Hey, everyone, welcome to The Author Hour Podcast. As always, I’m your host Gunnar Rogers. I’m joined today by the brilliant Eric Guttmann whose new book, Fat Loss After 40: A Simple System to Reduce Inflammation, Reset Your Body and Restore Health, is available today on Amazon. The Kindle version is discounted to 99 cents but before you go take advantage of that discount, make sure to tune in to my conversation with the one and only, Eric Guttmann.

All right, everybody, as mentioned in the intro. I am joined today by former Naval flight officer and newly minted author, Eric Guttmann, whose new book, Fat Loss After 40: A Simple System to Reduce Inflammation, Reset Your Body and Restore Health is available today, is joining us right now. Eric, thank you so much for hopping on with me.

Eric Guttmann: Well, thank you for having me.

Gunnar Rogers: Hey, I’m really, really excited to share a ton of your wisdom as much as we can with our audience today. First and foremost, I wanted to ask did you experience any significant weight gain after 40, or were you preparing for it? Just, what was the origin of this idea of fat loss after 40?

Eric Guttmann: That’s a great question. So as you know, I recently retired from the military. In the military, fitness is a requirement and what that means is if you fail a fitness test, you could lose your job. So I had to always remain fit to be able to remain in the military. What I did notice is that a concern with a lot of my peers is that after 30, they were concerned that they were losing their physical ability and that all the weight they were putting on was getting harder and harder to take off.

And in the military, it’s not just a physical test, meaning, pushup, sit-ups, and running but now, they do also what they called a BCA, a body composition assessment, and if you fail that body composition assessment, even if you passed the physical test, it’s considered a fail. If you have three failures, you’re immediately kicked out of the service. So one of the things that happens to a lot of people is that there’s holiday weight gain. 

For a lot of people, I noticed, after Thanksgiving and Christmas, they show up at New Year, and now they’re five to 10 pounds heavier and a lot of the time, those five to 10 pounds never really come off after your 40s. So I thought, well, you know, so I’m 49 now, and I said, “Well, how do I get ahead of a power curve on this?” So I realized that the best thing to do is to leverage your habits so that you’re not using willpower to achieve this because I had some friends that were wrestlers with the Navy, and they would have this habit of eating whatever they want and they would get three to 40 pounds overweight and then they would just like in wrestling they would diet down and they would make weight.

The problem was that after about 38 or 40, a lot of my friends who did the exact same thing year in and year out, started failing the body composition assessment, which registered as a fail and that’s when I realized that — and this happens to a lot of people. If there’s one thing I’ve heard more than any other is this; it’s A. “You know, Eric? In my 20s, whenever I put on a little bit of weight, I would just kind of diet a little bit harder, exercise a little bit more, and the weight just came off, and then I reach a point where no matter what I do, it doesn’t come off.”

So I could not have the luxury of getting fat and failing a physical fitness test because I have four kids and can you imagine telling my wife, “Hey, I need to look for a job because I didn’t pass the physical fitness.” And you know, that was like…

Gunnar Rogers: Yeah, having to blame the holidays for the loss of job on that one.

Eric Guttmann: Yeah, that was like a no-fail mission for me, but it’s also so interesting, you know. But what really happened to me was this: prior to joining the Navy, I would say, I studied physical education, and I had a tracking field collegiate experience. I was a javelin thrower and I liked bodybuilding and I used that, mainly the bodybuilding approach, to guarantee my fitness inside the Navy because you know, if you’re bench-pressing 275 pounds and 315 pounds, it’s easy to do a hundred bodyweight pushups.

But what happened to me one time, which completely changed the way I looked at life, is that I was on my sixth flight, we were flying over land in Iraq, and this is about 2004. Even though I am a winged Naval flight officer, which means, I passed all my schooling in San Antonio, I wasn’t yet a qualified navigator. So that means in the Navy when you show up to the squadron, you’re like what they call an FNG, which is freaking new guy. Well literally, the F is a more substantial word.

Gunnar Rogers: Yeah, I was going to say, my experience with Naval guys and Army guys and just military guys in general, I’m sure the F word was a bit different in reality.

Eric Guttmann: That is correct. So I was on my sixth flight as a navigator. I was on the seat but I was still considered a trainer. After 10 flights, you were then given your letter, which means that you’re now officially designated a navigator and that was one of your first steps to becoming a senior evaluator. But the point was, we’re flying over Iraq, and all of a sudden, they’re teaching me how to use the SAT phone, which is one of the many ways to communicate.

So let’s say, my radios go down, there’s a SAT phone on the aircraft that I could use to relay our position or for any emergencies and as they’re training me on this thing, I just hear a lot of beep-beep-beep-beep from the cockpit and I see a flurry of hands and I just got this feeling like, “Okay, this doesn’t seem right.” And then over the ICS, which is the intercommunication system, I hear the aircraft commander say, “Hey, we just lost an engine and I need everybody to man the windows because if you see a corkscrew trail of smoke, you got to let me know because that means we’re being fired upon and I need to take evasive action.”

And I’m telling you at that point, I felt, “So this is what it feels like when everything goes wrong.” And I don’t know if it’s because I believed I was going to die but my life literally flashed before my eyes and not only that but — and this is like in the span of less than a second — I could see my wife being visited by two guys in their service dress blues. I could feel her angst, “Listen, we don’t know if he’s dead or captured,” you know. I’m living all this thing while it’s happening until the pilot comes in screaming, “What is the minimum three, you know, the three engine minimum risk routing to get the hell out of here?”

And that’s snapped me back and I had to reprogram the inertial navigation systems in the GPS and we got out of — and that ended the mission that day but when I landed, I felt like I had a new lease on life. I felt like I was given an opportunity. Now though, anybody that’s listening to this from the Navy, they’re going to laugh at me because we lost our engine plenty of other times during missions, but at least I knew that we could survive it, but that very first time, I thought I was going to die, and this is when they were beheading people in Iraq. 

So that’s why it was a little bit more serious but what happened is when I landed, I can only call this like a decision from the deepest level of your being and said, “I want to live, like, I really, really wanted to live,” you know? And that propelled me to start investigating health, apart from just bodybuilding and that allowed me or just made me go into a lot of anti-aging seminars, and research a lot about health, not just about bodybuilding.

That’s where I started incorporating a lot of the stuff that made it into this program, which I still do to this day at 49, which eventually became an online course called Fat Loss After 40. I think that was a very long and drawn-out way from your initial question but I think that’s — 

Gunnar Rogers: No, I love that.

Eric Guttmann: Background for context.

No Days Off for Your Liver

Gunnar Rogers: Yeah, well then, beyond just the blanket idea and proof of concepts of when people start getting closer to their 40s or in their 40s, they have that moment of like, “I can’t lose weight the way that I used to.” On a cultural level, what are a couple of things that we just don’t understand about weight gain or weight loss especially in our 40s?

Eric Guttmann: So here comes another story to tell you how I got to this point. Once I went on a cruise with my wife and kids, and I think I was – if I wasn’t 40, I was like 38 or 39 but it was about to be 40 and when you’re in a cruise ship, you’re a captive audience. You can’t go anywhere and the two 20-year-old trainers put up this little sign about how to have a flat stomach in your 40s and I said, “Okay, I’ll bite, I’ll see what they have to say,” and the substance of their presentation was that after 40, your liver is the bottleneck to fat loss and actually, that is correct. 

That is true, the only problem I have is that their solution was to take these blue-green algae tabs at $120 a month and that it would take you three months to clean your liver. So the concept is right, I thought their solution was BS. Now, in the 1990s — and I learn this from when I started going to anti-aging seminars because of my experience on my sixth flight —people were talking about something called a liver cleanse and it’s because this nurse, called Hulda Clark in the 1990s, wrote a book called, The Cure for All Disease.

What she was saying is that the liver in our current society is overburdened from all the toxins that we’re exposed to, and we’re talking from pharmaceutical drugs, recreational drugs, building materials, ‘till I was in the Navy. I flew for the Navy, I was inhaling JP5 and JP8, which is jet fuel. Remember when you’re a little kid, when you’re pumping gas, and you like that gasoline smell?

Gunnar Rogers: Yeah, I agree, yeah.

Eric Guttmann: If you like that smell, it’s going inside your body. All these things that go inside your body that are labeled a toxin — and I’ve always looked for like, what the hell is a toxin? So the way I define it for myself is, anything that the body cannot use as a nutrient right now that goes in that little toxic pile, whatever that may be. Anything that the liver cannot get to right now, the liver encapsulates in fat, so that it doesn’t go into the bloodstream but also your liver doesn’t have to deal with it that moment.

So with the aspirations that one day, you’re going to get a break, and when you have a break, then the liver can break down that fat, process that toxin, everyone’s supposed to be happy and healthy. The problem is that with our modern life, the liver never gets a day off. If you think about it, from the time you’re 18 to the time you’re 40, if anything, people will overburden their livers. 

Maybe people start what they call self-medicating with alcohol to deal with all the stresses of everyday life, and this is besides if you’re a binge drinker in college, right? People may have more pain, and they take more pain meds, whether it’s Tylenol, Flexeril, or even stronger substances, right? Building materials; we’re constantly — I think, the last thing I heard is that every year, there are like 2,000 new chemicals that are just thrown out into the world, and we don’t know yet how our body responds to it.

So everything that goes into your body that your liver cannot detoxify immediately gets encapsulated in fat. So that’s why the love handles, and the little beer belly is a little bit harder to drop than fat around other parts of the body but also that’s why for a lot of people, when they go, “Well, I’m going to do what I did in my 20s. I’m going to diet a little bit harder, I’m going to train a little bit harder,” but the weight doesn’t come off.

The reason is because the liver is the bottleneck. Getting back to Hulda Clark, what this nurse did is she took this liver cleansing protocol, and she was able to help a lot of people with what are considered incurable diseases in Western allopathic medicine. And again, it’s not that the liver cleanse cures you of anything, it does not but her statement was, if you were able to cleanse the liver out, you unburdened the liver. 

Then your body, through its natural healing mechanisms, can heal itself but if your liver is like 20 steps behind, then you’ll never be able to achieve it. Now, just getting back to the simple stuff of weight loss, a liver cleanse, the way I teach it, is done in a day and a half, and will drop like five pounds. So that’s five pounds in a day and a half, in a healthy way, but what it also does is it liberates the liver from all these backed-up gunk that you have, so it can start doing all its metabolic processes now. 

The most amazing thing about the liver cleanse is there’s this guy in Canada, and he had multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease. So these are two diseases that, according to Western allopathic medicine, are incurable. If you have them, the most you can do is to treat them but there’s no hope that you rather be cured out of them. So this guy in Canada set out for 10 years, he was battling the stuff, and he was — he got tired of being told that all he could do was to suck it up and that all they could do is slow the rate of his demise.

So he got into this whole liver cleanse stuff, and in 18 months of doing one liver cleanse a month, he was able to free himself from both multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, and when I heard that I was like, “Okay, there’s got to be something to this.” So then I took this concept from the two young 20-year-old on the cruise ship that your liver is the bottleneck to you know, fat loss after 40. 

But instead of using their little $120-dollar-a-month, three-month method, I used the liver cleanse protocol used by Hulda Clark, and I’ve been tweaking it every year for 10 years and those two things combined I think is something that most people never even consider [when] they’re trying to lose weight. It’s also a cause of frustration because if people are trying to lose weight and in their 40s, and you just keep hitting a wall and they go, “I don’t know what’s happening.” 

“I’ve tried everything,” and they just, maybe they lost a little bit of weight, and then they gained it back with a vengeance and they’ve never addressed the liver, then I think, it’s probably like a get out of jail free card saying, “Look, it’s not all your fault, you’ve never addressed the liver and let’s start by reducing inflammation and cleaning your liver out and let’s see where that gets us.” And the beauty of this is that most of the people I’ve helped, I’ve made it a point that I forbid them from doing any exercise the first 30 days. 

The reason is, to train them that you’re not going to exercise your way into being thin and healthy. You first are going to have to reduce inflammation through a carnivore diet, and you need to clean out your liver. The people that do that without any exercise usually drop anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds in one month without exercise but not only that, they’re able to minimize joint pain, they’re able to get better sleep and they’re able to have a much healthier body.

So the weight they drop, it’s not like you’re starving yourself through caloric restriction, feeling really bad. It’s they’re actually getting to a healthier place so that after one month, you’ve dropped 10 to 15 pounds and now we can actually start considering healthy exercise, which is appropriate for you.

Gunnar Rogers: I love that. It definitely sounds like the liver cleanse and that whole side of weight loss is still not as mainstream as a couple of maybe more harmful diet approaches or even crash diets. So I had two questions here. One, what are a couple of clearly ineffective and even unhealthy ways to lose weight that people in their 40s are often trying?

Eric Guttmann: So I think one of the first things that people try to do is they try to get the so-called fat burners which are basically stimulants and it’s funny because I have known people in their 40s that take them and take a lot of them but they don’t exercise. They go, “I don’t know, I feel so jittery and nervous.” It’s like, “Dude, you’re taking these so-called fat burners, which are going to fry out your adrenals,” right? 

Because they’re basically high levels of caffeine and other stimulants and, while used moderately with a good exercise and nutritional program, they can help. When people try to use them by themselves, they’re just hurting their bodies. I think the other thing I would be very cautious about is like, these like, Hollywood 48-hour cleanse where you just drink some weird concoction, trying to drop weight and the difference is, a liver cleanse, the way I learned it and the way I tweaked it, you literally use very simple things. 

You get distilled water, you get Epsom salts, and Epsom salt is nothing but magnesium sulfate. You get an organic grapefruit; you get organic olive oil. So these things that I’m promoting, I’m not making any money out of it. I’m just saying, go to your local health food store, get them and a lot of these things are going to be able to repeat. When you buy a bag of Epsom salts, that’s going to last you two to three years, right? 

You get the bottle of olive oil, that could last you four to five liver cleanses. As supposed to somebody who has, you know, when people are selling these fat burners or these miracle cleanses, they’re selling you a product, which may or may not be good for you. I think it’s that quick fix, “Let me pay for something” is what gets people — and then, very interesting point, well I had a high-level martial artist.

He came to me and he did the liver cleanse and he was pissed because, and this happens to a lot of people, he’s like, “Man, some guy sold me on like, $120 of liver cleanse tabs and nothing happened.” And yet, a day and a half after this liver cleanse, he pooped out 200 stones and I call them stones but they’re not really stones. They’re really cholesterol plugs. They’re fat but the problem was that this guy was burning the candle at both ends. 

So he wasn’t fat by any means but he had a lot of international engagements and mutual friend of ours recommended him for the liver cleanse class and he was drinking like eight cups of coffee a day, burning the candle at both ends and then after one liver cleanse, he had his energy back, you know? So for a lot of people, it has to do with fat loss, but for a lot of people it’s just getting your life back, you know? 

Here’s something that I would have never ever guess, I taught the liver cleanse to a group of people and this one lady said, — in private, not when we were having the group discussion — that 75% of her psoriasis had cleared up and I go like, “Wow, I had no idea” and the point being that the liver cleanse, when you do a liver cleanse, all you’re doing is you’re giving yourself a chance to live your best life because the liver is the body’s main detoxifier.

But it has a huge metabolic role in your body and if your liver’s backed up and clogged up and working at God knows what percent of capacity, you will never be the best version of yourself and here’s something interesting, when I retired out of the military, they do a full evaluation on you and I had fatty liver I think for the first five or seven years of military service and that’s probably tried to bad eating and drinking.

Once I started doing the liver cleanses, I’ve never had fatty liver afterward. So I know that this practice works and for me, I do it at a minimum, once a year and why is that? Because by doing a liver cleanse in January 1^st, while people are nursing their hangovers, I can drop five pounds. That means I’ve negated holiday weight gain every single year.

But I’ve done it in a way that’s actually healthy for me because I‘m clearing out God knows what, years of exposure to whatever I was inhaling. Whether it’s jet fuel, whether it’s, you know, the medicines they gave me when I was a child. You notice that like, whatever the doctor gives you 30 years ago, if you tell your doctor today, “Hey, you know, my pediatrician gave me this.” He goes, “Oh no, no, we don’t do that anymore”

Gunnar Rogers: Yeah. That’s illegal now.

Eric Guttmann: Right, right.

Boost Yourself

Gunnar Rogers: That’s amazing. So getting a little more specific into the book, I love a lot of the insights you have and I really like how it’s really simple and easy to, not just understand but implement. You mentioned that your program also helps boost local human growth hormones. I was wondering, what hormone is it boosting and why? How are you accomplishing that?

Eric Guttmann: Absolutely. So in the anti-aging circles, the human growth hormone became like a big thing for a while and I think it still is. The problem is that, I say, well, this is for the very wealthy because to accurately do human growth hormone treatments a month, it’s about $2,000 or $1,500 a pop and to do it properly, it’s like daily injections and you have to get the dosage just right. 

Now, the problem with abusing it, it’s like my wife was very astutely asked me, it’s like — this is in the 90s, late 90s. She goes, “Eric, why does bodybuilders look like they’re pregnant?” she goes, “I remember when Arnold says, they all have small waists,” and I go, “Well, when people take a lot of growth hormone, it’s growth hormone. So that means that yes, their muscles will grow but so will their bones and so will their organs.” 

So when you see some bodybuilders that have that, what I call the Cro-Magnon look because their foreheads got bigger. 

Gunnar Rogers: Yeah. 

Eric Guttmann: And then their organs got bigger so they push against their belly so they actually have washboard abs but they have extended bellies. So it’s like they look like they’re pregnant but I can clearly see the eight pack like, there’s something that doesn’t — you know, you look at it and you go, “Uh, I don’t know what to think about that.” Whereas if you look at bodybuilding in the 70s and 80s before the advent of human growth hormone, they all have like, very small waists. 

For example, when Arnold Schwarzenegger competed, I believe he competed at a 28 or 32 inch waist.

Gunnar Rogers: That’s absurd. 

Eric Guttmann: Whereas now — and he was at 6’2”, 242 pounds I think was his contest weight, with a 28 or 38 or 32-inch waist. Now, these bodybuilders are first of all massive because they are doing testosterone, Dianabol, human growth hormone, it’s like $10,000 worth of steroids a month, but it’s no longer a health practice. 

If you think about what used to be called physical culture in the 1940s and 50s where everybody could do handstands and I think you know, around the 60s is when steroids start making it onto the scene, that’s when it started to change but then getting back to the positive side of human growth hormone, what happens is there is a guy called, what’s his name… Mercola and he came out with this thing called Sprint 8. Where he was saying that, “Hey, if you do sprint-type training, it is proven to boost human growth hormone.” 

Now of course, it is not going to be the same as an injectable but it is something that you can do, it’s free and it is actually good for you. So that’s why I started doing sprinting. Now, in the book, I actually recommend uphill sprinting and the reason I did that is because when I was in college as a javelin thrower, my coach will divide us into two groups. Those who train anaerobically and those who train aerobically. So even though my skill was javelin, when I was doing my general physical preparation, I would train with the sprinters, right? The interesting thing is like if you actually do a lot of heavy weight lifting like I started to do in the Navy, you could actually get strong enough that you can actually pull a muscle when you’re sprinting in a straight away. 

That’s exactly what happened to me one time when I was stationed at Naval Station Mayport and I would take my lunch hour to train and I went and I started sprinting on flat ground and I pulled a muscle and that took me out of running and sprinting for about, I don’t know, three to four weeks or something like that. So I was reading a book on strongman training and they said that by sprinting uphill, it has its built-on safety mechanism. 

Because to sprint uphill, you require more effort. So that uphill, which requires more torque in order for you to move forward is the safety mechanism that makes uphill sprinting safer than flat sprinting and ever since I did uphill sprinting, I’ve never had an injury. So you get the hormone, the human growth hormone boosting effects, which include being able to drop weight, increase in libido, having a better sunnier disposition. But without the chance of injury or without having to pay two thousand grand a month or without any of the negative side effects. 

The Good and the Bad of Fat Loss over 40

Gunnar Rogers: Personally as a runner, I would definitely probably love that piece of the protocol the most. I am curious, what is the one protocol in your program that your clients love and conversely, what is one that they struggle with the most? 

Eric Guttmann: That’s one of those questions where I have learned to make it more accessible because I have made all the mistakes. Over the last five years, I’ve made all the mistakes and now I do it in such a way that it’s accessible. So what I do, the program is usually a three-month program when I’ve done the online and private coaching. So remember, these guys have not worked out for 30 days and now they’ve dropped 10 to 15 pounds, they feel great. 

The first thing we start them on because it is both the safest and the most effective is what I call slow-motion training and the idea is for example, take a squat, right? Most men, they feel that if they worked out harder they would get faster results and that’s why for the first 30 days there is no working out. It’s just stick to this diet and let’s clean up your liver. When you do slow-mo training, the idea is that you’re moving very slow without any weight, just your body weight and this allows two things. 

First, it’s extremely safe and you’re moving through the whole range of motion of the exercise but also by moving slow, it allows for the maximum time under tension. So it is very simple or very easy for people who do bodyweight squats, they’d literally drop down and pop out of the squat like using a jumper momentum but when you are going really slow and I think to me, the beginner rhythm should be 10 seconds to get all the way from the top of a squat to the bottom of the squat. Then 10 seconds to come out from the whole all the way to full standing. 

So if you think about it that way, one full squat takes 20 seconds. So if you do a two-minute round, you should be getting about six squats per two minutes and in the beginning because remember, if a guy hasn’t worked out in five or ten years, I am not going to make him go do, you know, some crazy workout. You have to build this guy from the ground up, right? 

So by doing those slow-mo body weight exercises, first of all, it’s very therapeutic for them and they’re able to improve not in the traditional way where you go crazy like, “I am going to add more weight, I am going to do more reps” you keep the two-minute constant, right? So the two-minute rounds stays the same but then I go, “Okay, instead of taking ten seconds to go all the way down and then come all the way back up, let’s try to do 20 seconds all the way down and then 20 seconds in the way back up, so that you are doing a 40-second squat.” 

Eventually, if a person can take one minute to go from standing to squat and then one minute to go from the whole, all the way up top, that’s a much tougher and deeper squat than banging out six squats than two minutes but it is also safer and once they’ve built that slow-mo for about a month, then they can go into dynamic exercises like normal body weight squats where they’re trying to do them at you know, one every two seconds or graduate into sprinting. 

So by doing it this way, it helps everybody get to where they need to go whereas if I try to push people, they could do like the really crazy things upfront, they’ll just either have resistance or they’ll get injured. 

Gunnar Rogers: Totally, and so it sounds like you’ve made it as approachable and easy as possible for people to come into your program, get results and stick with it but just for our audience to hear from you directly, what is the key to sustaining fat loss for people in their 40s? 

Eric Guttmann: The number one thing is consistency. So most people are able to get excited for three days about anything in the world and then after three days, they either look at something else, and they want to try something else or they have their first slip up and then they give up. So in order to be successful, if I was after 40, you have to be consistent day in and day out, that’s why we can only focus on two things at a time. 

That’s why when we begin, we’re only going to focus on two things, on over diet and drinking water, that’s it, and they go, “Hey, what about exercise? Hey, what about supplements? Hey, can I eat guacamole?” It’s like, “Shhh, all you got to do is eat meat and drink water,” and by keeping it that stupid simple, it’s manageable pieces that they can do. It is not like the kid at the candy store, which is what happened to me. 

The second part of that is accountability. So the way this really works is by keeping it stupid simple and then having an accountability partner. So when I had my private clients, what it looks like is like this, “All right, every morning you’re going to get on that scale and you are going to text me your weight.” So what happens is even though they know it’s simple, “Oh, I am just supposed to eat meat and drink water.” 

After about the fourth day, they know that if they go and they want to have that little piece of bread, it is going to show up the next day in the weight scale and they have to report to me. So that piece of accountability is what allows a simple program to be able, something that they can do because they know that actions have consequences and that’s why I don’t get mad when they have a cheat day because whenever they have a cheat day, the scale won’t lie, you know? 

So if people have been dropping a pound or two pounds a day and all of a sudden they gain three pounds in one day, you know, I don’t need to — some people are afraid I am going to scream at them. It’s like no, I’ll text back is like, “It looks like somebody had a cheat day,” and they go, “Yeah, you’re right” but now, they no longer require faith that what I am saying is true. They’re learning from themselves, “If I eat this way, I am dropping weight on a daily basis.” 

“If I ever go and have a donut, I’m literally putting on two, three pounds that night” and then you go, “Is that something I want?” And just to be clear, I don’t think people need to be eating this way for the rest of their life. Once they find the weight that they like, then they can stay there and have a normal life. For example, one of the guys did very well with me is a guy named Dusty and he’s kind of the example I use in the beginning. 

So two years after he did the three-month program with me, he said that he went on a cruise and he put on eight pounds in a four-day cruise, you know? He was freaking out a little bit because all the effort he put but then he says, “Okay, let’s take it slow and kind of like do a liver cleanse.” In one liver cleanse, so let’s say from Friday night he gets on the scale or whatever coming back from the cruise and he realized he’s eight pounds overweight. 

So he did Saturday and Sunday, so when Sunday afternoon he had dropped the eight pounds and he did it in a healthy manner that is actually going to prolong his health and longevity because he did it through a liver cleanse. The other thing that people can do is doing the carnivore — they don’t have to live on carnivore 24/7. I don’t do carnivore 24/7 but again, just like a liver cleanse, I think it is a great habit to do once a year a 30-day carnivore reset followed by a liver cleanse.

That can be enough for a lot of people to stay on track once they’ve achieved their desired weight. So in the end, to me, it is really about how do you create habits that take care of this for you because nobody has limited willpower. Everything that depends on being tough or having willpower is a losing proposition because if you are constantly telling yourself, “I really want to eat cookies but I don’t. I really want to eat cookies but I can’t” you know, you’re going to lose that. 

But if you eat in such a way that you don’t, and it is basically by controlling insulin, if you don’t trigger insulin in the morning, you are very likely not going to be struggling with wanting to eat carbs during the morning and the afternoon and then by eating carbs with your dinner, it is going to allow you to have a better night sleep. Now, during the first 30 days, I do a carnivore-only approach because if you think about it, most people in America, I’ll raise my hand, I’ll throw I am in this basket too, have a love affair with sugar. 

So if somebody can do 30 days carnivore, that means that probably for the very first time in their whole adult life, they’re going to go 30 days without sugar and if they have any insulin sensitivity, they’re going to finally be able to reset that pancreas and that insulin sensitivity so that when they add sensible carbs after 30 days, their bodies will be able to process it a lot more efficiently. 

So in the end this is really about how to live as long as you can, as best as you can and let’s face it, if you are severely overweight, there’s no way you can even have that aspiration. In fact, I think I was reading something that doctors were saying that if you’re overweight and 80, it is very likely you won’t live to be 81 or 82. The doctors are saying that they don’t have fat patients over 82 or 81. 

So if you don’t fix your weight, the likelihood of somebody dying ahead of their time is very likely. So controlling your weight in a healthy manner is something very simple that you can do. It’s the ticket to a better life and to be a better father or husband or wife and mother and that’s what some of my friends have come to me, that’s their concern. If a guy is 38 or 42 and he’s 265 and he should be 230, and he’s got four or five kids, what happens if he’s not there, right? 

Some people are motivated by vanity or they’re just disgusted with themselves, but some people say, “If I don’t nip this in the bud now, then instead of 265, they might be 325 five or seven years from now and then what happens to their wife and their kids and their businesses?” So it is a short term thing, but it is really a lifetime thing. 

Gunnar Rogers: Definitely, I love that and reading the book, which once again is called, Fat Loss After 40: A Simple System to Reduce Inflammation, to Reset Your Body and Restore Health, that’s step one, and I know there is a couple of steps after the fact. So once people go purchase a copy of the book Eric, what are the best next steps they can take to continue on their fat loss journey? 

Eric Guttmann: Well, that’s why when I get to the end of the book, I tell them something, which I learned from a guy called Fred Hatfield, who is called Doctor Squat because he was the first person to squat a thousand pounds in competition.

Gunnar Rogers: Oh my gosh. 

Eric Guttmann: He was also the guy who founded the ISSA, it’s the International Sports Science Association and he’s something, which I think is very true and I say this at the end of the book. If you ask an overweight person what they want to do, they’ll say, “Oh, if I could just drop 20 pounds, I’d be happy,” but if you take somebody, right? And you help them drop 30 to 40 pounds, and you give them back their agility, their strength, their coordination, their flexibility and you ask them that same question, what they’re saying is completely different. 

Now, they’re reconnecting to their childhood dreams and desires and saying, “Oh man, I always want to learn fencing. Oh wow, I’ve always wanted to run a marathon. You know what? I always wanted to try MMA,” and what happens is, when somebody is overweight, I think it also affects your self esteem and their view of what’s possible for them. So they settle for 20 pounds, but once you take away the 20 pounds and give them a healthy body, then kind of like all the opportunities that are available to them become possible. 

I think that is the main thing, the point is to get your body back so that you can have your best life and usually it’s funny, right? For some people, I’ll give you a real example. I had this female in Australia, one of my very first and one of my best students, right? Once we did everything, I said, “Well, what do you really want?” and she said, “You know Eric, I’ve always wanted to do elite-level masters rowing.” 

Gunnar Rogers: Okay. 

Eric Guttmann: So that’s what she did. Now, could she have done it in the beginning? No, she needed somebody to give her a body that was capable of considering getting into rowing at 50, right? But that’s the beauty of it, she’s doing something now that prior to this process, she thought it was impossible but here is the opposite. I had a guy, he had a business. 

He knew he had to do something to stay fit and he was going to a cross-fit gym and kind of cross-fit gym for older people, so it wasn’t all crazy but he said, “You know man, I have a business and it takes me 45 minutes to drive to the gym, then I do my work out and then it’s 45 minutes to drive back home” and usually with my clients I gift them one of my programs, which is called extreme military fitness, which is just bodyweight and kettlebells. 

So this guy instead of having to go outside, he liked the idea of knowing exactly what to do at home because for him, time is money and knowing that he has an efficient workout and then if you add sprints, then you have everything you need but the true goal is like what Fred Hatfield said, you got to connect people to what really turns them on because only 20% of people enjoy going to a gym and lifting weights. 

That means that 80% of people are not going to commit to a healthy lifestyle, which includes exercise if the only option you give them is lifting weights and kettlebells or something like that. Now, if you connect them to a sport or discipline that fascinates them, whether it be hiking, surfing, MMA, parkour, whatever it is, dancing, ballroom dancing, then the likelihood of them sticking with it is extremely high. 

So what we’re really doing is we’re bridging the gap from where they are now, where to them it’s impossible to give them their body and their life and their health back and connecting them with their childhood dreams and desires and making it a reality. 

Gunnar Rogers: Oh, I love that and so for people that want to continue making their dreams a reality, they’re going to read the book, they’re going to follow the steps, lastly Eric, where can people follow you and how can they engage with you and continue benefiting from your wisdom? 

Eric Guttmann: Yeah, so right now if you can hit me up on Facebook. I am in the process of building a website, where I will just have courses and opportunity for private coaching but the best part of this is this, I am able to sustain my wife and kids on my pension and my VA. 

Gunnar Rogers: That’s awesome. 

Eric Guttmann: So any money that comes from this book, since I don’t need it to support my family, I started a foundation and the goal of this foundation is to help all military veterans, first responders and their families deal with soft tissue pain and minimize opioid dependence. That is easy for me to say but when you are in pain, how do you do that? Well, what I do is I teach them the very same system that David Goggins talked about in his book, Can’t Hurt Me, which is a system used by the Navy SEALs, and when I took that course, I’ve talked to the SEALs say is this – 

At the time I went there, I was a Naval officer, I was like, “You know, talk to me straight. Is this for real?” and I saw the research that they had done in Navy special warfare and there were 400 surgeries that we’re prevented over an eight-year period with this very specific regiment. It is a stretching in range of motion regiment and my goal is to just my first goal is to help a thousand people absolutely free by using the same system, which is the system that David Goggins talked about in his book. 

If anybody listens to this who is in the military, I will go to any base and do this for free. Now, I am in Jacksonville, and the invitation is, if you can get a plane to Naval Station Mayport or Naval Air Station Jacksonville, and for a military, that could be one of their training flights and pick me up, I will go to any base and teach them the full range of motion system absolutely free, just bring me back home. But the sales of the book would enable me to travel and help more veterans and first responders. 

So to me, this allows me to come full circle because here is the truth, I got to do these things every single day, right? I am going to do this range of motion stretches every single day if I want to live my best life and be out of pain and I know that a lot of my friends in the military are popping Tylenol like it was candy until they get a call from a doctor that says, “Oh my god, your liver enzymes are extremely high. You need to stop that right now.” 

Then they go, “Okay, I stop that now I’m in pain, what do I do?” so the solution for a lot of people is to incorporate these range of motion stretches and that’s what I would really like to do because I have to them every day for myself but I want to share them with my veteran and first responder community absolutely free. So this is what this book will allow me to do. So the website is coming, I just got the foundation set up. 

So if you hit me up on Facebook, you can reach me now and then once it’s set up, I’ll share with everybody the website. 

Gunnar Rogers: Awesome. Well, make sure you go engage with Eric there and continue following the amazing work that he is doing and also make sure as soon as this episode is wrapped, go check out his brand new book, Fat Loss After 40: A Simple System to Reduce Inflammation, Reset Your Body and Restore Health. Eric, thank you so much for your time today sir, we really appreciate you. 

Eric Guttmann: Thank you.