Transcript
Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Blake Calhoun, who is a jack of all trades, director, producer, editor, cinematographer. He’s done web series, commercials, all kinds of cool stuff. So, Blake, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today.
Blake Calhoun: Well, thanks for having me, Zack.
Zack Arnold: And I also will have to provide one caveat: is that you are the owner and creator of Cinemodie, which is one of my podcast sponsors, and there’s really no connection between the two, because we’re going to be talking about your own personal story, but for full disclosure, you are technically one of the sponsors of my podcast,
Blake Calhoun: That is true, yes,
Zack Arnold: But frankly, that has nothing to do with why we connected, that’s completely tangential, the reason that you and I actually know each other goes way, way back in the day. I guess it would have been God like six or seven years ago now, when I was editing and working on the band and way you were heavy into the world of directing and editing web series as well. So you and I connected, I believe. Remind me and correct me if I’m wrong, but because we were both nominated for Streamy Awards, correct?
Blake Calhoun: I can’t remember if I was nominated that year or not, but I was in 2009 and I believe 2010 I forget, but I had met you through Mark Gant and Jesse, who produced and directed and starred in that show, and we met in Hollywood at the awards. Yeah, you were the editor, and I guess you guys won big that night.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, so it’s our story goes way back, and since then we’ve been connected via email, via social media, and I know that from the very beginning you were interested in and supportive of fitness and post, and then you reached out to me, I guess it would have been maybe six months or a year ago, and said, “Hey, love what you’re doing, I have this new product that I want to get out to people, and I’d love to be a sponsor, and that was that, but like I said, we’re not really here to talk about sponsorship, we’re not here to talk about cinemodie, although we’ll probably be nice and let you do a, you know, 62nd pitch at the end of the show, but the reason we’re actually here is because I have kind of watched you go through your own personal transformation via social media when it comes to your health, what I wanted to do today was just kind of give the audience a little bit of a picture of what your daily life looks like, what you were dealing with in the past, as far as your health and the changes that you’ve made. So, this is just very much a personal story today that I hope will inspire others to make the same changes. So, to get started, I just want to give people a little bit of a background of what your life looks like on a daily basis, what you’re involved with, and just let’s give people an overview of what you do now. Then let’s go backwards, let them know what your life used to look like, and what some of the roadblocks you were hitting, and how you’ve made those changes. So, let’s start there.
Blake Calhoun: I am now, I pretty much made my living as an editor and a director, doing commercials in corporate video and indie film, as we, as we talked about, and like a lot of people that listen to your show, when you’re sitting in an edit bay all day, you’re very sedentary, and so I was very sedentary in the past, and now the main thing I do is I have a Fitbit, and I try to hit my 10,000 steps every day, which I almost never do, by the way, but I’m working on that. I set alarms to get up and move throughout the day. I now the main thing I do with my diet that I changed from a complete 180 is I do no soda and I eat no fast food, which is so even crazy for me to say, because as a filmmaker, I used to just live on Diet Coke and Wendy’s or McDonald’s, or whatever, just to go grab something quickly and come back and keep working, and so the main thing I do now is I work out. I don’t, I’m not a heavy workout guy, but I work out with weights. I used to also do a ton of static state cardio and treadmill, and never got anywhere with it, and I finally, my eyes were open one day to the realities of how street training actually burns fat. I don’t know, that took me a while to understand. And so basically, it’s staying active and just eating right, and it sounds real simple, and it is now that I’ve been doing it a while, but it’s coming to work editing. I’ve got two young kids, I take care of the kids, and just stay active, and it’s really, really made a big difference in my health and wellness, which is my ultimate goal, besides, besides vanity. If you want to look a little better,
Zack Arnold: Well, it’s funny that you use the word simple. I’m actually glad that you brought that up, because I always tell people that there’s a gigantic chasm between the two words easy and simple. Saying something is easy means that, well, it doesn’t require much effort. You don’t have to put too much into it to get the results that you want. Simple means that it’s easy to understand, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy to implement and stick with and get results from. So, I’m very glad you used the word simple, because yes, saying, well, I just need to move more and eat better. Well, clearly everybody knows that, like nobody’s listening, saying, “Oh my god, I had no idea. You mean, if I move more and I eat better, I’m going to be healthier? Like, nobody has that realization, but there’s a gigantic difference between common sense and common. Practice, so what I want to talk about is kind of really digging into the nitty gritty of how you actually made those changes, because I highly doubt that anybody listening that probably has the lifestyle that you did, where they’re living off of Diet Coke, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, is thinking, well, this is healthy for me. So what I want to try and do is help people get to the point where it’s now an afterthought, and they don’t have to struggle through, and say, well, how can I stop doing this? So let’s go backwards. Let’s, how long ago would this have been when you were living the life of Diet Coke and McDonald’s and Wendy’s, just running around and grabbing whatever you could? What, uh, what amount of time are we talking about?
Blake Calhoun: I made my change a year ago, in March, and so what, a year and year and a couple months now, I would wake up. Well, first of all, it’s one of those stories. I got married, I had kids, and when my wife got pregnant and gained weight, I gained weight with her and didn’t take the weight off, and so I had battled just being, I mean, not grossly overweight, but overweight to where I probably wasn’t healthy as I should have been for many years, and so my normal day I would wake up, I might go to McDonald’s. Well, I take my kids to school, might go to McDonald’s and get a McDonald’s breakfast, and then I would go to work, and then I would go for lunch, I would go have you always have to get French fries or chips or whatever with your, with your lunch, and then I would go back to work, and then I would eat, and then at night I would usually eat at home with my wife, but sometimes we would get takeout or eat pizza or whatever, and just over time, obviously, that’s hindsight is 2020 that will really affect your health.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, that’s an understatement, saying it will really affect your health, is that’s the tip of the iceberg. It can detrimentally affect your health in a negative way if you’re consistently doing that over a long period of time, but and I did a blog post about this kind of using this analogy, I guess it would have been four or five months ago, about being sedentary all day long, but you can apply it to food as well. Is the idea of the boiling frog, where if you take a frog and you throw it in boiling water, it’s going to jump right out, because it doesn’t want to burn to death, but if you take a frog and you put it in lukewarm water and you slowly boil it, it’s not going to move, and it’s going to let you boil it, because it doesn’t feel the change, because it’s gradual, and diet is the same way, where you can tell somebody, well, you know, having six Diet Cokes a day or eating pizza every night, you know, it’s completely ruining your productivity, your cognitive function, and the response is, I feel all right, like I don’t really notice a big difference, but that’s because it’s happening gradually over a period of time where your body is so inflamed that it doesn’t even know what it feels like to not be inflamed anymore, but then when you remove those stressors and you go through a process, and I actually went through the same thing. I didn’t – I was never at a point where I was really drinking soda habitually or eating fast food all the time, but I mean, I’ve – I’ve admitted on the show that I’ve had like rolls of raw cookie dough for dinner before, so I’m not a health nut. I never have been, never will be. I’m just much more conscious of it. But when you remove all the bad things in your diet for a short period of time, you start to feel better, and then you reintroduce them. They hit you like a ton of bricks. So, I’m.. Is that something that you’ve experienced as well? And we’ll go back again, because I want to dig a little bit deeper into your past. But have you experienced now that you’ve made these changes, the difference when you do have the things that you used to?
Blake Calhoun: I do sometimes actually get kind of an upset stomach, not to get too detailed there, especially when I eat a lot of heavy, heavy carbs or Italian food and such, but I’ve really gotten to the point, and this was a really great place to be, I have to say, and I remember reading a lot of blogs and such, once I started this new lifestyle, to where you eventually get to where you don’t even want that kind of food, and I’m there. I don’t even crave it. I don’t want it, partly because it makes me feel like crap, but also I just don’t even.. I mean, it’s like second nature now. It’s not in what you just said. I am by no means a health nut. I don’t eat perfect. I still don’t eat enough vegetables, but I also don’t eat pizza anymore. I don’t eat.. I haven’t been.. I literally have not been to a fast food restaurant in over a year, which some people may not think that’s a big deal, but when you ate fast food pretty much a daily basis for years of your life, that’s.. and also went cold turkey on the Diet Coke, which I, some I used to drink so much Diet Coke, I would sometimes jokingly say, but I think it was a half truth that I only time I had water during the day was when I brushed my teeth, and so I’ve completely done a 180 on that as well. So, yeah, I used to eat fast food all the time, but I don’t even crave that stuff anymore. It’s not even a craving, it’s not even part of my, my thought process, which is a great place to be. And I remember reading some blogs that once you change your lifestyle, you don’t go on a diet, you change your lifestyle, that that will actually happen, and it has for me, which has been great. So I’ll even go to a restaurant with family or friends, and they’re having pee. Sarah, what have you, and I just have a salad. I don’t even.. it’s not that I’m letting myself, you know, feel bad or the willpower thing, that oh, we feel bad eating pizza in front of you or something. It’s like, no, I don’t even care. It’s.. it’s not that I’m trying to be overly healthy. I just.. I don’t.. I don’t crave that anymore. And so that’s a good place to be.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important point to make, is the difference between diet and lifestyle, and anybody that’s listened to this before, they know that I’m just going to be beating a dead horse, but that’s the whole point of this program, is I don’t believe in diets. Diets don’t work. If you’re going to be training for some type of athletic event and you need to get super strong and you need to, you know, do whatever you need to do with your diet, that’s different. Then you do go on a specific type of training diet, you do have a training regimen, but outside of that, there’s really no reason you should be going on a diet per se. You just need to find the things that you change in your lifestyle to get to the point that you are where you’re saying, well, I didn’t really need willpower, I wasn’t thinking, oh my god, I just want that pizza, you’re thinking, yeah, I don’t really need it, because you’ve connected the way that you feel after you eat it with eating it itself, which is a very, very powerful place to be. So, I’m glad that you brought that up.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, and the other thing is, whenever you get in this right mindset, it’s like dessert or anything, anything along those lines, like for Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day was yesterday, and everyone had dessert, and I didn’t even.. I didn’t even want dessert, it was just like I’ll have another iced tea, so it’s just, it’s just a mindset that I’m really happy that I’ve come to in my life, and well, for instance, with the diets, I just read something the other day about the NBC show The Biggest Loser, where 14 of the 15 people over the last few seasons that lost all that weight have all gained that weight back, plus some. So, as you said, I’m not against diets for certain things, like if you’re a bodybuilder, or like when I was younger, I used to always diet before I went to the beach, and I guess you can still do that, but it’s temporary. You get back and you start eating, and I mean, again, like you said, it’s pretty obvious, but I think people are really still having that mindset, including myself, that the diets you want to go on a diet to lose weight, and that you want to eat low fat, those are the two things, or a couple things that I have learned that are just not even remotely true.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the reason that it’s still stuck in people’s heads is because that’s the information burned into our brains with every piece of media we see, whether it’s the internet, whether it’s magazines, whether it’s television, the whole way, the psychological way that these companies get you to buy stuff is by making you feel inferior and saying you have something wrong with you, and we have the product to fix it. So we want to believe that diets work, because we see the pictures in the magazines, we see the transformational before and after pictures on TV, and say, oh, well, I must have that, because I’m the guy in the before picture, and what is very, very true, and this is something that I go into much more in depth with Jonathan Baylor in a podcast that I did about calorie counting, is that calorie counting works short term, if you deprive yourself of food and you exercise like a maniac, you’re going to lose weight, the point is you need to look at the long-term implications, and I’m so glad you brought up the article about The Biggest Loser, because I saw that as well, and that was something that I talked about on a podcast way back in the day that I did with Mark Sisson, who is one of the godfathers of the Paleo movement, and I can link to that show as well, but he also talked about how when you look at calorie deprivation over the long term, not only will you gain it back, you’ll gain it back plus more weight, and that’s because our bodies have this thing called a set point, based on our hormones, based on our genetics, and your body’s just saying, this is where I am, this is how much I think I should weigh, and this is how my body composition should look, and rather than dieting, you have to find a way to change that set point, and that’s a hormonal thing, and that’s about changing things in your life, changing the things that you eat, changing the way that you move, but they’re long-term things, and it’s very hard to play the long game when you want to lose 20 pounds in 30 days, or whatever it is. So, I’ll put links to both of those shows. I don’t want to go too deep down that rabbit hole. For those who listen to my previous show, yes, you can take a drink, it’s part of our little drinking game. But what’s important to me now is we’ve heard where you are at this moment, which to a lot of people that do what you do for a living are saying that’s so cool, I want that, but I have no idea how to do it. Let’s go back again to a year or two ago, what was the moment where you said enough is enough? I have to do something about this. Was there a catalyst, or was it just you woke up one morning and you had this realization?
Blake Calhoun: For me, it was several things I mentioned, having kids earlier. I’ve got two young kids, four and six year old, and not that I was ill or feeling bad or even had been to the doctor or anything like that, because I know a lot of people will get inspired when they go to the doctor and they tell them you got to lose weight or that kind of thing. It was just thinking that I want to be around in the future for my kids was one of the was one of my things that just stuck in my head, kind of my purpose and in common. Combination with that was just wanting this kind of looking in the mirror, I got up to a weight that I hadn’t been at before, and just a combination of those things led me to where I wanted to do something about it, and that was that’s really it. It’s that simple, you know? You just have to have that trigger that that motivates you.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and for me it was kids as well, where it used to be when I first started all this, it was just, well, I have to find a way to survive this industry, but then once I had kids, I said, well, I don’t want to just survive, I want to be able to do my job and be successful, but not leave it all on the table, so to speak, and come home exhausted, I want to come home to my kids and have something left over, and that was my catalyst, and I have a six year old and a four year old too, so I know exactly what your life looks like. So, you and I are living parallel universes right now.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah. Now, I know that I’ve listened to your show enough where you really never had the weight issues, you were just, you had energy issues and other depression, that kind of thing. I’ve never really had that problem. Mine’s always been weight, and so in the year or so that I had done this, I’ve dropped little over 30 pounds, like maybe 35 pounds, and so that’s that’s a pretty, that’s made me feel a lot better all over, I mean, not only how my clothes fit and that kind of thing, but just health and wellness, I got my blood work done, my blood pressure was was perfect, my everything, my cholesterol, my good cholesterol was good, my bad cholesterol was low, and it was before that they were all borderline numbers for sure, and so I had, you know, all those things, it’s just amazing how you can really, you really can change your health just by what you eat, and I know that again sounds so silly, but for whatever reason, I think a lot of people, and myself majorly included, just don’t think about that, because I can remember a time in my life, not too long ago, where I thought I can eat whatever I want, as long as I do the treadmill, and that is just so stupid, to be blunt. Now that I kind of seen the light, it’s the diet I’ve learned, for me anyway, that diet is the most important thing. Exercise would be second.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the, I mean, there’s plenty of science to back up that at this point when they, when scientists and researchers have looked at diet versus exercise and body composition, the number is roughly around 80% where 80% of your body composition is determined by diet, so that means that you can’t exercise away your beer gut or being overweight. So, if you like, you said you, and you were doing that, you were on the treadmill every day, walking, walking, walking, jogging, jogging, jogging, and it’s like, why am I not losing any weight? And go to any gym in America, I, anybody listening, go to a gym, just sit and watch the people on the treadmills, and then go back some other time. Do you think people are going to look drastically different? No, it’s because the mentality that you talked about. Well, as long as I get 378 calories burned on my little digital readout on the treadmill, and I eat less than 378 calories of junk. Well, that means I’m going to lose weight, but the body doesn’t work that way. The body is biochemical, not just thermodynamic. So it’s that mindset that people have to get out of. Where it’s funny, because I had done a show about NAB and trying to be healthy at the NAB convention in Vegas, and I had backlash about it, where people were saying, well, what’s the big deal? I’m going to get 20,000 steps so I can eat whatever I want. It’s like you can, but that’s not an equation that’s going to lead to better health. And it sounds like you had that realization as well. I have, and that’s been one of the biggest things for me, is concentrating on the diet. And again, I work out, and then the other thing I mentioned it briefly earlier, about doing strength training, and I’ve always worked out a little bit, even ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had a weight bench, and and done various weight training and strength training, never that consistent, though, mainly just here and there, and so the idea, though, now I do strength training far more than I do cardio, and because I learned about, and I’d
Blake Calhoun: Always heard about this, but I never really understood it. The idea of the afterburn, and so the afterburn effect has.. I’ve seen dramatic results, because that’s the last thing I’ll touch on. Is instead of focusing on my weight now, I focus on my body fat percentage, and that has really opened my eyes too, because I was really surprised where my body fat percentage was when I started to where it is now, it is compared to what I weigh, and I’ve always heard that it’s like if an NFL player use BMI, they’re morbidly obese, but of course in reality they’re just full of muscle.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s great that you brought that up, because that is a very common misconception where people are just focused on the number on the scale and they don’t focus on anything else, or they’re thinking, “Oh, well, I’m focusing on my BMI, so I’m kind of at the advanced level of tracking my health, and BMI has been absolutely vastly discredited for its inability to account for specific things like muscle density, so, like you said, you can have an NFL player where his B. My number makes you think he’s gonna die of a heart attack tomorrow, because most of their weight is based on their muscle. So, for those that don’t know, BMI just stands for body mass index, and it’s a very simple equation where you’re just taking your height and your body weight, and it’s giving you a number. And I can put a calculator, very simple, I’ll just put it in the show notes for anybody that wants to look at it, but it doesn’t account for anything. It’s two simple numbers: height and weight. And if you’re perfectly normal average, then yes, it will probably have some significance. But let’s say that you’re really, really tall or you’re really, really short, then numbers are going to start to get a little bit skewed. And if you’re really muscular or athletic, your numbers are really skewed. So when I looked at my BMI when I first learned it, because I was an athlete for years, and I still do trainings for Spartan races and stuff, I freaked out, like, oh my god, why is my BMI so high? And then I talked to my doctor, and he’s like, just forget about the BMI, or you’ve been an athlete, like, you have, you know, more than average muscle density, so don’t worry about it. What I want you to do is start worrying about body fat percentage, which is exactly where you went. So, I have a scale that Fitbit makes, is called the Fitbit Aria, which uploads all my information to the Fitbit server, so I never have to track my weight or my body fat percentage, because, frankly, I try to automate as much as I can. So that’s a nice thing, where I just wake up in the morning, step on the scale. I don’t even have to look at it half the time. I don’t. I just want the information, but the body fat is one that, when that starts to go up, then I get concerned. But your weight can fluctuate by as much as, like, five pounds in a single day.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, it’s funny. We have the Aria as well. My wife and I use it, and I love it. So, because I’ve really bought into the Fitbit ecosystem,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s great, and I already feel myself going to going down that, that road, the tendency that I have to just go on and on and on and go down these, these, these giant rabbit holes, take a drink. So, what I want to do is go backwards now to the moment that we just talked about, which was you saying, “All right, I’ve got kids, I want to live for them, I want to have a longer, healthier life. What was step one for you? Where did you start? Did you read a blog? Did you listen to a podcast, or did you just say, ‘I’m gonna start experimenting? Where did you start? Because it’s important to me that somebody listening not only says, ‘Ooh, I want to kind of get to the mindset where Blake is, but I want to know the road map. So let’s help them find that roadmap.
Blake Calhoun: Sure, everyone obviously has their own way, and the way I started was one of my clients I do a lot of work for is a company called Advocare, and they are a sports nutrition company, and they have – I mean, I’ve heard you talk about Shakeology and through Beachbody, and they’re in that vein, and so I did one of their, my wife and I did one of their programs, called a 24 day challenge, where basically for 24 days you go on, it’s not even a diet at all, a strict diet at all, they have various supplements and such that you take along with sensible food, mainly proteins and and vegetables and low lowish carb and I did that for 24 days and lost 13 pounds and so that was my kickstart, so to speak. And what I do from them now is I mainly do their meal replacement shakes, and that’s that’s why I brought up Shakeology earlier, it’s basically I have a protein shake, is what it really is, and it’s got a lot of protein, and I think it’s got 20 grams of protein, and I do that either in the morning for breakfast or after a workout, and so that’s really, and then from there I started what you just mentioned, I really got into Tim Ferriss and Dave Asprey, and read a lot about paleo, and paleo is probably the way I try to track my diet, but I do still eat some brown rice, and I eat lowish carb, and so it’s kind of a blend, it’s not strict paleo by any means, but it’s I eat a lot of protein and vegetables,
Zack Arnold: So basically you eat like a caveman, like a paleolithic man.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, I mean that’s just tended to work for me. And I ate tons of almonds, I eat a lot of good fats, I’ll eat avocado and, and a lot of chicken. I ate tons of chicken. We, and it’s funny, because when we had kids, we switched everything to organic. We did organic milk for the kids, and we did organic meats and all that kind of stuff, but I, since I was still eating fast food, in addition to that, it didn’t make a difference. But now we do all grass-fed beef and grass-fed milk, or whatever, and it’s those little.. and that’s everything we touched on earlier, that I’ve really learned it really isn’t about, because you want to lose weight quick. I mean, everyone does, if you, or you want to see results quickly, but what I’ve really learned, and it’s a cliche, but it really is a marathon versus a sprint for the way you eat, and just continually moving forward, continually just doing small things. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, it wasn’t just one big thing, although the 24 day challenge is what Kickstarter. Me, from there, it’s little things on a daily basis. It’s taking the stairs. It’s not having that cupcake with lunch. It’s being active, going out. My Fitbit buzzes me. I mentioned earlier some alarms, and every day at 3o’clock I go and take like a 10 or 15 minute walk around the block, just little things like that that add up to getting in shape and being health, healthy, and being well.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. Anybody that has listened to the show before knows that all I keep saying is it’s about baby steps, it’s about taking the first step. So, again, if somebody’s listening and they’re thinking, well, I don’t want to have to exercise five days a week, and I don’t want to have to completely eliminate everything from my refrigerator or my pantry, and I’m not going to spend all this money on organic grass-fed meat, and blah blah blah. It’s like you just pick one thing and you start. That’s the important thing, because people get so overwhelmed, and they think I can’t do all of these things at once. It’s too much. Don’t do all of them, do one of them. But then you start to build a tiny bit of momentum, and you do a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, so that’s the key, is to find that first step and just get started, and it really sounds like that approach is working for you.
Blake Calhoun: It is, and one thing, and I don’t remember where exactly I read this or heard this, but I have really lived by this, and it’s helped a lot. I don’t ever think of it as cheating, I think of it as treating, you know, you may treat yourself to something, you may have, you may have pizza, whatnot, even though I don’t really eat pizza, but you may have a piece of cake. The thing I don’t do, though, is I never do it twice in a row, so I might do it for dinner, but then the next morning I’m right back on, or I might do it for lunch, but then for dinner, it’s the idea of, you know, if you start, if you went and had something bad two or three days in a row, then you may create another bad habit that you eliminated, at least that’s my mindset. So I might have something that I normally don’t have, like maybe I love pasta and like alfredo sauce or something like that. I might have that on a weekend, but then the next day I’m right back to it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I had the exact same philosophy, and I fall prey to this all the time, especially because I’m so health conscious. Sometimes I’ll kind of give myself more of a break, and like, oh, well, I’ve been eating so well, I’m just gonna take a weekend off, and if I take the whole weekend off, that’s a disaster. If I just say I’m gonna take this one meal, I’m totally going to enjoy myself. I don’t care what’s in it, I don’t care the ingredients, I don’t care how much sugar, whatever, I’m fine. But if I’m like, I’m just gonna take the next three days and treat myself, it takes weeks for me to recover, because, like, I’ve told people on the show, I am a sugar holic. I’m not somebody that grew up on alfalfa sprouts and kale. I grew up on the 80s diet. I grew up on fruit by the foot and Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles, and like those pleasure centers in my brain just light up like crazy. It’s great that you brought up the fact that you have to be careful about how, and I like that you said treat yourself. I’d read that same article in the scientific research behind it, where it is important to not cheat but treat. So I’m glad that you brought that up. The next question that I have for you, now that you’ve kind of gone through this transformation, have you noticed a difference in the way the foods actually taste, because this is a huge thing, where people say, well, I like my Diet Coke, and I like my cupcakes, and I like my pizza, but have you noticed that now that you’ve changed your palate, that things actually taste different to you?
Blake Calhoun: I have in some respects, but the crazy thing is, I have not gone back and had a Diet Coke, I’ve not had one soda at all, because I, I just, and I’ve heard some of my friends that have done this, and they go back and have Diet Coke, they’ll say, “Yeah, it doesn’t taste good to me. And so, the I have had that in some respects, but mainly it’s more about you mentioned earlier how the food affects my body, and so when I do splurge or something, I might get.. I used to one thing I didn’t mention earlier, and I think a lot of, I’m actually really surprised how many people battle this, like indigestion or acid reflux. I used to have a lot of acid reflux, and since I started this new lifestyle for a year and a half, I may have had it one or two times, period. And I used to have it maybe several times a month, and so that kind of stuff is one another reason that makes me not want to get gigantic thing of tetra, you know, tetrazini, or whatever, you know, full of carbs and full of various red sauces, or what have you, and I mean, I do love Italian food, Mexican food is probably my favorite food, I mean, I’m from Texas, and so I love Tex-Mex, and ironically, though, I found that you can actually eat Mexican food in a decent way if you just don’t eat the carb stuff. We will make a lot of various types of taco meals at home that are, I consider them fairly, fairly healthy. So, but the point being is, yes, some of the things I have had in the past do taste different, but it’s more about how my body feels more than taste.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s a big thing that happened for me as well. And I don’t even know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the show before, and people might be shocked to hear this, but I was addicted to Mountain Dew. It was when I was quite a bit younger, but I had, I don’t know, 345, Mountain Dews a day, and talking about taste. Just, I think it must have been a year or two ago. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I thought to myself, I’m just going to try this. I’m going to see if I still enjoy, and I spit it out. It tasted like battery acid to me, because my palate has changed so much, I couldn’t swallow. It was disgusting, and I had the same reaction to Red Bull, where at one point either it was in college or when I first got out here. I wasn’t downing Red Bulls the way that some people do, where they’re just kind of chain drinkers, like from one can to the next, but I use them from time to time to get through long stretches, and I cannot even swallow either of those anymore. And I had the same experience with a lot of other things that have a lot of sugar in them, where if I go for a decent amount of time without sugar, then I’ll have something that used to taste rather bland to me, and it will pucker my face because it’s so sweet. So
Blake Calhoun: That’s real, real Coke will do that to me.
Zack Arnold: Yes, I, when I had the, when I was on the Mountain Dew Kick, part of it was Coke as well. I never really got into to Coke habitually, but I still enjoyed it. Coke is another thing that I can’t swallow anymore, I put it. If I try to take one drink, I have to spit it out, because it’s so abhorrently disgusting to me, not because I’m a health nut, it’s just that’s how bad it tastes, because my palate has changed so much.
Blake Calhoun: It also, not to pick on Coke too much here, but it like burns my throat, literally.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, let’s pick on Coke, please. Let’s do it. I have no problem with it.
Blake Calhoun: Okay.
Zack Arnold: Well, now that you brought that up, it’s funny that you brought up the burning your throat thing, because they’ve actually done videos on YouTube and studies of how Coke is one of the best substances to use to clean toilets. It actually does a better job than Clorox or any of the other different chemicals that you can buy as a toilet cleaner. Coke is the best one.
Blake Calhoun: Well, I remember seeing those videos. I don’t think this was pre-YouTube, where people would clean their car battery, they’d pour it on battery acid.
Zack Arnold: Yep, and people are drinking that five, six times a day just to stay alert and stay awake and focused.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, the main, the main thing with soda, too. And since with the kids, I have just, we have the little friends of ours that are a child of our kids that have will actually drink soda, and to me it’s baffling. And so our kids do not drink soda, and we don’t let them even know what it really is. And I’m not saying when they get older, I’ll let them, you know, make their own choice to an extent, but just soda. I mean, there, have you seen the documentary Fed, I think it’s called Fed Up.
Zack Arnold: Yes. Oh, absolutely. I love that film.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, that’s that’s great, and it’s really scary. That’s a whole nother subject to go on to, but not only does it affect us as the parents, but man, it can really affect the kids. And so that’s the other thing I’m trying to set up some good ways for my kids to be a good role model for my kids when it comes to diet and exercise, so they don’t have some of the same problems I did.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s that’s huge. It’s another one of the reasons I do it, is to set a good example and provide the education that I didn’t get, because growing up as a kid in the 80s, all this stuff is great.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, exactly. I did the same thing, I mean, low fat was what I thought I was supposed to eat, I mean, that’s.. I still, still, sometimes that’s in the back of my mind. My mom still occasionally will talk about low fat stuff, and I’m just like, “Mom, don’t, don’t, don’t listen to that anymore.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I mean, the science is definitive at this point, so if somebody is thinking, “Well, I’m having my.. my Yoplait low fat yogurt and my no fat milk and my no fat this and no fat that, like, I almost guarantee you probably feel like crap on a daily basis, and you can’t focus, and you have no energy, because that’s what fat is for,
Blake Calhoun: And you don’t know why, that’s the scary thing, you really, it’s almost not people’s fault, you know,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s, it’s, there’s no question that the fault lies with the food companies and the marketing, like that’s where it all came from, because until the 60s and 70s, nobody thought the fat was bad, but they changed, they turned the tables around, because they realized it’s a lot cheaper to produce high-carb foods and high-sugar foods. That’s how you get people to buy more, because you put more sugar and more carbs in the food, your brain says, I want more, and I’m not full yet, and it makes you feel hungrier and hungrier, which therefore makes more money, so that’s that’s where all this came from. It didn’t come from all kinds of, you know, reliable science. The science has made it very clear at this point that fat is not bad for you. There are still spectrums of what fat is good and what fat is bad. So, if you’re thinking, well, McDonald’s fries are fattening, wrong fat, but there are a lot of fats that are indeed good for you, and going back one step, when you were talking about soda in our house, I treat soda like smoking, and that may sound a little bit off the beaten path, it may sound a little extreme, but I don’t think that it is. I think that over the next 10 to 20 years that drinking soda or drinking coke is going to be seen the same way that smoking is looked at now, because 50 years ago doctors prescribed smoking for stress, so I think that soda is going to become the same thing when it comes to sugar, treats, cupcakes, birthday cake. I just make sure they’re doing it in moderation, and I want to make sure that they enjoy themselves and enjoy life, and they’re not having kale salads at a birthday. The party, which, by the way, living in Southern California, I’ve seen that firsthand, and it’s terrifying.
Blake Calhoun: I can imagine,
Zack Arnold: Like, little three-year-olds and their mommy is saying, “No, I’m sorry, you can’t have cake, but I brought you a kale salad. Like, “Oh my god, gone to my head.
Blake Calhoun: Sure, yeah, you still want to live, and that’s the thing. I mean, there’s a, there’s always a balance.
Zack Arnold: Yes, but when it comes to soda, it is absolutely forbidden, and when they say, ‘Can I have a soda? No, you may not have a soda. It is bad for you. So, now my kids are already growing up thinking, ‘Well, I can’t have a soda, and I guarantee they’re going to try it, just like they would try cigarettes when they’re 13 years old. That’s fine, but I’m burning it into their brains how bad having that soda is for them. So, it’s no longer, well, you know, the soda is bad, but I’m going to treat myself because my dad said it was okay. It’s like, no, you don’t treat yourself as a cigarette, you don’t treat yourself with a Coke, like that’s the way that I feel about it. And I think that that’s that’s where things are going to go in the next 10 or 20 years as this movement online continues with all this education coming out.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, it’s interesting because one of the things I drink a lot of is iced tea, because I still, I’m not against, I mean, I know some people go no caffeine, but I still like caffeine to an extent, and so I drink unsweet tea, and there’s a brand called Pure Leaf, I don’t know if you’ve seen that around or not,
Zack Arnold: I’ve heard of it, yeah,
Blake Calhoun: It’s really good, but here’s what’s really interesting, and you mentioned sodas, maybe going away one day, I think it was independent originally, and then it got bought by Lipton, I believe, but I noticed on the label recently that I guess Pepsi now owns Lipton. So, the point being here, you wonder if the soda companies kind of see the writing on the wall in the future, and they’re going out and getting stuff that will probably, I mean, because obviously Coke sells bottled water in Dasani, or isn’t that their brand, yes, one of those, so you know they’re diversifying, because one day soda may be gone.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, and they’re absolutely seeing the writing on the wall, and they’re buying up all the organic brands, and all these, like, if somebody has a little tiny farm and they have a nice little pretty green label on their milk or their health drink, whatever it is, these giant companies are saying, well, that’s what people are buying now, so we’re going to buy them. So, if the Coca Cola company decides that selling the healthy, unsweetened drinks is what’s going to make them gazillions of dollars, and they switch over, great. I have no problem with that. It’s just continuing to tell people that there’s nothing wrong with the products that they currently have. That’s where I have the issue, but they want to make bazillions of dollars selling things that are actually good for people. I have no problem with that at all. Like, it’s not like they have to go away and other people need to replace them, as long as they decide this is what makes money, and we as consumers vote with our checkbooks. Well, actually, probably people don’t have checkbooks anymore, but vote with your debit cards, vote with your chip cards, whatever you want to call them now, that’s what’s going to change things, is making that vote with your wallet.
Blake Calhoun: No, I agree completely.
Zack Arnold: So then, for any last words for somebody that’s saying this is the store I want to be on the show someday, and I want to have Blake Calhoun’s story where I was somebody that was overweight and working long crazy hours in front of an edit workstation, and I want to start making some of these changes outside of some of the things we’ve already talked about. Is there any last thing that you want to say? Hey, here’s here’s something that’s going to really help you out, where I hit a roadblock or I was stumbling, and this really helped me through. Do you have any final ideas or resources that could help somebody that just wants to do it the simple long-term way?
Blake Calhoun: I would say the two things for me are the first and foremost was just, and we’ve touched on it, but to make sure you understand that it’s a new lifestyle, it is not a short-term fix, is just the way, and this actually helps me, because I’ve gotten to the point where I have no issue with it at all. I mean, it’s just this is the way it is, this is the new normal, which is a good new normal, and in that same, in that same breath, for me, it’s what is your purpose, what is your motivating factor, and mine is my family and my future, and again, not that I was on my death bed, anything like that, but I was in, I’m in my 40s, and so I was on that path, or if I didn’t make a change once I got into my 50s, and further down the road, I could have some serious health problems. Not that you know, you never know what life’s going to hold, but you want to do everything you can beyond the genetics you have, you’re born with, to help you not end up in a bad place. And so, your purpose, what’s your motivating factor, and then that it’s a lifestyle, not a diet, is what’s kept me going.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn’t say it any better myself. So, now, as promised, I want to give you a couple of minutes to kind of talk about your latest endeavor, and the reason that I have this as part of my podcast sponsorship, and why I think it’s important is that you’re providing a service that’s helping, it’s helping to make an editor’s life easier, and that’s part of what I’m trying to do in this program, is provide tips for productivity, tips for health, tips for efficiency, so you actually, at the end of the day, have energy left over to live your life, either for yourself, for your friends, or for your family, and you provide a service that does that, so. Just as a full disclaimer, you didn’t say that you wanted to do this. I’m allowing you to do it because I believe in what you’re doing. So, let’s talk a little bit about Cinemodie and the services that you provide.
Blake Calhoun: Sure. No, actually, I didn’t know you were going to do this at all. I mean, the funny thing is, the reason I even connected with your blog and then your podcast was because number one, the way we knew each other from the Streamys, but also because of the fitness side of it, I mean, that’s the part that’s the part that I was really attracted to, and so from that I had started this side business, and that’s pretty much what it is, of doing various types of second unit photography in stock, and one of the things that we do that’s a little bit different than the other guys is we are really catered towards the technical side of filmmaking, the big boys like Shutterstock and all those, we’re not even trying to compete with them. We don’t do the typical kind of corporate motion background, that’s great, those places do that. Our stuff is geared more towards indie film or commercials, so we have background driving plates that a lot of people may or may not have, the and the thing that kind of sets us apart on all that is that we offer most of our footage in raw and also in log, which is pretty unusual. I don’t know that I found that out. So you can get it in a log version or rec 709 or raw, depending on what camera was used to shoot, and then also everything we offer that’s a QuickTime codec would be in ProRes, and so a lot of other companies are starting to do that, but in the past you would get, you’d go to a stock footed site and they would have, like, JPEG 2000 I’m talking technical here, but if you’re listening to the show and you’re an editor, you know what I’m talking about.
Zack Arnold: Well, the other thing that you offered, I didn’t mean to cut you off, because maybe you’re going there, is this not just background plates, and it’s not just other second unit footage, just really cool things like foreground elements, like I had never even heard of stuff like this before, that it was really cool.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, it’s funny, a lot. It’s one of those things where things come up that you need, and that’s how things get invented. In, for lack of a better phrase, I was doing some film work, and I had a, an establishing shot of a house, and I needed a shot of a tree branch, or I wanted, I wanted, I wish there would have been a tree branch blowing in front of it, just to def folks that had some depth of field, or shallow depth of field, or give the, you know, give some production value to the shot, and so I looked high and low, and this was several years ago, and could not find anything online like that, and so we had an idea to go ahead and implement that, so we have tree branches and things like that, we have digital extras, they’re actually live action people that are crossing frame, we shot them on a red Epic and 5k and they’re shot on green screen, and so you can composite them in, and instead of having a PA or someone walk in front of the camera, you know, when you’re out on location, you can have, you can add that in post, and so just little things to add that next layer of polish, or next level of polish, I think is one thing that we specialize in, and again, just people that want to have high-quality footage, but also are looking for the more technical side of things when it comes to color grading, being able to match footage into your, into your show, that’s where log and raw and that kind of stuff really comes in handy.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that was the real, that was the difference maker for me, because when you first sent it to me and it said second you to footage, I’m like, all right, well, there are a whole bunch of companies that I can get motion graphic backgrounds or shots of buildings or cityscapes or whatever it is, but it was when I saw the digital extras, the foreground elements. I was thinking, I don’t know of any other place where I can get that stuff, and those are things that I’ve thought about before as I’m editing, or that producers or directors just said, “Oh, do we have a shot with this? I’m like, “No, we don’t have anything. Sorry, you didn’t shoot it, but now you don’t have to just say, “Well, we don’t have it. You can say, well, yeah, we can get something, we can create it. So that was the difference maker for me that really perked up my ears was all those different elements.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. And we’re a very small company, we’re basically run like an independent film would be. In other words, we are grassroots, and so the more awareness we get, that’s how we’re trying to build, you know, try to get a little bit of the market, and that’s I’ve been reaching out to the various filmmaker friends of mine, and we’ve gotten some different footage and different shows and different different films, and that kind of thing. But again, it’s about building brand awareness and building up our our inventory as well. We have tons of stuff that we’ve shot that we’re slowly but surely getting online. So anyway, we I love the show, and so we thought it’d be a good fit, just get out here, and we, we like fitness, and we like post, so there you go. Well,
Zack Arnold: Awesome. Well, I’m all for supporting people that would consider themselves like indie filmmakers, which means that you most likely are working 20 hours a day and taking dump trucks of money and just pouring them into holes where you never see it again, because that’s the world of indie filmmaking.
Blake Calhoun: You nailed it. Oh, wow, it sounds like you, you’ve been here too.
Zack Arnold: Well, guess what, that’s what it’s like running a blog and a podcast as well. So, I exactly like the indie film world, except I’m doing it with health and fitness. So, yes, I can very much relate to that. Well, anyway, that having been said, I’m going to give people a special link where they can go to check out Cinemo. It’s just fitness in post.com/cinemody which you probably already heard in the sponsorship read, but also you have a coupon code that people can use as well, correct?
Blake Calhoun: We do. Yes, I believe it’s FIP 15, they can get 15% off any order.
Zack Arnold: Yes, and I highly encourage anybody that is in post that needs cool elements that you might not be able to find elsewhere to check out this site, I’m a huge fan of it, and there’s a reason that you’re a sponsor, because I don’t just take checks from people, it has to be stuff that I believe in and want to spread the word about. So, I’m, I’m a big believer in all of that. So, that having been said, I want to thank you so much for being willing to share your story, and hopefully we’ve inspired a few people in post to start taking some small steps.
Blake Calhoun: Yeah, absolutely, thanks for having me on the show. I’m a big fan, big fan, as they say.
