Colin O'Brady's First Meal After Returning from Antarctica | Joe Rogan

Now, how did you calculate your nutrition? So the nutrition journey was actually fascinating. And to be honest, in my opinion, people said, well, how come other people died trying or why did other people not be able to do it because one other guy ran out of food. And so when I was looking at this journey, and again, we were calling it the impossible first, like how am I going to make the impossible possible? And I thought that the nutrition piece of it was going to be huge. I actually, my dad's an organic farmer in Hawaii, like whole food health and nutrition's been a big part of my personal journey. And so I found a company that was really in it with me. So this company called Standard Process, they're a whole food supplement company, really involved in chiropractic and acupuncture. And I presented them with this and I said, hey, what do you guys think? Like, is there a way to like figure this out? And they're like, well, we have 20 of the top doctors, nutritionists, food scientists, you know, on our staff and this innovation center around nutrition, like come in the lab with us. And so they'd never done this with an athlete before, but they were intrigued. And so I actually went and did a years long worth of, you know, 100 plus blood tests, VO2 max tests, all this fitness testing all around my physiology. And they created ultimately a custom food solution as a bar form essentially called the column bar. That was all whole food ingredients. It was no, you know, chemical derivatives or anything. It was, you know, coconut oil, you know, seeds, nuts, you know, all these different pieces of macronutrients as well as micronutrient blends that I needed, but custom tailored to my physiology. And that's what I mean, that was the bulk of what I ate. I ate 7,000 calories per day. I was burning 10,000. So even at 7,000, I was losing about a pound of day of weight almost to my body. So that's why I needed to get bigger. But these column bars just burned super efficiently in my body. Like it was the perfect blend of everything. So eating the same thing every single day for 54 days may have gotten a little bit boring, but my body was just, it was actually pretty dialed in. Wow. Now, when they did this and they made these custom bars for you, did they know how many, how did you know how many calories you're going to be burning while you're pulling this 300 pound sled? Was it dependent upon the conditions? Like if the snow was more packed or icy, it would be more difficult if it was soft, right? A hundred percent. So I mean, we had to use our best guess, honestly. We had to just say, let's use our best guess. I guys had a bunch of smart people smarter than me were in this room, all these doctors, these PhDs around this. And we had to make some assumptions and ultimately they were like, okay, you're going to burn 10,000 calories. Get you 10,000 calories in these bars. And we started running the weight on the sled and we're like, that'll be a 500 pound sled. Like we can't carry that. So it's this equation of like, can you make the sled light enough to pull? If we can get the nutrition right, how efficiently does that burn your body? How much can your stomach absorb? You're hungry the whole time. More or less. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. I was, I was ready for a big fucking meal. Jesus. What's the first thing you ate? The first thing I ate when I got back, uh, was a big burger, but you might call me lame for saying this, but I'm just going to say, cause it's the truth. What I craved was salad, man. What I craved was just something cause I'd eaten this. You know what I mean? I've been eating like this freeze dried field, this like chunk of column bar, which got me through, but it was like something green and alive. And so I had this big salad with like avocado and salad. No, I had a big burger too. But then of course I eat, my stomach is shrunk, right? I eat this big meal and I'm like, oh, my stomach kind of hurts. But emotionally I was like, I'm back in the real world, baby. So it was like, it was, I ate everything I could get my hands. I went to a buffet. It just was like, my stomach was hurting, but I was like, I'm not going to stop. And I just started eating like whatever croissants and bread, just all the things. So, uh, I would imagine your body would like, you probably craving all that life, like live things, green, leafy vegetables and fruit. It's weird to say, I mean, like I'm from Portland, Oregon, you know, it's pretty green part of the world up there in the Pacific Northwest. And so not even just the food component, but there's nothing alive out there. There's no animals on the coast there are, but like in the interior, I didn't see any animals. I didn't see a bird. I didn't see, you know, nothing. Right. And so not only, I think as humans were kind of wired to see things living, I mean, even here in LA, a bit of a concrete jungle, but like you see trees on this tree, you see the ocean, whatever. And sort of Nazi anything alive for 54 days. It was like, wow, I want to like smell trees, fresh air in the trees. I want to eat a salad. I don't know. Like that's where my mind got to is kind of coming back to reality in that way.