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Gut Health: The Missing Key to Sustainable Weight Loss | Joel Greene
If you're stuck in the cycle of restrictive dieting and rebound weight gain, your gut may be the root cause. In this eye-opening episode, Joel Greene shares how gut diversity, immune signaling, and adipose tissue health impact fat loss—and why most diets fail without nature’s built-in rhythms. Learn how to reset your microbiome, restore key bacteria, and train your metabolism to work with you, not against you.
KEY TOPICS
- Gut-immune signaling and why your body protects fat
- The microbiome’s role in fat storage and cravings
- How to reset fat-burning bacteria like Akkermansia
- The truth about old fat, fibrosis, and weight loss resistance
- 7-day and seasonal rhythms that reprogram your metabolism
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] Why modern diets fail without nature’s rhythms
[02:00] The fat loss trap: clean eating, shakes, and metabolic chaos
[05:30] Muscle doesn’t fix fat—why bulking leads to rebound weight
[07:00] Joel’s gut-focused breakthrough and the birth of The Immunity Code
[12:00] Akkermansia, bifidobacteria, and the fat-burning microbiome
[14:30] Foraging, fasting, and mimicking natural dietary rhythms
[19:30] Rebuilding the gut after antibiotics and immune dysfunction
[28:00] The 7-day rhythm protocol for metabolic reset
[35:00] Fasting for women: age, cycle, and cortisol timing
[42:00] Cold exposure, mechanical massage, and adipose rejuvenation
[47:00] What makes fat “old” and impossible to lose
[51:00] How inflammation and ECM fibrosis block fat loss
[57:00] Joel’s 3-phase supplement stack for gut and fat reset
[01:03:00] Why weight rebound hardwires future resistance
[01:04:30] Fast twitch muscle training for women over 50
🎙️ GUEST: Joel Green
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realjoelgreene
Website: https://veevpnutrition.com
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Transcript
Most of the diets we have nowadays are diets of abundance.
Speaker A:You look at carnivore diets, you know, you look at like Paleo diet, it's all about the fact you have a refrigerator, okay?
Speaker A:And it doesn't work.
Speaker A:If you take, if you unplug the fridge and you take it away, that diet doesn't work.
Speaker A:And the reason is it's a diet of abundance.
Speaker A:But in nature, that's not what happens.
Speaker A:Nature presents scarcity routinely to you.
Speaker A:And so what scarcity drives inevitably is diversity into the diet.
Speaker A:And contrary to popular belief, diversity is protective.
Speaker A:Diversity has several advantages and synergies.
Speaker A:Where nature has provided this way, where foods, plant and animal foods work together and what they do is they neutralize the limitations of each other and you get the benefits.
Speaker A:The high level is just simply dietary diversity is what nature looks like.
Speaker A:And then if you want to drill down to another level, it's eating things that you would eat in nature which maybe aren't your first preference.
Speaker A:Things like roots, leafy grain.
Speaker A:And what you have to understand is that because of the way nature works, you're not, you're not vegan, you're not living on a diet of leafy greens in nature.
Speaker A:You're not going to do that.
Speaker A:What's going to happen is those are, those are temporary measures until you can get, you know, fish or game.
Speaker A:And then in nature, I don't care what you think you are, you're going to eat everything in front of you.
Speaker B:Welcome to the Optimized Women, the podcast for high performing women ready to take back their health.
Speaker B:I'm Orshi McNaughton, a board certified holistic health practitioner and functional nutritionist.
Speaker B:If you are tired of feeling stuck, you can't lose the weight.
Speaker B:No matter what you do, your energy is in the toilet and you lost the spark you once had, then you are in the right place.
Speaker B:We are here to unleash the unstoppable force you meant to be and give you the tools to fix what's holding you back.
Speaker B:So if you're ready to own it, start thriving again and live the life you deserve, then let's get to it.
Speaker A:I think where it really for me became a serious focus was in the early 90s.
Speaker A:And what happened to me was something that eventually will happen to just about everybody who gets on a weight loss journey.
Speaker A:And I was an early adopter of meal replacements, which in the early 90s, the revolution began with a product called Metrex.
Speaker A:And Metrex was what was considered to be the first engineered food and what made it unique was that it had a little bit of think through with it.
Speaker A:So that it had lactoferrin, it had glutamine, it had things that for that time were just unheard of.
Speaker A:And I got absolutely ripped to the bone on that.
Speaker A:I mean I was doing, I was doing like four shakes a day and then a dinner.
Speaker A:So in a way it was kind of almost like intermittent fasting.
Speaker A:And that was really my first foray into getting serious with anything to do with nutrition.
Speaker A:And I just figured like, oh, I've, I've figured it out.
Speaker A:This is how you do things, you know, and this is how you get ripped.
Speaker A:And I went through the phase that everybody goes through, which is everybody wants to know what your secret is and your success and all that.
Speaker A:And you start speaking authoritatively.
Speaker A:And little did I know that I had started a decades long butterfly effect.
Speaker A:I had no idea existed.
Speaker A:And what happened was about year four, year five, all of the hormones and aspects of metabolism that control food intake were so disrupted, so knocked out of homeostasis because I had deprived the, the body of key hormonal domains for so long.
Speaker A:One of them being stomach distension, another being variety in the diet, another being the microbiome.
Speaker A:And so many things I had disrupted by doing the same thing year after year that I just started, I'd never had a problem with, with cravings.
Speaker A:And I started just eating like crazy.
Speaker A:I mean, I just couldn't eat enough.
Speaker A:And I didn't, I knew, I knew, I knew I'd done something, I didn't know what I'd done.
Speaker A:And that set me off on a journey.
Speaker A:And I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for what happened to me.
Speaker A:Because I really, at that time, this was about 90, 96, I'd say 97.
Speaker A:And nobody knew about leptin, nobody really knew about the orexigenic gut hormones, nobody really knew about GLP1, any of that stuff.
Speaker A:And I went off on this journey trying to figure out what I did.
Speaker A:And so I wound up literally doing every diet you can think of.
Speaker A:And the focus was always the same.
Speaker A:It was, it was always, it was very bodybuilding ask like I wanted to be very low percentages of body fat and what I quickly noticed into this.
Speaker A:So I had my, my whole clean raw phase that was late 90s, you know, everything's got to be whole, clean, raw, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker A:And then I had my strict calor accounting portion macro phase.
Speaker A: know, that was kind of early: Speaker A:And every one of those Every didn't matter what the approach was.
Speaker A:The, the result was always very similar, which was, so I get really lean and then there would be a rebound effect to that later.
Speaker A: le thing culminated for me in: Speaker A: And what happened was in: Speaker A:I mean, I was, I was really, really lean.
Speaker A:And the dichotomy is just if you could stand the two people next to each other would blow your mind because ran into the inapplicability of most advice in the real world.
Speaker A:That's what happened to me.
Speaker A:I quickly discovered that most of the advice you get comes from people who've never had a real job, live in this bubble and their entire day is free to pursue being lean.
Speaker A:So I got fat.
Speaker A:I was really fat.
Speaker A:Like I was £260 and I was just, I was, I was very big because I was working out with weights and I had a ton of muscle, but I was also just fat.
Speaker A:And by the way, that really debunks an idea that's become popular, which is not accurate, which is that if you want to solve the body fat problem, just gain muscle.
Speaker A:Nothing could be further from the truth.
Speaker A:That's not true.
Speaker A:It's never been true.
Speaker A:In fact, it's the reverse.
Speaker A:The most muscle you'll ever have is typically the heaviest.
Speaker A:You'll ever be, like the fattest.
Speaker A:And that's just true.
Speaker A:It's true of bodybuilders.
Speaker A:You look, they have what's called the bulking season, you know, where they, they add more muscle and they add a lot of fat in the process.
Speaker A:So having a bunch of muscle is not going to make you lean.
Speaker A:Never has.
Speaker A:You'll, you'll typically have more fat just because as a result, you have to eat more calories to gain muscle.
Speaker A:The only way to really gain muscle is you have to eat a ton of food.
Speaker A:It's the only way to do it.
Speaker A:And in order to do that, you're going to put fat on.
Speaker A:It's the way it works.
Speaker A: coming out of that, this was: Speaker A:I was disillusioned.
Speaker A:So I was overweight, I was disillusioned and kind of almost, I would use the word bitter because I had followed all the fitness advice for 20, 30 years, you know, and then to kind of discover the truth, which is, you know, the real secret here is just the fact you're putting two hours a day in that's the real secret, you know, and if, and if you took that two hours away, you wouldn't have any better answer than I did.
Speaker A:In fact, you'd have no answer.
Speaker A:And I've seen that play out many, many times.
Speaker A:So that was a, that was an earth shattering thing for me.
Speaker A:And it kind of, it really changed my thinking.
Speaker A:It got me really thinking about maximum results, minimum time and what, what would, and out of that eventually came the immunity code.
Speaker A:So I was essentially the first gut, gut dude I wrote.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:And I had created this software that was very microbiome centric and that led me into doing corporate wellness engagements.
Speaker A:And so kind of by luck I quickly gained a very large body of outcomes like literally in, in the thousands.
Speaker A:And a lot of this is, is on video.
Speaker A:Like you, if you go to Transcend Fit, you can watch it.
Speaker A: ch that was published between: Speaker A:And along the way I kind of got, I kind of got in some good circles.
Speaker A:And so I wound up getting involved with the Dr. Phil show kind of in a tangential way.
Speaker A:Where was the head trainer on the show?
Speaker A:Robert Reams.
Speaker A:And he was running these weight loss challenges and then they would use my software as the mechanism to, to lose the weight.
Speaker A:So we got involved in several Dr. Phil storylines and basically this was before anybody knew about the microbiome.
Speaker A: So this is like: Speaker A:And I'd already had thousands of people who had, you know, gone through it.
Speaker A:So I kind of knew what worked.
Speaker A:And then we started to have these outcomes that were mind boggling that were featured as part of the show.
Speaker A:So one of those was a lady who weighed 320 pounds.
Speaker A:She was given five years to live by her doctor.
Speaker A:She was on 22 meds all at once.
Speaker A:So she was on the trifecta of like diabetic medications, blood pressure meds, like, you know, statins, everything you can think of, you know, things that actually really ruin your ability to have a metabolism.
Speaker A:And so we put her, we put her on all the, you know, the diet protocols, microbiome based stuff and within 90 days she'd lost 80 pounds.
Speaker A:And then they blood tested, they gave her an blood test and she came back, her blood work was completely normal, 100% normal.
Speaker A:Like a hundred percent.
Speaker A:They Took her off all the meds, all 22 meds by month three.
Speaker A:You know, for me that, that was really a testament to, to what's possible in a very short period of time.
Speaker A:You know, using, using kind of the, a microbiome based strategy.
Speaker A: And so by: Speaker A:So I had a, I had a huge body of outcomes under me and I kind of, I kind of really knew what worked.
Speaker A:And eventually that led to writing the Immunity and then kind of here we are.
Speaker B:Wow, what a amazing career.
Speaker B:And, and we always say food diabetes medicine is such a good example of that, like that you were able to have that lady by month three come off of all her medications.
Speaker B:And I'm assuming so much of that was diet and you know, gut health.
Speaker B:That will dive into that.
Speaker B:I also so resonate with what you said in your early career.
Speaker B:I actually spent more than 10 years in the fitness industry myself and I was also younger at the same time and just fitness and nutrition and everybody was looking for that one shake that you can take that will just going to solve all your problems and you cannot lose all the weights.
Speaker B:All that one supplement that was going to work or the one like certain way of eating that just going to tweak it a little bit and everything magically going to be perfect.
Speaker B:So it's, you know, we tend to oversimplify things and the body is so complex and I think we all realize after a while that this like very simplistic approach just simply maybe only works for a short amount of time and then stops working or it doesn't work at all.
Speaker B:So I'm so excited to dive into these concepts that you discovered during this like amazing career that you had.
Speaker B:So your work focuses on the immune system's role in metabolism.
Speaker B:How does the gut immune connection influence fat loss and body composition?
Speaker A:So the key thing to understand a couple high level things is that we're sort of in the post genomic era right now.
Speaker A: The genomic era was kind of: Speaker A:And if you're into the science piece of it, right now we're way past that.
Speaker A:Now we're into the post translational modification era and looking at epigenomics and things like that.
Speaker A:So the first thing to understand is that we don't have one genome, we have three.
Speaker A:And all three genomes have a tremendous impact on the body.
Speaker A:And the microbiome genome is significantly Larger than the human genome.
Speaker A:It's much, much larger.
Speaker A:Like, humans only have about 20 plus thousand genes.
Speaker A:It's not very many.
Speaker A:And you have literally millions in the microbiome genome.
Speaker A:So what that means is that if there's a gene that you need to accomplish a certain thing, odds are the microbiome probably has it.
Speaker A:If you could cultivate the right strain, if you could get the right strain going.
Speaker A:And when it comes to getting and staying lean, the first thing we have to look at is what happens in nature.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:So nature is always our true north.
Speaker A:Like when you stick a human being in, and I said this in the immunity code, everybody always wants the simple answer.
Speaker A:Just give me the simple answer.
Speaker A:Give it to me, give it to me.
Speaker A:What's the simple answer?
Speaker A:The simple answer is go become a hunter gatherer.
Speaker A:That's the simple answer.
Speaker A:And that works every single time.
Speaker A:It's never not worked.
Speaker A:And you can verify that by watching naked and afraid.
Speaker A:Just go watch.
Speaker A:Go watch alone.
Speaker A:Go watch what happens.
Speaker A:Watch.
Speaker A:The weight transformations before and after being a hunter gatherer has never, ever failed, never will fail, okay?
Speaker A:And there's reasons for that.
Speaker A:One of the focuses of biohacking is aligning with nature's rhythms.
Speaker A:And there's this meta idea that if we realign with the rhythms of nature, we're going to optimize our, our, our body.
Speaker A:Example.
Speaker A:I'm going to realign with light and dark.
Speaker A:And by realigning with light and dark and wearing my blue blockers at night, I'm going to reprogram my circadian biology by doing that, by aligning with nature, okay?
Speaker A:Another is hot and cold.
Speaker A:So by realigning with hot and cold, which you would experience in nature, we're going to optimize our mitochondria and our biology, okay?
Speaker A:There's a much higher permutation of that.
Speaker A:Like, that affects everything in a much more powerful way.
Speaker A:And that's the dietary rhythms of nature.
Speaker A:And you never hear about this, ever.
Speaker A:It's the most powerful one.
Speaker A:And you never, ever hear about it.
Speaker A:And you can prove it's the most powerful one.
Speaker A:Anybody can prove this to themselves by simply signing up for a weekend survival course.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:You go into nature for like three days and you gotta hunt and you gotta gather, okay?
Speaker A:And you will quickly discover what nature's rhythms are for eating.
Speaker A:And basically, nature's rhythms are that what we call fasting, or rather going hungry.
Speaker A:Never, ever, ever goes alone by itself.
Speaker A:It's always accompanied by foraging.
Speaker A:Always.
Speaker A:Like, you're never sitting around going, oh, I'm so hungry.
Speaker A:I really hope they bring a water buffalo to me really soon.
Speaker A:You never do that or you're never sitting around going, I'm gonna go hungry for another five hours and then I'm go to the fridge and I'm gonna get a rib eye.
Speaker A:Never happens.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:What you do in nature, nature's dietary rhythms is you go, I'm really hungry.
Speaker A:And you start wandering and looking for stuff.
Speaker A:And then you come across things that are edible but aren't on your, but are nobody's first pick.
Speaker A:That's what happens.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And historically those have been roots, berries, mushrooms, nuts, things like that.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Well, it turns out that the bacteria that are fed by foraging, foraging foods, things like resistant starches, berry phenols, things like that, the exact same bacteria that mimic the fat loss pathways, the amp K pathway in the body, they do the same thing as fasting those bacteria.
Speaker A:So nature, not surprisingly, has provided a way where, when the body is in a hungry state, to optimize it through diet.
Speaker A:And it occurs naturally in nature.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:It also debunks the idea that.
Speaker A:Just give me the simple answer because if you were to write down everything you did on your three day weekend doing your survival course, it would look like the most complex meal plan ever.
Speaker A:That would just be so like, I can't do this.
Speaker A:It's too complex.
Speaker A:You know, it's because necessity forces you to, to forage.
Speaker A:So it turns out that we can pretty much optimize the body by, by focusing on two bacteria which, which the immunity code introduced really both of these to the public at large, like they weren't talked about prior to the immunity code.
Speaker A:And that was Achromansia mucinophila together with the family of bifidobacteria kind of work like the rudder for human health.
Speaker A:Both of those bacteria together and it turns out they have a reciprocal relationship.
Speaker A:So bifidobacteria actually works as a controller over Akkermansia.
Speaker A:It keeps you from getting too much.
Speaker A:So what you'll, what you'll see on certain types of diets, like a carnivore diet, is you can actually wind up feeding Akkermansia or fasting.
Speaker A:You can feed Akkermansia, but you're, you're losing bifido at the same time.
Speaker A:So your control mechanism is decreasing as you're increasing the one bacteria you think is good.
Speaker A:And you can wind up with issues, you can wind up with problems from doing that.
Speaker B:I was actually going to ask you a question about ekromancia since you brought it up.
Speaker B:I do a lot of gut testing for people like a GI map and I kind of see some of their keystone bacteria and gut flora.
Speaker B:And I'm one of those people just using myself as an example that have zero Akkermansia in my gut.
Speaker B:And so I've never been able to figure out how to bring Akkermansia back in my as a keystone, because I feel like if you've never had it introduced to you as a baby or when you were young, I don't know if you can bring it back.
Speaker B:I think if it's low, maybe there's way to eat foods to polyphenols and things in your diet that will proliferate that in your, in your GI tract.
Speaker B:But what do you do with people that just have like zero?
Speaker A:The answer is they probably have Akkermansia.
Speaker A:The test just isn't picking it up.
Speaker A:So there's several strains, there's like, I don't know, like five new strains discovered in the last 12 months and there's probably many more that we don't know about.
Speaker A:So you really have two main mucus foragers.
Speaker A:You have Akkermansia, mucinophila and fecal bacteria Prosnitia.
Speaker A:Akkermansia is much more robust.
Speaker A:And if you didn't have any Akkermansia, you'd probably have major massive issues.
Speaker A:So the problem with the tests is that you're only testing one gene and that's the 16S ribosomal RNA gene.
Speaker A:And that test is matched up against database of known species.
Speaker A:So if you have a species that's not known, it's not going to catch it.
Speaker A:I'm not saying that tests are mistaken 100%, but I don't think they're 100% accurate either.
Speaker A:I think that as new strains of Akkermansia are discovered and cataloged and you know, added to the database that suddenly, oh my gosh, I do have achiemansia.
Speaker A:I think a lot of that is going to pop up.
Speaker B:There's a lot of people that, you know, born with like a C section, not being breastfed and really not getting really great microbiome at the start of life.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Maybe also take a lot of antibiotics in childhood or during what, for whatever reason and, and they just don't have good diversity or they just don't have even some of these keystone or very limited amount.
Speaker B:What do you do to rebalance that?
Speaker B:And I'm sure you're going to go into that, but some people are sort of starting at a very difficult situation.
Speaker B:As a kid, like, for example, I had a lot of immune issues as a kid as a result of that.
Speaker B:And I was on antibiotics many times a year over a course of like 20 years of like my first 20 years of my life.
Speaker B:So it's a little bit.
Speaker B:What do you do in a situation like that?
Speaker B:Is there a way to bring that back?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:What's also interesting with that too, before I get into that, is just mapping out the obesity increases per year and the increases in antibiotic application.
Speaker A:So what you see is this almost one to one between the use of antibiotics.
Speaker A:And it's not just antibiotics, I mean, it's a bunch of other things.
Speaker A:But you do see a correlation very strong between the, you know, ubiquitous use of antibiotics and generational weight gain.
Speaker A:So it has a lot to do with things, a lot to do with why so many people are so much heavier than they were 40 years ago.
Speaker A:But generally speaking, so let's kind of break it down on, on the one hand you need the Fido and that's kind of your master controller.
Speaker A:That's easy to acquire, very easy.
Speaker A:And then Akkermansia, you also kind of need that one.
Speaker A:And typically with Akkermansia you're going to be able, you have some, typically like, like there's some in there, there's like, you know, maybe, maybe minuscule amounts.
Speaker A:And you just need to, you just need to begin a pattern that is feeding both Bifido and Akkermansia.
Speaker A:So bifido will kind of help cultivate, cross feed Akkermansia.
Speaker A:And so the way I've kind of laid it out in the way is that the three things that are going to really feed Akkermansia is fasting berry phenols and then resistant starch.
Speaker A:Those three things really feed Akkermansia.
Speaker A:And what's going to feed Bifido are dairy products, berry phenols, resistant starch, cruciferous vegetables.
Speaker A:So the trick really is that you are having a couple of short fasts in a week and proceeding those with bifidogenic foods and Akkermansia centric foods.
Speaker A:And in most cases I've seen people, not 100%, but most cases, people are able to quickly, rapidly restore Akkermansia levels.
Speaker A:Very significant.
Speaker A:In fact, there's been some tests that have been done now just using resistant starch and showing that you can Increase Akkermansia levels 300% in 30 days with very low doses.
Speaker B:Have you seen things like pendulum achromansia work for people?
Speaker B:Or do you think supplements like that Combined with their polyphenol boosting, whatever Akkermansia boosting compounds is that work for people?
Speaker A:You know, this is just my opinion.
Speaker A:I'm, I'm not a fan of that approach, number one, and I'm happy for someone from Pendulum to correct me on this.
Speaker A:But as I understand it, that particular strain they have engineered is not native to the human gut.
Speaker A:It's, it's an engineered strain of Akkermansia.
Speaker A:It's designed to, it cannot survive in the gut on its own.
Speaker A:So you have to be on that product forever in order to maintain your, your Akkermansia profile.
Speaker A:So I, I don't think that's a great approach to do it.
Speaker A:I'm not to say that it doesn't work and you can't produce measurable improvements through it, but I just think as a sustainable strategy, I'm not a fan of that.
Speaker B:I tried it personally because as I said, like I, I saw like I have nothing.
Speaker B:Although you're right, I may have some strains that the test is just not det.
Speaker B:But I, I took Pendulum for like six months and I retested and I still had zero.
Speaker B:So I thought like maybe I can kind of repopulate or at least get, get it started.
Speaker B:But it didn't show anything on the gut test for me.
Speaker A:Yeah, as I look at you though, I don't see any of the things I would see with someone who like, you know, has issues with, with that like your skin looks really good, really, really good and you just don't show any of the signs to me.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker B:And then can I also ask you a question about foraging?
Speaker B:Because this term is not familiar with a lot of people that are not hunter getters.
Speaker B:What does that really would look like for us in modern life?
Speaker B:Because obviously most people are not going to go out on a naked and afraid trip over the weekend.
Speaker B:What does that look like for us average people?
Speaker A:Well, the end product is dietary diversity.
Speaker A:So we're in this age of dietary exclusion as the way to health.
Speaker A:And I would offer that that's the exact opposite that you're going to get the exact opposite from dietary exclusion.
Speaker A:The reason dietary exclusion has become such a thing is because of COVID and vaccines and antibiotics and all sorts of reasons.
Speaker A:Significant number of people can't digest anything anymore so they go into these exclusion based diets.
Speaker A:But in the process you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because you're losing the ability to cultivate species that keep you healthy.
Speaker A:An outgrowth of dietary diversity is, or excuse Me an outgrowth of scarcity is diversity.
Speaker A:So foraging is the result of scarcity.
Speaker A:And there's a very easy way, simple way to understand how close a diet aligns with nature.
Speaker A:And that's just simply to ask, could this diet survive without a refrigerator?
Speaker A:Most of the diets we have nowadays are diets of abundance.
Speaker A:You look at carnivore diets, you know, you look at like, you know, paleo diet, it's all about the fact you have a refrigerator, okay?
Speaker A:And it doesn't work.
Speaker A:If you take, if you unplug the fridge and you take it away, that diet doesn't work.
Speaker A:And the reason is it's a diet of abundance.
Speaker A:But in nature, that's not what happens.
Speaker A:Nature presents scarcity routinely to you.
Speaker A:And so what scarcity drives, inevitably is diversity into the diet.
Speaker A:And contrary to popular belief, diversity is protective.
Speaker A:Diversity has several advantages and synergies.
Speaker A:Where nature has provided this way, where foods, plant and animal foods work together and what they do is they neutralize the limitations of each other and you get the benefits.
Speaker A:So the high level is just simply dietary diversity is what nature looks like.
Speaker A:And then if you want to drill down to another level, it's eating things that you would eat in nature, which maybe aren't your first preference, things like roots, leafy greens.
Speaker A:And what you have to understand is that, but because of the way nature works, you're not vegan, you're not living on a diet of leafy greens in nature, you're not going to do that.
Speaker A:What's going to happen is those are temporary measures until you can get fish or game.
Speaker A:And then in nature, I don't care what you think you are, you're going to eat everything in front of you.
Speaker A:If you were in a survival course and you caught a giant salmon, you're going to eat the whole thing.
Speaker A:So you don't get too much of anything in nature.
Speaker A:That's kind of how it works.
Speaker A:Or you have these micro seasons where, you know, you might have a couple of weeks of eating really good and you're eating mostly the same thing, but then you mix it up later.
Speaker A:And so nature, by virtue of scarcity, forces diversity into the diet.
Speaker A:And it forces things that we, most people don't prefer to eat, which is, you know, leafy greens, stocky vegetables, roots, things like that, mushrooms, things like that.
Speaker A:So, so that's really it.
Speaker A:It's just simply getting back to what we got away from, which is that the real, the real path to real life, sustainable health is through a diverse, nutrient dense diet you mentioned like things.
Speaker B:That don't need refrigeration.
Speaker B:I remember.
Speaker B:So I grew up in Europe and I spent my summers with my grandparents and my grandparents had like the tiniest refrigerator.
Speaker B:I mean like right now you would laugh at it like how small it was.
Speaker B:And I don't know how they were able to live from that tiny little fridge, but I remember that like they grew most of their fruits and vegetables themselves.
Speaker B:They had the, raised quite a few different types of animals and they only would go to the store to buy like a few things.
Speaker B:I think they only bought maybe like bread and milk and just like very, very few things in the, in the store.
Speaker B:And and I remember even when they would butcher an animal, they would salt a lot of the foods.
Speaker B:It would, would not be ref, it was smoked or salted.
Speaker B:That's how they preserved it.
Speaker B:There was definitely so much seasonality to eating.
Speaker B:So like during the summer they would have a lot more fruit, like they grew there.
Speaker B:They had a whole bunch of grapes and made their own wine and that would be.
Speaker B:I was always there during the summer.
Speaker B:So we had the pleasure of eating all their fruits and all the, all the delicious things.
Speaker B:But they definitely ate more seasonally.
Speaker B:So I mean even just two generations ago, there was way more seasonality to the way we were eating.
Speaker B:Now obviously there's pineapple all year round in the store, like all kinds of fruits.
Speaker B:So for, you know, adopting it into our modern life, how do we sort of revire our metabolism?
Speaker B:A lot of people are trying to get in shape, lose some body fat instead of forcing weight loss.
Speaker B:How do we revire the metabolism?
Speaker A:I'm just going to kind of regurgitate stuff I've written about that's in the, in my book the Way.
Speaker A:But what, what I've put forth is that the core of it is to understand that there are seven day rhythms, seven day patterns.
Speaker A:And what that says is something that really nobody's talked about and that is that different days of the week have different nutritional requirements.
Speaker A:The more you get into that, the more true it gets.
Speaker A:But you never hear about it and it's easy to prove.
Speaker A:Like, just think about it like you don't eat the same on Friday that you do on Monday.
Speaker A:They're very different.
Speaker A:You don't eat the same on Sunday that you do on Wednesday.
Speaker A:They're very different.
Speaker A:The body has, all biology has seven day rhythms built into it.
Speaker A:And this has been shown actually in experiments.
Speaker A:It's actually at the forefront of what's called chrono immunology, where you know, certain drugs are best on, like you want to take this drug on Thursday, that's the day you get 27% more utility from the drug.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:So 17 day rhythms become kind of a frame, a framework or a container, okay?
Speaker A:And then within that container, we're putting in a two day pattern that mimics foraging and feasting.
Speaker A:And so in that two day pattern, we're doing as best we can what happens naturally in nature, which is you are, you're on the first day, you're eating the foods of lesser preference, the foraging foods.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:And so what that could look like is.
Speaker A:And there's umpteen variations on this, but it's basically like the simple way to understand it is over two days, you need to master five meals minimum and seven max.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:Three to five meals on day one and two meals on day two.
Speaker A:And it's, let's just take the five meal version of it, okay?
Speaker A:So the five meal version of that could look like this.
Speaker A:So morning is nuts and berries.
Speaker A:And again, there's umpteen variations on this.
Speaker A:Like this is just a basic two day framework.
Speaker A:But different days of the week will dictate different things.
Speaker A:Like on Wednesdays we need a very large breakfast because it's midweek and stress is building.
Speaker A:So we need a cortisol check on Wednesday so we change it up.
Speaker A:And breakfast is very large.
Speaker A:Okay, But I'm just giving you, you know, a simple example.
Speaker A:So breakfast on day one would be like nuts and berries.
Speaker A:Lunch could be like, you know, a really good Mediterranean salad, you know, with some protein.
Speaker A:The main thing is to add some resistant starch.
Speaker A:So we might put in some chickpeas.
Speaker A:And the resistant starch is very, very important.
Speaker A:It's, it's because you're mimicking foraging when you get resistant starching.
Speaker A:Or it could be something like a purple sweet potato, you know, and just let it cool down and add some chicken with that.
Speaker A:And then dinner would be like a leafy green salad with some protein.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:So in that day we have enough diversity, but not too much.
Speaker A:So you get, you're getting some, some fruit, some nuts, you're getting some leafy greens, some resistant starch, but you're not living on it, you're not doing it every day.
Speaker A:And then the next day is a very short fast.
Speaker A:And the whole trick to that is that, and this is something that is unique to the immunity code, which is by increasing the bacteria that mimic fasting the day before the fast, you get all the benefits of much longer fasts.
Speaker A:But you don't have to fast very long.
Speaker A:And that's how it happens in nature.
Speaker A:So in nature you're always foraging when you're fasting.
Speaker A:And so by replicating that and the day before the fast spinning up Akkermansia and bifido, then when you fast, all those amp K pathways are lit already so you have to fast much, much shorter.
Speaker A:And so in particular for women, you know, this is something that has been missing from the picture.
Speaker A:And then a couple of, a couple of meals on the second day which are very, very high protein, higher in fat, very low in carbs, okay, can look very keto ish, can look very carnivorous, you know.
Speaker A:So I might do like for lunch like a really large, really large steak and then dinner might be, you know, kind of a, kind of similar.
Speaker A:But me typically I'll do like, I'll do some eggs, avocado, you know, kind of keto ish, you know, and I'll throw in some veggies if I need to on that.
Speaker A:But that's basically it.
Speaker A:It's very simple.
Speaker A:So if you take that pattern and think about what was in there, that's a complete diet.
Speaker A:I mean you had everything in there, but you don't have too much of anything.
Speaker A:You get the benefits of all those different foods.
Speaker A:Without the liabilities example the leafy greens, you're getting all the benefits, all the nitrate, all the nitric oxide inducing benefits of leafy greens, you're not getting, you're not getting massive oxalate absorption.
Speaker A:In fact you're, you're spinning up the bacteria that break down oxalates.
Speaker A:So you're getting the best of all worlds there and you're getting ample protein, you're getting ample fat.
Speaker A:You're just timing it in such a way.
Speaker A:It's timing and it's all time to circadian and, and circuseptin biology.
Speaker A:So then if we take that container, that, that two day container and then begin to map it over seven days.
Speaker A:Now we have all these other checks for example.
Speaker A:So let's talk about Wednesday breakfast.
Speaker A:So midweek we call it hump day for a reason.
Speaker A:It's because, you know, Mondays are typically very stressful for most people.
Speaker A:It's a lot of items you gotta get to.
Speaker A:Most people die on a Monday.
Speaker A:I know it's kind of a known stat.
Speaker A:So midweek we want, we want to help the body maintain its natural cortisol rhythm.
Speaker A:So you need a very large breakfast typically on Wednesdays.
Speaker A:What that does is it helps to keep cortisol from inverting so you help to keep cortisol where it should be in the morning and it sets up the rest of the day.
Speaker A:So what you're doing is by having a very large breakfast on Wednesday morning, you're going to trigger GLP1 in the gut and you make it possible, if you want to be aggressive for fat loss in the evening.
Speaker A:And so you begin to see that by adding in the layer of seven day rhythms to this basic two day pattern, you're hitting everything, everything.
Speaker A:Like example would be Sundays.
Speaker A:Sundays are a day to set the week up for cortisol and we do this by overfeeding for satiety in the morning.
Speaker A:So the first half of the day are meals that drive incredible satiety, incredible pleasure through food.
Speaker A:So you might do like, you know, pancakes, steak and eggs for breakfast and then have a grilled cheese as a snack and then lunch might be like a very large bowl of soup and then the rest of the day is an offset.
Speaker A:But what you're doing in that morning is you're driving satiety, you're driving serotonin production, you're helping the body wind down in its natural seven day rhythm on a Sunday and get relaxed and taking all that stress, all that stuff, spinning that down so you don't go into the week coded with inverted cortisol rhythms.
Speaker A:And so this whole thing of mapping circadian biology to seven day biology, it's just a next level thing.
Speaker B:You mentioned all the seven day rhythm, but we also have seasons, right?
Speaker B:Different seasons where different foods are available.
Speaker B:And then women also have an infradian rhythm.
Speaker B:How do you take into account these other rhythms that are overlapping at the same time?
Speaker A:Yeah, so those are built in.
Speaker A:So for women you have to, to count, factor in the monthly cycle and you can, you know, there's nothing new here.
Speaker A:You can factor in types of training, you know, strength versus cardiovascular to match to that cycle.
Speaker A:And then seasonal rhythms are basically just built into the way you can shift the basic two day pattern.
Speaker A:So you can, you know, in the winter you can rely more on proteins just by changing up certain meals, you can get in more of what you would naturally eat in winter and then in summer, just by changing the types of the meals on certain days you can add in more fruits, more vegetables, things like that.
Speaker B:And you also mentioned fasting.
Speaker B:So it's always an interesting topic.
Speaker B:How, how do women fast?
Speaker B:And you know, especially I think it depends on the age of the, the woman, like what stage of life she's in, what her current metabolic health is and what I see a lot of ladies in sort of midlife trying to do a lot of fasting does create a lot of stress on the body, like short fasting windows.
Speaker B:But then they tend to do better with larger fasting windows.
Speaker B:And then postmenopausal women tend to do really well with fasting.
Speaker B:What, what is your experience or what is your recommendation?
Speaker B:The best way to fast for women?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So again, let's come back to nature.
Speaker A:And we always got to realign back with nature on this.
Speaker A:So in a survival show, men and women are both going to fast.
Speaker A:There's no, there's no getting around it.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And we have to inventory basically dose and frequency.
Speaker A:So because, because you said the key word, you said too much.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:So we have to understand.
Speaker A:So a few years ago, you know, we were in this, you know, fasting's only good.
Speaker A:It's only good.
Speaker A:That's all, you know.
Speaker A:And, and I wrote in, in my first book six years ago.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, it's not.
Speaker A:There's a lot, there's big downsides to fasting too much.
Speaker A:Now we're in the, well, maybe fasting's only bad for women.
Speaker A:You know, we're in that phase now.
Speaker A:And both of those are overshoots of the truth.
Speaker A:So there are benefits to fasting.
Speaker A:When you go to, when you go to sleep, you're fasting and there's benefits.
Speaker A:You have a lot of cells that go into autophagy and you know, you activate all of your amp K and you know, all your genetic rush hour kind of stuff at the right time, in the right way when you're hungry.
Speaker A:And it has a very anti aging effect on the body.
Speaker A:And we can sort of soup that up a little bit with a little bit of additional fasting and then maybe once in a while kind of an extended fast.
Speaker A:So the way that I've addressed those is I call it the amplified fast.
Speaker A:And the basic idea is that number one, you're not doing it all the time.
Speaker A:Number two, it's very short.
Speaker A:Number three, you're preceding it the day before with foraging foods.
Speaker A:Number four, in that fasting window, you're adding in a bunch of stuff.
Speaker A:So you're adding in small molecules, you're adding in other things.
Speaker A:And then number five, you have checkpoints that offset the stress on the body from that.
Speaker A:So and those checkpoints typically are like Wednesday and Sunday morning where you're having these very large breakfasts at the start of the day which help to reset everything.
Speaker A:And so if you take all that and pack it Into a seven day window like that, you can begin to get the benefits of something without the downside in particular for women.
Speaker A:You know, women are kind of taught not to have big meals and you know, you shouldn't.
Speaker A:You just eat little small portions all the time and all that.
Speaker A:And there's a lot of benefit to big meals if they're done in the right way and in the right timing.
Speaker A:Tons of benefit, particularly on the stress pathways.
Speaker A:Just a question of what time of day, what day of the week, and then what are you doing after that.
Speaker A:But if you begin to leverage those big meals, those big breakfasts, it can have a massive impact on the stress hormones in a positive way and inverted cortisol rhythms.
Speaker A:And it's very, very simple to do and it's very natural.
Speaker A:Again, if we were doing the survival course and we'd spent three days in the woods eating just nuts and berries and then we had a bunch of food available at breakfast, you'd eat everything you can get your hands on, on, okay.
Speaker A:And that would have a very restorative power on the body.
Speaker A:Like after that you would feel like you just feel relaxed.
Speaker B:So a lot of women deal with autoimmune issues.
Speaker B:As a matter of fact, I think 80% of people with autoimmune issues are female.
Speaker B:And so autoimmunity has a huge connection to gut health and gut issues.
Speaker B:And oftentimes women end up doing elimination diets, eliminating a lot of things from the diet that makes them feel better.
Speaker B:But then they are not very good at bringing foods back and variety back into their diet.
Speaker B:What's your recommendation for somebody that is dealing with something like Hashimoto's or maybe overweight, having issues with their thyroid function, they trying to lose weight, like they eliminated gluten and dairy and a whole bunch of stuff and they feel better, but they, they're sort of stuck.
Speaker B:What, how did they bring the diversity back into their guide, gut gut health and still keeping their gut gut health sort of intact without increasing their inflammation markers?
Speaker A:Yeah, that's a case.
Speaker A:So autoimmune issues can be very complex.
Speaker A:I mean, I don't think there's a single answer out there, but some, some broad strokes I think that I've seen work and make a lot of sense is to first understand the role that bifidobacteria plays in autoimmune issues.
Speaker A:So what you have is your ratio of th:1 to th:17, basically your helper T cells.
Speaker A:And what you're going to see is that with most autoimmune issues the downstream effect is interleukin 17 is over the hill.
Speaker A:It's just you've got way too much of it.
Speaker A:And so what needs to happen is you need to increase th1, decrease th17.
Speaker A:And the way to do that is through very specific strains of bifidobacteria that do that naturally.
Speaker A:Okay, so there are, there are strains of bifido that will normalize ratios of TH17 to TH1 and pull interleukin 17 down with that.
Speaker A:But what happens is when you go on elimination diet is you, you lose the symptomology because you're not taking in the offending food, but then you also lose the fuel source to fix the problem long term.
Speaker A:So you're not really, you know, it's kind of one step forward, two steps back.
Speaker A:So what I would throw out is instead of having so much of a focus on the specific offending food is to kind of have a period of focusing on restoring ratios of bifidobacteria bacteria as kind of a broadsword.
Speaker A:And that's generally pretty ameliorative.
Speaker A:I mean, like, like most people who kind of have a period of getting bifidobacteria up in a broad swath notice significant differences.
Speaker A:Very significant.
Speaker A:You know, energy goes up.
Speaker A:A lot of the low energy from thyroid issues are B vitamin related.
Speaker A:And, you know, so many of those strains make methylated B vitamins so that you can, you can really cure a lot of things that way.
Speaker A:It's not, it's not a panacea.
Speaker A:It's not 100%, nothing is.
Speaker A:You know, it can be very complex of autoimmune issues, but that's a broad sword stroke that I would do.
Speaker A:And the way to get there typically is through microdosing or micro titration and, and typically specific.
Speaker A:I'm not a fan of taking probiotics unless it's acutely and single strains.
Speaker A:I think with single strains targeted acutely, you can do a lot and it can work very well.
Speaker A:But generally that kind of thing I think is best with a practitioner to do, because what I find individuals do is you tell them one thing's good and then they overdo it.
Speaker A:They just do too much.
Speaker A:So if they have a practitioner kind of guiding them, like, okay, so we're going to add in, you know, infantis brev befit them.
Speaker A:We're going to add these three strains in and we're going to microdose them into your yogurt so that you're just taking in very tiny amounts like a thimble I just want you to start with a thimble.
Speaker A:And over about two months, three months, four months, we're going to build up Then.
Speaker A:What you see typically is kind of a lift all the way around by going at it that way.
Speaker A:So, and, and what I've seen more often than not is a lot of food sensitivities go away.
Speaker A:Like suddenly they can handle gluten, suddenly they can handle dairy.
Speaker A:I've seen that many, many, many times.
Speaker B:I'd love to just talk about cold exposure a little bit.
Speaker B:It's often hyped as a fat loss tool.
Speaker B:So does it actually move the needle for metabolic health in women and, or are there any better tools to focus on?
Speaker A:The thing to understand about cold exposure is that it doesn't work the same at all points in time.
Speaker A:It works on a logarithm them over time.
Speaker A:So for those of you not familiar, a logarithmic straight curve is going to look like this or look like this.
Speaker A:A logarithmic curve is going to have a curve that goes like this.
Speaker A:Okay, so what you're going to see up front is this, you know, on the first go, this incredible effect.
Speaker A:Like, like if you've never cold plunged before and you get in the first time and you know, your, your results are going to be up here, your negatives are going to be down here.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:But then over time, this logarithm kicks in.
Speaker A:Okay, so.
Speaker A:And a mistake a lot of people get into is they'll try a protocol and they see amazing results, but they're not aware of curves.
Speaker A:They're not aware of either what's called a U shaped curve, which is a dose curve.
Speaker A:So too little, you know, you have negatives, too much, you have negatives, but then there's a sweet spot where you have benefits and no negatives or a logarithmic curve.
Speaker A:And most things in health work on either a U shaped curve or a logarithmic curve, or both.
Speaker A:And once you understand that, it changes your approach because you then understand and you're not going to always get the same return based on the investment that you've been getting.
Speaker A:And that explains drugs.
Speaker A:You know, it's like, well, I took this drug, it worked amazing, but now I need to take 10 times the amount for it to work, you know, so with cold exposure, in that first exposure, that first 10 days ever in your life of doing it, that's one of the best times in your life to drop a bunch of fat, because it will help.
Speaker A:And the body's going to quickly adapt to that quickly.
Speaker A:And it's probably never going to be quite the same again with that.
Speaker A:So if you've never cold plunged before and you want to get the maximum benefit, I would have a really good 10 day plan that incorporates everything.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And then you can really move the needle with that on an ongoing basis.
Speaker A:The way that I use it is cycling it out.
Speaker A:So I will use it for 10 days on, then I'll cycle out for 20 days.
Speaker A:And the reason for that is a couple reasons.
Speaker A:One, there are rapid changes in the microbiome based on cold.
Speaker A:Not all of them are good, particularly with Akkermansia, which acts as a cold calorie controller.
Speaker A:So the, the, the response to cold can be to make you eat more.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And so what can happen is you start cold plunging, you have all these fat loss benefits up here, no issues with food.
Speaker A:But then the more you do it, you know, the results aren't as good.
Speaker A:But then you tend to be hungrier.
Speaker A:You're like, I'm eating more, why am I doing this?
Speaker A:And it's because the surface area, the gut, expands with exposure to cold over time.
Speaker A:Then you start taking in more calories.
Speaker A:So in order to mitigate that, you want to kind of cycle your doses of it.
Speaker A:That's what I've found.
Speaker A:But the other thing has to do with mitochondria function within adipose tissue.
Speaker A:And that's very important.
Speaker A:What happens over time, particularly with menopause, particularly with shifts in insulin sensitivity that take place in adipose tissue, is the mitochondria tend to shrink in certain cells in adipose mass.
Speaker A:And so, so we need everything we can get at our disposal to keep those mitochondria working.
Speaker A:Cold is a very good tool to keep the mitochondria healthy.
Speaker A:And if you combine cold with mechanical massage, it's even better.
Speaker A:And then there's other things you can add in.
Speaker A:So if you combine cold with mechanical massage and menthol, it's even better, you know.
Speaker B:And what does that look like?
Speaker B:Can you just explain, like, do you do cold plunge and then you get a massage?
Speaker B:Or like what, what does the stack look like?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So mechanical massage has a lot of forms.
Speaker A:One of them is endermology.
Speaker A:But just a simple form is just to, you know, a theragun, for example.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:And you can, you can research this, you can just go type in mechanical massage, type in mechanical massage adipose macrophage.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And what you're going to see is polarity changes or changes in phenotype of key immune cells in body fat with respect to mechanical massage therapy.
Speaker A:So it's one of the ways, simple ways that you can help to keep your, your adipose tissue younger is by what happens as we get old, is our fat gets old.
Speaker A:And when your fat gets old, it sinks the whole ship.
Speaker A:So there are key differences between young fat and old fat.
Speaker A:Old fat tends to be bigger cell by cell.
Speaker A:It's just bigger.
Speaker A:It tends to have more inflammatory immune cells surrounding it, it tends to be stiffer, all kinds of things.
Speaker A:And so the more you can help your fat profile, like young fat, the easier everything else is.
Speaker A:Everything's easier because insulin resistance typically starts in adipose tissue.
Speaker A:That's where it starts.
Speaker A:And it's accompanied by hypoxia of the tissues.
Speaker A:That's because your circulation is going downhill as you get older, so you're not oxygenating it as well as you should.
Speaker A:The micro, the macrophage types are switching to the inflammatory type.
Speaker A:So you have inflamed fat.
Speaker A:Inflamed fat is insulin resistant by its very nature.
Speaker A:And then what happens is as you get insulin resistance and adipose tissue, everything else goes.
Speaker A:So then you start to get insulin resistance in muscle, you start to get intramuscular fat, and then you get a feed forward loop where the poor get poorer.
Speaker A:And so that, all that to say that if we kind of have a few simple tools which is combining things, combination therapy like cold plunging with mechanical massage, you know, with contractions with menthol, These are simple things.
Speaker A:And the way it would look is example, you, you cold plunge, you're on a 10 day cycle, you cold plunge, you get out, you take a mechanical massager until you're fat.
Speaker A:You know, you're, you're particularly the belly fat area.
Speaker A:That's usually where insulin resistance and hypoxia starts, Particularly in women at menopause.
Speaker A:You get the, you know, they just get insulin resistant.
Speaker A:And that's why keto diets work so well on women when they hit menopause, is it helps them with their insulin resistance.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Then you apply.
Speaker B:Can I just ask.
Speaker B:Sorry to interrupt.
Speaker B:When you say young fat, do you refer to like brown fat?
Speaker A:No, young fat has more brown fat or rather more beige fat in it.
Speaker A:No, no, but I'm referring to a specific phenotype or rather a specific cluster of qualities associated with people who are young in their body fat versus people who are old.
Speaker A:So it's not just that people who are older have more fat.
Speaker A:Their fat itself is qualitatively different.
Speaker A:The adipose mass is different.
Speaker A:And we're in this era that is saying things that just aren't true, which is that, you know, the most important thing is muscle.
Speaker A:Look, I mean, I've been, you know, on the muscle train since I was 13 years old.
Speaker A:I mean, I, I know that train.
Speaker A:And I can tell you right now, the thing that sinks the ship is the age and the health of adipose mass.
Speaker A:It comes first.
Speaker A:That happens first before muscle begins to go sarcopenic.
Speaker A:The body fat exists in a feedback loop with muscle.
Speaker B:Muscle.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And there are several different mechanisms.
Speaker A:Adiponectin is one of them.
Speaker A:So adiponectin is an adipokine secreted by body fat.
Speaker A:And it has a lot to do with the ability to gain muscle.
Speaker A:So adiponectin is involved in securing muscle fibers together through these proteins called coherence.
Speaker A:And when your fat is healthy and it's producing adiponectin at a high level, you have the ability to gain muscle because muscle, muscle fibers can adhere and you can grow muscle.
Speaker A:When fat gets unhealthy, gets old, you start stop making adiponectin and then you can't gain new muscle.
Speaker A:So if you look at what happens first, the health of body fat goes first and it gets old.
Speaker A:And when it gets old, you see very specific things.
Speaker A:You see enlarged fat cells, you see lots of inflammatory macrophages, you see hypoxia, you see fibrosis.
Speaker A:You see very specific types of collagen fibers represented more versus the young.
Speaker A:So young people have, have different types of collagen.
Speaker A:Older people have collagen 6, which is an inflammatory collagen riddled throughout their fat mass.
Speaker B:Can you visually see that or do you just have certain symptoms when, when you notice these changes?
Speaker A:Well, the principal thing you see is you can't drop body fat.
Speaker A:So weight loss resistance, it gets very hard, very hard to drop body fat.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And so weight loss resistance very often is insulin resistance in adipose tissue.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And what happens is when white adipose mask, it's insulin resistant, then fat has to go somewhere else.
Speaker A:So then you're going to start to see visceral fat when that happens.
Speaker A:But it all relates back to insulin resistance in, in your main storage fat.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:So body fat has to do a few things.
Speaker A:Well, the, the thing it has to do best is store fat when it can't even do that.
Speaker A:Well, everything else goes, the whole body goes, everything.
Speaker A:So you get visceral fat, you get intramuscular fat, intramuscular fat that exists with the secretory or senescent associated secretory phenotype the SAS phenotype, which is an inflammatory old phenotype and exists in a circle with, with white adipose mass.
Speaker A:So what happens is you begin to get more fat deposition in muscle, and then muscle begins to shrink and wither.
Speaker A:You get sarcopenia, all that, and all that comes back to old fat.
Speaker A:And there are simple things that you can do to preserve your fat fat top three, number one, you can learn how to shift and steer macrophage populations.
Speaker A:It's so much easier than you might think.
Speaker A:We can control macrophages through sugars.
Speaker A:So in the immunity code in the whey during the amplified fast, we have these very specific periods where you can take certain kinds of sugars.
Speaker A:So examples would be D ribose, mannose.
Speaker A:And these sugars turn us.
Speaker A:These sugars have the effects, effect of flipping macrophage populations in body fat.
Speaker A:It's super easy through sugars, which, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
Speaker A:Immune cells and cancer cells are very similar.
Speaker A:They run on for them.
Speaker A:So when the immune system has an insult, it needs to do the same thing cancer cells do.
Speaker A:It needs to rapidly multiply cells.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And it has to use the exact same biology.
Speaker A:It has to use glycolysis.
Speaker A:It has to.
Speaker A:It has to flip on the oxygen backup switch, which is called HIF1, has to turn that on and then turn on.
Speaker A:Glycolysis works the same way as cancer cells.
Speaker A:What do cancer cells feed on?
Speaker A:Sugar.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Well, specific types of sugars, functional sugars can flip macrophage populations.
Speaker A:It's super easy to do, but nobody knows about it.
Speaker A:So if you begin having a fasting period a few times a week, where you're having super sugars like trehalose or D mannose or some of these types of sugars, over time, you're helping to keep inflammatory macrophages down in adipose mass.
Speaker A:Now, when you stack that in conjunction with resetting the gut, you get an additive effect.
Speaker A:Because the problem you get with body fat as it gets older is it gets inflamed.
Speaker A:The reason it's getting inflamed very often has to do with translocation of immune cells from the gut into body fat.
Speaker A:It's called macrophage translocation.
Speaker A:And along with them, they bring lipopolysaccharides.
Speaker A:And lipopolysaccharide basically is an inflammatory mediator.
Speaker A:So that will turn up key inflammatory mediators, among them tumor necrosis factor alpha.
Speaker A:And that breaks glucose transport inside adipose tissue.
Speaker A:So by healing and sealing the gut, you Solve that problem by adding in rare sugars, special sugars like treylose mannose.
Speaker A:You can steer macrophage populations.
Speaker A:Then you stack in things like cold, plunging, mechanical massage.
Speaker A:And now you got a strategy.
Speaker A:Okay, now you have something you can do to affect the most important thing.
Speaker A:Thing, really.
Speaker A:And I, and I hate to say the most important thing because everything's important, but if we're gonna create an a priori list of, you know, what do we do first?
Speaker A:It's okay, well, heal and seal the gut and then begin to address the quality of adipose mass, which is totally unacknowledged.
Speaker B:This is really just such a cutting edge, kind of new way of approaching weight loss, really, that I think so many people have not heard of.
Speaker B:I mean, we all, like, in the last 10 years, we heard of the gut immune connection and how your microbiome is so important, but, like, really breaking it down into how to affect your body fat and weight loss resistance is really, really amazing.
Speaker B:So thank you for putting that all together in your book.
Speaker B:I want to touch on supplements real quick.
Speaker B:So biohackers obsess over big supplement stacks and sometimes ignore the food, but obviously the food is the most important.
Speaker B:What is one supplement that you think is overhyped and one that actually moves the needle for metabolic health?
Speaker A:Overhyped, wow.
Speaker A:Let me come back to that one.
Speaker A:The one that moves the needle for metabolic, I would say nac.
Speaker A:Nac Glycine is kind of a foundational one because it affects so many things in such a positive way.
Speaker A:The combination of nac glycine, it's got some good research behind it.
Speaker A:It's shown to, you know, reverse aging across a bunch of parameters.
Speaker A:But beyond just simply anti aging, it affects so many things.
Speaker A:It affects, you know, it impacts a biofilm, it impacts glutathione levels, it impacts your ability to sleep.
Speaker A:You know, like glycine is a big help with that.
Speaker A:A whole bunch of things that are just beneficial with NAC and glycine.
Speaker A:That being said, you shouldn't be taking it every day, which is not something you hear a lot.
Speaker A:But the big flaw of the supplement industry is daily.
Speaker A:That's the biggest flaw of the supplement industry is that, you know, in order to have viable products, we need you taking, taking them every day, and then we can send you more product.
Speaker A:And what I do with my stuff is there's nothing you take every day.
Speaker A:Day you take one set of supplements maybe three days a week.
Speaker A:Another, the nac glycine stuff.
Speaker A:In a product I have called Young body three days a week during your fast and then another one you take once or twice a week.
Speaker A:And I could make, you know, three times the money just by, just by putting daily on the label.
Speaker A:But the problem you get into with supplementation is that you can get too much of a good thing.
Speaker A:Let's take daily grains.
Speaker A: was on that bandwagon back in: Speaker A:I had a daily greens product, you know, and it worked amazing the first couple years, but the more I dug into it over time, yeah, this is probably not something everybody should be, anybody should be taking daily because in nature you're not going to do that.
Speaker A:You're not going to get this mass of concentrated greens every day.
Speaker A:You're not going to do that.
Speaker A:And when you begin to look at the negatives of some of the things in there, example, well, you know, chlorella, I mean, they could be toxic.
Speaker A:So you could build up toxic amounts of things, so.
Speaker A:And same's true of polyphenols.
Speaker A:Polyphenols are massively beneficial.
Speaker A:But too much can be negative.
Speaker A:You can have negatives from too many polyphenols.
Speaker A:So anyways, Nac glycine, I would say the overhyped supplement.
Speaker A:Gosh, I was really trying to think on that.
Speaker A:Most of them.
Speaker A:How about that?
Speaker A:Most of them.
Speaker B:Well, instead, why don't you tell me?
Speaker B:Because for those of the listeners are not, not familiar with your supplements, if somebody was on a weight loss journey and they had, let's just say, three months of implementing your recommended diet, working on their gut health, maybe doing some cold plunging and some of those other adjunct therapies at the same time.
Speaker B:What would be like supplements that you would recommend during that three months journey?
Speaker A:Well, the first thing is to reset the gut.
Speaker A:And so that is in my system that would be young reds and young gut together with young body.
Speaker A:And you have a loading period of about 15, 10, 15 days.
Speaker A:And during that period you're, you're basically trying to renormalize or re optimize the two bacteria you had when you started life, which was bifidobacteria and akkermansia.
Speaker A:And then that resets the whole body, literally doing that.
Speaker A:And that's critical.
Speaker B:And you take that daily or do you cycle it somehow in the beginning?
Speaker A:In the beginning you take it daily for about 10 to 15 days, but then you wean off and then you're taking the polyphenol, the reds on Your foraging food day, and then you're taking the anti aging the, the young body on your fasting day.
Speaker A:And then the third one, the young gut, which is the resistant starch, you can just mix it in once or twice a week into the reds.
Speaker A:And, and so that's an optimal level of dosing that gives you just enough, but not too much.
Speaker A:That's the first step.
Speaker A:Because in an immune centric approach to fat loss, the problem that is almost never addressed is inflammation in body fat.
Speaker A:And how do you fix that problem?
Speaker A:Because until you, until you clear inflammatory immune cells, inflammatory macrophages from body fat, you haven't solved anything.
Speaker A:And, and so a first step to do that is you begin with the gut, not with body fat.
Speaker A:You heal and seal and reset the gut and then you can approach body fat.
Speaker A:And so there's, there's kind of the, the pre fat loss phase, which is resetting the gut and that stack's meant for that.
Speaker A:Then there is kind of your fat loss phase, which is whatever your flavor of how you're going to get there, okay?
Speaker A:And then there's the most important phase of all, which is the offset phase, and it doesn't really exist.
Speaker A:You never hear me talking about this.
Speaker A:But the problem with weight loss that no one Talks about that's 100% true, is the butterfly effect of weight regain.
Speaker A:And so very often you'll start a weight loss journey, and particularly in your 20s, and you think it's going to solve everything.
Speaker A:And then you get to the after phase and it's all selfies and posting and here's what I did and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker A:But what you're not aware of is that you've started the butterfly effect, okay?
Speaker A:You've started this thing that echoes down the decades.
Speaker A:It'll play out for decades and it gets bigger and more magnified.
Speaker A:And that has to do with the fact that our bodies are designed to keep us alive, okay?
Speaker A:That's the first priority.
Speaker A:Looking lean and mean is not the first priority, okay?
Speaker A:So what happens is there are, are 30 plus mechanisms that I know of, probably more in the body that are entirely devoted to regaining whatever you lost, okay?
Speaker A:And that's just survival.
Speaker A:You know, like, like you think about it 10,000 years ago, you know, maybe there was a really tough winter and you know, you went hungry and everybody got really lean.
Speaker A:A lot of people died.
Speaker A:You know, maybe there was a famine and then summer came around and the herd came back and man, we ate good.
Speaker A:Okay, well, what the body is designed to do is rapidly Restore all that lost weight, all that lost mass as a protection against the next famine.
Speaker A:And the body learns every time, it learns from every trip to the starvation.
Speaker A:Well, so it gets better and better and better at defending its weight.
Speaker A:You know this as a practitioner and what you see is, you know, same story always.
Speaker A:You know, woman in her 50s.
Speaker A:Yeah, it used to be so easy.
Speaker A:I could drop weight so easy.
Speaker A:Now I can't drop weight at all.
Speaker A:I don't know what's going on.
Speaker A:On.
Speaker A:Well, there's a lot going on.
Speaker A:It's never simple, but one of the things going on is repeated trips to the weight loss journey.
Speaker A:Well, hardwire weight loss resistance long term, make it very difficult.
Speaker A:And it's a number of reasons.
Speaker A:I mean, we could, I could bore your listeners to death going through the mechanics of it.
Speaker A:It's actually quite fascinating.
Speaker A:And in fact, I will let me bore you guys for a minute.
Speaker B:Minute.
Speaker A:So one of the things that happens, this never talked about for fat to lose, for you to lose fat, there has to be a deformation of support structures, meaning surrounding your fat there are these collagen rich structures called the extracellular matrix, okay?
Speaker A:And it's loaded with very specific types of fibers, collagen fibers.
Speaker A:So what happens is in order to collapse that structure, there are very specific enzymes required, matrix melanoproteases.
Speaker A:And those break down, they break down collagens.
Speaker A:And that allows your fat to shrink, your ECM to shrink and you get that nice tight belly, okay?
Speaker A:Without those enzymes, you can't do that.
Speaker A:The problem is those enzymes have a high cost.
Speaker A:Very often they're creating feedback loops.
Speaker A:And so what'll happen is on the reconstruction of your extracellular matrix in your new lean, trim body, the body's learning, going, oh, a famine just happened.
Speaker A:Okay, all right.
Speaker A:This time around, we're going to use stiffer fibers.
Speaker A:So we're going to load more stiffer fibers into the structure so that next time this doesn't happen the same.
Speaker A:Well, science has begun to decode all this stuff.
Speaker A:So there's, there's different types of fibers.
Speaker A:When you get into what's called the collagen 6 family, those are inflammatory.
Speaker A:So those are post fat loss fat fibers very often loaded into the extracellular mat matrix.
Speaker A:They're inflammatory beacons and they are programmatic in nature.
Speaker A:They program the nucleus of fat cells.
Speaker A:They program them, okay?
Speaker A:So you have this two way communication going back and forth between collagen fibers in the support structure and the nucleus of fat cells.
Speaker A:And the nucleus of fat cells is programming the fat Mass to load.
Speaker A:These types of collagen fibers, these types of collagen fibers are going back and reprogramming the nucleus.
Speaker A:And so what you get is these inflammatory def weakens.
Speaker A:And so you begin to get over time with age, stiffer ecm, we call it fibrosis.
Speaker A:And then you get inflamed fat.
Speaker A:And part of the problem is these repeated trips to the weight loss.
Speaker A:Well, that's part of the problem.
Speaker A:So what you find is that this is, and anybody could validate this for themselves.
Speaker A:Just type in adipose tissue, fibrosis, ecm, go type that in.
Speaker A:And what you're going to see is this reality that the stiffer your structure gets, that surrounds your fat, the harder it is to drop fat.
Speaker A:So without this weight rebound period, if you don't account for the weight rebound, meaning we got a check box, we got a list of boxes to check.
Speaker A:You know, we've got to offset this, this, this, this and this.
Speaker A:If you don't do that, then what happens is you're setting the butterfly effect up to really play out in your 40s and 50s and 60s.
Speaker B:That is so true.
Speaker B:I can't even tell you like that.
Speaker B:Almost every single person goes through this journey, especially women.
Speaker B:As we head into like midlife, I just want to round up the conversation with fitness.
Speaker B:So during this three months journey that we are describing, how should women work out?
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a really good question.
Speaker A:So a lot of it has to do with your history and what you've done historically because certain things are going to work much better the first time you do them or the first few times versus, you know, later.
Speaker A:So I think you mentioned earlier, like the age of a woman has a lot to do with the way a thing is going to work.
Speaker A:And that's very true.
Speaker A:With respect to exercise and what to look at doing, the key really is when you look at what the leanest people in the world consistently do.
Speaker A:And that would be bodybuilders entering into competitions, nevermind the drugs.
Speaker A:That's a factor.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And they wouldn't look the same without the drugs.
Speaker A:But leaving the drugs out, they're doing cardio.
Speaker A:They're absolutely doing cardio.
Speaker A:So these are people who train muscle all the time.
Speaker A:But I mean, I know people, people like this and they're doing, you know, sometimes two, three hours of cardio a day to get super, super lean.
Speaker A:So I'm not suggesting anybody go do that.
Speaker A:But what I'm suggesting is that there's absolutely a role for dedicated cardio.
Speaker A:The issue that people get into is that you start to think, well, I'm putting too much stress on the body.
Speaker A:By doing lots of cardio, you can mitigate that through food patterns, things we talked about earlier, and timing cardio to certain things and things you do with cardio.
Speaker A:So what I found is that, that particularly with women, particularly when they get into that 50 year old range, you know, where it starts to get really, really hard to drop body fat, sometimes you just have to increase the dosing of cardio exercise.
Speaker A:Sometimes it's the only thing that breaks through and then sometimes you have to combine that with very low calories, you know, not always, but sometimes.
Speaker A:Definitely resistance training.
Speaker A:A lot of what I'm into now is more functional stuff, which is keeping the muscles young through fast twitch training.
Speaker A:And that involves things like incorporating into your workout bands and rapid movements.
Speaker A:So by incorporating bands into your workout along with rapid movements, a good example would be you can basically have a, have a weight and basically do like a forward lunge with a weight with a band holding you back.
Speaker A:And so you're creating dynamic tension.
Speaker A:And what that's doing is it's training the fast twitch muscles.
Speaker A:And you'll find that the more you train the fast twitch muscles, the easier it is to stay lean over time.
Speaker A:Time.
Speaker A:And most of the advice out there is really just old 70s bodybuilding advice that had been glommed onto by a lot of people who have now adopted that message, which is 40 years old.
Speaker A:But really the cutting edge right now is fast twitch functional movements.
Speaker A:Like if you really want to get a lean athletic body that looks really good, it's, it's by learning to incorporate essentially functional fast twitch training.
Speaker B:Yeah, because fast twitch muscle declines with age.
Speaker B:Right, Right.
Speaker A:Yeah, you, you keep, you keep the slow twitch, you lose the fast twitch.
Speaker A:But the fast twitch is what keeps you from getting injured.
Speaker A:It's, it's what keeps your athletic range and it's what keeps you young.
Speaker A:I mean, the difference between the young and the old is the young can run fast.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And the old are slow.
Speaker A:So by training the young muscles, which is fast twitch, it's, it's pretty amazing.
Speaker B:I mean, those are the things we start noticing as we, we are over 50, is that everything kind of starts slowing down.
Speaker B:It's harder to get off the ground, harder to pick up speed and momentum and, and have the endurance to, to do certain things.
Speaker B:So that is definitely a training that I think a lot of people are not familiar with.
Speaker B:So maybe something new they can bring bring into their workout stack.
Speaker B:Oh my God.
Speaker B:Joel, you covered so many things.
Speaker B:That was such a mind blowing conversation, really.
Speaker B:I think we just ran into so many things that just a lot of people don't talk about.
Speaker B:And I really appreciate your time.
Speaker B:How can people find you and find your books and your supplements and everything.
Speaker A:That you do well?
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker A:My Instagram is real.
Speaker A:Joel Green.
Speaker A:I'm trying to get a Twitter started, which is the same.
Speaker A:And you can go to veepnutrition.com which is my website, and all of my stuff is there on my Instagram I have a link to.
Speaker A:I've put a lot of this out for free now, so I have a free basic eight steps into the immunity code and you can kind of dive into that and do all that cool stuff.
Speaker B:And Joel have some, like, amazing educational videos on his Instagram, so definitely go and check them out.
Speaker B:Joel, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker A:Thank you for having me.
Speaker A:It was fun.
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