but they're like high energy and they're a great example for their team and for their family, what type of habits does that person have? That person has a set of habits, routines, and rituals every day. What are those habits, routines, and rituals? And then part of it is like looking around your environment for people that fit that criteria. There will probably be people. And the good thing about social media now is you can get into masterminds and you can connect with people like this. where you can meet people that normally 20 years ago you would have never met. And so you can put yourself, you can look at someone who's got a really good result and you can study them. And not only can you study them, but very often you can, if they are a consultant, if they are a coach, you can get into their group, you can get into their proximity. And then you can really start to study them. And then you look at them, okay, what time do they go to bed? What time do they wake up? When do they take their meetings? What time do they go work out every day? What do their meals look like? What snacks do they eat? What supplements do they use? And you just model, model, model. If you just model all of those things, part of what I do in my coaching models is I show people, even on Instagram and Facebook, I'll post in my stories every day and I use it like a digital log for myself. So I tell people I post in the every day and I use it like a digital accountability log for myself. And then the byproduct or the bonus is that it's almost like marketing material too. Like people see it and they're like, Oh, what's he doing? He's working out and all the things. Right. So they, I see it and they ask questions, but the thing is that they'll see the levels of consistency over an extended period of time. That's the biggest thing. I think like it's one thing to kind of come out of the gate. And you're doing 75 hard and you put your head down and you do it for a little bit. It's another thing to see someone and they just keep stacking days over and over and over again. And I even tell people, you don't need to be perfect, but you do need to raise your baseline. So most people think, okay, if I can't get to the gym and I can't do a full blown gut busting 60 minute workout, I just won't do anything. And I'm like, you're better off doing 10 minute workout at home. Honestly, you're better off doing a 10 minute workout at home every day than doing two workouts, 60 minutes gut busting at the gym. And if you stack those little bits of accountability, that compounds, that's how you raise your baseline. So I'll tell people like on a bad day, they might eat really poorly, they might not work out, they might sit on their butt all day, get like 4,000 steps. And that might be like a one out of 10. If they were to get 8,000 steps and get a 10 minute workout and have one healthy meal, maybe that's like a five out of 10. So now their baseline is five out of 10 consistently. That's actually how you get to the goal. You don't get to the goal by hitting a home run. and having a 10 out of 10 day, and then the other days are one. You get there by having just these back-to-back base hits, these gritty base hits. It's the stuff that's not sexy, man. It's not sexy. If you're watching a baseball game, it's not sexy to watch all the base hits. People want to see these massive home runs. That's the whole point. They want to see the Hail Mary touchdown passes. They don't want to see all the gritty, little, tiny touchdowns. But I will tell you, in many ways, your health journey, it's like a series of base hits, real gritty, and it doesn't look that sexy. But if you can embrace that and think to yourself, okay, I don't have to be perfect. But how can I raise my baseline to go from one or two out of 10 to five out of 10? And if you just focus on that, you will really see positive change. I love the, the, like the line driver base hit up the middle because of the baseball, um, because it makes sense. It's like you go up there as, you know, professionals, they're, you know, you're trained to hit line drive, line drive, line drive, and then, you know, and then it starts to go out of the park. So it's kind of like the same thing, right? You got to build up to it. You're hitting line drives. The goal is just hit up the middle line, drive after line drive. And eventually it starts to go out on its own. So that makes sense. Um, yeah. So switching over to like energy is currency, right? So how, you know, how, how do you build energy that's going to scale Yeah. And this is a good, this is a really good question. And I will say this has been. more and more and more of a focus of mine in the last few years. Cause you know, early on when you first start your health journey, you just want to, you know, people like they have all the superficial goals. They just want to like be 10% body fat. They want to have abs. They want to fit into a certain size dress. They want to, you know, it's, it's like the superficial surface level targets and there's nothing wrong with that. I think initially if that kind of gets you going to start with, so be it. But especially what I found is when I became a father, it changes your life. And all of a sudden now you don't have all this extra time where you can just chill. So, you know, you, you will work through the day and normally a night time when you would just kick back and chill. Now you've got kids to navigate and look after and care for and attend to. And, you know, obviously, you know, if you're married, you're juggling that relationship as well. And you want to make sure that you're doing your best you can to like, connect with them. And so I thought to myself, I don't want to be that person that works through the day and pushes really hard financially, but gets to the five o'clock and I'm just like a write-off and I'm completely trained and I have no time to like read my kids a book or I have no time to just connect with them or give them a shower or a bath. I have no time to like connect with my wife properly and just talk to her about stuff or go for a walk with them. And so I felt like, how do you achieve that? And what I realized was a big part of that was energy optimization. Because I would say the rate limiting factor for most people, like most entrepreneurs, most people in general, is it's not their time, it's their energy maximization. So the way I think about it is, We all have the same amount of time in the day. So how do some people get so much more done? I mean, part of it's obviously like leverage. They're better at leveraging their time. But I think another part of it is they're better at energy management. They don't have as many naps. They don't have as much downtime. They don't get as much brain fog. They don't have to sleep in as much. They are just more efficient with everything that they do and it accumulates. And so because they're more high energy, because they have more streamlined processes, they get a lot more done. And that's what helps them achieve the outcome that they want. And so what I started to think about was I thought to myself on a biological level, What is energy? And to not get too in the science with the audience, but to just give them a basic understanding. Think of energy a bit like, you know, each cell in your body is like a cell phone. And in this phone that I'm holding is a battery and that battery charges and powers the functionality of this phone. Your cells are like a bunch of little phones that are all connected together. And the battery is your mitochondria. And the mitochondria are these little things that basically create charge in your body. As you age, mitochondria lose their charge. It's like if you've ever had a phone or a device and over time the battery loses its charge. So you stick it in, you charge it up and it's like, boom, it just drains. In many ways, as we age, that's what happens to our body. If we don't look after it the right way, it will start to lose its energetic charge. And so I thought to myself, what are the main pillars that drive mitochondrial function to create more energy. And we can walk through some of these because like there's there's some obvious ones and then there's some not so obvious ones. But these are things I do every single day. And if you start to embrace these principles, this will be the stuff that creates that energy in you that allows you to train hard and recover well and sleep well. You'll have a way better temperament with your spouse and your kids. You'll have a way better temperament with your team or your employees or your friends. Anytime I see someone optimize their energy like this, you often see them blossom in lots of other areas too. So they usually get new pay rises or bonuses or new job opportunities. And it's not an accident. It's because they're showing up as a more vital, vibrant version of themselves. You know what it's like. If you meet someone, and they're really like good energy and they look healthy and they're vibrant and vital and they're positive, you're like, man, this person's awesome. Like I want to be around this person. Whereas if you meet someone and they're kind of beat up and like drained and grouchy, I mean, you're like, oh man, I don't want that. I don't want that. So you essentially, you are what you attract. And so the first things to realize is that the human body is almost like a hybrid between a windmill and a solar panel. So think of like a windmill, like an electric windmill that's like building up a battery bank. If that windmill is not spinning, it doesn't create any energy, zero charge. Just like a person, if you are not moving, you don't create any charge. And so the irony is that people think, oh, well, if I walk more, I'm gonna use more energy and I'll feel more tired. It's actually the opposite. If you walk more, you build up more charge in your mitochondria and you will actually have more energy. And so one of the tactics I do for all of my guys is I'm like, look, In your home office, get a standing desk and a walking pad. And while you are working, walk like half a mile an hour slow, slow enough that you can type and do stuff. You don't want to obviously do it so fast you can't type and function. But you want to be standing and you want to be walking. And I tell you, it not only helps with energy through the day, all day, it helps with digestion. Like you won't get bloating and digestive issues like a lot of people do, and it reduces cravings. All of those are tied together, by the way. So what I noticed is that as a byproduct of going from 5,000 steps a day to 15,000 by getting a standing desk and a walking pad, people lose body fat without counting, even counting calories. their digestion improves, and because they've got more energy, they crave less junk. And because they crave less junk, they don't eat that stuff, it doesn't affect their blood glucose as much, so they have more focus and energy. Because a lot of what causes ADHD-like symptoms is blood glucose instability. Like if someone was snacking on a bowl of M&Ms, All of that sugar is going to make it go up and down, up and down, up and down. That undulation is what causes the brain fog. If you have a nice steady sort of arc, that's when you get that sort of crystal clear focus. And so walking, and even if you don't have a standing desk and a walking pad, I would say aim to get out for 5 to 20 minutes in the morning in the light, And in the afternoon before dinner, and if you can around lunchtime, just after lunch, even if it's a five minutes and I even tell my guys, I'm look, if you have to take a sales call or do that meeting or do a voice to text while you're walking to, to get that time in and you repurpose that time where you're like doing some business stuff, do it. And so I do that every day. I will walk outside multiple times in the day and I'll send voice to texts and all kinds of stuff. I leverage that time like a savage and it works really well. And so the first thing is movement. The second thing is light. And so people don't realize like the human solar panel concept, that part of the reason why people when they come into fall and winter will get seasonal depressive disorder, which is very common. So like people get more depressed in winter and they get more sick. So they get more colds and flus, you know, like the flu season. Part of that is because when you get outside less, you get less vitamin D synthesis. And so your vitamin D levels drop. And when they drop, that affects your sex hormones, like your testosterone, which affects like your drive. It also affects your immune system function. and it can affect your mental health. So vitamin D drives positive mental health function, sex hormone profiles, and immune system. And so all of a sudden, because you're not getting light exposure, these drop. So I tell people, if you can, don't just walk on a walking pad or walk on a treadmill inside all day. Try to get out in a little burst through the day and get bursts of natural light while you're walking. And if you do those two things in conjunction, that will be a massive part of the equation. Massive part. So part of it is reconfiguring someone's workflow so it fits. Because most people have designed their workflow to be very reactive. They just are on a bunch of calls, and they're bending to the will of everyone around them. And they're just answering calls when they come in. They have all the push notifications coming in to them from left, right, and center. And with me, I turn off all my push notifications. I have zero notifications on anything. And I will go in with intention when it's planned. And in that way, I can shape when I'm outside, I can shape when I'm inside, I can plan everything. And I'm telling you, man, it changes the game. So outside of those two things, I would say the other part of it is going to be a combination of optimizing sleep. So sleep's a big one. And then obviously the quality of the diet. One of the things that I think a lot of people focus on when it comes to diets and health is they just think about calories. Am I eating a low enough calorie count for fat loss? They just think about protein, calories, fat loss. That's it, typically. What I tell people is you don't just want to think about calories and protein. You want to think about the quality of the food that you're consuming. Because you can lose weight and you can be in a calorie deficit for fat loss eating McDonald's. Like people have done it. People have lost body fat and dieted down eating a bunch of junk food. You can't actually do that. Now you will lose weight potentially, but you will feel terrible. Like your digestion will be off. Your mental health will not be good. You'll have so much inflammation in your body. And so I tell people a few key concepts, like with your main meals, eat the rainbow. So where's your green food? Where's your red food? Where's your orange? And when you add in different colors, different colors are representative of different micronutrients. So different sets of vitamins and minerals. And that's what drives a lot of energy function. And so if you're eating, And another general rule of thumb that I say is 80 plus percent of the food that you consume, make it foods with one ingredient. So brown rice is just brown rice. Blueberries are just blueberries. Carrots are just carrots, right? So like if you can add bunches of foods with one ingredients together in what I call like a macro bowl or a poke bowl, that is going to set you up massively. Because straight away what it does is it reduces down a lot of the boxed processed food that you're consuming. Because straight away, if you're consuming foods with one ingredient, it means that a boxed macaroni and cheese is now like not part of that criteria. And so you might have it as like a free meal, like a treat every now and then, but it's not something you consume all the time. And so right away, because you're removing a lot of the boxed inflammatory stuff, that inflammation comes down and it sort of unlocks another level of energy in your system. And so I'm telling you, man, most people don't realize how much they're capable of. They don't realize how low their energy actually is. I had a guy that I was talking to a while back, and he was probably about 80 pounds overweight. And he told me that, he's like, oh, my energy's really good. And I just looked at him, and I thought, there's no way your energy's really good, man. Like, you don't know what you don't know. Like, when you can't read the label when you are inside the jar. Like, think about it, when you've been, 80 pounds overweight for your whole life. You have no yardstick of measurement. You have no way to figure out is my energy actually good because you don't have any comparison. You don't know how to compare that to like the 80 pound lighter version of yourself. And so I said right away, like that's your rate limiting factor because you don't know how low your energy is and how much could be liberated when you get in shape. And the thing that I would tell guys is like, if you've ever done rocking before, so rocking is where you put a weighted vest on and you get out and you kind of walk around. A lot of people love to rock. I think rocking is kind of cool. It gets you outside. It's kind of almost like a meditation almost. Um, but I will say if you're wearing a 40 pound or 50 pound weighted vest for like an hour, it gets pretty tiring. I mean, at a certain point you're like, this thing's pretty heavy. It's sort of lugging it around. I tell people if you're 40 pounds overweight, you're carrying a 40 pound weighted vest of body fat. 24 seven. That is really tiring. So I tell people like, just imagine how tiring you would be if you threw a 40 pound rock fist on and walked around all day with that on. You'd be exhausted. That's what you're doing, but you've got body fat. And so as soon as they realize it, they're like, wow. I wonder how much more energy I could have if I was to liberate myself of this 40 pound weighted fat vest. And I'm like, that's how you want to be thinking. So part of it, man, is like, I actually think the energy management part of this is the most exciting part because it often gives people a new lease on life. It often helps them feel so much better about their life. Because what happens is like, when you have a surplus of energy, It's a bit like if you have a surplus of money. No one is going to feel good if they look in their bank account and they're in a deficit. No one's going to feel good if they check their portfolio and their crypto is down like 50%. But if you go in and you look and you're like, man, everything's pumping, it's a bull market, I've got all these funds, that feels good. The energy is the same. Your energy bank is the same. Most people, they're in a massive deficit. And so they're just kind of irritable and they're anxious and they don't feel good. And honestly, man, I don't think a lot of the psych med that people take, I don't even think they're necessary. Yes, they might solve a temporary challenge and get you through like a hard period, but I don't think they're a long-term solution at all. And I've had a lot of people come to me because they heard my story and we were able to kind of transition them with all these tools and eventually get them away from a lot of those things. And you feel so much better. That doesn't mean that you don't have days that challenge you. I mean, as you know, it's like you can still be really healthy and dialed in and you're still going to have days that test you and days that are hard and days where you feel frustrated or anxious, but it's way more manageable. It's like night and day difference. It's that manageable level of stress and pressure where you feel like, oh, this is kind of tough, but like, I've got this. Versus like, oh my God, I feel like I'm about to have a heart attack. And I might need to get my wife to call the ambulance because my blood pressure is like 200 over 100. I've had guys that's happened to them. Blood pressure through the roof, heart rate through the roof, and they're only in their 40s. And I'm like, look, man, do this for all the reasons of getting abs, being in shape, looking jacked. That's cool. But do this so you're actually alive for your people. You know, and so you can live out this beautiful long life. Um, so that's, that energy man is like just, it's the foundation, right? It's like the foundation layer of a beautiful life. And when I see people make those connections and connect those dots and start this, I tell you, there's nothing like it. There's nothing witnessing like someone who's just like mastering that. And they're excited about that realization of like, wow, like I'm, I'm It, yeah, that is true. Even myself knowing like, God, I was almost 300 pounds. Like, you know, you don't sleep well, you don't just, nothing is great. And you wake up and you're like, yeah, you feel foggy. And you just, but the one thing I think that, um, makes a difference is, is like what you put in your body. Like you're saying, like, I don't think we really realize like the stuff we put into our body. Um, like you're saying, eat the rainbow. That's a massive part that are like, some say the Mediterranean diet or whatnot, um, stuff like that. And instead of worrying about the calorie count, I think that's a massive part, like you're saying to, uh, like poke bowls. I think that's a, that's a new thing that's coming Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, for the audience in general, calories, it's important to be aware of your calories, but I would definitely say poke bowls, or they're also called macro bowls. If you go to Instagram, Pinterest, if you just go to ChatGPT and say, what is a poke bowl? P-O-K-E. What is a poke bowl? or a macro bowl, give me a rundown of it. How do I make them? What type of foods should I add to them? Give me some recipes. It will spit you out all kinds of stuff. And I think the reason why that's so useful is because I don't even count calories at this point. I've got to a point where I can eyeball stuff now. But before I did that, I used metric measuring cups. You know, you got like your baking cups. So you've got like one cup, half a cup, a third of a cup. So my wife's got a bunch of metric baking cups because she'd do baking with my daughter and you can use those to portion your stuff. So you can get your one cup of rice or your half a cup of rice, or you could, you know, you could dice up your protein and put your protein in that and make sure it's like one cup. And if you just put in like one cup of this, half a cup of that, a third of a cup of this, And even with the rainbow vegetables, you can be a lot more liberal with those because they're so low in calories, you can pretty much grab handfuls of those. I mean, one of the things that I tell people, I'm like, look, if you want to have a big meal and you want it to be easy on your gut and you want it to be low in calories, things like spaghetti squash and butternut squash, and zucchini noodles and even pickles. If you added like a bunch of those to your meal and you use a low calorie condiment, like no sauce or cheese, huge barbecue sauce or something like you're adding a lot of volume that will keep you full, but it's very low in calories and it's easy on the gut. and it's got a good micronutrient profile. So it's got good amounts of vitamins and minerals that you wouldn't just see if you just ate some like romaine lettuce, for example. So part of it, man, is like the micronutrients. I say to people, food is like software and your body and mind are like the hardware. And so think about if you had a virus on your computer, You wouldn't all of a sudden think the computer is stupid and throw the computer out because this piece of crap doesn't work. You'd be like, okay, I've got a virus on the computer. I need to run an antivirus on this, clear out the system, reboot everything, and then it will run Well, and your body and mind are literally like that. Most people, they just don't realize anxiety and mood and brain fog and aches and pains, all that stuff. It's like a series of virus running on your hardware. And very often it's caused by the things you're consuming. And so, you know, if you're consuming a lot of processed stuff, like a lot of white refined junk food or fast food, or, you know, maybe you have a bunch of food sensitivities. One of the common things that people don't often know is they might be like, well, I'm kind of eating healthy. You know, I'm eating like a sort of a keto or Mediterranean or something. And if you run a food sensitivity panel with them, sometimes they're allergic to like red peppers or they are allergic to egg whites. There's like foods that like they think are healthy, but they actually have a sensitivity to them. And that sensitivity is like, for them at least, a virus. And so often what I would even say is like, in my journey, I've seen people achieve really good results with like almost every type of diet you can think of. Like, there are so many different ways you can achieve the outcome, but what determines what outcome is, what process is best for you is literally like, what does your blood work say? What does your food sensitivity panel say? If you do a hair mineral analysis, what does that say? Because if you were to get those three things tested, and even as a bonus, go online and do the Braverman test. So the Braverman test is a subjective test that asks you a lot of questions. And it creates a determination of your brain chemistry, like dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, GABA. And it's actually pretty useful. I mean, it's quite accurate. And the reason why I say all this... is because based off that, you can then look at, okay, what foods am I consuming every day that are acting like a virus? And what foods am I consuming every day that will act like an operating system update? And so the more operating system updates you can put into your hardware, you will look better, you will feel better, you won't get the brain fog, you won't have the anxiety and the low mood, all stuff that most people experience. I even would say as far as like a lot of aches and pains and joint pain, like a lot of joint pain and like sort of that arthritic, creaky, like poor recovery. I would say a lot of that's just like systemic inflammation where your body's not recovering from your training because you don't have enough antioxidants. You don't have enough polyphenols. And so every day, I'll make sure that I add in organic blueberries, organic blackberries, goji berries. I do a serving of blueprint extra virgin olive oil every day. And it's like, I almost treat it like whole food supplementation. Like in my head, I'm looking at those blueberries and I'm like, that's my antioxidants. I'm looking at the olive oil and I'm like, that's my polyphenols. I'm looking at the goji berries and I'm like, that's my vitamin C. And when you think about each food as sort of serving like a medicinal function, you start to piece your diet together with the idea of creating like this sort of medicinal approach where each thing has a role. Each thing has a function. If you're just eating for calories and macros, you're not really addressing the functionality part. You're just addressing like the energy surplus or the energy deficit, which is obviously one part of the equation. But you do need to be mindful of the micro-nutrients. I would say that is a big part of outside of the movement, outside of the light, outside sleep. Addressing that is probably one of the biggest drivers for someone really optimizing the body composition the most. Because what will happen, and I've noticed this, a lot of my people will notice that their cravings go down. See, one of the hardest things with dieting, as you know, if you came from 300 pounds, it's getting cravings. You get cravings, you get these pulls, you know it's not good. And you're like, man, I've got this urge to eat Domino's pizza. I've got this urge to eat the Oreos. And you know that it's not good, but you have such a drive internally that craving this signal is so strong. And so what I found Was that part of why that craving signal was so strong? There is an emotional part to it, but the other part is, very often, you're missing certain vitamins and minerals, and your body is trying to send a signal to tell you we're low in magnesium, or we're low in zinc. A really good example that a lot of women will experience is during their menstrual cycle, at certain points in their menstrual cycle, they'll crave chocolate. That's quite a common one. And it's almost like an inside joke with the chocolate cravings with pregnant women or menstrual cycles and women on periods and stuff. Anyway, part of that is during that process with blood loss, you will lose magnesium and iron. And so from the magnesium and iron loss, Like you get a signal for chocolate craving because chocolate is high in magnesium and iron. And so if you know what your body needs, you can plug the holes with like cacao nibs. So you can put cacao nibs or a little bit of supplementation, or you could add magnesium rich foods in every single day. And what it does is it turns that signal down. It doesn't necessarily turn it off, but it turns it down. And then if you were to take that concept and then apply a micro-dose of even like a red atrutide or terzapatide, some of these GLP-1 peptides can be useful if you dose them right. It's not good if you dose them poorly. But if you combine that with this concept, Man, people can completely transform their body. They'll break through binge eating patterns that they've had for decades. And I've seen it. I see it. And so it's one of those things, man, where you've got to realize your body is much more advanced than a computer, but the principle kind of Totally. You know, it really brings it home because I'm always like, you know, I never realized how much I would snack and you're like, you know, you're grabbing, grabbing, you don't even realize it. And I'm like, you know, I look back on it, you know. when we got married in 2018, then 2019, then our kid comes along and I got, you know, this fat and you're just like, Oh, and you're, I'm like, I was snacking that much. Like I didn't even realize it. Like you don't even, one of the, one of the things I'll say, man, one of the things with snacking, it It's very often. the things we snack on are quite calorie dense. And so, you know, trail mix, people will snack on trail mix, or they might snack on dried fruit, or they'll have things that have, you know, seed oils on them. And so they have like a lot of extra calories. You know, I was looking at this trail mix in the store one day that one of my students was asking about, and I was looking at the portion size, one serving. was like quarter of a cup, which is not really that much. I mean, quarter of a cup is like, it's like a little baby handful and it was like 180 calories. So if you, if you do one cup, that's like 600 calories. And so someone could easily over the course of a day, eat a cup of trail mix. And so that's where you, what I tell people is you want to almost have like a snack quota where you know, okay, I've got this amount of this thing. I've got this amount of this thing. I can eat it whenever I want, but I don't want to just have this open-ended loop. And I even have a snack window. So rather than just open-ended and I just eat whenever I want, I'll have a window in the day where I have like a 30 minute window where I consume extra things that I'll have as snacks with the whole principle of like medicinal function. And so I'll know that those things are within my calorie quota without even tracking. Like I won't count any of this, but at this point now I know that it fits the bill, but I tell you man, like the, the snacking part, especially as, as a parent, Because when you're sleep deprived, your cravings will go through the roof. That's one of the things that I tell people is that you've really, you know, it's hard when you are a parent and you've got young kids, because if your sleep's really broken, your body almost like looks for food to try to create the energy. It's like, okay, we're really deprived right now. Let's use some food to generate some energy. What I tell people is what you want to be doing first is get outside and walk in the light. Like even if you have to strap your baby on the front of you or like put the baby in a stroller and walk outside for 10 to 20 minutes, you'll often find if you do that first and you drink a bunch of fluids as well, you will notice that your pull to eat the snacking food goes down quite a lot. And so now at this point I find that because I walk on my walking pad all day while I'm working, I don't get any cravings, zero. And that's legitimate. And it never used to be that way. Well, I used to do all the other dietary stuff and I would try and take certain supplements and do all the different hacks. And what I found was the walking continually, even as a slow plod and the light exposure, it changed the game in terms of snacking. And so I do think for a lot of people, they can eat the healthy poke bowl meals that you have a healthy lunch meal and dinner meal. And then you're wondering like, why am I not losing weight? Part of it is very often like you said, the snacking, and it can almost be an unconscious thing. I think people get, you probably will know this, like when you've done it for such a long time, you'll know that you're doing it. but I don't think you realize the degree to which you're doing. So you think, okay, I had a little bit and you're a little bit, you think you had a hundred calories, but you actually had 500. And if you apply that to like snack A and then snack B and then snack C, you've already pushed a thousand calories into your diet and you might be eating a really clean, healthy dinner meal. but you're not seeing any weight change. And part of it is all of those other things that you're like letting slip through the cracks. You're not doing the other stuff wrong. You're just letting the other things slip through the cracks and that's pushing you into that surplus. So part of it early on, I do think is just like becoming aware of these things, man. Um, and I always tell people, Just keep getting back to reminding yourself why you're doing this. What is the vision you want for your life? What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want to model to your wife and kids? And just really do your best to show yourself some grace and compassion, but at the same time, hold yourself to a higher standard as well. Some people, when they hear me say, show yourself some grace and compassion, they think just to excuse everything that you do. And what I actually tell people is, no, I want you to be hard on yourself, but from a place of love, not from a place of self-loathing. There's a difference. Some people, they'll be really negative about themselves, and it's a real place of shame. and self-loathing. It's like a really destructive energy. And I don't think that's good. I think rather be hard on yourself, hold yourself to higher standards, but from a place of like, you know that you're capable of so much more and you want more, like you want to have a better life. You want to feel better. You want to look better. You want to have an amazing business. You want to have an amazing family. You want to be a beautiful role model for your family and your people. And like, you're coming from like that place. And I tell you, man, like when you come from that place, you'll still make mistakes. You will, but you will, you'll get back up again and you won't have that heaviness that comes with, you know, the shame of just doing the destructive stuff, you Yeah. And the feedback part, it's just like, wow, you know, a quarterback comes off the field where they score a touchdown or they go three and out their hand at the iPad. You know, I mean, there's stuff to learn on every, on every drive and, and going back to the poison of like the food, I learned that, um, steak. you know, steak kills me. If I eat steak and then I combine like a carb with it, good luck. I mean, I might as well be One of the good things to know, like what you just said is that everyone is different. And when that's the, I always tell people when someone says to me, oh, well, I heard eggs are not good for you. I heard this is not good for you. This is good for you. And I'm like, I don't think anything is good or bad. It's the context. And so for you, you know, okay, that feels like a lead weight in my stomach. I don't feel good. I feel like, I don't feel, you get a negative biofeedback response. And I tell people that's going to be, that and your blood work are your best indicators to what is good for you. And so I've seen guys consume a bunch of steak and their blood work was good. And I'm like, holy moly, if I did that, my stuff would be terrible. So it's one of those things where it's different for everyone, but just the fact that you're paying attention to those things and you take those mental notes. I mean, if you do that, man, and you get your bloodwork run consistently, you'll start to build a really good inventory and a picture of what your ideal diet looks like, like what your superhuman 2.0 type of diet should look like. I'm at the point now where I know exactly. like exactly what foods my body functions best on. And I pretty much don't deviate from that at all. It's one of those things where people will say to me, don't you ever miss eating pizza or like, you know, like they'll insert like a junk food. And it's funny because I remember when I first got into fitness, I used to love a big old cheap meal, man. You know, you see these fitness people and they do like cheap meals and they'll do like what I eat in a day and it's like 10,000 calorie, just glutton fist. And I was like that. So I'd be like, man, I'm going to pile back the burgers. I'm going to eat all the fries. I'm going to eat all the donuts. I could eat 12 donuts in one sitting. I mean, I was like a food eating competitor almost. I remember being able to eat a large Domino's pizza by myself and still have room for like a pint of ice cream. And now I think about that and I'm like, man, I don't know how my stomach handled that. I even feel like I get bloated just thinking about it. But I say this because I went from that place and I noticed how even though I was like bodybuilding and I was into health and fitness and I keep my diet pretty locked in, And I was in reasonably good shape visually. My blood work still wasn't very good and my energy still wasn't very good. And I didn't feel that good. Like I looked okay, which is what a lot of people do, but I didn't feel that good. And what I noticed was that when I really started to get serious about cleaning things up, and one of the things that I do that will be a really useful tactic for your listeners is I use this healthy food upgrade principle where you can only white knuckle it for so long. Like if you love brownies or you love cookies, where you don't eat a cookie. And what I would say is you need to find better upgrades. So a really good brand that I really love, and they're based out of Australia, so it takes about two weeks to ship over here, which is a pain in the butt, but I'll just make a bulk order, is MacroMic. So MacroMic have these high protein, low allergen baking mixes. like donuts, brownies, mug cakes, cookies, chocolate chip, banana bread. I mean, you name it. And my daughter loves that stuff. And so she'll bake with my wife and we'll use these macro-like baking mixes, which are almost like a fitness health food, basically. And they're low in allergens, They're low in calories, they're clean, and they taste amazing. And so we will use things like that for our brownies. We will use things like that for our donuts. So we don't actually white knuckling and never having the thing again. We're finding a better alternative. And the same thing is true if someone loves sodas. I mean, sodas at this point now are quite an obvious thing to remove. But if someone, for whatever reason, loves sodas, you can use the Zevia soda waters. So Zevia uses... They have a soda water in Sweden with Stevia. I would say that's even better than using Diet Coke. When you use Diet Coke, it's still got a lot of processed stuff in it. So in my mind, I'm like, how can I make that better. And so stir-flavored water drops. If you want flavored water or your kids drink a lot of juice, add stir-flavored water drops to their water. It's like juice without any sugar. I mean, this is the type of stuff, man, that is not only good for you, but when you have a family, you can give that gift of health to them. I mean, I would say my daughter is so healthy. She doesn't realize that at this point, she's still young enough, but she never gets sick and she's very intelligent. And I just feel like part of it is that she's had so many good operating system updates on her computer from all these choices that we've made. It's a gift. And so I would say for all the listeners, Think about that gift you can give to other people when you get the macro mic for your family and now your kids can have the brownies, but it's not the high processed white refined sugar ones where they eat it and they're bouncing off the wall all ADHD and crazy, right? So if you can find healthy food upgrades for all the things that you love, which there are things for all of that stuff, you will never feel like you're dieting again. And that is how you unlock the next level, man. You know, that's how I've been able to get to the point where I'm at at like 6% body fat and not maintain it all year round, all year. Most fitness people, they're kind of like deceptive in a way. And I don't want to call people out, but it's like, they'll diet down. They'll take a bunch of pictures of themselves when they're dieted down in different settings. And then they'll just drip feed those pictures for over a period of months. And then they'll kind of get soft and fluffy again. They'll be kind of soft and fluffy, but they're posting pictures of them when they're shredded because they can't maintain that look. I'm like, dude, I don't do that at all. I'll post the pictures as they are because you can maintain that level when you know what to do. Part of it is you know that they do that because they don't understand these principles. They don't understand these healthy food upgrade principles. Um, but I tell you that it's like, I've had to, I learned these things because I wanted to be able to achieve the result in my life and make sure that I did it in a way that was healthy to, you know, it wasn't just like looking jacked and, and, and being strong and having abs, but you're like a typical bodybuilder that's blasting a bunch of steroids and you're like super unhealthy. I mean, the fitness industry in and of itself is pretty unhealthy. I mean, you, you, you would look at a lot of bodybuilders and then not, they're not actually healthy. They look good, but they're not healthy. And there's a difference. And when you're not healthy, you won't feel good. You won't sleep well, your energy will be terrible, and they just kind of grind through. They just grind through because they know they have a competition they're working towards, and they have enough willpower to kind of grind it through, but they don't feel good. So part of it, man, is always that energy management concept that I keep coming back to, because I really think that's the foundation Yeah, it's bringing, you know, it's creating that legacy over, you know, just looking chiseled, but you might, yeah, might keel over at 50 with so much steroids. Yeah, it doesn't matter what you look like. Well, I appreciate you coming on here. Really, thank you. It's been tremendous, the ownership, the awareness, the execution, everything that you entail. I think people will obviously be able to get a lot of information out of this, and they'll be able to connect with you. Obviously, your Instagram, all your ways to connect with you inside the Honestly, man, I just tell people just start imperfectly. Start in the storm. People wait. I'll wait till January when I have more time or have more money or have more bandwidth. And I always tell people, like, you might as well just start in the storm. Cause when you start in the chaos and you start in the storm, you're essentially like building your standards. So now when you're going through the storm, you'll have the skillsets to navigate the next storm that comes into your life. Whereas if you wait for when you're less busy or you have less pressure, what happens when the pressure comes back? You just drop off. And so I tell people, when you hear this, just pick one or two things that you understood from this discussion today and just go do them and start today. Don't even wait till Monday. Start today. Start in the storm. Start imperfectly and just give yourself that grace and compassion that you're learning And as long as you raise your baseline from like a one out of 10 to a three and a four and a five out of 10, you don't have to hit home runs to be successful with this. And that you just remember that every single I love that. A lot of slumps are broken with a bloop single, right? There you go. That's it. Start small and work your way I appreciate it, Fraser. Thanks for coming on here. And if anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out to him. And on the show notes, once again, Elevate Everything. One love. Until Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and tell your