meredith:this is episode 105, and today wehave a very special guest joining dr. pompa and i. it is ben greenfield. before i introduceben, i’m just going to read his bio, so you guys can learn a little bit more aboutben. ben greenfield is an ex-bodybuilder, ironman triathlete, spartan racer, coach,speaker, and author of the new york times best seller,â beyond training: mastering endurance,health, and life. in 2008, ben was voted as nsca’s personal trainer of the year, andin 2013 and 2014, he was named greatest as one of the top 100 most influential peoplein health and fitness. ben blogs and podcasts at bengreenfieldfitness.com and resides inspokane, washington with his wife and twin boys. welcome, ben to the show.ben:up.
meredith:up, what do you mean by up? i canhear 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’llgive him a minute to do that, and he’ll realize that in a second. it’s funny becausehe’s walking on the treadmill, which is a much better thing than sitting in the chairall 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 beforethe show. isn’t that ironic how that happens? anyways, i remember years ago, meredith, andi’ll set this show up this way. ben, i’m
sure you can hear me, but i don’t know whenben first did these tests on himself. it was proving that fat-adapted athletes exist, meaningthat the old days of all the high carbs with athletes, i believed, were gone. yet, theywere still saying we didn’t have a lot of proof. ben in his own study, at one of theuniversities, 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 forthree 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 fastovernight,†like i usually do, intermittent fast, and it was around 18 hours, and i wenton a three hour fast bike ride, fasting 18 hours, so 18, 19, 20, 21. by the time i gothome, 22 or 23 hours before, i’d eaten one bite of food, didn’t bonk everyone on theride, which are great athletes, we’re eating, and i was the only one not eating and to theirsurprise, i never bonked. i had plenty of energy with over 20 hours without food. benproved that in a laboratory. wonder if we can hear him now? he can talk about some ofthese 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 aroundsome 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 heardwhat 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 inspiredyou 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, thatstudy is available as a full pdf if you really want to dig into the methodology and the excellentdiscussion that is in that particular study. the faster study is what it was called. mypersonal reasons for doing it were frankly pretty selfish. i’m racing ironman triathlonand if i wanted to go faster or at least be able to maintain this speed that i was usedto going at for longer periods of time, i wanted to do so without experiencing a lotof the potentially deleterious effects that chronically elevated blood sugarcan causeor 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 shownto have about a 17% higher than normal risk for type 2 diabetes, i needed to figure outa way to actually hack ironman triathlon so to speak without going the traditional routeof 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 specialdiet of about 80 to 90% fat, 5 to 10% carbohydrate. protein would vary a little bit dependingon 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 anyitalian restaurants. anyways though, so i raced twice, in terms of ironman races, duringthe course of that year. i raced ironman canada, and i raced ironman hawaii, and it was reallyinteresting to experience long, stable sources of energy even in the absence of the highamount of exogenous carbohydrate intake. we’re not talking about a complete absenceof carbohydrates because frankly the nature of the beast is something like saying ironmantriathlon is you’re out there for nine hours or ten hours, but there’s a lot of whatis called burning the match during that period of time. what that means is that when youpass someone during the race and the bike
ride, you might be going from your normalrace pace of 250 watts up to 400 watts, so that actually does cause a pretty significantglycolytic 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 zerocarbohydrates, but it’s a much slower – about a quarter of the amount of carbohydrates iwould normally consume during the actual event along with ample amounts of easy to digestproteins, particularly amino acids, and then also easy to digest fats, particularly mediumchain triglycerides. since that time, i’ve added in a third energy component and thatwould be ketones, literally the exogenous ketones in a powder form that you can taketo 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’agostinoabout 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 themsince but during the time that i was preparing for this particular study that we’re talkingabout, that wasn’t something that was really readily available. anyways though, that particularyear of racing culminated in the study that you were referencing, where we went in, andwe did a lot of tests. some of the more notable test that we did was a microbiome to see howthe gut differs between someone who follows
a high-carbohydrate diet and someone who followsa high-fat diet. we did fat biopsies to see if the actual fattissue make-up was any different. we did muscle biopsies before and after exercise to seeif there was any difference in the ability of the muscle to be able to store carbohydrateor how quickly the muscle burns through carbohydrates. we did a resting metabolic test, which isjust a test of how much carbohydrate and how much fat you’re burning at rest along withan exercise metabolic test, which is a measurement of how much carbohydrate, how much fats, andhow many calories you’re burning during exercise.long story short is that, and i’m sure that you know this based on your conversation withdr. volek. even though most physiology textbooks
will inform us that we can burn about 1.0grams of fat per minute during exercise, the athletes who followed a ketotic or low-carbohydratediet for close to 12 months, were experiencing fat oxidation values of closer to 1.5 to 1.8grams of fat per minute, significantly higher than what you would expect. there’s notonly a glycogen sparing effect in a scenario like that, but there’s also some prettysignificant health implications, meaning that you’re creating fewer free radicals, andexperiencing less fermentation in the gut, and experiencing less fluctuations in bloodsugar. i guess one of the more annoying parts, forme, about the whole results of that test was that people said, “oh, they call it thefaster study, but you guys weren’t going
any faster, you guys who did the high-fatdiet.†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 wayto limit the health effects, or eliminate the health effects of chronic fluctuationsin 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 eliminatingsugars, why not do it? if i slow down, then i have to ask myself that question of whatkind of balance do i want between health and performance? how many years of my life, orhow many years of my joints, or how much gut distress, am i willing to sacrifice in exchangefor 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 surewhere 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 hearit. can you hear me? ben:yeah.dr. pompa:yeah, great. i’m glad you brought that up because i always say, “look, goas fast with this diet†like you said, “it’s not to go faster.†“it’s to go as fast,â€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 andmore that these people are dropping dead, and having horrible degenerative disease,and yet they’re thin, and yet they have all of this degenerative diseaseindicatingyears of inflammation and oxidative stress driven by glucose spike, insulin spike, afteranother, 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 sportsabsolutely drive more oxidation and aging. i believe that that has changed. your studiesand others now have proven that that has changed with a fat-adapted athlete. ben, i don’tknow your body fat, but i know i’m, at age
50, under 8%. yet, we can go for hours, andhours, 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 talkingabout, they used to say that people that were very efficient at fat burning can at leastburn 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’reexercising. ben:yeah.dr. pompa:i thought that was really one of the best parts about the study is becausethere 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 iton a high-carbohydrate diet. you only burn those numbers and that much fat while you’refat adapted. ben:yeah, i think that one of the importantconsiderations here is you need to look at the length of time that the fat-adapted athletesin that study followed a high-fat diet. the researchers reached out to me a year priorto that test. most of the athletes who i coach, or who i consult with who are doing well followinga high-fat diet, have been following that for one to two years. sure, you experiencesome of the health effects of lower blood sugar levels and less oxidation even afterfollowing a diet like this for a couple of weeks, but in terms of you achieving what’scalled the mitochondrial density necessary
for producing a lot of atp on a high-fat dietwhile 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 sportfor, say, 20 years, spending 6 months to 2 years getting yourself to a state where youcan really efficiently use a natural source of fuel and limit oxidation, that’s notan incredibly long period of time. i do think a lot of people hear about this magical effectof a high-fat diet and you rush out and feel like crap, especially for those first twoweeks. that’s something important to understand. you have to be in this for the long haul beforeyou really begin to experience a lot of the favorable adaptations, before you begin tobe able to go for really long periods of time
without eating, and even exercise during thoseperiods 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, andi get a lot of emails from the doctors that i train from their clients, saying, “youknow, i am keto-adapted, and yet i’m still not burning fat,†etc., etc., and they’reworried about the weight loss. i explain that it takes time to become more and more efficientat 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 beforeshe was able to use her fat storage for energy. it was months and months, and really almosta year, before she became as efficient as
myself. now, her numbers are a lot; she’snow 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 gettinginto that fat-burning efficiency.†ben:yeah, the other thing i think that’simportant is the type of high-fat diet that you follow. there was a really interestingstudy last year that looked into the potential for high levels of chlorophyll in the bloodstreamto be able to assist with atp production. a very plant-rich, ketogenic diet is, in myopinion, favorable for not only limiting oxidation and free radical production, but also causingeven more stable energy sources due to the
fiber, but also potentially an increase inatp production beyond what we fully understand in nutrition science when it comes to havinga lot of plant-based chlorophylls in the bloodstream. i see a lot of people follow, say, like thebulletproof coffee type of approach. they’ll have three cups of coffee with butter andmct oil in it during the day, and they’ll have a big cut of fatty steak at dinner. lunchmight be coconut milk with some coconut flakes and some chocolate stevia. if you step backand 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 ofplants per day. we have an enormous backyard garden, and i’m eating tons of kale, andbutter 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 onecomponent that needs to be emphasized here, that a high-fat diet does not mean that you’renot eating plants. in fact, i eat a lot of plants, a lot of fiber, and it makes a night-and-daydifference. when i look over the blood and bile markersof people following a high-fat diet, a lot of times i see really high triglycerides andreally low hdl, which is often what you’ll see in someone who is eating a ton of animalfats without many plants or without much fiber. i’ll see a lot of co2 and really low chloridelevels, an indicator of a net acidic state, and a lot of biomarkers that aren’t necessarilyfavorable and that can be a result of a high-fat
diet done improperly. i think that’s oneimportant thing to bear in mind, too, is that you don’t want to necessarily eschew plantintake and vegetable intake; you just want to ensure that those are accompanied primarilyby 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 ancestorshave done. they were forced into different diet variations seasonally, even weekly. whenwe look at the hunza people as an example, in the summertime, they were relying mostlyon plant food. then the wintertime came, and they were forced into higher-fat, obviouslymeats, 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 dietat 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 eatinga lot of plants in my diet, no problem. i’m very fat-adapted even with it. in this timeof 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 bythe afternoon, i’m burning high ketones again. it’s remarkable when you give yourbody time to get more efficient how you can almost benefit from being in ketosis and notbeing in ketosis. that’s what i’m doing
now during the winter. i agree. i think thatvariation in the diet is really critical. i think it’s great.ben:yeah. meredith:i’m wondering, too, i mean, 25to 30 servings of vegetables, that’s amazing. how are you fitting all of those vegetablesin? 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 phoneson youtube, one of those big ones, not the cheapo kitchenaid, but a really nice blenderthat 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 fullof vegetables. i’ll generally spend 30 to 60 minutes chewing each bite 20 to 25 timesand 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. thenif i do have a snack during the day, a lot of times it’s just a smaller version ofthe smoothie that i’ve had for breakfast. if you were to see the size of my salads andthe size of my smoothies, you would be shocked.
you’d think i would be morbidly obese, butif you dig in and you look at it, it’s really just mostly plant volume. that’s generallywhat i do, salads and smoothies. i’m not a big fan of soups. my wife does a lot ofsoups, 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 reallylike 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 oliveoil, macadamia nuts, almonds, walnuts, pumpkin
seeds; i always have a big thing of chia seedsslurry, where you just mix chia seeds with water and let those sit, and it’s just likea jell-o. i have that that i’ll mix in, for example, with a lot of my smoothies. animalfats aren’t a huge source. i do fish a couple of times a week. i’ll do some kind of asteak or a red meat a couple of times a week. i always have some pemmican around, whichis a rendered fat recipe that’s in a tube that i can use when i’m on a plane or needa 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 aremost of the biggies. bone broth does have a certain amount of fat in it, and we makebroth 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, eventhough i’m not a huge fan of those concentrated sources of oil versus the tastier forms likethe 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 shouldsay a day and week. ben:yeah, not as much as people think. i generallyam 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 milesat a low intensity like i am right now. when
i get up in the morning, i’ll generallyspend 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’vebeen 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 mightbe a tennis match. it might be kickboxing or jujitsu. it might be some kind of an obstaclecourse 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 theafternoon to the early evening, then up until that point, low-level physical activity allday 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’reworking and moving all at the same time. isn’t it remarkable, meredith? it’s like he’sactive six to eight hours a day. it shows you there’s always time. for people watchingthis that say, “i don’t have time to do this or that,†you’re doing it. you’redoing it. meredith:i’d like to go back to what youspoke about in the beginning with the experiment, and being in ketosis, and the impact on yourgut and your microbiome. if you could speak to that, i’d like to learn a little bitmore 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 ifyou were doing butter or coconut oil, for example, likely have slightly higher levelsof butyric acid. if you’re eating more plant-rich diet, probably higher levels of short-chainfatty acids and just better colonic health overall. i would imagine you’d probablyhave lower risk of yeast fungus, candida, the type of overgrowths that might occur withhigh starch or sugar intake, or high alcohol intake. i’m not really sure what would happenwith some of the other bacteria like the firmicutes or some of these things that are associatedwith 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 upto 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, froma colonic standpoint. i have really good colonic health. i generally, since i started intothis, gosh, four years ago, i don’t have the fermentation, the gas, the bloating, theconstant farts that endurance athletes have, all that kind of stuff. that’s not somethingthat i deal with anymore at all, which is kind of cool. i would, again, hazard a guessthat there’s a lower risk for things like
small intestine bacterial overgrowth, andprobably a lower risk for just fermentation overall. again, if you’re eating a dietrich 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 thingsalong those lines, overall bacterial diversity on plant-rich, fat-rich diet is probably quitehigh, again, due to the short-chain fatty acids, the butyrate’s, and then all theplant matter and the prebiotics. dr. pompa:yeah, yeah, exactly. i mean, you’reobviously a very well-trained athlete, showing that athletes can be fat-adapted and utilizingfat is their energy source, their number one energy source, but you’re getting your carbohydratesfrom your vegetables, right? i always explain
that, look, i believe i eat a normal carbohydratediet, what humans were supposed to eat. we talked about a little bit aboutâ that today,even people that think they’re eating low-carb—really this is just the way that humans were meantto eat. it just so happens in our society we call it a low-carb diet. i call it a normalcarbohydrate 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 glucoseis going to drop, that’s what’s natural. ben:right. i do a lot of hunting and foragingand wilderness survival type of stuff, and typically, if i’m out there without foodsthat i’ve brought in, what am i eating? i’m eating mushrooms, mint, nettle, leafygreens, dandelion, and then that’s combined
with any animals i might encounter with theunderstanding 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 offat. 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 manybakeries, it’s mostly just plants, and mushrooms, and small amounts of animal proteins, andlarge amounts of animal fats and oils. dr. pompa:yeah. how much protein—you saidit 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 wouldsay i’m somewhere in the range of 100 to 120 grams, or so, of protein. that would beon the high range. i don’t get anywhere near the 200+ grams that i used to take inas a bodybuilder. i try and stay as close to at least 0.5 grams of protein per poundof 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 lotof evidence that there’s a great deal of anabolism that takes place once you exceedthat amount. dr. pompa:yeah, i’m with you. i think peopletoday 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 ofhigh-protein and i know that it’s not a healthy diet. of course, through gluconeogenesiseven turn into sugar. i always tell people as a general rule, half your body weight—consideringthat 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. ithink i agree with your range there. ben:yeah. like you said, it all depends onyour 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 closerto the 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound. most people
can maintain anabolism and health at 0.55or 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 heardthat you do practice fasting, but i didn’t know if you spend longer fasts or what yourexperience 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 dinneron 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 gowatch the videos because these guys drop a lot of f-bombs, and it might be offensiveto some, but they’re called the hodgetwins. you can google them. they’re funny. i haveto 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 19-20hours. they used to be into the 5-6 meal a day thing and they realized that it wasn’tworking like they expected. someone encouraged them—i don’t know their exact story. nowthey’ve been doing this for a while so all
of their videos are on intermittent fastingand how it raises their growth-hormone, testosterone. now they’ve gained all this muscle, i think20 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 actuallythink these guys are pretty smart, they put on a little act for the youtube videos, butthey 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 ofthese guys are biology-hackers. you’d be surprised at what it takes to get your bodydown to, say, 3% body fat while staying pretty big, especially if you’re not going to takea 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 andthen 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 somewherearound 9 to 10:30 a.m. that’s just a daily practice for me. typically, at some pointduring that time range i’ll do something very low-level in the morning, like yoga andâ 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 helpme 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, itworks if you’re fat burning, pretty significantly. yeah, i started out when i was intermittentfasting like you i started out i was doing 15-16 hours and then i pushed it. it seemedlike the longer i pushed it the more hormone-sensitive, no doubt, i’d become more important thatis, trust me. i noticed a difference, immediately; even my ability to hold onto my muscle. thegrowth hormone rise and the hormone sensitivity occur the longer i go, for sure. you do alot of endurance stuff, so i could see you
needing to shorten that window slightly, asfar as how active you are, ben. ben:yeah, most of that’s due to those eveningworkouts i do. they are pretty tough because i’m still racing professionally as an obstacleracer. a workout for me—when i’m saying 30-60 minutes in the afternoon, after a dayof being on my feet and moving for 6-8 hours, we’re talking about a workout where theaverage 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—exceeding16-hour fasts daily—that gets tough. i mean, of course, the other issue’s that my wifeis an amazing, amazing, cook and so i can only skip so many meals during the day beforei 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 definitelyhave to eat earlier, there’s no doubt. you’re still getting the benefit; you’re stillgetting the growth hormone rise, even with the fast. ben, once a week i do a 24-hourfast. 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 likethat, just because of my busy schedule. it was remarkable, but i felt like i definitely—noticeablymore energy on those days, and noticeably leaner, and yet didn’t lose one once ofmuscle; 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 thatyou keep a busy schedule working and you’re still doing all that, ben. i mean, i findthat 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’simpressive as well. ben:cool. thanks, man.dr. pompa:yeah, yeah. no doubt about it. i mean, as far as that goes, where are you goingwith it? you love doing the studies, you love doing this stuff. what do you see yourselfdoing here in the future with it?
ben:i’d like to look into more of an ancestralapplication, a more practical application. i would like to look a little bit more intopersistence hunting not just persistence hunting, but perhaps something closer to where i livewhere i’d be going after elk or moose or something like that. preferably in the snowwhere 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 lookingat with a bow, or with a spear, or with a close-range weapon, and seeing if it’s possibleto actually go and get your own food in the absence of food, just to begin to get peoplethinking about the state that we live in, the culture that we live in where food isjust constantly readily available. what would
happen if we didn’t have food but we hadto figure out a way to feed ourselves? the same is to be said for foraging and forwild 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 foundoutside 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 squirrelsor coyotes or anything like that, so for them it’s just plants, right? as part of theirchildhood they have had to learn to figure out how to go out and take care of themselvesby 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 ingredientsfrom 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 quitehandily with the things that we’ve talked about—fasting and ketosis, and denial ofmodern 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 persistencehunting in the absence of any significant sources of calories, to be able to take whatallows one to, say, do an ironman triathlon with very little calorie intake and then turnthat 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 littleadventure to embark upon. dr. pompa:yeah, that’s fantastic! i can’twait to hear the results. i’ll tell you what, i’m going to have my kids watch theshow and i’m going to say, yeah, so you think you have it bad in the pompa house—hiskids 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’sstill in it. now i have them intermittent fasting, i vary their diet. they do what itell them to do, that’s the fun part. it’s
like, let’s try a higher carb, let’s trythis, and i’m watching their performance level so it’s always fun. gosh, that’swhy we have kids, meredith. see, that’s why you’ve got to have some kids, you’vegot to experiment. ben, you know what i think you’re goingto find with that? i think you’re going to find what i say is, look, i believe thatpart of—really, we see it as far as getting patients or clients back to health, varyingtheir 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 adaptationis 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 forcedinto these states, fasting states, it is the bad cells do not make the—they can’t adaptand the bad cells start dying, too. autolytic behavior starts to take place, where the bodystarts eating the bad cells. it’s forcing our bodies to adapt. having to adapt whatyou’re describing is what our ancestors had to do. there is health to this type ofadaptation and diet variation so, really, you’re going to find that when you do thoseexperiments. i can’t wait to hear it. ben:yeah, that or i’ll just wind up deadin 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 themountain and there on the right was this massive spine. i think it was a moose because typicallywe 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 anotherprey. ben:i hope not.dr. pompa:lines around here so be careful, ben.ben:i will. dr. pompa:this is great stuff. meredith, iknow 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 minutesleft. ben, i want to thank you so much for being on the show. i’m wondering if youhave any advice for our audience who’s watching, who wants to do some things like you’redoing, obviously, not to that extreme. what would you suggest to some of our viewers whoreally want to increase their performance, want to implement some of these strategiesthat 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 thatyour life can be fitness. after we finish our call today, i will get off the treadmilland before the next call i’ll go and check the mail. after i grab the mail i’ll sprintback up the driveway, really, really hard.
i’ll get to the top of the driveway andi’ll crank out 25 pushups. then i’ll open up the mail, take care of the mail, and headback down to my next call. little things like that add up during the day. they get you tothe point where you really can go out and do things like an ironman triathlon, or aspartan 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 activitysomething that you do all day long. if you work in a traditional office setting, puta kettlebell underneath your desk, and get
one of these stools that you lean back onrather than sitting down, every time that you go to the bathroom have a rule that you’vegot to do 50 air squats. start to work in those little things throughout the day. you’dbe surprise at how fit you can stay and how prepared you can be for a big event withoutnecessarily neglecting your family, and your friends, and hobbies, and work, and stufflike that. dr. pompa:yeah. that’s great, ben. you livean 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 thatwe 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 finda link to that site, but also a link to some of the other articles i’ve written on turningyourself into a fat-burning machine, high-fat diets, things like that. i would go read myarticle. 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, andmeals, 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. thanksfor watching, everyone. ben:bye.meredith:yup. see you next week. bye.
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