Combining Low Carb And Extreme Exercise - The Official Results Of The Great Ketogenic Ironman Experiment

Ben Greenfield (0:01)

Hey, folks, Ben Greenfield here. Sunday afternoon, one week after Iron Man Canada. My family is headed out the door to go to the grocery store for a little while, so I figured why not sit down and make this the perfect time to fill you in on all the nitty gritty details of what happens when you combine low carbohydrate intake and a ketotic diet with extreme levels of physical exercise and an attempt at above average physical performance in something like an Iron Man triathlon. So if you're not a total triathlon nerd or an Iron Man geek or whatever you want to call us, no worries. You're actually going to pick up a ton from today's episode because we're really going to dig in to just active individuals in general and what low-carb and ketosis can do to your body, looking at this N equals 1 case study of kind of what happened to me, the good, the bad, the ugly, the good times and the bad times. So I've also got Facebook questions from many of you that sent in Facebook questions. I'll be answering those during today's episode. I will be going over the full blood results and Wellness FX panel that I took over the 12 weeks of testing. I'll also be telling you why I did not end up doing the testing with Talking20.

And then finally, a few other things that I'll be kind of going into in today's report is an update on because I'll give you a spoiler right here. I qualified for Ironman Hawaii, so I'll be going into what the plan is going forward into that and whether I'll be continuing with this type of protocol and pretty much everything else that you'd ever want to know about low carb ketosis, performance, et cetera. So put your propeller hats on because we're going to get all nerdy. I have no co-host. I have no special sexy music. I have no voiceover girl. I have no dancing panda bears. It's just me sitting here in my board shorts on a Sunday afternoon recording. So what do you think? You ready to do this? Okay. So here we go.

Big picture overview. Ketosis. I'm not going to sit here and give you a lecture about exactly what ketosis is, but the 30 second elevator pitch is this. When you are burning fats as a fuel, they're being fed into a specific cycle in your body called the Krebs cycle. And one of the things that happens when fats are being fed into the Krebs cycle is that a byproduct of burning fatty acids via the Krebs cycle is something called acetyl-CoA. And your body will take acetyl-CoA and convert that into ketones or ketone bodies. Now these wind up circulating in your bloodstream. They are used preferentially as a fuel by your brain, and they're also something that you can measure. You can measure them in your breath. You could measure them in your blood. You could measure them in your urine. And the idea is that you're not necessarily in ketosis to burn ketones as a fuel, even though your brain will burn them as a fuel. You're really in ketosis to burn fats as a fuel, and ketones are just kind of the consequence, kind of the byproduct of that. Why would you want to do it? Well, first of all, like I just mentioned, ketones are the preferential source of fuel by your brain. Your brain loves to run on these little guys. So you get increased focus and mental alertness. It's one of the reasons why, you know, you have a guy like Dave Asprey recommending you do like his bulletproof coffee in a fasted state in the morning. One of the reasons that works so well is it transports a bunch of fats into your brain and keeps you in that state of kind of using ketones as a fuel source for your brain. So you get that focus, and that's good if you're a CEO or a hard charging athlete or a soccer mom or anybody else who wants to be able to think very well during the day. A few other advantages are that you train your body how to be very metabolically efficient and how to burn fat as a fuel as a very preferential energy source, which comes in very handy during a long endurance event, like an Ironman Triathlon, for example. Now, finally, I would say that the third kind of biggest win for me for ketosis is just the fact that you wind up consuming fewer sugars. So not only do you sleep better and feel better after you cross the fitness line of something like an Ironman Triathlon, but you also in the whole buildup to something like that are not creating a lot of the reactive oxygen species and advanced glycation end products and inflammatory kind of consequences of burning high amounts of sugar as a fuel.