Alyson Rose: Fasting for Women, Pro Video Gaming, and Why Burst Training Rules

A lot of people have been asking for a more intimate peek into what our own personal habits look like, especially to see what my wife Alyson does.  So, guess who’s on this week’s podcast?  Yep—my lovely wife and creator of the ridiculously delicious Choconut Cookie, Alyson Rose.

You’re going to love this show because we’re exposing a few of Alyson’s secrets… can you guess what her favorite food is to cook and eat?  (Hint, it’s not salad.)

On to the show with Alyson, where we chat about:

• How Alyson practices fasting differently as a woman
• The importance of healthy habits—even if you look silly doing chi gong in public
• Why burst training is better for women than treadmill
• And food—delicious food!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=/MCd-NzOdgqU

Alyson Rose: Pro Gamer To Kitchen Guru

Abel: Before Alyson became captain of the wild kitchen, she was a professional video gamer traveling all around North America and worldwide for competitions.  She was also on a reality television show.

“I used to be a pro gamer,” she says.  “I started gaming when I was really little.  I have five older brothers, and I needed to prove that I was equal in some way.  Later on I became a professional gamer on team called the Frag Dolls.”

Abel: She then worked at BioWare, where she helped launch a Star Wars video game.

I think gamers’  minds work in a different way… even when we’re out a bar, I have to make an objective list for myself, always looking for little treasure hunts, it’s a way to frame the world.

Abel: Now, she takes the energy she spent getting people addicted to video games to helping people realize a healthier lifestyle through incredibly delicious food.

Alyson is also responsible for a lot of the behind-the-scenes work on the blog, podcast, and heading up the online coaching forum—the Fat Burning Tribe.  And co-created our new Wild Diet Cooking Class series where you get to join us in the kitchen to whip up some of our favorite recipes.

When we first got together, you knew how to cook—but not healthy food.  I knew how to cook improvisationally, but you lapped me many times over because you’re so talented.

Cooking is like playing an instrument. You have to practice every day. Click To Tweet

When I started cooking, I started with mac n cheese and ramen, and then I’d get creative and add some gouda and tomato…  But Abel started the show about 4 months after we got together, so we both took the plunge into this specific way of eating that he’d been researching.

It was then that I realized I couldn’t have chocolate chip cookies because they were full of wheat and sugar.

“I kind of live for desserts.  Sometimes, at the end of the day I need a cookie.”

Abel: You started with a cookie, and over the course of years you perfected the perfect low-sugar, low-carb, gluten free chocolate chip cookie—now you have hundreds of amazing dessert recipes along with meals and smoothies and more.

So, what would you tell someone who’s new in the kitchen and a little bit afraid?

Once you’ve made a recipe, like chicken parmesan, which surprisingly is not easy to screw up, you’ll be so much less intimidated by it.  When you start to cook a meal, you think, “Okay, I’ve made this before.  I need these ingredients, et cetera.”  And you can do it.

You’ll mess up sometimes… just throw some bacon on there and it will be great!

Abel: We were both guilty of exercising a lot.  I was running marathons and you were doing 2 – 3 sessions a day on the treadmill.  Like an hour each session.  Now, you’re still the same weight but you don’t exercise the same way.

Yes, and my body composition is different.  The toning, color… I was kind of sickly, gaunt-looking, it wasn’t as good as I am now.  I started to realize that it was not that healthy—all that exercise and the diet I was eating.  My dad saw me and said, “Alyson, you need to eat more!”

Exercise: Why “Fun Exercise” Is Better

When I was gaming, I was like, “Oh, crap!  I’ve been sitting on the couch for 18 hours a day playing video games and my thighs are not looking so great.”  So I started working out a ton—like running three times a day for an hour each time.

Now, I do a Wild7 workout—which is short bursts of high intensity exercise.

“Sprints are my favorite.  Even if it’s just sprinting down the driveway and back, it feels so good just getting my blood moving in the morning.”

It’s fun, like you’re a kid again.

We just moved to the woods, and so I take Bailey (our dog) out… and she doesn’t have to be on a leash. We just sprint through the woods.  It’s kind of like a video game for me.  We are dodging branches and going around trees and I end up with scratches—you just feel alive doing it!

It’s not the same movements over and over like running on a treadmill, so it’s also much better on your joints and your body.

When I do this, I just set myself up for a fantastic day.  The rest of your day can’t be bad, because you were a wild animal this morning.

I also like to do squats and kettlebell swings.  Your legs and your butt are the biggest muscles in your body, so when you work those out, you get this awesome cascade effect.

I’ll do squats with a 50 pound kettlebell and swings with a 30 pound kettlebell—and I usually do 4 sets of 25.  It feels really good because that for me right now is enough to where I’m pushing it.  I high five myself for that.

Abel: How long does your kettlebell workout take?

It takes 5 minutes or less. It’s like micro-exercising, and it gets amazing results.

How To Create Resilient Habits

Abel: We spent the last year on the road living in many parts of North America—Colorado, California, Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, New Mexico, Utah, Texas… and all over the world in Fiji, Bali, Australia, Canada, Peru… and tons of other places.  We lived nonstop out of campers, RV’s, tents, and other peoples’ houses.

So, I have a few tips about effective eating and living from living in such a haphazard way for so long.

The main thing is you want to have your routine, the things that keep you healthy and thriving every day, you want to have those down.

Here’s my morning routine: I exercise and then do some yoga and chi gong, and I meditate. It’s important that I do it in the morning because it really sets the tone for my whole day.  I feel calmer, centered, focused, and more connected with the universe.

I know I’ve done my exercise and I feel good.  Those are the things I told myself I was going to do and I did them.

It’s especially important to do your routine in the morning when you’re on the road because you never know what might happen—truck catching fire, or being caught in a blizzard—If something goes haywire, and you haven’t gone through your routine in the morning, you may not get to it.

Suffice it to say, we’ve really learned how important habits are and it is possible to persevere.

Keeping routine on vacation is also really important. A lot of people go on vacation, and it’s easy to say, “I’m not at home, I’m not going to exercise, or meditate, or follow my healthy eating plan because of (some random excuse).”

You just have to do it.

“You can go from playing video games for ten hours a day to having the same habits as the most successful people on Earth.”

If you don’t do your regular routine every day, it’s going to be a lot harder to get back into that once you get back home.

Also, one thing that’s built my confidence in a lot of ways, besides sticking to my daily habits, is doing it in front of other people no matter where we are. No matter what RV park we were parked at, we’d get up on top of the RV and do qi gong up there.

I wanted to do it even if other people saw.  It was a big confidence builder—a practice in not caring about what other people think.

You have to look ridiculous in front of other people to find out who you really are. Click To Tweet

Fasting For Women

Abel: In my daily life, I do 16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating…  the more difficult explanation is more like 20 hours fasting, 4 hours eating.  But in the morning and midday I might drink a fatty coffee and eat some sort of fat.

I’m straddling ketosis most of the day up until noon, 3:00, or 6:00pm.  A lot of women say they don’t feel good when they do that… how do you approach fasting?

I started off small.  I stopped eating at 8pm, and started between 10 am and noon the next day.  I felt so good, and I had this incredible focus. It’s hard to explain, it’s like a physical feeling of clarity and focus in my head.

Then I’d push it longer and farther. I went as far as fasting 5 – 7 days a week and going until about 2 or 4pm.  And then snack on something while preparing dinner.

I recently got my cortisol tested—my morning cortisol was lower than it should be, which is why I started doing sprints in the morning. (I don’t drink that much coffee).

Now I’m scaling it back to fasting 3 – 4 days a week… today I didn’t have my green smoothie until 2pm.  About 8pm – 2pm is my fasting window, for about 3 – 4 days a week.

It’s annoying to think about breakfast in the morning when I just want to get right to it.  I don’t feel like I’m starving myself.  I feel really healthy.  And at night we have a feast.

It’s a feast of things that are difficult to overeat.  We break our fast with two huge glasses of low-carb, low-sugar green smoothie.  We do it differently than other people.

A lot of juices and green smoothies are loaded with sugar.  Ours are full of vegetables.

My smoothie will be:  A big bunch of greens, a little bit of oil (like olive, avocado, or coconut oil), flax seeds, soaked chia seeds, ice, and maybe some berries.

We’ll either break our fast with that, a salad, or some eggs.

Then, when we have our feast, it’s not disordered eating.  We are having fun–a big salad, nuts and seeds, flax crackers… if we have any carbs we save them for the night—sweet potatoes, wild rice, red rice.

For dinner, we will usually have a nice cut of meat (I like short ribs—doesn’t have to be expensive) and tons of greens.

We might even treat ourselves to popcorn on Sundays—but not regular popcorn (which is almost always full of artificial flavors, colors, and industrial oils).  We do a super-delicious heirloom, non-GMO popcorn that’s packed with more flavor than any other popcorn we’ve ever tried.  It tastes like buttered corn on the cob.

The Superfood that Made Me Cry

One thing we were putting in our smoothies for a while didn’t work out so well.  Maca.

It’s not a good one for me.  It’s the “new superfood!”  It does all these great things—increases your sex drive and makes you superhuman.  It tastes good, too.

It’s potent, and because I eat a balanced diet and my body balance is good, Maca throws my hormones all out of whack… and so for half a day, I am just a mess.

There are a lot of health foods that contain Maca, and people often stack them up so they’re consuming more than a single dose.

One of the girls in the Tribe was gaining weight and having trouble with her hormones, and I helped her break it down. She was having a protein shake that had maca in the ingredients, and she was adding additional maca to it. When I shared my experience in the group, it clicked for her that was the culprit.

Food is medicine.

Abel: This happened to me with deer antler velvet—something guys are more prone to taking it to get their huge lifts on. I tried it, and it made me pissed off and get acne.

What Do You Eat?

Let’s talk more about food—I’m excited about this cooking class.  What’s your favorite thing to make and eat?

Ice cream and cookies!  I love dessert—and pie.  We have all these wild blackberries growing everywhere around here.  I’ve been dreaming about making a blackberry pie.

Abel: Aside from desserts—what do you like?

I really like ribs and steak.

I also like duck.  It’s similar to cooking a chicken—but much fattier and juicy, and you get the byproduct of duck fat at the end. You cook the duck on the roasting rack and all the fat drains into the baking pan, and you have duck cooking fat, which is usually about $10 at the store.

Save the drippings. It’s worth it! Click To Tweet

This is the way we actually live.

I have to ask, what’s YOUR favorite, Abel?

Abel: I like everything you cook. I like a really good omelet that’s packed with avocado and caramelized onions and some chicken and veggies.  I like punch-you-in-the-face hearty foods and flavors.  Especially because I go most of the day without eating.

Now here’s something I’m going to share on the down-low: When you’re in the health field for a while, you get to eat with a lot of other health experts—and a lot of health experts don’t follow their own diets.

We, on the other hand, just open the veil and say, “This is what we actually do every day—these are our habits and this is what we’ve learned and how we apply it.”

Like our cooking class—it’s just the two of us hanging out, showing you how to cook the food we eat all the time—like pumpkin bread, bacon burgers, healthy pancakes…

Talk about the pancakes!

This one was sent to us by a community member—it’s eggs, coconut milk, coconut flour, baking soda and vanilla.  It’s so good.  They cook up and look just like pancakes and they’re really tasty.  All the recipes we put into this Wild Diet Cooking Class are our favorite, easy, delicious hard-to-mess-up recipes.  Most are like 8 minutes long.

Where To Find Alyson

Abel: We want to get you in the kitchen.  That’s one place you can find Alyson.  Now, tell them about the Tribe.

It’s a website that we update three times a week with a bunch of cool videos, recipes, downloads and a private Facebook group where everybody is on this journey together

This is a huge part of it—if someone asks a question, I’ll answer and I have my perspective, but there’s also a bunch of other people on the Tribe Facebook Group who have been doing this diet for weeks to years, and they’ll pipe in and share their experiences… we share recipe and weird articles and “can you believe these companies?” rants.  But mostly it’s positive and inspiring and supportive.

So, you can find Alyson at www.FatBurningTribe.com.

What’s In The Works?

We finally found a place in the woods in the Rocky Mountains, and we’re back to working really hard—and it’s been so cool to see Wild Diet reviews, especially for the audio book, and the thing that warms my heart the most—a lot of people are giving The Wild Diet as a gift to people they love.

From podcast to blogs to books—we want it to be this thing that’s honest—and I’m totally coming clean right now, because one thing I realized (especially in publishing The Wild diet)—a lot of people in the industry are marketers first… and then kind of interested in health.  Going up against people who are marketers is a challenge and sometimes it’s frustrating.  But it’s worth it.

It’s not some super complicated thing. It’s very simple, but not easy.  We try to make it easier to work it into your lifestyle, your habits, and that’s what we really specialize in.

It’s true, this fat loss game can be a little bit confusing. My wife, Alyson, is about 105 pounds, and I stay lean and mean at around 165.

But by looking at how well we eat, you wouldn’t guess it.

Like last night, for example. We had grass-fed burgers smothered in cheese and topped with bacon, egg, and sweet potato fries, a salad packed with nuts, cheese and fruit, and a slice of blackberry pie for dessert.

Other nights we might have homemade ice cream or cookies for dessert.

It’s puzzling, because most people don’t expect us to eat butter, bacon, steak, muffins, pumpkin bread, and other fatty delights while staying so lean.

The trick to eating this way is that our homemade recipes are made in a very specific way. We don’t use GMO’s, industrial oils, processed sugars, or anything else that could negatively affect our health.

We want to share this way of living with as many people possible. So we spent the past few months creating the Wild Diet Cooking Class for you with some of our favorite recipes.

Sale – Get The Wild Diet Cooking Class for 50% Off

We believe it’s possible to optimize your health by eating your favorite foods.

Here’s just a small sample of the fat-burning meals we’ll be demonstrating for you:

• The Perfect Green Smoothie
• Power Cookies
• Bacon-Wrapped Scallops and Sweet Slaw
• Cashew Cream Alfredo with Zucchini Noodles
• Roasted Bone Marrow
• Old-Fashioned Pumpkin Bread
• Ultimate Bacon Burgers
• Sun-Dried Tomato Meatballs with Zucchini Noodles
• Smoked Salmon and Kale Salad
• Nourishing Bone Broth
• And much more…

We want to show you how we cook at home… not by spending hours preparing intricate and time-consuming meals, but by grabbing a skillet and whipping up an incredible, healthy meal in just 15-20 minutes.

The Wild Diet Cooking Class

Okay, so it’s probably no secret that my beautiful, petite wife loves dessert, and that the Choconut Cookie was praised by professional chefs at Paleo(fx) as the best thing they tasted at the whole conference—and you can make them for free in your own kitchen!

Alyson and I put together a show that teaches you how to make these gooey, delicious, gluten-free, low-sugar, and nutritious cookies in less than ten minutes as part of our Wild Diet Cooking Class series.  We’ve spent years perfecting some of our favorite healthy meals, and this cooking class really takes the frustration out of cooking.

It’s all about grabbing a skillet and whipping up healthy, delicious meals in under 20 minutes—like Chicken Parmesan, Green Monster Frittatas, scrumptious desserts and much more. Head over to the Wild Diet Cooking Class to check it out—we’re offering the entire series at half off for a limited time. One reviewer says,

“The chicken parmesan was amazing.  My son who refuses to try anything healthy at 18 loves it!” – Maria Frasche

So, if you want to support this ad-free show and try out some awesome gluten-free, Paleo-friendly recipes—join us in the kitchen.

We started “hacking” our favorite meals like chicken parmesan, bacon/avocado burgers, chocolate cookies, and more. We wanted to make our “cheat” foods healthy… and since we eat these meals every day, I can say that we’ve cracked the code.

For example, our recipes are:

• Gluten-Free, Wheat-Free, and Grain-Free
• Low in sugar and carbs
• Nutrient-dense
• Packed with fiber
• And totally guilt-free

Here’s what people are saying about our class:

“So much fun!!! It’s great to get to hang out with you guys in the kitchen and see how simple cooking amazing tasting and healthy food can be. I already consider myself a good cook, but I learned a ton of extra tips in these videos to save money and time in the kitchen. Thanks guys!” – Amanda Wilcock

“These videos have giving me such a better understanding of how to actually make great tasting food. It’s one thing to read a boring cookbook, but it’s another thing entirely to actually see it get made right in front of your eyes. I recommend this class to anyone who wants to be a master in the kitchen.” – Jan Moore

“These recipes are soooo amazing! Love it all! Can’t wait to make them all, I think it might be time to have a Wild Party and whip up a feast! Love you Abel and Alyson!” – Christine Kwong

We’ve spent months making this class for you, and we can’t wait to hear what you think.

It’s on sale for a limited time – Get the Wild Diet Cooking Class for 50% off

Imagine – you can be totally comfortable in the kitchen in less than a week. No matter what’s in your fridge, you’ll have our top tricks for making fat-burning meals without the fuss, mess or stress of traditional cooking methods.

And since we just launched the Wild Diet Cooking Class, you can get the entire series for more than 50% off for a limited time.

If you want to know literally what we eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner to stay in great shape, watch these videos.

Launch Sale – Get The Wild Diet Cooking Class for 50% Off

So for the last 4-5 years, Alyson and I have been perfecting recipes for our favorite dishes and desserts. We’ve finally figured out a way to make healthy meals in just a few minutes that will totally knock your socks off.

Here are a few of our favorites that you might enjoy:

• Chicken Parmesan
• Choconut Cookies
• Green Monster Frittata with Bruschetta
• The Perfect Green Smoothie
• Power Cookies
• Cashew Cream Alfredo with Zucchini Noodles
• Old-Fashioned Pumpkin Bread
• Ultimate Bacon Burgers
• And much more…

Check it out, we know you’ll like it.

Special Launch Sale – Get the entire class for 50% off!

Where to Find Abel

Come check out the cooking class or join the Fat-Burning Tribe. Find me on Twitter @fatburnman or on Facebook.

If you want to make sure you never miss out on a podcast, blog, or freebie—go to the home page and enter your best email to sign up for the newsletter.

You’ll be able to access every show I’ve ever recorded, and I’ll send you free fat-burning downloads straight to your inbox (along with some delicious recipes).

What did you think of this show? Have you checked out The Wild Diet Cooking Class yet? Leave a comment below to let us know!