The 5 Best Ways To Accelerate Fat Loss, Can Testosterone Be Too High, How To Get In Running Shape Fast & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, the five best ways to accelerate fat loss. Can testosterone be too high? How to get in running shape Fast, coffee, enemas101, and much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Rachel. Today is an epic day.

Every day is an epic day that we have a podcast. Ben.

I know. It kind of is. It kind of is.

Why, in particular is today an epic day?

Well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you in a moment, but first, I want to know, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

I am just dosing on Chimera. Coffee.

Kimera coffee. Okay, gotcha. The reason I ask is because I was just curious if you ate anything that has a nutrition label on it.

Well, Chimera does, right?

I believe that it does. Anyways, though, the reason I ask is literally today, the big epic day. After years of committees and debates and panels and retreats and literature reviews, the FDA actually finalized their new nutrition label guidelines.

Wow, that's huge.

Insert trumpets here. Actually, you know what? They're pretty good.

And I don't know if you're impressed by the fda.

I'm impressed by the fda.

Oh, wow.

The powers that be, the white collars at the FDA have finally done us right. So here's what they did. First of all, when you look at a nutrition label, not that I endorse necessarily eating packaged food all the time, but let's just say that you're branching out beyond simply eating romaine lettuce and turkeys that you've shot in your backyard or something like that. Maybe you're not 100% ancestral. What they have now is, first of all, they have added sugars. So rather than simply showing carbohydrates, now they'll show added sugars, which is really great because natural sugars are a lot different than added sugar. So if you get, like, a package of blueberries, those blueberries are going to have sugars, right?

Right.

Blueberries are fruit, and they have glucose and they have fructose, but they also have all sorts of other good things in them like fiber and micronutrients and anthocyanins and all sorts of antioxidants. But if you look at the nutrition label now at the grocery store on, say, let's say, like, dried blueberries, right, they'll show the sugar from the blueberries, but then they'll show any added sugars that they've added in.

That's awesome.

Very useful. Okay, here's a good one. They've got revised serving sizes. So you know, when you buy, like, let's say. Let's say you're being really healthy. All right, we know if you're listening to the Ben Greenfield fitness show, you're not drinking Coke, right? But let's say you're drinking kombucha, right? And you look at the label on, say, Kombucha, and it says 40 calories. And then you take a closer look, and that's 40 calories per serving. Per serving. And there's two servings in a bottle, two serves. Who the hell opens up a bottle of Kombucha and just drinks half of.

It and then just tucks the other.

Half in the refrigerator for the next day or a. Or whatever. So now they actually have realistic serving sizes, what someone actually typically consume in a setting. So they've got that. That's good. They added micronutrients, so they added vitamin D, and they added potassium, which is really good. They added updated micronutrients as well. So they've added things like the vitamin and the mineral content in milligrams or micrograms. So now you know a little bit more about the actual micronutrients in the food that you eat. What else have they. Oh, they. They added calories and also servings per container. So what we just talked about how sometimes it can be deceptive when you buy it, knowing exactly how many servings are in the entire container. Well, now, if you buy, let's say, a bag o chips, it will tell you, you know, this bag of chips is considered to be 8 servings, or this bag of chips is considered to be four servings, which I think is helpful for people who maybe, you know, are at the airport and buy a bag of chips and take it onto the airplane and maybe glance and see that, oh, hey, this is actually 8 servings of chips. And maybe I shouldn't eat all of this right before the plane takes off.

Yes, true.

That's useful. And here, here's a big one. They removed calories from fat.

Hmm.

Which sounds kinda bad. But at the same time, like, that was a big one that a lot of people would look at. They'd look at how many calories from fat that a food contained and avoid that food if the calories from fat seemed high when, you know, as we've discussed on the podcast before, really, it' sit's in many cases sugars that are a bigger issue when it comes to metabolic disease and all sorts of other nasties in food compared to fat. So they've actually removed the amount of calories derived from fat, which I think is important because I think it's gonna cause more people to consume, hopefully more healthy fats.

Right? Definitely. What about anything around the whole natural flavorings thing?

Natural flavorings? I do not believe that they have adjusted that at all. You can still have a food that says that it contains natural flavors, and those natural flavors can, as we have mentioned on previous podcasts, be derived from a beaver's anus. So there you have it.

Oh, gosh. Well, that's good news anyway.

Yeah. Good news for the beavers. Good news for the fda.

News flashes.

Rachel, do you ever measure your heart rate variability?

I have before, but I don't, I don't routinely do it, no.

Why?

Well, I don't know. That's a good question. I should. I know.

You need to start doing it. It's the one thing that I measure every day.

I know.

Hrv. So in, in case you didn't know, this is the part of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show where we talk about news flashes, the latest research, and every single day. If you follow twitter.com BenGreenfield and what's the Facebook URL?

Facebook.com BG Fitness yeah, we, we post.

Plenty of research on there. I actually spend typically about an hour every morning pouring through about 30 to 40 different and articles trying to dig into what might be interesting for you. And here's one on hrv. They've actually done a study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. And in this study, what they did was they took 150 people from your neck of the woods, Rachel, University of Western Sydney.

Oh, wow, the Aussies.

Yeah. And they measured their heart rate variability and then they asked about their opinions on social issues from a third person perspective, which apparently I did not know this, but in research science, that particular method of questioning is supposed to be correlated with the ability to engage in what they call wise reasoning.

I did not know that either.

Some might call Solomon like wisdom. And what they found actually when they measured their heart rate variability or the time interval between heartbeats. Right. Which is a measurement of the Strength of your nervous system. They found that a high heart rate variability caused those people to be able to, from a third person perspective, make wiser judgments. And quote from the study, it says some people may use their cognitive skills to make unwise decisions to challenge their cognitive abilities for wider judgments. People with greater heart rate variability first need to overcome their egocentric viewpoints. I know that's a mouthful, but basically what it means is that people who have high heart rate variability may have wiser judgment, may make better calls in the face of stress, and may actually be able to do things like make political decisions or judgments a little bit more reasonably.

Yeah, I'm imagining it's got a lot to do with feeling triggered and having strong biases around social issues. Like in those conversations, if you can kind of remove, you know, the social issue itself from like your association to it with your identity, then it makes it a little bit easier.

Yeah. Or more specifically, basically just not having an active sympathetic nervous system or unbalanced sympathetic nervous system that allows you to have like a knee jerk reaction.

Right.

To something that comes your way.

Yeah.

So it turns out that focusing on a lot of the stuff that we've talked about in previous episodes, like the health of your vagus nerve, sleep de stressing like I am right now, diffusing pine essential oil, you know, things that, that all allow your heart rate variability to stay really stable throughout the day, that may actually affect your, your ability to engage in wise judgment. That's why I just sound like so chock full of wisdom right now, Rachel.

Right. You've got a really strong parasympathetic nervous system.

It all comes down to heart rate variability. It's also why I'm sure I'll vote perfectly here in a few months. When voting comes along, voting season comes along, which by the way, we, we avoid talking about on the podcast.

That's probably smart.

In America, never talk politicians. Although I am libertarian.

Okay, I guessed that a long time ago. Ben.

Yes, I own guns, I hunt gold, silver. All about freedom.

I love it.

All right, so moving on to the, the non Democratic and non Republican listeners still around Speaking of heart rate variability, there are certain ways that you can increase wisdom and assist with cognitive impairment. And as we mentioned, heart rate variability is 1. But there was another study that was done at University of California, Los Angeles in which they did a three month yoga and meditation course. And in this case what they did was 12 weeks of doing just one time a week, a Kundalini yoga class, and then 20 minutes every day of meditation and the specific type of meditation that they did involved chanting and hand movements. Two things that by the way, increase your vagal nerve tone, increase the strength of your parasympathetic nervous system. Chanting, gargling, humming, singing, any of these things, as well as hand movements. And they also did light visualization. And that's basically where you, where you close your eyes and you imagine like your third eye chakra and you see colors and you're seeing colors even though your eyes are closed. So kind of woo woo. But still two things that I do like. My kids and I were literally in the living room yesterday, sitting cross legged, holding hands, blasting ourselves with 440Hz, 444Hz tones from these whole tone CDs that we listen to. And I'm getting the guy who produces these CDs on the podcast. They're designed to basically like enhance cognitive function and decrease stress. And they're specific, they're very similar, like binaural beats. So we play them really loud in the living room, we sit in front of the speakers, so the tones just like blast our entire bodies. And so what this study looked at was this idea of like meditation along with Kundalini Yoga. And what they found was a big increase in specifically cognitive performance and blood flow to the brain and visual spatial memory. Increase in people who did this 20 minutes of meditation along with this specific form of yoga called Kundalini Yoga. And it turns out that even compared to like crossword puzzles and computer games and other forms of memory enhancement training, that 1, 2 combo of meditation and yoga vastly improve cognitive function.

And I guess now it's technically not woo woo because it's a scientific study.

Scientific fact anyways though, so Kundalini, now that's something that I personal do multiple times a week. I had a custom Kundalini Yoga routine designed for me. I don't know if. Did you listen to the podcast I did with Summer?

Yes. She's brilliant.

She's very cool. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com CustomYoga you can have Summer actually design a custom Kundalini Yoga routine for you. And then also, if you want to know more about the chanting and the music that my kids and I are listening to now, just stay tuned, pun intended. Because I'm getting Michael Tyrell, who wrote the entire book about whole tones and produce these CDs, I'm getting him on a show very soon.

Very exciting.

Fun news flash. So kind of taking a completely different direction. I wanted to talk a little bit about Water. So do you use a water filter, by the way, or do you drink special water?

The only filter we use is one of those jug filters. What are they called? Brita. A Brita water filter.

A Brita water filter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're like, those are terrible.

Rachel, what are you doing? Water filters are okay. There's more that you can do when it comes to water, though. There's certainly more that you can do. For example, there was a really interesting article recently that I read about Hunza water. So Hunza water is based on studies that have been done on isolated societies, such as the Hunza warrior tribe population, and the type of water that they drink. And in many cases, they've found that these folks are drinking water that A, has a lot of live minerals in it and B, gets exposed to a lot of sunlight. And so this particular article, which I'll link to in the show notes, talks about how to make your own Hunza water. And it's kind of a cool little recipe. So what they use is a Himalayan pink rock salt in this Hunza water recipe. And then they take that rock salt and expose it to sunlight to activate all the minerals that are in Himalayan rock salt. Because the idea is that you want water that has a high amount of vibration in it, such as water that would be when it travels down glaciers or mountainsides in the sunlight and stuff like that. So the way that this works is you take water and you fill a sterilized clear glass container with the highest quality drinking water you can find. You put that glass container in a sunny window for a full day, so it's getting exposed to a bunch of sunlight. And while it's. While it's in there, you also take a bunch of Himalayan pink crystals, and you can buy these on Amazon. And you take these Himalayan pink crystals and you put them in another glass jar. And you. You take this jar and you take the sun water that you've had basically exposed to the sun for a full day, and you pour it over this Himalayan salt, these Himalayan salt crystals, and then you basically drink that. And they call it Hunza water.

Very cool.

This is basically water with a really, really high vibrational charge.

Have you tried it before?

I haven't. It's on my list of things to try. And I'm putting it in the show notes for people who want to try this recipe, but this is actually not. Woo woo. The body is a battery. And the idea is there's this researcher at University of Washington. I've had him on the podcast. His name is Dr. Gerald Pollock. And he goes into how water can vibrate at specific frequencies. And when it's vibrating at specific frequencies, it creates what's called an exclusion zone, which allows for bonding between water molecules that is based off of electrical charge that is not just hydrogen bonding, but causes a series of these crystalline, like, lattice structures in the water. And when that happens, more water is able to move into cells. And so when you expose the water to sunlight and then you pour the water over minerals after it's been exposed to sunlight, you get water that has very similar vibrational qualities as the type of water you'd get, say, if you were on a. On a Himalayan mountaintop. Like, it. Like getting it from a spring as it tumbled over the rocks. So it's a way to hydrate yourself much more completely.

Is. Is rainwater supposed to be like the. The be all and end all of water? Is it supposed to be particularly good for you?

Rainwater?

Yeah. Like, if you were just to harvest rainwater directly and drink.

That depends. If I was in la, I wouldn't go near rainwater.

Really?

Well, no, because it goes through the smog. It's full of a bunch of pollution. So not rainwater, but spring water. And there are. Actually, you can go to findaspring.com and there are other companies. My friend Daniel Vitalis has a podcast called the Rewilding Podcast, and he recently interviewed someone who is now setting up shop in different big cities. Louisiana being one of the most notable, by the way. And delivering spring water to your home. And spring water is one really, really good way to get exposed to water that has this really good vibrational qualities in other ways. You can biohack this, right? Like, I get my water from a well outside my house, but then after the water goes into my house, it passes through a filter that's basically like a series of glass beads. It's a structured water filter. It's called structured water. And when it does that, it gets a lot of this vibration. But what I'm not doing is pouring it over these Himalayan rock salts or let it sit out in the sunshine. Wow.

Next level.

Yeah. So you need two glass jars, you need some of these chunks of Himalayan pink salt, which you can find in grocery stores for, like, $3 each, and then just some high quality drinking water, and you let the one water sit in the sun. Once it's sat in the sun for a day, you dump it over the Himalayan rock chunks and you have yourself Hunza water.

Sounds delicious.

And then one other note about water. There's a really interesting article on npr.org and by the way, I'll link to all of these articles and research over@BenGreenfield Fitness.com 353 and this article is about Gladiator Gatorade and they go into what gladiators, the sports stars of the Roman Empire may have had for their post workout recovery drinks and what they may have guzzled. What they found is that they had this drink made from the ashes of charred plants. The ashes of charred plants. What they found was that when they burnt plants and they used the ashes of charred plants in water, there's a bunch of minerals and a high amount of alkalinity in that particular water and a ton of calcium in particular in addition to manganese and copper and iron and many other trace minerals that we can get when we say remineralize water or take trace liquid minerals or whatever. But they were actually burning up plants and using the ash from those plants and then adding them to water for their post workout recovery drinks. These gladiators and this was considered to be like their their power juice.

That's so fascinating to me because I would have imagined that ash would have nothing left if it was burnt to a crisp like that.

Yeah, they called it a plant ash beverage. And I haven't been able to hunt down an actual recipe for how to make your own plant ash beverage. But I don't know, maybe Gatorade has suppressed all the recipes out there so they don't go out of business. But, but if you were listening in and you know how to make this gladiator Gatorade with plant ash, please do let us know the recipe because this is something I would actually try. I could see myself going out, finding some plants, burning them and figuring out how to how to drink lye or water made from plant ashes because I'm all about turning myself into a gladiator. So. Oh and and by the way, the the Hopi Indian tribe, by the way, they found that they use burned plant leaves and burned pea pods to prepare things like bread and dumplings and also to add to their water again for calcium and manganese and copper and iron and all that kind of stuff. So.

So it's the new superfood.

Could be the new superfood could be a way to die from copper and iron overdose. Not quite sure, but either way I thought it was notable. And I'll put the link in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 353 for those of you who want to Dig into the goodness that is plant ash.

Listener. Q and A.

Hi, Ben, this is Joshua. Love your podcast. Love your website. My question is, I just got my blood work back. Everything looks really good except for my Testosterone was at 1100, which I know is ridiculously high. So it scares me. Any thoughts? I don't know. I'm going to go to see my doctor here in about a week, but I just don't trust them to have a real answer to what's going on. So I know it's good to have high testosterone, but 1100, I know, is a little bit over the top, so love your feedback. Thanks a lot.

Poor, poor Joshua. All the guys listening in right now absolutely hate Joshua.

Right? So much testosterone.

What are the.

So much testosterone. What do I do with all this testosterone? No, seriously, though, there are some definite considerations here. If your testosterone is ridonkulously high, as Joshua says, and 1100 is pretty high. To put this in context, mine floats between about 500 and 700, depending on when I test.

Wow.

When I used to race Ironman triathlons, it was between about 300 and 400. Most guys are generally, like, high is considered to be like 800 plus. 1100 plus is typically what you'd see if somebody was taking testosterone, like a testosterone patch or a cream or something like that.

Okay.

Which it doesn't sound like Joshua's doing. So can you have too much testosterone? Is too much testosterone a big deal? Well, first of all, yes. High total testosterone, which is what we're talking about with Josh, that can be an issue. So one of the things that you'll tend to see with high total testosterone is aromatization of that testosterone, meaning that much of the overabundant hormone can get converted into estrogens, which can cause things like man boobs getting weepy during chick flicks, increased risk of cancer, the latter probably being the most serious. And you can certainly get on what is called an aromatase inhibitor. So there are compounds like chrysin C H R Y S I N, or Myomin M Y O M I N. These are potent aromatase inhibitors that can keep that total testosterone from getting aromatized into estrogens. But ultimately, this is an uphill battle that a lot of people who are on a patch or cream or a lotion or a testosterone injection have to face. Is this over aromatization? And the issue with testosterone getting converted into estrogens? Now, there is a way that you can test and you can see whether or not your total testosterone is getting converted estrogens it would be a very, very simple panel, would be like a, like an estradiol evaluation. There is a sex hormone balance test. I actually have this test as one of the available lab tests over@greenfieldfitnessystems.com because I just basically list a lot of the tests that I tend to frequently recommend over there. And this test is called a sex hormone balance test. And what it looks at is not just what your total testosterone looks like, but where that total testosterone is going. So it looks at total testosterone free testosterone, estrogens like estradiol, dhea, cortisol, and something called sex hormone binding globulin or shbg. So I would recommend, number one, that if your testosterone is really high, you test and see if much of it is getting converted into estrogens. And if so, you may want to consider using one of these aromatase inhibitors so you don't turn into a woman. So that's one. Number two would be that very, very high amounts of total testosterone can also cause oily skin and acne. And this can be brought on if a lot of that testosterone is getting converted into DHT or dihydrotestosterone. Now, in terms of oily skin and acne, what I've found is that people who have high total testosterone or who are doing a lot of like testosterone creams or patches or injections or lotions, if they have to deal with oily skin and acne. One of the tricks to keep oily skin and acne at bay is to keep levels of what is called insulin and insulin like growth factor low. And the best way to do that is to be very careful with wheat. Wheat and dairy. Those are two of the most insulinogenic foods that you could be eating. Whey protein isolate is pretty high up there as well. So you clean up your diet when it comes to wheat, dairy, whey protein isolate. And this can really assist with like the oily skin and the acne that high levels of testosterone can create. So you kind of clean up the diet a little bit. But you should note also that this dht, this dihydrotestosterone, it's something that a lot of guys who begin to go bald, this, this high levels of DHT is what can cause you to begin to go bald. A lot of guys freak out when that happens. But if you try to simply lower dht, like by taking, you know, like, like, say like propecia or something designed to cause you to increase hair growth, Propecia, for example, decreases dht. And DHT is an Extremely anabolic and libido enhancing form of testosterone. So when guys begin to go bald, if they've got lifestyle in order and stress and sleep is good and their nutrient density is good, and the baldness just appears to be from high levels of dht, I tell them, hey, you know what, embrace the baldness because it means that you've got really high libido and really high levels of dht. And the only thing you want to bear in mind is that you want to control insulin and insulin like growth factor by doing things like controlling wheat and dairy intake whey protein isolate. Intermittent fasting can help as well, like going longer periods of time between meals to improve insulin sensitivity. But that's another issue with very, very, very high testosterone can be this oily skin and acne. But come at that from a standpoint of not decreasing testosterone, but rather by going after insulin and insulin like growth factor.

So why would it, why would one not come at this in terms of decreasing testosterone if testosterone is so high?

Well, the thing is, high testosterone is not necessarily an issue. It would be making sure that we control some of the downstream byproducts that that high testosterone can create. Like the estrogen that I talked about, like the DHT that I just talked about or specifically like insulin and the insulin like growth factor. Another issue is prostate cancer. And prostate cancer or PSA can tend to increase this prostate specific antigen which is a risk factor for prostate cancer. It tends to sometimes correlate with very, very high levels of testosterone. And so one of the things that can control this prostate specific antigen is lycopene. And you know, I've personally done genetic testing. I personally have higher than normal levels of risk factors for prostate cancer. So I go out of my way every day to eat fresh cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes or like these nice rip the vine tomatoes, tomatoes, you always want to go organic. Any vegetable or fruit of which you'd eat the skin, you always want to go organic. So I don't necessarily go out of my way to buy organic bananas or avocados because they have a nice thick skin on them. But for tomatoes or cucumbers or peaches or anything that you'd eat the skin of, I go organic. And when it comes to prostate cancer, trying to get a good serving of organic tomatoes each day, that's another one that can help out if you have very, very high total testosterone. So the testosterone tomatoes link, another one would be that when you have a high amount of total testosterone, it can also cause an increase in red blood cell mass. And hemoglobin levels. And high, high amounts of red blood cell counts can increase your chance of heart attacks or strokes or clotting. And one of the best things that you can do to make sure that you decrease blood thickness is a fish oil. So I'd be taking about 4 to 6 grams of a good fish oil each day to make sure that your blood is staying thin. That's assuming you're not on some kind of a blood clotting medication like warfarin. Right. You shouldn't. Or you need to be careful with fish oil if you're on a blood clotting medication. But the other thing I do is test your iron levels. And if you have very, very high levels of iron, which again, can sometimes go hand in hand with high levels of testosterone, consider giving blood or blood donating or at least not taking iron supplements. So just bear in mind that those two things can go hand in hand. Thick blood, high levels of iron, and high total testosterone.

Interesting.

That's another one. And then finally, I've got one more for you. And that would be that in many cases, you'll find that guys have really high total testosterone, but they've got low libido and they low motivation to work out and low aggressiveness and low amounts of a lot of the things that you would, would expect guys with high total testosterone to have high amounts of. And that is because the total testosterone is not actually getting converted into free testosterone. Now, free testosterone is the bioactive form of testosterone. So your brain can make a bunch of luteinizing hormone, which is called lh. And that's the signal for your testes to dump out a bunch of total testosterone. But in many cases, that total testosterone doesn't get converted into free tea. And that is because you have high levels of something called sex hormone binding globulin. That's another thing that sex hormone balance test that I mentioned will test for. High levels of sex hormone binding globulin tend to be caused by hypercortisolism, high levels of cortisol. The other thing that can cause high levels of SHBG is calorie depletion, just a consistent low level of calories. Because for some reason, nature doesn't want us to make babies when we're stressed out and when we don't have much food around.

Food, Right.

Oh, go figure. So the idea here is that you should test your free testosterone. You should see if that total tea that you're making is getting converted into free testosterone. If it's not what you'll typically notice is that SHBG will be high. And then you want to look at things like stress, sleep, too much chronic cardio, too much calorie depletion. And what I've found is that in guys who have good amounts of total testosterone but low amounts of free testosterone that can be fixed by doing things like calorie refeeds one or two times a week, where you have that day where you're just eating as many calories as your body needs to sustain a nice normal, healthy metabolism, limiting the amount of like chronic long term cardio that you do, making sure that you limit stress, decrease salivary cortisol using things like the meditation and the yoga that we talked about, using their specific herbs that have clinically been shown to lower salivary cortisol and lower plasma cortisol. Probably three of the top ones are phosphatidylserine supplementation, the use of lavender oil, like diffusing lavender oil or putting lavender oil on your upper lips before you go to your upper lip, before you go to sleep at night. And then holy basil, which is an herb that you can get in capsule form or T form. All three of those have been shown to decrease cortisol. When you decrease cortisol, in many cases you'll also decrease this sex hormone binding globulin. So lots of little things to look into if your total testosterone is high. But ultimately this would be a consideration for a Joshua or B guys who are doing like testosterone creams or patches or lotions or injections, which frankly a shockingly high number of guys actually do. And it seems these days, why do they do that?

Why do they get testosterone injections?

In most cases it's an easy way out. In my opinion. You should be able to maintain good normal levels of high testosterone with adequate sleep, frequent sex, good high amounts of fat soluble vitamins, good amounts of magnesium and zinc lowering cortisol, lowering sex hormone binding globulin. But frankly, a lot of guys want to live a stressed out, hard charging lifestyle, eat crappy food and then just cover that up with testosterone injections and creams and lotions. And frankly I've worked with a lot of guys who have been on those that we've gradually gotten off of them and onto just natural amounts of normal testosterone production. So I'm just, I'm not a fan of testosterone therapy also because it puts you in a state of constant anabolic growth growth, it puts you in a state of constant cellular growth and that can be synonymous with cancer. And so anytime you have a high amount of undifferentiated cell growth, you're looking at the potential for cancer. And so I think that it's almost like in a way pushing the fast forward button on life if you're not careful. So anyways, go on natural dudes.

So sex hormone balance test, best place for Joshua to start.

Yeah, I'll put a link to that in the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 353 it'd be sex hormone balance test. And then, you know, if you're listening and you have more questions about this stuff, of course, leave them in the comments over in the podcast show notes and we'll, we'll be happy to help set you straight and ensure that you don't get man boobs. Go bald acne. Anything else that we just talked about? So there you go.

Hello. I have a friend who does regular coffee enemas. He, he cannot sleep at night. Is there a relationship between the coffee enemas and his inability to sleep? Should he change the frequency of his enemas as he enjoys them so much as they give him energy. However, the last couple times he claims that he didn't get that energy boost. Please give me your advice.

Rachel. I'm going to put you on the spot.

Go, Ben, do it. You know I love it.

Have you ever done an enema?

I haven't, no. We did talk about this a little bit last week.

You're missing out on life. Well, here's the deal. A lot of people cringe when it comes to enemas and I know a lot of people's colons are just quivering with curiosity right now. Maybe have not done an enema. But coffee enemas aren't like this new underground biohacking method method. And they've actually been used in herbal medicine and folk medicine and shamanic healing for literally thousands of years. So there's, there's, for example, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they talk about the use of enemas using as a way to clean out the, the unclean and evil smelling things of Satan as they describe in the Dead Sea Scroll. And evil smelling things of Satan does indeed accurately describe, I know, many people's bathroom episodes. But there's more to coffee enemas than just getting rid of bad smells. And they were actually until the 80s, coffee enemas were in the Merck manual, which was a handbook that was used by physicians all over the world. And they just gradually fell out of favor and for some reason became something that people scoff at as Woo woo. Medicine. But there is in fact a lot of cool things that happen when you do a coffee enema.

I would love to hear them now.

Before I jump in, I can tell you that I personally do a coffee enema twice a month and I feel amazing afterwards. I mean, it's something I've been doing for about a year and a half. It completely cleans you out and it causes a lot of kind of cool things to happen. Now the reason that I started doing this in the first place was I did a metal detox episode with Dr. David Minkoff and we talked about how we're surrounded by environmental levels of toxic compounds like lead and mercury and cadmium and arsenic and nickel and uranium and radiation and all of these different chemicals that are allowed in foods and are found in fruits and vegetables and other things that pesticides and herbicides get sprayed on and are found in prescription and over the counter drugs that you may not take, but that still wind up in the water that you're drinking if you're not filtering your water really, really well. And these drug residues can just hang around in the body for decades. These metals can hang around in the body for decades. So one of the things that a coffee enema can do is it can help to clean out some of these metals very similar to like heavy amounts of sweating in an infrared sauna, for example. That would be another way that you can do this type of.

They live in the colon when they stay in the body, is that right?

Among other places, yeah. Toxins and pollutants tend to hang around in the large intestine. So astringency is one thing that a coffee enema can do. And all astringency refers to is that's peeling of the top layer of skin or the mucous membrane. And I know this is making a lot of people probably sick to their stomachs to think about, but an enema basically cleans the surface layer of the mucous membrane of the core colon.

So does that hurt? That sounds painful.

No, it doesn't hurt at all. Unless you were to say put Sri Chacha hot sauce in your coffee enema or something else like that. But. But no, it doesn't hurt at all. You don't want to put. No, just go with straight up coffee. There, there are other kinds of enemas that people do like, like milk for probiotic, you know, like raw milk and stuff like that. But there's a few other reasons that you would want to use coffee. And I'll get to that in a second. But an enema will also kind of mechanically wash out the colon. So if you struggle with constipation, if you've got, like, pockets or diverticuli in your colon, which are little expansions or dilations in the wall of the colon, it can clean out things like food particles and bacteria and even parasitic organisms like worms and yeast and things that tend to live in the colon. There are antioxidant effects. So coffee has a lot of antioxidant chemicals that prevent oxidation. And you can basically, in the same way that people would use ozonated water, is another thing that a lot of people use for an enema. And this type of oxidation or cleansing effect can also be achieved in something that's high in antioxidants, like coffee, for example. It can help with digestion. And this is because coffee specifically, when put up the butt, causes an increase in bile flow, causes an increase in bile production by the gallbladder. There is an improvement in fat digestion when you're eating later on in the day. And it helps also what's called peristalsis, so movement of food stuff through the digestive tract. So if you struggle with sluggish digestion or you struggle with constipation, doing coffee enema a couple of times a month can help tremendously with just keeping things flowing. So it helps to clean you out if you're one of those people who tends to struggle with, like, sluggish digestion. Glutathione. So glutathione is a major detoxification system that catalyzes the binding of toxins from the bloodstream. And what glutathione does is it binds these toxins to what's called the sulfhydryl group of the antioxidant glutathione. And coffee enema has been shown to significantly enhance the amount of endogenous glutathione that you produce, which helps to remove many toxins from the blood and from the liver. So that's another cool thing about it.

And that's coffee specifically, not enemy.

That is coffee specifically. Then there's caffeine. So caffeine, as we know, it's a little bit of a central nervous system stimulant, but it's also a vasodilator. And it causes dilation of what are called bile ducts. And when you dilate the. The bile ducts, this again, can improve digestion during the day. And it can also cause fecal matter to move much more quickly through the digestive tract and again, speed up digestion. So you get that one, two combo of dilation of bile ducts and stimulation of the central nervous system. Coffee has selenium and zinc and other minerals in it, and those can actually get absorbed through the rectum. As we know with suppository medications, many things can be delivered pretty significantly through the rectum. In terms of drug delivery. There are even. This is going to be a complete rabbit hole. But I don't know if you're familiar with like THC or CBD capsules, Rachel, or if you heard of those. So you can actually enhance the delivery of those to the endocannabinoid system by doing rectal administration of a THC or a CBD capsule and earmuffs on the kids, please. I will pause for a moment so that the parents can put the earmuffs on the children pre sex. A THC capsule that you would normally swallow. If you put it up your butt instead, it basically is like a high for your crotch and makes sex absolutely amazing. Little tip there.

That's a super biohack.

Get your hands on a THC capsule if it's legal where you live, and try that as a bit of a suppository. Anyways, so earmuffs, back off the kids, back to coffee enemas. A few other things that they can do is they can assist the lymphatic system. There's something called lymphatic drainage that occurs in Peyer's patches, which are certain areas of the small intestine that are lymph glands. And a coffee enema improves lymphatic drainage, so it assists with your immune system health. It can also help out quite a bit with hydration. And one of the reasons for that is that many people are dehydrated. And in many cases that's due to not drinking enough water or drinking incorrect types of water or ingesting things that can tend to dehydrate at you, like alcohol and sodium, rich packaged foods and stuff like that. And when you do a coffee enema, you're actually putting about anywhere from one to two liters of fluid up your butt. And much of that is getting absorbed and actually causing you to become more hydrated. Ironically, you'd think that coffee would dehydrate you, but this can actually hydrate you. The list of benefits go on and on when it comes to coffee. And I've written actually an entire article on how to do a coffee enema, what type of coffee to use. And by the way, a medium or a dark roast is best because it's gonna be higher in vitamin E and in glutathione and in a lot of the antioxidants. Organically grown coffee is best because you don't want pesticides up your butt. Coffee grown in a high climate would be best. And by the way, I've never done an enema with Chimera coffee, which you mentioned, Rachel, which has like the neurotropics infused in it, like DMAE and theanine and stuff like that.

But what do you think would happen happen?

I. I would imagine you would probably spin a few dials in your brain by doing something like that. Maybe you should try it to try it out and report if the folks at Camara Coffee are listening in prepare.

I want to try your coffee to.

Wind up on Instagram somewhere anyways though. So I have, I have the full instructions. You want like a stainless steel enema bucket. And it's very simple. You lay on your left side, you put the coffee in, you let it sit for about 20 minutes.

Why on the left side?

That just basically allows the coffee, the way that your large intestine travels through your body to make its way into the upper portions of the large intestine a little bit better. So you put it all in there, preferably after a bowel movement, you hold it all in for about 20 minutes and then you just basically go to the bathroom and you get the improvement in digestion, you get improved circulation, you get the reduction in high blood pressure, improved liver and gallbladder function, the anti inflammatory properties, the antiviral viral properties, cleaning out yeast and fungus and bacteria. So huge fan. And again, I will put a link in the show notes to my complete comprehensive instructions for how to do a coffee enema. But to answer, to answer Vaughn's question, you do absorb lots of caffeine. When you do a coffee enema, you will feel as though you have had a cup of coffee. And if you're doing regular coffee enemas, enemas and you can't sleep at night, you are probably a. If these are coffee enemas that you're doing in the morning, you're probably a slow caffeine metabolizer, meaning that coffee can stick around in your bloodstream for a really long period of time or caffeine specifically. So I would consider doing something like a coffee enema early in the morning, as early as possible, like right when you get up. Don't wait until the afternoon of the evening. B. You could also look into using something like a Swiss water processed decaf coffee And Swiss water process just means that chemicals aren't used for the decaffeination of the bean. The only issue with that is you won't get a lot of the liver and the gallbladder stimulating effects. A lot of the dilation, et cetera that occurs when you use caffeinated coffee for something like an enema. So I would recommend just moving it to early in the morning and if it's still keeping you awake at night, et cetera, you could also consider just doing an enema with something. There's a lot of different things that you can use for enemas, things like ozonated water, things like a probiotic infused coconut water, which is another way that you can really help out with the floral balance in your large intestine. That would involve breaking open probiotic capsules, fermenting them in coconut water on your countertop overnight, and then then using that as an enema. That's another common one that people will do. They'll like break open probiotic capsules and, and shoot those up the butt. So a lot of, a lot of.

Ways you could do, can, can you do too many coffee enemas? Is there a sort of certain frequency that's best?

Depends on how much of a social life you want and how much time you want to spend in the bathroom laying on your left side with a bucket of coffee draining into your anus.

So daily wouldn't be about a bad thing.

You, you could probably do it daily. I mean, some of this stuff's kind of, kind of unresearched. You know, n equals 1 guinea pig type of science. I personally have found that the sweet spot is about twice a month. Like it's not overbearing. I can mentally handle curling up on the bathroom floor twice a month and doing the coffee thing and making the big I, I do the cowboy coffee. Right. Like the way to do it, and I talk about this in the article, is you boil the coffee for about 3, 13 minutes in a cast iron skillet and then you decant it into the stainless steel bucket, you add a bunch of water to bring it to room temperature and you know, get you to about that 1 to 2 liter mark and then you just shoot it up there. So anyways though, yeah, as far as frequency goes, I mean, I guess if you, if you were bored, you could just do it every day or if you were very toxic or if you just want, you know, if you have really poor digestion, you just want to clean things out. But, but I would say a more reasonable approach would be, you know, one to two times a month. I wouldn't, I wouldn't go ape nuts. And then also try, try that THC thing I mentioned if you're listening in and let me know how that goes for you.

Hey Ben and Rachel, I've decided that I'm going to start running. I've never really been a runner before. I've never really ran for any greater distance than about three to five miles with a buddy who was trying to lose some weight. Also, just want to know if you guys have any suggestions on how to improve stamina and maybe ways to motivate yourself to actually get up and go run. Maybe best times a day to go running. I'm not sure if I'll try to get to a full marathon distance or anything like that, but I'd really like to get, you know, where I could run for say an hour without getting tired. I love the podcast guys. I listen to all of them. Thanks for all the great information. Ben in and have a great day.

Before we reply to Joshua's question, Rachel, I think we should probably open the kimono for the podcast listeners. We, we just both pressed pause and went to pee. There was, there's something about chatting about coffee enemas that, that for some reason.

All those liters of water and expression of things out of the body.

You know, I've, I've been staying incredibly hydrated. We talked about water earlier in the news flashes and I have been been ordering Pellegrino by the case and I'm a big fan. Like when I travel I do glass bottled sparkling water. I'll get Pellegrino Perrier. Gerald Steiner. It's one of the first things that I do when I get into a city and I'm driving my rental car towards my hotel is I'll stop at a Whole Foods or wherever else and just load up on a ton of glass bottled water. And I've gotten so addicted to it over my travels that I now order Pellegrino like buy the caseful from Amazon using the subscribe and Save on Amazon to my house. So I do my well water but then I also do Pellegrino and I've actually this morning it's whatever 10 something am I've already had two giant bottles of Pellegrino.

How much do you think you drink in a day?

I go through almost three glass bottles of Pellegrino every day and then they'll.

Literally one liter bottle.

It's becoming a spendy habit. Yeah.

Wow, they're big Bottles.

So. Yeah. But you know what? I can think of worse things to spend money on. Yeah.

All right, Joshua.

Anyways. Okay. So, Joshua, you decided to start running.

Good for you.

Frankly, I think that the human body gets pretty beat up by running. It's not necessarily the most enjoyable activity on the face of the planet. In many cases, a lot of people don't get very motivated to run, and it can cause knee pain and ankle pain and hip pain. I'm a fan of running, but unless you're training professionally for marathoning, doing the least amount of running that you can, the minimum effective dose to get the maximum benefit out of running, that is just me. And I know that there are people that have other podcasts like the marathon, I think it's called the Marathon Academy podcast and. And the running podcast. And there are people who are just obsessed with running. But I personally, even though I do marathons and Ironman triathlons and 26 mile Spartan races and just a ton of competition that involves running, I don't run that much. In between the competition, I run maybe a maximum of about 8 to 10 miles a week. Wow. I have special ways.

Tell us, tell us.

So, first of all, nearly every day I am at my treadmill workstation for a good two to three hours. So anytime I have a phone conversation, I have a consult. Sometimes during podcasts, I will be on my manual treadmill at my desk walking. And I have one of these special treadmills. It's like an ergonomic treadmill. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's called a. I don't know. What is my treadmill called? I don't even know. It's called a. I remember. A true form. That's right, a trueform runner. Sorry, I had to go look at the label on my treadmill. It's a manual treadmill, so it doesn't have the motor that produces a lot of electrical pollution. It puts you in a proper biomechanical position for walking or running because it's impossible to make the belt move unless you lean just slightly forward board. I have a whole podcast about it that I'll link to in the show notes. But I spend a lot of time at very, very low levels of physical activity on that treadmill. And that causes the mitochondrial density that I'd normally need to build by doing long runs each day or long runs a few times a week. So that's one thing that I do is I spend a lot of time with just easy, slow walking on the treadmill during the day. And that helps with the stamina, the endurance component when you're on your feet all day. So that's number one.

Right.

So number two would be also related to the treadmill. I am a huge fan of the treadmill because it forces you to have really fast turnover and cadence and it allows you to get a lot done in a short period of time. With running. There are, and I don't know why these allow me to get motivated to run fast or to, to push myself harder than I normally push myself when I'm running, but they just do. There are these run workouts called Runnervals by this guy named Troy Jacobson. And it's basically just this dude walking around a room full of people on treadmills barking out orders. And It'll be like two minutes as hard as you can go and then 30 seconds off and then two minutes as hard as you can Go and 20 seconds off. Then two minutes as hard as you can GO and 10 seconds off and you'll repeat that like three times through boom, done. They're like all like 20 to 30 minute workouts, so they're called Runner voles. And you could easily get a few of these Runnervals DVDs and just do, you know, two to three of those a week for your high intensity interval training on say like a Monday, a Wednesday and a Friday. They're called Runnervilles. I'm a big fan. I don't know why, they just get me excited about running.

So because you, you love having people yelling at you.

I love Troy Jacobson yelling at me. Yep, total cheesy, you know, like 80s type of music. Like, But I like it. It works. So there you go. The next one is 30 second treadmill burst. So this is a workout that I'll do about once a week. I include it in a lot of my clients programs. So if you're listening in and I coach you, then you are. You're probably sick of this one. But what it involves, it's very, very simple. You put the treadmill on the maximum incline and maximum speed that you can do for 30 seconds. So let's say that's 10 miles an hour at a 10% incline and you'll do 30 seconds of that and then you just hop off the treadmill and you walk it off. So if you're at the gym, you would just like walk around the gym until you're finally ready to get back on the treadmill. Then you do another set and you do 10 sets of 30 seconds and that's it? I call this the hurricane workout because it's just like this hurricane blowing through the gym or blowing through wherever you're running on your treadmill. Again, I'm a big fan of the treadmill for making you a better runner. And this is 10 by 30 seconds. So it's just 30 seconds as hard as you can go, maximum incline, maximum sprint and then you're off. You can do this just like once a week.

You can take as long as you want in between. Or is there like a max time before you get back on?

The ideal ratio is a one to four work to rest ratio ratio for stuff that's that hard. So technically you'd walk around the gym for about two minutes. Now in folks who are training for something like obstacle course racing or MMA or something like that, I will actually have them do body weight workouts as they're recovering. So you'll do 30 seconds as hard as you can on the treadmill and then you'll do a back to back set of say push ups and bicycling crunches and then you get back on the treadmill and then you'll get off the treadmill and you'll do a set of body weight squats and a plank hold and then you'll get back on the treadmill. So in each of those two minute recovery periods, periods, you're putting work into your body and that becomes a very difficult workout. But you know, on the flip side, it's, it's over with fast, right? That's 20 minutes if you're looking at 30 second bursts and two minutes total if you include the recovery time and.

You don't need to do it three times a week.

Three times a week or even once a week, you know, it depends on the program that you're following. If you're also doing these runner rolls, right? And you're also walking on a treadmill desk and you're also doing some of the other things we're about to talk about about you could do something like that just once a week. So you know, and I have programs like my, my Look Good Naked longevity program in which you're doing something like that once every two weeks. Because there's so many other little interval training methods that I have sprinkled into that program. Next is, and this is something that I do about once a week just for running errands, going to the grocery store, you know, if I'm gonna like say ride, ride over to the park park or I'm going to rides to say like I'll do later on today to go get a haircut. I use the elliptical trainer. And there is a lot of really good research on the crossover between elliptical training and running. And the most recent one was actually it just came out. It was performed at a university in Ohio, at Ohio University. And what they did was they used the, you know that outdoor standup elliptical trainer, the Elliptigo bicycle.

It looks like a bike.

Yeah, yeah. And that's what I own, that's what I use for my elliptical trainer. And they, they did a test and trained fit runners to see if they were able to maintain the performance, the physiological fitness necessary for running at a very high performance level using an elliptical trainer as a cross training method. And what I mean by that is if you're running five days a week, you would instead run three days a week and then substitute two of those sessions. Sessions with the elliptical trainer. And it turns out that the elliptical trainer can actually maintain or build running fitness without running with lower joint stress compared to running with targeting of many of the muscles that tend to be notoriously weak in runners, like the hip extensors and the hip external rotators and with more calories burnt because you're using more of your upper body and more core muscles. So I'm a big fan of working in elliptical training as well. And if you're going to commute or something like that, you could use an elliptical trainer. They range, there's a few different models. Like I think the one that I have. I mean it's like a decent bicycle. It's about 1200 bucks.

Yeah.

Okay. So you know, it's about what you'd spend on like a road bike, except there's way more crossover between elliptical training and running versus cycling and running. Running.

And you have a lot of hills in your area. How do they go on hills?

Fine.

Is it super hard?

It's tough, but, but it also has eight gears. So you can, you, it's, you're not just stuck with one gear that you have to mash up a hill on. So I mean if I can, if I can ride on this thing out in the backwoods of Spokane, Washington up these really steep hills, just about anybody should be able to use one of these things. So I'm a huge fan of these elliptigo elliptical trainers or even just using an elliptical trainer at the gym. Gym. There's two other things that I use in addition to the treadmill desk. The runner Voles by Troy Jacobson. This 30 second treadmill, hurricane style workout and the elliptical trainer One would be an incline treadmill. So, yes, I have a manual treadmill in my office. And then out in my garage, I have one of these incline treadmills that will go up to 40%. And I was explaining this to someone at that. So I did. I did Train to Hunt Utah last weekend.

And you won.

I won. I actually won Train to Hunt Utah, which qualified me for nationals. And for those of you not familiar with Train to Hunt, it involves obstacle course racing combined with shooting your bow, combined with hundred pound meat packs, straight up hills and downhills. And one of my secret underground training methods for that is I have an incline treadmill. Because what an incline treadmill allows you to do is hill training to get all the benefits of going uphill without ever having to get all the knee pounding and hip pounding of going downhill. And so for a typical workout, for example, I will just walk as far as I can at a 40% incline and, you know, 1.7 to 2 miles an hour holding a 50 pound sandbag or with, you know, 50 pounds in my backpack, and I'll just walk straight uphill. The other thing that I'll use is a weighted vest. So I'll wear a 40 to a 50 pound weighted vest and just walk straight uphill on this treadmill. You do not even need to run to vastly increase fitness if you're going up a treadmill. I've got a friend who is one of the top master Spartan athletes. He's actually one of the top Spartan athletes, period. But he rarely, if ever runs. He does almost all his training walking at a 20 to 40% incline. His name is Matt Novakovich. He's also known as the Bear in Spartan racing. And the majority of his training he's just walking uphill because his knees and his hips can't take the pounding of running. But he's still super fast. He's turning out incredibly fast. 5Ks and 10Ks in these Spartan races, but he's just walking uphill for the majority of his training, typically holding a sandbag or holding a bucket or with a weighted vest, but at a 20 to a 40% incline. So NordicTrack is the company that makes, makes these treadmills. I got mine from NordicTrack. I, I actually got it off ebay. Got a really good deal. I think I got mine for like about the same price as that elliptical trainer. Like 1100, 1200 bucks, something like that. So they're not super ch cheap in terms of treadmills, but check Craigslist, check Amazon. Amazon has NordicTracks. The NordicTrack website, they'll let you get on a payment plan. But incline treadmills as a way to get a lot of bang for your buck out of your run training, especially when combined with something like a weighted vest. Huge, huge way, you know, good, good, good way to increase running fitness fast. And then finally there's this guy that I interviewed, dude, and his name is Jay Schroeder. I met him at one of Dave Asprey's biohacking conferences. And this guy uses like high, high intensity electrical stimulation on the NFL athletes that he works with. And he'll use like super duper fast intervals on like a fixed speed bicycle trainer. And he has all sorts of these weird ways that he'll train people. He'll train Olympic swimmers with like these tubes that pull them through the water like four times faster than they normally swim. Just to train the neuromuscular cadence, necessarily for turning someone into an extremely fast swimmer. I'll link to the podcast I did with them. Interesting, because it's fascinating. So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com353 and listen to that podcast. But one of the easy, simple to implement tips that I learned from him is this concept of isometric loading. Now what that means is you'll do a very long, long isometric hold, right? Like a three minute isometric lunge for the right leg and a three minute isometric lunge for the left leg or a five minute isometric squat. And what that means is you're dropping into that position and you're holding it for a very long period of time and allowing a bunch of lactic acid to build up in the muscle tissue. Tissue. But because you're not contracting right, that you're not moving the joint up and down, all that lactic acid sticks around in the muscle tissue. So you build up this enormous tolerance to lactic acid. And what you do is you combine that with movement. So a typical workout would be, for example, you would hold an isometric squat for as long as you can. And when you finally, when everything's burning and quaking and shaking and trembling and you're just about to, to, to, to fall over, you stand up out of that squat and then you run a hundred yards and then you, so, so you're running with your legs just chock full of lactic acid and you'll do like 10 repeats of that. You know, you drop into the squat again, hold it, and then run back for a hundred yards. Super difficult way to train. But, but this is one of the advanced endurance training techniques that we talk about in the podcast with him. When you put all this stuff together, it's amazing. Like you don't have to go on a lot of, of like one and a half and two hour runs. You don't have to pound the pavement every day. You can do like these short forays into intensity or use these little techniques like isometric training or the incline trainer, or do all your commuting on like a standup elliptical trainer. And all of a sudden you can stay in really good running shape year round. And again, I personally run maybe 8 to 10 miles a week, but I can go out and, you know, I'm not the fastest marathoner on the face of the planet. It, I'm not, I'm not necessarily like winning every Spartan race, but I'm pretty competitive and I don't waste a lot of my time running. And probably more importantly, I'm not beating up my knees and my hips. Right. Like I'm not going to need a knee or hip replacement, knock on wood, when I'm, when I'm 50 years old because frankly I just don't run that much.

Right. So when you, when you do go on your 8 to 10 mile runs, what are you looking for? Like, why do you even run at all?

No, I mean I, I don't run 8, 10 miles miles unless I'm in a competition. Like I run 8 to 10 miles a week total. Like all my running ever put together for the whole week. Wow. That's what I'm, that's what I mean when I say it's 10 miles, so.

Right.

Yeah, you can get away with not running very much and get to be a better runner. You would be surprised at what a lot of these little, little biohacks can do for you. So I'll put a link to all this stuff though, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 353 all these little tips like the runner bowls and stuff like that, so, so there you go, Joshua. Enjoy not running.

Rachel and Ben. Hi, my name's Craig. Been listening to you guys for a couple years. Over the winter time I hurt my arm and fell out of taking care of myself and eating good foods and so on. And so now here I am, 20 pounds over the weight I like to be at and just trying to, to get back on the horse, so to speak. And what's the, Curious to know if there's a, if you were in that position, Ben, how would you. I guess maybe from a food perspective, detox Perspective, Trying to lose fat perspective. Just kind of curious to see what you would do besides the obvious of eat better foods and exercise. Just didn't know if there's something more.

You'D recommend in that case. Case.

Thanks a lot. Love the show.

Take care. This is a good question.

This is a brilliant question.

There's a lot of stuff you could do. I could talk a long time.

So you had to choose your five favorite ways.

Okay, I'm okay. I'll give you my five favorite ways to jump start fat loss or to accelerate fat loss or to get back on the fitness bandwagon very, very quickly. This is, this kind of segues nicely from the tips on running because this is all about efficiency, right? Like getting the maximum amount of efficiency with the minimum effective dose. So Craig and everyone, five best ways to accelerate fat loss. Get out your notepads, put on your thinking caps. I'm going to fly through this stuff. I'm going to feed through the fire hose. Okay? Number one. When you combine niacin, high dose niacin, with infrared sauna, you can lyse fat cells, meaning that the frequency, the, the vibration of the infrared waves. When you have niacin in your body, high dose niacin, it causes this flushing reaction that causes fat cells to lice and disappear very quickly. A lot of people when they use this strategy, they'll break out in like rashes and stuff because of the rate at which fat cells are dying in the body. Body.

So is there anything that's bad about that?

Yeah, it's uncomfortable and you get like welts and it's in rashes and I mean you detox quickly.

Okay.

But yeah, I mean you want to drink a lot of water and clean out the body and you know, you could combine something like this with like the enema approach that I talked about earlier. But basically the way you do it. I've got an article about this I'll link to in the show notes, but it's about 500 to 1,000 milligrams of niacin using a liver friendly form of niacin called Nia Safe. It's made by a company called Thorn. And what you do is you take that and then you go into a sauna, preferably an infrared sauna, and you stay in there for about 30 minutes. You can do yoga, you can do kundalini, you can do whatever you want in there, Read a magazine, listen to an audiobook, whatever. But it's high dose niacin plus infrared sauna and ideally you finish that up with another very, very good way, way to accelerate fat loss. And that would be cold thermogenesis. So you finish that whole thing up with five to 10 minutes of a cold soak or a cold shower or a cold bath or any type of cold exposure. Snow angels, whatever you name it sounds intense.

Love it.

Okay, so that is number one. That's number one. You can do that. I personally still do that myself to stay lean and to keep my body detoxed three to five days a week, I'm doing infrared sauna with cold thermogenic and high dose niacin. So that's number one. Number two, every single day, do a fasted session, meaning you haven't eaten for 12 to 16 hours. So you stop eating at 8pm at night. And at 8am you do a fasted exercise session in your fat burning zone. Okay? You preferably do this with caffeine in your system because caffeine can increase mobilization of free fatty acids. Acids and cause you to burn through more adipose tissue. So technically, the infrared sauna is one thing that could count as a fasted fat loss session because your heart rate will rise during that session. Easy cold water swimming is another really, really good one because you're getting the cold combined with the movement. Walks in the sunshine, that's another good one because you're getting the vitamin D and the sunlight exposure combined with easy movement. Movement, anything except for extremely hard efforts which will increase cortisol and can actually fly in the face of fat loss. So we're talking about easy aerobic fasted morning fat sessions. How do you find your personal fat burning zone? There's a few different ways to do it. One would be you take the heart rate at which your muscles really burn during exercise and you subtract 20 beats. Okay, so that's, that's one way to do it. That's just like a simple calculation. It's going to give you a ballpark, right? So if your, if your muscles really start to burn during exercise at 170 beats per minute, then your fat burning zone is going to be close to 150 beats per minute. Another way that you can do it is you can Google search for the name of your city plus the words metabolic testing. And what a metabolic test is, is, is it's called indirect calorimetry. You get on a treadmill and you exercise at varying intensities. And they measure fat oxidation and carbohydrate oxidation. And there will be a certain zone at which you burn a high, high amount of fat that would Be your maximum fat burning zone. And while that zone is not the best zone for getting fit necessarily, unless we're just talking pure aerobic fitness. And while you don't want to do all your exercise in that zone, doing fasted morning 20 to 30 minute sessions in that fat burning zone with caffeine in your system is another way that you can get fat off the body very quickly. That's number two. Number three. Number three would be to keep yourself extremely insulin sensitive and keep your blood sugar levels extremely low. There are four ways that I do that. That. Number one, the equivalent of two teaspoons of organic Ceylon cinnamon each day. Ceylon is the type of cinnamon that's been shown to decrease blood sugar and to increase insulin sensitivity quite efficiently.

And you just eat it?

Yep, I just have it in the morning in my smoothie. Number two would be apple cider vinegar. The equivalent of about a shot of apple cider vinegar each day. Just get like organic whatever Bragg's apple cider vinegar off Amazon on, but a shot of that each day. Preferably. You're timing these type of things prior to a meal so you're decreasing your postprandial blood glucose. Number three would be bitter melon extract. I take two capsules of this prior to my largest carbohydrate containing meal of the day, which is typically dinner. Because I'll typically have a glass of wine before dinner, I'll take the MPX100 which is a the form of bitter melon extract that I take to get the blood glucose low. And since I'm having carbohydrates typically at night with dinner, this allows me to get back into what's called ketosis extremely quickly when I take this prior to a carbohydrate containing meal. So those three things, bitter melon extract, cinnamon and apple cider vinegar. And then the final thing that you want to do is up regulate the sugar transporters that are necessary for getting sugar out of the bloodstream quickly so sugar doesn't get converted into fat in the liver. So you don't get a lot of the metabolic byproducts of high amounts of blood sugar. You want to upregulate sugar transporters so that sugar gets driven into muscle tissue and liver tissue. And the best way to do that is prior to your biggest meal of the day, which is in an ideal scenario based on circadian rhythms going to be dinner. You want to do either high intensity interval training or strength training or both. So for example, five sets of five deadlifts, five sets of five squats 500 yard sprints. And that would be an example of an evening or later afternoon workout that will upregulate sugar transporters much higher than say, like easy facet aerobic sessions like I talked about earlier, those you do in the morning and then you do the high intensity interval training and or the heavier strength training in the evening prior to your biggest meal of the day.

Wow. Huge. Yes.

Number three. And I guarantee if you were listening and you incorporate all these, you're going to melt fat off your body. If they ever let me be one of the personal trainers and the biggest loser, I'd be using all these strategies. I'd be kicking the other trainer's butts, I guarantee. And I didn't even get to coffee enemas. Okay, so a couple other things. One of the times that people sit a ton of a ton, especially people who live in municipal areas, big cities, they drive. And you can use the car not only as a university or like, I'm always playing podcasts and audiobooks in my car, but you can also use it as a gym. How do you do it? Three things. Number one, I have a power lung in the glove box of my car. A power lung is a resisted breath training device that allows you while you're driving, despite the funny looks that you might get at the stoplight when you're doing this. It allows you to train your inspiratory and expiratory muscles and diaphragm and maintain your metabolism when you're driving. So you can do three seconds out, three seconds in, and you would be surprised at how much of a workout you can get for your lungs and your core by using this power lung while you're driving. Number two would be hand grippers. I keep Captains of Crush hand grippers in my car along with these hand expander bands that are also made by Captains of Crush. So I can do grip training as well as training for the opposite motion that you get when you're doing the Captains of Crush grip training. And when you're training your hands and your grip, you get a growth hormone release, you get a testosterone release, you get a slight spike in your heart rate. And that's another thing that you can combine with power lung sets to basically be working out while you're sitting down, while you're driving, driving. And then finally, I talked about that Mark Pro earlier, that electrical stimulation device. You can use that or any other form of electrical muscle stimulation attached to your quads or your hamstrings or your calves or anything else like that. While you are driving. So you can also do e stim. And this would be especially like if you have a long commute. Let's say you have an hour or 45 minutes commute to work and back during the day, you can get nearly two hours worth of making your body and your brain better. With a commute like that, there is no excuse to just be sitting there slumped over listening to the top 40 radio.

Yeah.

So make your body and your brain better when you're driving. And when it comes to fat loss, get a hand gripper, get a power lung, and if you can afford it, get an electrical muscle stimulation unit as well and keep all three in your car.

So that's four. What's number five?

That's four. Number five is. And this is huge. It takes a little bit of self control, but it's not that hard once you wrap your head around it. 124 hour water fast each week. There's a huge longevity effect, There's a huge cellular cleanup effect, but there's also a really, really good fat loss lysing effect or fat cell lysing effect. When you do this very, very simple, this would mean like Saturday at lunchtime you quit eating and you skip Saturday's dinner and you skip Sunday's breakfast. And then Sunday at lunch you break your fast. Very, very simple way to do a 24 hour fast because half of the time you're just sleeping through the fast. Amino acids if you get really hungry can help to quell the appetite. Just taking like essential amino acids and those are not going to count as calories. Another thing you can take to really, really help, and this also helps people who are doing ketosis would be mineral. High amounts of something like trace liquid minerals. One to two shots a day of minerals can help to combat a lot of the blood pressure lowering that can occur when you're doing a water fast. And then finally a multivitamin. We talked about this in the podcast a couple of months ago, but there was that guy who did like 350 plus days of fasting and went from 460 pounds down to 100 and something pounds. And all he was doing was mixed minerals and a multivitamin and a water fast. And while I don't necessarily recommend going for a full year fasting, doing it once a week can massively accelerate fat loss along with giving you a host of other longevity promoting effects. That's one 24 hour water fast per week combined with amino acids, minerals and a multivitamin. And if you do these five things, I Guarantee you you will strip fat off your body fast without necessarily having to go on some crazy diet and without having to spend hours and hours and hours per day exercising.

And what I love about this is it doesn't require thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars either. It's all really cheap.

I mean, the most expensive thing I just talked about was an electrical muscle stimulation unit for your car.

And a lot of this stuff you'll already have at home.

Yeah.

Brilliant bench.

So there you have it.

Brilliant.

We'll link to that stuff in the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 353 where you can also leave your comments. And speaking of leaving comments, we also have a review.

Yay.

So we love itunes reviews.

We do.

And we spend a lot of time on this podcast from the weekend guest episodes that we have to the podcast that you're listening to right now, now with Rachel and I. And one of the best ways that you can give back and you can introduce some good karma into your life is by leaving us a review in itunes. And every week we pick the best review, the best 5 star review and we read it on the show. And if you hear your review read on the show and you just email gear as in G E a r@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com Let us know your T shirt size, we'll send you a gift pack. And that's gonna be a BPA free water bottle, a cool tech T shirt you can work out in, and a Ben Greenfield fitness beanie. So this week we have a review from Boomlio who says searching for truth in fitness and nutrition left us five stars. We're gonna send you a sweet gift pack. Rachel, what do you think? You wanna take this one away?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, here we go.

So he says, I've been listening to the Ben Greenfield podcast for about nine months now. It is my number one podcast to go to for tips on fitness and nutrition. Whereas some fitness nutritional podcasts contain only hearsay and little fact, it is helpful for me to get research based advice from experts around the globe whom Ben brings to his show. I was overweight and unfit a year ago. Now at 59 years old, I ran my first 10k ever over Thanksgiving. And just last week I ran a sub 8 minute mile. And nice, right? The expert guidance and levity of Ben and Rachel have led to my fitness and nutritional reclamation of my body.

I don't know what levity or reclamation.

Mean, but he reclaimed his body. I highly recommend them in their podcast I am one who appreciates that Ben will use himself as a human guinea pig for fitness and nutritional tips before recommending that his listener listeners can that's.

Right, I will stick THC and coffee up my butt before you need to.

We're so grateful for that then. Seriously. As for some doubters, I never took an intentionally cold shower in my life until April 1st, which was the first day of the 21 Day Cold Shower Challenge.

That's right.

Since then, 70 of my 75 showers have been cold.

Wow, he's a good counter.

Yes. This is just one of a couple of dozen changes to my life that have come as a result of my listener listening to their podcast. Keep up the great work guys. You're really making a difference. Tom C. From Dallas and Tom, you.

Now have a bunch of other things to add into your protocol like cinnamon and infrared sauna and coffee enemas. So you're welcome. But also thank you for the awesome review. And that's the kind of stuff that warms the cockles of my heart to hear that people are actually getting success by using some of this stuff that we talk about that goes above and beyond drinking Gatorade and spending copious amounts of time exercising.

Which makes me want to say Craig, who was our last question? Take a before and after photo after you've implemented what Ben said and send it to us because we'd love to have a testimonial for Facebook, preferably in a Speedo. Yes, yes.

That being said, we should wrap this thing up because it's getting a little long in the tooth. But again, BenGreenfieldFitness.com353 look for me in Dallas and LA this week if you happen to be in those areas. Stay tuned to twitter.com BenGreenfield because I typically tweet out when I'm headed out to a restaurant or a coffee shop or I'm gonna go do something cool. That's the way to get the insider scoop. And then check out BenGreenfieldFitness.com calendar for all the other cool events that are coming up. And Rachel Ben, Top of the morning.

Top of the morning Tea later.

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

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