"Ask Me Anything About Ketosis & Ironman" Premium Podcast with Ben Greenfield

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. And if you are hearing this or you are viewing it, you're not only seeing my extremely messy office, but you're also either listening in to the coaching call for this month for Pacific Elite Fitness, or you're tuned into the premium podcast where I'm going to go over some questions that I received about, about ketosis specifically and kind of some of the ins and outs of what happens to the body and how the body feels when you're, when you're in a state of fatty acid utilization. And let's face it, a lot of kind of the struggles that you run into when you freaking want to have a piece of pizza, but you know that you're trying to maintain this level of physiological awareness that kind of keeps you in that ketotic state. And I know I promised to some of the athletes that I coach, as well as some of the premium listeners and viewers, that I was going to dig into that a little bit more and kind of kind of show you a little bit or talk a little bit about kind of the insides of what goes on, some of the struggles, some of the practical applications, etc. Believe it or not, it goes way above and beyond putting a little pan of butter in the microwave and drinking that for breakfast and eating spoonful of coconut oil all day. And there are a lot of struggles and I'm going to go into those. And when we come out the back end of this talk today, hopefully you'll have some of your questions answered about kind of what it's like to utilize something like ketosis or fatty acid utilization for achieving high levels of performance and kind of going above and beyond just using it for something like management of a disease or something of that, that nature. So, that being said, I also have some people on the call with me tonight. I've got Quinton in, I've got Julie and Keith are in on the call. And this thing is actually taking place live via Spreecast. And what I do want to make sure of is that those in the room can hear me and also ask their questions as we go. So just type a yes there in the chat box if you can hear. And this is also your chance to kind of ask your questions as well as we kind of go through this thing. And I see yeses. So that is good. Now, if you're wondering, if you're watching the video and you're wondering where I'm at, welcome to my life. This is my office. Those geeky glasses that I have on are my blue light blocking glasses. I actually have three different pairs. My other two are way more styling, but I couldn't find them. So I'm wearing kind of a gaming pair of glasses. That a little bit nerdy, I'll admit. I just got back from a toasty warm bike ride here in Spokane, Washington. The boxes stacked behind me in my office are random T shirts that I send out along with like, you know, supplement samples and things of that nature to listeners of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. Yes, I send those straight out from my own home. Take them to the Spokane Valley post office. Those are not sent from some big warehouse. Those are sitting in my stinky office. So those are all the boxes that you see behind me. My wife is out on a bike ride right now and my kids are in the other room watching Wreck It Ralph. So let's do this thing. That's the extent of my life. You can't see right now, but there's also a cage where my dog would normally be. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into the first question about ketosis. And then there are some questions coming through on chat too, and I'll get to those as well, because I know there's going to be kind of just some general questions about sports performance and nutrition and things of that nature. The first question that I have here that was submitted about ketosis specifically is from Trevor. And Trevor asks, do you use bitter melon to help buffer blood sugar spikes in an effort to continue producing blood ketones? If yes, how important is the timing of taking bitter melon extract for this and how much do you take each time? That's a great question. First of all, bitter melon is nasty ass stuff. It does not taste good. Like the actual bitter melon that they eat in Okinawa or whatever. It's not super tasty. I do have in my refrigerator bitter melon extract capsules. And these bitter melon extract capsules are something that can work just as well as the diabetic drug mets, metformin for controlling blood glucose. So they're kind of dangerous to have around, honestly, because you can use them as a cheat. You can literally like eat a carbohydrate laden meal and be like, oops, bad me, and take bitter melon and kind of mitigate some of the blood sugar damage. That's not to say that there still aren't some things that happen to your body. You know, from like an insulin standpoint, your pancreas still releases some insulin. There's still some propensity of some of that glucose to get driven into the liver, converted into fats, things of that nature. But it's much, much less when you take in bitter melon extract. Now, if you use bitter melon extract and you haven't even had any carbohydrates, and you take it in, say a fasted state, it can actually cause hypoglycemia. It can shove you into like this really blah feeling. Because when you are, whether you're in a state of ketosis or you're doing a high protein diet, low carb diet, whatever you want to call it, you still always have trace levels of blood glucose that are circulating. You know, if you were to go out and get a fasted glucose test, you might bei like to see values between 80 and 90, for example. And if you get those values pretty low, you start to feel crappy. And even when you're in a full state of, let's say you've got ketones, you're in ketosis, your ketone levels are above 0.5 or they're above 1, you take bitter melon extract, you shove any blood glucose that's in your bloodstream at the same time as those ketones down, and your brain runs out of the fuel that it needs for neurons feel really crappy. So bitter melon is a supplement you need to be careful with. That being said, if you eat a meal that has high amounts of carbohydrate or high amounts of protein that can get converted into glucose, if you either have bitter melon extract in your bloodstream, meaning you've had it 30 minutes prior to having that meal or that snack, or that cheat or that binge or whatever you want to call it, the pizza, or if you take it as soon as possible after, kind of like in a 30 minute window after, it can mitigate some of that damage, I can do some white rice, some sweet potatoes, some yams, some kind of the typical safe starches and stuff like that. With dinner, I can test my blood ketones. Afterwards, I use a blood ketone monitor called a nova max blood ketone monitor. And my blood ketones are slightly higher when I use the bitter melon extract prior to or after the meal. If I'm testing downstream one to two hours later. Now, it's a slight rise in the blood ketone values, but it does show me a little bit of a shift in fatty acid utilization. So yeah, you can definitely use something like that as a strategy. And by the way, if you're, if you're listening to the audio of this after it comes out. I am drinking maca root extract right now. If you hear me, stop and take a sip. No martinis on a Friday night for me tonight. So if you're in on the chat right now, you can ask a question. We have a question that just came in from Keith and Keith says, I've read some good protein things with brewer's yeast. Yay or nay to take. Keith. Brewer's yeast is chock full of some really good vitamins and minerals. Great source, for example, of vitamin B12. And it's got some other, some other nutrients. It's got some trace minerals in it. It's something that traditionally would be used in health food circles to sprinkle on salads and things of that nature. But here's the deal with yeast, with fermented foods like kombucha, like kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, that type of thing. In the health community, we always see these things across the board with a very broad brush painted as healthy. And that is not indeed the case. There are two issues that you need to be concerned about. When it comes to consuming fungus, which is what kombucha is, or when it comes to consuming fermented foods, or when it comes to consuming yeast, the first thing that you need to be concerned about is the source. Any of these compounds grow mold, fungus and toxins very easily. There is an entire podcast devoted to this on the premium version of the Ben Greenfield fitness app, in which Dave Asprey goes into all of the different toxins and fungus and mold that can form on a lot of these foods. If you're not careful, even something as let's say we take something as hippie woo woo as making your own kombucha, which is something that we do, frankly, you gotta be careful with that because you can literally grow fungus and toxins and molds in your kitchen cupboard. And if you feel like crap after you've had your little cup of healthy kombucha, that could be the reason why brewer's yeast, similarly, you do need to be careful with it. If you don't feel well after you use it, if you get brain fog, if you get digestive upset, if the next day youryour digestive system is irregular. Constipation specifically is one of the issues that you notice, then you're probably really not tuned well to use it, which I'll get into in a second. Or it's got like a yeast or a fungus or a mold or a toxin. The other issue is called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or sibo. And I talked about this on a blog post that I just wrote@BenGreenfieldFitness.com called how to fix a broken gut. This is something that I see more and more in athletes especially, and I think it's severely under diagnosed. The fact is that we dump lots of fuel into our bodies as athletes. All of that fuel has to be processed, it has to ferment, it has to pass through your digestive tract. And one of the things that can happen, especially if you're eating a really healthy diet that's chock full of fiber and probiotics and fermented foods, and you're like following all the rules, right? You can get yourself into a state where you overbuild your gut flora or you overfeed your gut flora. Let's face it, the human body was simply not really however you want to look at, designed, evolved, whatever to process 3, 4, 5, 6,000 calories a day that many, you know, for example, ironman triathletes are shoving into their bodies. Now what happens is when we get this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, fermented foods like yeast or kombucha or kefir or yogurt or any of these foods tend to really aggravate the issue. And you actually have to shift to a diet that would be considered like a nonfermentable carbohydrate diet. What's called a low fodmap diet. You can go google fodmaps, print off a list of common f maps and tape it to your refrigerator or something like that. I've noticed that a lot of athletes feel better when they do this. And not only that, but a lot of athletes who struggle with typical sports nutrition compounds, whether it be you can superstarch or carbo Pro or hammer gels or whatever the case may be, these fructoses, these maltodextrins, these super fermentable carbohydrates, they feel better when they clean up their digestive tract. Quit eating a lot of fermented foods, and then you can actually, frankly, to really get rid of sibo, you have to cleanse. You have to take like oil of oregano, you have to take goldenseal, you have to step back on total food intake, especially fermentable carbohydrate intake. There's this whole protocol that you go through. You know, if you have something like that, you may have to wait until like the off season to really get rid of sibo, to Test for it is super simple. You slap down 150 bucks to a company called Quintron. They send you a breath test you do over the course of three hours. I believe it's something like ten different breath measurements. And each of those breath measurements measures the amount of methane and hydrogen gases that you are consuming or, I'm sorry, that you are producing. And that's indicative of how many bacteria are in your digestive tract. You go on a special diet the whole day before you test for sibo, and then that morning, right before you give all those breath measurements, you down one big, nice, tasty cup up of pure glucose. And so the bacteria eat all that up. Actually, in some cases, depending on the test that you do, it's lactulose. Kind of depends. But, for example, I've tested for it, and glucose is the beverage of choice that I consumed. And then you just see what happens with those nice little bacteria fermenting in your digestive tract. Hugely under diagnosed issue, though, in people who eat lots of food and specifically eat lots of fermented food. If you eat fermented food and feel like crap and you have these enormous, not to be crass, enormous balance movements, and you're on the toilet all the time, and you experience gas and you experience bloating, and you can't use carbohydrates or, you know, sports performance beverages, you know, even quote unquote healthy things like Superstarch without getting gastric issues, a lot of that can be due to sibo. It can be something that you test for. So that being said, this is probably a good lead in to a question from Chris, who asked on Facebook, have you had any breaks where you carb binge? He asked that to me about my ketosis diet. So here's where you get the inside sneak peek. As one of the athletes that I coach or someone who's listening to the premium podcast. And the answer is yes. The answer is yes. Two weeks ago, I kind of broke down. I had a really crappy day. I had a horrible workout. It was really. It was really hot out, so I went to the gym to run on the treadmill. I felt nasty. I got like. Like stomach upsets and had to use the bathroom. And so then I drove home and I was mad because I didn't get my workout in. So then I grabbed my. My Elliptigo and I was like, okay, I'm just gonna go take my elliptigo for a ride. Got 20 minutes out from my house, got a flat tire, had to push it Home. And I got home and my wife was having a party with her sister and some of their friends and they were barbecuing corn and had these fantastic bacon burgers that they'd prepared with these rice buns, you know, these gluten free rice buns, watermelon with sea salt and cayenne pepper and this, this gorgeous wine from a local winery. And I came home, I got in the shower, I came out out. I was hungry, I was mad, I was tired, and I was like, screw this. And I walked into the kitchen and just piled stuff on my plate. Just piled stuff on my plate. I had like half a watermelon and three ears of corn. I had two hamburgers. My wife sitting there watching me and she asked me, she's like, is this part of the special diet that you're doing for Ironman Ben? And I'm like, just, just let me enjoy myself tonight. And I stuffed my face and you know what? The next two days, I was a complete rock star in my workouts. I rode my bike up Mount Spokane and then back down Mount Spokane and then just like time trial that peak capacity, I was pushing at least 300 watts, I'd say for a good hour. The next day I got up, I ran 14 miles down the trail in the middle of the afternoon again, felt like a rock star, went first. I mean, like I was, I was performing like I was on crack cocaine for two days. So, you know, what does that tell you? Well, one thing is that, you know, and we discussed this with Jack Cruz in the podcast that I did with Jack Cruz. The human body does take a long time to break the cycle. You know, for. For 25 years of my life, I ate a high carbohydrate, crappy diet. For another five years, I ate kind of a somewhat healthy, you know, slightly low carbish diet after a while. But I, you know, I'm only 10 weeks into really trying out this ketosis thing and I really feel as though my body, you know, hasn't fully adapted and taken full advantage of the peak performance potential and the health potential that comes along with it. But the short answer to course this question is, yeah, you know, that was my binge. And then I kind of got back on the bandwagon and, you know, based off of that binge, am I tempted to go on a similar, you know, quote unquote binge prior to Ironman Canada? To be honest with you, yeah, I am. And for me, it's going to come down to a situation of, okay, do I want to, you know, whatever, put a flag on the moon of ketosis performance science and just try Ironman in a state of ketosis and show everybody whether it can or can't be done or do. I do what I know is going to make me feel really, really good that I've done for every Ironman that I've ever done, and that is to eat lots of taro and white rice and sweet potato and yam and really good healthy carbs for two days priorit's going to be an interesting decision and that's just a tough decision I'll have to make. The other thing, by the way, speaking of things that have been working well for me is prior to my big weekend workouts, getting ready for Ironman, I've been taking out the juicer and taking out the blender and just about every meal that I consume is either a juiced green smoothie, kind of like my high fat green smoothie, or else juices like carrot juice mixed with lemon and ginger and some olive oil. And I'm pretty much not chewing my food prior to my big workouts. And aside from that one binge that I just talked about, that has actually also been a really, really helpful thing in terms of improving digestive. So for example, when I head up to Ironman Canada, yeah, I'm going to be packing the, you know, the Omni blender and probably packing the juicer as well and not using my teeth too much. And I think that that's a good plan if you're really pushing your body to the limits, is take as much stress off your digestive tract as possible. Angela says. There's a question from live listener Angela. What do you think of Ezekiel Brady? I haven't heard much, but I love bread and they say this. People say it's better for you. So when you're looking at something like Ezekiel bread, which you can find in the frozen food section of most commercial grocery stores, and it's in the frozen food section because it doesn't have preservatives added to it. Ezekiel bread is a soaked and sprouted form of wheat that has, because it's been soaked and sprouted lower levels of digestive enzyme inhibitors, lower levels of immune aggravating proteins like gliadin in it, and it's gotten a little bit more fiber in it. It has a higher level of activated amino acids in it and nutrients and vitamins and minerals that get activated through the process of soaking and sprouting, which is kind of sort of a form of fermentation. However, it's still a modern form of wheat. And if you go and read Dr. William Davis's book Wheat Belly, he gets into this a little bit and he discusses how Ezekiel bread uses a grain that is still bred for high yield crops and still has very, very high levels of that problematic protein gliadin in it. If you are going to have bread and have flour, it's best to order it. You can get stuff called Einkorn. You can get another brand called Kamut, spelt, teff rye. Any of these ancient grains from a website like kingarthurflower.com frankly, lots of Seventh Day Adventist websites, Seventh Day Adventist food websites, as well as health food stores will have some of these grains as well. It's better for you than Ezekiel bread, but Ezekiel bread is better for you than, say, Wonder Bread. Ezekiel bread was all I ate for bread for two years until I kind of talked to Dr. William Davis and learned a little bit more about it. And then just one of the decisions that I made because I'm always looking for ways to get that extra advantage to clean things up a little bit. So I cut that out. Me personally, I feel better when it's cut out. The other thing is that I work with a lot of people who are trying to get a six pack or trying to get lean. Frankly, a lot of folks who I work with are going after that 1, 2 combo of performance and fat loss. There's a reason that the guys who race in the Tour de France only eat the outside of the bread because it's like this myth in cycling that when you eat the inside of the bread, you get fat. That's true. It's very calorie dense and not very nutrient dense. When you cut out bread, regardless of any downstream health benefits, you just lose weight. I mean, you really do. Like you, you, you can watch fat melt off when you just kind of like cut out the bread. So, you know, there are some people out there who frankly need to put a little meat on their bones. But most people, and especially people that I work with are more looking for fat loss combined with performance and health. You know, could maybe the bodybuilder, the person trying to put on a ton of muscle mass, the high school or who wants to, you know, get into the varsity squad and needs to get up to £200, could they qualify by maybe sucking down a few loaves of Ezekiel bread a week? Yeah, probably, but, you know, still not ideal for the digestive tract. So I had a question come in from Michael who says, please let us know about your experiences with oxaloacetates and how it boosted your performance. So this is a really good question. Oxaloacetate is something that I've used hand in hand with a ketosis diet, because oxaloacetate is a supplement which upregulates the conversion of lactic acid into glucose. Now, what that means is that when you're exercising, you produce lactic acid as a byproduct of normal muscle metabolism. Now, in everybody, no matter who you are, and this kind of flies under the radar sometimes, but it's simply a fact of physiology, some of that lactic acid will get shuttled back up into your liver, converted into glucose and released into the bloodstream. Very cool mechanism that your body has to maintain high levels of blood glucose in the face of difficult exercise sessions. Now, now if you're trying to limit the amount of what's called exogenous carbohydrate that you consume, which I'm trying to do personally to keep my body in a high state of fatty acid utilization, when you consume oxaloacetate, you lower the amount of glucose that you would actually need to take on board because you're producing more of your own glucose via the use of lactic acid. Have I noticed a difference by using it? Absolutely not. Prior to aerobic efforts, as you might guess, because aerobic efforts aren't producing much lactic acid, but prior to any hard interval training workout or any weight training workout that's producing significant levels of lactic acid, I have noticed a big difference with oxaloacetate. For example, I have one workout that I do where I get on a treadmill and I do 1030 second sprints with full recovery in between each. And I noticed notice a significant reduction in leg burn when I use something like oxaloacetate. Will I use it before something like an Ironman triathlon? I'm not convinced that I will necessarily because frankly I'm not producing a ton of lactic acid during a race like that. You do a few times, you get up to a point on the bike where you're burning some matches, you're passing some folks, you get up to threshold a few times on hills, but frankly I've tried oxaloacetate prior to long workouts like that I'm doing to try to train for Ironman. Haven't noticed as much of a difference before those workouts as I noticed when I use it before. Really like hard and heavy interval based workout. And frankly when it comes to cost of digestion and you trying to make your gut work as little as possible so that your muscles and the rest of your physiology is as free as possible. During something like an Ironman triathlon, you can't take every supplement on the face of the planet. Sure, there's a lot of stuff out there that could help you, but how many capsules do you actually want to pop before you go out there? You know, how, how manyhow many things do you want to force your gut to break down? So yeah, it's good for interval based workouts, but I probably won't use it for Ironman. So yeah, it's an interesting supplement though. I use the upgraded oxalate acetate, which is, it's from upgradedself.com, which is Dave Asprey's website. It's marketed as an anti aging supplement. However, I've been using it for sports performance. Honestly, I don't know why it's marketed as an anti aging supplement. I couldn't tell you that. I don't know the mechanism of action via which they're proposing that it could somehow improve longevity, but I do know it's got some darn good effects on lactic acid. Julie has a question on the live feed. She said, is there any advantage to adding harder to find meats like lamb and bison to my diet? Julie, to answer the question about lamb for lamb, yes, if you don't do well with other meats, lamb is very hypoallergenic. The size of a goat, the size of a lamb, the size of a sheep, both the children and the baby lambs and goats and sheep, as well as the adult lambs and goats and sheep. Sheep, however you say that sheep, plural, they're closer to the size of a human being. And if you look at the actual milk and the protein content of the meat in any of those animals, they're much, much more what's called thermodynamically favorable in terms of their absorptive capacity in the human body and their ability to be utilized by the human body for repair and recovery and breakdown and nutrient utilization compared to larger animals like a cow or a bison or, you know, whatever you're, you might be eating an elephant or a giraffe or, you know, whatever the, the milk of a, of a sheep or a goat as well as the meat of a sheep or a goat is actually better for a human being. If you look at the island of, I believe it's called Ikarios or Ikaros, off the coast of Greece, one of the longest living populations on the face of the planet, their primary meat is from goat, not from cow and larger animals. And a lot of people who don't do well at all with, for example, cow's milk, they do just fine with goat's milk. A lot of people who don't do well with whey protein made from cow do just fine with whey protein made from goat. Yes. On the lamb. Lamb is a great meat to have in your diet, especially if you tend to struggle with things like food allergies, asthma, eczema, anything that signifies an allergic reaction or an overactive immune system. If you still want to get a high quality source of protein in your diet, lamb is good. Bison. I can't really say anything specifically about bison other than the fact that it's just a different flavor. It' sit's a lean meat. But remember that lean is not necessarily good because saturated fats are necessary for your cholesterols and your hormones. And so, you know, I used to be a big fan of saying, well, the leaner the meat, the better. Whatever, let's all go out and eat ground, you know, chicken and ground turkey. But, you know, just because an animal is lean does not mean that that's the healthy one that you should be eating. And, you know, I personally don't really do much in the way of bison, but I certainly do do some stuff in the way of lamb. Kind of helps out that my. My wife's dad is a sheep farmer, so I can get get lamb anytime I would like. So there you go. Okay, question from Mike. Another kind of ketosis type of question from Mike who says, I'm doing the triathlon Domination. And I'm curious as to how you typically train right now. Are you still doing predominantly high intensity interval training with long aerobic efforts sprinkled in like Triathlon Dominator and triathlon Dominator is the very first Ironman triathlon training program that I ever wrote. As a matter of fact, It's@triathlon dominator.com and there are literally thousands of people from all over the world using that program. And testimonials pour in every day from athletes who are crossing the finish line in anywhere from slightly under 10 to 14 hours to complete Ironman triathlon with the triathlon Dominator program. You know, from a business standpoint, really me writing that program. And then again, this is just kind of an insight or sneak peek at my life when I was a personal trainer working 12, 14, 15 hours a day doing triathlon coaching, swim lessons, you know, track sessions, bike fits, everything else, I had to figure out a way to kind of like replicate myself. And so I just started writing down all of the knowledge that was inside my head into a training program for Ironman and half Ironman triathletes. And, and then I sold it as Triathlon Dominator. And that actually was, was the program that, you know, from, from kind of like business standpoint allowed me to step back and really kind of quit my job to a certain standpoint and start doing more, more book writing, more videos, more podcasting, more, you know, of the stuff that I kind of like to do, you know, bringing a greater amount of knowledge to a greater number of people rather than doing a lot of the one on one coaching that I did for a decade. But Triathlon Dominator is, yeah, it's written for the time crunched assets. The average person who wants to use high intensity interval training along with aerobic training. Has my own training protocol changed a little bit since I originally wrote that program. Yeah, specifically I can tell you the one place that it's changed the most. And the athletes who are in on this call, who I coach, are going to be able to tell you this as well. Triathlon Dominator, you end up doing, you know, two or three weight training sessions a week, kind of like two or three high intensity interval training sessions a week, a couple of tempo sessions. But then it's got kind of a pretty long aerobic zone two, what's called Zone two, kind of like fat burning intensity workout on the weekends, like a long bike and a long run. And there are some weekends where there's like you know, 100 mile bike followed by a 13 mile run. I found that Ironman athletes can have six with less zone to work of that nature and more shorter race pace efforts, what's called zone three work. So everything is the same really in a lot of the programs that I, that I do now in terms of my philosophy when I'm laying out a program for someone, except now instead of say me having someone go out for a 17 mile run at Zone 2 on the weekend, I'll have them go out for a 70 minute run with zone three intervals. Or instead of having someone go out and do a century ride on the weekend, I'll have them go out and do five hard 30 minute zone three efforts with two or five or 10 minute recoveries. So I'm using a little bit less aerobic work aside from, I mean, don't get me wrong, triathlon dominant works just fine. I'm not going to go back and like rewrite the whole program because why fix it if it Ain't broke, but you can, you can train a little bit less, you know, and everybody who uses Triathlon Dominator, they've got access to a kind of like this support forum with me. A lot of them listen to the podcast, so they're kind of aware that, you know, yeah, the program has been modified a little bit and, you know, so as the nutritional aspects of the program and I do a pretty good job emailing out updates and stuff, but the main changes is slightly less of the really long aerobic weekend training and even a little bit more kind of interval paced training on the weekends. So. Question from Alan. Here's another Facebook question that came in about ketosis. He says, how much does it cost a month to eat that way? Carbs are so cheap and yeah, yummy. So our grocery bill is shockingly low. We do not spend a lot of money on food in the Greenfield household. Now, we do have a lot of planning and preparation that goes into our meals. We do lots of batch cooking. My wife does a huge vat of bone broth once a week. We do a large amount of meat that we will purchase in bulk. Like we buy a half of a cow every year. I shoot a deer every year. We order food in bulk, like liver and organ meats and stuff like that in bulk from us Wellness Meats. We've got a big chest freezer out in the garage. My wife is part of a group of six other women who take turns every six weeks driving to a farm that's about 40 miles away and then bringing back into a local place right here in town, fresh eggs, raw milk, and those are the main two things, actually, milk and eggs. And then Jessa brings those home and she makes yogurt out of the milk. She makes kefir out of the milk I mentioned. She makes bone broth. We also in the fall do a ton of canning. So we have have a huge vegetable garden in the summer and the spring, and then in the fall we can all of that. So we've got all this canned food that we live off in the fall and the winter that's either out in the garage or in the refrigerator or in the pantry. And then we do the fresh stuff in the summer. So when I go out and make a kale shake, I'm not going to the grocery store and spending $5.99 on a bag of kale. I'm going out to the backyard and picking it. Same goes for romaine lettuce, tomatoes, tomatoes, mint, basil, cilantro, you know, red leaf lettuce. Gosh, you know, oregano, arugula, spinach, you name it. So we have taken our tiny, tiny little half acre plot of land. You know, we live in just a normal suburban rancher house and we've dug up our entire backyard and it's all garden we that work. Yeah. But our grocery bill is shockingly low because of that. And plus, it's just very therapeutic and it's good for you from a vitamin D perspective and all that jazz to be out in the garden. We also have an Amazon prime membership that we use for some of the weird stuff that we can't get locally, like coconut milk or kelp powder or some of our seasonings and spices. And so we do a lot of that in bulk as well. We also have a Costco membership and we use an American Express card that gives us rewards back. So we get, we get cash rebates when we use an American Express. So at the end of every year, because we fill up on our gas at Costco and also purchase all of our groceries at Costco, we get a check at the end of the year from American Express. That's basically a cash rebate as long as we've used our American Express card. Costco, we also, we shop the sales. So my wife has specific grocery stores that she goes to once a week and that's it. So not a lot of time spent shopping, but it's in and out. And she just has basically three different stores. Yolks, the local fresh market, kind of like the local health food store, and then Fred Meyer. And those are kind of like the three stores where she knows what's the best prices at which stores and just like once a week takes the kids and heads out. You know, the heck, Fred Meyers has free kid care, so she'll put the kids in kidcare and go to her shopping there and that's it. So, you know, we do not spend that much on grocery bills as far as like me, you know, like my dietary staples are some of the things that we don't grow in the garden. Avocados, coconut milk, olive oil, olives, roasted or I'm sorry, raw seeds. Seeds and raw nuts and you know, a lot of that stuff. Yeah, it's, it's, it's stuff you got to order. But I mean, heck, I even order my butter online. I get, you know, I get coconut products from Nativa, I get butter from Tropical Traditions. So I mean, you go down, you hunt through this stuff and you know, between a combination of Google Shopping and Amazon prime, as long as you're willing to kind of set up mechanisms for yourself, you can, you can do all this and you, I mean, for 25 bucks a month, folks, you can hire a virtual assistant from the website fancy hands.com researcher.com and they'll do all this for you. Send them your grocery shopping list, they'll find it all for you and get anything that needs to be sent to your house sent to your house, the lowest possible price for 25 bucks a month. So, I mean, if that allows you to whatever, get a couple extra hours of work in or something, that might save you a little money too. You know, go listen to the recent podcast that I did did with Ari meisel from less doing.com or go visit his website less doing.com to kind of get the inside scoop on some of that stuff. So, yeah, we don't spend much on grocery shopping. So there you go. We're coming up here pretty soon towards the end of this episode, but I do have some other questions coming in. Julie says, what are your thoughts on barefoot or minimalist running? I'm a huge fan of it, Julie, and I think almost everybody goes about it the wrong way, right? They get on the bandwagon, they get on the barefoot train, off they go, and three months later they're laid up with a foot stress fracture or an ankle issue or hip or a knee issue. Just like ketosis, to really get in into that full state of fatty acid utilization is an exercise of patience that can take 24 to 36 months to really get your body to begin to rely upon fatty acids again as a primary fuel, like it did when you were a baby drinking your mother's breast milk. Similar to barefoot running. If you've lived your entire teenage years, your college years, you know, much of your adult life and built up running shoes or built up shoes, period, period, you can't make that switch in a summer. I spent a process of, it's been almost three years now, gradually making the switch to minimalist footwear, to barefoot running, to using Vibrams, to using. I use a brand from Portland called Score at running shoes and now my feet are strong and knock on wood, I don't deal with injuries like I used to. They just don't like hip injuries, knee injuries, any of that stuff. It just doesn't happen. Yeah, I do other stuff more regularly than I used to. Like, I foam roll twice a week and I use Kelly Starrett's Supple Leopard mobility book, you know, so I take out a lacrosse ball and go hunting, you Know, once or twice a week for sore spots. And, you know, I do a lot of body work. I used to get a massage once a week. Frankly, I don't do that anymore. I don't. I don't get massages barely ever anymore. I just do foam roller and lacrosse ball because massages mean I got to drive somewhere and spend the money and, you know, and whereas with doing foam roller in the saw or doing foam roller and lacrosse ball, I can put on an MP3 player and listen to an audiobook, make myself smarter, save money, not drive somewhere, and really do just about everything that a massage therapist could do as long as I've got the tools to do it at home. So anyways, Sedgway there. But as far as the barefoot running goes, yes, I'm a fan of it. If you're willing to, to ease yourself into the process and spend a good year at least of just learning how to do single leg exercises at the gym. Use a standing workstation with your shoes off. Go barefoot around the house, but don't go barefoot running or don't go minimalist running. You know, put your shoes on for those activities and then just gradually make that shift to barefoot running. I have an article@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that walks you through the process, process of beginning to get your feet strong enough to barefoot run. And you can just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for barefoot running. But one of the, one of the top tips I can give you is you get a golf ball. And I actually have a lot of my athletes do this, and you keep a golf ball underneath your desk or underneath your standing workstation. If you're a standing workstation person and you just roll that golf ball around on your, on your foot. And if you get to the point where you have two golf balls and you can stand on those two golf balls, one under each foot without holding on to anything, and you can just stand there and there's no foot pain and you've got the foot strength to be able to stand on two golf balls. You're ready, you know, Congratulations, ninja barefoot running master. You know, you've graduated. You. You're ready to go do it. So, you know, golf balls can be a really cool way to just kind of pass massively strengthen your feet while you're at work, and then you can go on and kind of take things to a bigger level from there. So let's go ahead and do one. One more question here, and this one is from Angela who says, do you recommend anything for me in my first five. First 5k? Don't really focus on the trickle down information that comes from typical sports nutrition recommendations that were meant for marathoners. You can roll out of bed in the morning and go run a 5k with whatever fuel you have on board, fats, you know, storage, carbohydrates, whatever, and you're just fine. Most, most people destroy their 5Ks because they go out and whatever, carbo load and do gels during it and all that jazz. Just go out and frickin, you know, roll out of bed and warm up and then just go run the thing, you know, or eat something very, very simple two hours prior and then go run. So first of all, nutrition frankly doesn't really matter at all if you really want to get into the biohacking, better living through science type of thing. Yeah, I mean you slam some, some oxaloacetate and some caffeine and you know, maybe a bottle of this x2 performance stuff that I've been using, you know, which is a blend of different performance enhancing compounds for those type of activities. And I mean, yeah, you could, you could do some supplementation and stuff like that, but ultimately you just get out there and run and ignore all of the eat this, eat that, because frankly it doesn't matter. You know, anything that you've eaten is really just kind of sitting in your stomach. So most of the that stuff is trickle down info. From marathoning as far as pacing goes, best 5k pacing is you warm up well, you go out hard for about the first hundred yards or so, which is about the length of a football field. Then you settle into your pace, okay, and you make it to the mile mark. And then from the 1 mile mark to the 2 mile mark you begin to build. And you build between the 1 mile mark and the 2 mile mark to an effort that is kind of hard, that's, that's kind of uncomfortable. So that by the time you get to the two mile mark you're thinking, okay, I'm working, this is starting to hurt. And then between the 2 mile mark and the 3 mile mark, you treat the 3 mile mark as the finish line. Okay, 5K is 3.2 miles. But you treat the 3 mile mark as the finish line because adrenaline, trust me, carries you through those final 200 yards, so. Or this final 200 meters. So from the two mile mark to the three mile mark you start counting like you count to 20 over and over again. Or you tell yourself, okay, I'm just going to get to that next telephone pole, I'm going to get to that next street sign. And you're basically just stringing yourself along at your maximum sustainable pace that you can hold without, you know, killing yourself, thinking, all I got to do is make it to three miles. All I got to do is make it to three miles. And then once you get to the three miles mark, your body will kind of want to shut down. But your brain knows how close you are to 3.2, so you just keep going. And you know, it's, it's very similar to what I tell like Ironman triathletes. You know, the point where you pull the trigger is with 10k left in that race. So when you pass the 20 mile mark, you know it's 26.2 miles that you got to get to. When you pass the 20 mile mark, you start running. And what I like to do and I man is kind of a modified version of what I just explained for a 5k or when I pass that 10k mark, I act like all I got to do is run a 5K. All I gotta do is run 3.2 miles. Because I know in an Ironman, such a long day when you have just three miles left to go, it's just all adrenaline at that point. And so you can actually pull down a pretty, pretty good like negative 10k split at the end of an ironman if at 20 miles. Because everything's just management really up until the 20 mile mark. But at 20 miles you tell yourself, all right, all I gotta do is run a 5K and I'm done. And you convince your brain of that fact. And then once you get to the 5k point, you just tell your brain, okay, I lied, but the finish line is right up there. You can make it. And then you just pull yourself through. You know, these are the, these are the crazy little mental things that go through my head. I don't know, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm just nuts. Nobody else says this, but you know, I will. At that point. Literally I was talking about counting during Ironman during the last five cave in Ironman. All I'm doing is I'm this running blob of muscle counting to 100 over and over again. Then that's all I'm doing. Like I'm just counting down hundred over and over again just to get my mind to not shut down and get, get my, my mind to not shut down, my body specifically. And it's pretty crazy how, how long you can string yourself along when you do that. So I'm weird like that though. I count a lot during exercise like I do on the bike, like during the Iron man on the bike sometimes too. During the 112 mile ride I just like count. Sometimes I'll count to 100 like 10, 15, 20 times. You know, maybe I'm slightly autistic, I don't know. But that's just kind of like what keeps me focused is I just like count my pedal strokes, I count my steps, I count my reps in the gym. You know, it's like Arnold Schwarzenegger's book. Everything is sets and reps. Like if I can break say an Ironman triathlon into this whole like, you know, this video game, this mental video game of like, you know, point A to B on the swim, point B to C on the swim point, CD on the swim, and then I chunk the bike into, you know, whatever five different segments and then I chunk the run into, you know, five, 10 different segments and I'm just like giving myself little like pats on the back as I get to each segment. That's honestly like how I do Ironman. That's how I string myself through and I just split into these tiny little chunks. So there's never any one given point during the race until I reach that 20 mile mark when I'm thinking about the finish line. Like the finish line is just the final chunk of the whole race. But up until that point all I'm focused on is just the next chunk that I got to complete the next, you know, stage, so to speak. So, and especially for something like Ironman, like that's a really good way to get yourself through it. So. So yeah, I believe that's everything that we're going to kind of get into tonight. So I hope that was helpful for everybody who is on board for tonight's call. And yeah, have a wonderful Friday evening. If you're listening to this on Friday evening, I'm going to go. Speaking of bone broth and chicken, I believe that is what is on tap for tonight's dinner. So I'm off to stuff my face with some chicken and anyways, I will catch you all later.