Podcast Episode #38: Learn Exactly How Low-Fat Diets Make You FAT

Podcast episode number 38 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast, your free weekly audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, nutrition and wellness information. My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm an exercise physiologist, certified personal trainer and nutritionist. Each week I'll be bringing you information that goes outside run of the mill exercise and diet advice. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to lose a few pounds, enjoy this week's podcast episode from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners, do I sound a little bit more distant? A little bit, perhaps farther away than I usually sound when I'm recording? That's probably because my headset once again has broken. You know, I may have to invest in something just a little bit better than that $40 plastic headset from Best Buy. I'm recording right now while sitting in my closet on my little MacBook internal microphone. Because that's really the only way I have to get this podcast out to you see the extent that I go through to actually make this work. So I apologize for any slight drop in quality of the sound. But either way, I've got a jam packed episode today. So what we're going to do is we have special announcements, then we're going to go on to our listener Q and A. I've got a special product review and then we're going to finish up with what I think is a fantastic talk by a doctor who specializes in nutritional nutrition and fat loss. So let's go ahead and move on to this Week's content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com special announcements I'm going to go ahead and keep this fairly brief today, but I did want to put the word out to anybody in the Spokane, Washington or Coeur d', Alene, Idaho area. As you may know, this is where I live and I will be giving a talk at Pilgrim's Nutrition center over in coeur d', Alene, Idaho on Friday, April 21st. I'm sorry, that's Friday, April 24th, 6 to 7pm it's going to be on Holistic Fueling for Ironman Triathlon. The basic idea behind this is that Ironman triathletes, because they exercise so much, have to put a lot of fuel into their bodies. And much of the time just attempting to get the dense fuel sources necessary to complete Ironman Triathlon causes a lot of people to put the wrong type of things into their body. And so when I'm looking at nutrition profiles of Ironman triathletes. I see quite a bit of food, things like bagels, orange juice, soup, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, all sorts of inflammatory producing compounds. And what I want to teach the Iron man triathlete how to do is how to eat holistically using good, healthy, natural fruits and vegetables, raw fruits, lean proteins, etc. And so I'm going to actually teach this class over at Pilgrim's and it's going to go into how to maximize your recovery, enhance your performance, delay your fatigue, boost your immune system, and achieve your Ironman goals without destroying your stomach, crapping out your kidneys, or having a constant headache due to all the crap that you're pouring into your body. So I'm going to try and record that and once I do, I will also make that available to everyone@BenGreenfieldFitness.com now, in addition, the fat loss and sports performance classes designed for beginner, intermediate or advanced exercisers, those are also still open initially. I'm going to be teaching those over in Spokane, Washington. Now, announcements for everybody out there in podcast land across the rest of the world. Not a whole lot to announce. This week I'm headed down to New Orleans to race in the half Ironman 70.3 triathlon. If you're a first time listener to this podcast, it's not just designed for triathletes. Just so happens that many of the announcements today were about triathlon. But anyways, especially if you're local, be sure to sign up for those fat loss and sports performance classes. They're going to be fantastic. I'm designing them to be lots of fun to get you ready for spring. So check those out. Let's go ahead and go forward into this week's listener Q and A. And it's a good one.

Ben, this is Drew.

Just had a question. I run cross country and I'm just wondering if I want to be. Should I be looking to boosting my.

Testosterone levels or if that's going to end up. That's going to end up hurting me.

More in the long run that way.

So thank you.

Great question, Drew. Let me start by saying that any type of sports performance is going to require the presence of testosterone to enhance lean muscle, burn fat, and put your body in a situation where you have good performance and a strong immune system. So you should never be attempting to reduce testosterone. However, I was recently listening into a lecture that was on something called Andropause. I wanted to actually indirectly reference that lecture because Drew's question made me think about the fact that there are a lot of people who generally over the age of 50, actually are going through this andropause or this decrease in testosterone. And that should be a much more serious concern, especially for athletes, than trying to reduce testosterone. You know, if you're running cross country, I would just say make sure you don't spend a lot of time in the gym because muscles take a little bit more energy to cool and they take a little bit more energy to carry around because they're heavier. However, if you're older and you're concerned about losing testosterone, you really can't necessarily stop that natural decline in testosterone after age 50. But what you can do is set up your body to be in a situation where you're taking away some of the risk factors that occur when that drop in testosterone occurs. Namely, when your body quits producing the hormone testosterone, it actually steps up production of one of the things that's produced by testosterone, and that's called dht. Now, it's not exactly clear why the body has this response to the drop off, that natural drop off in testosterone, but DHT is what can cause the male prostate to enlarge. And so when you get prostate growth, that can eventually lead to something that's called benign prostate hyperplasia. You may hear about that called bph, and that's when you get extreme difficulty with urination, erectile dysfunction function. All those problems that the aging man would love to avoid. And kind of the double whammy is that another hormone that increases with age called prolactin can increase the conversion of testosterone to dht. So for you guys out there, there are some things that you can do nutritionally and from a lifestyle perspective to make sure that you put this off for as long as possible and that your body is in an ideal state to take care of itself when it does occur. First of all, avoiding high amounts of sugar, stress, caffeine, smoking and alcohol should go without saying that has a profound effect on health generally. But it will also help to maintain testosterone levels and decrease that production of DHT and potential enlargement of the prostate and prostate hyperplasia risk as you age. There are a few nutritional remedies out there. Flower pollen extract is one. And the idea behind this is that that can actually increase zinc levels in your prostate and it improves the clearance of this DHT vegetables in particular, some in vegetables called phytosterols, those can reduce the amount of inflammation in the prostate. You turn around your Heinz ketchup bottle and look at the lycopene in that. I wouldn't recommend drinking the Heinz ketchup bottle, but tomatoes, one of the prime ingredients of that, those have a really great anti prostate cancer effect. And then one other interesting nutritional supplement is called saw palmetto extract. That and the flower pollen extract are obviously a little bit harder to get your hands on in whole food supplements, but those are great in terms of giving you some enzymes responsible or inhibiting the enzymes responsible for that DHT production. I personally consume flower pollen extract, sal, palmitic extract and zinc almost every day, and especially during periods of time where I'm spending a long time riding a bicycle. And I really don't have any trouble in terms of a lot of the symptoms of an enlarged prostate or prostate inflammation. So I recommend, if you're a male, do take care of yourself from that direction. Whether you're young or old, you want to think preventively. So great question, Drew. I know I kind of went off on a side tangent, but great question. Okay, we have another question from listener Ronnie who asks, I'm looking for a good energy drink. I do spinning classes, but feel quite tired through the class. I'm fit, but recently legs struggle a bit during class. My best piece of advice for you, Ronnie, is never mask fatigue or mask a lack of recovery by just sucking down an energy drink. So number one, you want to take care of your body. And I would recommend skipping a workout, getting some sleep over sucking down, you know, whatever, Rockstar, Monster, Red Bull, and then just getting through the class and basically ignoring that fatigue. Now, that being said, if you do have good amounts of sleep and your stress is under control, then you can bump up your performance a little bit with energy drink compounds. Most of the ones out there have kind of a common ingredient profile. Caffeine, B12, taurine, those type of things. And all of those will give you a little bit of focus, enhance performance. Some of them can actually speed up the fat burning process. I take one in particular that has another compound called theanine in it because that actually keeps you from getting the energy crash that occurs after you consume a lot of those other energy drinks and actually crosses the blood brain barrier and can cause a release of dopamine. So you feel pretty good as well. That supplement is called Delta E and it's basically powder that you add to water. That's what I would recommend. So number one recommendation is don't mask fatigue with an energy drink. Number two recommendation is try and get as holistic an energy drink as possible. What I mean by that is don't suck down a lot of crap in a can. Artificial sweeteners, sugars, things of that nature. Try and get just those isolated compounds and you're looking again. Caffeine, B12 and taurine are three of the things that can bump up the energy levels. And then I have a great question from Bob and a little bit more involved. This is the last question. Bob says Ben, I have a couple questions. I'm a relatively new triathlete. I do Olympic distance. I'm also trying to lose about 20 pounds of body fat. Unfortunately, I'm unemployed due to the economy and have limited funds. I've been struggling with feeling good on my workouts as well as with weight loss. My questions are how does stress, such as the mental stress of being unemployed, affect workout and weight loss? And how would you prioritize a limited budget for weight loss workout? For example, will I get the most bang for my buck with supplements and a store bought workout plan or would I be better off spending all my money on a personal trainer, etc. I know that is vague, but would appreciate the guidance. Let's go ahead and first of all tackle your initial question which is how does stress affect a workout and weight loss? When a human being is stressed out, they do need to be concerned about weight loss because stress produces a substance called neuropeptide Y in your body. And when mice are injected with this, they've actually been shown to become obese. Their metabolisms drop off. The other thing that happens is your appetite can literally go out of control. Now the reason for that is that your body has one thing that really helps you control appetite cravings. It's a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin decreases when you're stressed out or you're low on sleep. And then you have another hormone, I'm sorry, ghrelin increases so you increase appetite cravings. Another hormone called leptin. That one is responsible for helping you with appetite cravings. While leptin actually goes down when you're stressed out or you're low on sleep. Cortisol, your body stress release fat storage hormone, that one's going to go up. Testosterone, your body's lean muscle building fat burning hormone, that one goes down, you lose a little bit of your sensitivity in your brain to something called gaba. GABA produces a couple of chemicals that help you to feel good after you eat, namely dopamine and serotonin. When those are low, you got to eat a lot more to feel better. And so when you're stressed out, it's a lot easier to eat junk food. I'm sure some of you have experienced that. You do crave some of those foods that aren't that great for you when you're stressed out or when you lower on sleep, both of those have the same effect. So I would say that the mental stress, such as being unemployed, will affect your workout. It will affect weight loss. So one of your first goals should be to try and decrease stress. It's an interesting cycle because exercise is one of the best ways to get rid of that stress. Yoga, which incidentally I'll talk about a little bit later on in this podcast, is also great for stress relief, as are breathing techniques. Now, in terms of prioritizing a limited budget for weight loss or workout, if you think about most gyms these days or many of kind of the small fitness centers, you can get memberships at those for less than a buck a day. So if you don't have a gym at home and you like the motivation of going to a gym, having other people there working out, that's one of the best investments you can make. I mean, most of us can find a way to find a dollar in a day that we can save somewhere, whether it be on some type of food or coffee that we're buying or maybe shopping a little bit for less expensive gasoline, that type of thing. Try and free up that dollar a day. A gym is a great investment. Now, as far as prioritizing other things for weight loss, okay, let's talk about nutrition supplements. If you are going to buy nutritional supplements, don't get things that are going to fight against your goal. It's a pet peeve of mine. When I see people walking out of GNC and they've got this big, big canister full of protein powder or weight loss powder, but it's got artificial sweeteners, colors, preservatives, sugars, all sorts of things in it that actually fight against your fat loss. So if you're going to use weight loss supplements, make sure that they are designed with your health in mind so that you're not driving down one aspect of your health while getting fit, because eventually that will catch up with you. In terms of a personal trainer, a lot of personal trainers are trained to make you keep coming back for more. Now you want to be able to use your personal trainer the same way as you would use, for example, your physician. Now, I hope that your physician would like to heal you, would like to cure you, would like to take care of an illness that you come to them with personal Trainer, same thing. Your personal trainer shouldn't say, okay, well, you need to come to me in order to exercise. They should provide you with the knowledge that you need to go out and exercise on your own, to go out and eat a healthy diet on your own. And then you should be able to use them as a consultant so that you could come back to them, say once a month and have your program updated or learn more about nutrition or have them look over your nutrition logs, that type of thing. Now, I know that there's people out there who have some money to spend on a personal trainer and who like to have a personal trainer there for motivation or to just tell them exactly what to do. A lot of us work out better when we have a drill sergeant in our faces. But if you're on a limited budget, just make sure that the personal trainer that you choose is the type of person that's going to treat you more like a physician patient relationship. And they're literally going to give you information that helps you to cure yourself or to heal yourself and to learn to exercise and eat healthy on your own without having to have your trainer there all the time. And so you should be able to meet with a trainer. If you're doing something like once a month, doing a consult with a trainer for $75 or $100, that's an investment that will be well worth it in terms of saving money on health insurance, gaining optimal fitness, and getting the most bang for your buck while you're working out. In terms of your question about a store bought workout plan versus a personal trainer, think about it this way. The best exercise plan is the one that you're not on. Your body adapts to workouts very quickly and so you have to change up your workouts. Most of my clients are changing up their routines about every four weeks. And some of the clients that I work with face to face literally change up their routines every day. So if you're going to get a store bought workout plan, don't spend $39.95 on some book that teaches you some workouts that your body's going to get used to within just a couple of months. What I used to do when I was on a budget for exercise, I would grab 3.99-4.99, one of the men's health magazines or men's fitness magazines, and I would choose a workout from that magazine and I would make that workout a part of my plan, but just for three to four weeks or conveniently until the next magazine came out. And then I'D start into the next workout plan. And through college I was able to stay in very good shape because I was always throwing curve balls at my body, giving it new things to try. So I'd recommend if you're going to do anything like a store bought workout plan, just get an exercise type of magazine. And believe it or not, most of the workouts in there, they're written by fitness professionals. If a fitness professional is at the level where they're writing for Men's Health, a lot of times they are going to have pretty decent advice. Occasionally you're going to see stuff in there that might be stretching the truth a little bit in terms of the benefit that it might give you. But for the most part, you can find a lot of good workouts in that type of literature. Now, I know that you out there in the audience probably have your own thoughts on this. And@BenGreenfieldFitness.com one of the things that I've really noticed lately is that it is a blog. And one of the definitions of a blog or one of the characteristics of a blog is we've got sections for you to comment in and I would really like you, the audience. If you have feedback for the listeners who write in or call in with their questions, go ahead and log into the comments page for the podcast. Leave your own feedback. And today I'd like to ask you, what do you think? Do you have advice for Bob? I mean, how have you maintained a way to exercise on a budget during the recession? Do you have special techniques that you have used, special workouts you've used, favorite body weight exercises, favorite exercises that you can do with no equipment? So go ahead and log into BenGreenfieldFitness.com and leave a comment in the show notes of this podcast. So give Bob some of your advice. And then the other thing is, if you have a question for me, you can email me ben greenfieldfitness.com you can call me and leave a voicemail for Ben Greenfield at 877-209-9439 or you can Skype me with the free Skype software. You can simply Download that from Skype.com and my username is Pacific Fit. That is as in Pacific Elite Fitness. That's the personal training site that I run, pacificfit.net but my username for Skype is Pacific Fit. So go ahead and leave me a voicemail. And once again this week, the first voicemail that I receive will get a free three month premium subscription to TrainingPeaks. That's the world's top online fitness logging and diet logging software. Check it out. That's about a $50 value that you get just for calling in with your question. So let's go ahead and move on to this week's product review. The folks over at Endurance Films recently sent me a copy of Yoga for Endurance Athletes. So I decided to try this out and I'm a little bit wary of yoga because even though it always decreases my injuries and it helps me to feel great, it de stresses me. I a lot of times just don't have time to drive to the gym and do an hour long yoga class. And when I first got this DVD I was like oh man. Because it said two hours of yoga moves. But basically when you stick the DVD in, the DVD in, it's actually really cool because it's got about 20 different kind of mini yoga routines that you can mix and match. You literally go through with your DVD remote. You check the sections that you want to do. Like I did a workout that was it bands, shoulders, hamstrings and then breathing and you can mix and match. Basically a workout that is as long as as hard as or hits the sections of your body that you want to hit in a custom way. My wife and I put it in and we did a really quick and really effective 25 minute yoga workout while our kids were taking a nap. We literally just selected the exact parts that we wanted to work by touching them on the DVD menu. And yeah, we did skip that 10 minute laying on the mat drill that comes after yoga. Not that I don't see benefit in that, but sometimes you just don't have the time and you want to get get the stuff that you feel gives you the most bang for your buck. And then it also comes with some pre design workouts like strength, balance and then another really, really cool one I'm going to be trying out this week before my race is called Focus. And it literally just gives you laser focus. It dials in your breathing, your visualization, everything of that nature. So it's called Yoga for Endurance Athletes. I'm going to put a link for that in the show notes as well as a little video that is kind of like a trailer for the DVD that shows you more about it. But definitely check that out. Surf on over to the show notes for this podcast. Click on Yoga for Endurance Athletes. One of the better investments you can make as we go towards what is going to be a heavy training or racing season for a lot of cyclists, marathoners and triathletes out there. So now, the big moment. We're going to move on to the lecture on fat loss that I'm really looking forward to getting to you.

To start off, since I'm on the academic side of things, of course, I have to start off talking about something difficult. We use big words, morbidity and mortality. And I have to add that I've always been favorably impressed by, by the emphasis at impacts on health. Not the purely cosmetic, not what's the flavor of the month, but upon health. And this, of course, is important in terms of weight loss, weight gain, because in fact, as you can see on this chart, issues of mortality. If you're worried about when you're going to kick the bucket, I'm afraid that you can certainly speed things along by putting on too much weight. So you're bound to see a lot of people who need the product. If more than half of all adult Americans are in a camp that need it, you're bound to meet some of them. I don't want to get too technical, but the primary issue for most people with weight gain is what's called insulin resistance. What happens is once you reach about 15 pounds above your ideal weight, your body's response to insulin starts declining. Now, insulin is the hormone which your body produces in the pancreas, which controls blood sugar levels. Of course, it does a whole lot more than that. But nevertheless, what we usually think about in terms of insulin resistance is, well, how much insulin does it take to control a given amount of sugar in the blood? You have to control the amount of sugar in the blood. Too much sugar does real nasty things. It thickens your arteries, it makes your blood real sticky, things like this. So you have to use the insulin. Unfortunately, too much insulin has its own downside. I don't want to give you any simplistic notions as to why people gain weight. It used to be, probably everyone in this room can remember what used to be said, that, well, if you just control the fat grams, you control your weight. How many people have heard this? I mean, the way you're going to control your weight is just don't eat. That's what everyone says right now. It's really curious. I've always found this a very curious argument given that the percent of calories in the American diet from fat has been declining since 1955. This has been declining on a more or less yearly basis for a very, very, very long time. And the amount of percentage of adult Americans who are overweight has been going up for a very, very long time. So eating a whole lot of fat may not necessarily be good for you, but it's probably not the single most important reason as to why anyone carries weight. And in fact, you go to Europe and you look at, say, the French and the northern Italians, well, since about 40% of all calories in their diet comes from fat, and especially the southern French are not noted for carrying a whole lot of weight. They have about 40% of our heart disease rate. It's not true that merely fat makes you fat. There are a few other things that do it as well. Now, some of this data is hard to come by, but for the latest year, for which I had reliable data about 1996, because of course, all this data sort of trickles in, you have to get from various sources, so you're always several years behind. The latest data, which seems to be reliable is that we eat 150, 52 pounds of sweeteners per man, woman and child. Let me see, how many days are there in the year? How many pounds, Half a pound of sugar.

Per day.

You're asking yourself, how can we actually eat that much sugar? I approached some experts about this and asked them, well, is it really true that we're eating this much sugar? What's happening is that we've, we are substituting sugar for starches. So think about the breakfast cereal you eat. You have just enough wheat in your flakes to act as a carrier for the sugar you're putting on it. So wheaties, well, it should be sugaries because most of this is in fact sugar. We just have enough corn, enough rice, enough oats, enough wheat, whatever to carry the sugar. That's how you get this figure. We're substituting sugar for everything. Otherwise, how could you possibly eat this much sugar? What you'll see here is there's a very close correlation between the increase in sugar consumption, especially sugar and soft drinks, and weight gain. Now back to our friend insulin. Insulin performs lots and lots and lots of roles in the body. Some of them happen to be in your brain. One of the satiety signals, the signal that you're full is insulin entering the brain and doing certain things. This should happen about 10, 15 minutes after you start eating a meal. You should feel that you're full. You should have start seeing a society signal the problem. When people become insulin resistant. This brain signal takes twice as long to appear. So you don't know, you don't get the signal that you've eaten enough calories because the signal takes twice as long to start appearing in the brain. We know this because you can do the thermal scan of the brain. You can tell where the blood is starting to hit and how long it takes because you can see what parts of the brain warm up because there's more blood flow there. And in people who are overweight, it takes about twice as long for the parts of the brain that control satiety to start lighting up the screen. In the meantime, what you'll find is that, well, insulin is involved, of course, unfortunately we talked about promotes glucose uptake from the blood. Well, it also promotes glucose uptake by fat cells and storage. Again, I don't think most of you need a refresher course on why having a whole lot of fat in your blood is a bad deal. What has increasingly been found to be the real issue with heart disease is excess insulin reduces the after meal clearance of triglycerides. That is you can have, oftentimes you go into a doctor, someone 50% of all heart attacks occur in people who don't have any obvious problem. Well, if you test someone right after a meal, you see a problem which is a little bit more obvious because insulin changes the clearance of blood fats. Insulin does a whole lot of things. It inhibits fat from storage. As I like to say, if you're not burning it, you're wearing it. So if you come insulin resistant, this is a big catch for anyone who is carrying extra pounds. No problem is that you have a lot of insulin out there trying to control your blood sugar levels. Well, at the same time it's putting the sugar into storage, it's also preventing you from getting at fat for fuel. Very major problem. If you don't burn it, you wear it. So you increase the storage, you consume fat. In fact, we can show that if you take something that really stimulates production of insulin at the same time you have fat in a meal, you increase by 20 or 30% the uptake in storage that fat. You can show that experimentally. Then it does a whole bunch of other nasty little things. Increases production of inflammation in the body, even alters the structure of artery walls. And those of you who are into anti aging reduces the circulation of certain important anti aging hormones produced by the adrenals. Unfortunately, it's not the case that just reversing insulin resistance is going to solve your problems. Promise that just reducing insulin resistance, it's a necessary first step, but it doesn't cause anyone to lose any significant amount of weight, certainly not in the short term. You have to do a lot of other things, which is why the Impacts product was designed the way it is. Because you have to do something else. But what you'll find is that it's a trap that we fall into when we want to lose weight. We think that it should be easy. You have people saying, well, ten pounds in ten days. You've all seen these commercials, right? You want to know how to lose.

Ten pounds in ten days?

I'll tell you how to do it. I'll tell you right here. Ten pounds in ten days. You go to the store, you buy a whole lot of cans of vegetable juice and a whole lot of bottles of fruit juice, and you live on fruit and vegetable juice for the next 10 days. You're going to feel terrible, but you're going to lose ten pounds in ten days. You may also have a gallbladder problem at the end of this, but of course you've lost 10 pounds in 10 days. And I assure you in the next 30 days you will regained all of it back probably a little bit more as well. Losing weight is really easy to do. There is absolutely no mystery. I can give you a half dozen different ways to lose weight, not necessarily all of them ways I recommend. By the way, it's easy to lose water weight, it's easy to lose lean tissue. It's very hard to get rid of fat. But fat is what you want to get rid of. You don't want to lose the lean tissue because the more lean tissue you lose, the harder it's going to be for you to ever keep trim again. One pound of fat equals approximately 3200 calories. I wish I could tell you that starving yourself for two days and not eating 3200 calories would lose a pound of fat for you, but it doesn't work that way. And in fact, on certain low calorie diets, even at 800 calories a day, which I would think would be a low calorie diet, 800 calories, that after a period of time some women were gaining weight. At 800 calories a day, you think you're going to fool your body, don't bet on it. Your body's going to protect you from yourself. No matter how foolish what you're doing, your body is going to step in and protect you from yourself. So I don't advise this as a way of losing weight. Real weight loss means changing your body's lean to fat ratio and increasing the calories burned in a permanent way. So this is a short course on how to make a good weight loss product which does not consist of the diet to the stars does not consist of the what's the juice fasting program. Why they call that? It may be the European way to do it or something like this. I forget the names. Oh, yes, the Hollywood diet. No. Well, I suppose you want to get into into that bikini for something you're going to do next week. Yes, it's something you might consider, but keep in mind that you won't be able to get into it the week after. I think we call this yo yo dieting. So first you're going to have to take care of the insulin response. You're going to have to start dealing with what's blocking you from burning fat to begin with. So you're going to have to deal with insulin response at some point. However, you're also going to have to deal with stomach response to food. You're going to have to increase your stomach response to food. This is important because 10% of all the calories you burn during the day probably will come if you don't have an insulin problem will come from the additional heat produced by the body after meals. As much as 10% of all the calories you burn during the day should come in response to meals. And the problem here is that people who are overweight typically are not burning that additional 10% of calories, which is why, of course, they're putting on the weight. You have to deal with your thermic response to food. Somewhere along the line, your basal metabolic rate is going to have to increase. It simply means the number of calories you burn at rest, even when you're sleeping, because most of the calories you're going to burn are not going to be in response to exercise. Most of the calories you're going to burn are always going to be in response to just existing. If your energy usage rate is real low, you're not going to be able to lose weight. You're going to have to do something to tell your body, well, it's safe to go burn calories. Got to do something. Fat production and storage has to be inhibited. On the other hand, you have to improve your body's ability to release fat. Unfortunately for all of us, as we get older, it becomes harder and harder to to release fat from storage to burn for fuel. It happens to everyone. Lean tissue has to be protected. Remember, it's easy to lose lean tissue. It's real easy. It's really easy to get rid of water. It's just hard to get rid of fat. Thyroid function has to be improved. Probably there's at least one or two of you in the audience who has some sort of thyroid problem because of medical reasons. And typically what you discover, of course, is that it was that you start gaining weight thereafter. Very common. But those of you who've gone on weight loss diets, typically every time you've gone on a weight loss diet, your thyroid function drops down a notch. So you go through five weight loss diets, you drop down five notches. It's not hard to predict what a result would be. Plus, you have to support your adrenals and you have to support the antioxidant needs of the body because the fat stores most of the toxins in the body. Now, there are lots of thermogenic products out there. Thermogenic simply means creating energy. And typically we're talking about energy that's produced without you going out and running around the block. We're talking about, say, the energy produced in response to the meal you just ate. We're talking about the energy your body uses up just to keep you on an even keel depending on how many calories you're eating. Because your body is the instrument that's going to regulate all this. You shouldn't have to regulate it by having portion control of each meal. Even diabetics can't follow these portion control rules, and it's a life and death situation for them. Are you really going to weigh out every portion, every item at every meal? Of course not. So you want something that's going to increase the energy expenditure for thermogenesis. And unfortunately, the truth of this is going to take three to four weeks. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. There's something called an uncoupling protein. You have to increase the amount of this in the cell. That's why you weren't getting the thermogenesis to begin with, because you didn't have enough uncoupling protein in the cell. It's going to take the body three to four weeks to increase the amount of this protein. This little regulator, okay, See lots of products with ephedrine and caffeine for at least the first month, probably 80% of all the calories that are restricted there is because of appetite suppression, because you're whacking the central nervous system. You're pulling out your nice little sledgehammer and you're sleeping. You're gently knocking it on the noggin. Ka thunk ka thunk ker thunk. Of course, a lot of women in particular can't take these products because you're flying higher than a kite or they're scraping you off the ceiling, something like this. Plus, we'll not mention the fact that, oh, of course you're losing weight. You can't sleep at night, of course you're losing weight. Can you spell stress? Safe enhancement of thermogens will show up as weight loss only after about a month. Just the way it is. I'm sorry. I wish I could tell you it's instantaneous. We all want instant gratification. Got computers, you click, you jump from page to page. You got your little TV clicker so you can jump from channel to channel to channel. Well, unfortunately, your body doesn't work by the same rhythm. And don't watch the scale. Lean tissue, as Brenda demonstrated, weighs a whole lot more than does fat. If ease to lose water and lean tissue, it's hard to lose the fat. And so what you're going to see is scale watching just makes you nervous. The chief thermogenic product in the thermal factor is something called Advantra Z. Okay. Advantra Z is an extract from bitter orange, increases your body's ability to release fat from storage and increases the burning of that fat for fuel. It increases thermogenesis for those of you who are athletes. It improves athletic ability by allowing you to get to your fat stores, which, after all, are virtually unlimited. So you can preserve that small amount of glycogen that you've got in your muscles and your liver. So it helps with physical performance even on low calorie diets, which I don't recommend. Nevertheless, even on low calorie diets, this advantracy spares lean tissue and it helps to build muscles. You're actually weight training because you're using fat for fuel rather than eating up your muscle tissue for fuel. It means that if you actually weight train, you can put on muscle. Just to give you a quick idea of what's in Advantra Z, notice no ephedrine. No ephedrine alkaloids. Exactly, exactly, no ephedrine. These are just for those of you who are technically minded. Snefrin N methyltyramine, hortonine, octoponine and tyramine, a bunch of amino acid type compounds which have little or no effect on the central nervous system. It does exactly what you want. You activate what's called a beta 3 receptor and you get thermogenesis. This is where you want to be. This is why you use this in the product. Now, a very short course as to why you don't want to use the other product, the unmentionable products. You have a bunch of receptors in the body, some are called alpha receptors. Constrict your arteries, raise your blood pressure. You have alpha 2 receptors, raise your blood pressure again by restricting the veins and unfortunately also have this negative effect. Upon releasing fat for fuel, they actually turn off your ability to release fat for fuel. You may have beta 1 and 2 receptors which influence cardiac function, your heart function again, play games with your, with your blood vessels. Then you have the beta 3 receptors, 3 being the appropriate number here, beta 3 receptors which increase your ability to burn fat for fuel and they activate thermogenesis. The problem even with beta 1 and 2 because they appear not to have any negative effect, is that if you take something which activates beta one and two, that is those unmentionable products as a feedback cycle, you eventually activate Alpha 1 and Alpha 2. You want something that as much as humanly possible sticks with the beta 3 and doesn't mess with these other receptors. What you have of course is the product. And this is not the only item in the impacts product by the way. We'll get to the others. But you'll notice that advanter Z simply activates the beta 3. It does not activate the other receptors, which is exactly the picture you want to be seeing. Why doesn't it have side effects? Well, besides not knocking your adrenals, by the way, your adrenal glands are just above the kidneys. I remember hearing back from some individuals in Hawaii and Asian medicine knows about this very well, who complained about an ephedrine product. This was years ago. They complained about an ephedrine product. Their kidneys seemed to be sore what was happening. Of course, they were doing so much activation of the adrenals, that sensitive individual could actually feel the effect in the kidney region. You don't want that. You also don't want to put this in the brain. The nice thing about the beta 3 activation is you don't have to get inside the brain to do it. Very important, because get inside the brain, then you have all these problems, sleeping at night and so forth and so on. You're grouchy, your mate doesn't want to be around you, and so forth. Now you may be willing to pay a price to, to lose some weight, but are you willing to pay this high a price now for some real technical stuff which you just need to see. So you know that in fact the research has been done and those of you who are in the trial group and lost all the fat tissue will recognize why it was working. The bottom line here, the respiratory quotient just tells you are you burning carbohydrate for fuel or are you burning fat for fuel After a meal, you want to be burning more fat for fuel because that's what thermogenesis does. Typically you're going to take some carbohydrate, going to turn it. You use what's called brown fat for thermogenesis. Well, brown fat is. Well, it's a fat, though. It's typically turning some carbohydrate into a special type of fat and then burning it. Okay, what you want is a product that can alter what's called the respiratory quotient. Now, the bottom line is your advantage alone. The middle line is a meal, and the top line is the meal plus advantra z. What you see here is that the advantrez e does release fat from storage so you can get at it. And it also improves the effect with a meal. Thermic effect of food. Remember, 10% of all calories during the day. Thermic effect of food. Bottom again, is your citrus auranthium extract. Your middle line is the meal alone, and your top line is meal plus advanter z. Okay, so you can see that in fact, you're increasing the percentage of calories burned at a meal. You're improving thermic response to food, which is always depressed with weight gain. Your body produces all sorts of hormones in the adrenals. And this chart simply shows that with this product, you get an increase in the amount of epinephrine in the bloodstream or is being released in the urine. So you know what's being produced for this effect and increase in dopamine. These are hormones. Your body produces itself. These are regulators. Your body produces itself in order to get a satiety, in order to create thermogenesis. So you want something that safely and increases these levels without giving you all the side effects. And so when you look at calories burned, the white chart, the white bar is the one you want. This is the effect of a good thermogenic product. You burn more calories with each meal. That's why you're taking it. And for those of you who just can't resist, because I know that there are going to be some of you who want to get into that bikini next week. You just can't resist and insist upon a thousand calorie a day diet. The day eight. This is a bunch of women who are taking 1,000 calories a day diet. Day eight. That's the first week. They had lost approximately two kilos, about two pounds, without this is just on diet alone. Most of that quite frankly is going to be lean tissue and water. Then they start taking the advantage z product and you notice that you double the amount of weight loss in the second week taking the product. It's on 1000 calorie day. We doubled the amount of weight loss by adding this product in. However, no single product does everything, certainly not safely. For this reason. Thermo factor we include a special green tea extract. A typical use for green tea is a first class antioxidant supplement and is in Asia viewed as improving the function of the liver and the blood. Blood cleanser. What does the green tea add to this special extract? Not just any green tea. You have to have a good powerful extract. You have to have a real extract to do this. But what do you do? You slow the absorption of carbohydrate, which you want because carbohydrate, remember you're insulin resistant. You're producing too much insulin and then you get this cascade effect on the body. You want to slow the production of the absorption of carbohydrate so you even out the requirements for insulin. At the same time you want to increase how much energy you use even at rest. Just taking the green tea extract alone increases your body's use of calories by about 4%. And since it increases this as use of fat, not carbohydrate, it allows you to get leaner at time the same same time. Just the green tea extract alone would increase your energy expenditure by about 4%. That's like an additional slice of bread at your evening meal. Additional bagel. That's what we're talking about. You just got rid of by taking the green tea extract. You just used up that bagel. Now the nice thing is that there's a synergistic effect with the advantra Z. It improves the thermogenic effect of the other product, the other compounds aniline factor. Finally, tea contains an amino acid called L theanine which is actually mildly relaxing. So it counterbalances. It's one of the things reason that if you take the same amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee as you do in a cup of green or black tea, you get wired with the coffee and you may go out and take a nap with the tea. Those of you taking different, you know, tea and coffee have the same effect, same amount of caffeine, not the same effect. This is one of the reasons why and just a little technical chart so you can see caffeine is a xanthine Xanthine improves the impact of the advantra z. And this is simply a chart that shows you. These are the two nerve endings. Nerve releasing nerve receptor. And there you have it, our friend beta 3 receptor. So you want to increase this. Now, thermal factor has a host of supporting ingredients. It contains the amino acid l tyrosine, which improves appetite suppression, supports adrenal function, supports the production of thyroid hormones. We include chromium to improve insulin binding on its receptor. Chromium is important, it just doesn't do what all these other ingredients do. We include vanadyl sulfate because it has an independent insulin like effect. It doesn't need insulin for this though. Nice thing. Plus it actually has been shown to mildly inhibit the effect of insulin to store calories in fat. Don't want too much of this. We put the right amount in. We include manganese because it improves thyroid hormone functioning. It also may help improve basal metabolic rate. Again, this number of calories you burn just existing and it supports carbohydrate metabolism. So what you have, you have the main character, you might call it the king. Then you have the king's chief advisor, for example, green tea. Then you have all the foot soldiers. But you have to have. Even the king needs the foot soldiers. Let's face it, the king doesn't do everything normally. He's delegating all the time. So we're going to delegate. And so these are the other factors we're delegating to. Now, along with the thermal factor, we have lean factor. This is to answer a number of issues. One of them is that, well, most people who are going to go on a diet have been there before. Probably why they're back again. Okay, so repeated bouts of low calorie dieting are known to depress thyroid function. You're going to have to do something to reverse this, otherwise you're going to gain the weight back. If you don't reverse this, you don't raise the set point on thyroid. You're going to gain it back. Lean factor helps correct the thyroid function. As we age, the ratio of lean to fat decreases. Again, lean burns calories, fat stores calories. Real simple dichotomy the way it goes. Many of you have discovered that once you reach a certain age, typically somewhere between 40 and 50, you start putting on weight and it's like there's nothing you can do to stop it. Well, once you cross a certain magic threshold, you don't have enough lean tissue to burn those calories you're eating any longer. Then you just start putting on the weight, unfortunately, you need to eat a certain number of calories to get enough nutrients in your body. So you want to push it back a little ways so you can eat enough food to get the nutrients you need for good health. You've got to eat a certain amount of food just to maintain basic nutrition. Let's see. And then the. And what Brenda's so happy about, of course, is that what lean factor does, it helps push you back in the direction of having the same ratio of lean to fat as you had in younger years. Now, if you want to increase your lean tissue and keep the lean tissue, ultimately you're going to have to go out and do some additional physical activity. But if you want to get back to that ratio of lean to fat, which allows you to stay in equilibrium, lean factors helps. There you want to get an equilibrium. I advise going out and doing a little bit of exercise so you can increase the amount of lean tissue. But lean factor is real good at getting you back to the ratio of where you were before you start putting on weight. And then of course, those of you who do exercise, bodybuilders will love it very quickly. Your cast of characters. One's called Gugalipid. Typically in Asia, that's used to control high cholesterol levels, high triglyceride levels. It's a little gum resin we do a really nice extract of. What does glisterirone do? Helps increase thyroid function, stimulates your basic metabolism, may prevent thyroid. Reduction of thyroid activity even on a low calorie diet, helps reduce certain types of inflammation and improves the HDL to LDL ratio. These are all just sort of add ons to go with the weight loss. Another important factor is something called coleus for scoli, unfortunately a rather expensive item. Lots of uses, typically used for certain types of skin problems like eczema, asthma for asthma, for psoriasis, for angina, for high blood pressure. Again, something that has lots of other effects. Whereas the product you can go down to your local health food store and buy to raise your blood pressure. Well, here we have a product that has the same benefits without doing exactly the opposite. Very nice item. It's just been very expensive. Getting the right extract until recently has been very, very hard to do. The active ingredient is called Forskolin. This again is a technical explanation I don't expect anyone here to follow. So what it does is it increases the amount of what's called cyclic amp. This is the primary regulator for your response to a whole slew of hormones. It's like all these Hormones to activate their activation signal goes through this one little hole, one little pin prick. So if cyclic amp isn't working right, which elevated insulin levels will interfere with this. It's like you're blocking a whole slew of these. You're blocking thyroid for example, where Skolin protects against many of the side effects of excessive metabolic stimulation. It improves release of stored fat for energy. It helps inhibit the synthesis of new fat and helps compensate. This is very important because most people are going to be taking this product off going to be more than 35 years old. I'm assuming this is the case. It helps to compensate for age related reductions in your response to fat releasing hormones. Again, the thought here is you want to move back towards where you were as a younger adult. So let's put all this together. No one product does everything. Keep this in mind. Advantage Receive, for example does not handle insulin related problems. Chromium, manganese, etc. For that. So don't expect one compound to everything. So the impact products, your thermal factor, your lean factor, give you a complete and coordinated system with lasting results. No yo yo rebound. The products are non stimulating. They don't affect the central nervous system. What this means is you don't have to cycle. This doesn't need cycling. Any ephedrine based product has to be cycled. Real fat loss takes time. Do not expect anything real to occur in less than three to four weeks. Doesn't mean you don't start losing fat. But don't expect this to show up on your scale in any major way until after three or four weeks. Remember, fat doesn't weigh very much in comparison with muscle. If you're losing fat but putting on muscle, the needle on the scale isn't going to budge. Realize that with the product that impacts put together together. This product was designed for health first. Give it time to change the fundamental mechanisms in the body. That's going to take three or four weeks. Burn fat for fuel easily, you have real stable energy. I'll give you an example how important this is. You take a person who is lean, have them run a mile, they come back, they don't want to look at food. You take a person who is 20 pounds overweight and they run a mile. They come back and they're tired and hungry. Why? Because they couldn't get the fat they had stored for fuel. They used up all the glycogen in their system and their brain is screaming at them, eat that donut, eat that donut, eat that donut. Okay, so the early effect of.

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Thermal factor and the lean factor will be stabilized energy levels. You'll have better control over your cravings. But this is only going to show up and you'll start losing fat as fat right away. But it's only going to show up on the scale probably three or four weeks down the pike. Be prepared for this. We looked at this in terms of health first. Thank you.

So that's all the content for this week from BenGreenfieldFitness.com I know that Dr. Couture talked about a couple of supplements in that lecture. I'll put a link to a couple of those in the show notes to the the podcast so that you can find out more about those. And then next week I'm actually going to be doing a little bit of a review of some iPhone fitness apps. I'm just getting my new iPhone tomorrow and I'm going to start right away into finding out how those of you out there with an iPhone can use it to enhance your fitness. So look forward to that next week. And remember, if you want to leave our show a ranking itunes, you can do so by clicking, clicking on the link in the show Notes to the podcast that I'll put right there@BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's a great way to get the word out about the show and it does me a huge favor because hey, you know what? I'm sitting in my closet right now in my bedroom at 11pm getting cutting edge advice out to you. So do me a favor and leave us a ranking. Until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a great and healthy week. Week.