Angelo Poli: Aaron Rodgers and the 3 Pillars of Elite Nutrition

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 753 with Angelo Poli.

Introducing Angelo Poli and MetPro

Tom Rowland: Angelo, how are you?

Angelo Poli: I am great. Thanks for having me on.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you. We have a mutual friend in Rob Orlando, and I'm really excited to hear about what you did with Rob. But of course your marquee client is Aaron Rodgers. That's what a lot of people will know about. But tell me what MetPro is and what you do there before we get into what you've done for those athletes.

Angelo Poli: I'm still trying to figure that out, Tom. We're a bunch of nerds. You've probably heard of the kind of think tank when it comes to CrossFit training and programming. So we're kind of like that on the nutrition side. We do programming and nutrition, but our specialty is really metabolism. It's interesting, almost ironic — today, fast forward almost a decade since this whole idea of metabolic profiling started, about eighty-five percent of our clients come to us because they have stubborn weight they want to lose. But when it started, it was really for high-end athletes like the Aarons, the Robs, and so many others, who are basically already performing at a high level but want the most technically accurate next steps to enhance that through nutritional recovery. There's a lot of science and nerdy stuff that I'd love to share with you that goes into that.

Tom Rowland: I'm all into it. I spend most of my free time when I'm not thinking about fishing — this is kind of a fishing podcast, so a lot of the audience is into outdoors and fishing, but there's a lot of people whose number one thing, their New Year's resolution, is to lose weight and get back in shape. We talk about it all the time here. What I do in my spare time is read books and study and try to figure it out on my own. I'm fifty-four and a competitive CrossFit athlete, and this has been a lifelong journey. I was a wrestler in grammar school all the way through high school, so there was all the cutting weight, and it did teach me some things about food. Then I found the zone diet, which taught me a lot about protein, carbohydrates, and fat, but it's been a lifelong learning process. I feel like I get a little better every year, but it sounds like you really have this dialed in. I'm about the nerdy stuff — I like to know exactly what you're doing, and everybody out there is wondering if there's a secret to getting rid of stubborn weight. That's what almost everybody wants, even a high-level athlete who still has that extra ten pounds that just doesn't want to go anywhere.

Baseline Testing and the Science of Metabolic Profiling

Angelo Poli: Solutions can be had. It all comes down to baseline testing. That's an element that as athletes and CrossFitters we understand, but we forget to apply it to nutrition. What's your favorite named WOD, Tom?

Tom Rowland: I like the hero workout, so let's say Murph.

Angelo Poli: The moral of the story is if you have, say, a Fran — I worked with an athlete who was particularly fast at Fran, he did a two-oh-nine. In order to improve on that, what would you need to know? You'd have to know what your previous WOD is. You have to have a baseline, and once you have a baseline you can measure. That's why I love CrossFit — every session acts as a baseline training protocol you can compare yourself against. We do that constantly for our training. I performed at this level at this time for my Helen or whatever, then we train for a month, we try something different, go a little heavier, do more training in the lipolytic or glycolytic pathway, increase reps, decrease rest, whatever we try, and then we test ourselves against that previous time. Nutrition works the exact same way when you're trying to improve your performance, and here's the secret — even when you're trying to retrain your metabolism for sustainable weight loss, it works the exact same way. That's what we do at MetPro — MetPro is short for metabolic profiling. When somebody comes to us, this is what we did with Rob, this is what we do with all of our athletes — we put them on a baseline meal plan. Most people think, oh yeah, I use MyFitnessPal, I know how many calories I'm eating. That's good, that's better than nothing, but that's like saying I'm heading east or west — it gives you a rough outline of a direction. What we need is to get a lot more granular. What is your macronutrient ratio? And even your macros don't paint the complete story. I need to know, are you spreading that out over three meals? Are they balanced? Are you heavy on protein or carbs early in the day versus later? Are you spreading it out over five, six, seven meals? One of my pro athletes was waking up to his alarm at two in the morning to eat an eighth meal, if you can believe that — that was an extreme scenario, not typical. But you have to know where the nutrition is coming from, and are you getting consistent glycemic loads in your meals based on how you're pairing your macronutrients. Most people, when they hear me talk about this, their head is spinning, and they say, look, Angelo, I don't have time to go get a PhD in all this. But that's where you can leverage some very simple technology that helps parse your metabolism. So when I start with a client, I put them on a very simple meal plan, built with foods they like — they don't have to upend anything, maybe their timing is a little adjusted. They ask me, what's special about this meal plan? My answer is always the same — nothing. What's special is that three days from now, when you come back to me, I will know exactly how many calories you ate a day, the glycemic load of each meal, how many times you ate, what the macronutrient load was, how much energy you expended, and all those metrics. Then when I have that, you lost two pounds, you gained two pounds, or you maintained your weight — I have a baseline.

Tom Rowland: So you're looking at, say, a CrossFitter or a high-level athlete — how would you know how many calories you're burning? There's intensity, duration, a certain person burns a little hotter than others. How do you determine what someone's burning, especially working with people over the internet you don't see every day?

Angelo Poli: Tom, you're right, that is a difficult number to know, and I'm glad you asked. For years the technology — pay no attention to the number on the treadmill when you're running, it's telling you a number that's completely off. The numbers have improved with your Aura, your Whoop, they've gotten better. But there is a fundamental flaw the technology will not be able to account for in the foreseeable future, and that's adaptive thermogenesis. What the current research shows, and I've been shouting this from the rooftops for years — I was the guy who worked with a number of the contestants who were on The Biggest Loser. A year after they came off the show they had broken metabolisms. I don't want to bad-talk the show, I know several of the coaches, and overall they were a force for good, but there were some issues. These people would come off of intense scenarios of five, six, seven, eight hours of exercise a day, eating relatively low caloric intake for their expenditure, and their metabolism had been altered. Around that time researchers did a lot more studies and tapped into something us metabolism nerds had known for a while but couldn't put our finger on why. When they do the math — here's how much weight you lost, here's how we account for your lean body mass and fat mass, we'd expect your metabolic rate to decrease to this amount — except it was decreasing more. The delta they now refer to in research communities as adaptive thermogenesis, and it's hard to put your finger on because it's not one mechanism — it's everything from hormones like leptin and ghrelin to neuropeptides and how our insulin levels change and how our bodies produce and utilize energy on a cellular level. It's death by a thousand cuts. When you diet, when you reduce intake, your body acclimates in a multitude of ways across multiple bodily systems, and because of that your efficiency goes up. These calculators that technology uses account for how active you are, your heart rate, hours spent, weight, gender, and so on — a good starting point, but they cannot discern where your body is in that adaptive process. That's really the heart of what we get at. MetPro is discerning where your personal metabolic rate is on the spectrum of adapting to changes in composition, weight, and energy intake, and meeting you where you're at. So to answer your question, you can't get precise with your energy expenditure unless you're in an oxygen chamber with doubly labeled water. For the average person, practically, you can't get precise — you can get close. But you can get precise with your food intake, which is why I'm going to tell you a recommendation that shocks people at first: we tell them the first week, if you're not currently exercising, don't start. Now, trust me, my number one goal is to get people out there moving. But what happens is Johnny comes back to me and says, Angelo, this is great, I just started the meal plan you gave me and I lost five pounds this week. I'm like, Johnny, that's great, except I noticed you started running four miles a day — are you accustomed to that? He says no. I'm thrilled you lost five pounds, but now we have to do the baseline test over, because I didn't get the data I needed. If somebody's already used to exercising, we don't tell them to stop — we tell them to merely continue what their body is currently accustomed to for a few days. The only delta, the only change, is the nutrition, so we can actually track how the body is adjusting to it.

The Biggest Loser Lesson and Why Diets Rebound

Tom Rowland: We probably made about half the audience glaze over, but it's the reason people don't want to go on a diet anyway — why does it have to be so complicated? It doesn't have to be. You can go see somebody like yourself and just do what they say, or you can get more interested in it like I am. I like to know if I'm eating certain things I sleep better, and if I sleep better my performance is better in the gym. Then I'll try different things for a while, and with CrossFit you're recording everything, so I'll see that nothing changed except what I was eating, and I did better. But then somehow you get confused, or you decide to try something different. Maybe I was on the right track for a while, and then you get off the right track. A lot of people get on a program, they'll do great, just like The Biggest Loser — everybody knows a lot of those people gained a ton of weight right back. So why does that happen so often, that people lose weight and then gain it back and put on even more?

Angelo Poli: We do a lot of research. Our latest research paper examined about fifty-two different research projects and papers, some of them meta-analyses, and we tried to explain, through the lens of the thousands of high-performing clients we've worked with, what these studies are really indicating. What we found is here are the biggest influencers: you have your calories, your energy intake versus out — everybody knows that, that's not contested, it remains a huge influencer. Then you have your macronutrients, your carbohydrates — it's interesting to examine the debate between calorie control and carbohydrate control, which comes out on top, and I won't get into the nuance, but the research is conclusive that they're both viable scientific approaches, and the key is applying each to the degree appropriate for your circumstance. Then there's exercise — some good research has exposed the truth about the effort we have to put into exercise to see immediate effects as a weight-management tool, but in eighty-eight percent of the meta-analyses showing successful interventions, consistent regular exercise was a part of it. That illustrates what coaches and athletes already know — exercise has to be part of ongoing weight maintenance. But then there's a fourth component, and this is the one, Tom, that gets missed, and it's the one I spend the most time teaching: periodization. We all know that word, it's sports training terminology, but it's also applied to nutrition. Periodization has to take place whether you're a grandma looking to lose ten pounds to keep up with the grandkids, or an elite top-ten CrossFitter. There has to be some level of nutritional periodization, or there should be, if you're bumping up against a plateau, and here's why: your body will acclimate to your diet. Period. If it can't, you die.

The Ben and Jerry's Thought Experiment

Angelo Poli: Let me explain that. What happens if I were to take a thousand calories out of your diet, Tom? Would you lose a little weight? Sure. So what would you weigh tomorrow if you lost two pounds?

Tom Rowland: I weigh a hundred and eighty-two. If I lost two pounds, I'd weigh a hundred and eighty.

Angelo Poli: Right. Now if you continue to lose two pounds a week for a year, how much would you weigh?

Tom Rowland: A hundred and four pounds less. That's right.

Angelo Poli: So your body will find a way to acclimate to keep you alive. I love asking this in a room full of doctors and neurosurgeons — would you die if we took a thousand calories a day out of your diet? No. You might wish you were dead, you certainly would not thrive, but there are entire countries in the world today whose people exist on less than a thousand calories a day less than what you're eating. They do not thrive, but they will not expire. So your metabolism has to be able to acclimate and close that gap. Everyone has experienced that — you go on a diet, the first week it's like a party, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I'm losing weight, and then by week five it's like, what's going on? That's the body acclimating. Now here's the hard truth: it works in reverse, you just don't notice. Tom, you weigh a hundred and eighty-four pounds — what would happen if you changed nothing about your diet except added a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream every night before bed?

Tom Rowland: I'd probably get to about a hundred and ninety-five.

Angelo Poli: There you go — I've asked hundreds of people this over the last two decades, and you're the expert on your body, I'm the expert on metabolism, and I'll confirm, that sounds about right, you'd probably gain ten or fifteen pounds. Now we have a mathematics problem. In a pint of Ben and Jerry's there's a thousand calories, so that's seven thousand calories a week. Do you remember how many calories are in a pound of body fat? Thirty-five hundred. So that's two pounds a week — fifty-two weeks in a year — any chance instead of gaining ten or fifteen pounds over the first year, you'd gain a hundred and four pounds?

Tom Rowland: It could be — there's a lot of factors, as you add calories maybe you get a little extra energy, maybe you want to work out a little more. I think a lot of people did that in COVID — nothing changed except more came in, no more went out, but more came in.

Angelo Poli: That absolutely does happen, and some people would gain more. But here's what I can promise you, Tom — you would not gain a hundred and four pounds in one year. You might gain more than you were thinking, but nowhere near a hundred and four, for all the factors you mentioned, but it's that metabolic adaptation. Just like if you cut a thousand calories you wouldn't die, if you added a thousand calories your metabolism would speed up. This isn't just theory — they've done research on this. In one recent study with a small group of athletic young men, weightlifters, they put them through a doubly-labeled-water chamber protocol, took them through a cutting phase restricting their intake and measured the effect on metabolism, then reversed it into a refeeding phase where they overfed them, and sure enough that metabolism trailed — and it wasn't weeks behind, it was within twenty-four to forty-eight hours they could see the shift. Supporting that, they've biopsied and researched elite trained female endurance athletes, and found the number one predictor of their metabolic rate is intake, even over composition. Think about that — that's profound. And to back that up, there was another paper that tracked an elite female bodybuilder's metabolic rate through two contest preps. At baseline her BMR was sitting around fourteen hundred. At the end of two contest-prep cycles, about three or four months, her BMR had dropped to about eleven fifty.

Tom Rowland: Explain what a BMR is for people who don't know.

Angelo Poli: Base metabolic rate, or RMR, resting metabolic rate — essentially, vegging out on the couch, how much energy your body needs to sustain you without any activity added on top. So when they tracked it and found her RMR drop, that's what we'd all expect — she's cutting and dieting really hard. But in the process she was also lifting like a machine and actually increased her lean muscle mass during that same period. Despite the increase in lean muscle mass, her RMR still dropped. But post-competition it recovered, and she was even able to outpace her baseline, getting up to close to sixteen hundred, showing that there is hope. Does that prove all the science about muscle mass feeding your metabolism is wrong? No — what it proves is that the body's survival mechanic will persist and even outpace it when the need arises. You still want to have muscle — that muscle mass and training gave her the potential to speed her metabolic rate and outpace baseline, but in that state of deprivation, eating under twelve hundred calories a day, even with the added muscle, the body is going to find a way to become more efficient to keep her alive, and that's even going to outpace the fact she has more muscle. Which is why tracking your intake comes full circle back to what we do at MetPro. We use technology to very simply track and baseline test as we go through. We know where someone's metabolic pace is, and we can predict with reasonable accuracy — hey, if we cut ten percent here, you're likely to have a good outcome, and hey, we probably shouldn't cut anymore right now, it looks like your metabolic rate is just in maintenance, what we need to do is take you through a revving cycle. So remember what we learned about Ben and Jerry's ice cream? I'm going to say something technically accurate, don't write hate mail — Ben and Jerry's ice cream speeds your metabolism. Shocking, right? So many people will be happy about that. The experts are going to say, is this guy crazy? No — but technically speaking, the increase in energy, your body will respond. Now, you're going to gain body fat, you're going to feel lethargic, it's going to hurt your performance, you're not going to like what you see on the scale. But technically speaking, your metabolic rate will be increased.

Periodization: Retraining the Metabolism the Right Way

Angelo Poli: Imagine if instead of doing it that way, we did it in a calculated fashion. Here's what I would do with you, Tom — this is what I did with Rob, this is what I did with all my elite athletes. I'd say, here's what we're going to do next week, we're going to increase your intake, but it's not going to be some twenty percent overnight increase. I'm going to have you add a third of a cup of brown rice, or a quarter cup of sweet potato, a half cup of berries. We're going to do that for seventy-two hours, then add again, marginal, small, gradually, for two or three weeks, and finally you're going to reach a threshold, Tom, and come back to me and go, whoa, Angelo, I need a pound. And I'm going to say, perfect, that's what I wanted. Now I know — I'm not guessing, this isn't theory, this is data that just happened. Now you're at your threshold — now, Tom, go burn that pound off, but here's the catch, you cannot eat a bite less food. This is how we retrain your metabolism, this is how we force the issue and condition it. So now you go do an extra twenty minutes of cardio a day for four or five days and come back to me huffing and puffing — okay, Angelo, I burned that pound off, because you can cardio one pound off, anyone can, you can't cardio a hundred pounds off, but you can cardio one pound off. And then this is where I get all my evil nicknames — you come back to me and I say, great, now I want you to eat another half cup of oatmeal, half cup of this, half cup of that, go gain that pound back. And I would force you, Tom, to increase and gain and lose that same pound three or four times over the course of five to nine weeks, depending on what we were doing, until your metabolic rate was now conditioned as if you'd been eating Ben and Jerry's ice cream that whole time. Then what happens, Tom, when all at once I pull your carbs out and drop your calories?

Tom Rowland: Then you drop the weight, drop the body fat, probably.

Angelo Poli: It incinerates off of you. Because weight loss — and here's the big secret — weight loss is not about eating right or wrong per se, healthy or unhealthy, although that should all be accounted for. Weight loss, technically speaking, is about contrast — what your body is used to versus the contrast between what you change it to, and that's the missing component most people don't understand. You're doing everything the professionals say is quote-unquote right — yes, you are, but your body is used to right. We need to get it used to something different, and then change it fast. Pull the rug out from under it, then we get adaptation. This isn't anything new — this comes from coaching elite bodybuilders and contest prepping, but the same principles apply to performance nutrition, endurance conditioning, hunting and fishing, longevity, wellness, any aspect of performance — if you want to enhance the outcome, you can apply a little bit of science, there's a way to do it.

Applying the Same Approach to Everyday Weight Loss

Tom Rowland: So would you take that same approach with a regular person who has stubborn weight, who's tried everything and it's just not coming off?

Angelo Poli: Absolutely.

Tom Rowland: So many people are looking for the overnight solution — there are plenty of ways you can cut two thousand calories out of your diet and lose quickly, but it's not going to sustain, and you're going to be on that yo-yo deal everybody sees. So your approach seems to be a much longer approach before you see this dramatic rate of weight loss.

Angelo Poli: I'll clarify that a little — I was approaching it from the all-too-common standpoint of being at a plateau. Technically speaking, about eighty-five percent of our clients see weight loss right out of the gate in the first seventy-two hours. There are occasions where somebody comes to us eating — I won't name names, but I had an elite-level CrossFitter who was eating very healthy, boiled chicken, broccoli all day long, but was severely under-fueling on macronutrients. As soon as that got fixed, it was night and day. But most people coming with a weight-loss goal, which is the majority of people who reach out to us, will find that even on a baseline testing meal plan, because of the structure, because of the lifestyle adjustments, because we're not eating sugar and a bunch of garbage, weight drops off right out of the gate. A very common scenario — I'll use a guy who's six feet tall, weighs two-eighty, and wants to weigh two-twenty. So often what we'll do is a baseline test, and after that I'll know where his metabolic rate is and put him on a rough progression with a pretty good estimate of how much weight he's going to lose in his first cycle. In that scenario, I'm looking at what's triggering weight loss. All our meal plans — we have about six hundred meal plans in our CRM, there is no one diet or one approach, it's a matter of having the right tool for the right job, but they're each in categories, one through ten. Rob Orlando talked in one of his videos about being on a phase ten — that's referencing an approximate intake level, there's a lot of nuance to that. I'm looking at what intake threshold triggers weight loss, and based on that I can tell someone, we're probably going to be able to get twenty or thirty pounds off before your metabolism catches up and you hit that plateau, or, your body's stubborn, your metabolic rate's running slow, I'm going to be able to get eight to ten pounds off of you and then we're going to have to do an up-regulating cycle. It all depends on where the person comes in at. But a very common scenario is they started at two-eighty, now they're two-fifty, two-forty-five, but they're getting to the point where there's not a whole lot more to cut. So we're going to take a pause there. Even though they want to be two-twenty, we're not just going to push ahead and ignore metabolic responses — now we spend five, six, eight, ten weeks regulating their metabolic rate up, it's like rebooting their metabolism. Now we can start that process and get down to, okay, now we're going to push for two-twenty. And, by the way, if somebody wants to weigh two-twenty, I'm going to diet them down to two-sixteen. Can you imagine why we might need to do that?

Tom Rowland: I don't know, tell me.

Angelo Poli: Statistically, it's most likely that when you hit your low weight in a dieting process, you're going to be on the lower end of your intake spectrum, and that's no way to live, Tom. I don't want people living without pasta and meatballs every once in a while — you gotta have a good sauce — but you're also not going to have pizza and beer every night either. So that means when they get to two-sixteen, they're on a more sharp cutting cycle, and I want them to gradually gain through that up-adjusting process I described, up to their maintenance weight, so when they get there their body's used to eating so much more, and now we own it. A lot of clients will come to me and say, hey Angelo, I hit the goal weight — and I say, no you didn't, you don't own that weight, what did you eat yesterday? Oh, well, my stomach was upset so I hardly ate anything. So you don't own that number — the number on the scale is a reflection of your metabolism. If you're eating a normal, sustainable amount of food each day and you weigh that number, then you weigh that number. If your environment is such that you didn't eat, any number on the scale is very temporary. Here are a couple interesting stats for our listeners — we've found, running algorithms and data-crunching from a whole bunch of angles, that the best reflection of metabolic pace requires actually a nine-day snapshot. I'll look all the way back at nine days of data, and I'll even look further, at months of history, but in the moment, nine days is the tail.

How the MetPro Platform Actually Works

Tom Rowland: Now the data you're looking at is the amount of calories and what those were comprised of, and how that affected their weight — that's what you're looking at, those two things?

Angelo Poli: Weight, energy, and performance, of course.

Tom Rowland: How do you measure energy — just by feel?

Angelo Poli: That's the subjective portion. The nice thing is now, with some of our sleep trackers and things like that, we can get a little more objective data. But at this point, through our app, I have clients basically putting in a workout score, giving me a subjective personal appraisal of how their performance was today, and that's what we want to see going up and down, and this data tracking takes about ten seconds. That's the key. I've been a personal coach, passionate about personal transformations, for twenty-one years now, and I've learned the secret to consistent transformations with my clients, and it's not what you think — the secret is time management. If I ask my clients to do something that's overly cumbersome, we won't do it. It has to be efficient, it has to be quick. So we've developed our technology with that in mind. The way our platform works — and I'll give some tips you could use at home even if you're not on our platform — one of our coaches working closely with you will assign a very polished, specific meal plan. All it does is dictate, at your meal time, how much should be coming from protein, from complex carbs, fibrous carbs, fruit carbs if you're assigned those, fats, etcetera. It breaks it down, it's not just totals, it's more granular than that, and that's where the technology is leveraged. You don't have to invent and go to the grocery store and get out your spectacles and calculator — you just pick from the food lists the foods you're going to eat, and it runs the calculations for you and says, if you're going to have lean steak, you're going to have this many ounces, and it moves the bar and shows you where that gets you in protein, carbs, and fats, and makes recommendations for how you can hit that. It takes the guesswork out of it. As a user, you simply check off whether or not you adhered to that meal — you either adhered to it or you didn't. If you didn't, the algorithm weights that data less. It'll say, okay, today Johnny weighed two pounds more or less, but looking back at the data in the last forty-eight hours, he only had a sixty-five percent adherence to his meal plan, so we're not going to ignore the data, but we're going to put a lot less stock in it. And then when somebody says, hey, for seventy-two hours I nailed my meal plan, now the algorithm heavily weights that data as quality data, and your coach is looking at it and can read between the lines — oh yeah, he was out of town hunting or camping this weekend.

Tom Rowland: How often are clients talking to the coaches — is that email and text, or full phone calls?

Angelo Poli: It's an ongoing, day-in and day-out process. We do a lot of texting for efficiency, back and forth, but I like my clients to actually talk with us and have a good heart-to-heart once a week, maybe twice a week. Between those conversations you can expect a lot of text messaging back and forth — depending on who you are, a lot of jive, a lot of jabs, a lot of fun. We like to have fun with our clients.

Tom's Own CrossFit Masters Case Study

Tom Rowland: When I looked at your website preparing for this, I noticed you had three categories — weight loss, performance and energy increase, and build muscle. A lot of people are hard gainers, they have a hard time putting on muscle, so that's somebody you're talking to. But for me personally, I'm fifty-four, and if you know about CrossFit competitions, there's fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds who are scaled a little, and then eighteen is when you turn into the regular elite male, and the same weights and movements apply all the way until you're fifty-four. Then when you're fifty-five the weights drop significantly. So I'm playing the system right here — I'm fifty-four, and by the Games next year I'll be fifty-five, I'll be at the bottom of the age group and the weights have dropped. After all these years I've been doing CrossFit since 2008, this is my absolute best chance to do my very best. I'll be at the bottom of the age group with all new weights, some scaled movements, and I'm paying very close attention to it. That's why I was really interested in talking to you about this — I'm trying to dial in everything I possibly can this year. I do weigh and measure anyway, but I'm talking about being in for whatever, I would do whatever.

Angelo Poli: Tom, this is my passion, let's do this, buddy.

Tom Rowland: That sounds great. So tell me about the process, especially around energy — I get tired a lot of times and I do believe a lot of that is nutrient timing. Like I'm eating too much at certain times of the day and not enough at others. When I was doing the zone a long time ago, that's when I felt the best I've ever felt, and I didn't have a tracker, I was doing it with a pencil and a piece of paper, just weighing and measuring, and honestly I felt really great. That was a long time ago. But I'm looking for more energy and better performance, and I feel like I have a body weight that I believe is my best competitive weight, which is about ten pounds lighter than I am right now. So I feel like I could strip off a little fat, but I don't want to do that too early — it's all about peaking, just like you'd work with Aaron Rodgers, there's no reason for him to get in unbelievable shape in the spring, he needs to peak at a certain time. I just wonder what the process looks like for somebody like myself.

Angelo Poli: Let's take you through it. So you're fifty-four — having done quite a bit of work with elite CrossFitters, a lot of people don't realize CrossFit is not just a physical sport, it's very much a psychological and mental sport. Going in and deciding, am I going to train and bet there's going to be more endurance-based high rep, or is this the year they're going to program real heavy and I need to go in a few pounds heavier and stronger — you're playing a little of that game. But Tom, because of that threshold where you're going from fifty-four to fifty-five and the weights are going to drop, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've probably got the strength piece dialed, and you're going to really excel by having your strength-to-weight ratio optimized. That's just my gut feeling for you right out of the gate. So how do we get you there without sacrificing an ounce of performance and recovery? I'm going to tell you a hard truth, and for some reason sports nutritionists don't like to utter these words, but I don't know why we're afraid of it — it's the truth. Doesn't matter how good you eat, when you're dieting down, even eating incredibly healthy, you're going to sacrifice performance. That has to be timed properly. So what we want to do is evaluate what your intake is like.

Tom Rowland: I track my stuff — I've been tracking for the last year, and I'm on a program that reshuffles when I hit a plateau, and I made my weight-loss goals and I feel great, but I think I could feel better and perform better. I probably looked as good as I ever did, like I was ready for a bodybuilding competition, but that didn't mean I felt my best or was performing my best. Nobody cares what you look like, you want to win — if you look at past CrossFit champions like Rich Froning and Matt Fraser, neither one of those guys were the leanest of the athletes, but I think they both knew where the sweet spot was to have the right body weight to win over a five-day competition. If you look at some of the other guys with veins going through their abs, they looked better, but they didn't win — those guys knew what the right body composition was.

Angelo Poli: We have to acknowledge there is a delta for body type — someone more mesomorphic or endomorphic versus someone more ectomorphic may actually be on the leaner side and still bring their best. But there's so much truth in what you just said, Tom. Back in 2017 I was working with a young man who qualified top ten, and at the end of the day he wanted to look like a Calvin Klein model slightly more than he wanted his recovery to be a little better, and he came in about twenty-second, twenty-third, and it broke my heart, because he actually needed those reserves. Sometimes it takes life experience and maturity to recognize that, but what you're saying is absolutely spot on. So with your intake, what we need to do, Tom, is decipher at what point you have the metabolic leverage to endure a cutting cycle without it being too costly. Do you know currently about your caloric intake and your macros?

Tom Rowland: About twenty-four hundred calories.

Angelo Poli: Okay, so you were too low — not too low for today, that's the right amount for you today because that's what your body is accustomed to. But I guarantee I can get you over three thousand without body fat gain, and that's going to get us that delta. Now the way we're going to do that — you've heard the debates, well, you don't eat when you're not hungry, it's better to eat less often, and all the research on the pros and cons of intermittent fasting. Then you have the bodybuilding community that says nope, you eat every two hours.

Tom Rowland: That's why it's so confusing, because you're hearing these conflicting, almost polar-opposite things from people who obviously know what they're talking about — this guy's a bodybuilding champion, this guy's a football player, and it's no wonder it's so hard for people to have success because you don't know who to listen to.

Angelo Poli: Precisely, and it's not that one guy has it figured out and all the others are wrong — all of these approaches are viable, they're just not optimized for you. This age-old debate, carbs or calories, which do you cut — the answer is whichever you personally have the most leverage with. For you right now, calorie restriction is not an option for us, twenty-four hundred calories for you. For somebody less active than you, sure, they could survive down at eighteen hundred, no problem. But for you the lever we have remaining would be macronutrients. If I got you up to about twenty-eight, twenty-nine hundred calories a day, then I'd have both levers. It's not one or the other. That's what I'm passionate about, Tom — helping people understand the science. For example, what's better, small frequent meals, or just listening to your body and eating when you're hungry? Well, when you eat only when you're hungry, that's a lifestyle and behavioral tactic that will likely result in less over-consumption, so it's a force for good. But in the context of someone like you, Tom, there's no place for that — we want to train your metabolism to be conditioned to eating at two-thirty every day, so it anticipates it and optimizes around it. When we have you eating small meals frequently, you won't actually lose more weight in a cutting cycle — the research is out, they've done it with small frequent meals and with just two big meals, and it's conclusive, you lose about the same based on your calorie and carbohydrate restriction. But what they don't explain is on your way up — if I need to add a hundred grams of carbs to your diet and spread it between just one or two meals, you're going to gain some body fat. But if I can spread it out over six or seven meals, piece of cake. Not everyone is trying to add a hundred grams of carbs and spread it out, so it's a matter of understanding what we're trying to do and the timing of it. So for you, how many meals a day are you eating right now?

Tom Rowland: Three meals a day.

Angelo Poli: So right out of the gate I'm going to encourage you — not because it's holding you back today, but because it's going to raise the roof on your potential tomorrow — I want you to go to a minimum of five, and if I can twist your arm, six. It's a time commitment thing, I understand, but if you go to six it's going to give you the leverage to increase your intake without body fat gain. Then we could go back to three during a cutting phase if we elect to, but likely you're going to feel so good it's just going to give us so much leverage for a cut. That's how you're going to get that ten pounds down and still enhance your performance and recovery.

Blood Work: What It Can and Can't Tell You

Tom Rowland: Do you look at blood work ever, or just the metrics we've already talked about — weight, calories, workouts, and whether you subjectively feel good or terrible?

Angelo Poli: For the average person, they want to know, am I losing it in a sustainable way — that's the big metric for a lot of people. But for someone who's an elite athlete like yourself, those are all the metrics, and I want every data point you can get your hands on. It's not a requirement that you get blood work, but especially for my elite athletes I'll always encourage it. This is a different tangent, but blood work is so useful, yet it's a pet peeve of mine — it's used in marketing in a misleading way that frustrates me. There is no blood test that's going to tell you what you need to eat to gain or lose weight.

Tom Rowland: I hear that a lot — explain that. I think my wife is doing this right now, she's submitted blood work to somebody, and it's supposed to be the be-all end-all, telling you what your ancestors used to do.

Angelo Poli: Those things are fabulous, useful metrics, they just overpromise when it comes to weight loss. I can tell you what the blood work is going to say — that your body is sensitive to carbohydrates, and when you eat too many carbohydrates you gain weight, because that's how every human body works. Your blood work will give you some unique foods you may have sensitivities to, and inflammation markers, and these are all pieces that fit into the wellness protocol. But what it cannot tell you is how many calories you're eating — it can't look at that. We have to actually test it, put you on two thousand calories, and I don't care what your blood work says, you're either going to lose weight or you're not. That's truth, so we have to work within those confines. It can tell you what your body may have more digestive sensitivities to, it can tell you about your hormones and inflammation markers, but some of the programs out there are marketed to get you to invest the money and they're basically going to put you on the same plan — reduce your carbohydrates, reduce anti-inflammatory foods. I can tell you for free to eat less sugar, less fried food, more vegetables, moderate fruit — these are all things we already know. Now, where blood work becomes even more critical is when there's a deficiency — the value of a supplement, of micronutrients, becomes exponential to the person who may be deficient in something. You get a supplement on the market with the same psychology as diet gurus and fitness gurus — they're not saying things that are wrong, you'll read, well, I took vitamin D and now I'm hitting PRs. Vitamin D is great, I recommend it for all my clients, I love vitamin D, but here's the truth — is it going to make you feel that way? If you were deficient in it, it will. If you weren't deficient, it's going to be an optimization, not the end-all be-all, and that's why you get conflicting recommendations. The blood work can tell you things like that, but it can't tell you now is a good time metabolically to cut, or now is a good time to increase your intake and rev, or now is a good time to maintain. The blood work can't give you those indications, so it's just a matter of understanding what is.

Avoiding the Yo-Yo Trap: Tinker, Don't Abandon

Tom Rowland: So you just have to tinker with it — every person's different, you need to tinker a little, see how you respond to certain changes, and then double down on those changes, or abandon them if they're not working. That's where I think a lot of people get frustrated or overwhelmed with a diet — they start to lose a little weight, they stop losing weight, and they don't tinker with it, they just stop and go back to what they were doing before, and the weight goes back up. I don't know why it happens to so many people so often, but you do see that yo-yo thing — you lose weight, then you gain weight. I think they just don't have a real program like what you're providing, and someone there to reassure you — look, you've hit a plateau, you're probably going to stay here a little bit, but the plan is we're going to get you down a little further, so stick with it. And it's at those plateaus, I think, where people go, I knew it, and go right back to where they were. But they never know how close they were to success — if they'd just stuck with it another few days or weeks they might have seen the scale start to move again, but a lot of people abandon right there because they don't know, and they think, maybe it's keto, or maybe it's paleo, or this other person says this is the way to do it, and they shift to something else and who knows what happens.

Angelo Poli: Abandon ship.

Tom Rowland: Right, but they never know how close they were. I do want to talk to you more about it, because I'm serious about wanting to really dial it in this year, and what you're saying makes a tremendous amount of sense to me, especially getting more calories as fuel, because I really do feel like I run out of fuel in the day, but eating more only puts more body fat on, and I don't want that. So you're just living in this malaise of not feeling your best — you don't feel your best, but eating more, the scale just goes up. I know I can make it on eighteen hundred calories, at one point in this cut I was at eighteen hundred calories, I got down to where I needed to be and got comfortable, and then it started to creep back up again. And I know I'm not at my prime competitive weight, but it's also not the prime competitive season, so I'm willing to be wherever I need to be to peak at a certain place, and that's what I really need help with — looking out into the future and saying, we want you to feel your very best during all this training, and get you down to where you're peaking at the beginning of the competitive season and able to hold on to that all the way through the summer.

Angelo Poli: Well, Tom, what we're going to do, if it's alright, is hang on when we're done here for a moment and I'm going to get you set up to work with us for a month, we'll do a comp session for you, this will be a blast — this is the exact demo that lights us up, we're so nerdy when it comes to this stuff.

Tom Rowland: You know, when I saw somebody like Rob Orlando, who for a long time has paid very close attention to his nutrition and is trying to do the best, start to work with you and have a really great experience, feeling like he's recovering better as he's getting older, able to work hard — I know the guy, I know how he works out, he's an animal — those testimonials on your website really make a difference. Because if somebody knows somebody like that, that's really something — to take an Aaron Rodgers, or a Rob Orlando, and tweak what they're doing to make them get their ultimate performance. If you can do that for somebody like that, when you're talking about Aaron Rodgers or Rob Orlando you're only going to improve their performance by tiny degrees, because they're already the best in the world, and if you can get them to improve one percent, that's massive. But for the regular guy who hasn't exercised in two years and gained a little weight, there's fifty percent that you can work on there, so much more leeway. If you can polish it up for somebody like that, it really speaks highly of whatever you're doing. I'm looking forward to checking it out — we can do a follow-up and see how it's going, if you want.

Where to Learn More About MetPro

Angelo Poli: Yes, thank you, Tom. I just want to say I learn from every one of these athletes — that's very kind of you to say. I'm just fortunate to have been able to work with athletes with this kind of work ethic, and it's been a lot of fun. We're going to have some fun together.

Tom Rowland: Okay, cool. Well, tell everybody how they can learn more about what you do, become a client, your website, social media, whatever you have.

Angelo Poli: Sure — our team built a link for your audience: metpro.co/rowland. If you go there, it's a front-of-the-line way to actually talk to one of our consultants — you're not going to get put on the phone with a robot, you're going to talk with Steve or Will, and they are excellent, they've done this for years, they're professionals. Even if this doesn't end up being the right fit for you, come ask them your questions — they're going to ask you some questions to get to know you and your history. Most people are accustomed to a one-size-fits-most experience even when it claims not to be — that will not be your experience with us. We're going to get to know you, your fitness and wellness history, your training history, how you currently eat, and the specifics of your goals. The goal-setting session with us might surprise you a little — it's about what we're not going to focus on early on, because we need to be hyper-focused on moving one or two dials aggressively. Talk with one of our consultants, they'd love to get to know you and hear from you. You have a great audience here, Tom, thank you.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I do, they're really incredible people here. So if they call or visit the website, it's a free consultation, just to get to know you and see if it's a good fit?

Angelo Poli: It's a hundred percent free, absolutely.

Tom Rowland: Cool, thanks. Alright, I'm gonna try it and see what happens, and we'll do a follow-up after I get started and work with Angelo for a month. And if you're interested — I know there's a lot of people out there, not just on Physical Fridays, who put a few pounds on in COVID and are having a hard time taking it off — this might be a great way to address that. Alright, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit after this, and we'll be back with another awesome guest just like Angelo next week. If you have guest suggestions or show suggestions, you can text me at (305) 930-7346. Alright, that's it for today. Thanks, Angelo.