How To Live Longer And Defy Aging | Ben Greenfield & Vishen Lakhiani

[Music] [Music] now let me bring up a special teacher for today and I got to know this guy a couple of months back and we've become really good friends and I really enjoy being in his presence because he's one of the funniest guys I know he's got this weird sarcastic sense of humor but he's also one of the most brilliant minds I know I can hold up a camera to him and say Ben dish out some wisdom and then he will spew the most poetic science and philosophy and wisdom on a topic whether it's conscious parenting or biohacking he's truly brilliant but not only is he brilliant up here Ben Greenfield is really unique in 2008 he was voted America's fitness trainer of the year but he didn't just stop there to most people that that itself is a big achievement then went on to start a really famous podcast called the Ben Greenfield podcast and it is the podcast I spend the most amount of time listening to because there many other podcasts out there but this one had science it had ideas it had mind-blowing tips and it had been Swickard sense of humor I love it when he would bring on incredible powerful high-level guests like Naveen Jane like one of the richest men in the world and extract their knowledge on this podcast with this beautiful sense of humor that gets them laughing - so if you haven't checked out the Ben Greenfield podcast you want to get hooked on it listening to this podcast will probably add three to five years to your life the other cool thing about vendo is that there's this race called the Spartan Race right it is one of the most difficult races in the world for example in one of the Spartan races you go for 72 hours in minus 30 degree weather this race could kill people who are not prepared Ben did nine of the hardest Spartan races in the world in one year nine of them and he is one only three people in the world to pull that off so this man has trained his body like a well optimized machine but what's good about him is that he is consciously competent he can train you to think of your body like a well optimized machine you can ask him a question about Everett anything from intimate and fasting to nootropics to biohacking and he knows exactly the science the map he will cite the studies all data-driven and so he is gonna blow your mind and in the next 60 minutes we're gonna learn and go deep on the topic of health of longevity and on the science of biohacking with this remarkable man before I call up then I'm gonna play a one-minute video of what happened when I went to visit Ben and this was just meant to be a normal business meeting we spent maybe two hours talking about business and an entire day doing weird things to our body check this out [Music] I'll go in and get out groomed up for dinner I'll be going back to the sauna okay that work and Lorenzo you get the front of this yeah I get it get back now we got on the hot tub and you're gonna feel all these spoof pleasant little pins and needles all of you [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] every time I have a new author I'd like to learn the office stuff really go in deep with the program that we're creating this is potentially be hottest immersion I've ever done in something by a mind of the author but it feels so good so please give a big round of applause to Ben Greenfield that was a fun business meeting I was quite a business meeting have a seat Ben so normally when I do interviews I sit on that side and the guest sits on this side to us this is my prettier face but Ben insisted on sitting on that end because this is where his tattoos are oh yeah it gives an instant credibility instant credibility you got it you got to trust a guy with a tattoo my nose piercing is on this and my stamp is on the backside with the butterflies in the barbed wire so we could have just perched backgrounds and it's so good that the kids are actually in a separate room some of them there's there some children being clean you know those were organic herbs that we were vaporizing in the sauna children so so one of the things that that's really interesting about Ben and you guys are gonna get a chance to ask Ben questions in fact some of you already posted questions last night on Facebook when I mentioned that this in TV was gonna be happening right but one of the most interesting things about Ben is he's not just gonna talk about biohacking but this guy is weird last night we were at the 4th of July party we had a hot dogs we had a beer we had our burgers and by the way Ben isn't one of those guys who who will question every way that does this contain gluten you know see he he will have fun in the right um the right occasion I know how to eat sweet potato fries soaked in mayonnaise and you know how to enjoy a burger but then Ben would look down at the grass and he'd go vision you gotta try that plant and then he jumped over the fence he would pick up a leaf and stick it in my mouth I felt like a goat but it was actually delicious it is true that wilderness grows up from the from the cracks of a sidewalk in a city and people do things like mow their lawn and pick the dandelions out when in fact that is one of the most powerful liver tonics that you can make a smoothie from or last night what I gave you was wild metal stinging nettle it's one of the most protein rich nutrient-dense plants that you can get your hands on and not only that but what I gave you was the seed from the top of the nettle you walk into a supplement store and they'll charge you 60 bucks for a bottle of that to enhance your testosterone guys and you can find this stuff just sitting around in nature if you educate yourself you know there's a there's a variety of different plant foraging books and plant foraging apps and my boys and I my boys are sitting over there we use one called flower checker or you can just take a picture of any plant and within 24 hours a team of live botanist on the other end identify the plant for you and tell you what you can eat and what's good and you can build your own online or bury them and when it comes to living a long time you know you talked about living an extra 3 to 5 years by listening to my podcast assuming you're not doing so smoking a cigarette and driving around in your car with your butt planet in a chair for eight hours a day yeah one of the things I talk about is wild plant intake legume intake these are two of the of the five characteristics that you see prevalent amongst all blue zones these areas where there are a higher than the normal level of people who have a very long time you also see absence of smoking you see you see a large amount of time spent with family and love and in social relationships you don't see people exercising much you actually see very little exercise in a box stepping into a CrossFit WOD beating yourself up with a barbell instead people engage in low-level physical activity usually in nature all day long so it's very interesting we can learn from a lot of these populations but yes do something as simple as learning how to identify wild plants that grow in nature around you and rather than picking them up or mowing them to pieces you you eat them put them in smoothies that's fascinating so in the Blue Zone study so the Blue Zone is is a concept that that identifies areas in the world where people live and unusually long amount of time for example in sadena you get a 10x the number of people living to their hundreds as you do in the United States so scientists study this they label these areas blue zones and then it's also where you find a lot of Smurfs these blue zones and then you're saying that it has little to do with exercise but more to do with moderate activities such as walking and with eating healthy exactly I you know when when you look at the way that society is built whether it's the doctor's office whether it's I mean ironically is it as it can seem even a conference room you'll full of chairs cars commuting etc we spend a lot of time sitting and when you look at a lot of hunter-gatherer populations when you look at a lot of what our ancestors did and when you look a lot of these Blue Zones people are working with their hands their gardening their hunting their gathering and I understand that if you're a blogger or you're a podcast or you work in IT or you're a computer engineer you're you're relegated and in a very similar way as I am to being in front of a computer in front of a screen much of the day but you can hack your environment to simulate that of our ancestors or a hunter-gatherer the people we would find in the Blue Zones everything from standing workstations to special pads that you can stand on you know I I in my own office have a little balance board that I stand on a standing desk that I can crank up and down I've got a walking treadmill and when I travel you ought to walk into my hotel room I'll take a chair and stack it on top of a coffee table and put a couple of books on top of that and I'll stand while I'm working I stop about every 25 minutes to do some form of exercise like 10 burpees or a hundred jumping jacks or something that puts just a little bit of blood flow and also release is a very powerful molecule that's like it's like viagra for your whole body it's called nitric oxide and by doing those little things all throughout the day my goal is this by the end of the day exercise to stay fit or to improve the way your body looks or anything like that should be an option not a necessity because you you've hacked your way into being physically active all day long and even when I'm in a conference like this and and won't take it as disrespect if any of you want to want to do this you know I'll stand up I'll walk to the back I'll stretch I'll move I'll stand I'll shake but the idea is that they've even shown that if you exercise at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day and you have a good exercise habit you go to the gym if you have your butt planted in a chair for eight hours a day in between those exercise sessions you still have a high risk for cardiovascular disease and a host of other chronic diseases so the trick is not to exercise per se in a structured traditional exercise format it's to engage in low-level physical activity all day long Wow that that's an intriguing idea and I remember some studies done there was a BBC documentary on this and they installed a exercise bike in an office and they found that people who would get on that exercise bike and engage in around in a minute to four minutes of simple tabata would show the same increase in their health and I don't remember exactly how they were tracking the health as people who were doing aerobics in the morning for half an hour or so exact does it mean oh what a tabata is it say yeah if this was developed by by a Japanese researcher who found that a four-minute exercise session of 20 minutes or 20 20 seconds rather 20 seconds pretty hard like smoke coming out your ears pretty hard like you're running from a lion or you're in a sword fight at medieval days you're 20 seconds on 10 seconds off for four minutes that that's a total of eight rounds simulated 30 minutes of steady-state exercise on a treadmill or on a bicycle or doing any other form of chronic cardio it's called a tabata set but what's even more compelling than that is there are there are two things that are the most important things to pay attention to if you want to live a long time and have the absence of disease and a high quality of health during that time number one is controlling what's called glycemic variability glycemic variability is how often your blood glucose goes up and down during the day the other is to control your inflammation inflammation is something that builds up in the body when you eat a lot vegetable oils when you eat a lot of sugars and even when you get exposed to high amounts of Wi-Fi dirty electricity poor air unclean water etc the idea is if you can control glycemic variability and inflammation you've taken care of the two lowest hanging fruits when it comes to your longevity now this idea of the the Tabata set that enhances your fitness in a very short period of time during a work day could be brought to the next level when we look at research on what it takes to actually control blood glucose prior to eating now if you exercise before you eat you'll actually enhance your body's ability to be able to maintain a normal blood glucose response after you eat but do you know how long you would need to exercise how long you need to do that that explosive tabata type exercise in order to to enhance your blood glucose response I was shocked when I saw this study sardine 30 seconds 37 you can drop and do whatever 20 burpees and do that prior to a meal and you'll vastly improve your glucose response to the meal furthermore the the this is another research study in Japan if you walk for about 15 minutes after a meal you also do a fantastic job at supporting your glycemic variability so the idea is for me when I know I'm gonna be eating a large meal or eating a lot of carbohydrates or having dinner or really having any meal at all I'll just go out of my way to drop and do some push-ups you know I have a rule when I went about a restaurant will slip into the bathroom and do I I call them air squats my friend Jeff when when he first saw me do this I began to call them piss squats because I'd say I was gonna go to the bathroom to take a pee and I'd come back kind of red-faced because I've done my 40 squats but the idea is you do something that just gets the heart rate up a little bit before you go eat a big meal then you go on a quick walk afterwards it's a very very good way to control by seeming variability as are those tabata sets that you talked about the and you say when you sing these are squats these a squats take 30 seconds in a bathroom if for those thought you mean I have rules in my life little rules to keep me active like I mentioned I'll stop every 25 minutes during a work day and step away to you know swing a little kettlebell that I keep under my desk or hang from a pull-up bar and you're my office or do something that keeps me active but a couple of other rules are a I'll do the 40 squats when I matter when I'm at a restaurant so if any of you are at a restaurant with me this week and you see me disappear into the bathroom frequently it's not because I have a small bladder it's because I'm off doing my squats on an airplane I actually do 20 squats when I'm in an airplane anytime I stand up to go and use the restroom I close the door and I do 20 squats my rule is the butt has to kind of touch the back of the toilet seat and they're doing squats and these little rules that you kind of sprinkle throughout your life coming full circle to this idea of trying to simulate what the Blue Zones do or what our ancestral hunter-gatherers did you're basically just tricking your body into staying physically active all day long and it comes down to habits rituals routines and rules that you implement in your life to keep you active and so in summary it's not about doing 30 minutes of aerobic activity in the mornings right it's about spaced out activity for 30 seconds to a couple of minutes throughout the day exactly and and I'm not saying that you know if your own personal Mount Everest is to go to an Ironman triathlon or to go to a marathon or go to one of these Spartan races I respect that you know if that's something that you've set up for yourself as a goal and if you have set that up as a goal yeah you got to go out on you know less frequently than most people would have us to believe the human bodies actually I Nate Lee very very good at endurance we can outrun given food and water any animal on the face of the planet so you actually have to train for endurance far less than you think we have a very large amount of stamina but the idea is if you are an athlete or if you've signed up for something that that's gonna push your body you got to do a little bit more than a tube at a set at the office and and some piste squats on the airplane right but unless that's that's your goal or unless you're getting you know paid to be a professional athlete there's not a need to go out and do these these long exercise sessions that beat you up and in fact they've done research on how much exercise is too much right what would be the amount of exercise that would give you a law of diminishing return and increase what is called your risk for mortality your risk of dying at an earlier age now for aerobic exercise for this long steady-state cardio to avoid things like arterial stiffness and cardiovascular disease that can result from excessive exercise if you do anything more than 90 minutes which for a lot of people that's a lot of exercise but you'd be surprised at the number of people who are actually out you know doing a lunchtime run and an evening bike ride and getting out in the morning or you exceed 60 minutes of intense exercise on a daily basis you actually see a law of diminishing returns and it's it's a parabolic curve with an increased risk of mortality if you exercise too much so it's it's very very surprising what it comes down to when you're looking at physical activity it's low level physical activity spread throughout the day it's brief Sprint's here and there and it's lifting heavy stuff every once in a while that's really interesting now box the online magazine recently carried an article suggesting that there's this grand myth in our society that we need to exercise to lose weight but what they said is that science now shows that 90% of our body shape has to do with what we eat and not the amount of exercise what do you lose on this it has a great deal to do with that because that second component I talked about inflammation right if you have low level chronic inflammation all day long and and again this this can come down to the water that you drink so it's more than just the food the water that you drink the amount of artificial light that you're exposed to the number of times you're bombard in your body with Wi-Fi signals the quality of the air that you breathe I don't want to I don't want to scare you into thinking that you're doomed by living in a post-industrial era to an early death there are things you can do I mean you can you can have portable HEPA air filters that you carry with you if you live a nomadic lifestyle or a good air filter in your office you can drink good clean water or buy glass bottled water when you travel you can put your phone in airplane mode and hardwired into the router and or into into the wall in a hotel room when you're traveling there are things that you can do to control this but when it comes to food the idea is that low level inflammation can not only restrict the body's ability to kill fat cells or to convert fat cells into other tissue but it can also down regulate a lot of the nerves in the abdomen and the stomach and a lot of these things that help us carry this tall upright posture that allows us to to good we see actual damage to those nerves when we're in a chronically inflamed state when we're eating foods that leave us in a state of gut inflammation so when it comes to inflammation in my opinion the biggest culprit that I see over and over again as a staple in people's diet a lot of people think it's sugar but it's not and the reason for this is that as we were just alluding to you can metabolize sugar right I can do 30 burpees before a meal and go for a walk after a meal and have a big batch of something sugary like sweet potato fries or a few slices of bread or some dark chocolate or red wine or whatever with a meal and and it's burnt off right that glucose if it's actually not in excess and if you're moving is really not as big of an issue as the oils in the meal that you're eating because your body can burn some of those oils but it will also take the oils and the fats and the foods and the foods that you're eating and it will use those to make your cell membranes you are literally made up of not only what you eat but what you eat ate right what that big bear that you're gonna eat it medieval days whether that bear was fed on corn and grain and trash or whether that bear ate blueberries and wild fish right like that's gonna influence what your cell membranes are comprised of and when I traveled here to Tull in for example I'll often stop at the at the little newsstand at the airport and and stroll through and look for some some healthy snacks to buy right and even when you go to the healthy food section at the airport stand or Whole Foods or or any of these other fancy you know so-called organic stores and you look at the ingredient label more often than not you're going to see in addition to organic agave syrup and cane sugar and again I'm not as much of a being not a fan of those as I am of this next ingredient you'll see canola oil safflower oil sunflower oil peanut oil any number of different vegetable oils that are used to coat healthy foods that basically bastardize a healthy food and turn it into something that damages your cell membranes so anytime I'm evaluating whether not of food is gonna cause that type of inflammation that's referred to in the Vox article as being something that would that would disrupt my physiology and disrupt my body's ability to be able to burn fat or kill fat cells the first thing I look at is the oils you want an oil that is stable that's unprocessed and that hasn't been heated to high temperatures are exposed to high pressures if you walk into my house and you you come sit with me in the in the sauna and do the the infrared light and roll around in the snow and then walk into the pantry you'll find that we have macadamia nut oil avocado oil extra virgin olive oil and a little bit of grass-fed butter sometimes some ghee right these are all oils that are very stable at high temperatures or that carry with them some antioxidants like extra-virgin olive oil good green I love being in Europe because the olive oil is real right a lot of the oil in the States even at 5-star Napa Valley restaurants is cut half in half with canola oil to save money right extra virgin olive oil though that's green and spicy and flaky and you know my my kids and I do olive oil tastings at home because we're a member of an olive oil Club that sends us olive oil from different areas of the world but this type of oil is actually great for you it's not that the trick is not to avoid fats is to avoid the type of fats that cause inflammation and if you guys want if if you're actually doing a good job controlling your vegetable oil intake looking at your food labels even asking at a restaurant hey could you cook this in butter could you cook this in extra-virgin olive oil instead of canola oil which which you'd be surprised at the number of restaurants that will that will very easily do that for you back in the kitchen they'll take those those brussel sprouts that you love to get that they bring out nice and crispy to the table but that are often cooked in canola oil they've got extra virgin olive oil and butter back there and you just tell them hand can you make those Brussels sprouts with a good healthy fat like a butter and olive oil instead if you're making these type of changes to your diet I'll tell you if you guys want the number one thing that you can do to then convert these fat cells into other tissue or to kill them this is a trick that goes that it kind of flies under the radar but it's one of my secrets sustained lean year-round so what what is that because I got a couple of questions here and I'm rats and ooh I'm Rita you in the house I'm right is somewhere in the house there he is on Amrit said what's your favorite help hack mmm you know we could probably lump this into that category armor as a really really good health hat so I'll tell you the hack and then I'll tell you how you can you can up level it upgrade it and take it to the next level so the hack is this and you've already been given a big big clue in the first minute when vision was showing you that video it's cold cold exposure in the absence of inflammation is one of the best ways to take fat cells and convert them in the metabolically active tissue or to kill them there's this myth going around that you can't kill fat cells that you're stuck with whatever you have for the rest of your life and they're just waiting there like greedy little cells ready to to soak up calories and get bigger that's not true you can kill them and you can convert them into other cells if inflammation is absent and then if you get cold exposure on a frequent basis heat works pretty well also which is why I like to do the hot and the cold what you saw a vision and I doing at my house I do that on a frequent basis my kids do it too we'll go and sit in the sauna then we go jump in the cold pool then we'll get in the hot tub if it's snowy outside we'll go roll around in the snow exposure to temperature fluctuations is fantastic for pushing these fat cells in a different state go he said he just said exposure to temperature fluctuations is fantastic Thank You Ben you guys cannot blame me now for the Estonian weather right you go - OH 13 on one day 27 on the next yeah thank you thank you yes there's the tall and the tall and gods are bipolar I swear cuz it did six it's all over man it's light at 3:00 a.m. anyways though so cold exposure how do you do that especially if you live in in a hot environment well of course cold showers are the glaringly obvious solution to this if you live in an area like this where there's there's great cold water coming from the tap you can simply stand in the cold water for two minutes at the beginning of the day and two minutes at the end of the day which by the way at the end of the day is fantastic for sleep because your body will not enter a state of deep sleep unless your body temperature is low one of the best ways to get your body temperature low at the end of the day aside from keeping your room temperature low and not sleeping with too many blank Kitt's is to take a cold shower at some point towards the end of the day now I will typically about once a week take that to the next level and go sit in a cold bath or go jump in a cold river or a lake or the sea or something else that kind of gets me to the state of shivering the state of being even more cold if you live in a hot environment there are a bio hacks that you can use there are for example companies that will sell gear that you can place on areas where you tend to have a lot of metabolically active fat tissue like these there's a company called cool fat burner and they make like these vests and and waist belts that you can wear that you can actually pack ice into and keep your body cold while you're working if you have a lot of fat to burn it's actually a very very good solution another thing that you can do was was taught to me by a guy named Ray Cronus he was first featured in Wired magazine runs a metabolic laboratory he's a former NASA materials engineer and he developed what he calls the shiver system he came and spoke at an event I did in Spokane Washington and shared some of the stats on stage and my mind was blown he was he was burning 20 to 30 pounds of fat per month off of the clients that he was working with with you know good good healthy food absence of inflammation not exercise but this low level physical activity throughout the day and then at the beginning and at the end of the day they would take a 5 minute shower and that five minute shower was 20 seconds of cold with 10 seconds of hot 10 times through right for 5 minutes that's a cold hot cold hot 10 times through if you get bored you can you can go to for example Amazon and grab yourself I do this a little underwater mp3 player so you can listen to audiobooks or podcasts or whatever kind of gets you motivated as you're there hanging out in the shower Pet Shop Boys whatever you like to listen to anyways though the idea is that you do this the beginning of the end of the day you're getting temperature fluctuation you're getting a nitric oxide release you're shutting down inflammation you're enhancing blood flow you feel fantastic it's great for your cognition as well and then finally the heat part of things that you saw us doing in the sauna you develop heat shock proteins heat shock proteins are a special type of protein that you can build in your body with cold and hot exposure and these make you more resilient to stress not just physical stress but also mental stress if you do something that is for example a common practice here in Estonia and also in Finland something like a sauna a few times a week where you're getting yourself nice and hot you develop these heat shock proteins and so if you use the cold in addition to the heat you're kind of getting the best of both worlds so been another another aspect of health that you talk about in great detail you wrote an incredible blog post on this right and check this out Ben Greenfield on sleep Google that you'll find his blog post by far the most detailed post I've seen on the science of sleep for well-being let's talk about sleep that article put you to sleep pretty quickly by the way it's long that's that's the trick he's raised the article and you go speaking speaking up cold you've even recommended it to me certain temperatures right go to bed right so it's sleep hacking is is something that that I find fascinating I I protect my sleep quite a bit I track my sleep I shoot for about 10 percent of my night spent in deep sleep deep sleep is a lot of where your your memory formation occurs a lot of neuronal repair and recovery occurs it's not the only type of sleep that you want in the lighter stages of sleep for example you get more you get more muscle healing you get more of attending two of your musculoskeletal system and some of your other body's systems but when it comes to your neural system your brain your your neuromuscular system staying cold sleeping in a cool room and maintaining a lower core temperature increases the percentage of deep sleep that you get dramatically so in addition to for example taking like a cold shower at some point towards the in the day that's not be right before bed and as a matter of fact right before bed you get a little bit of a cortisol dump that can keep you keep you up a little while I'm not a fan of doing the cold shower right before bed but you can keep your room the ideal temperature for sleeves they may know this for for deep sleep about you're gonna make me do the Celsius Fahrenheit conversion dang it it's 64 to 66 degrees Fahrenheit so but you could do the conversion hop out just repeat that again 64 to 66 degrees but so when I walk into a hotel room the first the first thing I'll do what we in nineteen yeah about nineteen so all all adjust the temperature to 64 to 66 degrees exercise that's that's roughly 18 degrees Celsius 64 degrees Fahrenheit yep exercise your physical activity if you're doing it let's say you're doing the 10x program for example you want to do it at some point during the day because it will enhance your deep sleep to move during the day again it doesn't have to be a traditional gym session it can just be you know burpees and pull-ups and walking kind of spread throughout the day but you want to finish any exercise session that you do preferably at least three hours prior to when you want to go to bed and the reason for that is because that gives your neuro endocrine system a chance to shut down some of the cortisol it also gives your body temperature a chance to go back to normal there are also also sorry Ben you'll still have optimal time to exercise it's three hours before you go to bed well the optimal time to exercise varies and I'll fill you in on that in just a second but whatever you're doing for exercise aside from that easy post prandial dinnertime walk that easy walk that you do after dinner would be just making sure that you finish up any hard exercise at least three hours prior to when you're going to go to bed so if you are gonna go to the gym you'd ideally like to be done at the gym if you're gonna go to bed at let's say 11:00 p.m. you want to be done with your gym session by 8:00 and no later than that now when it comes to exercise if you are gonna exercise and then I'll return to how to keep your body cool during sleep there's a few other strategies that you can use timing of exercise though the ideal scenario is if you are gonna exercise your body has this natural rise and cortisol when you wake up when when light hits your eyes in the morning and you get out of bed your body releases some hormones that naturally wake you up one of those hormones is not coffee by the way you don't naturally have coffee floating through your bloodstream as a matter of fact I've done continuous blood glucose monitoring and the single biggest variable that shoves my blood glucose up very high in the morning is believe it or not coffee because coffee causes this big release of cortisol that then causes your liver to dump a bunch of sugar into your system that's not a bad thing necessarily I'm all about better living through science and using some of these wonderful herbs and plants that we have all around us in nature to enhance our life and I would classify coffee as one of those but if you do have adrenal issues it's it's profound how much extra cortisol coffee kind of dumps into your system but the idea is that because you have so much natural cortisol release in your system when you wake the best type of exercise to do in the morning is something that I call easing into your day something restoring something relaxing something that might even pair well with the meditative or a prayer practice at the beginning of the day for me that's usually something like a nice walk in the sunshine or sometimes I'll go down and do some yoga moves in the sauna and finish those up with a cold shower yoga in and of itself is great an easy swim maybe a simple bike ride through a park something that that's just very simple and relaxing and restorative maybe allows you to focus on your day allows you to think about what you want to accomplish that day make your affirmations engage in deep breathing these are the type of things that the body is very receptive to in the morning that can enhance your deep sleep later on in the evening now between about 4 & 7 p.m. your body temperature Peaks your reaction time Peaks your grip strength Peaks your ability to be able to build new muscle after workout piece so if you're gonna do a hard exercise session again it's not necessary to get a nice body it's not necessary to live a long time but I understand that sometimes it feels good sometimes you're you're competing in an event sometimes maybe you want a little bit of extra muscle because you like the way you look with that extra muscle you like the way your jeans fit you like the way you fit a t-shirt etc there's a lot of reasons that it's okay to build a little bit of extra muscle or to do that hard exercise session but if you do it between about 4 and 7 p.m. is the ideal time to do that hard exercise session with the cool thing being when it comes to that is that you're getting that hard thing in before dinner so if dinner for you is a very social event if you like me have big family dinners where you have an red wine and dark chocolate and sourdough bread and sweet potato fries and a lot more of kind of the rich carbohydrate dense foods your body is very crimes to be able to deal with that blood glucose so I know a kind of a little bit of a rabbit hole when we were talking about the cold for sleep but as far as the timing of the exercise that's the scenario I used for myself and for most of the clients that I work with is we do the easy thing in the morning to ease ourselves into the day and then as long as the schedule permits the the harder thing kind of towards the end of the day one other thing for sleep that's quite fascinating I'd be remiss not to throw some of these bio hacks in there would be I have a chilly pad on my bed has anybody ever used it chilly pad it circulates cold water underneath your your sheet while you sleep and you can actually set it for whatever temperature that you would like and you and your partner can actually set your own sleep temperature so I set it at 55 degrees meaning that the the ambient air around me is about 64 to 66 while I'm sleeping but then I've got this 55 degree cold water going underneath my body while I sleep and that vastly enhances my deep sleep percentage as well it all comes down to us we decide to a translation that's 15 degrees Celsius for the rest of the world this is like when I speak in Japan I die I say something and I have to stop so that they can they can translate this into Japanese Celsius to Fahrenheit very similar anyways though the the idea behind sleep hygiene though is you have cold and you're already a little bit more informed about cold and then a few other necessary components of sleep hygiene that of course you know but how many in here are traveling to be here right and having to deal with the 3 a.m. sunrise and the the jetlag and the light and the crazy fluctuations in temperature and everything else that can affect your sleep well maintaining a cool temperature is one thing another is absence of artificial light absence of blue light at night and in that sleep article that vision referred to that you can find if you just search for the last one I wrote it might still be on the front page of my website it was about four weeks ago I wrote a really comprehensive sleep article I talked about you know things that you can install on your computer to lower the amount of blue light that they produce I even give a little hack for your phone where you can you can set it up so it only produces red light or grayscale light at night you can also of course wear what I call birth control for your head which would be these blue light blocking glasses the very unattractive slightly creepy blue light blocking glasses you see a lot of biohackers wearing they actually do work they do a great job of making you sleep as a matter of fact if I try to watch a TV or a documentary or a movie at night and I have these on I gets sleepy because it blocks so much of the blue light from coming off the screen but absence of artificial light in the evening is another necessary component of sleep along with presence of lots of natural light during the day being outdoors taking that morning walk in the sunshine etc so we have light we have a cool sleeping environment and then we have silence or something to cover up the noise has anybody in here ever used binaural beats or white noise these actually work really really well especially when you're in travel scenarios like I'm staying in an apartment down in Rota Minh City and it's close to the road and so what I do is I have a little app called sleep stream and even though my phone is in airplane mode it's beside my bed and it's playing this white noise called sleep stream and I'll often even pair that with something called sleep phones which are their soft headphones that'll I if you're a side sleeper to kind of play this in your ear and cover up noise and this app that I used called sleep stream it's like a DJ for sleep I'm not financially affiliated with them or flower checker in these other apps I'm talking about I just like them but this sleep stream plays white noise and it also plays binaural beats so you can kind of do both at the same time while you're trying to lull yourself to sleep so anyways those are those are the big three would be called the absence of artificial light and then also trying to use noise or sound or else eliminate noises and sounds from around you while you're sleeping so we've spoken about food who's talking about exercise we've spoken about sleep now Sara cappucci Sara are you in the room Sara's right there stand up Sara so Sara has a question for you Sara asks what are your thoughts on nutrigenomics which is eating according to one's genetics can of worms nutrigenomics so the idea is that and there's actually a great book about this called the jungle effect the jungle effect by dr. Daphne Miller and the idea is that you know dr. Miller for example will take her her Hispanic patients in California and put them on a more traditional Mexican diet comprised of legumes and non-gmo corn and maize and you know beans and a lot of these natural foods that they would have been exposed to for hundreds of years or that their ancestors would have eaten rather than you know traditional you know tex-mex GMO corn you know refried beans canola oil that type of thing and see profound healing in her patients and then she'll rinse wash and repeat you know put Northern European patients on for example a slightly higher salt diet with fermented foods and cured meats and a natural wild-caught fish and again see profound changes in health and the idea is that it is actually and makes sense right logically you look at what your ancestors would have eaten which you can elucidate by talking to your grandparents or going off and doing a salivary genetic test such as a you know a 23andme genetic test you can look at and investigate what your ancestors would have eaten and try and simulate something close to that now I understand that we live in an era in which we've got a lot of mutts like me you know I'm I'm a little bit of a little bit of Spanish a little bit of Italian a little bit of Australian you know I'm I'm all over the map and so for me rather necessarily getting really confused about whether I shoot the Spanish diet or the Mediterranean diet or a northern European diet or whatever I take a little bit of a of a deeper dive and I look at my genetic factors that allow me to do certain things like for example I've tested my genetics and it's shown that my body produces a lower level of what are called endogenous antioxidants than the average person so I go out of my way to do things like supplement with glutathione and eat a lot of wild plants and flavonol and polyphenol rich dark fruits and vegetables and give my body a little step up in the antioxidant Department I also know that my body unfortunately metabolizes alcohol very poorly so when I consume alcohol I actually will do things like you know take activated charcoal soak up some of the acetaldehyde all use supplements like Sammy and melittin amande a few other supplements that allow me to be able to process alcohol a little bit better I know that I carry the gene that does not allow me to digest lactose quite as well so I'm going to have dairy I'll consume fermented dairy where the lactose sugars are predigested yogurts and Kieffer's and things like that rather than let's say milk or pasteurized and homogenized yogurt or any other type of dairy in which the bacteria have been killed because the bacteria help to digest the lactose in the dairy now the way that I did that the way that I figured all of that out was I took my 23andme results and these are very very simple to get via salivary test and I exported those to a website that gave me a host of information about where I'm at genetically and the way that I personally not only should be eating but fascinating enough even exercising right like whether I should be doing fast and test exercise as my staple or whether I should be doing more endurance based exercise as a staple and there are two websites I found that we're really good for this one is called 23 and EUCOM and the other is called strata gene strategy is a website run by somebody who I consider to be one of the world's leading leading people to follow if you really want to look at how to treat your body based on its genetics his name is dr. Ben Lynch he wrote a really good book called dirty jeans dirty jeans and it walks you through via questionnaires and quizzes how to kind of identify what type of supplements you should be including what kind of foods you should be avoiding what kind of foods you should be including and if you want to take that to the next level and go past his book and kind of a subjective qualitative questionnaires you can go to his website you can upload your genetic data your raw genetic data and get this big printout of all the different cycles that you're strong in that you're weakened and you can you can really customize you and what what is the laser precision that website is strategy Str ATA gene strategy so yeah we live in an era where dice are said you have to go to test three and me 23andme sign up for that DNA kit to be sent to you and by the way they will ship to Estonia and then you spit in that vial that they give you so you set up back to them and all your genetic data will now be available to you on 23andme and if you have that if local data you upload it to strategy if you have difficulty dripping your saliva into a tube here's the trick that I found that works amazingly sniff peanut butter I sniffed peanut butter and I start salivating like Pavlov's dog with peanut butter so you have peanut butter you sniff the peanut butter and I personally just start to drool when I sniff you have a hack for Everett there you go so speaking about hacks so one of our one of the people watching the livestream so we're actually Facebook liveing this on the mind/body fanpage so all of you watching this is a big shout out to you so one of you posted this question and this person's name is Magda and she said then tell me how to stay young and strong forever Wow I would be I would be a billionaire if I could answer that question well let's keep it to staying young what are best tips for slowing down age exactly we talked about the blue zones right absence of smoking wild plant intake we see Legum intake and and that doesn't mean you got to go out and have beans with every meal that could that could get a little bit annoying to your to your housemates or to your family if that were the case especially if you're me but the idea is that the reason that legumes work so well it alludes to something that I referred to earlier may know why legumes are correlated with longevity or with these blue zones glycemic variability which I talked about there they're very slow digesting carbohydrate that doesn't you know seeds and nuts can act similarly as can being careful with the times that you eat carbohydrates etc but but the overall picture is you reduce your glycemic variability you know time spent outdoors social life etc but one of the things that that I found through telomere testing took 17 years off of my biological age when you can test the rate at which your telomeres shorten and when I first began testing I was 34 and my biological age as I was finishing up a career in Ironman Triathlon and still hadn't gotten fully on to the kind of like that the caring for my stem cells bandwagon and some of the other things I'll tell about I was I was 37 biologically 34 chronologically the next time I tested I was 35 chronologically and I was 36 biologically on this last test that I did I was 37 chronologically and 20 biologically and the one change that I made was I began to focus with very intense precision on caring for my stem cells now I personally did and ambitions done something like this to I did stem cell injections where I actually had my fat cells extracted from my back via honestly it's like liposuction they take a big needle and they stick it in and out of your back they suck out the fat cells and then they grow them and they extract your stem cells from those I did the same thing with my bone at a place called forever labs in Berkeley where they went in through the bone they took out bone they concentrated the stem cells from that and I actually have the 34 year old me stored so I can reenact the into my joints in any given time but that's an expensive procedure and I realize that not everybody is gonna go out and get footlong needles shoved into their back and and you know the anvils shoved into their hips to extract stem cells you can actually enhance your own endogenous stem cell health and stem cell production and this returns to Marta's question on longevity by engaging in certain dietary and lifestyle practices that increase your own stem cell production there are foods that have been proven to allow your body to create more stem cells and there foods that you're probably aware of as healthy foods blueberries are one aloe vera is another chlorella is one colostrum is one coffee berry fruit extract is one there there's a host about I think it was about four or five months ago somebody asked a question about increasing their own stem cell production in my podcast and I gave a full list of things that you can eat to increase your own stem cell production another thing and this kind of returns to the concept that sometimes in life the things that give you the most bang for your buck are slightly hard and slightly uncomfortable because there's this concept of what is called hormesis and hormesis is the idea that things that are bad for you in large amounts are actually good for you in small mouths right so we could take a cold shower for two to five minutes and feel fantastic we could take a cold shower for an hour and walk out of there just like cold and shriveled and stressed out if you staying cold for too long obviously you'll die of hypothermia we could stay in the sauna for thirty minutes and get this big increase in red blood cell production and heat shock protein and nitric oxide or we can stay in there for 90 minutes and get a cardiovascular incident from loss of mineral production and and you know and and basically that the body getting to the point where it's so dehydrated the heart doesn't work anymore right you can go out in the sunlight and get all this fantastic vitamin D and near-infrared light and farm for lighting and collagen production for your skin and testosterone production and everything that sunlight gives you and then you could stay out there for two hours burn yourself to a crisp and increase your risk of skin cancer all right they've even shown that that the low levels of radiation that we now find around areas like Chernobyl are actually helping some of the rodents there in that area live a longer period of time do not say that Ben green felt ours ago moved next to it nuclear disaster waste site but but you get the idea right so you subject your body to hormesis and by subjecting yourself to small amounts of cold small amounts of heat small amounts of exercise which as you learn can kill you in large amounts but is good for you in small amounts by exposing your body to wild plants which are actually stressful to your body they actually build up these natural defense mechanisms that resist digestion that causes your by to churn out its own antioxidants but insane amounts right not two pounds of kale a day but a little bit of kale and your morning smoothie for example you actually are subjecting yourself to hormesis now one of the most powerful forms of hormesis that will increase your own endogenous stem cell production and help you to live a longer time so they might know what it is slightly uncomfortable but it's one of the best things you can do and an enormous number and a growing body of research has shown this to be one of the best things you can do for your longevity in your help fasting fasting yes exactly so yes you said five day so the researcher Valter Longo has shown that two to four times per year an extended five-day fast moves the dial the best now I know that's that's uncomfortable for a lot of people I'm personally a foodie its complete torture for me to go five days without food ease yourself into it don't think that you need to go five days without food the magic number of hours at which things like cellular turnover what's called cellular atop rogram cell death stem cell production etc kicks in it's at about the 16 hour mark the 16 hour mark so this idea of giving yourself about a 12 to 16 hour window each day in which you're fasting is a very smart move now what I do and I've found this to be very sustainable for myself and for the people I work with twelve to sixteen hours I go without eating so this means if I finish dinner and say 9 p.m. I'll go until at least 9:00 a.m. without eating and if I have the capability to do so and I'm not you know if I'm traveling in air and I'm at a fantastic hotel with a wonderful buffet I'm not gonna you know bite my finger and walk past I'll go enjoy life and go eat food but I'll wait at least 12 hours before doing so in many situations and especially if I want to improve my cognitive performance or if dinners been especially large like that that small baby size piece of pork leg that I had at Ola Hans of the first night I was here at there at this medieval restaurant I'll wait 16 hours to eat right so if I'll finish dinner at 9:00 p.m. and I won't eat again until 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. for lunch in addition to that a single 24 hour fast once every one to two weeks can really help to move the dial as well and that's typically a dinner - dinner fast meaning you've finished dinner on let's see a Saturday night and then you just don't eat again until Sunday at dinner here's the biggest mistake a moment just to go ahead when you say when you say you just don't eat again I know there are certain things which are okay water is okay coffee is okay what is okay in that 24-hour fast anything and then this this is a mind-blowing concept it's gonna is gonna absolutely blow you away anything that doesn't have calories it doesn't have cow oh it's that so people like oh can I have my coffee with the stick of butter in it or can I have my my fish oil supplement or you know can I have bone broth all those things technically have calories your body has to tap into those and kind of reset the cycle and everything before it gets back into a fasting mode now those things won't spike blood glucose they're not going to result in in completely ripping you out of let's say a ketogenic state or some of the other favorable states that occur in your fasting but they strip away your body's ability to be able to get some of those stem-cell and longevity benefits of fasting so waters okay some sea salt and minerals are okay supplements that don't have a lot of calories in them right like a multivitamin complex things like that those are all okay but what you'd want to stay away from his anything that that has actual calories in it so so just to give a practical example I went for dinner with Ben and we finished our meal at 9 p.m. and because it was a heavy meal it was at a restaurant here now we ate we ate like beast weight a lot of food we ate a lot we've finished our meals completely away by the way and then I simply add Ben's advice I simply skip breakfast and my next meal my next calorie intake was at 1:00 p.m. that's a 16 hour fast now when I did that I thought oh my god I'm gonna be going on stage I'm gonna feel hungry I get hangry hungry and angry when I'm hungry I'm gonna start yelling at people but what I actually found was pretty interesting firstly I forgot I skipped breakfast I was more I was slightly hungry towards lunch but I had the same amount of energy the same amount of cognitive functioning throughout that day yeah exactly well you'll find even if you do this 24 hour fast is about 2 p.m. you get hangry cray you want to bite you want to bite somebody's head off if they bug you and and you start you know dreaming about about you know roasted chickens running around in your head when you close your eyes and then what happens is your body begins to shift into what is called ketosis you start to produce these ketone bodies as your body taps into its own fat and the more frequently you fast the more fast and painless this transition becomes and once you make it through that window all of a sudden you're not hungry right and the other thing that I'll do on my 24-hour fasting day is I choose activities that keep my mind occupied right because a lot of times food is equated with boredom so I won't go out to lunch with people I'll make sure I've got an article to work on and I've got some other things to do and I have a hike to go on and I have all sorts of things to do to keep my mind off of food now one thing and this this winds up hurting a lot of people especially lean people or people are very physically active do not think that intermittent fasting or 24-hour calorie restriction is synonymous with eating fewer calories if you're trying to lose weight there the whole calories and calories out equation dictates that at a certain point you just gotta stuff stop stuffing more calories in your mouth so you tap into your own fat as a fuel but the benefits of fasting don't come with caloric restriction they come with a long period of time spent between eating so this means that if you decide hey I'm gonna take Ben's advice and every week I'm gonna do a 24-hour fast from Saturday dinner until Sunday dinner plan a big fantastic family feast on on Sunday night or go to your favorite restaurant and eat a bunch of amazing wonderful food on Sunday night you know sometimes all fast for 24 hours Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner need 2500 calories for dinner on Sunday night right so so the the idea is not calorie restriction again unless weight-loss is your primary goal but if it's longevity that your that's your goal it's the idea that you simply engage in periods of calorie restriction without necessarily lowering the number of calories that you eat for that 24 hours so been in the last seven minutes we have you wrote a white paper called look good naked and you have a quests coming up with MindValley which is essentially on having a great body looking good and living longer what would be your best tips for staying lean for having especially for men for having a healthy body fat percentage and for and for having good musculature bulimia just kidding sorry that was that was insensitive anyways deep the idea is I I tapped into this strategy when I when I was preparing for Ironman Triathlon I used to be a 215 pound bodybuilder so for me it wasn't fat it was muscle that I stripped off my body I stripped off 40 pounds of muscle and but then I maintained very very very very lean physiology without necessarily doing as much exercise as a lot of my peers were doing and I still maintain this habit to this day nearly 365 days a year you are already all educated pretty much as to as to why this strategy works so you wake up in the morning in an intermittent fasting state so your body is a little bit deprived of its storage carbohydrate it's ready to burn its own fat as a fuel you've fasted for 12 to 16 hours when you wake up at that point you put a little bit of caffeine into your system like I mentioned coffee is great at dumping some cortisol but it also amps up your fatty acid burning green tea also works any anything that that's caffeine based gives you a slight edge when it comes to your metabolic rate now if caffeine isn't your thing there are some other herbs and supplements that can help - for example would be a cayenne pepper based herb or bitter melon extract either of these can achieve a similar effect in terms of shifting your body into a little bit more fatty acid utilization so you've woken up 12 to 6 an hour intimate and fast you put some kind of supplement into your Sitz and that's gonna shove you into a little bit of extra fat burning and then you do that simple 20 to 30 minutes of very easy aerobic physical activity in a simple conversational aerobic zone you're not stressing your body out when you do this you're not finishing it up and feeling as though you got to go eat a couple of waffles with almond butter on them for breakfast and pat yourself on the back because you did this hard CrossFit WOD in the morning and you're stressed out anyway so you want to eat you also don't put yourself into a situation where and this is very common based on human psychology I worked out really hard this morning so I'm gonna sit for four hours at work right instead it's a very easy session so you're still motivated to stay active while you're at work you're not super stressed out but you're tapping into your own fats as a fuel so your fasted you've got something in your system to increase the amount of fats that you burn you move for 20 to 30 minutes and then you finish that up with two to five minutes of cold exposure a 2 to 5 minute cold shower or maybe jumping in the river that's beside the walking path that you walk on or anything else that exposes your body to cold and then you finish up and you go along and you start your day and you know depending on the scenario that you're in based on what we were just talking about with fasting maybe you're having breakfast afterwards maybe or not doesn't matter because you didn't do a super hard work out that morning anyway and I swear that routine when you perform it regularly and you and you make that a part of your habit a part of your ritual and that's that's the way that I stay pretty lean year-round that works fantastically that's phenomenal and way this food come in so when it comes to food the basic idea is pretty much what I've harped on already reduce glycemic variability by ensuring that when you eat carbohydrates your body is very responsive to them from a glucose standpoint you've exercised before you're walking afterwards you're being careful with how high of a glycemic index those carbohydrates have so you you limit the amount of times that your blood glucose goes up and down during the day and you limit inflammation you do those two things and you're gonna equip your fat cells to be able to convert be converted into muscle tissue and also to to die a horrible painful early death and so one of my last questions this is from Verena de Metz marina you in the room marina nice to cilantro baby so Sabrina asks what do you think we've learned a ton today what do you think is the best way to keep yourself motivated to continue along this path hmm there's the idea of extrinsic motivation and public embarrassment for not achieving your goals which I'm actually I'm actually a fan of that versus intrinsic motivation I'm just gonna try really hard and make this happen there there's a fantastic new book by author Benjamin Hardy called willpower doesn't work and that book is probably one of the better ones that I've read in terms of altering your personal environment to keep you more motivated meaning if you walk into my office there are kettlebells littered across the floor there's a there's a pull-up bar there in the door of the office there's special fun things that I can stand on that make me want to stand during the day there's even a walking treadmill right I've hacked my environment to provide me with some of that intrinsic motivation for staying fit throughout the day so to radically change your habits you need to radically change your environment and that's also a fantastic way to keep yourself motivated just just change your environment and that can of course extend to your pantry your refrigerator etc now the second part of that is the extrinsic motivation piece and I've found that I and anybody I speak with who is heavily motivated to move to stay physically active to eat healthy etcetera they're signed up for something sometimes it can simply be something as simple as a quest in which you're held accountable to a community and held accountable to it to a daily schedule that you're adhering to because it's written down and human psychology is that we want to check things off we want to achieve them but I also like to encourage people to sign up for events right I always have something on the schedule I always know twelve months from now I got to travel to Iceland to do a Spartan Race or four weeks from now I am signed up for my local community 5k that I already registered and paid my thirty dollars for right like I always have something on the schedule that I can look forward to that provides me with in addition to my intrinsic motivation the environment I've created for myself extrinsic motivation fear of public embarrassment knowing that all my friends I told on Facebook that I was gonna go do this you know this 5k or this marathon or you know pick your poison I've held myself to it because I've told the world hey look I've committed myself to this so that's what I do fantastic so Ben in a final closing minute any words to wrap up Oh brilliant words of wisdom or advice go eat bear at-at-at OLDA Hansa tonight make sure it's ask them to cook it in butter and extra virgin olive oil do some burpees beforehand slip off into the bathroom and do some piss squats as you're eating go for a nice walk afterwards through old town maybe maybe engage in a jousting match beforehand to get the heart rate up a little bit yes and then come watch Armin van Buuren and then go look on dance your ass off to armin van buuren so that's a good question so we are we're over the clock but I do want to answer that because in many cultures around the world vest is belief that if we go out in the cold we're gonna get sick grandma said you'd get sick if you didn't put your coat on exactly right not not true but I'll give you one final little tip just bid this wasn't what I was going to but I'll end on this anyways to give you a tip because I did it this morning and I do it anytime I'm gonna be around a lot of people anytime I'm on airplanes any time along buses any time my kids have been exposed to cold or immune system issues at school it is one of the most potent methods that that I use and that I travel with to keep my immune system strong it's a very powerful antiviral antibacterial it makes you smell like a like a giant pizza when you when you take it in every morning it gives you great breath oil of oregano oil of oregano is actually one of one of my secret weapons for immunity so try that one out and I guess we're ending on oregano and bears so there you have it fantastic guys please give a big round of applause to biohacker Ben Greenfield thanks Ben Thanks fishing you

Channel: Mindvalley Talks

Views: 303,390

Keywords: mindvalley, Education, Personal Growth, tedx, tedx talk, ted talk, ben greenfield, biohacking, how to live longer, how to stop aging, vishen lakhiani, personal development, age defying, age hacks, biohacking your body, dave asprey, fitness tips, fitness transformation, hack age, health, health and fitness, health tips, healthy habits, healthy habits to live longer, healthy lifestyle, how to be healthier, how to be healthy, how to prevent aging

Id: _OVLQS1PQW8

Length: 65min 13sec (3913 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018