EAT THIS To Burn Body Fat & LIVE LONGER In 2022! (Melt Your Fat)| Mark Sisson

you have this great empowerment over your own life to to manifest the body you want the mood you want the relationship you want the productivity in your work that you want you know all these things are possible but but but there's a an element that goes back to the primal nature of who we are and that is this amazing genetic recipe that we all have but that we don't necessarily follow the instructions [Music] hey everybody welcome to health theory my name is tom bilyeu and i'm the co-founder of quest nutrition and i am obsessed with actuating potential and living the best life possible and i learned somewhere along the way that to do that mindset while very important actually comes in position three for me numbers one and two are diet and exercise and so really understanding health and its fundamental properties is absolutely critical if you want to do something extraordinary with your life and that's why we've created the show and today i am joined by somebody absolutely extraordinary you guys are going to love this guy he is one of the most interesting intersections of mind and body that i've ever come across at a very good time researching him he's a former endurance athlete author of the primal blueprint i should say best-selling author of the primal blueprint he's written several books primal endurance most recently the keto reset diet and he's also the creator of a whole slew of amazing foods that you can find on amazon's where i got them i don't know if that's his recommended channel i'm sure you can also get them on his website as well you can also find him on marksdailyapple.com where he is blogged daily for 11 years which is absolutely extraordinary go check him out he's one of the most important voices in the space without further ado please help me in welcoming mark sisson mark thank you so much for coming on the show man thanks for having me man very very excited truly to have you on the show and researching you so i knew of you pretty well because i'm in that sort of keto experimentation world i understand i've never been truly paleo but i understand the world and so you can't get that far in that universe without encountering you but really going deep and researching you for this interview i was like wow like this dude is really my kind of dude so i want to start with what do you mean like the slogan of your company is live awesome right what do you mean by that how did that come about well it came about because people uh wanted me to define what primal really meant um you know was is it paleo is it primary does it have to do with the caveman experience or does it have to do with you know some other primal urge primal scream basically primal is about extracting the greatest amount of enjoyment pleasure contentment fulfillment uh satisfaction from every possible moment and that's really what defines live awesome how do you live awesomely you do though you do that by by enjoying every every moment possible but in order to do that uh there are some uh hurdles that we create for ourselves in this modern life right and they they may be in the form of uh making inappropriate choices in how we in how we eat or inappropriate choices in in our um sleep patterns uh staying out of the sun instead of being in the sun and all these different things that uh over the years i realized were critical to our experience of life that that if you make some of these decisions in the context of wanting to be strong and lean and fit and happy and healthy and productive if you are mindful is the word that he is now of all these of how your genes manifest each of those behaviors then you have this great empowerment over your own life to to manifest the body you want the mood you want the relationship you want the productivity in your work that you want you know all these things are possible but but but there's a an element that goes back to the primal nature of who we are and that is this amazing genetic recipe that we all have but that we don't necessarily follow the instructions it's interesting because when i got into health and fitness it was entirely around my willingness to suffer like so i grew up in a morbidly obese family right so i saw what happened sure i got sort of the natural evolution of where that was headed and so i made enough sort of early reasonable choices they were not great by my standards now but like reasonable enough that i wasn't packing on the pounds but then in in my mid-20s i um i stopped eating uh fat because obviously that was bad for me and i wanted to keep the fat down because fat makes you fat and i was eating licorice literally by the tub and i remember somebody said to me i think if you eat more sugar than you burn it turns to fat and i was like that doesn't make sense like how would that happen and so that began this really confusing period in my life where i was eating less than i'd ever eaten in my life but i was getting fatter and i was like what is going on and so knowing that if i kept and i thought it was just genetics right oh i've i've hit my mid-20s here we go and then really diving in and saying okay i need to figure this out i actually need to learn about this but i didn't come to fat for years and years and years later and lived ultimately in this sort of rabbit starvation phase but i was 60 pounds heavier than i am now used rabbit starvation to get lean like i won't lie if you're willing to suffer and you don't mind massive joint pain like you can you can get by on like ultra high protein really low fat and virtually no carbohydrate why is it that people need fat and what's the the experience that you think that they'll get out of switching their diet around well so that's a very complex question um and com and there's a complex equation behind it but people need fat fat is a you know provides not just burnable calories fuel but fat uh certain types of fat play critical roles in the creation of cell membranes in the in the communication between cells um in certain uh hormone uh precursor situations um a certain amount of body fat is just uh sort of requisite to be healthy in the first place so we're not all striving to be two percent you know body fat people uh but the the idea that fat makes you fat has been long dispelled i mean this was like that's a quote from susan powder back in the 80s right and uh uh and it still somehow made its way into medicine for for some unknown reason because the research has been very clear um we need we need certain amount of fat in our diet if you were to eliminate fat from your diet which is what everyone thought we needed to do for the last several decades you're left with with um carbohydrates and protein well carbohydrates are sugars every virtually every carbohydrate turns into sugar body can't burn that much sugar blood sugar normal blood sugar represents about a teaspoon full of blood in your entire sugar in your entire bloodstream at any point in time and yet we have this amazing capacity to take those excess sugar calories and convert them into into stored energy which is which is basically what fat is protein again it's weird that prot that people give protein even a caloric value because we're not really supposed to be burning protein you can ascribe four calories per gram to protein you know in a any any nutrition facts panel you'll see it right there but maybe the first 30 or 40 grams of protein a day isn't intended to be burned it's intended to be used to rebuild to to create new cells to to build muscle to strengthen bone to create enzymes because all enzymes are are derived from the amino acids that are in protein i wrote an article years ago called the context of calories and one of the things i would look at is you know if you're looking at creating a macro nutrient like profiling how are my that's the big thing right now all the guys are talking about macros what are your macros right you know um it's far more nuanced than that because some fat you're not going to want to burn you're going to want to incorporate it into cells some protein you're not going to bur you're definitely not going to want to burn you're going to incorporate it into cells and and uh and that leaves you know carbs which are just a source of quick energy in the form of glucose that we don't really we aren't that really that good at burning over the long haul so we get into this weird kind of um situation where where like in your case you had the willpower to undergo a caloric deprivation but it made you miserable it was like literally struggling and suffering and sacrificing every single day calorie counting portion control all that stuff because you kept thinking it's all about the calories but it's not sometimes it's about the it's about the the individual nutrients and how you partition them and that's kind of the beauty of keto for instance is that we is that we we look at how we can take this millions of years of evolution and harness it to become really good at burning fat to become less dependent on glucose to spare the protein that we otherwise would be burning for calories uh and and it's all part of this great system that we evolved i don't want to co-opt your show here but i want to talk to talk about something for you okay we talk about metabolic flexibility a lot now in this new era of of macros metabolic flexibility simply means that you are able to extract energy from the fat on your plate the fat on your body the carbohydrates on your plate the glycogen in your muscles the glucose in your bloodstream uh the ketones that your liver makes that's flexibility that's getting energy from all these different substrates and not become dependent on burning uh protein to create glucose historically humans didn't have access to food three times a day let alone every day so wire to eat overeat uh store those calories as fat and then a day later or two days later take that energy out of storage and burn it and spare muscle and not have angriness and all the other stuff that that goes with that it's such an elegant system to store it and to burn it well most of us today are so good at storing it and then we we've lost the the ability it's a it's literally we're born with it it's a it's a factory setting at birth and then we lose the ability to take that fat out of storage combust it as fuel create ketones offset the need for the brain that to require glucose uh spare protein so we get this great protein recycling system take the opportunity to do a short-term cellular house cleaning and repair all all of this and all of it comes down to the choices we make in our food yeah i want to go back to what you were talking about with um the the suffering and so i got lean because i was willing to suffer and be at a caloric deficit and all that and and i really didn't understand something that you just said then and it it still bums me out now because to give you an idea my business partners had to pull me aside and say you no longer have a personality like that's how bad it had got like everything was about like you know can i eat can i eat can eat and uh so pushing that off and pushing it off really did like have a massive effect of my ability to be joyful to express joy to be fun and playful um and what i didn't understand was that what i consider a key insight for anybody that's just now getting into this which is your body is so elegantly designed do you not wonder why it stores everything as fat right and so if fat is like this beast that we're meant to be afraid of like why would we have such a readily uh readily available source of body fat if we're not meant to use it as a fuel source so that became one of the first things that really clicked me into experimenting with ketogenics but i want to go on your journey for a second so you start as an endurance athlete yes totally understanding the high carb world and how to use that and leverage that for some pretty extraordinary results first of all you were in amazing shape you were doing very well i mean maybe not number one in the world but you were a deep competitor yes so if you had all that success what made you want to move away from that well so i had the success racing and i had the success using old technology so the old technology was you train your ass off until literally and you know until you can't train anymore uh so it was a moore's better no pain no gain concept uh and then to fuel all that work the understanding at the time was that you needed complex carbohydrate that it was basically how you manage glycogen in your muscles that determine where the wall was when you hit the wall so we recognized the the utility of becoming good at burning fat but because we were so dependent on carbohydrate all the time every day you know you deplete carbs then you over eat carbs at night we call it carbo loading in the days and you'd carbon load every single day to be go out to be able to go out and do it again the next day i mean i ran 100 miles a week on average for seven years some day some weeks it was only eighty some weeks 125. and imagine how you know that's 20 miles a day in some some weeks uh to be able to repeat that you sort of had to um to to con if you hadn't learned how to really burn fat well and hadn't done the training and and re re uh reoriented your um digestive tract and your enzyme systems to become really good at burning fat you relied on carbohydrate one relied on carbohydrate i relied on carbohydrate well carbs are very pro-inflammatory over the long haul and especially in 20 or 30 or 40 years ago we thought the furnace will burn anything so it didn't matter that even the quality of the carbs and i ate complex carbs quite a bit but i'd have pizza and beer and i'd have uh you know bread and rice and cakes and candies and cookies and you know anything that was carbs i'd sort of take it in thinking i'm going to burn it off tomorrow anyway so i got really fast and i trained my butt off but i started to fall apart at a very early age i had arthritis in my osteoarthritis in my feet had tendonitis in my hips that ultimately was what shut me down i had irritable bowel syndrome that ran my life i literally from the age of 14 until i was 47 um was it was devastating um i had uh you know upper respiratory tract infection six or eight times a year uh just partly from from uh from having trash my immune system with the stress because stress is an immune suppressor but also from the uh having trash my immune system from so much sugar sugar suppresses the immune system as well so on the outside i was like the picture of you know fitness on the inside i was literally dying falling apart the running was a was a effort to do something that science showed would would improve my longevity the diet seemed to indicate lots of carbs go for it um but so at the age of like 29 or 30 i just said this is not working i retired from competition i took a step back and i said i'm gonna you know i still want to be strong and lean and fit and happy and healthy and productive i just there's got to be a way to do this without so much pain suffering and sacrifice and was this based on science you were reading no it's probably based on science but most of it was based on an intuitive approach to like wait a minute this just it just can't be going back to my my roots in college where i was uh pre-med and i uh you know i got my bachelor's degree in biology i was focused on evolution evolution was really starting to come to the forefront in the early 70s and i thought well how you know what is it about where we are now in our evolution that would allow us to adapt to training and become stronger from from whatever we choose to do uh so i started to look at at ways in which the body would respond to training um and one of the key elements that i think was overlooked for so many people for so long is you you have to recover you can't just beat yourself up every day a certain round of training requires nutrition and it requires some amount of rest and recovery in order to to allow the organism to improve to the next level because if you keep layering on training and training and training you go down this rabbit hole of over training and burnout which is what so many endurance athletes encounter like a friend of mine johnny g who went on to create spinning johnny was training for this race across america and uh he would be he'd he'd be doing 200 mile rides with avocado oil as his primary source of energy i'm like dude yeah like dude you are crazy you you you know you this is you're supposed to be managing glycogen everybody knows this right and he would go no you know um it's all about the fat and i try to do the south african accent it's all about the fat uh and uh and the avocado oil and he'd have these he'd take 1 600 calories of avocado oil and some emulsifier so he wouldn't throw up and i started to think this guy's on to something it's like it's really about how you how what's the highest level at which you can perform and mostly burn fat and spare glycogen from within rather than having to keep layering glucose and glycogen by ex uh external feedings every 15 minutes this would this is counterintuitive still now today yeah this would have been so like sacrilegious back then one how did he did he just have deep intuition about it i think and of one or yeah i think he was intuitive about it uh i think he he you know he'd done enough of his own research i don't know you know where the research was coming from um you know guys like finney and volk were starting to get their work published uh in those days so there was there was a recognition that there was this thing called ketogenics and ketogenesis and that there was a way in which you could train the body to be better at burning fat but the question really was how do you do that because there was again up until five years ago there was still this assumption you have to have glycogen there are ways that we can go about extracting 95 to 97 of our energy from fat when we are performing at a very high level like for some runners it could be six six 20 miles and get 95 of your energy from your stored body fat but you have to teach your body how to do that that's the development of metabolic flexibility that i teach and that i'm such a fan of because it it it manifests itself off over a wide range of of benefits uh more energy all the time uh hunger being suppressed or mitigated to the point you don't think about what's the next meal and what's the next meal and what's the next meal because i guarantee you in your day when you were doing this rabid starvation you were always thinking like okay when's the next 247 calorie bolus that i can eat right oh yes when you become metabolically flexible one of the first things that happens is appetite goes out the window you discover you're much more efficient i talk about metabolic flexibility i also talk about metabolic efficiency which is the the ability to extract energy at a at a much more efficient rate so you're not um wasting calories or wasting energy good what's the result of that that you need to eat less yes it's crazy so most people who have been keto for any length of time will report back dude i first of all three meals a day can't even handle it it's like i couldn't eat three meals a day it's way too much food number two i probably get by on 30 fewer calories now doing all the same activities than i did before i was keto what's that about and what that it's about it's about metabolic efficiency it's about um you know less thermic effect of food you know sometimes we eat a large meal more than we should have and the body raises its temperature just to kind of burn off some of that fuel right because it doesn't want that much fuel at one time yes it tries to stash the glucose into the glycogen reserves the muscles if there's not enough room goes to the fat cells you know yes there's some protein but excess protein goes to the liver gluconeogenesis gets converted to sugar same same issue with that so all these all of these elements of of efficiency now you don't need as much protein because you're sparing protein instead of deaminating it and then peeing it out all the time you don't need as much carbohydrate because you've learned how to make ketones from your own stored body fuel those ketones really reduce the amount of glucose that you need to make or you need to take in from the outside um you know there's a statement that many people make in the keto world that there is no requirement in human nutrition for carbohydrate at all because the body can make enough glucose through gluconeogenesis and then offset the rest of the requirements with ketones so the efficiency becomes again a very important aspect in reduction of inflammation because the efficiency also carries with it a a reduction in reactive oxygen species from the from the um inefficient burning of fuel to get rid of it uh the house cleaning i talked about where where a cell will look at the the environment and go uh geez there's not enough uh substrate around for me to dive to divide right now so i think i'll i'll stay where i am and i'll do some house cleaning and i'll and i'll literally consume some of the damaged proteins within i'll uh consume some of the damaged fats a cell might even say time for me to give up the ghost i'm going to die autophagy the the cell will will self-destruct based on the signals that it gets from the environment which and that environment is a a dearth if you will of nutrients now conversely if you've if you're eating every couple of hours you know you're eating three square meals a day plus snacks in between plus something before you go to bed which most people do the body goes well there's so much food around this is amazing so my cells they can divide because there'll be plenty of substrate and and food for the for the two of me when i divide but as we know from sort of the anti-aging movement you know cells have kind of a finite number of divisions that's what the telomeres are all about right and so if you can prolong that time from from when one cell decides it's time to divide and not only prolong the time but then have that one cell start to do some house cleaning that's a critical kind of theory behind the anti-aging movement and the anti-aging aspect of keto and of intermittent fasting and of long-term fasting so there's there's a lot of it's like a new era of science that we're in that we're embarking on here that kind of has to go back and refigure the science because the science for the last several decades has kind of been based on body needs sugar fat's bad uh heart attacks are caused by fat and cholesterol um you know you can you can you have to do exercise to burn off all the calories if you want to lose weight all these things have been shown to be inaccurate now one thing that i i think you have a really beautiful way of talking about because i know that some of the people watching this first of all they found me because they're interested in mindset and so the health stuff always seems like something off to the side but you've really talked eloquently about you know not judging regarding the food and eating in a way that's entirely pleasurable so how do people reconcile the what i was told was the first rule of nutrition which was if it tastes good spit it out which i always thought was really clever uh and seemed true though if i'm honest like in my period of rabbit starvation that seemed honestly true sure um so how do you walk people through that transition of i'm fed up i've tried a hundred things none of them worked and i don't want to hate my life and i would rather be you know whether it's overweight or joint pain or whatever i'd rather do all that to be able to eat and drink and be merry how do you help them see that they don't have to make that sacrifice well first of all i want to be clear um i every bite of food i put in my mouth i enjoy so i there are certain things that you would say hey mark this is really healthy you should try it if it doesn't taste great i'm not eating it i don't care how healthy it is so i only eat things that taste great i only eat to satisfy my you know my my my hedonistic side the amount of food i eat um i've learned that there's a point at which it doesn't serve me to eat anymore so the the the quantity of what i would consider a serving has diminished now does that mean i'm sacrificing because i don't eat till i'm full or i don't finish my plate no it quite the opposite it means i eat till i'm satisfied knowing full well that a my body is really good at burning off stored body fat so i got all the energy i need for days so if i don't eat for another meal or two i'm fine but i can plan on eat eating at another meal so i sort of adjust my intake on a daily basis to how do i feel i don't look at numbers i don't i'm not one of those quantified self guys i'm really operating off of how do i feel if i have the energy i want if i'm maintaining muscle mass without any effort if i'm never sick and if i'm not hungry then what's the problem with how i eat what does it take to get there it takes some work to get there because i'm telling you the truth is there'll be no world in which eating cinnabons all day is going to be healthy yes you're going to have to give up sugars so candies pies cakes ice cream cookies you know then you're going to have to probably give up if you want to go keto bread pasta rice cereal now what can you eat you can eat all the vegetables you want all the vegetables you want some fruit meat fish foul eggs nuts seeds lots of sources of protein healthy fats coconut oil coconuts avocado oil nuts and then within this realm of food you can do all sorts of stuff to make it taste phenomenal the reason i created my company is the sauces the dressings the toppings if you can put those on the food and they're healthy and they add taste and functionality you are so far ahead of the game and the fact that you can't eat a basket of bread rolls before dinner comes or that you can't you know uh eat a massive dessert i think most people get that that's that's a nice trade-off if appetite is is controlled if they get rid of hunger and cravings and appetite if they trend toward their ideal body composition if they have all the energy they need all the time if they sleep well then you checked off all the boxes and to to have given up candy or soft drinks to have you know given up some amount of grains was well worth it provided again that you never go hungry and that you enjoy every bite of food you eat so my journey to ketogenics was weird and i do want to talk so what got me into it at first was anti-cancer the potential that it had anti-cancer properties and so i try ketogenics and you've talked about how people absolutely should not go from a lifetime of being a sugar burner and try to just like cold turkey go over to ketogenics which i did so i had keto flu like coming out my ears was a total misery and i was like okay nothing about this is pleasurable at all ketogenics is powerful if it has these anti-cancer properties but it's horrific yeah and as i was going through it i used to have to ice my wrists every day for 15 years because i had that much pain in in my joints and i in the middle of keto flu and all this i was like wow that's so weird my wrists feel perfect and i was like you know just sort of in the back of my mind and so when i i did about three weeks of full-blown like measuring my blood which you've talked eloquently about the the dangers of of paying too much attention to that um but super hardcore i was even taking exogenous ketones so like i was a blood superstar yes felt terrible and at the end of it i'm like i'm never doing that again but this whole wrist thing i'm gonna keep fat in my diet and see what happens that was utterly transformative but for a year people kept after that i was like i'm never doing keto again and people like no no it changes your relationship to hunger and i was like i don't even know what that means and so for a year i didn't do it again and then i thought you know let me i'd been hearing more about managing keto flu and i thought let me try it again because this wrist thing is real and i did it again did it right and it was amazing and i came out the other side going this is what it means to not be controlled by my hunger but i still don't know how to explain it to people there are people in my life who i love more than you can imagine and they're going to die early because of obesity related complications and i know that on the other side of something like the keto reset diet where it wasn't painful the food is [ __ ] delicious and their relationship to change their relationship to hunger changes dramatically that they would be stoked that they did it but i don't know how to explain how it changes well you know the reason i wrote the keto reset diet we have a 21 day stair step program so in order to earn the right to go keto in the book for instance there's a 21 day sort of elimination process where you're getting rid of the pies of cakes candies the cookies the breads the pastas the cereals you're starting to incorporate more of the certainly more vegetables because fiber and vegetables are not a no-no on keto they're actually encouraged healthy proteins healthy fats again taste is critical uh first thing i tell people when they they embark on this program is don't let yourself go hungry don't set yourself up for failure so if you do get hungry and you'd normally reach for a bagel in the middle of the afternoon or a doughnut or whatever have uh some nut butter have you know some artisana coconut butter it's one of my favorite go-to kind of take the edge off things or a handful of macadamia nuts or some beef jerky or something that that isn't going to go back your old ways but it's going to take the edge off your hunger get you through that period while your body is learning how to to burn fat so the the reason it's 21 days is when we eat food every bite of food has a hormonal effect on the body one way or the other you got insulin you got leptin ghrelin glucagon test testosterone epinephrine norepinephrine you could we could go on and on it's all these signaling systems that that are responding to the information that you're putting down your gullet so when you eat sugar insulin goes up uh starts a whole cascade of events uh you know shuts down testosterone increases cortisol a little bit on the other hand you take a healthy fat in uh no no insulin there's a different set of leptin ghrelin interactions and hungered suppresses because fat is is satiating so there are all these different uh processes that happen as a result of your choices in food what we're trying to do in 21 days is rewire your body so where i talked in my original book about reprogram your genes to burn fat well you're taking these genes which are basically information sets and you're up regulating certain things when you say i'm going to deny glucose for a while then the body goes okay i gotta i'm set up for that so if you deny glucose we're gonna up regulate the enzyme systems to take fat out of storage that burn it in the mitochondria and if you do that long enough we're gonna upregulate other enzymes or other systems that make more mitochondria which is where the fat burns so over time you reduce glucose the brain which is used to glucose goes ah geez there's not going to be much glucose i better go to plan b which is send some signals and convert some fats in the liver to ketones so the brain is happy with fuel doesn't need glucose you know increase those mitochondria in the muscles so they get much more energy from the fat there's twice as many of these little factory powerhouses that are made in the sales because you sent the signals to your genes to do that now that takes three weeks it takes three weeks to get about eighty percent there so if we stair step this down for the first three weeks there's a midterm exam in the book and it's basically how do you feel so when can you wake up in the morning and not be ravenous for breakfast how long can you go in the morning without having to eat without getting hungry can you do a workout fast can you come home from a workout and not eat for an hour and a half um how's your sleep we have all these and if you pass if you get a 75 on the exam you earn the right to go keto now in that process of stare stepping down you get into this space where now you're literally now the you've clearly sent the message we're going to have to make ketones we're going to have to learn how to burn ketos so the body builds the metabolic machinery to burn ketones and that is so cool because that's again tapping into that factory setting that we all have at birth that experience that we never get to have based on our heritage of two and a half moons years of human evolution and then 100 million years of mammalian evolution before that to be able to to extract that fat from from fat stores so it's a it's a it's a stair-step process i want it to be as comfortable and satisfying as possible now once you've once you've become keto once you've built the metabolic machinery as long as you don't go back to two three five hundred calories or grams of carbs a day whether or not you're in ketosis you still have that metabolic flexibility so i'm i use the word keto now because that's where i exist i exist in the keto zone some days i get 30 grams of carbs and that's all i get some days i get 150 grams of carbs that's what i get the difference is i don't feel i don't notice any difference from one day to the next because i've built that metabolic flexibility to extract energy from whatever substrate is available and do you have a way of um getting people to like a short analogy or a description of what it's like to not be controlled by hunger because the people that i've encountered anyway it's like they get it intellectually but they're they're not moved emotionally to make the change yeah that's a tough one because so much of our lives revolve around hunger i mean i'll give you an example most people you and i included sort of live right on the edge of what can i get away with how much how bad can i inject and get away with it right and with food it's basically what's the most amount of food i can eat and not gain weight this is how people think what's the most amount of that dessert i can have and not feel miserable or guilty and so we live our lives that way and and over time we find that some of us even develop an exercise habit around that like okay um i i go to the gym and i see people on the treadmill all the time i'm always interested in like why they're like you're there five days a week and you're doing 45 minutes why are you doing are you training for a 10k or a marathon and the answer is typically no i just i like to eat i'm like dude you would rather be miserable for 45 minutes so that you could earn the right to eat something you probably shouldn't be eating in the first place how ridiculous is that so rather than go through life with this strategy of like what's the most amount i can eat and not gain weight or not be sick to my stomach or not feel over full i did a thought experiment years ago and i said what's what's the least amount of food i can eat and make i have all the energy i want maintain muscle mass never get sick most importantly not be hungry hunger throws everything out the window so if you can get to that point tim tim ferriss would say the minimum effective dose of food right but it's basically like like how can i um orchestrate my eating strategy so that i'm always satisfied but i'm also i know where the limit is and if my limits are three bites of cheesecake or four pieces of of a chocolate cake or you know one bite of cookie or in my case you know i have a grain gluten insensitivity but i can have three pieces of bread slathered in butter and that's kind of my limit and so i know i'm not giving up bread i'm just i just know where the limitations are and i'm happy to i'm happy to incorporate those so i'm actually playing right up to the edge in my of what i can get away with but i know where that edge is does it make sense yeah totally look i don't judge choices people shouldn't judge choices you need to understand your body where your limits are um and and i love this idea so um lgn right so your community knows well look good naked and you said there's actually been a recent shift to fgn feel good naked and you said i think that that's really important why is that an important shift well you know looking good naked uh for some people was like a primary motivator most people on instagram apparently uh but in uh in the real world uh and in my world most people initially came to primal blue the primal blueprint my my site mark's daily apple because i was talking about about alternative ways to achieve health looking good naked was a nice side effect but damn it i want to feel good i want the joint pain to go away i want my i don't i want to get off my meds i want to lose you know 100 pounds and and you know get to a decent weight not lose four pounds and get to a you know a cover of shape magazine weight so feeling good naked is really about just you know like okay i just i've you know i have energy i sleep well i'm in a good mood i'm getting along with my family i'm productive at work i'm enjoying as much of every moment as possible you know that's really what in my mind that's why we're here to get the greatest amount of of real-time pleasure in the moment as possible speaking about pleasure i want to talk about ibs running your life for like 30 years which is crazy this show is actually because my wife was struggling with microbiome related issues ibs type symptoms yeah but it got so bad that it got scary and there was a point where not to be overly dramatic but i was like legitimately you can die from these symptoms and so i started getting really freaked out we took her to every doctor i mean we were in the fortunate financial position where we could just throw money at the problem through money at the problem and it didn't help it didn't get better so then i was really in a desperate situation and realized okay i'm gonna have to learn about this myself i'm gonna have to become an expert in this and started going down the microbiome path it's completely changed her life i would say we're still not finished but it's so much better what what was that journey like for you what is it that actually improved the symptoms for you yeah so it was partly um my lifestyle that began with uh emphasis on complex carbohydrates so there's a lot of quote healthy whole grains in my diet so i always ate a lot of grains i was a lot of of uh seven grain breads and and uh whole wheat you know pancakes and buckwheat this and and uh and whole grain that uh to the point where i was in some weeks some days consuming 700 800 grams of carbs a day sometimes a thousand grams of carbs a day and that was always assumed to be like the healthy way to go about things like i got early on sugar's not going to serve me as well as as you know as a as an energy substrate as whole grains that are sort of low glycemic et cetera et cetera but what i didn't recognize early on was the potential damage that the anti-nutrients in certain grains would do so as i got deeper into the research i still up until the age of 47 was defending my right to eat grains even though i was reading about i'd read some of jared diamond's work i'd read other people who were in you know indicating that that that the the gluten in wheat that the folded proteins the glyadines the designs and corn and all these different forms of protein were so tightly wound together that humans hadn't developed an efficient way of of digesting them because grains have only been on the scene for literally about ten thousand years but i kept defending my right to eat grains and throughout my life it was like i had to drive an hour and 15 minutes to get here uh this morning happy to do it tom but i would have had to think about what gas stations were open along the way with a bathroom in case something went wrong i mean i literally lived uh in fear of like having to go to the airport for an early flight and and having a you know 40 minute drive and no no bathrooms a long way it was i woke up with a with a severe cramps every day of my life from the age of 14 to 47 pretty much um sometimes when i was under stress it became so debilitating that um i remember uh having to go sit in a you know in our hot tub at four o'clock in the morning three or four o'clock in the morning just to kind of ease the pain my wife one day goes she says you know i just gave up grains and i feel so much better you should try that and i'm like wow i hadn't thought of that even though i've been writing about the possibilities so i gave up grains for 30 days the arthritis in my fingers went away the some of the tendonitis that i had subsided the upper respiratory tract infections went away and most importantly the ibs went away it just literally went away it was it almost brings me to tears today to think about how much i suffered simply by assuming that well since the rest of the medical world and conventional wisdom and certainly all the vegans think that grains are healthy for me that couldn't be problematic having given grains up it was that was really what drove me then to you know write the primal blueprint to take a position on how important nutrition is for everybody that whatever is is ailing you right now may or may not have been caused by some nutritional choices you made but but certainly could be mitigated if not cured by alternate choices i'm pretty clear on that i don't purport to know what everyone is for everyone's condition but i would say that that my job as an educator is is to offer up these opportunities like here's what the research shows on on on reducing grain consumption here's what the re the research might show on skipping a meal a day or fasting intermittently or here's what the research you know we talk about sleep and sun exposure and you know everything that has to do with diet exercise health fitness and so on when you were talking earlier about in the 1980s already starting to look at fat and people were writing about it and thinking about how insanely fringed that would have been but now is really and i'll speak n of one the transformative effect of fat in my life can not be overstated it literally can't be overstated so it has changed so many aspects of my life we haven't even talked about like the um the impact on cognition which is my obsession in that when i get hungry now on a high fat diet i do not have a decline in cognitive performance that that is just transformational in a way that i can explain being able to i once went accidentally without food because i was traveling for 24 hours i was like jesus i haven't eaten in 24 hours like you you couldn't have convinced me that that was true so the the thing that's on the fringe now which is a little unfair because this is you know fat maybe in the late 90s versus the mid-80s but the microbiome yeah like every everything that is okay so that's so funny you say that because i look like i'm i'm almost over the microbiome not in a bad way in a great way but i've been talking about it for three years now you know so i feel like that i and that's part of my being caught up in this in this world in which i i sort of sometimes preach to the choir with my readers i'm surrounded by like-minded thinkers so a lot of us have been talking about the microbiome for for so long they were like okay we handled the microbiome we're on to the next thing you know um i think again it it's some of the things about the microbiome some of the measurements like trying to trying to discern three or five thousand different strains of bacteria and figure out which is which combination is good for you that's a truly complex equation right or the idea that you could do a fecal transplant from somebody else and then derive the benefits from that in your own particular um you know uh microcosm uh or ecosystems how more old tech could you get than consuming a [ __ ] milkshake right from somebody else yeah right so that's as old tech as it gets let's not downplay it either i mean like on a ketogenic diet people would would ask well how do you handle the biome because you're not eating much fiber and i'm like dude i'll probably eat more fiber than most vegetarians i have a i have a big-ass salad every day it's got 13 different types of vegetables and lettuces and you know carrots and and and tomatoes and radishes whatever and i douse it with a high fat dressing and i put some protein on top right the amount of carbs in that salad is probably only 18 grams total probably 25 grams of fat probably 30 grams of of protein and lots of micronutrients in the vegetables and lots of fiber like all the fiber my gut biome needs so my gut biome does not require bran fiber you know to move it along as long as i'm feeding my gut bacteria what they what they truly need which are these soluble fibers that you can find in plants in green leafy plants you know vegetables then i'm i'm com i am providing my body the prebiotic fiber that a healthy gut biome would would uh thrive on so i don't want to i don't want to overlook the importance the gut biomass huge and taken care of but but if you've if you have a healthy gut biome then literally all you really need to to provide it are the fodmaps ironic that that if you have an unhealthy gut biome you get rid of all these things but if you have a healthy gut biome then all those fructo oligosaccharide disaccharide and so on become the substrate that those healthy bacteria use to create um the short chain fatty acids and the precursors to neurotransmitters and so on and so forth all right i want to bring it all back around to living awesome yep so what are some elements of that like you told a really cool story about your wife's assistant who had tried and struggled for years to lose weight and you're looking at the results she's getting you're thinking there's no way she's being honest about what she's eating and then the result ended up being therapy and i thought wow like that that juxtaposition of your ability to talk about like just a hardcore biological science but then go all the way to hey therapy may be exactly what some people need what are some parts of living awesome that we haven't talked about well i think play is an important thing so i you know play is is a critical part of the human experience we sort of ascribe it to well that's something kids could can do until they're you know adolescents and then they got to be grown ups and they got to act mature and then once you're once you're a grown-up play is really a luxury that probably we don't need well in fact play is critical to our development not just as as young adults but also throughout our experience i like to go stand-up paddling i have fun stand up paddling there's never a point when i'm on the board when i go oh geez when's it going to be over which was like happened a lot when i was a runner or a cyclist so i stand up paddle i like this i like to snowboard i like to you know i want to do things that are fun i want to play i i spend now let's shift gears a little bit use your brain i my kids had this i read a book recently about orchestrating your life and my son said dad what gets you up every morning and i said the first thing gets me up is i can't wait to have a cup of coffee and do the crossword puzzle so it's something as simple as that like i get to use my brain every day before i go use my brain for uh for production and for work um sleep you cannot be cannot be uh under uh overemphasize or overlooked its sleep is so critical to what we do and having a regular sleep routine um and that's one of the that's that's a part of living awesome part of living awesome is is not being um uh apologetic from the amount of sleep you're getting but being proud of it and enjoying it and reveling in it you know um sun exposure you know people think well i you know i'm told by my dermatologist i got to stay out of the sun well no some amount of sun exposure is actually a good thing is probably um better for you than avoiding the sun it just you have to know where the limit is for you so in part of being out the sun is actually being outside which has its own sort of mood enhancing benefits of being outside in nature hearing you know the wind or hearing the birds or hearing you know whatever that's amazing all right before i ask my last question where can these guys find you online where you find your book yeah so mark's dailyapple.com is the blog it's been around for 11 years as you say um ketoreset.com uh information about where to buy the book links to where we can get it online i mean all the all the normal places and then uh primalblueprint.com is our is our ecom site if you want to look into um the dressings and the mayonnaise is that we the healthy sauces dressings and toppings that we that we offer cool and what's the impact that you want to have on the world how do you do all of this yeah well i do this because i want to change the way the world eats right i want i see the power of food so so intimately and strongly that i think that that like i've made these kind of blanket assertions that we could take a trillion dollars off the national health bill in the next 18 months if everybody ate the way you and i know we should be eating without sacrifice struggling or suffering so my mission is literally to affect the health of 100 million people primarily through through reorienting their their way of eating in a way that um develops metabolic flexibility see how we brought that back i like that awesome mark thank you so much for joining me thank you all right guys this is somebody that you are absolutely going to want to dive in go to his blog in fact i sent it around to my entire team because i think it does such an amazing job of walking people through exactly what they need to do of making it accessible this is somebody who understands the intersection of the science and the humanity of why you would want to change the fact that this tag line is live awesome and not be shredded uh you had me at hello i think it's incredible that last bit that he just did of listing all the other things that we didn't really get a chance to dive deep on a you're gonna be able to dive deep into that in his world and i think that they're all critical not the least of which is play to have fun to enjoy your life that's that is the whole reason that this show exists is to find ways for you to enjoy your life more to get the potential out of yourself that's there that is unfortunately dormant unless you do something with it and i really really encourage you guys to go dive into his world i think it is it is truly unparalleled in its ability to bring those two things together and to give you a blueprint a primal blueprint nonetheless for how to live your life in just a better way that is going to make your life better in a thousand ways all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] you