Building Muscle & Testosterone On A Ketogenic Diet, Food Combining, Psychedelic Experimentation, Natural Depression Remedies & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Building muscle and testosterone on a ketogenic diet. Food. Combining psychedelic experimentation, natural depression, remedies, and much more.

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

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

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

Hey, Rachel, I know you always have some kind of a special drinky drink that you drinky drink during the show. Not that you're. Not that you're an alcoholic, but what are you diving into tonight?

I love a fancy drink. I have Tianchi this morning, and it's probably my favorite. It's been my absolute substitute for coffee for, like, the past month, and it's just doing me wonder.

Tian Chi, I was actually, I was with your husband at an. At an entrepreneurial event last week. And as I'm getting on the airplane, somebody taps me on the shoulder and I turn around and there's Jacob. Your husband's standing there. He has a packet of that Tianchi stuff, and he's just, like, offering it to me out of the goodness of his heart, so I took it.

I love that he offered you Tianci when you introduced him to Tianci, but he told me that you.

When I probably have an entire duffel bag of the stuff.

Yeah, exactly. You told me that you ripped open the packet, threw your head back, and dumped it straight into your mouth.

Yes. I hear that's how they do it. That's how they do it in the Orient when they take adaptogenic herbs.

One way to do it.

Last time I was with you, you were drinking the whiskey thing with the cherry in it. What was that called?

An Old Fashioned.

Old Fashioned. That's usually your drink of choice.

It is, though. It's got so much sugar in it, and I always wake up with a sugary. It's not good, but it tastes so good and I feel so fancy.

That's that damn cherry. Actually, that reminds me, my voice is going to fade because I'm in my little hotel room here in Monterey, California. I'm down here racing the Monterey Spartan race. So I've got my little. In case the audio sounds different. By the way, for those of you listening in this because I've got my little portable podcasting microphone set up my slick little setup here on my desk. I'm kneeling on my pillow in my hotel room, which is my equivalent of a standup desk, except this is kneeling desk, but across the room, tempting me as we talk about what was the whiskey drink, the Old Fashioned, Old Fashioned, and the Tianchi. My refrigerator was calling my name. I always order a mini fridge to my room when I first get into a hotel, because then I can go like this morning, my breakfast was a tomato, an avocado, a can of sardines, and a carrot with some almond butter on it. And that's because whenever I travel, swing by the grocery store, grab a bunch of stuff, and throw it into the mini fridge in almost every hotel. Most people don't know this. Even the crappiest of hotels, not that the Marriott in Monterey is that crappy, but they always have mini fridges and they'll bring them to your hotel room and you can store things in there. So if you learn nothing else from this podcast, learn that. But I'm gonna go over there and grab my sippy sip of choice. One second and you can guess what it is. Be right back. Stay there, stay there.

I already know what it is. There's only one thing that you ever drink.

Almost there. It's sparkling water. You guys. Okay, and I made that sound really exhausting. There's only five feet away. Okay, ready? Here we go. What do you think I have there, Rachel?

It's sparkling water, Ben. It's Lacroix, isn't it?

It's Lacroix. Coconut flavored sparkling water. I usually will go for the glass bottled Pellegrino, but I. I'm a sucker for this coconut flavored Lacroix stuff. It's actually pretty good.

You're some. You're somewhat becoming predictable. You and your Lacroix. Oh, my God. What was that?

That's not me. What are you drinking, Rachel?

Brock, arms back. All right. Brock, is that you, buddy?

Oh, my God.

Back.

Yay, Brock. Jason Skywalker Armstrong, our former podcast sidekick. What are you doing here, dude?

I don't know. I thought I'd just drop by and say hi. Or maybe I'll just come back and take over for Rachel.

Dude, this is crazy. First of all, before. Before I address that second thing you just said. What are you drinking, dude?

Coffee. Just black coffee.

Of course. Some boring Canadian black coffee. Black coffee and poutine. Hey, you guys listening in? Guess what? There is a reason Brock's back and that I faked surprise that he's back because I knew this was gonna happen. Brock is back. Rachel has decided to move on to, I think, run for the Prime Minister of Australia.

That's exactly what I'm gonna do. Vote 1 Rachel Brown.

That's right. You're also working hand in hand with who's the vagina queen lady?

The girl, the vagina loving, vagina weightlifting, vagina powered woman. Her name is Kiminami.

Yes, you're doing quite a bit with Kim. And I mean, now, I don't know if you're personally learning how to pick up kettlebells and coconuts with your vagina, but I know someone who's not, and that is, that is Brock because he doesn't have any coconuts yet around yet for his vagina.

I've been hunting high and low. I can't find a single one here in Vancouver.

Vaginas or coconuts?

I'm not saying.

Anyways, you guys, Brock is coming back onto the show as the Ben Greenfield fitness sidekick in Sidekick Sidekick. In addition, we're gonna start launching back into listener Q and A. You can expect here on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show a couple of listener Q and A's a month, a couple of interviews a month, possibly more. But perhaps most notably, Brock is back. So let's all give Brock a rollicking round of applause.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

News flashes.

All right, this is the part of the show where I don't know who do I even talk to? Now I'm confused. Do I talk to Rachel or do I talk to Brock? Which one of you guys wants to intro the news flashes?

Brock, you go on. Okay, take it away, Brock.

I'll give it a shot. See if I remember all the locations of all your social media.

We'll just put them in the show notes. BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368 Nice. Nice. Okay, yeah, I just did your job for you.

And you're out and I'm done. Now you can find all these news flashes over@twitter.com BenGreenfield Instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness Facebook.com BGFitness and of course, BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat.

Yeah, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368 if your memory's like mine. Okay, so interval training. Interval training. Here's an interesting one, you guys. This was in the New York Times. There's this gal that writes for the New York Times called Gretchen Reynolds and she's always got these pretty interesting articles and she recently reported on this study that was published in Cell Metabolism that shows that certain kind of workouts can undo what years of living can do to your mitochondria. Like recently I interviewed those chaps from Tello years where they went in and they measured the telomeres on all my white blood cells and determined how likely I am to die, what my biological versus my chronological age was. And I was actually kind of shocked. Like I found that my biological age is actually a year past my chronological age, probably because I've done some pretty vigorous endurance exercise in the past and that's actually been shown to decrease or, I'm sorry, increase the rate at which your telomeres shortened. But this. Go ahead, Rachel.

Is one year bad though, Ben? One year seems pretty legit for the amount that you put yourself through.

I don't know. The doctor who interviewed me, he's like 45 years old and his age was 27. So I got telomere jealousy.

Telomeresy.

That's right, telomeresy. Anyways, though, what they found out was when they biopsied muscle cells of all these individuals who did all sorts of different kinds of exercise, and they followed them for 12 weeks during this study. They had a group that did vigorous weight training several times a week. They had a group that did brief interval training three times a week on a bike. And what they did specifically was hold hard exercise for four minutes and then they rested for three minutes and they did that three times through. So if you do the math, which is really complex, that's 21 minutes of exercise. And then they had a steady state exercise group that just rode the bike for 30 minutes without doing the intervals. And then they had a fourth group that didn't exercise. Now the group that did the interval training compared to the group that did the weightlifting and compared to the group that did the moderate exercise or moderate exercising, what they found was almost, almost 400 genes were working differently in terms of advantageous anti aging mechanisms compared with just 33 gene changes for the weightlifters and only 19 gene changes for the moderate exercisers. And so it turns out that because most of these affected genes are particularly involved with the mitochondria and how the mitochondria produce energy for the muscle cells, interval training, and especially this four minutes on, three minutes off, three times through deal, seems to be an extremely potent short interval training workout that extends lifespan even more than weightlifting and even more than steady state exercise. How cool is that?

That's very interesting. And it also is interesting because of your telo jealousy, because you do a lot of high intensity interval training and yet it's aged you.

Well, there's a couple of things that come to mind for that. Number one, I do a lot of exercise generally, and I have an article about this. If you go to quickanddirtytips.com, it's about how once you exceed about 60 minutes per day of intense exercise or 90 minutes per day of aerobic exercise, not only do you see a law of diminishing returns, but you actually see increased mortality. So this kind of seems to back that up. That again, like, short and intense is best followed by recovery, followed by, yep, exactly, active recovery. So I'll link to this one over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368 if you want to check out that study. Now, there's also been some recent investigations into the ketogenic diet because a lot of people say that you can't build muscle on a ketogenic diet. And furthermore that a ketogenic high fat, low carb diet would decrease testosterone.

Which you, I believe, experienced exactly that when you were doing your great ketogenic experiment back in. When was that? 2000?

Back in the 2000s. Back in the good old days. But yeah, I was training for Ironman, I was following a ketogenic diet, and my testosterone took a hit and my thyroid took a hit. But it turns out, and if you go to a website, there's a really good website called ketogains@ketogains.com they do a lot of talk there about how to. And I'm not married to a ketogenic diet, by the way. There's. I think we have a question later on in this episode about how to choose the perfect diet for you. And for some people who are doing like, you know, very long endurance exercise or who wanna, like, hack cognitive performance, a strict ketogenic diet can be useful. But it also makes it, as I've said in the past, really difficult socially, especially when you wanna walk past an Italian restaurant like I like here in Monterey. I went to a great Italian restaurant last night and they brought olive oil, like extra virgin, thick green olive oil to the table. The homemade bread, the homemade focaccia bread. Or like the day before I was in Bulgaria, right? And they brought out the sausages and the tomato sauce and the vegetables and the ratatouille or the whatever it was, like the roasted vegetables. And then they brought like this enormous loaf of like thick, flaky bread to the table. I'm not going to freaking, like push my chair back and ask for some MCT oil, please. Right? I'm going to stuff that bread in my face. But this particular study looked into the effects of ketogenic diet on body composition, strength, power and hormonal profiles in guys who were lifting weights. And what they found was not only did they see a significant increase in total testosterone during 11 weeks of a ketogenic diet combined with weight training, and they actually saw a slightly higher rate of testosterone increase compared to the group that wasn't following the ketogenic diet. But they also noted a significant increase in lean muscle mass gain in these people who are eating the ketogenic diet. Because according to the study authors, it appears that the ketogenic diet had a fat utilizing muscle sparing effect. And the other interesting thing, and this is what I want to note to folks who are listening in, who are thinking, well, I'm gonna try, like the high fat, low carb diet to gain muscle. They did protein match in this study. What that means is that both groups, both the ketogenic group as well as the regular group, were eating 20% of their dietary intake from protein, 20% of their dietary intake from protein. And the actual breakdown here of the ketogenic diet they used in this study, it wasn't like 90% fat. It was. Let's see if I can get into the study. I have the full study here in front of me and I can tell you exactly what the breakdown was here. It was. So the percentages were for the regular diet, 20% from protein, 55% from carbs, and 25% from fat. But then the ketogenic group was 20% from protein, 5% from carbohydrate, and that includes fiber and 75% from fat. So obviously pretty significant differences here. But what they did find was that testosterone not only didn't decrease, but it increased. And you can also gain muscle on a ketogenic diet assuming you're eating enough calories and assuming you're eating about 20% of your diet, possibly a little bit more from protein. So there you have it.

So is that amount of protein, is that enough to actually kick you out of ketosis, though, like with. What's that called when protein gets turned into.

Yeah, glucogluconeogenesis. No, the idea is that if your nitrogen balance goes up too much from too much protein on something like a ketogenic diet, what will happen is that that can cause some glucose conversion. But if you're lifting weights, that's pretty unlikely to happen. So. So there you have it.

Gotcha. So this needs to be combined with the heavy lifting. Otherwise it could be kicking you out of kick.

That's right. So butter gives you biceps, baby.

Yeah.

That'S actually the next book I'm going to write. Butter and biceps also. Oh, go ahead.

Does this mean though, does this mean that the jury is out and we are 100% sure now that you can build muscle on a ketogenic diet provided.

That you lift heavy stuff and provided that you get enough protein? Yeah.

Yep.

There you have it. And also there's a great follow up article that the study authors wrote that I'll link to. They wrote it over@ketogenic.com so go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368 if you're a nerd and you want to take a deep, deep dive into that while you suck down coconut oil and butter in your La Croix sparkling water. Also, Rachel, you live in Portland and I discovered a very interesting article about Portland and it is about how Portland is leading the way into a new golden age of psychedelics. Did you see this?

I did see it and I'm not surprised, to be honest. Well, Portland, there's a lot of my Portland medicine in general going on in this little town.

Well, it begins with this fellow named Chris who makes a smoothie before he goes to work and he puts his bananas and kale and berries and everything. And then he also throws in a couple of capsules of psilocybin mushrooms before he puts his cap on and whistles out the door and heads to work loaded up with psilocybin. And he says that the afterglow lasts for a few days. He does this on Mondays and Thursdays. So he does a shroom based smoothie which is called microdosing on a Monday and a Thursday. And as the article says, in New York they want to trip balls. California is more burner culture, hearts and flowers. But Portland is different. People want to incorporate psychedelic experiences into their daily life. And there's for example, this other guy that they highlight in the show who bought a Sonoran Desert toad that he keeps in his house to produce what's called 5 Meo DMT in Toad's said venom sacks.

Wasn't there a Simpsons Simpsons episode about that where they all lick the toad?

Oh, I told I don't know if he's licking the toad or what he's doing with the toad, but oh my God. But venom filled sacs that produce 5 Meo DMT would be another thing that you could keep around the house in addition to psilocybin that you put into your smoothie. And by the way, I'm jesting slightly, but I do microdose, right? Like about every week or so I'll do a microdose of LSD and, and you know, I've used shrooms as often as two or three times a week in like very small 0.5 to 0.7 milligram doses, which is like a dose for me. That's not what they call a trip dose, but is instead just enough to cause an increase in cognitive performance. The article has a lot of interesting anecdotes in it that I'd recommend you go check out if you want to learn about how these quote, normal unquote folks in Portland are using psychedelics. But yeah, like all sorts of people, microdosing. And one thing that's really funny is they say people report they form better sleeping habits, better eating, improved stress response. One man said he looked at the menu and said, by God, I wanted the salad. They tend to drink less, smoke less. That's both tobacco and pot. And many report less coffee drinking as well. That sounds like.

Sounds like some kind of hell, I know.

Less coffee drinking sounds horrible. Less coffee drinking, more salads and mushrooms in your morning. Morning smoothie.

This is the reason why you don't go to Portland on a Wednesday.

This is the reason why you do go to Portland on a Wednesday. Everyone's walking around microdosing.

The same guy who wrote that article also wrote the article which I'll link to in the show notes, entitled I tried microdosing with four different psychedelic drugs. Here's what happened. And this guy, after writing the article about Portland, took a pretty deep dive. And what he did was he rated pleasantness and productivity from a variety of different experiences. So he did cannabis as one of his drugs of choice and he rated productivity as a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, but pleasantness as a 6.5. He did LSD and what he rated for LSD for productivity was 8.3 and pleasantness was 7.1. So he actually found microdosing with LSD to be quite more productive than doing it with cannabis. No surprises there. Slightly more pleasant, probably a lot fewer potato chips too. He did dmt, which is an intense psychedelic experience. You know, that's the one you'd find, for example, in the venom sack of your pet toad. As 5 Meo DMT and he rated that pleasantness as 8 and productivity is 8. So that one actually was higher even than LSD or cannabis in terms of its total rating. And then of course, there were shrooms and shrooms. Productivity rated 6.5 and pleasantness 7.2. So it turns out that the toads win over everything. Wow.

Keep some toads in your backyard. I don't know. I don't know. I don't even know how you harvest the sacks of them to take. Like how does that even work?

Very carefully.

I want to know.

I Very, very carefully. With the help of a small child, carefully. My kids have a dragon lizard. So next up is they're going to get a toad. But there was a recent study that came out that shows that magic mushrooms are the safest drugs. This came out just a couple days ago. Compared to lsd, Ecstasy and cocaine, apparently compared to all these other drugs where you'll have a relatively high percentage of people like alcohol, 1.3% of people who use it wind up having some kind of death like experience or emergency medical treatment. You know, cocaine is 1%, LSD is 1%, amphetamine is 1.1%, ecstasy is 1.2%. Cannabis is the next safest, with 0.6% claiming to have sought medical help after its use. But when it comes to magic mushrooms, only 0.2% of people reported seeking emergency medical treatment. Probably because they couldn't find the phone as it was a spinning.

Like they couldn't get off the couch.

Was a spinning pile of unicorn shooting rainbows.

Anyways, though I find that really interesting because during the 420 celebrations here in Vancouver, the emergency rooms saw a huge spike in visits just for that one day. Maybe it's just because people super got carried away on that one particular day. But yeah, there were a lot of people going to the hospital.

I would imagine that the difference between microdosing and hedonism would be pretty significant. So that's interesting. So I'll link to those articles in the show notes and I get a lot of questions from people. Actually at Paleofx, somebody raised their hand and they were asking like how you, you can actually source said mushrooms and LSD and all these things that are technically illegal. And there are websites out there that teach you to source it. But one of the most common methods is you get a bitcoin account and a cloaked browser and then just go shop to your heart's content. You can purchase mushrooms, AK47s, hitmen, helicopters, you name it.

You can also grow them legally in Portland.

Yes. Or you could just get a horse that takes a dump. Dump in your backyard. That's right. Oh, and then one other thing. Speaking of psychedelics, let's talk about sleep. I've been jet setting all over the globe recently. I haven't been home in 20 days. Not only do I miss my kids, but of course I have to pull out all these different jet lag and sleep biohacks, many of which I talk about in my Beyond Training book. But there was a really interesting study that went into something I hadn't thought about too much in the New York Times. Another one from the New York Times that I'll link to in the show notes and among a variety of things that you probably already know, right? Circadian rhythm is effed up by flying around in the airplane. And you can be in a state of perpetual jet lag if you're waking and sleeping at random times. And you should try to keep your internal clock kind of cued with things like morning sunlight and trying to get rid of too much blue light in the evening. One takeaway that I got from this article because I read just about every sleep article and sleep piece of research that comes out there is that that you can actually use melatonin in the morning. And what that does is it advances your internal clock. It tricks your brain into thinking that you slept longer. So let's say you're going from east to west, right? So you're traveling from east to west. And that means in the west, when itwhen you know, 10pm rolls around, technically your body thinks it's 1am, right? So you're gonna get a lot more tired a lot earlier in the evening. But you can fix that by that morning taking a small amount of melatonin to advance your circadian clock. So the way that theythat they phrase it in the actual article is travel east and you'll need to focus on morning light and evening melatonin, but travel west and you'll need evening light and morning melatonin. So isn't that kinda interesting? I never thought about taking melatonin in the morning, but it makes sense. And furthermore, they say that it does not cause drowsiness when you take melatonin in the morning. I actually just took some this morning.

I was going to say, have you tried it because you've been traveling all over the place.

Yeah, actually I have not yet tried it. I'm curious if any of our listeners, you can leave a comment over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368 if you're a morning melatonin. But apparently it can actually work pretty well.

How small of a dose are we talking here? Did it say?

I'm not sure, but typically a small dose of melatonin would be about 0.3% or so. And they actually talk about or 0.3 milliliters milligrams. Yeah. They also talk about chronotherapy combined with psychotropic medication. Speaking of psychotropics, they talk about the use of ketamine as a way to fight after or fight off some of the depression that can occur with changes in circadian rhythm. I thought that's an interesting one. Lithium was another one that they talk about. Lithium is something I discussed in my podcast with Kevin Rose and also the guys who invented the Qualia Supplement as another kind of nootropic that flies under the radar. So extremely interesting article, but I thought the most interesting part was just taking melatonin in the morning.

Can you just drink a whole bunch of Sprite?

That would probably work. As we know Sprite is chock full of melatonin. Thank you for your. Thank you for your intelligent contribution.

There actually was Lithium actually.

Seven up. It's seven oh.

Seven up.

Yeah, yeah. Seven up. Dummy.

Listener. Q and A.

Hey Ben, this is Corey. I am currently training for the hurricane heat 12 hour event for Spartan Race. I did this event last year and I got time hacked at the 10th hour and so I have learned from the event and I've started to do a lot more rucking and weighted calisthenics and more military PT style workouts. But I know this style of training can do a lot of damage on your body's joints and I'm wondering if you have any tips on how to train for a weight bearing endurance event like this without doing too much damage to yourself. Also, if you have any special gear like any rucks you can recommend and things like that, that would be great as well. Thank you so much. I love the podcast. Keep it up.

So what the heck is a Hurricane Heat to start with? I've never done a Spartan. I've only done tough mudders. Is this something completely different?

Yeah, they put a giant fan in front of a wall to simulate a hurricane and then you run at the fan, your hair blows back, you sprint like Tom Cruise sprinting away from an explosion, except you're you sprinting towards the hurricane fan.

That doesn't sound that hard.

That's what it is. No, actually what it was, it was back when Hurricane Irene was going to knock out the east coast and force the folks who were putting on a Spartan race back there to shut down the race instead. And this seems really intelligent. They decided to just go do the course anyways during the hurricane. And they showed up and Joe decenna, who's like the CEO of Spartan, he just basically forced them to toil through the race with a whole bunch of like pouring rain and sandbags and obstacles and tons of burpees. And they just did that for like 12 hours instead of doing the actual race. So. Sounds super pleasant. But now they've turned in like this crucible. So you could do like a 3 to 4 hour version. You could do a 12 hour version and.

Wait a second. Were you serious?

Yeah, I'm serious. So that's actually.

I was. I was waiting for you to like, for the bump there.

Seriously, no punchline. That's actually how they did. The folks at Spartan can get pretty crazy. So, yeah, now they do this. You could sign up for any Spartan. Like, if I wanted to tonight, instead of going to race the Spartan in the morning, I could show up at like 7pm tonight and just like do the hurricane heat until 7am the next day as a way to grow a little bit more hair in my chest.

You probably lose some of that hair, I'm guessing.

Well, I've done. I've done many hurricane heats.

You'd also lose some tello years.

I am, I am actually one of the few people to have ever completed the Spartan Delta, which. Which was designed to produce some of the strongest and most mentally tough citizens on earth by doing things like the hurricane heats and the Spartan agoji and the Spartan. Like the. The deal where you do like all the Spartan races on one weekend. Yeah, I did that.

I remember.

That's why I'm.

I remember that, Ben.

So my telomeres are so old.

I remember a goji and I remember you telling me that a girl lost some toes to frostbite. And I was like, I'm not really sure about this anymore.

Yeah, she lost toes in like the first hour. Yeah.

Yeah.

That was cold. You couldn't pull down your pants to take a crap without your ass cheeks getting frostbite because it was 38 degrees below zero. That was a cold race.

Welcome to my world.

Yeah. So how do you. How do you actually train for one of these things? Well, I know, I know Corey is wondering how he can do it without damaging his joint, specifically, because that's. That's the big thing. And there's some definite strategies that you can use. So my recommendations I'm going to give to Corey. I would say that there are probably five and then I'll throw in a bonus sixth little tip for you Corey. That would be the reason most people fail stuff like this. Most people fail Ironman. Most people fail. I don't want to say fail, just like have a really miserable time even if they cross the finish line. The Navy sealfit, Kokoro, etc. So I'll throw in a little tip for you at the end. But the first thing I recommend is a freaking really good incline treadmill. Like I have a NordicTrack treadmill that goes up to 40% incline in my garage. I got it for a great deal off ebay. You'd be surprised at how many rich folks buy fancy inclined treadmills and then just basically sit on them or like practically pay you to come pick them up. Craigslist is another good source for this. Like do a search for Nordic Track incline treadmill. You want the kind that goes to a really steep incline so that you can get your heart rate really high and you can simulate the kind of hills that you're going to be climbing which are to going usually going to be more than 20%. Like one hurricane heat. I had two 40 pound sandbags and I carried them for almost four hours and part of it was just like up and down muddy slopes and they were a lot steeper than 20% and probably even more than 40%. But the idea is that you use that treadmill so that you can get all of the metabolic and physiologic benefits of uphill climbing with none of the joint pounding of downhill running. Right, because you could go out and run hill repeats, but going down you really tear up youryour knees and your calves and your ankles and that can lead to joint pain over time. But if you just have a basic incline treadmill and even if you don't have one, you know, go to the gym and get the treadmill that'll at least go up to 15% and do really long brisk weighted walks up that thing without any type of downhill running. So it sounds boring, but it does save your joints. And there are some professional spartan racers. Like one guy I'll have dinner with tonight who's here in town for the race, Matt Novakovich, who also goes by the name the Bear. And he's like one of the fittest older Spartan. I think he's like 41, so he's not super old. But he also really keeps himself put together in one piece and he spends copious Amounts of time just on the incline treadmill. And the dude can run a blasting fast 5k, but most of his training is just walking up very steep inclines. So there's that. The incline treadmill, that's one way to build up stamina number two. And this is something that I'm typically on when I'm at home for four to five miles a day. Low level physical intensity that keeps your core muscles activated, that trains all the tiny little muscles on the bottom of your feet, but that allows you to still be productive at the same time. That would be just a basic treadmill workstation or a standing workstation or both that you're alternating through throughout the day. It sounds dumb, it sounds simple, it sounds silly, but that freaking works. Even when I was training for Ironman, I would be on my feet for five to six hours a day. And then I'd finish the day with one really brief high intensity run or high intensity bike ride or high intensity swim. So I had low level physical activity all day long. And then kind of like the icing on the cake or the cherry on the poutine, or however you say in Canada, it was that brief high intensity exercise at the end of the day. So just a basic standing workstation or a treadmill workstation, that would be tip number two.

Would you put it on a 15% incline?

You could, yeah, you could kill two birds with one. Now, I don't use the mechanical treadmill in my office because these things churn out a ton of what's called dirty electricity. So that one's out in the garage. But my treadmill in my office is called a true form treadmill, which I like because a true form treadmill, you can only run or walk on it if you're in a proper biomechanical position, meaning if you're using like a mid to front forefoot strike. So it's a good type of treadmill. Expensive, but they're manual, they don't produce a lot of dirty electricity. And your posture stays really, really good when you're on them.

So you can't lean way over and put your elbows on the thing and read a magazine while you're running on it.

Right. Or heel strike. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Sounds like the voice of experience. Next up would be a really good weighted vest that allows the vest not to like bounce around, but be very form fitting on you and allow you to do a lot of the rucking and the weighted calisthenics and the military PT style workouts, but with extra weight on your body. But again, weight that's not bouncing around. And so it's just again, like greasing the groove. Right. You're working against one of these weighted vests that you could start it at £10 and tweak it to get up to £40 by adding extra weights to it. The one that I like for that is made by this company called Hyperwear. I've tried out a lot of weighted vests and this one is like the most form fitting way.

Yeah, it's almost like a compression vest.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Actually, I did on. On a dare, I did a spartan race wearing this vest once and, and that was pretty, pretty horrible and uncomfortable because it is kind of tight and compressy.

Were you surprised that it was horrible? Was that really a surprise to you?

No, but climbing the rope was really hard. Like climbing a rope with a weighted vest is hard, especially when you're again, not surprised. So get it like a good weighted vest that, that fits tight like a Hyperware weighted vest. That's. That's the brand I like. And, and I'll, I'll put our AM. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368. Anytime I mention something like that and you buy it on Amazon, you put a few coins in our podcasting hat. NormaTec. These NormaTec recovery boots, I swear by these. And what I figured out a couple of months ago was I can stand at my standing workstation with these boots on it. It's called gradated compression, meaning unlike compression socks, what it does is it pulses the actual fluid out of your limbs starting at the bottom. If you're using the legs ones, the bottom of your feet, not your bottom, the bottom of your feet. And then it pulses all the way up to your hips and then goes back down to your feet. So you go through these different compression cycles. Not only does it make your legs feel light as a feather, but it gets rid of inflammation and soreness a lot more quickly and allows you to do something like stand at a standing workstation for a few hours without getting that super heavy feeling in your legs. And they can also be used to recover really quickly from a lot of, like, the longer rucks and the longer uphill walks you're gonna do. So, and the cool thing, like I mentioned, is that I just realized you can wear them while you're standing at your desk all day. And it gets rid of all of that, like that heavy feeling. You know, you feel like you can have bricks on your feet after you've been standing for like seven hours while you're working, this doesn't happen. So they're called NormaTec Pulsing Recovery Boots. And again, those are kind of expensive, but in my opinion, like, if you're gonna be an exercise enthusiast for life, well worth owning those.

The best part is it makes it sound like you sprung a leak.

Exactly.

Beep, beep.

I've worn them during podcasts, actually. Yes, I've heard it.

It sounds like you sprung a leak.

Mm. The next one that I'd recommend, that's very, very kind of similar to the Norma. That is probably one of my other favorite recovery tools. I don't talk about a lot on the podcast, but it works really well for everything from like releasing your jaw. If you have like a tight head, neck and jaw. It works really well for increasing blood flow to the head if you move this thing around in your head. But then it also works really, really well for joints. Like moving synovial fluid in and out of joints, reducing inflammation in joints, helping the joints to recover more quickly from exercise. When you do some passes with it around the knee, around the ankles, around the hips, I like it for even around the elbows after I've been like typing or doing a lot of pull ups. And it's called a myobuddy. A myobuddy. It's almost like a glorified car buffering device. Car buffing, I guess you'd say. Car buffing device buffering is what the Internet does for buffing your car. That's right. And it looks just like a car buffer, but you use it on your body. They should have called it a body buffer, but instead they decided to call it a myo buddy, which I think refers to myofascial. And then of course, buddy, it's a buddy for your myofascial.

Oh, it totally looks like a car buffer. I just went to their website.

Yeah, yeah. And it works really well. There's another one called the theragun, which is more of like a pointed, like a, like a jackhammer for different areas. But this myobuddy is a little bit more of like a softer approach that works really well for your joints. You just like move it in like a counterclockwise or a clockwise motion around the joints. That's another one that I really like for just like a quick go to recovery tool when you don't have time to. To put a massage therapist in your pocket. So that one's called the Myo Buddy. The MyoBuddy. So those would be a few of the sources that I would use to train for an event like this while minimizing some of the damage. Those would be some of the tools in your training toolbox. Aside from just like hunting down hurricanes and training during hurricanes, that would be very, very sport specific for this particular event. Really? No laughs at all. Nobody thought that was funny? I thought it was a little funny.

I still think you made that up.

No, I didn't. It happened during Hurricane Irene. Like, look at like Google, like hurricane heat, Spartan story. I'll be good because Google's always right. Or Wikipedia. The other thing that I find, you know, whether it's the hurricane heat, as people get more and more pale and tired and the best athletes in the world that would normally just like, you know, kick my butt or other people's butt, they fall to pieces, you know, at like seven or eight hours. You see this happen in Ironman, in Kokoro, I had this guy who was like, he was training for the Navy Seals and he fell asleep standing up while we were doing Murph. I mean like, like you see these people just crumble and fall to pieces. And it doesn't have to do with lack of fitness, it doesn't have to do with lack of recovery. What it has to do with. And this is the again, a simple stupid rule that you need to follow during these events. Just pure hypoglycemia and glycogen exhaustion by the time you get like eight, nine, ten hours in. And the reason for that is based on your gastric emptying rate and based on your ability to absorb from the bloodstream X amount of carbohydrates or other forms of fuel per hour. You can't like wait until the meal time that they have at these events where theythey have your break at the three hour mark or the fourth four hour mark or whatever and use that as your time to eat. Neither can you eat when you're doing an Ironman like once every hour or during say the Kokoro event, the Navy Seal Kokoro event, stop to eat. Just when they have you break for the breakfast, the lunch and the dinner occasionally. Instead, all I do is I eat early and I eat often. So I'm literally taking little bites of really good clean energy bars or little bites of nut butter packets or little bites of pemmican in or like algae and spirulina bits. Anything I can sneak in, whether it's in my backpack or in my shorts or whatever. You'll find me constantly, anytime I can get just a slight boost of energy I do it. So I follow this rule of eat early, eat often. When you eat early and eat often during a very, very long event like this, what you'll find is you have a lot less gastric distress, but your energy levels stay far more elevated than if you follow the rule that I think works pretty well for longevity and for staying in fat burning mode the rest the of of your life. Right. Like I only eat two or three times a day most of my life, but when I get into these events, I'm taking little nibbles like every single hour and often every 15 to 20 minutes for that slow bleed of energy. It helps tremendously, especially when you get 8, 9, 10 hours in and then you know, for some of These events you're 35, 40, 45 hours in, 60 hours in. That adds up when you're just doing those little bites throughout. So eat early and eat often. And I'll put a link to some of my best articles I've written on how to tackle kokoro, how to tackle a hurricane heat, how to tackle some of these big stamina requiring events in the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 368 so you can go kinda, kinda dive into those if you want.

Ben, I just stumbled across the concept of food combining. I've always thought of combining foods to get a balanced meal. So getting some proteins and some carbs and some fats in each meal. I am somewhat new to the nutrition side of things. What's the lowdown on food mixing? How do you do it properly and how are you and how do you avoid having undigested proteins and other things in your system? Thanks Ben. Hopefully look forward to an answer from you.

I'm pretty sure I broke every food combining rule in the world this morning because I had a carrot with almond butter, a can of sardines, an avocado, a tomato and a can of Lacroix.

Yeah, that meal, that does not make a lot of sense to me.

Did you melt cheese on top of it though?

I took a picture of it, put.

It on Instagram on top of the can of sardine.

If you go to instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness you could see it, you could comment on it. It was actually really tasty. A little bit of black pepper, a little bit of sea salt standing in the hotel lobby. Amazing. It was almost as good as the Four Seasons breakfast buffet.

Almost.

But we digress. Food combining. So have any of you ever experienced with a food combining diet?

No.

Nope.

Okay. Or experimented.

I Should say, I just like to eat all food all the time.

Food goes in here.

And it's good food, but, like, it's all food all the time.

It's all good food all the time. Yeah, Just down the gaping maw. So the basic principles of food combining a. You don't combine meat and starches in the same meal.

I'm out.

Okay, so pizza, like meat lovers.

I'm out as well, because I don't eat meat.

Meat lovers. Combo is out. Combine vegetables with meat or starches. So whenever you have meat or whenever you have starches, you combine vegetables with them, right? So you must always place kale lovingly on your bread. You only eat fruit, except lemons and limes, of course, away from other food groups because fruit is highly fermentable, apparently. And then you avoid. Avoid dairy or you eat dairy all by its lonesome. So if you're gonna have brie cheese, resist the urge to put it on a cracker and definitely resist the urge to put it on a watermelon and avoid dairy or eat it alone.

That doesn't sound very fun.

This is just making crap up now. It's like, no, eat dairy or don't eat dairy.

This old Ayurvedic practice. And the. The problem with it is you pretty much find almost zero traditional society on the face of the planet, aside from these rare Ayurvedic situations or people who just listen to too many podcasts about dieting. You see, whatever Switzerland, it's all milk products with rye bread that Swiss villagers would have eaten. Or the Gaelic people of northern Europe would have subsisted on fish and oats. They would have got their hands slapped by the food combining dietitians. In the Caribbean, right, you find seafood with tubers, right? Like purple potatoes and things like that. The Polynesians, you see starchy tubers and fruit and seafood. You know, you see very few primitive people. You see very few of our ancestors from either a traditional standpoint or just like a basic. It's just basically freaking like eating. You see very few of them doing things like putting restrictions on combining starches with proteins or fruits with proteins. And there's a reason for that, and it's because when you consume food, your body can digest any food combination, right? So you've got saliva in your mouth that has the enzyme amylase, which starts to break down carbohydrates. And then your stomach has, like a pH of 2, which can dissolve just about anything. And so when all the contents wind up in the stomach, that turns steak into soup in like a couple of minutes. I mean, the stomach is extremely powerful in terms of its ability to be able to handle, from an acidity standpoint, any combination of foods. And then once it gets into your small intestine from your stomach, the acidity from the stomach causes the pancreas to release all these alkalinic enzymes like bicarbonate and digestive enzymes. And that allows you to break down and absorb things like fats. And so if you're producing adequate stomach acid, especially, everything necessary happens downstream to allow you to be able to digest foods just fine. Now, at the same time, you see some food combining diets do actually work because a, you've got this whole ritual approach to mealtime where you're gonna be restricting certain foods and restricting certain calories just because there's so many ways that you can't eat. And honestly, sitting down and being mindful about a meal and choosing what it is you're gonna eat versus just doing as many of us do, which is just gogo ape nuts, grab everything, eat it, stuff it into our mouth and push our chair away from the table. You're going to be less stressed and you're gonna digest your food a little bit better. You're obviously gonna reduce the intake of a ton of different problematic foods because, you know, Twinkies, you're out. Right? Because that's starches and fats. And, you know, potato chips, I guess, would be starches and oils. Right. Like, there's so many things that you can't really eat when you do it. And then, of course, when you're restricting fruit, you might, you know, restrict some amount of fermentation. Like, there' sthere's all sorts of things that could point to the reason that food combining might actually work. But I think there arethere are better ways to allow yourself to digest food the right way. Right.

Like, go ahead. Is it intended to be a, like, lifestyle diet or some people lifestyle choice rather than something that they do as a to combat something that's going on digestively.

Right. In many cases, there'll be that argument that you do it when you want to fix your gut or you'll do it when you want to lose weight. But some people try to. I mean, it was on the Dr. Oz show, it was on Oprah. I mean, you'll see thisthis diet championed in many cases. And I think thethe biggest thingone of the reasons it works for most people is stomach acid. Right. People who are on proton pump inhibitors or on acid blocking medication when you have low stomach acid protein and carbs and fats simply don't digest as well because the fats and proteins aren't getting digested by the enzymes from the pancreas that are supposed to get released in response to the acidity coming in from the stomach to the small intestine. And you also get a lot less breakdown in the stomach itself, and that can also result in leaky gut and autoimmune issues, et cetera. So one thing would be stomach acid production, right? And actually not only not being stressed out, but also using things like enzymes and bitters and perhaps lemons and limes before you eat, and things that will cause the body to produce not just more stomach acid, but also to produce more digestive enzymes, right? So the other reason that a lot of people have problems digesting fat is a lot of people have followed a low fat or a poor fat diet for a long time. So your gallbladder doesn't release bile as much. And in many cases, once you start to introduce more fats, you need to consume some digestive enzymes, right? Like digestive enzymes with bitters or digestive enzymes with what's called ox bile is another common one. But things that will jumpstart your body's own production of bile, so you can handle some of the fats that you're eating along with with these other foods. So doing things like increasing your stomach acid availability, increasing your availability of digestive enzymes, gradually getting yourgetting yourself into eating more fats with foods, even limiting, like, the amount of liquid that youit is true that if you gulp down a big glass of water with a meal, that can actually dampen the acidity in the stomach to a certain extent. So I personally don't drink a lot of water when I'm eating a meat meal. These are all things that you can do to support digestion. But the idea is your body is actually equipped toto digest many of these foods all the same time. So it's really not necessary to do a food combining diet. Although I do have some recommendations here of food combinations you definitely want to avoid and food combinations that work really well. If you guys want to hear what those are.

Yes, I'd love to hear them.

Okay, so first of all, the number one worst food combination on the face of the planet that you're gonna find in pizza, doughnuts, french fries, would be any type of processed fat combined with carbohydrates. And there's a reason for that. So when you look at insulin, insulin's youryou'reyou know, it's a storage hormone. It increases one of the major fat storing enzymes in the body called lipoprotein lipase. Okay, so basically the other thing that insulin does is it, it decreases the availability of something called hormone sensitive lipase and it slows fat oxidation by suppressing something called CPT1, which is the rate limiting step in fat burning. And so if you actually increase insulin at the same time that you are taking in a high amount of calories, you're essentially shoving those calories into fat tissue and simultaneously suppressing fat oxidation. And one of the best ways to increase insulin in the presence of fat would be to consume starches along with those fats. Now there would be a situation in which case this would be okay, and I'll get to that in a second. But that would be one thing. Anytime you're at caloric excess with a combination of fats and carbohydrates, you're vastly increasing the propensity to shove calories into adipose tissue. Now there are other things that will happen when insulin gets induced by carbohydrate consumption and when you're eating fats at the same time. For example, there's something called acylation stimulating protein, it's known as asp. Now ASP that gets induced by fat intake and it's also a fat storing feedback mechanism, meaning that when ASP goes up, insulin goes up, and when insulin goes up, ASP goes up. So it's a 1, 2 combo to store fat. You've also got this gut produced signaling molecule. It's called glucose dependent insulinotrophic peptide known as GIP. Okay, you can say that 10 times fast glucose dependent insulinotrophic peptide. Anyways, GIP is also induced by both carbs and fat, and it also can cause fat storage, storage of energy, and then finally ghrelin, the hormone that gets released that actually induces hunger and cravings for things like sugary foods and salty foods. It actually increases in response to this lipoprotein lipase. So you also get this kind of like yo yo weight gain response. Now when you look at all of these different molecules from the acylation stimulating protein, the gip, the ghrelin, the insulin, the lipoprotein lipase, and the other hormones responsible for fat storing, they're all going up significantly when fat is consumed along with carbohydrates, okay? Especially when processed fats are consumed with a very fast release carbohydrate like a starch or a sugar. Now the reason or the situation in which this would not likely be the case. And where you can actually slow this down would be a. If the fiber or if the carbs have a lot of fiber, right? So low starch carbs, you know, like having celery with almond butter, right. Or having like some kind of like a healthier, healthier fiber rich bread with avocado, right? Like let's say a sprouted hemp bread with avocado. You know, things like mixed nuts, right, which already have fiber in them. Those type of things that actually can decrease the insulin release and the release of a lot of these other issues that. That can cause fat storage. That'll be one thing is if it's a higher fiber, carbohydrate, probably less of an issue. The other situation, this is how I do it. I don't combine fat with carbohydrates for the reasons that I just mentioned, and also because it can increase oxidation of the cholesterols in the bloodstream that the fat produces. I don't consume fats with carbohydrates unless I'm in a post workout scenario. Because when you're in a post workout scenario, your blood sugar barely goes up at all because you have the ability to be able to shove glucose into muscle cells and liver cells really readily, but you also have upregulation of glucose transporters after you've exercised. And that means that you have less of a need for an insulin release. So the one time that I will do, you know, whatever, a nice roasted chicken with oils and sweet potatoes, or avocados with a quinoa salad and red wine and a dark chocolate. But it's dinner in a post workout state. So I'll exercise in the late afternoon or early evening. And then with dinner, like, I will have carbs along with fats to my heart's content. But unless I'm in that post workout insulin sensitive state in which glucose isn't gonna stay very elevated, I'm very, very careful. And if I haven't worked out, such as for Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner, where God knows, right? Like cranberries and turkey and mashed potatoes and every other other combination of fats and carbohydrates, I'll go for a walk afterwards, which lowers postprandial blood glucose and increases insulin sensitivity. So the worst food combination for overall health and for weight loss would be fats with carbohydrates. But there are some exceptions to that. Does that make sense?

It does. Yeah.

I think the lesson here is to always be in a post workout state.

Unless You're Rachel. In which case it's just don't eat processed fats and carbs.

And by the way, they have studied what I just said and they haven't found it to be true in a hypocaloric state. Meaning everything I just said would only be if you were dieting and restricting calories. Everything that I just said has a far, far less pronounced effect. So that's one thing that you should note. The other thing that's interesting is certain food combinations can be really, really, really good together. Like take plant foods with meat, right? When you consume leafy greens or berries or any polyphenol containing food that can inhibit the formation of the carcinogens that get produced when you eat meats, especially meats that have been cooked or seared over high heat. Right. So that's why, you know, salad is really good with steak or that's why it's kind of funny. But when I'm at a breakfast buffet and if I'm doing bacon and eggs, I'll put like raspberries or, or blueberries or blackberries over top of the eggs and actually have polyphenols along with the potential carcinogens from the meat or the cooked products. So that's one thing that works really well. Uhm, another one would be anything vinegary with a carbohydrate rich meal because it can blunt the glycemic response to a meal. Right. So for example, if you're having sweet potatoes and steak, you could have balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing on your side salad. Or if you're having like sausage and potatoes, right? Because I just got back from Bulgaria where there's a lot of that. You could have pickles or sauerkraut or any like fermented vinegary food that can lower the blood glucose response. Or even doing something like a shot of apple cider vinegar before like a higher carb intensive meal lowers insulin and lowers postprandial blood glucose. So vinegary foods along with carbohydrate rich foods, that's another one that works really well. And interestingly, a close second to vinegar is cinnamon, specifically Ceylon cinnamon. Right. So sprinkling cinnamon on sweet potatoes or putting cinnamon on an oatmeal or having cinnamon on bread, right. Those are all ways that you can lower the glycemic rise and improve your insulin sensitivity in response toto one of these more insulin producing foods. So that's a really good mix as well is a lot of these different herbs and spices like cinnamon and vinegar. And then Also having plant foods along with meat as things that you should do from a food combining standpoint.

And would a glass of kombucha suffice for the vinegary?

Only with a shot of vodka. That's the way I do it. Yeah.

I don't tend to drink vodka for.

Lunch, but yes, that's one final food combination I'll leave you guys with is if I'm at Whole Foods, like when I go to a city and I want to have cocktails back in my hotel room or whatever, and I've got that mini fridge, I always buy a bottle of sake and a bottle of kombucha from Whole Foods. And sake. Kombucha mixed 5050 is frickin amazing. If you've never tried that, you're missing out on a cocktail from the heavens.

Hi, Ben. My name is Hannah and I just broke up with my boyfriend of two years and I'm having trouble coping with the mental and physical ramifications. Ramifications of heartbreak. I take a lion's mane mushroom supplement. I take D3. I exercise regularly. I take cordyceps and a good B vitamin. And I think all those things are helping. But I am exhausted. I'm having trouble sleeping. I can't think clearly. I am breaking down all the time, and I'm having a really hard time coping. So I was wondering, do you have any. Any suggestions for how to deal with a heartbreak and the physical aspects that that entails?

Wow.

Love hurts, huh, guys?

Love hurts.

Yeah. Speaking is probably the only one here who's divorced. Yeah, it. It can suck.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling the question in, Hannah. It's super courageous of you. This is not usually something we cover on the podcast, but I think it's a really important one.

No, it's not. This would normally be what, the. The Dr. Drew show or the Sex with Emily show, but I feel like.

Ben Greenfield's got some really good insight into this, though.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, like, I look at this very similar to how I would look at, you know, how would you naturally approach something like depression? Right. Which was, you know, kind of an issue with neurotransmitters. And obviously antidepressants are a huge issue in not only the US Alone, but worldwide. I mean, it's like a billion dollar industry, right? The antidepressant industry. And it's especially interesting when you look at this industry and you find that not only do antidepressants not work, but if anything, they make things worse. Right. Like, they've been shown to increase the symptoms of depression and increase the risk for suicide and basically cause the withdrawal symptoms of things like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that can mess up your neurotransmitters for a really long time and cause you to do more and more antidepressant drugs to actually get the same effect. If you go and you look at one of my friends, Dr. Chris Kresser, he's done some really interesting writings on antidepressants and their vast number of shortcomings over on his website. And yeah, I mean you should definitely look into other things. There was even a randomized control trial recently in which they looked at adults with major depression, was called the Smiles trial. And this one just came out. It's a great, great title for a study. But it was a 12 week randomized control trial of dietary interventions to treat severe depression. And in this case all they did was they cleaned up the diet, right? In this case they switched people to like a, it was kind of like a Mediterranean based diet and they saw a vast reduction in depression symptoms just from a simple dietary fix, meaning that they were introducing more vegetables, more fresh produce, more fish, and a lot of kinda like healthier whole grains, which I know can have issues depending on how you prepare them. But ultimately, you know, and they were doing like seeds and nuts and fermented foods and things along those lines. Significant increase in the ability to be able toto get rid of some of these depression symptoms. But there are other things that you can do as well that I think fly under the radar when it comes to depression. So some of the things, depression or sadness in general, for example, one thing that you see over and over and over again is just straight up physical movement, right? Physical movement not only for the dopamine release, the brain derived neurotrophic release, the assistance with sleep. But there are so many studies on exercise and depression and specifically they did one experiment that looked at aerobics and looked at weight training and looked at circuit training and, and despite us seeing from my earlier note that interval training is best for anti aging, it turns out that weight training is the best for reducing depressive symptoms. Perhaps that's because of all the catharsis that occurs when you're, I don't know, pushing the bench press or doing a heavy squat, get rid of all this negative energy. But anyways, so it turns out that nonaerobic exercise, weight training or anything that's nonaerobic, like less than 2 minutes minutes long in terms of interval length, appears to be the best for reducing depressive symptoms. So basically lift heavy stuff. If you're coming at this from an exercise standpoint, the other thing that they found, and they found quite a few things to be efficacious, but I want to highlight a few. Light therapy. Now, normally what light therapy involves is sitting and staring at about 10,000 lux units of light from what's called a light light box. But unfortunately that can cause retinal damage when you do that. And I'm a bigger fan of greenish blue light. And I use these things called the re timer glasses. I also use something called a human charger, which is in ear light therapy. But light therapy's actually been shown to be quite efficacious when it comes to lifting mood and when it comes to getting rid of things like seasonal affective disorder. And it sounds dumb that if you have your heart broken, you'd go put on on a dorky pair of green and blue light producing glasses. But it turns out that there's actually not only benefits to light therapy, but when combined with some of these things like exercise and adequate sleep and some of the supplements I'll talk about it can be quite useful. So that would be another one would be light therapy. There is an herb, it grows like wildfire on my property. My kids call it the happy plant. It's yellow. They go out there and actually eat it sometimes when like my son, I remember last year, he was like, dad, I'm not feeling well, so I'm gonna go out and actually harvest. And he was harvesting this happy plant and he was actually like tearing the little buds off the end of these yellow flowers and eating them. And it is a plant that's been shown to be far more effective than antidepressants with like 10 times less the adverse effects of an antidepressant. You know what it is?

Is it St. John's wort.

It's. Well, as a St. John's wort in Australia or St. John's wort, as we say in America. Rachel? Yes, St. John's wort, the little yellow flower. And the extract from this flower has been shown to be quite useful for depressive symptoms. And it's kind of funny because it's a beautiful, like yellow, uplifting flower. Like nature has these clues that they give us. So St. John's Wort would be another one that you can look into. You can get that as a cat capsule, you can get it as a tincture. So that's another one that I think flies under the radar sometimes. Now, a few other things to look into. They've actually shown that your omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio. Right. Too many omega 6s from seed and nut oils and rancid vegetable oils and things like this, and not enough omega 3s from things like wild caught fish or eggs or even some vegetables like pumpkin seeds and hemp seeds, that omega 6 to omega 3 imbalance can be a risk factor for depression. So you can actually use things, as silly as it may sound, like fish oil for depression. Wild caught fish, like I mentioned, grass fed beef, a lot of these compounds that are higher in omega 6s and just as importantly lower in omega 3s. That seems to have a pretty significant effect too. Another one would be vitamin D. And they've shown that about 5,000 international units of vitamin D per day, preferably combined with vitamin a and vitamin K2, so you avoid anyany type of vitamin D toxicity. That's actually been shown to have a significant impact on depression. So a higher intake of vitamin D, that would be another one that I'd recommend a few others that I would look into. And again, these kind of fly under the radar. One would be hydrotherapy. So there was one study that was done in 20002010 that found that hydrotherapy and this would be the use of like hot water baths. And you could even do something as simple as, you know, like a mineral bath with some magnesium and some lavender. They've shown that that can actually reduce depressive symptoms for a significant period of time. Just basically like taking a freaking bath with bath salts and with something like, you know, lavender oil.

I feel like us women are well and truly aware of this. We feel like we've been doing this for probably a century or two, trying to get you guys on board, but no, yeah, now it's proven.

Exactly so. And by the way, they found that cold water immersion and cold water face splashing can help out a little bit with your vagus nerve health as well and may have a little bit of an antidepressant effect too. So that would be another one to look into would be a hot therapy or cold therapy or even both. Right? So go take a cold shower the next time thatthat you get, you get your heart broken. So there you go. And then just a few others, they've shown that curcumin, right? Consuming turmeric and curcuminoids can have a significant impact on depressive symptoms, especially compared to a placebo. So cooking a lot with turmeric or using supplements that have something like curcumin in them. There is another thing called Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing emdr, that appears to have a pretty significant impact on depression. That's when you're gonna have to Google and look up. I don't have much experience with emdr, but that one also pops up. And then finally something that I do every single day. And I actually I'm designing a journal for my own practice for this that I do every day without fail. It's just basically gratitude, right? So every single morning I wake up and I answer three questions in my gratitude journal. What truth did I discover in today's reading? Because I always read in the morning and I find that I read with more intention and purpose when I know I'm going to have to answer a question about what I just read. I mean get to answer a question about what I just read. What am I grateful for? Right? So you write down one thing that you're grateful there and then instead of like the affirmations like me, me, me, I, I, I, what can I accomplish today? What am I getting from me? How am I going to make myself better? How am I going to make money? You know, that type of thing facing, it's instead others facing. So the third question I answer in addition to what truth did I discover today and what am I grateful for? Is who can I pray for or help or serve today? Who can I pray for or help or serve today? And I write down that one person and those are my three questions that I start off with. And I think a daily gratitude practice can be profound. For depression, for sadness and for just like, like thinking about others instead of thinking about yourself if you do it the right way. So those are some of my recommendations.

What about tianchi Ben?

Then you could also just dump tianchi into your mouth. Yes. Actually no, that does have a lot of adaptogenic herbs that cover some of the bases that I just talked about. So yeah, yeah, that also would be good. So dump some tianchi in your mouth and write down what you're grateful for and go take a cold shower. Anyways, best of luck Hannah. And if any of the rest of you have tips that you want to put into the show notes, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368 and leave your tips for Hannah there.

What are your thoughts on the whole 30 book lifestyle change in the recipes they have, do you think it's beneficial.

Or are there other ways to figure.

Out what may be causing certain reactions in your body?

Wow, this is a loaded question Diet. First of all, let me Put it this way, the Whole30 diet is super clean. I mean, if you don't know the rules, basically it's not these silly food combining rules. It's basically don't have any sugar, don't have any alcohol, don't eat any grains, don't eat any legumes, don't eat any dairy, don't eat any additives, and don't eat any junk food for 30 days.

Sounds like Paleo.

That's it sounds like the air diet. No, but you actually can, you can have like, you can have, you know, grass fed meat and wild caught fish and produce and vegetables. Yeah, it's very similar to like the, it's very, very similar to the Paleo diet.

Actually that was the first thing. When I read the, the first book version of this book that came out, I'm like, well, this is just Paleo just repackaging.

Yeah, it's basically like the Paleo diet getting rid of even some of the additives from something like that. Because like I was looking at the, the label of a Paleo energy bar today. It was a paleo donut glazed energy bar made from egg white protein. Right. Just like Paleo man would have had. Exactly.

So Tuk Tuk was shoving those down his gullet.

Paleo diet with a grain of salt. So any diet like this where you're eliminating that many things, I mean, let's not beat around the bush. It's going to freaking work. Right? And I know everybody listening in. You're intelligent, you know, when you restrict that many foods, you're gonna see some things work. From a dietary standpoint, I don't think it's working because there's something magic about taking legumes out of the diet. I'm a big fan of lentils, like sprouted lentils, for example. I don't think it works because you're removing wheat from the diet. Frickin. When I'm in Europe and they're not spraying their crops with glyphosate. I ate bread to my heart's content. I don't think it works because they're taking dairy out of the diet. I've got two little goats at home that we can milk for raw milk. Honestly, it's the combination of getting rid of all the junk food that makes this thing actually work. But rather than looking at a specific diet book and saying this is the diet that's gonna work for me. I like the second part of this question, which is, are there other ways to figure out what you should be eating and what Foods, rather than just eliminating all foods, say, well, why don't I just eliminate the foods that aren't working for me? Now, most food intolerance tests like ALISA is one or ALCAT is one. Like those are two common blood tests for food intolerances. And they basically look at how your blood responds when exposed to a specific food. Like the ELISA test measures something called the IGG antibody reaction, and the ALCAT test measures white blood cell reactions. And that seems like a plausible theory because antibodies and white blood cells are part of the immune system. So if your immune system reacts to a food, that would signify an intolerance. But the problem is that, for example, you know, an IGG response to a food in many cases can indicate that your body needs that and it's not an intolerance. Many of the white blood cells are tested in response on these tests to raw protein, like raw chicken or raw eggs or raw beef and not the cooked protein. So it's not a surprise that you get these tests and then you walk away with a frustrating long list of foods you're not supposed to eat because the cooked form of that food wasn't even tested. So you get this huge list of like, false positives. The only food allergy test that I actually like, it's made by this company called Cyrex C Y R E X. Not only do they test every single protein twice to ensure that, they call it their double assurance method, but they test both the cooked and the raw form of the protein. They have one called an array 10. The Cyrex array 10. I'll link to it in the show notes, but that's the one that I and most of my clients get too, to identify true food allergies. I get it from this company called Tru Health Labs. So Cyrex food allergy test. That's the test that I like. But then you can also, if you didn't wanna buy, you know, cause it's kind of expensive. I think it's like 600 bucks, something like that. I mean, granted you have your list of foods for life, but it's still expensive. Even more expensive than not eating legumes for 30 days. Believe it or not. Believe it or not, Rob Wolfe, he has this new book called Wired to Eat, where you're simply measuring your blood glucose after certain meals to figure out what which meals spike your blood glucose and which don't. And a meal or food that doesn't spike your blood glucose significantly would be something that you could eat. Right? So I would recommend you review that book, you could do like a Cyrex test and then also review that book to check and make sure you're not just getting an allergy reaction or not, but also to make sure you're not getting a deleterious blood sugar reaction to a food just with a cheapo blood glucose monitor from Frickin Walgreens. Um, another one that I'd look into would definitely be a DNA test. So you can not only see, you know, whether or not you produce certain endogenous antioxidants yourself, versus, you know, do you need to supplement with glutathione or do you need to supplement with vitamin C or something like that. But then you can also see, you know, what your ancestors ate. You can see what type of intolerances you're predisposed to, like lactose or gluten or something like that. And the very coolest thing is, I think if you let' slet's you go and you see like you came from sub Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia or Mexico, or, you know, you can go and look at what your ancestors would have eaten. And there is a fantastic book. I just got done reading the book and I'm gonna get the author of it on the podcast. But it goes into exactly how to choose your diet and the foods that you eat based on what your ancestors ate. Right? So this lady named Daphne Miller and I met her at an event I was at in Malibu a couple of months ago. She traveled all over the world and she would take like Mexican people on diabetes or with diabetes, and she would actually put them on like kind of like a slow carb bean and rice and pork rich diet with like homemade corn tortillas and all these things you wouldn't expect, expect that they should be eating. But instead of it being like Tex Mex or American Mex, like traditional low glycemic index, traditionally prepared Mexican diet, non GMO corn and all these healthy meats, and these people did just fine. Or she'd put these Greek people dealing with heart disease on their traditional Cretan diet, like with rosemary and tea and wine and wild caught fish. Fish and copious amounts of extra virgin olive oil. And they'd get thin and their heart disease issues would go away. So it's really interesting. She would actually just see what their ancestors would have eaten and not put them on like the Americanized version of that ancestral diet, but on a version of that diet that really, truly was like their ancestors would have eaten. And she saw amazing improvements in these people from a Chronic disease standpoint. And so the name of that book is called the Jungle. Jungle Effect. It's called the Jungle Effect. The healthiest diets from around the world. Why they work and how to make them work for you. It's a really fantastic book.

I love the songs from that book too. The simple bare necessity.

No, it's not that. It's not that one.

Brock makes a lot of sense though, you know, it's not. It shouldn't really be that crazy. It makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, it does. So she went to like, you know, Mexico and Greece, Iceland, Cameroon, West Africa, where she found like, nobody has bowel trouble over there based on the foods that they eat over there. Okinawa, Japan. And then she even has this chapter called Foraging for Indigenous Foods in a Modern World. How to find some of these indigenous foods in modern grocery stores. And it was pretty shocking what she was able to find. Freaking Walmart. So really good book. It's called the Jungle Effect. Check that one out. And I'm actually going to go down to her house. She lives in Berkeley. So I'm going to go down and race the Spartan in San Francisco and then swing into her place and interview her in Berkeley later on this year. So we'll have a good little interview then about this stuff. But yeah, that's where I would start as far as customizing your diet is concerned. And yeah, I guess that means that now that we've introduced Brock, we've let you know about the news flashes. From magic mushrooms to interval training to melatonin and beyond, we have have answered a whole bunch of questions. We filled you in on the calendar@bengreedfoldfitness.com calendar. Now all we need to do is give some crap away. What do you guys think?

Oh, can I do it? Can I do it?

Yes, you can do it, bro.

Go for it. Brock, why don't you give some stuff away?

Dude, I haven't done this in so long. It'll feel so good.

Simple pleasures in life.

You have no idea. For two years I have had an empty hole in my heart because I haven't been able to give stuff away every week. Okay, so the rules are you leave a review on itunes and if you hear it read on this show, then you get stuff sent to you. You just have to send an email to. What's the email address?

Gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com okay, so this is the review.

And it's by Savor3 and the title is what Would Ben say? Five Star Review. Nice. And it goes like this. I knew I had become a BGF junkie when my wife said what would Ben say? As I explained to her my recent loss of energy during my workouts. I've been an avid listener for over three years now, piping Ben, Rachel and their guests into my earbuds while I sweat out my morning fitness sessions. And I've sent podcast links to friends clients on multiple occasions. So have a listen and you'll start asking yourself, what would Ben say?

You know the funniest part about this review is if we got bracelets made up like what would Jesus do?

Like what would Jesus do?

WWJD, it'd be WWBs. So if you want to design your own personal WWBS bracelet and take a picture of you wearing it, not only will we send Saver a gear package, just email gearreenfieldfitness Systems with your T shirt size. I'll send anybody a frickin gear package if you upload a photo that says WWBS on it. Just that little tongue in cheek bit of evidence that you listened into today's show and made it all the way through. So there you have it. Sabre, write us, let us know your address, your T shirt size, and if you want to leave a review, just go to itunes. Leave a review. It's good karma. Make sure you say something nice. If you don't have anything nice to say, as my mother said, don't say anything at all. Brock and Rachel. I guess we should say that for those of you listening in, this might be the last that you hear of the beautiful, rollicking Australian voice of Rachel on the show. Rachel. It's been a wild ride the past two years. Any last words for the audience?

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been so much fun. I've loved getting to know you guys over social media as well. So keep tuning in, keep listening, keep asking questions, keep engaging, and I'll be around.

We love you, Rachel. Brock, you got any last words for the listeners? Anything as profound as what Rachel just said?

I don't have anything as profound as Rachel said, but I'm going to miss Rachel and it's really, it is an honor to have passed the job off to Rachel two years ago and it's even more of an honor to accept the job back from Rachel. So thank you, Rachel. You're welcome for both covering for me and for giving it back.

You are so welcome.

Hugs.

All right, all around, virtual hugs, radio wave hugs. I'm not really sure.

And should we finish with a joke about canadia just to shove Brock under the bus. Good.

You got one?

I don't have one.

You don't have one?

I love Canadians.

Okay, how about this? What Dr. Seuss book do they read every morning in Canada? What Tim Hortons Hears a whole. All right, you guys. Well, for those of you listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 368. Leave a comment, leave a question. Let me know if I made a huge mistake bringing Brock back on the show because you never know what fireworks might implode at this point. But anyways, though, Rachel, Brock, Ben, thank you. Thanks for joining me here in my hotel room in Monterey. Let me go back to the mini fridge and grab another LaCroix, baby.

Yeah, maybe clean up that pile of underwear too before the maid comes in.

Possibly. They don't call them maids here. All right, later, you guys.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

SA.