Insider Pro Athlete Nutrition Consult with Ben Greenfield

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.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. What you are about to hear is a recording of a nutritional evaluation that I did for one of the professional athletes who I work with. And I wanted to put this out there for you, the premium listener, just because I think that you'll get some value out of it. So enjoy. Okay, What I want to do here is go over a week's worth of eating in, you know, what's obviously a really physically active scenario. And I gotta tell you, when I was a bodybuilder and you know, I was a young hard charging athlete who was able to just like work out all day long, I did dump a lot of things into my body that my body could just process due to the high amount of physical activity that I was engaged in. But the problem is it eventually catches up with you. If you are dumping a lot of inflammatory omega 6 fatty acids into your body and affecting your joints and the total amount of inflammatory cytokines that your body produces, it eventually catches up to you. If you are dumping a lot of preservatives and artificial components into your body just because those tend to build in places like your liver and your gut and that eventually can affect things like your thyroid or your ability to generate testosterone or your ability for your gut bacteria to generate important vitamins like vitamin K2 or neurotransmitters. And then finally, the thing that can happen if your macronutrients in terms of your protein carb fat ratios are not ideal, is you tend to not have enough fat for adequate nervous system health, which eventually can degrade the health of a lot of the what are called the myelin sheaths which help your nerve signals to be propagated throughout your body. But it can also cause some insulin insensitivity issues as more and more insulin is released into your bloodstream from a high amount of carb intake or a high amount of proteins getting converted into glucose. So ultimately what we're looking at here is not whether or not a diet is actually adequate to support performance, but whether or not a diet is adequate to support the ultimate combination of performance health in longevity. So let's start by looking at Monday. So Monday, 3:30am Beef jerky now first of all, 3:30am is a pretty damn early time of day to get up. And there was actually a recent study on circadian rhythms and athletes. This one was done in swimmers, but it basically showed that you're better off if you're actually able to do most of your hard exercise later on in the afternoon or the evening. When it comes to circadian rhythm, optimal sleep and recovery, I assume that if you were eating beef jerky at 3:30am you're probably getting ready for an early morning workout or you were waking up hungry. Now a very important rule to follow is from about an hour or so before you go to bed at night, all the way until you get up in the morning, you are either intermittently fasting, meaning you're not consuming anything at all, or if you need to consume foods, they're not protein based or carbohydrate based, but they're fat based. For example, one of the best things you can do if you wake up hungry is to just do a couple tablespoons of coconut oil. Great gut antiviral and antibacterial properties, chock full of some really good slow release medium chain triglycerides. And if you just can't stand the taste of coconut oil, you could put a little bit of nut butter with it. But if you're waking up early hungry, that's a much, much better way to go than the protein such as beef jerky, which will get converted into glucose really quick. Now after that 3:30am Beef jerky at 5am you had four eggs, potatoes, sausage, coffee and cream. Now that actually could be a healthy meal if the eggs are pastured and the potatoes are not fried in vegetable oil. That's very important for an athlete. The sausage is natural and then any cream that is added to the coffee is just like natural real stuff like coconut milk for example, or even like an organic mil that Technically, eggs, potatoes and sausage can be a healthy breakfast. But you need to ensure, especially with proteins, that they're coming from clean sources and that they haven't been exposed to vegetable oils. So next, from 7am to noon during a 13.5 mile mountain run, you had Gatorade power bars and a nuts cranberry mix. Now one of the important things here during workouts is that we still consider things like the artificial sweeteners or colors, chemicals, processed and preservative things, or gluten laden compounds that we're putting into our body. So there have been lots of studies that have shown that during running liquids perform better than solids and Liquids would include something like a gel or a sports drink. But the problem with many gels and sports drinks is for sports drinks, for someone who's like an obstacle racer or runner, they're bulky and can be tough to carry and get in the way. And when we look at something like gels, they're all sugar based. And the problem with gels that are sugar based is they can basically rip us out of fat oxidation. They have a net inflammatory load. So you recover less quickly from all those sugars that you're dumping into your body. And they can result if you're not getting proteins and fats in central nervous system fatigue. If it's just like maltodextrin and fructose, which a lot of gels are. Now there are gels out there that would be ideal for you to use during a workout or during a long mountain run, for example, that actually would be okay. For example, Justin's nut butter made out of nut butter. There's another one called Vitalite that's basically comprised of chia seeds. There's a company called Goo that makes one called a peanut butter flavored gel. There's a company called Chocolate Number nine that uses basically a cacao fat base. There's a company called Huma H u m A that uses a chia seed base. There's a company called Pak that uses a nut butter based similar to the company Goo that makes a peanut butter flavor. A company called Hammer Gel also makes a peanut butter flavor and that is also amino acids and fats in addition to lower amounts of sugar. There's a company called Artisana Foods that makes more of a coconut oil based gel. There's a company called Winforce that makes a gel comprised of a mix of oils and sugars, but again, not like nasty processed heated vegetable oils, but more cold processed derivatives. So ultimately you should ideally pick a gel that is a fat based gel with some proteins added to it and roll with that. Right now I'm personally experimenting during my longer efforts for which I need something portable, but I need something light that I can just like stuff into the pockets of a compression short or even use safety pins to safety pin to the like the side of my shorts. Right now what I'm experimenting with is fuel from a company called Pocket Fuel, which is just nut butter in like a ju based format. But that works really, really well when combined with just basic water. And the nice part about a lot of these nut butters is they're salted, so you're getting some of your salts as well. So that's what I would recommend as opposed to like Gatorade, power bars, nuts and cranberry mix. So after your workout, looks like you had a cheat meal. And you do label this a cheat meal. Jalapeno poppers, chili, bacon, cheese burger and onion rings. So here's the deal with cheat meals. Ideally a cheat meal does not inhibit recovery or create a net inflammatory state which this meal, high in vegetable oils and gluten actually would. You could have a cheat meal comprised of like a bunch of dark chocolate, red wine, some sweet potato mash, a giant steak, and you know, something like that is going to allow you to recover much, much better and still give you that nice dopamine kind of like, you know, eat everything in sight type of, type of release. But it will allow you to recover because again, this stuff catches up with you. You want a nice clean digestive system. You want joints that are not attacked by Omega 6s from a cheat meal. So cheat meals can be big calorie laden meals and even include things that are really kind of a mix of fats and sugars. Like dark chocolate is a good example, or honey, almond butter, sweet potatoes, yam steak, stuff like that. But it shouldn't necessarily be jalapeno poppers, chili bacon, cheeseburger and onion rings. At this point, you know, on your Monday, omega 6 fatty acids, vegetable oils and inflammatory foods are the biggest issue for you in terms of recovering as quickly as possible. Now next at 4pm, it looks like you had a Coco Mojo bar and a kind bar. Those are gluten free, kind of lactose free type of bars. Those bars are all fine. They're pretty good. They still have a lot of sugars added to them. I follow this simple rule. You don't eat energy bars unless you're exercising or unless you've just finished exercising. You're about to exercise. Otherwise it's just glorified candy. It really is. So it's better to just, you know, for example, go to snack for me is some full fat coconut milk mixed with a little bit of protein powder and then I'll throw some coconut flakes in there and sometimes a little bit of dark chocolate. Stir that up and I'll eat that with a spoon as like a recovery pudding. And it's much lower in sugars than a lot of these bars. There's also one bar out there called a Coco Chia bar and a Coco Chia bar actually is higher in fat, lower in sugars, so that one would be a little bit more acceptable if you had to go with a bar, that or just a handful of raw seeds and nuts is not bad too. And you can even put a few little chunks of dark chocolate or a dried ginger in there and that's really good as an anti inflammatory snack. That is again, a decent alternative to a bar dinner. Looks like you knocked it out of the park with dinner. Chicken, wild rice salad, goat cheese. You know, I would say the only thing is that if you eat a lower fat protein like chicken, always add fats. Add whatever, MCT oil, olive oil, whatever you want as far as like a good healthy fat, avocados, et cetera, to that leaner meat like a chicken, because that will slow the protein release and cause less of that gluconeogenesis or glucose spike to occur after a dinner like that. So Tuesday, you start off the day with bacon, eggs and kale and then coffee with a cap full of mct. And that's all really, really good. Remember one thing about doing like a high fat coffee or coffee with MCT oil is carbohydrates present. When you use MCT oil. Like if you have like a bulletproof coffee or coffee with mct, but you also have potatoes or pancakes or something like that, the glucose and carbohydrates from that will shut down the ability of your body to generate ATP based energy from the mct. Now the reason I bring that up is because technically bacon and eggs, some of those will go through gluconeogenesis and get converted into carbohydrates for that reason. If you're looking at things from a weight loss, overall calorie intake standpoint, I'm a bigger fan of either doing bulletproof coffee, the MCT oil, fatty coffee, in the absence of any other calories or proteins, et cetera. Aside from if you wanted to add some collagen to the coffee, like a couple tablespoons of bulletproof collagen, for example, or Great Lakes collagen or Bernard Jensen collagen. So you either do that or you eat a real meal like bacon, eggs, kale, or a green smoothie or something like that, but not both. Okay, so bulletproof coffee should always be something taken solo, not with a meal, especially from a weight loss, fat loss, weight control standpoint. Looks like 10am you had walnuts and beef jerky as a snack. There are a lot of paleoprimal companies that are making really good beef jerky without a lot of added nitrites and nitrates and sweeteners and sugars and things like that. Make sure you're using a good healthy organic beef jerky. If you're going to be snacking on beef jerky and you know that's an okay to do walnuts and beef jerky. Looks like at noon you had coffee with soy milk. Generally, soy is one of the most testosterone depressing, estrogen raising, man boob forming things you can put in your diet. Both men and women should steer clear of any form of commercial soy, period. The only form of soy you should be doing is fermented soy, natto, tempeh, miso, things like that. If you can't get your hands on those forms of fermented soy, don't use soy. Better forms of milk would be almond milk, coconut milk, or even just organic cow's milk. At 3pm you had salad with wild rice, goat cheese and walnuts. Not bad. Looks like at 5pm you had what you say is a bad meal. Flat bread with mushrooms, quinoa kale salad, salmon, mushrooms and black rice. Two glasses of wine and a small cup of ice cream. Now remember, it's not so important, especially in a hard charging active person like yourself, to restrict calories because that can affect thyroid and testosterone as to choose the right calories. Calories that are nutrient dense and digestible. Every single meal, for example for me for dinner is a really healthy protein. Salmon, chicken, beef, whatever, all from organic or wild sources. Some form of dense vegetable, generally drenched in olive oil or MCT oil or coconut oil. And then quinoa, white rice, sometimes brown rice, but not too much because it has higher levels of arsenic in it. Sweet potato, yam, even a baked potato. But basically the things you want to avoid would be inflammatory compounds again, gluten, dairy, omega 6s, things of that nature. So you could have easily adjusted the flatbread with mushrooms, quinoa kale salad, salmon, mushrooms and black rice. Two glasses of red wine and a small cup of ice cream to be something like let's say extra serving of black rice. And then leave out the flatbread and have the mushrooms with the black rice. Do the quinoa kale salad, do the salmon, do the mushrooms, have the two glasses of wine and then rather than ice cream, use coconut ice cream. That for example would be a better scenario. So Wednesday coffee with MCT by itself looks good. Pre workout you did a quest bar and then mid workout another quest bar. Quest bars are good. Those are okay. That's a clean source of fuel. Post workout meal you did protein, creatine and coconut water. Look at your protein, make sure it is organic protein, cold processed, doesn't have artificial sweeteners in it, doesn't have sucralose, acesulfamipotassium, vegetable oils, soy lecithin, stuff like that in it. And if it doesn't, that's fine. I like a company called Mount Capra for a good clean whey protein. I like a company called Living Fuel for a really good more vegan source of protein, but ultimately protein and creatine. That's a really good post workout blend. But make sure that they're from clean sources. There's so many protein powders and creatines out there that are not from clean sources. So dinner Big salad, goat cheese, almonds, five eggs teriyaki dressing, spinach. That all looks good. One thing to bear in mind is look at the label of dressings. Make sure that they don't have canola oil, vegetable oil, stuff like that in them. Generally the best dressings are going to use an extra virgin olive oil or olive oil base. You can also use an McTool as a base if you just want to make your own dressing. And then they don't have added sugars on them. So a lot of times it's fresh herbs, some olive oil, some vinaigrette. I generally just don't get dressing period. So you know, I'll put olive oil and vinaigrette and then add salt, pepper, some cayenne, some turmeric, you know, things along those lines. And it's, it's much, much better than using a store bought dressing. So other than that that's a, you know, it's a pretty good dinner Thursday looks like you had a tea with MCT oil, some more like fatty tea and that's fine. That looks good. Looks like oh and and by the way, I should mention just because you're doing a lot of workouts breaking down muscle, a lot you can do. I mean with that morning tea, morning coffee, you can add grass fed butter, you can add collagen, you can add if you want a little bit of sweetener like stevia or something like that so you don't have to limit yourself to just doing MCT oil. Looks like post workout you had creatine protein scoop with another Kokomo Joe bar. Again, all that's fine. Just make sure that your creatine and protein are clean. That's the most important thing. Again, from a long term health standpoint, an athlete longevity standpoint, looks like you had a quinoa peanut salad with an egg white salad. That's bad news Bears. Here's why peanut salad peanuts are an inflammatory legume high in Omega 6s. I would avoid them. When you can choose raw nuts, almonds, walnuts, cashews, stuff like that. Egg white. You need to follow rule. Eggs should never be consumed in the absence of the yolk and the white put together. Okay. Just because the isolated sugar spike, insulin spike, glucose spike that you get from the egg white on its own, along with the fact that you're missing out on all of the testosterone building and CH building properties of the yolk, along with the help for your nervous system, your eyes, your visual acuity, everything else that that yolk gives you. It's just sad when I see yolk separated from the eggs. So egg white salad, not a good idea. And it probably had mayonnaise in it that was made with vegetable oil. I mean like, you know, I know I'm picking apart your lunch, but you could have done like quinoa with some raw seeds or nuts and then like some real eggs or some real egg white salad, preferably made with some kind of a mayonnaise that doesn't have vegetable oil. If you look at the book, there's a really, really good book I'm going to recommend to you that has some awesome recipes and also some awesome foods that you can find at any grocery store. And it's not my book Beyond Training, even though that's a good book too. It's a book called Rich Food, Poor Food. I recommend it to all the athletes that I work with as an easy go to source, especially when you're traveling and you want to get healthy food at the grocery store. Rich food, poor food. Check it out. It's written by Meera and Jason Kelton. It'll cost you a few bucks in my opinion. An indispensable guide to have on hand. So check that one out. Looks like pre workout for that day. Thursday had aminos and that's fine. Your second workout of the day looks like you had more creatine and protein, some banana, some sunflower seed butter. Afterwards all that's fine. I'm assuming the sunflower seed butter was raw. Make sure that when you have seeds and nut based nut butters get the raw stuff. It's well, well worth it for shutting down inflammation. And then it looks like we move on here to your Friday. Friday it looks like you had a double spin class and you did an amino scoop prior to a double spin class. And then post workout you had a scoop of protein and creatine, two large glasses of orange juice and steak omelette and potatoes after a double Spin class. Honestly, if you weren't eating during the spin class, the sugar from two large glasses of oj, assuming it was like a real natural oj, not made with high fructose corn syrup and stuff like that, your muscles are probably going to suck most of that up and just store it away as storage glycogen. So I'm not going to get too nitpicky on that. You know, I'm a bigger fan if you were to just like eat a couple of oranges, honestly, because you're getting the fiber and more antioxidants. But ultimately I'm not going to get too picky. If you had two glasses of OJ after a double spin class. Steak omelette potatoes, again, just make sure that those are not laden with Omega 6s, that they're the real organic wild stuff, and that potatoes, for example, would preferably be cooked in coconut oil or avocado oil or macadamia nut oil, not vegetable oil, canola oil, stuff like that. Then it looks like you had quinoa, spinach, three scoops of sunflower seed butter, again with the nut butter. Make sure it's raw the rest of that day. Looks like we had some of your usuals that we're starting to see now. Protein, creatine, banana dipped in almond butter, coffee with soy milk. I already talked about the soy and it looks like dinner. Three sausages, one with a bun, and a couple of beers. Again, when we look at estrogen and we look at man boobs and we look at shutting down testosterone, beer is not the best. I mean, there are some good organic beers out there. Thank God that Spartan Racing has teamed up with, I think it's Sam Adams, which actually has a decent organic beer. There are some decent beers out there, but just be careful with beer. Make sure it is made from organic sources and that it's not the cheap stuff with high fructose corn syrup and fillers in it. And then just limit it because all of those grain sources used to make the beer do get pretty estrogenic along with the hops. So just be careful with the beer if you're going to drink alcohol. I'm a bigger fan of the holy trilogy of vodka, tequila or red wine. And then beer is only in moderation, like after you cross the finish line of a race. Okay, Saturday, again, it looks like you stuck to most of your main staples that I've kind of already hit on for you as an athlete. For dinner you had three glasses of wine with a 22 ounce steak, a piece of White bread with butter, mushrooms and a beet salad with goat cheese and a piece of cake. Okay, so we've already kind of dug into some of the issues with dinner. You need to do more fat and less alcohol and less gluten with dinner, period. Like I would prefer for. If you're really, truly going to be a world champion in your sport, you need to. Aside from the trace amounts of gluten you're going to find in like corn, oatmeal, quinoa, stuff like that, you should not be doing bread unless it's real, like ancestrally prepared, like fermented sourdough bread. And that's just the way it is. If you're really serious about optimizing your performance and your longevity to the max. To the max. You should also be really careful ever consuming more than two servings of alcohol at a time, ever. Unless it's very few and far between, like after you've won a big race or something like that. Aside from that, never, ever more than two servings of alcohol. And again, these are, this is where the big wins come in and where you have to ask yourself, you know, in situations like that whether you want to be a world champion or whether you want to settle for less than that. And it's about controlling some of the sources that are unclean in your diet or that are potentially shoving your hormones low. Okay. And then finally we get to Sunday where you started off the day with three scoops of sunflower butter. I need to put something in. And this is coming from a guy who would eat like a quarter. A quarter, what do you call them? Container of peanut butter on a daily basis. When I was in college, seeds and nuts are really good as a calorie dense source, but they are chock full of Omega 6s. So a serving of like a handful of seeds and nuts and then like a tablespoon of nut butter, that's about the max amount of nuts you should be having per day. And everything else can come from other healthy fat sources like coconut milk and olives and avocado and, you know, wild caught fish and, you know, a lot of these other compounds. But I would really like you to see, like going to chapter 11 of my book, grabbing yourself a good blender and starting into this whole like green smoothie, green shake thing rather than doing like a few scoops of nut butter. It's just going to be way better for your joints and inflammation long term. So breakfast wasn't too bad. Looks like he had a bunch of bacon, some sausage. I'M just going to assume that you're really trying to choose clean pasture raised with pork. So bacon and sausage needs to all be pasture raised, which is a topic near and dear to my heart right now because my wife is currently butchering half a pig in our garage. Veggies and hummus and a cup of oatmeal. Careful with hummus. You want to make sure that anytime you get legumes, lentils, garbanzo beans, chickpeas, et cetera, they've been soaked and sprouted. Otherwise they have a lot of digestive inhibitors and inflammatory components in them. Pre workout you had half a quest bar, half a monster energy drink. Energy drinks should not be part of your vocabulary, period. Again, if you're in this for the long haul with your adrenal glands, coffee and tea are okay. Once we delve into energy drinks and the chemical cocktail they're in. Not a good plan. And again, this is coming from a guy who used to drink three or four monsters or rock stars a day back when I was a hard charging personal trainer. And I've had to deal with the blowback from that. From an adrenal standpoint, testosterone standpoint, thyroid standpoint, this crap catches up with you once you start to get to the point where your testosterone levels are naturally going to decline, which is about age 27, and then your thyroid and your adrenals start to take the big hit from all this stuff when you're about between 30 and 35. So I'm just saying this stuff so that you can look forward to a high, high amount of longevity in your athletic career. And this is the stuff I wish people had told me when I was a young athlete and I was hard charging and I was just eating everything in sight and, and kind of settling for less than ideal when it comes to diet. So really, really important stuff. Those are the main things that I wanted to go over when it comes to your diet, so I hope that this was helpful for you. I know you'll probably have some questions and once I send this over to you, feel free to reply with your questions. But big picture, read chapter 11 of Beyond Training book and then get that book. Rich food, poor food, Eat clean proteins, clean up your dinners quite a bit, include healthy fats with your proteins as much as possible and really lower the amount of seed and nut intake. So a lot of stuff for you to start into, but hopefully that helps. And best of luck. Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here and if you listened in to that entire nutritional consultation and you want a consult for yourself or for your nutrition. You can get coaching and consultations over at the website pacificfit.net that's pacificfit.net and generally I'll talk to you on the phone rather than record an audio for you. But I wanted to record this audio just so you, the premium listener, would have access to it. So I hope you enjoyed that and I hope you can make some adjustments to your diet based off of what you just heard. Thanks for listening. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. Don't.