OPtimum EXperience Nutrition: Nobody on Their Deathbed Blamed the Apples
Frameworks with Carl Hardwick | CoachRx Podcast Network
Frameworks, Episode 53, with Carl Hardwick and James FitzGerald
Lisa has been working with her coach for a few months now. The physical side makes sense to her. She knows what a gain contraction is, she knows what a sustain contraction is, and she has stopped asking what she is doing tomorrow. Then she opens her phone and the feed hands her seed oils, fructose, pesticides, organic versus conventional, a study about Doritos and broccoli being equal if the calories match, and a reel from someone who is very certain about all of it. She brings it to her coach and asks the question every coach eventually gets: how much of this matters?
That is the episode. Part two of the Optimal Experience series, capital O, capital P, capital E, capital X, and this one is nourishment. Carl and James agreed before they started that behavior would be spliced out and saved for next week, so the conversation stays on the physical effect of food, with one large exception they could not resist. The reframe is the shortest one the show has produced: eat real food, and stop asking questions. Underneath it is a harder claim, which is that most of the complication in nutrition exists because someone wanted to be paid for knowing more than you.
The six rung ladder
Carl opened by pulling an old artifact back into the room. In 2019 and 2020 James laid out a six rung food ladder, and Carl walked through it for anyone who was not around then. Inadequate, deficient, good enough, ideal, worthy, highest order.
Inadequate is mostly processed food, eaten by someone completely unaware of what they are eating. Deficient is the standard American diet, food for pleasure, food as reward, or the same unawareness as the rung below. Good enough is balance: grains, dairy, beans and legumes, meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs, nuts and seeds, with no particular focus and no need for one. Ideal is food from nature, from the air and the land and the trees and the water, with a high level of awareness about it. Worthy adds cleanliness on top of ideal, more organic, lower pesticide, and a person who knows exactly what they eat and why. Highest order is a personalized food profile, built for one person, with that one person's vitality as the focus.
James gave the example he always gives. One person might do well on avocados and a certain fish off the west coast of Africa. Someone in Finland may do better with cod and tubers. The deepest personalized version still lives inside the context of real food, probably untreated, probably sourced by the person eating it.
What each rung can handle
The part of the ladder that is easy to forget is that each rung came with a correlation to physical expression. Carl asked James what the inadequate person should be doing for physical activity. Really low intensity movement. Learning what the patterns are. Figuring out what the tougher contractions feel like. Easy aerobic work. The deficient person is capable of about the same, and probably learning a little more in each area.
At good enough, James said, it can get more spliced up. This person can start experimenting with what harder contractions and aerobic work actually look like for them, a deeper understanding of the kinds of contractions rather than just doing something. The person who is inadequate just needs to do something. The person who is good enough gets to splice.
Splice, not spice. The L matters. It became the word of the day.
Strategies belong at the top, not the bottom
Carl added something to highest order that James had not said out loud. Highest order foods, yes, but also highest order strategies. If someone delays their first meal of the day, and they are doing it because it is individualized to their lifestyle and their intention, not because a reel told them it produces more growth hormone, that strategy can live on the top rung too.
Where it gets dangerous is when those strategies get handed to someone with a deficient food profile. Cover the foundation first. Cover your bases before you take on a strategy that may not do anything for you at the moment.
James caught the word. Strategies deal with choice, and choice is behavior, and behavior is next week. Carl had wanted to talk about levels of awareness too, and he made the call on air: awareness gets into behavior, so it gets punted. Today is the meat and bones, the non-emotional stuff around the physical aspects of food and its effect. Hard to hold, Carl admitted, but that is the choice they made when they started the series. If you dig in on physicality you cannot also do nutrition and behavior, or it becomes hours of debate for no reason.
Would James change the ladder in 2026
Carl's real question was whether James would lay the ladder out any differently today. The first answer was no. Going back in time, he would not change a thing, because he only knew what he knew, and he thought it was the best way to get people to an enlightened state about nutrition: recognize where you sit, then use the scaffolding to move toward the highest order beacon.
Then the second answer, which is the one that matters. If he started today, he would not build the ladder at all. He would say: here is the highest order. If you choose to do it, there are all these benefits, some of which I do not have science for, so you just have to believe me. See you later.
His reasoning is about what happens to the conversation once the ladder exists. You do not need to go through fourteen journals on the variation between populations on a processed food diet and a real food diet at matched calories. You do not need an economics paper on the cost of organic broccoli against the calories in four Doritos. That is where you end up if you do the ordering and the scaffolding seven years later. All this opportunity for chaos and useless banter. If that is uncomfortable, he said, he is not going to apologize.
Carl asked whether the goal was still to get everyone to highest order. James said the goal now is just to lay out what he believes is the best. It comes back to the liberties and freedoms conversation from a few episodes ago. He does not care what you do. He is saying this is the best, choose as you wish, and he will not get mired in the other things: well, science is showing this, and these are modern times, and what about AI, and what about processed foods, and what about genetically made meat, what are your thoughts on it. I already told you. Eat real food. Stop asking questions.
Humans are the problem, the food is not
Carl was not willing to leave it there, and said so. Lisa has heard the physical conversations and they make complete sense to her. But the ladder itself talked about pesticides and organic and cleanliness. So, with no intention of prescribing anything to Lisa, Carl asked the question she would ask: how much does that stuff matter? The pesticide conversation. The organic conversation. The seed oil conversation from weeks back. Where does it sit?
James's first answer was that he personally does not think it matters that much. Then he grabbed the comment and expanded it, because he knew he had to. It is the same thing he said previously about seed oils and gluten. Humans are the problem. The food is not the problem.
The question to ask first is why can't I detoxify any of these invaders? Why can't I? Because we actually have a number of systems, set up in multiple ways, to get rid of things that are not useful to us. They were set up naturally. We have defense systems after we ingest, and we have sense making defense systems before we ingest anything: the feel of it, the smell of it, the slight taste of it if we have just started on it. All of these say this is in, this is out.
Why we have lost that sense making is a whole other conversation, and it drags you back into lack of awareness and lack of intuition, into chewing slowly, understanding your food, prepping your food. Behavior again. So the answer stands. He really does not think it matters.
Two extremes, and the carrot that is not a panacea
To make the point hold, James put it into extremes. Take someone who is really good in their mindset and whose physicality is superb, and who eats real food that has been treated, maybe some GMO cucumbers every now and then. James would argue that person is going to have a very vital life, and you will have a very hard time proving to him that an end state disease for that person came directly from their food choices.
Now take the other side. Someone who eats the highest order foods from day three to ninety one can still have a horrible physical expression, and be an unhappy, discontented, unwise, unaware, unkind individual for eighty five years, and still operate at whatever function is necessary to stand upright and move around from seventy to ninety.
So you cannot isolate what carrots are treated with as the panacea for all of these issues. Because the moment you do, you take on thirty five other things. What about blue blocking glasses. What about getting in sunshine. Why can't we just bring it down to some principles.
Generally, James said, it does not matter. His asterisk was that you have to talk about the human's behavior and their physicality alongside it, and they were not allowed to today. We're spliced, man.
Nobody on their deathbed blamed the apples
Carl remembered the fructose panic from about ten years ago, when a popular conversation said we needed to avoid it. He found it so stupid he did not want to spend the time building the counterargument, so he built a question instead, and he remembers asking clients.
Have you ever in your life met someone lying on their deathbed, or struggling with type two diabetes, who looked you in the eyes and said, if only I had not eaten so many apples?
People laugh. James laughed. And Carl's point was: what does that tell us? Does it tell us fructose from apples is the boogeyman and we should avoid it at all costs? No. Does he have the paper to prove it? He does not. But it is common sense, because you just laughed when he asked.
What he noticed was that when he started approaching nutrition that way, people were more receptive, because they started using common sense. It is the same reason James said a few weeks ago that he refuses the argument with the person who wants to go back and forth about whether a Dorito and broccoli are technically equal if they are calorically balanced. Are you kidding me.
Do we overcomplicate nutrition
Carl said it might make the episode short, but he asked anyway. Do you believe we overcomplicate this concept of nutrition?
Oh my gosh, yes.
James got there through the three buckets, behavior, exercise, nutrition, and the question of whether we overcomplicate everything inside all three. He has landed that we certainly do for movement expression and for nourishing ourselves. He is more open on behavior, and he said why. He thinks behavior is the thread, the needle, between what gives coaches a job for the next twenty years and what does not, because he knows computers are going to do a better nutrition and exercise prescription. There is something left in how a human manages their own AI to help another person, and he thinks it has to do with behavior. So he is willing to let behavior stay a little more complicated for now.
Steel manning the complication
Carl tried something without notes. Can we steel man the utility of overcomplicating nutrition?
James did not think he could do it properly, but he knows why it happens, because he was there. It sometimes comes with good intentions. But in the end, if you think really hard, which makes people uncomfortable, even with good intentions it was a power grab. You wanted to say you were smarter than the other person. You had the knowledge, they did not, and therefore they had to pay you for that particular knowledge.
Then the summary of the whole principle. Read all the diet books and all the nutrition material, and what does the layman realize at the end? They need the basics of eating real food. It is all the same stuff. It all ends up in the same place.
Effect size, and the two percent
Carl predicted the next move, because he has watched it for years. When the principles get too simple, people reach for extenuating circumstances and special populations.
James answered with two words: effect size. How many people is this important to? For a nutritionist to open with special populations, his response was blunt and we will keep it to the clean version. Go do your research, do your education, help some of those people, good for you. Then come back and have an honest adult conversation, which he will have for hours, about how his exact same principles would never put that person in a bad position in the first place. You want to talk about diseased populations? How about they grew up eating real food. How about they were taught to eat real food and prepare their own food. You will never get them to an okay with that, because they will see that the principles inside of nutrition always end up being the same thing.
Carl pulled the through line across to physical expression, since they had already done that episode. The performer, the special population, is less than two percent. Among the population that actually needs this stuff, it is zero percent. And he said this should be empowering for coaches listening. Do not fill your tool belt with tools you will never use. If you want to help people, change lives, teach, then do not fill the belt with things that will never teach someone to do something with a great level of consistency. Ninety nine percent of the people just need the things in this conversation. If you have questions about those populations, ask offline, and they will happily go back and forth.
The line that lands is about time. Sometimes we spend the whole hundred hours talking about the two percent instead of reserving two percent of the time for the two percent. Save the last two minutes for it. You will get there.
It could be freeing
Carl said the point of all of it is that it could be freeing. You do not need to go down the rabbit holes and truly, truly understand those things, because you are never going to change anyone's life with that knowledge, and you may never have that person in front of you.
James's response was that it would help coaches focus on behavior more. If you want to fill a bucket with tools, fill it there. And it brings back the limitation they talked about last time, that coaches often cannot reach the behavior mastery ideas that help someone else until they are in their fifties. The mismatch is obvious once you see it.
His prescription for coaches was unusual. Philosophize more. Sit back and contemplate ideas. Come up with some specific claims. Come up with something. Then at least have the conversation they were having, or you end up in the areas where the only honest question is: what is the effect size of what you are talking about?
The sports medicine paradigm, again
Carl's effect size point also reminded James of the thing he discusses ad nauseum, the sports medicine paradigm, the therapeutic paradigm. You are just fixing things. Is it practical? Yes, it makes money. Coaches can make money fixing things. You can educate the public and be an influencer: look at me, I'm fixing things. Or: look at me, I can perform, I can stress people and it helps them perform. Or working with what James now calls entertainers, flashy, doing unbelievable things.
None of that has to do with the principles of what most people need. What most people need is hard contractions, then long term easy contractions, and real food. That's it.
Coaching is the business of behavior change
Carl had run the CCP kickoff call the day before, and it happened to be behavior week. He told the coaches that a lot of what they would cover would seem theoretical, philosophical, up in the clouds, and that the job was to keep asking how it correlates exactly to the people they work with. How do I gauge where my relationships are with these people. How do I gauge what moving forward looks like for them. How do I gauge what ideal looks like. When it becomes real for you, it becomes interesting.
Then the claim he ended the call on. If we can identify a great coach by anything, it is someone who can help another person change their behavior. So coaching needs to be looked at through the lens of: I am in the business of behavior change. Simple to say, very tough to get to, especially one individual at a time, because every individual is different.
And it links to James's picture of the future. A coach running their own AI tool, adding the personalization that triggers someone to do something based on the knowledge, the information, the aim. The learning available inside that is endless. Compare it to the learning required to design a good training program for someone who just needs to start moving a little. You could do that in a day. With behavior, you have to keep digging.
James, as a modern realist
James was careful about how he put his side. As of this moment, on this day, he thinks behavior is really important, and he recognizes there are people more advanced in it who may see behavior the way he sees physicality and nutrition, as something that has also been overcomplicated. His claim is simply that he needs to learn more about it so it sits right in his head as to what coaches can focus on. He is also, in his words, a modern realist. Computers are there now for the other two buckets.
Where he struggles is the machine aspect of the rest. He keeps thinking about the word love. True love, true empathy, true awareness, listening, the little things. He is reading Nick Bostrom's Deep Utopia and getting hit over the head with it: even at what Bostrom calls technological maturity, there is still a space for the important things around what he and Carl are calling behavior and human interaction. If you give that no space and think machines will do an even better job of it, then you are probably not a parent. The communication you have with the one you love and the ones you reproduced is the example of what sits inside a coach and client relationship. Maybe after he dies a machine will do it. He cannot see it.
So he gave Carl credit and a yes sir. There is something more inside behavior. His heart does not agree with the idea that it could be fairly easy.
Will, from the UK
Then the roles reversed. Carl pointed out that James was being the optimist for once, and that Carl was about to take the seat James usually sits in.
On a recent office hours call, a coach from the UK named Will said the thing every coach wants to be true. This technology is not going to replace what I give my clients, because what I give my clients is more than a program on paper or a nutrition prescription. I give them a relationship. And he described it beautifully: the jokes, the laughs, the empathy.
Carl loved it. Then he challenged it. Is it possible that a good relationship is in the eye of the beholder? What if, on the other side, the beholder does not recognize a good relationship the way we are defining it on this call?
He said he felt like he could see the future, and that everyone would laugh now and then in a couple of years say, remember when we said that on the call in 2026 and thought it was stupid, and now it is everywhere. The only reason he feels that way is that we have watched it happen in the recent past. There are human beings getting civilly married to AI models. They say I have a relationship, I want this to be my wife, my husband, my best friend. Carl's first reaction is that it is very sad, and sad because we see it as asinine. That is not a person, that is a machine.
But what if, in a few years, a large enough percentage of the population, even two percent, which is a lot of people, starts to see a relationship as not being a human to human thing? What if they are open to a relationship with this bot or that bot or this Anthropic thing I am calling Claudio? Then we are on our side saying no, a relationship is human to human and cannot be replaced, and they are saying it is being replaced. He is not on that side. He just thinks you have to look at how often the asinine thing came into fruition a low number of years down the road.
The two year old with a digital footprint
James had been reading too much Bostrom to leave it short. Everyone should read Superintelligence and Deep Utopia, and he will give you more if you contact him. His argument to Will was not that Will is wrong. It was that Will needs to contemplate something.
Take a 2026 two year old. They have the digital universe around them, including the 365 days a year, twenty four seven, that mom and dad take pictures and record video, both parents talking. All of it is a digital footprint for this child. Fast forward thirty years. Imagine all the ones and zeros inside that thirty two year old. There is a possibility that something sits in the middle of deciding what the highest order relationship is.
The reason it is hard for him and Carl to see, and the reason they make the claim that the coach will remain special, is what they grew up on. They grew up analog and then got the digital world, so they are in the digital fight, the cognitive revolution, complaining about what to do with the machine. Their appreciation of love and the virtues around the deepest aspects of relationship is real, and it is also their bias about the impossibility of a machine replacing a coach there.
So he says give it time. He has two girls born into the newest generation, people born from about 2005 on, and he does not know another way to describe it: they were born into it. Not uploaded to the internet, but with a cohesion between their physical universe and their digital universe that is different from his and different from Carl's. We can hammer all day that it will still come down to how much you bench versus your emotions and social media. He is not sure. He is leaving room to be completely wrong.
He went one step further, into the pessimist boat. He is extremely empathetic and sympathetic to the person who comes into this world and decides to take on an AI partner. There is so much hatred out there and so many disgusting ways we treat one another that if you take your face out of your phone and look around, you can see why someone would. Put yourself in their boots in terms of what the options are otherwise.
Carl's reply: that was my goal. I had to bring you to the pessimist side. James: the rest of my day is ruined.
Dysfunction gets recognized, or does it
Carl's counter was about dysfunction. He believes that when dysfunction shows itself, it gets recognized. Technology brings good things and bad things, the bad things lead to relational dysfunction and other kinds, and once it is recognized we try to fix it. The kid who cannot communicate with other humans in real life because most of their time is spent with humans behind a screen is an example. Then a book like The Anxious Generation gets written and a lot of people open their eyes to the idea that their eleven year old should not be inundated with social media. So even taking the non optimistic view, Carl thinks the thing gets brought to light because it is dysfunctional, and he is choosing against it for his own kids.
James disagreed, and said why. Function speaks in normative terms. It says this is what normal is. And it is hard to contemplate what twenty years will look like, because you cannot know what functional, common sense, or normal will mean then. Our virtuous existence as we know it, the boy kisses a girl at thirteen, plays sport, goes to university, gets a job, is normative today. Imagine none of it being normal.
This is where it comes back to principles. You only find out the truth when the systems are really stressed. At technological maturity, everything you currently think of as normal turns out to be based on the analog world. What if energy is free. Some people cannot even contemplate that as a possibility because they are paying six seventy five for gas in California. What if we do not have to work. What if the economy is a complete variation of what it is now. You have to sit back, read, relax, and contemplate, because it lets you see that the change is possible. He added that he thinks we need far more films and far more music with a revolutionary bend around how to handle the rise of technological maturity.
Against our nature
Carl said he was not trying to be agreeable, but he thought they were saying similar things, so he changed his word. Dysfunction was wrong. The term he should have used was against our nature. He does not think the things that are for or against our nature today will ever change. Our nature is our nature. It has always been, and it will be.
James: this is where I'm glad you said that, because this is where I disagree. In our lifetime, maybe.
Carl likened it to morality. Morals can become subjective through conversation, time, convincing, and experience. But he believes morality is a conscience thing, that we know through our conscience what is moral and what is not. When he says nature, that is what he means. There are things congruent and incongruent with our nature, and those cannot change. He knows where the biology versus nature objection goes, and to him they are in the same camp.
James does not think they are. Carl was talking about the mechanical universe and James about the subjective universe. On emotions and behavior, James is open to a complete overhaul of what we think is right and wrong, because any version of right and wrong is a culmination of human adaptation and experience. And then, with the word of the day, he named what was happening. This is where he appreciates that he and Carl splice. The baseline difference is Carl's attraction to a belief system and James's non attraction to one. This is good, he said. It is bleeding into what will be helpful for the behavior conversation.
How we got here, with good intentions
James stepped back to say how they got there. With all good intentions. What is best for human flourishing. They may disagree on the answer, but their intentions landed them on the questions, and they are not trying to be the certainty people about those questions. Questions on human origins are important. Questions on meaning are extremely important. Questions on morality. Questions on hope, which Carl would call faith and James would call hope.
His disagreement with Carl is that it is very easy in the modern age, and he does not mean lazy, to think there is no way meaning for humans will change. He says bet your bottom dollar that meaning is going to change. And what people will say is: well, what do we do about it? That brings it to this moment. The two of them have to have the conversation, because no one else seems to be looking at what a coach's life is in ten years when a machine can possibly do a better job as a relationship.
To sum up his claim for the day: nutrition today can be done better by a machine, and exercise can be done better by a machine, as a prescription to a human. Those are his points on those two. Behavior they will wrangle with next.
Physical and metaphysical
Carl wanted to keep going, and said so, because they were now into definitions of the physical and the metaphysical. Is there truth in the physical, and is there truth in the metaphysical? He says yes to both. Logic is metaphysical, not physical. Rationality. Abstract concepts: time, space, free will, consciousness. There are truths inside those. What he proposes is that absolute truths cannot be changed, and that is where his nature argument sits. It is metaphysical.
James said he was not proposing there is no truth in the metaphysical. He was saying there are uncertainties. Then he caught Carl: you just said there are absolute truths, so you are certain there are. Carl corrected the shape of it. There have to be absolute truths. But we cannot be certain what every one of them is. That is the interesting thing about life and about learning. We are always seeking certainty, and we may need to understand that we will never find it. Hope and faith are different, but they are in the same realm.
We're seekers, Carl said, and James is one of the biggest seekers he has met. James would say he is seeking knowledge, seeking learning. Carl: but if we are seeking to learn falsities, what are we doing? James: you seek out everything. When you land on certainty, you become calcified as a human.
Carl: how certain are you that we should eat real food?
Nice end cap, James said. There is jerky on this end cap at Whole Foods.
The ideal diet, from the cottage
Before they ended, Carl said the thing he loves about James is that he cannot change his tone or his language around his beliefs and his adamancy. Then he read something James said in the cottage, at the end of 2019, during a block of filming.
The ideal diet is one that creates the highest possible mental acuity, supports the highest possible potential function, and ultimately lets you live the largest life possible.
Nowhere in that is eating to get leaner, eating to look good naked, or eating to win. It is about vitality, and Carl thinks that single sentence explains vitality better than most of what has been written since. Mental acuity. Potential function, with the word potential doing real work in front of it. And the largest life possible. When you start talking about individuals, identifying what your largest life is becomes a worthwhile pursuit to consider.
James agreed, and called it a nice segue for next week. Behavior. The third part of the Optimal Experience. Lisa, for her part, can stop reading the ingredients and start cooking.
Frameworks is part of the CoachRx Podcast Network. New episodes weekly.
If you want to spend less of your career on the two percent and more of it on the human in front of you, the OPEX Method Mentorship is built for exactly that. Carl and the OPEX mentors are also hosting a free webinar on October 28, What It Takes to Make It as a Coach. Save your seat.
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