How To Turn Yourself Into A Fat Burning Machine By Fasting For 24 Hours Then Going Out And Do Monster Workouts Without Bonking.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it's been a few months since we have had Dr. Peter Attia on the podcast. We did an incredibly popular interview with him a few months ago, and I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes for this interview. But when we talked to Peter, we specifically talked about how to fuel an active lifestyle and still be in a low carbohydrate or even what is called a ketogenic state. And if you want to really lay down the foundation of understanding and go back and listen to that podcast, if you haven't yet, I would recommend that you check it out before you listen into this one. But I had the pleasure of hanging out with Peter for a few days over in Boston recently at the Ancestral Health Symposium. And while we were visiting, Peter mentioned to me that he recently fasted for 24 hours. And then he went on, I think it was like a five or a six hour long bike ride with what I think was no fuel, just some sodium. And so I told him I had to get him on the podcast to kind of, kind of learn how he's doing stuff like that, how he's tracking it, what some of his tips and tricks are, just because there are a lot of health and fat loss and some really cool fat burning implications when you're in this ketogenic state, which we cover in the last podcast that we did. So, Peter, thanks for coming on the call today.

Ben, thank you so much for having me. It was awesome to meet you in person finally after speaking so many times and yeah, just it was an honor to meet you and look forward to chatting about this topic.

Yeah. And if you've ever seen me or seen Peter, you do know that I win the hair contest. So I just.

And the hide contest.

Yeah, that's true, that's true. But you win the ketogenesis contest, I think. So let's start there, man. Do you actually stay in this ketogenic state all the time?

It's a great question. It really depends on how you define it. So if you were to define ketogenesis as having a plasma or serum concentration of beta hydroxybutyrate above 0.5 millimolars, then there are definitely times I dip out of that state. So just for reference, the average person walking around is at 0 millimolars. The average person after an overnight fast might be at 0.1 millimolars. So 0.5 is kind of what we just sort of notionally use as a threshold for being in nutritional ketosis. And in my Experience. The sweet spot is really when you're about at 1 millimolar in a fasting non exercise state. So yeah, for about almost 18 months now I have been in nutritional ketosis. But there are definitely days when I slip out and it's obviously always a result of eating a little too much of something and it's generally over consuming protein. But on occasions it can be over consuming certain carbohydrates. For example, you're very, very susceptible to fruit, so over consuming fruit can easily whack you out of ketosis. Like I said, for me, that sweet spot in protein kind of needs to be below about 120, 125 grams a day. And there's times when I'll go over that and I might dip out for a day.

What's the sweet spot for carbs? Are you like at zero or no.

It'S very difficult to get zero. There are a couple of foods I just like too much to eliminate. It's hard for me to get rid of nuts in my diet. What I don't eat really any of is just sort of your routine carbs that most people think of. I don't eat low carb breads or low carb bars or things like that. But all of my carbohydrate content really comes in the form of vegetables, which I eat quite liberally. And obviously I don't really eat the big starchy ones. But even making a salad with tomatoes and cucumbers and stuff, you're getting some carbs there. As I mentioned, the nuts really like almonds and cashews and walnuts and macadamia. Not huge sources of carbs, but especially in the cashew, you got to be careful. Every ounce of those things can come with anywhere from like 5 to 9 grams of carbs. So you got to use those kind of liberally. Pardon me, not. You can't use those too liberally. And you know, I really like olives and I put heavy cream in my coffee and stuff. And again, it's really a numbers game. Over the course of 24 hours, you can very easily get to that 50 level, which is probably about the threshold. Although as we'll discuss today, Ben, there's a huge temporal component to when you consume these things.

You mean in conjunction with activity levels or time of day?

Both, yeah. And the frequency with which you're eating. As I'm starting to learn over the.

Past few months, how often are you testing, like with ketone strips?

You know, when I first entered nutritional ketosis, I was testing probably three or four times a day. And you know, when I work with people who are transitioning into ketosis, I sort of give them a very simple set of parameters, which is I'd like you to test first thing every morning, I'd like you to test immediately before dinner, and I'd like you to test right before bed. Those are three pretty predictable times in a person's day. When looking at the changes in glucose and beta hydroxybutyrate give me a sense of where the struggles are and where they go. Now, the kicker is these things aren't cheap. And as one reader on my blog pointed out, it's probably one of my top 10 comments I've ever got on the blog. They said the new definition of wealthy is the person who can afford to check their ketone strips all day long. The glucose strips are cheap, the ketone strips are not. Once you're really dialed in, I mean, you can move to as infrequently as every couple of days. Although I still check a lot when I'm doing kind of experiments on myself. You know, sometimes I'll go a week without checking and sometimes I'll check seven times in a day. So highly variable.

Cool. Well, that's probably a good segue, you talking about experiments that you do on yourself, because like I mentioned when we opened, you were telling me about how you fasted and then you went on a long bike ride. So before you explain how you did something like that, let's talk about why you would do something like that. What exactly were you trying to achieve when you. When you didn't eat for a day and then went out and did a long endurance training session?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's important to know that that certainly wasn't the first time I had done that and it took me a while to work up into that. So I hope that nobody decides that they're going to go a day without eating and then go for a five or six hour ride. Took me a while to get there. Basically in the spring I wanted to try and experiment to see could I give an attempt at this intermittent fasting. And as probably your listeners and readers know, there are a lot of different protocols for that out there. There's people who will advocate sort of doing one meal every 24 hours, you know, anywhere from once, twice, or several times a week. There are others who will talk about intermittent fasting where you just do all of your consumption within a window of time. Call it six hours. Sometimes people talk about eight hours. So going 16 hours off eight hours on. Basically, I wanted to look at all these things, and my motivation was really to kind of expand on what I'd already learned about my body's ability to utilize its own internal fat stores. You know, I travel a lot for work, and a lot of times I find myself during travel not having ready access to the kind of foods that are conducive to the life I want to live. And so, just naturally through that progress, I found myself fasting quite a bit. You know, it was sort of if my choice is, you know, eat the candy covered peanuts that Southwest is giving me, or, you know, eat the sort of go to Subway and scrape the turkey off the sandwich and eat the turkey, sometimes it's just easier to eat nothing. And so I began to observe in myself that I had this ability to go longer and longer in between meals if necessary, with no hit in performance. Whereas, you know, three years ago, when I was eating a standard American diet, that was simply impossible. I just couldn't function if I wasn't eating constantly. So that was really the genesis for this. And now specifically for the riding thing, what I wanted to know was if I'd become metabolically flexible enough that I could access fat stores even at a relatively high percentage of VO2, it seemed at least theoretically possible that I should be able to go for a long period of exercise without having to intake anything, because obviously I still have some glycogen in my liver and my muscles. And it seemed that if I provided enough hydration and mineral, I should be able to access fat to provide the majority of my energy requirement, with the exception of those peak periods where power output necessitates going to a glycogen path and therefore, an anaerobic pathway.

Gotcha. Okay, so basically, you're just trying to more or less turn yourself into a fat burning machine.

Exactly.

Cool. So in terms of getting through something like that, you told me that you were using high amounts of sodium via chicken bouillon cubes. And I actually recently wrote an article about some of the things that help you get through a low carbohydrate diet. And I know some of those supplements are the same for a long ketogenic training session, but are you taking in any supplements before or during something like a fast followed by a long and during training session? And are you taking in any form of calories at all? You know, like medium chain triglycerides from coconut oil or anything along those lines?

You know, it definitely depends on the experiment. So, you know, one thing that I've Gotten pretty comfortable with doing would be doing. So this would be sort of my standard thing. Whereas I would do maybe one meal a day. So let's say on a Saturday I would have my one meal and that might be at 5 o' clock in the evening. And then the next day I would wake up, call it at 6 or 7 o' clock in the morning. So 14 hours of a fast. I would then consume about 3 grams of sodium in the form of bouillon, usually either chicken or beef stock, and that's a pretty high amount. That's about half my daily requirement of sodium. And then I would load up the bottles with just water and basically I started gradually increasing how far I could ride under those cond. So the first time I did it, I just went for a 30 mile ride at a pretty reasonable intensity. And I carried with me what I call my rescue agents. I'll carry with me a bag of really salted nuts, usually cashews, some almonds and peanuts. I got through that 30 miler and I came home and I didn't need to eat. So I was like, okay, great. So the next week I tried that again and stretched it out to 40 miles and then 50 miles and eventually I was able to stretch that out. I think my longest ride to date under those conditions is about 90 miles. By the time I was doing a 90 mile ride, that was a pretty hilly ride, which probably took close to six hours, probably five and a half hours. Amazingly, when you get home from these rides, of course I'm always checking my glucose and ketone levels. That's some of the highest recordings you'll ever find in a ketone, because at that point you've really just turned the body over into fat oxidation. And of course your brain at this point is going to require the ketone because you no longer can supply the hepatic glucose output to meet your brain's requirement fully. So it wouldn't be uncommon to come home from a situation like that and have a blood glucose level in the 50s and a ketone level at three to three and a half millimolars. And so folks that are kind of familiar with those numbers, most people with a blood glucose of 50 are not cognitively playing with a full deck of cards. Whereas the amazing thing is when you've got the three and a half millimolars of ketone bodies there, you don't actually notice it. So that's kind of what got me thinking. Now there's an obvious question that Doug's asking, which is, is my performance improving? Under that situation. And the reality is, I would say no, this isn't necessarily a performance enhancing strategy, but one of the things I did want to do this summer was lose 10 pounds to try to get a little lighter for some of the climbing. And this was certainly a strategy that facilitated that this was an easier way to create a caloric deficit, but through still using a ketogenic diet to do it.

Right. And I think that's certainly something that's important to harp on is that there is that health performance trade off of any of the folks who I've spoken with so far who are kind of, you know, endurance athletes or athletes and who are still staying very low carb or ketogenic. You know, you seem to have to have cracked the code quite a bit here in terms of allowing yourself to go relatively hard in a state of ketogenesis. So I think this is good information. So what if somebody wants to maintain as high an intensity as possible? Let's say somebody wants to go out and, and do something like this. Go as low carb as they can, but also burn a few matches, you know, get up to max power, pass some guys during like a, like an Ironman triathlon. You'll be able to run at close to lactate threshold during a marathon, you know, following 112 mile bike. I mean, do you think that, that there are things that should be added into the mix to help folks along or have you experimented with any of that stuff?

Yeah, I've definitely done a lot of that. And certainly if you're, if you're like, if you're going to go out there and do an Olympic course and you want to break two hours, if you're going to go out there and run the Ironman, you're going to need some supplemental energy. And the reason I say that is anybody who's doing an Ironman, you're talking about, you know, even the winners are going to be in sort of that nine hour range and sort of your average super fit person is going to be kind of, you know, 10 to 12, I'm assuming, very difficult to not need the bursts to get to the point where you're going to not require going through your entire glycogen store. Now it's a complicated pathway, as you know, because obviously a lot of the glycerol that you're breaking down from fat goes through gluconeogenesis. So it's, you know, it's, your tank is not completely depleted. But nevertheless it's just not the most optimal way to, to get your performance the other product. And I think we may have spoken about this in the last podcast, but I've also been using this and in fact, for the past two weeks, I've been bringing it back into my training a lot more as the Superstarch product by generation YouCan. And the reason I'm just such a huge fan of that product is it's kind of like the best of both worlds because it is a starch. It's a pure starch. It's a hydrothermally treated amylopectin. And amylopectin is just plant glycogen. But you hydrothermally treat it, you turn it into a molecule with a molecular weight that's probably 2,000 times that of maltodextrin. And when you're ingesting this stuff on the bike or in the water or in the weight room or whatever, you're basically giving yourself a super, super slow release time release glycogen store. But you're doing it without the insulin spike that turns off lipolysis. And right now, what I'm doing with Superstarch primarily is using it post fasted ride as a means to very quickly get glycogen back in the tank. And that's just because of where I am right now and what I'm training for. I want to be able to go into each workout the next day, even though I'm going to be largely fasted, having at least a glycogen tank that's readily full. By readily I mean probably 2/3 full. It's obviously very difficult on a completely ketogenic diet to be walking around with a full tank of glycogen. Gotcha.

Have you experimented with anything else in terms of even supplements like caffeine or creatine or anything of that nature in conjunction with a good hard session in a ketogenic state?

Yeah, I mean, I've definitely gone through a lot of those things. I mean, I'm a caffeine consumer. I typically don't consume any caffeine while exercising, but it wouldn't be uncommon for me to have a large cup of coffee along with my cup of bouillon before I go out for a ride. You know, as far as other things that I use, you know, I'm just not really a fan of any of the commercial products. I certainly find the maltodextrins, the high fructose corn syrups products, just to be really counterproductive, both on the gastrointestinal tract and also in terms of the amount that they secrete insulin even during exercise, though to a much lesser extent during strenuous exercise than when you're sitting on a couch. But nevertheless, they really do inhibit fat lipolysis. And there's obviously data showing that for me, really on the bike, it's very simple. My supplement regimen off the bike is obviously a little bit more complex. We talked about sodium. I also supplement magnesium. I use a probiotic. I do use MCT oil as well. And a lot of fluid, believe it or not. It sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed how much your demands for fluids are there when you're doing this kind of work. And so I actually just did a 24 hour urine analysis the other day. And so for a day I had to keep track of everything that I was drinking and obviously voiding. I was kind of amazed. I mean, I drank like 7 liters of water in a day, which is probably more than I would have guessed if someone had asked me how much I drink.

Rob, you actually prefer the MCT oil to doing something like coconut oil?

Yeah, I do cook with coconut oil. So I'm actually getting MCTs both when I cook with coconut, because I really only apply heat to either coconut oil or butter or lard. But sometimes in the morning, it's just quicker and easy if I'm going to use a supplement to just take a couple teaspoons of straight MCT oil out of a jar.

Right, gotcha. Cool. So in terms of additional advice, any thoughts you have for folks as far as going out and doing this, first of all, do you have any additional recommendations and kind of parallel to that, is there any thing that folks need to be aware of when it comes to people who shouldn't be doing something like this or potential side effects of this approach? Anything that could potentially be damaging?

Well, absolutely. I think it's important for people to keep in mind that my experience is really reflective of an N of 1. I started this after a year of being keto. Adapted a little over a year, actually. I went through, and I think we may have discussed this in the last podcast, Ben. My first six to eight weeks of ketosis were horrible. So that was a really difficult transition for me. And a year into that, I think it was a much easier transition for me to move to not only an intermittent fasting protocol and various intermittent fasting protocols, but also incorporating rigorous exercise. I gotta be honest with you, I don't think I could have gone straight to what I'm doing now, which is two hour, really challenging, high intensity sessions in the Weight room, flipping the tires, doing the jumping, pull ups, all the crazy stuff I love doing. I don't think I could have just gone straight into a fasting state of doing those out of the gate. So I think the most important advice I'd give people is this is a journey and you've got to start slowly, you've got to listen to your body. So when you're getting lightheaded, when your performance is failing, you've got to kind of slow down, evaluate what's going on. It's obviously really difficult to troubleshoot these things in sort of a broad manner. I think every, every case is a little bit different. It's challenging. I know when you're running a blog to want to be able to help everyone specifically. Whereas at best the most you can do is kind of help people in general and hopefully give them the tools to ask themselves the questions. Am I getting enough sodium? Am I getting enough magnesium? Am I getting enough fluids? Am I getting enough fat? Am I taking too much protein? It really is. As Jeff Volek and Steve Finney would say, it's, it's probably more art than science at this point. Gotcha.

Cool. Well, I've got one last really important question for you, Peter. When are you going to come up to Washington State and race me on the bike?

Oh, I'd love to. You know, it's so funny. I was just on the phone with someone up in Washington State up at the University of Washington today, and I was asking him if he was going to be down in San Diego or if I was going to have to be up there. You know, Ben, I gotta be honest with you. I don't think I'd stand a chance against you on the bike, man. Now that I've seen you in person, I just, I don't think, I don't think I can take it. I think the only thing I could take you in is if we came up with a contest that was completely geared towards like things I knew how to do that you didn't. You know, like we could come up with sort of like a macrame, obscure set of things to do. But as your readers probably know, I mean, you're pretty amazing physical specimen and, you know, I'm just an old guy trying to get by.

Well, I think that if you probably put me into as ketogenic a state as you get into that, you would definitely have the upper hand. Especially if we fasted for a day and rode our bikes for six hours.

Only until you adapted. Once you adapted, you know, we'd be on par again.

Well, I think that was a lot of really good information, and what I'll do is link to Peter's excellent website where he's got some really good blog posts, especially on cholesterol. Incidentally, over@eatingacademy.com I'll also put a link to some of the other things that we talked about, like the UCAN sports drink mix and the link to the previous podcast that I did with Peter a few months ago. So Peter, thanks for your time today and for coming on the call.

Thanks a lot, Ben. It's been my pleasure. Always great to speak with you.