Day: October 9, 2025

• Arnold Schwarzenegger was never strict about his diet and doesn’t really drink protein shakes.
• He follows a “70%” plant-based diet with staples like oatmeal, cucumber salad, and pumpkin seed oil.
• He also eats what he wants when he travels, exercising more to compensate.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is no longer crushing workout shakes. At 78, his muscle routine is fueled by oatmeal, soup, and moderation.

“I used to drink, for instance, protein drinks, but I don’t do that that much,” Schwarzenegger told Business Insider. “I just think that I eat really well and I stay healthy this way.”

While eating enough protein is crucial for healthy aging, too much LDL cholesterol from high-fat animal products can lead to heart disease and stroke. Doctors generally recommend getting protein from a wide range of sources, such as salmon, Greek yogurt, and beans.

Schwarzenegger, who famously cut back on meat to lower his cholesterol, isn’t a strict vegan; he follows a “70%” plant-based diet. “That doesn’t mean that I’ve cut out the wiener schnitzel or a steak every so often,” he said.

All of this is in aid of protecting his body so that he can keep working out as he ages.

Schwarzenegger, the Chief Movement Officer at Zimmer Biomet, is promoting its You’ll Be Back campaign targeting joint pain. He said that he’s had to “work around injuries” from 60 years of working out, and maintaining a diet that goes easy on his heart health is a crucial part of his routine.

Schwarzenegger shared what he typically eats in a day — and why he allows himself to eat whatever he wants when he travels.

He eats a protein-packed breakfast

Schwarzenegger starts his day with some lean protein, “usually an oatmeal or a yogurt with some berries and some granola.” He previously told Business Insider that he sometimes has his protein-packed breakfast later in the day, more like a brunch.

These are considered some of the best options for a low-calorie, high-protein breakfast. The daily recommended protein intake for strength gains is 0.75 grams of protein per pound of total body mass.

At his age, with his daily exercise regimen, Schwarzenegger should aim for at least 83 grams of protein per day, according to the CDC and the World Health Organization. With 6 grams of protein in a 1-cup serving of oatmeal or 17 grams in Greek yogurt, berries, and granola, this sets him up nicely for the day.

Dinner is light and heart-healthy

For years, Schwarzenegger has stuck to a light, nutritious dinner of vegetable soup and cucumber salad. He likes to top the salad with a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil, derived from his native Austria.

Vegetable-packed dinners tend to be high in fiber, while pumpkin seed oil can help lower blood pressure, helping blood vessels expand.

He works out more after high-calorie days

Schwarzenegger said he sticks to his oatmeal and vegetable soup pretty regularly, except when he travels. “Then the whole thing is out the window and everything goes out of control,” he said.

On a recent trip to Germany, he couldn’t pass up the local cuisine. “You can imagine I ate wiener schnitzel and I had my potato salad,” he said. He then attended a few events in Spain and Italy, where “of course, we went from one pasta to another,” he said. “So that wasn’t helpful either for my waistline — I mean, it was like a disaster.”

In the end, he said everything is about balance. When he had time on vacation, he “went into the gym a little longer” and biked more. When he returns home, he jumps back into his workout routine.

“Now I’m going to work out a little bit more this next week,” he said, “and I’m going to watch much more what I eat.”

• Additional reporting by Gabby Landsverk.

Ron Trosper is losing it. The Chair Company, an HBO comedy that premieres on Oct. 12, traces the unraveling of this suburban family man, played by co-creator Tim Robinson, who believes he’s stumbled upon a criminal conspiracy following a minor workplace humiliation. But that conspiracy tends to manifest in the form of universal contemporary annoyances. “You can’t get a hold of anybody,” Ron rants after his investigation leads him into customer-service hell. “That’s the problem with the world today. People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain, you can’t get an apology. I wanna scream at ’em!”

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The character will be familiar to anyone who knows Robinson’s work. In his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave and recent feature Friendship, the comedian portrays men who are hilariously, uncontrollably angry for reasons they don’t seem to fully understand. In his nitpicking and narcissism, the relatability of his grievances and his unhinged methods of redressing them, Ron also resembles a younger, Middle American version of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm antihero. He’s a great character—one portrayed with the explosive mix of awkwardness and rage Robinson has perfected and placed in situations that are funny because they’re absurd, but also because, despite their surreal trappings, they speak to modern discontents. It’s all just entertaining enough to make up for the show’s scattershot storytelling.

Ron is, at once, an average guy and a mess of insecurities. At home, he’s overshadowed by an impressive wife (Lake Bell) and teenage son (Will Price), as well as his daughter’s (Sophia Lillis) upcoming wedding. (She and her wife-to-be want to marry in a “haunted barn.”) Now that his dream business venture has failed, he has returned to a stressful job at a construction company. All it takes is one blip to send him down the rabbit hole. Sometimes his quest for the truth takes the shape of a prototypical thriller—rendezvous at dive bars, threats issued by shadowy goons in parking lots. Other times, Ron is a terminally online Larry, typing screeds into customer support forms and cursing out chatbots.

Robinson’s style of comedy may not be best suited to longform narrative. Writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, which cast him as a lonely guy who befriends, alienates, then becomes fixated on a cool neighbor (Paul Rudd), has some great moments but falters midway through due to a predictable plot. In the six Chair Company episodes I screened (out of eight), Robinson and co-creator Zach Kanin don’t make the conspiracy thriller funny so much as they use its tropes to connect characters and situations that are, in themselves, very funny.

Robinson has a genius for channeling society’s ambient toxic vibes, in abstract but eerily evocative ways, through his odd alter egos. Friendship is a funhouse mirror of the male loneliness crisis. Yet his sensibility is most potent in the concise scenarios of I Think You Should Leave. From the guy who won’t stop making filthy comments on an “adult” ghost tour to the one in the hot dog costume who insists he had nothing to do with the crash of a hot-dog-shaped car, these characters embody the anger, mendacity, immaturity, and allergy to accountability that define so many of today’s most powerful men without explicitly addressing politics.

The Chair Company’s hero is the other side of that coin, a disempowered man whose earnestness brings him only embarrassment and whose attempts to find someone to blame for his misery only dig him deeper into it. Ron’s crusade against corporate shadiness (and shoddiness) never generates much suspense. But whether he strikes you as an everyman Larry David or as a modern-day David taking on a faceless Goliath, his plight is bound to resonate.