Barbell Shrugged - Being the Boss of Your DNA with Mark Sisson

Episode Date: July 5, 2017

At this year’s Paleo F(x) conference in Austin, we had a chance to interview one of the primary spokespeople for the Paleo movement, Mark Sisson. You know him from Mark’s Daily Apple, his website and blog dedicated to “primal living in the modern world.” A true Paleo hipster, Mark has been preaching the primal diet gospel since before it was cool. Mark’s interest in primal living can be traced back to college, where he became really interested in evolution and human DNA. He later worked as the anti-doping commissioner for the sport of triathlon worldwide. As the guy who oversaw every hearing, he learned a ton––not just about the off-limits performance-enhancing drugs, but about the healthy supplements and eating styles competitive athletes and little old ladies alike can use to reach their full potential. These two threads of experience set Mark up for a career in discovering the health lessons of our ancient ancestors and applying them to our daily lives. In particular, he’s developed interest in how we can “turn on” certain strands of our DNA in order to live the best we can. Twenty-one years ago, Mark started his own supplement company, all while he was married with two kids, and no money in the bank. Today, in addition to his nutritional supplement line and his best-selling books, Mark’s Primal Kitchen brand will keep you from having to eat gross mayonnaise. Mark’s newest book, The Primal Kitchen Cookbook: Eat Like Your Life Depends on It! is hot off the presses. He told us he refuses to eat a single bite of food that isn’t delicious, so this is a good guide to check out.  In this week’s episode, we interview Mark Sisson about: How the right eating habits and exercise can alter our DNA Why our workouts need to be playful in order to be successful long-term What to put in your exercise pyramid What to expect when you switch to a ketogenic diet After the episode, head over to Mark's shop and get 15% ALL of his books, supplements, paleo mayo, snacks and etc with the code GROK15. Click here to shop now Enjoy, Mike

If you follow that pyramid, that that's the best way to approach longevity. Yeah, move around a lot, lift a couple times a week. Again, twice a week is enough to lift for longevity. Sprint once a week. And I'm talking about like six to eight repetitions of 30 to 40 seconds. Done. We'll be right back. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bletzer with Doug Larson and Alex Macklin. And we're hanging out here in Austin at Paleo FX.

And we have one of the quintessential speakers, representatives of the paleo primal movement, and Mark Sisson. And you've been coming to this conference. Since the beginning. Yeah. How'd they rope you in? In the very, very beginning. That's pretty funny. No, I mean, it was.

Because for first year conferences, it's tough to get great names in. No, I mean, you know, as a spokesperson in the paleo community, I want to participate. I want to help drive traffic. A rising tide lifts all boats, whatever other cliche you could come up with. I was willing to participate. Awesome. Yeah. I think we've all been following Mark's Daily Apple for a while. A long time.

It came up on my radar maybe in, I don't know, 08, 09? Would that be? Well, 06 is when I started. It's over. On my radar. Oh, sorry, man. Yeah, before you't know, 08, 09? Would that be? Well, 06 is when I started. It's over. Oh, sorry, man. Yeah, before you were born, it started. Youngin'. Yeah, what got you started doing Mark's Daily Apple?

Well, so, you know, like I was in the – I've been in health and fitness my whole life, initially as an athlete and training, and then when I got injured, I started coaching people, so I was always interested in performance. That led to a stint as the anti-doping commissioner for the sport of triathlon worldwide. So I started deep diving.

You were the bad guy. I was the guy who oversaw every hearing. You were in triathlon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But the research that went into that not only looked at the performance-enhancing drugs, but also the things people could take that were maybe helping their performance but were legal. So as I got deeper and deeper into that, I got a really profound knowledge of all of the supplements

and even eating styles that athletes would use to improve performance. Rolled that over into starting my supplement company 21 years ago at the age of 43 with a wife and two kids and no money in the bank. How crazy was that? That's how most people start businesses. I know. It's like the scariest shit, especially if you have kids. No, that's the point. I mean, I would have been okay with my wife being out on the street in the car with me, but not my kids. So anyway, but it was a calculated risk i actually had some consulting gigs lined up to help pay the way while i was creating a line of of uh products so i found a television deal where i could go on tv on a local cable actually not too

far from here uh a texas talk show on health and fitness called know the cause and i became a regular on the show and i had my supplements and i'd sell them on the show and and i was trying to sell them to athletes in uh magazines you know and triathlete magazine and runs rope magazine uh i got no traction from the athletes but i got i had little old ladies who read the anti-aging magazines and and read about all of these different supplements, you know, CoQ10, don't really care that much, apparently, about micronutrient supplementation and whatever. So I pivoted to this TV show, which my company grew 6% a year for seven years. It was fantastic. I had a great business business and then all of a sudden 2004 rolls around and the the business literally dries up it it at 2004 there was the advent of the internet so now people

are buying things on the internet people aren't watching tv as much or if they are there's now 300 channels to choose from you were marketing in a channel that that basically didn't have a lot of competition yeah yeah so so when that went away i took a year and i said well this is You were marketing in a channel that didn't have a lot of competition. Yeah. So when that went away, I took a year and I said, well, this is fine. I know content. I know television. I'll produce my own television show.

So I actually produced 50 half-hour episodes of a health talk show called Responsible Health. I bought time on Travel Channel. It was on every morning at 8.30. Did you see it? No, but I didn't know that. Nobody knew it. Nobody knew it. So I blew through a million bucks doing that,

and at that point I go, this isn't scalable. Right. So that's when I started blogging. In 2006 I go, well, I'm great at creating content. I'm a good storyteller. People like to hear about health and fitness and diet and exercise. So I started writing about all aspects of this. And I'd written books on training, and I'd been sort of a researcher for 30 years,

so I had a lot of material, a lot of ideas in my head. So it quickly formed into uh mark's daily apple and then the primal blueprint which is a brand emerged from that and then the book was sort of a response to people who said well i'm reading what you're writing every day and it's all interesting but can you put it all into one compressed format in a book and that became the primal blueprint so then i couldn't find a publisher for it so i self-published and the next thing you know i'm a publishing company so now i have you know we've published 35 books now um about eight in my own name but i publish other authors and it just kind of evolved the brand evolved over uh the last 10 years um and it's gotten a lot more traction partly because of a a community like we have here at this event, partly because there's just been a growing interest in performance and health and diet and exercise and science.

And I've kind of tried to read the tea leaves there and figure out where the pain points were for the community and how I could offer services, whether it's more books or events. I did seminars for a while. I did three-day events, not unlike this. I had Primal Con was one of the things. I had one in Austin about five years ago. I remember that was going on. Yeah, yeah.

But I'm not an event guy. It was like way too much work to put on an event. So, you know, over the years I got away from focusing on supplements, and I started making. And like only three years ago I realized I'm writing a lot about food and how diet is really critical to your accessing good health. And certainly if you're a performance athlete, and you don't even have to be a performance athlete.

If you're doing any kind of exercise in the gym, you're working out on a regular basis, diet is so critical. Nutrition is the foundation. It's the fundamental. I mean, we say a lot, 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat. Yeah, you still have to work out, but really 80% of it is determined this way. So I started thinking, well, wait a minute. So it's about food and then what's missing in the food space.

And from my own experience, particularly offering up recipes every week on how to make your own dressings and your own bone broth and your own condiments, like how to make your own mayonnaise, because there's no good mayonnaise anywhere to be found in any store. I'm not a big fan of the vegan products. And so I said, well, let's look at the food space. Really, you know, when you get right down to it, if you start eating clean, if you get rid of the grains and the sugars and the industrial seed oils, you're kind of left with a small group of foods that you can actually enjoy, right? There's maybe five kinds of meat you're going to eat next year.

You know, beef, lamb, pork, probably elk and wild boar, chicken, turkey. How'd you know beef lamb pork probably chicken wild boar chicken turkey how'd you know yeah you forgot the moose that's right uh and uh you know a couple kinds of fish and then you know i almost i i dare you to name me 17 vegetables you'll eat next year you know that's it it's what makes the difference is what you put on the food the sauces the dressings the toppings right so but and yet there were no great sauces i mean the food, the sauces, the dressings, the toppings. Oh, for sure. And yet there were no great sauces. I mean, I think the sort of mantra we've heard for the last 20 years, particularly when it was a low-fat environment, was, oh, use that stuff sparingly. You can add a little bit of flavor, but don't use too much because it's bad for you.

So I want to create products that the more you put on the food, the healthier the meal became. Yeah. And so that was the driving force behind the first mayonnaise. And then now we have flavored mayonnaises and we have five salad dressings with a few more coming down the pipeline. It was really about how do we create the types of sauces and dressings and snacks, in this case, where it not only doesn't interfere with my diet it adds to the enjoyment like like my main thing about like the the motto of my company is live awesome okay and so we try to

look at ways in which we can extract the greatest amount of pleasure and satisfaction enjoyment contentment for every moment possible right i mean it's i're at. It's where we're doing that, right? So that includes food. So I say I don't want to put any bite of food in my mouth that doesn't taste absolutely phenomenal. You could tell me, oh, geez, Mark, I got this great kale salad here with, you know, it's got a little bit of drizzled dressing on it. And I'm not a big fan of kale, particularly if it isn't soft and kneaded and left out overnight. But just because it's healthy doesn't mean I'm going to choke it down.

So I want every bite of food I consume to taste fabulous. And that is the driving force. So every product we make, first, it has to taste fabulous. Second, it has to have clean ingredients. And those become sort of the main R&D characteristics for everything we develop. I think a lot of people don't eat well because they think I have to eat. Healthy food tastes bad.

Just chicken, like baked chicken. Chicken breast. I mean, chicken breast and broccoli. I mean, chicken breast. You know? And yeah, that was the sort of bodybuilder mainstay diet for chicken and rice every day. 40 years. Yeah.

Yeah. What got you to go down the primal paleo path in the first place? Was that something you were always practicing? Yeah, so because I was an endurance athlete and, well, in college I was really fascinated by evolution. So I looked at evolution and I got a sense, a picture in my mind of how humans evolved and how we evolved in certain with with certain capacities to to run long distance and to become stronger by by lifting things and even before we started really deep diving into genetic science i was aware that genes turned on or off based on

signals that we gave them so i is 1982 i I wrote my first book, The Runner's World Triathlon Training Book. And in that book, I talk about evolution. I talk about how we evolved with certain traits and that we could develop those traits by training specifically in certain modalities so that lifting weights would create a certain type of muscle and doing long-distance stuff would create a longer muscle with more slow-twitch fiber. So I combined my strong interest in evolution with what became over the ensuing decades this greater body of knowledge on genetic science and how genes,

like every study you look at now, what it looks at is how the genes are turned on or off, how genes are expressed. Right. You know, and so that's kind of fascinating to know that we have such immense power over how our genes turn on or off. It's literally like, it's like a superpower. Like you can recreate yourself, rebuild yourself, renew yourself, regenerate yourself minute by minute based on certain choices you make. You know, and it's really powerful.

I think a lot of people don't operate from the place where they realize they can change. Yeah, they assume. People think that the genetics are their destiny. But you have a choice by the actions that you take. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So so my job for the last, you know, 10 years anyway, is to like discover these hidden genetic switches and what turns them on or off and give you the if not a roadmap, at least some options, some choices as to how to manifest that. Can you give some specific examples? Yes. I mean, you know, like within the paleo community, we talk about like industrial seed oils are high in omega six fats. Well, omega six fats are are necessary for the human body. paleo community we talk about like industrial seed oils are high in omega-6 uh fats well omega-6 fats

are are necessary for the human body but a balance an imbalance the ratio between ratio between 06 and 03 can drive up inflammation so you take you take in too many omega-6 and not enough omega-3 and it turns on genes that cause inflammation well when inflammation is great when you're injured right or when you're sick but but chronic systemic inflammation, just, you know, it's like setting a fire throughout the entire body. And that's when stuff happens. I mean, that's when, you know, we talk about the root cause of heart disease not being, you know, cholesterol clogging your arteries like a pipe.

It's not a plumbing sort of scenario. It's like an oversimplification. Yeah but it's like an oversimplification yeah it's a wicked oversimplification it's like doctors for a long time and researchers yeah we're thinking about things and just a very mechanical model totally totally um so what we you know so what we do know is it's it's largely a result of oxidation and inflammation and there are different you know pathways that get involved and certain catalyst catalysts have to become involved as well. But if you turn on the genes that cause systemic inflammation and that inflammation is happening in the bloodstream, then certain things take place that wouldn't ordinarily take place.

Or overtake place. Yeah, exactly, that set you up for creating blockage or an embolism or a clot or something like that. And we go down the – like certain behaviors will downregulate genes that build muscle. So you get atrophy because the body is elegantly set up to not waste any energy. And if you're just sitting around doing nothing all day, then the body gets that signal and says, you know what, if we're going to do nothing, we better just decrease our engine size because we don't need it. If we're not going to be doing weight-bearing activity, let's decrease the bone density. We don't need that. Why would we waste resources keeping something we don't really need?

So the body's very efficient that way. And so you get a down regulation of all those systems. On the other hand, when you say, well, I'm going to start lifting weights, the body says, well, if this clown's going to do this every day, we better get jacked. That's the GJ gene. GJ1-2. Get Jack Gene. So a second ago you mentioned omega-6 fatty acids and how they are essential amino acids. You need them, but oftentimes people eat way too much of them through industrialized seed oils and what have you.

I don't know if epigenetically you want to answer this question and or just kind of in general, but what is the difference between getting omega-6s from cashews, as an example, versus soybean oil, like in regular mayonnaise? Yeah, so, you know, omega-6 is omega-6 at the end of the day, so it doesn't matter where they come from. So people can overdo cashews, thinking, well, cashews are, you know, I won't do the soybean oil, but I'll do the cashews, and the next thing you know, they've overdone that. So, you know, there's a certain amount of awareness that I try to teach. That's my job, is to teach, you know it there's a certain amount of um awareness that we that i try to teach uh that's my job is to teach you know sort of give people enough knowledge that they can make choices and whether they make a good choice or bad choice after that it's up to them it's like if i make a bad choice that's on me pal because uh you know i know better than that

but i'm not going to judge the choice right you know as good or bad they're just they just are what they are so beyond like the pro-inflammatory response that you would get from omega-3s, like, if you take psilocybin and you heat treat it and you bleach it and deodorize it and all these things, like, does it change the structure of the fatty acid and it makes it that much worse for you? Well, there's other stuff in there. There are other things. Yeah, certain, so the fats have, are missing certain endpoints and, you know, will cause greater free radical damage because they're scavenging electrons.

And there's a lot of issues with overly processed oils in general, but certainly the industrial seed oils that are high in omega-6. So, you know, then we shift over and we look at what are the alternatives. Well, they might be oils like avocado oil or olive oil or coconut oil or lard or ghee or butter. So there are a lot of great choices, and it's just understanding the differences between what the effect would be on the body. Now, you can drive yourself crazy knowing almost too much about that and going, oh, geez, I better not eat this because it could do that I better stay away from nightshades because I heard about nightshades over here and I better stay away from from all beans because they have lectins in them and lectins are gonna kill me and and they're gonna cause leaky gut and no grains of any kind because there might be gluten in

there and you're left with nothing to eat so there's a I think the the whole movement which started out sort of identifying these potential offending culprits is now kind of coming back going, ah, well, you know, everybody's a little bit different and there's an experimental one. Some people can actually eat gluten. Yeah. God bless them. I know, right? Man, jealous.

Yeah, yeah. But back to the – so you can also, you know, do the types of exercise that cause your muscles to grow in different ways. You actually upregulate certain systems that create greater fast twitch fiber, and you can recruit deeper and deeper by doing certain types of exercise. So three times ten sets of weighted squats might have one effect, but doing two deadlifts of 80% max every 10 seconds for 8 minutes is going to recruit fibers deeper and deeper and deeper, and they'll have two different, not that they'll be similar,

but different enough effects that they're really specific to the types of work that you're doing so or you know if you're an endurance athlete uh long long long easy slow stuff will have one effect and then longer intervals will have another effect yeah and and and you just sort of have to kind of figure out okay where do i want to put these pieces together and how do i want it's going to vary from person to person. And it varies from person to person. So like having the knowledge and knowing how these things work, you still have to kind of have the intuitive ability to figure out how it works for you.

And that's part of the beauty of all this stuff that we do in the gym is the experimentation. Yeah. Well, you have a very easy to understand model of movement priority like you have a you have the pyramid yes yeah yeah the pyramid where at the bottom it's move move a lot move as much as you can don't worry about burning calories yeah yeah and then in the middle you have lift some heavy things you know and then at the top you have sprinting sprint once a week yeah sprint once a week yeah. Yeah, is that typically where you would say people should sit? Yeah, what's, like, crazy is that when you –

because I took this from a totally ancestral model. You know, our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago, millions of years ago, even as recently as – Grok. Grok, yeah. You know, just moved around a lot. They didn't sit on a chair. They didn't lie down on a sofa for a nap.

You know, they moved all the time. And if they weren't moving, they were squatting in a full squat, which't lie down on a sofa for a nap. They moved all the time. And if they weren't moving, they were squatting in a full squat, which is still a – Carrying things. Yeah. So they were climbing trees. They were building huts. They were carrying things. They might lift a carcass, I mean, in a really heavy carcass, back to camp or carry babies or lift stones or get trees out of the way or climb a tree.

So all this stuff that we sort of find ways to mimic in the gym, those are actual ancestral patterns that we use. And so part of it is based on, like, how many different planes and ranges of motion can I do this in? Because we get, you know, the danger is you go to one gym, you do the same sets of machines. Right. You know, and half the machines aren't even set up for your biomechanics. Yeah.

So you can actually screw yourself up doing that. We actually just talked. Are you familiar with Katie Bowman? Yeah, of course. Yeah, we just had a podcast with her earlier this weekend. She talked exactly about that. She's all about variety. Yeah, variety.

Yeah, and how we exercise. It's really just some of the same just types of movements that we're doing. Yeah, variety. And how we exercise, it's really just some of the same types of movements that we're doing. So we move around a lot at a low level of activity. Lift heavy things a couple times a week, not too much. And then we have at the peak of it sprint once in a while. The sprint once in a while isn't necessarily running sprinting. I mean, it probably, in an ancestral model, it was. But now it could be on the elliptical or on the bike.

Or could you take that as like a Metcon or something like that? And you could use a Metcon as an example of that. Or like playing with like Frisbee or things like that. Yeah, there you go. No, exactly. So it's not limited to anything. But the point is get your, like do a max effort for short bursts because the body expects that. I mean, what we're doing here is we're just, all we're doing is we are giving the genes signals that they evolved to expect from us.

Yeah. And so you're basically trying to manifest the body that your particular set of genes wants to be. And for most people, they've screwed it up in the first 10 or 15 or 20 or 50 years of their lives by eating the wrong foods not moving enough or moving uh too much the wrong way i mean i was guilty of the you know chronic cardio um art devaney's at the at the conference here and yeah i my first two blog posts ever in the world were guest posts on on our devaney site and one of them talked about chronic cardio and how there's this tendency in the endurance community to just think that more miles and more repetition is better right yeah

yeah yeah always always more is better come on so um when i find something i like i do it every day that's it no it's uh but that's human it's almost human nature to do that because we grew up in such scarcity for so long or we evolved in such scarcity. So, yeah, so the chronic cardio thing was a big issue. Where are we going with that? I don't know. I forget what track. Alex, how did that.

The pyramid. Yeah, how did that chronic cardio affect you? Oh, there it is. Yeah, so the chronic cardio thing was the reason for my downfall as an endurance athlete. I was a marathoner, and I was getting better and better and better, but I knew where I was going with that. So just years later, I got my DNA tested, and it said that I'm like a 57% endurance athlete and 43% strength athlete. Well, you know, I wouldn't have been a world-class runner at that level of variation.

I had not enough endurance and too much strength. So that's why I weighed 10 pounds more than all the other runners that I ran against. I still ran 218. I still finished fifth in the U.S. National Championship Marathon in 1980. So I feel good about the fact that I probably got the most out of my body that I was ever going to get. Yeah. But it also, I look at that and I go, well. What do you think if you did some interval stuff?

Oh, I did interval. I did intervals. Okay. But I'm talking about like I should have done parkour would have been my, you know, that's a combination of endurance. Oh, gotcha. And strength. Yeah. Or obstacle racing.

Are you saying you should have picked a different sport? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was probably better prepared for a different sport that didn't exist. Right. Was it round back then? Yeah, yeah, it was. Parkour wasn't. You timed it wrong.

No, I know. You know, I've done that a lot in my life. But the obstacle racing thing right now would have really appealed to me because I was a gymnast before I was a runner, and so I had that kind of combination. And I was actually a pole vaulter for a little while, but at some point when you're a pole vaulter, your lack of speed shuts you down.

You have to be fast as a pole vaulter. So, yeah, anyway, I guess the point is that if you're really focused on being a certain type of athlete, it is instructive to know where your potential is. A lot of that you can get through self-experimentation. A lot of kids know, you know, what they how good they're going to be at soccer or baseball or football, you know, through a couple of years of of doing whatever Little league or pop warner or ayso but um you know and eventually you go well i'm not i'm destined not to be a pro athlete so i'll just pivot and move on to something else right but this pyramid i feel like it's more about uh you know just just general is it more for general health or is it for performance or yeah yeah so it's definitely for for general health it's like uh the more that time goes by and the more I look at the studies,

the more I realize that if you follow that pyramid, that that's the best way to approach longevity. Yeah, move around a lot, lift a couple times a week. Again, twice a week is enough to lift for longevity. Sprint once a week. And I'm talking about like six to eight repetitions of 30 to 40 seconds done. You know, warm-up, two minutes in between, but done. That seems to be one of the first things that goes away as people get a little bit older.

They stop moving full speed. They stop running sprints. They stop jumping. They stop doing agility training. We were talking to John Durant earlier today, and it seems that, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you have that kind of automatically incorporated into your week by playing Ultimate Frisbee. Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, but the main thing, the main reason I play is it's fun. Dude, I spent most of my life, like in 200 endurance contests in my life, from the mile to mile, 5K, 10K, marathon, triathlon, all that stuff. There was never a point between the time the gun went off until the time I crossed the finish line that I could truly say, oh, man, this is fun. And that's a sad commentary. When you're an endurance athlete, you're just managing pain. And the best you can say is I'm in the zone and I don't feel much.

Or the pace is slacked off. Oh, good, i got a little bit of respite but there are so many in a marathon in particular even more so sometimes in an ironman there are times when you hit a crisis and if you feel like the wheels are going to come off if you don't pick up the pace and you drop the pace you're off the back yeah so the only choice when you feel like shit is to go harder is to pick up the pace and hope and hope that that shakes things up um and you can only allow yourself two or three of those crises in a race and it's like okay that wasn't organ yeah um but yeah so i so i so ultimate's fun yeah you know i'll play

two hours of ultimate it's the hardest workout I'll have all week. And at no point am I going, oh, when's it going to be over? It's like, oh, shit, it's going to be over in 20 minutes. The sun's going down. I've got to go home. Yeah. Or, you know, I love paddling. I think stand-up paddling is one of the greatest exercises ever. When you do it right.

And, you know, I don't dick around. I'm like going, you know, three miles there and i'm straight straight line as possible and i'm digging deep and you ever have any uh encounters with the great whites lately no but there's been some spotted off i know off of uh uh long beach which is about 40 miles south of me but you know i was like uh three quarters of a mile off the coast the other day and two 50 foot whales with babies yeah that was beautiful. That was awesome, yeah. It's really cool. But anyway, paddling, same thing. It's like I got an hour and 20 minutes to get a paddle in,

and I'm never thinking when's it going to be over. I'm thinking, oh, shit, I've got to get back and make a call. So that's a big difference to me is enjoying the movement, enjoying the fun. So now the only reason I go to the gym is to sort of get enough of a workout that I can prevent injury when I'm playing. That sounds like a common theme. I find the same thing with myself.

Going from gym rat to how does the gym supplement the lifestyle I want to live. And once somebody's been competing and training, I mean, I was training for 20 years, and then I go, oh, I want to have fun. Yeah. And it seems like that's the only way to have longevity, is everyone I talk to who is in awesome shape and who has been training for a long time, they end up having to incorporate more play. Have to.

And I think a lot more people who never, they don't really get into a lot of physical activity, it's because they forgot how to play yeah it's like there's or they never knew or they never knew and some people feel like if they're playing then they're not actually working out they're wasting the time that they could have to know that but that's that's a classic uh case of a specific athlete who's training in one you know for one sport and then they play another sport they feel like it's wasted time or it's cutting into their time. And when I was a marathoner, I didn't ski because I was afraid it was going to hurt my knee.

Yeah. So I missed out on skiing and snowboarding for 15 years. Oh, yeah. There's definitely plenty of activities that all athletes just have to opt out of. They opt out of. And, you know, then when my kids were finally uh uh younger they were my daughter was like 13 my son was 10 i we took up snowboarding as a family like oh geez i've been missing out on some of the most fun oh yeah ever you know and then we wound up doing trips around the

country and our big our big trip every year was our snowboard trip so um i just i'm looking at ways to have more fun while i'm moving and that's's really, as you say, that's the way it ought to be. So the gym time, probably necessary just to get in there and do a couple of, I do mostly body weight stuff, so it's push-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, lunges. Which you can do anywhere. You don't have to go to a gym. Correct, correct. I mean, I get a rubber band with handles on it.

What do you call those things? Just a stretch cord, I guess. And I can get such a pump and such great – just from doing some little – put it around my feet and go up like this. Yeah. You know, and so there's – it's crazy how, you know, people spend a million bucks building a gym with all this crazy equipment. There's a gym all around you. Yeah. Yeah. There's a gym all around you, yeah.

Have you ever been downhill mountain biking, like at a ski resort where you take a chair lift up and you ride down? So there's a famous E.E. Cummings poem called Song of Olaf. It's about a conscientious objector. But the famous line in there is, there is some shit I will not eat. And that's how I feel about downhill mountain biking. Not doing it. It's like I had to reassess the risk-reward ratio of a lot of things. And, you know, like I was a great inline skater for a while.

In my 40s, I was one of the best inline skaters in Los Angeles. And I never really raced, but all the guys that did race would draft me for 30 miles while I pulled them, and then they'd sprint around me. But I was a very strong skater, and then I got badly injured, a tore hamstring off the insertion, tripping on skates and then doing a split. So I had to reassess where I was, and I was in my late 40s at the time, and I just said, you know what, I don't want to do that again. So that's going to compromise the rest of my ability to have fun doing other stuff.

So I've pulled some of the things out. I probably shouldn't be playing Ultimate with 20-somethings, but it's so much fun that I do, and I have a blast doing it. We have guys from – we have 8-year-old kids who learn how to play with us and become really good, good enough to go to college and play at a college level. And we have, you know, 40- and 50-year-old guys who say it's the most fun they have all week. They can't wait until Sunday at 930 to play Ultimate, and we've been doing it for 13 years. So it's a great game.

I mean, if I had to prescribe one opportunity for every school that has cut their PE program because they don't have the facilities, if you've got a grass yard and you've got a $9 Frisbee, you've got the greatest learning experience and fitness experience for any young kid possible. It teaches teamwork. It teaches hand-eye coordination. It teaches sprint skills and teaches hand-eye coordination. It teaches sprint skills

and movement and lateral agility drills and jumping. It teaches sportsmanship. It teaches hand-eye coordination with judging the flight of a disc. I mean, you could turn it into a physics course. It's crazy. It's such a great sport. And I think it's like the perfect sport. Doug actually won the Australian National Championships. Oh, yeah? That's crazy. It's such a great sport. And I think it's like the perfect sport. Doug actually played in the Australian National Championships. Oh, yeah? That's true. He's not even Australian. My little brother has played in that many times.

So I actually, when I was living in Australia, they just kind of like snuck me on the team. So I've actually only played in the Australian National Championships. I never played any game other than that. Wow, that's crazy, man. It was really fun. My whole job, because I wasn't like a handler while I'm actually throwing. Just catch it. Barely at all.

Just catch it. That's right. Get open and catch it, baby. Run to the end zone, score the touchdown, which of course is not called that, but that was my job. What are some other kind of philosophies that you can live by in terms of, you know, other than nutrition or movement? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I'm big on sleep. You know, I try to get eight hours a night, and I think it's one of the most overlooked aspects of health and recovery. So if you're an athlete, a lot of athletes, they know they need sleep because they can feel it. But a lot of people are also of of the mindset that what i'm gonna it's 11 30 and the groups the gang's going out for beers i'm gonna miss out on something so it's

fomo right so there's a huge fear of missing out for people and they and then they you know it's sort of i'll sleep a lot well when i'm dead and i just i'm a i'm a big fan of sleep i think i think a lot of people are are getting hip to that. It's becoming a much bigger conversation because people are just crashing. You talk about things that affect gene expression. I mean, sleep is one of those big things. Right, and getting sleep doesn't have the stigma that it used to. It's like you tell people you get eight or nine hours of sleep. It's like you're lazy ass.

You're a slacker. What's wrong with you, pal? There's something like that. If I'm taking a nap and someone calls my phone, I'm just like, hello? Is this a good time? I'm totally awake. I was working. Absolutely.

No, I know that one, and I'm pretty good at that too. Yeah, and then being out in nature and sun exposure. I mean, we don't get enough sun. That's pure and simply one of the biggest issues, particularly people living in the northern parts of the United States. We just don't get enough sun. And when we do get sun, we get too much of it because we haven't gotten exposed to it on a regular basis. So sort of what we call photo period and monitoring the amount of sunlight you get on a daily basis.

And sometimes it gets pretty crazy. Like if you wear sunglasses, you don't get the same effect of the sun exposure as if you wear. That's something I've learned recently. And I've been trying to get myself, not trying, I have been getting myself off the sunglasses. It's hard to be out there in the sun, though, with the blue eyes and the fair skin. Yeah. But I keep sunglasses in my truck. Yeah.

I only use them if I feel like by not having them, I'm going to be a danger. I'm like driving into the horizon and the sun's right there. I'm throwing them on. I'm not familiar. How does that work? Just as something in the eyes where the sunlight has to hit the back of the eyes, not direct sunlight. Right.

And there's a biochemical response to that. Yeah, you have rods and cones in the back sunlight. Right. And there's a, you know, biochemical response to that. Yeah, you have rods and cones in the back of your eye. Rods and cones and shit. That's basically it. I think I've heard of that before. The phobia. That's how I describe it. But, you know, for like being out on the water,

there's a lot of reflection and stuff like that. So I've been teaching myself to not wear sunglasses when I'm out there. It seems like everything that we've invented as a human race sets us back. Like we're not supposed to live. Like when you were talking earlier about like gene expression, it's like I kind of thought in my mind, it's like you're supposed to live the way you're supposed to live, like the way you were designed to live by nature, you know, and that's not wearing sunglasses or things like that.

Yeah. I mean, the closest, like I got, you know, the five-fingered shoes on, and I'm a big fan of the, there you go, I'm a big fan of these. I've worn nothing but these for 10 years. No shoes of any kind. Really? And the good news is my feet are really strong, so I can sprint with these on. And, you know, I could step in chuck holes and not twist an ankle, which I definitely would have done if I'd had cleats that raised me this far off the ground.

And then when I switched to the left, not just the leverage, but the fact that the small muscles of my feet had trained for it. Right. And, you know, I feel so I do long hikes in them. I mean, I pretty much do everything in them. But I also have good looking, I have like 25 pair of these. So I have like, like when these were new, they were really pretty hip looking shoes and I could wear a three-piece suit with them.

And if I didn't want you. You got suede going on over here. I know, I'm telling you. And if I didn't want you to look at my feet, you wouldn't. So you wouldn't go, oh, that crazy guy with gorilla feet or whatever. I didn't even notice until you pointed it out. There you go. See?

So point taken. But, you know, weddings and funerals and, you know, I don't – So, like, for instance, I kind of lied because I've worn shoes twice. And in those two times, my feet were so screwed up from being cramped and it's it's weird how it's scary notice how you think that if that's what happens when i put shoes on oh yeah what must be going on with my feet every time i wear shoes so i'm back to you know looking for uh other other shoe companies and other things that would most closely approximate what my feet want to do. You know, what they expect.

Yeah. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to talk about athletes and ketosis. Okay. All right. We're back with Mark Sisson. Doug, you had a question you were wanting to kick off before we got into ketogenic. Yeah, yeah. So humans tend to be very, very social creatures.

You know, put somebody in solitary confinement, and they just fucking just socially, psychologically, emotionally kind of just fall apart. Physically, I feel like that probably holds true as well. If you have no physical touch in your life, you know, biochemically, maybe epigenetically, like there are changes that are happening hormonally. Like you just aren't the same. So both sexually and and non-sexually like i think physical contact and physical touches is a really good thing an example like when i go to jujitsu and i'm and i'm wrestling with with other human beings primarily men and of course a non-sexual way

like i feel just more normal and just better day to day even compared to like if i spent five days doing jujitsu versus five days of working out they're both physical activities i'm burning i'm burning calories i'm using my muscles i'm getting full range of motion etc etc but there's something about the human contact that i think is very good for me emotionally and psychologically i feel like doug needs a hug yeah i'm a very physical person i'm just waiting for it that's right so do you have any thoughts on that i think you just said it i think i think everything you just said I agree with 100% that we need contact and touch. One of the things that's happening in our world now with all of this digital involvement and not even having eye contact with people, it affects us. It affects us chemically, biochemically, whether it's hormones, whether it's neurotransmitters. It could be pheromones.

There's a lot of interplay here. But humans are very social animals, as you have described. The good news is I think we're getting back to that. I think there's a recognition of that. I hope we get back to that. I think there's a recognition of that. And I hope we get back to that. Because one of the things I see that could be a pivotal point in human evolution is virtual porn, 3D porn. I mean, it's like Woody Allen first talked about it in Sleeper like 40 years ago, but that sort of non-human experience that's so human in terms of its internal nature could be devastating to relationships and human relationships.

So I'm just sort of waiting to see what happens as a result of that. Have you had the virtual reality porn experience? I have not. I have. And? had the virtual reality porn experience i have not i have and it was it i actually it it was so real yeah in some ways and so unreal in others that it it was a brand new experience yeah i've watched porn before for sure and shocker i'm sitting there i actually i'm sitting i had the gargasant and i had somebody touching me yeah and it still was just just the experience was I got out of it,

and I was like, I got to find a real person to touch. Right, right, right. It was really weird. My wife, on the other hand, loved it. Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah. So that was a beta test.

She loved you doing it. She was like, yeah, just go do that. Leave me alone. That's perfect for you. That was a beta test. It's going to get much better. She loved it. Yeah, when it becomes a masturbated test, then it will be better.

She actually liked being a guy. I have an attitude. Open up a whole other thing. A whole different show, and I'm not going to go there. Anyway, so back to the concept of connection. I mean, like I, you back off and you say, well, you know, there's touch and there's eye contact and there's listening and the ability to listen and hear someone. And communication and all of these, they all sort of are different aspects of connection. Yeah. And that's, you know, I wrote a book called Primal Connection,

which some people say is my best book, and it sold about seven copies. That's usually how it goes. We'll link it. We'll link it. I actually didn't know about that book. I'm really curious to read it now. Yeah, I don't know how I missed that one. And I totally agree.

You know, like, I totally agree with you that it's going in that direction of people are seeking out more connection. Yeah. Because we live in this world like everything's through social media and on the Internet. But we think we're connected. We think we're connected. But people are actually really searching for that personal touch. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, they have the chill zone downstairs, which when I looked in there, have you been in the chill zone? It looks a lot like a cuddle puddle type situation. Cool. You going to get on that? I will now. Do you know what a cuddle puddle type situation. Cool. You going to get in on that? I will now. Do you know what a cuddle puddle is? He lives in Malibu.

He knows what a cuddle puddle is. What's a cuddle puddle? I got a picture of what it is. It's like a naked dog pile. Oh, yeah, basically. Yeah. It's a good time. My wife wouldn't like that.

So ketosis. People going on the ketogenic diets. It's exploding right now. You wife wouldn't like that. So ketosis. People going on the ketogenic diet. It's exploding right now. You have a book on it. I've just finished writing a book. It will be out in October. What's the book called? The Keto Reset Diet.

Okay. So the concept of this book is how to use ketosis to reset your metabolism, to become better at burning fat, to build the metabolic machinery that not only burns fat but gives you the freedom to skip a meal and not worry about it, the power to be able to create additional fuel from your own body. It's like a superpower. Because ketones are like this undiscovered fuel for most people

because most people go through their lives never really being able to access that type of fuel. They'll burn a lot of glucose, a little bit of fat, maybe some protein if they're so deeply into the sugar-burning hole that when they run out of fuel, they start to tear down muscle tissue, and that was sort of the mantra of the fitness and bodybuilding from the 60s through the early 2000s. Don't go catabolic. Don't go catabolic, which means don't go more than a few hours. A few hours without eating. So six meals a day, and so Tupperware went to a billion-dollar company because everybody had to carry their little meals around with them.

I was doing it. You know what? Everyone was doing it. Car know what? Everyone was doing it. Carbs, carbs all the time. Yeah, so you had this fear that you'd go catabolic because your body would start to consume its muscle tissue. Well, that was always based on this idea that if you're not good at burning fat and if you haven't built the metabolic machinery to burn fat, your body only knows how to burn glucose.

Now, it's either stored in your muscles or it's glycogen in your liver, or it's from the food you just ate or the gel pack you're drinking right now. But the danger is that when you ran out or run out of that fuel, which you will do pretty quickly because the body can't store much of it at all, is that the brain, which needs glucose, if you haven't trained for it. Is it about, what, 25% of the glucose in a day is usually used by the brain? Yeah, the brain consumes 25% of the energy of the human body in a day. And preferred fuel is glucose. And the brain doesn't burn fat.

So people who are sugar burners are not only using their muscles to burn sugar and glucose glycogen, but they're also, the brain is heavily involved in consuming some of that glucose. And the brain is what tells you you're tired. So the old theory was, well, if I'm doing a race and I hit the wall, it's because my muscles are running out of glycogen and I've lost my glycogen storage. Well, in fact, now we know that your muscles still hold on to a lot of glycogen. There's a set point and they won't go, the muscles won't go below that. It's the brain that says, hey, we're in a danger, danger, danger. Siren's going off. The brain says, pull over, take a nap. a lot of glycogen, there's a set point and the muscles won't go below that.

It's the brain that says, hey, we're in danger, danger, danger. Siren's going off. The brain says pull over, take a nap. And I've actually heard about athletes pushing that have a mental fortitude can just run through that and then start hitting that, like digging into more glycogen. And they do. And that's one of the hallmarks of of the old the older athletic model which was how how willing are you to hurt right so steve prefontaine was probably one of the greatest

runners the country ever had he was a very talented athlete but there were much more talented athletes worldwide uh around him in distance running and he would get on the line he'd go i know you're better trained than i am and you may have a higher vo2 max i'm willing to kill myself in this race is that okay with you and you know and he higher VO2 max, I'm willing to kill myself in this race. Is that okay with you? And, you know, and he would. He would. That would psych anybody out, I feel like. Alberto Salazar was probably one of the greatest, another great runner.

Salazar, when he was a teenager, passed out in the Falmouth 10K and read his last rights. His core temperature was like 107 because he drove himself. He just had that ability to dig deeper and deeper. I have contemporaries of mine from the world, from the days of triathlon, Ironman guys who would get into the zone so deeply that today, you know, 30 years later they'll go, you know what, I feel pretty strongly. I left part of my life out on the course here. Oh, I'm sure. You know, I think I gave up a couple of years

on the back end of my life doing what I did. That's cool that you can override that stuff and you can get into that zen state, but when you become good at burning fat, when you become fat adapted and you automatically become keto adapted, when you cut the carbs out of your diet or cut them down enough that your body says, I get the message. The message is, the signaling is, genes turn on that build more of the enzymes that burn fat. We upregulate the production of mitochondria so we can put more fat through the mitochondria so there's more mitochondria. All the mitochondria have their own DNA, mitochondrial DNA. That gets upregulated So the mitochondria can become more efficient in and of themselves.

And I have more mitochondria, more efficient mitochondria, and you can put more fat through the system. So how that's manifesting itself in today's endurance athletes is there's guys that can run six minute miles and get 92, 93% of their energy from fat and not tap into those glycogen reserves and not have to drink those nasty gel packs, which specifically you're talking specifically about endurance. I'm talking about endurance athletes right now. So just to give you the difference between what it was in the old days where you had to be drinking the carbohydrate drinks all the way. I sucked down some goo in my

day. It makes sense because your body's reserve of fat is way higher than your body's reserve of glycogen or carbohydrate. I mean, you know, I'm pretty low body fat these days, and I probably got enough fat on me to walk 300 miles. Yeah, exactly. So that's how the body was designed. That's how we evolved. Again, we looked at evolution so why would we evolve a system that uh that allowed us to store this much extra fuel without mechanisms to burn it so one of the things that happens in ketosis is you go deeply into that low carb strategy where you cut carbs so so much that the body starts to build that metabolic machinery um and and all of a sudden the liver starts to

say okay we're going to create some we're going to take some fat and we're going to we're going to slice it differently we're going to create these ketone molecules and the ketones can go and and the brain burns the ketones better than it burns glucose um and without a lot of the oxidative damage that glucose sometimes causes so and the muscles love ketones. And cardiac muscle thrives on ketones. So ketones are almost a preferred fuel in the right conditions. But you have to sort of get to that point. You have to train the body. It takes a little while.

It takes a while. So it takes a couple of weeks to do that. And I'd say you get 80% there in a couple weeks. And then maybe the next 10% might take a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks, yeah. Yeah, to do that. And I'd say you get 80% there in a couple of weeks, and then maybe the next 10% might take a couple of months. And the last 10%, if you really wanted to be a world-class keto athlete, might take another six months. You mean this shit takes time? Yeah.

I want it now. But why I say that is you'll get a lot of the benefits, the endurance benefits at lower levels, sub-threshold levels of endurance. They're very quick. And so we have people who can, say, hold 275 watts on a bike for two hours. And once they become keto-adaptive, they can hold that for 20 hours. That's a huge difference. Yeah.

Now, if you slide the wattage up a little bit and you start to go to 300 or 350 watts, so now, you know, 20 minutes becomes two hours. Well, that's significant in a race situation. But one of the things that does happen is early on there's a loss of top-end power. So you can't crank 1,400 watts for 10 seconds, right? Right, okay. So you lose that top-end. But that's what you get over time. You get that top end back over time.

But you sort of lose that. How long does it take to get that top end back? Because that's something I've noticed. Like a year. That's where the year is. You have to be willing to do it for a year. And so how many competitive elite athletes are willing to take a year on the chance that maybe this will work? So we haven't really found that yet.

Where we do find it is in some of the sports like ultra endurance running where all the top guys now, the guys who are setting records, they're all keto, they're all low carb, they're all training in ways that were inconceivable four years ago, five years ago. You're also having to go lower protein with this as well. Yeah, protein. So what turns off ketosis?

So ketosis, again, ketosis is your body manufacturing ketones that can be used as fuel. Ketosis is driven in a low-carbohydrate state, which of necessity means it's a low-glucose state. And it's a low glucose state. And it's a low insulin state. So when you have low glucose, you have low insulin. So increasing insulin shuts off ketosis. That's why you don't get ketoacidosis as a non-diabetic when you go into ketosis. There's an automatic regulation here of creating enough glucose hepatically to raise insulin to cut off ketosis. So when you are training in that

ketosis stage and you're creating these ketone bodies, you're in a position where you're creating these ketone bodies, you know, you're in a position where you're going to be able to do more work for the same amount of, well, you burn more fat, create more ketones, and unburden your body of needing to take in glucose. Yeah. So over time, that's a good thing. But protein, which can become converted to glucose by the liver in excess, and sometimes by itself, protein is insulinogenic. So you might take whey protein isolate can be insulinogenic and cause insulin.

So if you have too much protein, it shuts off. I think for a lot of athletes they might be scared of the ketogenic diet because now i'm not going to get this anabolic uh yeah so um effect from the i have to cut my protein out now so and that's that was my the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place for me gotcha so um you know because i i work damn hard for my muscle mass right and i'm not a i'm a skinny guy you know i weigh more than damn hard for my muscle mass, right? And I'm not a – I'm a skinny guy. You know, I weigh more than I should.

I work hard to keep the muscle mass. So that fear of, oh, if I cut protein, what's going to happen? Well, what happens is the way ketosis works, and it's beautiful, is ketone bodies are protein-sparing. Sparing, protein-sparing. Yeah. Bodies are protein-sparing. Spare, protein-sparing. Yeah, so beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is one of the ketone bodies, literally it's an epigenetic signaling device that causes protein to be spared in the body and recycled in a different pathway. So you don't lose protein. You don't piss it out.

You just recycle it. So I've lost six pounds on this. I've been in straight ketosis for the last, say, nine weeks. And I've lost six pounds. And I didn't think I had six pounds to lose of body fat, but I have. And I'm not a big guy, but people go to the gym and they go, dude, you're putting on mass. I go, no, I'm actually losing mass, but you're seeing more striations. You're seeing more of the effect of that. And it's the protein sparing effect. It's like

scary how, how, how, how sparing, uh, when you're in deep in ketosis, how sparing of, of protein and muscle that can be. Yeah. Well, you've looked at, well, you looked at, uh, endurance athletes, but what about strength athletes? Um, is ketone viable? So there's a lot of, a what about strength athletes? Is ketone viable? So there's a lot of strength athletes I think are looking at ketosis as a method of training and cyclic ketosis. So particularly strength athletes that have weight classes, that are in divisions where they have to, whether it's weightlifting or MMA or wrestling or whatever, it's a great tool to use to shrink down your fat stores to as low as they can go and maintain muscle mass.

Because a lot of, again, with wrestling and boxing in the old days, you know, they'd put on the rubber suit and they'd run and they'd spit. Yeah. I've done it. Yeah. And all that's doing is, you know, you're burning a little bit of fat, but you're mostly. It's water weight. It's water weight. It's water weight.

And then you're losing glycogen, which is a false sort of sense of weight loss. You're not actually burning off fat. And it all goes back to – well, it goes back to high school coaches who say, oh, you know, your normal weight is 145. You're going to wrestle 107. It's like – or whatever. You know, I don't know what the weight cuts are. Ask Doug about his weight cuts.

Yeah, yeah. He's made the biggest swings out of all of us. Yeah, yeah. And that's like a sadistic way to treat a teenager, by the way. Now, you said cyclical ketosis. Yeah, so. What does that mean? It just means you go in for a couple of days, a couple of weeks,

and you come back out. Okay, so you would go into keto. You go into ketosis. Okay. Yeah. And keep staying ketosis for as long as it feels comfortable. Uh-huh. And then, you know, come back out.

And when I say come back out, don't go eating. Ben and Jerry's. Right, right, right, right. Just slowly add some cars back in. Slowly add some cars back in. Okay. Okay. And then.

I might have to try that. You know, I don't know if you guys have ever used. If you've ever used creatine. Creatine is a powerful supplement for weightlifters to use. But after six weeks, the effects stop. So creatine is best used when you do six weeks on and two months off. Because six weeks on, you'll ratchet up to a plateau, but you'll be at a new plateau. And then you hold that plateau for another couple of months,

and then you just reintroduce the creatine. I mean, it's kind of cool how you can use some of these devices. So we're looking at – you asked about strength athletes, and we have endurance athletes. So we have an athlete that's primarily in one energy system, and what about this energy system in the middle, the glycolytic? Yeah, that's where most CrossFitters, a lot of CrossFitters live. Yeah, we look at the sort of CrossFit,

and I'm going as hard as I possibly can for 10 minutes. Well, you're not going to sacrifice your glycolytic systems because they're always there. That basically takes place outside the mitochondria. But what you'll find is that, so one of the concerns is, well, wait a minute, if I'm going to do two days on, one day off, that second day is going to be a bear because I won't be able to refill my glycogen stores to do the glycolytic work. Right.

So that's a consideration. And you might say, okay, well, then I'm going to be in ketosis the day I do my first Metcon, and that night I'm going to top off with some sweet potato, 100 grams or something like that of sweet potato, or 100 grams worth of carbs from sweet potato. So the next day you get up, and you've pretty much topped off your glycogen stores, and you go do what you're going to do, and as soon as the workout's over, you're back into ketosis.

There's been some talk back and forth in the community about, well, once you get out of ketosis. That's what I was going to ask you. Yeah. It takes you, you know, it takes three days to get back, and that's not been my experience. Okay. I mean, I play around with carving up one night, not a lot, but inappropriately with, you know, some chocolate thing here or there. And clearly would be out of ketosis, wake up the next morning, do a fasted workout. Don't eat until my workout. Do a fasted workout and then don't eat until 1 o'clock, which is normally what I do anyway.

Test my ketones at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm 1.7, 1.8. You know, it's fine. So, you know, I think we develop this skill over time. And the more you go in and out and the more you play around with it, like every time you – every week or two you spend in ketosis, I think it benefits you further on down the road. Further down the road.

Whether you never go there again. Because have you built that machinery? Yeah, you built that machinery. Unless you completely screw it up by doing – Eating pizza, like a whole pizza. Right, or eating 1,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not just one time, but no.

One time isn't going to do it, but three weeks is going to do it. So the body likes to get sort of a sense of what's happening in real time. That's the neurotransmitters and the hormones. And then in the long term, the body finally upregulates and says, you know what? That's gene expression. That's gene expression. So over time, once you've built the metabolic machinery, you won't lose it unless the body,

this goes back to the original premise that we had about atrophy and stuff like that. If the body says, well, I don't need this fat-burning mechanism anymore because we've got so much glucose coming in, we can just fire it off whenever we want, then there's a downregulation, there's an atrophy of those systems. Now, it's tough to lose mitochondria. It's a little bit tougher than muscle size or strength, which diminishes pretty quickly. So I'm just suggesting that this becomes a tool that you can use, a strategy in your life.

It's an anti-aging strategy. It's a fat-burning strategy. It's an energy strategy for going through the day. I mean, it's fantastic to be able to wake up in the morning and go, oh, jeez, it's 4 o'clock. I haven't eaten yet. A friend, Todd White from Dry Farm Wines, he's been a ketoser for three and a half years. I don't know if you've met Todd. Yeah, I have actually.

I've drank the wine. I drank the wine. I drank the Kool-Aid. That's right. But he tells me, he says, dude, some days it's like the end of the day, and I have to be mindful of my eating. And I go, does that mean you tend to overeat? He says, no, I tend to not eat enough because I'm not that hungry,

and I have all the energy I need. So for the general population, one of the great things about ketosis is it's appetite mitigating. It suppresses appetite. And appetite is the biggest issue for most people who are trying to adjust their diet and lifestyle. And your body doesn't like change, so it's going to tell you, like, hey, feed me. Yeah, and the brain's always going to say feed me, and there's always going to be this tendency if you're sugar dependent to eat again and again because insulin goes up and it goes down and hormones, ghrelin goes up, leptin goes down. And all of these interplays, we wind up living our lives from one meal to the next.

It's like, okay, lunch was awesome. When's dinner? Sounds like me on the cut. But it doesn't have to be that way. And how freeing is it to have an experience where for most of your life, you're not only not hungry, you're like, I'm here's how here's how like you're you're not hungry you never you don't get sick because your immune system's boost boosted you have all the energy you want um you're keeping muscle mass like that's an awesome like that's magical right yeah and but it all revolves around

not being hungry because the other three things they they fall away if you're hungry yeah yeah i've so i've heard people talk about cycling on and off how long does somebody want to stay on you're talking about somebody who's been doing it for four years yeah and i've heard you know people go on it for a few months and they come back out yeah what's what's uh there's no there's no standard there's no standard no it's it's and it's we're young enough in the in the ketogenic age that um we don't have enough data points. Like somebody said, well, should I be on ketosis for the rest of my life? I don't know.

Maybe not. But so far, a lot of people have had some great success with it, particularly kids who have epilepsy and seizure and brain damage. That's where the initial studies are done that are just overwhelmingly in support of what's going on with brain metabolism and these ketone bodies. Do you use testing strips to test if you're in ketosis? Yeah, once in a while.

Now I know. But I mean, yeah, mostly when I'm playing around with stuff. Like if somebody will send me a new ketone supplement and I'll, okay, I'll. Like an exogenous ketone? An exogenous ketone. And I'll brag, well, you'll be at 6.0 in an hour and a half. And I'll go, well, I'll be the judge of that, and I'll see. But I stopped testing regularly, first of all, because those bastards cost about $5 a strip.

They're really expensive. So that's the main reason. But it only works to test your blood ketones, the breath stuff. Maybe, I don't know the breath stuff, but you know the p strips is like all right um because a lot of stuff happens there where you're you're an early adopter and you pee out and it's a purple strip that says you're producing ketones well you're producing them but you're pissing them out you're not using them you haven't built them in about machinery gotcha and then so when you get really good at using them and i feel like i am the body it's very efficient. It only makes what it needs.

Right. And if my body's used to making enough ketones to keep me energetic and thinking clearly and all this stuff, I don't need to be 4.0 millimolar. I can be 1.3 or 1.6 or whatever. And on a piece strip, I got nothing because I'm using it all. Right. You know, the body's wickedly efficient at this stuff. Yeah.

So I'm curious, you know, you said you're in ketosis right now. Yeah. What's kind of like a daily, what's your daily look like food-wise? What do you eat? I wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, sometimes with cream and nothing else, and then don't eat until, well, then I'll go to the gym. I usually start work and answer emails and write.

Try and fasted. And then I go to the gym around 10, fasted. I'll do whatever workout it is. If it's an interval workout, no problem. If it's a Metcon kind of bodyweight Metcon thing, no problem. And then one of the benefits of this is when you finish a workout like that, you're not hungry, where in the old days I would have been starving as finish a workout like that, you're not hungry. Where in the old days I would have been starving as a sugar burner, but now I'm not hungry.

So I just go until 1 o'clock. Around 1 o'clock I have a big fat bomb salad. So I have a big salad because people think, well, you don't eat vegetables on a ketogenic diet. That's not accurate. Yeah, I don't know where that came from. But a big bowl of, like, lettuce and some – a couple of cherry tomatoes and some broccoli strips or something like that and some peppers and some cucumber probably has 15 to 20 grams of carbs total. It's, like, almost nonexistent. But then – and I make this awesome salad dressing, this Primal Kitchen salad dressing.

And that's. Great closer. That's the fat bomb. And I'll put, you know, 200 or 300 calories worth of dressing on there, all of its healthy fats, all of its avocado. That's my lunch. And I might put some tuna on it. But these days I'm cutting my protein down to one meal a day sometimes. So I might put a couple of pieces of cheese on it.

That's lunch. Might have some macadamia nuts in the middle of the afternoon, 4 o'clock, something like that. And then around 7, 7.30, you know, I'll grill up a steak and have some grilled vegetables or some steamed vegetables with a lot of butter on them. And at the end of the day, I've probably taken in 35 to 40 grams of carbs, 60 to 75 grams of protein.

The rest is fat. The total of the whole package is far fewer calories, so many fewer calories than I used to eat that I almost can't believe that I maintain my strength and energy and mass on that. But it just proves to me that this is a cool way of not only eating, but a cool way of, like, saving the world because the other people can have the rest of the calories what was funny is i i posted something the other day which was

you know which is more sustainable for the planet like vegan vegetarian paleo yeah someone's like what about keto yeah i was like i didn't even really yeah think about that but you yeah i'm saying way less way less food and you maintain the mass because you're just better at recycling stuff. And by the way, recycling stuff means your body is choosing to consume damaged proteins, poorly folded proteins, damaged fats, and all the debris in your cells that otherwise would be accumulating and clogging, causing aging. The body actually goes to naturally with autophagy and consumes it and recycles it or uses it for energy. It's a very efficient system. Interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. When does your book come out? October 3rd. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Check it out. The Keto Reset Diet.

Awesome. Where can people find out? Yeah. So MarksDailyApple.com is the site. My book is The Primal Blueprint, the new Primal Blueprint on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and bookstores everywhere. If you're interested in the healthiest foods around, the healthiest sausage dressings and toppings, that's PrimalKitchen.com,

and they're in Whole Foods and on Amazon where the top selling main is on Amazon. We're in Thrive Market if you're familiar with that. We buy our food there, Some of our food, yeah. Cool. Awesome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.