Gerry Morton on protein, cravings and recovery

He has run in over 30 different marathons and many Ironman triathlons and other athletic competitions. He has counseled so many people. I don't even think he could probably count with their athletic performance and how to really get healthier over the years. I welcome you, Gerry Morton. Are you there? I'm here. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be speaking with you guys this morning. I hope we can help some of your listeners today.

Help answer some good questions for them. Well, I think weight loss is an area that I know that you like talking about because it's a major health problem in our country, whether it be for children and adults and people besides athletic performance, many people on their weight loss challenge, correct? Absolutely true, I have. And it's something that's really passionate for me because it's a subject that's just near and dear to so many people's hearts in this country today.

So many people wrestle with on a regular basis. So it's great to be able to focus on that and try to help people with those challenges. What have you found as a counselor that are really a few very, very important guidelines to begin in this very important goal? People want to be healthy and they want to look good and it's oftentimes just a challenge because they really want that but they can't achieve.

I think that's where I like to start is rather than fighting our cravings, a lot of people start right out of the gate and say, "Okay, I can't eat this, I can't eat that. Let me start drawing boxes around all the things that I can and can't do." I think it's easier to work with your cravings and try to curtail those cravings by eating certain things and changing certain behaviors than it is to just start limiting yourself right away. One way to do that, there's a few things that you can do.

The gate. One way, probably the best recommendation across the board is just to drink more water.

Excellent. And again, what is your recommendation on water? At least half your body weight in ounces of water per day at a minimum. Okay, that's the same as ours, Kelly. Yeah. Well, very good. I was getting a lot more than that when I was doing that detox. I mean, drinking 200 ounces of water was a tremendous amount. But when you're detoxing, and I think what Gerry said is so right on. I mean, a couple years ago before I found health. Water, I mean, oftentimes.

Hunger reflex is really just a mistaken thirst reflex. So when we're drinking more water, we're hydrated, it's a good first step. And then starting to exercise a little bit, not only to burn more calories, but exercise really does stave off hunger as well and makes people a lot less...

Foods and it immediately balances our blood sugar. It's almost like a reset button when we go out and exercise even moderately. It immediately resets our blood sugar and gets us off of the roller coaster of constantly craving all these different foods.

And once we've kind of got ourselves just exercising a little bit, get off the couch, get moving, and we're drinking enough water, then just like you said would be to step into the protein. Because adding additional protein to your diet contributes to balanced insulin levels. It increases your serotonin uptake so that you actually feel more satiated and happy and generally satisfied.

Of what you are eating so you don't crave the different foods. I love that you are bringing that up because our body does make these hormones that actually help with pain and they increase pleasure right? Absolutely. So when you are adding more protein you just said that your pleasure hormones come up. We want those. Absolutely. We use only an all natural flavor ingredient with low glycemic, all natural with tons of health benefits.

It. We think Stevia is the best way to flavor any product really because it has very low glycemic, no sugars and it's very healthy for you and it's completely natural with nothing artificial. That's great. Do you find when you're counseling people that a lot of people that are overweight come to or not feeling good come to you skipping meals? Absolutely. That's the first thing people often do is they think,.

I'm trying to lose weight, well I need to eat less, so I'm going to skip breakfast and I'll skip lunch. Then they get to dinner time and they're ravenous. They eat a whole bunch of food, but they eat the wrong kinds of food. Not only that, but they're.

And their metabolism has slowed down so much during the course of the day that once they do flood their body with all this food.

Their body is in a storage mode where it says, gosh, We haven't had any food or any calories the whole morning. it had better store this for the rest of the.

Day, and so it goes ahead and takes all the food that you eat and stores it,.

Because it doesn't know when it's going to get food again. That's so important. I'm glad you're sharing it because it's more of the survival mode that the body puts itself into. And so you encourage people to eat regular meals, three meals a day, and maybe the protein powder could be one of those. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ideally you're eating six meals a day. I mean, you're eating kind of throughout the day. And that's one of the things that's great about the protein shakes. I mean, I'm drinking a shot of our protein and our.

In a blender bottle right now and it's a great way to just get...

Calories just kind of throughout the day at different times and just always continue to feed your body with those amino acids and that lean protein and a good green drink supplement so that you get those vitamins and the phytonutrients, digestive enzymes and probiotics of a green drink. But to go ahead and continue to drink that throughout the day.

Getting hungry, you maintain the metabolism at a high rate, you're continuing to burn fat and burn calories, and then it continues to feed your body with these amino acids that are so important to continue to keep your muscles strong and lean and built, which as you maintain muscle mass, that's actually the best way to increase your base metabolic rate, which is the level of calories that you're burning on an basis.

We got serious about it about 10 years ago.

Prior to that, I've been competing since high school.

But then sort of decided in '97 to just really get serious.

I did. It's true. It was amazing how the lack of education that I had about nutrition and about performance affected my training and how I felt from over training and not really understanding that when I was running too much or not resting enough that rest was really an important element to performance. I wasn't resting enough and I was over training and I was constantly.

Tired and sick and had low energy. And then to the nutrition side and learning that I wasn't fueling my body properly and wasn't eating enough good lean protein.

And eating the right balance of calories and macronutrients for my body and again, causing me to feel fatigued and tired and not progress at the rate that I would like and how making those little tweaks and how much I rested and how I took care of myself and then also the nutrition that I had just made radical differences in my performance and in how I felt overall. - To the immune system, if people overtrain Gerry. - Great question.

And when people over train, all of the elements of the immune system break down. I mean, obviously our joints, but also on the cellular level, the body breaks down and then if we allow ourselves to rest and feed it with the proper nutrition, it then builds back much more strongly and we actually increase our immune system. But if we don't take the time to rest and provide our body with the proper nutrition, then we continue.

It down and don't give it a chance to build up and we get sick, we feel tired, we get frail. So it's important. That's great. It's an important area. I didn't understand that until just some years ago that whether you're a cyclist or out doing kayaking or running and you did the triathlons. What were the triathlon? It encompasses.

There are all sorts of distances of triathlons. I did a series of Ironman triathlons and then the Hawaii Ironman in Kona. The distance on that is a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112 mile bike ride and then a 26.2 mile run. That's just amazing. Again, the body is a wonderful feeling, I'm sure, but it really goes through a lot of stress and sometimes athletes can actually die prematurely.

There's a whole other series of nutrition education that people need to have to avoid hyponatremia, to avoid different types of keeping your electrolyte levels in balance. that I mean.

Nutrition that you get at that level when you're exercising for that duration actually could mean the difference in life and death rather than just how good you feel. Unfortunately, even young people lately we've been in the news just dying. Again, you can't just say, "Oh well, they had a defect." So often I don't think coaches in high school sports, right, Kelly? Because you have family that are in high school sports too. They don't really teach nutrition.

Especially in high school football, all kids want to do, especially males, you know, juniors and seniors, they want to bulk up. They want to get big, you know, and so many of them don't think that they can take a healthy approach to getting big. They're looking for testosterone. They're looking for these other bulking agents, you know, that may have 30 -- it advertises that they have 30 grams of protein in it, but then it doesn't necessarily have any of the amino acids, and it has all those fillers.

I think it's really important when you're going to find a protein shake to actually read the label, read what's in it, like I said before, and do a little research on what you're putting into your body. It's no different than taking a supplement or a vitamin. So when you're looking at a protein shake, really break it down. And that's what's so great. If you go to energyfirst.com, they break down their protein shake along with five other well-known protein shakes.

United States. So, I mean, really check it out for yourself.

Right away and we've always felt that dissolvability and texture was nearly as important as taste and people using the product so we've made it really imperative that it dissolves really quickly and easily as well as tasting great as well as maintaining our key differentiators which you know we talk about is all natural things in addition to the dissolvability and the taste are what make our product truly unique in the marketplace.

So actually, to take this a couple of times a day would be okay. It would be fantastic recommended and you'll probably feel better than you ever felt.

Naturally, the whey protein isolate can help with those aminos that feed your muscles, can help to allow you to maintain the lean muscle mass and the physique that you had in your younger years, which also again maintains the amount of calories that you burn all the time and how much energy you feel and how good you are generally. So that the shakes just become that much more critical as you get older in order to maintain.

Drinking protein shakes? Is that what you want or do you want to combine it with other foods and how to combine it? Good question. Ketosis, for those of you on the call that aren't familiar, if you have little or no carbohydrates at all, your body goes into a state of ketosis where you start burning ketones, you're basically not -- it's something that you don't want to maintain over the long term. You want to limit.

Of ketosis to a shorter period. With the shakes, if you are adding fruit to your shakes or raw oats or any kind of good raw foods as grown carbohydrate source, that's going to keep you well out of ketosis. That's one of the downsides or the pitfalls of the Atkins program is that it immediately puts people into ketosis and leaves them there which.

Some very unhealthy side effects to it.

Things, any kind of carbohydrates to your shake, you'll stay out of ketosis completely.

Actually take very much in the way of carbohydrates at all to prevent ketosis from setting in. The protein can be effective eaten with other foods or combined with other foods. Absolutely, absolutely. You can combine it. You can even make it, throw it in if you're making muffins or something like that. You could throw the protein in there in baking it. But in your shakes, oftentimes like on all of our shake recipes and if you go to our.

Page at energyfirst.com. We've got all different shake recipes and all of them include some form of foods that's grown, raw carbohydrate, notably some type of fresh fruit or a raw oats or something along those lines. Any one of those different things that you add to the shake will keep you well out of ketosis. Okay. It's effective to combine the foods then, not just eat it.

Protein by itself. Yes it is. It's great to eat the protein with a good carbohydrate and a good fat as well. Excellent. If you take fish oil or if you add the Omega oil or the Omega mix to your shake to get your Omega 3s and your EPA and DHA and your carbohydrates you mix it all. It's a perfect meal. It's highly encouraged to do that. For a menopausal woman, how many shakes a day would you recommend? Again, I'd go back to that one gram of protein, lean protein per.

Body weight. If you look at how much protein you're getting from other sources, fish or chicken or what have you, and then make up the difference with the protein shakes, it's without a doubt the best way to start your day. For breakfast, it's the best breakfast that you could ever have. Then if you ever finish working out or exercising, that's another excellent way to have a shake. Then any time during the day that you start to feel a little bit hungry and you want to replace a meal or get some additional.

And keep your metabolism going is a great place to sub it in.