Podcast Episode #51: Ben Greenfield & John Gilbert Answer Your Best Burning Questions About Fat Loss, Nutrition & Human Performance

The answers to all your burning questions from podcast episode number 52@BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield coming to you with podcast episode number 52. And for those of you who subscribe to the newsletter, you know that what you're about to hear is a little bit unconventional. You may have received an email from me just a couple of days ago that shared with you the bad news that I accidentally erased this week's topic interview on natural anti inflammatories. And so I was forced to to find content quickly for today's podcast. I ask for your questions, your top questions about fat loss, nutrition and human performance. And I have sat down with the best of those questions and actually am going to answer them today. Now, here's the thing. You guys sent me so many questions that I decided there was no way on the planet that I would be able to answer all these myself. So I brought on my trusted assistant over at Human Wellness Solutions, and he's the head personal trainer at my downtown Spokane facility, John Gilbert. Say what's up, John.

Hey, guys.

John. He's got a degree in human metabolism and exercise physiology from Washington State University, studying to be a registered dietician. Very well versed when it comes to exercise. It's one of the reasons you work here, right, John, and knows quite a bit about fat loss. And so between the two of us, we're going try and answer your questions, but I threw a little bit of incentive in the pot and promised that the first question I got would get one of the brand new BenGreenfieldFitness.comT shirts. And the top three questions which we're going to answer first, what are they getting, John?

They're going to be getting a free T shirt, man.

Didn't you read the hundred ways to boost your metabolism dvd? So we're giving away three copies of that. So if you hear that your question was chosen and we are answering literally all the questions questions that I received via email. But if you hear that your question was chosen for that 100 ways to boost your metabolism DVD, you're going to need to email me your address. You're also going to need to email me your address if you won the BenGreenfield Fitness T shirt. So you can just email Ben greenfieldfitness.com so before we go on to all the questions that I received, I would like to just make a couple of quick announcements. The first is that last week I mentioned that the girl that I'm helping with her weight loss plateau down in California started into what I described last week in podcast episode number 50, the HCG Diet for Fat loss. And after being at a pretty severe plateau for quite some time and trying everything for fat loss, she's so far down £9 in the first six days. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the podcast at the bottom of the show notes after all the questions where you can click and follow her story. I also had David, the 55 year old financial advisor who's trying to become Most lean ripped 55 year old man on the planet. And he started in January 2009 again. He's doing online coaching, email coaching. He came into the office for a body weight and body fat evaluation. His starting weight was 219.5. He's down to 198. But more impressive than that, his starting body fat was 28.2% and he is down to 15.39%. That means he's lost over 20 pounds, 21 and a half pounds. But he's dropped 13% body fat between January and July 2009. In four weeks he's coming back in and we are going to take some pictures and put them on his page as well. But I was very impressed with his results. Good job, David. And then finally, there are only seven days left in the 63 day fat loss challenge over at Shape 21. And this was a chance for a select group of males and females to go through a fat loss program using my book Shape 21, which I completely redesigned to feature an allergy free meal plan. And it still features all of the beginner, intermediate and advanced exercises for days one through 21. It's no guesswork involved. Exercise and nutrition manual and these people are almost through it. And we're going to find out who won the over $400 worth of prizes in that contest. And once I give away those prizes, this book is going to be released. The publisher has it ready along with the DVDs and July 23rd it will be available for you to order. And it's not an ebook, it's an actual physical book that you'll arrive. People went through the challenge, were using the ebook version because it wasn't quite published yet. But now the book is published, it is ready and will be released on July 23rd. Keep your eyes open. I'm going to be giving some of the first people to surf over there and grab that book a big discount. So John, what do you think? You ready to tackle these questions?

Yes, I am, Ben.

Okay, remember, if you have a question as you're listening, you can email it to benreafieldfitness.com but I don't know. Well, John, when you were reading over these questions, before we hop into them, what were your thoughts on kind of the range of questions that we received?

Well, it was pretty interesting. There's different ones ranging from why am I having a lower heart rate, some kind of physiological questions, to even some psychological questions of why am I not being able to do this when I know I can. And so it was a good wide range of different topics.

Really? Yeah. And a lot of them seem like pertain to either fat loss or triathlon. There are a lot of kind of triathlons, endurance athlete related questions out there. So we're answering them all today. But this was the very first question I received. Congratulations to Nicole because you won the BenGreenfieldFitness.com t shirt. Email me with your address and we'll get that out to you. But Nicole says, hey Ben, I've been charting my meals online to monitor calorie intake now that I'm not training for long distance events. And the most frustrating thing I find is estimating your base metabolism and how many calories you truly should be eating in a day. There's a huge amount of variance from site to site depending on your normal daily activity level and amount of exercise. Is it worth being tested or consulting a nutritionist? Or is there a reliable do it yourself source for this kind of information? And relatedly, many of these sites also estimate the amount of calories you burn during exercise, which seems to be entirely arbitrary and potentially inaccurate. But I know that my polar heart rate monitor is off too, so I only use it for estimating purposes. This gets frustrating when I'm trying to balance diet and exercise more closely. The bottom line is is good enough really for using these systems for weight loss? I'm curious as to your opinion. Thanks for the podcast and the newsletters. They're always a good source of information. So I think what this question boils down to, John, is she's trying to figure out exactly how many calories she should be eating in a day based on how much that she's burning. And there's a lot of equations out there. There's a lot of things. You know, she mentioned the polar. What else is there? I mean if there's.

Well, we in school are taught a lot of different equations and kind of averaging those equations, so there's different things she can do with that. But there's IND calorimetry, something that we do here at Human Wellness Solutions in Spokane. And that'll measure the oxygen and CO2. And you've talked about it on other podcasts, so I don't know how specific.

You want to get. I mean, that's like the gold standard. It's a resting metabolic rate test. If somebody's just sitting at home, though, and they want to be able, you can't obviously hook this thing up to you and leave it on the whole day. It's a good way to sit in a chair for 15 minutes and find out how many calories your body is burning. When you're doing nothing at all. To give you that base calorie count that Nicole is asking for, you obviously don't take the machine around you the rest of the week, the rest of the month, so you couldn't kind of see how your metabolism changed. You could, like, go get a test every four weeks or every six weeks. If you're kind of looking for a place to do this in your area, you'd want to find a physiology lab or university. And the name of the test that you'd be looking for is a resting metabolic rate test. Usually they run about 75 to $150 in that range, but now they've got, like, the body bug, the Fitbit, the polar heart rate monitors, and, yeah, all these estimate calories. How accurate do you think the equations are, Dylan?

Well, it really depends, to be honest. There's the Harris Benedict. There's a lot of different equations. But I would say, in general, if you take a lot of them and average them and then chart your progress of weight over time, that's going to be the best for a practical standpoint. But in terms of a percentage of how accurate, I don't know off the top of my head.

Yeah. And what I find is I compare the equations to people that have come into our lab for metabolic testing, and, yeah, they're off 100 calories, 200 calories here and there. If someone is, for example, on a pharmaceutical drug, like a depressant or a stimulant, if they've taken a lot of caffeine, if they're on a heart drug, all of these things can affect your metabolism. And so if you're using one of those equations, there is no place in the equation to say, yeah, I'm on a beta blocker or I'm on an agonist or. Or I drink three cups of coffee a day. And so there's a lot of variables that the equations don't take into account. So the easy, easy way to do it. And my favorite equation is one called. You mentioned John Harris Benedict, just like it sounds. H, A, R, R, I, S space Benedict, B, N, E, D, I, C, T. The Harris Benedict equation. Plug that in, you find out what your resting metabolic rate is, and. And you multiply that by about 1.2, and that will give you about how many calories that you're burning during the day. What it boils down to is if you're using one of those polar heart rate monitors, you're going to get pretty good accuracy. I mean, it might be off by 10 to 15 calories, but that really doesn't matter that much. I mean, 100 calories there, 150 calories here on a daily basis. Yeah. If you're bodybuilding, if you're really trying to slim down, drop from whatever, 15% down to 5%, that's where that kind of information makes a difference. If you're 200 pounds and you need to get down to 150, just start exercising and burning calories and know approximately how many calories that you should be eating during the day, and it'll help. So take into account some of those extra things that you might be taking, like caffeine or stimulants or pharmaceutical drugs. And then also consider doing like one resting metabolic rate test to find out about exactly where you're at if you really want to know the exact number. So anything else you think, John?

No, I just re emphasize that they are estimations. So it's hard to get an exact, exact amount of calories. And kind of you yourself doing some equations and tracking your progress over time in conjunction with the equations will give you a better idea kind of of where those equations relate to you and your metabolism.

Yeah. So congratulations, Nicole. I guess we should probably go faster when we answer questions, huh? Okay, so we'll try not to drone on. We droned on on that one. We promised not to drone on anymore. So, buddy from Southern California, you are going to win a 100 Ways to Boost your Metabolism DVD. This was the first best question that we got. Here's Buddy's question. You want to read it? John?

How do you stay motivated when you know what to eat, how to lift, and amount of cardio that is necessary to lose weight, but you can't seem to stick with it. I have approximately £20 to lo. And when I lose £10, I seem to notice that I feel better, my clothes fit better, and I receive compliments from friends and family. Then I fall off the dedication wagon. And quickly put the 10 pounds back on a month or two of dedication lost in a matter of weeks. I'm trying to understand the psychology side to my self sabotage. Any suggestions? I know you're not a psychologist, but any suggestions you have would be helpful. Sincerely, Buddy.

All right. I know that you recently took some psychology. I did quite a few psychology classes. And you've been implementing some of the techniques that you've learned with our clients, helping them to lose fat. You know, what would you say, John, in terms of staying motivated?

Well, there's a lot to be said here. I'm going to not try to drag on, but address the question and also get some other people's inquiries about psychology. I just took a motivational psychology class, so hopefully this is helpful to all of you out there. One major thing is to just really be thinking more than you think you are. It's kind of an odd intuitive statement, but be a little bit more proactive about thinking if you're reacting to your environment or if you yourself are kind of creating your environment. It's what's called stimulus bound or goal directed. And you can think about this in terms of barriers. You have mental and physical barriers. And what you need to think about before or during exercise is what is causing you down the road here to give this up. You need to think about is it physical, is it kind of not enough sight on the road for a run or no equipment to work out with? You seem to be, Buddy, you seem to be in a situation that is pretty good for that. But mentally maybe you're thinking you don't have enough time, you're too tired, you don't have the belief in yourself that you can get past this £10. And you need to address these barriers. And in doing that, that's going to be how you're going to push through. It's much easier to say than to a One way of doing this is creating a belief in yourself. And it's something we call self efficacy. And so in doing this, what you're going to do is really make some sustainable but also short term goals. Even if it's as little as 10 minutes of just that. You believe you can do 10 minutes this day and keep that going. That's going to be what you want. You want to make sure that these are attainable short term goals. And if you can combine this barrier approach of thinking about your physical and mental barriers along with this self efficacy, there's a lot of research out there to support this. I went to the American College of Sports Medicine National Conference this last year. And there was a lot of research out there to support this type of an approach to some sustained long term nutrition and exercise. And something else I want to discuss here too is extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation and rewards. You got to think about you're getting some extrinsic verbal rewards from your friends and family that you're getting compliments. Do you think it's that these are what's driving or what is really driving you? Think about is it the feelings you're getting, the intrinsic worth of the working out and think about is that diminishing over time? What is diminishing? Something is not sustaining and that's what your question is about. So it's about figuring out what is lacking and sustaining if it's kind of a diminishing kind of return on either the extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. And think about kind of a principle of association here as well. What do you think about when you work out? Do you have music? Kind of create situations where you have maybe some poster prompts around, say in your office on the back of your door, have something that's going to remind you of the positivity of working out? Maybe it would be in a car or maybe again at another office it's in a cubicle or it's on the refrigerator door next to the tv. You don't want this haunting you. You want it to be a positive situation, but you want to be having it. Have you think about what's going to be going on and the barriers you're going to be facing here in the future. And it kind of gets back to what's called the Yerk Stocks law of optimal arousal. You got to really think about not overwhelming yourself, but not underwhelming yourself, creating some goals that you are going to be really satisfied intrinsically with down into the future. I challenge you, buddy, to really think about, instead of knowing how to lose 10 pounds like you say you do here, to lose maybe a few pounds over a longer period of time and sustain that, maybe lose two to three pounds over a month. And then I challenge you to sustain that loss over the next month and then maybe move on. Because that seems to be what your specific problem is, is the sustainability.

Yeah, the biggest thing that I heard John say that I really agree with was the short term goals. When you get that ten pounds off, then don't think about the next ten pounds, think about the next pound and go after that for one week and then go after the next pound. You also in addition to the short term goals, John, you talked about the true reason that you're really working out. I mean, put a picture on the refrigerator of the person that you want to look like. I mean, I know that sounds shallow, but if you've got this body image that you're going for, find it in a magazine, post it. You know, if you're embarrassed to put it on the refrigerator, put it on the inside of your closet, keep it in your wallet, whatever, and pull that out and say, you know what, that's what I want to look like. That's what I want my body to look like. And that's why I'm going to go for that pound this week. And then the other thing I think you also mentioned this, John, was like having ways to keep yourself motivated during exercise. Exercise. I love doing podcasts and music. Like if I don't have my MP3 player, I'm way less likely to work out. And so me and we talked about this last week, I'm an audio type. Audio really motivates me. And so if I have audio, I'm a lot more likely to work out. Maybe you're a visual person. So rather than going to the gym, you got to go work out in a park where there's kind of a change of pace, change of scenery. Maybe you're a kinesthetic person and rather than going for a run, you need to go put your hands like around an elliptical trainer and do some of that and switch back and forth between different devices, feel different things. So I would say that it's a multifaceted approach really. But what I would say is keep yourself entertained and set those short term goals. So that was a great question, buddy. The next question that we got was from listener Steve and he says this was an interesting question. Send us your mailing address. Steve, about nine months ago, when I got back into a training routine, I was able to hit my max heart rate of 170 with what seemed to be relatively low exertion. As my fitness improves, I find it harder and harder to get my heart rate up. I used to do long runs at 150 beats per minute without a problem. Now 143 to 145 beats per minute is a huge effort. My endurance is greatly improved. My pace is faster, but max effort is now required just to reach lactate threshold. My lactate threshold tests yield lower numbers each time. Doing 100% effort. 1 minute sprints or 4 minute Tabata sessions won't even allow me to reach maximum heart rate. I don't believe that I'm over trained and I don't really feel terribly fatigued. What gives? Is it just me or does this happen to everyone else? Steve, I got news for you. You're in good shape. This is pretty common. What happens is that when you are detrained, when you're a sedentary couch potato, you can sometimes get up and have a higher vertical jump and better explosive power when you're compared with someone who goes out and runs a marathon. And the reason for that is that muscle fibers are able to convert from fast twitch to slow twitch. Fast twitch muscle, it uses a lot of sugar for energy. It produces a lot of lactic acid. It's very good at quick, powerful movements. It's not good at endurance. And slow twitch muscle uses a lot of fat for a fuel. It's very efficient. It doesn't produce quite as much lactic acid, and it can go for long periods of time. What happens when somebody who is, let's say, just your average Joe decides to become an endurance athlete? They have this fast twitch muscle. That's kind of what the body naturally reverts to when it's not training. You produce the slow twitch muscle and a few things happen. The first is you have less fibers on there that are going to produce lactic acid. And when you aren't producing as much lactic acid, what happens is you got to work a lot harder to be able to get up to the burn. The same thing happens with the heart rate. Your stroke volume gets bigger, your heart becomes more efficient. And so all of a sudden you have to work much, much harder to get up to the heart rates that you used to be able to get up to. One of the markers that I look for if someone comes into our laboratory and does a blood lactate test is I will look for lower levels of blood lactate at any given workload. And that shows that they've lost fast twitch muscle, that they've lost some of that explosive speed, that power capacity. And the same thing is happening to you. Well trained endurance athletes, usually as time goes on, have to train harder and harder to be able to get the kind of burn that they were able to generate before. Just because their bodies become far less efficient at producing lactic acid and more efficient at buffering it, more efficient at working hard at lower heart rate. Some of the best endurance athletes in the world, if they were detrained, their resting heart rates would be a lot higher, but so would their maximum heart rates. My maximum heart rate when I'm not working out when I'm not well trained is usually up in the 190s. I can tell you right now, in the middle of triathlon season, it's really hard for me to get up to 185. So this is pretty common. John, you have an experience seeing stuff like this?

Yeah, most definitely. And to kind of clarify, to just shoot through some of the things you touched on physiologically, the reason you're training is for these effects. Steve, this is what you want. Basically, your heart Benito talked about stroke volume. Its left ventricle size is getting larger and your blood volume is increasing with this endurance style of training. And Ben was referring a lot to muscle types. And basically around the muscle you're going to have capillary density and mitochondrial density. When you pair this larger amount of volume that's pumped out of the heart with the larger amount of blood, you have mitochondrial, more mitochondria to extract the oxygen, the gas that you need from that blood. And so therefore, if you think about the amount of beats you need per the amount of oxygen, you're needing less beats because you're having more being pumped out and then more extraction going on with the mitochondria and the capillary density. So essentially what you're having is you don't need those extra beats to accomplish the same workload. And so that's why you want to train, is for that effect.

It's like having a chain ring on your bike and put more teeth on it. All of a sudden you can go just as fast as I have to pedal around, not quite as many times per minute. You got more teeth on your chainring, Steve, Good job. And then the last question was a three part question. And we are spending more time on the questions that are kind of the best questions. But theory from Theri, I don't know where he was from, but anyways, he gets a DVD for just going all out and asking a three part question. So the first part of this question is, what's your take on Kril oil as a substitute for fish oil supplements? I read that it was more potent and does not give you the fishy burps or side effects. And you are correct there, it does not give you the fishy burps. I don't know what you're referring to in terms of other side effects, but it does not give you the fishy burps. And the other reason that krill is becoming a little more popular is that it contains this antioxidant. And the main reason is that krill Eat an algae. And this algae has a bright, bright red pigment on it. And the pigment's called astaxanthi. That pigment gives krills and some other crustaceans like lobsters and shrimps, this reddish pink color. And that's an antioxidant. It would be just like eating a beet, a really dark red beet versus eating an apple. Yeah, both are going to be good for you. But the beet is a little bit higher in antioxidants. Krill is higher in antioxidants. It is a little bit more expensive than the fish oil typically. It's a little bit tougher to get. I personally don't like the fishy birch or side effects. I use a flax. I use something called N or efa. It's a flaxseed oil. And I feel great with that. I get the great skin. Get the cardio protective benefits. So, yeah, as far as the krill go, yeah, it is a good substitute for fish oil supplements. And it is more potent. It is higher in the antioxidants. And then part two says there are a lot of claims being made regarding resveratrol in wine and as a supplement, is it something we should try to fit into my diet? What do you think, John, with resveratrol in wine to.

To be honest, I haven't researched that as of late as I just finished my class in motivational psychology.

Gotcha. So he knows the psycho babble. Okay, so here's the deal with resveratrol. Yeah. It's been shown to improve longevity in mice and have other cardioprotective benefits. Mice and rats. When they first came out with the study, everybody was excited. They went out and they started drinking wine like it was going out of style until one scientist pointed out that you'd have to drop drink like eight barrels of wine in order to get as much resveratrol as they were injecting into those mice. And so now there are resveratrol supplements, resveratrol pills and capsules available. Drinking wine in multiple studies has been shown to have cardio protective benefits to reduce your risk of heart disease, to be kind of a de stressor. But the idea behind the resveratrol is that there's actually a little bit more of it in grape juice and there is in wine. And you're getting a lot less of the damaging effects that alcohol could have on your body depending on your tolerance to it. And so what I would say with resveratrol is that if you're Going to take it as a supplement. Don't be drinking wine and grape juice for resveratrol because you'll have to drink a hell of a lot to get what you need. But if you're taking a pill or a capsule, concentrated form of resveratrol or resveratol, there is some evidence in mice and rats, not humans, that it could help chimpanzees improve longevity. I personally have a glass of wine about three or four nights out of the week, usually a glass of red wine because it is a little bit higher in the antioxidants. And just know that wine is not going to be your most concentrated source.

I'd also like to add too here that it can be dangerous with the alcohol involved. But scientists are seeing that the alcohol helps to increase your good cholesterol, your hdl, and that's not seen with the grape juice. So kind of, of having, with all your nutrition. This is my biggest, biggest thing is a variety of grape juice and wine is what I would suggest, both in moderation, both spread out over a week's period of time.

Yeah, definitely in moderation because really, I mean, yeah, stuffing them. But I don't know what your opinion is on this, John, but I would say empty calories for a lot of people to produce fat. It really is, it's kind of empty calories. And then question three for John, or what do you think about taking the daily vitamin supplement four to six hours apart? Currently I break my tablet in two and take one half of breakfast and the other half with lunch or a snack. I read somewhere that the body may not be able to absorb all the good stuff and that it may be excreted if not taken in smaller doses. Well, basically, pretty much anything that you take is going to go straight into your liver. Your liver has a great storage capacity for vitamins, for nutrients, and your body will tap into that when it needs it. And so breaking up your multivitamin is not necessary if your body is overloaded with a vitamin. If it's a water soluble vitamin, it'll get rid of it over the course of several days. But just breaking up your multivitamin over the course of one day isn't really going to make much of a difference. Your little liver has a good storage capacity for things like vitamins, especially those fat soluble vitamins. I would say more importantly than breaking it up throughout the day is that you take them preferably like on an empty stomach before breakfast. And that's kind of painting with a broad brush because there are some Parts of the multivitamin that have enhanced absorption when they're consumed along with something else. But for the most part, you're going to get best absorption on an empty stomach before breakfast. If it's inconvenient for you to break it up into a couple of doses per day, then I wouldn't worry about doing it. If you want to keep doing it. I haven't really seen any research that's going to show that it's going to increase absorption just because you got that storage mechanism in your body anyways. What do you think, John?

Well, in our classes we talked about the absorption of different vitamins and minerals, and you would be surprised how little absorption can occur in even from foods. I mean, there's a lot of vitamins and minerals that aren't 100% absorbed. Many, even approaching 50%, is pushing it. So to keep in mind that, you know, a lot of foods, even whole foods, aren't going to always be absorbing all the nutrients involved in that. And that's something to kind of keep in mind. But also know that if you're lower in a certain nutrient, as Ben was referring to, our bodies are good at kind of regulating where we need to be. So if you're going to be lower in a specific nutrient, then you're going to most likely absorb it from the multivitamin. I don't know. I haven't seen specific research studies that look at breaking up a multivitamin specifically, But I do know that smaller amounts of vitamins and minerals over a period of time will be absorbed a little bit better. So it's a little different perception than Ben's. But at the same time, I would agree with Ben in the ultimate results. If it's an inconvenience to break up the multivitamin, I don't think it would be doing you too much better.

I don't think he's getting much added benefit from breaking it up. So those are the top three questions. Now we're going to move through the rest of the questions. First question is from David. How can I add more muscle to my neck? David, I'm going to tell you my top three top three ways to do it. The first is really simple. It's called headstands. You literally go against the wall, you stand on your head and you stay there for about 60 to 75 seconds or as long as you can tolerate with no neck pain or jaw pain or back pain. And that can help with the neck. You can do. And again, I'm assuming that you have a Healthy cervical spine. When I tell you that if you have a history of atyposoliosis or spinal defect, take all this with the grain of salt. Towel pushes where you have like an old sweat towel or a rag in your car and you push your head against the front, to the back, to the side, to the side. What are called isometric, like 10, 20, 30 second holds against that towel that can help thicken up the neck. And then the last thing I would say is something that kind of works a little bit lower down on the neck, but that can assist with the base of the neck. Something called Farmer's walks. You pick up a set heavy dumbbells that are heavy for you, whatever, 50, 60, 70 pounds, and you walk around with them for just like two or three minutes during the day. So those are kind of my top three ways to build your neck. John, you got any like your top exercise for neck building?

Well, it kind of relates to the Farmer's walks with shrugs. It's not specific to the neck. What are called your vastus lateralis or I'm sorry, your sternocleidomastoid and. And it wouldn't be specific to that, but you would be getting a thickening of around the neck with these shrugs. And you can do that with dumbbells on the side kind of doing a shoulder shrug. Like if you were carrying some groceries and you were, I don't know, had an itch on the back of your neck.

Yeah. So especially like if you're older and your skin's starting to kind of get in folds around your neck, it can help to tighten and tone the muscle underneath. Graham writes in with a question. A nutritionist told me that it's best to do your long ride or run on an empty stomach and not eat for at least the first hour as this improves the body's ability to utilize fats when racing longer distances. Is this correct and why? Yeah, it is correct. If you don't have a lot of carbohydrate on board, your body's not going to be oxidizing carbohydrate quite as readily. Sometimes it helps to avoid eating until you're about 30 to 40 minutes into an ultra endurance event like a marathon or a long bike ride. The trick to this though is that if you're not eating before you're not eating for the first hour, you better be truly going at a low intensity. This better be a true fat burning intensity. I mean, we're talking about the type of strategy that you would use for like a 26 plus mile run or 100 plus mile bike ride where there is no way that the legs are burning in that first hour. And it's pure fat utilization. So yeah, it's correct and it's, it can help for you to delay dipping into your body's carbohydrate stores. But man, it's got to be low intensity. Next question is from listener Heidi. Dear Ben, being a vegetarian, I'm jumping into this one, John, just because I wrote the book. So now I can answer this one. Dear Ben, being a vegetarian, can I still do the Shape21 plan? Yeah, I talked about Shape21 earlier. You can go to shape21.com to read about the book. But it does have meats in it. Heidi it does. And the reason for that is that for 21 days during that program you're exercising. I found that writing a program that was going to allow you to maintain your iron levels, your vitamin B12 levels and get all your essential amino acids in day after day was going to be difficult for me to make it just a vegetarian based diet. And then there was kind of the issue of well, do I want to write a book that completely cuts out meat? Because there's a lot of people who aren't going to be interested in my book if they can't eat any meat. So what you could do is you could use shape 21 and you could use meat substitutes for any of the meals that do contain meat. And a lot of the meat containing meals are hypoallergenic meats such as lamb. There are certain, if you're vegetarian, you're well aware of the combos that you need to do to make sure that you get your essential proteins. I'm not to going to talk about those because you can find those just about anywhere and I'm sure you're aware of them, but basically make sure that you're supplementing with particularly amino acids. So like an amino acid supplement would be nice. I use one called Recoveries heme based iron which you're not going to get from vegetables. That's all non human based iron. So you'll probably get to supplement with that and then vitamin B12. So as long as you're supplementing with those, then just put something like tofu or whatever type of meat substitute that you're currently using in for some of the other foods and you could still do it. Any thoughts on vegetarians and exercise that you would say? John?

Yeah, well one kind of combination and maybe you know this already, but it deals with vitamin C and iron if you're having say some spinach or something of that sort, that's going to be a non heme iron source. Try to get a little vitamin C in there. Whether that's with some belt peppers, some broccoli or even some orange juice or something like that. We want to try to get some vitamin C that will enhance the absorption of that non heme iron.

Yeah, interesting. There are tons of fruits and vegetables in the shave 21 plants. You're going to already get those, but yeah, it'll take a little bit of tweaking on your part, but absolutely, Heidi, you can do shave 21 as a vegetarian. And remember, the thing is chock full of a complete no guesswork exercise plane too. So it's not just the diet in there. Okay? From Listener Anonymous I've always been into fitness, even as a smoker. I finally quit 18 months ago and feeling looking ever so fabulous. Months after quitting, I continued to work out five to six days per week. I didn't change my diet by consuming more food, yet the scale showed I was gaining weight. I've come down to 130 and yes, I'm having a very difficult time getting back back down. I'm only 5 foot 2. I'm very comfortable at 115 and I don't want to take any type of drug to burn fat. This is such a tough question because they don't say whether they're male or they're female. But essentially it looks like they were working out, they were gaining weight, they weren't eating more calories. And so I would say that if you really truly were working out, okay, let's say that you were doing everything perfectly that you weren't eating more calories. Then there was something going on that was causing your body to retain water because again, you're not going to build muscle if you're at a calorie deficit. There was something going on that was causing your body to actually retain weight. I'm just saying, I'm assuming that you really are telling me the truth here and that you weren't eating more calories and that you were continuing to work out because it would be physically impossible for your body to actually put on muscle if you were at a caloric deficit working out because muscle needs 3,500 calories to build one pound of muscle. So something was causing you to retain water. A lot of times that can come down to something like an allergic tendency. A bloating reaction to food cortisol can actually be something that causes you to Retain water. It's a hormone that acts on some of the same mechanisms that cause water retention retention. There could have been something going on with salt, with sodium pepper retention. But again, I would first really, really rule out the fact that you really, truly were at a caloric deficit. And then the other thing is that you mentioned that you were a smoker, and smoking does bump up the metabolism, and it can take a while for your metabolism to return back back to normal. After you quit smoking, you do experience a dip in the metabolic rate. We talked about that in the podcast a while back. So kind of a tough question to answer. But, yeah, there are some things that can happen that can cause you to gain weight that go beyond just eating too many calories or putting on too much muscle or putting on too much fat. And a lot of times that has to do with just simple water retention. It's at the kidney level. From Joe. Hi, Coach. If you had to name five supplements that no endurance athlete should be without, what would they be? Thanks, Ben. Ooh, this is a tough question. Five supplements. Okay, I'm just going to name the five that. You know what, John? I'm going to name three. You can name two. All right, let's do that. Okay, so here's the favorite ones that I take. I take cordyceps mushroom X Rap. I take something called Cortagen VO2. It's from a company called Millennium Sports. It's been used by Chinese Sherpas for thousands of years climbing Mount Everest. Not a lot of research done on it in the United States, but if it's been used for that long period of time, and it makes me feel like I have much bigger lungs when I'm working out, I use it and I've used it for two years, and I love it, and I can really tell a difference when I don't take it. So Cordyceps mushroom extract. Yeah. The next thing I would say is like a complete superfood type of supplement. I personally take spirulina. It's what they feed to racehorses. It's an algae that is super high in all sorts of nutrients, very high in protein. Another one that I would really encourage. And then an omega 3 fatty acid supplement. It really helps with cardiovascular potential and it is great for your joints when you're out exercising a lot. So I take a flaxseed oil for that. So my top three are flaxseed oil, cordyceps, and spirulina. What would you say, John?

Well, I would add in there. First of all, I agree with an Omega 3. We both looked at research here. I might say a DHA instead of just an ala, but that would be maybe more of a fish oil than a flaxseed. But people could experiment with that to see both have been studied to help with performance. But I would say vitamin D is a big one because so many people are deficient in this and it very much acts like a hormone. It's a very hormone kind of based fat soluble vitamin. And that may help with testosterone levels and things of that nature in acting to kind of help with performance in that way with different aspects of the muscle. So I would definitely say vitamin D and then something else I've seen out there a lot. Ben, I would be interested to hear what you have to say. But is green tea tea extract. I've seen for different things from increasing metabolic rate to helping with endothelial function. And then finally what we're talking about here, improving performance.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean to paint that broader picture, caffeine in general, so many studies out there that helps endurance athletes pop on that stuff before you go out for your long ride to conserve glycogen to enhance your rating of perceived exertion or lower your rating of perceived exertion. So, you know, a cup of coffee may not seem like a supplement, but technically caffeine is considered an ergogenic aid. That's why the US Olympic Committee has certain restrictions on it. So what did you say? Caffeine and vitamin D? And vitamin D. And to add to.

The caffeine real quick, most of the research looks at 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. If you are interested in trying that out, anywhere from 90 to 30 minutes, you got to be wary of the crashes. But there's a lot of information out.

There to support it if you want to optimize it. That's a hell of a lot of caffeine. But yeah, if you got a big training session, it can help for sure. It can make 100 miles on a bike go by a lot faster. So Noah says how should daily diets and calorie intake differ from working out with 2A days to tapering or recovery day with no exercise? Well, I'm going to give you the big duh. First, lower caloric intake when you're not exercising. If you're working now, running in the morning, swimming at night, and then you got a recovery day, lower caloric intake, but you're going to be tearing down your body less. Lower protein needs, kind of that standard 1 gram per kg or in the range of 1 gram per kg of protein might not necessarily apply on recovery days. Me personally, I do a lot of salads, a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables. I don't eat that much meat. I'll do some nuts, some seeds because I'm not that concerned about complete proteins when I usually get them in right after my workouts on my exercise day. So lower overall caloric intake, higher fiber, antioxidant, low calorie vegetable, fruit type of intake would be ideal. So that's what I would shoot for. NOAA and what would you say, John?

Yeah, I would agree with that. To definitely not cut out the protein though those recovery days are going to be essential for rebuilding and kind of getting in those proteins that you've broken down and react, reconstructing so to not take it out completely. But since a lot of the training days you can get in maybe fiber because of GI problems that may be upsetting the stomach. That's an important thing.

The other thing I watch is like my supplement intake. I will sometimes limit my supplement intake on those days that I'm resting just because I may not need a bunch of cordyceps mushroom extract if I'm going to be sitting around watching TV all day. Okay, so the next question. Let's see from listener Jennifer. I have two small kids who don't. I should. I should start letting you read questions, John. I guess I'll read them. All right.

I have two small kids who often don't sleep through the night. Some days I am just so tired. Is it better to get a couple more hours of sleep or should I just get up and work out at 6am Anyway, I am really frustrated because I have lost 23 pounds so far, but I still have belly fat. I have only lost 1 inch around my waist. What should I do? Well, first of all, Jennifer, congrats with the 23 pounds of weight loss. I think that is great. The one inch around the waistline. Ben, I'm going to put that to you because you have much more experience with that.

Yeah, it's just body fat distribution loss. I mean different people will lose their weight in different places. The abdominal body fat a lot of times can be due to an inflammatory reaction to the, the foods that you eat. And so if you are not eating a clean diet, free of toxins, organic food, if you haven't been identified for food allergies, things of that nature, a lot of times the gut is where your fat is going to hang out and manifest itself. So I would definitely look into eliminating some of the common food allergens like gluten, wheat, soy, eggs, dairy and basically step back and see how your gut feels. A lot of times a lot of that's just bloating, inflammation and then as far as the sleep, yeah, it's important. I've had people who have been perfect exercise, perfect nutrition, they quit losing weight because they were only asleep for four hours a night. Cortisol goes up, testosterone goes down. Ghrelin which can give you appetite cravings that'll go up. Leptin which will reduce appetite cravings that will go down. Serotonin and dopamine, both two things that help you feel satisfied after a meal. Those go down when you're low onset sleep. So I would say that I would try and find a good balance. Maybe have a few days where you are getting enough sleep. Even like every 48 hours, try and get enough sleep and then get up and get your workout in at 6am on those other days. What do you think?

Yeah, I think something I didn't catch right away is that the balance here it seems like an all or nothing question of should I just sleep or should I just work out. A lot of research looks at seven to eight hours of sleep with controlling the leptin and ghrelin levels that Ben was referring to. So if you're really struggling for getting enough sleep, I would say try for at least seven hours and then getting in that workout, you don't give us approximately how much you're doing it, but getting in that workout at least a few times a week and then getting that extra sleep a few times a week. I would rather have a seven hour continuous week with a little bit of working out than have you have eight or nine hours of sleep per night with no working out essentially. And that's a little obvious. And then also one thing I'd like to add here is you're asking what you should do. I'm hoping that you're not thinking that we're going to tell you to do a bunch of sit ups and crunches and things like that to spot check your body. We can't really do a lot of our bodies aren't going to lose fat in specific spots if we work the muscles in those specific spots. We just don't have the physiological capability. So please don't think you need to go out there and do a bunch of crunches. Rather than just be using as much calories as you can in your workout, think about as much musculature with a Squat with a press to anything you're doing. Just working and moving as much as you can to get the largest caloric deficit paired with the anti kind of inflammatory diet should get you where you want to be. But that's kind of nice.

Yeah, I mean like I had two babies last year and what I did was have high, high intensity sets. I would only work out like 20 minutes a day because I was going off very little sleep and trying to take care of babies. I still did an Ironman triathlon that summer, but I used lots of high intensity intervals. So we've talked about those on other shows. I'm not going to go into them, but those can be your very good friend when you don't have a lot of time. Next question is from Julie. Ben. As a person with occasional irritable bowel flare ups, especially in stressful times like right before a triathlon, do you have any suggestions or nutritional thoughts on how to lessen or eliminate the flare ups? Two things that I do before triathlon is two days before I really lower my fiber intake. I'll cut out like apple and banana based carbs, salad based carbs, get a little bit more sweet potato and potato starch, a little bit more bread sometimes if it's gluten free, sprouted bread. I'll do stuff like quinoa, some dairy foods like yogurt. The other thing I'm really careful with is too much coffee, too much caffeine that can really cause your gut to flare up. And then the last thing is some relaxation. You gotta get those butterflies in your stomach to fly in order. They're still gonna be there, but relaxation. I close my eyes a lot before a race. Go off to a quiet place, imagine myself going through and doing everything perfectly. And that helps quite a bit with reducing. Do you think there's anything else, John, that you should avoid eating in terms of bowel flares?

Just kind of. You touched on caffeine. But acidic foods is what I've read about with things like orange juice or just low ph. High acidity foods can add to flare ups of the gastrointestinal kind of flora there, or not flora but cells. Also to keep in mind this relaxation is a big thing. Something that I've done in the past when I've done sprint tr. This may sound strange, but get in a rocking chair and actually massage the gut or massage kind of the intestinal area to just kind of get a little motility going and moving mechanically. And I found that to be very helpful.

Where the heck is she? Rocking chair for a trap.

But I'm just okay.

So yeah, I can see that. Like lying on the ground. Lying in the the ground. Self massage the stomach. Yeah, that can help a little bit. I guess it could help with gut motility too. I mean, you know, not to be crude, but if you got to take a crap real quick before the race, what have you got to do to get that out there? If that helps. That might be another thing. So, listener Kevin, can you recommend stretches or other solutions for extremely tight hips? I can't bring my knees to my chest while holding them together and have very little internal rotation in my hips. So if you can't bring his knees, knees to his chest will hold them together. Very little internal rotation. He's talking about tight external rotators. Basically a tight IT band. Tight gluteus medius. My biggest tips is yoga and a foam roller. Foam roller. There's a lot of exercises that you can do with that. If you go to BenGroomfieldFitness.com.com scroll down to the right hand side of the page, there's a website called Perform Better. Go to Perform Better. Pick yourself up a foam roller. You'll get a PDF or a CD that shows you exactly what to do. Start using that foam roller on your external rotators. I personally do about 10 minutes of yoga every morning and I include a lot of the external rotation stretches that are in yoga. There is a CD out there that I reviewed on the show called Yoga for Endurance Athletes and that one literally has a place on it where you can just choose to do a quick 10 minute routine that is all external rotator stretches. What do you think, John?

Yeah, I would suggest going to the website and checking that out. And when you're warming up, do what's considered a dynamic warm up where you're moving and stretching at the same time. Such as maybe slow walking lunges or things like this that are going to help with hip extension before you work out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So including some like leg swings side to side. Leg swings can be good for the external rotators as well. We'll do those before a run actually. And Tommy, Ben, I can't forget, figure out why I have a sensational craving for fat at night, particularly for almond and sunflower butter. I know they're not bad fats to eat, but I'll get a bag of baby carrots and go through a whole jar in one setting. So he's dipping baby carrots in almond butter or sunflower butter. Tommy, that's just weird. That sounds Nasty man. I do admit these cravings occur on big training days and I know I'm not supposed to be refueling on fat. How do I stop these drug like cravings for fat? Is it because my body prefers fat rather than carbs for energy? Not sure if this would help, but I'm a 6 foot, 170 pound, 3 hour marathoner who's currently training for Lake Stevens Half Ironman. What would you recommend I do? I think the most important unique part of this question is, is it because his body prefers fat rather than carbohydrates for energy? You know what, in America we're all one big genetic melting pot. A lot of us came from different ancestries. You're going to get some ancestries like those big Samoan Islanders. Those guys function very well being at heavier weights. It's part of their culture. They do well on higher fat, kind of a coconut oil, medium chain triglyceride based diet. Some people do very well. They don't gain weight and they have great stabilized energy levels on high carbohydrate diets. Some do well on high protein diets. There are several books out there on metabolic typing. Dr. Mercola comes to mind as one individual who has a metabolic typing test out there. There are other metabolic typing tests on the web that you can do. There's one that I send out to some of the clients that I work with online who fill this out so I can get an idea of how their body functions in relation to carbohydrates and proteins. And a lot of times the people who crave fats would fall into the higher protein metabolic type. They don't do as well. Unlike the $0.55, 65% carbohydrate, 15, 25% fat, 15, 25% protein diet. They do well on like a 2530 fat and a 25 30% protein. They have better energy levels. You could be one of those people. But the other thing I would really make sure that you're doing, especially in your big training days, is if you're getting these cravings for fat, look into using something like a monounsaturated fatty acid supplement, medium chain triglycerides supplement, branch chain amino acid supplement. I know I'm throwing all these phrases out there. I'm not going to assume you know what these mean, but basically you're looking for the sports supplement that has proteins and sometimes fats in it. One example is like the Hammer gel Perpetual. That's a fat and protein based long distance fuel. That might be something That's a little bit better for your body than just pure sugar based gels. Roctane by a company called Goo that has branched chain amino acids and carbs in it instead of just simply carbs. So two things to bear in mind. The first is, yeah, your metabolic type might need a higher protein, higher fat diet. And the other thing is make sure that you're getting some fats in while you exercise. They also make now a pretty digestible coconut oil extract that you can take 1 to 2 teaspoons or tablespoons prior to the workout. What do you think?

Yeah, yeah, I got three points that relate to this one with the medium chain triglycerides. I'd like to kind of clarify here that what you're eating definitely with the almond butter and that nature is going to be a healthy fat indeed. But it is not really going to have, especially compared to the coconut, those medium chain triglycerides which have been shown to really help with performance. And so what I'm getting at here is fat loading other than looking at medium chain triglycerides has not been shown to be better than carbohydrates for a source of energy in endurance. So that's a big, a big thing to get across. Another point that I want to make here is it's hard or it's difficult to assess this when you only tell us one aspect of your diet. It'd be interesting to look and see how much protein for satiety you're getting in the rest of the day. It may be that you are only providing yourself with carbs or things of this nature. And then at the end of the day you just haven't had enough satiety throughout to kind of sustain you. So kind of thinking about things leading up to the day. And then the last point being that in consuming the almonds and these type of fats, there's a lot of omega 6 fatty acids as opposed to omega 3s. So make sure you're trying to balance that with either some alpha linoleutic acid from flaxseed or the DHA oil or omega 3s you'll find in fish oil.

Yeah, good points, good points. Peter has an interesting question. Hey Ben, what are your thoughts on nightshades in relation to training, recovery and anti inflammatory properties? Okay, so as far as nightshades, nightshades are basically their plants. They're edible plants that would include like tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplants. And they have been known to cause some of the symptoms that can make joint pain worse because they have what's called a positive if rating or a positive inflammatory rating. Now, if you tend to be someone who experiences joint pain, it might help you to eliminate nightshades from your diet. Those tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants, and see if you notice a difference. So if you do, you might be someone who's sensitive to the particular substance in these foods called solanine that can actually cause some of that inflammation. If there's something that you're sensitive to now, it goes beyond just like getting heartburn from tomato sauce. We're talking about actually getting joint pain. So if you're trying to heal, trying to recover faster, you're consuming nightshades, you're noticing that your joint pain increases, then try eliminating them from your diet. I personally don't have anyone that I coach that I have eliminate nightshades from their diet, but every in moderation. And I would have to say that a lot of the diets that I write out there aren't a ton of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants, but they creep up now and then during the day. I would say if they're staples in your diet, that might be the bigger issue. Do you guys study nightshades at all in any of your classes over at wsu?

No, we actually don't. We haven't got to that point yet. And so that was an interesting question to read initially.

And if you as a in the audience, if you have comments on any of these questions or some things you want to add, go to the Show Notes for podcast episode 51 and leave us a comment. Especially with those nightshades. Tell us if you have your own thoughts or things that you've discovered with nightshades. John says, does what you eat and when you eat really matter? If I have three slices of pizza, will they give me belly fat? And if I eat them 20 minutes before bed, is the effect amplified? I don't think we should spend too much time on this question because we have answered this before before. But yes, when you are physically active, your body is more sensitive to insulin. It's less likely to store what you eat as fat. So, yeah, it's not just about the calories, it is about the timing. Go back and listen to some of the secrets of fat loss episodes earlier in the podcast. So I'm not going to go into that question too much, but absolutely, three slices of pizza can make you fat, and they're more likely to make you fat if you eat them before bed because you are going to be less insulin sensitive when you are Inactive. And then listener angel says, you want to read this one, John.

Ben, are there certain foods that can aid in fat loss, or does fat loss depend on calories in versus calories out and musculature? Thanks, Angel. This one, I know it's directed towards Ben initially, but I'm going to answer it here. It is about calories in and calories out to an extent. Ben has touched on this in podcasts and other areas in talking about inflammation. And so I'm going to pass this to Ben because he's versed in this. But you are correct in that the musculature also plays a part in your metabolic rate. With a higher bit of musculature. The higher metabolic rate, yeah.

Again, this is one of those questions. I don't want to spend a ton of time on one because we have covered this in previous shows that it really is more important than calories in versus calories out? Even though that comes into play, I think the first part of her question is interesting. Certain foods that can aid in fat loss. Yeah, there are. There's a book I've written, 100 Ways to Boost your metabolism. Go pick it up. It's like 14 bucks. Read through it. It gives you 100 different foods that can. That could bump up your metabolism and aid in fat loss. But ultimately, what I don't want to give you the impression of is that there's some magic bullet, some food that you can eat that's going to make you lose weight. You got to go work out, you got to go exercise, you got to watch your overall caloric consumption. So I always like to be careful with these questions. Yeah, if you'd gone for three years without losing weight and had a perfect nutrition and exercise program, yeah, we'd start looking at some other stuff. But ultimately, there's not a lot of magic bullets. You need to exercise, watch your calories. And then if you want to know about foods specifically that can increase your metabolism, then go check out the book. That's why I wrote it. For questions like that, Rich says, here's my question. How do you feel about supplements like fat burners? They're all over in terms of advertisements and promise to boost metabolism for everyone, regardless of activity level. Okay, first of all, possible podcast number 44 actually covered every single. Not every single, but most of the thermogenic fat burners out there. And then, did you read the recent study in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research, John? Yeah, it was called the acute effects of thermogenic supplements on energy expenditure and cardiovascular function. Do you have any thoughts on their findings?

Well, I was surprised coming from kind of a whole foods perspective, not really believing in these thermogen aids. But they really have shown in these reviews that they can be helpful in aiding to metabolism. And then I would suggest going to the podcast because some are more dangerous than others with the stimulants, but there are ones out there that are beneficial and safe. And so that was a good point to come across in research.

We use two with our clients. One is called Lean Factor, one's called Thermo Factor. Both of them don't have all the caffeine and central nervous system stimulants in them. And so they don't do damage to your body from an adrenal level. And basically they have things that help stabilize your sensitivity to insulin. One has a little bit of a green tea extract in it, but not enough to make you jumpy. One has an enzyme that helps your liver's fat burning enzymes to enhance their activity. Bitter orange extract to control the appetite, something called Advantra Z. But Lean Factor and Thermo factor are the two that we use. And if you just go to bangorenfieldfitness.com and do a search for those, you'll find them. And those are the ones that I would highly recommend. But yeah, most of them actually work. But it's just a question of how healthy they are for you. Got to be really careful with some of the caffeine side effects, your liver, your kidney, your adrenals with some of this stuff. Listener Jesus. We actually have a listener named Jesus. That's kind of cool. What's the best dinner and breakfast before race day? Wonder how often he gets teased about that name. And also, how long can you go without drinking water during a race? Is it a bad thing to not drink anything during a race? I usually don't and my maximum distance is a half marathon. That's not what really big deal. You can get away with that. As long as you're hydrated, you can easily go through a half marathon, assuming you're running it fast enough without drinking any water. I think a bigger thing to pay attention to is once you lose 3%, in some cases 2% body weight from loss of water, your performance decreases. It starts to go down significantly at that point. Different people have different rates of water loss. And if you tend to be a heavy stuff sweater or someone who loses quickly, that might come back to harm you in a half marathon. It definitely come back to harm you in a marathon. So you can go as long during a race as it takes for you to lose about 2% body weight and then it starts worrying, you start worrying. So if it takes an hour, if you lose 2%, you better not be going out and doing any races that last more than an hour without actually starting to drink water. Most of the bad athletes out there, they cross the finish line dehydrated, but there's a fine line behind giving your body just enough water that it needs to keep yourself from getting that 2%, 3% loss and over hydrating. Any thoughts on the best dinner or breakfast before race day? John?

Well, carbohydrates, usually of a starch variety, is what I would suggest. Such as sweet potatoes. We've talked about this before and those are probably, probably the highest recommendation I would go with. But just high carb, high starch, maybe pumpkin or these things, try to stay away from a lot of fiber, but just getting in those carbs to top off the glycogen levels for the next day. And keeping in mind too, the other part of this question being what type of environment you are in, that's kind of the underlying implication that Ben's talking about here. If it's high hot, if it's humid, these things are going to play much more of a factor in your sweat loss and losing that 2% body weight.

As far as carb loading, a lot of my athletes are doing a lot better with gluten free carbs for dinner and for breakfast. So we're talking about potato based starches, yogurt based starches, fruit based starches, staying away from lots of bread, lots of pasta. Listener Susan says. Hi Ben, I recently listened to one of your podcasts from May. Ooh, I almost ranked this as the best question question where an athlete mentioned gaining more weight during her Ironman training than when she was a couch potato. Your comment was that you heard that a lot. Well, I'm in the same boat. I've been training for Ironman since 2006 and every year since then I've put on more weight and gained more jiggly bits than when I was just weight training and running for short distances. I'm not an elite triathlete or a top age group or I'm average. I'm a mere mortal. I've been watching what I eat and I feel I eat a clean diet 95% of the time. So why is it that I keep putting on the weight and gain body fat? Is this just a normal thing as you age, or am I doing something wrong with my eating? I'm not sure if you can answer this question without knowing my training hours or looking at a food journal, but I greatly appreciate any advice you can give me, Susan. So, Susan, here it is in a nutshell. When you start training for Ironman, we talked about this earlier in the podcast. You're using a lot of slow twitch muscle and one of the issues with the slow twitch muscle is that it really doesn't work. Bump up the post exercise metabolic rate. You don't get the same amount of testosterone release as you do when you're doing fast twitch muscle, high intensity type of exercise. A lot of the hormones that can enhance fat loss are not released and you tend to turn into. I'm just going to kind of throw this out here as an example. Especially if you're not training as a pro and doing a lot of the faster repeats, you tend to kind of turn into a turtle, into a tortoise. You're able to go very long periods of time with exercise and if I said let's race, you wouldn't be able to beat me to the next telephone pole. But 20 miles later you might be ahead. Now, the body likes to use fat for long distance fuels and it likes to turn itself into a good little fat burning machine with just enough storage fat on you in order to help you go for those long distances. You combine that with the fact that you're not doing much of the fast twitch that and yeah, what I've done, especially my female athletes who have this problem, is we incorporate weight training with high intensity intervals three times a week. Some of the stuff that's similar to what I have in my book, the Top 12 Resistance Training Routines for triathletes. And then we incorporate higher intensities. A lot less of those four five hour bike rides, a lot more of a quick one hour hard ride with ten two minute efforts thrown in. I mean hard stuff. So that should shock your body off its plateaus. Think more about speed, less about distance. Not going to talk about your nutrition because I haven't seen it. I'm going to trust that you are eating a clean diet and tell you to go out there and throw some fast stuff in. Get your body shocked down in that long slow turtle mode. So you want to read the next question, John? Yeah.

Hey, my burning question, having lost weight recently and being over 50, what, what can I do nutritionally? Supplement natural to handle the saggy baggy skin issue?

Get surgery, get stapled. What do you think, John?

Well, there's different topical creams out there. I don't know of the research behind them. But from a nutrition supplement point of view, I would look at omega 3s. We talked about those earlier with flaxseed and fish oils. Really help your skin Exact. There's different vitamins and minerals out there that propose to be good for your hair, your skin and different proteins. What I would suggest is looking at your diet, I mean, it's a little bit more of a forefront question of generalized. But if you add in those omega 3s and look more at getting some more fruits and veggies in, as generic as that may sound, you're going to get the vitamin K and some of those things that are purported to specifically help with hair and skin.

Yeah, like vitamin A, the essential fatty acids that John talked about. All of those can help the skin with its elasticity. Staying hydrated is very important to maintain your skin's elasticity and fullness. You want to take care of your skin. You don't have to go out and buy expensive moisturizers or expensive creams, but there are some simple moisturizers and creams out there. For example, I use something called action wipes and it's just the tea tree oil and a eucalyptus oil with a few of her light and natural moisturizers that I put on my skin to keep it kind of supple and elastic, Especially after a workout. Exfoliation that can stimulate the cell turnover on your skin, it can help generate new skin. Exfoliation will be important if this is something that you're dealing with. And again, there are skin nourishing supplements out there. There are moisturizers out there. I don't know if you've tried those, but if you haven't, I would definitely, definitely try them and I would definitely stay with them for a good three to six months to actually see the difference. A lot of these aren't designed to give you results right away, but if you stick with them, they can help. But yeah, staying hydrated and I don't know anything else, John.

Yeah. To add to the hydration. I'm sorry I missed out on that general rule that I know there's research behind. This rule is taking half of your body weight in ounces and having that as a rule for water consumption. You don't want it to kind of overtake your life. But that water consumption will help with the hydration of the skin. There's research to support that. And that water consumption will help with distension of the stomach. If you are working at trying to lose weight and consume, consume less calories, that will Help you feel fuller longer if you're consuming those large amounts of water.

Jan says I'm in my mid-50s. I use natural progesterone derived from yam for sensitive. At first I was able to have some control over my weight and then all of a sudden it didn't work anymore. I switched to natural bioidentical compound estradiol cream and it didn't do anything. I tried estradiol for six months with no success and discontinued it. As I noticed no change. I continued my workouts. Cardio and resistance. I'm still stuck. Do female hormones really assist with fat loss? I've not seen it in my experience. I've tried both progesterone and estrogen Bioidentical would not success when used singularly or in combination. Thanks, Jen. Yeah, they work for some people. There's an excellent resource out there, a gentleman named Dr. John Lee, who's written some very good books on natural hormone balance, natural hormone replacement therapy. And what his general recommendations come down to is that if you're going to be taking these things, you have to test pretty extensively and you have to test accurately to make sure that you really truly are replacing what you are deficient in and that you really truly were what's called estrogen dominant in the first place. So what I would say is if you're just randomly like throwing progesterone creams at your body or natural estradiol and you're not actually testing to make sure that your levels are being optimized by the amount that you're taking, then yeah, it's really not going to do much. The hormone replacement has to have a lot of supervision in terms of having a medical professional kind of walk you through the testing prior. I would recommend the salivary testing versus the blood testing. A lot of those blood hormones are bound and inactive. The salivary hormones are unbound, they're more active. And so once you get tested specifically for progesterone and estrone or estrogen, estrogen. But I would suggest that you do a 24 hour steroid panel for all six of your sex steroids and you can go to your doctor and ask for this. It's called a 24 hour sex steroid panel. Get a look at that. And it literally is over a 24 hour period of time. See where you're at. And then you would like to go actually approach a physician who knows about natural bioidentical hormone replacement and who is willing to actually continue continually test you as they optimize your levels. But the trick with using it is you have to test, you have to retest and you have to make sure that the hormones are at the levels that you want them to be at. But look at the books by John Lee. John Lee has some really good writing on that. There are other reasons that women can be stuck with fat loss in addition to hormones, but estrogen dominance is really the thing that you want to look at. Joe says, what are your thoughts on Hammer nutrition products in general and specifically recoverite and perpetuum. I like them. I've used them before. I'm going to give you a link, Joe, to talk about how I've used them. BenGreenfield Tri Tri, like triathlon. BenGreenfieldTri.blogspot.com I write out all my race reports there, what I use for nutrition, how I use it during the race. Check out my race reports for the entire year, year of 2007 where all I used was Hammer products. But yeah, they work well. There's quite a few of them out there and they're a good quality natural supplement. Nigel is next. Nigel says, hi, Ben, hope things are going great. I have one burning question. How do you lose weight without losing power on the bike run? He goes into his body weight and everything, but essentially he says he wants to do Ironman in 9 hours and 40 minutes plus. I look at the weight for height ratios with the guys doing the Tour de France at the moment and that is roughly what they are at the 183cm and about 74kg. Yeah. I mean, have you seen Lance Armstrong, John?

Yeah, recently.

Recently. Just gone. He lost a good amount of weight. He's about 2kg lighter than he was in previous Tour de France. But that, that guy was ripped. I mean, earlier in the season he had put on some muscle and that boy had to lose, I think like 8 to 10. Boy. I don't want to disrespect him. I kind of disrespected him last week with the FRS question. So sorry, Lance, I know you're listening in, but yeah, I mean, the man has lost what, like 8 to 10 pounds getting ready for the Tour. The way that I do it with the athletes that I work with, Nigel, is because you, you have to be really careful training hard and losing weight at the same time. We talked about the study last week that showed that that really can kind of come back to haunt you and hurt your performance is that we combine deficit days with loading days. That means that there are certain days where you really load up on food and you really want those to be your toughest exercise days. Usually you shouldn't be doing a lot of interval training more than about three days per week if you don't want to blow up your body for really, really talking about true interval training. Those days would be your carb loading days, the days where you really are enhancing your overall calorie intake with high density foods. But then you have your recovery days and your lower volume days. And I would especially recommend one of these low volume days be long. We're talking four, five, six hours of cycling, but primarily on flats, not a lot of rollers. And that particular day you taking in a lower calorie diet. So we're trying to tap into those fat stores while at the same time we're not doing damage to the body. So you're trying to cycle the training and the nutrition, the aerobic and the anaerobic workouts. So if you really want to look at this in a simple fashion, take your entire week, take the easier days of the week, start to calorically restrict on those days and on the other days, man, get your nutrition perfect. Okay, within 20 minutes, minutes, get your calories in, make sure you're optimizing your carbohydrate protein fat intake and then lose weight on the easy days. And that's really, that's how I do it with my athletes and it works really well. John, any thoughts on that?

Yeah. To add to that, something I'd like to bring to the attention here is that these are also different sports. They utilize the Ironman utilizes cycling, but you gotta realize you're using the lats and a lot of different musculature with the swim and the run. And so you're going to have to have some extra musculature on board to do the activities you're doing. If you had the upper body strength of these cyclists and you were trying to do an Ironman, I would predict you wouldn't fare very well.

Lose all your upper body muscle, man. You got to carry a little bit of mass, especially for Ironman, you need that muscle. So yeah, Ashley says how much, when and what is your best practice for fueling for long training and race? I'm training for my first triathlon, but I'm trying to determine what type of fuel and how much I need. I don't really want to spend too much time on this question because it's kind of basic and we've gone over a lot of this stuff in previous podcasts. The main thing I would warn you about, Ashley, is a Lot of the fueling advice that you're going to find out there is trickle down advice from Ironman triathletes. The stuff that says eat 600 calories before your event, the stuff that says eat 200 to 300 calories during the day during your event, the stuff that says go out and get four meals in after your workout. That stuff was written for people who are exercising 20 hours a week and doing 10 hour long events, not for sprint distance triathlons. So your main concern would be to not over fuel. So that's what I would say to you, Ashley, is just be careful with not over fueling. And then as far as the type of fuel and how much you need, you don't really need anything during a sprint distance triathlon. If you're doing that thing in anywhere from like 60 to 80, 90 minutes, your body has more than enough storage carbohydrate on board. Just make sure you follow all the rules that we've talked about on this show before with pre workout and post workout nutrition and you'll be good to go. What do you think about the next question, John?

It says please explain the differences in sugars and also explain cortisol cycles as they pertain to circadian rhythm. Well, we've looked at this a little bit bit in school, to be honest. I don't recall all the specifics, but we do have some information recently that we researched.

So Ben, could you. Oh yeah, sure. Well, the sugars, I mean, Jim, when you see the difference in sugars, I'm assuming that you're talking about low glycemic versus high glycemic index sugars. We could take up the next hour talking about those. But just go Google glycemic glycemic index and you're going to learn everything that you need to know in about 10 minutes on the difference in sugars. But I really like the part of your question that asked about cortisol cycles as they pertain to the circadian rhythm. Because basically what we're looking at is that cortisol is just a hormone in your body. Think about it as a type of hormone that kind of turns you on, gets you going. But if there's too much of it, like there would be if you're stressed out all the time, then, and it's not really that great of a thing for your body, you can essentially suffer from a lot of the symptoms of being overstressed when you have high cortisol release things like muscle wasting, low testosterone levels, low metabolism, things of that Nature cortisol levels tend to be triggered by light, by your natural circadian rhythm is triggered by light. And so they'll start to really elevate in the morning. And typically they'll reach their peak kind of about mid morning and fluctuate kind of roller coaster throughout the rest of the day. But then they do start to drop as the sun sets and as you get closer to sleeping and your metabolism starts to slow down a little bit and you start to burn fewer calories and your body really starts to relax and get ready for sleep. And so specifically in terms of what the cortisol reaction looks like is that sunshine is what signals your body clock to begin its active cycle. So your body responds by producing serotonin, adrenaline and cortisol, among other things. This helps with that cerebral activity, it helps to jumpstart you get your motor activity going. Think about cortisol as kind of like your jumper cables. It's just meant to be in the body for short durations of time. Cortisol is. And so if you've got those jumper cables going, but then you're getting up and you're going to work for 14 hour day and being highly stressed out, that's when that cortisol might not match what it's supposed to match. Based off the natural circadian rhythms. Your body temperature increases throughout the day, your metabolism increases throughout the day, reaches its peak. It kind of depends. Sometimes it's mid morning, some studies I've seen mid afternoon. But in terms of fueling your body, you want to really watch your overall caloric consumption as you get closer to dinner and about four hours before bedtime, because that's when cortisol is going to start to drop off. That's when your metabolism is going to start to drop off. And until the next morning when light hits your system again and your circadian rhythm goes back up, you should be careful with doing things that are going to cause you to store calories. So that's the deal with cortisol cycles. And the main takeaway message is that cortisol is good in moderation. You need to watch your stress levels because cortisol is already going to be naturally released by your body and you don't want to throw off that release by being stressed out throughout the day. Following a circadian rhythm that responds to a light dark cycle is ideal if you got to work at night. Sometimes that messes it up and sometimes that's just the place that you are in life. But I would really recommend that you try to sleep when it's dark, wake when it's light and that will really help your body in terms of its calorie burning and metabolism. Good question, Jim. John, do you want to read the next question? Yeah.

What are the three or more? Pick any manageable number most important initial steps for a beginner novice to take when starting a fat loss program. What are the three or more most important initial steps to take in order to maintain sustained progress after a fat loss program? And well, the most important initial steps I would say, I would refer back to that psychology question we talked about earlier. Dealing with, with barriers, identifying barriers and setting short attainable goals to deal with the barriers specifically before you start any type of training. And that that's going to be what you're going to look at for success. And then from there, once you have identified the barriers and getting going with understanding how to do that, that's when you want to add in a fat loss program that is going to be sustainable. You can start one up right away and if you feel like you can deal with the barriers at the time, but that's how I would say you should go initially and then sustaining. We talked about that in the psychological question as well with short term goals, attainable goals, feeling self efficient. But I'd like to put it over to Ben here if you have anything to add.

Yeah, man, when you're first starting off, don't guess, don't waste your time. Get a personal trainer for just like a month, have them teach you exactly what to do and then take it from there and go on cruise control and just see them once a month, once a week to help you out. And then once you have lost the fat that you want to lose and you haven't wasted your time doing it because you're doing it pro and no guesswork. When you're in maintenance mode, cheat, man. Give yourself that day where you just let yourself eat whatever you want or not exercise if you don't feel like it because that makes it for life. That makes it a lifestyle. You can't live like a monk your whole life. You won't have any fun. So have that night where you go out and have some fun. Have that day where you eat cake. So yeah, let yourself cheat. It's part of maintenance.

To add to that, my favorite saying is moderation, including moderation. You have to have these days. Even Ben, I've heard on this podcast, of all people, his Sundays are his days to indulge. And it's just keeping in mind that you're not going crazy with your indulgence, but just keeping in mind that you need to stay sane.

Yeah, totally. Scott says. I recently found a kelp calorie calculator online based on gender, age, weight, average heart rate, and total time exercising. In my opinion, this would be a more accurate way of determining calories burned during any activity. What was your average heart rate during the total time of activity? Regardless of the activity, isn't the increase in heart rate most indicative of intensity and calories burned? Thanks, Scott. Yeah, as long as the increase in heart rate is really truly tied to an increase in oxygen. If your heart rate goes up because a bear is chasing you or say because you drank eight cups of coffee before your workout, that's not indicative of intensity and calories burned. That's indicative of central nervous system stimulation. It doesn't necessarily burn calories, just makes your heart rate beat faster. However, if your heart's beating faster because you're low on oxygen and you're having to suck in a lot of oxygen and bump up your metabolism, then, yeah, that is indicative of calories. Perfect. So there's a direct link, a direct tie there. We talked about the resting metabolic test earlier. We also do an exercise metabolic test in our lab. It's based off that we measure how much oxygen you're consuming. That is directly tied to the number of calories that you burn. That is directly tied to heart rate. We tell you the heart rate that's associated with the calories that you burn. You go out and exercise that heart rate, and you don't actually measure oxygen consumption because that's, like, really hard to measure while you're exercising. But, yeah, 20 to a certain extent. As long as it's not because of central nervous system stimulation. Yeah. Heart rate is indicative of calories burned. Joe says, if you had only one type of food to snack on during the day, what would it be and why? Let's both pick one. John, what's yours?

Well, it depends how you're framing the question. If you're talking about health or you're talking about indulgence.

Let's say if you're on a desert island.

Well, let me first give the good connotation of health. Broccoli would be the main health one I would use, but if I were to say something that would be indulging, something I like quite a bit would be mixed nuts. I tend to like those quite a bit and could eat quite a lot of those. The salt associated with mixed nuts, the crunchiness, that tends to be something that I can go overboard on. Pretty easy.

Well, I'm going to say quinoa. Quinoa was like a super food used by Aztecan warriors back in the day. Highest protein content of any whole grain on the planet. My kids drink it. It's very hypoallergenic. We'll grind it up and make milk out of it. We'll use it as our whole grain. We'll make bread out of it. Muffins out of can keep the body going for a long period of time. As a matter of fact, some. Some of the Aztecans, who were like ultra marathoners, used to burn it and put the ash in their mouth and hold it as almost like a chewing tobacco in their mouth and run with it. And they mix that with cocoa powder and release what are called alkaloids in the ash from the quinoa and help them to go just like forever. So quinoa, big super food. It's always in the refrigerator. And that's the one food that I would go with who keeps. Keep me going for a long time. As long as I had adequate water.

I think you'd survive more than me.

I would survive versus Jonathan's broccoli and mixed nuts. Okay. Chip says I greatly reduced my stress level. I cut it by 75%. Suddenly, my workouts are much more productive. I asked my trainer what we were doing differently, and he said, nothing. It's your stress levels. What exactly is going on there? What is it about stress that was killing me and keeping me fat? I guess we kind of answered that question. Cortisol.

And then, you know, the.

What else do we say? We mentioned? Well, we mentioned about sleep. Right. The serotonin, the dopamine, cortisol, testosterone.

It essentially deals with different hormone levels, and that can then relate to different neurotransmitters. Yeah. Appetites and how you go about regulating what you do. A higher heart rate, placing higher blood pressure and more stress on the. What are called the endothelial cells, your kind of vessel walls, then can relate to heart attacks down the road. It all deals with kind of hormones and the amount of activity that's going on with your heart and blood vessels.

So it doesn't have much to do with your brain, man. I mean, a lot of people think there's, like, this barrier between the brain and the body. It really is physical. It's hormones and neurotransmitters and steroids that actually suffer when you're stressed out. That's what was killing you. That's what was keeping you fat. John says name one essential. Must have Won't finish unless I have a thing that I must take during iron distance races. So for Ironman triathlon, John, one thing that you won't finish unless you have it. Assuming that you're fat enough enough and your body is able to strip off fat and use it for energy during the race, pretty much all you really need is water. You can finish an iron distance race off of pure water. You got to be going at a snail's pace, man, because you can't use any carbohydrate. But technically you could do the distance. If you're fat enough and you've got some fat that you can tap into, you can do it on water. So that's what I'd take out there with you. Kind of a silly question, but yeah, Mary says this is kind of an interesting question. Can you read this one, John? Yeah.

I have heard recently that carbonation slows fat metabolism by 60%. What are the current facts about diet and regular soda? Thank you for all you do. Well, first of all, I'd like to say that diet soda and regular soda have both been shown to be associated with obesity, even though people are taking in less calories. There's strong correlations between this diet soda with its caffeine and everything and its acidity that we had talked about earlier. That may be related to some of the weight. I'm not up to date on all the research dealing with diet soda, but I do know that there are strong correlations, like I said, with diet soda consumption and obesity, even though the calories aren't there.

Yeah. And as far as your question about carbonation and slowing fat metabolism, nuh. There's no evidence out there that a carbonated drink could slow your fat metabolism. As a matter of fact, sometimes things that are taken in a carbonated form can actually be released a little bit quicker into the bloodstream. And so if you're taking a caffeinated supplement in carbonated form, you might get the caffeine into your system a little quicker. And if caffeine is helping you to lose weight, carbonation might help a little bit. I'm totally just thinking out loud here, but basically in a nutshell, Mary, no way. Carbonation does not keep you from losing weight. It's all the other crap that comes in carbonated drinks that keep you from losing weight. Okay, last question from listener Jordan. Last question of the day. I'm allergic to all the non steroidal anti inflammatories that I've tried. Aspirin, anaprox, niclobin, naprosyn, yada. Do you have any ideas for some topical or ingestible anti inflammatories that I might try? The amount of non steroidal anti inflammatory has to significantly accumulate in my body before I get a reaction. So it's not to worry. I don't have a lower reaction for the first few doses. What are your thoughts John?

In reading research this last year on vegetarians, it was really interesting to read about that they had higher blood levels of what's called acetylsalicylic acid or salicylic acid and it's actually the main ingredient, the main active ingredient in aspirin and the fact that the higher levels of the salicylic acid was related to decreased inflammation due to higher what we already know, fruit and vegetable consumption. So that's going to be another kind of generic answer here. But the more you can get fruit and veggies in your diet, it didn't look at raw versus not just the more you can get in, it seems to be the more that you're going to benefit from this anti inflammatory effect of the food. Yeah.

And as far as natural anti inflammatories, I wrote a big article on this called 18 Ways to Help youp Body Heal Faster. Google that, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Read that article. Just about every natural oral anti inflammatory that you could take is listed on there. And then in addition to topical anti inflammatories, there's more than one way to skin a cat with that. I've used magnesium oil, I've used oil of oregano. I've used a mix of something called MSM and glucosamine. I've used arnica. There's another one out there called Trauma Meal. There's quite a few different supplements, topical ointments out there that you could use. And a lot of times if you're combining these with an oral anti inflammatory that is natural, you can avoid some of the reaction that you get to the nonsteroidal anti inflammatory. None of these are quite as powerful but if you're getting an allergic reaction, they're options. They're options for you.

And there also is research to point at omega 3s. I know more about DHA and fish oils doing this, more so than ALA and flaxseed. But I know there's research out there to support the anti inflammatory effects of omega 3 fatty acids. So that's another coming back to that supplement being quite important or at least getting in some fish along with the supplement you can get that in in many different ways. But there's even a warning to not go over 2 grams in a day due to the anti inflammatory and blood thinning effects that can occur because of such a high amount.

So that's in that article 18 Ways article as well. Those are all the questions, man. I know we talked for a long time here. If you have comments, leave them on the show. Notes to this podcast episode number 51, including additional questions that you might have about the questions that we answered. If you won a DVD or you won the T shirt, email benandbengreenfieldfitness.com with your address. Make sure you check out the Shave 21 Lean Body Challenge that's coming up next week. We're going to go back into our interviews, have some really great interviews coming up. And last thing is, if you like this show, we spend a lot of time on it. So there's two things that you could do. One is you could go to our itunes page, leave feedback and give us a rating. And then the next thing is you could consider donating to our show. And we're going to throw in a free T shirt for anybody that donates to our show. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com right side of that page there's a link where you can donate. There was one other thing that I want to mention. Oh, new website. John and I, we work a lot with clients in the Spokane, Coeur d' Alene area and all over the world online. There's a new website that just ties together everything that we do. It's not completely full yet or completely completed yet, but it's called humanwellness solutions.com humanwellnesssolutions.com and I will put a link to that in the show notes at the very, very bottom of all the show notes. I'm typing it out right now. Human Wellness, I guess it's spelled with three S's. I hope that doesn't confuse people. But humanwellnesssolutions.com I'm just going to kind of hide that in there so you can go check it out and, and surf around, see what we do and just give us an email if you have questions. There's some free newsletters and a calendar of events and things like that out there as well. And then keep your eyes posted because we are going to be starting up those live online TV Q&As soon. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and John Gilbert signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week it. Sa.