Five Simple Steps To Turning Yourself Into A Fat Burning Machine.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here. One of the things that you'll learn about in today's podcast episode is how lack of sleep actually keeps your body from becoming a fat burning machine.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I have to admit that one question I get quite a bit from folks, and I think this is because of the experiments I've done with myself on ketosis and turning myself into a fat burning machine by following a high fat diet or doing fasted workouts, things of that nature. One of the questions that I get from people is how do you actually do it right? Like, what would be the practical steps to become a fat burning machine to shift yourself from carb to fat utilization. And so I figured, what the heck, why not do a full podcast and give you all of the steps necessary to become fat adapted without doing metabolic damage to your body? Because frankly, it comes down to a little bit more than just like switching your breakfast from cereal to coconut oil and then throwing in a stick of butter for lunch. So I actually have on the call with me today a guy who's been a guest on the podcast before. His name is Barry Murray and last year he came on the Ben Greenfield Fitness show to give us what he called the ultimate guide to combining fasting and exercise. And this is a guy who goes out and will do like full on mountain runs, like day long mountain runs in a completely fasted state. And we talked all about fasting, how to do it the right way when it comes to combining fasting and exercise and some of the crazy workouts he's done in a fasted state while still managing to pull off pretty amazing and fast feats of physical performance. So Barry works with professional cyclists. He works with triathletes, distance runners. Last year he worked as the sports nutritionist to the BMC professional cycling team. He's a competitive endurance athlete himself. He races in ultramarathon events. If you've been to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com, you may have noticed that Barry is also one of our coaches over there who works as a performance nutritionist and offers consultations through Greenfield Fitness Systems. That's also a good place to look him up. So anyways, Sit back and get ready to learn everything you need to know about how to become a fat burning machine. Barry, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Hey, Ben, thanks for having us on again.

Yeah. So, you know, you've sent over to me in the past kind of like some of the steps that you like to bring athletes through as you work with them on their diet to becoming fat adapted. And I'd just like to jump right in, if we could, to what some of the first things someone should do when it comes to. Well, basically, the first step that you talk about is optimizing the general diet. Can you start there with, like, somebody comes in off the streets, they're like, hey, I want to teach my body how to burn fat better. What do they do first? From a dietary standpoint?

Sure. We'll take even a step back before that. And the question is actually defining what the fat adaptation is, because it's in the public a bit more these days. Fat burning machine is becoming more of a general term. People are becoming familiar with low carb, high fat diets. Keto adaptation is now becoming. Well, so very quickly, just to set the tone here, fat adaptation, I find a lot of athletes are getting mixed up about what it actually means. So very quickly. Basically, what I'm trying to do with most endurance athletes that I'm working with and what I believe is beneficial for most people in any athletic sense is how can you upregulate the rate at which your body burns fat to produce energy? So simply, then that means is, where have you got fat to burn? Most people know that you've got subcutaneous fat under the skin. So what you're trying to do is the first term is lipolysis, and break down fats into your fatty acids, triglycerides, and send it to the muscle to get burnt. Second thing you're trying to do then is grow a bigger fat engine. So what you want to do then is upregulate beta oxidation. So that's the conversion of fatty acids into acetyl coenzyme A, which is your precursor then for the Krebs cycle.

And if I could just interrupt, we over here in America call it beta oxidation, in case anyone was confused. Barry calls it tomato, tomato, tomato beta oxidation. Okay, so we want to upregulate beta oxidation.

Yeah. So again, you want to upregulate, so you want to regulate that so that you can convert your, as, you know, as much at a higher rate and as high an intensity which you are exercising into. Like I said, acetyl coenzyme A and then you get that into the electro, you know, into the Krebs cycle electron transport chain ATP. What you're also trying to do is grow a bigger fat, intramuscular fat, intramuscular triglyceride amount. So that's the fat stored in the muscle. You also want to improve gluconeogenesis. You want to improve the way the body can make its own glucose. Right. So I haven't even talked about ketones yet is where people are going wrong because people are thinking that the recommendation is you get into ketosis and that's what makes you fat adapted. It's not. There's a lot of steps and a lot of physiological mechanisms that first need to be put into place to simply increase the rate at which your mitochondria can burn fatty acids. Like I said, the spin off of that is producing glucose as well.

So basically we've got a few different ways that, that we can do this. We've got upregulating beta oxidation or your body's ability to actually burn fat and turn it into ATP. We've got better ability of the body to make its own glucose. You called it gluconeogenesis. So rather than relying upon like energy bars for glucose, we're somehow training our body how to make its own glucose. And then that other thing that you mentioned was the muscles fat stores. I don't think a lot of people realize that the muscles actually store fat. Can you touch on that real quick about, about how it is that the muscles actually store fat or utilize fatty acids?

Yeah, exactly. Very quickly people go out and buy a nice sirloin steak or even a T bone steak, you're going to see white bits in it. That's obviously most people know steak is muscle, the white bits are fat. Fat can be stored in the muscle and it's actually the storage amount is increased, particularly in endurance athletes. So if you slice open maybe my quantum quad muscle, Ben, and you slice open, you know, a 100 meter sprinters quad muscle, the 100 meter sprinters muscle is going to be a lot redder. And my hopefully I would imagine my, my muscle has got a lot more white bits in it. In other words, that's what's called intramuscular triglycerides. In other words, it's fat stored in the muscle. Now if you look at it from a purely logistical aspect that doesn't need to travel very far to get burned because it's in the muscle. It can just go directly in the mitochondria and then be used as, as fuel. Whereas the stuff that's under your skin obviously has to travel a lot further.

So, so are you, are you, are you saying that having more fat inside your muscle is actually a good thing? Like in a fat adapted athlete you generally have like basically more. More marbly muscle?

Exactly, yeah. Wow. Totally. And true, simply true endurance training. That, that, that's what the trick is, is to increase the rate at which you can. So in terms of. Let's get some quantities here. I mean there's actually not a huge amount of studies on it, but you're probably talking up to maybe 3,000 calories in terms of the amount that can be stored. I think it can go higher.

You mean in muscle or just in the whole body?

In muscle.

Wow. Wow. So just in muscle alone not accounting for like the fat you'd store on your, on your butt or hips or thighs or upper back or elsewhere. Just the muscle alone can store around 30,000 calories of fat.

No, sorry, three. Three.

Oh, 3,000.

Which is.

Well, I guess that's still twice as much as many carbohydrates as most people.

Well, it's. Yeah, well, it's one and a half times, theoretically, whatever you want to call it. In other words. Yeah. You've got stuff in your muscle before you even touch what's under your skin that most people can use for most, you know, general sports activities for longer in terms of like, like the, the, the quantity of fuel that's available. So IMTG is the shorthand version. Intramuscular triglycerides. We can store a lot of. Lot of them in the muscle. The more endurance exercise you do, the more you store and the more you train the body and upregulate beta oxidation, I'll pronounce it the right way this time is obviously you will be able to burn more of that stuff without then that you've got the big glycogen. You're saving glycogen sparing then is going on just from that.

Yeah. It's interesting because I think a lot of people just think about fat burning as just basically upregulating the amount of fat that you burn versus carbohydrate that you can burn. But it's so interesting how there's all these other physiological mechanisms that you're talking about that I think fly under the radar. So it's, it's a lot of stuff.

Yeah. And I, I'm. You know what, there's still other stuff like the pentose phosphate pathway, which I'm not going to get into at the moment. But there's other stuff, there's other things going on in terms of how we can up, how could we, how the cell can produce energy without having to ingest and burn carbohydrates. So, so I haven't even mentioned ketones and ketosis, but I've already discussed several pathways, mechanisms, fuel sources, which we need to train and train a lot to make our bodies more efficient at the way they burn those fats, transport those fats, get them into the mitochondria and the rate at which they can be burnt. So people, you know, there's a lot of things going on that people are, aren't aware, aren't aware of and therefore they get a little bit lost in what they're actually trying to achieve and buy keto strips and think that just measuring and producing ketones is what they need to do to be fat adapted. But like I said, I've just described what fat adaptation is and it doesn't even involve ketones up until that point, so to speak.

Okay, so I know that we're going to talk a little bit about both training strategies as well as lifestyle and environmental strategies, but also food strategies. And I think like step one that you wanted to get into was what you do as far as optimizing your general diet to get into this state where all these moving parts are allowing you to be a fat burning machine. So what, like when someone first comes to you, what are you guys doing from a dietary overhaul standpoint?

Yeah, so I mean, the first thing I would spend time on is like, there's a lot of food education required. So the bottom line is that this is a long term process. It's not a overnight transformation, it's not a magic bullet, it's not something you do for two weeks. It's something that you do long term. And the longer you do it, the better it becomes. So in order for that to be long term, you need to create a way of eating that's habitual. Therefore you need to, and you need to obviously do it in the right way. The right way would be based around obviously a lower carb, higher fat type of diet with the food based on, you know, the paleo lithic type foods. Now, I mean, I'm not even 100% Paleolithic myself and I would probably recommend something like using the Paleo code approach. I think it's Chris Kresser who has that book where I tried to get guys, you know, I'm dealing with a lot of professional cyclists and you know, telling them that they can't eat, you know, certain grains and certain dairies and even, you know, certain legumes, etc, etc, you know, it's, it has to be a practical way of eating that somebody can do for the long term. So you need to understand that there's certain foods that do not need to be 100% excluded. You need to then introduce, you know, you need to educate people about, you know, what, you know, different qualities of food and the different, you know, nutrient, you know, the nutrient densities of foods and things like that and the right types of fats to eat. You know, obviously explain the kind of quality in terms of the, that's a grass fed beef, etc. All those kind of things which most people listening to this show would know. And the final thing I would say that goes in with the food based thing, Ben, is like the coping strategies because trying to get somebody to go from, let's say eating, you know, had bowls of oatmeal in the morning and you know, still, let's call it in inverted comma, safe carbs of, you know, sweet potatoes and all that kind of stuff and then trying to get them to go on a dramatically, you know, remove those things from their diet and go on a very, you know, just high fat, moderate protein and 50 grams of carbohydrate a day. You know, most people aren't able to do that and it usually means that people fall flat on their face after, you know, about a few days of trying it basically.

So because they're, they're restricting carbohydrates excessively.

That and the fact that people are simply not. I mean the biggest, I want to think one of the biggest kind of appetite, dietary things that we have to overcome is sugar, our sensitivity to sugar and our sweet tooth. Everybody has it. And it's one of the, one of the biggest challenges I find dealing with, you know, initially when I'm dealing with athletes is trying to say, listen, you know, you know, go and eat some cream instead of a sugary yogurt. Right. And the simple fact is that we are sensitized and obviously the more simple sugar, carbohydrate foods and never to mind, never mind the sweet stuff, but even just simple sugar type foods is that that's switching on a lot of the kind of receptors for the sweet hit and you need to desensitize the brain and desensitize your taste buds, so to speak, so that you can actually eat for the long term a much higher, like a much more savory diet because you Start throwing in, you know, people are, I see, peeling on the people in the paleo world doing things like, you know, yeah, they remove sugar and they remove white flour and stuff like that, but they put in like half a container of honey instead. Right. And as you know, honey is just fructose and glucose anyway. So while it's in like it's, it's more natural and probably healthier for you. It's still, you know, it's still a glucose and a fructose at the end of the day. So there's a lot of getting to proper, low carb, high fat way of eating.

Okay, so I'm curious when we get down into brass tacks here. When you're looking at like an active athletic person who's exercising quite a bit, you know, most of our listeners are at least exercising, you know, 30 minutes a day, most exercising 60 plus minutes a day, what exactly would a typical day of eating look like in someone who is trying to become fat adapted? Like what, what would be like an ideal day for you if you could just like ship a meal to someone for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner and for their snacks?

I mean, again, it's like it's about, I mean, if it's somebody who's just kind of looking into this and trying this and they're not a full time, you know, athlete or an elite athlete, that, that's the. I would, you know, some, some of the simple dietary changes I would make would be like, you know, just first maybe get them just to switch to you know, a completely kind of lower GI type of carbohydrate food. So you know, maybe particularly obviously in Ireland, porridge or oatmeal would be quite a commonly eaten breakfast. But you know, I would try and first of all lower the GI content of their food. So you know, I start recommending things breakfast like, you know, instead of just cereals and stuff like that, I might just recommend obviously a lot of eggs based breakfasts. If people are not into eggs, I start just getting them on say Greek yogurt and mixing that in with different nuts and maybe some seeds and berries and things like that. And so you're gradually always lowering the carbohydrate amount and then you know, for lunches and dinners, basically keeping them to like, you know, lower GI veggies. Obviously sweet potatoes are just like starch, fibrous, non starchy type veggies and salad dishes with, with meats and then all the, you know, kind of, I always make a point of kind of including the higher fat Foods like, you know, just simply like avocados and, you know, using coconut oil and butter and stuff like that. It's kind of like people. Another big mistake people make is they, they start eating like chicken and broccoli, you know, and I'm kind of like, well, you know, you're basically just eating some fiber and some protein. And the whole point of this is that you make, you want to upregulate, you want to activate the enzymes that actually switch on fat burning. And one of the things that does that is actually eating a higher content of fat. So fats need to be put in more so than any of the other macronutrients. And that's a huge mindset change for people. I mean, I'm dealing with people who for most of their life have been hearing about how fats are bad for them. So telling people to go and eat beef dripping and lard and stuff like that is a huge mental battle for people. So, but I mean, to go back to your very original question, low lower GI type meals and using kind of things like sweet potato and oatmeal and fibrous veggies and keeping their. So you know, really just trying to work on the whole point of, you know, managing the insulin response and upregulating fat. Hormone sensitive lipase, which breaks down fats by including higher amounts of fats.

So you can actually upregulate your amount of lipase by adding extra fats to meals.

Yeah, so yeah. So I mean, so one of the enzymes that the enzyme that looks after conversion of triglycerides fatty acids is hormone sensitive lipase. And that's first of all, that's inhibited by a high insulin response. So obviously then you eat a big bowl of cereal with toast, you're going to inhibit that enzyme. And the other thing that activates it then is our actual fats, in particular saturated fats. So you can switch that enzyme on and you can switch it off. It's you want. So that's why understanding about the types of foods you're eating is critical.

Okay, well, I want to jump into the actual timing in a second here. But what it sounds to me like, because this is something I'll do a lot of times with the athletes who I'm talking to is we'll pretty much like do a normal kind of like healthy diet. What might even be considered a paleo diet or an ancestral diet or even like something like kind of a, a Weston A. Price diet where they're even eating some things like quinoa or sourdough bread or properly prepared grains and things of that nature. But you pretty much add in a bunch of grass fed butter, MCT oil, olive oil, chopped up avocados and chopped up olives, some added cheeses, while at the same time as you're adding those just detracting from the carbohydrate portion of the meals a little bit. And that's like, in my opinion, I've found that to be a very natural approach where you're just telling people, hey, drench this stuff in a little bit more oil, add some more healthy fats, decrease the carbohydrate portion. And just from a dietary standpoint that just kind of gradually nudges your body towards fat burning rather than you, as you say, having to dip your spoon into lard for lunch, have a bulletproof coffee, coffee every single morning and then basically, you know, eat three avocados for dinner. I think that that's, you know, that's like that drastic super duper low carb approach that some people take because they saw whatever, you know, I don't know, Jimmy Moore, bless his heart, eating a stick of butter for lunch and it's like, yeah, that's certainly something that people on the, on the pointy, pointy edge of this stuff will do. But like, that's not what you necessarily have to do, especially if you're active, to become a fat burning machine.

Right? Exactly. Basically, exactly what you said there is exactly the approach people need to be taking and more so not just from, you know, the practicalities of it, but you know, in the background when I'm working with somebody, I'm thinking that means that they're going to stick to that. There's a much better chance they are going to stick to that long term. And like I said, the fat adaptation approach and turning yourself into a fatter burning machine, a long term project, it's a, you know, at least several months. And I'm going into now four or five years of doing this myself and I'm still working on it and getting better at it. So what you described there in terms of what people are eating are foods that most healthy people are going to like eating. And there's not huge sacrifice in terms of what they have to leave out there either.

It's like eat healthy, add, add extra fats. Okay, so that's step one is to make that dietary change. It's kind of the obvious one, but that's helpful to know about the common mistakes that people make. Now step two that you talk about is nutrient timing And I'd like to hear about that and how nutrient timing fits in with the daily schedule as far as like when you're structuring these foods.

So kind of the next step I use then is the timing of what people eat and how. And I'm always relating that back to what's that switching on and what's that switching off in terms of hormonal responses, enzyme activate, enzyme inhibiting enzyme activation. So to go in line with what we said about the kind of long term effect or long term project that this is, that this involves, I, in terms of continuing, continuing eating a certain level of carbohydrate means I don't get them to just eat, you know, the same amount with each meal during the day. So the first, one of the first timing things I would introduce is backloading. So backload the carbs. So if it's somebody who's. I always use a weekend as an easy way to describe it. I'm saying look, if you go out and you do your training in the morning and you go out and you do an hour run or a couple of hours cycle or swim or play a match, whatever it is, obviously crossfitters out there as well. So I would usually say look, don't eat a boat of boat, don't eat your carbs before you go, you want to go in, into your training session generally in as low an insulin state, low an insulin state as possible with the fat out of the fat engine doors open. Therefore you know, have an eggs based breakfast or have a low, very low gi, low carbohydrate amount of food for your breakfast and train and when you come back eat the majority of your carbs for the day with your lunch or when your next meal is and you know, then you know, don't have a big, you know, bowl of pasta in the evening, go back to a much lower carbohydrate meal or much lower GI at least.

Did, did, did you know that? Because I just interviewed him for my, my rev conference but John Keefer when I talk to him, because he's kind of like one of the guys who originally came up with this whole carb backloading workout in the evening and then eat all your carbs in the evening type of approach, what he was telling me was that pretty much whether or not you work out in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evening, that the best time to eat your carbs just because of the circadian rhythm relationship with insulin is in the evening. Even if you work out in the morning, he Was saying, you know, even if you're doing like a morning workout, continue to eat high fat in the morning, eat high fat in lunch and continue to save all your carbohydrates for the evening. Are you familiar with that approach at all or have you experimented with that?

Yeah, I am familiar with it. And the reason why I would be slow, I mean I would be against it from the perspective of there's other stuff going on in the immediate. So it's all about the context as well. I mean if you're. Okay, my context, I'm dealing with, you know, pro cyclists a lot. So getting them to say, go out and do four hour, pretty hard session on the bike with big efforts when they, and they've got five hours the next day and their cortisol is through the roof from that four hour session and you know, adrenals are working overtime and glycogen synthase is activated post, post exercise immediately. Immediately post exercise. I'm kind of, I mean, I know there's benefits to what he's John Kiffer saying, but I'm always looking at the context of the situation and it would, the benefits of putting if you're a regularly trained, if you're like high volume regularly, you know, training athlete, competitive athlete, I still favor on the side of backloading immediately post your training session. Okay. For the fact that it's going to, it's not going to cause it's, it's going to, it's going to lower the inflammation, it's going to lower the cortisol response. It's going to take advantage of just simply, you know, getting about better gluttony replenishment and think, I don't know if there's even some sort of like appetite signaling response where you know, if you eat some carbs post training, I think that down the line helps kind of appetite response later on in the evening.

Yeah.

And there's other things like astrocytes which are the kind of, you know, the glucose storage units in the brain that actually get replenished very quickly post training as well. So like everything with, you know, nutrition there's pros and cons to everything. So I think you can definitely, I mean there's new, new research coming out now where they're saying, you know, don't put any carbs in post training. You get much better training adaptations. And like there's a researcher in Australia coming out with some good, good papers on that now, John Holley, I think his name is. But so, but again, I go back to the point of who it is, who is it you are talking about? If it's a, you know, an Ironman doing 20 hours a week and they've got, you know, a couple of sessions coming up the next day, or like I said, cyclists and runners who've got big volume sessions coming up next day and are highly stressed from the session that they've just done. I'm still a backloading approach from the terms of put it in post exercise.

Okay, gotcha. And what I generally do, and I know that a lot of people listening in are kind of moving or doing some kind of exercise session twice a day is the way that I currently have my diet set up and I've written articles about this. So I've gone into the labs and I've been tested. I'm very, very well fat adapted myself. But my main strategy is I get up in the morning and I do some very light kind of like what would be considered easy parasympathetic nervous system rest and digest based activity. Meaning I'll do yoga, a light walk, some light movement, some mobility work, some foam rolling. I generally accompany that with caffeine from just like a black cup of coffee, not a cup of coffee with a bunch of calories added to it, like MCT oil and butter and stuff like that, just a regular calorie less cup of black coffee. And then also cold shower both before and after that morning fasted fat burning session. And the way that I do things is after that I'll eat breakfast. But my breakfast is basically like plants plus fats. So I'm blending up like, like fats and plants in a blender, you know, kale, MCT oil, coconut oil, coconut milk, almonds, nuts, stuff like that. And then generally like in the afternoon or the early evening when body temp peaks and reaction time peaks and my body's really primed for a very tough workout. I'll do about 45 to 60 minutes of high intensity interval training and generally at some point within two hours after that I'll have dinner. And that dinner is my primary bolus of carbohydrate for the day. So for a two day scenario that's actually worked very, very well for me. And that would be, I guess you might term that like a cyclic ketotic approach. Because cyclic ketosis means like I'm, I'm pretty much in ketosis all day long. And when I eat that final evening meal and I have, you know, typically it's anywhere from like 150 to 200 grams of carbohydrate with that evening meal, I'm out of ketosis for usually about like two to three hours. So I'm, I'm out of that full on fat burning state and then I'm back into it either by that night or by the next morning. And that's, that's the approach that I use as far as a timing standpoint. And it works pretty well for me.

Yeah, perfect. But there's one big difference there. What you've said in the morning is like you said, you lose some light exercise, some parasympathetic stuff, which is absolutely fine. I mean, what I would, where I'm coming out is if you come for a two hour room with me in the mountains, try and come back and just have black coffee and not. That's what I'm, you know, that's the, that's the difference. But in terms of your context, that works absolutely fine. And I even do that. You know, I've. Anyone who listens to the last podcast that I did with you, I am all about the fasting and that's what I've kind of like. I do that use that similar approach myself. I'm a two meal a day guy. A lot of the times when I'm not training, say running in the morning or cycling in the morning, I do mobility work and a bit of move, not stuff and like a lot of kind of like movement type, you know, squats and things like that. But just I exercise and then I won't eat either until lunchtime, basically. So it just comes down to the kind of volume and intensity of the work I think that you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, got it. Okay, cool. So we've got step one being to optimize the general diet, step two being nutrient timing. And I'm sure that our listeners can hear that there's a, somewhere a baby crying. And that's because.

Yeah, that's not my side.

Yeah, that's not my baby either. It's someone else's baby somewhere. This podcast is being brought to you by the Spokane, Washington library. So anyways, number three would be fasted state training. And this probably segues pretty nicely from what you were just talking about and what we were discussing regarding fasting. Where does fasted state training come in as far as the best way to do it to turn yourself into a fat burning machine? How much is too much? Like, like what's your take on, on the whole facet scenario and where that fits in?

This is where I've kind of spent a lot of my time researching, reading about and Practicing. And I think in terms of the adaptations that you need to get to become, you know, a super high, highly efficient fat burner and a massive mitochondrial growth biogenesis, a massive mitochondrial efficiency and a massive cytochrome one, let's call it activation. You can get the biggest adaptations through fasting and in my case, what I call fasted state training. So anyway, again we covered a lot of this in the last podcast, but what, what this, when you look into it is what happens is the main thing that happens in mitochondria, you get a stress response and a stress signal signaler protein called AMP kinase. And AMP kinase is the guy that comes in and goes, we're not getting any fuel in here, we're exercising, things need to change. And what happens then is you get expression of transcription factors and other protein signaling molecules. So you get the Sirtuins, Sirt 1, you'll get PGC 1, you'll get P PAR Alpha. And what all these things do are, they are messengers to say we need to start building more mitochondria here, we need to start burning more fats here because we're not getting any carbs in, we need to start making more glucose even and we need to become much more efficient with what we have. It's a simple case of not giving the body anything, not giving it any fuel. So you can do what you can do there is utilize two strategies. I think that the two biggest strategies that you can get to making your body adapt on getting, getting improvements is intermittent fasting, stroke fasting. So you know, 16 to 18 hour fasts or longer. And the second thing you can do is what I've been doing for the last several years is get up in the morning and train without breakfast because like I said, that's where you're getting, you're going to get all the biggest, biggest stress responders all switched on and big AMP kinase release. All the, all the adaptations that I'm talking about in terms of upregulation of beta oxidation, mitochondrial biogenesis. And so, you know, the practical aspects of doing this is people hear about this. It's another thing that's kind of, you know, in the public a bit more and being talked about and podcasted about and blogged about and people, but people are like, yeah, okay, I'm gonna try this this weekend. I'm gonna go and you know, go on a three hour bike ride and just have, you know, coffee in the morning and bring a bottle of water with me and a stick of butter. But the point is again, your body has to be adapted in order to do it. So I bring people again gradually into it. So it would be a case of doing whatever your easiest session of the week is. Try and just do that in the fastest state once a week. See you get on or try and go out on an easy long run or long bike ride. I mean it depends on the type of athlete you are obviously. And just go fasted after the first hour, eat something and then maybe in a couple of weeks time try and bring it out to an hour and a half. Then after a couple of months bring it up to two hours.

I mean how often do you recommend doing? Because I currently do it once a week. I go out and do something fasted that takes me a longer period of time once a week. Now of course I'm not competing as a competitive ultra endurance athlete or multi day cyclist or a mountain marathon or anything like that. I'm probably, well, to be honest, I probably fall into the category of more of our listeners who are not necessarily ultra, ultra endurance athletes but who are just like, you know, kind of doing triathlons, maybe marathons, things along those lines if they're doing long stuff at all. But do you think once a week is sufficient? Is that too much for like a longer fasted fat burning session or what do you think for the general population would suffice?

I like usually starting off with, with. Yeah, with one, um, and usually the weekend kind of longer, let's say whatever the longer type session is and then like building on that as in, you know, like I said, doing it once a week, let's say it's a long bike ride or a long run, like eating after the first hour and then extending that as you go. So yeah, I mean I think twice a week is, it can be safely done by pretty much everyone. So you know, where you do something maybe Wednesday and then you do something fast as that is Wednesday and then fasted Saturday or Sunday. I mean I've gotten to the stage where, you know, I took it to the extreme and I was doing it maybe six times a week and I'm doing quite big volume sessions. But that's how you can dig a big hole for yourself. But I think the benefits, you get huge benefits by doing it once to twice a week and doing it once or twice a week drastically reduces any risks that come with that.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I'm kind of again just to use myself as an example, just, just so people know, I pretty much do at this point a fasted session almost every morning. That's that shorter 20 to 30 minute fasted session. Literally that's like six days a week and then on one day of the week it's a longer fasted fat burning session. But I'm pretty much doing a facet workout at this point in my life almost every day of the week and staying lean is a total no brainer and I can, I can literally stuff my face with my wife's solid cooking at dinner, especially if I'm doing that after a post hard evening workout. And it works out really well. So I love the facets state training and I think it's another one that some people forget to include in becoming fat adapted because they're whatever, afraid that fasted training is going to be too catabolic or something like that. But ultimately I think as long as it, as long as you're keeping it aerobic and it's not like a bunch of strung together fasted crossfit workouts for example, it works out really well.

Exactly. I recommend people not doing back to back days. So yes, that would be one thing people start doing. They're like oh fasted, I burn more fat so I'll get really lean, get really ripped, blah blah blah. They start doing it, you know, all the time. And that's how you really dig yourself a grave basically.

Yeah, I, I agree. Unless the facet workouts are really easy and I find that if the fasted workouts are really easy, like we're talking yoga and stuff like that I'm able to do it every day. Oh yeah, I feel fine. But yeah, once you get into like the hard like long fasted workouts or the hard, hard and long. Hard or long, that's where it starts to dig you into a hole. Absolutely. Okay, so step one is to optimize our diet. Step two is to time our nutrients throughout the day. Step three is to include fasted state training. Step four, you talk about lifestyle and environmental factors that affect your ability or non ability to turn yourself into a fat burning machine. What are some lifestyle and environmental factors people need to take into consideration here?

Yeah, so I mean, you know, this is a big area and the more, the more I'm trying to talk explain these things, the more I realize, you know, who have to skim over the surface of a lot of stuff. But you know, I guess one of the big things that will be, you know, familiar to people a lot and it seems to be, you know, like the media and the news a lot these days is sleep. And you know, I would have a lot of people, a lot of athletes who, let's say they're eating, you know, paleo ish and lower carb and faster, say training, but their sleep is crap and you know, they're not getting a solid night's sleep. And then you look into the effects of sleep and you look at its effect on insulin sensitivity, cortisol patterns, and you look at its effect on prolactin and melatonin and you start going, well, you know, did he might be eating all the wild Alaskan salmon in the world and having really good extra virgin coconut oil and you know, eating all, you know, his greens, etc. But if his insulin sensitivity isn't working, that means his nutrient partitioning isn't as good. And if his cortisol pattern isn't good during the day, that means his again it's going to affect fat adaptation and appetite signaling and you know, so sleep obviously will be one of the first things I always look at. And then I would apply all the kind of biohacks that you can apply these days to sleep. You know, you don't have to look too far these days to find out what are the improvements or what are the things, solutions you can use to improve and sleep. The other thing that I look at and this kind of goes a bit deeper is you start looking into really how the body works and the body functions and you start looking at all the physiological and the biochemical mechanisms which I spent most of my life doing. And then you start kind of looking in a bit deeper and you start looking at the quantum mechanics that are involved in how that, how the cell works. And it starts making you realize that it's a lot to do with, you know, quantum physics, which unfortunately was a subject I didn't actually study. But anyway, but what I'm saying in here is that, you know, there's a lot to do with say redox or redox reduction in oxidation reactions. And that's pretty much how cell signaling can work. And if the cells are not signaling well to each other and reduction is gain of electrons and oxidation is loss. So therefore you start going into the kind of aspect of, well, what's actually affecting this person's body and the way the cells communicate with each other and the way electrons are transported and the way how that affects making the body work and making ATP, etc. And you start going, and then you start looking into lifestyle factors that affect the way reduction and oxidation reactions are affected. And that comes down to things like, well, if you put something that's not an Electromagnetic force that's not native close to you, then that's going to disrupt.

Like a cell phone or a WI fi router.

Yeah, exactly. Then that's not going to disrupt your oxidation and reduction reactions and that's going to affect electron transport and that's going to affect the way your, your mitochondria works. So, and what's, what's a non native electromagnetic force? Well, yeah, iPads, iPhones, laptops, everything that people are stuck to these days. So this is where I've kind of come to the realization that it's not necessarily, I mean I'm a nutritionist and I've spent a lot of my time obviously understanding food and researching food. But now what governs the way your physiology works and what determines how efficient you can become and how healthy you can become essentially is through these factors, these lifestyle factors that actually are affecting the way your cells operate. And like I said, one of the things then would be, you know, dirty electricity, whatever you want to call it, non native EMFs. And you start, look, if somebody is trying to get, you know, lean healthy and become a fat burner machine and race an ironman and sub 10 hours on 50 grams of carbohydrate and they're sitting in bed with their iPad on and they're stuck to their iPhone all day, chances are they're not going to become as ketotic or fat adapted or efficient as they should be. Yeah, I think a lot of the failures today and people's kind of athletic prowess, if you call it, want to call it, and certainly in people's health is, are things like this. So next to sleep would be, you know, people's exposure to, you know, electromagnetic, non native electromagnetic frequencies. And I'm working with a lot of athletes to try and get them off that stuff.

And that's, that's one of the biggest barriers that I run into with the clients who I'm working with is they're willing to do the exercises that I load up for them. Like I use trainingpeaks for example, and I give them their workouts and their exercises for each day. And I use Evernote is what I use right now to deliver my clients their meal plans and their nutrients or recipes to follow. But then when it comes to sleep, when it comes to, to shutting off the cell phone, when it comes to hard wiring into the WI fi router, when it comes to a lot of these, you know, even hidden inflammatory factors like changing up the brand of shampoo that you use or changing what you're cleaning your Kitchen counter with like some people think you can just exercise and eat yourself into a state of optimized fat burning efficiency. And the fact is you got to have every lifestyle factor present. And of course that goes way above and beyond just fat burning efficiency. That goes into like everything from freaking like anti aging to mental performance to just looking, feeling and performing fantastically throughout the day. I think that the other important thing to take into consideration here, when you look at inflammation in general, which can of course be caused by dietary factors, but can also be caused by some of these other hidden dangers that we talked about about is, I mean it's been shown to cause insulin resistance. Like in fat tissue, when you have inflammation, you're resistant to insulin, so you get less fuel partitioned in the muscle, you get leptin resistance. I know that especially like inflammation of the brain or the hypothalamus. And so you get dysregulation of appetite and metabolism which can inhibit your ability to stay in a fat burning state. And then gut inflammation, you know, that's another biggie here is you, you can produce more, what are called lipopolysaccharides and that's essentially an endotoxin that's produced by bacteria in your gut and that, that can also cause inflammation and insulin resistance, especially in the liver and that can inhibit your ability to become a fat burning machine too. So yeah, people gotta take care of their brains. They, they got to take care of their guts, they got to look at their environment. And I appreciate that you include that as a strategy because that's a huge one that a lot of people don't pay attention to.

Yeah, totally. And basically what you've been. The point that what you've just said has made is that everything is connected and nothing to do with what we're talking about here. Fat burning is not simply eat 50 grams of carbs a day and eat a stick of butter and drink some bulletproof coffee. So all of those things that you just mentioned actually do impact on, you know, like how, how, how you can become fat adapted because like you said, it's down to we're controlling inflammation. And. Yeah, you've just discussed what, what, what, what those things affect. Yeah, I mean the other like the other lifestyle factor I bring in is actually, well, what, what's one of the things that actually causes an anti inflammatory effect and that will be getting people out and grounded and connecting, you know, barefoot, so you know, using grounding and also the cold like you, you use cold daily, but again they're easy Things, they don't cost anything. But yet again, people overlook them or don't understand them because there is quite deep science behind them. But people assess them as being kind of hippie, airy, fairy kind of things. But when you look deep into them, there's, there's some serious like again, back to the kind of quantum mechanics effects of how these things work. But yeah, Earth and grounding and colds are very strong anti inflammatory mechanisms that you can use. So sleep, emf, cold grounding, and you've got probably things going on there that impact your fat burning capabilities more so than the free range eggs you're eating in the morning.

Yeah. So if you're that person substituting roasted vegetables with olive oil instead of the mashed potatoes at the restaurant, but then you're standing up when you get a phone call and holding that cell phone up to your ear, you're putting water on the fire on one end and gasoline on the other end. So make sure you optimize all those lifestyle factors. Now, Barry, a lot of the people that listen to this point podcast, and of course I know a lot of people that you work with, they're also competing, they might be competing in CrossFit, they might be competing in triathlon and marathon, in obstacle course racing, whatever. Once you've got the correct food base and eating structure in place and some of these lifestyle factors in place when it comes to actually competition and what you're into, folks eating or fueling with during competition or any type of, of supplementation used before big workouts or competition to keep yourself in a fat burning state, what are some of the big wins that you're implementing right now?

A lot of it comes down to just the practicalities of being in airports, being on planes, being in a hotel, not being at home with your own kitchen supply on your own fridge. So some of the things, you know, I would be always recommending people bring kind of stuff with them that's kind of, you know, bring. I'm always, I always bring kind of fresh coffee with me. Maybe bring things like, you know, coconut oil, a jar of coconut oil, for instance, bring some, you know, 100% raw cocoa powder and just, just a lot of the kind of like daily, healthy and kind of fundamental things that would be important to, as I said, like, kind of like keeping you in, you know, use, like I said, using things like the, you know, things like coconut oil, things like, can't think off the top of my head now. What else would I be recommending guys to people? There's obviously A limit to what you can bring, but there's some.

You mean when you're traveling? You mean.

Yeah, when traveling.

One, one big one I like is Pemmican. Yeah, you can like, like I get mine from, from this company called US Wellness Meats. And it's just rendered fat that's mixed with sea salt as a little bit of a preservative. That stuff travels pretty well and it's, it's, it's really, really good. I also pretty much every single time I step onto an airplane for a day of travel, I've got a couple of avocados and a can of sardines in my bag. And what I'll do is I'll. I'll grab a green salad from Starbucks or from any of the other airport vendors and I just like chop up an avocado and dump open a can of sardines on that. And that's pretty much like my go to meal when I'm. When I'm in the airport and trying to avoid a lot of sugar boosting type of compounds.

Yeah, exactly. And suddenly true. What is quite a simple kind of an effort that you, a couple of avocados and a tin of fish, you've suddenly kind of kept your insulin levels low, kept your fat pathways open, and you haven't had a big ciabatta or a panini or a baguette or baguette or whatever else is usually available in airports, which is sometimes what a lot of, you know, fat adapted serious athletes have to resort to. And it can. There are simple fixes like what you just described or prevention mechanisms, let's call them other things like, you know, I like using branched chain amino acids. They're kind of things that are quite portable and easy to bring. Magnesium in transdermal form. So in the spray form. So, you know, they're kind of easy things to travel with and usually effective to kind of keep with. Then there's the big aspect of fueling during the race and the. This is quite controversial topic because I'm not in favor of the. So I'm, you know, known for being very into the whole fat adaptation mechanisms, fasted state training, lower carb diets. But when racing there's different things that are going on. And I believe one of the biggest factors is the central governor, as in the brain. And one of the things that, that runs on apart from ketones, as we know. But one of the easy fuels it runs on is glucose. And I think a lot of athletes today are actually overdoing the, you know, Trying to race on say, you know, cheese and dried meat and nuts and the long starch polymer carbohydrate drink. When really insulin remains dormant during these races. Therefore you do not spike insulin if you have some carbohydrate and is actually small glucose hits in the form of some fruit or dried fruit or a natural energy bar flapjack or a natural nut type gel with some natural honey in it or something like that. Is that actually helping the central governor from crashing if you're doing an Ironman, for instance? Because I had clients who went to Kona Ironman just in October, gone. They're very fat adapted, but they need to race using carbs. Now you don't need to use the whatever 90 grams of carbs an hour factor because you're not fueling the muscle, so to speak, but you're fueling the brain. So, you know, a lot of the time I'm trying to get guys to not have the standard gels and standard sports drinks and things like that, but have the lower carb type, let's say gels and sports drinks and also just simply use natural carbohydrate fruits and bars during what? Let's say there's a race of marathon and longer distance or you know, fast Olympic distance type triathlon, Any of the shorter stuff. I don't think you need to be fueling with glucose, so to speak. But that's kind of a big area. I think people are getting wrong and it's something that's throwing off the fat adaptation kind of principles. Not the principles, but the benefits a bit. Because people are thinking that they have to race with, you know, just a stick of lard and they can't have a banana when the opposite is true and when actually glucose actually favors the brain central governor mechanism during intense exercise.

Okay, so is there, you know, for example, if you look at like Gatorade Sports Science Institute, they're saying a minimum of 200 to 250 calories of carbohydrate per hour during exercise. You know, some athletes like I used to be up around 400 calories of carbohydrates per hour during Ironman. Do you have a certain number of calories per hour of carbohydrate that you found to be able to maintain performance while still keeping the body in relatively fat utilizing state?

Again, it's, I mean, really hugely depend on the athlete and how long they can adapt and how long they've been following this, this strategy. But I mean, I think a competitive, you know, let's say sub 10 hour, sub 3 hour marathon runner. And I've done this myself. You can operate on you know, 20, 30 grams of carbohydrate an hour because that's enough to fuel the brain. So you know, what's that in calories? That's like 100, 150 calories. Now what you need to do is be highly fat adapted so that you're open the zones of exercise of whatever it is you're competing at, zone three, zone four where you are in 100, where your respiratory quotient is, is good enough that you are comfortably racing in a almost 100% fat burning mode. So you're not use it utilizing much glucose and like I said, the main glucose that you're using is actually for the brain. So I mean look, I've won some big ultramarathon races where I probably consumed on average something like I don't know, less than 100 calories an hour. But that would be over maybe a 12 to 14 race duration situation where yeah where I'm highly fat adapted, I'm running in the fastest, I'm running fasted and I'm running at a steady state as opposed to, it's not, it's not a sport that has any much changes in the intensity and the speed at which I have to go. I don't have to race up hills or like I'm comparing this to say a cycling race or there's no sprint attack so to speak and there's no, you know. So yeah, so various really varies on how largely adapted fat adapted you are, what your respiratory quotient is. But I think the understanding that we need to fuel during, to fuel the muscle when if you're highly fat adapted you can and like we said the muscles are the fat that's already in the muscle can take care of what you need to in terms of ATP requirements. The, the small loading that you need is mainly would be to take on to like I said, fuel the brain. So yeah, so that was just along with the race preparation of what you said about you know, how you can improve airport meals and the foods that you can bring with you and some supplements you can take with you is also just the natural kind of gels and drinks and natural foods that you can actually use during a race.

Okay. So basically if we step back and we look at this big picture as far as the five steps that we just went over, the first is to optimize your diet and it sounds like the big picture there is to not be afraid of Eating carbs and real foods and things like that. But just ensure that you're really drenching your diet in a lot of good healthy fats to shift you into fat oxygen oxidation and all the more. So is that true or. That's true when you're an athlete, when you're already pretty active and when those carbohydrates are not going to do quite as much damage. And the trick is to get more fats in. Number two would be nutrient timing and making sure that you time your carbohydrates accordingly during the day and try to line them up to your periods of physical activity and specifically the more intense physical activity activity of the day. Number three would be to do lots of fasted training and make sure that that's, that's not something that you shy away from with your, with your training. Number four would be make sure you address inflammation from hidden sources like cell phones, WI fi routers, oxidation from like airline travel, stuff like that. And then number five would be if you're competing, especially if you're traveling when competing, A, make sure that you're bringing things along with you that allow you to stay in that fat adapted state and planning ahead to do so. And B, would be, don't be afraid to actually include carbohydrates during a big workout. Just know that those are primarily being used for the brain as fuel. You're in a relatively high fat burning state and taking in some bananas, apples, natural sources of carbohydrates like that is not necessarily, necessarily going to shift you out of fat oxidation during exercise if you're already fat adapted.

Yeah. And as you know, there's a lot, we can go into a lot more depth in probably each one of those points and do separate podcasts.

But at least that gives a really good overview, though.

It's a good overview and it's. Hopefully it paints a better picture as to what actual fat adaptation is for people you know. Cool.

Well, these are. This is a really good primer. I like it. It makes it easy. Five easy steps. So here's the deal. If you're listening in, first of all, you can find barry@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com he's one of the performance nutritionists over there in the show notes for this episode. And by the way, if you need the show notes, you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and the show notes are over there for pretty much any episode if you scroll down. But you can all also, if you subscribe to the newsletter of BenGreenfieldFitness.com you get the show notes automatically sent to you every time one of these bad boys gets released. And then as far as Barry goes, you can hire him for consulting or nutrition coaching or anything like that. And you can go over to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com and find Barry there if you click on the coaching tab. Now, Barry, one other thing I know that you do just if anybody's kind of close to you in the area that you're going to be doing this is you do like live workshops too, right?

Yeah. So just recently kind of teamed up with some two other guys, kind of a running coach and a movement specialist. So, yeah, basically what we're trying to do is set up these and based them on the kind of primal aspects of kind of training and eating and combine, combine everything into kind of one weekend workshop. So we're calling it like the Primal three, and we're running it out of a place called Glenda Lock in Wicklow, which is just outside Dublin here in Ireland. So we're going to be running one of those kind of workshop weekends every, every month, hopefully in the new year. We're trying to use all the principles that I've just discussed in nutrition, but combine that then with move knot principles and mobility and technical, you know, running form. And we're going to target it to, you know, runners, triathletes, cyclists, and a lot of mainly endurance sports, but also to crossfitters as well. Cool.

So. So if people contact you, I know your contact information, for example, is over there. Greenfield Fitness Systems, if they want to find more information about that, they can just shoot you off an email.

Yeah. The advertisement, the booking details are on a website called champions everywhere.com. champions everywhere, yep. So people go to championseverywhere.com they'll see the details and the information about how to sign up for these primal workshops.

Awesome. Well, folks, if you're listening in and you have questions, comments or feedback, you can leave them on the show. Notes for this episode episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com don't forget to visit the website of the sponsor for this episode, Casper Mattresses. And when you go to Casper.com Ben, you get $50 off towards any mattress purchase. Again with promo code ben@casper.com and until next week, thanks for listening in and have a healthy week.

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Sam.