BUFFETS AND MICHELIN STARS

My dad did a lot of business in Las Vegas, primarily because he worked for my Grandfather, who was a real-estate mogul that leveraged that into becoming a guru, who would put on seminars and sell books (so you can see this runs in my blood) but was also INCREDIBLY cheap (or “financially responsible” as he would put it) and Vegas in the 90s was marketed as being a very inexpensive resort town (very much different from today’s Las Vegas), which made it the perfect place to gather his subscribers and host events.  That was one helluva run-on sentence.  But anyway, Las Vegas in the 90s managed to be inexpensive because it leveraged the income it received from degenerate gamblers in order to subsidize family entertainment, which is actually probably about as twisted and evil as it sounds, but boy did WE benefit as kids.  There were arcades EVERYWHERE in Las Vegas, all with the latest and greatest games, and my dear sweet grandmother was one of those aforementioned degenerate gamblers who was entrusted with watching my older brother and I while the adults were away discussing real-estate and would, instead, swing by on occasion and go “The slots are running hot, I just hit it big, here’s $50 in quarters, I’ll be back in a few hours!” and we would live like kings of the arcade.  This same saintly woman, having no real concept of money, would one day give my brother and I $300 to “go buy a video game”, to which we purchased our first ever Super Nintendo.  This is way more of my family history than you ever wanted or needed, but it’s my blog and I get to tell the stories, and where this story is EVENTUALLY heading to is the fact that one of the other charming graces of 90s Las Vegas were the DIRT CHEAP buffets.  These days, a trip to the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace can run you $65-$95 per meal WITH a 90 minute time limit imposed on you, whereas in the 90s the average buffet cost was $5-12.  I say all this to establish the fact that: I KNOW buffets.  I grew up in buffets.  To the point that, whenever I visit some sort of TERRIBLE dingy poorly lit smoke filled buffet off the beaten path, with food trays that clearly haven’t been emptied out for hours and food that is of questionable origin and quality (like what we saw in “Vegas Vacation”), the dopamine centers in my brain light up like it’s Christmas, because my brain goes “you’re a kid again!”  I went to buffets so much growing up that I started to make it a game with each Vegas trip to ONLY eat a certain item the entire time I’m in the city: one glorious year it was fried chicken, which WAS at every single buffet, without question.  I bring all this up in this INCREDIBLY long introduction to discuss how many of those in the physical training realm are LIVING the buffet life, which, as we’ve established here, is really…a pretty scuzzy kind of life, subsidized by degenerate gamblers, in a city built by the mafia, premised entirely around fleecing you.  Many are missing out on some REAL gourmet Michelin Star experiences, where it’s not about the QUANTITY or variety of food, but the actual quality of the experience.  Let’s explore this metaphor.

Wonderfully awful movie and a time capsule of the era

 

On the surface (which is as deep as you ever WANT to look at a buffet, believe me), a buffet seems like the ULTIMATE dinning experience.  You get to pick WHATEVER you want, as MUCH of it as you want, and you don’t have to put ANYTHING you don’t want on your plate.  Watching children at buffets is especially delightful, because they’re shameless, and unlike adults that might try to ACT like adults by putting some sort of vegetable on their plate that they have no intention of eating, kids will have a mountain of French fries next to a lake of chocolate pudding while using mozzarella sticks to form a dam.  We then take our monstrosity back to our table, absolutely gorge ourselves, and even WITHOUT the 90 minute table limit, we still try to shovel the food in as fast as possible so that we can accomplish MULTIPLE passes at the buffet in order to take in even MORE massive quantities of bizarre food combinations: spaghetti and buffalo wings, next to pizza, nachos and sushi, with a hot dog chaser and 4 different desserts.  And at the end of the meal, we roll ourselves out of the booth, slough off to our vehicle, and spend the rest of the evening feeling absolutely miserable and swearing we’ll NEVER do that again…until the next night in Vegas, of course.

 

When we have a for real, sit down, gourmet experience, it’s entirely different.  The chef EXPERTLY prepares the meal, using years of culinary training to achieve effects in terms of taste, texture, aroma, and all other senses involved in the dinning experience.  Each element is expertly seasoned: many high end establishments will refuse requests for additional condiments or seasonings because they don’t want YOU to ham-fistedly RUIN the chef’s hard work.  The food is portioned appropriately in order to compliment the MEAL as a whole and as an experience: it’s not an arms race to simply give you the BIGGEST possible serving of meat next to a MOUNTAIN of potatoes, but instead the right amounts in order to achieve the right effects.  Many places will even employ palate cleansers between courses, to ensure that you are receiving the intended experience.  And when the meal is done, we are satisfied with our experience and feel BETTER than when we arrived.

Until this part of course

 

And speaking of “ham-fisted”, allow me to finally get this metaphor out: most trainees in the realm of physical transformation employ a “buffet approach” when it comes to their training and nutrition.  They look at all the “dishes” prepared by all the chefs of the world of training and nutrition, and only pick the parts that they like: excluding all the “yucky” foods and only gorging on the hyperpalatable delicious and overly indulgent parts.  And, along with that, they select portion sizes that are ENTIRELY inappropriate within the context of the meal: becoming overly saturated with one taste and completely neglecting the others.  And much like the buffet experience, they just keep on gorging on the parts that they like over and over again, never once making a pass over to the “lighter fair”, and once the meal is done, they’re in a worse place than where they started and are swearing that they’ll NEVER do that again…until they do.

 

We see this with the trainees that are addicted to just slamming themselves with volume and intensity and never once put in a thought toward the value of fatigue management as it relates to growth and recovery.  We see this with the trainees that cut out ALL the hard work in a program, designing some monstrosity of nothing but cables and isolation exercises and never managing to grow.  We see this with the trainees that lock in on “If It Fits Your Macros” and view it like it’s a Tetris like challenge wherein, through a strategic implementation of protein powder and ice cream they “win” at Macros.  I absolutely did this myself, “following” the Deep Water Diet by getting 2 double quarter pounders at McDonalds and “only” eating the meat and cheese.  And I got buffet style results from that.

Suffice to say he approaches it a LITTLE differently...

 

And I’m speaking about “Michelin Star Chefs” here when discussing this buffet style approach: coaches in the realm of physical training that have created “dishes” worth enjoying.  But the food at a REAL buffet is never going to be the same quality as what you get from an individual meal, even WITH the greatest possible chefs working there (which the aren’t…because it’s a buffet), because the sheer logistics of it don’t work.  And we see this in the realm of physical transformation as well: trainees COULD be sampling the dishes of Dan John, Jim Wendler, K Black, Dave Tate, Chad Wesley Smith, John Meadows, etc etc (seriously: it’s borderline unfair the amount of unrestricted access a modern trainee has to some of the GREATEST minds in the industry), but instead they’ll follow the plan of some influencer online whose only credentials are having abs and lots of followers.  THAT is buffet chow for sure, and they’re loading up on it, because these influencers are like true buffet line cooks and just producing “food” simply for the sake of producing it.  There’s no thought or consideration to portion sizes and putting together a meal: they just know that, today, they gotta make 400 chicken wings, 500 meatballs, 100lbs of spaghetti and enough taco meat to feed General Santa Ana’s army.  They don’t care who eats it or how much of it they eat: they get paid for QUANTITY, not quality.

 

It’s no wonder why you feel so terrible when your meal is over: you made a stupid meal to eat you big dummy!  Because think about that: as much as you may think “I’ve been eating my whole life: I know how to eat”, it actually takes YEARS of culinary training to fully understand how to build a MEAL such that it is a satisfying experience for the diner.  Yeah, you can take a nutrition course and figure out which foods are healthful, and you can take a food safety course to learn how to make food that doesn’t kill you, but the art of actual meal construction takes education and effort, which is WHY people entrust it to skilled chefs when dinning out.  In the realm of physical transformation, this is “working out” vs “training”.  Working out is about exhausting ourselves that one particular day: training is about building up to something greater over the course of many training sessions.  A skilled chef knows how to build training, whereas when you build your workout plate, it’s nothing but mac n cheese and mashed potatoes. 

When left to our own devices

 

And folks, I don’t say all this to overcomplicate food.  We don’t have to be Michelin star chefs in order to create a decent meal: we simply have to spend a little bit of time and effort learning and experiencing different element of cuisine to able to understand and appreciate the balancing act that occurs through the process.  But if we treat each meal with the buffet mentality, all we ever know is gorging, oversaturation/stimulation, flavor fatigue and a general malaise.  A trip to the buffet on occasion can be enjoyable: these are those stupid workouts that we KNOW we shouldn’t do but we do anyway.  But we can ALSO treat ourselves sometime by going out and getting a real gourmet experience from someone that knows what they are doing, where we just sit back and enjoy what is put before us.