Ray: So this brings up, what you talked early about, is intermittent fasting. And when I was looking at a lot of these, again, my first twist of this was to look at the metabolic thing.

So, let's get metabolism out of the way because this other stuff is a lot more interesting to me. But this, in terms of metabolism, everybody wants to think, "I need to increase my metabolism." "I'm going to eat this meal, it's gonna..." "I'm eating this protein shake, my metabolism is going to rise." Well, it turns out, I've not measured a single broken metabolism in three years of my life. In a 100 people, no one has a broken metabolism. Your metabolism scales with your mass, pretty much, you know?

Inside, whatever size you are, is your thin lean self. Give that thin lean self the steel equivalent of what you lost and carry it around all day, and that is what happens. But, what's really interesting, now on the extreme side. So, I could say all these in terms of food, but when I was dieting, even doing extreme dieting, by everybody else's...just a very low-calorie diet.

Rhonda: Your 21-day is extreme.

Ray: What I'm saying is, before even that, just in the things that I do, where people lose weight rapidly, with most people that I work with lose weight, 0.6 to 0.8 pounds of fat a day. And that's without exercise. The exercise...

Rhonda: is that with cold?

Ray: No.

Rhonda: No cold?

Ray: No. Cold is part of it, but it's not part of it in the way you're thinking of it. So, I use it as adjunct therapy, but it's not to increase the metabolism.

Rhonda: We'll talk about cold later.

Ray: Yeah. So, basically, though, what's interesting is that in all the different regimes, my metabolism always tracks with the Harris Benedict equation. And when we go back later, I'll show you. I've got the 1918 study. I'll show you. I've all their data. The point is those guys did this research and what they did is right and what we've done today is we have popularized these words. And I literally have debates with people about metabolism...

Rhonda: Can you define what you mean by metabolism?

Ray: Yeah. So, what I'm talking about is the net sum of respiration of all your cells. So, the way we measure metabolism is we measure the carbon dioxide, exhale, breath by breath, and the oxygen that goes in and then oxygen that comes out. So, we know the delta oxygen. We know the carbon dioxide. And so, the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen is called the respiratory quotient or RQ. It tells us like a thumbprint what fuel we're burning.

So, if you look at this general stoichiometry, like the combustion of ethanol. Ethanol plus oxygen equals CO2 plus water. And you do the balance equation like you did, you'll see that you get a three on one side, two on the other or two on the one side, three on the other...no, two and then three, and you get the respiratory quotient of 0.67. So that's a number. So, if I'm mainly metabolizing alcohol, my respiratory quotient will push down. Carbohydrates of all kinds, it doesn't matter what kind they are, all of the glucose, anything that's dropping in there, those have a respiratory quotient about 1. And then fats or lipids, are around between 0.69 and 0.7.

So, what's really interesting is that...and amino acids, they average 0.84, if I average all of them. So, proteins are kind of mixture. One protein might be slightly lower, slightly high, but they average 0.84, which is great because the only way we measure protein is not through the carbohydrate because by that time, the deaminations happen. You've lost all that energy through urea and it looks like sugar coming out otherwise, right?

But what we can do with protein is we collect the urine, which is why I'm carrying an orange jug around all day. Too much information but it's science, right? So, we get the nitrogen from the urine and then we can back out. But by knowing the carbon dioxide produced and the oxygen, we can see the ratio of glycogen to fat burn, real time.

Rhonda: And you're saying that you have not seen someone's metabolism that's been broken?

Ray: Meaning they're at their... Their metabolic rate, which will be like speed of the car, is what all of the industry is focused on. Everybody wants to increase their metabolic rate. What I'm saying is how fast you're going only matters if you're headed in the right direction. You need a compass too. And RQ is kind of a compass. It is the indicator. Am I burning mainly carbohydrate or am I burning mainly fat? You can run your ass off for hours, and if you're only burning carbohydrate, you just get on the glycogen treadmill. And so then, what people do to counter that is they say, "Oh, I'm going to remove all the carbohydrate and shift my body into ketosis so I'm burning fat all the time. So that when they're running, they are burning fat.

But, again, it's not necessary because it turns out, when we become more restrictive, your body is smart. And when we become more restricted, you naturally start shifting to more and more and more fat because your body knows to reserve glucose...conserve it. It wants to. So, where I'm going with metabolism is that all the discussions we have about metabolism, about boosting metabolism, about all these things, even cold stress, a lot of them fall into that simple thing I said earlier, which is we use to eat to support our activity because food was rare. And today, we're active to support our eating. And the more simple thing is you can't out exercise your mouth. It's impossible. It's thermodynamically impossible. You can swallow way more than you can move. It's just not...

So, while I was talking about metabolism, what I'm saying about not being broken is, you don't have a slow metabolism. That's not your problem. It's not that you have a slow metabolism. Now, you got to get hormones to speed up your metabolism that nobody, by the way, ever measure. Isn't it amazing? All these people talk about metabolism and they don't measure in.

So that's what I started to say earlier was, I have these debates. And I say, "You know, how metabolism do you measure? Do you know anybody who's measured a metabolism? Have you ever touched anybody that measured...?" And the answer is most people never made it. And I hadn't. I was talking about metabolism. I was guilty of all the same stuff. I'm, you know...

But once I started measuring it every day, when we measure yours later, you're going to find, it's way more dynamic than you think it is. It's way... And then, I mean, because you are very precise about the things you want to know. This one is really going to mess with you because it's not what we think. So, this boosting the metabolism, we're going to boost metabolism.

Now, cold stress, we'll come back to it when we talk about cold stress because there's some really specific things on cold stress and really some specific numbers that I can give you or I can show some things that I've done with cold stress, which is kind of interesting because it turns out mild cold stress, naturally tends to lower RQ, meaning shifting towards fat. So, and we'll talk about that when we get to that.

But to sum up metabolism, we're not broken. And that's one of the things I'm going to try to talk about in our book in more common language. I say, "Well, we're not broken. Let's not start with that let's start with the food we're eating and the social environment of how why we eat."

And then, superimpose on top of that my benign conspiracy or I could say our benign conspiracy, which is I really wanted people to shift more to healthspanning. I want to shift more towards to a kind of a diet that will promote healthspan because it's really embarrassing that the community we run with, and we know all the people we're talking about, the community we run with that are talking longevity and talking about all of those stuff, and they aren't eating well. And if we can't, like, we know this stuff works. Like, you said earlier, we know it works now. We don't even... We just have to do it.

Rhonda: Well, who doesn't want to live a healthier life and be younger when they're older? I mean, who doesn't want to not be crippled and degenerated and...?

Ray: Arthritis.

Rhonda: Yeah. Who wants any of that...

Ray: Heart disease...

Rhonda: ....pain?

Ray: Diabetes...

Rhonda: ...suffering. I mean, all that, yeah. It's like, I think that eating to increase your healthspan, I think, it is my goal and I think that it is a lot of people's goals even if they don't realize it. Even if they don't realize it.