Episode #215: How Fast Can You Lose Fat And Gain Muscle At The Same Time?

In today's podcast, how fast can you lose fat and gain muscle at the same time? Also, good nutrition for morning workouts. The best way to do burst or tabata sets. How to choose a sport. Watch the truth about green coffee beans. How to eat Paleo for energy and endurance. The best way to approach your first ironman and low carb high fat with IBS and an uncooperative family member.

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.

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. My name is Brock and I am your host or sidekick. And of course we've got Ben on the line. We couldn't have the show without him. Ben, what's happening?

Actually, you probably could have the show without me. It would be really like poutine and hockey and anything else. Canadian Most.

Yeah, I'm actually going to start that podcast right after we're done.

Mm.

I've got a bowl of poutine and my beaver standing by. He's my co host.

You're beaver? You know what I'm actually doing right now is I'm eating green tea. Literally didn't have time to hit up the coffee this morning and I literally have these dried up green tea leaves. Somebody sent them to me.

So you're not eating the beans?

No, they're green tea like leaves and it's got like 95 times the potency of brewing a cup of green tea.

Oh, geez.

I mean, they're slightly, they have that slight kind of, kind of green tea, slight bitterness to them, but they're actually, they're kind of cool. They come in this little bag and just dip your hand. You know, it's almost like using some dip or some chew. You put your fingers in there and put some in your mouth and yeah, save me from having to brew a cup of coffee.

So this show is going to be 95 times better.

That or I'm just going to get all batty. So I'll put a link to my eat green tea stuff in the show. Notes for people.

News flashes.

To get these and other interesting news flashes every week and every day actually go to twitter.com BenGreenfield or to the Google page or to facebook.com bgfitness and you can get all of the awesome stuff and then you can listen to us talk about it.

There you go. Right now, a few hopefully helpful things that I posted this week. One was I found a chart on supplement drug interactions. We know how many druggies listen into the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. So I thought I'd post a link to it just because it's very, very interesting how many of the different kinds of herbs and supplements and alternative medical treatments that we use actually do have mild to serious interactions with pharmaceutical drugs. And I put a link in the show notes to how things from bitter orange extracts to licorice to melatonin, to how all of these different things that we use as alternative treatments actually interact with other compounds. And some of them are pretty straightforward. It's like you generally are going to see a much greater sedative effect when you mix melatonin with something like Ambien, which I guess that might be kind of a good tip for anybody hopping on an airplane. I guess so. But I mean, you look at mixing like red yeast rice, which a lot of people use for cholesterol, with statin drugs and that actually increases your risk of rhabdomyolysis, which is pretty severe muscle damage. So I mean, there's some things that you should know if you're on a pharmaceutical and you're also taking some kind of a supplement. Probably the best biggest supplement, the one that had literally almost 150 drug interactions from mild all the way up to serious, was something called St. John's Wort, which is kind of a mental type of supplement or stress control type of supplement that has a ton of different drug interactions. So that's one to be pretty careful with. The other type of supplements that you really want to be careful with is if you're taking a blood thinner like warfarin or aspirin, ibuprofen, to a certain extent you want to be careful with some of these more serious blood thinning type of compounds like high dose garlic or fish oil. Ginkgo biloba is another one. But it's an interesting chart so we'll link to it in the show notes. If you are on a pharmaceutical drug and you're also taking supplements, it's probably worth checking out.

Yeah, it's a good place to just double check before you start pounding some natural remedies.

That's right. Then another interesting article from our friend, Alex Hutchinson. Actually, he's not really our friend. We just talk about him every now and again.

I met him once I Feel like I'm his friend because I met him once and I read his blog so often.

Yeah, he's got a good blog, the sweat science blog over at Runner's World. And he also writes for the Globe and Mail and he had a very interesting article on unconventional ways to boost testosterone. And he specifically went into three different studies. And in one study what they did was they had a dozen volunteers watch six four minute YouTube clips and then hit the gym after viewing each film. And the YouTube clips showed sad, erotic, aggressive, humorous or neutral type of videos. And the aggressive video and, and also the motivational video actually caused testosterone levels to spike and cause an increase of about 5% in barbell squat performance. Whereas the sad video, which in this case was a video of starving children in Africa, actually lowered testosterone and workout performance. And then the erotic videos and the funny videos were kind of somewhere in between.

I would have thought, like just immediately would have thought the erotic would have had the same effect as the aggressive one.

Well, it's possible that somehow the effects of the erotic video interfered with the biomechanics of the barbell squat. It's always a possibility.

I guess there's always. The eroticism is in the eye of the beholder as well. Maybe it was just not erotic to those folks.

Could have been monkeys and elephants. You never know.

You never know.

There was another experiment where they took some professional rugby players and before the match showed them a 15 minute video in which they were getting video of great plays that they'd made in a previous game and the coach was providing good feedback to them. And then they were also shown clips of their opponents making great plays. And the coach basically saying like, you know, don't let that happen today. And what happened in these folks was that the positive feedback increased testosterone and of course the negative feedback actually increased cortisol. So that was one. And the last one that he mentioned was basically a one hour feedback session with the coach after a match, again showing footage of the player's best moments from the previous night's game or the player's worst mistakes with the coach basically either saying, great job, you did wonderful, or looking at your mistakes, why couldn't you do that? Right? And the positive feedback group tested with dramatically higher testosterone levels a few days later. So it's pretty interesting what mental and emotional triggers, the effect that those have on hormonal levels.

That's interesting that it was a few days later that they were noticing the testosterone was increased.

Very cool. It's like kind of a long term effect which is Great. And a good reason to focus on the positive. So speaking of focusing on the positive, what do you think? Special announcements.

Mm.

Special announcements.

Okay. This podcast is brought to you by Pacific Elite Fitness. A great place to get high quality nutrition supplements. Supplements that are handpicked by you, Ben.

That's right. Fitness fine, purveyor of the highest quality stuff on the planet. So if I findors it, you're going to be able to find it over there. So you can check that out at the big stamp of approval specificfit.net so in terms of other special announcements today, for those of you in the Spokane Coeur d' Alene area, tomorrow night, 6:30pm I'll be presenting on the top exercise strategies for fat loss. And if you are a dear podcast listener and you don't want to come to Coeur d', Alene, it will be recorded and I'll put the video out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com as soon as it's available.

Awesome. And tomorrow being November 1st, tomorrow being.

November 1st, meaning today is Halloween.

I almost forgot.

Cool opportunity for you to win a free bottle of a candy cravingsugar burner nuke type of supplement called Thermo Factor, which is basically just a mix of traditional insulin stabilizing compounds like chromium and vanadium. I'll get a free bottle of that out to you if you post a picture of yourself in your Halloween costume to the facebook.com bgfitness page. Best costume. I'll toss a bottle and a few other bonuses in the mail to you.

And while you're at it, make sure to go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and check out the post that goes along with that contest where Ben gives some really good tips on how to sort of either get rid of the candy or make the candy last or just minimize the damage that all that Halloween candy will do to you and perhaps your children.

That's right, my kids and I are going to be driving to the local dentist's office on November 1st and trading in much of their candy for cold hard cash. So there's a good tip for you. And I tell you, I tell you how to find out if there's a candy buyback in your area in that article. So one other thing I wanted to mention is superhumanencoder.com Many of you know that I now wear one of these performance wristbands. Never ever thought I would have ever endorsed or worn something like this, but this thing's actually working out for me. And I basically put up a page where I try and go past all the science speak and just go into the straight talk about why I wear this and the way that it's designed in easy to understand terms rather than scientific geek speak. So you can check that out@superhumanencoder.com and.

Speaking of being superhuman.

That's right, one more special announcement and we'll jump into the Q and A.

Want to get personal access to all of Ben Greenfield's secrets Live this March in Spokane, Washington, Ben is bringing the world's best speakers straight to you. You're going to get step by step blueprints for performance, fat loss recovery, digestion, brain sleep and hormone optimization and get insider access to private parties, special sessions for podcast listeners only, and of course, delicious locally grown organic meals. The conference is called Become Superhuman and it's already filling up fast. But you can get in now@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Superhuman. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com superhuman. You'll come away from this live two day event completely, completely separate life to achieve everything you want for your body, mind and performance. Whether you want to maximize fat loss, achieve an Ironman triathlon, or push your body and mind to the absolute limits of human performance. So visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com superhuman and we'll see you live and in person March 8th and 9th, 2013. Listeners Q and A.

Hey Ben and Barack, this is Craig from Birmingham. Just a quick comment. After a lot of self experimentation based on what I heard on the podcast, I think I have figured out what I need to do for morning nutrition. So what I do if I'm going to get in a morning workout is I get up and shortly after getting up I go ahead and eat a banana and take five map. Then I go and do my workout and then post workout come back and fry up some pemmican and eggs and coconut oil. So I'm a middle aged man, about 5 foot 11, weigh about 145 pounds and that works for me. So maybe it'll work for some of your listeners out there. Thanks, bye.

Well Craig, I think that sounds like an awesome approach. The only thing that I wondering about Ben is taking the map with a banana. Would he probably do better if he was taking it on an empty stomach?

Well for those of you scratching your head about why Craig would be doing what he's doing, what he's attempting to do, it sounds like is boost his amino acids by taking this master amino acid capsules along with a little bit of sugar before a morning workout. Now this would be a strategy for somebody who may be is trying to hold on to every last shred of lean muscle and doesn't want to cannibalize lean tissue. Maybe they've already kind of reached the body composition that they want to be at and so body fat loss is not really a goal and you just want to feel pretty good during a hard morning workout, for example, like an interval based swim workout or a hard weight training session, without actually taking the time or putting the stress in your stomach of eating a full on breakfast. So this would be a case where you've reached your body composition goals. You're not trying to do a fasted workout. You want to feel the benefit of both carbs and amino acids in your bloodstream during the workout. That's a good way to do it.

Yeah. Okay, I get it. So if he actually did want to lose some body fat, he'd just skip the banana, go straight for the map, do the workout and then hit the exactly, exactly.

Because the amino acids are relatively nil in terms of calories but still keep your muscles from cannibalizing themselves. And then the breakfast is all good. I mean pemmican, coconut oil, eggs, that's a kick butt breakfast. For those of you who want, I'll put a link in the show notes to the Pemmican, the grass fed hormone free pemmican from US Wellness Meats that I always keep a freezer full of. You take it out, takes about two hours or so to thaw or you can just keep one in your refrigerator the night before. And I've actually chopped that up with eggs and coconut oil myself and it's pretty good stuff.

Sadly it's not available outside of the US and I'm having a heck of a time finding some decent pemmican in Canada. So if anybody has any suggestions, stick them in the comments section and let me know because I'm desperate for some.

Well, there are pemmican recipes out there. My wife and I are in the process of putting together some how to make beef jerky, how to make your own bone broth, how to make your own pemmican videos for the inner circle.

So another good reason to join the inner circle.

There you go. Hi Ben and Barack. I have a question. Last week on the podcast, Ben mentioned 30 seconds of exercise with a four minute rest done five times. And I was wondering what exercises he recommends for those 30 seconds that would be easy to do during the workday without any special equipment I was thinking something along the lines of burpees, but I didn't know if there's anything else. Thanks guys. Great podcast. Well, the cool thing about this kind of interval training is you can pretty much use anything. I mean, even push ups can be used for a good cardiovascular stimulus when it comes to 30 seconds of very, very hard exercise. The research studies that typically do this type of thing are having someone do a 30 second burst on usually a treadmill or a bicycle, and then rather than just sitting on your butt in between each burst, you're doing very, very easy pedaling or easy walking, jogging. So as you can imagine, that type of session would be a little bit more conducive to, you know, kind of like a full on workout, you know, at the gym or at your home gym or even outside, compared to, for example, just dropping and doing a 30 second burst of as many push ups as you can do and then kind of chilling for the next four minutes. What I personally do is for high intensity interval training that I'm going to be doing using strength training sets like whatever, push ups, overhead press pull ups. I typically use what are called Tabata sets for those, which is a single 4 minute set of 20 seconds of as many reps as you can DO followed by 10 seconds of recovery. And that is not a pleasant scenario for those of you who have actually done a full on Tabata set. But it works really well for kind of like a traditional exercise for these type of 30 second bursts followed by four minutes of recovery. It does work better to do a chronic repetitive motion type of movement like a treadmill or a bicycle, versus doing say burpees. But really anything that gets your heart rate super high would work. The only reason I'm not a huge fan of doing like burpees or push ups or something like that for this type of thing is what are you going to do for those four minutes that you're kind of recovering for each set. And I suppose that something like this would work maybe if you were doing these fitness trails where you're running and you come to a certain station and you can do a bunch of exercises on that station, then move on to the next station. You could almost have your own fitness walk where you're going on a 30 minute walk and every four minutes you're doing some kind of 30 second burst of a hard effort like burpees or jump squats or something like that.

I've done this kind of workout in my office before and I'll just sort of do something like burpees or jumping jacks or something and then just basically walk in. Well, walk the perimeter of the office at as quick of a pace as I can safely without crashing into the photocopier and stuff like that. And it's, it's not ideal, but it certainly works. The worst part of it is that you sweat up your work clothes a little bit because if you're doing it as intense as you should be, it does get you sweaty.

Yeah. And a cool little thing. This company sent me a couple and I was experimenting with them in the past couple weeks. But it's called a set starter. It's just like this little device that you can put on your finger and it will vibrate at specific intervals. So you could set it to like vibrate every 30 seconds or every two minutes or every four minutes or whatever. And that's kind of a cool way to get an interval based workout in without having to be tied to a watch. They did give a discount code. I asked them if they could give a discount code to podcast listeners. So they're giving us a 10% discount code. The code is, fittingly enough, 10%@setstarter setstarter.com so I'll link to that in the show Notes. Ben, this is Dan from Massachusetts. I wanted to thank you for all your great triathlon and training advice. I just finished my first Ironman distance triathlon. I only was able to train the bike and the swim for four months, but I survived it. Anyways, my question actually has to do with GPS watches. I'm looking to get a GPS watch for some of my endurance races and I want to know what the best or best value GPS watch is that comes with a heart rate monitor and how accurate are altimeters and do I need one? So any information you can give me there would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. You know, full disclosure on this. I race for Team Timex and so most of the GPS devices that I currently have are of the Timex variety. And specifically I've got the Timex speed and distance model and the Timex run trainer. And compared to a Garmin type of device, the Timexs don't tend to have an altimeter on them. So you can't get real time data of elevation, et cetera. You know, if we're talking about like a watch that's going to be used for running. But the thing is that when you use an online piece of software like TrainingPeaks is the one that I highly, highly recommend for keeping track of your workouts and for literally plugging your watch in after a workout and within a few seconds getting all that data there sitting in front of you. You know, TrainingPeaks will spit out all your altitude data at you anyways. So you don't really have to get a watch with an altimeter on it if you're going to be downloading your workout information to a computer or to a system like TrainingPeaks. But if you were going to get something with an altimeter, the Garmin models are pretty decent. There's a really, really good website though for reading reviews of most of the technology out there. A guy I've actually had a chance to hang out with a bit and who's a pretty cool dude, ray from Washington D.C. he's got a website called dcrainmaker.com and@dcrainmaker.com you can read a ton of his articles on kind of how to choose the best GPS device, heart rate monitor, et cetera. So that's a really, really good resource for looking into some of this stuff, probably especially for people who live in the US Best deals that you can get on heart rate monitors or watches with altimeters in them is heart rate monitors USA. I think it's like heart rate monitors USA.com something like that. But I mean, these watches are so fancy these days. Like, you know, I can take my Timex run trainer and set it. You know, we talked about kind of setting like the little vibration deal on the finger for going off at certain intervals. You can do that with your watch now for beeping at certain intervals, you can have it beep set you at running at a pace of 8 minutes per mile for 2 minutes and then 6 minutes per mile for 3 minutes or whatever you want to do. I actually shot a few videos for Timex where I show you how to kind of use a watch that can give you speed and distance as effectively as possible. So I'll make sure that I put a link to those videos in the show notes as well as to the training peaks and the, the D.C. rainmaker site. But you know, it's.

Go ahead. I was just gonna say I. With the, the vibration and beeping alerts, I actually have the, I have the Garmin 910 XT and I find that the vibration on it is really cool. If I'm doing an open water swim, I can actually tell it to like alert me every time I do say 500 meters or 100 meters or something. So when I'm swimming in a, in a pool, it's easy to know how far you've gone. But when you're out in the middle of the lake, it's nice to just get an alert that says, okay, you've gone 200 meters and can sort of judge where you're going and what you're doing.

And I've heard really good stuff about the 910 XT. I don't personally use it because Timex would shoot me, but, you know, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Timex comes out with a version of that as well. So a lot of options out there. Check out dcrainmaker.com though. That's a really good website for. Have you been to that website, Brock?

I haven't. I'm going to check it out for sure though, because my 910 barometric pressure altimeter has died and the fancy function that I was just talking about with the vibration also has become incredibly sporadic and erratic. So I'm either going to get it fixed or in the market for a new watch.

Yeah, and it's pretty unbiased, the advice that he gives out on that site. He pretty much covers every single watch out there that you could get in terms of like a GPS or a speed or a distance watch. But they'll send him something to review and he sends it back like he doesn't keep it. So he's. It's fairly, fairly unbiased advice. I was actually talking to him about this. We went on a, on a run together and that was down in, down in Galveston earlier this year. But yeah, check that out. And there you go.

Hey, Ben, this is Donna calling and wanted to find out. There's lots of talk about green, the green coffee bean being a. Some sort of additive now for burning calories and fat. And what's your take on that? Just kind of curious. There's just always something out there. Last thing was, I think raspberry ketones. So now the latest and greatest is the green coffee bean. Anyway, I drink regular coffee, organic espresso and I love that. Not sure about the green one, though. So what's your take on that? Thanks, Ben, and love the podcast. You and Brock are doing a great job. Talk to you later.

Bye. Yeah, the idea behind the green coffee extract, which I know Starbucks is pushing big time down, you know, it's kind of like the, like the raspberry ketones. Both of those came out at a similar time. I think we can blame Dr. Oz for that one, if I remember correctly. But it's this chlorogenic acid that's an antioxidant, but that kind of affects how your body responds to sugar and it may improve your insulin sensitivity. It may also be the fact that's responsible for coffee drinkers having reduced risk of diabetes because it can really have some positive effects on blood sugar. Most of the supplements containing this green coffee extract that are being pushed, they're being marketed based off of really the results of one study which was funded by a company that markets green coffee extract. And that study found that overweight people lost weight when they took a high dose green coffee supplement. The thing is that the amount of chlorogenic acid in that green tea extract supplement really isn't that much different than what you're going to get from say, drinking a cup of coffee. And I have nothing against coffee in terms of its ability to help you feel more alert and to even be used as an ergogenic aid to enhance athletic performance and everything else. But I see no need to be paying extra money for the chlorogenic acid from a green coffee drink versus just having yourself a nice cup of coffee.

Especially when the Starbucks green coffee drinks are all laden with artificial sweeteners.

Yeah, and there's, I mean, the interesting thing is there's this drug called metformin that has some really, really nice effects on diabetes, blood sugar control, and potentially fat loss. And you know, we were talking about drug supplement interactions and there is one type of supplement that recently came to my attention that is basically an extract from bitter melon. And it has very, very similar effects to metformin in clinical studies in terms of promoting better blood sugar control with less insulin, controlling release of insulin, controlling release of insulin like growth factor. And that's, that's some pretty interesting stuff. I've actually got a couple of bottles of this stuff in my pantry, but it's basically just a bitter melon extract mixed with another extract called Rock Lotus. There's so many different things out there. Earlier I mentioned this thermo factor fat burner. And then we've got this mix of Rock Lotus and bitter melon and we've got our green coffee extract. I wrote an article for this over@quickanddirtytips.com but for any of this stuff, we're talking about very, very slight effects compared to lifestyle and exercise and dietary modifications. I mean, we're talking about getting an extra two maximum, maybe 5% of a slight increase in metabolism or fat burning. But I don't want to give anybody the impression that I'm a proponent of just sitting around and popping pills to get effects. I know that sometimes it may sound like this on the show because we end up talking about lots of supplements, because we get lots of questions about supplements. But ultimately, any of this stuff doesn't hold a candle to good exercise and using. Really a lot of the stuff I'm going to be talking about in tomorrow night's seminar about how to exercise appropriately for fat loss, how to find your fat burning zone, and the type of weight training sessions to use, and how to pair cardio bursts with weight training sets. I definitely will put the video of that out for podcast listeners when it comes out. But yeah, I mean, you could use green coffee extract. You could just drink coffee. You could use a mix of chromium and vanadium. I like that. As a fat burner. This rock lotus bitter melon extract is looking like a good option as well. But again, take priority with the nutrition, the exercise and lifestyle modifications first.

Yeah, like we said last week, do some bursting training or high intensity stuff like we were talking about earlier in the, in the show. And that can burn what, what was it, 200 calories for the rest of the day.

Yeah, which. Which basically just like blows any fat burner out of the ballpark, so.

Exactly.

Hi, Ben, my Name's Jane. I'm 45 years old and I've been doing the Paleo eating plan for around two months now. My problem is I'd like to train.

For a half marathon and run that.

Next year, but I have no idea how to go about that or how I should adapt or modify my eating.

For energy and endurance. So if you could help me with that, that would be great. Keep up the great work.

Thanks.

Well, when you're eating Paleo and you want to switch to like chronic repetitive motion exercise, which technically is going to burn more calories and have a higher metabolic cost for your body, the only real thing that you have to change, potentially is occasionally having a few days where you shift some of your eating towards a slightly higher carbohydrate intake than you might get if you were just eating, say, meat and nuts and seeds and non starchy vegetables. What I mean by that is, for example, if you're training for a half marathon and you're, you're following a paleo diet and eating relatively few amounts of carbohydrates, you just have one day, let's say your big run day, say Saturdays, is going to be your long run day, and on that day you almost have a little bit of a carb reloading type of protocol where you're getting your hands on some safe starches, parsnips, carrots beets, sweet potatoes, yams, stuff like that. And you're giving yourself anywhere from 40 to 60% carbohydrate intake on those days versus 10 to 30% on your other days of the week. It's pretty simple to do. I've talked about carb reloading on this show before and how that's going to do things like save yourself from metabolic damage, save yourself from potentially suppressing thyroid production, save yourself from some of the immune system deficits that can come with long term carbohydrate depletion, and basically give you that little extra step of performance enhancement that comes with slightly higher sugar intake. So that's the way that I would do it. You just have that one day where you've got a little bit higher intake of safe starches.

Could she sneak in some quinoa or some beans or something like that as well, or is that just too anti paleo?

Technically, both of those would be forbidden on a paleo diet. Those are not considered part of the safe starches that a paleo diet would incorporate. I personally do some quinoa. It's usually soaked for a good period of time, 12 to 24 hours, to rinse off the saponins and make it a little bit more digestible. And you can also very easily sprout quinoa. I mean, you could use chef quinoa Google and just type in the word sprout quinoa and it'll show. I mean, you can buy quinoa, amaranth, millet, stuff like that and sprout it. And that really inactivates most of the enzyme inhibitors or digestive irritants and something like that, beans, legumes, stuff like that. Again, soaking, preferably in an acidic medium. It's got some vinegar and stuff in it. Allowing it to ferment a little bit is going to improve digestibility and again decrease a lot of these or inhibit a lot of these lectins that are in those compounds from causing issues in your digestive tract. Again, not technically allowed on a paleo diet, but foods that, if treated properly, can be, in my opinion, just fine. When you look at a lot of these studies that show beans and legumes and quinoa or any of these other items to be digestive irritants, in many cases, they're not cooked or soaked or sprouted properly.

Now, Chef Google, he's a friend of Dr. Google, right?

That's right. Chef Google and Dr. Google make people's lives a lot easier or make our lives a lot harder, depending on the way you look at it. Speaking of chef, my wife is going down to LA this weekend to audition for MasterChef. Hey. And I actually think her, she's doing all just like local slow cooked stuff. She's just bringing it all literally in one big messy suitcase down to la. And yeah, it's going to be interesting. But I think she does have some lentils as part of her meal specifically because she's choosing a lot of stuff that's regional to us here in the Pacific Northwest. Hi Ben, this is Keithi from San Diego. I was looking for ways to bulk up that is put on a lot of lean body mass without adding any extra body fat percentage. So I do eat pretty healthy and I'm trying to eat extra calories whenever I can. My training program is also pretty dialed in as in I lift heavy and do hrits once or twice a week. But it's been two months now and I'm really not gaining any weight at all. Do you have any suggestions in terms of macronutrient ratio and timing and how many extra calories to eat in order to put on at least 10 pounds of lean body mass? Thanks. So putting.

It's the good old question. You want to put on some lean body mass. Who doesn't want to put on some lean body mass and not add some fat?

Professional marathoner maybe?

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah. Actually I'm working on an article right now about how to boost testosterone with the type of weight training that you do. And I've come across some really, really interesting research on how endurance exercise suppresses testosterone, with one of the reasons being that your body probably does just not want to hold, hold on to that extra muscle mass that testosterone allows you to do just because it flies in the face of you moving your body over long distances efficiently or economically anyways though. So one thing that you're going to want to do is avoid too much chronic cardio. But as far as how fast you can build muscle, it really depends on your category. Whether you're beginner or intermediate or advanced, there's really two primary exercise physiologists or fitness experts who have really looked into this hardcore and come up with charts on how fast you can gain muscle. So one guy is Lyle McDonald and he's got this chart that bases your potential rate of muscle gain per year on how many years you spent training, so how experienced you are. So for example, if you've just trained for one year, you could add 20 to 25 pounds of muscle potentially or about 2 pounds per month. If you've trained for two years, you'd be closer to 1 pound per month. If you've trained for three years, you'd be closer to a half pound per month. And really, if you have four plus years of good, solid weight training under your belt, you put on a lot of muscle. A lot of times you top out around two to three pounds of muscle that you can add per year. So that's one chart. Another chart is Alan Argon, who I think I've had on this podcast before. He talked about his top 10 myths at some point. Go to Ben Grateful Fitness and do a search for Allen Argon. It was a good interview with him, but he has three categories, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. He says beginners can put on about 1 to 1.5% total body weight per month. Intermediate, you can put on 0.5 to 1% total body weight per month. And advanced could put on 0.25 to 0.5% total body weight per month. So stepping back and looking at that, let's say you weigh 200 pounds. 1% total body weight per month means you could put on two pounds per month. If you're like an intermediate exerciser. If you're an advanced exerciser, 0.5% total body weight per month means if you weigh 200 pounds, you could potentially put on one pound of muscle per month. Ultimately, all of these scenarios are much, much less muscle per month than what you see. A lot of muscle magazines or bodybuilding supplement websites promising you to put on 10 pounds of lean body mass. Let's say that you're just in average shape. I don't know Keerthi's exercise history, but we'd be looking at anywhere from between 5 and 10 months to do that effectively without putting on a bunch of fat simultaneously, because you could eat like crazy and potentially accelerate this rate of muscle gain a little bit. But if we're talking about lean mass gain, 10 pounds of lean body mass, the quickest you're probably going to put that on in a healthy way is going to be at about 2 pounds per month. So that's what I would look at as a realistic.

I'm really curious why Keerthi wants to put on like 10 pounds of lean body mass instead of increasing strength by 25% or increasing the explosiveness of his jumping ability or something that's a little more practical. Do you have any ideas?

Well, I mean, for me, if I was doing, it'd be two reasons to look good naked or to look good on the beach. I mean that's. Or to look in a T shirt or a suit. I mean, there's definitely some aesthetic advantages to, to putting on muscle in many cases.

Yeah, it's just I'm thinking specifically putting on ten pounds rather than a couple inches around the bicep or around the chest or something like that. It just seems like a rather arbitrary way to look at muscle gain.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's something that, you know, a lot of times it's just nice to think about having an extra 10, 20 pounds of muscle. Come on, Brock, let's not beat him up too much. I wrote an article on how to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time over at the Quick and Dirty Tips website. And for those of you who don't know, I write articles every week over there. Some people wonder why I don't write articles more often for BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's because I literally am spending time churning out some of the best articles I can write for quickanddirtytips.com so I'll put a link in the show notes to this one I did on how to lose fat and gain muscle at time the same. Same time. But one really, really interesting thing is that you can build muscle even when you're at a caloric deficit. And they've had studies where people were on as low as 800 calories per day. Not that I'm condoning that type of stress on your body, but they were able to, over the course of several weeks increase their lean muscle mass by 6% while also losing a significant amount of fat on that 800 calorie. And this happened to be a high protein diet. Now I recommend that you go closer to eating a slightly higher amount of calories than you're actually burning. If you want to put on muscle around 500 calories, then you're actually burning and go with that on a weekly basis rather than, you know, going with 800 calorie high protein diet. But it's interesting how in the presence of weight training especially even a caloric deficit can result in some significant lean muscle gain.

The reason I was asking those questions was I always like to sort of be the guy who chooses a realistic reason and method to reach that sort of body improvement or self improvement that you want to achieve. And sometimes when it seems like it's just this arbitrary number, you might be setting yourself up for failure, which really isn't a failure if you don't hit that 10 pounds. Is it really was it important to hit the 10 pounds or was it better, like Ben said, to look good in a T shirt or in a suit? I guess that's what I was getting at.

Well, as an ex bodybuilder, I'm just shallow and vain, so I accept stuff like that. I'm actually flexing in my office window reflection right now while you're talking, doing my double biceps.

I'm going to try that too. Oh, that's depressing.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Rob. I'm an avid listener of the podcast and you know, I really enjoy, appreciate, and look forward to all the cool new things you guys, you know, talk about on the podcast. So, so keep it up. I plan on training for my very first endurance event, which is called the Ironman. I've never done any kind of endurance sport. In fact, the longest I've ever ran up until this point is six miles. The most I've ever swam was probably three laps in an Olympic sized pool. And the longest distance I've ever rode on a bike is probably about 10 miles. I'm pretty fit, pretty in shape, weigh about 200 pounds, you know, 12, 13% body fat. So, you know, like I said, I'm a pretty strong guy. I get a lot of cardio out of playing basketball and doing the high intensity training. I'm also a vegetarian and so I'm pretty aware of goals and my body. Good or bad. I planned on using the Tridominator program to get myself in shape for the Ironman. So my question was, do you think the Tridominator is a good program to start off with in training for my first Ironman? I just wanted to, you know, want you to keep in mind that I, you know, pretty competitive guy. I just don't want to race. I want to compete. I want to do very well in this race. So like I said, will Tri Dominator be a good bet? My second question actually, since I'm pretty new to the endurance sport or endurance sporting world, you know, I have no training gear at all. So do you guys have any suggestions on, you know, where I can get some really affordable training gear? I'm pretty broke, so, you know, the cheaper the better. Look forward to hearing what you guys have to say. Take care. Bye.

Well, there's a lot of different ways that we could go with this, but I guess I'll throw some of my best resources out to those of you who are training for your first Ironman and kind of some ways that you can take this in terms of getting over the learning curve and getting access to some affordable training gear and stuff like that. First of all, you can get really, really good deals on gear, especially at the end of a triathlon season. Really close to the time that this podcast is being recorded, like around, you know, September, October, November on Classified's websites. I mean, you could go to ebay, you could go to your local Craigslist. One thing that I really, really like to do is find your local triathlon clubs. And a lot of times they've got classified sections on the triathlon club's website where people local in your area are selling stuff. One good website that I like, it's not used stuff, it's new stuff, but it's wiggle.co.uk free shipping anywhere in the world on a lot of really good deals on triathlon or cycling gear. So that's a really good website. Another really good website that I like for picking up gear is thetryshop.com. the cool thing about them is they let you try stuff on and send it back if you don't like it, they can have free shipping. They've got this membership where you can join as a member. I think it's like 20 bucks and you get 10% discount on all your orders at one time. You may want to try this. It should still work, but at one time they were offering a discount to all of our listeners. The code was BEN10. I haven't gone over there lately and tried out that discount code, but it's 10% discount code BEN10. So I like thetryshop.com and I like wiggle.co.uk, it's probably two of my favorite sources for new triathlon gear. And then for the used stuff, Craigslist ebay. Classified section of your local triathlon club works really, really well as far as figuring out what to get and how to use it. So many of you who listen to this podcast know that I run what's called the Rockstar Triathlete Academy. And we offer anything from, like, customized, basically kind of more personal work with myself and the other coach over there. And that's $37 a month, all the way down to basically what we call our bronze module. And this is a good idea if you wanting to get into triathlon or get over that learning curve or wanting to do your First Ironman, it's seven bucks a month. And what it is is it's 42 modules. And starting from number one, all the way up to number 42, you get walked through basically everything you need to know to go from Knowing absolutely nothing about triathlon and doing your first triathlon to literally like getting your pro card if you wanted to. And we spent a good year designing that entire series. It's videos, it's audios, it's articles. But check. I'll put a link in the show notes, but you can check that out@rockstartriathlete.com and you don't have to do the fancy 17 or $37 a month deal. It's just like 7 bucks a month. Super useful for anybody who just likes to geek out. Our last one that we did was on proper pacing for your race and how to respond to pace changes. And we've done how to choose a wet suit and how to choose your running shoes and how to choose your cycling shoes. So that's a really, really good one to check out. And of course total biased response here. But Absolutely, my Triathlon Dominator.com program will work just fine for you if you're training for an Ironman. So I'd absolutely do that. I think we do have a question coming up about kind of being a vegetarian. And so I do have some thought thoughts on vegetarianism and how it jives with Ironman training. So maybe we'll address that in our next question.

So are you sure it's trishop.com, i just went there and it's somewhere in Texas.

In Texas. I don't know where it's at, but it's the Tri shop.

The Tri Shop. Okay.

And I'm pretty sure the discount code is BEN10 and it should work along with their other discount codes over there so you could save some big bucks. Hi, Ben.

Hi, Brock, Tony in Glasgow, Scotland. Just like to thank you both for what you do and all the information you give. A bit complicated question on the diet front. I'm a lacto ovo pescatarian trying to do low carb. I have ibs. I can do two low carb meals a day because I can look after myself with the breakfast and lunch. But my wife is the major cook in the household, so she does the dinners and that tends to be relatively high carb with rice or sweet potato and the like. Am I doing myself more damage by just doing two out of three meals, low carb and then a high carb evening meal? Should I just modify my diet in some way? And I'm aware of the oxidosis, oxidation of fats, which is a problem. So obviously if I have a relatively high fat breakfast and lunch, is that going to cause me a problem? Having high carbs in the dinner. The other issue with the IBS is I can't do coconut.

Really.

It causes issues. So I'm limited with the breakfast options. I've got your low carb photo triathlete book and that has quite a bit of coconut in it, which I can't really take. Also, eggs really bind me, so I'm really kind of limited. The only thing I end up having for breakfast is generally yogurt and almond butter, which gets a bit old after a while. Any suggestions you've got on whether I'm doing myself more harm doing two out of three meals as a low carb and one high carb meal, or whether you think that's okay and better than nothing. Thanks again.

So for those of you not familiar with the term lacto ovo pescatarian, that is a vegetarian who also will eat fish or like mollusks, like scallops or oysters or crustaceans, like lobster or shrimp, stuff like that. That's the pescetarian part, that's the pescatarian part. So basically seafood, shellfish, et cetera, and then also eggs.

Now that's the OVO part.

That's the OVO part, exactly. I'm a big fan of the whole pescetarian approach because, I mean, the biggest thing that you're missing out on when you're a vegetarian, in my opinion, is high quality dha, which has some potential down the road implications for your central nervous system health, for your brain health, for your neuron health, just because it's such an important part of your nervous system, that specific fatty acid and conversion from ALA to DHA from vegetable sources is pretty low, even when you're looking at stuff like hemp and flaxseed seed and chia seed and things of that nature. So if you're not a pescatarian and if you're a vegetarian or a vegan who's not including fish in your diet, one of the best things you can do for yourself is at least include a bunch of spirulina and chlorella, which is going to give you some decent sources of decently bioavailable dha. But I'm a big fan of the pescatarian as far as adding the lacto OVO in there, the milk and the eggs. I'm hit or miss on that. I personally really don't do that much in terms of milk or eggs anymore myself, just because I did an immunoglobulin test and it turns out that I'm fairly sensitive to that kind of stuff. So it is though, if you're not sensitive to it, a decent source of getting extra protein that might be more difficult for you to get if you're not eating meat. Kind of addressing Tony's digestive issues though. One of the things I tend to notice this more in the veganvegetarian population is probably due to the slightly higher intake of fermentable carbohydrates. Even though Tony is eating low carb for two meals a day, eating higher carb later on the day, you tend to see a little bit more of like the H. Pylori issue, some of the candida yeast, fungus issues, a lot of the stuff that can contribute to irritable bowel syndrome. So I would recommend Tony, that you look into getting like a parasitology test. Now it sounds like you might be across the pond probably. I was thinking maybe uk. Yeah, I think he said Scotland or Scotland. Okay. Yeah. So in that case you're going to have to check because here in the US you can do that through a company called Genova. You're going to have to look for a good source for a parasitology test over where you're at. But I would be looking just at things like H. Pylori, fungus, yeast, things of that nature in your digestive tract. The fact that you're having issues with a lot of these fat based foods like coconut, eggs, stuff like that, suggests that there may be some digestive enzyme issues going on. In this case it would be like lipase, the enzyme that's responsible for digesting fats. If a lot of these fatty based foods aren't agreeing with you and they're foods that are completely dissimilar, coconut and eggs, then it's likely kind of a digestive enzyme issue. So I'd look into that as well. Popping a couple digestive enzymes, you know, whatever. Now food super enzymes or caprazymes or something like that before you actually eat a meal, literally like five minutes before and see if that addresses an issue if you're eating a meal that has the coconut or the eggs in it or that type of thing. As far as some other recommendations for your gut and your IBS, I've got this page that I maintain over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, which is just basically a list of all my different recommendations. I also recently put out a free book on Amazon that's just kind of that same stuff in Kindle book format. But some things that I also recommend that you throw in if you're trying to heal your gut, one would be to address any of the yeast candida fungus overgrowth type of issues by getting your hands on a good high quality oil of oregano and getting a few drops of that one to three times per day. You can literally put, put it into a glass of water. That's something that I travel with for immune system benefit as well. That's one thing that you can add. In a lot of times when you've got irritable bowel syndrome, where you've got digestive issues, it can indicate that you're low on hydrochloric acid, which is the acid in your stomach that's responsible for activating pepsin, which digests protein. So you can use a hydrochloric acid supplement before you eat and you can get your hands on a capsule again like Now Foods makes a good hydrochloric acid supplement that you should be able to get just about anywhere. If you end up testing, and you end up testing, doing like a parasitology and finding that you've got parasites, things like that, which are. It's actually fairly common in a lot of folks in the digestive tract. There's a good supplement called Paragard out there that can really help kind of kill off parasites in your digestive tract. And then the last thing that I'd recommend would just be using some bitters right before you eat. Herbal bitters are really good digestive that can help out a ton. There's a good one made by a company called Floridex that's a decent supplement. And then finally, from a dietary standpoint, points. We had them on the podcast or him on the podcast a few weeks ago, but the guy who wrote the specific carbohydrate diet book, and he has a diet there that does a really, really good job in terms of healing the gut. Now if you simply cannot get your wife to kind of go lower carb, especially eliminate a lot of the fermentable carbohydrates like pasta, grains, fructose, stuff like that from dinner. What you may want to consider is this approach of just getting yourself super insulin sensitive before that evening meal by shifting your workout to be like afternoon, early evening, or even after dinner. So at least you can ensure that high carbohydrates at dinner are not doing you damage as far as your body composition. And that's kind of that whole carb backloading approach we had talked about a few weeks ago, where you give yourself a ton of carbohydrates in the evening, but you also have a really, really hard workout in the afternoon or early evening. So that's a strategy that you could use. I think we've mentioned before on this show that the Pacific Elite Fitness Mental Coach, the Mental Performance Coach and myself are launching a program that helps you stick to a diet and helps you eat whatever diet that you're eating regardless of social pressures or peer pressures or family situations. And that'swe're getting ready to launch that. You can check it out. It's over@thedietdominator.com it's going to be called the Diet Dominator, but that's a good resource for you. But if your wife just is simply going to insist on having lots of carbs with dinner, you can at least get yourself into an insulin sensitive state and then stay fairly low carbohydrate for your other meals.

How about if he threw in a bit of a fast after that? So if he had all the carbs for dinner but then didn't eat anything else for the rest of the night and waited quite a while after waking up to before having breakfast, would that help?

Yeah, I tell you what, after like a binge or a party or, you know, a bunch of food that I hadn't planned on eating in the evening or that I know isn't healthy, for me, that 1:2 combo of fasting plus cold exposure can really help to maintain body composition in a situation like that. So I mean it's literally you get up, you don't eat much and you get yourself like a cold shower and some cold exposure, like a cold soak or wear like the cool fat burner vest or anything of that nature. And that's a really nice one two combo for something like that. And also I wrote Pesca OVO Vegetarian Plan for Training Peaks. So if anybody uses trainingpeaks and wants to just download my version of how to do like a fish egg vegetarian plan, I do have a full on plan available kind of for physically active people who want to go that route. So you can check that out. We'll put a link to it in the show notes as well as a link to everything else that we talked about because I think that was the last question. Right?

That is the last question for episode 215.

Cool. So I know we've got one quick audio call in that's going to be a good one for you guys to listen to at the end here. If you want to get an idea of how using this podcast can help you. It's just a nice little note from a guy named Jim. So we're going to put that in for you to listen to as we end here. But remember you said this is episode 215, Brock.

Yeah, that's right.

For resources for everything that we talked about in today's episode, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and check out the show notes for episode number 215. Or alternatively, we always keep a running list of all of our recommendations over at the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page@facebook.com bgfitness and there's something called my list there. And it's just basically a list that we generate from each podcast that kind of gives you all the helpful tips that we we talk about in one easy to grab list. So I think that about wraps it up, huh?

Yeah. I just wanted to remind everybody to make sure to go over to itunes and leave us a ranking and even put a comment if you've got the time. It would really help out to grow the community and keep everything just chugging along really nicely for the podcast and especially you Canadians. There hasn't been a review for months and months and months on the camera Canadian itunes site. So get to it.

A. That's right, you Canadians. Was there like a big like hockey tournament or something up there that kept people off itunes.

Oh, don't start with the hockey talk.

All right, well, Brock and I are going to go ahead and get into a political argument here about Canada versus the U.S. well, you all get to listen into this audio from Jim.

Hey, Ben and Brock. This is Jim calling from London. I really started my process a little over a year ago just feeling very unfit, kind of up and down weight wise and exercise wise and decided to get serious about it, started doing more exercise, started to watch my diet and came across you, Ben, in the podcast somewhere along the way, which really very, very heavily influenced my exercise routines and diet and so forth. I've gone to high fat, low carb diet and the results have been pretty unbelievable. So just in the last seven months when I really started measuring it, I've lost 18 pounds. I've gained 2 pounds of muscle. I've gone from about 18% body fat to about 8. So I've gone from almost 200 pounds down to about 165, feeling incredibly fit and strong. I'm 49 years old, so I think this message is really relevant given your podcast about the kind of over 40s last year, because I did my first triathlon a year ago as part of a relay team in the big London Triathlon. This year I was placed top 10 in my age group, and it's really got me focused for next year. So I'd like to, you know, really try and place well within my age group. And I'm also looking to do a 70.3 next year for which I've dutifully purchased the triathlon dominant. So I just want to say thanks because you've been incredibly influential to me. It's been a fantastic journey. In addition to just helping me feel a lot better. Obviously, the mental benefits of building confidence and strength and so forth have been enormous. Thanks, guys. Great job, and I look forward to continuing to live to be a listener.

Bye.