Welcome to the Get Fit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

In part one of this special series, you learn that tricking your brain into giving your body a better workout requires you to do something called

overriding your central governor and distracting your brain. Now, if you miss that episode, I'd highly

recommend you go back and take a listen to it. You can grab it now over at quick and dirty tips.com.

Now, today, I'm going to give you six quick and dirty tips to ensure that your

brain is healthy and tuned enough to communicate with your body to allow that brain tricking to actually

happen. Tip number one is to moderate your use of stimulants. Now, don't get me wrong, caffeine is okay in

certain amounts. Low dose caffeine can improve your mental performance and protect against

Alzheimer's, so you don't need to avoid caffeine entirely. But in a similar manner to

aphedron, ephedra, gerrana, riddlin, antidepressants, and any other central nervous system stimulant, caffeine can flood your brain with too much stimulation.

And this can actually cause you to become desensitized to neurotransmitters, the tiny molecules that your brain and your nervous system use to

communicate. Now, there's a reason that I personally drink no more than 8 to 10 ounces of black

coffee each day, and for at least one week every couple of months, I switch to decaf coffee. People who frequently drink coffee, tea, soda, or energy drinks can actually change their brain's chemistry and physical characteristics over time.

Now, because it's both water and fat soluble, caffeine can easily cross your blood-brain barrier.

So as you dump more and more caffeine into your brain,

you can build up a chemical tolerance. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a very

interesting New York Times article about how that chemical tolerance build-up actually happens.

But for now, you should know that the good news is that to kick a caffeine habit, you only

need to get through about seven to 12 days of caffeine avoidance.

And that's why I recommend taking week-long breaks from coffee and other similar stimulants

every couple of months just to make sure that you don't build up a dependence.

...