Episode #126: How To Run A 10 Billion Dollar Company Division, Have a Family & Still Stay Fit

In this podcast how to run a $10 billion company division, have a family and still stay fit Is it bad to do cardio after weights? Can you teach your body to sweat less? Substitutes for common supplements how to detox your body how often should you breathe while you're swimming? Should you exercise if you have adrenal fatigue? Will a collagen supplement helps brains heal faster? Non surgical remedies for hernias Is it necessary not to do aerobics if you're doing high intensity cardio intervals? And is it okay for blood sugar levels to spike after a workout?

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlois 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 folks, Ben Greenfield here enjoying my glass of carbonated SodaStream water. I just actually got a SodaStream for Christmas. My wife knows I love carbonated water and so now I can make it on my kitchen counter. I'll tell you guys more about that in a future podcast or maybe I can do a review on it or write a post on it over at the website. Anyways, today we have some fantastic questions from listeners. As you may have been able to tell from the introduction, we also have an interview with a guy named Chip Berg who is a very busy businessman who still finds time to do things like run marathons, end up on the podium at triathlons, have a family, and basically be a perfect example of how to stay fit and also have a successful life. So I'll be interviewing him about how he does it and he'll be sharing some of his tips and tricks. So you don't want to miss that. Aside from that, we're going to have a few special announcements and then move into this week's content@bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Special Announcements.

Folks, you have probably heard by now that the Inner Circle, the secret section of BenGreenfieldFitness.com with a forum with extra videos, with tons of bonuses, free signed books from me, and lots of exciting new content from both myself and my wife, is now open. So be sure to check that out if you haven't yet@bengreenfieldfitness.com so and speaking of the Inner Circle, the next free Inner Circle podcast is coming out next week and that is going to be a discussion of common, unhealthy grocery shopping items and good substitutes for them, as well as some tips on getting your family and your kids involved in fitness. Over at the Rockstar Triathlete Academy, there's just a few more days where you can get in for $1 and also get access to some big bonuses that we're including for our end of the year membership drive in order to give you a good start to your 2011 triathlon season if you're a triathlete. And then finally, remember that there are full transcripts of every single podcast episode that's ever been done and I will put a link in the Show Notes along with a link to everything that I talk about on this podcast in the Show Notes for this Podcast episode. Episode number 126 get the Inside Edge from Ben Greenfield Fitness delivered straight to your phone. Just text the word Fitness to 411247 and you'll instantly get exclusive VIP discounts and insider tips that no one else will ever see except you. Do it now. Text the word Fitness to 411247 and you'll be in Ben's VIP Text Club for free.

Foreigner Q and A.

Now remember, if you have a question, you can email ben greenfieldfitness.com you can call toll free and leave an Audio question to 877-209-9439 or you can Skype to username Pacific Fit and the first question for this week comes in from Kelsey. Kelsey asks, I've heard that doing cardio after weightlifting will stop certain enzyme activity and curb the afterburn from a weightlifting session. What are your thoughts on this? Okay, so this is kind of the classic cardio after weights or weights after cardio question. Now, the idea is this. When you're training with cardio, it's obviously going to typically be, for the purposes of this discussion, an aerobic cardiovascular session or a cardiovascular interval session that may involve a mix of easy aerobic and harder anaerobic intervals. And when you're training with weights, that's primarily nonaerobic. Those are short bursts of energy or relatively short bursts of energy compared to cardiovascular exercise. So we're essentially using two different energy systems and also training in two different styles. Weightlifting being, of course, something that tears down muscle, causes a lot of muscle damage, a lot of fiber damage, and cardio being something that might not cause quite as much muscle damage but often burns more calories or stimulates the metabolism a little bit more. So the idea with cardio after weights is what people will argue is that number one, it saves energy for weightlifting. So if you do your cardio prior to weights, then you might enter into your weightlifting routine slightly fatigued, you might actually lift with poor form, or you may not be able to exercise or weightlift to the intensity that you normally would. The next argument is that you might burn more fat if you wait to do your cardio after weights because the weightlifting will have slightly, slightly depleted your energy stores. And so then you're going to be burning more fat when you do the cardio. And then the people who argue that you should do the cardio before the weights will say that you'll have fresh legs, so you'll be able to do your cardiovascular exercise a little bit easier and maybe have better biomechanical form. Kind of the same biomechanics argument that people make who say to do weights before cardio. And then also the idea that cardiovascular exercise is going to be important from a cardiovascular health perspective and should therefore be prioritized compared to weight training, which is actually, well, it's a bunch of bunk. There is evidence that weight training is just as good for your health from a cardiovascular perspective as actual cardio exercises. But let's look at an actual research study that investigated people who did their weight training and then went for a run versus the people who ran and then did weight training. And basically the outcome of this study was that the amount of calories that you burn or your excess post exercise oxygen consumption was greatest. So total number of calories burned was greatest when the cardio was done before the weight training. So if you're going to do a workout and you're going to combine the cardio and the weight training, from a calorie burner metabolic perspective, cardio before weight training would be superior. Now, the next thing that they found was that physiologically running after doing a resistance training session was more difficult, meaning that the rating of perceived exertion and also the the amount of oxygen that was being consumed while running was greater after the weights, which means that there may be implications there for running efficiency or even running safety, meaning that you're basically just going to have a harder time running after a weightlifting session, which makes sense because you're biomechanically fatigued from the damage that's been done to the muscle fibers from the weight training session. And then the final outcome of that study was that you should perform aerobic exercise before weight training when you're combining aerobic exercise and weight training into one exercise session. Now, I completely disagree with their statement about doing cardio before weights based on the effects of the study or based on the outcome of the study. And the reason for that is this. It really depends on your goals. If you're training for a marathon, if you're training for something like a triathlon, during which cardiovascular exercise and the efficiency, the economy and the skill of your cardiovascular exercise is important to you, you should always prioritize your cardio before your weights. Because when you do weights before cardio, you're going to affect your ability to properly perform the cardio, and you're also going to affect your ability to have a high quality cardio session. If your goal is to get stronger, if your goal is to add muscle, or if your goal is to basically do anything for which weight training would be considered more beneficial, then you should prioritize the weight training session and save the cardiovascular exercise for after. Now, getting down to the meat of your question to finish this thing up. When you say that the cardio after a weightlifting session will stop certain enzyme activity, the reason for that is this. When you are doing any type of exercise, cardio, or weights, you get elevated levels of an enzyme called glycogen synthase, which is responsible for taking what you eat after an exercise session and getting it into the muscles for replenishment of energy and repair more quickly. When you do cardio after weights, you are basically depleting your muscles of some of the energy that they may need for repair and recovery. And if you are someone who's exercising for a long period of time, say weight training for 45 minutes and then doing 30 to 45 minutes of cardio, you may end up reducing your ability to recover properly from a weight training session. Of course, the answer to that is to if you're going to do your cardio after weights, do a weight training session, eat something such as a piece of fruit with a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit with an amino acid supplement or a protein supplement, and then move on to your cardiovascular training session. So ultimately, it really is a combination of both science as well as the type of training that is high priority for you that will affect cardio before weights or weights before cardio. So the next question is from Neil, and Neil says, I've done quite a bit of running in the past. I would like to do another marathon, but feel I could greatly improve my chances of a personal best if I could limit how much I sweat. I feel that I was sweating excessively and wonder if this was a physiologically fixed piece of my makeup or is there something I can do in terms of training, diet or supplementation to influence and limit my loss of moisture. Well, first of all, Neil, before I give you some of the ways that you could decrease your sweat rate, you need to know that sweat is something that's crucial for cooling. In other words, when your body puts that moisture on the surface, if there is enough evaporation that's allowed to take place, and you're not in an excessively humid environment, that cooling is going to help you significantly, and it's going to help you more than it hurts you, assuming that you're replacing the hydration that you're losing and you're replacing the minerals and electrolytes that you're losing. However, if you really do want to shut down your ability to sweat, or if you have a medical condition called hyperhidrosis or excessive sweating, there are some things that you can do. The first would be, of course, to use an antiperspirant. Now, I am not a fan of the aluminum containing antiperspirants because the aluminum can be a bit toxic in terms of presentation of a toxic metal to the skin, which is basically one big mouth. So I would recommend that if you're going to use an antiperspirant, you just use baking soda, which is just as good as most of the antiperspirants out there. May not smell quite as good, but it's going to still stop sweating. There are oral medications, for example, something called Robinol, which can actually stop or limit the amount of sweating that you do. And this is something that a lot of people use who, for example, expose excessive sweating on their hands, who have those kind of wet, clammy hands that you never like to shake when you're at a public event. And so they'll use this medication to stop that excessive sweating. But there's lots of side effects like blurred vision and dried mouth. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend medications, especially if this is something that's taking place during an exercise session. Botox injections, for example. People who have excessive armpit sweating and don't like to pit out onto their shirts. You can get about 20 different injections into your armpit every four months or so. And that can actually limit excessive sweating in the pits. And again, this would be more from a cosmetic perspective than it would from a performance perspective, but it's a thought. There's something else called iontophoresis. Iontophoresis is basically this electrical current that gets passed over your skin. It's not painful. It's an electrical current that's very light, but basically what it does is it limits the ability of the sweat ducts to stay open. It basically blocks the sweat ducts or causes them to contract or shut. And iontophoresis is something that you'd have to do a few times a week. Each session would last for about 20 minutes. But that would limit your ability to sweat as well. There's a really expensive surgery that you could get called symphathectomy. And what that would do is it would actually interrupt the symptoms sympathetic nervous system's ability to cause you to sweat. And in the surgery there's basically this, it's called an endoscopic instrument and that gets inserted into your body below your armpit and essentially destroys the nerve that connects to the sweat glands. So you're essentially shutting down a component of your sympathetic nervous system. Not something I would recommend, but if you really want to stop this. So sweating, it's an option. So in addition to some of those surgical or medical ways to stop sweating, a few of the things that you could do as well is make sure that you are at an adequate weight, meaning you could decrease your body fat percentage, thus increasing your ability to stay cool. And you could listen to any of the episodes that I've done on fat loss for more tips on decreasing body fat percentage. And then you could also engage in pre activity cold water immersion or cold baths, or even a cold towel application. Excessive use of ice and very cold water sponges doused on the head, on the shoulders, the back of the neck, or even put into your uniform or your running kit during exercise to keep the body's core temperature down, which could also limit sweating as well. I'll be talking more about cold water immersion and the use of cold for not just sweating, but also for weight loss with Tim Ferriss, who will be coming on the podcast in a few weeks to talk about some of the methods that he used from a cold water immersion standpoint for weight loss and performance. So that should be an interesting interview. But in the meantime, what I would recommend is that you not worry too much about the sweating, that you take advantage of the use of some cold water type of supplementation or ice bath immersion or exposure to cold as much as possible during your exercise session and then just make sure you hydrate and use proper electrolyte and mineral intake. And you shouldn't have to worry too much about the sweating actually causing too much damage. So great question. Next. Oh, Neil had a follow up question. He says, I live in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar and have very limited access to supplements. I listened to your chocolate milk feature on the podcast recently and would love to hear if you or your listeners have any other cheats like chocolate milk that could be used in the place of conventional supplements. And Neil is referring to the fact that there's been research for a really long time around that chocolate milk just sugar and the protein from the milk is just as good at replenishing your post exercise protein carbohydrate needs as many of these engineered and expensive recovery powders that are out there. And it's absolutely true. Chocolate milk isn't the only thing. There are other foods out there that could replace protein and carbohydrate in about a 2 to 1 to 3 to 1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. One example would be to have like a sweet potato or a yam with either chicken breast. You wouldn't be getting a full whole protein profile, but you could also do like a tablespoon of almond butter with about a medium sized sweet potato or yam, or a handful of almonds or walnuts or pecans with one of those tubers like a sweet potato or yam. You could do a piece of fruit with a handful of nuts or again a piece of fruit with some chicken breast. Typically about 2 to 4 ounces of chicken breast, believe it or not. Quinoa the grain quinoa is in about a 3 to 1 to 4 to 1 carbohydrate to protect protein ratio. And just having a bowl of quinoa, you know, putting a little salt and pepper, maybe a little Bragg's amino acid or something on there to make it taste a little better would be a perfect convenient post workout supplementation. Ultimately the 3 to 14 to 1 carbohydrate to protein ratio is not super important unless you're exercising again within the next eight hours or so. So if you're doing a two a day, you'd want to hit that ratio pretty closely. But some other things that you could do as a replacement for supplements. For example, if you're not wanting to take a lot of fish oil. Fish oil is one of those things where it's something that's found in lots of natural sources. Wild salmon, grass fed beef, omega 3 eggs, pumpkin seeds. A lot of people take about 2,000 milligrams of fish oil on a daily basis. Well, you're going to get about that equivalent in a typical six ounce fillet of salmon. So. So it would be pretty easy to get your omega 3s from those animal based protein sources if you didn't want to supplement with a fish oil capsule. Now granted, the fish oil capsules and a lot of these other supplements are good based on their convenience. But if you wanted to eat real food, that would be an option post exercise. Antioxidants, you don't necessarily have to take an antioxidant supplement. You could do berries, like blueberries are a very high antioxidant source. Another dark skinned fruit, A lot of the, a lot of the dark fruits, dark vegetables are very good, like a pomegranate. Dark vegetables like kale, watercress, bok choy, spinach, brussels sprouts. A lot of these things that are called superfoods. They're very high in antioxidants and also a lot of the other nutrients that your body may need to bounce back from exercise. So those also should be included in the diet on a regular basis. If you don't want to spend money on an antioxidant supplement. Creatine supplements, making sure that you're including animal based proteins specifically, you know, doing something like a lot of grass fed beef or bison or buffalo would give you a lot of natural sources of creatine for your joints if you didn't want to take like a joint supplement. A lot of these things, like the cap reflex, for example, that I recommend that people take if they're getting a lot of joint pain after exercise. It's got things like turmeric and ginger in it. And you could obviously go out to the store and buy turmeric and ginger and use those supplements on a regular basis. Your cooking, you know, do a lot of curry based Indian or Thai cooking and that would help a lot with, you know, things like an osteoarthritic or a cartilage type of breakdown condition immune system. You take, for example, hyperacidity in the body. Lemon juice and using lemon juice before you eat lemon juice is very alkaline. You take something like garlic. Garlic is a potent antimicrobial. If you're using lemon and garlic on a regular basis, you could probably get a lot of the effects of taking something like one of these immune system supplements that I take, such as enerprime. Enterprime's got 32 different superfoods in it. But if you really wanted to, you could go out and buy those superfoods one by one and include them in your diet. What we're getting down here to though is a matter of convenience and also the fact that there are some things that, that you simply would have to eat a lot of food to get quite A bit of you take vitamin E, for example. The current recommended daily intake of vitamin e is about 200 to 400 international units. To get that from, for example, nuts, you'd have to have about 40 cups of nuts to get that much vitamin E. Or you could do about 130 cups of brown rice. Vitamin C, the recommended daily intake, well, it ranges, but it starts off at about 500 milligrams. You're going to get, I think it's about six or so from an apple in terms of vitamin C content. So you'd have to eat a heck of a lot of apples to get as much vitamin C as you're going to get in about one pill. So a lot of these supplements are just jam packed with so many stuff that you'd have to eat a lot of food to be able to get. And that basically brings us down to the reason to take supplements in the first place. There are a lot of foods that do not have the nutrient content that active people need. Foods get irradiated these days. A lot of foods are exposed to ionizing energy and radiation to extend their shelf life. And this destroys a lot of the essential nutrients that are in them. Environmental pollution can, a lot of times leach quite a bit of the things out of food that we need in them or introduce toxic supplements into food that we really don't want to be getting. And so a lot of times we need to include things in our body that will help to detox some of the environmental pollutants that are going into food. And I'll talk about detoxing the body later on in this podcast. We get genetically modified foods, and genetically modified foods can have different nutritional values than the type of foods that we were eating 100 years ago prior to the introduction of genetic modification, soil depletion, and the use of aggressive farming tactics, polluted rains, the use of artificial fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, things of that nature, all of that can cause nutrient and mineral depletion in the soil. And so we get the foods growing in those soils, specifically fruits and vegetables, being slightly reduced due to a lack of minerals or a lack of nutrients. When we age, we lose a lot of our ability to absorb some of the nutrients that we're getting from food, and so supplementation may become more necessary. Stress can limit our ability to absorb nutrients from food. And a lot of food, frankly, is just less rich because of food processing, because of farming practices, because of the use of pesticides. And so you combine that with straight stress, with age, and then with the increasing need for nutrients based on exercise. We've basically got this big picture of most people needing in most cases to at least be taking a few solid supplements. You know what I tell people is if you're just gonna take anything, take some vitamin D, take a mineral supplement like a magnesium, and then get your hands on some type of a green supplement that is gonna dump a bunch of superfoods into your body. And just start off with those three supplements and you'll be replacing a lot of what food may not be giving you. So it's a great question and enough time spent on that. Let's go ahead and move on to a question asked via Twitter. And remember, if you want to ask a question via Twitter, just go to twitter.com, follow BenGreenfield and ask your question and Twitter handle 1kread asks, do you have any suggestions on a holiday detox to jump start the new year? Well, detox and holistic health is kind of a coverall term that gets thrown around a lot. But basically it's a natural process. Your body can do a lot of its own detoxing or neutralizing or eliminating toxins from the body. And most of that's done via the excretion of stool or urine. And that's how we pass a lot of chemicals and harmful compounds and nitrogens. But it is true that especially if you haven't been eating healthy or you've been having a lot of chemicals in your diet, you know, pesticides, household cleaners, food additives, exposure to pharmaceutical drugs, pollution, cigarette smoke, you know, heavy metals, it could be necessary that you may need to introduce some type of accelerated form of detox, which is generally some type of a diet that minimizes the amount of chemicals that you take in. And a lot of times puts things into your body, either high fiber supplements or even colonics that draw out or eliminate toxins by increasing the frequency of your bowel movements or the amount of urination. So a typical detox diet is going to be a high fiber diet that's a lot of times lower in calories and, and usually accompanied by some things that'll really flush you out quite a bit. So a lot of herbs that will essentially cause you to go to the bathroom a lot. So one of the things that I recommend to people is a colon cleansing kit or a body cleansing kit that was recommended originally on this show by Ann Louise Gittleman. And I'll put a link to podcast number 29 where Ann recommended this on the show. But Basically it's this 30 day supply of capsules that have things like grapefruit seed extract in slippery elm bark, wormwood, pomegranate, peppermint, bromelain. Just a ton of antifungals, antibacterials and antimicrobials that you dump into your body to help clear your digestive tract and your bloodstream and also help to aid digestion. So for 30 days, you take about six of these capsules per day. And you could absolutely shorten it and do it for five days or 10 days or 15 days. But they recommend a full 30 day protocol. I'm not convinced that you would necessarily need to do that. You could probably get this and split it into a couple of different detoxes that you do maybe twice a year if you're somebody who is exposed a lot to chemicals or you're concerned about the presence of a high amount of toxins in your body. And that particular kit also comes with a bunch of probiotics and also what's called a vermifuge tincture, which is basically kind of a cocktail of a bunch of added antifungals in case you have some type of a candida infection in your gut. So essentially you're going to find yourself sitting on the toilet quite a bit if you start into a cleanse or a detox like this. But the idea is it's supposed to help eliminate yeast parasites, worms and waste from your system. And it's called the Colon Cleansing Kit. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Now, I personally don't do a lot of cleansing because what I do is just a gentle day to day cleanse. And the way that I do that is I take a probiotic every day. I use the Mount Capra Caprabiotics. I take a supplement called Ener prime every day, which I mentioned has a ton of superfoods in it, but it also has a high fiber source, it has inulin in it, which kind of keeps stuff moving through my body. And then I take oil of oregano about two to three times a week. And what I'll do with oil of oregano, which is a potent antifungal and antimicrobial, is I'll put about four to five drops of that in a glass of water and just drink that glass of water water. So essentially I kind of cleanse my body and detox my body on a weekly basis through the use of those supplements. But if you wanted to bring out the big guns and just fire away at your body for this holiday detox, you would Want to use something like the colon cleansing kit and be prepared to be making multiple trips to the restroom for something like this. So, great question. Now, Patrick asks, how often should one breathe when racing over a long course swim? I've noticed short course Olympic distance athletes breathe very seldomly every four strokes or so. But pro triathletes breathe every stroke. So there have been studies done on breathing frequency when you're swimming. And the idea is that the less that you breathe, the more lactic acid you're going to build up during swimming. And it makes sense because the presence of oxygen is what can help to. I'm sorry, not the presence of oxygen, but the breathing off of carbon dioxide is what can help to buffer a lot of this lactic acid that builds up in the bloodstream. So the more you can exhale while you're swimming, the more lactic acid you're essentially going to be able to blow off. Now, the flip side to that is that breathing is inefficient when you are swimming. Every time you take a breath, you're bringing the head up, the feet drop just a little bit, you prevent a greater or you present a greater surface area, specifically your chest to the water, and you can slow yourself down just a little bit. So the idea is that when you're swimming for a long period of time, the other thing that you have to take into account is inspiratory muscle fatigue, meaning that every time you breathe in and out, you fatigue your inspiratory muscles just a little bit. So when you are swimming and you're swimming very, very fast and you're producing a ton of lactic acid, a lot of times breathing frequently makes more sense. The reason being that you're swimming for a shorter period of time, you don't have to worry quite as much about inspiratory muscle fatigue. And if you can get yourself to the point where through the mechanics of your breathing, you're able to breathe very efficiently. For faster, shorter swims like sprint or Olympic distance races, breathing more frequently is typically going to trump breathing every three or four or five strokes. I personally breathe every stroke during a sprint or an Olympic distance triathlon. Now, once you're getting up to the longer races, kind of Moving towards like a 3 or a 4k type of Ironman distance, you're, you're going to start to risk inspiratory muscle fatigue and a lot of biomechanical inefficiency if you're breathing every stroke. Plus you're also going slower. And so you don't have to breathe off quite as much carbon dioxide and lactic acid. So I'd recommend you breathe every two strokes or three strokes. Four strokes is pushing it, but you could try every four strokes as well if you've got a little bit bigger lungs for those longer swimsuits. Now, I personally, for an ironman, I breathe every two strokes. For a half ironman, I have this special type of breathing where I breathe for one stroke and then I take two strokes, breathe again. Then I take one stroke and breathe again. So my breathing frequency during a half ironman essentially comes out to about breathing every one and a half strokes. So I breathe every stroke during a sprint in Olympic, I breathe every one and a half strokes during a half ironman and I breathe every two strokes, sometimes every three strokes during an ironman. So that's kind of the logic behind that, but good question, Patrick. Next question is from Joy, who says, I was recently diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. My doctor changed my diet and I'm changing my lifestyle by sleeping 7 to 8 hours as opposed to 4 to 5 and reducing my classes to lower my stress a bit. The doc says that cardio is off the table for me, especially running. And I'm guessing stressful interval workouts aren't allowed either. I can really feel the stress even when I climb stairs. But I'm concerned about cardio restriction. Do I really need a year off in order to properly heal my adrenals? Well, adrenal fatigue is kind of a catch all term. There is a disease called Addison's disease where your adrenal glands essentially shut down and really kill produce their hormones at all anymore. But adrenal fatigue is basically when typically you've been stressed out a lot and you have been maybe exercising a lot, producing a lot of adrenal hormones, and you become fatigued because of this chronic stress due to your adrenal glands being unable to keep pace with this constant stimulation from your fight or flight based nervous system or your sympathetic nervous system. So what happens is as your adrenal glands become fatigued, they. They can't produce the amount of hormones that they would normally produce in order to keep your body stimulated or give you energy. And so what happens is you get chronic fatigue, you get this foggy mental state. A lot of times you get depressed, you get a lot of aches, you get tired very quickly, and you essentially have to kind of figure out how to reboot your body in order to shut down this amount of adrenal fatigue. So digging into this a little bit deeper, basically the hormones that I'm referring to when I talk about the adrenal glands producing these hormones are three different types of hormones. The first would be what are called your glucocorticoids, which would be something like cortisol, and then also your mineral corticoids, which would be aldosterone, and then your androgens, which would be kind of your sex based steroid hormones, specifically DHEA and something called DHEAs. Now cortisol is necessary in small amounts to allow your body to respond and adapt to the stress that you're going to experience in your daily life. Your body's going to produce a little bit of cortisol as soon as light hits your eyes when you wakes up or when you wake up. And cortisol will help to maintain blood sugar levels, promote a healthy immune system and kind of keep you a little bit alert during the day. Aldosterone is something that manages your blood pressure, kind of works to balance salt and water in your body. And then DHEA essentially helps with precursor to testosterone formation, testosterone being something that can, that can also contribute to your energy levels, your sex drive, et cetera. So when adrenal dysfunction occurs, you're typically going to get drop off in each of these. So when you can't produce cortisol, you don't get that normal energy production that you're going to get. When you wake up out of bed in the morning, you're going to get a drop in sex drive as you can't produce your androgens. And then you're going to get a drop in your ability to maintain your blood pressure. And a lot of times fluid retention when you're not producing, producing aldosterone as you normally would. And you can get any of these hormones tested, cortisol, DHEA or aldosterone. And low levels of any would kind of indicate that adrenal fatigue may be an issue for you. So what do you do? A lot of times you really limit the amount of hard exercise that you're doing. You try and limit any amount of stress in your life. You really bump up the amount of sleep that you're getting. You try and meditate. Sometimes a little bit of yoga can help. Then a lot of times you'll take supplements to assist with adrenal fatigue. And usually these will be like Chinese adaptogens, some stress relieving herbs, mushrooms like shiitake, yorishi, mushroom extract, things of that nature, as well as staying away from any supplement that'll stimulate the adrenal glands, caffeine being the most common, however, exercise can actually help to stabilize these hormones. And exercise can gently stimulate the adrenals and essentially be one of the things that can help to reset a biological system that has been fatigued in the way that it becomes fatigued in a state of adrenal fatigue. So light exercise, stress, relieving exercise, breathing, introducing oxygen into the body, relieving some tension. Tension from the body can actually be quite helpful. The issue is that someone with adrenal fatigue has to do this very, very lightly. For example, I had a guy who recently hired me who has just gotten over adrenal fatigue. And all we started off with was light stretching and yoga once a day for about 10 to 20 minutes, combined with about 15 to 20 minutes of very light walking each day, nothing else. We'll be doing that for four to six weeks. And what we'll be looking for is an increase through testing of those adrenal based hormones. We want to see an increase in the cortisol levels, an increase in the DHEA and increase in aldosterone. And then eventually we'll move back into light body weight bearing. So a little bit of resistance training and then will be able to eventually get back to weight training. Cardiovascular intervals, which are great for cardiovascular health, weight management, longitivity, but initially need to be limited as the body gets reset. So I would say in your case, you're going to need to monitor your adrenals through testing, but a light exercise would actually be fine. And even in people who are in a deep state of adrenal fatigue, I find that that really helps with energy stabilization, gets just a tiny amount of cortisol circulating and helps to fight that fatigue. That can happen with adrenal fatigue, assuming that you're able to exercise without going too hard. So next question comes from official Dillo, a Twitter handle. Who asked via Twitter, would taking a collagen supplement be of any benefit to the healing process of a soft tissue injury? Well, we've talked about collagen supplements on this show before. And collagen is that functional fibrous protein that's found in skin, bone, tendons, cartilage, blood vessels, your teeth. It's all over in your body and you can also supplement with it. There's ground up chicken cartilage that you get. You can get shark cartilage. It's basically just a component of bones ground up and then supplemented, typically orally, sometimes through a collagen based cream. Most of the research that shows any efficacy for collagen has been done on arthritis or osteoarthritis and found some limited results, meaning that some people have been able to feel lower levels of pain when they take collagen for an arthritic condition, and some people have not. The research kind of bounces back and forth from a wound healing perspective, though. So specifically in a state of inflammation with sprains, strains, et cetera, there haven't been any studies that have shown a decrease or, I'm sorry, an increase in the speed at which a soft tissue injury could occur via the use of collagen supplementation. However, that being said, I personally, along with many of the clients that I've worked with, have felt less pain from a sprain or a strain when taking a collagen supplement, such as a glucosamine chondroitin type of supplement. Now, that may be, for example, because one of the supplements or the supplement that I take for collagen source is called Capreflex, and that has a lot of proteolytic enzymes and a lot of herbs in it like turmeric and ginger and garlic, and some of the things that can kind of naturally help to relieve joint pain. And so that may be what myself and my clients are feeling more than the collagen and the glucosamine chondroitin that's in that supplement. However, what collagen comes down to is if it helps you to feel better when you have a sprain or a strain, then it may be something that could work for, for you. But there's just not a lot of evidence that it could speed up tissue formation or wound healing. So ultimately, what it comes down to is you're going to have to turn yourself into a case study of one to see if a collagen supplement would work for you. If you're going to take a collagen supplement, I would recommend that you take something like Capreflex. That's what I found to be very, very effective for myself and my clients. So, great question. And we're going to move on to a question from David, who says, what's your view on non surgical remedies to inguinal hernias? Well, what an inguinal hernia is, is that's when a little portion of your bowel or your large intestine actually bulges out through what's called the inguinal canal. And the inguinal canal is this opening in the muscles of your abdominal wall as the abdominal kind of transitions into the groin. So what happens is when a lot of pressure builds up, sometimes the large intestine can literally push through this portion of your abdominal wall down in the inguina. And there's kind of two types of inguinal hernias. The first is called a direct inguinal hernia. And that's when you have a real, real weak spot in your lower ab muscles. And then you lift or you strain or you cough, and a little bit of the large colon kind of pokes through. And then an indirect inguinal hernia is literally an anatomical condition that occurs when your inguinal canal fails to close before you're born. And that's something that you're typically born with. And it's something that's a little less common than a direct inguinal hernia that occurs via essentially a combination of a weak core and exercise, or over exercise, over buildup of pressure during exercise. So typically, what's going to happen with an inguinal hernia is if it's significant enough to where you can actually literally feel or see a bulge in your lower abdominal wall and have a sharp pain associated with that bulge. Surgery a lot of times is recommended almost immediately because what can happen is a loop of your intestine can become trapped inside that hole in your abdominal wall that cuts off blood flow to your large intestine. And then you've got a serious medical condition going on and kind of a backup of poo, which is not a good thing. So what happens is they remove the hernia and then they stitch up and they close or they patch that inguinal canal, and it's a pretty quick surgery. It's a lot of times done as an outpatient surgery, sometimes blown out of proportion in terms of the inconvenience of it. It's a pretty quick in and out surgery and fairly low risk. Now, some people do report that they have to take a lot of painkillers for a long time after surgery. Other complications could include some reduction of your sexual sensitivity, sometimes a little bit of incontinence, little bit of ongoing pain in the groin, and occasionally there can be some nerve damage that causes tingling sensations in your legs or your thighs or your groin. And so for this reason, some people are into non surgical management of a hernia. Don't get me wrong, if you've got a visible bulge, you probably need a surgery, and you need surgery very, very quickly. If you've just got some slight pain down in your lower abdominal area that occurs when you're doing things like sit ups or crunches or heavy amounts of coughing, you may be able to get away with a non surgical approach. One example would be wearing a support garment until your body is able to heal itself and that wall is able to kind of close on its own. And those are called hernia belts or hernia trusses and those typically you'll wear for anywhere from six to 12 weeks. And that would be one option. Light strengthening of the pelvic floor and the abdominal muscles, or light stimulation of the pelvic floor and the abdominal muscles via, for example, lying in a crunch position on the ground and pushing your low back into the ground can help a little bit in terms of stimulating the abdominal wall to heal just a little bit. Focusing on eating foods that are easily digested, switching to primarily like a smoothie based diet, staying away from foods that are going to cause a lot of gas, you know, don't eat a lot of beans, a lot of legumes, trying to eat foods that are a little bit less likely to be foods that you'd eat a lot of. So staying away from foods you tend to binge on, Reducing the number of meals that you eat during the day. All of that can help a little bit in terms of reducing some of the internal abdominal pressure. But essentially the term given to waiting to get surgery for an inguinal hernia is called watchful waiting. And essentially you just wait and you see if the pain goes away. After a few weeks of essentially being careful with your diet, wearing a supportive belt and just seeing what happens. Now the reason that I like this question is because I have had an inguinal hernia before and I did the method of watchful wading. I wore a weight training belt tightly around my waist when I would go and do any type of exercise, stayed away from crunches and sit ups for, for about two months and was just very, very careful not to stress my abdomen area. And within about, I think it was about six weeks or so, the pain started to go away. And within just a couple of months I didn't really feel it anymore at all. And it was basically a slight tear of the abdominal wall, not large enough for the large intestine to be able to bulge through. And so I didn't need to go in and take the risk of getting a surgery. So my view on it is that if it's something where there's not a visible bulge and it's something that isn't presenting a high amount of pain or discomfort that you consider a non surgical remedy, but this is something you would really ultimately want to talk to your physician about before you make that final decision. I'm not a doctor, so. So can't tell you for sure legally. Question from Graham. Graham says, I was reading an article about high intensity interval training and the sessions were typical, fairly succinct workouts. But the writer said to do the session for a two week block every two days and not to do any aerobic sessions in between. He said to get the desired effect of high intensity interval training, this was required. Do you agree or understand why the protocol suggests only doing high intensity interval training to the exclusion of other training? Yes. The handful of studies that show high intensity interval training to be superior to aerobic training or to cause just as much fat burning adaptation or say, increase in mitochondrial density or decrease in cardiovascular risk compared to aerobic training have all been done with high intensity interval training versus aerobic training. And so the high intensity interval training that has been done is typically very, very hard exercises injected about every 48 hours into the routine. The problem is that light cardio sessions in conjunction with those high intensity interval training sessions has not ever been looked into. So what people will see is they'll see this study that shows that the high intensity interval training every two days is getting just as good of results as the aerobic training. And so they'll say, well, therefore you have to do it this way. There's no other way to do high intensity interval training other than to go out and just kick your butt every two days with a very hard high intensity interval training. And not to do anything else. But in my personal experience and in the experience that I've seen for the clients that I've worked with, it's very possible to go out and say, do a Tabata set, which would be one form of high intensity interval training, and do three Tabata sets a week and also do a few aerobic sessions a week and be able to get away with that just fine in terms of accelerated weight loss, accelerated calorie burning, and also no risk of overtraining. Where you get into trouble is when you start to do high intensity interval training, but you also start to inject, say medium paced cardio intervals or medium paced cardio sessions in between each of those high intensity interval training sessions. What I mean by that is, let's say you're going to do one of these high intensity interval training sessions that would consist of eight very, very hard 30 second sports sprints, each 30 second sprint separated by four minutes of recovery. And you're going to do that three days a week. Well, in between each of those days, if you were to go out and do a light aerobic session, that'd be just fine. But in between each of those days, if you were to go out and do, say, a 30 to 40 minute kind of medium intensity aerobic session called a tempo session, that would be a situation where you would be introducing a possibility of inadequate recovery, recovery, muscle fatigue, and a decrease in the effect of or the ability to do the high intensity interval training session. So essentially what it comes down to is it's okay to do high intensity interval training and cardio as well, as long as the cardio is done primarily aerobically. And if you have somehow figured out a way to do both, then I can almost guarantee that you're not going hard enough with your high intensity interval training. Most people really don't or don't go as hard as they actually went in the research. I mean, in the research, we're talking about people doing 140, 150% of VO2 max. Most folks don't understand what that is. For example, I've been doing a high intensity interval training session twice a week, and it involves putting the treadmill at a 10% incline and a 12.0 for speed and doing 1030 second sprints. And in between each 30 second sprint, essentially walking around the gym for about three to four minutes and doing nothing. That's what a high intensity interval training session looks like. Most people think it's, you know, doing a series of jumping jacks. It's really not. High intensity interval training is hard, hard stuff if you do it right. Okay, last question is from Jack. Jack says I'm a diabetic. I'm getting back to lifting weights. I. I just started my workout routine again, and I've noticed that my glucose is high after workouts. I'm insanely controlled with a 1Cs, ranging from 5.9 at my lowest to 6.2 at my highest. But glucose has been hitting the high mark after workouts. Just curious if I'm stressing my body too hard starting out again or if I should take things slower until my body gets used to the physical strain. Well, first of all, when Jack mentions his A1C scores, A1C is a measurement. It's basically kind of like a snapshot of your blood sugar levels for the past three months. Because what happens is that when you consume too much sugar, it sticks to proteins in your body. And these components, these red blood cells with the sugar, sugar stuck to the protein, circulate in the body for about three months before they die. And when the sugar sticks to these Red blood cells. It gives the person who's testing you an idea of how much sugar has been around in your body for the past three months. So A1C levels being low, like around 6, would mean that your average blood sugar has been fairly low.

So.

So that's good for a diabetic to have an A1C score of around 6. For the average person, that still means that your blood sugar level is fairly high. But for diabetics, having a mean blood sugar that's at an A1C of 6 is just fine. Now, the fact that your exercise is stimulating your blood sugar levels to increase is fairly normal. When you exercise in response to adrenaline and in response to physical movement, your body produces something called glucagon. And glucagon causes your liver to take storage blood sugar, or glycogen, and release it as glucose into the bloodstream, thus increasing your blood sugar levels. And that's a good thing, because you need that added blood glucose for energy. A problem can arise if your body is not producing enough insulin, though, because what happens then is insulin is basically necessary for getting glucose into the muscle cells. And if you've got these high levels of circulating glucose after exercise, but as a diabetic, not enough insulin to take that glucose and get it into the muscle cells to be stored as glycogen, then you could put yourself at risk. For example, if your blood sugar level is getting over, you know, specifically like 300, if you're feeling sick, short of breath, if you're getting a lot of ketones in your urine, getting tingling pain, numbness in your legs, then you're risking a very severe hyperglycemic reaction that diabetics need to be very, very careful with. And you may need to supplement with insulin immediately if you're getting those type of blood sugar levels. But if we're talking about a slight rise in blood glucose due to that normal release of glucagon and release of glycogen from your liver into your blood to give you energy for exercise. That's totally natural. Non diabetics get that, Diabetics get that. And it's something that should be expected. It's really not a bad thing. And as a matter of fact, the more you exercise and the better you get into shape, the more your body starts to rely on fatty acids, the less sympathetic nervous system response you get, or epinephrine response that you get to exercise, the less of a spike in blood glucose you're going to see. And it is true that you may need to gradually increase your fitness if the type of exercise that you're doing now is spiking your blood glucose up to dangerous levels. So yeah, you may need to do less high intensity interval training or less hard cardio, a little bit less weight training and just monitor your blood glucose levels. Start off with aerobics, light cardio, light body weight training, gradually add some intervals and a little bit of weight training and then gradually progress to harder intervals, heavier weight training. And by doing so, you will train your body to release a little bit less glucose versus jumping into a hard and heavy exercise routine right away. So that would be my advice to you. Again, I'm not a doctor and you shouldn't rely on this as medical advice. But basically you shouldn't be too concerned about blood glucose levels rising during exercise. That's normal. But a real, real sharp and steep rise that's putting you into a hyperglycemic range. That's where you need to be careful. That's where you may want to consider backing off the exercise to the point where you're not getting that type of spike in blood glucose levels. So great question. And that wraps up the questions for this week. So we are going to have one special announcement and then move on to the interview with Chip Berg about how to stay fit when you're super busy.

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Hey folks, this is Ben Greenfield and I know that many of you are incredibly busy, but you also have a passion for fitness. Maybe you have a passion for running 5Ks or weight training or even doing something like Ironman triathlons and marathons. Well, the gentleman who is on the other line right now is actually the president of a $10 billion global business, Procter and Gamble. The president of the male businesses division at Procter and Gamble, he runs that division and yet he still manages to be in remarkable shape. He does a lot of different events and keeps himself in shape. I'll have him tell you a little bit more about the type of things that he does in terms of the competitions that he takes part in. But he's learned a lot of things in his time in the trenches. And so I thought it would be interesting for you to get this man Chip Berg on the line to talk a little bit about how he juggles all the things that he's doing and still finds time to stay fit, still finds time for his two year old daughter and still manages to even win his age group in some events. So Chit, thanks for coming on the call today, Ben.

It's great to be here. Thanks very much for that very nice introduction.

Tell me a little bit more about the type of events that you participate in.

Well, I've always been an athlete, I guess, you know, going all the way back to, you know, when I was a kid. The different types of sports I've done has changed through the years, but when I was in college I realized I took up running and after I got out of college I started running marathons and, you know, 10Ks, all the way up to marathons. And a little bit later in life in my 40s, I had sort of stopped doing marathons and I started getting into swimming, which led to eventually getting into triathlons kind of in my early to mid-40s, 40s and now I do a little bit of everything. I do triathlons mostly during the summer since I live in the Northeast and the triathlons range from sprint distance all the way up to half Ironmans. I haven't quite gotten to the point of doing a full Ironman, although it's on my dream list and I live in Boston. So, you know, when you live in Boston, you have to do the Boston Marathons. So I run one or two marathons a year. Those are getting tougher and tougher to do, I will admit, but I do manage to run those every year and I'm looking forward to running Boston again this coming April.

Cool. Cool. So walk me through if it does exist, a typical training week for you in terms of what you try to check off as far as like runs or weight training sessions or whatever it is that you.

Dr. Yeah, well, I have, I guess I have two different types of typical weeks or typical days. There's the typical week when I'm in town when I'm not traveling and out of town. And then there's the typical week when I'm traveling and the two are somewhat different, although I really do make it a priority and an important part of my day every day to get my workout in. They're now more Programmed, I will say, than they used to be in the past because I now work with a coach, an online coach who regularly sends me my workouts. So there's a little bit more regimen in it than it used to be. I'd wake up and it'd be like, okay, what am I going to do today? So now it's a little bit more programmed. But when I'm in town I'm lucky that I've got a decent gym in my house which includes an endless pool so I can swim at home. So I will work out just about every morning during the week. I'm typically up somewhere between 5 and 5:15. I'm down in the basement by about 5:20 or 5:30 and I've got, you know, I can do a triathlon down in my basement if I want to. I've got an endless pool down there. I've got my bike on a computrainer and I've got a treadmill and I also have some free weights down there as well. So I've got in a relatively small space, the space of about a one and a half car garage. I would say I've got everything I need to basically maintain my fitness and to train at a, you know, intense level. I would say.

So would you say that's a fairly important thing is for people to enable themselves to have access to being able to work out without having to add in the management of say going to a gym.

Well, having access and whether it's a gym or your home basement and having, you know, it doesn't, you don't, everybody can't afford and you know, everybody doesn't have the kind of space to necessarily put an endless pool in their house. I'm lucky in that respect. But having access, easy access to the right kind of equipment so that you can get your exercise workout in is pretty important. You know, the other thing, you know, in Boston it's now dark until you know, 7 o' clock or 7:30 in the morning and it gets dark at about, it's getting dark right now at 4:15 in the afternoon. So I do a fair amount of my training in the winter, my running training on a treadmill. I try to get outside when I can, but so, but it is important I think that you have access. And so that's, you know, that's definitely one of the things that when we moved here I made it a priority that I was going to find a space that would allow me to put a decent enough gym in my basement.

And for those of you listening in? You don't have to like Chip says, get an endless pool. My version of an endless pool is I have a couple of swim cords, I tie them to a bed post and I can set up an indoor bike training, go back and forth doing five minutes of simulated swimming and a 10 minute time trial on the bike three times through and get a swim bike session in. So, you know. But it's the same philosophy that Chip is preaching. Have it available. So.

My youngest son is 23 and he lives in Minneapolis and he lives in a little, you know, one bedroom condo. He's a year and a half out of school or so and you know, he's got his little space set up in his little one bedroom condo. He's got his bike up on a trainer and he's got his weights in the other corner and you know, he can get his workout in, in his living room if he has to. He also belongs to a gym. So, you know, if it's important to you, you're going to find the space and you're going to find a way to make it happen. The other part of my normal when I'm in town, Our office space we built, you know, I call it Boston's best gym here at the Gillette World Shaving Headquarters. And, and so we've got a phenomenal fitness center here which we installed when we moved the operation into this building. And you know, during a typical week when I'm in town, I'm in that gym at least three days a week at lunchtime and sometimes it's four. And when I'm really lucky it's five. So I make it a priority to kind of break my day up when I'm in town by getting another workout. And so if I swam in the morning, I'll run if I, or you know, or I'll do weights at lunchtime. If I did weights in the morning, maybe I'll run at lunchtime. So it gives me kind of a second workout and it breaks the day up for me and it's really an important part of my day. So that's a typical week when I'm in town. When I'm traveling it's obviously a little bit more difficult, but I do make it a priority to get my workout in. In fact, I have what I call my travel rituals, which everybody who works for me around the world knows what my travel rituals are. And one of the rituals is we're not starting the day until 8:30 in the morning because if we start at 8:30, that gives me time to get up, get into the hotel gym or go to a nearby pool or whatever. My program is going to be in whatever city I'm in in the world, get, get a good one hour workout in, you know, get back to my room, shower, run my email, get some breakfast in me before I head off and really hit it for the day. So I make it a priority and I also make sure that I'm to sleep early enough that I can get up at, you know, five, five, 30, quarter to six, depending on what time the facility opens to get my workout in.

Yeah, yeah. And in terms of flexibility of your program, you mentioned that you have a coach who's giving you workouts. Do you find it important to be able to kind of drag and drop them as you please or do you really straight stay adherent to it, to a very, very strict schedule?

No, I, well, I try to stick with the schedule that she sends me. But, but you know, stuff happens, right. And you know, so I'm not. Yeah, well, I'll tell her to listen, but, but I, I do. You know, you got to be flexible and things happen during the day or during the week and you need to make adjustments. I try to be smart about the adjustments that I'm making. I let her know about the adjustments that I'm making. She also has my travel schedule, so she knows ahead of time as she's developing my schedule, when I'm going to be out of town, when I'm going to be in town, and so she can work the program that way. I also know a lot of the hotels where I'm staying, what kind of facilities I'm going to have, and I try to build my travel workouts around what facilities each hotel is going to have along the way. So if I know a hotel's got a great pool, I'm going to try to get a lot of swimming in at that hotel before I move on to the next city where the hotel might have no pool. So it's a little bit of common sense along with, you know, trying to make sure that I stay on track, getting the number of miles in that I need to be getting a lot. Also depends on where it is during the season too. You know, through the course of the year.

It's a very valuable tip to actually plan blocks of training around what you're going to have available to you. And I know that's something I've done with my athletes before where when they're traveling and pretty much all they have access to are running paths. We put Their running block in right there. And they become a better runner during that week.

Exactly.

Let's change pace a little bit here and talk about your, your diet and your nutrition. My first question before we talk a little bit about how you eat when you travel is in terms of all the different diets that are out there. Paleo and 40, 30, 30 and high carb, low fat. Low carb, high fat. Do you have a particular diet that you stick to or nutrition plan that you use?

Well, about six months ago, I became a vegan. I'm now a pretty hardcore vegan. And that, you know, initially that posed some challenges when I was traveling, but I've now found that if you just kind of stand up for what you want when you go into a restaurant, just about any restaurant is going to bend to, you know, make sure that you don't leave hungry or frustrated. So I, you know, I stick to a very disciplined vegan diet. I mean, disciplined is probably an adjective that would describe me. And, you know, I just try to get a good mix of protein and carbohydrates and fat during the course of the day. And I do track what I eat. I track just about everything that goes down my throat to make sure that I'm getting enough calories and to make sure that I'm getting enough high quality proteins during the course of the day.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And do you have like a recipe sources that you use for vegan? Like, do you use Brendan Brazier's book Thrive or anything like that?

I have read his book, actually. I live in Boston and probably one of the best sports nutritionists in the country is here in Boston, a woman by the name of Nancy Clark, who also wrote a sports nutrition book. And I met with her when I became a vegan. And it's not like I needed to lose weight, but when I became a vegan, I lost about almost 15 pounds in the first six weeks or so, to the point where it kind of got scary. And I went and saw her and, you know, the bottom line was I wasn't getting enough calories. And that's when I really started tracking the calories that I was consuming. And am I getting enough high quality protein? And now I've managed to put about half of that 15 pounds back on and I've probably hit what is really my right natural weight right now. I do track what I eat. I try to mix things up and make sure that I'm getting a good mix of different types of both vegetables and different types of carbohydrates. A lot of complex carbohydrates. I used to drink a lot of protein shakes, and I've kind of cut back on that, trying to get as much protein as I can from real food sources.

So I was going to ask you that in terms of, especially when you travel, how often do you rely on engineered foods as a vegan food source? And if so, are there any that you would recommend?

The answer is I try to rely on it very minimally because it's a pain in the neck to carry it around. But I do carry around a protein mix, which is vegan, with me when I'm traveling. I just carry it around in Ziploc bags, and I only carry a couple with me. And then I also carry some sports bars with me. And. And, you know, to be honest, they may even have a little bit of egg white or something in it. But, you know, this isn't. This is not like a, an ethical. I'm not doing this for ethical reasons or anything like that. If there's a little bit of egg white, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. But I do carry around sports bars with me because sometimes I will find myself in a meeting or something where the only thing to eat is meat or something like that. And it's good to have a go to in your briefcase. So I do carry that with me.

I'm just curious if you were to, say, walk into Outback Steakhouse when you're out traveling, what are you going to tell the waitress there?

And as a matter of fact, I do wind up at Outback a fair number of times because I fly in and out of Cincinnati and there's an Outback in Cincinnati's airport, and normally I'm on the last flight out, and that's where I'll stop and have dinner. And I can get a sweet potato there with no butter. I can get steamed broccoli, steamed veggies. I can get salads. So there's plenty to eat. And that's my point. I mean, I actually thought that I'd have a hard time keeping to a vegan diet when I travel. And actually, it's not an issue at all. And most restaurants, if you say I'm a vegan, no meat, no dairy, no cheese, what can you do for me? Sometimes you'll be blown away by what the shuffle put together. They take it as a challenge.

Yeah, you just have to think outside the box, huh?

Yup. Exactly.

Interesting. So in terms of any final tips or tricks that you would have for people who are super busy and want to stay fit and maybe travel a lot and want to stay fit. Do you have any other little tips or tricks that you use in your life to motivate you or to keep you after your goals?

Well, I do. A big part of this for me is, you know, as I was thinking about this as we've been talking, part of this is just how I define myself. Right. You know, I define myself as an athlete and to some extent and I've got a, you know, personal mission statement. And the first line in my personal mission statement is live life. And part of living life to me is being healthy, being active and being fit. I'm 53 years old. I've got a two year old daughter. I want to be around when she graduates from college. I'd like to be around when she gets married. I'd like to be around when she has kids that could be 35 years from now. So I want to live a long, healthy life. And I know that by staying fit, staying healthy, it's going to increase my odds of being around in another 25 or 30 years. So one big thing is just you got to make it a priority for yourself and almost make it part of who you are. And then the second thing is you got to program it into your day. You know, if I don't get out of bed at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning to get my workout in, particularly if I'm traveling, it's not going to happen. And if it doesn't happen three or four days in a row, then it's then you got to start it back up again, Right? So if you just make it a priority and figure out where on the calendar, where on the calendar that particular day, it's got to fit in. And then you just have to be disciplined to make it happen.

Yeah. Well, fabulous advice, folks, from a guy who's involved in a $10 billion company, still manages to pull off marathons, triathlons, do very well in them, has a family and he's got it together. So thank you so much for coming on the call and sharing some of your tips, Chip.

Thank you, Ben. Great talking with you.

All right, folks, until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and Chip Berg signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com that is going to wrap up today's podcast, folks. So if you enjoy this show, be sure to go to itunes and leave a ranking. And remember, you can grab any of the information that I talked about in this podcast, including links to everything and a ton of extra goodies. Over at the Show Notes, people ask me what the Show Notes are. Those are just the notes for every single podcast that comes out. Just go to BenGreenfield4 and do a search for podcast number 126 podcast 126. If you want to grab the Show Notes for this episode and all the other episodes are on there as well@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so we've got tons more great interviews coming out this month, but until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from Ben greenfieldfitness.com.

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