Written by Christopher Kelly
May 27, 2016
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello. Welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today, I'm joined by Kyle Kingsbury. Hi, Kyle.
Kyle: How you doing, Chris?
Christopher: I'm good. I'm slightly intimidated. People are asking for strength-based athletes to be on the podcast. I didn't just get any strength-based athlete. I got a flipping former UFC fighter. How cool is that? Or retired.
Kyle: Yeah. Retired from getting punched in the face but not retired from the athletics, that's for sure.
Christopher: I'm slightly intimated by you even though you're on the other side of the Skype connection. I think we better start by you telling us about your physical dimensions. How big are you?
Kyle: Let's see. The height hasn't changed. So 6'3.5". I'm somewhere floating in between 230 and 235 depending on how ketogenic I am and how much carb backloading I've been doing.
Christopher: What's your collar size? I always think that's one that's really scary.
Kyle: You know what? I haven't measured my neck in a long time but I think when I get fitted it's somewhere in the 18 to 19 range. If I get the 20 inch neck, it fits nice, it's a fat guy's suit underneath that. So I try to get something that fits my waist nice and then I just use the tie to kind of snug it up and get the collar to work.
Christopher: Maybe I should get you to send me some pictures that I can put in the show notes. I know we were just talking about this before that it's difficult. As a UFC fighter you don't get that many photos. I'm sure you can dig up something that I can put in the show note so that people can see you because you are a striking human being to say the very least.
Kyle: Yeah. Most definitely. I'll send you over some photos.
Christopher: Tell me what it was like being a UFC fighter. How did you get into that?
Kyle: I played football my whole life since I was 10 years old. I finished up at university, as you UK folks like to say, in Arizona State University. I played division I football there. I wasn't good enough to play professional football, like anything I still had the itch and wanted to push myself, so I started training in mixed martial arts. The guy who I was training with, he owned the gym. He also owned a small fight promotion up in Arizona. He just said, "Hey, you're big. You can fight heavyweight. Why don't you just get in there and get your feet wet? If you like it you can continue. If you don't like it you never have to do it again."
So my first two fights I won in under 30 seconds. I was pretty hooked from then on. So I started training and everything kind of snowballed. I rose up pretty quickly in smaller organizations and then made it on to The Ultimate Fighter season 8. That was my foot in the door for the UFC. I fought for six years there and then retired in 2014.
Christopher: That's unbelievable. You're just dangerous, aren't you? You've always been dangerous. You didn't do Kung Fu or wrestling or something?
Kyle: Yeah. I wrestled in high school in junior high. I fought a lot growing up. I wasn't a stranger to that type of interaction but it is different when you're talking about fighting somebody out of anger and in the moment versus a trained guy who's doing some background research on you, figuring out what you're good at, your strength and weaknesses, and you really have no problems with the guy but you're doing it for money to try to work your way up to an eventual title shot, all those things play into it. It was a whole different avenue. I wasn't sure if I was going to like it.
I can honestly say the first time you knock someone out, that's one of the most addictive feelings you can have as a human being. There's no other drug like it. The adrenalin rush you get from that is quite phenomenal. That's really what hooked me into it initially.
Christopher: Even though I'm a skinny mountain biker I can sort of relate to it because I used to do kung fu and kickboxing when I was younger. I used to do a lot of bench press and a lot of strength training and do all that. I eventually bowed out of it because I keep getting my head kicked in. You would spar with kids that would come into the class for the first time. I just was getting too many injuries. I just couldn't cope with it anymore. It was so difficult.
Do you find that when someone spar with you or did spar with you that they would just be "Oh, this is Kyle Kingsbury. He's invincible therefore I have to put in 110%," and they would always just go in too hard and someone will get hurt."
Kyle: Not so much with the younger guys. Where I was training, at American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, we had the heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez there, he wrestled at Arizona State when I was playing football, Luke Rockhold who's the current middleweight champion, Dana Cormier the current light heavyweight champion, these are all guys that I was training with the majority of my career. So to put it lightly, I was going against guys who are much better than me on a regular basis. That made me better but it definitely took its toll.
A lot of guys get hurt in the sport due to overtraining and really just running themselves down and not putting an emphasis on recovery and rest. I certainly fell under that group as well.
[0:05:03]
You get to a point where is the juice worth the squeeze. I feel fine now and I feel like I have my whereabouts. I've had my face busted twice. I've had two orbital fractures on my left eye and I've had my left eyebrow smashed in a fight. So to say that if somebody's hitting me hard enough to break bones in my face, to act like that's not going to take its toll long term, I'm just kidding myself. Really, that's one of the biggest factors in my decision to retire was just weighing out is the juice worth the squeeze long term in terms of brain health and cognitive health. With everything I've learned with nutrition and longevity and health and wellness, it was time to pull the plug.
Christopher: Tell me about your style of martial arts. You talked about kickboxing. I'm slightly familiar with that. I don't remember being taught anything to do with wrestling. We never did any ground work or anything like that. So how would you describe your style?
Kyle: I started off in wrestling in high school and junior high just to be better at football. When I finished football and got into mixed martial arts I still had some wrestling knowledge but nothing compared to the guys who are fighting in UFC now. A lot of them are collegiate level or above. Really, that ended up being a hindrance of mine long term.
Like I said, my first two fights I won in under 30 seconds. Those are both by knees to the body. So I had just the natural talent for Muay Thai which is a form of kickboxing in Thailand. I actually spent some time out in Phuket at Tiger Muay Thai. I gravitated towards that. It was something that I always enjoyed, just adding new weapons, knees, elbows in addition to really powerful kicks and being able to use my range, being a taller fighter. Push kicks and teeps and things like that from Muay Thai were really effective weapons for me. I always enjoyed that.
The first time you get Big Brothered by somebody who takes you down and just lays on top of you, and you feel manhandled and helpless in front of 20,000 people and however many people that are watching on pay per view, that really gives you an appreciation for the ground game. After I lost to Stephan Bonnar here in San Jose in front of my home crowd that really put an emphasis on wanting to be better in pursuing jiu-jitsu and facilitated my growth and my love for that sport in the ground game which is really my focus now.
Christopher: You still are involved with fighting but not competitively. Your style is Brazilian jiu-jitsu now.
Kyle: Yeah. I compete in jiu-jitsu just for fun because I think it's good to put yourself in a situation where you're uncomfortable. It's humbling. You can lose to a smaller guy in jiu-jitsu. That's deeply humbling. There's that challenge that I seek mentally of having to calm my nerves and to focus and to find stillness inside. That's something I get from martial arts without getting my face pashed in. So that's something I continue to do. My father still competes in jiu-jitsu. He's 64 years old. So it's something you can do for a very long time. They call it the gentle art. I think as long as you do it right and you're not afraid to tap when you're putting a submission then you really can have a long career in it.
Christopher: This is starting to interest me because I've interviewed a couple of people who I respect a lot that are really into this. One is James Wilson who's a strength training coach that specializes in mountain bikers. What he teaches is very similar to what Dan John teaches that you probably heard of.
Kyle: I love Dan John. Easy Strength is one of my absolute favorite books. It's so much that I learned now post fight career that I'm like "Damn it. I wish I had [0:08:32] [Indiscernible] fight career because it makes so much sense."
Christopher: Welcome to my world. Every single book I read I'm like "God damn it," like Mark Sisson's Primal Endurance book.
Kyle: Yes. Completely agree.
Christopher: I'm like "Are you kidding me? I could've read this 15 years ago and not had any of these problems." Yeah. That's annoying. I know that James Wilson is really into Brazilian jiu-jitsu, as is Robb Wolf, of course.
Kyle: Yeah. I want to go up and train with Robb Wolf. I know he's got an amazing gym up in Reno. I would love to get up there and just pick his brain and teach him some jiu-jitsu and have a nice little exchange that way.
Christopher: Right. I don't know if you regularly listen to Robb Wolf podcast. He always talks about how he really struggles to perform at his best when he's not eating carbohydrates. He really enjoys the clear thinking that comes with high fat ketogenic diet. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu really suffers.
Kyle: I want to jump in here. I completely agree with that statement. I think it was maybe two podcasts ago. I forget the name the name of the guy on. You were picking his brain on the subject. It was the podcast where you had prefaced it with sorry for talking about myself and cycling again.
Christopher: Yeah. I know what you're talking about.
Kyle: People could email you better ways you could ask better questions to keep your podcast going. And then when I listened to the podcast I was like "No, no, no, no." This is perfect that you were asking those questions. I think anybody who competes and goes into a ketogenic diet, that's something you fall in love with is the cognitive function and the ability.
[0:10:12]
I have a one-year-old so I know what you're going through with the two-year-old. To be able to mitigate sleep loss while in ketosis, that is crucial but then at the same time when I need to go into fifth gear and really put the pedal to the metal there's something lacking there. That's kind of what I'm trying to play with now with the carb backloading. So I'm riding the same boat with Robb Wolf but the difference for me is I don't feel like I can't do well on jiu-jitsu. I feel like I can kill it in jiu-jitsu in a ketogenic diet. Where I feel the loss in power is when maximal effort deadlifting or maximal effort squatting, those kinds of things.
Just the other day I was deadlifting. I got 498 relatively easy on my way up. We were looking at 525 and I couldn't budge the bar. And then we went back down to 495 later. I felt like I could hit 495 for three reps so I easily should be able to do 525 in that situation and yet that maximal energy was just wasn't there.
Christopher: I see. I'm just laughing out. Do you know how much right that is? That is three times my body weight at least.
Kyle: It's all relative. I'm the weakest guy there. That's part of the deal. I trained with these guys. They were much better than me. Now when I powerlift I'm the weakest guy in the group. I think that's how it's supposed to be. You don't want to be a big fish in a small pond. I've certainly gained so much more strength working with these guys that are infinitely stronger than me. There's a 22-year-old who just deadlifted 825 and he weighs 220. He's a beast of a kid. You pick up lots of tips and tricks and technical things working with guys like that. That definitely helped me out.
Christopher: What was your life like before the ketogenic diet? What inspired you to try this?
Kyle: It was after I retired and just continued to learn and listen to podcasts and read books on diet and nutrition and things like that. I think Ben Greenfield was talking about it on his podcast about doing the ketogenic diet. I love high fat food so it wasn't the end of the world to try to get rid of carbohydrates. I love baking. I've been into really high quality meats. My dad and I bought our own grass-fed cow. We split it 50/50 from Oregon. So it's 100% grass-fed, grass-finished.
We eat really high quality meats and fats and things like that. It was easier just to increase the fat and cut the carbs and get into this. And then when I got into it it was like wow. I feel my brain working for the first time. I felt like I should go back to school like Rodney Dangerfield and retake all my college courses. It just felt like my brain was working in a way that it hadn't before.
In addition to that, my systemic inflammation dropped. The knee pain that I had for years was gone. For decades this knee pain was just lingering in the background and it had vanished, not to mention my flexibility went up seamlessly overnight. I could just drop first thing in the morning, pump to the ground and touch the ground, no pain and no tightness. Everything kind of opened up. Also that baseline endurance just goes through the roof.
So there was a lot to it especially not competing and fighting which definitely needs a lot of that glycolytic, as far as you can go type system. I wasn't using that as much anymore even in jiu-jitsu. Most of it is flowing and really trying not to exert 100% effort but just to find gaps in my opponents and things like that and then attack. I feel like the transition into a ketogenic diet has fit perfectly for this time in my life especially with having a newborn and now a one-year-old. It definitely helps.
Christopher: Do you find that you have a reduced requirement for sleep?
Kyle: I feel like I need sleep no matter what. I also work weekends. I've had shift work as a bartender and bouncer on Saturdays and Sundays for probably the last seven years. I will get home at 3:30 AM. With the little guy you're up at 6:30 or 7:30 no matter what. I felt a huge difference because after he was born maybe somewhere between two and three months old I started going back to carbs and really trying to push the weights. I didn't put my finger on it until I was listening to Dr. Dominic D'Agostino and Tim Ferriss' podcast talking about the sleep mitigation and how it helps so much with that and some of these pathways that it's working on and the brain is not yet well understood including how it affects epilepsy and things like that and the way that it works in those regards but it does work.
So right there I was like "Oh, man. All right. Yeah. Let me get back on the horse." So when I went back into strict ketosis the difference was night and day. That really showed me there because he was still getting up two or three times a night and then up for good at 6:30 AM. That's really been one of the biggest benefits for me as a new parent is being able to stay in ketosis, and load up on the MCTs before bed as well has helped a lot.
[0:15:20]
Christopher: That's really interesting. I just did an interview with Kirk Parsley. This is not the one that was on my podcast. It was on my podcast a couple of weeks ago. I'm just recording the interview for a Keto Summit, an online summit that people will be able to get access to very shortly. Kirk was the first of the interviews for that.
Kyle: Is this the Navy Seal doctor?
Christopher: Yeah. Exactly. Kirk is a former Navy Seal and doctor to the Navy Seals. He's actually Peter Attia's doctor. Do you know who Peter Attia is?
Kyle: Yes.
Christopher: He's his doctor and Peter is his doctor. Obviously we talked about sleep for the Keto Summit. He talked about how most of the studies that have been done on how much sleep people need. They put them in a darkened room for 14 hours a day and they just get as much sleep as they possibly could ever need. Eventually they settled down to this kind of baseline. At that point you realize, they've just reached how much [0:16:20] [Indiscernible] level of sleep that they need every day. Nobody has ever done studies like that in people who are keto adapters. So we don't know. That recommendation of eight hours a night is how much sleep you need, that's in keto adapted people which could be very different.
Personally I've not found that it's reduced my requirement for sleep but your right. My sleep in theory should be freaking terrible because I have a two-year-old and yet I'm certainly not tired during the day. I don't feel like I have a problem with sleep like I did in the past. Maybe it's the ketosis that's saving me from trouble that I just never would've known otherwise.
Kyle: Yeah. I think it was night and day being able to see that difference. Being in ketosis when my child was born all the way through his first two months and then coming out of it for a couple of months and then going right into it really just showed me the difference there. Now I got to sign up for this Keto Summit so I can get all this new information and studies coming out.
Christopher: Yeah. I'm so excited about this at the moment. I've got Ben Greenfield, Mark Sisson and Jimmy Moore, Dave Asprey, Robb Wolf, Tim Noakes, Travis Christofferson I interviewed this morning, he was amazing, he talked about cancer, Dominic D'Agostino, obviously, Richard Feynman, Patrick Arnold, Mike T. Nelson, Phil Maffetone, Bryan Walsh, Kirk Parsley I've done, Eric Westman, Jason Fung is tomorrow, Tom Seyfried, I'm very excited about that, Chris Masterjohn, Cate Shanahan, Barry Murray, Menno Henselman who is a keto body builder guy, Ken Ford, Ivor Cummins, Catherine Crofts, Max Lager I think you pronounce that, Kieran Clarke is a professor of biochemistry from Oxford University in the UK, Alessandro Ferretti, Ron Rosedale, Marty Kendall, Adrienne Scheck maybe, and of course my own Dr. Tommy Wood. It's going to be quite a lot of work to get that done but I'm just going to have so much information at the end of it. I wouldn't know what to do with it. It's going to be phenomenal.
Kyle: Yeah. I caught the first 90% of the names. Halfway through, the last 50% of the names are guys I never heard of but that's just equally exciting because now I get introduced to new people that I can draw from.
Christopher: Yes. There are definitely some people out there who are very good that I haven't invited or maybe there were invited and they didn't have time or whatever. Tommy, obviously he's deeply involved in research and this whole world. He created a spreadsheet like "This guy is really good, this guy is really good, this guy is really good. You need to go get him." We collaborated on it but it's mostly the people that Tommy thought had the best information based on his technical knowledge. They're all really good.
Tell me about some of the work that you've been doing with Grace Liu. I think of Grace Liu as being one of the world's foremost experts on the gut and the gut microbiome. I think she's looking at the gut in a way that maybe nobody else can. So what Grace had me do was she took the biome app which doesn't really tell you much about the data that they've sampled, and she had me write an application on top of that. It extracts the data from your biome and produces what's called a phylogenetic tree in a PDF diagram. That allowed Grace to actually look at the species level data from the sample that was taken from the gut. I'm pretty sure that nobody else on the planet can do what she does with those results.
I know you've been working with her. That makes me instantly question have you been having trouble with your gut or how did you come to meet Grace Liu and work with her?
Kyle: Let's see here. Where did it start? I think I heard her on Dave Asprey's podcast or something like that, and I started following her blog on Animal Pharm and was just instantly glued to it. I was learning about resistant starch. She was writing a lot about the RS2 and RS3 and the differences.
[0:20:13]
My wife, she was pregnant at the time. We dove straight in. I came home with like six packages of Bob's Red Mill.
Christopher: Oh, no. You can't say in front of Grace. She'll club you to death.
Kyle: No. Grace recommended it. This is before. So this how our relationship started. Of course I'm following the blog and she's talking about all the benefits of potato starch that it came from the studies on rats. So we dive right in and we're taking it every day. My wife is getting fatter at a pretty quick rate and I am getting run down and sick more often than I ever do. I wasn't sure why. I couldn't put my finger on it.
I think we had traveled to Las Vegas to see Natasha's sister and her family. I was feeling a little run down so I wanted to double up on the probiotics and this wonderful resistant starch, potato starch. So I added a ton of potato starch to the shake and I had it before bed. When I woke up I could barely breathe out of my nose. I mean I felt just terrible. So I went back online. The new data had come out that said it turns out that human's microbiome is a lot different, not being scavengers like rats are. This rodent model doesn't quite apply to us.
So I immediately wrote her online. I was like "Hey, we've been doing this for like three months now. My wife has gained a lot fat." Obviously it showed in this latest research how it destroyed a lot of the good bacteria that helped with metabolism and fat burning and body weight regulation and as well a lot of the good bacteria in our gut that helps with immune function. So there you had it. She was gaining weight and my immune system was trashed. I wrote her. I was like "Hey, we've been following this for three months. What's the fastest way we can try to mitigate the damage and reverse this?" She was like "I'm so sorry. This was new information. This is what's going on now."
She's just been amazing. She's helped us tremendously. She switched us over to her bionic fiber with the psyllium, acacia and inulin-FOS. Now that she's making her own costumed probiotics we're taking those, Bifido Max. We're seeing great results. Natasha's in the best shape of her life with one year post pregnancy. I feel great. My immune system is great. Everything's working well. I really feel the difference now.
That's kind of was the start of our relationship together was this one recommendation gone wrong and then her jumping in to correct and help us out.
Christopher: I think she's amazing to actually stand up and say, "What I said before was wrong. There may be a better solution" because that's not normally the way that things go down. The Max Planck quote or maybe it's a Max Planck misquote which is science progresses one funeral at a time. People, they just refuse to change their mind and they just die with this stuff and then things change. It seems extremely honorable to me that Grace said, "Okay. I know that was wrong. Sorry." If you live on the bleeding edge you're going to get cut.
Kyle: Yeah. I have no problem with that at all because it's like "Hey, I'm trying to be on the cusp. I know this is new science. I'm working hard." It's all an equals one. That's really what it boils down to. The people who are asking me constantly about this ketogenic diet and everything like that, there's a template to follow and then the other 90% is fine-tuning. That's why we do the blood testing with the ketone strips and everything like that because this is how you're going to figure out what works best for you and where you feel your best and how to get into that position. It's not a one size fits all for anything in life.
Christopher: Absolutely. You are your own expert. I'm a big fan of that. None of these holding test results real close to your chest, "Please, Doctor. I want to know what's going on." That's fantastic. So those are the fibers that's been working really well for you.
The ketogenic diet, it can just mean so many things. You could have somebody that's eating nothing but meat and fat or you could have something that's more like our ketogenic diet which is mostly plant-based, honestly. When you look at our plate, mostly plants make up the volume. Is that true for you? Are you getting most of your fiber from the vegetables that you eat?
Kyle: Yeah. There are a couple of things that I really like; fast meals and meals you can make and forget about. So we use the Crock-Pot at least two or three days a week. That's an easy way to just get a ton of cruciferous veggies in you which are mainly ketogenic in my opinion. I'll do a Crock-Pot with a little bone broth, pick a cruciferous vegetable like cauliflower or cabbage, leave it on the bottom, put whatever meat I want on top.
[0:25:10]
Yesterday we did ginger, two yellow onions, three pounds of organic chicken thighs and then three cans of coconut cream and some tikka masala, Indian curry paste. That was amazing and very low carb, high fat but just loaded with high fibers as well. I think onion has quite a bit of inulin or good prebiotic fiber from what I was reading.
Christopher: Yeah. That's a good one.
Kyle: That's a good way. They talk about how the outer shell of onions has the most amount of quercetin but if you've ever tried to eat the outer shell of an onion it can be quite a task.
Christopher: You can do it. You're a tough guy.
Kyle: You Crock-Pot it for 16 hours on low heat. It's actually edible. So I think that's an easy way to get these good things in our body. The other way is just making a nice big salad. Something I found fascinating in listening to you talk about the organic acids test was how our body breaks down oxalates. I've heard both sides of the coin. Dave Asprey is saying you should always cook your kale and steam it and remove some of the oxalic acid. Other people are saying, "No. You eat it raw." These tiny little things that kale and some of these other vegetables cause problematically end up having a full swing effect from the way our body response to them, how our body ramps up to mitigate some of the small amount of damage actually has an end result that's better. Have you heard of this?
Christopher: Yeah. Absolutely. I'm not sure what to make of it.
Kyle: Neither am I. We do it both. That's why I have cooked veggies, cooked crucifers and then I'll do some raw kale and raw spinach. I can't get this test that fast enough.
Christopher: [0:26:52] [Indiscernible] like the mass spectrometry. It takes a couple of weeks. It's annoying. I can tell you what's been seeing since that interview. It's with Dr. Bill Shaw. I'll link to this in the show notes. The Great Plains organic acids, it kind of brought new insight to what was going on inside people's gut specifically. The oxalates, we've never managed it before on the Great Plains test and so we just didn't know what was going on. We've heard people like Dave Asprey talk about this compound before but not really thought about it too much. Sure enough you start doing the test and it's going back high on everyone. Sure enough the reset checks out. Bill Shaw is a great guy. He does his homework. What he says is valid.
The question is is the oxalate coming from the person's diet or is it coming from something else that's in the gut because every time we see the oxalic acids we also see massive overgrowth of yeast and fungus, and we know there's a strong connection there. So it could be that all these people have been driving themselves potty trying to avoid the oxalates in foods which is almost impossible. Really, what's going on is the yeast overgrowth in the gut. So that's what they really need to deal with is the yeast and not the oxalates.
I think it makes sense. You don't go by 10 pounds of spinach and then blend it up with an avocado and drink it every morning. That's probably not the best thing to do. At the same time it's probably nothing to do with the amount of vegetables you eat. That's my bet. We'll see what happens, what pans out with that.
Kyle: I'm definitely into that. I've had to run Candida cleanse a couple of times. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the case. That was the other thing. When I found out about the organic acids test I was like "Why didn't I know about this five years ago? Why didn't I know about this 10 years ago?" What an amazing thing to figure out so much about the body, if you have bacterial overgrowth or fungus problems, kind of where your neurotransmitter depletion is or if it's lopsided. A lot of people lie in bed awake at night and they can't turn off their brain. Some people are tired all day long. It may not necessarily be adrenal fatigue. It might just have to do with neurotransmitters and which side you're lopsided towards.
Christopher: Absolutely. Tommy talked about this. I should link to this in the podcast notes as well. On the Endurance Planet podcast he did a really good interview with Tommy where they talked about women's hormones and PMS and how they relate to neurotransmitters. We know that we can measure the neurotransmitters on the organic acids. So if you're a woman with PMS, you do an organic acids test while you've got the symptoms, and then we can look to see what's going on with serotonin and dopamine and all of that. All of a sudden it's like rather than guessing with a bunch of herbs you're actually doing something a lot more diagnostic. That typically, I think, leads to better results. It's exciting time that some of these tests are becoming commercially available.
Kyle: Even in Dave Asprey's Better Baby Book with his wife Lana Asprey, they talked about how the child will take whatever it needs. That can be very depleting for a mother especially if you have back to back children and you don't do child spacing. I think Natasha, my wife, has had a rougher go with it simply because of these things.
[0:30:04]
She just submitted her organic acids test as well. I'll be very interested to see exactly what's going on in there and what corrections can be made. That's another great thing about it is it's not just "Hey, here's what's wrong with you," it's "Here's what's wrong with you and now. Here's how we fix it." That's an incredible, empowering thing that we can have at our disposal.
Christopher: I think that's one of the reasons that doctors don't run this test. It's not really about treating and diagnosing disease. It's about creating performance and longevity. They don't really have a way to bill for that. So if your goal is just to be a better UFC fighter or a better mountain biker I can't bill for that. Maybe I'm not so interested in the organic acids for that reason.
I have to say though it does tend to lead to a crack on our supplements. Because it measures so much stuff it's going to find problems. The temptation is to try and fix them all. So if you're someone like me like I just want to do everything at once, and so now I'm taking carnitine, I'm taking a lot of supplements. I won't bore you with the whole list but there's quite a lot of stuff.
Kyle: I could probably go down the list with you and take them all. I've been on acetyl L-carnitine for a while. I actually went and got N-acetylcysteine after listening to that podcast. I was like "You know what? I could never have too much glutathione so let me get this going right now regardless of what my scores come back at." My wife and I have been supplementing with that. It's cheap. I mean all these things add up but if it's cheap and you can just toss it into the mix and not worry about it then I don't see any issue with that.
Christopher: What's happening with your kid, the one-year-old? Is it a boy or a girl?
Kyle: It's a boy. His name is Bear.
Christopher: That's cool. Is he starting to show an interest in food?
Kyle: Yeah. You know what's funny is he eats whatever we eat, and he's really into some of the spicier food. I think the first time he had curry with us, it was like a green curry and it had a decent amount of chilly in it. It was making me sweat. My wife was like "Hey, he shouldn't have this." My cousin's a doctor. They have a little girl who's maybe four months older. They're like "It's good to let him try different things. If they like it, they like it. Just expose them to different things." So right then we got the green light.
I gave some of this green curry. He absolutely loved it. He was literally flexing with excitement. Every time he had a bite he goes "Ahhh." His whole body would light up. We've tried every different type of curry, Indian curries, Thai curries. He loves them all. He likes spicier food. He likes a lot of the broths and the coconut cream, stewed meats, chicken and beef and things like that. Sometimes we'll bird feed him where we chew it up and hand it over to him. He does really well with that. He's the savory guy. I'm not trying to make him ketogenic. He likes some sweets but for the most part he really does like these heavier, fattier, salty foods. I'm okay with that too.
Christopher: I'm okay with it too. So much of what children eat is learned from their parents I'm sure. Our daughter is now two and a half. She just wants to eat what she sees me eating particularly at lunch time. I have kind of the big-ass salad that you talked about at lunch time. That's what she wants to eat, a bunch of leaves with a can of sardines and half an avocado in it. She loves that stuff.
But I just kind of worry. There's a problem, definitely, with just weaning kids I think straight on to just pure carbohydrates, rice crackers and all that crap where there's zero micronutrition, it's just a bunch of carbs. I'm still not convinced that ketosis is a really good idea for certain groups of people or in the long term. I'm worried that Ivy's just going to end up gravitating to not liking carbs just because we don't eat them that much. What are you finding with your boy? Does he still eat some carbs?
Kyle: Yes, he does. I listened to Dominic D'Agostino when he was talking about -- I think he wrote an article for Robb Wolf. It was a four-piece series on Robb Wolf's website that talks about the history of the ketogenic diet. Obviously in the 1920s it was developed for kids with drug resistant epilepsy. What they found was all those kids survived and they did well but a lot of them were smaller without carbohydrates. If you look at mother's milk, mother's milk is not just fat and protein. There's about an equal amount of carbohydrate in there as well. I think that kids need all those things when they're growing at that pace.
We find different ways to kind of make it savory to give him his carbs but I'll put in a big sweet potato and I'll mash that up with a little coconut cream. He likes that a little bit better than just a straight sweet potato or I'll do bananas but I'll fry them on medium heat with some grass-fed butter and put a little cinnamon on top of that. And then he'll have the mashed banana with butter and cinnamon. He seems to enjoy that more than just straight banana or these mango-banana kids' pockets things that you can get in the store. I try to add fat or a little bit of collagen powder to any of his fruity things. He definitely enjoys that more.
[0:35:25]
Christopher: That's really awesome. Our daughter, the main thing she likes is fruits. It's May in California and the farmers' market is starting to have lots of delicious fruit. We had some blackberries this week that I have never tasted anything like them. They're like size of golf balls. Those are little balls of sugar. We used to have those things grow in our garden when I was a kid. They make you kind of wince a little bit like a lemon when you ate them. Maybe my pallet has changed a little bit. I think there's a lot of sugar in those. She just gobbles those down too. Other than that, she eats the same. Julie does eat some carbs.
You know what? I'll tell you. It's interesting that you talked about breast milk. It's slightly weird but we did the test. I took some of the ketone strips. I tested Julie's blood's ketones, beta hydroxybutyrate, and they were north .2 millimolar. Julie doesn't restrict carbohydrates in any way. She's not thinking about it at all. I would say she eats a low carb diet but she doesn't really think about it. So north .2. Technically it's not nutritional on a ketosis but there's obviously some level of ketones there. We tested her breast milk -- of course you did -- and it was north .6. So there was actually a significant amount of ketones in the breast milk.
Kyle: Yeah. That's something Dominic D'Agostino talked about as well that it's actually quite normal for children to get these ketones in. That's why he says it's maybe the fourth macronutrient should be keto, to look at it that way.
Christopher: Maybe we might have to wait until we have another baby to figure this out. We know -- I say we, Tommy told me, he sent me the papers and I read them -- the MCT, the medium-chain triglyceride, that are ketogenic for the baby that appear in breast milk, they come from carbohydrates that are synthesized in the breast tissue. So mom actually needs some carbs to make medium-chain triglycerides so that baby can be in ketosis. So if mom is in ketosis that might actually be holding something back from the baby. So what we'd really like to do is test like if Julie eats a high carb diet, what does that do to the breast milk.
Kyle: Yeah. Actually I was going to mention that. Natasha, she felt like she was getting fat from this potato starch. She'd say, "Let's cut the carbs." She'd notice that her boob size would kind of drop. Once we had Bear if we cut carbs at all, her breast milk would be cut in half. I would make a coconut rice dish with white rice, coconut cream and some xylitol sweet in it, she'd gobble that up, and her milk supply would double just overnight.
We ran that same test while she was pregnant. She saw me doing the ketone strips every night. She's like "Oh, I wonder where I'm at." I said, "I don't want to waste the $4 strip on you [0:38:26] [Indiscernible]. That's where you're at. I just told you your score, 0.0." She's like "Please, let's try." She had 0.9 millimolar. She's like "You've got to be kidding me right now." She's having at least 100 grams of carbs a day but if you think about it, most of those are going building little Bear inside her. So she was still in nutritional ketosis even with eating large amounts of carbohydrates each night.
Christopher: That's interesting. Whereabouts do you normally sit during the day?
Kyle: Well, I find that I feel my best when I'm between 1.0 and 2.0 millimolar. With the carb backloading and things like that, I'm usually huddling around 0.7, 0.8.
Christopher: Okay. I'm actually lower than that especially first thing in the morning. I'm normally around north .2 which is technically not ketosis at all but I feel good and so that's what I do. And then it's up to about 1.2 in the afternoon. That's interesting. Tell me how you use the carb backloading strategy. Will you just wait until you've done that deadlifting session and then refill the carbs as appropriate or do you plan ahead or how do you do it?
Kyle: I have this 50K race that I was prepping for. I'm not a distance runner by any means. I think the farthest I've ever done was half marathon, maybe a handful at times. I heard about Dr. Kelly Starrett, Becoming a Supple Leopard, MobilityWOD, CrossFit guy to San Francisco. He had done a 50K. He weighs 230 pounds. He was my inspiration for it. I remained really ketogenic during that even though I was still lifting heavy weights and pushing myself on that regard.
Once I finished that April 9th that's when I started playing with carbohydrate backloading and trying to really push my numbers in the strength room. This is kind of what interested me in the podcast you just did where you were picking the guy's brain on it, was the muscle fiber changes over time. I feel like even if I carb backload I might be missing that extra gear not because I'm not glycogen loaded but just because the muscle fiber has changed to more of this fat oxidizing slow twitch muscle.
[0:40:24]
So that's kind of where I'm at now. I'm like do I make it more consistent because if I'm more consistent eating carbohydrates -- Mark Sisson talked about how he's definitely not in nutritional ketosis but he's still relatively low carb and he has no carbs during the day and he'll carb backload at night. If I went to a diet similar to that, would that change my muscle over time? I'm not sure. So that's something I might play with but at the same time with this lack of sleep there is a craving to be in nutritional ketosis just for the fact that I mentally feel so much better. That outweighs everything in my opinion. How I feel, my mood, my quality of life, that outweighs if I can pick up 600 pounds or if I can only pick up 550.
Christopher: I was going to say a first world problem, but it's probably a Kyle Kingsbury problem. What on earth persuaded you to do a 50K run then? I've interviewed all these experts and I've tried to unpick or put together the puzzle that is optimum health and performance. It seems to me like walking a lot and then occasionally lifting heavy things is a really good strategy for health and most types of performance. I'm sure that you know that and you're already doing those things. What on earth persuaded you to want to do a 50K run?
Kyle: You're exactly right. The more studies they show now the more realize that hey, a marathon and above is not healthy. That's what people tell you, it's not a healthy thing. You can even see in people that do [0:41:56] [Indiscernible] endurance events, the enlarged portion of the heart just from having to pump the volumes, and that can be an issue. It wasn't about health. It was just about can I push myself to do something that I may not necessarily be good at and really driving through it and then know in the end like yeah, I can run a 50K. That's really the challenge was for me.
We went with a group called Ultra Adventures. They do an event in Grand Canyon. I think we're going to do next year. They do an event in Zion, Utah which we did this year in April. They just go to these beautiful, majestic places. Your ball's deep in nature. That's really what it's about. It's just this amazing experience at the same time that you're putting your body through the grinder. More than the race itself, it was knowing hey, if I have this date where I'm going to have to run 50K I know I need to prep for it. Really, that was kind of my all right, now that I know that I got to put the road work in but not ridiculous miles.
Obviously, you read Primal Endurance and Ben Greenfield book and things like that. You know that you can get away with doing high intensity intervals and really only putting in one slow, easy snail-pace jog a week will get you there. I did just fine with that. I didn't have a record time or anything like that but my goal is just to finish. I'm at a 10-hour cut off. And I did. I finished at nine hours and 56 minutes. I was the last guy across before the cut off. Twenty-six people came in after me. So I wasn't dead last.
We had some pretty amazing race conditions. They had a storm come in the day before. They almost canceled the race. I don't know if you're familiar with the terrain in Zion but it's pretty fine powder and it can be a little dusty but when it rains it turns into straight clay. I don't know if you've ever done any rehab on like a slide board where you kind of slide back and forth with these funny socks on your shoes.
Christopher: No. I never have.
Kyle: It opens up the [0:43:53] [Indiscernible]. It's like what a speed skater would do. This was kind of like that clay. I would say 80% of the run was really a hike through the slide board clay where I was almost doing the splits. People were eating dirt left and right. I fell on the mud several times. It was like a 10-hour Tough Mudder. I mean it was pretty brutal. Not a whole lot of it was running. Maybe 20% of them were actually running. It was an amazing thing. It's not something I would make a habit of. I might do this one next year in the Grand Canyon just to know what it's like to be able to run the whole race instead of having to hike a lot of it through mud. It was more for the challenge than anything else. I think it's important that we continue to do things that stretch our limits and push us to places where we don't feel comfortable.
Christopher: You're certainly doing that. That's a solid mountain bike ride. 50K, 30 miles, that's like a solid mountain bike ride for me. That'll take me three hours, four hours on the bike. So to do it on foot is kind of difficult for me to get my head around.
What did you eat during that time? How did you feel? You're kind of limited when you're on the foot. You can't really carry that much. I feel like it's easier on the bike to carry calories.
Kyle: Well, I had a fanny pack. I'm wearing a fanny pack.
[0:45:06]
Christopher: I saw that on the Joe Rogan podcast. I enjoyed that. I saw it.
Kyle: In UK you guys call them bum bags because fanny means something else.
Christopher: I've got my daughter used the chamois cream. I got this nontoxic chamois cream we call it in the UK. She calls it fanny cream which I find hilarious. She loves to get a hold of it and smear it all over her face and everything. It's great. Do you carry calories in a bum bag?
Kyle: Yeah. I got this book Feed Zone Portables that Dr. Kelly Starret lent to me. Basically what I made was like this baked egg dish mixed with steamed white rice, avocado, cacao and xylitol, so it had a little bit of sweetness, some sea salt. I had my protein. It was high fat. There were still a little bit of complex carbohydrate in there as well. That was my fuel. I made like cupcakes. I put them in cup cake pans and baked them the night before. They were pretty delicious. It actually turned out to be great because there were supposed to be four aid stations in this race. It ended up only being one due to the race conditions. Thankfully I was well hydrated. Being in ketosis I could get away with having little less fluid intake.
The biggest mistake I made was thinking I have this four aid stations and I did not bring water on me whereas everyone else had their camel backs and all that so they could have a sip of water whenever they needed. That was pretty much it. As far as the food was concerned, I was good to go there. I had some KetoCaNa in these two little packs that I had. So once I did made it to the aid station I could fill up the water in there, shake up the KetoCaNa and get some automatic beta hydroxybutyrate, salt and calcium loaded into me.
Christopher: Interesting. Wow. All the tips and tricks like you said, you turned it all. I do know Feed Zone Portables. I ride with a local guy here. I'm really hoping to get him on to the podcast. I know he's very busy. There are two people that ride bikes in Bonny Doon, and he's the other one. He's working on an HIV vaccine. He was a biotech guy that quit his job and is doing a PhD and he's working on a vaccine.
Kyle: Do they inject it with HIV to get rid of the HIV? Is that the process behind it?
Christopher: I don't want to go too deep into this because I don't really understand it. It's a really, really difficult area but they've obviously made a ton of progress with it. So I'm hoping to have him on. The flimsy segue there was we've done some really long rides together recently between four and five hours. He's really into those Feed Zone Portables and the baked eggs. I have to say it did look pretty good. I've got this place now where I can do rides like that and not eat anything at all. I feel like I do really well on that. I don't like putting food in my gut while I'm exercising if I can avoid it. I'll do it in a race but just for a normal training ride I don't really feel the need to do that.
Kyle: Yeah. I completely agree with you on that. I don't eat anything in a half marathon. If it's shorter and it's not too demanding, there's really no reason. All you need to do is stay hydrated especially in a ketogenic state because you have all this fuel on tap for your body. The 10 hours was pretty damn grueling for me. I'm not used to running that far. The Feed Zone Portables definitely came handy for me.
Christopher: You've obviously learned a ton since you retired. Do you ever get a chance to reconnect with some of your former colleagues in the fighting world? Are you able to coach them or teach them or pass on anything you've learned?
Kyle: I do. I keep in contact with all the guys from the Ultimate Fighter, Ryan Bader and Tom Lawlor, Vinny Magalhães, a lot of these guys are still fighting, top tier guys, rank from the top 10. The guys in my backyard at AKA, they're doing big things. A lot of them are gearing up for title defenses and things like that. So I get in there and talk with them about the latest things. It's really just who's receptive.
If it ain't broke fix it, a lot of them have that kind of mindset. They're not necessarily looking for the next big thing or different ways to monitor and watch exactly what's coming out of their body to see how they can make small changes that will create big improvements down the road. Other guys they're just constantly glued to anything. A few of my fighter friends, we just bounce podcast off each other like "Dude, did you hear [0:49:24] [Indiscernible]?" I'm like "Oh, no. I'll listen to it. Hey, check this guy out." I got a lot of people into your podcast as well simply by getting the reference from Dr. Grace Liu. She's like "Hey, you want to listen to this one on organic acids test? Do you want to listen to this?" I was like "Oh, man. It just blew my mind."
We're in a wonderful time in the world where we can share this information. So many good things are coming out of it. People are just publishing this stuff and it's going out there. Everyone has an excuse on "Oh, I don't have time to read this book." That's all fine but you have time in your car to put on a podcast and listen to this information. Nobody can turn that down.
[0:49:59]
Christopher: I love my podcast. I still listen to tons and tons of podcasts. You're right. We do live in this incredible time where it's so disruptive. The information travels so fast. This came up in my interview for the Keto Summit with Travis this morning. You look at some of these solutions. They've been around since the 1920s and then some other important studies that were done in cancer in the 1980s. Why didn't that information propagate as quickly as it should? Well, it was all buried in the library somewhere. It was in somebody's freaking filing box somewhere where it never could be found with a Google search. Now you can figure stuff out.
Tommy, we call him the PubMed pro. He's just unbelievable. You ask him a question. "What's the mechanism of this, Tommy? How does Phosphatidylserine lower cortisol?" He'll come back with you within 30 seconds with seven really good human studies that have been done that precisely explain the mechanism. We just live in this time where that's easy for him. That just never would've been possible. We would've had to go spend two weeks in the library trying to figure that thing out. We might've turned up empty handed at the end of it. It's pretty incredible, the age in which we live. We got crappy food that like food science. You can go to hell like you've not really done anything good for us.
Kyle: What we're going to feed starving kids in Africa. We're going to end world hunger with this glyphosate ridden nastiness.
Christopher: Yeah. It's true. I have to keep that in mind. A lot of what we talk about is slightly elitist especially the supplements are rather elitist. They're so expensive.
Kyle: Like I said, I think that's one of the beautiful things about the OAT test and different things like that, and especially the uBiome test. I mean $90. When you talk about what it can do for you and all the things that the microbiome influences and how we feel, our mood and just general quality of life -- there's no reason people shouldn't be doing a stool sample for $90 at least twice a year. That's easily correctable.
Paul Chek has a quote that I absolutely love. Sooner or later your health will be your number one concern. You can put all your eggs in one basket. You can do whatever you want to do. Whether you're lying on your deathbed, that's when it becomes your number one concern or you make it a priority right now. You'll always have the resources to make changes and to learn and to gravitate and make small changes over time if that's your priority. That's really what it just boils down to is making it your priority.
Christopher: Absolutely. It's certainly my priority. I think I probably overthink it now. It's all I talk about, all I think about. I'm so excited about it all. Julie and I talk about it probably too much as well. Ivy is probably going to be really, really turned off by it, isn't she? My daughter would just hate all of it and just want to be a rebel about it. That's my worst fear but I bet it's going to happen.
So is there anything else? Are you a coach? You're not an author? Is there anything that people should know about you or is there a place where people can go to find out more about what you've learned?
Kyle: Yeah. You could follow me on Twitter and Instagram @Kingsbu. We'll be starting a podcast here called the Mom's Garage podcast. It's been put on hold because we live in my mom's garage and it's not necessarily the best place with construction going on right by us to do a podcast. Yeah. That's about it. There's no book yet. There's nothing like that. I'm really just trying to learn more of myself and experiment and really fine-tune. I do coach some people here in the Bay Area if you're local but that's not really my thing. I think my thing now is focused on making sure that I provide the best situation for my son. I'd like to start a gym here soon out in Vegas on mixed martial arts, jiu-jitsu and meditation and diet and nutrition and all the things that I've really focused on. That's about it. Just continue to learn and grow.
Christopher: I'll have to talk about that. Send me the link once you get the podcast going. People can check that out once it's going.
Kyle: Most definitely, Chris.
Christopher: This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Kyle.
Kyle: Thank you so much. You'll have to have me back on once I finished this OAT test and start making changes.
Christopher: Yeah. We could talk about your organic acids result. That would be fun actually. I think people probably would enjoy that.
Kyle: Yeah. I'm pumped. Maybe that'll get me up to that 600-pound deadlift I'm chasing.
Christopher: Yeah. Maybe. We'll see.
Kyle: All righty, Chris. Thank you so much for having me.
Christopher: Cheers.
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