Dr. John Jaquish Explains How to Get the Body You Want

In this episode, we chat with fitness inventor, Dr. John Jaquish on his products including Osteostrong, the x3 system for weightlifting, and his latest book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want.

Full Transcript

Janelle Leatherwood: You’re listening to Staying in the Game, a Plum Dragon Herbs podcast, where we have conversations about mindset and techniques for staying at the top of your game. I’m your host, Janelle Leatherwood. Welcome to our show today.

We’ve got a special guest, Dr. John Jaquish, who is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want, and he’s also the inventor of several products, including OsteoStrong and the X3 system for weightlifting. Dr. Jaquish, you’ve got your Ph.D. in biomedical engineering-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Janelle Leatherwood: … and I would just like you to tell us a little bit about yourself, and maybe let’s start out with your early life experiences and some of the background in your life that got you to get to where you are today.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. No problem. When I started researching bone density it was because my mother was diagnosed with osteoporoses, and when that happens, there’s a different level of priority when it comes to helping your mother versus just having a job, and she was very distraught.

She thought she was going to die a lot younger, and many people do from… They die from compounding factors surrounding fragility fracture, so they break their hip, they go to the hospital, they get pneumonia because they can’t move around, and then they die of the complications, and there’s a 50% of death after the age of 50 if you break a hip.

Janelle Leatherwood: Yeah, it is crazy. I’ve had a lot of elderly relatives where it’s like their downhill starts as soon as they break a bone or hip or whatever, you know?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. You say elderly, 50’s not elderly.

Janelle Leatherwood: Yeah, that’s true, absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t see people like… My mother was… She was in her 70s at the moment that this happened, but she was doing everything. She was super active, and then she was heartbroken. She felt like she couldn’t hike anymore, she couldn’t play tennis anymore, she couldn’t spend any more time in the garden, because if she breaks something, she might die.

What I told her was, “I’m going to find out what athletes out there have the highest bone density, they’re the total outliers, and when I find them, I’m going to figure out what they did to get that way,” and then maybe we’ll learn something from that and we’ll go from there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Immediately, I did a literature review on high levels of bone density in different sports, and I found the outliers almost immediately, and they were gymnasts. So, it had to do with high impact force, so you can lift weights all you want; you’re not getting anywhere near what a gymnast does. A gymnast gets 10 times their body weight sometimes on a dismount from the uneven bars. Nobody squats 10 times their body weight. Most people can’t squat two times their body weight.

So, yeah, I realized the impact was just such a powerful stimulus we were getting, but we were all avoiding it. You always hear low-impact exercise like walking is fine. That’s nonsensical. That’s like saying aspirin is good for headaches, here’s one milligram. A milligram will do nothing. It’s not anywhere near the effective dose-response.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, once understanding this, I thought, okay, that’s why the recommendation resistance exercise will improve bone density. Well, it’s completely untrue when you look at standard resistance, but if somebody were to make a medical device that would apply force in the manner you absorb force in a high impact incident, well, then we could get the benefits without the risks, and so that’s exactly what I did.

So, that medical device was tested through the University of East London at a hospital that’s right down the street called the Stratford Village Surgery, and this is in London, and they ran the tests and collected the data, and they come up with an incredible study.

Dr. John Jaquish: It became crystal clear to me when some of the physicians who ended up being in the test group… Some of them were in the control group, but some were in the test group, and they would ask, “How is it that we can tolerate such high forces?” Because we had a post-menopausal population loading their bodies with five, six, seven, eight, nine times their body weight.

These people had never exercised before, and they were just becoming incredibly powerful because they were having bone adaptations. Now, some muscular adaptations were happening too, but what I realized was that the difference, the reason we can’t lift what we can absorb is different biomechanics and different positions.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, when I looked at the impact biomechanics, I realized they were seven times more powerful than sort of the stretched position biomechanics, or the inefficient position. So, if we have a sevenfold difference through the range of motion of a weightlifting exercise concerning output capacity, then why would anybody ever lift a weight that is a static mass? That makes no sense.

That’s a waste of time, the worst stimulus, because the way weightlifting works right now is we just overload joints and underload muscle, and that’s a quote from Peter Attia. That’s why he hasn’t been a fan of weightlifting. He does it, but he does it very light and he does it more safely than most, but I would argue you go light, you just end your results right there.

There’s no getting away from heavy. You need to put heavy loads on the body, you just need to be strategic about it. And then that’s what I came up with, is a strategic way to place force on the body so that the force goes up to where you are stronger and it goes down where you are less strong.

Janelle Leatherwood: So, how does it feel? I mean, what are you feeling when you’re using this medical device?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it’s a hard exercise. You only have to do 10 minutes a day of this method, but when you are completely exhausted, it is like a new definition of exhaustion. It’s powerful. But it’s all you need. You only need one experience, and anything in nature is one stimulus, and then an adaptation. The idea that we do multiple sets with weightlifting is just a monument to how stupid weightlifting is, because-

Janelle Leatherwood: I don’t know if you said it’s hard to describe. The audio kind of cut out for a little bit when I first asked you, so I mean, are you feeling the force, or is it-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah, incredibly so.

Janelle Leatherwood: So, how does an elderly person tolerate it better than… I mean, I can imagine they’re able to tolerate it better than a gymnast trying to do a gymnast move, but yeah, describe what type of feeling-

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I mean, older people are weaker people, but they’re not worthless, so they can… The scale of what they will use… When I do a chest press I hold 500 pounds at the top. As I move the bar closer to myself, it becomes 300 pounds, and then, as I move the bar so that it’s close to my chest, it becomes 100 pounds. But they’re just going to pick a different resistance that’s not the same magnitude, but they can already do it.

I think one of the problems we have with the treatment of the elderly is we give them a dumbbell that’s two kilograms or something. They use more strength putting their shirt on in the morning, but sort of like we’re getting activity confused with progress, and we put them through almost like a play that looks like a workout, but it’s not.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, everybody does a golf clap at the end, and the guy walks away and he goes, “I didn’t do shit.” So, we need to stop doing that. That’s not doing them any favors. It’s probably based on the liability of the facility, which I do understand, but I think older people need to understand that they need to get as… Well, heavy is relative to them. If heavy is 20 pounds, well, then it’s 20 pounds. It’s 500 pounds for me, but it doesn’t matter. It’s got to be relative to them. They have to take their musculature to fatigue to do that. See, they’re-

Janelle Leatherwood: So, they don’t have… Is there any range of motion at all, or is it just resistance?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, there’s the full range of motion. Isometrics doesn’t do anything. That was a myth of the 1960s and ’70s that somehow is coming back, but if you do a literature review, if you look back at the history of isometric research, it does nothing. Missing out on a lot of things. There are no hypoxic moments, there’s no sarcoplasmic fatigue, there’s no myofibril fatigue unless you’re using a very specific range of motion, so a wall sit will do nothing for you.

Janelle Leatherwood: Interesting. That’s an interesting comment, wow. Okay, so where do people find this medical device, and what is it called?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, so there are two products that we’re talking about now. My medical device is called OsteoStrong. There are 150 locations in eight different countries. The device is not something you have at home. It’s about the size of a car in a couple of separate pieces, and you need to go to one of these clinics, and they only have them at OsteoStrong. I give an exclusive license to that company, and then the other one is a home product called X3, and they can just get that online at x3bar.com.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay, and so when… What’s the difference in the amount of benefit you can get from the home product versus going to the clinic?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, the clinical product is for bone. The other one is for muscle, so they’re very different.

Janelle Leatherwood: Wow. Completely different, okay. So, the X3 bar is for muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay, and I was watching some videos and some other content where some top athletes are using this.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Right now there are about 30 professional athletes on the website, including the… You count all the pictures, there’s about 30, but one of those pictures represents the entire Miami Heat basketball team, so they use it exclusively, as well as the other guys on there, and I mean, they might throw some drills in there for what they do, because they have to be good at their sport, but for the most part, they’re 100% X3, and so those are the people who are just cool enough to endorse me without me paying them anything. I do know there are 10 to 20, depending on how you judge a top athlete in their sport, that use X3, and they’re just not associated with the company, they just went and bought one.

Janelle Leatherwood: Wow. So, you have your book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Do you ever convince any of these top athletes to give up their training schedule and only do what you’re doing?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They’re the easiest ones to win over, because they’re at the highest level of training and they’ve been spinning their wheels for years to get better. So, do they believe there’s a better way? Absolutely.

It’s the beginners who think any day now I’ll drop that weight who have been working out for maybe only a year or two don’t yet realize that what they’re doing is nothing, but the way I encourage them is to be more open-minded, like, who’s fit? Who has the body you want? Is it one out of 600 people? One out of 6,000?

Dr. John Jaquish: Probably more like one out of 60,000, because really, anybody I know with visible abdominals is advertising a product on social media. If just about everybody who looks sort of good gets a sponsorship deal, it’s time to look at the industry and acknowledge that the industry has given us the most failed human endeavor of all time.

You go into any regular gym and look at the people that are in there and then you go next door to the Pizza Hut, everybody looks the same. I mean, really. I know people that have worked out for years and their body hasn’t changed at all.

Janelle Leatherwood: Yeah, well, okay, let’s talk about the Pizza Hut goers for a second. So, you’re eating a primarily carnivorous diet. How much does that play into it? Let’s say I’m not willing to give up my diet, but I’m willing to try the X3. So, will I still achieve pretty good results, or how much does one weigh versus the other?

Dr. John Jaquish: If you don’t have the proper amount of protein you will never build muscle. Never. It’s like, how many brick houses can you build with no bricks? Zero, because you don’t have the building block. Now, I have made it easier… So, there was a point where I was eating three pounds of meat a day in one meal. I only ate one meal a day because I wanted a fasted benefit every day.

So, let me tell you, that last pound I did not enjoy, right? I mean, it’s just so much. Then, of course, I have some vegan friends and they’re like, “Dude, I can’t do that, I’m vegan.” So, I thought there’s got to be another approach to this, and so what I discovered was a cancer therapy or part of a cancer therapy that had to do with flooding the body with essential amino acids in a very specific ratio but making them with bacterial fermentation.

Dr. John Jaquish: It was very successful when it came out in the early ’90s, and it’s still out there, but it’s not recommended by mainstream medicines. A lot of guys just don’t know about it, but it’s really big in Spain to a certain… It helps to recover from chemotherapy. When chemotherapy first came around, there were a lot of people that doubted the chemo.

Of course, nobody wrote it down that way, but it was just seen as well, they died of cancer, but the chemotherapy is very damaging, so they give them this anti-wasting protein so they wouldn’t lose muscle, they’d at least maintain what they had when they were completely bedridden, and they had amazing clinical data.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, what happened was their patent ran out and I went to these guys and I said, “Hey, what about this for fitness?” It was funny because they said, well, almost the same thing as everybody else who I’ve talked to about the fitness industry. Oh, the fitness industry is full of stupid people, you won’t convince them of anything scientifically, and they’re pretty much right. I mean, if you look at where most fitness information is found, it’s YouTube and Instagram, pictures and video. So, they were right in that just going with fitness audience…

Dr. John Jaquish: So, pretty much who I target that product to is just busy professionals. Same thing with the X3, busy professionals and athletes, because most of the time, most people aren’t on the internet to talk about fitness. It’s more like they want to talk about how smart they are, and it’s like, if you’re unwilling to learn, which people who are on the internet to brag, they’re not there to learn. You’re not willing to learn, then there’s nothing… You won’t ever make progress, so just get lost. So, yeah, we targeted a very different audience, and sure, there’s pushback, but not from those who read the scientific documentation.

Dr. John Jaquish: And also, I can tell you that the people who benefit from it the most, and I know you started by saying with this question, it’s like, what if people don’t want to change their diets, well, what they do is they replace their protein need with this bacterial fermentation, which is vegan-friendly. No animals were harmed in the creation of this product. So, when you have that and you can replace all the protein, then anybody can build the maximum amount of muscle, and that’s okay.

Now, with their other nutritional choices, I would urge them to avoid things with oxalates and inflammatories, because that’s just going to hurt their joints and inflame every cell in their body which, of course, can encourage different types of cancers and things like that. So, now I eat a tiny amount of red meat, and that’s all I eat in a day. My entire daily calories might only be 1,000, and I’m 200 pounds.

Janelle Leatherwood: When you say you’re eating a tiny amount of red meat, are you saying you get your protein from elsewhere?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, from the product, the bacterial fermentation.

Janelle Leatherwood: Oh, okay. And I’m looking Fortagen , right? I’m looking online and it’s called Fortagen .

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: F-O-R-T-A-G-E-N. So, that really helped a lot of people who didn’t want to eat a huge amount of meat. Also, I know people think eating all meat is controversial and it’s cancer-linked. This is all untrue. There were some heavily biased studies done with people who… They found a group of 1,000 people who ate an Oscar Mayer hot dog every day for 40 years, I’m not kidding, and they had a 2% greater chance of colorectal cancer. Yeah, they probably had a 2% greater chance of dying for all kinds of things, because if somebody eats an Oscar Mayer hot dog every day, they’re not doing it for their health. They also probably smoke more, drink more, do more hard drugs, having sex with prostitutes,

I don’t know. You can probably make a whole list of people who don’t give a shit about life, because the only person who’s going to eat an Oscar Mayer hot dog every day is that guy. They didn’t control for any of that. I It’s like, so, you designed this study so that would fail for meat eaters. I see.

Janelle Leatherwood: It’s like, sadly to say, every time I drive by a Wienerschnitzel it’s like, is that place still around? I’ve never even been there.

Dr. John Jaquish: They use organic meat now.

Janelle Leatherwood: Oh, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: I thought the same thing, so I walked into one, and it’s like all organic meat, and they have gluten-free buns, and it’s just like, oh, well, okay, I can see this working.

Janelle Leatherwood: They sell healthy food now.

Dr. John Jaquish: Here’s what gave you and me a heart attack, is they didn’t change their logo. So, you feel like it’s the same old Wienerschnitzel, the nitrite meat, it’s just not that. It’s really funny.

Janelle Leatherwood: That’s funny. All right, so you’ve got your amino acid protein-packed. Is it a powder or…

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s powder. You just mix it up. Tastes like pink lemonade.

Janelle Leatherwood: Tastes like what? Pink lemonade?

Dr. John Jaquish: Pink lemonade, yeah.

Janelle Leatherwood: Ah. Okay. All right, so this… I’ve taken people through kind of a little journey, right. We were first talking about osteoporosis and a better way to treat it, get off the dangerous medications, and you talked about your OsteoStrong clinics, and then there was a little bit maybe confusion that I interjected, because I didn’t realize we’re talking about two totally different products with the X3 bar, which is geared toward muscle, and we talked a little bit about the athletes that use that, and then how it’s really necessary to do that in tandem with a protein-focused diet. Is there anything else that you would add to that mix for getting strong and fit?

Dr. John Jaquish: You got it all. It’s two things. It’s a superior stimulus, which you will get with X3, and it’s very hard to get anywhere else. People ask me, “Well, can’t I do this at home without your product?” Well, I don’t want to be just hustling the product, but I mean, think about it. I wouldn’t have bothered inventing something if you could just do it at home. Sorry. Yeah. But it’s a best home gym that’ll outperform any home gym. It’ll outperform the Olympic Training Center. It works so well. But it’s $550 and it fits in a drawer or a bag, so you can put it in a bag and put it under your bed.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay. The X3?

Dr. John Jaquish: The X3, so I feel like it’s the cheapest best home gym alternative, and it works so much better than anything.

Janelle Leatherwood: But this isn’t targeted toward bone conditioning, correct?

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay, so what if you need to do some bone conditioning? Because a lot of our customers are martial artists. They’re into iron palm training. They want an iron fist, strong arms, forearms. What can you do to harden those if you aren’t close to one of your other clinics, the OsteoStrong clinics?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, the OsteoStrong clinics would help them. The way you get stronger fists and elbows is by basically creating microfractures in the bone by hitting, usually, bamboo. So, you crush the bone matrix in the outer cortex, and it grows back as what you would call a calcium deposit. So, it’s almost like putting a callus on your bone, and that’s how far as to build bone that is so powerful for striking, but it doesn’t mean they’re fracture-resistant, it means they’re fracture-resistant in that one little spot. But yeah, if they want to be able to punch their bricks and stuff, you got to build that up. They already have the formula for that. It’s bamboo, actual hard structure.

Dr. John Jaquish: I read about this and I found it… I found the writing to seem hyperbolic. I thought it was just BS, like no way. Like, they’re not actually crushing the bone, and then I went to a kickboxing academy to actually take a couple classes. I wanted to see what they would have me do, and so they had me go and do it, and I’m like, okay, we might deaden some nerves so you don’t feel it as much, but I watched them do it and watched how they instructed me to do it. It is literally creating microfractures.

Janelle Leatherwood: Well, and a lot of people know that in order to get a little bit more conditioning and recovery from that type of training is they use our products, which are Dit Da Jow, which is a lineament that’s good for seeping into the skin and even into the bone to get that extra nutrition where they need it. We’ll have to send you a sample of our product so that you can take a look at it as well, but-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Beat me up so I can experience it. No, that sounds great. I’m excited to try that.

Janelle Leatherwood: Well, good. I want to talk a little bit more about recovery and strength now since I brought up this topic. So, I think I heard you talk on another podcast about how you do load up on some carbs after a heavy workout, but this isn’t something that you recommend for amateur athletes. Do you want to clarify that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Carbohydrates have no value to the human body. None at all. Fiber is completely unnecessary. The concept of fiber keeping it clear is sort of like, oh, my toilet’s plugged up, let me throw a towel in it and flush the toilet 10 times. So, you don’t add more solid matter on top of solid matter to get a pipe unplugged. The basic logic is not even there, so fiber is not necessary, and then, when you eat a mostly-meat diet or all-meat diet, almost nothing goes through you. Your body uses almost 100% of what you eat. Your bowel movements become very small. Not that that was your question.

Janelle Leatherwood: On recovery, using carbohydrates after a heavy workout.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, so right after the workout, and you can even do it right before the workout because I’ve heard some people complain about heartburn, and they have high blood flow, and they have some carbohydrates and it just doesn’t… It’s being may be used so fast there’s an acid response, so either way, you want to pair the carbohydrates, either before or after, with a workout, because it gets stored and processed as glycogen. It replaces the glycogen that just got used.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then what I do is I don’t load up on it. I have 80 grams, which is not much, to replace that glycogen, but then I also mix that with a vasodilator, so I take a vasodilator supplement or medication, like epimedium that’s used in Chinese medicine. That would be a good vasodilator, or you can just go for the prescription level and take a Viagra. It does have performance benefits that are incredible when you pair them with carbohydrates in a workout, and then you stretch afterward, and this is a way to create hyperplasia. This is the splitting of muscle cells. This was once thought impossible.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, that’s the only way carbohydrates are really used with meat. Other than that, they’re not even a macronutrient. They’ve been misclassified. The amount of carbohydrates you need to take in to sustain and thrive in life is zero. That was actually published in the US Food & Nutrition Guide in 2005, it’s a textbook. So, I guess the guy from Kraft and the guy from Nabisco had that day off, because Kraft and Nabisco want everybody to be vegan, not because it’s good for you. It’s also because they know vegans don’t eat kale, they eat cookies and cake. Yeah. Right, because vegans eat… They can’t live without processed foods, so they don’t have a resistance to processed foods, so guys like me Kraft and Nabisco don’t like at all, because they got nothing for me, but they-

Janelle Leatherwood: Well, I think there are probably some vegans who would take issue with a little bit of what we just said.

Dr. John Jaquish: Do you think so?

Janelle Leatherwood: I think so. I mean, I’m staring at a book right now that my son brought home from junior high, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. Have you read that?

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Janelle Leatherwood: I’m just wondering if we got you in a room with this omnivore how you would battle it out, the nutrients that you get from plants, a primarily plant-based diet. I guess what would you say to that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I would say a lot of those nutrients would… You can’t prove that we need them. Yeah, they’re there and we’re calling them nutrients, but do we need them? Are you sure? Because no study’s been able to determine much, except for iron, B12. There’s a handful that we need, but there are a couple of others that, even if you’re in a deficit, your body will make it. When I’m low in vitamin D, my body just starts making vitamin D, especially now that I’ve gone carnivore. Also, let’s remember vitamin recommendations, the best information we have right now, the best, was done with expert opinion in the 1950s, which is the lowest form.

Dr. John Jaquish: You couldn’t even publish a paper based on expert opinion, but here’s another… A study was done at University of Florida by a researcher friend of mine, his name is Jason Colton, and that study, they said if we were only to eat whole foods from anywhere around the world, because we all like looking at things like we’re tribal people living in one place. Well, so much for your nut butters, which come from seven different continents. But let’s just accept that. If you were to have only a whole food diet, no supplements at all, how many calories would you need to eat to get to the recommended daily allowances ascribed by the American Medical Association? Take a guess.

Janelle Leatherwood: All right, I’m going to guess 2,000.

Dr. John Jaquish: 27,000 calories a day.

Janelle Leatherwood: Oh my gosh.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, and nobody ever ate like that. There’s never been a human that ate that much. Not even someone who’s morbidly obese can eat that much. So, the whole idea is a joke, and so my advice to people is to ignore it. If you have a deficiency, then address the deficiency. Now, have blood work done; don’t avoid the doctor. But when they say you’re low in some vitamin, just be like, “Well, okay, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I’m performing at a high level.” Another reason I want everyone to get involved in some sort of athletic, where it be just X3 training just for maximum strength and musculature and aesthetics. Everybody wants to be prettier.

Dr. John Jaquish: No matter what it is, you want to test your body because you want to know where you stand. You want to know how healthy or not healthy you are. Can you sprint? Can you hike for 20 miles? You got to know these things about yourself. When I know I can do everything, and they look, and they look at my blood work, and there are a couple of vitamins that are low, but not all that low. I’m like, all right, well, I won’t do anything different then. They’re like, okay. Yeah, so I’m very suspicious of those vitamin recommendations. I think they should just be ignored.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay. Well, that is a very unique and interesting reflection on nutrition, but I love that you’re sharing these with us to give people a new way of looking at it. And I know that you challenge people to not just take your word for it. You want them to research and find out on their own. Do you have some good resources on your website for people to look into?

Dr. John Jaquish: The book has 250 academic references, so literally, this book is 0% my opinion. Everything is scientifically backed up. Unlike what the US government says, there was science used in this, and it’s cited. So, yeah, I encourage everybody to check the book out, and a lot of the questions will be answered there, and we have a great staff answering questions, so if somebody joins the Facebook users group they can meet some of the 100,000 users and ask any question that they want, or maybe search for others who have asked that same question.

Janelle Leatherwood: Yeah. What do you have going on the horizon right now? What do you have coming up?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, a little bit of writing, a little bit of product development. I never want to promise anything. We had a product that was on its way to being produced, and just killed that this morning.

Janelle Leatherwood: Oh.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s something great for people, but it just doesn’t have the right business model behind it. It’s not going to make money.

Janelle Leatherwood: Well, do you feel like are some of the holes in our wellness world right now where we need something, we need a better fix, a better solution?

Dr. John Jaquish: It has more to do with eliminating than adding, but I’d say finding substitutes for some of the snacking habits that we have. Why do we need to have cheese and crackers when we have wine? Do we need to be eating? Is this an hour before dinner kind of thing? I go to a lot of cocktail parties, and it’s like wines in my face, and I’m politically active, so I go to these events and it’s just like, can I have a glass of water? I know all this stuff is free, or my donation’s paying for it, but I’d rather you just give it to the candidate or the charity instead of spending it on expensive hors d’oeuvres. We are in this kind of perpetual lifestyle where we’re constantly engaged in grazing, and that shouldn’t be like that. So, I think some of the general activities we do should be changed up.

Janelle Leatherwood: Do you ever catch yourself eating for pleasure, or have you been able to eliminate those cravings?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I am told that I have a level of willpower where I shouldn’t be able to make decisions for what people should do, and I agree with this, because I know I’m willing to do a lot of things that nobody else is willing to do. For example, I’ve done three days dry fast, no food or water. I don’t think the typical person’s going to do that, and I went years with eating absolutely nothing but meat. I’ve added in a couple of things because I’m trying to come up with a recommendation that’s easier for, there’s no pun intended here, but easier for people to swallow, because when I say I have one big meal that’s just meat, and then I don’t eat anything for three days, and then I repeat that process, people are like, “You eat one meal every three days?”

Dr. John Jaquish: They get halfway through the first day, and then they eat a large pizza, because they just can’t. They think they can’t. I mean, I hear the word can’t all the time, and I… My general attitude is just grabbed them by the ear and throw them in a cargo plane, get above the Amazon Jungle, we parachute in the jungle and say, “Listen, man, we’re going to eat what we kill, and it’ll probably take a couple of days to hunt down the first animal, so you can kick and scream here like a child, but I’ll just leave you here to die,” and marching out of the jungle on foot. So, don’t break anything.

Janelle Leatherwood: Have you done any of that kind of real-world coaching?

Dr. John Jaquish: I have by myself, but this is one of those discipline things that I’m good at and others aren’t.

Janelle Leatherwood: We might have the beginnings of a new reality show if you’re up for it.

Dr. John Jaquish: You know, it would be great if I could just take someone whose favorite word is can’t, and they’re a perpetual victim, everything is somebody else’s fault, this is like almost everybody I see on the news. The news is now the Victimhood Olympics. I’d love to take these people and do that with them, but I’m pretty busy running a company right now.

Janelle Leatherwood: Yeah. Well, for those who say they can’t, do you have any little bitty bits of advice for people who are only willing to take some baby steps towards bettering health?

Dr. John Jaquish: Of the things that I recommended, some of them are exercise-based, some of them nutrition-based, tell me the ones you can start today and you’ll never look back. And they usually say, “I could do one meal a day.” Everyone’s done that by accident like you’re flying somewhere, international long flights, you land, and then you sleep for a couple of hours, you wake up and eat breakfast, and you realize you went more than 24 hours without food. Did you die? Usually, the answer is no, especially they’re there to answer the question.

Dr. John Jaquish: We do that all the time without thinking about it with air travel, so I know everybody can go 24 hours with no food. You’re drinking water, and it’s a lot easier if you’re distracted, you’re sitting at home. I understand the weight that people put on during the lockdown because they were bored. When you’re bored, a lot of people like to snack, so one thing I do is I don’t keep any snack foods in my house. The only thing there is steak in the freezer, and then steak thawing out for tonight.

Janelle Leatherwood: Which might be hard to do in a house with teenagers.

Dr. John Jaquish: It wouldn’t be hard for me, because they’d wipe their tears away. I’d just say, “All right, stop being a sissy, get to work. There’s no choice. Humans aren’t meant to snack. You’re not a bird, you’re not a cow. Get to work.” That’s the way it should be. Even in sort of ancient times when we would have been in tribes, you had to hunt a mammoth, which took a couple of days. Do you think people brought snacks with them? Do you think they had their little hydro flasks so they could stay hydrated? No. They just went to work and they did great, which is why we’re all here. So, yeah, this sort of candy-ass rewriting history thing that people like to do with modern convenience nutrition products, that’s just not how it works, and they can repeat their lie over and over again. It’s nonsense.

Janelle Leatherwood: Yeah. Yeah, well, there’s one way you would be on the same page with this Michael Pollan. His book’s also a New York Times Bestseller, but he talks about if it has a label and it’s calling it a health food, that’s a red flag right there that it’s not a portion of healthy food.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, Nature Valley granola bars are made of things that did not come from nature.

Janelle Leatherwood: Well, it was fun having you on your show. I think you told us a little bit, but if people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I created a landing page so I didn’t have to call out a bunch of stuff. Just go to doctorj.com, D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter J, dot com.

Janelle Leatherwood: Okay. All right, great, and we’ll also have links and a show notes summary of this-

Dr. John Jaquish: Great.

Janelle Leatherwood: Thank you. It was great having you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Great.

Janelle Leatherwood: Take care and have a good rest of your day.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right, but-bye.

Janelle Leatherwood: Bye. And thank you to all of our listeners for joining us today.