In this show, I share more thoughts on my new, recent longevity mantra: perform, recover, perform, recover.

These thoughts were inspired by an interaction I had with my friend Michael Kummer—host of The Primal Shift podcast—who recently wrote a newsletter article about the longevity practices of the increasingly prominent biohacker Bryan Johnson.

While I appreciate a lot of things that Bryan does in service to the health community by trying all these cutting-edge strategies and then reporting back on his results, I do have some thoughts on the tendency many people have these days to drift a little too far towards high-tech anti-aging methods—particularly when it comes to taking a flawed approach to a biohacking strategy.

Just look at Bryan Johnon’s decision to eat fewer calories based on the assumption that calorie restriction does indeed help with healthy aging….When it comes to biohacking, are some extreme methods too extreme? And could we be making some huge mistakes in the process? Find out in this episode!

TIMESTAMPS:

Calorie restriction studies have mostly been done on animals. How do they apply to humans? [00:45]

Many people are equating fasting, ketogenic diet and other, strategies and interventions with longevity. However, these are things that that promote a stress response. [05:41]

Ditch the nutrient deficient processed foods. [07:57]

Brad takes a look at Brian Johnson’s longevity goal. [10:38]

A glucose spike is not inherently a bad thiing. Is there such thing as having insulin that’s too low? [13:56]

Brad tries to limit stress in his life in many ways.  He has found that shortening his time in the cold plunge is more beneficial. [16:55]

Some people get so obsessed with their training, they get into orthorexia which is an unnatural and unhealthy fixation on doing things correctly. [18:55]

Brad discusses his new dietary patterns. [24:38]

Should you feel sore after a good workout? [27:40]

Eat more and move more is a longevity strategy. [29:59]

Perform, Recover, Perform, Recover is Brad’s mantra. [32:40]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns.com
• Brad Nutrition.com
• B.rad Whey Protein Superfuel- The Best Protein on the Planet!
• Brad’s Shopping Page
• BornToWalkBook.com˜
• B.rad Podcast – All Episodes
• Peluva Five-Toe Minimalist Shoes
• Primal Shift Podcast
• Minnesota Starvation Study
• Nourish Balance Thrive
• Podcast with Dr. Tommy Wood
• High Intensity Health
• Mike Mutzel Fasting vs. Exercise

LISTEN:
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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype hacks, shortcuts, and science talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:39):
If you properly fuel yourself, if you get sufficient rest, recovery, downtime, and evening sleep, you are going to enable a more.

Brad (00:45):
Here are some more thoughts on my new recent longevity mantra of perform, recover, perform, recover, and these thoughts are inspired by interaction. I had with my friend Michael Kummer, host of the Primal Shift podcast, and doing a great job with his email newsletter and his podcast. I’ve been a guest on there a couple times. He’s been a guest on the B.rad Podcast, and he wrote a recent newsletter article about the longevity practices of the increasingly prominent Brian Johnson, the biohacker, we call him the $2 million man, because he’s famously spending a couple million dollars a year on his care with a team of scientists, researchers, trainers, dieticians, dialing in everything. He’s got a movement called Don’t Die. And he held a summit recently where people paid good sums of money to come engage with him. And these super high tech exhibitors talking about all the latest, greatest in biohacking.

Brad (01:51):
And I appreciate a lot of the things that he’s doing. I think he’s doing a great service to the health community as a whole by investing so much personal resources and time and energy on the cutting edge strategies, and then reporting back for all of us to indulge in the information. He even has like a competitive type of portal where you can track one’s rate of aging through these sophisticated tests and how you rank on the leaderboard. And he ranks, of course, very highly or at the top. But then there’s some average guy that came forth. He was a guest on a podcast, and he’s doing his thing on a much smaller budget than $2 million a year. But he’s, uh, supposedly aging at a slower rate, uh, and his telomeres and his other test scores, his blood markers are really well, uh, chronicled.

Brad (02:45):
And so all this stuff is fun and games, but we do have this tendency today to drift a little too far into the high tech and the quantified self, and as a consequence, perhaps be making some huge mistakes in the process. One of them is a flawed approach to a biohacking strategy, and I’m gonna call out Brian Johnson for one of his pillars. His mainstays of his regimen is systematic restriction of calories or minimizing his caloric intake in the name of longevity. And touting a lot of research and a lot of other health leaders that are agreeing or assuming that eating fewer calories is gonna help extend lifespan. Jay Feldman, my four time podcast guests and host of the Energy Balance podcast, Jay Feldman wellness.com, has done an excellent job taking this assumption to task and really, destroying it.

Brad (03:46):
Noting importantly that all the research, all the research on calorie restriction promoting longevity has been done on animals. Some of them, the sea creature, the sea elegance, or the nematode. And it lives 60% longer with caloric restriction, but it’s also in a sort of hibernation pattern for a lot of that time because it’s not eating. So you can kind of toss out conclusions like that. There’s been a lot of studies on rodents and other creatures showing that they eat less food they live longer. Uh, one argument coming back on the rat studies is th eating rat chow in the laboratory, right? They’re eating junk food. And so if you feed them less junk food, they live a significant amount longer. And again, not much relevance to the human. And as Jay pointed out on one of our shows, we do have one prominent, uh, calorie restriction study amongst humans, and it’s called the Minnesota Starvation Study.

Brad (04:41):
And this was performed on conscientious objectors, I believe, to World War II, where they were given a choice to go to war, or they could go into a metabolic ward. That’s where they control your food intake 24/7. And essentially, uh, these, these conscientious objectors, I believe they’re all men, they starved. They were starved for weeks and weeks and months on end, and the results were absolutely disastrous. There’s interesting research coming out now that it had lifelong adverse effects on their mental attitude and behavior towards food. They, a lot of them became morbidly obese and all this kind of backlash from this relatively brief starvation experiment. But basically, they wasted away, they became, uh, emaciated, terribly unhealthy, became obsessed with food around the clock, and it was a really bad deal, had no, you know, no positive benefits whatsoever. So we have to be really careful with making a blanket assumption, like, look, it’s as simple as this.

Brad (05:41):
If you eat less food, you’re gonna live longer. That one’s a tough one to embrace. And even Brian Johnson, himself, I believe, has modified his extremely precise regimen to increase from 2,238 calories a day to 2,471, because some of his blood markers were off. I’m making up those numbers, but it was somewhere close around there. So that’s one challenge I want to have outta the gate that goes, flies in the face of my perform and recover mantra. Other big prominent leaders in the health and longevity space like Valter Longo and David Sinclair, are in this camp of touting calorie restriction, promoting longevity, I believe, in an irresponsible manner in some ways. Similarly, many, many people are equating fasting, ketogenic diet and other, strategies and interventions with longevity. However, these are all things that promote a stress response in the body and deliver immediate health benefits such as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory response, autophagy response.

Brad (06:57):
That’s the natural internal cellular detoxification process that is heightened when you’re in a fasted state. And I’ve written about this myself for many years, and I don’t take back anything I’ve written. There are tremendous benefits that you enjoy from, for example, uh, adhering to a ketogenic diet pattern where your brain burns a cleaner source of fuel, and you have all this cleanup that occurs and this antioxidant anti-inflammatory benefit. However, we wanna look at the long-term big picture and realize that these strategies prompt stress mechanisms in the body. And that is by definition by the way that the benefits are obtained. So when you starve yourself, you go into a repair and conservation mode where your cells work better, in contrast, when you’re feeding and feeding and feeding, your cells are in, uh, cell division mode. That’s what happens when a female is pregnant or a baby is growing, or an adolescent is growing.

Brad (07:57):
Their cells are dividing at an accelerated rate. They’re wolfing down food all day long, and they’re growing, growing, growing. But, during these, uh, narrow stages of life where we want to be in a growth phase, the rest of the time, we don’t want to overdose on the growth phase and overdose on fuel, because that will set the stage for unregulated cell growth, which is the essence of cancer. And by and large, the driving reason why cancer is so prominent today is this unregulated cell division from an excess of energy. Dr. Layne Norton calls it energy toxicity. That’s where we are storing too many calories and burning too few. So when you have this energy toxicity state as the baseline, as the foundation for the vast majority of modern citizens, yes, indeed, all this commentary rings true. And if you start to engage in things like intermittent fasting, time restricted feeding, ketogenic diet, carb restriction, whatever it is, it could be going plant-based.

Brad (09:02):
Instead of your regular standard American diet fold with nutrient deficient processed foods, you’re going to get wonderful health benefits. What I’m doing instead is understanding that we’re locked into this energy toxicity paradigm in today’s world. And if we disengage from that for a moment and say, look, I’m getting my shit together here where I’ve ditched the nutrient deficient processed foods, I eat in an energy balanced manner where I don’t, I’m not in a constantly pattern, a lifelong pattern of storing more energy than I burned, then we have a whole different set of decision-making parameters to address. And when you systematically under consume calories that’s going overboard in the other direction without the sufficient justification for doing so, I’m gonna say it’s huge gigantic mistake, because as we’ve learned from my shows with Dr. Herman Pontzer reproduction repairr, growth and locomotion are a zero sum game.

Brad (10:04):
So if you don’t have sufficient energy to fuel your active energetic lifestyle, your body is going to engage in assortment of compensation factors to slow things down. You’re basically gonna need a jacket and gloves if you are engaging in long-term systematic calorie restriction in pursuit of longevity, because you’re gonna have a lower body temperature, you’re also gonna be less active. It’s gonna take you longer to recover from what fitness activities you do engage in. So that one’s a pretty easy one to shatter.

Brad (10:38):
Now, back to Brian Johnson, the $2 million man with his highly quantified and optimized approach, I think he’s still in a plant-based emphasis where he’s not eating, many of the most nutrient dense foods on earth. However, he’s thriving, he’s putting up good blood work. But one argument I’m gonna make about him is that he lives and breathes this longevity goal.

Brad (11:00):
Therefore, his stress is very tightly regulated to the extent that he can get a sleep score of 100 night after night after night. I’m not familiar with the sleep apps, but I believe that you wear the ring or you have a device that can somehow make an assumption of how high, how quality, was your evening sleeping period. That too, I’m gonna second guess for a moment because when I wake up in the morning, that’s when I assess the quality of my evening sleep doesn’t seem much more difficult or complicated than that, and I know when I slept poorly versus when I wake up feeling refreshed and energized and test out that assumption. When I get into, let’s say, my morning exercise regimen that I do right away when I get out of bed or into my workout even after that, and I can feel very easily and very clearly when I’m not at my best versus when I’m fully rested, I don’t need a sleep score.

Brad (11:56):
But Brian Johnson touting his string of sleep scores of a hundred is indeed impressive. But again, when he goes to sleep at eight 30 every night like clockwork and finished his eating, his final meal by, I believe he said 11:30 AM was when the last calories go down his throat. These are things that are gonna set him up for success. And boy would I love to go to sleep at 8:30 every night into a dark room. But I’m not willing to make that sacrifice due to the other things that I like to indulge in between 8:30 and my pretty standard, pretty locked in bedtime, rarely, beyond 10:30 PM So I’m gonna pat myself on the back. At least I do that. But again, maybe there’s more benefits to be accrued if I went down earlier into a pitch black room and allowed the body to try to strive for that a hundred sleep score.

Brad (12:50):
Now, this is a guy who’s got all the time and energy and funds in the world to pursue his goals and report back. However, his previous life, he became like a billionaire. He sold his company to PayPal. I believe he had a startup, and it’s worth $800 million. And that’s all wonderful. But during that time when he was super stressed and working hard and trying to build his company, and he has some storytelling about how difficult his past life was. He had a very public relationship, legal drama that he shared with his following. His stress was probably outta control like a lot of other people’s or somewhere on that scale of manageable to outta control. And I guarantee you, he wasn’t getting sleep scores of a hundred at that time. Now, if he’s traveling around, stressed out, building a company like a regular Joe, I’m gonna wager that he might feel like crap with his current regimen of systematic under consumption of calories, restriction of nutrient dense animal foods and swallowing 138 supplement pills every single day.

Brad (13:56):
So back to this, perform and recover mantra, and our obsession in the biohacking space with doing things like, continuous glucose monitors and regulating your glucose as tightly as possible, and the more regulated it is, the better. Somehow we’ve gotten outta control with this kind of thinking where we, we feel like a glucose spike is inherently a bad thing, and a glucose spike is not inherently a bad thing. A glucose spike occurs when, for example, you are asked to perform a high intensity workout, or when you consume a substantial amount of calories at a meal, the glucose spikes, the insulin comes into the bloodstream. Remember that insulin is delivering nutrients throughout the body to muscles and tissues that need it. And so insulin is an extremely important, it’s, they call it a anabolic hormone, but it’s the truth is it’s an anti catabolic hormone, but it’s the same thing.

Brad (14:52):
It helps build your body back and recover from stress, especially if exercise in the simplified example of insulin delivering glucose into the muscles and the liver to restock depleted glycogen from your challenging workout. so now I’m asking, and I had some good consultation from Chris Kelly at Nourish Balance Thrive, and Dr. Tommy Wood with our two or three podcast episodes we did a while back where we’re posing this question that is there such thing as having insulin that’s too low? We’re obsessed with getting insulin lower and lower. Dr. Paul Saladino thinks that it’s the number one health marker for disease prevention. And indeed, we have some urgency to get our insulin inside safe levels where most people, it’s outta control and, uh, heading toward type two diabetes. So you wanna urgently get that insulin, I believe it’s under 12, would be, you know, really big red flags, and under five would be optimal.

Brad (15:52):
But then when it’s under five, like one of my, uh, uh, blood test results in recent years, my insulin was 2.3. Is it possible that instead of giving myself a gold star and saying, look how low I got my insulin, maybe that was too low for an athlete who wants to perform and recover as his path to health span and peak performance and maximum enjoyment of my life. At a more recent test, I believe I couldn’t find the result, but it was around four or five. So still way inside the safe and optimal range, but maybe I doubled it, and maybe that’s a good thing because I started consuming more carbohydrates and more total calories in the last couple years as I’ve reported a couple times on the podcast in pursuit of this perform and recover, and this desire to, uh, put all my stress mechanisms and my stress capacity into my high intensity sprinting and jumping workouts, and then do everything else I can in life to minimize other stress factors.

Brad (16:55):
That includes fasting, that includes carb restriction, that includes time restricted feeding, that includes not arguing with people who cut me off in traffic, that includes not, uh, staying up past my bedtime and all those things. That includes moderating my use of therapeutic cold exposure as a health practice so that I’m no longer getting in there and trying to extend my record and go from four minutes to five minutes. And I once got up to six minutes in 38 degree water, just proving to myself how awesomely cold adapted that I was. And it was a nice experience. I think it has that psychological resiliency benefits, but I no longer go and stick myself in the cold tub for minutes and minutes. Instead, I do it at a proper therapeutic dose, which is extremely doable and non-stressful for me. It usually ranges from one and a half to two and a half minutes.

Brad (17:50):
I oftentimes will put just my legs in there rather than a full body cold exposure session. And I’ll do that after workouts, using it more as a recovery tool rather than a checkpoint in my health regimen, which by definition, again, uh, prompts a stress response and activates stress mechanisms in the body by which, uh, you’re able to obtain these benefits that are widely touted, like anti-inflammatory, antioxidant boost, all that great stuff. So, uh, I mentioned that point about is it possible that insulin is too low, that glucose is too tightly regulated, and then you’re departing from the perform and recover mantra to be obsessed with biohacking and kind of overdoing it with these, these tightly, tightly controlled life behaviors. And instead of going for, uh, like the athlete example and the athletes that I’ve had on my show don’t seem to be into any of this, right?

Brad (18:55):
Shelby Houlahan was talking about how breezy the rest of her life is, where she’s trying really hard not to get too deeply obsessed with her running workouts and, and regulating her diet and regulating every aspect of her life. I think she mentioned that maybe she’ll feel like going out dancing on the weekend sometime, or ordering up for Domino’s Pizza, and one of the greatest athletes in the world who’s not completely obsessed with their diet. To the extent that we get into that category of orthorexia, which is big issue these days in the progressive health scene, orthorexia is an unnatural and unhealthy fixation on doing things correctly, especially as it relates to diet. Therefore, one gets stressed out when they can’t find food that meets up to their high standards, such as they’re walking through an airport, they’re hungry, but everything’s got seed oils in it, so they have to pass and get stressed and upset.

Brad (19:50):
That’s when you’re taking it too far. And of course, we have the eating disorder, uh, realm, which is a extreme example of that, where it can be extremely unhealthy. Something that started as, uh, a, a, a health promoting behavior to try to scrutinize diet. Same with, as we talk about extensively in chapter Three of Born to Walk, the obligate runner, someone who has such an obsession with running that it drifts into the category of addict, by definition, one who feels irritable unhappy and stressed out if they don’t get their workout in every day. In other words, they have to perform the workout in order to achieve baseline emotional regulation. That is a sign that your athletic endeavors have become addictive rather than, a harmonious passion is the term that the psychologists use for something that benefits your life. And you’re into exercise and running, or fitness, CrossFit, going to the gym. It’s great.

Brad (20:54):
It’s a social aspect. It gives you that that wonderful satisfaction of pursuing peak performance and being competitive. So harmonious passion can easily drift into unhealthy obsession when you cross that line and experience that those, those negative emotional adverse effects. I talked about Chris Kelly and proposing that maybe my triglycerides were too low, maybe my insulin was too low, and my blood sugar journeys on the CGM were too tightly regulated, and that I could open up the reins a bit and, and benefit. And Dr. Tommy Wood echoed this, and he gave an epic memorable quote during the podcast that I think about and share with people all the time. He says, I counsel my healthy fit, active athletic clients to eat as much healthful food as they can until they gain a pound of fat and then dial it back a bit.

Brad (21:47):
And that’s where, you know, what’s optimal. That kind of flies in the face of this widespread promotion of fasting, time restricted feeding, uh, monitoring your carbs to stay in the, in the keto range, and all those things which can fly in the face of performing and recovering when you are out there putting in work. I love the insight shared by Mike Mutzel of High Intensity Health, his wonderful YouTube show, and he was talking about this widely touted benefits of autophagy. Again, that’s the natural cellular internal detoxification process that occurs when the cells are under stress, when are placed under stress by, for example, not feeding them. And there’s good research showing that autophagy benefits peak after about 48 hours of devoted fasting. So if you fast for two days, this is also a centerpiece of Valter Longo’s book, the Longevity and Fasting Researcher at USC, where, uh, after a couple days and you’re, you’re kicking into heavy autophagy, your organs actually shrink in size, which is a good thing because they are discarding damaged and inflamed cellular material.

Brad (23:08):
So off we go off and running with our ambitions to fast and try at first to go for 24, and then someday build up to 48 so you can get the maximum benefits. And then Mike Mutzel hits us with the punchline in his video, and we’ll put links in the show notes, but you can search YouTube and, and just type in Mike Mutzel fasting versus exercise autophagy. He says, after a hour high intensity workout in the gym, you get a similar autophagy benefit because you have starved and challenged your cells by depleting them through exercise. And you get this, uh, adaptive, uh, response to kick into internal cellular detoxification and repair as a consequence of training. So I ask you, which one would you prefer? Do you wanna starve yourself for 48 hours in the name of autophagy benefits, or do you want to go slam for an hour in the gym?

Brad (24:04):
And then, worst of all, or perhaps the, the biggest warning of all, when you try to dabble and combine those two, now you are overloading the stress side of the balance scale, right? The scales of justice, you know, the justice is blind, the, the blindfolded lady, uh, the statue, and there’s two scales. Um, you have to be very mindful that we want to have a graceful stress, rest balance in life. And that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I put up the mantra, perform and recover. I will report back that now.

Brad (24:38):
It’s been about a couple years of taking off the gloves and going for really an unregulated increase in caloric intake, especially carbs, and especially going away from any sort of fasting practices that I had in the name of health in prior years. Fasting still happens as a consequence of me getting too busy to sit down for a meal or traveling or whatever reason, but it’s very rare.

Brad (25:06):
It’s not a lifestyle practice anymore. So I deliberately go outta my way, whether I’m hungry or not, to prepare this wonderful B.rad Super Fuel high protein smoothie every morning. I put in dried frozen fruit, like \I’m fond of putting in dates and bananas in there. So I get protein, sometimes I’ll do coconut milk, sometimes just water, but several scoops of the B.rad Super Fuel Protein and some nice chunks of bananas and dates. And thats how I start my day. I’ll often have a huge breakfast. At other times, with tons of eggs and other treats and indulgences like fresh baked sourdough from the farmer’s market that I’ll live on for a couple, few days before it goes stale. So that’s the only bread that I’ll eat is bread that I’ll go stale in a few days.

Brad (25:52):
That’s my guideline. I encourage you to consider something similar that’s really a true nutritious bread without all the chemicals and preservatives that can cause a lot of those problems, especially with those that are gluten sensitive. So that’s kind of a look at my new dietary patterns. I’ve had a whole show on this, so I won’t belabor this, but again, a lot of ground beef consumption, a lot of dark chocolate, a lot of eggs, fresh fruit, uh, raw honey. I’m making a devoted effort to get more spoonfuls of honey in throughout the day. I’ll have dried fruit in and around my workouts and dining out. My favorite is taqueria. I could eat it every night. Also enjoying now going for a, a ramen instead of sushi. And, you know, even the noodles, get the eggs in there, get some nice meat.

Brad (26:42):
I love that for dining out. But a lot of times I’m really simple on this sort of meat and fruit theme, but the overarching picture of recent years of diet is to devoted effort to consume more calories. And, like Dr. Tommy Wood, suggested a couple of occasions. I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten a little soft and added a couple, few pounds, due to my powerhouse dietary strategies, and then I have to make a slight effort in the back of my mind to dial it back a bit and get back to my racing weight. But one of the reasons I think this happened recently is I became, even better adapted to my sprint workouts where they didn’t really trash me feeling, you know, cooked out four hours later, or 24 or 36 or 48 hours later.

Brad (27:40):
Because when I was building, building up finally injury free in recent years, and pushing myself and throwing down some of these impressive workouts, a lot of times it would be very difficult to recover <laugh>, especially at my age. And I’d wake up the next morning, 24 hours later, feeling stiff and tired, or needing a nap really strongly, like 36 hours after my tough workout. Now, I feel like now I can go blast a workout and then go about my busy day and not be completely cooked even after a really centerpiece workout where I’m really pushiing myself to the maximum and that’s a wonderful positive adaptation that’s gonna help me improve my performance and also minimize the damage and the repair required after pushing myself perhaps a tiny bit too hard, which I think muscle soreness, people talk about that as a good thing a lot.

Brad (28:33):
I heard a quip from someone was commenting about what they heard a personal trainer say, where the client said, wow, I’m really sore after Tuesday’s workout. And the trainer said, you’re welcome. So I’m gonna strongly disagree with those kinds of, uh, struggle and suffer, uh, dogma that’s been pushed into the fitness scene, uh, for many decades. And instead, contend that of course, some muscle soreness is going to be natural and expected that’s coming from either workouts that are unfamiliar or doing a little bit beyond your current capacity. So sprinting is not unfamiliar to me. Doing a set of two hundreds is something that is bread and butter. Uh, but yesterday, I strained my hamstring a little bit because obviously I pushed myself a little bit harder than I should have, or was ready for doing the same thing that I always do.

Brad (29:29):
Now, it’s easy to get sore if you go out, even as a super fit person and go out for a few poles on the water ski rope, you’ll wake up the next morning really sore, even if you’ve been in the gym doing all kinds of strength training, leading up to it for months. So that’s the unfamiliarity, or going a little bit beyond capacity. And I definitely want to be very careful to not do that routinely and not get sore routinely from my workout patterns. That’s a sign that I’m overextending myself a bit.

Brad (29:59):
Okay, I’ve covered a lot of stuff here and bounced around a little bit, but I think the main takeaway is perhaps, inspiring you to adopt a mentality like perform, recover, perform, recover, or another equip. Someone, uh, described it as the eat more, move more longevity strategy, right? So if you’ve properly fuel yourself, if you get sufficient rest, recovery, downtime and evening sleep, you are going to enable a more active, energetic lifestyle to the extent that eating more allows you to move more, get better body composition, better muscle mass, muscle tone, and reducing excess body fat due to your highly active lifestyle. We know that activity is the big key, the excess post-exercise, oxygen consumption that comes after the hard workouts, even if they’re brief and duration, that’s where you’re going to make progress, dropping excess body fat. In contrast, the other strategy of really tightly regulating your caloric intake and suffering your way to a fat reduction goal. You’re so frustrated. You went on the cruise, you came back, you stood on the scale. It’s five pounds higher than you’ve seen. Gosh darn it, that’s it. No more breakfast for a month.

Brad (31:17):
That kind of strategy, which has been widely practiced for years and decades. We know that it has many adverse consequences and poor long-term results. Again, we have the compensation theory at place here where the body engages in an assortment of mechanisms and genetically-driven starvation responses to slow things down and make you colder more, more lackadaisical. And this is all a response to, uh, systematically under consuming calories in the name of fat reduction. So, as I’ve talked about on a few other shows, I think fat reduction best happens with an under the radar strategy where you are just tightening things up, dialing things in. You’re eating nutritious foods to satisfaction at every meal. But once in a while you can dabble and dip into, let’s say, skipping a meal or let’s say pushing yourself a little harder on a workout and allowing some extra fat burning to kick in without kicking into, without triggering those compensatory mechanisms as might happen when you go for days and days with, uh, 300 fewer calories than you really need, or whatever other strategies that people have touted for for so long.

Brad (32:40):
Okay, lots to think about there. I’ll leave you with perform, recover, perform, recover. Send me some emails, some comments. We’ll get into this with Q and A too. If you have some questions. podcast@bradventures.com. Thank you for listening, watching.

Brad (32:57):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur, and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.