Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 15, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by the world's angriest trainer, Vinnie Tortorich. Hi, Vinnie.
Vinnie: How are you doing, man?
Christopher: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm really, really excited. I think the podcast is getting to a point where I can ask really famous people to come on and they will. And it's so exciting. It's really great.
Vinnie: So, when are you going to start doing that?
Christopher: I'll talk about your book. The book is called Fitness Confidential. I'm pretty sure that most of the people listening to this have read that book already. And if you haven't, you need to stop what you're doing, maybe even stop this podcast, stop the car and order yourself a copy of Fitness Confidential because it is a really brilliant book. It is genuinely one of my favorite books I've ever read. It is by my definition a comedy especially the first part of the book.
I went to reread it again before this interview. I had already read it a long time ago. And I had to stop. I use this little speed reader thing that flashes the words up like subtitles and I kept to have to keep pausing it to tell Julie the next joke that I just read. And it's like six of them a minute. I'm constantly pausing and telling her the joke. It's a really funny book. The first thing I want to know is how did you do it? How can you be that good a writer and a speaker and trainer? Was it all Dean? You can confess right here right now.
Vinnie: Everyone wants to think it was all Dean Lorey. But I wrote the entire book and then -- Here's how it happened. I did not want to write the book at all. And Dean kept on. Dean is a real writer. He's a Hollywood writer-producer. He has written everything from Arrested Development to My Wife and Kids to the movie Major Payne. He's written a bunch of those movies for, what's his name, I can't think of it.
Dean is just a big time deal. He's also written a lot of books. And he kept coming to me saying that, "You have a book in you." You have a book. I kept going -- I've written a children's book once before, Monty, and it did really well. I say, "I don't know. What can I say about fitness that hasn't been said?" And he says, "That whole approach you used with Hollywood with the no sugars and no grains."
And I said, "Well, how is that a deal? That's a one-page book." I could just tell people don't eat sugars, don't eat grains, and that's the whole book. And he says, "No, but your stories. You've been around forever. You've been doing this for 35 years and you have all these great stories." So he convinced me to sit down and start writing notes. And since I can't type, I would literally write the notes on yellow page, like these legal pads.
And once every third or fourth day, I would sit down with a yellow pad next to my computer and literally, since I can't type, I would sit there with my finger plucking and pluck them all into the word document. And after I had a bunch of notes, literally, it was bullet point five or six sentences. Bullet point, five or six sentences. And Dean, every four or five days, I would send a whole group of these to Dean. And little did I know he was organizing all of my notes as I sent them to him.
And about four months later, five months later, we were having Scotch one Friday evening and he said, "You know, you've sent me well over 40,000 words of notes." And I said, "You're kidding me." He goes, "No, you've written a book worth of notes. What do you say you come by the house and we start organizing those?" And we did. I went over to his house and we started organizing and that was our first writing meeting. We sat there for the next five or six months and wrote the book together. Most people think I said it into a recorder or whatever people do when they do such a thing. But no, I actually sat there and wrote my book with Dean.
Christopher: Yeah. I must admit, probably a lot of people do that. They read the book, they probably get about half way through it and they're like, "This is so funny. How is this guy so funny?" And then they probably do a little bit of investigation on who Dean Lorey is and like, "Ah, okay, Arrested Development. This makes a lot of sense." But no, it's all you. The story is all yours. That's what makes it such a brilliant book as well. It's not dry. It's not just all prescriptive. It's about a thousand different amazing stories. Sometimes the stories are weaved within stories. It's a really brilliant piece of work. I'd highly recommend it to everyone.
Vinnie: I appreciate hearing that. I was just looking while I'm talking to you and it's funny, the book has been out now for over two years. And right now, as we sit here, on Amazon, it's sitting at number six. Here, I'll go back to it. Certainly I'm not telling a lie.
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It's number in Kindle Store in ebooks health and fitness, diet, diet weight loss and weight loss. It's got over 900 reviews and it still has a 4.7 review rating, which means it's almost a virtual five-star review after almost a thousand reviews and we call it the little bug that can or the little but that could because we never thought anything like this would happen from this book.
Christopher: Yeah. It's a fantastic piece of work. It was recommended to me by a friend, actually. He's a mountain biker and we've been working together for a while and running some tests and he sent me this book and he said, "You've got to read this one. This Paleo diet thing you've been going on about, this guy simplifies it down to just no sugar, no grains. And he's a mountain biker. You have to read this book." And I was like, "Okay, I better read this book."
And, yeah, he was right. It's so much fun. But maybe I should take a step back and for people that might be one or two who don't know who you are. So tell me about how you got into being a personal trainer in the first place. I think that's a really interesting thing. It seems like a terrible job to me, getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning, shouting at fat people, not getting paid very much money. Why would you want to do that in the first place?
Vinnie: Well, when I started doing what I do, there was no such thing as personal trainers. I started working out as a young kid because I was kind of this outcast kid and there were no gyms back in, let's see, I was eight, so maybe 1970, the first time I walked into this guy's gym in his backyard. It was in this little cinderblock building with a tin roof.
I was kind of an outcast kid. I didn't have many friends and that kind of thing. I just started working out. And by the time I was 15 or 16, me, along with that guy, his name was Joe Bonadonna, we started a gym in my small hometown in Southern Louisiana. And that was kind of the beginning, the impetus of guys my parents' age who was asking me for weight lifting advice.
So it just kind of, as I went through high school, I kind of gotten known for something. I went to college on a football scholarship. And I had to study something so I got into the health and fitness field and learned everything I could about that. When I got out, I didn't want to be a school teacher, so I started teaching people around New Orleans where I was living how to be in shape. And they literally didn't even call me a trainer. I was called Vinnie the fitness guy. And that was about 35 years ago.
Christopher: Wow, that's so cool. Can you tell us a little bit about the sort of people that you trained that got you famous? You probably can't mention any names, can you?
Vinnie: I usually don't but some names are out there. One of the early ones that we talked to, it was the first chapter in the book, I was in Hollywood for a while and I kind of started making my name by getting people to shape. We're talking 1991. So we're looking at about 20, almost 25 years ago. And by '92, '93, I'd picked up enough people to kind of start making a name for myself. And one of the people I picked up was this really, really morbidly obese vice president at Playboy Corporation.
And I took a couple hundred pounds off of her. She went, "You know what we have a problem with these playmates. They tend to gain weight and we have them under contract and nobody wanted to see a fat playmate." So they started hiring me to keep some of their playmates in check. I started doing that, started working with them. Her name is slipping my mind now. She's the one that passed away. She became the Guess Ad girl. Why is her name slipping my mind?
It was people like that they will gain weight easily and they would have me work with them. And playmates are kind of short jaunt to actual celebrities, if you will. And because they all kind of know celebrities and it was like, "Hey girlfriend, how are you staying fit?" "Oh, you got to get this guy Vinnie over," type of thing. And that led to my name being brought up in a meeting between one of the biggest managing firms in LA. As a matter of fact, at that time they had Dolly Parton, they had Michael Jackson, they had Roseanne Barr.
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That's back when Roseanne Barr show was the biggest thing. And they got my name along with Disney because they wanted to bring this girl, Margaret Cho, to television and make her like the new Lucille Ball of Asians. But they had a problem. She was really heavy and she didn't look good on camera. So they hired me and I got a lot of weight off of her in no time by taking her off of sugars and grains back in 1992. That was kind of the beginning of everybody in Hollywood putting me on speed dial.
Christopher: That's awesome. So that's like get old-fashioned, you got famous because you're really good at what you do and your name just spread by word of mouth. There wasn't email list and WordPress blogs and opt-in monster and all that kind of stuff. It was just -- There was something you said in your book which I think is very appropriate. I think it originally came from Loreal, is that right? It was that saying 'if you don't look good, I don't look good.' It's that kind of I'm here to make you look good. And people are going to know. If you don't look good, people will know.
Vinnie: It was actually Vidal Sassoon.
Christopher: Vidal Sassoon.
Vinnie: Yeah. We don't look good. It was a lot of that. It was the antithesis of what I do today because I had a secret. I knew how to make people thin and keeping them healthy at the same time and giving them energy and that was basically by putting them in dietary ketosis. And these actresses don't want to know how the sausage is made. They just need the job done. And the agents don't want to know. Nobody wants to know.
But I was the first guy that came along that said, "Hey, you don't need to use speed. You don't need to use cocaine. You don't need to take all that stuff that's going to make you jittery. Just pay attention to what I'm telling you and you'll be in shape." I became popular overnight. And the last thing I wanted to do was tell anyone how I was doing it. Well, I gave away trade secrets.
Christopher: Yes. So how did you do it then? Would you mind talking about it? Now, I know you don't mind talking about it because you tell 600,000 people a month on your podcast exactly how you do it and it's all in the books. So do you think the 'no sugar no grains thing' is the most important part or is there other stuff that you're telling these people to do to get so lean?
Vinnie: Look, if someone doesn't really care, I just get them off of sugar and grain and that works. But there's also a lot of people like yourself who want to take it one step further. And that's when you start talking about cruciferous vegetables, bang for your buck food, as I call it, getting them off of everything else that could be a problem, making sure they're not having things like diet soft drinks or any kind of chemical.
Just get them eating as healthily as possible. There's that group of people out there and I work a lot with those people. But then there's other people who don't want to go that distance. They just want to know how to lose weight. And they need a simple way to do it. And by pulling sugars and grains and letting them know that potatoes are sugar and to stay away from fruit. If you could just give them a few things to go with, they will go with it and succeed quite easily actually.
Christopher: Awesome. So it's not about making people -- Do you still do any training now? Are you still training people one on one now?
Vinnie: Yeah. Yeah, I still have. Not as many as I used to because I'm busy doing this all day and I just finished writing my next book, which will be out in a few months. So hopefully, you'll have me back on.
Christopher: Yeah, of course, absolutely.
Vinnie: But I still have a handful of people, the Howie Mandels of the world, and all those people. Speaking of another celebrity. I'm just name dropping at this point. But, yeah, I still see a few people every day because -- By the way, I think I always will because I need to keep my hand in that end of it. And I also talk to people by phone. I do phone consults. You go to vinnietortorich.com, you can sign up for phone consult for little than nothing. We were at dinner the other night and some good friend of ours said, "Hey, would you come in and train me? I've kind of lost my way and I want to get in great shape again and the whole thing." So friends and family and some celebrities I still do but that's about it.
Christopher: That's interesting. It's amazing you're still doing it. And I want to ask you about some of the things you've seen come and go and some of the diets. What do you think? There's something you wrote about, the blood type diet in your book and it really made me laugh. What do you think when you see all these different things come along, these different juicing and whatever else, fad diets? What do you think?
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Vinnie: Well, back when I was a kid, 15 and 16 years old, I would see these things and I would go -- Back then every university had a diet. Like there was the Cambridge diet and the Harvard diet and the Princeton diet. And that was a thing for a while. And then there was the protein diet. My thing was as soon as one diet comes out, another one comes out right behind it. And even as a young kid, I would say to myself, well, if it's too good to be true, it's got to be too good to be true.
My mom would try everything and I never actually saw her gain or lose weight. She always stayed about the same. And a lot of times after these diets, would gain weight. Any weight she lost, she would gain back more. So I had some hints early on that diets just don't work and they always make it seem like if it didn't work it wasn't them, it was you. You were the problem. So that was kind of -- I had early hints that diet don't work. We have micro diets, macro diets, diets for your blood type.
I like telling this story and I wish I told this story in the book. I think I wrote it and then I cut it out because it became one story too many. But when I lived in New Orleans, I dated a newscaster. I dated the 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock news anchorwoman. And they had a woman on the air named Leslie Carde, and she was the health and science reporter. And she had literally one night -- And we're talking 1985.
She did the five worst diets she could come up with. You got to realize this was long before computer or Google or anything. There's no Apple, there's no nothing. And she said these are the five worst diets she could come up with. And, in fact, if you try any of these diets, not only are they bad but they can actually harm your health. And I can't remember all five right offhand but one was called the Sludge diet where for three days you were supposed to eat nothing but peanut butter and ice cream.
To create some sort of sludge in your system that will then begin to start pulling fat out of your system and you'll just poop all of your weight away, with the sludge diet. Another one was the chocolate diet, which is very similar to the sludge diet. All you do is eat chocolate all day. Then there was the one that she really made fun of where she said this one won't hurt you but it won't help you either. It was called the prayer diet where you say a certain prayer every day to lose weight.
And there were two more and I can't remember what they were. But she said there's absolutely no way in any of these diets will work. Four of the five will actually cause some sort of detrimental side effect. The very next day, the news station was bombarded with people asking for more information on those five diets that she said would absolutely not work. People are that desperate to lose weight that they would try something called the sludge diet. When you get down to that, you begin to realize that people are desperate for anything.
Christopher: Right. The whole world needs something. So do you look at the -- The Paleo diet, it's kind of Johnny come lately, I suppose, as far as you're concerned. Do you think the Paleo diet falls into the same category?
Vinnie: Yes and no. I think Paleo is as close as you're going to get to a good diet, I don't know if you agree or disagree. But within Paleo, now you're starting to have people splinter off and it's kind of like the Republicans. Now you have the Republicans and now you have the tea party. You have the crazies within the crazies and that kind of thing. The same thing happens with vegans. There's nothing inherently wrong with being a vegan but then you have super duper vegans who will say, "Well, you have to have a raw food diet."
You can't even cook your vegetables. And then you have super duper duper vegans who will say, "We don't even believe in that, you just eat fruits." And then you have super duper duper people on that who will say don't even do that, just breathe air, we're air-tarians.
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So when you ask me if a type of diet is good or bad, it all becomes cultish at some point. And that's where I worry. I worry about that with NSNG all the time, whether it will become that. But what do you think of it? Let me interview you for a second.
Christopher: Yeah, I think you're right. I think people maybe are over complicating it. I think maybe sometimes people are not understanding the real reason we got into this trouble in the first place. I think the goal should not be to reinvent the same old crap that made you sick in the first place. When you look at some of these products particularly the energy bars, so it doesn't have wheat in it anymore, it's got ground up nuts. And it doesn't have cane sugar anymore, it's got honey.
Is that a really big deal? Is that really going to make a difference between health and no health? I don't really think so. So, I think it's important just to keep things simple and to know that if you get to the end of the diet, that's failure. If there's planned failure, that's no good.
Vinnie: Yeah. I've always said about diet, what are you going to do when you get to the last day? It's all about figuring out a lifestyle you can live on for the rest of your life. People will say to me, "How long do you think it will take me to lose these 50 pounds?" And I always answer it with a question, "Why? Are you going to stop when you get there?"
Christopher: Right.
Vinnie: If you are going to stop when you get there, you're already set up for failure. You're already on the wrong diet.
Christopher: Right. I'm probably going to have to steal a lot of your -- So, they're called vinnieisms, these things. They're like little pearls of wisdom. That's such a good answer. Why? What are you going to do when you get to the end of the diet? You're going to go back to doing whatever it was? I mean, that's madness, isn't it? Just to do the same thing again and expect not to gain weight.
Vinnie: Yeah. All the time I'll ask people, they'll say, "Yeah." Everyone I interview, they'll say, "Yeah, I lost 100 pounds and then I gained 150 back." "Well, why?" "Well, after I lost it, I started eating the way I used to eat." "Why?" The whole thing just drives me crazy. I don't want to go there because I'll just get all negative.
Christopher: So I have to ask you. You're probably wondering why I haven't already. Why are you the angriest trainer? Why did you choose that name?
Vinnie: That was kind of by accident. Because when I wrote the book, I was told that if anyone wanted to figure out who I was, I would have to go on the internet and somehow make myself popular. And when you tell it to a guy that doesn't really know how to turn on a computer, that's not a good day. I created America's Trainer and Serena goes, "You should call yourself America's angriest trainer because you're angry at what happens to people."
I'm not an angry guy in life. I'm just angry because people's good intentions had been stolen. We've kind of moved away from that title a little bit calling me just Vinnie Tortorich, celebrity fitness trainer, because that's what people know me as anyway. But that title, we started the podcast with that. We still start every show like that. He is America's -- whatever it says. I don't even know what it says.
Christopher: I really enjoy it. In a way, we have that in common. That's kind of how I got into this too. I followed the traditional guidelines that the USDA food pyramid and high carbohydrates for athlete and when all went wrong I went to the doctor and the doctor gave me a lot of really bad information. When I figured it all out, I was kind of angry. Not super duper like angry road rage angry but still there's energy associated. Like at some level, anger is a type of energy and that energy, it comes across in the way that you speak and it comes across in the humor of the book. I think you can make that anger a positive thing. So I don't really want you to move away from that. I think it's part of who you are.
Vinnie: I don't know if you've ever listened to the show.
Christopher: Of course.
Vinnie: I go on rants sometimes. I'll just get -- Like Ana will read stuff. I get angry on the Monday show because Ana will read stuff and I will just lose it. Once that happens, I'm off and running and it's kind of hard to really come back in.
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When you hear about the mommy -- One of the early shows we did, we've done like 500 shows now, this woman sued Nutella because -- we called her Nutella mom -- because she thought Nutella was healthy to give a kid for breakfast. And the kid got fat so she successfully sued Nutella. Well, Nutella has never said that their food is a breakfast food nor that it's healthy yet she successfully sued that company. I was sitting there yelling why are we leaving this baby with this crazy person? Why is no one going in taking this kid away and putting it in a home where it's going to be safe? And that was like show number two or three. And it's been the same ever since.
Christopher: Right. Yeah, I know. I've resisted the temptation to go there although we do think like that sometimes. Like another good example is people, if you leave your dog in your car with the window wound up then you're going to go to jail. They'll probably sentence you to death of that, at the very least a fireman is going to come along and smash all of the windows. But if you feed your two year old Skittles or Cheerios or food like that which we are pretty sure it's not healthful, then it's okay. That's perfectly acceptable behavior. In society, nobody blinks an eyelid at that kind of behavior. It's very strange to me.
Vinnie: Well, let me give you an even closer to home example. There's a guy. He's been on my show twice, a guy named Brent Merrick. And his kid Jaden is like seven years old. And this kid Jaden broke the world record for the half marathon at seven years old.
Christopher: Wow.
Vinnie: And there are parents out there who's calling for this parent's head, "How can you let your kid run that hard? What kind of parents at you?" And they're not making their kid do anything. This kid found running when he was four, five, didn't want to stop. So by the time he was six, they started putting him in 5k fun runs and then 10ks and then so on and so forth. The kid, I've had him on the show twice. The kid loves to run. Yet there's a public outcry to burn his parents at the stake.
And then there's this mom, I can't remember where she is in the world, somewhere in the United States, the cops have come to take her kids away twice because she lets her kids walk down the street to the park two blocks away so they could go play. And the other parents think that this is unfit for a parent to let their kid walk the two blocks nowadays to go play. They think this is an unfit parent, right?
Christopher: Right.
Vinnie: And the cops have come and arrested the mom and taken the kids away twice. That's an unfit parent. Brent Merrick, they got the torches out, they're ready to burn him at the stake. Yet every one of these effing parents -- We can't curse in your podcast, right?
Christopher: I don't normally but I don't see the reason why not.
Vinnie: Every one of these effing parents will give their kids Fruit Loops for breakfast and that's perfectly fine. That's perfectly okay, that they're going to give their kids a SunnyD. That's perfectly fine, sugaring the crap out of your kid. Letting your kid eat dessert every night after dinner, sending your kids to school with a Ho ho or a Dingdong or whatever are the candy or food, and giving your kid money so that they could buy fruit juices which is nothing but sugar out of their machines at school and letting them have Cokes, letting them buy 32 ounce Coke. That's all fine. Those parents are fine. But the guy who lets his kid run 13.1 miles, let's hang him by his toes until he drops dread. It drives me up a wall.
Christopher: Yeah. It wants me to want to go home, I think, like when I saw some of the stuff, I stopped reading the news for this type of reason. It just drives you completely nuts. Just nothing but good things happen when I stopped reading the news. That's why I don't. You're absolutely right. You're making me think about something else actually. A few weeks ago, I kind of look really carefully at the types of people I've been working with and the types of people that we're getting really good results.
Everybody sees some improvement. When they work with us, they work with Julie and Julie tells them what to eat or they work with me or Amelia and we tell them how much sleep they need to get and how they can get better sleep and if they do some testing with us and we find some problems on the lab results and we tell them how to get, they always get good results. And some people get better results than others. And a pattern I started to notice emerging was the age of these people.
[0:30:03]
When you get to 35 years old, I think, you have this moment like most people would describe as midlife crisis where you kind of have this glimpse of your mortality. And suddenly this is real. If I don't do something about this, I might die. So, those people are highly, highly motivated and so I thought, "Well, screw it. I'm just not going to work with anybody that's less than 35 years old and that will solve that problem. Everybody will get fantastic results."
But there's a story in the book that you tell where you talk about working with a kid. And suddenly I thought, wow, maybe I've got it all backwards. Maybe I should be working with the children and then they'll never get to this place where they need my advice in the first place. So why don't you tell us about the kid that you worked with in the book? I think that'd be a great story to tell.
Vinnie: Yeah. Kevin. As a matter of fact, I was at Kevin's house last night. I still train his mom and a sister. I've been going to that house now for 24 years. I'll tell you, if I could tell you a funny story about Kevin aside from the story in the book. He would always talk about, he and these other kids would talk about their friend Frampton. I would always hear, "Yeah, the other day I was over at Frampton's house." And Frampton this and Frampton that.
One day, Kevin and, I guess, they were 13 or 14 or 15 at that time. I said, "This Frampton, who names their kid--" I figured some mom went to a Frampton concert, maybe that's where they're conceived, this kind of thing. So I said, "This Frampton kid you're talking about, why do you guys call him Frampton?" And they said, "Oh, that's because that's his last name." And I said, "You ever meet his dad?" And they said, "Yeah. He's kind of this bum. He just hangs around the house." And then Kevin made air quotes with his fingers. "He says he used to be some kind of rock star."
I was like, "Does his name happen to be Peter?" They said, "Yeah, you know the guy?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I think I've heard of him once or twice." But these kids were -- The story about Kevin was he didn't want to be fat. By the time he was 11 or 12 he had already weighed 230 pounds. And he should have been half that weight. And when I first started working with him, I cleaned him up -- Tell me this is the story you wanted me to tell.
Christopher: Oh, yeah.
Vinnie: I got him off of everything. Kevin was willing to listen to everything I had to say because I'd gotten his mom in great shape. He would go to this fat camp every summer. I would lose him for the summer. And he would actually come back from fat camp fatter than he went. And by the way, it was called Sports Camp but all the kids that went there knew why they were there. They called it fat camp. It's where rich families in Southern California would send their kids for the summer to try to get rid of their problem and have someone else take care of it.
And he would come back from fat camp fatter than he left. I was really -- After the second summer, I was getting enough of it. Kevin was losing, barely losing any weight. I knew he had to be cheating somehow because I would always quiz him about what he was eating. He would go, "Oh, I have two eggs for breakfast and I have this and I have that." And he was doing exactly what I was telling him to do. One day I was taking Kevin for a mountain bike ride of all things, talking to a mountain bike guy.
I picked up my cell phone to talk to my younger brother and I had him on speaker and Kevin heard me talk to my brother. My brother goes, "Man, ever since I got off of the Cola-Cola, I seem to be losing a lot of weight." And I said, "Yeah, man, you get off of that sugar, man, you'll lose weight right away." And I hung up the phone and Kevin sheepishly said, "Wait a minute, I can't have Coke?" And I said, "Well, no, Kev, that's a ton of sugar." He says, "You never told me I couldn't have Coke."
I said, "What are you talking about? How many Cokes do you have a day?" Turns out he was having several Cokes. I can't remember what it was now, five, six, seven. He was having a ton of Coke every day. Every day, full sugar Coke. I said, "Kevin, I've been training you for two years now." He said, "You only asked me what I was eating, not what I was drinking." But you see, that's kid logic. That's the way they think.
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Christopher: Very black and white.
Vinnie: Yeah. I never once said, "Kevin, what are you drinking?" It never occurred to me back then. Of course, we took him off the Coke. As a matter of fact, he was so addicted to the sugar and the caffeine, we had to wean him off. But even during the weaning process, he started losing. His body did not want to hang on to that weight.
Christopher: Right. So, Kevin, he lost the weight in the end then? He's fine now?
Vinnie: He is happily married man with a daughter and a beautiful wife and he's never gained the weight back.
Christopher: That's fantastic. That's really fantastic. I really wonder then, do you think you should be doing the same thing? We have this other podcast that I do called the Paleo Baby Podcast. We try and talk about baby things, not just pre-conception and pregnancy but also first foods and that kind of stuff. Do you think our attention would be better diverted in that attention, get them while they're young, just tell them really black and white stuff, the rules they can follow, and then maybe you could prevent that midlife crisis where you find yourself spending $1000 on doing tests to try and figure out why you feel so tired?
Vinnie: I think there's a lot of truth in what you just said and I work on that all the time. When I first moved out to California, I came here and went to the powers that be and said, "Look, I see child--" And by the way, no one was talking about childhood obesity in 1991 when I got here. And I said, "I see a problem coming down the pike and we need to deal with this." They said, "Great. What do you think we should be doing?" And I said, "Well, we need to take kids off of all the sugar they eat and all those grain." And Disney pretty much laughed me off the lot saying, "We would be out of advertisers."
I tried to dummy it down when I went over to Nickelodeon and kind of soft sell the sugar-grain part. But they saw right through that and went, "No, can't do it. Can't do it at all." And that was that. They wouldn't have anything to do with it. But, I think, you're on to something by doing that.
Christopher: Yeah. You just reminded me by saying Disney. Tell us about the story, the small world ride at Disney.
Vinnie: Yeah. I forgot about that. I left that story in the book. A couple of years ago, Disney literally had to, for the first time in the history, take the Small World ride and stop it for a couple of months while they went in and reengineered it. Basically, the way that ride works is you get in this kind of boat that's hooked to a cable and the cable pulls you through, "It's a small world, blah, blah, blah." And they take you through that.
When it was all, I think, two or three people could fit on to a boat. I'm not really sure how many. But it was designed for people in the 1950s. But because people are so overweight now, the boats were constantly bottoming out. So Disney was able to put a little more water through the ride to buoy it up even more but it had gotten to the point where people were so fat that they kept bottoming out and breaking the rides so Disney had to shut the ride down and dig a deeper moat for these boats to be in so that people can, it can accommodate the size of people today.
Christopher: Could you imagine being one of those engineers, being involved in that project? I just can't even fathom it.
Vinnie: It's upsetting. I mean, when you think about the whole thing -- By the way, not one fat person I know wants to be fat. But now, we can't even talk about it anymore. I got in trouble. There's a group on Facebook called Vinnie Tortorich's No Sugars No Grains. I don't own the group. I'm a member like everyone else. And it's a group -- I'm looking at it right now. It's got almost 6500 members in it. It's a group that was started by people who read the book and whatnot. I'm a member like everyone else.
And I was at 24 Hour Fitness the other day and I took a photo from behind of a trainer who was training someone. The guy was, he's by all definition morbidly obese, the trainer. I took a picture of it and posted it on that group and said, "Here's where we are where trainers don't even have to be thin anymore." I got yelled at by the group. I wasn't trying to make fun of the guy. I didn't have his face in the shot.
[0:40:03]
I didn't even have the face of the guy who was training in the shot. I just had the back of his shirt that said 24 Hour Fitness Trainer and the girth of this guy. It would have been a better picture had I taken it from the side but it would have caught his face and I would have had to tile out the face. I got in trouble. People would go, "What are you, fat shaming now? What are you, Mr. Fat Shamer?" No, we're in a place now where we don't give a damn that our trainers are now fat. Would you hire a trainer that was fat, that was morbidly obese? I know I wouldn't.
Christopher: No. And so, yeah, I think that's a good point, actually. Do you think the same about doctors as well then? Because I was looking during these heath summits they have online now and one of the doctors that was presenting on that summit, he's just super clever. I mean, he's smarter than I'll ever be and he knows more about a lot of things I'll never know about than I could possibly imagine. But he's kind of overweight. And he's speaking on a weight loss summit. I mean, what are you to think? Do you think -- So, that's not okay as far as you're concerned?
Vinnie: No, I don't. There's a lot of people like that in the weight loss game who are fat. And, of course, to thinks people started yelling at me. "You don't know what his journey his and his journey and his journey." I don't give a **** about anybody's journey. I don't. Either you are who you are or you're not. And that's the part -- And by the way, I've been watching this trainer for two years. You want to know what his journey is? He's gained weight the entire time. He's bigger now. The reason I even noticed him two years ago was because he was heavy.
And he's not smaller now, he's bigger. How do we hire those people? I wouldn't go to a doctor who smokes. The point I made about this on the podcast when I was defending myself, I told Ana, I said, "Look, if you went to a mechanic shop and the mechanic was looking into the hood of the car and couldn't figure out why it wasn't starting and then you looked in the car and noticed, "Oh wait, it was out of gas," would you leave your car with that mechanic?
Christopher: No. No.
Vinnie: No. You would go out and you go try someone else. This guy can't even figure out that the car is out of gas. He's not good. It should be the simple pre-req that at least the trainer is actually in shape. Unless you're a trainer for sumo wrestlers.
Christopher: Okay. That makes sense.
Vinnie: Otherwise, you need to be in shape.
Christopher: Right. And that kind of reminds me of something else actually. I had a lot of health problems myself. We just talked about that in your podcast. One of the doctors, I just couldn't believe how incompetent my doctor was. There has to be good doctors out there. I went to see a bunch of them. And the first one, I really remember this woman quite clearly. I had to wait a long time to get an appointment with this woman. I sat down in her office and I said, "I want you to run a full thyroid panel, not TSH, seven markers. I want the whole thyroid panel."
And she started looking at me and I could see that she was getting nervous. And she said, "Why would you want all seven markers?" And I started explaining the different hormones that are involved in thyroid function and she clearly didn't know what any of them meant. And when she did try to get involved in the conversation, she was clearly confused and she just didn't know the difference between T3 or T4 or any of those things meant. And, I guess, it's because -- I mean, she must have had to have known that stuff at some point.
But I'm wondering if what really was going on there was she just didn't care. It's just a day job for her. She had no reason to really believe in it or care about it. And that's why. I mean, what do you do? How do you even know though? If you're not someone that's into doing the research, how do you even know whether your doctor is one of these people? It's kind of scary to me. But for the same reason, I think they're no good, right?
Vinnie: Well, you have a point because the first time I walked into one of my doctors and said, "Can you do a complete cholesterol panel?" She actually said, "Absolutely, but don't expect me to read it." At least she was honest about it. Because they only check, when it comes to cholesterol, they will check ACL and LDL and start waxing poetic about some coordination between the two, good to good, ACL is the good cholesterol and LDL is the bad.
As a matter of fact, the reason we don't call it low density lipids is because it makes it sound more like a bad rapper, LDL coming at you. Coming at you, LDL. And that's all they know. Because some stat queen walked in and said, "Hey, anyone who has an LDL of this and ACL of that, put him on the stat."
[0:45:00]
That's all they care about. They care about handing our drugs. But at least my doctor was honest in saying, "I will order the entire blood panel for you but don't expect me to read it because I don't know what I'm looking at." Which leads me to believe that you don't know what you're looking at anyway. But that's where we are. Everybody thinks doctor is god. Not all doctors are created equal. You got to find one who really knows what they're talking about. And they are few and far between.
Christopher: Yeah, I would agree with you. To be honest, the length I've had to go to are really quite extraordinary. So I've ended up quitting my job at hedge fund and starting this new business and then I was a guest on Robb Wolf's podcast and that's how Dr. Tommy Wood heard me. And Tommy Wood is now someone I work with on a daily basis. We look at test results together. Tommy is an incredible doctor and an amazing research scientist. That was kind of what I had to do to find a good doctor.
You'd expect you'd just be able to ask your mother-in-law or something and she'll say, "Oh, yeah, the guy on Scotts Valley is great. You should just give him a ring." And I don't think that's true. And it kind of -- The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because I'm guilty of something that you described as being a bad thing in the book. That's not having any qualifications. I mean, I have an undergraduate degree in electronics and one in computer science and I've done various courses in functional medicine that are not--
So I'm partnered with another medical doctor, Jamie Busch. She spent seven years at medical school and she has $270,000 worth of student debt and she's put a lot into her education that I have not. So what do you think? Do you think I'm doing the wrong thing? What should I do now? I've read in your book that I don't have the education that you have. What would you advise me to do to keep doing this work? Do you think I should go get an education of some type?
Vinnie: Well, look, I think so far you're doing the right thing because you're not just waxing poetic and pretending you're an expert. You're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. You've found a couple of experts to run it through. Does that make sense?
Christopher: Yeah.
Vinnie: And by the way, I do the same thing with a couple of doctors. I'm not a know-it-all by any stretch. And when I don't get or understand something, I got, let's see, Dr. X, Dr. Patty. I have four doctors, five doctors that I get to go to whenever I have a question and I have to deal with that. And they're all highly respected doctors. But I think that you're fine right now. Now, does that mean if you wanted to be at trainer this and that? I don't think people who go and get the weekend training course that has no other background is worth their salt in anything.
I had this girl that worked for me. She's a friend of mine. She's a Jewish housewife. She's 60 years old. She over the years became a Pilates teacher, a yoga teacher, a trainer, a gyrotonics teacher and something else. All through correspondence, all over a couple of hour or weekend period on the internet. She's never walked into a college. I think she barely graduated high school. Yet but she's got all these different certificates saying that she could do all these different stuff.
And she's honest about it. If you ask her, "Do you know what you're talking about?" Her actual word is, "Hell to the no." That's what she will say. She will say I learned how to count backwards from ten, therefore, they made me a trainer. They taught me X number of exercises, therefore, I became a gyronotics instructor. They taught me a couple of things about their reformer, therefore, I became a yoga teacher.
You could start mentioning just casual muscles around the body and she doesn't know what you're talking about. No idea. Yet she's got all these different "certifications." Those are the ones I'm talking about. You're not sitting there pretending you're something you're not. As a matter of fact, that's what I love about the Brits. You guys are very honest with who you are and what you do. I live with a Brit. And I get it. I think that's why she loves me and I love her, because we don't live a lie.
And you're not living a lie. You're not sitting there saying, "I know everything about everything." It's just like what's his name? The guy who came up with cholesterol conundrum. I can't think of his name right now.
Christopher: I can't either. I have heard that phrase before though.
Vinnie: He's basically a scientist who does science in other areas, became a -- He started studying cholesterol and he says that. He's from Ireland.
[0:50:03]
Christopher: Oh. You're talking about Ivor Cummins.
Vinnie: Ivor Cummins, yeah. He's been on the show two or three times. Ivor Cummins is the guy who looks at data. So even he says, he goes, "Look, I'm not a doctor. I'm just a guy who looks at raw data and tells you what it is." That's it. No more, no less. And I have great respect for guys like you and Ivor and everyone else that's doing what you're doing. Because you're not pretending to be something you're not.
Christopher: Right. So Ivor Cummins is a chemical engineer. He's an expert in complex systems. And he's just been dragged into this. I'm trying to get him -- We were supposed to record for my podcast last week and something came up. I don't know what happened at work. I hope it was not a chemical spill and stuff ended up in a river or anything like that. I'm sure it wasn't but something went wrong.
Vinnie: He's a great guy.
Christopher: He is a great guy and I'm really looking forward to the conversation with him. Yeah, we're just kind of being dragged into this whole thing just because the answers we got from the so-called experts were wrong. And so that's what motivates us both is we both have skin in the game and we know that people that are giving out the advice right now are not doing a very good job and that's what motivates us.
Vinnie: Yeah. By the way, I was going to say, if you didn't know him, I will get you in touch with him because he's really a good guy. And I'm going to ask you in the air if you can get me in touch with Robb Wolf. People think that I have access to everyone. I've never done Robb's show and Robb has never done my show and I would love to have him on.
Christopher: Oh, yeah, that will be a great conversation. Yeah, I'm going to be on Robb's podcast again with the doctor I talked about, Tommy Wood. So that's going to be quite good. Robb is a super cool guy. He's been on my podcast, The Paleo Baby Podcast and I rebroadcast that quite recently just because it was so good. He's such an amazing guy. Of course, I will connect you with him.
Vinnie: Some of these guys, I don't know, because I use language and this and that but I keep it clean when I have to keep it clean. I had Marion Nestle on last week. I kept it clean for her. I keep it clean when I have to. But, yeah, I would love to have him on and, I think, he's a great guy and I'd love to do his show.
Christopher: Yeah. That would be a fun conversation that I would certainly look forward to. Well, Vinnie, we're coming up on an hour so, I think, this has been good. I really want to know if you'll come back on. I mean, there's so many things we could have talked about. We haven't talked about your leukemia story or your mountain biking and those are the two main things I wanted to talk about. So will you come back on?
Vinnie: Well, look, it's like when you came on my show. We didn't even get to the topic. So I promise to have you back on my show if you promise to have me back on your show.
Christopher: That's definitely a deal.
Vinnie: We should do it -- I'm going to India next month. As soon as I get back from that, we should do it.
Christopher: Sounds good.
Vinnie: Cool.
Christopher: Excellent. Well, thank you so much. This has been fantastic, Vinnie.
Vinnie: Thanks for having me.
[0:53:00] End of Audio
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