Listeners just keep sending in a variety of interesting questions and thought-provoking comments. Please join the fun by sharing your thoughts by emailing podcast@bradventures.com.
We’ll cover topics like: Can Two Meals A Day be just breakfast and dinner, and do caloric (and non-caloric) beverages count as breaking your fast? I discuss the many benefits of mitochondrial health, and one listener asks: what should one think when a physician says to specifically avoid eating red meat after having a colon procedure? I also read a message from a listener, Jack, who reports that Two Meals A Day has changed his life and “undone decades of damage” as well as another message from a listener who has been “mind blown” by a study showing that a few sprint workouts over just two weeks can double your time to exhaustion, which leads into the next question: can women obtain a similar benefit doing single set exercises to failure? I also talk about the importance of distinguishing between wholesome, unprocessed carbs versus refined carbs, and the big-picture perspective about the healthy role carbohydrates can play in the diet, especially for active folks, and how stacking the stress factors of intense workouts, carb restriction, extended fasting and being in the 50+ age group can be counterproductive.
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Brad:
[00:02:14] Okay. It’s time to go into the mail bag for some wonderful Q and a, I nominate B.rad podcast listeners as the smartest, most astute, most thoughtful group of podcast listeners in the world. Congratulations. Good luck in the contest and really thank you so much for these thoughtful messages. Some of them are comments, success story style, and some of them are straight up questions, but we’re gonna breeze through these. And I think you’re gonna have some fun, some inspiration and some clarity.Heather starts it out saying, uh, I’m trying to get more tuned into my natural hunger cues and listening to the, all the latest and greatest from your book Two Meals a Day. Most frequently I hear people talk about skipping breakfast and eating lunch and dinner as their two meals, Can the two meals please be breakfast and dinner instead? I’ve always noticed that I become ravenous in the morning after fasting for 12 hours.
Brad (03:10):
I hardly ever feel hungry for lunch. So breakfast and dinner might be a great fit for me intuitively. And of course, Heather, you have my permission to pick your two meals whenever you want. And there are a lot of good reasons for eating breakfast in the morning. And I think sometimes we get led too far down the path of dogma and rigidity to the extent that the extreme popularity of the 16 and eight pattern where you want to get faster for 16 hours every single day. And that means you can’t eat until 12 noon, even if you’re out and about running around and might not have time to sit down to a delicious, relaxing lunch, but you might be better served to sit with your family and enjoy a leisurely breakfast in the morning to fuel your busy hectic day and then come back and eat dinner.
Brad (03:57):
So yes, the fasting pattern that you engage in and the meal times that you choose are all up to personal preference, convenience, and especially enjoying your life and connecting and enjoying meals with others. So let’s take a step back here and realize that there are an assortment of wonderful benefits to be had by eating less frequently optimizing caloric intake instead of overeating and banking periods of fasting, where your body can engage or upregulate repair and rejuvenation processes, particularly at nighttime when you’re sleeping. Right. So I appreciate the message from leaders in time restricted feeding like Dr. Sacha Panda, who suggests that we should all have a minimum 12 hours every day where we’re not engaging digestive function. We’re not consuming calories, we’re not processing anything, even non caloric beverages such as coffee. So that 12 hour break, I think, is words to live by for anyone outside of that,
Brad (05:02):
it’s a free for all really because if you like to start your day with healthy, nutritious food and end your day with a healthy, nutritious meal and have a long period of fasting in between that guess what as Brian McAndrew, my cohort at Primal Blueprint filmmaker said, uh, going through a day, a busy day full of energy expenditure in a fasted state is just as impressive as fasting for 16 hours. So in other words, a 12 hour or 10 hour or eight hour fast, where you’re actually using energy is just as impressive as banking a 16 hour fast, where a lot of those hours were sleeping, right? So let’s not get too caught up in one being better or superior than the other. And I’m especially reflecting and rethinking on the dire necessity to fast for long periods of time.
Brad (05:56):
If you have a healthy body composition, healthy blood work and have a active fitness regimen. Because when you engage in a strenuous workout, you are stimulating the same metabolic benefits as happens when you’re fasting. That is you are starving your cells of energy through the workout demand. So you’re creating a energy deficit in the cells, and that’s what triggers mitochondrial biogenesis, that wonderful process of making new mitochondria or improving the function of existing mitochondria and this emerging field of mitochondrial health. There’s a lot of books about it. There’s a lot commentary and studies isolating on the functioning of the mitochondria inside the cell as a key to health vitality and especially longevity. And when your mitochondria become dysfunctional, you have a difficult time metabolizing fuel for energy. And to when you get into things like metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, and so forth.
Brad (07:02):
So healthy mitochondria comes through various channels and pathways. One of ’em would be fasting. One of ’em would be frequent exercise, especially strenuous exercise, brief intense workouts, or of course, prolonged workouts that will also give you that, uh, energy challenge depleting energy, and then refueling and getting your cells to be insulin sensitive that is tuned into the signaling of insulin. So the minimal amount of insulin will do the job wonderfully rather than the opposite, which is insulin resistant. And that’s when you’re producing excess insulin in a chronic manner, because one reason is you’re eating meals when your cells are already full of energy. Your glycogen tanks are already full. So what happens when you’re completely full of energy and you throw more energy down the pie hole, your body has to deal with it. And that’s when the chronically excessive insulin production can occur. If that’s your lifestyle pattern.
Brad (08:00):
And so that’s where you get these great benefits of fasting and, or doing challenging workouts is emptying those tanks on a regular basis and then refilling them with healthy, nutritious foods. All right. Another thing to consider is that when you’re into regular meal patterns, you will experience a spike in hunger hormones in accordance with that circadian clock. So if your body is used to eating breakfast at 8:00 AM every morning, for years and years, months, and months, whatever you are going to wake up and reliable experience hunger signals in the morning as part of your digestive circadian rhythm. Now, if there’s a reason to climb out of that, somehow, like you’ve been eating too much for the last few decades, and now you want to get healthy. Now you want to throw in some fasting into your health practice and you claim to be hungry in the morning.
Brad (09:01):
Guess what you can work through those hunger spikes. They will subside in about 20 minutes. Ghrelin, the prominent hunger hormone that makes your stomach growlin. (That’s how we remember the term. Thank you, Dr. Cate Shanahan) when that happens and you ride it out, your body will realize that no food is coming imminently and it will kick into accelerated fat burning and even ketotone production, if necessary. So that’s something to note if you’re trying to change your habits for the better, but generally speaking, when you do experience reliable hunger sensations, that’s a good time to go ahead and eat and enjoy the meal. But if you’re trying to shift your clock, go onto a new program, drop excess body fat with a concerted effort over a, uh, short period of time. That’s when you might wanna take a second look and go keep yourself busy. when those hunger spikes occur, knowing that they’re going to will down in around 20 minutes.
Brad (09:58):
All right. I hope that’s enough. Thank you for the comment Heather and Jack says, I was a primal individual before reading your book. I was hunting, fishing and hiking almost daily, and he found my work through my main man, Dr. Paul Saladino leader of the carnivore movement. Jack had an eight centimeter pre-cancerous colon tumor a couple years back, and doctors recommended get this, that I cut out red meat entirely. They made no mention of fried foods, lifestyle changes, or environmental toxins. I know your works. Aren’t technically medical for legal reasons, but this book Two Meals a Day is changing my perspective and undoing decades of damage that the food industry has done to my body. Jack is so inspired that he’s now pursuing a doctorate of chiropractic and a masters in nutrition because of the work of individuals like you have put forth in fighting the food industry’s new propaganda.
Brad (10:57):
All right, man, you’re going out there on a limb. I appreciate you saying that. And boy, when you talk about a soundbite, that can be a attack savagely for being irresponsible. It’s that constant connection we hear between red meat and colon cancer. So the first thing I wanna say to that is besides not being a physician and don’t take anything set on this show as medical advice, is that when we say red meat, we are grouping and all, most, all the studies out there are grouping all manner of red meat together. So we’re talking about the pepperoni pizzas and the processed sausages from Smokey Jack links and all that crap that we’ve been put into our body for years and years, the nitrate and laden bacon, the fast food hamburgers, that’s where most Americans, most Western citizens get their very poor, inferior quality red meat.
Brad (11:52):
But if you are responsible here, and go source quality sources of red meat, we know that grass fed is the highest standard, a hundred percent grass fed grass finished, and the great opportunity to get stuff like that now from places like Butcher Box at an affordable price. When we’re going to that, we are now getting the highest rated in terms of nutritional profile and minimal toxins and objectionable fatty acid profiles, red meat is superior to pork and chicken. So when you hear people say, yeah, I’m trying to get healthier. I cut out red meat. I just eat chicken and fish. Well, there’s a lot of concerns in the fish family from toxins, pollutants from the waters and also the overfishing and the sustainability concerns are really high in a lot of categories of fish. You can go to Monterey Bay, aquarium.org and look at their recommendations for which fish to enjoy and which fish to avoid.
Brad (12:51):
The cow cattle and other red meat, animals being ruminant category, ruminant family. They have a better ability to process the feed that they’re given. Almost all cattle are given feed, even when it says grass fed, they’re oftentimes finished on grain to fat up before slaughter. And so the cow has a better ability to process those offensive food ingredients and still deliver a quality meat. That’s not laden with an excess amount of polyunsaturated oils, unlike the chicken and the pork. So if you’re really trying to source the best meat, red meat is gonna come out number one provided you find the, you know, most sustainable and humanely raised options in red meat. But if you’re going conventional across the board, like if you want to go to what’s the chicken place that always has the line around the corner, the fast food joint, oh my gosh, I’m blanking.
Brad (13:50):
You can tell I’ve never been there, but, um, it’s like a sensation everywhere. I go seeing lines around this stupid chicken, fast food joint. But if you’re going for fast food, chicken, fast food beef, or fast food pork such as, or, or, you know, conventionally raised pork like the bacon from the diner, you’re going to fair better when you choose the cow rather than Chick-fil-A, that’s what it is. Oh my gosh. This show is not sponsored by Chick-fil-A. Thank you very much for listening. So go source the best grass fed beef that you can. And let’s second guess these irresponsible statements from whomever, even if it’s a doctor, saying that, oh, you have some issues with your colonoscopy. So I want you to cut out red meat as your first and foremost objective. The first and foremost objective would be to cut out the refined industrial seed oils that cause damage to all cells in the body immediately, including the digestive tract. And then we can talk about further dietary modifications.
Brad (14:50):
Okay. Switching gears to fitness exercise in a very interesting study submitted by Tom. Brad, you probably saw this because Erin Power, fromPrimal Health Coach, brought this link into one of her articles. Yeah. Go check out prima health coach.com. They have great podcasts, great articles, and a great coaching program. I’m working on a comprehensive fitness certification program, which you’ll learn more about in 2022. Oh my gosh. It’s so exciting. It’s gonna be the greatest fitness certification program of all time. But anyway, Tom says: this study had subjects doing 15 minutes of anaerobic work over two week period. So very little, just a few sprint workouts. And they were able to double their aerobic capacity. What they did was 30 second sprints with four minutes recovery, three times a week for two weeks. Then they did a performance test for endurance, their time to exhaustion test, and they increased it from 25 minutes to 50 minutes.
Brad (16:03):
This result blew my mind. I agree, man. That’s crazy yet, Brad, you’ve said all along that it doesn’t matter what kind of anaerobic workout you’re performing could be five times one kilometer. Could be eight times, 400 meters, whatever they all lead to an increase in fitness and the context there was, I think a lot of times recreational athletes get too drawn into the nuances and the particulars thinking that it’s super important to specify the exact type of interval session that they do in order to deliver some intended result. And really when you go out there and push your body hard, whether it’s bicycling fast up a hill or in a pack or doing a track workout or doing a tempo workout or an interval session or a hill session, or a far lick session, uh, they are challenging. They’re stressful and they prompt a fitness stimulation if you do them correctly and rest appropriately before and after.
Brad (16:58):
So, rather than getting into the weeds, I much prefer to focus on the big picture principles of how to train properly. So if you wake up and you still have stiffness in your legs and a little scratch in your it’s in your throat, that’s a great day to do nothing or go for a walk around the block and save it for another day, rather than adhere to these ridiculously complex schedules that are spit out oftentimes by professional coaching or an online resource where you’re following some plan every single day with all these. And it’s simply unnecessary unless you’re talking about, uh, performing at the Olympic level where they have, you know, whole teams of people observing them and strategizing and trying to plan for and peak at the appropriate times. But even then very interesting watching the 2021 Olympic trials for the United States Olympic team, there was a big story in the men’s 800 meters Donovan Brazier, the world champion at 800 meters, one of the top US runners in recent memory, heavy favorite, and everyone’s observing the race where he took last place in the, in the trials, didn’t make it to the Olympics.
Brad (18:12):
There was talk that he choked this and that, and really, he was a couple seconds slower than his very best peak form. But it’s so difficult, especially the 800 meter race where it’s so hectic and chaotic and you can definitely get left behind if your strategy is a little bit off. But he had a slightly off day. Wasn’t terrible. And there you go. So it’s so difficult to peak at the right time. And in order to run a 1:42 for 800 meters, you have to train extremely bloody hard. So you’re always tempting and teetering on that edge of over it and suffering a bit of breakdown or a regression in your fitness and peak performance potential. And that happens frequently. A lot of athletes are at the very top and then they’re off a little bit and spit out the back.
Brad (19:01):
And so that’s, what’s so beautiful about watching elite level competition is that it’s such a high level of performance required and precision required to peak properly that even they screw it up is the point I’m making. So, uh, for those of us who are pursuing this in a recreational format, look, get over yourself a little bit, take care of your body, mind your intuitive factors as your quote readiness to train and Kelly Starrett references this as a study from the Olympic training center that this metric was ranked more highly than anything else than the blood, the lactate meters, the heart rate variabilities, the strapping, the human up to a contraption to measure all manner of biomarkers. But number one, in terms of making the best training decisions, recovering properly, absorbing the training load appropriately was desire to train or readiness to train subjective readiness, to train.
Brad (20:07):
So if you don’t feel like it, if your legs feel heavy, when you go out there and do the warmups or the drills that you do before, it’s about to sprint or do something, uh, that’s high intensity, maybe it’s a strength training session in the gym where you feel a little tight, uncoordinated, all these are signs that you’re still recovering from previous sessions. And you don’t need to stick to the script, so to speak in order to become a high and fit and competent athletes. So there’s a vote there for being a little more intuitive, a little more flowing, flexible, and open to changes in variations, including those that are on the fly when you’re trying to design the correct training schedule and complete the optimal workout on a day to day basis. So, uh, going back to Tom’s letter that this study blew his mind, that just a little bit of going fast had this massive improvement in endurance in, uh, time to exhaustion. Brad, you and, and Phil Maffetone and others have been talking a long time about how too many athletes make their anaerobic workouts too stressful.
Brad (21:15):
And this study shows that that’s right on the money. That insight, because they sprinted for such a minimal total duration, uh, for the experiment and then still doubled their time to exhaustion. This insight has really helped me simplify my training. Here’s what I do. I do a good block of easy aerobic work I sprint for a couple weeks and I go race. Done. Boom, nice letter, Tom. Thanks a lot.
Brad (21:38):
A comment on YouTube from Hanan El Bassell. She was talking about the Ted Naiman podcast and his recommendation to do these single sets of exercise to muscular failure. He mentioned one set of pull ups as your morning workout, running a sprint up the hill once in your neighborhood, of course, warming up appropriately for any of this stuff, doing a single set of pushups to failure, and that is his template workout.
Brad (22:05):
He’s getting fantastic results. You can see on Instagram, very smart guy. He’s a family physician up in Seattle, taking care of real people in real life and recommending this very, very simple approach to fitness. So, I love those insights. It lines up really nicely with the other stuff we’ve talked about with Dr. Doug, McGuff, Dr. John Jaquish of pushing the body really hard on these really short duration, brief explosive efforts. And you don’t have to do it for hours and day after day. So you just sprinkle this in once in a while, and Hanan wants to know, uh, can this be, uh, the same application, the same benefits for females? Of course, yes, we all subscribe. We all ascribe to the, the same principles of performance and recovery. So, definitely go for it. And there’s not a lot to lose here.
Brad (22:57):
We’re talking about such a short duration effort that you’re gonna get that wonderful fitness response. And if you, wake up the next day and you feel stiff and tired, because you did a single of pull up to failure the previous day, then you take it easy. You don’t have to worry about pullups for a day or two or three or four more until you feel like getting up on that bar and, and challenging your body again. And you’ll get great results this way, even if you’re not quote unquote consistent, like we’ve always heard about in the fitness realm. And I think, uh, there’s a lot of importance to being consistent with your lifestyle, with your activity levels with your St training stimulus, if you have, uh, particular goals like endurance or strength, but I think we misappropriate that term commonly to conceive of the idea that we need a consistent application of stress to the body day after day after day, where we get ourselves a little bit tired out consistently such that we can get into these chronic exercise patterns that disturb metabolic function, hormonal function, that cause fatigue, burnout, injury, and illness.
Brad (24:05):
And so I think there’s a consistent consistencies necessary just to remain active and do things that are in the medium or low to medium category in degree of difficulty. So we definitely know that sitting on your butt all day and leading a largely inactive lifestyle is extremely unhealthy. Nut then we flip the switch all the way over to the other end where we have this craze of attending a CrossFit workout four or five times a week, or being in the gym and going to the group exercise classes that last for an hour and push most participants well over the aerobic heart rate zone. And then it participants are coming and doing this two or three or four or five times a week. So that type of consistency has a really high risk of attrition and negative results.
Brad (24:56):
Now consistently walking your dog around the block every day or getting out and enjoying the fresh air and doing something that’s moderately exertive. I mention my morning routine a lot on the show, as you know, and I’m putting that right there, smack dab in the medium degree of difficulty category. And the cool thing is because I do it every single day and I’ve built up the fitness competency that it actually is a pretty impressive workout. But for me, because I do it every day, it’s not taxing as it would be if I were to jump into it cold five years ago before I started doing this stuff. Okay. So you get the difference,? Be consistent for sure, but be careful with this stress and rest balance. And when you push yourself hard, you take it easy after.
Brad (25:42):
Thanks for commenting Hanan.. And now we have Scott ,writing in some very thoughtful emails. I love these exchanges. And he makes a really important point about our terminology, our syntax, when we talk about carbs. And it’s super important to qualify this as Dr Lustig did. So Scott points out during Dr. Robert Lustig’s podcast, he, frequently repeated the term unprocessed carbs in contrast to simple carbs, processed carbs. And so we have that distinction in nutritional value and the metabolic effects of ingesting unprocessed carbs. This would be things that have a greater cellular matrix require more energy to break down. So they’re slower burning carbs. You hear people talk about sweet potatoes as an excellent choice for getting additional carbs into the diet, because it’s a complex carbohydrate versus, for example, a slurpy or a soda or a Starbucks drink, which is a highly processed carbs.
Brad (26:47):
So Scott points out that, uh, in some of the shows, I’ve just said the word carbs, lumping everything into the same category. So we wanna distinguish between the unprocessed carbs that have that fiber matrix, and don’t be afraid to include those in a healthy diet, says Scott. And I’d love to hear this mentioned more frequently because it’s very confusing out there with all the nutritional advice, especially when I’ve seen sat back here and, uh, helped start the keto craze when Mark Sisson and I published the Keto Reset Diet in 2017, it was great to see it increase in popular, but it’s been so kind of sensationalized and misappropriated that now we’re walking around and a lot of people have, uh, received the message that carbs are evil, and the more you can cut back on your carbs, the he you’re gonna be because you’re gonna enjoy, uh, entry into this promise land called ketosis.
Brad (27:43):
And there’s an entry gate, and someone’s watching very strictly with a clipboard, making sure you don’t consume more than 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, which is very, very little, if you wanna go look on labels or on the internet, you can get to 50 grams before you sneeze first thing in the morning. And so the ketogenic journey is very regimented and precise because basically you’re limiting yourself to some servings of vegetables, which, you know, have a lot of fiber and water content. So they don’t have a ton of carbs if you have a plate of broccoli and a salad. But beyond that, if you’re talking about throwing in a little bit of fruit or a sweet potato there, or dark chocolate, as I’m fond of accumulating my carb count with massive consumption of dark chocolate, you’re gonna be past that keto cutoff, but guess what?
Brad (28:36):
I feel like it’s gotten outta hand in ways. As Mark Sisson says very appropriately, every time he’s asked about keto, uh, it should be seen as a tool to fine tune your metabolic function. The more metabolic damage that you have, the more appropriate, and probably the more you stand to gain from a journey into a ketogenic dietary pattern for a, a short duration or even a longer duration, if you’re still someone that is discovered to thrive and work really well on a minimal carbohydrate diet. But in many cases, it’s about healing, this metabolic damage, cause by years and decades of egregiously consuming, uh, an excess of processed carbohydrates. So we have to kind of calibrate the body, tone down that chronically excessive insulin production, help our cells become more sensitive to the signaling of insulin.
Brad (29:36):
So we’ll become insulin sensitive as a goal rather than insulin resistant, which is what happens when we have years and decades of chronically excessive insulin production. And so by getting the carbs out of the diet, even to the extent of going keto and getting at that 50 gram per day level for three weeks or six weeks or 12 weeks, that can be really helpful for someone that’s struggled with yoyo dieting, difficulty reducing excess body fat, is in the obesity high risk factor category, you can have great results. But when the athletes start heading down that path, it can easily turn into be something that is overly stressful. And as I told Scott back on the email, I had to learn personally that the accumulation of a number of different stress factors turned out to be too much for me. And those stress factors were number one, trying to perform these wonderfully exciting, super challenging high intensity sprinting and high jumping workouts.
Brad (30:40):
That is a stressful event right there. Number two, being in the older division, the old man age group of 55 plus. So, the older we get, we’re still trying to go over to the running track and act like a high school varsity athlete. That is a stress factor as is cutting carbohydrates in the name of the ketogenic diet. Of course, so I was doing a lot of R and D in 2017, 2018. So I was obligated to follow the diet to the letter and test my blood several times a day and note my, uh, carbohydrate count. And it was all in the spirit of putting out a great book and learning as much as I could about keto. But I was not a strong candidate to go do these sprint workouts at the older age group and not come back and replenish glycogen with a big feast of carbohydrates as I’ve been known to do throughout my life after a difficult, challenging high intensity or prolonged workouts.
Brad (31:39):
And then also I was doing some extended fasting because it’s really the best way to embark upon a ketogenic dietary experiment. It is not this constant shoving down your throat, high fat snacks and treats and keto, products that you can find off the shelf now, but rather just engaging in prolonged fasting so that your body naturally kicks into ketone production in order to maintain stable brain function in the absence of calories. So I was doing long fasts and then I was having meals that were very low in carbohydrate, and then I was doing my sprinting and then I was counting my birthdays. And so if you put those four together, it was too stressful for me. And, uh, I would have these crash and burn periods after feeling great. For example, doing a great sprint workout, being alert and energetic, and then the next day having a crash and burn episode and wondering what happened. And what happened was when you stimulate cortisol, the prominent stress hormone to get you through for example, prolonged periods of fasting, uh, to get you through a high intensity workout.
Brad (32:50):
Those are, um, appropriate and natural expectations that you’re gonna have an increase in stress, hormone production when you’re not eating when you don’t have energy and or when you’re trying to perform, but you have to kind of balance that out and calibrate it with things like a glycogen replenishing meal appropriately dosed with the healthy, nutritious, colorful carbohydrates. This reminds me of something that Dr Cate says that carbohydrates are only offensive when they disturb homeostasis. So it’s only when, for example, your body is completely fueled and your glycogen tanks are full because you’re not that active of a person. And then you sit down and consume a, a medium or high carbohydrate meal. That’s when body kind of gets overwhelmed. Again, we’re looking at the evolutionary example where our ancestors very rarely sat down to high carbohydrate meals or grabbed an 800 calorie Starbucks drink in between a full breakfast and a full lunch without doing much exercise.
Brad (33:54):
Okay. So when carbohydrates come down the pipe and disturb homeostasis. That’s when we have this insulin production. That’s when we have this inflammatory response. That’s when we create more free radicals, more oxidative stress from trying to process an excess of carbohydrate intake. And the highly processed carbohydrates, put you at risk of that because they spike blood sugar so quickly. Alot of them don’t promote satiety, for example, anything that’s in a liquid form, that’s high carbohydrate, you’ll be able to definitely drain a slurpy and not feel as full as if you consumed a similar amount of carbohydrates, with four sweet potatoes or what have you. S as Dr. Cate reminds us when those glycogen suitcases are empty and you consume carbohydrates, all manner of carbohydrates will simply go immediately to replenishing the glycogen stores in your body. And so it’s not gonna be as disruptive to homeostasis to go and pound a slurpy after an explosive high intensity, challenging workout as it would be sitting at your desk of after hours of desk work on a lazy afternoon.
Brad (35:06):
Okay. So, we know there’s a difference in nutritional value between a sweet potato and a slurpy, but after the workout, everything’s converted into glucose, every type of carb you ingest, and then it quickly goes into storage. So, this is all again, honored by Scott’s note to be careful with our terminology when we talk about carbs and we should always think in our minds when people are criticizing carbs, we’re talking about excess carbs. We’re talking about carbs disturbing homo homeostasis. And then of course the nutrient deficient, heavily processed carbs are giving us zero nutritional value and then leading to appetite spikes and metabolic dysfunction down the road. And please listen to Dr. Robert Lustig’s show for further details about that and how his contention that if you simply eliminate processed foods, you will clean up your diet and enjoy phenomenal health benefits to the extent that that should be your sole focus.
Brad (36:12):
Before we start splitting hairs and talking about the number of grams of carbohydrate we’re consuming per day and all that stuff that we do when we get further down the road. The 16/8 fasting patterns and all those things. But if we can just eliminate processed foods, Lustig contends that it’s virtually impossible to gain excess body fat, when we have a diet of nutritious, wholesome, natural foods, because of the satiety factors that naturally calibrate us to consume an appropriate amount of food, to feel full, to feel satisfied, to feel great, as long as it’s not, uh, simple and overprocessed. Okay along with Dr. Cate’s comment about carbs only being damaging if you’re disturbing homeostasis, this kind of goes hand in hand with Robb Wolf’s epic one liner from our interview when he says, if you wanna live longer, lift more weights and eat more protein.
Brad (37:10):
So if you are trying to cut calories and unwitingly cutting protein in the interest of dropping excess body fat, you’re looking at the whole picture from the wrong angle. And instead, what we wanna do is get our body composition right, uh, get our blood values in line, so that we’re healthy. And then that’s when you open yourself up to the benefits of deliberately consuming extra protein that you might be comfortable with because it’s to help all manner of baseline body functions, especially development and maintenance of lean muscle tissue. So instead of being, uh, phobic about the number of calories we’re consuming just looking for healthy, nutritious foods and prioritizing protein for the manner of longevity and for health, and also that’s gonna lead to a natural regulation of appetite and satiety hormones. So my final comments to Scott were regarding what I learned there with all those stress factors being too much for me.
Brad (38:14):
Now, what I do is I very gracefully increase my carbohydrate intake, usually in association with my workout energy expenditure in an intuitive manner. And of course I’m choosing mostly or almost entirely unprocessed carbs. I’m not hitting the Slurpys with my free hall pass when I am pedaling home from the, the running track. I guess most of my carbon intake is coming from dark chocolate. I also am enjoying the routine inclusion of sweet potatoes. I’ve been eating those purple sweet potatoes now, which are difficult to find, but they’re really delicious found some in Hawaii. And now I go looking for ’em at the store. But yeah, it’s an intuitive direct association between workout energy expenditure and increased carbon intake. Cuz I do feel like you can get a little sensitive to the blood sugar roller coaster effects of a high carbohydrate meal.
Brad (39:08):
If it’s just eaten in the context of a day sitting at your work desk. So mostly my carbs coming overweighted in the evening hours and that’s to ensure that I recover and have good hormone balance and all those things that nutritious carbs can benefit you with. And they’re also not disrupting my blood sugar at times when I want to be alert and energetic during the day. I love how Ben Greenfield came out strong on this a couple years ago and about how he’s enjoying or he is banking hours, long periods of time in a fasted state, in a ketogenic state, enjoying all those metabolic and health benefits. Things like autophagy that you hear about. Apoptosis, things that are up regulated when you’re in a fasted or a ketogenic state, but then at nighttime, he enjoys family time, this his kids, and they’re in the kitchen making up these healthy concoctions that might happen to have quite a bit of carbohydrate content.
Brad (40:05):
I think he mentioned that he’d eat easily eat 200 grams of carbs in one sitting in the evening. And that ensures that he recovered from whatever badass workout he did during that day. And a lot of people are mentioning a similar strategy where the carb intake is kind of targeted or put into this, uh, narrow timeframes. So do a little experimenting yourself and let me know how it goes. Send us all manner, feedback questions, comment, two podcast@Bradventures.com. Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you sharing the show, leaving a review on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we’re gonna have a little contest for someone who submits a review over the course of the next month. So go ahead, send your review. Email that you did so, and we will enter you in to win a free bottle of Brad’s Macadamia Masterpiece,, the sensational mind blowing nut butter blend.
Brad (41:07):
Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support please. Email podcast@Brad ventures.com with feedback, suggestions and questions for the Q and A shows. Subscribe to our email list@bradkerns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful bimonthly edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with apple podcast or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. It helps raise the profile of the B.rad Podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called Overcast allows you to actually record a sound bite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much for spreading the word and remember B.rad.
