(Breather) Knowledgeable health experts are really making gut dysfunction the heart and center of a variety of real issues that can arise within.

Brad: 00:08 Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author and athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit and happy in hectic, high stress modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge and expertly balanced that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go though.

Brad: 00:32 If you start to restrict your level of dietary carbohydrate intake, what happened is you get better at burning stored body fat throughout the day, so at rest and during workouts, you’re a better fat burner and you have a reduced need for glucose burning, which we know is more truthful, more dirty of a fuel source. Then fat once in a while you go out there and blast yourself with whatever you want. If it’s the crossfit session and you’d go there and try to beat your time and write it on the whiteboard once a week or once every 10 days, hey, go for it.

Brad: 01:13 Or you go and do a 10 k race. If you’re an endurance athlete or you get to the starting line and you light it up and your heart rate to anaerobic threshold for an hour once in a while that delivers a training stimulus and give you a fitness breakthrough. The problem is that the same pattern of the, if that happened too frequently, why would you need a cheat day? Yeah, I guess you could call it a celebration day where in my case I mentioned eating more popcorn and mark dark chocolate on a particular day then is aligned with let’s say a Ketogenic Diet pattern, but I’m not even calling it a celebration day. I’m just calling it another day and following that intuitive, uh, approach to eating where the, you know what it turns out in many cases my increased carbon taken, increased caloric intake is aligned side by side with an increased exercise output. Make sure I recover restock glycogen, all that stuff.

Brad: 04:32 Okay. Breathers show. Part two, deconstructing my two shows with Dr. Tommy would so go back and listen to the first one. It kind of sets this up. Not really, but it’s nice to get that basic overview of our overly stressful lifestyle patterns today and then get into some of these extremely popular progressive health topics today. Things like gut dysfunction, leaky gut syndrome, you’re hearing this more and more, and if you haven’t heard of it, you better start looking into it because this is becoming centerpiece of health concern, disease prevention, uh, attributing so many things to the health of our gut microbiome where previously, let’s say three, four, five years ago, no one even talked about it. No one made that connection, didn’t realize that, uh, the 80% of your serotonin is made in the gut and the tremendous link between gut health and cognitive conditions like depression, uh, also being the root cause of all kinds of autoimmune difficulties and disturbances and so many people now ditching the grains, sugars and the refined vegetable oils healing, they’re damaged gut lining and reclaiming their health whereby a whole bunch of other stuff didn’t work, including eating a healthy diet.

Brad: 05:57 When you have leaky gut, a, you’re not even getting the nutrients that you deserve from all that expensive stuff. At the overprice national supermarket chain, supposedly filled with healthy, wholesome foods. And I’m making a little dig there because if you go into some of these unnamed stores, there are so many packaged processed foods and even fresh foods made in their fresh area with canola oil. They don’t care. They haven’t seen the light or embrace the concept that these refined vegetable oils are arguably the single worst thing that you can ingest into your body. That’s from Dr Cate Shanahan and many others who are highlighting the importance of complete eradication of these offensive agents from your diet. Ben Greenfield on a recent show on the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast, and listen to my interview with him on, get over yourself. Fantastic stuff. He’s doing great work, cranking out that crazy content of his biohacking and optimize lifestyle practices, but a lot of good things to learn and take away at whatever level you’re comfortable with.

Brad: 07:09 He said that the evidence shows the residue, the damage caused by vegetable oil ingestion, uh, stays in your system for around 18 days. So he said, that’s not a cheat day with your French fries or whatever. That’s a cheat month by the time you add it all up. Oh mercy. Okay. So a little dig at Whole Foods there because for some reason they allow a vegetable oil products all over the store. How about Whole Dude’s instead? That’s my friend Brian’s Instagram account with his delicious meals. And we are working on a cookbook together just for dudes. So there’s a little plug there, two commercials in the middle of the show. Anyway, back to Tommy. So the topic of gut dysfunction, uh, if you have gas, bloating, digestive disturbances, conditions ending with itis, this is being more and more traced to the integrity of your gut lining.

Brad: 08:08 And the gut lining is compromised by these offensive inflammatory foods, especially gluten. That’s why gluten free is a giant health food category these days. A lot of people find that just eliminating gluten from the diet, uh, causes a quick, uh, improvement in digestive symptoms. And of course the digestive symptoms are direct, but there’s all kinds of downstream symptoms that start with a gut health. So not just ditching the gluten, but ditching all grains because gluten is the most offensive, uh, found in wheat product. But there are similar inflammatory agents, agents similar to gluten that are contained in oats, corn, uh, rice, things like that. So if you’re sensitive and you have some damage, you have some permeability and your gut. Now, uh, it warrants a complete elimination of the big three modern offensive foods, sugars, grains, and refined vegetable oils. Maybe there can be some add back and reintroduction over time as you regain gut health.

Brad: 09:17 But out of the gate, you really want to clean things up and try to get some healing going. Uh, so then Tommy talks about getting off carbs, man, getting off those processed carbs. One thing that we’ll do, we’ll save your stomach because the inflammatory, the stressful effects of ingesting sugar and trying to digest it really compromises your gut health. So that’s one reason to dial down the process. CARBS, we’re not talking about the colorful nutrient dense, nutritious carbs, vegetables, fruits, sweet potatoes. I’ll even put dark chocolate in there. Black is a color, right? As colorful, as long as it’s not beige or white. Uh, we’re talking about eliminating the processed carbs to help nurture your gut health. So if you start to restrict your level of dietary carbohydrate intake, what happens is you get better at burning stored body fat throughout the day. So at rest and during workouts, you’re a better fat burner and you have a reduced need for glucose burning, which we know is a more stressful, more dirty, uh, more dirty of a fuel source, than fat.

Brad: 10:30 It creates oxidative stress. Free radicals are produced when you’re burning glucose, especially when you’re a high glucose burner in carbohydrate dependency. So when you simply, uh, minimize it or ditch processed carbs in your diet, you burn fewer carbs at rest, you burn fewer carbs during workouts because you to become more adapted to burning fatty acids in your muscles during workouts, as well as burning ketones as needed. So we’re talking about burning fewer carbs at your desk, burning fewer carbs when you get out of your car, climb up two flights of stairs, enter the gym, get on the treadmill or the bicycle and do a brief warm up and then head over to the vigorous or high intensity session where you’re definitely burning carbs during those, uh, they call them glycolytic workouts. That’s a high glucose burning workout. But overall when you compare to a carb addict who has high carbohydrate intake in the diet and high carbohydrate burning both at rest, during moderate exercise and of course during strenuous exercise, this is the path to escaping carbohydrate dependency and becoming a fat burning beast.

Brad: 11:46 And not only to become a more efficient athlete, you have much better success with reducing excess body fat and you dramatically reduce your risk of diet related diseases that are so prevalent today, a metabolic syndrome type two diabetes. And even for those fitness freaks, with the six pack, they’re still showing signs of oxidative stress and disease patterns just like we talked about with the uh, Afib, the cardiovascular problems that a high performing athletes get. That’s related to not only the stressful nature of their workout patterns, but the stressful aspect of the diet. So in this part of the show, uh, Tommy got a little sciency, but the takeaway point is if you cut process carbs from your diet, you can meet your glucose needs in other ways. Uh, remember the brain has sort of a baseline requirement for 150 grams per day of energy. Uh, a carbohydrate dependent eater, most of us, most people on the planet, uh, are getting, you know, 99% of their energy needs and the brain meant by glucose because the brain is not really burning fatty acids. It’s burning glucose or ketones if you’re in the Keto scene, it also can burn lactate. Uh, surprisingly a amazingly, but putting that, uh, insight aside for a moment where either a sugar burning brain or we start to transition over into the world of fat and Keto Adaptation. So we can even reduce that baseline glucose requirement. But you can meet your baseline glucose needs via gluconeogenesis. That’s the conversion of amino acids into sugar. You can meet it through some fat metabolism such as the glycerol molecule splitting off from the fatty acid molecules. That’s why they call it triglycerides. That’s three fat molecules bound with a glycerol molecule. So when you’re not consuming carbs in the diet, you’re getting your glucose needs met in other ways.

Brad: 13:54 Don’t stress it, don’t worry about it. Another side benefit of transitioning away from carb dependency eating is you tend to lose maybe a significant amount of weight in a short time. That’s because, uh, three to four grams of water bind with each gram of carbohydrate ingested. So if you pig out on a giant bowl of popcorn, and not naming any names, but I do that once in while Yeah, it’s all right sometimes whatever. Um, and you eat this much weight in a sandwich or whatever the carb source of your choice, the popcorn, you’re going to gain four times as much weight because of the water retention aspect of maxing out those glycogen stores. And then when you get fat and Keto adapted, you don’t have to have this obsessive a stocking of glycogen at all times because you’re so good at burning fat. And that is why people lose 10 pounds in the first two weeks of transitioning over to low carbohydrate eating.

Brad: 14:56 Then the wonderful topic of polarized training comes up. That means, uh, you know, the polar opposites. So you’re either going really easy or you’re hitting it really hard with a short duration, high intensity workout. And we’re trying to get away from this no man’s land. This in between zone of what Dave Scott calls “kind of hard” workouts where you’re beyond your maximum aerobic heart rate, your math heart rate, which again for cardiovascular sustained workouts is 180 minus your age in beats per minute. So when you calculate that out, I’m 54 now, so that would be 126 beats per minute is my maximum aerobics heart rate. So if I’m going to go do a jog or bike ride or anything that’s a cardio related, I’m going to keep my heart rate under 126 which translates to a very, very slow, comfortable pace and thereby have a productive fitness and health outing.

Brad: 15:59 But when I exceed that maximum aerobic heart rate, such as when I’m playing around of speed golf and running at a tournament conditions where I’m running a tempo or anaerobic threshold pace and my heart rate’s up there, 165-170 for an hour, that is a highly stressful event and can lead to breakdown burnout, illness and injury, hormone dysfunction, immune suppression. If you do those in a repeated pattern. So that’s the opposite of polarized training is going out there and going quote kind of hard several days a week and I’m sorry, gotta break it to you, most of the crossfit scene, because of the stressful nature of that workout and how they blend a strength with cardio, your heart rate is up way above maximum aerobic heart rate for most of the 45 minute session or however long you’re going, especially when people don’t pay proper attention to a gentle warm up, they go jump onto the bike and they warm up, quote unquote, at a heart rate, vastly exceeding their maximum aerobic function.

Brad: 17:00 Same with the endurance community where they’re going out on these pack rides or pack runs and they’re 15, 20, 25 beats above their maximum aerobic heart rate because they don’t feel like they’re getting a workout when they’re doing jogging./walking, which is really the proper workout to develop the aerobic system. Uh, my shows with Dr Phil Maffetone get deep into this on the primal endurance channel, so it’s a tough one to tell people to slow down, but polarized training is where it’s at. Of course, we want to a favor and advocate for those brief high intensity sessions. On the other side of the coin, the other side of the polar opposites, but again, the featured, uh, aspect of those is that they’re brief in duration. So it’s stimulating the fight or flight hormones in a genetically desirable manner for a short duration workout where you really hit it hard.

Brad: 17:51 So you’re not kind of going into this in between session, uh, in the gym with strength training where you’re lifting a whole bunch of reps, have a pretty easy weight and you’re falling into that same category as the endurance athlete who’s jogging a little bit too quickly. I call these blended workouts where you’re going in the gym, you’re not resting much in between sets and so your heart rate’s elevated for 45 to 60 minutes. Your trainers, they’re urging you on saying, all right, let’s go to the next station. Uh, don’t rest too much. We’ve got to start hitting these other weights. But again, they’re not too hard because you’re tired and you’re getting a broken down and worn out over the course of your session. That is not a productive workout pattern. Again, once in a while you go out there and blast yourself with whatever you want.

Brad: 18:37 If it’s a crossfit session and you go there and try to beat your time and write it on the whiteboard once a week or once every 10 days, hey, go for it. Or you go and do a 10 k race. If you’re an endurance athlete where you get to the starting line and you light it up and your heart rate’s and anaerobic threshold for an hour once in a while that delivers a training stimulus and gives you a fitness breakthrough. The problem is the sustained pattern of these that happen too frequently. These are horribly in conflict with our genetic expectations for health because as I detailed on the first breather show, our ancestors didn’t do any of this nonsense. They did the bare minimum necessary to survive. What’s happening during these blended workouts, these chronic workouts is that you’re overstimulating the fight or flight response both too many days a week. If you’re heading to crossfit too much and for too long of a duration, so the optimal high intensity session is going to last for hey, 15-20 minutes, that’s plenty.

Brad: 19:40 Of course not counting the warmup and the in between stuff, but your hard work periods of time are very short and you get out of the gym and go home and allow your hormones to settle back down to a homeostasis rather than buzzing out for too long and getting these endorphin rushes. That make you feel good? But they’re leading to breakdown burnout, illness and injury. And

Brad: 20:02 Another problem with the polarized training, excuse me, and the other problem with not doing polarized training but doing these kind of hard workouts is you’re really messing up your gut health because by definition, when you’re doing, let’s say an anaerobic threshold session, your gut becomes permeable. When your body temperature heats up, stays elevated for a while, your cells are a burning, a lot of energy for a sustained period of time, and that is leading to opening up the pipes and putting yourself at risk for a leaky gut syndrome.

Brad: 20:39 Next we transitioned into the discussion of metabolic efficiency and Tommy offers an interesting and expanded perspective to the narrowly focused a boiler plate. Talk about the Keto Diet. That fasting is the ultimate health practice and eating fewer calories over your lifetime equals longevity. Now, that’s not a false statement. There’s a lot of truth to that. There’s a lot of science behind that. Uh, that fasting extends lifespan. Uh, but the counterpoint that Tommy’s trying to make is to bring in that, uh, that high stress modern life aspect, both with athletic training and busy, stressful, hectic pace in the workplace where you’re using your brain, uh, in a sustained and intense manner that’s vastly different than any hunter gatherer. So possibly needing additional calories and having the fasting perhaps becoming too stressful when combined in conjunction with these high intensity workouts. Uh, Tommy made an interesting point that as an athlete doing a depleting workout where you’re depleting your cells of energy, you pushing yourself pretty hard, whether it’s a high intensity, doing a bunch of box jumps and then going over and doing some dead lifts and then doing some bench press and going hard for 20 minutes, you’re depleting cellular energy.

Brad: 22:03 And when you starve yourself of energy, this is a very good thing for your health because it kickstarts. It optimizes the natural internal cellular detox, suffocation process known as autophagy. You’re cleaning up damaged cellular material so you don’t get freaking cancer and immune suppression and chronic illness and uh, autoimmune conditions and things like that. So autophagy, good thing starving your cells of energy in contrast to overfeeding them. What happens when you overfeed your cells all your life, which is pretty much what we’ve been doing when we’re going on our three meals a day or when we’re athletes, obsessive Lee refueling and purchasing the before, during, and after products memo and Gatorade had that series of products. If you’re reading through the sports, fitness endurrance magazines of old where they had you take something before, I think it was like a powder or something, then you had your drink during and then, or are you had your little gel packets during and then you had another powder after.

Brad: 23:09 So the opposite of health and longevity and WOOF. Luckily we’ve come a long way and now we realize the wonderful benefits of fasting to, uh, restrict cellular energy or doing a depleting workout. And I can also say, and or because if you get really metabolically flexible, highly fat and Keto adapted, you can benefit from pairing high intensity workouts with fasting for a real turbocharge in fat burning autophagy, aptosis that’s the, uh, program, death of undesirable cells, the potentially precancerous cells. Uh, Mark Sisson talks about this pairing fascinated with intense exercise. Ben Greenfield talks about this. Our [inaudible] talks about this. He says, starve and exercise Art Devini is the key to getting rid of damaged cellular material. And the question was posed to him, uh, what kind of recommendations do you have to treat depression? And he said, starve an exercise man, because that will clear out those damaged brain neurons, those damaged cells that are thinking bad thoughts.

Brad: 24:21 Pretty trippy stuff, man, but starve and exercise. One of the keys to health and longevity. Just be careful about overdoing it and realizing that in many ways, that period of fasting waiting until noon til your first meal is giving you a very similar benefit to the high intensity workout. And uh, we know, especially, uh, Brad knows that sometimes you can overdo it with the fasting and exercise to the extent that couple of days later you kind of feel like crap. So I’ve had a reoccurring pattern with my own personal R and D where let’s say I do a sprint workout in the morning in a fasted state feel fantastic. Uh, and then afterward I fast for three, four or five more hours to maximize all these benefits. And I guess what? 24 to 36 hours later, I kinda noticed I feel like crap and badly need a nap and feel a little stiff and sore, you know, a delayed aspect to this. I’m not stiff and sore and feel like crap right after the workout. I feel buzzed on, uh, the, the cocktail of stress hormones, but within an hour or two after a high intensity workout, uh, you might want to get a nutritious meal into your body to promote recovery.

Brad: 25:38 Okay. So that’s just my own personal insight and I really am liking the intuitive approach here. So if you ask me, how’s my, uh, Keto eating pattern these days, what am I doing? Uh, many days I’m engaging in prolonged fasting a Keto aligned meals, maybe stringing them together. And then right out of the next side of my mouth, you can find me bingeing on evening popcorn, dark chocolate, sweet potatoes, and increased carb intake on particular days. Uh, Ben Greenfield calls this concept, uh, the best of both worlds where he loves doing fasted and workouts. He loves eating Keto aligned meals.

Speaker 2: 26:22 He’s banking a lot of hours in that fasted or, um, calorically minimal state. And then in the evening he calls it family time and enjoying his lifetime and he’ll make all these preparations with his boys and his wife in the kitchen. And Ingest, sometimes a lot of carbs up to 150 grams just in one evening. But he says what that happens is it kind of keeps him free from the risks of hormone disregulation. They talk about the thyroid slowing down when you’re doing intense workouts and also doing Keto, uh, I believe Tommy and, uh, Chris Kelly saw that on my nourish balance thrive report that my thyroid was looking a little sluggish. And thus the suggestion to consume more calories. So if you get good at fasting and put in some fasting work, put in some fasting days, a delay your first meal, and then, hey man, the very next morning, get up and make yourself a delicious omelette, especially when it comes to enjoying your life and trying to align with patterns of your family and friends.

Brad: 27:25 You’re sitting there in the corner like, “no thanks. I’m Keto”. I’m not going to have any of that. And kind of feel like this, uh, a disengagement from enjoyable modern life. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about, uh, pushing over to eating the garbage. So, uh, I don’t like the statement. “Everything in moderation”. I think it’s a disgrace because, uh, we’re so unhealthy and have so many adverse trends in modern lifestyle that we need to have an extreme and devoted commitment to health rather than ever saying that term. Uh, when it comes to food choices, uh, and, and, and sleep habits and things like that, moderation will get you into a early death and demise these days. No joke. So when we have an extreme commitment to dietary quality, uh, our indulgences are celebrations are extremely well chosen rather than mindless rationalizations under the category of everything in moderation.

Brad: 28:22 So if I’m going to have an apple pie, it’s going to be that apple pie made by grandma steaming hot out of the oven, made from scratch with whatever might not be on the ketogenic diet, but it’s certainly not one of the intimates garbage with all the chemicals and the refined vegetable oils and whatever else they throw in there that comes off the shelf, right? So make it count when you’re doing a dietary indulgence and then have that, you know, extreme commitment to high quality and complete enjoyment of the celebration rather than a, these feelings of guilt and rationalizations going through your head, which might keep you locked into a adverse lifestyle practices where you can’t seem to keep your commitments. Okay. So that kind of discounts the, uh, the notion of cheat days. Because if you have to say the word cheat day and have that concept in your brain, that means there’s something wrong with your baseline diet.

Brad: 29:17 Why would you need a cheat day? Yeah, I guess you could call it a celebration day where in my case I mentioned eating more popcorn and more dark chocolate on a particular day. Then is aligned with let’s say a ketogenic diet pattern, but I’m not even calling it a celebration day. I’m just calling it another day. And following that intuitive, uh, approach to eating where you know, what it turns out. In many cases, my increased carbon take and increased caloric intake is aligned side by side with a increased exercise output to make sure I recover, restock glycogen. All that stuff.

Brad: 29:51 Enough on that. Are you getting me? You get where I’m coming from? Okay. Almost home. A little long for a breather show. But this stuff is important. Folks. Tommy finished up talking about the psychology part. We know what to do in many cases. Maybe you’re not in your head through 70% of this breather show in the previous one, but what’s going on? Why is it so difficult to keep our commitments aligned with our highest ideals? You know, one reason, the temptations that surround us in modern life, we’re tempted every evening to engage in digital entertainment. You should see my list of shows to watch a call at. It’s on my notes, on the apple software, on my phone and on my laptop because someone says, oh, you gotta check out this show. Escape from Dannemora by Ben Stiller, the true story of these guys breaking free from jail only a couple of years ago from maximum security. It was a great show. I’m on episode number three. It was an eight part series and cheese. It’s one of the few things I’ve been able to watch in the last six months. So this list of stuff to watch is just off the page. It’s so long because every evening when it’s time to make the decision whether I should plug into get started on another series cause I have so many good recommendations or just go to sleep, I’m usually too tired and I want to go to sleep.

Brad: 31:13 So we have that constant temptation to engage in digital, digital entertainment. For some reason the type a hard driving goal oriented, uh, population has this temptation to exhaust ourselves with too much training and too much work in the workplace. We’re constantly being pushed and even encouraged to go out of balance. What happens to the worker that goes out of balance and works too much. The mofo probably gets promoted these days, you know what I’m saying? So these days we have this baseline cultural acceptance and even embracing of disastrous health practices, like a poor sleeping habits. People are blasting their eyeballs with digital stimulation from a small screen, medium or large screen late into the evening. Like it’s normal everyday pattern. And that makes it okay. Ah, enough already. Let’s stand up and take charge and say, no, I don’t want to struggle and suffer and get old too quickly and make some compromises and make some commitment. Of course you can still enjoy your digital entertainment. Maybe do it a little earlier in the evening. Right. Okay. Be mindful about it anyway and if you’re going to celebrate and indulge maybe a, make a commitment to yourself to kind of turn things around or balance things out the following day.

Brad: 32:33 Wow. What a show. Thank you so much Dr. Tommy would for the inspiration. We pretty much kept to the uh, summary of what we talked about in the two shows, but definitely go listen to those to hear it from him and hopefully, this stuff will resonate.