Transcript of Episode 105: Ketogenic Diet and Athletes with Guest Ben Greenfield
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and special guest Ben Greenfield.
Meredith:
This is Episode 105, and today we have a very special guest joining Dr. Pompa and I. It is Ben Greenfield. Before I introduce Ben, I'm just going to read his bio, so you guys can learn a little bit more about Ben. Ben Greenfield is an ex-bodybuilder, Ironman triathlete, Spartan racer, coach, speaker, and author of the New York Times best seller, Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health, and Life. In 2008, Ben was voted as NSCA's personal trainer of the year, and in 2013 and 2014, he was named greatest as one of the top 100 most influential people in health and fitness. Ben blogs and podcasts at bengreenfieldfitness.com and resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife and twin boys. Welcome, Ben to the show.
Ben:
Up.
Meredith:
Up, what do you mean by up? I can hear you, shoot. Alright, just muted there. We have Dr. Pompa here. How are you, Dr. Pompa?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, he said he might have to switch from his fancy mic to his other mic. We'll give him a minute to do that, and he'll realize that in a second. It's funny because he's walking on the treadmill, which is a much better thing than sitting in the chair all day. I know a couple friends that do that, as well.
Meredith:
Yeah, just out literally walking the talk.
Dr. Pompa:
While he gets his sound up from his computer – it was working right before the show. Isn't that ironic how that happens? Anyways, I remember years ago, Meredith, and I'll set this show up this way. Ben, I'm sure you can hear me, but I don't know when Ben first did these tests on himself. It was proving that fat-adapted athletes exist, meaning that the old days of all the high carbs with athletes, I believed, were gone. Yet, they were still saying we didn't have a lot of proof. Ben in his own study, at one of the universities, and he can tell us which one, actually did a study on himself.
Ben literally got on a treadmill for three hours, did all this blood work, and biopsies, and urine samples, stool samples, everything before the study, got on the treadmill for three hours, reread all the blood work, and the urine, and the stool, and everything. We'll have him talk about those results, but that inspired me. When I read it, I said, “I'm fat adapted because I've been in ketosis.” I said, “I'm going to fast overnight,” like I usually do, intermittent fast, and it was around 18 hours, and I went on a three hour fast bike ride, fasting 18 hours, so 18, 19, 20, 21. By the time I got home, 22 or 23 hours before, I'd eaten one bite of food, didn't bonk everyone on the ride, which are great athletes, we're eating, and I was the only one not eating and to their surprise, I never bonked. I had plenty of energy with over 20 hours without food. Ben proved that in a laboratory. Wonder if we can hear him now? He can talk about some of these results as proving fat-adapted athletes do exist. Ben, can you hear me?
Meredith:
Oh, shoot. Can't hear you. Oh, shoot. Alright, he's going to switch around some microphones, alright. Anyway, as he does that, guys, if you haven't guessed today, we're going to talk about low-carb fueling for athletes. That's the topic, and Dr. Pompa, do you want to share a little bit more while – Ben looks like he had to log-out. Maybe he's logging back in, while he gets his audio straight there maybe?
Ben:
Can you hear me?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Meredith:
Yes, we can hear you now, alright.
Dr. Pompa:
Ben, I don't know if you heard what I had said.
Ben:
I heard everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, great. Your comments on that, and I know that even when you wrote that article, that I had originally read, all the data still wasn't even in. Talk about what inspired you to do that study on yourself, and then talk about what occurred during the study, what you measured, and of course how that affected life afterward.
Ben:
Sure. First of all, for anybody who likes to dawn their propeller hat and dive in, that study is available as a full PDF if you really want to dig into the methodology and the excellent discussion that is in that particular study. The FASTER Study is what it was called. My personal reasons for doing it were frankly pretty selfish. I'm racing Ironman triathlon and if I wanted to go faster or at least be able to maintain this speed that I was used to going at for longer periods of time, I wanted to do so without experiencing a lot of the potentially deleterious effects that chronically elevated blood sugar can cause or the potentially unsettling effects that carbohydrates fermenting in your gut can cause. Because of that and also because of the fact that in my genetic testing I've been shown to have about a 17% higher than normal risk for Type 2 diabetes, I needed to figure out a way to actually hack Ironman triathlon so to speak without going the traditional route of fueling with gels, and bars, and energy drinks, and things of that nature.
Over the course of the year that I was preparing for that study, meaning following a special diet of about 80 to 90% fat, 5 to 10% carbohydrate. Protein would vary a little bit depending on the day's activities. On a day that involved a lot of muscle tearing type of activity, particularly weight training or running, I would get protein up to close around 20%. The rest of the time, protein wasn't that high either. Protein was around 10 to 20%, so really a great deal of my dietary intake came from fat. I was not allowed near any Italian restaurants. Anyways though, so I raced twice, in terms of Ironman races, during the course of that year. I raced Ironman Canada, and I raced Ironman Hawaii, and it was really interesting to experience long, stable sources of energy even in the absence of the high amount of exogenous carbohydrate intake.
We're not talking about a complete absence of carbohydrates because frankly the nature of the beast is something like saying Ironman triathlon is you're out there for nine hours or ten hours, but there's a lot of what is called burning the match during that period of time. What that means is that when you pass someone during the race and the bike ride, you might be going from your normal race pace of 250 watts up to 400 watts, so that actually does cause a pretty significant glycolytic shift, a response of your body needing to burn through a high amount of carbohydrates.
It's not like you're going for a long-endurance event if you're doing ketosis with zero carbohydrates, but it's a much slower – about a quarter of the amount of carbohydrates I would normally consume during the actual event along with ample amounts of easy to digest proteins, particularly amino acids, and then also easy to digest fats, particularly medium chain triglycerides. Since that time, I've added in a third energy component and that would be ketones, literally the exogenous ketones in a powder form that you can take to jack up your ketone levels.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we interviewed Dr. D'Agostino, and he talked a lot about exogenous ketones.
Ben:
Yeah, and what did you just say?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I'm sorry. There's an echo there. We interviewed Dominic D'Agostino about more of the exogenous ketones, and we've added those to our fat regime.
Ben:
Yeah, I wish I'd known about those when I was racing Ironman. I've been using them since but during the time that I was preparing for this particular study that we're talking about, that wasn't something that was really readily available. Anyways though, that particular year of racing culminated in the study that you were referencing, where we went in, and we did a lot of tests. Some of the more notable test that we did was a microbiome to see how the gut differs between someone who follows a high-carbohydrate diet and someone who follows a high-fat diet.
We did fat biopsies to see if the actual fat tissue make-up was any different. We did muscle biopsies before and after exercise to see if there was any difference in the ability of the muscle to be able to store carbohydrate or how quickly the muscle burns through carbohydrates. We did a resting metabolic test, which is just a test of how much carbohydrate and how much fat you're burning at rest along with an exercise metabolic test, which is a measurement of how much carbohydrate, how much fats, and how many calories you're burning during exercise.
Long story short is that, and I'm sure that you know this based on your conversation with Dr. Volek. Even though most physiology textbooks will inform us that we can burn about 1.0 grams of fat per minute during exercise, the athletes who followed a ketotic or low-carbohydrate diet for close to 12 months, were experiencing fat oxidation values of closer to 1.5 to 1.8 grams of fat per minute, significantly higher than what you would expect. There's not only a glycogen sparing effect in a scenario like that, but there's also some pretty significant health implications, meaning that you're creating fewer free radicals, and experiencing less fermentation in the gut, and experiencing less fluctuations in blood sugar.
I guess one of the more annoying parts, for me, about the whole results of that test was that people said, “Oh, they call it the FASTER study, but you guys weren't going any faster, you guys who did the high-fat diet.” That's not the idea. That is where, I think, people get derailed a little bit. The goal here is not to go faster. The goal here is to go as fast, to figure out a way to limit the health effects, or eliminate the health effects of chronic fluctuations in blood sugar or chronically elevated blood sugar, while still maintaining similar speeds. That was my whole philosophy going into this. If I could go just as fast by eliminating sugars, why not do it? If I slow down, then I have to ask myself that question of what kind of balance do I want between health and performance? How many years of my life, or how many years of my joints, or how much gut distress, am I willing to sacrifice in exchange for going just a little bit faster? Now fortunately, it turns out that you can go just as fast, again, not faster, but just as fast on a carbohydrate-limited diet. Why not do it?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I've got echo. Maybe you could mute. There's an echo. I'm not sure where the echo's coming from.
Ben:
Try that. I plugged in my headphones, so may be less of an echo now.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah. Perfect. I don't hear it. Can you hear me?
Ben:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great. I'm glad you brought that up because I always say, “Look, go as fast with this diet” Like you said, “It's not to go faster.” “It's to go as fast,” but what I always say is, “but live longer.” What's happening is these high-carb athletes – there are problems from joint problems, heart attacks. It's just getting more and more that these people are dropping dead, and having horrible degenerative disease, and yet they're thin, and yet they have all of this degenerative disease indicating years of inflammation and oxidative stress driven by glucose spike, insulin spike, after another, which we know is oxidative and damaging to the cells and obviously even ages you prematurely, really that's the problem. Ben, you're right.
I enjoy endurance sports myself, but we know that people that do a lot of endurance sports absolutely drive more oxidation and aging. I believe that that has changed. Your studies and others now have proven that that has changed with a fat-adapted athlete. Ben, I don't know your body fat, but I know I'm, at age 50, under 8%. Yet, we can go for hours, and hours, and hours, without ingesting carbohydrates because we're very efficient fat burners. I think your studies prove that and just to bring it back to people what Ben was talking about, they used to say that people that were very efficient at fat burning can at least burn a gram, one gram, per minute of exercise, but you proved that it was higher, much higher, almost two grams in someone who's fat adapted, their ability to burn fat while they're exercising.
Ben:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I thought that was really one of the best parts about the study is because there was even criticism in the beginning of you guys talk about this fat-adapt exercise, but where is the proof that you can burn that much fat during exercise? You won't do it on a high-carbohydrate diet. You only burn those numbers and that much fat while you're fat adapted.
Ben:
Yeah, I think that one of the important considerations here is you need to look at the length of time that the fat-adapted athletes in that study followed a high-fat diet. The researchers reached out to me a year prior to that test. Most of the athletes who I coach, or who I consult with who are doing well following a high-fat diet, have been following that for one to two years. Sure, you experience some of the health effects of lower blood sugar levels and less oxidation even after following a diet like this for a couple of weeks, but in terms of you achieving what’s called the mitochondrial density necessary for producing a lot of ATP on a high-fat diet while exercising, you’re looking at needed to be in it for the long haul.
Granted, in the whole scheme of things for an athlete who may want to compete in a sport for, say, 20 years, spending 6 months to 2 years getting yourself to a state where you can really efficiently use a natural source of fuel and limit oxidation, that’s not an incredibly long period of time. I do think a lot of people hear about this magical effect of a high-fat diet and you rush out and feel like crap, especially for those first two weeks. That’s something important to understand. You have to be in this for the long haul before you really begin to experience a lot of the favorable adaptations, before you begin to be able to go for really long periods of time without eating, and even exercise during those periods of time. I mean, it takes some time to build up to being adapted.
Dr. Pompa:
You know, Ben, I believe a lot of it’s epigenetic. I get these clients, and I get a lot of emails from the doctors that I train from their clients, saying, “You know, I am keto-adapted, and yet I’m still not burning fat,” etc., etc., and they’re worried about the weight loss. I explain that it takes time to become more and more efficient at burning fat and, therefore, the body feeling free that it can burn its fat even for energy.
It takes time, even it took my wife time. She did not click in for a long time before she was able to use her fat storage for energy. It was months and months, and really almost a year, before she became as efficient as myself. Now, her numbers are a lot; she’s now an efficient fat-burner. It’s so much easier for her to stay lean now. Meredith, you have asked that question, I think, to Volek and maybe D’Agostino about that time. You’ve said, “What’s the difference? It seems like women have a tougher time getting into that fat-burning efficiency.”
Ben:
Yeah, the other thing I think that’s important is the type of high-fat diet that you follow. There was a really interesting study last year that looked into the potential for high levels of chlorophyll in the bloodstream to be able to assist with ATP production. A very plant-rich, ketogenic diet is, in my opinion, favorable for not only limiting oxidation and free radical production, but also causing even more stable energy sources due to the fiber, but also potentially an increase in ATP production beyond what we fully understand in nutrition science when it comes to having a lot of plant-based chlorophylls in the bloodstream.
I see a lot of people follow, say, like the Bulletproof Coffee type of approach. They’ll have three cups of coffee with butter and MCT oil in it during the day, and they’ll have a big cut of fatty steak at dinner. Lunch might be coconut milk with some coconut flakes and some chocolate stevia. If you step back and look at the diet, maybe there’s some macadamia nuts sprinkled in here and there. There’s very little plant matter.
I personally eat about 20 to 25 servings of plants per day. We have an enormous backyard garden, and I’m eating tons of kale, and butter lettuce, and bok choy, and mustard greens, and cilantro, and parsley, and tomatoes. None of that counts towards my total daily carbohydrate intake, but I think that is one component that needs to be emphasized here, that a high-fat diet does not mean that you’re not eating plants. In fact, I eat a lot of plants, a lot of fiber, and it makes a night-and-day difference.
When I look over the blood and bile markers of people following a high-fat diet, a lot of times I see really high triglycerides and really low HDL, which is often what you’ll see in someone who is eating a ton of animal fats without many plants or without much fiber. I’ll see a lot of CO2 and really low chloride levels, an indicator of a net acidic state, and a lot of biomarkers that aren’t necessarily favorable and that can be a result of a high-fat diet done improperly. I think that’s one important thing to bear in mind, too, is that you don’t want to necessarily eschew plant intake and vegetable intake; you just want to ensure that those are accompanied primarily by healthy fats and oils rather than accompanied by high amounts of protein and starches.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great advice. I practice something, and I’ve written articles, Ben, about something I call diet variation, which is basically emulating what our ancestors have done. They were forced into different diet variations seasonally, even weekly. When we look at the Hunza people as an example, in the summertime, they were relying mostly on plant food. Then the wintertime came, and they were forced into higher-fat, obviously meats, and different fats and butters. They had this long stretch of mostly vegetables, which created this variation in their diet. Today, we have the ability to vary our diet at all times, which can work for us and against us.
I go into ketosis during the summer. Like you, I’m still able to stay in ketosis eating a lot of plants in my diet, no problem. I’m very fat-adapted even with it. In this time of year, I’m eating way more fruits and vegetables, and because I intermittent fast, where I don’t eat until a certain time, I’m not in ketosis in the morning, but by the afternoon, I’m burning high ketones again. It’s remarkable when you give your body time to get more efficient how you can almost benefit from being in ketosis and not being in ketosis. That’s what I’m doing now during the winter. I agree. I think that variation in the diet is really critical. I think it’s great.
Ben:
Yeah.
Meredith:
I’m wondering, too, I mean, 25 to 30 servings of vegetables, that’s amazing. How are you fitting all of those vegetables in? Are you doing a lot of smoothies, blended soups? What are some of your suggestions there?
Dr. Pompa:
Great question.
Ben:
For me, it’s mostly smoothies and salads. I do one to two really big smoothies a day, one of the big blenders that blend cell phones on YouTube, one of those big ones, not the cheapo KitchenAid, but a really nice blender that will just pulverize everything from the pit of an avocado to an entire bunch of kale, so a lot of plants. Generally, in the morning, I’m grabbing six to eight different plants, both wild plants and herbs, as well as more traditional plants like cucumbers or avocados, for example, from the refrigerator and just blending those up with coconut milk, and fats, and some seeds, and nuts. Lunch is a really big salad, an enormous salad bowl just full of vegetables. I’ll generally spend 30 to 60 minutes chewing each bite 20 to 25 times and eating lunch like a cow while I go through emails and things like that during lunch. That’s another big one. Dinner, generally another giant salad, really big salad. Then if I do have a snack during the day, a lot of times it’s just a smaller version of the smoothie that I’ve had for breakfast.
If you were to see the size of my salads and the size of my smoothies, you would be shocked. You’d think I would be morbidly obese, but if you dig in and you look at it, it’s really just mostly plant volume. That’s generally what I do, salads and smoothies. I’m not a big fan of soups. My wife does a lot of soups, like cold soups, and hot soups, and stuff like that. I’m just not a soup guy. Even my smoothies, I make them so thick I need to eat them with a spoon because I really like to chew my food. Yeah, I’m a smoothie and a salad guy.
Dr. Pompa:
What are some of your favorite fats that you like to take in in a day?
Ben:
Returning to that concept of variety you mentioned, it really does vary. Generally, the staples are full-fat coconut milk, avocados and avocado oil, olives and extra virgin olive oil, macadamia nuts, almonds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds; I always have a big thing of chia seeds slurry, where you just mix chia seeds with water and let those sit, and it’s just like a Jell-O. I have that that I’ll mix in, for example, with a lot of my smoothies. Animal fats aren’t a huge source. I do fish a couple of times a week. I’ll do some kind of a steak or a red meat a couple of times a week. I always have some pemmican around, which is a rendered fat recipe that’s in a tube that I can use when I’m on a plane or need a snack on the go.
I really don’t do a ton of animal fats. It’s mostly plant-based fats like some of the ones that I just mentioned. Those are most of the biggies. Bone broth does have a certain amount of fat in it, and we make broth every week. There’s some in there, too. Those are most of them, though. MCT oil, I’ll do that sometimes during exercise; coconut oil sometimes in the smoothies, even though I’m not a huge fan of those concentrated sources of oil versus the tastier forms like the extra virgin olive oil and the avocado oil. I just find those to be more flavorful, and I feel better on them. Yeah, those are some of the fats that I do.
Dr. Pompa:
How much exercise do you get a day? Tell us about your exercise regime. I should say a day and week.
Ben:
Yeah, not as much as people think. I generally am active all day long. Today, while I’m writing, and doing consults, and reading emails, and things along those lines, I’ll walk somewhere in the range of three to five miles at a low intensity like I am right now. When I get up in the morning, I’ll generally spend 20 to 30 minutes doing some deep-tissue work and some mobility work, some foam roller, some band work for traction on my joints. By the time I get to the end of the day, I’ve been mildly physically active for six to eight hours at just very low-level intensity.
Then at the end of the day, I’ll throw in 30 to 60 minutes of a hard workout. That might be a tennis match. It might be kickboxing or jujitsu. It might be some kind of an obstacle course workout with sandbags, and kettlebells, and things like that. It might be a swim. It varies quite a bit, but generally it’s 30 to 60 minutes of something hard in the afternoon to the early evening, then up until that point, low-level physical activity all day long. It’s just tough to quantify because I’m always moving. As far as a formal workout, it comes out to about 30 to 60 minutes a day.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s remarkable that you’re working and moving all at the same time. Isn’t it remarkable, Meredith? It’s like he’s active six to eight hours a day. It shows you there’s always time. For people watching this that say, “I don’t have time to do this or that,” you’re doing it. You’re doing it.
Meredith:
I’d like to go back to what you spoke about in the beginning with the experiment, and being in ketosis, and the impact on your gut and your microbiome. If you could speak to that, I’d like to learn a little bit more about that.
Ben:
Yeah, I didn’t see the results yet, interestingly, from that test. A few of the things that I would suspect if I could hypothesize, for example, is that in someone eating a higher-fat diet, you would definitely, especially if you were doing butter or coconut oil, for example, likely have slightly higher levels of butyric acid. If you’re eating more plant-rich diet, probably higher levels of short-chain fatty acids and just better colonic health overall. I would imagine you’d probably have lower risk of yeast fungus, candida, the type of overgrowths that might occur with high starch or sugar intake, or high alcohol intake. I’m not really sure what would happen with some of the other bacteria like the Firmicutes or some of these things that are associated with adiposity. I’m not quite sure how those change on a high-fat versus a high-carb diet.
Now, I did last week send in my skin, my tongue, and my stool sample to the American Gut Project. When they send the results of that back to you, you get to see how your gut matches up to the general population. That particular test is accompanied by a diet questionnaire, so that might give me some insight, as well. In my own gut tests that I’ve done, though, I do generally have a lot of short-chain fatty acids and fats in the large intestine, from a colonic standpoint. I have really good colonic health. I generally, since I started into this, gosh, four years ago, I don’t have the fermentation, the gas, the bloating, the constant farts that endurance athletes have, all that kind of stuff. That’s not something that I deal with anymore at all, which is kind of cool. I would, again, hazard a guess that there’s a lower risk for things like small intestine bacterial overgrowth, and probably a lower risk for just fermentation overall. Again, if you’re eating a diet rich in plant foods—and I also do a lot of fermented foods, we do a lot of kimchi, kombucha, we do a lot of pickling and fermenting of our cucumbers and our beans, and things along those lines, overall bacterial diversity on plant-rich, fat-rich diet is probably quite high, again, due to the short-chain fatty acids, the butyrate’s, and then all the plant matter and the prebiotics.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, you’re obviously a very well-trained athlete, showing that athletes can be fat-adapted and utilizing fat is their energy source, their number one energy source, but you’re getting your carbohydrates from your vegetables, right? I always explain that, look, I believe I eat a normal carbohydrate diet, what humans were supposed to eat. We talked about a little bit about that today, even people that think they’re eating low-carb—really this is just the way that humans were meant to eat. It just so happens in our society we call it a low-carb diet. I call it a normal carbohydrate diet; moving in and out of ketosis throughout my day—I mean at different times.
If you weren’t eating for a period of times, your ketones are going to surge, your glucose is going to drop, that’s what’s natural.
Ben:
Right. I do a lot of hunting and foraging and wilderness survival type of stuff, and typically, if I’m out there without foods that I’ve brought in, what am I eating? I’m eating mushrooms, mint, nettle, leafy greens, dandelion, and then that’s combined with any animals I might encounter with the understanding that if I’m eating an animal and it’s at night and I’m on a campfire, I know to go for the fats because that’s what’s going to keep me going the next day. You don’t get very satiated from gnawing on the breast area of a rabbit, for example; you always want to go after the gizzards. I know in the gizzards there’s a lot of fat. If you look at things from an ancestral standpoint, if you’re out in the wilderness, you’re not coming across a lot of apple trees, you’re definitely not finding many bakeries, it’s mostly just plants, and mushrooms, and small amounts of animal proteins, and large amounts of animal fats and oils.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. How much protein—you said it percentage-wise, but how about gram-wise—how much do you weigh and then how much protein, on average, in grams do you get per day?
Ben:
I weight about 180 pounds and I would say I’m somewhere in the range of 100 to 120 grams, or so, of protein. That would be on the high range. I don’t get anywhere near the 200+ grams that I used to take in as a bodybuilder. I try and stay as close to at least 0.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight because that amount is necessary to avoid loss of muscle, but I never, ever, really exceed 0.8 grams per pound—or that’s pretty rare just because there’s not a lot of evidence that there’s a great deal of anabolism that takes place once you exceed that amount.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m with you. I think people today they move into, well, I guess what’s in rage right now is The Paleo Diet, right? Then people start eating a bunch of protein. I’m not a fan. I’ve read the studies of high-protein and I know that it’s not a healthy diet. Of course, through gluconeogenesis even turn into sugar. I always tell people as a general rule, half your body weight—considering that you’re not morbidly obese—half your body weight is a very safe—you’re an athlete, you can take a lot more than even the average person and utilize that protein safely. I think I agree with your range there.
Ben:
Yeah. Like you said, it all depends on your nitrogen balance, if you’re a hard-charging person, and doing a lot of physical exercise, and you have a high-level of muscle mass to support, then you might need to get closer to the 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound. Most people can maintain anabolism and health at 0.55 or so.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree; it’s a good number.
Meredith:
I’m wondering, Dr. Pompa, you had mentioned about your fasting experience. Ben, I was wondering if you could speak to your fasting experiences. I think that I heard that you do practice fasting, but I didn’t know if you spend longer fasts or what your experience has been and how that’s impacted your training and your health.
Ben:
Yeah, I generally do, every month, a 24-hour fast, just to clean things out a little bit. It’ll just be a Saturday at lunchtime until Sunday at lunchtime, or I’ll just skip dinner on Saturday night and breakfast on Sunday morning.
Meredith:
Are you drinking some water? Is it just a water-fast?
Ben:
Yeah, just water or coffee, tea, stuff like that, sometimes kombucha.
Dr. Pompa:
I don’t know if you ever—it’s hard for me to recommend some people to go watch the videos because these guys drop a lot of f-bombs, and it might be offensive to some, but they’re called the Hodgetwins. You can Google them. They’re funny. I have to admit that they’re funny even though they’re a little rough around the edges. These guys are bodybuilders, right? Ben, your past. They intermittent fast, they go 19-20 hours. They used to be into the 5-6 meal a day thing and they realized that it wasn’t working like they expected. Someone encouraged them—I don’t know their exact story. Now they’ve been doing this for a while so all of their videos are on intermittent fasting and how it raises their growth-hormone, testosterone. Now they’ve gained all this muscle, I think 20 pounds since they’ve been doing it, and they’re under 6% body fat. Watch the videos, I think that you would gain some insight out of it, it’s pretty humorous. I actually think these guys are pretty smart, they put on a little act for the YouTube videos, but they get a million hits on their videos. It’s pretty funny.
Ben:
Bodybuilders are pretty smart. There’s that whole pro-science thing and a lot of these guys are biology-hackers. You’d be surprised at what it takes to get your body down to, say, 3% body fat while staying pretty big, especially if you’re not going to take a lot of steroids or testosterone, and stuff like that. It’s tough, so yeah, I agree, bodybuilders a lot of times are smarter than they get credit for.
To respond to your question about fasting: I’ll do the 24-hour about once a month and then every single day I just have a 12-16-hour fast. Most of it, of course, is overnight, but generally I’ll finish dinner around 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. and breakfast will be somewhere around 9 to 10:30 a.m. That’s just a daily practice for me. Typically, at some point during that time range I’ll do something very low-level in the morning, like yoga and rolling, and mobility work, so there’s a little bit of aerobic work in there, too. That seems to help, pretty significantly, in maintaining a low body fat percentage. Just combine a little bit of easy aerobic activity or even something like cold thermogenesis, try a little bit of a cold soak, or sauna combined with a cold soak, that seems to help me out quite a bit with staying lean by working some type of activity in there.
Dr. Pompa:
I do that. I take hot saunas and then do cold showers afterwards. Yeah, it works if you’re fat burning, pretty significantly. Yeah, I started out when I was intermittent fasting like you I started out I was doing 15-16 hours and then I pushed it. It seemed like the longer I pushed it the more hormone-sensitive, no doubt, I’d become more important that is, trust me. I noticed a difference, immediately; even my ability to hold onto my muscle. The growth hormone rise and the hormone sensitivity occur the longer I go, for sure. You do a lot of endurance stuff, so I could see you needing to shorten that window slightly, as far as how active you are, Ben.
Ben:
Yeah, most of that’s due to those evening workouts I do. They are pretty tough because I’m still racing professionally as an obstacle racer. A workout for me—when I’m saying 30-60 minutes in the afternoon, after a day of being on my feet and moving for 6-8 hours, we’re talking about a workout where the average heart rate is very close to maximum heart rate, so like a puke-fest style workout. That’s pretty draining from an energy standpoint. Generally, for me to do daily—exceeding 16-hour fasts daily—that gets tough. I mean, of course, the other issue’s that my wife is an amazing, amazing, cook and so I can only skip so many meals during the day before I feel like I’m missing out on a very important part of life.
Dr. Pompa:
I think at your activity level I think that you’re still getting that benefit; like you said, you exercise. I would exercise that intently at night when I do. I’d definitely have to eat earlier, there’s no doubt. You’re still getting the benefit; you’re still getting the growth hormone rise, even with the fast. Ben, once a week I do a 24-hour fast. This week I did two of those, not even on purpose; I just went from dinner to dinner. It was remarkable. I love to watch what my body—I ended up doing two in a row like that, just because of my busy schedule. It was remarkable, but I felt like I definitely—noticeably more energy on those days, and noticeably leaner, and yet didn’t lose one once of muscle; matter of fact, maybe the opposite. My gym workouts were super strong.
I’m not nearly doing the athletic stuff that you’re doing these days. I admire that you keep a busy schedule working and you’re still doing all that, Ben. I mean, I find that really impressive. What you’re doing is working. It shows you what we do works, right? I mean, you have busted the mold for these high-carbohydrate endurance athletes. You really have. I find it remarkable, and you took it to the science, Ben. I think that’s impressive as well.
Ben:
Cool. Thanks, man.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah. No doubt about it. I mean, as far as that goes, where are you going with it? You love doing the studies, you love doing this stuff. What do you see yourself doing here in the future with it?
Ben:
I’d like to look into more of an ancestral application, a more practical application. I would like to look a little bit more into persistence hunting not just persistence hunting, but perhaps something closer to where I live where I’d be going after elk or moose or something like that. Preferably in the snow where tracking is a little bit easier, but seeing if it’s doable to go out and, say, head out on a anywhere from five to eight day hunt is realistically what you’re looking at with a bow, or with a spear, or with a close-range weapon, and seeing if it’s possible to actually go and get your own food in the absence of food, just to begin to get people thinking about the state that we live in, the culture that we live in where food is just constantly readily available. What would happen if we didn’t have food but we had to figure out a way to feed ourselves?
The same is to be said for foraging and for wild plant-based foraging. This is something I already do with my kids. In the summers, for example, we usually have one day a week where they can only eat what they’ve found outside until dinner. From breakfast until dinner they can only eat wild plant matter, things that they foraged for outside. They’re not old enough yet to be killing squirrels or coyotes or anything like that, so for them it’s just plants, right? As part of their childhood they have had to learn to figure out how to go out and take care of themselves by going and getting plants. They come back inside, they’re allowed to use the stove, they’re allowed to use the blender, stuff like that, but they can’t use ingredients from the pantry, or from the refrigerator; it’s all based on plants.
I would like to get people more aware of that type of practice because it really goes quite handily with the things that we’ve talked about—fasting and ketosis, and denial of modern food sources and starches and instead just learning how to take care of yourself. I think that there’s a lot of lessons to be had from a health and survival standpoint, and so plant foraging, spreading our message, as well as the potential of seeing the persistence hunting in the absence of any significant sources of calories, to be able to take what allows one to, say, do an Ironman Triathlon with very little calorie intake and then turn that into a more practical level like going out and getting your own meat and stuff. Again, without carrying a bunch of power-bars out with you, I think that’d be a cool little adventure to embark upon.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s fantastic! I can’t wait to hear the results. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to have my kids watch the show and I’m going to say, yeah, so you think you have it bad in the Pompa house—his kids forage for their meals. I’m going to get another level of respect out of that, maybe. They’re not going to hassle me anymore. My kids are always my experiments, right? It’s always humorous. I have two of them now—I had them in severe ketosis—one’s still in it. Now I have them intermittent fasting, I vary their diet. They do what I tell them to do, that’s the fun part. It’s like, let’s try a higher carb, let’s try this, and I’m watching their performance level so it’s always fun. Gosh, that’s why we have kids, Meredith. See, that’s why you’ve got to have some kids, you’ve got to experiment.
Ben, you know what I think you’re going to find with that? I think you’re going to find what I say is, look, I believe that part of—really, we see it as far as getting patients or clients back to health, varying their diets, forcing these changes, ketosis. Fasting states, making and forcing these changes, is part of what our body is meant to do to adapt, but what comes with that adaptation is massive genetic changes that take place; turning off bad genes, turning on good ones, becoming more hormone sensitive.
Part of what I teach, Ben, to my doctors, is forcing their clients into these adapted states where their body’s forced to adapt. We interviewed Thomas Seyfried a few months ago and he believes that when we’re forced into these states, fasting states, it is the bad cells do not make the—they can’t adapt and the bad cells start dying, too. Autolytic behavior starts to take place, where the body starts eating the bad cells. It’s forcing our bodies to adapt. Having to adapt what you’re describing is what our ancestors had to do. There is health to this type of adaptation and diet variation so, really, you’re going to find that when you do those experiments. I can’t wait to hear it.
Ben:
Yeah, that or I’ll just wind up dead in the wilderness somewhere.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to be forced to adapt, alright. Actually, I was hiking up—we do this hike a few times a week; we hike up the mountain and there on the right was this massive spine. I think it was a moose because typically we encounter wildlife like moose on this hike. It was this massive spine and, of course, my dogs went right after it. Hopefully you don’t end up like that, as just another prey.
Ben:
I hope not.
Dr. Pompa:
Lines around here so be careful, Ben.
Ben:
I will.
Dr. Pompa:
This is great stuff. Meredith, I know you have a list of questions so I don’t want to—we have a few minutes left. I know, Ben, you have a whole line.
Meredith:
I know we do just have a few minutes left. Ben, I want to thank you so much for being on the show. I’m wondering if you have any advice for our audience who’s watching, who wants to do some things like you’re doing, obviously, not to that extreme. What would you suggest to some of our viewers who really want to increase their performance, want to implement some of these strategies that you’re employing? Where would they start and what would be fed?
Ben:
I would emphasis what we touched on towards the beginning of this call, the idea that your life can be fitness. After we finish our call today, I will get off the treadmill and before the next call I’ll go and check the mail. After I grab the mail I’ll sprint back up the driveway, really, really hard. I’ll get to the top of the driveway and I’ll crank out 25 pushups. Then I’ll open up the mail, take care of the mail, and head back down to my next call. Little things like that add up during the day. They get you to the point where you really can go out and do things like an Ironman Triathlon, or a Spartan Beast, or something like that, and not have to spend your whole life exercising, right? It’s fun, too, because you have energy all day long, right?
You don’t standup because your flexors have been shortened for hours and have back pain. I would say just figure out a way to hack your environment to make physical activity something that you do all day long. If you work in a traditional office setting, put a kettlebell underneath your desk, and get one of these stools that you lean back on rather than sitting down, every time that you go to the bathroom have a rule that you’ve got to do 50 air squats. Start to work in those little things throughout the day. You’d be surprise at how fit you can stay and how prepared you can be for a big event without necessarily neglecting your family, and your friends, and hobbies, and work, and stuff like that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s great, Ben. You live an amazing lifestyle. I know you’ve been an inspiration to our viewers and listeners, so that’s fantastic. For them, where can they go to read the article, the study that we referenced? You mentioned it in the beginning but—they can go and get that link.
Ben:
I have it linked to—if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com, my latest article on this topic is entitled “How to Get into Ketosis.” If you were to go there you’re not only going to find a link to that site, but also a link to some of the other articles I’ve written on turning yourself into a fat-burning machine, high-fat diets, things like that. I would go read my article. You would probably just open Goggle—if you were to Goggle how to get into ketosis. Then I’ve also got a about a 450-page book that’s just jam-packed with bio-hacks, and meals, and work-outs, and everything. That’s at beyondtrainingbook.com.
Dr. Pompa:
Alright. Ben, thank you so much, man. Go get your mail, sprint up the driveway, and don’t forget the 25 pushups.
Ben:
Alright.
Dr. Pompa:
Thanks for the inspiration and the knowledge.
Ben:
Sounds good. Got it.
Thank you, guys.
Dr. Pompa:
Yup. Absolutely.
Meredith:
Thank you, guys. Take care. Thanks for watching, everyone.
Ben:
Bye.
Meredith:
Yup. See you next week. Bye.
