[00:02:48.920] – Allan
Ras, how are you doing.

[00:02:50.130] – Ras
Great Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:52.570] – Allan
A little frustrated. The Panamanian government reneged on giving us our Saturdays back. So now it's the last time I thought I was going to get a Saturday off. And it appears that they decided that Bocas del Toro doesn't. And part of it is, you know, at least at this point, they're thinking in terms of states or provinces as we are. And we just happen to be associated with Bocas del Toro province, which includes the mainland. And so they are having some major outbreaks in on the mainland. But last we heard, there was less than twelve cases here on the island.

So, you know, it's under control here. But we, you know, living under more stringent rules. So they didn't open our curfew and they didn't give us the Saturday back. So,

[00:03:38.880] – Ras
Wow, it's so sorry to hear that. That's awful.

[00:03:41.850] – Allan
Well, it is what it is. It's just, you know, this, too, will pass.

[00:03:45.990] – Ras
Yep.

[00:03:46.410] – Allan
It just means I'm going to get more miles in during my five days I can walk then.

[00:03:50.690] – Ras
That's true.

[00:03:51.390] – Allan
Than I normally would.

[00:03:52.880] – Ras
That's true.

[00:03:53.630] – Allan
So how's your week been.

[00:03:55.340] – Ras
Good. Good. Got a good run in this morning. Our weather's cooling off a little bit so running was great this morning and I've got a run club tonight so I'll be getting a few more miles with some friends tonight too. So that'll be fun.

[00:04:09.030] – Allan
Cool. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and get into today's episode. I'm going to be talking about seasonal ketosis, and it's a term that, I coined the phrase and I talked about a little bit in my book, and I recognized that I've mentioned it a few times on a few podcasts and I briefly describe it. But I wanted to go into a little bit more detail because I was talking to somebody about ketosis and they're like, oh, I could never eat like that year round.

[00:04:36.420] – Allan
You know, every once in a while I want some cake or bread or something like that. And so I said, well, you can have your cake and eat it too, with some stipulations. So let's go ahead and get into that episode.

Hello and thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness Podcast, I'm really glad to have you here today. Today's show is going to be a little different. I have talked about seasonal ketosis as the way that I eat a few times on this show and on some other podcasts, but I've never really broken down how it works and why it works and what it is, specifically for me and how it fits within my overall ancestral based lifestyle.

Now, when I started this effort to go from a fat bastard to healthy and fit. I was introduced to Paleo by a dietitian and she brought up the paleo diet, explained what it was, what I could eat, what I couldn't eat, and I loved it. So I stepped away from my high carb diet and started just eating meat, fish and vegetables. I'd never heard of the ketogenic diet or the keto diet, as it's often called, but because I was on such a low carb version of the paleo diet, it actually put me into ketosis.

So I had to figure out what ketosis was because something different was happening to me and, you know, my breath and other things you hear about. But the weight loss was dramatic. So I enjoyed a lot of benefits out of the ketogenic diet. My blood sugar got steady, I had higher energy, I had less brain fog and it felt great.

Now, over the past eight years, I've continued to follow the ketogenic diet for most of the year, and I call that seasonal ketosis. Now, most people that adopt the ketogenic diet, they do it full time and they start eating low carb and they stay low carb and they try to keep their body in ketosis all the time and they see the benefits.

They would ask, why would I ever go off the keto diet if I enjoy how I feel when I'm on it? And to answer that question, for me, it's really about balance. I enjoy beer, I enjoy wine, I enjoy fruit, I enjoy yeast rolls. And occasionally I want to have a hamburger with a bun. So I pick a specific part of the year where I would allow myself to go off of ketosis. Now, I mentioned a few shows back that I had not started my famine season on time and really kind of blew it for a while. But I am back into my famine season and I've lost 25 pounds plus and still going.

But that's, that's not all this is really about. So I use seasonal ketosis as a way to stay generally healthy, to keep my health in good check, to keep my weight in a healthy body composition range. It improves my fitness, longevity, and the joy I have in my life. So I've developed an ancestral based lifestyle. And I'm not going to get into the argument about what our ancestors would or would not have eaten. I'm not going to get into the argument of, you know, how long they lived and all that. I'll talk a little bit about that. But that science doesn't interest me. I know that there were no fruits available to my ancestors in the northern part of Europe. I know that they would not have been able to transport food all around the world, so I would not have been eating nutrients from different continents all at one time.

I would not always have access to vegetables and fruits and all this other gobbledygook. I just wouldn't there'd be periods of time when I wouldn't. So but before I really get into seasonal ketosis, I do want to talk about a few key things just so we're all on the same base. When I'm talking about ancestral living, there's a few just core tenets that I'm going to throw out there. One is understanding what ketosis is now. Ketosis is when your body is burning fat.

So that can either be the fat that you're eating or it can be body fat. And in doing so, you create ketone bodies. Now, these ketone bodies are something that your brain and your body can use as fuel. Most of the time people are running on glucose. OK, there's glucose in your blood, there's glucose, you know, in the form of glycogen, in your muscles and liver. And we use that for energy most of the time.

At least that's how it's been for at least the last probably six to seven years here in the United States now. And we've also got a lot fatter. Ketones, on the other hand, can do all of that fueling. And in many cases it's more efficient and it's cleaner. It doesn't cause as many problems for us. So our bodies actually perform better, operate better and are in better health when we're in ketosis. So that's just ketosis. Now, the ketogenic diet is also called keto or the keto Diet.

It is a low carb, high fat diet that forces your body to go into nutritional ketosis. Now you can induce ketosis with exogenous ketone bodies or MCT oil, which is a medium-chain triglyceride. But that's not what I'm after here. We want healthy food. We want a healthy diet of real food that puts us into ketosis naturally. And it's not that hard to do. You just got to get the macros right and push through. Now with me, seasonal ketosis is a cyclical ketogenic diet. Now, instead of doing just a week, I do my cycles running over months, OK.

And in fact, seasons. So I'll have a season where I'll go into famine and then I'm in a strict ketogenic diet at that point. I stay in ketosis almost the whole time and then I'll have some feasting seasons when, you know, I'll go ahead and allow myself to eat what I want. I don't have any no, no's. Now I do tend to continue to eat a little bit high fat, low carb at that time, but the rules are gone. I just eat what I feel compelled to eat and enjoy the food that I have.

Now, my approach to health, a healthy ancestral lifestyle really is about health and longevity, even though we may never actually answer that question how long our ancestors would have lived. What we do know is that child mortality was much higher. We know that they didn't have the medical Know-How of modern times and they had less access to food. And we didn't have access to what, you know, most of the experts would call healthy Whole Foods. I mean, we had what was there that was all that was there. So what we didn't how we did. That's all we had.

There were no McDonald's. There was none of that stuff. And we did a lot more physical activity every day. So whatever the evidence says, you know, if people weren't living as long, it was probably for different reasons. OK, now, during those times, there would be periods, particularly in the north, where we would have feast and famine. When we would spend part of the year eating a ketogenic diet and even some periods of fasting. We didn't have food preservation. So we would have to wake up in the morning and maybe not have any food around. So we would have to go get it. We could be traveling and walking for hours and not find that.

But what we would do is if you think about it from a seasonal perspective, we would have access to more food in the spring, through the fall. So there would be fruits, there'd be vegetables, there'd be things like that. And so we would probably put on some weight between spring and fall. We'd just be a normal thing. And it was good because body fat helps protect us from the cold, keep us warmer, and it also gives us food. I mean, when we don't have food, it provides us the energy we need.

Okay, now as we go into the winter, weight loss would be the norm as we started using that fat on our bodies to keep us alive. So if we didn't have access to food, our bodies adapted to stay alive, our bodies adapted to be able to continue to do what we needed to do. I also believe that we were opportunistic eaters and we didn't have a McDonald's or a Tim Hortons or whatever it is that you have on every corner.

We didn't drink sweetened beverages. We just had water. We ate whole foods. When we killed an animal, we ate it hoof to nose. As hunter gatherers, we ate well as we could and we fasted when we had to. So we were on the land. And I think that's one of the core tenets of this is that we knew what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, and we got that through the tribal knowledge. So, you know, I think it's really important to understand that the things that we call food today are not food. You know, groceries, as they are today, are not as nutritious as what we had been. And we've got to fix that as a people. That's got to be a priority somewhere along the lines.

SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast is sponsored by Vault Health. Guys, we need to discuss the elephant in the room. Most of us really struggle to manage certain health issues, especially when it affects things we don't want to talk about, like our libido and vitality. Yes, I'm talking about LowT. Did you know that 40 percent of men over 40 suffer from LowT? LowT can cause weight gain, loss of muscle mass, ED, fatigue and poor sleep, low energy and depression.

These completely dismantle any efforts you're making to be healthy and fit if you're dealing with one or more of these. It's worth booking a free online consultation with a Vault physician at 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/vault. Vault is all about discretion. After your free consultation and you agree you want treatment, they'll send a phlebotomist to your home to do a blood draw. You'll get a personalized doctor review treatment plan. This can be with pills, cream or injections.

The medications are mailed to your home. There's nothing macho about neglecting your health. If you live in the United States and you're struggling, it's worth learning more. At Vault Health, go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/vault today. That's 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/vault.

Now, another big tenant I want to talk about is fitness. Now, we were not sedentary. You cannot survive as a hunter gatherer if you're going to sit and not do anything, you just don't. So we would have to be fit. We wouldn't be able to go to a gym for cardio and strength training, but we would have regular exposure to three primary movement modalities that were really, really important for us. We would do low intensity, steady-state or LISS, as I like to call it where we had to migrate.

So, you know, food's not always where we want it to be. And the animals were moving with migration patterns. We would have to move with them if we want to be successful hunters. So this would require sometimes days of us to walk and travel, hiking, basically, and we'd have to carry our stuff with us. So if we had shelter and coats and in different clothing and blankets and all the different things, we needed tools and weapons, we would be carrying those with us. So we would go on these long, low intensity, steady state movements.

Now occasionally we would have high-intensity interval training. And you could think of that in terms of if we were hunting or we were fending off other tribes, it would require us to have some power and some skill. So working with weapons, moving for short periods of time, quickly resting, moving again, that would be normal regular activity for us. So, yes, more movement. And then finally a strength in mobility when we killed a large animal or we stumbled across a berry patch, we would feast.

Now, that would also require, in some cases, for us to lift parts of the animal and carry it back to camp, or we'd have to squat down to pick the berries that we were going to be eating. So, again, more movement. And so you can see through this, just the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is filled with tons and tons of movement. Now, we also would have work life balance. We would be putting in long commutes. We wouldn't be doing a lot of the things we do now.

But while we're working to survive, we would also understand that we needed to rest. We would understand that, you know, we would need flow. And what I mean by flow is, you know, flow is kind of fitting in with what's there. You know, we would know that there's ways to hunt. There's ways to to move. There's there's times that we need to go. And so we would start following a natural pattern of days, months, seasons.

You watch some of the shows where they depict people and they live by the moon, the moon and the seasons give them the information they need to survive. Now, if they faced a threat and then they had a stressor, which, you know, basically what a threat would do is the stress response. It would be acute, immediate, it'd be life or death. So they would have that cortisol hit. They'd have, you know, that adrenal hit and then it would be gone. It wouldn't be this long, drawn out months and months and months of things that we do to ourselves now.

So we would have a very low stress life in a general sense, as long as we were able to successfully hunt and move and do the things we needed to do. Our stress levels were much lower. We also did risk management. And that sounds kind of weird talking about our ancestors.

But the way you stay alive, the way longevity happens, is understanding the risks associated with your life is a primal living being. We weren't worried about calories, blood sugar, vitamin C, processed meat, dietary fiber, or if we had a healthy microbiome, those concepts weren't even in our head. But what we did was we followed a path that was set by our ancestors.

My ancestors would go and they'd say, we know we go this direction. This is the way we have to go this month at the moon. And then we would go, but we would have to also understand what we're facing. If another tribe moved in to the area, we might have to change the plan, but we would do it. We had risk management. We were paying attention. So the biggest risks to us at that time was infant mortality and tribal warfare.

And the only biohacking that we would have done was just making sure that we were aware of the risks and then figuring out ways to avoid them or deal with them. And then relationship would be very important to us. We worked and moved as a tribe. And in a tribe, it works to our benefit because it helps everyone's survival. We hunted in packs and were hard coded in our DNA to be socially engaged. So that relationship, that closeness is really, really important to the nature of ancestral living.

And then finally within ancestral living. I want to talk about curiosity. You know, we did tend to follow the same basic patterns, seasonal patterns, year in and year out. But we were constantly engaged with what was going on. In the world around us, because our survival depended on it. You know, we couldn't go in and ask Google or Facebook what the weather was going to be like or if we were going to have an early summer or a late winter or whatever.

There was no groundhog to do it for us either. We looked to our elders to advise us and then the tribe had to learn and adapt, and that's how we would survive hard times. Now, I recently started a blog to dive into these issues in more detail. But full disclosure, I'm a terrible blogger. I can brag about this being episode 455 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. But you know, I've done several blogs over the years and I don't think I've ever gotten more than maybe 15 blog posts in any one blog I've ever started.

So they blog fade pretty quickly. You know, I hope that doesn't happen with this blog. But what I plan to do with that blog is explore a lot of these topics that I've talked about so far. So if you're interested in any of those, you might want to check out the blog. I'll do the best I can, but. What's probably gonna end up happening is I'll probably end up bringing some of those topics here to the podcast, so check out the blog as I get going on it. Probably not anything else on there now. But check it out. And that's where a lot of these topics are going to be discussed in more detail. And if you have any questions, feel free to join us on the Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/Group. And just ask I'm there. I mean, I'm there to participate and help you in any way I can. So if you're interested in this topic, I would like to carry on that conversation.

So for today's discussion and then I'll be gone already for quite a while. But I really want to dive into seasonal ketosis and share why I do it and the reasons that it may or may not be right for you. The first question I kind of have in my mind when I'm thinking about this is seasonal ketosis. The same thing is cyclical keto diet? You know, and technically it is it's you know, you're cycling in and out of keto. So it is a cyclical keto diet. However, when you talk to most people about this cyclical keto diet, it's a six days on, one day off, and they call that a refeed day. And I'm metabolically capable of doing that kind of keto diet, but I'm not a really good moderation type person.

[00:22:02.340] – Allan
You know, I'm either all on or all off. So if I took a weekly cheat day, you know, or carb up day, I just don't know what that day after that might be like. And I might just go ahead and have a second cheat day. So when I start my famine season, you know, in my ketogenic diet, I start dropping weight relatively quickly and then I'll get to my set point and I'm good, you know.

I like seeing two to five pounds come off in a week. What I wouldn't be a fan of is seeing like four pounds down, then two pounds up. And I'm pretty sure that's how the cyclical keto diet would work for me. And I don't really like that. It's progress, don't get me wrong, it's progress. But that's just not me. I'm happy knowing that I can have a few more carbs on my high activity days without going out of ketosis.

So if I'm going to have more carbs, I'm just going to work out a hell of a lot harder that week to make sure that I can keep myself in ketosis and have the carbs too. So if I want some fruit, I got to earn it from a from a carb, blood sugar, muscle and liver glycogen model. Now, there are some positives to the cyclical keto over full time keto. In many cases, athletic performance can be better and muscle growth is better.

I'm not a bodybuilder and I perform fine without the refits. I can I can do as much as I want to do. I need to do so again, cyclical keto is just not for me. But if you're someone who's looking for a way to do keto and then have that kind of that refeed that break, you might want to check that out. Now, why does seasonal ketosis make sense to me from an ancestral perspective?

And I've gone into some of this already. You know, I when I started this and I was learning about the paleo diet, I came across Mark Sissons primal blueprint. And now Mark laid out a very reasoned case for how our ancestors lived and ate. I used to character I think he named Duroc. So rather, you believe in human evolution, creationism or intelligent design, I don't think you can argue that we we're not doing things right now.

We've got to change something. The standard American diet is killing us. You know, back then we didn't eat refined grains and we didn't have junk food. You know, we were hunters and gatherers. We were, like I said, opportunistic eaters. And we ate the nutrition that our body required, essential amino acids and essential fats. They came from animals, primarily red meat and fish. That's where we got our food. Most of our food was going to come in that form.

And then based on the seasons, you know, we had short periods of the year where it was either cold or dry. We were in ketosis because there just might not be any vegetables or fruits available to us during periods of time. And then, of course, because, you know, food availability and everything, we would spend a good bit of time fasting or intermittent fasting or maybe some extended fasting, depending on the nature of what's going on in the world.

You know, if if we got a good, cold, hard freeze and all the animals are moving and there's no, you know, no vegetation at all, we got to go with the animals. We got to catch up to them. And then we got to do the hunting. So just recognize that our diet would have been very keto for much of the year. OK, now I started doing this for weight loss. That was my my core reason. And I was very much drawn to the primal paleo diet because it made intuitive sense.

Mark did a really good job, because it was maybe the first article I read, that you can't eat what you don't have access to. So you wouldn't eat processed foods at all, ever. OK, everything we would have eaten. Would have been whole food. It would have been locally and sustainably sourced and the human body was designed to be a hunter. I mean, there's no doubt whatsoever when you look at our features, look at what we can do. We were designed to be hunters, but when there are fruits and vegetables available, we're probably going to eat those. But we would not have eaten a high carbohydrate diet year-round. It's just impossible for any of our ancestors short of just some very small areas, you know, in the tropical zones where people would have eaten primarily carbohydrate diets that just wouldn't have anyone from northern Europe, anyone pretty much if you're from Northern Europe or Europe at all, your ancestors probably didn't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.

That's just that's just part of it. Now, you can look at the current chronic diseases, obesity, heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And the health problems are associated with our food. There's something seriously wrong. In our modern world, most people have insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome. And it's it's so epidemic that it's just weird to me that this has become politicized. That, you know, we have the food companies telling our government what to tell us what to eat is kind of crazy. It's not animal products and saturated fat that are making us sick as much as those food companies want the government to tell us that it is. It's just not true. It's the fast food. It's the processed foods.

It's high, refined carbs and sugar. We're eating too much sugar. We're eating too many refined carbs. We're not eating whole food. So if the government was in our favor doing the things that it was supposed to do, they'd be focused on food quality. They would not be telling us to eat cereal and grains and refined carbs. They would be telling us to eat meat, fruits and vegetables, Whole Foods.

Now, I've interviewed experts across all spectrums of nutrition. I've had vegans on I've had carnivores on paleo, keto, everywhere in between. The interesting thing is, is every single one of them will tell you that their way of eating is the best because it is based on high quality whole food. And they'll be able to pull out the studies that show people eating their diet. Whole Foods are crushing it. They're doing great. But what's hard is that they ignore Whole Food studies that say the exact same thing about a different type of diet, because it doesn't fit their world view, it doesn't fit their paradigm.

They have a cognitive bias. So, I just really struggle when someone tells me that the quality of your vegetable matters, but the quality of your meat doesn't. It's just all meat is bad. Or and people say the same thing you know, the other way. Is the quality of the meat matters, but all vegetables are bad. You know, that doesn't make sense to me. Our bodies were designed to eat both. Quality is what matters.

That's why the paleo diet makes sense to me. I think everybody should be trying to eat more whole food. You know, the debates out about whether we would have eaten potatoes or, you know, and I don't think we would have eaten much dairy, to be honest with you, because we didn't have cows. You know, we didn't have goats.

We hunted them or something similar to them. But we didn't we didn't have any animal product like that. We weren't domesticating the animals, so we weren't doing dairy. Beans, you know, those are a little weird because yeah, there are some issues there where we have to be careful with them. But, you know, I like the primal experience of having a big, juicy steak. I just do. I love having a cup of blueberries or blackberries and the sweetness and the tartness and just, I love that.

I'm not going to give up either one of them, I'm just not. My diet is comprised of meat, fish, vegetables and some fruit. I did try the Carnivore diet for a few weeks and I started missing vegetables. I tried the vegetarian diet and then I adapted it into the pescaterian and diet to try to get my protein. And I couldn't do it. I gained weight because I was eating too many fruits and vegetables and grains, so I just started putting on weight. So there's not something that I enjoy. And, you know, when I when I do these did these little experiments, you know, I was typically doing them during my my feasting season. So, you know, was not a period of time when I had to worry about being in ketosis. I just did what I did.

I think it's important for you to understand that whole food is the answer. However, you choose to put that in a way of eating is really about you. But I will say this. If you're going to try seasonal ketosis, you do need to think about a few things. OK, one, I don't. Have any insulin resistance or diabetes or, you know, I don't have any of the the diseases or any of the issues that that people would would be suffering from, that they might be using this as a protocol. So if you have insulin resistance or diabetes, you know, or you're using the ketogenic diet for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, PCOS, or an autoimmune auto immune issue, I wouldn't necessarily cycle off of the ketogenic diet.

Those protocols are specific about staying in keto the whole time. And so that's not something where you would want to cycle out because you're just setting yourself up. If you're way above a healthy body composition and you want to use keto to lose weight, seasonal ketosis is also probably not something for you because your weight is going to fluctuate. I fluctuate 10 to 15 pounds each year as I go through these cycles. So that is, and then, of course, if you're prone to eating disorders, you know, you need to find a way of eating that you're comfortable with.

If it's sustainable for you, the cycling in and out is probably not in your best interest, you know, except for this slip up. I had recently did a covid-19 I've been able to manage my seasons stably for the last eight years. You know, going into my feasting season in late August, early September, and then coming out of it right after the Super Bowl or my birthday at the first week of February. That's my feasting season.

And then my fasting season or famine season, as I call it, will run the rest of the year. And as I said I might put on 10 to 15 pounds during the feasting season, but I ditch that weight pretty quickly and spend my famine season at my lower, lower range of my set point. Now, I love the metabolic flexibility that I have to be able to spend part of the time in ketosis and part of the time having a little bit more carbs.

When I say more carbs, I'm talking about beer and some simple carbs. You know, it's like I'll have a hotdog, I'll have a hamburger. Someone offers me a piece of pie at a tailgate, I'll eat it. So that's kind of that thing. You know, to me, the weight loss is relatively easy. Once I'm in ketosis, my body just naturally says, OK, you don't you don't need this. And some of what I'm flushing out from a weight perspective is water.

But a lot of it is body fat and it goes pretty quickly. And I'm pretty happy with that. Now, if you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, there's two ways that you can do this. I talked about the group earlier, you know, 40+ Fitness Podcast, dotcom focus group, or you can go to the Web site – 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/455. And there's a comment section under this post.

I put a post with the transcripts each week and that's why I tell you the full show notes are there. If you go there, there's a comment section, you can leave a comment there. I'm pretty passionate about the benefits that I get and the flexibility I get and the freedom I get with seasonal ketosis and my style of ancestral living. So I love talking about it. If you want to go into more detail with this, I encourage you to go check out one of those two places and let's continue the conversation there.

[00:34:12.300] Allan
All right, Ras welcome back.

[00:34:15.510] Ras
This is great. A lot of good stuff in the episode.

[00:34:19.320] Allan
Yeah, you know, most people that will talk about ketosis, they talk about in terms of it being a permanent lifestyle. And it can be. But I think it's it's kind of easy for people to get roped into measurements or things and not necessarily doing it for the right reason. I knew that I was going to roll up on football season and want to go tailgating. You know, since I finished my Tough Mudder, I was like having a beer and I was out of ketosis that afternoon, that evening.

[00:34:50.880] Allan
So, you know, just for my life style perspective, it just didn't make sense. They're going to be periods of time that I was not. But I found a manageable way that I could spend some of the year in ketosis and get the benefits that I wanted to get, but at the same time, spent some time doing some things that I enjoy.

[00:35:11.220] Ras
That sounds great, I'm glad that you found this new way to work keto into your normal lifestyle. That sounds like it's flexible enough to work with the way that you like to live.

[00:35:23.000] Allan
It does. You know, of course, you know, this year I had a little bit of difficulty getting out of the beast mode just with everything that was going on. I did put on a good bit more weight than I normally would have. But I've dropped almost all of that now and I'm back down to near a low for the last five years, I've been running at about two hundred and seven pounds.

And I'm right about there right now. I think I'm going to push it down a little lower because my muscle mass is a little lower than it was five years ago. So I'm probably going to push my weight down below two hundred before I kind of level things out again. So I do see some fluctuations with my weight and I know that can be challenging for a lot of people.

[00:36:11.350] Ras
Yeah. That's what I wanted to ask you about that. As you watch the scale go up and down, how does that impact mostly how you feel? Because to me a few extra pounds can feel kind of yucky and sluggish for me. But for you, how does that feel when you're in the fisting mode versus the famine mode?

[00:36:31.660] Allan
Yeah, well, first off, I'm but I'm about five foot 11, so I can I think I can carry 200 pounds pretty well and I can carry up to two fifteen I would say. I don't actually worry about the scale as much. I mean occasionally I'll step on it during my fisting mode just to kind of see where I am. I can usually just guess by looking at how my pants fit.

I before we move down here to Panama, I found a pair of cargo shorts that I liked. So I bought like four or five different pair and different colors of the same cargo shorts. And so they all fit me the same way. And so I can just pretty much tell when I put those cargo shorts on how I'm doing and where I am. And as I mentioned, I eat relatively low carb during my feasting season. So I'm not crazy on carbs.

It's just I don't really worry about it. If, you know, if I'm out with folks, we want to have some beers. I don't think about it. You know, if someone offers me something that I wouldn't normally eat like a hamburger with a bun, I'm going to eat it. I'm not going to worry too much about it, but I do pay attention to my size. You know, if I didn't start noticing that I'm getting bigger, then I'll I'll tap it down a little bit.

I won't I won't go as crazy. Well, except during COVID. But…

[00:37:54.320] Ras
Yes, totally different rules for covid.

[00:37:58.930] Allan
And so, you know, if you're someone that's really stuck on the scale and you just know there's this weight, your magical weight you're supposed to wear, your head tells you, this is my no, you're not going to like this. You know, the interesting thing is, like, you know, like I said, I'll put on ten, fifteen pounds in a swing. So from my feasting to that, I will put on up to fifteen pounds.

You have to recognize that about about five or seven of that is water weight. And I flush that the first week I go back into ketosis. Right. You know, so I'll literally sit there and say, OK, I'm going to go in ketosis, you know, drop five to seven pounds in a week or two. And then it then it tapers down and I'll lose a few pounds a week and then one pound a week and then my body will get to that homeostasis, its happy weight and I just go by how I feel.

Now I've mentioned this before on another episode I was talking about this a little bit. I don't feel as good during the feasting season, you know, because the foods I'm eating or not is healthy. You know, the beer is not a health food.

[00:39:11.260] Ras
That's true. Sadly, sadly true.

[00:39:13.260] Allan
As much as they'll try to tell you it's okay. It's really good. No, it's not actually really good for you at all. That's fake science. Someone wanted that to be true. They made the hypothesis and then they just said, well, it doesn't kill you, so it's got to be good for you.

[00:39:27.730] Ras
Great. Great science.

[00:39:29.450] Allan
Yeah. So, you know, don't if you're someone who's going to freak out about the scale, if you're someone who has issues with your eating, this is not that kind of thing. You know, find one way that works and stick with that would be my recommendation for that. If you really worried about the scale, stay in ketosis.

But I also want to preface it. You know, I notice I do feel better in ketosis. It's just a better state for me to be in. But I'm not all that tight end up being that way all the time. You know, I'm okay to have a couple bad, you know, days where my energy level is not as high or, you know, I feel a little frumpy. I'm cool with that. It's the price I pay for the detour I took, and I just accept that.

If you're someone who's doing it as a protocol for cancer, for diabetes, insulin resistance, any other metabolic issue, then it's something you're probably going to want to stay on. It's not something that I want to cycle through.

[00:40:31.030] Ras
That's a good point.

[00:40:31.030] Allan
You know, even the people that do cyclical, where they're taking one day off per week, I said that that would actually drive me bonkers because I would feel like I was making all this progress dropping, like I said, seven pounds in a week, only to pick four of them back up. Yeah, it would be like that's all I'm doing is flushing water. I'm not really losing any weight.

And so I would struggle with that kind of cycle. Whereas if I'm off, I'm off. If I'm on, I'm on. And that's another thing about my personality, you know, and I talk about in the wellness chips, you've got to know yourself. You got to be self-aware. And it's one of the things I know is I don't have a dimmer switch, the light switch, maybe I'm on or I'm off.

And so it's just easier for me to say, okay, flip the switch and I just do it.

[00:41:24.010] Ras
Yeah, it's a good point. I think that the cyclical, you know, one day a week where you can have a cheat day or cheat meal or whatever, it's a slippery slope because food can be a trigger. And if you have that one serving of chips, that might become the bag of chips and then it might be one more serving the next day, in the next day. And it is a slippery slope. And if you're not confident in your ability to put it away and get back to it, then that can be dangerous.

[00:41:52.180] Allan
Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I would like to mention is that, you know, we're starting to get anecdotal evidence and maybe some studies where we're looking at performance of someone who's in complete ketosis versus someone who uses carbs as a fuel along with ketones versus someone who's just a sugar burner. And, you know, I'm not going to say one fueling mechanism is best for everybody, but I would put this out there for anyone that is trying to do in terms sport, the heavier you are, the more weight you have to carry for the miles that you're traveling, the more wear and tear you have on your body.

And if you're eating refined carbs specifically and sugar, you're going to have inflammation and that inflammation is going to cause problems in your joints. And so from a health perspective, I would I would be the one that would air on the side of using ketones for for energy.

If I were doing endurance athletics, an occasional carb up here and there before a race might help your performance. But, you know, I'm not sure how much additional glycogen your body is going to be able to carry for that particular event. And you're always going to want to practice what you're going to race. So you would be eating carbs as a regular probably thing each week to carb up for your long runs if you're following the standard training protocol. So you would still be eating a good bit of carbs as a part of that.

So I'm not saying one is better than the other from a performance perspective. I'm just thinking in terms of wear and tear on your body inflammation and you just weigh a little bit less, you know, in carrying less water. So, you know, yeah. All of that's going to probably, in the end, help your performance. But I don't they don't have enough evidence right now where I would say there's one superior fueling way.

[00:43:55.510] Ras
Yeah. And I think as an endurance athlete, that's what kind of attracted me to keto in the first place, was I needed to lose a few extra pounds that I was carrying around. Every time we've moved and and we've moved several times as a family, we set up the house. We have projects I can't get in the runs. I gained a few pounds and so I looked to keto for just something different, a way to just get those pounds off. And it actually worked for me.

The one or two times that I've actually ate something non kaido. It impacted me greatly. I was very sick so I can't really do too much cheating. I know I've got a limit. I probably can eat something that's bread or sugar, but not very much more than a bite of cake or something small because it will impact me. But as far as the endurance part of it, it has helped a lot in my running.

I'm not winning races or anything. I've never been fast either in the first place. But yeah, keto has been a real big help for me in the endurance field. But like we like you mentioned earlier and just a little while ago is that you really need to find what works for you as an individual and there's just a wide range of eating, I could give you a couple of names of some impressive vegan ultra runners. Scott Drake is probably one of the most famous vegan ultra runners.

And then to the exact opposite, Michael McKnight, just this summer or spring, actually ran a hundred miles and no calories, nothing, no food. One hundred miles. I want to say, he did it in 18 hours, if I remember right. But so he's he's definitely keto. But like you were mentioning, he is also carving up a little bit in the week leading up. So his body was fueled with carbs, but then he goes straight kitto so that his body is prepared with fat as well.

And I think that's probably how he survived it. But he's also a pretty famous keto ultra athlete.

[00:46:05.330] Allan
Yeah, I as over the years I found I can get into keto pretty easy. I don't really do the of flu thing anymore since I go in and out, you know, each year I don't really have a kid, I feel a little less energetic for a day or two, but the switch over for me is pretty quick. So that's one of the things I like about doing it the way I do it. But that said, not everybody would you might not have the same experience that I had.

So, you know, the what's that they say in the ad is the results you see might not be your results right into it. So I'm not going to say everybody would have as easy of a time going back and forth. I don't have any insulin resistance. I don't have any blood sugar issues. You know, my awarenesses always been fine. So for me to switch back and forth seems relatively easy, you know, but like I said, most of the year, I'm eating this way anyway.

The difference is just not paying attention to my carbs, are not being worried about the carbs. And so that's why it works. And the other side of it is I don't stress about rather on that point five or point to five as far as what my ketone levels are, as long as I'm in ketosis, I'm cool. But a lot of people are like, no, I want to see that. No, I want to be one point five or better.

And I bought a Keto Mojo not long ago to replace my other ketone meter that I lost. I guess I can't find it after I moved. I'll probably find it when I go get the rest of my stuff. But anyway, so I bought it and they introduced this new where they measure your glucose and you measure your ketones at the same time. And we do that. It gives you a different measure relative so ketones relative to glucose. And so it's an index that they've created.

And so again, it's just one of those. But again, it's that competitiveness of seeing a higher number that it seems to be pushing toward. And I'm not a big fan of that. You're either in ketosis or you're not. You're not. You know, you can say you're more in ketosis. I mean, there's just more ketones circulating in your blood. So I don't think you're in more ketosis. You just can't be more perfect.

You can't be more pregnant as you are. There are the days you might feel more pregnant than you did the day before. But you know that you're not in you know, you're not in more ketosis. You're in ketosis, you're not. And so it's for me, it's a good protocol. But I'm a little bit different in that I don't have a health issue. I do it to thin out, to lean out a bit, because if I did the feasting all year round, if I ate that way out of control, I would blow up, you know, so I know I can't do that and I have to be very cognizant of it.

I wasn't this year. I went and I stayed with it and just kind of proved my point of once I broke that that that barrier that I had my set point for my body, it said, oh, good, we'll just throw in a lot more weight. We don't have a problem with that. You gave us the fat cells years ago. We know how to use them. Just keep feeding us. And it did. So, you know, you got to turn that around.

And for me, it's when I said no dimmer switch just flipped the switch and let's go.

[00:49:25.580] Ras
That's awesome. You must be very metabolically flexible then to be able to go on and off and in and out of ketosis. And your body doesn't give you the pain that a lot of people get with people it doesn't know, you know.

[00:49:38.780] Allan
I'm very fortunate. I know a lot of people are not like that. They struggle to get into ketosis. And once they're there, like, I love this, I'm never going back. And, you know, that's cool. But, you know, you eat something bad like you said, you don't maybe you don't even know it has sugar in it or as many carbs in it as it does. And you eat it and you fall out of ketosis.

Now, people do that all the time and go right back into ketosis and never even know they were out of ketosis. So it's not this magical state. Where you're going to have to go through keto flu every time you go in and out, because people are going in and in some levels, most people are in a mild state of ketosis almost every morning they wake up because you've gone, you know, eight or 12 hours without eating. So your body is starting to produce ketones.

Now, is it using them efficiently as a fuel? No, because you're immediately going to put some more glucose in the system. You know, if you're very active, like you do your endurance sport and you're burning down some glycogen in your muscles and your liver. So when you do have additional carbs, some additional carbs, your body's going to use this insulin to restore that. So if you need it in the liver, if you need it in the muscles, then insulin is going to do its thing to do that.

If you didn't do any work and you're already topped up with glycogen, then it's only got one other choice and it's going to start making fat. So if that's something you're trying to avoid, you want a better body composition. I can't think of a better way to do it than keto.

[00:51:09.910] Ras
Yeah, that sounds about right. That's what I've experienced as well.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

How to use keto for optimal wellness and longevity – Lori Shemek

Less...

[00:04:22.230] – Allan
Dr. Lori, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:25.080] – Dr. Shemek
Hey, Allan, thank you so much for having me. You know, it's an honor.

[00:04:29.160] – Allan
Well, I'm really excited to talk to you because it's actually been a while since we we talked. I was on your podcast, I think it was about three, three years ago. Maybe. I don't know.

[00:04:41.290] – Dr. Shemek
Wow, a lot has changed in three years, hasn't it?

[00:04:43.770] – Allan
It absolutely has. A whole different world.

[00:04:46.830] – Allan
Now, your book is called The Ketogenic Key, Unlock the Secrets to Lose Weight, Slow Aging, Stop Inflammation, and Prevent Disease.

[00:04:56.730] – Dr. Shemek
Right.

[00:04:57.420] – Allan
That's a pretty big key.

[00:04:59.380] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah, it is. And, you know, it's it's actually ketosis, which promotes all of those wonderful benefits. And so, like you and I were discussing earlier, I should have named the book The Ketosis Key, because it is the driving factor in all of these wonderful things like weight loss, you know, slower aging, longevity, inflammation, reduction, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it's it's definitely the key ketosis. So it's not just the ketogenic diet either. It's the ketogenic diet. It's intermittent fasting, it's exogenous ketones or supplementation and exercise. And the great thing is you can do them separately or together. And if you do even two of them together, it's very powerful.

[00:05:48.420] – Allan
Yeah, I guess I'd sit there and say I do what I call seasonal ketosis. And so I'll spend a year in ketosis, which I am right now, and then I'll spend a good part of the year out of ketosis because I like tailgating and drinking beer and eating crap food and just watch a football game and then, you know, the first Thanksgiving and Christmas come around and my birthday's in February and so that's my feasting season.

[00:06:16.650] – Dr. Shemek
Clean up month.

[00:06:17.200] – Allan
Just let it go.

[00:06:18.020] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah.

[00:06:18.250] – Allan
Just let it go. And then after after my birthday in February, then I'll say, OK, now I'm going to hit by my fasting season. So my famine season like ancestors would have had when it was colder weather and there wasn't access to any vegetation to eat. And so now they're having to eat more fatty foods to get the sustenance and they're going into ketosis. In many cases they're fasting because you can't keep meat without a refrigerator and other means so they had to eat what they kill pretty quickly.

[00:06:54.440] – Allan
But they'd wake up in the morning some mornings and there would not be any food there. So they'd get up and they go, you know, do their hunts and they find their food and then they have maybe a pretty nice lunch, then a really good dinner. And so they're in a natural, you know, intermittent fasting mode. And I found every time I get into ketosis, I just naturally fall into intermittent fasting it's just a natural thing.

[00:07:19.770] – Dr. Shemek
Right. And that's what's so beneficial about all of these is that, you know, you do enter a state of ketosis and it's even more powerful if you do intermittent fasting, in fact. So if you can tag on intermittent fasting to any of the other options that we list in the book, then you're even, it's even more powerful. So it's all out there, all powerful in and of themselves, which is a really wonderful way to look at your health.

[00:07:50.460] – Dr. Shemek
But when you combine, like I was saying earlier, just even two of them, you're doing incredible, power stuff.

[00:07:59.850] – Allan
I'm doing three of your four right now, ‘m eating really low carb. And so that's putting me into nutritional ketosis. And I measured it the other day. I'm also doing exercise. So I do these long haul walks almost every morning that I can. I'll walk for two, three hours and then, you know, that puts me a little deeper into ketosis and I'll do that fasted. So, you know, waking up in the morning.

[00:08:24.760] – Dr. Shemek
Oh, perfect.

[00:08:25.430] – Allan
My last dinner was at seven o'clock, six thirty seven o'clock. We tend to eat a little early and then, you know, so it's then I got at least two, two and a half hours before I go to bed. So I go to bed then.

[00:08:37.320] – Dr. Shemek
Thats even better.

[00:08:38.370] – Allan
I wake up in the morning. I wait until, you know, about eight o'clock and that's when it's a little warmer than I think most people want to walk, but I don't care. I'll Honey badger that and do a good long walk. And so by the time I get…

[00:08:52.740] – Dr. Shemek
Well that's a good…The heat is a good hormetic stressor as well. So another powerful factor.

[00:09:01.900] – Allan
Well, there was definitely some heat today, but so so, you know, here I am. I guess I'm sitting here at 12:30 as we're recording this. And I haven't eaten a thing today. I had some I had some coffee in the morning, but nothing in it. Just black coffee and did my long walk. And I'm going to do this and do a couple other things. And I'll probably be about two o'clock and I'll go ahead and have my first meal of the day.

[00:09:25.540] – Allan
So I'm putting all three of them together, which really works well for me. I had a kind of a setback and I'm going to I talked about this in an episode a couple of weeks ago about, you know, I think everybody talks about the covid 15. And I was a victim of it, too, you know, just being locked in our house because it was we were not allowed to go out at all. And so being locked in the house, I just really tapped my motivation and I was down. So I wasn't moving. I wasn't eating well. And, you know, I was taking in a little bit more alcohol than I should have and so I put on…

[00:10:01.510] – Dr. Shemek
You're not alone.

[00:10:02.530] – Allan
Yeah, I know.

[00:10:03.490] – Dr. Shemek
It's rampant right now. Yeah. And it's better in the States. It's better. You know, I think the world at large is getting a little bit better with covid, but yeah, it's, it's, it's rougher in some areas. But nonetheless many people have paid the price in one way or another with this horrible virus. So. Yeah, and it's and that's the, well the irony of the thing is that in order to get through it in a healthful way, we want to be you know, we want our immune to be stronger.

[00:10:39.070] – Dr. Shemek
And we do have that innate immunity. But with the, I guess, emotional eating and the lack of exercise, it puts us down a notch in terms of our immune strength. So, yeah, it's it's a tough road.

[00:10:53.320] – Allan
Yeah. So enter into the picture nutritional ketosis. And I'm happy to say that I started so really eating low carb in May, May 1st and since May 1st, I have lost all of that and more. So now I'm into my…

[00:11:09.940] – Dr. Shemek
Wow!

[00:11:10.600] – Allan
Because I kind of pushed off. I didn't do my famine season when I had planned to because of everything that was going on with, you know, issues and, you know, all that and then getting locked in. I was like, so that just didn't happen the way it would have normally happened for me when I got around to February. So I stepped up and said, OK, here I am in May, I need to start now. And I started and I've been generally in and out of ketosis for the last couple of months. And then this this last Monday or so I said, OK, that's it, I'm going deep. And that's when I started, you know, putting together those three.

[00:11:45.940] – Allan
But one of the things I wanted to get into, because I know the benefit of nutritional ketosis, because I can I can drop twenty pounds in three months really easy when I'm in ketosis. So the weight loss is that's a no brainer. That's going to happen for all of us. If we if we have the fat to lose, we will lose it. But I tried exogenous ketones when they first started coming out. They were nasty.

[00:12:15.360] – Dr. Shemek
Yes, I know. Right. Oh, I've heard some names you don't want to hear.

[00:12:20.930] – Allan
Oh yeah, I was like…

[00:12:20.960] – Dr. Shemek
It's like, oh thank God I've never had to try it and the delicious ones. Right.

[00:12:27.940] – Allan
OK, yeah well so I tried one, I tried them when I first, started coming out and I was like, oh my God. And I said, well I need to do this. I want to try. It's an experiment. You know, I'm on the podcast and I want to be able to talk about them. And, you know, I was thinking, OK, that really, the concern I had was if you go into if you start doing a ketogenic diet and your body's not used to using ketones, then you're peeing them out. And that's why we're able to measure them with the urine stick.

[00:12:57.500] – Allan
So my concern was if I just throw exogenous ketones on my body as a sugar burner, aren't I going to do the same thing? So I was really concerned about whether I was, I had spent,because they were expensive also.

[00:13:10.620] – Dr. Shemek
Right.

[00:13:11.610] – Allan
So I spent a lot of money on something that was really nasty. And I didn't, you know, other than saying maybe it would help me transition to keto or if I were doing a long distance endurance sport, then exogenous ketones would seem to make sense. But in the book, you put forward a case that it's even better than that, that there's a lot of use cases for them. Can you can you talk about that?

[00:13:35.860] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah. You know, and that's the thing when you use supplemental ketones, it really does put you into a state of ketosis within 30 minutes. That's the advantage. The problem is, is it doesn't stick around as long as if you were to be, say, on a ketogenic diet. Right. And so this is really one of the wonderful things about ketones in terms of a beta-hydroxybutyrate BHB, as it's referred to often. This ketone is powerful and that it can really mitigate all sorts of inflammatory conditions and other areas in terms of optimizing your health.

[00:14:14.230] – Dr. Shemek
So what we want to do is we want to up level our, you know, our physical fitness, our ability to to utilize these ketones. And when you become metabolically flexible and even if you're not, you're still utilizing them. Right. Your body really loves ketones. And it's just that it's just not equipped at that moment to say when you're, you first embark on a ketogenic diet to use them. And so, you know, the reason that people are feeling so good and wonderful and athletes do so well on it is because you're up leveling, you're boosting your mitochondrial health, your cellular health.

[00:14:59.680] – Dr. Shemek
There's more ATP going on. There's less glucose machinations, if you will, within the cell, which produces a whole lot of oxidation ROS. And that means it's similar to like a a car, an electric car which burns clean versus gasoline powered car, which burns dirty exhaust. Right. That's what happens when you burn glucose. But when you burn ketones for fuel, you have a better form of energy, a more therapeutic, if you will, form of energy that really optimizes every part of your health, including brain health.

[00:15:39.770] – Allan
So, yeah, so I guess as I look at exogenous ketones, I still go back to I think, you know, they're good, if you're when you're first trying to get in to ketosis, they're probably a pretty good thing to help you through the keto flu a little bit.

[00:15:53.190] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah, it will.

[00:15:54.470] – Allan
Making sure you're getting your electrolytes and plenty of water.

[00:15:58.790] – Dr. Shemek
Your potassium, right. Magnesium.

[00:16:01.310] – Allan
So I have the I have the the supplements and all that to try to make sure that particular as I go into this, losing my water, I'm going to be cool. I also, like I said, if you're an endurance athlete, there's some I think there's a lot of benefit to having them because at some level.

[00:16:17.010] – Dr. Shemek
Oh, yeah Allan.

[00:16:17.610] – Allan
And as a long distance thing.

[00:16:19.730] – Dr. Shemek
But you have to be careful because you know and now if it's if it's a for example, it's a high energy sport, one that, you know, say high intensity interval training or something. You have to be careful in terms of, you know, hitting that wall, if you will. But if it's an endurance sport, you're really good to go. Part of the reason is the steady state of energy that we have when we're using the supplemental ketones.

[00:16:47.690] – Dr. Shemek
We don't have that spike in blood sugar. So it keeps our glucose stable. And I'm not sure if you're aware that the Tour de France, the team there was one team that used exogenous ketones and they did, it was an incredible win using these ketones. And so that was in 2018. And then in 2019, a large number of these teams were using them. So there's still the competitive factor. But nonetheless, that first 28 go round, that team won simply with the exogenous ketones.

[00:17:26.510] – Allan
And that's what I'm saying, you know, when I when I was when I was training heavy, I was trying to get ready for a Spartan. I had hired a coach. And, you know, I go in there and the cool thing was, you know, of course he's a fitness geek and I'm a fitness geek and I'm going to be working out and he's training me and is like, you don't really need, he says you don't really need a trainer, and I'm I like absolutely need a trainer.

[00:17:46.040] – Allan
And he says, well, you know you know more about this stuff than I do. And I said, well, so. Give me a program. Let's talk about the programming. Let's talk about what's going on. And so, you know, he's trying to…

[00:17:55.690] – Dr. Shemek
Let me tweak it for you.

[00:17:57.320] – Allan
Well, I did very little tweaking. I actually did his program. It was built it was built a little bit more towards the being a 20 year old than I would normally have done. But it was still cool. And but we were talking about me being in ketosis and he was like, well, why are you doing that? You need the carbs to be able to get through the workout. I'm like, I can get through the workout just fine. I said, you know, I'm going to probably, and I did, when I, if I do a heavy deadlift session because I'm not relying on APT for energy, I huff and puff, I get exhausted because it's, you know, that exertion that I go through and a good set of ten on the deadlift is going to take me past thirty seconds.

[00:18:36.590] – Allan
And so that is a struggle. Even exogenous ketones would not push me past that struggle.

[00:18:42.710] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah.

[00:18:43.060] – Allan
With the weight lifting, the way I was doing it, very heavy and I because it was very heavy, very slow. So you know, I understood that being in ketosis kind of put me at a disadvantage for that. But I could still push through every set. And I got really, really strong anyway because I also didn't have to deal with inflammation or any other things that were going on.

[00:19:02.870] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah, and that's exactly true. You know, it's it really is. The bottom line is that Ketones really offer the average athlete, right, a lot of benefit. And like, you know, you just mentioned the inflammation, which we can get into in a little while if you want. It just but it gives you these these exogenous ketones, give you more energy, it mental clarity, focus, and we make our own. If you're on the ketogenic diet, we have endogenous ketones, meaning they come from within. Right. And so when you combine the two, it's really amazing what the amount of energy you have.

[00:19:42.630] – Dr. Shemek
But I would venture to say that even though even if you were taking ketones with your power lifting, it helps you in some way because they really do help create more ATP within the mitochondria.

[00:19:55.010] – Allan
Yeah, you know, and I would say if it was helping me with anything, it was the fact that my my total workout time was an hour and while it might had been in sprints. You know, dead lift and go, dead lift and go, you know, and then I'm breathing heavy. When I got into the lighter lifts later, I still had the energy and those were less like that. And so, yeah, I absolutely agree that it helped.

[00:20:17.780] – Allan
But I actually think probably the best benefit and we'll get like I said, I do want to get into it is inflammation. Because every time we talk about a chronic disease, heart disease, cancer, you know, diabetes, you just, you know, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, you just keep going on and on and. They take you back to the beginning, in the beginning is chronic inflammation, and you called it silent inflammation and I actually like that because it's scarier.

[00:20:52.880] – Dr. Shemek
It is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:54.620] – Allan
What what causes silent inflammation and how does the ketogenic diet help us address it?

[00:21:01.160] – Dr. Shemek
So we have, I'll just start off by talking about the two different types of inflammation. And the first type is called acute inflammation. And it's not so cute because it hurts. It's uncomfortable. It's that sprang, black and blue swollen ankle. It's that cut on the finger. It's that terrible sunburn or awful head cold. Right? So that is acute inflammation. We need it in order to heal. Without it, we're sitting ducks. Really. So let's take that cut on the finger.

[00:21:31.910] – Dr. Shemek
When you cut your finger, an enormous amount of inflammatory molecules are released. And soldiers, if you will, rush to the site to repair the wound. They repair the wound, the wound heals, the soldiers go away, the inflammation goes away and all is well. So that's acute inflammation. And, yes, we need it, even though it seems unreasonable because it doesn't feel good. But but we need it.

[00:21:56.970] – Dr. Shemek
So then the next type of inflammation is silent or chronic inflammation. And the name silent really suggests danger, doesn't it, because we don't know it's there until the symptoms start to occur. And so 75 percent of all Americans are walking around with silent inflammation and don't even know it. It is really such a sad situation, really, but it is the core underlying cause of most illness, disease, faster aging and weight gain. And you can look at silent inflammation is like having a sore on the inside of your body that never heals unless you intervene.

[00:22:38.540] – Dr. Shemek
And unlike acute inflammation, which emits just a trickle of inflammatory molecules, silent inflammation emits just acute inflammation emits an enormous amount. Silent inflammation emits just a trickle. Okay. And so you would think, well, this is better, right? And it isn't because it goes on 24/7 every single day, unbeknownst to you, where acute inflammation goes away. Once you're healed, it's gone. But sometimes the immune system goes, it becomes haywire. And this is what causes this over abundance, this overstimulation of the inflammatory pathways. And why it's called chronic inflammation is because it never goes away.

[00:23:31.830] – Allan
This episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast is sponsored by Vault Health. Guys, we need to discuss the elephant in the room. Most of us really struggle to manage certain health issues, especially when it affects things we don't want to talk about, like our libido and vitality. Yes, I'm talking about LowT. Did you know that 40 percent of men over 40 suffer from lowT? Low tech can cause weight gain, loss of muscle mass, ED, fatigue, and poor sleep, low energy and depression? These completely dismantle any efforts you're making to be healthy and fit.

[00:24:06.750] – Allan
If you're dealing with one or more of these, it's worth booking a free online consultation with a Vault physician at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/vault. Vault is all about discretion. After your free consultation, and you agree you want treatment, they'll send a phlebotomist to your home to do a blood draw. You'll get a personalized doctor review treatment plan. This can be with pills, cream or injections.

[00:24:33.330] – Allan
The medications are mailed to your home. There's nothing macho about neglecting your health. If you live in the United States and you're struggling, it's worth learning more. At Vault Health, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/vault today. That's 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/vault.

[00:24:56.390] – Allan
Now, whenever you bring up the ketogenic diet around someone that really hasn't heard about it or they've heard about it, but they've heard it's deadly, it's going to kill you, you shouldn't be doing that because that's the worst way to eat, because it doesn't buy into the fat is bad mantra. But the reality of it is that when we eat a ketogenic diet, it actually can help improve the ratios and the things that we should be most concerned about when we're talking about fat and cholesterol. Can you get into that?

[00:25:31.250] – Dr. Shemek
Yes. And I'd also like to address the inflammation factor that at the ketogenic diet reduces inflammation in the body. It actually reverses inflammation. And that's because we are we are signaling NFR2, that is the master regulator of antioxidants signalling within the body. Right? And the ketogenic diet prevents the NLRP3 inflammasome from doing its dirty work within the cell. So it's just a very, very important way to eat. And a lot of people have misunderstood its benefits.

[00:26:16.250] – Dr. Shemek
They hear the word ketosis and they think it's keto-acidosis, which is a very harmful effect that happens to people who have diabetes and go into a state of ketoacidosis. So it's much different. But yes. So the the fat and the cholesterol, all of that has really been misunderstood. In fact, the ketogenic diet improves HDL and triglycerides. And this, you know, this is due, the improved HDL is due to a reduction in triglycerides that are created within the liver, which is a really good thing.

[00:26:59.930] – Dr. Shemek
You want a low triglyceride level for heart health. Right? Triglycerides really, really alert you to inflammation in your body. And if it's high, then you know that you need to do something different. And so they're an indication of your heart health as well. And there's the HDL triglyceride ratio that you can do to if it's one or under, you're good to go. If it's higher than than one, you need to do some work.

[00:27:34.850] – Dr. Shemek
But there's also an increase in LDL, which happens to some people on the ketogenic diet. And it's but generally it's not the LPa form which is or can be the most harmful. So it's the big fluffy cholesterol that's roaming around versus the little ones, the little dense lipoproteins. So that that is part of the the reason that the ketogenic diet is so great for your heart health. And, you know, there's also the misunderstanding about people think the ketogenic diet is a high protein diet when in fact it's a moderate protein diet. And, you know, they're afraid of of eating eggs. They're afraid of saturated fat. And it's really sad because we've, you know, really, you found out that there was a researcher's, his name was Ancel Keys, and he did a seven country study and cherry picked the data.

[00:28:36.770] – Dr. Shemek
Right. So blamed everything on saturated fat versus what really is causing the heart conditions. Heart disease with people we now know is the overconsumption of carbohydrates, especially refined sugar. And you know me, Allan, I really recommend people stop eating sugar. Eliminate it from your diet. And so it's the sugar, the process, simple carbohydrates, but it is not the saturated fat. In fact, there was a study I don't know if you recall, it was called a pure study.

[00:29:12.770] – Dr. Shemek
It was published in The Lancet in 2017 and it studied over 135,000 people across 18 different countries. And it turned out that those who ate the least saturated fat had the highest amount of heart disease and mortality. And those who ate the most saturated fat, of course, then had the lowest rates of stroke and heart disease.

[00:29:37.370] – Dr. Shemek
So right there, you know, you see it's a large study and you see the the correlation or the the amount of health with saturated fat. And so eggs were demonized and still are demonized, saturated fat is still demonized, but I think they're starting to come into their own. People are starting to understand and even reputable high ranking health experts in cardiology are saying, yep, you know, saturated fat is necessary for heart health, in fact. And and we do know that every time you take a bite of an inflammatory food, sugar, refined flours, etc, processed junk foods, crackers, cakes, cookies that you are eating, creating inflammation.

[00:30:30.720] – Dr. Shemek
And that's unfortunately sad because what's happening is up from a cellular level, you are harming the mitochondria within the cell. The more mitochondria you have, the healthier they are, the healthier you are in every way. And so you see people who are older and frail. They have very little mitochondria going on, OK, they're not really healthy mitochondria. And so if you're tired all the time, that's a sign that maybe you need to start boosting your mitochondrial health, your cellular health.

[00:31:08.130] – Allan
Yeah, unfortunately, the signal of fatigue is go eat some more sugar.

[00:31:14.950] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah, exactly.

[00:31:15.160] – Allan
So they actually get the opposite message out of that. Oh, if I, if I have some sugar I'll feel better, you know, and they yeah. They get the dopamine and they feel good but it's not really helping. And you know, I'm, I'm a perfect example of you know, when I check my cholesterol and triglycerides is when I'm in ketosis my HDL triglyceride ratio is off the charts. Good, even though my total cholesterol is high. So I'm one of those responders that, yes, my LDL goes up, but it only goes up about 30 points.

[00:31:50.950]
But my triglycerides can can I can get them down to 50. But if I'm you know, when I'm in my low feasting mode and I'm drinking beer and eating what I want to eat, they'll usually pop up to 150, maybe even 200 if I'm not careful. And I can actually get my HDL higher than my triglycerides when I'm eating a strict ketogenic diet. So it really can help you improve your lipid profile if you're if your doctor doesn't lose their mind about what the total number and the the LDL number is, because that that seems to be their focus more so than than triglycerides and the HDL.

[00:32:33.190] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah, it's true and you know, and a lot of people panic when, you know, I have family members calling me up and saying, Lori, my LDL is really high, it's 250 and they want to put me on statins. And, you know, it's that's it's really important for the patient to look at the numbers, the breakdown of the type of cholesterol. And that has been a big myth as well. So we're learning so much about heart health and what what produces a healthy heart. And so if you take anything away from this show, it should be that, you know that saturated fat is not going to hurt you. Now, if you are in, if you're 10% of the population who has a genetic condition that doesn't clear cholesterol from the body and cannot, then that's another issue.

[00:33:29.590] – Dr. Shemek
But that's 10 percent. So it's really important to make sure you're not you will you will know when you get your blood test if you are or not, it will be sky high. I mean, it won't be your typical high number. But again, if you take anything away from this show, make sure that you stop eating sugar, eliminate added sugars from your diet and refined junk foods that we spoke about earlier, because that is the key to optimal health in many cases.

[00:34:00.860] – Allan
One of the areas that, and I'm going to admit I'm confused when it comes to ketosis, because there's two there's two concepts, OK, so on one hand, a lot of people are looking at ketosis as a potential protocol to help with cancer treatment. They're not saying it can cure cancer or perhaps even prevent cancer, but particularly the cancers that rely on glucose. If you're keeping your overall blood sugar, you know, in control and you're doing ketosis, that will slow the growth of the cancer.

[00:34:37.130] – Allan
And then I go on the other side of the conversation and I say, OK, an individual that's trying to perform long distance athletic performance. Is this still going to be burning glucose and glycogen, so like where I went on a trip, you know, went on a run or a walk and I'm you know, I'm a 1000 calories in now, the human body can carry about 2000 calories.

[00:35:02.360] – Allan
But for my body to keep going, maybe even further, which people do you know they go hundreds of miles, it's crazy, but they do. And that but their body and they do it while they're in ketosis. So there's something happening there where our body is taking what it gets out of fat and it's turning it into blood sugar. And ketones, because we still kind of need both, your blood sugar is not going to zero is staying fairly stable, so we are producing some glycogen from somewhere, some glucose from somewhere, because at some point it burns out, it would burn out the muscles.

[00:35:40.230] – Allan
And so Ketones are producing the APT, but I guess I'm losing it as is if our if our body can produce with, say, zero carb, our body could still produce and keep our blood sugar stable. So when we're breaking down fat, we create the glysol, I guess its a black hole and we produce the ketone. So I guess I'm trying I'm having a hard time balancing those two things out to say that, yes, you're going to have enough sugar in your blood and in your muscles and in your liver for the athletic performance. But then it's also going to slow the growth of cancer because you're going to have less sugar. You understand what I'm saying?

[00:36:22.680] – Dr. Shemek
I do. I understand exactly what you're saying. And so what happens a lot of times is that the body is able we always have some glucose in storage in the liver. We always have it, you know, for those emergency situations and also to, the body can break down muscle for glucose as needed if it wants it. Right? So that's that. And then in terms of the the you know, the cancer and the sugar, you know, one theory is that cancer feeds on the sugar that you eat and a high fat diet, like the ketogenic diet starves as tumors.

[00:37:01.720] – Dr. Shemek
OK, and but one thing is for sure that you are with ketones in the mix, you are definitely balancing you're creating cellular homeostasis. Right? You're balancing your blood sugar. The insulin is low. And but yet you still have the the ability to make glucose within the body and it stores, glycogen within the liver and can be can be used for any type of situation necessary. Does that help?

[00:37:34.380] – Allan
Yeah, it does. I guess the question is it sounds bad whenever you say burn muscle for energy. I always thought that the ketogenic diet was muscle sparing. Well, so this, it has the ability to do it, whether no matter, you know, whether you're on a ketogenic diet or not, so it's called Gluconeogenesis and the body is able to utilize glucose by breaking down muscle, if that makes sense.

[00:38:04.600] – Allan
Yeah. OK.

[00:38:05.380] – Dr. Shemek
So, yeah no matter what.

[00:38:06.850] – Allan
If I chose to do these long distance things, I'm going to probably sacrifice some muscle along the way.

[00:38:16.180] – Dr. Shemek
Gluconeogenesis occurs.

[00:38:17.260] – Allan
And when I get past that point where, you know, I've used up my liver and muscle glycogen and my brain's going to still want a steady supply of blood sugar, at some level, it's not going to let you.

[00:38:31.390] – Dr. Shemek
And if you're fat adapted your metabolic metabolically flexible, then you can do either, OK. You can use your body can utilize glycogen, it can utilize fat for fuel, your own fat stores for fuel, dietary fat. So that's what, you know, we didn't mention. But that's what ketosis is, is your body takes dietary fat and your own fat stores breaks them down in the liver and it produces ketones. And one main ketone that I mentioned early on is called beta hydroxybutyrate BHB that produces all the magic, if you will, of the ketogenic diet. So, yeah.

[00:39:17.050] – Allan
Those are those are the ketones you're going to measure in your blood. So they're the ones that we used.

[00:39:22.330] – Dr. Shemek
Right.

[00:39:22.390] – Allan
We're breathing out, you know, in our breath, you can you can measure those out of the breath and then of course. And I forget the other one, but there's urine strips that pick up that that third one, I'm forgetting, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the third. But, you know, so that's how we're measuring those. And yeah, the one what's in the blood is what gets you. So.

[00:39:42.030] – Dr. Shemek
That's right. The BHB is the most important one. Yeah.

[00:39:47.560] – Dr. Shemek
Now, you talked about intermittent fasting, and as I said earlier, I, you know, just I just fall into these things. I did paleo and because I was eating relatively low carb, I didn't realize that I fell into ketosis the first time and realized what was happening. It was wonderful because in Paleo I lost 25 pounds and then in keto, I lost another 35.

[00:40:09.290] – Dr. Shemek
Wow.

[00:40:10.020] – Allan
So it was, you know, so boom. Yeah, it's just awesome. Over 11 months, you know, I knew something was going on. My breath was stinking and I was losing a lot of weight. And I was like, this is interesting. So I found out what ketosis was. That's how I actually discovered ketosis. And then, you know, I just naturally started getting into intermittent fasting because I wake up in the morning and I forget to eat because my body was using my body fat to keep me going.

[00:40:37.450] – Dr. Shemek
And you were satiated.

[00:40:39.310] – Allan
Oh, completely. Completely. And I tell the story, I, I got up one morning and I went out to my property to do some work. I had this, had some acreage in Florida and I had some ponds on it. So I went out there to clear and do some work and I worked out there pretty, pretty hard clearing the land work with, you know, what a sling blade is to cut down weeds and grass and such. I was using the sling blade and going for a few hours.

[00:41:02.250] – Dr. Shemek
Wow.

[00:41:02.680] – Allan
I said, OK, I'm going to go ahead. I did have a tractor out there to mow it down after I beat it down. And so then I get on the tractor and I cut a few things down. Then I take the tractor back up on my trailer and I still came to haul this thing home to my actual house. And I say I'm going to haul this out of here and my truck got stuck in my front yard of my property.

[00:41:23.000] – Allan
And I was like, this is ridiculous. I can't get out. So I had to call AAA. Well, AAA shows up and they the truck breaks while they're trying to pull me out. And so it was four hours later when they got the part, got everything fixed and got me out of the mud. So there's like I'm rolling on about six o'clock and I'm realizing I haven't eaten in 24 hours.

[00:41:44.680] – Dr. Shemek
Oh my goodness.

[00:41:45.760] – Allan
I didn't even think about it. You know, while he was out at his truck, I went fishing and I just sat there.

[00:41:51.070] – Dr. Shemek
Isn't that amazing? That's a really great example.

[00:41:52.790] – Allan
Yeah, I didn't catch anything but.

[00:41:53.530] – Dr. Shemek
A lot of people mean a lot of people are afraid not to eat. And that's that's it's really a it's a headset, it's a mindset, if you will. Because, you know, we've all not eaten. Intermittent fasting is simply not eating for a period of time. However long you want that time to be is is just fine. But the problem is most Americans are eating 24/7. We eat breakfast. We have snacks sometimes all the time.

[00:42:24.190] – Dr. Shemek
We have lunch, snacks, dinner, snacks, dessert until we go to bed. Right. That's not the way the human body was designed to evolve. The human body was designed on intermittent fasting, actually. So during those periods of time when you're not eating is when all the magic happens because this gives the body time to do the things, the cellular clean up, if you will, that it normally can't do while it's processing your food. It's the digestive process takes up a lot of energy, most of the energy outside of brain function in the body.

[00:43:01.480] – Dr. Shemek
And so when we don't eat this, this allows ourselves to go into cleanup mode. And it's called autophagy, and that's cellular housekeeping, essentially. It breaks down things, it's autophagy really mean self-heating, meaning that it can, you know, get rid of dying cells, it can remodel cellular parts. It can just really improve mitochondrial health, which we talked about before. And for those of you that don't know what mitochondria are or don't remember, they're little tiny organelles in the cells of our body that are crucial and vital not only to keep us alive, but to keep us healthy as well.

[00:43:45.670] – Dr. Shemek
So as we age these little organelles, these mitochondria, they begin to falter. They begin to lose their robustness, their health, and we lose a number of them. This just happens naturally as we age, right? Unless we intervene and do something about it. Well, intermittent fasting does this. The healthier you are, the better mitochondrial health you have. An intermittent fasting does is the ketogenic diet does this. Exogenous ketones, supplemental ketones do this. And exercise does this very effectively as well.

[00:44:21.900] – Dr. Shemek
So those are the four options you have and that I talk about in my book, the Ketogenic Key to get into ketosis, and that's what you want. So intermittent fasting is an easy way because if you don't like the ketogenic diet and you don't like to go very low carb, which, by the way, is 50 grams or less, 25 grams or less for even deeper ketosis, you don't have to. You can do intermittent fasting and then eat your your carbs later. OK, so that's what is so wonderful about intermittent fasting. Why I'm such a big fan of it.

[00:44:57.160] – Allan
Yeah. Now one of the things I did have a question about is because I was interviewing someone else and he mentioned fasting and autophagy and we got into it and his his opinion, I guess I haven't really seen any science on it is that intermittent fasting wasn't long enough to actually create autophagy that you had to really kind of be fasting two or more days before you'd really start to see those benefits. But so does intermittent fasting really get us that far?

[00:45:30.910] – Dr. Shemek
Intermittent fasting does. And so you're you are, you go into some autophagy while you sleep for eight hours. There's some. You do if you if you desire to fast for you know, you extend your breakfast, say by two hours, you're still you're going to incorporate more of it. But the sweet spot is really about 16 to 18 hours is when autophagy kicks in. But he's talking about deep autophagy. When you get into deep autophagy, this literally resets your metabolism.

[00:46:04.990] – Dr. Shemek
It resets your cellular health. So if you fast for 24 hours or longer, then you're really doing a great benefit for your body. But I don't recommend doing it more, you know, 48 hours or more, very often, once a month, maybe at the most, because you don't want to stress your body too much. It is a hormedic stressor, as it's referred to. And so you, you know, having a daily 12 hour, 16 hour fast is just fine. And then once in a while, doing the longer fasting.

[00:46:42.970] – Allan
Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting, but I always, always tell people if you're wanting to do something more extended, you need to you need to be talking to a doctor, particularly if you're on meds.

[00:46:53.680] – Dr. Shemek
Agree completely!

[00:46:53.720] – Allan
And if you're going to try the ketogenic diet and you're on metformin to control your blood sugar. You're on insulin. You know, this is going to help with your metabolic syndrome and your insulin resistance. But at the same time, you have to let your doctor know this is going on because this is going to change your blood sugar.

[00:47:13.950] – Dr. Shemek
Yeah.

[00:47:14.860] – Allan
Your medications are going to they're going to have to change and you have to be able to adjust to that. So when you're going to do something like this, the health benefits are huge. And when you're cutting inflammation down, when you're getting your blood sugar under control, you know, a lot of my clients, I'll get them down to start to start lowering their sugars. Let's just cut the sugar down. Nothing crazy. Just a little bit here, a little bit there.

[00:47:38.160] – Allan
And they're you know, they're watching their their overall blood sugar go down. They're like, oh, I need to call my doctor and get my metformin dose changed. And then, sure enough, they get on the doctor's like, what are you doing? I just changing what I'm eating, keep doing it, you know, because it's working.

[00:47:53.740] – Dr. Shemek
And that's part of intermittent fasting as you are, you're creating ketones. And it really is a superior fuel compared to glucose. And once you start using this fuel and your body becomes used to eating and using glucose and using your own fat or creating ketones, you will markedly you will feel the difference big time. So many people were relying on the toxic Western diet, which again is is highly processed with refined food, which is really an inflammatory diet. The keto diet focuses on eating very few grams of carbohydrates and eating more healthy fat. Right? And some protein.

[00:48:40.470] – Dr. Shemek
And intermittent fasting, which keeps, by the way, keeps insulin low and glucose low. But intermittent fasting flattens insulin and flattens glucose. And again, when there are no digestive processes essentially going on that the cells have to worry about, then the cellular inflammation begins to heal. It begins, the tissues begin to heal. You, you know, you have there's something called cell danger response that happens to people. If this inflammation becomes overwhelming to the body and the brain senses it. The mitochondria senses it, the cells around the in the body sense it.

[00:49:25.950] – Dr. Shemek
So when the brain gets the message that you've turned off this type of inflammation, the cell danger response or CDR, then things heal within the body. So it's really a wonderful tool to actually heal yourself.

[00:49:44.340] – Allan
Dr. Lori, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:49:54.150] – Dr. Shemek
Just three. OK.

[00:49:58.550] – Allan
Just give them something until they get the book, OK?

[00:50:00.860] – Dr. Shemek
OK. So I think it's crucial to keep inflammation low, as we've been talking about throughout. And we do this by being very proactive and mindful of every single choice we have the opportunity to make. Right. And I underscore the word opportunity. So I would say living in antiinflammatory lifestyle, whether it's with the ketogenic diet or a Mediterranean type diet, will boost your health span and your life span, which in and of itself generates a really a better quality of life for you.

[00:50:36.680] – Dr. Shemek
And so I think that is, you know, when you are living without excess inflammation, we want a little bit because we want to be protected. Right. We want ourselves to be on guard. But we we don't want it to be an excess, which, as I mentioned earlier, 75 percent of our population is walking around with. And so it affects your mindset, your mental well-being, your fitness, your ability to move and and function freely and easily, and your health span, your immune system is all up regulated.

[00:51:10.010] – Dr. Shemek
So it's a really I think it's really important. So you want to remove excess carb intake, you want to use nutrients as well for to target specific situations, such as increasing mitochondrial density, like the supplement P2Q with your doctor's approval and you want to keep inflammation low. So exercise is another is another option, which is one of the most underutilized ways to increase mitochondrial health and uses as an antidepressant even. My two cents.

[00:51:49.410] – Allan
Thank you, Dr. Lori.

[00:51:50.730] – Dr. Shemek
You're very welcome.

[00:51:50.820] – Allan
If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, the Ketogenic Key, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:51:58.830] – Dr. Shemek
I would love for your listeners to go to Amazon. On Amazon, you'll find all my books there, including this last one called the Ketogenic Key, and I think you'll find it a wonderful tool to help optimize your health and life as well.

[00:52:15.890] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/453, and I'll be sure to have the links to the books there. Dr. Lori, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.

[00:52:25.900] – Dr. Shemek
Thank you so much. Really. It's been fun.

[00:52:32.110] – Allan
All right, Rachel, now you're one of the neat people that does endurance running and you do keto, that used to not be a thing. We used to carb up the night before, you know, how much pasta can you shove in your mouth. You get up in the morning and you make sure you're still eating carbs and you carry carbs with you in these little packets. Or when it first came out it was these bars that were really hard to chew when your mouth was dry.

[00:53:02.950] – Rachael
So true.

[00:53:03.910] – Allan
But you're able to do endurance work and not have to worry so much with fuel.

[00:53:11.590] – Rachael
That's true. I've been keto for about two years now, a little over two years now, and it's helped my endurance quite a bit. I can tell you I could probably run 15 miles, fasted, well just on a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every morning no matter what, but I think the longest I've gone without needing any fuel has been 15 miles. But I don't do that on a regular basis. On a long run day I will eat something before I go out. But that's been one of the huge benefits of keto is not relying on a constant sugar load throughout a long day.

[00:53:51.930] – Allan
Yeah. And, you know, we talked about exogenous ketones and other things that you can use. So there are some strategies that you can put into it. But and I think I've said this before, if you're if you're going to try a strategy for a race, do it on your long runs practices, practice.

[00:54:08.550] – Rachael
That's right. Absolutely.

[00:54:09.930] – Allan
Make sure your body is going to react the way you want to. Yeah, I'm good to go for a good long time with without fuel. That fasted walk I did on Monday. I mean, the 13 mile walk on Monday. I did it completely fasted.

[00:54:23.800] – Rachael
Wow.

[00:54:25.270] – Allan
You know, when I came home, I took a nap because I was, you know, roughly I was going from about eight o'clock in the morning until close to noon by the time I stopped sweating and got a shower. And then I just went ahead and took a little nap about an hour or so, got a good sleep cycle in, and then, boom, I'm bouncing up, ready to eat and feeling like I earned it.

[00:54:47.140] – Rachael
Fantastic. Isn't that incredible?

[00:54:49.720] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:54:49.900] – Rachael
That is something.

[00:54:51.250] – Allan
And so, you know, I had I had kind of fallen off of the the wagon, I guess, as you will. I Normally do, a seasonal ketosis. And I'm just going to have an episode on that coming up in a couple of weeks. A few weeks, a couple of weeks, I guess. And, you know, I will normally go into a famine mode for this time of year around February. So I would have started around February. But with the pandemic and the stress and everything that was going on around that time, you know, like closing my gym and hoping I'd get to reopen it, just not knowing a lot of things, I didn't I kept feasting and put on the covid 15, you know.

[00:55:29.410] – Allan
So now we're going into the period of time when I would normally go into a feasting season, but I'm not ready to do that right now. I have lost all the weight and some. I'm back down to my fighting weight, what I normally run at during my my famine season. But I want to I want to push it a little bit further. And so I'm actually not going to to do what I normally do. I'm actually going to try to go through this next period and stay in ketosis.

[00:55:57.070] – Allan
And it'll be a challenge and probably a podcast episode about how to travel in keto, because I'm going to be traveling back to the States. It looks like they're going to be opening things up here to let us travel home and back, but they keep changing the rules so we won't really know till we get on the plane what we're supposed to do and hope that we did it right. But, yeah, I mean, I try to do the holiday season in the United States traveling around and try to make sure I stay in ketosis that time.

[00:56:26.050] – Allan
So food choices will be a tough selection, you know, just because there's a lot of foods that come out in the fall that we just really, really tend to enjoy and want. And many times they don't really fit our eating style.

[00:56:42.150] – Rachael
That's right. And it's hard to eat out unless you know the menu really well. It would be a good experiment. And looking forward to hearing what you experience with that.

[00:56:51.640] – Allan
Well, like everything it comes down to being prepared, you know, plan, plan, plan and plan some more. Have strategies. You know, if there's a food that you just love and it's the fall food and, you know, you're just going to want some of it, you have a strategy for it. So, you know, I'm going to make sure I carry some food with me. You know, when I go into a restaurant, there'll be a certain way that I'll order.

[00:57:16.680] – Allan
Sticking to the protein and, you know, vegetables that aren't coated in sugar, you know, and then and then with my mom, you know, it's like we do a meal. It's like I'll just go ahead and do some of the cooking. So I'll make a keto cranberry sauce because I love cranberry sauce and I'll do the chicken. I mean, the turkey and make sure it's a little bit more fatty cut the way I cook it. So it's going to be a little bit more fat added to it, which will make it juicy and delicious. And then you were saying, you know, we're getting into, I guess, the pumpkin spice season. I'm not I'm not that kind of person. I'm a black drinker. I just trained myself that way as when I was getting off of the diet sodas. But you found a recipe that you're pretty eager to give a shot.

[00:58:06.060] – Rachael
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the pumpkin spice, but I do love cinnamon and nutmeg. And this fall season, when the weather gets crisp, I actually do like to add a dash of cinnamon to my coffee, but I will be making some keto snickerdoodle muffins later on this afternoon. I found this recipe from Kirbie's Cravings and I've tried it several times and even my non-keto family members enjoy it as well. So it's a really nice fall treat.

[00:58:35.280] – Allan
Well, good. Well, we'll have a link in the show notes so you can find that. Just scan to the back of the show notes section and we will be sure to make sure that a link to that recipe is there.

[00:58:46.290] – Rachael
Absolutely. Yep.

[00:58:47.650] – Allan
Cool. All right. So Dr. Lori is a really cool person. I've known her for a while. I was actually on her podcast years ago. And, you know, so glad to see her out and writing this book because it was I think it was an awesome book. And I really enjoyed the conversation with her because I think, you know. We don't equate keto with much in the athletic field, we think of it in terms of, oh, I want to lose weight or oh, I've got diabetes and therefore I need to cut my sugar and then keto gets the bad rap, you know? And it's partially I think it's partially deserved because the initial people that were pushing keto kept talking about bacon.

[00:59:31.450] – Rachael
Yes.

[00:59:32.400] – Allan
You know, and I'm like, it's not the bacon diet. Stop the bacon. You know, it's not the bacon. Bacon's fine, it's a condiment. It's something you have with your eggs. Eggs is the main entree. And then the bacon just happens to be something you have on the side. Don't fill your plate up with bacon and then have a couple, a little bit of egg. It's that's not the way this is supposed to work. That's wrong. But, you know, I think people are upset with, you know, they don't know because they've been told for decades to stay away from the saturated fat that it's going to kill you. But the science is coming out now is un-refutable. It's the sugar that's killing it.

[01:00:09.700] – Rachael
Yes. And that was part of your discussion with Lori that I really enjoyed, was that it's not the bacon and egg diet, but that's getting into ketosis involves a little bit of diet and exercise, some intermittent fasting and the Exogenous ketones. So it's not just the bacon diet and there's a lot more to it and it has a lot of benefits.

[01:00:36.130] – Allan
Yeah. And I'd say if you're looking at it as a protocol. So first we're talking about diabetes or we're talking about Alzheimer's or epilepsy and those types of things then I do think there's a good place for the endogenous ketones. But just like I'll say with supplements, just like I'll say with medications, same thing with this. That's not food. You know, it's not what your body needs. We don't have a ketone deficiency because our body is going to make the ketones and eventually our body is going to learn how to use the ketones.

[01:01:09.760] – Allan
So if you're giving it more ketones than you use and you need, you're just going to pee them out. So, yes, you can spend thirty dollars to get the high end ketone little drinks that you can get on Amazon. They're little over thirty dollars for a two or three ounce bottle. You can get the ones that clear the salts that aren't quite as high octane and you can pay seven or eight bucks for about a two or three ounce thing of that, and they make them delicious.

[01:01:37.510] – Allan
So that tastes great. Now, they were horrible, horrible in the beginning, but they taste better now. You don't have a deficiency now if you're in an extreme endurance athlete. So you're looking at saying, OK, I need to make sure that I have fuel for this marathon or this ultra. And you're concerned that, you know, yeah, your body's not going to be able to burn enough body fat because maybe you just don't feel like you have that much body fat to burn. Then there's a place for them and you can factor that in.

[01:02:06.950] – Allan
But just recognize that you're investing in your performance and you need to know that they're working for you and then you're not just wasting your money. So I know there's people who are huge fans of them. It was interesting that Dr. Lori was a fan because she's not selling them, you know.

[01:02:26.910] – Rachael
Yes.

[01:02:27.260] – Allan
The fans, most of the big touting fans are the ones that are actually making them and they'll tell you how wonderful they are. But that's that's anything. Any supplement, anything. But the guy making it loves it.

[01:02:40.000] – Rachael
Yeah. For you. But there's a time and a place and as an endurance athlete myself, you know, if I have a rest day, my nutritional needs are going to be far different from when I'm on my long run day. So if I'm running 20 or 30 miles, I need way more nutrition and fuel as well as hydration that I would maybe on a rest day or just a day at the gym or something. So, yeah, there's a time and a place for all these different things.

[01:03:08.910] – Allan
Yeah. And I again, I look at exogenous ketones and I can't help but kind of lump them in with the term biohacking, you know, how do we hack this, how do we had that. And the human body was not meant to be hacked. It was it was meant to be treated well, nurtured and babied and given what it actually needs on a regular basis. When you're doing that, you've made up 95 percent of you being optimal.

[01:03:34.790] – Allan
And then these other little things you can do, you know, be at Infra-Red, be it taking glutathione or exigence ketones or any of those things. They're a little incremental steps past that now. Yes. If you're trying to take a minute off your marathon time. Yeah. Something like that might help, but you've got to be doing that other 95 percent first.

[01:03:56.420] – Rachael
For sure, yeah, we got to put the work in, get the muscles ready. Yeah, there's a lot to it than just what you're going to eat or drink that day.

[01:04:03.550] – Allan
Yeah it's not like I'm just going to go and take some endogenous ketones and run a marathon, you know. It's just not going to happen. I can definitely walk a half right now, but I could probably jog or run a half if I put my mind to it. But

[01:04:17.680] – Rachael
I'm sure.

[01:04:18.620] – Allan
But you know, I'm not going to just sit there and start taking a supplement or taking something like this and becoming a super athlete.

[01:04:25.590] – Rachael
Right.

[01:04:26.120] – Allan
But, you know, just the cool thing about keto and it's just something to pay attention to is the science is coming out and there's more and more of it that you can use ketosis as a protocol to cut down the inflammation. And I think that's the core of it. What is getting us sick is the food and the things we're doing to our body. It's creating inflammation.

[01:04:49.350] – Rachael
Absolutely.

[01:04:50.810] – Allan
The more we can heal our body by getting the proper rest, stress management, diet, exercise, the more we can get ourselves in balance in pretty much those four areas. And then relationships and family and everything else just, you know, get all of that balanced out and working for you and you're going to make up that 95 percent.

[01:05:09.920] – Allan
And then at that point, you can make some decisions if you want to do the tweaking and and twisting of knobs and just, you know, play mad scientist with your body. And then that's when it makes sense.

[01:05:20.480] – Rachael
Yeah, absolutely. I was resistant to try the ketogenic diet initially, but about three years ago I had a pretty bad ankle injury and I had a tendonosis. I had this inflamed tendon, and I was researching everything I could do to get my ankle back in the shape and the more I read about the ketogenic diet and reducing that inflammation, I thought, well, what's the what's the harm? I give it a try and see how it goes. And two years later, I'm still doing it and feeling better.

[01:05:56.600] – Allan
Yeah. And you know, the core reason I do seasonal ketosis is the reason a lot of people don't do ketosis at all. Those of them say, oh, it's unsustainable. You know, I like beer. You know, and if I have a beer or two beers, I'm going to fall out of ketosis. And if I'm doing that, you know, a few times a week as I'm, you know, going to football games and watching football, because, you know, of course, there's a football game on Sunday, there's a football game on Monday, there's a football game on Thursday, then there's another one on Friday, then there's one on Saturday.

[01:06:29.510] – Allan
And let's start the week all over again. I'm going to have a few beers during the season. Well, I guess I'm not this season, but normally I would. And then we roll right on into Thanksgiving or, you know, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and all the parties in between New Year's Eve. And then my birthday is right around the same week as the Super Bowl. So we just roll and, you know, roll into that part of the year.

[01:06:54.770] Allan
That's just too much for me to sit there and constantly tell myself, no, no, it's it just feels restricted. And that's the reason a lot of people fail at diets as diets are restrictive. But if you have a program like ketosis and you know how you're going to manage it and when you're in it and you're not completely tied in the fact that you're ketones, have to measure one measure, one point five every time you do it, then it becomes a really good, easy, sustainable way to eat and you get this huge amount of freedom.

[01:07:25.290] Allan
Because like you said, you go on a long training run, you don't have to carry three pack packets of Guu with you.

[01:07:31.440]
That's right. You can just go do the run, you know, have a little bit before and just go do the run. And when you get done, all you have to really worry about on the run was hydration.

[01:07:41.440]
Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

[01:07:42.440]
They don't have to do all this extra stuff, you know, stop at a fast-food restaurant along the way just to get it right.

[01:07:51.270] Rachel
It does give me a lot of freedom, but it's also for me, it's still an easy way of eating. And and you mentioned Thanksgiving. It's it's my favorite eating day of the year. I love everything having to do with Thanksgiving. And my parents and my husband, they're always they're fantastic cooks. But we have had Thanksgiving the last two years and it's been just as delicious as as any other Thanksgiving meal I've ever had. So, I mean, it's totally possible to still eat the foods you love, just making them a little bit more healthier than normal.

[01:08:27.390] Allan
Cool. Well, I'm going to I'm going to challenge you. OK, we're coming up. You know, this is we're going into this this fall season and we're coming up on the Thanksgiving season soon. So why don't we do an episode where we where we're at the end of an episode where we do keto recipes, we drop a couple Thanksgiving keto recipes on folks so they'll have some things they can fall back on.

[01:08:50.740] Rachel
Absolutely. That would. Great.

[01:08:52.740] Allan
So that's my challenge. Get your favorite Keto recipe together for Thanksgiving or one or two of them. And then once we get into October, November, we'll start sharing some of those recipes.

[01:09:53.820] Rachel
Sounds great. I'm on it.

[01:09:06.300] Allan
Well, let's just say goodbye and we'll talk next week.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Keto-green 16 with Dr. Anna Cabeca

Less...

Hello and welcome to Episode 450 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness. I'm really glad you're here and I hope that you're someone that's actually gone back and checked out the other 449 episodes we've done, which include over 275 interviews. It's kind of crazy how many people I've talked to over the years about health and fitness. And today I want to talk about something that's really, really important to me because it's a personal experience.

It's something that happened to me recently. And I'm talking to a lot of people and it's happening to them, too. And I want to give you the tools to get past this. And so I'm going to call this episode, “How to Turn Each and Every Slip Up Into Success.” And yes, even the best of us, the best personal trainers, the best fitness people out there. Every once while we make a mistake, every once in a while we slip, it just happens.

We're human and you're human, too. And so a lot's been going on in the world. And I want to kind of talk about my perspective of going through all of this with COVID, with the racial strife in the United States and obviously an upcoming election. Things are really, really crazy in the United States. And it's really hard to be on social media and do those types of things, because, quite frankly, it's just it's scary and it's frightening and it's hurtful and, you know, just all these emotions that are coming out.

I want to talk about this a little bit and give you some of my perspectives. And then after that, I want to give you some tools, some tools to help you the next time you slip. This is a process that I developed to work with my clients because like myself, many of them were struggling. And as I was finding my way out of the dark, I laid some bread crumbs to help them along the way as well. And it's been beneficial to everybody that I've talked to using this method. So I want to share it with you now.

COVID-19 hit the United States in January. I think the first case was registered up in the State of Washington around January 20th. And since then, it grew and grew and grew and obviously has grown into something much bigger, but not quite as big as they projected. So that's the good news. But the reality of it is COVID affected just about every single human being on this earth.

It's changed the way we live. It's changed the way we do almost everything we do and it's changed what we can and can't do. I'm in Panama and I can tell you Panama did not treat COVID like a joke at all. In fact, once they started getting cases in Panama and they were concerned about the medical system being able to keep up, they shut us down. And when I say shut us down, I mean, they shut down all the businesses, every single one of them, except grocery stores and pharmacies.

There was nothing else, just the pharmacy. You could go to the ATM if you needed some money and the pharmacy. And that was it. And they shut us down to a point where I was allotted two hours, two days a week to go do my shopping and that was only for necessities. I wasn't to be out there walking around, getting exercise. I was out there to shop. And so this was my Tuesday morning and Thursday morning from 7:30 – 9:30am were the only times I was allowed outside of my apartment.

Women were allotted 3 days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday again, all these times were based on your personal ID card. So your passport depending on whether you were a citizen or resident. Since I'm a resident, I went with my passport. So my time was set. If I was caught outside, they would you know, sometimes they're checking your ID if you're outside of those times or you're somewhere where there's obviously not a grocery store or pharmacy they would arrest you, take you in, and they were doing that for a lot of people.

They really locked us down and that went on for nearly six weeks. So they did slowly start kind of opening things up. And as I'm recording this, you know, sort of the last week of September, I mean, August I'm sorry, you know, they still we still are locked down on weekends. And that means from 7:00 pm on Friday afternoon and evening until 5:00 am Monday morning, we're not to be out and about.

So the police are patrolling. If they catch you out, they'll arrest you. We're required to wear masks. So the whole argument that a lot of people are having about masks or not to mask. They'll arrest you. So you wear a mask. So that's been Panama. We're still on a curfew, so I can't go out at night. So from 7pm to 5am, you can't be out. That's every day.

We're still in this general lockdown. We're trying to slow the spread of the disease in the hopes that a vaccine will come. And that's been my life. You know, my gym's closed down. I was locked in my apartment for four months or more, unable to go out more than a couple hours, twice a week. And quite frankly, I melted down. You know, it was a hugely stressful situation, just reading what was going on.

Even though I could focus a little bit on my clients and I could focus a little bit on my business, I wasn't able to really put my all into that because I was just really struggling with this huge trigger event in my life that scared the crap out of me when I first heard about it. And as a result, I did what most people do. I spent all my days reading articles.

And in fact, you know, because I'm a data geek. I'm an information geek. I was reading every single article I could get my hands on in my search criteria. I just basically would say COVID-19 coronavirus, but not anything that mentions President Trump. And so I removed all of that political garble that was going on because it removed all of, you know, the opinion and stuff that was out there. And it gave me the medical information, the studies, the things that were actually going on in the medical community. The discussions they were having, the treatments and the, you know, the discussions of how they were going to do you know, virus, I mean a vaccine.

I was reading up on this every single day. And the reality of that has hit me that it just really, it pushed me further down. It kept me depressed. It kept me just addled. I didn't have a solution in my own head how I was going to handle this and what it was going to mean to me, to my wife, to my family. You know, our parents are up there in ages. They're all in their 70s. And quite frankly, they're not in the condition to handle something like this.

It was just really, really devastating for me to be sitting here in Panama and think about the things I couldn't do. And even if I had gone up to the United States to be around family, I really wouldn't have been any help to them to protect them. It just would have been the same. So we decided to stay in Panama and we're stuck in our houses and our apartment.

As a result of the stress and everything that was going on, I kind of slipped. So my slip and it involved alcohol. It involved almost no movement. I did bring some equipment from the gym over to my apartment and it sat and gathered dust in the corner. The whole time, I didn't really even have any desire to work out, which was really, really strange for me. But the impact of what was going on in the world, the stress that I was feeling and just feeling incapable of doing anything about it really, really bothered me.

So the no movement, the alcohol, the eating crazy stuff, you know, here and there, the cumulative impact was huge and it was weight gain. You know, the COVID 15 is a real thing. I did my part. I gained my fifteen pounds and I felt terrible about it. But it was, you know, it was just a reaction to what was going on in my life. And it was a major slip for me health-wise. It was not something that I wanted. It was not something that I planned. Sometimes I do plan to gain some weight and enjoy myself and go have a couple of weeks of, you know, fun and crazy at an all-inclusive resort or at a football game or just on some vacation. But this was not that social media.

It was just driving me batty and, you know, as I was going through it. And then, of course, the violence and stuff that was starting to happen in the United States particularly, and all of that coming through, it was just huge. Now, with that, I did slowly start to come out of it and think about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

So in a sense, this was very much a wake up call for me. I was sitting around thinking, you know. Why am I so bothered by this and what is really driving my behavior? What's the lesson out of all of this? And the reality of it was a few things. One is, you know, I'm watching videos of kind of crazy violent stuff happening. And I'm you know, I'm watching a woman or a man and they're in their 50s around my age and they're getting beat up and they're not able to defend themselves, are not able to help themselves.

And I'm watching people die, not necessarily watching them die, but hearing about the deaths and realizing that they're dying. Not necessarily because they got COVID because a lot of people were getting COVID and just moving on with their lives, recovering and moving on. But there are people just that couldn't recover and they couldn't recover because they just basically weren't taking care of themselves. So, you know, the first realization that came out of this was that COVID-19 is not the Spanish flu.

You know, that we want to compare it to the last pandemic. But the reality is this is apples and oranges. We know how germs pass now. They didn't know as much back then when Spanish flu was going on. And really the only reason that we're having to deal with COVID as much as we are, because in a real sense, it wouldn't be much worse than a flu if we were all healthy. But that's the point. Our health is crap in the United States.

You know, two-thirds of people are overweight, one third are obese, pre-diabetes, diabetes is just rampant. Heart disease is the number one killer. And, you know, as I'm recording this, I was thinking, you know, people aren't taking care of themselves. And right now and like I said, as I'm recording this, you know, there have been 180,000 deaths in the United States, which is tragic. But what we don't think about is there's 480,000 tobacco-related deaths every year.

So if you count the 7 months that COVID's been around as of this point in the United States, it's killed 180,000 and 280,000 have died of tobacco-related illness. Now, I know there's an overlap there. And so what COVID is actually doing, rather, we want to admit it to ourselves or not, is it's just accelerating our death.

SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Fastic before we had refrigeration, processing and bulk transportation, we just didn't have access to food like we do today because we're opportunistic eaters. Most of us consistently eat more than we should. And our bodies don't know how to signal to us that we've had enough. I practice intermittent fasting regularly, and it's a strategy many of my clients use to get control of food and as a happy side effect, lose weight. Fastic is an app you can download on an Apple or Android smartphone. It's a pretty snazzy app with a lot of tools to help you do intermittent fasting, right. It not only lets you track your fasting, but water consumption, steps and a lot of other things.

You can also connect with a fasting buddy to help keep you even more accountable. If you have an iPhone, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ifastic. For an android, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/afastic. If you're interested in learning more about intermittent fasting, or just need some help getting started. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ifastic for an iPhone. For an android, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/afastic.

Now, we talked about aging last week and a little heads up the next couple episodes are also about aging because as I was going through my moments, I was just thinking, you know, we're aging and we need to be healthy. And so how do I teach people how to age better? How do I teach them to be healthy longer? Because we don't want to go out that way. And, you know, so, you know, we have to take responsibility for our own health.

You know, I had to take responsibility for my health and my fitness. So, you know, when I see some 50-year-old guy getting pummeled or some 50-year-old woman getting pummeled, I have to think in terms of if I were in the United States walking around and got into that situation, am I the victim that they're going to be looking to mess with or am I someone who basically looks like I can take care of myself because I'm in good health and I'm reasonably fit.

It's not that you have to look like Mike Tyson to survive in this world, but the reality is they're much less likely to victimize you, to bully you, to attack you if it looks like you might be able to hurt them back. And so I don't want to throw this out there and really upset a lot of people, but, hey, if this is you, get a little upset, you know, that's OK. This was my wake up call.

If I'm going to take care of my loved ones, I've got to be there for them. I've got to be able to do the things that are necessary, you know, and it goes beyond being able to help my wife out of a wheelchair 30 years from now. It goes to the fact that if someone sees me walking with my wife, they just see me as someone to just pass on because they don't want to attack me.

If a COVID virus or something like that, something similar to this comes again, like I am generally now, I want to be healthy. I want my vitamin D to be where it's supposed to be. I want my B vitamins and zinc. I want all those things in my food so that I'm already healthy. In fact, I stepped up my supplementation because I was locked in an apartment. I've got vitamin D, I've got zinc, you know, like it's almost like a medicine cabinet kind of thing, which I normally wouldn't do, but I just didn't want to take chances.

Being locked in an apartment, limited access to the food. I mean, I have access to food, but it's the same food. So just making sure that the varieties there I've started supplementing. And so I was able to kind of turn this around and I turned it around and I started thinking, you know what I'm doing? All I'm doing is the basic thing that successful people do. The way you get success in this world is you learn from your failures and you do that by doing three things, and that's what I want to share with you.

This is my three-step plan for recovery when you slip. So pay particular attention to this one.

OK, so the first thing is to forgive yourself. And this is the most important thing if you don't really forgive yourself and I mean really like self-love deep. I made a mistake. I screwed up. I shouldn't have sat there and drank myself silly and ate myself silly and sat on my couch reading about COVID virus, things that really weren't going to impact my life or improve my life.

And I did those things for six solid weeks. I can't do that again, but I need to recognize that there were triggers, there were things that made me do that that were out of my control, and I didn't take the moment to stop myself and stay in control. So that's on me. But I have to forgive myself. So I accept responsibility and I forgive. And from that forgive. Now you're ready to move to the second step.

The second step is what did you take away from that moment? What was the learning experience of that moment? So for me, it's when I hit a really stressful period of time, I need to move. I need to move one way or another. Rather, they lock me in an apartment where they really lock me in a room or they lock me in a bathroom. I need to move and I'm going to move next time. If something like this happens and they lock us down, I'm still going to move. I'm going to keep moving as long as I possibly can because that's really helped me.

Since I got out of this, I've been walking regularly. I've been lifting regularly when they started letting me out to do other things besides shop. So I've been doing those things. And it's meant a world of difference, having that movement in my life, doing the meditations, doing the things that are going to relieve the stress, that will keep me from the actions that are detrimental to me. So I learned a lot out of this about myself.

You know, your trainer is not perfect. I'm human and I have to accept that and I have to act on that when something bad is happening, I have to recognize the symptoms and I've got to do something about it. So I've I've changed up a few things in my morning rituals. I've gone through some training. I've done some extra work on myself, mentally, physically. And that's helped me a whole lot. Moved way past where I was.

Now the third. And again, I'm not going to say this is the most important because really the forgiving is. But if you don't act on what you're supposed to do, you set that plan. You're like, OK, I'm going to meditate every morning. I'm going to go for long walks. I'm going to commune with nature. I'm going to get as much vitamin D as I can possibly get by supplementing and getting out in the sun. I'm going to do these actions to protect myself, to make myself stronger, to make sure that I'm the person my loved ones deserve. Then that's the action and that's when you have to do it. Now, what I did as a part of my action was, you know, I stepped up and said, you know, I'm going to go ahead and launch and do a round of what I call eight weeks to WOW.

And unfortunately, as you're hearing this, we've closed out on the third round, which might actually be the last time I do this in 2020. But I went through eight weeks to WOW with the first group that went through and we were all seeing great success, which was really up-lifting. And I, basically going through that program, lost 12 pounds. And then I went through my Strong, Lean Over 40 program, which, you know, I sell it as a program which is a strongly energetic program and then basically lifting part, which would be the coaching part.

And I've been doing that now for about three or four weeks. And I'm down below my pre COVID weight. So the fifteen pounds that I gained, I've lost more than that since May 1st. And I did that because I went through that three-step recovery plan. You know, the three-step plan is to forgive, to learn and plan and then act. OK, so you've got to do those three steps before you're going to get past this, because if you don't forgive, you won't recover.

If you don't set a plan, learn something and set a plan, then you won't step in the right direction. And if you don't actually act, then you're not stepping at all. So it takes all three of these in that order for you to be successful at recovering from a slip. So if you want to go from slip to success, you take those three steps. Now, I'm going to offer you a free gift.

If you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip. I'm going to have a little cheat sheet. I call it the slip to success cheat sheet and it's going to kind of walk you through those three steps and give you a little bit of insight into each one and how to apply it in your life. So go ahead and go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip and you can download the plan, the cheat sheet and it'll be like I said, it will kind of walk you through.

So if you're finding yourself right now sitting there saying I'm a victim of the COVID 15, you're not a victim, stop being a victim, take action, forgive yourself, set a plan and take action. And this little gift, this little cheat sheet is going to help you get on that track. So you are not a victim. We are not victims. We are in control of our future. We write our own next chapter. Our next chapter hasn't happened.

Now, we have an option right now to take out the pen that we've been writing our life with, and we get to write a new story starting today, so if you're ready to do that, to get this cheat sheet and then reach out to me and let me know what I can do to help you be successful in your journey forward. So I appreciate you being on the podcast today.

The next couple of episodes are going to be about aging. They're really good conversations. I was in kind of an aging mindset as I was going through the last month. And this is what came out of it. We ended up with a theme like that. But, you know, the world is not always positive and it's really, really hard for us to keep moving forward when things just seem to be falling.

You know, at some point, Sharknado is probably going to happen in 2020 because, you know, it's been that kind of year. We kind of laugh about, you know, we're going. But there are two hurricanes coming into the Gulf of Mexico as I'm recording this. So, yeah, it's just a really, really strange year with a lot of stressors in front of us. And having a plan is going to help. Now, the core of all of this, and I want you to start this today, is I need you to start using positive self taught and using positive thinking, have a positive outlook.

I know it's hard, but you're currently healthy. You're currently in good shape, at least more in better shape than being on the other side of the grass. You're listening to this. So just recognize that you do have control in rewriting your future and you can start today. So make that conscious decision to start and then recommit.

Go back to your why and your vision. As we talked about in the Wellness GPS, if you have those two things, they're always going to be that rock, that foundation that keeps you solid and on your feet ready to move forward. OK, so when you take that recommit, you get into it, boom, I'm in. And then you go through and you go through that three-step plan. You're going to make this happen for yourself. I have no doubt whatsoever.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Nobody's Perfect

Less...

Allan
Dr. Saladino, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Saladino
Thanks for having me on. It's good to be here.

Allan
I have had someone on about the carnivore of diet before. His name is Craig Emmerich, Maria's husband, you might know him. And it was really fascinating. I've been interested in the diet, but honestly, it seems pretty extreme to me to just eat meat and organs. I've read a lot about it. I've heard a lot about it. But I think your book, The Carnivore Code, is really kind of the first book I've seen that basically power drives any other way you'd want to eat, I mean, for lack of a better word, it's like, boy, you just pulverized all the vegetables I like and you did it with science.

Dr. Saladino
Well, I tried. And the goal of writing the book and we can get into what I do and why I do it, my goal is not to convince everyone to stop eating all plants for the rest of eternity. The idea with the book and I'll tell the listeners a little of my story as well in a moment, but there are really two main thesis in the book. There are two things that I'm hoping to achieve and the first is to exonerate, red meat to undo the bad science that's been done around red meat and ruminant animals, cows, bison, lamb.

Dr. Saladino
These kinds of foods are some of the most vilified foods on the planet. And yet I strongly believe and I think that the medical literature strongly supports the fact that they are the most nutritious foods on the planet for humans. So what we have is this completely upside down ideology this completely reversed mainstream idea around fear of red meat. And that doesn't need to be that way. And I talk about in the book why that is and evidence for red meat being essential in the human diet.

Dr. Saladino
And we can get to both of those things. The second point of the book is to explain and to suggest to offer that plants exists on a toxicity spectrum. They're rooted in the ground. They've been co-evolving with animals for four hundred and fifty million years. And so in order for plants and animals to co-exist in an ecosystem, they have had to develop defense chemicals. This is really not conjecture or opinion. This is botanical science. And these defense chemicals can harm humans. And so plants exist on a toxicity spectrum and understanding which plants are the most toxic in the least toxic is crucial for every human to achieve optimal health.

Dr. Saladino
It's really just it's another tool in the toolbox for people. If people are listening to this and they are thriving, they're just crushing it, kicking, butt, don't change a thing. I respect anyone who's crushing it. And I will give anyone an electronic high five for making an intentional choice with their diet. Whatever that choice is, that's the first step, is making an intentional choice of diet, thinking about your food.

Dr. Saladino
But there's a lot of people that are suffering and no one has really gone to these lengths. No one has uncovered these questions. Nobody has turned these stones over and said maybe some of these plants are harming us. Maybe this is the reason that some of us suffer with eczema like I did, or asthma or psoriasis or depression or mood issues or libido issues or weight gain that won't reverse or tons of other autoimmune issues.

Dr. Saladino
And it's just exciting to be able to do to try and do those two things to say, hey, this red meat don't fear this. Very valuable for you, very critical for you, your family, your children, for their health, for your parents health, everyone. Wrongly vilified based on bad science, which is epidemiology. And the second part is you're not thriving, realize that plants exist on a toxicity spectrum.

Allan
Yeah. Now in my book, The Wellness Roadmap, I brought up a concept that I call opportunistic eaters. And what it is, is as humans, you know, if we're hungry, we're going to go for food. I think I got a little backward and so I got opportunistic eating today is pulling up to the McDonald's drive-thru. It's easy. It's quick, low cost for me from an energy perspective, I don't even have to get out of my car and there it is. Not good for me, but it gives me the energy it did what it was supposed to do, I guess. But then when I thought back to our ancestors and the way that they would look at the opportunity, I think I had it backward. And you rightfully said something in your book that that made me turn that around. You call it the Carnivore Code Hypothesis. And that would be where we would effectively favor meat, particularly red meat, over other sources of food for the nutritional value of them.

Allan
Whereas I thought it's easier for me to pick blueberries in the blueberries, not actually attacking me back. Well, we're going to find out later. Maybe that blueberry is but, you know, I feel safer picking blueberries than I would hunting a water buffalo. Now, even if you and I and a few other guys together with spears and went out there and started working, it would be a little safer, but still risk. We take every time we wanted this food. But what you brought up in the book. There's a good reason why we would take that risk.

Dr. Saladino
There's a very good reason why we would take that risk and why we have taken that risk. The beginning part of the book is really about where we've come from in humans and looking at fossilized evidence of human cranial vault size, the growth of the brain. And there's pretty good evidence that one of the key, if not the critical factor in the massive growth of the human brain, was the advent of hunting in our ancestors and the procurement of meat and these unique nutrients that occur in meat.

Dr. Saladino
So if you look at what's in meat and this goes back to the idea of exonerating red meat and understanding how valuable these foods are for humans. There are many nutrients in red meat specifically, but in all animals really that only occur in animal foods.

Dr. Saladino
So often we're told, of these phytonutrients, quote-unquote. And I really think that's a fairy tale, that's not true when we can talk about that as well. But there are unique nutrients. There are unique nutrients that only occur in appreciable biologically available quantities in animal foods.

Dr. Saladino
But we've never heard about these. So you kind of allude to this in your description. And I think most people and our ancestors were really after the calories, but it worked out when they were seeking the most calories in the largest animals and the largest repository of food, they were solving this energetics equation. Per energy invested, the return on a water buffalo is much better than a blueberry. And it just so happens that when you get that water buffalo, you are getting so many more unique nutrients that are so much more bioavailable. Because we know that in order for humans to be optimal, we need micronutrients. These are things like vitamins and minerals, and I'll talk about those in a moment. In order for our ancestors, or you or I to survive until tomorrow, we need calories.

Dr. Saladino
And you can get those calories from a Slurpee or a Big Mac or a Frosty or french fries. You'll survive till tomorrow. But if you want to survive decades from now and have vital health and healthy children and multiple generations and play with your grandkids, you need micronutrients. And that is the real difference. But by seeking out the highest sources and the most efficient sources of calories, our ancestors also sought out the unique micronutrients. So what am I talking about here?

Dr. Saladino
I'm talking about things like creatine, carnitine, choline, carnitine, vitamin K and B12. The list goes on and on. These are nutrients that really only occur in animal foods in any appreciable quantity. And they are necessary. They are absolutely essential for optimal human health.

Dr. Saladino
But you really can't get creatine from plants. We know that it makes builder stronger, but we also know that it makes us smarter. There have been interventional experiments where they'll do trials without giving vegetarians and vegans creatine. And they get smarter. They do better on memory tasks and card sorting tasks and cognitive processing tasks.

Dr. Saladino
And then there's choline, an essential nutrient for the formation of the brain to make new baby brains to make our brain strong. It really doesn't occur in appreciable quantities and plant foods, but it's absolutely abundant and very biologically available in animal foods. Carnitine, carnitine, these are unique amino acid forms that are used in the antioxidant process in the human body. Vitamin K2 is a form of vitamin K that's absolutely essential for proper calcium partitioning in the human body and higher intakes of vitamin K2, which is a series of Menaquinones, have been associated with much better cardiovascular outcomes.

Dr. Saladino
But where's the vitamin K2 In-plant Foods? It doesn't exist. You can't get vitamin K2 from Plant Foods. You can vitamin K1, which is Phylloquinone. But humans are really, really bad at converting Phylloquinone to medical quinone and an intake of Phylloquinone in Plants is not associated with any of these improved outcomes from heart disease or calcification or sclerosis. So the list goes on, right? Vitamin B 12. Most people know about that, but these are all critical nutrients, trust to be optimal and they were critical for our ancestors brains to grow.

Dr. Saladino
And the statement I make in the book is that I strongly believe and I think the evidence absolutely corroborates the notion that eating meat made us human. It's essential for humans to eat this. And so the investment is slightly higher danger hunting a water buffalo is going to be repaid in spades, it's going to be repaid over and over. As you get that hunt, you get that kill graciously, thankfully, and you share it with your tribe and you are nourished so deeply also by eating organs, if we can talk about.

Dr. Saladino
But that's really what allowed our ancestors to thrive, that it was so easy to get the nutrition from animals. And you can survive on plant foods, but they've got these toxins and you have to detoxify them. They're good for survival. But our ancestors really would have sought out animals first. And if they had to, they would use these plant foods as a fallback. If you can't get a buffalo, you might gather some blueberries.

Dr. Saladino
Now, fruit is kind of a specific thing that I'll talk about. I think our ancestors would have eaten fruit in season, but blueberries aren't available year-round. And you don't make a baby out of blueberries, you know, but you can't just you can't make a human out of the nutrients in blueberries, but you can make a human out of the nutrients in water buffalo that's got almost that's got basically everything you need.

Dr. Saladino
Blueberries, It's got some calories and a few things that we can use, but not great. Now, the fruit stems, leaves, roots and seeds of plants are much more highly defended with these defense chemicals. And that, I think, would have been absolutely way down on the list for humans. If you cannot get you cannot get an animal, then you're going to eat those things to survive. But our ancestors favored animal foods. They made us who we are. And by really forgetting that wisdom today, we are forsaking our ancestral birthright to much, much deeper levels of human health.

Allan
Yeah, and kind of following along with that as we develop and you start thinking about, OK, why is a human-like a human? Because we do have some teeth that allow us to eat some vegetables, but they're not all of our teeth are animal or plant teeth. So it's obvious that we have a little bit of diversity opportunity there. But there are other things about the human body that makes it clear that we're hunters, we're meant to be carnivores. Can you talk about some of those changes physiologically that have happened as humans have evolved?

Dr. Saladino
Yeah, so this is quite a fascinating story and it starts in the mouth. And really, as you go, as you said, the teeth argument always gets brought up a lot. But we clearly have teeth for both chewing fibrous material. Probably we held on to those because we needed that during times of scarcity of animals. And we have lots of teeth for biting into meat and eating animals. The digestive system of the digestive tract is one of the more fascinating parts of our physiology that distinguishes us from plant-eating herbivores.

Dr. Saladino
The acidity of our stomach is much more. It's much greater. So we have a lower PH, which means a more acidic stomach than many other species, many other primates, many other herbivorous or even omnivorous species. That's a strong suggestion that as we begin eating meat, we were eating rotting meat. So we were eating carrion just to prevent our guts from being damaged by bacteria that might have been growing on the meat. We don't have to eat rotting meat today, but there's a clear evolutionary blueprint there of our ancestors eating meat that was rotting or eating meat in general and the stomach acid protecting us from it and the stomach acid also breaking down that meat.

Dr. Saladino
The shape and distribution of gut regions is also very different in humans. And this is one of the other things called the expensive tissue hypothesis that probably allowed the human brain to grow so big. And we see this in other animals and other species as well. But energetically there is a ceiling on how an animal can change throughout its evolution and as a species.

Dr. Saladino
And so if you want to grow a bigger brain, which uses a lot of your energy, you're going to have to trim the fat, so to speak, from somewhere else. And it looks like the tradeoff for humans was in the gut. We have a much smaller, large intestine. So there's a stomach, a small intestine and a large intestine. The small intestine is 20 plus feet, goes from the end of your stomach to the ileocecal valve, which is where your colon starts. And your colon is your large bowel and these these parts of the intestine serve different purposes. But humans have a slightly larger small bowel and a much smaller, large bowel than primates.[00:17:48.710] – Dr. Saladino
So what appears to have happened in the very compelling hypothesis is that as we were able to eat more nutrient rich foods, we were able to shrink the size of our colons because we didn't need the colons to do the massive fermentation that primates do. So if you look at a gorilla or an ape, they have both a very protuberance stomach. They have a rib angle, which is much more pointed outward than humans. Our ribs kind of go straight down and an ape goes way out to accommodate this very large colon.

Dr. Saladino
The colon now for humans is really just to reabsorb the last bits of water from our stool as it passes through the small intestine. And the small intestine is where we do most of the absorption of nutrients. So there's this real change and that allowed our brains to grow big because we have smaller energy needs in our gut. We can then redistribute the caloric availability to growing a big brain in a very metabolically expensive brain. There's a fascinating fish in Africa that I talk about in the book called The Peters' Elephant Nose Fish.

Dr. Saladino
People can Google this. It's a really cool looking fish. But you see the same thing here. The expensive tissue hypothesis plays out in this fish as well. It has the biggest brain of any species or fish relative to body size. So it's a pretty smart fish. And in order to do that, it has the smallest gut. So it has this trade-off between gut and brain. Again, not surprisingly, that fish is a carnivore as well. And in the fish world, Carnivore is a little different than in the human or land mammal world. But that fish doesn't eat plants, that fish eats other fish or smaller, smaller animals that it's consuming.

Dr. Saladino
So that allows it to consume higher nutrient density food and have a smaller gut. And so it gets a bigger brain energetically in the trade-off. So there's all sorts of other things that suggest that we're hunters. We've got these shoulders that allow us to pitch, and no other species on the planet can throw a fastball like a human can throw a spear.

Dr. Saladino
Primates can't do this. Nobody else can do this. We have these articulated fingers. We're very agile on our feet. And even the whites of our eyes are fascinating. I should have, the book is it wouldn't have shown this picture very well, but I should have put a picture in the book about this. If you look at a chimp's eyes, I didn't know this until I was researching the book The Sclera. So the part of the eye outside of the iris is brown.

Dr. Saladino
And a human, it's white, and so if people look in the mirror, you'll see that center part of your eye, that's the iris and the white stuff to the side. That's the sclera. And a chimp sclera is brown. So if you look at the chimp eye, versus a human eye, it looks very different. And the hypothesis here, advanced by Bill von Hippel and others, is that humans became cooperative rather than competitive. That if I'm in the tribe with you and I'm looking to the right, you can tell which direction I'm looking because you can see the contrast between the iris and the sclera.

Dr. Saladino
But if you look at a chimp, you can't really see which direction they're looking because it's all the same color. So it was advantageous for them to not signal their intentions, what they were looking at, potential mate, prey, escape route to other chimps. But humans became cooperative.

Dr. Saladino
So we were hunting in groups. We were signaling danger and we were becoming this cooperative species. Well, you don't need a whole lot of cooperation to pick blueberries, but if you're hunting a water buffalo, you probably want to cooperate, right?

Allan
Yeah, let's send Derrick in there.

Dr. Saladino
If you've been in the military, or you've seen these adventure movies, you know, you can communicate with somebody across the room with your eyes without saying anything. Or if someone sees danger, you can see where that person is looking immediately.

Dr. Saladino
So there's all these adaptations that make us look a whole lot like hunters. There's also fossil evidence that we've been hunting. I mean, two million years ago when the human brain began to grow is when we see these fossilized remains of Shuli and tools, these by facial by facial stones, which look kind of like big arrowheads. They were used for spears and for butchering. And we start to see bones that are dated to two million years with cut marks on the bone from the butchering.

Dr. Saladino
And we see hunting injuries to animals and we see mass graves where our ancestors apparently herded animals into blind corridors or drove them off cliffs to harvest them in mass. So right at the time we see the human brain start to grow. We then begin to see evidence for hunting and looking at the fossil record, we can see these changes in the human physiology, suggesting, humans are hunters. First and foremost, we're hunters.

Dr. Saladino
Everybody says we're hunter-gatherers. Well, we're like hunter-gatherer. You know, we're like mostly hunting a little bit of gathering if you can't get an animal. And then the question is, what are the foods our ancestors were really gathering? It wasn't kale, I'll tell you that. You can get into it.

Allan
So since the 70s, you know, you don't eat fat, don't eat fat, don't eat fat, low fat, low fat, everything, and with paleo coming up, I guess mid two thousands and so and it was growing and then that went to Keto. So I was I was into ketosis. I was was feeling better than I've felt in forever. And then this news report comes out, you know, that red meat you're eating is going to cause colon cancer. Your chance of dying just went up dramatically. You know, I'm reading the article and I'm like this can't be true. But, you know, well, there's a study and everybody took off with that study. Can you tell us a little bit about that whole story of how that happened and why it's wrong?

Dr. Saladino
Yeah. So based on what you already laid out, I'm sure the listener can imagine how evolutionarily inconsistent it would be for a food that was at the center of the human diet for the last three to four million years would be bad for us. That doesn't make any sense. OK, but there's, quote, science. So let's talk about why this is so misleading.

Dr. Saladino
So what you are referring to is a 2015 IARC report from the International Association for Research on Cancer, which is a WHO/FAO type of committee on cancer. And they met to review all of the studies that they could find connecting red meat and cancer. So it wasn't an actual experiment. It was a consensus decision by a group of scientists, which can also be valuable. But, and they came out in 2015 and said red meat is a class to a carcinogen, which means that we're pretty sure it's a or maybe it was 2B, 2A or 2B.

Dr. Saladino
They give gradings to the recommendations based on the strength of the evidence. And so then they said that processed meat was a 2A carcinogen and red meat was a 2B carcinogen, meaning there was a little bit less evidence that unprocessed red meat was a carcinogen and there was more evidence that processed meat was a carcinogen. So they're making these recommendations.

Dr. Saladino
And you said, OK, well, how do they get these recommendations? They didn't do an experiment. They're reviewing the data. Well, they're super smart scientists, right? We should trust them. Well, in 2018 and this caused a huge hubbub in 2015. In 2018, the actual explanation of how they arrived at those decisions came out.

Dr. Saladino
And when you read that, it paints a very different story. So these, there were many scientists, I think over 20 scientists that sat down and I think it was in France and they had over four hundred studies to review and they excluded all the studies except 14. So that decision is based on 14 studies. They just took everything else. They said that's not valid. It's not that experiment wasn't done well enough. It doesn't it's not an appropriate model.

Dr. Saladino
They excluded all the animal studies. So there were no animal models. Right. And every single one of the studies they looked at was epidemiology. So in that consensus report, they used 14 epidemiology studies. Now, this is worth diving into because it causes so much confusion and consternation. Epidemiology is observational research. There is no experiments done. Most of us from science class imagine that all the studies we hear about on the news are interventional. You combine two chemicals, you get a color change, you take a group of rats, you give them more sugar or more fat, and you see what happens.

Dr. Saladino
You take a group of humans and you give them a drug and you see what happens. This isn't what this IRC report is referring to. There have been studies done in which people have replaced carbohydrates with red meat. And in fact, those studies do not show any harm for red meat. They show decreasing CRP and no changes in other markers of inflammation. But was that an interventional study included in this decision? No. No interventional studies were included in this decision.

Dr. Saladino
They were all epidemiology, which is survey-based research. And so what these researchers did was look at 14 different types of, 14 different studies. And all of these studies were either prospective or retrospective cohort study. So they take a group of people and they give them a survey. And they say, how much red meat did you eat over the last 10 or 15 years? And then they looked to see how healthy these people are and they try and correlate those two. Or they'll take a cohort of people and say how much red meat you eat now and then follow them moving forward for 10 or 15 years and see how many of them develop health problems. And at first glance, that sounds reasonable, right?

Dr. Saladino
Except here's the problem. Epidemiology, observational studies can only tell us about correlation. You can't make a causative inference from that because just because somebody eats more red meat, it doesn't mean that the red meat caused the problems.

Allan
I think you had a really good example. You had a really good example in the book about divorce rate in Maine.

Dr. Saladino
Yeah, there's a great website called SpuriousCorrelations.com, where people can see these sort of the hilarity that ensues when you try and connect correlation with causation. Many things correlate. The divorce rate in Maine correlates with the per capita margarine consumption over the last eight or nine years to a very, very high degree. Does that mean that as people ate less margarine, they got divorced less? No, but it makes absolutely no sense. But you can correlate these two things.

Dr. Saladino
You can also correlate things like deaths by getting tangled in the bedsheets with per capita cheese consumption and the number of movies Nicolas Cage has appeared in with, I think something with pool drownings or something. You know. You can correlate all kinds of things that don't have any connection. And in the case of red meat, you've already really alluded to the problem that for the last 70 years the narrative has been fat is bad for you, red meat is bad for you. So who eats red meat over the last 70 years?

Dr. Saladino
People that are rebels people that also probably are less likely to go in the sun, less likely to play tennis on a Tuesday morning, less likely go to their doctor to get a colonoscopy or mammograms, less likely to get pap smears, less likely to do other types of health behaviors. Exercise, meditate. These are just these are the types of things more likely to smoke, more likely to drink alcohol.

Dr. Saladino
These are the type of things that are very hard for epidemiology to control for. But the people who eat red meat consistently do worse in the United States because they are the people who are rebels. In the book, I call them the James Dean types. And the converse is also true. Who has eaten more vegetables over the last 70 years?

Dr. Saladino
Well, it's the people that I gave a high five to at the beginning of this podcast who are making intentional choices with regard to their diet. Now, they're also doing other healthy things. You don't just listen to health advice on diet, you also listen to health advice on exercise and go out in the sun and you do other things that are good for you. You're more likely to be of a higher socioeconomic status because you have the ability to do those things.

Dr. Saladino
So it creates this really confounded story regarding what are these studies actually telling us. But really the narrative doesn't end here. If you look at those 14 studies considered by the IARC, are you ready for this, only 8 of the 14 to start with, 8 of the 14 did not show any association between red meat and cancer. And if people are just kind of like scratching their head right now, OK, so 8 of the 14 studies showed no association between red meat and cancer. Granted, these are epidemiology. But 8 of the 14 association, the majority of the studies, no association between red meat and cancer.

Dr. Saladino
6 of the 14 showed association between red meat and cancer. But of that six, five of them, that's association was not statistically significant. So not only is epidemiology confounded by these biases and does it not allow us to make a causative inference from correlation if we do the math and the correlation is not even statistically significant, we can't even actually say that it's a real correlation.

Dr. Saladino
It could be due to other errors. It's not a big enough difference. So what I'm saying is that 1 of the 14 studies, 1, showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And we can dig into that one study even further and say, what was that one study done? That one study was done in a population of Seventh Day Adventists, which is a religious group that shuns meat. So in that group, the people that eat meat are really going to be rebels because the rebels not only at a social level, the rebels at a religious level, and the whole Zygi, the whole environment of a Seventh Day Adventist community is a group that's mainly vegetarian.

Dr. Saladino
And if you're eating meat in that community, you are definitely an outlier and definitely sort of bucking other health norms. Likely they found that the people who ate more red meat in that study were also much more likely to be obese. This is the problem with epidemiology studies. Was it the obesity that led to more cancer or was it the red meat? Well, the study can't say, which is why you have to do interventional research. And as I said, there are many studies that have been done with red meat that are interventional.

Dr. Saladino
Take a group of people, give them more red meat, see what happens. They don't show any problems, no inflammation. It's very hard to study people at an international level for cancer. You'd have to give people more red meat for years and years. The epidemiologist is done for years. But at a molecular level, we can see that giving people more red meat does not. Lead to increases in inflammatory markers, which is what you would expect if it were going to trigger a cancer, it was going to do something bad if it's going to trigger a cancer.

Dr. Saladino
But this is really what the notion that red meat is bad for humans is based on. Badly done epidemiology in which 8 of 14 studies showed no correlation, 5 of 6 not statistically significant. Only 1 of 14 showed a statistically significant correlation between red meat and cancer. And in that study, it was badly confounded by unhealthy user bias. The last thing I'll say here to really drive this point home is if you look at epidemiology, again it's all flawed, none of it's perfect. But you can look at epidemiology from other countries like Asia, and you don't see the same correlation that you do in the West because the narrative is different there.

Dr. Saladino
There's very large epidemiology studies from Asia looking at over 180,000. Another one is 220,000 individuals followed for 5 to 15 years. And where they find the men who ate more red meat had less cardiovascular disease, the women who ate more red meat had less cancer. But they didn't think about that study at the IRC. and no one can explain that the only way then you could say is what? Red meat is good for Asians but bad for Westerners. That makes absolutely no sense. That's silly. It's possible. But that's not even that's really not a hypothesis anyone is going to entertain.

Dr. Saladino
The more plausible explanation is that the narrative is different. In Asia, We know this red meat is associated with athletes. So who eats more red meat? The same people that eat more vegetables in the US, the people that are more likely to exercise, they have more financial resources. The more people, people that are more likely to do things, go see their doctor, less likely to smoke, less likely to be obese because they have more of an investment in their health.

Dr. Saladino
So this is really how we get misled about red meat and cancer, red meat and heart disease, red meat and longevity. It's all the same story over and over. And I go through all of these in the book and debunk these myths one by one and give tons of references. The book has over 650 references. And I show, hey these things you've been told you've been misled. These are based on observational epidemiology. And when I have it, which is most of the time I share interventional studies with argue, which argue completely against it and say, hey, look, this is much more valid.

Dr. Saladino
Very savvy listeners will know that in 2019, another study came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine that was super controversial. A separate group of researchers looked at the IARCs findings in 2018 and said, that's hogwash. You guys excluded all these studies. You didn't weigh them properly. You didn't use any interventional studies. In the Animals of Internal Medicine. Two studies came out in 2019 saying red meat is not bad for humans. We're going to look at this evidence again. Red meat is not bad for humans, but we get this like propaganda in our heads. And now we're so scared. We're fearful as humans.

Dr. Saladino
Nobody wants to die early. Everybody wants to see their grandkids grow up. We don't know what to do. And I think as humans, it's been part of our consciousness for 70 years. And we suddenly are just it's very hard to get it out of our out of our out of our paradigm, out of our perspective and really look at the data. And we have Ancel Keys and originally very bad epidemiology from the 1970s to think that that's a whole separate story.

Allan
Yes, it is. Now, one of the other things I found kind of fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, was that the advice at one time was to tear your kale and let it sit for about 10 minutes. So the toxicity that would happen would be at the highest level. So we would get this hormesis this effect from the kale, and it makes it that much better for us. I can't tell you how many times I tore the kale and let it sit for 10 minutes before I ate it. Can we talk a little bit about plant toxins and why you know, that kind of hormesis might not be what we actually really need.

Dr. Saladino
Yeah, so this is a little bit of a complex point, but I'll try and break it down in the simplest terms for me. Hormesis is a word that basically means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger up to a point until it kills you. Hopefully most of your listeners have seen The Princess Bride where Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and they're having this battle with iocane powder and maybe people haven't. But he says, you know, he give he says he gives them two cups of water to put iocane powder in one of these cups. And it's a poison. It's obviously a fictitious poison. And I'm going to, you get to choose, you know, the Dread Pirate Roberts is talking to the Sicilian and saying, you choose which one.

Dr. Saladino
And he puts it in both, right, and they both drink, and so the Sicilian dies and he goes, Oh, how did you you tricked me. He said, Yeah, I tricked you. I put it in both. I've been slowly developing this this the strength to iocane powder over the years. That's how hormones this is supposed to work. But it doesn't quite work like that. You know, a little bit of poison is supposed to make you a little stronger. But it does and it doesn't. So here's the problem. The concept of hormesis, I believe, conflated between what I call in the book environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis.

Dr. Saladino
Environmental hormesis, this is a pretty well-established concept. It's the idea that a little bit of sunlight, a little bit of heat stress, like a sauna, cold plunge, ketosis. These are environmental hermetic, so not molecules, they're experiences. I could have also called it experimental hormesis, but these are things that we encounter in our life that our ancestors always encountered fasting, starvation for a short amount of time, leading to ketosis.

Dr. Saladino
These are things that we've always encountered evolutionarily that cause our body of stress going to the gym and lifting weights, going for a walk, going for a jog. These are hormesis. Exercise is a experiential or environmental hermetic. A little bit of that makes you it gets a little bit of a toxin. You know, that if you lift weights too much, you're going to be sore. If you go out in the sun too much, it's going to you're going to feel it. You go in the sauna, you're like, whoa, that was intense, right?

Dr. Saladino
You feel it. It causes a little stress, but what is your body do in response to that stress? It gets stronger. Anyone who's ever exercised to lose weight or lifting weights and seen their muscles grow, will realize the stress makes you stronger. Now, at a certain point, it's going to break you. If you lift too much weight, you're just going to tear the muscle or break a bone. If you run too much, you're going to stress fracture, etc. But there is a concept that a little bit of a poison makes you stronger when it comes to experience or environment.

Dr. Saladino
Now we have applied this concept to plant molecules incorrectly, I believe. And the reason it's incorrect is we've forgotten that molecules come with side effects. If you look at the research on Sulforaphane for instance, which is the glucose scintillate, which becomes an Isothiocyanate, in kale when you when you rip it up, it has been shown to increase glutathione in the human body. But it's also been shown to do many other negative things that we're never told about. It's just like when any of the listeners go to the pharmacy and you get a prescription for a medication. That medication comes with a package insert, in the package insert tells you, hey, this medicine is metoprolol or lisinopril or a statin. And I hope that, I don't prescribe those medications much at all in my practice anymore. And I hope that most of your listeners are healthy enough to have avoided them.

Dr. Saladino
But we all know this. If you go to a pharmacy and get a medication that comes with side effects, antibiotic, whatever, all the molecules that are foreign to human biology have this. They all have it. sulforaphane has it, curcumin has it, resveratrol has it. All of these plant molecules, we've been told are so good for us also have package inserts, but we're never handed them because they're not considered to be pharmaceuticals. But they are.

Dr. Saladino
They are definitely pharmaceuticals. And many plant molecules are used and developed into drugs. Most of the chemotherapy that we use for cancer is from plants, paclitaxel, etc. There's lots of chemotherapy from plants. Well. In the case of chemotherapy, it's pretty clear the chemotherapy might kill some cancer cells, but it's also going to kill your cells and chemotherapy has very clear bad side effects. But it's the same with other plant molecules.

Dr. Saladino
So if the plant molecules have a bad side effect in the case of sulforaphane that Isothiocyanate in the kale you're eating, that one has a side effect of inhibiting the absorption of iodine at the level of your thyroid and causing damage to cellular membranes and oxidizing your DNA, which can also lead to problems and cancers. And people who have eaten too much kale may also get GI effects, you know, gas bloating or other issues. And so it's pretty clear that sulforaphane or other compounds in these vegetables are also harming our gut.

Dr. Saladino
But we're never told about those things. We're only told these are good for you. Eat more of this. Well, it's pretty clear those are plant toxins. We're told they're antioxidants, but they're not. They're pro-oxidants. And they cause our body to increase its own endogenous antioxidants.

Dr. Saladino
But here's the kicker. You don't need any more antioxidants if you are doing the environmental hormesis, if you are doing experiential hormesis, exercise, cold plumbing, sauna, being in the sun at a healthy level, fasting occasionally. There are many good studies that I show in the book that suggest vegetables don't do anything extra for you from an antioxidant perspective. There are many studies in the book that I share in reference that show inclusion of massive amounts of fruits and vegetables don't improve markers of oxidative stress, inflammation or DNA damage.

Dr. Saladino
And what they do do is cause you all these harm on the back end. They cause all this collateral damage because of the side effects. So when you're ripping that kale, you're thinking I'm getting, quote, antioxidants. Well, no. Sulforaphane is a pro-oxidant and it's very clearly a plant defense molecule. It doesn't participate directly in any human biochemistry. Sulforaphane causes free radical production, Sulforaphane causes oxidative stress. You can get it to bump up your glutathione a little bit, which is this endogenous antioxidant.

Dr. Saladino
But you can also bump your glutathione, this molecular policeman in the human body by doing cold plunge, by doing sauna, by doing exercise. And then you won't have any of the side effects from the so forth thing and you'll probably have a lot less gas and your thyroid will be much healthier in the long run. So this is essentially what I'm saying here. There's a real difference between molecular hormesis and environmental hormesis, and we don't need plant molecules to be optimal.

Dr. Saladino
That's been demonstrated over and over and over. And we must not forget the side effects that these molecules have in human physiology. And that, I fear, is where many people are suffering unnecessarily.

Allan
Yeah, I think one of the points I had early on when the Carnivore diet started getting a little bit more popular is just like ketosis. They come forward with an idea. And everybody thinks of the keto diet now as the bacon diet, people that are going to keep the “bacon! bacon!” And yes, you can have bacon, but not just bacon. Something else, please. A lot of people that are in carnivore are doing something very similar, like 30 days, just eating rib-eye steaks or they'll go 30 days just eating bacon. And yeah, they lose weight. They say they feel great because they do get into ketosis, but they're not getting everything they need either. There's a right way and a wrong way to do Carnivore.

Dr. Saladino
Yeah. And I think it goes back to what we spoke about earlier. Just how did our ancestors do it, both out of respect for the animal and just from an environmental sort of caloric perspective. They ate the animal nose to tail. So I'm a really big advocate for this. This is understanding that you cannot just eat steaks and be on a carnivore diet in a healthy way that's going to cause a folate deficiency.

Dr. Saladino
So I talked about all these micronutrients earlier in the podcast and they are found throughout the animal. A cow is not just animal meat all through the cow. A cow has a liver and a stomach and a spleen and heart and a kidney and intestines. And you know what most of us will think of it is gross. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so interested in developing some adjuncts to help people get more organs in their diet, which I'll talk about in a moment, but it's something that our ancestors have always done. And so anyone that's listening to this, that's from an ethnic background, your family probably ate heart or liver or kidney or spleen.

Dr. Saladino
And, you know, maybe as a kid, you were like, I don't know about that, but it's relished by indigenous people. Liver is sacred. It's not even touched by human hands in a lot of cultures. It's the first thing you eat. If we look at the way animals who are carnivorous eat other animals, they always go for the viscera first, they'll eat the liver. And it sounds morbid, but it's like, hey, look, we're just trying to appreciate the sacrifice that animal has made for us and get all the nutrients we can. I've seen video of ORCA's eating sharks and they just eat the liver. They don't eat the animal meat. They just eat the liver out of the shark. All these animals realize the liver and these other organs are super beneficial for nutrients.

Dr. Saladino
The liver is a very rich place for folate, choline, vitamin K2, Riboflavin. If listeners are unsure of this, I'll ask them the question, where do you get your riboflavin? I think riboflavin is the most commonly deficient nutrient in human populations in 2020 that no one knows about. Vitamin B2, you really can't get it from plants and you can't get it from muscle meat in enough quantity, but you can get it from the heart or liver.

Dr. Saladino
So and I realize this is a very hard thing. This is probably the biggest piece for people that's challenging is how do I eat organ meats. So it's so exciting to be able to I wanted to build a company to help people do this. This company is it launched at the beginning of August and this podcast is coming out later in August. It's called Heart and Soil, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. What we do is we take organs from grass-fed grass, finished animals in New Zealand, and we desiccate them with low temperature, dehydrate them and we encapsulate them into a pill. We're basically making organ meat pills to help people get the organs. If they don't want to eat the liver.

Dr. Saladino
I think the best thing is to eat real liver or not even. It's not that the pills aren't real liver. Just the best thing is to eat fresh liver or fresh heart. But if you can't do that, that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about being able to do this for people in this business at Heart and Soil is to get them desiccated organ pills. But there's a real option for people now because you can take them in a pill that's been low temperature hydrated to get the organs.

Dr. Saladino
But if you're not eating the organs, whether you're eating plants or not, you're missing out on nutrients. It's not just for carnivores. They're for everyone. It's for you and your grandma and your kids. My sister has a two and a half-year-old and an eight-month-old, and both of them get these organ meat pills. She just opens them up and sprinkles them on the food, mixes it with hamburger. Neither of them can swallow a pill, but she can open the pill and sprinkle the powder onto something and put it mixed in with ground beef for Luke, my nephew and Michaela.

Dr. Saladino
And it works great. And they get these nutrients. But that's what kids need and that's what adults need. Even if you're eating plants, you still are not getting enough choline. You're still not getting enough folate. You're still not getting enough riboflavin. What about zinc? What about copper? What about selenium? What about manganese or about boron? What about K2? There's so rich in the organ meats.

Dr. Saladino
The other piece of this equation is methionine and Glycine. And this comes in with collagen. Collagen is thankfully specifically kind of quote, an organ meat that has become much more in vogue recently. People are all about bone broth. They understand the incredible benefits of this for skin, hair and nails health. But a lot of people in the Carnivore world don't even do bone broth. They just eat steak and you need to get the connective tissue.

Dr. Saladino
So one of my favorite things to do every day is to make bone broth. I don't make it every day, but I eat it every day and I make it just by putting bones and tendons in an instant pot and then drinking that it gets collagenous and kind of jelly in the fridge. And then you're getting tendons. Well, the tendons are rich in glycine, it's an amino acid that complements with thymine and which is rich in muscle meat.

Dr. Saladino
And so together these helper biochemistry run in the best way to get too much thiamine without enough glycine. And there's a real problem in human biochemistry. So but again, it all works when you eat like your ancestors. If you eat the animal nose to tail, there are no nutrient deficiencies that will develop in humans. So I will repeat that, because that's a very important statement. Eating animals nose to tail provides humans with all of the nutrients they need to thrive. End of story, full stop, period. That's it. That's why it was so easy for our ancestors if they had to go hunt and gather a blueberry, a little bit of this route, a little bit of that plant to get all their nutrients. It's really hard. I don't know if anyone's done a plant based diet, but I was vegan for seven months. I was Rovi for seven months. About fifteen years ago. I had to work so hard to get all the nutrients I needed.

Dr. Saladino
Where do you get your zinc, pumpkin seeds? Well, I don't really like pumpkin seeds. Like that's the only source of zinc I could find in any appreciable quantity on a plant-based diet. So to get adequacy on a plant-based diet, you have to eat 37 different foods that are never all in season at the same time that never would have grown together at one time. You can't get all the nutrition you need from eating plants, period.

Dr. Saladino
All the nutrients I mentioned earlier and even just to get basic nutrients, you have to eat twenty-five different plants that never occurred together on the face of the earth. Evolutionarily it's really hard. You want to get all the nutrients you need eating animals, eat a steak, add some liver, you're pretty much done. Add some bone broth steak and liver. Now you can add other things for variety, but you'll get everything you need. The first thing people think about is vitamin C, and I address this in the book.

Dr. Saladino
There's plenty of vitamin C in animal foods that are fresh. We know that animal meat has vitamin C, animal organs have more vitamin C than the muscle meat. No one has gotten scurvy eating animal foods when they're fresh. This doesn't happen. There are thousands of people doing this. I don't believe vitamin C, I don't have scurvy, but vitamin C level is just fine. You can get vitamin C in whole foods. That's a whole other rabbit hole.

Dr. Saladino
But even beyond vitamin C, you don't need fiber. I address that myth in the book. You can definitely poop without fiber and multiple poop, even better without fiber. So again, this leads us to so many of these rabbit hole, whichever one you want, but eating from the nose to tail is so critical, and that's why I think the supplements can be helpful at heart and soil or just eating the organ meats that you get from a good farm is critical along with bone broth. And the only other thing I'll say here is that a carnivore diet also doesn't have to be ketotic. I think that low carbohydrate states would have happened. I think humans would have been in ketosis absolutely frequently, but I don't think we were in ketosis all the time.

Dr. Saladino
And so if ketosis is a stumbling block for you know, that in the book I talk about tier one through five carnivore diets and have a stepping stone. And in the Tier 1 diet, I outline which plant foods are the most toxic and which plant foods are the least toxic. And I think the least toxic plant foods are the fruit. They're the part of the plant that the plant wants you to eat. So things like squash or avocado or olives or berries or even apples and oranges, I think these are reasonable for most people.

Dr. Saladino
And you can get carbohydrates in your diet on a, quote, animal-based diet on a Carnivore ish type diet. So don't fear this. If ketosis is scary, if you want to do a ketogenic diet, you absolutely can. I found for myself and most people, cycling in carbohydrates in the form of low toxicity fruit works best. It's probably what our ancestors would have done and things like Honey, so raw, organic honey is a great adjunct that people think about all the sugar.

Dr. Saladino
I have a podcast. It's called Fundamental Health. I've addressed all this on the podcast. We talk about it in the book. You don't want to overeat fructose and fruit, but reasonable amounts look pretty darn safe for humans. You know, if you're eating less than seventy-five grams of fructose a day, which is a lot of fruit, your liver can handle it just fine. You'll be fine. That's even a very large amount. Most people don't get more than twenty or thirty grams of fructose a day.

Dr. Saladino
And so reasonable intakes of fruit and honey, totally safe for humans, not type of naturally occurring sugar is not bad for us. You don't have to fear it in any way, shape or form.

Allan
Dr. Saladino, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Dr. Saladino
So I think that you need to understand food. Food is a big lever, right? So that's what we've been talking about this whole time. Understand what foods nourish your body and understand what foods harm your body or are causing problems for your body.

Dr. Saladino
So that's what the book is about. And again, it's not it's not about convincing the world to stop eating plants. It's about helping people understand that animal foods, red meat critically vital for humans, very nutritious, not harmful, wrongly vilified, plant foods exist on a toxicity spectrum, can be harmful for a lot of people. Eat the least toxic ones if you need variety, color, flavor. But understanding which foods help your body thrive will be the first step.

Dr. Saladino
That's critical. And then at the end of the book, I also talk about how to live like our ancestors. And we've hinted at this previously with our discussions of environmental hormesis. It's also sunlight, community, cold plunging, sauna, exercise outside, occasional fasting. These are all normal things. I think if you do those things. And then the third piece for me would be doing something that you care about finding meaning in your own life.

Dr. Saladino
And I'm so grateful to be able to do this work. It's it's been a challenging road for me because so many of these ideas are so controversial. But I really believe that this knowledge needs to be out there. There are a lot of people who are being misled and their lives are suffering because of it. And so doing something that you find meaningful in your life is probably the third critical piece.

Allan
Cool. Well, thank you. And if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, The Carnivore Code and that supplement company you were talking about, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Saladino
So the book is TheCarnivorecodebook.com. That's the website. You can check it out. It's out now. It's, I imagine I really think it's going to sell really well and hopefully we're going to affect a lot of lives positively. The website for my company, HeartandSoilSupplements.com. So heartandsoilsupplements.com, you can find all those organ pills if you want to include more liver or bone marrow or heart or spleen, any of the organs in your diet. We've got them on there for you. And my website is Carnivoremd.com.

Allan
So you could go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/448 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Saladino, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.

Dr. Saladino
It's my pleasure.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Carnivore cooking with Craig Emmerich

Less...

00:03:07.080] – Allan
John, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:10.780] – John
Thanks, Allan, great to be with you

[00:03:12.700] – Allan
Now I got your book, Innercise: The New Science to Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power, and, you know, I've read a lot of books and I've read a lot of books about the brain and about neuroplasticity. This was probably the most practical book on neuroplasticity that I've ever read.

It was not just the theory of this is how the brain should work or should fire, this was set Innercise, exercise for your brain that actually makes this stuff happen. And, you know, you said in the book, don't do all of them at one sitting because it's too much. But I found myself as I was reading, trying to do them.

Yeah, it was exhausting when you got to the beach one, it's funny because I um, that was just a meditation I started doing for myself to fall asleep if I woke up and I was feeling anxiety and I would just imagine myself walking down a beach. And so it was just it was interesting. You started going through that. And I was watching it and reading and it was like, oh, goodness, I had to go take a nap.

I was like, so relaxing and so awesome. So, again, I really enjoyed the book. And then I went on to even go do the Brain-a-Thon, which again, was awesome. So thank you for that. I appreciate sharing that. I really appreciate you being here today.

[00:04:41.960] – John
Thank you. The book Innercise was all around when I came to the realization that I have and everybody who is with us today has a trillion dollar brain, but we weren't given the user's manual for it. And, you know, everybody knows that I could exercise to build up my cardiovascular system and to build up my lung capacity and to strengthen my muscles if I want to exercise. But what about our brain, the greatest neuro muscle and bio-computer in the whole universe?

[00:05:18.320] – John
What are some techniques that we can use to get our brain to work better and to get us to focus more, to create empowering habits, to let go of stress or anxiety or uncertainty or fears that hold us back? What about that? And for many, many years, I've been practicing the mental and emotional techniques that I laid out in Innercise and actually give people the audio, enjoyed it and have a great dialogue about it.

[00:05:49.160] – Allan
Perfect. So in the book and I think this is where it clicked for me to understand this, is that I work with a lot of clients and they're trying to lose weight and they're trying to get fit and trying to get healthy. And for some of them, it just seems so hard.

[00:06:08.340] – Allan
And, you know, they struggle and they struggle and I'm like, you know, I know you want this. I know you're committed to this, but it's not happening for you and we've got to break that down. And you use this term cohesion and dissident's kind of talk about one of those kind of things that holds us back that we're not even necessarily aware is happening. Can you talk about that?

[00:06:30.130] – John
Sure. So, listen, we all develop our habits, right? We have habits the way we think on a regular basis. We have a habitual way of feeling. We have behaviors that lead to our results. So when we understand our brain just a little bit better and we understand that every one of us is already one hundred percent disciplined to our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings and our behaviors. And so changing is hard if you don't have the right process. So whenever we're looking to change our eating patterns, when ever we're looking to change how much activity we get in the day, whenever we want to change, how much sleep we get when ever we're looking to change our own self image of ourselves, which is something we've had for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, that requires understanding.

[00:07:32.140] – John
How do I make change easier not easy, but easier. And this is where most people have an issue. It's not in the intention or the goal that's the problem. It's what happens after that that's the problem. And so when we understand that our brains all work identically, every human beings brain works identically and our brain works on a couple of principles. So let me give you a couple of these principles.

[00:08:04.570] – John
Number one is any time that our brain experiences a change, a change in our behavior, a change in our diet, a change in our exercise, our brain goes, hey, what's going on? You're using energy and our brain wants to conserve energy. So anything that is going to use up more energy the way I think or behave, our brain is going to go what's going on here? And it's going to resist. So that resistance is our brain wanting to move back into its comfort zone. Right. Just like a thermostat is meant to keep temperature in a room at a certain temperature that's set in the thermostat. Our brain wants to have you keep the same settings. You're awake, you're eating your exercise energy expenditure. That's one.

[00:08:55.320]
Number two, whenever our brain feels that there might be real or potential pain or discomfort, it says, hold on a second here. I don't want to feel any pain or discomfort. Well, guess what? Changing our diet is considered uncomfortable to our brain, starting to exercise, even though it feels good to do it, it also means we might have muscle soreness. It also means that we might have aches and pains, etc.

[00:09:23.170] – John
So our brain is trying to resist anything that's going to cause us pain or discomfort or having less than what we had before. So understanding that these are natural mechanisms of our brain, we can start saying, OK, are there some techniques that I can use to make this easier versus easy? And the answer is yeah, there's a lot of techniques that we can use to re-commit to reframe things. So first thing that I share with people who want to lose weight, first and foremost, stop thinking of what you need to do is losing weight.

[00:10:05.680] – John
As soon as our brain thinks of losing anything, it resists it. Why? We're always taught to find what we lose, find what you forget. So what if we instead said, OK, what do I really, really want? Is that weight that I want to lose or is it fat that I want to release? Right. So if we think about body weight as extra calories, extra energy, what we want to do is we want to release that energy and use it.

[00:10:34.390] – John
But that's really not what we're looking to do. You know, the reason we want to, I'm going to use a term that I don't like to use is lose weight, is not for the losing the weight. It's for how we're going to feel about ourselves. It's for the love where we're seeking. It's for the self belief about ourself that we want is for the lifestyle that we want its for the energy that we want. And so what if we instead of focused on losing weight, we focused on what's the lifestyle that I want?

[00:11:09.830] – John
What are the benefits of that lifestyle, instead of focusing on what I'm going to have to give up, what am I here to gain by doing this? Instead of focusing on a diet, why not focus on a new way of eating as a new way of being. The very fact that, you know, the word diet, the first three letters are die? OK, dieting is hard, but figuring out a meal plan, a way to eat that sustains me that I could that I could keep doing past one week or three weeks or six weeks, that's a totally different focus.

Instead of focusing on what I'm going to have to give up, what am I here to gain by doing this? Instead of focusing on a diet, why not focus on a new way of eating as a new way of being. @johnassaraf Click To Tweet [00:11:52.970] – John
Now, most people try to lose weight and they say, OK, I'm going to lose 10 pounds with 20 pounds or thirty pounds or fifty pounds or whatever the amount is, and they alter their behavior until the point of reaching their goal, and then they revert back to all of the old behaviors that got them to gain all the weight. So instead of having their brain focusing on the behaviors and the way to be for losing weight, why not say, nope, let me make a lifestyle change that will empower me or make me feel better for the rest of my life instead of for a week or two or three.

[00:12:30.530] – Allan
And so what you're basically doing is you're kind of getting cohesion between what the body wants, which is to be what the subconscious brain wants it wants to be able, wants to have adequate energy. It doesn't want the knees to hurt when you're walking up and down the stairs and losing weight as it will, we would think about that logically. The words we use is doing that. But you're using the term release, which is a very different thing than the losing.

[00:12:56.300] – John
And the other thing that we need to understand is water is weight. Muscle is weight, we don't want to lose weight, you could lose two, three, four, five, six pounds of water and weight in a week. But you're going to get it all back. You can have one dish of pasta or rice and it retains two and a half times its own weight and water and gain it all back. So what we want to do is we want to activate fat release so that we use our fat stores as energy. And that's really what we want to do.

[00:13:33.130] – John
We want to create an environment within us so that the food that we're eating gives us energy and what it is that we're doing for basic survival needs but then through hopefully a little bit of exercise, we are using fat as fuel for the energy requirements that we need. And we create initially a slight imbalance between how much we're consuming and how much we're using.

[00:13:58.340] – John
And in doing it slowly instead of fast and really focusing on fat release and sustainable weight release or weight loss, if that's what we want to call it. Now, we're looking at a totally different game and we're not looking at going on a diet which is is really detrimental to a lot of people's heads and hearts because they suffer these, or they gain these high wins and then they suffer these lows by gaining all the weight, which happens for ninety seven percent of people.

SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Vault Health, guys, we need to discuss the elephant in the room. Most of us really struggle to manage certain health issues, especially when it affects things we don't want to talk about, like our libido and vitality. Yes, I'm talking about Low-T. Did you know that 40% of men over 40 suffer from Low-T? Low-T can cause weight gain, loss of muscle mass ED, fatigue and poor sleep, low energy and depression.

These completely dismantle any efforts you're making to be healthy and fit. If you're dealing with one or more of these. It's worth booking a free online consultation with a Vault physician at 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/vault. Vault is all about discretion. After your free consultation, and you agree you want treatment, they'll send a phlebotomist to your home to do a blood draw. You'll get a personalized doctor review treatment plan. This can be with pills, cream or injections.

The medications are mailed to your home. There's nothing macho about neglecting your health. If you live in the United States and you're struggling, it's worth learning more at Vault Health, go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/vault today.

[00:16:03.350] – Allan
Now, when you're talking about exercises, I mean Innercise excuse me, know, one of the things that you brought up there was there's lots and lots of different ways to Innercise, much like with exercise. So I could I could decide to go ahead and do an aerobics class where I can go lift weights or I can go for a run or I could go skiing or I could go hiking.

[00:16:22.220] – Allan
There's so many different ways that I could exercise to affect different things balance, mobility, strength, endurance. It's much the same way with innercise. But there's about seven key areas that you identified in the book that we can innercise to benefit ourselves. Can you talk about those?

[00:16:38.670] – John
Sure. So let's just take the, you know, the self-image side of our brain. Everybody knows that they have a self-image of themselves. And so if I was to ask you to draw yourself out or to write down what you feel you look like, would that either visual or written description match the way you want to look? And for most people who are maybe overweight, there's a mismatch. What if I said that if you, for example, went to some magazines where they had people with your type of physique that you want to have, those realistic. What if you cut out a picture of a physique that you wanted and you took your own face and you put it on top of that picture.

[00:17:35.730] – John
And what if every day you looked at that picture and you started to see yourself moving towards that over a period of time, whether it's one month, three months, six months or one year? You said this is the body that I'm going to have. This is the body that's giving me energy. This is the body and physique that's going to make me feel the way I want to, look the way I want to. What if you start to just visualize that every day?

[00:18:01.650] – John
What if you started to emotionalize what would it feel like to actually be in that body? What would happen is you would start to develop a new self-image that would override your old self image. It's almost like recoding software on a computer. Your self image is nothing more than cells in your brain of recognition of what you have seen in the mirror ten thousand times and what you have thought about a hundred thousand times.

[00:18:34.000] – John
And so when we start to use, for example, visualization, visualization is a simulation. When we start to simulate in our mind's eye on a new body, the new energy, how we will feel, the complements we might get, the things we might start seeing to ourselves about ourselves, we start to rewrite our own hidden self image and overlay a new self image around that.

[00:18:59.830] – John
And when we start using innercises, whether it's verbal analyses or emotional innercises or mental innercises to activate cells in our brain and then reinforce those cells and patterns in our brain, we know that whatever we do consciously, repetitively over time becomes an unconscious pattern. And so we can use a variety of different innercises to rescript, reshape imprint what it is that we want instead of what is.

[00:19:36.410] – Allan
Yeah, so, you know, the way I kind of look at it and you said something really important that I want to go back to is realistic, you know, don't don't sit there. I can't pull out, you know, you know, say Arnold Schwarzenegger and put my face on his body and say, you know, when he was at his prime and say, that's what I'm going to look like in a year or two, that's not realistic. But if I do find, you know, a body body style, I think that's going to fit me, and I begin to think of myself in those terms that's going to affect my subconscious, which is going to then affect my behavior. And make me start doing the things that are necessary to have that body type.

[00:20:13.650] – John
Absolutely. There's a visual that I like to share with everybody just to show them how this can work. I'm going to ask everybody who's listening right now a question. And the question is this. Can you slowly jog a marathon right now?

[00:20:32.300] – John
And I work out almost every day, and I cannot right now. Like I'm not in shape to jog a marathon 26.2 miles. Now, here's the second question for everybody who's listening, as if we agreed today that a year from now or 18 months from now or even two years from now, we're going to jog slowly and healthy and a healthy way, a marathon, 26.2 miles. And today all we did is we got from a seated position and stood up and then sat back down.

[00:21:07.640] – John
That's all we did today, maybe five times during the day. And then tomorrow we did it five times and the next day we did it five times. And we figured out what would be a really good eating plan for energy. What would be a good little movement plan for flexibility and some balance. Could we maybe in a week, if we were sedentary for the last five years, could we maybe walk in our apartment from the sofa to the kitchen? And the answer is probably yes.

[00:21:35.640] – John
And then once we did that five or 10 times, could we walk outside maybe a tenth of a mile slowly. And then could we walk two tenths of a mile, then can we walk five tenths of a mile, then can we walk one mile, if we did it in a healthy way? The answer for almost every single person is if I started off that slow, yes, I could do it.

[00:21:57.850] – John
Well, let's take it out to three months. Could we get faster, stronger, better in three months and build a foundation? Yes. Well, what about three months later? What if we hired a professional to help us get in better shape? And then we started to slowly once we release the weight, once we felt more comfortable, we started having more energy. Maybe at a certain point we needed to do a slight, very easy job. Could we do it? The answer is, of course we could.

[00:22:29.880] – John
Well, then guess what? If we could do that, could we build up the muscle and the endurance as we got stronger, as we release the weight? Could we possibly in a year or a year and a half or two years slowly jog a marathon? And the answer is yes, and how do we know that we know that because millions and millions and millions of people start off just that way.

[00:22:54.350] – John
So even though we may not see the end outcome right now and even though we don't have the knowledge or the skills or even the resources to do it, could we gain the mental and the emotional and the physical fortitude to be able to do it if we committed to it? And the answer is yes. We have all the knowledge, the skills of how to do it right now.

[00:23:19.460] – Allan
Yeah, you've just described how I trained for a Tough Mudder. I was in no shape to even consider doing a Tough Mudder. I could do a 5K obstacle course, I couldn't do a 13 mile one. And so I was I was watching the videos of the people that were completing it and they were doing it. And I was like, OK, that guy has a grip strength. That's how he's able to do what he's doing, that person stronger.

[00:23:41.990] – Allan
That person isn't carrying as much body fat. And so the visuals I had in my head was a person is doing that. That's not me today but that will be the day that I do that race and I committed by signing up for it. I wrote my check, you know, give my credit card number. I got the ticket for my daughter and I. And so the commitment was there.

[00:24:02.110] – Allan
And what that meant was each day was, OK, I've got to get my grip strength a little stronger. If it's just hanging from a pole, you know, a pull up bar, that's how I'm going to start getting my grip stronger. And then I was doing pull ups and then I was doing, so it's just a progressive thing over time. And it's those little bitty things like if you put a penny in a jar every day and then and then after two weeks, double it and put two pennies and after two weeks double it and put four pennies. After a while, you realize you basically have your retirement taken care of. It's that kind of building that you get out of all of this.

[00:24:35.320] – John
Yeah, and whenever you're looking to, you know, to change from one habit to another, from a destructive to constructive, from disempowering to empowering, there's something that I teach all my students and that is reduce it to the ridiculous. So reduce whatever it is that you need to do or want to do to the ridiculously small. Right, and so one minute a day, two minutes a day, three minutes a day, five minutes a day for 100 straight days builds the habit.

[00:25:09.270] – John
Once we have the habit, we can build the intensity and the duration. And so instead of trying to do everything in the first week or two weeks, why not focus on I'm going to develop empowering, constructive habits that I'm going to stick to instead of something that's not sustainable. And so when we're thinking about our brain. Let's understand how it works and our brain resists big changes, our brain resists anything that takes a lot of time and energy.

[00:25:44.790] – John
And so when we want to develop a habit of this is what I would like and I'd like to sustain it, let's reduce it to the ridiculously small so that I can develop the habit that I can add layers afterwards.

[00:26:03.750] – Allan
Now, one of the things you went into the book, and I think it's it's really important, is that if you don't set a goal the right way, your likelihood of accomplishing that goal goes way, way down. But you talked about a function of something called brain friendly goals. Could you go into that briefly?

[00:26:20.910] – John
Sure. So it actually piggybacks on. What I just said is there's different parts of our brain. If you think of your brain almost like an orchestra or a band, you know, there's different musicians who play different instruments. Well, there's different parts of our brain that does different things and when we can get our brains, different parts to work together in synchronicity and harmony, it works a lot better. So, for example, there's a part of our brain I called the Einstein part of the brain.

[00:26:52.320] – John
That's really good for imagination. What I would like, what it would feel like and be like and how can I achieve it. All right. There's another part of our brain which I call is the Frankenstein part of the brain that is analyzable. What can go wrong here? What if you start and you don't continue? What if you get hurt? What if you embarrass yourself? Or what if you're ashamed or ridiculed or judged because you give it your best and you fail?

[00:27:18.810] – John
So our brain, in order to make brain friendly goals, works like this. What do you want to achieve? Write that down. Why is it really important for you to achieve it? Write that down. How can you get started? OK. Write that down. When are you going to do it? Put it on your calendar. What are the tools or resources or people that you need in order to help you get that all together? That's a brain friendly goal because now I have the what, the why, the how, the who, and the when, and our brain goes, OK, are you committed to doing this or are you interested?

[00:28:02.400] – John
And this is the question of all questions I have, because when somebody says, here's what I want, I always ask them, well, are you committed to that or are you interested? And many people say to me, what's the difference? I tell them, what if your answer is going to cover stories or reasons or excuses, why you can't or why you won't if you're interested, you know, when it's time to do it, you're going to come up with a story, reason or excuse.

[00:28:26.370] – John
But if you're committed, you will overcome the story, the reason, or the excuse. If you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes. If you're committed, you will override the “I don't feel like it.”

If you're committed, you will overcome the story, the reason, or the excuse. If you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes. If you're committed, you will override the "I don't feel like it." @johnassaraf Click To Tweet [00:28:39.540] – Allan
I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be? What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:28:47.220] – John
Well, number one is, what does it mean for you to be well? Right? How are you thinking? How are you feeling? What are you doing? Whose life or whose whose life is impacted other than just yours? And so whenever we think about wellness and well-being, define it for yourself. Define it for yourself. For me. Tell me, how do you define success? For me success is harmony between health, wealth, relationships, career, business, fun experiences, charity, spirituality. For me, it's that harmony. That's success. It doesn't make sense for me to have so much health, but not wealth, so much wealth, but not health. So for me, it's that harmony. So that could feel like my life is in flow.

[00:29:43.520] – Allan
OK, thank you, John. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Innercise: The New Science to Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power and all the wonderful things you're doing over there with your company, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:29:56.420] – John
Thank you. I think they can hop onto Amazon to take a look at my book Innercise or my other book Having It All, which is also New York Times Bestseller (also available on Audible). They can if they want to go deeper into the brain around making more money and to financial success. They can go to brainathon123.com. I'm on Instagram. I'm on my Facebook fan page. I'm on Twitter. And then obviously our websites JohnAssaraf.com or myneurogym.com, which is my company.

[00:30:31.220] – Allan
Yeah, I did the Brain-a-Thon this weekend. I made it about three quarters through and I just a lot it was wonderful. And then I just joined your Exceptional Life Program, so I decided I'm seeing a lot of you lately, but yeah some really cool stuff. Thank you so much for being a part of Forty Plus Fitness.

[00:30:51.660] – John
Thank you my friend. Thank you so much for doing this.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Healthy brain happy life | Dr. Wendy Suzuki

Less...