The Real-Life Diet of Jason Walsh, Personal Trainer to Hollywood Stars (and Regular People)

Some people want to go the full distance. I want to get in shape, I want to look good, I want to be able to take my shirt off at the pool. Everybody has those aesthetic wants and needs, but that’s the final piece for us. Are they functioning correctly? Are they keeping things in place? Are you stable? Are you mobile? You got all these elements.

Did you have someone in your life—whether it was a trainer of your own, a fitness guru, a high school gym teacher—who really made you want to pursue this as a career?

So, my mother was 17 when she had me. I didn’t grow up with a grandfather. I didn’t grow up with any men in my life, so I’m definitely very female-influenced, and I’m an only child. I didn’t have anybody [who was] like, you got to play football, this is our favorite team. I actually discovered sports organically and I was like, wow, this is so much fun. Anyway, long story short, my uncle, who inspired me at such an early age, he had this stature. He was tall and he was muscular in his own way—not lifting weights—but he was a survivalist and a climber, kind of just a naturalist, very pure soul. He spoke to me on a level that really resonated with me and told me about eating well and doing these things for your body. I was fascinated because he wasn’t talking down to me like I was a little kid. He’s just like, “This is really important and you need to pay attention to what I’m telling you.” It inspired me so much that I wanted to be my uncle John.

At a young age, I learned discipline, which is a very, very important word to have in a kid’s life, because that’s going to trickle throughout the rest of your life. I worked out, I had a high school coach that saw me and gave me the keys to the weight room in fifth grade. I had athleticism and I had a work ethic that these coaches identified in a young kid. I got pulled into the world of sports and my coach was like, “Here’s the keys to the gym. We don’t [normally] do this, but we want you to do this.” It was the typical crap, bicep curls and all that stuff. I would go on the way home after school, three days a week, these rusty old weights.

I wasn’t really inspired at a young age to be a trainer. I actually kind of frowned upon it, to be honest. Growing up in Missouri, I thought that trainers were very douchey. It was the guys that were juicing and were just walking around super insecure but arrogant. I was turned off by it, because I was in better shape than these guys naturally. I held my head high because I didn’t have to juice to get big and strong. I just thought I was better than them. I ended up really gravitating towards kinesiology, physiology, all of these biomechanics. I got discovered at the school rec [center]. One of my friends who was there, he was on the lacrosse team. He came up and said, “Jesus Christ. What the fuck are you doing, man? Are you training for something? Are you an athlete and we don’t know it?” I was like, no, this is just how I train. It was more of like a bodybuilding thing. You just figure it out. You go to the gym, you go, that guy has great shoulders. I’m going to watch what he does. Take that information, apply it, and then it works.

I feel like I’ve got the Jason Walsh ethos now.

I want people to be able to trust that what I’m doing is for you. I don’t have to do it. I do it because I want to, and I want to bring some quality to what I do, whether that’s training, whether that’s some sort of a product that I’m going to invest everything in. I’ve turned down millions of dollars of sponsorships over the years. Who does that? No Nike, no Reebok. There’s so many brands. But then you’re diluted as a person. I just don’t think that there’s a lot of integrity out there anymore. I know you got to pay bills. I know you got to hustle and do what you can to bring money in. But it is not conducive to the type of training with the people that I work with. It’s not worth it.

When you were explaining your journey, you talked about the things that you had to change and the things that you learned. What were some of those things?

I’m 49 years old, so I’ve gotten a lot more wisdom at this point from making mistakes. I want to make the mistakes for my clients before they make those mistakes. When it comes to nutritional stuff, people go to school for a long time to get the licensing and do all these things to become a dietitian. Nutritionist and dietitian, people need to understand there’s a big difference. I can call myself a nutritionist. You could read some stuff and call yourself a nutritionist. A dietitian is someone who has gone through school—and it’s a hard amount of schooling to go through, a lot of science. I don’t want to disrespect my peers that are dietitians and say, here’s what I think. I have a lot of friends and a lot of colleagues that are dietitians. I love talking to them about this stuff because I’m truly interested in it. But I do not want to ever dilute what they do and the information that they provide by pretending to be something I’m not. I respect people for the path that they’ve chosen and the blood, sweat and tears that they’ve had to commit to that.

So then I’m guessing you’re not big on telling your clients what they should or should not eat?

Well, yes and no. That’s a very, very difficult question to answer. Everything that we do is all science-based. So we do VO2 tests on people, which gives us information like resting metabolic rate, what your body’s burning. This is very individualized and people don’t realize this. They think it’s a one-shoe-fits-all, it’s not! I have a very high metabolic rate, surprisingly even at the age of 49. Some people don’t have that kind of metabolic rate.