FoundMyFitness - #024 Ray Cronise on Cold Thermogenesis, Intermittent Fasting, Weight Loss & Healthspan

Episode Date: May 3, 2016

Ray Cronise Ray Cronise is a former NASA material scientist and cofounder of zero gravity, a company that offers weightless parabolic flights to consumers and researchers. The interesting thing about this interview, isn't strictly raised professional background, however, but instead his propensity towards aggressive self-experimentation. In this episode, Ray and I discuss... (00:00) Introduction (03:40) Ray's 23-day (and counting) water fast (05:13) Using fasting and cold stress to lose weight (10:44) Meeting nutritional needs over the long-term (17:22) We are simultaneously overnourished and malnourished (23:31) Inflammation may be the best predictor of aging (29:03) What is metabolism and how do we measure it? (40:22) Meal timing to optimize health (01:12:04) Cold stress promotes wellness (01:27:19) Similarities between cold stress and exercise (01:42:27) Exercise and cold stress delay neurodegeneration (01:45:13) Cold stress increases fat oxidation (01:51:52) Anecdotes and fun facts about melatonin If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here. Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor

Hello, my fellow cold-shocking mitochondria-loving listeners. In this podcast, I speak with my friend Ray Kronice, a former NASA material scientist and co-founder of Zero Gravity, a company that offers weightless parabolic flights to consumers and researchers. The interesting thing about this interview isn't strictly raised professional background, however, but instead his propensity towards aggressive self-expermentation. In fact, this podcast was recorded on the tail end of a rather extreme 23-day water fast. Ray brings the sort of rigor into his personal life that most people would only reserve for the professional world,

even going so far as to buy and set up an indirect calorimeter in his home in order to quantify the effects various dietary experiments have on his metabolism. While Ray is quick to note that his lifestyle may be socially perceived as extreme, whether we're talking about sleeping without blankets in the winter or fasting for days on end, in fact, exposure to these brief biological stressors may actually be biologically normal because from an evolutionary perspective, humans certainly would have been exposed to famine and the occasional temperature extreme without the modern comforts of heating and air conditioning that we enjoy now. In this two-hour podcast, Ray and I discussed a great number of our common

interests, including all things related to health span, fasting, cold chalk. In addition, we talk about fasting, a lot about fasting, since of course Ray was doing some serious water fasting leading up to this conversation. We also talk quite a bit about cold chalking the body. Shifting one's perspective from looking at nutrition only through the lens of meeting day-to-day nutritional needs and instead also considering optimizing metabolism for longer-term effects as well. The importance of thinking about longevity in the context of functional health span. How evolutionary history might explain why occasional periods of caloric deprivation seem to be beneficial at this cellular level.

Both some of our mutual anecdotes about the effects of cold stress and heat stress, as well as what some of the scientific literature has to say about the effects of both hot and cold on human physiology, some of the similarities between the body's physiological response to heat stress, cold stress, and exercise, and so much more. But before we get started, just a couple of things. This podcast and my newsletters, videos, and helpful website tools that allow you to run reports on your genetic data and so much more is brought to you by people like you. That's right, this podcast is crowdfunded. I like to think of crowdfunding as sort of like being Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. You're the last hope for the resistance, and you've got Admiral Ackbar

yelling up in your ear, it's a trap! But all you know is you have to shoot that proton torpedo into the heart of the death star. Except instead of a death star, you're actually just blowing up misinformation in the world of science, health, fitness, and nutrition. And instead of a proton torpedo, you're actually just sending money. But in all other respects, it's exactly the same. And you're definitely Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia or Jarger Banks. Look, I don't know.

Maybe this colorful analogy is breaking down. All I know is, if you want, you can support Found My Fitness for a few bucks a month by going to foundmyfitness. forward slash crowd sponsor. That's foundmyfitness.com forward slash C-R-O-W-D-S-P-O-N-S-O-R, crowd-sponsor. Studies have shown that this is actually the only real way a person can boost their mitochondrory account.

So to recap, a couple of bucks per month is an excellent way to achieve massive good energy and keep your inbox filled with podcasts and newsletters and probably videos and other fun stuff from Found My Fitness. Okay, enough about that. Come along, Artie. Ray Kroen Isow waits and he's, riding high on a bloodstream full of ketones, and he's got a clever turn of a phrase or two. Now on to the podcast.

Hello, everyone. Today I'm sitting here with my friend Ray Kronise. Ray is a former NASA scientist, and he is a co-founder of Zero Gravity. Ray is known for popularizing using mild cold stress as a tool for weight loss, and he recently did something completely crazy. He has just completed a 21-day medically supervised water fest. So what's up, Ray? How's it going?

Well, technically I'm not done because I still haven't eaten. This is day 23. I did some other tests at the end, but hopefully tomorrow or maybe the next day. So I feel so good. I don't know if I ever have to eat again, right? This is dietary restriction, right? Like, to the extreme. To the extreme.

Yeah, and, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions. People believe that it's much more draconian than it is, and it is socially extreme. but it's probably not biologically stream. You know, we can imagine that in our evolutionary past, there are periods of days or weeks that we didn't have food. And the fact that I feel perfectly normal, that, you know, we had some conversations earlier, you know, there's some things that slow down a little bit.

It's not like you can do everything. You know, words don't come exactly as quickly. But for the most part, it doesn't feel any different than day one. And I think one of the reasons I adapt so quickly is because I mostly live a dietary very restricted lifestyle when I'm not doing this. But anyway, it's interesting that you don't feel hunger. I don't have headaches. I don't feel tired. I just feel like normal me. It's just that food just isn't on the thing to do. So for us, type A is that love to do stuff. You just work and do your thing and you don't have to stop to eat. What instiated to you just to try out not eating

for 21 days? Like what's your... Yeah, so going back, you know, part of the... My own personal problems was, you know, I had gained 80 pounds during the time period of when I was at NASA and leaving NASA in a company I had in between there for about eight years. And, yeah, I was type two diabetic, basically. I had high cholesterol. I had issues. I lost my weight doing the cold stress. And everybody's read my story on that. And, you know, it's in Tim Ferriss's four-hour body and TED Talk out, Ted Med Talk out there. But even when I lost weight, all those things still didn't fix. So I actually had to start looking into diet.

And I was exercising. I was doing the sort of a body for life plan, six meals a day, cardio, alternating with upper and lower body, you know. So six workouts a week. So it wasn't like I wasn't doing what they said, but it didn't fix the problems I had. So as I started digging deeper, about that time, the bow wave of press came with Tim's book.

And of course, everybody looked at ice bass, because Tim, in the chapter, his supplements that he put in are all about ice baths. And, of course, that's not what I was doing. I did some extreme stuff in the beginning to sort of understand, but I didn't, I wasn't focused on the ice baths. I was focused on just exposing my body to mild cold all the time. You know, I used to say gloves before sweater makes you look better, you know, just always making your body burn just a little bit more calories.

And so in doing that and getting out there, everybody threw. through the BS flag. You're like, you know, you didn't really lose weight that way. The cold, you know, you burn more calories. They used to say, and you can find these articles, you burn more calories getting hot. And it's just simply not true, but it was said. And so then started the myths. And because of the blog and people having questions and I constantly get inundated with

protein carbs and fat, I wanted to know how the calorie works. So fast forward a couple years, I bought an indirect calorimeter. I had it in a lab built next to my heart. my kitchen and I just started repeating all the classical experiments. Well, there's this whole body of literature that was done on fasting. And it's fascinating. And not only as a medical modality that they were actually getting better, things that get better at the facility I'm here, people are lowering their blood pressure dramatically, dealing with diabetes, dealing with eczema. You know, I had a guy who was a sweetmate, Hanro from South Africa that was with me for a couple,

He was fasting. He was there for a couple days. He's gone back. But, you know, fixed his exima completely. So the idea that there's something there, that the body, when it gets in this really restrictive mode, starts to repair things, that's not so far-fetch. No, it's been shown. But it's so long ago, and how do you sell it? Like, people say, well, you know, how do you sell sitting in a room drinking water? You know, it sounds crazy. But I think it's something we really need to be blanket science. I think we need to look at the intersection of this. So starting last year, I did a series of experiments where I was changing my diet over a six-week period. And what I was able to demonstrate is that I was actually able to lose body fat at about the same rate as when I was water fasting, which to me is pretty neat.

You know, by just doing some simple changes. That's the kind of thing I used when Pend Gillette lost his weight. But the point is that in seeing that I could function on so little, it seems like the basis where we start where your stuff then picks up, which is, okay, we get down to this basis. We're not overnourished now. What things do we need to deal with? What other kind of supplements?

What kind of things do we need so that we don't get the dietary restriction without malnutrition? How do we add that back? And now having experienced it, it seems like something that I think will be a part of my lifestyle for the rest of my life. So you, getting to this dietary restriction without malnutrition, we have a lot to talk about with dietary restriction and its effects on the human physiology. But did you supplement with anything? Was this like, so this 21 day fast, you know, were there any vitamin mineral supplements?

Like, along with that? No, and that's a surprising thing. I'll show you my nutrient panel. Even last day with 14 days, my vitamin D went up. Didn't go down. Of course, I was in sunny California, laying in the sun. It was beautiful. I wasn't deficient in anything.

All my blood panels turned out normal. On day seven, I did a around-the-clock amino acid panel where I did all the amino acids and there are the several metabolites that are in there. And of course, they tracked with a circadian day, just like you've talked about. They're not something they're fixed. This idea that we're eating protein and it's pumping in our blood, it's always there. But they do cycle with the day. Of course, things like alanine, which is mainly used for the gluconeogenesis,

went through the roof, lipids go through the roof. So there's some changes, certainly some physiological changes, but I wasn't deficient anything. The idea that we have to have nutrition every day and this balanced meal, that's one of the things that I really want to challenge. Because I do think we need a comprehensive nutrient adequacy across the spectrum, but it's probably measured in days or weeks, not every single day. Yeah. So in terms of like the might, micronutrients and certain micronutrients that are needed, you know, you're talking about B vitamins, vitamin K, selenium, zinc, magnesium.

The question still remains like what is an adequate level? Because a lot of the RDAs that are set based off of animal studies that have been done that have shown that deficiency can cause death. And so like a couple standard deviations above that are what are considered what you need. But the question is, and this is something that my mention, or Bruce Ames has proposed and put out there, and I know that you're familiar with, something that he calls triage theory. And that is, well, there's all these enzymes and proteins that require some of these

micronutrients as cofactors that are not essential for short-term survival. So if you're deficient in it, you know, it doesn't matter right now because it's not needed right now. It's needed for a long-term survival. It's needed to repair damage that's constantly happening. It's needed to prevent things like cancer, Alzheimer's disease. So the question of deficiency in of itself, I think, needs to be challenged. I think we don't really know how much of these certain micronutrients.

We need to make sure DNA repair enzymes are working, to make sure our tumor suppressor genes are working. To make sure that all our antioxidant or, you know, all those pathways that need these micronutrients are getting their cofactors, you know, that they need to work optimally. Or, you know, to at least be working as we're aging. So I think that's, if we look at something like a blood panel, let me go, well, we're not deficient. Based on what? Based on the short-term function? Right. We don't know, right?

Well, yeah, but at the same time, we also don't know the consequences of overnutrition. You know, and we get a massive excess of a biologically active compound that's, and levels that we never would have seen in nature. And we've seen it with vitamin E. We've seen it with vitamin D. We've seen it with some of the other ones. So the question is here, you know, first. you know, if we stop thinking about our diet as a daily thing and start thinking it as a lifetime thing, then things change because there may be things that are very much something we do.

I mean, you guys are in prime reproduction time. So to get, you know, fecundity to go up and be more fecund, we want to increase essential amino acids. We know that things like methionine and whatever increase fecundity. At the same time where I am, which I'm done with that process at 51, you know, that we want to, to make sure that I'm longevity, and they're also negatively associated with longevity. So, you know, what I feel like where we are right now, the science and things that we can be doing in the next decade is taking this body of knowledge, and yes, we can start peeling the onion more and more and more and more mechanistically, and now we've spread that to all the blogs,

and they're peeling the onion, but every now and then they, you know, cut off and forget half of it. They just sort of put these technical words out there. But how do we bring it back to look at something more comprehensive? How do we look at health span? Before we lengthen life, we need to lengthen health span. And I'm saying that if we look at, if I'm not deficient, the average person thinks if they go without a meal, their metabolism is going to crash, for example. Right.

So, and this will be the, I will finish with the micronutrient, but we'll go to the macro nutrient, I mean the macro level. But if they think that by skipping a meal, something's going to happen or by, by somehow not including some food group or something in every single meal, that somehow they're going to be deficient. You know, the ubiquitous, you know, the evil words I've told you before, protein carbs and fat, I hate them. If you get on my blog, you'll see why.

But, you know, no one's going to be deficient in protein, really. And if they're going to be deficient, it's going to be in one of nine amino acids, essential amino acids. We know what they are. We've studied them quite a bit. And, you know, the fact that the matter is, is that for the average person out there, we also know that those nine happen to be connected to longevity too. And no one's looking at that part.

So my point is looking at this more of a as a spectrum. So originally we looked at diet because of the economics of food and the scarcity of food. If you don't have enough, it's great that every single thing meets a certain minimum. So when these rules of eating were developed and we can look at some of those later, because I have all those USDA guidelines from the turn of the century, which were just fascinating, because they actually said why they did it. And today they have different reasons, but they say the same thing, and that's kind of spooky to think about. We've made up new reasons for the same explanations.

But anyway, if you look at what they said, if you think about the average person was spending 60% of their income on food. And when you're in a situation where you have a limited, if we look at this as a budget thing, more people may relate to, if you're at a budget, you're barely making enough each, month, every dollar counts. But the value of $100 to me and a billionaire is still $100. So the point is, is that every dollar counts, the closer you get to what you're meeting your needs are. So this idea of balanced meals and balanced diets and balanced nutrition, always being deficient, came in a time when people really were deficient. Deficient, deficient, deficient, and we're up to see the diseases that we've identified.

Now what you're saying... The gums were falling out because they're getting scurgy. Right. And where you're at, and I am too, is... Okay, now in addition to that, not necessarily what are we deficient in, if I change the language and say, what more can we get at the micronutrient times, the phytochemicals, all the phytochemicals, to maximize and optimize our longevity. You know, there isn't a perfect diet. We're not designed to eat anything.

We can eat everything, and that's why we spread everywhere. But I think somehow this construct of food and the construct of the balanced meal and the construct that it happens in a single setting versus spread over days or weeks where I think the body is, it's much more rational to me to think that the body deals with it's over days and weeks and doesn't become deficient instantly. I think that's where the tension needs to focus. And there's really no money right now to be made in that. I can't sell somebody something.

I can't sell them more supplements. I can't sell more training. I can't sell more exercise. And so it's kind of a trap. But I think there's people like you and I, and some of the collaborators I'm working with yours too, that are just intellectually curious about it. But we need to bring it back to whole food. We're bringing it back to food and say, what can we get out of what we have? And then what's left over to supplement.

Right. So you were alluding a little bit to some of the studies on dietary restriction. And I think it's important, in science, dietary restriction doesn't refer to the extreme type of restriction that you just underwent. Can I make it real quick? Let me explain how I tell people about this because before I started doing this research, the way I saw it was overnutrition, too much, normal diet, deficient undernutrition. That's what was in my head.

As I began to read a lot of that dietary restriction without malnutrition work, and I now always add that at the end, what I realized, is probably what's more thing is there's overnutrition, which is actually a small bar because in nature, it's really hard to do that. But how do you separate overnutrition from giving people, you know, getting too much of your amino acids, too much of your fatty acids, too much glucose without getting the micro-reutrients? Right.

But I'm just, let me talk the big, at the big block level first. Overnutrition is a sort of a small little thing because in nature you don't really have it. Normal nutrition is what we would normally, you know, normal, healthy person would be eaten there. But then there's this all diet restricted without malnourishment, which I would say is a big block because that's human survival. We have to be able to survive periods of this, you know, up and down with the nutrition,

and that's a big block. And interestingly, the things you and I are most interested in, the micronutrients, which are all coming from these leafy-grie plants, are actually abundant. You don't get much calories from them, but you can find them all the time. And then when they're stressed, xenohormacists, they may be able to be. actually given us even more. So you got that. And then there's under nutrition. When I added this extra block and said, you know, I call it the survival block. That block is a place where we likely lived and we likely survived, not optimally. We don't have parasites. We don't have infectious disease.

We don't have the things they were really battling. So we can maybe leverage that to live longer. So now back to what you were saying is I think that we don't know. I don't know that we know where that upper limit is, but I know that from a calorie perspective, and I hate to use that word too, because it's misused a lot. And then there's people that even question it, and we can talk about that in a minute. But we certainly are overnourished from just a calorie density perspective. Absolutely. You know, we are. And that's an, this is disease of affluence. We have so much disease of affluence. You can go to countries that don't have access and they don't get the same disease. They get the

wealth and China, India, and then they come with it. Well, what's so interesting is that, and ironic, is that at the same time that we're overnourished, we are, according to a lot of these Henhanes studies coming out, we are getting inadequate levels of many of these micronutrients. Right. Think if you're over-nourishing yourself, that you then would have adequate levels of these micronutrient, but the thing is people are eating the wrong food. Right.

They're eating the wrong foods, and so they're not getting all their folate, vitamin K, selenium, They're not getting, you know, all these important micronutrients, and yet they're getting a lot of, you know, fatty acids, amino acids. They're getting a lot of the macronutrients. Maconutrients, right, yeah. And it is a big problem, you know. Yeah, and what we tried to do to address it, and we've got a series of papers coming out, but the metabolic winter hypothesis already there, and the food triangle, one of the reason

we do it, because, first of all, ideology aside, the sort of eat meat, don't eat meat debate is boring to me and I never even go there. I know we talked about it that night. It just gets to be old. So this isn't a, you know, it's not that. But it turns out animals are biologically very similar from a, from a, that's why we use them for models. And plants are very fundamental simple.

And it just so happens that mostly animals, the energy that you get from animals is mostly fat. And the energy you get from plants is mostly dietary carbohydrate. And I don't want to then use. I won't say carbohydrate again. And then except for nuts and seeds and avocados, things like that, that have a significant amount of fats. But when we look at it, when we draw this food triangle,

you know, what we put at the top were the leafy greens, the cruciferous vegetables, stems like celery and asparagus, mushrooms and bulbs. We said, look, the vast majority of what you eat every day should come from the top of this thing. If you eat the majority of these food, the volume of food, if you just eat the volume of food, Now, you have a choice.

If you eat down the left side, which would be kind of a paleo diet, you can maintain your weight. But you won't get as much fiber. You won't get the extra phytonutrients, extra things that are over here, because you end up calorie displacing, energy displacing. If you start adding all this stuff, because as soon as, you know, you start adding this part over there, you start going over your energy limit, and now you still haven't gotten to where you and I want to get, which is enough of the micronutrients. On the other hand, when you add down the part, you start down the part, you start going to be, you start going over your energy limit. plant side. What's interesting is you get great things and fruits, berries, nuts and seeds. I mean, every single issue of American Journal of clinical nutrition just about has a study on nuts and seeds and the flavonoids, cartoids, all those things are in nuts and seeds. You get legumes,

and big one. I mean, that's a huge life. You look at the, what is it, the blue, what is the book, the blue zones. You know, legumes are a big part of that. So let's, let's, let's, so this part of Is it the right side of your triangle? So it's a lot of plant, nuts, and legumes, right? Basically, the bottom, the bottom of that side is pulses, legumes, I mean, cereals, pulses, which are legumes, starchy vegetables, fruits, and then to a small thing, which is nuts and seeds, which we separate just to distinguish the fat content. If you, if from an aging perspective, so, you know, a lot of people have different goals,

my goal is to have a healthy and extend my health span. You mentioned health span. And what that really means is to, you're not necessarily going to, you know, live to be 200. Right. But when you are 90 years old, you're going to be physically active, fit. You're going to be biologically, you know, 20, 30 years younger, 40, 50 years younger. Most people don't guess me at 51. Right.

So the thing is, is that there's a chronological age and there's a biological age. And you want to be biologically younger, like who cares about your chronological age is. And the thing to bring it back to the legumes and plants and the nuts and seeds is that if you look, recent study has been published by this Japanese group where they looked at a variety of different biomarkers that are age-related. So they looked at these scientists look at telomere length, you know, markers of senescence. They looked at hematopoises. They looked at, you know, glycolated hemoglobin, blood glucose levels, insulin sensitivity, and they looked at inflammatory cytokines, you know, biomarkers of inflammation, biomarkers of,

you know, all the inflammatory pathways. And they looked at it in three different populations of people. The elderly, which are about 85 to 90 years old, centenarians, which were, you know, 100 years old, and then semi-centenarians, which are about a, sorry, semi-super centenarians, which are like 105. and then super centenarians, which were 110 up to 115. And to me, if you look at the average lifespan in the U.S., it's 79, so it's close to 80. Well, if someone's, if we know right now that humans are physically capable of living to be 115 years old, that's almost you can round up 40 years longer lifespan.

That's like a 50% increase in lifespan. That is huge, that we're doing, that it's right now. No science fiction. No nanobots involved. No CRISPR. Nothing. It's already designed in our biology. That's possible, right?

And in some of those populations, some of them just are sort of outliers where they just live all. Some of them are fully functional. Exactly. Fully functional. Health span, yes. Yes. They're fully functional. Cognitive.

I mean, yeah. So my point is, is that the only biomarker that was identified to drive the aging process in all three categories, the elderly centenarian semi- or all four, was inflammation. Inflammation was inversely related to age, into longevity. And when you think about the human body and biology and physiology, the number one driver of inflammation in humans, in our bodies, is the gut. The gut is where we have the highest concentration of immune cells. It's where we have the highest concentration of bacteria.

And when those two combine, you get war firing away of cytokines. And that's the major source of all inflammation in the body right there. And what has been shown in countless studies, particularly over the last five years, is that the gut likes fiber. Absolutely. And not only that, but the gram negative bacteria, the fat-loving ones, those are the ones that are usually the most inflammatory. And so when I did a post on this a couple years ago,

and I think there are two really big things that are going to end up coming out. First of all, fecal transplants in our lifetime will actually, I think, be a part of aging. I think we will end up that just basically that microbiome keeping it right because of antibiotics, because of the things that we do in life that disrupt. You know, I usually tell people, you know, you send 12 Amishmen to a rock concert. They can have a great message, get up on stage, but the environment's not conducive. And in that microbiome, they are what we eat. their waste products go into our absorption organ.

And this is critical. And, you know, it's not just, because we've seen all the transplant studies we've done in mice, it's not just eating the food, but it's also having the right distribution down there. And all it takes is a little bit of wrong things. And then you get an explosion of something. And so, again, what's socially extreme may not. be biologically streamed. The kinds of solutions we need to have for that and the kinds of fiber and the food food, what we want to do, on the right side of the food triangle, I guess I'd say right for the

audience. On the right side of the food triangle, all of those foods are, we are going higher and higher and higher fiber. Right. And it's interesting that these different types of fiber, like the different types of beans and the nuts, they're fueling different types of bacteria and these, and they make these byproducts that are literally regulating our immune system. They're regulating hematopoises. They're increasing the amount of T regulatory cells to regulate autoimmunity. They're decreasing all these immune cells that are firing away pro-inflammatory. So they're regulating the inflammatory process. And all these little ugliosaccharides.

All those feet of mind. They're just crazy all the things that are going on there. And yet, if you think about what we're doing, first of all, we're deluging that. From the time we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed, we're just, just always in the chronically fed state. We weren't in the chronically fed state. And our next paper, the next paper that we're having, it will talk about the implications of the chronically fed state.

So, you know, this brings up what you talked earlier about is intermittent fasting. And, you know, when I was looking at a lot of these, you know, again, my first twist of this was to look at a metabolic thing. So let's just like get metabolism out of the way because this other stuff is a lot more interesting to me. But in terms of metabolism, everybody wants to think I need to increase my metabolism. I'm going to eat this meal. I'm eating this protein shake.

My metabolism is going to rise. Well, it turns out I've not measured a single broken metabolism in three years in my lap. A hundred people. No one has a broken metabolism. Your metabolism scales with your mass pretty much. Inside, whatever size you are, is your thin, lean self. Give that thin leaf self to steal equivalent of what you lost. and carried around all day, and that's what happens.

But what's really interesting is that now on the extreme side, so I could say all this in terms of food. But when I was dieting, even doing extreme dieting by everybody else, it's just a very low calorie diet. 21 days is extreme. Well, I'm saying before even that, just in the things that I do where people will lose weight rapidly with me, most people that I work with lose weight, 0.6 to 0.8 pounds of fat a day.

And that's without exercise. Is that what's cold? No. No cold. No. No. part of it, but it's not part of it in the way you're thinking of it. So I use it as in junk therapy, but it's not to increase the metabolism.

We'll talk about cold later. Yeah. So basically, though, what's interesting is that, you know, in all the different regimes, my metabolism always tracks with the Francis Benedict equation. And when we go back later, I'll show you, I've got the 1918 study, I show you, I have all their days. The point is those guys did this research, and what they did is, you know, the first is that they did is right. And what we've done today is we have popularized these words. And, you know, I literally

have debates with people about metabolism. Can you define what you mean by metabolism? So I'm talking about, yeah. So what I'm talking about is the net sum of respiration of all your cells. So the way we measure metabolism is we measure the carbon dioxide that's inhaled, breath by breath, and the oxygen that goes in and then the auction comes out. So we know delta oxygen. We know the carbon dioxide. So the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen is called the respiratory quotient, or RQ. It tells us, like a thumbprint, what fuel we're burning. So if you look at this general stoichiometry, like the combustion of ethanol, ethanol plus oxygen and equal CO2 plus water.

And you do the balance equation like you did. You'll see that, you know, you get a three on one side, two on the other, or two on the other, and then three, and you get the respiratory equation of 0.6. So that's a number. So if I'm mainly metabolizing alcohol, my respiratory quotient will push down. Carbohydrates of all times, doesn't matter what kind they are, all of the glucose, anything that's dropping in there, those have a respiratory quotient of about one. And then fats or lipids all around between 0.69 and 0.7.

So what's really interesting is that in amino acids, they average 0.84 if I average all of them. And so proteins are kind of a mixture. One protein might be a slightly lower, slightly hot, but they average point A4, which is great because the only way we measure protein is not through the carbohydrate because by that time the deamination has happened. You've lost all that energy through urea, and it looks like sugar coming out otherwise, right? But what we can do with protein is we collect the urine, which is why I'm carrying an orange jug around all day.

Too much information, but, you know, science, right? So we get the nitrogen from the urine, and then we can back. out. But by knowing the carbon dioxide produced in the oxygen, we can see the ratio of glycogen to fat burn real time. And you're saying that you have not seen someone's metabolism that's been broken. Meaning at their metabolic rate, which would be like speed of the car, is what all the industry is focused on. Everybody wants to increase their metabolic rate. And what I'm saying is how fast you're going only matters if you're headed in right direction.

You need a compass too. And RQ is kind of a compass. It is the indicator. Am I burning mainly carbohydrate or am I burning mainly flat? You can run your ass off for hours. And if you're only burning carbohydrate, you just get on the glycogen treadmill. And so then what people do to counter that is they say, oh, I'm going to remove all the carbohydrate and shift my body into ketosis,

so I'm burning fat all the time so that when they're running, they are burning fat. But again, it's not necessary because it turns out when we become more restrictive, your body's smart. And when we become more restricted, you naturally start shifting to more and more and more fat because your body knows to serve glucose. It's going to. It wants to. So where I'm going with metabolism is that all the discussions we have about metabolism, about boosting metabolism, about all these things.

even cold stress. A lot of them fall into the, that simple thing I said earlier, which is we used to eat to support our activity because food was rare. And today we're active to support our eating. And the more simple thing is you can't out exercise your mouth. It's impossible.

It's thermodynamically impossible. You can swallow way more than you can move. It's just not. So while talking about metabolism, what I'm saying about not being broken is you don't have a slow metabolism. That's not your problem. It's not that you have a slow metabolism. Now you've got to go get hormones to speed up your metabolism that nobody, by the way, ever measured. Isn't it amazing?

All these people talk about metabolism and they don't measure. And so that was what I started to say earlier was I have these debates. And I say, well, you know, how many metabolisms have you measured? Do you know anybody who's measured in metabolism? Have you ever touched anybody that's measured in metabolism? And the answer is, most people never made it. And I hadn't. I was talking about metabolism.

I was guilty of all the same stuff. I'm, you know, but once I started measuring it every day, and when we measure years later, you're going to find it's way more dynamic than you think it is. It's way, and then, I mean, because you are very precise about the things you want to know, this one's really going to mess with you. Because it's not what we think. So this boosting the metabolism, we're going to boost metabolism. Now, cold stress. We'll come back to it when we talk about cold stress because there's some really specific things on cold stress and some really specific numbers that I can give you or I can show you some things that I've done with cold stress,

which is kind of interesting because it turns out mild cold stress naturally tends to lower your RQ, meaning shifting towards fat. And we'll talk about that when we get to that. But to sum up metabolism, we're not broken. And that's one of the things I'm going to try to talk about in our book and more commonly. language is say, look, we're not broken. Let's not start with that, you know, let's start with the food we're eating and the social environment of why we eat. And then superimposed on top of that, my, you know, my benign conspiracy, or I could say our benign conspiracy, which is I really wanted people to shift more towards health span eating. I wanted them to shift more towards a kind of

diet that would promote health span because it's really, embarrassing that the community we run with, and we know all the people we're talking about, and the community we were run with that are talking about longevity and talking about all those stuff, and they aren't eating well. And if we can't, like, we know this stuff works. Like you said, we know it works now. We don't even, we just have to do it. Well, who doesn't want to, you know, live a healthier life and be younger when they're older? I mean, who doesn't, you know, want to, you know, not be crippled and degenerated. Authritis.

Yeah, who wants you to that pain, diabetes? Suffering, I mean, all that. Yeah, it's like, I think that eating to increase your health span, I think it is my goal. And, you know, I think that it is a lot of people's goals, even if they don't realize it. Right. And so the one twist, what I would say, the pause that I think we should do now to think about just a little bit is I think my vision of doing what we're talking about before was about slugging how much stuff that I could get in my body that was helpful.

And now I'm not so sure that's right. Now I'm not so sure that in doing so, I might unintentionally be overnourishing things that I really don't need to. So let me talk in my specific diet. since for me animal products are rare and appropriate. So what I mean by rare and appropriate is it's people in places. It's not how often I eat something. So I'm not the person that says, you know, I'm going to have sushi every two weeks

or I'm going to have whatever. It's people in places. So for example, with sushi, something I absolutely loved before. Now, if I eat it too often now, my diabetes comes back. You know, hate to ruin everybody's party. It may not happen for everybody, but I know because, you know, I have a continuous glucose monitor. I know exactly what it is. Yeah, so, you know, it's like right here.

I know exactly what my blood glucose is at any minute. And so I know what it is and I know that it comes back. And so, you know, but my son, my son really loves eat sushi. You know, so for me, you know, if he wants to go and we'll go do that, you know, because I don't tell my kids how to to eat. They mostly eat like me, but you know, they eat whatever they want. And we'll go. I'll have a big old rice or I'll have something before, you know, that fills me up. Then maybe I have a couple pieces. But we're having fun when doing that stuff. I don't go pig out on sushi. I just don't do that anymore. Or we make our own. So I make all the sushi that I do with mushrooms and lots of other

things, which they love just as much, especially because you can eat as much as you want, you know. Bill's great, you know, so it's inexpensive. I shop at the Asian store. So anyway, back to the food triangle. You know, I eat on the, I'm on the right side of the food triangle, and, you know, I get nuts, seeds, and avocados often, and I eat lots of fruits. I have fruits around all the time. I'm not glucophobic, you know, like all these people think it's sugar, sugar, well, you know, I don't even refine sugars, you know, but I eat that. If I want to sweeten something, I use a date, but what's really interesting is that as my diet has changed, my palate and my taste security has changed immensely. And, you know, recently Pend Gillette's been posting on Facebook,

and he's, you know, he says, first he was saying I ruined him and somebody correct him said, I fixed him. But now, even in eight months' time, he's eating these things like making this big blowout for show, and he's not enjoying it as much as it. I just don't enjoy those things anymore. So as much as I did. So I get those things. But what I'm not. doing is I'm not doing the all-day eating thing. So I don't start with a smoothie and do this and do this and do this. I tend to compress my eating windows. So I'm kind of naturally doing alternate day fasting or every other day eating or intermittent fasting because I'm just decreasing my meal frequency. And I eat a lot of food. You would not believe how much I'll eat. And that's why a lot of

People say, oh, yeah, I went vegan and everything started happening. Well, you know, most people just don't need enough food. Clearly, we can live off this. Our primate cousins are fine, so that, you know, there's not a debate there. And if you're eating junk food, you know, the worst place to try to eat healthy food is a vegan restaurant. Because they basically just shake sugar, salt, and fat and put it on plants. Like the Western diets take sugar, salt and fat and throw it on, you know, meat and stuff. You know, meat is the delivery system for sauce.

You know, what it really comes down to it. So anyway, when I'm eating on that right side, what I try to do is decrease the frequency. And that's where I think it's kind of neat because I do think, you know, blending, for example, not juicing, but blending. And I know you're advocate too. I think, well, I get tons of fiber in my diet because I eat an enormous amorous amount. But I think blending certainly ruptures the cells, certainly get more access. There's some studies.

I think we need to do more on that. Where I'm excited is like this summer I did all hydroponics. I grew all my greens and I'll show you some of the pictures. But two weeks from seeds to harvest. I use the vertical earth garden. It's an amazing thing and I'm growing. But where I think, what if we start stressing these plants and going to that next level? Just going beyond even that.

So we need to probably explain a little bit of that. But first I want to ask you, with your intimate fasting, do you usually eat in the mornings, like evenings? When do you actually take in most of your food? I tend to, I'm not a morning person. I've never eaten in the morning. I get up early. My best thinking time is between, say, 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. That's where I can really do.

I taught myself a year and a half ago to sleep. I never could go back to sleep my whole life. So I don't, I don't, there's not very many times that I slept past seven in my entire life. I'm like, even if I go to bed late, boom, my circadian locks hard, get up. But I taught myself how to go back to sleep. So I've been trying to sleep. So I'm getting... I'm averaging right now.

I'm averaging, you know, eight, nine hours, eight or nine hours of sleep. So... Are you tracking your sleep? Yeah, I'm tracking my sleep. I'm tracking my sleep. Is this like your own thing or is this like an app? This is the Whithing's aura. So I have a whole suite of Withing's things.

They have the aura that manage... measures your sleep, the scale. Can you spell that? Whittings, Wittings, Wittings. And they have the sleep and this active, this or activity or whatever, the pop. This, this guy measure sleep too. So I have that. I have a, you know, they have a camera that measures V-O-C, your scale measures CO2. So it's sort of, it's sort of interesting because it maps your environment, what kind of environment you're in. But I'm now sleeping way better. And we talked a little bit on your Facebook page about melaton. We can get at that in a second too. But so, so I tend to eat in the evening or in the afternoon. And I, you know, because I'm

working out of my house, it's just when. So one of the things that I try to teach the people I work with is don't name a meal. Technically, the first meal of the meal is break fast. I'm going to break fast. tomorrow and it's going to taste really good. But, and then I don't need, naming meals is convenient for restaurants so they know what to serve you, right? But there's not time of day eating and there's not time of day foods. It doesn't matter what you eat, where you are, whatever. This idea that you're fueling your body for the day, just not true. Well, the one aspect that I think, you know, I think that is important and that has to do the circadian rhythm. So in the morning, you are the most insulin sensitive. In the morning,

You know, so these, the way our metabolic enzymes, they're going on a rhythm. So there is that component. And the reason I'm sort of interested in it is because I also will practice intermittent fasting. And I'd like to talk about the aging aspects of that. But, you know, it used to be that I was fasting the day and that I'd eat at night. And that's mostly because my husband Dan can't sleep. If he doesn't eat something before bad, it was like, you can't sleep, but he's hungry. And, you know, there's some truth to that, right?

There's some people that like that way. Yeah. Well, recently, we were traveling in. Europe for a while and we were doing Airbnb's and so we wouldn't have any food. So if we were eating we would eat like mid to late afternoon, like three or four, the latest. And that was it. So like then I was done and didn't eat anything until the next day. And what I found is that I really felt really good doing that, which is the opposite.

So I started not eating right before bed, you know, whereas that's what I was doing originally So to back that up, talk about glucose, if you're eating starches in the evening, instead of getting those sharp peaks that you saw today, the sharp people like this, you'll get tailing. So this is true. I mean, there's no doubt that you'll get tailing. The glucose doesn't clear as fast the later in the evening. So I'm not talking about night. I'm talking about, like, I may eat it two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and then maybe

I'll eat it five or six or seven, you know, so I'm not, I'm not a late, I don't eat late. No, no, I don't do that. That's what's so dangerous about, you know, a lot of people. And there were times when I, you know, I'm working late and I don't get home until, you know, 8 p.m. or 8.30. And then it's like, then I have to cook and then dinner's not ready until 9.30. And it's like, that's too late. And I have a weapon because I have this third option.

Don't eat. And once I freed myself, I've been on a business trip for two days. and came all the way home, and the only thing I had from the time I left to the time I came home was water. Yeah. And that seems radical, but having that option as a tool in our toolkit. It is radical, but I agree with you. It doesn't have to be two days. It can just that night for some people.

And I do think that, you know, I know several people that are late night eaters. They'll not eat in the morning because they're so busy and they work, work. And it's not until, you know, later in the evening. and then they end up eating around 10 o'clock at night. And, you know, you're the most insulin resistant at 10 o'clock at night. And then it's like they have problems with, you know, metabolism problems and weight loss and all these things. And I think that it's just, it's not healthy just based on what we know from circadian rhythm.

Just based on that alone, we know that that's like the time you're not supposed to eat. You're not supposed to get all this like glucose and everything. I can't wait to use your paper because we had some other. explanations that will go right along with this. It will actually, it will superimpose well with us. And I completely agree. So let's, I'd love if you, if you would like to, I talk a little bit about caloric restriction or dietary restriction, which is what we now call it, and intermittent fasting.

And like, you know, I've seen some studies comparing the two in terms of longevity and how there's similar effects in almost every respect, you know, in terms of the metabolic effects, glucose metabolism in terms of brain atrophy, brain aging, multi-organ aging, all being delayed. The one difference that was found in this paper, and I forgot which group it was that did this and it's pretty recent, was that when they challenged the brain with like a neuro, some sort of neurotoxin that caused neuronal cell death, the intermittent fasting was protected, but the caloric restricted or dietary restricted was not. And they hypothesized with the ketone body, whatever.

And I haven't got into that part. So this is sort of this is, what I'm doing right now is my lead-in. My point was first when we start with the idea of fasting and expand it beyond what you do to take a blood test. In other words, this idea that we're, quote, fasting every night, this is not where I'm going. So when we start the fact that here I am at 23 days and I'm fully functional, I don't feel bad, you guys have been with me, running upstairs, you know, doing a stuff. You're having this conversation. It's fine. I mean, you do get a little foggy at some point.

So you're not as on top of things. Like I told you earlier, words are more difficult. It's kind of interesting, certain things. But if we start from this basis that during this time, we have these amazing healing processes that happen. What I was telling you about blood pressure, 30 point drops in blood pressures in a matter of weeks, you know, people with X-Men, all those things that are different.

So we have these amazing repair processes that are happening in the fastest state. And we fast forward... Can we talk about why that is? I mean, that's been shown mechanistically in animal models and in monkeys, mice monkeys, it's been shown that when you fast, it is a mild stress on the body. You had diluted to the hormesis. And that causes massive changes in gene expression.

Many genes are increased that are involved in dealing with damage, repairing damage, anti-inflammatory. All that stuff's being turned on. Go, go, go, go, go. And the body starts sequestering the things that it needs. needs, you know, the popular myth is, oh, your body's fasting, it's going to hold on to fat. No, it's not. That's your storage organ. It's going to use the fat. But the point is, is that for the stuff we're interested in, you know, your body starts mobilizing, it starts cleaning house,

you know, metabolically cleaning house, going in saying, here's a dysfunctional cell. I need these, I need these resources, need this, need this, just like what you do when you're trying to make things that. You rob around. Which is really, really, really good because those dysfunctional cells, as you call them, they're often senescent, which means they're not dead, they're not alive, they're sitting around, and what are they doing? They're secreting... Hormose. Yeah, they're making more, they're damaging cells nearby. So if you can do something to get rid of that crap, you better do it. And fasting, intermittent fasting, has been shown to do it. Right. So if we would get rid of the fasting term, meaning the overnight thing, right? So we lose

that. We go to this extreme and say, you know, look, the longest medically supervised water fast was 382 days. And that 382 days, yeah, 382. What? What? 276 pounds, 382 days. I'll send you the paper. Actually, I might have even posted it up on your thing. But it's 382 days.

Medically, in the middle. Supplements or anything? Just water. They did a multivitamin. And then in the middle 49 days, they had to do some electrolytes. But other than that, he was fine. And he weighed 185 when he was done. What did he start?

What was this starting with? Well, he lost 276 pounds. Okay, so we had a lot of fat to burn. Yeah, absolutely. had the energy, right, right. That's important, right? If I were to do 308, I think I'm probably dead. I don't know, there's probably some Brevarians down the street that would disagree with us, right?

No, so the point is, is that, so that is, that is, but when you say it's extreme, what's interesting is, there's no reason I couldn't, other than I don't want to get much thinner, you know, other than that, there's no reason why I couldn't go on and on and on at this point. The idea that somehow fasting is miserable was because people are responding to regularly dose in their body with meals and any anticipatory habit, habitual stuff that's going on. And what do they get? There's symptoms of hunger or headache, lethargy, lack of focus, irritability. What happens when you give up cigarettes? Lack of focus, irritability, headache, shaky, heroin, alcohol.

And I'm not saying that food is addictive in that way. I'm saying the body only knows to withdraw when you're regularly dosing it all the time with stuff. So all of what you feel, what you feel now is hunger, really isn't hunger. Like right now, I'm hungry. And the only real symptom of hungry, you know, when I say that, is that my mouth will water. And right now food would taste so freaking good. You wouldn't believe it. Like I go to cooking classes.

You know, they have cooking classes. You would say, you go sit in cooking classes while you're fasting. Yes, because a lot of taste is smell. And surprisingly, my friend Richard Ross, he was one of my clients. He's an amazing, he's a cephalopod scientist at the museum in San Francisco. What's amazing is you can just smell food. And believe me, it's almost as if you ate it. It's crazy.

You know, I can't, it's like I can't tell you. Smelling food is good. Yeah, I can't tell you. But I mean, it's really intense. It's like something you've not experienced before at this point. Like when you don't eat and you just smell it. I imagine. And it's almost like you taste it as whatever, but it doesn't send you into any crazy feeling

because you're in a perfectly normal state. The body shouldn't, you know, these symptoms are not a way of starving animal finds food. You've got to be clear, you've got to be lucid, you've got to go find food. So, okay, beating back to that, the senesic. Can I ask you a question? Did any of your friends join you? Like, was this like something that other people that are also starving? People, all the, all the fast. Has anyone ever just like gone crazy and started eating? No, it's, you don't have those urges. That's the point. That's a myth about. what it is because what people's idea of hunger and what people's idea of eating is is based on an idea

that their entire life, they've never been more than 10 or 15 hours without food. So first we had to dispel the miss that the fasting, which is this overnight fasting, which is, you know, has this point, as you say, hormonally has this point. One of the reasons eating late is a problem is because then, you know, you eat, you go all the way into the night and then you get up in the morning and you drink your shake right before you go to work out and now you got what, four hours a day fasting. And if all this important cleanup activity has happened during this downstate, you know, it's like taking an amphetamines all the time and staying away just because you can. Well, the brain needs that time. It doesn't shut down a metabot. You know, it doesn't go metabolic.

Brain activity doesn't go away. It just changes. So what I'm saying is our body is somewhat, I feel this body is somewhat same way. So now if I start from this basis, say, here I am, at 23 days, I'm doing, okay, now I start compressing that window. And so, okay, now, where do we get, where those health benefits start kicking in. You know, some of intermittent fasting is some of it. Some of it, dietary restriction. So you could dietary restrict and be chronically fed. What do you mean by that?

You could be eating all day long, very small amounts, and by a calorie perspective, which is why I don't like calling it calorie restriction anymore. I'm going to start. Dietary restriction. You could be dietary restricted but in the chronically fed state. Because post-pranthal, metabolically, we change. Yeah, and St.T1 gets activated. Every time you're making, so when you're eating anything, you know, when you're eating food,

you're going to make NADH, which is one shot off SIRT1, which is also part of the, you know, benefits of fasting. So feeding frequency, when we look at feeding frequency, and that may be a reason. And we can look at the say, if you look at the study with that lens and say, okay, how did they feed them? If they did the standard three meals a day, which was just made up, I'll show you the document of where it was talked about. In fact, we'll see. I'm talking about what happened 100 years ago when we started. You know, Hippocrates's question whether we should eat once or twice a day. He said some was to habit, some was to season, some was to age and some was to country, you know, where you lived.

In other words, you know, people were eating once or twice a day. They just didn't have a lot of food. They didn't shut down the pyramids three times. a day to feed those guys. They said chisel, you know, pull the rope, here's some water, and then they give them some bread later, you know, and they manage to do something that we can't do today, right? So all alien theories aside, right? So basically what I'm saying is, is that, you know, we have this template that fits around first the agricultural cycle, which I grew up on a farm, so eat a small little something in the morning before you go out, stop early in the early,

11 o'clock, have the biggest meal then while the sun's out, and then it's a long day, you go there, and it's a light meal towards the evening, and that's where this is three meals a day. Now for the workforce, it's eat before you go to work, have a break, have something to eat then, go eat lunch, you know, now go have happy hour, go home, eat again, and then you're, you know, late-nighters are obviously even worse, you know, go get the round of ice cream before you go to bed or whatever. That's a chronically fed state. What I'm saying is you could be in a chronically fed state and still have just a little bit of calories. You know, you might lose body fat. I'm not saying you won't be at a deficit. What I'm saying is this idea that you're

always slugging. Every time we slug, we activate a whole set of hormones and react. And so we talk about fasting when we talk about and we talk about intermittent fasting, the idea that you're really going long periods. But even in the popular media, because everyone's terrified to say, don't eat, You know, you'll be anorexic or whatever. You'll have an eating disorder. But the idea that you can last a day or two, I mean, really. I mean, anybody tells me, it's like, you know, they're experts and they say, you can't, you know, use spad for your metabolism.

I'm like, how many days have you been without food? Right. Like exactly. Well, this is a question I've been trying to answer for myself and that is what's the minimal time that I need to fast to get the atophagy benefits. So autophagy is clearing away those damage cells we were talking about. And there's other benefits. So there's lowering IGF1.

You know, there's the sort of T activation. That stuff, sure T can happen quickly. I mean, as soon as you're an A. Just to give you an idea of my last fast, although it was, I did it over, my IGF1 went down to 69. At the end, I was at 69. This one, it was really interesting. I started 200. So gaining the weight and eating, and I ate helpful things to gain the weight, but I did stuff to get up there.

And I was massively eating two or three days before because I really wanted to have a negative experience with fasting. I really wanted to really set off the hunger pangs because I've seen people that have dealt with that. Most of them don't eat my diet before they fast and the people that don't eat like me, they're really sick. I mean, they don't do so well. So I wanted to try to do that.

So for about four or five days before, now I didn't really gain weight during that period because I was eating my food. It's really hard to gain weight on. But, so I was done with the weight loss. I'd already gotten up to my weight to start, and I held it for about a month or so. And then two or three days before I started the fast, I, you know, I just started eating three meals a day, you know, healthy food, but just really eating a lot of volume of it. And my IGF was surprisingly. Did you eat?

No, I don't need any meat. Your IDF went on. Yeah, still went up. Yeah. So, you know, zero. You know, I had none. I mean, I had, you know, it was just all whatever. And it was up at 200.

And then by the midpoint, it was already down to 100. So it dropped 100 points in seven days or 10 days. And we'll see what it is. I already did the last one. The results will be back soon. We'll see what the ending is. Last time, like I said, I ended at 69. But anyway, why I'm saying that is because, you know,

I haven't seen a lot of work out there on this, but I think there might be data that we could tease out of papers that exist. It's something I want to think about as sort of a next step, which is, you know, this meal frequency. know, how often we're eating could be a huge problem. I mean, just frequency. And unfortunately, it's the social. You and I, a scientist, are able to sort of ignore the social.

If we think we're wanting to do something, we get headstrong, we're going to do it, right? And you just don't care what people say, and neither do I. But a lot of people out there, they're eating primarily for social entertainment. That's the only reason they're eating for health. but even the ones in a lot of the fitness thing, they're just, they're socially doing what all of their crowd is doing, right? And even with us,

I don't think we know enough yet to really optimize. I think we did a relatively good job of creating a simple roadmap with the food triangle. So I think it helps from that perspective. We can say eat right, we can say if you're a bottom feeder,

which would be meat and potatoes, pasta and meat sauce, fish and chips, burger and fries. That's the most energy-dense that you have and is it surprising everybody gains weight. Now, the fat people blame the carbs and the carb people will be able to be in the fat and they're both wrong for the right reason. They're both right for the wrong reason, which that will be explained in our paper. But that food triangle becomes

a roadmap. And then the question is, how can we optimize eating frequency? Because I want to maximize my body's chance to do this. And obviously, I could have fasted and supplemented. There's no reason why you couldn't do that. Although, at what, level of supplementation, do you interfere with one of those other systems, right? So we don't know that. But I think there are things we should be doing. But because there isn't a economic endpoint, it's a health endpoint, us getting the funding to do that sort of thing becomes problematic. That would be an interesting study. I like to see the male frequency. I've seen, you know, I've looked at a lot of studies on intermittent fasting, dietary restriction, and humans and, you know,

finally figuring out why a lot of the data wasn't being replicated in humans that was found in monkeys and mice. And then they figured out humans, when their dietary restricted, tend to eat more protein because it's more satiating. And then they're like, oh, so then their IGF-1 levels were going high. But eventually those things were sort of teased out. Right, but even down the satiation. Yeah.

Okay, so that's a made-up word. And the entire context of that word is used in talking to people in a chronically fed state. I'm satiated. Yes, you are. Right. So what I'm saying is, if we're going to change the language, we have to fundamentally, as scientists especially, we have to disengage from all those studies. They're all polluted.

It's like today, if I'm going to do a cholesterol study, I can't because there's nobody out there that has the issues that are on statins. The ones we did before are about the best we're going to do because we can't do a randomized control and put someone and say, just don't do what you're doing and the other guys do this. So we've polluted the data set. All of the studies are varying protein carbs and fat, a thing that I want to get rid of. Well, you, okay, so I'm going to hold protein constant at 12%. And so in order to do that, what am I going to do? I'm going to study sugar versus oil. Okay, what have you just learned? Nothing. Because if I add a whole food starch, I screw up my

protein number. If I add legumes, I screw up my protein number. If I add any of the things that I would actually really eat, I screwed it up. You know, on the fat side, okay, you add, add lots of meat, you're screwing up your protein number, whatever. So what we're, what everyone's arguing about, the sugar versus fat crowd, the whole crowd, if you really look at the papers, it's pretty easy to see. They're basically arguing of that. And you can look at any arm of the study. It's really a simple thing to just look at a study and say, you know what, I'm not going to even think about this. Look at the carbohydrate arm. And you're going to need to see two things. First, did the fat go down. Not these goofy studies where a low fat diet is 40% and say, oh, well, that's what

they ended up eating. Well, no, if you're going to control it, control it, you and I can't say, well, you know, we were aiming it to get, you know, four millimolar, but, you know, the lab tech just couldn't get it right and got it at 20 millimolar, and so therefore, you know, we're just going to go with that and still call it a study. It's just ridiculous what gets out there and publish. But if we look at it, on the carbohydrate arm, always, you'll see a rise in the carbohydrate, arm and you won't see an increase in fiber. And if you don't see increase in fiber, that means they added refined sugars. Yeah, that's ridiculous. It means it's just, it's compared to what you and I eat. It's an irrelevant study. I don't really, I mean, we don't need to debate

sugar versus fat anymore. It's irrelevant because I don't eat oils, nor do I eat sugar, because I don't use the energy without the food. All of my, all of my foods, all of my dietary sugars, all my dietary starches, all my dietary fats are all come from whole foods. So, for example, if I didn't have the word, if we could eradicate the word carbohydrate from the diet, just that one. Think about it for a second. If I don't have the word carbohydrate, I can't equate a whole food starch with a refined sugar. There's no way to connect. I can't equate a carbohydrate to cotton, also a carbohydrate. I always say refined carbohydrates.

Yeah. But even if you say that, you're still not specific. This is a carbohydrate. Wood, the wood floor is a carbohydrate. Termites eat wood, mossy, shirt, cotton linens, you know. So what I'm saying is these are all carbs. Chitin in crabs gels, carbohydrate. It's a big term.

Yeah. It's not very important. So it doesn't mean really anything. Then we've got to start saying complex carbohydrate. What the hell? Now we're just making the language. This is nutritionism. We're confusing it.

We're confusing it. And yet, if you do a study and say, I added potatoes and this is what happened. I added beef and this is what happened, you know, instead of a protein source. You know, because for most... I added twinkies. Yeah, this is what happened. Exactly. So the point I'm making is that it makes more sense because, you know, the labels just confused.

We have the eat more, eat less policy in the United States that came out after the McGovern port, which basically is when we're going to say something good about food from a government perspective, eat more fruits, eat more vegetables. If it's something that's bad, we're not allowed to name the food. Eat less saturated fat. Eat less oils. Eat less refined sugars. We're not allowed to say the food. And from a government policy level, that's really what we do. And that's what happens in the messaging to the public. And you look at all across the agencies, they all use that message. Do you know why that is? What was the- Because they devastated the beef industry when they said, don't eat red meat. To this day, everybody says red meat. And there's really not that much

difference between any of the meats. They're all right about the same. We're all animals. Now, if you report the calories per weight, yes. I mean, I'm sorry, the fat per weight, it's the same. But if you report fat per calorie on all the different cuts of meat, we're all between 25, 30 percent. We're all really, there's no lean meat. They're all about the same. I mean, they're very, very close. And so that, you know, again, we have 26, 27 National Institutes of Health, but nutrition is controlled by the USDA. Do we need some? say anymore. I left NASA because I knew they weren't getting us into space. That wasn't going to happen. NASA's a great organization, a lot of smart people there. Everybody wants to do stuff,

but in a mature bureaucracy, there's a rule against everything. So getting back to our stuff, what I'm saying is that if we would change the language and talk about food, like all the things that you talk about on some of your videos, the short videos, like your smoothie or whatever, yet you're talking about what's in it, but you're always putting foods in there. I don't see you dumping powder and anything you're doing. And I don't eat it. I know we've talked about this that night we talked. So if we started with a whole food diet and we say, okay, we got a whole food diet, now how much do I need to meet my minimum energy needs? I meet it. If I'm active, I'm going to have to eat more. If you're in the baby producing time and that's what you guys are trying to get

pregnant, you're going to have to definitely eat a different diet. But then how do we deal with that whole meal frequency and eat it in a small window to address this fasting? Or, Do we need to go a couple of days? You know, I mean, I don't think anybody can answer those questions right now. Well, that's what I was wanting to get to with the, what time frame do you need to fast to get specific benefits? And the specific benefits that I really am interested in is the increase in autophagy, which then increases hematopoises. You know, these processes are very important for, you know, long-term health and something that I'd like to sort of, you know, tap into. And from Walter Longo's research at UCLA, at least in animals and mice, he's shown that it takes 48 hours of intermittent fasting to activate that whole autophagy system robustly and to increase the amount of places.

So now, you know, whether or not that's applicable to humans or if there's, you know, I don't know. And I'm trying to get in contact with him to figure that out. Right. Because I'd like to know. I'd like to know, do I need to incorporate 48-hour fast? to get those atopagy benefits that I want. And this is my goal post book. I get my book out there just because I want to get sort of the language changed,

how we're talking about food, to be able to get more people like us that can extract the social paradigm, which is, you know, I don't care if you think what I'm doing as radical. It's not biologically extreme, and there's a lot of different benefits. And studies that are starting to be, I want to see studies that are, that are done that don't use the template of three meals a day. You're going into starvation mode. We got to make sure you get every single thing.

We got shut down by an IRB. It was embarrassing. But we got shut down by an IRB, I won't say where, to do for me to eat potatoes for two weeks in a metabolic lab because the IRB said it wouldn't be nutritionally sound. Based off of... Nothing. Okay, now, never mind, I had a better caleranimeter than this major Ivy League school.

Their IRB didn't want me to do it. You know, we were going to do some full comprehensive blood work, something that we could at least write up as a case, something that could be a seed to get some funding. But that's how polluted it all is. It really is. And you talk to your average dietitian, and now the protein carb fat, I mean, it just becomes just Jabrawi.

I personally just want to, like, figure out the best diet that what I can do right now to extend my health span. Absolutely. And right now I've been turning to, you know, what's known. I've been looking at these, you know, super centenarians, which I know these people, there's, there are, you know, individuals out there that are 115 years old and are cognizant and are healthy and are, you know, still active. They're not, like, just crippled and, you know,

And so I want to look at these individuals and understand what is it about their genetics, you know, because we know that things like intermittent fasting dietary restriction, we know that hormesis, different plant compounds, you know, that are present in a variety of plants can activate a variety of genes that may be activated in these individuals. We know, for example, Fox O3 is one that's well known to be associated with. And that's Luigi Fontana, I mean, he's big and fucked up. Exactly. And so, you know, what can we do with our diet, with our lifestyle that can activate these different pathways to help us live to be longer? But to get on that, to sort of on that note. So temperature.

Yes. So the whole idea. Tell me about WIM, first of all. So I know you've interviewed him, but tell me your whole thing. Isn't the amazing man? He is full of energy and passion. Yes. Yeah, we had a really fun time. A couple of years ago, I went over for, and we spent a week together just to get before. everything was on the rush. He was like in the what he was going to do next phase and we just spent every day just talking all day

and a night laying, that we were laying in beds in the same room. We were just having these conversations felt like, you know, in camp when you were kids, you know, and you're laying there in a dark talking about stuff, hearing all these stories. And what was really fun about the whole thing is that as I was

you know, I went out and I usually carried just the gloves. I use these, the agey love, They're really a gloves, but they have silver on them because you can use your iPhone, and they're just little cotton gloves, and I use these little earbags. And if I have those, if I cover those two symptoms up, I can tolerate coal really well. So I have my gloves on, and I'm out walking, you know. Where are you guys?

We're in Amsterdam. So we're just walking to the grocery store. Yeah, it's like February. And we're walking to the grocery store. And we walked down, and he walked down, and he wants to, like, strip down. and get in the water cold. It's just this way. It's just fun.

We had a great time. So, anyway, we're basically, so we're walking back, and, you know, he's looking. He was, oh, hi. And they actually said, look at this. The ice man has a coat, and you have a short-sleeve shirt. He said, this looks crazy. So then, like, he took his jacket. He said, I need to kill.

And then when he got home, he opened all the windows. They said, you know, I've been trapped in this apartment all summer. But it was really interesting that, you know, people think of him, and you see this. People think of it. extreme and what women's actually trying to say is not extreme he's saying humans can do this we can't a normal human can do it this is what i'm saying now about fasting a normal human i'm not superhuman to go without food this is normal and normal humans experienced and what's interesting is just like this time with that and what we have in our metabolic winter hypothesis paper is this you know the fact that these

two traits cold stress and dietary restriction hit the same genes hit the same genes hit the same UCP1 hit the same PGC1 alpha, you know. So there's overlap, yeah. Yeah, there's overlap and you know that winter never comes. There's never time of cold stress. There's never time of dietary restriction, scarcity. And we're in chronically a chronically lighted environment because of modern light. So if we think about this, you know, the idea, unfortunately, gets, you know, the cryotherapy.

And, you know, I got to be, and it's all gets sold as extreme. But what you found, like, in your sauna thing, you know, and I don't know if you've talked about it on another blog or whatever, but the idea that suddenly you get this amazing sleep, like amazing sleep. Well, I didn't. So recently I had this experience where I had done some very extreme temperature contrast therapy where I was, you know, sitting in a very hot sauna. At its peak, it was 220 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very hot. And then transitioning once, I mean, I was bearing the pain.

I was sitting in this hot sauna, you know, and really pushing it. Like, I wanted to get out, but I stayed in. And then finally got to the point where I'm like, okay, I'm going to get out. And then I went straight into a ice bath, a very cold ice bath. I mean, it was just lots of ice. and that was also very difficult because it was cold. So I was going from hot as hell to like really cold. And that was the first time I've ever done that.

Did you notice that the pain sensation on both sides was the same? Yeah, it was burning. Yeah, it's interesting. We only have one sense. Well, what's interesting, I met with this. Okay, well, let me get to the sleep thing. I'm going to get sidetrack like I always do. So I did this like four rounds.

And I had a variety. I mean, I noticed that I felt. really good, really relaxed. There's lots of things going on in the brain. And I've done the sauna for years. And the sauna also makes me feel really good. And I've talked about some of the mechanisms by why that occurs. But the way I felt with the contrast therapy was a little different. I felt extremely just very relaxed and very, very happy and pleasant. And I've done cryotherapy. And cryotherapy also where I was standing in this chamber with. liquid nitrogen. I also felt really good, like, after doing that for two or three minutes,

I forgot how long I did it for, but I got out, and I felt good. And I know that's, you know, norap anepheneference being released. It's been shown with cryo and cold water immersion. But anyways, back to the contrast therapy. The thing that was so surprising to me was the fact that it completely reset both mine and Dan's circadian rhythm, where usually, like, him more than me were kind of night people, like, where it's like, oh, I'd go to bed before midnight, but he struggles to go to bed before midnight. And so we were at 9.30 p.m. So we did this in the evening, so we started like around 6 p.m., I think. But by 9.30 p.m.

we were in bed and asleep by 10. And then we woke up the next morning at 7.30. And that is not our typical schedule and certainly not his typical schedule. And that was very surprising to me, the contrast therapy, resetting my circading rhythm. So one of the things you asked earlier about cold stress and weight loss for the people I work with, that's actually one of the things I do. I want them to get a lot of sleep. So I talk, I have sort of more of a metaphor, I guess, to use to sort of simplify things. But metabolic winter, I think, of dark, cool, still and scarce.

Metabolic summer is bright, warm, active, and abundant. So one of the things that I want them to do is get a lot of rest. You know, seasonal effective disorder. You know, is it a dysfunction or is it a feature? because, you know, if you're, don't have a lot of food, it's really not worth it. The idea that we're running through, you know, with Spears and getting stuff is, you know, a bunch of, you know, cartoon stuff, you know. I mean, the idea was we just did, we would hunger down. We would wait, you know, and interestingly, the first plants that we see, the first green that comes up through the ground are all attached to bulbs, starch, underground storage organs, which is kind of an interesting, an easy way to find them.

But the contrast therapy, so I have them do 10 seconds of work. warm, 20 seconds of cold. I have them repeat that 10 times and then end on cold. Now, first, it sucks. Yeah, there's a contrast shower. And it sucks at first. How hot is the water? Just your, you just need to get warm, right? So you get either the, you know, get either a gym boss timer or get the app on your phone. Okay. And set it up for like a tapto would be, you know, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and repeat 10 times and on cold. So 10 seconds. So 10 seconds, warm, 20 seconds cold. Right. Because, and women and I did, we developed this literally in his apartment. We were talking, because we were talking about the benefits and, and we were talking about

the saunas. We were talking about that. But, you know, what could we do in a, in a concise amount of time that would get us, get us going? Well, as a complete side, complete coincidence, just like you, I was doing something. I don't know, we are, whatever, it was late. And I was still going. My mind was still going and I went and did that and I realized, you know, I'm really getting sleepy. And so then I started repeating and it's like, wow, I get sleepy really fast. I may hit the bed and I go to sleep really quick. So at first, because our, you know, our skin can't sense absolute temperature. We sense differences. In fact, you know, whim did a little finger, one little finger tests and they made him with ice water pass out, which is kind of funny because he said, you know,

My ice man passes, I submerged my body nice, and they did this little test. And there's a strong, I don't know what the, I haven't looked up, but there's some strong react, something they do with your hand. And it has a strong response and it can make people pass out. So anyway, but the point is, is that our body sense differences. You know, I wrote a blog about this on mine. It's called Chichanges. And the body really, like, if you're out working in the fall, you know, when you go out,

it's cool and you start raking leaves or you start doing something physical. and then you take off layers, and now you're fine or whatever, and then you walk in the house, ah, it feels hot, right? And you say, oh, it feels hot in here, and everybody else says it feels normal on here, you know? You're turning down the thermostat,

and vice versa, you know, walking. So we sense these changes, and so what we tried to do is make it practical where we can do it. And what I found with myself and with, you know, 100 or so people who work with, is that doing it in a morning, just lights you up like a Christmas tree.

You just feel ready to go. You get out and go, whew, you know, you're ready to go. Not a cold shower, but the cool, and then there. And you can go as cold as you want. You have to have a big contrast. At first you might not go as far, but eventually you're going to go full cold because it's not, I mean, it's like 50, 55 degrees. You can handle it. Everybody has a part, their belly, their back, their face.

Something about them really makes them, like, you know, tighten up. But you'll figure that out. And what's paradoxical about it, and I saw this on my blog and people reporting back this is all a couple of years ago was that you start tolerating heat better too. And it was kind of weird. You start sweating less. Your body starts getting sort of more adapted to this contrast so that when you go from one environment or the other, you just doesn't seem to be as much as stress, which means when you go out walking, when you go outside, I always have people do the reverse of skiing. So instead of layering and taking them off as the day goes on, I say carry it with you and only put it on if you really

need it. You know, cover your symptoms first. You know, we don't get frostbite, you know, of the, of the head. We get it of the nose, ears, toes, fingers, the extremities, right? Vezo-constriction happens, and when vaso-constriction happens, we start losing the circulation, it's cold. But if you cover those symptoms first, and that was my very first experiment I did before the first weight wall, it's like, why am I cold? And just sitting out on my back porch with a notebook trying to say, okay, how do I stay out here until I can't stay out here anymore? What makes me go back? And what I found was my ears and face will send me into, I can't stand it anymore, way more than my body. So back to the contrast showers, what doing this contrast does is it slowly

elevate your tolerance for cold. Like right now I have zero cold tolerance because of the fast. And I opened my windows last night. And it's, you know, even at 66 degrees, which my house is normally even colder than that, it starts feeling really cool. You know, it's so, so, So that's just a temporary thing. And last time it took about a month and a half or something to where my normal cold tolerance came out. I know it pretty well. But as you do this contrast therapy and you end on that cold for two minutes, again,

in the morning it gets you alert and at night because of the, I think, where you are on your circadian day, it makes you sleep. And I did the same thing in Australia that you did for in terms of reset. And I tried it. Now, I didn't get completely over jet lag. So it wasn't really a complete success. but I used a combination of melatonin and those molecule stress and light, you know. And it still took a day or two.

It was worse coming back for me. It was much worse coming back. And I didn't completely fix it. So there obviously is a time function that we sort of can't avoid. But I think something as simple as that has benefit. Yeah, I'm definitely going to try to dig into some of the mechanisms there because it's, and it's hard to find. but I'm planning on trying to understand just because it was profound for me. And there's really good data.

Maybe I can find a Dropbox folder and send your whole set of links. But like on clinically depressed patients, they were doing five-minute cold showers with 60 degrees F. And they were having as good as results with medications with their depression. Please send me that because I've been. And theorizing that that would be the case based on the fact that cold, if you're, if you're, I think it's around 60, anything below 62 or 63 degrees Fahrenheit, 17 degrees Celsius, what it is. It increases noraphenephyran.

Right. So, my old stress, when I talk to people, first of all, I really, I don't think people really need to be doing ice stuff right now. I mean, it's just, there's way more risk, and you can get a lot of benefits above it. So what I always tell people, because I think everybody goes to the extreme and the fitness industry is the worst about this. But basically the guidelines I give to people is this, is that molecule stress begins at 80F in water, okay? And it begins at 60F in air. So that's about where you start seeing a change.

You start seeing a metabolic response. You start seeing a hormonal response at about those temperatures. Water is really easy to deal with all the way down to 60F. When you get a little bit below that, it starts hypothermia. And walking hypothermia is a real problem. And you can become hypothermic and not really know it because that shivering response shuts down. And you go into your non-shivering thermogenesis. And yes, you boost up.

You can get 3 to 500 percent increase in metabolic rate. And you can measure this, which I can show you some stuff later, that you can actually measure it. And a shift in respiratory quotient towards what we want to do, which is fast. firm, but it also, the risk of injuring yourself goes up greatly. So my caution to everybody is to play in the mall places first and then go down. With air, if you're above- Can you send me the studies on the risk of injury as well? Because I- Well, hypothermia is all the place. There's basically a chart. But if you look at the chart and I'll show you what it is, if you just put water in hypothermia, you can get a chart

and there's an exposure time. Now, obviously, I can exceed that by far and WIM can exceed it by far. You can train yourself to do it. What I'm saying is you get the person out there, they get all excited and they start extreme and then they wind up having a problem. So, and the error one is below 32. Below 32, you start having a bigger risk. So if you work in the range of that, of 60 to 32 or 60 to 80, you pretty much for a normal person, you're going to do just fine. Now, for swimming, because one of the things I want to do, this is the last time I remember doing weight loss stuff, I'm done with this forever. So I'm actually going to start exercising it.

I have an exercise for five years now, only cold stress. Yeah, so all of this kept even after five years. You know, all my muscles actually shrunk down, which is kind of weird to look because the volume water leaves your muscles when you're fasting. It really freaked me out last time. I was like, I was just sure that I was just atrophying like crazy. I was really, I've really screwed this one up. But when I got back to the dexas scans,

and as soon as you start eating and getting minerals in your diet again, sodium and other stuff, the water comes back up. Okay. You know, so like, for example, when you pump up in a gym, you're not adding protein or amino acids. You're just adding fluid.

So anyway, but my point is, is that I stayed fit, I kept muscular, and I did it all through cold stress. I just did cold stress. Okay, so what was your protocol? So the Contrast shower is one of them. I also have an 8 by 16 swim spa that I put in my backyard, and I have 110,000 BTU heat pump on it.

So I can take it to 45F all the way up to a hot tub. My kids love it. They have their kids over have a party. It's 102, you know, whatever. And so a regular cold exposure in there, and I would just lounge. I mean, for example. Shoulders under? Right, right, up to the face.

In fact, I did a thing with Stephen Leckhardt from Wired. When he came, we did all kinds. I've got great data from him, but we did feet, I think, knees, waist, shoulder, and head, where he was always submerged. So I was doing metabolic rate the whole time. What temperature was water? 60. I did them at 60. I did them at 70.

I did them at 80. And those were essentially the same between all three temperatures? No, there was some differences. And then also I did, and a lot of this is on a blog, I think it's called. called, what did I call it? If they just go to the metabolism tag, I came up some stupid name for it, but it's something metabolism, mastering metabolism or something. Anyway, I do it in the third part.

I talk about Stevens' results. And down in the comments section, I posted even more data because people became interested. I don't want to put too much of it up there just because it gets boring. But the swimming, getting back to swimming, I want to take up swimming. No, I've always been able to swim, so I've never been afraid of water. I scuba dive. I was a water skier. I love swimming.

But I never learned to like swim laps, you know? And, you know, I really want that graceful to be able to swim. Swimming is the only exercise you can start at any age, at any level of fitness, and you can do it to any end of your life. So I want to introduce, and what's interesting about resistive swimming, which means if you're swimming on a tether, and you're swimming in a swim spot or a tether in a pool where you just have a mount. So you have like a fiberglass rod and a rope that goes through a band. When you're swimming, you're really, it's really, you know, glide left or glide right. You know, you're basically cutting through the water.

It's not really a power move. You know, it's really about the hydrodynamics of the water streaming over you, you know. But when you're swimming on a tether and you're not moving, it's like slogging through water. So it's actually physically more difficult to swim on a tether. It's the same activity, the same feel. But when you move, you start moving that fiberglass rod and you start bending it down some. And if you let off a little bit, you start going back. So you actually, it becomes even swimmers, really good swimmers have told me I had Olympic athlete in my pool.

And she said, you know, it really definitely gives you a workout if you want the workout part. But what's really amazing about Stevens data is that when he got out of the water, instead of doing what everybody does and jumping in the sauna, we just had him sitting there and we were measuring his metabolism the whole time. And his respiratory quotient went from 1.0, which is most activities are burning glycogen, almost a 0.7, almost pure fat. and for over an hour he was still burning fat. And that's after what temperature being? And that was 70. So for swimming, the optimal temperature of comfort and impact is about 75F with all the stuff I've looked at. I'm not studied, but stuff I've looked at in my pool.

Right around there, it's not too much of a shot. Now, 70-degree water for someone who lives on the West Coast, they're like, what? Right. Right. You know, if you live in the South, you know, it's a, it's a lot of water. You know, the Gulf in Mexico, it's like 80 or in the tropics. And down at 60, it starts becoming something, right? So...

What do you mean by becoming something? Like, your metabolism really speeds out of it? No, you're still going to burn carbohydrate as long as you're really active. And if you're shivering, you're burning carbohydrate. You're not burning fat. Right. Shivering is exercise. So here's what we know.

We talk about this a little bit in the metabolic winter herbaceous, which is, you know, I believe exercise is mimicking cold stress. I believe most of the benefits we're seeing, because here's what happens. If I have people exercising and they start to shiver, I'm sorry, I started exercising, not shivering, they start to exercise. They produce irisone. Irisin is known to upregulate and create more brown out of post tissue. We've seen these studies, and these studies, and it's come out in the last three years or four years.

Well, what's shivering? Shivering is a original exercise. I mean, we don't really have to go do something at a gym. I'm not talking about people that want to look better. I have no problem with people having it as a sport or compete competition or whatever. Our conversation is in the silo of longevity and healthfulness. This is metabolic. So the first step of cold stress is that I'm shivering.

Now, this is a very energetically expensive way to produce heat. Why? Because now, you know, 20% of it is being used to move the muscles and do that. So then what happens? A little bit later, shivering stops, non-shivering thermoshenesis kicks in. Up for regulation happens in UCPB1. Now I'm just using electron leaks through mitochondria, and suddenly I'm not producing ATP. I'm just producing 100% heat.

What's the cell using to do that? It's grabbing the most energy-dense fuel, and it's using lipids to do it. So that's a real good adaptive strategy, because if you were keeping warm using glycogen, you'd run out very quickly. Or if you were using it and it was coming from gluconeogenesis, you would run out really quickly. So what's interesting is that if you think of exercise as a way that we mimic mild cold stress in the past or periods of mild cold stress, a lot of the benefits might actually be the same. Yeah, I think there are definitely a lot of overlapping benefits like the brown anaupis tissue,

PGC1 alpha, the increasing mitochondrial biogenesis. You know, all these fat oxidations. They all overlap. Yeah, but there are absolutely important benefits from exercise. Like, study just, I was reading today about on the brain how it's like doing aerobic exercise in midlife for a mouse, like prevented the blood brain barrier from breaking down, prevented decreased the amount of activated microglia. You know, so there's a lot of other benefits from exercise that are not related.

The point here is, and that's the, this is about changing. our conversation because it almost is impossible to talk about something other than exercise without someone saying, yes, but. Yes, but exercise. Forget that. We all know there's benefits of exercise. Let's just put that aside for a second. And let's say, okay, what specifically might be going on?

You know, what specifically, you know, the same people probably didn't study the same people that were mild cold stress. And maybe some of those same benefits can happen with that. So all I'm saying is is that it's possible. You can't prove right here, but it's possible that a lot of these benefits of this excess moving, because in nature, all organisms are conserved. They conserve. They live a conserved life.

We want to think of them being all active, and they're all on the hunt, and they're more active of us, and we live a sedentary lifestyle. But the opposite of sedentary isn't exercise. The opposite of sedentary is active. And I didn't say it wasn't active. I didn't say I never got on a bike. I just didn't change clothes to do it. I didn't say I didn't ever go out when the kids for a walk.

I didn't say I'm a skateboarder. So I didn't say we didn't go skateboarding. I just said I didn't change. I didn't count it. I didn't write it down. I didn't do it. You're not going to a gym. Right.

So what I'm trying to say disruptively is, wait, let's stop talking about exercise. for a minute, because this all got started around 1911, between 1900 and 1911. McFadden was the first one. I'll show you the books where all this got together. And the link of diet and exercise happened primarily through the calorie. Now, we've since learned there's a lot of benefit, but the vast majority of people think it's energy, I'm outputting energy and I'm inputting energy and I'm trying to main that

balance. And that's really not the way I'm thinking of exercise. I'm thinking of exercise the way we think of food differently. we were on the same side of that. And I'm saying that there are things that exercise does that might likely mimic cold stress because exactly the same thing happens. It doesn't make sense for the body to create irisone

that creates a tissue that burns fuel and just creates waste heat unless it had, unless it was more energetically do it. It was more energetically to get up and move to create the waste heat. to go get something, that would have probably been the pathway. I'm saying there's a good argument to be made that maybe the benefits are that we evolve those sets of cold stress responses that happen to mimic the dietary restriction as a survival mechanism for winter.

And we've just engineered winter out of our life in the last century. We do have temperature-controlled environments. Right, right. You know, and I think that both temperature extremes are important. And, you know, if you're living somewhere like in the south, it's hot as hell in the summer and the winter is cold, you know, maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. Maybe your body's supposed to be shocked by the heat and shocked by the cold. Right. But instead, we come into these heat and air-conditioned houses and, you know.

And what you said when we were talking to the party, you know, when we're sort of making our little mind-melt implosion in the center of room, right? You know, I think we sort of forgot everybody was there. But the heat shock proteins, they're very similar to the cold shock. So the point I'm saying is if we could just entertain the thought, you know, Aristotle said it's a mark of the educated mind to, you know, to consider the, entertain the thought without embracing it. And I'm saying, let's put exercise aside for a second, just like I'm saying, if soon as I start talking about calorie restriction, intermittent fasting,

fasting, immediately the dietitians go, yeah, but you've got to have balancing it. You can't be deficient. It's like, okay, we understand that that's there. We don't want to talk about deficient. We're not talking about deficiency, but they don't even know a concept. They don't even know an idea behind how a person would possibly even live. They think you die in days without nutrition. They just, they do.

And you know, it's funny, right? And yet I'm having a, you know, this is a pretty challenging conversation. I have to ask you a question. Go ahead. On your 21-day fast, like, so like what happened to your bowel movements? They stop. I still have my one. When, like how long?

The last one I have was Monday at a 7-Eleven on October the 12th. And today's November 3rd. Yeah. You just don't have that. That's pretty wild. Yeah. It's crazy. You don't have Valmos.

Can you please do a U-Bio? Like, I want to see. Oh, you didn't do it before. I know. Oh, Ray. What's wrong with you? I just had so much to get. I just had so much to get.

I mean, all the blood work I did was so much. expensive and, you know, I've used really a donation on my ball. You know, there's plenty of opportunities to do this. Again, absolutely, I should have done it. I should have done it. And the last time the nitrogen, I forgot to do nitrogen. You didn't do nitrogen? I didn't do nitrogen last time I had Dexod, so this time I did nitrogen. So I have that. But anyway, getting back to cold stress. And the point I'm making is, is that this is what I mean about change in dialogue. And what I'm trying to do in my book, Our Procomplate, is talk about how we can separate things. to chapter when exercises, look, okay, I'm starting it's off. Exercise has a lot of benefits. Okay, did we get

that over with? Okay, I don't want to talk about that anymore. You know, I want to talk about where exercise overlaps with these really cool, really, pun intended, I guess, cool things in our biology that are connected with longevity. And, you know, and it's like extreme. Okay, I know we can live in extreme environment and we can deal with all extreme stuff, but quite frankly, I don't have this testosterone rush. I don't have to beat my chest and say, you know, I'm the he man with the abs. I just really would care when to live long. You know, they can have the abs, whatever they want. So the point I'm making is what I want to do is look at this cold stress and say, okay, look, here are all the things that we know are upregulated. Here are all the things that

happen. Yes, they have an overlap with exercise. And then over here we got nutrition, and there are things that we need to be nourished with and things we don't want to be deficient in, but here's where we have dietary restriction. And I think that something can put together. And then you add the third part of the trichotomy, which is sleep. It's clearly sleep is beneficial for both of those. So, you know, if we look at this little trichotomy, a sleep, you know, cold stress, and dietary restriction, to me, that's the axi we start with.

And then the exercise, again, just like we talked about with starches and sugars and sugars earlier with the studies, all the exercise stuff is a lot of it is done on people that are living in a normal world. So if it makes you better in a normally overfed, overnourished kind of world, that doesn't mean people that have actually approaching diets like you and I care about our diets and we're approaching something, at least the best we can figure out, approaching something that's optimal, if it's necessarily going to have the same benefit as us. it might drive over nutrition. Because there is a feedback loop.

There is a point. There is a tipping point. I'm just in my head thinking there may be a temporal effect too because I just now am recalling a study. So this animal study I just told you that it was just published in Fast Subjournal, I believe. Maybe it was Ploss. It's one of the, I'm sorry, I don't remember which journal,

but it was published like today where they showed that in midlife, you know, aerobic exercise had all these positive effects in the brain, delayed, you know, markers and all this stuff. There's another study that was published about last year in nature. that showed that cold stress, it was mild cold stress. Actually, it was more than mild because it was more like standing in a refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Right, right, every two hours. Yeah. But it showed that it had that mild cold stress protected against Alzheimer's disease in animal models that were genetically engineered to get Alzheimer's, human Alzheimer's. It showed that it protected against it, but only if the cold stress was done in early life. So if cold stress was done in midlife and not in early life, it had no protective effect. So it was kind of weird, and I'm not exactly sure why. But I do want to ask you on the cold stress. I would be interested in seeing studies to see if there's synergistic effects on the brain.

I'm also very interested in the brain and the effects of exercise. Most of the work that I did on cold stress, because where I was in that point in my life was I didn't understand calories. And so I was really trying to understand how can we maximize calorie burn. I really believed the goal at that time was to create more metabolic output. And I hadn't quite found that I can control weight and everything perfectly with the dietary input is actually pretty trivial. So now that my goal has flipped, so a lot of the things that I know about this are ancillary to what I was looking at at its time. But I've aggregated a lot of studies on that. So just it would be a great data dump.

When we go back, I've got a lot of them. Unfortunately, I have to have paper. When I'm reading a paper, I can't do it online. I can't do it electronically. Maybe with the new iPad. Some people are physical. Like, you remember things by physical. It was just because I did it that way for so long.

I always had notebooks. I always wrote whatever. Maybe with the new iPad Pro, whatever is big enough and I can write on the paper. Maybe that will give me a. enough tactile input that I can do it. So the downside is I've got all these PDFs that are lost and Mendeley. The upside is that I have a lot of them organized because of our paper. I have a lot of them are in one place and we can just a data bump. But I wasn't looking at what you were looking at. That's the point. But I want to ask you about the, like a protocol, let's say someone that

wants to try to increase some of their brown adipose tissue. They want to ramp up their fat oxidation using mild cold stress. Is there some sort of general protocol where you say, spend, in addition to your contrast therapy that you mentioned, you spend 20 minutes in 60 degree water or something like that? Is there something that you think would work? It's on my website. I actually have the data right there. You can see it.

I mean, it doesn't burn a significant amount of fat. That's the downside. So you're not going to really, the weight loss is minimal. It does in addition to dietary restriction, but you have to have some kind of deficit to start with. But it definitely shifts your RQ. And what I have seen is that, you know, generally speaking, after, you know, a few weeks of cold stress and doing a restrictive diet where you're just running at a chronic deficit. You're going to see your RQ shift more towards 0.7, it lowers.

It goes more towards fat burning. You know, you can get yourself easily into a mode where about 75% of your day is burning fat or metabolizing fat if you keep your activity low. As soon as you start doing things that raise your activity, your respiratory quotient starts going back up, and then you're on the glycogen treadmill, which is why all these people want to get in the keogenic because they want to short the change the system. But I'm talking about something that also benefits the microbiome, et cetera. And if I do that lifestyle, then the microbiome, it's like pushing a bubble on a bumper sticker.

They're just pushing the problem around. But nobody's worried about the microbiome, and that ends up being, I think, like we said earlier, that's actually the most important place. That's where we need to start. feeding it and making sure we get that. But shifting it over to fat, you absolutely can with cold stress. Most people just don't have access to cold water. What about sitting in a cold bathtub?

Like if you just put cold water. Yeah, I think that, again, what I do when I'm skiing, for example, is because since I was skiing every year, but I wasn't doing any activity or any training before it. Right? So normally what that would mean is, like on the second or third day, you would just be fatigued and your legs were wasted like noodles, right? Everybody would think.

Yet, never happened to me. And the reason why is as soon as I come off the slopes, I go into the bathroom, I do a contrast shower and on cold, and then I fill the bathtub's already filled up with cold water. As cold as it'll come out of the tap, just sit up to my waistline in cold water, and all of that leaves. And you feel, when you get out, you almost feel as if you could go run or do anything. again right then. It just does that. So that's like a little simple strategy that I use for that. I move past the calorie thing because in order to do the calorie balance, I needed to understand

food. And so then when I got the calimeter, yeah, I did some things with Stephen on activity. And all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute, it's all the food. It's the food. It's the food. Because no matter what I was doing, the numbers that I made, when you're really measuring, your calories and you're really seeing exactly how much fat and carbohydrate you did in this session. And it's like you're not, you can't hide from it. And it's like over and over. I'm like, wait a minute. It's the food. So that got me off from the last four-year rabbit chase to figure out how did our relationship with food break. So, you know, to not answer your question, but to address it at least to say is that I don't think I have it at that granularity. And I think there, to me,

where I am now, my interest is, is really in how much cold stress do we need to activate these things. That's where I wanted to go next with it. Next with, just like we were talking about earlier, with crowdfunding and potentially doing stuff with dietary intervention that we can measure these biomarkers, okay, then with them without cold stress. I live chronically in cold stress in the winter, so I let my temperature fluctuate with the outside. My heat is set maybe at 50. So It goes up sometimes because the day is warm and, you know, you get whatever. Wow. So at night it gets cold. Yeah, and I don't sleep.

And I don't sleep with blankets. At all? No. Give a sheet? No, sometimes. At 50 degrees. Yeah, so I can sleep. I can sleep. Right now I can't because of the fasting.

But I conditioned myself. This is one of the things I did before all the stuff that came out for our body. I started with, you know, blankets. And I'm like, you know, we had blankets or we blanketed to. because we never used to heat bedrooms. That's what blanket was for. The rest of the house was cold. And now we blanket and we hit the bedroom.

So I started with the blanket and I fold it down and then you'd have it back in the morning, right? And then you fold it down. One night you wake up is, ha, I didn't use the blanket tonight. You know, it was halfway. And I found that if it's just all my feet, just actually the weight on my feet,

and it turns out I have enough. And a lot of my friends are astronauts. One of my friends, Scott Peresonsky, and they talk about sleeping. A lot of astronauts can sleep free tethered and float. And a lot of astronauts need a tether to something because they need that feeling because they just don't like the mummy free float thing.

So I'm a little like that and my feet need some kind of weight on them and that's funny. So then I start with a sheet the same way. Put it halfway down, sleep without it, and then you get it back up. And where you end up with is really an interesting place. So for me, the comfort you get from a blanket, that this is like sugar feels good and food gets good and that sort of thing.

The comfort you get from a blanket is sort of this warmness, this, you know, wound-like feeling. That feeling for me is between me and the bed. And when this side gets cold, I turn over and that's the warm spot. But you acclimated yourself together. But I acclimated now. Have you ever taken a nap on the sofa? Yes. Did you need to lose a blanket?

No. You can just sleep on the sofa. I don't remember. Well, you know what my point. You point every people like people. fall asleep in the couch all down. You don't need to do all that. It's just conditioning. And so you don't just like put all your blankets off and say, I'm going to sleep without covers. That's crazy. That's just like, you know, you're not going to, you're not going to do it. You've got to do it slowly.

And there's a really simple test to see if your room is too warm or you're over-blanketing. And that is if you stick your feet out from the covers at night or in the morning, or you have to stick your hands out. If you do those two things, that's a sign that you're sleeping with too much covers because that's a way to trick your brain into thinking you're cooler than you really are. Because we actually have to go to cool. So onto melatonin, which is in the actual place. Everybody knows about melaton reset and that sort of thing. And we can talk a little bit about the certune and that paper I sent you with the activation, which I think is good for the longevity stuff. But one of the roles of melatonin is to have you drop core body temperature. Temperature through

your extremity. You actually told me that. You're the first person that told me that when we, you know, met a couple months ago. And I was completely fascinated and I looked at the studies and I found, yeah, administering melatonin people does make their core body temperature drops. So what's neat is, is this is part of that got to drop the brain temperature. And what we do is we have this warm room, we get in our warm pajamas, you know, we get in our flannels, we put this blanket on. It's everything is antithetical to what our body's trying to do. Now, enter the contrast hour. You start out with the contrast shower, say 30 minutes or an hour. so before you're going to go to bed, right? Out of the shower, lights go off. Now I'm into the, you know,

all these people walking around, Blue Walk or Blue Block, whatever. I don't do that. Just come out there, lights go off. I have a little red light that's, my bed light is red, and I switch to paper. The screens go off, and now I'm from my old books. I love to read my old books, right? Okay, 30 minutes I stay in the dark, I do, and I do about 30 milligrams of melatonin a night. That's a lot of melatonin. Yeah, it is. It's a lot of, it's a lot of. A lot of melancholyden. Yeah, it is. I do about 30 milligrams a night.

And there's a lot of really great stuff that was done in 90s on melaton and the antioxidant side and obviously this longevity stuff. And I don't fear it. I don't think that it's a bad thing. I'm doing it exactly when my body would be producing it. Let me ask you again, so the contrast shower was 10 seconds warm, 20 seconds cold, how many times, and on cold for two minutes? Ten times.

And on cold two minutes. Yeah. Yeah, you know, just, I want you to get used to it because that's the conditioning part, right? I'm going to try this. Right. Because I want to see if it does my circadian weather. And then out of, then dry off, get in bed, and then at that point, it's, I don't do the dark, I do dark or I do red lights. No blue light. Right. So I do that. I don't do screens. And then, and then I wait 30 minutes. And then I do the melaton. Now, sometimes it's a problem because it used to be like after contrast showers. I told you, I'd hit the pillow and I'd fall asleep in like seven minutes. minutes. You know, I mean, you get sleepy. And I find, I usually lay my melatonin, I use the fast dissolves.

So I used to find them, I used to have them, you know, just laying down there ready to go. And I'd wake up in the morning there, they would still be. I forgot it. But anyway, so the melatonin. And one of the things it did for me is it completely cured secondary insomnia. The contrast that, contrast, the combination of those two. Yeah. And I tried time release and I never worked. I tried melatonin alone. I was doing the one milligram five that did nothing. And if somebody just starts with 30 milligrams, you're going to feel hung over in the morning. So you can't just start there. Because do you know what? Have you played with melatonin? I have the largest dose I've done. I usually only take melatonin if I am trying to get over jet lag.

Right. And I've done three milligrams. Or if I'm traveling someone, I can't sleep. For a normal person doing melatonin at that point, if they go over the dose, the symptom is in the morning they feel groggy and they don't want to wake up. I've heard about that. Right. So in the beginning, it's just not possible to do that. So it's just not possible to do that. But I built up over a while.

And I'm getting all, you know, obviously past 40, my melaton's fallen off precipitously at this point. You know, that's what all the studies say. I'm doing it at the circadian time, the time when my brain would be of releasing it probably is releasing it. And I feel like at that point I'm also, you know, I'm entering a fasted state as well, the dietary restriction. You know, my meals were earlier in the day, so I'm far past. I'm in a post-absorptive state at this point. And so I just feel like it's going to be beneficial.

And then this study just came out. And unfortunately, I haven't had a time to dig into the one that I posted for you, which is the basically cert1 and melatonin and resveritrol all working together. So they found a synergistic effect with melatonin, cert 1. I went to melatonin and resveratrol and cert 1. So again, I see this clue once again of this little tricotomy, sleep, dietary restriction, cold stress. Melatonin's a hormone. Regulates 500 different genes.

I mean, that's 2.5% of the human genome. Yeah. You know, it's like you said, it's one of the most important hormones that regulates brain antioxidant intivity. Right. You know, and that's been, those sites have been shown. I mean, in the 90s, there were a lot of really, you know, I know there were sort of fad-duyish books, but they were serious researchers, too. They were all publishing, you know, all the little books that were the small print

that we used to come out the way diet books used to be, you know, before it was big money. Yeah. And then the color of glossy stuff we see today. And you also mentioned that, you know, you're at a point in your life where your melatonin's dropping your psychotipat. And that's, you know, at least from the studies that I've seen it, like, around 40 years old. Yep. your pineal gland starts to make less than less serotonin.

I mean, melatonin. The other interesting thing is that, you know, most of the melatonin made in the body is actually made in the gut. Right, the serotonin. And it's like, yeah, serotonin gets converted in the melatonin. And my question is, what is it doing? What is it doing in the gut? Like, what is it doing in the circulatory system?

I'm kind of interested in that. Like, I'd like to know. I think this is, like, this paper really made me excited because I had hypothesized these connections and ran it by David. And we actually, we touched on it. We had, because of editorial limits on that first paper, we had to sort of walk away a little bit from the sleep part, and we mainly focused on the other stuff. But you know what it's like.

You know, it's like, okay, we got, we're. Too many words. Right. But basically, but we got it in there, but we had to do, we just said that people can adapt to sleeping cool. These are like the Aboriginal studies that were done. These are, I think in the 30s or whatever, where they took literally refrigerator trucks into Australia, took the natives who, by culture, they sleep under 30 degree temperature,

no covers, no blankets, they shiver all night and they get perfect rent sleep. And yet, the Caucasian control, those guys were just miserable and they were horrible. Same thing with the laps, you know, the northern lap, the laps. They could learn to sleep in these cold just on a little cot above the floor, the ice hut, And they were getting amazing sleep even though it was cold. And they weren't all blanketed, you know? So what we know is we're highly adaptable. That's the point we make in the paper.

And, in fact, we know that, you know, we've now some studies have come out in terms of metabolic rate and activity. The ones that were done in NIH with 66 trees. People sleep better. I sleep better. Hospitals are cold, not warm, and there's a reason, you know. What I like to understand is, well, one, I can't sleep in the heat. Right.

I think a lot of people are like that. But what I like to understand is, you know, why core body temperature. Core body temperature is absolutely under a circadian rhythm. Right. Obviously, you know, melatonin plays a role in that. But I would, I'd like to understand, like, why exactly? Right. Why is it that, why does your body being cold, cooler, make you sleep?

Like, why? Right. You know, I'd like to understand the mechanism. I'm curious, I want to know. Yeah. And I'm trying to figure it out. I just started looking into it. Yeah.

And it's, and I mean, I think it's tied to the fact of that drop into half a degree that the brain needs to see. You know, that's at half degree. And, you know, it's really amazing. Hibernation, you know. Yeah, yeah. You go, you get the, it's when, in winter. Yeah. When they sleep.

Yeah. And it's, and if you think about it, you know, it's really amazing. If you think about, you know, you know, homeotherms versus is Pocotherms. When you look at the difference in our regulatory mechanisms, and you look at how in the hell our body stay at this certain temperature. And, you know, another big leader in the thermal regulation side, that's a whole new brand, a whole other branch of people. A really interesting colleague that met, he's been amazing. Ivanov has done all this stuff on thermal regulation. Interestingly, our temperature is a result.

of energy flux and we don't actually maintain body temperature. So we're actually not maintaining 98.6. It's the net sum of what actually is going on. And that's really kind of interesting. And he's done amazing studies. When I was doing all this stuff with the energetic side, his stuff was really, really, really incredible. But, you know, it just seems like this theme comes up over and over

that these things get connected. And if you think about it in the last century, and that's the subtitle of my book, how our mastery of food and environment may have led to unintentional chronic disease and obesity. Super cool, Ray. This has been a very interesting conversation we've had.

We've covered a lot. Yeah, we did. We've covered a lot. The room didn't melt this time. Right. If people want to learn more about, you know, the science you're doing, the books you're writing, the experiments you're doing, anything about Ray, Kronice, where can they find you? Well, Google is easy. Just Ray Kronice, it's C-R-O-N-I-S-E. I guess you'll slug that. Right now, for a short period of time, when this is being, this and if you're looking later, I have a crowdsource, hour broken plate is the title. It's on Kickstarter. I love your support. try to do this. This is a sort of proof that we can sort of do this. And then my regular website is hypothermics.com, but Raychronyce.com points to it. I'll probably be blogging a little bit less.

I mean, literally, I blogged once in the last year twice. I'm not one of these people that has to put something up every week just to drive traffic because I don't care. It's when I have something really to say that I put it up there. But go back and start and read. And you'll see, actually, I was wrong. Because, you know, one of the things that you and I know, but a lot of people, you know, you're only learning when you're wrong. And if your thoughts don't evolve, and if you don't change along the time, you're probably not, like, pushing hard enough. So you'll actually see my thinking evolve on this. And, you know, some of the things we've talked about today, I go into more detail. So that site, and then sooner or later, I'll probably have an hour broken

plate and do a little work on there. So I hope to use that as a focus point to try to pull together some of the philanthropy money that's thrown at all the other stuff. What about social media? Yeah. Twitter, it's at Ray Kronice. I have an Instagram. I think my Instagram is Mr. Zero-G. You can link to all those.

YouTube channels all, and I'm not putting anything on there right now. But you can link to all those on my hypothalamus page. Cool. Thanks a lot, Ray, for this. Great. It's been fun. Okay, that's it for this podcast. Thanks for listening.

Learn more about what Ray is doing by going to to Raycronized.com. That's R-A-Y-C-R-O-N-I-S-E dot com. And remember, boys, girls, sentiate machines, and extraterrestrials. To get awesome articles, podcast announcements, and much more, go to Found MyFitness.com and sign up for my email newsletter where I regularly send out exclusive content not released elsewhere. And if you really, really like what I'm doing, you can support it by pledging a few bucks at FoundMyFitness.com forward slash crowd sponsor. That's FoundMyFitness.com forward slash C. R-O-W-D-S-P-O-N-S-O-R crowd sponsor.

Tudaloo for now.