There is so much information, and misinformation, out there about what the best way to eat is. We think that you need to figure out the diet and lifestyle that works best for YOU. Brad Kearns joins me to talk about following the Keto diet, fasting, micro-exercising.
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Brad explains how you can speed start the Keto diet by following his tips. Particularly, it is about being very strict right from the start: no sugars or processed carbs! Brad also mentions the type of people who shouldn’t follow the Keto diet.
We are both big believers in how incredible fasting, both intermittent and for days at a time, is for your productivity. Brad says that humans perform at their highest in a fasted state, and I have to agree - I actually fast for a few days before making any big decision as I feel I’m in my most mentally clear state.
Brad talks about the benefit of micro-workouts, especially in our modern society. Micro-workouts are small bursts of exercise throughout that keep your baseline fitness built-up at all times. People who are active throughout the day tend to have a higher fitness level than those who only workout at the gym a couple of times a week.
We talk about why your blood sugar spikes when you’re working out, even if you’re fasting or in a fasted state. Brad shares his desire to constantly challenge his food beliefs and why he thinks you should always question what you’re eating, what diets you’re following, and what the experts say. Finally, Brad implores us all to keep in touch with our youthful spirit for a long and healthy life.
Do you challenge your food beliefs regularly? Do you have any questions about the Keto diet after listening to this episode? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you have questions, email team@drannacabeca.com.
In This Episode:
- How you can speed start the Keto diet
- Who can’t follow the Keto diet
- How fasting makes you a more productive version of yourself
- What micro-workouts are and how they can improve your fitness routine
- Why your blood sugar spikes when you’re working out
- Why you should challenge your fixed food beliefs
- Why you need to cultivate your youthful spirit
Subscribe to Couch Talk w/ Dr. Anna Cabeca on Youtube
Quotes:
“If we feel intimidated about fasting or we’re not sure how long we can last; when a 16-18 hour fast sounds too hard, my suggestion is to wake up in the morning and wait until you experience a true sensation of hunger to eat something.” (13:04)
“We live in a life of excess and indulgence and massive choice that’s overwhelming in the number of choices that we have. So if you can narrow things down, and make some commitments, I think you’ll get a really positive benefit, even if it happens to be something someone might dispute as the very best thing to do, it’s worth thinking about and trying out.” (39:50)
“Psychological age is by far the number one factor for your rate of aging and demise and longevity. Biological age is strongly correlated with psychological age. And then third, and a distant third, is your chronological age.” (42:07)
Links
Find Brad Kearns on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube
Transcript
Brad:
There's a lot of confusion and controversy in the diet scene, but the first thing is to get rid of those toxic modern foods. Unfortunately, for people who like the word try, you have to make a total commitment for a complete elimination of these high insulin-stimulating foods out the gate in the first 21 days because they have such addicted properties. I'm talking about sugar and refined grain foods, and of course, the toxic industrial seed oils are also in that picture.
Dr. Anna:
Hello, everyone, this is Dr. Anna Cabeca and welcome to Couch Talk, an intimate place for intimate conversation shamelessly and guiltlessly. We get real on the show and this is why they call me the Girlfriend Doctor. It is like you're having a conversation with your girlfriend, no whitecoat syndrome here. Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics and that is keto. Here we are in prelaunch for my book coming out, Keto-Green 16, and I'm bringing on some keto experts and sharing them with you as their wisdom just continues to bubble forth and based in science.
Dr. Anna:
Today, I have a really interesting and very special guest, unique to Couch Talk and I have invited Brad Kearns to our couch. We're going talk about his new book Keto for Life, like a spinoff of Body For Life if you remember that, but he is the author of Keto For Life and The Keto Reset Diet. He's an endurance athlete, has had a tremendous career. He is a New York Times best-selling author and also a Guinness World Record-setting professional speed golfer. I didn't even know there was such a thing, speed golfing, but apparently there is. He's also a former national champion and number three world-ranked professional triathlete.
Dr. Anna:
I don't know you about you all, but exercise is essential. We all know this. Exercise is essential for a healthy life, for healthy aging, for quality of life, but I look forward to leaving the gym. I look forward to finishing my workout. When it's done, I am so happy, but it is not something I wake up and I'm just ready to get going and committed and I get up thinking about it. I've got so much passion over physical activity. For me, I'd rather curl up with a good book and have a glass of tea or glass of wine and sit with my girlfriend and talk or go for a walk. I'm trying to incorporate these activities into daily life. It's really an important part of a healthy Keto-Green lifestyle. Join me in welcoming Brad to Couch Talk. Welcome, Brad. It's so good to have another keto dieter with me and to share your perspective on Keto for Life.
Brad:
Oh, my gosh, Anna. I love what you're doing. We had a great talk before we hit record about Keto-Green and keeping the women aging gracefully and strong and exuberant. I'm trying to do the same thing on the men's side really where we have so many resources at our disposal. We know how to be healthy, but there's a lot of forces in the modern world which are pushing us into these horrible patterns of disease [inaudible 00:03:17] and we don't want to participate like we did when we were younger, so we're trying to fight that battle gracefully, have fun along the way and plenty to talk about.
Dr. Anna:
So much to talk about with you. There are several areas I want to hit on and one of them being when you're working with men too, just getting started on keto. What are your steps to speed ... Because everything you do is on the fast side, on the high-intensity side, how do you speed start someone on keto?
Brad:
Good question. I think you have to line up with the individual personality and some people are really good at jumping in and going cold turkey and being totally focused and writing down their objectives on a piece of paper and knocking them out one through seven. Then, there are people who are a little bit resistant. They're coming into a picture where they might have had battle scars from failure and suffering and struggling in the past and self-limiting beliefs that are still in the mix, challenging their best intentions. Sometimes, we have to proceed slowly and gracefully and do little victories each day and just go step-by-step with no rush or no pressure.
Brad:
I think it's really up to the individual what's going to work best, but for everyone, if you're considering a dietary transformation which could quite possibly save your life because we're locked in a cycle of carbohydrate dependency in modern life and we want to get over. We want to cross that bridge over to the world of being fat and keto-adapted. To do that, the first step is to get the junk out of your diet and that's undisputed. You're not going to have a guest on next week that's going to counter anything I say here unlike a lot of other things we might. There's a lot of confusion and controversy in the diet scene, but the first thing is to get rid of that toxic modern food.
Brad:
Unfortunately, for people who like the word try, you have to make a total commitment for a complete elimination of these high insulin-stimulating foods out the gate in the first 21 days because they have such addictive properties. I'm talking about sugar and refined grain foods, and of course, the toxic industrial seed oils are also in that picture. If you can envision this as a detox or you're ditching the sugar and sweet beverages and all that stuff out of your diet for 21 days, this gives you a fighting chance of continuing to progress toward that goal of not being dependent upon regular meals for your primary source of energy and instead being able to access and burn stored body fat and make ketones in the liver as necessary.
Dr. Anna:
I completely agree with you and it's often doing less, not more, right? It's starting out with that cleanup, that clearing up the clutter. If it doesn't serve us, let it go and I think that's a really great place to start. Again, is there anyone that you have found couldn't do keto?
Brad:
That's a good question. I think we hear this commentary a lot. If you go on to Keto Reset Facebook Group, we have 30,000 people, you're going to hear a lot of different opinions and voices. I think what happens is to try to proceed with a dietary transformation in an ill-advised manner. There are many, many people who can't do keto or they can't do low carb or they can't do blank, blank. I think it's all about hitting the checkpoints properly, for example knowing that you're going to get enough sodium as you reduce the sodium intake from your diet by ditching these toxic modern foods if you do all that right. We're all humans. We're all coming from this ancestral evolutionary health example where ketone-burning was a fundamental element.
Brad:
It was a fundamental survival element of human evolution for 2 million years. Humans can make ketones, otherwise, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be able to survive those periods where the caloric intake was uncertain. It's a magnificent evolutionary attribute that we all, in fact, dabble in on a day-to-day basis. Anyone who sleeps overnight for eight hours, even if you had a hot fudge sundae as your last thing at 10:00 PM, you're going to be making a little bit of ketones in the liver when you wake up because you're in a fasted state for so long.
Brad:
Then, if you go and have an all-American high-carbohydrate breakfast, you're going to trash that system and put it on the backburner. Same with fat burning which is even more simple and essential to lock into a fat-burning state for the duration of the day, we trash that when we slam out faces with high-carbohydrate processed foods throughout the day, even little snacks. One of the big elements that we're really pushing is this idea that you don't really need to snack. Even if you snack on something healthy, it stops fat burning in its tracks as you burn through the calories even if it's a fat bomb and it doesn't spike insulin, it's got no carb content. Of course, that's going to be less than reaching for a high-sugar energy bar, but this idea that we need to have food around all the times, I think it's mostly coming into emotional reasons, boredom, things like that rather than for any purpose in metabolic function and in fact can be counterproductive.
Dr. Anna:
I am with you there because when you hear about the eating windows for many of the keto or intermittent fasting recommendations like, "Oh, we'll eat for eight hours." No, eat, stop, eat, stop.
Brad:
All right, yeah, that's right. I think we have to get away from this overly obsessive approach to diet transformation. I'm working on a book with Mark Sisson now about the concept of just eating two meals a day instead of worrying about going from more than that. The starting point I think for healthy eating at this point would be, Mark calls it, intermittent eating rather than intermittent fasting. In other words, let's say our baseline human operating default position is in a fasted state. We do fine in a fasted state. It's undisputed by the scientific and medical community that we operate more efficiently in a fasted state than when we're in a snacking state or an eating state where we're going from meal to the next.
Brad:
If you understand that and acknowledge that, that you're going to make more antioxidants, you're going to have a better anti-inflammatory benefit than any superfood on the planet or any concoction from just fasting and spending more time in a fasted state. Then, when it's time to eat a meal, you do it because you're hungry, because you enjoy the omelet from the corner down the street, because you're in a celebratory set meeting and all of those kinds of things, instead of having this obligation to go find some slices of butter to drop in your coffee because someone said that's what you need to do when you wake up. We can agree to trend in that right direction where we're not so worried about foods and the particulars but more worried about how good we're operating as a human in a fat-burning state.
Dr. Anna:
I think that's a point well made. I really think about clients that are initially very worried about fasting or struggling with low blood sugar issues and really want to explain that, "Your blood sugar valleys or you get these low blood sugar reactions because of the high carbohydrate content." Once we take that out in the Keto-Green keto-type diet that you also recommend in Keto for Life that you have stable blood sugars. I want to show you a couple of things around that, but I also want to let women know and men who are listening is that initially when we start keto, we can run into some severe cravings and hunger and just know that it gets better.
Dr. Anna:
That's when we're doing some more of the fat or maybe some Ketone Esters will help up front, but some extra fat MCT oil and really hydrating between your meals, but by day three, ghrelin, the hunger hormone, is going to come back to a nice level and you're not going to have that crazy hunger. So often, fat loading upfront and staying really hydrated as you go into and just being aware by day three, that hunger will be gone.
Brad:
Thanks for making that distinction especially after my previous rant. When I talk about transitioning from carb dependency over to becoming fat-adapted, a fat journey requires you to reach for macadamia nuts on the hour for the first three days or the first three weeks. As long as you can progress away from that wildly excessive carbohydrate intake and consequent wildly excessive insulin production, whatever it takes, if it takes a lot of snacking and huge meals. Personally, I'm a high calorie-burning former athlete and still an athlete. I used to be a professional triathlete eating my face off all day.
Brad:
When I first transitioned over to the ancestral-style eating pattern and ditching grains and sugars, I had a six-egg omelet every morning with all the stir-fried vegetables in there and the avocado slices on top and the salsa and the melted cheese every single morning. That's what I woke up and made and it was wonderful. I felt great and I was burning energy steadily hours afterward. Then, maybe after seven months or something, I finally woke up a few days and realized I'm not really starving for this giant omelet. I don't really need it.
Brad:
Then, I explored the world of fasting and compressed eating windows in more detail there, but that graceful transition that I made from the giant cereal bowl that I had eaten every single day of my life starting back when I was kid and then high school and burning all these calories at the running practice, I went from that huge carbohydrate bomb in the morning to this wonderful high-fat, nutrient-dense omelet. That was my [inaudible 00:12:59]. I just want to get to everything in a natural and appropriate manner. When we feel intimated about fasting or we're not sure how long we can last and these six things and eight things sounds too hard, my suggestion as you wake up in the morning and wait until you experience the true sensation of hunger to eat something.
Brad:
Dr. Cate Shanahan, my good friend, author of Deep Nutrition, she says ghrelin gets your stomach growling. When you sense that activation of the hunger hormone ghrelin, perhaps you can go honor that with a meal. It's no big deal. You don't have to make a failure checkmark in your book. You just want to get back in touch with those hungers and say tidy signals that work wonderfully to help regulate your body composition and all these things that we've forgotten in the carbohydrate dependency paradigm. Your body will take care of you. Just trust it.
Dr. Anna:
I think that's where this ability to trust our body and listen to our bodies is critical. I think that's really the theme of this decade is really becoming the CEO of our own bodies, of our own health and reclaiming that knowledge, trusting our intuition and being able to hear it. You had said something about fasting for cognition earlier. I fast before I make major decisions. I'll do one, two, three-day fast. Before I have to make any major decisions or from enduring the business meeting, whatever, there's a lot of pressure or stress to get clarity, I absolutely fast. I think that's just helped me make some much better decisions. Let's see, but that's been part of it. Brad, tell us some of your backstory. Tell us how you got to here.
Brad:
Oh, my goodness. I'm an endurance athlete when I was younger and was so blessed to be able to pursue the dream of triathlon as a professional for nine years. I competed all over the world on the pro triathlon circuit. My life was a total emergent into this compelling athletic challenge where you had to master the sports of swimming, bicycling and running and do these grueling events and this grueling training program, perhaps at the level of any other athletes in terms of the number of hours we had to put in every week. That was a great phase of my life. The best thing that I can carry forward from that is that when you're in the athletic scene, you learn the lessons of success and failure, the lessons of life in a very intense and graphic and dramatic manner.
Brad:
You can't lie to yourself nor can you bullshit the world like you might be able to in a corporate setting where you got the promotion and someone else didn't or vice versa. You're exposed there literally because I'm running around the Speedo and I have magazine pictures of me, walking around in basically my underwear, right? It was a really intense journey. That's a great phase of life and then you move on to the phase, like in my case having kids, raising a family and getting a job, all those wonderful important things. To take those lessons that I learned, I feel like that's my most prominent idea that I want to communicate.
Brad:
I named my podcast Get Over Yourself. Not trying to be a wise guy to the intended listener, but this was the most important lesson that I had to learn for myself especially when I was an athlete that if I could get over myself and not get too caught up in the self-importance and ego which was very difficult to do when you're in the athletic scenes. Again, it's very exposed and dramatic. When I could compete with great intensity, great passion, you want to win really badly but release the attachment of my self-esteem to the outcome, that's when I was in my most powerful position as a competitor. By the way, the same thing goes for being a parent, not being attached to the outcome of your parenting.
Brad:
We're in the age of helicopter parents, where the parents are trying to control and manipulate and perfect their kids' lives to the extent that we just empower them from coming into their own human and learning from failure and struggle. I take that into, of course, my career ambitions. We're working on a book, putting my heart and soul into a book. You know how that is. Then, we have a tendency to want to check the sales records and look at how many approvals we got on social media. Of course, these things are widely criticized, but it's easier said than done.
Brad:
If you can get back into this position where it's okay to be driven and intense and competitive, but to not live in that world to be able to disengage a little bit and realize that you can go on with life and live in a position of gratitude rather than the disease state, the now confirmed disease state of FOMO which my good friend, Dr. Ron Sinha, takes care of high-income patients in California Silicon Valley and some of the world's leading tech companies, Facebook, Google. These people are very affluent. They have two and a half times the national average income, but he has identified the prevalence of FOMO is so strong that it turns into pressurized life."
Brad:
If we can all understand this message that, "Boy, it's great to be alive." Whatever you're doing, whatever failures or struggles you've had especially if we're talking about a diet transition or body composition, guess what? You can start today and go off with a clean slate and get away from these measuring and judging forces in the modern world that are so destructive. They can be so destructive.
Dr. Anna:
That's impressive. Being that you're also this amazing fitness expert, I know in Keto for Life and just in your life and what you teach and how you practice, you really are on the cutting edge of this next level of fitness. What do we do over 50 to get fit in the shortest amount of time possible for me?
Brad:
Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited to get into this topic because I've made some incredible discoveries in my own fitness regimen in recent times, in the past year talking to some amazing experts that I think are on the cutting edge and pushing through these amazing breakthroughs. One of them I think is this mentality of the all or nothing work out where most of us envision a workout as getting into the car, looking for a parking spot, going into the gym, spending an hour and 15 minutes of valuable time, getting in with a trainer or a group exercise setting where you're getting pushed really, really hard and you feel great afterward and you're buzzed on endorphins.
Brad:
Then 36 to 48 hours later, you feel like crap and you end up reaching for the pint of ice cream in the freezer because you're in an overly exhaustive depleting workout pattern. As an alternative which is more doable for anyone of any fitness level and even fitness enthusiasts that have a high-skill level is this concept of micro-workouts. These are brief explosive efforts that you can do over the course of a busy day that stimulates a tremendous fitness response over time without that high-risk factor of breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury that occur when you're in the traditional fitness setting that we see in the gym where people are getting pushed too hard.
Brad:
I have great love and respect for these fitness trends of today like CrossFit and Peloton and all these things that are getting people off their boat which is another big challenge and into something exciting, but as I look back and observe especially from an old-time athlete guy, doing what I've done and the mistakes that I've made, I'm looking at a pattern of this burnout trend where people push themselves too hard and then they give up and they're gone and they're not in the gym by April Fool's Day after their January 1st New Year's resolution.
Brad:
If you can think of this concept like micro-workouts where we want to break out this prolonged periods of stillness that we experience in daily life, most of us, many of us who are in an office environment and right there in your cubicle, drop for a set of 20 deep squats. You think it sounds silly or too simple, let me talk when we get to 16, 17, 18, 19. Your legs are going to be burning, no matter who you are, I'm telling you because it's a tough little effort. It takes one minute let's say. Maybe you do that three times over the course of an eight-hour day.
Brad:
In my home office environment here, out on the back on the side yard, I have a hexagonal deadlift bar, one of the great fitness implements of all time if you had to pick one. When I throw the garbage out in the garbage can, I go past the hex bar and I do a single set of eight repetitions of a 200-pound hex bar. It doesn't count as a workout. I'm not writing it in my journal like I'm proud to do one set or its significance, but you add that up to 365 days a year, I'm lifting hundreds of thousands of extra pounds just because I've created this habit of walking by the bar and picking it up eight times.
Brad:
Same with the pullup bar that I'm touching right now as we do the podcast, I would haul up a set of 12 or 14 or 15 pullups a couple of times a day, now on average, right? These things add up so wonderfully over time that when it is time to do a proper workout like I love sprinting, I'm still pursuing competitive goals, but when I go do that proper workout at the track, I have so much more resiliency, injury protection and a higher baseline fitness level from which to launch from just because I move around and find ways to move my body over these busy days where we're engaged with our brain function and a lot of times sitting there still.
Dr. Anna:
How often do you think we should do these micro-workouts? I really like the concept of micro workouts by the way, so how often throughout the day?
Brad:
As often as you want. That's the whole beauty here is that you can use your intuition and [inaudible 00:22:39] with slight hesitation or backlash. If I answer the question, "Will I need to do a deep squat six times a day every two hours?" which I'm being silly here, but we've been hit with so much of this. We've been slapped around with so many edicts and recommendations and people pointing, you can see me pointing there at the camera, enough already. You just do what you can do, but put this in your mind, thanks for listening and watching the show, put it in your mind that it's okay to do a miniature session of explosive effort with your muscles.
Brad:
It's not going to make you sweat or stress you out too much. It's not going to make you tired for tomorrow's big workout either, but we need to move more. Some of the experts that we cite, we talk about this in the book Keto For Life really nicely, some of the leading experts in fitness and exercise physiology are now discovering that increased general everyday movement, most particularly walking, that's the easiest way to do this, increased general everyday movement is more important than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen for your health, for your longevity and your overall wellbeing.
Brad:
The people who are going to gym at 6:00 AM and doing spin class three days a week, and by the way, leaving that class and heading straight over to Jamba Juice for 600 calories of the medium smoothie and the breakfast scone which is exactly what you just burned during the spin class, so you have a net wash there when it comes to weight loss. The people who are moving more in daily life can get a better adaption than the extreme fitness people. Remember, there's 168 hours in a week. Even if we're at the gym working out hard day after day and you're putting in six hours a week at the gym, you have 162 other hours where you're sitting around.
Brad:
A lot of times, Dr. Katy Bowman calls it the lazy athlete mentality, where because we did that workout at the gym, we're lazier than the average person and we drift further up the parking lot looking for a spot near the big box store so we can walk in, all those kind of things. We got to get out of that mindset and into the mindset that humans are meant to be active throughout the day.
Dr. Anna:
I completely agree with you especially traveling around the world, that culture is walking here, walking there. My daughter is studying in Holland right now, her third year of college and she has bicycles and there's no cars. They're all riding bicycles everywhere they need to go. You just get wet when it rains and cold when it snows and then it's okay.
Brad:
Wow. It's okay people. We can't imagine it here in America. You know what? I believe the second healthiest state is by body composition measures besides Colorado, the clear winner, it's the only state with less than 20% obesity in the United States, New York. The reason New York ranked so highly is because so much of the population lives in New York City and the reason New York City which is by many accounts an unhealthy place to live, the huge urban environment with the pollution and the noise, all that thing, but they transcend those negatives because they walk so much.
Brad:
The average New Yorker living in the urban environment is walking so far that they're walking their way out of high-risk of whatever they're eating and the slice of pizza on the corner and all those things. That walking is just pure magic and that's something that anybody can do without feeling intimidated, right?
Dr. Anna:
Right. Then there's that sense of community too. I think that New York does that well. Lots of groups, lots of interaction, a big social life 24/7 and so you have that really good sense of community. I know you guys talk about that too in your book, community increases oxytocin. That is the hormone of longevity. The more we can get, the better. I wanted to say when you're talking about these micro-workouts, what we know too, similar with HIIT workout exercise increases your growth hormone and it's going to give you a better night's sleep. Hormonally again, we're turning back the clock. I like that you bring those points up in your book as well.
Dr. Anna:
The question for is something that surprised me. I'm going to show you this now. For those who are listening to my podcast, I'm going to just talk to you about this, but I want to show Brad this. When you see that spike, this blood sugar, a 24-hour blood sugar monitor, it's a 14-day monitor called the FreeStyle Libre. It's one of these little buggers that go on my arm and diabetics use this. I'm fasting here. What do you think that like that spike ... Can I tell you what that spike was you see at the top? Why? With spikes, there's like I'm fasting all morning, continuing to fast. It must be at 9:00, 9:30. Just waking up, having my tea. I get a little bump in blood sugar and then this huge spike over 150 because I'm doing my boxing workout. That's fasting boxing.
Dr. Anna:
I didn't eat that day until 4:00 PM or something. It makes sense after the fact, like, "Why aren't I in ketosis after my workouts? I did bump out of ketosis. Now, I know why."
Brad:
I feel you, Dr. Anna. It's very interesting. I discovered the same thing because when Mark and I were working on the Keto Reset Diet, this was back in early 2017, and keto hadn't taken off yet. It was a very obscure dietary concept that the early pioneers like Dr. Dom D'Agostino were talking about in the laboratory and it's great for epileptics, but it hadn't turned into this crazy thing. We were trying to learn about it ourselves and I was pricking my finger every single day and getting all my blood values and getting these super-low ketone values like 0.3 after a 30-hour fast and an incredible sprint workout and then my glucose is 110. Then, my glucose was 130 one morning.
Brad:
What's going on is we're now getting a window with this technology into the body's amazing ability to deliver whatever nutrient you need on-demand in real-time for whatever you're doing. We noticed in conjunction with workouts a huge spike in glucose because the body is dumping glucose from the storage depots, the glycogen storage in muscles and into the liver into your bloodstreams so you can perform the workout. You can get these weird values where we're told we want that blood sugar down in the 80s if you're a real fat-burning beast and that's the health and the longevity. It needs to be put in context.
Brad:
Same with the ketones, I believe what was going on for me was this concept of ketone flux where your body makes just the amount of ketones necessary to fuel brain function in the absence of a ton of dietary carbohydrates. Because I was good at making and utilizing the ketones, I wasn't accumulating these huge levels in my bloodstream like people do who are going into this in a crash diet pattern or if you've present in the emergency room and you have the severe flu and you haven't drunken any fluids or eaten in a few days, you're going to be in ketosis. Congratulations, your numbers are off the charts because you're making these ketones, but your body is sick and can't really utilize them.
Brad:
Same with a poorly adapted diet or switching too quickly into keto, they're going to be darkening those urine strips, but guess what that means? It means you're excreting the ketones rather than burning them. To get a little bit more context here and I have to admit to the viewer, the listener that I'm so busy with other wonderful objectives and interest in my life like speed golf that I don't really care about measuring or tracking my dietary patterns anymore. I've done enough of it. I've done those reports for the books, right? We had to scrutinize every bit of food that goes into the mouth for two days and measure it all that and that's great and that's eliminating and I was able to publish information to help other people, but oh, my gosh, I'll never do that again unless someone forces me to.
Brad:
What are we going to do then? You're going to track how you feel before the workout, during the workout, after the workout. Compare and contrast to whatever dietary patterns you have. Yes, some people like to eat some calories in the morning and it's not a good time for fasting especially with hormone dysregulation and people that are struggling from coming back from illness. Maybe fasting is not the recommended strategy for them and it's better for them to ... People talk about getting some protein first thing in the morning if they have adrenal or thyroid stress. All of those things are wonderful. The professionals are out there giving good advice, but you got to figure it out for yourself and the best measurement is how you're feeling on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Anna:
Absolutely and I think that's the other things that we talk about the gratitude journaling, the positive attitude, attitude of gratitude and those principles, bringing that into place is really critical to altering our physiology in a positive way and the more we understand from science that our body is actually able to do that, the more exciting this gets, because it's like only, I don't know. I always quote, it's only about 25% about what we eat, so all the other things that come into play too, when, with who and the lifestyle, right? The active lifestyle. You've given some hacks. What's the research showing now with keto for longevity?
Dr. Anna:
Again, amidst the controversy of keto long term, the recent article published out of, I want to say it was Yale or Harvard, I think it was Yale Medical News. They were looking at rats, a study of rats. It was looking at continuous high fat, so it was 99% fat, basically 1% carb diet that after two weeks the mice model were storing excessive fat at that point, many of them. It was implying that keto long term is of concern. Typically, for me, in the Keto-Green, it's a lot about like your omelet with stir-fried vegetables and avocado. That's a Keto-Green plate. It's not just bacon and butter, right?
Dr. Anna:
There's a concept of keto healthy, but long term, I also recommend fasting. I also recommend feasting. We have those feast days for metabolic flexibility as well. I wanted your insight into this and keto for longevity.
Brad:
Well, your recommendations sound wonderful and I think people can buy into those and enjoy those. Boy, beware of reading these headline articles. Of course, I get bombarded by friends and family, "Hey, did you see this? Red meat causes cancer. Oh, they were grouping in hotdogs and fast-food burgers with grass-fed, pasture-raised." It's complete nonsense and the distortion of critical thinking and the flawed conclusions and flawed logic that's being applied and being slammed into our faces. People are talking to me now about a recent documentary that came out about plant-based eating and all the athletes are doing wonderfully well on that, so this is the way to go. You're taking these intuitive leaps that make no sense.
Brad:
There's a counter-argument to almost anything that's put out there. Then, that will confuse the heck out of people that don't have all day to jump into this and read the research and reason with what's going on. Then, what are we left with? I would say that you can look at your blood values now and get a clean bill of health from a somewhat forward-thinking medical expert that can see that your triglycerides are dropping and your HDLs are going up and your inflammatory markers like HBA1c are going down with a dietary change and that validates the worthiness of that without regard to whatever the headline article said about keto being a concern long term for mice that are eating a bunch of processed fat foods and things like that.
Brad:
It's really tough to engage these days because there's so much controversy and so much noise in the mix. Now, if you go back to the model of evolutionary health and realize, for example, I had a guest on my podcast that was talking about how eggs are so bad for humans and they raise cholesterol and increase heart disease risks, but humans have been eating eggs and raiding the nests of eggs for 2 million years. We evolved into the top of the food chain creature because we were able to access nutrient-dense foods for millions of years and grow a bigger brain that was more complex and it's branched off from our eight cousins like the gorilla who eats shoots and leaves for 11 hours a day to fuel that tiny brain to sufficiency.
Brad:
I like to go to these big picture common sense ideas that humans are very adaptable to eat a variety of foods. There probably are some individuality. I don't think it's much individuality as people are crowing about these days where whatever your blood type is or your ancestry. My ancestry comes from Ireland and the British Isles, but that's only what? Maybe three or four or five generations back. All of us come from East Africa, newsflash and that goes back to 160,00 years when the first emergence of modern-day homo sapiens came about. We're all African by descent and then we started to colonize the globe.
Brad:
If we can go to this common ground factors of what the homo sapiens species need to thrive, we're talking about the foods of the planet that had been minimally processed and in their best energetic state, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds and certain foods that are from modern times but happen to be healthy. It doesn't get more complexed than that. Now, from that list I just spewed out, if you're deeply believing that you're going to thrive only on vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds and you're going to take that to town and you're going to see how you feel at the three-month mark, the 12-month mark, the five-year mark which I have extreme concerns about as you might guess, then let's see what happens there.
Brad:
Same with, I'm really interested and intrigued by these guys who are leading the carnivore diet movement whereby some people might be resistant to plants and these antinutrients that are known to be present in plants, these mild plant toxins that most of us taut for the antioxidant benefits in the body, but if we've been medically damaged in some way over the course of our life of eating processed foods, these restrictive diets where people are just eating animal foods for 30 days are resulting in amazing healing stories. You can't say much more than someone who just [inaudible 00:37:13] amazing healing [inaudible 00:37:14], so you can't knock it out of hand just because it doesn't align with your fixed beliefs.
Brad:
For me, the recent times and the explosion of information and different philosophies has been an exercise in challenging my fixed beliefs and remaining open-minded to new sources of information and trying these things out such as micro-workouts and things that you never would think, "I don't work out unless I got to the gym and get a white towel and punch my keypad at the front desk." You can open your mind to other possibilities that are really fun to do it and I think really rewarding to realize that, "Hey, maybe there's more flexibility than you think with your approach to keto or whatever it is that's causing a little bit of stress because it's too rigid."
Dr. Anna:
I agree with you and keto carnivore is very interesting. I have a guest coming up too to talk to about keto carnivore, but that immune issues, it's like how can you argue with that? It's interesting, right? Variety is the spice of life. That's what I think.
Brad:
Or not if you're going into strict carnivore, there's less variety, but in a lot of ways, any restrictive diet is going to deliver a positive benefit in the short term because now all of a sudden, you're focusing on your diet and you're putting some rules and guidelines and restrictions in. I did a show on my podcast about how I realized after a lifelong identity as an athlete, I was eating a lot of popcorn at night and ended up gaining 7 pounds out of nowhere and I had weighed myself on the scale one day and I'm like, "Dang, man." I've weighed the same for 25 years and now I'm like, "Okay, this is going to fun."
Brad:
I went on a journey of exploration to try to drop excess body fat, which I don't think I've ever done in my life and I realized that bringing some awareness into the picture, for example formulating the goal, like, "I'm going to drop some of this body fat because it doesn't align with my identity as an athlete and putting into place things like no-calorie consumption until 12:00 noon," that worked for me. I'm not saying this is an idea, but it's just putting a rule and regulation in place. No sugar is a wonderful rule for any human that wants to live a long life and escape disease patterns.
Brad:
Once you do that and say, "I don't eat sugar because it's not healthy for me," you are freed from the decision fatigue and the application of will power when you're at the window at Starbucks and trying to decide what to get, or when you're out and about and they bring the dessert tray over, you say, "No, thank you." It's just like a person with a severe peanut allergy on an airplane. They say, "No, I don't want the bag of peanuts. Keep it away from my face so I don't get into shock." These things are valuable now because we live in a life of excess and indulgence and a massive choice that's overwhelming in the number of choices that we have.
Brad:
If you can narrow things down and make some commitments, I think you'll get a really positive benefit even if it happens to be something that someone might dispute as to the very best thing to do. It's worth thinking about and trying out. For me, I did a carnivore experiment at the same time as I put in this more regulation with my fasting period and I quickly lost the excess body fat and I attribute it to narrow dietary choices and eating nutrient-dense foods, obviously low in carbohydrate, just in keto. I'm sure I was aligned with keto in that sense, but also just the habitual process of not eating until 12:00 noon.
Dr. Anna:
I think what you're talking about too is just the disciplines and practices you put into place that have worked for you, that you discerned has worked best for you. Now, Brad, we are going to wrap up in just a second, but I want to address you're over 50. You're 55, 54, 55? Have you found any challenges? What do you say to your male counterparts that are over 50 now, they're struggling with some of the increased risk factors that are coming, the inflammatory factors, the hemoglobin A1c, the fatigue, the erectile issues?
Brad:
They say getting old is no fun and all that kind of stuff. I have this reference point of being this extreme athlete where I was out there pushing the highest levels of peak performance. Boy, it's not going to happen like that forever and ever. I raced as a professional for me, just 20 to 30, and then when I was 30, I was so tired and worn out and beat up from this journey that I've been on with all the world travel and the intense training that I felt like I was 80 literally. When you feel like you're 80, there's a lot of significance to that in the biological sense and the concept of the three ages that Dr. Deepak Chopra has communicated for a long time.
Brad:
There's chronological age, the number, your birthdays. There's biological age, which is your level of functionality compared to [inaudible 00:41:57] obviously. You're it to something and then there's your psychological age which is how old you feel. Dr. Chopra asserts with great scientific validity that psychological age is by far the number factor for your rate of aging and demise and your longevity. Biological age obviously strongly correlated with psychological age and then in a distant third is your chronicle age. Now, the next follow-up quip would be someone saying, "Hey, age is just number. I'm just 55. I don't care. I don't care. I feel 25," but guess what?
Brad:
Most of us should be paying more attention to that number because if you do have a number up there that you're not respecting the need to for example do more injury prevention work before you step on to the basketball on Thursday evenings once a week to let it all hang out, that's not going to work very well when you're 55. In fact, I had to quit the adult basketball leagues because the guys, they still had the mentality of young tough guys even though we're all terrible old man running around, getting me injured too many times. I'm like, "Come on, man. We got to tone it done here."
Brad:
I think to cultivate that youthful spirit and to not accept this accelerated decline that unfortunately we see all around us, "I'm going to commiserate with my peers and we're all going to sit on the sidelines and dedicate Sundays to watching the NFL games rather than heading out to the nearby running track or the golf course or doing something for our own competitive intensity," boy, that's going to be probably a really big mistake and a big disappoint that you're going to regret later. I'm trying to maintain that youthful spirit, pursue appropriate competitive goals that's not necessarily, of course, not the same as the goals that I had when I was racing on the pro circuit.
Brad:
Now, I do things that promote longevity, promote health, don't compromise health and are appropriate to my current lifestyle and other responsibilities. To always have that competitive edge working in the background, but properly calibrated so it's reasonable and you're not one of those showoffs that think that they're still young, but not doing themselves any favors out there.
Dr. Anna:
You're adequately preparing and you're following up afterward for proper nutrition. Brad, what's one thing you would recommend our listeners to take from this message and apply into their lives, a piece of advice, a pearl of your wisdom to send us home with?
Brad:
Get over yourself. It's so fun. I think I conveyed the idea pretty well that it's okay to have this great passion and competitive intensity in life but then move on with a smile and get up the next day and try again. One of my favorites of all time, Kobe Bryant, we just lost him at the week that we're doing this recording and I can't shake it out of my head. It's just so devastating because of the great joy that he gave me and my son, my little basketball-playing son that I raised him and we had such a great experience in the sport. What he stood for was this tremendous unbending competitive intensity no matter what.
Brad:
When everyone else is goofing around at the end of NBA All-Star and he's trying to catch up from nine points down and just taking control of the court, it's something that we can all be inspired by when we're talking about going after these health goals and these fitness goals and not giving up and not letting that aging mind get in the way.
Dr. Anna:
I think it's half fun, be kind. I hear the fun in your message all the way around. I love your get over yourself, but I look forward to listening to your podcast as well. Brad, I want to thank you so much for being with us today and your book, Keto For Life. It's available anywhere books are sold and your website, would you direct us there?
Brad:
bradkearns.com, lots of fun. You can see crazy videos of me jumping in the 36-degree chest freezer every morning. I have my morning routine where I'm doing my flexibility and mobility drill, so it's my first micro-workout of the day. It starts as soon as I wake up and those kinds of things. If I were to do backup recommendations besides getting over yourself is do something very first thing in the morning to advocate for your personal health and hopefully build energy and get the blood flowing because unfortunately, 84% of Americans, the very first thing we do every morning, guess what is it?
Brad:
We're reaching for the phone and we're putting our mind into this reactive mode which is very difficult to escape from and get back into that wise, problem-solving, strategic mode. Instead of reaching for the phone, go on to the ground and start doing some stretches or get right up out of bed, get out into fresh air, take your dog out for a walk, [inaudible 00:46:43] all those forces that are definitely going to pull you in later in the day of course.
Dr. Anna:
I agree. The setting your morning off right with that shift enthusiology to a more holistic state versus a stress out is just game-changing. It is definitely game-changing for me. It made an entire difference in my physiology, my health, my hormonal balance. Brad, I want to thank you so much for being with us today and I look forward to talking with you more and having you back on the podcast. Thank you.
Brad:
Thank you, Dr. Anna. Keto-Green, let's do it.
Dr. Anna:
We can see that are many ways to do keto and customizing keto for you is really critical and that's where we're in agreement, my colleagues that are doing keto right, the fact that we have to discern what's working for us and what's not and give ourselves time and also test, don't guess. Look at our measurements. Check your pH and ketones, see that you're getting into ketosis, blood ketones as well and your hemoglobin A1c, your inflammatory markers, your adrenal markers. We really want to maintain optimal health. Watch your numbers. Do what is working for you and enjoy yourself. Get over yourself, enjoy yourself and have fun. I appreciate you. Please, I love reading your reviews. Leave me your review for this podcast and share this message with your friends and your connections. I will see you next week on Couch Talk.
