Biohacking India: Sleep, Jet Lag, Hidden Environmental Killers, Air Pollution, Antiviral Tips, Eating For Longevity & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, it's hard to be persistent and consistently invest yourself into that because you don't see an immediate return.

You've got this big fiber bolus chock full of bacteria that's slowly making its way through the gut and just painting the entire inside of that hose. The number one thing that I did that would reduce my blood glucose the entire day, all the way up to dinner, reduce that glycemic variability. You know what it was health, performance.

Nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Man, oh man, what a crazy past couple of weeks it's been with the virus going around. I actually do, not, unlike the plethora of podcasts that seem to be streaming about the Internet, have a podcast episode today for you about coronavirus, although I have been doing some panels, some articles, some guest podcasts, etc. And been keeping track of that all for you over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com VirusQA where I have a helpful Google Doc that I've been kind of assimilating for you if you want to keep track of all that. But lest I exhaust you with more talk about coronavirus, because again, I've been at that document@BenGreenfieldFitness.com VirusQA as well as on my Twitter feed, primarily@twitter.com BenGreenfield been pushing out as much helpful information as possible in today's episode. I want to instead focus on what I got up to during my recent trip to India, where fortunately I came back safely and managed to get back into the US before any of the travel was quarantined. And I was able to take part in some fantastic Q&As and panels over there. And the one that you're going to hear today is one of the better ones. So we spent over two hours not only replying to really educated and informed questions from the audience about biohacking, sleep, fitness, beauty, symmetry, jet lag, etc. But then we also did a panel, and the two gentlemen who you will hear along with me on this panel are Jag Cheema and Chris Gethin, two guys who I actually toured India with, and we did a panel in both Delhi, which you're about to hear, and then also a panel in Mumbai in which we covered a bunch of extra information. And I'll also be releasing that episode for you soon. But Jag himself is an entrepreneur, he's an investor, he's a big health and fitness personality who has done a lot in the health and fitness space, particularly in Asia, although he's based out of London. And then Chris Gethin, who you'll also hear on this podcast, a new friend, new acquaintance of mine, former bodybuilder and editor of Bodybuilding.com who was one of the best natural pro bodybuilders in existence. And now he does a lot of personal training with Bollywood celebrities and billionaire businessmen and a lot of athletes. He has a whole chain of gyms as well over in India. And so between me and these two guys, we covered a ton of stuff. Everything that you're about to hear is going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Deliqa that's in case you don't know how to spell that famous city in India. D E L, H I Q A. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Deliqa you'll be able to get the robust show notes for everything that we discuss in today's show.

Hello, everybody. I just got to India about three days ago and I want to say it's absolutely amazing here. The generosity, the hospitality, the friendliness of everyone is just absolutely amazing. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, like Jake said, first time over here, but it's great. The food is wonderful. I've been punishing lots and lots of spicy peppers and, and feel amazing. Feel absolutely amazing. And you know, I guess really that's the message of Boundless. You know, I recently wrote a book called Boundless. And the reason I wrote that book is because I wanted that book to be about energy. About energy. Because I think that that is at the root of a lot of people's issues these days. Not feeling the way that a human body should feel throughout the day, having the energy that you want at your back end call throughout the day. Most people actually hit a wall around 2 or 3pm or they cannot fall asleep at night or they cannot get going in the morning without the use of stimulants. And not that I personally don't appreciate a giant cup of black coffee when I wake up, but this idea is that we should be able to using a combination of both ancestral wisdom, things we might borrow from Chinese traditional medicine or Ayurvedic medicine or things and practices that our ancestors were engaged in and be able to combine that with modern science. A lot of the things we'll talk about today, a lot of these biohacks and novel molecules and things that can do things like enhance muscle gain or enhance fat loss. And by combining the Two, in a smart way, by doing what has now become to be known as biohacking, we can actually tap into a lot more energy than most of us are currently walking around with. And I call that being boundless. And it really comes down to a lot more than just, say, exercising and eating the right kind of diet, in my opinion. You got to come at it from three angles. You got to come at it from three angles. Number one, you have to care for your mind. You have to care for your mind. So we're talking about things like optimizing your neurotransmitter balance. We're talking about fixing this area that a lot of people will talk about called your blood brain barrier, making sure that that is sound so that you can sleep well, so that you have good cognitive function, Engaging in things and consuming things that enhance neuroplasticity or the growth of new neurons. You know, attending to the brain is one kind of. Kind of almost like spoke of the wheel that we need to focus on next is the body. A lot of people focus on that, but it is, of course, important. Power, strength, speed, endurance, stamina. You know, I like to think of being boundless as almost having. If we were to synonymize it with a comic book character or a superhero, almost like being the Batman of your body. Right? Batman wasn't like being Cardinal, Hulk or Flash and that he just had one aspect of total body fitness, like extreme strength or extreme speed, but was able to. Able to operate with good mobility, flexibility, go for a long period of time, have decent amounts of strength, speed, be able to throw a football around with your. I guess I should say over here, kick a football around with your grandkids. When you're 90 years old, the body part is important, but of course, unless you have the central nervous system, the program up here that's in control, working properly. There are a lot of very fit people who are not optimized, who do not have energy, because what's up here is not functioning properly. And then the third spoke of the wheel. Probably even more neglected than addressing the brain. It would be the spirit, the soul, right? That's something that I've come to, especially over the past few years, develop a great appreciation for this concept of the spiritual disciplines. Fasting, meditation, yoga, silence, solitude, prioritizing love and relationships, engaging in a lot of these disciplines that we see, these blue zones, right? Areas where people around the world are living in a disproportionately long period of time. Places like Sardinia and Nicoya and Okinawa. We also find a very Big emphasis on the spiritual disciplines in these regions as well. And you know, I would say that really we do have a lot of people, you know, especially I know that many of you here in the audience are involved in the physical fitness culture or in the gym culture. We have people walking around with optimized bodies or even optimized brains. But that third part is often just shrunken up and shriveled and neglected inside of people. And that's a spiritual component. And really, I mean, I got to tell you, every single one of you could walk out of here today totally full of knowledge from questions that you've asked as well as things that we address here on this panel about the perfect diet for you and which supplements you should be taking for your specific goals and the exercise program that's going to get you the body that you want. But I got to tell you, at the end of the road, and I run into so many other people in the fitness sector who feel this, no matter how perfect of a body you develop, no matter how quickly you can memorize 50 names or a deck of cards, you will be unfulfilled at the end of the day. You will never find true happiness and purpose and fulfillment until you also optimize your spirit and care for your soul. But when you blend body optimization, brain optimization, and spiritual optimization all together, that is what I call being boundless. That's when you have boundless energy at your beck and call. Because don't get me wrong, I get tired. I mean, I've been jet lagged the past three days, right? But I also tap into not just supplements that help with jet lag and engaging in circadian rhythm cues like exercising in the morning, eating at the time in the time zone that the people where I'm at are eating properly, timed breakfast, lunch and dinner, large amounts of natural light in the morning. But even when I'm tired, that's when I got to tap into the soul. I got to tap into the spirit. Specifically, for me, it's like, what's my purpose in life? My purpose in life is to empower people to live a more adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. Up until last night, I had slept nine hours since I arrived in India. So I was averaging three hours a night of sleep. But man, when my eyes pop open in the morning, I think I get to go out today and empower people to live a more adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. Even that purpose statement just rips me out of bed in the morning. Even if I don't have the amount of sleep or the amount of nutrients on board that I might need for that physical optimization. That's where the spiritual piece comes in. But once you have all these things woven together, then you have boundless energy at your beck and call whenever you wanted, all day long. And that is what being boundless is about. That's what my new book called Boundless is about. And we actually didn't bring any of the books here. We had hundreds of copies down at my Bangalore event. But what I told people down there is you can get the book anywhere in the world if you go to boundlessbooks.com book-depository boundlessbook.com book depository. It's there. Do you like how I worked in the Shameless plug for my book in response to your question? I love it.

Yeah.

So yeah, that's what it means to be boundless. We can go from the esoteric big picture stuff that I just went over deep down into the nuts and bolts.

I love it. Chris, you've read the Boundless.

It'll probably take me about a year and a half to read through it. Like this is not a book. This is huge. I probably would have been about 50 pounds overweight if I'd packed it with me then. It's a phenomenal book and I think anybody who's everybody in the biohacking and health sector has gone ahead and purchased this book. You know, it is like the bible of biohacking really. And it is a phenomenal book. And you know, it will take me a while to go through it. You just come out with an audio version, correct?

Yeah, audio, audio and Kindle. Yeah.

So that will be easier for me to manage on long haul flights. But it's a phenomenal book. But just touching on what Ben mentioned here and what it means to be boundless, I 100% agree. We all, even though some of us struggle to work like our pec muscles, delt muscles, people find it so much harder to work their soul muscles. You know, if I ask anybody here who's meditated, most of you will put your hands up. If I ask any of you who meditates, I'm sure there's going to be a lot less people because it's difficult, it's hard to be persistent and consistently invest yourself in into that because you don't see an immediate return. It's a long term investment to get that long term return because as we do Aged at 90, hopefully over 100 years old, our pecs will wither away, you know, that cognitive function will slow A little. However, if you haven't worse, like Ben mentioned, your soul muscles, then that purpose is going to decline. And that's that purpose, as we have seen in these blue zones, that helps people carry through to disproportionate ages of their life in good health. There was actually a blue zone here in the south of India, I believe, up until like the 1940s, 1950s maybe. And now that is no longer a blue zone, far from it, because now we actually have. The westernized culture has come in. We have a lot of vegetable oils, a lot of adulterated foods. Obviously we know what the pollution's like here in Delhi, you know, and a lot of us, our DNA hasn't changed, but our surroundings have changed, you know, and biohacking, which Ben really describes and goes into extreme depth within Boundless shows how to control and biohack your biology and biohack your environment. The DNA hasn't changed by environment has. So just finding a way to stay ahead of the curve. Of course we have the fundamental principles in place. The light, the hydration, the nutrition, the rest, the sleep, the recovery. But what else can we do to optimize once that in place? Some people just go direct for the biohacks and they don't look at the cake before the icing, they just go straight for the icing. But we have to optimize by bringing both and all of these together. You know, of course we all want to look good. It makes us feel better, more confident. But how can we feel good internally from the inside? Because otherwise we're just going to get very frustrated when the going doesn't get so good. You know, when it gets tough, we will get frustrated.

Thank you. So, Ben, you mentioned sleep. What is that missing component?

I think that these days, most people have heard of sleep hygiene. Raise your hand if you're familiar with the concept of sleep hygiene. It's basically. You may have heard it under a different title, but essentially it is optimizing variables that would help you to get the sleep that we know that humans need. I'm talking about the basic concepts of sleeping in a dark room, sleeping with cool temperatures, and not having a lot of noise, right? So we hear these things, right? Light and temperature and silence are crucial to a good night of sleep. But then once you get into it, and now we're going to get into the nuts and bolts, once you get into the nitty gritty of how to implement that, it becomes a matter of strategizing how to actually optimize sleep hygiene. So what do I mean, by that, let's start here. Light, right? Your sleep cycle, your circadian rhythm begins when you wake up. When you wake up, the amount of natural light that you are exposed to is your body's cue to begin your circadian rhythm. And if you are not getting large amounts of natural light during the day, it's going to affect your sleep and your deep sleep cycles later on in the evening. Now, once you know that, it can become as simple as you finding the time when you wake up at some points between waking and noon to go for a 20 to 30 minute walk in the sunshine. Unfortunately, many of us are working in environments or we're in areas where we don't have access to be able to get out into the morning sunlight. This is where things like biohacking would come in. So now, for example, they produce devices such as. There's one called the human Charger. And this is a small in ear device that targets the photoreceptors within your neural tissue to actually allow you to get bright light in your ears. That simulates sunlight and causes a circadian rhythm cue, very similar to looking at sunlight. There's another pair of glasses that you can wear that you push a button on that actually produce sunlight for your eyes while you're at your office working on your computer during the day. That simulates what sunlight would do even if you're in your office unable to get out in the sunlight. There are also forms of red light. We know that the sun produces. Well, it produces the full spectrum of light, but specifically it has far infrared red and near infrared spectrums in it. And we know that these are enormously helpful for things like collagen and elastin production on the skin. We know it's helpful for hormones, we know it's helpful for thyroid. And you can get red light panels that you put in your office or that you put in in your home that you can also use to do things like simulate sunrise. So when we're talking about sleep cycles and light, it begins with as much natural light and as much simulation of natural light as possible during the day. You'll notice that I'm wearing glasses right now. And these glasses specifically block the flicker that's produced by LED and fluorescent lighting. Now, in my home, I have removed all the LED and fluorescent light bulbs and replaced them with a bulb that actually replicates much more closely the full spectrum of sunlight. Does anybody know what kind of bulb that would be? It's just an old school incandescent light bulb. So I've got Incandescent bulbs, they use up slightly more energy, but they're far more natural for the circadian rhythm, and they don't cause the type of retinal damage that some of the LED and the fluorescent bulbs do. Another example would be I'm working on computer monitors during the day, typically a laptop or a larger computer monitor. So I have a software called Iris installed on all my computers. And what Iris does is it reduces the blue light from the backlit LED part of the screen and also lowers the amount of flicker that's in the screen. So when I'm working on my computer during the day and I've got that Iris software on, it will actually make it so I'm not getting bombarded by unnatural light spectrum during the day. Now, this leads to the evening. A software program like Iris will also, for whatever area of the world that you happen to be in, as soon as the sun has set, it will shift to a more red screen. It will pull some of the blue light out of that screen, thus allowing you to engage in the second part of light, which would be to decrease the amount of light that you're exposed to later on in the day. Because as soon as the sun has set, your body, from an evolutionary ancestral standpoint, is not equipped to deal with the large amounts of light that we're exposed to in malls, gas stations, grocery stores, headlights from cars, backlit computer monitors, LED and fluorescent lighting in our homes. So what you want to do is you want to hack your environment so that you're exposed to as little blue light and artificial light in the evening. So, for example, not only do you have that software that you can use that Iris software I talked about, but tonight when I go out to dinner, I will remove these glasses and replace them with a pair that's more of like an orange or red colored lens that will more simulate. It takes a normal light and makes it look more like torch light or fire light or the type of light that our ancestors would have gathered around in the evening. Because we know from many studies that blue light, that artificial light suppresses the melatonin production by the pineal gland. So if you're looking at lights before you go to bed at night, then you're going to decrease the amount of melatonin you produce and you're going to diminish the quality of your sleep cycles. Even in my bedroom and in my master bathroom, I've actually used instead of regular incandescent bulbs, you can also buy these red incandescent bulbs, right? So when I flip on the lights in my bedroom or when I get up at night to take a pee in the bathroom, I'm not getting bombarded by what my body believes is the sun. Right? Not telling my body that it's morning. Instead, everything is very kind of dim red. And you feel as though your sleep cycles are far less suppressed in that type of scenario. Right. So you want as much natural light as possible during the day and then absence of that bright blue light in the evening. So light is one component that's an example of us knowing about proper sleep hygiene, but then using biohacking and smart living and even tying in ancestral concepts like getting out into the sunlight to actually put this into practice. So when we talk about that second component, I discussed cold. Cold, okay. So I had an engineer in my hotel room last night with a ladder, you know, up in the little thing above the door, tweaking the air conditioning so it'd go as low as 17 degrees Celsius, which is what I wanted to sleep at. Because if you dial in your sleep temperature anywhere from 16 up to about 19 degrees Celsius, we know that the body's nervous system repair and neuromuscular repair occurs much, much more readily during a night of sleep. And you fall asleep faster and you stay asleep longer if you're sleeping in a cool environment. If you have eaten a heavy meal or you've exercised anywhere closer than three hours prior to bedtime, we know your body's core temperature is going to be elevated when you go to bed. So what can you do about that? What I do is I take a simple cold shower before I go to bed at night. If I'm in a hotel that doesn't have air conditioning or an airbnb or a home that doesn't have air conditioning, or if I've exercised or eaten a heavy meal prior to bed, because I can use that to decrease my core temperature at home, I sleep on a device called a chilipad. The chilipad will circulate 55 degree Fahrenheit cold water under my body during an entire night of sleep when I'm traveling. I obvious don't have my chilipad, but there's a little hack that they've actually shown in research will decrease by a factor of three the amount of time that it takes you free to fall asleep, and that's to simply wear a pair of wool or insulating socks when you go to bed. So you just wear underwear or minimal clothing, but you put these socks on and it sounds counterintuitive, but by wearing something Warm on the feet, it actually causes a blood flow response that allows the rest of your body to cool. You can also select cooling sheets with a thread count that keeps your body more cool during sleep. And just stay constantly cognizant the actual temperature of the room that you're sleeping in and how warm your body is when you actually hit the sack. Okay, so that's another example of how we can actually practically implement this stuff into our lives. We look at silence. That third component that I mentioned. Well, when I'm traveling, I've got foam earplugs. When I am sleeping, I put my iPhone in airplane mode next to my bed stand, and I have an app called Sleep Stream. And what Sleep Stream will do is it will play noise that blocks out any ambient noise. You know, sirens, people, you know, walking by in the. In the hotel hallway, etc. And it'll drown out that noise. And furthermore, I believe it was Stanford University did this research. Has anybody heard of, like, white noise before? Yeah, white noise will block out a lot of other sounds, but it turns out there are other forms of noise, like brown noise and pink noise. And it turns out that if you listen to pink noise as you're falling asleep or during a night of sleep, that's the best one for optimizing how you can stay asleep and fall asleep more quickly. So you put an app next to your bedside, and you use something like Sleep Stream, and you play noise like pink noise that actually drowns out ambient sound and pushes you into a sleep cycle more quickly. If you want to take things to the next level, say you're a side sleeper and you can't sleep with headphones on. There's a pair of headphones called sleepphones. And sleepphones are soft earphones that you can put around your head that allow you to sleep on your side, but then actually play this from your phone, you know, wired in through the phone that's on your bedside, straight around your head if you want to drown out even more sound while you're asleep. Now, those are just some examples of optimizing light, optimizing temperature, and optimizing silence. And then there's one final component that I don't think enough people focus on when it comes to sleep. And that's safety. That's safety. Your bed, your bedroom should be to your body, to your subconscious, to your limbic system, that reptilian part of your brain that wants to always sense danger. If your bedroom is a place where you are sensing danger, then that's going to keep you from Falling asleep or staying asleep. So how do we actually practically implement this? Well, for example, when I'm in a hotel room, I never ever do. And this is something I used to do all the time, and I'm sure many of you have done this before. You put your laptop on the bed and you flop on your belly on bed and you check email, get some work done. And maybe as you're falling asleep, you take the laptop out again to apply some emails automatically. Your body will associate bed with work. And while work may not seem dangerous to you, it's still something that stimulates your sympathetic fight and flight nervous system. You should never work in bed. You should never have your laptop in bed, because if you do, your body associates the bed with being an unsafe place. In addition, I have now begun to use when I sleep something called a gravity blanket. And what a gravity blanket does, it's a 15, 20 or 25 pound blanket that you pull over your body when you fall asleep. And it's like this nice protective cave that you've crawled into. You'd be surprised at how much safer you feel when you fall asleep under a, a gravity blanket. And so that's another way that you can associate your bedroom with safety. And so making sure that you don't do stressful things in bed or in the bedroom, that's another real key to sleep hygiene that I don't think is talked about often enough. Okay, but what I've just talked to you about, this is a perfect example of biohacking, right? We take something that we know is important, sleep, and we say, okay. We know we have a lot of kind of what would be called evolutionary mismatches, things that we fight against in a post industrial era, like light that does not simulate sunlight, traffic outside that might keep us awake while we're asleep at night, temperatures that might not be that nice, cold outdoor temperature our ancestors might have slept in when they were in caves or tents or outside. And we simply use smart living technologies and biohacks to begin to fight those evolutionary mismatches and enhance, in this case, our recovery, our memory consolidation, and our energy levels the rest of the day. Because we've optimized our sleep cycles. So that's what comes to mind when you say sleep.

Thank you, Ben. Chris, what do you have to say about that?

Well, the whole time I was here, as Ben was talking, I was just scribbling things out, saying, okay, he's spoken about that, he's spoken about that. Left me very little to talk about. But I tell you what, I Was actually, I haven't used. Was it the gravity blanket? Yeah, gravity blanket, yeah, I haven't use that. But I was actually in Park City like three weeks ago and myself and my fiance had the best night's sleep because in the hotel the blanket was so heavy, very, very heavy. And my sleep score the next day is phenomenal. And usually in hotels I don't sleep well at all. So that's something I definitely need to get the link off you for because the one that I found only came in a queen size that I'm sure my fiance would be pissed off because I'd be cocooned, room temperature is down.

And she'd be freezing her ass off.

Without any heavy banquet. But there's a few of the things that I noticed, you know, you mentioned about people working where I found, you know, on their computer before night or on their device. And I noticed a lot of people don't even work, but they will just scroll through socials and they find it gives them like that dopamine fix. They'll eat before, but they'll get an even more compounded effect by just scrolling. You know, people get this dopamine fix by scrolling through socials aimlessly. It's like reality tv. And that's also, also going to activate the brain before bed. And what they've said, that's one of the contributing factors now to childhood obesity. They're getting exposed to the blue light penetrating their retina. Cortisol is going up and of course they're staying up later at night. So you getting this dopamine fix, you know, scrolling through social networks mindlessly. So that's something that you've got to be conscious of. And one thing that I've become devoted to now in the morning and at night is I understand that my anxiety for the rest of the day is dictated on how I start my morning. So I will make sure that I wake up with a bookend in the morning and at night where I will not go near my door advice. And I know that you have a routine that you prescribe to in the morning as well. Then first thing in the morning I will, you know, I'll stretch. I've got something at home that's called a feet up. It helps me do a headstand and I'll do that for about four or five minutes without pricking my neck because I did that the first time without one of these devices. And you know, especially in the winter where I am now in Idaho, you know, I'll have exposed myself to the red light therapy. And that is my time. That is my time to gather my thoughts. Meditation that will then turn into the manifestation for the rest of the day. And that helps me go to sleep much better at night by forming the function of my day from the moment that I wake up. That really, really does help me. And I'd be interested to know as well what your thoughts are in regards to your diet throughout the day to help people with sleep. So you know, I know obviously you mentioned fasting for a good hour or two before bed. But what I've noticed with myself as well, even though I'm not following this particular diet at the moment, when I went following a cyclical keto approach like you do Ben, I found that by increasing my fats and drastically lowering my complex carbs throughout the day really helped with my fats, helped with my sleep as well. Is this something that you found?

I have a couple of thoughts. The first is just a total aside. You talked about the phone and scrolling through the feed at night. I would encourage all of you to make your phone as boring as possible in the evening. The way that I do that. This is very simple. You can Google iPhone red light trick if you have an iPhone. I believe there's a similar function on the Android, although since I use an iPhone I don't know how to do it on the Android. But basically what it allows you to do is is night mode that is already built into iOS on steroids. It essentially sucks all blue light out of the screen and it just makes scrolling through feeds, notifications, etc. Not really pop out so you don't get the same dopamine response. Plus it sucks all the blue light out of the screen. It uses the color filter setting on your phone switches everything to red. So use that iPhone red light trick if you can. Now regarding diet, I have a couple of thoughts on that. Number one is I do not eat any carbohydrates the entire day. I save all my carbs for the very end of the day. Now this is useful for a few reasons. A It keeps me in a state of fat utilization the entire day. So rather than my blood glucose going up and down all day long which keeps me from tapping into my body fat stores and can also have an impact on insulin inflammation, I'm staying in a low inflamed, stable energy fat burning state during the entire day. And then and this is especially important if you're physically active because your body does have to use storage carbohydrate to be able to do things like Lift weights or do cardio interval training. Like high intensity cardio interval training, you eat carbohydrates in the evening. And this is useful because a, in many cases, dinner is kind of like our most social meal of the day. It's the time when we might be out at a restaurant, the time that we might be with friends, the time when we actually don't want as many dietary restrictions. You know, I might want my sweet potato, my yam, my, my red wine, my dark chocolate, maybe a cocktail, etc. So I save all the carbohydrates for the evening. And carbohydrates allow you to produce serotonin, which assists with your melatonin production when you sleep. So assuming you're not eating very heavy meal within three hours prior to bedtime, having carbohydrates at the end of the day can actually enhance sleep. Assuming you've limited carbohydrates the rest of the day and then you simply go to bed. And for me, I'll fast 12 to 16 hours after dinner, wake up the next morning, rinse, wash, and repeat. Meaning no carbohydrates, only plants, fatty acids, proteins, etc. All day long. And at the very end of the day, then I'll have my carbohydrates. Now, the other trick that I have for you for food prior to sleep is, is especially many physically active people, which I know many of you are. They will hear, well, it's not smart to eat a heavy meal prior to bedtime, but they'll lay awake hungry. And we actually know that fasting inhibits your sleep quality. We know that it's very difficult, especially people who will do like, you know, three, four, five day water fasts, et cetera, sleep quality goes absolutely to hell. Now, the trick for this is there are specific things that slowly bleed into your system that not only help your body to repair and enhance something called autophagy while you sleep, which is your body's natural cellular cleanup property, but they're also not going to raise your blood glucose as you're asleep. Now, at the very, there's a lot of things that fall into that category, and I'll fill you in on all of them. So for the longest time, what I would do was a small scoop of nut butter, right, which gives me the fatty acids necessary as a slow burn while I'm asleep. And then I would put a little bit of a good sea salt in with that, because one thing that actually keeps people from falling asleep, and I discovered this when I was racing triathlon I would lay awake at night. I could hear my blood pounding in my ears. I couldn't sleep. So I started to use a lot more natural mineral salts and trace liquid minerals throughout the day. And automatically my blood pressure re regulated. And this is based on cortisol and also mineral loss. And I was able to sleep a lot better. You can combine that with something like a nut butter, a little bit of sea salt. And the last thing that I would add in there is a very kind of like a slower release carbohydrate or a lower glycemic index carbohydrate and actually just raw honey, which has a lot of probiotics in it, a lot of enzymes in it. And it is wonderful in moderation. You put a little bit of honey in with that too. So I would just have a giant tablespoon of nut butter, a little bit of sea salt, a little bit of honey on there. It tastes pretty good. It's almost like dessert. And that gives you that slow bleed of energy while you sleep. Well, since I adopted that strategy, I've completely quit doing that because I found something that works even better, that just covers all those bases and again, just works better in terms of appetite satiating and not giving you a lot of calories right before you fall asleep in bed at night. And that is J E L L O. Okay. Jello is made from glycine. Okay. So when you make jello, you've got all that gelatin in it. It's rich in glycine. And glycine is the perfect amino acid to keep your appetite satiated and enhance that cellular cleanup process while you sleep. So every week I make myself. I don't, I don't buy jello. I just make myself a big batch of jello. All you need is gelatin. I warm up a little water, I dump the gelatin in there. And then what I'll typically use is a good, like a coconut milk or a kefir or like a really good natural milk as a base. I'll take that hot water with the gelatin that I've mixed into it. I'll pour it into the milk, right? And then I'll put a little bit of stevia in there, which is a sweetener that isn't going to raise my blood sugar. So I stir all that in, I put it in the fridge, I let it set for a little while, and I have this giant pan of Jello, and I'll have one big cube of that, about about a third of the size of my phone here. Before I go to bed. And it's amazing for satiating your appetite and that glycine just heals your body while you sleep. So that's a fantastic appetite, satiating and body healing strategy before you go to bed is to have jello, preferably like a Jello that you make yourself because it's so darn easy to make. It's amazing for sleep.

That is making me hungry.

Yeah, we go out for jello after this.

Jello, Jello. Okay, well, we've met the owner of the hotel here. We'll just give you access to the kitchen and we'll make it for everyone.

I would love to do that.

All right, sounds good. Yeah. I actually made the coconut the coconut yogurt that you prescribed on your podcast once and use the jello in there. So it should be an easy transition for me.

You can if you wanted to. If you're lazy, you could just make that coconut yogurt and then add the gelatin that you've mixed in hot water to it and literally have the benefits of both the probiotics and the yogurt. Because that coconut yogurt will automatically become jello if you add hot water with gelatin to it, stir it in and put it in the fridge.

Perfect. Cooking with Ben. I'm just going to add a couple of things to the sleep here that I wrote down that I found that's been helpful to me. And I know that you actually have like a WI fi kill switch in your home. And I'm sure that we've all got WI fi routers in our home. Try to conscious. Okay. We're surrounded by WI fi wherever we go and a lot of you are traveling. You're getting exposed to X rays, gamma rays, etc. Why not switch it off during the six, eight hours that you're sleeping as well so you're not penetrated by the WI fi. That can obviously be a little hack that you can implement with you guys. And like Ben, Jack, we're all wearing an aura ring. If you have a sleep tracker, it's like wearing a personal trainer. You know, I'm sure some of you have the Fitbit whatever you have that can actually accurately track your sleep, whether it be like a Fitbit bio strap, a Whoop or an OURA ring. I just find this handy because it's not on my wrist and I wear lifting straps and stuff. It's like having that form of accountability. I love it because actually Jack hates it because he wants me to have meetings with people that 8:30 at night. When I'm in bed, I may look like a party animal. I'm in bed by 8:30, no later. And it's because I have this accountability now, because I actually went to a sleep clinic in 2014, or actually a clinic, not a sleep clinic, but I came out of there much better than what I am. I'm nowhere near fixed, but I had mold toxicity from when I lived in Mumbai, and that led to me having about three hours of sleep every night. And it wasn't good, but I utilized it to my advantage. At that time, I was writing content that was motivational, it was hardcore. And I was kind of patting myself on the back for burning the candle at both ends. But obviously that's not good. I wasn't a good person to be around. It's probably one of the contributing factors that led to my divorce. Who knows, you know? But looking back on that, I'm very much a different person. And one of the major contributing factors is because I've optimized my sleep now. And having something that form of accountability that we have available to us today that we did not have just five or six years ago can be huge for you if this is a major missing component in your life. Because we kind of walk around a little bit drunk if we're down in sleep about 20%. And I'm sure you all want to optimize your day and your life and the very short period of time that we have on it. So optimize your sleep with efficiency that you can carry with you throughout the rest of the day. And a couple of things, you know, in regards to, like, the apps that's available to us now, one of the things that's helped with me, and we've got things like, I know you mentioned that you use calm with a couple of other devices out there, Muse. But one that's helped me is it's called silent mode. I don't know if you've used that bit. Then it's kind of like an eye patch. I actually use an eye patch anyway. Eye mask. But this is like an eye mask, and it helps you with breath work as well. So help you turn yourself from that sympathetic into that parasympathetic nervous state in the evening. So you'd think actually, you know, doing breath work in the evening that's kind of rigorous would actually wake you up, but it actually helps, really helps me lull me to sleep. So that's a little hack that I found. And when you're traveling well, it doesn't matter if you're at home, but when you're traveling, you'll notice, like the standby lights, we've got the alarm clocks. I wouldn't suggest pulling out the smoke alarms by any means, but cover those lights up as much as you possibly can. I put a pillow on my bedside, you know, just to cover all the lights there. Have as much darkness as you possibly can in that room. You know, really blacken out absolutely everything. Because not only do you have the photoreceptors on your eyes, you actually have the photoreceptors on your skin as well. So, you know, this is for all of those people that are very, very sensitive sleepers, like this person on my left here, Jag. He'll only have four hours sleep. Half of that will be deep and the other half will be rem. I'm very jealous of this person. But we're not all like that, you know, so we have to realize that we all have various sensitivities. So we have to, you know, kind of do whatever we can and mitigate it with these tactics. And, you know, I don't know if you use anything like this Ben defender shield that have these covers on our phones that can help scramble a lot of the emf. They actually have blankets now as well. I don't know if you actually use one of those when you trial them.

Yeah, I have a few thoughts based on what you just said, and I realize we're spending a lot of time on sleep, but of course this pours into many aspects of your life, and I think these are such important things that we're talking about for a variety of things that go beyond sleep. So you talked about unplugging the WI FI router, but you can, for about 30 bucks, get a digital wall timer. And a digital wall timer will turn off anything that's plugged into that outlet at whatever time you specify. So you can get a digital wall timer, plug your WI FI router into that, and set it to say, turn off at 10pm and then flip on again at 6am so for a third of your life, during the time when you're in bed, the most important time, when your body should be healing and recovering and not bombarded by non native emf, you have no WI FI signal in your home because you're not using the Internet anyways. At least I hope you know during that time that you're supposed to be in bed and asleep. So a digital wall timer will allow you to automatically turn off the WI fi without thinking about it. Now, related to what you were talking about with the blankets that scramble WI fi. That's like a Faraday blanket that you can sleep in. They make Faraday clothing. You know, when I traveled over here for my long haul flight, I wore a suit that's essentially made out of Faraday fabric that blocks all this emf. They're not very fashionable, but they work. I do not sleep with a Faraday blanket, but what I use is essentially what's called a wifi scrambler. It's a frequency generator that blocks the signals that would be coming from. Because let's say you've turned off the WI fi in your house, all the other homes and condos and areas around you that are also emitting WI fi signals. So there's three different companies that actually make something could put next to your bed, plug it next to your bed, and it'll block those WI fi signals. One is called a Key Qi. There's another one called a Blue shield, B L U shield. And then the final one is called a Soma Vetic. S O M A V E D I C. And, you know, they all operate on similar principles, but essentially they're generating a frequency that's more tuned to what the earth's natural frequency is, and that actually blocks a lot of the WI fi that you're experiencing while you're in bed at night. You just plug it in, put it in your bedroom. I have one in my bedroom, and I have one in my. My office. And those can work very well. And then two other things I jotted down because obviously Chris and I are thinking of things. We're going back and forth. The sleep mask, you said you use one called a silent mode. Silent mode, yeah, silent mode.

That's just like if I'm traveling. Sorry, If I'm traveling, I'll use what's called a remedy sleep mask. But the one that's attached with the app that has the breath work that is silent mode.

Okay, gotcha. So silent mode is more for the breath. Breath work. The mask that I use is called a mind fold. It was developed originally for psychedelic and Plant Medicine Journeys, where when you're using something like Ayahuasca or DMT or whatever, one thing that happens is your pupils dilate. You become very light sensitive. So for Plant Medicine Journeys, this company developed this mask. Just block out as much light as possible. But it works fantastically even if you're not sleeping on Ayahuasca. It's called a mindfold Mindfold mask. And that's the one that I use. It just. It does A better job than any other mask I've used at blocking out light. And then, Chris, you were also talking about breath work, and I agree. I'm a huge, huge fan of using breath to control physiology. Using breath to control physiology. I'm often asked about stress. You know, what are the best stress control strategies? And sure, you could take, you know, phosphatidylserine as a supplement to lower your cortisol levels. And you could mix things, theanine in your coffee to make coffee become less jittery. And you can buy electric devices that you attach to either side of your neck called vagal nerve stimulators that lower cortisol. There's all sorts of things you can do. There's like 20 things I talk about in my book for lowering cortisol and lowering stress. But the simplest and most effective thing is free and built into each and every one of us, and that's our breath. So, for example, there are three forms of breath work. Three forms of breath work that I teach to all my clients, that I use myself in my own practice. One is alternate nostril breathing, which has been shown in as little as 1 minute to decrease plasma and salivary cortisol levels. And it's very simple. When you find yourself, like holding your breath or doing shallow chest breathing from all the bullets flying out from the email inbox in your computer, you pause and you take one breath in through your right nostril. Then you cover the right nostril and you exhale through the left nostril and you do three rounds of that. Just three rounds of that is going to take about a minute. And that's all it takes to reduce cortisol. Another one is box breathing. Now, I'm a huge fan, specifically for, well, for fat loss, for blood flow, for a variety of benefits. I'm a huge fan of doing, like, these cold soaks, jumping in a cold river, cold lake, cold ocean, ice bath. I have a cold pool at home. And I'll do box breathing when I'm in that stressful environment. So that's a four count in. Four count hold. Four count out. Four count hold. That was the first form of breath work that I taught my kids to become more aware of their breath work and use breath to control stress and to control their physiology. That works fantastically, I found for periods of time when you're under physical stress. It even works when you're recovering between sets in a gym to cool you down very quickly, get you into parasympathetic very quickly. When I'M falling asleep. The one that I found to just lull me to sleep very easily is four, eight breathing. Some people will do four, seven, eight breathing, which is a four count in, seven count hold, eight count out. I don't worry so much about the seven count hold. I just do four breaths in or.

I'm sorry.

Four count in, four count out. Now, here's the interesting thing. We know that animals that live a disproportionately long period of time, like say, the bowhead whale or the naked mole rat, these are animals that are living a much longer period of time than the species that are closely related to these animals. They have a high amount of what's called CO2 tolerance, carbon dioxide tolerance, meaning that they hang on to high levels of CO2 in their body. Now, if you are well oxygenated, if you're breathing well, your mitochondria are operating properly, and you're consuming foods that enhance oxygen uptake, and you're exercising, you're getting good oxygen levels. But if you also maintain high levels of carbon dioxide, what happens is that's the signal for the oxygen to dissociate into things like muscle tissue and heart tissue. And the number one way that you can train your body to have high CO2 tolerance is to simply breathe out for a longer period of time than you breathe in. And I do this when I'm walking, right, for 10 steps, I'll breathe in, but then for 20 steps, I'll breathe out. I even have a small device, very simple. It's in my fanny pack over there. It's called the relaxator. The relaxator. You just put it in your mouth while you're on a walk, and it resists your breath out, so you're forced. It kind of like trains you to breathe out for a longer period of time than you're breathing in. And again, as you fall asleep. Four count in. Eight count out. What are you doing? Well, you're increasing your CO2 tolerance, but you're also, as you breathe out, you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system, because long exhales automatically send a signal to something called your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve innervates your heart and all the other organs of your body. And one of the things it can do is flip you into a fight and flight response or a rest and digest response. And when you breathe out for a longer period of time than you breathe in, you automatically cause the vagus nerve to send a parasympathetic signal to your heart that lowers your heart rate and causes your heartbeat to become more tuned to your nervous system. So the three forms of breath work I like for stress are the alternate nostril, the box breathing, and the 48 breathing. And it's also very useful, not just for sleep, but throughout the the day to be cognizant of how much you're breathing out compared to how much you're breathing in.

I'd just like to ask a couple of questions to the audience too. How many people here are connected to the fitness industry? Fantastic.

It's a lot of gym junkies. Yeah.

So traditionally, when a member goes to the gym, fitness professionals usually recommend supplements and other shortcuts to try and help them get results faster. But sleep is one of those low hanging fruits which has always been overlooked. Just to give you guys a quick example, there's a lot of people that I've come across who use gyms and always have an excuse that they are working long hours and therefore cannot get enough sleep. I'm actually one of those people. I have tried to reduce the number.

Of hours that I work so I.

Can get more hours of sleep. However, I've actually taken advantage of some of these sleep hacks. So even though I may be getting a short amount of sleep, the quality of the sleep, as Chris says, is a lot better. So I find that my recovery is a lot better.

Fasting has helped you a lot. Absolutely.

That's another question which we'll move on to about fasting. But I would always suggest that you use some of these accountability tools to see if these sleep hacks actually work like the oura ring. So as soon as you take active steps to make improvements, you'll see a result. But just before I go into anti aging, I noticed that you were sitting in an unusual position that I noticed in the restaurant last night when we were having dinner. What was the reason for that?

There's two reasons that you guys might see me fidgeting up here on stage, standing up, stretching, chain changing positions, and you know, throughout my entire day at work is the same way. A we know that your posture specifically, well, sitting in a traditional chair for a long period of time is associated with things like shortened hip flexors, which automatically decreases the extent to which you can use your glutes when you're walking or running or lifting later on in the day. And poor glute activation is one of the biggest contributors to low back pain, especially when combined with shortened hip flexors. So that's one reason is to protect the health of my low back and Also to keep activated the most athletic muscle in anybody's body, which is your glutes. The next reason is that there's this concept called neat. Concept called neat. Non exercise activity thermogenesis. Now that's a big phrase. But what non exercise activity thermogenesis is, it's the number of calories you burn during the day, not necessarily when you're exercising or say, digesting food, but it's just the small movements you do during the day, including the amount of steps you take, that add up throughout the day. And it turns out the calorie burn and the fat loss benefits of non exercise activity thermogenesis far outweigh what you get from exercise, right? By moving our bodies throughout the entire day, by even using things like self quantification devices like a ring to track our step count, to keep us motivated, like saying, okay, my rule, like I, Ben Greenfield, and this is a rule. I take 15,000 steps a day, period. I push myself away from the dinner table at night and I glance at my app and I'm at 13,500 steps. I'll go call my wife and walk for 15 minutes while I'm talking to her to get that 15, 15,000 step count. Now that's not a substitute for me for exercise because I actually like to maintain a nice body. I like to compete in athletic events. Like I go to the gym to be athletic and also for aesthetic purposes, but for things like fat loss and general movement, it's my non exercise activity thermogenesis that I focus on, right? So for me, it's the postural component, but then it's that activity thermogenesis. And so the other thing that I should mention is that I was with a guy in Bangalore who has seen some research specifically on Indian populations and a drop in bone density related to sitting instead of the traditional method of say, like eating or defecating, etc, which would be a squatting position, right? So a lot of times I'll do just a deep squatting position, which is also fantastic for something else that I hadn't realized until a few days ago. And that is bone density, right? So there is no rule. And by the way, there is no rule for any of you who are out there sitting in the audience that you need to be sitting. Like, I'm fine. If people are like, if you get up occasionally, you know, go to wall stand, stretch, try different, you know, moves in your chair, et cetera. We can destroy all the hotel room chairs by planting the bottoms of our shoes in them. And apologize to the hotel owner later on. But yeah, that's really why I'm constantly in different positions rather than just sitting.

Got it.

So I want to move on to anti aging. And just before I do, Chris, what is a biological age?

My biological age, it's 30, I think you're 38. 37. I'm 38.

Chronological age is 38.

Yeah. So my biological age is the same.

As Ben's at the moment.

My actual chronological age is 45.

No, your chronological age is 45, which is how old you are in years. Biological age is 38. So technically your cells are seven years younger than they should be.

That's right. But it wasn't always that way. Some years ago I was doing the same sort of thing doing the Ironman triathlon and bodybuilding at the same time. Funny story, actually I came across Ben not from the biohacking world, but several years before that when I was watching all your videos on Ironman triathlon. I hear geek out on the pieces of equipment that were probably lost for me, to be honest with you. But you know how to optimize various discipline of Ironman triathlon when I first got into it. So thank you very much for all those helpful videos there, Ben. So what was the question again?

Biological age.

Biological age. Yeah. So you know, I'm 45 years old now and you know, I'm very thankful that I get. A lot of people say, wow, you kind of look like you're reversing your age because when I was here, as I mentioned back in 2011 and I was here for a few years, my sleep was not good. You know, I was possibly aging much faster than I. That I was. And then since I've optimized my sleep and I know that we're going down this rabbit hole again, I've actually felt better. Now I'm going through a phase of putting on muscle again. You know, I was following various programs last couple of years that kind of took me off track and I thought, okay, well, I want to just see if my body will respond if I can put on a lot of muscle but still optimize my health and my performance at the same time. And you know what, it's, it's reacting very well. You know, I didn't know if I could as well at this age, but my body is reacting well and I feel very, very good. But just mentioning the low level activity that Ben was talking about earlier, it's phenomenal. There's a lot of people that will use the excuse while I'm at the office, I'm too busy. I don't have time to go to the gym, have a shower, get changed, get back to the office. But there's so much that you can do with just low level activity throughout the day. Like I have a treadmill desk at home that Jack got me some years ago. That's been phenomenal to me. So if I'm on a conference call, if I'm doing a podcast, generally I'm on that treadmill desk moving around. And Ben is the culprit as well. That has led to me doing 50 ear squats pretty much on the hour when I'm on long haul flights as well. But it keeps the body moving. And if you are tracking the calories and the steps that you're burning off throughout the day, you are not even broken breaking into a sweat, but you're able to churn through that many more calories that you generally wouldn't if you're too busy.

Yeah, I a few things I want to want to say about this. First of all, what you just commented on regarding like the, like the treadmill workstation, very important. And there's like a non negotiable for the, for the folks who I work with and coach, they get to own three things. They have a kettlebell in the floor of their office that they can stop and sit, do kettlebell swings with at some point during the day, which are also one of the most amazing things. If you learn how to do just a double arm kettlebell swing. One of the best ways to get rid of the short hip flexors and activate the glutes, a proper kettlebell swing. They have a hex bar. A hex bar is basically a bar that you can load up with heavy weight. And we know that your grip strength and the amount of weight that you can deadlift is directly correlated to anti aging and longevity. And I have the same thing. I have one hex bar. It's in the room that's next door to my office and I just wander in there a few times a day and do five to ten heavy lifts. Right. It's not a formal weight training session. I just pick it up and put it down five to 10 times and then finally for what's called brachiation. Right. Some people believe that humans originated from apes. Some used to hang from the trees and mobilize the shoulders. Regardless of what you believe about the origin of species, the idea of hanging, of decompressing a lot of joints by hanging or by doing pull ups, that's also Very important. So the three crucial pieces of gear that I have around, in addition to that treadmill workstation that you talked about, I think everybody, as long as your budget can afford it, should have a hex bar, a kettlebell and a pull up bar. And these should specifically be located near to where you are working, like near to your office where you're working, so you can stop and use these things during the day. Now you talked about biological age versus chronological age. Well, so just to explain, to clarify what's meant by that, is typically these days this concept of measuring how young your cells are compared to how old you are in years, typically it's done via what's called a telomere analysis, which is analyzing the length of the telomeres on each cell with the idea that the shorter those telomeres are or the more rapid the rate at which they are shortening, the more rapidly you're aging or the older that you are. Now, it's a somewhat flawed measurement in that it's looking at a limited number of cells. And you know, it's questionable how correlative that is to longevity, you know, compared to all the other variables that we could measure. And now there are some better, more accurate measurements coming out to measure biological age. One in particular called the DNA methylation clock. It's not that accessible right now, but within about the next six months or so, that that's what you guys will see popping up as the best way to actually measure your biological age. But in my opinion right now, probably the most accurate way to measure it is via telomere analysis. And there's a company called Spectracell in the US that I use to measure my actual biological age, which right now is 9 years old. How do I do things like that? How do I get my telomere length down that or to be that long? I'll give you three of my top tips. Okay, three of my top tips for anti aging or longevity. One we already briefly touched upon and that is fasting. I fast 12 to 16 hours every day, meaning that if I finish dinner at 10pm, I will not eat again until 10am minimum. If I get up and have a midnight snack, then breakfast is out the window and I won't be eating again until lunch. Right? But fortunately most of that time you're sleeping, so it's not that hard, especially if you use that jello trick that I told you about earlier. Okay, so I do a 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast every day of the year, 365 days a year. Number two is I do a 24 hour dinner time to dinner time fast, one to two times a month. And that's very simple. I just push myself away from the dinner table on Saturday and I don't eat again until our Sunday night family dinner. Super, super simple. Because for me it's like, yeah, maybe a three to five day water fast would be better and I get more cellular cleanup, et cetera. But for me it has to, to be sustainable. Right? A three to five day water fast does not get me excited. That's like telling, telling somebody just go to the gym for three hours, you're gonna get super fit. Yeah, maybe, but it's just hard to sustain. Now the third type of fasting that I do is based on the research of a guy named Dr. Valter Longo. And Dr. Valter Longo found that rather than just not eating any calories at all for five days in a row, you can get very similar longevity benefits by simply eating 40% of the number of calories that you would normally consume. 40%. So four times a year as almost like a, like a seasonal cleanup. For my body, I simply go five days eating 40% of the number of calories that I would normally eat. And for me it's very simple. If I just skip breakfast for those five days, have a light lunch and really have a pretty normal dinner, which allows me to still sleep through that five day fasting, fasting cycle, it works out just fine and I get all those longevity benefits. So that's how I fast. If you are a woman, the only caution I would give to you is that many women, especially premenopausal women, experience some hormone issues if they fast for longer than 12 hours. So especially if you're a lean and active female, I would be careful with the longer, more extended fast. But everybody benefits from some form of an intermittent fast. With guys closer to 12 to 16 hours, women closer to closer to 12 hours. So fasting is number one. Now the other two things that I think have made the biggest impact, the biggest impact on anti aging, longevity and biological age for me, number one is peptides. Mark my words, peptides are going to be the next frontier of health and anti aging medicine and they're huge in the US right now. They're very small amino acids sequences that can directly interact with cell receptors in very specific ways. So for example, in the bodybuilding, in the muscle gain industry, a lot of people for a long time have been using growth hormone. The problem with growth hormone is it targets every single cell receptor for growth hormone. In the human body and can potentially be carcinogenic because it just causes pro growth across the board. But what if there was something that would cause an increase in growth hormone only localized in muscle tissue tissue? Well, it turns out that you can use peptides to target just growth hormone receptors in the brain or in say, muscle tissue or in vasculature. So you know, there's one peptide called tessamorelin. Tessamorelin, you use that peptide, all it does is target growth hormone receptors in muscle tissue, so you gain muscle more quickly. Peptides, the only problem with them right now is that they are for the most part injectable, right? You have to get something like an insulin syringe and inject them right under the skin. Now there are of course millions of diabetics around the world doing this with insulin all the time. But it's still something that makes some people, especially people who might be needle phobic, a little bit uncomfortable. But peptides are absolutely amazing. There's one peptide, and I've been using it for three years. It's called epitalon. Epitalon, E P I T H A L O n. And the Russians have done the lion's share of peptide research. They have shown in human research studies that a twice per year, 20 day protocol of injecting epitalon decreases all cause risk of mortality across the board and extends lifespan significantly directly by increasing, or I'm sorry, by decreasing the rate at which your telomeres shortened. So that one peptide is the one that I think is at the top of the anti aging totem pole. And I think that's made a big difference for me. There are other peptides, but that one for anti aging is amazing. And then finally, finally I'm very protective of my DNA and cellular repair mechanisms. Remember that little naked mole rat I was telling you about that has very good CO2 tolerance? It also happens that that mole rat can repair its own proteins and DNA very, very quickly because it has a high natural amount of two molecules, One called NAD and one called sirtuin. Okay, so NAD is a fantastic supplement. It's protective of the mitochondria. It is one of the best ways to repair DNA. It has a host of physiological functions. It's a very hot supplement in the US right now. People are getting NAD IVs. They are using NAD supplements or different forms of NAD as a supplement. And I use NAD daily. I also get an NAD IV once a month. And it's amazing for protecting and for repairing your DNA. But guess what? NAD will only Work to repair your DNA. If you also have something else present in your body, and that is your sirtuins. You might be familiar with sirtuins because it's something that you get from blueberries, cacao in dark chocolate, red wine, any of the, like, nice dark, purplish blue foods that you might consume. And when you have a diet that's got a lot of the rainbow of colors in a wide variety of plant foods, herbs, spices, cacao's red wine, blueberry, dark chocolate, and you're also using NAD, then you've got a potent 1, 2 combo for DNA repair. If you or one of your clients can't afford nad, it's also naturally upregulated through fasting and also through consumption of fermented foods. Right. So there are some natural lifestyle tactics you can also engage in to increase your NAD levels. But for anti aging, for me, those would be the top three fasting peptides and NAD sirtuins.

Thank you, Ben. So just a question for the audience once more. Have you ever noticed people around you who look like they've aged faster than the actual age? Can I see a show of hands, Chris? What would you say would be possibly the five major causes of aging faster than your actual age, and what could people do to combat that?

Well, I can't say having kids because Ben's got a couple, so that's definitely not one of them.

It will decrease testosterone now.

So, you know, I often get this when I go home and visit my family in Wales and I see people that I went to school with and, you know, obviously their lifestyle, I think, you know, not having some form of purpose if these people are doing the same sort of thing. And as we mentioned before with the blue zones, a lot of these people are able to, you know, they interact. The elderly are celebrated as opposed to forgotten. And I think that's one of the contributing factors. I think it was in one of Ben's podcasts with Paul Saladino, and Paul mentioned that he had created like a wolf pack. And I thought, what a good idea. What a great idea, because I very much a recluse. You know, it's funny that I'm in this industry, but I've got a very, very small social circle. I'm just a recluse and that's it. So I thought, well, I don't go out, I don't socialize. What can I do? I'm going to create this wolf pack workout. So, you know, in my garage there, I got the hexa bar, I got the kettlebells. I've got the box, the punch bag, the tire, the hammer. And so every Saturday and Sunday, you know, at 8 o' clock in the morning, I have that warm workout. It gives me one of those contributing factors of forms of purpose. Now doing a lot of the lengthy cardio sessions that I was doing, getting ready for ultramarathon and ironman and Spartan and stuff like that, you know, I was going long and slow. I'd be like for an 80 mile bike ride or an 18 mile run. I know that wasn't a contributing factor for my age. And my testosterone levels were dropping because I'm still doing bodybuilding, I still do. So one of the things I started, I found that by backing off on a lot of my exercise, because exercise isn't so much for vanity purposes for me, it's a necessity. It makes me feel better, I'm a better person to be around. It's my AA batteries in the morning and it's therapeutic. But by backing it down and increasing the intensity, I found has really helped with the aging process as well. So I shortened my periods of my workouts. Like we burnt off like 500 calories this morning in like 26 minutes. You know, that was great. It was perfect. It gave me the therapy that I needed this morning. And you know, I've obviously found that through some of these contributing, contributing factors that we've mentioned earlier that my testosterone levels have now increased. They've started to bounce back. Looking at the forms of the calories that I take in, you know, calories have information and making sure that the information that I'm giving my body is better. You know, we deal with a lot of oxidative stress. So doing whatever I can to counterbalance a lot of the oxidative stress that I'm undertaking here. You know, we have obviously the hormetic responses that we've spoken to before and you know, having that hot and cold therapy I think has really favored me, but in an indirect way of anti aging because stimulating that, you know, that vagus nerve, that vagal nerve tone, going from hot to cold to hot to cold has helped me emotionally so much better to encounter stress, anxiety, work commitments, as opposed to just losing it. Because, you know, Jack, I'm quite anxious but, but it's calmed me so much more and I think that has been a major contributing factor for me to reverse my aging process. So you guys, we're here in India where yoga is huge and meditation, one of the, you know, actually participating, applying, you know, some form of meditation and being present has Been huge as well because me being like a former competitive bodybuilder, which Ben was as well, we're eating six meals a day and we're not always present when we're eating those meals. We're scrolling, we're reading, we're talking, we're just trying to get the calories in. But now I take my time and I did this with Jack the other day. I said we're going to close our eyes for a few minutes and we're going to be thankful for this food. It wasn't like so much praying but just thankful for the food. For the first couple of eyes, for the first couple of minutes with the eyes closed, thinking how this food is going to help nourish me and my stay at my cells, how it's going to make me feel, how I'm going to function when I eat this meal. And then for the next couple of minutes I'm actually looking at all the colors of the rainbow on that plate. And during that time I'm telling myself I'm going to take, take my time and I'm going to take at least 10 minutes to eat this meal. And by doing so again, we're charging into that parasympathetic nervous system, staying really calm, relaxed, chilled and allowing that food to nourish myself.

So I wanted to ask you a question about food choices and anti aging. Now what most of you will probably notice is when you are traveling, when you're at the airport, there's so many bad choices of food that are available to you. I was talking to Chris the other day, we were at the airport around six in the morning and there was like special offers for alcohol. Buy one, get one free. And the fast food joints were busy as hell. It was unbelievable. But I found it so difficult to try and find a sensible food choice.

Even in the lounge?

Even in the lounge. I personally actually carry food with me and I noticed that you had quite a lot of supplements with you yesterday. I'm going to come back to you on this question too because you've been in India for quite a while and you've seen the type of food choices that people have. Would you agree there's a lot of bad food choices out there?

Yeah. And do you all agree that you're foodies too?

Yeah, everyone's a foodie. So what are your thoughts on how to make better food choices for anti aging and can bad food choices make you age a lot faster?

The number one thing to focus on. Well, let me back up. If you could measure you know, throw all the fancy telomere measurements, DNA methylation measurements, etcetera, out the window and the general population could affordably and sustainably measure the two things that I think make the biggest impact on health and longevity. It would be A, glycemic variability and B, inflammation. Now, glycemic variability is simply the extent to which your blood sugar fluctuates up and down during the day and how long that blood glucose stays elevated. And that's actually not a hard nut to crack, right? We already talked about doing things like just not eating any carbohydrates until the very end of the day. Chris talked about doing, you know, 50 air squats when he's, when he's, you know, standing up and going on the airplane to use the loo. And you know, I do the same thing when I'm out at dinner and I get up to use the bathroom. I come back and I'm all red faced and people think I'm constipated. And it was just me doing my air squats in the bathroom, right? Staying with that neat, that low level physical activity during the day, doing things like lifting weights, et cetera, all of these things can keep your glycemic variability under pretty good control. We also know that in these blue zones, which we've mentioned a few times, these herbs and spices that they consume have a natural insulin sensitizing effect that keeps your blood glucose low. So for example, we know that a couple teaspoons of Ceylon cinnamon per day can sensitize your insulin and keep your blood glucose levels low. We know that a shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal can keep your blood sugar levels low in response to that meal. We even know that an alcoholic digestive or a cocktail that's rich in bitters and herbs and spices, one of the things that that does is it enhances what's called your first phase insulin level response, so your blood glucose response to the meal is lower. So I always, you know, like these are little rules throughout the day. 40 air squats when I go to the bathroom at some point during the day. A couple teaspoons of Ceylon cinnamon, a shot of apple cider vinegar. If I'm at home, it's hard for me to get apple cider vinegar on the road. But a lot of times I'll make myself a pre dinner cocktail that has apple cider vinegar in it. I ordered a cocktail at dinner last night and always when I'm out at a restaurant and I order a cocktail, I always get a very bitters Forward cocktail, you know, typically a clean burning, low glycemic index alcohol in it, like gin or mezcal or a little bit of vodka, and then a whole bunch of bitters and herbs and spices and lemon juice. And if the bar has apple cider vinegar, I'll put that in there too. And so I'm getting all these bitters into my body before the meal to keep the blood glucose lower. And that's something that's not that difficult to do. Most people can wrap their head around avoiding sugar, avoiding oat, processed carbohydrates, and doing things during the day that keep the blood sugar stabilized. But I think the biggest issue, the biggest issue is when it comes to inflammation, that second component that I think is so crucial, it's rancid, processed, oxidized vegetable oils that are pretty much a staple in nearly everything from processed and packaged foods that you would get from a gas station to the healthy food section of the airport news station to the finest of restaurants. So what I mean by that is if we are traveling in the airport and we go to buy, let's say you go to the healthy section at the Hudson newsstand, you want to buy sugar snap peas, you turn them over, you look at the label and it says sugar snap peas. And typically two other ingredients are sugar or cane sugar and some form of vegetable oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, Canola Oil Oil, etc. It is a huge problem in our culture these days. When we had dinner last night, we called the chef out and I said, I only want clarified butter or ghee or olive oil. I do not want anything off the menu that's been cooked in vegetable oil. And you have to do that these days because even in Napa Valley, California, five star restaurants, they cut their olive oil, their nice fine, extra virgin olive oil, half and half with canola oil. And the reason this is so important, and I think more important, important in the sugar component, is because, let's say you were to come up to me and you were to say, ben, I've got this nice stick of cotton candy or this entire bowl of white sugar. And you can choose between having this or this, this basket of french fries. I would choose the sugar 10 times out of 10. And the reason for that is because at least I can burn it off. I go take a walk, go hit the gym, you know, at least get it in and out of my bloodstream pretty quickly that vegetable oil is what's going to be used to make my cells and my cell membranes for the next 90 days, right. It becomes part of your body and it vastly inhibits almost every metabolic function that a human being creates. And so if there's anything, anything that you can do from a dietary standpoint for overall longevity and health, it would be to ruthlessly, ruthlessly eliminate vegetables. Vegetable oils. And it has kind of turned me into an annoying person at restaurants, I will admit. But it is that important to my health, my wife's health, my children's health. And there's a reason I'm telling you guys this is vegetable oils are the biggest problem and it's the biggest culprit even in healthy people's diet that I would just ruthlessly eliminate.

Totally agree with that. And it's crazy to think that you will actually go to a nice high end restaurant or hotel and to think that they'll actually use these vegetable oils and these seed oils. But they do. And that's why it's essential that you not just ask the waiter but you ask the chef to find out what they cook it. You know, that's why when I'm eating my chicken tikka here, which is pretty much as adventurous as I get with Indian food, I ask no oil A little bit, A little bit. No oil, no butter and no sauce. You know, butter is okay, but you know, as I mentioned, the vegetable oil is very pro inflammatory. And you know, I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to make any structure function claims, but you know, the one thing that I do notice is that when I was a child back in the 1940s, there was, there wasn't, I didn't know anybody that had, you know, cancer. And all these diseases that seem to be increasing, like diabetes here in India is growing at a disproportionate rate. Maybe that is a contributing factor because of the combination of your fats and a lot of the starch carbs that you have together. I would suggest that you try to separate them whenever you possibly can. But the fat is a huge component and you've got to make sure that, you know, whatever you are eating your food in, you're going to have to burn that calorie off. But some of it does so much more damage than that calorific value, as Ben mentioned, you know, that's within your cell membrane for a good 90 days, you know, and if you are compromising your immune system anyway, that could compromise your immune system in a way that you're going to have to visit the doctor. And sometimes, you know, if you have regrets, it's too late.

Now if, if you mess up, right, so, so we had breakfast here at the hotel. This will be the second time I've insulted this fantastic hotel. I'm sorry I insulted your lights and I'm going to insult your breakfast. You know, you have the, and same thing like the nice whole food salad bar, you know, like, like the hot food section. Almost every hot food, anytime you open up the pot and it's stew or tomatoes or the eggs at the shop, shepherd cooking, etc. Almost guarantee it's vegetable oil. But let's just say you're out, you're hungry, or you find out after the fact it was cooked in vegetable oil. There are two things that you can do to protect your cell membranes. This is based on research by a guy named Dr. James Nicolantonio in the U.S. there are two things you can kind of carry in your vegetable oil health kit to protect you. One is what I already mentioned earlier. Same thing that's in that jello, that glycine. Glycine can help to protect your cells from the damages of vegetable oil. So you can have like some glycine powder or glycine capsules that you travel with. And then the other one is spirulina. So spirulina, about 20 to 30 grams of spirulina, spirulina powder, spiralina capsule, etc. That can also protect you from vegetable oils. Not that you should use that as an excuse to eat them. But if you are in a situation where you just big business dinner, whatever, and you got to have some vegetable oil and you just, you, you can't be that person making a big fuss at the table. Just have some glycine and some spirulina in your bag. When you get back to your hotel room or your house later on, get some in your system or take it beforehand to protect your cells. You can do some things to mitigate the damage at least a little bit.

I got a question for you, Ben, in regards to that as well. Because obviously when the food that's usually accompanying that can be vegetable salad. And as we know, we actually discussed this the other day when you said some of your family that are farmers In Punjab, like 25, 30 years ago, they were spraying their crops with herbicides, pesticides. So understanding that it can be very hard for us to get organic produce here in India. Are you taking anything like an activated charcoal or restore or anything, any sort of binder to help you overcome the effects of food that could be non gmo?

Yeah, it is tricky. Insecticides, herbicides, pesticides pesticides. We know that one of the things they can do is essentially poke little holes in your gut wall. They can cause damage to the villi and also the gut lining. And you know, there are problems with that. Like, like for example, your villi is where a lot of your, your lactase is going to reside, which will digest lactose molecules. A lot of people think they're dairy intolerant. They just have a damaged gut because of herbicide and pesticide exposure. So they don't have enough lactase production in their gut to break down lactose. There's a whole host of issues and allergies and intolerances that people think they have that are essentially just related to gut damage, not to an underlying true intolerance or allergy. Now, regarding protecting yourself from glyphosate, it's very tricky. It's a very nasty molecule. There's one researcher in the US named Dr. Zach Bush, and he has found a certain. It's almost like a probiotic, probably harvested from soil is called lignite. That's something. That's one of the few supplements I have my kids take every day. They take a shot of lignite every day just because I know how prevalent herbicides and pesticides are. And some of them can even contaminate organic produce.

So that's under the name Restore.

Yeah, well, the supplement used to be called Restore. They changed their name recently and it's called Ion Biome. Ion Biome. But I suspect, and this is not based on research, but what I suspect, suspect that because that's a soil based bacteria, that if you have a healthy microbiome and you're eating a wide variety of fermented foods, possibly even taking a probiotic, even though I think taking a wide variety of fermented foods is even more important. And I'll tell you why if I remember to after this or you remind me. But I think that that could be protective against some of the ravages of glyphosate. Just because we know that that can help to restore the lining of a leaky gut. The reason I say that about fermented foods versus probiotics, I've recently begun to change my stance on this because it just makes sense to me, even though I haven't seen a lot of research behind it. When you take a probiotic capsule, think of your gut, because this is basically what it is. It's just a giant garden hose, right? A giant garden hose that travels through your body, that's essentially open to the environment. And if you take a probiotic, you're essentially sprinkling little parts of your gut with that probiotic, wherever it might happen to hit as it's traveling through the gut. If you happen to be even taking a probiotic that will survive the acidic nature of the stomach, and there's very few that do. There's one in the US called Seed, and they wrap their probiotic in an algae that helps it to actually make its way into the small intestine. They even found it can make its way into the colon. But yet you're essentially like fairy nesting, like sprinkle little bits of bacteria in the intestine. But when you think about eating like a big batch of kefir or kimchi or yogurt or sauerkraut or any of the wonderful fermented vegetables that you have here in India, you've got this big fiber bolus chock full of bacteria that's slowly making its way through the gut and just painting the entire inside of that hose. And so for me, I suspect, and again, I haven't seen any research on this yet, but I suspect that if you look at the microbiome of someone who's eating a wide variety of fermented foods, it's going to be more diverse and it's probably going to be a healthier gut than someone who's just eating probiotics. That's actually one of the things that concerns me about this recent carnivore diet craze is they talk about how fiber may not be necessary, but I have yet to see the microbiome of someone who's eating an all meat diet versus someone who has a wide variety of plants and fermented foods and herbs and spices in their diet. And one of the things they say in the carnivore diet is you eliminate those foods because plants have these natural built in protective mechanisms in them. But the fact is you can deactivate a lot of those through fermentation. If you have one of the sourdough forms of a flatbread, automatically by it being fermented in a sourdough medium, you've got lower gluten content and you have lower phytic acid content. So you've pre digested a lot of that bread already. If you have hummus and that chickpea has been soaked, and preferably after being soaked and rinsed, pressure cooked, you deactivate a lot of the lectins that could be in that hummus. And that form of a hummus would be healthier for you than one that's simply made from chickpeas that have just been taken out of the bag and cooked right. So a lot of this comes down to the plant preparation methods. And I don't think a high intake of plants is going to be very harmful for your gut or for your body if you're soaking and fermenting and sprouting and preparing them the way that our ancestors would have. So that's something important to think about when you're consuming food is this slow preparation versus fast preparation method.

You'll love it when we go to Mumbai then because there's a restaurant right next to the hotel that does a very slow fermented bread.

Amazing.

It's pretty cool. I'm just going to add one thing before I give this mic back to you, Jack, but I know that now over the past few years, kombucha has become readily available here and people are just drinking gallons of kombucha thinking this is all the fermented food that I need and just drink loads of this. Now I got this from Ben where for over a year he was all about a year. He was wearing a 24 hour blood glucose monitor. I felt so interested. It's fascinating. So I thought I'm going to do that and quantify over a period of time. You may have seen me training with a patch on my arm and to see that blood sugar response. And I was absolutely shocked and very disappointed because I really love my kombucha as well. How quickly, how high that raised my blood sugar levels. Now I think that was a combination of the sheer amount of sugar in there and the carbonation as well. So be very wary of other fermented things such as your kombucha.

Yeah, it's a good point. And again, last thing I'll say before you kick in here because I know we're going for a long period of time. I talked about glycemic variability and I also wore a continuous blood glucose monitor for about a year just to see how certain things affected my blood glucose levels. I found out a lot of things. But the most interesting fact that I'll share with you, the number one thing that I did that was would reduce my blood glucose the entire day, all the way up to dinner, reduce that glycemic variability the entire day. You know what it was best thing you can do for your blood glucose control the rest of the day?

Movement.

Movement helps something different. It was surprising me, the melon, five minutes of cold in the morning, cold shower, cold soak, cold dunk, you know In a river or lake or ocean, anything that gets you cold. And it's. If you don't want to get cold, I was actually just with one of my clients in Bangalore and opened his freezer and he has all these cold packs in his freezer because per my instructions, because he works an office job and can't go jump in the lake during the day. He owns a cool fat burner which is a vest that you put on and you just take these ice packs and you put them into the vest and it keeps your body cold for 30 or 40 minutes while you're starting your emails for the day or whatever. So that's of kind of a hack if you're not able to get in the water. But yeah, cold at the beginning of the day stabilizes your blood glucose all day long. And furthermore, if you just eat a big meal, big cheat meal, and you're just like, oh crap, I gotta, like, not only do I have to get sleep tonight, but I know my blood glucose is gonna be through the roof. Just go take a cold shower. It's fantastic at reducing your blood glucose.

Yeah. Unfortunately the showers aren't here as cold as they are. It's okay. And you have to make with what you got. Now, are your supplements available? Kion supplements here available to people, people in, here in India?

No, we pretty much are fulfilling domestically. Most people who use them overseas either are just getting a whole bunch when they travel to the US and checking their bags and bring it back, bring back a whole bunch with them or just paying shipping and doing a bulk order. I wish they were, but not right now.

Well, this is going to be a shameless plug because both of our supplements actually have ingredients in it that help with the blood sugar regulation. With one of your products, what was the name of it that has a bit of melon extract?

Yeah, our most popular fat loss supplement. Which is ironic because it's not actually burning fat. It's technically a blood sugar control supplement. Right. Because sugar, assuming that your, your liver is already full of calories, automatically all the sugar gets turned to is fatty acids and it gets stored on the waistline. So with this supplement, supplement does is it lowers your blood glucose response and causes more of that sugar to get sucked up by the liver and sucked up by the muscle. And it's called Kion Lean. And it's, it's essentially just a, like a bitter melon extract with a few different minerals that lower your blood glucose after a meal. And that's, that's a very popular blood sugar control Supplement.

Yeah, and I've actually, I've actually used that as well in combination with the one that I have and it's called Clean Burn and it has an ingredient that's from here, incidentally, Geneva, Geneva Sylvester in there. And so those are a couple of good blood sugar regulators that you can consider.

We get a lot of questions regarding intermittent fasting and I do see during my journey in India, especially people who find it difficult to stay on track. There are many accountability tools that you can use to try and keep yourself motivated. And there is a lot of confusion on what breaks are fast. But before we get to that, I want to ask you what does fasting actually do to you and how beneficial is it?

I mean, I feel like we talked about fasting a little bit already in terms of the fact that it enhances what's called cellular autophagy. When you are putting a bunch of calories into your body, your cells go into cleanup mode. And we know that the cellular autophagy now has been linked to increased longevity. So it has direct anti aging effect by allowing your body to detoxify and to clean up cells more readily. It's pretty much that simple. I mean, there are other benefits. Like obviously if you're not eating, your glycemic variability is going to be lower because you're getting fewer blood sugar fluctuations during the day. But I think probably one of the biggest confusions with fasting, the reason more people don't do it, is they synonymize fasting with calorie restriction and the two are not the same. You do not need to be cold and hungry and libido less your entire life because you are restricting calories. Like I mentioned, I only do that four times a year for five days. Restrict calories.

Right.

But on all the other days I eat 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day. But again, I've got the 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast. All those calories are compressed and it's just three meals, right? So there's a long period of time between meals during which the blood glucose can re stabilize. And from a biological standpoint, that's all that's happening. Now, of course we know, hearkening back to what I was saying way back at the beginning of this panel, that in all these blue zones and in many other longevity hotspots, fasting is a spiritual discipline. We hear about the benefits of a Mediterranean diet and how we should all be eating oodles and olive oil and fish and cheese disease. But what they don't tell you is that There are periods of pretty significant protein restriction, there's periods of significant religious fasting, religious observation of fasting. There's fasting just like woven into this diet, which I think lends a great deal to its health effects. And in addition, fasting is a way of training your spirit, right? It's not just training self control, but in many cases it can be used as a way to optimize things like meditation or yoga or prayer. We know that in the Christian church when they would go to prayer, when something needs to be brought before God, a lot of times it was combined with restricting calories, with fasting, with going to an uncomfortable place so you could more readily focus on speaking with God. And I think that there's something to be said for the spiritual benefits of fasting as well. You know, it's just a way of kind of like, well, to pardon the expression, sorry if I offended anyone. It kind of makes you learn how to shut up your inner and learn how to deal with hunger and focus your mind. So there's some definite mental and spiritual.

Benefits as well with the fasting. Like I got into that. It was funny. Up until two years ago, I hadn't missed a meal for 18 years. After the first year I was pumped because, you know, there wasn't much traveling going on. At that time I was living in Australia. But then a year after that and a year after that, I put so much pressure on my shoulders, I thought I cannot miss a meal. And I patted myself on the back for not missing a meal for 18 years. But then several years ago or a couple of years ago actually I went for a colonoscopy and I had to fast for it. So I thought, oh, there it is and I've missed my meal. So that's when I thought, well, this is the chicken point that I need to start experimenting with controlled time, time related eating, intermittent fasting. And the way that I actually do it is very different to some others. I do what I call like a controlled fasting method because my goal is a little bit different. Of course I want to increase autophagy, but you know, the way that I'm training right now, I think I fasted pretty much every day for eight or 10 months. Last year wasn't a joke, but now I'm not fasting as much. Only fast like once or twice a week. However, what I was doing and what I'm doing now is what I call a controlled intermittent fast. So I'm actually supplementing with essential amino acids during that time and fermented Glutamine during that time. It really helps with. I find my gut permeability, but I am trying to stay. I'm trying to ward off catabolism. I'm trying to stay in a somewhat anabolic state whilst I'm doing this because I am still training hard, I am still trying to want to gain muscle. Probably for the next maybe eight or ten weeks, I'll follow this particular mass building, if you will, cycle. So I do what's called a controlled intermittent fast. And I never used to have my clients that want to compete in bodybuilding or want to put on muscle to actually fast, but now I do and I find that the responses that I get from those clients is much better. They're actually cleaning house, they're taking a stress away from their digestive system. And let's face it, if you're eating five or six meals a day, that's a lot of stress, a lot of stress. So I find that that's really helped with that gut permeability. It's helped with them feel overall better. And up until I started doing this fasting myself, I honestly thought that I was going to go the way of my father, where, you know, he's not like fat by any means, but he's got that typical beer belly without drinking beer, you know what I mean? And I was starting to feel bloated and I started hitting ABs, thinking I need to work my transverse abdominis, maybe I've got a weaker transverse. But as soon as I started fasting, I found that my gut felt that much better. I was cleaning house, you know, so that's one of the things that I do. And I know I wanted to just extend what JAG was mentioning earlier on, you know, how do we stay on track? How do we stay committed and disciplined with the persistence in order to apply all of these methods? Well, funny you should say that. I do a lot of things that I don't always want to do. If we were to do what we always want to do, then chances are we're never going to be in shape, we're never going to have our health. So that's why, one of the reasons, not just for the benefit of health, that I'll have a cold shower every morning and I get my clients to have a cold shower every morning. That's a form of discipline. Not hitting that snooze button and getting up earlier in the morning is another form of discipline. If I can get up at 4:00am, then surely you can get up at 7:00am, you know, that's a form of discipline. And not just throughout the week, but on the weekends. Having that consistency within your life definitely, definitely helps. And fasting is just one of those forms that you can practice even if you don't want it for the autophagy reasons, or cleaning house for discipline. For discipline. And don't think that you're going to wither away by doing it. It's not going to happen. I don't know where Ryan is now, but he was sat there a second ago. There he is, my man. Like, he eats one meal a day, one meal a day. And he's in phenomenal shape, carries a lot of muscle and trains exceptionally hard. But he does it smart. And, you know, it's something that definitely should be applied as that form of discipline that has a transverse effect in other areas of your life.

Ben, what is autophagy?

For the benefit of those who don't.

Know, it's basically the cleanup of metabolic waste products from within the cell. Sometimes it means that a cell is actually turning over and dying. This natural process, which your cells actually need to die. You got to get rid of old cells. That's one aspect of autophagy. Another aspect is simply removing metabolic waste products and repairing things like the cell wall. So, you know, you think about it, you know, it's kind of related to what Chris was explaining. Think about it as though you are exercising. You're exercising and exercising and exercising all day long. At some point you break away and you recover and you repair and you sleep. Now, recovery, repair, and that sleep, that would be the time during which your body is recovering from all that breakdown that you've been doing. And essentially, that's almost like the lifestyle corollary to cellular autophagy. And it's something I'm guilty of having inhibited in people for a long period of time, because I was that personal trainer who would show up at the office with my yogurt, my apple, my protein bar, my chicken, my rice, my broccoli, my second protein bar, and just snack and graze all day long, because I was convinced that that was what was necessary to not only keep the metabolism elevated, but also to allow the body to maximize protein synthesis and muscle gain after a workout. But we now know that there aren't many metabolic benefits from eating more than three meals a day. Many people are doing just fine with the omad, with the one meal a day protocol. And there's also some interesting research that shows that even after a hard weight training session, if you wait for a couple hours to Eat, you actually get a big bump up in growth hormone and testosterone. So really the only people to whom I recommend a significant post workout feeding are a for people who want to really maximize muscle gain. Like a bodybuilder who's trying to put on a lot of muscle, or football players trying to gain 20 pounds for the season, or someone who's doing a two a day workout. Right. If you're working out within eight hours of your first workout, then you should eat after your first workout so that you're adequately replenishing some of the nutrients and some of the amino acids that you need for the second workout. But aside from cases like that, there's no need to just be, you know, face something all day long.

Thank you. I'd just like to say there are quite a lot of people who message us on a regular basis and ask for accountability tools on how they can stay on track. Does anyone time they're fast, like with an app or anything here? Fantastic.

Great.

Well, I just wanted to add that I use an app. There are a lot of people here who want to kind of keep a record of their fast because it feels good. If you keep a streak of 7, 10, 15 fasts, it does feel good. So I continuously use an app to try and measure the hours that I do. I try and do a 16, 8 myself, 6, 16 hour fast myself. And fortunately with the days that we're busy, I'm able to kind of track and do longer. Almost 18 hours today. So accountability tools. There's a lot of online tools that are available like apps.

So can I, can I be morbid for a second? Some people think it's morbid, but I actually have an app called Countdown. I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but basically if I put in here, maybe I think that I'll live to 100 years old, but maybe 80, 90, you can put in the years that you feel that you'll live to. And you can see how many meals that you have left based on how many you eat per day, how many weekends you have left, how many days you have left. There's all sorts on here. How many times to have sex? I haven't got many actually. How many sunrises to see how many trips based on how many trips are going to take a year. And I find this very, very efficient for me, of course, if I want to have downtime, that is scheduled downtime, but it allows me to be that much more efficient and be present within the conversation that we're having now, within the Time that I spend with my loved ones, you know, and the time of my meals to make sure that that meal is going to be nourishing for me because my time is going. My workouts aren't there just to show up. They're going to be quality workouts because I need to be efficient with my time. So that's just another.

What's that app called?

Countdown.

Countdown. I like that. That's. That's something that's huge in our life and huge in our home. In our practice with my children, children and my family is a gratitude practice. And write it down every single day, one thing that you are grateful for, but a constancy of gratitude throughout the day. That app's amazing for something like that. Like, for me, recently it's been breath, breath, every breath counts. Be grateful for every single breath. And this also means that even something as simple as, like, the way that you breathe when you're exercising, or like every breath that you take while exercising gets, can dictate the benefits of that workout. Like, I try to do a lot of nasal breathing when I work out. I talk about when I walk. I try to breathe out for a longer period of time than I breathe in. I mean, I don't know how many times we breathe during the day. You could probably figure it out with a respiratory rate of 12 to 16 breaths per minute. But this idea of even being cognizant of every single breath and then of course, as Chris just alluded to it, kind of makes you more aware. And I think also I'm grateful for, you know, every meal, every breath, every time you lay your head to sleep, everything.

Yeah, it's overlooked as well. You know, it's like when I started getting ready for triathlon, I just started running, assuming that I know how to run. Because we all started walking and running as kids, so we all assume we know how to run. And I couldn't believe how inefficient I was with my run. I read a book called the Art of Running and then started to visualize that I had a sphere inside my stomach. If I leaned forward, it would fall to the side. It would fall. A lot of things went into that efficiency of the running that allowed me to be better. Same with swimming, you know, you just think, oh, my God, I'm so unfit when you start. Well, actually, no, it's inefficient. You're not hydrodynamic. And it's the same with breathing. Because we've been breathing all our lives, we assume we know how to Breathe. But when you're conscious of it, you realize how shallow you are with your breath. You're not oxygenating your brain and your body as you once as you could. And I think Wim Hof, they did some studies on him where you're able to increase your ph by about 8. So, you know, so you'd see a lot of power lifters and strength lifters hyperventilating before workout. And I think he actually encourages people to do that before the ice as well, because then you can acclimatize yourself to the pain that you're about to encounter throughout that set that much more. So there's so much that you can benefit for breath within itself. You just have to be conscious of it and practice of it. And nasal breathing, I think a lot of people in India actually practice that. Correct. I've seen a lot of people do it in parks and in the gyms and stuff. So it's great that you guys are doing it. You know, spread the word.

You guys know why that is, why nasal breathing is so beneficial? In addition to the CO2 tolerance I talked about, you're filtering the air, you're better oxygenating the air, you're heating the air when you breathe into your nose, but you also breathe through your diaphragm when you breathe through your nose. And when you breathe through your mouth, you tend to breathe through your chest. Your chest has pressure receptors in it called baroreceptors. And those baroreceptors directly activate a release of cortisol. So by doing something as simple as breathing through your nose, you're naturally activating your parasympathetic nervous system. And you can train yourself to get to the point where you can do this during a pretty hard exercise session, this deep nasal breathing. And it actually really enhances your oxygen uptake and the filtering of the air, and also your ability to be able to stay calm under stressful conditions such as a hard exercise session.

So.

So there's a lot to be said for nasal breathing, and there's even a popularity, at least in the US I don't know how many people are doing this here yet, but a lot of biohackers are doing things like mouth taping when they go to bed to force themselves to keep their mouth shut when they're asleep and engage in this nasal breathing. I did it for a little while, but I didn't enjoy it too much because my wife and I like to chat as we're falling asleep at night, say things to each other. So I eventually kind of kind of forward the mouth breathing strips. But I think they helped me kind of learn after using them for a little while, how to breathe through my nose. Then you can kind of wean yourself off of them. But yeah, there's a lot of benefits of this nasal breathing concept.

Thank you, Ben. So I know there will be quite a few questions, but just before we go to the questions, health optimization, where do you stop?

All right, so we talked about a lot of stuff just now. We talked about a lot of stuff. And yeah, that's a question that I get a lot like, oh man, there's so many things I could do. Taping my mouth before I go to bed and putting on these glasses and using the app that shows me how many times I have left to have sex. And like, where do I start? And you know, here's what I think. There's a wonderful book called the Body Electric by Robert Becker that kind of showcases how our entire body is essentially a battery, right? Like, like every cell operates on an electrochemical gradient, right? A negative charge inside the cell and a positive charge on the, on the exterior part of the cell membrane. And if we can engage in specific things that optimize our electrochemical gradient, I think that's the very first step. That's the foundational principle. Assuming you've got healthy diet in place and you're moving throughout the day, you need to pay attention to optimizing your body's electrochemical balance and keeping your human battery charged. Okay, One example I can give to you of that is we talked about non native EMF, Wi Fi cell phone signals, 5G, 4G. One of the things that happens when you are exposed to these type of non native EMF signals is you get a shot sharp influx of calcium into the cell. Calcium as a positively charged ion can actually affect the electrochemical balance to make a cell that's supposed to be negatively charged on the inside go from what's called a millivolt potential negative 60 millivolts to negative 20 or negative 10 or even higher than zero. And this is why, you know, especially when people are hanging out around a lot of non native EMF after airline travel, you know, if you bid your off with a lot of WI fi routers, one of the best things that you can do is to use magnesium as a supplement because magnesium will directly offset that influx of calcium. That's just one example. But here's what I think the best foundational principles to start with are if you're going to think of your human body as a battery A we know that the Earth, every time it's struck by lightning, accumulates a whole bunch of negative ions from that lightning. And lightning is striking the planet all the time, which means that the Earth is chock full of negative ions that help to restore that electrochemical balance. This means that going outside barefoot or wearing special shoes called earthing or grounding shoes that allow you to be in contact with the Earth while still having your feet protected, using things like grounding and earthing technology, such as grounding mats or earthing mats that allow you to pull those negative ions from the planet of the Earth. I think that's incredibly important. I think everybody should least be going outside barefoot at some point during the day to get in touch with our mother Earth. Number two would be sunlight or photons of light. It could be like those red light panels that I talked about. It could be getting outside in sunlight like I was talking about a long time ago in this talk. But we know that sunlight directly charges up the body with electricity as well. And we actually know now, based on newer research, that the human body can photo sign synthesize very similar to a plant. If you have dark compounds in your body, things like melanin, the sunlight interacts with those to actually allow you to produce ATP in the absence of calories. So for example, if you're going to go for a walk in the sunshine or get exposed to light, you can use something like chlorella, or you can eat a salad with a whole bunch of different greens in it. You can consume chaga mushroom, which is very high in melanin content, and you can actually further enhance your body's ability to be able to produce energy and maintain a proper electrochemical balance in response to sunlight. Right? So we've got being in touch with the Earth, being in sunlight, Another couple of things that really help to enhance that electron flow are regular heat practice, like a sauna practice, and regular cold practice, like a cold shower, right? So I think everybody should be doing some kind of a deep sweat at least once a week, preferably a few times a week. Everybody should be doing something like a cold shower every day, right? So we have the Earth or earthing, grounding, we have the sunlight, we have heat, we have cold. And then finally, the things that actually carry electrolytes and minerals and charges through the body are water and salt, right? So consuming really good, clean, pure water with a high amount of minerals in it, or putting little pinches of sea salt into that water, salting your food with a really good mineral rich salt, it Gives your body a lot of the charged particles that it needs to maintain a normal electrochemical balance. So if you're already moving well and you're eating well, the best things you can do are grounding and earthing, sunlight, heat, cold water and minerals. And I think that's the perfect place to start. That's going to cover 90% of your bases when it comes to optimizing your health.

I think Ben pretty much covered absolutely everything there. But just in regards to hydration, remember you guys have coconut water here and it's the closest hydration flu that you can have to blood plasma. Take advantage of that, you know, hydrate yourself. One of the things that I've noticed, especially in the UK and here in India, people drink coffee and tea and think that's hydrating them. In fact, it isn't. It can actually have a diuretic effect and it isn't just the volume of fluid that you're drinking. I noticed when I was living here, I was sweating all the time. I'm a sweater anyway, and just drinking volumes of fluid. I was just getting bloated, but I wasn't hydrating myself. If anything, I was diluting myself of the proper mineral balance. But having coconut water can be one of the hacks that you guys can apply very easily here. And in regards to the earthing, definitely overlooked. I know it's very difficult in populated places here to find yourself some grass and earth yourself. But there are, you know, earthy mats. I've actually brought one with me to put in a bed that I sleep on, and I've got one at home that's there permanently. I actually have what's called, like earthy bars on my shoes at the moment. So when I'm walking, you know, I am actually getting somewhat earth at the same time. And you know, where this is all going, where, you know, biohacking is going, I have no idea at the moment. But I can only assume that a lot of them are going to start getting stacked together. You know, we're going to have sensory deprivation tanks with photobiomodulation with earthing with inside. I can see that's probably going to be one of the things that we're going to see in the future.

Awesome. Thank you and love to open up to any questions. So please do stand and ask any questions that you may have.

This is originating from one of your articles where you mentioned injuring your lower back recently while deadlifting. And then you could recover very quickly. I don't know. Do you remember what I'm talking About. Okay. So from there, when I read that, I was led to some other article where I read about being able to. To brace your core in a way that even under load, you could have some traction in the spine. I know this is a little more specific than what you were talking about, but are you familiar with any such method? Because I can't find any way to brace your core where you can still be under spinal traction. Under load. Yeah. I mean, core bracing, when you are lifting, that's. That's essentially a breath strategy. Right? You're basing, basically creating the equivalent of a weightlifting belt by contracting a lot of your inspiratory and expiratory muscles and core muscles by. When you're lifting the weight off the ground, starting here, expanding the ribs, stabilizing everything, and then lifting. And I think one of the best ways to learn how to properly expand the ribcage and the brace is a form of training called foundation training. It's made popular by a. By a chiropractic doctor named Dr. Eric Goodman in the US and that core foundation training is just a series of moves that you can do. It's fantastic for rehabilitating the low back, for decompressing the discs when people sit for long periods of time. I use core foundation moves as one of the little stretches that I'll sprinkle in throughout the day. But that teaches you how to breathe in such a way that braces your spine, and you can take that same breath work and carry it into the gym and use it when heavy lifting. So that's what I would recommend. Thanks, guys. Could you talk a little bit more about the strategies around reversing blue light damage? Because you've talked a lot about prevention, but reversing that damage would be great. You mean like actual retinal damage from blue light, skin damage, Aging damage caused through blue light? Well, I mean, you know, we know that collagen and elastin fibers, those can respond pretty well to red light therapy or like near infrared or red light. So that could be one strategy. We know that there are some peptides that can help with that as well, like BPC157 or TB500. We know that for the eyes, there's another Russian peptide called bizomitin that they've actually used to reverse blindness from retinal damage in rodent models. Those are a few things that come to mind.

And.

We also know that there's a wide variety of compounds that almost act like edible sunscreen, but at the same time can protect and repair the skin. Probably the most potent of those would be astaxanthin. Astaxanthi is something you use as a supplement. I used to use it when I was racing Ironman Hawaii to help heal my skin after sunburn. I take about 40 grams of astaxanthin a day. So that along with a wide variety, like a full sector of antioxidants business would probably be pretty helpful as well. So those are a few of the.

Places that start a tablet called Macu Gold plus, which has got astaxanthin, zeaxanthin and butyl. All three combined.

Oh, fantastic. They developed that for macular degeneration.

It is.

That's a good mix.

What's the brand called? Macu Gold plus. M A C U G O L D. Gold plus. It's the only one in India. Thank you. And I know it because my cousin brother heads that division and I use it.

Awesome.

Can I ask a question?

Absolutely.

So if you look at the disease pattern in the world today, majority of the diseases are autoimmune diseases. And to the extent that 70% of the death in the entire world is caused by autoimmune diseases. So can you just tell us something about how we can start looking at this and trying to stop and then reverse it?

Autoimmune disease, in my opinion, most of the time, and there are exceptions to this, but it comes down to the gut and inflammation. Chronic stress, chronic inflammation that simply renders you more sensitive to any autoimmune type of issue. And so I think one of the best things you can do is to incorporate a lot of the strategies that we talked about from a lifestyle standpoint today, such as breath work and, you know, modern vegetable oils, things like that. But I also think healing the gut and in a diet that eliminates a lot of the common autoimmune triggers, like, I mean, heck, you know, just like in the US Monocrop, they is an issue here, like wheat, corn, soy, etc. Not only is it destroying our planet and turning all our soil into dirt, but it's also presenting our gut with a host of compounds that are either laced with oversized pesticides that can cause the gut damage, or large protein molecules that can cross that blood barrier and cause immune reaction, with things like gluten and lectins being two of the more well known Polish molecules that can do that. So when it comes to the gut, there are certain things that can help to heal the lining of the gut that I'm a huge fan of, especially when paired with A diet that restricts a lot of those common autoimmune triggers. So if you look at something like the Paleo autoimmune diet, right, you're eliminating for a certain period of time, legumes, corn, soy, wheat, a lot of these things that we know if someone has a compromised gut can be an issue. Now, where I differ from the Paleo diet or the carnivore diet or of these other diets that can be helpful for autoimmune conditions is I don't think in most cases they're a diet you need to follow for life. Right. We're talking about like 12 to 20 weeks that you would follow those and you would also, at the same time engage in practices that help to heal the lining of the gut. Some of my favorites for that would be, for example, colostrum. We know that babies are born with a slightly leaky gut lining. And one of the best things to heal that gut lining is a little bit of colostrum that comes as part of the first part of an animal's breast milk. And you can also buy goat milk or cow milk. Colostrum that you can take as a supplement. Bone broth is another perfect example. Glycine and the amino acids, these are very nourishing to the gut. If you're vegan or plant based, you can do something like a chia seed slurry, like a chia seed gel that can achieve a similar effect. There are supplements like L glutamine that can also do a really good job at helping to heal the gut. That one that we talked about earlier, the ion biome product that we talked about when we were discussing herbicide and pesticide exposure, that's something else that can help to heal the gut. But I think the 1, 2 combo of eliminating a lot of the triggers, healing the gut and then decreasing chronic stress and decreasing chronic inflammation, when you put all that stuff together, I think that's what's going to make a big impact on autoimmune issues. And obviously one of the reasons that autoimmune. Autoimmune is such a big issue. So many people are walking around chronically stressed, inflamed, with compromised guts, and if we could fix that stuff, we'd have a big dent in autoimmune issues. We talked on one point called anti aging. So my question is in regards to inflammations. So we see many of the doctors like Dr. Michael Kreger or Steven Grundy and even Dr. Kate Shanahan saying that eliminating animal based food from your diet is essentially help in reducing inflammations. So where do you stand on vegetarianism and veganism? It depends. So animal based products, we know from a variety of studies can contribute to things like cardiovascular disease and cancer. And the reason for that is twofold. A, the actual source of the animal itself, right? Whether it's antibiotics and hormones, whether it's processing and smoking and doing things that can increase the number of carcinogens in that meat, grilling at high temperatures, blackening, etc. We know that just like plants, as I was talking about earlier, need to be prepared properly with soaking and sprouting and fermenting. The same thing should be said for animals. They need to be properly sourced and they need to be properly prepared for them not to be damaging to the human body. And furthermore excess consumption of meat products. And this relates to what I was saying about the Mediterranean diet and how certain periods of the week or the year there's, there's lower amounts of protein consumed. Because we know if you're constantly overfeeding with protein, you're eating large amounts of the amino acid leucine and you're getting a big activation of mtor which can with constantly elevated it be something that could be too pro growth, too anabolic, too potentially carcinogenic. Right? So there are issues if you're eating an omnivorous diet or an animal based diet, if you're not choosing your animal products and preparing them properly and also if you're not paying attention to the amount of protein that you're actually consuming and the frequency with which you're consuming it. Now we can also look at the environmental mental impact and also just the animal cruelty aspects of a lot of animal operations these days. Everything from CAFO feedlots to, you know, the way that chickens are very, very quickly bred and raised and we produce a large impact on the environment, the way we raise animals versus say like regenerative farming and crop rotation and you know, grass fed, grass finished, lots of for animals. So the issue when we look at veganism and vegetarianism, which can be a way to get rid of some of those issues with animal products, is we introduce other issues. We introduce issues such as we know the human body needs omega 3 fatty acids, especially in the form of DHA which can be difficult to get from plants. We know that the human body needs creatine, carnitine, carnosine, taurine, vitamin B12 and a host of other nutrients that are, that can be difficult to attain on a plant based diet unless you're in a very intelligent way supplementing that diet, not to say that it can't be done, it's just that many plant based eaters don't do things like soak, sprout, ferment and also supplement in such a way that can allow that diet to be healthy. Can you be healthy on a plant based diet by eating it the right way? Absolutely. You just have to. It's a little bit more difficult to get every everything you need from a plant based diet unless you're very careful. So for me personally I eat an omnivorous diet, right? So I'm cognizant of my protein intake. I always know the source from which the animal that I'm eating actually came. But then I also eat a lot of plants, I eat a lot of herbs, I eat a lot of spices and I also make sure those are soaked and sprouted and fermented so they're not doing damage to the gut. So I think that in most cases many people can thrive on an omnivorous diet. And we can also get into self quantification. There are certain people for example, that are undermethylators and they need a higher amount of methyl groups in their diet. And for those people, they might not feel so good unless they have some of those animal rich methyl compounds in their diet versus an over methylator who might do better on a plant based based diet. We know that certain people, for example, have. Let me think of another example for you. Well, you know, I guess I could use something like a ketogenic diet as an example, you know, and this is more about just like dietary customization more than just animal versus plant based diet. But certain people have poor gallbladder and liver function. Certain people have an FTO gene that predisposes them to a high amount of weight gain inflammation in response to saturated fats. Certain people have an APOE gene that dictates a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's in response to a high fat diet. And these would be people who, although a ketogenic diet would work just fine for their friend or their neighbor, would actually not be a great idea for them. So ultimately it comes down to the fact that A, we must be cognizant of the way that our food is prepared and fill in the gaps in our diet if we've chosen to eat a diet such as a plant based diet and eliminate some food groups and B, we should be aware of the individuality of our own bodies and choose a diet that's most precisely correlated to our genetics and our blood work. So we know that what we're eating is for us and not because it's coming from the most popular, hottest diet book that currently is on the market. And I think those are some of the things we think about when we're eating. We can do a better job of maintaining health. And the last thing I want to say is that, you know, no matter the diet, again, if we look at these blue zones, there are characteristics that we see over and over again, whether you are in, you know, Sardinia eating a Mediterranean diet or whether you're in Loma Linda eating a plant based diet. And these are things like Chris was talking about, eating in a parasympathetic state, chewing your food, blessing the meal, being grateful for the meal, eating with people, not eating while you're driving through traffic, but sitting down with family. We know that there are elements of fasting and periods of time of protein restriction or calorie restriction in these diets. We know that many of them include a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices. And so if you look at these patterns, you know, fasting, eating in a parasympathetically driven state, putting a wide variety of foods, you know, we can at least structure our diet in such a way, no matter what the source of the food is, that kind of mimics what we know to be things that make any type of eating healthy for a human.

Thank you, Ben.

Thank you, Chris.

We have a round of applause for these two gentlemen. So I'm sure there will be many more questions that you may have. And as I mentioned at the start, Ben has just released a new publication. Could you just remind us one where.

They can get that from?

Yeah, the book, which, I mean 650 pages and there's another 400 pages on the book website. It'll answer a lot of your questions. So for here In India, it's Boundlessbook.com book depository. Boundlessbook.com book deposit. I also coach and consult with people from all over the world via Skype. I talk to people constantly. I'm usually doing about 20 sessions a week talking to people about everything from fat loss and muscle gain to blood work and labs to sports performance parameters to, you know, anything that someone wants to delve into with me. And so that's not just for people in the U.S. i do that all over the world. And then I think most of you sounds like are kind of word my podcast, my blog. But if you want to, you know, read what I put out or listen to me interview people way smarter than me twice a week for a good 60 to 90 minutes. That's@BenGreenfield Fitness.com and offer for, like, coaching and stuff like that. It's just Ben greenfieldfitness.com. no, it isn't anymore. Just Benrecoaching.com if you want to use my services and get on a phone call with me or have me write out a training plan or a nutrition plan for you or anything like that, I'm happy to, happy to help out. So that's Benrepo coaching.com for that stuff.

I'll be interviewing somebody way smarter than me tomorrow. Chris, we get a lot of people ask questions. I know that you recently started a service online. I'd just like you to tell people about HealthKick.

Yeah, so I just recently started Health Kick. That's spelled K I K healthkick dot com. This is. We'll have a new website. Actually, it's currently going through a revamp over the next couple of months. So this is, you know, a lot of people. I put out a lot of free content, as you guys know. You know, on my caged muscle website, flatbodybuilder.com are people that wanted additional content specifically to cover specific areas I'm pretty much piling my way through at the moment. So I've just Now completed like 15, 16, 17 ebooks over the past seven months to put on this platform. It's a subscription. There's a lot of free content. There's a subscription model there as well to various video series that I put up, which Paul. Video series from that video series and coaching on there as well. So, yeah, that's it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, guys.

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