The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 62. Q&A: Fasting Dos & Don’ts, Improving Testosterone, & Better Sleep with Gary Brecka

Starting point is 00:00:00 how to increase testosterone. This is a really big topic, so I'm just going to hit it really, really quickly. Very often, people that are deficient in testosterone have something in their bloodstream called thoughts on bulletproof coffee. Can you lift weights and work out fast? Is sparkling water bad for your health? So let's get right into it. hey guys um you asked i listened and so today we're going through the list of the top most commonly asked questions that my team has consolidated from all of our social media platforms and we're promising to get through all of your questions. So we're going to continue to do shorts like this, where we take questions from you guys that are on the top of your mind, and we answer them as best as we can. So let's get right into it. Is sparkling

Starting point is 00:00:54 water bad for your health? Well, I don't know that I would say that sparkling water is bad for your health. There's limited evidence, very scant evidence, that it may be bad for tooth enamel, that it has an acidic property that can actually erode tooth enamel. I was not able to find any real definitive research on this, but there were some studies that indicated that it had a greater effect at enamel erosion, obviously, than regular water. Some of the things that I did find on sparkling water were that it can change the pH of the stomach. So those of you that have gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD or acid reflux may

Starting point is 00:01:32 want to think about switching to a regular water and not, you know, a still water and not a water that has gas in it. Also, a lot of the sparkling waters are infused with sugars. So it's a way of sneaking excess carbohydrates and sugars into your diet. And some people that suffer from gas and bloating report a direct consequence of drinking carbonated beverages and the increased incidence of gas and bloating in their gut. So if you have any of those conditions, I would go back to still waters. But listen, if you're switching off a soda and drinking a carbonated beverage that doesn't have a lot of sugar in it is a better alternative for you, then by all means, continue to drink your spring waters or your carbonated spring waters and don't have much of a guilty feeling

Starting point is 00:02:20 about it. If you can, my preference would be that you actually drink hydrogen gas-infused water. This has all kinds of benefits. If you're a geek like I am, you can go to hydrogenstudies.com. You can read all about hydrogen water, which actually does have hydrogen gas infused into the water. You can actually select out the animal studies and look just at human clinical studies and see the myriad of benefits of drinking hydrogen gas infused water. So that would be my preference. Secondly, I would say drinking a mineral spring water from a bottle would be your next best. Then mineral spring waters from plastic, which would be my least

Starting point is 00:02:56 preference, and then everything else after that. So are we able to drink black coffee at all during a fast? If so, when, how much, and if not, why not? Yes, you can have black coffee. If you're like my wife, she said, if I can't have black coffee, I'm not fasting. So if you're falling into that category where coffee is really, really important on your daily to-do list, then by all means, do not fret about coffee breaking a fast. It is not metabolized through the liver the way that other beverages that contain carbohydrates or fats or sugars are. So very often we include black coffee on a list of okay items to drink during a fast along with certain teas. Also, remember that we don't want to drink coffee after

Starting point is 00:03:40 about 2 p.m. in the afternoon if you are worried about your sleep cycle. Remember, caffeine is metabolized very slowly. You get the initial effect of the caffeine metabolism, but it can be in your system for as long as 8 to 10 hours and disrupting your capacity to get into deep delta wave of sleep or slide into REM sleep later in the night. So if you're one of those people that's trying to improve their sleep scores, no coffee after 2 p.m. in the afternoon, but by all means, black coffee in the morning if you are a fasted exerciser or fasting for a water fast or for some other purpose, intermittent fasting, black coffee will not break your fast. Can you lift weights and work out during fasting? My answer is absolutely yes, you can. Some of the greatest

Starting point is 00:04:25 athletes in the world exercise and workout in a fasted state. However, I would insist that you take something called perfect aminos, which is the eight essential amino acids in the perfect ratio so that you can continue to have the protein building blocks in your bloodstream so that you can repair muscle and you're not amino acid deficient. Remember, there are perfect aminos doesn't even break a fast. I think it only has a single calorie. It's equivalent to taking 29 grams of whey protein. So if you're working out in a fasted state and you want to maintain lean muscle and really address fat loss, my suggestion would be continue to work out or lift weights in a fasted state,

Starting point is 00:05:05 but take a perfect amino acid, which is all eight of the essential amino acids prior to. Do I take my 10x supplements during three days of fasting? You take it on the first day of the fast, and the next two days you skip even your supplements. As we get to water only, we really want the body to almost be in a slightly deprived state so that it goes after senescent cells and breaks these cells apart and turns them into energy. One of the things that we do when the body consumes cells called zombie cells or senescent cells, these are living cells in your bloodstream that are actually no longer performing their function. One of the things that the immune system is able to do is break these cells apart and actually get amino acids and other nutrients from the cells to fuel your body's activities for

Starting point is 00:05:54 the day. So if you're fasting, by all means, you know, you will definitely benefit from this process of cellular autophagy. Next question is headaches are always a concern going into fasting. What nutrients are lacking to keep this from happening during the three-day water fast or into the future of intermittent fasting? So what I've found is that very often headaches are actually not coming from the brain. Remember, there are no pain receptors in the brain. There are lots of pain receptors in the covering of the brain called the dura. And this dura hates two things. It hates being stretched and it hates being contracted. There's a very interesting clinical study linking an inverse relationship to sodium and migraine headaches, meaning that as sodium intake went up, migraine headaches went down. And it was a pretty broad

Starting point is 00:06:46 meta-analysis of several headache studies. Very often, we have found in our clients that clients that actually are sodium or nutrient mineral deficient are very often plagued with headaches, and they have a tendency to hit earlier in the morning rather than later in the day, because this is when you are the most dehydrated. You've gone the longest amount of time without fluid. So if you're dehydrated when you get in bed and you respire all night, you lose heat throughout the night, then by the time you wake up in the morning, you're very dehydrated and bang, you're waking up with a headache. So to avoid this and to not break a fast, whether you're intermittent fasting or two-day or three-day or seven-day water fasting, you can use a mineral salt. One of my favorites is called Baja Gold Sea

Starting point is 00:07:32 Salt, B-A-J-A Gold Sea Salt. It has all of the trace minerals that the body needs. It also has sodium in a very bioavailable form and also in a lower quantity than most salts. You could use Celtic salt. I would say good, better, best would be pink Himalayan sea salt, better would be a Celtic salt, and the best would be a Baja gold salt. Use half a teaspoon of that in eight to 10 ounces of water first thing in the morning. You should not have a problem with headaches thereafter. How do we recover from adrenal burnout? Well, adrenal burnout is mainly due to three things. Number one, poor sleep quality. Number two, poor sleep quantity. And number three, stress. Those are the three things that cause us to just run on adrenaline and catecholamines, the fight or

Starting point is 00:08:21 flight neurotransmitters and the neurotransmitters that heighten our awareness in a stress state. Some of the best things that I see our clients do to recover from adrenal burnout are number one, focus intensely on sleep. If you haven't downloaded my free sleep guide or taken my sleep challenge, you can go to theultimatehuman.com. You can download my free sleep guide and you can start developing a reallyimatehuman.com, you can download my free sleep guide, and you can start developing a really good sleep hygiene sleep routine. Remember, most of us have a, we have a protocol for our business, we actually have a plan for our workouts, we have a plan for getting our kids off to school, but we actually do not plan our sleep and we do not have good sleep hygiene.

Starting point is 00:09:04 And by sleep hygiene, I don't mean how clean we are when we go to bed, but I mean a consistent routine centered around sleep. If you go into my Instagram, you'll see links to some of my sleep hacks, red light in the room, you know, reducing screen time, what time to stop drinking coffee, how to use a breathwork technique called box breathing, which is essentially a four-second inhale followed by a four-second hold, followed by a four-second exhale, followed by a four-second hold.

Starting point is 00:09:31 One of my favorite ways to get into sleep when I get into bed. And then also breathwork consistently in the morning within 30 minutes of waking is very, very good to reduce stress. There's also some supplements you can find at theultimatehuman.com which actually support healthy adrenal and cortisol function. One of my favorites is one

Starting point is 00:09:50 called NeuroModula Complex. You take two of these capsules at night and it does help restore adrenal and cortisol burnout. How to increase testosterone. This is a really big topic, so I'm just going to hit it really, really quickly. Very often, people that are deficient in testosterone and, more importantly, free testosterone, the bioavailable form of this hormone, have something in their bloodstream called SHBG. So if you have normal levels of testosterone and suppressed levels of free testosterone, ask your doctor to check your SHBG levels, sex hormone binding globulin. This is a fancy way of saying a protein that binds to sex hormones, mainly testosterone, carries it out of the bloodstream and makes it appear as though you are testosterone deficient, even though you are

Starting point is 00:10:43 producing healthy amounts of the hormone testosterone. There's a number of things you can do to increase testosterone. If you're deficient in DHEA and you're not a professional athlete, you can take DHEA to raise your testosterone level as that is one of the core nutrients that the hormone is built from. Also, raising your vitamin D3 level is a good idea if you want to build healthy hormones, including testosterone, and checking your signals. Remember, in men and women, the organ that produces testosterone does not decide how much of this hormone it produces. It has a boss, and the boss is the pituitary. The pituitary is like the volume knob. It decides how it's going to increase or decrease the levels of certain hormones in the body.

Starting point is 00:11:27 And this is true in both men and women. It's also true in how women's menstrual cycle is regulated. And if these signaling hormones are low, you will be low on the hormone testosterone. So before you go straight to hormone replacement therapy, talk to your doctor about peptides and about increasing the signal so that you can produce more of this hormone on your own. And then look at a couple of specific nutrient deficiencies, mainly vitamin D3, which is also called 25D-hydroxy, and something called SHBG, sex hormone binding globulin. If the SHBG is elevated, there are several supplements, including boron, that work very, very well to lower the level of this protein and allow your hormone levels to rise naturally. Thoughts on bulletproof coffee. So for those of you that are in ketosis or following a keto diet or living a low-carb lifestyle. I don't have any

Starting point is 00:12:26 issues with you putting MCT oils in your coffee in the morning. I've not found that the additional benefit of MCT oils has any real clear scientific proof stating that adding MCT oils or butter to your coffee has some kind of profound health outcome, my preference would be that you drink regular coffee and that you take a good omega-3, omega-6 fish oil or fatty acid supplement so that you get the right amounts of omega-3 fatty acids. Most of us have this ratio of fatty acids off and just by adding more fat to our diet is not the solution.

Starting point is 00:13:02 We need to add the correct form of this fat. And so you can get it and put it in your coffee. It's not necessary, but you can also do it in capsule form. I make a great fish oil. There are other great products on the market that have the right omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio. I personally do not put butter or oils in my coffee. You can also find that high amounts of fats going into an empty stomach with

Starting point is 00:13:27 the caffeine will cause intense acid reflux. So if you're one of those people that suffers from acid reflux or gastroesophageal reflux disease, you may want to skip the heavy butters or MCT oils in your coffee in the morning. For the rest of you, if you're following a low-carb lifestyle and you're not irritated by MCT oils or small amounts of butter in your coffee, by all means, adding this is not detrimental. Should you cold plunge with a CompT gene mutation? Wow, that is a really interesting question. I don't see any correlation between the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene mutation, the gene that actually down-regulates catecholamines, which are fight-or-flight neurotransmitters, and whether or not you should be exposing yourself to a cold plunge. I also am not aware of any direct link between the down-regulation of

Starting point is 00:14:19 catecholamines and exposure to cold water, So I don't see any reason why people with the gene mutation COMT, which my wife has, should avoid cold plunging. In fact, it's been a sleep hack of ours lately to do 20 minutes of sauna or steam and then a one-minute quick cold plunge right before going to bed. And last night, I had one of the best sleep scores I've had in a very long time. My recovery was 97%. My sleep score was almost perfect. And I used that exact little hack sauna, minute into the cold plunge, and then right off into bed. By the way, if you don't have a cold plunge, you don't have a sauna, you don't need to go out and spend the money on those. You can do it by alternating intermittent hot and cold water water and then getting into bed. Just remember, always end on cold. Thank you for listening, and I hope that you found these

Starting point is 00:15:10 helpful. Please continue to submit your questions to info at theultimatehuman.com or on my YouTube or Instagram channel. We will funnel these into the team. We will get them up so that we answer all of your questions. And as always, that's just science.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 62. Q&A: Fasting Dos & Don’ts, Improving Testosterone, & Better Sleep with Gary Brecka

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