Episode #240 – Full Transcript

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Podcast #240 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/05/240-how-to-get-rid-of-adrenal-fatigue-lose-fat-as-fast-as-possible-the-joe-rogan-shake-and-more/#more-13006

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Introduction: In today’s episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast: nerve pain while running, natural remedies for rosacea, how to lose fat as fast as possible, how to get rid of adrenal fatigue, how to cure a peroneus injury, and how to absorb the more protein from a protein shake.

Brock:  How are you feeling buddy?

Ben:  Dude, I like slept almost the whole day yesterday. It’s actually been a pretty hectic morning of catch up because I’ve literally been doing yoga and these long soaks in the river down by my house since I got back from California.

Brock:  You’re already in the river.

Ben:  That’s about 45 degrees fahrenheit and I got really weird looks from the rednecks who are sitting on the edge of the river drinking beer and I also had a man who is ready to dive in and save me last night. He literally like was running towards me, “are you okay? Are you okay? I’m coming” and I’m like “just chill in dude, I’m okay”.

Brock:  So, the reason why Ben is doing these odd behaviors because he did back to back half iron distance and Olympic distance triathlons over the weekend.

Ben:  Yeah, on one of the toughest triathlon courses in the U.S., the Wildflower Triathlon. It was called the Wildflower Squared and the day before I went down there to do this to my body, I got blood work done and then I did the two races, then came back literally drove straight in to the lab, got more blood work done and so actually next Monday’s blog post at bengreenfieldfitness.com I’m going to publish all the results in terms of like what the blood work look like, what happened during the race, what the post blood work look like, all of the interpretations in terms of what happens to your body when you go out and do something like back to back hard workouts or marathon or triathlon or something like that. Incidentally, I’m also going to point out to people all the little things that are kinda messed up in my body even before the race. You know, there’s some definite issues with like cortisol and thyroid and hemoglobin and so I’m just kinda take some people through on that blog post. The way that somebody like me would fix things like that from a lifestyle on a dietary standpoint and then also for my inner circle members, I’m doing an inner circle spreecast on May 24th where folks can come and just ask me any of their questions about their blood work. That’s gonna be over at the bengreenfieldfitness.com/inner circle and that’s coming up as well.

Brock:  Anybody who wants to take a look at the first blood work results you can go over to facebook.com/bgfitness and you can see Ben posted the information up there or the sheet that he got and there’s a lot of questions and answers below it to see you can find out a lot of information right now.

Ben:  Yeah. Let’s just put it this way, there are definite areas in my life where I need to pull my own parachute so to speak meaning that, there are things I’ve personally neglected that I need to pay attention to.

Brock:  And that worries me because if somebody who’s taking care of themselves as well as you are has those problems I don’t even wanna see mine.

Ben:  Yeah and I mean it it could have possibly been the crossfit workout of the day combined with the crack cocaine and the all nighter going in to the blood work. It’s possible?

News Flashes:

Brock:  You get access to all the latest breaking news stories with all the coolest new studies and breakthroughs that are happening right now, right here make sure to go over to bengreenfieldfitness.com/240 and you can get links to everything that we’re talking about including this next few news flashes.

Ben:  Handy dandy linkage. We love links. Okay, so a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. What has happened in the overloaded news flashes at bengreenfieldfitness.com we did a couple of articles. Did I say nude flashes?

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Brock:  that’s what I heard.

Ben:  It makes sense. So, at bengreenfieldfitness.com we recently had a couple of new articles pop-up. One was on 7 new and enchanting toys for people who are into fitness and I tried to choose everything that’s really hard to pronounce like Zukay Kvass, the fermented beet beverage and the sensorium thingy for heart rate variability measurements and all these other weird things. So, check out that article that’s over there and then there are also some news flashes that I put out on twitter this week. For example, one of the things that I tweeted was about maintaining your cognitive performance during the day and whether it’s best if you’re gonna wake up in the morning and let’s say you just wanna impress your boss, you wanna think as good as possible at work, you don’t wanna stutter and drool and be the cave man. Let’s say you don’t wanna be Andy Bernard at work, some of the things that you can do to improve cognitive performance on the job. So, this study was really interesting because what they looked at was what the effect of eating breakfast and not working out did, eating breakfast and working out and then working out without eating breakfast. Oh, the other one was of course not working out and not eating breakfast. So, the reason that this is relevant is there’s all this people out there who are maybe trying this fasting approach and they’re not eating breakfast (maybe they don’t have time to eat breakfast) but they’re doing a workout before they head into the office. There are other people who are maybe doing a workout and eating a big breakfast and head into the office and you know, the question is what’s best, what’s the best way to set up your day if you’re gonna do something like this in the morning. So, they studied all these folks and put them through cognitive performance test and mood test during the morning after they had actually done this and they also did the same thing after lunch. So, closer to noon after they’ve had lunch they have them to the cognitive test and these moods scales again and what they found was that to optimize your performance on the job during the day (your cognitive performance) especially in the morning hours, there’s 2 different ways that you can go about doing it. First of all, you can fast. You can wake up and do the intermittent fasting thing and fast until lunch but it only works to improve your cognitive performance if you also refrain from working out. Okay? So, if you’re gonna fast, don’t do a workout and continue to fast because that’s shows a dip in cognitive performance and mood (‘cause you’re about to chew your own arm off after having workout not eating anything and then went to work) so don’t do the fasted workout. Fast and refrain from working out, that actually works better than eating breakfast and refraining from working out. So, we all know that there are some cognitive benefits to kinda teaching your body how to burn fatty acids instead of like large amounts of glucose as a fuel and it turns out that fasting does improve your cognitive performance indeed between the time you wake up and lunch. Now the other option (that’s gonna get you the most bang for your buck) is you workout but if you workout, have breakfast. So, if you’re looking at the option of having breakfast and not working out or having breakfast and working out in the morning, always having breakfast and working out is gonna improve your cognitive performance. So, you either fast and don’t workout or you have breakfast and workout.

Brock:  Do specify when the breakfast was, was it before or after the workout?

Ben:  The breakfast was post workout. So, you get up, you workout you eat breakfast, and you head to work or you don’t eat anything at all, you don’t workout, and you head to work. Those are the 2 best case scenarios for improving cognitive performance. So, cool study and we’ll link to it in the show notes. Another study looked at fructose and the reason I thought that this was interesting was they looked at this mild, mild doses of fructose like kinda baby doses like I think they were looking at around 10 grams or under so around 40 calories of fructose. The reason I thought this was interesting view was because there are some natural energy powders that I used that have anywhere from 5-10 grams of fructose in them. Tianchi is one that I talk about a lot as the Chinese adaptogenic herb complex I used that has about 8 grams of fructose in it.

Brock:  That’s surprising! That seems like quite a lot.

Ben:  No! It’s not, I think it’s 8 grams and even be less than that. I don’t know.

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Anyways, it’s got trace amounts of fructose, delta E is another one (that’s another one I recommended in the past as being kinda like green tea on steroids and it comes as little pink packet), those are 2 things that actually next recovered on my desk and there’s something a lot of times that I’ll pop like mid-morning or mid-afternoon. We are still talking about the equivalent of like a quarter cup of coffee and there mostly they’ve got neurotransmitters and herbs in them and so they’re focusing more of that than on central nervous system stimulation but they’ve got this fructose in them and so this study actually looked at what happens when you get this little micro doses of fructose and I honestly don’t know why they did this study but to me it was relevant because I’ve got this little things sittin’ around the house that I occasionally take in during the day that have trace amounts of fructose in them. What this study found was that this trace amount of fructose actually improved your ability to control your blood sugar level with no effect on your body weight, on your triglycerides, on your insulin or any of these other metabolic parameters that would show that these stuff would to have a propensity like make you fat or decrease insulin sensitivity or take you out of ketosis or something along those lines. No effect as a matter of fact compared to not taking in the small amounts of fructose (it was worst scenario) so this small doses of fructose taken in during the day and in this case they actually had a total of 6 different times during the day when they’re taken in this what they called catalytic fructose doses. You know, I’m talking about doing it once or twice during the day but no effect on metabolism, no effect on insulin sensitivity ‘cause I get this question a lot “oh if I have some Tianchi is it gonna take me out of ketosis as I break my low carb diet. Is it gonna mess me up from a sugar standpoint”. It turns out that the answer is no. So, interesting study and I’ll link to that one in the show notes as well.

Brock:  Actually just looking at how many grams of sugar or fructose during different things and honey’s got 269 grams so yeah, I guess your 8 grams of fructose is pretty minuscule compared to something like honey.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah it is. You can remove the honey pot from your desk Brock.

Brock:  Yeah, cola’s got 297.

Ben:  What website are you using Brock, nutrition data?

Brock:  Ah ….., yeah.

Ben:  Yeah, it’s a good website. Okay, cool. The last thing I wanted to mention was a study that was recently done that looked at what happens when you move after you eat. And this study actually took a bunch of folks who actually kinda have a high risk of type 2 diabetes. So, they had some blood sugar issues and all they did was for 12 weeks they did a postprandial walk (postprandial being the geeky term for after a meal). So, you take a walk after dinner. So, for about 30 minutes (very very light physical activity like walking and talking or walking the dog) and what they found was a significant effect on hemoglobin a1c levels which is the kinda the 3 months snapshot of your blood glucose as well as blood glucose levels just from this little change, just for moving after a meal. And I think that it’s the Japanese who have…. there’s some kind of a proverb we’re saying in Japan that “you live longer if you take, whatever, 300 steps after eating a meal”. I thought this was very interesting and it’s actually something that I personally kinda work in like after I eat dinner I always make sure not sitting around between dinner and bedtime. I always do a hundred jumping jacks after lunch and I’m typically moving around and working at my standing work station after breakfast and I think that all that stuff you know, if you look at my blood work that I posted, I have gold standard: Glucose, hemoglobin a1c and insulin meaning that my insulin levels are very low my hemoglobin a1c is right where it’s supposed to be at and my blood glucose is like 82 something like that. I think the big part of that is just kinda staying physically active during the day but I thought this was interesting that even something as simple as just like moving after a meal makes a significant dent in your blood glucose levels, in your sensitivity to insulin.

Brock:  The postprandial walk holds up the postprandial stooper.

Ben:  We need to do some podcast postprandial activity so maybe that’s we’ll do every time we transition we jump up and do a hundred jumping jacks and all the listeners can join us.

Special Announcements:

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Brock:  Okay, so on Tuesday Ben is going to be getting sexy with you all.

Ben:  Getting sexy with all of my listeners. Getting sexy on spreecast. Getting sexy on!

Brock:  Wow!

Ben:  Sex drive and hormone Q & A, I’m doing a live video spreecast. It’s gonna be the Tuesday after this podcast comes out so we’re talking about Tuesday, May 14th that’s in the evening we’ll do at 6:30 Pacific daylight time so, you folks in the East Coast you could maybe come and join in on the spreecast and then go practice what you learn. You folks on the Pacific daylight time I have to wait a couple of hours but no, all your questions about sex, drive, hormones, I wanna really geek out on that stuff with you so, we’re gonna put our sexy propeller hats on and this is gonna be a live video spreecast. We’ll put a link in the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/240 and you could go early and leave your questions if you can’t make it to the actual live spreecast but they’ll be available for replay, you’ll get way more out of it because I’ll be sure that I wear my sexiest pair of sexy lucky charms underwear during the spreecast. You’ll love them! Very sexy lucky charms underwear. And anything else sexy I can find around the house like a coconut bra or whatever and we’ll do the live sex, drive, and hormone Q & A. So, Tuesday night 6:30 come right in to rumble and bring your glass of wine and we’re gonna get our sexy on. So, that’s coming up.

Brock:  I think in the meantime you need to look up the word sexy ‘cause I don’t know if lucky charms, propeller hats and coconut bras actually fall in that category.

Ben:  Hey, we got our own little thing going on in Washington State.

Brock:  Just saying. I guess so.

Ben:  So, what else speaking of strange and sexy.

Brock:  Speaking of sexy…. how about Thailand?

Ben:  Thailand! There we go, ping pong balls and everything. The double triathlon adventure in Thailand 2013, that’s happening and it’s filling up. We’ve already got 8 people on the trip and probably got to max it on to 12 which means we’ve got room for about 4 more folks to sign up to join us for a couple of weeks at the end of November beginning of December to go down race a couple of triathlons and have a ton of fun. So, links will be in the show notes to that, it’s like an Olympic distance triathlon – 1 weekend and half ironman the next weekend and just a ton of play in between each and lots and lots and lots of pad thai. So, there you go.

Brock:  Oh, food is worth the trip alone.

Ben:  That’s right and food is worth the plane ticket easily. It’s actually….. you know, Thailand is cheap like when you get there it’s cheap. It’s just a matter of, you know, I usually just like put up an alert on kayak.com and just like way for prices to fall on tickets usually it’s between Tuesday and Thursday, that prices fall on airline tickets and just grab your ticket and you’re off to the races. So, there you go.

Brock:  Literally!

Ben:  For those of you who don’t wanna go to Thailand and for those who live and want to be in New York or the Connecticut area, I have on May 18th (that’s coming up super quick) that’s a Saturday afternoon May 18th in Fairfield, Connecticut. I’ll be doing a triathlon and endurance sports clinic, Nutrition and Training for Endurance Sports. All of the details we’ll put in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/240. Why Fairfield? Just because I happen to be in Fairfield that weekend and I thought it would be swell to do a clinic. If you are in Fairfield, if you have friends (do me a favor) if you have friends who are in Fairfield ping them and tell them that Ben is coming and his lucky charms pajamas and coconut bra to do a triathlon clinic and they should show the heck up.

Brock:  Sounds good. You should probably mention two other things: first of all, a few weeks ago we got a bunch of request over the last little while for an easier way for people to access podcast from the past more specifically like certain topics from the past. So, we put our heads together and we decided that the best way to do that was to release sort of volumes or albums on iTunes that have topics from the past that proved to be very popular.

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So, if you are interested in an easier way of finding stuff, make sure to go to the show notes and there’s a link there to the iTunes album that has all kinds of cool topics and we’ll be putting those out every couple of months with more topics so people can just have access to stuff from the past without digging through hours and hours of us rumbling on and that’s what’s we’re able to do.

Ben:  That’s right, it’s more topics. Literally, graham crackers, dark chocolate, marsmallows, more topics, lots of more topics. And then oh, we’ve been also churning out a ton of content. I’ve been shooting videos, recording inside our audios like “The Naked Truth” with Jessa Greenfield and a ton of insider bonus exclusive premium. Am I forgetting any used car salesman words here.

Brock:  Ah, we must be crazy to give this stuff away!

Ben:  We must be crazy to give this stuff away. Anyways though, we’re launching the brand new Ben Greenfield fitness phone app. For any of you who already owned the phone app, throw it out it sucks now, no good, get rid of it, ditch it. The brand new android and iphone app is coming out, it’s gonna be SLICK, it’s very cool. I’ve seen it, I’ve got the chance to test it and it’s fun and we’re putting….. like it’s not just like get the app and it’s pretty much the same as the website but there’s a ton of extra videos, pdf’s, audio interviews, bunch of stuff inside the app so stay tune. We don’t even know the release date yet frankly because iTunes is kind of a biatch to work with. I shouldn’t say that ‘cause now iTunes is gonna kick us off. ITunes is great! We loved them! But they won’t tell us when our apps is going to come out. Anyways thoughs, so we don’t quite know the date that it’ll be released but it’s gonna be the next 2 weeks so stay tuned, follow twitter over twitter.com/bengreenfield or facebook.com/bgfitness and we’ll let you know when it’s gonna be released. Oh, I don’t know I said 2 things but there’s 1 other thing, we’re actually adding also to the app gear video reviews (actually gear nutrition) possibly like pet animal whatever, any reviews with Brock. So, anything that you want Brock to do videos with that you want featured to the app just let us know. Write in to the show at [email protected] we’ll hook Brock up up there in Canada with whatever you want him to do a video or a view of whether it be a protein bar, a drink, compression gear, special hats, groucher mark disguises, chest hair removal kits whatever and we’ll hook Brock up and will throw those video reviews under the app so stay tuned for that too. And yeah, that wraps it up.

Listener Q & A:

Ashley:   Hi Ben, my name is Ashley and I’m calling because I’ve had a strange problem with my right leg recently. I ran a marathon last spring and ever since then I…. about 2 miles into my run I lose muscle strength in my right leg. I called it “noodle leg” and essentially it’s hard for me to bring it around and I just feel like I lose strength in my right upper thigh so if you have any suggestions or ideas of what that could be I’d appreciate any feedback. Thank you so much!

Brock:  So, good old noodle leg here. What do you think is going on with noodle leg Ashley?

Ben:  It’s probably kind of a nerve entrapment thing and there’s a lot of  different mechanical irritations that can happen that kinda, you know, it’s similar to your arm falling asleep or you know, whatever. If you sleep in an airplane, your leg or foot falling asleep or anything like that you get peripheral nerves, they get injured, they get entrapped and that disturbs the function of the nerve and when you disturb the function of the nerve you get basically a neuropathy that keeps the nerve from being able to properly innervate the muscle. And there are a lot of different neuropathies that runners tend to experience.

[0:25:04.3]

And most of the time it is in the lower and the upper limbs. So nerve entrapment in runners is actually something that more commonly refer to as like pinched nerve. When it comes to like the thigh and the upper leg, you’ve got a couple of different nerves that tend to run through there that can be injured by something like a knot or a spasm or scar tissue-forming from having run a marathon or from getting injured or from simply lack of mobility. One is your femoral nerve and if you get your femoral nerve entrapped or compressed, it’s, the medical term for that is lateral femoral cutaneous nerve entrapment. And it’s also known medically as meralgia paresthetica. And this is something that actually a lot of runners deal with. Your thigh kinda goes numb and some of us gets on and off. I’ve had it before when I’ve been sitting for long periods of time and not doing a good job keeping my hip flexor stretched because that femoral nerve passes underneath what’s called your inguinal ligament, your inguinal canal. So if you’ve been sitting a lot, if your hip flexors have got really a shortened and you’ve got a lot of basic hip flexor tightness, hip flexor spasm, hip flexor cramping, and this can also happen with an improper bike fit. Your thigh tends to go numb, you know, right where that femoral nerve kinda tends to pass under. What can you do about it? Usually the best best thing is to really focus on hip flexor flexibility. I am releasing the next chapter of my book, probably this weekend over at bengreenfieldfitness.com and it’s a chapter on mobility. But mobility and hip flexors are super important, you know, Kelly Starrett just came out with that really popular book “Becoming a Supple Leopard” and doing everything from, you know, using resistance bands to apply traction into that leg and pull it back to using a lacrosse ball, kind of in that area of the inguinal canal, and up and down the thigh to a film roller up and down the thigh to like lunging hip opening moves and yoga. All of that stuff can help out a lot with this type of nerve compression. Also, interestingly, it can be brought on by just wearing tight belts and tight clothing and so if you’re one of those people who during the day has your belt singed up, if you like to go to work in your spandex or your compression gear that could actually aggregate this condition as well. People who are more prone to nerve issues tend to have thyroid issues and diabetic issues. Meaning you tend to have blood sugar stabilization issues or you tend to have thyroid issues. And so it may also be helpful for you to go back and listen to, I think it was podcast 235. If you go to podcast 235 (and we linked it up in the show notes), I talked a bunch about how to fix nerve pain. And in this case it was for a guy who had a thoracic nerve that was cut when he got back surgery, but I talked about all the different things like resveratrol, omega-3 fatty acids, zinc, magnesium, glutathione, all the things that can help quite a bit with repairing nerves and assisting with nerve function. So in addition to not wearing your tighty-tights to work and making sure you have flexor stretched, that’s another thing you can focus on. The reason I’m talking so much about the femoral nerve is because that’s the more common nerve where this happens. Typical, like medical procedures would be what’s called surgical decompression. Sometimes they’d put you on like steroidal medication or injection or something like that but really you should be able to manage most of this without doing, you know, some serious like neuromodulatory medicines, you know, or you know, getting surgery or something like that. The only other nerve that tends to cause an issue in runners that passes through that same area is called your obturator nerve. And a lot of times if you have entrapment of your obturator nerve, it’s a little bit more in your groin, like you get kind of a deep achy feeling in your groin.  Sometimes some tingling, some numbness. That’s actually somewhat similar, one of the things you wanna do though instead of just focusing on your hip flexor flexibility, if that tends to be an issue, is a lot of your internal rotator flexibility as well. That would be like stretching your adaptors, doing the kind of stretching you do if you’re like doing the splits, doing lot of mobility work for the inner thigh, that type of area. So , you know, these are things that are kinda a good idea for runners to be doing anyways, kinda taking care of all of the muscles around the hips in terms of mobility in the hips but that’s probably with something like this is which is be like a femural nerve entrapment.

[0:30:07.1]     

Brock:  So is that, would that be related to like the same sciatica feeling you get when your toes go numb when you’re running? Is that the same idea?

Ben:  Well that’s a nerve entrapment as well but usually when you’re looking at the lower leg there are different nerves involved so sometimes that can be a sciatica issue. There’s another one called the peroneal nerve that passes down through there. There’s another one called the tibial nerve. There’s the saphenous nerve. I mean, there’s a bunch that run down the lower leg too. And it’s kind of a similar issue. It’s mobility in the knees, mobility in the hips, mobility in the feet, sometimes its fascia, soft tissue. And all this is fresh on my mind 'cause I’m literally releasing a blog post on mobility and fascia and all that here on the next couple of days over the website.

Brock:  Awesome.

Ben:  But yeah. Similar deal.

Brock:  Perfect.

Paul:   Hi Ben, Paul here. I have a question about Rosacea. Do you have any suggestions on how you can help this condition? Love the podcast by the way. Great job.

Brock:  So that’s the rosy-cheeks….

Ben:  Ruddy-faced Paul….

Brock:  That people get when they’re….

Ben:  Yes, what’s it’s called. Ruddy-faced Paul. Rosacea, basically it’s redness. Maybe Paul just needs to drink less alcohol.

Brock:  Or stop holding his breaths so much. He probably plays trumpet.

Ben:  Give up the trumpet switch to violin. Areas of redness on your face, red bumps or sometimes pus on your nose, on your cheek and your forehead a little tiny blood vessels that tend to pop-up a bit. You tend to flush easily, you tend to blush easily and it affects a lot of people (millions of people) who gets rosacea and a few different things that can worsen or that can cause rosacea, lots of sun exposure, stress is a biggy for a lot of folks, alcohol as we all know especially if you have rosacea like my mom gets super red face when she drinks wine and stuff like that, spicy food can also be an issue and there are some definite  just basic kind to your body natural things that you can do to alleviate rosacea. Two of the biggies would be addressing inflammation in the diet and addressing stress in the life and this sound like kinda woowoo funny this guy type of things but they actually help because they shut down a lot of that amplified blood flow response to the face. So, when I talked about controlling inflammation in the diet, Brock and I had the pleasure of hearing the nutrition diva, Monica Reinagel talked about this at the become superhuman conference. She showed her website inflammationfactor.com and we’ll link to that in the show notes. Just chockfull of really good advice about which food can cause inflammation and which food can alleviate inflammation. So, some of the foods that you would expect to cause inflammation do deep cause inflammation, sugar, starches, (for some people even the skins of things like night shades like tomatoes and eggplants and things of that nature tend to be an issue) but there are foods like that. There are also anti-inflammatory foods like kale or blueberries so making sure that you’re consuming an anti-inflammatory diet can help out tremendously more than doing like supplements or creams and lotions and stuff. Stress management (and this has also been studied), can help. Hypnotherapy, interestingly has been shown to be incredibly significant in helping those with Rosacea but in case you don’t have a hypnotherapist you carry around in a suitcase, you could also do stress management techniques. I really really like, as I think most long-time listeners know heart rate variability for this so you get something like the sweet beat hear rate variability app and you install that on your iphone, you know, if you have a smartphone and then you spend five minutes each morning doing relaxation exercises, deep breathing and focusing and getting your heart rate variability preferably above ninety. Incidentally, you know what my heart variability was at after I did those two triathlons?

Brock:  Not ninety, I’m guessing.

Ben:  I’ll publish it on Monday. It’s interesting, I did a 15-minute reading and it was hovering between 55 and 60 which is just like sick, like a sick person’s scores. But actually that’s adrenal fatigue scores, that’s what it is so you know I basically shove my body into temporary adrenal fatigue. That’s another reason I slept all day yesterday. But doing stress management techniques can help out a ton with rosacea as well. On the same lines as inflammation, food intolerance just tends to be a biggie with this as well. So going through and doing a food intolerance test or just eliminating common digestive irritants or food intolerants foods from the diet like wheat, soy, dairy, things of that nature. You may notice that that helps as well. So if you actually have…

[0:35:13.7]

Brock:  How about airborne pathogens?

Ben:  Airborne pathogens?

Brock:  Like ingestive pathogens would be something like airborne stuff..

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  They would probably trigger this as well.

Ben:  Yeah. And that also can cause inflammation for sure. You know we talked about this, I think last week when we’re talking about pollution. And actually in the, in upcoming get fit guy podcast, I’ve got a whole podcast coming up on pollution. But basically, yeah, pollution, airborne irritants, things of that nature, you know, I don’t, when especially when you walk around in a mask or anything like that, there’s not a ton you can do when it comes to that. But what happens is anytime that you’re consuming foods that tend to be auto-immune triggers, then you tend to be more sensitive to these kind of things floating around in the air too. So we can touch on supplements and creams, there’s some out there – some creams out there – there’s one called azelaic acid crème and there is a study in the archives of dermatology where they used this azelaic acid crème and it’s spelled as a-z-e-l-a-i-c- and that one was pretty effective. It’s derived from wheat and rye and barley which might sound bad to you people out there who are trying to be gluten-free. But you aren’t ingesting it and those gluten proteins are absorbed through the skin so that’d be one thing. Vitamin B cream like niacinamide crème. That also can be really effective. For some people, just taking vitamin B supplements can be effective but like a vitamin B cream can also be something that can help out a little bit as well. Other creams, topical lotions, the only other one that I’ve seen that actually has studies behind it that showed it could help with rosacea is called chrysanthellum cream and that is basically made from an herb called chrysanthellum and that also has been shown to be effective on rosacea when you apply it on a daily basis and for all of these creams they’re typically used for a long period of time like 6-12 weeks. So I think you’re gonna have better luck with auto-immune diet and anti-inflammatory protocols and stress management but those are some creams that you could look into. And then the last thing, you know not a lot of supplements out there that I think are super effective with rosacea but we’re talking about shutting down inflammation, you would already have these kind of stuff I would hope in an anti-inflammatory diet like ginger, turmeric, some of our basic anti-inflammatory protocols, as well as any of those omega-3 fatty acid sources preferably something that’s high in what’s called gamma-linolenic acid which is the part of the omega-3 fatty acid supplement that really improves the health of the skin. So looking at something like, you know if you’re getting a fish oil, for example that super essentials fish oil that I use, it’s got evening primrose in it. You mean primrose oil in it and that’s something that can actually help with the skin specifically. It also has astaxanthin in it which means you gotta use less sunscreen. So that’s another good one. That’s this fish oil I really swear by, like that’s one that I take a lot and it’s just called super essentials fish oil and especially like when you’re beating up your skin or you have a skin condition, it could help with that. So I’ll be sure that I’d link to Monica’s websites, it’s to that fish oil and stuff in the show notes for Paul and those are some of the things I would do.

Thomas:  Hey Ben, my name is Thomas. I’ve been really successful eating paleo, working out, lifting heavy weights 3 times a week, doing sprints about once a week, things like that, that it helped me lose 25 pounds and 7 and a half inches around my waist. But I have about 15 more pounds to lose and I’ve got about 6 more weeks before I’m gonna be back home, seeing all my old friends and family and wear a swimsuit. I would love to see if you have anything that you would say is safe for the short-term to really quickly, rapidly lose that last remaining bit of fat. I know it will eventually go away if I keep continuing my way of life but I would love to just jumpstart that and then continue being healthy after that. If you have anything that you haven’t shared before or anything that I’ve missed, that would be awesome to know. Thanks very much.

Brock:  Alright. So Thomas is going home, wants to look good in his bikini for all his friends and family.

Ben:  Man-kini.

Brock:  I don’t blame him.

Ben:  Man-kini. Get it right.

Brock:  His man-kini. Like Austin Powers 2-piece.

Ben:  Either way, yeah. How to lose fat as fast as possible, I love this kind of stuff. You’re doing a lot of stuff right, Thomas. You know you’re eating paleo and I’m not paleo, I don’t eat paleo but you know, by eliminating a lot of those common auto-immune triggers, you certainly can clear up the type of cortisol-based fluid that can accumulate on your waistline and things of that nature.

[0:40:08.6]  

It can also be good for supporting muscle gain. You’re doing sprints which is gonna enhance testosterone and its one of the best fat-burning activities you can do specially compared to like chronic, long cardio sessions which we’ll get to in a second, and you’re lifting heavy. So all that. Cool. Great. So we wanna step things up though. What were you saying Brock?

Brock:  I said beauty.

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  He’s doing really great. But 15 pounds, 6 weeks.

Ben:  Okay. So first of all, bringing up the superhuman live event again, you know Ray Cronise, the guy from thermogenics.com, gave a great talk there about losing 25, 30 pounds in a month. And the protocol that he was using, with minimal exercise on a couple of different folks to achieve that rate of fat loss was simply a 5-minute shower at the beginning of the day, and I believe it was another 5-minute shower at the end of the day but he was going 20 seconds cold, 10 seconds hot so cold-hot contrast showers ten times through. So 20 seconds cold, 10 seconds hot, ten times through. You could accelerate those results even more if you keep your body kinda chilly when you’re working at your desk during the day. I like it. Cool fatburnervest.com, you can check out coolfatburner.com, grab yourself one of those vests and so that sits just right over your collarbone, some of your brown adipose tissue, keeps your brown adipose tissue trying to generate heat and burning a hell of a lot of calories and fatty acids doing that. So the other thing that you could try if you have the time and the willingness to do like I do and put it why I literally put an mp3 player in my hat and I go stand in the river for like 20, 30 minutes and try not to get rescued, I mentioned, by people running down the shore to save me cause I really am the only person in the river right now in Spokane, it’s cold. Anyways though, that stuff burns a ton of calories just make sure that you don’t engage in the temptation (and this comes with cold exposure) to overcompensate by eating a bunch of calories cause sometimes you get hungry when you get cold.

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  So resist the temptation.

Brock:  That was something that Ray was very specific about was not to eat afterwards..

Ben:  Yeah because then..

Brock:  During the cold exposure…

Ben:  And this is something we’ve been talking about, I think in the inner circle forum, you know, about polar swimmers. Like they’re kinda fat, right? Like, you know, they’re kinda thick people. Well the reason for that is they combine cold thermogenesis with lots of caloric intake so their body builds a lot of brown fat tissue and even a little bit of adipose tissue. But if you do cold thermogenesis and don’t combine it with high calorie intake, you don’t wind up looking like a fat polar bear so that’s important. So don’t shoot yourself in the foot with the cold thermogenesis stuff. If you do that in the morning, fasted, with a little bit of green tea in your system, the other thing that works really really well is bitter melon extract. Bitter melon extract can amp up those results even more. That’s something you can get from a supplement like MPX100. That’s what I take when I mess up on my diet and eat too many carbohydrates to control insulin levels. It also enhances your fat burner results when you’re doing cold thermogenesis.  So like bitter melon extract, little bit of green tea, and then you do those cold sessions in the morning. You could do that everyday. That’s gonna really enhance results and then repeat with that cold-hot shower contrast in the evening. Your body can shed some toxins through your skin. You can shed a little bit of water weight and fluid weight through your skin as well and either a regular sauna or if you happen to have access to one (most people don’t), but if you have access to an infrared sauna, a regular sauna or an infrared sauna, even a steam room in a pinch. But getting your sweat on everyday can help as well because it’s gonna move windflow, it’s gonna move bloodflow, it’s gonna have a little of a detoxification effect, and as fat cells dump out toxins, you’re gonna get a little bit more of kinda like a  fat loss skinny-up ripped kind of look as well so don’t dehydrate…

Brock:  I always thought I was just, yeah, sorry. That’s what I was gonna say. I always thought that was sort of a mild dehydration by just losing a bunch of water weight.

Ben:  No, I mean if you ever like if you stink after you do a sauna, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re detoxing. And I know that I’m eating a clean diet if I sauna and I don’t smell at all. But if I sauna and I smell, you can literally get the scent of those toxins coming out of your skin. That’s a pretty good sign that you could use some sauna so sweat, basically. The other thing that I would do as far as like setting up your sprints and your heavy lifting and that type of thing is I wouldn’t do both intervals and weight training on the same day if you’re trying to avoid some of that cortisol effect that might cause you to not lose fat as quickly. I would alternate high intensity interval in strength training days, in the afternoons and do 2 a day.

[0:45:03.5]

So in the afternoon, when your core temperature is highest, you do your high intensity interval session or your weight training session and then in the morning, you do your cold thermogenesis session in that fasted state. The other thing that you could do if you wanted to (and this is that caveat about aerobic cardio I wanted to get to) but the other thing that you could do in that fasted state is easy cardio in your fat-burning zone for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. It’s like an easy walk with the dog, the type of thing that’s not gonna really stress out your system to do in a fasted state and literally conversational pace technically if you wanted to get all quantitative with it, you’re looking at wanting to be about 20 beats, 20 heartbeats below; the point at which your leg starts to burn and you start to breathe hard. So if you find that hard for you it’s 160 beats per minute. You’re gonna wanna be closer to 140 for like a fasted fat-burning session. And it doesn’t need to be epic…

Brock:  it shouldn’t too.

Ben:  Yeah. If you get too epic, your body gets really good at holding on to fat. And so what you do is you basically go out for just like 15, 30 minutes. I’m not talking about 2-hour fasted hikes on your fat-burning zone just short stuff. So you do that in the morning and, I do that in the morning by the way but for me it’s yoga like I can get my heart rate into that zone just by doing yoga with deep breathing. And you do all that and then you do the high intensity interval session with the strength in the afternoon. And always always always have one recovery day a week during which you allow your body to kinda reboot so you don’t get that again – cortisol base fluid retention and fat retention. But it’s okay if your recovery day is you know, Bikram yoga or something like that or still doing some detoxing, doing some movement, getting some lymph fluid moving around but no like hard sessions. The recovery day can also still include the cold thermogenesis stuff as well. So yeah, that’s how to lose fat as fast as possible, in my humble opinion.

Brock:  I just wanna.. just to clarify. Let’s say Thomas has dinner. He doesn’t have anything to snack, he has dinner in like let’s say, 7PM. Does not have anything to eat before bed, post-bed, gets up in the morning, has does the fasted 15 to 30 minutes  light exercise, gets into the shower, has does the 10/20 (10 seconds, 20 seconds) 10 times then he gets out then how long does he wait before he eats?

Ben:  Well you know what, it doesn’t matter honestly. You just eat when you’re hungry like, here’s the deal. A lot of people wait and wait and wait and women tend to do this more than guys and they think that the longer they wait, the more fat their body is gonna begin to burn. If you’re biting your arm off and you’re ravenous and you’re hungry, that’s not a good sign. Okay, that means that your body is getting pretty cortisol. I personally find that, because I eat a high-fat diet and I’m very sugar-stable like I kinda just have to eat like at some point because I just don’t get hungry so in my case, I just eat. But sometimes it’s, like last night, I did that cold thermogenesis thing for 30 minutes in the river and it even involved a light, easy, you know, 10 minute bike ride and  you know, there and back, you know super easy on the river and back and you know I had lunch at like 1. I got back from that at 8PM. I had dinner finally at 9:30 PM last night so for me it was like 90 minutes and that was at the end of an 8 and a half hour basic fast right at the middle of my day and I was fine. I wasn’t like ravenously hungry of anything. My body was not sending me a bunch of cortisol signals or anything like that so I just ate when I finally felt like eating.

Brock:  Okay.

Ben:  So it’s not that important but in most cases, for most people, especially for people who are like taipei over-achievers, high cortisol, you know kind of adrenal fatigue type of folks, eat. If you had to choose between eating or not eating after that session, eat.

Brock:  I remember a few weeks ago you were talking about how long the intermittent in fasting and for women it was like 12 hours you shouldn’t exceed and for men it was 16, I think?

Ben:  Well…

Brock:  Should that be the best rule of thumb?

Ben:  Yeah, and ultimately…

Brock:  So here’s where I’m at at the whole intermittent and fasting thing time and time and time again and this might be my skewed population that I see because I work with a lot of endurance athletes and like women especially who are over-exercising and under-eating and in adrenal fatigue and amenorrhea and all that crap. I find that women do better on just one fasted day, one or two times a month. Just one fast a day where all you’re taking in are some amino acids, maybe some green tea, maybe a green supplement, you know a little bit of alkalinity, and that’s it. And not do any intermittent fasting at all. You know, go into bed, eating dinner, going to bed, getting up, eating breakfast, that type of thing. And then guys just seem to do just fine on a 12-16 hours in terms of working in a daily fasting period. So again, that might be the skewed population that I’m working with but that’s what I found to be most effective is I like to just work in like 1-3 times a month 24 hour fast for women.

[0:50:20.0]

Gary:    Hi Ben! I am a long distance runner who is experiencing a lot of the symptoms of adrenal fatigue for the past 2 years I have not been able to run like I want because I’m always tired, my muscles are very tight and I am just really stiff also. I also had my neurotransmitters tested and I am very very low in adrenaline or epinephrine and very high in norepinephrine and dopamine. My thyroid seems to be working okay I was just wondering if you have any specific recommendations regarding diet or supplements or anything that could help me get back to feeling the way I used to feel. Thank you very much. I love your podcast.

Ben:  Yeah, adrenal fatigue. You know Brock, I just taught a 2 hour long seminar on adrenal fatigue just a couple of weeks ago and this was in my superhuman coach network which is the mentorship program that I run for personal trainers for around the globe to kinda teach them about a lot of these concepts. A bunch of these is kinda fresh on my mind and what Gary described especially from like a neurotransmitters perspective when he says he’s low in adrenaline and high in norepinephrine and dopamine and kinda have this some muscular issues a lot of that is definitely adrenal fatigue related. So, adrenal fatigue is something that we could do a long podcast on but basically when you look at the body’s systems that are affected, when you’re in adrenal fatigue and you beat up your body for too long it’s 5 basic body systems that get affected when you’re adrenally fatigue. The first is your metabolic system that’s like your blood sugar basically and what happens is hypoglycaemia. So, when you’re adrenally fatigue that means you beat up your body to the point where it can’t really produce cortisol anymore, you tend to get really high insulin levels and so this combination of low cortisol and high insulin tends to keep you hypoglycaemic and this is the reason why people with adrenal fatigue tend to crave caffeine and sugar ‘cause that gives you this bump up in sugar. And so that’s one thing you see as metabolic imbalance. You also get collagen and protein that are broken down in connective tissue and a big big reason for that is due to the high high cortisol output that precedes adrenal fatigue. So, you’ve got a lot of catabolic activity, you’re getting a lot of collagen structures and muscles and even internal organs are breaking down and then you’ll get too adrenal fatigue and by the time you’re there you have what’s called fibromyalgia (which are kinda like this ghost pains in your body, tightness, soreness, that type of thing), muscular skeletal system break down is another thing that happens. The next is neurological issues, now neurological issues are typically related to the fats that are not only insufficient glucose that’s available for your brain because of all this hypoglycaemia that’s going on but you also tend to be low in some of your key hormones that give you this neuro drive that’s specifically DHEA and testosterone and estrogen. And when you lose a lot of these key hormones you tend to get brain fog overtime and so that’s another issue essentially it’s brain inflammation is what goes on, the combination of hypoglycaemia and lack of adequate hormones available for your neurological system, your brain gets inflamed that’s one of the reason why the Tianchi (the Chinese adaptogenic herbs) that forms one of the basic pillars why I’m using this in folks I’m working with to train and bounce them back from adrenal fatigue especially athletes. So, that’s another thing that happens is that neurological system dysfunction and the other thing that’s part of that neurological system dysfunction that Gary refers to is neurotransmitter dysfunction. So, you have all these major neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and what happens in adrenal fatigue is…… in the early stages of adrenal fatigue we gonna get really low serotonin levels and your epinephrine and your norepinephrine and you’re like stress fight and flight type of neurotransmitters tend to be going up and up and up as your body goes to overdrive and produces more and more cortisol but as you progress into deeper stages of adrenal fatigue, what typically happens is you get a drop off in serotonin because serotonin is the neurotransmitter that’s most responsive to a lot of these hormones that you’re losing like cortisol and testosterone and estrogen and stuff like that.

[0:55:13.3]

While epinephrine stays high, dopamine stays high, and norepinephrine tends to stay high. So it’s basically…. you’ve probably heard of before that whole tired and wired scenario where you’re really fatigue but still you’re waken up at 4 am, 2 am whatever. All of that is not necessarily because you’ve got a bunch of cortisol waking you up, it’s because you’ve got a bunch of epinephrine and norepinephrine and dopamine staying really really high where serotonin is low that kinda neurotransmitter imbalance can really really leave you with that tired wired type of deal. That’s your 3rd system that tends to have dysfunction as your neurological system, your hormone system which is already kinda hint to that you know, estrogen, testosterone, all of that that just tends to go right into the bucket. So, hormonal system overload. A lot of people think that adrenal fatigue is like high cortisol it’s not, it’s low cortisol. It’s where you’ve got to the point where you just can’t churn out your adrenal cortico steroids or your cortisol anymore ‘cause you just exhausted your body for too long and most of the other hormones tend to be low in the state of the adrenal fatigue, all of them will tend to drop, estrogen, DHEA, progesterone tends to follow even faster than estrogen so sometimes you get the symptoms of estrogen dominance. Low thyroid and stuff like that (that’s another big big one) is the hormone imbalance that’s one of the biggest one that you see in a state of adrenal fatigue and then the last that suffers is your immune system. You tend to have more allergic reactions, you tend to be more sensitive to foods that you might not have been sensitive to before like dairy, even you could handle gluten before it tends to all of a sudden create a bunch of inflammation in your digestive tract. You basically tend to get a hyper responsive immune system. Now, when that happens not only do you get sick more but you also just tend to have the sniffles more, you’re really sensitive to wheat, corn, soy and milk and eggs, you can be gluten free instead of wheat allergies if you’ve got adrenal fatigue. So, those are the main systems that tend to drop into dysfunction and you can go out and do blood test for adrenal fatigue, there’s also a quiz that you can take (a simple quiz) if you can’t afford the blood test and you just want to take the quiz. It’s really good quiz that I’ll link to in the show notes it’s called Dr. Wilson’s Adrenal Fatigue Quiz and it’s over at adrenalfatigue.org but you can go take that if you’re kinda concerned about yourself, you can check that out. Honestly like when I work with somebody who has adrenal fatigue, there are a lot of different kinda supplements and dietary modifications that I make but some of the big things that I do is first of all almost completely reduce physical activity to just like basic mobility and some yoga and some really really easy stuff, easy you know, easy walk, some things like that. So, workouts get thrown out of the window if someone is in the middle of triathlon season, that’s the end of their season period. They’re done. So, because of their adrenal fatigue you can’t just push through you need months of care to bounce back from it. You know, if somebody signed up for Ironman Hawaii and they get adrenal fatigue, it’s bad news. The other thing I do is really really nutrient dense foods –bone broth, organ meats like liver, fermented soy sources that are rich in fat soluble vitamins like nato, do a lot of like dark fruits, dark vegetables, cold water fish, grass-fed beef, eggs with the yolk, all the stuff that you’d essentially do to fatten somebody up, give them a lot of nutrients. That’s what you do with somebody who with adrenal fatigue and you treat them like a growing baby and you all of a sudden really really take care of the body while avoiding a lot of things that tend to be big issues like coffee and tea and black tea and fruits and fruit juices, honey and sugar, and refined flour products and stuff like that (it goes out the window). As far as supplements go, there are a lot of different things that I do it kinda depends on the person but some of the biggies that I used: one is licorice root and that can help to start you to produce cortisol again, so about 200-400 mg of licorice root extract, I already mentioned Tianchi, I like to do about 1-2 servings of those Chinese adaptogenic herbs per day and that’s another really good one. For restoring neurotransmitters, I liked an essential amino acid supplement like the master amino pattern capsules about 10-15 grams of that a day (which is a lot) but it can really help.

[1:00:08.1]

Trace minerals because your electrolyte status tends to get really thrown off especially with the drop in cortisol (so using like a trace liquid minerals) and then another thing that really helps is just hide those vitamin D along with huge amounts of morning sun exposure to help to reset the circadian rhythm and the cortisol levels and combining high dose vitamin D 500k-600k IU/day with lots of morning sun exposure. There’s some other stuff and it kinda depends on whom I’m working with sometimes I’ll use ginseng, sometimes what are called mixed tocopherols which you find a lot of fish oils, sometimes if someone’s stomach isn’t too beat up anywhere from 2-5 grams of vitamin C everyday. One thing that I don’t recommend is the use of glandulars or hormones like DHEA because just like testosterone you can shut down your own natural production of hormones and so that’s not very good when you’re trying to recover from adrenal fatigue, teaching your body that it doesn’t need to make its own hormones anymore. I’m a bigger fan of using kind of a more natural approach, like I mentioned I’d taught a seminar on this for 2 hours and so that’s just my really brief podcast response. You know, if you’re a personal trainer or something like that go join up with the superhuman coach network and watch some of the modules I’ve got in there on adrenal fatigue and on nutrition supplements and fat loss and everything else, and if you’re not a personal trainer or somebody who works with folks just go over to superhumancoach.com and meet up with any of the coaches who are featured there because they’re all equipped to help you ‘cause they’ve been through that seminar. I’ll put a few links in the show notes for this episode, some of my basic and really my four basics would be Tianchi, trace liquid mineral supplement, some vitamin D and then the essential amino acids along with a lot of those lifestyle modifications that I talked about.

Brock:  You know, I get asked this all the time when I’ve already bring up the topic of adrenal fatigue or it comes up in conversation, people often don’t know or want to know the difference between adrenal fatigue like true adrenal fatigue and just overtraining. What would be the differentiation there?

Ben:  When you’re over-trained you have high cortisol levels and you’re in fight and flight mode and you get to a certain point where your adrenal glands can’t keep up anymore and you don’t produce hormones anymore and you don’t produce as much cortisol as you need and at that point that’s where you’ve crossed the threshold into adrenal fatigue. Most people think that they’re adrenal fatigued and they’re really only over-trained in this case (in Gary’s case) with what he just heard in about neurotransmitters and muscle tightness and everything else, he probably does have adrenal fatigue. And you know, you can push through it and you can push through it and eventually you just…. you crush and it sucks and I’ve never personally been in adrenal fatigue but like after I did those back to back triathlons I certainly had a couple of days there where I at least experienced some of the same feelings. Fortunately, I woke up today pretty cheaper and I’m back in the land of the living but I was doing 3 Tianchi a day for the past 2 days just to get enough adaptogens to pull me back.

Marie-Claire:   Hey guys, MC from Lemon Bless here. I just want to let everybody know that Ben helped my husband before his ironman last year unfortunately on January Gerry had an injury peroneus brevis and peroneus longus injury. I give him deep massages and feet and fairly well, he’s almost paleo (once in awhile he’ll have something to eat) and I would love to get some advice to get him back on track fast. Right now, he’s getting deep massages, ART and EMS. I would love to hear any kind of nutrition advice supplement advice and a way for him to get back on track fast. So again, thank you so much Ben, you’re really superstar in the nutrition realm and I really really appreciate all the work that you’re doing. We listen to your podcast together every week, I really enjoyed them. So, keep up the good work guys, thank you!

Ben:  Hey MC and Gerry. I know MC and Gerry. I’ve hung out with them a bit.

Brock:  Where, was it in Ironman Canada? I think…

Ben:  No it was Kona. I hung out with them, and also at the 70.3 World Championships in Vegas. We had dinner. So good to hear from MC and Gerry. And you’re doing a lot of things right so congratulations, you know deep tissue massage, and kinda eating a clean diet, doing active release therapy and electrical muscle stimulation.

[1:50:07.2]

You know, those are all, you know, kind of the geeky things that you can do to go after soft tissue injuries like this but they’re band-aids. I mean ultimately, all that stuff is just a band-aid and you gotta get to the root of the issue and I’ve had peroneous tendon issues before from tendonitis in the peronial ligaments and tendons that tend to run up the inside or the outside of the lower leg and it all always returns to the type of shoes that you’re wearing, of in the case of a bike, the type of bike/cleats that you’re using, and then your foot mobility. You fix those things and you can get rid of peroneous completely. So when I say foot mobility, I mean first of all, and this is something that I recommend for anybody switching to minimalist shoes. You should keep a golf ball under your desk or nearby and be rolling your foot with the golf ball as much as possible to improve your intrinsic foot strength, your foot flexibility, your arch, and all of your little tiny foot muscles and all the little fascia knots that tend to build up in those tiny foot muscles. If you can get to the point where you can stand on one golf ball under each foot, okay, and just stand there with your full weight on each golf ball, you’re bulletproof. You can go run in vibram five fingers for miles if you like and actually I did in the wild flower in vibrams cause I actually left my score running shoes on the second day outside and it got wet from the morning dew. You know it felt great, running in Vibrams. So minimalists’ footwear, that type of thing, whether it’s wanting to do that, whether it’s wanting to get rid of lower leg issues, you have to optimize foot function and you have to improve foot mobility. So you need to be doing lots of rolling and deep tissue work on the foot and the best way I found to do that bar none is a golf ball. That simple. So that’s one thing. The next thing would be to increase your ankle mobility. One of my favorite ways to increase ankle mobility is to get one of these foam rollers that look like they have been cut in half. You know what I’m talking about? They’re like the half foam roller?

Brock:  Yeah. The half-moon.

Ben:  Stand on that and everyday, even if it’s just in the morning, you know during the morning yoga or something like that, stand on that everyday and get to the point where you can do a single-leg squat, standing on top of that half-foam roller. If you can do a single leg squat while standing on that half-foam roller, it’s really gonna improve your ankle mobility. There are other things you can do to increase ankle mobility like deep tissue massage and all the muscles around your ankle. Even that golf ball that I mentioned, using the golf ball on your foot, because you’re moving your ankle as you do that is also gonna improve your ankle mobility but because its moving you laterally side to side, these mini side to side variations, front to back, that type of thing, single leg squat on that half foam roller. I’m a huge fan of. So that’s another thing. And then…

Brock:  And don’t be afraid to lose your balance. You’re not doing it wrong if you’re losing your balance; that’s part of the exercise. It’s recovering from losing your balance.

Ben:  Yeah, and you may have to start just by standing on it. The last thing would be balance/hip strength because the 2 can be trained at the same time. And what I mean by that is to strengthen your hips specially the side to side movement of your hips by doing as much as you can on one leg. Brush your teeth on one leg. Work in the kitchen on dinner, you know, standing on one leg. You don’t have to cut a leg off and go peg leg or Captain Ahab anything like that. Unless whale hunting is your occupation of choice but stand on one leg. Working out on the gym, doing overhead presses, stand in one leg and don’t allow your hips to collapse when you’re doing that, standing in one leg activity. You can get to the point where you’re doing a heavy, you know like a 5 rep max, overhead dumbbell press, standing on one leg without your hips collapsing, you’ve got pretty strong hips and that’s gonna translate into less stress on your feet and less stress on your peronials when you’re running. So that’s it. I do ankle mobility, I do foot mobility, I’d work on strengthening the hips, and then continue to do all of the natural organic stuff that you’re doing but understand that those are band-aids unless you address the mobility aspect.

CT:  Hi Ben and Brock. I have a question regarding protein powders and smoothies. I like to throw some berries in my protein powder in the morning, I use a nice whey protein from Jarrow and I was curious if it hurts the impact or the absorption of protein into the system and whether or not I should continue doing it. Live the podcast. Thank you.

Brock:  I’ve never heard of Jarrow whey protein. Is that the popular…

[1:10:00.8]

Ben:  Jarrow, Jarrow. You know, I was thinking it was Rich Roll’s but Rich Roll’s is Jai.

Brock:  It’s Jai, yeah.

Ben:  Another popular one out there is Bren Braizer’s vega. I’ve heard of Jarrow but I haven’t used it. I’ve used Vega, I’ve tried the Jai Lifestyle stuff. I personally used the living protein stuff from Living Fuel because that’s the same place I get my fish oil from. But Jarrow, yeah I mean…

Brock:  I’m looking at Jarrow right now.

Ben:  Actually, what, is it whey or is it vegan? The Jarrow.

Brock:  It’s whey.

Ben:  Okay, it’s whey.

Brock:  It’s a whey protein, 100% natural, no hormones added, no sweeteners, blah blah blah.

Ben:  Yeah. So it’s probably…

Brock:  Sounds good.

Ben:  Decent stuff. Now as far as impacting the absorption of protein, a lot of people really do think this. This is like this myth that goes around that you gotta combine carbohydrates with protein in order to enhance the protein absorption with the theory being that when you eat carbohydrates, it spikes insulin so you get a source of insulin and it drives the amino acids into the muscles, you know, it’s the chaperone that pulls the amino acids in. But in fact most people don’t realize is that protein spikes your insulin almost as high as glucose does. Eating a hamburger spikes your insulin. You know, eating ice cream, even if it’s you know, lower in sugar, whatever, spikes you insulin. Like you do not have to eat sugar to spike your insulin levels so that’s a myth that eating carbohydrate with protein is somehow going to enhance absorbability of that protein. That being said, there are ways that you can improve absorbability of protein. The first would be to simply increase the weight at which the protein is broken down in your stomach. Now, the way that you would do that is you would include some hydrochloric acid or some lemon juice or some bitters in every protein shake. If you’re really like wanting your thing to absorb as fast as possible, I mean ultimately, it’s not really necessary unless you’re doing a ton of protein because protein is gonna absorb. The maximum rate of absorption for something like whey protein is 8-10 grams per hour. Okay so if you take in 50 grams of protein or whatever, you’re gonna absorb it within about 5 hours or so. I mean, I guess, if you wanna absorb more quickly, or you find that you get you burp up your protein a little bit, whatever. Hydrochloric acid or lemon juice of bitters which stimulate the release of hydrochloric acid, any of those, taking those in along with your protein would actually improve the absorbability of the protein. There is also an interesting study that they did in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition where they looked at combining digestive enzymes with the protein shake and this would be something like the Mount Capra Deep 30 protein shake or protein powder where they’ve mixed a bunch of digestive enzymes in there. Or you could go out and get digestive enzymes just take a digestive enzyme capsule along with your protein shake. What they found in this study was they gave 2 groups 50 grams serving of whey protein and then they measured their total nitrogen excretion and the total nitrogen excretion just basically tells you how much of that protein was actually absorbed. And what they found was that with straight up whey protein, there is about a 30% increase in total amino acid levels after about 4 hours and there as a certain amount of nitrogen that was excreted in the urine. And nitrogen excreted in the urine is basically gonna indicate that you’re producing nitrogen from or you’re utilizing the amino acids from the actual protein. So then they took, I think I said they split them into 2 groups and took the same group. They took the same group and then later on they did the same thing but they gave them digestive enzymes and they found that instead of a 30% absorption over right around 4 hours, they actually got 127% absorption in that same timeframe when they gave them 5 grams of digestive enzymes along with the whey. Now, you could, theoretically, just use something that has something with digestive enzymes in it – pineapple is a good example, papaya, is another example. If you’re trying to go low carb, you could just basically take-in a digestive enzyme capsule or even just use a whey protein like the Mount Capra Deep 30 stuff that already has the digestive enzymes in it. But either way you go, digestive enzymes or increasing the amount of hydrochloric acid that you take in along with the protein are much better ways to improve protein shake absorbability compared to just throwing a bunch of carbs in there to increase the insulin because your insulin is already gonna be up. And by the way, I just published my video of me trying out the Joe Rogan shake recipe. Did you see that video Brock?

[1:15:19.7]

Brock:  I did.

Ben:  So Joe Rogan, the podcaster, MMA fighter, comedian, he makes this shake every morning that he’s published to his website and it is a celery and cucumber and kale and ginger and garlic and a pear. So I made it. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the video or we’ll embed the video in the show notes. I made it, I did a taste test, and I’ll let you know what I think of it and how you can make it way better so let’s put it this way. Joe Rogan’s shake tastes a little bit like ass. But it could, there are ways that it could be made better, actually once I modified it and it tasted really good. So there you go.

Brock:  Ass with a hint of ginger.

Ben:  Ass with a hint of ginger. So does that and what do you think? Should we read a review?

Brock:  Yeah, I… This is a good time to read an iTunes review.

Ben:  That’s right.

Brock:  Anybody who’s putting up reviews on iTunes we really appreciate it because it helps boost the ranking of the podcast within iTunes and that means that more people know about it and can find it easily but also, if you do review, Ben may choose it and read it on the show and you win a prize.

Ben:  And it makes us feel good about ourselves when we read those reviews too which is the most important thing.

Brock:  We need that.

Ben:  That’s right.

Brock:  Yeah, we really need that.

Ben:  That boost in self-esteem. So if you are iTunes reviewer and your name is… Pull up that review that I thought was kind of nifty and creative. If I can even find it here. This is great podcasting , I’ll pull it up in a second, don’t worry. Okay. If you are almost 50 exclamation marks. That’s the word. The title of this review is “Love Love Love”

Brock:  Aww.

Ben:  I’m not an Ironman athlete. I’m just a 50 year-old female that enjoys running and I’m trying to slap mother nature away. I love that. Slap mother nature away. Before finding Ben, I stress-fractured my hip due to poor marathon training in 2011. After listening to Ben, I discovered how to change my nutrition and training to help my healing and performance. Ben explains everything to the fullest detail. Sometimes going over the same thing more than once or twice but I need that. I’m a little hard-headed. I completed my first full marathon in 2012 thanks to all the knowledge I gained from Ben. So…

Brock:  Thanks!

Ben:  There you go. Love love love.

Brock:  Thanks almost 50!

Ben:  Thanks Almost 50. If you heard us read your review, write in [email protected]. Let us know and we’ll get a cool Ben Greenfield Fitness Love Pack out to you. And speaking of love, if you love the show, you can also, in addition to leaving an iTunes review,  go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/love and at bengreenfieldfitness.com/love, you can share the word about what you love about the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast so just send out a tweet or facebook and go spam all your friends. Spam your friends and tell them to go listen to the podcasts so that being said, I think we’ve got one quick audio message to wrap things up.

Brock:  Yeah. A little message from Anne.

Anne:  Hi Ben, it’s Anne. I just want to send a quick message and say thank you so much for your support and coaching me and getting me to the finishing line in my first Ironman. I was as thrilled to  you know, finally cross that finishing line but I wanted to make a special thank you to really how the training program has allowed me to incorporate my other priorities, the other priorities in life, really my family and friends and work but still allow me to participate in events like this and it’s amazed me how the training approach that we’ve been working on and you’re really training 6-10, 12 hours a week has allowed me to  complete an Ironman so thank you. The other thing that I wanted to comment on was I really can’t believe how well I’ve recovered from the race. I followed all the nutrition plan and I’m not quite sure if I should read it to you but as far as muscle soreness of fatigue, I’ve really bounced back very quickly and have very little muscle soreness at all so thanks so much for the preparation. We’ll always cherish the moment I had when I crossed that finish line and you’ve really been a critical person for achieving that so thanks again. Bye.

[1:20:23.0]

 

 

May 9th, 2013 Podcast: Nerve pain while running, natural remedies for rosacea, how to lose fat as fast as possible, how to get rid of adrenal fatigue, how to get rid of a peroneus injury, and how to absorb more protein from a protein shake.

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right side of this page, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, Skype “pacificfit” or (if you hate the sound of your own voice) scroll down to the “Ask Ben” form.

Please don’t forget to give the podcast a comment/ranking in iTunes – it only takes a minute and you could WIN A PRIZE!
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Special Announcements:

If you’re looking for a topic we covered in the past – we have released the Ben Greenfield Fitness Top Hits, Vol. 1.

Including:
1. The Benefits of Fish vs. Fish Oil
2. The Best Ways to Stop Hair Loss
3. Increase Your Hematocrit & Oxygen Levels
4. Strengthen Your Immune System & Shorten the Duration of a Cold
5. Top 10 Ways to Boost Drive
6. Get Rid of Migraines Naturally
7. Become a Curvaceous, Lean, Ripped Female Athlete Without Destroying Your Health
8. Stop Side Stitches as Fast as Possible
9. Is It Possible for a Vegan to Be a Healthy Endurance Athlete
10. How Much Water Do You Really Need to Drink Each Day

Sex and Drive and Hormone LIVE Spreecast – Tune in here on Tuesday, May 14th @ 6:30PDT.

2013 Thailand Triathlon Adventure with Ben Greenfield – details at pacificfit.net.

Essentials of Triathlon Workshop with Ben Greenfield – Saturday, May 18, 2013 in Fairfield, Connecticut. In this private clinic you’ll discover everything you need to know about how to maximize your triathlon success, including Ben’s top secrets, tips and tricks to save time, get the most bang-for-your-training buck, and ensure your body, health and hormones are optimized for endurance. Location: Fairfield, Connecticut.
– Hour 1: Essentials of Triathlon Fueling + Nutrition Q&A
– Hour 2: Essentials of Triathlon Training + Workout Q&A
Registration: May 1-17: $50, At-Door Registration: $60. Reserve your spot now. Space is limited!

A brand new Ben Greenfield Fitness app – is coming out SOON… get yourself (and your smartphone) ready!
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Listener Q&A:

As compiled, edited and sometimes read by Brock, the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast “sidekick”.

“Noodle Leg” Ashley asks @ 00:23:44
She ran a marathon last spring and ever since, when she goes for a run longer than 2 miles, she loses muscle strength in her right upper thigh and has trouble bringing it around. Any idea what that could be?

~ In my response, I refer to episode #235.

Paul says @ 00:30:59
He is looking for suggestions on how to help with the condition Rosacea.

~ In my response, I mention www.inflammation-factor.com and superessentials omega fish oil

Thomas asks @ 00:38:41
He has lost 25lbs and 7.5 inches around his waist eating paleo, doing sprints, and lifting heavy. He has 15 more pounds to lose and he has about 6 more weeks until he is back home, seeing friends and family (and wearing a swim suit). Is there anything that is safe in the short term to lose that last bit of fat quickly? He doesn’t want to hurt his long term health.

~ In my response to Thomas I mention the www.coolfatburner.com vest, fasted cold thermogenesis or fasted fat burning sessions in the morning, MPX100 Bitter Melon Extract, sauna/detox, alternating HIIT and strength in afternoons, and 1 full recovery day (perhaps with bikram yoga to shed water weight).

Gary asks @ 00:50:19
He hasn’t been able to run the way he wants because his muscles are very tight, he is very stiff, he is very low in adrenaline and high in norepinephrine and dopamine.

~ In my response, I mention The Adrenal Fatigue Quiz. Also: 
 -1-2 TianChi per day on empty stomach
 -2-3 servings per day Trace Minerals
 –Vitamin D3 ~ 35IU/lb
 -Amino Acids – 5-10 MAP per day

Marie-Claire says @ 01:03:32
After an awesome triathlon season last year, her husband Gerry had a peroneus brevis and peroneus longus injury and is looking for some nutrition and supplement advice to get him back on track quickly. She has been giving him deep massage, he eats nearly paleo, and is getting ART and EMS.

~ In my response, I mention a soft ankle brace.

CT asks @ 01:09:35
He likes to throw berries into his whey protein (from Jarrow) smoothie in the mornings and is wondering if that hurts the impact or absorption of the protein into the system.

~ In my response, I recommend proteolytic enzymes, such as Recoverease, and also the protein powder Deep30 and…
And don’t forget to go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/love!

Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/05/240-how-to-get-rid-of-adrenal-fatigue-lose-fat-as-fast-as-possible-the-joe-rogan-shake-and-more/#more-13006

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