May 24, 2016
Found My Fitness Podcast: Ray Cronise, Cold Thermogenesis, Intermittent Fast, Weight Loss and Healthspan
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- Bonafides: Former NASA Scientist, Co-founder of Zero Gravity, popularized using mild cold-stress for weight loss (as covered in The 4 Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss) and about to complete a 23-day (medically supervised) water fast
- Btw, you bowel movements just stop after a while
- Long fasts are socially draconian, but not physically draconian
- I don’t have headache, hunger pangs, etc.
- Fasting is helping people with diabetes, lowering blood pressure and even Ezcema
- The idea that the body gets into a repair mode when in a dietary restrictive environment is not that far fetched, but how to you sell sitting around and drinking water?
- Once we have dietary restriction we’ll need to supplement to make sure we’re not malnourished
- Over past 23-days Ray’s blood levels were all at healthy levels
- Myth: You don’t need comprehensive nutrition every single day, maybe over any given week or month, but we don’t need everything every day
- Which makes sense if we evolved often not having food available every day as hunter-gatherers
- AND you can be clear headed and effective when fasting, as we needed to be able to hunt without eating and do it successfully
- What is an adequate level for vitamins/minerals?
- The RDAs (recommended daily allowances) were set based off animal studies about what levels caused death
- But what about the stuff that are not essential for short term survival, but essential for long term survival and damage repair (Triage Theory, Dr. Bruce Ames)?
- But we also don’t know the consequences of over-nutrition?
- Start thinking about diet about a lifetime thing, not a daily thing
- g. At a certain age you are trying to have children, so you want more amino acids to help with fecundity
- At older ages, you want to aim for longevity and have fewer amino acids
- How do we look at HealthSpan: Live long and be functional when old, not just technically alive
- Myth: Going without a meal will crash your metabolism or by not including a food group in every meal
- Also, none of us are going to be deficient in protein, not happening in the West
- Original rules were written when we didn’t have enough food and it was about making sure we had enough, now this is not the case
- Now, what more can we get at a micro-nutrient level to optimize our health
- Over-nutrition is rare in nature, not a big thing
- But now we are over-nourished by a calorie density perspective
- Strictly a disease of affluence that the US exports to other nations
- Ironically, we are undernourished in key micro-nutrients, even though getting lots of macronutrients
- Dietary restriction is not Caloric Nutrition and can be done without being malnourished
- Micronutrients come mostly from plants, even though they don’t have a lot of calories
- Food Triangle (page 3)
- Top: Leafy green, veggies, mushroom, stems/bulbs [Eat most of your diet from here]
- Left side: Paleo diet, you can maintain weight, but won’t get enough fiber and extra phyto-nutrients
- Right Side: Plants, nuts, legumes, starch veggies, fruits
- Bottom Feeder: Meat/potatos, burger/fries, etc. – very energy dense and everyone gains weight
- Inflammation is the only biomarker with people that live well over 100
- The gut is the greatest source of inflammation in the body
- The Gut likes fiber, so give it fiber
- I think we’ll start doing fetal transplants in the future commonly as we age
- There is no such thing as a broken metabolism: It basically scales with your body mass
- 1918 study, Francis Benedict equation is still right
- Metabolism: Measured by ratio of oxygen in/CO2 out and we can calculate what is burned
- You can run your ass off for hours, but if you’re just burning carbs you get nowhere
- So people cut out carbs to get into ketosis to burn fat, but that isn’t necessary as your body does this itself when you restrict diet
- “We used to eat to support out activity, but now we are active to support our eating”
- “But you cannot out exercise your mouth, it is just impossible”
- I’m not sure it’s about putting as much good stuff in my body as possible, but now I’m not sure that that is right – I may be over-nourishing
- “Worst place to eat healthy is a vegan restaurant, they just put sugar/salt/fat on top of plants” just like meat, meat is the delivery system for sauce
- Trackers that Ray Uses Withings trackers
- Aura: Sleep
- Active/Pop
- Scale
- Intermittent Fasting:
- I try to decrease frequency of meals, blending, but NOT Juicing
- I tend to skip breakfast
- 3 meals a day was a created social construct to match to work day of the farm or factory worker
- Hippocrates discussed if they should eat 1x or 2x a day, nobody ate 3x a day
- How often we are eating could be a huge problem for health, and it’s really socially driven
- Don’t name meals, that is for restaurants so they know what to serve you
- There are not time of day meals and time of day foods
- In the morning you are the most insulin sensitive (least at night, so eating starches late at night is not a good idea)
- Having the option to just not eat dinner if you’re too busy to get food ready early on in the evening
- Shown similar health benefits with dietary restriction, but with additional protective to infection
- We have amazing repair processes when in a fasted state, this has been shown in many animal studies
- The longest medically supervised water fast was 382 days!
- Lost 276 pounds with just a multi-vitamin
- Down to 185 pounds when finished
- The idea that fasting is miserable is a response to the habit of eating. Symptoms of hunger are headache, irritability, lethargy = Same as giving up caffeine, cigarettes, heroin
- Not that food is addicting, but that body only thinks to respond like withdrawal if you’re regularly feeding it
- All of what you feel of hunger is not actually hunger
- The only actual symptom of hunger is mouth-watering and food tastes amazingly good
- Just smelling food is almost as if you ate it when been on a long fast
- These symptoms is are not a way that a starving animal finds food
- Health benefits from fasting kick-in after
- Dietary Restriction:
- You can be eating all day long and being calorically restricted
- How can you optimize eating frequency?
- Satiation is a made up word, and the entire context of using that word is with people that are chronically fed
- Any study for low fat shows a rise in the carbohydrate arm and no increase in Fiber = increase in refined sugars – This is an irrelevant study
- All is shows is sugar vs. fat which we know about already
- All of Ray’s foods all come whole foods that have multiple things in it, simply a carb or protein or fat
- Carb is way too vague a term, no real meaning. Then you add Refined Carbs you are just making stuff up to try make it all make sense
- What if the study was about adding potatoes or beef and seeing what happened, NOT fat/protein/carb.
- US Gov. Policy:
- If saying something good, we name the food (fruits, veggies)
- If saying something bad, cannot name the food (fat, sugar)
- Because they hurt the beef industry by saying don’t eat red meat, so they won’t do that again
- We have 20 national institutes of health, but food is regulated by the USDA…
- “In a mature bureaucracy, there is a rule against everything”
- Fasting benefits:
- Increase autophagy (takes 48 hours of fasting in mice studies), but unclear how long for humans?
- Fasting might seem socially radically, but it is not biological radically – normal people can do this
- FOXO3 is well known to be activated on healthy aging
- Temperature/Cold Therapy/Cold Stress:
- See Wim Hof
- “Mild cold stress isn’t really about ice baths, more about constant exposure to mild cold” –
- “Gloves before sweater makes you look better”
- Ray wears gloves and ear muffs and he can walk outside in the very cold without a jacket – cover the symptoms of cold first
- Cold Stress and Dietary Restriction hit the same mechanisms in the body
- You don’t need to take it to the extreme like cryotherapy – cold air/water is enough
- Cycling cold/hot before bed can make you very sleepy and give you amazing sleep (can reset your circadian rhythm – travel tip)
- Ray’s Protocol: Contrast Showers 10 seconds warm, 20 seconds cold, repeat 10 times, end on cold
- Skin can’t sense absolute temp. we only can tell differences/changes
- You end up tolerating heat better after doing this, so you sweat less and get cold less easily
- Clinically depressed patients with cold showers showed similar benefits to medications (anything below 60F)
- Mild cold stress begins at 80F in water (60F in air), where you seeing a change
- Below 60F begins hypothermia (<32F in air), so the risk of injury is much higher
- You don’t need ice, don’t start extreme – start with mild levels
- Mild cold stress begins at 80F in water (60F in air), where you seeing a change
- See Blog Post: Metabolism Mastering…
- Swimming is the only exercise you can start at any age and can continue to the end of your life
- Swimming with a tether makes it much harder
- For Swimming, the optimal level for impact and comfort is about 75F, but when you get out just stay out, don’t go warm up if you want to burn fat
- Exercise = Mimicking Mild Cold Stress (in some ways)
- First step, Shivering = burn carbs, not fat
- Then shivering stops and you shift to burning fat to make heat
- The opposite of sedentary isn’t exercise, it’s Active
- Let’s stop talking about exercise…
- It’s not about balancing inputs/outputs of energy
- We live in conditioned environments, we’ve lost being in natural warmth/colds and the responses those create in our bodies
- We need to think about Sleep, Cold Stress and Dietary Restriction
- Weight Loss Cold Stress Protocol: See Ray’s Website
- It’s not burning a ton of fat, but it shifts your Respiratory Quotient
- After a few weeks of cold stress and restricted diet, you’ll get 75% of the time burning fat
- Cold shower/bath helps right after exercise will help avoid your muscles from hurting the next day (after doing exercise for the first time in long time)
- Ray lives chronically in cold stress in the winter, house set at 50F and without any blankets
- Took a while to condition himself to being without a blanket
- We used to have blankets because we didn’t heat the house, so we do both
- Test: If you stick your hands/feet out of our blanket while sleeping, you are too warm and trying to trick your brain into thinking you are cooler
- We need cool to sleep, this is part of the role of melatonin – to drop your core temp drop
- Ray’s Bedtime:
- Contrast shower 30-45 min before bed
- No screens
- Ray takes a TON of melatonin (fast dissolve) a night (30mg) – this seems dangerous…
- Cured secondary insomnia
- Rhonda takes it rarely and no more than 3mg
- After 40, your melatonin levels drop off, most of it is made in the gut (why?)
