Let’s take a breather and talk diet and exercise tips.

Are you tired of hearing the terms “hacks” and “shortcuts” when it comes to healthy living? So am I! Leading a healthy, balanced life is inherently enjoyable. Sometimes the best things in life take extra time. For example, preparing a fresh, home cooked meal. These Longcuts are related to diet and exercise. These tips are simple, common sense and easy to implement into daily life. Eat only clean, colorful, nutritious foods. Ditch toxic modern foods like sugars, grains and refined vegetable oils. Make mealtimes calm, relaxed, and unhurried. Eat in a maximum window of 12 hours (e.g. 8am to 8pm). Strive to ditch carb dependency and trend toward becoming fat- and keto-adapted.

With exercise, it seems like increasing general everyday movement is becoming the number one priority, arguably more important that actual workouts! Honor the Primal Blueprint philosophy of moving frequently at a slow pace, lifting heavy things, and sprinting once in a while. Brief, intense workouts optimize hormones and stimulate fitness improvement. It’s critical to avoid anything resembling a chronic exercise pattern. This is a huge and common mistake for everyone from elite athletes and novices. Also realize that the harder you train, the harder you have to recover. Stay tuned for an important Part 2 of Longcuts, relating to sleep, stress management and relationships.

TIMES STAMPS: 

What are some real ways to optimize your life? [00:00:53]

Eat only clean, colorful, nutritious foods. [00:01:36]

Ditch grains, sugars and refined vegetable oils.  [00:03:44]

Don’t get so stressed about it. [00:04:44]

Make sure mealtimes are calm and relaxed.  [00:05:15]

Strive for metabolic flexibility. [00:07:46]

Number one most important exercise factor is turning out to be increased everyday movement. [00:09:29]

LINKS:

Fast Food Nation

Orthoexia: and unnatural and unhealthy fixation around food

Active Couch Potato Syndrome

LISTEN:

Speaker: Brad Kearns

Brad Kearns:Welcome to the Get Over Yourself Podcast. This is Brad Kearns. 

“We want to strive for that metabolic flexibility. That means the ability to burn a variety of fuel sources, most particularly stored body fat for energy. So, that means a grand, fabulous transition away from the disastrous state of carbohydrate dependency that pretty much represents the standard American diet.”

Welcome to another breather show. This one is about long cuts. Get it, instead of shortcuts. I’m so sick of hearing the word “shortcuts” and “hacks”, especially when it comes to healthy living. So, it’s going to be a short breather show, fast moving. But we’re going to talk about some real ways to optimize your life in the areas of diet, exercise, sleeping habits, lifestyle, relationships, stress management. Okay? Putting it all together; simple insights, no shortcuts.

You know what? This show is going to simulcast on the Primal Blueprint Podcast Keto show that I do once a week. So, if you’re into the ketogenic diet, the keto movement, go over and listen to that show, and we’ll get deep into the powerful health benefits of following a ketogenic diet, living a keto-friendly lifestyle.

For now, first, let’s talk about diet, so much controversy, so much detail, so much confusion, splitting hairs, people that are so far into the diet thing, that they’re obsessed with the different choices they face every day, and the macronutrient profiles and analyzing and charting everything on computer. We got to take a few steps backward and just talk about eating clean, colorful, nutritious foods that are as close to their natural state as possible.

The great thought leaders like Michael Poland, writing his books that just talk about healthy, clean eating. And if it happens to be meat, yes, go source some delicious, nutritious, grass-fed beef. That stat is sticking in my mind from Wild Idea Buffalo and the visions on their website – wildideabuffalo.com, where you see these beautiful animals roaming free on the prairie and digging deeper. And noticed, how they’re harvested in a humane manner as compared to the unbelievable operation. That is America’s feedlot concentrating animal, feedlot operations. Oh, my goodness. The filth, the disgust, the unhealthy environment and circumstances in which our mainstream animals are raised and slaughtered in these slaughterhouses.

Read Fast Food Nation, a fantastic book by Eric Schlosser – also, made into a documentary movie. And you can see, oh my goodness, the health risks and concerns when we talk about the packing houses and the conglomerates that oversee this mass production of beef for our enjoyment. Stat from Wild Idea Buffalo – 40 million cattle are slaughtered each year as opposed to only 60,000 buffalo. So, considering switching over to buffalo meat, it tastes better. Why not? Wildideabuffalo.com is your start. How about that for a commercial threaded into the content?

Yeah, but eating clean, colorful, nutritious foods. Dr. Peter Attia, in my great show with him, episode number two, he says, “Yeah, how about just eating stuff your great grandmother could have eaten?” Here’s a guy in the very forefront of the science, deep into the ketogenic world for many years and he spouts off that simple common-sense insight. Instead of going deep into the particulars, just eat stuff that was around 100 years ago. Mainly or most importantly for your health, is to ditch grains, sugars, and refined vegetable oils. Especially the vegetable oil component, I want you to have zero tolerance for that from this day forward, for the rest of your life. There’s absolutely no reason to consume any of this.

However, it’s pervasive, it’s everywhere. So, you have to be very careful. In restaurants, ask for your meals to be cooked in butter instead of vegetable oil. Throw away any bottles that you see in your house or any of your friends’ and family’s house. Don’t even tell them, you don’t want to get into an argument. Just toss the stuff, replace it with a bottle of avocado oil from primalblueprint.com.

Also, with diet, don’t get so stressed about it. This condition of Orthorexia is becoming more common among health enthusiasts, and that is an unnatural and unhealthy fixation with being perfect or being the highest best dietary choice at all times. Sometimes, you’re going to do the best you can and that’s going to be okay as long as you have a heightened awareness for everything that you’re putting into your mouth, and the consequences of your choices.

Next, make sure that your mealtimes are calm, relaxed, unhurried, a restaurant-type experience. Every time you sit down and enjoy food, one of the great pleasures of life, this makes a huge difference in your digestion. The quality of the food that you eat is going to be compromised if you’re grabbing it and throwing it into your mouth on the run or while you’re driving in traffic.

So, make mealtimes a special celebratory education. Chew each bite carefully and completely. I believe the recommendation is to chew each bite 30 times. Count yourself sometime. You’ll find you might be falling a little short, like three to four or seven if you’re lucky. Yeah, chew and chew and chew. That’s the initiation of the digestive process with the salivary enzymes contributing to breaking down your food and getting it ready to be absorbed and assimilated as good nutrition by the body.

Also, strive to adhere to this digestive circadian rhythm. This is from the exciting new research from Dr. Satchin Panda at UC San Diego. He’s all over the internet, has done some great podcasts with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. And his research has shown that it’s an extreme health benefit to eat inside a maximum time frame of 12 hours a day. So, you don’t want to be eating in a larger time window than 12 hours. If you wake up and eat something at 8:00 AM, finish eating by 8:00 PM.

At the most, of course, the people in the primal paleo keto community are talking about compressed eating windows and intermittent fasting and extending the time from which you’re not eating, because this is when the immune function and cellular repair is optimized, when you’re in a fasted state. So, people are striving to eat in eight-hour time windows, very popular practice, or even smaller time windows.

Todd White – Dry Farm Wines, eats one meal every day. He eats dinner and that’s it. He doesn’t eat. So, he’s basically fasting for 24 hours every single day. 23, let’s say if the dinner takes a long time, which it does, because those guys go out and celebrate many nights a week. If you work for Dry Farm Wines, good stuff. My podcast with him coming soon.

So, 12-hour maximum, digestive circadian window. We want to strive for that metabolic flexibility. That means the ability to burn a variety of fuel sources, most particularly stored body fat for energy. So, that means a grand fabulous transition away from the disastrous state of carbohydrate dependency that pretty much represents the standard American diet, the modern dietary habits in the developed world. And if you are a carb-dependent person, that means you can’t function very well if you so much as skip a single meal, you are most likely doomed to a lifetime of fatigue, illness, suffering, disease, early death from type two diabetes, heart disease, cancer.

No offense, but these are the leading killers of humans in the developed world, on the planet today. And they are strongly associated with a carbohydrate dependency, dietary pattern of constant excess caloric consumption, lifelong insidious weight gain, increased oxidative stress and inflammation due to the nature of the food and the excess insulin production – t’s called hyperinsulinemia. And these are the leading disease patterns of modern life.

This is undisputed by medical science and people on all sides of the fence realize that Metabolic Syndrome, strongly driven by excess insulin production represents the number one health concern in modern life. How do you escape from this trap? You become metabolically flexible by developing the ability to burn stored energy, skip meals, subsist on healthy nutritious fats as your prominent fuel source and the diet and tone down the consumption of refined grains and sugars, which drive you into carbohydrate dependency.

Okay, moving onto exercise. And it’s coming about that the number one most important exercise factor is turning out to be increased general everyday movement. Thank you, Katy Bowman; visionary, promoter of Nutritious Movement. Not a fitness freak or any of that, but just talking about the importance of everyday movement and those types of ideas are rising into prominence as very likely more important than doing actual workouts. More important than your gym membership, your weekly mileage, your commitment to these fitness protocols that are very narrow in nature, narrow in focus.

Even if you’re a CrossFit person, the broad base fitness protocol in CrossFit is still just a workout. It’s still only an hour of your day, or if you go four times a week, which is probably too much. We’re only talking about a small sliver of your overall lifestyle experience. So, finding ways to move more in all manner of everyday life. That is your number one objective for exercise, especially getting rid of periods of prolonged stillness by getting up and taking physical breaks. It could be just doing 20 deep squats in your cubicle and sitting back down if you can’t get up and walk for seven minutes around the office courtyard.

But we have so much opportunity to do this and we’re getting super lazy. A lot of it’s what Katy Bowman calls The Lazy Athlete’s Mentality. Where because we did our hour-workout, we did wake up and get on the spinner bike at 6:30 for the high energy class, so we’re allowed to be a slug the rest of the day. And this mentality is both conscious and subconscious.

So, the exercise population is at particular risk for something called the Active Couch Potato Syndrome. This is where people who have a devoted commitment to fitness, never the less reveal the same disease patterns and risk factors as sedentary population. And it’s because that one-hour workout in the gym or on the road, does not counteract a long commute, a desk job and consuming your digital entertainment during your leisure time such that you’re inactive for 20, 21, 22, 23 hours a day. Okay, so increasing general everyday movement, number one priority, more important than workouts.

In tandem with that goal of just moving more every day, is to be absolutely certain that you avoid anything resembling a chronic exercise pattern. This is so common in the fitness community where people get into it, they’re having fun, they’re getting that endorphin buzz. After these high intensity spin classes or boot camps or CrossFit workouts or joining the running club and preparing for the upcoming half marathon or marathon, it’s go, go, go. It feels great for a while, but what you’re doing is you’re overstimulating the stress response. So, you are buzzed on stress hormones. You feel great, you have more energy, life is good. It might even being losing some excess body fat, making all this progress and fitness, but if it becomes a chronic pattern, then that overstimulation of stress hormones will eventually trash your immune system, trash your endocrine function, and you will suffer from breakdown burnout, illness, and injury.

This is the dirty little best kept secret in the fitness industry. Vinnie Tortorich talks about this on his show, Fitness Confidential. That people are exercising too hard, too strenuously. The trainers are guilty, the class teachers, the purveyors of exercise programs are all going for that low hanging fruit of giving you that endorphin buzz and of course, a nice balance to an inactive lifestyle. You get to the gym, you blow off some steam, you sweat, it feels good. But we have to step back and take a big picture look and realize that when you conduct high intensity workouts, they have a high stress factor, so that you require a lot of rest and recovery and general everyday movement in between. You don’t need to do it four times a week.

So, toning down those high-intensity or those strenuous workouts in favor of gentle, everyday movement. As the Primal Blueprint principles communicate, your objectives for exercise. So, the genetically optimal exercise patterns consist of moving frequently at a slow pace, lifting heavy things, and sprinting once in a while. That’s the optimal fitness protocol based on the historical experience of our ancestors. So, this moving frequently at a slow pace entails yeah, walking around more, taking breaks, doing your squats, doing your flexibility drills, but also conducting structured cardiovascular workouts at comfortable aerobic heart rate – 180 minus your age or less. Okay?

Pairing that with regular strength training sessions. They need not be long in duration. You can get a lot done in 15, 20, or 30 minutes, and you never need to exercise longer than 30 minutes during a strength workout. Because if you do, you’ll overstimulate stress hormones. Sprinting, brief duration, all out sprints that give you that spike of adaptive hormones. Hormones that help you get better and stronger in the future and delay the aging process. So, pretty simple fitness protocol. Not so time consuming, but making a big difference.

That is going to be a part one finish line for long cuts to a longer life. We will cover the sleep relationships, stress management techniques in a different show. Thank you for listening to this one. Get that diet and exercise dialed.

Yeah, this is a cool newsletter; how to produce a successful pod … Are you recording yet? No, don’t push record yet, I want to read through this. Let me know what you think. It says, “If you’re going to read an advertisement, make sure it’s authentic. Otherwise, you’ll harm your credibility.” Yeah, that makes sense. And oh, it says, “If you’re asking your audience for a call to action, be sincere. Thank them from the bottom of your heart and make it short.” So, let’s try that. Okay, yeah, hit that red button, record. Yeah, right there. Okay.

Hey, this is Brad Kearns. Thank you for listening to the show. You know this show is fairly new, so it would be a huge, massive help if you could visit iTunes for a second or wherever you consume podcast, and leave a positive review for the show. This is how shows attract more attention and get new listeners, so I can brainwash them to subscribe for life with this wonderful compelling content.

Thank you so much for doing that. I know it’s a big hassle, but if you do it, and then you go over and email me; getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com, I will mail you a dollar. No, I won’t do that man. That would be a huge hassle. Talk about a hassle. But you know what I’ll do? I’ll thank you from the bottom of my heart and I’ll enter you into a draw and put your address on there too. And I’ll do like 10 grand prizes, something cool like primal kitchen, extra virgin avocado oil to drizzle on your salads, something. I promise you. Thank you so much for leaving a review.

It’s time to spread the word about the Get Over Yourself Podcast. And speaking of advertising, I promise you at all times, I will be talking about only stuff that’s super cool, awesome. That I use and appreciate in daily life and would recommend to you or think that might help you. I know you can always push that 32nd forward button and skip the ads, but I want to do some cool stuff. I appreciate you listening, if it’s value to you.

Please, participate in the show. Send me your constructive feedback or otherwise, suggestions, comments to that wonderful lengthy email, but unforgettable; getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening. This is Brad Kearns.

Okay, hit stop right there and then it’ll stop. Yeah.