Episode #130: Tim Ferriss and Ray Cronise Explain How To Manipulate Your Body’s Temperature To Burn More Fat

In this podcast how to manipulate temperature to burn fat how to choose a healthy breakfast cereal Carb blockers are juicers okay. What to do if you can't do a squat A supplement called Moomayo Monster Low Carb Energy Drink. Does looking behind you slow down your running pace? Can carbonated water give you a side stitch during exercise? Is running twice a day better than once? How to eat healthy on a low fiber diet Supplements that make you smarter, separated shoulder exercises, calorie rich food for very long runs and a supplement called Athletic Greens.

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.

Well folks, last week we interviewed Chris Bohann and he told us about these fancy new body cooling devices. And today we're going to take that one step further and instead of talking about enhancing your product performance by manipulating temperature, we're going to talk about burning fat and losing weight by manipulating temperature. And I've got two guests, Tim Ferriss and Ro Kronise. Tim is the author of the Four Hour Body and you may know who he is. Ray Kronice is a NASA materials engineer and a very smart guy. The two of them and me have an interview in today's featured topic and then you'll also get access today to a 20 ton of information in our listener Q and A. So let's jump right into this Week's content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Special Announcements.

To those of you who popped on the blog this Monday morning, you may have noticed that you had a live two hour video from me, primarily consisting of me dressed in Lycra sitting on a bike. I was doing a very advanced bike fit called a retool bike fit. Did the whole thing live. And this is the most technological way to make your bike fit like a glove that you can find anywhere. Anyways, if you want to see the replay of that video, I've made it available over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so be sure to check that out and be sure to look for an update from me once I actually get out there and ride the bike so that I can tell you how how a bike fit like that actually jives in terms of its real world practicality. Two other special announcements. The first is that remember to visit the link that I put in the show notes to the brand new supplements that I'm featuring, including Mount Capra Double Bonded Whey Protein, which is that goat protein that your body treats far differently than a regular cow based whey protein absorbs it much better. Be sure to check that out along with the solar synergy that I put on there. The Cap Reflex, which is the only form of glucosamine chondroitin that I've found to actually work well. Vitamin D Fish Oil Super Pack from Bioletics that's now available straight from the podcast show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com and then finally the full GI food allergy testing panel. If you've always wanted to know exactly what's going on inside your gut, that would be the gold standard test so that you have zero guesswork about what you're supposed to be eating. The other thing is, be sure to check out the BenGreenfield Fitness inner circle and the free video is over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle. If you haven't yet checked that out, you'll get to see a day in the life of healthy living as my wife and I follow each other around with the video camera. So let's go ahead and jump right into this Week's content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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Listen Q and A.

Remember, if you have a question, you can ask it by going to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and clicking on the Show Notes to any of the episodes. And if you wonder what the show notes are, if any of the posts start with episode number like this one will be episode number 130. Those are the show notes and in the show notes is the Ask Ben form. It's right above all the Q and A notes. You can also call toll free to 877-20-99439 if you want to ask your question via audio or you can ask it via Twitter by going to twitter.com BenGreenfield finally, you can ask it via the free iPhone app. If you've got the free BenGreenfield Fitness iPhone app Just click the Ask Ben button. Alright, Patrick asked the first question via Twitter. He says, I know you're not the biggest fan of breakfast cereals, but what's your take on Kellogg's new offering for fiber plus ao? And in this case, AO stands for antioxidants. No big surprise there. They're very, very sexy in nutrition these days. So what they've done is they've got the Kellogg's Fiber plus, which is basically about 35% of the RDA for fiber, and they've added antioxidants, specifically vitamin E and zinc, into the cereal mix. And so if you go through the list, we've got chicory root fiber. And chicory root fiber is actually a pretty common fiber supplement, kind of a filler. It fills you up more quickly, keeps you satiated, reduces some of the absorption of fat, helps food to move through your intestine. So chicory root fiber is a very common fiber source that you're going to find in a lot of these packaged supplements or bars or cereals that are adding extra fiber and then they move on. They've got rolled oats, rice flour, sugar, malt extract, salt, more sugar, semisweet chocolate drops, more sugar, cocoa butter, milk fat, soy lecithin, confectioner's glaze, coconut, coconut oil, vegetable oil made up of palm kernel coconut and palm oil, canola oil, fructose, honey, cocoa glycerin, soy lecithin, again, wheat starch, nonfat dry milk, partially defatted peanut flour, soy protein isolate, and then bht, which is a preservative that they add for freshness. That's quite the laundry list. And there are some things that are good on there and some things that may not be too great for you on there. Specifically the high amounts of inflammatory omega 6 fatty acids from those vegetable oils, as well as a lot of the preservatives and the sweeteners, tons of sugar that they add to these things just like any breakfast cereal. And that's the reason that I'm not a huge fan of most breakfast cereals. Ton of sugar, acid and omega 6s to start off your day, considering that you can save about 50 to 75% over a cereal like this. And instead, just make yourself a bowl of oatmeal and put a little bit of fruit in there, like a handful of blueberries or raisins or figs, throw some almonds in there, maybe throw a little bit of whey protein or hemp protein or rice protein in there, and you're getting the same thing. Again, these Things receive an A for effort, but really a D in terms of health. So looks good on the front, but really it's not the greatest thing. And then one other thing about chicory root fiber is that it can cause a lot of bloating, a lot of gas. And so fueling up on something like this before you head to the gym or off for a run, probably not the best idea. Okay, we're going to move on to the next question here, which is from listener Joe, who says, what are your thoughts about taking a carb blocker? Okay, so when it comes to carbohydrate control supplements, you've usually got kind of three different categories that are out there in the nutrition supplement industry. One reduces carbohydrate cravings. So you're going to find elements like chromium or vanadium or bitter orange extract, or the type of things that will basically stabilize blood sugar levels and help reduce your sugar cravings. And then you've got supplements that speed up the enzymatic activity of the conversion of carbohydrates to energy. So basically, the carbs that you eat get converted into ATP or energy more quickly. And then finally, you have these carb blockers. And the idea behind the carb blockers is that they interfere with the enzymes in your body responsible for breaking down carbohydrate in, say, bread and into simple sugars. And simple sugars would, of course, be absorbed much more quickly into the bloodstream at the small intestine level. So essentially what happens is a carb blocker interferes with the actual digestion of carbs. Looks good on paper, but the problem is that when you shut down the enzyme, specifically, it's called alpha amylase. When you shut down that enzyme that's responsible for digesting carbohydrates or breaking down carbohydrates, you. You get a bunch of undigested carbohydrates going through your digestive tract, and then you've got two issues. The first is leaky gut syndrome. You may have heard of leaky gut syndrome before, but it's basically the process via which undigested food particles cause inflammation in the small intestine. And many of those undigested food particles end up still getting absorbed, traveling into the bloodstream, but causing an allergenic response because your body is unable to recognize those as something it can utilize and as energy because they're impartially broken down. And then the other issue is that you have all these undigested food fragments ending up passing into your large intestine, your colon and sitting there and fermenting. So you get a bunch of bloating gas and essentially GI distress. You can also get heartburn as stuff comes back up as well. So the prospect of that type of discomfort from taking something like a carb blocker to me is more of a disadvantage than an advantage. And I would recommend that you just activate your sensitivity to carbohydrates and your ability to convert them into energy a little bit more easily by exercising regularly or limiting your carbohydrate intake. Typically anytime you take something like this that allows you to kind of have your cake and eat it too. There's always side effects somewhere. It's the same thing with like, with like the Ali fat loss pill. It shuts down the enzyme responsible for breaking down fat. So what happens? You end up getting a bunch of oil in your colon and you essentially have to wear a diaper or not mind the anal leakage that the package warns you about when you buy that particular fat loss product. So always be cautious when something says it's going to block because it means it's going to shut down. Something that naturally occurs within your body and typically we cause some side effects. Joe has a follow up question. He says you recommend getting a juicer. I heard that juicers weren't really that good for you, Joe. You probably heard that because you heard from someone that when you drink a juice you end up getting lots of sugar and not much fiber and it can be not all that great for blood sugar levels. If you're exercising, moving regularly and you want a highly concentrated form of things like antioxidants and a lot of the phytonutrients, a lot of the good stuff that's in fruits and vegetables and you want to juice them to get that. It's fine to drink a juice concentrate like that. Just don't do it at 11 o' clock at night when you're sitting around watching TV. Do it as you're active during the day. Suck down some juice before you head out on a run. You're going to find that the stuff clears your head, gives you a great deal of energy, and just like anything, you need to be careful and think about when you're drinking juice. Don't juice all day long and rely on that concentrated sugar source as your primary form of energy. But it's great every once in a while and it's a very good way to get that concentrated fruit in a really tasty form. Along with vegetables, you can do dark leafy Greens, you can do, grapefruits, you can do oranges. The list goes on. So get a juicer, have fun with it. There's tons of great juicing recipes out there. Next question is from Chelsea. Chelsea says, I'm a runner and I want to do squats to build strength and prevent injury. The problem is that my flexibility is so bad, I can't get into a full squat squat, even without weight. If I try to squat all the way down, I either have to go up on my toes or use something for balance or I'll fall over. I know I need to work on flexibility in general, but do you have any tips for working on getting away from wussy halfway squats? Her words, not mine. To be able to do a full squat, yeah, absolutely. Two things you need to work on. One is the flexibility of your hip flexors, and the other is the strength of your butt muscles, your glute muscles, what would be called your hip extensors. The hip flexor part is pretty easy, especially if you're sitting down all day long at an office, something like that. You're going to be in a position that chronically shortens your hip flexors. So stand up every 30 to 60 minutes and get into a lunging position in which you reach for the sky. Stretch those hip flexors out, and if you're doing it properly, you're going to feel that stretch on the front upper part of your legs. The other thing that you can do is strengthen your butt muscles. You can do that by, by, for example, getting down into a crawl position and doing an exercise called a kick out where you kick your legs out behind you. You can strengthen by doing walking lunges or reverse lunges. You can get an elastic band and do side to side elastic band walks. You can get an elastic mini band where you tie your ankles together and do the same thing. So essentially, you're strengthening your butt in an isolated fashion that is not putting you in that kind of biomechanically difficult squat position. And then once you've done that for about four to six weeks, go back to the squat and try it out. Feel free to go through partial range of motion. Feel free to hold onto a wall or use a stability ball to guide you as you go through the range of motion. And you'll eventually get to the point where you can do a squat but strengthen your butt muscles. Get your hip flexors stretched out so you're not getting pulled forward onto your toes, and you should be able to get up to doing a full squat very Quickly. So, question from Kyle. Kyle says, have you ever heard of the moo myo supplement? What is your opinion on it? So mumayo is an extract, and it's known as an adaptogen. Now, that's another word, kind of like carb blocker that you're going to see thrown around a lot. An adaptogen is a term that's used by herbalists to refer to basically any product that they believe is going to increase the body's resistance to things like stress, trauma, anxiety, or fatigue. You might also see a term like rejuvenating herb, tonic, restorative. All of that would be considered an adaptogen. And they can range from being like a berry extract to being a mushroom extract. And there's no actual control over what can be termed an adaptogen. So you kind of have to be careful. However, the idea is that they balance the endocrine hormones and the immune system and help your body to essentially feel a little bit less stressed out, which would be good if you were doing endurance activity. It would be good if you were stressed out in general. You don't want to be activating that run from a lion system the entire day, especially if you're sitting around at the office. So I take adaptogens. They're in the enterprime supplement that I take. We've interviewed people about adaptogens before on this show. If you go to BenGreenFulfitness.com and do a search for Roger Drummer, you can listen to an interview with him that I did primarily about adaptogens. And that's what this moomayo extract is supposed to be. It's an adaptogenic herb that happens to also be very high in minerals. So it's something you would use for repair or recovery or during the day when you feel stressed out. The issue with adaptogens is they're not controlled, first of all. So you really need to make sure that you're getting these from a laboratory that would be considered safe. Safe and preferably would be what's considered a certified good manufacturing practices facility or CGMP facility. The other thing you'd want to look into is that there's very little evidence on Moomayo. And if you, for example, go check on PubMed, you'll find very little on there. A couple really small studies that look at the, like, the antitoxic properties of a mumayo extract. But anytime there's really a lack of solid research on something, then you want to be careful. So ultimately, worth a try. Haven't heard anything bad about it. Haven't seen a lot of promising research on it, but that's the idea is that it would be considered an adaptogen. And let's say that it does work, then yes, an adaptogen would be something good. And I recommend that anybody who feels stressed out a lot or anybody who is beating up their body with exercise include some type of adaptogenic source in their diet. The specific source of that in the, the enterprime that I use is the reishi and the shiitake mushroom extract. Alright, question from Amy who says I have a question about the low carb energy drink, the monster low carb energy drink. From the look at it, the monster low carb doesn't seem so bad, but is there something hiding from me? Monster low carb energy drink. You guys have heard me talk about Red Bull before and the problem that that can have with unleashing a host of health problems, problems in even healthy folks, especially if they're consuming it during exercise or with alcohol. We look at the monster low carb energy drink and the ingredients are carbonated water, glucose, citric acid, taurine, sodium citrate, color added. And then they've got kind of their, their, their powerful stuff added. Ginseng root extract, guarana seed extract, a bunch of B vitamins, caffeine. And then of course we've got maltodextrin, potassium sorbate, sodium acid sulfate, more caffeine, ascorbic acid, more maltodextrin and more glucose. So yeah, even though the total carbohydrate and the sugars in this is fairly low, there's still a good amount of chemicals in it. And as far as the actual caffeine in this stuff, it is going to really stimulate your adrenal glands. Okay, what we are looking at in terms of comparing this to a cup of coffee, it would be about 150% of the caffeine content of a cup of coffee. It's about three times as much caffeine as is in like the Delta E energy drink powder that I've recommended before on this show. And I'll be sure to put a link to that Delta E stuff in the show notes. But what this comes down to is you've not only got that, but you've also got acesulfami, potassium and sucralose in it. Sucralose being something that can kill up to 50% of the good bacteria in your stomach, acesulfami, potassium being a possible neurotoxin. And I really don't recommend that you mess around with that stuff especially Combined with stimulating your adrenals to a very, very high extent with this stuff. So, so would not recommend whenever I turn over an energy drink, just to give you guys an idea of what I look for immediately, if there's artificial sweeteners on there, I don't get it. The next thing I look for is caffeine in excess of 100 milligrams. If that's on there, I don't drink it. And then if there's just a ton of citric acid sweeteners, et cetera, the type of stuff that all combined are going to cause some bone demineralization, some problems with your tooth enamel, that type of thing. Again, I don't get it. So most energy drinks really don't fall into a very healthy category. Alright, next question is from Ernesto. And Ernesto has a three part question. I'm going to answer all his questions because they're really good. He says, my high school cross country coach would preach to us that we don't look behind us during a race as this shaves seconds off our time. Can you verify this, Ernesto? There's no studies out there that have compared runners who look behind them as they're running versus those who do not. But the primary muscles responsible for turning your neck are these muscles called your sternocleidomastoids. Nice big word that we had to learn in anatomy class back in college. And when you shorten your sternocleidomastoids, which you have to do in order to turn your neck, what you can cause is this chain reaction that goes up your spine anytime you're shortening the muscles of the upper body. You can limit the ability of your hips to, to rotate. And when you limit the ability of your hips to rotate, your stride length is going to decrease just a little bit, as will your ground push off force after ground contact during the run. So it is theoretically possible, and highly possible, that by looking behind you, you're not only going to reduce your power and your stride length, but you may also sidestep just a little bit, which can add up over the course of a race. So from a strategy standpoint, you may have to do it at certain points during a cross country race, but in terms of making a habit of looking behind you, I wouldn't recommend it. The next question is, you say, my coach would also tell us that drinking any carbonated water would cause us to get stitches and slow us down during practice. That could be true. When you drink carbonated water, what happens is you'll get bubbles for forming in your stomach and you have to burp in order to release those bubbles. And burping is a conscious muscle action that requires you to shorten your diaphragm. When you shorten your diaphragm, you can get a side stitch when the diaphragm goes into a chronically shortened position or state of spasm. That's what a side stitch is. And if you're shortening your diaphragm over and over again as you try to burp up the carbonation from the water, you could get a side stitch while running. So I really don't recommend, unless you're say, riding a bicycle or doing something that's not taking up a ton of oxygen or using a ton of your inspiratory expiratory muscles, that you not drink carbonated beverages during the event. However, if you're drinking a carbonated water in the morning and you have track or cross country three hours later, it's not a big deal. And then lastly, you say Steve Magnus, the author of the website the Science of Running, wrote an article that running four and a half miles a day is better than nine miles at once and can lead to greater fitness gains. Can you back this up? Because when you do any physical event, you have what's called post exercise oxygen consumption, which means your body has to go into a state where it repays the oxygen debt that it went into during the exercise session, you will burn more calories. When you split up an exercise session into two sessions done during the day, not only will you burn more calories, but you could burn more fat. You can increase your resting metabolic rate. And so from a weight loss calorie burning perspective, yes, you can get a lot of benefit from splitting a workout into a two a day versus a one a day. The second reason that it may be beneficial is because when you have central fatigue set in or muscle fatigue set in, you're going to slow down. In the last four and a half miles of a nine mile run may not be performed at the same speed or intensity of the first four and a half miles. And so if you're training from a pure speed training perspective, specifically if you're training for anything up to about a 10k event, splitting it into 2 runs is going to get you more benefit than splitting it into 1 slower 9 mile run. However, if you're training for a half marathon on up, you need to include runs where you are actually getting close to the distance that you're going to be putting on during the event itself so that you're used to spending that much time on your feet and your muscles and bones are used to being pounded for that amount of time. So for a shorter distance, splitting up into two a days, going harder, not longer, is always going to be beneficial. If you're planning on doing anything longer, then you are going to want to include sessions where you're going the full distance all at once. Next question is from Jennifer, who says the only foods I am allowed to eat are simple carbs because I have a permanent source, small bowel obstruction, and have to remain on a low fiber diet for the rest of my life. This includes white bread, white rice, white potatoes, white meat, white pasta, etc. She's listing those as the foods that she can eat. And then she says absolutely no fruits and vegetables, cooked or raw. No whole grains of any kind, no nuts, no seeds. I can't even eat applesauce. I'm at my wit's end about what to do. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. For those of you wondering what exactly got Jennifer into this conundrum in the first place, a small bowel obstruction or any type of bowel obstruction is either a mechanical obstruction or a functional obstruction of the intestines. So either something stuck in your intestines or your intestines are functioning in such a way that they are closing off or constricting. So you're preventing the normal transit of a lot of the normal products of digestion. When you get a bowel obstruction, you get a ton of abdominal pain, you get vomiting, you get constipation, dehydration, loss of electrolytes, vomiting. There's lots of issues when you have a bowel obstruction. It's not pleasant, but the problem is that there's multiple recommendations for bowel obstructions. And I don't know the root of Jennifer's bowel obstructions, but some people put you on a high fiber diet to move things through. And that's typically going to be when there's a mechanical obstruction of the small intestines and you're basically just constipated. That's when you take in a bunch of fiber. But people who have a functional obstruction of the intestines where the intestines simply aren't functioning the way that they're supposed to need to be careful with fiber intake, because fiber can put a lot of stress in terms of functional digestive stress on the small intestines. And so people who have this type of obstruction not only need to be careful with anything that causes a great deal of digestive activity, which would include Milk products, eggs, meat, chicken, a lot of fluids, and especially any type of beverage like a coffee, tea, cocoa, alcohol, but also foods that have a lot of fiber in them. And that would include a lot of the seeds and a lot of the nuts and even some of the whole grains, the fruits and the vegetables. And so for Jennifer, I'm not going to necessarily step into her physician's role or her nutritionist's role and say what type of diet she should be on, the low fiber diet or the high fiber diet. But instead I'm just going to give her some recommendations for if you really don't do well in fiber, what you can eat and still get nutrients from. So if we look first at vegetables, there are some vegetables that are lower in fiber than others. These vegetables would include asparagus, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, lettuce, onions, potatoes, which, yes, are a vegetable, tomatoes, water chestnuts, or zucchini. Now next we move on to the fruits. And I don't know why you've been told not to eat applesauce, Jennifer, because applesauce would be considered low fiber. Bananas are lower in fiber. Grapefruit's lower in fiber. Grapes, peaches, pineapple, and anything from the melon family would also be lower in fiber. When you look at juices, we talked about getting a juicer before, that does remove a lot of the fiber. And you can do like a tomato juice, a carrot juice, pretty much any vegetable based juice. If you look into cereals, you can do like a cream of wheat instead of an oatmeal. Cream of wheat tends to be a lot lower in fiber. When you look at breads, pretty much most of the white breads, as you've already mentioned, are going to be lower in fiber. But I wouldn't be doing a ton of those, especially if you're concerned about weight. I'd be doing more of the low fiber vegetables, the low fiber fruits, and then something like a, like a cream of wheat. Now, from a meat perspective, meat is not considered a high fiber food. Meat is actually very low in fiber. But again, for people with a bowel obstruction, you need to be very careful that you try to choose meats that you can chew into a very, very well chewed bolus before you swallow. And a bolus, when I say that, that's just a ball of food that moves down through your intestine. So something like fish or chicken would be better than say like a nice fatty piece of beef. The other things that you could look into would be tofu and eggs. Those are fairly Easy to chew and digest. And finally, really look into getting a good blender like a Vitamix, that you can blend things in and get them a lot more pre digested before you put them into your body. So if you struggle with high fiber, whether it be because of a bowel instruction or because it causes you a lot of gas, those are some of the things that you can do. And again, for something as simple as constipation, you would not want to go low fiber. When we're looking at something like a permanent bowel obstruction that a lot of times even requires surgery, eating foods high in fiber can actually cause digestive stress. So great question, interesting question. The next one is from Marco, who says, what can I feed my dad? He had a brain stroke and he's in bed all day. Do you recommend any supplements for his brain? Absolutely. There are a range of supplements that can assist with healing from a stroke. And this is not to be considered medical advice, but these are some of the things that could either decrease risk of stroke or help to preserve the brain cells or rebuild the brain cells in stroke victims. The the first would be good folic acid and vitamin B vitamin. So supplement with like a vitamin B, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, folic acid, and anything that's going to help to decrease the levels of something called homocysteine in the body, which is going to increase the risk of stroke or increase the destruction of the brain cells after the stroke. So consume a lot of vitamin B. Vitamin E is another antioxidant that could be a really good supplement for stroke recovery or stroke prevention. Could help reduce the risk of developing blood clots that can cause a stroke. So get on a vitamin e supplement. Coenzyme Q10 is another one that may actually help to increase blood flow to the brain and could also help the brain cells to be more active. You've heard of fish oil, of course, and fish oil would be a fantastic supplement. They've actually done studies in people who have had strokes and have taken fish oil. And what they found is that post stroke rats, not humans, but when they were given a fish oil after they were induced into a stroke, the fish oil helped to decrease the swelling in the brain and help to repair damaged brain tissue. So I would definitely get on a high quality fish oil supplement. The other thing I would look into would be a magnesium. And especially because magnesium can be a vasodilator, it can help to improve the activity of brain cells. You can get like a topical or an oral. Specifically, I'd recommend you get into like an Angstrom based magnesium. Those are all things that would help out. So look into a magnesium, a vitamin B supplement, folic acid supplement, fish oil, coenzyme Q10 and yeah, that would be. Oh, and a vitamin E. Those would be some of the things that I definitely look into if I were trying to get a loved one on something that was going to help them recover more quickly from a stroke or decreased risk of stroke in the future. Sam says, I just got a type 3 separated shoulder in a bike crash. What is your advice on the best exercises? So, separated shoulder, it falls into several different classifications, but basically what it is is it's also known as an AC joint separation. It's a pretty common injury. You see it a lot in cyclists or people who fall on outstretched hands. And it's not a dislocation, but it's actually a point where the end of your clavicle or your collarbone becomes separated at what's called the acromioclavicular joint. And a type 3 separation of the AC joint means that the ligaments in that joint are torn and it could take up to about 12 weeks to heal. But it's not a complete tear. There's still some amount of function, so you can do some exercises. So some of the things that I would recommend that you do, the first would be like an external rotation exercise, really common exercise. And that's where you get a towel or resistance band and you stand there with your elbow at your side and you simply externally rotate your elbow. The other thing that you can do is what's called a scapular squeeze. And for this you would want to lie down face up with bent knees like you were going to do a crunch. Put your arms straight at your side, put your feet on the floor, floor. And then turn your palms so they face the ceiling and simply press your shoulders backwards into the floor and towards each other. So you're squeezing your scapula or your shoulder blades closer together. That can help out quite a bit. Using a real, real light weight and simply doing a side raise out in front of your body and out to the side of your body can help to strengthen the deltoids, which are going to support that separated shoulder and provide you with shoulder function once you're able to return to normal activity. And the other thing you may want to consider is a real, real light uppercut punch. And you can use a very light pair of dumbbells for this exercise. You can also just use your hands. But to do this, you can lie face up on the Floor again and hold the dumbbells with your arms straight up above you and in line with your shoulders. And then simply punch the dumbbell up towards the ceiling and then back down. So those are some real, real simple exercises, some basic exercises that aren't going to put a lot of stress on the shoulder. Again, I'm not giving you this as medical advice, but those are some of the things I'd look into with a type 3 separated shoulder because you still are going to be somewhat functional. All right, interesting question from David who asks for the Marathon des. I need to be self sufficient for 7 days while running between 150 and 160 miles in the Sahara desert. I need lightweight, calorie and nutrient rich food. Do you have any recommendations? Absolutely. Okay, so here's some of the things that you could do. I would recommend you look into getting chia seeds and you can soak the chia seeds in water until they form a gel. And then you can eat about 2 tablespoons of this gel for every 60 minutes that you're out there running. You can also put it into one of those flasks. And chia seeds are going to be real, real high in amino acids and fatty acids. Those would be great. Medjool dates, which you can also get your hands on, would be good to consume as a quick recovery food after your running is done. If you're going to be doing a lot of running, if you eat the dates for a long time, they can draw quite a bit of water into the large intestine. They're very fibrous, so they could actually cause a little bit of GI distress if you're using dates as a primary source. But dates would be great as a real, real good, high glycemic index food to get into your body quickly because you need fast carbohydrate restoration. I would definitely be looking into a lot of the superfoods. I would take goji berries out there with you. Goji berries have a ton of amino acids in them. They're very, very nutrient rich. They're not cheap, but I would definitely get those. I would also grab a millet because millet is very easily digested. It's a very nutrient dense grain and that's something that you can again eat several tablespoons of before you head out during the day. Similar to millet, you could do the same thing with any of these. A buckwheat, an amaranth, or a quinoa. You can get all of those to give you some variety as you go through but again, these are things that you can eat by the handful or by the tablespoon during exercise because you're going to be moving slow enough to where you can actually digest those. And you can also use them afterwards as a way to restore nutrients in a very, very dense format and a format that's also going to include lots of carbohydrates and amino acids and not require the same digestive time as say, a piece of meat. Look into like a barley powder. You can get like a barley grass powder. A lot of these green supplements are going to have it in there. For example, the living greens superfuel, that's something that I always travel with. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's called, I called it living greens. It's actually called Living Fuel Super Greens. Living Fuel Super Greens. Look into something like a greens powder because those tend to be very nutrient dense. They've got things like barley grass and algae and spirulina in them. Look into the maca root. And maca is just a root vegetable. It's from the turnip family. You can do like ground maca. You can put maca in muesli's or smoothies and that's going to really help stabilize your adrenal glands and give you a nice long term source of energy as well. Look into grabbing some coconut oil, like some extra virgin coconut oil. Start off your day with a couple tablespoons of that or use that during exercise as long as it's not getting heated to a rural high temperature. You could also get something like the Udo's 369 oil and take that out there with you as well. Also grab some avocados if you can get those. And use a chopped avocado, you can use that during exercise or after. Again, if you're moving at a slow enough pace to be able to digest that fat. I definitely do sweet potatoes and yams as well. And you can also, again, be, because you're moving very slowly, go with seeds or nuts. I would specifically go with something a little bit higher in antioxidants. Something like a pumpkin seed, something like a Brazil nut. Either of those would be great. Sesame seeds would be another good one. And those are just things that you can, you can chew on as you go. Sunflower seeds as well. So lots of choices in terms of very, very nutrient rich foods that you could take out there with you. But those are some of the ways that I would go. Like if someone were to tell me, go run across the country Right now that's the stuff I would be buying when I go to the grocery store and giving to my support team or taking with me in a small backpack pre prepared. Okay. Speaking of greens, I figured this would be a good question to end on since it mentions the person we're interviewing next on the show, but it says what do you think about athletic greens from Tim Ferriss book for our body? Do you feel this supplement would affect people with hypothyroidism or have an interaction with with Synthroid? You know, again with the with the clarification that I'm not a physician, you do need to be careful with some supplements if you're on a thyroid medication. I won't get into the argument that I really don't think that levothyroxine or Synthroid is the best way to be controlling thyroid anyways. But there are a range of vitamins or herbs or supplements that you shouldn't take at the same time as your Synthroid because they can decrease the absorption of that by up to 20%. I wouldn't be taking calcium, iron, magnesium or any mineral supplement at the same time as your Synthroid. Chromium is another one that I would avoid. Anything that's made from a soy product, anything that contains kelp specifically because of the iodine walnuts can also interfere with Synthroid absorption. And also anything that would be considered like an antacid because those again are typically contain a lot of minerals. So you asked specifically about the athletic greens supplement and the athletic greens, again, just like any greens supplement, is a shotgun of vitamins and greens and there are definitely some things that are fairly high in minerals. It's got a ton of chromium in it. It's definitely got things in there that would interfere with your thyroid medication absorption. But it's not that big of a deal if you just take it at a different time of day than you take your medication. For example, if you take your medication medication in the morning, take something like this in the evening before you go to bed. I'll say the same thing I said last week about green supplement. I've tried a ton of them, probably haven't tried all of them. I haven't tried this one for example. But I've never found any that I can feel the same way that I feel the enterprime that I take. I just do not get the same results with anything. But hopefully that helps you out and you definitely wouldn't do any damage by taking this stuff. It does not kill, contain artificial sweeteners and chemicals and preservatives and the type of things you need to worry about. So that being said, we're going to move on to the interview with Tim Ferriss and Ray Cronice. I will put a link to Tim's book in the show notes. I'll put a link to Ray Kronice, who's a fascinating guy. We'll have him on the show again in the show notes and you can go explore a little bit more about the stuff that we talk about. And just to lay down the basics behind this interview with we're talking about how you can manipulate your body's temperature to lose weight. And there's quite a bit of information in this interview. So sit back and enjoy.

Featured Topic.

Hey folks, this is Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com and I've got a couple of guys on the line right now, Tim Ferriss and Ray Cronus. And Tim, who you probably know of from a couple of books he's written Four Hour Work Week and the Four Hour Body has specifically a very interesting chapter in the Four Hour Body about mastering temperature to manipulate weight. And in that chapter of his body he also talks about Ray and the interesting weight loss that Ray was able to experience by manipulating his temperature and also some of the experiments that Tim performed on himself. So guys, thanks for coming on the line.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Ben.

So Tim, starting off, what inspired you to actually contribute an entire chapter of your book to the topic of mastering temperature to manipulate weight?

I experimented with cold exposure starting in earnest in 1999 or so. The reason was muscular recovery. So I was looking at contrast therapies using hot showers and ice baths to speed recovery, among other things. I had also read a book at the time called Thermogenesis and hypothesized that if I could use pretty well established supplements or stacks like the ephedrine, caffeine, aspirin, stack in combination with cold, that I should hypothetically lose more body fat. And that turned out to be the case. So I started with muscular recovery, then began using it for body fat loss. And in the course of writing Our Body had wanted to explore the cell chapter, but quite frankly didn't have enough data. And that's when luck intervened and I was introduced to Ray at NASA Ames Research center, where I'm a faculty member at San Diego University. And Peter Diamandis, the founder of the XPRIZE foundation or chairman of the XPRIZE foundation, introduced the two of us. And that was a match made in heaven. So Ray was then able to work with me and offer me a lot of the science that I would not have had access to otherwise.

Got it. So when it comes to science, obviously when people think about being cold and weight loss, one of the things that comes up is this law of thermodynamics that either Ray or you can address, but that's the fact that energy cannot be created or destroyed and it can only change forms. How does this actually relate to weight loss in the traditional sense when we're not talking about cold experimentation?

I think Ray is better qualified to jump into thermodynamics, considering his job was to keep space shuttles from burning up for a while. So, Ray, you want to tackle that one and maybe some of the misconceptions about the thermodynamics.

Yeah, I think, Ben, the part that you probably should keep in mind and everyone should keep in mind. And really the secret is where Tim started with his stacks, because if you think about what he was doing, he was still mastering thermodynamics. I mean, yeah, it's sensational to talk about ice baths and being cold and shivering, and there is some definite benefit with all of that. But ultimately, what Tim talks about in the book in a more subtle way, and I think what he was experimenting, which is really closer to the ultimate truth of how we harness this, is the idea that we've got to completely understand the energy of any system to do it. And the traditional paradigm and the conversation that started all this with Tim and I was this idea that everybody has, this idea that it's calorie in, calorie out. At the most basic level, that's true. But like any generalization, when you start digging in, well, it's almost always true. But the problem that we had is that the only calorie out, calorie in is obviously anything we eat, but the only calorie out that we have is really exercise. And that's the place where both Tim and I were frustrated, because there are many ways to force the body to expend energy that don't necessarily involve climbing stairs or running or those kinds of traditional activities. Part of what he had experimented with was obviously the thermogenic effect of food, which is your body has some the processes that uses the thermodynamics, not necessarily of getting hot or cold or your body temperature changing that much, but the energy consumed in processing the food and how the food is processed. Then that stretches all the way back to the ideas that I was looking at. That was really simply if my body wanted to be 98.6 and maintain that homeostasis. Was it going to use more energy if I exposed it to a colder environment? I think the answer is yes. The idea behind this is not about just being extreme, although obviously the extreme cells people like hearing about people doing crazy things to their body. But what Tim, I think really stumbled in upon in his research was actually using another kind of therapy and seeing other multiplying effects that lasted beyond just the initial exposure.

Okay, so Tim, your book is about self experimentation or a good portion of it is about self experimentation. In this particular category, we. What type of things did you experiment with when it came to seeing whether changes in body temperature could assist with weight loss?

A lot of it was looking at short duration exposures because in the literature, typically you might look at a perfusion suit where someone will be wearing an actual suit that is then circulated, that then has cold water of a specific temperature circulated through it for an hour, two hours, three hours. And unfortunately, we don't necessarily want to do that in real life. So I had to look at alternatives that would be not only effective, but practical with real world responsibilities. So I looked at cold showers. I looked at cold baths of different temperatures and was able to more or less determine guidelines based on pounds of ice. And the average bathtub would be roughly 20 pounds of ice for a standard bathtub in the United States at room temperature or slightly colder, in some cases up to 30, but no more than that. Also looked at the hormonal response and body composition responses to these different stimuli. It's challenging, of course, to separate out or control variables, but I would simply ensure that that was the primary change I was making and that the diet, the exercise, et cetera remained constant. I also experimented with performing the cold exposures at different times of the day, so in a fasted state, after food, before food, et cetera, to try to identify what had the greatest fat loss impact.

Okay, gotcha. Now, when you were doing these experiments, were you looking at all at dietary supplementation or things that you could do in conjunction with cold therapy to enhance weight loss if it could be enhanced?

I did look at this. I had to hold off on that for a period of time because I would either have to do it for all of the experiments or for none of them to make them comparable. Two things I noticed that worked reasonably well were cayenne. You could use some type of cayenne pepper extract. You need to keep an eye on the BTUs, but taken with a small amount of protein, I found that to enhance the thermogenic effect. And the mechanism is explainable. So it's not mystery. It's a pretty straightforward combination of two thermogenic approaches. The other was protein eating protein about an hour beforehand. And that could be as simple as unflavored whey protein in cold water. And using that, as Ray mentioned, to capitalize on the thermic effect of food and protein in that case is going to be generally the most produce the strongest effect.

Okay, gotcha. Now, as pleasant as it sounds, to take a few 10 pound bags of ice and put them in your bathtub and sit in there for a long time. In terms of practical ways that people could implement something like this to speed up weight loss without putting themselves through that kind of discomfort. Did you find that there were other methods aside from cold bath immersion?

Oh, there are tons of options and Ray can talk about a number of them. I simply prefer the short and sweet. So I do. And I also actually do the cold baths specifically because they've demonstrated to be very effective as mood enhancers and also for sleep purposes. So I don't only use them for fat loss. But I think Ray should comment on this. I have found cold showers to be very effective. And also simply using ice packs, if you place them on the upper back or upper chest While you're watching TV for 30 minutes to try to target the brown adipose tissue, the fat, burning fat that's typically located in those areas in adults. But Ray has a few other options that have worked well for him. So I'll let Ray jump in.

Gotcha. And I'll come back to you on that brown adipose tissue, Tim. But Ray, what do you think in terms of other ways aside from cold baths?

So this is an interesting thing that Tim stumbled into. And I know that when we first started talking, most of his was about the short exposure. Turns out whole body of data in the 50s and 60s where they actually did long exposure, like they exposed men from anywhere from 2 to 22 days at 60 degrees C or 60 degrees F and 45 degrees C, 15 and 20. And what was interesting is that when they were looking at adaptation, that was one thing, there was a big push to say, how do people get used to it? So you can think about sort of Navy BUDS training. How can we teach people to get to experience the cold and adapt to it, to be functional? The other thing was what was the caloric intake that you needed to support somebody in the field when they were in a cool environment? What did their nutritional changes have to be? But here's the interesting result that is very, very, I think, applicable to what Tim found and that is that adaptation for most people came in terms of their ability to suppress their initial metabolic boost. So if you think about it this way, when you first get into that cold, that exhilaration, also the thing that can be dangerous if you're a heart patient, certain people just shouldn't do this, as Tim's probably explained as well in the book. But the bottom line is that initial exposure causes a huge spike in your metabolic rate. It can be from 20% to 400%. If you're full on shivering, somewhere between 400 and 500%, your resting metabolism rate can be generated by full on shivering, miserable, not wanting to be there. But to tell you how far that goes, you're talking about an RMR from 2000 calories a day to an RMR of 10,000 calories a day. Obviously you're not going to stay exposed to it 24 hours a day. But just to put that in perspective. But what's interesting is the effect, the initial effect, the rise in metabolic rate happens almost instantly on exposure. Your heart starts to go up. And these are some of the same things, things like green tea extracts and cayenne and the things that Tim is talking about, about the thermogenic effect of food. It just causes your body to rev at a higher, at a higher rate. I mean, that's how all of those kinds of products do it. Well, Tim found a way to do it by simply exposing temporarily to cold. I came at it from a completely different perspective. I looked at what those guys were doing and said, can I expose my body to long duration? 60, in my case, 60 degrees F. And the answer was yes. And so I did a number of things that were long and steady because I had the flexibility and the time to be in that cool environment all the time. I wasn't in an office. I was specifically doing this for a six week period and I did the shiver walks and a number of those things. So mine was sort of. It's like the tortoise and the hare. I think the slow duration has a bigger magnitude over the longer run. But I definitely believe what he's doing has an impact. I mean, it is a measurable impact and there's plenty of studies to support it. What I don't know much about is the bat side and that's what I've been looking at now. And I think Tim raises some really interesting questions that we know that we find it more in adults. Babies have it a lot they have a big. A lot of their energy, their thermal energy is derived from that because they can't move in such the way that humans can.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves with bat, Ray, because I know some people won't understand what that is, I want to come back to you on that. And by the way, folks, Ray is a material scientist at NASA, so he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to this stuff. Tim, you had hypothesized or suggested that there may be other mechanisms at play above and beyond this rise in metabolic rate. And that's where you brought up the issue of BAT in your book. Can you explain what BAT even stands for and why you brought it up?

Bat. BAT stands for brown adipose tissue. Adipose tissue is just fat, the fat that most people think of. The fat you see on a steak, the fat that you grab on your love handles is called white adipose tissue and generally thought to not do a.

Hell of a lot.

It's actually almost like an endocrine gland. We won't get into it. But the brown adipose tissue is less common and you find it primarily in infants and other animals for increasing body temperature. Infants aren't going to be running around to heat themselves, and they use this brown adipose tissue to keep warm in many cases. It does, however, exist in adults. And what makes it very interesting is it's brown because of mitochondria in the fat itself, which makes it actually more similar to muscle tissue than normal fat. Long story short, you can trigger this brown adipose tissue with cold exposure, and it causes the body to burn calories, fat calories, specifically to generate heat. And so that was one plausible mechanism that I looked at to explain why. Let's say Ray could go from I think it was 1.5 pounds of fat loss per week to 4.5 pounds of fat loss per week. What might be some of the other mechanisms besides just the calories in, calories out, use of cold.

Okay, gotcha. So this bat isn't something that would necessarily be an unsightly fat that you develop upon cold exposure. It's actually something that you can get and still not look fat.

Oh, yeah. It's something you want more of. You wouldn't even be able to see it unless you had a PET scan or something like that done. It's something that activates. It's not unsightly. It's not going to be something that hangs over your belt. This is the type that you want, the type of fat you want to have more of a. Because it helps to keep the unsightly fat off of you.

Okay, gotcha. So in terms of practical applications for people, you mentioned cold packs. Is there anything else that people can do? I mean, is something as simple as drinking very cold water or turning up the air conditioning in your home going to work as far as burning extra calories?

I'll jump in on that. Ray did a number of things including walking outdoors with just a hat and gloves and he would leave his jacket at home in 60 degree weather.

I was wearing plants.

Depends on if you're in San Francisco. You might be able to get away with no pants, but most of the country you can. Right, which is where I live. So I'm able to talk smack about it. You could also, like you mentioned, drink 500. I would say 500 milliliters, which is like 2/3 of a bottle of wine in terms of volume of cold water first thing upon waking. I found this to be very effective. So If I do 500ml of ice cold water, don't give yourself brain freeze first thing when you wake up and then go for a walk outside, a very fast 15 minute walk, let's just say you do that three times a week. I find that to be very effective for accelerating fat loss. It is important that you time that first thing in the morning, in my experience. And I will challenge you a little bit on the ice bath though, like Ray mentioned, if you have a heart condition, this is not something you want to do right off the bat. But surprisingly, I've seen a very high level of compliance with people who start the ice baths, do it three times a week and do it for five to ten minutes only up to the waist. It's really only uncomfortable for the first 60 seconds or so. So I would say that I don't think that is as out of reach as people might think because they think ice bath and they think being up to their neck in ice, convulsing as they shiver, and that's simply not what happens when you're doing it up to your waist. So I actually do think that's more practical than one might think.

Okay, gotcha. In terms of places where you might see research going as far as the use of, of cold or temperature adjustments for weight loss or research into growing adipose tissue. Tim, have you seen that the weight loss scientific community as a whole seems willing to accept and explore this topic?

I'll be curious to see if people can get studies funded that are intended specifically to look at the Fat loss applications. Ray's I think in a good position to comment on this. One area I do think will be looked at more closely, and I would like to see it looked at more closely is the role of adiponectin, which is another hormone most people haven't heard of. But the role of adiponectin in fat loss and muscular gain as it relates to cold exposure and other types of environmental stimuli. And specifically looking at whether the effects of adiponectin can be triggered by very short duration cold, which I believe is the case. So that's one area of research that I think will be interesting. But Ray, what do you think? Do you think people will be getting money to look at this stuff?

You know, I actually, I think if we can get over the hump, and here's the scientific hump that we have to get over, and it's actually pretty simple if you look at it with an open mind. But it's difficult. It's kind of like BMI and a number of other things where people are locked in. But one, there is actually a lot of research going on to generating brown adipose tissue from white adipose tissue or just encouraging more brown adipose tissue. And you see a lot of that actually is active research. So that's actually, I would say the most accepted, streamlined kind of research is looking at how you can generate or.

Or.

Protect the brown adipose tissue you naturally have and looking at the levels of brown adipose tissue of obese versus non obese people and what the connection is. So I think there's a lot of that kind of work that will continue to go. What I actually see as the big misstep of the industry is the fact that there's a lot of things such as swimming that have gotten a bad rap that are very much a thermodynamic drainage. People are immediately equating excess hunger because I believe you're burning a lot more calories at those times and it generates a residual hunger with the idea that you're going to somehow put on weight, like this idea that you're going to put on layers of fat to insulate yourself, which just simply isn't the case. The point that I see is some really well funded studies, especially on swimming, but on the things that Tim has even talked about, we've talked about the shiverwalks, a number of other things. I think there's ways that you can trigger some long term. But if a person's not told that they're going to get hungry, I think they're going to tend to overeat. I think one of the areas is taking strategies like what Seth Roberts has done with the oil and combining some of these strategies that we know suppress hunger. When you're eating foods, the things Tim are doing so that you actually don't get hunger. Because one of the things that neither Tim and I could tell you today that could be a big part of this is that we managed to stave off our hunger even though we were exposing ourselves to these losses. I don't know Tim, if you want to add something along that, I think.

That'S an important point. Namely, and this is true of exercise as well, if you take someone who has 30 plus pounds to lose, let's just make it a larger number, 50 plus pounds to lose. I think asking them to change their diet and change their, their exercise or incorporate exercise at the same time can actually increase the likelihood of failure. Because if their dietary habits aren't locked in as subconscious, if it's no longer their default, you'll find that many of them overeat after they go to the gym and they completely knock out any type of caloric deficit that was produced. Not to say that caloric deficit is the only value of exercise because I think that that's actually really misguided in a lot of ways. However, I think the same is true for exposing yourself to thermal loading through swimming. Like I said, which can be very effective, particularly if you're doing. I forgot to mention this, I did experiment with longer, slow and steady duration. Or as you probably noticed, I'm impatient. I like short quick fixes. I looked at effectively high intensity interval training via swimming. So doing 50, 50 meter, 100 meter repeats for a short period of time, 10, 15 minutes, then getting out. But doing it in a cold pool proved to be very, very effective. But like Ray said, you get very hungry. And one of the ways to stave that off is by having branched chain amino acids, let's just say 10 to 15 grams, or some type of rapidly digested protein like whey protein prior to the workout so that it hits your bloodstream after you leave the pool. And that would be one, I think force multiplier that is worth experimenting with if people are going to go testing this in the real world.

That's interesting. I'll actually be experimenting with some of those protocols this summer. Me and a few friends are doing a 122 mile swim over in Lake Tahoe and I'm sure we'll be consuming many, many calories. But Tim, I know you got to go Soon. Quick thing before you go, if you could leave people with a couple of options, ideas if they end up implementing this, what are a couple ideas that you have in addition to the branched chain amino acids for them to suppress hunger, are there any supplements in your self experimentation that you found to be good for suppressing hunger or suppressing appetite?

There are quite a few that will suppress appetite. Well, the question is, which do you want to take long term? Let's see, a lot of bodybuilders take. I don't want to recommend that. Let's see. I would say that if you are consuming an abnormally large high protein breakfast, you really don't experience the hunger pangs as much as you might expect. That's the starting point, is setting your glucagon and ghrelin and so forth on the right track in the morning by having at least three 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. That's a pretty decent amount of protein. If that's whole food, you're looking at four or five hard boiled eggs. Whole eggs. I prefer certainly to try to do that with a shake of some type and then some whole food. But if you do that, you find that you will consume naturally 20 to 30% fewer calories throughout the day, particularly if you have a few eggs been studied extensively. So if you have a big breakfast with eggs, let's just say two eggs and then you can do whey protein and have some other vegetables and so forth hypothetically, and I know it doesn't work out perfectly this way, but if you increase your appetite 20% by the swimming, you should net out and really not feel much of a change. And when I was experimenting with this, that was the approach that I took. I ensured that I was consuming more protein for two reasons. One, to suppress appetite slightly and number two, to increase the thermogenic effect of food in terms of supplementation. I've never taken anything really to suppress appetite. Any stimulant will have that effect and that could range from something like coffee to an A2 adrenergic receptor antagonist. But those get pretty gnarly. If you're using something like yohimbine for example, which I wouldn't necessarily recommend. I find that the protein does the job really effectively.

Yeah, and I would say to add on to that the fact that part of Tim's slow carb diet is he's got lots of legumes. So you've got high fiber food. And the great thing about those is they're very difficult to overeat. So things like spinach, kale, broccoli, beans, those things. If people develop the taste and flavor for those, the great thing about them is they can literally gorge themselves and they won't, they won't get any significant calories, but they will have a lot of nutrient density. So there's a lot of really positive nutrients in them. And so actually the more they eat, the more they lose. It's one of those things that it's kind of a bonus food. And if you can learn to have a taste for that and if you told people, hey, you're going to be a little bit hungry, but when you eat this is a smaller subset of things that you're allowed to just really go nuts on, then you're not going to likely overeat. It's the calorically dense, nutrient poor foods. A lot of the protein sources come with a fat. There's the fat and obviously any of the sugars, the whites, the things that are sort of out of Tim's low carb recommendation, but those things go away. So we want to stay to nutrient dense, calorically poor foods and then you can just have at it, eat what you want. But obviously is that knowing. I think it's the knowledge that's the power here. If someone's told you're going to get hungry, then they'll know that hunger means success. Now it doesn't mean it's not knowing it and insidiously creeping up on you because you have an extra shake or eat the wrong foods or you don't know. It's the knowledge. I think that's what we've lacked in all the peer reviewed studies that I've seen. They all sort of say hand waving. Well, we kind of didn't tell them what to eat. Well, doesn't that really defeat the point?

Yeah, exactly.

I would also add one more thing and that is that part of the reason I time the ice baths, during which I just read, it's actually pretty pleasant, if you can imagine that. But I time the ice baths also an hour before I go to bed. I do it for many reasons, but one of the reasons is if I get hungry while I'm asleep, it doesn't bother me. If I get hungry just before I go out to eat dinner with four buddies, that could be a disaster and undo a lot of progress. I also make a point of doing this before bed, not only because it helps me sleep, but, but because it helps to stave off the negative effects of appetite. But I will have almond butter before I go to bed. As one way to stabilize blood sugar and prevent any type of excessive hunger pangs. But the timing, I think, is really important with anything, with many things. Exercise, diet, investment, timing is really everything. And I do think that that applies to cold exposure as well. And I'm happy to answer one more question if you'd like. Or I can let you gentlemen carry on the good fight without me.

Well, I think Ray's got a little bit more science that he wants to delve into. Tim, you've been a wealth of knowledge. I would definitely point out to people. If you want more of Tim, check out his fantastic blog over@fourhourworkweek.com and we'll also put a link to his new book, Four Hour Body, where he does have a chapter entitled Ice Age, where he also delves into this topic. So, Tim, thanks for coming on.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, gentlemen, and have a blast. I'll let Ray introduce you to the wild world of thermodynamics and fat loss. So have fun, guys.

All right, catch you later, Tim.

See you soon.

All right. So Ray, just real quick, kind of a funny story, but what first got you into this? You mentioned in the book that you heard about Michael Phelps eating 12,000 calories a day. How did that not jive with you?

Well, I mean, you can imagine I was eating 12,000 calories a week. That was my caloric intake for a week. And I was tracking everything. So sort of back into this. I started with a spreadsheet and I was doing primarily the Body for Life program. That was Bill Phillips. I had recently met Bill and actually was interviewed by him. And I did okay success wise on that program. Small, frequent meals. That worked out for me. The exercise regime was good, but I just wanted to make a lot more progress because in my particular case, I was doing well to about the 12 week mark. And I think a lot of your listeners can probably relate to this, but somewhere around 12 weeks, I just was tired of it. I mean, I, I wish I could say that I had more willpower and I certainly didn't have as much to lose as some people at only £50. But I would get to the 12 week mark, things would be good, and then I would go back to my old habits and end up back where I was. In this particular case, I'd come down about £20 and I really wanted to succeed. So the idea was, how do I look deeper in and find some other way to make it more interesting? And I was looking at all the, all the exercises in a spreadsheet saying what could I do every day to just add up the caloric deficit. That was all I cared about. I just wanted to rack up a deficit. It literally happened. I know it sounds like a made up story, but it literally happened in the middle of that, just after I'd figured out a marathon burns about three quarters of a pound of fat. In terms of energy, obviously it's not straight fat, but in terms of your overall deficit, it's around 2,600 calories. Thinking about that, it was like it just didn't make sense. I know he's an Olympic athlete, I recognize that he obviously does other workouts, etc. But no amount adjusting his RMR for his health and fitness, how much swimming he did, trying to go back in the websites and figure out what his routines and workouts look like. None of them added up to that kind of excess calories. It just didn't make sense. That was. It sort of hit me. Maybe that's the water. It's 24 times more thermally conductive than air. What I find is that not only does he have that, but he's got a really low body fat. His ability, like I said, your body's ability to adjust the water is just merely that metabolic spike. But long term, when you're exercising, the body's response is to dilate. You have vasodilation of the skin, the heat gets shuttled up past the fat, past the adipose tissue. So there's studies with trending obese and obese women in water environments. And when they're made to exercise, basically the entire fat layer becomes not a part, it ceases to be part of the insulation equation. It's really just the muscle that's insulating inner core muscle that's insulating your innermost core, if that makes sense. The fat just goes away because the heat gets shuttled out to the skin like a big radiator and to dump the excess heat so that you don't overheat. So the point of the realization was he has low body fat, he's exercising continuously, he's got to dump heat, there's just no way around it. The pool's 80 degrees, he's 98.6. The energy has to go somewhere. I mean, it just can't. It has to come from within him because they don't stick heaters in him during break. So where does it come from? Well, comes from his diet. That was the initial genesis of what to start to do. But then I was amazed at how little people had looked at this seriously, because everybody gets stuck with the ice water diet. You suck on an ice cube and you're going to lose weight. Maybe to put it in everyone's perspective, to melt, to use the energy in one pound of fat to melt ice. That's 66 pounds of ice melted and heated to body temperature. So I want to sort of put that energy. And that's why many scientists immediately dismiss it, because they do that basic calculation. They say, you know, just one pound of fat is 66 pounds of ice. That doesn't make sense. But what I think Tim stumbled into, and I came at it from a different approach, but it's the same thing, is that there's an overall net effect that you know is not unlike when you run and you stop. All of the good that you've done doesn't stop at that point. The body starts recharging, the body starts doing things. I think it's in that post recovery phase that you're getting a lot of the benefit.

Gotcha. So once you realize this, obviously we kind of mentioned during the talk with Tim that you started drinking ice water and going on these cold 20 to 30 minute walks with nothing much clothing on. You mentioned in the book that you were sleeping with no covers on. Has that evolved? I mean, are you doing even more now in terms of cold management or has your research taken you other places?

You know, yes. The interesting thing is what I learned is that most people don't like cold. They don't even like the thought of it. And so my question was it was clear that I was getting results, but I was doing things that were relatively extreme. And so the question was, could I get similar effects by other things? And my mind keeps bringing me back to swimming because I'm not a swimmer. I don't swim that frequently. That's one of my goals for 2011. So I really want to be good. I'm not afraid of water. And I can swim. I just can't swim laps like Tim describes in his TED Talk. I looked more like a drowning monkey. I don't. I just can't do it with style. And I envy people that have that graceful long stride. That being said, if you look at even the most recent data, there's a lot of people that suggest that you can't lose weight swimming. I believe one of the missing factors is this hunger side that they're not controlling that factor. Any excess physical activity, if you eat more, you negate the energy you burn during that activity. And so that's really where I focused a lot of my energy since then was how can I encourage people to take a few layers off, maybe understand how their body gets cold. The body gets cold in a series of steps. The very first thing, it stops blood flow to the skin. We've talked about that. The next thing it does is it starts shutting down, flood blood to the extremities. You never get frostbite of the head. It's always of the toes, nose, ears, fingers. One of the things I did to sustain a cooler environment is I covered those things. I covered my nose, I covered my face, I covered my hands, I covered my feet so that I didn't have these feedbacks that would make me more cold. Does that make sense?

Dr. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

The idea was I was trying to trick my body into, into being able to sustain it longer without going obviously into hypothermia. Because people think I'm talking about lowering their body temperature. You don't want your body temperature to fall because that then uses less energy. You want your body temperature to stay where it is. What I did was I would go and I would walk out as far as I could until I just felt like I'm cold now. When I felt like I was cold, a reasonable cold, then I would run back. And so by the time I got back, I was perfectly comfortable. Like any other runner will tell you, 30 or 40 degrees is actually great running weather. I mean, if you actually get out and do it, once you get warmed up, it's like the New York Marathon and these others, they leave clothes along the way and donate them. I didn't know about that until recently because I'm not a long distance runner either. The idea is that once you get your body going, it's generating heat. I just walked out and exposed longer before I started that process.

Gotcha. So you lost when you were doing the Bill Phillips Body for Life program, you lost almost 18 pounds, about 17.8 pounds in 12 weeks. How much did you lose in that amount of time or how much did you lose when you started this program with the cold exposure?

It was right at, it was like, I think I don't have the date in front of me, but it's like, I think it was like 27 pounds of fat. It was like, you know, 26 or 28 pounds of fat or something. And then I don't know what the actual weight was, 209 to 182 is what I think it was.

You jumped from losing one, basically one and a half pounds a week to losing like almost five pounds a week?

Yeah. So from 1.6 to 4.8 pounds a week. And the only change that I had because I really had completed the Bill Phillips program, this was the third time through. So I was doing it pretty religiously. And when I commit to something like that, I stick to it. So I was doing it and I jumped from 1.6 pounds a week average to 4.8. And that was just the net effect. Now I don't know which one of them had the biggest effect. I was sipping about a gallon of ice water a day. That's negative 123 calories. You know what I mean by negative calories? In other words, it takes 134 calories really, just depending on if you set the ice water temperature at 32 or 40. But basically it takes a certain amount of calories to heat that water up to body temperature. When it comes out, it's going to be 37 degrees. The idea here was it was a small amount. But thinking about it another way, my 50 pounds of weight loss, of weight gain over the 20 year period that I gained, it averages out about two and a half pounds a year or an extra 168 calories a week or just 16mms. So I want to put that in perspective, what that means calories. So when someone thinks about drinking a gallon of ice water, sipping a gallon of ice water throughout the morning, okay, obviously more water is good and you can drink too much, so don't drink too much. But if you do that, and if it is somewhere between 120 and 130 calories to warm it up, of net calories to warm it up, that's daily. And we're talking about 168 calories extra a week. Excess calories is equal to 50 pounds of fat loss over 20 years. Fat gain over 20 years. Do you see what I mean by these small differences? Can make a huge change if you're consistent and you don't undo it with overeating. This is really important. Having a system, whatever system you find that diet wise, you can keep with that, you know what you're doing. I think at that point, adding some of these other ideas or some of these other strategies on top, layering them on top of it, that becomes a place where you can really succeed.

Gotcha. So Ray, where do you think that your research or your experimentation in terms of cold therapy or cold exposure is going to take you next?

Well, we've got an amazing community. I had no idea how much people respond to both the media and the book. I mean, we have thousands that have registered on my site, which is just raykronice.com or hypothermix.com, you can put the link to it. What I'm really interested in is creating a forum where we can start pushing the envelope of some of these ideas. I like the idea of the open source concept for the body. I like the idea of self experimentation and what's going on. And like at the TED talks, patients like me and other people that are taking control of not just being geeks about tracking everything, but submitting data to a larger community so that we can learn something. Because it's very difficult in peer review science to get compliance on diet and exercise, because often it's college students that are doing or that are the participants, and they end up going off for a weekend and going off of it, and they're reporting errors and lots of things. The other place where we got a lot of really good data, where we do get compliance, is military because they literally lock guys up and say, this is what you'll eat and this is what you'll do. But we're not doing as much of that anymore. So what really would be helpful is over these thousands and thousands of people that you reach that Tim reach millions, literally that Tim reaches and that I can reach. If we could aggregate people who are willing to do something, and even if they try something a little different.

As.

Long as they report it and do what they say and say what they do, that data is meaningful. And so what I'm trying to do at my site is provide a place where people can submit data and submit that to me. And I want to try to aggregate it and find some really good trends. I believe that we will find it. And we've got some pretty cool data analysis tools that allow us to throw out data that's obviously not acceptable. Things that we were using for even stuff that we were doing at NASA. I think we can actually evolve and learn some techniques that we might not find through trial and error. I mean, literally, like a lot of serendipitous science happens, I think that a lot of people trying little things will make a difference. The biggest place where I think we can make a difference is swimming. And with the stuff that you guys do this summer, if you can track the data, track the water temperature, try to make these things as repeatable as possible. I think swimming holds a big key because you can do it at all fitness levels. You can do it when you're obese, and you can't run and you can't walk and you can't bike. There's a lot of advantages. Obviously space is near and dear to my heart and that's my first love was getting everybody weightless. That's the fastest weight loss program. So if you haven't flown on our zero G plane, it's something that's definitely something to experience. What it feels like to weigh nothing. But at the same time, swimming is the closest thing we have on earth to that kind of sensation. The idea that you're able to glide effortlessly, but it's still a good cardiovascular workout. If we can show that with a controlled diet that people are exposed to a higher thermal environment, that thermal load or thermal environment is actually good for weight loss, if they know they can suppress the hunger, we might have a huge impact. I think that area right now, the direction that it's going from the researcher's perspective is there's a lot of data out there that suggests you just don't. Basically the papers all conclude you burn the same amount of calories as swimming as you do these other exercises, but swimming makes you fat. That to me is a contradiction. They both can't be true. Either you don't burn the calories or you do burn the calories and you should lose weight. I think not telling the people that they're going to get hungry and people not exploring that part, that's where swimming has gotten a bad rap. And I would like to see a huge emphasis nationwide on more kinds of water based activities.

Gotcha. And I think that one thing that people should not get confused about is the fact that many good swimmers, especially open water swimmers, swimmers or distance swimmers are they sometimes are a little pudgier, they're a little thicker. And remember that one of the reasons that they do that is for performance. For example, I personally try to shed muscle and I will be putting on a little bit of fat before my open water swim attempt this summer just to make myself more buoyant and less heavy just because muscle is a little bit more dense. So don't get confused and think that you have to look the same way as like a slightly pudgy open water or North Pole swimmer would have to look. Right.

That's exactly right. And right now I'm going to tell you that with you saying that that's more than what appears in the peer reviewed literature, they more pose it as a mystery. And in fact they've done studies with runners, swimmers and triathletes and they see the similar kinds of recovery and biochemical processes happening in the triathletes and the swimmers. And yet the triathletes and the swimmers are carrying a little bit more body fat. We're talking about the difference between 8 and 10%. For the average person, even hitting 10% is a miracle. So when they say you have this extra fat, let's not fool ourselves. I've never hit 10% in my adult life. So these people already pretty fit to start with. So I think, Ben, what you're talking about, this is information. There's a huge disconnect right now. And at the turn of the century, swimming was one of the top 10 activities in our nation. And now, you know, the turn of last century, now it's, you know, it's not there. At the 1932 Olympic trials, 250,000 people were in attendance. So swimming was huge in our country. I don't know if there's a connection between that and fitness, but I do know it's something that people generally enjoy to do. And I think this is the area where we have the most fertile ground for doing research and especially folks like you that do both, because that interval training, the idea of aerobic activity that heats the body up, followed by a cool activity that keeps the heart rate up, but allows you to dump heat into the water, that kind of activity probably will be our best opportunity to use this.

Gotcha. Well, for you folks listening in, this definitely won't be a one and done topic. Here@bengreenfoldfitness.com I am in touch with Ray and have his contact details. And I'm certain that we will end up partnering up or doing some things together in the future to help you out when it comes to weight loss, cold swimming and some of the topics that were discussed on the show today. So in the meantime, Ray, I'd like to thank you for the time in this interview.

Hey, thanks a lot, Ben. I'd love to come back and I'd love to have people submit any data even if they're not doing the swimming. Right now. I've got a pretty good tracking program for transformation. It's a 12 week spreadsheet and if they would just submit data, the data is helpful for me. Even if you're doing something else, as long as I know what you're doing. Having those measurements, aggregating a huge repository of measurements while people are doing transformations or trying to get fit is extremely important.

And folks, we will be putting a link to Ray's website so you can go do that if you'd like. To everything will be on the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so until next time, this is Ben Greenfield. And Ray, just to make sure I pronounce your last name correct, is it Cronus?

Cronice.

Cronice. Ray Krone. Ice. Fitting the ice.

That's the first time that joke's made, but I think I'll hear it a lot now probably.

All right, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com all right, folks, well, I do have good news. That is one of the last times you'll have to put up with my voice being quieter than the interviewees voice. I fixed some of the microphone issues that we were having in the interviews, so I know my voice was a little bit faint compared to Tim's and Ray's, but I've worked that issue out with our technical audio wizardry. So in the meantime, be sure if you liked that interview to go to the Show Notes and check out some of the resources that I put up in the Show Notes, including Tim's book, a link over to Ray Kronice, and of course, a link to everything that I talked about during this week's Q and A. And also if, if you like the podcast, be sure to leave a rating in itunes and even leave a comment if you'd like. If you have questions, remember you can ask your questions via the Ask Ben form at the website and you can also email me ben greenfieldfitness.com if you've got guests that you'd like to see on the show. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com did you.

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