How To Detox Your Liver, Natural UTI Remedies, Drinking Bulletproof Coffee Every Day, Strength Training For Runners and More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Natural UTI remedies how to detox your liver. Can you drink bulletproof coffee every day? 6 Ways to Deal with anxiety and proven ways to fix muscle cramps.

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

So I hear standing is the new sitting.

Standing is the new sitting. And even though I'm a huge proponent of standing because sitting is kind of bad for you, kills you. As most people know who are sitting there slowly, slowly dying as they sit there listening to our podcast.

Fatter and fatter until they die.

Yeah, that's right. I stand now. The past two weeks I've been standing when we record the podcast. In the past, I haven't really been able to hack together my microphone, computer setup to be able to really stand. And now I'm standing. And I'm sure that all of our listeners can hear the vitality and the energy and the non dyingness that's going on now.

Slowly getting fat and dying.

You know the other way that you can get more energy and vitality when you're talking and presenting is you can put food in your underwear. Have you heard about that?

Yeah, yeah, I've been keeping food in my underwear for, you know, I was doing it before it was popular actually.

Grapes, mayonnaise, cereal, everything. I'm totally not kidding. Like, I've been to a few different seminars where advice was given. Totally not kidding you that one of the best ways to put yourself at ease and relax when you're public speaking or presenting is to put food into your pants or into your underwear. Isn't that crazy?

So does it have to be on your genitals?

I don't know where the food actually goes. I never actually raised my hand and asked that question. I would leave it to someone like you to ask that question, but that's.

The first thing that I would have done. I can't believe you didn't ask that.

So if not only is an excuse.

To say genitals, but it's also the important, the most important thing to.

That's right. If you're listening in and you have any important talks to give today, presentations at work, seminars, talks to kids, anything like that, what I'D like you to do is go put some food in your pants right now, give it a try and then right into the show and let us know how that goes.

News flashes.

This is episode 258. So that means you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 258 to find all the links to all the stuff that we are talking about.

The latest greatest news flashes. So let's, let's start off talking about runners. And I love your sound effects.

Yeah.

Those are not canned sound effects. That is actually Brock live beatboxing a male runner.

I'm that guy from the Police Academy movies.

That's right. So first study that came out on PubMed, which apparently may actually due to the lapse in government funding here in the US disappear at some point soon.

That would suck. That would be the worst part of your government not being able to sort itself out.

Every research study I've read this week has had this big warning on the top of it that PubMed may be disappearing. Warning. So if we actually start just making up research, that's why. Because the government just let PubMed fail.

Because the Republicans were sore losers.

Go Obamacare. Concurrent training in elite male runners. You know what concurrent training is, Brock?

It's when you train back to back to back to back.

Well actually that's complex training. Concurrent training is when you combine strength training with endurance training.

Oh yeah, yeah, of course.

And, and they did a study in the past, most of the studies that they've done where they've compared like what happens when you combine endurance with strength training versus doing endurance training. They've never really looked at well trained runners at like elite runners. It's always been in kind of the general population. So they did this study in Elite Runners to find out if you combined a strength training program with a running program, if it would slow you down, speed you up, not makes a difference at all, that type of thing better in your genes. That's right. So this was in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. So they had an endurance only group who just continued running. And these are highly trained runners. And then they had a group that did strength training with like exercise bands and body weight stuff and just kind of like ho hum, you know, the type of stuff you see folks doing in Runner's World magazine or whatever. We just lost our entire contingent of Runner's World magazine employees who listen every week I'm sure they have employees. And then we had a strength group and the strength group actually did like heavy resistance training and Plyometric power exercises. And then also, of course, continued their running. And what they found was that all of the groups were able to kind of maintain things like their running economy, their VO2 max, their maximum heart rate, their rating of perceived exertion, their time trial speed, everything. So there were really, first of all, no deleterious effects of strength training, even heavy strength training. And that's something a lot of runners get concerned about. Right, Is the increase in muscle mass and the potential for decreased economy and efficiency. Not only did none of that happen, but there was one group out of those three different groups, the running, only the light elastic band stuff. And then the strength group, there was only one group that actually showed a significant improvement in their time trial test. And this was for a 3k time trial, 3000 meter time trial. And you know which group it was?

The combination group.

Yeah, that's right. The group that was doing that like the heavy strength training along with the endurance training. So they were doing strength training, plyometrics, endurance training. That group got the most bang for their buck, period. So here's a pretty good research, pretty, pretty good study that goes to show that if you're a runner, even if you're an elite runner, strength training can help you out.

So I heard that Wilson Kipsang has been doing combination training.

That was crazy. Marathon world record. What was his, what Was his time?

3:23.

Wow.

2 hours and 3 minutes, 15 seconds faster than Patrick.

And did you hear that, like, just as he was about to cross the finish line, some naked dude, like ran out in front of the camera holding some advertisement for a porn website?

I didn't. Yeah, it's crazy to steal the limelight. Well, I guess he didn't because I didn't hear about that.

Yeah, yeah, talk about food in your pants. Anyway, so the next thing I wanted to mention was kind of another study while we're talking about running. And this was also in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research. And this one actually was really interesting. They went around and they asked a bunch of elite cross country and track and field coaches about the way that they prepare their athletes to kind of get limbered up or to warm up prior to their races and prior to their training sessions and workouts and.

Afraid, I'm afraid of what you're going to say next.

Yep. Even though multiple research studies have shown that static stretching, like stretching and holding or yoga style stretching, actually slows you down and reduces your peak force capacity and reduces your performance during exercise, the.

Majority has no effect on whether you're going to get injured or not.

Right. No effect on the reduction in injury prevention. We've still got the majority of NCAA Division 1, Division 2 and Division 3 cross country and track and field programs are still having their athletes do these long static stretch holds not only in between the interval work and their training events, but also prior to their races in track and field. And this is in the U.S. so.

You know, it's not a huge surprise. You still watch it like basketball, football, hockey, all those guys are still doing static stretching too. It's like I don't understand when they're going to give that up.

Yeah, it's one of those deals where I think that some track and field and cross country coaches or football coaches or basketball coaches in general are may be under the impression that even though there's not some kind of a magic performance enhancing effective static stretching, that it's a good way to address muscular imbalances in an athlete. And the reason that I say that is I've even heard, I was actually listening to the the Rob Wolf podcast and Rob's a great guy, but I heard him and his, his podcast partner talking about how static stretching was a really good way to improve mobility for something a squat. And the fact is that it's really very, very seldomly limitations in the actual stretching capability of the muscle belly that's going to keep you from achieving the range of motion that you want to achieve during a specific activity. Typically it's one of two other things that are going to keep you from achieving that range of motion that you want to achieve. Even if we're talking about something like a squat, much less a running or a sprinting mot. Number one would be cross linking in your fascia, which is that sheath that surrounds your muscle tissue. And that's something that's addressed through deep tissue work, through foam rolling, through a lot of the type of kind of mobility protocols you might see in a book like excellent book Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett where he does a lot of kind of like deep tissue work and you're doing like foam roller mobility using even things like barbells to smash muscle tissue and really mobilize fascia and terrible title.

Great book.

Yeah, good book. And Kelly, I don't remember if he points out in that book or if he pointed out elsewhere, but you know, he said it can be a 12 to 18 month process to really reinvent your body in that manner. But that's one thing is fascial adhesion. So that, that, that's One area that that coaches should be coming at mobility from the other area is simply movement and the ability to recruit certain muscles. For example, for a squat range of motion, many athletes simply aren't able to recruit their hip and their glute muscles properly simply because whatever, they've spent long periods of time in a seated position. So their hip flexor muscles are shortened and their butt muscles are turned off. There's a really, really good book out there and I've actually started to. I used to do yoga almost every morning and I'm gradually making a transition into doing the actual exercises in this book instead. Every morning I'm still doing yoga once a week. Not because it increases my performance or decreases my injury potential, but just because I find it relaxing and kind of restoring and it decreases blood pressure and improves focus and all that jazz. But this, yeah, exactly. This new program that I'm using is called foundation. And I had the author of this book foundation on the podcast like two years ago, Eric Goodman. Excellent, excellent book. I'll put a link in the show notes, but this book has a 10 exercise sequence in it that is designed to align your hips, turn your butt on, and open up the exact muscles that allow you to become a better athlete. This is a guy that's worked with Lance Armstrong, the US Professional water polo team, just a bunch of athletic organizations, specifically with the goal of improving posture and improving utilization of what's called your posterior chain or kind of kind of turning on your butt. So it's called foundation training. It shifts the focus from the front of your body to the back of the body. It strengthens your posterior chain, corrects your poor movement patterns in the back, maximizes your power. It still improves flexibility as well as endurance. The ability to hold a position as well fixes back pain. I'm a huge, huge fan and it was one of those deals where I've known about the book for a long time. I finally made it a point to learn the exercises in the book. And I would say that if I could see track and field, cross country coaches, basketball, football coaches, whatever, doing two things, number one would be to teach all these foundation exercises to their athletes. Number two, it would be to incorporate deep tissue work. You do those two things and that's going to kick the pants off of static stretching.

So I think you should throw a third thing in there, which is turning their butts on.

Well, that's what foundation training does is turn. It's. It puts the little red staples button, the easy button on your butt, and you just press It.

And I've been madly trying to think of some kind of joke of like turning Lance Armstrong's butt on.

It's like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, except it's the butt instead of the nose. It just starts to glow red. Hey, I see your butts on. All right. One other thing I wanted to mention was a, a study that came out that looked at cross reactivity. And the title of this study was cross reaction between gliadin and different food and tissue antigens. That sounds like a mouthful, literally. But what it looked into was delicious mouthful. The ability of certain foods to cross react with gluten. And the reason that this is important is because even if you're not super duper gluten sensitive, there are some foods that you can combine. You know, for example, foods that might have trace amounts of gluten that you can combine with other foods. And you can really do a number on your gut if you happen to combine certain foods. And this study looked into the foods that are most that have the highest potential to be cross reactive with gluten. If you're trying to fix your gut, if you're trying to go gluten free, if you have issues or suspect you have issues with celiac, if you've been eating a poor diet for a long period of time and you have a leaky gut or a damaged gut, this is really important for you to listen to because if you've decided that you're going to eliminate wheat or you're going to be really careful with wheat, there are a few other things that you're going to want to be careful with as well, especially if you happen to still be getting in trace amounts of gluten here and there. Some of the big ones that they found in terms of immune reactivity or cross reactivity in this study were milk and specifically cow's milk, as well as milk chocolate or chocolate made from cow's milk. Oats were pretty high up there, as was corn and instant coffee. Really, really interesting that instant coffee. So one of the worst things you could do for your stomach would be to have for example, coffee and a gluten containing food like coffee and oatmeal, for example, a typical breakfast for a lot of people can actually be an extremely cross reactive combination. So the reason for that is that there are foods that are naturally gluten free, like chocolate, like coffee, but they contain proteins that are so similar to gluten that your body can confuse those proteins from for gluten. And when you eat those foods, your body and Your immune system can react very similarly to if you just ate a bowl of whole wheat pasta, for example. And that's especially an issue when you, when you combine those foods with trace amounts of gluten here and there in your diet. So understanding the concept of cross reactivity is really important. And if you're going to go gluten free or you're going to go through a period of time where you want to say, fix your gut or maybe you're even preparing for an athletic event where you just want your gut to be as primed as possible and really eliminate any type of increased permeability in your gut or leaky gut or potential for you to have kind of a gut explosion, so to speak, when you're out there competing. I would be really careful with instant coffee. I would not be doing a lot of oatmeal. I would be careful with chocolate, especially milk chocolate. Those are some of the biggies that they found. Also, yeast containing foods were another biggie in the study. But I'll link to it in the show notes if you want to see the full list of the foods that they found. But those are some of the big ones that they found cause issues.

I don't want to see the list. This is the. I have two reactions to this study. The first one is, is there anything that we can eat? I'm starting.

Oh yeah.

I mean the point where it's like, you mean cutting out gluten, you're cutting out now, you're cutting out stuff that's reactive with gluten. It's getting so limited. And I understand the dangers and all that, but at the same time I just go, so disheartening.

Go read the chapter I wrote in my book. I mean, it's available for free on BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's called 40 Easy Meals. Yeah, 40 Easy Meals for, for athletes. And I mean it just gives you a list of all your nutrient dense food. Your salmon, your grass fed beef, your seaweed, your nori, your even things like white rice, sweet potatoes, yams, cauliflower, nutrient dense vegetables, all this stuff. I mean, there's a cornucopia of foods that you can eat that are incredibly nourishing to the body. It's just a matter of thinking outside the, the typical westernized diet we've kind of been led to follow as the easy way out.

I guess I need to look at the list because it just seems like obviously the stuff that you listed right now I don't eat a lot of milk. Chocolate. I don't eat instant coffee. I mean, why would you do that to yourself? Those are easy to avoid, but I'm afraid that list is going to have other stuff on it that just takes all the fun out of eating.

No, it really doesn't. I mean, it's mostly foods that you would find in like packaged boxes in the cereal section of the grocery store. It really is. It's a lot of foods that you would typically find packaged, processed, and, and foods that you probably wouldn't want to be staples in your diet anyways. So.

I feel better, so.

Good, good. I'm glad you feel better. You are.

I was, I was scared. I was kind of like shaky and sweaty there for.

I was afraid we were going to have to end the podcast right there.

Yeah, me too. I'm okay. Shake it off.

Special Announcements.

Premature ventricular contraction.

Premature premature ventricular contraction. Not similar at all to the other premature issues that we experience in medicine. It's a heart palpitation and it's one of the multiple issues that was unveiled to be wrong with me. And my heart certainly saw two things.

Just the PVC and the enlarged left ventricle. Basically was pointing to the fact that you have the heart of a 50 year old man.

So I just published my complete medical results. It was pointed out to me actually by one of the people who was looking at the app that actually my personal phone number and a dresser in there. So I got to go back and black those out. But I just published the full medical results of the heart scan that I did to determine what 10 years of extreme endurance exercise has done to my heart. Just published that to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Premium section which you can check out at. Yeah, it's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Premium just publish that. I've got a follow up post, follow up interview with the heart doc. Bunch of stuff coming down the pipeline that I'm going to add to that. But for now, for those of you who want to jump the gun and just go check out my results, check out the ekg, the electrocardiogram, the ultrasound, everything. Just published all that to the app basically like last night. So that's all there. If you want to check it out. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Premium and you can see whether or not I'm going to drop dead of a heart explosion. To bar the highly scientific term, that's.

We'Ve had a gut explosion and a heart explosion on this podcast. That's right, Messy podcast.

Speaking of exploding the holidays are approaching food. Cookies, fruitcakes, turkey, beer, punch, everything. The green bean casserole with the little crunchy noodles on top of it.

Everything has pumpkin in it.

That's right. And pumpkin. So October 4th spice anyway, which is actually in two days. If you're listening to this podcast when it comes out October 4th, my wife and I are doing our monthly webinar for the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle. And this month we're going to be teaching you how to get through the holidays and maintain your physique and maintain your six pack abs and your that doesn't sound like tight butt and all that jazz. Brock thinks that we're just going to tell people to zip their mouth shut during the holidays.

Everything. Stay at home, lock the doors.

We're going to talk about some of our recipes, some of the desserts that we use, some of the ways that we prepare our Thanksgiving and our holiday meals. And even though incidentally this year we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving in Thailand, so it'll be chicken pad Thai for Thanksgiving. Either way though, we're going to go over all of that in this month's Inner Circle webinar so you can check that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle tons of other goodies in there, including over 3,000 different forum threads on a variety of different lifestyle and health and nutrition topics. So check that out in the Inner Circle.

Not only are you guys really active in there, but you've got some very active smart folks over there as well. They're filling in the gaps.

Helper elves. And then also for those of you who are into Ironman triathlon, Brock and I, I'm headed over to Kona to compete in the Ironman World Championships. Brock is headed over to Kona to.

Drink and lay down on the beach.

And Lord knows what. That's right, drink rum. And Brock's over there doing our triathletes. That's actually the this upcoming week is the official week that pre orders open for my brand new book Beyond Training. And Brock's going to be down there as well. So any of you coming to the big island of Hawaii, be sure to check out or keep your eyes peeled to twitter.com BenGreenfield to see where Brock and I will be to see where we're doing the secret launch party and the meetup up. Everything we're gonna we're gonna keep posted up on the Twitter page as well as over@facebook.com BG Fitness so stay tuned to that. And of course we are spending a little Bit of money to actually get our plane tickets and hotels and everything to be down there in Kona.

Stay fed.

That's right, to stay fed and, and, and drunk and everything like that. So if you want to help donate to the cause of Brock's rum addiction, then go to the show notes for this episode BenGreenfieldFitness.com258 and you can just click to help donate to the podcast. And by donating to the podcast, you will allow Brock to buy lots and lots of floral prints, T shirts in Kona and also ensure that the Kona coverage is magical.

Yeah, really, that's which little bit. If you, if anybody has anything that they absolutely would like to see or know or, I don't know, take pictures of or something from the, from Ironman World Championships, let me know because I'm going to be running around. I'm looking for ideas, looking for suggestions, things you want to see. We. I actually followed Ben from the condo to the start line of the of Iron Man Canada. And it turned out that everybody really liked that and I was just doing it because I had nothing else to do. But if there's anything else like that that you'd like to see, let me.

Know, such as running nude across the finish line just as the men's champion is about to finish.

I'm gonna wait till the women's champion to be.

Listener Q and A.

Hey, Ben and Brock, I wanted to share a success story with you guys. I had a breakthrough and just really wanted to say thank you. So after listening to your podcast, I was inspired to change my eating habits and get my act together, transition to a lower carb eating style, increased fats, moderate protein, and it's been going very, very well. I've lost a bunch of body weight and body fat percentage as well. I'm a pretty big guy. I'm 6 foot 2, 230 pounds, and my body fat is down around 15% right now. The true trial, though, came this weekend when I ran the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim. It's about 48 miles, 11,000ft of climbing and 11,000ft of descent. I've been doing ultras for a number of years and I've always used Hammer nutrition products and always been in the 250 to 350 caloric intake range and had success with that. But as I got older, my body fat slowly increased. I got all the way up to about 240 pounds of 27% body fat. Completely unacceptable. Going into this, this year's Grand Canyon run, I Decided to try something completely new, which I hadn't done before. I used UCAN superstarch, Vespa and a couple of nut butter packets for the entire run. The entire way I felt fantastic. Nice even energy nice. And felt relatively strong throughout the whole entire thing. As well as can be expected. With all the descent and climbing in the last couple miles, I started to feel a little bit sleepy. I busted out some sport jelly beans that I had held in reserve. A little bit of glucose and caffeine that was there perked me up just enough and I flew out of that canyon. Canyon run took a little bit, just over 13 hours for the entire day. I consumed under 200 grams of carbs and had about 88 calories per hour, which is a significant departure from my previous load. I felt wonderful the entire day and really excited about transitioning to this method of a little bit more fat adapted approach to endurance athletics. So thank you Ben and Brock. I really appreciate all of your guys information and your podcast and happy trails.

Wow. Running the Grand Canyon Rim to rim race at £230 is no joke.

That's. And doing it at any weight is no joke.

That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Especially on a low carb diet. And those of you who have been over on the Facebook page know that I was called out by the 30 bananas a day guy, Dorian Ryder, in a recent video. By the way, guess who emailed me last night and who's going to be on the podcast.

All right, Dorian Ryder, is he going to learn your name?

I'm interviewing him the week after Hawaii. Hopefully between between now and then he learns that my name is not Gren Beanfield. And yeah, we're gonna get down and dirty and talk about the 30 bananas a day thing. So stay tuned for that. That's gonna be an interesting podcast. So that'll be coming out in a couple of weeks.

There's something terrible about social media that everybody can really come across as being probably more aggressive and more of a jerk than they actually are. So this is a great opportunity to. To show that, I mean, well, both of you can have the opportunity to be civilized normal people and have a great conversation. So.

Yeah, and both of us can be complete assholes too. So get ready.

You could go that way as well, but don't.

Hey, Ben, this is Craig from Birmingham. I have a friend who's in her mid-70s and often struggles with urinary tract infections. And she's done everything the doctors have advised and it really doesn't help. It just seems to recurrent, so I wondered what you might have to say on that subject. Thanks. Love the podcast and Brock. Didn't want to leave you out. Thanks for all your contributions as well.

Urinary tract infection is no fun. I don't know if you've ever had one, Ben, but I have had. I've had two in my life. And man, it's like you finish peeing and immediately feel like you need to pee again and you just spend the whole day doing a little dance.

Never, ever had the burning pee. Had to. Had to help out some people with it, though. My. My. Well, I won't name names, but I've. I've had folks who have had to help out with it. So first of all, it's not an.

Embarrassing thing I don't like. I hope people know, like, having a UTI is not a shameful event. Yeah, it's just a thing that happens.

Yeah. So there was actually for. For those of you who aren't aware of the Sexy Back Summit, a lot of people think that's just a kind of something about how to have better sex. But the Sexy Back Summit, Justin Timberlake. It's. It's that too. It's. It's 24 different presentations on things related to. To sex, relationships, caring for your genitals, etc. And there's an.

That's a third time we've said genitals.

That is. We're on a roll. We're on a roll. One of the presentations in there is given by a gal named Krista Rachio, and she has a really good presentation in there called why we get UTIs, yeast infections and Candida and How To Knock Them Out For Good. Now, I'm not gonna give away everything in there because honestly, it's something that you're supposed to go and purchase and it's well worth it. I don't remember how much the Sexy Back Summit costs, but I can give you a few of the little takeaways that Krista goes into in that episode because it's really, really useful. So first of all, she gives some specific precautions that you can take to prevent developing a UTI in the first place. Number one is to urinate after you have sex. Number two is to drink a lot of water, especially if, if you have a new partner or if you're someone who's prone to UTIs. In and around sexual activity is especially very important. Time to flush the system, so to speak. So keep one of those little gerbil water bottle things maybe above the bedroom and you can just. Or up above the bed and you can just kind of drink from that like a straw, you know, in between. In between.

Your second in the same paragraph made me really uncomfortable.

So let's jump into some of the nutrient protocols though that she recommends. The first is D. Mannose. And D. Mannose is a sugar that disrupts the adherence of bacteria to the urinary tract wall. And you would actually time your D Mannose to be taken after sexual activity if a UTI is something that you experience. Cranberry extract acts similarly to D. Mannos but really doesn't hold a candle to it in terms of effectiveness. So D Mannose, you can get it in a capsule form or you can get it in a tincture form. I'll put a link in the show notes to a couple different versions, good versions of D. Mannos and that's one thing that can come in really handy.

Another thing that's interesting, that's the cranberry juice is a thing that took care of both of my UTIs just like right away too. It's like big glass of that two hours later, right as rain.

Well, Dr. Riccio says that D Mannose works even better. So there you go.

And you probably don't have to drink a whole crapload of Ocean Spray. That's right, Fructose, sucrose and burn syrup.

So in the beginning phases of a uti, a few other things that you can do that help to stop it and it's tracts are to eat lots of steamed asparagus. Asparagus, similarly to D Mannose, can help to disrupt the adherence of the bacteria to the urinary tract. You can also, if you're steaming the asparagus, drink the water that you steamed it in and adding, adding garlic, the sulfates in the garlic can actually help to activate those components of the asparagus as well. So a few other delicious full strength probiotic as well as the use of fermented foods like kefir, kimchi, raw sauerkraut, all of those can help out quite a bit. There's also an herb that is incredibly powerful. Kind of flies under the radar, but it can potentially work even better than D Mannose. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's called UVA ursi U V A U R S I Uva ursi. It's an herb that can literally knock out about 90% of UTIs. So that's another one that I'd look into if you really want to get down and dirty and Listen to the full presentation that Krista gave on UTIs. I'd recommend that you do so because I've really only scratched the surface of some of the stuff she talks about. But those are a few of the areas I would start with would be D mannose and Uva Ursi for supplements. Asparagus, garlic, fermented foods like kefir, kimchi and sauerkraut, a good therapeutic strength probiotic, lots of water and all that stuff will help out.

Hi Ben, it's Chris in Atlanta. Big fan of the show. So I've been running for about three years, ultra distance for the past year or so and I've been pretty healthy throughout those three years. But prior to that I was actually a chronic hard drug user and I'm curious if maybe that's left some long lasting damage to my body. I just went through a Wellness FX blood test, performance blood test. Everything looks fairly good. I have slightly elevated, elevated alt liver enzymes, but otherwise everything's pretty good. But I wonder if there's something specific I should be looking at to determine maybe if there's something that I need to address and if so, is there a specific detox protocol that I should maybe consider. So love to hear your thoughts on that. Hope you're surviving your zombie apocalypse training and again, love the show.

Thanks, that's very cool. Christopher. Good work turning your life around and certainly wanting to take it to the next level as well.

That's good on ya, certainly. And of course, I mean it shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that, you know, having been a chronic hard drug abuser, it's gonna mess up your liver a little bit just because that's, that's, that's the detox organ. So I've had some people though go through the Wellness FX performance blood panel which is a really good panel and I think it's pretty much available in 50 states now. So anybody could get the Wellness FX Performance Panel and it gives you like your complete blood count and your liver enzymes, your kidneys, your electrolytes, your thyroid, everything. I have a lot of folks that I put through that panel. We'll link to it in the show notes. It, as Christopher says, will show your liver enzymes and I'll see those elevated many times simply because people have exercised the day before the test. Even doing something as simple as a hard exercise session the day before you go in for a test that includes liver enzymes can cause a little bit of liver inflammation and it can cause those enzymes to, to be slightly elevated. But the way that this works is the liver filters and it processes blood as it circulates through your body. And it metabolizes nutrients and it detoxifies substances like pharmaceuticals or alcohol. It makes blood clotting proteins and it performs a lot of other pretty vital functions. And all the cells that are in your liver contain proteins called enzymes that drive all of these chemical reactions. So when the liver cells get damaged or they get destroyed, the enzymes that are in these cells leak out into the blood. And when you get a blood test, it will pick up the presence of these enzymes. So one, one enzyme, for example, is called aspartate aminotransferase and that's abbreviated AST on a liver test. That one you'll find in muscles as well as liver. And that's why sometimes AST will be elevated on a liver enzyme test, when in fact it's more coming from muscle breakdown than it is from liver. And that's where you'd see something like that elevated from someone having exercise the day before they go in for a blood test. Alanine aminotransferase, abbreviated alt, that's more exclusively found in the liver. So it would be a little bit more concerning if you found both ALT and AST elevated in the blood. That's more indicatory of liver damage than just AST being elevated, which could just mean you worked out hard the day before. There are some other liver enzymes that you can have tested, everything from alkaline phosphatase to another one called gamma glutamyl transpepsidase, which is abbreviated ggt. Most of the time, Basic liver test is just going to test your ALT and your ast, those first two I mentioned. But there are a bunch of others that you could potentially test in a full on liver function test as well, if you wanted to dig into whether or not there was really significant liver disease. Now, the liver also makes albumin, which is a protein that circulates in the blood. And you'll find albumin levels to actually be low in people who have damaged liver because the liver isn't making normal amounts of albumin. Bilirubin is another component that you'll see in a liver function test. And that's a waste product that's made from the breakdown of red blood cells. And the liver processes bilirubin, so it can be excreted in your stool. Bilirubin flows through your liver's bile ducts and it gets dissolved in bile. And you'll find that if people have issues with their gallbladder or impaired bile flow, or even some issues with their liver, bilirubin levels tend to be elevated as well. However, this is another one because it's produced from the breakdown of red blood cells in really active people. If you look at a liver panel, sometimes you do see bilirubin elevated as well. So bilirubin and AST would be two things that I personally tend to see elevated on a lot of people's panels that I'm not that concerned about unless you also see things like elevated alt. Now, the. The thing is, though, once you find out that something's going on with the liver and this kind of gets to the meat of Christopher's question. Should you do a cleanse? Should you do a detox? What can you do if you have, say, high alt, high ast, high bilirubin, you know that you've taken pharmaceuticals in the past, you've been drinking lots of alcohol, and you've pretty much got a lot of signs pointing to the fact that your liver is probably a little bit beat up and needs some tlc. So what you can do is, first of all, understand that there are kind of two different detoxification pathways in the liver. So the liver has these two different mechanisms via which it gets rid of a lot of the compounds that it has to get rid of or detoxifies. Everything from contaminants, pollutants, insecticides, pesticides, food additives, drugs, alcohol, everything. There's a phase one pathway and a phase two pathway. So what you want to do if you're going to detox or if you're going to cleanse or if you're going to take care of the liver, is you want to address both pathways. So the phase one pathway of liver detoxification consists of oxidation and reduction reactions combined with what's called hydrolysis or breaking things down with. With water, essentially. So to put it simply, this pathway will convert a toxic chemical into a less harmful chemical, and this is achieved via the use of antioxidants. So antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E and the natural carotenoids you're going to find in, like, vegetables and fruits and things like that, if you don't have enough antioxidants in your diet or antioxidants are lacking because you have high levels of exercise or toxin exposure, then phase one detoxification pathways in your liver can get really impaired. So some of the things that can cause kind of an overworking of the phase one detoxification pathways or a limitation of their ability to operate properly would be things like excessive caffeine intake, excessive of alcohol intake, excessive intake of like processed fats or animal fats that are laden with like hormones and antibiotics and stuff like that. Exhaust fumes, pollution, high amounts of estrogens from like plastics or, you know, birth control pills, stuff like that. All of that stuff can affect phase one detoxification. Now the things that you would want to put into your diet that would actually help you with phase one detoxification would first of all, as you would probably suspect, be anything that would be considered like a full spectrum antioxidant. So I'm a big fan. There's one supplement called Life Shots that's a full spectrum antioxidant. I'm a big fan of that one. Unsweetened grapefruit juice can really help with that phase one detoxification detoxification pathway as well. If you have a juicer, for example, and you juice grapefruit, that's really, really good for the phase one part of the detox pathway, curcumin, which is the yellow compound that gives turmeric its yellow color. I'm a big fan of high dose curcumin for supporting that phase one detox pathway. I always slam a good 1 to 2 grams of curcumin from phenocaine, which is a kind of a natural pain killing supplement I use if I've been drinking a lot of alcohol. So we'll definitely have to take a few suitcases of curcumin. Tacona.

I've already packed mine.

Yeah.

And my glutathione.

That's right, curcumin, Grapefruit, a good full spectrum antioxidant, all of that stuff can help to support the phase one pathway. Magnesium is another really important component of the phase one pathway. So using like a natural calm magnesium, for example, before you go to bed at night, and then what are called indoles from cruciferous vegetables, so including like broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, stuff like that, all of those can help with the phase one detox pathway in the liver.

So what's it called? An indole.

Indole. I N D O L E. Oh, okay. So getting those into the diet can really help with the phase one pathway. Now there's of course, two different pathways. Once you've hydrolyzed and you've oxidized or reduced those specific compounds, they actually have to be bound and removed and kind of passed on into your stool and taken out of your body. And that's part of the phase two pathway. It's called the Conjugation pathway, the phase two detoxification pathway in the liver. And that's where the liver is going to add a substance. Specifically it's usually a molecule like cysteine or glycine or a sulfur molecule to a chemical, to a drug, to a component in the liver to make it less harmful and to allow it to be excreted from the body in the bile or the urine or the stool or whatever. So there are some major sulfur containing compounds and some really important molecules that you'll want to have in your body to support these, this pathway as well. One of the most important ones that you may have heard of before is glutathione. I'm a big, big fan of using like a, like a liposomal glutathione as a binder for the phase two detoxification pathway. Any sulfur containing food can also really, really help with this. Like garlic, onions, along with those cruciferous vegetables I mentioned earlier, like broccoli and cauliflower and asparagus and stuff like that. That can help out as well. Chlorella is a really good detoxification support for that phase two pathway. It also helps to bind toxic substances. So you could use something like, there's those, those little green tablets that you can eat. One is called Energy Bits, that's Spirulina, but that's that same company@energybits.com they also make one called Recovery Bits and That's Chlorella. It's 100% organic. Broken cell wall Chlorella.

I didn't realize they were two different supplements.

That's why they call them two different names. So, so that one's really good. There's even, there's a discount. They give us a discount code we can use on that. I believe it's Ben actually I think either Ben or greenfield, either one in all caps will give you a 10% discount over@energybits.com on that stuff. Charcoal activated charcoal works really, really well as a binder also. So that's another one that you can use to support that phase two detoxification pathway. And these are all things that you could use for a 30 to 60 day protocol for like a, like a liver cleanse. And there are some of these things that you can use on a daily basis like cruciferous vegetables, garlic, onions, things of that nature just as your, as your daily support. I'm also a fan of using a flavor full spectrum antioxidant on a daily basis as well, like that Life Shots packet. Now just a couple other things to bear in mind, when it comes to liver detox, milk thistle extract is another good one. There is a supplement called Capricleanse that I like, that's got some really good detoxification compounds, including milk thistle extract in it. That'd be, you know, if you were going to put a bunch of stuff together and do like a gold standard liver detox, you'd do something like, you'd get that Capra cleanse and do, you know, anywhere from four to eight of those a day. You do one packet of life shots a day. You would take either activated charcoal or chlorella. I wouldn't necessarily do both. One or the other would be fine. And then the liposomal glutathione and you could do all that along with a high intake, of course, cruciferous vegetables and a lot of water. And that'd be a really kind of natural cleanse that wouldn't have you spending too, too much money on like one of these, these fancy liver cleansing packages. One other thing I would consider would just be like liver cleansing juice. There are some really good juicing recipes out there and some natural, natural things that you can juice that have really good liver cleansing properties. I'm a fan of taking lemon, like the juice of a whole lemon and putting that in a juicer along with about a golf ball sized piece of ginger. And ginger, by the way, is really, really good at preventing and treating fatty liver disease as well as lessening the amount of oxidative stress in the liver. So that's another good one. It acts kind of similarly to curcumin in that respect. Some cilantro, which is another really good detox, some garlic and then some mint. And you can juice all of that. You can add a little bit of like a Himalayan sea salt and then a little bit of flaxseed oil. And flaxseed oil can also reduce the levels of fats that accumulate in the liver and help to reduce risk of fatty liver disease. You can put all of that together, juice it and make literally like a, like a liver cleansing juice. So again, you take some lemons, you do some ginger root, you do some flaxseed oil, you can put some garlic in there, you can do a little bit of mint. And then you put all that together, you juice it, you add a little bit of sea salt, and that's a really nice detox recipe for the liver.

I did a liver cleanse a few years ago that was almost that same recipe, except it had olive oil in it as well.

Yeah, olive oil works okay. Flaxseed oil though actually works a little bit better when you're looking at a liver detox. You could use just a basic cold pressed organic flax oil and probably tastes.

Better too because the olive oil didn't go well with the citrus.

Yeah, yeah. And you really want to make sure your liver cleansing juice is worthy of master chef. So there you go. That's your liver cleansing detox juice recipe. And if you've got your own liver cleansing detox juice recipe, because I know there's a lot of juicers that listen into the show. Leave your comments in the show notes for Christopher. If you've got some other juicing recipes that you like. But I think that it's really, really handy. Kind of almost like self medicating tool to have around. Like a good masticating juicer or a good, good juicer in your kitchen. A juicer and a smoothie I think are really good kitchen tools to have around for stuff like this blender. That's right. A juicer in it and a blender. What did I say?

A smoothie.

A smoothie. Well, yeah, you make a smoothie with a blender.

I just use a hammer personally.

That's right. It works really well.

Good stainless steel bowl. And a hammer.

A hammer and a nutcracker. And then you just like keep a little trained squirrel around to chew on stuff. Or if you really want to take out the big guns, a beaver. Keep a beaver around.

Now our squirrels are pretty big around here.

Yeah, that's true. You're up in Canada, you have beaver sized squirrels.

Mm.

Hi Ben and Brock, thanks for all the great work on the podcast. Question about bulletproof coffee. Do you think it's a good idea to just use it every day consistently, or is it better to take a day or two off a week from using bulletproof coffee? I have used it a couple times and I like the effect. But I'm just thinking that taking a few days off a week and saving it for big days would be more effective than using it every day. Thank you very much. Bye.

You know, lately I've been having bulletproof coffee like maybe four or five times a week. But personally I can't do it every day just because I get bored.

Yeah, well, I like breakfast food. You know, if you're listening and you don't know what bulletproof coffee is, it's just, just where you take coffee and you brew it and technically bulletproof is trademarked by Dave Asprey's upgraded self company and you blend your coffee with medium Chain, triglyceride, oil, butter, and then maybe some other flavorings like a little bit of cinnamon or some chocolate powder or stevia or something like that. You could technically do it every day. But there are a few issues that I think you need to be careful of. First of all, for somebody like me or anybody who's out there competing, you want to keep your body really sensitive to caffeine. And we talked about this in a podcast a few weeks ago. But you've got these adenosine receptors in your brain and they can actually get desensitized to the effects of caffeine. And generally I'll throw in a good week or two of no caffeine about every couple of months or so. So my body stays really sensitive to the effects of caffeine. And like right now, getting ready for Ironman Hawaii, all I'm drinking is decaf. There would be no issues with you doing something like bulletproof coffee every day if you wanted to do that. But I would recommend that you consider using decaf coffee every now and again if you're gonna do it. And in, in the past, there really hasn't been a very, very good, clean source of decaf coffee. I know that, that Dave Asprey's company now does like a, like a Swiss process, what's called a Swiss water treated coffee. That's a really, really good way to decaffeinate a coffee. What it does is it simply takes green coffee extract and it soaks coffee beans in that green coffee extract that has had its, its caffeine removed. And so that naturally kind of sucks the caffeine out of these coffee beans and then you can roast them. But there's no actual chemicals used in the decaffeination process. And there's been some really good studies on the benefits of decaffeinated coffee. It can improve blood flow to the brain. It can, it can have some pretty good effects on decreasing your risk for diabetes. It can improve your carbohydrate metabolism, specifically, is how it does that, as well as your insulin sensitivity. Decaf coffee beans have just as many antioxidants in them as regular coffee. The only thing that you're really missing out on with the decaf is that you don't get the caffeine high that you might get from a cup of bulletproof coffee in the morning. But one thing you should remember is that caffeine can actually inhibit what's called mtor, which stands for mammalian target of rapamycin. And MTOR is a mechanism that increases protein synthesis in your muscles, especially after exercise. So if you're exercising, say in the morning and then doing a cup of bulletproof coffee, technically the caffeine in that bulletproof coffee could inhibit a little bit of your muscle rebuilding or muscle repairing responses, in which case you'd want to opt for more of like a decaf version of a bulletproof coffee rather than a regular version. So I would say the bigger thing to consider here would not be whether or not you could drink something like bulletproof coffee every day, but whether you should have the caffeinated or the decaffeinated version. I personally save my bulletproof coffee consumption for big workouts or before races like prior to Ironman Hawaii. I will do a big old cup of bulletproof coffee, meaning I'll do, you know, a good 16 ounces or so. It'll have half a stick of butter in it, it'll have about two big tablespoons of MCT oil in it, it'll have some cinnamon, it'll have some chocolate, and that'll all get blended up and that's what I will, what I'll drink is my pre Ironman meal and I won't have any, anything else until I come out of the swim and getting ready to get onto the bike. But up till that point I'll just be burning pure fats driven by caffeine across the blood brain barrier. And it's a really, really cool feeling for me, you know, on race morning or something like that. And you know, I'm a bigger fan of doing like a smoothie in the morning. I just enjoy a nice kale smoothie that I add some coconut milk and stuff like that to too. I'm not a huge, huge fan of drinking necessarily like the high fat coffee every morning. I do use Dave Asprey's upgraded coffee every morning as my coffee of choice. Sometimes decaf, sometimes regular, but a lot of times I just do the coffee and I don't actually add the fat and everything to it. If you were doing coffee every day, you could, but I would definitely make sure that you, you use decaf as well as regular.

I think the study that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the conclusion was that if you were to alternate two weeks on, one week off with caffeinated to decaffeinated coffee, that you'd be able to maintain those pathways. Is that what you remember too?

It would actually you, you could even do something like two months on and one week off. You could do as seldom as that in terms of, of two months of caffeinated coffee followed by a week of decaffeinated coffee, and that would still allow your. What's called your adenosine receptors to stay upregulated. So there you go. Man, the propeller hats are really spinning on today's show. I feel like we're getting pretty nerdy.

Awesome.

Hey, Ben. My name's Michael. I'm a big fan of the show. I was just wondering what your recommendation would be for, like, maybe, like, a general. Someone with a generalized anxiety disorder combined with maybe some resulting in, like, adrenal fatigue, that sort of thing. I'm kind of looking for a more natural approach to treating, you know, what I believe is my generalized anxiety disorder. But, you know, I have been on certain drugs in the past, like clonazepam, clonidine, and, you know, I know those can be kind of addictive, and I've weaned myself off from those successfully. And I've been, you know, trying some things like valerian root extract and some St. John's Wort 5 HTP. You know, it's kind of a antidepressant slash, like, anxiety protocol. And it's been working pretty well. But I would just. But at the same time, you know, I'm still feeling pretty fatigued, Chronic fatigue type syndrome going on. And I was just wondering what your recommendations would be just for an overall adrenal support supplement diet, you know, lifestyle type program in addition to natural supplements, you know, that I think can be used to reduce anxiety. All right, thanks, Ben. Love the show. Look forward to your response. Take care. Bye.

Bye. I am a bit of an expert in this area, really, if I do say so myself. I had some serious anxiety issues for a number of years. I've been on SSRIs, I've been off of SR. I've been through the cognitive behavior therapy. I've done tons of yoga, learned how to do all the deep breathing, and I came out the other end perfectly.

Perfectly. What did you find made that made the biggest changes or had the most positive effect for you, Brock?

It would absolutely be the combination of cognitive behavior therapy, like the training that you go through with that type of therapy and breathing exercises. And with. I think those two things should be taught in, like, elementary school.

What kind of. What kind of breathing exercises did you do?

Um, I actually. I have two different ones that I. That I cycle through. Like, when I can't sleep, I do a count of. So I'll find my heartbeat.

So I'm.

I'm in time with my own biorhythm. And I'll do eight beats of breathing in, then I'll hold it for three beats and then I'll exit, exhale for 12 beats and then hold it out for three beats and do that. It only takes about six times before I can take myself out of a full blown anxiety attack or just put myself back to sleep. If I've woken up in the middle of the night and got that, you know, when the brain is just churning and churning, that's the. That's been by far one of the most effective things.

Interesting.

And it did take some practice. It's not one of those things that you can go and try the first time and be like, oh, Brock's right, this is perfect.

Yeah.

It takes a little while to get your body used to it and to understand that this means to relax and calm down and quiet down. And now I can almost think about doing the deep breathing and I get that same kind of cue.

And you did cognitive behavioral therapy as well?

Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing that I think everybody should be taught. Just being able to take that step back, see how you're reacting to things, figure out why you're reacting that way to them, and then decide whether that's the way you want to react to it or not, and then reprogram.

Did you meet with a practitioner for that?

I did, yeah. I went, I think, as a weekly thing for. For a few months. It was like six months. Not every single week, but most weeks.

Okay.

And a lot of it involved keeping a journal, doing some. Doing a bunch of work on my own. Not necessarily just going into the practitioner all the time, but doing a lot of work on my own. Yeah, it's. It paid off big time.

Yeah. That's one of the things I actually wanted to bring up. Six different recommendations for Michael, and the first recommendation that I had for him is something that you just mentioned, which is journaling. And I believe that in the last podcast I mentioned a new form of journaling that I'm using called the Five Minute Journal. I think the website is five minutejournal.com I'll find the URL and link to it in the show notes. But it is just five minutes of journaling total per day. A few minutes in the morning, a few minutes in the evening. And it tells you exactly what to do. It's very, very kind of a done for you journal. Nice little white bound journal that you keep on your bedside. And journaling has been one thing that's been shown to help quite a bit with anxiety. So that would Be number one. Number two would be I'd surf over to the Heart Math Institute and at the Heart Math Institute, I'll link to that in the show. Notes. They have a couple of different biofeedback tools that you can use. One is called the EM Wave and that is a handheld tool that has a little cable that comes out of it that attaches to your earlobe and collects your heart rate and tracks your heart heart rate variability. But it also comes with software and what you do is you sit in front of your computer as the software collects your pulse data and your heart rate and it brings you through these different techniques, interactive exercises and gameplay that help to bring your heart and your mind into a very coherent state. And they've done studies with this that have shown it to to reduce anxiety and to also help with things like focus and reduce stress and things of that nature. They also on that same website have something a little bit similar, not quite as powerful in terms of the desktop software neurofeedback feature, but it's called the Inner Balance Trainer and that's an app for iPhone or iPad. Same thing. It's got an earlobe thing that you put plug into it feeds your heart rhythms into the app and it does a little bit less fancy biofeedback than the desktop software, but it has like a breath pacer on it. It shows you your heart rhythm pattern and your hrv. And there's a little bit of education built into that app as well. And that sensor. So the sensor and the app and everything put together is $99. And if you were to get like the EM wave and the software and everything like that, that's closer to like 1 99. Either one of those would be a pretty good solution though. Now they both are going to teach you how to do something called coherence, which is a technique in a nutshell, in which you notice and admit what you're feeling. You try to name the feeling that you feeling and then you tell yourself to ease up as you gently kind of focus in on your heart and relax as you breathe and ease the stress out. And over on the HeartMath website, they actually have a program that's called Eliminating Anxiety and it teaches you how to use these apps and this software that they have specifically to work with anxiety. And I know a lot of people have had a lot of success with that. So whether you you deal with stress, insomnia, lack of sleep, anxiety, anything along those lines, that's a really good website to go and explore. And I'll link to that one in the show notes for sure. Awesome.

That sounds like it would go really well with the cognitive behavior therapy because that would be some sort of an actual like a real feedback mechanism. You could see what you're, that you're actually achieving something instead of just like hoping you're feeling better. Yep, I like it.

Exactly.

Which I had that when I was going through all my problems.

So number one would be the Five Minute Journal. Number two would be the HeartMath Institute. Number three is I would certainly look into your neurotransmitter balance and you can actually do self tests now to do this. I'll link to this test in the show notes. But there's a test called the Neuroadrenal Extension Expanded test, which is a test that you can get from direct labs. And the Neuroadrenal expanded test will test for specific neurotransmitters such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, etc. That's a really good one to see what type of neurotransmitter imbalances that might be present that can really affect your anxiety, your well being, your sleep, your stress, your mood, etc. That's an excellent test. And what you can do once you have the results of that test is you can look into if it turns out that you need it, what's called neurotransmitter repletion. And typically these are blends of what it sounds like you may have tried a little bit before Michael, which would be like five HTP tyrosine, things of that nature. One really, really good blend that I found to work for a lot of people, especially folks who have done this Neuroadrenal expanded test and found themselves to need a little bit of repletion is a supplement called Travacor. That's T R A V A C O R. I actually have some and I'll keep it on hand for times when I'm really stressed out or when I find that too much work or anxiety is kind of keeping me awake at night. But it's Travicor, it's made by a company called Nutrascience and it's a really good blend in a really nice ratio of tyrosine and 5 HTP and some other relaxing compounds that would be another good one to have on hand. So that would be number four. So number one is the five minute journal. Number two would be to go over to the HeartMath Institute. Number three would be to look into Your neurodrenal expanded tests number four. Four would look into this supplement called Travacore by nutroscience. Number five would be Passion Flower. Did you ever try Passion Flower, Brock?

No, I've never heard of it actually.

So I'm big on passion flower. I keep a bottle of passion flower extract next to my bedside for if I ever wake up at like 3 or 4am and I've got, you know, just thoughts raging through my head about things I need to take care of the next day. There's been some really good studies in terms of the effects of Passion Flower on situational anxiety, like stage fright or anxiety about a job interview, as well as helping out with anxiety disorders, even like panic disorder or social phobia, stuff like that. So Passion Flower, it works really, really similar to like a benzodiazepine or like a Valium or something along those lines. And it specifically influences what are called the GABA receptors in your brain. And GABA is a certain type of brain chemical that helps to promote relaxation by decreasing electrochemical activity in your nerve cells. And Passion Flower is a completely natural way to achieve the same effects as something like Valium or diazepam or something like that without actually putting a number on we talked about your liver. Without causing you to have to, you know, detox or metabolize pharmaceuticals or get a lot of the addictive effects of something like a diazepam. But you want to use like a passion flower extract or a passion flower tincture. That works best. That would be a liquid form of passion flour you put under your tongue for about like 60 to 90 seconds. And you can use that prior to bed. You can use it when you're feeling anxious. It may make you feel a little bit sleepy. So you'd want to be careful like, you know, pulling it out in the middle of the day while you're working at the office. It would be more of kind of like a pre sleep, pre nap type of supplement. But it, it's almost like an anesthesia and it has a really cool effect in terms of settling you down. So I'm a big, big fan of Passion Flower for, for another kind of natural relaxant and anti anxiety.

Does it work quite rapidly like you're saying you, you take it in the middle of the night if you're awake?

It works, it works for really rapidly, like within a couple of minutes. So yeah. So passion flower extract, Passion flower tincture. Like I'll take that down to Kona, for example, and I'll be taking that like the night before the race, I'll have, like a glass of red wine. I'll do some passion flower extract, and I'll hit the sack and. And it'll really help me sleep before the race, too.

But it doesn't make you groggy in the morning, I'm guessing.

Not at all. Not at all. No grogginess.

Diazepam and lorazepam that I was taking, it would have, like. You'd almost have a hangover.

Exactly, exactly. So none of that from. From Passion Flower. So that would be number five, and then number six would be a book. And there's a really good book out there written by a guy named Dr. Kalish. And this particular book kind of goes into ways that you can. You can fix your brain. Different things that go wrong in terms of neurotransmitters, how to heal your body, how to do what he calls mapping your mind. And it's one of the better books out there when it goes into. When it comes to looking into fatigue, depression, anxiety, hormone and neurotransmitter imbalances that can affect that. I mean, there are a lot of other books out there that can be really good for this as well. Like there's one called the Edge Effect. There's a brand new one called Wise Isn't My Brain Working? But this. This Kalish Method one is pretty good. So I'll link to that in the show notes. I have yet to read the book why Isn't My Brain Working? But I do know that the Kalish book is good. This other one called the Edge Effect is a really good book as well. That one's written by Dr. Eric Braverman. But I would recommend that you do a little bit of self education in terms of why from like a chemical slash, nutrient slash, electrical standpoint, you know, sometimes you can experience the anxiety as well. And this is. That's a really good resource to do it.

I'd throw two books in there, if I may, too, that really helped me. There's one called Taming youg Gremlin, A Guide to Enjoying Yourself that was. It's kind of odd at first when you read it. It's almost like it looks like it's sort of a children's book. But once you sort of get over that and get into the meat of the information, it was one of the most helpful books that I came across. And the other book would be When Perfect Isn't Good Enough Strategies for Coping With Perfectionism. Because I think not necessarily everybody that has anxiety, it's coming from that same place. But I think a lot of people who have general anxiety disorder, it is a sort of habitual perfectionism.

The Gremlin. I love it.

Yeah.

Cool.

It's got some illustrations that are quite, quite hilarious.

Taming the Gremlin. So we'll put a link to all that stuff in the show. Notes Michael, and hopefully that helps you out.

Hey, Ben and Brock. My name is Chris Yeager from Chicago. I had a question with regards to cramping. It seems I've lost a lot of weight recently. I've been doing a lot of the paleo type diet training. Just did a half ironman do a lot more miles, a lot more endurance type things than I used to. And it seems I cramp a lot more, especially in the calves and the hamstrings and the thighs. Not so much during training, but actually coming out of sleep sometimes in the middle of the night. I'll actually be woken up pretty abruptly by a leg cramp out of nowhere. It seems like I can flex my calf hard enough. I can actually cause it to cramp whenever I want. So I didn't know if that was something in my diet. Dehydration, something I can look into or change or add a supplement or something that could help with the cramping issue. Because when your hamstring sucks up and it really, really hurts, it can be pretty debilitating. So that's be great to hear your thoughts on that. I haven't heard or read anything from you guys regarding that, but I'm sure you may have covered it before. But thanks a lot and I look forward to hearing it.

I get that same thing sometimes when it's usually after I've really exerted myself, like, I'll be like stretching my hamstring out or something or stretching my quad out. And my hamstring will just like knot up like crazy and I'll relax it and then I can do it again and it'll not up like crazy and just. It's so weird when that happens. Yeah, it sounds like Christopher can do that, like anytime he wants.

It used to happen to me a lot. Playing water polo, doing the egg beater kick combined with really, really hard efforts. Where I played whole set for the water polo teams, we'd push people around and you get to a point where you were fighting with somebody in the water in that whole set position, doing the egg beater kick as hard as you could, way harder than you ever would during training. Then it'd cramp and that'd be scary because you'd just Start to sink. So not a good place to cramp. The explanation typically for muscle cramps goes like this. They say when you exercise, you sweat, and you release water and electrolytes like sodium and potassium and magnesium and calcium. And as you lose the water and you lose the electrolytes, your body becomes depleted. And since electrolytes help you to conduct nerve impulses through your body that allow your muscles to contract, when you lose enough water and you lose enough electrolytes, these nerve impulses become deranged somehow, and that makes your muscles cramp. So that's the typical explanation for cramping that's put out by, you know, Gatorade and, you know, electrolyte capsule manufacturers, et cetera.

Did you really say deranged?

Deranged. The fact is, though, that there are several reasons why this probably isn't the case. And there was a recent article we published@BenGreenfieldFitness.com on why you really get muscle cramps and the myth behind muscle cramps. And the basic overview is that, first of all, sweat has way more water in it than it has electrolytes in it. So what happens is, when you get dehydrated and you sweat a lot, especially if you're exercising, your blood levels of electrolytes actually go up a little bit, or they stay about the same. Your body actually can go for days maintaining plasma levels of electrolytes without you taking in any salts at all. They've also done studies on athletes who who take in electrolytes versus athletes who don't and found that there's really not a huge difference in terms of the amount of cramping in athletes who have the same level of hydration as athletes who are dehydrated or athletes who have a lot of electrolytes on board versus those who have low electrolyte levels on board. So that doesn't seem to affect cramping very significantly as well. The next thing to think about is that if dehydration and if lack of electrolytes truly caused cramping, then all of your muscles would go into some kind of an uncontrollable spasm. And we see that in severe cases of dehydration and electrolyte deficiency, but in most cases, it's just one muscle that tends to spasm. You know, like your calf or your leg muscles, for example. It's not your full body. And so that also tends to kind of suggest that there might be something going on here other than just like, loss of hydration, loss of electrolytes. Now, the other thing that you have to realize is that if it were lack of water and lack of electrolytes that actually cause you to cramp, then one of the best ways to reverse a cramp or to stop cramping, which is basically stretching and resting a muscle or slowing down a little bit, those wouldn't work because technically, you'd still be dehydrated and you'd still have a lack of electrolytes keeping that from occurring. So what it comes down to is what really causes muscle cramps are a few different things. First of all, it would be pushing yourself harder than what you're used to in training during something like a race. And what happens is your muscle goes into a process protective reflex where. It feels or senses that you're pushing your body to the point where you might get injured. So there's what's called an alpha motor neuron reflex, where your body puts that muscle into a shortened protective spasm so that you're not able to contract it. And the fix for that would be to actually push yourself just as hard in training as you push yourself when you're, say, racing or competing or in that event where you tend to be cramping. So that would be number one. Number two would be, a lot of times, cramping is due to anxiety and stress and just basically focusing too hard. You can get that same alpha motor neuron reflex when you do that as well. And so trying to relax, being able to breathe, and to kind of let go a little bit during a race or during a hard workout where you're cramping, that can also help out. And that can be incredibly hard to do, but it can help. Light and passive stretching can help muscle cramps go away faster, especially when you combine them with this type of rest. And it's not that you're increasing flexibility. It's basically just this slight stretch that almost tells your brain it's okay to relax the muscle. So a light stretch of the muscle can help out a little bit if you find yourself in the middle of a cramp. And then, interestingly, even the taste of a salty solution can reverse this alpha motor neuron reflex. And this is the interesting study that they did on pickle juice, where they found that pickle juice could reduce a cramp. And the reason for that is not that the salts and the pickle juice are making their way into the muscle and restoring muscle electrolytes. The reason that we know that is because the reverse of the cramp occurs way too quickly for this to be electrolyte absorption. It's simply the taste of something salty. You can try pickle juice. You can break open an electrolyte capsule and just dump a little bit into your mouth to reverse that cramp. You could taste anything that's really salty. Technically, in a pinch, you might even be able to just like lick your arm. You know, if your arm has a bunch of salt, salt on it and just that taste can help to reverse a cramp as well. Anything salty or kind of vinegary can help with that. We'll put a link to the full article in the show notes for Christopher to go read, but I would recommend that he go check out that article on BenGreenfieldFitness.com on 5 Scientific Ways to stop muscle cramps. And then the only other thing that I've found to be an issue, because Chris specifically talks about when he's asleep, he's getting this issue occurring. I have found that a natural muscle relaxant, specifically one called natural calm magnesium, taking about 400 to 600 milligrams of a natural calm magnesium prior to going to bed at night is one of the best things that I've found to help with reversing muscle cramps, relaxing the body and getting rid of like these, these night twitches or these leg cramps. That, that's another thing that I would highly recommend if your cramping is something that you experience when you're. When you're in bed at night. Because a lot of times one of the, one of the things that really gets depleted once you start training for something like Ironman is magnesium. And even though electrolyte deficiencies during training are something that, that are rarely the cause of muscle cramps, I've found that sometimes your body just seizes up a little bit if it doesn't have that natural muscle relaxant magnesium on board when you're asleep at night. So I personally do natural calm magnesium before I go to bed at night every night anyways, because it just helps me sleep a little bit. But it can also be really good for that nighttime cramping.

Excellent. Well, I've only got one other question for you then.

What's that?

And that is do we have an itunes review this week?

Oh, c. C. We do. We have a quite fantastic one. But by the way, before we get into our giveaway and our itunes review, I don't know if any listeners happen to head over to giftfromben.com but any of you who heard us announce that last week probably got access to a pretty cool video over@giftfromben.com so if you haven't yet been over to giftfromben.com visit giftfromben.com because there's a free video from Brock and I right there.

You see us playing with the tennis ball.

If you have no clue what we look like, you can also see what Brock and I look like on that video. So go to giftfromben.com also don't forget to go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com love if you want to share the love and spread the wealth and tell other people about this podcast. But of course, we always end the podcast with a giveaway. And let me tell you, we now have on hand brand new Ben Greenfield fitness hats as well as tech shirts like running shirts, shirts that you can use for workouts, et cetera. They're really, really cool looking. They've got a big BG logo on the front. They say bengrigelfitness.com on the back. We're gonna send anyone who leaves a review whose review that we read on this podcast, a brand spanking new Ben Greenfield fitness T shirt and Ben Greenfield fitness hat. And today's review comes from. Interesting title here. WTF 2010? WTF 2010 actually left us a review in Spanish and I am not fluent in Spanish, but I'm gonna do my best to to read this. He actually titles it. He or she titles it Maravioso, which I assume means marvelous. Maravioso.

That. That seems to be.

Yeah. All right, are we ready? Do you think you might be able to play some Spanish tunes in the background as I read this one? Brock. Yep. Play some Spanish tunes things. All right, here we go. Ben y Brock son dos excellentes fuentes de information relationada a nutricion. Converte and un super humanoid. Super Romano. I know that last one. Super Romano. Supermano. Here's, here's the English. Ben and Brock are an excellent source of nutritional and fitness information for listeners of all kind. You don't need to be an expert nor an extraterrestrial to follow their advice and try to become a superhuman. I like the Spanish version better. That's my word of the day. Supermano. Supermano. Until next time. Until Kona go be super hermano.

Holy cha cha cha.

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