The Fat Burning Man Opens Up about His Process: A Conversation with Abel James

Richard Jacobs: Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. This is the health, medicine, and bio-science edition. I’ve got a great guest. His name is Abel James and his website is fatburningman.com. He is a health coach. He’s an author. He’s got a very highly ranked podcast. It’s probably one of the top ones in alternative health, so I know I’m going to learn a lot from speaking to him, not just about his main premise of fat burning and health, but maybe about podcasting too. So Abel, thanks for coming. How are you doing?

Abel James: Very well. Thanks for having me, Richard.

Richard Jacobs: So why do you call yourself the fat-burning man? Where did this idea come from?

Abel James: So it’s a bit tongue in cheek, but it was around ten, I guess more than ten years ago now. When I was in my early twenties I was trying so hard to be healthy following the typical advice from the time. And I grew up, I was an athlete and a runner and I raced mountain bikes as well. So I was getting my information from traditional Western medicine, from some of the coaches, fitness magazines, and just the general knowledge back then and knowledge is in air quotes that you should be carb-loading, fueling with goose and sugars and all these other things no matter who you are. And eventually following that advice, I developed high triglycerides. I had thyroid problems as well. It was underactive in my case and my body temperature wasn’t right. I would be sweating all the time. And basically, in my early twenties, I felt like I was in my forties and looked like I was in my forties.

Richard Jacobs: I’m sorry to hit you that early, but at least as a quick aside here. It’s, unthankful for my body telling me louder and louder. Don’t do that because it makes it easier. So in a way, I hope you look at it as a good thing but continue, please.

Abel James: Yeah. Well in some ways I was the Canary in the coal mine. I kind of got sick earlier and fatter earlier than some of my other athletic friends. And when I did some genetic testing, later on, I kind of figured out why that might’ve been. But suffice it to say, I kind of hit rock bottom early. I also at the same time lost everything in an apartment fire. So like stress and lack of sleep were layered on top of following the wrong advice. So I hit rock bottom and decided to risk doing the opposite of what my well-meaning, maybe the doctor was telling me and I indulged in a more, so it’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the body has the machinery to burn sugar as its main fuel, as most people do today who are eating lots of grains and processed carbs specifically. But the body can also burn fat and it takes a little while to develop the machinery to do so. And you can do that more quickly using things like intermittent fasting, which I have also started around the same time. And so that was an interesting kind of corollary and phenomenon that happened to me. It wasn’t until actually going way back, I remember getting horrible food poisoning and I just could not eat for days. And it was in coming back from that, that I realized my hunger was completely different. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced something like that, but sometimes when you’re sick, your intuition starts pointing you in the right direction.

Richard Jacobs: Well, I remember as a kid getting sick and yeah, it would be sometimes a couple of days and I don’t think I ate much at all besides drinking liquids and lose a few pounds. But I think I probably only had a day or two of maybe thinking differently about eating and then things would just go back to quote-unquote horrible.

Abel James: Exactly. So after that time, I’m just like, what if I don’t go back into all of those supposedly runner-friendly foods, like the cereals, the bagels, the whole wheat, you know, I wasn’t eating junk food I should say. I’ve always tried to be healthy and I was eating lots of whole grains and the things that were largely recommended low-fat foods back then. But then as I started to eat real butter again and olive oil and coconut oil and things like that, this is in late 2009, early 2010 I started to feel so much better and the way that I was thinking felt better. Like I had more energy in my brain and it was less dragged down by the low that you usually get between two and three and in the afternoon or after your breakfast or then after your snack. For me when I was eating six or eight times a day, it was like I’d wake up and eat breakfast, eight o’clock say then I’d want a snack by 10, I’d be really hungry again and then I couldn’t wait for lunch, 12 or 1 could be a couple of hours sitting there eating. Then again, snack in the afternoon when you get that low and then dinner and then maybe a dessert or whatever. But the thing is if you’re trying to be healthy and not overeat calories and energy in that circumstance, then for every single one of those meals, at least for me, I was ravenous afterward. I wanted to keep eating, but I had to cut it off because I knew I shouldn’t overeat.

Richard Jacobs: So how did you know that? It’s kind of funny. For myself, I had a gun to the head health moment, which made it much easier for me to change my eating. But for you, you did it without that. So that’s even harder I think. And you thought you were eating healthy, but yet you changed. So how did you do that?

Abel James: Yeah, I’m very fortunate to have been raised by my mom who’s worked in the health profession for her whole career. And she was a nurse practitioner in allopathic medicine, Western medicine, but also an author in herbal medicine and holistic. So she had always taught me that food is medicine and plants heal. And so it was really by abandoning my fears that came from the mainstream. I realized a lot of like, the healthy eating that I was doing was trying to avoid things like fat and cholesterol or salt for example. It wasn’t about nourishing your body with, for example, the specific types of fats that your brain needs, like Omega three fats are really the whole spectrum. Omega three, six, nine, DHA and all these different forms of fats, it shouldn’t be avoided. They should be eaten on purpose. And so that’s what I did. I tried to get a wide variety and spectrum of fats and use that as my main fuel for my athletic activities. And I was still running doing 10 Ks and marathons. And so I started doing experiments kind of fueling in different ways and training in different ways to see how my body responded. And it was the opposite of what all the running magazines were telling me, that I should be car bloating and that I should be sucking down Gatorade because otherwise, I would die. It’s like, it’s so silly when you look at some of this fear-based marketing in retrospect, but it’s easy to be fooled at the time. But suffice it to say, with once you develop the machinery to fast effectively and burn fat as opposed to glucose all of the time or sugar all of the time, then you have a lot more control over when you’re eating when you’re not eating, how much you eat, how long you can fast, and the ability to go from a few hours to a few days without food is a superpower in this world. And also it should be said too if you’re looking to optimize your immune system every time you eat, even a relatively insignificant amount of sugar, your immune system takes a hit for hours or even days after them, the dose. Whereas with fat, that’s not the case. So in times like these, it’s more important than ever to make sure your immune system checks.

Richard Jacobs: Well, you know, there’s this whole psychology leaning, and I’ve thought about this a lot myself. I mean if you think about it three to six times a day, at least you’re confronted with this decision, what do I eat? Is it quite healthy or not? So it’s tiring to make that decision every day to do the right thing. It weighs on you and what are you surrounded by? Especially if you go out a lot, you know, junk food and crap everywhere. And you know, I remember, well, it still happens. I go to a place and I’ll get a coffee and they’re like, you sure you don’t want a pastry or something and you feel bad. If I don’t get a pastry and tell the person, no, I’m not being nice to them somehow and they’ll be annoyed with me. I mean, these little social pressures, big and small, the ubiquity of bad food, it all contributes to make it incredibly difficult. And then you layer in advice from countless sources, your own upbringing, et cetera. It’s not an easy thing.

Abel James: No, there’s way too much information out there and it’s impossible to tell what’s true, what’s superficial, what’s a half-truth. And so I think one of the solutions, perhaps I’m looking forward, is to focus more on where the advice is coming from and who it’s filtered through as opposed to just getting these little tweets and little articles here and there with, Oh, butter’s bad for you. Eggs are good again, I should be eating those, vegetables bad now because carnivores a thing, you know, it’s so confusing and so overhyped and so driven by commercial interest as opposed to the health of those who are on the other end. So what most people need to know is they’re being raised or existing in a hostile media environment where they’re being exploited and tricked into buying the wrong thing and eating the wrong thing. Whereas if you take a step back and you try to eat as our grandparents or great grandparents would have eaten whole foods that come from the earth that are hardly manipulated by man or machine and minimally processed, if at all. That single ingredient that comes from the garden in your backyard. You know think fats that come from an egg or from a pasture-raised animal of some kind. If you’re going to eat any foods, you want to make sure that they’re clean and come from the natural world as close to the natural world as possible, not from giant industrial, chemical-laden farms that pollute the environment, basically create half-dead animals that are sick and by the time we eat them, we’re absorbing all of the pollutants and toxins that their bodies were burdened with. And the standards are too low just to kind of go with the flow and follow everyone else’s advice and where they’re going. And even there, if they want you to eat the pastry, and that’s kind of like you’re trying to maintain decorum and be polite, that’s all well and good and kudos to you, but also what you eat and every single bite of what you eat is pretty much the most important thing that’s going to happen to your body that day. Aside from major traumas and horrible things that can happen. Of course, what you’re eating, the fuel you choose that day better be clean. Cause this, if it’s not, it’s basically clogging up your whole body in all sorts of different ways that we don’t even have to jump into. Dirty food, there’s a way to do keto, paleo, vegan, all dirty. You can eat all in the dust, real foods, completely polluted that will make you sick doing all of these ways of eating. So it’s so much less about like what identity you put around the way you eat and so much more about just having high standards for every single bit of food you choose to eat.

Richard Jacobs: So, for yourself, what are the most difficult things that you ran into and run into nowadays and what were the biggest things that made you successful to consistently eat right for so long of a time period?

Abel James: I think the thing that really helped me the most was fasting or a compressed eating window. My friend Mark said no is calling it intermittent eating, which I think I like even better because it’s less about avoiding food. Because once you start fasting for a few hours and what that means is basically imagine just waking up and not eating breakfast right away. Maybe you eat it at 10 or 11 instead of seven or eight or maybe you just hold off until noon and you eat lunches here. So for me, I have been doing pretty much one meal a day only eating for four hours a day around dinner time. I’ve been doing that for about nine years, almost 10 years now. When I first started I was doing more of the starting eating at noon and finishing by dinner type thing, which is more of a 16, eight fast. And then on top of that, you can do longer, more extended fasts kind of therapeutically for three to even seven days. And some people do longer for spiritual reasons and things like that. But I’ll say that one of the biggest reasons it helped me is because it curbed my hunger. I realized that once I, after a few days of pushing my breakfast back into later in the day, I realized that I didn’t have those cravings and that actually it was the eating that was making me hungry after. And so if I delayed the eating until later in the day, then I didn’t feel hunger anymore in the morning. I could work or I could even work out. I could go for a run and do fasted exercise. If you want to lose fat, develop yourself as a fat-burning beast, then that’s kind of an excellent way to do it is working out fasted at actually a relatively low intensity that can be very therapeutical. So you don’t have to force yourself to constantly eat less because you’re in a space of time where you’re not really thinking about eating for about half the day, for example.

Richard Jacobs: In your four-hour window or whatever window in which you do eat, were you stuffing yourself or were you would just eating to normal levels. Like, what did you try first?

Abel James: When I first started this, I was in my twenties and I was training a lot, lifting and running and stuff. And so I do declare, I had some pretty epic, you know, the rock type cheat meals. Maybe a year or two I did that. But to be honest, that got old really quick. It was interesting to see that eating a white potato or eating a donut in the morning had a similar effect on the way I felt in some cases and also a similar effect on the way that you can, you know, sugar in your body if it’s coming from a dirty source can be similar to sugar coming from what would otherwise be a clean source. So there was a lot of learning about that, but it was really, once I turned down the sugar, that’s the thing that made it so that I didn’t stuff my face and I didn’t want it. So yesterday I was recording all day that a whole bunch of different podcasts and stuff like that all day. And then we’re moving house at the same time. So we’re super busy right now. And I had a very small dinner, very small. We had pasture-raised, grass-fed, instant pot ribs, pork ribs, delicious, made in with a whole bunch of different spices, different types of herbs and spices and sauces and acids and vinegar-based things that we like to include when we eat our meats and small amounts of fermented foods. And then I think I had some chocolate and a couple of homemade cookies. And that’s pretty much what I ate. Oh, and I had a small tin of oysters. Like four o’clock or so. And that was it all day. And at first, I would have been like, how could you possibly eat that little and still feel so good. But it’s not about how much you’re eating. It’s really about how efficient your body is at using the fuels and the foods that you’re eating to transform it into energy. And when you first start burning fat, you’re not that efficient, but the longer you do it and the better your body gets at dealing with not having food and enacting these self-healing processes like autophagy and also boosting human growth hormone naturally and aiding your ability to sleep. It’s like the body has all of these wonderful magic powers that you can engage through natural means as opposed to taking exogenous ketones and a bunch of drugs to try to force your body to shunt to sugar in a different way or use fructose differently. There is definitely a great need for advances in science, but I think a lot of people are still looking for a pill and they don’t realize that their body is capable of doing a lot of these things naturally.

Richard Jacobs: Well when coaching clients, when you work with them, just in terms of the eating window, where are they usually at when you first work with them and where do you get them to and at what point? When does someone need to restrict their eating, where they actually feel some positive effects?

Abel James: Yeah, everyone’s a bit different, but I think it’s important to take it one step at a time instead of jumping all in unless I’m going to super committed. Like I was on an ABC TV show coaching someone named Kurt Morgan who is 252 pounds at the beginning. And over half his body weight was pure fat at that point. And so we went long and hard and he lost 87 pounds in three and a half, like 14, and cut his body fat in half. So with him, I went fast and hard and he was up for it. And a lot of that was fasting and just kicking out as I said, the sugars, the processed carbs, but even the wheat, rice, and oats, some of these carbs can be relatively clean and if you’re training a lot and you want to rebuild glycogen in your muscles and kind of like retop off some of your sugar stores, then that can be okay. And then it’s like, I don’t avoid all carbs, but I keep them probably within on any given day, 50 to a hundred grams when I was maxing out, even during my training in my late twenties, it’s like I probably wasn’t going over 200 and it was probably a lot less than like less than one 50 most days and less than a hundred. Definitely for the past like decade or so. So for most people, if you ease into that, it’s really, if you were having a little snack pack of a hundred calories of something that’s like chips or carbs, a cheese doodle type things, popcorn, that’s not filling you up anyway. So you kick out one of those a day. Say you were eating one little a hundred-calorie snack, which is supposed to be healthy cause it’s only a hundred calories in or what’s in it. Especially if they’re whole wheat. So you kick out one of those a day for a week that’s 700 calories and a pound of fat, you know, 3000, 3,500 calories or so and we’re not perfect machines or whatever, but if you just kick out one of those little things or push back your breakfast, so you’re only eating four or five meals a day instead of five or six, that really adds up over time in the same way that if you lift a kettlebell, you know, 50 pounds, you lift that place in a day for seven days straight. And then you do that a whole year. It’s thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds that you’ve lifted by doing something extremely insignificant. So for most of the people I work with, it’s more like that where you start to get your power back by realizing that you don’t have to eat all the time.

Richard Jacobs: Well, what, I’ve read a bit about intermittent fasting, it seems like there’s not much benefit at least in the scientific literature until you get to at least, you know, a 16, eight or maybe an 18 six but what have you seen with clients is at least even a 12-hour window, a big milestone for them?

Abel James: To your point, that’s a great point is that there are a lot of benefits that kick in at that like a 16-hour mark and more benefits that kick in at 24 hours and sometimes a couple of days. So there are cascading benefits but it depends on your goals. If you’re looking to stop overeating or get better control over your hunger and lifestyle, then I think that’s a win right there. Like pretty much, I think almost everyone can win by eating a bit less. This isn’t like popular advice for me to say. And I didn’t always speak this way or think this way, but I think, one of the biggest problems we have and the reasons we were putting on so much weight is because we’re overeating, but it’s we’re overeating because the foods that we’re eating are making us more hungry. Like every time you have processed food, it’s designed to get you to come back for more. It’s keeping you hungry on purpose.

That’s how these foods are designed. And that’s capitalism kind of. But if you realize that and, and start to make your own food, like we make our own desserts with real food and really turned down the sugar and use natural sources like maple sugar, honey and sometimes a little bit of Stevia or monk fruit. But we dramatically turned down the sugar so that you’re filling up and the food that you’re eating, even if it is a treat, isn’t making you more hungry as you’re eating it. So when you are filling up on real food, you don’t have to constantly fight your hunger and fight your cravings anymore. And there’s dramatic freedom that comes with that because once you kind of hop off that train, you have half your day back to do something with where you’re not worrying about what am I going to eat for breakfast? Okay, got up, we’ve got to prepare that and make that clean up after it. Okay, what are we having for lunch? Got to go there. You’ve got to order something. You know, got to eat that. You got to get that cleaned up, got to go back to work and then do it all again for dinner and maybe dessert. And that takes up so much of your life. So I think for a lot of practical reasons, people can simplify by eating these more nutrient-dense and filling foods and that frees up their lifestyle to do more with their life. And they don’t have to be constantly addicted to outside exhaustion things like, various forms of sugar in sodas, in carbs like bread that people use for energy and in these little carb hits of snacks you don’t need that anymore. And once you can kick a little bit out, you find that you can keep that ball rolling. I think a lot of people don’t realize how addicted they are until they really start going on this elimination-style diet. One thing I would recommend is if you are serious about this, like take pretty much everything that’s packaged, a packaged food that you know is processed in one way or another and put that in your MRE like survival preparedness food stock-up pile. Don’t touch it for a while cause that food will keep, it’s okay, you don’t have to give it away or anything, but do your best to surround yourself with fresh foods from the perimeter of the grocery store that’s spoil, that is perishable and eat them primarily and really try not to stray into those processed shelf-stable foods if you can avoid it.

Richard Jacobs: What about if someone goes to restaurants every day for lunch or dinner. Is it possible even to eat real foods in a restaurant or is it just not relevant?

Abel James: Yeah, it depends on the restaurant for sure. But even in the worst-case scenario, like when I was on that TV show, Kurt lived in Atlanta and he would go to this like a fried fish place with his coworkers, I think every Friday he would. And that’s a social thing. Like you don’t want to miss out on critical time with your coworkers, with your family and all this other stuff when you are going out and celebrating an occasion or even just working, it’s important, I think that you’d be there and you’re not just to shut your whole life off from everyone. So that said, even that fried fish chain, down there in Georgia, there was a way to get the fish, not fried, but I think they had options for steamed, for baking. You might have to ask them specifically if they could get you something that’s not fried in oil or just whatever particular dietary recommendation you have at this point. There are so many picky eaters on the vegan side, paleo side, people who have food allergies to gluten and all sorts of peanuts and shellfish, all these different things. And so even if they are hotel chains and fast-food chains, most of these restaurants, surprisingly it might not be on the menu, but if you ask them are more than willing to accommodate you and your whatever food, whatever specifics you want as far as how your food is prepared because they’re trying to sell you food and they’re trying to make money and they want you there, they want you to come back. And I’ve found that over and over again over the years, and it can be a pain, you might have to be the high maintenance one at the table, but there are ways around that too where you can go up to the person at the front desk and you’re just like, you know what, I have some food sensitivities. Do you mind if I put in a special order or can I talk to someone? And you don’t have to make a big thing about it. And I’ve been really surprised by how cool restaurants and places where you eat out are about all of them.

Richard Jacobs: That’s really good. That’s excellent.

Abel James: I will say though, the food is more boring that way. Like you’re in damage control mode more than you’re in, let’s have a giant feast and totally enjoy this thing because the way that you avoid the bad stuff is at restaurants is really by avoiding these industrial oils and their sauces and salts, which are usually laden with MSG, processed salt and all sorts of other chemicals and nasty stuff. Well, actually this is a good point. I travel with a tiny little spice pack. It’s really convenient. It’s like the size of a salt shaker, but it’s got six different spices in it. Salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder. I usually keep it. And then on the bottom savory, I do cinnamon and chocolate powder for like coffee. And then we also travel with our own fats sometimes. So we’ll bring olive oil or dressings of our own and so yeah, you’ve gotta be willing to be the weird one, but also as you know when your health is at stake, there’s nothing more important.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. A couple of things I noticed when I was traveling with my family a few years ago and we were at the airport like Amsterdam and I was just really hungry. The only thing they had that was I guess, was like bacon and eggs that I get. So I ordered like five of them piled up all the baguettes and just ate the eggs.

Abel James: Nice. I have done that. It sounds familiar.

Richard Jacobs: Sometimes it’s more expensive or inconvenient or weird, but you have to assemble these meals from strange constituents, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Abel James: It’s true and there’s nothing wrong with that and although you’re ribbed at first and I was made fun of a lot. It’s those very people who are kind of giving you a hard time at the beginning that started hopping on the train as beginners.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, definitely. In your journey though, was it just smooth? You just kept losing weight and getting more and more ripped or what was the point that you found most difficult? Because I think it’s not easy for a lot of people and there’s a lot of bumps along the way.

Abel James: Absolutely. It’s different for everybody, but I can say if you’re not used to being in that intermittent fasted or fat-burning mode than a lot of the benefits can come pretty quick. Mostly in the form of getting rid of excess water right away. A lot of people notice that all of a sudden their face starts being a little bit more thin and their joints are less inflamed. And a lot of this is because when you have an excess of sugar stored in your system, it comes with water. And so as you become less reliant on sugar and you stop eating so much of it, your body let some of that sugar go and let some of that excess water go as well. And so that water weight feels different because if you’re out running for me five, 10 pounds, even if it’s just water, it makes a big difference in the way that you feel. So I actually kind of like training with my carbs down and as far as it being smooth or not that can be difficult. That transition for a lot of people going from riding that carb train to not being on it, all of a sudden it comes with like your body’s not ready. You have never felt some of these feelings before. They’re going to be novel. It’s going to feel weird and your stomach, probably your muscles in your brain might feel low energy, but that’s because of a skill that your body doesn’t have yet that you’re developing. Some people call this like the keto flu or the low carb flu or whatever, but it’s not really flu as much as your body is just like, Oh my God, what am I going to do without sugar? And I was like, Oh, I can just burn fat. And once it learns to do that, then it can burn the fat from your legs, from your back. One of the wonderful things about being a human is that we actually store our fat right in the center of gravity, exactly where you would want it. It’s perfectly designed, but if we’re constantly eating sugar, then it shuts off your ability and your natural skill to access that fat as a store of fuel. So it’s truly incredible what some people can do. And how efficient they can get at burning that fat. But it does take a couple of weeks. So I would say give it a good 21, 30 days to get a fair shake of eating this way and you can start slow. That’s fine. And make sure that you’re drinking plenty of water. If you do those and that you get plenty of that you’re not afraid of Himalayan salt, like not processed salts, but clean salt. Sea salts, unfortunately, are largely polluted with microplastics and other pollutants. But salt is an important electrolyte to keep in mind. Magnesium and potassium can really help through that train. But then after those few weeks, really there are a lot of people, there’s where there’s no turning back. The people who I’ve seen succeed lose over a hundred pounds and I’ve coached a lot of them. They don’t go back because it’s not pleasurable. They feel like they were addicted to food. As I did. I felt like I was addicted to food before and I don’t feel like that anymore. I feel like my brain and my habits have literally changed.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. I noticed that when I had a lot less sugar, if I ever tasted anything that had, you know, quote-unquote normal levels of sugar, I was like, yeah, oh God.

Abel James: It’s like a punch on your teeth.

Richard Jacobs: You’re like, Oh my God, you know, it would make you like, I don’t know. And then I remember like certain foods that seem to be okay before now tastes literally chemically. They’re full chemicals. So it made it a lot easier not to have that stuff.

Abel James: Totally. Yeah. Because your tastes do change, but it’s mostly from removing the over stimulus. It’s from removing all of this excess noise that all of a sudden your palette changes and you become much more sensitive. So even a little bit of salt or a little bit of this particular spice or you can be like, Oh, is there ginger in this? Your sense has actually become more powerful. Especially when you’re avoiding all of those chemical sugars, sweeteners, MSG is in almost everything. It’s so bad. Once you avoid it though you really notice when it’s in something, you put it in your mouth and MSG anytime, like it’s a bizarre little tingle, but it’s a unique sensation. And my wife and I, we both have this thing where when we eat the food we can almost tell what poison had been doing this for so long and at first like I wouldn’t be able to tell at all. If you’re drinking soda, you’re drinking Gatorade even every once in a while you can’t tell. Your senses are way too blasted to be able to notice what real flavor is. Unfortunately.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, I remember I was at the mall last week and there was ice cream place and I looked at it and just, it wasn’t one natural thing in the entire place. Like it was just, I looked at, you know, the other sugar, sugar, sugar, these eight kinds of sugar made it say this, these nine kinds of sugar made into that. And like even the machinery in the people and the lighting, like literally there was not one thing in the entire store that was natural, nothing. And I looked at a picture on my phone of like a farm or produce and it just literally looks so radically different. I didn’t even think about that until I sat there and looked at it and I was like, wow, it looks to me like the matrix. You know how people were plugged in and they were sucking out nutrients or giving them nutrients like this place had the soda machine and they were boxes of soda with tubes and man, it looked like the matrix to me.

Abel James: Isn’t that sad? It’s so dystopian. It’s like, why are those our standards? Why are our kids being raised in this world? We need to demand better than this.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So tell me a little bit about your podcast. What’s the goal of yours? Tell me about your coaching and your books. Like where are you headed? You’ve conquered your own eating, your family’s eating, you’re helping other people, but like, do you have big goals in mind? I mean, if these are big enough, but where are you headed with everything?

Abel James: I appreciate that question. I really, we’re so happy to do what we do and be able to help others. That’s why we do this. And when we’re not able to, or when we unplug for a while, we really miss it. So I do the fat burning man podcast where I interview as you do thought leaders mostly in the world of health, but increasingly pretty much from every walk of life. And we try to figure out this whole thing together because everyone has a different perspective. Everyone has unique skills and abilities and backgrounds. And so I love talking to PhDs, doctors and then just regular Joes and Janes who have gotten real results. And so the podcast is a great pleasure to do and it’s a video show as well. And I run fatburningman.com as well, which is a blog and I do some writing there and then also on a musician. And I wrote a new book, a book of humor called Designer Babies, still, Get Scabies. And that just became a number one international bestseller. So I’m really excited about getting that out there too because it’s kind of a different kind of project. And then also working with the Tim McGraw band again potentially. On a few little things and maybe even a TV show. We’ll see. I can’t say too much right now, but there’s a lot that’s going to be coming this year and next and we’re not going anywhere.

Richard Jacobs: Maybe it’ll turn burning man into fat-burning man and take over the festival or something.

Abel James: It might be a lost cause at this point from what I’ve seen.

Richard Jacobs: Oh yeah. That’s funny. All right. So what are some resources for listeners? They can find your podcast I’m sure at iTunes and everywhere, right?

Abel James: Yes it’s called Fat-Burning Man. And once again, my name is Abel James, so you can just search for me in podcast stores, social media and that sort of thing to find the podcast and that content. But also Abeljames.com has some of my other projects.

Richard Jacobs: And then if people want help directly from you, do you offer that with coaching or should they read books first and what are a few more resources?

Abel James: Yeah. I do have a whole bunch of different books that I put out in 2015, 2016. The wild diet is a big one. And I’m going to be updating that and releasing a new version hopefully this year, later this year. But that’s a great read and audiobook if you’re looking to just kind of dip your toes into this sort of thing. But if you’re looking for courses and more intense coaching, then definitely go to fatburningman.com. Check out our store, write me an email, get in touch and we’ll be sure to help you out.

Richard Jacobs: Well that’s great Abel. I mean you are aspiration and you got all this great positive energy and just that is it’s nice to listen to. So I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Abel James: Thank you so much for having me, Richard