How To Burn More Fat At Work, Fixing Adrenal Fatigue, How Your Genes Affect Your Diet & More!

My Bonnie lies over the ocean My Bonnie lies over the sea My Bonnie lies over the ocean oh, bring back my Bonnie to me in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. How to burn more fat at work, how to fix adrenal fatigue, how to naturally repel insects, what to do about exercise induced headaches, and much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything, everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's a natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Ben.

Yo.

I think I heard the voice of an angel.

You know, I. I really can't play that song without thinking about Bad Grandpa, the movie with Johnny Knoxville where the little kids.

Oh, my gosh, you're so good.

Have you seen that movie?

I have, yes.

Kid sings it and breaks into a stripper routine. For those of you who actually made it through the intro, which could have been quite painful for you, you may recall that a few weeks ago, Rachel and I announced that we both got ukuleles, or as they say, ukulele for Christmas. And I finally took mine out last night and began strumming. And that was the song, the beginner song, in my little Hal Leonard how to Play the Baritone Ukulele Book. So there you have it.

Incredible. And now I'm worried about being in the same band as you.

That's all right. At some point for our listeners, we'll get a little duet going on, and obviously it has nothing to do with fitness, but it has a whole lot to do with health, as we've talked about. You know, music is good for, like, your autonomic nervous system and for your dopamine intelligence, all sorts of stuff. So, folks, go out and get yourself a ukulele. Oh, by the way, Rachel, speaking of autonomic nervous system, do you remember two weeks ago in the podcast when we talked about how something called jaw realignment can help with your parasympathetic nervous system activation, like your vagus nerve tone and all this cool stuff when it comes to heart rate variability?

I do remember. Yeah.

I just got a jaw realignment.

Oh, you did?

Like an hour ago. Yeah.

And how did it go? How are you feeling?

I feel great. My jaws are moving. Okay. It hopped a few times. If, if my voice fades into the distance during this podcast, it means that. That I've got, like, lockjaw or something going on.

Is it kind of confronting the way that they do it?

It's a. It's a little bit. There's like this trust relationship you have to have with a practitioner because they're literally, like, pulling on your neck and your jaw and it hurts and you've got like. Like, they'll put pressure on your jaw and then you slowly open it. Tissue release for the jaw, so it's painful. But stuff popped in there that hasn't popped in a while. I got it done twice, so this morning and then also last week. And for those of you who measure your heart rate variability, who measure, like, the strength of your nervous system, you'll be very interested to know that after I got my jaw realignment, I did it on an evening. The next morning, I measured my heart rate variability and the number. We're just gonna jump straight into the propeller hat stuff. The low frequenc, which is a measurement, or, I'm sorry, the high frequency, which is a measurement of your parasympathetic nervous system strength. That measurement was at 13,500 for power, which is higher than it has ever been. Like sex, cold water, walks in the sunshine, all that stuff. We'll talk about more on this podcast about how to increase the strength of your nervous system, but nothing compared to the jaw realignment is not interesting.

That's fascinating.

So for those of you out there who want to go out and get your jaws popped, just go do it.

News flashes.

Rachel. I know it's super duper early over there for you.

Yeah, it's 6:07am super excited about it.

When you roll out of bed in Australia at, I would imagine slightly earlier than 6:07am Te be 5:55. 58am5:58. There you go. Do you have a tea or coffee or some kind of a heavily caffeinated pill that you swallow, or do you just wander your way over to the microphone and flip on the computer?

Well, this morning I had a cold shower and there's no caffeine. I'm staying with my brother and there's no caffeine in his house, so I had a tea.

There's no caffeine in your brother's house.

There's no coffee.

Is that intentional? Is that, like a health choice for him?

It is. His wife is pregnant right now, and so they're both off coffee, like, supporting her. He is, isn't that lovely?

He's a better man than I. Because my attitude was, more coffee for me. She's not drinking any, so I get more anyway. So, yeah. So while my wife was pregnant, it wound up turning into caffeine addiction for me because I had a giant pot of coffee to drink every morning all by myself. Anyways, though, it's very interesting because one of our news flashes this week are actually the first couple of news flashes that I wanted to talk about have to do with sleep and sleep deprivation. So I. I think we can jump right in. What do you think?

Do it. Yeah.

All right. So this was a study that came out in the American Journal of Physiology and Endocrinology. And it's a mouthful. It's called short term sleep deprivation with nocturnal light exposure alters time dependent glucagon like peptide 1 and insulin secretion in male volunteers. That is a mouthful if you don't read it slowly enough. It sounds like they were just doing something horrible to a group of male volunteers to their secretion. But basically what it comes down to is they took these folks and they sleep deprived them. They sleep deprived them. And they looked at what happens to the bad stuff that can occur when you eat a big meal, right? Like in this case, an 850 calorie meal, which is a decent sized meal. That's enough to fill the average person up, I'd say. And what they found was a very deleterious response in terms of like the blood glucose spike, the insulin release, what's called the glucagon, like peptide release, all of these things that would make a meal a little bit more metabolically damaging. All the things that would make like overeating, snacking, et cetera, more metabolically damaging, everything that would influence, for example, your ability to regulate your appetite. They found that in sleep deprived people, no surprises here, all of those hormones were dysregulated. But in this particular study, they looked at people who were sleep deprived under light conditions versus people who were sleep deprived under dark conditions, right? Like people who maybe weren't sleeping enough but were lying in bed during the night unable to sleep, or who maybe were giving it a good go to sleep a lot. And then the people who are just like bathed in light as you might get if you were clubbing or working a night shift, or engaged in some other form of sleep deprivation that involved exposure to light. What they found was that the people who were sleep deprived and who were sleep deprived because of light exposure had a much bigger deleterious effect of that Meal. And so it turns out that one of the worst things you can do if you're sleep deprived is to lay in bed looking at your iPhone, having the light on, you know, having the Kindle on, et cetera. And this is, it's really interesting. It's something that I actually, a while ago I interviewed a guy who wrote a book about like this 90 plus year old track star named Olga. It was called why Does Olga Run? And he went into how when she would wake up in the middle of the night, which is normal, honestly, it's normal to wake up in the night. We talked about this a little bit last week. She would do like deep tissue work. She actually kept a wine bottle on her bed stand. An empty wine bottle. Don't get any ideas here. She kept an empty wine and she would do deep tissue work. Right. Like foam rolling and stuff. And then eventually after breathing and a little bit of deep tissue work, she would slowly fall back asleep.

Interesting.

Yeah. The takeaway message is if you're having trouble sleeping or if you're sleep deprived or if you're working a night shift, it behooves you to really limit light and especially to limit the blue light wave spectrum. The blue light wave spectrum. And this actually kind of segues into the other study that I wanted to bring up that was kind of related to this. And this was this whole idea behind wearing colored lenses. Colored lenses. Because you've seen no doubt like these blue light blockers before.

Yes. Yep.

Yeah. Like these amber colored lenses. Yeah, the ones that. Yeah. Swannies has one. You know, I wear one called Erlen. There's one called Gunnar. There's a whole bunch of glasses that you can wear that block blue light and also make you look like a creepy stalker.

They are kind of creepy.

They are creepy. I haven't yet found a brand that just doesn't make you look like. Yeah. A creepy stalker or a psychotic author or maybe just somebody who lives in their mom's basement. But they did a study in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness in which they looked at the effect of these colored lenses on muscular performance.

Huh. And what did they find?

Well, they looked into. And I actually have a full article I wrote about this a couple of years ago. But this study is new. So this is, this is new research on the matter. They took a bunch of guys and they had them do 25 rep maxes weight training. In this case, they had them doing leg presses and they compared blue, they compared red. And then like a clear, you know, like a control group that was wearing a clear colored lens, what they found was that which lens performed best. I believe it was the blue lens. The blue improved the performance of a muscular endurance based task, which would make sense because blue light kind of like wakes you up and concentrates light. Red light also improved the muscular endurance. So both of them had an effect. But compared to the control group, it turns out that colored lenses can increase muscular performance. And I've always wondered this because I spent an ungodly amount of time, like five hours getting fitted for my lenses, doing like reading charts and speed reading and visual perception and acuity and all these things to allow me to get my own custom set of lenses created for my eyes. It was really interesting. It's called an Erlen lens and I'll link to this in the show notes. By the way, for those of you listening and want these studies or the show notes or anything, they're over@bengreenfieldfitness.com 34 3. But the final product is like this purple stalker ish set of glasses that I've got in a Ray Ban frame. And I only typically wear them at night. But it turns out that based on the results of this study, maybe I should be wearing them during workouts too.

Yeah, because you can increase your muscular endurance and look like a creep.

Exactly. A creepy leg presser. Creepy leg presser. So a couple of other things I wanted to bring up in terms of studies. There was a study that came out about car carb timing. About carb timing and specifically a form of carbohydrate timing that would increase your performance. And in this case it was with a group of triathletes. A group of triathletes. They took 21 highly trained male triathletes and they started to mess around with their carbohydrate intake. And specifically what they did was they restricted their carbohydrates at the end of the day following like an intense training session. So they were like carbohydrate depleting them. Right. Almost the opposite of what we've talked about on the show before, how you should kind of eat most of your carbohydrates at night after a really difficult training session. But no, they didn't, they didn't do that. They didn't give them any carbohydrates. These poor male triathletes. After that, that hard training session and then to put fuel on the fire or, or no fuel on the fire, really, they had them get up in the morning and do like a fasted exercise. Session, again with no carbohydrates, they were just like draining their carbohydrate stores. Now in the morning they were doing like a low intensity session, and in the evening they were doing a high intensity session. And then what they did was they monitored the ability of these folks after they went through this whole phase. They monitored their ability to be able to store glycogen. And they monitored some of these things that are responsible for improved endurance pathways, like increases in mitochondrial density and increases in the ability to be able to utilize fuel to create energy. And what they found was that in this group of triathletes who went through this carbohydrate depletion phase, and especially even training in what's called a glycogen depleted state, they found that they had a significantly improved response. And specifically what they found, and they described it as game changing performance gains in the article that I'll link to in the notes. But they found an increase in their time to exhaustion at specifically their race pace, like their lactate threshold pace. So it's really interesting that when you restrict carbohydrates, this happens. Now, in this study, I don't think they used a protocol that would be sustainable for most folks. Do a hard training session at night, don't eat any carbs, sleep all night, get up in the morning, train again without any carbs, you know, and have a hard session at night, an easy session in the morning. I have another method of doing it I'll talk about in a second. But there's a way that this works, and I've spoken about it quite a bit in my book Beyond Training. But the idea here is that when you deliberately restrict your carbohydrate intake during certain phases of your training, it changes your preferred fuel utilization from carb to fat. And it also causes the transcription of a few different genes and enzymes responsible for fat oxidation and for glycogen storage and for the creation of new mitochondria to increase specifically, there's this master regulator of mitochondrial adaptation. It's called PGC1alpha. And PGC1alpha, which is a great name for robot, or like a child in the 23rd century, PGC1 Alpha actually enhances endurance performance. And so it turns out that by having certain periods of time when you train in a state of low glycogen availability, you can really boost your endurance performance. And this was a cool study to show that happens.

Fascinating.

Now, like I said, like I mentioned, I'm not gonna quit eating carbohydrates at night. After my hard training session, because I think that a better scenario, more sustainable scenario, scenario that's less likely to produce adrenal fatigue and all these issues of just being starved and glycogen depleted post workout. I think a better scenario is what I personally do. So you go all day restricting your carbohydrates, not eating a lot of carbs at the very end of the day, preferably after an intense training session, then you eat some carbs and then you go into intermittent fasting where after you've eaten dinner and you've had like sweet potatoes or yams or rice or fruit or red wine or dark chocolate or all of the above with all the good stuff, all, why not, why not do all of it, right? Sweet potato mash, throw some yams in there, dip some dark chocolate in your glass of red wine, polish it off with some sushi. Basically you fast after that. And I fast for 12 to 16 hours. And I fast almost every day of the year for 12 to 16 hours. It's just, it's, it's easy once you start to do it, to sleep after you eat dinner and to not snack a whole bunch after dinner, to wake up and to not eat breakfast right away. It's pretty easy once you start to do it. And at some point during that window, I do like an easy morning exercise session exactly as they did in this study. Really like a low intensity 15 to 30 minute session. And by doing that, I really am simulating kind of like what they're doing in this study. But I'm doing it without necessarily making my body all stressed out because it's not getting full fuel after that hard evening workout.

So the difference is you're just eating carbs in the evening.

Exactly. You eat your carbs in the evening. That's called like a carb timing approach. It's also known as carb backloading. There's a guy named John Keefer who's written a book about this and we've interviewed him on the show. It's called Carb Night. But basically that's the idea. Because my concern would be like long term, if you took like a hard charging triathlete and just like never gave them carbs, like constantly had them training in a glycogen depleted state, that could be difficult versus using the approach I've just described, where you have that brief window of time where you give yourself a bunch of carbs and then you're fasting or low carb the rest of the time. It's very simple. And believe it or not, it doesn't require you to be too anal with your diet. Right. It's just like, hey, I'm done eating dinner, I'm not gonna eat again until breakfast. And most of my meals up until dinner the next night are not gonna have a lot of carbs in them. That's pretty easy to do.

It is, yeah.

So there you have it.

Fascinating.

Yeah, really interesting. It's called the sleep low strategy. Sleep low. So the one other thing that I wanted to mention was a really good article that came out on our buddy Mark Sisson's website, the Mark's Daily Apple website. Now this went into how different things that go on in your genes, right? Like you have all these little triggers in your genes. It's called the field of epigenetics, where everybody's born with the propensity to produce insulin in different ways and oxidize fats in different ways. He went into some of the major genetic issues that would make you respond to a diet differently. And it's really a great illustration of why some diets work for some people and some diets don't work for others. Why some people do great on a plant based vegan or vegetarian diet and other people feel like crap and just go nuts for bacon after two days on a diet like that.

Yeah. And what, what are some, some of the things you looked into?

So one was called the MTHFR mutation, also known affectionately by many people as the mother effer mutation. So the MTHFR mutation affects your ability to be able to methylate, affects your ability to be able to methylate. And especially when your folate intake is low, and remember, you get folate from like plants and vegetables and stuff like that, you really are unable to produce this methylation pathway that affects a whole bunch of different energy producing pathways in your body. And so if you have this MTHFR mutation, which is very easy to test for you, you got like 23andMe and you do a salivary test. For example, if you have this MTHFR mutation, there could be a really good reason that you feel like crap eating like a vegan or vegetarian diet. Whereas your neighbor, who doesn't have the MTHFR mutation and who is able to methylate even when their folic acid intake is low, they may actually do just fine on a vegan or vegetarian based diet. So basically it turns out that let's say your ancestors ate a very folate rich diet high in plants, high in vegetables. It's unlikely that you carry the mutation that would allow you to not make energy on a diet like that. And I'm really giving. I know there's a bunch of genetic people listening in who want to leap through the microphone and rip my head off, because I'm explaining this in kind of basic terms. But the idea here is you can test for this mutation, and if you have the MTHFR mutation, you may need to prioritize eating meats and things like that. Whereas if you don't have it, you may do just fine with a lot of dietary folate from plants and stuff. So that's one interesting one.

Fascinating.

Another one was salivary amylase. Salivary amylase. So I've talked before about how, like, Kenyan marathoners, for example, can do really well with, like, bananas and white rice. They have a lower insulinogenic response to that. They. They digest those carbs more easily. And a lot of other people have this gene that's responsible for producing a lot of salivary amylase as well. Salivary amylase is what starts to break down carbohydrate even as early as in your mouth. And you'll find that some people, like, for example, there's a group of populations called the Yakut, there's this foraging society called the Mabooti pygmies, There's another one called the Biaka, which are foragers in the Congo, et cetera, et cetera. They found that some of these folks have higher numbers of starch digesting enzymes than others. One example of a group of foragers is the Hasda tribe, the Hadzda tribe, and they have a high amount of salivary amylase. So they're able to do well on a high carb diet, whereas someone from, like, a northern European population is not able to. So it's really interesting.

It's a good place to start when thinking about what you should eat. Not salivary amylase, but the diet.

Exactly. It'll influence your decision about whether or not you're going to slam that Coke.

Or be a vegetarian.

Or be a vegetarian. There's another final one I wanted to mention real quick, and that's lactase persistence. There's another gene for lactase persistence. So some people, when they finish breastfeeding, their ability to digest lactose disappears really quickly. And then some people, the ability to digest lactose, it goes on for a really long period of time, like you can do it into adulthood. And that's based on a gene, it's called the lactase persistence gene, as the name would imply. And what that means is that, like, if you're Northern European, like Scandinavian or British or from France or Germany or something like that. Or your ancestors were. You're probably lactose tolerant. And there are a lot of people where the lactase persistence gene does not appear. For example, like Eastern Asian or Native American. Like almost none of them have the lactase persistence gene. So again, it's really interesting and it's why when you walk into Barnes and Noble and there's that super popular diet book with all the testimonials on the front of it that says that this is the end all the new miracle diet, well, guess what? It may have worked for the author of that diet who is say like, you know, from a, whatever, a French, Jewish, Western Asian population or whatever. And they've got the lactase persistence gene and they've maybe not got the MTHFR gene and they've got the salivary amylase gene and great, it helped them strip a bunch of fat off their bodies and go from morbidly obese to ripped in no time flat. And that same diet may make you go from ripped to morbidly obese. So yeah, there you have it. Really good article and I'll link to that along with a bunch of other goodies in the show notes. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 343 Again, my apologies to all of you nerdy folks who know that I really did not do a complete treatise of genes and diet, but this was just it was to wet your appetite.

And if you would like to receive these news flashes and more every single day, make sure that you're following Ben on twitter.com BenGreenfield instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness and all of the good stuff happens at facebook.com.

BGFitness listener Q& A.

Hey Ben, my name is Katie Jo. I'm calling from Austin, Texas. I love you and Rachel on all the good things that you're doing. I have a question about standing desk and cold thermogenesis and heart rate variability altogether. So I have a standing desk and on the days that my heart rate variability shows that I need to recover, I will use some ice packs at my standing desk. But on the days that my heart rate variability shows that I'm strong and my nervous system is doing fine, I will wear a 30 pound weight of vest while I'm at my standing desk and try to wear that for at least an hour, sometimes two, depending on how long I can tolerate it. My question is if I could do both at the same time. If I could wear the ice packs and do the cold thermogenesis and wear the 30 pound weighting vest at the same time, I don't know if that would cause too much conflicting information to my nervous system at the same time or if it would be like a two for one, what do you say? Double punch and get two benefits at the same time. I'd appreciate your thoughts on that.

Thanks. Bye.

So, Rachel, in addition to perhaps like wearing some giant springy tigger boots, perhaps like an overcoat that she could put rolled up quarters in the pockets of, can you think of anything else Katie could do to geek out her workstation even more?

She could throw on a training mask, but I think she's doing pretty well.

That's true. She could put on an elevation training mask. It's a good idea. So, Katie, this is actually a really good question. When you wake up in the morning and you're testing your heart rate variability and it says you're beat up and should you recover, can you still do this whole concept of greasing the groove and having a standing workstation and staying active all day long? And the short answer is yes. Most of the light activity that you do during the day, it mostly activates your parasympathetic nervous system. But we could look at this. So I've got a few ideas, Katie, for you to burn more fat at work without stressing your body out with too much sympathetic nervous system activity. So I won't recommend 100 burpees for every hour or some other masochistic pomodoro techniques, but I also want to address your question about like, cold. For example, I've gotten this question from a lot of people, like, if my nervous system is beat up, can I do cold showers? Can I wear a cold vest? Can I do this kind of stuff? So it turns out that they've actually looked into this. So there was one study that was done in an aviation journal of environmental medicine, and they looked at your autonomic nervous system function during whole body cold exposure. So we're talking about the kind of cold exposure you get from being underwater or like from cryotherapy or something like that. So even more hardcore than say, like wearing some kind of like a cooling vest or something like that while you're working. And what they found was pretty interesting. They found that there was actually a drop in what are called catecholamines and a drop in cytokines, which would be responsible for inflammation and adrenal stress and things like that. And they found a Significant increase in what's called your high frequency power or the strength of your parasympathetic nervous system activity. And so basically what happened was that the nervous system was enhanced after cold acclimation. Now I should mention that in the first few minutes of cold exposure in this study, they did find increased sympathetic nervous system activation. And so what that means is whereas like cold water or a cold shower or like putting on a cold vest might feel like it stresses you out for the first couple of minutes. And you may if like, if you're measuring your heart rate variability, you might notice that your sympathetic nervous system goes up. It turns out that after a little while, you've taken a few deep breaths, your body starts to get used to it. You actually see the complete opposite response and a shift towards increased parasympathetic nervous system activity.

That is fascinating. I actually remember doing a cold plunge at a Russian spa for the first time and it was a freezing cold pool and you jump in and at first it's like that and you can't breathe. But then when you breathe through it, all of a sudden it's like you get out and you've had a massive massage and you feel like a million dollars. So makes sense.

Those Russians didn't know what is up. Get in the cold water like a polar bear. Yeah, no, I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I like the whole Russian approach to thermal stress. But they've also tested heat versus cold. There was another study that they did called radial pressure pulse and heart rate variability in heat and cold stressed humans. And what they found in this study was similar to what they found in the other study. The exposure to cold primarily activates the parasympathetic nervous system. But interestingly, they found that heat stress and thermal stress, perhaps not what you would experience in like, you know, a nice relaxing sauna session, but you know, when your heart rate's really going up, say you're exercising in the sauna, hard, you know, like doing like dragging an exercise bike into a sauna like someone might do when preparing for Ironman Hawaii or something like that. That they found that there's actually a pretty significant increase in sympathetic nervous system in response to heat stress. And I should emphasize not heat, but heat stress. Like some pretty significant amounts of heat. I would say, you know, there's a fine line between, for example, like the sauna session that I recently described in my blog where I'm doing like Bikram style yoga and you know, like sun salutations and stuff like that. I'M not doing burpees in my sauna. But it turns out that enough heat stress can cause a pretty significant sympathetic nervous system activation.

Could enough cold stress do the same thing?

Well, if you get to the point where you get into what's called intense cold thermogenesis, where you're shivering quite heavily, it's likely. And most of us know when cold is starting to stress us out versus when we're just passively cold. So to a certain extent, you kind of got to trust your body too. But yes, you can do something. Like, for example, the vest that I personally use in the summer, not in the winter, because my house is nice and cool in the winter, I use this vest called the Cool Fat Burner vest. You can check it out@coolfatburner.com they sell both a vest as well as a waist pack. And you can put these on to burn more fat while you're at work and to shift your body from white adipose tissue to convert that into brown adipose tissue. So that's one option. And yes, you could do that even if your heart rate variability is low. The same could be said for a weighted vest, as long as it is not excessively heavy. The reason I say that is because I've measured my heart rate variability and my nervous system response while weight training. Most every exercise you do in the weight room, especially if heavy, suppresses your heart rate variability and puts a great deal of stress on your body. That's a good thing. That's why you get like a growth hormone and a testosterone, like a hormetic response to hard and heavy weightlifting. And by the way, the exercise that most decreases your heart rate variability is the back squat. There's something about having a barbell on your back that just stresses your body out. It's probably why the squat is so effective too, though, as something to build strength and resilience. But you could certainly overdo it. I'd be curious to see the nervous systems of these people who follow the squat every day protocol, which some people do. But as far as wearing a weighted vest, yes, I would say if the weight is distributed evenly and it's not something where you're like buckling under the load of the vest, you know, in like a half squat as you're working, because the thing's so freaking heavy and it feels like you're getting pressed into the ground while you're on a conference call. But if it's something a little bit more passive, you know, like a 20 or a 30 pound vest, or you know, even like a 10 pound vest is going to increase the amount of calories that you burn. Yes. There's a brand that I like that does a good job evenly distributing the weight and doesn't put a lot of stress on your body. I like a brand called hyperware for that. You could Google them or I'll put a link in the show notes. But a hyperware makes a good weighted vest that kind of evenly distributes weight on your body. So that's one to look into. I have some other ideas though too, and they're not as stupid as Rachel's training mask idea.

Whatever.

Hey, you can't podcast or make phone calls when you're wearing a training mask, but take it off. Those of you listening in have a photo of yourself using a training mask at work, please do send it in. We'll post it in the show notes anyways.

Post it on Facebook because we'll be so proud of you.

Yeah, so right now, you know, I am standing while we are recording, but I'm not walking on my treadmill. I do have a manual treadmill that I walk on. It's quite quiet, but it also forces you to use proper biomechanics when you both walk and run. The treadmill that I use for this is called a True form treadmill. Trueform treadmill. I believe it's T R U E F O R M And I've got a video that I've shot that shows my whole workstation setup. But I use this trueform treadmill and I put it in front of one of these hand crank desks that goes up and down as you need it to. And then beside the treadmill, I have this mat called a Kai bounder. And the Kai bounder is a mat that's like springy foam that kind of makes you make micro adjustments in your tiny feet and hip and core muscles as you're standing. And I'll alternate between the treadmill and that and I'll use a seat sometimes, lunging, kneeling, et cetera. But I'll put a video of my own workstation setup. But I use primarily, I would say 70% of my workday is spent either on the treadmill or on this mat. So that's of course, one pretty obvious way to burn more calories.

Definitely.

A few other things though. There, there are these new devices that are like balance devices. I own one called a fluid stance. You may be familiar with this idea of like wobbly boards and balance boards and those of you who have been on them at like, say, like A physical therapist or something like that, or the gym. They can be really hard to balance on. I mean, they take a great deal of cognitive focus to be able to balance on. And most people wouldn't use one at work for that reason. It's just like almost too hard. But some of these. And again, the one I use is the fluid stance. I'll link to a few other good ones on Amazon, but it's like kind of more passive balance, right? You're not working too hard to stay balanced on the thing, but you're having to make like these little micro shifts. So I've got one of those shoved up underneath the couch in the living room. And when I'm working from the kitchen table, I will use that combined with this more portable standup desk called a varidesk, which you put a laptop on, it just like automatically goes up and down. So I can kind of tuck a fluid stance in my little varidesk under my arm and wander anywhere in the house and work while balancing and putting my laptop up on that platform. So that's another idea for you, an.

Awesome little setup for you.

I like it. There's also this concept and I've written a few articles about this. It's not bunk. It's not some made for TV scam, but this idea of using electro stimulation to keep muscles activated while you are in a sedentary position, like watching a movie, talking on the phone, typing, et cetera. You can have your quad muscles or your thigh muscles literally simulating a hundred plus pound squat or deadlift or whatever you want while you are sitting. And every time that the muscle stimulation occurs, it can affect your voice a little bit. You know how if you're talking to somebody and they're taking a crap, you always know it because they'll start talking like this and then they'll. I've done that. I've made conference calls from a bathroom before. And you like put the phone on mute just to.

That is terrible.

Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Sometimes somebody calls you while you're pee in the sink. Not regularly, but I have done that when sharing. So I've shared suites with people at hotels before where they're in the bathroom and you're just like, dude, I gotta pee. Or they're in the master bedroom of the suite, which has the bathroom in it. You don't wanna wake them up. But your side of the suite has like the sink. So you pee in the s. Sink. Yeah, I've been.

Ah, God.

Been there, done that. I clean the sink and pee is sterile anyways, though we digress. So this electrostimulation, it might make your voice sound a little funny if you're making a phone call and the stim goes off. But if you're just working, typing, whatever, you can actually keep muscles and blood flow pretty dang active by using Electrostim. So that's another idea for you. There's a really good device. One device is more for recovery, one is more for muscle training. The device that's more for muscle training is called the Compex C O M P E X. And that would be one that I'd recommend for something like Electro Stem. Those are a few of the ways that you could burn more calories or burn more fat while at work. And then a couple other things I might throw in there for you. For those of you who want to kind of start into some of the benefits of cold stress without necessarily putting on like a fat burning vest or jumping into a cold pool, read the article that I just published this Monday and I'll link to that in the show notes about how to use cold and specifically this new wearable called the Quantlet. You wear this device on your wrist and it cools your blood as your blood passes past your wrist. And when that happens, the blood returns to your body cold. And so you get this mild effect. That's both. It activates what we were talking about earlier, your vagus nerve. But you also get a lot of these benefits of like cold thermogenesis without shivering. So that would be one kind of interesting thing to try. What I like about it is a lot of these things that are designed to like, cool blood going to your hands. They're designed for athletes to like hold while they're running, right? But you can't type and work and be productive at work when you're, when you're, you know, holding something frozen, when your hand is shoved into like this cooling glove. So this is like a wrist wearable. So that's one to check out if you want to kind of stay cold at work without wearing a fricking vest. So there's that. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention to folks who are interested is that there are a few other ways to increase your heart rate variability if your heart rate variability is low. And not to kick this horse to death too much because I know we've already mentioned his website earlier, but again, my friend Mark Sisson has a really good article with 16 different ways to increase your heart rate variability and We've talked about a lot of them before on the show. Right. Like, be grateful and don't drink too much coffee, blah, blah, blah. But a few of the tips he has on here and I'll link to this article in the show notes as well that I thought were interesting that we haven't talked about too, too much on the show. One is that alternate nostril breathing can increase your heart rate variability. Have you done this before, Rachel?

I have. It's pranayama. It's yoga. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. So. And it's very easy. You could even do this while listening into the show. Unless you're driving. Keep both hands on the steering wheel or at least one hand, but you put a finger on your left nostril to plug the left nostril and you breathe in through your right nostril. And then after you've breathed in, you place a finger on your right nostril and you breathe out through your left nostril.

Mm. Yeah.

This does not work if you're congested, by the way, you may need to blow a snot rocket before you do this.

It actually uncongests you pretty quickly as well.

Yeah. And then, of course, you block the right nostril and breathe in through the left nostril and then exhale through the right nostril and. Yeah. So alternate nostril breathing. They need to make some piece of headgear that will automatically plug one nostril for you and then plug the other and alternate. There's my idea for those of you out there wanting to do the next big Kickstarter, come up with an alternate nostril breathing helmet. Another one is to eat seafood. It turns out that omega 3 supplementation, a high intake of omega 3, about 3 to 4 grams per day, can increase your heart rate variability. 3 to 4 grams per day of like a fish oil. So omega 3s can increase your heart rate variability as well. That's another one that we haven't talked about too much on the podcast. One other from this article that I wanted to mention was that if you can go back in time, you can actually tell your pregnant mother to begin taking DHA supplements or eating foods that are high in dha, like fish. Or I suppose if you have a fetus hanging around. That's uncouth. If you're with child, as they would say in the scriptures. Basically, if you take DHA or eat foods high in dha, you can improve the heart rate variability of a child that is growing in the womb. So you can actually give Your child a step up on life. And I remember even when my kids were born, when Little river and Taren were born, Jessa and I would rub omega 3 fatty acids into their feet. We would open up omega 3 fatty acid capsules and rub them into the boys feet so they could absorb DHA and Omega 3s through their feet.

So what would be some good foods?

DHA foods, Walnuts are decent. Chlorella, spirulina, you know, a lot of these seeds and nuts, they. You don't get conversion of the ALA and the EPA into DHA very well. But you know, algal based sources are really good. Fish, of course, is good fish and fish oil fish is the biggie. But you know, I'm a big fan of fish with seaweed and with some form of algae, you know, like some chlorella or spirulina because you get a double whammy of dha. But interestingly, DHA is kind of hard to come by. There's not a huge number of foods in the plant that have dha, but chlorella, spirulina, fish, fish oil, those are the biggies. Good.

Thank you.

Hi Ben and Rachel. This is James here in Newport Beach, California. I love the show. Thanks for all that you do. So recently I've been diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. And I know you've covered various aspects of how to mitigate adrenal fatigue on your show and also in your book, but I was hoping you could do sort of a more comprehensive overview of what your exact protocol would be to mitigate and completely eliminate adrenal fatigue if you happen to be diagnosed with it. So yeah, that's pretty much it. Thanks again and love the show. This is a pretty big issue for a lot of people, Rachel.

It is and it's good. I think about time that we do some sort of comprehensive adrenal fatigue plan.

Well, I didn't really know what adrenal fatigue was and didn't know what could happen until I had this bodybuilder friend and this was when I was in high school and he dropped off the face of the map for like six months. Just disappeared. Quit showing up at parties and social functions and like dinners we would have at my house. He just like dropped off the face of the map and eventually he, he reemerged. He looked different, he was smaller, his hair was cut differently, which has nothing to do with adrenal fatigue. I just remember his hair was cut differently and he was bedridden for six months. Just like couldn't get out of bed. Like, that's how deep of a hole he dug himself into. And some people will, you know, some people will do that with training. Sometimes it can happen if you've had, like, Epstein Barr or Lyme disease or, you know, there's a lot of other things, things that can happen from both an immune standpoint as well as a training standpoint that can put large amounts of stress on your adrenals and eventually get you to the point where you get into a state of adrenal fatigue, right? Where you've jacked up your cortisol levels and your. Your immune system and, you know, your adrenal glands, adrenaline, epinephrine, et cetera, for so long that your adrenal glands become exhausted. They become depleted of minerals, they become depleted of vitamin C, your. Your negative feedback loop that would normally shut down cortisol and what's called your HPA axis, your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that quits operating properly. And so what happens is your body just turns out massive amounts of cortisol and then eventually just like, poops out on. On cortisol production because you need, like, more and more cortisol receptors to interact with this cortisol. Eventually, cortisol just quits doing its job. And it's a really, really nasty cluster of factors. I go into it hardcore. There's this guy who wrote a book called the Cortisol Connection. His name is Sean Talbot. And I have a series of interviews that I did that I kind of packaged up. And one of them is with Sean. We go into how adrenal fatigue happens pretty thoroughly in that. But ultimately, I want to focus more on what to do about it than the mechanism of how it happens. And some of my basic recommendations. I am currently working with over a dozen people on adrenal fatigue. So I do consultations, and I've got clients who hire me. And it's amazing how many of these folks come from, like, training hotspots, right? Like Boulder, Colorado and San Diego and places where you've got, like, groups of triathletes and marathoners and cyclists and people who are, like, extra exercising a lot. They get adrenal fatigue because it's like, you roll out of bed, you're supposed to go easy. Your friend calls you up on the phone. There's a group bike ride going on. Somebody at the group bike ride starts hammering off the front, you start hammering to keep up with them. Before you know it, your easy day becomes a hard day. And this happens over and over. Again, and a lot of people get fatigued from that. A couple of these people are. They're basically running companies. And their adrenal fatigue is more from kind of a combination of work stress, relationship stress, travel and airline stress like we talked about last week. And then also just electrical pollution. Right. Like tons of like wi fi and cell phones and computers just like up the wazoo, which can also put stress in your body.

So you have people that you work with on adrenal fatigue that aren't athletes.

Most of my clients, and this is, this is kind of a myth, a Ben Greenfield fitness myth. Most of my clients are not athletes. They are people running companies. They're people going for anti aging longevity and they are trying to optimize their health. I've got some people who have just hired me to help them biohack, right, like organize all these supplements and gear and tools into an actual program. So, yeah, most of the people I coach, it used to be mostly Ironman triathletes and now it's kind of changed quite a bit. It's mostly CEOs, executives, people who are into like biohacking and health and anti aging and then a small handful of obstacle racers, triathletes, marathoners, cyclists, and a couple of team sport athletes. So right now a tennis player and a soccer player. So yeah. So anyways, as far as the, the type of things that I do with some of these folks, there are, there are some specific things that you should look at. First of all, you want to shift your diet. You want to shift your diet and you want to preferably shift your diet towards a high amount of nutrient dense foods. A problem that I see a lot of people making when, or an error I see a lot of people making when they have adrenal fatigue is like, I'm going to clean up my diet and I'm just going to detox. I'm going to drink like whatever cayenne pepper and beet juice for 12 weeks to give my body a break. When you are in a state of adrenal fatigue, what I tell people in a nutshell is you almost have to, to a certain extent, unless your adrenal fatigue is completely related to gut stress. And you would know this, right? Like if you're, if you've got, if you've done a gut panel and you've got high levels of what's called calmodulin and lactoferrin, two inflammatory gut compounds, and you've got like bacterial imbalances and whatever, you know, you have fungus over and like it's all due to the gut. Yeah. Sometimes you do have to go on like kind of a. More of like a fasting liquid based diet to give your gut a break. Because just imagine like if your Achilles tendon was injured, right. And you kept running on it over and over again, right. Like eventually it's just not going to heal. The same can be said for the gut, totally. However, in most cases, adrenal fatigue is not caused by gut issues. Other things are caused by gut issues, like constipation, digestive issues and nutrient malabsorption. All these issues. But with adrenal fatigue, I tell people you need to get fat, you need to eat a lot of calories from really nutrient dense foods. And so if you open your refrigerator, if you have adrenal fatigue or you walk into your pantry, you should be seeing things like eggs, like whole eggs with the yolk and sea vegetables high in iodine and selenium and organ meats, right? Like liver and head cheese and kidney and heart. My kids were eating in the car the other day, I was driving them back from tennis and they're like eating these, these sausages that I gave them. And one of my boys was like, is this liver? And I told him it's not just liver, it's brain, it's heart, it's kidney, it's liver. So I order these sausages from US Wellness meats that have a lot of this stuff in them. So those are good. Bone broth. Shellfish is really good. Natto is another really, really good. More of like a, you know, plant based source or a bean based source of a lot of nutrients. Dark fruits, dark vegetables, right. Like pomegranates and blueberries and dark leafy greens, kale, bok choy, fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut, turmeric and curries, cold water, fish, grass fed beef, all these really nutrient dense compounds you need to add to your diet. So that's the first thing some people make the mistake of just like going on a diet and not eating enough. In fact, if you are recovering from adrenal fatigue, I would like for your body fat to go up a few percentage points as you eat a high amount of these really nutrients, nutrient dense, like ancestral foods. So that's one thing. That's one thing. So get these some head cheese. The next thing that you'd want to do is you'd want to get rid of foods that tend to aggravate the adrenal glands and make fatigue worse. And this is really like a Kind of pretty easy to wrap your head around. Heated oils and fats, like especially vegetable oils, adrenal stimulants like coffee and tea and colas and chocolates, refined flour products like pasta and white rice, bread, pastry, baked goods, fruit juice, pretty much anything sugary. You really have to, have to lower those because basically you want to train your body how to release cortisol again, because cortisol can help you to mobilize your liver's glycogen levels to naturally raise your blood glucose. And if you continue to pour exogenous sources of glucose and starchy carbohydrates and sugary carbohydrates and refined carbohydrates down the hat, that's not gonna happen. And so that's another thing that you need to do, you know, that's a little bit easier for people to wrap their heads around. It's just like, don't drink a lot of coffee and eat a lot of candy. The next thing that you want to do is you want to avoid anything that would put stress on your body from a dietary standpoint. And this would mean extremely long periods of time spent fasting. You could still do intermittent fasting, but like doing things like, like 24 hour fasts or like long fasted workouts or long periods of time with caloric depletion, et cetera, for the reasons that I just outlined. You know, again, unless you've got some real serious gut issues, you actually want to like feed your body frequently with good amounts of nutrient dense foods when you have adrenal fatigue. So again, you, you just basically have to let yourself get fat, give yourself a little bit of a tummy. So give yourself a muffin top.

I suppose that's every athlete's worst nightmare as well, having to do that. It is after working so hard to get it down.

That's the issue though, is unfortunately not to sound too harsh, but if you have adrenal fatigue, you made some mistakes and sometimes you do have to, as silly as it sounds, you got to eat your way out of all that caloric depletion and over training that you've gone through. And that's why a lot of these methods work too, for like amenorrhea and like female athlete triad, a lot of that stuff. It just comes down to training less and eating more. So yeah, you do about two to four weeks typically, unless it's a really, really serious state of adrenal fatigue, you want about two to four weeks of mostly easy aerobic workouts. Not a lot of hard Weight training, not a lot of high intensity interval training, but like yoga, meditation, tai chi, qi gong, a lot of these easy, easy movements. I've had a few people who I've worked with for six to 12 months, a full year, to really get the cortisol back in order, get the DHEA back up. So we'll do monthly adrenal salivary indices, where you test your salivary hormone levels and you want to see a return to normal cortisol levels and normal DHEA levels. And some people, and this has happened mostly with triathletes, there was one crossfitter, but it seems to happen more with people who have dug themselves into an overtraining hole hole or into an adrenal fatigue hole via overtraining rather than with like some other form of stress, like relationship stress or work. These folks can sometimes take a much longer time to bounce back. And so, you know, sometimes we'll have a good half of a year where it's just like we're doing bikram yoga and easy walks in the sunshine and, you know, like a little bit of like super duper slow relax, deep nasal breathing, weight training or body weight training, a little bit of isometric work, meditation, yoga, tai chi, that kind of stuff. So you basically become a hippie for a while as far as the workouts go.

A Zen monk.

That's right, a Zen monk. And then finally. And this I saved for last because this is the thing most people do first because they're like, I think I can pop, I can pop pill pop my way out of adrenal fatigue. Not true. This would be the icing on the cake. Okay? Everything I just talked about is the important stuff. This is the icing on the cake. But this stuff can help. Number one would be some kind of adaptogenic herb complex which can help you to begin producing cortisol again. That would be. Tian Qi is a really good one. There's another one called Inner Peace. So these just help you to fine tune your adrenals and begin producing cortisol and adrenaline again. So that would be one daily supplement to add into the mix. Another one, because like I mentioned, the adrenals are a storehouse of minerals. You would want to start into, like a daily shot or a couple daily shots of trace liquid minerals and liberal use of like a really good salt. Right, like an Aztec salt or a Himalayan salt or something that helps to restore the minerals that your body tends to lose when you're low on cortisol. So that would be another one, another supplement that I'M a big fan of again, because your adrenal glands are a huge storehouse of vitamin C is about 4 to 5 grams of vitamin C per day, like a really good absorbable vitamin C powder. And there are a few that I recommend. I'll link to a little article that I have on adrenal fatigue that has a list of some of these strategies that I'm talking about too, that should be helpful for you. So I'll go to Ben greenfield fitness.com 343 for that.

And so Ben, have you put this into some sort of plan?

I do have a, like a, I don't really have like a diet and supplement plan because I, I recommend testing, you know, before just like throwing a bunch of different foods and supplements at the body. But this is an overview. You know, I have an article, I don't have a plan that I sell, but I have an article that I'll let people do. I do have an exercise plan, however, I do have an exercise plan about a 12 week plan and I'll link to that in the shownotes. I have a 12 week plan. It's called the Overtraining and Adrenal Fatigue Recovery Plan. Not as customized as like, you know, working with me to customize something, doing the testing, but it lays out at least all the different exercises and workouts to do each day if you want to stay fit while you have adrenal fatigue. But you can't go to your CrossFit wads and you know, your runs and stuff like that. So I do have that laid out.

Is it possible when you're recovering from adrenal fatigue to still exercise to stay.

Fit using some of the strategies that I've just outlined. You can stay fit from more of like a longevity standpoint. You aren't going to be able to go do like an iron man or get the top numbers on your wad after doing what I've just described. But you can at least keep your blood flow going, satisfy that itch that a lot of people get when they're laying around, do something. So yeah, you can absolutely keep your body fit from like a blood flow and a lymph standpoint, et cetera for sure, and maintain some amounts of strength as well. So I mentioned minerals, I mentioned adaptogenic herbs, I mentioned vitamin C. A couple of other things that I should mention. Number one, would be a really good omega 3 fatty acid source. Again because it'll improve heart rate variability, which I talked about earlier, but it can really help with restoring the health of the nervous system and reducing the inflammation that tends to go hand in hand with adrenal fatigue. So like 4 to 6 grams per day of a good fish oil, that's 2 to 3 times the amount most people would take. But you know, a little bit of a step up in terms of the fish oil. Another one that I really recommend for very similar reasons, for the necessary building blocks to restore hormones is a good complex of vitamin D and vitamin K, two very important fat soluble compounds. And for people who have adrenal fatigue, I have pretty high recommendations. I typically recommend about 35 international units per pound of body weight of vitamin D. And so that means that some people are going to take, you know, up around 8,000 to 10,000 units of vitamin D. And so as long as that's accompanied with vitamin K, you don't get a lot of calcification with that. But that's, that's not the recommendation that I make. And then finally there are two compounds. One that can stimulate your body to begin producing cortisol again and one that can reduce the rate at which cortisol breaks down so it hangs around a little bit longer. Obviously, if you're producing a bunch of cortisol and you're like stressed out all the time, you wouldn't want to take these. That's why you got to be careful. That's why any of this stuff requires testing as you go, right, to make sure so you know when you can stop using certain things or start introducing certain things. But the one that helps your body to begin producing cortisol again, and this dosage is based off of studies that have been done on it, that would be red ginseng. Red ginseng. So you can find like an organic red ginseng powder or capsule. And you want a pretty high amount, about 5 to 6 grams per day of red ginseng. Most people, you know, most capsules contain like 600 milligrams. And so a lot of people don't get close to the dosage they need to start producing cortisol again. But there are some, some decent forms of ginseng and I linked to a few of them in that article that have a pretty high amount of ginseng and then licorice root extract and about 200 to 400 milligrams, 200 to 400 milligrams a day. Licorice reduces the half life of cortisol and allows it to be broken down at a slower rate by your body. So that would be another one to look into, would be licorice Root extract.

All right, so there you have it, James. There's your comprehensive guide for how to fix adrenal fatigue.

There you go. You make me sound so smart when you say words like comprehensive guide.

You are smart, Ben. We love you.

That's it all has to do with my jaw realignment and my ukulele playing. We do have a couple more important questions, so shall we jump in?

Let's do it.

Hi, Ben, My name is Robin. I'm from Canada and currently training in Phuket, Thailand. My question is why do some people seem to be more susceptible to mosquito bites than others and have larger reactions than others? Also, is DEET dangerous for you? And is there anything that can be done and are there any natural remedies or changing of the diet that can.

Reduce mosquito bite frequency? Thanks.

Believe it or not, Rachel, some people actually are more susceptible to mosquito bites.

I am not surprised because I was born in tropical far north Queensland and I took my husband up there who's born in Ohio, and he just got eaten alive by mosquitoes and they don't even care about me.

The takeaway message here for folks listening in is if you're from Ohio, be very careful gallivanting about the wilderness of Australia. Yes, do so you don't want to get eaten alive. They've shown that larger people who produce more carbon dioxide, so just like people who have a high bmi, people who are overweight, obese, and even athletes who produce more carbon dioxide, mosquitoes have a higher preference for that population.

That is fascinating. That answers so many questions.

Also, beer drinkers, again due to the type of gases produced. But wait, there's more pregnant women, which is really interesting. And also in the most recent study, your genes can influence your propensity to be bitten or not bitten by insects. So there was this new study in which they found that certain genes, kind of like the salivary amylases and the MTHFR and the lactobacom we were talking about earlier, certain genes will either attract or repel mosquitoes. And this was a study done with twins. It was really interesting. I'll link to it in the show notes. But what they found was that certain genes will produce certain body odors that either attract or repel insects. And a big part of this is because our genes influence the type of gut bacteria and the type of skin bacteria that we express. And it turns out that your microbiome can affect whether or not an insect will actually bite you. And there are specific bacterial species that are found on your skin in your armpits et cetera, that will attract a mosquito or repel a mosquito.

What interests me about that is I understand the repelling of mosquitoes because that makes sense if you, if you, like, from an evolutionary standpoint, you don't want to be bitten by mosquitoes for the rest of your life. So your skin starts to do this, you know. But why would your skin ever want to attract mosquitoes?

Well, that's a, it's a really good question. You know, it's probably a matter of some people having genes that come from a more like a warm environment or a moist environment or a humid environment where mosquitoes might breed more. And so those people have developed a specific gut microbiome or skin microbiome to protect them from that. Whereas people whose ancestors didn't come from mosquito heavy areas but might be unlucky enough to have moved or visited to that area, those people are kind of screwed.

Yeah, that makes sense. Makes perfect sense.

Yeah. So it's really interesting. The question is, what do you do when you're screwed? So this whole idea behind D E E T E T is bad news bears. So they've done pretty significant studies. So between 1961 and 2002, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported eight deaths related to DEET exposure.

Holy moly.

Which is not huge. But they did another study of a bunch of Park Service employees, National park service employees. And 25% had some pretty serious health effects in response to DET. Like mucous membrane irritation, nausea, numb and burning lips, rashes, et cetera.

Is this the, is this in the context of it being an insect repellent or something different?

Yeah, this is in the context of.

An insect repellent killed eight people or a pesticide.

Duke University Medical center actually spent 30 years researching the effects of pesticides, and they found that prolonged exposure to DEET actually impairs cell function in parts of the brain that can lead to neuronal cell death. And so not only is it damaging to your skin and to your lungs, but it's actually damaging to your nerves and to your brain health. So I'm personally not a big fan of Det. And I run from it like the plague when I see people squirting it around my kids or spraying it around me at a campsite. The question is, what can you take as an alternative to deet? So one thing that can work out quite well, and these are things that have been studied in terms of their ability to protect you from mosquitoes. One thing is cinnamon leaf oil. Cinnamon leaf oil, which is like an essential oil that you can purchase from any essential oil site that has been shown to be more effective at killing mosquitoes than D E E. T. Fascinating. One natural insect repellent. Another is to take some vanilla extract which most people have in their kitchen, and you simply take olive oil and you can put that in a little cup, you stir a little bit of vanilla extract in it. And this vanillin compound is actually a natural insect repellent as well. And it stays on your skin a little bit better when you mix it with olive oil. So that's another one that you can use. There are a variety of different natural insect repellents you can find on Amazon and many of them use citronella essential oil. Citronella. And citronella is considered to be a very good insect repellent as well. And many of these will combine this citronella with other really, really good forms of insect repellent like lemongrass oil, peppermint oil and vanillin. Now the interesting thing, and this is something that a lot of naturalists will like, and that is that many areas like around me there is a plant called yarrow. It grows quite readily in areas in the Inland northwest where there are lots of insects and mosquitoes. Like in damp areas of the forest, you can take yarrow, rub it between your fingertips and smear it on your skin. And it keeps mosquitoes away and also helps reduce the itch from mosquito bites. It's very interesting that nature has given us specific plants and specific areas where mosquitoes tend to be high that can do this. Lemongrass is another. When I'm in Thailand, if I've got lemongrass, I'll just. And I don't have a good insect repellent, I will literally just rub the lemongrass on my body or rub it between my fingertips and then roll my fingertips around on my body to get some of that natural plant based compound that grows in specific areas. So you'll find that in many cases something that will keep mosquitoes away is already growing or is present in the.

Area that mosquitoes are. Wow.

It is true, by the way, this whole vampire myth or vampire legend that consuming garlic can actually help with protecting against mosquito bites. So if you, if you eat garlic and lots of garlic when you're in a mosquito rich area, that can help as well.

What would you consider a lot of garlic?

A lot of garlic would be either using a couple capsules of a really, really good garlic extract, like Alamax for example, is really, really potent. A lot of people will use that for like yeast and fungus infections in their digestive tract, because it'll do a really good job at that. But then, for example, like taking an entire, what do you call it, a head of garlic, Not a clove, but a whole head. And you can like take a head, you chop one end off, you chop the other end off, you dump a bunch of olive oil and sea salt on that and you broil that in the oven for like 20 minutes and then you just eat it all.

That actually sounds so good.

It actually is really, really good. Have you gotten that at restaurants before?

I love roasted garlic.

Roasted garlic. So good. I love it. You smell like, just horrible afterwards. Unless you have to make sure that if you're going to have a meal like that, everybody else at the table is eating it too.

I feel like it naturally repels the world, just like it naturally repels mosquitoes.

Repels mosquitoes and everything else.

People and animals and birds.

That's right. Oh, and by the way, if you do get bitten and you itch, there are a few things I've found to just be like, almost instantly get rid of the itch. And this again, this is stuff that tends to fly under the radar. But if you take lavender essential oil, which can help you to sleep and relax, and you just take a dab of straight up itch lavender essential oil, it works wonders on itching. And if you've got a bunch of bites like you'll get after a hike, you can just make yourself a bath and put some drops of lavender essential oil into a bath to get a full body effect. That is an awesome anti itch remedy.

We had these really bizarre old wives towels as kids because I grew up with mosquitoes. And it would be that as soon as you got a bite, you would grab your thumbnail and you would put a cross in the bite with your thumbnail and then you would put spit on the bite and then that would stop the itching.

That sounds like a very affordable and budget friendly way to fix a mosquito bite.

I don't think it worked, but it's.

Not as relaxing as lavender essential oil, though, spitting on oneself. But it's a good idea, Rachel.

Thank you.

So we'll throw that one in there. Spit. It's kind of like peeing on yourself after you've been bitten by or after you've been stung by. By a jellyfish, which apparently works.

We do get told that too, which I'm not sure how true that is.

And I've got a few others that can help out quite a bit. Peppermint essential oil works not quite as well, but it can work similarly to lavender essential oil. And because baking soda can help draw some of the itch inducing compounds out of the bite. If you have like peppermint toothpaste and you just use like a dab of peppermint toothpaste, which you can find in a lot of places. Right, that works pretty well also, obviously there are a big variety of other compounds that you can find, but I'm a big fan of lavender and peppermint. And then one other is tea tree oil. Tea tree oil can help out quite a bit as well. I use a form of oil made by a company called Young Living. Young Living Essential oils are really, really good, potent, quality oils. I've had the folks from Young Living on a podcast before or like they, they really make good stuff. So I will link to that in the show notes. If you want to get yourself some lavender, some peppermint and then lemongrass oil is really good. And then like I mentioned, a cinnamon oil is super duper effective. That one flies under the radar, but it's really effective. So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 343 and I'll link to these for you in the notes.

Hey Ben, thanks for listening to my question. My daughter, who's 17 years old, has exercise induced headaches and she's had these since she was 8 or 9 years old. She gets them after she works out and works up a sweat, maybe runs a mile or plays soccer, something like that. So we were hoping she would grow out of them, but she's 17 now and has had them for about 10 years or so. And none of the doctors seem to have a really good answer for us. So we're hoping you can help us out a little bit. And thanks for doing what you do. Keep it up.

Well, you know, some people get a headache just thinking about exercise.

That's kind of me. No, just kidding.

Yeah, that. That is not. That does not qualify as an exercise induced headache. If the thought of working out makes your head hurt, that's a different problem. That's a motivation problem. But exercise induced headaches are also called exertion headaches, headaches. I've actually talked about these on the show before and I've brought up how you can have things like sinus infections and you can have obstruction of fluid and blood to the brain because of like the type of hypoperfusion issues that we talked about in a couple podcast episodes ago. Right. The one on cognitive performance and Alzheimer's. There's all sorts of different theories as to what can cause these exercise induced headaches. But one tends to be most prevalent and tends to be the biggest issue, and that is exertion headaches caused by biomechanical issues. Quite an issue that's near and dear to my heart right now after my jaw realignment, because that can be one issue here. But there is this theory, and it's really not a theory, it's something that they've tested and they found to be a significant cause of exertion based headaches. But it's this idea that cervical spine alignment, and specifically once you start hyperextending your cervical spine, such as you might do while reading or working on the computer, or sitting with poor posture or doing anything that kind of hunches your head and your neck forward, if you do that, and especially if you do it under load right, like which you might experience when doing a back squat or an overhead press, what happens is that puts a bunch of pressure on your cervical vertebra and that can cause nerve irritation. When that occurs, you get a sympathetic nervous system response. That sympathetic nervous system response triggers vasodilation of the blood vessels in your head and can make you feel, while you're working out, like someone's beating you over the head with a kettlebell. So that's kind of how it works. Now, obviously, as you would have guessed, if there are a bunch of other things that are causing sympathetic nervous system activation at play, like say you eating foods that you're allergic to, you being stressed out, the music being too loud, blah, blah, blah. Like all this stuff can be a cluster of factors, but the biggest one is poor cervical spine alignment. And even kids can have poor cervical spine alignment. Even kids can get stuff like this adjusted and do specific mobility protocols to help to mobilize and strengthen those areas that tend to play a significant role in this process. So there's, there's three different areas that would tend to cause this issue. One is called your scalenes, one is your upper trapezius and one is, I love this one, your sternocleidomastoid. Sternocleidomastoid, yes. Have you heard of that one before?

I haven't, no.

Okay, sounds like a dinosaur. Sternoclada mass anyways, though, so what you want to do is mobilize these muscle groups. And there are a variety of different protocols that you can do. I'm going to link to some videos for you in the show notes. But one would be a trap smash with like a lacrosse ball where you'd reach back behind you or you'd have somebody do this, they'd just roll a ball all up and down and through your traps. That can be a really, really good one. Deep tissue work on your trapezius. Another really, really good one is what's called thoracic spine mobility where you'll duct tape a couple of lacrosse balls together and then roll your thoracic spine, like your mid spine up and down over those balls to help to mobilize some of the areas of the scalenes and where you get some of the sternocleidomastic attaching. So that's another area that you'd want to work. There are some exercises too that can really help to bring the cervical spine back into alignment. Like really, really good deadlifts with perfect posture. Focusing on squeezing your shoulders back at the top of the deadlift. Seated rows can help out quite a bit as well as like single arm rows where you're really pulling the shoulders back. Like a lot of the things you'd use to, to fix poor posture and kind of like a bent over upper spine are the same things that can help with this type of exertional headache and the fact that sometimes the upper spine is just jutting too far forward and causing that sympathetic activation as the nerves get compressed and then the subsequent vasodilation. So I would really, really recommend that you watch some of the videos that I'll link to in the show notes. I'm not saying 100% that that's the issue with Sharon's daughter, but it's most likely playing a role. I'd be curious to see her from the side, like a photo of her from the side to see if she has this type of cervical malalignment.

And would that be something that she'd go and see a chiropractor for first and sort of get some scans done to see if that is the issue.

You could, you could almost tell by looking, you know, from the side if you've got like hunched over shoulders and a forward neck. Sometimes it's not rocket science. There's a really, really good book too that will teach you a lot of this self deep tissue work. And it holds a special place in my living room because I've got like my, my little box full of medieval torture tools like the lacrosse balls and the spiky balls and the rollers and there's. I've got something called a battle star which is like a, a really, really hard like coiled device to do deep tissue work. I've got all this stuff up in the living room. But I have this book that shows you how to use it all. It's called Becoming a Supple leopard. Becoming a Supple leopard, written by Kelly Starrett. He's been on the show before. Really, really good deep tissue work guy. And that would be. That would give you some ideas for how to work on your scalenes and your upper traps and of course, our favorite dinosaur, the sterno cleidomastodon mastoid. So check all that stuff out. And that being said, yet another marathon podcast for you all. But I should mention that after last week's announcement that we were getting a little bit short on itunes reviews, boy, did we have a doozy come through. We had a great, great itunes review that the C.J. thomas left. He left us one called the Nitty Gritty in Health and fitness. So a couple things C.J. and those of you listening in before Rachel reads this one is, first of all, thank you so much. Many of you leapt in and left some great itunes reviews and five stars. That helps out our show so much. It helps to spread the word. It helps with our itunes ranking. It helps itunes, the mysterious folks sitting in their thrones at Apple, to know that we really are the real deal. People really do listen to us. So if you haven't yet left an itunes review to spread the good karma, then I've got a link in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 343. Or you can just go find the show on itunes, leave a review. And if we read your review on the show, cool things happen, don't they, Rachel?

Very cool things happen. You get an awesome gear pack with an awesome water bottle and a beanie and a shirt, and it arrives in the mail and it's a present. It's super exciting. Then you can take a photo and send it to us and we can post it on Facebook.

Cluster of awesomeness. So all you got to do is if you hear review red, email gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com and when you email gearreenfieldfitnesssystemS.com be sure to let us know your T shirt size or else we will probably send you an xxl because that's what we have the most of anyways, though. So that being said, Rachel, you want to take this lovely review away?

Yes. So the Nitty Gritty in Health and Fitness is the title. Five Stars by the C.J. thomas. Ben, that was an exclamation mark. Sorry I haven't gotten to this sooner. I kind of got to blame you though, for putting out this so much amazing flipping content. Seriously, it seems like I never have enough time to consume it all. As a personal trainer in St. Louis and an avid athlete myself, this podcast is one of my secret weapons for helping me to uplevel my game and add value to the lives I directly influence every day. I'm not sure how it is you seem to know everything about everything. Me either. But I'll keep studying and learning so that I can someday be half the expert you are. I've heard many success gurus say that you should never write reviews saying that it's a waste of time, but I'm breaking that rule here because I think you deserve it. Anybody who delivers as much value as you do deserves all the Prosperity, Abundance, and 5 star reviews that this world has to offer. I'd give you 20 stars if I could. To be honest, the first time I tuned in, the content seemed too far over my head. But I'm glad I came back. And I'd certainly encourage any serious health practitioners, trainers, and dedicated athletes to do the same. You are the benchmark that everybody else should be aspiring to. I got my training mask for Christmas on your recommendation and look forward to trying oil of oregano to fix my splotchy skin. Had been looking for a remedy for that for years. Seriously, do you know everything? Anyway, love the show, my friend. You've inspired me and I look forward to meeting you someday. Prayers and best wishes, cj.

Holy crap.

That was incredible.

Wow. Well, first of all, CJ has a lot of time on his hands. Cj, that was an incredible review. I almost feel bad that you spent so much time writing that. And it's great. I will also apologize, by the way, that. Rachel. Did you say St. Louis?

I don't know how to say it.

Like the song. Like Louis Lui. How did you say it? I don't know. I think it's. I think It's. This is St. Louis, Missouri. I could be wrong. Maybe it is St. Louis. I've just never. I think I've always heard it. St. Louis. St. Louis. So our apologies to everyone in good old St. Louis and our big thank yous to CJ. CJ, that was an awesome review. Awesome review.

Yeah.

So, yes, give me a big head. Made my day. That and the jaw realignment put together and my chance to show off my ukulele skills. I promise my. I promise my ukulele will get better. But for those of you listening in, you need to now rib Rachel to get on top of her ukulele. Game and play us a little song at some point in the future.

I'll play with you, but we won't sing. But we should get a request for a song we should learn and we'll.

Hold her to it. So that being said, let's go ahead and end this thing and let the song request roll in so you can leave your song request, access the show notes, and oh so, so much more. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 343. Check it all out. Thanks everyone for listening in. Rachel, have a lovely day over there in Australia.

Thanks Ben. You too.

And for everybody listening, BenGreenfieldFitness.com is where you can access all the goodies. Have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.