SAMA HOOLE: [Vince Gironda] called sugar a poison and processed food an inferior protein, and he said it in the 1950s, when the sports nutritionist did not yet exist and the bodybuilder's supplement was a pint of milk.

In 1968 Arnold Schwarzenegger walked into a gym in North Hollywood and the owner told him he was fat.

The owner was Vince Gironda, and the gym had already produced the first Mr Olympia, so he was entitled. Larry Scott won the first two Olympias in 1965 and 1966 having been built… pic.twitter.com/1d9Iyfayhm

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) September 14, 2026

In 1968 Arnold Schwarzenegger walked into a gym in North Hollywood and the owner told him he was fat. The owner was Vince Gironda, and the gym had already produced the first Mr Olympia, so he was entitled. Larry Scott won the first two Olympias in 1965 and 1966 having been built in that room, and Frank Zane, Don Howorth and later Mohamed Makkawy came through the same door, and the diet they left on was the one thing in the building that never changed. Steak and eggs. Two meals a day, both of them steak and eggs, cooked in butter, as much as you could eat, and nothing else. No bread, no rice, no potato, no fruit. Every fourth or fifth day a plate of carbohydrate to refill the muscle, and then back to the steak. He called sugar a poison and processed food an inferior protein, and he said it in the 1950s, when the sports nutritionist did not yet exist and the bodybuilder's supplement was a pint of milk. His stronger claim, the one that still gets him laughed at, was that three dozen fertilised eggs a day, with liver tablets, would do for a natural man what a mild course of Dianabol did for a chemical one. He put his reputation on it, in print, and pointed to a protégé of 43 who looked better clean than he had at 23 on the drug. The gym had no squat rack, because he thought squats widened the hips, and no bench press, because he thought it built the wrong chest. He was wrong about both and right about the food, and the men who took the food and ignored the rest walked away with the best physiques of their era. Arnold went back, by the way. Trained there for a stretch, learned, and said very little about it.

The whole protocol fits on a napkin: eat steak and eggs until you are full, twice, and lift. There is no room on that napkin for a certification, a meal plan subscription or a tub of anything, which is why you have never been handed it.