Ben Greenfield: Biohacking Expert’s Tips for Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Fitness | Health | E30

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That's Global SKU. Hello, my name is Tim Story. Welcome to Miracle Mentality. Remember rooftops, drawing spaceships on the ground. It's for the dreamers, the doers, the believers in something greater. In each episode, I'll invite you to rise above the mundane, to push past the messy, and learn to live boldly in the miraculous. Every episode will have practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and my guests will explore what it takes to activate your miracle mindset. Remember to subscribe, follow, and like. Welcome to The Miracle Mentality. It's a podcast, as you know. Thank you for continuing to like, subscribe, and telling your friends. So we're consistently on the top 10. Thank you for putting me in the number four spot on most platforms. Don't make me move off. So keep on telling people. Today on The Miracle Mentality podcast, I have with me somebody who I think is amazing, Ben Greenfield. He's a person that I started watching many years before I even knew him because he helps us as a pioneer, researcher, spiritual thinker, and one of the most respected biohackers. I didn't know what a biohacker was until I started studying Ben Greenfield. Ben, good to see you. I feel like I need a cowboy hat and some dusty boots to be the pioneer guy. Exactly. The pioneer of biohacking. So when you came in the studio, you handed me a bar that tasted very, very good. and it's uh like a nutrition bar tell me what this was well hopefully it doesn't give you explosive diarrhea later you'll have to eat your words that that is a new product and thank you for just throwing me a softball right off the bat that was a free commercial it's a bar that has ketones in it ketones are a source of fuel that your brain and your diaphragm and your heart your liver can use as an alternative to glucose and it keeps your appetite satiated for a really long time yeah and uh ketones traditionally for anybody who's tried them they're usually in liquid form and they usually taste like jet fuel. And worked with a flavor profiling agent to make them taste good, put them in a bar. And we have vanilla cheesecake and you just had cinnamon roll. Yeah, and that was so good. So we're not doing a commercial on purpose. We are doing something like it because I just tasted it a few minutes ago and it tastes wonderful. And then give me the feeling it should do to me. How should it make me feel? If you're eating an energy bar, you want it to be clean, right? You don't want a lot of sucralose and acetylfamine and artificial sweeteners. You want some protein in there. So Zatine grabs a protein. You want primarily ingredients you can pronounce and that your grandparents would have recognized. So there's cashews and sea salt and honey. And the magic ingredient is the ketones, K-E-T-O-N-E-S. And even though any bar is going to give you energy to go hit the gym or do a podcast, these specifically because the ketones will just keep your appetite satiated for a really long time. like I will do something like ketones before a three hour plane flight. So I'm not much of the stuff on the plane, you know, a scenario like that or a busy day where I just don't have time to eat, but I want something good in the body. Makes sense. Okay. So as you know, there's a difference between a good idea and a God idea. So the God idea for your life started to unfold about what he was calling you to do with people because you're helping them spiritually, mentally, physically, how did it start to unfold? And it's so good that I have been studying your books, going through your journals and helping the life coach. So tell me about the God idea unfolding in your life. I've been a student of the human body and brain and physiology in general ever since I started studying it in college. I was homeschooled K through 12, grew up in North Idaho, raised in a Christian family, fan of fantasy fiction, played the violin for 13 years. I was president of the chess club. I was not much of like a jock athlete, science guy. And over high school, just got super interested. Primarily, I was playing tennis, I was running up and down the hills behind my house, I was starting to put eggs in my pancakes and pay attention to nutrition. And I got so interested in it, that I wound up studying exercise physiology and biomechanics at University of Idaho, graduated, and that launched me into a career as a personal trainer. So I opened up a series of personal training studios and gyms, raced Ironman triathlon, and Spartan racing and adventure racing and open water swim races all over the world for the better part of 20 years. So did a lot of masochistic endurance sports and beat up my body, got sane about three years ago and hung up the hat on that. Along the way, I did get very enamored with business. I saw a lot of success in the fitness world. And when I was about 33, so about 10 years ago, I really started to focus more on the things that I knew I needed to prioritize in life. Primarily because I could see my family slipping away, my time with my sons, my relationship with my wife, and most importantly, my relationship with God, which was pretty half asked at that point, just because I was too busy, too successful, too much doing it on my own power. And that was when I realized that I needed to rebuild my connection with God, rebuild my prayer life, rebuild the time I spend in scripture in the morning and rebuild family life, be the leader and the man for my family rather than the guy off jet setting around the globe, justifying to myself that I was sending home a paycheck and slaying the dragons. Um, since then, I mean, life has been incredible. I remember when I realized that I needed to focus just as much on spiritual fitness as physical fitness and mental fitness, walking into my pastor's office. I said, what do I do? I got this platform. People are interested in biohacking and racing triathlons and bodybuilding and fitness. And he said, well, write your testimonial. Just write your testimonial. Put it up on your website. That at least will be a way that you can open people's eyes to the gospel on your site. It's really a fitness site. And because I tend to go overboard on just about anything, it wound up with me writing a book called Fit Soul. Wrote another one called Endure. I wrote a spiritual disciplines journal for gratitude and prayer in the morning and service and self-examination in the evening. And since that point, I have considered life to be too short on this earth and the mission to be too important for me to not talk about God and not share the gospel in actions. And when the opportunity arises with words on the platform, God's doing. And that's how I started to hear about you, because a man that I know that's really into physical fitness he said you got to follow this guy Ben Griefeld He goes and he really talks a lot about Jesus for some reason That was like a pull towards me But I was really surprised that you talked that much about the Bible and about Jesus Because as you know, both of us play in what we call secular space, the non-religious space. Or if it's religious, it's your God, my God, anyone's God, and there is no source of universal truth and not a real focus on the salvation that comes through Jesus Christ alone. And that can be a very sticky topic once you open up that can of worms and say something like, the only way to God is through Jesus Christ. It can be an uncomfortable conversation. Yeah. So you talked about your boys. Tell everyone how many children you have. Two. Just two. Twins, 17-year-old sons. We homeschooled them also. They opted not to go to college. They started a card game company, channeling their creativity into that, telling stories, doing illustrations. They launched that on Kickstarter recently. They're doing well. They love the Lord. And I think one of the real keys for me as a parent is that we bookend every single day, meaning every morning we gather at 7 a.m. No matter where anybody's at, we're on the living room floor at 7 a.m. I read the Bible. We talk about the passage that I've read. We pray together. We have a discussion about who's got the car and where and who's making what for dinner and what time are we having dinner and who's got to practice tonight. And then we clap and huddle up like a football team and just scatter through the house and start our day. And then 7pm, same thing, like clockwork, we all meet around the kitchen table, I bring out the guitar, we sing a song, a spiritual song or a hymn, bless the food, my sons and I do father son book club. So every day we read a chapter of a book that I signed. And we discussed the chapter for a little while, we dive in, we have dinner and we have a giant closet, just one of those type of closets, you open up and boxes come tumbling out of hundreds of card games and board games. And that actually has kind of fueled their love for games and wanting to start a business in the gaming industry. And we play games for like an hour and a half at night and then clean up the kitchen. I love this. I love this. I love this. You talk a lot about legacy and you know, it's a very biblical idea. Psalm 78 says, tell the next generation about the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord so that they will tell their children and their children's children. So you're really into this legacy building. Yeah. Yeah. Very similar to that verse. The way I see it is we're not raising our kids. We're raising our grandkids and arguably our great grandkids and beyond. So the furtive glance you make five times at the dinner table on your smartphone is sending a message to your kids that there's something on there that's more important than them or the family or being together. And that's not just them seeing that that's them doing that when they're a father or a mother, and then their children seeing that and doing that. And before you know it, you got great, great grandchildren all on their screens, eating, taking baked pizza at the dinner table. So I think it is one thing to say that you are raising your children's children, and you must have some kind of a legacy mindset. It's another thing to actually systematize that. And I think that's important. I think a lot of people get the message and they understand it, but they don't actually put it together. And what we did was we started by writing down all the things that are family values, whether that be contentedness, no matter your circumstances, whether that be service, whether that be a spirit of gratitude. And from those values, we designed the family mission statement. The same way a business would put together core values and have a business mission statement. We did that for the family. And then we took all those values and that mission statement and turn it into a graphic. And we made a family crest. We designed a family logo. You know, I'm the forest at the top and my wife is the seed from which life springs forth at the bottom. And my son River is a crest of waves and my son Taryn is a leaf. And we created this giant family crest that hangs in the studio. We have this hundred plus page document, the Greenfield Family Constitution. It has what we do on Thanksgiving, what we do on Easter, what we do on Christmas, what the rite of passage from childhood to adolescence looks like, what the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood looks like. We have our obituaries, we have our end of life memorial wishes, we have all the way down to just financial legacy, the names and numbers of the family insurance agent and the family financial advisor. And I will be able to hand this document, this living document to my sons when they start a family for them to build upon. And I know a lot of people could hear this and just think like, my kids are 15 years old. I feel like that's way too late to do something like that. Best time to plant the trees 20 years ago or today. Yeah. And I think that having some kind of system, and it could be something as simple, yeah, we meet in the morning and we meet in the evening. Or, you know, another example is we do one-on-one date nights with each child once a month and spousal date nights twice a month. All of that is in the book. And it's just a matter of opening up blank Google Doc and starting to write down, what does our family hold dear? What are our values? What would this look like if we did a mission statement? GPT helps you a little bit. I don't And you start to form this living document that helps you produce the legacy that blesses future generations. I love it because on a biblical side, the parents are supposed to guide, guard, and govern their children. You're saying we're going to do that in our home. We're going to guide, we're going to guard, and we're going to govern. Right. How have you seen that in the boy's decision making? Because some parents might think, I think Ben may be putting his hands on them too much. Give them a little room. But it doesn't seem like they want more room. Responsibility is important. I think if you train your children up in the way of the Lord, which you primarily can use the word of God each morning to do, you're equipping them to be a little bit more compatible with the decisions or the rules, if you want to call them that, around the house. But we used a system called, this wasn't my idea, I believe it's called Love and Logic, is the book that kind of wants the idea of this system. And it's the concept that you don't just do the lazy parent out and tell your child yes or tell your child no. Anything. No, we don't eat sugar. No, we don't. I mean, getting into vices, drink alcohol, look at porn. Instead, because that method of parenting creates forbidden fruit, just a hard yes, hard no, you educate your child thoroughly about the consequences of any decision that they might make in life. and then you let them make the responsible decision and deal with the consequences that you've already educated them about if they make the wrong decision. And there's some exceptions to that rule. If you have a young toddler ambling towards a hot stove, you don't wait for them to get a third degree burn before you pull their hand away and you might slap their hand or warn them about going towards the stove. But for us, we've educated our kids about, you know, what marijuana does to a young developing brain and what alcohol can do to a young growing liver and the impact of porn on dopaminergic transmission and objectification of the opposite sex and what gluten might do to the gut or the brain if you consume it in excess and sugar and you know all of these things they know about and because of that I think they make responsible decisions because we respect them enough to educate them about it. I love that. I mean that's parenting right? Yeah. So let's switch subjects for a moment. Let's get into health and nutrition. So recently I was at a senior citizen's home and I was visiting somebody who's 94 years of age. And I noticed something that I'd never seen before. How many of the senior citizens could not walk? They're being wheeled or they're wheeling themselves through electrical ways, or they are walking with a walker. Right. So why are so many people in their 80s, in their 90s not able to walk Well Tim I glad you weren at the senior citizen home just scoping it out to maybe check in a couple months Exactly What the monthly on this one Exactly So if you look at aging, there are certain proven parameters, research-based parameters that allow you to maintain some amount of vitality and stave off loss of frailty with age. I'll give you three examples. One is grip strength. Actually, I'm going to give you four examples. One is grip strength, right? So if you are doing things during the day that make your hands tired, it's likely that you're also lifting heavy things. And that's probably why grip strength is correlated with longevity. This idea of maintenance of muscle mass, not just the cardio bunny running on the treadmill, swimming, doing triathlons, marathons, whatever. There's some value to aerobic fitness, but aerobic fitness is nowhere near as correlated with longevity as strength and maintenance of muscle is. So that's number one is people need to understand that you must subject the muscles to load. We live in a comfort crisis. We live in an ancestral mismatch where we don't have, if you want to call it this, the blessing of being a construction worker or a farmer or building fences or chasing animals or hunting. We live in like climate controlled boxes where we're largely thumb typing. And because of that, we have to fabricate stressing of the muscles and stressing of the bones, which is typically just like walking into, you know, a fake box with a bunch of weights and picking stuff up and putting it down. That's very correlated with longevity. And that's one thing people should go out of their way to prioritize even beyond the neighborhood walk or bike ride. Number two would be your walking speed, the speed with which you walk is also correlated more highly with longevity than the number of steps that you take a lot of people track the steps that they take. But you should try to the best way to think about this in simplistic terms, is try to walk a little bit more quickly than your brain wants you to go sometimes. Just slightly past that conversational pace, or at least to the point where you're nearly unable to keep up a conversation. Brisk walking, there's something about that rapid turnover that keeps the brain sharp. That'd be number two, if you walk, try to do it briskly sometimes. Super good. Number three is what's called VO2 max. VO2 max, maximum oxygen capacity. That's typically your lung capacity, the ability of your blood to deliver oxygen to the cells and the ability of your cells to utilize that. That is something a lot of people think they have to get through like the 45 minute suffer fest on the treadmill, but it's actually built really efficiently. And it's really just once every two weeks, less is more that you do a high intensity interval cardio session. So gold standard. And I do this once every two weeks. This is based on research for VO2 max. You just want to go straight to the chase and do the most efficient thing. It's four minutes hard, four minutes easy with about a four minute rest period. and you do that four to five times through. And it's kind of hard. You know, you're typically working out for 30 to 40 minutes with that time span, but you don't have to do it that often. But this idea of high intensity cardio, not just going at a steady pace, but gas pedal on, gas pedal off. And then the last one is, and this is related to people being in a seated position. You talked about people in like scooters, wheelchairs, et cetera. The ability to get up from a position in which you're lying or you're sitting on the floor is super important. There's this exercise that I do sometimes when I lead workouts at conferences or do some kind of like an energy enhancing exercise before a talk. I'll have people sit down on the floor with their legs outstretched and then just stand up. And I don't care how you stand up. You can use one hand, you can use two hands, you can use no hand. You can pull the legs to the side. You can pull them underneath you. I sit down and stand up 30 times almost every day. Meaning all you do is just sit down on the floor and stand up. And it might take you about two minutes to do um it might take you a little bit longer depending on your level of fitness but being able to just be down on the floor that's why i kind of like you know like the whatever like the indian concept of sitting on the floor when you eat because you're almost like forcing yourself every single meal it's like get down and get up but that is important for two reasons number one you learn how to use your limbs to get yourself up from a position that could be harmful for you and number two is you got to have some amount of mobility you got to have some amount of limberness to be able to do that so you think about those things your grip strength your walking speed your ability to get down and get back up and your oxygen utilization. Those are like four things. If you check off, you're probably gonna be a lot less frail as you age. I'm believing that you're enjoying this podcast, The Miracle Mentality. And so the best way to help other people is to share it with a friend, a family member, or even a colleague. We work hard on getting the right types of guests that will make your life go from the mundane, the messy, the madness into the miracle mentality. Don't forget your mindset is yours to set. So make sure and share this with someone else. And then tag me at Tim Story Official. That's Tim Story Official. Thank you for making this one of the most listened to and watched podcasts out there in the world. And guess what? Get ready for miracles to come your way. So for you personally, having crossed over 40 years of age, when I talk to a lot of men, they'll say like, Tim, it's weird. Now that I'm 40, my bones are creaking. I wake up moody. And some of these guys are in really good shape. Have you noticed any difference from you from 30 to now going into your 40s? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the main thing that you notice is a longer recovery time, right? The gym junkie who might have been like the seven day a week guy all of a sudden like four or five days a week is more than enough and all of a sudden you got two days where you have a recovery menu sauna cold plunge going on a walk in the sunshine doing some yoga you have to start making replacements as you age it's not about sitting on the couch and eating w snack cakes because it isn't your gym day it's more about filling that time with something that's a little bit more restorative. And even then guys have a pause later in life, very similar to how women have a pause later in life as andropause. We see this natural decline in testosterone. It happens. It's just a part of being alive. You know, it's a part of the gradual degradation of the body that occurs with age. We do live in an era in which with a little better living through science, you can keep testosterone levels elevated. I'm actually, even though I, I love natural living and sunshine and earthing and grounding cold plunges and swinging a kettlebell there's a time and a place to use a little bit of science to feel better with age so this is where something like testosterone replacement therapy could fit in this is where something like you know enclomaphene or hcg or gonadotropin would fit in it if you wanted to maintain fertility if you weren't done having kids this is where like the whole peptide world could fit in you know gotta be careful with those nowadays just based on fda crackdowns a lot of the ones you get online are a little sketchy but I think that most guys who want to maintain, especially like physical vitality, sharpness, and energy once they're past the age of 40, if they're doing everything right already, should think about looking into it. And when I say doing everything right already, there are building blocks. A lot of guys don't even get the building blocks for testosterone. Vitamin D, zinc, minerals, magnesium, omega-3 fatty acids, and creatine, right? Those are just like basic dirt cheap supplements you can get just about anywhere to fill in the holes from the diet. your legs have a really high concentration of androgen receptors. Those are the receptors that testosterone acts on and lifting heavy weights with your legs back to the lifting thing like deadlifts, squats, leg press, that gives you a natural boost in testosterone. And then the baseline fundamental things are probably stuff guys already know about, like try to live a low stress lifestyle because nature doesn't want to bring babies into the world when there's tigers running around. So whether or not you're trying to have children, you know, it's the same message to your body stress will lower testosterone lower fertility parameters So having time when you check out you pray meditate you do yoga you have quiet times during the day where you able to just slow down And then good sleep good relationships and time outdoors like the stuff that actually- I'm glad that you brought up vitamins because I believe in vitamin taking. You got to make sure you take the right ones, of course, but do you take vitamins yourself? I do, but not as much of like the shotgun multivitamin approach, even though like there's some not because there's not bad formulas out there. There are some really good ones. I think we live in this cool era of self quantification where you can get now. I mean, like you can get blood tests sent to your house. You can get poop tests and urine tests for hormones. You can do DNA analysis. You can do a urine analysis. You can just like submit every body fluid possible. And it's not that expensive. And you can find out, am I low in vitamin D or is my vitamin D just fine? And if I take vitamin D, I'm actually going to go into excess, which can be toxic. Or do I need more magnesium? Or is this whole like everybody on the planet needs magnesium thing? Not for me. Or what are my omega-3 fatty acids levels? Do I need fish oil? Am I getting enough for my diet? So you can create a pretty good picture. I mean, now in an era of GPT and AI, a lot of these labs, you can pretty easily like feed into a computer and get a pretty decent analysis of what it is that you actually need. So multivitamins, that's like the basic generic way to do it. But I think you can also have a little bit more laser-like precision in terms of just taking the things that your body actually needs based on test results. Yeah, I like this. Talk to us about fast foods. You could just drive down any street. gazelles, rabbits, fast ones. Exactly. What's your take on the fast food lifestyle that so many parents go to because of their busy schedule? Yeah. And they're going through a drive-through. Yeah. It's a couple of things. I mean, I would probably insult people's intelligence by telling them that there are ingredients in fast food that aren't good for you. Like, you know, most people know fried foods and sugars and lack of nutrient density, and maybe even the questionable source from which some of the ingredients came is something to think about. But I think what's discussed less is the impact of your nervous system on how your body actually receives, digests, and assimilates food. The very name fast food implies something quick, something fast, something possibly rushed, something eaten in a stress state. And your body has a completely different blood sugar response, hormone response, insulin response, even like muscle building response to some expensive superfood smoothie that you're sucking down while you're driving 60 miles an hour down the freeway honking your horn compared to how your body actually assimilates and uses those nutrients in response to them. if you're sipping that while you're sitting outside with your feet up and watching a YouTube video or taking a little break from work or hanging out with your family at the breakfast table. So it's just the nature of food when you're eating it in that fast food environment, not being taken in as almost like the celebratory nutrient bestowing sustenance that it's supposed to be. My rule for myself is if I'm stressed, I don't eat. If I got to eat while I'm driving, I don't eat. I mean, and sometimes I'll do something like a little bit of that bar, a shot of ketones, or just like something that'll get me through until the meal where I can actually sit down and enjoy. Even like travel, like I'm going to the airport after this, right? I don't eat at the airport, rushing to the gate, going through security. I will literally wait until I'm on the plane and I have a neck pillow and I'm all settled into my chair. And then I'll finally take out whatever my meal is going to be because I know my gut will feel better. Any bloating will be less likely to occur. I'll assimilate nutrients better. My blood sugar response will be lower. So it's about the environment and the mental state that you're in when you have the food, because you could go to fast food. That's just like, whatever, let's say whole foods started a fast food restaurant and sure. Some of the ingredients would be healthier, but you'd still be pulling into a drive-thru and just like eating food while you're driving down the road in many cases. Last question. What does lead with love mean to you? I have the heart of a teacher, right? Even my degree in physical education is just like glorified personal trainer and teaching people is something that's important to me because when I'm learning and I love to learn the science of the human body, physiology, how to get fitter, how to get healthier, you know, how to live with vitality. I don't like to learn for learning's sake. What gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that I get to turn around, take all this information, package it up and help people to live a healthier, more fulfilled life. And in my vernacular, that's definitely a way of loving them. I love that. What are you doing now that you're excited about? Like, what are you doing right now? What was your last book? How long ago was that? I just published the updated so-called bible of biohacking boundless but you know that i know that that's why i asked you the page anthology of gut and performance and recovery and it's gonna be great longevity anti-aging so now i am about six months out from having put the finishing touches on that book and brought it to the world so i'm finally through that phase where i'm thinking about writing again but we all but You understand you go through that phase. But no, but we all need that book. So I'm excited about this book that you've done, this big Bible book of gut health and everything that we've talked about. Yeah, and so what I'm excited about, what I'm working on now is, at least the working idea, is there is now in the health, the biohacking, the fitness industry, this quest for immortality, right, this almost like this grasping at the straws of life, because, you know, in a very materialistic way, this is all we've got. and then life's over. So you might as well live as long as possible and go to 120 or 150 or 160. And as a Christian, especially, I think that that can lead to a really selfish pursuit of extra years in life that leave you unfulfilled and put you in a spiritually starved state. In many cases, you kind of like become your own God, you become your own salvation. Yeah. So I want to write a little bit more about living a full and satisfied life. And even in almost like a mildly epicurean way, like enjoying all that God has put on this planet to offer and having a more reasonable approach to the whole like health, biohacking, longevity attitude. I love it. Best way to follow you would be what? BenGreenfieldLife.com or just Google my name and you should find stuff. Okay. Thank you for continuing to help all of us. Thanks, man. And for being you and being vibrant. Thanks. Thank you all for watching the Miracle Mentality or listening to it. as we said earlier, don't forget to like, share, or even tell your friends about it. But what Ben Greenfield was helping us with is this abundant life that we're called to. We are called to this kind of life, this Zoe life, this abundant life. So keep watching his journey because he's going to keep on teaching us life is still good. Thank you for sharing space with me on this episode of Miracle Mentality with Tim Story. If today sparked your courage or helped you understand why you're created for success, I invite you to carry that miracle mentality forward. Visit me at TimStory.com. That story with an E-Y on the end. Until next time, walk by faith, embrace possibility, and create your own comeback story.