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Optimal Diet Q&A

So um on that note after deking out on ketosis let's go ahead and take some more questions other questions that spilled over from the supplementation that we did or questions that you guys have but what I've been talking about peter gunn teo deeper into testing isn't there like testing for key toast? Yes, sure through different stuff if you want to grab that white pack that's next to the mouthpiece and bring that out here that yeah that's certainly one way you contest for ketosis this is uh this is listed under the breath test section of ben greenfield fitness dot com slash creative live but this is a breath to that can tell you whether or not you're in ketosis I can tell you that because I had a rice and falafel for lunch that I am not in ketosis right now but the way that this works is you take both black ends off of the tube and you break the little capsule in there that has the powder and then you breathe really hard into the tube. You do that for about thirty seconds normally ok a...

nd then you break the little liquid and you put both ends back on the capsule yellow will mean you're not in ketosis purple will mean your blood key tone levels are above one melon mueller which is enough to get a lot of the mental performance enhancing benefits of ketosis shake it like this you let it sit for one or two minutes and I'll tell you if you're in ketosis and you kind of hold it up I can already tell it's kind of yellow oranges meaning that my my blood key tone levels right now are definitely below one million more I can tell you based on the way I feel and what I ate for lunch I could have told you that already but that's how you can actually test breath key tones so you can get a monitor like that if you didn't want to like just do you like blood drop so the difference between you and the blood drop and that convenience not having a bleed to put your finger so um you know, I could shove that in the back of my bike jersey and I have to take like, electric monitor or anything out like like that out with me you know, blood tests, you bleed onto a stick and then you put the stick in the monitor in the monitor read your key tones so since we've mentioned brain fog a little bit we're on this topic just to clarify bionic was asking if you keep ketogenic diet is good for brit that brain fog that we were discussing taquito genic diet can certainly help quite a bit with mental enhancement but usually if the brain fog is due to the kind of gut brain issues that we're going to talk about in the next session or it's due to some kind of a neurotransmitter deficit key tones aren't necessarily going to kind of roll over that stuff and just instantly turned into a brain superstar now if you've taken care of brain inflammation and you've got a clean gut and ketosis is a really cool mental ac and it really can help out with that. So another question I'm just learning about fasting is not recommended to do on days that you do intense workouts a swell it depends let's say that I've got an intense workout I mentioned yesterday that because body temperature peaks and coordination peaks between four and six p m that that's when I work out I can fast overnight and eat breakfast and breakfast has certainly hit my system by four to six p m that day and I can go work out and technically still have more than adequate nutrients and amino acids on board to be able to get through that hard work out so you could do intermittent fasting and do a hard workout where you need to be careful is waking up rolling out of bed in the morning and doing your hard work out right then rather than waiting until later in the day. So yeah, so say you wanted sort of use this diet to say run a bit better marathon but you don't necessarily want toe follow this because they seemed like it's difficult to maintain. So when, like, can you sort of start this diet at a certain period before the young, exactly maximal adaptation to a kyoto sis based diet would peak at about two to three years is what some of the experts in terms of mitochondrial density and the body's actual physiological response to using a new source of fuel would say I notice benefits within twelve weeks, so I could just say from personal experience now, there's, not a lot of studies or research out there. Some people say that if you kept yourself in ketosis for two or three years, that you would turn yourself into, like an unstoppable fat burning machine, I don't know if that's true or not to me, it just seems awfully unnatural based off of again some of the ancestor observations and observations of other omnivorous animals that that you tend to see in nature. I think that full on ketosis is not necessarily natural, and it is hard to stand. But I would say from personal experience, even as little as twelve weeks you could you could definitely get a lot of those fat burning benefits I would stay with you during your marathon, so yeah, let's, let's take another question on the internet and we'll go back to them. To the audience yeah, we have another fasting question here from alberto in mexico city. I know sometimes people say that you need to keep your metabolism of by eating the small meals throughout the day, but you're saying to do these long fasting period so alberta wants to know how do you maintain a good metabolism when fasting? Does your metabolism drop or are these not related? No, your metabolism is on ly going to drop after about twenty eight days of clark depletion that's the point at which you can get metabolism set point decrease where you actually can see metabolic damage so severe caloric depletion doing like the eight hundred twelve hundred calorie liquid dia thing. If you were to do that for four weeks in a row, that's when you intend to see a drop in metabolism simply eating three square meals a day isn't going to do a thing to your metabolism. And technically you could even fast for a week or two and not see any issues with metabolism. So that's going to assume that noah dream fifty is president and that you're not already in some kind of a hole that you dug yourself into be like a healthy person going into a fast yeah, cheryl exercise fatigue I mean, I used to do this fitness boot camp in the morning, so five thirty working out till seven I feel great come home to my thing and then two o'clock in the afternoon I'm exhausted I mean sleepy head nodding is that due to working out too hard too long or inadequate nutrition? Or do I really one of these people I need a twenty minute nap in the afternoon sometimes it can mean that you did not eat enough right after the workout and you've kind of exhausted your glycogen levels and the brain does need anywhere from thirty to forty calories of of glucose to get by so you might be in that kind of state sometimes it can indicate hormonal depletion sometimes that's a that's an issue you can run into sometimes with estrogen dominance it's an issue you can run into sometimes with no transmitter balances so usually if I were asked that question we'd sit down, we go over your diet and look out like a week's worth of your diet. Okay, we look at any supplements that we're taking we'd look at your activity levels and we might even send you infer likes and testing and do like a neuro endocrine panel on like a hormonal panel and and then you're able to say for sure okay, why is brain fog occurring? And you could even do things like lookinto parasites east fungus candida I mean there's so many things that affect your brain that it really turns into detective work so you know and hopefully by the time we end these three days you guys are going to know a lot about how to do your own detective work and hopefully by now you already realizing some of this stuff just I'm curious if ketosis is something that a woman should try to do since you're saying that we're more dependent on carbohydrates well, well a woman is not necessarily more dependent on carbohydrates is a matter of fact women women tend to burn fats really efficiently as a fuel. The issue is that thyroid hormone dis regulates shin or neural and new condition regulation tends to be something that pops up maurine females in a state of caloric restriction and especially carbohydrate restriction compared to males. Um I just see that over and over again and the athletes that I work with so I think that if you're a female and your drink ito sis you got to do all sorts of things you gotta be like you takes up the like cairo gold eat liver once a week you know, take your sodium like do all these things almost make me question whether or not it's even the house not you know it's it's like you know it's one of those things where do you really want a bio hack to that level versus just kind of like upping your carbohydrate and take twenty percent or thirty percent you know kind of keeping your eye on on how you look feeling performs so yeah I mean I don't necessarily advocate key toeses lot people think like I'm the key toast this guy but that's not necessarily the case I'm a bigger a bigger advocate of the type of macro nutrient ratio that I opened this session with and then using ketosis perhaps is a bio hack or in the lead up to something like a marathon or in iron man to give yourself a little extra metabolic efficiency so embarrass mentioned body temperature and how you test your body temperature what would you consider a healthy body temperature and for someone with a regular all right well functioning thyroid um what is ah supplement besides, you know, just eating more carbohydrates that someone could up their body temperature you could use like iodine and selenium as thyroid supports you could do like the brazil nuts and the iodine things of that nature um as far as actual body temperature I followed a protocol forget the actual title of the of the protocol should all come to mind at some point but what we were looking at was axel eri and orel body temps and it was something like below ninety seven for axl arian below ninety six for orel was considered to be indicative of low thyroid and for me I was consistently scoring in like the ninety six and ninety five's for both so you know, definitely nowhere near like the mid ninety seven's ninety eight point six type of range. So other questions, yeah, we have a question here from gorby shaw and I know a lot of people say that caffeine can kind of be a good appetite suppressant when you're fasting, and they want to know what the best sources of caffeine during a fasting or I mean, should you be avoiding caffeine mirror in a fast combination of elle fanning and caffeine his best? Yeah, so combining green tea and caffeine because the healthy inning kind of acts synergistically with the caffeine, you could be like the caffeine in the morning and then kind of taper off it in the afternoon because the elle fanning from something like the green tea will still allow you to sleep and that's kind of a nice little mix in terms of caffeine and something else that kind of helps it a little bit great. Amantino posed a question that I'm kind of interested in also because I sometimes notice this for myself. He says that is it a good idea to start his day with a protein shake since he often skips breakfast? My goal is to gain muscle mass, but I always seem to get sleepy and or sluggish after pounding down that morning shake and I struggle with this because if I don't put something in my stomach I get lightheaded however if I eat too early I get sick to my stomach and it's one of those like how do you balance that out? Yeah there's a couple of things first of all, sometimes your digestive system does take a little while to wake up, so to speak production of a lot of those digestive hormones or digestive enzymes. In that case you could do something like use digestive enzymes before that morning meal you know, something like like this to help you digest the food all even use this to help keep myself from getting sleepy. I had a couple of these before for lunch because we had a nice lunch today I knew I'd get sleepy so I actually open this bottle and popped a couple of these before we had lunch. Um the other thing is that especially in the case of protein if you feel crappy if you take a protein shake a lot of times it's because the protein in itself is crappy or you have some kind of an autoimmune reaction to that form of protein we talked about cow versus goat protein. Yesterday we talked about rice and p and m proteins versus animal based proteins for some people a lot of people have reactions toe egg proteins and especially reactions to soy protein, so sometimes you may want to look at the actual ingredients of the protein source itself that you're using that's another thing to bear in mind on dh then making sure that you're not really exceeding that twenty to twenty five grand portion that can kind of be a little bit and excessive load on your digestive system, too. That's really helpful way did have a few people in the chat room discussing thyroid conditions. I know you had mentioned it and bionic a wanted to know in your case, particularly when your thyroid was having issues where you taking thyroid medication? Or was it straight just the thyroid gold that really helped you out? It was it was a thyroid gold that I took on dai ate liver once a week. We're actually in a lot of stuff. Liver are like like we did a lot of organ meats. I really you know, I did brazil nuts and iodine like I went out of my way to really give my thyroid some tlc for about a month after iron man and then I retested and I was fine. You said that was a sixty day trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Thank you. Did I understand correctly that you really are not advocating a low fat diet for children? Definitely not having getting a low fat diet for children. I think that that's one of the worst things you can do for a child so even though I know there's some rules about until the age of two, you do something, then after that something else, so I'm fine understand your curtain? I'm hearing you're saying that throughout, whether they're two or one or twelve that there's a better macronutrients racial for them rather than exactly exactly you keep them relatively close to breast milk, aside from the fact that breast milk has even higher glucose content, then what kids need once their brains have have finished that early early stage of development. So I love the open nature of the discussion that we've been having here in studio and then also with the internet outside of this dialogue. In this conversation, though, health is a very politicized and contentious issue, and so, I mean, I read read a recent study, which was pretty reputable that a percent of health care costs were between, like, four different factors drugs, alcohol, obesity and cigarettes. And so if you could just speak to the self corrective power of the human body to take care of itself, if you embrace the philosophy that we've been talking about here and act upon the recommendations that have been making, yeah, absolutely. You know that that returns to a concept called you know well, the self healing property of the human body is what a lot of like natural path e and even home your path is based upon and you know, when I came back from thailand with my huge bacterial infection last week from the nasty lagoon water that I swam in during the triathlon, the physician that I went to I mean is in his entire philosophy is based on natural healing methods and putting the body in a situation where it's able to heal itself you know, one of the first things he did when I walked into his office was he had me lying on a table covered in acupuncture needles hitting all the meridian points of my body that allowed my actual energy flow to kind of reverse its pattern and naturally heal itself I mean, within twenty four hours I was feeling better after going through some of these protocols that he did that seems kind of wu airy fairy but when when you're beginning to put your body and into a state where you allow it naturally flow like that you can absolutely c c aton of benefits I mean when we talk about healing your gut which is the next session you're going to see how if we take what naturally grows in our god would naturally lives in our gut and we allow it to flourish we can see aton of healing benefits that go way above and beyond our god, and extend to her heart in our brain and our muscles, and, yeah, I mean, it's, I don't know if I directly answered your question, but, um, but, yeah, I mean, the power of the body, two self heal when we put the right kind of things into it is pretty profound. I think we've got a lot into this segment and it's time for another fifteen minute break before we head to the final segment of the day. I know we mentioned it, but in the next segment, we're going to fixing our gut, anything you want to tease before we head to the break about that man, you are going to know everything that you need to know about your digestive system when we finish the next session, I really geek out on this stuff. I am a poop nerd, everything from from the mouth, all the way down, we're going to go over every area of your gut that you can optimize, and this effects a lot of different other things that go on in your body, is that just alluded to say, you're going to get a ton out of this next session, people have really been enjoying we've been talking about today, carol villa says that prior to the last break, I just use these fifteen minutes to make a chunky kale smoothie. I'm having it for lunch, and I've really been enjoying it. Thanks, ben it's. Delicious. And ethan says, if only I was interested in my job as I am with bio hacking, I guess again, he's, showing me where my true passions are.