Eating in the Wild

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus I give you tips that you can put into fast action to up level your health so that you can go out there and live that big life you're meant to live. Now, today's show is all about weird food. Crickets, sardines. Alright. It's about lessons you can learn from living out in the wild and how you can incorporate that into a wild diet. I was wondering where my buddy Abel James had gone and I found out that he kind of disconnected for the last two years and traveled the world, 12 plus states, 20 plus countries. So he is going to share what he learned by doing all of that. Now he is a New York Times bestselling author of the Wild Diet and he also stars as a celebrity coach on ABC on my diet's better than your diet. And he's also been featured in People magazine, Wired and USA Today. Also he has got an amazing podcast, Fat Burning Man. It's been out there for gosh, five years now. Incredible. And he's also spoken all over the place including the federal government, Ivy league universities, Fortune 500 companies. And he's a renaissance man. He's a songwriter and he plays a bunch of different instruments and he sings. Plus he loves coffee, so. And dark chocolate as you're gonna learn very quickly. And he's got some crazy amazing food tips that you are going to love. And if he can eat well in the middle of nowhere, we can eat when we're at home where it's easy. So I am super excited to have Abel James on the show today. All right, so let's do it. Abel James, welcome to the show. I am so glad you're here with me today.

Thanks so much for having me, jj.

Well, I had to track you down, man. Where the heck have you been living.

In the woods for the past couple years? Yes. We were completely unplugged from technology for weeks on end, literally. Carrying.

I don't know how you did that. I don't know how you did that, because you're such. On the other end of it. You're such a tech guy.

Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons that I did it. One of the coolest things that happens when you're away from all this for a while, everything from your phone to your computer to even the Internet at large, is when you come back from unplugging, you're like, holy crap, we're living in Star Trek right now.

This is real stuff.

And I think the biggest shift, though, that's important for other people because you don't actually have to completely unplug, is that when you turn off the notifications on your phone, you know, all the apps that are bleeping and blooping at you all the time, forcing you to react to it, when you turn those down, when you turn those off, you suddenly get your brain back. And that's a really powerful thing.

There's so many questions I have to ask you. First off, so did you go with your. Like, did you and your girlfriend go and live in the woods?

Yeah. And she came back, My wife.

Oh, goodness, this is shocking to me. Did you get married in the woods? Like, what happened here? So you went off and you live. How long have you been out traveling? Because I haven't seen you for a while.

Yeah, it was almost two years. And one of the things I wanted to do when I was writing my book, the Wild Diet, is live in other places and experience other cultures and the way that they think about food, the way that they eat food, and it's fundamentally different from the way that Americans do or the way that we were raised, where basically we're trying to dodge food and diet from food. And in a lot of other places, they're just struggling to have any. And it's such a striking difference when you compare those. So I really wanted that to kind of steep into what I was writing.

So you actually were living, like, in the wild in some cases?

Not for two years. We were definitely traveling to some. Well, actually, I'll say it this way. We were living in a lot of state national parks. We got an RV and we just lived there dry camping for a couple of weeks. But when you go from city to city, it is ridiculous how many of the same stores you pass. Right. Like, there's no point in going to Buffalo for Buffalo wild Wings. You can get them exactly in Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, it doesn't matter.

So you actually don't have to go to get them anywhere. You could just drive past them.

That's right.

The best technique of all. That's the best technique. So all these different places where you were dry camping and you were doing this. So how did you. Because I'm assuming there you weren't, like, out, you know, hunting, and I'm also assuming you weren't going to Buffalo wild wings. So how the heck were you managing to eat healthy while you were doing all that?

Yeah, well, actually, one of the reasons we did it is we wanted it to be an experiment because, you know, it's. It's pretty easy to be a health nut if you live in a mecca like Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Austin, Places that have, you know, thriving farmers markets and everything fresh if you want it is there. But when you go to the middle of nowhere in a state or national park, in a town that barely has a name, in Colorado, in the mountains or something like that, you really need to be diligent about eating right and what that means more than anything else. And you can take this, even if you're not really a traveler, but just someone who goes to work is be prepared at all times. Be prepared for your next meal, and ideally, be prepared for your next few meals. And if you don't have access to a kitchen or a restaurant that has good food for you to eat, making your own survival pack is something that.

Okay, let's hear what those are. What's a survival pack? Because I'm taking it. It's not M and Ms, okay?

No, it's not M and Ms. Although I do recommend that you carry around emergency chocolate. That's something.

Of course. Come on. That's obvious.

Oh, it's fantastic. It's a ritual that I enjoy. Usually at the end of the day, it's just. It gives you something sweet that's not going to destroy your metabolic markers or hormones, especially at night when the cravings kick in, especially when you're traveling and stressed out.

We are not talking Hershey's milk chocolate here.

That's right.

Clarify.

75, 80% plus. I like the stone ground stuff, so it's got some grit and kind of mealiness to it. I like that.

I found some hundred percent out in Canada. That is unbelievable.

Yeah.

Yes. So much chocolate, it's hard to do that. Yeah, it's like. It's not bitter, doesn't taste awful. And of course, our buddy. Our buddy Dave has bulletproof chocolate that's got. I think it's just xylitol, so. And Then there's the other lilies with stevia. So it's. There's some out there that doesn't even have any added sugar.

But, yeah, it's. It's fantastic. So easy to find that. And then the ultimate brain food. It's not necessarily always that palatable, but it keeps for a while, are sardines or canned salmon.

Anyway, see, now I'm not going to go live in the wild. You just ended it for me right there, Abel.

Okay, how about salmon?

You know, canned salmon's okay. Sardines. I wish. I want to say that, like, I tell everybody to eat them, and I always say, I wish I could eat them, but they just. I'm just afraid of them. Really. I've actually never tried one.

I totally. I totally hear that. One of the reasons I do eat them is because it's one of the ways of eating kind of like a whole fish, which we don't usually eat nose to tail anymore. So also, if I'm on the coast, I do my best to, you know, while in Rome. So we just went out to the coast in la. We got plenty of raw oysters, fresh seafood. So wherever you're going, find what they have there and load up on that. And more than anything else, you should make a fresh run. So actually, we don't always go to restaurants to eat when we're traveling. A lot of times we'll go to the local grocery store, might just take an Uber there, and load up on greens and make our own salads. And a lot of times we'll have our own olive oil and vinegar that we carry around. And I have this little spice missile thing, which is like 8 bucks on Amazon. And it's got six chambers where you can put all your favorite spices, so.

You never go, oh, that's super cool. A spice missile. Wow. All right, so spice missile, sardines and dark chocolate.

Well, load up on greens, like salad greens. A lot of times we'll. It sounds outrageous and it looks outrageous, but snacking on vegetables, even, like, cucumbers, but celery, carrots, things like that, super kid friendly. Really easy to put into your backpack. And, you know, cucumbers, for example, that's one of our favorite hiking foods because it actually hydrates you at the same time.

Oh, that's very smart. Who knew? Now, besides going to all the states, you also went abroad, right?

We did, yeah. We spent some time in Indonesia, Fiji, Australia, Brazil.

Okay, what's the weirdest thing you ate?

We had some really gnarly deep fried crickets. When we were in Thailand and they. Yeah, I. You know, the ultimate Paleo food. Right. But here's the bad problem. Number one, for the next half an hour, you're picking cricket out of your teeth. And then number two, we only wanted a couple to try, but, you know, it was like 25 cents for a whole sack, and that was like the least you could get. And so there are all these stray dogs running around. We're just like trying to pawn them off on the dogs. And the dogs would come up and sniff and like, shake their heads.

Uh huh. There you go.

Not for me. Ew.

But cricket in your teeth. Yeah. You just lost me there.

Yeah.

And I've eaten some weird stuff going abroad, but not.

What was your weirdest snake blood?

No, I'd say just bat. Bat, probably.

Yeah, that'll do it.

Armadillo. Chewy. Yeah. Yeah, bat. You know, bat kind of tastes like chicken, I guess.

Really creepy.

Sounds creepy, but come on, it's a bird. Like you know, just. Just a bird. I. I found the bat better than the armadillo. Just in case you're presented with a choice between the two. Go for the. Go for the bat.

I'll keep that in mind. I had guinea pig. That was actually really good. And we were down in Peru.

Guinea pig.

Yeah. Surprisingly good, huh?

Well, that sounds like it'd be good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Marinated just right. Nice and. Nice and kind of juicy. Almost like rabbit, but a little bit fattier. In a good way.

Yeah. And you just, you know, it's better to me than a bunny because bunnies are still so cute even though they're horrible pets. Horrible.

That's true. They ate through my super Nintendo when I was a kid.

I know. And then they pee everywhere. It's like they chew through everything and pee everywhere. And you try to touch them and they scratch you. I was like, what's. What's the use of this? Like, go out and play with the coyotes. So back to what you're doing. Anyway, so you went out, you traveled the world, you've been gone for a couple years because where the heck is Abel? And your whole thing. You wrote the book the Wild Diet, which is a New York Times bestseller. Big thing. Now give us the, like, the whole premise behind it, because I know you have this whole thing about why we should all be out there living a bit more like wild animals. So what's the wild diet? And why do you say that?

Yeah, the thing that I realized in doing over 200 interviews with experts like you, JJ and so many other People is that there is no shortage of things that people disagree about. Almost everything is controversial. Everything can be made dogmatic and super complicated. But what I like to do is take it back to its roots and get super simple. What do all of these people agree about? And generally speaking, it's that we should be eating far more green leafy vegetables.

I was gonna say eat more plants. That's the only thing I think we all agree on. Well, deep green leafies. Because if you go into plants, then we fight over that.

But generally speaking, this is true. And also, I should say other cultures abroad that don't have a lot of the same problems that we do also share these characteristics. You eat fresh food, mostly plants. And, you know, Michael Pollan was very right on with some of the words that he had to say about that. And also, when you're sourcing food, like, another portion of your plate should be some sort of protein like eggs, fish, or meats, you want to make sure that that food itself was raised on its wild diet, on its natural diet. Because when you feed, for example, cows an unnatural diet made of grains and corn, for example, they get really sick, and then they have to be pumped full of all sorts of antibiotics. You've been through this many times, jj, on your show. People. People know how that plays out. So anything that ends up on your plate, make sure that it was eating its own wild diet. So there's basically the huge factory farmed, industrial world of food that we're eating from right now that's causing a lot of our problems. On the other side, there's the truly, in the true sense of the word, the natural way of eating, which I call the wild diet, which is the diet that we as humans should be following. And it leaves us with a lot of options, but core principles that a lot of the health experts share instead of fight about.

I know, isn't it ridiculous? You could always say you could put 10 of us in a room, we're all great friends, and we'll like, duke it out over the most ridiculous, like get in a fight over garbanzo beans.

But at the same time, we're probably all eating the same lunch, right?

Yeah. So let's go through that. Like, let's take you, because this is what everybody always wants to know at the end of the day, what do you eat? So, yeah, when you aren't in Indonesia having crickets, and when you're not in a national park eating canned sardines, when you're just back in North Austin, Texas, take us through a Typical day. Abel wakes up in the morning and what happens?

Yeah, I wake up in the morning, and for the past few years, I've been doing intermittent fasting, but oftentimes I'll include some sort of fat in the morning. Like, I won't count that against fasting, so I'm not super strict with it. But I avoid all grains and sugars in the first half of the day and oftentimes for the second half of the day, too. I was going to say, yeah, but not always. So I love the ritual of coffee in the morning. Usually I'll add heavy cream that's grass fed or coconut oil or grass fed butter, some sort of fat to that. Or occasionally we'll also do a green smoothie in the morning if we're not fasting. My wife Allison, fasts less often than I do.

I find it very hard for women. First of all, I will not get up if coffee's not involved. So I'm not gonna. It's not happening. But. And I just. I went back to. I have two houses and I went back to the desert and discovered that I was out of bulletproof. And it was like, yeah, it was a craz crisis. So I was like, oh, my gosh, what do I do? And I'm texting. I'm sending Dave pictures from Starbucks going, look what you made me do. But I'm sure he loved that. But I find, you know, men do very well with intermittent fasting. Women, we get very mean.

It can be, yeah, it's a delicate thing. I've seen some. Some women pull it off, other women not so well. And for most people, it's in between. It's like, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Do you want to risk it or not? So, ye. I don't necessarily recommend fasting in the morning or every morning or every day for everyone. But I do think that the closer you. You get to being fat adapted, which is basically, you know, basically means your body is preferentially using fat as energy as opposed to sugar.

Yeah. Then you can go like, you don't have to eat, if that is such a clear one. As I talk about the Sugar Impact diet, those people, like, they didn't eat for two hours and they're crashing. Like, I mean, if you get up in the morning, you happen to not be able to eat for a couple hours, and you fall apart. There's a problem. Exactly, exactly. So that's a key one. I'm glad you made that distinction. Okay, so then you have that. So then what happens? Next.

And then usually my first meal of the day will be either a green smoothie that's usually fat, heavy with something like coconut or avocado in it, sometimes olive oil and tons of greens, maybe a little bit of berries, or a lot of times I like breakfast for lunch, breakfast for dinner, breakfast for breakfast. I'm a huge breakfast fan. So maybe a big omelet with a bit of goat cheese and some onions and garlic.

Yeah, see, but you're not having cereal, milk, or a muffin.

No, I'm not.

Take note, everybody, of what he meant for breakfast, for lunch or dinner.

Yeah, absolutely. Now we do something a little bit unique with our treats, though, which oftentimes we save for around dinnertime or after dinner. So if we're making a, like muffins, for example, we'll do our best to work in a, instead of a flour, something like a sweet potato or a beet, that's going to give it moisture and fiber. And then round that out with coconut flour or almond flour or some other gluten free flour, sometimes rice. That turns the starch or the sugar that you're eating into kind of your starch option for the day, if that makes sense. So a lot of times instead of eating a sweet potato, we'll have a treat like that. Although I think that sweet potatoes by themselves, a little bit mineral salt, total treat. Man, that's sweet too.

Yeah, same with butternut squash. Oh, my gosh. That's what people need to get to is realizing how sweet these things naturally are.

Yes. You just have to get your palate back first.

So what's your most typical. Like, what did you have last night for dinner?

What did we have? Okay, so zoodles, which is something that I really enjoy.

Zoodles.

Yeah. Basically you just take a zucchini, turn it into noodles.

Oh, okay. I've never heard it called zoodles.

Yeah, it's catching on. Jj, you gotta keep it.

Wow. I was out of it here. You've been out for two years and I've been around. I didn't even know about zoodles. Go figure.

Yeah, so that'll be like basically the base of a bowl. And then we actually had some leftover chicken that we turned into a stir fry, put that over the top, which made kind of like a nice reduction sauce that covered up the zoodles with a little bit of olive oil. And then over the top of that, we had some pasture raised bacon. So that was.

Well, that makes it just a slam dunk because everything's like bacon. Did you. There's Someone just sent a thing on Facebook of this little girl crying because she wanted bacon. I'm like, and what's wrong with this? You know, I want bacon.

Yeah. When people say they don't like vegetables, I say eat it with bacon and then say that you will eat those Brussels sprouts.

I had an early on a great nutrition mentor and he said, hey, you know what, they gotta eat their vegetables. If you have to cover them with dark chocolate, just cover them. Like just get them to eat their vegetables.

I agree. They will grow on you. You start to crave them after a while.

But gosh, Brussels sprouts with bacon. Come on.

The best.

It's the best. The best. Okay, I think I'm going to go cook now. So do you have@fatburningman.com do you have recipes there? Because you now said all this amazing stuff and I'm sure people are going, all right, I want more. So where can people get more, Abel?

Yeah, absolutely. The home base is@fatburningman.com and if you sign up for my newsletter, I send you a free mini cookbook and a quick start guide for the wild diet. And we have loads of recipes. Chicken parmesan, a lot of chocolate based desserts and treats and some plantain pancakes we just posted.

Oh, my God.

Absolutely amazing. So, yeah, at fatburningman.com, you can check that out. And it's also a podcast, so if you like those.

Oh, yeah, you have a killer podcast. So Definitely go to fatburnman.com and get Abel's podcast. I think that things been doing that for a while.

Yes. It's crazy. If I'd been doing it nonstop, it'd be coming up on five years. But when I was off the grid, it was harder to do. Like nine months off or so. But yeah, over 200 shows now.

That's super impressive. Well earned. You earned that time off. Plus you brought back all sorts of great intel and maybe that recipe for those deep fried crickets, but I don't really want it.

You can skip those.

We'll skip those. Nothing with crickets. Thank you. I know that's the hottest thing, cricket flour, but I'll take a pass. So hang on.

For the mealworms.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Not going that. Not going that route. Yeah. Paleo plus is what I call myself, not Paleo sideways. So, Abel, thank you so much for joining me today. And everybody go to fatburningman.com he's got loads of awesome stuff there. You already heard about some of these recipes. Grab that cookbook and sign up for his podcast. It is awesome. Now after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

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This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question comes from Sharon in Redlands, California and she asks jj, I love your shakes, but I like to do them later in the day. So what should I do for breakfast? Okay, this is a great question to ask when you just heard Abel talk about all the different things that he actually likes to eat breakfast for lunch and for dinner. Because that's really the key idea here is that you can eat dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner. You can mix these things up. I don't know where we ever got this idea that you had to have like cereal, milk or a muffin and a latte, basically dessert first thing in the morning. So what I want you to think about instead is I want you to think of eating by the plate. And in both the sugar impact diet and the virgin diet, I have a plate which features clean lean protein like wild salmon, grass fed beef, chicken that is leftovers from yesterday. Right. And lots of healthy fat like avocado or extra virgin olive oil or a nice nut butter and then a little bit of slow low carbs and loads of non starchy vegetables. So this means it's super easy to either use a leftover from the day before or just make something following that plate. And I want you to get out of the idea of breakfast foods for breakfast because most of the breakfast foods again out there are gluten, dairy, sugar bombs that will set your send your blood sugar rolling, crashing and burning and rolling. So instead make this simple. I'll tell you if you do not have a dairy sensitivity then you can look at using like and you don't have an egg sensitivity. You could easily look at doing omelets with the little goat cheese. But I want to emphasize there that that's not something you'd want to do every day because both eggs and dairy are things that I see people classically get intolerant to. So be careful with that. But I think of one that I love, which is I love using the Paleo wraps, the coconut Paleo wraps with some Kite hill almond ricotta cheese and maybe a little bit of raspberries. Roll that up. That is so delicious. And have a little side of chicken breakfast sausage. You got the protein from your chicken breakfast sausage or your nitrate free bacon so you could have that on the side or whatever protein you had the day before. Have some leftover and then you're getting your healthy fats and your fiber from the almond ricotta cheese and the paleo wrap. And then you're getting some fiber and some slow, low carbs from the raspberries. And even better if you can do a little bit of broccoli or asparagus or something else, or do a little stir fry in the morning with some bacon and some veggies just like Abel just talked about when he was saying, hey, I add bacon to my veggies. The big takeaway here is you just want to make sure that you're getting in that trifecta of clean, lean protein, healthy fats and fiber from lots of veggies and slow, low carbs. Because that's what creates the blood sugar balance that gives you steady, sustained energy and allows you to use stored fat for fuel so that you can go hours before you need to eat again with and you don't have that blood sugar crash that makes you hangry, right? All right, if you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com ask and you can leave a voicemail for me. I love hearing from you. And one more way I'd love to hear from you. I would so appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. Alrighty. This is Jim JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy. Dare to live a life that matters.

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