Healthy Meals: Consistency Beats Perfection | Mario Limaduran

Most of us know what healthy eating looks like. The challenge is sticking to it when life gets busy, stress levels rise, and convenience wins out.

So what can we learn from the way elite athletes fuel their bodies, and from the systems that make healthy choices easier?

In this conversation, Mario Limaduran, Culinary Director for Trifecta Nutrition, explores the realities of meal planning, the role of discipline and habits, and why perfection is often the enemy of long-term success. His message is simple: healthy eating doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need to be sustainable.

Explore Trifecta Nutrition meals

Disclosure: Live Long has an affiliate relationship with Trifecta Nutrition. If you make a purchase through our link, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Your support helps fund the podcast and keeps all episodes free to access.

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Transcript

Mario Limaduran: 0:00

I know I have them in there. I'm gonna just grab something from my fridge that I already know is healthy. I already know it has just following my macros, reheat it, and I'm good to go. So it brings that peace of mind to know that you're sticking to your goals even when you don't want to.

Peter Bowes: 0:21

Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long podcast. I'm Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the art and science of living long and well. Now we all try to eat as well as we can, or as sensibly as we can to maintain the best of health. The problem is, we don't always do that. In fact, sticking to an optimum diet, even if we know what that is, is something every single one of us struggles with at some point in our lives, and some of us more than others. So what can we learn from the meals that are designed for elite athletes, or indeed anyone who has somehow managed to master the art and science of meal preparation. Mario Limaduran is the executive chef at Trifecta Nutrition, one of America's largest meal delivery companies, where he creates meals designed to make healthy eating easier, helping people eat well without spending hours planning, shopping or cooking. I think most of us can relate to that. Mario, are you just about to make my life easier?

Mario Limaduran: 1:25

I think so. Hopefully, hopefully you and your audience find, you know, what we're going to talk about useful?

Peter Bowes: 1:30

And is it fair to say I kind of summarize it like this, that I think most of us want to try to eat? Well, we have limited hours in the day. We want to live well for our our health, but we also want to enjoy food, enjoy food socially as well. And that creates a dilemma, doesn't it?

Mario Limaduran: 1:47

It can, it can create a dilemma. Yes. Food is very much part of not it's not only social, but it's also very personal. And it's, you know, the health factor that you're talking about is, is the one thing that we can control in order, in order to make our lives in the long term, have a higher quality of living along with, you know, all the other inputs. But this one is, you know, we're controlling what we're putting into our mouth. And it's a lot more difficult than just saying that we all understand that. But at the same time, it's important to, from my perspective, understand that food is meant to be enjoyed and is meant to be shared. Breaking the bread. There's a reason why breaking the bread is a term that refers to sharing with others, coming together and enjoying a moment together, because we're also social beings, but it's also a tool for that longevity and understanding and making the best use of that tool can lead to a much better lifestyle long term.

Peter Bowes: 2:47

And talking of bread, just before we started recording this, you told me that you're baking bread right now.

Mario Limaduran: 2:51

Yes, yes, in my little oven back there, I don't know. Well, you can't really see it, but I've started to bake a lot of bread recently at home. And every single bull is getting better and better and better. And I think there's something so enjoyable. Yesterday was a very, just frustrating day, and I decided to just go ahead and need some dough by hand. And it was so there was such a therapy behind it. And I would never have said that before. I'm a chef, I'm not a baker, but I do thoroughly enjoy the science of baking and understanding it and just getting my hands on. And just a bread dough was incredibly therapeutic in many ways. So it's, something that I've been enjoying doing recently.

Peter Bowes: 3:34

Yeah. It's good to hear that. I can almost smell it. And that's the wonderful aroma that baking bread creates is just, just kind of puts you in a good mood, doesn't it?

Mario Limaduran: 3:42

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I've been actually, you know, I've been fermenting this for the last 13, 14 hours cold fermenting it. So I've been looking forward to this moment of smelling the bread baking.

Peter Bowes: 3:51

Well, I want to talk about your work with Trifecta. Before we do that, just tell me a little bit about your own career as a chef. And it's always interesting to me, you make that distinction between being a chef and a baker.

Mario Limaduran: 4:02

Yeah. For sure. so I went to culinary school and have a bachelor's degree in culinary nutrition. So my first two years were focused on culinary arts as a whole. And then the last two years were focused heavily on nutrition. So took nutrition classes, but also continued to take culinary classes with, with the focus of nutrition within it all. So four years of culinary, two years of nutrition. And then I focused on sports performance. After culinary school, though, I've worked in various restaurants throughout the country, including a two star Michelin restaurant in Los Angeles. But my main focus has been the both meal prep, performance, essentially teaching people how to cook and how to cook nutritious foods that they like in a very easy way.

Peter Bowes: 4:44

How does focusing on sports performance change the role of a chef in terms of preparing food for, let's say, most of us who are not elite athletes? What do you have to focus on?

Mario Limaduran: 4:58

Well, an athlete eats very intentionally and chooses their food very intentionally. Right. the last, I'm supporting the US women's national soccer team and, supporting their camps and something that really stuck with me in the last camp in Seattle. was that one of the, post training? One of the athletes came over to us and was like, I want to make sure that whatever I'm putting into my body after my practice is actual food. I don't want anything processed. And so I think that summarizes it very well because to cook for athletes, you're making sure that you're not adding any excess calories, the phantom calories, what I call it, which is fat and added sugars, right? So the oil that you don't see, the added sugars that you don't see in the sauce that make it taste good, which is not bad. Don't take that comment as something that I'm not saying that those things are bad, but an excess amount of them eating foods that just have layers of added calorically dense ingredients makes something that should be very simple calorically and nutritionally be very complex and not in a good way, right? So when you're cooking for athletes, you use stocks to cook the grains. You make sure that you balance your, your sauces with the ingredients that are necessary, not that, that are extra, for example, or substituting ingredients like sugar with honey or maple sirup or whenever it's necessary, adding a no calorie sweetener to the sauce. You know, so adjusting those things and creating a balanced overall meal is how athletes eat. And that can be applied to any person really in, in just a day to day life.

Peter Bowes: 6:35

Something that athletes have in bucket loads is discipline. And we all need an element of discipline, don't we, in terms of choosing what we eat, when we eat it and how much we consume?

Mario Limaduran: 6:47

Yeah, absolutely. I love Cristiano Ronaldo's quote. I don't care how I feel. I just gotta stick to the plan and show up. And that level of I mean Christian. Christian Ronaldo playing at 41, I think he is now because of that level of consistency and sticking to the plan that he's had his entire career right. He's very regimented. And so it's difficult. you know, I didn't go to the gym yesterday because I felt tired and it was a frustrating day, but I'll go back to today. But there's, there's that aspect of understanding your, that you're a human being and that sometimes things get in the way. And I like to think about it in the 80/20 rule, 80% of the time, if you take care of your, all your inputs, you can allow yourself to have those that 20% of cheat meal of that social interaction, that social meal of that drink, of not going to the gym. So that brings a human factor to life, right? you don't have to be regimented 100% of the time because life is not regimented. We go through ebbs and flows of just existing. Adhering to your diet takes care of the long term well-being, but that 20% allows you to enjoy life and be with friends and family and so on and so forth.

Peter Bowes: 8:02

Exactly. And striving for perfection, which is an issue that we've discussed on this podcast previously. Striving for perfection, whatever we perceive that to be, isn't always the right thing to do. And that that sort of 80/20 rule that you, you describe, I think is probably perfection in terms of running our lives and that we shouldn't be looking for 100% doing it right all the time.

Mario Limaduran: 8:25

Yeah. And 100% doing it right all the time leads to burnout. You know, I've seen so, so often people that go to the gym and they talk about these big plans. They just started going to the gym and they're going to run, you know, two miles every single day for the next six months. They're going to do 100 push ups, 100 pull ups, 100 squats every single day for the next 100 days. And you see them there for 25 days, and then they just fall out and never go back to the gym. So it's just a lot of talk in that mindset. I've also been a victim of that mindset of like, I'm going to do all this really quickly and, you know, from from 0 to 100 in one second. And that just leads to burnout. So understanding that if you're not where you want to be, getting to that place is more of a journey up and down. But as long as you're getting slowly up to that level and understanding that you're not doing it perfectly all the time, you don't need to do it perfectly all the time. That's, I think, key to that long term health and wellness longevity that you talk about in your podcast.

Peter Bowes: 9:25

So now you've moved away a little bit apart from cooking at home, but you've moved away from preparing the meals yourself. Your role at Trifecta is more management and it's more executive. Just tell me what that involves. And one thing that piqued my interest about the company is that you are the company that provided the food for a study that was seen on Netflix in a series the twins study. And maybe you can talk about that in a second, but it was certainly, I think, a has been a high point of your career with with the company.

Mario Limaduran: 9:57

Yeah. One of the many high points, I would say that was a really cool thing to experience. But Trifecta, I've been the culinary director for Trifecta for the last 2 or 3 years, I believe, but I've been with a company for almost eight years. So I started as the executive performance chef. We had a partnership with a UFC, so I traveled and with with the UFC during fight weeks. The week leading up to any fight, a fight for those who don't know, fights are typically held on Saturday. So the week leading up to that fight is called Fight Week. So we would support athletes in making weight in a very healthy manner. So we partner with UFC Performance Institute, which is the institute that was founded by the UFC itself to help athletes in. There isn't a holistic approach to performance, and so I developed the culinary nutrition program for them. When that partnership ended, became the executive chef. So started to tend more to the operational side of the business and then became the culinary director. So to answer your question with a little context, I essentially do research on development and take care of the products. There's more product innovation essentially pushed me to become a better chef myself, because I need to understand flavor way before I actually cook it in the kitchen, right? I need to understand how water activity and salt interaction and percentage of seasoning and which ingredients will, will have too much water, bleed, after they get reheated in the microwave or in a pan and sort of deal with all those factors and create a meal that is not only macro balanced, but follows a very strict, specification guidelines and tastes good. And so Trifecta is a meal delivery company where one of the healthiest meal delivery companies in the United States. We promise balanced macronutrient meals that are tasty with high quality ingredients. So I essentially deal with that operational side of the business, from inception of the idea of a meal all the way to sending it to our, to our chefs in our facilities and guiding them through the commercialization process, which is essentially taking that meal and producing it a thousand times over and over again.

Peter Bowes: 12:10

And the twins study that I mentioned, this was a Stanford University study, a bigger study, only part of it was seen in the Netflix series, but that's what gave it its profile. And essentially what they were doing was using twins, identical twins who were given different diets to see what the implications of that were. So your company provided the food that the twins were eating?

Mario Limaduran: 12:34

Yes. So this Stanford study was led by Christopher Gardner, and they essentially controlled the one factor that varies in each one of us within the study, which is genetic predisposition, right. By taking identical twins and putting half of that cohort in a omnivorous, healthy, whole food diet. And then the other side on a plant based diet. At the time that the meal plan was called clean. Now that's the equivalent to flex choice or everyday healthy meal plans that we offer in our website. And then the other side is our plant based vegan meal plan. So we provided the the diet for eight weeks and he twins ate that diet consistently. And so they wanted to see the study wanted to see once you control the one factor that is so variable, which is genetic predisposition in a pool of people that have the same genetic predispositions as a whole, what are the results of a diet that is mainly plant based or omnivorous? And the results were super, super interesting in the omnivorous side. there was not much of a change as a whole. There was a slight decrease in LDL. No muscle loss.

Peter Bowes: 13:50

Ldl being what some people refer to as the bad cholesterol.

Mario Limaduran: 13:53

The bad cholesterol. Thank you for clarifying that. Then on the plant based side, they saw a deficiency in vitamin B12, and then they saw a decrease in LDL and a positive weight loss in some fat mass, but also some muscle mass loss. So that is an interesting result, right? Because what does that tell you. That tells you that there is when you look at it holistically, there is a positive aspect to eating a plant forward diet, but also including a very well balanced, omnivorous diet with it. Right. It's a mix of both. It's not it's not that one is better than the other. And I think that's why I don't like documentaries too much, because they can really sort of tweak the, the, the outcome of the study, but in general, one side saw a decrease in, and micronutrients. Right. Nutrient deficiency. But the other side didn't see as bad as best results and the LDL aspect. So by combining those two, you can definitely create a healthier diet. So that was super interesting to see and be part of.

Peter Bowes: 15:01

It was interesting. It was a couple of years ago that the documentary aired on Netflix. It's still available. Actually, I watched it at the time and went back just a few days ago knowing that I was going to be speaking to you, just to watch it again and reading about it. One of the criticisms was that I think perhaps as you imply, that watching a documentary that followed a study over a short period of time, it does sometimes simplify the the issues, which are immensely complicated, especially when it comes to diet and, and also the outcome of this study wasn't a huge surprise to experts in the field that it generally showed what was expected between the omnivores and the plant based diet twins or the single member of the twins that they would likely show the results that you've just described.

Mario Limaduran: 15:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was one of the criticisms of the study that it was too short eight weeks. it really, it shows positive signs of what a long term balanced diet could look like and the results that that could take place. but it was, it was too short, you know, but I think it was really interesting to, to understand and see the outcomes.

Peter Bowes: 16:17

Definitely. So on this podcast, I focus on longevity living as long as we can, maintaining the best of health. Healthspan is, is the new kind of buzzword living as long as we can without getting those chronic diseases of old age. And I know this is a focus of yours as well, not just preparing elite athletes or women's football teams to to perform as best as they can, but especially through the company you're looking at just helping people achieve that healthspan goal. So with that in mind, where do you start in terms of helping people, as I described it at the beginning, making our lives a little bit easier in terms of mastering the art of meal planning, enjoying food, but choosing food that's appropriate for our bodies.

Mario Limaduran: 17:07

Yeah. I mean, I think it's first of all important to understand where your body is at. So getting blood, blood marker exams done to understand whether you're prone to something pre-diabetic, not pre-diabetic, high cholesterol, whatever the case may be, or if you're a healthy individual as a whole. Understanding what your baseline is and what you're where you're starting from is going to help you guide your, your decisions. That's first of all. Second, I think starting with what you like and learning how to cook, what you like to make it consistent is very important. A diet doesn't need to be restrictive. I think that's a concept dieting. I absolutely despise that concept as a whole. The idea, the the connotation that dieting means that you need to eat very bland, very boring, non enjoyable food. Well, I think it's time to move on past that. And I hope that we are moving past that because a diet, when somebody goes on a diet, it should mean that they're eating what their body needs in order to get healthy, but they're doing it in a way that they can enjoy it for, for a long period of time. And so understanding what you like and getting good at cooking those things is where I would start. I thoroughly enjoy burritos and burritos can be very healthy. So I make my my burritos macro balanced, healthy, and I have them with a side of vegetables. And that becomes a healthy, a healthy meal or I love, rice, steak and vegetables with a different sauce on, on that meal, like a bowl style meal. It doesn't need to be fancy. I also like potatoes, chicken and vegetables, you know, so I'm just changing some factors within what I like doubling down on them, cooking them very tasty and enjoying that healthy, balanced meal in a long period of time. And whenever I get bored of that, because I do go through phases, I just change it. And, and I think adjusting to what your desire is to what your sweet tooth or what your cravings are at that moment is very important so that you can stick to that diet for the longest times.

Peter Bowes: 19:08

And you mentioned guiding the users, the end user's decisions, that decision making process. And I guess the first decision that anyone has to make is to do this, is to start the process in the first place, which can often be the most difficult of decisions.

Mario Limaduran: 19:24

Yeah, I guess that's half the battle, you know, and starting with, yeah, that decision and understanding, hey, I need to get healthier. I have not taken care of my health for a very long time. And my body's passing the tax bill right now. Well, bodies are very resilient. I think we as humans, humans don't really give the body credit because if you haven't taken care of your health for 50 years and all of a sudden something is flaring up, it's because you haven't taken care of your body for 50 years. But 50 years is a long time, right? And within a couple of years, you can change that and improve your health and overall well-being. So, understanding that, yes, it's a slow process to get back to where you want to be, but giving yourself credit and being empathetic and just loving yourself for the change that you're trying to bring to your life and understanding that there's a difficulty, you know, you can choose your heart. I like that, I know you've seen the social media posts, but you can choose your hard or your harder. Hard is making the change. Harder is staying, sick. So choose your hard there. Understanding that process. And I think being patient with it, is, I think also key to not only deciding that you need to make that start.

Peter Bowes: 20:36

And how do you persuade people to adopt this kind of lifestyle in terms of allowing a third party to prepare their meals. Because let's look back a few short years. Services like yours, like Trifacta didn't exist. And it's relatively it's a modern day thing that we can have delivered to our home in a cold box, our meals for the next week. And some people are still think, feel as if, well, maybe cheating is putting it too strongly, but that I should still be preparing my own food from the basic ingredients to get the the best benefits there is, I think perhaps something of a psychological barrier there for some people.

Mario Limaduran: 21:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. The psychology behind it is, is so real with anything in life, right? Like with the with the race of AI building a website, you can build a website with cloud in an hour instead of just having to hire people and, or you do it and taking two years to do it. Right. which I'm talking about myself, you know, it's, it's been some sort of a journey of that sort, but it's also the beauty of the timeline that we live in. back in the 1970s, 60s and 70s was where the frozen meals came to life. And granted, at the time, frozen meals were filled with additives and preservatives and sugar and salt and fat. They weren't really that healthy. But through the through time that's been evolving and getting better and better and better. And what we see today in the ready to eat meal and meal kit space is the evolution of that. And so it's a tool, just like AI is a tool to support the work, the day to day work. Meal delivery is a tool to help support your overall well-being. And that means that you can utilize that tool to your advantage to make your life easier. Life is already complicated and hectic as as it is, so why not utilize one of those tools that's available to you to, to make that process easier and lighter? And sure, if you want to cook your own meals, go ahead and do it. But if you don't have the time, This is something that's available to you to exchange in order to to make sure that you're being consistent with your diet. It's okay to feel like you're cheating, but you're not. You're just being, you're just using your resources to your, to your, to your best benefit.

Peter Bowes: 23:32

And to be clear, you don't just provide vegan or vegetarian or plant based meals. You provide meat dishes as well. So you're catering for all tastes. And I'm just wondering, so you describe your food as science based science is widely disputed. You'll get one group of scientists saying, well, I think a plant based diet is probably overall the best for you. Others will say that we should be eating animal protein. And there's a huge and continuing debate there in terms of the interpretation of the science. And I guess you have to make your own interpretation of the science and not be too swayed by lots of other different arguments, otherwise you would never be able to focus in terms of providing those meals. I guess you have made some basic decisions as to what you think is the best direction to go in.

Mario Limaduran: 24:24

Yeah, well, it wasn't only it wasn't a decision made on a silo. We had dietitians and back in the day we had MD in our in our staff who helped create the nutrition guidelines for the company. And those have evolved with time. That's why we're saying spaces because, you know, back in, in the 90s, butter was deemed the devil's lettuce, you know, the devil, the devil's right hand. But now butter is understood to be something that is, is actually not too bad in balance. Right. So and even cigarettes. Cigarettes were considered were being suggested by doctors back when Marlboro first came to to the market. But now we know that that's not it's not a healthy, practice to follow. So nutrition is a relatively new science. And every year that passes is more and more data, more and more information telling us that what we thought before may not have been the best thought process. And there was there's new data that is challenging that. So Trifecta has evolved with times. We provide a, to your point, series of different meals, and meal outcome specific plans to help people get what they need based on where they're at in their life. So if you want to maintain your health and be overall healthy, just eat healthy meals, we have a meal plan for that. If you want to increase your muscle mass and you're working out a lot, we have a meal plan for that. If you want to lose weight and get healthier and leaner, we have a meal plan for that. Or if you're following a very specific meal plan diet like plant based keto, or if you want to follow a paleo meal plan. We also have that. So we give people a menu of options that they can choose from based on where they're at and where they want to be.

Peter Bowes: 26:05

And coming back to that word discipline again, which I talked about in relation to elite athletes, everyone requires that element of discipline, even when using your focused meals, depending on, as you just described it, your individual goals, whether it's protein to grow your muscles or you want to lose weight, whatever your specific goal is, you still need that discipline to ensure that for the rest of the day, you're not eating in quotes badly. In other words, you're not spoiling everything that you might achieve by focusing on the kind of meal plan that you can offer.

Mario Limaduran: 26:41

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's there's a and when you get your blood markers tested, there's a test for your short term sugar consumption and one for the long term. And I think that paints a very well. I think that's, that's a perfect way of perfect analysis on, on this discipline. Right. Because over a short period of time, as we've seen with the Netflix or the Stanford study, there can be potential positive health outcomes. But if that discipline only lasts eight weeks and then you go back to eating Cheetos and fried food all the time, then that's not a that's not a healthspan longevity focus. So that's why bringing it back to, you know, how do you start? And what I was mentioning is do and focus on what you like and, and double down on that because eating what you like to start and developing those habits is what's going to help you stay within that discipline and stick to it for the long term. The best. I have a bunch of dietician friends and they all say this the best diet that you can have is a diet that you can stick to for the longest period of time.

Peter Bowes: 27:53

Yeah, exactly. And I like that you use the word habits. I talk quite often about habits or routines in our daily life. And I know a lot of people who focus on those routines quite rigidly, to the extent that they will wear the same clothes every day because they don't have to think about it in the morning. Not the same clothes, but maybe always wear black pants and a black shirt, because that works for them and they don't have to think about it. And other aspects of their daily lives is kind of regimented so that they can focus on the creative side of whatever they're doing. And I guess what you provide as a company falls into that, that it's something that initially, yes, you might think quite seriously and in depth about in terms of which diet to follow. But once you've made that decision, the process then just unfolds and you kind of don't have to think about it.

Mario Limaduran: 28:39

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head. It's the, the support of having that tool that is consistent in your life is going to allow you to stay consistent within yourself. You know, you're taking one of those factors that can be so variable in putting a solution in place that just allows you to, to, to cruise through life knowing that you have that in your tool. And it's the same with meal prep. I typically just meal prep 5 to 7 meals any given Sunday, and I played them to be the same. And I know I have them in there just in case on a random Tuesday night, like last night or Wednesday night. I'm not feeling too hot. I'm gonna just grab something from my fridge that I already know is healthy. I already know it is following my macros, reheat it, and I'm good to go. So it brings that peace of mind to know that you're sticking to your goals even when you don't want to.

Peter Bowes: 29:28

And you just touched on what I was about to ask you in terms of your own daily living, from everything you've been doing professionally, have you seen your own life and your own values and attitudes, especially towards the food that you're consuming? Have they changed over the years?

Mario Limaduran: 29:43

no. I've generally been very consistent in eating healthy during the span when I was traveling, when during my first years of trifecta traveling with the UFC, I would travel three of four weeks every single month. and that was very unhealthy. I was also following a ketogenic diet, which, we had just released the keto meal plan with Trifecta back in the day. That was the first meal plan I ever released with the company. And, I was very unhealthy. I was what people call skinny fat. I wasn't working out, didn't have a lot of muscle. It was a lot, a lot skinnier than I am now. I put on a lot of muscle since then, thank God. and so I realized through test and trial that my genetic predisposition to having high cholesterol is very real. My grandfather was Native American, and I have I have a South American background as well, and my entire family has had a high cholesterol their entire lives. So staying, testing the ketogenic diet, you know, I was 25 and a doctor wanted to put me on cholesterol reducing medicine, which I thought it was the dumbest thing ever because I told them I was following this diet. I was just going to change my lifestyle. And lo and behold, within three months my cholesterol was down just because I changed my lifestyle. So, I had a lot of testing of my own diet throughout the ages, done with myself, the mindset and understanding what my body likes and how my body responds to what I'm eating has been one of the most difficult challenges of my of my own life. Even as a professional, even as an educated culinary nutrition human being, it was still difficult to achieve that. So I would say if you're having a difficulty understanding what your body responds to, keep testing and keep iterating on that, because eventually you will get to a place where you're like, oh, I'm the leanest I've ever been. What am I doing? Let's, let's focus on that. And that's where I'm at now. But overall, to answer your question in a long winded answer, I've always wanted to try to eat healthy whenever I could. I did, and I've been I'm a very regimented eater, but I also like to, you know, bake bread and, and enjoy pizza. I enjoy a fried chicken sandwich. You know, I don't limit myself to not enjoying food one because I'm a chef, but two, because I understand that I need that as a human being.

Peter Bowes: 31:57

And obviously food is just one of the pillars of healthy longevity. The other big one, the sleep and the stress reduction, and there's social connections. But the other big one, of course, is, is exercise. And you've mentioned going to the gym. I'm just curious what your weekly exercise regime looks like alongside what you eat.

Mario Limaduran: 32:17

Yeah. Great question. So I have a coach. His name is Max and he programs all my, my workout routine, my workout programing. He does my programing for six weeks. He does them through an app and every six weeks that's updated. So, we do a, four day split every single week with Saturdays and optional. So I do push legs, pull, legs number two. And in those, and two of those days, I've started to do cardio just running one mile and getting back into running and really developing my cardiovascular health. again, I felt I've been feeling that's important. A big weightlifter, avid gym goer. And I used to be, you know, I used to play soccer. I used to run track. So running has always been part of my life. And I think my body needed that in order to just lose that extra little bit of fat that, that I've been holding for quite some time. so that aside from the, from nutrition is it's also how I keep my mental health in check because it's so therapeutic to just go and throw some, some iron around and, you know, get the frustration of the day out or just have have a moment to myself. It brings me a lot of peace.

Peter Bowes: 33:26

I'm with you totally on that. And it's interesting. You kind of frame it like that. You can have a moment with yourself while lifting weights, but also there's the social side sometimes for me, the biggest plus after the hour at the gym with other people has been the social side. It's not it's not principally why I've decided to go. There's the physical benefits, but you. When especially most of us. Well, not most of us. A lot of us are working at home these days. That can sometimes be the most sociable hour of the day.

Mario Limaduran: 33:55

Yeah, totally. I now go to, gym here in my building, but back when I lived in Sacramento, I used to go to a, a gym that was very social and it had a really great group of people and I thoroughly enjoyed it because of that. And because somebody else, somebody else was taking care of doing the programing for me, even though I now have a coach. But that social aspect was very life giving, especially when I had moved to a city that I didn't know anybody at. that really gave me that, that air and that life that I needed, at that time.

Peter Bowes: 34:25

Interesting correlation there with meal prep. Then we trust a coach, a trainer at the gym to decide what we do physically. So why not trust someone to prepare our meals?

Mario Limaduran: 34:36

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a great metaphor that you just did. Ultimately, what you're trusting is the expertise and the years of knowledge and education that that person has had. Right? They're not a coach just because they decided to be a coach, or at least I hope not. that would, that would not be the, the more, investment of time and money. But if you have a coach that has a master's degree in exercise physiology, and you have a chef who has a bachelor's degree in culinary arts and hospitality management, you know that that person is educated and is putting their best foot forward to give you the best results possible. So, absolutely.

Peter Bowes: 35:13

And for many viewers, listeners to this podcast, it is their own longevity that they have uppermost in their minds when they're making these decisions about diet and exercise. Is your longevity - you're a young guy - do you think about the decades ahead and how you're behaving now is going to affect how you'll feel in 20 or 30 years?

Mario Limaduran: 35:34

100%, hundred percent. I mean, I exercise to feel good at the moment, but I think a lot about my, my old age and, and if I ever have kids, you know, to be an active father and a strong father, and a strong husband and, you know, for my nieces and nephews or grandchildren, you know, I want to be somebody who can move, can walk through Disneyland, can do all these things. My grandfather, bless his heart. May he rest in peace. He fought in the Vietnam War twice, and his body was absolutely destroyed during the last few years of his life. His life quality wasn't the highest, and it was very difficult to see that, and to want to do things with him, but he couldn't really walk too much because he got winded. He just didn't have the ability to do so, you know? So, I just saw somewhere and correct me or feel free to jump in here that, longevity and overall health is dictated by how soon you start in your life. So starting after 35 could mean that it's going to be much, much more difficult. But if you have focus on being healthy before 35, it's, you have a greater possibility to remain that health and keep that muscle and stay longer. But again, it's, I can't remember where I saw that it's something that's been very fresh and present to my mind, but it doesn't mean that if you're 15, you have to start it. You can't start, you know, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't either. Because long term, I think there's much positive, effects of muscle and bone and mental health of when when you're exercising versus when you're not.

Peter Bowes: 37:12

Yeah, exactly. A podcast about longevity you might think was designed to attract an older audience. I'm delighted when it's a younger audience, people in their 20s and 30s listening to these kinds of of messages, because I'm 100% convinced that the earlier we start with these life behaviors, the better it's going to be for us.

Mario Limaduran: 37:32

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Peter Bowes: 37:34

Mario. Thank you. It's been really fascinating. I'm planning with this podcast to work with you guys in the coming months. There's much more detail. I'll put it into the show notes of this episode, how to find out more about you, how to find out more about Trifecta. And hopefully we can stay in touch.

Mario Limaduran: 37:50

Yes. Thank you. Peter, thank you so much for having me. It was an honor.

Peter Bowes: 37:52

The Lifelong Podcast is a healthspan media production. I'm Peter Bowes. You can contact me through our website, Livelong podcast.com, where you'll also find show notes for this episode.

DISCLAIMER: 38:04

This podcast is for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. We do not offer medical advice. If you have health concerns of any kind or you are considering adopting a new diet or exercise regime, you should first consult your doctor.