Ben Greenfield explains how 30 seconds of intense exercise like burpees before eating can flatten your blood sugar spike. A 15-minute walk after meals does the same thing. Both reduce inflammation and improve longevity.
Questions this video answers
30 seconds (example: ~20 burpees or brief bodyweight exercises).
About 15 minutes.
Chapters
There are so many incredible bio hacks that we can apply in our life to radically transform our body. And many people think getting in shape, eating healthy, maintaining a proper weight is difficult. It is not. So what you're going to learn in this video is a mind blowing idea from Ben Greenfield. When I learned this, I kid you not, it literally blew my mind. So have you ever had those days when you are invited to go for an elaborate dinner or you are going to a restaurant with your family and you know the food is going to be incredibly delicious and you don't want to hold yourself back from truly savoring that food, but you feel guilty about the extra calories, about the potential increase in sugar. Now what if there was a simple 30 second hack, you could do literally 30 seconds that you could do before starting your meal that would jack up your metabolic rate so that meal burns efficiently. That's what you're going to learn in this video from Ben Greenfield. When I learned this blew my mind.
There are two things that are the most important things to pay attention to if you want to live a long time and have the absence of disease and a high quality of health during that time. Number one is controlling what's called glycemic variability. Glycemic variability is how often your blood glucose goes up and down during the day. The other is to control your inflammation. Inflammation is something that builds up in the body when you eat a lot of vegetable oils, when you eat a lot of sugars, and even when you get exposed to high amounts of wi fi, dirty electricity, poor air, unclean water, etc. The idea is if you can control glycemic variability and inflammation, you've taken care of the two lowest hanging fruits when it comes to your longevity. Now, this idea of the Tabata set that enhances your fitness in a very short period of time during a workday could be brought to the next level when we look at research on what it takes to actually control blood glucose prior to eating. Now, if you exercise before you eat, you'll actually enhance your body's ability to be able to maintain a normal blood glucose response after you eat. But do you know how long you would need to exercise? How long you need to do that explosive Tabata type exercise in order to enhance your blood glucose response. I was shocked when I saw this study. 30 seconds, I mean you can drop and do whatever, 20 burpees and do that prior to a meal and you'll vastly improve your glucose response to the meal. Furthermore, this is another research study in Japan if you walk for about 15 minutes after a meal, you also do a fantastic job at supporting your glycemic variability. So the idea is for me, when I know I'm going to be eating a large meal or eating a lot of carbohydrates or having dinner or really having any meal at all, or I'll just go out of my way to drop and do some push ups. I have a rule when I'm at a restaurant, I'll slip into the bathroom and do I call them air squats. My friend Jeff when he first saw me do this began to call them piss squats because I'd say I was going to go to the bathroom to take a pee and I'd come back kind of red faced because I'd done my 40 squats. But the idea is you do something that just gets the heart rate up a little bit before you go, eat a big meal, then you go on a quick walk afterwards. It's a very, very good way to control glycemic variability, as are those Tabata sets.
