Podcast Episode #21: What You Need to Know About Chinese Medicine, Ben Greenfield’s Secret 1-2-3 Rapid Weight Loss Strategy and…Can Fat Make You Fat?

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

Podcast number 21, November 10th, 2008, from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Welcome to the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast. Each week, we'll be bringing you cutting-edge content on holistic nutrition, medicine, weight loss, and sports performance, as well as a host of other exciting topics pertaining to fitness, diet, and lifestyle wellness. My name is Ben Greenfield, and I'm a certified nutritionist and exercise physiologist. So whether you are an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, we're going to keep you entertained and help you achieve success in all your personal goals. So enjoy this podcast, and stay healthy.

Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield. And in today's podcast, on November 10, 2008, we have some fantastic information to go over. The first topic is going to be an explanation of the quickest way to shed fat fast. It's a proprietary method that I use with a lot of my clients that I'm going to show you today on this podcast, or I'm going to talk about today on this podcast. I'm going to share that with you and teach you how you can put it into your own routine.

We have a little bit of a debate between John Gilbert and myself. If you remember, John Gilbert is the guy who's been contributing articles to the bengreenfieldfitness.com newsletter. If you haven't signed up for that, you can at the blog. But John's article in this week's newsletter is a little bit controversial, and I actually disagree with some of the things that are in it. And so, John and I are going to discuss that today on the podcast. And the actual name of the article is You Have to Eat Fat, or I'm sorry, it's about a myth that if you eat fat, you'll get fat. And I'm going to talk to John a little bit about that myth. We're going to share our potentially controversial viewpoints on it. After that, we have an interview with a Chinese medical physician or a practitioner of Chinese medicine who is also an acupuncturist. She has some great information for us, some really, really interesting things on why you should probably consider incorporating Chinese medicine into your wellness routine. And then, finally, I've got a couple of coupon codes towards the end of this podcast to help you save on a metabolism-boosting supplement, as well as a fantastic announcement for any people who happen to live in the Inland Northwest around the Spokane, Washington area. I have some great information to share with you at the end of this podcast, so make sure you listen in. Let's go ahead and move on to today's content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Okay, as promised, I want to give you some proprietary information that I just decided to release to the general public.

I actually posted this information on a recent blog post on a website called trainingpeaks.com, which is a great resource for you if you're trying to find a way to track your exercise via software.

And it's actually the same online software that I use to track all of my clients' nutrition, fitness, triathlon progress, etc. But they haven't have a blog on there, and I'm one of the blog contributors.

And I answered a question on that blog that I received recently. And the question was very, very basic.

It says, I need to lose five pounds of fat fast. What is the best strategy?

And this question was from Kathy in Minnesota. And here is my basic answer to Kathy.

What you need to do is, you have to get your body into fat burning mode when it's most likely to use the greatest amount of fat. And it's a three-step process that you can incorporate. It's going to allow you to lose right around five pounds of fat in about two to four weeks. If you do this every day, remember, consistency is the key with this. So you've got to do this on a daily basis. And this is something that I'll use with some of my triathletes who need to shed a few pounds quickly for an upcoming race, or it's also something that I'll do with people who just have a lot of storage fat that they need to burn through. So, first thing you have to do, step number one, determine your maximum fat burning heart rate zone.

You can do this, and I actually do this with people who are local in the Spokane, Coeur d'Alene area, via a metabolic test, where you're actually walking on a treadmill, breathing gases in and out, and essentially we measure those gases, and that gives us a picture of exactly how many calories you're burning, how much is comprised from fat, how much is comprised from carbohydrate.