the bossbabe podcast - 359. Biohacking For Women, Systemizing Daily Routines, Debunking Diet Fads, Fertility + More with Ben Greenfield

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Scaling a million-dollar business starts with better health. Today we are deep diving into health, family, and legacy with Ben Greenfield - a biohacker, nutritionist, and 13x New York Times Best-Selling Author. In this episode we talk about the world of nutrition + biohacks, how health impacts our businesses, relationships, and beyond. Ben shares applicable modalities, specifically for women to prioritize your health and fertility, all while building a balanced lifestyle focused on family, marriage, and a thriving career. This episode is full of nuggets any ambitious female entrepreneur can adapt into their lifestyle to leave a lasting legacy. HIGHLIGHTS The truth behind fasting for women + how to fast for longevity. Fertility talk – preparing your body for a healthy pregnancy through diet and biomechanics. Biohacks for the “perfect” human diet, covering up the holes in any diet + debunking diet fads. Routines for balancing + prioritizing family, career, and lifestyle as a present parent. How to build generational legacy and impact.  RESOURCES + LINKS Join The Société: The Place to Build A Freedom-Based Business Get up to 25 FREE healthy meals from Dinnerly with code: BOSSBABE - go to dinnerly.com/offer/bossbabe Grab my favorite sleep sacks & swaddles for your little ones - head to dreamlandbabyco.com and enter code: BOSSBABE at checkout for 20% off FOLLOW Ben Greenfield: @bengreenfieldfitness bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie

I had been like voted as America's top personal trainer and I was going to all these conferences and speaking and I was racing an Ironman triathlon and I was building my business and writing books and doing the podcast and just all over the map, but I wasn't a very present father and husband. welcome back to the boss with podcast i'm natalie ellis and i'm your host for this episode i'm so excited to introduce you again to ben greenfield he is a biohacker nutritionist physiologist fitness coach competitive athlete and new york York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including the wildly popular titles Beyond Training and Boundless. So Ben was actually on the podcast, I think it was about five years ago now, and it was a really, really popular

episode. And I wanted to bring him back to talk about anything that might have changed in the health industry, all of the latest diet fads, what we think about fasting. We also get into a lot of topics around women specifically, whether it's fertility, postpartum, and how we can take the best care of our kids. I loved all of the areas we went to in this podcast, especially the stuff around family, because I think connection, community, family, those are the hidden biohacks that a lot of people don't talk about. So I love this episode and I hope you do too. Ben, welcome back.

Thank you. Okay, so let's dive in. The last time you were on, I think it was five years ago. I think so. And I think it was in California, wasn't it? Yeah, it was in LA. Yeah. Our last podcast actually was, we talked about something that ended up being quite controversial. And I think in a really good way of how women shouldn't just be fasting all the time. And, and that really, really landed. So let's see if it was something else. The kiss pepton talk. Yeah. Yeah. And the whole idea is intermittent fasting is the rage. And of course, 80% of the research that's done anyways is done on males, not females. However, if you look at the actual research on females, then once you exceed around 12 hours, you see a downregulation of Kispeptin, which is technically a peptide. And that causes

a lowering of FH and LSH, two key fertility regulating hormones hormones and so you tend to see almost like this message that a woman's body gets once she gets past 12 hours of not eating that it's a time of starvation or famine and not a good time to bring a baby into the world even if you're not planning on having a baby so it kind of down regulates a lot of stuff you'd need for libido, for hair, for skin, for nails, for healthy cholesterol levels. And, you know, it's not as though you shouldn't fast, right? Almost every blue zone, almost every longevity hotspot has some semblance of religious fasting or some kind of systematic cleanse. It's just this whole idea of a daily intermittent fast that's longer than 12 hours seems to, for some reason in women be different, right? For men, you tend to see those effects kick in at 16 plus hours. That's where men need

to start to be careful. But for women it's 12 hours. So my way around this, like if you want to fast for the purposes of longevity, which is arguably like the best reason to be fasting is for longevity. You know, fasting is not going to necessarily like cause weight loss, right? Eating fewer calories causes weight loss. And because a fasting protocol such as intermittent fasting gives you a compressed feeding window, it's like kind of likely that you're just not going to be able to shovel as many calories into your gaping maw between like 10 AM and 6. and 6 p.m. versus just like eating ad libitum. So assuming that fasting is not great for weight loss, it's more the calorie count that is associated with fasting than the reason would be for longevity. But the problem is that all of the longevity benefits

seem to kick in at the 16 plus hour mark. And so what you do, and this is very similar to like how you would cycle out of keto or how you would cycle out of caloric restriction. You know, it's this idea of fasting feeding cycles, sending your body a message that, Hey, you're okay. There are enough carbohydrates or calories around. We're going to give them to you every once in a while. So with fasting, what you do is just a couple of times a month, do like a 24 hour dinner time to dinner time fast, where you're getting that period of autophagy and cellular cleanup and longevity, but it's not a daily restrictive scenario. And then I also like the idea of kind of like a quarterly cleanup.

This would be like spring, summer, winter, fall, whatever on new year's after Thanksgiving, when the summer starts and, you know, maybe around March, you're doing like a three to five day period of a lot of mindfulness and attention paid to the quality and the quantity of your diet. This could be like a bone broth fast, a juice fast, you know, like an Ayurvedic kitchery cleanse. I'm not a huge fan of just like straight up dry fasting. It's really tough and it depletes you of a lot of nutrients. And I mean, you know, if you had cancer or something like that, and you're trying to starve off cancer, you can make a case for it. But generally you work in a spring, summer, winter,

fall cleanup, do like a 24 hour dinner to dinner fast a couple of times a month. And then daily have some period of time where you're not eating, but for women, it should be closer to like 10 to 12 hours. Okay. I've never done one of those five day ones. Oh my gosh. Torture. I'm a foodie. And I always think about food and I'm skinny already. So yeah, it's, it's hard for me. I'm always working in like ketones and some amino acids. And you know, it's like people, you know, the, one of the most common questions is how in health is like, will this break my fast? You know, will the creamer break my fast? Will the sugar break my fast? And like even when I do a strict fast, I'll work in certain things that technically, you know, bone broth, a little bit of juice, you know.

And I think that's fine because they're kind of veritable speed bumps when it comes to getting the longevity benefits. And if that's what it takes to get you through like five days of eating, you know, 20 to 30% of what you normally eat calorie wise, that's fine. I know some people that do it and just like crush it. I totally find not eating. I'm like, you know what? I'm not there yet, but can we also talk about, um, you touched on it a little bit fertility and, and thinking about maybe preparing your body for fertility, for getting pregnant, like really thinking about how you can be in the best place to get pregnant what are some of the things women can be thinking about or doing in that in that time frame well i would chunk it into like biomechanics and metabolism right the way you move and the way you eat and you know it's interesting

because there was this dentist his name name is Weston A. Price, have you heard of him? Traveled all over the world. He looked at all these areas where the kids, all the way up to and through the adults, had really nice teeth and skin and hair and nails and hard, dense bones and well-formed jaws. And so this was decades ago. He started to do investigations into what the actual dietary composition of these folks is or are that would lead to this. And he identified high intake of fat-soluble vitamins, like vitamin A and D and E. But then there was like this mystery factor that turned out to be what we now call vitamin K,

which is arguably one of the most important vitamins you can take for heart health, for bone health, for muscle composition. Technically, there's different forms of it. And the form that's best in terms of the most research is called MK4. And, you know, there's an MK7, there's an MK1. In an ideal scenario, you would have the entire spectrum of k like um designs for health for example that's what i'm taking right now it's called tri-k because it's three different forms of vitamin k and the reason i take that is because of the effects of you know of aging on hair and skin and nails and muscle and bone so vitamin k

is great but you also find it in things like fermented dairy, grass-fed butter, even fermented vegetables like natto and miso and tempeh and fermented tofu. You don't get a ton from meat, but a lot of these fat portions of plants, even like avocados, olives, olive oil, avocado oil, you get a little bit there. I would say the most dense source would be like fermented dairy and butter. So vitamin K appears to be one big key factor along with really all the fat soluble vitamins. But this would be one thing to ensure that you're getting as an expecting mother or someone who plans on increasing fertility as well as well into breastfeeding and beyond beyond in addition to working some of those fat soluble vitamins into your child's diet. So that's one super important

factor are the fat soluble vitamins. If you go to Google or to the Weston A. Price Foundation website and you just search for Weston A. Price dietary guidelines, there is a one pager there. And I will have the women who I'm working with who are pregnant or expecting, or have already had a baby print that out and just like hanging on the fridge. Cause it gives you a full rundown. You could buy this book by Sally Fallon and it's, it's her entire book on the Weston a price diet with recipes. And I forget the name of it. It's like the art of fermentation or something like that. She followed up and co-wrote a book with Dr. Thomas Cowan all on pregnancy, childbearing, toddler and baby feeding. I forget the name of that one, but it's also printed by the Weston A. Price Foundation, really good clean quality grass fed grass finished beef products and fish and pastured pork and, you know, organic eggs from chicken fed a good diet and bone broth and vegetables. But they're fermented a lot of the times to increase the nutrient density and concentrate some of those things like vitamin K.

And then it's not like a paleo grain-free, dairy-free diet, right? Not only is there fermented dairy, but there's sourdough bread and fermented grains and lots of soaking and sprouting and fermentation and these slow food prep methods that deactivate a lot of the digestive irritants in plants and vegetables and also increase their nutrient concentration. So if I was sitting next to somebody who was wanting to have a baby or expecting on an airplane and they were just asking me, Hey, what's the healthiest diet? I would say, well, I mean, if you have nothing against eating meat and dairy, like the Weston A. Price Foundation diet is a pretty good place to start. And if you didn't do that diet, you could do, let's say like vegan or plant-based or Mediterranean or whatever you're

doing. But if you did that, I would at least supplement with a D E and K in terms of really good fat soluble vitamins. And then for the biomechanics piece, um, I think the two best things to do are bracing exercises in the gym. And usually you can, you can do these all the way up at least the second trimester. Once you get into third, like, like you can, you can start to get so much of, uh, this, this compound called relax and produce that it gets a little bit tough to like lift heavy weights or move multi-joint exercises without risking a little bit of a tear or kind of shifting a joint out of place because your ligaments become so relaxed in preparation for childbirth but deadlifts squats weight-bearing exercises even just like bracing as you do for example like a leg press at the gym upper body exercises but

doing them standing if you can lots of hip extender work like glute bridges low back extensions if you can tolerate the kind of like a partial range of motion because the belly can get in the way with those. But something that activates the glutes is really important because your hip flexors are going to get super tight as your forward posture kind of pulls you into that hunched over position. So if you work the glute extensors, you kind of combat that propensity to have things like low back pain

or even just a little bit of discomfort in the low back. In propensity to have things like low back pain, or even just a little bit of discomfort in the low back in the same manner, doing like hip openers, you know, like yoga based hip openers, you know, the classic couch stretch, which you can Google and see, and it's literally like putting one leg behind you and kind of shifting forward and just getting deep into that hip flexor, anything that opens the hips on the front and then triggers the glutes from the back. And I'm a voracious reader. So I'll sometimes drop all sorts of names of books, but there's a really great book by Brett Contreras called the glute lab. And this is the guy who's got the Instagram channel where, you

know, all he's showing is the glutes of all the different women who he's helped get amazing glutes. And his book is really good. And he's, he's scientific. Like he's done electromyographic analyses of the glute muscles and the hip extensors and looked at which exercises are the best. The very best one is that you can't find it at many gyms, but basically it's like the glute thruster where you kind of like on your back and you're pushing your hips up, but there's kind of a belt on your waist with the weight. And you can simulate that to a certain extent.

Like I'll do this. If I'm doing a workout in my hotel room where I'll put my heels on the coffee table and then just like bridge up. And because it's body weight, you got to do more reps, but that bridging or glute extension motion while your back's on the ground is one of the best exercises to activate the glutes. And you can do that without a lot of equipment. And it's, it's pretty easy for a lot of people to at least do that basic movement. So those types of bracing exercises are really good. And then swimming is amazing. My wife swam all through her pregnancy. It's very therapeutic. It's, it's kind of like this swishing or the baby, it kind of like lengthens the body. It's easy on the back. So if you're going to choose two different modes of

exercise besides just walking, which is fantastic, it would be a lot of these core based bracing and glute triggering exercises in the gym and then swimming. And you can swim. Like I think my wife swam all the way up to like maybe like five days out. She was just in the water all the time. Yeah. When you're that pregnant being in, being in the water, it's like magic. The water just takes the weight and you're like, thank you very much. I i'll stay here and obviously like subtle nuances people like well chlorine do i want a bunch of chlorine in my body right you can get mineral based you know you can swim in mineral-based pools and a lot of clubs and hotels and stuff

you can google the name of your city plus minerals pool and usually you can come up with a handful i would be careful with the chlorine a lot of it's mostly just like the fact that it continues to absorb through your skin after you get out of the water. Right. But the way you get past that is a vitamin C spray. You could literally take like lemon juice and water and wash down with that. Or there are sprays like one that I think is designed for swimmers. It's called swim spray. It's just a vitamin C solution. And I used to keep that in my gym bag. When I race triathlon, you just spray it all over the skin wipe it off with a towel and this would be after you've taken your post-swim shower and that gets rid of a lot of the chlorine that's just like sitting there on the skin absorbing for hours after you've gotten out of the pool wait that's so smart okay i'm

gonna do that because i i'm always conscious of that my daughter she loves swimming and especially with her having like your soft spot and stuff i heard that you can get their swim cap wet then put it on and it kind of shields but i'm always so nervous about the chlorine yeah so after they come out or after we come out you put it okay that's vitamin c spray and then rub it off and then even endogenous antioxidants like like some kind of really good powerful antioxidant like glutathione that's one that my kids take every day okay i did one of those genetic tests for my kids which a lot of people freak out about they're like uh insurance

companies and you know government somebody's gonna get their hands on that data and use it against your children i think the pros that way the cons of doing a simple salivary test and seeing like for my kids i found out they've got low levels of BDNF production, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor, which means that I do sauna with them a lot. We go on walks because aerobic exercise and heat increases BDNF. And then they take lion's mane, or they just put a little bit in their, in their tea or in their oatmeal in the morning. They, they have one of those little, um, four sigmatic lion's mane packets. Cause that also is one of the best ways

to increase BDNF. Psilocybin is also really good for that, but I didn't start giving that to my kids yet. Um, and then they take organ meat capsules, like the little encapsulated organ. Uh, it's like heart and liver and kidney. They're using the one by paleo valley right now because they've got sluggish methylation pathways, which a lot of people have. And one using the one by paleo Valley right now because they've got sluggish methylation pathways, which a lot of people have. And one of the best sources of bioavailable folate and some of those fat soluble vitamins that we talked about are organ meats. So they have that, they have their little section of the fridge, right? So they got their, their lion's mane, they have their organ capsules and then glutathione and glutathione is a safe antioxidant for kids to use

it's one of those little like sublingual squirts that kind of tastes like an orange cream soda i think they have the quick silver scientific one right now and that's also really good as an antioxidant that you could use after swimming other ones would be vitamin c vitamin e there's a there's a plant actually called ann natto and you can isolate the most powerful form of vitamin E from it called tocotrienols. And you can find supplement companies that sell like just a natto extract vitamin E, which is way better than the basic vitamin E you would get from, you know, CVS or Amazon or whatever. And then a couple super powerful other antioxidants that I think more people should know about that are like 100 times more powerful than a lot of the traditional like greens powders and red

powders and stuff like that one is called taro still being you hear a lot of people in the aging sector talk about sirtuins and guys like david sinclair talk about resveratrol as being one of those dna protectants and really good antioxidants well taro still being spelled like pterodactyl p-t-r-o still being that's like a hundred times more powerful than resveratrol you can get it as a supplement and the other one is c60 i don't know if you've heard of that one before but it's getting more and more popular in like the anti-aging and longevity sectors it's this little like soccer ball shaped molecule that just quenches and soaks up free radical damage the same as you would get from hefty immersion in chlorine and just sops it all up and it's c60 stands for carbon 60 and there's one company that makes my

my kids like to take these are these little gummies they're called purple power gummies and they taste great it tastes like a gummy bear but it's just like c60 and coconut oil and i think they use a little bit of stevia or something like that in there um yeah just like a vitamin c spray and then like some good antioxidants so then speaking about um western a price so i came across that rinsed around page first and then really got immersed into this maybe about three years ago and I am such a big fan of all those kinds of foods recommended and it's something that I did pre-baby while I was pregnant post-partum and with my baby now and it's a lot of nose to tail like her first food was liver we do raw dairy when she's not having breast milk and things like that but then I will say the explore page on Instagram feeds me so many things that

puts the fear in me around, well, you know, I, she has meat a lot and grass fed butter. And like, we always know the source of where things come from, but I, I see two camps, right. And I just want to put it out because as a mother, you just want to do what's best for them. And my intuition tells me this what's best for her. But then you you know meat's bad for you uh vegetables bad for you like it almost feels everything except cardboard is bad for you yeah cardboard needs to be organic yeah and what's your thoughts on all this because it just feels so confusing sometimes yeah it is confusing and and it's made even worse by the fact that especially in our day and age it's so easy to monetize a diet or a dietary principle. That's the dirty secret in the nutrition industry is you say you've got the one perfect diet for all of humankind and or the one supplement that blocks or breaks down the one molecule that's bad for all of humankind.

And then you write a book around that and you sell it. That is the blueprint. Right, exactly. Okay, I pride myself in having systems for everything and that includes our weekly meal prep. But sometimes when I'm coming off the back of a lot of travel or just having a busy week, I love having the option of a healthy delivery kit.

Dinelli is today's podcast sponsor and is the most affordable meal kit I've ever come across. Plus with our code BOSSBABE, you can get up to 25 free meals. With Dinelli you can choose from over 100 dishes every week including a wide selection of cuisines and flavors from steak dinners to oven roasted salmon or even your favorite takeout jupes. Recently my favorite meal from Dinelli was the steak fajita rice bowl. It came with everything we needed to put the entire dinner together in just 20 minutes and it tasted really good dinnerly it truly makes mealtime flexible not only can you customize your meals the way you want them but dinnerly also has different serving sizes for

families big and small budget-friendly recipes and options for so many different diets think low calorie low carb vegetarian and gluten-free friendly make cooking excitable affordable and easy with dinnerly head to dinnerly.com slash offer slash boss babe and use code boss babe for up to 25 free meals. Once again, that's dinnerly.com backslash offer backslash boss babe for up to 25 free meals and make sure you use my promo code boss babe so they know that I sent you.

First of all, based on the nature of biochemical individuality, which means people have different shapes and sizes of their liver, their pancreas, their stomach, they have different excretion rates for vitamin D. They have different amounts of methylation patterns that would dictate that they need more methionine from me and other people don't need as much methionine from meat and then there are genetic factors like some people have a super pronounced inflammatory response to eating an amount of saturated fat that's more than like 10 percent of their daily fat intake whereas other people can just like crush pork chops and fatty ribeye steaks and put a stick of butter in their coffee and be just fine because they don't have that inflammatory response to saturated fats. Some people due to lifestyle factors have like sluggish bile production by the gallbladders. They also can't handle as much fats. Other people

have a high predisposition to type two diabetes because they genetically just like don't turn up as much insulin by the beta cells in the pancreas, or they have low levels of like the glute four receptors, which kind of shovel glucose in the muscle tissue. So when you step back and look at it, you can make a pretty strong case that, well, there's no one perfect diet for everybody. That's the first thing to understand. If you were to paint with a really broad brush, back to like this, if you're sitting next to me on an airplane and you asked me the perfect diet for all of humankind i would say based on epidemiological data the diet that comes close to a diet that does pretty good job for most people at reducing all-cause risk of mortality and keeping nutrient levels elevated is some semblance of a mediterranean diet. Not like unlimited breadsticks and Caesar salad bowls with seed

oils at Olive Garden, but like a traditional Mediterranean diet, rich in plants and herbs and spices and omega-3 fatty acids and good fish and some elements of fasting thrown in there and good natural cheeses and how you'd eat if you were over in, over in Italy and, you know, eating a natural diet. So that all being said, when it comes to a lot of this fear mongering out there around meat or around vegetables, it all depends. Like for example, yes, you could make an argument that something like a carnivore or a meat-based diet is bad for you. If you're following the type of carnivore diet a meat-based diet is bad for you if you're following the type of carnivore diet that a lot of people typically follow which is you know ribeye steak for breakfast lunch and dinner and maybe some fish thrown in and maybe a little bit of bone broth

or something here and there but the reason for that is anytime you're eating all the muscle meat there's a lot of the amino acid methionine in there. And the organ meats and the nose to tail approach is much richer in a different amino acid called glycine. And methionine is associated with excessive activation of mTOR, which is a pathway in the body that could accelerate aging or accelerate risk of cancer. And so if all you're eating is muscle meats and not eating nose to tail, then a carnivore diet could be bad for you. In addition, just in the past two months, two different studies came out, one showing that at least 40 grams of fiber per day can decrease all cause risk of mortality and is associated with better longevity. Another study showed that high

polyphenol intake, such as you would get from the dark purples and blues and blacks and reds of the plant kingdom, like pomegranates and black walnuts and blueberry and grapes and things like that, that's actually also associated with decreased all-cause risk of mortality. Well, you can't find a whole lot of fiber and a whole lot of polyphenols on the carnivore diet, right? So that would be another issue is you're missing out on some key nutrients that yeah, you could supplement with to a certain extent, but even then you'd kind of be breaking the rules of a carnivore diet. So I think that if you are going to eat a lot of meat in a carnivoresque diet, you should

at least eat nose to tail, include polyphenols or some type of a polyphenol-based supplement, and even consider like a greens powder or something that would increase the amount of fiber, at least getting you up to around 40 grams. The other issue is that that diet tends to be kind of low in calcium and some other minerals. And that's why you'll see a lot of carnivore diet enthusiasts doing things like eggshells or bone powder, like bone mineral powder, or there's companies like ancestral supplements that have like a bone mineral matrix that you can drop into a smoothie. Not that you're doing any smoothies on carnivore diet,

unless it's like a raw liver bone broth, Steve. Yeah. Oh, you can't do Steve yet. Nevermind. We're all over bone broth smoothie. So, so, so yeah, I mean like a meat-based diet could be good or bad for you if you look at a plant-based diet well plants don't have teeth and claws and nails and antlers like animals do and so because of that they have their own plant defense mechanisms like you know lectins like gluten and phytic acid and digestive enzyme inhibitors and things that would potentially irritate the digestive tract of a mammal as a survival mechanism to that plant to either cause that mammal to not come back later on to eat more of it for seconds or to poop the seed of the plant undigested out somewhere else so that the plant can grow. So a lot of people will see that and say, well, we shouldn't eat plants. But in the same way, you know, because I do some bow hunting, I'm not going to like put a dagger in my mouth and jump out of a tree and just like sink a knife into a deer's neck and start chewing on its hide.

Like I have to I have to field dress it and I have to take the meat and usually I'll dry age it or wet ages. So that fermentation process starts to break down the meat. And then I got to cook it over a flame in most cases, you know, to, to get rid of bacteria potential for parasites. And there's a lot I got to do before I actually eat that meal or eat that meat. And you can say the same thing for plants, right? Like if you wander out into, I don't know, I live up on the Palouse up in Idaho and Washington. If you wander into one of the rolling fields of wheat there and just like pull a stock of wheat out of the ground and start chewing on it, that's a lot of concentrated gluten. All the more so because we breed wheat now in the U.S. for high yield crops, which concentrates the gluten even more. sourdough process or I were to soak it or do something that's going to make it digestible,

then it becomes far less problematic unless I have celiac disease or something like that. And you could say the same thing for like quinoa. It's supposed to be rinsed, preferably an acidic vinegar-like medium, like, you know, a quarter vinegar and three quarter water and left overnight and then rinsed again in the morning. And that's when you cook your quinoa. And that's how you get rid of like this saponin soap-like irritant on the outside of the quinoa or millet or amaranth or you could take like tomatoes yeah technically you are supposed to kind of like peel and de-seed them if you can because if you're eating a lot of them that stuff can irritate the digestive tract ideally if you're sensitive to lectins you could pressure cook potatoes right and a lot of people like this

all sounds exhausting but this is how humans operate for like thousands of years before ultra processing and packaging of foods developing like a deep and intimate relationship with your food all the way down to eating mindfully is something we should be teaching kids from an early age like that's what we've done with our sons we've taught them how to cook how to pray before a meal how to have gratitude how to like play dinner games and have conversations during dinner so you're eating your food slowly and mindfully how to you know make sprouts and kefir and kombucha and sourdough bread and all these little things that are constantly in the kitchens like a chemistry lab all this stuff is just constantly going and honestly it's kind of like brushing your teeth after a while like you just get used to hey you know friday morning i'm taking

my seeds and i'm tossing in a jar with some water after I rinsed them and putting the jar back up under the kitchen counter at a 45 degree angle. And then I'm going to, you know, look at my little post-it note on the windowsill and rinse it once a day. And by the end of the week, I have a bunch of beautiful sprouts that I would have paid 40 bucks for at the grocery store. And I just made them for a quarter at home. Right. So once you start to learn this stuff, it becomes very simple and really enjoyable. Right. So, so yeah, carnivore diet, you got to cover up some holes and prepare it properly. Plant-based diet, you need to pay attention to the way that you're preparing things. But ultimately, if you look at like the blue zones, even though they sometimes get a little

flack because of potential for birth record falsification or at least poor birth records or poor sample sizes. There are some issues with them, but you do see common characteristics of areas where people live a disproportionately long period of time, and it's not the same diet. It's not all low-carb, high-fat, low-fat, high-carb, plant-based, carnivore, whatever. You see common threads, low fat, high carb, plant-based carnivore, whatever you see common threads, common characteristics, such as high intake of herbs and spices in a wide variety of plants, probably because of the fact that a lot of these plant defense compounds when consumed in small amounts and when spread out over a wide variety of plants cause a little bit of hormesis the same

way that heat and cold and exercise do. So you can do some amount of cellular cellular resilience they also seem to do a good job stabilizing blood glucose which is why like if you're at the steakhouse and you want to punish some mashed potatoes like having a little bit of bitters and soda water is you know like a quick easy hack to wait what is that hack i don't know that hack like anything bitter or vinegar you know apple cider vinegar shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal or some ceeylon cinnamon in your smoothie. Well, if you don't have any of that and you're just like out at a restaurant, you can just ask the bar for a bunch of bitters on ice with some soda water. Bitters don't have a lot of alcohol in them anyways. It's not like you're going to get like sloshed from drinking bitters, but they're actually good for lowering your glycemic index and jumpstarting the production of digestive compounds in the body.

So a lot of times when you see me at a restaurant, it looks like I'm on my third cocktail. It's like my third soda water and bitters. And usually a little bit of like a squeeze of lemon in there is good too. Not a lot of restaurants have apple cider vinegar, but if they do, you can have them put some of that in. And then the other things you'll see in the blue zones is high level of physical activity. A lot of times outside you see some semblance of religious fasting or ceremonial fasting or systematic cleansing you see um a low intake in most cases of ultra processed foods particularly those rich in seed oils and added sugars because a lot of the food is grown just closer to nature and eaten more fresh and then perhaps in my opinion, most notably, like food is consumed in a parasympathetic state where resting and digesting is supported, where you're grateful, where you're eating with people, you know, where you're breaking bread, you know, with the family and maybe the extended family in the evenings. And it's way different than the Western philosophy of like sucking your superfood smoothie down while you're driving 60 miles an hour down the highway and way to work yeah or on the treadmill or so so yeah you see these common

characteristics and i would say it's in an ideal scenario in our day and age it's not that hard to self-quantify it's not that hard to get like a dna test and a blood test and maybe a stool panel to see what parasites and yeast and fungus are doing or maybe if you have a high amount of small intestine bacterial overgrowth or something that would predispose you to a lot of gas from fermentable foods and you can get something like a good food allergy panel from a company like cyrex or zoomer to just see if you have like a pronounced antibody reaction to certain foods and then you can sit down with that data and say, okay, well, here are some things I should avoid. Here are some things I'm deficient in that I can cover up the holes in from a supplement or a food standpoint.

And then you can step back and just like customize your diet accordingly. I mean, even if you look in like, it's a few years old. I was telling you before we started recording, I'm going to update it. But like in the last pages of my book,less there's like 13 different diets you know like the west and a price the paleo plant-based and then it says well if your genetics say this if your blood panel says this and if your goals and your activity levels are this and this is the diet that's probably going to work best for you so i tried to somehow replicate that in a book but in an ideal scenario you're like getting all the tests sitting down looking at them and them and then saying, okay, so these are the foods I should avoid.

These are the foods I should eat. These are the supplements I should avoid. These are the supplements I should take. And that would have cost you like $20,000, like a couple of decades ago. And now, I mean, you could run like almost every panel, everything I just said for, it's still expensive. It's still around like two thousand dollars but in my opinion like if you then have that data and you're just like set for life with everything you need to know to eat properly it's almost worth it 100 i mean it's prevent medical bills in the future and stuff especially in america yeah it's gonna cost and just peace of mind like walking into a restaurant being like hey you know i need the fish and the you know the white rice and some olive oil and

you know sweet potatoes. And I'm not going to do the asparagus because I have an antibody reaction to those. And I'm going to limit the alcohol because I've got sluggish liver or gallbladder production. You just kind of know. Right. Another thing I would love to ask you, and we're kind of weaving this in and out of the conversation. I have your parenting book. It's awesome.

It's like a full encyclopedia. I didn't think it was going to be so big. It's amazing. That was so fun to write. And you're very open in talking about your marriage, your children, the life that you live. And what I really admire is how established you are in your career, but how much you really prioritize what's important to you, your wife, your kids, your lifestyle, all of that. How have you balanced all of that? And what is your philosophy when it comes to balancing that? Because I think that's, especially in today's world, something parents are really struggling

with. Yeah. Family is really important to me. I grew up in a conservative household where there was a lot of importance placed on things like family dinners. And even like divorce was something that was looked upon as like a last dish option if like stuff had gone horribly south. But for the most part, you like love your partner and you figure out a way to stick with them through thick and thin, work out your differences no matter what. And, you know, um, time and presence spent with children was important. And my wife grew up in a similar setting. Like we just were just conservative, like North Idaho, you know, she went to classical Christian school, I was homeschooled. And so we grew up with an appreciation for family as a foundation not only for happiness but also for like cultural and societal stability and as a way to almost think of it as like a way to be immortal right like you're you're training your children up in such a way that your legacy lives on and the

work that you know you find most impactful and that you feel as though really feeds your purpose is something that can go on and be fulfilled through your children. If you raise them in a way that really passes your values onto them. So about nine years ago, I was pretty hard charging, right? Like I had been like voted as America's top personal trainer and I was going to all these conferences and speaking and I was racing an Ironman triathlon and I was building my business and writing books and doing the podcast and just all over the map. But I wasn't a very present father and husband, which is kind of paradoxical because like I re invented my entire career when my sons were born to be at home more. Like I sold my personal training studios and gyms and I started writing and I built a home office and started podcasting in my underwear at home and just started to, to be with the kids more. But then my business just took on such a trajectory that I was not around much. And we got to a point nine years ago to where I was just such a crappy, non-contributing,

unpresent father and husband that my wife and I began to consider separating. And we got some pretty big arguments. And I had to go back to the drawing board and sit with myself and analyze my life and spend a lot of time on my knees, you know, in front of God in the mornings praying and reading my Bible and meditating and journaling. And it was during that time that I was having dinner with this guy who's actually featured in my parenting book, Chad Johnson. And he's a really good entrepreneur. He's an Ironman triathlete. He's got like 11 kids or something crazy like that. And he, um, he said, Ben, your business will eat you alive and you have to have your priorities in order.

And the priorities are, and some people who are listening might've heard of this priority order. It's the big five. I talk about in the book as well. Number one, God, you got to care for your spiritual health. Cause that's the one part of you that's going to be alive and kicking and big five I talk about in the book as well. Number one, God, you got to care for your spiritual health because that's the one part of you that's going to be alive and kicking and flourishing and bright and burning. Even when the rest of you have, you know, faded and wrinkled and your muscles are gone, your bones have, you know, become less dense and everything's atrophied. It's like your spirit will still burn bright. And so you need to care for that. And that's also a way to be able to show up for the rest of the world in a really positive way. And then second is your spouse, because you and your spouse need to be yoked. You need to be connected. You need to have your oxygen masks

on first before you can be there for number three, which is your children, your family, right? So you've got God and then spouse and then children. And then the fourth is health, right? Just taking care of your body, not being that person that builds up a giant empire. And then when you're 50, you have a heart attack or when you're 60, you've got a bunch of money, but you can't do anything with it. You can't go hiking or whatever, you know, wake surfing or pickleball or anything because your joints are just all beat up and your body doesn't work properly. And so that order of priorities really resonated with me and God and spouse and children and then health and then business. And I was kind of like business health and then like God,

spouse and children were kind of sort of just all mixed up at the bottom. And I justified that to myself by thinking, well, I'm providing for my family. I'm building a business that will help to take care of us. You know, once I'm done with this building phase and I'll be just like a fully at present father and, you know, and, you know, I'm traveling all over the place. You know, part of my job is to race. I got to keep my health and my fitness up. And I just had my priorities backwards. So I fixed that. Like I really started spending lots of time in my spiritual disciplines and that would be, you know, there's great books about this. Like Donald Whitney is probably the foremost author. Adele Calhoun has like this spiritual disciplines

workbook that we spent two years going together as a family week by week by week, learning about fasting and silence and solitude and meditation and worship and service in the local community and scripture reading and journaling and prayer and just all these skills that are kind of like you know dead lifting and high intensity interval training and zone two cardio and ice baths but it's all for the spirit all these different ways we can train the spirit and so i began to structure my morning such that it didn't start with work or didn't start with a workout. It started with God. And so even now, like first thing in the morning, I open up my Bible app and I lay there and I read it. And I use this one called Bible in one year where it stops with different prayers throughout. And if I don't do that before I get out of bed, it's pretty unlikely that it's going to happen just because once life happens, it doesn't happen. So I lay there in bed and I like to use neuro triggers, you know, things that are positive or pleasurable things that you associate with a certain activity that might be kind of boring, like just laying there reading your Bible. And so I've got like, you know, red light mat on my bed and I've got some of the like body therapy

devices and it has a little PMF thing. So I'll just lay there in bed and kind of wake my body up while I'm reading the Bible. And then I always listen to something spiritual as I'm getting up and brushing my teeth and doing my oil pulling and doing my stretching and my foam rolling. And, you know, just kind of having my first hour of the day to care for my body. Usually I'm listening to like a sermon or something spiritual or something uplifting or an audio book, but really just trying to fuel and feed the spirit. And then at about 7am, the whole family meets in the living room and we do meditation and breath work and we read a devotional and we have a big team huddle where everybody

talks about, Hey, you know, who's contributing what to dinner tonight and when's jujitsu and when's tennis and who's going where and what time do you have math class so that your guitar lessons at home so dad can make sure it's quiet in the podcasting studio or whatever like we're just like having this big meeting the same way as you would with the business huddle and then we go about the day and we're all doing our things then we gather again for family dinner and before family dinner i take my sons through a chapter of a book because we all read one book every two weeks and we talk about the chapters in that book at night before dinner. And then we sing a song and we sit down and we play dinner games while we eat a dinner that everybody's

helped to prepare throughout the day. Like in the starting in the morning, you know, like Ben, you're in charge of the chicken and Jesse, you're doing the sweet potato fries and boys, you're making a salad. And, you know, so we all kind of like contribute and have whatever our part of the meal is ready at the end of the day. Then we have our family dinner and we all clean up together and talk and joke and laugh and hang out. And then we go up in my son's room and we'll play guitar, read a story. We all memorize a verse of the Bible every night.

So we're constantly focusing on something positive before bed. And then my wife and I go in the bedroom and we'll, we'll talk. Uh, we always pray before bed for like the past seven years, everything ends with a prayer just because we feel like that really keeps us yoked spiritually. And it's hard to like have something between you and your spouse and then do something really sacred like that at the end of the day. Just like, it's hard to have sex when there's something between you, right? It's hard to, it's hard to like pray and be holy when you feel like there's just like something left unsaid between you. So we have

weekly marriage meetings. My wife and I do where every Wednesday night when the kids are at youth group, we sit down and it's four C's that we go through. One is contribution, meaning like what are we grateful for about each other? What have we really noticed that the other person has done? And sometimes it's awkward and you feel like you're making stuff up or blowing smoke. Cause neither of us are like big into just like, I don't know, like compliment sandwiches and gratitude and all that stuff. But we do it, what we've noticed about that person that week. And then we go into chores, like where, you know, Ben, I noticed this is piling up in the garage or, you know, just so we really got to get the car in for registration or whatever, like things that we got to take care of that week that we just need to get on the same page about. And then challenges like blockers, like it could be, hey, I'm really having a hard time right now.

I think, you know, I've been whatever smoking marijuana too much. I really need you to to watch me and call me out on that or i've been really having a hard time spiritually and feeling close to god so i need you to pray for me this week because i just feel like i've got some spiritual blockers just like open vulnerable stuff all the way down to like hey mike i've got this weird growth on my left forearm you think i should just checked out by a doctor just like making sure we know about what's going on with each other medically, physically, spiritually, et cetera. And then we finished with calendar, like what's coming up for the next few weeks in the family

calendar that we need to make sure that we've canceled something for, we have somebody to watch the goats and chickens if we're out of town or whatever. So we do that every week. And then we do a quarterly retreat where for two or three days, my wife and I just go away and it's to plan about things like an upcoming home build or deeper dives into a decade to really make sure that my life is focused on God first and then spouse and then children and then health. Like I always, you know, after our family huddle, I always go out in the gym and sometimes I drag my sons out with me if they don't have any home classes or anything that morning and I do a workout every morning whether it's sauna and ice or kettlebell or whatever so I still take care of my health and then business is always last like I'm usually not diving into business to like 10 a.m just because I've set up my day to be able to prioritize all that other stuff and some people might be like well how do you have time for work and I find if you're really focusing

on prioritizing all that other stuff, you dink around a lot less at work. Like there's a lot less checking social media and a lot less unnecessary meetings and a lot less like checking Slack again. You just like dive in hardcore because you know, okay, I've got from like 10 a.m. till 4 p.m. now

to just make shit happen and to go deep. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place, so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So, of course, I needed to share it here with you.

It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible i definitely recommend kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering boss babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's Kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. All right, I don't know if anyone will say that their baby's sleep journey was easy, but ours definitely was not. And I'm so excited because the podcast sponsor today is actually a brand that I sought out

after hearing so many recommendations about how it changed the game for their baby's sleep. So that was the weighted sleep sack from Dreamland Baby. Dreamland Baby is one of our podcast sponsors, which is a pinch me moment because I have been using them since Naomi was six months old. They created the most incredible high quality, 100% cotton, even distributed weighted sleep sack that works wonders for babies and toddlers we personally have every single color under the sun they come in so many beautiful colors and styles dreamland baby even has weighted swaddles for infants and i'm not gonna lie i wish i'd known about these when

noemi was first born the evenly distributed gentle weight helps your little ones fall asleep much faster and stay asleep longer because the weight mimics the feeling of a parent's touch plus i love that this brand was found by a mom tara williams she has an incredible business success story after creating the first prototype for her own baby and it's always so fun to see and support other women in their business journey truly i swear by this product i can't see us ever giving it up. We even take our Dreamland Baby sleep sack on flights when they are late night flights. So if you are ready for better sleep for your baby and you, go to dreamlandbabyco.com and enter our code BOSSBABE

and you'll receive 20% off site-wide plus free shipping. This offer is for new and existing customers. That's dreamlandbabyco.com and enter code bossbabe at checkout. Now I'm off to use my own code. I think that not only does the morning work make you more productive later on, but it also makes it all more meaningful and happy. It's like when you're working and you just know, I had a great time with the kids this morning and I got a great workout and my wife and I were able to talk and we had a great time last night and, you know, and then we're on the same page and, you know, and so she's happy. And you, you just feel like business is more fulfilling when, you know, how we plan out our family bank and

our family crest and logo and our little family, you know, book that we rely on that, you know, my kids will get a copy of when they get married to keep using all our traditions and rituals and routines. But yeah, that's the basics of it. What I love about that is how routine and rhythmic things are. And I really think that's so important when there's, you know, more than one of you to be thinking about and getting on the same page, having that regular check-in twice a day, what you were talking about quarterly, that is so important. And I love how rhythmic it is. It just happens over and over. So it becomes kind of second nature. Yeah. You have to, you have to plan it like i mean honestly it just doesn't

happen like your family doesn't have a family huddle every morning unless everybody knows and they're looking at their watch like hey whatever i'm doing around 7 a.m i gotta be ready to drop it because our whole family is meeting or my wife and i just just know it's like you know everything down to like don't put your mouth tape on yet you know because we're we still haven't prayed together right like but if you know it's to happen and you know, Wednesday night, like I'm not going to men's tennis league and you know, she's not going to hot yoga. It's like, we're there at the house after she drops the kids off at youth group. And so from like six 15 until eight 30, we're just like there with each other talking and having dinner together

and having our, our meeting. Yeah. There's sacrifices with stuff like that. Like, you know, my, my kids, like they probably don't play quite as many like nighttime group sports as some of their friends. Cause we're just like having an amazing time at home, you know, having dinner together as a family, but we're really yoked. Like we're a unit and everybody's super happy and yeah, they still have jujitsu and tennis and you know, they, it's not like they don't have a social life but we have prioritized and carved out certain times of the day and if you don't do that and you just set up your entire life for your family like everybody's all over the map and you're like ships passing the night

well you get to the point where your kids are going to be like 16 years old and you just feel like there wasn't any structure and when they eventually leave and go to college or get married, it's like, what are they taking? Like, do they know what the daily traditions and the comings and goings are? And when do your kids have like a rite of passage into adolescence or, you know, what are the main family meals and the family recipe book? And, you know, what do you do for Christmas? And what time is the family huddle in the morning? If it's all just kind of like loosey-goosey, you aren't operating your family with a sense of generational legacy, passing on of wealth, passing on of traditions and rituals and routines. And that can work. And it's not like you're going to completely destroy your kids with that idea.

But I am a bigger fan of every single generation being equipped to become better and better, more impactful, more connected to their purpose, more proud of the family name, I am a bigger fan of like every single generation being equipped to become better and better, more impactful, more connected to their purpose, more proud of the family name, knowing what it stands for. And, you know, and, and I would love to see generation after generation of like, you know, couples who are married for 40 or 50 or 60 years and just like die together. And, you know, families who are continuing to contribute wealth to the family, whole insurance policies and banks. So that by, you know, the time the Greenfield generation is four years down, it's like, we've got like three and a half billion dollars for, for someone to draw upon if they want to start a business or, you know, if there's a catastrophe or whatever, and, you know, and kids

taking care of their parents in the same way that their parents took care of them. And, and, you know, more and more people coming together for family dinners to where it's not just the family, it's the grandchildren, the great grandchildren. Like, that's what I like. That's my vision for our family. I realize it's not for everybody. Some people are like the nomadic homeschooling family. Some people are the like, you know, be your own person, go off on your own adventure.

Some people are like, hey, we're going to stay together until the kids are grown and then we go off and do our own thing. And, you know, I think there's certain cons of many of those approaches. But I just think thinking with a sense of generational legacy, it's something that popped up so often over and over again with all the parents I interviewed for the book as well. Like they've got whole life insurance policies, and they've got family vacations, or they've got family handbooks, and they have family dinners, and they have, you know,

morning rituals and routines. And I was pretty surprised that that was one of the big common threads of the book was how much of a sense of legacy that the parents had. Yeah, and I just think it's so important to have that, especially as business owners, we'll create these entire operating systems for our company and we'll have these regular meetings and we'll check in with our employees.

But, and I noticed myself having that and then me and my husband wouldn't even know what's going on in each other's calendar and we realized wait yeah we put all of this tension into our business what about our family this is the team we need to also bring in those meetings like how are we checking in with each other supporting each other it's so important yeah as a matter of fact the one of the people i learned a lot about the legacy part of things from like we have a family crest that hangs above the fireplace and it's got our family logo on it and it's got little graphic

representations of each of the things that our family holds dear on each of the four quadrants of this shield and it's got stones around the outside with the like my logo which is a tree and my wife is a seed and my son river is like little waves and Taryn is a leaf. And when they have their kids and their kids have their kids, everybody gets a new embossing in that stone with their logo as a part of that family crest. And there's two flags hanging outside our front door and either side of the front door, like a castle with the family logo. And there's the family pepper grinder with the family logo and the family pickleball paddles and coasters. And we go out for dinner as a family. Like we usually do like one on one date nights where mom goes out with one and I go out with the other.

And sometimes it'll be the same restaurant and get different tables or sometimes it'll be at restaurants that are nearby to each other. And then we come together for dessert afterwards. But we always wear like our family logo hoodies and our family hats. And it's really cool because the kids can be just proud of the family. And that's all in the family handbook. Like here's how the crest is designed. Here's what every part of it means. Here's what each person's logo means. We've got it all the way down to like, my sons have planned out their funeral, their memorial service, their end of life wishes, what they want done with their body, what songs they want sung at their funeral. That's a very powerful exercise for a child to go through, like thinking through their own death.

But if you flip to towards the end of the family manual, it goes into, you know, here's what I want. You know, if I wind up in the hospital in emergency care or I can't talk, you know, here's, here's the way I want to be treated, or here's when I would want life support pulled. We've got the hex colors, each family's color for the font that they like for different designs for family projects. We've got what we do at Thanksgiving, what we do at Christmas, um, what we do on Christmas Eve, how we puff paint t-shirts on the 23rd. And we have a family potluck on the 24th and everybody, you know, goes for a hunt for the pickle hidden in the tree. And the person who finds the pickle gets to open the present

first, but that's not just like passed on verbally, right? Which is honestly, that's a big part of how tradition was passed on in the past. But now that we have the blessing of the written word, this is all in a giant family manual. And I learned a lot of this from a guy who runs a foundation called the Legato Foundation. And his name is Rich Christensen. And all he did was he was a business branding expert for years. And then he realized kind of the same thing you were just talking about. Why do we spend so much time branding a business and having a business core statement and mission statement and values? Cause like our family mission statement is hanging on the wall and the family all knows what the family values are. And he helped us create

like the beginnings of our family workbook. And this is what he does. Like he works with families through his foundation called Legato. And that just really resonated with me. I'm like, you know, I run my businesses, like I've got a supplements company, Keon and Ben Greenfield life. And we have team huddles and we have a mission statement and we have our core values and we have our core focus. And, you know, if you're building to acquire or sell you, everything's systematized and everything's measured and managed. natural nature out of being a family out of anything i think it just makes it even easier to to have meaningful events and occurrences and traditions as a family when you systematize it like that in the same way that you would a business i love it so much and i really enjoy your i know you talk about biohacking so much it's it's at the core of what you do work-wise, but I love how much you bring in outside of the science, the supplements, the nutrition around connection, faith. It goes a lot deeper than

how you work out, what you put in your body. And I think that's so incredibly important. And I love that you have that approach to it. Yeah. I mean, you know this, I'm sure, but when you look at a lot of practices that could increase longevity or, family to lower risk of cancer based on the number of friends or at least the quality of the friendships and connections that you do have to the 110 year old gin chugging cigarette smoking grandma in sardinia who's living a long time despite not doing all the biohacks but she is with her family a lot and is connected to humans and there's of course growing awareness of the epidemic of loneliness and the need for human connection and the ancestral, like sympathetic, high blood pressure, high heart rate, high cortisol, freaking out drive that happens just because we've got this built in

hardwired feeling that if we're kicked out from the village or banished somehow from our fellow tribe members, we're going to get killed by a saber tooth tiger wandering around out in the forest later on. But whether it's an ancestral drive or whether it's a deep spiritual connection or whether it's even like a quantum connection of photonic interaction when we're in a room you live with, that is almost like a protective barrier against a lot of diseases and mortality increasing incidents that seems to even trump the hyperbaric and the cryotherapy and the whatever, paleo or keto diet or grounding and earthing or red light helmets or anything else. Yeah, I'm so on that same page okay as we start to wrap up because i have a sense my baby's nap time is coming to an end

real life i want to just like shoot a few things at you and get some quick answers on them okay so these are going to be quick solutions that's fine i'm really good at quick answers as you already learned okay okay so this one's for the mom that woke up didn't have a lot of sleep has a really long day is there anything she can do in that morning nutrition wise supplement wise to set herself up for success that day top two safe supplements even if you're breastfeeding you know because a lot of herbs and plants and spices you have to be somewhat careful with that work for sleep deprivation like gangbusters are nad and creatine okay that is like the stack that i use for sleep deprivation, like gangbusters are NAD and creatine. That is like the stack that I use for sleep deprivation. You can get fancy with smart drugs and nootropic, but it's not like

NAD and creatine are going to be a problem if they wind up in breast milk, they're not going to cause addictive tendencies. They're not going to get you all jittery or, you know, or angry with your, with your infant because you're just so hyped up. You feel like you're on, you know, dropping acid. So NAD and creatine. Creatine, the dose is a little higher. It's like closer to 10 grams, which can give you diaper pants unless you split it up into a few different doses,

like two and a half grams throughout the day. I didn't know that's what it does and I sometimes pop my toe. Yeah, if you exceed five grams, it'll do that. And then NAD, that's a great sleep deprivation stack. Okay, appreciate that, need that. Okay. So this one is for the person who has a lot going on with work and is lying awake at night, just running through her to-do list. Is there like any kind of sleep or supplement stack she could take to start winding down before bed?

There's a lot. I mean, you know, magnesium, CBD, you know, anything that's like a GABA precursor, like lemon balm, or even some of these supplements that contain pH GABA. And I don't, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of different supplements out there that can help with that kind of stuff. But I also like to think about solutions that go beyond just supplements. I think about this too, because like I travel a lot to different countries, like especially like United Arab Emirates, right? So I have to be careful like what I bring in there because I don't want to end up in prison.

Yeah, you want to get back. Seven years in Tibet type of repeat. So anyways, I think that one of the most underrated protocols out there that I use a lot when I travel to just go lights out and lull myself into sleep is non-sleep deep rest protocols, also known as yoga Nidra, but designed for sleep. Like there's one YouTube channel because I have YouTube premium and I just downloaded all of her

tracks, like her two hour, four hour, eight hour. Cause I love her voice and it doesn't grind. And it just puts me to sleep. Her name is, uh, Allie Booth Royd. and she has a bunch of yoga nidra tracks on there it's just like body scans combined with breath work combined with relaxation and she even has like an eight hour one on there that i used i had a recent 10 hour flight to qatar and i like got on the plane and put on my noise blocking headphones and laid back and literally just like did non-sleep deep rest for eight hours on the flight and felt great when I got there. You're kind of like in this half sleep, half rest state. Sometimes you just nod on to sleep naturally as you listen to it.

A lot of these rings and wearables, they have like the boring story times now on them. Like the Aura Ring has, you know, the story time feature and you can download like boring stories to listen to. But I think the Yoga Nidra or non-sleep deep rest protocols work really well and then the other one is the apollo you've seen that apollo neuro yeah it's like a wristband or an ankle bracelet and you put it on and it has this mild haptic vibratory sensation that just kind of lulls you off to sleep without having to take a bunch of supplements and stuff like that i love the apollo neuro for postpartum anxiety. Yeah.

It was amazing. Yeah. And then you kind of threw me a softball. If you were going to take a supplement, I have one I formulated called key on sleep that I think is the best, but I'm biased. I love it. Okay.

One more question. And I know this probably could be quite detailed, but just curious your thoughts on it. Hot and cold, like cold plunging and sauna for women. Are you a fan? Not a fan. I am a fan. Um, curious your thoughts on it, hot and cold, like cold plunging and sauna for women. Are you a fan? Not a fan.

I am a fan. There's like this controversial vibe going around the internet right now that cold therapy is as shocking to you as an airplane crash because of that norepinephrine adrenaline dump that occurs in response to icy cold water. Well, I think the main thing to know about cold is that most of the benefits from it come from pretty brief forays into the cold, like 10 to 30 seconds. We're not talking about long cold bath, like shivering for 10 minutes, doing Wim Hof rounds over and over again. Like the cold can be brief, like quick cold shower, quick jump into a cold plunge. Like last night I was on a plane most of the day.

I got to my hotel room and I wanted to stabilize my blood glucose after getting in and sitting around all day. So I did 20 seconds hot, 10 seconds cold, five times through. And that was it. In the shower? Yeah, in the shower. Just a quick hot, cold contrast shower. The sweet spot for sauna, if you look at that in a lot of the Finnish literature is 20 to 45 minutes, four to five times per week. There is no significant breakdown between the sexes and how they would respond to heat and cold that I'm aware of. The only thing you could make an

argument for is that women may have a more pronounced sympathetic response to the cold and might need even less than men. But besides that, just like brief 10 to 30 second bouts, that's my gem just because I'm a time hacker, right? Like I'd rather have super cold, get in, get out, have it done with. And then I think the very best protocol is what I try to do three times a week, which is, you know, do a long sauna set, infrared sauna, dry sauna, hot yoga, whatever. And then just finish with a slightly longer cold bout, like two to five minutes, cold shower, cold soak, whatever. And you just get so many feel good neurotransmitters and like, it's almost like

addicting. Like you feel so good after that protocol. So good. But there's no big contra indications for women as far as hot and cold go okay amazing ben thank you so much thank you where is the best place for people to find you probably just my website bengreenfieldlife.com okay and what you said you're doing a new version of boundless i am i'm supposed to have the manuscript turn in in may which means it's going to be published till january so less than a year from now but amazing that's what i'm spending most of my time on and you've got boundless parenting balance parenting encyclopedia published my second cookbook boundless kitchen that's come out since boundless parenting okay so my wife and i have a bunch of recipes in there

my kids have some recipes so those are fun and then uh yeah balance will be the next book that amazing thanks for doing this thank you you