Episode #219: Why Women Gain Weight When Training For Endurance, And What You Can Do About It.

In today's episode, Brock and Ben are in the same place at the same time.

Yo. So I will be the sexy female voice that's introing today's podcast. I don't even remember what the sexy female voice says, but it's something like, welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness.com podcast. Whether you want to be an Ironman triathlete or just shed a few pounds, have we got some kick butt advice for you. So sit back and enjoy another episode of the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. Unedited, unplugged, and live from Thailand, Mr. Ben Crop. Brock. In case you hadn't guessed, folks, first of all, our deepest apologies to any new listener who just discovered this podcast.

Please go back and listen to another episode before you continue with this one.

Has already hit the stop button thinking that we are a bunch of frigging hack jobs. We're recording this on a. On a veranda right after a monsoon, and we have very limited editing equipment. But we're going to bring you a podcast anyways this week for two reasons. First of all, we're just those dedicated kind of people. We are. You would not believe how dedicated. We're actually both wearing our Ben Greenfield fitness T shirts and shorts, hats, pants. Yes, stop there. And also, we're recording this just because we happen to be together. And that rarely happens since Brock lives in a country that's very far away from America called Canada. So apparently we have to go all the way over to Asia to actually be in the same place. So what we have for you guys today is we do have news flashes, we do have special announcements. And what else do we have, Brock?

Love and questions. Oh, yes, questions.

Apparently love might be a little bit of an abbreviated podcast today. We may just stop the thing 10 minutes in if it sucks as much as it already does. But hang on tight, folks, because here it comes live. And if you hear any monkeys screaming in the background or German tourists, rain falling the background, German tourists attacking monkeys, just. Just let it all slide because we're here doing it live. All right.

News flashes.

I was wondering if there's news flashes. Music. All right, so couldn't remember how it actually sounds. Where do we get these news flashes, Brock?

We get them from twitter.com BenGreenfield and also from facebook.com BGFitness and also from Google. If you go to the website BenGreenfieldFitness.com and scroll down the right hand side, you don't have to remember the URLs.

You can just click and as usual, this is podcast number what? 219.

219.

So if you go to BenGreenFendness.com, episode number 219, we'll write down everything that we talk about there. But the first thing that I wanted to mention was a study that they did in overweight kids. And this study was actually in. Let me pull it up here. It was called Optimizing sprint interval exercise to maximize energy expenditure and enjoyment in overweight boys, which is very interesting. They actually have a physical activity enjoyment scale where they pull you about how much you enjoyed your physical activity.

That's kind of subjective, but I guess.

And they used a variety of different sprint ratios with these overweight boys. And they not only tracked their enjoyment, but they also tracked how much they wanted to eat after the exercise by giving them a buffet breakfast. And the interesting thing was was they found out what length of physical activity, what length of intervals that you could do that would both maximize your enjoyment and also keep you from doing that compensatory eating that we all tend to do after we exercise.

Yeah, that's why I exercise.

All right, so drumroll please. Here is the magic ratio of exercise if you are an overweight boy. Although I would imagine this would work for many other people too. So 30 minutes of either continuous cycling or sprint interval exercise with 4 second maximum sprints every 2 minutes, every 1 minute, or every 30 seconds. The interval ratio that actually won out, and I've got it written here somewhere so we don't have to go all the way through the abstract, was eight seconds on, 60 seconds off. What that means is eight seconds of hard, hard sprinting followed by 60 seconds of recovery. That is the money zone. So let's say you wake up in the morning before breakfast, you don't want to make yourself super, super hungry, but you want to maximize the enjoyment of your physical activity as much as possible. Hop on a bike, go outside, whatever. Eight second sprints with eight seconds on and 60 seconds off. And that was done for a total of, let's see, how long did they do that? That was done for a total of 30 minutes, 8 seconds on, 60 seconds off.

So there you go. So that maximized energy expenditure. So the most they could get out of them before they started wanting to eat more.

So basically maximize weight loss while not causing a ton of compensatory eating and also maximizing enjoy. Awesome. So the next news flash to mention was called the effects of load volume on epoch after acute bouts of resistance training and resistance trained in males. Do you know what EPOC is.

No, I was just looking to see what it is.

Exercise, post excess, post exercise oxygen consumption. Basically you hear people talking about metabolic rate, like how exercise boosts your metabolism. And in geek speak, that's epoch excess post exercise oxygen consumption. You're paying this debt after you finish exercising, meaning that while you're exercising, your body isn't getting enough oxygen, so it has to burn extra calories after you finished exercising to pay off that oxygen debt. And that's why you might have a metabolism boost of 24 hours after you finish a workout.

So it's a replenishment.

Right. But here's what they found in these weight trained males who were doing a ton, they were doing pretty high volume, they were actually lifting the equivalent of, well, it ranged from 10,000 to 20,000kg in a single workout, but with load volumes of up to 20,000 kilograms. Can you do the conversion kilograms to pounds?

It's 2.6, so that would be 46 pounds 2002.

But yeah, it's a lot of weight. We're talking about like whatever, a quarter ton of weight lifted during the actual routine. In people who are actually well trained, there was no increase in metabolic rate even from a very, very difficult workout session such as that weight training, no significant increase in your metabolic rate over and above your resting metabolic rate. That's a bummer. Well, yeah. What it goes to show you though, I think there's something you can take out of this. What they have found is that metabolic rate will increase in untrained people or in people who are being exposed to new activities. So if you take a bunch of people who have been resistance training and doing a certain number of different resistance training moves like bench press, squat, deadlift, clean, whatever, and you just have them go and do a whole bunch of those, it's not going to increase their metabolic rate. But if you throw a curveball at your body and you still do a bunch of new exercises, different exercises, you are going to notice an increase in your metabolic rate. And that has been studied. So the takeaway here is that if your goal is fat loss, we're not talking about strength, power or anything else, but if your goal is fat loss, the way that you do it is by continuously throwing curve balls, change it.

Up as often as possible.

And you can't just take what you already do and double or triple it and expect an increase in metabolic rate. Body doesn't work that way. You actually need something new that you're exposed to.

So how drastically new are we talking? If you're Usually lifting weights. Do you have to go to a completely different go do a 20 minute run? No.

You could for example, instead of doing bench press, do suspended push ups. Instead of doing squats, do single leg squats or single leg jumps onto a box.

So you're not sacrificing your end product or your end goal, you're changing the.

Angle and the neuromuscular requirements. Gotcha. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was a study on the effect of carbohydrate and protein supplements on resistance exercise performance, hormonal response and muscle damage. And basically this was a what happens when you eat during your workout type of study, which we all love to do. I know you're a big, you're a big Jamba Juice guy, right?

Oh totally.

36 ounce Jamba Juice in each hand. Yes. Double fisting. Well, curling biceps curls and running. Anyways, they fed people a carbohydrate protein beverage mix. Kind of a typical. There's a variety of different sports drinks that are a mix of carbohydrate and protein. We've got miffinate and yeah, a lot of them. And what they found was that there was not much of an improvement in performance during weight training. Even though they have shown performance increases during endurance exercise. They didn't show much of a performance increase during weight training. But post exercise inflammation was lower. They looked at what's called creatine kinase. They looked at myoglobin, both markers of muscle damage. Both were significantly lower along with lower soreness levels. So what that means is that if your single goal is muscle growth and bouncing back from your workout as fast as possible and not being sore after the workout, then it actually does serve you well during a weight training workout to be consuming a beverage during the actual workout itself. And they were consuming. What did it come out to? It was 100, about 175 milliliters prior to exercise, 175 halfway through and 355 milliliters afterwards. So they were taking in a pretty significant amount of fuel. But for you muscleheads out there, for you people who are wanting to put on weight, this just goes to show that carbohydrate and protein supplements can really enhance your response to weight training.

It seems like that would be more the protein that would be doing the repair to the muscles anyway, wouldn't it be the amino acids?

Yes, but you're also looking at carbohydrate actually staving off you losing much of your muscle glycogen anytime you're burning through muscle glycogen, you are creating metabolic byproducts in the intramuscular space. Basically, you're keeping yourself from creating that type of soreness as well. So it's kind of a double whammy. So those are the news flashes for this week and twitter.com BenGreenfield is where you can get the rest of those. And I'm cringing right now because I suspect that Brock probably has some special announcements music for us as well.

I really wish I could remember how.

That music special announcements. All right. You know, probably a glaring error here is that Brock and I didn't really describe discuss the special announcements too much before we actually sat down to record because we're actually eating squid. We just got done eating a squid.

A lovely barbecued squid.

A lovely barbecued squid that a Thai man grabbed off of a wooden platter and gave to us. It was tasty. Chewy, but tasty. So a few things in terms of special announcements. First of all, for those of you who want to come join us March 8th and 9th, 200313 in Spokane, Washington. That is the become Superhuman live event. I am bringing in a ton of awesome speakers for that event, but the reason I'm mentioning it to you now is because the early bird deadline to get in and get put into the drawing for not only getting a full refund on your registration or a free ticket, you get to choose as well as a one on one consultation with me, an hour long sit down where we'll go through and basically go over anything you want. That's all happening if you register before December 1st, which is it's like five days from now. I'm in. I'm in vacay mode. I don't even know the date right now.

Wait, my iPad knows the 27th today.

There we go. So you've got a few days if you listen to this right when it comes out. Assuming the Internet on this island that we're on doesn't crash and we don't lose Internet access, this podcast should come out relatively soon. So check that out. You can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comsuperhuman that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com superhuman. A couple of other things.

Oh yeah, the new version of the book.

I have done a serious upgrade to my low carb triathlon book. I've added a forum to it for you to ask all your questions. I've also added a training plan that's compatible for anybody who uses training peaks. 100% compatible with that it's got a fat adaptation week, it's got a low carb maintenance week. It's got a race or event week, a race or event day. I spell it all out for you. So it's all right there on Training Peaks.

So you can just drag and drop those in wherever you need them if you've got a race coming up in three weeks.

Exactly. You just basically take your race week, you drag and drop that week right in there and all of a sudden you know exactly, exactly what to eat. It'll even spit out a grocery shopping list for you that is all over@lowcarbtrathlete.com lowcarbpackage we'll make it easy for you and just put a link in the show notes to that. But it's brand new for people who already own the book. Check your email because I sent you out a little discount so you don't have to pay full price for it because it comes along with the training plan and the forum. You get the book too.

That's great.

And also some discounts on the basically some of my recommended low carb supplements like the Superstarch and the amino acids and stuff like that. So you get a pretty significant savings on those as part of the package. And then the last thing I wanted to mention, I wanted to give a shout out to a few people. I mentioned that what we're going to do is actually choose one lucky person each month to come onto the Ben Greenful Fitness podcast for a special episode. And we are going to open that up to anybody who starts a My List on Facebook.

And that's the thing that looks like Pinterest, but it lives on Facebook.

It's like Pinterest for Facebook comparison.

But it's true. And it's a lot cooler than Pinterest. You can do more than just scrapbooking.

So you go to facebook.com bgfitness as in BenGreenfield Fitness. At facebook.com bgfitness click on the My List button and basically you can start a list on anything you want. So a couple of people I noticed and you got to share the My list with me. So send it to me via email, post it on our Facebook page, post as a comment on the show notes, whatever we've got. Daniella. What's up, Daniela Knight.

Hey, Daniella.

Daniela's got a bunch of different mylists, but she's got one for snacks and looks like she's got Yogi green tea. She's got some strawberry whey protein isolate blueberries. Here we go. I like this one. She's got cocoa nibs, navitas, naturals, organic raw cocoa nibs, almonds. She doesn't have any squid on there. It's weird.

No curry either.

No squid. No curry. Gosh. But anyways, good job, Daniela. Liking your My List that you're churning out. We had another My List that I did have open, but it's somehow closed. Karine, shout out to Karine. I know that you created a My List. I'm not sure where it is because I had it open on my computer. But you had a few going as well. And so Karine and Daniella are both in the running for getting onto a podcast this month at Ben Grieftold Fitness. So good job. And if you want to get on the bandwagon, create your my list and share it over at facebook.com bgfitness then get my listing away and you could get lucky. So that about wraps it up for special announcements.

Okay, well, let's go into our questions then.

We will wait. Dude, music, music. Q and A. Does she say Q and A or.

Does she say listener questions? I think.

Yeah, listener questions.

All right, Our first question.

Do I sound like her?

Not at all.

No.

That's terrible action.

All right. And by the way, Brock's going to read questions because again, our editing capabilities are not very expansive here. We're actually in a place called Railay Bay, which is this isolated bay in Thailand with no cars. The power's kind of been on and off all day today, but apparently we're still recording. However, Brock's going to read the questions. We're going totally old school, so we'll see if he remembers how to do this.

So if anybody actually sent in audio questions this week, it's not. We will get to them.

They're.

They're in the queue. They're on my computer. They're just. We're not gonna do them this week.

He'll do his best to abbreviate because I think our first two questions are kind of similar. I'm just looking over them. Yeah, okay.

Okay, so Aaron asks. Normally I like to run in the late mornings, at least after I've had breakfast, on board for a while. Doing so. I trained for two marathons and my weight stayed where it had been for the last five years. Right now, my job requires me to do my training runs at 5:30 in the morning, and I'm on my feet all day at work. I'm not able to get in good workouts at 7pm When I'm done working I try to eat a little bit of carbs before and during my morning run the past 10 weeks. I've gained 10 pounds since I started running before work. I'm eating about 2,000 calories per day and running 40 to 45 miles per week. And yeah, then she goes into sort of getting a lot more more detailed about her diet and sort of jumped to the end. Why am I gaining weight? What can I do to lose weight? I am doing the things you've mentioned in previous podcasts. Reduce cortisol, but still the numbers on the scale climb.

Okay, so we've got Lisa. Who is it? Aaron.

That was Aaron.

Okay, so Aaron is training for a marathon and she's gained 10 pounds since she started training for a marathon. Yep. 10 pounds in the past 10 weeks. Yep. Okay, and what's Lisa have to say?

Lisa says, I have a question about weight gain during marathon training. I'm a 28 year old to female. IPad just turned itself off.

I just saw Brock's passcode. Yeah, sell that.

That's also my pin number for the bank, so don't tell anybody. I'm a 28 year old female training for my fourth marathon in June. I run anywhere from 50 to 75, 70 miles per week at the height of my training. And I often eat very clean paleo with the occasional cheat. She lifts two or three times a week. She's 5 foot 6 and around 130 pounds. Whenever I train more intensely for marathons, I end up gaining about 10 pounds, same as Erin. So again, goes into a lot more detail about her diet. Then I ate low carb, high fat for about a month in December when work prevented me from training at all. And I ended up losing £10 in a month, then regaining it almost immediately once I resumed training. Yeah, I think that's. Those are the important bits from both of those, I think.

Okay, so basically we've got two women who are training for marathon and they're gaining weight, which seems counterintuitive. You would expect at first glance that you would actually lose weight with marathon training, but they're not finding this to be the case. And you have this happen a lot when women start training for endurance sports, they gain weight. Just women in particular women more than men, tend to have this issue. And there's a few different reasons for this. The first is something that can be glaringly obvious, but a lot of people don't really think about it. And that is the fact that when you start to train for endurance training, your body enhances its ability to store Carbohydrate, you can actually train your body to store up to 60% carbon more carbohydrate storage glycogen primarily in your muscles. You really can't amplify what your liver is able to store, but your muscles are able to store up to 60% more carbohydrate once you start into an endurance training program.

So this isn't something you're specifically training them to do. This is sort of a residual of the training.

This is just what the body does. This is a natural response to endurance training because it's a survival mechanism. You're telling your body that it is going to be in situations where it has to go for long periods of time and have access to that carbohydrate to break down. Yeah. Get ready.

This may happen again tomorrow. May happen next week.

Exactly, exactly. So it's like this camel mechanism, but glycogen carries up to four times its weight in water, and so you can easily balloon up just from that carbohydrate and water gain. You tend to get a little salt gain with it as well. And unfortunately not what a lot of people want to hear. But there's not a ton that you can do about it. Because even if you say, okay, well, I'm not going to eat carbohydrate, I'm going to go low carb, I'm going to go into ketosis, what happens is your body is actually able to take the ketones that the liver starts to churn out. When you're on a low carb diet and you're not giving your body enough carbohydrates, there's what's called a glycerol backbone on those ketone bodies. Beta hydroxybutyrate acetoacetate are two kind of the primary ketone bodies you get circulating around in your bloodstream. If your activity levels are high and you're in ketosis, what happens is that your liver is still able to make glucose out of those ketone bodies. And technically, if you've got some insulin in your bloodstream, that glucose can still get converted into some muscle glycogen, and you can maintain fairly high levels of storage carbohydrate while you're in a state of ketosis. So, yes, going low carb helps a little bit with this scenario of ballooning up when you start endurance sports. But you're still at risk of gaining weight just from this glycogen storage mechanism.

But we're talking about weight, like just weight on the scale, right?

Like this is actually we're talking about weight on the scale, not necessarily fat.

So your pants aren't fitting necessarily different. It's just you're getting on the scale going, oh, man.

Exactly. And I think it was either Aaron or Lisa mentioned cortisol. And of course that can be an issue even if you're recovering properly, even if you're getting lots of sleep. What happens is cortisol can cause your body to retain sodium. And when you retain sodium, that also is going to cause some fluid retention as well, which can also leave you feeling bloated, gaining weight. Not necessarily fat, but it's still weight. There is no way for your body when you're training for a marathon. And by the way, both Lisa and Aaron are running way more miles than I would ever run if training for a marathon. I don't see any reason to run more than 30 miles a week. Unless you're trying to be a professional marathoner or something of that nature. Your body's going to churn out cortisol. It's simply the catabolic nature of endurance training. And that also can cause that fluid retention. When women and we did a full podcast about this, I'll link to it in the show notes about why women gain weight as they get older and what you can do about it. But as women get older, and this can be kind of enhanced a little bit by the catabolic, stressful nature of endurance sports, they tend to get a little bit of estrogen dominance. And when you get that estrogen dominance going on, that also can cause weight gain. For the reasons that we go into great detail on on that podcast that we did for something like that, you can take care of your liver, get on a good liver detox formula, basically start to clear out the estrogen pathways in the liver. The liver has two different detox pathways that it relies upon. One is very reliant upon basically antioxidants, like being on a full spectrum antioxidant. The other one is basically reliant on essentially adding amino acids to the toxins that build up in the liver. And having adequate amino acids and specific kinds of amino acids and also having antioxidants can both help with detoxification in the liver and with clearing estrogen a little bit more quickly. I'll put a link to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Recommends page in the show notes. But some of the things that you'll see there under the liver detox area would be like silymarin, which is a component of milk thistle extract. So there's one Supplement called Capra Cleanse that I really like for that, like doing three to six Capricleans a day. Good. Full spectrum antioxidant mix. I'm actually writing an article for the website right now on energy drinks. And one of the natural kind of potent antioxidant cocktails that I recommend there is called Life Shots. And that's something where you just do a packet a day. And that's got some really good liver support stuff in it too, like grapeseed extract.

You interviewed the guy who created those, didn't you?

Yeah, my personal physician in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. My naturopath doctor. He basically was responsible for the formulation on that one. So that's a really good one. You're gonna find some other stuff on that recommendations page that we'll link to, like calcium D glucarate, methionine. But getting on a really good liver detox type of formula can help quite a bit too. And then a couple other things. We already kind of mentioned compensatory eating. When it comes to exercise, so many people think that they're not engaging in compensatory eating, but if you write it down, in many, many cases you simply are. You're eating way more than what you normally would have if you weren't doing all that marathon training. And that adds up pretty quickly. And you'd be surprised, even if you think that you're eating the same or fewer calories than before you started training for a marathon, that you actually are not. And writing it down helps quite a bit. Or photographing your food also, even just.

Periodically throwing that in, just even when you're not training is always a nice way to just remind yourself of what you actually are eating. Because there's been studies, a lot of studies, that have shown that people have bad memories about what they.

Very bad memories. Yeah. Food recall is, is, is horrible. Alcohol recall is even worse. We actually did have an after party after the triathlon just a few days ago, and I think a few of us are still in recovery mode, including myself. So just a couple other things in terms of liver detox and estrogen turnover. High amounts of coffee, high amounts of tea that can basically slow down estrogen turnover and cause some of that estrogen dominance weight gain as well. So that's something to be careful with. And then also, cruciferous vegetables have a lot of phytoestrogens in them, which are basically compounds that simulate a lot of the effects of estrogens and can actually help out a little bit in this case including stuff like broccoli and onions and kale and things of that nature when it comes to estrogen dominance. And Brock is distracting. This is one of the issues with us recording live, especially where there's a.

Salamander over by the stairs, like right up against the side.

That's a frog. Oh, yeah. Still. Yeah.

This doesn't happen in the podcast usually. Sorry.

There you go, folks. Apparently Brock is. Everybody, look, everybody, check it out. A frog.

The Thai frog.

This is great radio. So, yeah, so those are the main things, you know, and you'll. You'll see a lot of websites, you know, like Shape magazine and, and Prevention and Women's Health. They all say, well, of course you. It's. It's muscle weight that you're gaining. Most women don't gain muscle when they're marathon training. Unless you're starting from complete novice and you're doing a ton of hill climbing or something like that, maybe putting on some muscle in your thighs, but it's usually not muscle gain. Typically we're talking about fluid retention from cortisol, glycogen retention, some sodium retention, that type of thing.

Before I got distracted by the frog, I was going to get you to clarify. Cruciferous vegetables. Which ones are we talking about?

Broccoli, kale, spinach, cauliflower.

So these are like what we would normally consider to be like, superfoods are actually causing some problems.

No, no, no. They have phytoestrogens in them, which can help. They basically occupy the receptor sites that estrogen would normally occupy. So they can actually help out a little bit, too. So those are some of the things I would recommend to both Erin and Lisa. And that's why women tend to gain weight when they start training for endurance sports. And some of the things you can do about it will not only put links to some of this stuff in the show notes for episode 219, but as usual, we'll create a My List for it over at facebook.com bgfitness if you want to access the My list. So there we go.

Let's move on to Anna's question. And Anna says, I do quite well in CrossFit competitions. I like beating people. Mind you, it's the scale division at my local affiliates, so I'm no pro am. It's just for fun. But I like to keep it mostly paleo, except for whey. So sweet potatoes, apples, raw honey, all smashed and cooked together with some whey is what I reach for during a competition. I also use creatine and Beta Alanine But I don't think whole foods will be absorbed fast enough for the wad for the workout of the day. Especially if you are required to do several workouts of the day back to back. These workouts are short and intense, intensive.

His iPad turns off again, off again.

These workouts are short and intense. 10 to 15, 10 to 12 minutes tops. You go in quotation marks, balls out.

I tried goo gel as women do.

Yes. I tried the goo gels during the CrossFit Open and I did not see any significant differences in my performance. I was wondering if you could put your kick butt brains together and give me some suggestions. In particular, would you say the new generation you can. And I think she's talking about the superstarch would be a good idea during competition or during training.

Yeah. Bad idea. Basically she's looking for. What's her name? Gabriel. You said Anna. Anna's looking for a fast release carbohydrate. Something that's going to bump up her energy levels super duper quickly when she's getting ready for her rod for workout of the day. You can Superstarch is designed to enhance your fatty acid utilization and be a very slow release fuel that doesn't cause an insulin spike, that doesn't cause a blood glucose spike. And you know, like I used it in the triathlon that we had the other day, I'll use it again in this next triathlon that we're doing on the weekend because I want a slow release energy source because I'm trying to tap into my body's own fat stores as a fuel. I'm trying to avoid those quick spikes in blood sugar pre workout. If you really wanted to maximize the glucose that you have available in your bloodstream and have the fastest possible energy source available to your body, basically you'd want to go for an engineered starch that is not superstarch. There's one that's called Vitargo. I'll link to it in the show notes for you. But it's basically it could be a waxy maize starch, it could be a barley starch. It's basically the process by which they make it more than it is the starting material that affects the rate at which it is released. But Vitargo has patented this fast release carbohydrate system that causes a massive insulin spike. A bunch of carbohydrate getting absorbed super quickly into the bloodstream. And it's a very, very large, long molecular weight carbohydrate similar to you can Superstarch. So it's all these branch change of Carbohydrates. It has what's called a very, very low osmolality, similar to you can superstarch, meaning that it's going to be emptying from the stomach a little bit more quickly and into the small intestine a little bit more quickly to be absorbed. But the chemical makeup of the starch itself is such that it gets a huge insulin spike. It gets released really quickly. And like, if you stuck me into, you know, let's just say a CrossFit box and told me I had to amp up my carb loads as quickly as possible, get ready for workout, that is what I would personally use would be something like that.

It sounds like it's similar to like a maltodextrin in its makeup.

They've done studies on it and it's like twice the insulin release of a maltode, Maltodextrin, even. Even a higher blood sugar spike than maltodextrin, higher than glucose, definitely higher than fructose. So that's what I would use. Again, I mentioned that we have a Ben Greenfield fitness recommends page, but there's a bunch of other stuff on that page that you can use to kind of amplify, like pre strength or power workout, your performance or even the sugar uptake. TNT is one of the things that I recommend. That's that Chinese herbal adaptogen complex that I use. That's a really, really good one. And then just your basics. It's creatine, carnitine, citrulline and beta alanine. Those are kind of the four main ones. I've got dosage recommendations and everything that I'll put in the show notes for you. But I mean, let's say you really want to just go geeky scientist and do all that stuff together. If you were to stack something like that waxy mage starch like Vitargo generate with the citrulline and the beta alanine and the creatine and the. What was the other one that I said? The carnitine. Put all that together, you're looking at a massive glucose spike. You're looking at a massive amount of energy in a short period of time. You're also looking at diabetes in a shaker cup. If you're not, you're just sitting on the couch. Yeah, if you're just sitting on the couch, quick, quick way to give yourself diabetes just because of the amount of insulin and blood glucose release you're gonna get. But that's what I would do. That's the way I would go about doing this. If you really want that fast release. Great.

All right, next question is from Gabriel. Gabriel says, I live in Puerto Rico. We have little access to quality animal based protein. Most of the beef and poultry is from industrial South American animals. What cuts of beef or chicken pieces are the least bad in terms of hormones, etc. I eat frozen salmon, cod or tuna once or twice a week. I don't eat it frozen. I cook it before. That's good. And I eat quinoa a couple of times a week.

We all like salmon popsicles.

Yeah, salmonella popsicles. There's something about a nice piece of meat, you know. Also, what do you think of synergenics? They've been pushing their stuff, their protocol to high levels, to high level executives on the island. It seems like a waste of time and money.

Okay, so first of all, the last little bit of that question about cenogenics, that's the one that you see in the back of the airplane magazines. The 70 year old man who looks like he's 40 and he's got, you know, he's flexing with his jeans on or whatever. You know what, I don't remember if it's been since Brock's been on, but I went into an extensive podcast review on what I thought about cenegenics. So just go to bencreamvillefitness.com and do a search for cenegenics.

Basically your hunches.

Right, Gabriel, let's focus on the meat part of this. So meat is going to tend to, if it's got lots of toxins, if it's got lots of hormones, it's going to store that in the fat and the skin. So whereas I usually recommend that you not choose leaner cuts of meat, that you go after the fat because of things like the conjugated linoleic acids and the omega 3 fatty acids, you technically want to avoid the skin, trim the fat and go for the lower fat cuts of meat. If you wanted to eat meat that hasn't been organically raised, grass raised, and you want to do as little damage as possible. So that's the first thing you'd want to do is basically, I mean, you go low fat on your cuts of meat. So there are certain cuts of meat or certain, certain meat, certain animals that are known to be dirtier than others. So USDA does studies on this. There's a lot of universities that have done independent studies on everything from listeria to salmonella to these other bacteria. Yeah, dirty, dirty, like, like stuff you'd want to avoid. In that case, ground Turkey and chicken are biggies. If you're not getting free range organic on those, your, your chance of getting sick goes way up. It was something like 25% of chicken has some form of bacteria in it that could potentially make you sick if you're not careful. So, you know, a lot of times we think of pigs as the dirty animals. Poultry is way, way higher than pigs when it comes to that stuff. So I'd be super careful with chicken and turkey, especially if it's not like, you know, free range type of stuff. If you're just looking at cage fed, that's going to be an issue. Cold cuts really, really high in listeria, that can also be an issue. So I'd be really careful with cold cuts and processed meats. Really? Yeah. Interestingly, listeria, which you're gonna tend to find in higher amounts of something like a cold cut, you know what tends to kill listeria? Mustard. So you could just slather mustard all.

Over your bologna, like just regular old French's mustard.

Yeah. So dip your, you know, if you bologna's been sitting on the counter for a few days, dip it in some mustard, you're gonna have some cross your fingers. Active listeria fighting compounds in mustard. That's interesting how the, those foods that tend to go hand in hand anyways, the mustard does have a little bit of a cleaning effect, so to speak. Be really careful with predatory fish. You know, like we were all here in Railay Bay. It's kind of cool. You walk along the beach and there's just all these vendors and they've got like big old, you know, pieces of slabs of fish on, on ice and you just point at what you want. They throw it on a barbecue grill for you and toss some corn and some vegetables and stuff in there. But you do see a lot, you know, like, like last night that place we went to, they had swordfish and they had shark and they had tuna and you know, I personally went for mackerel because that tends to be not one of the larger predatory fish. And there's a reason for that. That fish that eat other fish tend to be higher in heavy metals. So you'd want to be careful if you're doing fish with those fish and tuna is included in that list. That tend to be higher in the heavy metals. There are heavy metal detox formulas out there. Next, next Wednesday. This is probably a good time to mention this. I'm on a plane next Wednesday coming kind of coming back from Thailand and everything. So I am releasing an interview on that Day with Dr. David Minkoff about heavy metals. So next week our usual podcast will be released, released Friday with a surprise stand in guest that is not Brock.

I don't even know who it is.

Getting across Thailand, such a surprise. But anyways, heavy metals tend to be an issue with predatory fish. So that's what you want to be careful with. Oysters, raw oysters, definitely an issue. Salmonella is the biggie with those, so I'd be super careful with those. And ground beef, if it's typical commercial ground beef, that, that tends to be pretty big issue as well. So honestly, if you wanted to go as clean as possible, if I were you, I'd go for the, for the smaller fish. I would, I would do pork, I would do any of the larger animals that are not cattle. You know, like deer, lamb, goat, stuff like that. Stay away from, from turkey and chicken. Stay away from oysters. Yeah, that, that would be some of the main ways to kind of keep clean. The other interesting thing is there's a, there's a supplement that you can take that kind of leeches a lot of these toxins and offensive compounds from meat if you happen to not have a chance to eat the good grass fed, hormone free, free range type of stuff. And that's activated charcoal. You can literally just like eat a couple capsules of activated charcoal before you eat whatever that meat is and it can help mitigate some of the damaging effects. So that'd be one thing that you could do as well.

Those are the long term damaging effects, not necessarily like the food poisoning, it.

Can help with that. Both activated charcoal as well as probios can help with food poisoning. The other interesting thing is if you have ground beef and you're concerned about salmonella or other offensive compounds of that oregano has a lot of components in it that tend to be active against the bacteria in that. So you could do oil of oregano, you could even use fresh oregano and grind that up along with your ground beef.

Oh, so that would have enough of the.

You're making like a burger. It does have some of that, what's called carvacrol in it, which has some of those potent antibacterial properties. So there are ways to mitigate the effects, but hopefully that kind of points you in the right direction when it comes to some of the meats that are going to be better versus worse.

I was hoping you were going to say chocolate ice cream was the perfect.

Yes, chocolate ice cream. Make sure there's no predatory fish in your chocolate ice cream and you'll Be good to go.

No predatory ice cream. All right. Matt says, Ben, I read that power is lost 1.7 times faster than strength as we age. I thought power and strength. Strength were the same thing. What is the difference? And should I be working more on power exercise than strength exercises? Can you give an example of the difference between the two, by the way, I'm 39 years old.

Yeah, they have done studies on this. And as you age, you lose power more quickly than strength. I don't know if it's 1.7 times. I've seen figures like the loss in power exceeds the loss in strength by about 10% per year. That's not 10% loss of power per year. That. That means, like, if you lost 2% of your strength per year, you'd be losing 10% more of that. So 10% of whatever 2% is, you know, in terms of power or. Yeah, 110%.

3.2%.

Yeah, exactly. So you're losing. Brock and I are both excellent at math, as you can tell. You should see us trying to split up the checks at dinner. There's smoke coming out of our ears anyways, though. Yes, the loss in power is going to exceed the loss in strength. Power is just the ability to apply a large amount of force over a period of time. So an example of power would be like, how quickly can you shove this weight overhead versus strength, which is how much weight can you push over your head without any consideration to how far fast you can do it or how.

Long you can do it?

And fast twitch muscle is what you use to create a powerful effort along with a large recruitment of motor neurons. And those are two things that you tend to lose quite quickly as you age is the ability to recruit motor neurons or the neuron units in the muscle that would be responsible for producing high amounts of power. And you also lose fast, twitch muscle more quickly as you age. So this is why the deficits in power that you experience as you age tend to be more significant than what you lose when it comes to strength. As far as mitigating those effects, you would want to make sure that you're including resistance training sessions as you age that require you to lift weights fast. So you could do plyometrics, single leg, double length jumps onto a box, off of a box. You know, that kind of stuff. Skips, hops, bounds, Anything that causes you to create a large amount of force in a short period of time, as well as lifting, you know, changing up the tempo as you lift. I'm actually writing an article for Lava Magazine on this right now about how you can literally just kind of, depending on what time of year that you're in, change the tempo at which you lift. So if you lift something fast and lower quickly, you're going to do less muscle damage but develop more power than if you say lift something slowly and lower it slowly. But changing up the tempo, not doing all your workouts at the same tempo, is one really good way that you can ensure that you, that you maintain power, including some explosive efforts. Again, I know I'm kind of kicking this horse to death, but there is that. I do have that recommendation section@BenGreenfieldFitness.com where basically there are, there are recommendations on supplements that can help with power. Fish oil is the biggest one just because it contains a lot of the fats that tend to line the myelin sheaths of your nerves and help out with basically your nerve conduction velocity. So you're essentially sending messages to your muscles more quickly. So fish oil is a big one. There's another supplement called Choline that if you take along with fish oil, is a really, really good one to throw in there for power and just like, just have like pieces of equipment like around your house that you could use for more than just power. Like I like agility ladders, those you can get for, you know, from a website like performbetter.com they've got lots of power development tools, medicine balls that you can throw or slam into the ground, weighted vests that you can jump with boxes or some kind of a step platform that you can jump onto or jump off. Just kind of including those type of things as you age. Super important if you want to maintain power versus strength. So hopefully that kind of gives you a basic idea of the difference between power and strength. And I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes to some of the, some of the supplements that I recommend and some of the kind of the tools that I like to keep around for developing, for developing power rather than just pure strength. So awesome.

All right, well, our last question comes from Alan. Alan says when you eat matters not just what you eat. Now he's got a link to a science daily. I don't know, I guess an article. Any thoughts on this article? Trying to think about how you might incorporate this info into an active work and family life. And I'm finding it difficult. I work at 5am I would have to skip breakfast to make this work since dinner with my wife and kids is a priority plan. Would have to be dinner at 5, lunch at 1 breakfast at 10 does not sound too different from your routine. No.

Yeah. The study that he's linking to, basically they took one group of mice and just let them eat ad libitum around the clock whenever they wanted to. And then they took another group of mice. Those mice were given the same calorie allotment, but they were restricted to an eight hour feeding window. And the mice that were restricted to the eight hour feeding window did not experience the same blood sugar fluctuations, increase in obesity and overweight as the mice that were allowed to eat at any time of day. The takeaway message from this was basically you have a certain period of time during the day when you have a restricted feeding window and then the rest of the day you're not eating. Really? This is something we've talked about before. It's just intermittent fasting. It would be like throwing in a 16 hour fast every day is what it would come out to the equivalent of. Like you could quit eating at 8pm at night after dinner and not eat again until. What's that come out to for 16 hours?

Stop making us do math tonight.

So if you quit eating at 8pm, you wouldn't eat again the next day until noon if you were doing a full 16 hour intermittent fast. This thing though is about the. It's really about the letter or not the letter, the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. Meaning that your body is designed to operate on a natural circadian rhythm that has periods of time when it is dark and when you are not eating very much, and periods of time when it is light, when you are awake, when you are alert, when your body is able to metabolize fuel and when you are eating. And this does not mean that you have to be anal about squeezing everything into an eight hour window and then having a 16 hour window where you're not eating. But what it does mean is that you should consider adopting a scenario where you do something like after you've had dinner, not snacking and not eating anymore. And then when you get up in the morning, trying to go for a little bit of time, if it fits into your schedule, into your personal schedule, to not eat breakfast until 9am or 10am this is something I do every day. I try to quit eating after I've had dinner and then in the morning I work for a couple of hours. Sometimes I'll do like some exercise, some cold thermogenesis where I'll do like a cold shower and wear my cool fat burner vest or something like that. And Then I have breakfast. Typically for me breakfast is around 10am and since we eat dinner usually sometime between 7 and 8pm, that gives me a good anywhere from a 13 to a 15 hour fasted window every single day. So it doesn't have to be exactly what they did in this study with the mice, which is a 16 hour window. What it comes down to is your body has this internal clock, this internal circadian rhythm that's hardwired to respond to light dark cycles and defeating cycles. And if you just go haywire and eat when you want and kind of sleep when you want, and this is why people who work night shifts have such a hard time losing weight a lot of the time, then you end up throwing both your hormones and your blood sugar into a little bit of an imbalance cycle.

I think something that really goes hand in hand with this too is most of any real diet program that you go on will have you eliminate evening snacking because that really does always take you over and above your caloric needs for the day. It's all just extra calories. So really you've got two sort of bang for your buck here.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean it really. I mean go, go and watch like the recent how to hack your sleep article that I wrote @Ben Greenfield Fitness.com if you really want to learn kind of how eating at night also affects the quality of your sleep. The amount of leptin that you're able to release, which is kind of an appetite satiating hormone, the amount of melatonin you produce, the amount of leptin that gets taken up into the hypothalamus. I mean there's a ton of things that happen when you snack late at night. And all those would be some of the reasons that this study that you mentioned and linked to that will also linked to in the show notes found, you know, that basically mice who were intermittent fasting were more successful if mice, I don't know if mice would view it as success. I bet a mouse would view getting fat as success.

Yeah, I think they'd be happy about that.

Caloric nirvana.

They don't have body problems that we do.

Exactly. So speaking of caloric nirvana, Brock and I have been eating like kings here in Thailand.

I would say yeah, it's getting a little ridiculous. The food is just too good here.

Yeah, it is pretty fantastic. So we're gonna arrive at the 70.3. For those of you who don't know, we're here doing a double triathlon. So we did a triathlon on Sunday and Then we'll do another one this coming Sunday at Half Ironman.

Actually, we didn't just do a triathlon on Sunday. Ben won the overall H groupers and the triathlon on Sunday.

I did. I was more proud, though, of making top 10. I was happy. I was happy with that.

You were like a minute and seven seconds behind Macca.

Something like that.

Something like that.

I don't think he was having a good day, though.

He looked like he was having a.

Good day at the party. Yeah. Anyways, though, folks, hopefully you appreciate the fact that despite the crappiness of what this final product is going to be, Brock and I still are committed enough to skip whatever it is we'd normally be doing right now, probably walking up and down the beach and bring you this podcast. So hopefully you enjoyed it and you'll get something different next week, too. As I mentioned, I'll probably have some some hot female sidekick rather than your hot male sidekick rather than Harry Brock sitting here next to me.

But I am extra hairy in Thailand.

Yes, it's true. Yeah. Anyways though, folks, thanks for listening and we'll put links to everything over@bengreenfulfitness.com for episode 219 and also in the My list for this episode over@facebook.com bgfitness don't forget to create your My list by clicking on that My list button over@facebook.com bgfitness and sharing your My list with us. And until next time, like I just said my list like 20 times. This is Ben and Brock signing out from bengreenfieldfitness. Com.