Transcript #2 The Dark Side of Fat Loss with Sean Croxton

#2 The Dark Side of Fat Loss with Sean Croxton – Podcast

 

Today’s cool fact of the day is that for every gram of glycogen, which is stored carbohydrate in your body, you store four grams of water, which means that when you eat carbs, you bloat up pretty quickly with excess water weight, which makes it look like you have a spare tire.

Dave Asprey:  You’re listening to episode two of Bulletproof Executive Radio. This is Dave from the Bulletproof Executive here talking about how you can upgrade your mind, body, and life to levels you never thought possible.

Today, we’ve got a great interview with Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness. He is a really interesting and down to earth guy, who has one of the most popular YouTube channels on Health and Wellness. He’s also going to discuss his new e-book called the Dark Side of Fat Loss. We’ve also got some great updates on the blog this week too. We just did a post on “Vegetarian Crossfit Versus Paleo” with some really interesting information from a martial artist versus a crossfit trainer.

We are also kicking off a new series on grass-fed meat, which will last for several weeks. We’re going through a lot of details about this because it is something that is central to the Bulletproof Diet program.

We’re also going to go through some really cool new studies in the Biohacker Report.  We’ll talk about the right kind of exercise for fat loss, antioxidants, and how obesity is related to your mental ability. If you want to learn more about this, check it out at bulletproofexec.com. Follow us on Twitter, @bulletproofexec is our Twitter handle or sign up for the newsletter on the blog. So, let’s get started with the show. Tell us what self-upgrades are you working on this week?

Co-host: This week, I have basically been continuing my cyclical ketogenic diet and trying to meld that into my triathlon training. It’s not too hard. Basically, what I’ve been doing is instead of having like 5 days of ketosis and then like 1 day of carb loading, it’s been kind of the opposite where I have like one or two days in ketosis throughout the week and then the rest of the time and I got a new order of meat from US Wellness Meats, which I was really excited about, so I guess you can call that a biohack, if you want. Well, that’s pretty much it.

Dave Asprey:  I’m always excited when I get a big load of fresh red meat in my freezer. So, that definitely counts. I actually gave my first presentation while hacking my brain publicly this week. In Malmö, Sweden, I spoke at something called the “Media Evolution Conference” and I spoke with electrodes running on my head running a 50 Hz current across my brain, which puts me in a gamma state and I did it mostly to show the audience that you can do it and that this sort of thing is real and it is happing today and then we talked about what it is like to live your life online and how to deal with stress that comes from info overload. So, it was pretty cool and we’ll have that video up on our blog as well.

Co-host: Cool, man. So, do you want to get to some listener Q&A?

Dave Asprey:  Right on.

Click here to read the listener Q & A session.

Co-host: Cool man! Right, the first one is from Ryan and this came from our Bulletproof Diet page, “Why are garlic and onions not on the eat-a-ton part of the Bulletproof Diet?”

Dave Asprey:  This is a question that I get a lot and it comes into a couple of different things. One of them is that garlic and onions are considered medicinal in traditional herbal medicine. So, if you have an infection, yes, eat garlic and onions. Onions aren’t particularly good because they have a lot of sugar and carbs in them for one thing, but with garlic and onions, both smell as the molecule that makes them smell pungent and that molecule has an unstable nitrogen bond, which is the same kind of bond that’s present in a lot of psychoactive substances including THC for instance and one of the EEG researchers that I’ve done some work with over the years, who’s particularly interested in brain performance, a guy named, Jim Heart noticed years ago that people couldn’t get their alpha brain waves, the relaxed focus zone where brain wave is up, when they ate garlic and onions.  I was pretty skeptical until I spent a week getting my brain into the state that normally takes 40 years to get into, an advanced Zen state. So, when I learned how to do that and I learned what it felt like to really be in that zone, I learned how to put myself there, I absolutely can tell the difference. If I ate garlic, it takes me 4 days before I can get my brain into that state.  Andrew, one of the other Bulletproof practitioners, who you’ll read on our blog, a guy that I’ve coached extensively over the years, had exactly the same experience. He noticed when he was doing Dual-N-Back training using the software we’ve got on the site, the stuff that raised his IQ 2.75 IQ points per hour, after he did that, he said, “Dave, I didn’t believe you about the garlic, but now that I’ve trained my brain this way, my brain can’t do what it’s capable of doing when I eat garlic.” So, it’s not good for neurological performance and there are other reasons why garlic and onions may not be good for us, but they are mostly sort of circumstantial, historical in referencing very old text. So, I’m happy to take garlic if I’ve got something going on, but I don’t eat it regularly because it actually doesn’t help me perform better.

Co-host: Hmm, Cool! Now, this next one is from Auction Buzz which is the comment handle that it was placed under, “What do you think of raw ground coco beans featured at health food stores? I put a teaspoon of it in and blend with butter/coffee. There is not sugar at all and it creates a flavor, sort of like coffee and chocolate. Is it supposed to have all sorts of antioxidants in it?”

Dave Asprey:  You know, chocolate just like coffee is one of those high-risk-high-benefit foods and it is full of antioxidants and it tastes really good. I love raw coco beans. The only problem is that they are particularly subject to mold, just like coffee is. If you read the site, I have a video up about the risks of mycotoxins. Mycotoxins not only make you fat, they definitely affect mood and cognitive function, in fact they even affect dreaming. So, these are things that just parts per million matter. So, the short answer there is, yes, I have actually done that. I’ve grounded one coco bean in with my coffee and then brewed the coffee and you get a really nice mocha flavor, but you need to make sure that those are really high-end coco beans and you can tell if you eat a couple of them by themselves and you just watch how your brain feels, watch what it does in your mouth, is it irritating or is it not irritating?  And if you feel really good, if you have a couple of them in an empty stomach, you’re probably okay.  If a half hour later you feel tired or your joints hurt, you probably shouldn’t eat the rest of those coco beans.

I have had a hard time finding really clean ones, just it’s very variant depending on the batch and they seem to be okay when you find the good ones, then heck yeah, I would do that. I will add though, when you put it in hot coffee, it’s not raw anymore, so is antioxidants, it’s just not raw. It’s sort of funny people telling me, “I put raw cream in my coffee.”  There’s no point of putting raw stuff in a beverage that’s 150 degrees.  You’ll have no enzymes left when you’re done.

Co-host: Hmm, yeah! What if somebody put like raw cream in like coffee that’s already room temperature, that would be okay, wouldn’t it?

Dave Asprey:  Oh, that’d be fine, you know.  You could use raw cream to make ice cream with the coffee as well. Throw a couple of egg yolks and a little bit of your favorite sugar-alcohol based sweetener in there and yeah, that’s a nice recipe for feeling good.

 

Click here to read how you can speed your recovery from workouts.

Hey, this next question comes from Chuck. He says, “First, is there a correlation between nutrition and maintaining fitness? What I’m asking is on a rest day would eating less allow me to preserve my fitness levels or eating more or the same amounts? If I had to take a couple of days off from exercise, would my diet affect the type of physical fitness I have or would it have no effect? Is it just about body weight or is it about fitness?”

Co-host: Yeah, this is interesting because it’s correlating a lot of different stuff. Obviously, your nutrition is going to have a large impact on your fitness levels to any extent. Now, it’s not going to have a direct effect on let’s say your VO2 max or your muscle strength after like one or two days. So, let’s say you eat or you take a few days off and you eat a lot of like broccoli one day and a lot of carrots, you’re VO2 max is not going to change on that kind of thing.  Obviously, any kind of food toxins are going to impede recovery, so one of the reasons you’d want to take several days off from exercise is to recover, but if you go out and eat a bunch of beagles and junk food like Quinoa and Cheerios and stuff like that, then obviously there are worst things too, but I’d like to pick on those and that’s going to impede your recovery and you’re going to feel worse. You’re muscles won’t feel like they’re ready to go when you come back to exercise.

As you said, your weight is obviously affected by your diet, just like we talked about a lot here and your weight also affects your fitness, so if you’re overweight, you’re not going to be as fit, you’re not going to be able to run as fast like Matt Conley, and you’re not going to gain like several pounds of fat in a few days like a lot of people think you will if you overeat or whatever. What I would do if I was taking some time off is I would eat fewer carbs.  I know Chuck, he’s an endurance athlete. He has to eat at least some carbs, and so what I would do is I would cut back your carb intake on the easy days, kind of like I’ve been doing with the ketogenic diet. So, if I have a really easy day or I’m just doing like a one-hour bike ride like 60% of my max heart rate, you really aren’t burning very many carbs at all that day and so I’d cut back on carbs. I would make sure your food is really nutrient dense giving your body everything it needs to recover and I would try and maintain a fairly high protein intake, especially if you did weight training the day before because your body is going to need that to repair muscles. Yeah, that’s it.  Do you have anything to add on to that Dave?

Dave Asprey:  Yeah. I’d also look at, which foods are inflammatory and which ones aren’t. You know if you’re eating an inflammatory diet say with cooked milk protein and with wheat or other grains in it, you are basically going to be swelling up and you’re going to be inhibiting small vasculature blood flow to the parts of your body like your muscles where you probably need to get increased blood flow, so by eating the high healthy fat diet, by eating the right kind of carbs that are typically not going to be inflammatory, things like yams, you’re going to actually keep your physical fitness level higher.  There’s a second part of Chuck’s question too, where he says, “What are tips for speeding recovery?” He says, “I smash it on the weekends”, like last weekend he did more than half an iron man, but when he did it, his legs are still crushed till about Wednesday. This is what you can do to recover faster. Oh, and by the way, I don’t sleep enough, so much rule this that way as well. Maybe, I’ll take that one first.

Co-host: Yeah, go ahead.

Dave Asprey:  So, the bottom line, if you are going to go out and smash it on the weekend or do any kind of exercise, even if you’re just going to do a 20 minute Kettlebell or cross-fit session or something, you need to get more sleep that night.  One of the reasons that I don’t work out at all, at least I haven’t for the last couple of years, I’m just now starting to do, you know, maybe 20 minutes a week, is that in order for me to recover from just that amount of workout, I need to up my sleep by about 3 hours over the courses of the week and right now, I’m in the middle of working full time and finishing off a book and I run this blog and I have two young kids, so, I sleep very little and you will get sick if you don’t sleep enough and you smash it on weekends, so you have got to decide what are you going to do there.  You can make your sleep more efficient. You can run a 1.5 Hz delta current across your brain when you sleep using a cerebral electrical stimulation machine, which will put you in more of a physical recovery mode. You could do a grounding mat, which is the same technology that Lance Armstrong uses during the tour de France in order to recover. You ground yourself electrically so that you can reduce the inflammation by getting rid of the extra charge on your body, the extra positive charge and inflammation is basically positively charged and by grounding yourself, the theory goes and apparently the evidence from the books I’ve read and from my own experience is that you’ll have less inflammation and you’ll recover faster.

So, if you’re going to abuse your body the way you’re doing it, you’ll hack your sleep definitely those ways and I would also add do very heavy dose l-glutamine and add some Liposomal Glutathione most likely as an antioxidant, which is going to help you with the inflammation as well. I find that it helps me recover more quickly from a long business trip or from exercise, sort of same way as these other substances.

Co-host: Yeah, I’d just like to add a few things. Obviously, like all the little recovery, like there are million recovery tricks and things for this kind of stuff, but as Dave said sleep is the foundation of recovery. This will not recover if you are not getting enough of sleep or at least the right kind of sleep.  So, even if you can’t sleep for like 9 hours like would probably be ideal after doing something like you did, 9 hours or more, you can as Dave said hack your sleep, do things to make it more higher quality, so you can get more bang for your buck for the small amount of time you’re able to sleep.

One thing, you might want to think about doing to facilitate that is doing your big workout on days like Saturday, so you can sleep then on Sunday. So, assuming you have gotten your sleep down, some things that I find really help are, I’m ordering these from the least effective to the most effective, so ice baths, there’re some they help, there is some evidence they don’t. I think that’s kind of a personal decision. I’ll usually do an ice bath after a race if it’s available, if it’s not, I don’t sweat it unintended.  Elevation, I think that’s pretty effective, when you come in from a long workout like that, you just lie on your back and you throw your legs up against the wall and you sit there for about 3 minutes or so. Maybe do that again before you go to bed.  Massage, self massage, I think is better because it doesn’t take forever. In an ideal world, you would get a massage therapist to work on you, but that’s usually not as affordable or not as convenient for most people. So, massage roller after the workout is really effective. I’ve tried doing them like later in the day, hours after, and it just doesn’t work as well, so there’s a thing called the TP Massage Grid or the Trigger Point Therapy Massage Grid, and a thing called a muscle track, just like a rolling pen that you roll across your muscles and it helps break up adhesions that form and I’ll add a link to those to in the show notes too by the way.  Compression socks are something I’ve been playing around with recently. They work pretty well, so what I’ll do is I’ll put those on about 4 hours before I go to bed just while I’m working on my computer and everything like that and then I’ll wear those throughout the night. Mental recovery, visualization techniques, trying to minimize stress, those kinds of things, they all help a lot and just telling yourself like, “I feel better”. I know that sounds kind of new agey or dumb or whatever, but it works.

One of the biggest things is eat a Bulletproof diet. Even if you’re eating more carbs, everything else still applies, so you need to get that few quality down and sleep, just sleep, sleep, and sleep some more. So, and then one other supplement, I think, I’d like throw in there, I’m sure Dave would like to put you on this too is that, Hydrolyzed Collagen Peptides.  I think those work really well for recovery and they are very anti-inflammatory and the Pemmican stuff that’s on Upgraded Self, that is just like a recovery formula out of nowhere. It’s crazy and that worked, so I would recommend both of those.

Dave Asprey:  It’s got the lactoferrin from an extremely pure source, sort of the really high end stuff and lactoferrin is a bioactive milk peptide that comes from basically mother’s milk, the first milk that comes out of a cow after it gives birth and those are very good for immune system and they help you recover faster. There’s a couple of other more edgy things that I would do if it was me in that situation, but maybe a lot of our readers might not.  One is hyperbaric oxygen. So, if you want to recover really quickly, you can use a home hyperbaric oxygen chamber. They run about $2000 and they work with an oxygen concentrator, so you don’t need bottled oxygen and it compresses the oxygen in a tube where you lay there and you read for an hour or so, but it forces oxygen into parts of your body where your circulatory system wouldn’t otherwise get it.

Another way of reducing inflammation and recovering very quickly is by using medical grade ozone and that is something beyond what we would have time to talk about here, but that’s something that really speeds recovery. But it’s extremely alternative, I have a medical grade ozone unit at home and I’ve used it for a long time. It’s profoundly powerful, but it’s out there. It’s worked back in Cuba and Russia. These are the places where this is from.

Co-host: I’m just laughing because it’s so awesome. Cool and there are also these things similar like as Dave was talking about the eastern machine, I think they just call them like Electrostimulation Recovery Units, once made by a company called Compex. You basically set that to your muscles and it generates an electrical current because through them kind of like massage them and there are these really cool things you can put on your legs called, NormaTec MVPs and they run, compress air through them, and this is a form of compression basically. Those are pretty cool too and a lot of pros use those. Cool, oh, go ahead.

Dave Asprey:  One more thing, the electrical thing you’re talking about there, it is the same technology that fuels the CES machines, the one’s that you can run on your brain, but when you run on your muscles you use a much larger current. I have actually both of those things at home and if I have really sore muscles, I would use an electrical current across them because it basically cleans out all the toxins and gets the lactic acid out on all that.

 

Click here to learn the best kind of blender for making Bulletproof Coffee

Co-host: Cool man. Right, this next question comes from Clay, “What kind of hand blender are you using for Bulletproof coffee? All the ones I’ve seen are a lot bigger than the one you suggest. Thanks.”

Dave Asprey:  Here’s a secret for making Bulletproof coffee, the better the blender the better the coffee. So, when I’m at home my favorite is to use a $500 Blendtec blender, the kind that can grind up an iPhone and turn it into powder. However, when I’m traveling, I use little battery powered guys. I have 2 to 3 models. They’re all about the same. I found them on Amazon, they cost like $5 and they typically last for about 6 months before they break. The best ones come with little plastic cases and you can take the blades off, things like that, some of them have fixed blades, but they’re kind of throwaway Chinese ones. I also sometimes use a Braun full-sized hand blender at home, if I’m in a hurry and I’m just making one cup, but generally, heat up your blender with hot water and brew the coffee into the blender and you’ll have the best Bulletproof coffee.

Co-host: Is that kind of like a Magic Bullet, those little things you see on TV?

Dave Asprey:  You know what, I’ve tried Magic Bullet and I used one for a while and it makes excellent coffee. The problem is that anytime you put liquid into the Magic Bullet, especially hot liquid, it makes a little bit of pressure and then it pushes liquid through the seal and pretty soon, you’ve got crud growing on the bottom of the Magic Bullet. I actually went through 2 Magic Bullets in 6 months and I quit using them because of that problem.

Co-host: Hmm. Crud is not good. Next one comes from Albert, “I once emailed Trader Joes Corporation asking them if they could verify whether the Kerrygold brand of butter they sell is indeed from grass-fed cows. They replied they could not verify those. Frowny face. So, I’m hoping maybe you know more about this question. How can I be sure it is really from grass-fed cows? Thank you very much for your blog.”

Dave Asprey:  The best way to do this is just to ask the cows. No, what I did was I asked theirs. So, I went to Kerrygold’s website instead of Trader Joe’s and Kerrygold has right on the very front page of their website, “This is butter from grass-fed cows and makes it more yellow.” What they don’t have that makes me frankly a little bit angry is they don’t have all the health benefits of the grass-fed butter and they are selling a low-fat version of their butter, as if the fat in the butter wasn’t the health providing substance, so I’m a little upset with Kerrygold for this, but at least it’s grass-fed and, in fact, I had some for breakfast this morning.

Co-host: Nice. Yeah, I actually had a question about that low-fat scam crap butter stuff they are selling. Are they mixing soy bean oil into that as a filler or are they just whipping it so it’s like more air?

Dave Asprey:  I think they’re putting air and water into it. It didn’t have any ingredients listed that looked unsafe.  It just looked like they’re selling you less butter for more money. You know, good for them, bad for you.

Co-host: Gotcha. This next one comes from Josh, “What’s the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates? I’ve always been told that simple sugar should be eaten in moderation and that the majority of your calories come from complex carbs. Are complex sugars healthier than simple sugars and can a high-carb diet be healthy if one were to only eat complex carbs?”

Dave Asprey:  You know, there is a difference between simple and complex carbohydrates. Think about say a bunch of poker chips stacked up. A simple carbohydrate is a single poker chip and a complex carbohydrate is the stack of poker chips and you’re body has to go through the trouble of unstacking them before you can consume them. So, it takes more time and a little bit more energy to take apart a complex carbohydrate, so you don’t use this quickly and your blood sugar doesn’t go up this fast.

Now, it’s true, a complex carb is probably going to be better for you than a simple carb, so the classical healthy complex carbs that we recommend on the diet would be yams or sweet potatoes, which are relatively complex. The problem though is that if you’re going to eat a high complex carb diet instead of a high healthy fat diet, you’re going to end up with still having too many carbs.  Carbs convert to triglyceride and they raise your LDL which is not good for your cardiovascular health. You’re still going to be raising your insulin quite substantially and you’re probably going to be farting like a machine. A high complex carb diet is generally not good for human beings. We’re not cows.

Co-host: Yeah, I think one problem a lot of people run into is they hear that complex carbs are healthy and then the same people who are saying that are recommending beagles and all these other things, which do technically have some level of complex carbohydrates in them granted they also make sediments of sucrose and table sugar and things like that in the bread, but they hear things like whole grains are healthy because they’re slow or they’re lower glycemic index or whatever and while low glycemic index is good in the presence of food quality, it will not make up for lack of food quality.

Dave Asprey:  It’s kind of like, if you had to pick between being cut with a sword and cut with a pocket knife, you’re going to pick the pocket knife, so you could say the pocket knife is healthier than the sword, but neither one of them really is something that I want to try.

Co-host: Yeah!  Sounds good. So, if you have any questions. You know where to contact us on Twitter, Facebook, or in the Bulletproof Executive, that’s bulletproofexec.com on the contact page and you can contact us on Twitter too. We’re always on there.

Now, we’re going to do our interview with Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness.

Click here to read the exclusive interview with Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness.

Co-host: Today, we have Sean Croxton, who blogs at Underground Wellness and is in charge of UW Radio, which is one of the best podcasts in the world. He also has a YouTube channel with over 25,000 subscribers. He is a nutrition expert who graduated in 2001 from San Diego State University with a bachelor’s in Kinesiology. He also enrolled in the Functional Medicine University Program and he is a functional diagnostic nutritionist. Sean, thank you so much for coming on today man.

Sean Croxton:  Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Co-host: Cool!  First of all, basically understand where your story comes from and how you got interested in this and how you started Underground Wellness and what you do now?

Sean Croxton:  Oh, I love telling this story. My story is just really a matter of failure more than anything. When I graduated from college, I did really well in all of my classes and what kind of time frame do we have? Because I tend to talk too much.  Where we are trying to keep this, like a half hour or what?

Co-host: An hour is fine.

Sean Croxton:  All right, cool! Because, I will talk your ear off. But, when I graduated from college, I thought I knew all there was that needed to be known about health and fitness and all that fun stuff and I did really well in my classes, but when I actually went and took that information that I’ve learned, that I’ve paid a pretty good amount of money to learn actually and put it actually into practice, it didn’t work with real people.  I was recommending people to follow the food guide pyramid, eating tons of grains, doing the whole low fat thing. You know warning people, “Don’t eat that much cheese! There’s too much fat in there!” I remember just some of the things that would come out of my mouth, telling people to get off cow’s milk and to drink soy milk. You know things that now to me sound absolutely crazy. People were paying me for that advice and it obviously wasn’t working.  I’m a guy who really cares whether people get results or not and so, what I did was, as you and I were talking about before we started this, I became an Amazon.com junkee, and I just started reading as much information as I could.  That was very countered to what I had learned in college.

I started studying other people what they did, people who have actually worked with real people such Paul Chek and David Getoff and Dr. Mercola and just read what they read, learned what they learned and kind of slowly started to integrate it into what I did as a personal trainer back then. Started up the Youtube channel, started to convey this information to the public in a way that’s fun for them to understand and learn, easy for them to understand and then it just kind of rolled into Underground Wellness and rolled into Underground Wellness Radio and now the Underground Wellness TV show and you know the ebook I’ve got coming out pretty soon and it’s been a really fun educational journey.

Co-host: Yeah man, that’s crazy. It’s just life. It’s great what you’ve been doing too. I love the website and I love what you’re doing. You talked about something called self care instead of health care. Can you elaborate a little bit on that because I love that phrase and I’m going to have to steal that.

Sean Croxton:  I probably stole that from somebody else really. I almost feel like when people talk about healthcare, they’re looking for somebody to take care of them. Almost like, I hate to say, but almost like a babysitter. You know, I need my doctor to take care of me, I need to go in there when something’s wrong with me and get my pills and complain about them which a lot of us do and I think that we need to be a little bit more proactive about our health and to prevent health and just learn, I mean learning simply how to take care of yourself.

If you go and get a dog or you go and buy a cat or something like that, what’s the first thing you do? You start going online, trying to learn how to take care of your cat or your dog or your bird. You start learning how you should feed it because you don’t want that thing to die. You don’t want to have all this crazy veterinarian bills and all that good stuff.

Now, why don’t we do the same thing with ourselves? Why don’t we learn how to take care of ourselves, so we don’t have to go to the doctor for a 7-minute visit and get written some stupid prescription for some expensive medication?  I don’t get it. It’s so backwards to me, but at the same time, it takes some effort and some time to actually learn this stuff and how to take care of yourself. I think we kind of take it for granted and just think, “Oh, I’m fine. I’m doing fine. I’m good”, until we actually get sick and so, not a huge fan of our health care system, especially in this country, but I do feel that we could kind of eliminate, or not even eliminate, but use our health care system more for emergencies and whatnot and just go ahead and take care of ourselves, so we don’t have to need all that other prescription weird stuff. You know, that’s what I mean by that.

Co-host: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. This is self-education, so we can make decisions on our own and then when bad things do come up, knowing when to use like modern medicine and that kind of thing too.

Sean Croxton:  Yeah, yeah. Somebody needs to write a book called how to take care of yourself – real simple book, just how to take care of yourself, so that everybody will read.  They still don’t know and I swear that would eliminate so many problems that people have.

Co-host: Right. Just like the Self Help Survival Guide or something like that. Yeah.

Sean Croxton:  Something like that and it should be taught in like second grade.

Co-host: Yeah. Now, what are some of the specific things that they taught you in school that probably just sound like absolutely insane nowadays, like you mentioned soy milk, burn the fat, what other kind of things, like exercise related or that kind of thing?

Sean Croxton:  Saturated fat is bad for you. Grains are just the greatest thing in the history of the world. You know, grains will save your life and that’s certainly not true with 7 out of 10 people these days being gluten sensitive, but that’s a whole another topic right there. As you said, cardio, burn, burn, burn as many calories as you can.  Calories in, calories out, is the biggest problem that I have, as J.J. Virtue would say, what did she say? “Weight gain or weight loss is more of a math problem” which it is not.  We have oversimplified some of these things.  I can understand simplification when you’re talking about complex things, but we’ve done it a little bit too much. You know, calories in, calories out, really isn’t how it works. If it really worked that way, I don’t think we would have the obesity epidemic that we have because the solution would be pretty darn simple. Eat less and move more. Cool, move on with your life, but it goes so far beyond that, so I can go into all kind of mess about cholesterol being bad for you, animal products being bad for you, so on and so forth. I mean, it doesn’t really stop and I always tell people just to eat like your ancestors, move like your ancestors. It seemed to work really well for them and you know the other thing I’d like to say is that I really don’t understand how an old school food can cause a brand new disease. I don’t really get it.  You know, heart disease is a fairly new phenomenon.  In 1900s, medical schools didn’t even talk about heart disease. It wasn’t part of their curriculum, then everything got all switched up. We reduced saturated fat, we increased our vegetable oils, we increased our sugars, we reduced our saturated fat, we got heart disease and then we blamed the saturated fat. It just doesn’t really make much sense to me.

We’ve taken our ancestral history, our ancestral genetics, I should say, and we’ve done something really weird with them. You know, we’re cave people, we’re cave people with iPods and computers and Skype lines that we can talk over, but our physiology hasn’t really changed and now, we’re just full of all these degenerative chronic nasty diseases because we switch things up in the name of health when it’s not really healthier. It’s just really weird and bizarre man.  It’s like I live in this crazy weird science fiction movie, to be honest.

Co-host: Right and it’s seems like the flaw of the analogies and things we are using like taking pipes and then like pouring saturated fat down them and stuff like that. Again, it was some British commercial where they have like a tub of like __________ or something there sticking in a pipe and then like this is just happening to your arteries and I was like “Why are you doing that with a piece of cauliflower?”

Sean Croxton:  Yeah!

Co-host: Some of these are same thing man.

Sean Croxton:  It’s solid at room temperature.

Co-host: Yeah.

Sean Croxton:  Well, my body is in the room temperature in the first place, you know what I mean, broccoli is solid in the room temperature too.  Is that going to kill me?

Co-host: Yeah.

Sean Croxton:  It makes no sense.

Co-host: If you’re at room temperature, you have bigger problems than fat intake.

Sean Croxton:  You’re dead.

Co-host: Yeah. So, you wrote something called the five pillars of health. I thought that was kind of cool. You really broke it down and well, can you explain this, kind of just go through this real quickly and just describe what they are.

Sean Croxton:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! The five pillars of health. Our health kind of stands on these pillars. When these pillars aren’t functioning properly, when just one of them isn’t functioning properly, then health kind of starts to take a little tumble. I used the analogy of like a five-legged stool, we say four-legged stool, I kind of added in that fifth one on diets, but the four legs on that stool, you make one crack and then of course, the stool kind of starts to fall over and whatnot. You break another one and now the stool is going to fall over itself and our hormones would certainly be one of them.

If you’re dealing with fat loss issues, fat loss resistance, weight gain. I mean, that’s a hormonal issue.  Hormones store fat. Hormones should be in balance. You don’t want too much of them, you don’t want too little of them, you want them to be right there in the middle, nice and balanced and when they’re not, you’re going to have some issues. Your hormones would tell your cells what to do. If your cells are getting the wrong messages, then your body is not going to function very well.

The other one would be digestion. You can have the greatest diet in the history of mankind, but if you don’t have great digestion, it’s not going to work too well. You know what I mean? And so, digestion is something that a lot of people whom I work with, they present with digestive issues where there would be gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, acid reflux and all these different things that they deal with on a daily basis, but they’re just kind of hesitant to share them with others, hesitant to say, “Hey doctor, I haven’t pooped”, like I was talking to somebody the other day and then she was like, “I go poo like every 6 days.”, and I was like “Whoa!” That’s certainly something that she needs to get some help with. The other ones would be detoxification. If you’re not pooing in 6 days, you’ve got a toxicity issue for sure.

Look at our environment. Our environment is all screwed up. I’m inhaling things. I just moved into a new place and there’s a new carpet in my room right now and I’m inhaling fumes from that new carpet right now. We’re eating chemicals. We’re drinking chemicals. We’re rubbing chemicals all over our body and that’s getting absorbed into our bloodstream through our skin. We’re spraying stuff trying to clean the house, but at the same time dirtying up our body.  It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, we need to kind of clean ourselves up, especially clean our environment. That’s one of the sessions that I do with my clients as I say, “Hey, let’s identify where the toxins are in your environment and let’s go ahead and first things first, eliminate those. Let’s get you through some more natural products and whatnot.”

The next thing, of course, would be the immune system. The immune system is huge. It’s so huge and it’s very much tied in with the digestive system. 80% of your immune system, I should say, resides in your digestive system. So, we really need to take care of that. Just got done reading a phenomenal book. It’s going to be on my show pretty soon.  The author is Russell Farris and the book is called The Potbelly Syndrome, about how infections actually can cause many issues, like smoldering infections that the immune system hasn’t gotten rid of., cranking up our cortisol levels, cranking up our blood sugar, turning up our insulin, making us more insulin resistant, of course, making us fat. Infections are making us fat. These are smoldering infections.  They’re giving us heart disease at the same time because you can actually find infections in the plaque within the arteries. So, really, really fascinating concept, I’m really interested. I can’t wait to talk with him about when he comes on my show.

Of course, the last component, the fifth one would be diet and of course, you know, I would never say diet is first. I’ll always say the other things first, but diet of course is really critical, but it’s the one that we tend to focus on the most and I try to say, “Hey, we have to start thinking beyond diet and exercise because there’s a really strong possibility that your diet alone is not going to fix your insomnia problem, your libido issues, your digestive issues, your brain fog issues. You need some other help that goes beyond the diet and exercise component” This is a really big puzzle, but we’re just focusing on two pieces. You just need to start thinking more laterally and getting outside the box. How’s that for a long answer?

Co-host: It’s perfect man. It’s great. Yeah, I had an interview with Paul Jaminet from the Perfect Health Diet and we were talking about his theory of aging and one of his theories is that aging is mostly caused by buildup of those like small infections, fungus, parasites and that really has a lot less to do with other more classical free radicals and that’s really mess looking infections and that kind of stuff.

Sean Croxton:  Mmhmm. There are many different theories on it. The infection could be causing free radical damage.

Sean Croxton:  You know, one thing that I test for is lipid peroxides. Lipid peroxides are a measure of free radical damage to your cell membranes and clients who have infections, especially like gut bugs, H. pylori or Giardia parasites, things of that sort, they tend to have a lot of oxidative stress, really high free radical lipid peroxide scores, so they definitely all play a role.

Co-host: Right, yeah. I think the big thing is basically trying to fix everything.  I know like a lot of people basically like, “Oh, my digestion screwed up so I’m going to fix my gut and then they only focus on the gut.” But, really there are just so many different thing playing into it, as you mentioned, like H-Pylori and your digestion was one of the other parts and I know the H-Pylori is actually what causes stomach ulcers too and they have figured that out __________ active.  You really do have to just take a kind of holistic approach like you said.

Click here to learn more about Sean’s techniques for holistic health.

Sean Croxton:  Absolutely, you don’t want to have tunnel vision when you’re trying to address you health that’s one of the worst things that you can do. Think holistically.

Co-host: Yeah, I have one things that I really liked somewhere on your blog you mentioned the gym that you workout had a sign that said, “You can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet” I think that really kind of plays a part, because I know a lot of people who are thinking, “Oh, if I just do enough cardio, it really doesn’t matter what I eat, like I can still just burn it off “ or even if you’re not doing cardio they think like it’s almost they are not fat, they’re still fit.  They are like they’re still healthy and that’s one of the things that really bothered me in schools like these kids who would be bringing these horrible lunches and things, but they weren’t fat and so the teacher just acted like, “Oh, they’re still eating healthy because they’re not fat” and its really more than that like I just want to hear your opinion on that.

Sean Croxton:  Oh, I absolutely agree. I used to do that myself.  I see pretty horribly, but I’ll just do my cardio and lift and I was young too, you know I was in college, I was in college for a long time, 17 to like 23, I was younger, so I can get away with some of that stuff.  These days I certainly can’t but it’s just a really huge misconception.  Just because you’re not wearing it, just because I can’t physically see fat hanging off you, does not mean that you’re healthy.  That’s been a story that’s come up a lie.  When you listen to my radio show, my first question is always, tell us about your journey, where have you been and for a lot of those people they’re what we call healthy, fit people or they’re unhealthy, I should say, fit people where they look good, but beneath all of that were some serious problems. I would like to use the example of myself.  I was looking really good, but at the same time I had digestive issues, I had mood issues, I used to be on prescription __________ and all that stuff, so, you never want to just judge a book by its cover and say, “Hey, that person looks good, so they must be healthy.” Absolutely not, it does not work that way and you know people say body builders.  I don’t want to say bodybuilders in general, but the body builders whom I’ve worked with yolked up, looking good, you would see that person in the gym and think, “Oh my God, that’s how I want to look”, but usually that’s a client that I’m going to have for a pretty good while because they’ve done a lot of damage to their bodies.  There’s depression issues, constipation issues that I find very often, brain fog issues, it’s a truth man, you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Co-host: Yeah, I’ve noticed that a lot with bodybuilders and regimens, a lot of them seem to have a grain stuff, we’ve got to eat oats because that is like body building food , we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to eat like mountain of cottage cheese and stuff like that.  What you’re doing man?

Sean Croxton:  Somebody said that, that’s the thing that happens in the bodybuilder world.  Ronnie Coleman will say “I eat oatmeal, so it makes me big” but Ronnie Coleman forgot some of the other stuff that he’s doing to make himself big.

Co-host: Yeah

Sean Croxton:  Hope that doesn’t get me in trouble, but I think we tend to overlook that as well.

Co-host: All right.  It’s like, “Oh yeah, you’re also lifting weights for 2 hours like every day and doing all..”

Sean Croxton:  You’re also juicing dude, you’re juicing man. You’re using drugs to get big, don’t tell me it’s the freaking oatmeal, you know me, let’s just keep it real, I love you Ronnie Coleman.

Co-host: Yeah!

Sean Croxton:  I don’t want Ronnie Coleman to show up in my front door one day like he can fit through it in the first place.

Co-host: Yeah, the whole problem here is people in the gym are like, “Oh you all, that dude’s ripped, so I’m gonna do what he does”, you know that dude’s totally different from me man, what works for him might not work for you and the whole idea too is like it’s not all that just being big or just being fat, it’s like you’ve got to be healthy too man, and I’ve been doing it for a while, so yeah.

Sean Croxton:  Exactly.

 

Click here to read about the most common problems Sean sees and how to fix them.

Co-host: Cool, cool, so what kind of people do you usually encounter in your work like when somebody comes to you, you mentioned like work with bodybuilders, what’s the story behind most of people that are coming to work with you like have they been kind of rejected by their doctors or frustrated like what’s kind of the back story on those people.

Sean Croxton:  Yeah, rejected by doctors, frustrated, have tried umpteen different types of diets, have lost weight, have gained it back, have lost weight, have gained it back, every time they gain it back they actually end up heavier than they were in the beginning, which is one of the reasons why I say dieting actually makes you fat in the long run.  People who not only are overweight, but as I referred to earlier they do have sleep problems, they do have digestive issues, they do have brain fog issues, sugar cravings, itching issues, I find a lot people have candida overgrowth and whatnot, lot of stress, too much work, I find some of these people are just literally married to their jobs, and it’s a bad marriage, it is not looking too good and so, people who don’t have any control over their schedule, its one of the things that I have to work on, that’s our first session with a lot of people.  Hey, you know, pull out your Google calendar. We need to get your schedule right, no matter what I tell you or whatever I ask you to cook and to consume or do, if you do not have the time in the day to do it, it’s simply not going to happen. It’s really that simple and again it’s not always diet and exercise, I’ll have to work with people on their lifestyles, and so that’s a typical client for me and you know one of the things I always say, “Hey how many pounds you want to lose? And it’s “I want to lose 30 pounds”, “I want to lose 40 pounds”.  I’ll say, “Will you be happy being 40 pounds lighter, but you still can’t sleep, you still can’t poop, you still can’t have a sexual relationship with your partner – Is that what you really want?” and they go, “No”.  It’s like, “You want everything right?” Okay, cool, then we have to go beyond the diet and exercise component and fix some of these dysfunction that’s going on in your body.

Co-host: Right yeah, that makes sense.  So, I think that’d basically answers my next question just about restoring functions instead of just treating one condition and like just getting back to like where they want to be. I would love to get into little more detail here.  You’ve written a lot about something called glutathione, which I think really it’s fascinating.  I loved your 2-part series on that.  I’ll have a link to that on the show notes.

Sean Croxton:  Thank you.

Co-host: No problem man!  But, I’d love to just hear more about that.  Could you explain what glutathione is and why it is important?

Sean Croxton:  Yes, yes, yes. Glutathione is something that I didn’t even know how to pronounce it like two to three years ago. What it is? It’s your master antioxidant, master detoxifier, fantastic for your immune system and most of us after the ages 20, 25, we start to lose our production, it starts to diminish for us over time and what glutathione does is it protects ourselves from free radical damage.  Of course, free radicals, if you’re breathing, if you’re eating food, if you’re inhaling toxins, you’re making tons of free radicals, these free radicals can cause damage to your DNA, which can increase your risk of cancer, it can damage the enzymes within your cells that help to repair your cells, so, that’s not a good thing, they can damage the membranes on your cells and screw up your receptors for different hormones and whatnot and so, you want to be able to minimize that.

One of the many antioxidants that your cells make, these are called antioxidant enzymes and your cells make it themselves, is glutathione.  There’s other one, superoxide dismutase, few other ones out there that I’m familiar with and they literally can neutralize these free radicals at a rate of up to 1 million per second, that’s huge, that’s an antioxidant on steroids right there and your body makes that for you. Right? But, what do we do, we take antioxidants from vitamins and minerals through our foods, I shouldn’t say minerals, but few minerals, but through our antioxidant supplements through our foods, which is fine, totally fine and dandy.  I don’t have any problem with that; however, those antioxidants, your vitamin C, your vitamin E, your vitamin A, your Oxy E, whatever, they’re going to neutralize free radicals at a rate of 1 to 1.  If one molecule of Vitamin C neutralizes one free radical, it is pretty much done.  It can be recycled, but it’s pretty much done. The problem is that your body on average based on oxygen consumption is going to make about 300 sextillion free radicals every day. That’s 300 with 21 zeroes behind, that’s a lot of free radicals, so if I’m going into a gun fight with free radicals, I’m going to go with the antioxidants enzymes, the glutathione and the superoxide dismutase that are neutralizing those free radicals at a rate of up to 1 million to 1, instead of the 1 to 1 guys and so, what we can do is we can eat particular foods and we can take one of the supplements that I recommend through the process of what is called Nutrigenomics, which is the way in which food and other substances influence your gene expression.

We can take these foods or take these particular supplements and it’s going to tell our genes to regulate their production of glutathione and some of these other antioxidant enzymes and like I said it’s like antioxidants on steroids and sooner or later, it may not be sooner probably later, you know people are going to actually get hit to this game that these antioxidants that we are taking in through our diet and whatnot as fine as they are, they don’t come anywhere near some of the other foods and supplements that can help to get that up. Glutathione is huge.  It’s great for immune system again, great for detoxification, great for fighting free radicals.

Co-host: Right, I know a lot of people went out there and when they first heard about the whole free radical theory, they start mega dosing on like 5000 mg of Vitamin C, it’s like blowing their systems out of control and then they just totally shut down their endogenous production of antioxidant too until they are pretty soon with no glutathione and that kind of stuff, so, yeah, that’s going to be really Cool!.  I think it’s a perfect segway to talk about, obviously we both are like superintendent of real foods and getting most of our nutrients from real food, we do have one supplement that you are really passionate about, you are wearing the T-shirt right now.  I’d love to hear more about that stuff.  What are the ingredients, there really weren’t many, but I’ve definitely seen them before, I’d love just to hear kind of why that works and why it is different.

Sean Croxton: Well, Protandim is the supplement that we’re talking about. I’ve been pitched on so many different supplements, you have no idea, and continually said no over the years, I still say no these days, but Protandim was one that was really different because it had so much scientific research on it, you can go pubmed.gov and type in Protandim, and you will be able to find 8 peer reviewed published studies from like real universities like Harvard, LSU, The Ohio State University, University of Colorado at Denver, some really big names out there, also you will find some research on different disease processes that unfortunately I can’t talk about because of the FDA and whatnot.  But, what Protandim does, it’s got 5 ingredients, turmeric, milk thistle, Ashwagandha, Bacopa and green tea extract and it’s the synergism of those 5 ingredients in the proportions that they are in the product that tell your cells or to tell your genes to make more of those antioxidant enzymes and by the way, one of the reasons why I decided to “endorse” or recommend this product, being the first product that I’ve ever recommended to people and put my name behind, is not just due to the research, but due to Dr. Joe McCord from the University of Colorado at Denver.  If you go to Wikipedia and you type in that Elliott Cresson Medal, which is awarded to innovators, you know American innovators, you’ll see Henry Ford on there, you’ll see Pierre Marie Curie, Alexander Graham Bell.  Dr. McCord is the co-formulator of Protandim, he actually won the Elliott Cresson Medal for co-discovering of the entire field of free radical biology and living organisms.  I mean that’s absolutely huge right there, and so you know we talk about the man, he is the man when it comes to free radicals and so, I can’t be more than happy with the product, the testimonials that we’ve gotten have been phenomenal just through the roof and again, it tells your cells to increase your antioxidant enzyme production and that’s going to do far more for you than any Vitamin C pill ever would.

Click here to learn more about Protandim, Sean’s favorite supplement.

Co-host: Right, and so does it make recover faster from workouts, is it more like longevity thing?

Sean Croxton:  Well, here is the deal. I always tell people, don’t give anybody an expectation when they start taking Protandim and the reason why is because oxidative stress, which is pretty much that free radical damage we talked about earlier, oxidative stress is associated with over 200 different diseases and conditions. For me personally, I get phenomenal workout recovery from it.  When I started taking it, I actually forgot that I was on it. You know, to be honest I like getting free stuff, you’ve got a free bottle of something, send it over and I’ll try it, and I just took it and 4 days later just noticed that I did chest the previous day at the gym and I wasn’t sore and I did it again, and I did it again the next day, and because I was like, “What’s going on here, this is weird”, and I called the guy who told me about, he said, “Yeah, I had the very same experience”.  He was a chiropractor, he does this full time now with the products.  He was a chiropractor, did his legs on the weekend, and was expected to be very sore the next day and was not sore, maybe a little tight and so that’s been my experience.  We have got a lot of people say that exercise recovery is just through the roof these days, some people don’t, some people say they have better sleep, better energy, their hair starts growing faster, I’ve had one of my friends who said that her dad’s hair grew back, he was balding and it was no longer gray. These are not typical results, but these are just some of the testimonial’s we have heard. I have known of 2 people who have been on oxygen tanks who after a week or so on Protandim were able to get off of their oxygen tanks. I mean, it’s absolutely nuts right there.  If you go to PubMed, hope I don’t get into trouble with FDA for saying some of these things.

These are not typical results, yadayadayada, though the disclaimer in there, but if you go to PubMed and you type in oxidative stress, you are going to find 80 thousand different studies on that.  You type in oxidative stress in any other condition, depression, heart disease, cancer whatever, you are going to find multiple studies on that link between the 2 and so, whatever condition somebody may have that is linked to oxidative stress, there is a possibility, we make no guarantees, that it can improve, and everybody’s experience is a little bit different with Protandim.  Man, I hope that doesn’t get me in trouble with the FDA.  Well, you know, you’re not supposed to make any claims of cures or talk about supplements on any conditions, I’m not saying it cures anything, I’m not diagnosing anything, I’m just talking about some of the testimonials that we’ve gotten regarding the product.

Co-host: Right, cool!  This is a little different thing, but one of the things that a lot of people aren’t talking about very much is the whole mindset that goes behind like fitness and just getting yourself well and I know you’ve brought in people on your show who really don’t have much to do with fitness but just cultivating that whole self-empowered mindset and I’ve loved the talk about the importance of that self-empowerment and this free will that goes along with this.

Sean Croxton:  It is the most important question of the whole call right here.  If your mindset isn’t right, good luck, buddy. You know this is really not going to work, I mean It’s just, it’s just so, man, I can relate to that to this myself.  I’ve been trying to write a book for the last three, four, or five years, and I would start and I would stop, then I would start and I would stop, and then I will start, you know what I would do, I would stop, and this has gone on for a really long time and I find the same thing with some of the people whom I work with, especially in their past, they started it and they stopped, no matter how badly that they want it.

Now, for a lot of people the issue is that they don’t have a big enough why, they don’t have enough big enough reason to do it.  I have people, why do you want to do this? “I want to look good for my 20th high school reunion”, “I want to look good in a bikini on my vacation”, “I want my 20-year-old body back, I’m like 56 years old”.  What are we talking about here, you know what I mean.  I find that their why is not big enough, its superficial, doesn’t have anything to do with anything.  It’s not motivating at all.  It’s not enough to get them out of bed. It’s not enough for them to pass on the bread when they go out for a social activity or something with their friends. It’s just not big enough, so I spend a lot of time helping clients to find their why, I spend a little time as well helping people to find their values, what do they value in life, find somebody may value travel, religion, family, social life, education ,on and on and on and they’ve been trying to get healthy and lose weight for the last 20 years, and I go, “Do you notice anything missing from this values list you just gave me?”, 20 seconds of silence typically and then they go, “Ohhhhh, health!”, and I’m like, “Yeah, health!”  You don’t value it at all.  It’s not important to you.  I’m not a big chief.  You look behind me for the audience who are doing the Skype video right now, you look behind me I’ve got a bookshelf full of books on nutrition that’s something I highly value, if you ask me how well traveled I’m, I haven’t been anywhere, you’re not going to see any travel books in there, you know what I’m saying and so, that’s just one of the things that I help people to work on how can you get healthier and benefit some of the things that you value. How’s it going to help your social life? How’s it going to help your relationship? How’s it going to help your performance at the job? Your relationship with God?  How’s it going to help your travel?

You know everybody’s been on a plane and you sit next to the overweight person, you’re like, “Oh man! This is going to be rough.” You know I’m saying if they have taken up almost 2 seats, I’m sure that doesn’t make them feel good when you’re traveling, you know what I mean, so those things.  How does it benefit them and once they do and they can write down 100 ways in which getting healthier is going to benefit the rest of their life and the things that they value, it’s just goes to the roof, we had the authors of the Simple Success Solution on the radio show last week and it’s one of my favorite shows because we talked a lot about the subconscious mind.

You know the subconscious mind is running the show, 95% of what you do is pretty much on autopilot, back in the day you were 4, 5 , 6 years old,  somebody keeps telling you, “You’ll never be successful at anything. You’ll never achieve anything. You’re always a quitter. Yada, yada, yada, yada,” and that got plugged in the subconscious mind and that maybe the hardware that you are running on these days.  One thing that I’ve done is reading a book by Bruce Lifton on biology I believe and I started reading about the subconscious mind and whatnot and how the subconscious mind is not in line with the conscious mind, then you’re always going to have that self-sabotage issue no matter what you do. I figured that that was probably my issue, so I took my butt over to hypnotherapy.  I did some sessions with Marla Brucker and wrote a book, you know what I mean, with no problem, just bang that baby out, you know what I’m saying, so we’ve got the book coming out pretty soon.  So, I help people with that.  I do recommend that some people go get hypnotherapy if they really have a hard time with self sabotage. They really do some personal work.  I feel like some people need to do some work on the inside before we can really focus on their physical nature and whatnot. I wish I knew more about it, I wish I can do some of these techniques and whatnot with my clients as far as hypnotherapy and working with the subconscious mind, but of course I don’t know all that stuff.  I am not licensed to do that, so we have to do the referral thing, but mindset is huge, if you’re mind is not right, then you should probably get it right or go get yourself a new goal.

Co-host: Right, yeah, I think that’s like a big problem with a lot of people too.  It’s like they’ll get this notion that in order to be healthy they need to do X, they need to work out 5 times a week, they need to do this and that kind of stuff, it’s not really based on anything.  They feel like they’re not taking care of themselves if they’re not doing those kinds of things. When they really start learning about it, it just doesn’t take that much, you don’t have to exactly what everyone else is saying, and that kind of stuff, and this is being able to believe in yourself and understand your own goals too.  Yeah! I love that.

Sean Croxton:  Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. You need something that’s customized for you, that’s what most people need.  Most people are following this cookie cutter deal and you know there are different solutions for different people.  If your are one of those people out there who is overweight because you have an infection, you know you’ve diet and exercise problem, it isn’t really going to make it much better, for a lot of people exercise is actually making it worse.

Co-host: Right yeah.  I just have like few more questions, but one of them is pretty common.  When you have somebody come to you, when they are totally addicted to sugar and I purposely use that term, but definitely isn’t addiction, how do you go about getting them off of that, how do you educate them to the fact that it really is like a legitimate addiction and it’s not just like a little lack of willpower or anything.

Click here to learn how you can overcome your addiction to sugar.

Sean Croxton:  For a lot of people, it really depends on the person, I mean it could be a neural transmitter issue, so we might use some amino acids, one of the amino acids that I recommend to a lot of people doesn’t work with everybody and it can be sort of dangerous for some people that have got cancers or have had cancers in the past, is L-glutamine. I find that to be very helpful not just for sugar cravings and addiction, but also for other addictions as well L-glutamine has been used for, so that can be helpful.  Typically, I tell the client 500 to 1000 mg when you wake up in the morning as well as in between meals, tend to work really well for a lot of people.  For some people, it’s a mental emotional thing, for other people it’s a candida issue.

You know a lot of folks out there have fungal overgrowth secondary to bacterial imbalances, which may be secondary to some type of a parasites or something like that that is going on within their gut or some other type of infection, so you really need to think holistically with it, figure out what it is.  If someone’s got a candida infection, you’ve got to fix it. Again, it’s not just focusing on the candida, it is focusing on the overall environment within the gut, candida love sugar, they love it. It’s what they feed on and they are going to make you crave it all day long.  A diet that doesn’t have enough calories, you know which is pretty much across the border for a lot of people who are trying to lose weight, they’re screwing up their leptin levels, their leptin since it is all screwed up is cranking up there, was called Neuropeptide Y, which is going to make you crave carbohydrates.  We have to fix some of that and increase the calories that people are consuming.  They think it’s so bad, “You need me to increase my calories? I’m not even losing weight right now on this low-calorie diet,” but we need to increase your calories and restore your metabolism.

I think a lot of people don’t get, I am kind of getting off subject here, is that again like I said earlier, you are still a cave person and cave people had, as we do too, certain systems to get us through periods of famine and that’s called leptin, and when you don’t take in enough calories, you start to live off your fat stores, your leptin starts to drop and so, that’s going to make your metabolism drop.  If you’re in a famine, your body has no freaking reason at all to burn as many calories as it can. That means if this is going to burn up fat, then you’re going to die.  You know, it doesn’t make any sense.  It is also going to increase your appetite to drive you and motivate you to go and eat some more food, in that way you can get your fat stores back, and so that way when the next famine comes, you’ll be able live through that, what do we do?  We do voluntary famines to lose weight and what happens? Our metabolism slows down, we hit a plateau, we are hungry all the time because our body is like, “Dude, we need some fat stores, where are they at?”  So, we end up breaking our diets because we want to eat up the freaking refrigerator one day.  That’s what we’re doing and, I’ve got to do a video about this, and at the same time, think about this, we go to the gym and jump on a treadmill.  I’m sure they weren’t too evolved mentally and whatnot, but what kind of cave person went jogging during a famine?

Co-host: Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Croxton:  Right? They didn’t do that.  You know what im saying, so that’s what we do and what happens is our bodies seriously start to rebel against us and so again you just can’t think calories in, calories out because your body will kick your ass, excuse me my friends there.  It certainly will and it always wins, hunger always prevails over willpower and hunger is certainly what you are going to get by some of these ridiculous diet programs that people have out there as well as their crazy insanity whatever workouts they’ve got you doing.

Co-host: Yeah, I was actually writing an article about grill last week and how crazy strong that stuff is. It just like totally controls you man and its impossible to really break out of some of that stuff once it gets out of way, so, yeah.

Sean Croxton:  Yeah, it’s very hard, our bodies are just incredibly confused, our bodies are like, “Dude, you’re set up for a famine and you’ve got a convenience store in every corner right now, what’s going on?”

Co-host: Yeah! When I was relistening to some of your interviews with Gary Taubes, I loved how he describes this too.  It’s like, your body is just not made to do that man and we talk about maybe like caveman not mentally evolved and yet we’re the ones who are going out here and doing this stuff to our selves, so you have to wonder, right?

Sean Croxton:  It makes us wonder, but you know I wrote this in my book, we don’t know that we have a choice, you know to effectively choose is to know you have options in the first place and a lot of people out there don’t even know that they have any options and so, that’s why it comes down to you and me and Gary and all these other people to educate people.

Co-host: Right, yeah, I think it is a perfect segway to talk about your book too, I know you’ve been working like crazy on it, you kept everybody updated on your blog, we thought that was cool, I love going back and looking one of your posts that says like, “I’m on page 45.  I am going to have to finish this now”.  Yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about your book and what’s going to be in it.

Click here to learn about Sean’s new book: The Dark Side of Fat Loss

Sean Croxton:  All right, perfect.  Well, it’s called “The Dark Side Of Fat Los –  Lessons From The Underground” and really what it is, it is just a kind of a compendium of what I’ve learned during this journey over the last 5, 6, 7 years with the people whom I’ve interviewed, the books that I’ve read, the people that I’ve met, these courses that I’ve taken, all of that.  A lot of people think and I get e-mails and they say, “What course should I take, what should I do, I feel like there’s so much to learn , yada, yada, yada”. What I’ve done is I’ve put pretty much, not everything that I’ve learned, but the really the critical stuff that I’ve learned into maybe bout 150-page e-book and not only is it a fat loss book, but it’s about getting healthy.  I make the point really clearly that you don’t lose weight to get healthy, you’ve to get healthy to lose fat and that’s the key right there, so the book is just about being healthy.  It’s got the introduction, it’s got what is called the code of the underground, you know the code of the underground being what is it “hold no myths to be true.”  It’s all about the hormones.  Do what healthy people do, just eat real food, heal the gut, reduce stress, go to bed, detoxify your body, remove toxins, get your mind right, those are the chapters in the book, a lot of stuff we’ve been talking about during this interview, it totally rocks, it has been written in a really funny entertaining type of way, I’ve sent it out to a few people to read a few chapters.  They are like, “Dude, I can’t put this down”, and so I’m really excited about it.

I’ve been up this whole week studying a few things.  The hormone chapter is really hard because there’s so much information that I’ve to pack into about 10 pages and so, just figure out how to make it more basic than it already is. There’s going to be profiles in there, it’s called darksider profiles and so there’s all the different people like Gary Taubes has a profile, you can read about Gary, you can click and go on to his webpage, you can click on there and go to his radio shows that he has been on, so we’ve got those for Gary, for Cate Shanahan, for the __________ brothers, I mean pretty much all the people who’ve been on my show are going to have profiles, and so not only is it my information, but I’m also exposing a lot of people who want to lose fat, who want to learn about the dark side, who want to live the code of the underground exposing them to some of the other leaders that I’ve come across during this last 5 to 6 years and so, really fun.

There’s going to be a companion book.  I may just include this in the regular book, still trying to figure it out, but the underground cookbook where you know my undergrounders, the people who watch, people who listen, they’ve contributed real food recipes, and that’s going to be in there, but they’ve also made videos, so you’ll be able to click on it and watch them, instruction on how to make the video, which is pretty cool.

Then, there is the 3rd book, if you ever watch my videos, Brett Klika, a fitness questan, he’s done a lot of videos with me, he wrote the underground workout manual, so it’s about the anti-gym, you don’t always have to go to the gym, you can do things from home with less than $50 of equipment and not only are we going to have different workout programs in there from basic all the way up to  advance, not only would you see like here’s the beginning of the squat, here’s the end of the squat, you’ll be able to click on it, and you’ll be able to see Brett instructing you on how to do the exercises properly and effectively and so, very interactive products that we have going on, so we’re looking to launch on August 15th.  It was supposed to be July 28th, but we’re having some illustration issues right now and just though, “Hey, we could hold off for a little while anyway” to make sure it’s really perfect the way I like things and I’m pretty excited about it.  It’s been a long time coming up and talking about writing a book for at least 6 to 7 years and finally got it done.

Co-host: It’s great man, yeah, just before you finish, one of your articles is really important for a lot of people to read and that was one called This Is Silly. You know, I really like that one.  I know Chris Pressor was mentioned there before, but I really think that was important, I know we’ve been talking about all the stuff, but it’s just crazy to get too wrapped up in it too.  I’d love to just kind of hear some what is your expression on that article again.

Sean Croxton:  I haven’t been doing a lot of videos blogging lately because I’ve been busy with the book, but there was a period when I just didn’t want to video blog where I just wasn’t interested in being part of this ridiculous health blogosphere with people talking trash about people, people literally bickering. I mean, there are so many things to be concerned about and to blog about, to spend our time focusing on, you’ve got people literally on the internet arguing over food and it’s just like this it’s just really stupid.  This is just absolutely silly and I had people put me in their videos talking trash and like dude we are talking about food, really? and I just feel like it got real silly for a good while and I felt like we’ve just lost sight of the end goal and I started to put myself in the place of somebody who just wants to go online and just learn what they should eat and that person, if they went online to look for that would be incredibly freaking confused right now because we make things so darn complicated.  We always tell people the best diet to stick to.  It is a diet that you can stick to and all of these crazy diets that we’ve got these days, nobody can stick to them. Everybody talking trash about everybody else’s diet and we just need to reel ourselves back in, you know like I said in the video before you can teach people how to spell, you have to teach them what their A,B,C’s are. and I think we need to just go back and focus on what real food really is and that’s when we came up with the slogan of just eat real food, my girlfriend at that time she called it jerf and I was like that’s cool, so when you call it jerf in, you know what I’m saying and it’s just what is real food, I think that’s number one.  If we go back and look at Western Price, lot of the audience may be familiar with Western Price, he in the 1930s traveled around the country, studying, living with and visiting indigenous people who have been living that way for centuries and he didn’t find that anybody had the same particular diet, what he did find though was that they ate real food. They didn’t eat processed garbage that we eat, that is in the media, and had claims of being low fat and weight loss, they just ate real food and we have a society these days and people can’t even identify what a real food is, and so we need to reel ourselves back in, teach them what real food is, and then maybe they can move on to the next grade and get a little bit deeper but we’re just doing way too much.  It’s almost like people are grandstanding, you know, I’m smarter than you and I’m smarter than you and just kind of goes back and forth and it just becomes freaking battle wrap and its stupid and so, that why I wrote it.  It came from the heart and it seems like it resonated with a whole lot of people and I’m glad it did.

Co-host: Yeah, and I think that’s totally true.  When you really think about all these diets like the Paleo diet and even vegan and vegetarians and stuff like that, the idea is just don’t eat processed junk man, it’s like start getting in there and like playing with, “Oh, you shouldn’t eat more than 25 grams of fructose a day, you’ve got to do like this percentage of fat and carbohydrates”.  When you’re starting man, just don’t eat this crap, and eat everything else.

Sean Croxton:  Let me just do it real quick. It makes people stressed.  Okay, what should we eat, I shouldn’t eat this, I shouldn’t eat this, it just becomes this mind boggle you know what I’m saying and it stresses people out, you know what, stress makes you fat. You know what I mean and so what’s worse, maybe the bad food that you may have had a little bit of before, now you try to eat all clean, but now you are stressed out about eating all clean, you know I’m a guy, I’m a big fan of the 80-20 rule, some people have a problem with it, I really don’t care, you know what I mean eat right 80% of the time, other 20% of the time, get your groove on, have fun, enjoy your family, enjoy your friends, don’t be the weird one out there being all evangelical about your food, nobody likes that, you are going to have no friends sooner or later and then it’s just not worth it, just live man, just live.

Co-host: Right, yeah, yeah.  Sean, I just want to thank you so much for doing this man, it was like awesome, finally talking with a guy from Underground Wellness Radio, you know you’re always so fun to talk to.  I’d love to do it again sometime if you ever want to.

Sean Croxton:  Whenever you want me man, any Friday, I’d do it. I can run my mouth for an hour any Friday.

Co-host: Thank God, it’s Friday right.  Yeah, cool man. I hope everyone goes over and follows you on twitter @ugwellness.  Where can they contact you, if they want to learn more about you and what you’re doing?

Sean Croxton:  They can go on undergroundwellness.com.  If they’ve got any questions or need help with anything, just go ahead and click on the contact button, send me a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, usually about 48 hours and yeah, looking forward to meeting you guys.

Co-host: Cool, yeah, you’ll check out this guy’s YouTube page too.  It’s awesome.  It’s got 25,000 subscribers for a reason – it’s great.

Sean Croxton:  40,000 now!

Co-host: 40,000! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Sean Croxton:  It’s all good.

Co-host: It’s your fault man, your website still says it’s 25.

Sean Croxton:  I know, I know

Co-host: Cool man!  40 Thousand, hopefully it gets to a million soon by 2012, I know you will.

Sean Croxton:  Got a long way to go, but we’ll see what happens.

Co-host: It’s good to have big goals.

Sean Croxton:  Yeah, it is.

Co-host: Cool man. All right.

Sean  Croxton:  Thanks, I appreciate it.

Co-host: Thanks to you too man, I hope we can get back and do it again and keep up the good work.

Sean  Croxton:  I will and thank you.

Co-host: Cool.

Click here to learn about the latest studies and research from the Biohacker Report.

Click here to download the full PDF of the episode transcript.

 

Biohacker Report

Dave Asprey:  It is time for the Biohacker Report part of the Bulletproof Executive Radio show.  This is where we bring a few of the latest research reports that we’ve read to your attention

The first one here talks about how aerobic exercise bests resistance training at burning belly fat, and this came out on Science Daily a little while ago, and you’ll find the link to in on our site.

This is one of those reports where scientists assume upfront and the assumption that these scientist have made in their report is they have said burning calories means burning fat, so they say aerobic exercise burns more calories, therefore it is going to burn more fat and they made several other kind of big mistakes that you often see in this type of report.  Can you tell us few of the other ones that we find in this report?

Co-host: Yeah, some of the other ones they were looking at where the people who doing weight training were doing very small amounts compared to the people who were doing aerobic exercise. I’ll pull it up here, but the people who’re doing the aerobic exercise were doing, I believe, roughly an hour a day or so and they did show it reduced visceral fat and that kind of thing, but yeah, here it is, they were jogging 12 miles per week at 80% of their max heart rate and the resistance group performed 3 sets of 8-12 reps 3 times a week.  It’s like a 10 or 20 minute workout, like 20 minutes if you take long breaks and 12 miles a week, well that’s not terrible amount, that’s easily like several half-hour sessions.  That’s obviously the biggest problem, and the main problem is that they didn’t look at the food quality, so they were probably all eating like a standard American diet and obviously, as Dave and I talked about before the interview, well actually, yeah Dave why don’t you talk about why that’s not a good hack.

Dave Asprey:  It turns out that if you’re eating crappy food, you can help to patch the effect of the crappy food with crappy exercise, so long-term of aerobic exercise like that generally isn’t as good for you as high intensity in terms of what it does to your hormones, it tends to raise cortisol, and it tends to cause stress on your joints over time and I know some like for instance the co-host here is a triathlete and some of my friends and some readers who are sort of exercise addicts say, “Oh, but I get the opiate surge. I really like the endorphins.”  That’s all there, that’s all true; however, if you’re looking to live a long time, and you’re looking for the best hormonal response in your body, running many, many miles every week as a way to stay thin when you eat a bunch of junk food isn’t going to get you that optimal situation.  What is it is the Bulletproof diet that’s low in toxins and high in healthy fats plus the type of exercise that stimulates your hormones to work in the right way and it’s that hormones stimulation that comes from the combination of diet or nutrition or both that is key and that is not __________ whatsoever.

Co-host: Yeah, if I were trying to get down like 3 percent body fat, if I have some kind of competition I was getting ready or like a photo shoot, which I really don’t know why I do, but either way if I wanted to get my body fat as little as possible. I would not be doing virtually any aerobic exercise because I know it’s not great for your hormones.  Just a real quick before we move on to the next study, I’d like to quote what they said at the bottom, “What really counts is how much exercise you do, how many miles you walk, and how many calories you burn. If you choose to work at a lower aerobic intensity, it would simply take longer to burn the same amount of unhealthy fat.”

Dave Asprey:  When I hear quotes like that, it actually pisses me off. When I weighed 300 pounds, vicious lies like that for years had me doing things that kept me fat, so you just have to call it bullshit at a certain point and this is one of those times.

Co-host: Sounds good. Do you want to go on to the next one?

Dave Asprey:  Yeah, do you want to read that one?

Co-host: Sure man. Scientist say, “Obesity is a brain condition” This came from the University of New South Wales. Dave, do you want to brief on this? You obviously know more about this than me.

Dave Asprey:  Sure, I like this one because the link that where we found is actually from Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  I was on the radio with them a while ago talking about the bulletproof practices that I do. So, the thing about obesity being a brain condition is fascinating. I can tell you in my case there was a great correlation as well between cognitive function and being obese. When you are fat, your cognitive function isn’t very high, and it has to do with inflammation, and it has to do with having the wrong types of fats.  It has to do with blood sugar fluctuations and basically, your body isn’t regulating itself very well in your brain or in your body.

The parasympathetic nervous system is a big problem there, if you are seriously obese, you probably have some autonomic nervous system dysfunction that helps to allow that situation to come about and that autonomic nervous dysfunction would definitely tie in with the brain as well as the thing I’ve mentioned before like oxidized fatty acids and the wrong types of fats.

Co-host: Great, so, basically being overweight is going to hurt your cognitive performance and leaning out to some degree is going to improve it, right?

Dave Asprey:  Yep.

Co-host: Cool, do you want to handle this next one?

Dave Asprey:  Sure, the next one was the study that showed dietary total antioxidant capacity is inversely related to central adiposity as well as to metabolic and oxidative stress markers in healthy young adults. What that means in English is that they found that greater antioxidant capacity meant that you have less belly fat and that you have less oxidative stress and less metabolic stress, so that’s good because this is a study of healthy young adults, not sick older diabetics, which is oftentimes what you see for these types of things and this is kind of interesting because they talk about antioxidant capacity, which is important.

You can increase your antioxidant level by taking supplemental antioxidants, which I am a huge fan of doing, particularly Vitamin C because not only is it an antioxidant, it also helps you to form collagen and its one of the main building blocks of collagen. I also take collagen directly because it does some other things from having hyaluronic acid in it, but you can increase your antioxidant capacity through things like not taking antioxidants every day, by taking them, then stopping for a day, taking them and then stopping for a day and even intermittent fasting seems to increase antioxidant capacity. Your innate ability to manufacture oxidants and then to quench them with antioxidants is also tied to your glutathione levels.

Glutathione is the main antioxidant in your liver and in your cells, so without enough glutathione your liver starts getting liver damage and when you hear things like Tylenol poisoning, people gets liver damage from that, it’s because that particular painkiller eats up your glutathione, so if you drink two shots of whiskey and take a Tylenol, you’ve probably completely killed all your glutathione, so what I do to keep my total antioxidant capacity high is I take antioxidant on some days and not on others and I take liposomal glutathione directly.  I use the liposomal form of this antioxidant because that’s the one that can cross the gut barrier in order to enter the blood directly.  The form that I use, the form we have there on Upgraded Self will raise blood levels of glutathione similar to an intravenous dose of it and intravenous glutathione is used for people who have high levels of mercury or other really severe health conditions, so you get a huge burst of antioxidants, which funny enough is linked to less inflammation, less belly fat, and to basically being healthier.

Co-host: Cool man, so that’s everything for our Biohacker report. Do you want to wrap things up before we part ways?

Dave Asprey:  Yeah, so you can find the links to everything we talked about at bulletproofexec.com.  We do show notes and we are working on getting transcripts up as well and if you enjoyed this and got some benefit from, it would really help us if you would go to iTunes and leave a positive ranking that helps people find our show.  You can also find us at @bulletproofexec on Twitter or you can check out the blog anytime you like.  We also accept donations on our site or you can order some things for your self upgrade.  Some of the things we talk about, but not everything on the site will be on Upgradedself.com.  That is our sister site.  It’s a very small business and we’re helping offset the blog expenses.

Co-host: Cool man, so take care and hope to you don’t go crazy with all the stuff you’re working on right now. I know you’re going all over the place.

Dave Asprey:  Oh yeah, actually I am recording this really early in the morning from a hotel room in Las Vegas before I go off to spend the day talking about high-tech stuff.

Co-host: Cool

Dave Asprey:  Thanks a ton and have yourself a great day.

Co-host: You too.

Some background research for this post may have been conducted by Bulletproof staff researchers.