Episode #104: Plant-Based Diets – What You Need To Know

In this how to eat a plant based diet what causes weight gain after workouts? Total immersion swimming style how to cook for more than one muscle adhesions what to do about motion sickness while swimming Lead in your supplements what to look for in a personal trainer Is a vitamin D test worth it? Getting a broken bone to heal faster? Do you need to gain muscle to lose fat? What is starvation mode? A supplement called sport legs Waist to height ratios does sugar or fat make you fatter? A bracelet called C Prime A bar called pr what to pack on a picnic and training to run downhill.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and I am podcasting on the road this week, which is why the audio might sound a little bit differently. If there's any clue to you, we do have a ton of questions in today's podcast as well as an interview with vegan athlete Brendon Brazier. And whether you are a pro athlete, whether you are a weekend warrior, whether you're just interested in how to incorporate a vegan or a vegetarian diet, some of the things that Brendan is doing is very cutting edge when it comes to eating a plant based diet. So listen in to Brendan's interview which is going to come after the Q and A and the special announcements and we are going to have a fantastic jam packed podcast today. So enjoy.

Special announcements.

All right folks, first of all, thanks to those of you who have donated to the podcast to keep this podcast going. And you can do that by scrolling down to any of the episode show notes and at the very bottom there underneath the comments section there's a little spot where you can donate. You can donate a buck, you can donate 20 bucks, but anybody who does over 15, I automatically send a BenGreenfieldFitness.com T shirt. Thanks also to the people who have left a ranking and a comment in itunes that really helps the show out. And I also put a link in the episode show notes to to where you can leave a ranking for the show in itunes. This is podcast 104. If you're looking for the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com a few quick special announcements. First of all, as you may have heard in previous podcasts. I do have a couple of triathlon adventures that I'm offering people. One is going to be this November and December over in Thailand. If you're interested in a triathlon in Thailand, let me know. Shoot me an email BenGreenfieldFitness.com I will be taking a group over there to race. I know that race is full but I do have a couple of wait listed slots available. The other triathlon announcement is that I am teaching a triathlon camp in Austin in January. Actually at the end of January January 31st through February 7th, 2011 and you'll want to get in early if you'd like to be part of that camp. It's an all inclusive triathlon training camp for Half Iron and Ironman triathletes. So go to the Episode Show Notes to click, find out more details on that and to register for it. And then finally I've got a brand new book out and I know the special announcements are a bit triathlon heavy, but the book is called how to Qualify for Kona and it's based on the fact that it can be pretty tough to get to the Ironman World Championships. But this book has everything from qualification criteria to a list of qualifying races. Tips from coaches and experts on qualifying qualifying times per age group broken down so you can kind of see what to expect, how fast you'll have to swim, bike and run tips on racing in Kona once you get there what to expect on race day, what to expect on the race course Race course pacing strategies, fueling strategies, tons of stuff to help you get to and race at the Ironman Triathlon World Championships. The book just came out. It's only available right now@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and over at the Rockstar Triathlete Academy, but you can get it by clicking or by going to the Episode Show Notes Once again for episode number 104.

Listener Q&A.

Lots of questions this week and remember, if you have a question you can email ben greenfield fitness.com you can call toll free and leave a voice question voicemail question to 877-209-9439 and I'll put that number in the Episode show notes. Or you can skype using the free conferencing software@skype.com to Skype me and my username is PacificFit and the first question for this week is from listener Brad who says 24 to 72 hours after a hard full body workout accompanying my muscle soreness and stiffness and the swollen feeling is a 2 to 6 pound weight gain. When my soreness subsides, my weight returns back to normal. What is the cause of this weight gain? Is it normal or healthy? Well, Brad, first of all, weight gain is normal. The harder you work out, the more the weight gain is going to occur. When I'm talking about weight gain, I'm not talking about fat based weight gain, I'm talking about inflammatory based weight gain. Because what happens is, as you may have heard before, when you lift a load, the stress on a muscle causes little tears in the muscle fibers. And what happens is that in order to repair those muscle fibers, your body has to create an inflammatory condition. Specifically, it sends a bunch of white blood cells into your muscle. And the white blood cells help to clear up a lot of that debris that sticks around in your muscles from the muscle damage that's occurred. And the other thing that happens is prostaglandins get produced. And prostaglandins are like hormones and they cause pain, they cause swelling, but they're naturally going to be in any area where white blood cells are filling to help repair muscle tissue. So you get a lot of other fluids because you got to replace your glycogen stores, you got to replace a lot of the nutrients and the enzymes that you burn through while you're working out. And so you get a lot of fluids carrying those rushing into your muscles to help your muscles rebuild. And so along with those fluids and white blood cells and prostaglandins, you've got swelling. And with that is weight gain. Because in order for your body to produce all that inflammation, it needs to retain some fluid volume. Most of the physiological processes in your body rely on water. So you're going to retain volume in order for that inflammation and swelling to occur. Now, it's entirely natural. And what happens is that swelling starts about two hours after you finish working out. It takes about that long for it to kick in, and then it peaks anywhere from two to four days after. And soreness peaks usually about two days after. Swelling peaks anywhere from two to four days after. And after a real, real hard workout. Believe it or not, especially with bodybuilders, it can take 7 to 11 days for swelling to subside. And that's even more true when you're doing what are called negatives or eccentric type of exercises where you're lowering a load or you're trying to slow down a load. It causes a lot more damage to the muscle fibers when you're having to work against gravity. So obviously, since it's normal. You don't want to completely shut down the inflammatory process. You don't want to pop a bunch of ibuprofen after a workout. That's something that I tell people is you're actually shutting down your ability to respond to the workout. If you turn off inflammation after a workout, the trick is to manage post exercise swelling and to keep those fluids that are going in and out of your muscles moving as quickly as possible. So you can do things like compression tights and compression socks for your lower limbs. If you want to go extreme, you can go with a full body compression suit. Some people do that. A lot of professional athletes will use compression on all their limbs. The other thing that you can do is an ice bath, which helps to flush a lot of the swelling. Icy hot treatments, for example, cold hot contrasts of 30 to 60 seconds in the shower can help out quite a bit. Making sure that you rehydrate after workout, that you take in your proteins and your carbs after workout can help with sweet soreness. It's not necessarily going to help too much with swelling, but it will help with the blood flow into the area as the blood delivers all those nutrients to the tissue. Massage helps. Self massage with a foam roller or a stick can help as well. And good cool down. Light stretching also paramount to help your muscles really milk a lot of that swelling out of them and keep the fluids moving in and out of the muscle tissue for repair and recovery. There is a condition called rhabdomyolysis, which is basically excessive muscle damage. A lot of inflammatory markers occur and it can lead to even death. But quite a bit of muscle damage, that is a case that would indicate that you were working out way too hard. I doubt that's the case with you. You've got some normal swelling going on that's going to occur after a hard workout. So it is normal. Just make sure you manage it. So we have a question from listener Michael and he says, I was wondering why I don't see or hear about serious athletes using the total immersion style of swimming. Do you know why most athletes just use a standard freestyle stroke and not total immersion? Do they not know about it or do they just feel freestyle is good enough? Well, Michael, it's possible that your question is slightly misinformed because total immersion is a style of swimming that is a freestyle style of swimming. It's just basically a type of technique that's used with freestyle swimming. And specifically it's focused on balancing in the water, on streamlining your body, or swimming long. So that you reduce drag as much as possible on shifting your weight forward or swimming downhill a little bit so your feet stay closer to the surface of the water and basically getting a good glide or holding your plank place in the water by keeping one arm extended out in front of your body as a ballast so you get a nice long glide. Now, total immersion is a great swimming style. It's a wonderful way to learn the basic components of freestyle. And believe it or not, a lot of athletes are trained this way. And even serious and professional athletes started out with total immersion and made a few modifications to make themselves better. What modification specifically? What I find is that people who learn total immersion when they swim, they tend to hold their glide a little bit too long and they tend to not have a high enough swim stroke, especially for open water style of swimming. If you're trying to do a triathlon or something of that nature, you have to have a little bit higher turnover, a little bit more forceful, almost messy style of swimming compared to the total immersion swimming. But the balance that you learn in total immersion and the streamlining, the ability to move your body through the water while reducing turbulent flow flow of the water around your body, is very useful. And I would actually encourage you, if you're a beginning swimmer, look into a technique like the total immersion to form your basis. Form the basis of your swim stroke and then modify it with a little bit of speed and power as you go to help you out a little bit. But that's a great question. And total immersion swimming is used among professional athletes and serious athletes. It's just modified a little bit to make it more powerful. So a question over Twitter from Andrew Heaps. And Andrew asked via Twitter. And just so you guys know, if you ask me via Twitter a question, I'm sending a free BenGreenfieldFitness.com t shirt to the best question asked via Twitter. And there were a few of them this week. And I will be sending out a free T shirt to the best question asked via Twitter. You can do that by going to twitter.com and you follow me on Twitter by clicking the follow button. After you create your free Twitter account, then you ask me a question. So Andrew Heaps asks, hey Ben, any tips for good recipes if cooking for more than just one? Absolutely, Andrew. It's a good question. I know that a lot of the meal plans that you'll see me write and talk about seem like they're made for just one person, but the fact is that you can definitely modify them and eat healthy for more than just One, especially if you have a family. A few of the things that we do as a family is we'll do things that are like tacos. We do a lot of wraps. We do do tacos. Sometimes we do like falafel, like a Greek gyro type of wrap where we'll use like a whole wheat pita and some hummus and chickpeas. We use a little bit of feta cheese, some tomatoes, some lettuce. Any type of meal where you're stuffing either gluten free wraps or pitas or bok choy or Swiss chard or kale or big leaves of romaine lettuce, that works really well because you just put all that stuff out on the table and people dig in. And if you're trying to eat healthy, you can pick and choose. If you want to use the cheese and sour cream, or if you're watching your calories and you don't want to use the cheese and sour cream, or if you're trying to eat gluten free, maybe you wrap your wrap inside or you wrap ingredients inside romaine lettuce rather than a whole wheat wrap, but you have whole wheat wraps there at the table for the people that want to use them. Those work really well. Batch prepping with dishes like quinoa based dishes works really well. Amaranth and millet are another couple of very good kind of pseudo grains that are a little bit higher in protein that work well for larger dishes. A lot of times what we'll do is we'll just take a bite, bunch of fresh ingredients, fresh produce or fresh garden ingredients like tomatoes and basil, cilantro. We'll do some flax seeds, some almonds or pumpkin seeds, a little bit of olive oil, some type of vinegar or vinaigrette, and we'll just combine all that stuff together in like a salad, like a grain based salad over quinoa or amaranth or millet. You can put a little feta cheese or goat cheese in a recipe like that, but that's very easy to do. A couple of other things that we'll do is we do pizza. We do both. A gluten free pizza, which you can buy at any grocery store, gluten free pizza dough, very easy to prepare. You put your favorite fresh ingredients on top of pizza. We tend to keep pizzas very simple. Fresh tomatoes that you can slice and put on the pizza after you've cooked it for a little while with just a little bit of cheese. And there's a variety of different pizza sauces. Out there, I would recommend that you make your own. There are lots of good, healthy homemade pizza sauce recipes out there. And you know, for me to go on and on about cooking for more than just one. Obviously there's tons of recipes, but the things you want to stay away from are cream based recipes, casserole based recipes. Typically anything where you're combining a ton of ingredients and heating them up or cooking them or baking them, or slow cooking them. Usually more often than not, the ingredients involve lots of salt, lots of butter, lots of cream, lots of high calorie, low nutrient dense type of foods. So try and keep it fresh and light when you're cooking for more than just one. And think about it more as preparing than cooking. Now, I would really direct you towards Chef Todd. He's one of my friends who teaches online web cooking classes. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for Chef Todd, you'll find him a fabulous resource for cooking. He's got some really good stuff, stuff and it's well worth. He has like an online cooking membership website. He's actually worth looking into. You'll learn a lot from him. And he himself is becoming more and more healthy with his cooking style, which is awesome. So, listener Allison asks. I am a sports tissue and myofascial release practitioner. I wanted to ask you two questions. Number one, I have a client who is a diabetic training for her first marathon. She struggles with a lot of myofascial adhesions despite using the foam roller religiously and having a session with me every two to three weeks. Do you have any suggestions on how to help her body? Well, first of all, for those of you listening in, myofascial adhesions are pretty common causes of muscle pain or musculoskeletal pain. If you feel your neck get real, real tight sometimes, maybe up in your traps, carry a lot of tension in your shoulders, it can happen in the hamstrings as well quite a bit. It can happen in your adductors and your quads. Any muscles that you tend to use quite a bit, they tend to get adhesions. And the specific area that gets what's called adhesed is an area underneath the skin called the fascia. And there's a few different layers of this fascia. But essentially you get capillaries and blood vessels moving through this fascia. You get nerves moving through it and it connects muscles and fat and bone and all the tissues that move throughout your body. It kind of keeps them together in Fast, you can think almost like a spider web, like a real, real thick network of spider webs that hold your body together. And when you injure a body part, scar tissue forms, what are called adhesions form. And those are all made up of fascia. And if that fascia is not really forming in a way that's parallel or that follows the route that normal fascia would, it tends to create these knots and adhesions and feelings of tightness and what are called cross linking, haphazard cross linking, where your collagen and your fibers really aren't arranged in the way that they're supposed to. And there are some practitioners, probably similar to Allison, who specialize in just helping people keep their fascia aligned. And it's especially important if you've been injured before to keep that area of injury very mobile and keep the vessels and the nerves feeding that area very mobile. But it's important, too, for injury prevention to work your fascia with a foam roller or have a massage therapist work on your fascia to keep all those fibers lined up the right way. It's one of the reasons that things like massage therapy actually works. Now, with the diabetes issue, I'm not a physician, but I can tell you, and most of you know this, that with diabetics. Neuropathy. Diabetic neuropathy is something that's very common, and that's numbness and tingling and pain, weakness in the extremities, and it's stems from nerve damage as a result of diabetes. And while we don't need to necessarily get into the cause of how diabetes actually causes nerve damage, I'm not really familiar with fascia and muscle damage being a symptom of diabetes. But because nerves move through and weave through the fascia and the muscle, I would consider looking after some of the same treatments that you'd use for something like a neuropathy with this patient or some suggestions for management of neuropathy. Now, obviously, they'd want to talk to their physician about specific pharmaceuticals and things of that nature that they could use to treat neuropathy. Any of you who listen to this show for some period of time know that I'm a big favor of natural treatments as much as possible. And a couple of things that can be used or that have traditionally been used as nutrients to manage or to help with pain related to neuropathy include alpha lipoic acid. And alpha lipoic acid is a supplement that you could find at your local health food store. A lot of grocery stores have it now. Acetyl L carnitine is another supplement that has been used in the treatment of diabetic neuropathy. B vitamin dosing is another thing. And ginkgo biloba. Interestingly, we'll talk about gingo biloba a little bit later on in the podcast, but for both circulation as well as management of pain related to diabetic neuropathy, it's something that has been studied and used as a natural treatment. So I would look into some of the natural treatments for neuropathy. I would also consider some of the things that we're going to be talking about Next Week with Dr. David Minkoff, but he talks about managing adhesions and muscle pain with cold laser with some vibration based treatments. I believe he mentions acupuncture in that interview as well. And again, that will be in podcast number 105, which will be coming up. But there are some other things in addition to just physical manipulation of the fascia that could help with some of those adhesions and pains. So I would look after natural treatments of diabetic neuropathy. I would also look into some things that you're not doing, like the cold laser, like acupuncture, like vibration based therapy and some of those treatments. But myofascial pain, definitely something that can be frustrating, especially for people who are physically active. And it often requires more than one approach when it comes to treatment. And the second part of your question, you say, I am thinking of trying a try. However, each time I go to the pool to try and swim laps, I suffer from nausea and vertigo. I have horrible motion sickness on dry land anyways and often get so sick on boats and long car rides. Can you think of anything I can do to help? Ginger doesn't work. That was one of the things I was going to suggest and it's impossible to work out on Dramamine patches. I would agree with that. It's tough to exercise when you're on Dramamine. There are some other things that you can try. I've actually had some clients that I've trained who have real trouble. They get dizzy on everything from a treadmill to the water. Some of the things that we've tried include acupuncture and acupressure. You can actually get wrist bands with special acupressure tabs that target the area of your wrists and your hands associated with motion sickness. So you can look into wristbands with acupressure tabs on them. You can also work on some breathing techniques, some deep breathing, some relaxation techniques. I have a hunch if you've already experimented with ginger and Dramamine, you've probably tried some breathing techniques. But the other thing that you can do is actually train your body to handle the type of issues that it's not dealing well with as you begin to get into those wavy conditions in the water. And there's actually a drill that you can do. And the way that you do this drill is you want to get an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and you want to draw a bunch of black and white squares on there in a checkered pattern. In the middle of that checkered pattern, you want to put an X. And what you do is you shake your head back and forth while you're trying to focus on the X in the center of that paper. And you want to be able to work yourself up to the point where you can shake your head up and down and back and forth and still focus on that X that's in the middle of that checkerboard pattern. And after a while you'll find that you can actually begin to focus on that X without feeling dizzy as you shake your head. That can help out quite a bit. It's a drill that physical therapists use when treating motion sickness. The other thing that you want to do is use the lane lines in the pool. Make sure that you look at the lane lines and only at the lane lines. Trust the lane lines. Obviously it doesn't help in the open water, but looking at non moving objects as much as possible is the other thing that will help out quite a bit. But don't feel like you're stuck with the motion sickness. You can try and train your brain to deal a little bit better with it. So best of luck, Allison, and great questions. We're going to move on to a question from listener Kai and I've gotten a lot of questions about this recently about the fact that Consumer Reports recently published findings of high levels of lead and other metals in protein drinks and other supplements, including green drinks. Kai says. What is your take on this? Are there any certifications we should look for in supplement labels that provide guidance as to the quality of the ingredients? And what is your take on consumerlab.com we'll start with that last question. Consumerlab.com, i don't have a big issue with. They're out there to protect consumers and I appreciate some of the things that they've brought to us, specifically this study in which they took some very popular protein drinks. Something you may have heard of, the EAS Myoplex Shake the muscle Milk chocolate powder and another nutritional shake, a chocolate flavored nutritional shake. And what they found was that these shakes and powders not only contained lead and lead that was over and above what would be considered to be toxic levels, but they also contained cadmium, arsenic and mercury. Now these are of course all toxic heavy metals. And exposure to them can cause neurotoxic damage, it can cause, cause nausea, can cause vomiting. Long term exposure to heavy metals has been linked to cancer. Cadmium is a known human carcinogen. And these things can accumulate in your body over time. Especially if you're that person who's having a protein shake every day after your workout or for breakfast every morning. This is stuff that you should definitely be concerned about. So here are my thoughts and my take on this. The supplement companies that they studied are considered very big, kind of run of the mill. You know, I don't want to do any name calling here, but let's just say like gnc, you walk into GNC and those are the type of things that you would see at them. GNC being a popular supplement store here in America versus the smaller organic companies that tend to not mass produce quite as much, maybe not go after Chinese based products quite as much, which tend to be higher in lead. We all know what happened with the toy fiasco last year. And I do know that a lot of the bigger supplement companies outsource a lot of their ingredients overseas. Now you contrast that with organic based proteins and organic ingredients which has not been exposed or which have not been exposed to fertilizers, they haven't been exposed to a lot of the modern industrialization and commercialization practices. And so the soil and the area that they're growing is not contaminated with heavy metals. That would be a better way to go. And specifically I'm talking about like organic whey protein because whey is specifically one of the, one of the culprits here, organic whey protein or choosing proteins that are not based on whey at all, that are based on more like a hemp base or a pea base or a rice base. But essentially what we're talking about doing is choosing smaller companies that don't mass produce their ingredients, that aren't getting their ingredients necessarily from overseas sources that are focused on quality and organic in terms of their sources. I have mentioned on this show a couple of times the organic goat raised whey that is cold pressed, which means that it's a lot gentler way of extracting that protein and contains a whey protein concentrate that's naturally sweetened it doesn't have artificial sweeteners in it, doesn't have chemicals added, doesn't have preservatives added. And that's the Mount Capra double bonded whey protein. Now let's say that you're a vegan or you're a vegetarian and you're not into whey protein. Well, you've got other options. Brendan Brazier, who we're interviewing today, his entire nutrition company is based around ingredients that are high quality, that are organic and that are not animal based. So he's got vegan based protein compounds like hemp and pea and rice. There's another protein supplement you'll find over at Pacific Food, the Living Fuel Living Protein. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Another way to get protein without having to worry about some of these modern farming techniques that could be exposing the protein to heavy metals or outsourcing the ingredients that they're getting from Chinese based facilities. So those are some of the things that I'd think about when you're looking at some of the certification labels like wada, the World Anti Doping association, when you're looking at the certified Good Manufacturing Practices, which is the CGMP certification. Unfortunately, these same supplement companies that they found the heavy metals in all have those certifications or those recognizations or recognitions, and they still had the heavy metals in them. So the CGMP and the WADA are more focused on the type of things that would be considered illegal performance enhancing supplements in your supplements, not heavy metals. But this is definitely something that concerns me and makes me even more wary of the supplements that I'm buying and making sure that I'm going after high quality supplements. And I have also talked with the Living Fuel, the company that makes a living protein, and with Mount Capra. And I'm waiting back for a statement from them on their take on this matter. And I'll get that out on the podcast as well as soon as I hear back from them as well. And if you have more information, you're listening in and you want to leave a comment as usual, leave a comment right on the episode. Show notes for this podcast, number 104. Now listener Doug Lloyd asks a Twitter question. Another Twitter question. I'm feeling unmotivated to restart my lifting and running program. A trainer might help. What should I look for in a personal trainer? That is a question I wish more people asked you guys. I have been a trainer. I've been a personal trainer for over a decade and I've been asked Less than a dozen times. Where I was educated, how I was certified, what my experience is, it is similar. Or that type of approach would be similar to going into a health practitioner's office and not asking them if they are a doctor. Okay. Personal training certifications are available for people to get via an open book weekend certification from their home. You pay a company and they'll send you a test. You fill out that test using whatever books or Google or Wikipedia or anything else you want. You send it back in, you pay them $150 or $200. They send you a certificate that says, congratulations, John Doe, you're a personal trainer. And then that might be the personal trainer that you're walking into your gym and hiring at X dollars an hour to take care of your body. You wouldn't do that if they were a brain surgeon operating on your brain. Why would you do that with someone if they are taking care of and giving you advice about your body or your nutrition? That's why this is a great question. So here is what to look for, Doug. The good certifications out there that you need to be asking your personal trainer if they have and making sure that they can actually provide proof of certification, of updated certification. Because these certifications do expire and I do know some personal trainers who do not renew them and still tell people they are certified. The certifications would be the nsca National Strength Conditioning association, the only internationally recognized certifying body for personal trainers. The NSCA is considered to be more of like a performance strength and conditioning. Very good for athletes, very good for the general population. But that's the type of certification that is acsm. American College of Sports Medicine. Another very good certification often used for people working in a clinical environment such as a heart attack recovery center in a hospital. Very good for people who are doing coffee cardiac rehab. If you're having heart issues or you're rehabilitating from something like a cardiac based issue. ACSM would be the personal trainer that I would choose. Nasm, the National Academy of Sports Medicine. Not sure if I'm saying that right. National association of Sports Medicine, nasm. And the NASM is very good also for rehabilitation, for muscle work. Has a strong focus on anatomy, physiology. That's a great certification as well. One that's kind of on the edge for me is called ace. The ACE Personal Training Certification. ACE does have a very good certification program. It's just that some people just go through like, you know, the ACE Group Fitness Instructor certification. They are not the same as a person who has gone through the ACE personal training certification system. So you need to make sure that you know that the ACE has varying degrees of certification, as does the nsca, as a matter of fact, in most of the certification bodies. But ACE is the only one I'm aware of where you may find out that the person who is trying to teach you how to weightlift really is only certified to teach group Pilates and yoga. And that's really something that you need to be careful with. So look into the certification, look into the experience. How many clients have they worked with? How long have they worked with them? In the same way that you would want someone who's going to operate on your knee to have done hundreds of knee surgeries. I'm not saying that rookie personal trainers don't have a place to start out, but if it were me, I'd be looking for a personal trainer who has worked with lots of people, seen lots of cases, and worked with lots of different body types and unique needs. If I were choosing a personal trainer, I would also choose one that is well versed in nutrition or has access to a nutritionist or a registered dietitian or some type of mentor to help them help you with your nutrition needs. So make sure that you take into consideration the dietary knowledge of your personal trainer. Because there are some personal trainers that will just tell you to eat before and after a workout and make sure you eat, you know, whatever three times a day or six times a day. And that's all the advice you're ever going to get from them. Make sure that they actually know something about nutrition or they're willing to bring someone onto their team who's able to help you out with nutrition, or they're able to refer you out to a nutritionist. So if they're themselves not a nutritionist, make sure that they are willing to work with one and to help you out by referring you to one. Finally, make sure that you're choosing a trainer that fits your personality. There are some trainers that simply are not going to be the type of person that motivates you that you get along with. Some trainers, very soft spots. That's good for some people. That's not motivating for some people. Some trainers are very brash and that's also not necessarily good or agreeable for some types of clients. So make sure that you get a chance to sit down with your personal trainer. Any personal trainer should at least be doing a 30 minute consultation with you and preferably closer to a 50 or 60 minute consultation with you to really get to know you and for you to get to know them if you're going to be hiring them to reinvent your body, especially for a long term basis. So I will personally vouch for any of the trainers that work for me around the nation that you can find at Pacific Elite Fitness, that is pacificfit.net you can find me there. You can find any of the personal trainers that work for me there and I have hand picked any of them to to be safe and well certified and well versed to help you lose weight or do a triathlon or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. Great question, Doug. And as a matter of fact, you win a free T shirt for asking the best question of the week via Twitter. So send me your address, Doug, whether via Twitter or via email and I will get a T shirt in the mail for you ASAP. BenGreenfieldFitness.com T shirt and we're going to move on to a question from listener Gabe. Gabe says, I recently have had interest in the Bioletics tests and protocols that you talk about. I have a limited budget, so I'd like to start with just the vitamin D test. Do you think the vitamin D test is the best place to start with Bioletics? How do I download previous podcast episodes with Dr. Cohen from Bioletics? I don't see how to download those episodes from itunes. All right, great question. So first, let's address the second part of your question, Gabe, about downloading previous podcasts. If you're trying to access those from an iPhone or a mobile phone and you go to itunes and you're not seeing the previous podcasts in there, go to the link that I'm going to put in the show notes of this episode. Okay, now, BenGreenfieldFitness.com is accessible via mobile phone. I do have a device on there or a piece of software that basically reconverts the code on my website to allow you to comfortably view it on your phone, go to the episode show notes for this episode, episode number 104. And underneath your question, I've put a link that shows all the podcasts I've ever done. And if you click on that link, you'll be able to download any of those. Now to the first part of your question about the vitamin B test and whether I would say that that would be the best place to start if it were me, I wouldn't. Because so many people are deficient in vitamin D, you're almost guaranteed that if you start taking vitamin D, it's going to benefit you. You're also almost guaranteed that you're probably deficient in vitamin D. So I don't know if I would prioritize that as the top test to do. If I were in your shoes, I would look after something that's a little bit more diet specific and body type specific. I would look into the essential amino acids test, which was very eye opening for me and has been one of the life changing things for me in terms of my performance and my health was I got tested for the amino acids and I found out that I need to be eating a high protein diet and I also need to be supplementing with essential amino acids. And for me, I thought I was getting more than enough protein. I wasn't. And the other one that I would really look into is the essential fatty acids. In my case, again, I thought I was eating lots of healthy fats, Turns out I was. But I was eating too many of the omega 6 type of fats and I had to readjust my diet to take in more of the Omega 3s. So I would really recommend with Bioletics, even though all their tests are obviously highly beneficial, look into the essential fatty acids or the essential amino acids and we'll see if we can get Dr. Cohen to come on and comment on the episode show notes for his take on this. But if it were me and I were in your shoes, I would look after the essential fatty acids or the essential amino acids test. And you can read about all those tests over@Bioletics.com and they send test kits to your home to allow you to test things like your magnesium levels, your vitamin D levels, your fatty acids, your amino acids, your metabolic type, etc. Make sure you let them know that I sent you over there because that's important, that they know where you came from and that I am giving them business. I really believe in that company and what they do and I would highly recommend that you look into them. So we have a question from listener Jason next. And Jason says, I am a cyclist. Last week I was in a crash during a race resulting in a broken collarbone. My doc says it will be about four to six weeks until this has healed. I'm wondering if my nutrition over the next several weeks can help or hinder bone healing. Are there certain foods or supplements I should be including in my diet? What would you do for a broken bone? First of all, listen to your doc. Broken collarbone, Listen to your doc in terms of healing, make sure that your doc is a cyclist. I'm serious because there's no reason that you can't rig up an indoor bicycle. Suspend your arms so that you're not putting a lot of stress on your collarbone, ride with that for the first couple of weeks and then modify your handlebars. You can take an old handlebar, tape it on top of your existing handlebar to bring your hand handlebars up closer to your body and continue to ride that way as well. These are the type of things that a doctor who is a cyclist will tell you. A doctor who doesn't really care that much about endurance sports or the fact that you're going to want to stay fit and on your bike during your collarbone fracture or break is not going to tell you that stuff. So make sure that your doctor really is familiar with cyclists who need to keep riding with broken collarbones. Because guys finish the Tour de France with broken collarbones. Totally possible to do. As far as speeding up healing, I'm going to put a link to a couple of resources for you Jason in the episode show notes. One is podcast number 49 which was an interview with a gentleman about a supplement called lactoferrin or a compound called lactoferrin, which has some really promising research behind it in terms of its ability to speed up osteoblast activity. And osteoblasts are the parts of your bones that actually allow new bone cell to get laid down. And lactoferrin is a supplement I'd look into and you can hear the podcast about that in podcast number 49. I'd also look into my free resource how to Recover Like Wolverine from X Men. You can get that for free by clicking on the link that I'll also put in the show note episodes. But a couple of things that are specifically in that book that I look into. One would be glucosamine chondroitin. It's necessary for proper joint lubrication and cartilage regeneration. Your body makes it, but by giving yourself a little bit of extra, you're not going to hurt yourself. It's made from ground up goat cartilage, the stuff that I recommend. As a matter of fact, that same company I recommended earlier, Mount Capra, they make that organic goat based whey protein, but they also use ground up chicken cartilage and they make this glucosamine chondroitin and I definitely check that stuff out. It's called Capra Flex and it's something that I would look into. I'd also look into vitamin C which helps in the production of what are called fibroblasts and Chondrocytes which are also responsible for connective tissue fiber and cartilage formation. So a vitamin C dosing would be very easy to do as well. And that's something that I look into in terms of, excuse me, bone healing and circulatory, circulatory movement. Iron is a key component of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to your muscles and carries oxygen to other tissues. And making sure that you have adequate iron in your food is important. They have done studies where people recovered faster from surgery and from injuries when they supplemented with iron. Iron isn't necessarily a vital component of bone density formation, but it's definitely something that I always suggest to people who are injured to help with inflammation and oxygen delivery. A couple of other things I would look into is making sure that you're not leaching calcium from your bones by consuming an acidic diet. And an acidic diet would be a diet high in grains and sugars, processed sugars, a diet high in chemicals, toxins, artificial sweeteners, things of that nature. So I'd avoid cereals, I'd avoid grains, I'd avoid a lot of pasta, a lot of bread. Make sure you eat a lot of alkalinic foods, dark skinned fruits, dark vegetables, greens, supplements, cold water, Fish is good, green tea is good, nuts like walnuts and almonds, pumpkin seeds, flaxseeds are also good. So I'd look into taking in some of those. I'd also look into a couple of mineral, well, one large mineral and then some mineral co factors. I would look into magnesium to take take along with the calcium. You can take oral magnesium up to the point where you get loose stool. 500 to 1000 milligrams in that range is typically what would be about the upper range for what you could take in terms of a magnesium supplement to help with that calcium absorption, I'd also look into trace mineral supplementation. Trace minerals are just small micro minerals. I actually interviewed, I did an interview on trace minerals sometime back with a lady and you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com do a search for minerals. This lady was from a company called Ambaya, Ambaya Gold and she was talking about trace minerals and the role that they play in the body. But if you can get your hands on a good trace mineral supplement, that'd also be something that I would recommend. So a few different things that you can do there, but definitely look into the glucosamine, chondroitin, the vitamin C, iron, look into trace minerals, look into magnesium, continue to of course make sure you get adequate calcium. That should go without saying. And also look into an alkalinic diet, a non acidic diet, and some things that you can do to help you keep riding even though you have a stress fracture. So good question, Gabe. Or Jason, rather. Jason. Listener Zach says. I am a 35 year old marathoner that has decided to come serious about bike racing. I realized I needed to drop some weight to realize my full potential. I have a theory that I need to gain some muscle in order to lean out and then I can worry about cannibalizing some of that muscle when it comes time to get into racing shape. How would you go about this? So it's an interesting theory. I mean, the whole idea is you build muscle so you bump up your metabolism and then you use that higher metabolism to burn through fat. The only issue is that because muscle takes about 3600 extra calories of consumption, I'm sorry, 2500 extra calories of consumption. It's tough to gain muscle without at the same time gaining a little bit of fat. You don't have to eat hamburgers and big fatty steaks and do the whole body building approach of just putting on a ton of mass and then shedding fat. You, you can still put on protein mass without getting a ton of fat. But be warned that if you go about eating as much as you're going to have to eat to gain muscle mass, you're probably going to gain some fat in the process. Because ultimately what it comes down to is that for even a pound of extra muscle a week, you're going to have to eat at least 2,500 extra calories per week. A better way to go would be to focus on, on fat loss. But just make sure that you include weightlifting or resistance training in your cycling program so that you are sustaining a healthy metabolism. You are getting some of the hormonal response that occurs to weightlifting that can have a very positive effect on your ability to lose fat. But you're not doing kind of the mass gain type of protocol, which can be stressful. It can cause you to gain extra fat weight and it really isn't conducive to getting into good functional cycling shape. So if I were you and I were trying to shed some fat to become a better cyclist, but also make sure that I get some muscle on my body. The way I would do it is rather than thinking of bulking up muscle and then shedding fat, I would go for both at or not both at once, but I would go for more of a, more of a Moderate muscle building approach and a fat burning approach. So you're eating a healthy diet using the fat loss techniques that I've talked about on this show in the past. You're getting up, you're exercising on an empty stomach, nice and easy to jump start that fat burning. You're doing some weightlifting and some interval training later on in the afternoon. You're eating at a caloric deficit of no more than 1,000 calories a day, but in that 500 to 1,000 calorie a day caloric deficit range. And believe it or not, studies have shown that even people who are at a caloric deficit can still maintain or build a slight amount of lean muscle while weightlifting. It's not going to be like bulk gain mode, but you can gain a little bit of lean muscle even when you're at a caloric deficit as long as you're weightlifting. So I do the caloric deficit, the fat burning, and then moderate weightlifting for a moderate muscle gain. And when I say moderate muscle muscle gain, we're talking about like probably in the range of 0.2 to 0.4 pounds per week. So good question. Listener Todd asks kind of a related question. I was wondering if 1500 calories a day is a good goal for me. I don't want it to be too little and slow down my metabolism too much. I do cardio at least five days a week, and if the machines are accurate, I'm averaging about 700 calories burned per day. I have a worry in the back of my mind that my calorie intake will put my body into starvation mode, especially with the huge calories that I used to consume daily. Todd, the only way to know is to know your metabolic rate. So there's lots of ways to find out your metabolic rate. You can go to a laboratory. You can test your resting metabolic rate using what's called an RMR test. Do a Google search for your area, type in resting metabolic rate test and see what comes up. There might be a practitioner in your area who offers that service. You could also look into the local exercise physiology lab at your university to see if they're able to offer you a resting metabolic rate test. You could use an equation. There's an equation out there that's pretty decent called the Harris Benedict equation. And that equation allows you to approximate, based off your height and your weight and your age and your sex, your approximate number of calories that your body needs per day in order to sustain your metabolism. Now, once you find out what your resting metabolic rate is, my recommendation is that males not undercut that by more than 1,000 calories and that females not undercut that by more than 500 calories. So, for example, my personal resting metabolic rate, and I know this from a laboratory test, is about 2,900 calories per day. That's what I burn sitting around doing nothing. So I never eat fewer than 1900 calories per day because I want my body to have enough calories so that my metabolism doesn't slow down as my body goes into this starvation mode. Now, that's starvation mode. Starvation mode is not when you skip a meal, okay? Your body doesn't go into starvation mode if you eat three meals a day. Your body goes into starvation mode when you have day after day after day of undercutting your metabolic rate far below your resting metabolic rate or undercutting your intake far below your resting metabolic rate. That's starvation mode. Don't let anybody tell you that starvation mode is going to happen if you eat three times a day or you skip breakfast, okay? That's not starvation mode. Starvation mode is literally starving your body. That's when your metabolism begins to slow. So for you, you say you're 45 years old, 245 pounds, it's possible that your resting metabolic rate is over 2,500 calories, in which case, 1500 calories a day would be really low for you, or getting close to being too low for you. Now, if you happen to have a slower metabolism, let's say it's 2000 calories a day, you're going to be fine on 1500 calories a day. But it's really tough to say without knowing for sure your resting metabolic rate. That's why a cookie cutter approach is really tough in this situation for a while. One of the things that I've done with a lot of my clients is that resting metabolic rate test to make sure that we're finding out the exact resting metabolic rate if any type of severe caloric deficit is necessary so we don't undercut the calories by too many. So great question. Question from. I believe this was a Twitter question again. Have you ever used sport legs? If so, what are your thoughts about it? Okay. Sport legs. You know, I did use sport legs. I got a few samples. I think they sent me some samples. I tried them out. I kind of got interested in them for a little while. It's an interesting philosophy. Sport legs, you know, they contain trace amounts of magnesium and vitamin D, so little that those components really probably aren't doing much for you. But the main active component in sport legs that I'm really interested in is that it's basically lactate. Okay. And a lot of people call it lactic acid, but basically it's lactate. And the idea is, if you preload your body prior to exercising with a bunch of lactate, you cause the enzymes responsible for buffering lactic acid and turning it back into fuel and shuttling all the acid out, out of your muscles to work quicker, work more quickly. And so when you finally do begin exercising, you don't burn quite as much and you're able to achieve a higher intensity faster and get less lactic acid accumulation in your muscle tissues. And then furthermore, by having that extra lactate into your body. The idea is that hydrogen ions, which are responsible for the acidic state state in your muscles, get buffered or taken up by that extra lactate, so you recover more quickly. On paper, it all looks pretty nice. It's a really cool philosophy. And studies have shown that by preloading with that lactate, you actually can, you can increase the buffering capacity of your body and increase your ability to convert that lactic acid into glucose. However, I have yet to see a single study using sport legs that shows a direct performance increase based on that fact. So the question is, is your body good enough already at buffering lactic acid and converting lactic acid into energy that you really don't need extra lactate dumped down the hatch to make it happen? It could be. So. So until I see a definitive study that shows an improvement in performance, I'm not totally convinced that sport legs would be the best bang for your buck. I don't think they're going to hurt you. I took them a bunch. I took them before some sprint races, some Olympic races. I felt great when I took them. I'm not certain that I felt a huge difference between when I did and didn't take them. Really tough for me to say, but that's the idea behind sport legs, and they're not going to hurt you. I wouldn't be worried about the trace amounts of lactate that those are putting into your body compared to what your body is endogenously producing when you begin exercising. But the idea is, I'm not totally convinced they're going to help you recover or help you perform either, but they are a very interesting and compelling supplement. The next question is for or from listener Brad. And Brad says, several months ago, I watched a Dr. Oz interview where he told Jimmy Kimmel that the maximum healthy waist size should be half the height. Is that true? Waist height ratio is basically what that's called. And many of you might be familiar with the BMI or body Max index. And that's a ratio of weight to height. And it's been used for a really long time to predict your mortality or your cardiovascular risk. The problem with that test being that it will predict some people who are actually very fit and who may be heavy because they have large amounts of lean muscle. It will predict them to still be unhealthy or have a high cardiovascular risk, which of course is unfortunate if your BMI is being taken into consideration for something like your health insurance or your life insurance policy. So the BMI has some flaws, especially for thin people with lots of lean muscle who are in good shape, or thick people who are built like linebackers, who are in relatively good shape but just happen to be heavier, not from fat mass, but from muscle mass. So that's where the waist height ratio comes in, is that no matter how big or how small you are, if you have a thin waist compared to your height, you really have a reduced cardiovascular risk. It's. It's pretty intuitive, really. I mean, the thicker your waist is, the more likely it is that that thickness is coming from added adipose tissue and fat and storage tissue around your waist. And compared to your height, it can give a very clear picture of whether or not your ratio is in a healthy range. And you can find ratios. If you just Google weight to height ratios, you can find the ratios published on the web that have a ratio for men and a ratio for women. You know, use specifically asked me, Brad, you said, I'm 74 inches tall and my waist is 35 inches. So what you would do is you would take the number 35, you divide it by 74, and in your case, it's going to come out to about 47%. If you look at a chart, you would see where 47% lies. A ratio of 47% for men is considered healthy normal weight, with the caveat that there still are three categories under that. You have a ratio of 43 to 46 being healthy, ratio of 35 to 43 being extremely slim, and a ratio of less than 35 being abnormally slim to underweight. So if you have a desire to be a male model, you may want to shed about 12 percentage points off that waist to height ratio. Otherwise, just make sure you don't gain too much weight, because that would get you closer to 53%, which gets into that overweight, unhealthy category, but definitely a better measurement than the BMI listener Bernice asks, I am curious to know what is more likely to make you fatter, consuming excess fat or excess sugar? Well, the answer to that, Bernice, is neither. Consuming excess calories is what's going to make you faster or fatter. Now, to take that to a more personal level, what I feel personally, I find that people who tend to consume excess fats tend to be the type of people who are consuming steaks, burgers, higher protein diets. They're consuming generally not a ton of like corn, wheat based products, not consuming as much processed sugar. They're generally more of kind of like the caveman type eaters. And you compare that with the people who are the high sugar eaters who tend to eat lots of packaged and processed foods, lots of things from the Starbucks bakery case, lots of Twizzlers and candies and cookies and baked goodies, and they tend to consume more, shall we say, processed foods. And so if you were to take somebody who was eating 1500 calories per day and 70% of those were coming from processed carbohydrates or processed sugars, and you were to take somebody who was eating 1500 calories a day, and they were eating a diet that was coming from steak and burgers and things of that nature, whatever, coconut, avocados, maybe some trail mix. Higher fat in terms of their diet and high fat would be really anything above about 30%. But let's say they're getting 40 to 50% of their diet from fat. Even though I would consider both of those diets to be less than ideal, I would consider the higher carbohydrate, higher sugar diet to be more damaging, more acidic for the body, full of more preservatives, more chemicals. And of course, any of those excess carbohydrates are not only doing damage, but from an overall health standpoint, but they're also getting converted into triglycerides and stored as fat, just like fat would be. Whereas the person who's eating the steak, the nuts, the hamburgers, a lot of the fats that they're getting in are a, they could be healthy fats, they could be some of the healthier saturated fats, some of the omega 3 fats, some of the omega 6 fats, granted, they're probably also getting some trans fats and some vegetable oils and some more acid inflammatory fats in that diet. But for the most part, a higher fat diet tends to be lower in terms of its ability to produce an acidic inflammatory condition in the body compared to a higher carbohydrate diet. So it is likely that if you are asking me this question that you're not even at that stage where you're thinking how could I eat a high fat diet and have it be a net alkalinic non inflammatory diet based on avocados and olives and Mediterranean food and that type of jive, I'm guessing that you're probably more at the stage where you're just trying to lose weight. In which case I would be focused on the more general recommendation of limiting the number of calories that you take in consuming somewhere in the range of 20 to 30% protein, 20 to 30% fat, 40 to 60% carbohydrates, all from real food that you recognize and that you can easily identify that's not coming out of boxes, not coming out of drive thru windows packages or containers. And if you begin to follow those general recommendations, I'm thinking that the question of whether to consume excess fat or excess sugar is going to fall by the wayside. Now that being said, if you had to choose between a spoonful of peanut butter or a piece of chocolate cake for your cheat meal, I'm leaning towards the peanut butter. So hopefully that helps you out a little bit. And I'm going to put a link to an article or I'm sorry, not an article. Previous podcast called how low fat diets make you fat. It's called how low fat diets make you fat. I'm going to put a link to that in the episode Show Notes for episode number 104. Listener Karen asks, I would love to hear your opinion about the C Prime bracelet. I'm seeing more and more of these and hearing so many claims that this bracelet has made the biggest difference in running, biking, swimming and golf. Sounds too good to be true. What is your opinion? Well, the C Prime bracelet is a magnetic bracelet. Lots of companies are making magnetic bracelets based on the whole idea behind magnets being able to improve circulation and help to realign the natural energy fields in your body to improve performance and improve health. Now, there's been several studies on magnets and some have found decent results in terms of comparison to placebo magnets or non active magnets or things that look like magnets but weren't magnets. In terms of the ability to reduce a person's perception of pain and in terms of the ability to improve performance or specifically reduce the rating of perceived exertion. Some of the studies were not super elegant in the way that they were designed specifically. You know, there was one done at New York Medical College that was kind of grasping at straws because even though they noted statistical improvements, they had the groups divided into many different groups that it was really, really tough to see a real good statistical improvement when using the magnets. And then the other group had like twice as many women as men in the group that showed the improvement. And sex is definitely something to take into consideration when you're talking about a placebo versus a non placebo effect. So there's been a few issues with some of the studies that have been done, but ultimately what it comes down to, I mean, you're asking me this question, you're writing and asking me, and here are my thoughts on this. I've used magnets before on sprains strains. I have friends who use magnets and I personally feel less pain when I wear them. I have not yet noticed any improvement in performance, but I do notice that my injuries tend to feel a little bit better. And I'm also a big believer in the fact that we have energy fields in our human body, energy meridians in our human body that can be affected by magnets. Now I'm not saying that a C Prime bracelet is going to turn you from a 30 minute 5k runner to a 20 minute 5k runner, but let's just say that even the placebo effect is at play there and it helps you run a couple minutes faster or helps you recover a little bit faster from an ankle sprain. You know, I'm all for the placebo effect and I'm all for even trying something that may not have yet or have yet been proved by science, but if it helps you, it helps you. So that's the issue. You know, in case in point, Dara Torres, who had a fantastic Olympics a few years ago as a 40 plus year old phenom swimmer, she wore the magnetic bracelet. I have a picture of her. If you do a Google search for Ben Greenfield or search@BenGreenfieldFitness.com for Dara Torres, you'll see that I have a picture of her there wearing a bracelet. And in that same episode, I interview a gentleman about magnets and exercise and magnetic therapy. And it's an interesting interview, so I'm personally not totally sold on them, but they're not going to hurt you. And as long as you're not paying big bucks for your magnets, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Now, listener Rich asks, I have seen advertisements for a bar called the PR Bar in Competitor magazine. I called and the president of the company answered and told me how his Nutrition program would get my body burning fat for energy. Have you heard of this bar? I could not find any nutritional information on it. Well, here's what I did. I headed over to the PR Bar website and the PR bar definitely has a lot of hype behind it as being the cat's meow when it comes to supplying your body with all the fast fat burning nutrition that it needs. And it did take a little bit of digging for me to actually find the ingredient label, but I found it and here it is. Their ingredients are the PR blend. What is in the PR blend you ask? Soy protein isolate, whey protein concentrate, soy crisp which is rice flour, malt extract extract, calcium carbonate and soy protein isolate, fructose, peanuts, sugar, fractionated palm kernel oil, vegetable oil, that was my injection. Cocoa powder, whey powder, non fat milk powder, soy lecithin, corn syrup, peanut flour, maltodextrin, that's sugar, natural flavor, vitamin mineral blend and everything else from there on out is vitamins, vitamins, vitamins, vitamins and salt. Nothing groundbreaking here. This is basically a meal replacement bar or a protein bar that actually has more vegetable oil and more corn syrup and more sugar in it than any of the bars that I have ever personally recommended. It's also got potential allergens triggers in it like milk powder and peanut powder and peanuts. And it's basically, I guess the defining characteristic of it is that they put some vitamins in it. Nothing special here. Good advertising, Definitely good advertising. I'll give them an A for advertising. But the fast burn nutrition technology is probably going to do you more harm than good in the long run. And as usual I would continue to suggest that if you're going to use a meal replacement bar, you go with something that is gluten free, that is 100% organic, that does not contain things like peanuts, that does not contain corn syrup or fructose, and that preferably is more of like either a vegan vegetarian type of meal replacement bar or is made from entirely holistic healthy ingredients. Two examples, coccoccia bar made by that company Living Fuel that I talked about. Go to pacificfit.net click on supplements. You'll see the Coca Chia bar there. Bumble bar from bumblebar.com I love Bumble Bar. They're factory is three blocks from my house but they use good ingredients. It's a gluten free bar. Listen to the interview with Brendan Brazier. Check out his company. He's got an interview on the show today. He's got a company called Thrive, also dedicated to holistic real ingredients. Not shoving a bunch of protein and high fructose corn syrup down the hatch and then telling you that you're going to lose weight while doing that. That is not the answer. To me it's the same as a nutrisystem or a packaged meal. Sure, you might lose a little weight in the short term, but it's not really healthy. Long term, it's not real food. So question from Ecuador and the reason I say Ecuador is because just the way the question is phrased, it's Ecuadorian from Fernanda. She says nothing against Ecuadorians. It's just. I just wanted to give that clarification. I wanted to ask you if you could give some tips as what to bring to a picnic for a maximum of four people. Just food that gives you energy to run around all over the place. Also, I'm not sure if bringing much fruit will help because it is easily digested. And then we'll be in the query for a near bathroom. And one last thing, any other tips on activities like hit the ball? Please don't say hunting or fishing. I love that question. Picnic for four people. You know picnic foods when you see them in the cartoons. Traditionally you've got the cake and the beer and the sandwiches on the red and white checkered picnic blanket. And that's not necessarily the healthiest way to go. I can tell you what we do in my family when we prepare for a picnic. Usually we'll do crackers. There's actually a great recipe that my wife makes for flax seed crackers. And there are other recipes for crackers again in Brendan Brazier's book and we'll be interviewing Brendan pretty soon here. But crackers are very good. And especially like a non wheat based, like a gluten free seed and nut based cracker is very good. And you can do that along with some type of a meat. You can do that with a cheese or you can do that with a spread. And one of the things that we'll do a lot of the time is we'll get some nice plump organic tomatoes and we'll slice those tomatoes. We'll grind up some chickpeas and garlic and tahini in a blender and make some hummus. We'll throw some vegetables in there, like some crunchy carrots and cucumbers, some jicama strips and we'll put all that into a picnic basket. We'll get some water, generally some type of fresh fruit because you have to eat a lot of fruit to get diarrhea. You know, we get some watermelon, we'll get some, some sliced up apples, maybe some blueberries, we'll put that all in a basket. And you can take the tomatoes and the hummus and eat those with the crackers. If you do cheese and meat, you can use the cheese and meat as well. And then you can have the watermelon and the fruit. And then I personally like to do just a little bit of dark chocolate as a dessert. And for me that's a great picnic, especially if you throw in some sweet sparkling water, some Perrier or some Pellegrino. And much better than a ham and cheese sandwich with a piece of cake. That's my recommendation on the picnic foods. Brendan Brazier's book really does have some good on the go recipes that would be great for a picnic. Then as far as activities, there are so many things that you can do. You can do Frisbee, you can bring your tennis rackets and the tennis balls and hit those around. But what I would recommend is that you look into this new activity called bocce ball. And bocce ball is kind of like lawn bowling. What you do is you take a small ball and you throw it somewhere out in the distance. One person throws it and then the other competitors throw their ball and whoever gets closest to that ball that was thrown gets a point. There's variations on the point keeping system, but then the ball is thrown again and everyone throws, throws their ball to try and get closer to that ball that's in the distance. And actually played about an hour and a half long game of bocce ball on the beach the other night and it was a blast. So looking at this new game called, I don't even know if it's new, just new to me, called bocce ball. Check that out. And no hunting or fishing required, just bocce ball. Try that out. So great question. And for those of you down in this Sacramento or Eldorado Hills area, if you're listening to this podcast when it first comes out this Friday and Saturday, we'll be down there teaching at a special event focused on helping kids to get healthy and get outdoors. And we'll be doing a bunch of games and fun type of picnic based activities out there down in California. So if you're listening to this, shoot me an email and I'll tell you where to go. Finally a question. Or actually not finally two more questions. Question from listener Brian. Brian says I will be doing Syracuse Ironman 70.3 in September and have a question on long distance Downhill running after a heavy uphill bike course, the Syracuse bike course contains a lot of climbing and changes in elevation. Then, after what I'm sure will be a tough ride, the run course is all downhill for 13 miles. Can you offer any tips on form, position or training for either the bike or the run that will allow the quads and glutes to survive this back to back test? Absolutely. Let's start with the bike. Don't stand on the bike. You're going to use a lot of your hamstrings and your glutes if you stand on the bike and that's going to leave those muscles less able to help you on the run. Stay in a seated position on the steep hills, get in the arrow position on the shallow hills and that will help you to spin at your high cadence and reduce the potential for for you to easily fatigue your leg muscles for the run when you get onto, or I'm sorry, not when you get onto, but as you're preparing for that bike, make sure that you're of course doing lots of hill repeats. That should go without saying. Ride hills. If you're going to race hills. Now for the run, you're definitely going to want to build up some of your leg muscles which are going to be responsible for absorbing some of that joint impact and helping you to stabilize as you engage in your joint. Downhill running, try single leg lunges and single leg squats. Definitely those single leg support activities are going to help quite a bit because you're going to be breaking as that heel strikes the downhill surface and you'll be glad for the strong single leg support muscles that you build up with those activities. Make sure that you train your core, especially with plank based activities. Make sure that you train your hamstrings and your glutes. And this is going to go for the next question as well. Things like step ups, lunges, hip hikes, fire hydrants, there's tons of single leg type of activities you can do. Go to my website, pacificfit.net I have a huge free database of exercise photos and videos over there. Go check out some of the single leg stuff. Just scroll down to the letter S or the letter O for everything that starts with one leg or single leg. Check out some of the exercises that I demonstrate there and begin to implement those. Do a workout at least once a week that involves weightlifting or resistance training for the single leg. And then as you actually get into your downhill running technique, you're going to find that you tighten up in your upper body quite a bit. As you focus on running downhill and focus on watching where you're going, because you're generally traveling at higher speeds. Drop the shoulders, relax the shoulders, drop the arms. Whereas on steep rolling courses, I advise athletes to really let it flow, fly on the downhills and go fast and let gravity take them down and then work really controlled on the uphills. On a gradual downhill with lots of elevation loss and longer downhill strips, that going with gravity can actually beat up your body after a while. So I'll go with a slightly shorter cadence, slightly shorter or not slightly shorter cadence, slightly higher cadence, slightly shorter stride length. Don't stride out so much that you're doing a ton of heel striking. Lean forward because that's going to help push you down. Do not lean back, so relax your shoulders, but let them drop forward just slightly. Don't rotate your core too much, so keep your elbows beside your body and bent at 90 degrees and practice running so that your foot lands just underneath your hips. Okay? With that slight forward lean and that'll help you out quite a bit. So don't let it fly and it'll get too out of control going downhill or you'll end up really beating your body up and running downhill very unefficiently. Instead, relax the upper body, lean slightly forward, high cadence, slightly shorter stride length. Keep your feet under your hips and then just make sure that you don't over utilize those muscles on the bike and have those muscles ready for the run by doing some single leg weightlifting type of activities leading up to the run. And then we have a call in question.

Hey Ben, this is Tanya from Gainesville, Florida. I just discovered your podcast and I'm loving it. I'm going back and listening to a bunch of the past ones. A couple of questions for you. I drive about 1200 miles a week. I'm a sales rep with a pretty large territory. I am planning on taking my first vacation in quite a while and going to Telluride, Colorado and doing some extensive hiking. So a couple of things I was wondering if you had any effective exercises for preparation. I'm in pretty good shape. Anything beneficial to my hips would probably be good because that's one area I kind of take a toll with all the driving. And the other thing I was going to ask you is I would love it if you had any suggestions because there's quite a bit of altitude difference between Gainesville, Florida and Telluride, Colorado. And I was wondering if you had any suggestions on supplements. I saw some anecdotal information on cordyceps and Ginkgo biloba. I just wondered if you had any input on that. My, phone is 352-262-81, and my email is Tanya. T o n Y A Talton T A l t o nmail.com thank you so much, Ben. Keep up the great work. Excellent. Very educational. Thank you.

Well Tanya, first of all, I hope that you heard my response to the gentleman who asked the question about the downhill running because you're going to need strong butt muscles for hiking. Any of you who have done steep uphill hiking know that your butt gets very sore afterwards. So specifically focus on high knee step ups, focus on side to side, preferably deep lunges that use those side to side butt stabilizing muscles because you'll be goat trailing a lot as you hike uphill, going side to side, pushing off the side of your legs quite a bit. And then focus on fire hydrants and hip hikes, which I mentioned earlier, and check those out over@pacificfit.net at the exercises page over there or just google those exercises. Hip hikes and fire hydrants. Now as far as supplements, I would definitely recommend that cordyceps supplement. It's been used for thousands of years by Sherpas who guide people on Mount Everest. And I'm not saying that just because something has been used for thousands of years that it works. But there have been some promising studies done on cordyceps and its ability to enhance the adrenal activation of your lung tissue. The other thing that I would look into is ginkgo biloba and Gingko biloba, which I did mention earlier, is something that has been studied. And as a matter of fact, they've done a couple Himalayan studies on it and found that it inhibits your not inhibits, but decreases your propensity towards altitude sickness. With the likely mechanism being that when you get altitude sickness, a lot of times that's due to some swelling in the brain or some brain edema. And nitric oxide is something that can cause that blood brain barrier to leak a little bit. And the idea behind ginkgo biloba is that it has an ingredient in it that could actually inhibit nitric oxide synthase or the actual enzyme responsible for the production or conversion of nitric oxide. And ginkgo could also inhibit something called the platelet activating factor. So ginkgo is a little bit of a blood thinner as well. Now, that being said, there are certain things that you shouldn't take with ginkgo because there's a blood thinner. Those would be something like an anticoagulant vitamin E. You shouldn't take a lot of aspirin. You shouldn't of take a lot, a lot of ibuprofen. With ginkgo biloba, anything that thins your blood is going to enhance the activity of something that's taken along with and in some cases that can be dangerous. But interestingly, ginkgo is also very good for circulation in your hands and your feet and so it can help with cold conditions when you're hiking as well. But I definitely look into a ginkgo globe supplementation. The amount that was taken in the studies that showed promise was 120 milligrams twice a day. And somewhere in the range of that 80 to 120 milligrams twice a day is considered the physiological dose that's necessary to actually get that good response for gingko biloba. So great question, great questions from everyone. And remember, if you have a question, you can just email BenGreenfieldFitness.com you can call to 877-209-9439 or you can Skype Pacific Fit. And we do have a special announcement. And then we're going to move on to this week's interview with Brendan Brazier.

Did you know you can get personalized nutrition and fitness consulting from Ben Greenfield? No matter who you are, if you want to run a triathlon, lose a few pounds, reinvent your diet, or have Ben create a training program or nutrition plan that's customized to you, here's what you need to do. Visit tinyurl.com that's tinyurl.com helpfromben Ben will personally contact you within 48 hours. What are you waiting for? Visit tinyurl.com helpfromben today and get the body and results you've always wanted. Special announcements.

You should know that prior to this interview, I found out that I was going to need to be recording in a coffee shop. So I apologize for some of the background noise, but it's a great interview with Brendan. Listen in. Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield, and I'm here today with Brendan Brazier. And Brendan is not only a fantastic athlete, he's raced as a pro triathlete. He's raced as an ultra endurance athlete, but he also has a very special type of nutrition program that he both writes about and also implements himself. And I'm gonna let him tell you exactly what he does. But before we even get into what type of nutrition plan you personally implement, Brendon, tell me A little bit about your, your training protocol on a daily or weekly basis. What type of things are you putting your body through?

Well, right now I'm mostly just kind of training more for fun. I'm only training probably 90 minutes to two hours a day. But when I was doing it full time, I did it professionally for seven years and I would usually get up pretty early and swim for, well, I guess about 4 1/2 K. It's swim and then some weights. After that, usually have a nap and then ride four to five hours and then run 75 minutes from there and just really try and get some good volume training in and you know, just enlarge the engine, I guess, the aerobic engine and. Yeah, and just, you know, putting in the miles for Ironman.

So for, for those of us who are mere mortals, 90 minutes, 2 hours a day itself is pretty intimidating in terms of workload and workout protocol. But were you doing things like weightlifting, running, things that would tear your muscles up?

Yeah, in the beginning I started off with lots of aerobic training and I found as my career went on that I could actually make better gains by also including some strength training. So I was always afraid of building up bulk and then obviously having my strength to weight ratio drop. But I found that if you implement a properly put together strength training program, you can increase strength without increasing bulk, so therefore increasing efficiency, which of course is what the endurance athlete wants. So yeah, I started including some more weight training as my career went on and I found that really helped.

So tell me about how you came to implement the way that you're eating right now, which we haven't really told people much about. But I'd like to hear the journey of where you started and where you're at right now in terms of your nutrition.

Yeah, sure. I started off when I was around 15 years old. I just got really into running track in high school and thought it would be great if I could make a career out of being an athlete. So I started looking at what some of the top runners were doing and then I realized that I also like swimming and cycling. So I thought, okay, well if I can do triathlon and have a bit of a professional career with that, that would be ideal. So I looked at the top athletes training programs to find out what they were doing. And what really surprised me was they really didn't train differently from the average athlete. It was pretty much the same thing. So I figured, well, if the top guys in the world are getting different results in the same training program than the average athlete, what's that factor that separates them? And I found it had to do with rate of recovery, the rate at which you get your body to regenerate and renew itself. So that's where my focus went because obviously you recover faster, you can train more in a shorter amount of time. Of course it means you're going to improve quicker. So my focus went on recovery and therefore my focus went on nutrition because I found around 80% of recovery could be attributed to good nutrition. So that's what got me into nutrition in the first place. And I tried all different ways of eating. I tried high carb, low carb, high protein, low protein and nothing really worked amazingly well. And then I tried completely plant based and at first it didn't work well. I was always recovering and wasn't recovering well.

You just said completely plant based.

Right, Right. So yeah, completely vegan diet. And didn't work well at first. You know, like I said, hungry and tired and it wasn't working well. And then I, then I found how to do it properly and the other things I was lacking initially, which was complete protein, vitamin B12, iron, calcium, omega 3 fatty acids, and then started making a blender drink with all those nutrients from plant based sources that eventually evolved into what is now called Vega Complete Whole Feed Health optimizer, which is something that's available in stores that I partnered with someone else in 2004 and we brought it up. We started off just me making for myself.

So you actually launched an entire nutrition company based on this concept of eating, right?

Yeah, and it's really just good, simple plant based whole food nutrition which helps speed the recovery, which like I say, doesn't make you a better athlete but allows you to train harder and to train more efficiently. That will make you a better athlete.

So can you walk me through a sample day of what that type of plant based eating would look like?

Sure. I mean it varies, but usually I get up, when I get up I'll have an energy bar or half an energy bar. There's recipes in my book, my book is called Thrive. And you can make the recipes from that or Vega bar, same thing, you don't need to buy them. You can make the recipe. So really just a bar that's uncooked, so it's raw. It's made with dates and agave nectar and blueberries and buckwheat and hemp seed and a bunch of good things like that that digest very easily. So I would have that go out for a workout, usually a run, and then I would get back and have a smoothie that's got protein, essential fats, fiber, greens, enzymes, probiotics, all that stuff from plant based sources. So make that, that helps speed recovery. And then I would pretty much graze throughout the rest of the day. So a lot of fruits, quite a few vegetables, few nuts and seeds, Big salad every night that has lots of different types of lettuce and spinach and kale and usually avocado and carrots and beets and cucumbers, things like that. That usually what I finish off the day with.

Interesting. So obviously this style of eating is a lot different than what you were doing before. But are you finding that you're able to maintain energy levels? You find that the people that you've helped with this type of nutrition plan are able to maintain their energy levels and repair their muscle? Are you finding they need things that help them to fill in the holes?

Yeah. And I found that you really don't need as many calories as you may think. And this is a trap I fell into in the beginning. I thought because a calorie is a measure of food energy, the more calories you eat, the more energy you'll have. It seems to make sense. But I found that there was kind of a divide there. Calorie wasn't necessarily a calorie. If you have to spend a lot of energy to digest and assimilate highly processed food, it's hard to digest assembly, you have less energy. So there's a section of my book I talk about gaining energy through conservation as opposed to consumption. What I mean by that is eating foods that use less energy to digest and assimilate, but give you more nutrients in terms of micronutrients like phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, antioxidants, all that stuff in return. So I shifted my focus from calories. I used to eat tons of peanut butter and bread just to fill up my calories. And I shifted to eating more fruit, for one thing. So I would get most of my carbs from fruit as opposed to starchy refined carbs like pasta or rice or bread. And I would eat pitto grains too. So things like amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, wild rice, so those digested more easily and gave more nutrients in return. So just things like that made a big difference. My caloric intake dropped 20 to 30%, but I had far more energy because I wasn't spending so much to digest and assimilate it. And I was better nourished. Therefore I wasn't as hungry and my Weight dropped a little bit and therefore my strength weight ratio went up. It really worked well. So I eat far fewer calories than what a conventional sports nutrition book would suggest based on my weight and activity. But it's the quality that counts that's interesting.

So the reasoning behind that is that you're actually using less calories to require your body to handle the food that you are putting into it just because it burns cleaner.

Right? Yeah. And digestion takes a lot of energy. And if you're eating highly processed foods, your body has to build about its chest of enzymes and break it down. And like I said, that's work. So if you eat those more natural, raw, alkaline forming foods, they will digest more easily and use less energy to do it. And therefore if you don't spend it, you'll still have it. You know, it's like with anything like money, if you don't spend money, you have more of it unless you make a good investment and you can get a return on that investment. So I started looking at food as a way of investing. So I would invest as little energy as possible and get the most micronutrients in return. So high net gain is what I call that.

Interesting. Now, in terms of the type of diet that you're utilizing, is this clean eating, plant based diet, is it any different than say like a traditional vegetarian diet that someone would stumble across if they say, you know, let's say they googled how to be a vegetarian and they found a diet, what would be different between that and what you were doing?

Yeah, a lot of the vegetarian diets I found, the typical ones are very, very high in starchy foods. So a lot of refined carbs, like I was saying before, the pasta, bread, rice, they're often based on those. And mine's not mine based on greens, really leafy greens, and then fruit for carbs as opposed to starch for carbs. So that's one of the big differences. And also a lot of meat analog type foods would be in the typical vegetarian diet. So a lot of tofu, hot dogs, tofu, hamburgers, that kind of thing. Soy milk and soy ice cream. I don't actually have any soy in my diet. It's all soy free and wheat free, gluten free, obviously dairy free. So I eat other things like hemp.

Interesting.

You have things like, yeah, hemp and flax and all stuff like that.

Like pizza and hamburgers are in your book, but in a very non traditional sense. How do those fit into the plant based diet?

Yeah, the pizza recipes in my book, they're probably the most popular ones in the book, I think. And they're really simple, there's several of them. But the crust is basically made up of just a few ingredients, like lentils and wild rice, for example. And then some herbs would be the pizza crust. So you actually get the protein in the crust as opposed to in a topping. So you just put those three ingredients in a food processor, process it, bring it out, put it on a bake tray, and then put on a marinara sauce or pesto sauce. And there's recipes in the book and then vegetables on the top and then bake it. So it's really simple. You can find in the bulk section of basically any supermarket. And it's gluten free, obviously, it's yeast free, wheat free, flour free. So it's high in protein, easy to digest and just a really good clean source of fuel. And they taste really good too. They're pretty good. There's one also you can make with beets. You actually make a crust out of beets and sunflower seeds. So yeah, definitely different to a traditional beets.

Interesting. And all these recipes are in your book, Right? I'll put a link to that in the show notes for people. The name of the book is Thrive, but I'll make sure that I get it in there. Now, can you still use this diet and just basically shop at any old grocery store? I mean, do people have to have access to one of those super expensive or organic grocery stores that sells fringe ingredients? Or can people pull this off with an Albertsons or a Safeway or a Rosar's?

Oh, yeah, for sure. A good 90, 95% of the ingredients could be found in any. There are a few other ones that I call next level ingredients that are not essential, but they do help with things if you do have access to them. So you can get them placed like whole foods. So things like maca, which is a root vegetable powder from Peru, it's very high in trace minerals, which is good. Something called chlorella, which is an algae, very high in protein and B vitamins, great for cellular recovery and for cleansing as well. So really good after a workout. So things like that are a little harder to come by. But like I say, they're just kind of additions to the diet as opposed to the base of the diet.

Interesting. So those are the type of things that people would add in, for example. Well, I know you talk about maca in your book for people who are stressed out or need to stabilize cortisol levels. But those are kind of little extras that people can add into a plant based diet.

Right? Yeah, Mac is great for that, for rebuilding the adrenal. So if your adrenals get fatigued due to training or any other kind of stress, it's pretty common for people to get that. And then high levels of cortisol means you don't sleep as deeply. And when you don't sleep as deep, obviously then you need to sleep more. And also you're more likely to crave coffee and sugar because you're tired, because you haven't slept deeply. And so all these things that transpire when your adrenals get burned out. So eating the high net gain foods I talked about before is really going to help with adrenal function too. But if you need a little extra boost with that, MACA works very well. And MACA is not a stimulant, it's actually the opposite. It helps rebuild. Whereas caffeine will give you energy but through stimulation, which is short term and it's treating the symptom of fatigue, it's not treating the cause. Whereas MACA helps rebuild the adrenals which will then improve sleep quality which is going to make you less tired because you'll be better rested because you'll slept better.

Now for people listening in, when you say maca, how are you spelling that?

M A, C A.

So are there other resources that you would point people towards Brennan if they want to learn more about this, ways that you would suggest that people just get started in terms of implementing a plant based diet if they want to try one, or warnings that you would give people?

Yeah, I mean there's a few sites, there's. Well, my own site, there's a bunch of articles on there and links to some video and stuff. And that's brendanbrazier.com and also there's a web series that I put together about a year ago called Thrive in 30. So the website is thriveinthenumber30.com and that's, like I said, a video series that you put in your email. You get through emails a week for four weeks and each one is made up of a concise video segment that's basically just stuff I film myself. Really basic, really simple, talking about ideas in the book and how you can apply them to perform better, whether it's athletic performance or just general life performance. So that's a resource that's free and available to anyone as well.

Well, folks, we'll put a link to all this in the show notes, but we're talking to Brendan Brazier right now, who is a, who was a pro triathlete, has done ultra endurance, now still trains 90 minutes to two hours a day. I know that a lot of you are concerned about whether or not your body can actually get by in a plant based diet and Brendan has a lot of good information. I would highly recommend that you check his book out. I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes. And Brendan, thank you for coming on the call today and sharing that with us and thanks for your time.

Yeah, no problem, Ben. Thanks for having me on.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Brendan Brazier signing out. I will put a link to Brendan's book in the show notes as well as a link to everything else that I talked about in this episode. This is episode number 104. What do I ask from you? Just leave us a ranking in itunes and if you want to donate to the podcast, go to to the show notes and scroll down to the bottom and there you can not only donate but also leave a comment. Let me know if you have questions or comments on the topics that we've discussed today. Are you a vegan? Vegetarian? Do you eat a plant based diet? Do you not agree that a plant based diet is the way to go? Whatever it is that you have to say, I'd love to hear it. So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and leave your thoughts until next week. This is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy weekend.