Slim Down Lifestyle

[56:40] Is GHB Safe?

[64:51] What To Do After High School

[75:00] Giveaways & Goodies

[79:16] End of Podcast

Introduction:  In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast: How Skinny Guys Can Get Big Muscles, Is There Really No Such Thing As Too Much Exercise, Is GHB Safe As A Party Drug, and much more!

Brock:  Well, hey there, Ben.  How are you doing?  I’m having a hell of a morning so far, but how about you?

Ben:  A hell of a morning?

Brock:  Yeah!

Ben:  What’s a hell of a morning?

Brock:  Well, a good one.  I had a good sleep, I went out for a good run, I had a good breakfast, had a big cup of coffee in front of me, everything is going beautifully.

Ben:  That’s a lot of good.  That’s a lot of good.  For me, do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Brock:  Oh no!  Let’s go with bad.

Ben:  All right.  So, the bad news is I almost killed myself in the sauna or at least almost put out an eye.  I had a bright idea to drag an infrared light panel into my sauna.  So I have, I think I bought it from Sauna Space, I think, it’s four 250 watt near-infrared bulbs that I have screwed into almost like a chandelier-like device that holds all four bulbs at once and, you flip it on, of course all four bulbs turn on.  So, if I bring that into my infrared sauna in the morning, I can make my infrared sauna hotter and also add a whole bunch of near infrared and I thought I was a smart cookie doing that.

Brock:  It sounds smart.

Ben:  But, the problem is that… yeah it sounds smart, it sounds like something a smart person would do.

Brock:  Sure.

Ben:  Anyways though, so I got about halfway through my sauna session, I guess, maybe about 20 minutes in and the lights, I think I was in a down dog position and one of those 250 watt lightbulbs exploded and sent glass shards flying all over the sauna.  There’s literally one little glass shard actually stuck in the wood, the rest is scattered across the floor and somehow, God is good because somehow, I did not get hit by a single shard of glass in there in the sauna.  And, I mean, it was like an explosion, like put-out-an-eye explosion.

Brock:  Jeez!

Ben:  So, I guess I was going to say that’s the bad news, but really I guess that’s the good news is that I didn’t die in my sauna or become blinded by an exploding infrared lightbulb.

Brock:  Yes, that is good news coupled with bad news of, I guess, you won’t be trying that again.  Do you think it was a heat thing?  Did it just get too hot?

Ben:  Yeah.  It was a heat thing.  It wasn’t a failure of the bulbs or this device I got from Sauna Space or anything like that, it was just me doing a dumb thing.  So, anyways, don’t do that, people.

Brock:  Alright.

Ben:  There other thing is…  The good news is I’ve got a new smoothie, a new smoothie.  We’re all about smoothies here on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show because who doesn’t want to avoid cooking and instead just dump a bunch of stuff into a blender and see what happens?

Brock:  I just like to outsource my chewing.  I’m tired of chewing.  It’s a pain in the butt.  I’m that lazy.  Screw chewing, let’s smoothie everything.

Ben:  That’s true, they should just start to call the Vitamix and the Blendtec the “Mommy Birds” because that’s really all they’re doing.

Brock:  Yup.

Ben:  Chewing up your food for you and, they’re not quite vomiting it into your mouth, but it’s very, very close.

Brock:  You could rig something up.

Ben:  Yeah, they could probably rig up some kind of vomiting device to those things.

Brock:  Sure.

Ben:  Anyways though, we are all about… well, I guess some people call it “biohacking.”  I don’t call putting butter in your coffee or putting superfoods into a smoothie “biohacking,” I call that cooking and I call it barely cooking because, really, as you’ve just alluded to, Brock, the machine’s doing most of the work.

Brock:  It’s doing all the work.

Ben:  Anyways, we digress.  So, what I did was I researched every ingredient that targeted things like mitochondrial density and the health of the mitochondria membrane; and hormesis, like hormetic pathways, that induce cellular resilience; anti-inflammation; increased production of your own endogenous stem cells and collagen; the pathways for NAD, you know a lot of people are getting this antiaging molecule NAD injected, but you can take certain things that increase your own endogenous bioavailability.  There’s a lot of things in the antiaging community that are called sirtuin activators or stacks like blueberry and dark chocolate and red wine, more specifically grape skin extract, not red wine particularly, just the grape skin in the red wine.  And anyways, what I figured was why not take all these ingredients and make them into a smoothie?

So, what I did was I created this massive list on Amazon of everything, like moringa, aloe vera powder, turmeric, cacao, wild strawberry powder, organic blueberry powder, glutamine, the FourSigmatic 10 Mushroom Blend, even desiccated liver extract, coffeeberry fruit, everything I’ve ever talked about for enhancing longevity and I made an Amazon list.  I turned it all into a smoothie and you just basically take one or two teaspoons of each of these compounds, you put them in a smoothie.  And what I did was I put it all over ice with a little bit of stevia and I used bone broth because I like bone broth for the added collagen and gelatin benefits and my stomach just feels really good when I use bone broth, although I suppose you could for a creamier texture, use something like coconut milk, blend it all up, drink it, and it actually did not taste like, as I expected it to and as I’m prone to say, ass.  It actually didn’t taste too bad.  I topped it with some cacao nibs and some spirulina and, better yet, I turned this thing…  You know how you can make a list on Amazon?

Brock:  No, I was actually wondering about that when you said you made a list on Amazon; never actually knew that.

Ben:  Yeah, you can make a list.  I’ve got a list of the books that I bought my boys that we’re going through between now and when they’re 13 and they’re going to do their Vision Quest or rite of passage when they’re 13.  And so, I have all the books that I’m going through with them leading up to that.  But the smoothie, I’ve also got a list of all of this so if people want to actually use those books or use that smoothie they can actually just go to my Amazon List.  So, I will put this in the show notes, the show notes are going to be at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/391 or if you just want to skip the show notes, and I’ll put this right at the top of the show notes, you can also go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/AntiAgingSmoothie because I figured out I was just going to put this all on Amazon.  You can just buy it, all these ingredients, put them in your pantry, and make the exact smoothie I did.  I’ve even got comments on there about how much of this and how much of that to put in.  Isn’t that cool?  Isn’t that good news?

Brock:  So, you can go to Amazon and I don’t have to click on every single link?  I can just say I want to buy all this list and it’s that easy?

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  I don’t’ want to turn this into an Amazon commercial, I totally sounded like they’re paying for this, but I’m just curious.

Ben:  Yeah, that’s it.  You could turn it into an Amazon commercial, I don’t care.  They bought WholeFoods; they’re wonderful.  Now, I save money at WholeFoods.  They’re a big wonderful corporate giant.

Brock:  They are the richest company in the world for a reason.

Ben:  They’re not as wonderful as Monsanto, but they’re wonderful.  So, yeah.

Brock:  I’m confused.

News Flashes:

Ben:  Well, first of all, Brock, before I proceed, I was joking about Monsanto.  They’re evil.  I just recorded a podcast about Monsanto and it’s pretty bad.  I’ll release the podcast, I think, actually I believe that podcast might even come up this Saturday in a couple of days.  It’s pretty shocking what they’re doing now – Monsanto.  They’re not good.

Brock:  Yeah.  They got very focused on profits and kind of forgot about the humans I think.

Ben:  Yeah, I’m not even going to open that can of worms, honestly, because I talk about it on the podcast.  I don’t want to get derailed.

Brock:  Fair enough, fair enough.

Ben:  But, this is really interesting.  So, this is the part of the show, of course, where we talk about all the cool news flashes that came out.  And FitBit, God bless them.  FitBit, even though I’m not a fan of FitBit, I don’t wear it, I like the, as you know, the Oura Ring better.  It just tracks more and more accurately.

Brock:  And you look like you’re in the mafia because you’ve got a pinkie ring.

Ben:  Not anymore, I’ve got it on my ring finger now and it’s smaller, the new what they call the Generation 2 Oura.  It’s smaller.  So, yeah.

Brock:  So, now you just look like an engineering student.

Ben:  Uh-huh.  Yeah, pretty normal than my pocket protector.

Brock:  Or a graduate, I guess.

Ben:  Anyways, quit derailing me.

Brock:  Sorry!

Ben:  So, anyways, FitBit just released about 150 billion hours of their heart tracking data.  And heart tracking data, from just any wearable, it’s not rocket science to make it actually log your resting heart rate accurately.  So, that’s what FitBit does; that’s what all these tracking devices from the Apple Watch to the Oura Ring…  Usually to track resting heartrate and there’s not a lot of rocket science, you just track heartrate unlike sleep data and plethysmography data and heartrate variability data, all that kind of depends on the technology built into the device.  But FitBit has done a good job collecting all of this heart data and they’ve released all this information.

There’s this fascinating article that appeared on Yahoo about what they found based on resting heartrate.  So, for example, we know that according to something called the Copenhagen Heart Study that you’re twice as likely to die from heart problems if your resting heartrate is approaching 80, compared with anyone whose resting heartrate is below 50.  And, they actually backed that up with this FitBit data.  They confirmed this data that shows increased risk of cardiovascular disease in people who have a higher resting heartrate.

But then, they went in and because they have so much data, so much big data, because so many freakin’ people are wearing a FitBit now, they found a lot of other interesting things like: women tend to have higher resting heartrates than men and it’s not because women are going to die of cardiovascular disease earlier, it’s because they tend to be smaller.  It’s the same reason that hummingbirds’ heart beats a ton – their heart is smaller, so their stroke volume is lower, so the heart needs to work harder to make sure the blood circulates and gets to all the vital organs.  So, some of the other interesting things that they’ve found though was that a huge number of the population seem to experience a steep drop in the heartrate after middle age and what they attributed that to is because over 30% of adults in the US have hypertension, most of those people are on beta blockers and calcium channel blockers which are essentially blood pressure medication.  So, they’re saying that one of the big reasons we’re seeing this drop in heartrate is not because people are getting healthier or fitter as they approach middle age and beyond, it’s because so many people are getting on medication that artificially lower the heartrate.  So…

Brock:  That ain’t good.

Ben:  I know.  That was one interesting thing.  Another one was that they found that when it comes to the actual effect of exercise, and I actually want to get into another study here in a moment, they found that exercise is, of course, good at lowering your resting heartrate.  A lot of people say, well, they think of the heart like a battery, right.  You’ve got ‘x’ number of beats in the heart and then it’s done with, so why the heck would you exercise and use up all of your heart’s contractions with frequent exercise?  Well, the answer to that is that a brief exercise session of, let’s say, 45 minutes a day lowers your resting heartrate for the rest of your life, for the other 23 hours and 15 minutes.  So, ultimately, you see more benefits when you exercise in the heartrate than when you don’t.  But, what they did find was that there was not a change in the resting heartrate once you exceeded about 250 minutes of exercise per week.  The American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes, but there was a law of diminishing returns meaning there wasn’t a drop in heartrate that occurred.  Once people got after about 250 minutes a week, and I didn’t even do the math, we could probably do quick math on this.  How many hours of that would be per day?  I know we’ve tried math on the podcast before…

Brock:  It never goes well.

Ben:  It hasn’t worked out too well.  I believe it comes out to about 80 minutes a day, though.

Brock:  That seems about right.

Ben:  Around in that range.  So, 80-90 minutes a day, you really don’t see an increased benefit at that point and that kind of backs up what we know from mortality data that once you exceed about 60 minutes of intense exercise and once you exceed about 90 minutes of aerobic exercise, like marathoning or swimming or cycling or running or something like that, you actually see a slight increase risk of mortality because of an increase in arterial stiffness and you don’t actually see a decreased risk in mortality.  And, FitBit just backed this up by showing that it also doesn’t seem to make an impact on your resting heartrate.  If anything, though, one thing I should throw in there as we’re kind of going down this road of talking about how good a low-resting heartrate is, is that from an overtraining standpoint, like for elite athletes, sometimes you’ll see elite athletes develop what’s called bradycardia, like Lance Armstrong with his heartrate of… what was it?  Do you remember?  34?  33?

Brock:  Yeah, it was like the low 30s.

Ben:  Yeah.  What’s yours at?

Brock:  Mid-40s.

Ben:  Okay.  Yeah, and mine tends to be… depends.  When I’m in the middle of race season and I’m doing a lot of blood volume and heartrate work, I’ll tend to be upper 30s, but ultimately if you see a steep drop in your resting heartrate over the course of several days, like a drop that’s more than three beats below what you normally are, that can often indicate overtraining.

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  Heartrate variability is a better metric, but yeah, it’s very interesting how there are certain populations for when a low resting heartrate, especially a low resting heartrate that seems to occur just drastically all of a sudden over the course of a week, that could indicate impending illness or injury.  So, another caveat we should throw in there.

A couple of other things that they found from this article and I’m only touching on just a brief amount of the data if you really want to go into this.

Brock:  Yeah, this is a good article.

Ben:  Yeah, it’s really good.  So, they found that, for example, there was a score card they developed that was based off of life of events plotted against heartrate data.  That was fascinating.  There were certain amounts the person had, and this was an n=1, but they tracked their heartrate based on life events like when they went on vacation, when they started using a treadmill, when the school year ended, when the school year began, when spring break began and vacation began.  So, the steepest rises in resting heartrate, and this is relevant at the time that this podcast is coming out, were Thanksgiving, Christmas, running a Kickstarter campaign, the kid’s graduation, a family reunion, and passing a kidney stone.  All of those resulted in a steep rise in the heartrate indicating some kind of stress or some kind of intense foray out of one’s comfort zone whereas the lower heartrates occurred during vacation, spring break, and the end of the school year, and the time when someone began using a treadmill.  So, there you have it.

Brock:  Makes sense.  Yeah.

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  Doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out.

Ben:  Nah, what kind of country do you think had the lowest resting heartrate?

Brock:  I’m going to guess some Scandinavian country like Denmark?

Ben:  Yeah, Sweden was pretty low.  So, the highest was India for average resting heartrate.  They’re close to… they’re actually almost close to 70 for average resting heartrate.  The lowest was a place where we find a lot of these longevity hotspots and it was…

Brock:  Oh, Japan!

Ben:  No, Italy.

Brock:  Oh, dang.

Ben:  No, Italy.  Yeah, Japan was middle of the road.  Japan was almost equivalent to the US, about 64.  But, Italy was very low.  Another one was another Blue Zone, Costa Rica, very low.  But, when I say very low, it’s still kind of relevant.  “Very low” is 61 for Italy, which in my opinion, for resting heartrate is…  I like to see people with good cardiovascular fitness close to 50 or 60 or lower as we’ve alluded to.  But anyways, we could go on and on about this study, but ultimately I’ll link to it in the show notes for all of FitBit’s 150 billion hours of heart data that they unveiled over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/391.

Now, of course, very relevant to this is this brand new study that came out this week and here’s what the headline said… Did you see this one, Brock?

Brock:  I did.  Yeah, go ahead.

Ben:  Okay.  “No Such Thing as Too Much Exercise, A Study Finds.”

Brock:  Boom!

Ben:  So, this was a news study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and what they say and what media has been saying in these articles is that based on recent evidence, even though there’s been suggestions that elite athletes and heavy exercisers could be at risk of things like thickened heart valves, irregular heartbeat, and clogged arteries, and some research have theorized that there’s a U-curve for exercise, and I’ve ever said this on a podcast, of course, I just did say it on the podcast where too little exercise or too much exercise can damage the heart or result in increased mortality.  It turns out that based on the analysis of long-term data from the Cleveland Clinic in which they looked at over 120,000 patients, I think that’s a pretty respectable N, between 1994 and 2014, they found that pretty much across the board, the more elite of an athlete someone is, the more death-proof they were; the more highly active someone appeared to be when it came to the extent of their aerobic fitness, the longer that they lived.  And so, this was a VO2 max test on a treadmill that they were measuring these people on.  So, essentially, what the media said then was, “OK, well it turns out there is no law of diminishing return between time spent exercising and fitness and mortality.”  But, this is a huge flaw and I wanted to bring this up in the podcast because I could just imagine all those CrossFitters who are doing hot yoga while simultaneously training for a triathlon and a kettlebell certification…

Brock:  That’s me!

Ben:  [laughs] They’re going to use this as a way to justify spending yet another hour in the gym, but this study never measured the amount of hours spent training.  All they did was they gave people a test of cardiovascular fitness, a VO2 max test on the treadmill, and then they divided them into different tiers of mortality based on those fitness results, but all this means is that the people who had a higher amount of aerobic fitness did not have increased risk of mortality.  They never, ever looked into how often these people were training and I would definitely say that (a) increased performance on a VO2 max test is highly correlated with genetics just as much as it’s correlated with how much you train, (b) you can get yourself, and I have an entire book on this, this is what “Beyond Training”, my last book on endurance is about, you can whip yourself into amazing aerobic shape without necessarily doing a death march every weekday during your lunch hour and a three hour bike ride on a Saturday and some incredible open water swim on a Sunday combined with weightlifting every day, right.  There are better ways to train cardiorespiratory fitness, more intelligent ways to train, don’t require hours and hours of beating yourself up, and I would still say, based on the data that FitBit just released and also all the data that I talk about in that book and that we’ve discussed before in the show, this study in no way disproves the idea that there’s a law of diminishing returns when you’re beating yourself up with exercise every day.  All it shows is the fitter you are, the longer you live and I couldn’t believe that the media took this and said there’s no such thing as too much exercise.  What it should have said is there’s no such thing as too much fitness, right?

Brock:  Fitness, yeah.

Ben:  Yeah, because there’s a big difference.  It may seem like a subtle difference, but it’s a pretty big difference.  So, ultimately, once again, I’d say this shows that you always got to look at the study behind the headlines.  So, that was an interesting one.

Brock:  Were you able to find… did they have any graph or anything that showed the VO2 max correlated with a death age?

Ben:  No.  they didn’t have a correlation between VO2 max and death, but I can tell you, my wife and I were talking about this actually last night at dinner as you can imagine the Greenfield house is chockful of all sorts of geek-ery that occurs at the dinner table.

Brock:  Great dinner time conversation!

Ben:  But, really, the VO2 max test, again, we have to couch all this stuff in realistic terms.  The maximum incline they reached on the VO2 max test was about, I believe and I’m pulling this out of my memory, somewhere around 16-18% at a walking speed of 4-4.2, right.  So, these were still, in my opinion, not elite athletes they were testing.  To call someone an elite athlete because they can make it to, let’s be generous, let’s say 4.2 on an 18% incline on a treadmill, yeah, that’s hoofing it on a treadmill uphill walking at a brisk pace, but I know elite athletes who are doing intervals of 10 miles an hour at 10% on the treadmill or athletes, I’ve got friends in the obstacle race industry who are doing 40% incline for, in some cases, two or three hours.  So, it’s all relative.  So, anyways though, it’s interesting stuff.

So, the last thing I wanted to mention, speaking of walking at 40% on an incline treadmill which I don’t classify as meditation is a great little audio on Jack Cornfield’s website.  He’s got a nice little website where he does some writing and he does some audios and he has a really great piece he released this week on walking meditation – something that I personally love to do.  Do you ever do walking mediation?

Brock:  Yeah.  Yeah, quite often actually.  I did some this morning.

Ben:  Yeah, and for me a lot of times it going up on a farm road behind my house.  And the way that I do it is I do breathing through my nose, deep breathing through my nose, and then I’ll stop every once in a while when I pass, let’s say, a telephone pole and I’ll hold my breath for as long as possible and then when I’m completely out of breath, I recover, but I force myself to recover through my nose.  And when I finish a walk like that, which I’ll typically do over the course of about 25-30 minutes, I get back and feel very similar to as though I’ve done a yoga session or a meditation session or a sauna session.  And he’s actually got some pretty good tips in here for walking meditation.  For example, you really want to focus on feeling the pressure on the bottoms of your feet and natural sensations of standing and then you walk kind of slow with your arms swinging almost tai chi-esque by your side, like the old Asian men at the park, you want to walk like that nice and slow and kind of a flowing way as you follow each step mindfully.  So, we’re not talking about the power walk that you see the couple doing down the neighborhood street, the middle aged women walking at a brisk pace while conversing in their Lulu Lemon.  We’re talking about just a really slow, almost meditative stroll.  And, he’ll do it back and forth instead of just walking from point A to point B, just choosing 30 to 40 feet and walking 40 feet and then turning around and walking back the other way 40 feet.  And so, it’s a very interesting way to move and meditate at the same time and I honestly I feel better when I move as I’m meditating than I do when I’m sitting and I’m meditate.  I just do.  I don’t know why, but I do.  The only other thing that I wanted to note when it comes to this whole idea of walking meditation is that it’s vastly enhanced with high conception of psilocybin beforehand.

Brock:  What isn’t?

Ben:  Yeah, I know.  I know pretty much everybody before they meditate these days can no longer meditate.  You have to be on a psychedelic or a nootropic prior to meditation.  So, it’s no longer acceptable to just meditate.  So, use Jack Cornfield’s advice, but be sure to microdose with psilocybin beforehand, of course.

Special Announcements:

Ben:  Oh, Brock, I remembered what this Saturday’s podcast is about.

Brock:  Oh, yeah?  It’s not about Monsanto?

Ben:  It is, but it’s about gluten.  Gluten.  Yeah and how you can eat gluten without getting diarrhea.  So, one of the things that we talk about in that show coming up on Saturday is the stuff called dipeptidyl peptidase.  Have you heard of this?

Brock:  Yeah, there’s a product that’s got a really catchy name that I’m totally forgetting right now that has it.

Ben:  Gluten Guardian.

Brock:  Gluten Guardian!  That’s the one, yeah.

Ben:  Yeah, you should know that because they’re actually a sponsor of today’s show and this is a case where, as is always the case actually, if I talk about something on the show it’s because I use it.  Because I send my kids off to the birthday parties they attend with this stuff.  It predigests gluten.  They actually have a video showing where you sprinkle it on bread and you can watch the bread turn into liquid when you sprinkle this stuff on the bread, when you open up one of the capsules and you sprinkle it on the bread.  While I don’t necessarily endorse doing that at a restaurant because it’d just make the bread one big sloppy, nasty mess and who wants bread soup at a restaurant?  You can actually pop this prior to eating pizza or bread or any other gluten containing food and it actually predigests all of the gluten.  Now, I wouldn’t necessarily use this as the opportunity to eat a bunch of crap, but at the same time, when I go to a steakhouse and I want to have a nice, big slice like the artisanal bread that they bring out prior to the appetizers, if I pop this stuff beforehand, I get zero stomach discomfort.  So, it’s very, very cool.  Good idea, I think, too.  I’m guessing they’re probably going to kill it with this product because who doesn’t want to be able to have their cake and eat it too.  So, anyways, I don’t know if it’d word for poutine.  Would it work for poutine, Brock?

Brock:  It would, but I don’t think there’s any gluten in poutine.

Ben:  Oh, I always thought poutine was every offensive molecule known to man all covered in grease and sold in Canada.

Brock:  No!  It’s quite simple actually, it’s three ingredients.

Ben:  All right.  Well, I was just in Toronto and I walked passed a poutine shop and it looked like a heart attack on a plate, but that could have been your guys’ equivalent is of Domino’s pizza up there.

Brock:  Yeah, probably.

Ben:  Yeah, anyways, GlutenGuardian.com/GREENFIELD.  GlutenGuardian.com/GREENFILED.  You can get the Gluten Guardian and save 10% off the already discounted price.

Another thing you can pop before a meal and this also is, in all seriousness, something that I take now along with Gluten Guardian before I have dinner if the dinner has gluten in it, I’ll add the Gluten Guardian; if not, I’ll just have this before dinner anyways.  It is a liver protectant and it also lowers your blood sugar very similar to the diabetic drug Metformin based on my pre- and post-prandial blood testing or my glucose levels, but it basically is completely natural.  It’s bitter melon extract, the same stuff they eat in Okinawa, Japan, combined with rock lotus which has a lot of really cool clinical trials on it for improving your liver function and fatty liver.  So, if you like to have a cocktail or glass of wine with dinner, the rock lotus is taking care of that.  If you have carbs in the evening, which is what I do, I save most of my carbohydrates for the evening, the bitter melon is insuring your insulin sensitivity is improved.  So, more of that is partitioned into muscle, for example, and it’s a really cool 1-2 combo.  It’s called Lean, Kion Lean.  It’s one of the fine supplements that we have over at Kion.  So, what we’re doing for all of the listeners is you can use the URL GetKion.com and the actual discount code is BENLEAN10.  That’s BENLEAN1-0.

And then, a couple of other things, this podcast is brought to you by East West Health.  They’re in Salt Lake City, I’ve actually been there before for stem cell treatments and they have a really cool approach because what they do is they combine acupuncture with stem cell treatments and that actually increases the blood flow and the circulation of the stem cells and they actually have some research that they’ve released on their website, and I’ll link to all of this in the show notes, where they show how when you combine acupuncture with stem cells, you actually get more efficacious activity of the actual stem cells.  And, they even do intranasal stem cells.  You can snort stem cells ala crack cocaine.

Brock:  Really?

Ben:  Yeah, just snort ‘em.  They actually…  I haven’t done that yet.  I need to get down there and try that out, but they’ve got some compelling studies on that and Alzheimer’s and the treatment of some brain related issues.  So, if anything, it’s a good story for a cocktail party; just tell people about how you’re not snorting your own stem cells.  That’s what wealthy antiaging enthusiasts do at cocktail parties.

Brock:  I guess?

Ben:  So, they’re giving all of our listeners a consultation that’s totally free to do a consultation with East West Health, it’s free, and they’re also giving all of everyone a book called “The Stem Cell Breakthrough”.  Very simple, you just go to AcuEastWest.com, ‘Acu’ as in acupuncture, A-C-U, AcuEastWest.com and what they’ve told me is that all you need to do is mention Ben Greenfield and you’ll get a free consultation and you’ll also get that book.  So, there you have it.

Brock:  I’m holding out until they offer haircuts.

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  And a shave, too, actually.  That would be awesome.  So, acupuncture, stem cells, shave and a haircut.  Done.

Ben:  Right, intranasal of course.  So you could snort the stem cells.

Brock:  It might hurt your beard after it’s shaved off.

Ben:  Yeah, there you go.

And then, finally, this podcast is brought to you by, if you want to throw something else in your smoothie and maybe you don’t want to go on Amazon and get my entire list of antiaging smoothie ingredients and you just want one this, here’s a pretty good one.  It’s got moringa, it’s got chlorella, mint, spirulina, beets, match green tea, wheatgrass, ashwagandha, turmeric, lemon, and coconut water, but it’s all in one canister, and it’s called Green Juice, coconut and ashwagandha-infused Green Juice.  This stuff is made by Organifi and they also, if you were going to add just two things to your shopping cart over there, head on over there, have this wonderful pumpkin spice Golden Latte.  It’s like Thanksgiving in a cup.  It’s like your grandma made you a pumpkin spice latte, although now that I think about it, my grandma never made me a pumpkin spice latte.

Brock:  Mine neither.

Ben:  Yeah, but it tastes like something she would’ve made on Thanksgiving if she knew how to make a latte or she knew what a latte even was.  She was more of pumpkin pies and, of course, turkey and mashed potato and the beets, unfortunately she used the ones out of the can, not the better version of the beets like the cubed.  You know, my wife makes beets and boils them, they’re real beets, and cubes them and serves them with goat cheese and a wonderful salad.  My grandma would just take the canned beets and then slice them. Regardless, still love my grandma.  So, anyways, this Green Juice it’s got beets in it.  It’s got a lot more in it and you get a 20% discount.  Just go to Organifi.com.  That’s Organifi with an “I”, Organifi.com.  You get 20% discount code with GREENFIELD on any of the fine ingredients including the pumpkin spice and the green stuff from Organifi.

Then, finally, the last thing I’d throw in there would be, we’re kind of nearing the end of the race season and I’m speaking at a lot of events that are coming up.  We’ll put them all over on the show notes at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/391, but one place I’m going to be is San Francisco.  I’m going to go to San Francisco the first week of December, they’ve got a stadium race there, Spartan stadium race.  I always love to see our fans out there doing burpees in the dugout and rope climbs in the outfield and running around the concourse at AT&T Stadium.  If you’ve never done a Spartan race before, this is a fun way to get introduced to the sport of obstacle course racing without necessarily having to climb under barbed wire in the middle of a muddy forest.  So, it’s the AT&T Park Stadium.  They probably would if it wasn’t something that would result in litigious events and lawsuits put barbed wire and forest and mud there, but ultimately as it is, it’s a little bit more of a clean race.  It’s almost like doing a giant CrossFit workout in a stadium.  So, it is December 1^st and December 2^nd.  You can race both days if you want to down in AT&T Park in San Francisco.  I’ll be there and it would be fabulous to see some other friends there.  So, head on down, do the Spartan, a little thing to keep you fit and motivated over the holiday season.  So, there you have it.

Listener Q&A:

Alex:  Hey, Ben.  This is Alex here.  First time caller, long time listener.  I wanted to get your thoughts on a situation I’ve been dealing with these last few years.  I’ve been going to the gym mainly with the goal of gaining muscle mass and hypertrophy in my upper body, mainly in my chest and in my shoulders, and I’m not seeing the results I wanted to.  I was wondering if this is down to primarily my body type being ectomorphic in nature, I have been watching my protein, I have been making sure my lifts are targeted at the muscles that I want hypertrophy, and I’m just not getting the results.  I was wondering if these efforts are completely futile or if they should be put elsewhere if I just need to tweak a few things.  I’d love to hear your thoughts, man.  Thank you.

Ben:  Brock, last year you and I did a little bit of a mass and I have to admit I kind of half-assed it, but we did a bit of a mass gain protocol.

Brock:  We did.  I didn’t realize you were half-assing it.  I was using my whole ass.

Ben:  Yeah.  Yeah, no.   My problem was I was doing the mass gain protocol the same time I was preparing…  I had some kind of an ultra-endurance event.  I don’t remember if it was World’ Toughest Mudder or it might have been, I think it was, Spartan World Championships possibly, but the long one; I was doing the Ultra Beast.  So, regardless, I was doing way too much cardio for me to be able to gain mass.  But, I weigh, to give you some perspective, Alex and all you other skinny folks listening in who want to get big muscles, I weigh 175 pounds right now.  When I was in college, I weighed 215 and I was primarily, I didn’t have access nor affordability for any performance enhancing drugs or steroids or anything like that.  I did that on creatine and tuna fish.  That was basically how I put on that much muscle in college and then I, because I’m a skinny guy, was using a multi-joint approach.

So, there’s two different approaches to train a body part split where you might do chest and shoulder one day, and biceps and triceps and calves another day, and core and legs another day, and then rinse, wash, and repeat.  Not only does that take copious amounts of time because you need to be spending a good two to three hours during many of your workouts to hit each body part with sufficiency to get that anabolic response that causes those muscles to build.  But it also, in my opinion, especially for skinny guys, is not as efficient as the approach I use which was three full body lifts per week.  We’re talking cleans, benches, squats, deadlifts, etcetera.  A lot of barbell work, a lot of free weight work, a lot of dumbbell work, and then I would typically have one vanity day, right, where I really would do blast my biceps and triceps until I couldn’t lift my arms anymore and then I did a lot of seated calf raise and standing calf raise work and just did a lot of the filler work.  But, that was my approach.  It was just three days a week of heavy full body lifting and then one day a week of more vanity body parts and that was typically on a Saturday or a Sunday.

During that time, I was eating somewhere in the range of 5-7,000 calories per day.  So, not necessarily a healthy approach, I was doing more of a high protein, low fat, low carbohydrate approach.  And, I’ll speak in just a second about what I would do… what I will do actually if I were going to do this again.  But ultimately, that was my approach in college and I did learn a lot about how skinny guys can put on muscle particularly with that multi-joint approach, which we’ll unpack here in a second about how you can do that even more intelligently than I was doing back then.  But I also learned a lot about recovery and just about little things that skinny guys can do to put on muscle.  Where I want to start though is with a lot of what I learned from the guy whose program, Brock, you and I began to use last year, I just think you went at it a little more thoroughly than I did, but that would be Dan John.

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  And, Dan John’s book “Mass Made Simple”.  Now, I’ve interviewed Dan John.  I’ve also own his book “Mass Made Simple” which you can get on Kindle or you can get as a spiral bound book that you can take to the gym.  Basically, the idea behind Dan John’s principles, I would say there’s several basic principles that he gets into in the book.  The first is that you must, if you are going to really want to put on as much mass as possible as a skinny guy focus on that alone and not fat loss simultaneously meaning that it’s very difficult for you to get six-pack abs at the same time that you put on a lot of muscle.  In an ideal scenario, you would have a bulking phase and then a cutting phase.  In the bulking phase would indeed involve you eating more food and not caring that much if you did develop a little bit of extra body fat as you build muscle and then you go through a cutting phase where you do diet down a little bit and strip some of that fat off.  But, that’s why a lot of skinny guys will do their mass building in the fall and winter when they’ve got their clothes on, right, and you don’t have to worry about going to the beach and, I realize this sounds very vain and shallow, but it is something that people worry about and it’s true we live in a culture where we’re judged sometimes based on our ripped-ness, our striations.

Ultimately, the idea is you don’t want to focus on building muscle and losing fat simultaneously.  You focus on eating food and building muscle and putting on mass.  This is kind of related to Dan John’s advice on cardio and that is that, I remember when I spoke with him, he’s like, “you lift weights and then sit around and watch the football game.”  Don’t do the walking treadmill or the standing work station; park as close as you can to the grocery store when you go to the grocery store; take the escalator when you’re going through the airport; basically break most of the rules that we talk about when it comes to low-level physical activity throughout the day and that’s another big one when it comes to gaining mass.  You’re trying to avoid movement that’s not anabolic as much as possible.  So, I mean, he even goes as far as to say wear extra clothes so your body doesn’t have to go through cold thermogenesis to stay warm, definitely don’t take cold showers, sit more, find shorter routes to everything, and I realize that this flies in the face of what you might hear when it comes to longevity or fat management, but ultimately, if you’re lifting heavy s**t and then not moving a lot, you are going to gain mass; it’s just going to happen.

Again, if you’re goal is to put on as much mass as possible, sometimes longevity and fat loss get sacrificed, but ultimately the idea is limit cardio.  I’d say be reasonable.  For me, as I go into this winter, my goal is indeed I want to get up closer to my normal healthy weight of about 190 to 195 and I will continue to walk down to the mailbox to get the mail, I’ll continue to go my afternoon 30-minute walking meditation-type of things that we just talked about, I’ll continue to engage in low-level physical activity throughout the day, but I will vastly decrease the amount of cardio training I’m doing for Spartan races or triathlons and I won’t be doing a lot of time spent hammering my road bike down the highway for an hour or anything like that.  So, some stuff will get sacrificed.

So, another thing that Dan John recommends is, of course, eating a lot and eating frequently.  So, this whole idea of intermittent fasting, this whole idea of long periods of time between meals, this idea of a weekly 24-hour fast or a fasting-mimicking diet several times throughout the year, all of that goes out the window.  When you’re hungry, you eat and when you’re not hungry, you eat.  I’ve had skinny football players and basketball players hire me to put together nutrition plans for them to help them put on muscle and they’re shocked at the amount that they need to eat.  Yeah, you get a good digestive enzyme like you get Thorne Biogest and maybe you pick some up of Quicksilver Scientific’s Bitters and some things that are going to help you digest that food and you don’t eat in a stressed way so that you actually can assimilate a lot of those nutrients.  But ultimately, and even listen to this coming Saturday’s interview with the Gluten Guardian guys because we actually talk a lot about digestive enzymes.  One of those guys is a bodybuilder, the other guy, he’s actually trying to put on a lot of mass right now and they’re using a copious amount of digestive enzymes.  But ultimately, eating a lot of food and then combining a lot of digestive enzymes along with hat food, that’s also a really good strategy.  But, unlike Dan John who recommends you eat anything…

Brock:  Peanut butter sandwiches?

Ben:  Anything in sight!  Yeah, peanut butter sandwiches; and he says when you walk passed the doughnut, don’t resist, just eat it; and supersized meals at the fast food outlet…  Actually, I don’t think he says that.

Brock:  No, he doesn’t say that.  It’s not that bad.

Ben:  Yeah, I actually have different recommendations.  And as I go into this winter, I’m going to be using an approach that’s very similar to two resources that I’m going to give to you, Alex.  One would be the Weston A. Price Diet.  So the Weston A. Price Diet is based on eating whole, unprocessed foods; a lot of organ meats; beef lamb game, poultry and eggs from pasture-fed animals; wild fish, fish eggs, shellfish; a lot of, and this important for the growth hormone part, full fat milk products.  So, not just colostrum, but raw milk, and whole yoghurt, and kefir, and cultured butter, and full fat raw cheeses, and fresh sour cream, lard, tallow, not a lot of egg whites, right.  If you read Dan John’s book, he’s like, “oh egg whites, egg whites.”  No!  Egg yolks with cream, with butter, a lot of extra virgin olive oil, a lot of really good expeller-pressed sesame oil, expeller-pressed flax oil; tropical oils like coconut, and palm, and palm kernel oil; a lot of fish oil, a good over six grams of fish oil per day; plenty of whole grains, legumes and nuts that have been soaked, sprouted, and leavened to neutralize a lot of the phytic acid, the enzyme inhibitors that are in those; a lot of really good clean water; a ton of bone broth; and lots of sleep and natural light.  That’s the Weston A. Price Diet.

If you want to talk about a mass building diet, I’ve had some pregnant women who have hired me to help them with their nutrition during pregnancy and I put almost every single one of them, unless they’ve got some pretty sever autoimmune or allergy issues, on the Weston A. Price Diet.  I had two women last year give birth to babies that topped off over 10 pounds at birth and they’re just these big, beautiful babies with well-formed jaws and big bones, and all the fat around th]]>

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