Podcast #219 from

http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/11/why-women-gain-weight-when-

training-for-endurance-sports/

[00:00:00]

Introduction: In today’s episode, Brock and Ben are on the same place at the

same time. So I will be the sexy female voice that’s introducing

today’s podcast. I don’t even remember what the sexy female voice

says but it’s something like “Welcome to the

bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast”. Whether you wanna be an

Ironman triathlete or just shed a few pounds have we got some

kick butt advice for you so sit back and enjoy another episode of

the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast unedited, unplugged and

live from Thailand.

Brock: Sawasdee ka, Mr. Ben!

Ben: Sawasdee ka, Brock! In case, you hadn’t guessed, folks, first of all,

our deepest apologies to any new listener who just discovered this

podcast.

Brock: Please go back and listen to another episode before you continue

with this one.

Ben: Has already hit the “stop” button thinking that we are a bunch of

freaking hack jogs. We’re recording this on a veranda right after

monsoon and we have very limited editing equipment but we’re

going to bring you a podcast anyways this week for 2 reasons.

First of all, we’re just those dedicated kind of people. Right,

Brock?

Brock: We are dedicated.

Ben: You would not believe how dedicated we are. We’re actually both

wearing our Ben Greenfield Fitness t-shirts and shorts, hats. And

also, we’re recording this just because we happen to be together

and that rarely happens since Brock lives in a country that’s very

far away from America called Canada. Apparently, we have to go

all the way to Asia to actually be in the same place. What we have

for you guys today is we do have news flashes, we do have special

announcements and what else do we have, Brock?

Brock: Love?

Ben: Questions.

Brock: Oh yes. Questions.

Ben: Might be a little bit of an abbreviated podcast today. We may just

stop the thing 10 minutes if it sucks as it already does. But hang

on tight, folks because here it comes live. And if you hear any

monkey screaming in the background, just let it all slide ‘cause

we’re here doing it live. All right. Where do we get these news

flashes, Brock?

Brock: We get them from twitter.com/bengreenfield and also from

facebook.com/bgfitness and also from Google+ if you to the

website bengreenfieldfitness.com and scroll down the right hand

side. You don’t have to remember the URLs, you could just click.

Ben: And as usual this is podcast number what? 219?

Brock: 219.

Ben: So if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com Episode number 219,

we’ll write down everything that we talk about there. But the first

thing that I wanted to mention was a study that they did in

overweight kids and this study was actually in Optimizing Sprint

Interval Exercise to Maximize Energy Expenditure and

Enjoyment in Overweight Boys which is very interesting. They

actually have a physical activity enjoyment scale where they pull

you by how much you enjoyed your physical activity.

Brock: That’s kinda subjective.

Ben: They used a variety of different sprint ratios with these overweight

boys and they not only tracked the enjoyment but they also

tracked how much they wanted to eat after the exercise by giving

them a buffet breakfast. And the interesting thing was was they

found out what length of physical activity, what length of intervals

that you could do that would maximize both your enjoyment and

also keep you from doing that compensatory eating though we all

tend to do that after exercising. All right. Drum roll, please. Here

is the magic ratio of exercise. If you are an overweight boy

(although I would imagine this would work for many other people

too), 30 minutes of either continuous cycling or sprint interval

exercise with 4 second maximum sprints every 2 minutes, every 1

minute, or every 30 seconds, the interval ratio that actually won

out (and I’ve got it written here somewhere so you don’t have to

go all the way through the abstract), was 8 seconds on, 60 seconds

off.

[0:05:02.8]

What that means is 8 seconds of hard hard sprinting followed by

60 seconds of recovery that is the money zone. So let’s say you

wake up in the morning before breakfast you don’t wanna make

yourself super super hungry but you wanna maximize the

enjoyment of your physical activity as much as possible, hop on a

bike, go outside, whatever, 8-second sprints with 8 seconds on

and 60 seconds off. And that was done for a total of 30 minutes –

8 seconds on, 60 seconds off. There you go.

Brock: So that maximized energy expenditure so the most they could get

out of them before they started …

Ben: So basically, maximized weight loss well, not causing a ton of

compensatory eating and also maximizing enjoyment.

Brock: Awesome!

Ben: So the next news flash to mention was called The Effects of Load

Volume on EPOC after Acute Bouts of Resistance Training in

Resistance Training Males. Do you know what EPOC is?

Brock: No. I was just looking to see what it is. Exercise post…

Ben: Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. Basically, you hear

people talking about metabolic rate like how exercise boosts your

metabolism and in geek speak, that’s EPOC – excess post-exercise

oxygen consumption. You’re paying this debt after you finish

exercising meaning that while you’re exercising, your body isn’t

getting enough oxygen but has to burn extra calories after you

finish exercising to pay off that oxygen debt and that’s why you

might have a metabolism boost of 24 hours after you finish a

workout.

Brock: That’s a replenishment.

Ben: Right. But here’s what they found. In this weight training, the

males who are doing a ton…They were doing pretty high volume.

They were actually lifting the equivalent of well a range from

10,000 to 20,000 kg in a single workout but with load volumes of

up to 20,000 kg. It’s a lot of weight. We’re talking about a quarter

ton of weight lifted during the actual routine. In people who are

actually well-trained, there was no increase in metabolic rate even

from a very very difficult workout session such as that weight

training no significant increase in your metabolic rate over and

above your resting metabolic rate.

Brock: That’s a bomber.

Ben: Well, yeah. What it goes to show you though (I think there’s

something you can take out of this), what they have found is that

metabolic rate will increase in untrained people or people who are

being exposed to new activities. So, if you take a bunch of people

who have been in resistance training and doing a certain number

of different resistance training moves like bench press squat, dead

lift clean, whatever and you just have them go and do a whole

bunch of those, it’s not gonna increase their metabolic rate. But if

your throw a curve ball at your body and you still do a bunch of

new exercises, different exercises, you are gonna notice an

increase in your metabolic rate and that has been studied. So, the

take away here is that if your goal is fat loss (we’re not talking

about strength, power or anything else), the way that you do it is

by continuously throwing curve balls.

Brock: Change depth as often as possible.

Ben: Yeah. And you can’t just take what you’re already doing. Double

or triple it and expect an increase in metabolic rate. Your body

doesn’t work that way. You actually need something new that

you’re exposed to.

Brock: So, how drastically new are we talking about if you’re usually

lifting weights, do you have to go to a completely different like go

do a 20-minute run?

Ben: No. You could, for example, instead of doing bench press, do

suspended push-ups, instead of doing squats, do single leg squats

or single leg jumps unto your box.

Brock: So you’re not sacrificing your end product or your end goal.

Ben: Right. You’re changing the angle of the neuro-muscular

requirement.

Brock: Gotcha.

Ben: And then the last thing I wanted to mention was a study on the

effect of carbohydrate and protein supplements on resistance,

exercise, performance, hormonal response, and muscle damage.

And basically, this is also what happens when you eat during your

workout type of study. They fed people on a carbohydrate-protein

beverage mix kind of a typical…there’s a variety of different sports

drinks that are mix of carbohydrate and protein. And what they

found was that there was not much of an improvement in

performance during weight training even though they have shown

performance increases during endurance exercise. It didn’t show

much their performance increase during weight training but post

exercise inflammation was lower. They looked at what’s called

creatine kinase. They looked at myoglobin – both markers of

muscle damage and both were significantly lower along with

lower soreness levels.

[0:10:04.9]

So, what that means is that if your single goal is muscle growth

and bouncing back from your workout as fast as possible and not

being sore after the workout, then it actually does serve you well

during a weight training workout to be consuming a beverage

during the actual workout itself. And they were consuming 175 ml

prior to exercise, 175 halfway through, 355 ml afterwards so they

were taking in a pretty significant amount of fuel but for your

muscle heads up there, for you people who wanna put on weight,

it just goes to show that carbohydrate and protein supplements

can really enhance your response to weight training.

Brock: It seems like that would be more the protein that would be doing

the repairing of the muscles anyway. Would it be the amino acids?

Ben: Yes. But you’re also looking at carbohydrate actually staving off

you losing much of your muscle glycogen. In time you’re burning

through your muscle glycogen, you are creating metabolic by-

products in the inter-muscular space.

Brock: So you need both.

Ben: Basically, you’re keeping yourself from creating that type of

soreness as well. So, it’s kind of a double whammy. So those are

the news flashes for this week and twitter.com/bengreenfield is

working with the rest of those and I’m cringing right now because

I suspect that Brock probably has some special announcements

music for us as well.

Brock: I really wish I could remember how that music goes.

Ben: Special announcements. All right. Probably, a glaring area here is

that Brock and I didn’t really discuss the special announcements

too much before we actually sat down to record because we’re

actually eating squid.

Brock: A lovely barbequed squid.

Ben: A lovely barbequed squid that a Thai man grabbed off of a wooden

platter and gave to us. It’s tasty, chewy but tasty. So, a few things

in terms of special announcements: First of all, for those of you

who wanna come join us March 8th and 9th 2013 in Spokane,

Washington, that is the Become Superhuman Live event. I am

bringing in a ton of awesome speakers for that event but the

reason I’m mentioning it to you now is because the early bird

deadline to get in and get put into the drawing for not only getting

a full refund on your registration or free ticket you get to choose

as well as a one-on-one consultation with me an hour-long sit-

down where we’ll go through and basically over anything you

want. That’s all happening if you register before December 1st

which is 5 days from now. So you’ve got a few days if you’re

listening to this right when it comes out assuming the internet on

this island doesn’t crash and we don’t lose internet access. This

podcast should come out relatively soon so check that out. You

can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman. A couple of

other things…

Brock: Oh yeah. The new version of the book.

Ben: I’ve done a serious upgrade to my low carb triathlon book. I’ve

added a forum to it for you to ask all your questions. I’ve also

added a training plan that’s compatible for anybody who uses

Training Peaks. 100% compatible with that has got a fat

adaptation week, it’s got a low carb maintenance week, it’s got a

race or event week, a race or event day. I spell it all out for you so

it’s all right there on Training Peaks.

Brock: You can just drag and drop those anywhere we’ve got a race

coming up…

Ben: Exactly. You just basically take your race where you could drag

and drop that week right in there and all of a sudden you know

exactly what to eat. It’ll even spit out a grocery shopping list for

you. That is all over at lowcarbtriathlete.com/lowcarbpackage.

We’ll make it easy for you and just put a link in the show notes to

that but it’s brand new. For people who already own the book,

check your e-mail because I sent you out a little discount, you

don’t have to pay full price for it because it comes along with the

training plan and the forum. You can the book too.

Brock: That’s great!

Ben: And also some discounts on the basically some of my

recommended low carb supplements like the Super starch and

amino acids and stuff like that. So, you get a pretty significant

savings on those as part of the package. And then the last thing I

wanted to mention, wanna give shout out to a few people. I

mentioned that what we’re going to do is actually choose one

lucky person each month to come on to the Ben Greenfield Fitness

Podcast for a special episode and we are gonna open that up to

anybody who starts a MyList on Facebook.

Brock: And that’s the thing that looks like Pinterest on Facebook.

Ben: It’s like Pinterest for Facebook, yeah.

Brock: ….that’s a comparison but it’s true and it’s a lot cooler than

Pinterest. You can do more than just scrapbooking.

[015:09.6]

Ben: So you go to facebook.com/bgfitness as in Ben Greenfield Fitness

at facebook.com/bgfitness, click on the MyList button and

basically, you can start a list on anything you want. A couple of

people, I noticed and you gotta share the MyList with me so send

it to via e-mail, post it on our Facebook page, post us a comment

on the show notes, whatever. We’ve got Daniela. What’s up

Daniela Knight?

Brock: Hey Daniela!

Ben: Daniela’s got a bunch of different MyLists but she’s got one for

snack so it looks like she’s got yogie green tea, she’s got some

strawberry whey protein isolate, blueberries, (every girl likes this

one), she’s got coco nieves, navitas naturals organic rock coco

nieves, almonds (Jessa made squid on there).

Brock: It’s weird. No curry.

Ben: No squid, no curry. But anyways, good job Daniela. Liking your

MyList to your churning out. We had another MyList that I did

have open but it somehow closed. Corinne. Shout out to Corrine.

I know you created a MyList. I’m not sure where it is ‘cause I had

it open in my computer but you had a few going as well and so

Corrine and Daniela are both in the running for getting on to a

podcast this month at Ben Greenfield Fitness. Good job and if you

wanna get on the bandwagon, create your MyList and share it

over at facebook.com/bgfitness then get MyListing away and you

could get lucky. That about wraps it up for special

announcements.

Brock: Okay. We’ll let’s go into our questions, then.

Ben: Wait. Try music. Music.

Listener Q & A:

Brock: All right. Our first question.

Ben: By the way, Brock’s gonna read questions because again, our

editing capabilities are not very expensive here right here in the

place called Riley Bay which is this isolated bay in Thailand with

no cars. The power’s kinda been on and off all day today and

yeah, but apparently, we’re still recording. However, Brock’s going

to read the questions. We’re going totally old school so see if he

remembers how to do this.

Brock: So if anybody actually sent in audio questions this week, we will

get to them there in the cue, they’re on my computer, they’re just

…

Ben: He’ll do his best to abbreviate ‘cause I think our first 2 questions

are kinda similar.

Brock: They are. Okay. So Erin asks, “Normally I like to run in the late

mornings at least after I’ve had breakfast on board for a while.

Doing so I trained for 2 marathons and my weight stayed where it

had been for the last 5 years. Right now, my job requires me to do

my training runs at 5:30 in the morning and I’m on my feet all day

at work. I’m not able to get in good workouts at 7:00 PM when

I’m done working. I try to eat a little bit of carbs before and

during my morning run. In the past 10 weeks, I’ve gained 10 lbs

since I started running before work. I’m eating about 2000

calories per day and running 40-45 miles per week”. Then she

goes in to sort of getting a lot more detailed about her diet and

sort of jump, “why am I gaining weight? What can I do to lose

weight? I’m doing the things you mentioned in previous podcast

to reduce cortisol but still the numbers on the scale climb”.

Ben: Okay. So we’ve got Lisa, who’s it Erin?

Brock: That was Erin.

Ben: Okay. So Erin is training for a marathon and she’s gained 10 lbs

since she started training for marathon, 10 lbs in the past 10

weeks.

Brock: Yup.

Ben: Okay. And what does Lisa have to say?

Brock: Lisa says, “I’ve a question about weight gain during marathon

training. I’m a 28 year-old female training for my 4th marathon in

June. I run anywhere from 50-70 miles per week at the height of

my training and I often eat very clean Paleo with an occasional

cheat.” She lifts 2-3 times a week. She’s 5’6’’ and around 130 lbs.

“Whenever I train more intensely for marathons, I end up gaining

about 10 lbs (same as Erin). So, again goes into a lot more detail

about her diet. “I eat low carb high fat for about a month in

December when work prevented me from training and I ended up

losing 10 lbs in a month then regaining it almost immediately

once I resume training.” Those are the important bits from both

of those I think.

[0:20:02.1]

Ben: Okay. Basically, we’ve got 2 women who are training for marathon

and are gaining weight which seems counter intuitive. You would

expect at first glance that you would actually lose weight with

marathon training but they’re not finding this to be the case and

you have this happen a lot when women start training for

endurance sports, they gain weight.

Brock: Is this woman in particular?

Ben: Women more than men tend to have this issue. And there are a

few different reasons for this. The first is something that can be

glaringly obvious but a lot of people don’t really think about it and

that is the fact that when you start to train for endurance training,

your body enhances its ability to store carbohydrate. You can

actually train your body to store up to 60% more carbohydrate.

Storage glycogen primarily in your muscles, you really can’t

amplify what your liver’s able to store but your muscles are able to

store up to 60% more carbohydrate once you start into an

endurance training program.

Brock: So this isn’t something you’re specifically training them to do.

This is sort of a…

Ben: This is just what the body does. This is a natural response to

endurance training because it’s a survival mechanism. You’re

telling your body that it is going to be in situations where it has to

go for a long periods of time and have access to that carbohydrate

to break down.

Brock: Get ready. This may happen again tomorrow or maybe next week.

Ben: Exactly. So it’s like this camel mechanism but glycogen carries up

to 4 times its weight in water and so you can easily balloon up just

from that carbohydrate and water gain. You tend to get a little

salt gain with it as well and unfortunately not what a lot of people

want to hear but there’s not a ton that you can do about it because

even if you say “okay well, I’m not gonna eat carbohydrate. I’m

gonna go low carb, I’m gonna go into ketoses.” What happens is

your body is actually able to take the ketones that deliver starch to

churn out when you’re on a low carb diet and you’re not getting

your body enough carbohydrates. There’s what’s called the

glycerol backbone on those ketone bodies – betahydroxybutarate,

acidoacetate, or 2 primary ketone bodies you get circulating

around in your bloodstream. If your activity levels are high, and

you’re in ketosis, what happens is that your liver is still able to

make glucose out of those ketone bodies. And technically, if you

got some insulin in your bloodstream that glucose can still be

converted into some muscle glycogen. And you can maintain

fairly high levels of storage carbohydrate while you’re in a state of

ketosis. So, yes, going low carb helps a little bit with this scenario,

ballooning up when you start endurance sports but you’re still at

risk of gaining weight just from this glycogen storage mechanism.

Brock: When we’re talking about weight like just weight on scale, right?

Ben: We’re talking about weight on the scale, not necessarily fat.

Brock: So your pants aren’t fitting necessarily different.

Ben: Right.

Brock: It’s just your getting on the scale and going “oh man!”

Ben: Exactly. And I think it was either Erin or Lisa who’d mentioned

cortisol and of course, that can be an issue even if you’re

recovering properly even if you’re getting lots of sleep, what

happens is cortisol can cause your body to retain sodium and

when you retain sodium, that also is going to cause some fluid

retention as well which can also leave you yelling bloated, gaining

weight - not necessarily fat but it’s still weight. There is no way

for your body when you’re training for marathon and by the way,

both Lisa and Erin are running way more miles than I would ever

run if training for marathon. I don’t see any reason to run more

than 30 miles a week unless you’re trying to be professional

marathoners or something of that nature. Your body’s going to

churn out cortisol. It’s simply the catabolic nature of endurance

training and that also can cause that fluid retention. When

women (and we did a full podcast about this, I’ll link to it in the

show notes about Why Women Gain Weight as They Get Older

and What You Can Do About It) get older, and this can be kind of

enhanced a little bit by the catabolic stressful nature of endurance

sports, they tend to get a little bit of estrogen dominance and

when you get that estrogen dominance going on, that also can

cause weight gain for the reasons that we go into great detail on

on that podcast that we did. For something like that, you can take

care of your liver. Get on a good liver detox formula basically start

to clear up the estrogen pathways in the liver. The liver has 2

different detox pathways that it relies upon. One is very reliant

upon basically antioxidants – it’s like being on a full spectrum

antioxidant. The other one is basically reliant on essentially

adding amino acids to the toxins that build up in the liver. And

having adequate amino acids and specific kinds of amino acids

and also having antioxidants can both help with detoxification in

liver and with clearing estrogen a little bit more quickly.

[0:25:12.2]

I’ll put a link to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Recommends page in

the show notes but some of the things that you’ll see there under

the liver detox area would be like Silymarin which is a component

of milk thistle extract. So there is one supplement called

CapraCleanse that I really like for that like doing 3-6

CapraCleanse a day - good full spectrum antioxidant mix. I’m

actually writing an article for the website right now on energy

drinks and one of the natural potent antioxidant cocktails that I

recommend there is called Lifeshotz. That’s something that I

really use, do a pack everyday and that’s got some really good liver

support stuff in it too like grape seed extracts and….

Brock: You interviewed the guy who created those.

Ben: Yeah. My personal physician in Coeur D’Alene my naturopathic

doctor, he basically was responsible for the formulation on that

one. That’s a really good one. You’re gonna find some other stuff

on that recommendations page that we’ll link to like calcium d-

glucarate, methianine. We’re getting on a good liver detox type of

formula can help quite a bit too. And then a couple of other things

we already mentioned – compensatory eating when it comes to

exercise. So many people think that they’re not engaging in

compensatory eating but if you write it down, in many many

cases, you simply are. You’re eating way more than what you

normally would if you work doing all that marathon training and

that adds up pretty quickly and you’d be surprised even if you

think that you’re eating the same or fewer calories than before you

started training for marathon that you actually are not. And

writing it down helps quite a bit or photographing your food also.

Brock: Even just periodically throwing that in even when you’re not

training is always a nice way just to remind yourself what you

actually are eating ‘cause there’s been studies, lots of studies have

shown that people have bad memories about what they actually

eat.

Ben: Very bad memories. Yeah. Food recalls is horrible. Alcohol recall

is even worse. We actually did have an after party after the

triathlon just a few days ago and I think a few of us or so are in

recovery mode including myself. So just a couple of other things

in terms of liver detox and estrogen turnover, high amounts of

coffee, high amounts of tea, that can basically slow down estrogen

turnover and cause some of the estrogen dominance weight gain

as well so that’s something to be careful with. And then also

cruciferous vegetables have a lot of phytoestrogens in them which

are basically compounds that simulate a lot of the effects of

estrogens and can actually help out a little bit in this case

including stuff like broccoli and onions and kale and things of that

nature when it comes to estrogen dominance. And Brock is

distracted…This is one of the issue with us recording live. What

are you looking at?

Brock: (There’s a salamander over …)

Ben: (It’s a frog.) So those are the main things. You’ll see a lot of

websites, shape magazine and prevention women’s health. They

all say “well of course, it’s muscle weight that you’re gaining.”

Most women don’t gain muscle when they’re marathon training

unless you’re starting from complete novice and you’re doing a

ton of hill climbing or something like that, may put on some

muscle on your thighs but it’s usually not muscle gain. Typically,

you’re talking about fluid retention and cortisol, glycogen

retention, some sodium retention, that type of thing.

Brock: Before I got distracted by the frog, I was going get you to clarify

cruciferous vegetables. Which ones are we talking about here?

Ben: Broccoli, kale, spinach, cauliflowers, stuff like that.

Brock: Really? So these are like what we have normally considered to be

like super foods are actually causing some problems.

Ben: No no no. They have phytoestrogens in them which can help.

They basically occupy the receptor sites that estrogen would

normally occupy so they actually help out a little bit too. So those

are some of the things that I recommend to both Erin and Lisa

and that’s why women tend to gain weight when they start

training for endurance sports and some of the things you can do

about it. We’ll not only put links to some of these stuff in the

show notes for Episode 219 but as usual, we’ll create MyList for it

over at facebook.com/bgfitness if you wanna access the MyList.

So, there we go.

Brock: Let’s move on to Ana’s question. And Ana says, “I do quite well in

Crossfit competitions. I like beating people. Mind you, it’s the

scale division at my local affiliates so I’m no pro. It’s just for fun.

I like to keep it mostly paleo (except for whey). So sweet potatoes,

apples, raw honey all smashed and cooked together with some

whey is what I reach for during a competition.

[0:30:09.1]

I also use creatine and beta alanine but I don’t think whole foods

will be absorbed fast enough for the WOD (workout of the day)

especially if you’re required to do several workouts of the day back

to back. These workouts are short and intense 10-12 minutes tops

you go “balls out”. I tried GU gels during the Crossfit open and I

did not see any significant differences in my performance. I was

wondering if you could put your kick butt brains together and give

me some suggestions. In particular, would you say the new

generation Ucan would be a good idea during competition or

during training?”

Ben: Bad idea. Basically, Ana’s looking for a fast-release carbohydrates.

I’m just gonna bump up her energy levels super duper quickly

when she’s getting ready for her WOD. Ucan superstarch is

designed to enhance your fatty acids utilization and be a very slow

release fuel that doesn’t cause an insulin spike, that doesn’t cause

a blood glucose spike. I used that in the triathlon that we had the

other day and I’ll use it again in this next triathlon that we’re

doing in the weekend because I want a slow-release energy source

because I’m trying to tap into my body’s own fat stores as a fuel

and I’m trying to avoid those quick spikes in blood sugar. Pre-

workout, if you really wanted to maximize the glucose that you

have available in your blood stream and have the fastest possible

energy source available to your body, basically, you’d wanna go

for an engineered starch that is not Superstarch. There’s one

that’s called Vitargo. I’ll link to it in the show notes for you but it’s

basically, it could be a waxy maize starch, it could be a barley

starch. It’s basically that the process by which they make it more

than this starchy material that affects the rate at which it is

released. But Vitargo has patented this fast-release carbohydrate

system that causes a massive insulin spike. A bunch of

carbohydrate getting absorbed super quickly into the blood

stream and it’s a very very large long molecular weight

carbohydrate similar to Ucan Superstarch so, it’s all these branch

chains of carbohydrates. It has what’s called the very very low

osmolality similar to Ucan Superstarch meaning that it’s going to

be emptying from the stomach a little bit more quickly and into

the small intestine a little bit more quickly to be absorbed but the

chemical make-up of the starch itself is such that it gets a huge

insulin spike. It gets released really quickly and if you stuck me

into let’s just say a crossfit box and told me ahead that and put my

carb load as quickly as possible to be ready for workout, that is

what I would personally use, would be something like that.

Brock: It sounds like it’s similar to like a maltodextrin in its make-up.

Ben: They’ve done studies on it and it’s like twice the insulin release of

a maltodextrin - even a higher blood sugar spike than

maltodextrin, higher than glucose, definitely higher than fructose.

So, that’s what I would use. Again, I mentioned that we have a

Ben Greenfield Fitness recommends page but there’s a bunch of

other stuff on that page that you can use to amplify pre strength

your power workouts, your performance or even your sugar

uptake. Tianchi is one of the things I recommend. That’s a

Chinese herbal adaptogen complex that I use. That’s a really

really good one. And then just choose your basics. It’s creatine,

carnitine, citrulline and beta-alanine. Those are the four main

ones. I’ve got dosage recommendations and everything that I’ll

put in the show notes for you. Let’s say you just wanna go geeky

scientists and do all that stuff together, if you were to stack

something like that waxy maize starch like Vitargo generate with

the citrulline and the beta-alanine and the creatine and the

carnitine, put all that together, you’re looking at a massive glucose

spike, you’re looking at a massive amount of energy in a short

period of time, you’re also looking at diabetes and the shaker cup

if you’re not…

Brock: If you’re just sitting on the couch.

Ben: Yeah. If you just sit on the couch. Quick quick way to give yourself

diabetes just because the amount of insulin and blood glucose

really sure that you’re gonna get. But that’s what I would do,

that’s the way I would go about doing this if you really want that

fast release.

[0:35:07.7]

Brock: All right. Next question is from Gabriel. Gabriel says, “I live in

Puerto Rico. We have little access to quality animal-based protein.

Most of the beef and poultry are from industrial South American

animals. What cuts of beef or chicken pieces are the least bad in

terms of hormones, etc. I eat frozen salmon, cod or tuna once or

twice a week (I don’t eat it frozen, I cook it before) and I eat kinwa

a couple of times a week too but there’s something about a nice

piece of meat, you know. Also, what do you think of xenogenics?

They’ve been pushing their stuff their protocol to high levels…It

seems like a waste of time and money.

Ben: Okay. So, first of all, the last little bit of that question about

xenogenics, that’s the one what I see in the back of the airplane

magazines, the 70 year-old man looks like he’s 40 and he’s

got…he’s flexing with his jeans on or whatever. You know what? I

don’t remember if it’s been since Brock’s been on but I went into

an extensive podcast revealing what I thought about xenogenics

so just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and do a search for

“xenogenics”.

Brock: Basically, your hunch is right, Gabriel.

Ben: Yeah. Let’s focus on the meat part of this. Meat is gonna tend to

if it’s got lots of toxins, if it’s got lots of hormones, it’s gonna store

that in the fat in the skin so whereas I usually recommend that

you not choose leaner cuts of meat that you go after the fat

because of the things like the conjugated linoleic acids and the

omega 3 fatty acids, you technically wanna avoid the skin, trim the

fat and go for the lower fat cuts of meat if you wanted to eat meat

that hasn’t been organically raised (grass raised) you want to do as

little damage as possible. So that’s the first thing you’d wanna do

is basically you go low fat on your cuts of meat. There are certain

cuts of meat or certain animals that are known to be dirtier than

others so USD Aid has studies on this, there’s a lot of universities

that have done independent studies on everything from the

stearate to salmonella to…

Brock: I guess you mean dirty by having bacterias..

Ben: Dirty like stuff you’d wanna avoid in that case. Ground turkey

and chicken are biggies. If you’re not getting free range organic

on those, your chance of getting sick goes way up. Something like

25% of chicken has some form of bacteria in it that could

potentially make you sick if you’re not careful. A lot of times, you

think pigs are the dirty animals, poultry is way way higher than

pigs when it comes to that stuff. So I’d be super careful with

chicken and turkey especially if it’s not free range type of stuff if

you’re just looking at cage fed, that’s gonna be an issue. Cold cuts

are really really high in listeria. That can also be an issue so I’d be

really careful with cold cuts and…

Brock: Any processed meats…

Ben: Yeah. Interestingly, listeria which you’re gonna tend to find in

higher amounts in something like a cold cut. You know what

tends to kill listeria? Mustard. So, you could just lather mustard

all over your bologna.

Brock: Like just regular old French’s mustard?

Ben: Yeah. So dip (if you bologna has been sitting out in the counter a

few days) dip it in some mustard. Yeah. You’re gonna have some

active listeria-fighting compounds in mustard. But it’s interesting

how those foods that tend to go hand in hand anyways – the

mustard has some sort of a cleaning effect so to speak. Be really

careful with predatory fish. Here in Riley Bay, it’s kinda cool. You

walk along the beach and there’s a stall and these vendors and

they’ve got like pieces or slabs of fish on ice and you just point at

what you want, they throw in on a barbeque grill for and toss

some corn and some vegetables and stuff in there but you do see a

lot…like last night that place you went to like Sword Fish and they

had shark and they had tuna and I’m personally for mackerel

‘cause that tends to be not one of the larger predatory fish. And

there’s a reason for that. That fish that eat other fish tend to be

higher in heavy metals. So you’d wanna be careful for doing fish

(with those fish) and tuna is included in that list that tends to be

higher in heavy metals. There are heavy metal detox formulas out

there. Next Wednesday, this is probably a good time to mention

this, I’m on a plane next Wednesday coming back from Thailand

and everything so I am releasing an interview on that day with Dr.

David Minkoff about heavy metals. So next week, our usual

podcast will be released Friday with a surprise stand-in guest that

is not Brock.

Brock: Yeah. I don’t even know who it is, it’s gonna be such a surprise.

Ben: Anyways, heavy metals tend to be an issue with predatory fish –

that’s what you wanna be careful with.

[0:40:00.8]

Oysters, raw oysters, definitely an issue, salmonella is a biggie

with those. Try to be super careful with those. And ground beef,

if it’s typical commercial ground beef, that tends to be pretty big

issue as well. So honestly, if you wanna go as clean as possible, if I

were you, I’d go for the smaller fish, I would do pork, I would do

any of the large animals that are not cattle like deer, lamb, goats,

stuff like that. Stay away from turkey and chicken, stay away from

oysters. That would be some of the main ways to kinda keep

clean. The other interesting thing is there is a supplement that

you can take that kinda leeches a lot of these toxins and offensive

compounds from meat. If you happen to not have a chance to eat

the good grass-fed hormone-free free range type of stuff and that’s

activated charcoal. You can literally just eat a couple of capsules

of activated charcoal before you eat whatever that meat is and it

can help mitigate some of the damaging effects. That’d be one

thing that you can do as well.

Brock: Like those of the long term damaging effect’s not necessarily the

food poisoning.

Ben: It can help with that. Both activated charcoal as well as probiotics

_____[0:41:20.4] food poisoning. The other interesting thing is

if you have ground beef and you’re concerned about salmonella or

other offensive compounds of that, oregano has a lot of

components in it that tend to be active against the bacteria and

that you could oil of oregano, you could even use fresh oregano

and grind that up along with your ground beef to make it like a

burger. It does have some of that what’s called carvacrol in it

which has some of those potent anti bacterial properties. So there

are ways to mitigate the effects but hopefully that kinda points

you in the right direction when it comes to some of the meats that

are gonna be better vs. worse.

Brock: I was hoping you’re gonna say chocolate ice cream as the perfect…

Ben: Yes. Chocolate ice cream. Make sure there’s no predatory fish in

your chocolate ice cream and that’d be good to go.

Brock: No predatory ice cream. All right. Matt says, “Ben, I read that

power is lost 1.7 times faster than strength as we age. I thought

power and strength were the same thing. What is the difference

and should I be working more on power exercise than strength

exercises? Can you give an example of the difference between the

two? By the way, I’m 39 years old”.

Ben: Yeah. They have done studies on this and as you age, you lose

power more quickly than strength. I don’t know if it’s 1.7 times.

I’ve seen figures like the loss in power exceeds the loss in strength

by about 10% per year. That’s not 10% loss of power per year.

That means like if you lost 2% of your strength per year, you’d be

losing 10% more of that. So 10% for whatever 2% is in terms of

power. So you’re losing (Brock and I are both excellent at Math as

you can tell). Anyways, yes, the loss in power is gonna exceed the

loss in strength. Power is just the ability to apply a large amount

of force over a period of time. An example of power would be like

how quickly can you shove this weight overhead vs. strength

which is how much weight can you push over your head without

any consideration of how fast you can do it.

Brock: And how long.

Ben: And fast twitch muscle is what you use to create a powerful effort

along with a large recruitment of motor neurons. Those are 2

things that you tend to lose quite quickly as you age is the ability

to recruit motor neurons or the neuron units in the muscle that

would be responsible for producing high amounts of power and

you also lose fast twitch muscle more quickly as you age. So this

is why the deficits in power that you experience as you age tend to

be more significant than what you lose when it comes to strength.

As far as mitigating those effects, you would want to make sure

that you’re including resistance training sessions as you age that

require you to lift weights fast. You could do plyometrics, single

leg/ double legs jumps onto a box/off of the box, that kind of stuff,

skips, hops, bounds, anything that causes you to create a large

amount of force in a short period of time as well as lifting,

changing of the tempo as you lift. I’m actually writing an article

for Lava Magazine on this right now of about how you can literally

just kind of depending on what time of year that you’re in, change

the tempo at which you lift. So if you lift something fast and lower

it quickly, you’re gonna do less muscle damage but develop more

power. Then if you say lift something slowly and lower it slowly.

But changing of the tempo not doing all you workouts at the same

tempo is one really good way that you can ensure that you

maintain power including some explosive efforts. Again, I know

I’m kinda kicking this horse to death, but I do have

recommendation section at bengreenfieldfitness.com where

basically, there are recommendations on like supplements that

can help with power.

[0:45:14.1]

Fish Oil is the biggest one just because it contains a lot of the fats

that tend to line myelin sheaths of your nerves and help out with

basically your nerve conduction velocity. So essentially, you’re

sending messages to your muscles more quickly. So Fish Oil is a

big one. There’s another supplement called Choline that if you

take along with Fish Oil is really really good one to throw in there

for power. Just have pieces of equipment around your house that

you can use for more than just power like agility ladders. There’s

one you can get from website like performbetter.com. They’ve got

lots of power development tools, medicine balls that you could

throw or slam into the ground, weighted vests that you can jump

with, boxes or some kind of a step platform you can jump onto or

jump off. Just kind of including those type of things as you age,

super important if you wanna maintain power vs. strength. So

hopefully it kinda gives you a basic idea of the difference between

power and strength and I’ll put a bunch of links in the show notes

to some of the supplements that I recommend and some of the

tools that I like to keep around for developing power rather than

just pure strength.

Brock: Awesome! All right. Well, our last question comes from Alan.

Alan says, “When you eat matters, not just what you eat” (now,

he’s got a link to Science Daily, I guess an article), any thoughts on

this article? Trying to think about how you might incorporate this

info into an active work and family life. I’m finding it difficult. I

work up at 5:00 AM. I would have to skip breakfast to make this

work since dinner with my wife and kids is a priority. Plan would

have to be dinner at 5, lunch at 1, breakfast at 10. Does not sound

too different from your routine, no?”

Ben: Yeah. The study that is linked into, basically, they took one group

of mice and just let them eat ad libitum round the clock whenever

they wanted to, and then they took another group of mice. Those

mice were given the same calorie allotment but they were

restricted to an 8-hour feeding window. And the mice that were

restricted to the 8-hour feeding window did not experience the

same blood sugar fluctuations, increase in obesity and overweight

as the mice that were allowed to eat at any time of day. And so the

take away message from this was basically, you have a certain

period of time during the day when you have a restricted feeding

window and then the rest of the day you’re not eating and really,

this is something that we’ve talked about before. It’s just

intermittent fasting. It would be like throwing in a 16-hour fast

everyday is what will come out to be equivalent of. You could quit

eating at 8 PM at night after dinner and not eat again until noon if

you’re doing a full 16-hour intermittent fast. This thing though is

about the spirit of the law not the letter of the law, meaning that

your body is designed to operate on a natural circadian rhythm

that has period of time when it is dark and when you are not

eating very much encourage a time when it is light, when you’re

awake, when you’re alert, when your body is able to metabolize

fuel and when you are eating. And this does not mean that you

have to be annal about squeezing everything into an 8-hour

window and then having a 16-hour window where you’re not

eating. But what it does mean is that you should consider

adapting a scenario where you do something like after you’ve had

dinner, not snacking and not eating anymore. And then when you

get up in the morning, trying to go for a little bit of time if it fits in

your schedule and your personal schedule to not eat breakfast

until 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM. This is something I do everyday. I

try to quit eating after I’ve had dinner and then in the morning, I

work for a couple of hours. Sometimes I’ll do some exercise, some

cold thermogenesis where I’ll do a cold shower and wear my cool

fat burner vest or something like that and then I have breakfast.

Typically, for me breakfast is around 10:00 AM and since we eat

dinner usually sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 PM, that gives

me a good anywhere from a 13 to a 15-hour fasted window every

single day. So it doesn’t have to be exactly what they did in the

study with the mice where it’s a 16-hour window. What it comes

down to is your body has this internal clock (internal circadian

rhythm) that’d hard wired to respond to light-dark cycles and the

feeding cycles and if you just go haywire and eat when you want

and sleep when you want and (this is why people who work night

shifts have such a hard time losing weight a lot of the time) then

you end up throwing both your hormones and your blood sugar

into a little bit of an imbalanced cycle.

[0:50:13.2]

Brock: Something that really comes hand in hand with this too is most of

any real diet program that you go on will have you eliminate

evening snacking ‘cause that really does always take you over and

above your caloric needs for the day. It’s all just extra calories so

really you’ve got to sort of bang for your buck here.

Ben: Yeah. Go and watch the recent How to Hack Your Sleep article

that I wrote at bengreenfieldfitness.com if you really want to learn

how eating at night also affects the quality of your sleep, the

amount of leptin that you’re able to release which is kind of an

appetite satiating hormone, the amount of melatonin your

produce, the amount of leptin that gets taken up into the

hypothalamus. I mean there’s a ton of things that happen when

you snack late at night. All those would be some of the reasons

that this study that you mentioned and linked to, that we’ll also

link to in the show notes, found that basically mice who were on

intermittent fasting were more successful. I don’t know if mice

would be a success. I bet a mouse would be getting fat as a

success.

Brock: Yeah. I think that be happy about that.

Ben: Yes. Caloric Nirvana. Speaking of caloric nirvana, Brock and I

have been eating like kings here in Thailand, I would say.

Brock: Yes. Getting a little ridiculous. The food is just too good here.

Ben: Yeah. And it’s fantastic. So we’re gonna arrive at 70.3. For those

of you who don’t know, we’re here doing a double triathlon. We

did a triathlon on Sunday and then we’ll do another one this

coming Sunday at a half Ironman.

Brock: I’m sorry, we didn’t just do a triathlon on Sunday. Ben won the

overall age groupers – the triathlon on Sunday?

Ben: I did. I was more proud though of making top 10. I was happy

with that.

Brock: Like a minute and 7 seconds behind back up?

Ben: Something like that. I don’t think he was having a good day

though.

Brock: It looked though he was having a good day at the party.

Ben: Yeah. Anyways though, folks, hopefully you appreciate the fact

that despite the crappiness of what this final product is going to

be, Brock and I still are committed enough to skip whatever it is

we’d normally be doing right now, probably walking up and down

the beach and bring you this podcast. So hopefully, you enjoyed it

and you’ll get something different next week too. As I mentioned,

I’ll probably ask some hot female sidekick rather than hairy Brock

sitting here next to me.

Brock: I am extra hairy in Thailand. It’s true.

Ben: Yes. Anyways though, folks, thanks for listening and we’ll put link

to everything over at bengreenfieldfitness.com for Episode 219

and also in the MyList for this episode over at

facebook.com/bgfitness. Don’t forget to create your MyList by

clicking on that MyList button over at facebook.com/bgfitness

and sharing your MyList with us. And until next time, (like I just

said MyList 20 times) this is Ben and Brock signing out from

bengreenfieldfitness.com.

For personal nutrition, fitness or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or

DVD’s from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at

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