Episode #335 – Full Transcript

Affiliate Disclosure

Transcripts

Podcast #335 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/10/335-how-to-kill-fat-cells-5-ways-to-burn-more-calories-after-a-cheat-day-health-effects-of-ritalin-more

[0:00:00]  

Introduction: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show: How To Kill Fat Cells, 5 Ways To Burn More Calories After A Cheat Day, The Health Effects of Ritalin, The Best Way To Eat Wild Game, What To Do About Cracking Knees, and much more!

He’s an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America’s top personal trainer and one of the globe’s most influential people in health and fitness.  His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance.  He is Ben Greenfield.  “Power, speed, mobility, balance – whatever it is for you that for natural movement, get out there! When you’re working all the studies done… studies that have shown the greatest effort to see…”  All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Ben:  Rachel, I gotta tell ya’, I’m a pretty happy man this morning.

Rachel:  Well, why is that?

Ben:  I had pie for breakfast.

Rachel:  Pie?

Ben:  Mmm-hmm.

Rachel:  What kind of pie?

Ben:  I had my wife’s coconut flour and almond flour, heavenly crusted pie that was filled with like a coconut cream raspberry filling.  It was amazing.

Rachel:  Yum.  That sounds incredible.

Ben:  She may actually be a – she may be (curse word) when she gets home and finds that I dug into her pie.

Rachel:  Did you eat it all?

Ben:  I didn’t eat it all but I – I’m not very good at cutting pie, and so I may have messed up her pie a little bit.  I may or may not have been the person who messed up the pie.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  Really hoping it wasn’t for special occasion but I was – we’ll you’ve met Toffee and Caramel, our little Nigerian dwarf goats, right?

Rachel:  I haven’t met them, no.  But I’m aware of them, yup.

Ben:  Oh, I thought that the last time you were here that…

Rachel:  No, I didn’t went there, I was devastated ‘cause I really wanna… just to show how to milk them.

Ben:  Oh, okay.  Well I was out bailing of a hay out of the truck this morning, just loads and loads of these 70 lbs. hay bales that was my workout.  But I finished so close to this morning’s podcast, I didn’t have time to make my quintessential big ass green smoothie, so instead open our refrigerator and eat what looked good and just happened to be pie.

News Flashes:

Ben:  Rachel, I’m not a big fan of woo-woo stuff as I think you know but I actually tweeted out this week an amazing article that I read on of all places, the Time magazine website on Happy Rituals.

Rachel:  Uh-huh.  And what did you find?

Ben:  Well this was actually an article based on neuroscience research which…

Rachel:  That’s not woo-woo then, is it?

Ben:  Automatically makes it legit.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  Kinda woo-woo neuroscience, I guess.  I’ll put a link to it and all the research that of course we’ve talked about in the News Flashes over on today’s episode show notes which are at bengreenfieldfitness.com/335.  But it was, unless you wanna pick up a big thick book, and who wants to do these days on happiness? It was actually one of the more sci sync and thorough and helpful articles that I’ve read in a long time on ‘What makes us happy?’ So…

Rachel:  Interesting.

Ben:  Yes.  So a few other things that were in there, one is that it starts off by saying that one of the most important things that you can do is ask yourself what you are grateful for.

Rachel:  Yeah.  You gratitude for sure.

Ben:  Of course, that’s kinda been kicked to death, but what happens is they talked about how the anti-depressant Wellbutrin boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine.  And what they found is that feeling grateful activates the brain stem region that produces dopamine, and gratitude towards other people also increases activity in what are called the social dopamine circuits.  And that’s not all, there’s more.  But wait, there’s more!

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  Prozac.  Prozac boosts not dopamine but serotonin, and it turns out that gratitude increases serotonin production, what’s called the anterior cingulated cortex.  So…

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  …you get a release of dopamine, you get a release of serotonin, no anti-depressants drugs required and it’s simply a matter of waking up or ending the day with consciously and not just like kinda thinking at the back of like, consciously writing down and talking about what you’re grateful for, so.

[0:05:02.3]

Rachel:  Right.  And then the interesting thing would be is whether you feel when you’re depressed, if you actually have anything to be grateful for.

Ben:  Yeah, that’s…

Rachel:  A tough one.

Ben:  That’s a tricky part, right? What comes first…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  …the chicken or the egg?

Rachel:  Uh-huh.

Ben:  I’m actually,  I’ve used the 5 minute journal, I’ve used the practice of just writing down what you’ve read before, I’ve used the practice of going over and telling my wife that I’m grateful for her, all sorts of things.  I’m actually in the process right now of creating a journal.

Rachel:  Oh wow.

Ben:  It’s actually a – it’s been published over in Taiwan right now.  So it will be about 6 weeks before I get it shipped over here to the States.  I did a run of about 2,000 journals just to start off, but it’s a journal that’s basically exactly what I like to do each morning in terms of gratitude and I decided on why not just put it into a journal? So it’s a little bit different unlike the 5 minute journal.

Rachel:  That is awesome.  And now you have some partly woo-woo signs to back you up.

Ben:  Yes, full-on woo-woo, baby!  Negative feelings, they talk about negative feelings and they said that if you could put your negative feelings into words.  What they found is that in FMRI studies, the amygdala gets activated to reduce the impact of negative emotions if you give them a name.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  And literally, like label them or name them.  Like if you’re angry, you could name that.

Rachel:  I am angry.

Ben:  Or you could even say like “Harry the monster is angry”, or you could say something like “I’m feeling…” you wouldn’t use the word angry but you use some kind of a – I mean you could do that but putting some kind of like your own spin, your own label on it.

Rachel:  Hmmm.

Ben:  Doesn’t have to be “Harry the monster”, but you know what I’m saying? Like if…

Rachel:  Yeah, like if… personifying your feelings.

Ben:  Right.  Exactly.

Rachel:  And is that supposed to make them separate to you? Which then…

Ben:  Kinda, yeah.

Rachel:  …does something?

Ben:  It like detaches you from them.

Rachel:  Right!  There you go.

Ben:  Yeah.  Here’s another really…

Rachel:  Interesting.

Ben:  …interesting one.  If you want to boost pleasure and boost happiness, make a decision.  And this is something that I found myself struggling over when I like go to nice restaurants, I have a ton of really good looking things on my menu.  Or when I am doing a workout and I’m not quite sure you know, what exercises or what workout I wanna do, what series of exercises – simply making a freaking decision actually gives you a huge boost of dopamine.  So for example, if you give rats injections of cocaine and one rat has to pull a lever to get the injection and the other rat just gets the injection.  The rat that has to pull the lever to get the injection makes the decision that has to actively press that lever, it’s gets a bigger boost of dopamine.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  So the takeaway message here is that if you want cocaine…

Rachel/Ben:    pull the lever.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  Don’t just take cocaine.  Make yourself, make yourself work for it.  So all sorts of interesting things in the article, it goes on and on and I won’t read or go over the whole thing for folks, ‘cause it is kinda long article.  But oh, one last thing is physical touch.  Getting a minimum of 5 hugs a day for 4 weeks increases happiness by causing a release of the neurotransmitter hormone oxytocin which reduces the reactivity of stressful areas in your amygdala.

Rachel:  That does not surprise me at all.  Every single day and neither can you; I have to start the day cuddling either my dog or my husband.

Ben:  Mmm, yes.

Rachel:  Its – we can’t skip it, it’s a thing! It’s literally a thing in my house.  Cuddle is so important.

Ben:  And now you can tell them you’re doing it because you want to increase…

Rachel:  Exactly! Yeah.

Ben:  …your neurotransmitter oxytocin.

Rachel:  Win.

Ben:  There you go.. win!

Rachel:  Fascinating some…

Ben:  So check out that article.  Another thing that I wanted to mention was this idea of living in eternal summer, you know what that means?

Rachel:  No.

Ben:  Can you guess?

Rachel:  Uh, summer all year-round?

Ben:  Yeah, like air-conditioning, heating, comfort, comfort of temperature all the time.  So there is this new study that finds that living in eternal summer can adversely impact your health specifically by creating increase in risk of diabetes, cardiovascular risk factors, drop in metabolism, increase in body fat and all sorts of things related to biology, specifically things that would increase morbidity and mortality which are fancy words to say you’re gonna kick the can sooner.  When you constantly control your environment, like right now, I’m standing here, podcasting here.  I’ve got my shirt off in my basement and it’s about 58 degrees down here.  Now for a lot of people, they’d think that to be uncomfortable and yes, it is slightly uncomfortable, I have to consciously think about how I can keep my body warm whether it’s breathing, moving, standing, taking jumping jack breaks, whatever.  But it turns out that doing that and forcing your body to have to be the thing that keeps you warm, versus say like you know, artificial cooling…

[0:10:02.1]

or artificial healing methods, that’s actually going to help you out quite a bit in terms of your health.  So the next time that you’re – that if you’re listening, the next time your spouse or your loved one tells you to turn on the freaking air-conditioning or when you gonna activate the heater this winter, you can tell them that you’re just trying not to die sooner.

Rachel:  What about if you’re chasing the sun in places or in places that are hot all year-round?

Ben:  You mean like if you live in a place that’s hot all year-round?

Rachel:  Yeah, or if you travel to places just to keep…in summer.

Ben:  Yeah.  Then it works in reverse, your body produces heat shock proteins in response to heat stress.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:     And so if you’re in a hot air you could say, “okay, well I’m gonna drive today.” So it mean I have to go somewhere where you’re gonna be out pitted out and sweaty. “I’m gonna drive today and not use my air-conditioning.”

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  Or, “I’m going to allow my house to be a little bit hot and I’m gonna take some cold showers today”, those type of things.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  So, you know.

Rachel:  Interesting.

Ben:  So yeah, it’s kinda interesting and it relates to another interesting article that goes into cold thermogenesis.  Alright, this idea that submitting your body to the stress source of cold causes white fat to get converted into brown fat.  You actually enhance the expression of what are called brown fat specific genes and when you do that, you produce fat that is very rich in what are called mitochondria and fat that is very able to take calories and rather than storing away storage fats to turn those calories into heat.  That is one of the primary reasons that you know, I’ll for example, I just keep myself cold but I’ll use like these cooling gear like the cool fat burner vest or I’ll do cold baths, cold treatments, things like that.  But it turns out in this new study, that there is a specific herbal extract that causes brown fat to from more readily.  So, it actually stimulates the same brown fat specific gene and it also increases activity what’s called lipase which breaks down fat.  And also another one called carboxylase which suppresses new fat production or what we call lipogenesis, so you’re increasing lipolysis and you’re suppressing lipogenesis.  This particular extract also increases the activity of AMPK, so AMPK is considered to be like this metabolic master switch that increases your metabolism.  You get a big surge of an in response to say like, aerobic exercise sessions but you also get a response to it in when you are subjected to cold and specifically, if you combine this herb with cold, you get a really cool one-two combo in terms of inducing program cell death what’s called apoptosis in white fat cells.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  So, drum roll please.  Can you guess what the actual herb is?

Rachel:  (dumroll sounds) Uh, I can guess, is it curcumin?

Ben:  Curcumin, you got it.

Rachel:  Yey!

Ben:  Turmeric extracts.  You could do turmeric; you could do curcumin as well.  It’s very, very interesting and the other thing and I’ve been telling some people this lately is “I’ll take this curcumin capsules that I have in my pantry and in the morning, break them open into a cup of coffee, because they actually have neuro anti- inflammatory properties as well.”  Meaning, they kinda clean up your brain especially if you’ve had a night of drinking or poor night of sleep or something like that.  So, a lot of benefits to curcumin but it turns out a pretty cool one-two combo is to combine it with cold thermogenesis.  More on that later when we talk about how to combat the effects of a big calorie late in cheat day.  But for now, if you wanna check out that research, it’s over at Green Med info, I will put a link to it in the show notes.  So the last thing is this whole high carb debate.  Did you see – I don’t know if you saw this Rachel, but Denise Minger just wrote a giant 18,000 plus word article on her website and the title of the article is ‘In Defense Of Low Fat’ in which she goes into a ton of research on how people eating in all these studies that have been kinda suppressed or fall under the radar, people literally engaging in the carbocalypse as she calls it.  Eating like pounds of sugar and starches and potatoes and rice and just like processed sugar cubes literally all day long.

Rachel:  And what did she find?

Ben:  Absence of heart disease sometimes reversal of diabetes, reversal of multiple sclerosis, on and on and on, extremely controversial articles.  It’s kind of in breaking the internet of the nutritional world in the past several days.

Rachel:  And so what do you think about that?

Ben:  Well, I got Denise on a podcast that I’m releasing this Saturday.  I literally talked to her for about an hour and a half yesterday.  We went over all the studies, we went over the conclusions, we kinda cut through some of the clutter and confusion so.  If you’re listening in, tune in this weekend…

[0:15:00.8]

but the reason that I’m talking about this is it’s related to another article that came out this week in the journal of clinical nutrition.  And what this article looked into was whether or not your response metabolically to high carbohydrate intake is affected by your genes and it actually is.  There is – there’s something called lipoprotein lipase which causes some people to be insulin resistant and some people to have some serious issues when it comes to high carb intake.  And it turns out that some people are carriers of this gene called rs328 and the people who carry that gene can have metabolic syndrome in response to a diet high in carbohydrate, whereas the people who don’t carry that gene can do just fine on high carb diet.  And in this particular study, they were looking at people in China, and so they basically took from not really genetic melting pot, right? Like they’re all Chinese and they found out that some of them did fine with high carb, some of them didn’t.  So it turns out that genetics plays a role here.

Rachel:  Interesting.

Ben:  There you go.  So I’m hoping that I have the gene that allows me to eat pie for breakfast and don’t have a…

Rachel:  Everyone’s hoping they have that gene (laughs).

Ben:  …metabolic abnormalities.  So anyways, these news flashes and oh so much more, you can get it at bengreenfieldfitness.com/335.  You can also follow TwitterInstagramFacebook.  We’ll put all the links in the show notes because we’re constantly churning out information that goes even above and beyond, believe it or not, on we just talked about.  There you go.

Special Announcements:

Ben:  Rachel, this podcast is brought to you by pants.

Rachel:  Pants?

Ben:  Pants, yes.  And I’m not kidding.  I actually wear these pants and they’re called the Thesis pants and as a matter of fact, if you see me in airports, you caught glimpses of me doing my air squats in the back of an airplane or pretty much traveling anywhere these days, my pants of choice have been these Thesis pants.  And that’s called t-h-e-s-i-s, they’re made by today’s sponsor Inquiry and they are designed to keep you cool, dry, comfortable, they move with you, according to my wife, they make my butt look just okay, so I think that’s a bonus, too.  And they are designed unfortunately Rachel, I’m sorry, for men.

Rachel:  Men.  Dang it!

Ben:  You can tell Jacob about them.  I suppose, he might like them.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  But yes, it’s a really cool gear, they make pants, they make shirts, they’re made in Texas and I freaking swear by these things, I can beat the crap out of them, ______[0:17:55.2], they look good, I can wear them to a party, I can wear them on an airplane, they’re really versatile.  So they’re called the Thesis pant, what Inquiry is offering us is a 10% discount code for anybody who’s listening in on what’s cool, comfortable, clean pants or shirts, at shopinquiry.com.  That’s i-n-q-u-i-r-y.com, shopinquiry.com and you use 10% discount code ‘BEN10’ and you too, can have a cute butt on your next airplane flight.  So there’s that.  This podcast is also brought to you by Harry’s shaving.  Have you yet tried the Harry’s razor yet, Rachel?

Rachel:  I haven’t, not yet.

Ben:  You got to.

Rachel:  I need to get on it.  I know.

Ben:  Okay.  So Harry’s ergonomic blade, it’s got or ergonomic handle, it’s got three blades.  You shave and sometimes when I shave with the Harry’s, I’m totally not kidding, I don’t grow a lot of hair; I’m scared, too.  I’ve seen both of my brothers attempt to grow beards and it looks kinda like pubes on the face.

Rachel:  Right.  Yup, you don’t want of those.

Ben:  Yeah, I’m a pubes on the face person.  So when I shave though with this Harry’s razor, sometimes I think that the blade has like a color on it ‘cause it’s so smooth.  And I’m not just saying this ‘cause they sponsored the podcast, I actually use this Harry’s razor everyday and I freaking swear by it.  It looks nice, it’s heavy, I hide it so my wife doesn’t use it to shave her legs…

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  because it’s my…

Rachel:  It’s every men’s worst nightmare.

Ben:  …it’s mine, baby.  And you can get one; you go to harrys.com and use $5 discount code ‘ben’ at harrys.com, that’s h-a-r-r-y-s.com, harrys.com and you can get any of their fine shaving equipment.  German engineered blade, ergonomic handles, just makes you feel freaking macho when you shave with this thing.  Rachel, you too, would feel quite macho if you use this.

Rachel:  Oh, that’s what I need, machoness.

Ben:  Yeah.  Order one for Jacob. Get him pants, get him a shaver, so.  And then finally, Onnit – so, Onnit is a sponsor of today’s show.

[0:20:01.7]

They sponsored other shows but I haven’t really talked about this before, something that I travel with that I get at Onnit and it is a buffalo meat.  So I don’t know if you know much about the buffalo, Rachel…

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  but did you know that it run at top speeds for about 4 hours?

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  ,,,across the planes?  It’s an animal that actually has a large number of what are called a myoglobin.  So myoglobin, when you cut into meats or you eat meat and its super duper red, that means it’s got a lot of iron, it means it comes from an animal that has – that is enabled to run a lot.  Now unfortunately, sometimes you gotta trade off with myoglobin rich meat because it is lean and it’s less flavorful.  They might get a fattier cut of you know, from say like, I don’ know – a grass fed cow who’s fed wine and chocolate you know wine…

Rachel:  It’s just been hanging out and pastured its whole life, yeah.

Ben:  hanging out, being a fat cow.  So what they’ve done with this buffalo is they add cranberries along with a spicy pepper blend.  It’s a completely minimally processed, sustainably raised buffalo.  The buffalo’s actually fed and exclusively vegetarian diet, so it doesn’t get a lot of nasty stuff, it doesn’t get a lot of like a GMO grains and corn.  But they add some other stuff in there too, like celery juice, habanero pepper, jalapeño pepper, garlic, like I mentioned, dried cranberries, some sea salt – it’s a good jerky bar.  It’s a very good jerky bar.  So you can get that or any of the other functional foods at Onnit like sea salt or nut butter or anything else when you visit onnit.com/bengreenfield.  That’s onnit.com/bengreenfield instantly, save 10% magically on your – on your buffalo bars.

Rachel:  There you go.

Ben:  You could eat the cranberries and spit out the buffalo, if you want to.

Rachel:  I don’t know if I could.  No, I don’t know (laughs).

Ben:  (laughs) You would probably just eat buffalo…

Rachel:  I could try.

Ben:  We will destroy your vegetarianism if you gotta enhance in one of those things.

Rachel:  That does it delicious.

Ben:  They are pretty tasty, honestly, if you can get the image of the giant buffalo out of your head.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  So anyways, a couple other quick things I am – for those of you who listening in now, who happen to live near Encinitas or San Diego, if you look at your front door and see a bunch of gentlemen carrying giant logs through the street this weekend, it’s because I will be down at Kokoro at Mark Divine’s Kokoro which is like Navy Seal hell week for civilians.  That’s this weekend that’ll start tomorrow down in San Diego.

Rachel:  How exciting.  You’re interning, aren’t you?

Ben:  I’m not competing.  I’ll be there coaching not competing but…

Rachel:  Is it a competition?

Ben:  It is not a com – I shouldn’t say competing, participating.  It’s really not a competition as much as just a giant suck fest, so.

Rachel:  And… tell me Ben, is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

Ben:  Kokoro?

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  Umm, I don’t know.  It’s physically, yes.

Rachel:  Yes.

Ben:  Emotionally, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done is the – I forget what the appropriate term for it is but like co-birthing, like when my wife gave birth, we did the whole breathing protocol and everything while I’m there the whole time holding her, basically supporting during the entire birth.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  You know, I was covered in bruised after that from my elbows beginning to my thighs and you know…

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  that was a full on emotional journey that perhaps…

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  …we can talk about in detail on a future podcast.  But it basically involved us doing everything right, doula, midwives. water birth, natural birth, etc. 10 hours of hard core labor that culminated in my wife and the boys’ lives both being at stake, unless we drove to the hospital to cut them out, so.

Rachel:  That happened?

Ben:  That all happened.

Rachel:  Oh, my gosh.

Ben:  Maybe at some point if we talk about natural birth…

Rachel:  We need to.  Yeah.

Ben:  …and stuff, because I am a proponent natural birth.  Just so happens if we would have been back in the Wild, Wild West days, my wife’s narrow little, non-child bearing hips would’ve made her the girl in the Wild, Wild West movies who dies having a baby.

Rachel:  Yeah, it’s horrible.

Ben:  Grows up to be some famous sheriff.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  Anyways though, I digress.  I few other quick things: if you haven’t yet signed up for and you want to attend speaking of SEALFit and Kokoro, the Unbeatable Mind Retreat, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/unbeatable15.  This is gonna be down in California at the world famous SEALFit headquarters, getting a warrior yoga and instruction.  Robb Wolf will be there, Dr. Kirk Parsley, Dominic D’Agostino, bunch of cool folks – December 4th through the 6th, good conference to add to your ‘to attend’ list.  And then the other thing I should mention is that and this is the last thing, November 14th is the World Toughest Mudder.  If you’re a listener and you will be in Henderson/Las Vegas, attending or competing in the World’s Toughest Mudder…

[0:25:01.0]

then please tune in to the next several episodes of the Obstacle Dominator show.  The Obstacle Dominator show, because we are throwing a massive after party.  We’ve got a giant 4,000 square foot suite at Planet Hollywood post-race and all the podcast listeners are gonna be invited to come hang-out and party after the World’s Toughest Mudder.

Rachel:  That sounds like so much fun.

Ben:  It is fun.

Rachel:  I didn’t know you partied.  I don’t think you were party guy.

Ben:  I party occasionally.  Usually after…

Rachel:  There you go.

Ben:  Something like that.  So that’s gonna be only for our Obstacle Dominator insiders.  You don’t need to buy anything, just listen to the show and we’re gonna announce where and when and possibly even the room number.  So obstacledominator.com to get in on the party in Las Vegas, my apologies to anyone who’s not gonna be there because you’re gonna miss out on the good time so.  That being said, speaking of good time, what do you think? Shall we jump in?

Rachel:  Let’s do it.

Ben:  Hey, it’s Ben Greenfield and yes, this is a commercial but don’t press fast forward because it’s actually something that I think is really gonna benefit you.  See, every day I write down every single workout that I do and I upload it to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle, now that’s not all.  Each month, my wife and I sit down and will make an entire list of the food, the supplements, the gear, the productivity hacks, the health hacks – everything that we have found to be interesting, random, entertaining, etc. and we have a glass of wine, we get in front of the camera and we talk about all those things live for you while we answer your questions as they come in.  It’s like coming in to our living room and sitting by the fire, heading to the coffee shop with us.  Now, there’s also inside the Inner Circle something called ‘The Healthy Home Workshop” and let me give you an idea of what the Greenfield house looks like each week.  My wife is constantly carrying a video camera around and recording what she cooks, how’s she’s working in the garden, how’s she’s creating a healthy home.  Well, let me give you an example of what came out just this week inside the Inner Circle Healthy Home Workshop that she does each month, it’s like an online video magazine with PDFs.  She did something on guilt-free treats that keep you cool.  In other words, how to create things like healthy icies, ice cream, popsicles, etc. that don’t spike your blood sugar – she did an episode called “Everything but the Root” where she talks about how to take root vegetables like say turnips, carrots, etc. and it was way more like the stems, the leaves, what you can do with them, their nutritional value, etc.  She did an entire video on natural waste to clean your dishwasher completely toxin and chemical-fee ways to make your own dishwasher detergent – everything you need to know about your dishwasher and then she finally did amazing ways to use a lowly planter pot where she goes on how to take old planter pot, pots and to everything from making tiki torches, to string lights, to umbrella holders with them.  It really is pretty amazing which she puts together every month and even if you’re not interested in Healthy Home Workshop, the daily workouts from me, the monthly Q&As, and intimate workshops with my wife and I are well-worth being a member of the Inner Circle.  So, sorry for the long commercial but you can check all this out over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/innercircle, it’s a buck to check out, it’s $14 a month to be a member of which is a drop of the bucket compared to what you actually get as far as value.  Yes, you’ll get full access to all the archives and everything we’ve ever produced in the Inner Circle.  So if you pretty much wanna have your house run just like mine, if you wanna do workouts just like me, if you wanna eat the foods that I’m eating and prepare the dishes that my wife is making etc. – the Inner Circle really is the place to do it so check it out: bengreenfieldfitness.com/innercircle and it really will change your life, I promise.  So, see you inside!

Listener Q & A:

Anna:  Hey Ben, my name is Anna and I’m from Washington, DC.  I have a question about cheat days and more specifically, cheat meals.  Let’s say that yesterday were Sunday and I stumbled upon a gold Oreos or Dorito Shack and I kinda gorged for one meal and may or may not have had ice cream afterwards…

[0:30:01.3]

which is just completely off the record of my usual diet.  Which usually follows what you recommend which is high fat, low carb, moderate protein.  What do I do the following day when I’m usually kinda feel like (curse word) to be able to rebound and get myself going back again as quickly as possible? Any help would be really appreciated.  Thanks, love the show.

Rachel:  I’m not actually too big on cheat days because I don’t restrict my diet…

Ben:  Oh, come on.

Rachel:  …in any way, really.

Ben:  You’ve never just gone like a not Sun – I mean, I know you accidentally ate chicken…

Rachel:  Oooh, yeah.

Ben:  …a little to a few times, but I mean, do you ever just got like chocolate and wine and (rara-sound)…

Rachel:  Yep, for sure.  I take it back, I take it back.  Monthly periods, I must admit, I indulge in chocolate, I don’t know.  I just – I think it’s magnesium, I think you mentioned it at some point.

Ben:  Monthly, you mean month like literally when you’re time of the month comes around? That’s…

Rachel:  Right.  Well, usually a couple of days before…

Ben:  Okay.

Rachel:  But I just all of a sudden just indulge for sure.

Ben:  Oh.

Rachel:  And I’ll have cheese – oh my gosh – cheese and butter and like bread like fatty buried cheese like really fatty stuff.  And then I’ll have that for dinner and then for dessert, I’ll have like chocolate mousse.

Ben:  Chocolate mousse?

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  Amazing.  Yeah.  Now I don’t feel so bad about having pie for breakfast.

Rachel:  I can’t believe I didn’t think I had cheat days (laughs).

Ben:  You have cheat days at the…

Rachel:  Definitely have one.

Ben:  So best way to rebound after a cheat day.  Well, if you look at what’s going on with caloric excess, generally what happens is once your liver and your muscle glycogen stores get topped off.  Which takes around a little pan of size a 1,000 to 1,500 calories of carbohydrates or proteins, which can get converted into sugars and then store it away in muscle or liver as carbohydrates the same way.  Any excess after that, right? Like any glucose that winds up in the bloodstream is gonna pretty easily get converted into fats.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  Stores as white fast as said very simple mechanism that’s why fat for your licorice isn’t really fat for you licorice especially if you have the bucket of popcorn before you had the licorice so.

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  Unless you’re in a liver or muscle glycogen depleted state, you’re gonna turn carbohydrates into fats.  So caloric excess is an issue, you’ll also have typically on a cheat day, some issues potentially with some toxins or heavy metals, things like that floating in the bloodstream. Just because a lot of times, let’s face it, on a cheat day in many cases you are eating foods that might not be considered like clean and organic.  I don’t know many people that have cheat days on organic kale.

Rachel:  Vegetables (laughs).

Ben:  Yeah, from whole foods, right?

Rachel:  Junk food.

Ben:  So yeah and even you know, for me, like sometimes my cheat days are healthy but I’ll go to town on like sushi or you know, ungodly amounts of like steak where just boatloads of dark chocolate or you know, whatever.  And so in many cases, there are some things, you have take sushi for example, right? Like I can eat clean but I’m still getting some heavy metals and some mercury and some things like that along with something like say, sushi.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  So that’s another thing to bear in mind and just general inflammation.  You do produce inflammatory cytokines as a response to caloric excess, it’s simply the reason that you tend to see a lot of people like, I used to go like body-building shows and fitness conventions where people eat a lot, right? Like they wanted get swole, like a lot of the guys especially they’re there to be 70s big where they’re welcomed to the gun show t-shirts and…

Rachel:  (chuckles) I’m so glad I missed that era.

Ben:  And then you’re just like red faced, inflamed, puffy, swollen and part of that is just because of all the nasty ingredients that are in all of the energy bars and protein bars and protein shakes, etc. that are out there that are like you know, man in the can type of things.  But also, it’s just due to the freaking calories, like you are in a constantly inflamed state.  It’s why most of the blue zones in the world, most the areas of longevity, they have a practice at some point during the week or during the month or at some point during the year of fasting.  And it’s even a big problem on athletes.  I have an upcoming podcast on this about how athletes because they’re working out so much, they constantly have guts that are subjected to large amounts of calories that need to be digested.  And when your gut never gets a break, you can have not only inflammation but you know, constipation and heart burn and all these issues that a lot of you know, even “healthy” exercise are tedious can get, so.

Rachel:  Right.  Well, that makes sense.  ‘Cause I mean, if you’re eating that much especially in your early years, by the time you’re like 50, your gut has been working out.

Ben:  Mmm-hmm.  Yeah, yeah, exactly and sometimes you do have to hit the reboot button so to speak, with the fasting protocol, so.  That being said…

[0:35:01.6]

I’m gonna give you five of my best ways to burn more calories and to reverse some of the metabolic damage following a cheat day. So here we go, the first I already eluded to.  So we talked a little bit about cold and cold thermogenesis, and what I liked about that in addition to its ability to simply burn calories, is that you get a big release of the hormone called adiponectin.  Adiponectin gets released from your fat tissue during cold thermogenesis or cold exposure.  Now what adiponectin does is it increases what’s called mitochondrial biogenesis, the conversion of light fat and the brown fat like we talked about earlier.  But even more importantly, it triggers the release of free fatty acids from the fat tissue causes them to be taken up into the muscle tissue to be burned as a fuel, so it literally strips the fat out of the fat cells that you filled up the day before.  The cool thing is that’s also a natural anti-inflammatory hormone adiponectin and they’ve shown that through the use of cold thermogenesis and one study was done with this cool fat burner vest that I wear.  It’s able to raise adiponectin by about 9% when you use it which is significant.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  Not sounds so significant ‘cause it’s not double digit, but it is pretty significant.

Rachel:  So what’s the deal with being like how when do you actually need to be cold for?

Ben:  Yeah, good question.  So there are various stages of cold thermogenesis.  I wrote an article for the website T-Nation about this, about how you’ve got mild cold thermogenesis and then moderate cold thermogenesis and then hard cold thermogenesis.  Mild cold would be like, “okay, I’m gonna set my room temp at 60 degrees and sleep in the cold”, and it’s not like you’re shivering all night but you’re aware.  It’s like a cooler temperature, that’s mild cold thermogenesis and that requires long periods of time.  That’ll be like you’re gonna keep your house at that temperature, right?

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  And be subjected to it for whatever, 8 to 10 hours during the day.  You don’t get much of a response but you get a little bit of an uptake in lipase, fat burning, metabolic activity, etc.  Moderate cold thermogenesis would be you’re doing like a couple of cold showers during the day, you are perhaps doing like a like a cold water swim, right? Like you’re going to the gym, you’re swimming in the pool like 70 degrees and you’re kinda cold…

Rachel:  Yeah.  And yeah.

Ben:  And it’s one of those swims where you swing your arms at the edge of the pool trying to convince yourself to jump in…

Rachel:  It’s a good idea, mmm-hmm.

Ben:  but you’re also not like shaking and shivering at the end.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  You’re goosebumping a little bit, but it’s not that bad.  A hardcore cold thermogenesis would be like 20 minute ice bath, where it’s…

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  …really everything you’ve got and when you get out your shivering for like 30 to 60 minutes afterwards.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  Or you know the use of this cool fat burner gear that you – where you wear the vest until you get to the point where you’re shivering and then you keep it on and continue to shiver for good 60 minutes.  So that’s where you get the biggest effect, is once your body is actually shivering, shaking, goosebumps, that’s where you get a big effect and that’s typically what I go for, just ‘cause I’m masochistic and hard core.

Rachel:  Can we just quickly – what’s the benefit of doing the actual hot to cold contrast?

Ben:  So the hot to cold contrast going from cold to hot, what happens is you get increase production of what’s called nitric oxide.  The calorie burning effects of the hot/cold contrast are not quite as beneficial as the cardio-vascular effects, right? So it’s like taking a fire hose through your arteries, fascia constriction, fascia dilation, increase glucose and oxygen delivery to tissues, increase production of nitric oxide, greater wakefulness because your brain gets more capillary delivery as well – so that’s kinda the idea of the hot to cold contrast.

Rachel:  Interesting.  Okay.

Ben:  But ultimately, if you can, the morning after cheat day, subject yourself to cold, preferably like that hardcore cold, it can make a huge difference in terms of you not getting fat basically,

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  …in response to cheat day.  Now…

Rachel:  And that’s also gonna make you feel good as well as and the after going through that and then when your body gets back to like a normal temperature, you’ll feel real good.

Ben:  Well, sometimes like the morning after Thanksgiving or Christmas, I don’t wanna exercise like I wake up and it’s like you have a food hangover.

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  Yeah.  And so I am – I can jump in cold water and kinda hang-out for a while, I can wear the cool fat burner vest and like reply to some emails and stuff like that and still get a pretty good fat burning effect. So…

Rachel:  Fat burning for lazy people.

Ben:  You can combine these stuff, curcumin, like I mentioned.  Good plan: 1 to 2 grams of curcumin in combination with cold thermogenesis.  Caffeine also mobilizes fatty acids in a very similar way to adiponectin, caffeine would be another thing to combine with cold thermogenesis.  The last one is called bitter melon extract, now, bitter melon extract can similar to curcumin help with the formation…

[0:40:1.8]

of brown adipose to white adipose tissue.  Probably via the release of adiponectin and leptin from fat cells, as well as the release of another hormone called irisin.  And irisin works a little bit similarly to adiponectin, specifically in terms of mobilizing fatty acids from fat cells.  It can also lower the signaling protein that’s called myostatin that causes an increase in muscle growth.  If you ever see myostatin knock-out mice or myostatin knock-out bulls with this even little German kid, you can see on the internet, he’s got like – he’s like 9 years old and he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s got a myostatin knock-out gene.  Where he just doesn’t produce this or he naturally doesn’t have this protein myostatin and when you knock-out myostatin, you get this huge increase in muscle growth.  He’s probably gonna like die when he’s 22, but…

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  you don’t want just like, I can’t, I’m sorry, I was rude.

Rachel:  (laughs) It took me on emotional roller coaster this time.

Ben:  All the Germans are upset now.  Anyways though, so irisin is the other thing that this bitter melon extract might cause a release of, especially when combined with cold thermogenesis.  So, anyways, that is the first thing: get cold, preferably combine it with curcumin; combine it with bitter melon extract.

Rachel:  Get freezing cold.

Ben:  Freezing cold, yeah, that’s number one.  Fasted exercise is kind of a no-brainer here, if you can exercise, get up in the morning and do something in a fasted state.  You’re going to more readily tap into fatty acids during the night, you will have burnt through some of your liver glycogen and then when you wake up in the morning and you exercise, you’re going to be more likely to dip into fatty acids and yes, you can do the same thing.  You can use curcumin, you can use bitter melon extract, you can use caffeine, you can even combine all these at once like in your fasted exercise session could be a cold water swim, right? So you’re getting cold thermogenesis plus fasted exercise, so kinda like the best of both worlds.  But a fasted, not a fed exercise session, not a ‘drink a cup-of Bulletproof coffee’ – not that I have anything against Bulletproof coffee, I like this stuff, but you know, you don’t drink a 500 calorie cup of coffee to do your fasted exercise sessions.

Rachel:  Fasted exercise, right.

Ben:  Just that you know to have a piece of pie, just exercise.  So that’s number two: fasted exercise preferably about 20 to 30 minutes, you could go as long as an hour if you want to.  Once you exceed about 90 minutes that’s starts to get pretty stressful for your body, so you got that.

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  The next is that you want to somehow like I mentioned, all those carbohydrates that you’d typically have a on a cheat day are gonna fill up your glycogen.  They’re gonna fill up liver glycogen and muscle glycogen, and you want to at some point kinda tap into all that storage carbohydrate so that you free absorb carbohydrates so that you can have space to store any calories you might eat the next day for example.  So the way that you do that is you choose at some point during the day, preferably with the 1-2 combo of a morning fasted cold exercise session and in the afternoon or evening, do this next thing and that would be something that taps into muscle glycogen quite readily.  High intensity interval training or weight training and that’s how you burn glycogen – both of those burn up tons of glycogen.  And so what that means is anything that uses a lot of muscles like cycling for example, cycling with high intensity interval sessions like 10 by very, very hard 30 second efforts on a bicycle with full recovery, your big thigh and hamstring and quad muscles, they burn a lot of glycogen.  They swole a lot of glycogen, they also burn a lot of glycogen.  So cycling would be one example of a very good method of doing high intensity interval training.  You actually gonna burn more glycogen that way than if you say, sprint – much to sprinting up a hill, wearing a weight vest for example.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  Weight training is the other way to do it, full body weight training, make sure you’re moving through full range motion, forcing the muscles to actually rely upon glycogen, storage glycogen and carbohydrates to move through that range of motion, preferably working the muscles to fatigue, that’s how you burn carbohydrates.  It’s not rocket science, obviously, so that would be number three.  So we’ve got cold thermogenesis, we got fasted exercise, we’ve got high intensity interval training and or weight training – preferably both – you can do that in the afternoon for example.  The next would be low carbohydrate intake and this should go without saying.  Your glycogen levels are topped off so the fewer carbohydrates that you can eat the next day, better, especially if your cheat day involved the high amount of carbohydrates or high amount of protein.  Now fat doesn’t get converted into muscle glycogen quite as readily, so if your cheat day involved –I guess kinda like yours, Rachel, butter…

Rachel:  (curse word)

Ben:  butter…

[0:45:01.8] 

cream, what else? Chocolate mousse, etc. and it’s not like a sugar cheat as much as it is a fat cheat…

Rachel:  Mmm, definitely.

Ben:  In that case, following that up with a low carb day isn’t gonna do you quite as much good.  But if your cheat day is pizza, spaghetti, ice cream, like any of these sugar and carbonating foods, going low carb the next day simply means that you’re dumping that much less glycogen into your body.  And also, when you consider that glucose is inflammatory to the nerves and inflammatory to the blood, if it spends a lot of time in the bloodstream, then you can consider that to be an anti-inflammatory measure as well.

Rachel:  And what about just fasting in general, like skipping meals?

Ben:  Yeah.

Rachel:  After a cheat day.

Ben:  I mean you can definitely have a cheat day and then just like fasting entirely the next day if you want to you know?  You can do water fast or something like that.  A lot of people that listened they’re exercising however.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  And sometimes, if you know, whatever.  Let’s say you are running a marathon in February and you have a few cheat days over the Holidays, if you just decide you’re gonna fast and maybe try to exercise through the fast on a day after the cheat day, that can be really hard to get like a high quality exercise session and let me fly in the face of say you know, in this case your marathon training.

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  And so in that case, let just fasting in the morning and then throwing down some hard in the afternoon in more of a fed state could be…

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  …more prudent.  So it kinda depends on your level of activity…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  really, right?

Rachel:  Right.  If it was a recovery day, really.

Ben:  Oh, yeah.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  Yeah you can totally water fast, so you’re just like caffeine/green tea, some electrolytes, maybe some greens and just fast.  You stare at the wall.

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  Ah, infrared sauna and niacin.  This is the protocol that I talked about in my podcast on ‘how to biohack your body with an infrared sauna’.  And what happens is when you consume high dose niacin and you follow that up with infrared, preferably via sauna, you could use like one of these mats or body wraps or whatever, but the sauna is the most efficacious way to do it.  You get lipolysis, so you actually lipolyze fat cells in a very similar ways, you lipolyze fat cells when you combine say curcumin with cold.  You get a little bit of anti-inflammatory effect and you get this fat loss effect.  You also sweat things out, right? Like you sweat out things like heavy metals and toxins and stuff like that when you’re in infrared sauna.  And no, that is not woo-woo stuff that I’m pulling on my butt as a matter of fact, this Monday, I am publishing an article on how that occurs…on how you actually can detox through your skin.  Not just through your liver and your poo and your urine, you can detox…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  …through your skin.

Rachel:  Yes.

Ben:  So I’m gonna talk about that but basically what it comes down to is that you get a 1, 2 combo like lypolysis and you get detoxification.  So infrared sauna would be another way to do it and then I mean, again, you could combine things so you could wake up, you’ve got access to a sauna you could do your sauna with high dose niacin in your system and then you could follow that up with like a cold water swim.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  I mean there’s a lot of different ways that you could mix and match this stuff.

Rachel:  So the best way, really would be do a high intensity exercise in a fasted state but cold, in doing something cold, not eating any carbs and then having a sauna afterwards.

Ben:  Sounds like…

Rachel:  Ta-da!

Ben:  sounds like a party!  And… yeah!  So that’s pretty much it.  This also goes by the term bulimia, orthorexia, body dysmorphic disorder, etc. we’re towing the line with that kinda stuff, of course I’ll readily admit.  You know, eating to train and training to eat like that like some people be too much of that, so…

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  I would caution you.  Use…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  …every strategy that I just talked about in moderation.  I do not endorse stuffing your face like Rachel, with butter…

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  …and cheese and chocolate mousse…

Rachel:  Once a month.

Ben:  On a daily basis at least.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  So there you have it.  I’ll put links in the show notes to some of these tips over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/335.

James:  Hi Ben, my name is James.  I grew up taking Ritalin from the age of about 10 to 23ish, so I took a lot of Ritalin during that time.  I was wondering what I can do to get some health back in my liver and the other filtration systems that may have been damaged through the long use of that drug? Thank you.

Ben:  So Rachel, have you ever seen the Lego movie cartoon?

Rachel:  No, why?

Ben:  There’s this guy that this old school Lego figurine in the movie and he’s like the quintessential person that you’d put on Ritalin, like he basically runs around, like go on “Spaceship!

[0:50:01.4]

Spaceship!”

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  And he like builds spaceships extremely fast, hyper and flies off into spaceship and he’s just like a complete spazz, right?  So…

Rachel:  There’s a really hilarious in the new Family Guy episode out where they give Stewie Ritalin and then Brian takes it as well and it’s hilarious.

Ben:  Oh really? It’s the Family Guy Ritalin episode?

Rachel:  The new one.

Ben:  Okay.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  We’re gonna link to that in the show notes.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  So.

Rachel:  Stewie gets really calm and Brian gets really crazy.

Ben:  Nice.

Brian:   Stellano’s meds, huh?

Stewie:  Uh, yeah, they uh, they help to uhm… uhh, think.  Okay, time for an eyes open nap.

Brian:  Gosh, look what those pills are doing to you.  Putting you on that stuff was a huge mistake!

Ben:  Ah, okay.  We’ll definitely link to that in the show notes.  Writing a note to myself now to get it to the show notes…

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  The family guy Ritalin episode.  I’ve actually             never used Ritalin even though it is actually something that a lot of folks are taking.  It’s almost like a smart drug kind of…

Rachel:  Right. Yup.

Ben:  Because it is an amphetamine like substance, so it causes the same types of effects on the body as forms of speed.  Like loss of appetite and increased heart rate, increased wakefulness which you could also define as insomnia depending on use of…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  glass half full or half empty (chuckles).  And it is something that is in abuse a lot of these days as most people know, you know, injections, snorting, a lot of people are using Ritalin and a lot of people are seeing some long term health effects from that.  You know, especially when using it recreationally, you know like teenagers dying of heart attacks while out skateboarding because of using much of Ritalin as a party drug, that type of thing.  So it’s really, really interesting, that compound itself is called methylphenidate, methylphenidate.  So, methylphenidate is completely water soluble and what it can do in very, very high amounts because of that, is it can block a lot a little small blood vessels that can cause some damage to the cardiovascular system.  It can also cause some emotional conditions and addiction like symptoms even with short term lower amounts.  And you know, a lot of times, you will see short- term effects like disturbed sleep patterns, sometimes violent behavior, sometimes hyper excitability or irritability, sometimes panic or psychosis.  A lot of people don’t feel very good on Ritalin and…in many cases it’s you know, it’s not that great to be feeding kids the equivalent of poor man’s cocaine.

Rachel:  Right, yeah.

Ben:  Kinda like what Ritalin is.  Long term effects because of its water solubility can be permanent damage to blood vessels in the heart, blood vessels in the brain, high, high blood pressure, liver, kidney and lung damage.  Not a huge amount of it is metabolized by the liver unlike modafinil which is like 80% metabolized by the liver.  Methylphenidate, not so much, but it can cause long term organ damage.  You’ll also irritate your nose if you’re snorting it too much; destruction of tissues in the nose is something that you see in people who use Ritalin recreationally, so.

 Rachel:   The idea of snorting is that it what enters your bloodstream more quickly or something?

Ben:  Yeah, exactly.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  So, nasal capillaries and mucus membranes, etc.  So anyways though, the biggest thing though, for children and you know, the number one reason I wouldn’t really put my boys on it for example is just long term, very strong psychological dependence and depression, suicidal tendencies.  Like those are the biggies would Ritalin that you see a lot of kids get or just you know, suicidal thoughts, suicidal feelings, depression, etc.  So of course, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder is a pretty common neuro-behavioral thing that you see these days, ADHD whether it’s related to diet, whether it’s related to toxins and environment, mold, water, air, etc.  I am a firm believer that it’s more of an issue with a.) our modern environmental conditions not being that conducive to health in many cases.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  And then b.) the issue with a lot of children these days leading a more sedimentary lifestyle…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  …and in like my boys get super duper hyperactive, they probably fallen to every single category of ADHD when they’re sitting at home all day…

Rachel:  Yep.

Ben:  …versus when they play out in the forest for 4 hours…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  …and come back in just like, you know, both stimulated but also exhausted and they go to bed just fine.

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  So…

Rachel:  I feel like I don’t know if this is a great analogy but it’s the same as my dog.  Like if my dog doesn’t go out for a run, he’s a total (curse word).

Ben:  Right.

Rachel:  So.

Ben:  Exactly.  Or sometime, but some dogs…

[0:55:01.7]

like you could take them for a run but then you bring them back and you feed them bunch of crap dog food, they also have behavioral issues, right?

Rachel:  That’s… yeah.

Ben:  Sometimes it isn’t just environment…and then also you know, when you create a psychologically diagnosable condition, in many cases you just create a bunch of people who have that condition even though really they just, you know, they just need to be alive to be kids.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  It’s a big thing for boys.

Rachel:  And you know, regardless it doesn’t sound like Ritalin is the best thing…

Ben:  No.

Rachel:  …to be the answer to this ADHD question.

Ben:  No and interestingly, many of the alternatives to Ritalin are also things that can help reverse or combat a lot of the harmful effects of Ritalin, so let’s take a big one here: fish oil.  So the EPA and DHA in fish oil has been shown to assist with cognition and behavior modification in kids who have ADHD in randomized control trials.  So DHA for example very essential fatty acid for the brain can help to improve literacy and behavior.  EPA on the other hand, can help with blood flow and with reversing a lot of the blood vessel damage that Ritalin can cause.  So fish oil would be one thing like if I had been on Ritalin or if you know, I was dealing with something like ADHD, I would definitely be taking about 2 to 4 grams of a good, healthy fish oil each day…

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  so, that’s one thing.  There are some other things that help out, too: one is carnitine, so there’s this substance called acetyl-L-carnitine.  You’ll find it in many cases in meat for example, but you can also get it in its supplemental form and that’s another thing that has been successfully used to treat ADHD.  Now the form of L-carnitine is important because in many cases, if you go to the typical supplement store or even if you go to you know, for example like greenfieldfitnesssystems.com, we sell L-carnitine but we sell the form called carnitine-L-tartrate.  And that’s used for physical performance and power output, okay?

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  Some kind that you would use more for athletes, you need a form called acetyl-L-carnitine or ALCAR, a-l-c-a-r if you’re looking for cognitive enhancement.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  There’s a third form called the propionyl-L-carnitine or GPLC.  That one is typically used for blood flow issues.  That’s probably the least common one that you’re gonna find, but if you’re looking at using L-carnitine for neurologic health, then you want the form called a-l-c-a-r.  Brands vary like Mal Foods is a good brand, Standard Process is a good brand, Thorne has a good brand, I’ll put some links in the show notes for you but I would be considering that in addition to fish oil.  Now, there are also some herbs ashwagandha is very important herb, it’s one that we talked about.  Did you listened to the podcast episode with Roger Drummer?

Rachel:  I did, yeah.  It was fascinating stuff.

Ben:  Yes.  We released this podcast episode over the weekend.  If you haven’t listened to it, definitely go listened in.  And we talked about adaptogens and herbs and how they helped to regulate a lot of processes in the body specifically behavioral stress-based issues, hormone-based issues, etc.  And ashwagandha is a biggie when it comes to this, so ashwagandha is one to look into but there are some other things very similar to ashwagandha.  One for example is called bacopa, b-a-c-o-p-a, there was one study that found that kids 6 to 12 years old who had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, they actually were able to manage these symptoms.  This is a very recent study last year with the use of the use of this bacopa herb and ashwagandha has similar effects.  A lot of these herbs that are considered adaptogens actually help out quite a bit with neurotransmitter regulation and while I’m not a doctor and you cannot misconstrue this as medical advice.  And I’m not saying that you had a kid who’s bouncing off the walls on Ritalin; you take him off Ritalin right away and start shelving fish oil down their hatch.  But I am trying to give you some information so I just threw that disclaimer out there so that…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  I get a bunch of parents with ADHD suing the Ben Greenfield Fitness show.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  So not that would ever happen.  So anyways though, the supplement that has a high amount of adaptogens but doesn’t have caffeine in it, which I don’t feel especially for, kids at age they’d be using.  If you’re an adult, fine, not a big issue but there’s this one called Inner Peace.  So this guy we interviewed named Roger Drummer, we talked about this a little bit on the show; he’s got two different formulations.  One is called Tianchi which is more of an energy tonic that has a bunch of adaptogens in it and Inner Peace is basically everything that’s in Tianchi without any of the wakefulness inducing compounds.

Rachel:  Right.  Okay.

Ben:  Yes.  So that’s one called Inner Peace.  I take it before my naps, usually in the afternoon. 

[1:00:00.7]

Rachel:  And so just, one thing quickly with ADHD and we talked about what exactly is neurotransmitter regulation?

Ben:  So this would mean for example, some of those we talked about earlier related to happiness like dopamine, serotonin, etc., let’s say you’re low in dopamine or you’re low in serotonin, it can cause up regulation or more a greater release of those on what’s called the synaptic cleft, that connects one nerve cell to another nerve cell, so that’ll be have something like an adaptogen work on a neurotransmitter level.

Rachel:  I see.  Yeah.

Ben:  The last thing that would work well more for managing ADHD and then for reversing some of the effects of Ritalin would be 5-HTP and GABA.  So 5-HTP and that’s hydroxytryptophan and GABA is gamma aminobutyric acid, taking both of those together can have some calming effects.  A lot of women during their time of the month whether be it to control their propensity to eat ungodly amounts of brick cheese…

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  …or to… my wife has used both of these before when she finds herself irritable or experiencing cravings, etc.  These can also help to manage some of these symptoms of ADHD and certainly they can also help with insomnia, excessive wakefulness.  So 5-HTP and GABA, you’re gonna find them in a lot of sleep inducing compounds, there are some precursors to that like lemon balm and ashwagandha that are in the CBD compound that I formulated.  There’s also one I mentioned Onnit how you could get like the buffalo bar and everything for they make one called New Mood and New Mood is just a blend of lemon balm, GABA precursors, 5-HTP, etc.  And 5-HTP by the way, the way that works is a precursor to serotonin, so it helps you with a positive mood.  So and there’s some other things in there too like chamomile and valerian roots, some other relaxation type of compounds.  But I would recommend, if you’re just trying to calm yourself down a little bit, anything that contains a combination of 5-HTP and GABA or 5-HTP and GABA precursors can be quite useful.  And again, like unlike modafinil and stuff like that, long term liver, kidney, gut damage is not as high with Ritalin as much as some of the blood flow issues with some other things I talked about will help with…and also the behavior issues.  But if you do – you do want to do something like a gut detox or liver detox or something like that, there are a lot of fault claims out there when it comes to detoxification.  There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, there’s a lot of stuff that there may claims about that simply do not work.  Some of the things that actually have a research behind them chlorella would be one, charcoal would be another; there’s one called N-acetyl cysteine with used in hospitals a lot to detox the organs after like alcohol intoxication.  So, what I’ll do is I have an article that I wrote about kinda like myths of detox in which they just actually work in which things are either woo-woo or designed to make someone money.  And I wrote that on the Get Fit Guy website, so I will link to that in the show notes as well, if you kinda wanna throw the detox truth in there as well, it’s called ‘How to detox you liver and your kidneys’ is part two of that series and then ‘Is detoxing really a myth’ is part one of those series and I’ll put links to those in the show notes for you.  So, there you have it.

Patrick:   Hey Ben.  This is Patrick, apologies to any of your vegan listeners out there, but I have a question concerning harvesting deer organs.  I’m a hunter and this year I plan to harvest the animal’s organ meats, I was wondering if you had any suggestions on specific organs I should retrieve.  I’m already planning on saving the heart and liver, I’ve also seen that kidneys have been suggested as well.  I just want to get your thoughts on these and any others which might be beneficial.  Thanks and I love your podcast.  Keep up the good work.

Ben:  Rachel, ear muffs.

Rachel:  This one makes me giggle (chuckles).

Ben:  I know that you’re a not a wild gamer.

Rachel:  I am open.

Ben:  (laughs)

Rachel:  Each to their own.

Ben:  Oh.  Let’s see.

Rachel:  I’m fascinated to hear.  Ben, have you ever actually harvested a full animal?

Ben:  Uh, many times.

Rachel:  Yeah?  You’re a pro?

Ben:  I – well, mostly, deer.  So, I haven’t done like bear and pig.  My wife’s done pig before, she is, I mean one time I was off traveling, speaking somewhere and when I came back, an entire pig was taken apart in our garage.

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  Looks literally like a murder scene.

Rachel:  Oh god.

Ben:  I did not complain about the bacon that materialized shortly thereafter… 

[1:05:00.0]

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  …but the scene itself was almost disturbing.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  Anyways though, when it comes to wild gaming, especially when it comes to deer organs, specifically, there are some things that you can harvest.  And the first thing I’m gonna recommend to you is a book and then I’ll jump in these other things that I do.  So the book is a relatively new book written by guy named Steven Rinella who is quite the resource when it comes to not just harvesting wild game but cooking and preparing it in a darn tasty way.

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  So his new book is called “The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking Wild Game” and it’s an excellent read.  I’ve read it, great book, really good for hunting tactics, too.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  Actually there are few things about tracking white tail and so it’s got a lot of good things in there.  So check out that book, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but yes, there are some things that you can use.  One would be the heart, so the heart is when you’re filed dressing the animal of course, typically very, very easy to find.  You can’t really, can’t really miss the heart, right? And when it comes to the heart, typically you need to marinate that, if you are gonna use it.  So the heart responds very, very well especially deer heart responds very well to a marinade.

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  So what you can do…

Rachel:  Why, why do you have to marinate it?

Ben:  It’s a – it pumps a lot, it beats a lot, right? So it’s kind of like some of the muscles that you’d use a lot like a calf muscle like it can be very…

Rachel:  Oh.  Tough.

Ben:  kinda chewy and dense…

Rachel:  Okay.

Ben:  …just ‘cause, yeah, it’s tough.  So that’s why marinating it works so well.  One of the things that you can use as a marinade is some extra virgin olive oil, you can combine that with any kind of steak seasoning like a salt, pepper, cayenne type of thing and then vinegar.  Vinegar works actually very, very well to tenderize the meat, so mix the olive oil with the vinegar and then you basically use marinade.  You don’t have to marinate heart for very long, you can marinate it for like an hour and then you basically slice it into a little like half inch thick slices and you grill it and it’s actually pretty tasty if you do that.  The trick is to marinate it, though.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  You want the flavor of heart to actually be pretty good.  Another big one would be the liver, the liver again, very easy to harvest.  If you know, if you’re out hunting elk and where I know when a lot of people won’t grab the liver, the heart, they won’t grab the bones either which are great from bone marrow but they’re heavy.  And so when you’re packing out from the fields, sometimes you just wanting to pack you know, your major cuts that you can use for your sausage or for steaks, etc.  But if you can pack out the liver, not only use it an extremely rich source of fat soluble vitamins but I think it’s tasty, personally.  What do I do with the liver? I’ll typically soak it for about a day or overnight.  You either soak it in lemon juice which is relatively easy to find and get your hands on or you can soak it in raw milk.  Both of those remove not only some of the toxins from the liver ‘cause it does the detoxification organ, but they also help to tenderize the liver, very similar to the heart and they remove a lot of people describe it as like the gamy almost metallic flavor of liver.

Rachel:  Right, yup.

Ben:  So once…

Rachel:  I’m saying yup, ‘cause I actually have tasted it.

Ben:  Yup.  (chuckles)  So..

Rachel:  You guys think I’m all fake but I have, yeah, I have eaten.

Ben:  So once you’ve done that, what you do, very, very, very simple: you take a couple of eggs and you whisk them, alright, so you got your eggs.  You take some coconut flour or some almonds flour or any kind of flour and you take your little slices of liver and drag them first through the egg, then drag them through the flour and then you sprinkle some salt and pepper on them and you simply grill them for about 4 to 5 minutes per side.  Very, very simple recipe, you can add onions or mushrooms or bacon, you know that you kinda grill upon the side if you want all those go pretty well with liver.  And that’s it, that’s my world famous liver recipe.  So…

Rachel:  Simple stuff.

Ben:  Yeah, so you got that.  Another one is the kidneys, you could peel the outer membrane away from the kidneys, you can take them as it gonna be on either side of the deer of course.  Kinda up around close to the back side where the liver’s at and you can very, very easily without doing too much of the kidneys at all, just basically scram them up.  Like you can cube the kidneys once you peel the outer membrane away, that’s very important, unless you want a chewy membrane around your kidneys.  But they’re great for your adrenals and you can just like scram up with eggs, potatoes, there’s some herbs like cilantro, thyme or parsley in there and the kidneys are another one that’s some people don’t harvest but that actually work quite well.  So there’s a couple other things that some people don’t get from the deer but that you can get: one is the cheek meat, the jaw meat.  It’s very flavorful, it’s very rich, it’s almost like pulled pork and it’s actually quite easy to and again, you may want your ear muffs here, Rachel.  You can skin the head, so you get – you remove the skin from the head, once you’ve skinned the head you got access to the jaw meat.

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  And the jaw meat is just like you know, they sell a lot of like Mexican taco stands…

[1:10:01.8]

like tacos made from tongue, tacos made from cheek meat and it is very, very tender.  A deer’s tongue is typically not worth it, very small unlike elk moose, they’ve got big tongues, it can be very tender if you marinade them, etc…

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  But not a deer tongue, so I wouldn’t recommend the tongue but the jaw meat, definitely.  So you’ve got heart, liver, kidneys, your jaw meat and then the last thing, that you should take into consideration are the tenderloins.  And the tenderloins, you’re gonna find kinda like underneath the well, it’s basically the loins, kinda back behind the ribs a little bit, and that is something that if you’re out on the field or out camping and you’re hunting, if you get that out of their way right away, it doesn’t preserve very well, it doesn’t age very well but it’s extremely flavorful – you can eat it like that night.  It’s one of the most tender, juicy pieces of meat that you’re ever gonna eat.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  So just basically peel away the tenderloin and you wanna peel some of like – it’s got like a silver skin on it and some fat along the side of the spine where you’re gonna get the loins from.  But if you get rid of that silver skin, you get rid of some of the fat, you cut those tenderloins out, you can literally eat those almost right away and they’re amazingly flavorful when you get them from venison, so.

Rachel:  And how long does it take to do all these?

Ben:  Uh, field dressing an animal takes me about 45 to 60 minutes to that’s actually you know, gut it, fill dress it, if you wanna skin it and quarter it.  I mean that’s easily another 2 to 3 hours at least from me, I’ve seen people do it extremely fast.  And then other prep like once you’ve quartered, if you’re cutting it and you’re bagging and all that jazz, I mean sometimes we’re talking about hours and hours like that can be a full – full day’s chore.  So ultimately though, yeah, this is a great question Patrick asks because a lot of times people don’t save as many different portions as they can and amazingly…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  I’ve talked about this in my book “Beyond Training”, back in the day, good old days, the muscle meat was not prized because of its lack of fat soluble vitamins, because of its lack of the amino acid glycine which is important for your joints and your hormones, because the lack of fats.  And instead the liver, kidneys, the marrow, the heart, like these are the more prized parts of an animal…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  And a lot of times that they would feed the lean meat you know, the steaks to the dogs, so it’s kinda interesting.  You know, now we prize the lean meats more but yeah, these organ meats are incredibly important for everything: for your adrenal health to your hormone balance, etc.  And yeah, if you just can’t stand the taste, you can get desiccated liver powder and you can get thyroid extract – there what are called thyroid gland joints.  I mean you can supplement your way through this stuff but…

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  It’s oh, so much more tasty, too.

Rachel:  Yeah, I think you’re gonna hunt and kill it, you should eat it – the whole thing.

Ben:  Together with some mushrooms and onions and bacon.  I’ll save some mushrooms and onions for you.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  You can have those.

Rachel:  Thanks.

Ben:  And leftover lemon juice.

Rachel:  I’ll pass on the cheek meat and the kidneys and the liver and the heart (chuckles).

Judith:  Hi Ben, my name is Judith and I have a question for you, then here it is.  I’ve been a runner from most of my life – I’ve been a 10K runner until last year and then I’ve been competing in half marathon and then I’m coming from my third ultra marathon, ______ [1:13:25.6] actually that would be May.  So I clearly asked my mileage in the past year and a half and then after that, my knees are starting to crack very loudly when I’m just gonna walk and even more while I climb the stairs.  So is there anything that you can advise for me ______ [1:13:47.9] or if I just had this checked it out and you know, and let it make noise.  So thanks again and keep up what you’re doing.

Rachel:  So I feel like, this is everybody’s big question about joints cracking and like what do you do? What does it mean?

Ben:  We had a whole podcast on this.

Rachel:  Of course.

Ben:  Several months ago, episode number 314, about why joints pop.  But this is actually quite a timely question because there is a relatively new study that came out a couple of months ago that we didn’t talk about in that podcast episode.  And the study is entitled ‘Real-Time Visualization of Joint Cavitation’.

Rachel:  Hmm.

Ben:  And what it goes into is how we’ve always thought that cracking sounds that come from human joints are caused by these bubbles like the collapse of bubbles that form as different surfaces within the joint gets separated.  And so that bubble collapsing causes a crack cracking or popping or a little bit of a noise.  So what they did in the study was they took a bunch of joints,

[1:15:02.0]

in this case, they used metacarpophalangeal joints which are basically your fingers.  And they subjected them to traction forces and then they looked at what would happen using magnetic resonance imaging or MRIs.  And what they found was that the cracking was associated not with the collapse of a bubble, but instead via something called a rapid cavity inception, a rapid cavity inception (chuckles).  So what that means is that rather than being caused by bubbles popping, the sound actually comes from gas filling into the cavity that’s formed when we separate a joint and so it’s actually caused by bubbles forming.

Rachel:  Forming.  Wow.  Interesting.

Ben:  Cool.  So it’s like little bubbles are forming in these spaces and getting vacuumed into your joints as your joints separate, there’s not fluid that can fill that joint volume and so you create this cavity, create a black hole within your joints.  And when that happens, you get this like popping kind of sound since its influx of fluid.

Rachel:  And is it in any way, unhealthy?  Is it a sign of a healthy or unhealthy joint or anything?

Ben:  Hmmm.  Not in most cases.  So in those cases, especially like knuckles and backs and stuff like that, cracking your knuckles or cracking these joints has never been shown to cause arthri – if you have osteoarthritis, right? Like if you have cartilage in your joints that’s damaged, in some cases it could theoretically be bone on bone moving against each other – that’s more called crepitus.  And a lot of times that is just what sounds like, like this creeping (creeping sound), it’s not a crack or a pop.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  That is more damaging but the cracking and the popping is not.  Now there are some cases where it’s something else, it’s like the hips for example, that sometime pop or snap – you see these in runners and cyclists a lot. – this can often be due to tightness and muscular imbalances and it’s literally tendons that are snapping.  That are snapping over joints.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  That is something that we discussed in that podcast episode, so go back and listen to episode 314 if you wanna hear about that, the fix for that.  But then with knees, there’s another issue that can cause knees to crack and pop and that can be lack of strength in what’s called the vastus medialis muscle in the knee.  And when that happens, your patella doesn’t glide over the femoral surface the way that it should, so this is basically a weakness in the inner quad muscle, it can also be related to extreme tightness in the hamstrings.  So when I was young, my first snapper, I was like 19, 20 years old – I was playing a ton of volleyball, right? Sand volleyball, I was teaching the sand volleyball course to the University of Idaho, so every morning I was playing – it’s a horrible job.  I’ll basically go on the sand volleyball course behind the dorms and hang out with hot college girls for an hour and hit the volleyball back and forth.

Rachel:  Every young person’s dream.

Ben:  Every young person’s dream, and I was playing middle for the men’s volleyball team and I was also running ‘cause I was starting to dabble in triathlon at that point and I was putting my knees through a lot of stress.  And I got to a point where I couldn’t run more than a block without horrible knee pain, couldn’t jump, couldn’t land and I thought I had destroyed my knees – I literally thought it will.  It sucks and I’m done (chuckles).  I’ll be that guy that needs joint replacement when I’m 25.  And…

Rachel:  Oh my gosh.

Ben:  I went to the doctor, I went to local orthopedic surgeon and in many cases, orthopedic surgeons are knife happy, right? They’re trigger happy, they wanna put you in a knife and this guy took one look at me and put me on the table, put me through some stretches and basically told me, your inner quads are weak as heck and you need to spend a good 10 to 15 minutes per day, stretching and lengthening your hamstrings.  So I did exactly what he said, I did all these standing, straight leg, cable kicks where I was kicking forward with an elastic band or a cable with my toe turned slightly outward so that I was strengthening the inner part of my quadriceps.  I did the leg extension machine, same thing, toes turned outward, really focusing on the inner quads, I would walk uphill on the treadmill consciously and slowly focusing on the inner quadriceps muscles.  And then I would do isometric lunge holds where I drop down a lunge position, just hold the lunge position with focusing again on that inner quad muscle firing, so I was essentially training my inner quads.

Rachel:  Right.

Ben:  And at the same time, foam rolling and stretching the heck out of my hamstrings, I can tell it almost like – you know stretches sometimes feel like they’re gonna hurt ‘cause you’re…

Rachel:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  …stretching like they’re teeth-grit tingly tight.  And within about 3 months, my knee pain moved completely away because it was all…

Rachel:  Wow.

[1:20:00.7]

…due to my knee cap tracking improperly and once I got to stretch my hamstrings and my quads, didn’t get a crepitus, didn’t get a cracking, didn’t get a popping – that all went away, along with the pain, so.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  What I’m getting at here? In case you hadn’t guessed…

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  …is that in Judith’s case, I’d recommend she strengthens her VMO and she stretches her hamstrings and in most cases, that is going to fix the issue with pain in your knees.  Yeah, there may be other things going, might have tight calves, might have tight hip flexors, you may need like a full body full length routine like all those stuff is good.  You know, maybe a bicycle on your seats to like obviously there’s a ton of things I don’t know about Judith because I don’t stalk our podcast listeners.

Rachel:  (chuckles)

Ben:  But the quads and the hamstrings are two places that I would highly recommend that Judith start with, so.

Rachel:  Mmm, and so there’s a certain set of joints that could should crack normally then there are others that you might wanna look into something else being the reason for.

Ben:  Mmm-hmm.  That’s actually one of my favorite things to do is to kinda like interlays my fingers, put in form, crack my knuckles and pop them a little bit right before I swing up into a refrigerator and eat my pie – kinda like, “I’m ready.”

Rachel:  Morning routine.

Ben:  Pre-pie stretch.  Yeah.  So anyways though, check out Judith and anybody else’s listening in, I’ll put the link to some of these studies on joint cavitation and why joints pop, some of the fixes, etc., so that and some more goodies over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/335.  And speaking of goodies, we have a lovely, lovely little gem.  Did you see that review that got left on iTunes?

Rachel:  I haven’t.  I’m obviously about to read it though, so.

Ben:  Yeah, I swear.  Maybe this person was Australian.  Sounds like something that an Aussie would say lovely little gem.

Rachel:  Aww.  Yey!

Ben:  So, Jasline007 left us this review and here’s the way it works: if you leave a review on iTunes, not only do you do a great deal a good karma and service to help spread the good word about the podcast, you go in and you leave 5 stars, and you say something nice and you feel really good about yourself – make you happy, probably.  In the same way that gratitude, that there’s gotta be some kind of a dopamine or serotonin release.

Rachel:  It’s an active gratitude.

Ben:  Possibly.  Yeah, it is.

Rachel:  Yeah, leaving a review.  Yeah, it’s how you can make yourself more happy.

Ben:  Yes.  So, make yourself more happy, leave a review in iTunes and if  you hear your review read on the show, all you need to do is email [email protected], that’s [email protected], and we will send you a handy dandy tech t-shirt, we will send you a BPA-free water bottle, we will send you a really cool beanie that I actually wear quite a bit – all in blazing with the Ben Greenfield Fitness logo.  So that being said, Rachel, you wanna take it away?

Rachel:  Alright.  Here we go.  Jas says, “Remarkably, I discovered the podcast up on my phone a few months ago.  Ben’s podcast was the first one I listened to and I’ve been hooked ever since.  I have 2 boys, 7 and 4, who happen to love Ben’s coconut Popsicle recipe.  Sometimes the information goes right over my head…” Don’t worry, Jas, me too.  “But then I accept that as a challenge to grow, learn and expand my knowledge of the ever growing health and fitness world.  Check out this podcast and do yourself a favor by going ahead and clicking ‘Subscribe’.”  Awww, a legend.

Ben:  And she too, sounds like she too, randomly discovers apps on her phone or apps in general.  I’ll find apps in my phone that my kids that somehow figured out, I’ll install.  My kids don’t get my phone too much but like I found the Fart app on there the other day…

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  …just like cycles through 12 different variations of a fart.

Rachel:  That’s definitely the app of a young boy.

Ben:  Yeah, the other day, they’d figured out how to pull up a jokes website – a jokes website.  So I’m gonna start being careful of my phone – you don’t know what you’ll get – they, more apps that I download.  God forbid, they haven’t got my iCloud password that actually do the purchase apps, that would be the next phase of hiding my phone but…

Rachel:  You’ll have to lock it up.

Ben:  In the meantime, thank you for the review to 007, thanks for leaving that one, Jasline007.  And again, you can leave your iTunes review and tune in this weekend like I mentioned for that Denise Minger podcast.  It’s going to…

Rachel:  It’s gonna be fascinating.

Ben:  …blow your minds, it’s a good one, so.  That…

Rachel:  I listened to the one on adaptogenic herbs, that’s really cool as well.

Ben:  Yes, the herbs episode.  Where as we say, here in the Washington state, herbs, herbs.

Rachel:  (laughs) Good stuff only, there’s a ‘h’, it’s herbs.

Ben:  H.

Rachel:  Alright.

Ben:  Alright, cool.

You’ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.  Go to bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

[1:25:57.5]     END

Oct 21, 2015 Podcast: How To Kill Fat Cells, 5 Ways To Burn More Calories After A Cheat Day, Health Effects of Ritalin & More!

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right (or go to SpeakPipe), use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, or use the “Ask Ben” form at the bottom of this page.

—————————————————–

News Flashes:

You can receive these News Flashes (and more) every single day, if you follow Ben on Twitter.com/BenGreenfieldInstagram.com/BenGreenfieldFitnessFacebook.com/BGFitness and Google+.

—————————————————–

Special Announcements:

Did you miss the weekend podcast episode with Roger Drummer? It was a must-listen – titled “The Zen Of Chinese Adaptogenic Herbs: An Interview With The Inventor Of World’s Most Potent Adaptogens.” Click here to listen now or download for later!

This podcast is brought to you by Inquiry, which makes amazing men’s clothing that is cool, comfortable and clean. You can use 10% discount code BEN10 at ShopInquiry.com.

This podcast is brought to you by Harrys shaving. Visit Harrys.com and use $5 discount code “ben” on a Winston set, a Truman set, or any other mighty fine shaving equipment, at a fraction of the cost of drugstore razors.

This podcast is brought to you by Onnit. Visit Onnit.com to instantly save 10% on any of their tasty superfoods like nut butter or their Warrior bar, made with real prairie-fed buffalo, cranberries, and a spicy pepper blend.

Now Available – Ben Greenfield’s “REV Yourself Conference” – 25 Packaged Interviews With The World’s Leading Experts In Physical & Mental Performance Enhancement Strategies. In this package, you’ll get to watch and listen as Ben Greenfield sits down with the world’s leading experts in biohacking, physical performance, mental performance, cognitive enhancement, personal productivity, muscle gain, fat loss and more. In a frank, easy-to-understand, fireside chat format, these experts reveal all their most cutting-edge secrets, and your access to the videos and audios also includes helpful notes, summaries and more. From Dr. Mercola to Mark Sisson to Nora Gedgaudas, you can check out the lineup and get access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, forever (no expiration!) once you click here to get lifetime access for $47.

Dec 4-6, 2015: Ben is speaking at the Unbeatable Mind Retreat in Carlsbad, California. This is where SEALFit and Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine will be assembling the best of the best in everything from performance to cutting-edge mental training to advanced sleep tactics and more. Includes amazing ancestral meals, morning WOD’s at SEALFit HQ (the site of the world famous Kokoro camp), Warrior Yoga instruction and workouts, and speakers such as Robb Wolf, Dr. Kirk Parsley, Dominic D’Agostino, and more.

Nov 14, 2015: Ben will be competing at the World’s Toughest Mudder. If you live near Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada, be sure to come watch the action!

Nov 17-18, 2016: Ben is speaking at the Biohacker’s Summit in Helsinki, Finland. Discover the latest in wearables, internet of things, digital health, and mobile apps to increase performance, be healthier, stay fit, and get more done. Learn about taking food, preparation, cooking, and eating to the next level with the latest science and kitchen chemistry. Even delve into implanted chips, gene therapy, bionic arms, biometric shirts, robotic assistants, and virtual reality. Two days with an amazing crowd and a closing party with upgraded DJs to talk about. Click here to get in now.

Ben Greenfield’s New York Times Bestselling book Beyond Training is now available on Audible! After spending over 43 hours in front of a microphone, Ben has finished recording a 100% (fully updated) audio recording of this quintessential guide to performance, recovery, fat loss, digestion, brain, sleep, hormones and more. If you’re new to Audible, you can get it now for free by clicking here.

Grab this Official Ben Greenfield Fitness Gear package that comes with a tech shirt, a beanie and a water bottle.

And of course, this week’s top iTunes review – gets some BG Fitness swag straight from Ben – click here to leave your review for a chance to win some!

 

—————————————————–

Listener Q&A:

As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Rachel Browne, the NEW Podcast Sidekick.

5 Ways To Burn More Calories After A Cheat Day

Anna says: She wants to know the best way to rebound after a cheat day? How do you get yourself back to operating optimally as quickly as possible?

In my response, I recommend:
CoolFatBurner.com + Curcumin + Bitter Melon Extract
-Fasted Exercise + Caffeine
-HIIT and/or Weight Training
-Low carb
Infrared Sauna & Niacin
Get Fit Guy Detox article

Health Effects of Ritalin

James says: He took Ritalin from age 10-23, what can he do to get health back into his liver and other filtration systems that may have been damaged by the long use of that drug?

In my response, I recommend:
-Family Guy & Ritalin
Fish oil
Inner Peace
Acetyl-L-carnitine
-5-HTP and GABA (e.g. CBD or New Mood)

The Best Way To Eat Wild Game

Patrick says: He’s a hunter and this year he wants to harvest deer organ meat. Do you have suggestions on specific organs he should retrieve and why they are important, he’s already going to save the heart and liver.

In my response, I recommend:
The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game: Volume 1: Big Game

What To Do About Cracking Knees

Judith says: She’s recently increased significantly her running mileage from half marathons to ultra marathons, and as a result her knees are starting to crack very loudly, especially when she climbs stairs. What are your suggestions for how to fix this?

In my response, I recommend:
Episode 314 on Why Joints Pop
This new study on joint cavitation

Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/10/335-how-to-kill-fat-cells-5-ways-to-burn-more-calories-after-a-cheat-day-health-effects-of-ritalin-more/

 

 

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *