[Transcript] – 8 Energy Boosting Desserts, Yoga For Energy, Food Labels Made Easy, A Kitchen Makeover, And More!

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Transcripts

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/nutrition-podcasts/all-day-energy-diet-book/

[00:00] About Yuri Elkaim

[03:30] On Yuri's Baldness

[09:26] Relating Diet And Exhaustion

[16:33] On Exhaustive Enzyme Pathways

[20:21] On Potential Renal Acid Loads

[25:32] Using Clean Proteins

[31:17] Using Seven-Day Energy Resets

[37:30] End of Podcast

Ben:  Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I have on the call with me today a friend of mine.  His name is Yuri Elkaim, and he's actually kind of a little bit of an outlier in what you might call a renegade in the whole nutrition and health community.  He's actually been referred to, and I've seen this on his Amazon biopage as the Health Whisperer for being able to get to the heart of what matters and produce really good health and fitness results in folks who have kind of tried everything without getting very good results at all.

Now Yuri is not just a holistic nutritionist and a fitness expert, but he's one of those guys who has kind of been there and walked the walk to because he's a former professional soccer player, and also for seven seasons, he was the strength and conditioning and the nutrition coach for the nationally-ranked men's soccer program at the University of Toronto.  So he's not just out there writing about nutrition and about how to get a better body and have more energy, but he's also himself been through this and put a lot of the time in the trenches, and that's something that's very important to me when I bring you guys guests is that these are folks who are not just sitting around at home in their underwear, riding on their computer.  Right, Yuri?

Yuri:  Sometimes I do that.  Only when informed of such.

Ben:  So the reason that Yuri is on the call today is because he's been doing a lot of research.  He's been doing a lot of writing, and I happened to have gotten my hands on about eleven chapters of a brand new book that he's produced in which he talks about how he went from soccer to bed to having no hair on his head, which he's going to talk to us about today, and also why we're tired?  What sneaky food work their way into our diets that rob us of energy, the daily habits that can make us sluggish and the things that we do that our energy drains and then how to get off of these and how to find energizing sources of diet, of exercise, of basically ways of living that burn fat, that don't crush your body and that give you energy all day long. So we're going to delve into this and talk a little bit about this brand new book that Yuri has produced.  By the way, if, as you're listening, you want to go check out the book, I'll put up a page for you over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/energy, and at bengreenfieldfitness.com/energy, I'll include all of the resources that Yuri and I talk about today.  So Yuri, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Yuri:  Pleasure to be with you, Ben.  Thanks for having me.

Ben:  So let's jump in right here.  You were a professional soccer player, then in the intro to your book, you talk about how you went from soccer to bed to no hair on your head which is a very catchy rhyme, but I imagine that there's a little bit more to it than that.  Can you delve into what exactly is behind that phrase?

Yuri:  Yeah, so that phrase basically depicts twenty-some odd years of my life, so growing up, my whole goal is to play soccer professionally.  That was my dreams, so I dedicated probably fifteen thousand-plus hours training and playing.  In my early twenties, I was able to do that which is awesome, but it kind of overshadowed the reality that I was fit but I wasn't healthy.  So growing up I had really bad eczema and asthma that it got a little bit better as I got older, but even I remember, even playing in some of my professional games, I would have my puffer by the post just in case.  So that was more of kind of a baby having its blankie, just for reassurance.  But when I was seventeen, I actually started losing my hair, and my dad's Moroccan, so for anyone listening, hopefully you can get an extra image of how much body hair I may have had in the time before this.

Ben:  Yeah, that's like one simple Yeti or Chewbacca, right?

Yuri:  Pretty much, yeah.  So I had really bushy eyebrows, hair all over.  It wasn't really a control when I haven't seem more than I have now.  So I remember coming home from soccer practice one day and I was taking a shower, washing my hair and looking at my hands, and I've got hair on my hands.  And I'm like that's not normal, I've never seen this before.  Next morning I wake up, I've got hair on my pillow, substantial amounts, and within about six weeks, I lost all the hair on my head.  Eyebrows, eyelashes, everything, and so I was like okay, what is going on here?  And this is like my senior year of high school, so now I'm walking on the halls of school and people looking at me like I've got cancer or something.  So it was a really awkward time, and the medical community really didn't make things better because they had no solutions that were non-toxic.  They wanted to inject a cortisone into my head, lather my body up with cortisone to keep my eczema at bay, and I was like that's not going to happen.  So it took about eight years, so at seventeen I lost my hair, I finished high school, went to study kinesiology at the University of Toronto.  I did that, finished that, played pro soccer.  I retired in my mid-twenty-fourth year, so when I was twenty-four, I finished.  Skimmed back to Toronto, and through a series of events, stumbled upon a holistic nutrition school in Toronto, and I was like maybe I should check this out.

Ben:  Were you doing this, this interesting nutrition purely because of your hair, or had you created a link yet between your diet and what was going on with your hair?

Yuri:  No, it took about eight years for that link to kind of solidify.  So you know, playing soccer, I was eating tons of pasta and breads and grains 'cause this is what I was told athletes eat which is a complete bunch of nonsense as you know, but I was training clients.  I started personal training my second year at university is when I came back from France.  I started picking up my clients again, and I thought oh, this would be great for vent because it's obviously nested to understand diet and nutrition.  So I took the course mainly for them, but on the first day, I was exposed to this information.  I said wow, this is actually really eye-opening 'cause I've been four years among the top universities in the world.  Never been exposed to this stuff, and one day, I'm just like, my jaw had completely dropped from what I was learning.  So I asked one of the professors after my first day who's a naturopathic doctor.  And I asked her; I was like, “you know, I have alopecia which is an autoimmune condition that affects my hair and eczema and all this other stuff.  Do you think that would be related to my diet?”  Without even thinking, she's like, “absolutely.  We see it every single day.”  And I was like, “wow.”

Ben:  Where were you eight years ago?

Yuri:  Yeah, pretty much.  So that was kind of the hope that I needed to be like okay, I can actually turn this thing around.  So that was kind of my introduction to healthy eating, cleaning up my body, and within about eight weeks, basically overcame all my asthma, governed all my eczema.  All the digestive issues I had when I was younger were just gone, and pretty much most of my hair regrew.  As you know as I’ve said a couple of weeks ago, I don't have any hair right now, and autoimmune conditions tend to come and go sometimes.  So I'm just in a phase now where two and a half years ago, it started falling out again, so it doesn't really matter to me.  The most important thing for me though during that whole process was the energy that I started to feel again because when I was younger, I was sleeping ten to twelve hours a night and still feeling tired for the day.  I was falling asleep in class, a lot of times having to take naps after school.  I would often sleep in and miss my morning classes 'cause I didn't want to get out of bed.  So being able to transform that to jumping out of bed on seven and a half hours of sleep was a huge thing for me.  I didn't even care about the hair.  For me, it was more about the energy.

Ben:  Yeah, it's so crazy.  It's almost like the hair is the canary in the mind, right?  And it can indicate other things going on that are stripping you of energy, and I know that's what you start off in your book is answering that question of why we're so tired.  And what I'm curious about is kind of a two-fold question but it might be a one-fold question.  I don't know, the foods that you eliminated to help out with your autoimmune condition and your hair, do those relate to the same type of foods that make people tired during the day?  Like brain fog and feeling blah when you get out of bed and having to have that type of coffee and that type of thing?

Yuri:  Yeah, absolutely.  The thing that I realize is that how you heal anything is how you heal everything for the most part, and I've been doing this, really kind of specializing in energy for fourteen years, and I've noticed that if people are tired, usually there's something going on internally that is requiring more energy to heal or rectify that problem.  So our body has, let's call it a finite amount of vitality or energy, and if our body is constantly fighting inflammation or infections or is repairing from an intense exercise, then we don't have that amount of energy to put towards things like locomotion or movement.

So to make this a little more understandable, for women who are pregnant, they typically don't have the energy that they would otherwise, and that's because they're growing another human being inside them.  So their body's requiring a lot of energy to heal and grow.  If you're sick, you don't feel like doing much.  You just want to lay in bed, and that's because your body is requiring most of the energy to heal and get better.  So we have to understand that usually when people have no energy, there's something else going on inside, and when you start removing foods that irritate the body.  So for me, I grew up on a lot of processed foods, a lot of grains, a lot of dairy, very few vegetables and fruit, and I didn't realize what that was doing to me, but the reality was that it was just destroying my gut which was now spewing all sorts of undigested foods into my bloodstream.  My immune system was reacting to all that, and now my immune system was constantly working to fight all that off.  So that's one of the reasons why I had very little energy.

The problem too is that the very foods that drain our energy, at least a few of them are also the foods we turned to have more energy.  So I'll give you an example, caffeine and sugar.  The problem with caffeine is that it's a stimulant, and the reason we're so tired from the most part is that most of us.  Let me back up for a second.  The reason we're so tired is because our biology has not evolved since we first inhabited this earth, and that basically means when we're stressed, we go through this fight of flight response.  And that's what came in an acute dangerous situation where we have to run away from something or fight something, and that's the way our ancestors hunted and survived, but today when we opened up our e-mails, like boom.  Stress response.  When we get a message from our boss, then we did something that’s might more to him.  Boom, stress response.  When our kids are screaming, stress response, and it's go-go-go, non-stop.  So this constant stimulation on our adrenal glands which are mainly these two little walnut-sized little glands that sit on top of our kidneys that are responsible for giving us stress.  And so they very easily become overworked, so when you add in stressors or stimulants like caffeine, like sugar, you make that whole thing even worse.

Over time, this constant stimulation can wear down the adrenal function.  In addition to that, they also wreak havoc on blood sugar levels because what stimulants do like caffeine and like sugar is that they'll prime their adrenals to pump out adrenaline and cortisol which will break down energy reserves in the body from immediate energy in the blood.  So immediate blood sugar.  Along with that is it spikes with blood sugar, and then you get this surge of insulin to take that sugar into the blood, and then you crash.  So then you feel crummy, then you seek that next cup of coffee or that chocolate bar or something sweet to bring you back to life, and then it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle.  So that's typically how things evolve with a lot of people, and unfortunately, they're not really conscious of what's happening.  Yeah, so those are two of the biggies.

Ben:  Now let me ask you this because our podcast listeners are pretty healthy, and honestly most of them know that caffeine and sugar probably aren't that hot and are ultimately going to leave you kind of drained if you overdo them.  Do you think that there are actual health foods out there, like things that people are eating that they think are healthy that are hidden energy drains or that are things that cause autoimmune problems?  Did you find things in your diet that kind of shocked you in terms of foods or supplements or drinks that we might at first glance, think are healthy but that could in fact be an energy drain?

Yuri:  Yeah, and I think it really depends on what people think as healthy, what do they qualify as healthy.  Some people think whole wheat bread is healthy, but for me I categorize all bread in the same pile of garbage.  So whether it's white bread or brown bread or twelve grain, bread is bread because it contains very easily digestible wheats which causes issues with blood sugar, but also because it's high in gluten, and gluten are very problematic for attacking the lining of our gut which can lead to things like leaky gut and allergies and autoimmune diseases.  So that's one thing, but the thing is everything responds very uniquely to the same foods.

So if both you and I have broccoli, we might respond differently based on our metabolic make up, but I think what happens more pervasively is almost, and I talk about this in the book, is the journey daily habit which we all have, which we all do, which is eating and digestion, and you could be having the healthiest foods whichever they might be.  Avocados, or you can be having like really healthy smoothies, but if your stomach is not able to produce enough hydrochloric acid to break that stuff down or you don't have enough enzymes that are being secreted into your small intestines to digest them and kind of assimilate all that stuff, you're going to feel a little bit more tired because digestion is probably the most energy intense process in the body, and obviously you're a triathlete, and I don't know if you've experienced this.  I'm trying to think back to the most intense soccer games I've ever played in my life, and sure enough, they kind of wear you down, but I think a big Thanksgiving dinner, it takes the cake.  Like I've never felt asleep after a soccer game, on the field, but I've fallen asleep at the table around the couch after Thanksgiving dinner.

Ben:  Yeah, and it's one of those things where with athletes.  This is something I see in people, like the people listening to this podcast who are eating healthy diets but who are just eating enormous amounts of food, period, and I know that you talk about this in your book, this concept of exhausted enzyme pathways.  I've personally been tested for pancreatic enzyme production, and it's been shown to be insufficient.  Partly just because I've dumped so many dang calories into my body over years of Ironman, Triathlon training and lifting and everything else.  Bodybuilding, my body really has rarely gotten a break since I've been like twelve years old, and you talk about this in the book and this whole enzyme exhaustion.  Can you go into that just a little bit about how that actually happens?

Yuri:  Yeah, you know it's initially a sequence of events because the body, the more I learn about this stuff, the more I realize I don't really know anything.  I think nutrition is just one of those things, but the more I learn, the more I get into this stuff, the more I realize that it comes down to fundamentals and really basic principles.  So within the body, any pathway or hormone for instance that is overly called upon will eventually exhaust.  So it's essentially a wear-and-tear type of model.  So for instance, if you constantly eat bananas every single day, you will wear down the enzyme pathways necessary to digest those bananas properly.  So that's why when people start going into elimination diets and different ways of healing their body, variety and rotation are really important because you could have kale every single day.  It's a great food, but you're probably better off by rotating kale with Swiss chard, some spinach, some broccolis.  So you're rotating your foods, so that you're not constantly exposing those foods to the same enzymes that are required to digest those foods day in and day out.  You have to give your body a breather like with exercise.  Why is it that most pro athletes can't go past thirty-five?  They physically can't do anymore because their body just can't keep up.

Ben:  So what about people who are eating.  So I have a smoothie every day for breakfast.  Do you think that with something like that, because it's a daily staple, I should be using digestive enzymes with that, or do you think I should just kind of include some phase of my year where I work myself off that and give my body a break from those specific foods or food combinations?

Yuri:  I would say smoothies are awesome because they lessen the burden on the digestive system 'cause the blender does a lot of the chewing for you.  Nonetheless it's still a good idea to rotate some of these things.

Ben:  And I also started taking enzymes, by the way, since I found out that I had some of these enzyme pathways you talk about in your book that I had tested since I found out that they were exhaustive.  I just started using digestive enzymes a little bit more too which seemed to have helped a little bit.

Yuri:  Yeah, I think digestive enzymes are probably a necessary add-on for most people just because I don't think I've ever worked with anybody who has, maybe my aunt actually.  She's one of the very few people who actually gets energized after a big meal, and I'm like what?  But most people, it's just very sluggish.  If you feel bloated, gassy, tired, those are all symptoms.  If you feel any of that stuff after a meal within about half an hour to an hour, those are generally good indications that something in your digestive system is not working properly.  And you and I were just at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I feel for those people who speak on stage after lunch because you can see the people in the audience just dosing off.  It's so predictable.

Ben:  Yeah, now you go into a ton of stuff in your book, and the part of enzymes is fantastic, and I encourage people who don't understand this whole enzyme thing to go read the book if you want to wrap your head around enzymes and enzyme exhaustion a little bit more and how that can affect your energy levels during the day, but another thing that you talk about, Yuri, is this renal load and the alkaline acid component, what called Potential Renal Acid Load.  Can you go into that?  I don't think that's something we've talked about on the podcast before, this PRAL.

Yuri:  Yeah, this is something I'm really passionate about because I find that the foundation of energy is oxygen.  If you're cells get oxygen, they're able to produce ATP which is the basic battery of your body.  So if your cells do not get oxygen, then they start getting anaerobic which means they start using more sugar as their means of energy production.  That's a whole other thing which can lead down to some issues, but if you understand that oxygen is required in your cells to produce energy, then you would ask how does oxygen get there?  Well oxygen gets there through the blood, and your blood carries oxygen through its red blood cells which are like taxi cabs that carry oxygen.  The problem though is that these red blood cells can stick together.  They become kind of sluggish and as if they're driving in traffic if your blood becomes acidic.  So this is where PRAL or Potential Renal Acid Load comes in.  It's funny because I remember reading this article on Web M.D. or something and this dietitian said there's no scientific proof that the alkaline diet is any better than anything else, and I was like, so basically what you're saying is that there's no benefits eating more vegetables and fruit?  Because that essentially what an alkaline diet is, and that's where alkalinity comes from.

Ben:  Yeah, and I've seen those arguments too, how people will say that what you eat can't affect your net body acidity or alkalinity.  When you delve in and look at things like chloride and CO2, and in your book, you talk about urine.  It's just not true.  You actually do see that the Potential Renal Acid Load of your diet has a pretty distinct effect on your pH values.

Yuri:  Yeah, and the thing is that there are studies that show that it can be very quickly changed within about four hours and probably even sooner in a lot of cases.  So it's a real simple equation.  Potential Renal Acid Load looks at any food once it's metabolized, gives off protein and phosphorous which are the kind of acidic components minus the magnesium, potassium and calcium which are the alkaline components.  So if we look at things that are the most acidic, dairy tends to be at the top of the list there.  Gives off a huge amount of protein and a huge amount of phosphorous and lesser amounts of those alkaline minerals, and people are talking about cow's milk as being a great source of calcium.  And it is, but the problem is that the amount of phosphorous that is includes is far greater than what we should be exposed to, and the reason that's important is because phosphorous actually inhibits calcium absorption in stomach.  So you don't actually absorb a lot of the calcium from your cow's milk.  So that's just kind of the side.

So what we want to look at are foods that have a more alkaline PRAL.  So if we look at the vegetables, vegetables have very little protein, very little phosphorous, but a high potassium, magnesium and calcium.  So it's not about saying you have to give up meats or you have to give up dairy.  I don't think most people should be having dairy anyways, but if you want to have good quality meats, by all means do that in moderation, but also look at balancing that out in greater proportion with a lot of green vegetables, a lot of rainbow-colored vegetables, so you can offset that acid coming in from those foods.  The same as grains, a lot of grains are not as acidic as animal products, but they're just past that neutral point where they're slightly acidic.  So you have to really balance things out, and the same with fruit, right?  So don't go crazy on the sweet fruit like bananas and mangos and pineapples.  Focus on berries, like I think you can probably have a dump truck of berries.  Just dump yours in your front lawn.  You could eat that for the rest of your life and you'll be fine.  I wouldn't say the same thing about watermelon and bananas.  So there are certain fruit you have to have a lot of focus on.

Ben:  My kids go in the backyard right now because we have this huge raspberry bush, and I think they actually do about a dump truck load of berries every day, and they are one of the more nutrient-dense fruits that you can eat, for sure.  You have this chart on, I think its page eight, no it's page sixty of your book, where you go in some of the acid and alkaline-based food, and it's pretty shocking.  Some foods that are pretty acidic, that you wouldn't expect to be that acidic like sunflower seeds and you talked about low-fat cheddar cheese.  I mean it's kind of crazy once you start to delve into that pH value, so that Potential Renal Acid Load is really interesting.

Another thing that you talk about in the book is the concept of protein, and specifically you get into, and I know that you've worked with both a vegan and a meat-based diet, but you get into the idea of quality-based proteins and what you call in the book, it's clean protein, but a lot of people are aware that beef is a good source of protein, and chicken and lamb and some nuts like almonds or walnuts.  What are some of the ones that you talk about in the book in terms of sources of protein that fly under the radar?  What are some of the things that you include in the diet that you present in the book and also in your own diet that you would say are good sources of protein that a lot of active people don't use or don't have the staples in their diet?

Yuri:  Yeah, for sure.  So here's the thing about protein.  So there's the amount of protein in the food and then there's the body's ability to actually use that protein, so my issue, and by all means, basically my stance is about eating more plant-based foods, but you don't have to be vegan to do that.  When you understand what happens to protein when you heat it, it starts to make a little bit more sense.  When you have an egg and you put it into a frying pan, what ends up happening is it solidifies.  It coagulates, and what that does to the protein molecules, it actually renders it a little bit less digestible or usable in the human body.  So even though beef and a lot of meats have “good sources of protein”, the reality is that we're actually cooking them to make them a little bit safer or a little more tasty to actually consume, but what that ends up doing is compromising the quality of the protein that we're not consuming.  So our body has to work a lot harder to break that down, has to use a lot of our own water to be involved in digestive process, and it becomes a little bit more laborious.  So I really try to get people thinking about vegetarian protein sources because some of them are fantastic, and not to say that having the occasional steak or whatever is not a good thing because I love a nice fillet every now and then, but I think when you look at things like hemp seeds, which have about thirty-one grams of protein per one hundred gram serving.

Ben:  Yeah, see that something you don't hear people talk.  Where do people even get hemp seeds?  Is that something you just order, or can you find those in your grocery stores these days?

Yuri:  Yeah, like honestly pretty much all grocery stores will carry hemp seeds.  Most grocery stores have a health aisle, so they'll definitely be in the health aisle.

Ben:  And by the way folks, you don't get high off hemp seeds, right?

Yuri:  No, not at all.  I'm going to give a realistic measurement here.  So if I make a smoothie, I'll typically add in about three tablespoons of hemp seeds, and now we'll provide about fifteen grams of protein.  So to give perspective on that, I weigh a hundred and sixty-five pounds, and based on what most people need, they're looking at 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.  You might need a little bit more 'cause you're such a crazy athlete, but for me, I would require about, let's call it seventy grams of protein.  So in one smoothie, I can take three tablespoons of hemp seeds in about fifteen grams, just from the hemp seeds.  Now if I put in some almond milk or some almonds, now I've added maybe another fifteen to twenty grams of protein.  So in one smoothie, I can have close to thirty-five or forty grams of protein without even touching meat.  That's why I really try to present this information in a scientifically-backed manner to let people know that things like hemp seeds or sprouted lentils are terrific sources of protein.  Almonds, chia seeds, walnuts.  You know people think of eggs as a high…

Ben:  Do you sprout lentils yourself, or can you buy them sprouted?

Yuri:  I've actually never come across them sprouted, but it's really easy to make them from scratch.  You basically just put them in water in a sprouting jar or you could actually just leave them in a jar covered in water and just put a little cheese cloth at the top and invert it, and it takes about two days or so to sprout.  But the beautiful thing about lentils when they're sprouted is that they taste so delicious because they're more water-rich to kind of come alive and there's this beautiful, refreshing, crunchy, watery.  It's just such a great little food that you can add into salads.  It's just so awesome.  You know people think about eggs as a great protein food.  The reality is that eggs only have about six grams of protein per egg.  It's funny 'cause bread, one slice of white bread has about five grams of protein, so it's funny how we consider certain things as high-protein foods and now there's not.  What makes white bread not a high-protein food when it almost has the same amount of protein as an egg?  And in comparison to things like walnuts, they have about a third of the amount of protein.  So it's a very interesting conversation.

Ben:  Yeah, you've got some great protein sources in the book, and its crazy how you could skip out on the whey protein.  So let's say whatever, your kidneys were under a lot of stress, you tested for high albumin, you want to maybe eliminate some potential immune triggers which a lot of these animal-based or even whey proteins and things like that can do.  You could, in your morning smoothie, put sprouted lentils, spirulina and hemp seeds, three things that most people don't even know about until now, and you could have a fantastic source of protein in your smoothie.  Nice, I like it.

Okay, so there's a ton of things that you talk about in your book, but one thing I wanted to make sure that we get to is this seven-day energy reset.  Just because we talked about enzyme exhaustion and we talked about the need to sometimes give your body a break, and I don't really want to force you to give way to farm or anything like this, but can you give us some tips or give us the basic bird's eye overview of what a seven-day energy reset would look like?

Yuri:  Yeah, so the seven-day energy reset is a seven-day plan that is mainly food-based.  So obviously you can go through the book and adopt any of the other protocols that I talk about, but the seven-day energy reset, in and out of itself, is simply by adding these specific recipes and foods for the next seven days and you can literally double your energy.  Obviously it's tough to quantify that, but the reason we say double your energy is because we surveyed a lot of our clients about a year ago, and we ask them 'cause we've used this protocol for several years now.  We've asked them, on a scale of one to ten, how much their energy has improved after following the seven day plan?  And it just worked out to be about kind of a doubling of energy based on the numerical numbers that it gave us.  So the whole idea of this is to incorporate the foods that we talk about in the book while eliminating it once we talked with us being problematic.  So obviously things like bread and sugar and caffeine.  Obviously those are kind of a no-no, but we really focus on nutrient-dense foods that, throughout the week, provide a huge amount of nutrition and satiation.  So you don't actually need as many calories because we're getting a ton of nutrients.

So the other things is that throughout the week, on a big proponent of allowing some days to be higher calories, some other days, lower calories, which is, I think, a more natural state for human physiology.  We're not designed to be eating five or six meals a day.  I mean I don't think our Paleolithic ancestors ever had access to a fridge or Starbucks.  Some day's they had more, some days, they had less, some days they had none, and the seven-day energy reset basically allows the body to have certain days where there's, maybe a lighter day but still three meals throughout the day with optional snacks.  Maybe the next day, there are a slightly higher calorie load, and it's all within the parameters of the “All Day Energy Diet”, kind of food spectrum which is really about getting a lot of good quality veggies in, some clean meats and really removing a lot of the other junk out there, and what I really strive to do is show people.  When people think about it, “oh my god, I can only eat vegetables or meat or whatever.”  It doesn't sound that appetizing, but my goal, what I've spent a lot of time on the last couple of years is just showing people how they can actually eat like this every single day of their lives and enjoy delicious recipes that energize them and take less than like ten minutes to make.

Ben:  Yeah, that's kind of like what you were known for initially when I first met you.  It was like you were the guy who taught people how to detox instead of using supplements using real food, and it seems like when I look over your seven-day energy reset, for example.  A typical day, it's like you got your blue chia smoothie.  You have some vegan sushi, a Romaine juice, something called morning millet and that's one day.  Some of these foods that fit in to that alkaline profile that we talked about, that are some of the clean proteins that we talked about that are energy drains that require a ton of enzyme exhaustion, and so it's pretty cool.  You could just print out this chart on page 106 and just slap it to your refrigerator and have a reboot.  So it's really cool stuff, plus it looks pretty tasty.  I honestly have not tried most of the recipes in here 'cause I just got my hands on your book recently, but there's definitely some that are going to wind up on the Greenfield dinner table sometime in the near future.

Yuri:  Nice.  Your name is fitting, so that's perfectly okay.

Ben:  Yes, exactly.  Now you've also, speaking of recipes, you have a cookbook that comes along with this book to, is that right?

Yuri:  Yeah, it's kind of an unannounced bonus, so we just give it as a free gift for anyone who gets the book from the website, and you're one of the contributors for the community cookbook.  The community cookbook is sixty-seven recipes.

Ben:  And by the way, just in case people think it's a total vegetarian cookbook, one of the recipes that I contributed for that cookbook is bone marrow and our favorite bone marrow recipes.  So it's not all vegetables.

Yuri:  No, not at all.  There's actually quite a few meat-based dishes.  There's a lot of salmon, a lot of chicken, a little bit of sausage, good quality meats here and there.  I mean I just shot all the videos for these recipes, and they're unbelievable.  The taste and how quick they are to make is ridiculous, so it's a nice free gift that we're giving everyone who gets the book.

Ben:  Cool, okay so the book comes out, what's the day?

Yuri:  Launches in stores, September 23rd?

Ben:  Okay, cool.  I'll put a link with the book, the cookbook bonus, and I know Yuri's going to have a lot of other really cool bonuses that go along with this book.  It's kind of like a typical book launch and that you don't just buy the book at your bookstore necessarily.  You can get a ton of other bonuses along with it if you go to the URL that I'm going to set up for you over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/energy.  So well worth the read, totally understandable.  You don't need to be a rocket scientist to delve into this stuff, and everything's there for you.  From millets to hemp seeds to tons of smoothies and everything else, so Yuri, nice job on this book, man.

Yuri:  Thank you very much, buddy.

Ben:  So it's called the “All Day Energy Diet”.  Check it out at bengreenfieldfitness.com/energy, and until next time.  I'm Ben Greenfield signing out along with Yuri Elkaim.

 

 

A few weeks ago, my friend Yuri Elkaim (pictured above) published a book. Yuri is a bit of an outlier and renegade in the nutrition and health community. His mission is to empower everyday men and women with proper nutrition and health wisdom so they can take better control of their own health.

He also holds High Honours degree in Physical Education and Health/Kinesiology from the University of Toronto, is a former professional soccer player, and for 7 seasons acted as the strength & conditioning/nutrition coach for the nationally ranked men’s soccer program at the University of Toronto.

Some refer to him as the “health whisperer” for being to get to the heart of what matters and produce amazing health, weight loss, and fitness results where there seemed little hope.

I interview Yuri in today’s podcast, and in this episode, we talk about protein digestibility, enzyme exhaustion, why most juicing recipes are no good, and much more.

I must admit, Yuri’s new book “The All Day Energy Diet” is not the kind of book I would not normally read.

After all, Yuri – despite being an ex-professional soccer player – is bigtime into juicing, cleanses, detoxing – and I guarantee the guy eats far, far less steak than me…

…so I would *almost* classify him as a Whole Foods hippie.

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But his book is, frankly, brilliant.

It covers dietary concepts that I haven’t ever seen discussed in a book – concepts like:

-adjusting your blood pH with the foods you eat…

-how to test your adrenals without expensive lab tests…

-which foods literally exhaust your digestive enzymes…

-a new thing called the “PRAL” load of specific meals…

-six myths about plant protein

-how to choose the best kinds of coconut oiland butter…

-and much more.

I learned a ton from this book, and Yuri is a fellow athlete, a father, and a very smart dude, so I’m happy to tell you about his new book.

Better yet, if you click here to get the book now, you get the following ten bonuses (easily worth way more than what you pay for the book of course – $577 to be exact)…

  1. The All-Day Energy Diet Community Cookbook ($29 value)

Features 67 energizing, gluten/sugar/soy/dairy-free recipes that take less than 15 minutes to make from some of the industry’s leading experts and a few of our very own customers (including two recipes by yours truly).

  1. 8 Energy-Boosting Desserts ($19 value)

These yummy and healthy desserts will finally allow you to have your cake and eat it too, without the dangers of sugar, dairy, or gluten.

  1. Food Labels Made Easy ($39 value)

Chances are you will still have some packaged foods from time to time. This walkthrough video and workbook shows you how to understand those tricky food labels so you don’t get taken for a ride.

  1. The All-Day Energy Diet Grocery Guide ($19 value)

Get the complete list and quantities of foods you’ll need for The All-Day Energy Diet.

  1. The All-Day Energy Diet Kitchen Makeover ($49 value)

Watch Yuri show you around the kitchen and see what you should and should not include your “energized” fridge and pantry.

  1. The Bodyweight Energy Workout ($29 value)

Burn fat and get energized with this simple 20-minute follow-along bodyweight workout with Yuri.

  1. Yoga for Energy ($29 value)

15-minute yoga routine to relax and rejuvenate your body.

  1. The “Energy Sessions” audio series ($199 value)

Features 5 audio interviews with Dr. Alan Christianson (endocrine), Mitchell Stevko (sleep), me (fitness), Dr. Isaac Jones (cellular health), and Brendan Brazier (alkalinity).

  1. 1-Hour “Getting Started” Group Coaching Call With Yuri ($99 value)
  2. Lifetime Access To Yuri’s Private Facebook “Social Support” Group (priceless)

All these bonuses disappear Friday, by the way.

Just click here to get the All Day Energy Diet with all the bonuses listed above, and leave your thoughts or questions below! 

 

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