Mike Israetel eats, sleeps, and breathes fitness. He’s written books, taught college courses, and carved out a booming social media career educating the masses on nutrition, strength, and hypertrophy. In his spare time, he’s also an accomplished bodybuilder and Brazilian jiu-jitsu enthusiast.
With over a million Instagram followers and a stream of YouTube content, there’s no shortage of Dr. Mike’s opinions on the internet. But we wanted to drill down to the nitty gritty, and we did, getting his unvarnished thoughts on breakfast, alcohol being a poison, and the aesthetic issues that come with being really, really big.
Mike Israetel: It's one of these things that just kind of accumulated for me. I started wrestling in high school and I wanted to get in better shape for wrestling, and I sort of realized that having more muscle and less fat was going to help me do that. At first I didn't really like the gym, but eventually I started seeing cool results and I got into a better head space with how to treat the gym—less as an expression of anger and more as the chasing of a goal and the enjoyment of the process. Then, I just really liked working out! I liked becoming muscular and larger and stronger, and for a long time I just did as much of that as I could. Eventually it dawned on me that it would be really cool to be lean as well. For much of my life I was trying to chase gains, which was a mistake, but, well, we're all young at some point.
Maybe as an artist would work on a sculpture, my sculpture is both my own body—the hideous acid-induced interpretation of what a body should look like. But also, a big part of my life's work is to help uncover the principles of aesthetics: Essentially, how to train and eat and recover in such a way that allows you to look the way that you want. People's appearances matter to them deeply! I'm very, very intent on that, and it's really cool to be able to generate enough information and understanding so that not only can I make my body look as cool as I want it—just from an action figure sort of vibe—but also to be able to help other folks who maybe look at their bodies and say, “Ah, man, I'm not in love with this, but I really want to be.”
So, I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. Biologically, I'm like 87. But chronologically, I'm 40.
I'm not very perceptive when it comes to other individuals. I have maybe a bit of a ’tism in that regard. I'm kidding, maybe, who knows? But I do suspect that I have received a different kind of treatment. I have kind of a curious life trajectory anyway. I couldn't really develop a stable understanding of how people saw me because I went through a couple of really big changes in other regards. But I will say that as I have become more muscular and leaner, I've noticed that folks will assume a few things, not all the time, but more than I would expect if they were looking at someone who was shaped differently.’
A lot of people just assume that your entire existence and obsession and intellectual curiosity is exclusively in fitness. Fitness is the deepest part of my profession, but I'm also a dilettante intellectually in a bunch of other stuff. I'm a nerd first and got jacked second. No one would really ever guess that I'm a nerd based on how I look. It never offends me, but it took me a while to figure this out. I think people assume that once you're jacked enough that you're not very intelligent, worldly, erudite, or able to speak on a variety of concepts. Until I was 15, I had undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. So, I know very much what it's like to feel stupid. Most people who met me, not knowing who I was, still would kind of assume that I'm just kind of a dummy. I never took it personally, but it is definitely a thing that happens with larger folks who are super muscular, like a brute.
Another one is that males, especially teenage males, treat you very differently. If you show a 50-year-old someone at the airport with a zany outfit, they're going to be like, “Yes, people wear zany outfits all the time. Not a big deal.” When you're a teen, preteen, everything hits you really hard. And I am a caricature of what a human and a machine of war would look like if they blended together. My head looks all weird, I have really crazy facial muscles, I look kind of absurd. From teens and preteens, [I get] a lot of, “What the fuck is that?” They have trouble putting you into a box. All children and all animals go through this. When they see you, any idea of them being at the top is instantly shattered with the real fear of like, “Oh fuck, that person could instantly just rip me into pieces if they wanted.” It's a weird dynamic.
Females find males of incrementally more muscle attractive up to a point, and then after that you become kind of fucking weird. After that you become scary, and after that you're just a sideshow clown. I went through every single one of those phases as I got bigger. For context, I'm five-foot-six, which is not exactly the most attractive height for females. When I was about 160 to 180 [pounds], I probably presented as my most attractive self to the average female of reproductive age. Nowadays, I'm 230 but leaner than I was when I was 180, and still the same height, kind of a ball of muscle. I think a lot of people who try to get jacked are like, “Man, this is going to help me with girls.” It's true to an extent until it's no longer true, and then it's the opposite of true. The same analogy could be made for guys. Like, do guys like big titties? Yeah. What if I have triple-Zs? Eh, okay.
Most of my cardio comes from daily step count. I wear a step tracker every minute that I'm awake, and I aim for roughly 10,000 steps on average. That is really great for health. It's really great for fat burning to some smaller extent, and it's good for just longevity and all that other stuff.
I do train regularly in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. That's where I get a lot of my hard cardio. If I want to improve my cardio, then I'll do the elliptical. But in this phase of life, I'm pursuing aesthetic pursuits as my number one thing, like bodybuilding. The amount of hard cardio I'm going to be doing is going to directly interfere with my ability to recover from training and retain the muscle. Basically, I lift weights for high reps, and I get plenty out of breath during all my weights workouts. I do a few days a week of jiu-jitsu, trying to beat the crap out of people and not get beat up. Then supplementing that, 10,000 steps a day, on average.
Yeah, “nerd about jock shit” is probably the best description I’ve ever heard for what the fuck I do. I mean, I got a PhD in sport physiology, which was described to me by the chair of the program as the science of taking good athletes and making them better. I parlayed that into physique athletics, bodybuilding, et cetera. You can think deeply about a lot of different things. I tend to—when I find an interest in something and it becomes valuable to me—think as deeply about it as possible. It’s the fucking demon that will never let go. Actually, every now and again I take recreational marijuana in very high doses, to disrupt my thinking patterns. Point the brain at something, it really thinks through it, and then it helps me develop a plan that makes the most sense for me.
My intellectual curiosity combined with my involvement in this jock stuff allows me to disseminate a lot of information to folks who may not be interested in thinking about the shit this deeply, but would really like to take the advice of someone who has thought about it deeply, has a formal education, and has spent lots of time researching all this stuff. Like, “Hey man, thank fucking God someone's working on this.” I can simplify these things and tell them, “Hey, do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that.” Then they get fucking sweet results.
Yeah, I've consulted multiple US Olympic athletes at various training centers, and I've actually been a professor of nutrition at a major D1 university before. I've taught a bunch of good nutrition-adjacent courses. I used to help Olympic weightlifters basically make weight, make appropriate nutritional decisions, and weigh an amount that is still conducive to high performance but also fits into their weight class. My company and my team of coaches have actually helped multiple folks who have gone to the Olympics and medaled. I wrote the code logic for a whole nutrition app that we have as well, a bunch of books and all this other stuff.
One of my consultation gigs was at the Lake Placid Center. Those were winter sports like bobsled and all the other sports that are downhill at insane speeds. I don't understand how these people's risk calculations work, but I'm like, “Yeah, this will make you better at these things.” Lots of experience with weightlifting, some experience with sprint cycling. I've consulted a lot of volleyball players. They're very tall.
No, I actually don't intuitively understand the fascination with large breakfasts, with spending a substantial amount of your morning time making a breakfast. My idea is to get from my bed to my work area as quickly as possible, or from my bed to the gym as quickly as possible, depending on my schedule for that day. I also just don't really have much of a hunger response for breakfast. I could be on the nastiest diet of all time, very low percent body fat, if you wake me up in the morning and you're like, “Hey, there’s this new drug and it's just going to get you lean and jacked no matter what you eat. Here's the drug, let's go to get some fucking tasty breakfast food.” I'd just be like, “I'm good, man. Can you catch me in four hours or something when I have more of an appetite?”
Generally my breakfast is like a protein shake or a few protein bars with the biggest bastardization of coffee that you may have run into yet. It’s instant coffee from the grocery store, but it gets worse. There's Splenda in it. Oh, but it gets worse. It's decaf, and it's made inside of a protein shaker just by shaking it. The water isn't even steamed or boiled. It is just hot water from the tap. That's the level of degeneracy that I live every single fucking day of my life, sir.
I mean, I take my supplements like creatine and vitamins and shit like that, and I put on my clothes. Depending on when I'm training that day, I'll either shower or not shower. But other than that, no. My morning routine really begins when I get down to my basement office and begin to work on the computer.
No, I have a very quirky view on that. I think that screen time and non-screen time are, in the next decade, going to fuse. I think people are going to eventually have glasses and contacts and integrated displays through a neural link type of setup, such that we can be aware of internet videos with this part of our field of vision and then go like, “Go away. I'm just going to look at this thing now.” Screens will I think end up mostly disappearing and will be sort of projected or displayed straight to our visual field. Put it right in, baby. Give it to me.
I think that's the future, and I think that there are many toxic patterns you can get yourself into with screen time. All of my screens auto-adjust when evening hits to no longer be emitting blue light, and I try not to do crazy screen time all the way up until I go to bed. I guess I have a little bit of an advantage, in that it's very difficult for me to get addicted to scrolling. I'll do it for a while and it just feels toxic as fuck and I'm like, “Fuck this,” and I just won't do it for multiple days.
For other folks, I definitely think that if you have a proclivity to be on the screen too much—and you notice the toxicity of it, and you notice you’re missing other parts of your life—then yeah, definitely something to be aware of. It's not like I'm saying it doesn't fucking matter. I'm just saying that I think I have a pretty decent relationship with it. I seem to think it's going quite well, but maybe I'm just delusional.
It's multivitamin. I take some vitamins and minerals in the morning and some in the evening. I can sort of tell you about both. I take some fish oils…I'll just combine morning and evening. It doesn't matter much when you take them. I take extra D vitamins because I live in Michigan, there's no fucking sun. If the sun blew up and was gone, we just wouldn't know about it for months.
So I take that, I take some extra magnesium, and I take creatine every morning. I take a couple of drugs for blood pressure because when you're my size and you're 40, blood pressure is likely to be elevated. It's the great killer, so I don't fuck with that. I take some other fun stuff that is quasi-legal. But mostly it's those kinds of supplements. Recently I've actually been taking Bryan Johnson's longevity formula because that's lots of good nutrition stuff in the morning. Do you know who Bryan Johnson is?
I've seen the Blade movies enough to, for sure, want to be a vampire. Anything Bryan does, I'm just fucking doing it. My skin's not turning white yet, but soon enough. His mix is really good. I don't take his other products, but the longevity mix in the morning is pretty dope.
I typically alternate. I have two different types of meals that I eat. I think this categorization may be valuable for other people. I call them business meals and fun meals. Business meals are the shit you eat when you need your body to be fueled appropriately for health, longevity, performance at work, body composition, and all that other stuff. And then fun meals are meals when you may actually not want to eat the worst fucking shit in the world. You know that this meal is like—you're out with friends, you had a busy week at work, and you want to treat yourself.
That way, you don't have to try to make all of your business meals as fun as possible or all of your fun meals as nutritionally optimal as possible. You just have to consider yourself with a ratio and have mostly business meals and a few fun meals. Then it's kind of like a big hack. My business meals are typically ground beef, ground turkey, chicken thighs, or something like shrimp, though that's quite rare. I tend to notice if I eat shrimp for a few days straight, I'm kind of like, “I don't fucking ever want see shrimp again.”
That’s enough of that, yeah. But those are my sources of meat. I must always have veggies with every main meal. I'll have broccoli slaw, carrots, mushrooms, cabbage, broccoli by itself, kale. Lots of greens are a really good thing. Then for grains, I'll have whole grain bread sometimes, oftentimes I'll have pasta, sometimes whole wheat, sometimes regular. I will also have mashed potatoes on occasion and a lot of rice. We have a rice cooker—my wife is Asian. I didn't know rice cookers existed until I married her. It turns out white people have been doing this shit in the pot for no fucking reason for generations, bro. It's fucking wrong.
Those lean meats, those basic carb sources, and a crap load of veggies are the foundations of most of my whole food meals. Just for clarity, please, I do eat fruits as well! Plenty of fresh fruits like oranges, pineapples, apples, pears, things like that. Those are really awesome. Then just to finish that out, the most common sources that I use for extra added fats is either olive oil or canola oil.
The fear of sugar is entirely mythical and stupid and pointless and empirically wrong. The only thing about sugar that's bad is that you tend to overeat foods that are sweet and then they increase your calories and then you gain fat and then your health goes to shit. Within the context of a calorie-balanced diet that's otherwise very healthy, if you have some sugary foods—especially fruits, which are fucking loaded with sugar—you're totally good. There should be a concern for really high-calorie, ultra-tasty food, because that basically causes the obesity epidemic and destroys lives all the time. That's my statement on sugar.
Alcohol is a poison. It's probably a poison at every dose. But what I have gotten into some trouble for lately in the podcasting space is being on a few podcasts and rendering my opinion on alcohol as being spectral. So, if you have one or two drinks a few nights a week, you're paying such a low cost to your health, longevity, and quality of life that it's undetectable on major meta-analytic scales. They don't see a reduction in longevity from one to two drinks per night on average for folks. Now, two to three drinks, four to five drinks, it escalates on an exponential curve. Having eight drinks a night every night, you're going to be in the hospital sooner or fucking later.
Yeah, congratulations. A lot of undergrads are like, “Get the fuck out of here.” But usually after college, you realize, “Oh, my God, half my friends were literally alcoholic.”
And a lot of them are proud of it! What I like to do as a science communicator is say, Look, if you have a few drinks here and there, and if you don't have it close to bedtime, and you don't tend to overeat junk food after you have the drinks, there’s almost no downside. If you're concerned about minute levels of risk reduction, then just don't ever drive on the freeway ever. That's the deal with alcohol. If someone's like, yeah, I have two to four drinks a night on average most nights, is that okay? I'd be like, it's costing you. Now also, it's not going to fucking kill you tomorrow. It'll probably chop off a few years off the end of your life, maybe five, if you continue to do this all the time. Fve years scares the fuck out of people, but it's the difference between 80 and 85. At that point, when you're 80, you're like, I would eat a ton of baby spinal cords to stay alive for longer.
But looking at it from the big picture, I just really want people to get some proportionality understanding with alcohol. I actually don't drink. So my own personal thing, to answer your question literally, is I just don't drink. Every now and again I try drinking and I realize there's just no need for it. It makes me sick. It's awful. I drink once a year and I always regret it. It's just not a part of my life. But I just don't want people to swing the other way on drinking and do the whole fucking D.A.R.E. bullshit. You feel me?
They told us we were going to straight die from all the shit! Like, your friend's going to try marijuana and then stab his mom in the face. Then [you get older], you're just like, Dude, my friend's mom is on marijuana. This is ridiculous. It's just one of these things. Alcohol is a poison for sure. But some people like it, it helps them relax, and it's a real good social lubricant. We also know that social immersion is a huge factor for longevity and quality of life, and some people need a couple of fucking shots to get in the mix. For those people, I just always encourage them to look at it as a spectrum instead of “alcohol good” or “alcohol bad.”
Now sometimes people will mix different kinds of drinks, one into another. You're like taking notes.
You guys got a fucking baller education. They never told us shit. What the fuck is cross-faded?
I didn't know that. That's new slang for me. That's cool.
In Real-Life Diet, athletes, celebrities, and other high performers talk about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.