Zack Arnold

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The FiP Program, Shedding Belly Fat, and EMF Pollution

About Episode

This episode is a question & answer episode where I answer the most common question I get: How does the Fitness In Post program work? And after answering that question I answer specific questions submitted by users via social media. I talk about different strategies to lose belly fat, and I discuss EMF (electromagnetic fields) and how to mitigate the negative health effects they have on us as professionals who work with electronics all day long.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: Hello and welcome to the Fitness In Post podcast. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different than the ones we’ve done previously. My only guest today is me. I am going to be doing a Q and A podcast where I’ve been collecting some questions from users online on Facebook and on social media and on Twitter and such, and also I’m going to be answering a couple of really common questions that I get often, so it’s kind of an FAQ kind of a show. Full disclosure, I’m basically doing this because the schedule on my new TV show Empire, which is going to be on Fox next year, has been kind of crazy hectic, and it’s been hard for me to schedule time where I can actually have a set time. I know I’m going to be available, and I know I can have a guest available. So I apologize if you were expecting some amazing, brilliant guest to be on the show, because today all you’re going to get is me. So at this point, I’m just going to go right ahead and jump into the questions. Before I do, though, I just want to make one disclaimer. If you are new to the show and you don’t know much about my background, I am a film editor by trade, and have been so for about 15 years now. So if you’re coming here looking for firsthand expert advice on diet, nutrition, fitness, stress management, or otherwise, this is not the place to get it. What I’m trying to do is be a bridge to help people find the experts and find the people that know what they’re doing. So I’m not the destination for this information, I’m the bridge. I’m trying to share the information that I have acquired and give it to others so they can find the same information. But just know right up front that I’m not an expert on anything that I’m going to be talking about tonight. And in fact, I will be the first person to say that I’m basically going to be parroting other people’s writings and other people’s ideas. But I’m going to make it very clear where I’m getting that information from, so it’s not any form of plagiarism. I’m actually trying to honor these people and show respect for the great work that they do by sharing their work and their research with you guys. So that’s the idea: is I just want to share the information that I found that works for myself and give you guys a link to be able to find it as well, so all of the links and articles that I reference in tonight’s show are going to be in our show notes, so you can just go through and look one by one and find the articles and the references that I talk about. So if you’re in your car driving and you’re saying I’m never going to remember all this stuff, just go to the show notes, which is going to be fitnessinpost.com/20/20, because this is episode number 20. So you can find all the show notes there and learn everything that you need to know that I’m going to be talking about. This could be a mini episode. It could take me 10 minutes. I could ramble on for 90 minutes. I honestly have no idea. I’m a little hopped up right now on organic grass-fed butter. Just loaded my dinner up tonight with some butter, and I also just downed some a new supplement that I found that I really really like called Nutrients. It’s basically this liquid multivitamin that’s actually broken up into two periods during the day because there are certain vitamins that don’t absorb well with others, like calcium and magnesium, for example. And if you just shove everything into one multivitamin with fillers, you don’t maximize the absorption. So I found this new product I’ve been using for about a month and a half or two months now, called Nutrients. There’s a link for it on the main page of the site. It tastes really, really good, and I feel really good when I have it, and it’s completely all natural. So if I start to ramble and get a little nuts, it’s because I’m hopped up on vitamins. So full disclaimer there.

Zack Arnold: So the first most common question that I get from people all the time is, “What the heck is the Fitness in Post program specifically? Because first of all, everybody thinks that Fitness In Post is an oxymoron, and I’m joking, and then they realize that I’m actually not joking, and it’s something that I’m very passionate about. And I explain to them that it’s actually this five-step program, and even before I can talk about the five steps, they kind of look at me and they’re like, “Well, I work like 50 hours a week. I don’t have time to do a five-step program or do some fad thing. And the whole idea behind this program is that it’s not a fad, and it’s not something that you do for a set amount of time, and you don’t do the steps that don’t work for you. It’s about finding a way to adapt to your environment and your situation and make it work for you, because I personally work in front of a computer on average 12 to 14 hours a day, and that’s on a good day. And for years, that really broke me down, and I got to the point where I just couldn’t handle it anymore. And anybody that’s listened to the show before already knows my history with health and with this industry, so I’m not going to go into that. If you want to go back to past episodes, you’ll know way more about me than you’ve ever wanted to learn before. But I kind of put this program together for myself first because I just couldn’t figure out how to stay healthy and be an editor in the Hollywood post production industry because it was just too debilitating. So I just put together these five steps, and the five steps are basically a loose. They’re basically a loose interpretation of the Go Far program, and this again is a completely shameless plug. Go Far is a documentary film I’ve been working on for years about one of the former national poster children for muscular dystrophy. Who lived way beyond his lifespan and basically created this motivational program with these five steps, and I said, “How can I apply the Go Far program and principles to my problem, which is I want to be healthy in post-production? So I devised my own five steps, and the first step is exactly the same, almost word for word, and it’s setting your goal. And the idea is that you need to define what the journey is, and you need to define the destination. Because if you’re just walking down a road and you have no idea where you’re going, you’re just going to ramble and you’re just going to meander, and you’re going to end up somewhere where you don’t want to be at all. So an example of this would be saying, “Well, I want to be healthier. Well, that’s great, but if you don’t actually define what being healthier means to you, and moreover what the destination can look like for you, and that destination needs to be benchmarks. It’s never going to be an ultimate destination, other than maybe I want to live to play with my grandchildren. That’s my ultimate destination. I’m doing all this because I want to play with my grandkids someday. But you also need to set it up into smaller benchmarks. So when somebody says, “I have a 90-day program to transform your life, that’s all well and good, but what do I do after 90 days? So I’m hoping that this program kind of addresses that. So the first step is that you need to clearly define what your goal is, how much time you’re giving yourself to achieve it, and then you need to stick to it. And the sticking to a part is really what’s the hardest for most people, which is where this program comes in, because this program is all about accountability. It’s all about creating a community of post-production professionals that are working together, keeping each other accountable, so we can all stick with it together. Because we are all in this fight together, all dealing with the same issues. So the second step of the program is called Track Everything. What you measure, you can improve upon. And the idea behind this step is trying to quantify your activity and quantifying what it is that you’re putting inside your body.

Zack Arnold: I don’t think that we should all become robots and we should all be tracking everything that we do, whether it’s our sleep or our walking or our breathing patterns or our posture. And there are there are devices that do all of these things now. You can wear a heart rate monitor 24 hours a day. You can calculate every single breath that you take in. You can calculate all the food that you all the food that you take in, and that’s all well and good. But you’re never going to be able to sustain that for the rest of your life. However, I don’t think that you can find the way forwards until you take that first step, which is understanding your current baseline and saying to yourself, “Oh, this is how many calories I actually take in during a day. This is how many steps I take, and this is how many heartbeats I have during a workout. Once you do that and you establish a baseline, that’s what starts motivating you to do more and say, “Well, rather than taking 3,000 steps today, I’m going to take 5,000. Then I’m going to take 6,000. Then I’m going to go nuts and I’m going to do 25,000 steps in a day. And maybe that sounds absurd now, but I’m seeing it with my challenge group members every single day, where they’re starting at two, 3000 steps, and then two months later they’re doing 25 and 30,000 steps a day and loving it and losing weight and feeling great, so that’s what step two is about. And you can go to, and I should have said this before, but if you go to fitnessinpost.com/program, you can go through the five steps with me together if you want to. Step three, which I really think is the cornerstone of all this, is making small changes. And the key phrase here is baby steps. It’s really hard to just jump into a new program full force and just say I’m going to change everything at once. So I’m a big believer in doing the exact opposite. What I’ve done on the site is laid out a whole bunch of options for ways you can make small changes. A few of them that are my favorites are the first one is that you have to find a way to get nutrition into your body at least one time a day, we eat out every single meal at the job that I’m at now. I basically told them I don’t want to eat out every single day because that’s going to decrease my performance and make me not as good at what I do. So when there are healthy choices and healthy places to go, I’ll order, and when there aren’t, I will bring my own food in, and they’ll reimburse me for it. So I basically kind of had to talk them into that. But I said, “Listen, I’m going to feel better and perform better if you’re willing to let me buy my own food and cook it for the same price as whatever burger place you’re going to today. And they agreed to it. So that’s the first step: is finding at least one meal a day where you can eat something nutritious. And the the biggest recommendation I always make, and I know that I should turn this into a drinking game-no pun intended. But it’s Shakeology, and that’s something that I use every single day, and a lot of my challenge group members use. And I actually have people at my office now that are trying it and using it and absolutely loving it. It literally takes 45 seconds to get nutrition into your body and just keep on working. So it’s a really really great way to stay nutritious. Another couple options, like for example, what I do when I go to work every day is I find the parking spot that’s literally the furthest away that I can get from the elevator and from the the stairs in our office, so that way I get extra steps and extra and extra activity in both in the morning and at night. And then speaking of the. Elevator. The building that I’m in, you can’t actually access my office just from the stairs because it’s a high security building. So I have to take the elevator, which is kind of annoying.

Zack Arnold: But in most buildings, you can just walk in and take the steps up instead of the elevator, and that’s a great change that you can make and do every single day. Another one is I always try to get into my office and just do something with a little bit of activity and stretch for a few minutes and maybe do a few jumping jacks or a few push-ups. I don’t even break a sweat. I only do it for maybe 30 seconds, but it’s just enough to kind of get the heart moving and get me ready to go for the day. And then, of course, as most people know by now, I have a treadmill in front of my workstation and I stand, so I get a lot of activity during the day. And a lot of people will ask, well, how much do you actually walk, and are you able to work on it? And I actually just posted our first YouTube video, which is basically a two-minute clip of just me standing at my desk and how I edit while I’m on a treadmill. And I’ll put a link to that video as well. But basically, I will do. I think I’ll usually do about an hour or an hour and a half by lunchtime, which is about 10,000 steps, and it usually gets me two or three miles. I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head. And then after lunch, or sometime in the afternoon, I’ll try and do another hour or an hour and a half. So I’m moving and walking about two to three hours per day, usually getting around 15 or 20,000 steps in just by using the treadmill in front of my workstation, so that’s an example of you know a more that’s that’s an example of an investment that you make to get more activity in your day and make small changes, so to speak. It’s not something that everybody’s going to do overnight, but it’s completely changed my life. So that’s one option. Another big one that I always use is I never use my phone. I even told them don’t even bother installing a phone in my office because I’m not going to use it. Because if I have a question for somebody, I always walk to their office and I basically train them in a way to know that if they have a question for me, just knock on my door and come in because I just don’t answer the phone. If I have a producer in the room, they have their own phone line so they can hit the extension and call whoever they need to and vice versa. But the phone that’s hooked up next to my desk, I never even use. I don’t even know how to use it. So that’s another one that I do. And then one more quick example would be to just cut out all empty calories. So if you’re drinking Gatorade, if you’re drinking Snapple, if you’re drinking Diet Coke, it really doesn’t matter what it is. I guarantee it’s going to be loaded with excess sugars, and those sugars are going to make you less efficient, and they’re going to make you. Literally, you’re going to be addicted to those carbohydrates, and those carbohydrates are going to mess with your ability to work and function properly. And what I’m trying to do is optimize my ability to be a better editor. I’m not trying to have a fantastic body and look perfect in the mirror-that is a side effect of a lot of this-is that you will look better too. But I want to feel better, and I want my brain to function at an optimal level. So that’s why I do these things because it makes me better at what I do, and it gets me paid for jobs because people want to hire me because I’m good at what I do. So the next step is get outside, and what I kind of put in subtitles here is that that big glowing ball in the sky is called the sun, because there are a lot of editors that just never get outside and get any sun. And I was the same way. You just kind of get locked in your hole, and you get locked in your head, and you have this tunnel vision, and you just cut, cut, cut.

Zack Arnold: And what you need to do is get outside and just get back to the earth. And I’m not saying be a hippie and let your hair grow long and throw away your iPhone. It’s nothing like that. But there, there’s a lot of scientific research that actually points to the fact that you’re just outside touching the ground. You’re not on concrete and you’re not inside recycled air under fluorescent lights that has a huge positive impact on your overall well-being, on your mood, on your mental state, on your energy. So what I recommend is, at a minimum, get outside under the sun for at least 30 minutes a week, which I don’t think is asking too much. I try to lead a hiking group with with different people in the post production community almost every week. If you just go to fitnessandpost.com/hiking, you can learn more about our hiking groups. But just get outside, get your heart pumping. Whether it’s jogging, whether it’s power walking, whether it’s cycling, just commit to 30 minutes a week where you just get outside and just experience the world, as opposed to being inside, being in recycled air, being in air conditioning, just go back to our roots, which is being outside. So that one’s really, really simple. It’s not necessarily easy, but it’s simple. And then step five of the program is called Bring It, and this is the step where you really decide that you’re going to do total life transformation, and this is about reshaping your diet and learning more about food and how food actually works and learning about exercise and incorporating a fairly rigorous exercise routine into your life or finding ways to learn about sleep management or stress management. There are so many different components to this, and this is kind of like. When you decide you’re ready to change everything, that’s where we come to you. You come to us, and we decide that we’re going to put you in a challenge group, and you just want to go ahead and you want to make huge sweeping changes. And I’m seeing these huge sweeping changes. And again, if you want to learn more about their effects on people in other challenge groups, go back into previous podcasts, and you’re going to hear their stories. These are not fitness experts or people that are athletes. These are people that do what we do for a living. That are seeing huge changes in the way that they function just because they’re working with a group of like-minded people that all have the same goals, working with the same obstacles. So that’s kind of how the program works. But the most important component of the program is that you don’t have to do the whole program. So when people look at that and say, “Oh, well, I want to get healthier, but I don’t want to do one of those crazy P90X Beachbody programs, well, then don’t. Just go steps one through four. Or people will say, “Well, I work all these crazy hours, and I have one day off a week, and I just want to spend it with my family, okay. Well, number one, you can go outside with your family. That’s a really healthy way to do step four, or just do the first three steps. I’ve had people that have just gone through and set a goal, and then they’ve decided they’re going to track their activity, and then they decide they’re going to make small changes. That’s all they do. They do steps one through three, all of which are free except for buying the quantifying device, which is probably a Fitbit or a Jawbone or whatever the devices that you want to use to track your your activity, but outside of that, steps one through three are free, and you can do them at your own speed based on your own environment and your own schedule. So that’s the most important component of this program: is that you do whatever works for you. So, for those that have been wondering, what is the program and how does it actually work, and how do I make it work for me? Because my life is so nuts, which is probably every single person listening to the show. That’s the basic idea behind the program. So that’s probably the most common question that I get all the time.

Zack Arnold: And I just thought it would be really helpful to have like a 15-minute spiel that was all laid out nice and clean. So if people had a question, I can just send them to this show. So hopefully that was helpful. So the first user question that I want to get to is from Aaron Zuber, who is an editor here in Los Angeles, California, and he says, “I seem to be losing weight in my waist and legs and butt, but how do you lose weight in specific parts of your body, like the gut or stomach. So this is a really interesting question, and I’ve been doing athletics and martial arts and football and baseball and yoga. Like that’s just been a part of my life since I was 10 years old. So stuff like this I’ve always kind of taken for granted because until a few years ago I was always very trim, so it’s not something I really focused on. But what I’ve learned so far through all of the research that I’ve done and all the people that I’ve talked to, and I would say that to really distill this down into the simplest form, one of the best quotes that I’ve ever heard, and I really wish that I could attribute it to the right person because I read it somewhere a long time ago, and I don’t remember where. But the basic quote is that you don’t make six-pack abs in the gym; you make them in the kitchen. So for people that are out there that are weightlifting or running or doing all this crazy cardio seven days a week and saying, “I still have a gut. How do I get rid of it and have those six-pack abs? The first thing you need to look at is nutrition. So if you’re thinking I’m on the treadmill for an hour and a half a day, I’m sweating like a madman, and I still can’t get rid of these 10 pounds around my waist. What you need to do is rethink your strategy and look at what you’re doing in the kitchen, because diet is going to be the number one thing that affects whether or not you have quote unquote six pack abs. And frankly, that’s fairly low on my to-do list of things that I’m really interested in getting, but everybody wants to lose belly fat. So the first thing you need to do is focus on nutrition. And like I said, I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a dietitian. I am no. I am by no means an expert in this field at all. But what I am going to do is talk about a couple of different resources that I’ve looked at in the past, the first resource being Ben Greenfield, who is one of the foremost experts in fitness and nutrition in the entire country, and there are all kinds of great resources on his site, which is benGreenfieldfitness.com, where he talks about how to lose belly fat and how to increase energy, and another a second resource that I use all the time is the Bulletproof Executive. He’s the guy that invented Bulletproof Coffee, and eventually it’ll be Bulletproof just about everything. He’s going to be coming out with a diet book in a couple of months called the Bulletproof Diet. That was one of the first resources that I found where I where I really started to learn about the components of diet and how the food pyramid, as we know it, is essentially upside down and wrong. And his website is bulletproofexec.com. And a third place that I use a lot and third resource is a guy named Mark Sisson, who is one of the godfathers of the paleo movement. And his website, he has several. Them, but the place to start is marksdailyapple.com, and he talks all about just primal fitness and primal endurance, and just looking back at our ancestors and how did our cavemen live, whether it’s activity or diet and whatnot. I’m not paleo myself. I don’t subscribe to any specific diet protocol. I don’t believe in any form of dogma whatsoever.

Zack Arnold: But my basic nutrition protocol is that I have drastically increased the amount of fat that I have in my diet and decreased the amount of carbohydrates in processed food, because essentially most of the fat that you’re going to get around your waist that you’re trying to get rid of is going to be coming from processed foods, sugars, and carbohydrates. And I know that to a lot of people that sounds crazy because we’ve been told for decades to have six to 11 servings a day of grains and pastas and breads and whole wheat. And guess what? All that is complete BS. And there’s plenty of information online to prove why. And I’ll leave a few links as well. And if you want to go to all these sites, they’re all in one place right on our website. It’s just fitnessinpost.com/resources, and you’re going to see all these sites listed as well as other ones that I like to use as well. But the idea is that everything we’ve learned about cutting fat out of our diet and butter causing heart attacks and heart disease and all these other things-it’s all completely dead wrong. And what I and I have the labs to prove that this makes a gigantic difference because a year ago I was starting to have problems with cholesterol and triglycerides and inflammation, and I decided I was just going to completely turn this around. And before I was eating all low-fat foods and low-fat yogurt and eating whole wheat bread, and you know, having you know, whole grain pastas, and all these things, until I realized that those are not health foods. And what I did was I started incorporating a lot of saturated fats into my diet and healthy fats. It doesn’t mean that I’m going out and going to McDonald’s and having French fries every day or having fried chicken. I’m incorporating things like MCT oil and avocados and almonds and nuts and most importantly grass-fed butter. These are all things that I’ve incorporated very, very religiously that I eat every single day that give me a tremendous boost in energy. But the biggest thing, if you want to start cutting, if you want to start getting the fat around your waistline to kind of quote unquote melt away, you need to stop eating sugar and processed foods and carbohydrates. As much as people hate to hear it because we really are as a society addicted to these foods, cutting those things out is going to make a tremendous difference. So that’s the first thing you have to look at is nutrition. So before knocking out 1000 sit-ups a day, just look at what you’re putting on your spoon and your fork, and say, is this something that’s going to help me get healthier or not? And that’s the first step towards cutting out some of the fat that’s around your waist. Because even if you’re doing weightlifting or you’re doing all these activities, if you’re not eating well, you’re not going to take that fat off your body because your body is just going to continue to store that fat, because that’s the process. The more carbohydrates and sugar you have, the more insulin and resistant you become, and the more you’re storing fat in your tissues. So the first place that you need to look if you want to get those six-pack abs and burn off that fat is you need to look at what you’re doing in your diet. The second major component that you need to look at before deciding you’re going to wake up and do 1000 sit-ups every morning is your stress level. Stress levels are hugely important to weight loss, and this is something that I also know firsthand from years and years of experience in the wrong direction, which is chronic stress, adrenal burnout, major depressive disorder. I’ve been through all of it, and most of it is just based on my level of stress and the level of cortisol that I have in my system. The more cortisol, which is the stress hormone that you create, people say like the the fight or flight mechanism, right? There’s the sympathetic and there’s the parasympathetic nerve system. So the basics are that the sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight mechanism. You’re in an office building, somebody else fire you, smell smoke, and immediately you get a rush of adrenaline.

Zack Arnold: You kick into high gear, you run out the door, and you basically saved your life. But guess what? If you’re chronically under stress, and every time you hear your email ding or your text ding, or somebody knocks on your door and you feel just this little surge of anxiety, that’s chronic stress, and that cortisol in your system is going to cause you to keep the fat in your system and store fat, which means that you’re not going to burn it off. So if you’re going to be on the treadmill for three hours a day and you’re going to eat well and you’re going to do 1000 setups every morning because you want a six pack, but you are chronically stressed out, you are not going to lose that fat around your waist, so stress management is a huge component of trying to lose that weight around your waist. The next thing that we’re going to talk about, which is another major component, is sleep, and this is another one that I’ve been fighting with for years, and I finally just gave up and said, “Okay, everybody is right. Sleep is really, really, really important.” Because I wanted to believe that I could get four or five or six hours of sleep a night and still be healthy. Because you know what, I had stuff to do. So those things were more important. And I realized that it really isn’t more important to get things done than it is to sleep. Because not getting enough sleep was impacting the way that I was functioning during the day, and I wasn’t getting anything done because I was tired and I couldn’t focus. And since I’ve decided that I’m going to focus on sleep and getting better quality sleep and more sleep, I found that it’s easier to lose weight and it’s easier, more importantly, to lose body fat. So that’s another thing that you really need to focus on: is how much sleep are you getting, and more importantly, are you getting quality sleep? Because you might be in bed for nine hours a night, but if you’re constantly tossing and turning and you’re not going into those deep sleep cycles, those REM sleep cycles, then you’re not going to wake up fully rested. So there’s a whole ton of science behind sleep and how you can get better sleep and get better quality sleep. I’m not going to go into it, but I’ll leave a couple of articles that kind of talk about how you can get better sleep, as well as podcasts. But the most important question that you need to ask yourself is: When you wake up in the morning, do you feel rested? If you do, guess what? You’re getting enough sleep. If you wake up in the morning and you’re groggy, and the first thing you do is do the zombie walk over to the coffee machine, and you say, “I just cannot function until I have my first cup of coffee. Guess what? You have to look at your sleep management and realize that you’re not getting good enough quality sleep to function during the day. I drink bulletproof coffee in the morning. I don’t do it every single morning. I probably do it three or four days a week. But if I don’t have any coffee in the morning when I wake up, I feel pretty good and I can function all day without it because I’ve spent months learning about the science of sleep and how to get better sleep and how to develop good sleep habits. I’ll just throw out a couple of right now that are kind of the most integral to me that I have to do in order to get a good night’s sleep. The first one is that I have to make sure that it’s as dark as possible in the room and I don’t have any electronics, so I have a sleep mask. I make sure that all the little tiny lights, whether it’s like the green light on a fan or on a thermostat, whatever it is, everything is covered with black gaff tape. So there is no light coming in whatsoever, other than the light that’ll come through like a slip between the shades and the window in the morning. But other than that, the room is completely dark.

Zack Arnold: I don’t allow electronics in the bedroom other than my phone, and I put my phone in airplane mode. And the reason is that I don’t want the EMF frequencies, the electromagnetic fields. I don’t want those emanating from the phone during the night and affecting my sleep cycle and my brain state. So I put it in airplane mode, and I literally have my phone right under my pillow because I track my sleep patterns with my phone. There’s a great app called Sleep Cycle that I use, and I will link to that as well. But the idea is that it just maps your movements throughout the night, and you can actually get a sense of how deep your sleep is based on the amount of movement that you have. So that’s another one that I do, and then a third one is that I make sure that I have at least 30 minutes between being in front of any type of screen whatsoever and my head actually hitting the pillow. So I always do some form of meditation or stretching or yoga or even just sitting down and reading a good old-fashioned book. And for those that don’t know what a real book is, I can put a link in the show notes. But it’s this cool-looking thing that has all these pieces of paper bound together that you hold in your hands and you read words that are printed on paper. I know it’s a crazy concept, but I was reading my iPad before bed for years, not realizing that the blue lights coming from the iPad were affecting my sleep quality, and affecting that sleep quality is going to affect whether or not you can lose weight, so this all comes back to that initial question, which is how do I get the fat away from my waist? So that’s another way to do it is to look at your sleep quality. Another component that you can look at, which is actually going back to the previous question, which is about the fitness in post program and the steps, is going back to step three, which is making small changes. If you were to look at choice A or choice B, and if choice A is deciding to do a P90X workout for 60 minutes in the morning, and then sitting at your computer for 12 straight hours and getting no activity, or choice B is not doing any strenuous workout that you set aside the time for, but you just get activity throughout the day, whether it’s being on a treadmill in front of your desk or taking a walk every hour, or doing five minutes of exercise three times a day, and just getting lots of constant low-level activity, choice B is actually going to be healthier for you long-term, and it’s going to get you closer to your weight loss goals. If you’re trying to train for an extreme endurance activity like a marathon or a triathlon or a Spartan race, for example, you can’t just get away with taking a walk three times a day and getting low-level activity because you’re not going to be in good enough shape and have the muscular strength and endurance. So you need to do something like P90X or P90X3 or Les Mills Combat or T25 or whatever. But if you’re just trying to get healthier and lose some weight, those things can actually be detrimental to your weight loss goals if you don’t do them properly and you’re not in the proper shape. Because believe it or not, and this is something that never really occurred to me until I learned about it, doing strenuous exercise and activity is actually a stress on your body, and it will raise your cortisol levels. So a common question that I get in my challenge groups is: for the first few weeks, people are saying, “I’m doing all this exercise and I’ve changed my diet, but I’m gaining weight. How is this possible? And the most common reason is because your stress levels actually going up and your cortisol is going up because your body’s in shock. And if you stick with it, your body will normalize. It’ll find a new level of homeostasis, meaning balance, and your cortisol levels will go down.

Zack Arnold: And then that’s when you really find the progress kicks in, and you start to see the pounds melt off, and you start to get stronger and faster, and better cardio, and so on and so forth. But it takes a little while to get there. So if you’re doing really strenuous activity and you’ve only been doing it for a few weeks, and you’re saying, “Why am I not losing all this weight? That could be why, because your body is under a lot of stress. So you actually have to be careful and take it slow when you start a new workout program, which is something that I try to emphasize in my challenge groups. It’s all about baby steps, so that could be another reason that you’re not able to burn that weight off. But at the end of the day, if you’re saying I just need to do more sit-ups and more crunches and more oblique V-ups and all these crazy ab workouts, those are all well and good, but you’re not going to get all of the the fat burned off your midline unless you’re focusing on some of these other core ideas like nutrition and stress and sleep management and how you’re managing your exercise, but the caveat to all of this is that if you follow all of these protocols, but you’re not doing any strength training, you’re not going to find any muscles underneath the fat that you’re burning. So there is also a component of doing the setups and doing the core strengthening and doing the fitness component, which is going to produce the muscles that are going to be under that fat, and that’s another thing to look at, is that one of the best ways to burn fat is to build muscle because your muscles are going to require more calories than your fat is. So that’s why people say, “Oh, well, I turn fat into muscle. You’re not physically turning fat cells into muscle cells, but the idea is that as you build more muscle, that muscle is going to in turn burn more calories and burn more fat off of your body. So yes, there is a fitness component to it. I just want to make sure people know that doing 1000 sit-ups a day is not the one thing that you need to change in your life if you want to burn the fat off your midline. So that’s a really long-witted answer to that question, and I’m realizing that I’m definitely not going to have a mini episode today because I just, for an editor, I’m really not good at editing myself. So I’m going to go ahead and get to the next question that I have, and this is actually a question that was recorded via the website, and I highly, highly encourage anybody listening to this. If you have a question, you can just go onto the website on pretty much any page, but especially you can go to fitnessinpost.com/podcast, and there’s a green tab on the right that says “Ask a Podcast Question. All you literally do is click that tab. A little window comes up. You hit the record button, and you can record your voice right on the microphone on your computer. That will be emailed to me, and then I can answer your question. So I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to play this question for you.

Brian Klein: Hi, Zack. This is Brian Klein. I’m a freelance motion graphics artist and video editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And my question is: As post-production professionals, we are surrounded by electromagnetic fields all day long through the computers, phones, hard drives, everything that’s just sitting around us, and we really have no choice in the matter unless we want to pursue a new career. So the science is becoming more clear that it’s not a healthy thing for us to be doing. So my question is, what are some things we can do to mitigate the effects of EMF. Thanks.

Zack Arnold: So I’m just going to give you my disclaimer one more time, just in case you missed it the first two times. I am by no means even remotely an expert on this subject. It is something that I’ve researched a fair amount. It’s something that I’ve tried to mitigate myself. But there’s so much science behind it, and so many different things that you can do that I don’t even know where to begin to answer this question in depth or really do it with any justice. But I’m going to try and do my best just with the limited research that I’ve done. So to to go any further before people I completely lose the audience. They’re like, what the heck is he talking about? Electromagnetic fields or EMFs are basically the radiation that’s emitted from electronics. So whether it’s coming from your Wi-Fi router, it’s coming from your TV, or most importantly, coming from your computer monitor, which you’re standing in front of for anywhere between eight and 16 hours a day. These things emit radiation. You cannot see this radiation, but it exists, and. More and more science and research is finding that it adversely affects your health in various ways, and I’m not even going to begin to try and remember or talk about all the different health effects that it can have. But there are specific things you can do to try and mitigate it, and I can talk through a few that I’ve done, a few tips that I know that other people have, and I’m going to have links everything that I’m talking about with these articles specifically because, like I said, again, I’m basically parroting the people that I read from every day because I know I know almost nothing about this stuff outside of the research that I’ve done from these other people. So I cannot thank them enough for the work that they do in sharing this information. The first thing that I do to mitigate the electromagnetic fields in my area are I try to have a Wi-Fi router far away from me. So, like literally, you don’t want your your Wi-Fi your Wi-Fi router sitting right next to you. The next thing, and this is where it gets kind of sciencey. In again, I’m not going to be able to explain it in any justice, but there are these things called ions. And anybody that remembers chemistry, when you have a molecule or you have an atom, it has a positive charge or a negative charge. If it does have it and it’s not neutral, then it’s either a positive ion or a negative ion. And electronics create a tremendous amount of positive ions, and the research is showing that those positive ions are part of the component of the adverse health effects. So what you can get is something called a negative ion generator. And like 3040, 50 years ago, there were all these crazy snake oil salesmen that were trying to sell, you know, quote unquote, negative ion generators that cured cancer and cured heart disease, and thanks to those guys, they basically screwed the entire field of really good research that showed that there was some promise to negative ion generators mitigating some of the effects of positive ions in electronics. I will put a link in the show notes to a negative ion generator that I use. I think it probably cost me 15 to 20 bucks, whatever it was. It was super cheap. You basically just plug it into an outlet close to your computer, and I literally have mine plugged in right in front of my computer. I can touch it; it’s that close to me. And what it does is it just produces negative ions. And an example of natural things that produce negative ions would be like one of the most one of the most prolific forms of negative ion generation on the planet is a waterfall because it’s a really violent crashing of all this water, and it generates negative ions. And I don’t know anybody that stands next to a waterfall and doesn’t feel refreshed and just feel better and feel alive. That’s partly because of the negative ions that it generates. So these generators are kind of a more artificial way to generate those negative ions.

Zack Arnold: Another thing that I do to try and avoid whatever radiation that I can, no matter how small it is, and I know this is a small thing that a lot of people may already do, but I try to never ever put my phone up to my ear. I always use the headset. Even it’s obviously if you’re driving. Hopefully, at least if you’re in California or in a state where it’s illegal, you’re not putting it up to your ear anyway. But it doesn’t matter what circumstance I’m in. I try to always use the headset and keep the phone sitting on a desk somewhere near me, so I don’t have the phone up to my ear. So that’s a really small thing, but that’s another way that I can avoid that radiation. Like I said, when I sleep, I always make sure that my phone is in airplane mode. Another thing that you can do, and it’s going to be harder and harder to be able to do this, but one thing that you can do, and I learned this from Ben Greenfield, who I’ve mentioned a couple of times, is that he uses some he uses something that you plug in that will block the electrical pollution that’s coming out of the walls. And I don’t really understand what electrical pollution is from a scientific level, but it’s basically called dirty electricity. And if you think about all the people that I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about, people that lived under power lines or lived next to power stations, and they had all of these health problems, and nobody’s thinking, oh, that’s crazy, right? I would never want to live next to a power line because I know it would have really adverse health effects. Well, on a much lower level, we’re all exposed to power on a daily basis, and we have tremendous amounts of power surging at us all the time. And we’re in front of a computer, and as editors, we’re not in front of one computer. We’re in front of an iMac or a tower, and we have a second monitor and a third monitor, a TV monitor and a Wi-Fi router, and you know we need four surge strips just to be able to plug everything in that’s in front of us, that is being surrounded by tremendous amount of electricity, and there are these boxes that you can plug everything into that will block the dirty electricity from coming in. So that’s another thing that you can do. Another one that you can do. This isn’t so much a way to block it, but this is a way to monitor it. There’s this really cool device that just came out recently. It’s called the Lapka, and it’s basically this little tiny thing. It looks like a little Lego piece or like a little domino. You basically plug it into your iPhone, and you can measure the amount of EMF in your office or in your bedroom or wherever it is that you want to measure it, and get a sense of how bad it actually is, and if you. Making a difference with the devices that you’re using. I will put a link to Lapka, and also I’ll put a link to the podcast that Ben Greenfield does with the guy that designed the Lapka environmental monitor, and you’ll just learn more about how that how that process works and how these things are actually quantifiable and they do exist because there are still people to think, oh well, it’s just a bunch of hogwash. Like computers aren’t emitting radiation; we’re all just fine. Well, guess what? We’re probably not. And I’m not going to take a chance. Maybe that guy’s right, but I spend so much time at computers that I’m just not going to take the chance if I don’t have to. Another thing that I’ve been using for years, and I frankly didn’t even know that I was doing something healthy until I found out about it like six months ago. But I have what’s called a Himalayan salt lamp, and it’s something that you can just get on Amazon. They’re pretty inexpensive. It just looks like this big orange crystal, but they’ve hollowed out the inside of it and they put a light bulb in it.

Zack Arnold: And I bought a couple of them years ago that I always keep on my desk because they give a nice low-level amber glow, which is just a nice environment to have when you’re working in a dark room all the time, because you don’t want it to be completely dark. You always want some form of ambient light. Well, I found out recently that those are a an amazing form of negative ion generation, and if you take that lamp and put it between you and a Wi-Fi router, or you and a monitor, it’s actually going to block some of that radiation. And I don’t even know how it does it, but I know that there’s science that shows that it actually works. So I’ve been using those for years. I take them with me to all my edit suites, just because it’s kind of almost like you know one of those things that you take. It’s like a good luck charm or something. And I just found out like six months ago that they’re actually one of the best forms of natural negative ion generation that you can buy, because when the light inside heats up the rock, it emits those negative ions. So that’s actually something that I’ve been using for years. I didn’t even know I was doing something healthy, so that was kind of really cool when I found out about it. I wish that I could share more information about how to block EMFs, but I just I don’t know any more firsthand, and I’m not going to pretend to know information that I don’t have or that I haven’t tried myself. So, unfortunately, it was a really really specific question that I would love to have more information about, and I just don’t. But I’m going to share all the links that I have online, and hopefully that will be helpful to the people that are listening, because I’m guessing that there are some people that are saying for the first time, “What the heck is an EMF? I’ve never even heard about that, and I’ve been spending several months trying to learn about them and how to mitigate them. But if this is the first time you’re ever hearing it, then just getting a negative ion generator and a Himalayan salt lamp and having the awareness that they exist-that’s a huge start. So hopefully, this is enough to at least get people on the path to knowing that this is a real health hazard that we need to be aware of, and going down the the road to doing something about it. So that’s it for the questions that I have for this week. I don’t want the show to go too long, but I want to remind everybody again that I’m hoping to be doing another Q and A podcast soon, and make them something that I can do on a regular basis. So, if you want to be involved and you want to be on the show yourself, all you need to do is go to fitnessandpost.com/podcast, and you’ll see that green tab on the right. You click on it, hit the record button, and you just send me your message. It’s just like leaving me a voicemail, and I will play it on the show, and I will do my absolute best to answer your question. The other thing that I want to let everybody know about before I go is this show will be coming out on october 15, which is tomorrow. You may not be listening to it on October 15, but I will be recruiting another monthly clean eating Shakeology Challenge Group. So if you’re out there and you’re saying to yourself, “I really kind of want to take that first step, and I want to get some nutrition into my body, and I want to learn more about food, but I don’t have the time to do the research, and I don’t have the time to go on Google, and I don’t want to learn how to cook all this new food and what’s good and what isn’t, well, that’s what this group is about. You basically are with other people in the post-production industry. We have a Facebook group, and you just go ahead and you try Shakeology for a month, and you just learn how to use it to its fullest, how to improve your diet.

Zack Arnold: You learn about the basics of macronutrients, meaning how proteins, carbohydrates, and fats really work, as opposed to the way we’ve been taught how they work. You’re also going to learn an entire week’s worth of information about how to sleep better and improve your sleep quality, which of course is one of the things that I talked about at length. If you want to try and lose some more weight, is sleep. So that’s something we talk about a lot, and it’s fun. You’re just talking with other post-production people, and you you make some new friends. Like I have a lot of people that have met up on these groups and they become colleagues and friends afterwards. So it’s a really good way to network and get into the post-production community as well. So if you want to learn more about that and you want to RSVP, I’ll leave a link in the show notes, or you can just go to fitnessandpost.com/shakeology, which is just S H A K E O L O G Y, spelled basically. Like it sounds, just go there, and I’m going to be recruiting, and the group is going to be starting november 2. So go ahead and sign up for that if you’re interested. And lastly, I want to let everybody know that it would be immensely, immensely helpful, and I would appreciate you so much if you could just take a couple of minutes, go on iTunes, leave a rating for the show, even if you hate it. If you think this show sucks and you want to leave me one star? Awesome! I’m just asking for honesty, but I’m really trying to build a following and find more people that I can help. And the best way to do that is to get ratings and reviews on iTunes. And when I get 10 ratings, what I’m going to do is I’m going to pick one of the ratings randomly, and that person is going to win an Indie Essentials effects package. And for those that don’t know what Indie Essentials is, you can go to indieessentials.com. So I n d i essentials. com, and they create visual effects elements for editors and visual effects designers. And it’s by far the best package in the industry. Whether it’s muzzle flashes, or it’s explosions, or it’s creature effects, or zombie effects, or snow, or particles, or flames-whatever it is-there are all kinds of elements that we need. Even as editors, just today on the show I was working on, I had to put in muzzle flashes. I need some place to get those. I just can’t create them. So Indie Essentials is one of our sponsors. In full disclaimer, I know the guy that created the the company and the elements. His name is Canaan Flowers. He’s the executive producer on the show, but I only have them as a sponsor because I believe in their product. So if you’re out there and you’re saying, “Ooh, I want to get my product on this show, if I don’t love your product and I don’t use it, you’re not going to be a sponsor because that’s just the way that I roll. I don’t make enough money on this for me to be doing it for other people. I’m just doing it because it’s something I enjoy. It’s my passion, and I want to help others. So anyway, like I was saying, if you leave us a review on iTunes, and we’ll pick one of the the first 10 reviews, and you can win a package from Indie Essentials, and that stuff is really really awesome. So I hope these questions helped. If you want to get on our next Q and A podcast, you know where to go. So thank you for listening to the Fitness In Post podcast. Be well.

Zack Arnold

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The FiP Program, Shedding Belly Fat, and EMF Pollution

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