Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>
BRAZIER: Better nutrition is basically what the core [INDISTINCT] talks about, whether
it's last night's performance or other types of performance. So it's kind of just a full
gamut of what performance is. I'll be talking about how to prove that through what we eat.
I'll give you a little background first. I started off in 1990. I started running track
in high school and I just really enjoyed it. I just loved running, so I thought, "Well,
if I have to do this full-time as a career, as a job, that would be ideal." So that's
when I started working towards just trying to be a full-time professional runner just
because enjoyed it. I'm just really--like it or not by nature a competitive person,
you know, I just--just something I like to do. So, unfortunately, soon after, I got injured.
I ran too much, did it too much too soon and I got stressed up. So, I started swimming,
cycling trying to maintain my fitness while I was injured and I realized I really like
swimming and cycling as well. So I kind of figured swimming, cycling, running, that's
triathlon. Maybe I can do triathlon full-time and have that as my career and have that as
my job and now this could be ideal, this could be perfect. And I might say, by nature, I'm
not really a competitive person, so I wasn't doing this to try to prove anything to myself
or anyone, I just like doing it. So, I'm not really a motivational type of speaker, so
thought about overcoming odds and, like, breaking through barriers and trying to push myself
to experience times like this, so I hope I don't disappoint anyone. But soon after, I
decided to do Ironman Triathlon. Ironman Triathlon is made up of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike
ride and a marathon, so 26.2 miles. So, obviously, a really long event but if you want to do
well, you have to train a lot. But like I said, I enjoyed the training so that was--that
was the easy part for me just--because I like it. But what surprised me is when I started
looking into this seriously and I found that some of the top athletes in the world were
doing the identical training to the average athletes. Their training programs differed
very little. And, of course, I asked myself, "Well, if some of these guys are top in the
world and now they are just average, what is it that separates that?" Obviously, it's
not the training, so there's another factor there that is allowing some to become world-class
while others remain average in [INDISTINCT]. So, I started to investigate that and I found
it had more to do with what happened between the training as opposed to the actual training
itself. So, the recovery phase, the phase that your body generates and renews itself
after exercise is what we realized is the most important phase. And, of course, when
we rest, we eat well, our body overcompensates and becomes stronger, that's why training
works, is that overcompensation by our body that I think only happened during the recovery
phase and when our cell regenerate and renew themselves. So, that's where I began to focus,
is on that renewal process. And I realized that around 80% of recovery could be attributed
to nutrition, so, obviously, an overwhelming amount. So that's what I started focusing
on, was nutrition. And that's why I value and trust the nutrition [INDISTINCT] age.
And I didn't care about nutrition just so I could say nutrition. I cared about it because
I knew it would stab the [INDISTINCT] as an athlete. And I've never really being entrusted
with nutrition so much, but I'm entrusting the outcome of a good nutrition; the mental
clarity, the ability to get away with less sleep, the ability to be more productive which,
you know, I need to tell you people about, so things like that that are very tightly
tied to good nutrition, what it can do for you. So I became quite interested in this.
And I started trying different ways of eating just to see if I could boost my performance
with these--these different types of diets. I tried the whole gamut; I tried the high
carb, low carb, high protein, low protein and nothing really impressed me. And some
were better than others, but nothing was really amazing and I found that I wasn't really getting
the results I wanted. So, I kept on trying different ones and I tried to completely file
these diets to a vegan--completely vegan diet and it didn't work. At first, I was always
hungry, I was tired and I wasn't recovering well and my high school track coach asked
me what I was doing wrong and I'm almost trying this--this new diet, this new way of eating.
And he was a very good coach but because he was so good, he was somewhat closed-minded.
He had had a lot of success, he had the template that worked, he put all of his athletes through
it, they got results, so he wasn't willing to change and he had zero interest in this
new way of eating. And that discouraged me at the time, but when I look back on that,
I think that was actually a good thing because it's helped me realize that if this top level
coach doesn't place any value to good nutrition, then probably a lot of other top level coaches
doesn't either. So I thought, "Okay. Well, if I can find a recovery program that works
well for myself maybe that's the sort of thing that then can be passed onto athletes through--through
coaches. And he, like I say, was resistant to this but I kept on pursuing it and looking
into ways to boost performance through better nutrition. I tried a whole bunch of different
ways of eating. Like I say, there's different high carb, low protein also [INDISTINCT].
And then the [INDISTINCT] I start investigating further. I thought, "I think there's something
to this. I was eating wrong" and I was eating wrong. I was basically eating a junk food
vegan diet and that's very easy to do. And keep in mind too when I--when I'm telling
this story this was happening in 1990, so information didn't flow the way that it does
today. So information about all this nutrition was very hard to come by, information about
sports-specific kind of based nutrition is near impossible. So I had to do a lot of research
and really find out what's--what would help me and I have--I--I revealed five major things
initially that I was lacking in my diet, to this eating junk food diet, and it was complete
protein, vitamin B12, iron, calcium and omega 3 fatty acids. So, pretty major stuff that
I simply didn't have in my nutrition program. So as I investigated, I did some research
more, I found what each of these nutrients came from, which plants. And then I found
those plants, started planting them together kind of [INDISTINCT] working and it really
did work. It did allow me to speed recovery. It didn't taste very good but it's functional.
It got me what I wanted it. It got me to the point where I could--did considerably more
training than people I trained with and that was a huge advantage because that enforced-obviously,
my performance improved at a quicker rate and I got closer to achieving my goal of having
that triathlon. So I was pleased with that. In 1990, I started all this, in '98 I started
my professional career as an athlete, as an Ironman triathelete. So I did that seven years
full-time and it was great. I really enjoyed that, that seven-year career. It went--it
went well. But in 2004, I slipped [INDISTINCT] in cycling and I couldn't raise my gear, and
obviously not a good thing to have happened but for the first time I thought, "I have
trained all this time. I have always been training, racing and [INDISTINCT] for anything."
So, this is kind of exciting to me and I've been getting asked the same question over
and over. These people knew that I raced at a high level, they knew I had [INDISTINCT],
so I always getting asked where do I get my calcium, my iron, protein, all these things.
So, I decided to address those and write about them in a short book that I published that's
called Thrive. Self-published book, 500 pages long and it came up in 2004. Then I expanded
it, added a bunch of new ideas, expanded on the ideas that existed and added 500 recipes
and that became called the Thrive Diet. It was published by Penguin in Canada and then
published the following year here [INDISTINCT] diet. Apparently, the word "diet" sounds [INDISTINCT]
here, so I don't know. So it's just--if you see a book called Thrive Diet, it is the same
book [INDISTINCT]; different publisher, different cover, different title, same book. And anyway,
so what I wanted to do today is kind of go over some of the main ideas in--in those books
that you can use to apply to life whether you're athletic or not. They are very broad,
so they will help you perform better, like I said, when you're an athlete or you just
want to maximize you ability to think clearly, you can sleep amount by quality, [INDISTINCT],
all those things. As I was mentioning, in 2004, I have partnered with someone else and
we collaborated and made a replica the [INDISTINCT] myself for years and it's now available in
all pretty much all healthy stores, it's called [INDISTINCT] appetizer. If you love samples,
[INDISTINCT] and if you want to talk a little bit on that as I finish speaking here you're
very welcome to. We made some of that [INDISTINCT]. So it was pronounced six years in Canada,
five years here. Anyway, the first thing I want to talk about pertaining to the book
is something called gaining energy through conservation as opposed to consumption. What
do I mean by that? It's eating food, you use less energy, it's digested similarly but give
you more new things in return. Now, I made a mistake for years and I think a lot of people
make this mistake, it's very common, to assume that since calories [INDISTINCT] food energy,
you would think that the more calories you ate the more energy you would have. It seems
to make sense, but if that worked really true, people eat lots of fast food, lots of high
calorie foods without [INDISTINCT]. So the problem is, is that you have to spend energy
to digest when eating highly processed foods and when you spend something you no longer
have it, just like anything. It's like money, if you spend it, it's gone, you don't have
it. However, you can make a good investment and get a return on that investment. So that's
something that you have to think about food, is something that I would get a return on
if I made the right choice. So, for example, I went from eating tons of grand peanut butter,
not that that's the worst thing in the world to eat but it is very highly processed, it
is [INDISTINCT] bread and processed peanut butter. So we spend a lot of energy to digest--disseminate
that food so you have lots of it. Pretty simple not like--plus, it has very few nutrients
in it and when I say nutrients that's speaking of micronutrients. You know, we don't lack
calories. Calories are very, very easy to get. It's the micronutrients that a lot of
us lack and micronutrients are vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, anti-oxidants, all those things
are the base to good health that by eating these way, I was getting the calories but
I wasn't getting the micronutrinets. So I switched over and started squatting out right
a bread and even regular bread and pasta and all types of flours, all types of refined
starchy foods. [INDISTINCT] started eating, most likely, carbohydrate and fruit. Fruit
is a great source of carbohydrate, it digest much more easily than these refined carbs
plus there's more micronutrients. So, less energy out, more micronutrients in, I call
that high net-gain food. So that's the first part that I [INDISTINCT] on my focus on the
basic diet on high net-gain foods. Now, in other high net-gain food, in addition to this
fruit, there's something called [INDISTINCT] amaranth, [INDISTINCT] wild rice, these are
typically seeds, they're not grains. So they're anti-coagulant, they digest more easily because
they are seeds, they have more protein, they're around 25% protein supposed to, with grain
it will be much low. So, just making that little change with my diet, I found--I had
significantly more energy, yet my calories dropped, 20% to 30% but more energy. It is
like, so, is it spending so much to get it? Plus, I started getting more micronutrients
in. Now when you get the micronutrients in, that's going to help turn off your hunger
signal. Now, our hunger signal of course, is a cardinal signal that goes back to our
previous ancestor that tells us we need food and we need food for fuel and building blocks.
So, as soon as we get hungry, that's a sign, a biological sign, it speaks in from our brain
and tells to eat. Now, the problem is, most of Americans, a lot of food they eat lacks
micronutrients. So, our hunger signal remains active, you see, white bread as an example.
White bread, pretty much no micronutrients but you could eat it, it would physically
fill up your stomach but you're still going to be hungry, you're still going to want eat--keep
eating because that chemical hunt--hunger signal remains active. Now that's the number
reason for obesity in North America. It's very simple, we'd over consume. But the reason
we over consume is because there's so few micronutrients in the food we have these days
that we keep on eating and until we get the micronutrients to satisfy our hunger signal
and turn it on. And of course that, that's a lot of food, and then that's a lot of calories,
that's why people gain weight. And of course we gain weight, your risk factor for a whole
bunch of diseases goes up. So, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, cardiovascular diseases,
all these things. So, if we [INDISTINCT] foods plus all of--some specifics that have been
here, we're going to get full much more easily. We just don't want you to eat it. So, very
clearly, I'm not an advocate of portion control, I think if you're hungry, you should eat.
Food is not the enemy. Food is good. Food is a good thing for you. Why do we get ourselves
in trouble? It's because we eat--at times Americans, a lot of highly refined foods that
do not turn off our hunger signal and just creates a wealth of calories that basically
you're not healing. And it's actually very common, you have to be overfed, you have to
be nourished. I mean, I would have been a paradox, you know, 15, 20 years ago but I
was pretty much the norm and people who are obese are calling me, showing symptoms of
malnutrition. And you'll figure, how can you mean so much to become obese yet, be malnourished?
Very strange, but that's a testament to other direction our food system is going with producing,
yes, a lot of calories, a lot of starch, very low micronutrients. So, like I said, basically,
a diet on these high net-gain foods, a lot of energy out, lots of micronutrients in and
basically [INDISTINCT] a lot. There's something else I think is really important, is the relationship
between stress and hormones. Now, there are [INDISTINCT] a lot of people don't realize
this, I didn't realize this until I experience the downside of it and this is really a lot
of what my [INDISTINCT] me making states--taking years to figure them out and then, you know,
remembering the [INDISTINCT] so, hopefully, you don't have to be in the same states but
stress does not know where it comes from. It's perceived by your body the same way and
it has the same physiological response which is causing cortisol to get a lot of cortisol
stress hormones. So, stress can come from too much work, not enough downtime, you have
initial stress; concerns about family, concerns about relationship, concerns about professional
problems, walking down the street could be included there, that's environmental stress
or eating food that takes a lot of energy to digest because a very few nutrients returned
is nutritional stress. You know, work without getting something back is--it's biologically
stressful. It's [INDISTINCT] so, all those things even--it's like, logical stress. It's
like, we're going to go things you have control of it. Stress, you know, some people are more
[INDISTINCT] than other than [INDISTINCT] personality types [INDISTINCT] and, you know,
90% of those things they can't control. So, that's just extra stress that you don't need.
So, when that happens, anyone of those things triggers a stress response, cortisol will
go up, when cortisol goes up several bad things happen. One, physiologically you will not
be able to get to deep phase of sleep, on delta; that's a really deep rejuvenating phase
that as North Americans, most of us never get into it. And the reason of that of course
is cortisol being high. So, then we don't sleep deeply, we don't get this deep delta
phase of sleep, so what happens is, of course we wake up and we're still tired and then
when we do eventually get on that, we'll take coffee and sugar. Coffee and sugar works.
They give us energy right away and puts through stimulation and obviously it's treating the
symptom [INDISTINCT] it's altering the cause--the cause is we didn't sleep well. We didn't sleep
well is because the cortisol's high and the cortisol's high because of stress. So, it
all comes back to that. So if you do drink coffee, [INDISTINCT] to overcome this, it
just perpetuates the circle and then we become dependent on this stimulants and I realize
that we all can be successful in [INDISTINCT] not to break that cycle and it's hard to do,
you look around and see all the coffee shop and deli shops, it's very clear. The poor
society that is dependent on these stimulants but as we lower cortisol and I'll give you
specifics in a minute on how it is but cortisol starts [INDISTINCT] sleep deeply, you wake
up, you're freshly rested, you're ready to go, you don't have to take coffee and take
sugar. It [INDISTINCT] now the down side to this of course, is that it's [INDISTINCT]
it will take a couple of weeks to kick in, you drink coffee, obviously it's a medium,
this is not a medium. So, you have to be prepared putting in a little bit of an effort and invest
a little bit enough but of course, once it happens, then the problem is solved, you don't
have to deal with it anymore. And now there's a huge advantage to reducing cortisol is that,
when you sleep more deeply, when you get to that deep delta phase of sleep, you're colony
obviously is getting better. So therefore, naturally, you're quantity will come down.
So, maybe, you just need eight or nine hours sleep at night. Now, you can get away with
seven. And that's obviously very beneficial, I mean, anyone will sure benefit from that
extra hours of sleep at night or an extra hour of balance sleep a day. So it's kind
of a deal that saying everyday is [INDISTINCT] so, it's great. It's obviously a very practical
solution to freeing up more [INDISTINCT] by improving sleep quality and quantity to able
to [INDISTINCT] and I'm sure you've noticed this, you have pretty much had conversations
with people and you're wondering, are these people totally paying attention? Are they
fully awake? And the answer is probably no, they're not. Because when they're sleeping,
they probably weren't fully asleep. So I want it to become blur between being sleepy and
being awake. We don't sleep fully deeply; when we're awake, we're not fully awake in
some people, so. I'm honestly defining up on deep sleep and then complete being awake
and focus concentration and obviously productivity and stuff like that goes up. So, I'm sure
you don't appreciate that. Less sleep, another problem with high cortisol level is the inability
to tone muscle and move body fat efficiently. Now again, I learned this the hard way. I
was training in 1997, 35, 40 hours a week, I was trying to build up for my first [INDISTINCT]
even, first professional career as a triathlete for the following year and I was training
35 to 40 hours a week, it was great up until the fourth week and then I stared, first of
all, I started getting really tired and I thought, well, this [INDISTINCT] reason I'm
exercising a lot. But the more tired I got, the worst quality of sleep became. And I realize
now of course, that's because I've--has cortisol to go high, which should prevent me from sleeping
deeply so I can compensate by adding extra sleep and it [INDISTINCT] back in front but
I was sleeping nine hours a night and obviously, you don't have to do that and to make up for
the, you know, the shortcomings of my quality of sleep but also with the more quantity.
But like, as I got to back on track, I didn't understand it since I was [INDISTINCT] dressing
properly but now I know of course, if it had been to better nutrition that it would release
cortisone. What's starting to happen at the following year is even more strange, I began
gaining weight and it wasn't muscle, it was fat. I started gaining by pound of fat every
three weeks and I thought, "How is it possible to gain fat when I'm exercising 35, 40 hours
a week. No idea why. So I started asking around. I started asking, the so-called professionals,
reading a lot of books and everyone said the same thing. If you're gaining weight, it's
simple, you're taking more calories than you burn. And I thought, well, you know, that's
pretty strange because, yes, I was taking a lot calories but even if I was burning,
I thought, there's no way I would have taking in these excess fat. This can't be. But I
was out of idea. I had no idea what was going on. So I tried this suggestion, I cut back
in my food intake. I started gaining weight more for like--about a pound every two weeks
and I thought, "How is this possible?" If I'm right in eating, I'm gaining fat and I'm
exercising 35 to 40 hours a week, I don't get it. And I didn't get it until about a
year and a half later, until I spoke with men with problems to explain to me the relationship
between stress and hormones. Now, what I've done is I had over trained. So that's physical
stress, of course exercise is good but in excess, it's not and I stepped over the line.
So, I had put some physical strain in my body for me--having to find--recover from all these
exercise that--I've had some cortisol to be chronically elevated and burned up my adrenals.
So, I wasn't sleeping well, but also if cortisol goes high, it's near possible to tone muscle
and lose fat. In extreme cases, will be [INDISTINCT], so that's exactly what was happening to me
as I've gone to that extreme. And I think a lot of people are in that situation, not
from necessarily over training stress but just stress; work, family, all of those things
I mentioned before. So, it caused the cortisol to go up, so that means it's very difficult
to tone muscle and lose fat and breakthrough those athletic plateaus. So if you've been
working out consistently and you can't seem to get the results that you think you should,
look into at your life [INDISTINCT], look at all those other stresses and all those
other things going on as opposed to just calories in and calories out. The reason I started
gaining weight more quickly when I cut back on eating the food I was eating was because
I was down to five in my body nutrition. I wasn't getting the body--my body the fuel
it needed to fuel these workouts or the building blocks it needed to recover from it. So that
was just the greatest stress, I just placed more stress in my body which prompts the cortisol
to go up even higher which causes me to lean back that more quickly. So, on the surface
that seemed counter intuitive, obviously if you're exercising a lot, you're not eating
much and you're gaining weight, well, the tendency of course is exercise in the morning
less. That was the opposite if--of what I should have done. What I should have done
is ate more nutrient that's called high net-gain foods and alkaline-forming foods, I'll talk
about that in a minute and that's when it started to bring cortisol back down. So, I
think--like I said, a lot of people are in that situation and I'm sure you've seen people
like this. You see them at the gym, you go to the gym regularly. You see the same people
like week after week, maybe month after month, year after years. It's the same people at
your gym. And they have lose--that have lost 5 to 10 pounds or change their body shape,
whatever. And I'm sure if you were to go to those people and ask them what was going on,
then I must suggest you [INDISTINCT] right away if you were to do that. They'd probably
be confused, they probably wouldn't know what the problem is, but then we started looking
at--holistically as a person and not just the machine, calories in and calories out
but you started asking about their professional life, their personal life and you saw all
things that cause worry and concern in your, there's an answer; worry, concern, stress,
cortisol. So, essentially those people are and I was hormonally injured and that's the
way the endocrinologist explained me. And I think that's an excellent way to look at
it because--of course you can't see it, you know, like it's another type of injury; a
broken arm or something but it's still an injury. When your hormones are so far in the
[INDISTINCT] that you cannot tone muscle, you cannot lose fat. So, something to consider,
you know, if you're in that situation, you exercise diligently and you can't seem to
break through or you can go backwards then take a look at all the other things in your
life. Now, it's easier said than done in some cases. Now I understand that obviously there's
a lot of stresses in our life that we can't control and those things are family related,
work related, some of those things are out of our control. I will say one thing to that
though, perception also has a large component to do with the stress. If you could see something
stressful, it's stressful. So, as an example, I like to run, so for me to go for a run,
I actually get a greater physiological benefit, but some [INDISTINCT] forcing herself to go
for a run. So if you don't like running, don't run. It's pretty much that simple. People
say yoga is great for stress relief, yes, that's true if you like yoga, if you don't,
it's not so good. So, I think when you [INDISTINCT] your activity too, find something that you
really do enjoy and know that that is actually going to have a greater benefit to your end--your
end goal. >> [INDISTINCT]
>> BRAZIER: Now, I was--I was kind of flailing around with this, trying to fix this for awhile
and it wasn't until I piece those things together that it really made sense to me. So, what
I am going to say is, well, when I was researching the book, I found that of the average of North
America's total stress, 40% could be attributed to poor nutrition. Forty percent is huge.
Now, at first I thought it was terribly, you know, we're doing that to ourselves, we're
placing all types of stress on us by making poor or good choices. But then I realized
that was actually a good thing because we all control what we choose to eat and we make
those choices obviously. Like I say, we don't all control these other aspects that cause
stress but we control what we put in our mouths. So therefore, we have a lot of control over
lowering cortisol and bringing the cause of these symptoms which of course is overall
stress. So, the high net-gain foods, those will be the base, that's going to reduce a
large amount of cortisol, therefore a large amount of overall stress, therefore you're
going to free up a lot of these problems. I spoke a bit about acid alkaline and I think
that's where the--I'm going to talk a little more about. That's something that is better
understood now than it was a few years ago, but as North American's, we're actually getting
osteoporosis at a younger age that's never before in history. And originally that was
thought--the reason for that is that we weren't having enough calcium in our diet. It turns
out not to be the case. The reason we're getting osteoporosis at such a young age because we
take too much calcium out of our bodies and we do that by eating acid-forming foods, so
anything that is highly processed, white flour, white breads, synthetic vitamins, synthetic
drugs, meat, dairy, soda, all those are standard American diet, 100% acid-forming. So what
happens when you eat that? Is your body has to compensate, it has to off set this acid-forming
food that remains in your body. So what it does is it pulls calcium which is highly alkaline
out of the bones, into the blood to keep it neutral. Neutral pH is 7.35, so blood is going
to stay that way as a survival [INDISTINCT]. But in doing so, it draws calcium from the
bones. And you can add, you know, the course of one, two, or three that [INDISTINCT] every
meal, every snack is being acid-forming. You're going to get weaker bones and then eventually
osteoporosis. So that's why it's not uncommon now to see people get [INDISTINCT] who have
died and have osteoporosis in their 20s. So lastly, that saying, you obviously need alkaline-forming
foods. Alkaline-forming foods are basically any whole plant-based foods. They're going
to be much more alkaline-forming, the [INDISTINCT] feeling better they're going to be. The most
alkaline-forming foods are the... >> [INDISTINCT]
>> BRAZIER: ...green foods so anything with chlorophyll; spinach, [INDISTINCT], anything
like that, chlorella, spirulina which are both vegan as well, they're alkaline. Those
really help you to get alkaline. So, base salad everyday, the best thing to do for your
bones [INDISTINCT] great for your bones. But another huge advantage to keeping alkaline
is functionality. If you eat acid-forming food that all promotes inflammation and if
you have arthritis obviously that's, you know, that's a given, that's going to make a big
difference by just switching over. But even if you don't, just an average person, do you
think if--you have to work harder for every muscle contraction because they're inflamed,
you won't even know they're inflamed, that takes energy. So just walking across the room,
you don't have to spend energy obviously to do that and if you spend it, you have less
of it. So by the end of the day, you're going to be more tired which obviously again, you
know, it's just creating a more efficient body by reducing inflammation that is going
to free up your ability to move efficiently. Now, to an athlete, that becomes more important,
you know, if you think of all the muscle contractions during a 5K to 9K marathon, triathlon, there's
a lot. So, if you have to work hard for every month, you're going to needless to say spend
energy inefficiently. So, by eating these alkaline-forming foods, functionality improves
because it's [INDISTINCT]. Now, obviously I'm an endurance athlete, so it's all about
the strength to weight ratio, I want to be strong but I want to stay light and that's
a great way to do that. Obviously, getting this way, you know, keeps it pretty lean and
pretty light but what about if you want to grow a muscle? What if you're body building?
What is you're a power lifter and you want to put on some muscle? Can this type of eating
help? And yes, it can. Right after a workout, you're inflamed, your muscles are far down
from--and from the exercise and your body has to rebuild, so you need protein as building
blocks. But the problem is a lot of proteins, animal-based protein weight, protein--anything
from an animal is going to be more acid-forming. So if you eat alkaline-forming proteins, plant-based
proteins like [INDISTINCT] proteins, spirulina proteins, alfalfa, anything like that, rice
proteins, those things have chlorophyll in them, they're more alkaline-forming, they're
going to reduce inflammation right after workout. Now, when you reduce inflammation after your
workout--like I say, your functionality goes up. When your functionality goes up, you're
ability to life with heavier weight improves. So you'll be able to lift heavier weight next
time you're in the gym, which is--what makes it bigger and stronger, lifting heavier weight
is what build bigger and stronger muscle. So, eating this way in itself is not going
to make you stronger or bigger but it will allow you to train harder, you're just going
to get bigger and stronger. So, this kind of paves the road into that. Now, I'll talk
specifically to about some other ways to reduce overall stress. I talked about obviously perception
of different things, receiving and stress [INDISTINCT] and food. [INDISTINCT] the high
net-gain foods, the alkaline-forming foods, but there's something called maca as well.
It's spelled M-A-C-A, it's a root vegetable from Peru and it's grown at around 15,000
feet. And as with any plants, it's really a suppliant for the nutrient that are in the
soil. So it draws nutrition, vitamins and minerals--well minerals, draws them out and
it and extracts vitamins in its tissue by doing that and then it passes it onto the
animal or the person who eats it. So it's really a conduit for good quality soil. Now,
what makes maca eating is it has the ability to grow in this very difficult planet; so
very hot in the day, very cold at night, other plants can't grow at this altitude but maca
can. So it's monopolized all the nutrients from this volcanic soil and it will pass it
on to you which helps rebuild the [INDISTINCT] function. So, that was around seven or eight
years ago, I found out about maca and started adding it to my [INDISTINCT] grain and it
made a big difference. It took about six weeks to kick in but once it did, I noticed better
sleep quality right away and I noticed just--obviously then--so sleeping better, you have more energy
and then you have sugar cravings, starch cravings, all those things. So it kind of got things
back on track. So if you're eating those highly alkaline-forming foods and if you're eating
those high net-gain foods and you still find you have the symptoms of stress which are
general fatigue, [INDISTINCT] and apnea and sugar cravings, starch cravings especially
in the evening, dependence on stimulants such as coffee and sugar, difficulty toning muscle,
moving fat event though you exercise, all those things. Those are signs of high cortisol.
Those are signs that you're probably in a lot of stress in your life which is the most
high and that's in North America. Especially, you know, with high achievers where people
got a lot to do; if you've got a lot of things to work on, on projects, a lot of big stuff
to do. It's a--you know, it's the norm. So, that's normal. It's how you--how you off set
a lot with it, the nutrition that can make the difference. So, like I say, I eat about
two and a half grams of [INDISTINCT] a day, help me get through that. So, you may want
to consider that. It isn't [INDISTINCT] as well so if you are having [INDISTINCT] a day,
you won't get that anyways. And like I say, we'll have--we'll have some [INDISTINCT] to
try.