It’s very helpful to have this specific guideline for antioxidant timing because most advice is too general to be useful. I don’t take my GlyNACET anywhere near my weightlifting sessions, and have assumed that I need to do the same with methylene blue since it’s said to be a powerful antioxidant. I hope it’s okay to take it in the morning if I lift weights late afternoon or evening.
MB inhibits heat shock protein 70 (hsp70), which plays a role in muscle regeneration after exercise.
In skeletal muscle, HSP70 is rapidly induced in response to both non-damaging and damaging stress stimuli including exercise and acute muscle injuries. This upregulation of HSP70 contributes to the maintenance of muscle fiber integrity and facilitates muscle regeneration and recovery
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3822288/
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@AgentSmith It’s a good question. I find MB takes 24 hours to clear out of my urine. Below is the information about MB shared by Dr Scott Sherr. I don’t take MB right before my exercise but I haven’t been thinking about the 24 hour clearance vs antioxidant activity.
- At low doses (<3mg/kg), Methylene Blue (MB) is called an electron cycler. It acts as an electron donor to the electron transport chain in your mitochondria, increasing ATP production.
- MB also works as an acceptor of free electrons from reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (i.e. it works like an antioxidant…one as powerful as vitamin C or glutathione, in fact). There are very few compounds that cycle electrons (i.e. donates and accepts them) as effectively as MB.
- MB also increases the cytochrome oxidase (complex IV) function in your mitochondria and drives increased glucose consumption. The latter occurs because, when the mitochondria are making more energy, they need more substrate to supply electrons to the electron transport chain.
- While increasing glucose consumption and energy production, MB also increases the supply of NAD+.
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This is a great podcast! I did not know that certain types of fat can be responsible for afib, etc. @rberger . I will be getting a Dexa scan to check on, and track my progress.
Also lots of good information on how fat drives inflammation and accelerated aging.
Yearly (or more often) DEXA scans seem like they should be part of our baseline of longevity practices.
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@RapAdmin Thanks. Dr Loh is great. I’m now wondering if my healthy fat capacity is very low (skinny kid), and whether my metabolic issues (blood sugar and apoB) are from ectopic fat…perhaps my low hsCRP doesn’t mean low inflamaging.
I’ll have to lose body fat to find out, which sounds like a good idea no matter what. I’d definitely get a Dexa body scan if I could find one.
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KarlT
#6
Great talk, although I think her viewpoint is a little warped by the patient population she sees.
Maybe I missed it, but did she say how to loss fat?
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Well, the focus was really on generally healthy people, not obese - so the focus was on exercise, resistance training (mostly) and cardio, to maintain muscle. Not much of a focus on fat loss per se.
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Dr Loh did not get into that critical element of metabolic health because I was focused on what people can do to AVOID going down the path of excessive body fat accumulation. But it is a great question that I will ask Dr Loh to do a followup podcast episode about.
Of course the simple answer to weight loss is “calorie deficit” but the path to fat loss AND muscle gain seems hard. I’ve read that untrained people can do both simultaneously but that trained people must have a calorie surplus to gain muscle. So how to lose weight (calorie deficit) and gain muscle (calorie surplus) at the same time?
I think the answer lies in the following
- Get circadian rhythm working to increase ability to recover physically from exercise, improve mental health (support resolution of addictions), and better manage urges to eat
- Solve the happiness equation so that eating calories is not the primary source of happiness in life (stop alcohol, stop sugary/fatty foods, etc). Or just try to discipline your way through this forever (good luck).
- Get sufficient protein to build muscle and discourage the body from taking muscle to make up for a protein shortage.
- Cycle between calorie surplus vs deficit in sequence with exercise based signals (resistance training) to the body to need muscle. Work to gain mostly muscle during calorie surpluses while losing mostly fat during calorie deficits. Over time body composition improvement will occur
- Use HIIT exercise to shock the body into athletic preparedness (be ready for anything)
- Use endurance exercise to strengthen cardiovascular system, lower BP, increase blood flow to every part of the body.
- Use rapamycin to get sufficient, periodic autophagy to drive rejuvenation without excessive muscle loss
What am I missing or getting wrong?
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In some sense, it’s great to be out of shape and weak because your odds are better. 
Though I think most who are trying to lose weight really have to heed your point #3 and resistance train quite a bit to just not lose muscle.
That’s good advice, of course. For very specific body recomp guidance, I look to bodybuilders for methods that they have used with their clients over periods of years. I trust the scientist-bodybuilders like Dr. Layne Norton, Dr. Mike Israetel (Renaissance Periodization), Greg Nuckhols of strongerbyscience, and to a lesser extent, Dr. Andy Galpin.
Generally they all agree that if you’re not fat, you need to be in a surplus to gain muscle, but “Dr. Mike” tailors his advice by age, which I think is very prudent. Basically, if you’re on the younger side, you can stay in a “bulk” longer because any fat you gain with the muscle will be relatively easy to take off. Target 0.5-1lb of weight gain per week. Follow an established hypertrophy program.
If you’re older, be more careful. Target 0.5/wk but do short bulking cycles of 4-8 weeks and don’t let your bodyfat get above 20%. The idea is that it’s harder to lose fat when you’re older. Aim to bring your bodyfat back down to 15% or less before another bulk.
Cuts are so much easier in the age of GLP-1s, though. A lot of guys on the bodybuilding forums are taking advantage of them.
This is a great overview of general recomp expectations and realities that covers much of the above:
And here’s a new video from Dr. Mike specifically for the older lifter about how to build muscle safely. I do think rapamycin gives the older lifter an advantage. So do exogenous testosterone and hGH (recovery), but I mention those for completeness only, not as recommendations (“don’t flame me, bro!”):
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Thanks. These are worth watching. People here who are not interested in looking like these fellows can still learn from them. For myself, I am not looking to maximize my muscle mass. I have enough muscle. I want to keep it and keep it strong and healthy. I am focusing on shorter cycles of anabolism vs catabolism than recommended by the bodybuilders.
I do 48 hour resistance training cycles within a two-week rapa cycle. I go for a calories surplus in the 24 hours after resistance training and calorie deficit in the next 24 hours. I do a low protein / low calorie day 1 day per week including my rapa day every two weeks. I’m sure I lose a bit of muscle here but I offset it during the week.
My weight loss has to come from being more careful about my calorie deficit periods. Summertime is the easiest time to lose weight. I’ll try to lose it slow and steady. I’ll just stop losing when my metabolism adjusts to my new program. Then I’ll see if I got the metabolic benefits I was after. If not, I’ll back down a bit more.
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Here is an important paper to study. The devil is in the details. Little differences matter.
“The exercise treatment consisted of 5 days/week of walking for 30 min and 2 days/week of resistance exercise. After 16 weeks, the higher protein + exercise group lost 46% more body weight, 60% more body fat, and 40% less fat-free mass compared with the low protein + exercise group.”
Eat breakfast with protein
Don’t eat more protein at a time than can be used to stimulate MPS
Many more tidbits
Posted by Stuart Philips on X
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KarlT
#12
I found myself frustrated as she kept talking about how everyone was over fat, but every time diet was mentioned she stated you’d lose muscle and gain back fat.
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If everyone were to lose fat there’d be no fat people left to bully around.
She was referring to how yo-yo dieting usually works. She didn’t mean it had to happen that way.
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I found a Dexa body scan provider to use. I might be sorry to learn how much fat I have to lose. But…Geronimo!
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It’s great that you were able to find one. I look forward to hearing anything about your results that you feel comfortable sharing. I am going for my 6-month scan on my birthday in a couple weeks. I have high hopes for this scan since I’ve been working with a specific goal in mind. It’s nerve-wracking sitting there in the waiting room while they print the results!
My first scan was such a disaster since I had been fatmaxing of a different kind leading up to it 
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I will share so that I will have sufficient motivation to cure myself (also publicly).
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Bicep
#18
I’m curious about what it costs, if you don’t mind sharing that.
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$175 is what I’m told. I’ll be able to confirm this week.
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Beth
#20
Any particular thing to look for in a provider? Or do you just have trouble finding anything in your city?
