#80 Enter Flow on the Steak and Eggs Diet

Siim Land (0:00)

What about the steak and eggs diet? Can you carb load on just cruciferous vegetables? That broccoli bomb, that broccoli power. What do you eat for depression and anxiety? And how to get into the flow to quadruple your productivity? These questions and much more in today's episode of the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and before we begin, I want to mention that I'm organizing my next biohacking bootcamp here in Estonia on December 7th until the 9th, so it's a three-day event. This time, I'm bringing an additional teacher called Leigh Evan, who's a Wim Hof instructor and a bulletproof coach from Australia. He's going to teach people how to take ice baths and control their nervous system with breathing. My own workshops include optimizing the circadian rhythms, understanding nutrition, exercise, and I'll also reveal the main principles of my upcoming book, that's going to balance longevity and performance. I'm not going to tell you what the exact title is yet, but if you come to the bootcamp, you may get a free copy.

The bootcamp also has some sauna sessions, awesome cooking, and generally a great time.

The videos of the previous bootcamp I had in July are also on my Patreon page, so if you want to support this podcast and the YouTube channel, then consider becoming a Patreon. The links are in the show notes.

Future updates and free chapters of my book will also be uploaded there first. But now, this broccoli bomb has been ticking for too long, so let's get to Body Mind Empowerment.

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Siim Land (1:45)

Everything the body needs.

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Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:50)

What do you think about Vince Gironda's eggs and steak diet for muscle building, ketosis and testosterone boosting? Do you think that standard keto is better for hypertrophy or is the steak and eggs diet better? Where's the steak? That's a cool question to begin with. So maybe some backstory as well. Vince Gironda was this OG bodybuilder from the 50s, and he was one of the pioneering old school bodybuilders who developed his own way of eating called the steak and eggs diet. And basically the steak and eggs diet is a cyclical, zero carb ketogenic diet. There is no real mystery about it. What you eat is just steak and eggs.

He prescribed eating something along the lines of four to five eggs and eight ounces of steak twice a day or something like that. And yeah, it is like the cyclical keto diet in a nutshell, but it differs from regular keto in a sense that you're eating zero carb.

You know, it's more like carnivore diet with the eggs for these five days. And on the sixth day, you're going to have this massive carb refeed with unlimited amounts of cake or bread or potatoes or carbs basically. And that's how we did it. He said that it helped him to maintain performance at the gym while still staying relatively lean year round without having to go through these larger periods of bulking and cutting like the other bodybuilders started to do after that era. So yeah, I think he definitely was onto something. And the steak and egg diet definitely works. And it's like a really effective way of doing the cyclical keto diet. And it's also like a very effective way of promoting muscle hypertrophy with like a low carb version of eating.

In terms of the regular keto diet, then there isn't definitely like much difference.

You know, the small amounts of vegetables you might get from cruciferous isn't going to have like any significant difference between a standard cyclical keto diet and the steak and eggs diet. It's simply a matter of preference and how you choose to follow it. But other than that, you know, steak and eggs, those are the best muscle building foods and they do have some great benefit for both ketosis as well as testosterone. And Vince also was one of those guys who used to say that raw eggs and especially whole eggs with the yolk, they're the equivalent of the equivalent of anabolic steroids. And because of like the high amounts of cholesterol and all the other saturated fat and essential fatty acids as well.

So he would actually prescribe eating a bunch of those eggs. And in my opinion, eggs are indeed very anabolic. They also contain leucine, a lot of leucine. And leucine is one of the main drivers of protein synthesis. And it's going to stimulate the mTOR pathway. Eggs are probably the most potent, natural muscle building foods.

And if you leave out things like whey protein or such. But yeah, eggs are amazing. I myself also consume probably like 8 to 12 eggs every single day. And I even do it in a much confined time window. I myself do like a modified version of OMAD, where I do consume my food within like four hours or two to four hours. And yeah, during that time, I'm going to eat a bunch of eggs and steak as well. But I also eat some veggies. So, you know, because I think going zero car for a long period of time may not be that optimal. But if you do it in a cyclical manner, like with the steak and eggs diet, then that can be quite effective as well. So, in fact, if you do feel better on a very low carb, almost carnivore diet, then I would still recommend you to do it like the cyclical carnivore diet, where you follow something along the lines of the steak and eggs diet, where you consume maybe like three to five days of the week your zero carb. And on the sixth day, you may introduce some vegetables. You may stay keto, but you would still want to incorporate something else that would kind of reshape some of the metabolic profiles and to kind of boost your metabolism as well. For bodybuilding specifically, the steak and eggs diet that incorporates some carbs and these surges of insulin, that's also great for increasing performance and promoting muscle growth more so than the regular keto diet. You can definitely build lean muscle with the standard keto way of eating, but it's more difficult and definitely you're going to lack some, you know, the extra pump or the extra oomph that will kind of tip it over the top. And you will definitely be, you will definitely see greater results with some carb days basically.