Episode #183: Are Your Hormones Out Of Whack?

In this podcast, are your hormones out of whack? Also, which type of coconut milk is best? Bike workouts in a hotel Choosing the best elliptical chainrings which fats are the healthiest? Is sugar free dark chocolate okay? Controlling the urge to snack at work. Stress incontinence in runners, Increased heart rate in humidity and heat, correcting in estrogen dominance and lowering cortisol levels.

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

Hey folks, welcome to the February 15, 2012 Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. It's episode number 183. This is Brock coming to you live from the middle of Toronto. And I've got Ben here, of course. Ben, what's going on? Where are you?

I'm actually where I usually am, in Spokane, Washington. But I'm glad you survived. Cuba?

Yeah. Are we allowed to talk about Cuba? This is an American podcast. Am I going to get arrested?

I don't think they're going to fire missiles at us. Now you can, you can mention Cuba. How'd that go for you?

It is a fantastic place. The only thing was trying to keep up with the Rev diet that I'm working on right now was a little tricky staying in one of the all inclusive resorts, but I did my best.

I was going to say, would you just have like mangoes and coffee all day down there?

Yeah, pretty much. And you know, coconut milk is like in everything, which is fantastic. It's so easy to order. Basically a virgin pina colada and that's right in there. That's like pretty much what I had for breakfast this morning.

That makes it convenient. You didn't come back with like a big beard and like a camo cap or anything like that, did you?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm totally like, viva la revolucion.

Great look.

Special announcements.

Okay, so I know you've got all kinds of stuff going on, especially a book. What's happening with that?

Yeah, I do have my next book coming out on May 1st. That's the one I've been working on for quite some time. The book that teaches you what body type you have and then what type of exercise and nutrition program is going to be ideal for your body type. And I got a letter from my editors this week, actually, and they wanted testimonials for the book. And I thought it would be not only cool to get some testimonials from some of the clients who I coach, but also reach out to you, the people who are listening in. If you've been out of shape, overweight, maybe had some health issues you were dealing with, or you've achieved some really cool goal, write in to the show. Write to Ben greenfieldfitness.com, share your photo, share your story, share anything that you wouldn't mind us using in the book or maybe on the back cover of the book or in the first few pages or on the website or maybe we'll just make you famous and have you come, Oprah. But you know, essentially, if you've got a testimonial, if you've been a fan, if you've been following my advice, write in. I would truly appreciate any testimonials you want to shoot my way. So take a mental note to yourself as you're listening in. And if you've got a cool story to tell, email benvengreenfieldfitness.com Very cool. And to flip a complete 180. I got the results from my stool test back and I wanted to announce that.

Surprise, everybody.

Let's go from talking about testimonials to talking about poo. I posted the results publicly. There are no poo photographs or anything of that nature. Don't worry. Basically what happens is a stool exam allows you to get a look at everything that's going on in terms of your GI tract. It's called a full GI panel. I'll link to it in the show notes. But it's really cool because it allows you to see everything from how much good bacteria you have, how much bad bacteria that you have, the number of fatty acids that are in your stomach, the number of digestive enzymes you may or may not be producing, the presence of any type of parasites or infections. Just very, very cool to get a comprehensive look at the GI tract. And I know that a lot of people are kind of curious what it actually looks like, what the results that get spit back at you look like. So I posted them public. I'll put a link in the show notes. But I not only posted my results, but also kind of the explanation of the results. So if you've got GI issues, if you're concerned that you might have something in your GI tract, go check that out and you can kind of see what it looks like when you get the test done.

That's fantastic. Because I actually, I've considered having that same panel done and it'd be really interesting to actually, it'd be great to see what the, what you actually get back because when you're paying that much money for something like that, it'd be really nice to get a little sneak peek into what kind of information you actually get back. So, yeah, thanks for posting that. That's fantastic.

Yeah, you can get that affirmation that you don't have a sea monster in your small intestine or a wasp's nest in your stomach or anything else weird like that going on.

News flashes.

So you got stuff going on at Google, you've got stuff going on@twitter.com let's hear about some of the best ones.

Yeah, I came across a few interesting things this week. First of all, more evidence that fish oil is a good thing to take. You don't have to measure with fish oil. But there was a study that came out that looked at fish oil use, in this case aging females. But it was found that compared to a non fish oil group, individuals who used about 2 grams of a fish oil per day maintained significantly higher muscle strength and functional capacity. So as you age, grab those fish oil capsules or make sure that you're making fish a part of your diet. Super important. The benefits go beyond strength and functional capacity, but that was what this study found. And so chalk another one up for fish oil.

Cool. Now, I ate for dinner last night, I had one of those little packs of sardines in olive oil. How would that like, is that basically, is that like a dose of fish oil? Would that be comparable to taking a couple of those capsules or is that, how does it compare?

Yeah, as far as the capsules go, those are highly concentrated extractions of the DHA and epa, the beneficial fatty acids that you're going to find in something like a can of sardines. So a can of sardines is not going to quite give you up around that 2 to 4 gram range that you'd get out of a like a good high quality, like a triglyceride based fish oil capsule. So what I do is generally I'll take about 1 to 2 grams of a fish oil capsule if I'm not having, or if, I'm sorry, if I am having fish on the day. Like if I'm having a can of sardines or maybe some salmon with dinner or something of that nature. And then if I'm not eating fish on the day, I'll take closer to 2 to 4 grams of a fish oil capsule.

Gotcha.

Another study found or looked at sleep and appetite and found that lack of sleep makes your brain hungry. And we've kind of known that lack of sleep can indeed spark the appetite. But this was a study that came out in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism and found that as little as one night of sleep loss, even in a person who's sleeping normally throughout the rest of the week, results in basically acute loss of the ability to control the appetite. And they actually studied the regions of the brain that are responsible for appetite control. And it just once again affirms that it's so much easier to reach for that Snickers bar or have a lack of self control when you're low on sleep. And again, signifies the importance of getting enough sleep in most people and especially active people. You're looking at seven to nine hours. Despite. If you've read Dean Carnazi's 40 Marathons in 40 Days book where you sleep in five hours a night, he's an anomaly. People who only sleep five or six hours a night, I think Michael Jordan was another example. They're an anomaly. Most people need seven to nine hours.

I love seven hours. It's my favorite.

I love like 10, but that's few and far between.

Yeah, that doesn't happen when you have two little boys running around, I'm sure.

Yeah. Diabetes. There was a study on diabetes that found a direct link in terms of the actual dose of exercise with diabetes and improvements in sens to insulin and reduction of a lot of the risky factors involved with type 2 diabetes. And there was a distinct relationship between the amount of exercise that you do and the reduction of diabetic risk. And in this case, people who were exercising five times a week for 45 minutes a session, which, if you do the math, is significantly higher than what is currently recommended, which is about 150 minutes a week for diabetes. These folks experienced significantly lower symptoms. So what that comes down to is, is if you've got a genetic history in your family of type 2 diabetes, if you yourself are at high risk for type 2 diabetes or have type 2 diabetes, you may need to be exercising more than 150 minutes per week, which is the current recommendation. And I wanted to bring that to people's attention just in case you are doing the 30 minutes of exercise a day, 20 minutes of exercise a day, you may need to step that up to closer to 30 to 60 minutes a day. If you want to reduce that type.

2 diabetes risk, that's two weeks in a row. Now we've had information about type 2 diabetes. I think last week it was the really significant caloric restriction, like almost like a fasting. So that would be a perfect one, two punch. If you've got the type 2 diabetes, maybe don't go as far into a caloric deficit, but increase your exercise and maybe find a good balance that way.

Exactly. You don't have to starve yourself and be like a rat on a wheel all day long. But certainly moderate amounts of exercise and significantly moderate amounts of caloric restriction can vastly improve your insulin sensitivity and potentially reverse type 2 diabetes. And that's what that starvation study showed. Last thing I wanted to note before we move into this week's Q and A is a study that looked at weight loss response to four different weight loss diets. Essentially what they did was they took diets that were in differing amounts of carbohydrate, protein and fat content and then they studied folks for six months to see the amount of weight and the amount of fat that was lost on each different diet. There was really no significant difference between all of the different fat, carbohydrate and protein percentages that they used. So protein varied from 15 to 25%, fat varied from 20 to 40%, and carbs varied from 35 to 65%. I have two thoughts about this study. The first is that whenever you hear about a study that shows that there's no significant difference in weight loss between diet groups, remember there's more to life than weight loss. You want to look at things like the plaque buildup in the arteries, the health of the liver and the kidneys, the health of the digestive tract, the overall amount of inflammation that may occur or oxidized cholesterol particles. And I wish that studies that looked at weight loss. I know this is harder to do, it's more expensive to do in the studies, but I wish they'd look at some of those other variables that affect health. And the other thing that you should note about a study like this is that, for example, this study didn't cover my diet. My diet is about 60% fat and this diet only covered 20 to 40% fat carbohydrate intake amounts. In my opinion, they didn't really study a group that was relatively moderate in carbohydrate intake. The lowest carbohydrate intake was 35%. And I've seen fantastic results with people who are down around closer to 15 to 20% carbohydrate intake, in some cases slightly lower. So remember, too that when you see that a study has done something like looked at moderate carbohydrate intake and found no effect, a lot of times moderate carbohydrate intake kind of depends on who's defining it. In this case, 35% is considered the low carb intake, when in my opinion, for a lot of people, that's still kind of high.

Listener Q and A. All right. As usual, we have a enormous backlog of listener questions coming in, and that's fantastic. But make sure you don't panic if you don't hear yours this week. Keep listening. It will come up. So start it off with this first audio question from Rick.

Hey Ben, My name is Rick, calling from la. I have two unrelated questions for the podcast. The first question is about what coconut milk brand or type you recommend I should buy. I purchased your low carb diet book for triathletes a little while ago and I'm a little confused as to which type of milk I should buy. I see the milk in the one gallon carton as well as the milk in a can. My second question is, what are your thoughts on the propensity of athletes getting rhombomyolysis? I recently read an article on intense workouts and the author made reference to it. I was wondering if there was something that I should be concerned about with respect to this and what are the side effects? I'm assuming there's side effects to this, but what side effects would we watch out for with respect to that? Anyways, love the show, been a long time listener. Thanks a lot.

Bye.

So coconut brands and types, what kind should he get? I've been wondering the same thing. Is the can better? Is the carton better? Which one is it better?

You know, I personally use the can. We use a brand called Native Forest. We use that brand for a lot of the stuff that we do, a lot of the canned foods that we do, because Native Forest is one particular brand that is lower in BPA or bisphenol A, and that's the chemical that's in the lining of a lot of metal cans. And it is known for having this estrogenic activity. So it mimics the female sex hormone estrogen. And we'll talk about that later on in the podcast too, because I think we did get a couple other questions about estrogen. But this type of BPA intake, if you're eating a lot of canned foods or if you know canned coconut milk is a daily part of your diet that's linked to weight gain and diabetes and heart disease and Increased risk of cancer and infertility and a lot of issues. So we use native forest as a brand. And if you look at a brand like that, you basically check out the ingredient label. It's coconut water and something called guar gum. Now, guar gum is what they add to keep the water from separating from the coconut oil so that you don't open up your can of coconut milk and just have oil on the top and then your solids on the bottom. Even though that happens to a certain extent, the problem with guar gum is that can cause some gi distress in folks. Some people like to avoid that. I have seen some evidence that guar may have amounts of gluten in it. I don't really think that's an issue in most cases. But if you did want to completely avoid guar gum, you could make your own coconut or your own coconut milk. I'm not sure if you could make your own coconut. You could try it. Sure. Construction paper and I don't know. But what you do to make your own coconut milk is you can use shredded dried coconut and you mix it with water. It kind of goes beyond that, but that's the basic recipe is you get your hands on some coconut flakes and you mix them with water and you blend them. And that's coconut milk if you want to get more involved with this. And my wife and I have literally just bought coconuts and made coconut milk from coconuts before. It's very labor intensive. But what you do is you get your water, you get your coconut flakes. Usually it's 2 parts water to 1 part coconut flakes. Put it in a blender, you blend it for a few seconds, and then you pour everything that you've blended through cheesecloth to strain it. Because you want to get all of the, you know, all the flakes and the pulp out of there and you squeeze the liquid out of the cheesecloth and then you've got your flakes left over and you can actually do that a few times to kind of get as much as you can out of the flakes. So you re blend and then strain it through the cheesecloth again. And if you really want to, you can take all the leftover coconut flakes that you strained. And if you own a dehydrator here, you can dehydrate them and have them as something you can use as a high fiber addition to a trail mix. Now you could of course, buy the coconut flakes at the store and use those. Or you could literally get a coconut grinder. They make A tabletop coconut grinder. It's like 15 bucks and it's like a hand turn grinder and you split the coconut in half. You put one end over the grinder and you grind your flakes out of there. The advantage being then that you've got some extra meat, some of the coconut water, etc. But ultimately we did that for like a month, month. And we're like, screw this. We're spending like a half hour making two cans of coconut milk. So we just started buying the Native forest brand again. Now the stuff you'd want to avoid would be, for example, like the stuff that comes in the, in the paper container. That's like a coconut milk, like a sweetened coconut milk. A lot of times what you're going to find is that you've got coconut milk in there, but then they add cane syrup to it. That's a big one that you see is cane syrup. They'll typically add a bunch of flavors to it and sometimes they'll throw like vitamins. You know, it'll be like vitamin rich or whatnot. But the issue is the syrup that's added to it. That dried cane syrup just increases the inflammatory potential, the caloric content, you know, pretty much makes it so it's no longer like a, like a higher fat, lower carbohydrate meal. And that's something you want to be careful with. If you're buying it in paper, make sure that it's unsweetened and that's going to be a better way to go. The last thing that you could do for coconut milk is you could get like a coca coconut cream concentrate. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. There's a company called Tropical Traditions and they make a coconut cream concentrate and you can buy it and it's not coconut oil, but it's kind of got a little bit of similar texture. And you can buy it and you get it in jars and you can just mix that with water and make coconut milk. So that'd be another way to go if you want to make it yourself. That would technically be a little bit easier on the wallet too than buying coconut milk. But ultimately we do native forest canned coconut milk and that works just fine.

Cool. Is it important to get organic coconut milk or is that one of those things? Because it's in its own package and it's really protected from any sort of pesticides?

Yeah, any fruit or vegetable that has a removable skin and a fairly hard shell around it. You don't have to worry as much about the pesticides and herbicides and organicness of of it. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. Now, Rick, the thing is the organic stuff is just usually it's non BPA or BPA free. That's why you typically buy the organic stuff.

Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Rick had a second part of his question he asked about. It was hard to understand, but I think he was asking about rhabdomyolysis from intense workouts and what the side effects effects are of that.

Yeah, rhabdomyolysis is basically excessive breakdown of your skeletal muscle tissue. At least that's the cause of it. When the issue is over exercising and damaging your muscle cells enough to where you literally get little pieces of your muscle, little damaged muscle cells called myoglobins circulating in your bloodstream. And that's really, really tough on your kidneys in particular. Your kidneys have to try and filter this myoglobin and it literally like gums up your kidneys. So you get an issue with electrolyte imbalances, you get issues with cardiac arrhythmias. You can die from rhabdomyolysis. Usually it's not death that occurs, but instead quite a bit of kidney pain, a lot of difficulty urinating, a lot of muscle damage and muscle pain. And this is something when it comes to exercise, you'll see in like bodybuilders who have thrown down a four hour workout or two a day football players in the heat where, where you're already dehydrated and your kidneys are already strained and you're doing a two a day, two hour tough football workout. That's where you typically see rhabdo occurring in exercise situations. But the everyday recreational exerciser could indeed cause damage to the kidneys from rhabdomyolysis and excessive buildup of muscle damaged metabolites in the kidney area. If they are, for example, on pharmaceutical drugs, Statins in particular are a real, real big one when it comes to actually accumulating in muscle cells and getting a lot of the, or causing a lot of this myoglobin to build up and causing that kidney damage, that would be one thing to worry about. Ibuprofen to a lesser extent can cause this issue as well. But if you're exercising in a moderate dose, doing some weightlifting, causing some muscle damage, also on statins, you could be doing damage to your kidneys that's similar to rhabdomyolysis. And go back and listen to the episode we did a few episodes ago or go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for statins, you know, to kind of learn about maybe some alternatives to using something like that. Now, the other issue is the nutritional issue that could potentially cause rhabdomyolysis. And there was actually a swimmer that. This was reported in the American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation about this vegetarian swimmer who was eating so little protein that in his swimming, he was suffering from muscle breakdown. His body was cannibalizing itself to fuel his exercise sessions. And what happened was that as his body was breaking down his own muscle and producing all this myoglobin that was floating around, getting into the bloodstream, he developed rhabdomyolysis and some pretty serious kidney damage. So if you're vegetarian and you're exercising a lot, again, focus on making sure that you are getting adequate amino acids and adequate protein in your diet, because you can, you can get rhabdo from your body literally cannibalizing itself. It's not something you got to worry about if you're doing a fasted exercise session a few times a week, but it is something you have to worry about if you're in a chronically protein depleted state. And then finally, flip side of that, you eat too much meat. Meat, your body's got to break down that meat. And this, actually, interesting, is a particular problem with quail. I don't know why. The meat of quail is one that's a particular high risk for developing rhabdo. Somehow digesting and breaking down quail results in higher amounts of myoglobin in the bloodstream. But if you're eating a lot of meat, like a high, high protein diet, it can also result in some of this same type of kidney strain as you experience during rhabdo. You combine that with heavy, hard exercise, you know, like let's say a bodybuilder on a high protein diet. And again, you're putting yourself at risk for rhabdo or at least some pretty serious strain on your kidneys. So ultimately, be careful if you're a vegetarian. Be careful if you're on a high protein diet and exercising a lot, and be careful if you are on statins or to a less serious extent, like ibuprofen or high amount of oral anti inflammatories, and that will really help your kidneys be able to, to stay with you a little bit longer.

Also be careful if you're a great big muscle guy who's done a lot of cocaine and decided to do a whole bunch of squats. I only say that because my Girlfriend is a trauma nurse. And I won't say where this happened or anything like that because I don't want to get it unethical, but a guy actually came into the emergency room, had put himself into kidney failure because he did a whole bunch of cocaine, and then decided to do squats with like an enormous amount of weights on his shoulders and actually put himself in kidney failure failure.

So we just lost so many podcast listeners, all of our bodybuilder listeners who are snorting and squatting, they just quit. All right, well, we should move on anyway.

Yeah. Okay. Next question comes from Craig.

Hey, Ben. This is Craig from Birmingham, and I just got my work schedule and I'm going to be on the road nearly every week between now and June where I have a sprint triathlon schedule. And this is the first one for me. And my big concern is even though I have a tri bike and a trainer at home, I won't have access to that hardly at all during this period of training. And so my question is, what can I do with equipment that I can find at a local gym or otherwise to maximize my potential of doing okay in the bike leg of the triathlon? Thanks. Bye.

So, yeah, this is probably a common problem with a lot of people who have to travel for a living.

Yeah, I have experienced this myself. It's actually, it's not that bad. I do a lot of training in hotel rooms or hotel gyms more specifically and specifically try and get myself into good cycling shape. And I'm able to keep myself in fairly decent cycling shape even during triathlon season and do that still with the majority of my work being done in, like hotel gyms. So I use a lot of high intensity intervals. So the kind of the standby workouts that I use, first of all, number one would be a Tabata set. So what that means is I'll hop onto a recumbent bike or the stationary bike, whichever bicycle happens to be in the hotel gym, and I will pedal easy for 15 to 20 minutes. And when I say easy, I mean I'm still pushing, I'm still huffing and puffing and fairly aerobic. But I'm not an all out pace. You know, I'm at maybe like a six and a half or a seven on a scale of one to ten, after I'm nice and warm, I've broken a sweat. A little red in the face. The muscles are definitely heated up. I'll do a Tabata set, which means for four minutes, I go 20 seconds as hard as I can, like blue in the face. And then I go 10 seconds easy, and then I go 20 seconds hard and 10 seconds easy. And I repeat that for a total of four minutes. Any of the athletes who I coach who have been traveling and found themselves in hotel gyms have probably seen this pop up on their, on their workout plan before. But Tabata sets super useful. And if you've got the time, you can recover after doing those four minutes of 20 seconds hard and 10 seconds easy and then do it again. You'll want to give yourself a good 10 minutes or so of recovery from one Tabata set. Because they're really, really hard. You want to go really, really hard on them. But that's one thing that I'll do. I kind of go intensity over volume because I get super bored on a recumbent bike or stationary bike in a hotel, just gym. I'll also do power intervals. And this is a workout that I'll use when I'm exhausted. A lot of times when I'm traveling, I've just landed and I don't want to think during my workout or I've finished a day, whatever at a conference or, you know, engage in interaction with people. And I'm exhausted and I don't want to think about a complex bicycling workout. So what I'll do is I'll just get on the bike and I'll look at how much time I have available. Let's say I have got a decent time amount of. Let's say I've got 60 minutes that I can go. What I'll do is I'll just put on a show on TV or show on my phone or whatever, and I'll go for four minutes easy, one minute hard, and I'll just do that over and over again until I'm at the end of my workout. And the one minute hard is really, really hard. And the four minutes easy are kind of aerobic. And I call that a power interval workout where you're just throwing in these short, brief bursts of intensity for about 60 seconds.

Seconds.

And then the last thing that I'll do is just basically a long, hard ride. And this means this is typically when I have anywhere from about 20 to 45 minutes available. But I'll hop on the bike again at the hotel gym, stationary or recumbent, whatever I get my hands on. And I'll put on typically some kind of driving music. Like, I'll throw on, like, the, like. For me, it's usually techno. Like, I'll throw on the Tiesto podcast or the Pandora Channel for, like, you know, Paul Oakenfield built Fold or Moby or something of that nature. And I'll just use that driving beat and just hammer for however long I have. And usually I'm at about, you know, like an eight or an eight and a half on a scale one to 10. So, like, what I'd race at, and I just do a time trial for. For a set period of time. And, you know, when I'm done, I'm done when the smoke is cleared. So ultimately, those are kind of the three strategies I'll use to battle sets, power intervals, and kind of tempo rides. And if I don't have a bike after all, I will look for a StairMaster or some stairs to climb. And if I can't find those, then I'll find a hill to climb and I'll just do hill repeats. And you're still working some of those cycling muscles. And the last thing you can do, of course, is weight training, squats, lunges, things of that nature.

Awesome. Great suggestions. Okay, next question comes from Joe.

Hi, Ben. My name is Joe. You and Brock are doing a great job because it pretty much changed my life from the way I do my training, and I've gotten a lot better from it. I had a question about you about chainrings. Now, I had bought a specialized transition that came with the SRAM 5442 chainring set. I don't like it. It's too heavy. It's kind of stiff. I wanted to just go back down to regular comp set, something like 53:39 for the outer and inner chainrings. Whether or not I should go to just a normal power glide for SRAM red or. I've been hearing a lot of the rotor Q rings. Whether or not that elliptical shape has actually been. I find that my pedal stroke, no matter how hard I work on it, is just still a lot of random dead spots as well as low in power. So if you can just answer that question for me, that'd be great. Thanks.

So, a lot of questions, a lot of information about chainrings. Can you help them out?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me start by saying that I've discussed chainrings comprehensively in a previous podcast. I will link to it in the show notes. In podcast 159, I talked about chainrings and bicycle gearing specifically quite a bit. But this question, Joe's question is asking about these Q rotor rings or these elliptical chainrings. And I did mention these elliptical chainrings in episode 159, but I'll remind you, basically, these are shaped differently. You know, usually if you look at the chainring on your bike, it's round. And these are slightly shaped in like an oval. And the reason that they're shaped like that is because when you're pedaling around in an oval, you eliminate the dead spot at the top and the bottom of the pedal stroke. There really is no point at which you're pushing 0 watts, whereas when you're pedaling around in a circle, technically you are at 0 watts when you're at the top and you're at the bottom of that pedal stroke. So the elliptical shape allows your position where you're pushing down as you're coming over the front of the pedal stroke to produce more power. And it has been shown that you can get an increased reading on a power meter when you're using an elliptical chamber ring. Now that's the pro. The con is that it doesn't shift very smoothly. So you have to move the elliptical chainring a little bit farther away from the front derailleur, and it delays the shifting on the bike. And I don't know if that's the reason why or maybe some other reason, but there have been studies that have compared in blind studies where cyclists weren't told which type of chainring that they were using and weren't allowed to look. They've done studies on the elliptical versus the regular circular, and this is in time trials, like cycling time trials, and they haven't found a significant difference between the elliptical chainrings and the traditional circular chainrings. And I've personally ridden with both. I rode with the elliptical rings, the ring, called a Q rotor ring, for a couple of years, and I felt fine on that, but I also feel fine on a traditional circular chainring. So ultimately, it's kind of a matter of personal preference. And if it works for you, great. But. But in most cases, you're not going to see a significant difference when you're using an elliptical versus a circular chainring. It's more a matter of just personal preference and comfort.

Cool. I've never tried one of those. That'd be very interesting.

Yeah, it's not as different as it sounds. When you get an elliptical chainring, there are five, five different settings typically in, like a Q rotor ring, that you can adjust in terms of your gear ratio. And so you can make it a little bit more extreme in terms of how. How much of an elliptical shape you feel like you're pedaling in. But ultimately it's. It's not as Weird as it sounds to be pedaling in an elliptical shape versus a circular shape. Very, very slight difference.

It does sound like it would be very, it would sort of offset you if you were, if it was a really, really big difference. Might sort of tip over every stroke.

Yeah, it can, it can take a little bit of getting used to, but it's not too bad.

Okay, next question is from Bilal and he wants to know, he says someone whose opinion I trust and value forwarded me your recommendations on the food pyramid. I'm a bit puzzled by your recommendations for fat, especially items like ghee that are incredibly high in saturated fats. Olive oil makes a lot of, of sense as a clear alternative. Can you point me to some scientific studies on, on which your recommendations are based? I may have the complete wrong model in my mind and I'd like to be better educated on such nutritional issues.

Yeah, I mean, there, there are, there are many, many studies we could look at when it comes to the value of saturated fat. And let me first say that this Friday, the Friday after this podcast comes out, I am going to publish an audio about a 20 to 30 minute audio on why I set up fats to be at the base of the food pyramid that I designed. Because I've gotten a few questions since then and I go into it in a little bit more detail. So certainly tune into Friday's podcast to get this in more detail. But saturated fats constitute about 50% of your cell membranes. They give your cells the stiffness of and the integrity that is crucial in order for metabolites to move in and out of your cells and in order for your cells to function properly. So if you are on a low saturated fat diet or have very low fat intake, you essentially get like a soggy cell membrane, a floppy, flapping, non functioning or non optimally functioning cell membrane if you're, if you're deficient in saturated fats. Now that's not all. You can go on and look at skeletal muscle. And the way that calcium is incorporated into your skeletal muscle is that it requires the role of saturated fat in order for that mechanism to occur. And so if you have a low saturated fat diet, you put yourself at higher risk for lower bone density. Saturated fats protect your liver. They help your liver in terms of its metabolizing of toxins, toxins of pharmaceuticals, of alcohol. They're essential for that as well. I hate to make the podcast like a clinical paper, but there are studies that support all of these things that I'm saying. I'll try and Point a few out to you in the show notes if you want to go do your own digging and investigating on this. Saturated fats can enhance your immune system, system health. Saturated fats. If you're taking like a fish oil, which we talked about earlier, you can't properly utilize essential fatty acids, which you're getting from fish oil, unless you've got enough saturated fats in your diet. So what happens is omega 3 fatty acids get retained in your tissues when you've got enough saturated fat. Essentially, the fat content of your Diet draws those omega 3 fatty acids into the tissue, especially when the fat in your diet is saturated, saturated. Your heart relies on saturated fat. Your heart is actually surrounded by fat, saturated fat particularly, and your heart draws on that fat. And then finally, saturated fat, like what we would find in something like coconut oil, that actually has antimicrobial and antiviral properties. So a lot of benefits to saturated fat. There's really no scientific evidence that super supports the assertion that saturated fats are going to clog your arteries or cause heart disease. Most of the type of fat that you find in clogged arteries is polyunsaturated fat, which is generally what you're going to get from vegetable oils. That's what I have to say about saturated fat right now. If you want more on fats in general, not just saturated fats, but I'll cover more fats in more detail. Listening to the Friday episode, I think.

It would be very easy to turn this podcast into like a thesis statement every. Every week. And for a free podcast, that would be a lot of work to cite every single study and every single reference that that's made on the show. But I think, I think we do a pretty good job.

Yeah, we do, we do. Okay. But yeah, if I were going to start providing citations on everything, this would turn into a very laborious process. So it's one thing to talk about studies and to read the ones in the journals that I've lying on my desk. And it's another to actually transcribe all the citations and references and put them into the show notes. It turns into literally like writing a journal article every time you release a podcast. That makes it tough to do, but I will always, if anybody emails me or leaves a comment, comment on the show notes of the podcast. I'll always give you references if you need them.

There you go. Okay, next question comes from Alex. Alex says, I found a sugar free dark chocolate in the supermarket today and I checked the ingredients, which sounded okay, but not sure about a couple of them. It has 70% cocoao solids, 15% polydextrose, soluble dietary fiber, some erythritol, Erythritol. Erythritol. Erythritol.

Erythritol.

Yeah, there you go. Soy lecithin emulsifier, vanilla flavor and stevia. I know your opinion on soy lecithin from your recent protein powder podcast, but I'm not sure about polydextrose and erythritol. My Google searches didn't show them as too bad. Are they?

Well, you'll see a lot of these sugar free chocolate bars around now. They're, they're kind of sexy. And what they've done is they've taken the sweet taste that you'd normally experience from like a sugar or a cane syrup or some other sugar based additive in a chocolate bar and they've replaced those with indigestible forms of sugar, in this case erythritol and polydextrose. Erythritol is a sugar alcohol. So you chew gum, a lot of times you'll see like xylitol or maltitol or something like that in gum. Erythritol is the same, it's a sugar alcohol. It really is not digested by your body though. So even though it's derived from basically a natural source, what you do is you ferment glucose with a yeast and you produce erythritol. It basically goes through your large intestine or into your large intestine and passes out, typically in your urine. But erythritol and other sugar alcohols cause bloating and gas and erythritol is one of the biggies when it comes to bloating and gas. So that's one issue is your chocolate bar may taste great, but you may also have some embarrassing side effects later on. I remember when my mom found the recipe for sugar free chocolate bars and she owns a restaurant type of coffee house by day, pub by night type of place in Moscow, Ida, Idaho. And she started serving these sugar free brownies. I think in this case she used xylitol and her employees were testing them and getting gas and customers are getting gas. It was because of the sugar alcohols. That's one thing to be aware of. Small amounts aren't going to be an issue. Like the amount you're going to find in say gum. The amount you're going to find in a chocolate bar may indeed be an issue then the other one is polydextro. And that's basically it's what's called a glucose polymer and it's used in a lot of commercial compounds as like a low carb alternative or sugar alternative. A low carbohydrate sugar alternative. It's just soluble fiber. It's fine. It's not as much of an issue as erythritol. Polydextrose is going to be treated by your body. Just like fiber. It could potentially cause a little bit of bloating, a little bit of gas, but not as much as you'd get from like erythritol. Ultimately these may be gas bars. I just be careful and sometimes that.

Is a risk worth taking.

Yep, that was a timely question too for Valentine's Day.

It was. Yeah, that's true. You can give your give your sweetheart gas. Okay, David wrote, I'm an active athlete and I eat a paleo based diet. However, I work a pretty sedentary and sometimes pretty boring job. David, I hope your employer isn't listening. And even though I eat healthy foods when I'm at work, I can't seem to stop eating on my days off. I eat minute amounts in comparison. Do you have any trips to any tips to help me control my eating while at work?

Oh, do I ever. There there are many, many tips on the website. David, I'm going to put a link to everything I've ever done on controlling carbohydrate cravings and appetite cravings in the show. Notes for you to go watch all the videos and the stuff that I've done done on this, but I'll give you the basic overview here on the podcast. First of all, I've got a little kind of like a system for eliminating food cravings. And what you do is first of all you keep yourself adequately hydrated. So anytime you start to begin to crave any food, you drink at least 8 ounces of water and preferably closer to 16 ounces of water. That will ensure that these cravings that you're experiencing are not like dehydration based cravings. And it will also help to fill up your intestine and your stomach a little bit. So 8 to 16 ounces of water immediately. When you begin to crave any food, another thing that you can do is you can take supplements that help to stabilize blood sugar levels and keep you a little bit more insulin sensitive. I'm a big fan of cinnamon as something that you can use. For example, large amounts of cinnamon with breakfast in the morning or even with a midday snack. You can have almonds with cinnamon on them and that can help as well as a couple of compounds called chromium and another one called vanadium. You've probably heard me recommend a supplement called thermo factor before on the show. And you can literally take something like thermo factor 20, 30 minutes before lunch, 20, 30 minutes before dinner. And that can help with a little bit of appetite reduction. Steer clear of anything that's going to stimulate your appetite. Artificial sweeteners are a biggie. They kind of fly under the radar when it comes to this, like chewing gum that's got artificial sweeteners in it like sucralose or acesulfam, potassium aspartame, NutraSweet, those type of things. Drinking diet soda compounds. If you're on a paleo diet, I kind of doubt that you're drinking much diet soda, but I don't know if you're chewing gum, but that could potentially be an appetite stimulant as well. Exercise is an appetite supplement. So you can try jumping jacks, bodyweight, pushups, bodyweight, squats, stuff like that when you begin to crave food. And a lot of times just a couple minutes, literally two minutes of exercise can help you to, or help to stave off appetite cravings. There was a study that they did that literally just had people sniff peppermint extract throughout the day and that shut down appetite cravings. You could chew like a, like a natural mint based gum. Like I use one called Spry. I talked about those sugar alcohols earlier. It's sweetened with xylitol. It does, you know, it's not going to spark your appetite as much as like an artificial sweetener will. And that's got a mint extract in it. So that would be another potential strategy that you could use to reduce appetite cravings. There are, there are some kind of more fringe techniques that can be used. There's one technique called eft. I believe it stands for emotional freedom technique. But it's like a series of tapping. And one particular one that's used for craving is to put the five fingers of your hand on your forehead to space those fingers evenly apart and just start tapping them at one second intervals on your forehead. And you literally just do that for 30 to 60 seconds. And there's some kind of association. I'm not like an EFT specialist or anything like that, but the forehead is apparently the region that is associated with cravings. And tapping that area supposedly can help a little bit with it. So that's a technique that you'll see recommended here and there in terms of like being an EFT based technique. The last thing that you could do is you could try a whole bunch of different supplements. And rather than make this like me listing a laundry list of supplements, supplements that can help. In addition to the chromium and vanadium that I mentioned, which are kind of the biggies, those in Cinnamon, One of the articles that I'll link to in my response in the show notes is going to be an article that I wrote called 12 Dietary Supplements that can massively control your most intense carbohydrate cravings. That one is chock full of good information for you. So I will link this to that article in the show notes. I will link to my video 5 Ways to Suppress your appetite without taking any special pills or capsules. I will link to some of the practical recommendations that I just laid out for you, like the tapping and the mint and the water and things of that nature. And then I'll also link you to the full transcript of the episode on carbohydrate cravings that I did with Nora Good gatos. So I'll put all those links in the show notes and that will help you out.

Can you hear me tapping? No.

Yep. I. I thought, I thought that was your heart beating, but I guess it was just you tapping.

No.

I'm really hungry. It's almost lunchtime, so I thought that might help us get it through the rest of the podcast without my stomach growling. All right, next question comes from Laurie. Laurie says, can you talk about stress incontinence in women runners? What is your opinion of the bladder sling procedure to fix the problem, assuming it's a skilled surgeon?

This is an issue that I think kind of flies under the radar, especially a lot of guys aren't aware that women struggle with this issue. But stress incontinence is typically when your pelvic floor muscles are weak and the weaker those muscles are, the more likely that you are to actually kind of inconsistent up with an embarrassing wet spot on your pants when you're running or engaged in other activities that may actually put stress in that area. That's stress incontinence. You're leaking urine during physical activity because your bladder is not contracting the way that it's supposed to to keep urine in. This is typically a weak pelvic floor muscle issue and I would search address that issue prior to looking into surgery. And I don't know if you have addressed that issue already, but Kegel exercises, I've talked about them before. You've probably heard about them before. If you're a woman. But this is where you squeeze if you're pretending to stop the urine flow for about 10 seconds and then you rest for 10 seconds. Then you squeeze for 10 seconds and rest for 10 seconds. You can do it anywhere in the car, sitting at your desk, wherever. So Kegel exercises help. Pilates is particularly effective at strengthening the muscles of the pelvic floor. If you do it properly and you make sure that your low back is stabilized and you're kind of pressing your low back against the ground as you're doing a lot of these exercises. And that can help out as well. I'm not saying this to be crass, but they literally do sell essentially like weightlifting kits for your vagina, vagina. And this is another way that you can strengthen your pelvic floor muscles. And these are literally weights that you insert into your vagina and basically develop your strength using that method. So that's another alternative to surgery. You could also look into biofeedback. There have been studies that have looked at biofeedback and its effectiveness in terms of stress and incontinence. And biofeedback has been found to be effective. You can find a qualified biofeedback practitioner, I'll put a link in the show notes, but there's literally a certification for certified biofeedback practitioners and you could find one in your area that you could work with to assist with stress incontinence. And essentially what you do is it helps you be more aware of your pelvic floor muscles and how to kind of keep them contracted as you're doing the activities that you're experiencing stress and contract incontinence during. Now finally, you could look into the surgery and what they do in the surgery, in this sling operation that you talk about is they'll use strips of material, typically like some form of tissue to support the neck of your bladder and provide literally mechanical support for your bladder. And there have been some studies that say that slings are a bad idea idea. And there was a meta analysis, a review of several studies and essentially this meta analysis it was in a review called the Cochrane Review C O C H R A N E review found that there was inadequate evidence to say whether or not the slings were better than any other form of surgical or non surgical management of stress incontinence. So the evidence is iffy that the sling would actually work. And obviously like you, like you hint at, it may depend on the skill of the surgeon. But I would definitely try Kegel exercises biofeedback and some of my other recommendations prior to moving on to surgery.

Interesting. I know this is. It is a very common problem, especially from women who have had multiple children.

So it's.

That's good information to have out there. Yeah. All right, next question comes from Oyvind. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name, but that's. That's what it looks like. I am a spinning instructor, and I often coach interval training during my class. I coach my class at a. At. At an intensity level they should aim for during the session. And everybody has a heart rate monitor. With full house and high intensity, the temperature and humidity in the room ra rises. Do you know by how much the heart rate can increase at different intensity levels due to high temperature and high humidity? A ballpark figure would be sufficient. And also, as the instructor, I shout out instructions and at the same time as I work out myself. So do you have any input as to how much the heart rate can increase due to my shouting? And then he also has a question about acid zapper as a lactic acid and buffer. But we'll look at the heart rate first here.

Okay, first of all, the shouting issue. Like, I used to be a spinning instructor. Like, I was big into spinning. I was. That was like I was teaching spinning classes three or four days a week. I was a spin instructor for four years. Loved it. I think that's how I became a good cyclist was just like destroying myself while still also shouting at the top of my lungs and trying to teach spinning. And the rooms would be hot. And this would be after a day of spending the entire day on my feet as a personal trainer. I know that cyclists laugh at spinning sometimes, but it certainly can toughen you up when it comes to at least improving your bicycling fitness. Now, a very smart move that I made was I got a decent microphone, and that certainly helped out quite a bit. With the issue with shouting. There's no evidence that I'm aware of that shows the correlation between shouting and increased heart rate. But of course, course, when you're shouting, you are increasing the amount of work that your inspiratory and expiratory muscles are having to do. So if you're concerned about the heart rate increasing, then just get a good mic or one of those cones that you shout into. What's it called? A loudspeaker?

A megaphone.

A megaphone, yes. Get a megaphone. The heart rate can definitely go up with heat and humidity, as I'm sure everyone probably knows when you're looking at temperatures from about 60 to 75 degrees. So you know about the temperature many of us keep our homes at. And, you know, light, you know, late spring or early summer type of temperatures, your heart rate's going to go up by about two to four beats per minute when you get exposed to those type of temperatures. So you can automatically tack that on if you're working out at 60 to 75 degrees. Now, spin rooms probably be closer to 75 to 90 degrees depending on the amount of activity and the heat that's in that room. And that can increase your heart rate by about 10 beats a minute automatically. Without you even exercising, your heart rate can increase up to 10 beats per minute. That's why something like B cram yoga can increase your heart rate even when you're just lying on the floor. Because your heart rate increases as your body shuttles blood to your skin to cool the blood. When you're looking at humidity, once humidity gets up to about 50% and kind of goes on up to 90%, you can add another 10, 10 beats. So you could literally, you know, if it's 80 degrees in the room and the temperature or for the temperature and the humidity is like at 60%, it could cause potentially an increase in heart rate of up to 20 beats just from that alone. So, yeah, it certainly can. And those are kind of like the rough numbers. About 10 beats for the increase in humidity and about 10 beats for 75 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit around in there. So that's significant.

Significant.

Yeah, it is. And that's probably another reason that spinning can get you fit fast, is because your body's having to work on two different levels, right? Your heart is shunting blood to your muscles for the contraction and also shunting blood to the skin to cool you. So it certainly is a good way to improve cardiovascular fitness. But it's also something to think about if you're tracking your heart rate, if you've got cardiovascular concerns, or if you're trying to manage your intestines intensity.

So even if those are external, like obviously external pressures put on your body, the heat, the humidity, how does that relate to, like lactic threshold? Would, would you move your lactic threshold up accordingly or does it stay the same?

Sure. To put your question into context, everybody's got this heart rate at which the body begins to produce lactic acid. Faster than that, lactic acid can actually be released, removed, or buffered. So let's say you might have a lactic acid threshold of 150 beats per minute. Now what happens is once you get thrown into the heat or even if you've drank a bunch of coffee, your adrenaline is really high as it might be during a race or something of that nature, you might have a high heart rate even if your muscles aren't working that hard, meaning that you might have a high heart rate even if you're not producing much lactic acid acid. So if your lactate threshold is normally at 150, you might find that in hot humid conditions that threshold is closer to 160. And that's just a matter of experience going out and testing how much hot, humid race conditions, caffeine consumption, adrenaline, etc. Affects your threshold number. What I find is that in more expensive experience, more fit individuals, you get closer and closer values between what lactate threshold is and then what it is during a race or hot and humid conditions.

Cool. That's a great question, Oyvind. I'm really, really glad you asked that, I guess. Do you want to get into the acid zapper, lactic acid buffer?

Yeah, I mean I take stuff like that. I take extreme endurance, that is an alkalinizing agent. Basically what that means is you take a pill that is at an alkalizing or a non acidic ph and it can literally build up in your muscles during workouts and buffer some of the hydrogen ions that are kicked off from lactic acid. It's the same way that baking soda would take a little bit of the tang out of lemon juice. So, you know, acid zapper, sport legs. Extreme endurance is the one that I personally take. I love it. I'll link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, me too. I've been taking that stuff as well. It's great stuff.

Yeah. But if you're doing intense exercise, yes, you can certainly get an alkalizing effect. The issue sometimes is that you gotta take so much of the the stuff if you're using one that's designed to be taken prior to exercise that it can cause GI distress when you look at something like extreme endurance. And I think that acid zapper may be the same way. You take some tablets in the morning and some tablets in the evening, so you're taking them separate from your exercise session. And then if you look at something like extreme endurance, it's got bioperine, like a black pepper extract, it's got papain, a proteolytic enzyme. And so it's got some compounds that also assist with soreness. And in my opinion that's a pretty good way to go. I haven't Tried acid zapper. I've tried sport legs before. I've tried another acid one. I forget the name of it. But so far from what I've found, nothing really compares to extreme endurance.

All right, on to our next question from Rick. And Rick has a question about hormone levels. I recently tested my hormone levels through a saliva test kit. Results came back with allow progesterone to estradiol, E2 ratio being low at 11.49, suggesting I am estrogen dominant. I was subsequently prescribed topical progesterone to correct this imbalance. My question is, what would you do to correct an imbalance of this nature? Would you supplement with a topical cream as recommended or something else? Are there any side effects you'd be concerned about by taking progesterone cream? I'm a 34 year old male with no major health conditions. I know you're not a doctor, but your advice is very valued. He did the sort of disclaimer there for us.

Thank you for saying my disclaimer for me. Okay, so you're on a progesterone cream. I love that this is a guy that wrote this because a lot of people think that just women are taking progesterone cream, but that's not the case. Guys can have estrogen buildup, they can produce excess estrogen. It's typically either an issue with testosterone getting converted into estrogen or you're getting estrogen from like your environment. So I'll talk about some of the ways that you could be getting estrogens from your environment. But basically what happens is once you start to get estrogen or excess estrogen, it puts you at higher risk for inflamed prostate, heart conditions, cancer, weight gain, lower libido, erectile dysfunction and man boobs. So there are issues with that rise in estrogen. And one of the ways that it can happen, of course, is through these environmental toxins. We talked about coconut milk, BPA and the ability of BPA to mimic estrogens. There's a lot of of other substances that mimic estrogens like pesticides, dioxin, ddt. Basically the type of things you'd find in plastics, like if you're microwaving food in plastics, cleaning supplies like disinfectants, pesticides and herbicides. If you're getting non organic fruits and vegetables or not washing your fruits and vegetables thoroughly, a lot of pharmaceutical drugs, even pharmaceutical drugs that have built up in your water source supply and paints, varnishes, lubricants, inks, things of that nature, all of those can mimic estrogens. And lead to these symptoms of estrogen dominance in males or females, really, but it's still an issue. Non organic animals, like grain fed animals that are commercial animals, they're a lot of times fed estrogenic steroids to fatten them up, up. And those can be consumed by you when you're eating, for example, fast food or meat that is just like commercial beef. If you're not filtering the water in your home, you can certainly get excess estrogens in your drinking water too. And so there's a lot of issues with this. And it can cause this progesterone to estrogen ratio to be thrown off. Both guys and girls have progesterone, but in men, progesterone kind of protects you against excessive estrogen. And it is useful for a man to actually have enough natural progesterone in his body. Natural progesterone in a guy is good. So the first thing I would look at, though, prior to looking at a progesterone cream would be actually eliminating some of the sources of estrogen that may be creeping into your diet and also potentially using something like an aromatase inhibitor, which I've talked about before on the show to minimize some of the conversion of testosterone into estrogens. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for aromatase inhibitor to listen to some of the previous podcasts that I've done on that. So the issue with the progesterone cream is a lot of times you'll get this progesterone cream, it looks like a deodorant stick a lot of the times. Sometimes it comes in a tube, but you put it on your skin. And anytime you're using a hormone preparation on your skin, the problem is that hormones are fat soluble and once you apply them to your skin, they can get stored in your fat tissue. And as time goes on and on, these hormones can accumulate in your fat tissue and eventually disrupt your natural hormonal balance. It's kind of playing with fire to just be slapping progesterone cream on your skin. Now you can get a little bit less propensity for progesterone cream to build up in your fat tissue. If you're not using like a skin based application. There are certain types of membranes in your body. They're called mucous membranes. And those allow something like a topical ointment or a topical cream to be or to pass like straight into the bloodstream rather than accumulating an incident in fat. For men, that would literally be like on the surface of your rectum. That's where you have the greatest amounts of mucosal surfaces that you actually would be able to put a cream on. So if I were taking a progesterone cream, that's where I would apply it. But ultimately the problem with using a cream like this is typically you're not testing your hormones as you're taking it. So you don't know when you've taken too much or when you've had enough. And you really got to stay on top of things. You need to be doing, for example, like urine or saliva testing of your hormone levels to make sure that you're not taking too much progesterone or that you're not throwing your ratios off in the opposite direction. Because then what happens is you can get a lot of hormonal imbalances that can affect things like your risk for cancer. So you have to be really, really careful with this stuff. And I certainly wouldn't take it unless you've taken care of the other side of that ratio, which is the estrogen. Estrogen side. So I talked a little bit about some of these issues with estrogen, but what I would do, I'm going to tell you exactly what I would do before I started taking progesterone if it were me. Avoid using food and drink that's in plastic containers or styrofoam containers. Don't heat your food with plastic wrap like in the microwave, anything of that nature. Just avoid exposing food to plastics. Use glass or ceramic. Try, try and replace any chemical based household cleaning products with natural cleaning products that could fill an entirely new podcast. My wife and I talk about it a bunch over in the inner circle@bengreenfieldfitness.com innercircle that's like a $17 a month membership website that we run where we teach people stuff like this. Don't use commercialized meat because of that estrogen buildup. Use hormone free or organic meat. If you do have to eat commercialized meat, avoid the fat parts of it because that's where a lot of the hormones will build up where you'll find a lot of this estrogen. Use organic fruits and vegetables or else wash non organic fruits and vegetables in like a vinegar water solution to get rid of as much of the pesticides and herbicides as possible. If you are using any type of cosmetic or lotion or shampoo or cream, try to use natural chemical free as much as as you can because that will avoid some of the xenoestrogens that are involved in like personal care products. Those would be some of, some of the environmental ways that I would avoid estrogen. And then you can also kind of detox estrogen from your body a little bit too. For example, if you look at cruciferous vegetables, so everything from cabbage to broccoli to brussels sprouts, cauliflower, a lot of dark leafy greens like kale and mustard greens and bok choy, those all have a type of chemical in them that helps to detox your body of environmental estrogens. So that would be one thing to do is to increase your intake of cruciferous vegetables. Now as your liver is getting rid of some of those environmental estrogens, they're going to end up in your digestive tract and they'll pass through in the stool. So at the same time that you're increasing your intake of cruciferous vegetation vegetables, if you're taking like a high fiber supplement like psyllium seed ground flaxseed, even like a, like a cleansing pill like Capricleanse is one that I've mentioned on this show before, that can help kind of move things along. So you take, you eat more cruciferous vegetables, you up your fiber intake, you can include more natural plant estrogens in your diet. You want to be careful not using too many of these, but they can help protect you against some of the effects of like environmental xenoestrogens or fake estrogens. Doing something like just having a flaxseed oil around and using that occasionally like a salad dressing is good. Sesame seeds would be another example of something to have around. Both of those have kind of smaller, safer amounts of natural plant based phytoestrogens in them that can help out. Interestingly, some of those contain some similar compounds to what that progesterone cream that you have has in it. Progesterone cream is usually made from like a wild yam extract. There's a substance called calcium D glucarate. It's naturally found in apples and oranges and then also in those cruciferous vegetables that I mentioned, like broccoli and Brussels sprouts. And what happens is when your liver is getting rid of estrogens, it joins estrogens to something called glucuronic acid. What happens is in your gut, the estrogen that's bound to glucuronic acid can get broken up. And there's an enzyme in your gut that can break this bond. And then the estrogen gets recirculated as it goes into your bowel. The estrogen gets basically reabsorbed into your body. And the calcium D glucarate that's found in cruciferous vegetables and also in things like apples and oranges. Oranges it down regulates its enzyme so it can't basically break the estrogen deglucarate bond or the estrogen bond with this glucuronic acid. So what happens is you get rid of the estrogens a lot better. So again, cruciferous vegetables important. They do sell calcium deglucarate substances. But if you're already taking a bunch of cruciferous vegetables, you may not need them. And then the last thing that I would look into doing is make sure that you're sweating a lot and exercising to decent amounts. You can eliminate some estrogens through sweat. So you could do like sauna treatments. Infrared saunas work really well for this or like a dry heat or a sweat room. Either of those would work as well in terms of using like a sweat detox to get rid of some estrogen as well. So ultimately I would personally tackle this from making sure that you're taking an aromatase inhibitor to stop testosterone from converting into estrogens, eliminating a lot of environmental estrogens, and then also doing a little bit of an estrogen detox using some of those methods that I just went through.

Okay, so following along on the same sort of, I guess, hormone path, Amanda has a question and she says that I have not had a menstrual cycle for two years. I've been seeing a naturopath for the last six months and we're doing various treatments like taking progesterone and other hormones. Hormones slash supplements. This last visit we went over the test results and my cortisol levels are through the roof. To decrease the levels of cortisol, she asked that I only do yoga seven days a week. Now Amanda went into all her sort of her regime for the last little while, but I'll sort of jump over some of that details. But basically exercise is one of the most important parts of my life and to go from what I've been doing to only yoga is devastating. And she adds, I know I need to gain perspective on this. My doctor and I talked through some options and she said it was okay to run three times a week at 10 minute mile pace for 20 minutes and then yoga. But that's only two miles.

Ugh.

Lots of exercise points. I would love your opinion on non stressful exercise to do. I guess I'm just looking for guidance on what my week would look like for Exercise if I can only do if I get a workout and not. She wants to get a workout in. Not lose muscle tone, but not hammer her body as well. Her husband and her are planning to start a family, so she needs to get her menstrual cycle figured out.

Oh, not had a menstrual cycle for two years. Been training the heck out of her body. Has cortisol. That's through the roof. You know, Amanda, I really do not want to be, like, harsh or rude, but it sounds like you've got a little bit of a problem here. You know, if we would have replaced the word exercise with something like cigarettes, that's kind of the perspective that you'd want to put this in. This has taken something that's positive and turned it into a little bit of an addiction that could be harming your body. So you can read the article that I wrote@BenGreenfieldFitness.com called 10 Reasons Exercise is Bad. And this kind of highlights one of the reasons, and that is the risk of excessive cortisol and overtraining. Now, I talked about overtraining last week in quite a bit of detail in podcasts. Was that 182, Rob?

182, yeah.

In podcast 182. And I talked about the difference between sympathetic nervous system overtraining and parasympathetic nervous system overtraining. Now, here's the good news, Amanda. A lot of times when you're overtrained, you experience sympathetic nervous system overtraining first. And with sympathetic nervous system overtraining, that happens when you've gotten to the point of kind of overreaching, exercising too much, and then you begin to churn out a lot of hormones from your adrenal gland, and your body goes into high stress response mode, fight or flight response mode, and you get high cortisol release. That also increases things like insulin levels, causes weight gain, can certainly affect fertility hormone, balances estrogen, which I already talked about. It's. Et cetera. Ultimately, though, there's a significant amount of adrenal gland dysfunction that occurs with sympathetic nervous system over training. And one of the classic signs and symptoms of sympathetic nervous system over training is overproduction of cortisol. Now, that goes on for too long. And what happens is the adrenal glands become exhausted. You've heard of adrenal exhaustion before. This is where you begin to feel depressed. You lose your motivation to exercise. You don't even want to exercise anymore. You feel like lying around in. In bed. You've got Abnormally low resting heart rate. You're unable to push your heart rate up very high at all during exercise. Your heart rate takes a long time to recover from exercise and you are essentially cooked. You're cooked. A lot of people actually arrive at the start line of an Ironman triathlon parasympathetically over trained, and it's an issue. But a lot of times you do see this occurring in three stages. First, people overreach a little bit. Then the sympathetic nervous system gets over trained and your adrenal glands start to churn out all this cortisol. And then finally it's just like, boom, you're exhausted, you're done. Now what this means for you is that if you have high amounts of cortisol going on right now and you still have this intense desire to exercise, you're probably in a state of sympathetic nervous system over training. And you haven't yet reached the point where you've got to lift, literally heal your body for six months or 12 months, which is often what it takes to overcome something like parasympathetic nervous system over training. If I were you, I would face up to the fact that you probably do have a little bit of an addiction going on here. And you need to first of all understand that it's doing dangerous damage to your body. And then second of all, you need to find a way to work other forms of entertainment of dopamine and serotonin release into your life. Something to replace these endorphins that you're experiencing from exercise that you become addicted to. So you can look into things like learning a musical instrument, perhaps spending a little bit more time time learning cooking methods or taking up a hobby like that. You can do things that still involve movement and using your body, but that are less stressful. Things like rock climbing, for example, is not too bad. Ice skating would be another example. Things that require a little bit more balance and coordination, a little bit less, just like straight exhausting your, your body. Yoga, of course, is very, very good for people who are sympathetically over trained. That doesn't mean Bikram yoga and power yoga, 90 minutes, seven days a week. That means some real, real nice, easy Hatha yoga type of practice where you're still using your body. You don't feel like you're completely neglecting yourself, but you're giving your adrenal glands a break. I mentioned biofeedback practitioners early on in this podcast and they certainly can be useful in helping you to overcome, overcome an addiction and helping you to kind of Wean yourself off of things and realize and identify the type of thinking that can lead to addictions like this. And you may want to meet with a biofeedback practitioner as well. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a psychiatrist, and I don't want to pretend to be one. So I'm just telling you some of the things that I would do. But I think that it certainly may be necessary for you to meet with a qualified professional to overcome an exercise addiction. If just me saying some of the things that I've said so far don't help, so understand that you're not in a state of adrenal exhaustion. You're really pushing it, and once you get there, then it's really going to stink because not only will you not even feel like exercising, there will be no rewarding response for it, and you will be in a deep, deep hole that you got to dig yourself out of. So I hope that helps and doesn't create more questions than I answered, but that's what I would do. Amanda.

Yeah, Amanda, just as a sort of side note, I've had some experience with some obsessive behaviors as well, and I found that cognitive behavior therapy was fantastic. I believe in that so strongly. I think everybody should have a certain amount of cognitive behavior therapy in their life just to sort of get that perspective on being able to look at their own reactions to certain behavior behaviors and make some adjustments.

So did you actually meet with a specialist there in your area?

I did. I did. I went for several months, once a week. And it was sometimes a solo session and sometimes group session. And it was very interesting to do the group sessions especially.

Fantastic. Of course, you wouldn't have even had to do that if you would have listened to this podcast and just known that you could tap your forehead and problems go away.

I'm tapping like mad right now. I'm sorry. So hungry. All right, that wraps up the show for today. Unless you have anything else you want to talk about, Ben.

You know, I think that's it. That sounds like a good place to end for me. I will definitely put links to everything in the show notes. You know, my expanded GI panel that I talked about. I'll throw the results and the explanation of the results up in the show notes. We'll put a link to all the news flashes that we talked about, all the resources that I talked about, the appetite control articles, every everything else. And thank you for listening in, if you are listening. And thank you also if you've made a donation over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com we of course appreciate podcast donations. They keep this thing floating along, as well as rankings and ratings in itunes. So all the little things that make you go slightly out of your way to support the show, those actually do make a big difference. I'm incredibly grateful to the people who have been done that. And yeah, if you're listening in and you haven't yet, please consider so that's it. And tune in on Friday for the Talk about Fat.

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