12 Underground Fat Loss Techniques That Work

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep crain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

I think we got a lot of.

People here to somewhere in there it said something about taking your clothes off or looking good naked or something like that. Anytime you write that people like, ah, we're gonna do this. When you talk about triathlons and things like that, you don't get quite as big of a crowd. But something about people in their underwear, I get it, doesn't show up. So there you go. So I'm Ben Greenfield. I recognize some of you from other talks that I've done here and just from being in the community.

And the talk that I'm going to.

Give you is about ways that you.

Can burn fat and ways that you.

Can burn fat specifically without necessarily doing ungodly amounts of burpees all day long and without necessarily looking at the gym as like the place to go to lose weight. Right. My philosophy is lose weight all day long, burn fat all day long, keep your metabolism stoked the whole day. And I'm just going to give you some of my tips for doing that in the talk. Now, I'm a big Q and A guy, so write down your questions as we go. You know what, if you have a question while I'm talking, I'm totally cool with that too. If you feel like I'm totally forgetting to say something or you have something that's really relevant, like I'm talking, feel free to shoot your hand up. And I'll also allow ample time for Q and A at the end as well so we can have a really good discussion. So I'll stay here as long as.

They bring me food.

I'll stay here for as long as I need to. Bring me food, bring me Zevia, whatever, like all that stuff and I'll just keep talking until my kids fall asleep.

All right, so quick thing. A lot of resources are at my.

Website, BenGreenfieldFitness.com I've got a podcast and a blog over there if you have follow up questions. I am so bad with business cards. Like I show up at places and I don't have my business card, like my contact details. But if you go there, there's like a contact button and you can get ahold of me so that's a good way to do things. And of course you can talk to me afterwards. I can give you my number or my email if you want to do it that way too. The old school pen and paper method.

So let's just, let's jump right in, why don't we, with talking about pooping.

No, that's actually not pooping, but it.

Is, it's a bathroom stall and it's somebody doing air squats in a bathroom stall. I think I probably first read about.

This concept in like a book by Tim Ferriss where he was talking about doing air squats in the bathroom stall. And I was right on the same page because I do like push ups during the commercial breaks of TV shows and I'm constantly walking and moving and have a pull up bar installed in the door of my office so that I'm able to inject little bursts of fitness into my body. With that, I start off each day with a little bit of breathing and something anaerobic to boost my metabolism for the rest of the day.

But the key here is your mentality, your philosophy, right?

Like it's annoying the hell out of me right now that everybody's sitting. Should give everybody like a walking treadmill.

But the idea is that we spend so much time in a sedentary position, you get a down regulation of lipase.

When that happens, which is the body's primary fat burning enzyme.

And this means that we're basically sitting.

And storing fat all day long.

Now I'm a big fan of even if you're not a hunter or a.

Farmer or a gatherer or somebody like.

Works on your feet and with things all day long, I'm a fan of.

Hacking your environment so that you can make that happen. Okay? So standing workstations, I'm a big fan. Putting something heavy in your house that you have to stop and pick up doesn't have to be your couch, even though that works. And I've actually done that in hotel rooms, right? Use the hotel bed to pick up and set down something heavy to lift, but something heavy that you can lift during the day. A rock, a barbell that always has some weight on it, a couple of.

Dumbbells, things next to your desk or your workstation that you're at when you're doing the bills or maybe some of.

You work from home or when you're.

Making phone calls, things that allow you.

To have a raised surface so that you're constantly on your feet during the day.

These are all the little things that add up.

I call it Greasing the groove. Just because it's like digging and groove. And that's not my term. It's a term that was originally coined by this guy. His name is Pavlo Zatzolin. And his concept is he works with people who fight and he has them stop and do 10 pull ups here and then 10 pull ups here again, 10 pull ups here again. So every day they're doing like 100, 150 pull ups and really building that neuromuscular memory. But this works just as well for fat loss. All day long you figure out ways. So the way I do it is I have rules. I have rules that every single day I got to do 30 burpees. Every single day I gotta do 50 pull ups. I don't have to do them all at once, right? Like, I can do three here, five there, 10 here, whatever. Every time I go to the bathroom, I gotta do 10 squats. Either before I go to the bathroom or I have to go to the bathroom, just drop and do 10 squats.

So once you start doing this stuff all day long, you get to the end of the day and going to.

The gym or going to do a CrossFit workout or doing whatever it is that you often feel, frankly, dread at the beginning or the end of the day, that becomes an option, that becomes the icing on the cake of the calorie burning and the fat burning that you've done all day long. It's just a mentality. It's thinking outside the box when everybody else is sitting at the doctor's office, waiting around at the dmv, listening to a talk, whatever. I'm waiting for one person to stand up in the back.

But you stand, you get up, you move around. It's a really, really important concept.

I'm not saying there's not a time to sit. The important thing here is that you're in different positions all day long.

And I'll talk to you in a.

Little bit about how you can burn calories when you're sitting, how you can keep your metabolism elevated if standing and.

Moving is not an option for you.

But it's this mentality of just consistently moving all day long. It really upregulates lipase, your body's fat burning enzyme. It increases metabolism.

And think about it this way.

The key and what research has shown when it comes to not just fat loss, but also cardiovascular disease is it's having your butt planted for more than two hours at any given time during the day. That is the thing to avoid. So if you can at least break that cycle. Your rule is for every hour that I'm sitting, I gotta do 100 jumping jacks. That's a two minute break. I don't know, for some people it might be a 10 minute break. For some Uberfit people out there might be 60 seconds. But you've got these little rules throughout the day. They can be pop up reminders on your computer, they can be post it notes, whatever. But you will be amazed at how easy it is to keep weight off and to keep really, really high energy levels and maintain really high levels of fitness when you're just constantly moving. So that's one. And by the way, we're going to go through 12 things.

So standing, I kind of hit on this already a little bit. But I want to give you guys some practical tips because what you're going to find.

And I run into this over and over again when I make this recommendation. And people do what I say, right? They hack their environment and they get one of these fancy standing workstations or you know, I see people get their shoe boxes and put them up on top of the top of the cupboard so they've got their raised surface. I've seen all sorts of different variations of standing work desks. Some people will take their stuff out to the garage where they have a workstation up there.

The problem is that being in one.

Position all day long is bad for you. Like you can get Las Vegas waitress varicose veins from standing all day. In the same way that you can get fat and ruin your low back by sitting all day.

So when you're standing, there are little.

Things that you can do to make things a little bit easier on your body and to make sure that you don't get a lot of that joint pain, a lot of that blood pooling. A lot of things that can happen when you're standing.

Like right now I'm wearing two pants.

See, I've got like compression pants on and I'll wear these a lot of times all day long. I'll wear compression pants, I'll wear compression socks. I'll wear things that help pump the blood out of my lower extremities up into my upper body. That really, really helps at the end of the day of being on your feet. I'm also a huge fan of inversion. So I'll do like yoga inversion poses. I have like an inversion table out in my garage that I'll hang from for a little while every once in a while to kind of decompress the spine and get Some blood out of the legs. After I've been standing all day, excuse me, I'll shift out of that standing position quite often, right? Like sometimes I'll lie down on the floor on my stomach. So sometimes I'll sit, sometimes I'll stand, sometimes I'll have one leg up. I actually have a little treadmill next to my desk where I walk.

But the key is that if you.

Just take this advice and stand all day, you're going to feel kind of crappy at the end of the day. Like your joints are going to hurt, your feet are going to hurt. So the trick is to use compression, use things that keep the blood from.

Pooling in the legs and then think about your feet, right.

A lot of people have flat feet. A lot of people get joint pain in their hips and their knees. And a big, big reason for that is the actual surface that you're standing on. So there are things called anti fatigue mats out now. And there's like a company called Topo that's making mats. You can get really dense foam from like the fabric store that works really well. I've got this one mat called a kybounder. It's a ky bounder and it's just like, it's, it's, it really is just a dense piece of foam filled with fabric that they've patented and now charge hundreds of dollars for. When you could probably make the same thing from the fabric store.

But you find something, I mean, even.

Like an old mattress will work. Like something you can stand on that's really soft, that lets you bounce around and find different with your feet. Probably even use like a litter box or something. I have yet to see that be implemented. But just something that allows you to kind of move your feet around, kind of give you that uneven surface. That's really important too. It sounds small, but it makes a night and day difference when you're standing all day.

So not only do you move all day, but you kind of hack your environment so that when you're standing, your.

Body doesn't really reap a lot of the risks of what that feels like at the end of the day. And instead you feel good at the end of the day because you've just kind of been moving all over the place as you stand.

So that's number two is to stand. Number three is temperature. Now the cool thing is that a lot of us, pun intended, a lot.

Of us in the Pacific Northwest, we're okay with being cold, we're okay with fluctuations in temperature.

But I still run into People even around here who just constantly keep the house at 70 degrees and constantly either.

Have the AC or, or the heat.

On in the car or really always.

Heat up the shower before they get into the shower.

Now there's a lot of research out.

There on this idea that being cold burns fat. Like literally two hours ago, I went for a cold water swim outside in the snow. I've got this cold tub out in the snow. I hop in, I swim for like 15 minutes, I take a warm shower afterwards, and I burn as many calories in that one session as I would in a 90 minute workout. You don't have to go to that extreme. You don't have to get your hose and make like a little pool in your backyard with the cold water. You know, that'd be pretty sick. And I'll post it on my Facebook page if you send me a photo of your little cold pool that you built.

But basically, cold showers, that's an easy, easy entry, right? Like being okay with at the end.

Of your shower rather than finishing hot. Finishing cold, right? That's an entry level into my wicked, nefarious next steps, which would be like, get to the point where you're actually taking a two to five minute cold shower.

One of my buddies has clients who.

Are losing 20 pounds a month right now. His name is Ray Kronise. He's this NASA materials engineer. He just studies how to use cold to lose weight. And he has this hot, cold contrast method that he recommends because it causes your body to have to make these rapid fluctuations in temperature and that burns boatloads of calories. And the way that it works is it's 20 seconds of cold and then.

10 seconds of hot 10 times through.

At the beginning of the day and at the end of the day in your shower, right? So it's a five minute shower at the beginning of the day, five minute shower at the end of the day when you don't have time to work out or even if you want to enhance the effects of your workout or enhance the effects of being active all day, this works really, really well. Just cold, hot, cold, hot.

There's a lot of other things that.

You can do though, in addition to jumping in the cold pools and taking cold showers and stuff like that. Keep the temperature cold. So I actually keep my office because it's in the basement and it doesn't annoy my wife quite as much because she likes it a little bit warmer than I do. I keep my office at 55 degrees, right. And I work in a T shirt and either shorts or pants.

So I've got just a little bit of discomfort going all day long.

But I'm also amping up the calorie burning, right? So I'm consistently able to keep myself in that fat burning mode.

Sleep, you actually get into a deeper level of sleep when you're sleeping right.

Around 65 to 70, 70 degrees. Like a lot of people are really good right around 68. But sleeping in a slightly cooler environment, that's free calorie burning as well. So keeping your home cold, sleeping in.

A cool environment, doing the cold showers.

Being okay with every once in a while, like going for a run outside with just like the T shirt and shorts and cover the extremities, right? Like wear some wool underwear so you.

Don'T get frostbite down there and put on some gloves.

It actually is really interesting. And some socks and a hat.

When your extremities get cold, that's when.

Your metabolism starts to down regulate and shuttle a bunch of blood to your core to protect you.

But if you keep your extremities warm.

While you're exercising in the cold, you'll burn more calories without down regulating your metabolism. So the key is keep the crucial parts warm, like the hands and the feet and the crotch and the brain, and let the rest of the body be cold when you're working out. And whether it's cold water swimming or whether it's going out for a brisk walk in the cold, it's a really, really good strategy.

Heat can work a little bit similarly, you don't burn quite as many calories.

When you're moving a bunch of calories or when you're moving a bunch of blood around to burn heat.

But your body has to make these micro adjustments when you're hot too.

Like when you do like a 30 minute sauna session each week where you go and you catch up on all your reading while you're sitting in the sauna, or you do like a hot bath that makes you sweat every week once in a while. It's really good at detoxing, opening up the pores, getting blood flowing. You don't burn quite as many calories.

But anything that causes your arteries to.

Dilate, anything that causes vasodilation in your.

Blood vessels, that can help out with.

Glucose and oxygen delivery to working tissue. It can help out with the production of what's called nitric oxide, which amps up the size of blood vessels. Like the active component of Viagra. Right? That's how I remember. This is like Viagra for Fat loss, but basically hot and cold, always being okay with being slightly uncomfortable. Really, really good fat loss technique.

So think during the day or at the end of the day, have I.

Been a little bit uncomfortable from a temperature standpoint today? Have I forced my body to make these micro adjustments that teach me how to burn calories? And there's a ton of other cool effects like performance enhancement and fighting inflammation. A lot of the other things that go along with temperature fluctuation, but it's also good for fat loss. I mean, again, we're talking about the things that can get you going without doing tons of exercise.

So hidden weight.

Hidden weight is next. So I'm not wearing weight vests right now. I'm going to fly to California tomorrow. I'll have a 20 pound weight vest on. I put it over my shirt and under my coat because I got to take it off when I go through security. But during those four hours that I'm walking through airports, up and down the stairs, in the airport waiting line security, that type of thing, my body will be burning a few extra calories. It'll be building a little bit of extra strength. When I've got that weight vest on. A lot of times when I'm going around the house, when I'm out cleaning.

The garage, when I'm doing chores, when.

I'm going up and down the stairs, I have a little 20 pound weight vest, right? And that allows my body to burn more calories.

It's really interesting.

I used to have this physiology lab over in Spokane and I would get obese people who would come in, like really overweight people, and they would say, I don't know what's going on. My metabolism is, must be low. My metabolism must be low. And I test them. I had this little thing that would test your metabolic rate. It measures the oxygen you consume and the carbon dioxide that you produce. It's called a resting metabolic rate test.

And the metabolic rate of overweight and obese people is really high. And the reason for that is your body has to work hard and burn a lot more calories. When it's working to breathe against weight and it's working to move weight and it's working to support poor weight. And so even if you're not overweight.

Or obese, let's say you've got 10 pounds you want to lose, or 20 pounds you want to lose, you're not like 400 pounds or something like that.

Adding a little bit of extra weight can give you that same effect.

It can give you that metabolism that has to work harder.

And there's all sorts of ways that.

You can do this, right? You can just wear a weighted vest during your workout. You can wear a weighted. I've got my kids in the back there and I'll take them on a hike and I'll put on like a 50 pound vest when I take the most on a hike. And it brings my fitness level down equal with theirs. So they can keep up with dad because he's huffing and puffing with his stupid vest on that's puffing all over this big camo weighted vest. Actually it looks really badass, but it's also really heavy. Then I also have that lighter 20 pound one for traveling and stuff like that.

But having these hidden weights works really well. Ankle weights work well. Wrist weights work well. Some weighted vests are not that comfortable. The two that I'm aware of right now that do a really good job.

Distributing weight around your entire torso and don't give you really tight traps and a tight neck because a lot of them kind of put the weight right on your neck. One company was on Shark Tank, it's called Titan Tech and they actually distribute the way. They're really cool looking shirts. They're expensive, but they're really cool. They distribute the weight. They're actually kind of like this. They're a shirt like this, but it's got like little weights all over.

And then hyperware.

Hyperware is another good company. Like a really kind of tight fitted vest. And you can adjust it. 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30 pounds. It comes with these little weights so you can put extra weight in if you wanted to. So having extra weight around, whether it's for your workout or your day to day routine, really, really, really, really good way to go.

Okay, so the next thing.

Is fasting. This cartoon says, I'm jealous your religion has a built in weight loss program. Even though like a lot of religions don't fast nowadays. The ones that do though, I mean like there's this, what's called cellular autophagy, right?

Like your body can engage in programmed.

Cell death that detoxes your body, cleans.

Up your body, kills cancer cells, has.

This really cool anti aging effect. A lot of people in the fitness community are against this concept because like muscle is like God in the fitness community, right? You would not want to catabolize that muscle that you've got work so hard to earn. And fasting, yeah, it is a little bit catabolic, right? Like you actually wind up burning some of your own tissue for calories when you're fasting. But in my opinion, occasional fasting or the style of fasting I'm about to tell you about, like the benefits outweigh the risks as far as like muscle loss versus anti aging and fat loss. So if you look at like the longevity benefits of say the Mediterranean diet, right, like feta cheese and sardines and olives and avocados and olive oil, one.

Of the things that's kind of left out of the literature and out of the popular Mediterranean diet is that in traditional Mediterranean cultures there's often like over 100 days out of the year where they're fasting or they're abstaining from meat or high doses of protein that upregulate this anabolic fat building state. So it's important to think about, step back and think about, gosh, am I keeping my body in this constantly thinking fed state or am I sending it this signal every now and again that.

It needs to engage? I'm just going to use this word because it makes me sound smart. In cellular autophagy, right? In programmed cell death, I used to say autophagy until someone told me it was autophagy. Now I pronounce it in a much more PC way.

But anyways, the idea here is that intermittent fasting is a really, really good.

Entry level way to get into this. Okay?

So intermittent fasting, I do this almost.

Every day of the week, okay? I have a 12 hour feeding window.

It's super duper simple. So if I stop eating at 8pm.

My next meal is not until 8am or I could go from 9pm till 9am if I decide I'm going to have some ice cream at 10pm that means I'm not going to eat again until 10am And I'm a really competitive guy. Super easy. For me, I just set my watch. You set the chronograph on my watch and if I check it the next day and it's not at 12 hours yet, I don't eat. And I do this almost every day.

Of the week, 365 days a year.

It's very simple once you make it a part of your routine.

12 hour intermittent fast.

If you want to really impress your friends, it's called a compressed feeding window. Or you could say you're fasting or you could just say, I'm not hungry for breakfast yet, whatever you want.

But a 12 hour fast, really, really.

Easy way, it's called intermittent fasting.

Easy way to jump into a lot.

Of the benefits of fasting. It's True that you don't get all of the benefits of a full on, like, man, I'm really dang hungry type of fast when you're doing intermittent fasting.

And because of that, I encourage a lot of folks to try just one or two times a month, a lunch to lunch fast.

Like a Saturday at lunch till Sunday at lunch, 24 hour fast. You could do sparkling water, you could do multivitamins. You could do electrolytes.

You could do, I mean, like stuff.

Like kefir and kombucha and stuff like. That's kind of sort of cheating because technically those have sugars and stuff in them. Stevie would be okay. Coffee would actually amplify the effects. Coffee green tea is really good, like the catechins and the caffeine. And coffee and green tea, those have been shown they really amp up fat loss when you combine them with exercise when you're fasting, then kind of keep the energy levels up.

But a lunch to lunch fast, you.

Don'T want to overdo this, right? Just like anything, you can send your thyroid gland a message that because calories are a little bit too absent, it'll down regulate your thyroid production. So a lot of people, you know, I'll find some people really go overboard and use that all or nothing approach to like fast, like, you know, twice a week and on their fasting days do a crossfit wad or something like that. Like, that's not what you want. But occasional fasting here and there, occasional 24 hour periods of time, kind of makes you mentally resilient, right? Like, it helps you a little bit with your willpower, but it also has a really cool effect on cleaning up the cells. So we got a question. We got our first question.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

How often would you suggest doing the.

Lunch to lunch fast?

One or two times a month works just fine. Yeah, yeah. Like even.

Just like having one day, like you're gonna say, okay, the last Saturday of the month, like that last Saturday, I'm gonna go Saturday till Sunday, like Saturday at lunch till Sunday at lunch. And the cool part about that is half the time you're sleeping, so technically all you have to do is skip a dinner and skip a breakfast and you're good to go. So it's not that hard. Well, it's easier said than done, actually.

To tell you the truth.

At least for me. I get hungry, I'll get like six hours in and I'll be like, crap, crap. Tonight's pad Thai night. Why is this fast?

Okay, number six is fidgeting.

Does not mean taking up a habit of biting your nails or chewing on your fingers.

They've done some really interesting studies and they found that people who fidget actually burn more calories. Now fidgeting could be like chewing gum. It could be tapping your feet. I just had a meeting with my.

Children'S first grade teachers yesterday because we're going to install stand up desks in their classroom. We're going to be one of the first schools to actually start to put standing desks in the classrooms. And these desks that we're going to use, they got these little fidget bar on them so. So the kids can kind of tap their feet and play with this bar during the day. It's really cool for kids because they just get kind of hyper when they're inside all day anyways, but same thing for adults.

And a lot of these things that.

I was talking about, like these mats that make you move and I have like a log, like a little stump log next to my desk, I can put one leg up on and the other leg up on.

Like I'm constantly, again, not just here.

During the day, right? But like always kind of moving, tapping.

Fidgeting, opening and closing my hands, chewing gum, rolling my neck.

I use a lot of these strategies, like when I'm driving or when I'm on plane flights.

That stuff adds up. It's not silly to do.

It's not silly to think that, oh, I'm gonna burn one extra calorie by doing a head roll.

They've done studies and this stuff actually amps up your metabolism just moving around.

I mean, you guys can be like.

Right now you can be doing toe.

Raises and butt squeezes, shoulder rolls, I don't care. I'm not gonna judge. Careful with the butt squeezes. Squeeze your own butt, not your neighbors, unless you have permission.

But this stuff works. Like fidgeting is a good strategy. So that's another one you can throw in, right?

Like what I like to do when I'm personally sitting in a talk where I'm getting like a bunch of different little strategies thrown at me. What I like to do is keep a list and I'll implement like one one week and one the next week and just start to check them off and slowly make things a little part of my life. Like don't get overwhelmed and walk out of here and be like, yeah, got a physic. I was standing, I chew the gum, squeezing my butt.

Start with just a few little things. And there's no rule that we gotta be Perfect.

Right like that. We gotta have it all. We just start with these little things and they make a difference. Okay, cool.

We're halfway through, so let's all stand up. Everybody stand up.

All right.

And just pick your heels up towards your butt a few times. And if you're not holding the notebook, or even if you are, reach for the sky.

Stretch out the body.

And then let the hands go down. Plant those heels into the ground. Shake out the hands. Roll the head to the right, big circle. Hand to the left, big circle.

All right.

Shrug your shoulders a few times. Sit back down.

Quick break. No jumping jacks, no burpees. Trust me, if this room was less, there were like 10 people here. Yeah, you guys would be screwed. You'd be like pulling in benches and bench presses.

Okay, so the next thing is cooking. You'll also have a photo of Paula Deen here.

She's probably a poor example of how cooking can help you to lose weight.

Now, I like that they do a.

Lot of these cooking classes I and things like this. At Pilgrims, I had to be careful setting up my computer. I didn't start anything on fire with the stove or accidentally turning anything on.

But cooking is a really good way to not only get in touch with your food, but to also burn calories before dinner. See, there's this concept, and I really like this concept, that if you sit down to a big meal or even to just a normal meal in a state where you're not insulin sensitive, then you're gonna tend to store a lot.

More of those calories as fat.

So, like, the big meal in our.

House is typically dinner. And so I've actually kind of set up my life so that I can just like eat ungodly amounts of food at dinner. Like, I have my workout. My workout's at like 5 o' clock in the afternoon usually. Usually we'll have dinner like six, 30 or seven. And if you worked out within two hours prior to a big meal, then you're going to partition a lot more of the calories from that meal into muscle tissue to replace the energy that you've burned. And you're also going to have less of a rise in blood sugar.

Well, they've shown that you can get.

Away with as little as six minutes of activity before a meal to be able to make yourself a little bit more bulletproof to the fat storing effects of that meal. Well, think about cooking. I mean, how many of you in here cook yourselves dinner at night? Yeah, so a lot of you are going to Mickey D's I guess.

Or you're going to Pilgrim's, right?

You're here at Pilgrim's choosing kale chips out of the. Out of the aisle for dinner.

But the idea is, like, you're picking stuff up, you're squatting, you're bending, you're putting a pan on the stove, you're up, down, you're walking around, and by the time you've made dinner, you've got some blood flowing. You're kind of moving a little bit. You're also very much in touch with.

The ingredients that you're using. You're very much in touch with how much honey or sugar or oil or.

Any of these other components that are.

Often added to food. Like, you're aware of how much is in there, right? Versus, like, buying your food from a restaurant or having it prepared for you.

I recommend.

I mean, and honestly, guys, I get more resistance. I'm not trying to be sexist, but, guys, I know that in most cases, there's a little bit more resistance with dudes than ladies when it comes to cooking. It's just the way that society kind of sort of still is. But even guys, like, go get, like, I like to recommend people get, like Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Chef, right? It's a book about learning, but it's also got, I don't know, like, 12 recipes in there, right? Like, if you could learn to cook those 12 recipes, you'd be able to impress your dinner friends and impress ladies and whatever for the rest of your life. You just need those 12 meals.

But teach yourself how to cook. Learn how to cook and make it a practice of getting in touch with the food that you're eating. And understand, too, that cooking can be a really, really good tool for burning weight. So even when you're lazy, you can do really, really quick meals. I mean, it's super duper easy to.

Steam vegetables, to put some rice on to broil a fish boom bomb, and you're done. But you've spent some time, like 10 to 15 minutes, moving around before dinner, getting in touch with your food.

So kind of a little one. But the cooking, unless it's Paula Deen's chicken wings. All right, I like this one.

Posture. Cat has awesome posture. I don't have a cat. I have a dog. He sits like that. So sometimes, too.

So you can incorporate a lot of muscles or not when you're sitting.

So proper sitting patterns.

And you can all try this right now when you're sitting. But for a proper sitting pattern, you want to imagine that if Your heels are kind of planted, ladies.

Be careful with this one. Depending on what you're wearing. And you can do this without planting your feet.

Basically, you want to kind of imagine that you're trying to externally rotate your knees without actually letting them get farther.

Apart from one another.

And when you do this, you're going to feel the outside of your butt cheeks and your hips kind of tighten.

Up a little bit.

And then from there, as those butt cheeks tighten up, if you squeeze your.

Shoulder blades back, you're going to find your tummy kind of tightens up a little bit.

You pick your neck up just slightly. The way that I like to think about it.

If anybody reads like or who wrote the book Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen. Yeah, Jane Austen. Thank you. I flunked literature.

You think about the way that these.

Like, uppity, like, snobby Victorian folks would have sat in their perfect little chairs at those perfect little 90 degree angles. And that's what you're trying to emulate.

In terms of posture, because you can.

Incorporate a lot of muscles when you're sitting. If you're sitting the right way, like nice upright, churchy posture with your back straight and your butt squeezed and you're sitting up like you're talking to somebody.

Important, that actually incorporates a lot of muscles.

When we're talking about little wins during the day. If you've got like three or four or five hours, hopefully less now that you've been to this talk that you're sitting during the day, man, make that count. To give you good posture, good core.

Teach you how to keep your hips in alignment. I mean, you can make your body better even when you're sitting.

Like, you know, I get a church on Sundays when I'm sitting in church. But, you know, that's, that's two hours of time for me. I'm not completely ignoring the sermon.

That's two hours of time for me.

That I can just like sit there and work on my posture and work on all these muscles that I'm not really working on because I'm standing during my workstation or a lot of the day. So. So there are other reasons I go to church.

But just think about all the different times that you're sitting that you can work on your posture. And it's really, really important because this is another way that you can increase.

The activity of your fat burning enzymes.

And really work on the way that you look too. So sitting sitting up straight in church is a really good way to look good naked. If you learn one thing today so that's number eight. Next is breathing. The reason I'm showing a picture of.

Bane from Batman is I get some flack sometimes because I have one of these elevation masks that you wear. I was wearing it this morning, actually. I do yoga in it because I like to make yoga harder. So it teaches me how to. How to really have this nice deep breathing. And when I do yoga in the morning wearing my elevation mask, what happens is when I take it off because.

I have to work, I have to.

Struggle so hard against that mask to breathe with it on. Once I take it off, I find that I'm breathing really deeply for like four hours afterwards because I've just kind of like set my brain in that automatic mode of deep breathing.

So many people engage in shallow chest.

Breathing, and that down regulates your metabolism. It down regulates oxygen delivery to tissue. It down regulates oxygen delivery to your brain. It can give you brain fog, make you sleepy.

It's just straight up bad for you.

To have this shallow chest breathing.

And the reason it happens, right, is you get out of bed in the morning, you jump up, check your phone, do the Facebook, you make the coffee, make breakfast, you get on your emails, you drive to work, fight the traffic. And all of that stuff is very.

Very much like a fighting a lion or running from a lion is probably more appropriate term, running from a lion type of activity, where you just have your sympathetic fight and flight nervous system jacked up through the roof, right?

So the key is that you figure out a way, because it's really, really tough if I just say breathe deeper.

Like, frankly, it's really hard to do.

There's a couple things, though, a couple little things that you can do to.

Get yourself into a habit of really deep breathing.

The first is to start off the day with something that gets you deep breathing.

So like doing the yoga with the Batman from Bane Training Master or the Bane from Batman Training Master on. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is there's.

An app that I really like.

It's called the Pranayama app. And there's a lot of apps like this that are out there, but it's just like a yoga breathing app. This one's a four count in. Four count hold. Four count out. Four count hold.

We should try that, actually.

Let's try it real quick.

Let's do two rounds of it.

It's called Pranayama P R A N A Y A M A.

So go ahead and.

And I'll count as we breathe. So breathe in two, three, Four. Hold, two, three, four, then out, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four. One more time. In two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, three, three.

So going through what I found is just.

Just doing like, five rounds of that. It's really hard from a mental standpoint.

But if that gets you gassed just.

Doing, like, five rounds. We just did two rounds. Do five rounds of box breathing. You've got some breathing issues, you've got some oxygenation issues, you've got, a lot of times, alveolar issues in terms of oxygen saturation in the lungs. And you've got some work to do on breathing. Starting off your day with a round of box breathing or watching the sunrise or just sitting around, that's one really, really good way to do it. I don't really like it so much that I can't drink coffee while I'm doing that one. But box breathing is a really good way to go.

There's another thing that you can do. It's got a breath pacer on it.

There's an app. There's a variety of different apps. It'll measure your heart rate or your heart rate variability. I've got one on my website. It's called the Nature Beat app.

Nature Beat and what it does, you can have it hooked up to your.

Body during the day while you're working. Every time that you start shallow breathing, your phone will beep or vibrate and it'll remind you and it'll show a little breath pacer on the screen and you'll breathe in as it goes up and out as it goes down, as it goes up and out, as it goes down. That's actually a really, really good way to kind of keep yourself on track, too.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not.

A fan of all of these wearables and this Bluetooth technology and being just, like, connected to devices all day long. But if you need, like, a week of training, right, to get yourself into really good, consistent breathing patterns, sometimes using some type of wearable or piece of technology can help with that. And then, of course, there's doing, like, the yoga with the breathing or the yoga with the training mask.

But ultimately, the takeaway message here is figure out a way to teach yourself how to be a deep diaphragmatic breather.

And that's another win in terms of the calories.

Unlike the weighted vest, I don't recommend.

Walking around with the mask on, especially at the airport. Bad move. Okay. My kids have blindfolds. On now. Okay, next is sex.

So here's the deal. It does burn calories, and. And it's not necessarily working out. You get a really, really big dump.

Of testosterone and growth hormone and a.

Lot of the hormones that are responsible.

For amping up fat loss.

And when you look at studies that look at what happens hormonally after sex.

It'S very similar to what happens hormonally after, like, squatting and deadlifting, lifting up heavy weights at the gym. We send this anabolic message to our bodies to kind of like, stay alive, burn fat, amp up metabolism. A lot of times, especially for us guys, it's followed by rolling over and falling asleep really, really well.

But ultimately there's this response.

And it's also. It's calorie burning. It's a good way, again, to amp up the metabolism. Depending on what time of day it is or where you're at. I mean, you can pretty much burn calories just about anywhere.

But it is a really, really good.

Way to burn fat to burn calories. I'm not seeing any hand shooting up or any questions about how to actually.

Do it, so I'll let you guys use your imagination.

But.

But no, seriously. And just like, a lot of these things, right?

Like planning out the breathing and the standing.

It just takes.

You know, sex takes planning a lot of the time.

Like, if you have a significant other or a partner. I found a lot of times, like.

You have to start planning this stuff in the morning, right? By. By, like, you know, snuggling up or saying, hey, let's. Let's save some time for tonight. Or usually it doesn't happen, like, randomly when both of you collapse in bed at the end of the day unless you set your intentions earlier on in the day.

But I actually go out of my point at least a few times a.

Week to plan it out, right? To, like, have that time in the morning when I'm talking to my wife and when I'm kind of, kind of flirting a little bit. And that way it happens at the.

End of the day, but it actually is a really, really good way to keep things. Metabolism elevated and to just get a.

Little bit of free calorie burning. I'm thinking about things other than calorie burning when we're.

When we're doing it, but it is important, and it is another thing. And you know what?

It's more fun than fidgeting.

For me personally, I've tried chewing gum, and I've tried the sex of the sexes.

It's better. Hi, Kids.

Okay, so next is protein. Now, I know I kind of sort of shoved protein under the bus earlier.

When I was talking about your body consistently being in like, this anabolic state.

And this is true, right? There's a reason that bodybuilders and like, people who spend a lot of time at the gym sucking down the protein shakes. There's a reason they're so big, because that keeps.

Keeps the body in a constant anabolic state.

But if you look at what's called.

The thermic effect of food or the calorie burning effect of digestion, protein compared to carbohydrates and fats has the highest potential to cause you to burn the most calories when you're digesting it.

So that's why I recommend including a.

Little bit of protein with every meal. Your body can digest about 30 grams of protein max. A lot of smaller people, 20 grams of protein. So you don't need a lot of protein in a meal.

But just like I go out of my way to include a little bit.

Of fat with every meal because fat can lower a little bit of the insulin response to carbohydrates. I only eat three to a maximum of four times a day. I'm not a snacker. I'm not a grazer. There's zero evidence out there to show that snacking or grazing or eating several small meals per day increases your metabolism. So I don't do it. I spend a long period of time between meals so that I'm constantly having to dip into my body's own fat stores.

But when I do have my meals.

I go out of my way to include a little bit of protein because it increases the thermic effect of the meal.

So you're going to burn more calories.

From digesting the meal when you add some nuts to a big vegetable salad versus when you have just the vegetable salad. Or if you say shove aside a little bit of the brown rice or the quinoa or the potato or whatever, and add just a little bit of extra protein instead with dinner. So protein burns calories. Protein has the highest thermic effect when it comes to the calorie burning potential of food. Okay?

So I'm a big fan of protein for that reason. I don't overdo it. So the rule with protein, if you.

Want, just like the hard math, if.

You take how much you weigh in pounds and you multiply that by 0.55.

That'S like the lower range of protein. That's like your minimum. And then the maximum, the amount that.

Hasn'T been shown to give you any.

Additional benefit once you consume this amount is 0.8 grams per pound. And just like I'm not a fan of constantly having a wearable or a tech or a gadget that's counting, I'm not a fan of constantly counting calories.

But if you just kind of count.

For like, a week or so how much protein you're getting and you're hitting, like, closer to, like, that 0.7, 0.8 range on your more active, I'm tearing my body down type of days, and then you hit closer to, like, that 0.55 range on, like, the easier days where you don't need quite as much protein. That's a pretty good range to shoot for. Okay. And frankly, a lot of people who I measure, they're way off the scale of that 0.8 mark, right? They're doing, like, protein shakes and high protein all day long. And typically, what I see is it's skewed towards protein and away from fats and carbohydrates. It's like leftover from the Atkins diet.

Ideal for most people.

What I find, and you're going to get this if you get that 0.55 to 0.8 grams of protein, ideal for fat loss is typically about 50 to.

60% fat, which, by the way, you.

Can do even if you're vegan or vegetarian, 50 to 60% fat, about 20.

To 30% protein, and anywhere from 10.

To 30% carbohydrate, with the higher ranges of the carbohydrate coming on your more active days when you need to burn more of that carbohydrate. Okay, so that's what we're looking at from, like, a macronutrient ratio standpoint. But protein does burn a lot of calories.

And then finally, there is laughing. I don't know how many of you remember laughing when you were a kid, and you'd, like, laugh and laugh until your belly hurt.

That'll occasionally happen to us as we become adults. It's like we kind of turn off our laughter a little bit more, and I forget the statistic, but it's shocking how little adults laugh compared to kids. There's a stat out there somewhere, and I don't remember what it is, but.

A lot of us have just forgotten.

How to laugh and how to, like.

Deep belly laugh and watching funny movies, telling jokes.

Like, it was kind of funny. Like, river and Taren and I were in the hot tub the other night. We're going around telling jokes and it's amazing how many jokes kids know now.

They're actually getting funny, right guys?

Your jokes are getting pretty, pretty funny.

Yeah, but telling jokes, having laughter, you know, Like I subscribe to all of.

These blogs and podcasts, like all these health and fitness and nutrition and constant kind.

But I also have like, like parts.

Of my blog feed that are. It's just funny stuff, right? Like the onion or like, like the oatmeal or listen to like John Hodgman's podcast, which is just like dry satiristic humor.

But trying to throw in humor and.

Laughter and kind of sort of being.

Okay with, with laughing out loud and.

Having that be a part of your life.

It's not only really good for you psychologically, but you actually burn more calories when you're happy.

And when you're laughing, it's just yet another form of movement. So insert funny joke here. I don't know if anybody has one. I'm not a stand up comic, so otherwise I'd tell you some funny joke. Me and my kids have one. You guys got any funny jokes? All right, time's up. Maybe later.

So anyways though. So the idea here is that laughter.

Is a really important part of your life.

And it's kind of cool when you.

Think about this stuff like laughter and standing around and moving and sex. We're not just talking about fat burning, right? We're talking about being happy and we're talking about anti aging. That's what's really cool is you'll find a lot of times when fertility is high and movement levels are moderately high and when within a sane amount and.

Food quality, all this stuff comes together.

To create not just fat burning, but a really, really good anti aging and longevity effect. Right? So these are things that you can use for more than just looking good with your clothes off.

So those are some of my tips. Those are 12 of my tips. And now I'll open up the floodgates and answer your guys questions.

I'll put some. Those are my three websites. My blog is at BenGreenfulFitness.com where I send out articles right now the article that I'm working on for this Monday is five books that I've read lately that I really like for five different areas of your life. For fitness, for spirituality, for nutrition, for making money and for relationships. Right? So I'm writing about the five books that I've read recently that I really like. And I just write stuff like that. Like a lot of times it's just brain dumps or Random crap. I podcast from there, I shoot, I put some videos up on there.

So that's been your fitness Greenfield Fitness systems dot com. I do coaching and I do consulting.

Like, get on the phone, I talk with people, I write out workouts for people. I've got a bunch of coaches who also work with me or for me. I've got like supplements and books and stuff there, that type of stuff. So. Greenfitnesssystems.com and then I have a New York Times bestseller called Beyond Training. And if you dig this kind of stuff, it's like 500 pages of just like kind of the deep, deep science of a lot of this stuff and some of the more practical tips. It's like a cookbook, right, for your brain and for your sleep and for hormone balance and all this stuff. And that's@BeyondTrainingBook.com or you can find it at Editbook Bookstore, I think. I haven't been to the bookstore lately, but probably some of them I think might be gone. Yes, question.

I just told her I recently went to the nutrition shop and they were saying to get like protein powder, BCAAs, CLA, stuff like that.

Yeah.

Do you need that stuff?

Well, let's. So the question here, and I'll repeat.

The questions if they're towards the front for those you need to hear. She's asking, like, the nutrition shop told.

Her that she needed to get protein.

BCAAs, which are branched chain amino acids. When was the last one? Carnitine.

Cla.

Cla. Okay. Conjugated linoleic acid. Yeah.

I just had my fourth girl and I'm still nursing, so I said I can't take certain things. I need to lose weight. So they recommended having those three things.

Yeah.

So when you're trying to lose weight and especially if you're pregnant, a lot of the herbs are.

Well, they can get into breast milk. They can cross the placental barrier.

So a lot of herbs I don't.

Recommend, you know, a lot of these, like the most proven fat loss supplements, which, by the way, only give you about an extra 5%. Right. Like fat, like fat loss supplements are up there with, you know, like chewing gum. Right. Like, it's a little bit. But it's not your biggest win. A lot of them are based on green tea and caffeine and ephedra and a lot of these central nervous system stimulants. And I don't consider that to be all that healthy, especially when it's not in moderation. I'm a bigger fan for fat loss supplements of Things that control blood sugar. That's what I find because sugar gets turned into fat really, really easily by your liver. So I'm a fan of cinnamon and minerals and apple cider vinegar is really, really good for that. Probably, probably. If you were to go with one of the more unknown supplements I take, bitter melon extract. So before I have a carbolicious meal, I use this supplement called MPX100 and it's bitter melon extract and this stuff called Rock Lotus. And essentially it's just a blood sugar controller. They just did a really interesting study on ginger and how ginger root does a better job controlling post meal blood sugar than metformin, which is really powerful. Diabetes, diabetes drug. So fat loss supplements that control blood sugar would be the ones to go after.

And even in that case, if I were pregnant, which I've never been, I.

Would even keep things really safe. Just like use super duper safe stuff like cinnamon for example, or just not my baby.

So I'm still nursing, so I'm trying to watch what I take too.

Yeah, the cool thing is that like all those proteins they're recommending like whey.

Protein and amino acids and the conjugated linoleic acid, which is actually a fat, not a protein. Those are all.

Okay, they're not dangerous, but like protein.

Look at the ingredient label, right? Like if it has acetaminopotassium in it.

And sucralose, that stuff can kill some of your gut bacteria.

It can be a little bit neurotoxic. I look for stevia, right. Or like no sweetener at all. And then you add your own. Same with branched chain amino acids. And that's just like broken down proteins, they get absorbed a little more quickly. They're not that useful frankly, unless. Unless you're doing hard workouts. But those are the same thing. They can add artificial sweeteners to them and a bunch of preservatives. And you got to be careful eating the man in the can stuff, right?

I know, I don't want to buy it.

And then conjugated linoleic acid is like.

The fat that burns fat cla. You get that in steak and red meat, stuff like that. And frankly most people are not at a deficit of cla. Sometimes I'll recommend it for vegans and vegetarians and people aren't getting a lot of cla from meat, but ultimately it's not. There's some interesting studies on it and it certainly can help with burning fat. But I don't think it's your biggest win. So I would go for the stuff that controls blood sugar.

Okay, thanks.

Yes. Another question.

Yes, Ben, Would you comment on.

The.

Fact that a lot of Americans, including myself, are diabetic? A lot of people don't know they're diabetic. And I found in recent. Well, I'm now going to a nutritionist just how destructive over carbs are. I mean, particularly for a diabetic, it just shoots up sugar really quickly.

Yeah. It's interesting because, like, some carbohydrates can actually help a little bit with blood sugar stabilization when they're included with a meal.

Like legumes. Right. Like lentils are really good. Like a really good, slow digesting carbohydrate.

Carbs and bad carbs.

Yeah, exactly.

It allows for energy Resistant starches are another one. And these are a little bit more resistant to digestion. They don't cause a rise in blood glucose. But these are like green bananas or potatoes that you cook and then you put them cold into the refrigerator and then you eat them. It's called a resistant starch. Right. That's another example of something that's good.

For your gut bacteria but doesn't really.

Have much of an impact on your blood sugar levels. So it's the type of carbohydrate that really matters.

But it is true that it's a.

Big deal for diabetics. And I mean, when you look at pancreatic cells and the ability of the pancreas to start producing good amounts of insulin, for example, there's some really interesting research on high fat diets and even getting up into. And this isn't for everybody, ketogenic diets where we're at almost 80 to 90% fat and how that has a really interesting effect on the pancreas and on insulin production. And I'm kind of pushing the reboot button. So. And I'm not a doctor, right. Like, I can't. I can't give medical advice about how to control diabetes. But, you know, I can say that if I got diabetes, if carbohydrates would be the first thing that I would definitely start looking at.

Do you have material on any of your sites that kind of gives some direction as it relates to the misuse or.

Yeah, yeah. Like, if you were to go to my site and just do a search for like high fat diet or even like, do the search term diabetes, you'd come up with some interesting podcasts and articles that I. That I have on that. So, yeah, absolutely. Or blood sugar would be another good search term. Other questions?

Yes.

What would you consider a minimum weight.

For a heavy weight. I have a toddler who's about £30 and I pick her up 20 to 50 times a day.

Yeah, honestly, when you look at weightlifting.

It'S time under tension that's important more.

Than the amount of the weight itself. Now granted, if you want to get like hella strong or you want to get swole and big, you gotta lift.

Heavy weights or do really, really, really.

High reps to failure, right? Like sets of 100 and 300 push ups and 50 pull ups.

But if you're just trying to stay fit, then the important thing is that if all you have is say like.

A 30 pound baby, right, 30 pound weight, the important thing is picking that up a lot of times, just basically every time you get a chance, you know, pick it up, it's diaper's fault, pick it up a lot.

But basically, you know, moving around an.

Object a lot, carrying an object around a lot, really important. So if I've got a 50 pound weight vest on, right, Like a really, really tough workout for me is going to be an hour. If I'm wearing a 20 pound, a really tough workout is going to be wearing that thing around all day long while I'm at my house. So it's just the lighter the weight, the more frequency that you need, the higher the reps that you need. But there is no magic weight. It's like if it kind of sort of makes you a little bit tired to carry around, it's good. So, yes.

Lipase, can you increase it? Do you want to?

Yeah.

Lipase is a fat burning enzyme.

There's like intramuscular lipase and lipase that.

Your body makes endogenously that's used to just like burn your own adipose tissue. Right? Like burn the fats that are on your waistline or your hips, wherever you tend to deposit fat. And then there's lipase that's in a digestive enzyme. Good point to make when we're talking about high fat diets, by the way, because a lot of people get like oily stool and nasty GI effects and all this stuff when they switch to a high fat diet. And it's because a lot of times the gallbladder and the liver really isn't ready for all that fat. And that's where digestive enzymes come in handy. You add in if you're going to lower your carbohydrate intake and increase your fat intake, you increase your digestive enzyme intake and you look for a digestive enzyme that has lipase in it because I personally, I'm an athlete, I race professionally. I eat a lot of calories, I'm exercising a lot. That's stressful on my digestive system. I have an enzyme with almost every meal, like breakfast, lunch and dinner. Thirty minutes prior I pop an enzyme just because I know I need that extra little bit of digestive health. Because I test my once a year I do a poop panel.

Right.

Like it's a three day poop panel where you poop in the little tray and stir it up and you FedEx it off to the magic place in the sky where they test poop and you get read backs of your, your pancreatic enzyme production and triglycerides and your colon and all this stuff that's really interesting. I usually find out that my pancreatic enzyme production is a little bit insufficient. I've got a little bit of digestive distress. A lot of that is just because I need extra enzymatic support. So I use enzymes. But lipase is something that I look for in an enzyme. It's not going to help with fat burning as much as it's going to help with meal digestion. When you take it as a supplement. Yeah. Yes.

Is it really necessary to go 20 to 30 minutes before with Digestive insects? Because I used to try that with some supplements that I have that you say to take it, you know.

Yeah.

Or it's like I'm right in the middle of cooking dinner and stuff.

Yeah.

It's so hard to just stop.

You're still going to get some extra help when you take it like right with the meal or even right after a meal if you forget. But the, the timing is best about 20 to 30 minutes prior. Yeah. Yes. Since I take one. How long do they last? How long does what last? Digestive enzymes like after you take it?

I don't know.

I wouldn't go much longer than 30 minutes because I haven't seen any literature to show it to be that effective after that. But I mean a lot of these.

Things that you look at like WOBE.

Enzymes and proteolytic enzymes and like exercise recovery supplements that have enzymes, those are meant to be taken on an empty stomach. Right. So instead of digesting food they break down like the fibrinogen and all that kind of stuff that helps to. That causes your muscles to become sore. So in that case you're supposed to take those on an empty stomach. Technically if you took them with food, they digest food. But ultimately I'd take it pretty close to the meal or within that 30 minute time frame. Yes. Hands popping up all over the place like matrix here. Yes. Question.

Yoga ball on wheels.

Fancy. Wow. Yeah. But the one problem I've seen with yoga balls is like, I'll see somebody sitting on a yoga ball kind of like this, like bouncing up and down, like, look at me, I'm burning calories.

Yoga balls, you still have to maintain.

Really good posture on.

And if you do, they're good.

Like they cause you to use a few more of those core muscles. You just have to be careful because it can be catch 22. It's also easier to have bad posture on it, but ultimately it's better than a chair. Probably looks a lot cooler than a chair. So you got that. Yeah. Plus you can do crunches on it. So. Yeah.

Go with a few more questions.

Let's go with a couple more questions, I think. Yeah, a couple more questions. Yes.

Can you speak to where quinoa falls with the carb protein issue and leveling blood sugar if it does?

Quinoa is a, you know, it's a grass.

It's got a really good protein and amino acid content. It's. It's a nice complex carbohydrate. The one problem that I see people do with quinoa is it's got a lot of support, which are a soap like irritant that can really wreak some havoc in your digestive system. It's like when we do quinoa, we'll soak it overnight. You rinse it, you soak it. In the morning, you can rinse it again. If you leave it for like 16, 20 hours, you'll notice it'll start to sprout a little bit. And that's really nice too. I like a little bit of sprouting on the quinoa just because it's broken down even more and you get even more of the nutrients released.

But with quinoa, it's a good carbohydrate, right?

It's a nice slow release carbohydrate. It's just about preparation, like making sure that you prepare it in a way that it's digestively friendly. So, yeah, good question. Let's. Let's make this the last question. Here we go. It better be a good one.

Yeah. I'm currently remastering leptin and tonight you said that the eating more often thing, that is not the way to do it. But it seems like when you go to the gym and you talk to nutrition people or I recently had a friend who lost 99 pounds eating five times a day. But mastering left and doesn't say that. And that's what you're saying tonight. Could you kind of explain that a little more like what's going on? Because you said there wasn't research to support that.

But absolutely. There are two considerations here. The first is very simple. It's the fact that when your friend starts eating five meals a day, it's likely that they made some significant dietary changes and they're just more aware of their food period. And that's the thing with a lot of diets. A lot of diets work just because you're paying more attention and frankly, you're not falling into the McDonald's drive through when you're focusing on eating five meals a day, just because your focus is more on eating good quality food, because you're on a diet, you want it to work.

But as far as mastering leptin, so leptin is a hormone that is mostly.

Tied to your circadian rhythm and to sleep. And your body produces a lot of leptin when you have really good sleep patterns. And leptin not only helps you burn more fat, but it helps to control appetite cravings.

And a lot of people who have.

Had poor sleep patterns, worked night shifts, done a really bad job with sleep hygiene, right? Like looking at the iPhone, watching scary.

Movies before bed, and sleeping in loud areas. They've gotten to the point where their.

Body'S not doing a very good job producing leptin. Their circadian rhythm is a little bit broken.

And interestingly, one of the things in.

Addition to light, right, like bright light in the morning and darkness at night, that's one of the things that can help to reset your circadian rhythm to reset leptin. Well, another thing that the circadian rhythm.

Is tied to is feedings.

It's food. So if you send your body a.

Message in the morning that it's morning.

Time and breakfast time, that's one way that you can jumpstart your circadian rhythm. If you send your body a message in the evening that it's evening time, it's dinner time, that's another way to jump start your circadian rhythm. You could also potentially destroy your circadian rhythm by getting up at midnight all the time to snack and opening the refrigerator, getting the bright light and sending your body a message that, oh, hey.

Is it morning time? Is it food time?

That's one way that you can, you can disrupt your circadian rhythm. Excessive breakfast skipping, right? Because remember when I mentioned intermittent fasting? I'm not saying skip Breakfast. All we're doing is timing that first meal of the day to be a time that's 12 hours from our last meal of the day. In an ideal scenario, that last meal of the day is not super late so that that first meal of the day is earlier in the day and we have a nice aligned circadian rhythm. Well, with feedings, sometimes getting the circadian rhythm in line means that you have a few frequent feedings during the day. However, I think you can do just fine with that with three to four meals like a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner and a pre or post workout snack or an afternoon snack. I don't think you need to eat five meals a day to make sure that you have a good circadian rhythm. But you should definitely not be one of those skip breakfast every day, do lunch and eat dinner at 11pm Type of people. That's where leptin starts to get out of control, is really disruptive feeding patterns. The other thing that's really important for circadian rhythm and for leptin is regularly timed meals ideally. So like if you can do like a 9am breakfast, 12:30pm lunch and a 7pm dinner and do that frequently, that's really, really good for establishing a nice normal circadian rhythm. It's just logical. It's the same reason that going to bed about the same time every night is really good. So leptin, it's a pretty complex topic, but the idea is that it's all based on circadian rhythm and timing. Yes, I know I said that was the last question. I'm hoping you might just say something like my flies work out a little.

Bit before I go to bed at night.

What's that?

Do you think it's a good idea to work out a little bit before.

You go to bed at night? It depends how close it is to bedtime and how hard the workout is, honestly, and I'll make my answer here pretty brief. But if it is a hard workout, the best thing that you can do because your body has a hard time getting to sleep like I was talking about when the temperature is high is take like a lukewarm or a cold shower to get the body temperature back down. And that kind of help things to cool down more quickly. And also a nice stretch and a good cool down after a later evening workout is really kind of key. If it's a hard workout especially so.

Cool is there best time to work out?

Best time to work out is when your post workout protein synthesis is highest and your reaction time is highest and your body temperature is highest, and that's technically between 4 and 6pm in the afternoon slash early evening. It's the best time to do a hard workout. So.

All right you guys, thanks for coming and just contact me if you have more questions.

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