00:00:00:10 - 00:00:51:05
Laura
I'm so excited to introduce you to the most amazing Brandon, Carnivore Coach, Primal Ancestral Living, and I hope it's okay, but this inspires and impresses me so much, is 21 years old and is helping so many of his fans and followers through eating more real food, getting outside, living more, connecting to nature. And so we are so excited to have you here today Brandon, thank you for being with us. And I can't wait to get started about this subject. Do you want to tell us you have an amazing story and so do you want to tell us a little bit about what how you got here?
00:00:51:12 - 00:01:14:10
Brandon
Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me again. And I guess my story, I can condense it down for you really quick, but 2020 is when my my health journey started and I was 100 lbs heavier than I am now, and I took an approach to lose weight for the first time in my whole life. And I was 18, 18.
00:01:14:10 - 00:01:38:10
Brandon
Now that was three years ago. Wow. So I was 18. Kobe Bryant had just passed away. He was my idol. I looked up to him. I looked up to his mentality, his work, not just on the court, but outside of the court and what he did. And realized that he died in a freak accident, and, you know, no matter how rich, successful, famous you are, you could die tomorrow.
00:01:38:10 - 00:02:01:04
Brandon
And it woke me up completely. The next day. I look up how to lose weight. I'm like, I want to get my life back together. I want to get in good shape. I've never done this before. And the first thing I see is calories in, calories out. And I went the wrong way, unfortunately. So I ended up doing OMAD (one meal a day) for the next eight months without knowing really what OMAD was.
00:02:01:04 - 00:02:19:22
Brandon
I just ate once. I ate all my calories. Some was processed food, some was whole food. Not enough protein, not enough fats. That's for sure. And I ran what was almost 9 to 10 miles every single day throughout those eight months. What did that lead me to do? Well, it led to a few things. One, I lost 100 pounds which was amazing.
00:02:20:13 - 00:02:38:10
Brandon
Only problem was I lost all of my muscle mass and I felt horrible. I was not sleeping well. I was starving myself every single night and I was running my ass off every morning. It wasnā€™t sustainable for me. So at the end of the eight months, people looked at me and they're like, Wow, you must feel amazing. You look so good.
00:02:38:10 - 00:02:57:16
Brandon
And I'm like, I feel so much better when I was 100 lbs heavier, they're like, What are you talking about? I'm like, I'm starving. So I'm like, There has to be a better way. I was counting my calories to the dime every single day. Super unhealthy, which is now a part of our culture, unfortunately, is counting and tracking everything and not really relying on our intuition.
00:02:57:16 - 00:03:15:17
Brandon
So I wanted to go more of that way, but I was very scared to pull away from the caloric approach to help me for so long. So I see my grandparents lost a lot of weight as well during the time that I did too. They did it with keto and I knew keto was low carb and really know how it would benefit me at the time.
00:03:16:12 - 00:03:33:07
Brandon
So I just was like, Hey, you guys, you guys are starving too, right? Like, they lost probably 40, 50 pounds each. And, you know, I asked them, You guys must be starving every night. You guys must be running all the time, you know? And they're like, We didn't exercise and we're pretty full. And I'm like, What are you talking about?
00:03:33:07 - 00:03:58:01
Brandon
You have to be starving to lose weight. And I try it. So I take my current tracking app and I just put in the keto macronutrients and I just went high fat, moderate protein and low carb and immediately I slept better. I felt fuller, I was more energized. All of these positive things were coming out of a high fat diet, or at least a moderate fat diet.
00:03:58:18 - 00:04:18:20
Brandon
I started eating 2 to 3 times a day and I wasn't putting the weight back on and well, probably because I was still restricting myself with calories for a long time now. Now, a few weeks into this, I should also mention that I had IBS for first 18 years of my life and it was brutal. It was really bad.
00:04:18:20 - 00:04:39:23
Brandon
That's the main reason why I'm carnivores today. It's one of the reasons. So keto helped everything except the IBS. IBS was a huge issue for me. IBS was in the bathroom four or five times a day. It was brutal. It was not fun. I had to tell the teacher every every time I had a teacher, I had to tell her, you know, if I have to go to the bathroom, don't question me, just let me go.
00:04:41:08 - 00:05:06:07
Brandon
So after doing keto for a little bit, it did not get better. I was doing meat, eggs, seafood, lots of veggies. So I saw I came across, Paul Saladino, Carnivore MD, he was the first guy I saw who questioned the idea of eating so many plants. And I questioned that myself. After diving into the nutrient profiles of meat, eggs, fish and fats, I'm like, Do I really need this, this fiber?
00:05:06:07 - 00:05:29:19
Brandon
I thought it was necessary. Then I research a little more. I find Sean Baker, I find Mikhaila Peterson, all the big names, and I try it. I go without one week with vegetables around a week and a half of strict carnivore. My IBS is gone, completely gone. I've had, like, perfect poops. Everything is normal in the bathroom. One and a half weeks it took me.
00:05:30:14 - 00:05:48:16
Brandon
Now it's pretty fast. A lot of people take a lot longer. So I should mention that if you try and go carnivore in your issues not resolved in a week, it's probably going to take a lot longer than that. But after the veg I felt unbelievable. I felt way better than I did with the vegetables and my IBS was solved.
00:05:48:16 - 00:06:10:22
Brandon
So I knew this was the way for me and I became carnivore and I've been carnivore ever since, except for two or three months of last year where I decided to experiment and see what would happen with fruit and honey, because apparently fruit and honey because they're so nontoxic carbohydrates, they wouldn't aggravate my IBS. So I decided to try it and I did it.
00:06:12:00 - 00:06:29:05
Brandon
And I had no flare ups unless I had too much of the skin of fruit and the seeds of fruit. Then I had a flare up. If I have a few handfuls of broccoli in the bathroom immediately. But I was able to have fruit and honey. The only problem with the fruit and honey is it then led me to gain access body fat.
00:06:29:06 - 00:06:50:12
Brandon
It led to the energy crashes. It led to not as good sleep and all the issues I had on the high carb diet. And until then I realized that all forms of carbohydrates turn to sugar in your body and too much sugar, any kind, even natural sugar, can be inflammatory. So I went back to carnivore energy levels normal down.
00:06:50:13 - 00:07:15:10
Brandon
I felt great. And I've continued this way of eating for a long time now, and that's my story now. I help other people learn about nutrient filled foods. Since a few years ago, I've also included organ meats, which is not something I did originally, and that's also taking my game to the next level. So I'm a big fan of meat organs, fish, eggs, healthy fats are the base of my diet and pretty much all I eat now.
00:07:15:10 - 00:07:41:20
Brandon
So I've been, you know, experimented more on the holistic side last year and I got really into toxic cleaning products and toxic household products, which is actually part of the reason why I even reached out to you guys in the first place. So that's part of that which we can go into as well. But after cutting out stuff like vegetable oils from my life, I didn't realize they were still in my life and my moisturizers and my shampoo.
00:07:42:09 - 00:07:49:19
Brandon
So then I took a deep dive into that industry and we can go into all the changes I made as well. But that's the base of my story. That's how I got into it.
00:07:50:16 - 00:08:32:06
Laura
Oh my gosh, this is so inspiring. And I can't wait for everyone to discover you and have your books and your picture up on billboards because it's coming your way. This is so amazing. I'm so grateful, too, that you are helping others now with this discovery. And that's what my main question right now, after you sharing this, how in-tune you became and how you knew right away with eliminating things and, you know, experiment in back.
00:08:32:06 - 00:08:48:15
Laura
Do you, what has been your experience with like the general public, the people that you come into contact with, the disconnect between not feeling well and what they are eating? Like. What do you think about that?
00:08:48:15 - 00:09:16:18
Brandon
I get a lot of people in my life, fortunately were able to see my transformation and still are around my life after the transformation. So I'm not really judged too hard because they've seen the change in my life and I think that's something that's very powerful. However, a lot of people online don't really seem to care, and that's kind of, you know, the price you pay when you when you go and promote stuff on Instagram and promote this kind of lifestyle is, oh, you're going to have heart disease, you're going to die of a heart attack.
00:09:17:00 - 00:09:38:11
Brandon
I just made a video and it showed, you know, me at 260 pounds with low cholesterol. And I said, And now I'm 100 and really hundred and 70 now with very high cholesterol. And I said, You really think that I had a chance of having a heart attack now more than I did when I was 100 pounds heavier. Like you have to see how how blasphemy me that sounds.
00:09:39:15 - 00:10:13:06
Brandon
Yeah, I get a lot of comments. I'll get a lot of critics and I also get a lot of supporters because people will try this lifestyle for themselves. I think it's very cool. A lot of my friends just decided to eat more meat, not necessarily cut out everything else, but just include more nutrients in their lifestyle and they've seen the benefits from that as well, just maybe including a lot of less plant toxins and just focusing more on the animal foods because, you know, at the end of the day, we are made of muscle meat, connective tissue, organs and fat. So it only makes sense that we eat that. You know.
00:10:14:04 - 00:10:47:03
Laura
And I love all of your media of sharing your experience and how you live now. What what do you think was was it just the pure determination to, you know, feel better, like once you started experiencing the rewards or did you always like, know that you were a chef and want to be in the kitchen or because I, I know a lot of people don't even know how to cook or wouldn't know what to do with meat.
00:10:47:03 - 00:11:11:02
Brandon
Oh, come on. This lifestyle, this lifestyle is a joke to cook. If people don't know how to cook in this lifestyle, they have to learn. It is not that hard. It's not that hard to take an air fryer and put a piece of salmon in it and flip it over and then take it out. You know, it's not it's not very hard to learn how to crack an egg in a pan and let it sit there and do nothing, sell or put some bacon in the pan and let it sit there. So, I mean.
00:11:11:02 - 00:11:13:12
Laura
So why aren't more people doing it?
00:11:14:02 - 00:11:33:09
Brandon
Well, I think part one is because they're lazy and part two is because there's so much processed food that's easily accessible for them that that's what they shoot for. And, you know, there's no way around it. Cooking your own meals is probably one of the easiest ways to get healthier. There's a lot of truth to that. You know, you know what's in your food.
00:11:33:09 - 00:11:52:09
Brandon
You know what oil you're using, You know what additives are in it. Probably, hopefully none. You know, a lot of processed food has all of the additives. It's how it's able to sit on the shelf life for so long. So a good rule of thumb is your food should expire if your food doesn't expire. Is that really food? You know, that's what I like to think.
00:11:53:14 - 00:12:08:18
Laura
So then, from your experience, what do you think is the main consequence or consequences of the kind of conventional or mass way of living in the US?
00:12:09:11 - 00:12:28:08
Brandon
Well, I mean, the biggest one you got to think about is probably insulin resistance. I think insulin resistance is so easy to to get for someone. I mean, you can't exactly. There's a few markers you could tell and see if somebody is insulin resistant. But the easiest way to get there is processed food and living a modern lifestyle.
00:12:28:15 - 00:13:15:18
Brandon
There are so many horrible products in the modern lifestyle that we've added in that don't help us at all. In fact, they, you know, have a drastic decline in our health. Some of the ones I think of top of my head are skin products, makeups, moisturizer, stuff like that. I think of stuff that's colored. I think of dyed stuff that we've never had in our life, basically 99.9% of the time we've been here, it's been out in nature and not confined in a home with all of these products to use. So I think the more that you learn that, you know, we are natural and we are part of nature too, and the closer you get to being more natural and part of nature, the better your health will be. No matter what direction you go.
00:13:15:18 - 00:13:39:02
Brandon
You don't have to be carnivore like I preach that too. Like you don't have to be a strict carnivore. Like if you eat actual food, you're now 99% better than everyone else automatically, no matter what else you do. Because people are so far off nowadays that we're not the same people we were a few hundred years ago. So, you know, there's a lot in our environment that's really changed.
00:13:39:19 - 00:14:08:17
Laura
So I've done this over ten years for my own life and had a transformation like you do. And so because I've done it longer, what I can see now for me is a compounding effect. And it's a real advantage. So what so far in your journey, would you tell people are some of the greatest benefits that you've experience from doing this?
00:14:08:17 - 00:14:26:11
Brandon
The best one, I have to say for people that that, you know, love to work out is the body composition without doing much. If you get into first of all, I use X3 Bar and I stand by X3 Bar. I'm a personal trainer. I also work at a gym and tell a lot of my clients there to use X3 Bar.
00:14:26:21 - 00:14:49:19
Brandon
I use resistance bands and the weight changes as you move it. I probably do it for around 10 to 15 minutes a day. That's all I do to build muscle. The rest of it comes from adequate amount of protein. When you have an adequate amount of protein, especially usable animal protein, your diet, the body composition is fast for a lot of people, a lot of people out of shape once they start eating actual real food, their body will change and they will love it.
00:14:50:11 - 00:15:09:20
Brandon
I've never known a person who's done this long term and did not like the way their body looks or was severely overweight or obese. Never happens. It's not a thing. I like to compare this with nature too. You never go out in nature and see a wolf that's obese. It just it just doesn't happen. Why? Because they eat their natural diet.
00:15:09:20 - 00:15:28:22
Brandon
They live in a natural environment. Those two combine along with their circadian rhythm. They will not make them overweight or obese. It just doesn't happen. And guess what we're part of nature to? We're human beings. So the closer you get to that again, the better your body composition will be. You can cut calories all you want. You can restrict yourself all you want.
00:15:29:03 - 00:15:51:20
Brandon
The only thing it does is put your mind and body into a caloric prison and keep you in that caloric prison until eventually you break out because your genes do not want you to restrict calories. So that's one of the biggest things body recomposition. Second thing is energy levels. And I can't stress the amount of people that have come into my life and all they do is take naps.
00:15:51:20 - 00:16:09:12
Brandon
All they do is lay around and watch Netflix and take naps and they sleep 10 hours a day and they still take a nap. And they're always tired, they're always cranky. And if you're always tired, that is a big sign of insulin resistance, especially if it's the middle of the day when you should have energy and the sun is strong, you should have a bit of energy throughout the day.
00:16:10:22 - 00:16:29:13
Brandon
Something that's really interesting to note is my whole time being carnivore, I've yet to take a nap unless I've had to. One time I went to the airport and had to wake up at like three and that led me to take a nap. But as long as my sleep has been good, as long as I've been in the circadian rhythm as close as I can get I've never needed to take a nap.
00:16:29:13 - 00:16:47:19
Brandon
So the energy levels are there. Also, the skin is there. You have really good skin when you live this way. A lot of people think that, you know, the plants and the you know, the plant, all the all the plant foods cause amazing skin. And they're so good for your gut. But it couldn't be further from the truth.
00:16:47:21 - 00:17:03:10
Brandon
As you know, healthy nutrients and animal fat are some of the best for your gut microbiome because that is what we know. That is what we've been around for millions and millions of years. So it only makes sense that they're the best. So, you know, just trying to wake people up to this lifestyle is is just kind of what I do.
00:17:03:10 - 00:17:08:16
Brandon
And those are some of the biggest benefits. But they're endless more to this life.
00:17:09:02 - 00:17:25:11
Laura
Oh I know I I'm over here CHEERING It's so similar to my experience. So how do you help? Like what is the biggest transformation or how do you help others? Would you say?
00:17:25:11 - 00:17:46:08
Brandon
I think the biggest ways I help others are getting them out of their environment because it's not all about the food. And I really stress that a lot of my page is not just about food, it's about so many other changes you can make in your life. I think getting people on on track to the right food leads them in other directions that also change their environment, which is really good.
00:17:46:08 - 00:18:04:10
Brandon
For example, if I tell somebody, let's say this is why I don't count calories, I don't tell people about calories, but let's say I told somebody, eat 2000 calories of beef and eggs and salmon. They would actually have a want to go out and move and play and run around and be in sunlight and be in nature.
00:18:04:10 - 00:18:30:23
Brandon
And let's say I gave people 2000 calories, the exact same amount of processed foods, Oreos, cookies, candy. They would probably want to lay down and take a nap. So that combination of the quality of food and the portions of food will affect their will to do things. And there's been countless studies on this that when you eat healthier foods with more nutrients, you actually feel better and have a want to do things.
00:18:30:23 - 00:19:01:21
Brandon
So this is not just diet changing. It's more like life changing because you now actually want to go out and work out. You have a drive to go do things. Of course, I don't want to work out every single day, but certainly much more than when I did when I was eating garbage. So I think the food is a good step in the right direction and it propels you in line for the rest of the steps, like getting sunlight, using the sauna, you know, resistance training, all these other healthy things that all sort of go in the same direction and all sort of go together.
00:19:02:14 - 00:19:35:18
Laura
And I would add to that this is so inspiring, but it seems like there's so much noise and information about being healthy, whereas what I hear you saying is just this is how human cells perform. And if you want to just be able to perform and live and have a vibrant life, even even mentally mental health and all of it, that you have to recognize, you know, what humans need.
00:19:36:13 - 00:19:59:21
Brandon
Yeah, there's I mean, there's no way around getting nutrients. There's no way around it. You can do anything you want, but if you're not getting enough nutrients, you're just not going to feel is going to do the other thing. So I think I think it's that and circadian rhythm and the environment. I think that they're all hand in hand. If one is drastically off, the other just won't be right. So those are the most important things in my opinion.
00:20:00:12 - 00:20:07:05
Laura
Oh, this is amazing. Okay, so how can we support you?
00:20:07:05 - 00:20:11:02
Brandon
Well, I mean, how can you guys support me, like as a as a company?
00:20:11:14 - 00:20:15:14
Laura
Well, all of the people listening. Do you.
00:20:15:20 - 00:20:19:13
Brandon
Oh, okay. Like for, like, for my coaching or my Instagram.
00:20:19:13 - 00:20:20:15
Laura
Yeah, all of it.
00:20:20:15 - 00:20:44:06
Brandon
Oh of course. So. So my Instagram, you could find me @carnivorebmillz, BMILLZ. You could probably just search Carnivore B and I'll come right up. And on there is a link to all of my products that I recommend all the companies I recommend, everything I use, and a link to my YouTube, my Twitter, my Facebook and everything else that I do my podcast as well.
00:20:44:22 - 00:21:09:21
Brandon
So those are the easiest ways where you can find me and if you want to work with me, there's also the link on my Instagram. You can also just shoot me a DM. I'll try and answer as many of those as I get, but you can also fill out the survey in my bio in the link of my bio to start health coaching with me. I have a roster of clients that I help all the time and work to improve their quality of life. So that's what I do.
00:21:10:09 - 00:21:18:13
Laura
That's so amazing. And so do you work one on one or online? Is it in person? Is it all ages, genders?
00:21:18:17 - 00:21:41:20
Brandon
Oh yeah, it's all ages, all genders. I work anyone who wants to improve their health, it doesn't matter how old they are, you know, you deserve to have health, whoever you are, however, you know, whatever your age, it that has nothing to do with it. I work in person with personal training, so my personal training clients, they often just get nutrition information from me just because I'm around them.
00:21:42:12 - 00:22:06:02
Brandon
But for everyone else who's like on my Instagram and online and everything, I do one on one online for the most part. I do also do group coaching online as well if you want to a community as well. But if you just want to work privately and, you know, get to talk to me personally for the hour, that's that's honestly one of the best ways to do it. So, yeah, it's one on one online that's generally most of what I do.
00:22:07:00 - 00:22:33:04
Laura
Well, I thank you so much. This is just so inspiring. And it has led me just in this short time to about ten more episodes with you. I hope you'll be willing, but thank you so much. You're just so generous with sharing your own experience and it is so inspiring. I felt like crying several times also.
00:22:33:09 - 00:22:40:12
Brandon
So of course. Of course. No problem. They thank you for again for having me on and everything, so I appreciate it.