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Guest: Abel James aka Fat Burning Man

So, abel, you know, we've been friends for a while first met a couple of years ago, the paleo f ax conference and abel's definitely bio hacker your backgrounds kind of cool because you've studied neurology and music, and you've also lost a significant amount of weight, so we've we've walked in some pretty similar paths, which is why I invited you on this show also abel's podcast, fat burn man, fat burning man, but it's actually fat burn man is your twitter handle is well worth listening to, so we travel in the same circles, talk a lot of the same people and practice some pretty similar things, but abel's got a different spin on things, so well, I'm gonna ask you to talk for a couple minutes about toxins, and I'll be right back. Sure, I just want to start by saying one of the coolest things about dave in the way that he works is that basically it goes out and explores all of the different technologies and the new research about what works for the human body, what doesn't work for the hu...

man body and the kind of like ancestral paleo approach is going way back to your roots, going back tens of thousands of years, and even more than that in some cases and what we find when we go back that far. And when we look at what davis into all the new gizmos and technologies and things like that oftentimes we arrive at almost exactly the same conclusions so basically what we have what we start with is a framework thats based upon living the way that humans should live and once we kind of explore that with new technologies we find that the things that actually worked best for us in our bodies are the things that we've been doing for a very very long time according to what feels best is a human what would exist in our natural environment as well as what is built in automatically to a lot of the ancient traditions when it comes to food preparation the types of foods we would have been eating which could be completely different across the world and that's one of the things that's problematic with paleo died is that basically it doesn't give you a prescription for the exact foods that you should eat what it gives you is a framework that you can work with and basically plug things in that work with your own individual body so in terms of toxins one of the things that is extraordinarily useful in terms of health is getting a wide variety of foods basically the the philosophy behind nurturing your body nourishing your body is such that you want to maximize the nutrient density of your food's while minimizing the amount of toxins that you're exposed to with the foods and in your environment, I gotta ask you a question, I will go for it, I'm back by the way, I've got some water, all right? So if you maximize the variety of food you eat, are you also maximus and the variety of toxins you're supposed to you are? But if you eat the same food every day, you're also maximizing the amount of toxins that you're exposed you, so that the fact remains if you live in the world today, if you breathe the air, if you drive a car, if you live in a house, you are exposed to toxins. The average american I read, uh, is carrying in their body, you right now sitting out there me myself, dave even problem, maybe a little less for you carries over seven hundred synthetic chemicals in their body right now. Andi, I don't say this to scare you or shock you into in activity, but the fact remains that the world isn't perfect and we can do better. I think that some of the worst advice you could follow it is eat the same thing every day you lean down and that sort of thing what you want to do is recognize that you're exposed to toxins, eat seasonally, eat according to the spectrum, I think the way that you do it with the bulletproof diet is brilliant because you have this spectrum of foods it's not saying everything that comes from nature is great. Everything that comes from man is not great, you have this spectrum because there are a lot of things they you can plug into the ancestral template that work a heck of a lot better than a lot of even natural foods like m c t s are a perfect example. So if you eat the way that a human should seasonally a wide variety of foods that are bulletproof, I haven't talked about eating seasonally yet, and for people listening, I'm not sure that some people even eating seasonally means right, so go into that a little bit of detail, cool so you can get a watermelon you round, and we kind of expect that apples you around you, khun, get butter and dairy you around, but the thing is, all these foods are seasonal, and even more than that, the amount of nutrition that you get from these foods highly depends on the freshness of them and for butter. For example, you want butter that come from cows during the season while they're eating the healthiest grass, the most grass you wanted to contain, large amounts of nutrients, antioxidants, things like that, so the way that you do that is either by eating seasonally by getting foods at your farmer's market and that sort of thing or you stock up on foods while they're in season and then you store them correctly like butter it's funny you mentioned butter like that I try to avoid butter from cows like under major flight paths for airplanes because fat accumulates toxins better than anything else so clean fast are the hardest to find in the most important and I by spring and summer butter which is the most dark yellow because that's when the animals were eating the most grass and you could buy it's the same costas is in winter when they're eating more hey if you're lucky or more corn and soy if it's typical butter so you most yeah gmo is even worse so you by literally by one hundred pounds of butter it'll keep for amazing amounts of time in the freezer so I put it in the freezer next to the half a cow and I have all the butter ever wanted and it's butter with less toxins in it and more nutrients and more nutrients helps you take the toxins out right exactly so one of the one of the hypotheses that I subscribe to is that one of the major inputs into the obesity epidemic is malnourishment and talk since play on epic role and that basically what toxins do you can either burn fat and stay lean or lose weight or you can detoxify and you're kind of in these two modes, and so if your liver is always overloaded with all this junk and you're dealing with all these toxins, then you're not prioritizing burning fat because on the priority of what your body wants to do, it wants to keep you alive first, and it doesn't matter if your rail thin and if you have a six pack if you're dead so the first thing your body is going to do first thing your liver is going to do is try to get rid of all the things that are not bulletproof in your body all these toxins in fact, if you eat too much of certain nutrients, then that can also act as a toxin, so surprising things that are toxic can view water if ingested too quickly salt so even things that are exceedingly good for you kind of go on this this dose response curve, you know you want to make sure that you're hitting that sweet spot where you're nourishing your body, getting all the nutrients that you need, but not too much because if you get too much, then all of a sudden you have more toxins in your body it's a kind of ah scary thinking oh no there's toxins there's always been talking for the first time there was a fire in a cave, everyone breathe the smoke our bodies are designed to excrete toxins and we have this problem now where we've messed with our food composition where excess protein is toxic the wrong fats are toxic and even something like fructose which was really not in our diet very much fructose is fruit sugar is it a toxin it's a good question there's arguments about it I'd say it's probably not a toxin any more so than water but high doses of fritos do very bad things to your liver and very bad things to the lining of your arteries so even the definition of a toxin is a little bit watery there. What do you think about that's? A little squishy but I think a good a good way to think about it is anything that is in a certain amount that damages your body or interrupts the normal functioning of your body for the normal optimal function you have your body I shouldn't say normal because normal in america pathetic right now waken do better yeah it's funny like does wheat eliminate the normal functioning of the human body not normal by most people's standards but we do know that societies when they add wheat to their diet they get a foot shorter within a few generations that seems less optimal not that there's anything wrong with you short people out there but in all seriousness like you can see skeletal changes in the sun changes in teeth they come from this so if your perspective on life is is a little bit less compromising like I want to do things that are optimal, I don't want to do things that are good enough then paying attention to toxins matters and for losing weight its particular important cause I mean you focus on weight loss or that I've lost a hundred pounds we've we've seen assays of people's body fat and then amount of persistent pesticides and heavy metals in the fat in a lot of people it's the reason the fats they're your body makes the relatively intelligent decision let's see, I have his hunk of pesticide and mercury what should I do that? Should I put it in the brain? I guess not have some fat will store it in the fat right? And this is why on the bulletproof rapid fat loss protocol which isn't even in the official bulletproof type it's on the plug I tell people like don't do this some people just need to anyway and if you're going to do this, you must take a ton of talks and binding agents. If you don't do that, you can get really sick because if you lose one hundred pounds like a pound today is what people are losing when they follow the bull prevented man fasting stuff with a few tweaks when you do that all of those toxins that are in your the fat around your gut they're going to go into your brain if your liver can handle it so you want to get him out of the gods when you're dealing with like rapid fat loss in the people who listen to your blogger, the people that you coach what do you do about toxins table? You know, I think if you're talking about what happens when you're rapidly losing fat, people feel great because they're rapidly losing happen at the same time they feel horrible because all of us all of these joints like so activated charcoal is great for that it's a little bit I think you cover the pros and cons of it obviously it can prevent some things from being absorbed that may or may not be good but more importantly when you're losing that much fat and if you're if you're carrying that much fat over a long period of time there's a good chance that you're carrying a heck of a lot of toxins and another point about that like one of the best ways to illustrate how out of touch we are msg you talked about this before how do you induce obesity in the lab? What they do is like rats and mice and other animals aren't naturally obese you have to make them obese and so they have it down to a science because in order to deal with obesity you need to start with obese mice rats and so they take these normal rats and mice and then they inject them with msg and I should say that m iss cheese in the vast majority of processed foods and a lot of restaurant foods and it's it's very difficult to ignore unless you really pay attention to it. And so once they introduced this into the body of the rodent it's been shown to increase appetite by as much as forty percent and the rodents rapidly growth that that's how you induce obesity so getting rid of this stuff is exceedingly important if you wanna lose that it's funny I saw a study a while back that said putting msg and restaurant food's increased store receipts by thirty percent because people buy more drinks and they buy dessert when they find msg so it's funny those numbers almost lineup is pretty interesting. Yeah, so let's talk about lymphatic circulation because the bulletproof vibe here is something that I use and let's talk I mean you're familiar with lymph in all that obviously so so would you share with people what lymph is and why making it circulates important and some of the ways you can do it like, say, moving maybe moving yes oh, you already kind of covered off on some of the cool tech but there were low tech ways to do it to it if you're moving, you're doing better than if you're sitting and you're not moving, exercise has been shown to detoxify immensely do you mean moving or exercise? So moving exercise, training these air all different ways of explaining that you should get off your butt and do something? If your four hundred fifty pounds it doesn't make sense to do a burpee, but it does make sense to move as much as you can and the longer that you stagnate them or toxins khun build up in your lymphatic system. One thing that khun basically help you drain out and excrete a lot of these toxins, uh is deep tissue massage exercise uh, cem some more low tech things that you can do are eating green fibers, veggies, carella, spirulina like you talked about for, uh and then some of the tech that you showed before in terms of lyrical lymphatic system, that stuff works like gangbusters. It's interesting that, like your lymph is it's kind like the sewage system of your body. So you have this nice heart centralized pump and you have little things that in your arteries and veins that help to move blood through the body. But the lymph doesn't have that so all of the stuff that builds up you need to be able to get it out of there and then in order to get it out of there you have to move on, and I'm a fan of movement for sure and moving doesn't mean you're exercising, but the fastest way that I know of to get lymphatic circulation and get all these benefits is the bulletproof vibe, so I use that whenever I'm home, I stand on that thing for fifteen minutes today, sometimes I'm on the phone, my voice sounds a little weird. Uh, or you can, like watch tv or something because causing your muscles to tighten and release thirty times a second just moves things in the body faster than any other way I've been able to find, so I don't usually have two hours to go for a long walk and would have felt so I'm going to get it done. So one more thing about toxins, you don't necessarily have to freak out about them, but you should be very conscious that they exist. Uh, and if you're if this is new to you, if you ever really thought about this sort of thing before, I know right now that you can feel better, you can you can achieve mohr you can basically get rid of that brain fog that just out of necessity comes and goes through out the day that's, not normal. That's not how you're meant to perform that's not how you're meant to feel so when you start teo to experiment with this stuff and make sure that you're using national cleaning products instead of all the chemicals when you're taking the toxins out of your food when you're paying attention to it and when you go to a restaurant making sure that you're not eating tons of ah of barbecued food that's been scorched in the toxins that come with that as soon as you start doing that all of a sudden you start feeling a heck of a lot better so just know right now that it's not just us kind of like yapping at you it's like you can feel a heck of a lot better and you can do it in just a few days if you start paying attention to this stuff so able I have a question for you I know everyone listening wants to know you have a top ranked podcast in fact use you like a point or two above mine congratulations thank you uh tell us the name your podcast so I didn't introduce you very well with that and the name of your blog's people confined your work sure so the name of my podcast is fat burning man you can find that on itunes also on youtube and a few other places my blog's the same name it's fat burning man dot com and that's the best place to find mia's it released the fat loss type stuff is well is bio hacking that sort of thing thank you for coming in to talk about toxins I think we have time for a question or do you want to do yes I think we are going to take some questions we'll start with the audience wait do we have a better idea yet of the frequency of when we should be working out like how many times a week the sessions I know I've heard davey a podcast but they found her body by science twelve minutes a week you know, I've since I've been doing the bulletproof diet I've worked out way less I'm lost twenty five pounds so I'm kind of starting to really to what's that that was my experience too yeah so I mean that's like all right, I have more time to do everything I but I still want to work out, but how much should I work what's your take on this? It really depends on your goals and that sounds like a cop out, but I mean, I've got on both ends inspection I've run four hours a day, I've done marathon training and just for no reason run more than thirty miles at a time for a long period time I've also basically hack to my own body treat myself like a guinea pig ah, no, I've I've witnessed how little exercise you can get away with just a few minutes a week and maintain, you know, basically the same body that I have right now, um, something that I did, I exercise for the way that I feel more than the way that I look. So what a lot of people do is, you know, they'll get into crossfit or some sort of, you know, advanced type, super intense training, which could be cool and you might get shredded, but you also might get a spare tire if you do it wrong, you're not sleeping, and you won't. I feel super productive if you're expending that much energy and building up that much stress, so it really depends on your goals. If you want to be shredded, you don't have to work out all the time. I just kind of want to put that out there if you don't sleep, don't exercise that's really, really important. So one of the reasons that I cut my exercise as much as I did as I was, well, starting the bulletproof blogged and growing it, and I was working as a full time vice president at another company, and I have two young kids, my sleep was five hours, so I'm just going to hours a night. And I tried, you know, I'll try a little bit of, you know, some heavy lifting like that just cost me three hours, my fifteen minutes of listening because I needed three more hours of sleep for the two next nights, I didn't have six hours to waste, so I figured out how little I could get away with I'm not saying that's optimal, but the big uh, things are the minimum amount of exercise required in order to maintain a healthy, strong physique, and that said, it spins on your goal. I'm not a bodybuilder like I don't want to look, I don't want to look good naked that's not where I'm willing to spend an extra five hours a week and I'm married have kids what I need to look good naked, but in all seriousness, your your goals really do vary. So ifyou're goes to live a very long time. You probably don't want to be like uber muscular either, because there's pretty good evidence. A lot of those guys, you know, at the time, it one percent body fat and you know, I'm kind of doing that sort of thing. They get heart attacks in their fifties itt's, not necessarily howto live a long time, but it does look cool if you're into that. Yeah, and it's, the thing is, in order to maintain, ah, body like this, which is lean and has muscle on it and that sort of thing you can get away with so little it's incredible. But if you want to get unnaturally lien, if you want to stay at like, six like three to six percent body fat is a man or something like that, it's unnatural you're down, regulating all sorts of things, and as soon as you stop doing those things and starving yourself, you're going to put on more fat. Then we will, because everything's down regulated another thing that I forgot to bring out that I wanted to make sure we touched on is toxins as they relate to performance. Just a quick tidbit about that toxins show up everywhere. I mean, alcohol we know is one I drink dry red wine and scotch and other things from time to time on dh a little bit of them can be fine, and you might not even notice that it's affecting you might not feel like you have a hangover, but what I did was when I was running. I have one of those fancy gps watches you look at the rate of speed and and you're mile time in real time as you're doing it. And, uh, so I wanted to see if, if wine, which doesn't really get me drunk anymore, I went to dartmouth, so I experienced a lot of good times and it's, I'm not a lightweight, I'll just say that. So I tried drinking two glasses of wine a few times and and saw what happened when I went running the next day and my per mile time for the same level of effort, you know, I'm I was just dogging it, and it was twenty seconds slower that's from two glasses of wine from one glass of wine, it was about ten to twelve seconds slower, but more importantly than that, it was brutal. We there are those times when you're exercising, you feel great and you feel light. Those are the times when you're not carrying and dealing with a lot of toxins, the times that you are it's slowing you down and more importantly, it's slowing you down here, just basically sucking all your motivation away. One of my sandhill road venture capital buddies just went on six weeks of no alcohol, which friend was a huge thing because those guys, I think they live on one and and he said, I'm I'm almost ashamed to say how good I feel you I don't want this to be true, but yeah, they're toxins over there in red wine and beer. Her performance physically and mentally for a couple days after you have them it's unfortunate, but it's there.