My Favorite "Health Hack", How to Get the Best Night of Sleep Possible and How I Took 17 Years off

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, in my opinion, the biggest culprit that I see over and over again as a staple in people's diet. A lot of people think it's sugar, but it's not the number one thing that you can do to then convert these fat cells into other tissue or to kill them. This is a trick that goes. It kind of flies under the radar, but it's one of my secrets to staying lean year round. Grandma said you'd get sick if you didn't put your coat on. Exactly.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Yo, it's Ben Greenfield. Today's kind of a weird podcast episode because it is actually a full one on one interview that I conducted with my friend Vishen Lakhani when I was in Estonia. This was recorded at Mindvalley University. But if you want to see the video version of this or check out a little bit more about the interview, just go to mindvalley.com, which is the website for Mindvalley, believe it or not, and do a search for Ben Greenfield. You should be able to find any articles I've written over there and also the video version of the interview that you're about to hear. Where he put me in the hot seat along with audience Q and A for a full hour. I think you're gonna dig this one. Today's show is brought to you by Omax. Oh, Max. I don't know why I say that like I'm a phone.

What do you call them?

Call girl. Call girl. It's my sexy, sultry voice. Omax is sexy and sultry in and of itself. It is The Purest Omega 3 fatty acid fish oil you can get your hands on. I'm going to tell you in a second how you can get it for free. But here's what's cool. You don't get any fish burps with this stuff because it's that pure. And they even have this cool thing they do called the freezer test challenge, which basically, basically means that if you freeze any other Omega 3 supplement it gets all cloudy and that's all the filler. But the Omax 3 gel stays totally clear. It's that pure. And they clinically tested this stuff. It's pretty impressive, actually. How do you get a box for free, you ask?

It's a great question.

Go to tryomax.com Ben that's triomax.com Ben some terms and conditions apply. They said I have to say that. But ultimately you get a free box if you go there. Tryomax.com Ben this podcast is also brought to you by the website where you can find all of the formulations that I personally design and have made available to you, as well as some of the supplements that I really stand by, particularly those from Thorne.

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In other words, every single bottle can.

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So please give a big round of applause to Ben Greenfield.

Thank you. That was a fun business meeting. That was quite the business meeting.

Have a seat, Ben. So normally when I do interviews, I sit on that side and the guest sits on this side.

Do I have to sit?

This is my prettier face. But Ben insisted on sitting on that end because this is where his tattoos are.

Oh, yes. It gives him instant credibility, instant credibility.

When you want to learn fitness, you got to trust a guy with a tattoo.

My nose piercing is on this. My tramp stamp is on the backside with the butterflies and the barbed wire. So we could have just perched backwards.

And it's so good that the kids are actually in a separate room.

Some of them. There's some children we can clean through. Those were organic herbs that we were vaporizing in the sauna. Children.

So one of the things that's really interesting about Ben, and you guys are going to get a chance to ask Ben questions. In fact, some of you already posted questions last night on Facebook when I mentioned that this interview was going to be happening, Right? But one of the most interesting things about Ben is he's not just gonna talk about biohacking, but this guy is weird. Last night, we were at the 4th of July party. We had our hot dogs, we had our beer, we had our burgers. And by the way, Ben isn't one of those guys who, who will question every waiter. Does this contain gluten? You know, see, he. He will have fun in the right. The right occasion.

I know how to eat sweet potato fries soaked in mayonnaise.

And you know how to enjoy a burger. But then Ben would look down at the grass and he'd go, vishen, you gotta try that plant. And then he'd jump over the fence, he would pick up a leaf and stick it in my mouth. I felt like a goat, but it was actually delicious.

It is true that wilderness grows up from the cracks of a sidewalk in a city. And people do things like mow their lawn and pick the dandelions out, when in fact, that is one of the most powerful liver tonics that you can make a smoothie from. Or last night, what I gave you was wild nettle stinging nettle. It's one of the most protein rich, nutrient dense plants that you can get your hands on. And not only that, but what I gave you was the seed from the top of the nettle. You walk into a supplement store and they'll charge you 60 bucks for a bottle of that to enhance your testosterone.

Guys.

And you can find this stuff just sitting around in nature if you educate yourself. You know, there's a variety of different plant foraging books and plant foraging apps. And my boys and I, my boys are sitting over there. We use one called flower Checker, where you can just take a picture of any plant and within 24 hours, a team of live botanists on the other end identify the plant for you and tell you what you can eat and what's good. And you can build your own online herbarium. And when it comes to living a long time, you know, you talked about living an extra three to five years by listening to my podcast. Assuming you're not doing so, smoking a cigarette and driving around in your car with your butt planted in a chair for eight hours a Day.

One of the things I talk about is wild plant intake, legume intake. These are two of the five characteristics that you see prevalent amongst all blue zones. These areas where there are a higher than the normal level of people who live a very long time. You also see absence of smoking.

You see a large amount of time so spent with family and love and in social relationships. You don't see people exercising much. You actually see very little exercise in a box, stepping into a CrossFit wad, beating yourself up with a barbell. Instead, people engage in low level physical activity, usually in nature, all day long. So it's very interesting what we can learn from a lot of these populations. But yes, something as simple as learning how to identify wild plants that grow in nature around you. And rather than picking them up or mowing them to pieces, you, you eat them, put them in smoothies.

That's fascinating. So in the Blue Zone study. So the blue zone is a concept that, that identifies areas in the world where people live an unusually long amount of time. For example, in Sardinia, you get 10x the number of people living to their hundreds, as you do in the United States. So scientists study this, they label these areas Blue Zones and Bengals.

It's also where you find a lot of Smurfs, these Blue Zones. That's crazy.

And Ben, you're saying that it has little to do with exercise, but more to do with moderate activities such as walking and with eating healthy.

Exactly. You know, when you look at the way that society is built, whether it's the doctor's office, whether it's, I mean, ironically as it can seem, even a conference room, you know, full of chairs, cars, commuting, etcetera, we spend a lot of time sitting. And when you look at a lot of hunter gatherer populations, when you look at a lot of what our ancestors did, when you look at a lot of these Blue zones, people are working with their hands, they're gardening, they're hunting, they're gathering. And I understand that if you're a blogger or you're a podcast, or you work in it, or you're a computer engineer, you're relegated in a very similar way as I am, to being in front of a computer, in front of a screen much of the day, but you can hack your environment to simulate that of our ancestors or a hunter gatherer. The people we would find in the blue zones, everything from standing workstations to special pads that you can stand on. I, in my own office, have a little balance board that I stand on, a standing desk that I can crank up and down. I've got a walking treadmill. And when I travel, you ought to walk into my hotel room. I'll take a chair and stack it on top of a coffee table and put a couple of books on top of that. And I'll stick stand while I'm working. I stop about every 25 minutes to do some form of exercise like 10 burpees or 100 jumping jacks or something that puts just a little bit of blood flow and also releases a very powerful molecule that's like Viagra for your whole body. It's called nitric oxide. And by doing those little things all throughout the day, my goal is this. By the end of the day, exercise to stay fit or to improve the way your body looks or anything like that should be an option, not a necessity, because you've hacked your way into being physically active all day long. And even when I'm in a conference like this, and I won't take it as disrespect, if any of you want to do this, I'll stand up, I'll walk to the back, I'll stretch, I'll move, I'll stand, I'll shake. But the idea is that they've even shown that if you exercise at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day and you have a good exercise habit, you go to the gym. If you have your butt planted in a chair for eight hours a day in between those exercise sessions, you still have a high risk for cardiovascular disease and a host of other chronic diseases. So the trick is not to exercise per se in a structured, traditional exercise format. It's to engage in low level physical activity all day long.

Wow, that's an intriguing idea. And I remember some studies done. There was a BBC documentary on this and they installed an exercise bike in an office. And they found that people who would get on that exercise bike and engage in around a minute to four minutes of simple Tabata would show the same increase in their health. And I don't remember exactly how they were tracking their health as people who were doing aerobics in the morning for half an hour or so.

Exactly. Does anybody know what a Tabata is?

This was developed by a Japanese researcher who found that a four minute exercise session of 20 minutes, or 20 seconds, rather 20 seconds, pretty hard, like smoke coming out your ears, pretty hard, like you're running from a lion or you're in a sword fight. At Medieval Days, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off for four minutes. That's a total of eight rounds simulated 30 minutes of steady state exercise on a treadmill or on a bicycle, or doing any other form of chronic cardio. It's called a Tabata set. But what's even more compelling than that is there are two things that are the most important things to pay attention to if you want to live a long time and have the absence of disease and a high quality of health during that time. Number one is controlling what's called glycemic variability. Glycemic variability is how often your blood glucose goes up and down during the day. The other is to control your inflammation. Inflammation is something that builds up in the body when you eat a lot of vegetable oils, when you eat a lot of sugars, and even when you get exposed to high amounts of wifi, dirty electricity, poor air, unclean water, etc. The idea is if you can control glycemic variability and inflammation, you've taken care of the two lowest hanging fruits when it comes to your longevity. Now this idea of the Tabata set that enhances your fitness in a very short period of time during a work day could be brought to the next level when we look at research on what it takes to actually control blood glucose prior to eating. Now, if you exercise before you eat, you'll actually enhance your body's ability to be able to maintain a normal blood glucose response after you eat. But do you know how long you would need to exercise, how long you need to do that extra explosive Tabata type exercise in order to enhance your blood glucose response? I was shocked when I saw this study.

30 seconds. I mean you can drop and do whatever 20 burpees and do that prior to a meal and you'll vastly improve your glucose response to the meal. Furthermore, this is another research study in Japan. If you walk for about 15 minutes after a meal, you also do a few fantastic job at supporting your glycemic variability. So the idea is for me, when I know I'm going to be eating a large meal or eating a lot of carbohydrates, or having dinner or really having any meal at all, I'll just go out of my way to drop and do some push ups. I have a rule when I'm at a restaurant, I'll slip into the bathroom and do. I call them air squats. My friend Jeff, when he first saw me do this, began to call them piss squats because I'd say I was going to go to the bathroom, take a pee and I'd come back kind of red faced because I'd done my 40 squats. But the idea is you do something that just gets the heart rate up a little bit before you go eat a big meal, then you go on a quick walk afterwards. It's a very, very good way to control glycemic variability. As are those Tabata sets that you talked about that you're awesome.

And you're saying these air squats take 30 seconds in a bathroom before you start your meal.

I have rules in my life, little rules to keep me active. Like I mentioned, I'll stop every 25 minutes during a work day and step away to swing a little kettlebell that I keep under my desk, or hang from a pull up bar near my office, or do something that keeps me active. But a couple of other rules are a, I'll do the 40 squats when I'm at a restaurant. So if any of you are at a restaurant with me this week and you see me disappear into the bathroom frequently, it's not because I have a small bladder. It's because I'm off doing my squats on an airplane. I actually do 20 squats when I'm in an airplane. Anytime I stand up to go and use the restroom, I close the door and I do 20 squats. My rule is the butt has to kind of touch the back of the toilet seat when they're doing squats. And these little rules that you kind of sprinkle throughout your life, coming full circle to this idea of trying to simulate what the blue zones do or what our ancestral hunter gatherers did, you're basically just tricking your body into staying physically active all day long. And it comes down to habits, rituals, routines and rules that you implement in your life to keep you active.

And so in summary, it's not about doing 30 minutes of aerobic activity in the mornings. Right. It's about spaced out activity for 30 seconds to a couple of minutes throughout the day.

Exactly. And I'm not saying that, you know, if your own personal Mount Everest is to go to an Ironman triathlon or to go to a marathon or go to one of these spartan races, I respect that if that's something that you've set up for yourself as a goal. And if you have set that up as a goal, yeah, you got to go out on less frequently than most people would have us to believe. The human body is actually innately very, very good at endurance. We can outrun given food and water any animal on the face of the planet. So you actually have to train for endurance far less than you think. We have a Very large amount of stamina. But the idea is if you are an athlete or if you've signed up for something that the that's going to push your body, you got to do a little bit more than a Tabata set at the office and some piss squats on the airplane, right? But unless that's your goal or unless you're getting paid to be a professional athlete, there's not a need to go out and do these long exercise sessions that beat you up. And in fact, they've done research on how much exercise is too much, what would be the amount of exercise that would give you a law of diminishing return and increase what is called your risk for mortality, your risk of dying at an earlier age. Now for aerobic exercise for this long steady state cardio to avoid things like arterial stiffness and cardiovascular disease that can result from excessive exercise. If you do anything more than 90 minutes, which for a lot of people that's a lot of exercise, but you'd be surprised at the number of people who are actually out doing a lunchtime run and an evening bike ride and getting out in the morning, or you exceed 60 minutes of intense exercise on a daily basis, you actually see a law of diminishing returns. And it's a parabolic curve with an increased risk of mortality if you exercise too much. So it's very, very surprising what it comes down to when you're looking at physical activity. It's low level physical activity spread throughout the day. It's brief sprints here and there and it's lifting heavy stuff every once in a while.

That's really interesting now. Box the online magazine recently carried an article suggesting that there's this grand myth in our society that we need to exercise to lose weight. But what they said is that science now shows that 90% of our body shape has to do with what we eat and not the amount of exercise. What are your views on this?

It has a great deal to do with that because that second component I talked about inflammation, right. If you have low level chronic inflammation all day long. And again this can come down to the water that you drink. So it's more than just the food, the water that you drink, the amount of artificial light that you're exposed to, the number of times you're bombarding your body with wi fi signals, the quality of the air that you breathe. I don't want to scare you into thinking that you're doomed by living in a post industrial era to an early death. There are things you can do. I mean you can have portable HEPA air filters that you carry with you if you live a nomadic lifestyle or a good air filter and you your office, you can drink good clean water or buy glass bottled water. When you travel, you can put your phone in airplane mode and hardwire into the router or into the wall in a hotel room. When you're traveling, there are things that you can do to control this. But when it comes to food, the idea is that low level inflammation can not only restrict the body's ability to kill fat cells or to convert fat cells into other tissue, but it can also down regulate a lot of the nerves in the abdomen and the stomach. And a lot of these things that help us carry this tall, upright posture that allows us to look good. We see actual damage to those nerves when we're in a chronically inflamed state or when we're eating foods that leave us in a state of gut inflammation. So when it comes to inflammation, in my opinion, the biggest culprit that I see over and over again as a staple in people's diet, a lot of people think it's sugar, but it's not. And the reason for this is that, as we were just alluding to, you can metabolize sugar, right? I can do 30 burpees before a meal and go for a walk after a meal and have a big batch of something sugary like sweet potato fries or a few slices of bread or some dark chocolate or red wine or whatever with a meal. And it's burnt off, right? That glucose, if, if it's actually not in excess and if you're moving is really not as big of an issue as the oils in the meal that you're eating. Because your body can burn some of those oils, but it will also take the oils and the fats in the foods that you're eating and it will use those to make your cell membranes. You are literally made up of not only what you eat, but what you eat ate, right? What that big bear that you're going to eat at medieval days, whether that bear was fed on corn and grain and trash, or whether that bear ate blueberries and wild fish, right? Like that's going to influence what your cell membranes are comprised of. And when I traveled here to Tallinn, for example, I'll often stop at the, at the little newsstand at the airport and stroll through and look for some healthy snacks to buy, right? Even when you go to the healthy food section at the airport stand or at Whole Foods or, or any of these other fancy so called Organic stores, and you look at the ingredient label more often than not, you're going to see in addition to organic agave syrup and cane sugar. And again, I'm not as much of a being, not a fan of those as I am of this next ingredient. You'll see canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil, any number of different vegetable oils that are used to coat healthy foods that basically bastardize a healthy food and turn it into something that damages your cell membranes. So anytime I'm evaluating whether or not a food is going to cause that type of inflammation, that's referred to in the Vox article as being something that would, that would disrupt my physiology and disrupt my body's ability to be able to burn fat or kill fat cells. The first thing I look at is the oils. You want an oil that is stable, that's unprocessed, and that hasn't been heated to high temperatures or exposed to high pressures. If you walk into my house and you come sit with me in the sauna and do the infrared light and roll around in the snow and then walk into the pantry, you'll find that we have macadamia nut oil, avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil and a little bit of grass fed butter, sometimes some ghee. Right? These are all oils that are very stable at high temperatures or that carry with them some antioxidants like extra virgin olive oil. Good green. I love being in Europe because the olive oil is real. A lot of the olive oil in the States, even at five star Napa Valley restaurants, is cut half and half with canola oil to save money. Extra virgin olive oil though, that's green and spicy and flaky. And my kids and I do olive oil tastings at home because we're a member of an olive oil club that sends us olive oil from different areas of the world. But this type of oil is actually great for you. The trick is not to avoid fats, it's to avoid the type of fats that cause inflammation. And if you guys want, if you're actually doing a good job controlling your vegetable oil intake, looking at your food labels, even asking at a restaurant, hey, could you cook this in butter? Could you cook this in extra virgin olive oil instead of canola oil, which you'd be surprised at, the number of restaurants that will very easily do that for you back in the kitchen. They'll take those brussels sprouts that you love to get that they bring out nice and crispy to the table, but that are often cooked in Canola oil. They've got extra virgin olive oil and butter back there. And you just tell them, hey, can you make those Brussels sprouts with a good, healthy fat, like a butter or an olive oil instead? If you're making these type of changes to your diet, I'll tell you, if you guys want the number one thing that you can do to then convert these fat cells into other tissue or to kill them, this is a trick that goes. It kind of flies under the radar, but it's one of my secrets to staying lean year round.

So what is that? Because I got a couple of questions here and Amrit Sandhu. Amrit, are you in the house? Amrit is somewhere in the house. There he is. Amrit said, what's your favorite health hack?

You know, we could probably lump this into that category, Amrit, as a really, really good health hack. So I'll tell you the hack, and then I'll tell you how you can uplevel it, upgrade it, and take it to the next level. So the hack is this. And you've already been given a big, big clue in the first minute when Vishen was showing you that video. It's cold. Cold exposure in the absence of inflammation is one of the best ways to take fat cells and convert them into metabolically active tissue or to kill them. There's this myth going around that you can't kill fat cells, that you're stuck with whatever you have for the rest of your life, and they're just. Just waiting there like greedy little cells ready to soak up calories and get bigger. That's not true. You can kill them and you can convert them into other cells if inflammation is absent. And then if you get cold exposure on a frequent basis, heat works pretty well also, which is why I like to do the hot and the cold. What you saw Vishen and I doing at my house, I do that on a frequent basis. My kids do it too. We'll go and sit in the sauna, then we go jump in in the cold pool. Then we'll get in the hot tub. If it's snowy outside, we'll go roll around in the snow. Exposure to temperature fluctuations is fantastic for pushing these fat cells into a different state.

Go ahead, you said. He just said exposure to temperature fluctuations is fantastic. Thank you, Ben. You guys cannot blame me now for the Estonian weather.

There you go.

Minus 13 on one day, 27 on the next.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, the Tallinn gods are bipartisan, polar, I swear, because it's all of them. And it's light at 3am anyways, though, so cold exposure, how do you do that, especially if you live in a hot environment? Well, of course, cold showers are the glaringly obvious solution to this. If you live in an area like this where there's great cold water coming from the tap, you can simply stand in the cold water for two minutes at the beginning of the day and two minutes at the end of the day, which, by the way, at the end of the day, fantastic for sleep because your body will not enter a state of deep sleep unless your body temperature is low. One of the best ways to get your body temperature low at the end of the day, aside from keeping your room temperature low and not sleeping with too many blankets, is to take a cold shower at some point towards the end of the day. Now, I will typically about once a week, take that to the next level and go sit in a cold bath or go jump in a cold river or a lake or the sea or something else. That kind of gets me to the state of shivering, the state of being even more cold. If you live in a hot environment, there are biohacks that you can use. There are, for example, companies that will sell gear that you can place on areas where you tend to have a lot of metabolically active fat tissue, like these. There's a company called Cool Fat Burner, and they make, like these vests and waist belts that you can wear that you can actually pack ice into and keep your body cold while you're working if you have a lot of fat to burn. And it's actually a very, very good solution. Another thing that you can do was taught to me by a guy named Ray Kronise. He was first featured in Wired magazine, runs a metabolic laboratory. He's a former NASA materials engineer and he developed what he calls the Shiver system. He came and spoke at an event I did in Spokane, Washington, and shared some of the stats on stage and my mind was blown. He was burning 20 to 30, 30 pounds of fat per month off the clients that he was working with. With good healthy food, absence of inflammation, not exercise, but this low level physical activity throughout the day. And then at the beginning and at the end of the day, they would take a five minute shower. And that five minute shower was 20 seconds of cold with 10 seconds of hot 10 times through for five minutes. That's it. Cold, hot, cold, hot, 10 times through. If you get bored, you can go to, for example, Amazon and grab yourself. I do this a little underwater MP3 player so you can listen to audio books or podcasts or whatever kind of gets you motivated as you're there hanging out in the shower, Pet Shop Boys, whatever you like to listen to. Anyways though, the idea is that you do this at the beginning of the end of the day. You're getting temperature fluctuation, you're getting a nitric oxide release, you're shutting down inflammation, you're enhancing blood flow, you feel fantastic. It's great for your cognition as well. And then finally, the heat, the part of things that you saw us doing in the sauna, you develop heat shock proteins. Heat shock proteins are a special type of protein that you can build in your body with cold and hot exposure. And these make you more resilient to stress. Not just physical stress, but also mental stress. If you do something that is, for example, a common practice here in Estonia and also in Finland, something like a sauna a few times a week where you're getting yourself nice and, and hot, you develop these heat shock proteins. And so if you use the cold in addition to the heat, you're kind of getting the best of both worlds.

So, Ben, another aspect of health that you talk about in great detail, you wrote an incredible blog post on this, right? And check this out. Ben Greenfield on Sleep Google that, You'll find his blog post, by far the most detailed post I've seen on the science of sleep for well being. Let's talk about sleep.

That article will put you to sleep pretty quickly, by the way. That's the trick is you read the article and you go to sleep.

Speaking of cold, you've even recommended to me certain temperatures to go to bed, right?

So sleep hacking is something that I find fascinating. I protect my sleep quite a bit. I track my sleep, I shoot for about 10% of my night spent in deep sleep sleep. Deep sleep is a lot of where your memory formation occurs, a lot of neuronal repair and recovery occurs. It's not the only type of sleep that you want. In the lighter stages of sleep, for example, you get more muscle healing, you get more of attending to of your musculoskeletal system and some of your other body's systems. But when it comes to your neural system, your brain, your neuromuscular system, staying cold, sleeping in a cool room and maintaining a lower core temperature increases the percentage of deep sleep that you get dramatically. So in addition to, for example, taking like a cold shower at some point towards the end of the day doesn't have to be right before bed. And as a matter of fact, right before bed, you get a little Bit of a cortisol dump. That can keep you up a little while. I'm not a fan of doing the cold shower right before bed, but you can keep your room the ideal temperature for sleep. Does anybody know this for deep sleep? About you're gonna make me do the Celsius Fahrenheit conversion. Dang it. It's 64 to 66 degrees Fahrenheit. So you could do the conversion.

Get your, get your app out, just Repeat that again.

64 to 66 degrees. So when I walk into a hotel room, the first, the first thing I'll do what we had 19. Yeah, about 19. So I'll, I'll adjust the temperature to 64 to 60 degrees. 66 degrees. Exercise.

That's roughly 18 degrees Celsius. 64 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yep. Exercise or physical activity. If you're doing it, let's say you're doing the 10x program, for example, you want to do it at some point during the day because it will enhance your deep sleep to move during the day. Again, it doesn't have to be a traditional gym session. It can just be, you know, burpees and pull ups and walking kind of stuff spread throughout the day. But you want to finish any exercise session that you do, preferably at least three hours prior to when you want to go to bed. And the reason for that is because that gives your neuroendocrine system a chance to shut down some of the cortisol. It also gives your body temperature a chance to go back to normal. There are also.

So sorry, Ben, you're saying the optimal time to exercise is three hours before you go to bed?

Well, the optimal time to exercise.

Varies and I'll fill you in on that in just a second. But whatever you're doing for exercise, aside from that easy postprandial dinnertime walk, that easy walk that you do after dinner would be just making sure that you finish up any hard exercise at least three hours prior to when you're going.

To go to bed.

So if you are going to go to the gym, you'd ideally like to be done at the gym. If you're going to go to bed at, let's say 11pm, you want to be done with your gym session by eight and no later than that. Now, when it comes to exercise, if you are going to exercise. And then I'll return to how to keep your body cool during sleep because there's a few other strategies that you can use. Timing of exercise though the ideal scenario is if you are going to exercise, your body has this natural rise in cortisol when you wake up. When light hits your eyes in the morning and you get out of bed, your body releases some hormones that naturally wake you up. One of those hormones is not coffee, by the way. You don't naturally have coffee floating through your bloodstream. As a matter of fact, I've done continuous blood glucose monitoring. And the single biggest variable that shoves my blood glucose up very high in the morning is, believe it or not, coffee. Because coffee causes this big release of cortisol that then causes your liver to dump a bunch of sugar into your system. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. I'm all about better living through science and using some of these wonderful things, herbs and plants that we have all around us in nature to enhance our life. And I would classify coffee as one of those. But if you do have adrenal issues, it's profound how much extra cortisol coffee kind of dumps into your system. But the idea is that because you have so much natural cortisol release into your system when you wake, the best type of exercise to do in the morning is something that I call easing into your day, something restoring, something relaxing, something that might even pair well with a meditative or a prayer practice. The beginning of the day. For me, that's usually something like a nice walk in the sunshine. Or sometimes I'll go down and do some yoga moves in the sauna and finish those up with a cold shower. Yoga in and of itself is great. An easy swim, maybe a simple bike ride through a park, something that's just very simple and relaxing and restorative maybe allows you to focus on your day, allows you to think about what you want to accomplish that day. Make your affirmations, engage in deep breathing. These are the type of things that the body is very receptive to in the morning that can enhance your deep sleep later on in the evening. Now, between about 4 and 7pm Your body temperature peaks, your reaction time peaks, your grip strength peaks, your ability to be able to build new muscle after a workout peaks. So if you're going to do a hard exercise session again, it's not necessary to get a nice body. It's not necessary to live a long time. But I understand that sometimes it feels good, sometimes you're competing in an event. Sometimes maybe you want a little bit of extra muscle because you like the way you look with that extra muscle. You like the way your jeans fit, you like the way you fit in a T shirt, et cetera. There's a lot of reasons that it's okay to build a little bit of extra muscle or to do that hard exercise session. But if you do it between about 4 and 7pm is the ideal time to do do that hard exercise session. With the cool thing being, when it comes to that, is that you're getting that hard thing in before dinner. So if dinner for you is a very social event, if you like me, have big family dinners where you're having red wine and dark chocolate and sourdough bread and sweet potato fries and a lot more of kind of the rich carbohydrate dense foods. Your body's very primed to be able to deal with that blood glucose. So I know kind of a little bit of a rabbit hole hole when we were talking about the cold for sleep. But as far as the timing of the exercise, that's the scenario I use for myself and for most of the clients that I work with is we do the easy thing in the morning to ease ourselves into the day and then as long as the schedule permits, the harder thing kind of towards the.

End of the day.

One other thing for sleep that's quite fascinating. I'd be remiss not to throw some of these biohacks in. There would be. I have a chili pad on my bed. Has anybody ever used a chilipad? It circulates cold water underneath your sheet while you sleep. And you can actually set it for whatever temperature that you would like. And you and your partner can actually set your own sleep temperature. So I set it at 55 degrees, meaning that the ambient air around me is about 64 to 66 while I'm sleeping. But then I've got this 55 degree cold water going underneath my body while I sleep, and that vastly enhances my, my deep sleep percentage as well. It all comes down to sleep.

Translation, that's 13 degrees Celsius for the rest of the world.

This is like when I speak in Japan, I say something that I have to stop so that they can translate this into Japanese. Celsius to Fahrenheit.

Very simple. Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you that it's no secret that I'm not strictly gluten free. Now, before you gasp in horror, I should note that in those rare instances where I do eat gluten, it's usually sourdough bread that my lovely wife makes, which involves fermenting heirloom wheat. This massively reduces any inflammation or gut irritation that could normally come from gluten consumption. But that said, there's research at Harvard that says that all gluten is inflammatory and triggers an autoimmune response. Not just in celiacs. That's all people. And unless it's pre digested perfectly through something like sourdough fermentation, the human body is pretty much incapable of digesting gluten. Not if the human body is fermented. If the gluten is fermented, it's okay, but otherwise it's not a good idea. So most restaurants and food facilities are not gluten free, so you get a lot of cross contamination. Ultimately, the best way to get around all of this is this stuff called dipeptidylpeptidase. Now that's a big word. That's a protease. It breaks down the exterior coating of gluten protein. And there's a supplement called Gluten Guardian. Gluten Guardian. And it's the only supplement out there I'm aware of that has this dipeptidopeptidase enzyme in it in such high amounts that allows you to say, pound an entire pizza, pop some enzymes and still feel like a million bucks after. Now, you're probably still gonna feel pretty crappy if you pound an entire pizza. But let's say somebody brings this fantastic.

Bread to your table at the restaurant.

You want a little bit of help? You pop this stuff, you're good to go. It's called Gluten Guardian. Gluten Guardian. So I'll tell you how to get a 10% discount. Go to GlutenGuardian.com greenfield that's GlutenGuardian.com Greenfield code greenfield saves you instant 10%. So if your vice is partaking in rare glutenous delicacies, this is right up your alley. Glutenguardian.com Greenfield this podcast is also brought to you by a fantastic company. Uses science and data to get you low rates on life insurance. So if you run or you bike or you strength train or you work your butt off, what the heck, you should be saving money on your life insurance. And this company goes to bat for you and gets you savings that are exclusive to what you'd get by working with them. They're called Health IQ. 56% of Health IQ customers save between 4 and 33 whopping percentage points on their life insurance. So just like saving money on your car insurance, being a good driver, Health IQ saves you money in your life insurance for living a health conscious lifestyle. Lucky you. Pat you on the head, give you some extra cash for your wallet. Boom. Done it's easy, you learn more and you get a free quote over@healthiq.com Ben.

That'S healthiq.com Ben Anyways, though, the the idea behind sleep hygiene, though, is you have cold and you're already a little bit more informed about cold and then a few other necessary components of sleep hygiene that of course, how many in here are traveling to be here, Having to deal with the 3am sunrise and the jet lag and the light and the crazy fluctuations in temperature and everything else that can affect your sleep? Well, maintaining a cool temperature is one thing. Another is absence of artificial light, absence of blue light at night. And in that sleep article that Vishen referred to that you can find if you just search for the last one I wrote, it might still be on the front page of my website. It was about four weeks ago. I wrote a really comprehensive sleep article. I talk about things that you can install on your computer to lower the amount of blue light that they produce. I even give a little hack for your phone where you can set it up so it only produces red light or grayscale light at night. You can also, of course, wear what I call birth control for your head, which would be these blue light blocking glasses. The very unattractive, slightly creepy blue light blocking glasses you see a lot of biohackers wearing. They actually do work. They do a great job of making you sleep. As a matter of fact, if I try to watch a TV or a documentary or a movie at night and I have these on, I get sleepy because it blocks so much of the blue light from coming off the screen. But absence of artificial intelligence light in the evening is another necessary component of sleep, along with presence of lots of natural light during the day, being outdoors, taking that morning walk in the sunshine, etc. So we have light, we have a cool sleeping environment, and then we have silence or something to cover up the noise. Has anybody in here ever used Binaural Beats or White noise? These actually work really, really well, especially when you're in travel scenarios like I'm staying in a apartment down in Rotterman City and it's close to the road. And so what I do is I have a little app called Sleep Stream. And even though my phone is in airplane mode, it's beside my bed and it's playing this white noise called Sleep Stream. And I'll often even pair that with something called sleep phones, which are they're soft headphones that allow you, if you're a side sleeper, to kind of play this in your ear and cover up noise. And this app that I use called Sleep Stream, it's like a DJ for sleep. I'm not financially affiliated with them or Flowerchecker or any of these other apps I'm talking about. I just like them. But this Sleep Stream plays white noise and then also plays binaural beats. So you can kind of do both at the same time while you're trying to lull yourself to sleep. So anyways, those are. The big three would be cold, the absence of artificial light, and then also trying to use noise or sound or else eliminate noises and sounds from around you while you're sleeping.

So we've spoken about food, we've spoken about exercise, we've spoken about sleep. Now, Sarah Capacci. Sarah, are you in the room? Sarah's right there. Stand up, Sarah. So Sarah has a question for you. Sarah asks, what are your thoughts on nutrigenomics, which is eating according to one's.

Genetics, can of worms, Nutrigenomics.

So.

The idea is that. And there's actually a great book about this called the Jungle Effect. The jungle effect by Dr. Daphne Miller. And the idea is that Dr. Miller, for example, will take her Hispanic patients in California and put them on a more traditional Mexican diet comprised of legumes and non GMO corn and maize and beans and a lot of these natural foods that they. They would have been exposed to for hundreds of years or that their ancestors would have eaten rather than traditional Tex Mex, GMO corn, refried beans, canola oil, that type of thing, and see profound healing in her patients. And she'll rinse, wash, and repeat. Put northern European patients on, for example, a slightly higher salt diet with fermented foods and cured meats and natural wild caught fish, and again, see profound changes in health. And the idea is that it is actually, it makes sense, right? Logically, you look at what your ancestors would have eaten, which you can elucidate by talking to your grandparents or going off and doing a salivary genetic test, such as a 23andMe genetic test. You can look at and investigate what your ancestors would have eaten and try and simulate something close to that. Now, I understand that we live in an era in which we've got a lot of mutts like me. You know, I'm a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of Italian, a little bit of Australian. You know, I'm all over the map. And so for me, rather than necessarily getting really confused about whether I eat the Spanish diet or the Mediterranean diet or a northern European diet or whatever, I take a Little bit of a deeper dive. And I look at my genetic factors that allow me to do certain things. Like for example, I've tested my genetics and it's shown that my body produces a lower level of what are called endogenous antioxidants than the average person. So I go out of my way to do things like supplement with glutathione and eat a lot of wild plants and flavanol and polyphenol rich dark fruits and vegetables and give my body a little step up in the antioxidant department. I also know that my body unfortunately metabolizes alcohol very poorly. So when I consume alcohol, I actually will do things like take activated charcoal to soak up some of the acetaldehyde. I'll use supplements like Sami and molybdenum and a few other supplements that allow me to be able to process alcohol a little bit better. I know that I carry the gene that does not allow me to digest lactose quite as well. So I'm going to have dairy. I'll consume fermented dairy where the lactose sugars are pre digested yogurts and kefirs and things like that, rather than, let's say, milk or pasteurized and homogenized yogurt or any other type of dairy in which the bacteria have been killed because the bacteria help to digest the lactose in the dairy. Now, the way that I did that, the way that I figured all of that out was I took my 23andMe results and these are very, very simple to get via saliva test. And I exported those to a website that gave me a host of information about where I'm at genetically and the way that I personally not only should be eating, but fascinating enough even exercising, right? Like whether I should be doing fast, intense exercise as my staple or whether I should be doing more endurance based exercise as a staple. And there are two websites I found that were really good for this. One is called 23 and you'd.

And the other is called Strategene. Strategene is a website run by somebody who I consider to be one of the world's leading, leading people to follow if you really want to look at how to treat your body based on its genetics. His name is Dr. Ben Lynch. He wrote a really good book called Dirty Genes. Dirty Genes. And it walks you through via questionnaires and quizzes how to kind of identify what type of, of supplements you should be including, what kind of foods you should be avoiding, what kind of foods you should be including, and if you want to take that to the next level and go past his book and kind of the subjective, qualitative questionnaires, you can go to his website. You can upload your genetic data, your raw genetic data, and get this big printout of all the different cycles that you're strong in, that you're weak in, and you can, you can really customize your laser precision. That website, website is Stratagene. S T R A T A gene Stratagene. So, yeah, we live in an era where dietary customers.

You first have to go to 23andMe. 23andMe, sign up for that DNA kit to be sent to you. And by the way, they will ship to Estonia. And then you spit in that vial that they give you. You send it back to them, and all your genetic data will now be available to you on 23andMe.

And if you have difficulty, and you.

Upload it to Strategy, if you have.

Difficulty dripping your saliva into a tube, here's the trick that I found that works amazingly. Sniff peanut butter. I sniff peanut butter and I start salivating. I'm like Pavlov's dog with peanut butter. So get out the peanut butter. You sniff the peanut butter, and I personally just start to drool when I sniff the peanut butter.

You have a hack for everything.

There you go.

So, speaking of hacks. So one of the people watching the livestream, so we're actually Facebook living this on the mindvalley fan page. So all of you watching this is a big shout out to you. So one of you posted this question, and this person's name is Magda. And she said, ben, tell me how to stay young and strong forever.

How to stay young.

Wow.

I would be a billionaire if I could answer that question.

Well, let's keep it to staying young. What are your best tips for slowing down aging?

Exactly. We talked about the blue zones, right? Absence of smoking, wild plant intake. We see legume intake. And that doesn't mean you got to go out and have beans with every meal. That could, that could get a little bit annoying to your, to your housemates or to your family, if that were the case, especially if you're me. But the idea is that the reason that legumes work so well, it alludes to something that I referred to earlier. Does anybody know why legumes are correlated with longevity or with these blue zones?

Glycemic variability, which I talked about. They're very slow digesting carbohydrate that doesn't, you know, seeds and nuts can act similarly, as can being careful with the times that you eat carbohydrates, et cetera. But the overall picture is you reduce your glycemic variability, time spent outdoors, social life, et cetera. But one of the things that I found through telomere testing took 17 years off of my biological age. You can test the rate at which your telomeres shortened. And when I first began testing I was 34 and my biological age as I was finishing up a couple career in Ironman triathlon and still hadn't gotten fully onto the kind of like the caring for my stem cells bandwagon and some of the other things I'll tell you about. I was 37 biologically, 34 chronologically. The next time I tested I was 35 chronologically and I was 36 biologically. On this last test that I did, I was 37 chronologically and 20 biologically. And the one change that I made was I began to focus with very intense precision on caring for my stem cells. Now I personally did, and Vishen's done something like this too. I did stem cell injections where I actually had my fat cells extracted from my back via Honestly, it's like liposuction. They take a big needle and they stick it in and out of your back, they suck out the fat cells and then they grow them and they extract your stem cells from the those. I did the same thing with my bone at a place called Forever Labs in Berkeley where they went in through the bone, they took out bone, they concentrated the stem cells from that and I actually have the 34 year old me stored so I can re inject that into my body, into my joints at any given time. But that's an expensive procedure and I realized that not everybody is going to go out and get foot long needles shoved into their back and anvils shoved into their hip to extract stem cells. You can actually enhance your own endogenous stem cell health and stem cell production. And this returns to Marta's question on longevity by engaging in certain dietary and lifestyle practices that increase your own stem cell production. There are foods that have been proven to allow your body to create more stem cells and there are foods that you're probably aware of as healthy foods. Blueberries are one. Aloe vera is another. Chlorella is one. Colostrum is one. Coffee berry fruit extract is one. There's a host about, I think it was about four or five months ago somebody asked a question about increasing their own stem cell production on my podcast and I gave a full list of things that you can eat to increase your own stem cell production. Another thing. And this kind of returns to the concept that sometimes in life, the things that give you the most bang for your buck are slightly hard and slightly uncomfortable because there's this concept of what is called hormesis. And hormesis is the idea that things that are bad for you in large amounts are actually good for you in small amounts, right? So we could take a cold shower for two to five minutes and feel fantastic. We could take a cold shower for an hour and walk out of there just, like, cold and shriveled and stressed out. And if you stay in cold for too long, obviously you'll die of hypothermia. We could see stay in the sauna for 30 minutes and get this big increase in red blood cell production and heat shock protein and nitric oxide. Or we can stay in there for 90 minutes and get a cardiovascular incident from loss of mineral production and basically the body getting to the point where it's so dehydrated the heart doesn't work anymore, right? You can go out in the sunlight and get all this fantastic vitamin D and near infrared light and far infrared light and collagen production for your skin and. And testosterone production and everything that sunlight gives you. And then you could stay out there for two hours, burn yourself to a crisp, and increase your risk of skin cancer. They've even shown that the low levels of radiation that we now find around areas like Chernobyl are actually helping some of the rodents there in that area live a longer period of time. Do not say that Ben Greenfield told you to go move next to a nuclear disaster waste site. But you get the idea, right? So you subject your body to hormesis, and by subjecting yourself to small amounts of cold, small amounts of heat, small amounts of exercise, which, as you learn, can kill you in large amounts, but is good for you in small amounts. By exposing your body to wild plants, which are actually stressful to your body, they actually build up these natural defense mechanisms that resist digestion, that cause your body to churn out its own antioxidants. But insane amounts, right? Not two pounds of kale a day, but a little bit of kale in your morning smoothie, for example, you actually are subjecting yourself to hormesis. Now, one of the most powerful forms of hormesis that will increase your own endogenous stem cell production and help you to live a longer time. Does anybody know what it is? Slightly uncomfortable, but it's one of the best things you can do. And an enormous number and A growing body of research has shown this to be one of the best things you can do for your longevity and your health.

Fasting. Fasting, yes, exactly. So, yes, you said five days. So the researcher Valter Longo has shown that two to four times per year, an extended five day fast moves the dial the best. Now I know that's uncomfortable for a lot of people. I'm personally a foodie. It's complete torture for me to go five days without food. Ease yourself into it. Don't think that you need to go five days without food. The magic number of hours at which things like cellular turnover, what's called cellular autophagy, a program, cell death, stem cell production, etc. Kicks in. It's at about the 16 hour mark. The 16 hour mark. So this idea of giving yourself about a 12 to 16 hour window each day in which you're fasting is a very smart move. Now what I do, and I found this to be very sustainable for myself and for the people I work with, 12 to 16 hours, I go without eating. So this means if I finish dinner at say 9pm, I'll go until at least 9am without eating. And if I have the capability to do so, and I'm not, you know, if I'm traveling in an area and I'm at a fantastic hotel with a wonderful buffet, I'm not going to, you know, bite my finger and walk past it. I'll go enjoy life and go eat food, but I'll wait at least 12 hours before doing so. In many situations, and especially if I want to improve my cognitive performance or if dinner's been especially large, like that small baby sized piece of pork leg that I had at Ola Hansa the first night I was here at this medieval restaurant, I'll wait 16 hours to eat, right? So if I'll finish dinner at 9pm and I won't eat again until 1 or 2pm for lunch, in addition to that, a single 24 hour fast, once every one to two weeks can really help to move the dial as well. And that's typically a dinner to dinner fast, meaning you finish dinner on, let's say a Saturday night and then you just don't eat again until Sunday at dinner. Here's the biggest mistake people make.

Just to go deeper, when you say you just don't eat again. I know there are certain things which are okay. Water is okay, coffee is okay. What is okay in that 24 hour fast?

Anything. This is a mind blowing concept. This is going to absolutely blow you away. Anything that doesn't have calories. Anything that doesn't have calories, it's that. So people are like, oh, can I have my coffee with the stick of butter in it or can I have my fish oil supplement or can I have bone broth? Well, all those things technically have calories. Your body has to tap into those and kind of reset the cycle and everything before it gets back into a fasting mode. Now, those things won't spike blood glucose. They're not going to result in completely ripping you out of, let's say, a ketogenic state or some of the other favorable states that occur when you're fasting, but they strip away your body's ability to be able to get some of those stem cell and longevity benefits of fasting. So water's okay, some sea salt and minerals are okay. Supplements that don't have a lot of calories in them, like a multivitamin complex, things like that, those are all okay. But what you'd want to stay away from is anything that has actual calories in it.

So just to give a practical example, I went for dinner with Ben and we finished our meal at 9pm and because it was a heavy meal, it was at a restaurant here. Now, we ate, we ate like beasts.

We ate a lot of food.

We ate a lot. We finished our meal.

This guy can put it away, by the way.

And then I simply, at Ben's advice, I simply skipped breakfast. And my next meal, my next calorie intake was at 1pm That's a 16 hour fast. Now when I did that, I thought, oh my God, I'm going to be going on stage, I'm going to feel hungry. I get hangry hungry and angry when I'm hungry. I'm going to start yelling at people. But what I actually found was pretty interesting. Firstly, I forgot I skipped breakfast.

I was slightly hungry towards lunch, but I had the same amount of energy, the same amount of cognitive functioning throughout the that day.

Yeah, exactly. And what you'll find even if you do this 24 hour fast is about 2pm you get hangry, right? You want to bite. You want to bite somebody's head off if they bug you. And you start dreaming about roasted chickens running around in your head when you close your eyes. And then what happens is your body begins to shift into what is called ketosis. You start to produce these ketone bodies as your body taps into its own fat. And the more frequently you fast, the more fast and painless this transition becomes. And once you make it through that window, all of A sudden you're not hungry, right? And the other thing that I'll do on my 24 hour fasting day is I choose activities that keep my mind occupied, right? Because a lot of times food is equated with boredom. So I won't go out to lunch with people. I'll make sure I've got an article to work on and I've got some other things to do and I have a hike to go on and I have all sorts of things to do to keep my mind off of food. Now one thing, and this, this winds up hurting a lot of people, especially lean people or people who are very physically active. Do not think that intermittent fasting or 24 hour calorie restriction is synonymous with eating fewer calories if you're trying to lose weight. The whole calories in, calories out equation dictates that at a certain point you just got to stop stuffing more calories in your mouth so you tap into your own fat as a fuel. But the benefits of fasting don't come with caloric restriction. They come with a long period of time spent between eating. So this means that if you decide, hey, I'm going to take Ben's advice and every week I'm going to do a 24 hour fast from Saturday dinner until Sunday dinner. Plan a big fantastic family feast on Sunday night or go to your favorite restaurant and eat a bunch of amazing wonderful food on Sunday night. You know, sometimes I'll find fast for 24 hours Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner and eat 2,500 calories for dinner on Sunday night. So the idea is not calorie restriction again, unless weight loss is your primary goal. But if it's longevity that's your goal, it's the idea that you simply engage in periods of calorie restriction without necessarily lowering the number of calories that you eat for that 24 hour cycle.

So Ben, in the last seven minutes we have, you wrote a white paper called look good Naked and you have a quest coming up with mindvalley, which is essentially on having a great body, looking good and living longer. What would be your best tips for staying lean, for having, especially for men, for having a healthy body fat percentage and for. And for having good musculature bulimia.

Just kidding. Sorry, that was insensitive. Anyways, the idea is I tapped into this strategy when I was preparing for Ironman Triathlon. I used to be a 215 pound bodybuilder. So for me it wasn't fat, it was muscle that I stripped off my body, I stripped off 40 pounds of muscle, but then I maintained very, very, very, very lean physiology without necessarily doing as much exercise as a lot of my peers were doing. And I still maintain this habit to this day, nearly 360, 65 days a year. You are already all educated pretty much as to why this strategy works. So you wake up in the morning in an intermittent fasted state. So your body is a little bit deprived of its storage carbohydrate. It's ready to burn its own fat as a fuel. You fasted for 12 to 16 hours. When you wake up at that point you put a little bit of caffeine into your system. Like I mentioned, coffee is great at dumping some cortisol, but it also amps up your fatty acid burning. Green tea also works. Anything that's caffeine based gives you a slight edge when it comes to your metabolic rate. Now, if caffeine isn't your thing, there are some other herbs and supplements that can help. Two, for example would be a cayenne pepper based herb or bitter melon extract. Either of these can achieve a similar effect in terms of shifting your body into a little bit more fatty acid utilization. So you've woken up 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast. You put some kind of supplement into your system that's going to shove you into a little bit of extra fat burning and then you do that simple 20 to 30 minutes of very easy aerobic physical activity in a simple conversational aerobic zone. You're not stressing your body out when you do this. You're not finishing it up and feeling as though you got to go eat a couple of waffles with almond butter on them for breakfast and pat yourself on the back because you did this hard crossfit wad in the morning and you're stressed out anyway, so you want to eat. You also don't put yourself into a situation where, and this is very common based on human psychology, I worked out really hard this morning, so I'm going to sit for four hours at work, right? Instead, it's a very easy session. So you're still motivated to stay active while you're at work. You're not super stressed out, but you're tapping into your own fats as a fuel. So you're fasted. You've got something in your system to increase the amount of fat that, that you burn. You move for 20 to 30 minutes and then you finish that up with two to five minutes of cold exposure, a two to five minute cold shower, or maybe jumping in the river that's beside the walking path that you walk on or anything else that exposes your body to cold. And then you finish up and you go along and you start your day. And depending on the scenario that you're in, based on what we were just talking about with fasting, maybe you're having breakfast afterwards, maybe you're not. It doesn't matter because you didn't do a super hard workout that morning anyways. And I swear, that routine, when you perform it regularly and you make that a part of your habit, a part of your ritual, and that's the way that I stay pretty lean year round, that works fantastically.

That's phenomenal. And where does food come in?

So when it comes to food, the basic idea is pretty much what I've harped on already. Reduce glycemic variability by ensuring that when you eat carbohydrates, your body is very responsive to them from a glucose standpoint. You've exercised before, you're walking afterwards, you're being careful with how high of a glycemic index those carbohydrates have. So you limit the amount of times that your blood glucose goes up and down during the day and you limit inflammation. You do those two things and you're going to equip your fat cells to be able to, to be converted into muscle tissue and also to die a horrible, painful early death.

And so one of our last questions. This is from Verena Demet Varina. Are you in the room? Verena, nice to see you.

Front row, baby.

So Verena asks, what do you think? We've learned a ton today. What do you think is the best way to keep yourself motivated to continue along this path?

There's the idea of extrinsic motivation and public embarrassment for not achieving your goals, which I'm actually a fan of. That versus intrinsic motivation. I'm just going to try really hard and make this happen. There's a fantastic new book by author Benjamin Hardy called Willpower Doesn't Work. And that book is probably one of the better ones that I've read in terms of altering your personal environment to keep you more motivated. Meaning if you walk into my office, there are kettlebells littered across the floor. There's a pull up bar there in the door of the office. There's special fun things that I can stand on that make me want to stand during the day. There's even a walking treadmill. I've hacked my environment to provide me with some of that intrinsic motivation for staying fit throughout the day. So to radically change your habits, you need to radically change your environment. And that's also a fantastic way to keep yourself motivated. Just change your environment. And that can, of course, extend to your pantry, your refrigerator, etc. Now, the second part of that is the extrinsic motivation piece. And I've found that I, and anybody I speak with who is heavily motivated to move, to stay physically active, to eat healthy, etcetera, they're signed up for something. Sometimes it can simply be something as simple as a quest in which you're held accountable to. To a community and held accountable to a daily schedule that you're adhering to because it's written down. And human psychology is that we want to check things off, we want to achieve them. But I also like to encourage people to sign up for events. I always have something on the schedule. I always know 12 months from now, I got to travel to Iceland to do a Spartan race. Or four weeks from now, I am signed up for my local community that I already registered and paid my $30 for.

Right.

Like, I always have something on the schedule that I can look forward to that provides me with, in addition to my intrinsic motivation, the environment I've created for myself, extrinsic motivation, fear of public embarrassment. Knowing that all my friends I told on Facebook that I was going to go do this, you know, this 5K or this marathon, or, you know, pick your poison. I've held myself to it because I've told the world, hey, look, I've committed, committed myself to this. So that's what I do. Fantastic.

So, Ben, in our final closing minute, any words to wrap up or brilliant words of wisdom or advice, go eat.

Bear at Old De Hansa tonight. Make sure to ask them to cook it in butter and extra virgin olive oil, do some burpees beforehand, slip off into the bathroom and do some piss squats as you're eating. Go for a nice walk afterwards through Old Town, maybe engage in a jousting match beforehand to get the heart rate up a little bit. Yes.

And then come watch Armin Van Buren.

And then go dance your ass off to Armin Van Buren.

So that's a good question. So we're over the clock, but I do want to answer that because in many cultures around the world, there's this belief that if we go out in the cold, we're gonna get sick.

Grandma said you'd get sick if you didn't put your coat on. Exactly right. Not. Not true. But I'll give you one final little tip just this wasn't what I was gonna end on. But I'll end on this anyways to give you a tip because I did it this morning and I do it anytime I'm gonna be around a lot of people, anytime I'm on airplanes, anytime I'm on buses, anytime my kids have been exposed to cold or immune system issues at school. It is one of the most potent methods that I use and that I travel with to keep my immune system strong. It's a very powerful antiviral, antibacterial. It makes you smell like a giant pizza when you take it in every morning. It gives you great breath. Oil of oregano. Oil of oregano is actually one of my secret weapons for immunity. So try that one out. And I guess we're ending on oregano and bears. So there you have it.

Fantastic, guys. Please give a big round of applause to biohacker Ben Greenfield. Thanks, Ben.

Thanks, fishing.