The 6 SECRETS To Burning BODY FAT Explained! | Lewis Howes

About 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing.

What?

The only way that you can actually use the body fat is to... We.

Are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat. And the reason that we don't is we...

Burning body fat is one of the toughest things to do in health. And that's why I brought on some of the best experts in the world to talk about how to burn and keep that body fat off. If you enjoy this, make sure to click the like button right now, subscribe to this channel, and leave a comment below on your biggest takeaway. What's the most effective way to burn fat? So, still be strong.

Yeah, of course. You know, as we said initially in the Primal Blueprint, and I've said it decades before I wrote the Primal Blueprint, 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat. So if you, there's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat. Really? Yes. So as opposed to waking up, being hungry, having breakfast, being hungry at the 10:30 break, being hungry for lunch, having a snack in the afternoon, having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed, which is this sort of standard American approach, like Even the old bodybuilders would say, Don't go more than three hours without eating or you will cannibalize your muscle tissue. That was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate and had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to continue to work. It never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners. We are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat. And the reason that we don't as we go through life, as we present our, you know, you're two years old, you're eating cookies and crackers and mushed peas and all sorts of things. All that stuff. And so your body learns to depend on glucose, on carbohydrates as a source of energy and never really gets to the point where you force it to burn fat. So what we do is we shift the diet around. It's not painful. You get rid of the breads, the pastas, the cereals, the crackers, the cookies, the candies, the sweet and soft drinks. Well, it does sound kind of miserable, doesn't it? But what you're left with is meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, things like that. Those are great tasting foods if you eat them right. And they're real food. And they're real food. And you can use butter and lard and you can eat bacon on this program. And what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in and just sort of forces gently, forces your body to upregulate all the enzyme systems that access stored body fat and burn it. and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often. So the first thing that happens is your appetite self-regulates. So now you get into this space where you become a good fat burner, you start to melt away... You're not as hungry because... You're not as hungry because you're always carrying around a meal. It's on your thighs, it's on your ass, it's on your belly, wherever it is. It's, you know, that's your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories, It says, I don't need to eat. I'm really not that hungry. Wow.

Yeah.

And that's so empowering for so many people. But when you, you know, I was a, still love sugar. But I used to be really bad at sugar. I feel like I have much more under control. But I feel like when you're eating a lot of candy, sweets and sugar, you're never satisfied. You just want to eat more and more and more.

But that's, until you're sick. No, exactly. I'm full because I'm sick now.

Yeah.

I mean, stories of Lamar Odom eating.

Four pounds of candy. Before games?

Before games or whatever. Crazy. Yeah. But I mean, we are, look, we're all hired up.

Look where he's at now.

We're all, but instead of, by the way, sugar is a very addictive substance. It's so addictive. So, you know, we're all hardwired to seek out sweet things. That's part of that hunter-gatherer DNA that we all carry that hasn't changed in thousands of years. So how do we shift our minds? So you, the first way you do it is you go from the craving, which is what you're talking about, like you crave sugar, so you eat sugar, and then that just, promotes more craving and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle. You're actually producing sort of opiate-like substances that are occupying receptor sites that are giving you sort of a feel-good experience. So you got to kind of be willing to get rid of that. So you get rid of the candies, you get rid of the sweetened beverages, the soft drinks and teas, and you get rid of the carbohydrates that, not all carbs, but the breads that convert to glucose in the bloodstream so rapidly. So now you've lowered your blood, your glucose experience on a daily basis. So now the brain is starting to get, yeah, I don't need to really get that much glucose. You know, I can, the body is burning more fat. As a result of you being able to burn fat, you create these byproducts called ketones, which the brain loves to burn ketones and burns them preferentially. So you need less and less sugar to, you know, maintain clarity throughout the day. If you haven't become fat adapted and you're a sugar burner, which is what we, it's not a derogatory term, but we use a term to describe people who haven't become fat burners yet, they're sugar burners. If you don't eat, it's true, if you don't eat for a couple of hours, your blood sugar dips because you haven't learned how to burn fat yet.

You don't know how to access it.

You can't take it out of storage and burn it.

So now the blood sugar is low, the brain goes, I gotta go get.

Some more glucose, I gotta get energy somewhere. Sugar or something. Sugar or something. So you have the bagel at 10:30 in the morning. Oh my gosh. Or you have, Tastes amazing.

For an hour and then it's... No, exactly.

But then you're hungry again and that's this vicious cycle. So if we can take the steps, we say it takes 21 days. That's why I have a book called the 21-Day Total Body Transformation. 21 days of this cutting these sugars and starchy, not starchy but simple carbohydrates out of your diet and just focusing on healthy fats and lean proteins. and vegetables. Your body gets the message and says, I'm not going to be getting that much glucose. I'm going to learn how to burn fat and I'm going to do it well, damn it. And then it takes the fat out of your body fat stores. So over time, you lose a pound, two pounds a week, and you trend toward your ideal body composition. So all of this is a 10-minute long-winded answer to your question of what does it take to to burn fat, it doesn't take a lot of exercise. It mostly takes the dietary shift. Right. Yeah, you got to do some exercise. You don't have to do anything. But you can choose to do some exercise. It'll help accelerate. It'll help accelerate it a little bit, but most of it happens as a.

Result of the shifts you make in your diet. Absolutely.

It's all in the kitchen.

Yep. So you can get abs in the kitchen and not do anything different working out. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so what's the difference between, because.

It sounds like a little paleo-ish. What's the difference between primal paleo and like a bulletproof, which has kind of been picking up as well? You know, they're all sort of versions of a similar theme, which is to cut the sugars way down, cut the processed carbohydrates way down, get rid of the industrial seed oils, so that would be the soybean oil, the corn oil, the canola, which are causing inflammatory responses in a lot of people, and just kind of go to real food. With the Primal Blueprint, we said at some point, dairy, if you like it, why not include it in your diet if you don't have an issue with it, right?

I love it.

But all these foods exist on a spectrum. So dairy, there's raw milk, which is which is good for you. There's A2 protein, which is a form of casein. We could have a whole discussion about the different types of cows and the different types of protein that they make, but on the far end of the spectrum, the good end, there's butter, there's cream, there's all these things. At the other end, at the bad end, there's 2% skim, homogenized, pasteurized, non-fat, whatever, stay away from that stuff. So all these foods sort of exist on the spectrum. So cheeses, for instance, part of the dairy family, I love cheese.

I love cheese.

So, you know, we include it in our eating strategy because we say there's no real reason not to.

At the right price.

Paleo, yeah, exactly, artisanal cheeses and there's good and bad cheeses as well. But on the Paleo program or the Paleo strategy is pretty strict for a lot of people. So they would say no dairy at all of any kind. So no milk, no butter, no cream, no cheese. So that's, you know, there are little variations in this here.

But mostly whole foods.

Mostly whole foods is what we're all looking at. I mean, even if you look at a vegan experience these days or a vegetarian experience, it's really these dietary programs work largely as a result of what you eliminate, not what you're eating. So if you eliminate the crap and you're left, even if you're only eating vegetables as long as you're getting enough protein, you should be fine.

Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. What is LGN? And how does it motivate you?

Yeah. So LGN is look good naked. And it's a, you know, it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years. I think people have used it before, but we sort of made it a meme for a while. And it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is we want to look good naked. And I think that happens For a lot of people, that's a subset of their greater goal or it's a side effect of the original intent. The original intention for a lot of people who go to Primal Blueprint and to Mark's Daily Apple, my blog, is they're frustrated. They're sick. They can't get off the meds. They've had health issues and they've not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels. So, a lot of people come to me having had that experience in the medical community, not a good one. So the first thing that they recognize is their blood sugar normalizes or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away or their GERD or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes away and that's wonderful. And then they go, oh, by the way, I'm losing some weight too. That's awesome as well and I'm starting to look good naked.

Right.

So it becomes a nice side effect.

Side effect, gotcha. So what's a typical eating day look like for you? What are you putting in your system?

Yeah, so what time do you put it in? Yeah, so I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee around 6:30 in the morning. I like coffee, I'm a big fan of coffee. I don't eat until 12:30 or 1. Okay. So I use what we call a compressed eating window. Now, I will wake up and I have plenty of energy because I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that. I don't have the energy. I have the energy. I'm not in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that I was sleeping. It doesn't matter. I'm so good at accessing the stored body fat, I got plenty of energy. In fact, I'll go to the gym at 9:30 or 10 o'clock and I'll do my workout fasted. Sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day, sometimes it'll be intervals of some kind. Again, I don't and you feel fine. I feel fine. Right. And then when I get home, I won't eat. If I get home at like 11, I still won't eat for an hour and a half, partly because I'm not hungry and partly because I got stuff to do.

Right, right, right.

Exactly. But I'm not compelled to go, oh my God, I just finished my workout.

I must eat a post-workout shake or something. Yeah, there's so many people that say that, you know, have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes of waking up to start your metabolism, drink a shake right after a workout, Why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to?

I think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat, a couple things happen. First of all, you have the energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry, I say if you're not hungry, why are you eating? If you're not hungry, don't eat, because that's kind of key. When you become good at burning fat, you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot. which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue. Because when you're a sugar burner and you run out of sugar, or you're depending on carbohydrate, by the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate and sugar sort of interchangeable. But when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while, you've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles, 'cause your body's expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it, but you don't store very much of it. so when you run out of it, the brain, you need to fill it up. The brain goes, Hey, something's off here, we got to eat. And if we don't eat, then here's what we're going to do. We're going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol, which is going to go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose so I can fuel the brain. So it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose. All that goes away when you become a fat burner. When you become good at burning fat, now when you don't eat, your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your energy levels don't dip, your blood sugar doesn't dip, and so you don't cut into muscle tissue.

Gotcha. So you can train really hard to try to build muscle, and you're still saying you don't need this post-recovery shake.

Afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way. Exactly, exactly. Now, again, if you're the old paradigm and you are the carbohydrate dependent athlete, then yeah, you probably do want to eat a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because you're working on an entirely different operating system. Interesting, man.

And so that 21-Day Transformation is how you get off of that cycle and get into the fat-burning cycle, essentially. Yes.

Okay, cool. We'll have that linked up here as well. And also the Primal Endurance, the book, has a lot of it in there. This has it all in here, but this is really specific to people who want to race 10Ks, 5Ks, marathons, triathlons.

Spartan races, all that stuff. Gotcha.

Yes.

Have you done a Spartan race yourself?

I haven't.

I did one, a short one, like a five miler. It's pretty intense.

Yeah, it's intense.

It's fun though.

It's fun though. I wish it had been around when I was in my prime.

You would have been a machine.

Because I was a good marathoner, but I had my DNA fitness thing done a few years ago, and I was like 57% endurance and 43% strength. What that means is it made me A pretty good endurance athlete, but I was never going to be the best in the world because you'd have to be 80% or 85%, right? But it also told me that I had the strength, which is sort of in retrospect, that's why I realized I used to lift weights even when I was a marathoner. I lifted weights in the gym. So I maintained my strength. And I was a gymnast before I was ever an endurance athlete. So you look at the Spartan races and you go, well, it's got some gymnastics, some parkour types. Movements, rope climbing, some heavy lifting, all that stuff combined with the endurance, that would have been your thing, my thing. Wow. But right now it's like, I'm too guarding of my current fitness level and health. I don't want to get injured. Yeah, of course. So the big thing for me is my ultimate frisbee game once a week. You're an ultimate frisbee. Oh my God.

I love ultimate frisbee. You got to come out to Malibu, man. College champion with my team in college. Get out of here.

It's been a small D3 school. Whatever, man. But you know what? So, I can run a jump and we have a game in Malibu. Every Sunday at 9:30. It's been years, but I'd love to come.

It's the most fun.

Can we wear cleats? You can wear cleats. I wear my Vibrams, but yeah, guys wear cleats. Wow. No, it's anyway, so you know. I would love to come.

You know what a good workout it is then. That's one of the hardest workouts. An hour of Ultimate and I'm making excuses. We play two hours, by the way. Oh my gosh. I would be like, sub me in. 15 minutes, I'd have to get back in the shape for it. Wow, that's cool. In Malibu, huh? In Malibu, yeah.

9:30S, 9:30 a.m. Yep, I'll be there. And there's guys from West Hollywood that come out there too. I will come out for sure. Was it like 30 guys come out there?

We get, last week we had six on six, that's the most fun. Wow. The summer we'll have 10 on 10.

Sometimes, a little bit crazy, but yeah. Wow.

Okay, awesome.

Okay, so you wait until about, you have coffee in the morning, then you wait till about noon to one. Oh yeah, we haven't even gotten to my any food yet. And then what's, and what does that meal look like? So that meal's typically, it might be what I call a big ass salad, you know, it's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein, with lots of salad dressing. If you make your own salad dressing. And now I have my own salad dressing because I couldn't find any that I could put a lot on and.

Feel like this is-- that isn't filled with sugar.

Yeah. Or unhealthy fats or unhealthy oils, like the soybean oil that I was talking about or the canola. You know, it's like no canola. This is our salad dressings are made with avocado oil, which is the healthiest of all the oils. So I have a big salad with chicken from leftover from the previous night or a piece of fish or something on it.

Nice.

Okay.

And then?

And then I go till the middle of the afternoon, maybe late afternoon, I might have a handful of macadamia nuts. We do make a protein bar now. All my products I make for myself, by the way. Just so you know, I make stuff that I wish existed. This one, the Dark Chocolate Almond.

Dark Chocolate Almond. That's amazing.

It is amazing. And it's got, 15 grams of protein, but mostly it's 9 grams of collagen. So it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth. So, you know, I love bone broth, but it's a good trick when I'm driving my car, you know, with a--.

We pull out a bottle of bone broth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the bars are there because I'm really into the repair. So one of the issues I have as a 62-year-old guy trying to keep up with 20-somethings on a sprint to the end zone to defend a long pass is my Achilles. So the collagen really works well. Really. Absolutely. Keep seeing. I can tell the difference between when I've been eating a lot of collagen and when I haven't. In just near Achilles. In my Achilles, yeah.

What happens is tighter when you're not.

Yeah.

They feel like they're gonna snap. Really. And they'll feel sore enough that I'll choose not to back way off.

Interesting.

For weeks at a time. So, anyway, so that's, I might have a, I might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon.

I'm going to have to get all this stuff.

Yeah, I'll have to try it all out. Okay, and then in the evening, you know, I have a piece of steak, I've got this great Wagyu short rib that I get, it's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world, and I'll have that with a whole ton of steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it. And once in a while, I'll have a glass of wine. And that's it.

That's the whole day.

Yeah.

There's not much more than that.

No. So here's the thing. You may have gleaned from that that it's not a lot of food.

Right.

And one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat... You don't need a lot of food. You don't need a lot of food. So a few years ago, I had this thought experiment. I thought, well, you know, I used to my whole life see what I could get away with, see how much food I could eat and not feel like I was going to puke or not feel like I was going to gain weight, right? It's how much food can I eat and not gain weight. I think a lot of people live their lives that way. They sort of finish what's on their plate. They basically... There are a lot of people who run or work out just so they can eat more. Like, why do you run so much? Lewis, well, I run I love to eat. Dude, I love to eat too. But I don't want to beat myself up just so I can eat more. So that was the thought experiment. And then if you reverse it, you go, well, if that's the case, what's the least amount of food I can eat and maintain my body mass, maintain my energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And it turns out it's about 30% fewer calories than I used to eat.

Is there a way you think I'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good?

There's a component, of course, with genetics. Now, with that said, we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon is epigenetics.

Yes.

And things that are above genetic control. Now, with that said, I think the first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is. And most folks have no idea. Unfortunately, we're at war with something we don't even understand. And so fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum. And a couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're gonna go even deeper. So the first type is subcutaneous fat. And subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue. This is a fat that's just below your skin. and so if you're trying to, if you think about, like, fat on your arms or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly, but that's the stuff you can pinch.

Now, I can pinch a lot right here.

The other type of fat is visceral fat. And that's also, it's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity.

Right.

So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs, you know, kind of putting, if you have a lot of visceral fat, putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys and just everything in your core. This is the fat inside your, not.

On the outside of your muscles, but inside your body. Yeah, so it's like your abdominal cavity.

Gotcha.

Your visceral fat and you want less of that.

Yeah, this is the most dangerous type of fat. This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes. You know, it's just putting stress on your core, everything, which there's so much around there.

Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything.

And this is the stuff, it's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. And so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats, okay? So your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. Our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today, is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy. Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it though, and it can be a little bit clingy, you know, so you have to give the right messages and that's part of the issue. So I just want to make that clear. And fat is also, it's not, we tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body, but it's really an organ itself.

So that is an organ.

It's an organ. It's an organ that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones. All right, so it's like making, producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand. All right, so I want to preface by saying that.

Wait, is it an organ or is it like an organ?

It's an organ.

Fat is an organ.

Yes.

And.

And.

Just like for example.

So fat in our body is one.

Organ and it's all connected from the brain and my. All connected. From the fat of my brain to.

My belly to my toe. Now, there's different types of fat communities. All right. So this is another conversation. This, I go through all of these. I literally call it the fat communities and Eat Smarter and break this stuff down. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp. that a lot of people don't know about is called intramuscular fat. All right, intramuscular fat.

Is this the third type of fat?

Yeah. And so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my conventional education, I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of, they have this dichotomy. Like they're two different things. They're separate, but they actually work together. and intramuscular fat really provides. And just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak, that's your intramuscular fat. Now that can get out of hand too, and you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles with the intramuscular fat. So it's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community. So these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now here's what's really amazing and a lot of folks might know about this next one. We also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue, all right, or BAT, brown adipose tissue or brown fat. Now brown fat, the reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria. All right?

Mitochondria are good, right?

Yeah. Mitochondria are really the energy power plants of our cells, really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy. And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned. All right? So folks don't, we're taught these like diet paradigms, like where the, how does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? Your mitochondria actually are the place where the triglycerides get shipped to, to actually burn them and use them as fat. So brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria.

Side note, how do I go to bed weighing a certain amount and then I wake up and I lose two pounds? Where does that go? Is that just a burn through sweat? Is that just mitochondria burning and it's.

Disintegrating into the air? What is happening? This is such a great question. So in Eat Smart, this is the first time in book form, we're like we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens.

Uhuh.

And it's just, the question should be like, where the hell does fat go? Where does it go to? You just poop it out?

Do you sweat it out?

Does it, you've got that, do I breathe it in? You've got that Thanos keychain. Does it go to another dimension? You know what I mean? But what they did, and this was so fascinating, they actually tracked the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated. And so what they discovered was that about 84% of the fat, because, okay, We have to preface by saying this. For us psychologically, in our culture, we tend to think of burning fat. If there's a visual of it, it's sweating.

Yeah.

Like we're at the gym, we're sweating it out. That's like, that's your fat cells crying, having a good breakup cry. You know, that's how we, that's what we think.

Yeah.

But in actuality, about 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing.

What?

Yeah, it's eliminated via your lungs.

Yeah, it's carbon dioxide. So, no way. So fat in the body and then it goes what into your lungs? It's like transporting through the lung cavity and then you breathe it out?

It's an eliminatory organ. You know, we don't think about that.

What?

We tend to think about like our gastrointestinal tract, our bladder is an eliminatory organ, your lungs. And so you breathe about 84% of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath. And about a third of that happens.

While you're sleeping at night. So you breathe fat out. That's how you burn it.

Yeah.

80, how much?

Cesar Milan is the dog whisperer.

Yes, I'm just whispering. Exactly. I burn it in my sleep. So wait a minute, how much fat do we burn through our lungs?

About 84% of it. All of our fat. So if I'm 100 pounds, this is not just your breathing. It's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoots. It just comes through the mouth. Through the breathing. You also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. So about, you know, somewhere around the ballpark of about 15%, 16 to 14% sweat and urine.

And bowel. Yeah. Tears.

All of these things are eliminating fat products. Fat's gone.

It looks coagulated when you look at it in your body, right? So how is it, break down and then turn into just nothing that you can see.

Yeah, it's a very complex and beautiful process.

The body is fascinating what it can do.

It is, it is. And we go through, and it can be so overwhelming, but what I did was I made it an analogy in the book of a theater, making your body like a cellular movie theater. And there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seats. So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to quote kill fat or burn fat, but that's not really how it works actually. Your fat cells are storage containers and what they're getting filled with, the fat cells, basically when you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells, all right? You can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy and makes the fat cell expand. So what we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel.

Right.

All right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fats, the fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell or they usher them out when it's time to leave. So one of its hormone sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater.

All right.

Lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater. All right. And then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing. You know, namely your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin and the other one, its brother, is glucagon. All right, insulin is so man, when you think of insulin, what do you think of though?

Eating sugar?

Yeah.

That's what I think of. Insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar, right?

Yeah, and most folks think of diabetes too. It's like tied into that.

Of course.

But insulin is so important for our survival. It's just it's a super amazing. We need it. Yes, you absolutely have to have insulin. And if you're born, you know, in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin, like you can die, your cells won't get energy. So now here's the thing. Insulin's job is to store energy.

Right?

Yeah.

And to encourage all those enzymes and to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a problem.

It's storing too much fat.

Yeah. And it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin, it's getting overrun and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly. That's where you get insulin resistance. All right. And then you have something called this kind of instant cell fat cell creation that can take place with the liver. It'll just start making its own fat as well. So, but we'll circle back to that a little bit later. But here's the thing. So you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy. But glucagon cannot do its job unless his brother sits his ass down somewhere. Insulin. Yes.

So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job?

That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want it to stop. We just want it to be efficient. Efficient. Now here's another thing. We do know that, as you mentioned, sugar is a big driver of insulin. Carbohydrates in general.

Pasta's, right?

Yeah, but protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree for sure. And even fat in a kind of backdoor way does drive insulin function too, or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So it's not just this one thing. but we do know that in our culture, you know, on average, folks are eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year, you know? So that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this over overactivity of insulin to the, to the point that we have insulin resistance.

Because 100 years ago, we weren't eating as much sugar, I'm assuming, in process.

It's not even close. It's not even close.

But it's, but what is with the But the life expectancy increases every year, it seems like. We're eating more and more bad things, but we're able to live longer, whereas before we weren't.

That's the misnomer though. We're not necessarily living longer, we're dying longer.

We're getting sicker and being able to stay alive.

Yes, very different. And this is the first generation. We are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us. Right? This is the first time we're seeing this down tick. When we're supposed to be seeing folks, well basically the life expectancy has gone down for the first time.

Really?

In like recent history.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents or what do you mean?

So we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old. Now it's 79.

Really?

You know, so it's just going, the life expectancy has gone down for the first time.

Previous generation got you. Life expectancy history. It's interesting, I was asking Dr. David Sinclair about this.

I love him.

He was like, the goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable. He's like, I've seen that in too many people. The goal is to live as long as you can, healthy, flexible, abundant, not with chronic pain, and then die quickly.

Right, it's that.

To get sick and then die within a week. Not get sick and die within 20 years of misery. He's like, that's not a great life.

We don't just want lifespan, we want health span. And it all really boils down, and this is the most beautiful part about this, and what I'm really hoping to impress upon culture, because when we tend to think of food, we tend to think of it in relationship. In our culture, we think of diet in relationship to weight. It's just like what's connected. When in reality, food is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times. and this is what I really want to get across is, of course, I'm gonna give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food, but also how does food affect your cognitive performance? And it's shocking when you find this data out, how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people. Break that down as well.

What are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion? And what are the foods that... Before.

We get to that, the fat storage, there was one more.

Were you talking about brown fat? Yeah, brown fat.

And there was another fat. Yeah, so there's one other fat. And so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria, right? So these energy power plants, that's why it's brown. Babies have a lot of brown fat. It's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia, you know, just to basically keep thermogenesis going. As you become an adult, you have a lot less brown adipose tissue. It's mostly located like around your collar bones. your shoulder blades down your spine. And brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated if you have enough brown adipose tissue, which you can create more, and the mobilization activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition. So this type of fat is burning fat for you, if you know it's brown fat.

Yeah.

All right. So that's a We got three storage fats and then we've got two other types of fat.

And that's body fat that burns fat. Yes.

And so this other one, and this is one a lot of folks might not know a lot about yet, is beige fat.

Is this the fifth type of fat?

Yeah.

So this is beige fat.

Beige fat.

And so beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat. All right. Based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be turning into a fat storing type of fat or a fat burning type of fat. And the browning of this fat, one of the things, and I'll just throw this out there for folks since you asked about a specific food when we go through so many different, but I'm going to throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy, a little controversial, is coffee. Coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And in fact, one of the studies that I cited in Eat Smarter found they actually used fMRI and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up, signaling increased thermogenesis. And one of the studies found that there's about a 3 to 11% increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now, there's a U-shaped curve of benefits, right? Some is good, once we get to a certain place, we can mess ourselves up. And also we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with, right? Is it just, is it coffee or are you consuming coffee with- Donuts and crap. And like, you know, these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals. Yeah, that's not good. And even the coffee itself, are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut. So, there's a big conversation there and we dive into all these pieces to see like, there's so many wonderful things that we have access to, but in our culture, we've been a little bit led astray. And it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad. It's been utilized by humans for centuries, but it's the quality in how you're going about it that can make all the difference.

And the quantity probably, and yeah.

Yeah, and so just going back to your original question, when we're targeting that, you know, the belly fat specifically. And this is something that is not talked about enough. It's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning. Right. And this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat. And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this. But when I was in my nutritional science class in college, the very, like the king, the monarch, the warden of diet is calories. And I say warden intentionally because it's a little, it gets into this kind of prison or mentality. And diets are really revolving around this. And I'm always asked this question and I'm so grateful that I've kind of hard wired myself to do this. Where did it come from? Where the hell did this idea start? And so I went back and examined the entire history of calories. And it would actually, for me, it's just like when we find like Egyptian pyramids, like they didn't have any about calories.

Right.

Nobody was even thinking about it or looking for it even when it was discovered. And it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition. It was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering. And it's in the 1800s. And then it made its transition into nutrition thanks to a guy named Wilbur Atwater. But he's just kind of a little side note as well. And I basically, I go back and talk about all the people involved, but this is what changed America. This is what changed the world really. Was a physician, she's a pioneer for sure. Her name was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters. And she's the one who popularized the term calorie. And she sold, this was back in the early 1900s, she created a nutrition book, a diet book, and they sold two million copies back then, which is basically everybody and their mother had this book. What was it called? This was Diet and Health in the Key to Calories, something like that, the Key to Calories. But I went back and read these old-fangled writings. There's like a lot of pieces of it online. And this began the indoctrination of our culture in starting to look at food in terms of numbers. It's no longer this dynamic, multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems. Now it's numbers. And she specifically said, we will no longer call a slice of bread a slice of bread. You won't say one slice of bread, you'll say 100 calories of bread. You will no longer say a slice of pie, you say 350 calories of pie. And so we stopped looking at food as food. We'll start at this evolution. and started looking at it as numbers. And she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained 1200 calorie intake. And now, let me also make this clear. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters battled with her weight for her lifetime, all right? And it's that term of like teach what you want to learn kind of thing. Now, this is also crucial and some people this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit. This was also the beginning of this indoctrination associating Food with character, associating food with morality. And so she basically asserted that it's a character defect if you're not able to manage your weight. There's something wrong with you. And started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food. And this was also during the time of like World War I, so food rationing was a big thing happening. And she said, one of her quotes I put in the book, and I'm paraphrasing that, for every pang of hunger you feel, you should have a double joy knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or with soldiers. So she's basically saying this was also a massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss. If you're hungry, you're doing it right. And this started to really change the psychology of dieting, right? And so calories began to become the king and the big focus. Now, I want to say this, calories matter for sure. It's a measurement of energy in food. Just like a meter is a measure of energy in distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measure this room consistently, it's going to be the same meter.

Same distance.

However, calories are different. Completely ignore, when you're talking about a measurement of energy, it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters. and cellular function. It's going to be different every day. The calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body.

Because our hormones are changing, our bodies are changing, our timelines are changing. What we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50. Exactly.

Let alone you versus another person. And this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person, but it doesn't work for someone else. And I'm sick of it, man. Wow. Because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them. and they're not getting these very fundamental principles. And so folks can start to free themselves of this caloric prison. I can share, there's five really powerful metrics that are not examined. There's really five major things that control what calories do in your body.

What's one of those?

So if we think about, I keep mentioning hormones, but just to give a good analogy of what hormones are, hormones are really biochemical messengers. that help your cells, the cellular community that you have, this amazing cellular community to communicate with each other. It's like metabolic DMs, right? It's like text messages, emails.

How many hormones do we have?

There's about 50.

50 different hormones.

Yeah, about 50.

Are hormones, what is a hormone? Is it a cell? Is it an organ? Is it a connecting point? What is it?

So.

The most important fundamental building block of our hormones are proteins. all right? So I want to really reiterate this how important protein is because it's needed to build your freaking hormones, right?

Where are hormones stored?

All throughout your body, you know, even like that fat organ that we talked about is making its own hormones. But there are hormones that are being produced and secreted by your pituitary gland. Your hypothalamus is like a master regulator of your hormonal system, your endocrine system. It's in your brain. And so one of the things we talk about in the book is this growing epidemic of neuroinflammation that is messing up people's hypothalamic function that's screwing up what's happening downstream. Like your thyroid is on that HPA axis.

Is the thyroid here or something?

In your throat. So that's largely considered like the metabolic regulator, like your master gland associated with fat loss or fat storage. And it definitely plays a role. So these are all pieces and in this web. Now, what's actually determining what these calories are doing? And so I mentioned, I gave a little preface of what our hormones are. So when we're talking about calories, these five things, and I'll give an analogy, I'll give like an acronym, the DM, all right? We're gonna use that as our letters. So it goes down in the DM. You know what I'm talking about. So the first thing that's controlling what calories are doing, the T stands for the type of food itself determines what the calories are doing in your body. And this is highlighted in this crazy study. This was published in Food and Nutrition Research. Listen to this, this is freaking crazy. They went to find out what would happen with a meal of the same calories that's either a meal of whole foods or processed food. Same amount of calories.

So, a bowl of cereal and some fruits and vegetables.

So, what they did was they had sandwiches. And so one set of folks got the sandwich that was considered whole food sandwich, which was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. The other folks received the processed food sandwich, which was white bread and cheese product.

Right?

Oh, no.

And that's Kraft, Kraft slices.

That American cheese tastes so good. They can't call it cheese. And so here's what happened after, and I love this study because they tracked the pathway of calorie burn, their metabolic rate, and what happened when they ate these two respective sandwiches. After they compiled the data, the folks, even though the calories were the same, the folks who consumed the processed food sandwich had a 50% reduction in calorie burn after eating that damn sandwich.

What?

50% reduction.

Why is that?

Because the body, so this gets into some of the other things we'll talk about, but that the processed nature of those foods created some metabolic dysfunction and some confusion for your endocrine system.

Oh man.

And your nervous system and all these, the cellular community, that communication, so now the body is less apt to let go of that energy. It's confused, it's trying to hang on to it. All right. Now what are most folks eating? Processed foods. All right, so it's literally changing the way their body even associates with calories and they're trying to count these damn points and not understanding that the very nature of how their body's operating is skewed. so that's just the T. That's the type of food.

All right.

So the H is how the food is prepared, has a massive impact on what the calories do in your body. So you mean whether it's cooked, whether.

It'S raw, whether it's stir-fried, I don't know, like, all of that.

Really?

Exactly. Yes. So to give a good example, if you think about spinach, right, spinach, a lot of folks, of course, consider it's a healthy food. Popeye was, like, knocking it down in the can. I don't know if Have you ever had spinach out of a can?

No.

It must have been tough times. So spinach is a good, this is a good one because these green leafy vegetables, there's nutrition that's locked inside the cell wall. And you have to basically crack open the cell wall to extract the calories and some of the nutrients. And as the spinach gets older, that's why we have this baby spinach. And as the spinach gets more mature, the cell walls become harder to break into.

To.

All right. So just right off the bat, baby spinach versus the same quantity of mature spinach, you're going to get more calories out of the baby spinach.

Is that better for you or?

This is not about better or worse right now. This is just like understanding there's some other stuff happening. Interesting.

Okay.

Now, but here's another thing. Cooking the spinach too breaks down the cell wall. So regardless if it's a baby spinach, cooked spinach, I mean a mature spinach, and When this happens, it also the density of the spinach. Like you've seen it, you can- Shrink, whole bag. Comes this little teeny baby teaspoon, right? And so this is one of the things, and I really start the book talking about this, that most experts will agree that it was our ability to cook that really created like a quantum leap in the evolution of the human brain because we're now able to extract more nutrients and calories from our food, even though this term wasn't invented yet. Not to say that it's good or bad or that raw food isn't good. It's just understanding how the food is prepared changes what calories do in your body. Interesting.

So, if you're cooking spinach, it has less calories in it.

If you're cooking spinach, calories become more available. So, what does that mean?

When you consume it.

Yeah, your body's consuming more calories. It's able to extract more of the calories when it's cooked.

So, if it's raw, It's got less calories, a little bit less.

Less that you can extract from it. In general, these are minutia. These are small things, but they matter. So this gets into the conversation of what food is. And so even when we talk about calories, the way that this was initially kind of brought to the forefront, they used something called a bomb calorimeter, a bomb calorimeter. And what they do is they took the food and they put it into a box, and they put that box into another box that's filled with water, and then they would burn the food with electrical energy to find out all of the available calories that were in this food that was used to heat the water up. And so once they did this, they were like, okay, there's 200 calories in this particular food product. The problem is you might be the bomb, Lewis, but you're not a bomb calorimeter, all right? Your body is very different. There are indigestible components of that food, for example. Whereas the bomb calorimeter is basically saying all the calories that are here. When you don't absorb all the calories in the food that you eat. Okay, so this creates this schism. All right? So those indigestible components could be, they're gonna be more in raw spinach. You're not gonna digest as much. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah.

So you're not gonna digest as much and you're not gonna pull as many calories in. However, there's bioavailable micronutrients. that you're gonna get. It's not that raw spinach versus cooked spinach is good or bad. It's just there's different ways that it impacts your body.

So that's how the food is prepared.

Types of food, how it's prepared.

Right.

So the DM, it goes down in the DM. All right. The next one is the E, and the E stands for energy exchange. Now, this one here, this is something folks might have learned about a little bit in school. I know I did in my university class. However, I don't think we really get this. It costs energy, it costs calories to digest calories. Your body uses calories to digest calories.

To burn or digest the calories.

To produce the- the- Chewing. The saliva, to chew, to swallow.

To the intestinal wall, like everything, right? To churn the stuff.

To produce stomach acid, to move it, to take the food from your gastrointestinal tract through your small intestine and move it through into your bloodstream and move those cells, those nutrients to your brain, to your eyeballs, to your toes.

How much do we burn from one meal? From eating, chewing, to eliminating? How long does that take typically? Is that a 12 or 24 hour window? It depends. On one meal?

Man, that's such a very diverse question because it It depends on the type of food. It depends on, matter of fact, we'll get to that in a moment.

Okay.

Okay. We'll get to that. So, energy exchange. Energy exchange, now this energy exchange, how many calories or how much the caloric expenses in digesting food depends on the type of food too.

The macronutrients specifically is what people know about, but it's a little bit more diverse.

Processed food, it's going to be harder to digest. It's going to be more work or less work. It depends on the type of food. Got it. Let's we'll stick with the overarching because we could do the whole show just on that one topic. But just on the macronutrient side, proteins are well noted to be more calorically expensive to digest. It costs you about 20 to 30% of the protein that you eat is the calories in there are used to digest the protein. So we'll just say if you consume 100 grams of protein, 20 to 30 I'm sorry, 100 calories of protein. 20 to 30 calories are used to digest that protein. Wow, that's pretty good. So you get a net profit of calories of 70, all right?

So you can have more calories and realize it's gonna be less that you're actually eating.

Yeah, with protein. With protein. With carbohydrates, it's gonna cost you, it's about 10 to 15% of that energy that you take in caloric energy is used to digest it. For fats, it's about zero to somewhere in the ballpark about five. to digest it.

So more protein equals more burning calories.

It's called the thermic effect of food, all right? And protein is largely kept out of the conversation today. It's people are battling about carbs and fats. These are the big diet frameworks. And protein is like Rodney Dangerfield. It's like, you know, I get no respect.

Body really exists in sort of one of two states. You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. Okay, so when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job, is to tell your body to store those calories. Okay, so you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat. But that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, There's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is any time you don't eat, it's called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop, and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night, is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin is dropping, and you're using calories. So you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, when.

I'm eating, I'm storing. I'm not using calories.

Is that right?

Every time I eat down, I will store.

I'm not burning body fat.

You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example. and that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar's coming in, use the sugar that's coming in.

Don't burn anything off my body.

Yeah, exactly.

Keep all that stored fat, keep it. Just keep piling it on, right?

Exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah. and then you have to snack all day long. So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at 8:00 a.m., you don't stop till 10:45 p.m. That's on average. That's the average.

14 hours, you mean a 14-hour span of eating from the start to finish, right? You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours within 14 hour window.

It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state. So the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o'clock you're done, boom, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would say, oh, you need time to digest, right? That's what she sort of said. But the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times. And that was the secret that they could stay relatively Slim. Now, if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories. The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories. Your body, so the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores because your body's like, the instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem, of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all intermittent fasting is. If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you within an eight-hour window or a four-hour window or whatever, What you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat predominantly, but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat. Like that body fat is not there for looks, is there for you to use, right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're gonna burn it. Well, so again, go back to the 70s and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. You know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. And if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So in the town, you went from 12 o'clock to 8 a.m. 20 hours.

You look good the next day. You're looking clean. You got a six pack.

It's burning fat. Exactly. And nobody died. Nothing bad happens, right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right? And that's the whole point. is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating, like we would not be here today, because when we were cavemen and cave women, there was no food.

We didn't have food every day.

Exactly. There might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food, and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. and that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

What's the process for you, your day-to-day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast, and i'll tell you that it didn't I mean, I started this in medical school and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the door. You know, I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it was just a, it was just that the way I was, right? And so I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. if you don't eat breakfast, what's gonna happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. It's just gonna keep doing it, right? There's nothing wrong with it. So a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while when I get very busy, I will do a 24 hour fast, which is a one meal a day. and then every so often I'll do a longer fast. And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at, say, you know, during major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of universal.

So, you know, everyone's doing it. So no one's feeling exactly stressed when they smell the food. Exactly.

So if you're, if it's like good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or, you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not. physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly. But that means I can enjoy myself. Like, a couple years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot, and I knew it, and I could feel it in my pants were tight. so I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you, by the next week, I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and but I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation. I'm doing this. And at the same time, I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And it gives you a great tool to use if you need it, right? Yeah.

It's almost like either every day don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether before 468 hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time, is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, which in a 14 hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it. Like, that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating, right? But now, of course, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater. You can eat at your desk. You can eat in a car, like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in.

A boardroom when there's food everywhere.

Donuts, donuts and cookies, right? Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right? It's like, well, why? We're having a meeting here, right? So that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window, 10 hour eating window. You can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right, so if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time.

But-- no food.

No food, yeah. So if you think about fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has 3,500 calories roughly. If you need about 1,800 calories, so that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like a hundred pounds overweight, you could go 200 days, you know, if you want to lose a hundred pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get- and survive. And survive. Exactly.

And be okay.

Exactly. Be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories, right? It's very efficient. That's why we developed this.

It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

Exactly. So you use it.

Does it affect your digestive system? Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time? And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your colon, your metabolism? What's affected there?

And this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint, assuming of course you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're going to burn muscle. It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid. that it stores energy as fat, but the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle. Why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive? And it's like if you save firewood for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire. Why would you be so stupid? Our body's just the same. It's not that. And I know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That thing does nothing for building muscle. Like, otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on Earth, right? But we're not. We're the fattest nation on Earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown. And that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds, they get all this flappy skin. That's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein. Your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. So another big myth, so muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about as starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time because--.

Why does it stop?

Why does it stop burning those calories?

Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for a hundred years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less. So because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you spend a hundred thousand $1,000 a year. Now you make $50,000, you don't keep spending $100, right? It's, it's, you're gonna, you're gonna get thrown into jail. But so you reduce your expenditure same as a body. So it's getting less. So it's going to use less and that's the natural reaction is, it's, it's important because it's a survival response.

It cannot do anything different. So it's almost like, so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use.

Yeah.

In order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you, but if you just do a little bit, I'm gonna eat a little bit less today, it's not.

Gonna do that much. Dr. It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body, and as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat, just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut Cut it down. And the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there. Why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat. Because your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food. Then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low-fat muffin. You stay here. You can only burn food. All that stuff over there, those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2,000 calories, I'm going to eat 1,500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day. keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measured their VO2, which, as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing. and what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food, and they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was 10% higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down, it's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that, and we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up including your sympathetic nervous system which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of again, it's a survival response. So imagine again we're cave man and it's winter and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never.

Going to die again.

You're going to die because every day is going to be harder, you're going to circle the drain. So, our body is just not that stupid, right? So, what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in, boom, I'm going to switch you over to body fat, and then I'm going to pump you up so that you have energy. You go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth.

You're focused, you're clear, in the zone, everything.

Exactly. And that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just lounge around. But if you're the hungry wolf, that is not, that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration and our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken. which is a biography of this fellow who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he's talking about starvation and they were literally starving. They'd eat almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he, so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like it was so widespread, everybody was starving, and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he require his students to fast in order to come to his class because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility.

If you eat a healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed, I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff, or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better or Is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter?

Yeah, that's a really good question. The short answer is, yeah, it does matter. So, probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night and then probably the amount of protein because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food. so the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food. Our bodies want to be very cold at night, so anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep.

So, what foods help you sleep better that keep you colder? What are those foods? Whether it's an hour before or three hours before?

Yeah, I honestly, it's like almost anything you're gonna eat is gonna come with something that's gonna slightly raise your temperature. So, I just generally say try to not eat too much before bed. And I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed. So, you know, I'd have an avocado before bed. I'd have, you know, something that's like, you know, I just generally don't eat before bed.

The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler, and therefore help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed?

Yeah, and this is at least for me been most easy to exhibit. And I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. So fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water only fast, is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces, one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it, you have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on, right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says go get more food, right?

Be alert, be focused, go get food.

Like we don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times. But, I still feel quite rejuvenated by sleep.

If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleeping, you're staying up late because you're whatever playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active. Is there a negative for in your early ages, teens, early 20s through Lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done in your before 20?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens. The good news is before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How old are you now, Louis? You're near 37.

37.

So you might not have fully appreciated, I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you. And when I think about 17 to 27 to 30 to 11 to 47, I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience. Like at 17, you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day. Like you just couldn't, right?

You're Superman, yeah.

You're absolutely Superman. And I don't know, I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42-ish, about five years ago was the first time I was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? Like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise, but the same is true of physiology, right? Or I'll give you another example. Many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do. I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride.

Oh my gosh, man.

Probably still partially drunk. But felt fine by about two hours into the ride. Today, if I had three glasses of wine, the headache I'm going to have the next day is going to last me till the middle of the day.

Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it to its advantage then and now it's like it takes over?

It's a very good question. I really, I mean, I could sort of you know, speculate on what it is, but I just think there's an over. So there's this thing called homeostasis, right? Which is one of the hallmarks of youth. And it's one of the hallmarks of aging. And, you know, it's the ability to, or it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. So everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated, like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4. So seven would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14, to put that in perspective. Okay. So tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that? Amazing. Temperature, right? You go much below about 94, you're dead. You go much above about 104, you're dead. how good are we at staying in that range? Oh, I mean, good. I mean, we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band. So this homeostasis thing is amazing. It gets weaker and weaker as we get older. And so your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And I think it declines non-linearly. So again, what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40. It's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.

Is there a way to reverse this?

I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And, you know what? I would say you probably can reverse it, right? So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible. But, you know, so there are probably some variants of this that are harder to reverse than others. But no, I think we can reverse this process. But it gets harder, you know, it gets harder as time goes on. It gets harder the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.

What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself? How are you thinking about it?

Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually six years ago, 2014. so I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point, I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But I, you know, at that point, a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again, is a rich man's problem.

Ultramarathons, ultrabiking, ultra swimming, hiking.

That's, that's right. That's right. So again, and it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as exercise dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality. Now, again- Really? Yes.

Does that mean running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?

Yeah, great point. Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all. But running 40-50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast who is the world's expert on this. It was actually James's work six years ago, because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends. It's one of those things I'm sure you've experienced this, where you hear something and you don't want it to be true, so you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke.

Holes in it until you can find the evidence the other way.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago.

It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.

That's all right though. You'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month.

Yeah, exactly.

And then I think the second thing was I realized, it was sort of funny, but I realized my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about what was I doing this in service of, right? And not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self-motivated. I don't like, but just as a joke one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20 K?

Like, bike, run or swim?

Yeah, bike on a 20 K bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like, I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, Huh, that's funny. It's literally the most important person in my life, couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick-ass 100-year-old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial, because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.

What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?

So, so I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. Um, so the pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layer detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week. So it's a fraction of what I used to do, and it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.

What was the fourth one?

Stability, strength, mitochondria, and- Mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.

So you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis?

Yeah, yeah. Those four pillars sort of make up the training program. which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially. But my Centenarian Olympics has 18 events in it. I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool where there's a one-foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three-foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10-pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy and you'd be right as a 37-year-old stud. But the point is, as a 30.

Year old, a lot of them aren't easy.

Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet, but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard.

And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40, what should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part, I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?

So I don't, I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like, I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races. Like, I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. You know, there are only 168 hours in a week, and, you know, I have a very clear set of priorities, and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, How much do I want to put both time and money, so the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for, you know, money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today. You could have totally different strategies for that. That's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital. And so so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, you know, Peter, 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman, so I'm going to go and do that. And, you know, I want to climb Mount Everest and that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things.

And truthfully, I would say do them.

Now, because it's only going to get harder. Cause you're not gonna be able to do it later.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later. So get those things out of the way. And then maybe when you turn 40, you say, okay, now it's time I'm.

Going to really focus on my centenarian.

Olympics when I have a better sense of what those events look like.

For me personally.

So if you look at hunger during fasting, so they've done again studies where they fast people for 24 hours and they measure a hormone called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. The higher it is, the hungrier you are. Turns out that our ghrelin peaks three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. So you get hungry at, you know, 12 o'clock. It's lunchtime, you get hungry. So it's a learned response. The question is what happens if you don't eat? Does hunger keep going up and up and up? It doesn't. In fact, the ghrelin actually peaks and then it just falls. If you don't eat, it will actually just fall down and it will fall down within a couple of hours right to baseline, which means that your level of hunger at 12:30, 1:00, you're hungry, no question about it. If you don't eat, By 3, 4 o'clock, that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat. What happened? Well, your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat. You took that meal from your body fat and your hunger went down. So that's really interesting. So if you know that it's a wave, right? You just have to let the sort of wave pass over you.

Yeah.

I often tell people you will get hungry, okay? Don't pretend that you're not because you will. what you got to do is prepare for it and say, okay, well, if you get hungry, then you either, there's several things. One, stay busy. You know, keep doing stuff. Don't just think about how hungry you are. So we all have had this where we're, you know, working on some kind of, you know, doing work at work, or if you're doing some kind of, you know, home renovation or something. I did this all the time where I'm, like, painting, you know, the house or something like that. Right. And I'll just power right through because I just want to get it done. And I'm not hungry at all because I'm so busy. I'm so focused on doing the work that I just forgot about it, right? You see this all the time, you know, people who go to the casino and people who play video games, they just get so engrossed. So that's one strategy. The other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink by the time you finish, you know, a big cup of green tea, the hunger will have passed, but you know that it's going to pass. And that's the point. You know it's not going to get worse and worse and worse. and that's how you do it. What's even more interesting actually is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three, four, five days, the ghrelin peaks and then after about two days it starts going down. So by day two, day three, as you get to day four, day five, the hunger almost completely disappears. It's actually fascinating if you've never done it. I've done a few of these four or five day fasts. interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger. There's a whole lot of, hey, that slice of pizza looks really good. I really want to eat it.

Right, right.

But there's no actual physical hunger. So if I hadn't seen it, which is hard now, of course, with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff, I would actually, you know, gone and right by and done it. But the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with. That's not impossible because. again, one of the big objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it. Like, it'll work. Sure. If you don't eat, you'll lose weight, but nobody do it. Well, you know that literally millions of people throughout history have done this. Look at Ramadan. You look at Yom Kippur. You look at Lent. Like, when people say, okay, we're gonna fast together because our strength is in our togetherness, right? You know, it's Good Friday. We're not going to eat for this amount of time. Well, that's how people did it, right? They supported each other. There was no food around. Somebody's not frying up, you know, his steak while you're trying to figure out.

How to make cookies.

Yeah, exactly. So that's how you do it, right? You get yourself a supportive community. You know, you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time. And that's how you get through it, right? And while you do that, of course, your body uses up the body fat. So you're going to lose weight. use up the blood sugar, which is going to keep you from becoming diabetic, and insulin is going to fall, which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term, as well as those other conditions, obesity and type 2 diabetes, which puts you at such high risk of cancer in the first place. You're doing all kinds of good stuff for your body, and it's completely free.

You don't have to spend money on it.

Yes.

Exactly. And this is the part it's crazy. It's because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, which is the leading cause of blindness, of kidney disease, of amputations, the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery, it's less. It's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth. you can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better. It's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it. The people tell you, oh, you can't do it. You can't do it. It's like, that's not true. We all used to do it, right? If you think about, you know, you know, a community of, like, you know, on Yom Kippur, like millions of Jews around the world are doing it or Ramadan, millions. Muslims are doing it. Or, you know, millions of Catholics are fasting during Good Friday. Like, my priest used to tell me all the time during Lent, you know, fasting fat. Like, that's all he talked about practically. So it's, it's, it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of the diseases. And we don't have to charge anybody anything. We're not trying sell anybody anything. We're just trying to tell you, yes, you can do it. Because if you have too much weight and it's putting you at risk of this cancer, then let your body burn off that sugar. Let your body burn off that fat.

A couple months ago, I did a four day fast where I just had water and a black coffee a day. And it felt incredible. First couple days was challenging, but by day three, I was like, I'm in the zone, and I felt good. I looked younger. I felt healthier. I was doing it more of, like, seeing what I could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my, you know, kind of cleaning out my system. I just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds. It was burning a lot of excess fat, but I just felt better. I felt more confident. I felt like, oh, I could do something challenging. which gave me more strength in my mind. It was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways. And I'm curious, what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that, that you've debunked?

I mean, the, the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you. It's actually one of the healthiest things you can do as long as you're, again, not underweight and you're doing it safely.

Right.

You're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing. But there's this whole recent scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy, which has been, you know, very, very topical. People have been going crazy on it because in 2016, one of the Nobel prizes in medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers. And what it showed is that when you fast, and you turn down these nutrient sensors, then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy. And autophagy is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles and just gets rid of them, right? It breaks it down and recycles them. And everybody thinks, well, if you're breaking down stuff, that's bad for you, right? You're breaking down protein, that's bad for you. It's good for you because the first thing you need to do whenever you want to renovate, for example, say you want to renovate your bathroom, the first thing you got to do is throw out everything in there, right? That avocado green tub has to go, otherwise you can't put in a new tub, right? It's just the way it is. That's just, so your body works the same way. The first thing you have to do is get rid of the old, junky, old protein. You got to break it down.

You got to kill off those cells.

Yeah.

You got to destroy them, rip them off the body and let them whatever.

The waste mate or they flush out.

Your skin or whatever they do, right?

Exactly. The skin proteins, the connective tissue, all of that goes. And it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need. What happens is that everything starts to go and then the stuff you need, like if you're still exercising, your body's like, hey, I still need those muscles. I'm going to rebuild that. So that's the key that one of the things that activates during fasting is actually growth hormone. So if you fast for 24 hours, your growth hormone level is like four times what it is when you're eating.

Yeah.

And it sounds very strange. Why would growth hormone goes up? Well, it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff. As soon as you start to eat it, you want to rebuild all of it. So the Nobel Prize in medicine, which is Dr. Osuni said, this is the body's intracellular recycling system. So it's not, let's flush out all our old stuff. It's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff. But if you think about it, that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation, right? Get rid of the old stuff, bring in new stuff. It's like renovating your body, right? So all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not going to get if you are eating all the time. So this is this whole, you know, in people who are very interested in wellness, a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on. And you get this this point where you're doing, you know, so you've done these longer fasts. It's like, wow, this is, you just feel really good about yourself. You know, you're, you're full of energy, right? And, and this is the thing that I thought very strange when I did my first sort of three or four day fasts. Like, I have a ton of energy. Like, I could feel like I could do anything. My friend who used to work, he's a, he's a doctor, and he worked a lot of nights and stuff. He said, it felt like my brain was, like, fire. Like, I thought I could do anything and everything faster than I could and better than I could ever do it before. Interestingly, another friend of mine who's a cardiologist, so he's a heart specialist, he says, you know, I used to, he played piano for his whole life. He says, there's always this piece that I couldn't play. And then as soon as I started fasting, I noticed that I could start to do it.

Wow.

That's incredible.

Right.

And, and the doctors, when I talked to the doctors, they actually instantly see the logic of what I'm talking about because they know the physiology, what happens in the human body. Because what I'm talking about, which is what all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all the stuff that people tell you about fasting, which is, oh, you can't do it and it's dangerous and it's really bad for you. Whereas the opposite is true, right? It's actually part of a natural cycle, right? It's feeding and fasting, feeding and fasting, right? You don't feed all the time, you don't fast all the time. but we've gone so far into that one thing. So yeah, I mean this whole point of autophagy is very, very interesting and very topical. If you look at studies of longevity, for example, in animals, the only thing that really makes people, makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction. And so even almost 100 years ago, people were talking about it and saying, well, you can try and restrict your calories, but if you do that day after day after day, it's really hard. So fasting may be a better way to go, which is something they figured out sort of ages ago, because if you look back, that's how people thought of fasting, that people called it a cleanse, detoxification, reawakening, spiritual purification, that kind of thing. There's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you. which got turned in the 80s into something really bad for you, right? It's strange how things work, but without any sort of scientific evidence and as we become as a nation more overweight, it becomes even more important. And that's just one of these sort of fascinating things. So, you know, it's not like something I just made up. It's like literally the oldest dietary intervention in the books, right? I'm just rediscovering this and trying to tell people, hey, there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our healthcare. And you can do something like, you don't need your doctor, you don't need your dietitian. You can do something about it right now for no money. Right? And there's the sciences all there, right? Imagine how much money you could save as a society if we got rid of this problem. And it's like, oh my God, like the, it's mind-blowing.

Well, I think that's part of the issue is, the reason it's not popular, I guess, is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine. Businesses make a lot of money on selling more food, not selling less food, and therefore people want to make more money. And so they have to market their products, they have to market their medicines, they have to market their foods to try to sell more of it, not to say, oh, just have a few of these, just have a couple cookies a day. No, they want to sell boxes of cookies, right? It's not like they got to make money as in their mind, this is a business to be run and we need to sell more, more means more people need to eat sugar, refined sugar, breads, all these things. refined oils, refined meats, refined fats, all these things you said that are horrible for us to eat. The company's making them in order for them to survive financially, they need to sell more of these things to us, which is a challenge.

It's a real problem because if you look at, say, you know, the doctors and the dietitians, you go to conferences, they're sponsored by Kellogg's and, you know, the breakfast makers and so on, and it's crazy. I was watching this show the other day, one of these, you know, TLC shows with, like, these very heavy women. Anyway, they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes. I'm thinking, and, and they couldn't drink it. It was horrible stuff. They tasted really bad, so they spit it out. I'm thinking somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water, let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body. why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day, except that somebody wants to sell it to you? You're being played here. You're drinking this horrible, horrible tasting stuff and they're spitting it out. They couldn't take it. It's like, oh, the whole thing is so sad because it's like if you knew, you could simply take nothing at all and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money. It's a sad, sad sort state of affairs that we get into?

What would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then if we had to recap that part of it? What would you say are the top five? I'm hearing it's free. That's one of them.

Yeah.

So it's free. That's a huge thing. It's, it you really, you can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating. It only tells you what the period of time that you're not eating. so whether you're a vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be, even if you want to eat fast food all day, it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food. It tells you that during this period of time, don't eat. So you can add it to any diet, which is incredible, because now we're pulling on a completely different lever. That is, if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general, there's two levers, right? We always think of the what you're eating, right? Eat more vegetables. That's great. But what if you don't like vegetables, right? Well, that lever doesn't work, right? So here's a completely different lever. You're talking about, well, there's this other thing I can do to lose weight or get healthier, right? So you can add it to any diet. It's completely flexible. That is to say, you can do it whenever you want or if you don't want. If it's Christmas and you do not want to fast for these few days, then you don't have to. If they decide to fast longer after Christmas, then sure, you can do that. That's completely up to you. It's not like you're locked in. You know, the fourth thing is that it's very simple. So if you look at a lot of diets, that is to say, say you're on a paleo diet. It's a great diet, right? But it's like, this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo, right? It's complex or keto or whatever you want to be. So it's very difficult for some people to understand, and I've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused and you always get the, is this keto or is this paleo or whatever. Whereas fasting is very simple. It's like you can drink water and tea and herbal tea say, that's it. Everything else you can't eat, right? So it's very simple to explain to somebody. It makes it very easy for them to follow. because it's very black and white. If you ate a peanut, that's not fasting, right? Yes, it's not a big deal, but at the same time, that's not fasting. And then the other thing is that it's powerful, right? Because if you follow any type of a diet, there's always a natural limit. So, say here you want to lose weight, and so you say, I'm going to do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet. So, you do a vegetarian diet, and you lose a few pounds, but not as much as you want. Well, you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarian.

We're already vegetarian.

Exactly. So, what else are you going to do? There's nowhere else you can go. Or you can't go more keto or you can't go more paleo, whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting. And it's powerful because you're eating zero, which means that it is, by definition, for weight loss, the most powerful diet There is like absolutely you cannot lose more than that.

If you put any calories in your body, no matter what diet you're on, you're not going to lose as much as if you had zero calories.

Exactly. So that's the whole thing. It is the most powerful diet. It's the most powerful diet. But it's like, okay, well why would you not want it? If you have a lot of work to do, you want the best best tool. That's it, right? This is the best tool. And somehow we said, don't ever use this, right? It's like, why? If you use it, you'll actually get all these other benefits. So it's free, it's available, it's simple, you can do it with any diet, and it's powerful, and you actually don't have to stop. You can actually keep going. You can do a seven-day fast and take a little break, do another seven-day fast, and you can't go lower than zero. There's no way. it is possible physiologically to go less than zero. So it is the most powerful diet. So there's so many benefits and yet for years, I'll tell you when I started using it with patients in about seven or eight, seven years ago maybe, it was like the stuff we saw was just incredible. People were like coming off their medications, they were reversing their type 2 diabetes, they're losing weight. It's like, you know, all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. You've got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way too and still be better entrepreneurs, be more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things.

I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur.

Absolutely, absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts.

But why just emphasize is sleep important for you? I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is so such faulty logic. It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for some reason, I feel it, I know it, I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning.

6:00 a.m. wake up?

Yeah, 6:30, 6:00 a.m., 6:30. But if I were to go to bed at 1:00, I'd still wake up at my normal time. so I, i have to really force myself to not force myself because i'm tired at the end of the day. I'm, and I, and I have this whole wind down process. So my wife and I will, we'll watch some, we'll do some television after dinner. We'll catch up on, we'll do some, some binge watching, catching up of whatever the latest series was. But around 10, we'll break. Uh, I, i have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi, so I go into Pool's unheated, so in the wintertime it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering, just it's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the Jacuzzi. So my wife and I'll hang out in the Jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. It's very, we turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal cave caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed and I sleep like a baby as a result of that.

So that's the hot cold therapy.

Yeah, the hot cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down. And that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, they say that you should have a lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67. We have blackout curtains. So, it's a real cool sleeping environment.

Yes.

I always like to keep it cold.

Yeah.

Okay, and so if you do like a cold shower before bed, you think that's a good thing?

I think it's a good thing.

It'll help you sleep better.

I think so. Try it. I mean, it can't hurt.

Okay. You talk about stress and rest balance. What does that mean?

Well.

There are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress, sometimes training stress.

Waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes stress. Sorry.

Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from it. You never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours, I got here in an hour, or I got here in less than an hour.

Right.

So, that's good. Yeah. But, so you have these stresses, and some of them are imagined, even though your brain thinks they're real, they don't exist. You know, our stress mechanisms in the body were, they evolved to handle true life or death situations. you know, a tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's gonna kill you, a broken leg that may, you know, whatever have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I gonna miss my kids' rehearsal or am I gonna be late for work or whatever? Those cause stress, but they're not life-threatening. And yet we, the brain sees them as life-threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now, we talked about this before the show, that meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking maybe if you need a nap, you can do that. But certainly that goes back to the whole sleep thing being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing, if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says I have to go do six miles today. If you wake up that day and you feel like crap and the metrics, the heart rate variability is wrong or you're just not feeling good, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your log book, yeah, I got through the workout, felt like crap, but I got through the workout.

I was just rested that day.

Just rested. Yeah, yeah.

Gotcha. Okay, the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key.

So in primal endurance we go back to that philosophy that the body is a very sort of temperamental, it's in temperamental states back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not and you can't really plan on when those states are going to be so you have to be willing to listen to the cues. And for that reason we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. So it's when you feel good you can go hard, when you don't feel good back off, take time off. We use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there are tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off you can break those further up into quarterly annual segments always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build to ratchet up over time but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement.

Gotcha. the next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis, train slow to race fast. What does that mean?

Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really to grok. And that is a lot of athletes, and I was certainly one for 20 years, you basically go out and you train to hurt. So you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's, you know, 75 to 90% of your max heart rate. And you see how long you can hold that, right? and so you're training to hurt. And it hurts, you know that. It hurts you. It does hurt you, but you feel tough as a result of it. But the problem is you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? well one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen. Interesting. So we train you to become so good at burning fat. Now that's the 80% that we talked.

About with the diet.

But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are, it's typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you are 40 years old. so 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training, you're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now, you start out and you at that 140, maybe you can only run 13 minute miles, even though you're capable of running seven minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever. Right. But now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat. And we know that at at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. And we know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your or having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning you're building up lactic acid.

You're not burning fat.

You're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar. So we want you to be at the highest end of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic abilities. And we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age. So now the idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out you're running 13 minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate bumping up over 140. Well, you're not very good at burning fat. You might be good at burning sugar. Like I say, you might be able to run seven minute miles or six minute miles. But over time, if you stay at that high heart, at that maximum heart rate of, which is low, much lower than you're used to, you find yourself running 12 minute miles, and then 11 minute miles, and then 10:30s and 10s and 9:30s. And what it means is, even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through, now you're burning more fat. so you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym, now you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you.

So, just so I wrap my head around this, is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based.

On how... No, so your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting through your system. and it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat. They can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen, but they also burn without oxygen. So, you could run a 100-meter sprint with your nose plugged and there's no oxygen involved. It's all. Yeah, you'd still want to breathe. You'd want to breathe at the end of it, and you'd have to recover to recycle, but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount.

Gotcha.

So when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat, and by the way, the heart, it's interesting, the heart, we're not training the heart to be stronger. The heart's already pretty strong. So the heart doesn't get stronger. The heart doesn't have a PR, right? You know what I mean? It does what it does. But what happens is you become more efficient with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen X amount of oxygen and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation.

Okay.

Alright? So it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat. Not forever, but it's certainly through the base building and that's just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go, wait a minute, I can already run seven minute miles, why am I dropping down to 13s? But invariably and across the board we see if they stick to this for weeks at a time, they become more and more efficient. So now we know that now you're running seven minute 30 second miles and you're getting 92% of your of your energy from fat. So that when you do decide to run those six minute miles, now you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen to get there.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity, what does this mean?

It means partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some heavy lifting. Yes. But not a lot. Okay. This is if you want to be an endurance athlete. Yeah, if you want, even if you want to be an endurance athlete, One thing that athletes used to avoid, like the plague, was the gym. Or if they went, they would do 50 repetitions of a light weight because they're thinking, well, you know, I'm doing, when I'm running a marathon, I'm running 3,000 repetitions of a leg turnover, so why don't I simulate that in the--.

But you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well.

So what happens in any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel, is your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race. The first one you go up with 100% of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers have been exhausted and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82% of your max max power. And you might go up the third hill at 65% of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those efforts that require actual power, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights. It's typically 80% of your one rep max. and we do sequential repetitions with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions rest 10 seconds, three repetitions rest 10 seconds, two repetitions rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds, and until you can't finish one good rep. and then the workout's over. So, it's not you just did one set and it might have comprised 200 repetitions, but that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power.

Gotcha. And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that?

Well, so now we talk about everything else but the training. So, if you're, you know, it's spending time with your family, it's playing playing games with your, you know, playing frisbee with your dog, playing ultimate with your, with your, with your friends. It's, you know, it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, well, I can't, I can't afford to do that. I might get injured or I might, you know, I can't, like, I can't go skiing because I might twist and twist a knee. Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym, you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all.

Sure, sure.

Right? So we want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You want to wake up in the morning and go, I got that 10K today. I gotta go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous. But you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have fun. Do the right sort of training that builds this beast that when you get to the race, you're gonna enjoy it, you're gonna have fun, you're gonna perform probably better than if you've done the old paradigm of training. but you'll have lived a life in the interim. I mean, so many of my ex triathlete marathon buddies couldn't have a relationship. It was just, imagine...

They put all their energy into one thing.

Yeah, I mean, it's like the wife says, Can't you stay home and cuddle on Saturday morning? And the husband goes, no, I got a 100-mile ride I gotta do. And then I'm gonna go run after that. And then I'm gonna take a nap because I'm gonna feel like crap. I did so much. so we try to look at the life in general and say, well, an awesome life includes participating in these events.

Participating in life.

And doing well, but it also includes participating in life.

Yeah.

Yeah, so not to the exclusion of everything else.

What feedback would you give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle? You know, they want to be a primal athlete in their daily life, but they also want to run a business and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing. Maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else. What would you suggest? You're doing it, you've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multi-million dollar business, multiple of them. What would you suggest to them?

There are ways to have it all, but you can't be the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur. So you got to choose. how much of the endurance athlete you want to be, I would suggest that for me, the best choice was I want to tow the starting line with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90% of the field's ass.

Right?

So for me, the goal is almost how little can I get away with?

To get the maximum result.

To get the maximum result without having to go, okay, because if it's going to take 20% of the effort to get 80% of the result, I'm not willing to put in the other 80% to win the thing anymore. Or maybe I won't even win the thing because maybe I'll have overtrained. So now you're back to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete. Get a stand-up desk and a tread desk. So I have a treadmill. Every one of my employees has a treadmill at their work. I don't force them to use it. They can't, but they can. They request it, I give it to them. So you can put in eight miles walking easily and no one on the phone or even on the Skype will know that you're walking.

Yes.

You know, because you can make it uphill, whatever. Take lots of, take frequent breaks and, you know, drop and do some push-ups or some air squats. What I do is I like to, I like to go for a paddle and I'll bring a recording device on a stand-up paddle board. And I'll, if I get my great ideas when I'm paddling, so I'll just record my ideas.

Right?

Or I don't fall in. Well, it's a plastic bag. By the way, I almost never fall in. I typically will paddle for an hour and a half. I'll step on, get wet up to my calves and step off wet up to my calves. But the other thing is hiking. So if you want to do some serious hiking, bring a headset in your phone. Make business calls while you're hiking. I got a friend who's basically a billionaire and that's where he makes most of his business calls. He does two hours of hiking a day. Nobody knows he's hiking. He's hiking. Yeah.

Wow.

Okay. Awesome. And then so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time. It's not like you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff. Like I said, that maximum sustained power workout I just described is basically a short warm-up, maybe 10 minutes of doing it, and then you're done. And if you could do it two days later or three days later, you didn't do it hard enough. that day, right? So we want you to take a week to recover from that, from that specific work. It doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day, but you just wouldn't want to repeat a heavy leg day the next day.

Right, right, right, exactly.

So it's how you, this is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing where when you put it all together, you can have it all. You can be an effective, efficient entrepreneur and you can compete against all of those other guys who are claiming they're going to kick your ass in the.

10K or the Spartan race or whatever it is. Right, right. I love that. And we talked about the diet already, but the last thing is proper recovery. So, how much, when do you know you're over training?

Well, so there are all sorts of metrics. I mean, you just wake up in the morning and if you haven't slept well and you're sore, then you're probably over training. Should we not feel that soreness at all? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's appropriate to feel, you can feel it on a day-to-day basis, but not on a week-to-week basis. So you can feel sore after a workout, you know, yesterday or two days ago. But I think if you're still feeling sore for days on end, then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts or you might have overreached on one of your workouts. So that's one indicator. We have a metric that we use called heart rate variability, HRV, and you can buy these apps. that measure the time between heart beats. And you'd think that you'd want to see a metronomic beat, like an exact amount of time spaced between each heartbeat. But it turns out that that's an indication of over-training. That in fact, the heart, we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever is being called upon in real time. So there might be a 0.8 second skip and then a 1.1 second skip and then a 1.2 and then a 0.8 and a 0.9. And that's heart rate variability and if you've got a good heart rate variability score, it's probably a good indicator that you're rested and well trained and ready to go again.

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