Best Strategy For Fasting

Over the past few day’s nutritionist Brad Pilon has been sharing with us his scientific research behind the controversy book “ Eat Stop Eat.” Proving to help you lose weight, get rid of stubborn belly fat – all the while preserving your metabolism without making you lose lean muscle.

As you read in last day’s post, Eat Stop Eat is not some crazy diet you do to lose the fat super fast kind of diet. This is a lifestyle change to let you lose weight at a reasonable pace and then stay lean the rest of your life.

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Craig: Cool. All right, last question. I know that we didn’t get through all of them, so we’ll have another interview sometime soon. But for now what’s the best nutrition and exercise strategy for increasing longevity?

So, people on here not only want to be healthy, they want to live to be 100. I mean, I want to live to be 100 and something. I know you think that might be crazy, but it’s just because I really want to know how the story turns out, to be honest with you. So, what’s the best strategy?

Brad: This is a good question.  I’ve known a centurion in my lifetime, and he was 101, on my wife’s Heather side of the family, not on my side of the family. The rest of Heather’s families were like 98 and 97, so I’ve seen people live to extended periods of time. If I just had to go off of their experience, I’d tell you the answer is gin and tonic, but it’s obviously more evolved than that.

Then I wonder is it really more evolved or is it a factor of how well you handle stress? I’m not talking about stress as in you have a crappy job stress; I’m talking about ALL THE STRESS YOU PLACE ON YOUR BODY.

Whether it’s the stress from massive overeating, the stress from the world’s hardest exercise program, and then of course the other stress, the stresses from relationships, the stresses from work, and how flexible you are with all of these things.

So it comes down to developing flexibility, both metabolic flexibility and physiological flexibility, making sure that you are conditioned enough that if you have to sprint for a bus you can handle it. Then making sure you’re flexible enough in your mindset that if something bad happens at work you can handle it. The massive million dollar mess up that happens in your company. You look at it, and you go, “Oh, that was completely my fault.”

How you handle that, how you handle the stress of a fight with a good friend. All these sort of stresses and how your body somewhat is flexible enough to cope with them, so psychological and physiological, your long term ability to handle these things is probably going to end up being YOUR BEST INDICATOR OF LONGEVITY.

However, some of that is learned. We learn how to handle stressful situations in our lives, but some of it is physiologic as well. The feeling with that sort of thing may come down to simple measurements of what does your body look like. I know that sounds vain saying what your body looks like is going to be a great determinant of how long you live, but consider the fact that something as simple as the ratio of your waist circumference to your height is one of the best predictors to your risk of cardio and metabolic diseases.

Something as simple as the measurement of your waist relative to your height, you add in a couple more measurements, and now you look at your shoulder width or circumference and your waist, now you have a measurement of the amount of muscle you’re carrying, the amount of body fat you’re carrying, and how this relates to tons of risks that could end your life prematurely.

I think it really comes down to the fact that we call it getting in shape for a reason; there is a specific healthy shape. You look and walk through a mall, and you can instantly pick out people, “That guy works That that girl is in great shape. Those two do not.” There is AN IMMEDIATE IDENTIFICATION with what a healthy body looks like. That look has been with us for hundreds of years, we can trace it back through art.

The way that a warrior, or a god, or a fighter is sculpted, painted, or drawn is relatively fixed. It’s a definite look of health and vitality. When we drew, painted, or sculpted immortal people, gods, people who in terms of longevity, they wrote the book on it, they supposedly live forever, and they had a very definite adult muscular lean build.

As a result longevity may be a combination of your ability to cope with stress and the choices you’ve made in your life to maintain a body, a human body in its proper shape. You go to the bodies’ exhibit in Las Vegas or New York or wherever it is right now, and you see those human bodies with all the fat, and skin removed, and it’s just sort of the skeleton with the muscles on it, and you see a human shape. There it is and it looks a lot like a superhero. Every single one of them the shape is there.

If you consider the fact that a lean body that’s athletic a certain shape to it, and that shape allows for a certain amount of metabolic and physiologic flexibility, you combine that with a mental attitude that’s a whole bunch of flexibility in terms of how well you cope with stress, I think that’s what is going to drive us, that and a really awesome medicine system is what’s going to drive us into living probably well past 100 to tell you the truth. I think it’s possible.

I’m not really buying the live to 1,000 thing yet without severe medical and genetic manipulation, but the live past 100 thing and be healthy and mobile and living a high quality of life is something that you and I will see in our lifetime for sure. I think those are the tricks to it, a certain amount of flexibility and keeping within a shape that we’ve been told for centuries is a shape of health and longevity.

So, you would like to move more, lift some things,and learn to relax and how to be stress stress, that’s the foundation of living as long as possible.

Craig: Solid stuff, I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Brad.We’ve got at least enough questions from Facebook and Twitter and from my questions that we didn’t get to that we can do another interview fairly soon. Does that sound good?

Brad: Yes.

Craig: All right. I appreciated your power lifting story that was pretty cool.

Brad: I would do another, but not for awhile.

Craig: Okay. Well, anything else you want to add before we go?

Brad: No, that was great. If you want to touch on some of the other questions just let me know and we can do it at a later time for sure.

Craig: Awesome. Thanks everyone. If you want to learn more about Brad’s stuff obviously you can check out his EatStopEat.com program, but his blog is also very informative at BradPilon.com, So, Brad, thank you.

Brad: Thank you.

Craig: This is Craig Ballantyne from TurbulenceTraining.com.  I’ll talk to you soon with another great interview. Bye.