Episode #145: Hallelujah Acres – What Happens When You Mix Vegetarianism, Religion & Fat Loss?

In this podcast, what happens when you mix vegetarianism, religion and fat loss? Should you not eat fruit with a meal? What causes abnormally high heart rates during exercise? How to do a weekly fast and still train hard? Are steroidal inhalers safe for exercise? What shoes are best for gym workouts? Spectracell testing and cortisol testing.

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Welcome to podcast number 145 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com this is Ben Greenfield and today I am in the throes of getting ready for a group of athletes from around the world who are flying into my hometown for an Ironman triathlon camp in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. So that should be a huge amount of fun. I'll be releasing some videos and information from that Ironman camp, but you, if you're a triathlete and you're ever interested in becoming involved in one of these camps, they're a real hoot. I'm looking forward to having a great time with the folks who are coming in. So any of you people who are on your way in and listening to this podcast, welcome to Spokane, Washington. All right, we have a interview today with George Melkmus from Hallelujah Acres and I'll let him tell you more about what what that is. But basically, George is a vegetarian preacher who has created an entire healthy lifestyle and fat loss program based off scripture based teachings. And while this is not a religious podcast per se, we definitely do talk a little bit about it in the interview. So stay tuned for that. And we're going to jump right into this week's special announcements.

Special announcements.

First of all, I'd like to give a huge shout out to everybody who's been donating that $1 to keep this podcast going. We have a big donation button right there on the site where you can click to give a dollar a month to keep this podcast in operation. It's not cheap to host the amount of bandwidth required to give thousands of podcast downloads each week. So every little bit helps and you can to the podcast over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com by pressing the donate $1 button. And while you're there, feel free to grab the free iPhone or free Android app that I have that will deliver all these podcasts, news, videos, blog posts, everything straight to your phone. And there's even a handy dandy Ask Ben question right there on your phone. Those are 100% free. Also coming up on May 19, that is next week. That's a third Thursday at 3:00 clock Pacific Time, 6:00 Eastern Time, is a seminar I'm teaching for anybody who is a triathlete. And it's specifically designed to teach you time management techniques, training strategies, nutrition tips, and other elements of maintaining a healthy triathlon lifestyle while not neglecting your career, your family or your friends. So that is going to be really focused on people who want to do triathlon but also want to have time for their job or their family. So that's a USA Triathlon seminar and I'll put the USA Triathlon registration link right there in the show notes to this podcast podcast number 145. Now this is the last opportunity to create your design for the next Ben Greenfield Fitness T shirt, and there's been a lot of interesting designs submitted. You can submit your design or ask me for graphics to help you with your design by emailing me BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you're a creative person and you want hundreds of people walking around wearing a T shirt that you designed, then you can be part of that design contest. We're going to feature all the designs and unveil the winner in a blog post right at the last week of May. So you've just got a few days left to get that T shirt design in. And again, I've got graphics. If you email me ben greenfieldfitness.com, i can hook you up with graphics to help you out with the design. So with that being said, we're going to go ahead and jump into a special announcement and then this week's Q and A.

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Listener Q and A.

Well, before we hop into the Q and A, let me say one thing about that VIP Text Club announcement that you heard. We've now started speed coaching over at the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page, where on certain days I get on for a couple hours and just respond live to your questions in rapid fire format. And the only way to find out when those sessions are is actually by being a part of that free VIP tax club. You get a notice sent to your phone on the day or the weekend that the speed coaching starts and it tells you where to go. And yeah, you get the inside scoop. So that being said, let's launch into this week's Q and A. And remember, if you have a question, you can use the Ask Ben form over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com or you can call toll free to 877-209-9439. And that is where our first question comes from today.

Hey, Ben, question for your podcast. This is Jeff from Tampa, Florida. What shoes do you recommend for your athletes to work out in the gym with? For example, running shoes or basketball shoes or Vibram Five fingers or tennis shoes? What do you think? What do you prefer? Thanks a lot, Ben.

Bye.

Well, this is actually a very interesting question because if you look at old photos of weightlifters or power lifters or bodybuilders, a lot of times you'll see them wearing combat boots or like the old style Chuck Taylors or the Converse shoes that lace up. And there's a reason for that. And I'll talk to you about that in a minute. It's very good to think about what you wear in terms of gym shoes, especially if you're lifting free weights, because when you lift weights, you're basically wanting two things to happen. First of all, all the force that your body produces underneath the bar or while holding a set of dumbbells should contribute ideally to moving the weight and not due to movement back and forth or side to side in contact with the ground. And number two, you need to be able to control the weight safely. So if you wear, say like a running shoe, which is designed for a lot of flexibility and performance but isn't very stable, it's pretty much similar to trying to do like a squat or a deadlift or some type of weightlifting exercise while standing on a pillow, basically. So the soles of that running shoe, which are like a pillow, those absorb and they dissipate a lot of the forces that are generated against the floor that should technically be directed towards you moving the weight. So that gel or air pillow is really, really good if you're running, if you're engaged in like repetitive motion. But when you are lifting weights, say, in the weight room, the shoes really don't allow for the ideal transmission of power between whatever weight that you're lifting and the ground. So if you're really focused on just pure hardcore weightlifting, then you should think twice about a running shoe. And when I say pure hardcore weightlifting, I'm talking about if you're going in the weight room and you're doing things like squats, lunges, deadlifts, I'm not talking about using say like weight machines or doing very, very light, you know, say core exercising. So the other issue is the standing on an unstable surface issue, because what happens is that when you are trying to do like a squat with good technique, or say like a deadlift with good technique, anything that's moving around a lot between your foot and the ground is going to reduce the consistency of good technique. Meaning that if your shoe is just moving a little bit in a different direction each time you do, say a squat, you're never going to be able to execute perfect form with the squat. So again, it comes to an instability issue. Instability is somewhat good when you are running or engaged in repetitive motion. Stability is what you want when you're actually weightlifting. And weightlifters and powerlifters, they've been wearing these type of super stable shoes for more than 50 years. That's why you see them wearing things like combat boots. If you see like old posters of people weightlifting or old, you know, say like even Arnold Schwarzenegger posters. So those weightlifting shoes are extremely snug. They provide a lot of support. They've got this non compressible wedge sole with usually like neoprene, which helps with traction against the floor. Most of them lace all the way down to the toe so the foot doesn't move around much at all. In the past several decades though, really these pretty but unstable shoes have emerged as being advertised as like cross trainers or gym shoes. You know, Nike, Reebok, Adidas, all these shoe companies have come out with weight training shoes or gym shoes or cross training shoes. And these shoes are decent if you aren't doing like heavy weightlifting, squats, deadlifts, things of that nature. But if you really want to get into serious weightlifting, you would be amazed at the difference between wearing, I mean, even if you can go find a cheap pair of Chuck Taylors, the difference between wearing those and wearing your standard like Nike running shoe. So that being said, I personally don't really lift heavy weights too much. I used to do a lot of heavy weight lifting and I used to use really stable shoes. Yes, I did have some combat boots that I wore to the gym when I was bodybuilding. Because when you're Lifting lots of weight. Those tend to work really, really well. If you see bodybuilders that look like geeks at the gym, they're not wearing those shoes or those type of shoes like combat boots to stand out or to be rebellious. They're wearing them because that's the best type of stability that you can get when you're lifting weights. Most cross training shoes like the Nikes, the Reeboks, the Adidas, all of those are going to be pretty decent for your average weightlifter who's just doing maybe say a few weight machines and some cable exercises and a couple of things with the dumbbell and the barbell. Without a lot of weight, the shoes that you wouldn't want to wear to the gym would be something like a Vibram fivefinger, which is that shoe that is very, very close to a barefoot running shoe that you pull over your toes. Any type of racing flat or running flat, that's designed for a lot of performance but not much stability, that also isn't going to give you much of an advantage when you're lifting weights. So I would recommend you get a very, very stable running shoe, a cross training shoe, or a shoe specifically designed for stability in the gym, or you go with one of these weightlifting shoes. A few of the good brands that are out there that still work pretty well, I mentioned the Chuck Taylors made by Converse. There's a weightlifting shoe made by Worksan W e R K S A N that works really well. There's another one made by a company called Inser that's called the Pillar shoe. I n Z E R Pillar shoe. And Adidas makes a really good one. It's $170 to get this Adidas one, but it's one that a lot of the professional powerlifters use, and it's called the Adidas Adistar. So hopefully that helps you out probably a lot more than you wanted to know about weightlifting and powerlifting and shoe choice. But that's what it comes down to. The next question is from Andre, who says, I heard from different sources that you should not eat fruit with or immediately after a meal. Is this true? And if it is, why? Well, you are going to see this all over the place. Even Dr. Oz, the doctor from Oprah. He's somebody who has been quoted as saying that back in 2010. And this type of teaching has been around, at least on the Internet, since as early as 1998, put out by chefs and culinary writers and people who are trying to make very, very strict diets and they give a few different reasons why you shouldn't eat fruit with a meal. There's actually six reasons that they give. So the first is they say if you eat fruit after other foods, the other foods prevent the fruit from going into your intestines. Okay, that is completely fine. Faults, the foods in your stomach don't prevent nutrients in the fruit from reaching your intestines or from getting absorbed in your digestive tract. So if the other food that you ate with the fruit is very, very high in, like, fat or protein, that fat or protein can slow the absorption of the fruit sugars into the bloodstream. So technically, having a fat or a protein with fruit will be better than having fruit all by itself because the fat or the protein actually slows down the glycemic index or the at which the sugar is released from the fruit. So next, the people who say that you shouldn't eat fruit with food, they say when fruit comes in contact with food and digestive juices, the entire mass of food begins to spoil. That's not true. It doesn't make sense. If your food spoiled in your body every time you ate fruit, you would be constantly sick. When food spoils, that actually means that it's rotting, that it's getting mold, bacteria, things of that nature. Fruit does not do that. It's just fructose. It doesn't spoil food. So there's nothing scientific behind that statement. So another reason is they say when fruit mixes with other food in the stomach or in the GI tract, it produces gas and bloating. But that's not true either, because gas is created by bacteria in your stomach and in your intestines. So the bacteria break down fiber, they break down sugar if that's not being digested or used, and they use that for energy. And the byproduct of that is gas. And some kinds of bacteria produce a lot of gas and some don't produce much gas at all. And in most cases, if you have some type of digestive enzyme deficiency and you aren't digesting your foods properly, there's going to be more for the bacteria and you'll have more gas. So, for example, if you don't have a lactase enzyme or you have a lactase enzyme deficiency and you're lactose intolerant and you drink milk, then you're going to get more of that bacteria producing gas because your body isn't actually breaking down the milk sugar. The only reason that that would happen with fruit or fructose is if you have a deficiency in an enzyme that's responsible for breaking down fructose. Or if you have a fructose allergy and you can get a simple breath test at a physician or an allergist to find out if you have a fructose allergy. But for most people, that's not true either. So next they say that fruits are very acidic and that they can lower dangerously the PH of your, especially if they're eaten by themselves. But the fact is with fruits and vegetables, the way that those are broken down in your body, they actually create high PH by products or what would be considered alkaline or non acidic metabolites in your body, not acidic metabolites. And so there's yet another kind of falsehood associated. The fact that your body would become acidic by eating fruit all by itself is simply not true. So while I think that you should certainly not eat tons of fruit anyways, just because all that fructose circulating in your body can kind of, it's not all that great for your liver and it gets converted to fat very, very easily. The idea that you should eat fruit all by itself when you do eat fruit is not true. And as a matter of fact, eating it with fats and proteins is sometimes better than eating it all by itself. So next question is from Craig, who says I water fast one day per week for religious reasons. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to make this work while training for endurance events. And what Craig means by water fast is he's not eating anything except water. And there's been many research studies that show that fasting one day per week can be very, very helpful in terms of increasing your longevity and decreasing your risk of getting a chronic disease. And I would personally, if I didn't have as high a level of activity as I currently have, I would highly consider fasting once per week. The issue is that I'm training and doing so much that I find it difficult to do, but Craig actually want to do it. And one of the things that you need to bear in mind is that the day after the day that you fast, your body is going to be somewhat carbohydrate depleted and it's not going to do very well with any type of intense workout sessions. So if you're choosing, let's say, Sunday as your fast day, then you would not want to engage in any type of high intensity interval training or weight training on Monday because you really wouldn't be able to pull any of those sessions off at a high enough intensity to make them quality sessions. So something more appropriate for the day after a fast would be, for example, like an easy bike ride or an easy swim or a light core workout or maybe some yoga. So what that means is that if you do decide to fast one day per week and you aren't engaging in heavy exercise on the day that you fast, and trust me, you don't want to do that because you'll feel horrible, and you also aren't engaging in heavy exercise the day after you fast, that means that you're kind of, you're lowering your level of available workout days to five days a week. And if you're working out for like competitive fitness, that could be an issue. However, if you're just going after say like fat loss or general health, fasting one day per week, nothing wrong with it. Just don't do heavy exercise and preferably not much exercise at all other than something like yoga or stretching on the day that you fast. And then only light exercise the day after you fast with a moderate carbohydrate intake. Meaning that I would actually not engage in a high, high carb diet the day after you fast, but instead I would eat somewhere around the range of 30 to 40% carbs so that you're not throwing your blood sugar levels too high after your fast. And then as you increase your activity levels as the week progresses away from your fast, you can gradually increase your carbohydrate intake. So it would essentially look like this fast day, no exercise, or very, very light exercise the day after the fast. Light exercise, higher protein, higher fat diet, and then the following five days more like depending on your metabolic type and the amount of carbohydrates you do well with somewhere in the range of 40 to 60% carbohydrate intake. So definitely you could pull it off and I'd love to hear how it works out for you. So feel free to write into the show or call in to 877-209-9439 and let us know how it's going. Craig Cali says my question is about heart rate, specifically when working out. I've been working out with a trainer for eight months, but I feel like I have an abnormally high heart rate. When I do intervals, my heart rate will jump to over 200 while jogging at a comfortable pace, one that I could easily hold a conversation during. My heart rate is around 170 to 180. Everything I've read suggests that this is too high. But I'm an active, healthy 24 year old. Is it possible that my heart rate is higher than Normal? Well, that's absolutely possible. I've talked about it on this show before. I've also talked about it over at my guest Fit Guy podcast over@quickanddirtytips.com but the idea is that this whole equation of determining what your maximum heart rate is or the highest heart rate you should possibly be able to reach during exercise is based off of anecdotal research that was suggested during a conference back in the 70s by a group of cardiovascular surgeons who looked over people's heart rates during exercise and kind of came to the general conclusion that 220 minus age was approximately what your predicted maximum heart rate should be. The problem is people fall all over the place when it comes to actually correlating to that equation. So especially if you have a small heart and a small, say, stroke volume or the amount of blood that your heart can pump out per beat, then you are going to have a much higher heart rate than what that equation would predict for you. There are other reasons that your heart rate could be high. Certainly, you know, heart disease is definitely a cause of a higher heart rate. If you have something like coronary artery disease, your body's going to have to work harder. There are also electrical issues, specifically one called ventricular tachycardia, which is an abnormally high heart rate. And that would be something that you could get diagnosed if you went to a hospital and you did a clinical exercise test, what's called an electrocardiogram, they could look at that for you. A thyroid malfunction could cause a really high heart rate, typically more like a high resting heart rate. But it could cause your heart rate to go up a little bit during exercise, too. So if there's something going on with your thyroid gland, specifically an overactive thyroid gland or hyperthyroidism, that could cause an abnormally high heart rate as well. Your upper heart chamber, if that has any type of damage to it, that can put a lot of strain on your heart. And damage can, can happen from a virus or from something genetic that's going on and emphysema. You know, if your lung tissue is non elastic or if you're a smoker, if you're getting poor transfer of oxygen from your lungs into your bloodstream, that could also cause a higher heart rate, just because your heart has to deliver that much more oxygen to your muscles and so it has to work harder. There's a few other things that could cause it. You know, an acute condition like fever or anemia. There are some medications that can cause a high Exercise heart rate. Obviously, if you're stressed out, if you're anxious, if you're very nervous, that can cause it. And even if you eat a heavy meal right before you go out and work out, because your body has to divert a lot of blood to your stomach and to your gut to digest that meal, that could cause your heart rate to get really high during exercise as well. But from the way that you describe it, it sounds to me like you just happen to genetically have a small heart. And so your heart has to work harder in order to, or not really work harder, but do more pumps per minute in order to get all the oxygen that your working muscles need. So I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you really want to make sure you're okay, you could go get an electrocardiogram at your hospital. But ultimately, using the maximum heart rate equation really doesn't work too well. A better way to figure out your heart rate zones is to do a sub maximal test. And what that means is you would get on a bike, bike and you would ride at about the maximum sustainable pace that you can ride at for 20 to 30 minutes, like a stationary bike at the gym. And you see what your heart rate is at during that entire session. So you take your average heart rate during that entire session, and what should happen is that your leg shouldn't slow down, you shouldn't get to the point where you're huffing and puffing so hard you can't make the pedals turn anymore. But it should feel like it's about an eight and a half on a scale of one to ten. And that would be considered the point at where your muscles are burning, you're breathing hard, and you're at what's called your lactate threshold. And when you're at that intensity of exercise, that's the point where your body starts to use a lot of carbohydrates as fuel and produce a lot of lactic acid. And you can then classify that as the heart rate that you attempt to achieve when you're doing high intensity interval training. And for you, it sounds like that heart rate might be 200. You know, for me personally, it's about 170. So it varies highly from individual to individual. But once you find out that heart rate, the cool thing is if you subtract 15 to 20 beats from that heart rate, that's approximately your maximum fat burning or your maximum aerobic zone. So then you know the heart rate that you should be at during kind of your long, slow fat burning sessions. And if you add typically about 10 to 15 beats to that heart rate, that is very, very close to your maximum heart rate. So what it comes down to is the equation doesn't really work well for a lot of people. There are better ways to do things. And if you want more details on that test that I just described, I'm going to put a link in the show notes for you in the show notes to this episode, episode number 145 that shows you how to self test your heart rate. I'm going to put it right under I'm going to put that link right under Callie's question in the show notes to episode number 145@BenGreenfieldFitness.com the next question is from Issa, who says what is advisable or when is it advisable to use Spiropent? Does it have any side effects? Well, if you've ever heard of clenbuterol, which is a kind of a it's a bronchodilator. It's prescribed for people who have chronic breathing disorders like asthma. They use it to make breathing easier, especially like during exercise. That's what spiral it's clenbuterol. The other term that it's or the other name it's known under is ventipomin, but it is what's called a beta 2 agonist. Clenbuterol is and what that means is it's very, very similar to epinephrine and it stimulates your central nervous system. It can cause something like your bronchial muscles to expand or it's a bronchodilator. And that's really, really useful for people who are having an asthma attack or asthmatics who are exercising. But it's also been very popular as a thermogenic aid or as a fat burning aid because it increases your metabolism, it causes an increase in your aerobic capacity, it causes an increase in oxygen transportation and increases your metabolic rate both during exercise and at rest. So that means that you're metabolizing body fat a lot faster. That sounds really cool, but it's kind of like saying, well, I can make my car burn gas faster by pressing the gas pedal all the way down and putting it on neutral in my driveway. Your engine isn't going to last very long. And that's what happens is clenbuterol can be very difficult on your heart if you're using it chronically to say just like increase sports performance or aid you with exercise or fat burning, it causes an increase in your blood pressure and As I mentioned, it causes an increase as well in your oxygen transportation. And both of those components put together can make your heart work really hard. And so you want to be really careful with use of clenbuterol, because it can cause cardiovascular attacks or heart attacks during exercise. Now, in addition, it is banned for any athletes to use. So the World Anti Doping association, the ioc, or the International Olympic Committee, they all have banned clenbuterol. And you hear about these cyclists who win the Tour de France getting their title stripped. Like, the most recent one was Alberto Contador from Spain. It was because he tested positive for the use of clenbuterol. So the reason that something like the Olympic Committee or the World Anti Doping association would ban something like this is because it's dangerous. It's not because necessarily, it gives you an unfair performance advantage, because obviously, having a nicer bicycle could give you an unfair performance advantage if nobody else had one. The issue is that it's bad for you, could hurt you. And so I do not recommend it to anyone for fat loss or for improving exercise performance. The only reason you'd want to use a steroidal inhaler is for controlling an asthmatic condition. And if you are doing something like competing in triathlons and using it, then I would highly suggest that you go to the World Anti Doping association website and you fill out a therapeutic exemption form, which means that if for some reason you get pulled aside after doing something like a triathlon and they want to test you and you test positive for clenbuterol, you can prove that you were given therapeutic exemption for that because you have an asthmatic condition. So, ultimately, I wouldn't be using spiral pent unless you have asthma. So, next question is from Nick, who says you have mentioned bio letics on the podcast before. However, I cannot ever recall you talking about Spectracel, who offers a similar testing service. I was wondering if you've heard of them. Specifically their micronutrient test, which seems to be more comprehensive than the biolytics test. Well, the issue with the micronutrient tests from Spectracel is that that actually doesn't test for some of these big parameters that bioetics test for, like your omega 3 fatty acid levels or your vitamin D levels or what's called your glycohemoglobin levels or your hormone levels. So the bioletics test is designed to be technically more comprehensive than that micronutrient test through Spectracel. And Spectracel is just basically a laboratory that a lot of organizations use for their clinical testing. So A lot of doctors will use Spectracel to analyze blood samples or saliva samples. Biolytics actually uses Spectracel for a lot of their procedures. And Spectracel Laboratories, basically they commercialize micronutrient testing and that's what they offer is this type of testing. So a micronutrient test means that you're getting a blood test and you're measuring specific vitamins or minerals or antioxidants or other things in your blood. The issue with just doing a micronutrient test all by itself though, is that it doesn't give you as much information as getting a more comprehensive test that looks at at all the different variables that can be easily adjusted by adjusting your diet. So a Spectracell assessment is something that should be done after you've taken care of some of the bigger things like your omega 3 fatty acid levels and your vitamin D levels. But the other issue with getting this Spectracell micronutrient test is you got to have a medical script for it. So your doctor has to write a prescription for it, which you don't need. When you get tested by Bioletics, you have to get a lab blood draw. So you got to go to your lab and have them draw blood. And it calls costs almost $400 versus the bioletics test, which is 250. So I would recommend that you go with Bioetics if you're really looking at kind of getting your nutrition dialed in. I've talked about bio letics a lot before. I've interviewed the physicians from Bioetics. Highly recommend the company if you want to get tested and find out what's going on in your body. So the Bioletics test, I will put a link to that in the show notes underneath your question. Nick, I'll put a link to the actual test that I would recommend you do from Bioetics. So in episode number 145@BenGreenfieldFitness.com, i will link to that for you. And there's another similar question from Susan who says, I'm intrigued by the bio letics testing. When I had my blood work done, I had asked for a cortisol test which consisted of one blood draw in the morning. While I don't know the actual results, I was told they were normal. I am concerned about all the stress I place on my body through intense prolonged exercise. And with the sudden weight gain I've experienced, I'm grasping at straws. Can the saliva test from Bioetics tell me anything that the blood draw didn't well, this is really an issue of the medical profession not doing the cortisol testing correctly because cortisol levels are naturally very high in the morning. Morning they're very low in the evening. And a normal morning snapshot for the blood levels of your cholesterol doesn't really tell you what your actual cortisol levels are through the day or the levels of any of the other hormones like testosterone or another important one called dhea. So that's why it's important to get a salivary cortisol test and to also get a test in which you're testing more than once. So you're testing throughout the day so you can see what's happening to your hormones as they fluctuate through the day. It's what would be called an adrenal stress index and basically that involves you just dripping your saliva into a tube a few different times throughout the day. And it tells you the actual hormones and the hormone levels that are appearing from your adrenal glands like cortisol and DHEA and aldosterone and all the other hormones that are involved in your circadian rhythm. So all you got was a one time view of cortisol and it was actually your blood levels of cortisol, which actually aren't as accurate a picture of your cortisol levels as your salivary levels of cortisol. So I will put a link in the show notes to what an adrenal stress index actually is so you can see how something like that test compares to getting like a single blood draw and hopefully that helps you out a little bit. So we have a call in comment from Mike and I wanted to play this comment for you because Mike was extremely frustrated with what was happening to his knees and I helped him out a little bit and he called in. So here you go.

Hi Ben, my name is Michael and I'm calling the testimonial to your bulletproof knee program. I am an ultra runner. I've been doing a while and in November of last year I came up with it. Band friction syndrome. I've been trying to do everything humanly possible out there. I went to a sports medicine doctor in February of this year, did a cortisol shot. A month later, pain came back. After suffering many months of this, I was pretty desperate. So I saw your bulletproof knee program. I bought it and even though I thought the price was a little high, but I figure the price for a personal trainer is going to run you about the same for a one hour session. So it was well worth the expense because the information you provided got me from limping to running in three weeks. I'm going to tell you that almost six months of suffering this, I had been able to run more than three or four miles at a time. This week alone, I did four miles to test out, see how my running program's been going. I had no pain. So the next day I ran 10 miles, no pain. Couldn't believe it. This morning I ran 12 miles, zero pain. And it's almost unbelievable. So for those out there who are suffering from it, band friction syndrome, and you just can't seem to get relief, I'm going to tell you right now you need to try the bulletproof knee program. It is well worth the money and it will get you from limping to walking in just a few weeks. Just follow the program and it will be a success. So thanks, Ben, for everything you do out there and keep up the good work.

Well, congratulations, Michael, on your success. For those of you who do have knee pain and you want to see that program that I wrote, it's@Bulletproofnee.com and I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well to bulletproofnee.com so let's go ahead and jump in to this week's interview about Hallelujah Acres with George Melkman.

Featured topic.

Hey, folks, this is Ben Greenfield, and.

I'm here with George Malkmus.

And George actually is involved with something called Hallelujah Acres. And I'm gonna let him tell you a little bit more about how that actually came into being because it is actually a very interesting story.

And we're going to talk a little.

Bit more about what exactly this is because there's a lot out there right now when it comes to things like health spas and fat loss clinics or fat loss camps. And Hallelujah Acres definitely has something unique.

And original going on.

So we're going to talk about that today. And George, I'd like to thank you for coming on the call.

My privilege.

So how exactly did Hallelujah Acres get started? Can you tell me what it is and how it came to be?

Yeah, 35 years ago, 1976, at the age of 42, I was pastoring a very successful church in upstate New York that had grown from just my family of six to 600 members in six years. I mean, it was an incredible growth and God was blessing so great. And right in the midst of all this Blessing, at age 42, I'm told I have colon cancer. I was devastated. Not that I Was concerned about dying. I was a christian. I knew where I'd go prior to die. But what upset me so much was I wasn't christian. I was in full time ministry for the lord. And I thought there ought to be some kind of protection or immunity. Amen. And just prior to that, I lost my mom to colon cancer. And mother was a registered nurse. And mother, having great faith in her profession, Very willingly submitted to their treatments of chemo, radiation and surgery. And when mother was first diagnosed, there was no outward appearance she had a physical problem. But once she started on that chemo and the cobalt it was called nowadays, I saw mother start to deteriorate quite rapidly until she died. At the time of mom's death, I was convinced it wasn't the cancer that killed her, but the treatments. So here I am, faced with the same problem mom had died from. And I didn't want to go the way mom went. So I went looking for an alternative way of dealing with it. In my search, I turned to an evangelist in Texas by the name of Lester Roloff, who encouraged me, rather than go the medical route, to do something as simple as change what I ate from the standard American meat based sugar dessert cook food diet, the diet I'd been on for the previous 42 years of my life, to the very diet God gave Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. 100% plant based raw foods. And he said, drink a lot of vegetable juices. I made the diet change overnight, almost immediately, started to get well. Within days, my rectal bleeding stopped. Within a year, my baseball sized tumor had vanished. And God used that cancer in my life to birth a ministry called hallelujah acres. Took some years to happen, and I won't go through all the details, but in 1992, my wife Rhonda and I opened up a little health food store and restaurant on main street in rogersville, Tennessee was a large restaurant, 11ft wide and 16 seats in it. And we started serving vegetarian fare and vegetable juices. And we didn't have a lot of patrons in the beginning. But every Saturday morning, I did a free seminar on how to eliminate sickness. Gradually, a few people came, applied gut well, and they couldn't keep their mouth shut. And from that humble beginning in 1976, today Howley Acres is a worldwide ministry. We have millions on the diet. Tens of thousands have written to tell me they've recovered from over 170 different physical problems, including terminal metastasized stage 4 cancers, by doing something as simple as changing what they ate.

Now, what exactly Happens with Hallelujah Acres. Is it a place that people go to, almost like a camp to learn how to eat or live properly? Or is it more of like a ministry where you're doing things via books and online learning?

Well, it's both. We have our headquarters here in Shelby, North Carolina. We have 46 full time employees. I do a free seminar the first Saturday of every month. We usually run between 2 and 400 there, coming from sometimes as many as 17 different states and foreign countries for that three hour seminar. But mainly this is our headquarters. This is where our phone calls come in. This is where our shipping of our products goes out. And so many other activities take place here. But we have also four lifestyle centers where people can go and actually live in the home with a trained health minister. And by the way, we have trained over 10,000 health ministers to help us take this message to the world. And these trained health ministers are located in every state in the United states and in 50 foreign countries. But these lifestyle centers are located in Lake Lure, North Carolina, Plant City, Florida, Branson, Missouri. And we just opened a new one recently up there in West Virginia. And this is where the person can actually go and spend a week or two in the home with one of these trained health ministers, where they firsthand experience the program and they're very popular and it's pretty exciting the results we're seeing.

Now you mentioned the fact that you're doing a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruits. What exactly in a little bit more detail, is kind of the dietary or nutritional philosophy that you're following there?

Well, first off, very foundational is our body is a living organism comprised of living cells designed by God to be nourished with living or raw food. Every wild animal eats its food raw, carnivorous or vegetarians. Man is the only one that thinks he's so smart that he can take what God provides in its living and raw form in nature. And before he puts it in his body, puts it on a fire and literally cooks the living daylights out of it, destroying all the life force and most of the nutritional content. And so the very foundational is living food for a living organism. And so we promote a diet that's 85% raw, 15% cooked. And then we emphasize concentrating the nutrients in the raw plants by juicing them. And when we do that, according to Dr. Kirschner in his book Raw Food Juices, when we take a carrot, for instance, and we eat the carrot raw and send it through the digestive system, we lose over 65% of the nutrients in the processing and we expend a lot of energy. If we'll take that same carrot and before we put it into our body, run it through a juicing machine which removes the fiber, it actually does the work of the digestive process. So when we drink the juice without the fiber, it doesn't have to go through the digestive process. And according to Dr. Kirschner, the percentage of nutrients that reach cellular level when we juice is 92% compared to less than 35% when we ate the whole raw carrot.

Now who exactly is Dr. Kirchner?

Dr. Kirschner wrote the book the Raw Food Juices. He's a medical doctor. He's since passed on. But I don't even know if his book is still available. But it's pretty exciting. His research.

Interesting, interesting.

In terms of things like fats or fat based vitamins, are you concerned about that at all or are you getting those type of things with supplementation? Because obviously there's some stuff that when you're eating a vegetarian based diet that you may lack. People talk about how you might not get enough vitamin B12 or you might.

Need more fat soluble vitamins like the.

Type you'd find in meat or fish.

Or eggs, or that you might need extra minerals.

Do you guys kind of fill in the blanks there somehow?

Well, 15 years ago we hired a PhD scientist from graduate of Cornell University and we brought him on board to make sure there were no weaknesses in our program. One of the first things he discovered was that there's no plant source for B12. It doesn't come in the food, it comes on the food in the form of bacteria. When we are not so clean, like as a kid, we go out in the garden, we just wipe dirt off most of it with our hand and eat the carrot raw. We were picking up that bacteria from the soil and the body used that to manufacture B12. But we're so clean today, we're not getting those friendly bacteria that the body needs to make the B12. So we recommend a B12 sublingual supplement. The second thing that Dr. Donaldson realized was deficient in our diet was omega 3 fatty acids. We encourage folks to do a quarter cup of flaxseed ground each day or some flaxseed oil. And we're just recently recommending Pharmax fish oil. We really have concerns about many of the fish oils on the market today. If they're in capsule, we're finding oftentimes they're rancid because they're not refrigerated but this pharmax that we use is very pure, no mercury or any of the other toxic minerals in it. And it's very high in dha, which is also important. And the body oftentimes has trouble converting that from the Omega 3 to the DHA. So we supplement with the B12. We supplement with the Omega 3. The third thing that Dr. Donaldson has alerted us to is vitamin D. And there's a lot of information out there today, but we find that many folks do not get enough sunshine. If they don't get enough sunshine, they do not manufacture enough vitamin D. And this is also something that we believe most people need supplementation in. And the fourth thing where we're finding concern is lack of iodine. And there's a lot of thyroid problems today. And we're recommending that most people need to be checked at least to make sure they have adequate iodine. But those are the basic four nutrients that we do recommend supplementation of. And this usually covers any of the missing links in our program.

Gotcha. Now, what about amino acids? What do you guys do as far.

As those are concerned?

We feel we get them in the diet. Okay, okay.

You just combine a lot of different.

Foods to make sure that you're.

Yeah, but this whole talk about complete protein is hogwash. The body doesn't receive protein as protein. It receives as individual amino acids and stores them as individual amino acids and then it converts them as the body has need. And besides that, these cells are dying and replacing at the rate of about 300 million per minute. And a high percentage of the protein is recycled. And so we find it is almost impossible if a person is getting enough. Oh, the word slipping me. Carbohydrates. If a person's getting enough carbohydrates, they're going to have adequate protein just because.

Of the amino acids that they're getting in the carbohydrate based food sources.

Yeah, right, right. So it's not a concern. In fact, the big problem today is not deficient in protein. It's too much protein.

Interesting.

Now what about the exercise component? Are you doing things like prescribing workouts or giving exercise plans or do you guys have a certain philosophy when it comes to physical activity?

I feel that exercise is as important as the diet. Personally, I'm just a couple years from my 80th birthday and I do stretching exercises, I do resistance exercises. I mean, my body is rock hard. My abs, you can hit them pretty hard and you'll hit a rock. We also believe in aerobic exercises. And my wife and I do at least two miles every night of power walking with walking sticks. And so, yes, we believe very heavily that we must stress those muscles, we must keep those muscles strong. And with diet and with regular daily exercise, we find that a wonderful combination.

Gotcha. Now, I spoke with a guy named Arthur Devaney, who's another incredibly fit older man, and he has this philosophy that your exercise should just be basically common of staying somewhat active throughout the day and then throwing in these brief spurts of high intensity intervals or brief spurts.

Of heavy weight lifting.

Do you do things like that or do you primarily stick with cardiovascular based exercise or do you have a certain thing that you found to work well for you?

I do no lifting exercises. I do weight resistance. It's a very powerful way of building muscles. In the last three years since I started doing these resistance exercises, I've added two inches to my arms, I've added four inches to my chest, and I've gained 15 pounds of muscle weight. These resistance exercises can be done quickly without a lot of time spent in a gym, and it really produces wonderfully.

Can you give me an example of what a resistance exercise like that would be?

Well, we use what's called a fit 10 and you can go and google fit 10 and all it is is a rope thrown over the door. And you control the resistance through a series of exercises. You do total resistance for 10 seconds, 10 seconds in each exercise, and then you do 12 seconds as you slowly let the rope come through your fingers, keeping good resistance on. And so you stress the muscle with the 10 seconds and then you build the muscle with the 12 seconds and it takes five minutes a day. And I've done all of this in the last three years, built all this muscle and all these rock hard abs in five minutes a day using this resistance program called FIT 10.

Interesting.

I'll look into that a little bit more. I always like to review fitness products for people, so that would be an interesting one to look into. I'm actually not familiar with that, but it sounds intriguing.

By the way, it fits into a little cloth bag you can put in your suitcase and any place there's a door, you can do it.

I love that idea. I love a quick travel nutrition tip or quick travel exercise tips. So that's awesome. You guys have a really strong focus on spirituality there. Yes, sir. You've written a book.

What was the title of your book?

How Christians Get Sick or why Christians Get Sick or something of that nature.

Yeah, that was my first book. And it was written over 20 years ago and there's over a million copies in print now.

I want to ask you about that book in a second, but before I get to that, do you find that from a weight loss or, or a fitness or a fat loss perspective that there is a spirituality component?

This is interesting coming from a preacher, but we're dealing with natural laws. And you know, there's a law called gravity. Get too close to the edge of a high place, violate that law, gravity, Christian or not, spiritual or not, you're going to splat when you get to the bottom. Because there's a natural law called gravity. And we all understand it. But I believe God established a natural law as to what is proper nourishment for the physical body. In Genesis chapter one and verse number 29 in the Bible, where after Adam and Eve were created, he places them in that garden called Eden. And there in Genesis 1:29, he tells them what they are to eat for the physical body he God had just created. And who would know better what was proper nourishment for the physical body than the creator of that body? And when we violate that natural law 100% plant based diet, and as Adam and Eve left the garden, by the way, that's when sickness began to be manifested. And we have found that a non Christian, a non spiritual person gets on our diet, they will get well just as fast as a spiritual person will because these are natural laws that we've been violating. And these are natural laws we begin to obey when we adopt this living plant based diet.

What about from a stress perspective?

You hear a lot about how prayer and meditation affects stress. And I know that for a lot of people, stress is tightly tied to the ability or the inability to lose weight.

Well, stress is so powerful and anti health. In fact, myself personally. Ten years ago, after 25 years on the Hallelujah diet, I experienced a hemorrhagic bleed on the brain. I had a stroke. It was not a clogged artery, it was a busted blood vessel in the brain. But what had preceded that? I had been to South Africa. I had done seven seminars in six days to an average crowd of 600. I had been in the air 53 hours and I came home and apparently I overstressed. And that's when I had this hemorrhagic bleed. And they rushed me to the hospital. They wanted to immediately airlift me to Charlotte for cauterization and introduce intravenous drugs into my body. But my wife, bless her heart, knew I hadn't had a drug in my body in 25 years. She refused any medical help. They immediately wanted me out of the hospital. Ambulance took me to my home by stretcher, put me in my bed, and she had to sign a slip that I arrived home alive. She immediately put on what we call the Hallelujah Diet, recovery diet. And within days, my memory was back. Within a week, she took me to a neurologist who looked at my hospital records, talked to me, and he said, you're a miracle. Because I had no limitations physically or mentally in one week after that stroke that the doctor said I would die from without medical treatment.

Interesting.

So tell me a little bit more.

About this book, why Christians Get Sick.

Well, this was my first. My first book. Since then, I've written four more books, but this was written over 20 years ago when I was just starting to learn about nutrition. And it's interesting. There's not one thing that I wrote over 20 years ago that we have found to be incorrect. And it goes into the spiritual part of the whole program, but using the Bible as the foundation. And there's over 100 verses from the Bible in that book. And to me, it's probably the most popular book I've had. I've had more correspondence as a result. And then we went on and we wrote God's Way to Ultimate Health, which is a thorough manual with over 300 testimonies lining the pages. Then I wrote the Hallelujah Diet book. That was my most recent book. And that's one that probably is going to outsell my why Christians Get Sick book eventually.

Now, you say in your biography and your Hallelujah Acres website that you follow.

The Genesis 129 diet.

What is Genesis 129?

Well, that's the very diet I spoke about a few minutes ago that God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And if you look up Genesis 1 and 29, you will find that God is saying, hey, all of the herbs, the vegetables, and all the fruit from the trees, these shall be your food. And that was God, the creator of Adam and Eve, telling them what was proper nourishment for their physical body. And it's interesting that scripture was. God gave that information. Genesis 1:29, over six, six thousand years ago. And here we are today when we go back and go back to that very diet God gave Adam and Eve. Almost everybody gets well. The physical problems go away and they don't get sick anymore. So God had it right right from the very beginning.

Do you think that fruit and vegetables and things like that the thousands of years ago that that diet was prescribed were more nutritious or less commercialized or mineral depleted compared to the way that they are today?

Oh, absolutely. The nutritional content of the soil is so depleted today. And that's one of the reasons why we feel that juicing is so important, because we concentrate the nutrients. Also, we promote organic produce that has no pesticides and fungicides and herbicides and poisons sprayed on them and sometimes even get inside them.

I have a question that I want to ask you about the Paleo diet, because you hear about the Paleo diet a lot these days, and it's very focused on meats and fats and very adamant in steering people away from like a carbivore approach or in many cases.

Even eating much fruit at all.

What's your take on something like the Paleo diet?

Well, I'm not that familiar with it, but let me say a few things about what I'm understanding. It is, number one, we're finding that the fructose in all fruits can be a problem and we need to limit our amount of fruit. I was at the Shangri La Health resort many years ago as a lecturer and head gardener, and I saw folks go through a long fast, distilled water fast, and then they would break the fast with fruit. And I saw terrible, terrible problems the fruit creates. The sugar in the fruit creates hypoglycemic tendencies many times and to extreme losses of weight and loss of energy. And so I emphasize the vegetables over the fruits. But as far as the meat is concerned, my research, my experience is that the base cause of almost every physical problem we go to the doctors with today is the consuming of animal products, the too high of protein within them and the high fat content within them. If we eliminate animal source from our diet, which I did 35 years ago, I've had nothing from an animal in 35 years, not even cheese. The most dangerous thing we can put in our body. If we eliminate these animal products from our diet, we can eliminate almost any fear of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular problem, osteoporosis, acid stomach, heartburn, allergies, asthma. Almost every single physical problem we go to the doctor with today is caused by the consuming of these animal processes.

Is that kind of based off of the things that you've observed or are there studies and research that correlate to that?

There's research that correlates, but my oh, my, with tens of thousands of people writing to me, they tell me that when they get off the animal products and they get on this plant based diet, they see almost always every physical problem just simply disappearing from their body.

Interesting.

Well, I do really appreciate that with that vegan or with that raw diet that you guys emphasize some of the things that you're emphasizing like the vitamin D and the omega 3 fat intake from something like a pharmax and some of these other supplements. Just because I think that it's very tough to do a raw vegan diet. I've personally done it before to do.

It and to do it right and not damage your body.

It sounds like you guys are actually preaching, for lack of a better word.

The right message when it comes to the proper way to do that diet.

No, I do not promote 100% raw. I think 100% raw is a potentially dangerous diet. It's hard to chew for a lot of people. Enough, enough raw plant foods to get enough protein. We find that the chewing of food, if we do not break open the structure well, if we don't chew well, most of the nutrients just pass right on through the body without actually being utilized and being released. And so that's why chewing your food is the least efficient way to get the nutrients by going in a blender with them, we multiply the potential nutrients available by as much as 7, according to Dr. Blalock. Then when we go further and we juice the vegetable, then that is the ultimate way of getting nutrients to the cellular level because there's no fiber in there and it can go almost intravenously into the blood.

Interesting.

Your website is hacres.com and there's a ton of information on there. You guys have a lot of recipes and a big learning library. I do know that a lot of people that listen to this show are, some of them are very adamant vegan and vegetarians, and some of them are very adamant protein carnivorous meat eaters. And I think that interview will probably generate some discussion.

I wouldn't be surprised.

These topics always do.

Go ahead.

I also write a weekly electronic health tip that goes out to 92,000 subscribers every week. And if a person will go to our website, hacres.com there will be a yellow block with my picture there. And if they'll click that, they'll get my weekly health tip. Next week's health tip will be consecutive issue number 700. You can see I've been doing these a long time. And every one of these 699 previous health tips are available in the archives@that hacres.com site.

Awesome.

Awesome.

The Hallelujah Health Tip.

Cool. Well, George, thank you for coming on the call today and for letting us know a little bit more about the Hallelujah Acres and the Hallelujah Diet.

Thank you so much for the opportunity.

All right, well, I'm sure you have some questions about that and maybe some comments. So go to the show notes for this Episode, episode number 145@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Let me know what you think. And if you have follow up questions about what George had to say, I'll also put a link to that Fit10 fitness training device that he talked about. I was able to look into it and I actually got one and I've been doing a few workouts with it in my office and I find it pretty interesting. It's actually kind of cool. So I'm glad that he mentioned that and I was able to look into that and I'll put a link to that in the show notes called a fit 10. I'll put it underneath the interview with George there in the show notes. So that about wraps it up for today. And remember, if you have a T shirt design, send it in to me at Bengreenfield Fitness. Don't forget that next Thursday I'm teaching that triathlon lifestyle seminar for the USA Triathlon Organization. And of course, if you like this podcast, you can donate a dollar right there at BenGreenfieldFitness.com to keep the podcast coming until next time. This is Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com signing out.

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