Episode #174: What Diet Is The Best Diet?

In this podcast, what diet is the best diet? Cardio and muscle loss, outdoor winter training, preparing grains, Dr. Weil's pyramid, getting lean antibiotics, training for a climbing expedition. What is super compensation? Cultured vitamins, rapid weight fluctuations, good leg workouts and electromagnetic radiation. Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. And this week, Ben's here. How exciting.

It feels a little weird to be back.

I'm glad you're back. It was fun sort of doing it on my own, so to speak, last week. But I did feel a little bit lonely. So this is a good thing.

Yeah, I've got this foreign object, this microphone in front of my face. I'll have to figure out what to do with it now. I'm a little groggy. Brock and I had, well, we didn't have a mix up. I messed up. We actually typically record this podcast on Wednesday mornings and I have this nice little built in alarm clock in my home where it's called two three Year Old Boys and they generally show up in my bedroom sometime between 6 and 6:30 for snuggle time. Usually that's enough to wake you up when a stinky 3 year old boy shoves a full head of hair into your face and kind of snuggles up to you. And that didn't happen today. The reason being that we actually get raw milk. We get raw milk from a farm here in Washington and my wife with a group of about six girls takes turns driving to the farm to get the raw milk. And my wife got up early, early at the butt crack of dawn this morning, took off at 5am, grabbed the kids, took them with her and went to go get the raw milk so they could be home in time for their piano lessons. And I was left there sleeping and my eyes popped open just a little bit before nine. Considering that Brock and I were scheduled to record at 8. I'm a little bit behind, but I've had my cup of coffee, I woke up, did the dance, made the coffee, and I'm here in one piece. Brock on air live. My apologies.

No problem. I completely understand. And most people don't have that good of a story or at least A story that I was expecting one that involved beer.

No, no, no beer involved. And by the way, I know that. And you had mentioned, you know, I wasn't here last week and the reason for that, as I believe you mentioned last week's podcast, is I was down racing in Thailand and a bit of a long story there. We won't get into it on the podcast.

I did get into it a little bit. I read a bit of your, bit of your race report. Mostly the part about you pooing your guts. I hope you don't mind, but I figured you put it on the interweb.

So it's free game. I won't bore the folks who aren't interested. Combination of food poisoning and injury. And so you can head over to BenGreenfieldTry blogspot.com which is where I write about things like race reports and it's kind of the Me blog. So that being said, I guess we better because we have a, a huge amount of questions to go through.

We sure do. We've got a bazillion questions to go through.

All right, let's, let's move in.

Absolutely. Special announcements. All right, special announcements. Ben, what have we got going on this week?

You know, this Thursday, for those of you who are really on top of things and listen in to the podcast right when it comes out, this would be tomorrow night, Thursday, and at 6pm I'm teaching a webinar. If you go over to USA Triathlon, they have a really good database of webinars over there for triathlon and most of them do have kind of a nominal fee. They're anywhere from, I think about 5 to 20 bucks. But I'm actually teaching one tomorrow night about transitions and how to do triathlon transitions much faster. I'm just going to talk you through everything that I do and all the little tips and tricks that get you through transitioning lightning fast. So swim to bike bike to run super quick. That's tomorrow night at 6pm or Thursday, December 16th at 6pm so we've got that going on. And then of course, the Weight Training for Triathlon book is still selling like hotcakes over on itunes and also on Amazon for the Kindle and Barnes and Noble for the Nook, even though the hard copy doesn't come out until February. You can pre order that on Amazon. It's at a really good price right now. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. It's basically everything that you need for your weight training for this off season.

And it makes a perfect Christmas or Hanukkah present.

Yes, exactly. For the weightlifter in your life or the weakling in your life. And then this coming Tuesday, I am actually merging into the next decade of my life and turning on December 20. And the only reason I mention that on the podcast is because I tend to get really generous on my birthday and give away lots of big gifts to anybody who happens to be following me on the Internet. So if you haven't yet been following me on Twitter, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes for this episode. What is this episode number? 174.

174.

That's right, 174. So if you head over to the show notes for episode number 174, follow the link to follow me on Twitter. You can also fan the Ben Greenfield Fitness page on Facebook. I guarantee I always give away big gifts on my birthday to my fans, to my followers. And since this is my 30th birthday, it should be no exception. So I'd recommend you head over there and get on board by Tuesday, December 20th.

Cool. I remember last year there was some pretty exciting stuff going on in your birthday. I was only new to the Ben Greenfield world at that point, and I was like, what is this guy doing?

Well, oh, speaking of Twitter, I've got lots of tweets to go over, so.

All right, yeah, let's move into the news. Let's move into the news flashes. News flashes. Okay, in the land of twitter.com BenGreenfield what have we got coming down the pipes?

A few different studies that kind of, kind of turn my head this week that I tweeted about and wanted to go over in a little bit more detail here in the news flashes. The first was that there was a study that looked at glycemic index. And for those of you who aren't familiar with glycemic index, it's a measurement of how quickly a carbohydrate is released into the bloodstream and appears as sugar after you eat a meal. Glycemic index was looked at in a study in which they investigated a low glycemic index food, which would be something like yogurt or maybe a little bit of oatmeal versus a high glycemic index. Glycemic index food, which would be like a sports gel or a sports drink or honey or something really sweet. And what they found was that when you ingest foods that are of a different glycemic index, so low or high or whatever, about 30 to 60 minutes prior to exercise. There's absolutely no change in exercise performance. There's no change in what are called your beta endorphin levels, which kind of influence your ability to exercise to exhaustion. And there's no change in your carbohydrate or fat utilization. So ultimately what this comes down to is that you do not need to be afraid of if you're eating a sports bar 30 minutes before something like a 5K or a triathlon or any other event, no need to be afraid that it's going to cause this quick spike in blood sugar and then a drop in energy, which a lot of nutritionists kind of warn you against, simply doesn't happen. And this study kind of backed that up.

There's a whole chapter about that in the that Endurance Planet 20 Fueling Myths book, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. And I was actually pleased to see this study come out because it came out after the book and there were others. But I think this one is the best one so far that looks at glycemic index and exercise. So I'll put a link to that study in the show notes and anything else I mention here in the news flashes for anybody who wants to read up more runnersworld.com they've got good articles over there every now and again. I saw a really good one this week. Basically it talked about running rules you should break. If you haven't guessed yet, really big into articles that kind of dispel myths. And this one was a good one. It went over everything from how you really don't need to stretch before you run to how there's really not a big reason to do strides or bursts of intensity in your warm up to a marathon or anything like that. Basically it went over six different myths and I'll put a link to that article in the show notes. But for anybody who is running this winter, it's a good read. It's six Running rules. Pretty common myths in running. Six Running rules you should break. One interesting one was they actually recommended that you not cap your marathon longest run at 20 miles if you're training for a marathon, because most people actually basically kind of hit the wall within about a mile of the length of their longest run. And they say that for anybody who's gunning for an actual time goal in a marathon that they get up to possibly running a long run as long as 29 miles. I thought that was interesting and possibly not doable for a lot of people, but some kind of non run of the mill information like that in this article that's Interesting.

Did they talk about that being a mental thing? Because I know a lot of people just mentally have so much trouble envisioning the fact that they're going to run a marathon when they never actually run one. Leading up to that, yeah, they did.

And these recommendations were coming from big running coaches like Jeff Galloway. And I think he was the person that actually brought up this particular point. And yeah, absolutely, he mentioned in the article that it definitely was partially mental. So good read. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Another interesting study that came out looked at intensity and how little you could actually get away with when it comes to working out and the ability of very, very short workouts and a low amount of exercise per week. Still being able to improve your metabolic health. And whenever you hear that term thrown around, metabolic health, health, typically they're referring to your ability to regulate your blood sugar levels. I mean there's some other things, blood pressure and cholesterol, but really the thing that's most looked at when it comes to exercise and metabolic health is the ability of exercise to allow you to regulate your blood sugar levels and maintain what's called insulin sensitivity. And this study looked at folks who were doing very, very short exercise sessions, 10 minute exercise sessions, and they were doing them just three times a week. And during those 10 minute exercise sessions they basically had just a few very brief all out sprints. So these exercise sessions were on the bike. They went for several weeks, they did 10 second sprints in their first week, they did about 15 seconds in their next week and then I think they finished up with right around 20 to 30 seconds as the maximum amount of time that they actually went hard during that 10 minute effort. And then they compared that to kind of just a normal lifestyle, normal, average, western, slightly sedentary lifestyle. And they ran this study for six weeks and what they found was that the folks who were exercising for just 10 minutes three times a week significantly improved not only their blood sugar sensitivity and their metabolic health, but also their aerobic capacity or their actual fitness, their cardiorespiratory fitness. So very, very interesting and encouraging for busy folks who want to get away with a quick 10 minute workout. I don't think that you could necessarily get in shape for a marathon by doing that, but it's encouraging for folks who are really busy and who even if you are a fitness enthusiast, you're a fitness junkie and you just don't have time to work out as much as you'd like to or you want to just know that a quick 10 minute workout can still get you a lot of benefit.

That's a really intense 10 minute workout.

You know what? Not really, because in the past I've recommended high intensity interval training and that's really intense. That'd be like going for 10 minutes and doing 20 seconds hard, 20 seconds easy for 10 minutes. This was just a 10 minute, relatively nonchalant bike ride with just a few very brief, very hard efforts, but just a few of them.

So it's just the ratio of intense to non intense is actually. You can get away with a lot less.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. This was one of those how little can you get away with? Type of studies. There was another interesting study. Again, I know a lot of marathoners, a lot of runners listening to this, A lot of people are out training right now. And this was an interesting study because most people think that after you run a marathon or do a triathlon or do any intense physical effort, that there is this immunosuppressive effect whereby you have this suppression of immune function and you actually get sick a few days after that effort. And this was a study in medicine and science and sports and exercise, a relatively large study that looked at a few hundred runners from the London Marathon. And they actually had them analyzed for a reaction to common allergens that you'd inhale while you're out running. And the levels of these allergens were just through the roof in these folks. And a lot of the signs and symptoms that they were showing that you'd think might be because of a flu or a cold or some type of other opportunistic upper respiratory tract infection that pops up after you've done a hard effort. Really they were just allergies. So knowing that you can really kind of come at your marathon a little bit differently if you don't want to feel like crap a few days after. And focus on things that would reduce the allergenic reaction, really focus on lowering intake of things like wheat gluten, soy, dairy, things that might cause a lot of cross reactivity and kind of a hyperactive immune system that could have a stronger allergenic response. And if you really need to try a little bit of antihistamine or something like that, it probably is going to have a pretty significant effect considering that it's likely not a cold that you've come down with, but just an allergenic reaction from all the inhaling that you do during the event.

Interesting, because I've always been under the impression that you've taken such a toll on your immune system and well on your body in general, and especially ingesting all the, all the really simple carbohydrates like taking the gels and the Gatorade at the same time, you've just basically beat yourself up to the point where you're a weak little kitten.

Yeah, it turns out it's a little bit more allergy related, which is interesting.

Very interesting.

And then the last thing I wanted to go over was an eating frequency study. And this was in the Journal of the American Dietetic association, it came out last month. And the title of the study was that eating frequency is higher in weight loss maintainers and normal weight individuals than in overweight individuals. And they looked at the number of snacks that people ate during the day and they found that sure enough, people who were of normal weight or people who were maintaining their weight were snacking more frequently. And this was justit was based on dietary recall, like a 24 hour dietary recall. So this wasn't a super, super strict study where they had people living in a lab inside a cage watching their meal intake, but based on self reporting. And the reason I bring this up is because this one, this is going to be a study that once a lot of nutritionists and personal trainers see it, they're going to run away with this and go start telling their clients that they need to be doing the grazing and snacking six to ten times a day. And that really does keep your metabolism elevated and is associated with weight loss and weight maintenance. And the fact is, if you go and look at the study in detail, the highest amount of snacks consumed was an average of 2.3 snacks a day. Okay, so we're talking about like your normal breakfast, lunch and dinner and then throwing a snack in between each as the highest amount of snacking. We're not talking about packing an apple, a sandwich, a yogurt, some mini carrots, a power bar, an energy bar and a sports drink and then a little bit of dark chocolate and heading to work. So you can snack 10 times during the day. That is the type of snacking that really keeps your blood sugar levels elevated during the day. Doesn't teach you how to really kind of control your appetite and burn fat as a fuel and really I think is kind of a waste of time and energy if anything else. So know that if you see people citing this study about eating frequency, that the actual eating frequency was a maximum of two snacks a day. And it was actually closer down towards once you average everything out, closer down to like one and a half snacks a day that the higher snack or higher eating frequency group was doing. So just know that I think to.

Most North Americans, that doesn't qualify as snacking.

Yeah, exactly. You know, if you talk to the people who graze and snack, you know, they're just. They're way up there, you know, literally, like. Like 10 snacks a day. So. So that's it for the news flashes. I tweeted a lot of other stuff this week in terms of things that I came across in the literature and also on the web. But those were. Those are some of the main points that I thought would be interesting to folks on the podcast. And if you want to get more of those and find out the news flashes right when they come out, just go to twitter.com BenGreenfield and you'll be able to find everything there.

All right. Definitely check out the show notes. We'll put links to everything in there. I think it's time to move on to our huge, enormous bag of Listener Q&As. Is that right, Ben?

Good thing I had that coffee.

Yeah. Okay, let's go. Listener Q and A. Okay. Well, we've got tons and tons to get through, so let's dive right into our first audio question from Patrick.

Hey, Ben, this is Patrick over in Nashville, Tennessee. I got a question for you. I'm a personal trainer at a gym, and there's kind of an ongoing debate between myself and some of the other trainers who tend to come from anaerobic sports, you know, football, bodybuilding, figure competition. They're always throwing claims around that doing a lot of cardio, specifically intervals longer than 30 seconds or 1 minute, will tend to burn off too much muscle on the upper body. And as a runner and a triathlete, I know that so long as you're taking in enough calories, that's really not the case, but I was hoping to get your input on that. And specifically, if you have any research that I can look at to argue one way or the other. Thanks a lot, man.

So what do you think, Ben?

Short answer? Yes, and here's why. When you're exercising or when you're doing, like, basically prolonged aerobic exercise, what happens is your body has a mechanism to preserve its carbohydrate stores, so it can go for as long as possible while still burning some carbohydrate as a fuel. Not only because carbohydrate allows you to exercise for longer periods of time under a little less discomfort, but also, once you do switch to fat burning as your carbohydrate stores get lower and lower. You still burn fat more efficiently when you have a little bit of carbohydrate on board. So when you're out running long or biking long, a little bit of carbohydrate always does you well. And because of that, your body has a mechanism to keep that carbohydrate preserved. And it's called cortisol. So when you produce cortisol during prolonged aerobic exercise, what happens is it gives you the ability to use alternate fuels. So it allows you to tap into like, your amino acid stores from muscle as well as amino acid stores from, you know, anyany protein that you happen to have floating around in your digestive tract. But most of us aren't even eating, you know, like a steak before we go workout. Cortisol can kind of impair how much carbohydrate gets entered into the actual muscle and kind of steps up the amount of amino acids and fatty acids that end up being utilized by the muscle. It also can step up the amount of amino acids that are kind of processed by the liver to increase glucose production. So all of this stuff happens when you're out doing an aerobic run. And what that means is that your body is basically breaking itself down for fuel or breaking itself down so that you can conserve your carbohydrate stores for as long as possible. Now, especially when you combine that with caloric control, lower carbohydrate intake, a diet that's maybe set up to control your overall weight so you can run faster, you definitely get a harder time preserving muscle mass. And this is why I do things like recommend that you take an amino acid capsule muscle before you go out and do a long run, because it preserves your muscle stores. I mean, if you want to get rid of muscle, don't do that and make sure that you do work out in a relatively low fueled state. But if you've got muscle that you want to preserve, and you don't want to get super skinny or lose too much muscle from doing long workouts, you take some amino acids before you go workout, and what happens is that it's cortisol causes less dipping into actual muscle mass to get those amino acids instead relies on those amino acids that you've kind of supplied through the diet. So ultimately, yes, running can definitely lower muscle mass, as can any type of long aerobic exercise. And when I say long aerobic exercise, I mean stuff that's kind of exceeding that 45 to 60 minute range.

Okay, so it sounds like Patrick didn't lose his bet, but he was sort of leaning towards that. Oh, well, sorry about that, Patrick. Okay, next question is from Erling. And Erling says the winter is coming, and I was wondering if it's bad to do hard outdoor training in cold temperatures. And he says for the lungs, last year in Oslo, Norway, it was minus 20 for a long period. Assuming because it's Europe, that's minus 20 Celsius, which is pretty cold. So, yeah. Is that his training outdoors in the winter? Is that bad for you?

Gosh, it's cold here. So I've been thinking about this myself, and actually, this was a topic of a recent show, or not really a topic of a recent show. The things you can do to keep warm was a topic of a recent show over at Endurance Planet. There's an episode over there called Ask the Ultra Runner, where every week they talk to Tim Wagoneer, who's an ultra runner, and he runs in just crazy temperatures.

Lucho.

Yeah, exactly. His nickname is Lucho. So that's an interesting podcast. He talks a lot about the type of things he wears when he's out in the cold. But as far as what happens physiologically and whether or not you need to be afraid of damage to your airways or frozen lungs, again, I'll give my short answer first. And the short answer is no. You really need to be more concerned about your extremities than you need to be concerned about anything internal. You need to be concerned about basically keeping your. Your hands warm and your feet warm and your face warm, because those are all the things that are going to be most sensitive to the cold. If you look at people who are doing marathons out in the South Pole or the North Pole, where you're going to get temperatures below 50, really high winds, high altitudes, none of these folks are getting freezing in the lungs. Most of them have been interviewed after these events, as well as after doing things like summiting Mount Everest or. Or doing anything else that involves long, long periods of time in conditions that most people wouldn't even dare run in. And there has never, ever been a case of anybody in the history of sports like this freezing their lungs. So even though ethics keeps us from doing an actual study where this is looked at in laboratory conditions, like in an exercise physiology lab that's set up in a freezer, there's. There is no risk of actually freezing your lungs. However, there is risk of airway discomfort. And what happens is that when you get into cold air that's really, really dry, you get airway narrowing, which is basically. It feels similar to exercise induced asthma or like you're breathing through a straw. And the thing that you can do to kind of help you feel less of this kind of airway narrowing as you exercise is you want to basically heat the air before it comes and try and hydrate the air a little bit. And the way that you do that is you trap some natural water vapor before you breathe in. And the way that you do that is by breathing in through a scarf or some other type of mask that you wear on your face while you're out running in these type of temperatures. So I personally use a scarf. I love to run with a scarf. I just wrap it all around my head and my neck a few times. It keeps my nose warm, my ears warm, my neck warm, and then I breathe through that when I'm out running breathing in really cold conditions. And it traps that air. It builds up the water vapors from your exhaled air. And so you're breathing back in hydrated air and your lungs stay a lot more comfortable in conditions like that. So, yeah, there's no worry that you're going to hack up a nice frozen lung and there's no worries that your airways are going to freeze shut or anything like that. But there's certainly things you can do to make the process a little bit more comfortable when you're out running in the cold. And I would also recommend. This is kind of interesting, but. But we'll put a link to it in the show notes. I did an interview with Tim Ferriss and Ray Kronice last year, and it was about how you can kind of hack cold conditions to enhance weight loss, meaning that you can cause your body to step up its activity, what's called brown fat, which is your really, really metabolically active fat. And that will happen as long as you can figure out a way to exercise in the cold, but keep your extremities warm. And Ray goes into this in greater detail on that particular podcast episode. What it comes down to is you can do kind of this fat loss session where you get up in the morning without having breakfast, bundle up your hands and your face and your feet, but don't wear too many layers on the rest of your body so that you basically aren't staying super warm and you're slightly chillier than you'd like to be during your walk or your light run, and then you go out for a really light, like 20 to 40 minute session. And that can really step up the brown fat activity and your ability to be more metabolically active. With the trick being that if Your face gets really cold or your hands get really cold, or your feet get really cold, your body will start to down regulate your metabolic activity. So basically you're trying to cool down your core without cooling down your extremities. So it was a really interesting interview. And Ray's a smart guy. He wasn't just pulling stuff out his butt. He's. He's a NASA trained engineer and had done a lot of studies looking into stuff like this. So it was interesting.

Yeah, I remember listening to that one. I found it very interesting. Being from a really cold climate myself, I used to lead a running group in Edmonton, Alberta, which is very far north, and the temperature would often be like minus 30 Celsius or colder. And the only thing I'd add to what Ben said, and especially for men who have a little bit of a spare tire around the midriff, that is an area that is quite difficult to keep warm, especially once you get sweating. So that's an area you have to look out for for the. For frostbite. Also, guys, windproof undies are very, very important, like, especially right in the front because you don't want to frostbite your junk. And it's really, it's.

It's quite easy to do. Yeah, yeah, I've done that on a bike ride. Not pleasant. So, yeah, think ahead, think ahead.

And women, same thing with the spare tire for men. Just sort of the butt. Like you don't have a lot of circulation back there. So keeping just some extra layers back there is really important.

So if you've learned anything from this show, it's to insulate your butt and your spare tire. Yeah.

And don't frostbite your junk.

That's. That's right.

Okay, next question. I think we should move along. Andre asks. He says, I've heard you a few times talking about soaked and sprouted grains. So what is the proper way to do it? How do you sprout grains like quinoa and things like that?

Good question. So let's not get into the why too much, because folks can go back and listen to episode number 172 to learn why you would even think about soaking or sprouting grains. And on that same level, in terms of grains and their potential health or lack thereof, we will be also interviewing the author of the book Wheat Belly, which goes into this in a lot greater detail. And you can look for that interview in two weeks. We should have that interview with Dr. Davis coming out. But as far as soaking and sprouting goes, I'll give you the brief overview and if you want a little bit more detail than this, my wife and I recorded about a 20 to 30 minute video inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness inner circle where we show exactly what we do in our kitchen and what we use for soaking and sprouting. And I'll put a link to the inner circle in the show notes. And also the cookbook, Nourishing Traditions is a really good cookbook also for not only soaking and sprouting, but also doing things like fermenting and pickling food and really making sure that you get the most or maintain the highest nutritional quality from the food that you're eating. But as far as actually sprouting a grain, basically what you need are jars. So you'll have different jars that you use to sprout your wheat, spelt, millet, rye, quinoa, whatever. And you fill these glass jars, not quite half full, of whatever grain that you're going to be sprouting. And sprouting times and soaking times are going to vary per grain. Quinoa is basically going to almost soak overnight. Wheat can take a little bit longer than that, a few days sometimes. But basically you fill the jar not quite to the halfway mark with whatever grain you're going to soak and sprout, and then you fill the rest of the jar with water. What you want on top of the jar is what's called a sprouting screen. And it's basically almost like this mesh that goes over the top of the jar, and then the lid of the jar screws over that mesh. But the lid that you use is one of those lids of a jar that's open on the top. So essentially the top of the jar is just this mesh covering. So what the mesh covering is used for is after you've soaked your grains in this glass jar, you drain the jar the next day. So you let them soak overnight and then you drain the jar. And that screen catches all the grains when you drain the jar. So then you rinse the grain by pouring water back into the jar through that screen, and you kind of shake it a little bit and let that water roll around. And then you drain it again. And then you basically allow the grains to continue to drain and then pour them out, or pour the water out and continue to do this about two to three times a day, rinsing the grains, kind of shaking it around, pouring the extra water out, allowing them to drain, and then setting them back out, allowing them to dry. So it's only the first night that they actually soak in water and after that you're just basically rinsing them and they're setting out dry. And after about anywhere from overnight, sometimes for something like quinoa, it can just be literally a matter of hours to, to two, three, four days. For something like wheat, you're going to notice these little sprouts coming out of the grain. And at that point you have sprouted your grain and you can use it for whatever you're going to use it for. We have a food dehydrator and once you get that food dehydrator, you can dehydrate the grain and let it really, really dry. And once it's nice and dry, you can grind it and you can use a coffee grinder or a blender or food processor for that, that. And at that point you've got what you need to make, you know, flour or whatever you want to use for muffins or bread or cereal or whatever else. So that's basically how you do it.

That's great. The link to the inner circle I think will be a really, really helpful thing for people.

It's one of those things where it's useful to see via video. And I mean the whole deal with the inner circle is, you know, my wife does a lot of stuff in there, but basically it's a bunch of, of secret inside, kind of never before seen pages and posts from Ben Greenfield Fitness. We do a video seminar every month. We add bonuses like meal plans and stuff like that. People have access to be able to see my daily diet and essentially it's just kind of extra bonus material and we really focus on kind of like the healthy living and the cooking concepts quite a bit. So it's $17 a month to be a part of the Ben Greenfield Fitness inner circle goal, which I think based off of what we give you is worth it. And yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes. It's basically BenGreenfieldFitness.com innercircle but we'll throw a link in there too.

Great. Okay, next question comes from Ron. And Ron has a quick little question. He just wants to know what you think of Dr. Weil's food pyramid.

Yeah, sure. Dr. Weil is kind of a fairly well known naturopathic physician and I like most of the stuff that he puts out. And he recently published a food pyramid. It's basically what he calls an anti inflammatory food pyramid. And for the most part it's a little bit of a change up from the typical pyramid that you see put out by the fda because it stacks a lot more, more kind of like fats kind of towards the base of the pyramid and adds in some things that you don't see, like supplements and tea and herbs and spices. At first glance it looks pretty decent, but once you look at it in a little bit more detail, there's a lot in there that I'm not a big fan of. For example, he's got fruit portions at three to four fruit portions a day, which for anybody trying to lose weight, I've found that that amount of fructose really does not do you any favors when it comes to weight loss. I like to limit folks to no more than 2 servings of fruit per day, like a banana in the afternoon, maybe a big handful of raisins with breakfast in the morning. At the base of the pyramid, he has quite a bit of pasta and beans and legumes and whole grains. Again, go back and listen to podcast episode 172 where I talk a little bit more about about why those type of things can be inflammatory and how if you don't prepare them properly, they can do some real damage to you in terms of your blood sugar levels and your gut inflammation. And I think it's ironic that he has called his food pyramid the anti inflammatory food pyramid when he has those three to five times a day. I have a serving of grains about once every two days probably. So he's got three to five times a day having whole and cracked grains on there and then pasta as well, two to three times a week. Okay, so you're taking, taking Monday, Wednesday and Friday and sitting down to your bowl of spaghetti or whatever else, beans and legumes a couple times a day. Another potentially inflammatory food, if you're not soaking it and preparing it correctly. And then just a little bit farther up on the scale, he's got whole soy foods one to two times a day. And he doesn't differentiate between fermented soy, which actually basically is the healthy form of soy that has had its phytic acids and a lot of its nutrient inhibitors disabled. And non fermented soy like soy nuts and soy milk and tofu and edamame, he's got that stuff one to two times a day. Okay, so you're having grains three to five times a day, you're having tofu one to two times a day, you're having your beans and legumes one to two times a day, you're having fruit three to four times a day. Anybody who actually takes a look at this and follows it the way that it's written, I guarantee is going to feel horrible and get really fat. So, I mean, I know that sounds harsh, but I'm a little bit disappointed in his pyramid considering that I've liked in the past a lot of especially the medical stuff that I've seen Dr. Andrew Weil put out. So that's what I think of his food pyramid.

Yeah. It's actually really interesting to hear you disagree with him so, so much on the food pyramid because I heard him interviewed the other day, he was on an NPR radio show. And so much of the stuff that he was talking about was really bang on with things I've heard you say, Ben, and it's really interesting to hear that it's so different.

Yeah. Even his sources of protein, granted, kudos. He does a good job recommending healthy fats more towards the base of the pyramid. He's actually got a lot of fat on there, which is omega 3 fatty acids are anti inflammatory. He's got you doing walnuts and avocados and seeds and hemp seeds and extra virgin olive oil five to seven times a day. So a lot of fat portions. Actually, I don't even recommend that much fat because again, when it comes down to practical weight loss, which is where I'm at in the trenches, helping people to lose weight, that much fat every day, actually you get to a point of diminishing returns and people start to gain a lot of weight weight, unless they're exercising a ton. But then farther up where he talks about protein, he tells you to eat lean meats when really, if you're following the same logic, you should be eating fattier cuts of meat so that you're getting your conjugated linoleic acids and other forms of healthy fat, like saturated fat, that's going to come from your meat based sources. So again, not understanding why he recommends healthy fats at the base of the pyramid, but then farther up basically recommends that you choose leaner cuts of meat, which kind of flies in the face of research that we've seen recently on CLA's and saturated fats and the benefits of all these other things in meat.

All right, well, it's a good reason to get them on the show.

Yeah, we should, we should look up Dr. Andrew Weil and try and get him on.

Yeah, if anybody has any connections to him, please let us know.

We'll follow up and I'll argue with him about his pyramid.

Awesome. That's. I'll be front row center for that one. Okay. Next question comes from David. David Says Ben. I'm a triathlete and focus on this 70.3 distance and moving up to a full Ironman next season. I want to lean up, get stronger and be in a solid position for next season. I eat okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement in my diet, which would allow me to drop my body fat but still allow my muscle mass to grow over the off season and keep that muscle mass as I start the race season next year. What diet would you recommend? Start with the low carb diet and then convert to the Rev3 or any other suggestions? Keep up the podcast, David.

Okay, quick thing David mentioned Rev 3. I didn't want to confuse anybody, but I published a book last year called the Rev Diet. Not to be confused with the Rev3 Triathlon Series. The those are totally separate, just so you know, David. But the Rev Diet, basically the reason that I published that was I had a lot of people coming to me who had messed up diets and what it would take to fix their diets, detox their bodies, remove the inflammation and clean up. The diet was not the same type of diet that someone would be able to be on for life because you're talking about a lower amount of calories, you're talking about a lot of of detective work and a lot of awareness of every bite that you're putting into your mouth and complete elimination of soy and gluten and dairy and a lot of other foods too. Pretty much anything that could aggravate things like Candida or yeast issue in the digestive tract, things that could potentially cause inflammation, weight gain, anything that might potentially have food toxins in it. And so really, really squeaky clean diet, like annoyingly squeaky clean diet, people really just like they would just shoot themselves. They can't go for a year on a diet like that. So I built this diet plan that basically you spend two to four weeks eating really, really healthy, total elimination diet, total detox diet. And then you move into kind of like a phase two where you're gradually starting to introduce new food groups and supplement that support the digestion of the slightly greater number of calories that you're eating. And preferably you combine that with starting to exercise more. Whereas when you're kind of detoxing your diet and doing a lot of anti inflammatory stuff, you can't exercise that much during that phase because you're just not eating enough calories. And then the third phase of the Rev diet, what's called the vitalized phase or the V part of the Rev Diet is Higher calorie intake. And it's kind of optional, but that's the part of the diet you'd move to if you're like, okay, I feel great, I want to start to train for Ironman or do a marathon or start doing CrossFit every day and your caloric needs go way up. That's the part of the diet that's like higher calorie. Pick this if you're really training for competition. So you've got your reboot phase, which is the initial detox phase, your evolve phase, or the E part of Rev, which is where you start to evolve into a little bit more supportive diet and then the vitalized phase for if you're really wanting to amp up the activity levels. So that's what that diet is. And it's@revdiet.com if you want to check it out. But in comparison, something like the low carb diet is just kind of whether it's for life or for a year, however long you do it. A diet that's designed to teach your body how to burn fats more efficiently, how to still get enough calories to maintain high levels of physical activity. But it really, it is lower carbohydrate than something like the Rev diet. It's designed for people who are addicted to carbs and need to get off. People who maybe have some pre diabetic, some insulin sensitivity issues, people who basically just need for health reasons, performance reasons or weight loss reasons to get less carbohydrate in their diet. Moving on to David's question about muscle mass. It really returns to where we started and that is if you want to drop your body fat but still allow muscle mass to grow, you need to be eating a diet that basically gives you adequate amounts of protein, preferably kind of dosed as amino acid intake and timed very close to your workouts, two to three hours before your workout, kind of bumping up amino acid levels with higher intake of protein. And then whenever you do a long workout, making sure that you're doing long workouts in a well fed state so you're not going catabolic and you're not getting that cortisol release and then you engage in any type of a focus on weight loss or fat loss loss apart from the workout. So that's how you maintain muscle mass and still lose fat, is you don't do any calorie restriction or starved workouts or anything like that and you instead focus on weight loss during the times that you're not working out. Like don't Eat as much for breakfast and make sure you're not snacking within two hours before bedtime. But you don't restrict your body or starve your body before, during, or after a workout. And that allows you to maintain muscle mass. I kind of talk about that concept in my upcoming Tri Ripped book, which is for triathletes who want to maintain muscle mass and do triathlon and still look really good. That whole concept of keeping muscle on the body. So the diet that I would recommend for David would be probably closer to the vitalized phase of the Rev diet, just because you do want to maintain muscle mass mass. And it sounds like your focus isn't like, on hardcore weight loss. I would probably not do the low carb diet as much as I would like the vitalized phase of my Rev diet book. And essentially it incorporates the concepts that I just described.

That sounds great. And he's really describing kind of, I think what everybody would want to do on their off season is really lean up, get a little bit more muscle mass built up in time for that, the new season. So that's probably good advice for pretty much everybody out there that's involved in that sort of sport.

Yeah. And I personally, like, for me, from a mental perspective, I don't focus on leaning up during the off season that much. I mean, I spend November and December, and frankly, I'm eating treats and I'm drinking more alcohol than I would normally drink, and I'm not exercising as much. And the exercise that I do is really short and intense. I kind of like that feeling of being in good shape and not feeling like you totally let yourself go when January rolls around, but also kind of being mentally ready to live a little bit more like a monk as you move into your real training and your preparation. Because I find if you focus too much on fat loss and calorie control and all that jazz during the holidays, you kind of feel like you missed out when January rolls around and you're more likely to fall off the bandwagon moving forward.

Yeah, good point, Good point. All right, well, our next questions. We actually got two questions that were along the same vein about antibiotics. So we've got the first questions from Jim, and Jim says, I know you recently went through having to use some antibiotics for an infection. I have to take Cipro soon for an intestinal infection, and I heard is nasty. And you can't train because it affects your tendons and ligaments, especially your Achilles tendon. And would you know how long I should wait before resuming training? So that's what? Jim asks. And then, then Dan, sort of along the same vein, I guess, says, hi, Ben, I was wondering if you have any knowledge on fluoroquinolone, is that right? Fluoroquinolone, quinolone, antibiotics, Avalox, Cipro. He names a whole bunch of different kinds and the damage they can cause. He says, In April 2011, I had a sinus infection and was prescribed Avalox. And right away I started having, having knee pain while running and biking and it got worse and worse and in June I could barely walk without pain. So he's looking for some advice or some direction. He feels like he went from a Super healthy, fit 35 year old to somebody who can barely move without worrying about snapping something. So that sounds pretty serious, right?

Yeah. Well, first of all, what was the name of the first person that asked the question about Jim?

Jim.

Okay, so Jim referred to me being on antibiotics. This was actually last year. And I wrote a big post on this afterwards at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, we'll link to it in the show Notes from this episode, number 174. But it was called the Art of Using Antibiotics, how to Limit the Damage. And what had happened to me was I was working out in the gym and ended up contracting a staph infection from the gym and needed to get on a really powerful antibiotic series and basically wanted to do as much as I could to limit the potential damage that that was going to do to my gastrointestinal. Now, it wasn't a fluoroquinolone antibiotic like Cipro, which can affect your tendons, and I'll talk about that in a second, but it definitely was a type of antibiotic that can really do a number on the gastrointestinal tract. Basically what happens is when you consume an antibiotic, it's designed to kill off bacteria and you kill a lot of the beneficial bacteria that's in your entire intestines. And so that kind of damages the balance of your intestinal tract, which is really where a ton of stuff happens, from digestion and nutrient absorption to immune system function. And one of the things that can happen is what's called dysbiosis, which is where yeast can kind of grow unchecked because your flora in your intestinal tract has become unbalanced. And what happens is that when yeast, yeasts thrive in your digestive tract, they can literally poke holes through the lining of your intestinal wall and you get what's called leaky gut syndrome, and it can mess you up for a really long time. What you want to do as much as possible when you take antibiotics is try and limit the damage that can be caused, especially in terms of the throwing off of the balance of your intestinal tract. So antibiotics are really powerful and while you can take probiotics while you are taking antibiotics, they're really not going to do you a whole lot of good until you're off your antibiotics protocol. I pop probiotics anyways. If I'm on antibiotics and I take a lot of them, I usually double dose on probiotics and continue to do so for a full month after I've been off the antibiotic protocol. In addition to that that, I would recommend that you take some type of anti yeast supplement. I personally use oil of oregano as kind of an antifungal anti yeast three times a day, about four to five drops of an oil of oregano taken sublingually to kind of help out with any potential yeast infection. As you're on your antibiotic protocol now, like I said, the good bacteria in your stomach is still going to take a pretty big hit if you're on a really powerful antibiotic like I was on clindamycin. And that's really powerful. And one of the things that can kind of stand up to that a little bit better is one strain of probiotics that you don't find in most supplements. And you need to make sure that your probiotic supplement that you're taking while you're on your antibiotics specifically has this one in it. And it's called Saccharomyces boulardii. I know that sounds really hard to spell, but basically Saccharomyces boulardii is how you pronounce it. And if you were to ask your, your pharmacy if they carry any probiotics that has that particular strain in it or you were to go just read the article that I wrote over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com you could see how it's spelled and be able to find it. But basically it's a probiotic strain that's going to stand up to the antibiotics a little bit better. And it's again one that you'd want to take and continue to take after the antibiotics have kind of run their course and you're not on them anymore. And I also made sure to eat a ton of fermented foods which really contain a naturally high amount of probiotics, which that's why I was doing sauerkraut and pickles. And you can pickle Turnips and carrots and beets, and you can eat kimchi and you can do kefir and yogurts and just do as much as possible to get good bacteria into your system. The antibiotics kind of hit your liver a little bit too, as you process those as well as any other pharmaceutical drug. So I recommend that you get on a good kind of liver protective supplement and stomach protective supplement. And what I was doing was a milk thistle extract, which is really good, good for detoxing the liver. So anytime you've been exposed to a high amount of pharmaceuticals or even frankly been out on a bender or had too much alcohol, milk thistle extract can certainly help out quite a bit in detoxifying. I was also doing aloe vera juice, which really helps to protect your stomach and can ease up on some of the potential for stomach bleeding or stomach ulcers from some of these pharmaceuticals as well. Well, antibiotics can make you nauseous, so I recommend you get your hands on some ginger root and some ginger treat, some ginger tea, ginger capsules. Ginger can really help settle your stomach. And so I was doing that as well. A high fiber supplement is good because probiotics need prebiotics. Probiotics feed on basically a form of carbohydrate found in fiber. And so you can take like a psyllium seed supplement or some type of fiber supplement that requires really helps to feed the good bacteria that you're trying to maintain and allow to flourish in the presence of the attack that they're under from the antibiotics. And then the last thing would be like a glutamine supplement. Glutamine does a bunch of stuff in the GI tract, but it can repair your intestinal lining, especially if you have had a yeast infection and you do have all those holes that have been poked in your digestive tract. It can help with the elimination of of yeast infections. And so you could take like an amino acid supplement that has glutamine in it, or you can just get glutamine in its isolated form. But glutamine is really helpful as well. And if I were ever on antibiotics, I would do the same protocol again. Glutamine, the high fiber supplement, like a psyllium supplement, some ginger, some aloe vera and milk thistle extract, and then a lot of probiotics and fermented food, along with some oil of oregano. You know, as far as this whole tendon issue and muscle issue, yeah, absolutely. There's a big problem when you take the type of antibiotic that has quinolone in it and the reason that is the case is that fluoroquinolone based antibiotics, and fluoroquinolone in particular has a really high affinity for connective tissue. So it can build up and get highly concentrated in bone and cartilage and kind of in a lot of those muscle areas where some of your bigger tendons attach. In particular, the Achilles tendon is one major one and that really increases risk for tendonitis, especially in the Achilles or rupture in the Achilles. It can affect other joints, but the Achilles is the one that's the. It has the most potential for getting ruptured when you're out running if you're on antibiotics. And this is well known among all physicians. Unfortunately, a lot of them really don't advise their patients against running when they're on something like Levaquin or any other fluoroquinolone. And so those tendon ruptures can happen and then you're screwed for a lot longer period of time. So if I ever were on a fluoroquinolone, I would be engaging in activities that were non weight bearing, primarily cycling and water based exercise like aqua jogging and swimming. And the issue with those antibiotics is that they've actually observed tendon ruptures occurring as long as six months after the actual treatment administration of the drug. And this has been way back since the 90s that fluoroquinolones have been associated with the this. Ultimately, unless you absolutely have to be on a fluoroquinolone, I recommend that you get on an alternative antibiotic. And a lot of times fluoroquinolone is prescribed because it's really powerful. And clindamycin is a non fluoroquinolone based antibiotic that also is pretty powerful as well. I don't want to get into the realm of giving out medical advice now, which I'm getting dangerously close to. So what I would say is if you've been on equinolone and you want to play it completely safe, switch to non weight bearing exercise, at least for the next few weeks and consider not doing anything really, really hard for the next few months if you really want to reduce your potential for rupturing a tendon or developing tendonitis.

Wow, that's, that's kind of, kind of alarming stuff. I have to admit, when you're taking an antibiotic, you're not really expecting those kind of reactions. And I guess like you said, the, the doctors really should be warning somebody who's at least somebody who's obviously very active.

Yeah, yeah. You would Think, but unfortunately not.

Well, Jim and Dan, that should give you a, a lot of stuff to work with and hopefully that helps you out.

Yeah, and I'll put a link to that antibiotics article that I wrote in the show notes.

Awesome. Okay, next question comes from Kai. Kai says the three most discussed options to the standard American diet are vegan, zone and low carb. He wants to know, have any studies been done which objectively compare the health benefits of the these three intake approaches? With your recent release of the low carb diet for triathletes, what is your opinion on the zone diet and I guess these other two as well?

Well, there's been, there's been studies that have compared multiple diets, you know, not, not the three. What, what were the three that he asked about?

Vegan, zone and low carb?

Yeah, there, there's been no studies that have looked at those three in particular. Probably the biggest studies that looked at comparing different types of diets that we can actually learn from and maybe apply to his question is one that was in the Journal of the American Medical association and then one that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. The first that one that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine was back in 2009, and that compared weight loss diets with different compositions of fat and protein and carbs. So they basically took four different diets and they had a relatively large number of people that they recruited. Over 800 people. They took these four different diets that range from carbohydrate intake from 35% all the way up to about 65%. And, and basically the actual calorie intake was controlled. So they were engaging in caloric restriction or the type of calorie control that you would expect for weight loss. But everybody was taking in a different range of fats and proteins and carbs. And it varied way across the board. I mean, granted, none of it was what I would consider to be low carb, since the lowest carbohydrate intake in the study was 35% and the highest carbohydrate intake was 65%. But that's a pretty good span of carbohydrate intake. That 30% range from 35 up to 65%. In terms of comparison. The main finding was that every single diet that they looked at in this study, which was a long study of a lot of people, four different ranges of protein and fats and carbohydrates, every diet was equally successful in promoting significant weight loss and weight loss maintenance over the entire two years that they ran this trial, and they also did self reporting on hunger, on appetite, on food satisfaction. And there was no significant difference between the four different ranges of fat and protein and carb intake there as well. So the most interesting thing that I found about this study was that if you look across all the groups, even though the actual weight loss was the same between all of them, they found that actual adherence to the diet, in terms of dropout rate from the study and the ability of people to stay in the study study was directly correlated to basically these focus groups that they were running during the study. So they had these group sessions that were held once a week during the entire range of the study. And the folks who actually showed up at the group sessions and were staying accountable, those were the people that were the most successful in terms of their weight loss and their adherence to the diet. And so really like the mystery, the whole big thing that I take away from a study like that is that when it comes to a diet, the most successful diet is the one that you've enabled yourself to adhere to if you're trying to control your calories and lose weight, maybe a vegan, maybe a low carb, maybe a zone diet or whatever. But either way, whichever you look at, you need to be able to adhere to it, and that's really important. And that was really the most interesting thing about this study, was that people were staying accountable. I mean, you can stay accountable through blogging and Twitter and Facebook and anything else. It doesn't have to be by going to group sessions. But that was what helped people be the most successful. Not the actual macronutrient range of the diet, but the actual accountability factor. The other study, the bigger one, was in the Journal of American Medical association, and that one probably comes closer to answering the question because it looked at the Atkins diet. So we're talking about a really low carb diet because the Atkins diet is like the maximum amount of carbohydrate you're supposed to eat is like 20 grams a day. And I think, like, you can get close up to 50 grams a day towards the end of that diet. But the Atkins diet would be considered kind of like the low carb model. It's not perfect low carb model, but it's low carb model. So they compare the Atkins with the zone, which is 40% carb, 30% protein, 30% fat. It's actually pretty close to what I eat. The Ornish diet. The Ornish diet is like high carb, low, low fat. Ornish diet would be closer to like a Vegetarian based diet, like, you know, fat phobic, keep your dietary fat at a maximum of like 10% of your total dietary intake. And then the Learn diet, L, E, A, R, N and I don't remember what the learn part of that stands for. We could probably make up a bunch of potential things, but the Learn diet basically has a little bit higher carbohydrate intake. It's like about 50 to 60% carb. So we've got a lot bigger range here. We've got basically 10% carb all the way up to almost 90% carb in this study. Again, it was pretty big. They had a few hundred people. The trial lasted 12 months. And this is one, one that you hear cited by a lot of low carb advocates because the people that were following the Atkins diet had more weight loss or at least in the actual study. In the conclusion of the study, they say that those assigned to follow the Atkins diet had more weight loss and more favorable metabolic effects at one year than women assigned to the other diet diets. Now a few things about this study is that first of all it was done on obese women, on overweight or obese women. So this wasn't like a generally normal weight population. This was an overweight or obese population. What they found again was that the Atkins diet was considered to be a little bit more effective. But when you actually like, if you get your hands on the study and you look at it, you see that the Atkins diet, like lower carbohydrate intake, it was beating all the other diets at the two month checkpoint that they did and then again at the six month checkpoint that they did. But when you get to the end of the study, like at the actual 12 month checkpoint and you look at weight loss, it's the same between the Atkinson and the Learn and the Ornish. And so the only diet that the Atkins diet beat was the zone diet. In terms of statistically significant weight loss. It beat the zone diet by about six pounds over an entire year. So when we're looking at a zone diet, like a 40, 30, 30 versus a low carb, the low carb, when we look at the results of this study, appears to win at out. But here's kind of the issue is that again folks, you gotta get your hands on the studies and look at them because the Atkins diet is supposed to be like I mentioned, like 20 grams of carbs a day, which is like Nothing. That's what, 80 calories of carbohydrate, it's very, very little. What they actually averaged out to. If you look at what the groups who were on the Atkins actually did, was they were up at about 30% carb intake. None of them adhered to the actual Atkins diet diet and the Zone diet was way above the carb intake that they were supposed to be at. So nobody was successful. When I say nobody, I mean the entire group as a whole was averaging 10 to 20% more carbohydrate intake than they were supposed to take. In the Ornish group that was supposed to be at 10% fat of the total kilocalories were almost double that. During the study, the Learn group, which was supposed to be limiting their saturated fat intake, they had double the intake of their targeted saturated fat. And so ultimately this study that's kind of cherry picked by low carb groups, what it comes down to is that everybody lost weight and everybody was eating more carbs than they were supposed to. And the Atkins diet wasn't really the Atkins diet. So again, what we get here is lots of diet diets all working. Everybody in the group lost weight. Again, it's what you can adhere to. If we're just looking at weight loss, just looking at weight loss, it's what you can adhere to that's going to help you to lose weight.

That's the whole thing that I've been thinking the whole time you've been talking is all these studies have really all they focused on is weight loss. So I guess if your primary reason for or wanting to be on a different diet, and diet being like a way of eating on a daily basis, not a way to starve yourself, it's really. These studies don't have a lot to say about that kind of.

Except you can draw rough parallels between weight loss and metabolic health. Like, you know, if you lose weight, you're improving your blood sugar sensitivity or your blood sugar and your insulin sensitivity and probably decreasing your levels of bad cholesterol and lowering your blood pressure. So you can draw rough parallels, which is why generally considered that overweight and obese folks for the most part are less healthy. And so I think you can draw rough parallels in terms of health benefits. But I think the ultimate answer to which diet is best is that there is no diet that is is best. My advice is if you're confused, choose a diet that A, has no magic pills or magic juices or magic parts associated with it. Where you get on this diet where you're subscribing to drink a really expensive juice for a year, B, don't choose a diet that Completely, like vilifies a certain food group. Like a diet that tells you you can't go near grains or legumes. And then c, you pick a diet that you can adhere to. And I think if you at least follow those three things, you're well on your way to finding a good diet for you.

Yeah, I think being able to go out and actually enjoy life is an important part, part of being on a diet as well. Especially if you're gonna try and stick to it.

Exactly. And I mean, your diet can change throughout the year too. It can, it can change based on your activity levels and everything else. So, yeah, that being said, I guess we've spent a long time on that question. This will turn into a super podcast if we don't move on. So hopefully that helps out a little bit though.

Okay, our next question comes from John. John says, hi, Ben. Great job on the podcast. I'm preparing for a mountain climb expedition this spring. Expedition climbing differs from other endurance sports such as triathlon in a number of ways. An Expedition may last two months or more. The summit day may last 12 hours or more with only short rest breaks. The aerobic system is taxed by high altitude. Average intensity is less than race type sports, but peak intensity is just as high. You need good full body strength to carry a heavy backpack while performing climbing move moves with balance and flexibility. So he wants to know, how would you train for this? What specific workouts would you do?

Sounds like a cool expedition.

It does, yeah.

So as far as the altitude goes, more and more studies are showing that, you know, a lot of these altitude tents, altitude chambers, fancy, expensive altitude exposure mechanisms, don't really work all that well. And so I wouldn't get carried away with those as much as I would with as much as you possibly can. Try and engage in living low and training high, which is the form of altitude training that's been shown to have the most benefits when it comes to getting your body ready for something like this. So that means that multiple times throughout the winter you're trying to go on a drive or get yourself up to altitude, train for a few days at altitude at the most, or even just like a full day for altitude at the most, but then do most of your living, which is going to allow you to recover more quickly and basically absorb that training a little bit more effectively back down at a lower elevation. So it's called live low, train high. So if you can arrange that, it's logistically difficult, but that's really the best way to go about the altitude Training when you can get away with it. As far as looking at this from a strength and conditioning strategy standpoint, the type of things that I would be doing would be first of all, if you're limited to like a gym type of training and don't have access to a lot of hills around your area to train on, I would be doing a lot of weighted climbing on an actual stair mill, which is the type of stairmaster that is actual stair steps that move like a stair mill or like a treadmill. And you can do that weighted. So you literally bring your pack to the gym and a couple of light dumbbells and you can put some ankle weights on your feet to simulate your boots and heavier pants and you just climb and you can do that as intervals that's going to get you the most bang for your buck. But a sample workout to get you ready for a summit day that's going to last 12 hours or more would be like four 20 minute intervals with 10 minute recoveries where your intervals are at a fair intense climbing pace. So not incredibly exciting. But again, you're going to be climbing for 12 hours anyways, staring at the side of a mountain, so might as well get used to it. So the next thing I would do would be a ton of glute work. High knee step ups with a barbell on your back. Single leg squats, hip hikes, which is where you're standing on a platform and kind of dropping your hip to one side and raising it back up. Lateral leg raises, both for the back of the glutes as well as the side of the glutes. I would be doing a lot of glute work because that's going to be really important for your climbing capability. As far as the next part of your body, I would be focusing on core work and specifically when you're working your core, do standing core exercises. A couple I would really focus on would be like standing torso twists where you're holding onto a cable and doing torso twists to one side and then torso twists to the other with the arms extended, extended standing cross body chops. So chopping low to high, chopping high to low, still in a standing position. Because again, you're definitely not going to be working your core in a seated or a lying or a planked position. During this summit that pack is going to pull your shoulders forward. So I would be doing a lot of shoulder stability work like standing rows and a standing shoulder blade retraction, pulling your shoulder blades back, standing single leg rows, rows, which is where you can Literally hold onto a cable and row while standing on one leg. Doing a lot of work for the shoulders, again in a standing position. So shoulder stability work. And the other thing that you can do to fight against that kind of hunching forward mechanism is focus on chest flexibility. You can do like door frame stretches where you lean into a door and stretch out the chest muscles. And by the way, just about everything I'm talking about, I've got videos of over at YouTube, my YouTube channel@YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness so you can go over there and see pictures of all these exercises I'm referencing. I would do. The way that I would kind of put this together is I would be doing two a days. I would be doing your conditioning in the a.m. and your strength in the pitch, doing for the strength work, this glute work, core work, shoulder stability work that I just described. And if you don't have the time to do that, then alternate days conditioning one day, strength the next day, and then just spend as much time on your feet as possible. Get a standing workstation, standing desk, stand when you're eating, stand when you're talking, stand when you're talking on the phone. Just get used to lots of time on your feet so that you train a lot of those postural muscles, those smaller postural muscles that could easily become fatigued with like a 12 hour summit day. So that's what I'd be doing.

I've actually seen guys at the gym before with the full gear, the hiking boots, the big pants, the big jackets and a backpack on those stairmill things. And it's quite a sight to watch those guys go. But it's kind of funny at first and then after an hour and a half when I'm putting my regular clothes on and heading home and then, and they're still trudging up there like, whoa, that's serious.

Yeah. So the only thing that they're missing there is their Sherpa to kind of guide them. I think a Sherpa is essential, so I'll throw that in there too. As well. For my answer to John is to bring a Sherpa to the gym if you're going to do stair mill work.

I have nothing to say about that. Okay, so onto the next question from Jens. Jens says, I learned about super compensation decades ago and that certain muscles need approximately 48 hours to get into the super compensation state. Now, to be honest, I've never felt that it worked or, or that it didn't. I just did it. Does this principle still matter? And if so, how would one figure these cycles out? For runners who run every day, does this principle work or is this type of exercise different? How do trainers like you, Ben, figure out how often, often one specific person has to put on a load or put a load on their body to get the best results? Or is super compensation just a thing for bodybuilders?

Cool. Good question. Supercompensation sounds really fancy, but basically all it means is that your body recovers from a workout after the workout, not during the actual workout. So while you're working out, you're breaking down muscle fibers, you're depleting nutrients and you're fat, fatiguing your body and your muscle system and your nervous system. And from this state of fatigue, your body starts to rebuild itself. So when you rest, you increase your protein synthesis, which rebuilds the muscle fibers, your nervous system and your hormonal synthesis kind of returns back to their original baseline levels and you begin to do what's known as compensation. And if you really recover for a long time, you get into a phase of super compensation, which is where your body is, is totally 100% healed. And the problem is, if you let yourself go into super compensation too much, it just takes so much rest and recovery to get there that you kind of start to get out of shape. So the ideal scenario is that you only reach a level of super compensation, which is where you're literally kind of doing rest and recovery for two to three full days. You're only reaching that level of super compensation at certain periods of time throughout the year, preferably as you're getting closer to a race or an event or something for which exercise is really important. And most of the time you're just kind of reaching that compensation phase where you kind of back up to around baseline. So it kind of varies depending on your sport. And that's the thing is that this really is the concept of what's called periodization, which is where you set up certain times of the year where you, you are super compensating more often to allow your body to grow more fit during those times of year. And then there's other times of the year where you're not getting into the super compensation phase very much just because you're trying to beat up your body and kind of keep it in this really fatigue state for longer periods of time so that the post fatigue super compensation is even higher. So this is stuff that you hire a coach like me to actually help plan for you. And the thing is, if you want to learn all this yourself. Go pick up a book called Periodization of Sport. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's by Tudor Bumpa, but it's called Periodization of Sport. And it teaches you how to kind of set up your entire year so that you super compensate when you want to be super compensating. And then how I can track this with an athlete is I like to use. There's a few things I can use. The athletes who I coach can go into the system that I used to coach them with, which is called trainingpeaks. And they can log their heart rate and their morning weight, and they can leave feedback on their workouts and upload their heart rate from their workouts. And I can basically see what's going on with their body during their workouts. But one really, really cool way to do this is with something called Restwise. So if you go listen to podcast episode number 122, which I'll link to from here. In podcast episode number 122, I interview the guys from Restwise and they have this whole system set up where it basically graphs your recovery scores. And from there, when I see the recovery scores really, really dip on any of my athletes who are using Restwise and sending me their recovery scores via that system, then I know that that athlete needs to be brought into a compensation phase. If I'm seeing restwise scores that are constantly dipping or constantly low, low. And so that really helps me know when to plan out the workouts and how hard to go and when to lay off as well. Just keeping my finger on the pulse of an athlete's recovery period, hopefully that gives you a little bit better idea of how to use super compensation. What it is, and basically what you would do in terms of tracking your recovery and when you're finding that your recovery scores are really, really dropping and your morning resting heart rate is really high, and what's called your heart rate variation is kind of off the charts, and you're beginning to show a lot of the signs of overreaching or over training. Then you go into your compensation phase, and then you just kind of rinse, wash, and repeat throughout the year, timing periods of super compensation to occur before the areas where you want to be really fit, like before an event or a race. So that's how you would do it.

Well, there you go, Jeff. Hope that helps. That made complete sense to me. I've never heard it called that before, but that's. It makes. Makes total sense.

Yeah, that's the scientific term.

All right, next question comes from Kathy. Kathy says, hi, Ben, thanks for all the great info you put out. Can you talk a bit more about multivitamins? I remember someone asking you about taking inexpensive multis and you talked about the differences in low and high quality. But do you think taking a good multivitamin is good insurance even for someone who eats soundly and includes lots of different vegetables? Then she has a second part of the question where she asks about this particular kind of multivitamin that is, it's quite expensive and it's lower dose, but the idea is that it's cultured. It's a vitamin that's been cultured and therefore they say it absorbs much more effectively. So the lower dose dose is okay.

Yeah. So we're talking about the whole concept of whole food multivitamins. And the reason for that is when you isolate a nutrient, which is what a vitamin is, just a bunch of different isolated specific nutrients, and then you add that to the diet in the form of the pill or the capsule, it's a little bit different than when you get it from food. It's isolated. So it doesn't work quite as well as when it's the vitamin C. Apple is more effective than the vitamin C in the airborne tablet that you dissolve in your ginger ale. So what manufacturers are doing is they're trying to get closer to putting the actual source of the fruits and the vegetables into a capsule as kind of like a blended up whole food nutrient. So they're trying to include a lot of the components of the whole food that that vitamin would normally be found in in the capsule itself. Which is a lot of times when you take a whole food multivitamin, you gotta pop like 12 to be the equivalent of a normal non whole food vitamin, which may require you to get the same amount of vitamins from two or else the whole food vitamins are like horse pills compared to the normal ones. So I don't think anyone would disagree that getting your nutrients from eating a whole food source is going to be better. And anytime you're getting nutrients and vitamins and minerals from food, they're going to be better absorbed than when you get them from pills or from capsules. But the idea behind whole food vitamins is that they're more expensive to make. And I'm going to be straight up here. Even though all the multivitamins that I recommend to folks, and I do recommend them to old people, to children and to people who are exercising a lot, lot and depleting their bodies quite a bit, Even though all of the vitamins that I recommend would definitely be considered whole food vitamins, I recommend them based out of my faith that getting your nutrients from whole foods or as close to a whole food source as possible is going to be better than getting them from an isolated nutrient. And I don't want to give anybody the misperception that I'm basing this off of some type of big study that's been done that has compared whole food multivitamins with non whole food multivitamins. Because ultimately such a study doesn't exist, at least not that I'm aware of, in terms of a good study that compares the two sources of vitamins. So when you're looking at a cultured food vitamin that has probiotics that help to enhance the delivery by stepping up the activity of the digestive system system to whole food vitamins that include a lot of these complex compounds from whole food in the actual vitamin themself, you probably are talking about a benefit. But again, you're spending a lot of money on something that hasn't necessarily been proven with a study. However, if you are going to take a multivitamin, which I do recommend, if you are aging or elderly, if you're a growing child or if you're exercising a lot, lot and you need some extra vitamin or mineral or nutrient sources, I recommend those type of vitamins. The one that I actually like over at Pacific Elite Fitness, the one that I recommend over there, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes, it's a liquid vitamin. And that's just because supplements have to be absorbed and assimilated into your body. And for something like a vitamin where you want really complete absorption, if that pill or capsule does, it doesn't have to be dissolved in the liquid form before it gets absorbed or assimilated, you get a little bit better absorption and breakdown. So the one that my kids take, because my kids take a multivitamin is the kids calm liquid multivitamin. And then this other one is put up by Peter Gillum, Natural vitality. It's called an organic life vitamin that also is a liquid multivitamin. And I really do like the liquid source if you're going to go with a multivitamin. Finally, last thing is, I personally don't take a multivitamin. I eat a lot of really good food and then I add in the kind of a la carte the vitamins that I want to add in, which for me is vitamin D. And then I also have kind of like a higher Dose vitamin B supplement I'll take sometimes before a workout.

That liquid vitamin. How does it taste?

It's pretty good. My kids love it. It's got this orangish fruit punchy flavor and. And yeah, it's not bad.

I just had this feeling that it would be just disgusting stuff. But that's great if it even tastes good.

Yeah, it does. Tastes fabulous. Just drink it all day long, see what happens.

Turn into a God. All right, our next question comes from Brandon. It's a really interesting one actually. He goes into a whole long story I'll try to paraphrase before I ask the question. On Thanksgiving break, he went, he went away from his college weight room and wasn't doing any workouts, wasn't lifting weights or doing any cardio. And he saw a big decrease in his weight quite quickly. It was seven pounds over five days. Then he came back to, back to school and he went back to his regular routine and he shot up 7 pounds over about 5 or 7 pounds over his normal weight. So I don't know what his normal weight was, but he shot up even higher over the. Of the course. Course of five days. So his question is, Ben, I was wondering how quickly can cortisol and or water cause major fluctuations in weight gain? Could these factors cause gains that would indicate significant over consumption of calories or do the calories play the primary role in the weight gain that these factors make more apparent? So it's sort of which one's coming first here, the cortisol or the egg?

Yeah, definitely the cortisol. So cortisol inhibits your sodium loss through your small intestine. So what that means is you retain sodium as your cortisol levels go up. Interestingly, a little personal anecdote. I've had cortisone injections a few times during my life and I always notice, I feel, in addition to being stressed out from those extra cortisol levels, I feel like I'm a little bit bloated for a few days after getting a cortisone injection, interestingly. So usually sodium is kind of balanced with potassium in your body. And because cortisol causes that sodium retention as well as an excretion of potassium, you basically get this water retention, which is also caused because cortisol acts like an antidiuretic hormone. So about half of your intestines, intestinal waters that kind of flow in and out of your intestines, that's controlled by cortisol and you get a lot less loss of water again when you have higher levels of cortisol. So if you're stressed out, if you're back into your normal work routine, even if you're working out a ton, that can also cause really high cortisol levels. But all this stuff can cause almost immediate bloating, fluid retention, water retention that can cause that huge fluctuation in weight gain. That can happen a lot more quickly, literally, like over the course of a day compared to putting on fat from increased calorie intake, which usually takes place over a week or two, to actually from increased calorie intake start to really significantly gain weight.

Yeah, that's good to hear because with the holiday season coming, I think everybody's probably worried that jamming all that food into your body over the the course of two days is going to, it's not the greatest, but at least it's not going to result in what happened.

To our friend Brandon. I'm not trying to be gross here, but frankly, if it's an acute phase of overeating and you're a relatively healthy individual, you're going to end up pooing most of that out. You're not going to absorb it all and balloon up and become fat. I mean, don't think that if you eat 6,000 calories for a holiday meal because I a pound of fat equals 3,500 calories, you're going to gain almost 2 pounds of fat. You simply don't have the ability to absorb all that. And most of it's going to pass through, end up in your large intestine and you're just going to be spending a lot of time on the toilet the next day or the next couple days.

But we still shouldn't take that as free license.

Go for it. Just go crazy.

Okay, well this next we've got kind of another twofer here. There's Steve and Petra. Both wanted to know some information about leg workouts and I'm guessing this is above and beyond the legs like Lance Armstrong post. So if they haven't taken a look at that yet, Steve and Petra go take a look at that as well. But here's Steve's question. First is what are the best weightliftingresistance training exercises for the legs for distance runners? I typically get a lower leg or hip injury two or three times a year running and I believe it's from doing little resistance training for my legs. Now, Petra, her question is a little more in depth, but it revolves around the same thing. She says, thanks so much for everything you put out here, Ben. She's learned so much from everything that you, you post. She's very, very grateful about that. But the question is, I've run my entire life, or at least since I could join track, and I mainly do long distance races and have completed three marathons and just ran a half marathon. Now my goal is to qualify for Boston like every other competitive runner out there. I honestly think that if I could figure out how to lean up a bit more, I would be able to be a much better runner than I am now. And I'm just unsure how to combine running strength and nutrition all together. She thinks the problem that's holding her back is that she's always struggled with developing muscle tone. She's lean, but she doesn't look like a lean ripped runner. Her upper body is more toned than her lower half, but could still use some more help. So she's looking for some strengthening exercises that would be able to put muscle on under the fat in her legs.

You know, I know that those were two kind of, kind of involved questions, but I want to step back and simplify this because basically they're kind of both asking the same thing. How are you supposed to lift weights for running? Because you know, one person wants to get stronger, one person wants to put on a little bit of muscle. But ultimately because you, you should always be building muscle that is functional and not just isolated bodybuilder style muscle that really doesn't do anything for you in terms of your running speed or power or efficiency or economy. When you're looking at lifting weights to become a better runner, everything should be focused on the performance aspect of adding that muscle. And know that the lean muscle benefit, the aesthetic benefit will follow. That's kind of the entire basis of this new tri ripped triathlon training muscle program I'm putting together that comes out in January. And it's also the basis of my Weight Training for Triathlon book. Although the Weight Training for Triathlon book is even less focused on aesthetics than Tri Ripped is, and more focused on pure power and performance. So the type of workouts, the type of exercises that you're looking at doing are primarily exercises that involve hip extension. That's going to be really the action that you want to most pursue when it comes to lifting weights for running. So the reason for that is that the push off phase of running involves hip extension. And regardless of whether you're a high cadence runner or a low cadence runner, regardless of your running style, ultimately the harder you're able to push off the ground, the faster you're going to be able to go it's the greater distance you're going to travel per step. So for that reason, I would not focus too much on leg extensions and leg curls and even leg presses, which really don't put you in a position where you're in contact with the ground because you're usually lying down while you're doing them. And I would instead focus on squats and single leg squats, deadlifts and single leg deadlifts, and any type of cable exercise where you are kicking with a cable attached to your ankle via like an ankle based attachment that comes with the cable apparatus. At the gym, if you were to just choose three different modes of exercise, those are the three different modes of exercise that are going to most significantly increase the power of your hip extension. Now, there is a fancy contraption at some gyms, my YMCA has one and I love it. It is an exercise machine where you kind of get into it and you're leaning forward with your chest against a pad and then you're kicking out behind you, forcefully extending your hip behind you with one foot placed on a platform. Literally you're kicking out behind you. That's a fantastic exercise for improving your hip extension capabilities. But a lot of gyms don't have them. It's called like a hip kick out machine or a leg kick out machine or something like that. So that being said, squats, deadlifts and cable kicks in any direction are going to help you out quite a a bit. And typically your rep range is going to be anywhere in the range of like 6 to 10 reps for improving your power and your strength. And I would highly recommend, if you haven't got your form kind of dialed in with those, that you hire a personal trainer for one session to teach you how to squat and deadlift properly. And those would be the exercises that should kind of form the basis of you developing increased power in your hip extension and, and being able to run faster and also being able to add some lean muscle to your body because especially the squat and the deadlift, those are very anabolic exercises. They're very, very good at developing muscle as well as power and strength. So I hope I didn't simplify that too much, but I really wanted to just give Steve and Petra, pun intended, something they could just take and run with. And that's what I would start off with immediately at the gym for both injury prevention as well as strength and muscle development for running.

Yeah, I think that that would definitely answer Steve's question. Petra, I think, I apologize. I think I kind of butchered your question. I was asking Ben, but I believe he answered it really well. And also, if you go back and listen to earlier in the episode, there's been quite a bit of talk about gaining muscle mass and losing fat at the same time. I think we talked about that a couple of times in this episode. So hopefully between that answer and those other couple answers, you get all the information that you were looking for.

Yeah, just rewind four or five hours back to the beginning of this podcast. I think we're getting towards the end, aren't we?

We are. This is our last question. I started the episode with a little bit of gray in my beard and.

Now it's completely white and it's almost noon and I still have not had breakfast. All right, let's do it.

Okay. Nadine's question. Last question. On the web you have a link that deals with preventing your computer from sabotaging your health. The link talks briefly about electromagnetic radiation and its effects. There's been some research about the effects of wireless as well on the blood brain barrier. Also, toxicologist Deborah Davis has written a new book called Disconnect that deals with some of the health effects of wireless, I guess wireless technologies. What do you think about athletes using heart rate monitors and power meters? That pulse in the wireless range? Example A 2.4 GHz pulse.

Wow. Interesting. Interesting. Well, yes, I did write a article at BenGreenfieldFitness.com about how to prevent your computer from sabotaging your health. I'll put a link to that article. But basically the reason that I wrote it is because I use a laptop and it sets on my laptop. And a lot of times I would literally have high amounts of crotch discomfort and heat in my legs and radiation and heat going into my thighs and my crotch. And that concerned me, frankly. And in addition to that, I would have headaches after spending long periods of time staring at the computer and just a strange feeling in my head and my eyes. So what I did was I wrote an article about a couple of fixes that I use for that. I use a typ of reading glass or computer glass called a Gunnar and it literally is designed to block or shield some of the radiation that comes off the screen of your computer. And then I also have kind of a heat absorbing, electromagnetic field radiation absorbing pad that I set my computer on that when it's sitting in my lap or even just on my desk, it absorbs some of the heat from the computer so that it can set on my legs and do a little less damage. That Way I don't want again to give anybody the impression that I'm way out in left field when it comes to electromagnetic radiation, because you do get a lot of folks talking about high, high carcinogenic effect of an electromagnetic field. And the studies on that aren't real conclusions. So basically to understand this a little bit more completely, just understand that an electromagnetic field, which is also going to be known as emr, electromagnetic radiation, that's just a region like in space through which energy passes. So it's created by electrically charged particles, power lines, electrical appliances, radio waves, microwaves. Has this person stated heart rate monitors, all this stuff produces an electromagnetic field. And, and a lot of people kind of fear that that could cause cancer, although there's no conclusive or consistent evidence that that could be the case. And I'll mention a few of the studies that have been done. But basically you're getting this electromagnetic radiation from photons. So the energy of a photon, you know, how much actual energy that electromagnetic radiation, the form of a photon has, depends on its fraction frequency. So like a cell phone EMF is 10 million times weaker than the type of energy that radiates in a field that literally does cause radiation like something that could cause cancer. So the thing is that a lot of folks really, really want to try and prove that electromagnetic radiation can cause cancer. So there was in 2006, you know, it gets cited a lot, there was research done in Sweden that found increased risk for brain tumors and people who use cell phones or cordless phones held up against their ears. But that was a really, really small study and they basically did it with self administered questionnaires. So it wasn't that comprehensive or impressive. You know, in contrast, they did a Danish study with 420, 20,000 mobile phone users and they found zero association or increased risk of cancer. And that was done in the same year. So they were using the same type of technology. They found another study that really had no increased risk associated with short term mobile phone use. And that was another Swedish study that kind of came along a little bit later. And there are, there are some studies that have found in laboratory animals some effects from microwave exposure, but no actual effects that have literally been high enough to be of carcinogenic alarm. So there's lots of scare stories out there, there's lots of really small kind of fringe cited studies out there. But the fact is there's no real, really compelling evidence that electromagnetic radiation or electromagnetic frequencies disease could cause cancer, or high heart rate or high blood pressure or anything else that's Kind of cited by folks as being an issue this magazine or this book that was cited. What was the name of it?

The Disconnect by Deborah Davis.

Disconnect. We'll put a link to that in the show notes and I may go read it just to see what she has to say. Because I certainly have my mind open to this type of stuff because as you know, just based off the way that my body felt after using my computer for a long period of time, regardless of whether or not I thought that I was at risk for cancer, which I don't, I just didn't like the way that my body felt. So I got these glasses and this heat pad to reduce some of my exposure to these electromagnetic frequencies and electromagnetic radiation. When I go to bed in my house, I try and unplug as many things as I can in the bedroom because I find that I sleep better when I'm not getting exposed to a lot of this energy and EMF exposure. And I would treat your heart rate monitor and your exercise devices the same way. I wouldn't be using them unless you have to. I wouldn't be walking around during the day and sitting at your desk with your heart rate monitor on. I wouldn't have your big heavy GPS based wristwatch on all the time. I would be kind of disconnecting yourself when you can can disconnect yourself. And this again, I'm not basing it on research. I'm not saying you're going to get cancer or anything like that. I'm just saying to play it safe. And frankly, because I just feel better when I try and limit my exposure to a lot of these electronic devices. On my cell phone I use an air tube headset rather than the type of headset that can have higher electromagnetic frequencies. If you really wanted to go crazy crazy, you could go to website like I know there's one called Lessemf.com and they've got radiation blocking headbands and brain coat hats and T shirts and pretty much everything you can think of to block electromagnetic radiation. And I guess if you want to go to work wearing your big safeguard apron that protects you against any form of radiation that could come at you from anything, you could do that. But ultimately my answer is a little bit more simple. Just don't use electronic devices unless you need to be using them. And if you use anything that you feel causes heat or discomforts or headaches or anything else like that, try and find something like I did that blocks some of that radiation or absorbs some of that radiation I think that we probably scratched the surface of emf. And I think for that reason, I'm writing a note to myself right now to go check this book out because I am kind of interested in this topic and if I find it compelling, maybe we'll contact the author and we'll get her on the show and talk with her a little bit more about this.

Yeah, that'd be very interesting. I'm looking around the room right now that I'm in. I'm surrounded by stuff like there's two computers, there's a printer, there's a wireless generator, there's two different cell phones, there's light, there's everything. So really, it's almost like the bacteria problem. Like people who are using the bacteria hand washes constantly because they're trying to avoid bacteria. Well, you can make yourself crazy if you try to avoid all electromagnetic radiation in today's society.

Really?

So just like you said, Ben, just limiting your exposure is really all we can do because otherwise you can make yourself completely nuts and be the guy wearing the tinfoil hat.

Yeah, yeah, agreed.

And nobody wants to be that guy.

No, tinfoil hats are uncomfortable.

Yeah, they never look good.

They don't last that long either. They're very non durable.

Okay, now we're dragging it out for absolutely no reason and we actually have finished our final question. We just have one last thing here that I wanted to read. A testimonial from listener Christian. Christian said, good morning. I finished my First Iron Man 2 weeks ago Ironman Florida. I couldn't have done it without your triathlon dominator plan. Two more weeks of recovery and then training starts for Ironman Florida 2012. Goal for next year is sub 11 hours. Thanks Ben. Christian.

Cool. Nice job, Christian. By the way, thank you for the donation. Anybody that donates to this podcast, truly appreciate it. I spend about 300 bucks out of my personal wallet wallet every month to kind of support all the downloads that folks are doing. When people go in and give a buck, it helps. It helps a lot. Whether you're donating a dollar or $5 a month, I really, really, truly appreciate it. That's the reason that I can sleep in until 8:30 in the morning, roll out of bed and figure out that I almost overslept the podcast and get on and podcast until lunch. Lunch because of the support from listeners like you. If you want to keep this podcast going, donate. And if for any reason you can't donate, at least leave us a ranking in itunes or say something nice. Of course, everything we talked about today, which I know was a ton, we will put as a link in the Show Notes. We try and make the show notes as comprehensive as possible, and you can get those at podcast number 174 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and another good way to support the show, if we talk about books, follow our Amazon links because that means Amazon will pay us a few cents when you buy a book. Pretty much anything we talk about. If you can go to the Show Notes and check it out, it always helps to support the show. That being said, I'm really looking forward to giving away some stuff myself on my birthday here coming up.

Fantastic. That's very exciting. So I guess that's it for this week.

Yep, absolutely. And folks, happy holidays. I know we're right in the middle of the holiday season if you're listening to this podcast when it comes out. And I'd just like to wish warm holiday wishes towards everybody who's listening in. And I hope that you really are enjoying yourself and have a great Christmas and New Year's. And we'll be in touch next week.

Awesome.

Well, this is Brock and Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.