The 6 SECRETS To Burning BODY FAT Explained! | Lewis Howes

about 84 of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing what the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to we are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat and the and the reason that we don't is we burning body fat is one of the toughest things to do in health and that's why i brought on some of the best experts in the world to talk about how to burn and keep that body fat off if you enjoyed this make sure to click the like button right now subscribe to this channel and leave a comment below on your biggest takeaway [Music] what's the most effective way to burn fat and still be strong yeah of course you know uh as we said initially in the primal blueprint and i've said it decades before the i wrote the primal blueprint 80 of your body composition is determined by how you eat so if you if there's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat really yes so as opposed to um waking up being hungry having breakfast being hungry at the 10 30 break being hungry for lunch having a snack in the afternoon having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed which is the sort of standard american approach like uh even the old bodybuilders would say don't go more than three hours without eating or you will cannibalize your muscle tissue right that was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to continue to work it never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners we are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat and the and the reason that we don't as we go through life is we present our you know you're two years old you're eating cookies and crackers and mushed peas and ice cream all that stuff and so your body learns to depend on on glucose on carbohydrates as a source of energy and never really gets to the point where you force it to burn fat so what we do is we we shift the diet around it's not painful you get rid of the breads the pastas the cereals the crackers the cookies the candies the sweet and soft drinks well it does sound kind of nervous doesn't it but but what you're left with is meat fish foul eggs nuts seeds vegetables a little bit of fruit some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes things like that those are great tasting foods if you eat them right and they're real food and they're real food and you can use butter and lard and and you can eat bacon on this on this program and what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in and just sort of forces gently forces your body to to up regulate all the enzyme systems that access stored body fat and burn it and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often so the first thing that happens is your appetite self-regulates so now you you you get into this space where you become a good bat fat burner you start to melt away you're as hungry because you're not and you're not as hungry because you're always carrying around a meal it's on your thighs it's on your ass it's on your belly wherever it is it's you know that's your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories it says i don't need to eat i'm really not that hungry yeah and that's so empowering for so many people but when you you know i was a i still love sugar but i used to be really bad at sugar i feel like i have much more under control but i feel like when you're eating a lot of candy sweets and sugar you're never satisfied you just want to eat more and more and more but that's until you're sick no exactly i'm full because i'm sick now yeah i mean stories of lamar odom eating four pounds of candy before games or whatever yeah but i mean we are look we're all hired what is that now you know it's like we're all but sugar is a very addictive substance so addictive so um you know we're all hardwired to seek out sweet things that's part of that hunter-gatherer dna that we all carry really hasn't changed in in thousands of years so how do we shift our minds so you but the first way you do it is is you go from from the craving which is what you're talking about like you crave sugar so you eat sugar and then that just promotes more craving and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle you're actually producing sort of opiate-like substances that are that are occupying receptor sites that are giving you sort of a feel-good experience so you got to kind of be willing to to get rid of that so you get rid of the candies you get rid of this sweetened beverages soft drinks and teas and you get rid of the carbohydrates that not all carbs but the the breads that convert to glucose and bloodstream so rapidly so now you've lowered your blood your glucose experience on a daily basis so now the brain is starting to get you know i don't need to really get that much glucose you know i can i can the body is burning more fat as a result of your being able to burn fat you you create these byproducts called ketones which the brain loves to burn ketones and burns them preferentially so you you need less and less sugar to you know maintain clarity throughout the day if you're if you haven't become fat adapted and you're a sugar burner which is what we it's not a derogatory term but we usually use the term to describe people who haven't become fat burners they're sugar burners if you don't eat it's true if you don't eat for a couple of hours your blood sugar dips because you haven't learned how to burn fat yet you don't know how to access it you can't take it out of storage and burn it so now the blood sugar's low the brain goes i gotta go get some more glucose i get to get energy somewhere sugar or something sugar so you have to bagel it you know at 10 30 in the morning gosh or you have tastes amazing well for for an hour and then it's no exactly but then you're hungry again and that's and that's this vicious cycle so if we can um you know take the steps we say it takes 21 days that's why i have a book called the 21 day total body transformation 21 days of this uh cutting these these uh sugars and and starchy um not starchy but simple carbohydrates out of your diet and just focusing on healthy fats and lean proteins and and uh uh you know and vegetables right uh you get you your body gets the message and says i'm not going to be getting that much glucose i'm going to learn how to burn fat and i'm going to do it well damn it and and then it takes the fat out of your body fat stores so over time you lose a pound two pounds a week uh and you trend toward your ideal body composition wow so all of this is a 10 minute long-winded uh answer to your uh question of how you know what does it take to you know to burn fat it doesn't take a lot of exercise it mostly takes the dietary shift right yeah you got to do some exercise you don't have to do anything but you can choose to do some exercises that'll help accelerate it'll help accelerate it a little bit but most of it happens as a result real shifts you make in your diet absolutely it's all in the kitchen yep so you can get abs in the kitchen and not do anything different working absolutely wow yeah okay so what's the difference between because it sounds like a little paleo-ish what's the difference between primal paleo and like a bulletproof which has kind of been picking up as well you know they're all sort of versions of a similar theme which is to cut the sugars way down cut the processed carbohydrates way down get rid of the industrial seed oil so that would be the soybean oil the corn oil the canola which are causing uh inflammatory responses in a lot of people and just kind of go to real food with the primal blueprint we said uh at some point um you know dairy if you like it why not include it in your diet if you don't have an issue with it right i love it so but all these foods exist on a spectrum so dairy you know there's raw raw milk which is which is good for you there's a2 protein which is a form of case casein we could have a whole discussion about the different types of cows and the different types of protein that they make but on the far end of the spectrum the good end there's butter there's cream there's all these things at the other end at the bad end there's two percent skim homogenized pasteurized non-fat whatever stay away from that stuff yeah you know so um all these foods sort of exist on spectrum so cheeses for instance part of the dairy family i love cheese i love it so you know i we we include it in our eating strategy because we say there's no real reason not to mm-hmm paleo yeah yeah exactly artisanal cheeses and there's good and bad cheeses as well but on the paleo program or the paleo strategy is pretty strict for a lot of people so they would say no dairy at all of any kind so no milk no butter no no cream no cheese uh so that's you know there there are little variations in this here but mostly whole foods mostly whole foods is what is what we're all looking at i mean even if you look at a vegan experience these days or a vegetarian experience it's really these these dietary programs work largely as a result of what you eliminate not what you're eating right right so if you eliminate the crap and you're left even if you're only eating vegetables as long as you're getting enough protein you should be fine yeah yeah gotcha okay um what is a lgn and how does it motivate you yeah so lgn is look good naked and it's a you know it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years i think people have used it before but we we sort of made it a meme for a while uh and it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is we want to we want to look good naked we want to and i think that happens for a lot of people that's uh that's a subset of their greater goal or it's a side effect of the original intent the original intention for a lot of people go to prime to primal blueprint and to mark's daily apple my blog is they're frustrated they they they're sick they can't get off the meds they've had health issues and they've not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels so a lot of people come to me having had that experience in the medical community not a good one so the first thing that they recognize is you know their blood sugar normalizes or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away or they're gerd or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes away and that's that's wonderful and then they go oh by the way i'm losing some weight too that's awesome as well and i'm starting to look good naked right so it becomes nice a nice side effect gotcha so what's a typical eating day look like for you like what are you putting in your system yeah so what time do you put yeah so i wake up in the morning and i have a cup of coffee around 6 30 in the morning i like coffee i'm a big fan of coffee um i don't eat until 12 30 or 1. okay so i use what we call a compressed eating window now i will wake up and i have plenty of energy because i'm so good at burning fat i've trained my body to do that that i have the energy you know i have the energy i'm not i'm not in a in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that i was sleeping uh it doesn't matter i'm so good at accessing the stored body fat i got plenty of energy in fact i'll go to the gym at 9 30 or 10 o'clock and i'll do my workout fasted sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day sometimes it'll be you know intervals of some kind um again i don't and i feel fine feel fine right and then when i get home i won't eat if i get home at like 11 i still won't eat for an hour and a half um partly because i'm not hungry and partly because i got stuff to do right now exactly but i'm not compelled to go oh my god i just finished my workout i must eat a post-workout shake or something yeah there's so many people that say that you know have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes waking up to start your metabolism drink a shake right after a workout why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to um i think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat a couple things happen first of all you have the energy to get through the day second of all if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry i say if you're not hungry why are you eating if you're not hungry don't eat because that's that's that's kind of key when you become good at burning fat you don't you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue because when you're a sugar burner and you run out of sugar and or you're you know you're depending on carbohydrate by the way i use glycogen glucose carbohydrate and sugar sort of interchangeable but when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while you've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles because your body's expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it but you don't store very much of it so when you run out of it the brain you need to fill it up the brain goes hey something's off here we got to eat and if we don't eat then here's what we're going to do we're going to we're going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol which is going to go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose so i can fuel the brain so it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose all that goes away when you become a fat burner when you become good at burning fat now when you don't eat your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your your energy levels don't dip your blood sugar doesn't doesn't dip uh and so you don't you don't cut into muscle tissue gotcha so you can train really hard to try to build muscle yeah and you're still saying you don't need this like post recovery shake right afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way exactly exactly now if you're again if you're the old paradigm and you are the carbohydrate dependent athlete then yeah you probably do want to eat a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because because you're working on an entirely different operating system interesting man and so that 21 day transformation is how you get off of that cycle and get into the fat burning cycle essentially okay cool we'll have that linked up here as well and also the primal endurance the book has a lot of it this has this has it all in here but this is really uh specific to people who want to race 10ks 5ks marathons triathlon spartan races all that stuff gotcha yes have you done spartan race yourself i haven't i did want a short one like a five-miler it's pretty intense yeah it's it's fun though it's fun though i wish i wish it had been around when i was in my private in my prime because you would have been a machine because i was a i was a good marathoner but i got my you know i had my dna fitness thing done a few years ago and i was like uh 57 endurance and 43 strength what that means is it made me a pretty good endurance athlete but i was never going to be the best in the world because to be you'd have to be 80 or 85 right but it also told me that i had the strength which is sort of in retrospect that's why i realized i used to lift weights even when i was a a marathoner i lifted weights in the gym yeah so i maintained my strength and i was a gymnast before i was ever in endurance really so you look at the spartan races and you go well that's you know it's got some gymnastics some you know some parkour type movements rope climbing some rope yeah some some heavy lifting all that stuff combined with the endurance that would have been your thing my thing wow but right now it's like um i just i'm uh i'm too guarding of my of my current fitness level and health i don't want to get injured you know and yeah of course so like the big thing for me is my ultimate frisbee game once a week you're an ultimate frisbee oh my god i love ultimate frisbee you got to come out to malibu college champion with my team in college get out of here it's been a small small d3 school wasn't it whatever man but uh you know what so i can run and jump and we have a game in malibu every sunday at 9 30. it's been years but i'd love to come no no it's the most fun can wear cleats you can wear clothes i wear my vibrams but of course yeah guys wear cleats wow no it's it's anyway so you know i would love to come you know what a good workout it is then that's one of the hardest workouts an hour of ultimate and i mean we played two we played two hours by the way oh my gosh i would be like sub me in 15 minutes i'd have to get back in the shape for it wow that's cool in malibu yeah 9 30 9 30 a.m yup i'll be there and there's guys from west hollywood that come out there too i'll come out for sure was like 30 guys go out there we get uh last week we had six on six that's the that's the most fun wow this summer we'll have 10 on 10 sometimes a little bit crazy but yeah wow okay awesome um okay so you wait until about you have coffee in the morning then you wait until about noon to one oh yeah we haven't even gotten to my any food yet and then what's that and then what do you what's and what does that mean yeah so that means it might be uh what i call a big-ass salad you know it's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein with lots of salad dressing um if you make sure you have your own salad dressing now i have my own salad dressing because i couldn't find any that i could put a lot on and feel like this is that doesn't fill with sugar yeah or or unhealthy fats or unhealthy oils like the soybean oil that i was talking about or the canola you know it's like no canola this is our our salad dressings are made with avocado oil which is the healthiest of all the oils so i have a big salad with with chicken from leftover from the previous night or some piece of fish or something on it nice okay and then and then uh i go till the middle of the middle of the afternoon maybe late afternoon i might have a handful of macadamia nuts um we do make a uh we we make a protein bar now all my products i make for myself by the way you know i make stuff that i wish existed that uh so so this one the dark chocolate dark chocolate omelette looks amazing it is amazing and it's got um uh they're 15 grams of protein but but mostly it's nine grams of collagen so the it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth so you know i'm i love bone broth but it did you know as a kid when i'm driving my car you know yeah so so the bars are are there because i'm really into the repair so one of the issues i have as a 62 year old guy trying to keep up with 20 something right on a sprint to the end zone to defend a long pass is my achilles you know uh so so uh the collagen really works well really for absolutely keep seeing i i know that i can tell the difference between when i've been eating a lot of collagen and when i haven't in in your achilles yeah what happens just tighter when you're not yeah they feel like they're going to snap and i'll and i'll they'll they'll feel sore enough that i'll choose not a back way off for weeks at a time so uh so anyway so that's i might have a i might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon i'm about to get all this stuff yeah let's try it all out um okay and then and then in the evening um you know i have a piece of steak i've got this great wagyu short rib that i get it's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world uh and i'll have that with a whole ton of steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it and once a while i'll have a glass of wine and that's it that's the whole day yeah so much more than that no so here's the thing you may have um gleaned from that that uh it's not a lot of food right and one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat you don't need a lot of food you need you don't need a lot of food so a few years ago um you know i had this thought experiment i got i thought well you know i used to my whole life see what i could get away with see how much food i could eat and not feel like i was gonna puke or not feel like i was to gain weight right it's how much food can i eat and not and not gain weight i think i think a lot of people live their lives that way they sort of finish what's on their plate they you know they they basically there are a lot of people run or work out just so they can eat more like why do you run so much louis well i run because i love this game i love to eat i love that dude i love to eat too yeah but i don't i don't want to beat myself up sure just so i can eat more uh so that was the thought experiment and then if you reverse it you go well if that's the case what's the least amount of food i can eat and maintain my body mass maintain my energy not get sick and most importantly not be hungry and it turns out it's about 30 fewer calories than i used to eat is there a way you think i'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good there's a component of course with genetics now with that said we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon is epigenetics yes and things that are above genetic control now with that said i think the first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is and most folks have no idea unfortunately like we're at war with something we don't even understand and so fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum and a couple of these folks might have heard before but we're going to go even deeper so the first type is subcutaneous fat and subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue this is the fat that's just below your skin and so if you're trying to if you think about like fat on your arms or your thighs your butt you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly but that's the stuff you can pinch now i can pinch a lot right here the other type of fat is visceral fat and that's also it's also known as omentum fat and omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity right so this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs you know kind of putting if you have a lot of visceral fat putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys and just everything in your core this is the fat inside your your not on the outside of your muscles but inside your body yeah so it's like your abdominal cavity gotcha your visceral fat and you want less of that yeah this is the most dangerous type of fat this is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease with alzheimer's with type 2 diabetes you know it's just putting stress on your core everything which there's so much around there digestive tract your organs your liver your stomach everything and this is the stuff it's a little bit more firm to the touch it's a little bit harder to get your hands around and so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue these are storage fats okay so your body's storing energy and before i go on let me preface by saying this our fat is actually amazing it's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do it's just doing what it's programmed to do it's very good at it though and it could be a little bit clingy you know so you have to give the right messages and that's part of the issue so i just want to make that clear and fat is also it's not we tend to think it's like scattered droplets of of cells or unhappiness throughout our body but it's really an organ itself so that is an organ it's an organ it's an organ that has this interconnected communication and being that it's an organ it produces its own hormones all right so it's like making producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand all right so i want to preface by saying that wait is it an organ or is it like an organ it's an organ fat is an orgasm just like for example so fat in our body is one organ and it's all connected from the brain from the fat in my brain to my belly to my toe now there's different types of fat communities okay so this is another conversation this i go through all of these i literally call it the fat communities and eat smarter and break this stuff down so there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about it's called intramuscular fat all right intramuscular fat that's the third type of fat yeah and so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles now when i went to school my conventional education i really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of they have this dichotomy like they're two different things they're separate but they actually work together and intramuscular fat really provides and just to think about what it looks like if you think about the marbling of a steak all right that's that's your intramuscular fat now that can get out of hand too and you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles all right with the intramuscular fat so that's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community all right so these three are white adipose tissue these are storage fats now here's what's really amazing and a lot of folks might know about this next one we also have body fat that burns fat so they're not storage fats these are fats that contribute to the burning of energy the first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue all right or bat brown adipose tissue or brown fat now brown fat the reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria all right microphones are good right yeah mitochondria are really the energy power plants of ourselves really producing the energy when we talk about having energy these are the power plants creating that energy and mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned all right so folks don't we're taught these like diet paradigms like where the how does it work where does the fat go how does it get burned your mitochondria actually you're the place where the triglycerides get shipped to to actually burn them and use them as fat so brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria side note how how do i go to bed weighing a certain amount and then i wake up and i lose two pounds where does that go is that just a burn through sweat is that just mitochondria burning and it's disintegrating in the air what is happening this is such a great question so in each smart this is the first time in book form like we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens and it's just the the question should be like where the hell does fat go where did it go does it go to just poop it out do you sweat it out does it you got [Music] but what they did when this was so fascinating they actually tracked the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated and so what they discovered was that about 84 of the fact because okay we have to preface by saying this for us psychologically in our culture we tend to think of burning fat if there's a visual of it it's sweating yeah like we're out there we're at the gym we're sweating it out that's like that's your fat cells crying having a good breakup cry you know that's how we that's what we think yeah but in actuality about 84 of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing what yeah it's eliminated via your lungs yeah it's carbon dioxide so it no way so fat about the body and then it goes what into your lungs it's like transporting through the lung cavity and then you breathe it out it's it's an eliminatory organ you know we don't think about that we tend to think about like our gastrointestinal tract or bladders eliminatory organs your lungs and so you breathe about 84 of the fat that you lose comes out via your br your breath and about a third of that happens while you're while you're sleeping at night so you breathe fat out that's how you burn it yeah 84 how much caesar milan is the dog whisperer whisper exactly i burned it in my sleep um so wait a minute how much fat do we burn through our our lungs about 84 of it so all of our fat so if i'm 100 but this is not just your breathing it's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoot so it just comes through right through the breathing you also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids so about you know somewhere around the ballpark of about 15 16 to 14 sweat and urine yeah yeah tears you can all of these things are eliminating uh fat products you know yeah is the fat it looks coagulated when you look at it in like a in your body right so how does it break down yeah and then turn into just nothing that you can see yeah it's like it's a very complex and beautiful process body is fascinating it is it is and we go through we and it can be so overwhelming but what i did was i made it an analogy in the book of a theater making your body like a cellular movie theater and there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seeds so we tend to think that fat cells we're trying to quote kill fat or burn fat but that's not really how it works actually your fat cells are storage containers and what they're getting filled with the fat cells basically when you're when you're born you have a certain allotment of fat cells all right you can't just indiscriminately kill them they get filled with more and more energy it makes the fat cell expand so we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel right right and so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fats the the fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell or they usher them out when it's time to leave so one of his hormone-sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater all right lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater all right and then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing you know namely your your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles one of them is insulin and the other one its brother is glucagon all right insulin is so man when you think of insulin what do you think of though eating sugar yeah that's right and insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar right yeah and most folks think of diabetes too it's like tied into that lexicon but insulin is so important for our survival it's just it's a super amazing we need it yes you absolutely have to have insulin and if you're born you know in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin like you can die your cells won't get energy so now here's the thing insulin's job is to store energy right yeah and to encourage all those enzymes and to do their work as well so when it's out of hand when insulin is too active it can be a problem it's storing too much fat yeah and it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin it's getting overrun and and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly that's where you get insulin resistance right and then you have something called um this kind of instant cell fat cell creation that can take place with the liver it'll just start making its own fat as well so but we'll circle back to that a little bit yes but here's the thing so you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage glucagon does the opposite it encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy but glucagon cannot do its job when unless his brother sits his ass down somewhere it stops yes so how do you get insulin to stop doing its job that's what it's all about man that's what it's all about but we don't want to stop we just want to be efficient efficient and it's now here's another thing we do know that as you mentioned sugar is a big driver of insulin carbohydrates in general breads pastas right yeah protein but protein does as well it incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree for sure and even fat in a kind of backdoor way does drive insulin function too or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance so it's not just this one thing but we do know that in our culture you know on average folks eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year you know so that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this over over activity of insulin to the to the point that we have insulin resistance because 100 years ago we weren't eating as much sugar i'm assuming it's not even close it's not even clear but it's but what is with the the life expectancy increases every year it seems like if we're eating more and more bad things but we're able to live longer whereas before we weren't that's the that's the misnomer though we're not necessarily living longer we're dying longer we're getting sick and being able to be able to yes it's very different and this is the first generation we are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us all right this is the first time we're seeing this downtick we're supposed to be seeing folks well basically the life expectancy has gone down for the first time really in like recent history yeah yeah so we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents or what do you mean so we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old now it's 79 really you know so it's just going that life expectancy has gone down for the first time previous generation got jesus it's interesting i was asking uh dr david sinclair about this yeah i love him he was like the goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable he's like i've seen that in too many people the goal is to live as long as you can healthy flexible abundant you know not with chronic pain and then die quickly right to get sick and then die within a week not get sick within 20 years of misery he's like that's not a great life yeah we don't want just one lifespan we want health span and it all really boils down and this is the most beautiful part about this and what i'm really hoping to impress upon culture because when we tend to think of food we tend to think of it in relationship in our culture we think of diet and relationship to weight it's just like what's connected when in reality food is one of the greatest if not the greatest determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times and this is what i really want to get across is of course i'm going to give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food but also how does food affect your cognitive performance and it's shocking when you find this date out how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people or break that down as well what are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion and whatever before before we get to that the fat storage there was one more were you talking about brown fat yeah brown fat and there was another fat yeah so there's one other fat and so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria right so these energy power plants that's why it's brown babies have a lot of brown fat it's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia you know just to basically keep thermogenesis going as you become an adult you have a lot less brown adipose tissue it's mostly located like around your collarbones your shoulder blades down your spine and brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated if you have enough brown adipose tissue which you can create more and the mobilization and activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition so this type of fat is burning fat for you if you know it's growing fat yeah all right so that's a we got three storage fats and then we've got two other types of fat and that's body fat that burns fat yes and so this other one and this is one a lot of folks might know might not know a lot about yet is beige fat this is the fifth type of fat yeah so this is beige fat beige fat and so beige fat is really really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat all right based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be coming turning into a fat storing type of fat or a fat burning type of fat and the browning of this fat one of the things and i'll just throw this out there for folks since you asked about specific uh food when we go through so many different but i'm going to throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy a little controversial is coffee coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells and in fact one of the studies that i cited and eat smarter found they actually used uh fmri and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up signaling increased thermogenesis and one of the studies found that there's about a 3 to eleven percent increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine now there's a u-shaped curve of benefits right some is good once we get to a certain place we can mess ourselves up and also we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with right is it just is it coffee are you consuming coffee with donuts and crap and like you know these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals that's not good and even the coffee itself are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides or rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut so there's a big conversation there we dive into all these pieces to see like there's so many wonderful things that we have access to but in our culture we've been a little bit led astray and it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad it's been utilized for by humans for centuries but it's the quality and how you're going about it that can make all the difference and the quantity probably and yeah yeah and so just going back to your original question when we're targeting that you know the belly fat specifically and this is something that is not talked about enough it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning right and this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat and it's not that calories don't matter i want to make that clear i want to preface but with this but when i was in my nutritional science class in college the very like the king the monarch the warden of diet is calories and i say warden intentionally because it's a little it gets into this kind of prison or mentality yeah and diets are really revolving around this and i i'm always asking this question and i'm so grateful that i've kind of hard wired myself to do this where did it come from where the hell did this idea start and so i went back and examined the entire history of calories and it was actually for me it's just like when we find like egyptian pyramids like they didn't have any about calories you know right nobody was even thinking about it or looking for it even when it was discovered and it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition it was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering yeah and this was in 1800s and then it made its transition into nutrition thanks to a guy named wilbur atwater but he's just kind of a little side note as well and i basically i go back and talk about all the people involved but this is what changed america this is what changed the world really was a physician she's a pioneer for sure her name was dr lulu hunt peters and she's the one who popularized the term calorie and she sold this was back in the early 1900s she created a nutrition book a diet book and they sold two million copies back then which is basically everybody in their mother's house right all right what was it called this was diet and health and the keto calories something like that the keto calories but i went back and read these old fangled writings there's like a lot of pieces of it online and this began the indoctrination of our culture and starting to look at food in terms of numbers it's no longer this dynamic multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems now it's numbers and she specifically said we will no longer call a slice of bread a slice of bread you won't say one slice of bread you'll say 100 calories of bread you will no longer say a slice of pie you say 350 calories of pie and so wow we stopped looking at food as food was started this evolution and started looking at it as numbers and she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained 1200 calorie intake and now let me also make this clear dr lulu hunt peter's battle with her weight for her lifetime all right and it's that term of like teach what you want to learn kind of thing now this is also crucial and some people this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit this was also the beginning of this indoctrination associating food with character associating food with morality and so she basically asserted that it's a character defect if you're not able to manage your weight there's something wrong with you and started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food and this was also during the time of like world war one so food rationing was a big thing happening and she said one of her quotes i put in the book and i'm paraphrasing that for every pang of hunger you feel you should have a double joy knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or you know with soldiers and what so she's basically saying this was also a massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss if you're hungry you're doing it right and this started to really change the psychology of dieting right and so calories began to become the king and the big focus now i want to say this calories matter for sure it's a it's a measurement of energy in food just like a meter is a measure of energy and distance but that meter is consistent if we measure this room consistently it's going to be the same distance however calories are different completely ignore when you're talking about a measurement of energy it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function it's going to be different every day the calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body because our hormones are changing our bodies are changing our timelines are changing what we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50 exactly let alone you versus another person and this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person but it doesn't work for someone else and it's i'm sick of it man wow because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them and they're not getting these very fundamental principles and so so folks can start to free themselves of this caloric prison i can share there's five really powerful metrics that are not examined there's really five major things that control what calories do in your body what are those so if we think about i keep mentioning hormones but just to give a good analogy of what hormones are hormones are really biochemical messengers that help your cells this cellular community that you have this amazing cellu community to communicate with each other it's like metabolic dms right it's like text messages emails how many hormones do we have there's about 50 50 different hormones 50. are hormones what is a hormone is it a a cell is it an organ is it a connecting point what is it so horm the building the most important fundamental building block block of our hormones are proteins all right so i want to i want to really reiterate this how important protein is because it's needed to build your freaking hormones right where are hormones stored all throughout your body you know even like that fat organ that we talked about is making its own hormones but there are hormones that are being produced and secreted by your pituitary gland your hypothalamus is like a master regulator of your hormonal system your endocrine system it's in your brain and so one of the things we talk about in the book is this growing epidemic of neural inflammation that is messing up people's hypothalamic function that's screwing up what's happening downstream like your thyroid is on that hpa axis it's a thyroid here or something in your so that's largely considered like the metabolic regulator like your master gland associated with fat loss or fat storage and it definitely plays a role so these are all pieces and it's in this web now what's actually determining what these calories are doing and and so i mentioned i gave a little preface of what our hormones are so when we're talking about calories these five things and i'll give an analogy i give like an acronym the dm all right we're going to use that as our letters so it goes down in the dm you know what i'm talking about so the first thing that's controlling what calories are doing the t stands for the type of food itself determines what the calories are doing your body and this is highlighted in this crazy study this was published in food and nutrition research listen to this this is this is freaking crazy they went to find out what would happen with a meal of the same calories that's either a meal of whole foods or processed food same amount of calories so a bowl of cereal and some fruits and vegetables so what they did was they had sandwiches and so one set of folks got the sandwich that was considered whole food sandwich was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese the other folks received the processed food sandwich which was white bread and cheese product right oh no and that's that's craft craft slices that american cheese tastes so good and so here's what happened after and i love this study because they tracked the pathway of calorie burn their metabolic rate and what happened when they ate these two respective sandwiches after they compiled the data the folks even though the calories were the same the folks who consumed the processed food sandwich had a fifty percent reduction in calorie burn after eating that damage what fifty percent reduction why is that because the body it so this gets into some of the other things we'll talk about but that the processed nature of those foods created some metabolic dysfunction and some confusion for your endocrine system oh man and your nervous system and all these the cellular community that that communication so now the body is less apt to let go of that energy it's confused it's trying to hang on to it all right now what are most folks eating processed processed foods all right so it's literally changing their way changing the way their body even associates with calories and they're trying to count these damn points and not understanding that the very nature of how their body's operating is skewed so that's just the t that's the type of food all right so the h is how the food is prepared has a massive impact on what the calories do in your body so i mean whether it's cooked whether it's raw whether it's stir-fried i don't know all of that right exactly yes so to give a good example if you think about spinach right spinach a lot of folks of course consider it's a healthy food popeye was like knocking it down in a can i don't know if have you ever had spinach out of a can it must have been tough times so spinach is a good this is a good one because these green leafy vegetables there's nutrition that's locked in this inside the cell wall and you have to basically crack open the cell wall to extract the calories and some of the nutrients and as the as the spinach gets old that's why we have there's baby spinach and as the spinach gets more mature the cell walls become harder to break into all right so just right off the bat baby spinach versus the same quantity of mature spinach you're going to get more calories out of the baby spinach is that better for you or this is not about better or worse right now this is just like understanding there's some other stuff happening okay but here's another thing cooking the spinach too breaks down the cell wall so regardless if it's a baby spinach cooked spinach i mean a mature spinach and when this happens it also the density of the spinach like you've seen it you can drink whole bag comes this little teeny baby teaspoon right and so this is one of the things and i really start the book talking about this that most experts will agree that it was our ability to cook that really created like a quantum leap in the evolution of the human brain because we're now able to extract more nutrients and and calories from our food even though this this term wasn't invented yet not to say that it's good or bad or that raw food isn't good it's just understanding when you how the food is prepared changes what calories do in your body interesting so if you're cooking spinach it has less calories in it if you're cooking spinach calories become more available so what does that mean when you consume it yeah your body is consuming more able to extract more of the calories when it's cooked so if it's raw it's got less calories a little bit less a less that you can extract from it in general these are so this is minutia these are small things but they matter so this gets into the conversation of what food is and so even when we talk about calories the way that this was initially kind of brought to the forefront they use something called a bomb calorimeter all right a bound calorometer and what they do is they took the food and they put into a box and they put that box into another box that's filled with water and then they would burn the food with electrical energy to find out all of the available calories that were in this food that was used to heat the water and so once they did this they were like okay there's 200 calories in this particular food product the problem is you might you might be the bomb lewis but you're not a bomb calorometer all right your body is very different there are indigestible components of that food for example whereas the bomb calorimeters is basically saying all the calories that are here when you don't absorb all the calories from the food that you eat okay so this creates this schism all right so those indigestible components could be they're going to be more in raw spinach this you're not going to digest as much yeah i hope that makes sense yeah so you're not going to digest as much and you're not going to pull as many calories in however there's bioavailable micronutrients that you're going to get it's not that raw spinach versus cooked spinach is good or bad it's just there's different ways that it impacts your body sure so that's how the food is prepared types of food how it's prepared right so the dm it goes down in the dm all right the next one is the e and the e stands for energy exchange now this one here this is something folks might have learned about a little bit in school i know i did in my university class however i don't think we really get this it costs energy it costs calories to digest calories your body uses calories to digest calories to burn or digest the calories to produce the the chew the saliva to chew to swallow through the intestinal wall like everything right to produce stomach acid to move it to take the food from your gastrointestinal tract through your small intestine and move it through into your bloodstream and move those cells those those nutrients to your to your brain to your eyeballs to your toes how much does how much do we burn from one meal from eating chewing to eliminating how long does that take typically is that a 12 or 24 hour window from one meal that's that's such a very diverse question because it depends on the type of food it depends on matter of fact we'll get to that in a moment i'll get to that so energy exchange yeah energy exchange now this energy exchange how how many calories or how much the caloric expense is in digesting food depends on the type of food too the macronutrients specifically is what people know about but it's a little bit more diverse processed food is going to be harder to digest it's going to be more work or less work it depends on the type of food got it but let's we'll stick with the overarching because we could do the whole show just on that one topic but just on the macronutrient side proteins are well noted to be more calorically expensive to digest it costs you about 20 to 30 percent of the protein that you eat is the calories in there are used to digest the protein so we'll just say if you consume 100 grams of protein 20 to 30 i'm sorry 100 calories of protein 20 to 30 calories are used to digest that wow pretty good so you get a net profit of calories of 70. all right so you can have more calories and realize it's going to be less that you're actually yeah with protein with protein with carbohydrates it's going to cost you it's about 10 to 15 percent of that energy that you take in caloric energy is used to digest it for fats is about zero to somewhere in the ballpark about five percent to digest it so more protein it goes more burning this thermometer it's called the thermic effect of food all right and protein is largely kept out of the conversation today it's people are battling about carbs and fats right these are the big diet frameworks and protein is like rodney dangerfield it's like you know i get no respect body really um exists in sort of one of two states you're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state okay so when you're in the fed state you're eating insulin is going up and as insulin goes up its job like its normal job is to tell your body to store those calories okay so you can store it as glycogen which is sugar or it can store it as body fat but that's the point so you lunch or dinner there's way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point so you want to store that so when you don't eat which is any time you don't eat is called fasting so when you fast that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage right and that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage so in the fed state insulin goes up you're storing calories or body fat in the fasted state you're not eating your insulin is dropping and you're using calories so you're in one or the other you can't do both at the same time so if now you say okay what i'm eating i'm storing i'm not using calories is that right every time i'll store i'm not burning body fat you're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar for example and that sugar is going to signal that hey sugar's coming in use the sugar that's coming in don't burn anything off my body yeah exactly keep on store all that stored fat keep it just keep piling it on right exactly so the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat so if you are now eating constantly so the minute you get up somebody tells you oh you have to eat you can't skip breakfast blah blah blah blah and then you have to snack all day long so now if you look at studies the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes that's the average so if you start eating at 8 a.m you don't stop till 10 45 p.m that's on average that's the average 14 hours you mean a 14-hour span of eating from the start to finish right you may not be eating every moment but you're eating every few hours within a 14-hour window it takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state so the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast lunch dinner and by six o'clock you're done you know boom you know now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say oh you need time to digest right that's what she sort of said but the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your meal times um and that was the secret that they could stay relatively slim now if you're eating constantly then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories the problem of course is that insulin stays high which tends to keep your body storing calories your body so the high insulin for example blocks fat burning you can't burn your fat stores because your body is like the instructions that i'm getting is to store energy not use energy i want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food the problem of course is that there's never a time there's no food right every day is the same same thing right 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating and that's the point so now if you understand the problem you can say well how am i going to change this well it's simple increase the amount of time that you're not eating and that's all intermittent fasting is if you eat one meal a day for example or if you within a eight hour window or a four-hour window or whatever what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored which is body fat predominantly but that is precisely the reason you carry body fat like that body fat is not there for looks is there for you to use right and that's the whole point what's so bad about using it if you don't eat you're going to burn it well so again go back to the 70s and everybody says oh you can't fast you can't fast well you know they're eating breakfast lunch dinner and if you're a naughty boy you got sent to bed without dinner so you went from 12 o'clock to 8 a.m 20 hours you look good the next day you're like a clean you got a six-pack it's burning fat exactly and nobody died nothing bad happens right there was nothing wrong with that and hopefully you learned your lesson too right and that's the whole point is that there's nothing wrong it's a natural part of our human physiology if we couldn't survive without eating like we would not be here today because when we were cavemen and cave women they didn't have food every day yeah exactly they couldn't they there might be a stretch of three four five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat which they did and that was the whole point so let's let our body you know use it because that's the most natural thing to do what's the process for you your day-to-day life do you eat one meal a day two meals a day do you fast every month for a day are you always doing intermittent fasting is there a downside to intermittent fasting what's your process yeah i usually do a lot of sort of i rarely eat breakfast and i'll tell you that it didn't come i mean i started this in medical school and that was mostly because i really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like you know i'd wake up literally like five minutes before i left before you know i brush my teeth put on some clothes and rolled out the door i was you know it's just a it's just that the way i was right and so i i don't eat breakfast now because again people say you have to eat breakfast you have to eat but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast if you don't eat breakfast what's gonna happen well my body which is now burning fat because i've had eight hours of sleep it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar um it's just gonna keep doing it right there's nothing wrong with it so so a lot of times i try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours and then once in a while when i get very busy i will do a 24-hour fast which is a one meal a day and then every so often i'll do a longer fast and the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially it's it's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals so i often have dinner with my family for example and doing those longer fasts is really really disruptive to that sort of thing which is why when you look at traditional societies like if you look at say you know during major religions for example there will be a period of fasting that's sort of universal so you know everyone's doing it so no one's feeling exactly expressed when they smell the food exactly so if you're if it's like good friday or during lent or during ramadan for muslims or you know during yom kippur for jews or whatever everybody's fasting so it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there whereas nowadays if you fast and i've done this it's just really hard to do it's not physically it's not hard but it's hard and i do it mostly you know when i when i've gained a bit of weight usually after the holidays and after a vacation i will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because i know that i can lose that weight very quickly but that means i can enjoy myself like a couple years ago i went on a cruise and really ate too much just a lot i had a lot and i knew it then i could feel it in my pants were tight and stuff so i did sort of a three or four day fast and i'll tell you by the next week i was back to my normal weight well that's great because a week and but i got to enjoy the whole week prior where i really didn't look at what i was eating or how often i was eating or anything i was like this is my vacation i'm doing this but at the same time i know hey i've got this next you know after this week the week after you know very little to eat and and and it gives you a great tool to use if you need it right yeah it's almost like either every day don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time whether it be four six eight hours which i'm hearing is kind of the uh which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time is that right yeah yeah i mean if you want to lose weight you can do very well of course with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8 a.m to 6 p.m which in a 14-hour fast every single night remember they're doing for 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it like that's a secret because they don't even think about that that's just a period of time that they're not eating right but now of course the the the traditions are different you can eat anywhere you want you can eat in the theater you can eat at your desk eating in the car like in the 70s stuff like that didn't exist you didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom for example now you go to a meeting in a board room when there's food everywhere donuts there's donuts and cookies right somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that right it's like well why we're having a meeting here right so that's the uh that's the thing so you could do very well with that kind of you know eight hour eating window for 10 hour eating window you can do very well with it but if you're not doing well then you can extend it and that's the beauty of it you could extend it as much as you want right so if you think about uh fasting you could go three days you could go five days you could go 30 days people do that all the time but no no food no food yeah so if you look if you think about um fasting so uh the ad but the amount of energy that you need so a pound of fat has 3 500 calories roughly if you need about 1800 calories so that's for like a regular person not like an athlete or somebody's working out a lot it takes about half a pound of fat per day so if you're dealing with a lot of obese people like 100 pounds overweight you could go 200 days you know if you want to lose 100 pounds you could go 200 days without eating before you can survive and survive exactly and be okay exactly be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient fat is an efficient store of calories right it's very efficient that's why we developed this to keep you alive when there's no food around exactly so use it does it affect your digestive system does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time yeah and what happens when you start eating again does that affect your again your stomach your intestines your calling your metabolism what's affected there and this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do when you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint assuming of course you're not malnourished right i mean i'm assuming if you're the average american who's you know 10 20 30 pounds overweight then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits so there's a lot of sort of myths around it one is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle and the truth is that you don't i mean when you you know if your body your body stores energy as body fat so people say oh you're going to burn muscle it's like well you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat but the minute you need it it starts burning muscle right like why would our body be so stupid and if it were so stupid how did we survive right and it's like you know if you save firewood all wint for the winter and then as soon as it gets cold you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire like why would you be so stupid right our body's just the same it's not that so you know and i know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise right so if you have uh you know lift heavy weights then your muscles become stronger it doesn't become stronger because you eat right that thing does nothing for building muscle like otherwise we'd be you know the strongest nation on earth right but we're not we're the fattest nation on earth so that's the whole problem right i mean you're confusing two completely different things um there is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown and that's where people get very confused and say well you're burning muscle but you're not protein is not the same as muscle so our body has all kinds of protein including all the connective tissue like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place and some of that is often burned off so for example when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds they get all this flappy skin that's not excess fat that's excess protein so that's you know it's functional tissue that you've never used up so we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein the body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using so another big myth so muscle burning is one thing the other big big myth is people talk about as starvation mode or metabolic rate so metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day the number of calories you burn in a day and this is what we see if you simply cut calories so this is a standard medical advice cut 500 calories a day and you'll lose a pound of fat a week what happens of course is that you cut 500 calories a day and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories so now you're actually not losing any weight that's what happens all the time because why does this stop why does it stop burning those calories well it stops burning calories by reducing its metabolic rate so the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to say generate body heat your liver your kidney your heart and so on we've known this for 100 years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar what happens is that your body is going to start using less so because it doesn't like running a deficit right it's just like if you normally make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year now you make fifty thousand you don't keep spending a hundred right it's it's you're gonna you're gonna get thrown into jail but so you reduce your expenditure same as the body so it's getting less so it's going to use less and that's the natural reaction it's it's it's important because it's a survival response it cannot do anything different the difference like so it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use yeah in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you but if you just do a little bit i'm going to eat a little bit less today it's not going to do that much it doesn't work and and people assume that if you go to zero which is fasting say you fast for a full day you have zero calories you don't die right because what happens is completely different now you've lowered your insulin so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body and as you do that you're now switching fuel sources so instead of using food as your fuel you're switching it into body fat just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric right so it's using food and then boom it goes okay i have no food coming in i need to switch over now into body fat and then it goes whoa i have like 500 000 calories of body fat here so why do i need to cut cut it down and the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat of course it's a problem but for people who have adequate stores of body fat which is most of us and truthfully most people do it for weight loss too much body fat then what happens is that there's so much there why wouldn't you use it because it's a fuel source that's all it is that's the way you have to look at the body fat if you're eating all the time you can never use your body fat because your your insulin insulin's here your insulin's high you're using food then you get hungry so you eat some more right you have a snack you have a low-fat muffin you stay here there's you can only burn food all that stuff over there those 500 000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body so if you simply dial it down like this and say okay instead of 2000 calories i'm going to eat 1500 but i'm going to eat 10 times a day keeping myself here now you only have 1500 coming in you can only burn fifteen hundred you can't access that if you go to zero you go boom and then your body burns the full two thousand so they did a study for example where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using they also measure their vo2 which as you know is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing and what they found so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero then they measured it at four days of zero food and they were burning 10 more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating the vo2 was 10 higher you're doing more work your body is actually not shutting down is revving itself up and again there's a good physiologic reason for that and we know that when insulin goes down when you switch yourself into this sort of uh you know mode that you're burning fat other hormones go up including your sympathetic nervous system which is your noradrenaline so you're actually pumping your body up the reason for that is sort of again it's a survival response so imagine again we're cavemen and it's winter and there's no food so if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker you're never gone again you're gonna die because every day is gonna be harder you're gonna circle the drain so our body's just not that stupid right so what they do is that your body says okay there's no food coming in boom i'm going to switch you over to body fat and then i'm going to pump you up so that you have energy you go out there you go kill that woolly mammoth you're focused you're clear in the zone everything exactly and that's that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up and the constant the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say well i i have to eat because i have to concentrate it's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat think about when you had a huge thanksgiving meal well were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football right you don't have any sort of focus but if you think about animals it's the same thing lions they just eat they just like lounging around but if you're the hungry wolf that is not that is a very dangerous animal because he's focused he's ready to kill you same thing for us our level of concentration our mental ability mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry like if you think oh you're hungry for this hungry for that that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic it means you're focused so it's interesting because there's this book a few years ago called unbroken which is a biography of this fellow who got he went to a prisoner of war camp in world war ii japan and he was talking about starvation and he they were literally starving like there's they eat like almost nothing for the full day and he's talking about how his his uh his uh other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats so one guy was reading a book entirely from memory another guy learned all of norwegian in a week and he so the guy says this is simply the mental clarity of starvation so it was incredible it's like it was so widespread everybody was starving and they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree and then you know in the ancient greece the ancient mathematician pythagoras he would require his students to fast in order to to come to his class because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility if you eat a healthy meal let's say an hour before bed i'm talking about greens and lean meat and healthy stuff or if you eat pizza an hour before bed are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter yeah that's a really good question uh the short answer is yeah it does matter um so the probably the two things that would have the greatest determination um would be the simplicity or glycemic the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night and then probably the amount of protein because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food so the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food our bodies want to be very cold at night so anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep so what foods help you sleep better that keep you colder what are those foods whether it's an hour before or three hours before yeah i i honestly it's like almost anything you're going to eat is going to come with something that's going to slightly raise your temperature so i just generally say try to not eat too much before bed and and i go out of my way to avoid the two things that i think are worse so i just say i wouldn't have huge protein before bed and i don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed so you know i'd have an avocado before bed i'd have you know something that's like you know i just generally don't eat before bed the body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed is it going to sleep better sleep deeper be cooler and therefore hopefully help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed yeah and this is at least for me been most easy to exhibit and i think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting so fasting is kind of a funky state because you're all you're altering so many other things in the physiology but one of the things that happens especially by about the second day of a water only fast is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a in a state that is totally absent food and it's it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper the one that's keeping you awake is cortisol you have more of it you have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on right fasting would trigger a signal that says go get more food right be alert be focused go get food like we don't want to die and so that's kind of keeping you awake but the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body is turning down its metabolism so i actually find uh fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because i'm watching this plummeting temperature rising heart rate variability falling heart rate all of these really valuable things but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times but i still feel quite you know rejuvenated by sleep if you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food you're not sleep you're staying up late because you're whatever playing video games all night but you've got all this energy all day and you're active is there a negative for in your early ages teens early 20s through lacking sleep eating poorly or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done in your before 20. yeah that's a good question um i mean certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens the good news is before the age of 20 or 30 we are pretty remarkably resilient i mean you're an athlete so you can relate how old are you now lewis you're 37 37 so you you might not have fully appreciate i'm 47 so i'm a full decade older than you and when i think about 17 to 27 to 37 to 47 i can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience like at 17 you could shoot me and i think i'd still get up the next day like you just couldn't right you're superman yeah you're absolutely superman and i don't know i i feel like the first observation of not being superman for me kind of kicked in about 42 ish about five years ago was the first time i was like oh so this is what people talk about right like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day and i think that's just one lens which is through the lens of exercise but the same is true of physiology right like or i'll give you another example many of my patients have observed this i've observed this like i was never a big drinker in college but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where i'd go out and drink far more than anyone should and yet somehow the next day i could like get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever i need to do like i remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning i mean having so much to drink it was ridiculous and somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride oh my gosh man probably probably still partially drunk and but but felt fine by about like two hours into the ride today if i had three glasses of wine like the headache i'm going to have the next day is going to last me till the middle of the day is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its to its advantage then and now it's like it's a very good question i really i mean i could i could sort of you know speculate on what it is but i i just think there's an over so there's this thing called homeostasis right which is one of the hallmarks of youth and it's one of the hallmarks of aging and you know it's it's the ability to where it's our lack of homeostasis we lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance so everything about the human body is very particular for example take ph which is the amount of acidity in our body we're so highly regulated like our body really needs to be at a ph of 7.4 so 7 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you and this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14 to put that in perspective okay so tiny perturbations will kill you how good is our body at staying in that amazing temperature right you go much below about 94 you're dead you go much above about 104 you're dead how good are we at staying in that range oh i mean good i mean we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band so this homeostasis thing is amazing it gets weaker and weaker as we get older and so your ability to tolerate bad food bad sleep sedentary behavior more stress all those things it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker and i think it declines non-linearly so again what you experience as a decline between 30 and 40 it's bad 40 to 50 yeah that's worse 50 to 60 you can fall off a cliff is there a way to reverse this i don't think we know i think you can definitely slow the progression of it and i know you know what i would say you probably can reverse it right so just as you can clearly reverse diabetes diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible um you know so there are probably some variants of this that that are harder to reverse than others uh but but no i i think we can reverse this process uh but it gets harder you know it gets harder as time goes on and it gets harder the further the further you are into you know sort of the physiologic trap what are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff but a dip over the last five years for yourself how are you thinking about it well i sort of had a change of heart um five years ago so actually six years ago 2014 so i sort of hung up my bike which at that so at that point i'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport um but i you know you know at that point a couple of things had happened so one i had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training which again is a rich man's problem ultra marathons ultra biking ultra swimming hiking that's that's right that's right so again ver and it's the same sort of curve right where as exercise dose of exercise goes up mortality comes down but it has this little bit of a j where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise especially over the age of 40 you're actually driving an increase in mortality now really yes does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week yeah great great point running a marathon once a year probably not increasing your mortality at all um but you know running 40 50 miles a week probably is especially at that age now again this gets to your point about resilience someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality it really only seems to be an issue if you continue in fact i did an interview with a cardiologist james o'keefe on my podcast who is you know the world's expert on this and and um it was actually james's work six years ago because i heard him speak at a conference ten years ago we became friends i you know it's one of those things i'm sure you've experienced this where you hear something and you don't want it to be true so you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke holes in it until you find them you find the evidence the other way yeah yeah yeah and eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive so that's one piece of the the change six years ago the second it's probably bad that i just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday that's all right though you'll be fine i just think don't do one a month yeah exactly um and then and then i think the second thing was i realized like it was sort of funny but i realized like my prime was so far behind me that i needed to think about like what what was what was i doing this in service of right like um and not that i needed anyone other than myself to do these things because i'm very self-motivated so i don't like but just as a joke one day i asked my wife i said hey do you know what my pr is for 20k like bike run or swim yeah bike on a 20k bike on the time trial and i was like this is my wife she hears me talk about this stuff all the time i have spreadsheets and models and data and i analyze my power data every single day and i'm trying to break the record for san diego like i'm really so switched on to this she'll probably get it within a minute she'll guess what my pr is within a minute she was off by 20 minutes meaning she wasn't even in the zip code so i was like huh that's funny like it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this and what i realized was you know i need to start thinking about a different sport which is the sport of longevity so what does it mean to be a kick-ass hundred-year-old and so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the centenarian olympics so how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there and of course everywhere along the way so that now dominates my landscape of training which means i don't you know care about how fast i can you know ride a 40 kilometer time trial because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do what is your mindset going into a 40-mile bike then or or some type of experience is it more the joy of it so i don't i don't i don't i don't train no my training is very specific but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars um so the pillars being stability strength uh mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance and so each of those then has a super layer detail approach and i still ride my bike four hours a week so it's a fraction of what i used to do and it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training um what was the fourth one stability strength mitochondria mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency and then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance so you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis yeah yeah those those four pillars sort of make up the training program which is then in service of something that i invite every patient to define for themselves which is because you will have a different you know set of variables for me potentially but you know my centenary olympics has you know 18 events in it you know like i want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that you know where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb like lift myself up i want to be able to hop over a three foot fence i want to be able to walk three miles in an hour i want to be able to carry two ten pound bags up four flights of stairs i want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid i want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands so i could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say peter those seem really easy and you'd be right as a 37 year old stud but the point is as a future a lot of them aren't easy most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it and i have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can and so that's the aspiration is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s how do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s in your 50s and in your 40s and it's actually very hard and as i'm getting into you know i'm three years away from 40. what should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're you know i'm healthy i feel good you know maybe have some aches and pains here and there when i'm training hard or something but for the most part i feel amazing what should i be thinking about moving forward so that i continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things so i don't i think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean and it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this like i've obviously made a very conscious choice that i don't go to swim meets i don't go to bike races like i don't train for those things anymore and a big part of that is just time you know there are only 168 hours in a week and you know i have a very clear set of priorities and i'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise which by many people's standards is still quite a lot but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that i used to exercise i've never exercised so little in my life so i have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes and that means i'm laser focused on the four principles of that in your case i think it comes down to saying okay how much time do you want to avoid devote to the long game how much time do you want to devote to the short game another way to think about this would be investing if you're looking at an investment portfolio you might say how much do i want to put both time and money so the actual capital i set aside but also the amount of time i spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do i want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains um for you know money that i'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today you could have totally different strategies for that that's totally fine so i'm just in the category where i'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital and so um so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that and it might be that you say you know peter 37 i just want to focus on running a marathon i've always wanted to do an iron man so i'm going to go and do that and you know i want to climb mount everest and that's going to require like you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things and truthfully i would say do them now because it's only going to get harder because you're not going to be able to do it later yeah yeah i mean i don't think you're going to want to do it later so get those things out of the way yeah and then maybe when you turn 40 you say okay now it's time i'm going to really focus on my centenarian olympics when i have a better sense of what those events look like for me personally so if you look at hunger during fasting so they've done again studies where they fast people for 24 hours and they measure a hormone called gorelin which is the hunger hormone the higher it is the hungry you are turns out that our gorilla peaks three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner so you get hungry at you know 12 o'clock it's lunch time you get hungry so it's a learned response the question is what happens if you don't eat does hunger keep going up and up and up it doesn't in fact the gorilla actually peaks and then it just falls if you don't eat it will actually just fall down and it will fall down within a couple of hours right to baseline which means that your level of hunger at so at 12 30 1 o'clock you're hungry no question about it if you don't eat by three four o'clock that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat what happened well your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat you took that meal from your body fat and your hunger went down so that's really interesting so if you know that it's a wave right you just have to let the sort of wave pass over you yeah well i often tell people you will get hungry okay don't don't pretend that you're not because you will what you got to do is prepare for it and say okay well if you get hungry then you either there's several things one stay busy you know keep doing stuff don't just think about how hungry you are so we all have had this where we're you know working on some kind of you know doing work at work or if you're doing some kind of you know home renovation or something i get this all the time where i'm like painting you know the house or something like that right and i'll just power right through because i just want to get it done and i'm not hungry at all because i'm so busy i'm so focused on doing the work that i just forgot about it right you see this all the time you know people who go to the casino and people who play video games they just get so engrossed so that's one strategy the other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink by the time you finish you know a big cup of green tea the hunger will have passed but you know that it's going to pass and that's the point you know it's not going to get worse and worse and worse and and that's how you do it what's even more interesting actually is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three four five days the gorilla peaks and then after about two days it starts going down so by you know day two day three as you get to day four day five the hunger almost completely disappears it's actually fascinating if you've never done it because i've done a few of these four or five day fast it's interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger there's a whole lot of hey that slice of pizza looks really good i really want to eat it right but there's no actual physical hunger so if i hadn't seen it which is hard now of course with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff i would actually you know gone right by and done it but the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with but it's not impossible because again one of the big objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it like it'll work sure if you don't eat you'll lose weight but nobody do it well you know that literally millions of people throughout history have done this look at ramadan you look at yom kippur you look at lent like when people say okay we're gonna fast together because our strength is in our togetherness right you know it's good friday we're not gonna eat for this amount of time well that's that's how people did it right they supported each other there was no food around somebody's not frying up you know his steak wow you're trying to avoid baking cookies yeah yeah exactly so that's how you do it right you get yourself a supportive community you know you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time and and that's how you get through it right and and while you do that of course your body uses up the body fats you're going to lose weight it's going to use up the blood sugar which is going to keep you from becoming diabetic and it's insulin is going to fall which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term as well as those other conditions obesity and type 2 diabetes which puts you at such high risk of cancer in the first place you're doing all kinds of good stuff for your body and it's completely free right you have to spend money on it yes and this is the parent that's crazy is because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better heart attacks strokes cancer diabetes which is the leading cause of blindness of kidney disease of amputations the the the secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery it's less it's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on earth you can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better it's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it the people tell you oh you can't do it you can't do it it's like that's not true we all used to do it right if you think about you know a you know a community of like you know on yom kippur like millions of jews around the world are doing or ramadan millions of muslims are doing it or you know millions of catholics are fasting during good friday like my my priest used to tell me all the time during lent you know fasting fat like that's all he talked about practically um so it's it's it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of these diseases and we don't have to charge anybody anything we're not trying to sell anybody anything we're just trying to tell you yes you can do it because if you have too much weight and it's putting you at risk of this cancer then let your body burn off that sugar let your body burn off that fat a couple months ago i did a four day fast where i just had water and a black coffee a day and it felt incredible first couple days was challenging but by day three i was like i'm in the zone and i felt good i looked younger i felt healthier i was doing it more of like seeing what i could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my you know kind of cleaning out my system i just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds it was burning a lot of excess fat um but i just felt better i felt more confident i felt like oh i could do something challenging which gave me more strength in my mind it was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways and i'm curious what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that that you've debunked i mean uh the the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you it's actually one of the healthiest things you can do as long as you're again not underweight and you're doing it safely right you're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing but there's this whole uh recent um scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy which has been you know very very topical people have been going crazy on it because in 2016 one of the nobel prizes in medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers and what it showed is that when you fast and you turn down these nutrient sensors then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy an autophagy um is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles and just gets rid of them right it breaks it down and recycles them and everybody thinks well if you're breaking down stuff that's bad for you right you're breaking down protein is bad for you is good for you because the first thing you need to do whenever you want to renovate for example say you want to renovate your bathroom the first thing you got to do is throw out everything in there right that avocado green tub has to go otherwise you can't put in a new top right that's just the way it is that's just uh so your body works the same way the first thing you have to do is get rid of the old junky old protein you gotta break it down you gotta kill off those cells yeah you gotta just rip them off the body and let them whatever they flush out your skin or whatever they do right exactly the skin proteins the connective tissue all of that goes and it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need what happens is that everything starts to go and then the stuff you need like if you're still exercising your body's like hey i still need those muscles i'm going to rebuild that so that's the key that one of the things that activates during uh fasting is actually growth hormone so if you fast for 24 hours your growth hormone level is like four times what it is really when you're eating yeah and it sounds very strange why would growth hormone goes up well it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff as soon as you start to eat it you want to rebuild all of it so the nobel prize in medicine which is dr osuni said this is the body's intracellular recycling system so it's not let's flush out all our old stuff it's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff but if you think about it that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation right get rid of the old stuff bring in new stuff it's like renovating your body right so all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not going to get if you are eating all the time so this is this whole you know in in people who are very interested in wellness a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on and and you get this this point where you're doing you know so you've done these longer fast it's like wow this is you just feel really good about yourself you know you're you're full of energy right and and this is the thing that i thought very strange when i did my first sort of three or four day fast it's like i have a ton of energy like i could feel like i could do anything my friend who used to work he said he's a doctor and he worked a lot of nights and stuff he said it felt like my brain was like on fire like i thought i could do anything and everything faster than i could and better than i could ever do it before interestingly another friend of mine who's a cardiologist so he's a heart specialist he says you know i used to he played piano for his whole life and he says there's always this piece that i couldn't play and then as soon as i started fasting i noticed that i could start to do it wow that's incredible right and and the doctors when i talk to the doctors they actually instantly see the logic of what i'm talking about because they know the physiology what happens in the human body because what i'm talking about which is what all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all the stuff that people tell you about fasting which is oh you can't do it and it's dangerous and it's really bad for you whereas the opposite is true right it's actually part of a natural cycle right it's feeding and fasting feeding and fasting right you don't feed all the time you don't fast all the time but we've gone so far into that one thing so yeah i mean this this whole point of autophagy is very very interesting very topical uh if you look at studies of longevity for example in in animals the only thing that really makes people makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction and so even almost 100 years ago people were talking about it and saying well you can try and restrict your calories but if you do that day after day after day it's really hard so fasting may be a better way to go which is something they figured out sort of ages ago because if you look back that's how people thought of fasting that people called it a cleanse uh detoxification uh you know reawakening spiritual you know purification that kind of thing right there's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you which got turned in the 80s into something really bad for you right it's strange how how things work but without any sort of scientific evidence and as we become as a nation more overweight it becomes even more important and and that's just one of these sort of fascinating things so you know it's not like something i just made up it's like literally the oldest dietary intervention in the books right i'm just re-ex rediscovering this and trying to tell people hey there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our health care and you can do something like you don't need your doctor you don't need your dietitian you can do something about it right now for no money right and there's the science is all there right imagine how much money you could save as a society if we got rid of this problem and it's like oh my god like th it's mind blowing well i think that's part of the issue is uh the reason it's not popular i guess is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine businesses make a lot of money on selling more food not selling less food and therefore people want to make more money and so they have to market their products they have to market their medicines they have to market their foods to try to sell more of it not to say oh just have a few of these just have a couple cookies a day no they want to sell boxes of cookies right it's not like they got to make money as in their mind this is a business to be run and we need to sell more more means more people need to eat sugar refined sugar breads all these things refined oils refined meats for fine fats all these things you said that are horrible for us to eat the company's making them in order for them to survive financially they need to sell more of these things to us which is a challenge it's it's a real problem because if you look at say you know the doctors and the dietitians you go to conferences they're sponsored by catalogs and you know the breakfast makers and so on and it's crazy i was watching the show the other day one of these uh you know um tlc shows with like these very heavy women anyway they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes i'm thinking and they couldn't drink it it was horrible stuff they tasted really bad so they spit it out i'm thinking somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day except that somebody wants to sell it to you right right you're being played here you're drinking this horrible horrible tasting stuff and they're spitting it out they couldn't take it it's like oh this the whole thing is so sad because it's like if you knew you could simply take nothing at all and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money it's it's a sad sad sort of state of affairs that we get into what would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then if we had to recap that part of it what would you say the top five i'm hearing it's free that's one of them yeah so it's free that's a huge thing it's it you really you can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating it only tells you what the period of time that you're not eating so whether you're vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be even if you want to eat fast food all day it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food it tells you that during this period of time don't eat so you can add it to any diet which is incredible because now we're pulling on a completely different lever that is if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general there's two levers right we always think of the what you're eating right eat more vegetables that's great but what if you don't like vegetables right well that lever doesn't work right so here's a completely different lever you're talking about well there's this other thing i can do to lose weight or get healthier right so you can add it to any diet it's it's completely flexible that is to say you can do it whenever you want or if you don't want to if it's christmas and you do not want to fast for these few days then you don't have to if these decide to fast longer after christmas then sure you can do that that's completely up to you it's not like you're locked in you know the fourth thing is that it's very simple so if you look at a lot of diets that is to say uh say you're on a paleo diet it's a great diet right but it's like this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo right it's complex or keto or whatever you want to be so it's very difficult for some people to understand and i've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused and you always get the is this keto or is this paleo or whatever whereas fasting is very simple it's like you can drink water and tea and herbal tea say that's it everything else you can't eat right so it's very simple to explain to somebody it makes it very easy for them to follow because it's very black and white if you ate a peanut that's not fasting right yes it's not a big deal but at the same time that's not fasting and then the other thing is that it's powerful right because if you if you follow any type of a diet there's always a natural limit so say here you want to lose weight and so you say i'm going to do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet so you do a vegetarian diet and you lose you know a few pounds but not as much as you want well you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarians you're not ready for everything exactly so what else are you gonna do there's nowhere else you or you can't go more keto or you can't go more paleo whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting and it's powerful because you're eating zero which means that it is by definition for weight loss the most powerful diet there is like absolutely you cannot lose more than if you put any calories in your body no matter what diet you're on you're not going to lose as much as if you had zero calories exactly so that's the whole thing it is the most powerful diet it's the the the most powerful stuff that should die but it's it's it's like okay well why would you not want it right if you have a lot of work to do you want the best tool that's it right this is the best tool and somehow we said don't ever use this right it's like why if you use it you'll actually get all these other benefits so it's just free it's available it's simple you know you can do it with any diet and it's powerful and you actually don't have to stop you can actually keep going you can you know do a seven day fast and take a little break to another seven day fast and and and you can't go lower than zero there's no way it is possible physiologically to go less than zero so it is the most powerful diet so there's so many benefits and yet for for years i'll tell you when i started using it with with patients in about about seven or eight seven years ago maybe it was like the stuff we saw was just incredible people were like coming off their medications they were reversing their type 2 diabetes or losing weight it's like you know all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day [Music] we've got uh nine pieces of primal advice for athletes but i think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way yeah too and still like be better entrepreneurs be more productive have better relationships be sharper all these different things and i think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur absolutely absolutely but you talk about adequate sleep and this is something i've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts but why just emphasize is sleep important for you i mean sleep is when the body renews and regenerates repairs itself it's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think well you know i can sleep when i'm dead well you know that just is so such faulty logic yeah uh it's so critical and so important i try to get eight hours a night myself if i get less than six for some reason i i feel it i know it i try to make up for it i try not to let that happen i try i try not to schedule late nights because i wake up at the same time pretty much every morning so if i say i'm wake up or yeah 6 30 6 am 6 30. but if i were to go to bed at one i'd still wake up at my normal time so i have to really force myself to not force myself because i'm tired at the end of the day i'm and i and i have this whole wind down process so my wife and i will we'll watch some uh we'll do some television uh after dinner um we'll catch up on we'll do some some binge watching catching up of whatever the latest series was uh but around 10 we'll break uh i i have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi so i go into the pool's unheated so in the winter time it might be in the 50s wow i'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really really cold but not to the point of shivering just it's kind of a process in and of itself then i'll get in the jacuzzi so my wife and i'll hang out in the jacuzzi we'll just recap what the day's events were it's very we turn off all the lights in the house we have a fire pit out there so there's a real sort of a primal cave caveman kind of thing to that um then i'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and we and towel off and go up to bed and i sleep like a baby as a result of that wow so that's cold there yeah the hot cold therapy and that's kind of how i wind my day down and that prepares me to sleep it brings my body temperature down um which is uh you know they say that you're that you should have your lower body temperature to sleep better we keep the room around 67 yes we have blackout curtains so it's a real cool sleeping environment you know yes um i always like to keep it cold yeah yeah okay and so if you do like a cold shower before bed you think that's a good thing i think it's a good thing yeah it'll help you sleep better i think so try it i mean you can't hurt okay you talk about stress and rest balance what does that mean well uh you know you there are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable work stress uh commuting stress sometimes training waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes stress sorry well i'm more stressed about the traffic coming from right now you never know what it's going to be it could be you know i planned for two hours i got here in an hour and or i got here in less than an hour right so it's good yeah but so you so you have these stresses um and some of them are imagined even though your brain thinks they're real they're they don't exist you know the our stress mechanisms in the body where they evolve to handle true life or death situations you know a tiger bearing down upon you uh an infection that's gonna that's gonna kill you a broken leg that may you know whatever uh have its imp impact on you not uh you know am i gonna miss my kids rehearsal or am i gonna be late for work or whatever that's those those cause stress but they're not life-threatening and yet we the brain sees him as life-threatening so the the the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery now uh we talked about this before the show that meditation is a form of of rest in recovery but just taking maybe if you need a nap you can you can do that but certainly that that goes back to the whole sleep thing being being being critical but the other part of rest is recognizing if you're an athlete recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says i have to go do six miles today you know if you if you wake up that day and you feel like crap and you and and the metrics you know the heart rate uh variability is wrong or or you're just not feeling good then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and and being able to write in your logbook yeah i got through the workout felt like crap but i got through the workout i was just rested just rested yeah gotcha okay the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key so in in um in primal endurance we go back to that philosophy that the body you know is a very um sort of temperamental it's in temperamental states back and forth sometimes you're in a state of of energy and health and sometimes you're not and you can't really plan on when those states are going to be so you have to be willing to listen to the cues and for that reason we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete so it's it's when you feel good you can go hard when you don't feel good back off uh you take time off we use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there's there are tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep deep hard hard and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off you can break those further up into into quarterly annual segments uh always with the idea that some days are going to be good some days are going to be bad you're going to trend toward wanting to build to ratchet up over time but you're okay kind of not doing stuff uh as as hard and so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress it becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement gotcha uh the next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis train slow to race fast what does that mean yeah so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really to to grok and that is um a lot of athletes and i was certainly one for 20 years you basically go out and you train to hurt so you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's you know 75 to 90 percent of your max heart rate and you see how long you can hold that right right and and so you're training to hurt and it's and it's and it hurts you know it does hurt you but you feel tough as a result of it and the but the problem is you're not really training the body to be become more efficient you're just training yourself to hurt so when we talk about efficiency in racing we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in in muscle tissue when you run out of glycogen you sort of hit the wall so how do you manage glycogen well one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race the other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen interesting so we train you to become so good at burning fat now that's the 80 percent that we talked about with the diet but the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are it it's typically it's 180 minus your age so let's just say you are 40 years old so 180 minus 40 is 140. so that's going to be your maximum heart rate you're never in your training you're not going to go above that you set your watch you set your heart monitor to to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. now you you start out and you at that 140 maybe you could only run 13-minute miles even though you're capable of running seven-minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever right but now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat and we know that at that at that number 180 minus your age that's the highest rate that you can put oxygen through your system and and know that you're burning mostly fat and we know that because that's the that's the pace at which you could breathe you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath once you start losing your having to catch up or having to get winded we know that you're going into burning you you're building up lactic acid you're not burning fat you're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar so we want to we want you to be at the highest end of your of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic uh uh abilities and we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your rate so now the idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out you're in 13 minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate um you know uh bumping up to over 140 well you're not very good at burning fat you might be good at burning sugar like i say you might be able to run seven minute miles or six minutes right so but over time if you stay at that high heart at that maximum heart rate of which is low much lower than you're used to you find yourself running 12 minute miles and then 11 minute miles and then 10 30s and 10 and 9 30s and what it means is even though the heart rate hasn't changed you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through now you're burning more fat so you're becoming more efficient at burning fat so that when you do decide to ramp up and and throw in the the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym now you're you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you so just so i wrap my head around this is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based on how no so so your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting uh through your your system and it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat they don't they they can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen but they also burn without without oxygen okay so you know like you could run a 100 meter sprint with your nose plugged and you there's no oxygen involved yeah you'd still want to breathe you'd want to breathe at the end of it but and you'd have to be to recover yeah recycle but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount so when we when we train the body to become more efficient burning fat and by the way the heart it's interesting the heart we're not training the heart to be stronger the heart's already pretty strong so the heart doesn't get stronger it does the heart doesn't have a pr right you know what i mean it does it does what it does but what happens is you become more efficient at with with the materials that the heart gives you so if the heart is pumping oxygen x amount of oxygen and you're not good at burning fat you can't do anything with that oxygen but the better you are at burning fat the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that um glycogen uh storage situation okay all right so it's it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat not forever but it's certainly through the base building phase and that's that's a just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go wait a minute i can i can already run seven minute miles why am i why am i dropping down to 13s but invariably and across the board we see as if they stick to this for weeks at a time they become more and more efficient so now we know that that now you're running 7 30 7 minute 30 second miles and you're burning you're getting 92 percent of your of your energy from fat wow so that when you do decide to run those six minute miles now you're you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen interesting to get there interesting okay cool um structured intensity what does this mean uh it it means uh partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some some heavy lifting yes but not a lot okay and this is if you want to be an endurance half yeah if you want even if you even if you want to be an endurance athlete one thing that that athletes used to avoid like the plague was the gym right they would or if they went they would do you know 50 repetitions of a lightweight because they're thinking well you know i'm doing when i'm running a marathon i'm running you know 3 000 repetitions of of of a leg turnover so why don't i simulate that in the but you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well so what happens in any long endurance contest in addition to running out of fuel is you run out your your power uh decreases because you haven't trained the power an example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race the first one you go up 100 of your power the second one even though you have energy your muscle fibers are they've been exhausted and they they haven't trained to sustain your power so now you go up the second hill at 82 percent of your max power and you might go up the third hill at 65 percent of your max power well if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those for those efforts that require actual power uh we can we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that hill second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. right so we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights it's typically 80 of your one rep max and we do sequential um repetitions with with sequential rest in between so it's not like you do uh three sets of of five and you stop it's like you do three repetitions rest 10 seconds three repetitions rest 10 seconds two repetitions rest 10 seconds rest 20 seconds and and to until you can't finish one good rep and then the workout's over so it's not you just did one set and it might have might have comprised 200 repetitions right but that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power gotcha the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices what do you mean by that well so now we talk about everything else but the training so if you're you know it's it's uh spending time with your family it's playing playing games with your you know uh playing frisbee with your dog yes uh playing ultimate with your with your with your friends it's uh uh you know it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete i know i used to go well i can't i can't afford to do that i might get injured or i might you know i can't like i can't go skiing because i might twist and twist the knee well if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were uh you know then than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all sure right so um we we want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis you know you want to wake up in the morning and go i got that 10k today i got to go clean out my gi tract i'm so nervous you know but you want to you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day what we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training have fun um you know do the do the right sort of training that builds this this beast that when you get to the race you're you're going to enjoy it you're going to have fun you're going to perform probably better than if you've done the old paradigm of training right but you'll have lived a life in the interim i mean i so many of my you know ex triathlete marathon buddies you know couldn't have a relationship it was just you know imagine they put all their energy into this one thing yeah i mean they you know it's like uh the the wife says can't you stay home and cuddle you know saturday morning and the husband goes no i got 100 mile ride i got to do yeah you know and uh then i'm going to go you know run after that then i'm going to take a nap because i'm going to feel like crap because sure i did so much so we we try to look at the life in general and say well an awesome life includes participating in these events participating in life and doing well but it also includes participating in life yeah yeah so not to the exclusion of all of everything what feedback would you give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle you know they want to be a primal athlete in their daily life but they also want to run a business and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing yeah maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else yep what would you suggest you're doing it you've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multi-million dollar business multiple of them you know what would you suggest to them so um you know there are ways to have it all and uh but you can't be like the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur so you got to choose how much of the endurance athlete you want to be i would suggest that that for me the best choice was i wanted i want to toe the starting line with with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90 of the field's ass right so i for me the goal is almost how little can i get away with get the maximum to get the maximum result without having to go okay because because if it's going to take you know 20 of the effort to get 80 the result i'm not willing to put in the other 80 to win the thing right anymore or or and maybe i won't even win the thing because maybe i'll help overtrain so now you're back to the to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete get a stand-up desk and a tread desk so i have a tread treadmill uh every one of my employees has a treadmill out there really yeah at their at their work and they i don't force them to use it so they can but they can they they request it i give it to them so you could put in eight miles walking easily and no one on the phone or even on the skype will know that you're walking yes you know because you can make it uphill whatever um take lots of take frequent breaks and you know drop and do some push-ups or some air squats uh what i do is um i like to i like to go for a paddle and i'll bring a um a recording device on a stand-up paddleboard and i'll if i get my great ideas when i'm paddling so i'll just record my ideas right or i don't fall in well it's a plastic bag by the way i almost never fall in love i i typically will paddle for an hour and a half i'll step on get wet up to my calves and step off west but the other thing is um hiking so if you want to do some serious hiking um bring a headset in your phone make make business calls while you're hiking i got a friend who's basically a billionaire and that's where he makes most of his business calls wow he does two hours of hiking a day nobody knows he's hiding that he's hiking yeah wow okay awesome and then so the so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time it's not you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff like i said that uh that maximum sustained power workout i just described it's basically a short warm-up maybe 10 minutes of doing it and then you're done and and if if you could do it in two days later or three days later you didn't do it hard enough okay right so we want you to take a week to recover from that from that specific work doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day but you just wouldn't want to repeat you know a heavy leg day the next day right right exactly so it's how you this is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing where you when you put it all together you you can have it all you can be an effective efficient entrepreneur and you can compete against all of those other uh guys who are you know claiming they're going to kick your ass in the 10k or the spartan race or whatever it is right i love that um and we talked about the diet already but the last thing is proper recovery so how much you know is when do you know you're over training well so there there are all sorts of metrics i mean you just wake up in the morning and if you haven't slept well and you're you know you're sore then you're probably over training if you're should we not feel that soreness at all yeah i mean i don't think it's it's appropriate to feel you can feel it on a day-to-day basis but not on a week-to-week basis so you can feel sore after a workout you know today yesterday or two days ago but i think if you're still feeling sore uh for days on end then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts or you might have uh you might have overreached one of your workouts so uh that's one indicator um we have a metric that we use called heart rate variability hrv and you can buy these apps that measure the time between heart beats and you'd think that the that that you'd want to see a metronomic beat like um an exact amount of time space between each heartbeat but it turns out that that's an indication of overtraining that in fact the heart we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever is being called upon in in real time so there might be a 0.8 second skip and then a 1.1 second skip and then a 1.2 and then a 0.8 and a 0.9 okay and that's heart rate variability and and you can and if you if you've got a good heart rate variability score it's probably a good indicator that you're that you're rested and well trained and ready to go again if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here 25 of our blood flow goes into this thinking brain and the rest is like on stand

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, BURN BODY FAT, how to lose weight, weight loss, burn body fat fast, health, nutrition tips, health tips, healthy theory, shawn stevenson, mark sisson

Id: V7YoUrpHr9A

Length: 131min 20sec (7880 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021