Q&A 446: Living A "High Energy Flux" Lifestyle, The Best Way To Do A Low Carb Diet, Left Nose Vs. Right Nose Breathing, Peptide Safety & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life show, living a high energy flux lifestyle, the best way to do a low carb diet, left nose versus right nose, breathing, and much more.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

Jj. We are here. We're live with a whole bunch of our friends on Twitter as we do with these live Wednesday Twitter Q&As for Q&A episode. What are we on? 4:46 BenGreenfieldLife.com 446. You realize you left me high and dry for episode 445. I had to do that thing all on my own.

I know, man. And I feel bad for doing that because I was stuck in la, which is not like the place I really want to be. I mean, it's no offense. I just offended all my LA hipsters. But that's not my favorite place in the world and I'm headed back there again this week. But I'm here today, so that's all that matters.

I love la. I don't know what you have against la. I actually love California and Californians in general. As a matter of fact, I'm moving to Idaho next year and I would invite as many Californians as possible to join me in moving to Idaho. However, because I grew up in Idaho and I had an older brother dyed in the wool, redneck gun rack, giant CB antennas, pickup truck with the muffler removed, driving redneck. And as the bumper sticker on his truck all through high school read, save Idaho, Spay and neuter all Californians. So everybody from la, you're welcome to come up this way, just be spayed and neutered and we'll call it good. Anyways, let's jump into these news flashes. What do you think?

Yeah, let's go, man.

All right, so here's the deal. I interviewed, I think it was a guy named Jay Feldman on my podcast a few months ago, and we discussed this whole bioenergetic model of living. And a term that came up during that discussion was this concept of what's called a high energy flux lifestyle. I tweeted out that this is pretty much how I live my own life. Meaning that there's kind of like two different ways to lose fat or maintain weight. One is to diet, to sit around, to be cold and hungry and libido less, and to basically cut off calories and live like a tortoise, right? Like, don't eat much, don't move much, because you can't move much. When you don't eat much and essentially just be, I guess, like a monk. The other aspect is a little bit more hedonistic. It's a high energy flux lifestyle is what it's actually called, high energy flux that involves basically eating more, doing more and moving more. And it's a pretty great way to live. And that's the way that I live my life. Now. What this is related to, and I'll link to a fantastic research paper that goes into all of this, is the concept of flux, meaning how much energy are you moving through your body, how much energy are you burning through movement, and generally how active is your metabolism on any given day. Now when people lose weight, and I don't think this is a news flash for anybody, your metabolism downregulates, you actually begin to burn more calories than you would normally burn as at rest. Not only that, but even things like the thermic effect of food. A lot of people don't know this, but how many calories your body will burn when it's digesting food that will decrease. Your body basically pulls off as many stops as it can to make sure that you are able to conserve calories when it is sent the message that you are dieting and also to a lesser extent the message that you're not moving around too much. So the flip side is basically this idea that you can achieve high energy flux and lower body mass, lower adiposity, higher metabolism, higher thermic effect of feeding, et cetera, by moving around a whole lot during the day, not only through low level physical activity, like a high step count, but also like lifting weights, high intensity interval training, both of which will maintain high energy flux for hours on end after you finish them, consuming adequate amounts of carbohydrates, which we'll get into later, but not being like full on strict keto and essentially moving more, doing more and exercising more. Now what this paper gets into is the idea that not only, as I've just alluded to, is frequently performed resistance exercise, weight training, carbohydrate consumption and overall calorie consumption useful for maintaining this high energy flux. But it appears that chronic long term endurance exercise is actually not the best way to, to achieve this high energy flux because that can actually result in similar thyroid downregulation and endocrine dysregulation that can kind of like long term decrease the metabolism, which is a lot of times why long distance triathletes and cyclists gain weight really quickly once they stop because their metabolism is not quite as high as it would have been if they were weightlifters or if they were doing high intensity interval training. But the other thing that's interesting is that whenever they've done studies on people who are obese and who lose weight, we saw this with the Biggest Loser phenomenon. Once they quit doing all that physical activity, they go back to the weight that they were at before or close to it because they're no longer maintaining that high energy flux. So essentially there's a few different ways to lose weight. You could not eat a whole lot and also, like I said earlier, not move around a whole lot because you can't when you're not eating a whole lot. You, you could exercise but not eat a whole lot, which is difficult to sustain long term, as I basically just said. Or you could eat an ample amount of calories, move a whole bunch, kind of sort of have your cake and eat it too. And that's what high energy flux is actually referring to. It's essentially treating yourself like an athlete rather than a dieter. And so it's got a ton of studies behind it. This concept of high energy flux being predictive of long term fat loss. One of the best weapons to fight against, against the era that we live in, in which there's readily available highly palatable foods all over the place. And the interesting thing is it seems to help with appetite dysregulation, it seems to help with blood glucose, it seems to help with overall metabolism, possibly even longevity. There's so many reasons to do this. It's basically flies in the face of this old school philosophy like eat less, move more. It's more like eat more, move more. And so that's what I mean when I say high energy flux lifestyle, 10 to 15,000 steps, a some form of resistance training or high intensity interval training. Nearly every day, eating a solid square, two to three meals a day, not engaging in extended amounts of fasting a lot, Meaning I'll do a 12 to 16 hour overnight intermittent fast, occasionally a 24 hour dinner time dinnertime fast, occasionally a quarterly cleanup of four to five days where I might eat fewer calories. But it's cool because you get to just basically live life to the fullest and if you're a foodie, eat a lot of really great foods. And I think a lot of people are just scared of doing that, which when in my opinion, this high energy flux lifestyle, and especially if you look at the research and I'll link to a lot of it if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 446 points out to the fact that it's really not a bad way to go. Yeah.

I would say this is a good example of what I do in my own life. But one thing I was curious about, Ben, so I want to get your take on this. Do you think this is more for individuals who are looking to maybe maintain body composition or kind of stay where they are once they get to where they want to be? Or do you think that because I was thinking about this from a bioenergetic perspective, we think about it from even like a caloric deficit perspective. Like the whole notion of like, eat less, move more and this is eat more, move more. Is this more like eat more, move even more? Like, do you see what I'm saying there? Or is this saying. Because I'm trying to think about weight loss and a caloric deficit and how this factors in.

Yeah. So when it comes to weight loss and it goes. Because, you know, it comes down to, at the end of the day, you know, you gotta pay attention to physics and the idea of calories in, calories out. I do think that diet quality matters, but calories are kind of like the biggest part of the equation. What you just asked me reminds me of this three year long term study that they performed in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This was on a bunch of teens and they found that the teenagers who basically ate a lot of calories and then burned a lot of calories were the most successful in reducing their body fat percentage compared to those who would eat a little bit and move a little bit. So basically this idea is that if you want long term sustainable weight loss where you're just lean and fit year round and continue to become more lean and more fit as time progresses, you actually would have, yeah, maybe a slightly lower calorie deficit each day because you're not eating more and moving less, you're eating more and moving more. But long term, the sustainable weight loss is really impressive. And there's subtle nuances, right. You could have certain days where maybe it's a yoga sauna, easy walk day where you are eating a little bit less, and then you have a high intensity interval training and weight training day where you're eating a little bit more. But ultimately long term you're not doing strict dieting and it appears to be a much more successful way to lose weight and to keep it off. I think you can lose a lot of weight by just strict dieting, say eating 800 calories a day and spending six hours a day on a treadmill like they did in the Biggest Loser. But ultimately, and I think this is what you're getting at with your question. If you want to live a high energy flux lifestyle, but you're starting off at a pretty high weight, yeah, it might mean that you're eating more like the calories that you would eat for your goal weight than for your current weight, but that's pretty easy to pull off. As a matter of fact, if you go to the show Notes for Q&A 445@BenGreenfieldLife.com 445, I talked about and shared a link to a wonderful calculator that lets you plug in, hey, here's my goal weight. How many calories should I be eating per day based on my total daily energy expenditure, how much I'm moving, how much I'm active, what kind of calorie deficit I want to be in? And you could plug that in. And the general rule to follow if you are in that state is I would not have a calorie deficit that's any greater than 500 calories per day. Meaning if you calculate that you're eating 2,500 calories per day, you would not want to be burning more than 3,000 calories per day. Meaning you're achieving a 500 calorie deficit each day. And I have found that once you do more than that, that's when you start to see some of the thyroid down regulation, some of the metabolic effects, some of us shift into more of that low energy flux type of environment. Does that make sense?

Makes total sense. I think. So many people go way too fast too soon and that's what kind of leads to this, like you mentioned, just kind of this downregulation of all these pathways that cause the lack of libido, it causes the lack of energy. But also from a behavioral change perspective, when you're going from eating 3 or 4,000 calories a day to dropping down to whatever, you know, 1500, 2000 calories a day, but you're burning 30004000 calories. Like it's just, it wears you out. And then from a behavioral change perspective, it's just extremely difficult to maintain that. So I love this notion of like the modif kind of like it's almost like the modified high energy flux. And then when you get to where you want to be kind of like your maintenance place, if you want to call it that, then it's like full on higher G flux lifestyle. Seems very fitting and it seems a lot more appealing and sexy than this notion of just eating less Moving more.

Sexually, Sean Connery would say is related to something. I also want to talk about this whole idea of carbs because like I mentioned, carbs fit into this equation like carbohydrates are for fat burns in the fuel of carbohydrate. You need a certain amount of glucose on board, not only for mental function. Your brain doesn't just run on ketones, which is myth that's bandied about these days. Your brain needs about 30 to 40 grams of glucose per day for thinking if you don't want to be stupid. But then your joints need proteoglycans, your thyroid needs a certain amount of carbohydrate throughput. Even the Leydig cells in the testes burn glucose, which is why a lot of times super low carb diets result in low testosterone. And this high energy flux lifestyle depends on one of these fuels that actually is associated with, with, with a higher metabolic rate and higher calorie burn. And, and so there's a few nuances here that I think are related to carbohydrates as well. And that's why I wanted to bring up this recent study that looked at the ergogenic effects of acute carbohydrate feeding on resistance exercise performance. It was really interesting because what they did was a meta analysis where they looked at, well, you know, we, we've seen an endurance, for example, that, that consuming carbohydrates seems to. But we know that consuming carbohydrates before short term high power activities like powerlifting doesn't really seem to help that much because you don't burn a lot of glucose. That's mostly creatine. What about resistance training? What about high intensity interval training? And what about the type of training that a lot of people, average person who goes to a gym are doing? Is carbohydrate that beneficial? And it turns out that the short answer is yes. So what they found in the review was that first of all, if you're going to weight train for more than 45 minutes and you're doing like anything eight to 10 sets or higher, which most people are in the gym for 45 minutes or more are doing carbohydrate ingestion improves performance. And in this meta analysis, the average amount of carbohydrate ingestion range from about on average about 20 grams to 60 grams. Right? So 80 to 250ish calories of carbohydrates consumed right before the workout is like a shot in the arm. It's like an ergogenic aid. I've said before, sugar is a sometimes drug and before you go do hard weight training or high intensity interval training or exercise. Oh, it definitely helps. It helped even more if people were in a fasted state. Meaning carbohydrates aren't going to help you out as much for your early afternoon or your late afternoon or early evening workout as much as they're going to help you out for a morning fasted workout. Now I realize a lot of people might not like the idea of having carbohydrates before morning fasted workout. I like to work out fasted in the morning, but if you're an athlete and you're shooting for performance, I mean it's a no brainer for a hard workout, not do it fasted, have it with carbohydrates or these are a lot of little nuances throughout. And they've done studies like this, mostly do the hard workouts fasted, but every once in a while throw in carbs and then definitely have carbs before the actual competition because again, kind of like caffeine if you abstain from it during exercise, but then every once in a while when you really got to go hard and when you have a competition, throw it in there. Helps a ton. The amount of carbohydrate ingested didn't seem to matter that much. Almost as though the taste of carbohydrate and the presence of carbohydrate sent the body this message that staved off sensation of hunger, dictating that it could be as little as like a banana and as much as like a giant maltodextrin fructose based carbohydrate shake. Right? So 20 to 60 grams, 20 to 80 grams even is not that large of a range. But it turns out that the dose is not that important as much as some small amount of carbohydrates, even like a small piece of fruit. Another thing they found from this meta analysis was that the carbohydrate ingestion helped more with lower body performance than upper body performance. And this is interesting because I've told people if you want to stabilize blood glucose and you want higher testosterone and better hormones, work out a lot with your legs because legs have a high amount of androgen receptors, which helps with things like increasing testosterone post workout, right? Deadlifts, squats, high intensity interval training on a bicycle, et cetera. But they also burn glucose like it's going out of style. And so that means if you want better blood glucose management, maybe you're wearing Continuous blood glucose monitor. Maybe you're pre diabetic, maybe you just want to, you know, stabilize what's called glycemic variability as an anti aging or longevity hack. Don't be the person at the gym with the big upper body and the toothpick legs, guys and ladies. Don't be the person who's just doing like chronic cardio on the treadmill or the, you know, or the ergometer. I realize I just stereotyped sexes, but I'm going to roll with that anyways I did because males and females are different. News flash. But anyways, the idea is if you do working out with your legs, it's kind of interesting. Eating carbohydrates helps more with leg workouts. But the reason for that is that leg workouts or doing exercises with your legs burns more carbs. So you can kind of use this as a clue to indicate that for better glucose function overall, be sure to include leg day frequently. But then also you may actually benefit if you're going after the greatest intensity on leg day by consuming carbohydrates beforehand. When I say leg day, I'm not a bodybuilder who likes the, the whole concept of leg day, but what I mean by leg day is workouts that include the legs. So in addition, they found out that if you do have carbohydrates pre exercise, you get a significant increase in post exercise blood lactic acid levels. Which means that the increased carbohydrate intake not only allows for more production of lactic acid, which occurs when you're burning glucose versus when you're burning fats, but also it means that you, you may have more recovery implications or at least a better need for a cool down or something like a little bit of cold, a little bit of compression, a little bit of flushing with a foam roller, that type of thing. If you are one of those people who consumes carbs pre workout. So the big takeaway from this that I want folks to think about is first of all, studies like this don't look at overall metabolic health, anti aging, longevity, long term blood glucose management, et cetera. They're just looking at, hey, does this help you work out, bro? Like, does this increase your performance? There are obviously other things that we would want to think about. However, I think that some people who kind of get a blah feeling in the gym can't push themselves hard enough, who may be living some element of this low energy flux lifestyle in which they're constantly restricting carbohydrates, would benefit from either A, consuming carbohydrates acutely pre workout, or B, and this is my approach, having some type of carbohydrate refeed in the evening before the morning that you do a hard workout. Because this is a case where I think you can have your cake and eat it too. What I mean by that is the evening carbohydrates. A little red wine, dark chocolate, sweet or purple potato, maybe some millet or beets or parsnip or carrots or anything like that. Or one of my wife's lovely slices of homemade fermented sourdough bread, a little bit of BlackBerry jam on it, which is actually very close to what I had last night with dinner.

Very appealing right now, right?

Or some of it. We just harvested 10 pounds of honey from our bees. You know, a little bit of honey. Honey's great. You know, and I think that honey counts as being carnivore too, apparently, from what they say these days. Anyways.

So that's what Paul says nowadays.

Yeah, Dr. Paul Saladino, I think he endorses honey. So big thumbs up. So anyways, the idea here is you have your carbohydrates in the evening that refills your liver and your muscle glycogen stores, thus allowing you to mobilize that carbohydrate in your next workout. And by the way, high energy flux lifestyle, I didn't mention this is associated with better metabolic flexibility, meaning be able to burn either fats or carbohydrates or both during exercise and at rest. So basically you're consuming carbohydrates the evening before rather than right before the workout. You've still got all that glycogen to tap into because via the process of glycogenolysis, you're your body, once it has the exercise implications involved will begin to break down that glycogen from the muscle and from the liver, release it in the bloodstream, elevate glucose just the same as if you'd eaten glucose right before the workout. However, because you're working out in a fasted state, you get some of those longevity benefits, some more of those metabolic flexibility benefits, some of the fat loss benefits, et cetera. And of course, as I've mentioned before on other podcasts, prior to that evening, carbohydrates refeed. I'll even do things that help the carbohydrate get into muscle and hang around in the bloodstream a little bit less long. So called blood glucose disposal agents like berberine or apple cider vinegar or cinnamon or Shout out to Kion Lean. I formulated that supplement for that specific reason. Cold, like a quick cold soak or a cold shower, a little bit of weight training or even just 30 burpees. It doesn't take much. And so, so this idea of doing something to enhance the uptake of that blood glucose prior to the evening carbohydrate refeed, then you do your overnight fast, 10 to 12 hours for women, 12 to 16 hours for men kind of varies. Women, those longer intermittent fasts downregulates your levels of a hormone called kisspeptin, which can impact fertility and hormones and things like that. So premenopausal women do better with a shorter 10 to 12 hour intermittent fast. Guys, 12 to 16 hours. But then you squeeze in your workout at some point during that fasted window, after which you could do a post workout meal. And it's kind of a beautiful way to access the ergogenic effects of carbohydrates without necessarily missing out on some of the longevity and other benefits of a fasted morning workout. And so I think that's a pretty good way to go about doing things. But the reason I highlighted this study is just to send people a big old message that if you want to have really great workouts, figure out some time of day that you actually are refilling your carbohydrate stores and your body's going to thank you. And it fits beautifully into this whole concept of a high energy flux lifestyle.

Yeah, I have noticed 100% that when I do carb refeeds in the evenings, I mean, I normally work out in general pretty early in the morning before I come to the office, so around 6:30 or so. And if I have a night where that I have not eaten as high of a carbohydrate load, I certainly notice maybe a little bit of a lack of energy, maybe even a little bit less. I guess I would say a little bit more poor sleep. And but when I have a little bit of extra carbs at night, it feels like it increases overall sleep quality and sleep architecture. But then my gym session in the morning feels a lot, I feel a lot more invigorated and I feel a lot stronger. I feel a lot faster. So I would certainly, at least from an data anecdotal perspective, agree with the research.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, thank you for agreeing with me. I do not like to be disagreed with on a podcast because it makes me feel inferior.

Isn't that what you pay me for?

I pretty much pay you to make me look smart because I'm the ultimate narcissist. The eight most popular ways to do a low carb diet is another article that I'll link to@bengreenfieldlife.com 446. It came out a couple weeks ago on Healthline. Caution with Healthline, by the way. It's the one that when Google redid its whole algorithm wound up being the website that will appear most often in search results once they started to downregulate. Guys like Dr. Mercola and the Wellness Mama and Josh Axe and all these people have pretty great articles. Those don't appear in search results as much anymore. But the thing about Healthline, if you pay close attention, half the ads on there are from pharmaceutical companies. So they got a little interesting little tweak going on. So don't swallow it all hook, line and sinker.

No agenda whatsoever.

No agenda whatsoever. Ignore the pharma ads. So they discussed the eight most popular ways to do a low carb diet. And I figured this would be a cool review for people because a lot of times people hear low carb and they don't understand there's a lot of variants of it. So drum roll please. The eight different versions of a low carb diet. First is the typical low carb diet doesn't have a fixed definition and it can generally refer to anywhere from 100 to 150 grams of carbohydrates on a daily basis, which is actually what I would consider to be. I would even go as high as 200. The definition of a low carb diet for a high energy flux person or an athlete, it's still like, like a quarter of what is often recommended by folks like the Gatorade Sports Science Institute for carbohydrate intake. But amongst low carb and keto people, 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates is a bastardization and you're going to be kicked out of low carb club if you do that. But for an athlete and someone who's working out a lot like 100, 200 grams of carbs, that's definitely low carb. And then 50 to 100 grams or even under 50 grams, which is geared towards faster weight loss and better glycemic management. But I think that that's not enough for most examples of a high energy flux lifestyle. But that's the typical low carb diet doesn't have. It's kind of a foggy definition. It just means low in carbs, high in protein, moderate in fat. Then you have the ketogenic diet, which is a very low carb, high fat diet. That's the diet I used a lot when I was racing Ironman. I was in strict ketosis for a good two years at one point eating 80 to 90% fat. Right. So a typical keto diet is high protein and high fat with carbs sometimes limited to as few as 20 to 30 grams per day. Originally it was used for medical management of things like drug resistant epilepsy in children or people with neurological disorders or metabolic issues like type 2 diabetes. But there are a couple variants of the ketogenic diet that they bring up the targeted keto diet, in which case you do it but you add in, speak of the devil, carbs around your workouts. Right. So you're in ketosis all the time, but you add in carbs around your workouts. I don't like that approach because again, I like to work out fasted or with not a lot of carbs on board because I want to tap into my fats and my muscle and liver glycogen. The other option is what's called a cyclical ketogenic diet, where you eat a ketogenic diet on most days but switch to a high carb diet for one to two days a week. That would be another example of a ketogenic diet variant and I think they neglected to include a third, which is a cyclical ketogenic day where, and this is again what I do, you're high fat, moderate protein, low to no carb all day long, and then you do all your carbs in the evening after you've done something to enhance your glucose disposal, like cold resistance training, glucose disposal agent supplement, et cetera. And so I think if you're going to do some type of a ketogenic diet, that's a great way to again have your cake and eat it too, too. That's a version of a cyclical ketogenic diet with a daily, or at least an almost daily carbohydrate refeed in the evening. The third one is called a low carb, high fat diet. Low carb, high fat diet is simply a variant of the low carb diet that tends to have a real big emphasis on whole, unprocessed foods like meats and fish and shellfish and eggs and vegetables and dairy, nuts, berries, et cetera. All that means when you hear somebody banding about that term is that they're eating low carb, but they're not doing like a junk food low carb diet, they're eating whole, unprocessed foods called a lchf, low carb, high fat diet. That one's pretty straightforward. Then there's a low carb Paleo diet, which is very similar to the one I just mentioned, except it's paleo, so they get rid of grains, they get rid of legumes, usually dairy, usually added sugar. Most processed foods, including things like sugar, alcohols, and wear caveman garb and carry giant clubs around and live in caves or sometimes hanging from hammocks and trees.

The best days.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's the paleo low carb diet fits to simulate what our Paleolithic ancestors apparently did. Although I have to admit, in many archaeological investigations of our Paleo ancestors, they have found grains to be present. So I'm not sure I'm going to swallow that one. One sacra. And then there's the Atkins diet. The Atkins diet is like the one where you just reduce all high carb foods but have as much beef jerky as you want, go to McDonald's whenever you want, just throw away the bun, just eat low carb. Eat a ton of protein, too, which honestly kind of defeats the purpose because protein is gluconeogenic and insulinogenic and you still get the big glucose spikes and insulin spikes. I think the Atkins diet, the way that most people do it, like, yo, I'm just going to go to the barbecue joint and McDonald's and taco time or whatever, but I'm just going to not eat the carbs. I think that that's kind of like the junk food. It's kind of like dirty keto. Atkins would kind of fall into the category of dirty keto with slightly higher protein than dirty keto, in my opinion. And then there's Eco Atkins, which is basically very straightforward. It's a vegan version of the Atkins diet. And again, it can be total junk. It can include things like Tofurky and Beyond burger and all that jazz, but it's just vegan version of the Atkins diet, like a low carb vegetarian or low carb vegan diet. Then there's zero carb. This is the seventh one. Zero carb is basically zero carb. It is a thing. People do it. They just eat meat, fish, eggs and animal fats like butter and lard. Add in some sugar and spices. This is almost like the carnivore diet, which some people will say, oh, it's not high enough in vitamin C, it's not high enough in fiber, where I see some people pull it off. And if you eat enough protein, you can kind of Sort of pull it off. But I see. And speaking of Paul Saladino and the whole carnivore diet thing, it's very rare. I see someone follow a strict carnivore diet for an extended period of time without eventually throwing their hands up in the air and starting to throw in papaya and pineapple and honey and some of these more natural carbohydrates. So I think the zero carb is something not a lot of people adhere to for a very long period of time. There was one case study from the 1930s where they had two guys who ate nothing but meat and organs for a year and remained in pretty good health. But there's very little epidemiological evidence that zero carb is sustainable long term. And then there's a low carb Mediterranean diet, which I think is a great diet. It's based on the traditional foods in Mediterranean countries. It limits grains and bread and stuff like that. Doesn't totally eliminate them, but it just emphasizes more fatty fish instead of red meat, more extra virgin olive oil instead of fats like butter. I tell people painting with a broad brush, and this might be due to the human origins in the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean areas and that kind of ties in with our genetic ancestry as a whole, that if you have no clue and no money to afford lab testing and you just don't know where you're supposed to start, what you're supposed to eat. I think a relatively low carb version of a plant rich flavanol and polyphenol rich Mediterranean diet for most people, and especially for people concerned about cardiovascular health and Alzheimer's, dementia is kind of like the way to go if you just don't know what to eat. If you can do some semblance of a low carb Mediterranean diet, you're probably going to be pretty healthy. Yeah, there's some people who have compromised guts who can't do as much as the grain version of that, or may not be able to get away with the feta cheese or whatever, or can't do a lot of raw roughage fiber and got to puree and ferment and turn their vegetables into smoothies. But aside from that, I think the low carb Mediterranean diet is probably the healthiest version of the low carb diet that's out there, there. So I think this is helpful though for people just to be able to wrap their heads a little bit better around all the different variants. And in my opinion, some type of a plant rich nose to tail carnivore, esque Cyclic ketogenic diet, which is what I do, or some version of a low carb Mediterranean diet. Either of those work pretty well. And then if you're an athlete, you throw in a little bit more carbohydrates than the 50 to 150 that some of these diets will endorse. But that's kind of the skinny pun intended, I suppose, on eight different common versions of a low carb diet. I just think it's important for people to understand it's not just the same across the board when it comes to eating low carb. Right.

Well, we gave you eight examples of low carb diets, so choose one or pay the price.

That's right.

That's all we have to say.

I love having you around to wrap things up with witty one liners, Jay. Okay, then finally, related to carbohydrates and this was interesting. We all are familiar with this idea of stabilizing postprandial blood glucose by moving often before but usually after a meal. Right? Like the 15 minute walk after a meal that's often recommended to reduce blood sugar levels. Works, works like gangbusters. But this latest paper evaluated a whole bunch of studies that looked at exercise after eating and it turns out that yeah, moving at least within 60 to 90 minutes after a meal definitely delivers wonderful postprandial blood glucose stabilizing results. But it's pretty shocking how little you can get away with just two minutes of walking works for me. That's really good to know because my family eats kind of late. We finish dinner and by the time we finish dinner it's like 8:30pm we're getting ready for bed. I'm not going to go out for a 20 minute walk and not be able to read my kids a bedtime story or play them some guitar or gather the family for our evening meditations. But I will literally go out and turn on the garage alarm and in the minute that the garage alarm takes to activate, do like 60 jumping jacks out in the garage and then come Inside, drop, do 30 pushups and head up to the boys room to get them ready for bed. I'll just do something very, very brief and I mean you can also pat yourself on the back. The sexual intercourse that fits the bill. Doing a few burpees after the meal, going outside and playing a quick round of bocce ball or cornhole or whatever with the kids in the backyard. Like, like it doesn't have to be a full on workout after the meal, especially after dinner, which can be inconvenient for a lot of people. If you're going out to eat, just park your car four blocks away from the restaurant. You're easily good to go. So two minutes. I mean, that's not long, even if you can't pull off anything. And this is again, this is not just for me with dinner. This is like, I finished my morning smoothie, and right before we podcasted Jay, I went outside because I pee outside sometimes. I like it. I live in the forest, and I go outside to pee. I'm often a country boy. Yeah, I conserve water. I'm an if it's yellow, let it mellow type of guy in the toilet, much to the chagrin of my wife, because the dogs drink out of the toilet. And she's like, the dog has pee breath. Ben, flush the toilet. But I'll usually pee outside. And when I go outside after breakfast or after lunch, I'll just do a few jumping jacks outside, go back in, and get back to work. So that's what I did today. I went outside, I peed, I did 100 jumping jacks, and camera down into my office for the podcast. But again, it doesn't have to be much. It can be these little bouts, but it almost just becomes like brushing your teeth after a meal. It's like, oh, I finished a meal. I'm gonna crank out a few pushups or a few jumping jacks, and then, boom, get back to the grind. And two minutes is totally sustainable. I think.

I love it because I was in a habit of getting my family out of the house for maybe a little bit longer of a walk after dinner. But to your point, I have young kids, and they go to bed pretty early, which means we eat pretty early, which means that if we're running a little of late, it was easy for us to make the excuse to just go straight up to bed and not actually do anything. And I think that that was significantly impacting us, and it was impacting, you know, glycemic variability. But knowing that we only need to exercise or engage in movement for two minutes, I mean, it's like, you can't argue yourself out of that. And if you do, then, well, I mean, that's on you. Because from a behavior change perspective, I mean, it's really easy, again, to talk ourselves out of things that just. I don't see that realistic or attainable. But two minutes is pretty damn attainable for, I think, everybody. I'll reach out there and say that, which is a great thing. But having research that highlights things like this, that are just these really small changes that you can make that can significantly impact your overall health and wellbeing is really important. And I'm sure as the years go by, we'll continue to get these just tips on small little micro changes that we can make that have a really large scale impact. So that is a great thing.

It kind of reminds me of this book I'm reading right now. It's a great book. I highly recommend it to anybody listening in. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's called 22 Simple Actionable Ways to Propel youl Creative Life. And this discussion reminds me of that book a little bit because at one point in the book he says something like there's this saying, a lot of people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a day. And he says, I say a lot of people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 minutes. And this part of the book has 20 different things that you can do in the 10 minutes that you might have available in little chunks here and there during the day. Like writing 200 words, memorizing a poem, getting a full 10 minutes of practicing a musical instrument, doing a mini 10 minute workout, sitting with your child for 10 minutes and having a quick discussion. It's a really great book and it's mostly just about time management. And he's kind of like a time hack, the guy who wrote the book. But this discussion reminds me of that. Never underestimate the importance of these tiny, tiny little things you can fit into the little minutes that are available throughout your day. So that book is called 22 Simple Actionable Ways to Propel youl Creative Life. Total rabbit hole. But check it out if you need a book to read or book to listen to. All right, you're gonna like this. Last thing that I want to mention before we open it up to a few questions from our Twitter audience who's waiting patiently in the wing. So this paper, relatively recent 2022 in the journal of Scientific Reports, looked at brain activity during what's called unilateral yogi, nasal breathing. Now this is interesting because I was having a discussion with some folks I was with recently who were partaking of the Amazonian herb hape or rape, which is like this alkaloid nicotine, rich substance you would typically breathe up your nose prior to meditation or app medicine ceremony or hunting to increase sensory perception, et cetera. Kind of opens up the sinuses feels like you smoked a cigarette up your nose. But occasionally I've done hoppe and I've experimented with what happens if you just breathe it up the right nose or just breathe up the left nose. Because typically you do one puff in one nostril, then immediately go to the other nostril, and then you don't breathe through your nose and you just breathe through your mouth for about five minutes while you let the goodies just kind of sit up there in your nasal cavities burning away. And then eventually do the one nose snot blow out of a each nostril, get rid of it and go on with your day anyways though. So I was saying that, well, if you actually just do it up your left nose and you test your hrv, what happens is the parasympathetic dominance skyrockets on whatever HRV monitor that you're using. And if you just do it up your right nose, your sympathetic nervous system dominance goes way up.

Up.

Well, there's actually a reason for this that I'm sure you're intimately familiar with as an HRV expert, Jay. Your nasal cycle is coupled to higher order brain processes like neuroendocrine function, cardiovascular function, the regulation of fuels, the immune system, the gut and your nasal cavity, where all this erectile tissue resides and all these nerve endings and a large portion of blood supply and nitric oxid production takes place. Well, it's all regulated by the autonomic nervous system system via the hypothalamus. Therefore, the nostrils themselves are linked to central nervous system regulation and also to brainwave activity. And it turns out, and they've studied this, and this paper actually gets into a specific electroencephalophograph study, like an EEG study of brainwave activity. It turns out that when you just breathe in through the right nostril by plugging the left nostril nostril, you get an increase in brainwave activity and you get an increase in sympathetic nervous system activity. And it charges you up, it wakes you up and it's like energizing. If you cover the right nostril and you just breathe in through the left nostril, you get an increase in parasympathetic nervous system activity, a drop in heart rate and a lowering across the board of EEG brainwave activity. This is why this concept of alternate nostril breathing in yoga, breathe into your left nostril while you have your right nostril plugged, and then breathe out through your right nostril and then breathe in through Your right nostril with your left nostril plugged and breathe out through your left nostril has a really, really great impact on balancing your nervous system and increasing your heart rate variability. Your recovery and your overall balance doesn't necessarily relax you as much as it balances you. If you were just going through your left nostril, it would relax you. If you were just going through your right nostril, it would excite you, you. But if you do it through both nostrils, it balances you and induces just like this calm state of relaxed focus. So it is interesting that they've actually studied this now and it turns out there's data behind it. The increase in EEG activity of the brain with right nostril breathing, the decrease in EEG activity of the brain with left nostril breathing. And it's kind of a hack because if you are tired and you don't want to balance, but you just want to wake yourself up, up, cover your left nostril and breathe through your right nostril. And if you're super excited, stressed out, et cetera, and it's like way too much excitement and you just got to go full on parasympathetic, cover your right nostril and breathe in through your left nostril. And if you're using one of these heart rate variability monitors that will track your, what's called your sympathetic dominance and your parasympathetic dominance, and one is too high. Let's say your parasympathetic dominance is way higher than you want it to be, thus causing your heart rate variability or HRV to be low. Then just breathe in through your right nostril and it'll decrease parasympathetic tone, increase sympathetic tone, increase HRV and balance you out. So it is interesting. You can play with your central nervous system and your EEG activity based on which nostril that you breathe in and out of, which I think is just fascinating.

It's for sure fascinating. Of course, I have a lot to say on this, but I'll try to keep it brief and pithy. The one thing that I will say that I found very intriguing about this study is that when they looked at the different areas of the brain or the regions of the brain they saw, like you mentioned, increased activity in some places, decreased activity in some places, depending on which nostril was being utilized and depending on whether it was their dominant breathing nostril or non dominant. The one thing that I really found fascinating is that when they looked at left nostril breathing, which is again, more associated with parasympathetic output. They found that the areas of the brain that were lighting up were typically in the posterior regions of the brain. And what. What they've seen in other studies before is that when you put monks in a meditative state and they have eyes closed state that a lot of these posterior regions of the brain will light up with alpha activity. So this like, flow state activity that's associated with a level of direct awareness, but also a level of calm and relaxation. And so I found that really, really interesting because I haven't seen a study that has done that yet, though they mentioned other studies that have kind of done that, and this is confirming it. So the other thing that I'll mention too, because when I read this study and I knew we were going to talk about it today, obviously I obviously threw on my hanu, and I promise this is not a shameless plug for my device, but I threw on my hanu and I started playing with it. So we have a feature called Snapshot that I talked about with you on the podcast where you can just test things out. It's like an open state. It's like, hey, experiment, have fun. And I started playing around with it, and I was. I'm always skeptical when I hear this, even though I. I like, know the research and I've seen kind of the evidence for it, but I started just watching it happen. I was in a state where I was already fairly relaxed and calm, but I was left nostril breathing. And I saw HRV start to accelerate in an upward direction. And then I. The one thing that I did is I kept the variables as much as I could, the same. So the pace of breathing was actually guided by a pacer. I did not change the pace of breathing, which would influence EEG output as well as heart rate variability. But I switched over to right nostril breathing, and all the stimulus, sudden it started going down from where it was. And then I was like, well, that's interesting. That's what you would expect to see based on this study and other studies. And then I went back to the left nostril and what would you. HRV starts to rise again and then obviously flip back over and it did the opposite. So it's a really interesting thing for people to test out and play with. And I like that you mentioned, Ben, that, you know, if you're in a state where you're like, I need to excite the body, I need to prep the body, I need to pump the body, up and motivate the mind and body, then, right? Nostril breathing is a great way go. And you can monitor HRV and heart rate during that time. But if you need to down regulate the nervous system, then it's great to move over to the left side. And then if you really want kind of just modulation of both areas, well, then that's just kind of another reason for you to engage in balanced nasal breathing. And nasal breathing is indeed the mediator here. So yeah, great study. A lot of interesting stuff.

That's right, everybody practice your one whole nostril snot blows now because you're going to need them handy to experiment with what you've just learned. So that all being said, I think that we should open it up to some questions from Twitter, from our wonderful Twitter audience. The way this works is you simply make a request to speak and I'll activate you. I'll bring you on and you can ask your question. Let's go ahead and open it up. And again, all the show notes can be@BenGreenfieldLife.com 446 for all the research, anything we mention as replying to these questions, et cetera. So let's do this. Who would like to come up to speak? We've got Aji. AJI has requested to speak. So let me add you as a speaker and then just give me one second and I'll turn up your audio here. Aji, when I say go, you can ask your question. So aji, go ahead. What you got for us?

Hey, man, what's going on?

Yo, what's going on?

Dr. J. First time dad here and want to know any tricks you guys have to biohack my baby's life.

Okay, to biohack your baby's life.

This is possibly an example, no offense, aji, of the term biohacking potentially being used out of context. Because I really think that hooking your baby up to hyperbaric oxygen and some type of nasal infrared device and feeding them MCT oil is not necessarily going to be that pleasant of an existence for a small human being. However, I would say that that I mean, if we define biohacking as either including certain technologies or lifestyle activities or nutrition or fitness or other things that would speed up or somehow enhance the normal healthy metabolic activity that you're looking for or eliminate certain variables that might cause the system to slow down, I could think of a few things I would pay attention to. I would look at light, a common thing that's biohacked, and I would ensure that you have have natural incandescent lighting and even consider red incandescent lighting if you'd like, in your child's sleeping environment rather than any type of more harsh LED or fluorescent lighting. You could also give them a tiny little pair of baby blue light blocking glasses, but I don't think that's necessary, as cool as that'd be. And I know if I would have said that, someone would have started a company devoted to baby biohacking glasses. But just make sure you pay attention to the light cans and the light bulbs in your child's bedroom. From an electricity standpoint, I would be very careful with baby monitors, which are notoriously high EMF and have a lot of dirty electricity. I would look for a low EMF baby monitor. I don't have a brand off the top of my head, but there are a few that exist if you look up low EMF baby monitors. And I would do things like put some dirty electricity filters in the bedroom and just make sure the WI fi router is far from the bedroom and could take consider the electrical environment which is going to be good for your baby's growing nervous system. I would ensure that moms, specifically, if you're breastfeeding, is paying attention to water quality. Many moms will pay attention to a lot of things like what they're eating, what herbs they're avoiding, the cigarettes they're not smoking, or the alcohol they're not consuming. But they forget that water is a notorious source of toxic chemicals. And lots of things in the municipal water supply that you may not want want winding up in your breast milk. They've even found things that, like phthalates and endocrine disruptors from personal care products and household cleaning products and shampoos and the like can wind up in breast milk. And a lot of moms know that, but they still don't think about water. So make sure you're using good, clean, pure, filtered water from a water standpoint. From a dietary standpoint, I have helped a lot of women who are breastfeeding with their nutrition and have found no diet to be better than the Weston A. Price diet, which is rich in fermented food foods and organ meats and natural fats like lard and ghee and butter and all sorts of wonderful natural home foods and homemade foods and ferments and the Weston A. Price Diet and even the Weston A. Price Book of Child Rearing, which I forget the full title of that book, but it's written by Dr. Tom Cowan and Sally Fallon. Wonderful, wonderful book for growing a healthy baby. From a nutritional standard standpoint. I'll also give a shout out to our friends at Serenity Baby Foods who I think make the best infant formula and the best natural omega 3 fatty acid, protein and fat rich baby foods from all organic and wild caught and grass fed grass finished products out there. Serenity Baby Foods is another one I would look up from a nutritional standpoint. And then the last thing I would mention, in addition to paying attention to light and electricity, to water and to nutrition, I'll mention two other things things I would make sure that you are frequently grounding or earthing your baby. Getting them outside barefoot, naked on their back on the ground, just getting as much in contact with the healing and negative ion rich and Schumann resonance rich frequencies emitted by the planet Earth. Just get them out healing in those frequencies as much as possible. Make them an outdoor barefoot baby. And then. And then finally I would consider the use of cold and you might have a social worker wind up at your door. Put them in the morale, you put this into practice. But there is a rich, especially amongst indigenous cultures of exposing a baby even early in life. I even came across a photo recently of young baby bassinets outside in the winter in Sweden. It was a photo from like the 30s or something like this, but they would just put their babies outdoor in the cold in the middle of the winter and let them sit on out there for a little while. School children were encouraged to go play outside in the snow. Native American populations would take their babies once a day and just dunk them in cold water in a cold river or lake or in the ocean. And so my own kids, we would get them outside in the cold all the time. They started cold plunging with me when they were one or two years old. I would have started it earlier if I would have had access to one. So if you have access to getting your baby cold, within reason, get them outside, get them accustomed to a the cold, have them dip in the cold pool with you, take a cold shower with you, et cetera. Cold is actually really, really great for a child, especially a child's immune system. It's kind of like hanging out with dogs. Letting dogs look them in the face and be around farm animals and around slightly dirty outdoor natural environments is great for their immune system. Based on the hygiene hypothesis, getting cold frequently has a lot of benefits to their cardiovascular system, their immune system. They got tons of brown fat that can handle it theoretically even better than a grown human adult can. But get your kid cold too. Jay, you got anything you'd want to.

Throw in yeah, man. So I like what you mentioned there, and I think that these are really fun biohacks. These are great things that we could kind of throw into that category. But I truly am just a large scale believer in two things as being one of the most, I guess, positive or most beneficial things that I did with both of my boys. And one was just show that baby as much possible freaking love as you possibly can. And for me, what that looks like was just a lot of skin to skin contact, allowing both of my boys to sleep on my chest, to feel the warmth of my skin, just kind of being there to comfort and soothe and let that baby know that you love them. And the one way, and the one thing that I had to learn the hard way with babies especially was that they are obviously very physiologically demanding, but they're super psychologically demanding as well. And they will, will push you and it will cause trials and obstacles and provide barriers. And the one thing that you can do is always control your response. You can always regulate your emotional response. And I know I'm sounding like a true psychologist right now, but I think that the research is so clear that we can do everything we can to provide for them nutritionally and all the things that you said, Ben, which are really great, positive things. But if we're not regulating kind of our response to them, something that they feed off of immensely, then that can do a lot of detriment to just a growing baby. So show them a lot of love and then just regulate your response. Control your response. Choose your response well. And I think that you are, you're going to grow the baby up to be a very good little young boy or young girl. And yeah, that's what I have to offer.

Or possibly just a very cold and hungry child. Wild. But good luck with that. All right, we are going to go ahead and bring Bojan on. Bojan has a question. Bojan, go ahead and ask your question.

First of all, thank you, Ben and Jay, for doing this kind of stuff. This is awesome. I'm, by the way, I'm in my home country, Serbia. People outside training, exercising, calisthenics, 9pm it's awesome. So I started doing jiu jitsu recently and I noticed that, for example, I'm not able to connect like three classes in a row without some sort of injury. It's usually tendon, soft tissue or something like that. In hindsight, I probably always had this problem, but I was too young to notice it because I would just heal on its own. But now it's not healing. So to be short, I'm considering using TB5000, sorry, 500 and BPC157. And I didn't see that any one of two of you talked about this before. So I'm just asking for a comment. Usually when I talk with the medical people, they would say stay out of using peptides. That's dangerous. While on the YouTube everybody's talking about BPC150, this as a miracle drug. So yeah, I'm just asking for a comment.

Thank you.

As far as peptides that are safe, that are efficacious, those are probably the two that I started with for joint injuries and for general inflammation. Yeah, I mean they're safe, safe, they're effective, they're proven. I've seen very little side effects from either of them. I'll link to two pretty big articles I've written about both of them on BenGreenfieldLife.com sourcing you gotta be kind of careful with. Some people say Peptide Sciences sends out pretty clean peptides. I'm not totally sure that I haven't used a lot of peptides from Peptide Sciences. However, Can Labs is one that you can order from. I get most of my peptides from either Dr. Matt Cook at BioReset Medical in San Jose or Dr. Craig Conover, who does prepackaged, automatically filled syringes, which is super. You should go to his website and check out his peptides. He'll prepackage them, ship them out. They're already in syringes and that makes it super easy. BPC157 and TB500 have both been shown to help with wounds, burns, inflammation, tendon. I usually almost always have a bottle of that handy. Not only if I've torn something or hurt a joint, but just like general inflammation, soreness after a hard workout day, et cetera, you just recover faster with the stuff. And BPC157 has even been shown to do things like treat gastrointestinal issues. It's originally where they found it. Body protection compound found in gastric juices and then TB500. It's really good for tendons, for reduction of inflammation. It seems to have some impact on the immune system system as well. They're natural and they seem to work pretty well for most of the things that they're recommended for. A lot of people don't realize they help to promote the growth of collateral blood vessels and endothelial cells. So they can actually be really, really good for cardiovascular health as well. A lot of people will stack them together and take them at the same time. Some people do like BPC157 on one day, TB500 on the next day. If I've hurt something though, I'll just, just crush it with a subcutaneous injection right under the skin, as close as possible to the area that hurts. Even though they can be used systemically for things like cardiovascular health or gastric inflammation, in which case you could pinch the skin around your belly button and just inject a little with an insulin syringe right in there. You can also pinch some skin close to where it hurts and inject it right in there. You clean the area with an alcohol syringe. Use good hygienic practices as you do so. But in the same way that a lot of people will inject insulin, millions of people every day, the same is not much more complex than doing that. And so yeah, if I had to choose, I'd go with CanLabs or BioReset Medical or Conover Wellness. But BPC157 and TB500, they're safe peptides and I think they're two of the better and more widely available ones that are out there. I haven't recently checked global dro globaldro.com to see what their status is as far as their band status for WADA sanctioned sports, for the ncaa, et cetera. So, so if you're engaged in any of those activities, you may want to double check because the peptides kind of go back and forth on there. But aside from that, I give thumbs up on those two. So I think they're fantastic. And I would have no issues with most people using them as long as you're needle phobic. I don't think the oral versions work very well, but okay.

The needles even still are normally pretty small gauges.

Yeah, yeah, they're super small gauge. And if you are needle phobic, I mean there's some. They have these things now called peptide bioregulators, which are oral capsules which are targeted to specific organs. You can look them up. It's based on research by a Russian guy named Dr. Kavinson. And they seem to have a really, really potent anti aging effect and target specific organs. They've even done amino acid tracer studies on them and found that when you consume these bioregulatory peptides, they wind up in the specific organ. So a lot of people will use those or they'll use organ supplements from a company like ancestral supplements. They'll use thyroid glandular and testosterone or testicle extract or spleen or kidney or pancreas or brain or intestine. That's kind of another way to get kind of sort of what you're looking for in peptides because technically those are peptides and those oral organs, I don't think they're quite as efficacious for some an injury as injecting BPC157 or TB500. But for the whole anti aging general systemic play, who, somebody who does have access to peptides doesn't want to inject, I even think just organ glandulars or bioregulatory peptides are a decent option as well.

Yeah, I was going to mention one thing, Ben. I think to your point, knowing your sourcing is extremely important here. I, I heard recently Peter Attia refer to sourcing in peptides as the wild wild west. And I think that that is probably pretty accurate. And I think the other thing too is that we don't know for chronic use of these peptides like the longer term or more longitudinal studies, we just don't have those yet. So it's always one of those things like should we wait on those, what could be 10, 15, 20, 30 years before we have more longer term studies on people who use it more chronically. So it's just something to always keep in mind. And I think that's probably why Peter referred to it as the wild wild west. And I guess the last thing that I would say too is whatever you can do to prevent injury is always going to be better than always coming in after with something post injury. And so I, I know he said, I could have sworn he said he was doing Jiu Jitsu three times a week, which is a fair amount of Jiu jitsu and is going to lend itself to a higher propensity for injury. But whatever you can do from, you know, increasing mobilization, stretching, taking plenty of, or being plenty hydrated with plenty of, you know, mineralization, like all these things can be extremely important. So I would just always say go for that first and then always, you know, come, then you can always come in afterwards if you know those things are, excuse me, aren't very effective.

Boring. Stretch hydrate.

I just want to injection all the basics before biohacks. Yeah, yeah, that's all boring stuff.

All right, well, let's bring one other person on. Grant. Let's bring Grant on as a speaker. Grant, go ahead. What's your question? Awesome.

What's up, Ben? What's up Dr. J? Thanks for having me on. Here's my question. I'm a professional athlete and I've Been, been an athlete for pretty much my whole life. But as I've gotten older, I've noticed that I've. I've kind of lost my edge. I've lost the ability to find this adrenaline rush that's really driven my. I wouldn't say it's driven my performance, but definitely helps. So long story short, you know, adrenaline definitely plays a big part in, in my sport and the performance has really tapered off and I'm just trying to look for that edge. Do you have any tips or tricks on how to not necessarily fake the adrenaline, but to find it?

Yeah, great question. So in a nutshell, steroids, particularly. Andro. I would just go ape nuts on that. Double injections both butt cheeks as frequently as possible. Morning, this afternoon and evening. I'm just gonna look at my phone here. Grant Dayton. Hold on, let me look. Let me Google Grant. Grant Dayton is an American professional baseball pitcher in the Los Angeles Angels organization. He has played in the MLB for the Dodgers and the Braves since 2016. Wow, we're famous. We got a famous major league bill. Oh, Grant, kudos. Yeah. What position does he. Let's say professional baseball pitcher. Oh, wow. That's your problem, dude. You should have been a catcher, Grant. That would have fixed all your problems. You can be a catcher until you're like 75, from what I understand. As long as you got good stuff.

Bum knees, though.

Yeah, bum knees. This is interesting because, Lewis, I'm going to come at this from a psychological standpoint. Let's assume that you've taken care of your nutrients and you're not testosterone depleted and you're eating well and you're moving and you're getting sunlight. You're not in a high electricity environment. You've done all kind of the hacks, the things that you're supposed to do to stay healthy. If you haven't, you need to read my book, Boundless, Shameless Plug. But I mean, any athlete who wants to have a long career needs to read that book. But let's say you've taken care of all the fleshy stuff. Lewis Howes has this book called Masks Men Wear, I think it is. And the athlete identity chapter of that book really helped me out because I got to that stage where I was kind of burnt out on Ironman. I was burnt out on Spartan racing. Even though I had races lined up and I had these external goals, I wasn't that motivated by them. And I read that book. In that chapter of the book about releasing your identity as an athlete and the pain that that involves and some of the hesitation of what's next in life because this is a language I've spoken and how I've lived for the last.

20 years or sometimes longer. How do I make that transition? And a few things that helped me out was first of all, I watched my wife as a professional runner, a top Idaho miler and cross country athlete, ran track and field for University of Idaho. And I watched her just gradually give herself the permission to not run and begin to hike and garden and do yoga and take up the sport of tennis. And I watched how happy she was with not having that necessity to crush herself in competition anymore, even though, unlike Grant, her career, her paycheck didn't depend on us. That probably eased the transition a little bit. But I watched her give herself the permission to just move on to the next chapter in her life and release the athlete identity as a mask and not have that be something that she clutched to as the way that the world judged her or accepted her her. I watched her do that and I thought, gosh, if she did it, I can do this. What if I tell myself, hey, I don't have to swim, bike, run every week. I don't have to go make every workout a soul crushing routine? And what if I skip workout today and go play pickleball? Or what if I don't do leg day and I go hit the tennis ball with my kids instead? And what if music and playing the guitar doesn't have to be something I feel guilty doing because I'm not burning calories or exercising or making my body better or preparing for a competition, but I'm doing it because it's just part of being a human being enjoying life and vibratory frequencies and music on an amazing planet. And what if I spend an extra hour cooking dinner tonight and watching a YouTube video to learn a new technique like sous vide or smoking? What if I just decide I'm going to go on a nature hike but do it slow, slow and stop and pick some fruit or smell some flowers or sit on a rock and look at the clouds? I think a lot of athletes are afraid once they start to fizzle out. Let's say you truly are fizzling out, Grant. Again, let's say it's not physiological because again, we could have a whole hour discussion about that's what I do a lot of times with people. I'll consult with them. We'll figure out all be their blood work and everything, all the little micronutrients they might be deficient in or things From a physiological standpoint, that could be causing low energy. But let's just say it is time for a new chapter and it is time for someone to rise up and take your place. Well, I think the key factor for me was finding things that brought me happiness and fulfillment besides exercise and besides sporting and besides competition. The problem is if you've been an athlete for a really long time or you've been a fitness enthusiast or an exercise junkie for a really long time time, you almost forget how many other things are super pleasurable and fun. And you also forget that at the end of the day. And again, granted, this is in full respect, but I had to google your name and I'll bet that even sometimes if I saw you pitching on tv, I wouldn't pay that much attention to what your name was as much as just watching the game. I think a lot of times as athletes, we think more people are paying attention than there actually are. We think that more people are expecting stuff of us than they actually are and that the harshest judge of ourselves is ourselves. And once you realize, oh wait, there's another great book about this called the Gap versus the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. The expectations I'm setting for myself have brought me into this pattern of unhappiness simply because I've set expectations that really aren't the right expectations for me anymore. And once you wake up and you're like, my expectation of myself is not to, to be on the squad or the roster next year and start and do a two hour workout today. My expectation of myself is to learn piano and work out for a half hour today and go on a hike and work on this business. Maybe I'm drawing amazing art and starting a store on threadless or whatever and beginning to sell merch. Once you start to give yourself permission, just be like, oh, this is the next chapter in my life and there's so many other cool things in life that I haven't yet tapped into. You get this resurgence, event energy, this resurgence of purpose and this resurgence of enjoyment that exercise or being an athlete no longer offers to you. And I'm not saying you have to do that, but I'm saying my gut response to your question is that from my own personal experience, giving yourself permission to do that and then opening yourself up to all the other things that the wide world has to offer can be really cool and really fun and really fulfilling. So that's what I would think about. What do you think, Jay?

Spoken like a true psychologist there, Ben. I like it.

Oh, thanks.

You've been taking some notes. One of the things, it's really interesting, Grant. I mean, I've worked as a sports psychologist for a long time, and the one thing that I always come back to is this idea of, is your motivation, Is your energy systemically gone down so it's in every area of life, or is it to certain and specific things? Especially the thing that we're talking about, which could be athletics, it could be sports, it could be your identity as an athlete. If it's systemic, then that's where we, you know, can get into, like Ben said, an hour, two hour, three hour discussion. Or we can even look to say, well, is this kind of a sign that life for me is feeling a little bit hopeless, a little bit helpless? Am I feeling a little bit depressed because I don't have the energy or motivation really to do anything? It's just kind of impacting everything. Or if it's this one thing that we're referring to, and if that's the case, well, then now we're saying, am I living a life that is congruent with my value system, with my aspirations, with my passion and meaning and purpose? And if that is the key component, if that's the thing that's not there, and you can't in good conscience look in the mirror and say, yeah, I'm living a life that's, you know, in line with my values, my aspirations, truly in line with my values, my aspirations, my meaning and my purpose. Well, that's when it's time to say, okay, are there other avenues now that I can pursue to your point, Ben, athletes have so much wrapped up in this identity of, of who they are, what others perceive them as, and if they move away from that, then they won't know how to deal with themselves or perceive themselves. They won't know how others are going to perceive them. Are they going to say, oh, this is a person who just gives up. They have no grit, they have no perseverance. You know, you fill in the blank when you look back at your track record and say, dude, I did something that 0.0001% of the population has done. And so therefore, like, maybe, maybe the self talk that I have and this lack of energy and motivation that's tied with it is probably not warranted. But the last thing that you want to do is continue to have yourself in something that is not bringing you a sense of joy, value, meaning and purpose. And that would be kind of what I would say. You know, I don't get like to give people direction and say jump out of one thing, because I don't think it's right for you. You have to be the one that is saying that. And then you also have to just be the one to make the assessment and say again, is it this one thing in life that I'm not finding energy and motivation, my adrenaline's not pumping for anymore, or is it in every area of life? Because I think that those are two different questions with two different resolutions and if we had a couple hours we could dig into them. But since we don't, now's the time for self exploration.

I hope that's helpful, Grant. And I hope that based on our answer, we didn't just lose the LA squad. An amazing picture because you just walk into your coach's office today and say, hey, Ben said I should hang up the hat. So just some things to think about. Sometimes I wish these Twitter Q&As. We had the opportunity to go back and forth and back and forth with the guests, but that's not the way we structure them currently. However, I hope that's helpful, Grant. And to everybody else on Twitter, I'm super grateful that you joined us. And again, we do this a couple times a month. So I'll always put it out on twitter@twitter.com BenGreenfield and also to the free newsletter@BenGreenfieldLife.com for anybody who wants to join us. I'll put all the shows notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 446. Sometimes we'll read a testimonial or a review for the show and give something away. But unfortunately I have a really important phone call in about 10 minutes. I don't even have time for that. What I can tell you is if you enjoy this, if you want to just pay it forward a little bit, then go leave the podcast a review, say something nice about it wherever you listen to it. It takes two minutes. A lot of people forget to do that, but it really does mean a lot, a lot to me and to Jay and to the entire podcast team. It just helps us kind of keep the fire burning on our end. So if you're able to go leave a review, say something nice, subscribe whatever it is that you feel led to do to help us out. That's kept me going for the past 16 years of podcasting, however many years it is, I lose track. But that's kind of the lifeblood of the podcast is your reviews and your rankings and your subscriptions. So help some brothers out and do that. And gosh, Jay, I think that's about it, man. I feel good about this podcast. How about you?

That's it, man. Dude, it's always a blast. Have fun chatting with you, man.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crack. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.