Zack Arnold

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‘The Kung Food Way’ (The Lesser Known Martial Art)

About Episode

We all know what it’s like to sit on the mix stage at 4pm on a Friday and try to resist the plate of warm chocolate chip cookies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional indulgence. But if you find yourself constantly exhausted by the barrage of unhealthy food options in the post-industry, you need a better strategy.

In this episode I have an in-depth conversation with Meredith Gold, the founder of the program ‘The Kung Food Way.’ Meredith is one of the rare few people I’ve come across who not only has an extensive background working in the post-production industry but also has a lot of knowledge of athletics (being a black belt herself) as well as nutrition.

Meredith is a scenario-based self-defense instructor as well as a holistic nutrition coach, a member of Black Belt Magazine’s Hall of Fame and was even voted their ‘Woman of the Year.’ Her program draws parallels between everyday safety/self-defense strategies and healthy lifestyle choices.

If you’re fed up with working in post because the food options are always terrible, this episode will provide you with the basic defense strategies you need to begin making healthier choices.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Meredith Gold, who is the founder of the Kung Food Way, and you’re probably thinking right now, what in the world does that even mean? So, Meredith, it is a pleasure to have you on today to talk all about this concept, which I absolutely love.

Meredith Gold: Oh, I’m so delighted to be here. Thank you.

Zack Arnold: So, for a little bit of background, and I mentioned this a little bit in the show intro, Meredith is a very, very unique person to be talking about health and nutrition, as well as self-defense, because she’s not just a health and nutrition coach and a self-defense instructor, she spent years working in post production, and finding somebody that has that kind of background for my audience is frankly impossible, so it is so, so cool to have you here, and just, just to warn everybody, Meredith has a very soft sounding voice, she’ll kick your ass, Meredith, tough as nails, don’t mess with her, but anyway, you’re a wonderful human being, but you know, just, you know, your stuff, so anyway, where I want to start is just giving a little bit of explanation of your backstory, because this is where I think this episode can be very, very powerful, beyond just the good information and the tips about nutrition. I think understanding where these ideas came from is so paramount. So, let’s kind of start at the beginning of your origin story.

Meredith Gold: Let’s see, I got into self-defense because I was assaulted as a teenager. I lived in fear for a really, really long time, because I had been assaulted in broad daylight in my neighborhood in Beverly Hills as a teenager. Was a long time ago, it was 1980 and no one really dealt with it or helped me cope with it. It just was something that, like, oh, you’re fine, get over it, kid, keep moving. And so when I moved into my first apartment, I was working on a show at Paramount, and I was moving to an apartment in the Hollywood Hills. I decided to take a self-defense course, and I immediately changed my life. It was a program called Impact Personal Safety. They still teach here in Los Angeles. They’re a really great organization, and they do reality-based full-contact self-defense training, utilizing realistic scenarios. What happened in that training was I was re-empowered. I realized that even though something bad had happened to me in the past, I now you know, could change my future, and frankly, just put a new ending on an old story, which was extremely therapeutic and super empowering. So I was really at the beginning of my editing career at that time. I was working on a movie called Ghost, I was on the picture crew, and was really dedicated to working in film, but also realized, God, I love self-defense. I love this particular kind of self-defense, because it was changing people’s lives. It was really helping people who had horrible assault histories get a new lease on life. So I was lucky enough for many years to have a dual life where I was in the cutting room during the week, and on the weekends I was teaching self-defense, and it was really, you know, the best of both worlds. And they did that for a really long time, but in the early 2000s it became really clear that the schedules were just too crazy. There was no way that I could schedule classes for the weekend, because I wouldn’t even know until Thursday if I had to work the weekend, and so I was on the horns of a dilemma, and made the decision that I really wanted to pursue self-defense fully, and so I left post production, which was really hard. I still miss it, I miss the camaraderie, and you know, it was a lot of fun, but after 16 years of being a picture and sound assistant, I left, and in doing so, and focusing a lot more on self-defense classes, I realized that, you know, a lot of students that are coming to us, so I left Impact Personal Safety, that’s where I had become an instructor, and I left Impact Personal Safety, and in the year 2000 my husband, Mike Belzer, who’s a lifetime martial artist and was one of the male instructors, he and I started our own program based on the same training methodology, full contact self defense, realistic scenarios, so in teaching all these classes I was recognizing that a lot of our students who had trauma histories were oftentimes living with health-related problems, body image related problems, weight-related problems. They could be directly traced back to their trauma histories, and when they would go through this incredibly empowering self-defense program, and learn how to say no under stress, and learn how to hit full force and full speed. They started to have a different feeling about themselves, which is the whole point of the training, and I started to have students come to me and say, you know, I think I’m finally ready to start dealing with my health issues, or I think I really. Do want to get in shape, you know, and I’m feeling more confident to go out into the world, and I really wanted to be able to help them, and so I went to nutrition school, because I felt like that was the missing piece, I wanted to be able to continue to help them on their path of empowerment, and so I attended the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City, and learn the skills that I was going to need to help people get healthy, but when I was at nutrition school, I would be thinking about it, and all this stuff I was learning about healthy lifestyle and food choices, and finding balance in life, and you know, really creating a holistically healthy life. I realized, you know, what all the stuff that I’ve already been teaching people for 20 plus years, it all works when you apply it to nutrition, whether you’re talking about self-defense or nutrition concepts like awareness and avoidance and boundary setting, and keep a safe distance, and use simple techniques. All the stuff that I was teaching my self-defense students apply to nutrition, so that is how the Kung Food Way was born. Self-defense-based nutrition strategies, because I realized that it’s a wonderful way to integrate these ideas that I consider to be all part of, like, a holistic personal empowerment pie. If you can envision that, like, you know, everyone has different components to that pie chart, but it could be, you know, for me it’s like being able to speak up for myself and be heard, and being able to use my awareness and know that I can take care of myself, kick ass if I have to keep my body fit, and yeah, you know, I really think that knowing how to eat, how to go source healthy food, and prepare healthy food is equally important in my personal empowerment pie. It helps me feel like I’m competent and capable and self-sufficient. So that’s the concept of the Kung Fu way, is helping people learn the skills that they need, so that they can feel empowered, independent, and capable on many levels.

Zack Arnold: Well, I can tell you that if right now I were either faced with an attacker or I were faced with a plate full of warm chocolate chip cookies on the mix stage, I’d probably be more successful against the attacker, to be perfectly honest. I mean, that’s, that’s a just.. it’s a huge rampant problem throughout our industry, and you really brought to light in.. because I had seen you originally at a presentation for the Motion Picture Editors Guild a few months ago, and I was like, oh my god, this makes perfect sense, like I’m even not immune to just all the stuff that’s thrown at you all day long, so kind of having that picture in your mind. If you’re an audience member, thinking, oh my god, everybody knows that it’s like to be on the mixed stage at 3o’clock on a Friday, they’re just shoveling food down your throat and you can barely focus, and you’re like, oh, I don’t need to give any notes, I’m in a sugar coma. Like, we’ve all been there. So, let’s start talking about some of these strategies that you’ve put together, where you do align real-world self-defense strategies with nutrition, and then we can go a little bit deeper into some of the information about nutrition as well. But let’s start with these kind of core concepts that you have.

Meredith Gold: Yeah, awesome. The primary one, whether it’s self defense or nutrition, is awareness, and I know that sounds, you know, trite, like, oh, please, everyone says that, but they say it for a reason, because the more aware we are of who and what is around us, the more possible it is to make a choice that can get us out of danger before we even have to be in a physical confrontation, so for sure, you know, the number one thing I would teach someone with self-defense is know who and what is around you, use your awareness, and the nutrition corollary for that is to really tune in to how you’re feeling when you eat certain foods, because without a doubt, if we’re paying attention, we will notice, oh yeah, after I ate that thing, I felt really energized, and you know, great for the rest of the afternoon, versus, oh my god, after I had this thing for lunch, I just wanted to take a nap, and I think that paying attention to it, tuning into it, is so critical, because too many of us just assume that there’s no alternative, too many of us just assume that, of course, I want to take a nap in the afternoon, not really understanding that that’s not necessarily normal. It’s not, and so I think it’s extremely important to pay attention to how the foods that we’re eating are affecting us and making us feel. And the second piece of awareness, when it comes to nutrition, is to tune into why am I eating? It’s extremely important. Why am I at the refrigerator at 11 o’clock at night? I already had dinner, I have enough calories on board, I don’t need any more calories. So, what? What is driving this desire to put something in my mouth? And, of course, oh my god, in post production with a. All the stress and pressure that everyone is always dealing with, mindless eating, emotional eating, you know, it’s, it’s a huge problem, because most of the time we’re not really hungry. Well, that might not be true, if you’ve been pulling a long stretch and cutting for a long time, you might be starving, but I guess, like you’re saying, that that plate of cookies on the mixing stage, most of the time we’re not eating them because we’re actively hungry, so just to take a beat when we realize that, you know, we’re just about to put something in our mouth that may not be necessary, and just check in with that awareness and say, why, why am I eating right now? What, what am I really feeling? Am I bored? Am I lonely? Am I pissed off? You know, am I just so stressed that this feels like the thing I want to do, and then make a better decision, because if we continue on autopilot and eat without thinking, then of course for most of us regret sets in right away, you know, I mean, it feels good for a minute while you’re chewing and swallowing, and then, then, here comes the self-loathing. So, awareness would be my number one strategy

Zack Arnold: To me. That’s always the first thing that I help people understand as well. I actually wrote a blog article when I first started the Fitness of Health program that was all about the idea of trying to measure how you feel when you eat something, and not just how do I feel after I ate it. Like, after I eat a chocolate chip cookie, I feel fantastic for like five minutes, but then how do I feel in two or three hours? And once I started to develop that mindset and eliminate the whole, oh well, this cookie says it’s 185 calories and 17 grams of sugar, like I should either eat it or not eat it, but now I just look at food as fuel and I say, all right. I’m really super busy right now. I have, like, for example, right now, as we’re speaking, I’m in the middle of three different episodes simultaneously. I have a pilot that I’m finishing, I have an episode that I’m doing notes for the network, and I’m cutting dailies for a third. Like, I got a lot going on. So, when it’s 3o’clock in the afternoon and somebody says, ‘Hey, we’re all having birthday cake, my thought isn’t, ‘Oh man, I can’t have the calories. My thought is, well, if I have the birthday cake, as much as I would love it, because anybody that listens knows I’m a sugar whore, I’m not going to be able to do anything for the next three hours, and I would rather go home and put my kids to bed instead at work on Facebook, because I don’t have the energy to cut. So awareness is a huge, huge component, if not the top component, it’s the same with activity too, but we’ll stay on the nutrition track for now.

Meredith Gold: I, you know, I agree. I think Zack, what you’re talking about, it’s.. it’s having the self knowledge you already know well enough. If I eat this now, this is going to be the result, and it might be a physiological one, where I’m just going to be zapped. I’m just going to feel like crap after I eat this, and I have stuff to do. And again, the duality is also the emotional part of it, like, how am I going to feel about myself if some, you know, someone is, you know, making a concerted effort to change their habits and do something different, so that they can maybe reach a weight loss goal or reach a fitness goal or something. One of the things that I do, even when I’m marketing, if I’m hungry or having a bad day or stressed, and I’m finding myself in literally in the supermarket aisles reaching for, well, my thing are these things at Trader Joe’s. They’re these lentil crunchy curls that I don’t know, they’re some weird extruded crunchy project product made out of potato flour and lentil flour, and it’s a giant bag. It’s supposed to probably be like 10 servings, but I know that because they’re just so crunchy and yummy that I go into weird, like machine mode, and I just will keep eating them because they have, you know, they’re light as a feather, and whatever. I literally have stood in the Trader Joe’s aisle and just taken a deep breath for a second when I’m having the impulse to reach for that bag and projected myself forward. What’s the likely outcome from me doing, you know, going back into this habitual behavior? You know, I’m going to get in the car, I’m going to rip the bag open, start eating it on the way home, because I’m hungry, and before I know it, three quarters of the bag is going to be gone, and I’m going to be annoyed with myself. I’m going to be disappointed in myself that I did it again. So, really, again, like you’re saying, that self-awareness, that understanding of what’s the likely outcome for you, and it’s not the same for everyone. I mean, I think that’s also important. Not everyone has the same experiences, but to pay attention and take notes, and be willing to spend maybe a couple of weeks keeping a food log, keep a journal, so that we really understand how certain foods are affecting us, and then we can reference back to that, and start really developing those important skills that allow us to go, oh nope, that seems like it’s going to be a good idea now, but I’m going to pass, and here’s why.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that developing a food journal or tracking food, tracking calories, like I think all those are great for developing awareness, and that’s a point of confusion that listeners and readers have had with me in the past. They’ll see, I’ll write an article or have a podcast about how calorie counting doesn’t really work for long-term health, and they’re like, “But you said I should be using My Fitness Pal, but you said I shouldn’t be counting calories, I don’t get

Meredith Gold: It. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: And what I try to explain to people is that if you’re on My Fitness Pal, counting every single calorie for the rest of your life and trying to balance your life based on income versus outcome, that’s not how the body works. However, if you take 30 days and force yourself to write down what you’re putting in your body, and you understand the makeup of it, and more importantly, like you said, you write down, okay, how did this make me feel? All of a sudden, you’re gonna have 30 days of invaluable data where you can say, “Wow, now I understand why at 3o’clock every day I have to lock my office door and take a nap. Now it makes perfect sense, but once you have that information, you’re like this also means I can do something about it.

Meredith Gold: That’s right, that’s exactly right, that it’s not just an inevitable outcome, that and again I think that is so important, whether it’s self defense or it’s nutrition, this idea that we actually are participating in this, we have a choice in affecting the outcome. There it isn’t inevitable, it’s but it’s more than just learning the skills, just just as you said, it’s more than just counting the calories, it’s more than just following a diet plan, and for the self-defense analogy, it’s more than just learning a bunch of techniques in the stress moment, in that moment where you’re going to need it, which is never going to be ideal. It’s never going to look like it looked in the dojo when you were practicing it. For nutrition, it’s never going to be ideal. You’re going to find yourself on that mixing stage, you’re going to find yourself at a barbecue or at a an event where you’re not cooking for your own in your own kitchen in your own environment, it’s those times that we are able then to rely on what we know about ourselves and the commitment that we’ve made to ourselves to pay attention to that, and then we can act effectively in that moment, but if we’re just relying on the actual sort of mechanics of it, of the or like the tools that I learned, that’s more of an intellectual process, so that’s where integrating it, making it a really holistic experience is so critical, because as soon as we’re out of an idealized environment that can be really problematic if we, if we don’t have, if we haven’t developed those sort of really deeply programmed responses to those unpredictable situations.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I love that parallel with self-defense, because I studied martial arts for about a decade as well, but I did one of the more classical forms of the martial arts, where you do katas or forms, you do a lot of stand-up techniques, where people kind of load the punch and hold it there for you, so you can do the hip throw or do the shoulder throw, whatever it is, which you’re never going to face anything like that in real life. And so I’d done that for seven or eight years, and then I took Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. There’s a stand-up component to it as well, where it was more real-life. You could, you couldn’t go to 100% but you go to like 90% and all of a sudden, when I was put in that situation, a switch turned on that hadn’t been turned on in eight years of doing classic martial arts, because the adrenaline was like, “Whoa, this is like the real thing, and if I don’t do something about this, I’m getting choked out right now.

Meredith Gold: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: And I’m gonna put a link to one of the videos that you have, because I saw it, just like how things work in your studio, and I’m like, yes, that is what I want to do, because it is full flipping contact, like it is craziness, but it’s as close as you can get to a real world situation where things are just super messy, it’s you’re not going to get a nice little spin roundhouse kick, you’re not going to be Van Damme, like it’s just going to be ugly, and it’s about survival, and that’s really the way that works in the real world with nutrition as well. And I think that that’s where so many people get discouraged as well. I, I did my nutrition plan, and I had this and that, but then I went to an industry mixer, and I had three drinks, and they had this and that. I’m, I give up. I just can’t do it. It’s like, no, no, no, no. If you build the system, you can deviate from it and always come back to it. It’s once you set these ridiculous goals and say, well, my goal was to do this for 90 days, 100% and now I failed one day, so I give up. Like, it just doesn’t work.

Meredith Gold: That’s right. That’s an exact dovetails perfectly into set strong boundaries. That’s a key concept that I teach in self-defense and nutrition. You know, know, know your limits, know where they are, be willing to enforce them, be willing to say no, you’re too close to me. Take a step back, you know, I will talk to you, but you have to take a step back. If, if we can get comfortable and give ourselves permission to say that to someone in a stressful situation, it becomes far more possible to allow people to get closer to us, and I know that that’s a kind of a strange duality there, but it’s the more we can say no, it gives us the freedom to say yes, because we’ve shown ourselves. What we’re capable of, and what we’re willing to do and say to keep ourselves safe, and the nutrition corollary is what you’re just referencing, where it is possible to go off track, even the best laid plans, you know, nothing, nothing survives first contact, right? I mean, it’s just how it goes. So, okay, I have a plan in mind, I have kind of a lifestyle that I’m following here, and yeah, stuff is going to happen, and you are going to be in situations where you go, you know, I’m hungry, I need some calories, and those are my options, so I’m going to eat whatever that thing is, and as soon as I’m back in my lane, where I’m, you know, able to make the choices that I want to make, I’m going to do that. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, but it comes down to a sense of personal confidence and control. Am I really in control here, or is someone or something else in control? And the name, the Kung Fu Way, kind of.. my husband actually came up with it when we were brainstorming, but you know, I’ve actually had people say that they feel like they’re being attacked by food, by the messaging that’s coming through, you know, whether it’s Dr. Oz or Oprah or a delicious-looking television commercial, we’re being bombarded all the time with messages that are saying, “Eat this, this is the best thing, this is the super food, this is the miracle food, or you know, maybe you’re just really hungry, and you’re watching TV, and there’s some incredibly enticing new product, and it looks easy and convenient and fast, and I’m busy, and whatever. It’s, I think, that it comes down to people feeling out of control because there’s simply too much information coming in. So, you know, again, being able to set strong boundaries, have a plan in place for what we know works for us as an individual, is extremely important. You know, practice it as much as possible, but have a deep confidence that you really are in control. So, even if you do need to go to that industry event, even if you do find yourself on the stage for a period of time where your choices are more limited, it’s, it’s not over, it’s just you’re making the best choices you can within that framework, and then as soon as you, you know, have the ability to exercise control on on more levels, you will.

Zack Arnold: What I really want to extract from this, which I think is so profound, is the idea that if we’re going back to the martial arts idea for a second, that you have to set these boundaries so you can allow people to get closer to you, which obviously sounds like an oxymoron, but I totally understand this, because once you’re you have the confidence in yourself to set those boundaries, then you can let people closer to you, because you have the confidence you can defend yourself if you need to do so, and where I think this really correlates with food is there’s this idea called the 8020 principle. This is something that I learned about from Mark Sisson, who’s the creator of the primal blueprint. He’s one of the godfathers of the Paleo diet movement, he’s got an entire line of primal and paleo food products now. Like, the guy’s awesome. I actually did a podcast with him, I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago, and I could put a link to it in the show notes. But the idea with 8020 principle is that you don’t deprive yourself 100% of the time, you say 80% of the time I really diligent, I’m going to stick to whatever diet I’ve laid out, and I’m gonna eat healthy, and then 20% of the time I’m just going to town. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care what’s in it, I’m just going to enjoy myself. And at first, I’m like, oh, okay, I kind of get this, but if we’re talking about this idea of I want to be able to bring people closer, because I can set boundaries with food. How this works for me is, let’s say that every day they have a plate of chocolate chip cookies sitting on the counter in the break room where I work. If I’m going with the 8020 rule and I’m not so good with the math, that’s why I chose to be an editor, but that would mean that four out of five days I would politely walk away from it, and 20% of the time, any one day a week, I would have the cookies. By setting the boundary for those four days, on that fifth day I feel no guilt, I feel no remorse, and I enjoy it, and I’m totally present with the experience, which makes a huge difference. So I can either have cookies five afternoons a week and feel guilty and remorseful and know I shouldn’t be doing it, or I can do it one day a week and I don’t care at all, and man, do I love – like, my eyes will roll back in my head, and I’m like, this is awesome, and I feel no remorse. And there’s actually science behind how the mindset shift that you create when you eat something and actually have physical effects. And I can’t remember any of the numbers offhand, but the idea was that if you don’t feel the guilt and you enjoy the experience and you’re present with it, the science has actually shown you may actually gain less weight. It’s crazy, the way how powerful the mind is.

Meredith Gold: It is incredibly important to recognize that, and I, I love that you brought that up, because boy, what is the point of even eating the cookie if we’re just guilty about it? I mean, there’s just no point. I mean, yeah, there’s there’s delicious. City, for those minutes when it’s hitting your taste buds, but you really nailed it. You know, that’s it’s extremely important to recognize that, as much as food is fuel, of course it is, of course, it’s fuel, it’s so much more than just calories in, calories out, and and the emotional experience that we’re having when we’re eating, without a doubt, can have an effect on the way that our body utilizes those calories that we’re putting in, and the 8020 idea is it’s a great way for people to have the ability to still have those experiences that they want to have. Oh my god, some of the great experiences of food are about sharing, you know, having a great meal with people that you love or enjoy, or whatever, and, and if all we’re doing is looking at that plate and analyzing it and going, oh my god, oh my god, you know, can I do this, you know, can I, can I afford to eat this, and la la la, it’s really overlooking something so extremely important about food, and so it’s all, it’s all about having a plan, it’s all about knowing ahead of time what your framework is, and you know to be able to enjoy that cookie one day a week and really, really, really dig it is so, so, so much more valuable than just, you know, having it every day and feeling crappy about it, and you know, there’s this whole idea of coming from a place of abundance or coming from a place of scarcity, and you know what is sometimes hard for us to recognize that we really do not need to eat those kind of treats and things that, you know, we consider sort of naughty or whatever on a daily basis, that it doesn’t, it’s just not necessary, but unfortunately, you know, if we’re coming from that place of somehow that’s threatening, if I can’t have it every every day, that’s threatening to me, it’s very hard to let go of it, so it comes back to again personal confidence and a feeling of control and participation in what’s happening, so that it’s not happening to us, it’s happening by design.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. That choice is so paramount. Where, when you’re actively making the choice to enjoy the cookie, the cake, whatever it is, it’s a totally different experience. So, that having been said, we’ve talked about awareness, and we’ve talked about setting boundaries. So, where do we go next?

Meredith Gold: Okay, so there’s I have 10 strategies. I’m not going to torture them with you all, but I’m happy to give you the link, and if people want to download the 10 strategies that they can reference and keep, and if you want to ask questions or whatever, that’s awesome. Present yourself with confidence is an extremely important one. When I’m dealing with someone on the street, I need to send a message that you picked the wrong person, right, because so much about self-defense comes from this idea that someone perceives that I’m going to be an easy target. So, presenting myself with confidence is extremely important, but again, as we approach food, having coming to it from that place of confidence is really important, and a great way to do that is to really educate ourselves about it. So, being able to follow a great plan or work with a coach or something like that is a really great way for people to learn more about it, but if you don’t have the ability to do that, it’s also possible just to look online. Oh my god, there’s so much great information available just to educate ourselves about why things are good or bad. You might see the headline about them being good or bad, but the question is exactly why. Look at different websites, there’s some really great still printed magazines about nutrition and healthy eating, and so really to educate ourselves is the nutrition equivalent of presenting ourselves with confidence, because we’re coming to it from a place of knowledge. Practicing target denial is a really important concept in self-defense. Target denial is exactly what it sounds like. I don’t, I’m gonna deny this guy the target he’s looking for. So, if I’m walking down the street and I see a problem up ahead, something that makes me feel uncomfortable, if the elevator door opens and I don’t like the look of the guy that’s standing in that elevator, you know, if there’s ever a situation where I’m not sure about it, or I don’t feel comfortable, I can avoid it. I can wait for the next elevator, I can cross the street, I can get physically move myself away from the problem. So, with nutrition, target denial is also important, because I think sometimes we defeat ourselves by continually putting ourselves in situations that are going to test us and activate us, so making having an awareness that, oh, I know it sounds insane, but even if you’re on the stage, maybe you’re going to sit at the other end of the console from where the cookies are, I. That sounds so lame, but sometimes it is about proximity. Move yourself away from where the problem is. If you’re super hungry and you’re driving home from work, and you know that there’s a drive-through that’s like your Achilles heel, and you just find your car magically driving in there, take a different route on the way home, really be willing to go make the extra effort to create ways that you can avoid things that you know are pitfalls for you, because sometimes, especially when we’re on crazy schedules, and we’re just too tired, and we’re just too wrung out, it is asking a lot if we’re continually putting ourselves up against temptations that have shot us in the foot before.

Zack Arnold: This is a huge, huge one for me. I actually talk about this in my Move Yourself program. As far as activity is concerned, is everybody wants everything to be so efficient as far as their environment and their layout, and I say sometimes you need to be less efficient, like for example, when I set up an edit bay, I take my garbage can and I put it in the opposite corner of the room, so anytime I want to throw something away, I have to take 20 steps to throw it away, which forces me to stand up and get down, and there I actually did a podcast a couple of months ago with a former life sciences director at NASA that talks about how that’s so beneficial, just to stand up and sit down again, even if you don’t do activity, but with food, why it’s so important is what I will do when I go to a new job is say, all right, well, where do they keep the snacks, where are the bad snacks, where are the good snacks? All right, well, if I know that every time I have to go fill up my water bottle, I’m walking by a bag of Doritos, I got to come up with another solution, because Doritos, I’m going for the bag, like I am no stranger to bags of Doritos for dinner. So, if every hour that I fill up my water bottle, I see that that’s going to be a problem. So, like you said, I have to rearrange my situation, so I can just avoid these kinds of scenarios.

Meredith Gold: Yeah, I mean, listen, let’s set ourselves up for success as much as possible. You know, it doesn’t – it’s not a sign of weakness at all. It’s smart, you know. It’s because it can be very self-defeating to just continually put ourselves in these circumstances where, oh, you know what, I failed again today. You know, it can be so simple, and I love all of the ideas you just outlined, they’re so easy, and it’s just about doing a little reconnaissance ahead of time, you know, just make the plan, and you know what, bottom line, it’s about making it a priority, if it’s an afterthought, it’s going to be a problem, because then you’re coming from, you know, this place of playing catch up the whole time, but if you just build it in, there’s so many things that we’re going to do when you know we’re preparing for our day of work, and so many things that we would never even consider missing. You know, you’ve got to turn on your system, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that. There’s stuff that you just know you’re going to do, and if you just do that little bit of reconnaissance to help set you up for the most successful nutrition day that you can have. It doesn’t even have to feel like a burden or an inconvenience. It’s just smart.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, this kind of goes.. I was thinking in my head that this is kind of the difference between going on a diet and changing your lifestyle. This is not about saying, all right, I have to do x number of things for 90 days and deprive myself, then I lose my 10 or 20 pounds, then I go back the old ways, like you said, it’s all about frameworks, it’s about systems, where it’s just every morning I go to work, the first thing I do is I press the power button on my computer, and I turn on whatever system here, turn on my monitor, I make my cup of coffee, blah blah blah, and one of those parts of the system is I’m just, you know, not going to go into this specific cupboard and open it, because I know that something’s in there. So, as long as you have that system and that preparedness, it’s much easier, and it’s just about longer term lifestyle change than it is about deprivation and 90 day diets,

Meredith Gold: Completely, completely. And you know, the same goes for self defense. Honestly, if I find myself in an actual physical fight. If I’m defending my life physically on the street, a whole bunch of other stuff has gone wrong, like that’s that should not be happening. So, by building in this idea of being aware, paying attention to what’s happening, and this is extremely important, I know that that we’re all really, really busy, but I’m just.. let me go back a second and talk about a little other part of awareness that’s critical, which is don’t walk down the street with your face down, looking at your phone, typing. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Have your head up, be looking around, be engaging in the world. It’ll help you see a problem before the problem sees you. If you’ve got earbuds in, you can’t hear what’s going on around you. That’s extremely problematic, not only from a physical safety point of view in a potential assault situation, but people are also getting run over in crosswalks in record numbers now, because. Got headphones on, and they are face down in their phones, so sorry, I digress again. But just, if I walk out into the street, which I do now, I was just in downtown LA. I’ve been in downtown LA for most of the last week. When I walk down the street, I go into the parking structure. I have a program in mind. It’s just like what we’re talking about in your cutting room environment, set it up so that you’re going to be as successful as possible. I gather my stuff, I get out of my car, head up, looking around, because you know it’s a new environment and there’s unpredictable factors there. Over the years, I have personally just gotten very comfortable carrying what I need to carry in my left hand or over my left shoulder, because I want my right hand free, because I’m right hand dominant, and if I’m going to have to fight, it’s going to probably be with my right hand. And things, once we do them enough, they just become second nature again. You don’t think of it as any kind of a burden or an inconvenience, you’re just programming yourself, because it’s lifestyle, you know. I’m going to be, I’m in an environment I’m not aware of. I’m going to be head up, I’m going to be looking around, I’m going to make sure that I’m not encumbered, you know, that I, that I, that I’m not limited by the things that I need to carry, and I want to set myself up for success. And in doing so, project a whole different energy to the world around me that just says, hey, I’m here, I’m confident, I see what’s going on, and chances are I’m never even going to be targeted, so the likelihood of ending up in a physical fight go down dramatically, just just by laying that groundwork and, and really making it habitual, so that it’s, it’s second nature.

Zack Arnold: Well, now I don’t feel like such a weirdo, because I do stuff like that all the time too, and I feel better about it, because I’m the same way. Like, I will put things over my right shoulder, because I’m left hand dominant, just in case. You never know, you know? I make sure that if I’m carrying a backpack or whatnot, that I’m not off balance. So, and people are gonna think I’m nuts, but I’m like, all right, well, if I need to plant on my right foot and do a left foot back kick behind me, I’m ready to go, like it’s those things that you just program into your brain from years and years of training that just are things you don’t even think about anymore. Another one being that whenever I seat myself at a restaurant, I’m just putting myself in a place where I can see the door and I don’t have a bunch of tables behind me, like I’m not Jason Bourne, but at the same time, like these are just things that I’ve learned to develop as strategies, and you can do the exact same thing with food, where you just develop these avoidance strategies or these awareness strategies when it comes to food. Like, one of the worst mistakes I ever made was a few years ago I started bringing small refrigerators to the office because I wanted to have access to healthier snacks, because when I would go into the main refrigerator, you know, everybody had their cans of Coke and all this other stuff, and frankly, most of that doesn’t even interest me anymore. You couldn’t pay me to drink a can of Coke, but then I realized, well, I was just snacking all day because the refrigerator was right under my desk, and I’m like, clearly this isn’t going to work either. So I stopped bringing the portable refrigerator, so now it takes work for me to decide I want to snack, and I’m going to go get it. So I’m not constantly snacking all day long. I’m consciously saying, all right, I know that at 1130 or 12 o’clock every day, I’m going to go grab an apple and some almond butter, like that’s just a habit for me now. It’s just burned into my brain, that’s just what I do. But it takes like five or 10 minutes to, you know, step away from the desk, walk all the way down the hall, cut the apple, like it’s, it’s work, so it’s, it’s harder for me to snack because of those systems that I put in place, which

Meredith Gold: Is great. I mean, it’s great, it’s you’re the one that invented this whole system. The whole idea behind what you teach is to also build in those breaks, take the break, you know. Otherwise, what happens? You end up getting just completely sucked in, and all of a sudden all these hours have gone by, and you haven’t moved, and you’ve been in the seated position, and you’re completely stressed out and exhausted. And so, no good can come of that. So, yeah, absolutely. Make, make it a little bit more of a challenge to get up and get that snack, because you win on so many levels.

Zack Arnold: Well, now that we’ve kind of gone through some of the bigger picture frameworks, before I lose you, because I want to be very respectful of your time. What are some nice little quick tidbits that we can talk about with just quick changes that can be made to your nutrition, where you don’t have to go on this giant deprivation diet or just start over from scratch, but just some simple things you’ve learned from your study with nutrition.

Meredith Gold: Okay, so I think that something that is always going to be a factor is making sure that we’re drinking enough, because a lot of times people think that they’re hungry and really it’s their body needing fluid, you know, it’s misconstrued as a hunger signal, but it might actually be thirst, and so definitely encouraging people to always maintain their hydration, and I’m sure the people that are listening are probably already doing that, because they are following you, and I know that’s. Obviously, something that you’re talking about a lot. I just remember keeping my big jug on my bench, and that’s how old I am. I was winding film on a bench. I had my 32 ounce jug, and I just made sure that I was filling it up several times a day, keeping my hydration going, and also that really does help keep at least for me, it helped keep me feeling more sated, and I wasn’t necessarily looking for snacks as much. Fiber is like such an important factor, fiber, fiber, fiber, it’s so easy to lose track of that, and with different diet fads and that kind of stuff, it definitely became difficult, especially with things like Atkins, because there was no fiber in animal protein. So making sure that we have food, whether it’s throwing a scoop of chia seeds into your smoothie in the morning, or you know, if you’re looking for any kind of bread products, if your listeners are eating those kind of carbs, making sure that you’re getting a minimum of two grams of fiber per 90 calories of any serving of bread or pasta or anything like that makes such a big difference. I mean, it’s for a lot of people it can be utterly life changing, to just, I know it’s just scatological topic here, but just to be able to eliminate efficiently is incredibly life changing for people. So, definitely make sure that the snacks that we have in our environment are contain fiber and can help us feel fuller and sated longer, planning ahead. I mean, definitely, without a doubt, one of the great ways to maintain our safety, as we already talked about, is to have a plan. We have to have run the scenario in our head of time and have a plan, and a big part of that is, if they’re at all possible, to bring our food with us, you know, make your plan ahead of time, know what you’re going to eat, or if you don’t have the ability to do that, to just have some things in mind that you know are going to work for you, and then you can look for them more efficiently, like if you have to go to the commissary instead of getting sucked into the pizza line, or whatever, because you’re just not sure what you want to eat. Have a plan ahead of time of what it is that you’re going to eat, but if at all possible, to prepare it at home and bring it with you is amazing. And I know that there are different companies, I’m a fan of prep dish, and, and I think that you’re.. did you interview?

Zack Arnold: I did. Yes, I did. I did a full interview with Allison, and I do prep dish on a regular basis. And my partner in crime and fitness, and post Natalie Boschan, swears by it every Monday morning. Well, did another prep dish and made this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and it’s awesome. So, yeah, that.. I think prep dish is huge. The other thing that I want to mention to people as well, when it comes to preparedness, is first of all, I second and third everything that you just said is like that’s the key is walking in prepared, but there’s inevitably people that are going to say that’s great, I know I should be making my meals at home, I don’t have time for prep dish, I don’t have time to do anything, and I don’t even know how to do anything. The next level that I recommend, and this is actually what I’m doing right now, because on average I’m currently working 15 hours a day, I am spending two hours a day with family, and I’m sleeping for seven hours, so I don’t have a whole lot of room there to be doing a lot of cooking, and I will bulk cook usually for two or three hours on a Sunday and make it a family activity, and I use prep dish when I do that, but to be prepared when I’m in super busy periods like this, there’s a meal delivery service called Freshly, and Freshly is amazing, like I don’t believe in a lot of meal delivery services, like stay away from things like Nutrisystem and all, like run like the plague, but with Freshly it’s somebody preparing a home-cooked meal for you, shipping it out that day, you throw it in your freezer, and you have it. So I can put a link in the show notes if anybody’s interested in Freshly, but I swear by this stuff. So when they come to me at 11am every morning saying, ‘Hey, we’re ordering Chinese, you want to jump in? I’m not thinking, ‘Oh man, like I brought this stuff that I was going to try and make for lunch, but I’m just super busy, so yeah, I’ll get just give you the orange chicken, like that’s what I used to do, but now it’s like, nope, sorry, like, you know what, unless you hear from me, you don’t even need to give me the menus anymore, because I have an entire week’s worth of meals ready and cooked in the fridge, and they taste better than most food that you’re going to order from restaurants, like the meals are amazing, so freshly is a huge recommendation for me, if you want to be prepared and you don’t have the time,

Meredith Gold: That is awesome. Yeah, that for sure. And, and I just, I do want to give a shout out to one more program, and it’s Kitchen Karate, and I know it’s hilarious coming from the Kung Food way, but Kitchen Karate is similar to prep dish. The guy who does it has a really good online program, and you can also do courses in person, and it’s, it’s a similar vibe, but just hilarious that I actually came across a guy who had a program, a food-based program that was martial arty too, and it’s, you know, again so empowering because we’re able, if we have the time to source what we are, the foods that we know are going to be healthiest for us, and then prepare a lot of meals in a really short period of time, so that you don’t have to think about it, and I can, I do, I have time to, for the one that I know, this is not as uncommon a concept, but every now and then someone still goes, oh, that never occurred to me. One of the big self-defense concepts is keep a safe distance. You don’t want to let someone get close enough to touch you, because if they can touch you, they can also hit you or grab you. And so the whole goal is to use your boundaries, verbal and physical boundaries, to keep someone at a safe distance, which we consider to be about two arms, that’s kind of ideal, but you know if they’re that far away, then they actually have to take a step to get in and grab me, which gives me a chance to respond and defend myself. So, keep a safe distance is extremely important, and the nutrition corollary, the visual that I like to give people is when they’re in a supermarket, and that is to shop the outside aisles first. If that idea has never been presented to you before, just close your eyes for a second and envision the supermarket you shop in. Most of the naturally occurring foods that we are really wanting to eat are arranged around the outside of most supermarkets, produce, dairy, meats, now even a lot of supermarkets have their bulk bins around the outside, so the whole goal is to, of course, have our shopping list and know what we want ahead of time, but really fill up your cart with all of these naturally occurring foods before you start moving toward the inside aisles, it just gets, it just gets more and more dangerous, doesn’t it? With processed and packaged and chemical-laden food, and in the very center, where the frozen food aisle is, there are certainly some good choices to be had in frozen foods if you take the time to really read those labels and make sure that the sodium content isn’t astronomical and that it isn’t just full of preservatives and chemicals. So, by and large, the advice would always be to shop the outside aisles first and try to eat as much food as we can that is unprocessed, because as valuable as it is to know how to read a nutrition label, and that is extremely important. I always tell people that the best advice is to try to eat as much food as possible that never had a label, the food that essentially looks the same way as that it did when it was harvested.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, one of the best quotes that I ever heard that has stuck with me, and I can’t even remember where I heard it anymore, but it was that your food shouldn’t contain ingredients, your food should be ingredients, and that just totally hit me on the head. And now it completely changes the way that I food shop, but it is important for people to understand that grocery stores are just designed to be giant sales funnels, you walk in and they want to direct you to specific places, and they want you to buy the foods that they’re going to make the most profit on, and grocery stores are not making a lot of money on celery and sweet potatoes, so you need to understand that there are certain ways that you can go, like you said, around the outsides, and I agree with that, but the caveat is that grocery stores are starting to figure that out. They know that all the advice online is, oh, shop the outside of the stores. They’re like, all right, well, let’s start putting the crap on the outside aisles, because people, people don’t know why they’re shopping the outside. They just know people say in a blog post, oh, I should be shopping the outside of the store, not going to the middle. So they’re like, we’re going to put the freezer aisles on the outside now. So I’m noticing grocery stores are starting to shift their design because they know that people are starting to change, which is very frustrating, but you just, you got to keep ahead of the curve and do what you can do to avoid that, but so at this point I want to be super respectful of your time, and I’m going to let you go, but at the same time, if anybody listening is saying, I love this philosophy, I want to learn more, and I want to do some coaching. Meredith made it very clear she doesn’t want to sound like she’s trying to sell herself, and I told her I love the work she’s doing so much, I’m going to sell her instead. So, if you have any interest in going deeper and doing any form of coaching, I highly recommend that you speak with Meredith. We have no kind of deal, like not an affiliate thing, this is just me genuinely wanting to send people her way, so people want to work with you. How do they do so?

Meredith Gold: They can send me an email at Meredith at the Kung foodway.com I work privately with people, and I also would really love to gather up a small group. Do group coaching, because just like with the self-defense training I do, I think there’s tremendous value in a group environment, and so the idea with that would be that we would meet once a week online, I would present the material, and then we’d all have a chance to talk about it and check in from what happened the last week and see how things were working and that kind of stuff, because I’m a huge, huge, huge fan of group process. I think it’s, it can be extremely effective. So, if you’re interested in either, please feel free to send me an email, Meredith at The Kung foodway.com or you can call me on my phone, 310-351-8731 and Zack, just.. I know I’m a big talker, just let me.. let me just finish with this, because I didn’t fit.. I didn’t do all of the strategies, which is totally fine, but extremely important one is to follow through. In self-defense, we have to follow through. If you’re going to start, if you’re going to launch your defense, you must keep defending yourself until there’s no longer a threat. It’s extremely important, and in nutrition, that’s about making the commitment that we talked about. And I just want to say this: I can teach someone all of the self defense strategies in the world, all the individual techniques that I know are going to be effective in a real-world physical crisis, and I can also teach someone all the nutrition strategies in the world, but at the end of the day, we have to be willing to use them. We have to believe that we’re worth it. We have to believe that our health and our safety are enough of a priority that we’re going to give ourselves permission to do what we have to do to protect ourselves, because it can’t be an intellectual process. We have to deeply believe that we’re worth it, and then just go for it, just go for it, and defend ourselves fiercely, whether that’s when you’re at the supermarket or whether you’re walking down a dark alley. So, that’s just the most important thing that I want to leave people with, is just this idea that it’s not about how much training you have, it’s about how much you believe you’re worth

Zack Arnold: It. Yeah, and I could not have said it better myself, and I certainly cannot top that. So, on that note, I want to reiterate once again that if you really want to learn more, give Meredith a call, send her an email, like she, she can give you all the strategies that you need to really make a total life transformation. So, on that note, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your incredibly busy day to talk with me.

Meredith Gold: Thank you. I really, really enjoyed.