Episode #213: "Healthy Foods" That Cause Belly Fat

In today's podcast, healthy foods that cause belly fat. Also, is fasting effective for recovery? What to do about degenerative disc disease? How much should you eat to gain one pound of muscle? Losing weight without becoming amenorrheic, how to be less susceptible to injury as you age, and when to use grapeseed oil.

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

Hey.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. I'm Brock, and I gotta warn you, I've had two cups of coffee, I've ridden my bike 30 kilometers, and I've practiced accordion this morning, so I am on fire. How about you, Ben?

Dude, you play the accordion?

I sure do. I played professionally for like 12 years.

You are like an international man of mystery. You are a ballerina. You play the accordion.

No, no, no, don't call us ballerinas. We're male dancers.

Ah, gotcha. Is there anything else that listeners should know about you that they'll find shocking or entertaining?

There is, but I'm not gonna say it right now. You'll have to keep tuning in to find out all the mysteries that make me who I am.

I love the intrigue. Well, you know, for those of you listening in, I'll actually get to hang out with Brock over in Thailand here in what, a month and a half?

Oh, don't remind me. So nervous. So excited.

We're going over there to do a couple of triathlons along with a group of. Gosh, it's over a dozen athletes, some Ben Greenfield fitness listeners and fans and athletes that I coach. And it's going to be a fantastic time, but we'll send you a few videos and you can see maybe Brock and I will do the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast live via video.

I'll bring my accordion too.

I just got back from Ironman, Hawaii.

Yeah, Was it awesome? Was it amazing?

Yeah, it was pretty cool. For the first time in my life, I actually slept through the swim start, which was great after having to be in the swim for the past four years. And then I rode my bike out to the energy lab out there, which is where people kind of go in one end with a smile on their face and come out the other end looking Completely nuked. And that was pretty fun to ride my bike out there and just kind of hang out in a different part of the different part of the race course. So those of you who are Ironman Hawaii fans, of course one of the things that you can do is you can go to, I believe it's ironmanlive.com and this is something I did last year. And you can watch the whole race, like start to finish. And for those of you who are maybe training for an Ironman or just triathlon geeks, you can actually stream that live and watch it while you're, I don't know, riding your bike indoors or playing the accordion, as the case may be.

And we won't spoil it for you, but we will say Crowey didn't win.

He didn't win. And then, oh, one other thing. I signed up for Ironman Canada yesterday.

Hey, cool. The new one in Whistler.

Yeah, over in Whistler. So if you're, if you're a listener to the podcast, then I will, I'll see you up there next year, next August. So.

News flashes.

Okay? To get these and other interesting news flashes every week, perhaps every day, make sure to follow Ben on twitter@twitter.com BenGreenfield and on Google of course, and you can find that all@BenGreenfieldFitness.com all right, so.

Here we go with the first interesting thing. You can get an eight fold increase in a specific protein that builds your mitochondria. And remember that the mitochondria, little oxygen consuming organelles, part of your cells that are responsible for producing energy as you exercise. And the way that you can get an 8 fold increase is in a specific protein called PGC1alpha, is by training at a moderate intensity in what's called a glycogen depleted state. And this was based on a study in which they took two groups of actually fairly elite competitive road cyclists and mountain bikers and they had them do a workout following kind of a carbohydrate depletion protocol and even a pre workout meal comprised primarily of eggs and bacon rather than the traditional pasta. And of course they gave the other group of pasta, oatmeal, orange juice, bananas, things of that nature. And in the low carbohydrate group performance did not suffer. And also they had a fairly significant increase in this protein that's responsible for mitochondrial expression. So kind of the practical take home message of this is that a tool that you can have in your workout toolbox is to engage in some kind of glycogen depletion or low carbohydrate state prior to a moderate exercise routine. In this case, I believe it was a series of four minute intervals that this group did. And that can be something that you can use as an alternative to a super high intensity workout, which actually has a similar effect on this PGC1alpha protein and mitochondrial expression. So that was something that I thought was interesting.

Cool. So it's not necessarily going into it in a. Or it's not going into it in a fasted state, it's just going into it with more fats on board than carbohydrate.

Either one would technically work. Although fasting is of course a little bit more stressful on the body when it's combined with exercise or interval based routines.

Gotcha.

Another interesting study was on probiotics. And specifically what this study looked at was probiotic intake in athletes. And what they found in trained athletes who they put on a probiotic protocol for about 14 weeks, was that it had a very cool effect on the digestive system, particularly in reducing pretty well known markers of inflammation in the digestive system, something called a protein carbonyl group, which is a specific group of proteins that you see in a lot of inflammatory diseases like Alzheimer's and arthritis and diabetes and things of that nature. That decreased TNF alpha, which modulates inflammation and is kind of associated with leaky gut syndrome, where you have these undigested food particles crossing from the digestive system into the bloodstream that was decreased, and then interleukin 6, which is another marker of inflammation that decreased in response to probiotic intake, specifically in athletes. And the other thing that happened was that zonulin, which is basically a protein that's associated again with leaky gut syndrome, tended to decrease with the probiotic intake. And the idea behind that is that the more zonulin that your body produces, the leakier your gut kind of becomes. So what they found in these people who were on the probiotic intake was they had tighter gut junctions, the cellular junctions that would allow, you know, undigested food particles to cross in the bloodstream. They had lower levels of oxidation and lower levels of inflammation. And this was all in response to probiotic supplement use. So, you know, while I am of course a fan of introducing fermented foods into your diet as much as possible to get your good bacteria. You know, this was a 10 billion count a day probiotic intake, which is a fairly standard probiotic supplement.

Okay, yeah, I was going to ask if they talked about how much, what the dosing was. So 10 billion?

Yeah, 10 billion. And you're going to find a lot of capsules. I believe that cap probiotics that I take is a 20 billion. You can find probiotic capsules that go up to 80 billion. In this case, 10 billion seem to be doing a pretty good effect. But that was another interesting article. And then the last one that I wanted to mention was an article over in Sweat Science, which is a blog over at Runner's World from Alex Hutchinson. He usually has some good stuff. Yeah, he had a post about whether drafting helps in running, meaning running closely behind the runner that's in front of you and whether or not that drop in air resistance would actually help you. And so they looked into whether or not tucking behind a runner in front of you would actually allow you to save energy. And it looks like you save about 80% of the energy that you'd otherwise spend fighting air resistance. And so what this means is that there can be what comes out to about one second for every 400 meters of running and possibly even more than that on really windy days where you're running into a headwind when you're running right around a pace of about a six minute mile. So. So these are fairly fast runners that they looked at. But either way, if you're running a 5K, a 10K, a marathon, whatever, if it's a windy day, or even if it's not a windy day and you just want to save your energy from fighting air resistance, tucking closely into the runner in front of you actually has a fairly significant effect. And I'll link over to the article in the show notes. We link to everything that we talk about over on the show notes. And this is going to be what, episode 213.

That's right.

Yep. So we'll link to that article on whether drafting helps in running in the show notes to episode 213@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and also to some of these other studies I mentioned.

Just make sure if you're tucking in behind somebody, watch for the Snot rockets.

Yeah, the snot rockets. And you may even want to ask the folks what they had for their pre race meal. If beans or legumes were involved, you may want to keep your distance.

Special announcements.

Okay, make sure to go to audiblepodcast.com Ben because this podcast is sponsored by Audible, a fine purveyor of audiobooks for many a year now. And Ben, I think you found a cool book on there this morning.

Yeah, that's right. If you're into fitness audiobooks, and in this case specifically, mental fitness. You should check out keep your brain alive neurobic exercises to help prevent memory loss and increase mental fitness. And I'm a big fan of doing anything you can to keep your brain aerobically fit. For me, it's doing things like playing instruments and learning new languages, but you can also do these an aerobic exercises. So this is one of the top ranked books in Audible right now in the fitness category. So you can check that out.

Don't just go to audible.com, go to audiblepodcast.com Ben so they know that we sent you.

That's right, so we get our credit. Speaking of mental performance and keeping your brain alive, many of you who listened in participated in a survey that we sent out a few weeks ago about diet and sticking to a diet and kind of overcoming the mental challenges that go along with healthy eating. Chris Janzen, who's the mental performance coach over at Pacific Elite Fitness, and myself have been working pretty hard on your survey responses and we are developing a series of live webinars that are going to teach you how to stick to a diet. And it's actually going to be called, no surprise, the Diet Dominator. Stay tuned. If you subscribe to the Ben Greenfield Fitness newsletter, which you can grab for free over@BenGreenFitness.com, i'm going to give our listeners kind of the first stab at taking part in these webinars and they should launch fairly soon. So stay tuned for that. It's called the Diet Dominator and I wanted to make sure that people know about that.

I still think you'd get more hits if it was Diet Dominatrix.

I probably would, but not from the crowd that we're trying to target for this.

Hits are hits, man.

Yes, that's true. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention, I don't know if this is a special announcement or not, but I figured out a really cool way to if you like to use audio to help you to sleep, I know there are some people out there that use like white noise apps, but I put together a pretty cool audio track that I was using down in down in Hawaii to help me sleep. Just because you're in a different time zone, sometimes you're waking up three hours early. So all I did was I downloaded one of these free 20 minute kind of body scan MP3s. You can find them all over the Internet. And if anybody wants the link to the one that I use, just leave me a comment in the show notes to this episode. But it was about 20 minutes of body scanning. And body scanning is where you start down at your toes, you completely relax your toes, then you move up to your legs and your hips and your stomach and your face and your forehead until you've basically relaxed your whole body. And I created a sleep playlist that went straight from that 20 minute relaxation scenario into delta wave frequency. What are called binaural beats that kind of lull your brain into these delta waves and it worked really well. So kind of a cool way to lull yourself to sleep. So what I did in itunes was I created this sleep playlist where I just had literally eight hours of these delta wave beats that were preceded by this 20 minute body scan. So it puts your body into this total state of relaxation, then takes you into delta wave activation. So for those of you who like to sleep pack and mess around with audio and stuff, there's a quick tip for you and just leave a comment for me in the show notes if you want some links to the stuff I use. It was just some free downloads I got off the Internet basically.

So relaxed.

One last thing. Probiotics video. I put up over an hour long live kitchen presentation in which me and my wife teach you how to make your own probiotics at home. It's free. It's posted over@BenGreenFeldFitness.com so check that out. If you haven't been over there and watched that video, I think it's super helpful for any of you who want to learn how to make your own kimchi and sauerkraut and stuff like that.

Or anybody who's concerned about what kind of yogurt to buy after last week's podcast. That's right, just make it yourself.

Finally, a solution for healthy living that actually makes sense. Ben Greenfield and his wife Jessa have cracked the code on healthy living and reveal their entire system inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle, where you'll get Instant access to 24. 7Forum interaction with Ben and Jessa, a live monthly webinar, meal plans, videos, Ben's Body Transformation Club archives, and much, much more. If you or your family want to learn how to achieve the ultimate healthy lifestyle on a budget, then the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle is for you. Get four free videos to get you started and full access to the inner circle@BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com innercircle We'll see you inside. Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben and Brock, it's Graham from Australia.

I've got a question or a bit of a theory about maybe using a.

Fasting day as part of a recovery.

If you look at some of the markers after a marathon or an ironman, like inflammation markers and oxidation markers, well, these are all exactly the same things that you see reduced when you use a fast. So what I was wondering is, could you use a fasting day maybe two days after a marathon or an ironman.

As a way of expediting recovery?

Appreciate your thoughts, guys.

You know, this is an interesting question because it's absolutely true that fasting can have a pretty cool effect on inflammation. And there was in particular a study done, it was a few years ago, but it was in the annals of nutrition and metabolism that looked at what happened to inflammatory markers in people who were observing Ramadan, which is basically just a series of intermittent fasts in which you're not eating at all. From basically it's morning to evening, essentially sunrise to sunset. Yeah. And they collected twice daily blood samples on these people, and they found significant reductions in inflammatory markers. So you've got these traditional markers that you tend to test when you're looking at whole body inflammation. One is interleukin 6. And interleukin 6 is this pro inflammatory substance. It's released by macrophages, which are your white blood cells. And a ton of studies have shown that what happens with this Interleukin 6 is it's produced by adipose tissue, fat tissue, like in your abdomen, or also what's called your visceral fat tissue, which is kind of some of the deeper fat tissue around your organs. And this Interleukin 6 tends to be inflammatory, and it can bind to microbes, and it can help the immune system attack foreign and damaged cells. And you tend to see it in higher amounts when there's higher immune system activity. But they found that this interleukin 6 tended to decrease when you were in a fasted state, specifically implying that the immune system actually is allowed to settle down a little. Reactive protein is another inflammatory marker that you tend to measure when you're looking specifically at risk factor for cardiovascular disease. But it can also be really, really elevated when you have, for example, run a marathon. And that's something else that you can measure. And then the last thing that they measured was something called homocysteine. And homocysteine is it's another inflammatory molecule that reacts with proteins. And high homocysteine levels cause a lot of what's called oxidative damage. They cause inflammation Many, many times in the gut. And so elevated homocysteine levels, that's something you can also measure as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, but also for general kind of whole body inflammation. And so all of these tended to decrease when an intermittent fasting protocol was being observed. So when you run a marathon, of course you wouldn't want to be fasted right away because your body does need nutrients for cellular repair and recovery. It needs some carbohydrate to replenish the body's glycogen stores because lower immune system activity can occur when you're in a severely glycogen depleted state following a hard workout. And then of course, you need amino acids for cellular repair and recovery. So cross finish line of a marathon and going straight into a fast not only sounds horribly unpleasant for those of us who have slammed pizza and beer post race, but it also could be very stressful on the body. However, once you've adequately replenished the body's energy stores and you've had kind of at least a 24 hour, possibly up to a 48 hour window of refeeding, you've still got high levels of a lot of these inflammatory markers in marathon runners. These inflammatory markers that I just mentioned, they've been observed to stay elevated for up to 19 days after the race. So even though it hasn't been looked at in studies running a marathon, refeeding and then going into a fasted protocol, it is highly likely that you may actually experience some beneficial anti inflammatory effect of after you've replenished the body's energy stores, having kind of a day of lower calorie intake. Now Graham does mention a few supplements that may be helpful, like using branched chain amino acids. And I do recommend that. I recommend two things if you're using this fasted type of protocol to keep the body from being stressed too much. One would be branched chain amino acids. The brand that I would recommend would be one called Recoveries, because you not only have the amino acids to keep your body from essentially cannibalizing lean muscle tissue when you're doing a fasted protocol, but that also has proteolytic enzymes in it, which, especially when taken on an empty stomach, which of course you'd have if you were in a fasted state, have a really, really good effect at breaking down fibrinogen, one of the primary causes of muscle soreness. And so you'll get kind of a double whammy effect of the amino acids along with the proteolytic enzymes with recover ease and Then the other one would be some type of a greens supplement. Greens supplements, whether they're in capsule or powder form or even if you're taking a bunch of spinach and kale and stuff like that and blending it, they're highly alkalinic. So they can fight off a lot of that whole body acidity that you tend to experience after a hard effort, like a marathon. And that also is something that can be quite useful to use when you're going through a fasted protocol. You get a little bit of a detox, what's called an alkalinizing effect of a green supplement. So I would include a green supplement. I would include branched chain amino acids and then of course water. But yes, absolutely there could be something to trying this protocol. I'll put a link to the green supplements and the branched chain amino acid supplement I recommend in the show notes and also on the my list for this episode over@facebook.com bgfitness would it still.

Actually qualify as fast if you're taking the green supplements? I know the green supplement that I have has a considerable amount of calories.

Like how many?

I think it's like 200 or so for two scoops. It's the Living Fuel Super Greens.

Oh yeah, well, Living Fuel Super Greens is a meal replacement powder. I mean that's a full on meal replacement powder.

So you're talking about like a real supplement, like just a supplement?

Yeah, usually it's like blended up spirulina with some, you know, blue green algae and broccoli and kelp. You take Capra Greens, which is one that I use, super duper dense green supplement for like a double dose serving of that, you're looking at 40 calories max. So it's, it's pretty insignificant.

Now how about some omega 3, like some fish oil or something? Would that help with the inflammation as well?

Yeah, you tend to see a little bit of an anti inflammatory effect with a good triglyceride based fish oil that's been packaged with some antioxidants in it like some vitamin E and some astaxanthin and stuff like that. So yeah, you could use a good high quality fish oil as well. But I definitely recommend getting the greens and the amino acids in there and. Yeah, like an anti inflammatory omega 3 fatty acid. Absolutely. So if Graham, if your athletes try this protocol or if anybody else listening in tries this out and finds success with it in terms of decreasing soreness or helping you to feel better after a hard effort, then go for it. I personally tend to eat Like a pig for the week after I've done an Ironman or a marathon or something like that. So I'd have a tough time doing this one.

Hi, Ben and Brock. This is Stacy and I have a question for you. But first, let me give you some background. I first injured my hip about a year and a half ago and I was told it was trochantriac bursitis. Then in April this year, my back went out. About a day or two later, my stomach started hurting and it straight through from where my back hurts. You could put an arrow through it. I have had therapy and many up and downs since then. And that MRI was done, finally showing I have degenerative disc disease between L5 and S. One doctor said 100% he is sure this is the cause of my pain and even my hip issue. I am only 41 and was told that this will just get worse and surgery may be in my future. My question is, can this be the cause of the pain and is there anything I can do about it? And with regard to exercise, what can I do without making it worse? What kind of exercise can I do? Because I definitely don't want to aggravate it and make it disintegrate basically anymore. And then the next question is supplements. Are there any supplements that I can take that could help? I am six three and weigh 150. My goals are just to be fit. And maybe some miniguns would be nice. And thank you for the podcast and everything you guys do.

Okay, so I did a little bit of research myself on this one, and the first thing I noticed was that's a really terrible name for it. It's not degenerative and it's not really a disease. So degenerative disc disease is a pretty bad name for it.

You mean it's not degenerative because.

Because it doesn't actually worsen or it doesn't necessarily worsen over time, which is what we sort of like, just believe when you hear that word.

Yeah. And a lot of times you don't need surgery to fix degenerative disc disease. There are some cases where surgery and a lot of times immediate surgery would be required. Like if you completely lose bowel or bladder control, that's a pretty bad sign. You can also get what's called cauda equina syndrome, which is you have this group of nerves that kind of hangs off the end of your spine and it looks like a horse's tail. So literally, that's the Latin term for horse's tail is cauda equina. And what the syndrome, which is a pretty serious disorder is, is extreme low back pain and weakness in the legs, pain that goes from the back into the legs, and again loss of bowel or bladder control. In a situation like that, a lot of times you do need surgery, but in many cases there can be non surgical options for degenerative disc disease and alternative treatments. Physical therapy is of course the most common treatment in which you're doing decompression type of exercises for the low back and a lot of type of stretches and flexibility. But there are other things that you can try as well. For example, acupuncture, which is the use of these very, very fine needles without medication can be used to treat pain. And the acupuncturist would leave needles in precise points in your body's what are called meridians and those are typically left in for 20 to 40 minutes. And it causes your body to release pain fighting chemicals like endorphins or serotonin. And those may actually help to init a little bit of healing process as well. So that's one example of an alternative treatment for this that you may want to try. There are herbal remedies that are out there. A few traditional remedies that would be used would be different types of anti inflammatories like white willow bark, cherry juice extract, turmeric. I've mentioned the joint supplement cap reflex before as one of the things that I found to be quite efficacious for joint pain and one that I've had a lot of people write in to me and tell me that they found to be especially useful for things like knees and hips and ankles and injuries. But you may want to try something like that for degenerative disc disease as well because it does have many kind of aspirin like compounds in it that don't actually irritate the stomach and that can be useful for pain or inflammation and relief. There's another type of supplement called S Adena Adenosylmethionine. It's a tough one to pronounce, but it's abbreviated.

That's a mouthful.

Yeah, it's abbreviated S, A, M E or same. And there's a little bit of evidence that suggests that might be useful for a lot of age related wear and tear type of spinal conditions like osteoarthritis or like degenerative disc disease. Interestingly, it's also been shown to have a decent effect on depression as well as. But that's just like a powder that you can get I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but it's pretty easy to find just about anywhere. But that would be another kind of supplements type of thing to look into. The last supplemental treatment that I would probably recommend, the highest that you check out would be hyaluronic acid or what's called sodium hyaluronate. The reason that I recommend that is that when you're looking at degenerative disc disease, a lot of times you do see a little bit of cartilage damage. And your cartilage works kind of like a hydraulic system. And you can look at hyaluronic acid as being like the hydraulic fluid that would fill up your spinal column and act as the fluid in that hydraulic system. So you can get this restorative effect with hyaluronic acid. And I've come across many, many cases where people have tried out hyaluronic acid supplements for back pain, for back stiffness, and found some really good results within one to two weeks. You have to take a pretty high dose of hyaluronic acid for something like this. In most cases, you'd take like a powder, and you'd want around 500 milligrams of a hyaluronic acid powder powder. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can get the stuff off Amazon in pretty pure format, but you mix that with sea salt, and the actual formula is about 500 milligrams of hyaluronic acid powder. And you mix that in about 10 grams of sea salt, and you put that into water, and you need about half a liter of water or so, and that's something that you can dose with. And the 500 milligrams would be about a daily dose of hyaluronic acid, and you wouldn't want to mix that in bulk. You want to mix it fresh because it'll tend to degrade if it's not in use. But that's basically something that's been used in kind of like the anti aging circles. But it's also something that you could definitely try for degenerative disc. You'd want to use it for about a week to see if you noticed results in terms of pain, range of motion. Now, of course, I need to throw in the medical disclaimer here that I don't want you to misconstrue this as medical advice or any type of prescription. I'm simply reporting on what I've found that people have tried when it comes to this and reported success with. But that's something that you could certainly experiment with. I'll put a link to just basic bulk hyaluronic acid and sea salts in the show notes if you want to try it out. The other thing that can contribute to muscle stiffness is a lack of magnesium. Magnesium combined with MSM can actually do a pretty good job with neck pain and with back pain. And there is a specific type of magnesium plus MSM lotion. It's put out by a company called Magnetic Clay. And it's like a topical lotion. If you applied that topically along with oral consumption of the hyaluronic acid, you'd probably notice a little bit of an effect. So that's, you know, if it were me, that's what I would try. Very, very last thing you may want to look at. And this is something that I've spoken with a physician who's been on this show before, Dr. David Minkoff down at Lifeworks Wellness center in Florida. He uses a lot of prolotherapy for these type of issues. Prolotherapy is basically an attempt to stimulate growth of new ligaments and tendon tissues using an injection of what's called a proliferant, which is sometimes like a sugar water, sometimes it's a mix of different enzyme, but it's supposed to kick start the body's healing process by causing just a little bit of inflammation. And usually several rounds of injections of prolotherapy are something that would be used in something like degenerative disc disease. But that's another thing that you could visit with an alternative medical practitioner about would be going through a series of prolotherapy sessions. So I know that's a lot of stuff that I just threw at you, but if you were looking for alternatives to surgery, those are some of the things you could try.

Now she also talks about whether or not she should exercise when she's got this condition. And I'm just looking, she, she also mentioned she's 6 foot 3 and 150 pounds. So that's quite, quite light for that height. Actually it's very light for that height. So maybe some, some strengthening would, would really help out.

Yeah, strengthening. But you want to be careful that it's not really in a compressive type of setting where you're doing like an overhead dumbbell press or a squat with something on the back or something of that nature. Generally spinal decompression is going to feel a lot better like doing for example, the assisted pull up machine or a lat pull down or even a seated row or something of that nature. The other thing that has a really, really good effect in terms of spinal decompression is swimming. Because of that weightless environment, it's not going to have much of a strengthening effect, but it can actually or could have a pain rel. You see that a lot of times in a physical therapy setting for degenerative disc disease is water therapies. And that would be another thing that you could utilize, would be just experimenting with different strokes in the pool and using that as an exercise as well.

Those pull downs and pull ups will certainly get you the mini guns that you were mentioning, too.

That's right, yes. I would like to ask a question.

My question is, if you work out and when you get done, and how much time will you have to be able to still accumulate 2,500 calories for it to be effective to gain one pound of muscle? That's my question. Thank you very much.

So the idea behind this question is that it takes approximately 2,500 calories to gain a pound of muscle, around 3,500 calories to gain a pound of fat. The problem is that even though if you take a lab rat and you get those 2,500 calories to somehow build a pound of muscle, if you're eating as many extra calories as you need to eat to gain significant amounts of muscle, you do risk many of those calories getting converted into fat instead of muscle, because you can only build muscle so quickly. And when you look at a lot of, like, you know, personal training programs, you know, they're taking those 2,500 calories and dividing them to get around 350 to 400 extra calories per day to gain around a pound of muscle per week. The problem is that in many, many folks who eat those, you know, 350 to 400 extra calories per day, they tend to see some of that getting converted into fat. And so you see this slight rise in muscle. But unless you're exercising a lot, doing a ton of lifting, maybe doing some kind of a bodybuilding type of protocol, you tend to see these kind of high calorie intake changes resulting in an increase in muscle, but also an increase in body fat. And what I have found is that in most people who are trying to gain muscle and who want to make sure that the muscle is achieved via more of a lean gains type of protocol, via putting on muscle and not putting on body fat, shooting for closer to about a half pound of muscle a week tends to work a little bit better. And so when you're shooting for closer to a half pound of muscle a week generally. Instead of eating 2,500 extra calories per week, it's closer to 12, 50, 50 extra calories per week. So you're only looking at right around, you know, 150 to 200 extra calories per day, you know, kind of over and above what your metabolic rate would be. So the way that you would actually figure this out is you would, you would need to figure out your metabolic rate. And you can do that, you know, using a metabolic laboratory. You can use that using like what's called a bod pod. If your gym has one of those, you can even go to like my website, GetFitGuide, that has some really good calorie calculators on it that will let you use, you know, input like your, your height and your weight and stuff like that and approximate your metabolic rate. You just take that metabolic rate and then you, you multiply by a certain factor. In most cases, for most people who are doing an exercise program, it's 1.5 and then you add 150 to 200 calories to that. And that's kind of your approximate amount that you would eat per day in order to put on about a half pound of muscle a week. And putting on about a half pound of muscle a week is going to, in most people result in an ability to put on muscle without also putting on fat. So that's kind of the route that I would take as far as how quickly after a workout you need to eat extra calories. That doesn't really matter as long as your total calorie intake by the end of the day comes out to it being around 150 to 200 calories more than what your metabolic rate is or the amount of calories that you're actually burning are. You do of course want to make sure that you generally try and give your body some carbohydrates and some amino acids within anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour after you finish working out. The closer to the workout the better. Especially if you haven't had like a good pre workout meal. But yeah, so you know, rather than 2,500 calories a week for a pound of muscle a week, you know, closer to 12, 50 extra calories per week for a half pound of muscle a week is going to allow you to gain weight without gaining too much fat.

Hey, I wanted to know what's the best way to lose fat? If you're a skinny guy but you gained a little weight in the Stomach, and you just want to lose some stomach fat. Okay. So I actually, I literally went to the website depengreenfieldfitness.com and search for belly fat, and there's quite a lot of information there. One page in particular called 10 Ways to Burn Belly Fat Fast. And there's a link in the show notes to that. But it is one of those topics that comes up a lot, so it's probably worth going through one more time.

Yeah, I mean, there's. There's certain foods that are heavily associated with belly fat. And I've always mentioned before on this show, I think that sugar and alcohol are the two biggest things that I just say cut right away if you want to get rid of that last little bit of fat around the waistline.

Oh, my. Cuba Libra.

Yeah, your rum and Cokes are out. However, there are other things that would traditionally be viewed by a lot of people to be health foods, foods that are the biggest culprits in both guys and girls when it comes to belly fat. So those traditionally thought of as potentially healthy foods would be, first of all, like whole wheat bread or whole grains. I would cut those out. And generally that's because of their ability to really spike blood glucose levels, spike fat storage and insulin levels, and essentially cause a little bit of gut inflammation. So I would get rid of any of that stuff, you know, bread, pretzels, cereals, chips, whole grains. Cut it.

So when you talk about gut inflammation, that's not like. I think a lot of people think that that's actually sort of like the really. The stuff that's sticking out and makes their T shirt look bad. But you're talking about something that's a lot deeper inside the body, like in the gut.

Well, both. I mean, when and when you have, like, let's say the protein portion of wheat, like wheat, germagglutinin or gliadin, causing an inflammatory response in the gut. You not only get some damage to, like, the villi of the small intestine, so you get less vitamin and nutrient absorption, and you get a little bit of an inflammatory and cortisol response in the bloodstream, which can cause swelling and fluid retention and stuff like that, but you can also get a little kind of like an unresponsiveness of the nerves in the stomach. The same nerves that are responsible for innervating a lot of your stomach muscles, a lot of your ab muscles are also the nerves that are responsible for gut function. And so inflammation in the gut can lead to lack of tone in the stomach muscles. So Both really. You have fluid swelling, weight retention, immune system response, high cortisol levels, and then also a lack of nerve innervation to your stomach muscles. So, yes, both. Fruit juice would be another one. Fruit juice is not only loaded with fructose, which if your muscles carbohydrate stores are full and your liver's carbohydrate stores is going to get very easily converted into fat, but you also tend to get a pretty dense and quick calorie load with fruit juice. So in addition to whole grains, I would cut out fruit juice, soy from tofu, soy milk, stuff like that. A lot of times it is considered a healthier alternative to regular milk. But because of the estrogenic effect of soy, we tend to see that also being an issue, especially in guys, and only with belly fat, but also man boobs. So soy is another thing that I would cut out. The next thing would be vegetable oils. Vegetable oils, just because of what happens when you cook them in terms of oxidation, some of the inflammation in terms of the high amounts of omega 6s. In the same way that you can get some inflammation from wheat and whole grain consumption, you tend to see similar amounts of inflammation from vegetable oil consumption. And you see vegetable oils a lot of times in healthy foods, you know, healthy packaged crackers and stuff like that. And a lot of times even healthy foods, you know, like vegetable and rice bowls that you might get at a restaurant. A lot of things that people are kind of going out of their way to eat as they're trying to fix their diet can be gut bombs, literally. Frozen yogurt, you'll see a lot of people kind of start to cut out ice cream and go for like, like frozen yogurt instead. I think that's a big, big issue when it comes to belly fat because you're combining commercial dairy with all of its hormones and antibiotics and estrogenic type of compounds, along with high, high amounts of sugar. And it's advertised as fat free in many cases. And I think that you'll see a lot of people cutting out the ice cream and going for frozen yogurt instead. And that really doesn't do you any favors from a belly fat perspective as well. And then the last thing would be artificial sweeteners. I'd cut out splenda, aspartame, all this stuff. Not only can it have a pretty nasty effect on your gut flora and the good bacteria in your gut, but it also can tend to spark the appetite and cause you to eat more food later on. And these are also pretty heavily associated with overweight and obesity. So whole grains, fruit juice stuff with soy, vegetable oil, oils, frozen yogurts and artificial sweeteners. You'll tend to see all these things in a quote unquote healthy diet, but they're associated with belly fat and I'd cut them out.

That's some good advice. And also make sure you go to the, to the website because I know we've talked about it in depth a few other times.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

So Marianne says I want to lose about 10 pounds so I can carry less weight and hopefully become a bit faster running and biking. But if I decrease caloric intake, I lose weight, but I get a minorrheic, I'm constantly hungry, thinking of food all the time, and I feel weak and dizzy. When I eat enough, I'm not hungry, but I gain weight, which I attribute to muscle gain because my body fat percentage does not change. Now she gives us a few some more breakdown and stuff, but I think the most interesting thing is she says her diet is about 50% vegetable and fruit, 25% fish and chicken like proteins and 25% whole grains. And she also trains six days a week for about two hours each day.

Yeah, this is, this is kind of classic female athletes triad. That's, that's basically the combination of low energy availability. So low calorie intake combined with amenorrhea or loss of female reproductive function or lack of the menstrual period and then osteoporosis or low bone density. And I'd hazard a guess that if Marianne tested her bone density, it'd probably be pretty low. Now Marianne says that she wants to lose about 10 pounds. And I think that that might confuse a lot of people because they may mentally associate this female athlete triad with being associated with really, really skinny girls like cross country runners and stuff like that. But the fact is that there is no real association between the female athletic triad and body weight or BMI or body fat. It's most heavily associated with lack of adequate energy availability. And the entire hormonal cascade that causes low bone density. And the drop specifically in the hormone called LH or luteinizing hormone that leads to amenorrhea is all a function of low energy availability. It all comes straight from that. So when we look at Marianne's diet, but what she needs to look at is basically calorie intake and that combined with low energy availability from the high, high amounts of exercise, the only way to defeat the female athlete triad and actually very, very quickly and effectively bring someone back out of that, because it's pretty simple to get the hormone levels back up, up, to get the fatty acid levels back up and to kind of reboot the body is through dropping physical activity almost completely. And combining that with high calorie intake and even, yes, shockingly high carbohydrate intake, that can reset the female athlete triad within two to four weeks. And I know it sounds simple, I know it sounds stupid, but essentially what happens here when we look at this from an evolutionary perspective is that drop in energy availability actually sparks this mental trigger in the female athlete or the female exerciser to increase physical activity. And this is basically kind of an evolutionary response that when there's not enough food around, your body begins to drive itself towards physical activity to go out and find more food. It's like a foraging, hunting, gathering response. But the unfortunate thing is that rather than going out to find food, you'll see that many female athletes or females who are engaging in calorie restriction or energy restriction will, rather than using that drive to exercise to go to the grocery store and get food and fuel up and take care of their bodies again, will instead hop on a treadmill or a bicycle and use up the energy that way. And so that you create this vicious cycle in terms of energy depletion, hormone depletion, drop in luteinizing hormone, combined with a real, real rise in cortisol and a lot of the inflammation that can arise from the over exercising and you get this triad. So what I would recommend to Marianne would be dropping physical activity and then increasing calorie intake, specifically increasing carbohydrate intake not from whole grains, but like getting lots of sweet potatoes and yams and parsnips and carrots and beets and healthy carbohydrates, continuing the vegetable and the fruit intake and just going through kind of a two to four week reboot. Because a lot of times the feelings of constant hunger and thinking of food all the time, a lot of that is due to real, real high out of control levels of ghrelin and a drop in leptin. And that's the, you know, ghrelin is the hormone that causes you to be hungry. Leptin is the hormone that can help you to control appetite a little bit. Those tend to be way out of whack when you've got this female athlete triad going on. And so that can help to fix those as well and deal with some of these hunger issues that Marianne is experiencing. So basic big picture is, is if you are female and you're experiencing some of these symptoms, you need to essentially just give yourself this two to four week reboot window where you eat what you want, when you want. Kind of, I don't want to say the pizza, beer diet, because I'd rather you go gluten free as much as you can and combine that with not exercising too much. And I know it sounds annoying and it sounds counterintuitive, but that's really what you have to do to dig yourself out of this hole.

Yeah, it's really hard for some people to hear taking that time off, but really the time off will pay off big time in the long run.

Yeah, absolutely. And like I mentioned, with that diet dominator that Chris Janzen and I are going to come out with here, pretty soon we're going to be addressing some of these issues as well. Not only issues of sticking to your diet, but also kind of overcoming the mental barriers to changing up the way that you eat. Because it can be really, really difficult, especially for someone who is eating, quote unquote, extremely healthy, to make a change that they might perceive to be unhealthy or excessive when it comes to calorie consumption. So we'll be talking about that stuff too when we launch this program.

All right, our next question comes from William. And William says, how do I make my muscles less susceptible to strains and pulses, particularly my hamstrings? I am 55 years old and have been competing at skiing and running at a serious level since I was a child. I have a very healthy diet and low stress lifestyle. I've got a good handle on managing my muscle health. I've had the best success with some massage, topical magnesium, ems, compex, and so on and so on. He lists a bunch of things. It sounds like he's really taking good care of himself, but he just wants to know, am I missing something? Or as other people have said to me, I'm doing okay for my age. Just be grateful.

You know, you get a lot of older folks and especially older athletes finding themselves more susceptible to these strains and sprains. And it can come down to a few things. The first thing is that when you look at the body, you want to look at it from a fascial standpoint. And fascia is this tough membrane of varying thickness that envelops and separates everything in your body from your muscle groups to your bones, literally down to each individual cell. Now, fascia is kind of this. It's almost like this three dimensional net and it surrounds all of these different components of your body. And in a normal and a hydrated and A healthy state, fascia is able to stretch and it's able to move without restriction. And when it is restricted, you tend to see this lack of mobility and this increased susceptibility to sprains and strains. So when you see fascia that's not healthy, what you tend to see are what are called fascial adhesions. And ideally in fascia, the fibers run parallel to each other. But often when the body's been damaged or with age, you tend to get, get fibers that tend to stick to other fibers running parallel to them. Almost like you've got, you know, you've got a violin with a bunch of strings on it, but all of a sudden the strings and the violin are glued together, so it's not going to, it's not going to play correctly. Now, when you put strain on a fascial adhesion, you typically tend to make the issue even worse and also increase risk of, of injury. And stretching by itself doesn't tend to fix the issue. A lot of times it tends to aggravate the issue of adhesion. So you gotta do things other than just stretching to get rid of fascial adhesions. And this is where you tend to see things like deep tissue work being something that can help out quite a bit. When I say deep tissue work, I'm talking about literally working one with a massage therapist or doing lots and lots of foam roller type of drills. This is why I've talked about on the show before, like the rumble roller with the ridges sticking out of it that dig deep into the fascia and work down into the tissue to help to relieve a lot of these adhesions and to improve mobility and decrease a lot of this susceptibility to injury. Golf balls, tennis balls, stuff like that, and rolling in areas that have lack of mobility, that can help out quite a bit, as can working with massage therapists anywhere from once a week to once a month, depending on what your wallet is able to handle. You can also support the fascia or even relieve some of the stress on the fascia from what's called a kinesio tape. And if you go to Ben Grindel Fitness, you could listen to an interview that I did with Greg from Rob Rock Tape. If you go there and do a search for rock tape. And he explains how kinesio tape actually can relieve some stress from the fascia. And strategically placed adhesive taping can essentially reduce areas where fascia would normally be strained. Now, this type of taping method would really be something that you'd use if you found yourself susceptible to these type of issues and you wanted to go do a, like a triathlon or marathon or basketball game or soccer game or something like that, that can help as you're in the process of improving your actual mobility. But that's still something that I would consider to be a band aid. So stretching is not going to be as effective as deep tissue work. The other thing that I would really, really focus on is actual hip mobility. So in addition to doing some deep tissue work with foam roller, tennis ball, golf ball and massage therapist, do some classic dynamic hip mobility drills like front to back leg swings, side to side leg swings, fire hydrants, reverse lunges, mountain climbers, hip thrusts where you're squatting really low and then thrusting towards the sky. There's actually really good series of hip mobility drills called the Agile 8. Hip mobility drills. I'll put a link to the Agile 8 in the show notes to this episode, but I would certainly be using a ton of dynamic stretching and hip mobility exercises. Rather than coming at this from like a stretch, the hamstring standpoint, which again isn't really going to do much for you, especially when it comes to your fascia, I would be going after this in terms of actual movements, like some of the movements that I just mentioned, like the mountain climbers and the deep squats and the lunges and stuff like that.

And so that would be different. Then he did mention, he said, I've lost a bit of spring and explosive power, but if I train for that, I tend to tweak things.

Yeah, see, that's not plyometrics per se. Plyometrics would be like depth jumps and lunge jumps and stuff that. That isn't mobility as much as it is actual explosive exercises. So I would be focusing more on dynamic mobility exercises. And I'll put a link in the show notes to some of my favorite hip mobility drills. And then when it comes to weight room exercises, stuff that can really help with improving hip mobility would be like deadlifts, deep squats, single leg squats, side to side lunges. Again, not necessarily going after explosive exercises as much as exercises that take you through full range of motion. One really, really good exercise to engage the hips, to really work on hip extension and to also improve hip mobility is just like a simple Romanian deadlift where you're picking the weight from about the shin level in a deadlift style move, but keeping the legs relatively straight. You know, slight softness, slight bend in the knees. But Romanian deadlifts are a great exercise for improving hip mobility and hamstring strength without increasing risk of straining the hamstrings as well. So that's another one I would look into. But that's where I would come at this from the standpoint of making sure that you're taking care of your fascia with some deep tissue work, doing some dynamic mobility, especially like a dynamic one warmup prior to your exercise sessions, and then just doing some some weight training moves that take you through full range of motion.

Perfect. There you go, William. All right, and our last question comes from Bridget, and Bridget says, I just listened to podcast 192. You talked about different oils and which ones are good for high heat content versus others. There's one that I've been using for all my stir fries, sautes, pan frying fish, and anything else that requires high heat. It's called grapiola or grapeseed oil. Is this a good choice to use for all that I stated above? I also use it as a salad dressing mixed with red wine vinegar.

Well, the interesting thing is that you have to consider more than the heat point or the smoke point of an oil when you're looking at whether or not it's going to be healthy to cook with with. As you know, if you've listened to some of the things that I've said about fats and oils before, they're basically made up of different fatty acid types. You have monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, and then saturated fats. And if you look at what the predominant type of fatty acid is in a specific oil or specific fat, that helps to determine whether or not it should be exposed to heat in cooking. And the general rule of thumb is that if you look at an oil or a fat and it's got high levels of what are called polyunsaturated fats in it, then it shouldn't really be used for cooking, regardless of what's listed as its smoke point. If it's got high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids in it, that means that it's a highly reactive oil. And that means that you're going to get a high amount of what's called lipid oxidation and also free radical production, which are two things that can contribute to inflammation in your body, you're going to get those things taking place very quickly. When anything that has high amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids in it are exposed to any degree of heat, even very low heat. So when you look at grapeseed oil, it does have a really high Smoke point. The smoke point on grapeseed oil is 485 degrees, but grapeseed oil is over 70% polyunsaturated, which means that it shouldn't technically be exposed to any degree of heat. You know, if you have grapeseed oil, you could store it in the refrigerator and you could use it as, you know, in moderation, as like a salad dressing or something like that. But because of the levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids in it, I wouldn't cook with grapeseed oil at all. And to illustrate this, you could take something like rice bran oil and rice bran oil. Smoke point is almost identical to that of grapeseed oil, but rice seed oil is only about 35% polyunsaturated, about half of the amounts of polyunsaturates compared to grapeseed oil. And it's much, much higher in saturated fatty acids. And those saturated fatty AC acids tend to protect more of the delicate polyunsaturated fatty acids when something like rice bran oil is exposed to low heat cooking. So, you know, that would be an example of where smoke point is not the only thing that you want to look at. Some other oils that have lower levels of polyunsaturates and decent levels of saturated fatty acids that would be okay for higher heat cooking would be avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, or regular olive oil. Not extra virgin olive oil, but regular olive oil. And any of those would be better for higher heat cooking. The stuff that you'd want to stay away from in addition to the grapeseed oil for cooking would be corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, flaxseed oil, walnut oil oil, hazelnut oil, anything like pine nut, pumpkin, or wheat germ oil. For any of those, you want to keep them away from heat, from light, from oxygen. And I think like I mentioned last week when we were talking about olive oil is you want to look for the cold pressed, unrefined versions only, and then for anything that's like a cod liver oil or fish oil or anything like that. Those should never be used with heat or with cooking or anything of that nature. So go above and beyond smoke point. When you're looking at whether or not an oil should be used for higher heat cooking.

For sure, that would be all right to use the grapeseed oil for a.

Salad, like she said, yeah, to use it with a salad dressing mixed with red wine vinegar would be just fine. But in terms of cooking at home, in addition to butter, coconut oil, macadamia nut oil, avocado oil, and olive oil would be the ones to use for fractional heat.

Unfortunately, those are all the most expensive ones on the shelf.

I don't know what to tell you, Brock. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

I don't want cake.

I don't want cake. I just want.

I just want good oil. That's all. All right, well, that wraps up today's episode. Make sure you send us your questions and you can do so by going to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and using the handy Dandy record audio track button. Or you can call Pacific Fit on Skype. Or you can just send an email.

That's right. And we will link to everything that we talked about in this week's show in the show notes for episode 213@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and also be sure to go to Facebook.com BGFitness and check out the my list for this episode where you can click on and kind of add to your own list some of the stuff that we talked about. So that's going to wrap up today's show. Be sure to leave a ranking in itunes if you dig the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. And Brock will play.

It was laying around. I had to pick it up. I'm having trouble playing with my headphones on.

Freaking awesome. And we'll leave you with that.

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