How To Kill Fat Cells, 5 Ways To Burn More Calories After A Cheat Day, Health Effects of Ritalin & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, how to kill fat cells, five ways to burn more calories after a cheat day, the health effects of Ritalin, the best way to eat wild game, what to do about cracking knees, 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 you need to optimize physical mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the 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.

Rachel, I gotta tell you, I'm a pretty happy man this morning.

You are? And why is that?

I had pie for breakfast.

Pie? What kind of pie?

I had my wife's coconut flour and almond flour. Heavenly crusted pie that was filled with like a coconut cream raspberry filling. Was amazing. Yum. She may actually, she may be pissed when she gets home and finds that I dug into her pie.

Did you eat it all?

I. I didn't eat it all, but I, I'm not very good at cutting pie and so I, I may have messed up her pie a little bit. I may or may not have been the person who messed up the pie. I'm really hoping it wasn't for a special occasion, but I was. Well, you've met Toffee and Caramel, our little Nigerian dwarf goats, right?

I haven't met them, no, but I'm aware of them. Yep.

Oh, I thought that last time you were here that, that.

No, they weren't there. I was devastated because I really want Jester to show me how to milk them.

Okay, well, I was out, out bailing all the hay out of the truck this morning. Just loads and loads of these, these 70 pound hay bales. That was my workout. But I finished so close to this morning's podcast. I didn't have time to make my quintessential big ass green smoothie. So I instead opened the refrigerator and ate what looked good. And it just happened to be pie.

News flashes.

Rachel. I'm not a big fan of woo woo stuff as I think you know, but I actually tweeted out this week an amazing article that I read on, of all places, the Time magazine website on happy rituals. Uh huh.

And what did you find?

Well, this was actually an article based on neuroscience research. Neuroscience research, which that's not woo Then is it automatically makes it legit, Right. Kind of. Woo woo. Neuroscience. I guess I'll put a link to it. And all the research that of course we talk about in the news flashes over on today's episode show notes, which are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 335. But it was unless you want to pick up a big thick book and who wants to do that these days on happiness. It was actually one of the more succinct and thorough and helpful articles that I've read in a long time on what makes us happy.

Interesting.

Yeah. So a few of the things that were in there. One is that it starts off by saying that one of the most important things that you can do is ask yourself what you are grateful for.

Yeah. Gratitude for sure.

Horse that's kind of been kicked to death. But what happens is they talk about how the antidepressant Wellbutrin boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine. And what they found is that feeling grateful activates the brainstem region that produces dopamine. And gratitude towards other people also increases activity in what are called the social dopamine circuits. And that's not all. But there's more. But wait, there's more Prozac. Prozac boosts not dopamine but serotonin. And it turns out that gratitude increases serotonin production, what's called the anterior cingulate cortex. So you get a release of dopamine, you get a release of serotonin, no antidepressant drugs required, and it's simply a matter of, of waking up or ending the day with consciously, not just kind of thinking in the back of your head, but consciously writing down and talking about what you're grateful for.

Right. And then the interesting thing would be is whether you feel when you're depressed, if you actually have anything to be grateful for.

Yeah, that's the tough one. That's the tricky part, right. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? I'm actually. I've used the five minute journal. I've used the practice of just writing down what you're grateful for. I've used the practice of rolling over and tell my wife that I'm grateful for her all sorts of things. I'm actually in the process right now of creating a journal. It's actually being published over in Taiwan right now, so it'll be about six weeks before I get it shipped over here to the States. I did a run of about 2,000 journals just to start off, but it's a journal that's basically exactly what I like to do each morning in terms of gratitude. And I decided, well, why not just put it into a journal? So it's a little bit different than the five minute journal.

That's awesome. And now you have some partly woo woo science to back you up.

Yes. Full on woo woo, baby. Negative feelings. They talk about negative feelings and they say that if you can put your negative feelings into words. What they found is that in FMRI studies, the amygdala gets activated to reduce the impact of negative emotions. If you give them a name.

Wow.

And literally like label them or name them. Like if you're angry, you could name that angry. Or you could even say like, Harry the monster is angry. Or, or you could say something like I'm feeling. You wouldn't use the word angry, but you use some kind of a. I mean, you could do that. But, but putting some kind of like your own. Spin your own label on it doesn't have to be Harry the monster. But you know what I'm saying?

Like, yeah, like you personifying your feelings.

Right, exactly.

Is that supposed to make them separate to you, which then kind of does something.

It like detaches you from them.

Right, There you go.

Y here's another really interesting one. If you want to boost pleasure and boost happiness, make a decision. And this is something that I found myself struggling over. When I go to nice restaurants that have a ton of really good looking things on the menu, or when I am doing a workout and I'm not quite sure what exercises or what workout I want to do or what series of exercises, simply making a fricking decision actually gives you a huge boost of dopamine. So for example, if you give rats injections of cocaine and one rat has to pull a lever to get the injection and the other rat just gets the injection, the rat that has to pull the lever to get the injection that makes the decision that it has to actively press that lever, it gets a bigger boost of dopamine.

Wow.

So the takeaway message here is that if you want cocaine, pull the lever. Don't just take cocaine. Make yourself, make yourself work for it. So all sorts of interesting things in that article. It goes on and on. And I won't, I won't read or go over the whole thing for folks because it is kind of a long article. Oh, one last thing is physical touch. Getting a minimum of five hugs a day for four weeks increases happiness by causing a release of the neurotransmitter hormone oxytocin. Which reduces the reactivity of stressful areas in your amygdala.

That does not surprise me at all. Every single day. I'm not even kidding you. I have to start the day cuddling either my dog or my husband. We can't skip it. It's a thing. It's literally a thing. In my house, cuddles are so important.

And now you can tell them you're doing it because you want to increase your neurotransmitter oxytocin. There you go, Win. So check out that article. Another thing that I wanted to mention was this idea of living in eternal summer. You know what that means?

No.

Can you guess?

Summer all year round.

Yeah. Like air conditioning, heating comfort, comfort of temperature all the time. So there is this new study that finds that living in eternal summer can adversely impact your health, specifically by creating increase in risk of diabetes, cardiovascular risk factors, drop in metabolism, increase in body fat, and all sorts of things related to biology. Specifically things that would increase morbidity and mortality. Which are fancy words to say you're going to kick the can sooner when you constantly control your environment. Like right now, I'm standing here podcasting with you. I've got my shirt off in my basement and it's about 58 degrees down here. Now, for a lot of people, they'd think that to be uncomfortable. And yes, it is slightly uncomfortable. I have to consciously think about how I can keep my body warm, whether it's breathing, moving, standing, taking jumping, jack breaks, whatever. But it turns out that doing that and forcing your body to have to be the thing that keeps you warm versus, say, like, you know, artificial cooling or artificial heating methods, that's actually going to help you out quite a bit in terms of your health. So the next time that you're. That if you're listening and the next time your spouse or your loved one tells you to turn on the freaking air conditioning, or when you're going to activate the heater this winter, you can tell them that you're just trying not to die sooner.

What about if you are chasing the sun in places or in places that are hot all year round?

You mean if you live in a place that's hot all year round?

Yeah. Or if you travel to places just.

To keep in summer, then it works in reverse. Your body produces heat shock proteins in response to heat stress. And so if you're in a hot area, you could say, okay, well, I'm going to drive today. Assuming you don't have to go somewhere where you're going to be all pitted out and sweaty. I'm going to drive today and not use my air conditioning or I'm going to allow my house to be a little bit hot and I'm going to take some cold showers today. Those types of things.

Interesting.

So yeah, it's kind of interesting. And it relates to another interesting article that goes into cold thermogenesis. This idea that submitting your body to the stressors of cold causes white fat to get converted into brown fat. You actually enhance the expression of what are called brown fat specific genes. And when you do that, you produce fat that is very rich in what are called mitochondria and fat that is very able to take calories and rather than storing them away as storage fats to turn those calories into heat. That is one of the primary reasons that I'll, for example, not just keep myself cold, but I'll use these cooling gear like the cool fat burner vest, or I'll do cold baths, cold treatments, things like that. But it turns out in this new study that there is a specific herbal extract that causes brown fat to form more readily. So it actually stimulates this same brown fat specific gene and it also increases activity, what's called lipase, which breaks down fat, and also another one called carboxylase, which suppresses new fat production or what would be called lipogenesis. So you're increasing lipolysis and you're suppressing lipogenesis. This particular extract also increases the activity of AMP K. So AMP K is considered to be like this metabolic master switch that increases your metabolism. You get a big surge of it in response to say like aerobic exercise sessions, but you also get a response to it when you are subjected to cold. And specifically if you combine this herb with cold, you get a really cool 1, 2 combo in terms of inducing programmed cell death. What's called apoptosis in white fat cells.

Wow.

Drum roll please. Can you guess what the actual herb is?

Da da da da da da da da. I can guess. Is it curcumin?

Curcumin, you got it. Turmeric extract. You could do turmeric, you could do curcumin as well. But it's very, very interesting. And the other thing, and I've been telling some people this lately, is I'll take these curcumin capsules that I have in my pantry and in the morning break them open into a cup of coffee because they actually have neural anti inflammatory properties as well, meaning they kind of clean up your brain, especially if you've had like a night of drinking or a poor night of sleep or something like that. So a lot of benefits to curcumin, but it turns out a pretty cool one two combo is to combine it with cold thermogenesis. More on that later when we talk about how to combat the effects of a big calorie laden cheat day. But for now, if you want to check out that research, it's over at greenmed Info. I will put a link to it in the show Notes. So the last thing is this whole high carb debate. Did you see, I don't know if you saw this, Rachel, but Denise Minger just wrote a giant 18,000 plus word article on her website and the title of the article is In Defense of Low Fat, in which she goes into a ton of research on how to people eating in all these studies that have been kind of suppressed or flown under the radar, people literally engaging in the carbocalypse, as she calls it, eating like pounds of sugar and starches and potatoes and rice and just processed sugar cubes literally all day long.

And what did she find?

Absence of heart disease sometimes reversal of diabetes, reversal of multiple sclerosis, on and on and on. Extremely controversial article. It's kind of been breaking the Internet of the nutrition world in the past several days.

And so what do you think about that?

Well, I got Denise on a podcast that I'm releasing this Saturday. I literally talked to her for about an hour and a half yesterday. We went over all the studies, we went over the conclusions. We kind of cut through some of the clutter and confusion. So if you're listening in, tune in this weekend. But the reason that I'm talking about this is it's related to another article that came out this week in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And what this article looked into was whether or not your response metabolically to high carbohydrate intake is affected by your genes. And it actually is. There's something called lipoprotein lipase, which causes some people to be insulin resistant and some people to have some serious issues when it comes to high carb intake. And it turns out that some people are carriers of this gene called RS328. And the people who carry that gene can have metabolic syndrome in response to a diet high in carbohydrate, whereas the people who don't carry that gene can do just fine on a high carb diet. And in this particular study, they were looking at people in China and so they basically took folks from not really a genetic melting pot Right. Like, they were all Chinese. And they found that some of them did fine with high carb. Some of them didn't. So it turns out that genetics plays a role here.

Interesting.

There you go. So I'm hoping that I have the gene that allows me to eat pie for breakfast.

Everyone's hoping they have that gene.

Metabolic abnormalities. So, anyways, these news flashes and, oh, so much more. More you can get@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 335. You can also follow Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. We'll put all the links in the show notes because we're constantly churning out information that goes even above and beyond, believe it or not, what we just talked about. So there you go.

Listener q and a.

Hey, Ben.

My name is Hannah, and I'm from Washington, D.C. i have a question about cheat days and more specifically, cheat meals. Let's say that yesterday was Sunday and I stumbled upon a glorious burrito shack, and I kind of gorged for one meal and may or may not have had ice cream afterwards, which is completely off the rocker of my usual diet, which usually follows what you recommend, which is high fat, low carb, moderate protein. What do I do the following day when I usually kind of feel like sh T To be able to rebound and get myself going back again as quickly as possible? Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks. Love the show.

I'm not actually too big on cheat days because I don't restrict my diet in any way. Really?

You've never just gone, like, ape nuts on. I mean, I know you accidentally ate chicken, as we alluded to a few times, but, I mean, do you ever just got, like, chocolate and wine and.

I take it back. I take it back. Monthly periods. I must admit, I indulge in chocolate. I don't know. I just. I think it's magnesium. I think you mentioned at some point, you mean month.

Like, literally when your time of the month comes around, like. That's right.

Well, usually a couple of days before. But I just all of a sudden just indulge for sure. And I'll have cheese. Oh, my gosh. Cheese and butter and, like, bread, but, like fatty brie cheese, like really fatty stuff. And then I'll have that for dinner, and then for dessert, I'll have, like, chocolate mousse.

Mousse.

Chocolate mousse.

Yep.

Amazing. Yeah. Now I don't feel so bad about having pie for breakfast.

I can't believe I didn't think I had cheat days.

You have cheat days, definitely. So best way to rebound after a cheat day well, if you look at what's going on with caloric excess, generally what happens is once your liver and your muscle glycogen stores get topped off, which takes around, depending on your size, 1000-1500 calories of carbohydrates or proteins, which can get converted into sugars and then stored away in muscle or liver as carbohydrates. The same way any excess after that, right. Like any glucose that winds up in the bloodstream is going to pretty easily get converted into fats.

Right.

Stored as white fat. It's just a very simple mechanism. It's why fat free licorice isn't really fat free licorice, especially if you had the bucket of popcorn before you had the licorice. So, yeah, unless you're in a liver or muscle glycogen depleted state, you're gonna turn carbohydrates into fats. So caloric excess is an issue. You also have, typically on a cheat day, some issues potentially with some toxins or heavy metals, things like that floating in the bloodstream. Just because a lot of times, let's face it, on a cheat day, in many cases you're eating foods that might not be considered like, clean and organic. I don't know many people that have cheat days on organic kale.

Vegetables.

Yeah. From Whole Foods. Right.

Junk food.

So. And even, you know, for me, like, sometimes my cheat days are healthy, but I'll go to town on like sushi or, you know, ungodly amounts of like steak or just boatloads of dark chocolate or, you know, whatever. And so in many cases there are some things, you know, take sushi for example, right? Like I could eat clean, but I'm still getting some heavy metals and some mercury and some things like that along with something like, say, sushi. So that's another thing to bear in mind. And then just general inflammation. You do produce inflammatory cytokines as a response to caloric excess. It's simply the reason that you tend to see a lot of people. I used to go to bodybuilding shows and fitness conventions where people eat a lot, they want to get swole. A lot of the guys especially, they're there to be 70s big and wear their welcome to the gun show T shirts and all that good stuff.

So glad I missed that era.

And there's just like red faced, inflamed puffy swan. And part of that is just because of all the nasty ingredients that are in all the energy bars and protein bars and protein shakes, et cetera, that are out there, that are like, you know, man in a can type of things. But also it's just due to freaking calories. Like, you are in a constantly inflamed state. It's why most of the blue zones in the world, most of the areas of longevity, they have a practice at some point during the week or during the month or at some point during the year of fasting. And it's even a big problem in athletes. I have an upcoming podcast on this about how athletes, because they're working out so much, they constantly have guts that are subjected to large amounts of calories that need to be digested. And when your gut never gets a break, you can have not only inflammation, but constipation, heartburn, and all these issues that a lot of even, quote unquote, healthy exercise enthusiasts can get. So.

Yeah, well, it makes sense because, I mean, if you're eating that much, especially in your early years, by the time you're like 50, your gut has been working out.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And sometimes you do have to hit the reboot button, so to speak, with a fasting protocol. So, that being said, I'm going to give you five of my best ways to burn more calories and to reverse some of the metabolic damage following a cheat day. So here we go. The first I already alluded to. So we talked a little bit about cold and cold thermogenesis. And what I like about that, in addition to its ability to simply burn calories, is that you get a big release of the hormone called adiponectin. Adiponectin gets released from your fat tissue during cold thermogenesis or cold exposure. Now, what adiponectonectin does is it increases what's called mitochondrial biogenesis, the conversion of white fat into brown fat, like we talked about earlier. But even more importantly, it triggers the release of free fatty acids from fat tissue, causes them to be taken up into muscle tissue to be burned as a fuel. So it literally strips the fat out of the fat cells that you filled up the day before. The cool thing is that's also a natural anti inflammatory hormone, adiponectin. And they've shown that through the use of cold thermogenesis. And one study was done with this cool fat burner vest that I wear. It's able to raise adiponectin by about 9% when you use it, which is significant. May not sound that significant because it's not double digit, but it is pretty significant.

So what's the deal with being like, how long do you actually need to be cold for?

Yeah, good. Question. So there are various stages of cold thermogenesis. I wrote an article for the website T Nation about this, about how you've got mild cold thermogenesis and then moderate cold thermogenesis and then hardcore cold thermogenesis. Mild cold would be like, okay, I'm gonna set my room temp at 60 degrees and sleep in the cold. And it's not like you're shivering all night, but you're aware it's like a cooler temperature. That's mild cold thermogenesis. And that requires long periods of time. That would be like you're gonna keep your house at that tem, right? And be subjected to it for whatever 8 to 10 hours during the day. You don't get much of a response, but you get a little bit of an uptake in lipase, fat burning, metabolic activity, et cetera. Moderate cold thermogenesis would be, you are doing like a couple of cold showers during the day. You are perhaps doing a cold water swim, right? Like you're going to the gym and you're swimming in the pool's like 70 degrees and you're kind of cold. And it's one of those swims where you swing your arms at the edge of the pool trying to convince yourself to jump in. It's a good idea, but you're also not shaking and shivering at the end. You're goosebumping a little bit, but it's not that bad. A hardcore cold thermogenesis would be 20 minute ice bath where it's literally everything you've got. And when you get out, you're shivering for 30 to 60 minutes afterwards. Or the use of this cool fat burner gear where you would wear the vest until you get to the point where you're shivering and then you keep it on and continue to shiver for a good 60 minutes. So that's where you get the biggest effect is once your body is actually shivering, shaking, goosebumps, that's where you get a big effect. And that's typically what I go for just because I'm masochistic and hardcore.

And just quickly, what's the benefit of doing the actual hot to cold contrast?

So the hot to cold contrast, going from cold to hot, what happens is you get increased production of what's called nitric oxide. The calorie burning effects of the hot cold contrast are not quite as beneficial as the cardiovascular effects. Right. It's like taking a fire hose to your arteries. Vasoconstriction, vasodilation, increased glucose and oxygen delivery. To tissues, increased production of nitric oxide, greater wakefulness because your brain gets more capillary delivery as well. So that's kind of the idea. The hot, cold stress. But ultimately, if you can, the morning after a cheat day, subject yourself to cold, preferably like that hardcore cold. It can make a huge difference in terms of you not getting fat, basically in response to a cheat day.

And that's also going to make you feel good as well, isn't it, after going through that. And then when your body gets back to like a normal temperature, you'll feel real good.

Sometimes, like the morning after Thanksgiving or Christmas, I don't want to exercise. Like, I wake up and it's like you have a food hangover.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I can jump in cold water and kind of hang out for a little while. I can wear the cool fat burner vest and reply to some emails and stuff like that and still get a pretty good fat burning effect.

Fat burning for lazy people.

You can combine this with stuff. Curcumin, like I mentioned. Good plan. One to two grams of curcumin. In combination with cold thermogenesis, Caffeine also mobilizes fatty acids in a very similar way to adiponectin. Caffeine would be another thing to combine with cold thermogenesis. The last one is called bitter melon extract. Now, bitter melon extract can, similar to curcumin, help with the formation of brown adipose to white adipose tissue, probably via the release of adiponectin and leptin from fat cells, as well as the release of another hormone called irisin. And irisin works a little bit similarly to adiponectin, specifically in terms of mobilizing fatty acids from fat cells. It can also lower the signaling protein that's called myostatin, and that causes an increase in muscle growth. If you ever see, like myostatin knockout mice or myostatin knockout bulls, or there's even this little German kid you can see on the Internet. He's got like, he's like nine years old and he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's got a myostatin knockout gene where he just doesn't produce this or he naturally doesn't have this protein, myostatin. And when you knock out myostatin, you get this huge increase in muscle growth. He's probably gonna, like, die when he's 22. But, you know, you don't. You don't want just like a con. I'm sorry, that was rude.

He took me on an emotional roller.

Coaster all the Germans are upset now anyways though. So irisin is the other thing that this bitter melon extract might cause a release of, especially when combined with cold thermogenesis. So anyways, that is the first thing. Get cold, preferably combine it with curcumin, combine it with bitter melon extract and get freezing cold.

Not as cold.

Yeah, that's number one. Fasted exercise is kind of a no brainer here. If you can exercise, get up in the morning, do something in a fasted state, you're going to more readily tap into fatty acids. During the night, you will have burnt through some of your liver glycogen. And then when you wake up in the morning and you exercise, you're going to be more likely to dip into fatty acids. And yes, you can do the same thing. You can use curcumin, you can use bitter melon extract, you can use caffeine, you can even combine all these at once. Like your fasted exercise session could be a cold water swim, right? So you're getting cold thermogenesis plus facet exercise. So kind of like the best of both worlds. But a fasted, not a fed exercise session, not a drink, a cup of bulletproof coffee. Not that I have anything against bulletproof coffee. I, I like this stuff. But you know, you don't drink a 500 calorie cup of coffee to do your fasted exercise session, right? You just fat, you don't have a piece of pie, you just exercise. So that's number two, fasted exercise. Preferably about 20 to 30 minutes. You could go as long as an hour if you want to. Once you exceed about 90 minutes, that starts to get pretty stressful for your body. So you got that. The next is that you want to somehow like I mentioned, all those carbohydrates that you typically have on a cheat day are going to fill up your glycogen, they're going to fill up liver glycogen and muscle glycogen. And you want to at some point kind of tap into all that storage carbohydrate so that you free up storage carbohydrates so that you can have space to store any calories you might eat the next day, for example. So the way that you do that is you choose at some point during the day, preferably with a 1, 2 combo of a morning fasted cold exercise session and in the afternoon or evening do this next thing. And that would be something that taps into muscle glycogen quite readily. High intensity interval training or Weight training, that's how you burn glycogen. Both of those burn up tons of glycogen. And so what that means is anything that uses a lot of muscles, like cycling, for example, cycling with high intensity interval sessions, like 10 by very, very hard 30 second efforts on a bicycle with full recovery, your big thigh and hamstring and quad muscles, they burn a lot of glycogen, they store a lot of glycogen, they also burn a lot of glycogen. So cycling would be one example of a very good method of doing high intensity interval training. You actually are going to burn more glycogen that way than if you say sprint. Unless you're sprinting up a hill wearing a weight vest, for example. Weight training is the other way to do it. Full body weight training, make sure you're moving through full range of motion, forcing the muscles to actually rely upon glycogen storage, glycogen and carbohydrates to move through that range of motion, preferably working the muscle to fatigue. That's how you burn carbohydrates. It's not rocket science obviously. So that would be number three. So we've got cold thermogenesis, we've got fasted exercise, we've got high intensity interval training and, or weight training, preferably both. You could do that in the afternoon, for example. The next would be low carbohydrate intake. And this should go without saying, your glycogen levels are topped off. So the fewer carbohydrates that you can eat the next day the better. Especially if your cheat day involved a high amount of carbohydrates or a high amount of protein. Now fat doesn't get converted into muscle glycogen quite as readily. So if your cheat day involved, I guess, kind of like yours, Rachel, Butter, dammit, butter, cream, what else? Chocolate mousse, et cetera. And it's not like a sugar cheat as much as it's a fat cheat. In that case, following that up with a low carb day isn't going to do you quite as much good. But if your cheat day is pizza, spaghetti, ice cream, like any of these sugar and carb laden foods, going low carb the next day simply means that you're dumping that much less glycogen into your body. And also when you consider that glucose is inflammatory to the nerves and inflammatory to the blood, if it spends a lot of time in the bloodstream, then you can consider that to be an anti inflammatory measure as well.

And what about just Fasting in general, like skipping meals after a cheat day.

I mean, you can definitely have a cheat day and then just fast the entire next day if you want to. You could do a water fast or something like that. A lot of people that listen, they're exercising, however, and sometimes if, whatever. Let's say you are running a marathon in February and you have a few cheat days over the holidays. If you just decide you're going to fast and maybe try and exercise through the fast on the day after the cheat day, that can be really hard to get a high quality exercise session in. And it may fly in the face of say in this case your marathon training. And so in that case, just fasting in the morning and then throwing down something hard in the afternoon and more of a fed state could be more prudent. So it kind of depends on your level of activity really.

Right. If it was a recovery day, it'd be okay.

Yeah, you could totally water fast or just like caffeine slash green tea, some electrolytes, maybe some greens and yeah, just fast stare at the wall. Infrared sauna and niacin. This is a protocol that I talked about in my podcast on how to biohack your body with an infrared sauna. And what happens is when you consume high dose niacin and you follow that up with infrared, preferably via sauna, you could use like one of these mats or body wraps or whatever. But the sauna is the most efficacious way to do it. You get lipolysis. So you actually lipolyze fat cells in a very similar way as you lipolyze fat cells. When you combine, say curcumin with cold, you get a little bit of an anti inflammatory effect and you get this fat loss effect. You also sweat things out, like you sweat out things like heavy metals and toxins and stuff like that when you're in an infrared sauna. And no, that is not woo woo stuff that I'm pulling up my butt. As a matter of fact, this Monday I am publishing an article on how that occurs, on how you actually can detox through your skin, not just through your liver and your poo and your urine. You can detox through your skin. So I'm gonna talk about that. But basically what it comes down to is that you get a 1, 2 combo, you get lipolysis and you get detoxification. So the infrared sauna would be another way to do it. And I mean again, you could combine things here. You could wake up, you've got access to a sauna you could do your sauna with high dose niacin in your system and then you could follow that up with like a cold water swim. I mean, there's, there's a lot of different ways that you can mix and match this stuff.

So the best way really would be to do a high intensity exercise in a fasted state. But cold in doing something cold, not eating any carbs, and then having a sauna afterwards.

Sounds like a party. And yeah, so that's pretty much it. This also goes by the term bulimia, orthorexia, body dysmorphic disorder, et cetera. We're toeing the line with that kind of stuff. Of course, I'll readily admit eating to train and training to eat. Some people do too much of that. So I would caution you, use every strategy that I just talked about in moderation. I do not endorse stuffing your face like Rachel with butter and cheese and chocolate mousse once a month on a daily basis at least. So there you have it. I'll put links in the show notes to some of these tips over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 335. Hi, Ben. My name is James. I grew up taking Ritalin from the age of about 10 to 23 ish. So I took a lot of Ritalin during that time. I was wondering what I can do to get some health back in my liver and all the other filtration systems that may have been damaged through the long use of that drug. Thank you. So Rachel, have you ever seen the Lego Movie cartoon? No.

No.

There's this guy that is old school Lego figurine in the movie and he's like the quintessential person that you'd put on Ritalin. He basically runs around going spaceship, spaceship, spaceship. And then he builds spaceships extremely fast, hyper, and flies off in his spaceship. And he's just like a complete spaz. Right.

There's a really hilarious New Family Guy episode out where they give Stewie Ritalin and then Brian takes it as well. And it's hilarious.

Oh really? It's, it's a Family Guy riddle and.

Episode a new one.

Okay, we're gonna link to that in the show notes.

So Stewie gets real calm and Brian gets real crazy.

Nice. Still on those meds, huh? Yeah, they, they helped me to think. Okay, time for an eyes open nap. God, look what those pills are doing to you. Putting you on that stuff was a huge mistake. Okay, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes. Writing a note to myself now to add that to the show, notes the Family Guy Ritalin episode. I've actually never used Ritalin, even though it is actually something that a lot of folks are taking, is almost like a, like a smart drug kind of, right? Because it is an amphetamine like substance. So it causes the same types of effects on the body as forms of speed, like loss of appetite and increased heart rate, increased wakefulness, which you could also define as insomnia depending on whether you say glass half full or half empty. And it is something that is even abused a lot these days, as most people know, you know, injection snorting. A lot of people are using Ritalin and a lot of people are seeing some long term health effects from that, especially when using it recreationally. Like teenagers dying of heart attacks while they're out skateboarding because they're using a bunch of Ritalin as a party drug, that type of thing. So it's really, really interesting. The compound itself is called methylphenidate. Methylphenidate. So methylphenidate is completely water soluble. And what it can do in very, very high amounts because of that is it can block a lot of little small blood vessels. So it can cause some, some damage to the cardiovascular system. It can also cause some emotional conditions and addiction like symptoms even with short term lower amounts. And you know, a lot of times you will see short term effects like disturbed sleep patterns, sometimes violent behavior, sometimes hyperexcitability or irritability, sometimes panic or psychosis. A lot of people don't feel very good on Ritalin and in many cases it's not that great to be feeding kids the equivalent of poor man's cocaine. Right. Kind of like what Ritalin is. Long term effects because of its water solubility can be permanent damage to blood vessels in the heart, blood vessels in the brain, high, high blood pressure, liver, kidney and lung damage. Not a huge amount of it is metabolized by the liver, unlike Modafinil, which is like 80% metabolized by the liver. Methylphenidate, not so much, but it can cause long term organ damage. It can also irritate your nose if you're snorting it too much. Destruction of tissues in the nose is something that you see in people who use Ritalin recreationally.

So the idea with snorting is that it what enters your bloodstream more quickly or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Nasal capillaries and mucous membranes, et cetera. So anyways though, the biggest thing though for children, you know, one of the reasons I wouldn't really ever put my boys on it, for example, is just long term, very strong psychological dependence and depression and suicidal tendencies. Like those are the biggies with Ritalin that you see a lot of kids get or just, you know, suicidal thoughts, suicidal feelings, depression, et cetera. So of course, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pretty common neurobehavioral thing that you see these days. Adhd, whether it's related to diet, whether it's related to toxins in the environment, mold, water, air, et cetera, I am a firm believer that it's more of an issue issue with A, our modern environmental conditions not being that conducive to health in many cases, and then B, the issue with a lot of children these days leading a more sedentary lifestyle. Meaning, like, my boys get super duper hyperactive. They probably fall into every single category of ADHD when they're sitting at home all day versus when they play out in the forest for four hours and come back in just like, you know, both stimulated but also exhausted. And they, they go to bed just fine.

So I feel like, I don't know if this is a great analogy, but it's the same as my dog. Like, if my dog doesn't go for a run, he's a total ass.

Right? So. Exactly. Or sometimes. But some dogs, like you could take them for a run, but then you bring them back and you feed them a bunch of crap dog food. They also have behavioral issues, right? So, so sometimes it isn't just environment, sometimes, sometimes it's fun. And then also, you know, when you, when you create a psychologically diagnosable condition, in many cases you just create a bunch of people who have that condition even though really they just, you know, they just need to be allowed to be kids.

Right?

It's a big thing, boys.

And you know, regardless, it doesn't sound like Ritalin is the best thing to be the answer to this ADHD question.

No, and interestingly, many of the alternatives to Ritalin are also things that can help reverse or combat a lot of the harmful effects of Ritalin. So let's take a big one here. Fish oil. So the EPA and DHA in fish oil has been shown to assist with cognition and behavior modification in kids who have ADHD in randomized control trials. So dha, for example, a very essential fatty acid for the brain, can help to improve literacy and behavior. Epa, on the other hand, can help with blood flow and with reversing a lot of the blood vessel damage that Ritalin can cause. So fish oil would be one thing. Like if I had been on Ritalin or if I was dealing with something like ADHD, I would definitely be taking about 2 to 4 grams of a good healthy fish oil each day. So that's one thing. There are some other things that help out too. One is carnitine. So there's this substance called acetyl L carnitine. You'll find it in many cases in meat, for example, but you can also get it in its supplemental form. And that's another thing that has been successfully used to treat adhd. Now, the form of L carnitine is important because in many cases, if you go to the typical supplement store or even if you go to, you know, for example, at greenfieldfitnesssystems.com we sell L carnitine, but we sell a form called carnitine L tartrate and that's used for physical performance and power output. Okay. It's something that you would use more for athletes. You need a form called acetyl L carnitine or Alcar a L C A R if you're looking for cognitive enhancement. Okay. There's a third form called propionyl L carnitine or gplc. That one is typically used for blood flow issues. That's probably the least common one that you're going to find. But if you're looking at using L carnitine for neurologic health, then you want the form called Alcar A L C I R. Brands vary like Now Foods is a good brand. Standard process is a good brand. Thorne has a good brand. I'll put some links in the show notes for you, but I would be considering that in addition to fish oil, now there are also some herbs. Ashwagandha is a very important herb. It's one that we talked about. Did you listen to the podcast episode with with Roger Drummer?

I did, yeah. It was fascinating stuff.

Yes. We released this podcast episode over the weekend. If you haven't listened to it, definitely go listen in and we talk about adaptogens and herbs and how they help to regulate a lot of processes in the body, specifically behavioral, stress based issues, hormone based issues, et cetera. And Ashwagandha is a biggie when it comes to this. So Ashwagandha is one to look into. But there are some other things very similar to Ashwagandha. Ashwagandha 1, for example is called Bacopa B A C O P A. There was one study that found that kids 6 to 12 years old who had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, they actually were able to manage those symptoms. This is a very Recent study last year with the use of this Bacopa herb and Ashwagandha has similar effects. A lot of these herbs that are considered adaptogens actually help out quite a bit with neurotransmitter regulation. And while I am not a doctor and you cannot misconstrue this as medical advice, and I'm not saying that you have a kid who's bouncing off the walls on Ritalin, you take them off Ritalin right away and start shoving fish oil down the hatch. But I am trying to give you some information. So I just have to throw that disclaimer out there so that we don't get a bunch of parents with ADHD suing the Ben Greentel Fitness Show. So not that that would ever happen. So anyways, though, the supplement that has a high amount of adaptogens in it, but doesn't have caffeine in it, which I don't feel, especially for kids that they should be using. If you're an adult, fine, not a big issue. But there's this one called Inner Peace. So this guy we interviewed named Roger Drummer, we talked about this a little bit on the show, he's got two different formulations. One is called tnt, which is more of an energy tonic that has a bunch of adaptogens in it. And then inner peace is basically everything that's in TNT without any of the wakefulness inducing compounds.

Right? Okay.

Yeah. So that one's called Inner Peace. I take it before my naps, usually in the afternoon.

And so just one thing quickly, with adhd, and you talked about what exactly is neurotransmitter regulation?

So this would mean, for example, some of those things we talked about earlier related to happiness, like dopamine, serotonin, etc. Let's say you're low in dopamine or you're low in serotonin, it can cause upregulation or a greater release of those from what's called the synaptic cleft that connects one nerve cell to another nerve cell. So that would be how something like an adaptogen would work on a neurotransmitter level.

I see, yeah.

Yeah. The last thing that would work, well, more for managing ADHD than for reversing some of the effects of Ritalin, would be 5 ADHD, HTP and GABA. So 5 HTP, that's hydroxytryptophan, then GABA is gamma aminobutyric acid. Taking both of those together can have some calming effects. A lot of women during their time of the month, whether it be to control their propensity to eat ungodly amounts of Brie cheese or to my wife. My wife has used both of these before when she finds herself irritable or experiencing cravings, et cetera. These can also help to manage some of the symptoms of adhd. Incidentally, they can also help with insomnia and excessive wakefulness. So five HTP and gaba, you're going to find them in a lot of sleep inducing compounds. There are some precursors to that, like lemon balm and ashwagandha that are in the CBD compound that I formulate. There's also one I mentioned on it, how you could get the buffalo bar and everything for there. They make one called New Mood. And New Mood is just a blend of lemon Balm, GABA precursors, 5 HTP et cetera and 5 HTP. By the way, the way that works is it's a precursor to serotonin, so it helps you with a positive mood. And there's some other things in there too like chamomile and valerian root and some other relaxation type of compound compounds. But I would recommend if you're just trying to calm yourself down a little bit, anything that contains a combination of 5 HTP and GABA or 5 HTP and GABA precursors can be quite useful. And again, unlike modafinil and stuff like that, long term liver, kidney gut damage, it's not as high with Ritalin as much as some of the blood flow issues with some of the things I talked about will help with and also the behavioral issues. But if you do want to do something like a gut detox or a liver detox or something like that, there are a lot of false claims out there when it comes to detoxification. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't work. There's a lot of stuff that they make claims about that simply do not work. Some of the things that actually have research behind them, Chlorella would be one, charcoal would be another. There's one called N acetylcysteine that they use in hospitals a lot to detox the organs after alcohol intoxication. So what I'll do is I have an article that I wrote about kind of like myths of detox and which things actually work and which things are either woo woo or designed to make someone money. And I wrote that over on the Get Fit Guy website. So I will link to that in the show notes as well. If you kind of want to throw the detox root in there as well, it's called how to Detox youx Liver and your Kidneys is part two of that series. And then is Detoxing really a Myth? Is part one of those series and I'll put links to those in the show notes for you. So there you have it.

Hey Ben, this is Patrick. Apologies to any of your vegan listeners out there, but I have a question concerning harvesting deer organs. I'm a hunter and this year I plan to harvest the animals organ meats. I was wondering if you had any suggestions on specific organs I should retrieve. I'm already planning on saving the heart and liver. I've also seen that kidneys have been suggested as well. I just wanted to get your thoughts on these and any others which might be beneficial. Thanks and love your podcast. Keep up the good work.

Rachel Earmuffs.

This one makes me giggle.

Ear muffs I know that you are not a wild gamer.

I am open each to their own. We all do our best. I'm fascinated to hear Ben, have you ever actually harvested a full animal?

Many times, yeah.

You a pro?

I. Well, mostly deer, so I haven't done like bear and pig. My wife's done done pig before. She is. I remember one time I was off traveling speaking somewhere and I came back and an entire pig was taken apart in our garage. Looked literally like a murder scene. I did not complain about the bacon that materialized shortly thereafter, but the scene itself was almost disturbing. Anyways though, when it comes to wild game, and especially when it comes to deer organs specifically, there are some things that you can harvest. And the first thing I'm going to recommend to you is a book. And then I'll jump into some of the things that I do. So the book is a relatively new book. It's written by a guy named Steven Ranella, who is quite the resource when it comes to not just harvesting wild game, but cooking it and preparing it in a darn tasty way. So his new book is called the Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking Wild Game and it's an excellent read. I've read it. Great book. Really good for hunting tactics too. Actually learned a few things about tracking whitetail and so it's got a lot of good things in there. So check out that book. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But yes, there are some things that you can use. One would be the heart. So the heart is when you're field dressing the animal, of course, typically very, very easy to find. You can't really miss the heart. And when it comes to the Heart. Typically you need to marinate that if you are going to use it. So the heart responds very, very well. Especially deer heart responds very well to a marinade. So what you can do, why do.

You have to marinate.

Pumps a lot? It beats a lot. So it's kind of like some of the muscles that you'd use a lot like a calf muscle. It can be kind of chewy and dense just because, yeah, it's tough. So that's why marinating it works so well. One of the things that you can use as a marinade is some extra, extra virgin olive oil. You can combine that with any kind of steak seasoning, like a salt, pepper, cayenne type of thing, and then vinegar. Vinegar actually works very, very well to tenderize the meat. So you mix the olive oil with the vinegar and then you basically just marinate it. You don't have to marinate heart for very long. You can marinate it for like an hour and then you basically slice it into little like half inch thick slices and you grill it and it's actually pretty tasty if you do that. The trick is to marinate it though. You want the flavor of heart to actually be pretty good. Another big one would be the liver. The liver, again, very easy to harvest. If you're out hunting elk and you're way out in the middle of nowhere, a lot of people won't grab the liver, the heart, they won't grab the bones either, which are great for bone marrow, but they're heavy. And so when you're packing out from the field, sometimes you're just wanting to pack your major cuts that you can use for sausage or for steaks, et cetera. But if you can pack out the liver, not only is it an extremely rich source of fat soluble vitamins, but I think it's tasty, Tasty. Personally, what do I do with the liver? I'll typically soak it for about a day or overnight. You either soak it in lemon juice, which is relatively easy to find and get your hands on, or you can soak it in raw milk. Both of those remove not only some of the toxins from the liver, because it is a detoxification organ, but they also help to tenderize the liver very similar to the heart. And they remove what a lot of people describe as the gamey, almost metallic flavor of liver.

I'm saying yep, because I actually have tasted it.

Yup.

You guys think I'm a little fake, but I have eaten it.

So once you've done that, what you do very Very, very simple. You take a couple of eggs and you whisk them. So you've got your eggs. You take some coconut flour or some almond flour or any kind of flour, and you take your little slices of liver. You drag them first through the egg, then you drag them through the flour, and then you sprinkle some salt and pepper on them and you simply grill them for about four to five minutes per side. Very, very simple recipe. You can add onions or mushrooms or bacon, you know, that you kind of grill up on the side if you want. All those go pretty well with liver. And that's it. That's my world famous liver recipe.

Simple stuff.

Yeah. So you got that. Another one is the kidneys. You can peel the outer membrane away from the kidneys. You can take them. Those are going to be on either side of the deer, of course, kind of up around close to the backside of where the liver's at. And you can very, very easily, without doing too much to the kidneys at all, just basically scramble them up. Like you can cube the kidneys once you've peeled the outer membrane away. That's very important. Unless you want a chewy membrane around your kidneys. But they're great for your adrenals. And you can just scramble up with eggs, potatoes, throw some herbs like cilantro or thyme or parsley in there. And the kidneys are another one that some people don't harvest, but that actually work quite well. So there's a couple other things that some people don't get from the deer, but that you can get. One is the cheek meat, the jowl meat. It's very flavorful, it's very rich. It's almost like pulled pork. And it's actually quite easy to. And again, you may want earmuffs here, Rachel, you can skin the head. So you get. You remove the skin from the head. Once you've skinned the head, you've got access to the jowl meat. And the jowl meat is just like they sell at a lot of Mexican taco stands, like tacos made from tongue, tacos made from cheek meat. And it is very, very tender. A deer's tongue is typically not worth it. Very small. Like elk, moose, they've got big tongues that can be very tender if you marinate them, et cetera, but not a deer tongue. So I wouldn't recommend the tongue, but the jowl meat definitely. So you've got heart, liver, kidneys, your jowl meat. And then the last thing that you should take into consideration are the tenderloins. And the tenderloins, you're going to find kind of like underneath the. Well, it's basically on the loins kind of back behind the ribs a little bit. And that is something that if you're out in the field or out camping and you're hunting, if you get that out of there right away, it doesn't preserve very well, it doesn't age very well, but it's extremely flavorful. You can eat it like that night. It's one of the most, most tender, juicy pieces of meat that you're ever gonna eat. So you just basically peel away the tenderloin. You want to peel some of like, it's got like a silver skin on it and some fat along the side of the spine where you're gonna get the loins from. But if you get rid of that silver skin, you get rid of some of the fat, you cut those tenderloins out, you can literally eat those almost right away. And they're amazingly flavorful when you get them from venison. So.

And how long does it take to.

Do all this field dressing an animal? Takes me about 45 to 60 minutes to actually, you know, gut it, field dress it. If you want to skin it and quarter it, I mean, that's easily another two or three hours at least for me. I've seen some people do it extremely fast. And then other prep, like, once you've quartered, if you're cutting it and you're bagging it and all that jazz, I mean, sometimes we're talking about hours and hours like that can be a full, full day's choreography. So ultimately though, yeah, this is a great question Patrick asked, because a lot of times people don't save as many different portions as they can. And amazingly, I talk about this in my book Beyond Training. Back in the day, the good old days, the muscle meat was not prized because of its lack of fat soluble vitamins, because of its lack of the amino acid glycine, which is important for your joints and your hormones because of the lack of fats. And instead the liver, kidneys, the marrow, the heart, these are the more prized parts of an animal. And a lot of times they would feed the lean meat, the steaks, to the dogs. So it's kind of interesting now we prize the lean meats more, but yeah, these organ meats are incredibly important for everything from your adrenal health to your hormone balance, et cetera. And yeah, if you just can't stand the taste, you can get desiccated liver powder and you can get thyroid extract through what are called thyroid glandulars. I mean, you can supplement your way through this stuff, but it's, oh, so much more tasty, too.

Yeah. And if you're gonna hunt and kill it, you should eat it, the whole thing.

Eat your liver with some mushrooms and onions and bacon. I'll save some mushrooms and onions for you, Rachel, so you can have those.

Thanks.

And the leftover lemon juice.

I'll pass on the cheek meat and the kidneys and the liver and the heart.

Hi, Ben. My name is Judith and I have a question for you. So here it is. I've been a runner for most of my life. I was more of a 10k runner until last year, and then I've been competing in half marathon and I'm now gunning for my first ultra marathon, my first 15k. Actually. That would be next May. So I clearly upped my mileage in the past year and a half, and as I reacted to that, my knees started to crack very loudly when I just when I walk and even more when I climb stairs. I was wondering if you had any advice for me on, like, what to do to fix that or if I just had to kind of suck it up and, you know, let it make noise. So thanks ahead and keep up with the awesome work that you're doing.

So I feel like this is everybody's big question about joints cracking. And what do you do? What does it mean?

We had a whole podcast on this, of course, several months ago, episode number 314, about why joints pop. But this is actually quite a timely question because there is a relatively new study that came out a couple of months ago that we didn't talk about in that podcast episode. And the study is entitled Real Time Visualization of Joint Cavitation. And what it goes into is how we've always thought that cracking sounds that come from human joints are caused by these bubbles, like the collapse of bubbles that form as different surfaces within the joints get separated. And so that bubble collapsing causes a crack cracking or a popping or a little bit of a noise. So what they did in this study was they took a bunch of joints. In this case, they used metacarpophalangeal joints, which are basically your fingers, and they subjected them to traction forces. And then they looked at what would happen using magnetic resonance imaging or MRIs. And what they found was that the cracking was associated not with the collapse of. Of a bubble, but instead via something called a rapid cavity inception. A rapid cavity inception. So what that means is that rather than being caused by bubbles popping, the Sound actually comes from gas filling into the cavity that's formed when you separate a joint. And so it's actually caused by bubbles forming.

Forming. Wow.

So it's like little bubbles are forming in these spaces and getting vacuumed into your joints. As your joints separate, there's not fluid that can fill that joint volume. And so you create this cavity, create a black hole within your joints. And when that happens, you get this, like, popping kind of sound. It's this influx of fluid.

And is it in any way unhealthy? Is it a sign of unhealthy or an unhealthy joint or anything?

Not in. In most cases. So in most cases, especially with, like, knuckles and backs and stuff like that, cracking your knuckles or cracking these joints has never been shown to cause arthritis. If you have osteoarthritis, right. Like, if you have cartilage in your joints that's damaged, in some cases, it could theoretically be bone on bone moving against each other. That's more called crepitus. And a lot of times that is just what sounds like. It's like this creeping. It's not a crack or a pop.

Right.

That is more damaging. But the cracking or the popping is not. Now, there are some cases where it's something else. Like the hips, for example, will sometimes pop or snap. You see this in runners and cyclists a lot. This can often be due to tightness and muscular imbalances. And it's literally tendons that are snapping that are snapping over joints. That is something that we discuss in that podcast episode. So go back and listen to episode 314 if you want to hear about the. The fix for that. But then with knees, there's another issue that can cause knees to crack and pop, and that can be lack of strength in what's called the vastus medialis muscle in the knee. And when that happens, your patella doesn't glide over the femoral surfaces the way that it should. So this is basically a weakness in the inner quad muscle. It can also be related to extreme tightness in the hamstrings. So when I was. When I was a young whippersnapper, I was like, 19, 20 years old, I was playing a ton of volleyball, like sand volleyball. I was teaching the sand volleyball course at the University of Idaho. So every morning I was playing. It's a horrible job. I would basically go out in the sand volleyball course behind the dorms and hang out with hot college girls for an hour and hit the volleyball back and forth.

Every young person's dream.

Every young Person's dream. And I was playing middle for the men's volleyball team. And I was also running because I was starting, starting to dabble in triathlon at that point. And I was putting my knees through a lot of stress. And I got to the point where I couldn't run more than a block without horrible knee pain, couldn't jump, couldn't land. And I thought I had destroyed my knees. I literally thought, well, that sucks. I'm done. I'll be that guy that needs joint replacement when I'm 25.

Oh, gosh.

I went to the doctor. I went to a local orthopedic surgeon. And in many cases, orthopedic surgeons, they're knife happy, right? They're trigger happy. They want to put you under the knife. And this guy took one look at me and put me on the table, put me through some stretches, and basically told me, your inner quads are weak as heck and you need to spend a good 10 to 15 minutes per day stretching and lengthening your hamstrings. So I did exactly what he said. I did all these standing straight leg cable kicks where I was kicking forward with an elastic band or a cable with my toe turned slightly outwards so that I was strengthening the inner part of my quadriceps. I did the leg extension machine, same thing. Toes turned outward, really focusing on the inner quads. I would walk uphill on the treadmill consciously and slowly focusing on the inner quadriceps muscles. And then I would do isometric lunge holds where I would drop down in a lunge position, just. Just hold a lunge position while focusing again on that inner quad muscle firing. So I was essentially training my inner quads and at the same time, foam rolling and stretching the heck out of my hamstrings, like, until it almost like. You know how stretches sometimes feel like they're going to hurt because you're stretching, like, their teeth grittingly tight. And within about three months, my knee pain went completely away because it was all due to my kneecap tracking improperly. And once I had stretched my hamstrings, checking my quads, didn't get any crepitus, didn't get any cracking, didn't get any popping. That all went away along with the pain. So what I'm getting at here, in case you hadn't guessed, is that in Judith's case, I would recommend she strengthens her VMO and she stretches her hamstrings. And in most cases, that is going to fix the issue with pain in your knees. Yeah, there may be other things going on. You might have tight calves, you might have tight hip flexors. You may need to do like a full body foam rolling routine. Like all that stuff is good. Maybe you bicycle and your seat's too low. Obviously. There's a ton of things I don't know about Judith because I don't stalk our podcast listeners, but the quads and the hamstrings are the two places that I would highly recommend that Judith to start with.

So and so there are a certain set of joints that could should crack normally, and then there are others that you might want to look into, something else being the reason for it.

That's actually one of my favorite things to do is to kind of like interlace my fingers, put them forward, crack my knuckles, and pop them a little bit right before I swing open the refrigerator to eat my pie.

Kind of like I'm ready morning routine.

Pre pie stretch. Yeah. So anyways, though, check out Judith or anybody else listening in. I'll put a link to some of these studies on joint cavitation, why joints pop, some of the fixes, et cetera. So that and so many more goodies over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com335 and speaking of goodies, we have a lovely, lovely little gem. Did you see the review that got left on itunes?

I haven't. I'm obviously about to read it, though.

Yeah. I swear, maybe this person was Australian. It sounds like something an Aussie would say. Lovely little Jane. So Jess Lynn 007 left us this review and here's the way it works. If you leave a review on itunes, not only do you do a great deal of good karma and service to help spread the good word about the podcast, you go in, you leave five stars, you say something nice, and you feel really good about yourself. Makes you happy. Probably in the same way that gratitude. There's got to be some kind of a dopamine or a serotonin release.

That's an act of gratitude, possibly leaving a review. Yeah. That's how you can make yourself more happy.

Yeah. So make yourself more happy. Leave a review in itunes and if you hear your review read on the show, all you need to do is email geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's geergreenfieldfitness systems.com and we will send you a handy dandy tech T shirt. We will send you a BPA free water bottle. We will send you a really cool beanie that I actually wear quite a bit, all emblazoned with the Ben Grundle fitness logo. So, that being said, Rachel, you want to take it away?

All right, here we go. Jess says, remarkably, I discovered the podcast app on my phone a few months ago. Ben's podcast was the first one I listened to, and I've been hooked ever since. I have two boys, 7 and 4, who happen to love Ben's coconut popsicle recipe. Sometimes the information goes right over my head. Don't worry, Jess. Me too. But then I accept that as a challenge to grow, learn, and expand my knowledge of the ever growing health and fitness world. Check out this podcast and do yourself a favor by going ahead and clicking subscribe. Aww, what a legend.

And she, too. It sounds like she too, randomly discovers podcast apps on her phone, or apps in general. Like, I'll find apps on my phone that my. My kids have somehow figured out how to install. Like, my. My kids don't get my phone too much, but, like, I found that the fart app on there the other day just, like, cycles through 12 different variations of a fart.

That's definitely the app of a young boy.

Yeah, the other day they had figured out how to pull up a jokes website. Jokes website. So I gotta start being careful with my phone. The older. The older they get, the more. More apps in my download. God forbid they ever get my icloud password and actually be able to purchase apps. That will be the next phase of hiding my phone.

You're gonna have to look it up.

Yeah. In the meantime, thank you for the review to 007. Thanks for leaving that one, Jess Lynn. 007. And again, you can leave your itunes review and tune in this weekend, like I mentioned, for that Denise Finger podcast. It's going.

It's gonna be fascinating.

Blow your mind. It's. It's a good one. So that.

And listen to the one on adaptogenic herbs. That's really cool as well.

Yes, the herbs episode. Or as we say here in the Washington state, herbs. Herbs. It's herbs.

It's definitely. There's a H. It's herbs.

H. All right, all right, cool.

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

Sam.