Category Archives: Uncategorized

How to Detox Your Home – Guest Blog by Ben GreenField

How To Protect Your Body From The 10 Hidden Killers In  Your Home.

how to detox your home

Welcome to Chapter 18 of Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health & Life, in which you’re going to discover how to protect your body from  the 10 hidden killers in your home.

Home is where your heart is.

And if you’re anything like me, your home is also one place – aside from  gyms, roads and parks – where you probably spend a significant amount of time  sweating and sculpting your body. But wouldn’t it be a real pity if you were  turning your body into a chemical wasteland in the process?

The fact is, you can’t do much about the diesel exhaust getting piped out the  backside of the trucks that drive besides the roads you run or bicycle on, the  chemical-laden disinfectants that gets sprayed on the treadmills and exercise  equipment at the gym, or the pesticides and herbicides that litter the grass at  a public park.

However, in the same way that you have complete control of what kind of foods and chemicals  you put into your body, you do have control over how healthy – or unhealthy  – your home is. You also have  control over how well equipped your body is  to handle potentially toxic environments, such as gyms, roads and  parks.

So today’s chapter marks our journey into Part 5 of the book – the  “Lifestyle section”. In addition to discovering how to detox your home, over the  next several chapters, you’ll also learn:

-How to “equip” your home so that you can  stay naturally physically active throughout day – rather than sedentary with  unnatural exercise micro-doses…

-Time saving tips for to combining a daily  commute and training, managing training with kids and family obligations, and  getting more done in less time…

-Other lifestyle hacks that can free up lots  of time, including food prep methods, combining workouts, and other cutting-edge  productivity strategies such as utilizing virtual assistants, e-mail filtration  systems, and everything else that I personally do to free up as much time as  possible during the day…

As usual, leave your questions, comments and feedback below this  chapter – and also let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see addressed  that I may have left out!

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household chemicalsWhy  You Need To Protect Your Body

You’ve learned how to clean your gut, clean your liver, and do a detox to  eliminate internal toxins from your body, but how much consideration have  you given to the toxins, pollutants, chemicals, heavy metals and hidden killers  that aren’t inside your body, but are outside your body?

In other words…

When you’re cranking out push-ups in your living room, have you ever  thought about what kind of carpet you’re shoving your nose into?

When you’re doing the cold thermogenesis showers you learned about in Chapter 4, have you ever considered what  compounds your skin might be soaking up from the water?

And as you’re sitting here right now reading this chapter, do you know  how many spectrums of electromagnetic frequencies are bombarding and radiating  your body from smartphones, e-readers, and computers?

The fact is, the average home contains 500-1,000 chemicals, ten times more  electrical pollution than 40 years ago and an untold number of mold, mites,  fungi, spores, pollen and other “bioaerosols”. Most of this stuff you are  completely unable to see, smell or taste, but just because you can’t sense it  doesn’t mean it won’t leave you struggling with brain fog, an afternoon  headache, a crappy night’s sleep, or a horrible workout.

So let’s learn what you can do about it.

Find out what some of the major ones are and see how Ben suggests dealing with them! Click here for the full article.

Download SweetBeat on iTunes now!

Why Yogurt and Probiotics Make You Fat and Foggy – Guest Blog by the Bulletproof Executive

Why Yogurt and Probiotics Make You Fat and FoggyThis is a small excerpt from the original article, “Why Yogurt and Probiotics Make You Fat and Foggy,” by the Bulletproof Executive. Read on to learn, “3 Ways to a Healthy Gut Biome and Reduce Histamine Intolerance.”

#1) Follow the Bulletproof Diet to heal your gut:

Eat a low histamine, anti-inflammatory diet like the Bulletproof® Diet
as the primary way to protect your gut and reduce histamine intolerance. Eating prebiotic foods that selectively stimulate the growth of good bacteria in your gut is also helpful. Prebiotic foods in the ‘green portions’ of the Bulletproof diet include: Jerusalem artichoke, avocados, and vegetables high in soluble fiber like sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, and turnips. Onions are in the yellow zone because of what they do to alpha brain waves, but they also have prebiotics in them.

Self-tracking tools like the Bulletproof Food Sense App
help to detect physiological responses to foods you are sensitive too that may be due to excess histamine concentration. Although histamine intolerance can be difficult to diagnose, one of the common symptoms is an elevated heart rate. Using the Food Sense App after meals (as instructed) will use the iPhone’s camera sensor to measure your heart rate and compare it to your baseline heart rate. If there was an increase of more than 16 beats per minute, then this signifies a food sensitivity and helps you zoom in on gut wrecking or histamine-rich foods.

#2) Reduce histamine producing bacteria

Avoid histamine producing bacteria like Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus reuteri, and Lactobacillus bulgaricus that are mostly commonly found in the majority of yogurts and fermented foods, especially when they are not balanced by other species. Rampant unbalanced focus on lactobacillus in yogurt has led to this problem.

#3) Increase histamine degrading bacteria

Finding ways to get more histamine degrading bacteria into your diet can be difficult, but is great for gut health and key to reducing histamine intolerance. High phenol foods like blueberries, coffee, and chocolate can feed a type of gut bacteria called firmacutes.

My favorite (best tasting) source of balanced bacteria is a yogurt-like product, called Amasi, that contains 30 carefully controlled strains of bacteria. Traditionally, Amasi is the renowned drink of the Masai warrior tribes in Northern Tanzania and Kenya and is known for its rich variety of beneficial bacteria and highly bioavailable nutrients.

As you might have heard on podcast episode #47 with Jordan Rubin, founder of Beyond Organic and creator of Amasi, he replicated the Masai tribes’ production system to produce Amasi from grass fed, antibiotic free, cow’s milk. Rubin even went to the extent to make sure he used the same genetic breed of the Masai’s cows to assure they have non-inflammatory kind of casein (Beta casein A2).

The fermentation of the Amasi is influenced by key histamine degrading bacteria: Lactobacillus plantarum, Bifdocaterium lactis, and Bifidobacterium longum.13,14 These particular strains not only lower histamine levels, reduce inflammation, and improve digestion, but Amasi as a whole food helps improve absorption of specific nutrients such as vitamin B6, B2, and K, folic acid, niacon, and zinc.

MLM alert – Beyond Organic, the creator of Amasi, is a multilevel marketing company. I despise that business model because it usually victimizes needy people, and it leads to low quality or high prices. Long discussions with Jordan and an evaluation of his standards and pricing lead me to believe that Beyond Organic is not out to victimize people and is charging a fair price for impossibly high quality dairy. I did not decide to mention a MLM company lightly and did so after great diligence. If you don’t like it that I’ve made this decision, I invite you either accept it or unsubscribe. It is a decision made with integrity.

Beyond Organic has gone to great lengths to do everything right in creating a truly transformative dairy product. I have never seen anything like it and Amasi is the only yogurt-like food my body has been able to digest flawlessly, and it tastes great! Amasi is a great way to allow a little bit of yogurt into your life and still feel perfectly normal afterwards.

This is why I worked with Beyond Organic to create customized Bulletproof packs at a special discounted rate for the Bulletproof Community to try these incredible products yourselves. The Bulletproof® Packs
were personally crafted to include an assortment of Bulletproof approved foods and beverages that will help upgrade your gut health and mental performance, including: Amasi, Omega powder, grass-fed low histamine beef jerky, almonds, and herbs.

Download the Bulletproof Food Sense App for free now!

Ironman Lake Placid Training Week 25 Update-Still Tapering – Blog by Bri Tri

To see Bri Tri’s full blog post with his training description and pictures, please click here.

Below is an example of how SweetBeat can be used to monitor training for the Ironman at Lake Placid.

Time to Geek out!

“The Training Totals(since January 1 2013)..

Activity Distance Duration
Swimming 169,586 yds(96.4 mi) 66:37 hrs
Cycling 2,274.4 miles 140:59 hrs
Running 561.1 miles 88:39 hrs

Heart Rate Variability

My Heart Rate Variability (HRV)rebounded back into the high 60’s and 70’s this week with the reduction in training. I can’s say I really felt that spectacular yet, so hopefully that will come up even more this upcoming week.

image

Looking at HRV for the entire training season, you can see the up-and-downs that go with the changes in volume and intensity of training. Overall, it appears to trend upward as the 2nd half of the season progresses. The very high value during the first week or two was from an old algorithm that was used in the Sweetbeat iOS app.

image

Training Load Analysis(TRIMP/CTL/ATL)

The graph below shows that my fatigue(ATL) has dropped significantly below my fitness level(CTL) giving me a positive Training Stress Balance(TSB) of 24(132 CTL-108 ATL = 24 TSB).

Training Load 2013-07-21

 

Finally the breakdown of weekly training volumes broken up by activity…

Weekly Training Volume 2013

To download SweetBeat on iTunes, click here.

Try our free app with Bulletproof Executive, Food Sense.

Ep 24 – SweetBeat and Soap Boxes By Jon & Debbie from FitFatFast.com

CEO Ronda Collier is constantly participating in podcasts to enlighten our users and listeners on how the autonomic nervous system works. She was recently interviewed by Jon and Debbie from FitFatFast.com. This is an excerpt from the article. To listen to the podcast, click here.

 

“Ronda Collier from Sweetwater Health, come on down, you’re the next guest on The Fit Fat Fast Podcast! In today’s show Jon and Debbie (but really Debbie’s “friend”) talk with Ronda about Heart Rate Variability and why it is an invaluable biomarker to track.  Indeed, if finding health and balance in your life is your ultimate goal you need to know about HRV!  We side-step all the uber-geek talk and get down to the nitty-gritty of what this stuff means to the regular person.  It’s a great conversation and it really is a topic very important to metabolic health.  We also talk about the functionality of the SweetBeat App which is the key that unlocks all of this information.

Jon also goes off on a tangent and climbs on his soap box while discussing an article written by a world renown Heart Surgeon on what really causes heart disease.  The Fit, Fat, Fast podcast is never short of opinions and Jon certainly makes this one known!

We also take on a listener question about why you still need supplemental calories from carbs during exercise even if you’re fat adapted.”

To download SweetBeat click here.

Download the free Bulletproof app – Food Sense.

Please send all support questions to support@sweetwaterhrv.com

Find Your Kryptonite With the Free Bulletproof Food Sense iPhone App! – by Dave Asprey

Find Your Kryptonite With the Free Bulletproof Food Sense iPhone App!Check out the brand new free iPhone app that helps you identify the hidden food sensitivities that make you weak. Hidden food sensitivities are like kryptonite – they cause chronic inflammation, make you tired and moody, and sabotage your fat loss. The free Bulletproof® Food Sense™ app uses your phone’s onboard sensor to get data about what your body does after you eat, so you can identify and eliminate problem foods in order to perform to your maximum potential.

This app is a brazen attempt to use biohacking technologies in an iphone app meant for everyone’s benefit.

After years of knowing that heart rate data is useful for detecting food sensitivity data, but not having a convenient way to use it in the real world, it’s exciting to work with SweetWater Health™ to make this type of technology convenient and accurate enough to use. The alternative is a lab test, which costs a lot of money and involves needles.

You can use this app to decide if it’s worth your time to get a full blood allergy test, or you can use it to help you know what foods to avoid without any lab test at all. I recommend you get a blood test for food allergies unless you feel awesome all the time without fail.

This is an example of how powerful it can be to gather and analyze data from your own body and use it to upgrade yourself. The Food Sense app isn’t meant to be used all the time. Just use it when you’re testing new foods to see how it helps you zoom in on your unrealized food sensitivities.

This app is free because everyone performs better when they are more aware of what is going on in their bodies. You don’t have to eat  the Bulletproof® Diet or drink Bulletproof® Coffee in order to use this app to feel better. Whether you are a biohacker or just concerned about your health, Food Sense™ helps you in your quest for optimal performance and a healthier life. Try it outUS iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store, see if it works for you, and let me know what you think!

The Quest to Bring You This Technology

When I first started down the path of biohacking and upgrading myself, I was fascinated to learn of Dr. Arthur F. Coca’s research that shows how the heart rate raises, by at least sixteen beats per minute, after you eat foods you are sensitive to.1 As profound as this research is, I found it wildly inconvenient to continuously measure my heart rate, gather the data, and analyze it to help me discover which foods were inflammatory vs. which ones just weren’t for ME. Of course this specific quest was before I fully developed an understanding for the larger relationship between common inflammatory foods and biochemistry in the majority of all people. It is one thing to know your sensitivities and another to know about inflammatory foods in general. More often than not they go hand in hand.

Then, in 2009, I was CTO of a company that makes heart rate monitor wristbands. I became interested in using wristband technology to gather data on food sensitivities, but soon realized that there was no real mechanism for doing that in a watch.

When I started working as an advisor to SweetWater Health™, a heart rate variability monitoring software company, I jumped on the opportunity to partner with them to create the Food Sense app. I was amazed to see how accessible and user-friendly they made the technology I have been dreaming about for years.

How the Food Sense Test Works & Why Eliminating Hidden Food Sensitivities Can Make You Think, Feel, and Look Better

food-sense-screenshot
My experience as a biohacker who used to weigh 300 pounds and really struggled with food cravings, is that every single person has a set of things in their environment or their food that makes them weak, and most people don’t know what most of them are. The Bulletproof® Food Sense app offers a food sensitivity test, using methodology developed by Dr. Coca, to help you identify what is causing the weakness. If you are sensitive to certain foods, you may not experience symptoms right away, though your body reacts by elevating your heart rate for up to 1 ½ hours after eating an offending food.

Food sensitivities are a reaction from the immune system or a result of the body’s lack of proper enzymes to digest foods. When the body reacts to a food, it sends out inflammatory proteins and cortisol, which create low-level chronic inflammation. This type of chronic inflammation may impair digestion, cause sore joints, headaches, and brain fog. Inflammation also triggers weight gain because it affects a specific part of the brain (the hypothalamus), causing it to become insulin and leptin resistant. Decreasing inflammation is critical to any effective fat loss protocol, including the Bulletproof Diet.
Unfortunately, a person with low-level inflammation often does not connect the symptoms with the foods, or may not even be aware of them.

This is where easy-to-use self-tracking tools like the Food Sense app come in handy. The Food Sense app uses the iPhone camera sensor to take quick and easy heart rate measurements at specific times of the day. You use the app to measure your pulse first thing in the morning to get a resting heart rate as a base to compare to. Then, before eating a meal, you record what is on your plate and perform a quick pulse test again. After the meal, the app will prompt you to measure your heart rate three times, every 30 minutes after the meal. Once testing is complete, the app determines if the meal triggered a food sensitivity, indicated by a red “X” or if not you will see a green checkmark.

While people can also use one of the affordable heart rate monitors compatible with the app, the camera sensor is a convenient way for people to adopt the food sensitivity test into their everyday life. Using the camera sensor merely requires holding the tip of your index over the iPhone camera lens and flash. No needles. No blood.

I used technology similar to this years ago, but it was too much work to take my own pulse using a little finger attachment, writing it all down, and analyzing the information. This app makes this process really simple and recordable.

Stress and HRV Training Features for High Performers Are in Full-Featured Version of the App

If you want to get a bit nerdy and serious about your performance, you can also get an amazingly full-featured version of the app that works with a compatible chest strap to measure and track your heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in the time between heartbeats, all day long. HRV is a great way measure of a person’s stress level and this app is able to tell you when you are “unconsciously” getting stressed or moving into a fight or flight response throughout the day. In fact, users can see their HRV in real time, giving them the ability to take action to manage stress during a 5-minute breathing and relaxing session. Doing these sessions can help you return to a more relaxed, higher performing state, even in demanding business environments.

This application does not compete with my friends at Heart Math who make the Inner Balance sensor, which you use to train your HRV for short periods, not track it all day. The two HRV apps actually work well together to train your nervous system for optimal performance.

In competitive sports, studies show HRV to be an effective metric to detect overtraining. The full-featured app measures HRV for training, recovery, and provides an objective measure of your body’s response to each workout. The athlete simply does a 3-minute HRV session each morning to determine a result that recommends, “train as usual”, “low exertion day” or “rest day” based on the athlete’s baseline trend.

The app even allows users to upload their data to a secure database in the cloud so they can access their data on a compatible Bulletproof website. Users sign in securely to see a calendar of their sessions, color-coded by average stress level, session tags, and session summaries.

Bulletproof Recommendation

For overall food allergy testing, the Bulletproof recommendation, if you can afford it, is still to get a blood test that looks at your antigens (IGE and IGG). These two tests will help you map out which foods on the test you’re sensitive or allergic to. However, if you eat out at a restaurant or eat mystery processed foods on occasion, that weren’t on the blood test, the Bulletproof Food Sense app will let you know if you have sensitivities to them.

So again, you don’t have to use this app all the time. Use it for a few days in a row to help you zoom in on your kryptonite.

Food Sense is available for free so you can try it out, see if it works for you, and let me know what you think!

Click here to download your free Bulletproof Food Sense app from the Apple iTunes store

50th episode of Bulletproof Executive Radio – New Free iPhone App “Food Sense”

Below is the original podcast article. To listen to the podcast and get a play by play itinerary click here.

“It’s the 50th episode of Bulletproof Executive Radio, which has now been downloaded more#50 New Bulletproof iPhone App, Food Sensitivities & HRV with Ronda Collier from SweetWater Health™ – Podcast than 1.3 million times, and has reached #1 status on iTunes. It’s time to celebrate and say thanks, so in true biohacker style, here’s a brand new free iPhone app to help you upgrade yourself, along with an interview with the scientist who made it all happen.

The new iPhone app is called Bulletproof® Food Sense
and you’ll hear a lot more about it in today’s show, and you can read more about it in the full blog post to come. Thank you for your support for the show and the blog – I am humbled.

Today’s interview is with long time biohacker and founder of Sweetwater Health™, Ronda Collier. Ronda is putting her Rhonda-Colliermore than 25 years of experience in high tech to work at SweetWater Health™, where they are looking at the signal coming from the human heart, and instead of seeing beats per minute or simple heart rate variability, seeing a huge pool of big data just waiting to be analyzed using Ronda’s crazy advanced math skills. There is a lot more information in your heartbeat than you’d think – stress levels are just the beginning. By applying mobile health monitoring and stress management with medical research techniques, SweetWater Health is creating some very advanced, very easy to use biohacking technologies.

My experience as a bio hacker who used to weigh 300 pounds and really struggled with food cravings, is that every single person has a set of things in their environment or their food that makes them weak. SweetWater Health and Bulletproof Executive just partnered to create the free Bulletproof® Food Sense iPhone app to help you find your personal kryptonite by using the phone’s onboard sensors to detect your hidden food sensitivities.

You can also get an amazingly full-featured version of the app that works with a chest strap to measure and track your heart rate variability all day long and use complex algorithms to quantify your food, stress, and overall health.

Click here to download your free Bulletproof Food Sense app from the Apple iTunes store

This application does not compete with my friends at Heart Math who make the Inner Balance sensor, which you use to train your HRV for short periods, not track it all day. In fact, I’m on the advisory boards of both Heart Math and SweetWater Health. Both companies totally rock!”

Ironman Lake Placid Week 20 Mini Camp Day 3 – Guest Blog by Bri Tri

This is an excerpt from Bri Tri’s Ironman Lake Placid Journey. At the bottom of the post you can find a link to the rest of his blog. We like to share our users’ journeys as often as possible.

“Sunday morning I woke up a bit groggy. I reached over to my nightstand, fumbling around until I felt the elastic band of my heart rate monitor strap. I squirmed around wrapping the HRM around me without  actually sitting up in bed, a task I have become quite proficient at over the last several months. I check my Heart Rate Variability(HRV) every morning. I was curious what HRV reading would be this morning after the 100+ mile bike ride and brick run yesterday. I hit the start button on the Sweetbeat HRV iPhone app and tried to relax as best I could for the next 3 minutes. After the buzzer went off, indicating the test had completed, I was more than shocked to see a reading of 36. Half of the previous days’ reading of 69. Obviously Saturday’s training had taken its toll on me and my body was a bit of stressed. Despite the app telling me to take it easy today, I had a 2:45 long run to do today, so the easy day will have to wait until tomorrow.

 

Daily AM HRV readings

As you can see from the graph, my HRV rebounded quite well on Monday after my long run with a value of 76. So I was able to recover from the bike pretty quickly.

I slowly maneuvered out of bed and starting making some instant oatmeal. My thought was to have my smoothie after my run, but then realized that I would not have time when I got back since we had to pack up and head home. So I mixed up the smoothie too, and had a much larger than normal breakfast. I am sure my body appreciated the extra nutrition. While eating breakfast, I noticed the constant flow of runners going back and forth past the end of the driveway on River Road, about 25 yards from our window. It was going to be a busy day on the run course I guess. Next I got my running gear together and set off for my long run. I had no idea how my legs would respond after the full bike.

I set off north (towards Whiteface) on River Rd for the 1.5-2 miles towards the course turnaround point. I started off without my 4-bottle fuel belt. No reason to lug that extra weight if I don’t have to, since I can pick it up on the way back. My legs were a little stiff at first, but by the time I got back to the house they were feeling better. It was very cloudy this morning and a little muggy. Not horrible though and I didn’t have to put sunscreen on which is great. There were a constant flow of runners out and most were all pretty friendly saying hello and good morning. Mostly everyone out was going at a pretty slow, Ironman age-grouper pace, but every so often a younger dude would fly by at a pretty fast clip. There were even some people out walking and a couple ladies doing the run/walk. I knew that cause I heard their little timer go off when I went by and they immediately started running.

When I got back to the house I stopped in for a bathroom stop and grabbed my Fuel Belt. Ughhh…it felt like I strapped a divers weight belt on. The slight grade of the road, heading south, amplified this weight even more. Eventually I settled into a steady rhythm again. I passed a couple people running towards me on my side of the road. I don’t know how people can run with their back to traffic? I felt really good the entire way out to Route 73 by the ski jumps. I was not looking forward to the either of the two hills on the course and the first one started here as I made the right across the steel bridge. It really wasn’t too bad and I continued to run fairly steady up it. Once I crested the hill, the course flattened out again back into town. At Lisa G’s began the big climb up to Main St.

The slog up up to Main St. is a tough one. I took it easy and slowed my pace a bit. A couple younger couples blew by my on the hill at a pretty fast pace. The one couple that was leading decided to just stop running and the other couple behind them almost ran them over. It was pretty funny. The couple that stopped continued running fast and walking the entire rest of my run. I kept leap-frogging them the whole way. It was quite annoying after a while. Why don’t they just run a little slower and keep running?

I made the turnaround at the back side of Mirror Lake and started making my way back to River Road again. Now the sky had really clouded up and was getting dark. It was only a matter of time before the rain started. I was ready for a little refreshing rain now. I continued leap-frogging the stop-and-start couple and took in the beautiful scenery of the mountains surrounding Lake Placid. It is such a beautiful place, which is why I wanted this to be my first Ironman. I think the mountainous scenery is one of those things that will help to really enjoy doing this event and get me through those times that are going to be painful.

My Garmin was reading 15 miles when I approached the house on River Road and I was somewhere around 2:15 at that point. I needed to do 2:45 so the out and back to the course turnaround should fill that in promptly. It is funny how so many times workouts just seem to automagically fit perfectly into the time I need to complete for a workout. Most times I do try to plan them that way either. The rain finally started to fall just as I passed the house. Denise was not back from her outing yet, so I pushed on. I figured she had gone to Henry’s Woods for a trail run. The rain increased more as I continued and by the time I got back to the house it was a steady downpour. 17.3 miles in 2:50. Not bad for a slow, steady run. I think that is a better pace than what I ran my first marathon. Of course I was nursing some IT Band issues during that, but it would be pretty funny if I end up PR-ing my marathon during Ironman. We’ll see.”

To read more about Bri Tri’s Ironman journey at Lake Placid, go to his blog.

To download SweetBeat click here.