Barbell Shrugged - Real Chalk  — A Quickie w/ Mark Sisson  — 27

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Mark Sisson is founder of Primal Nutrition and Primal Kitchen, a fitness author, blogger, and a former distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal/paleo movement back in 2009. In 2017, Mark officially became a New York Times bestselling author with The Keto Reset Diet. He is also the publisher of MarksDailyApple.com, the #1-ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category. In this episode, Mark talks about his process of growth in the development of his company Primal Kitchen as a brand and natural food provider. He walks the the Real Chalk crew through the process of searching for quality in the foods we eat, and how to identify specific ingredients that are indicators of low quality foods. Mark also discusses his routine for a sharp morning as well as sharing his favorite meals, and more. Enjoy! - Ryan and Yaya ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/rc_sisson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, this is Doug from Barbell Shrugged. I just want to let you know that we now offer 11 of our top training programs as a part of a single membership site that we're calling the Program Vault. We used to launch training programs every few months and people were always bummed that they couldn't sign up at any time. You had to be around for the launch. The launch was only 4 or 5 days. If you missed it, then you had to wait 6 months or a year depending on what training program we were offering next and it's kind of a hassle even when people were signed up for training programs to switch to a different program when they got to the end of their current program or they just happen to be in a new phase of training they hit their their past goal and now they have new goals and new goals require different training programs so inevitably it was a pain in the ass for people to switch programs so

we took all that feedback and we decided to just put all of our programs together on this thing we now call the program vault that way all shrugged athletes could have access to all the workouts that we have and move from program to program as they saw fit for themselves makes sense so there's 11 programs three of them are long-term very comprehensive programs where there's you know a warm-up and there's mobility and there's nutrition added in there. All the workouts are there. There's a cool down. There's stuff to do on your off days. They're super, super comprehensive. And those programs last for over 18 months if you want to stick around for that long. And there's also eight short-term programs. These programs

are three months long and these are basically add-on programs so if you are already doing classes at a gym and you don't want to stop doing your classes but you want to work on one particular thing maybe you want to like work on your shoulder health or you want to work on your conditioning like your your aerobic capacity or maybe you just want to work on your squatting strength or your pull-up strength or something like that then we have these short-term add-on programs that are super low volume but they're just like an extra you know two or three exercises at the end of your workout to help work on whatever those very specific goals are that you have. So the three long-term programs are flight weightlifting. That's a very weightlifting

specific training program. It builds you from someone who's more like beginner intermediate at weightlifting and builds you up to be a more technical professional style weightlifter, you know, over the course of 12 or 18 months. We also have muscle gain challenge. If you at weightlifting and build you up to be a more technical professional style weightlifter you know over the course of 12 or 18 months now we also have muscle gain challenge if you just want to put on muscle mass and you want a higher volume training program this in my opinion is more of an intermediate program if you don't have good technique on the olympic lifts yet you're going to kind of be throwing right to the wolves so to speak. It doesn't ramp you up like flight does. Flight has very specific progressions for weightlifting

to let you learn all the technique over time. Muscle gain challenge kind of just throws you right into it. So ideally, you already have some experience with Olympic weightlifting before you start the muscle gain challenge. And there's a very high emphasis, of course, with the muscle gain challenge on gaining muscle. So that means you've got to eat a lot of food. So there's a lot of emphasis on of course, with the Muscle Gain Challenge on gaining muscle, so that means you've got to eat a lot of food, so there's a lot of emphasis on how much to eat, what to eat,

and your recovery as a part of that program, so that way you can get bigger and stronger. Also, we have Strug Strength Challenge, which is more of a traditional kind of CrossFit program. If you do CrossFit classes at a CrossFit gym, you probably do some strength movements at the very beginning of class. Maybe you do front squats for five sets of five, and then you do a Metcon that's, you know, 20 or 25 minutes or whatever it happens to be. That's more typical of the shrugged strength challenge where strength is the goal, but certainly conditioning is a key part of

that as well. It has more of a strength bias than kind of a regular generalized CrossFit-y type program. So the eight short-term training programs, again, these are about three months long, and they're kind of an add-on program. So the first one is Boulders for Shoulders. That's a shoulder health and stability program, health, mobility, and stability program. That doesn't mean you're going to be doing a whole lot of jerks and overhead presses necessarily. This is, again, an add-on program. So you're going to be doing a whole lot of jerks and overhead presses necessarily this is again an add-on program so you're gonna be doing a lot of assistance work for your shoulders your thoracic spine uh etc that way you can have the healthiest shoulders possible there's the aerobic monster program which is adding in a bunch of extra mostly aerobic

conditioning you'll be on the airdyne a lot you're going to be on the rower a lot you're going to be doing a lot of monostructural stuff so you know if you already have your regular workout you do strength you do your metcon and then you know as a very overly simplistic example you do you know 20 minutes of rowing or you do 30 on 30 off for 10 rounds where you're doing a hard 30 and an easy 30 or whatever it is just a little bit extra aerobic work there's the squat the house program where you know we add in two leg exercises three days a week. So you might squat and then do some lunges or something like that. Depending on what your regular classes are like, you might already be doing a lot of squatting. But if you're not

currently able to do a lot of squatting and you want to do some more squatting and you just want to add that onto your current training, then Squat the House is a great program. Anaerobic Assault, that is a high intensity interval style program where you're doing very fast metcon so you might be doing airdyne sprints you know 30 seconds on 100 full speed and then and then take a three minute break and do it again or even you know five touch and go deadlifts followed by you know 10 burpees rest two minutes and then do it again but you're doing it all 100% full speed, really teaching you how to kick it into high gear and move very, very quickly when you're doing your Metcons.

There's my first pull-up, which is not going to give you a whole lot of actually doing pull-ups. This is a program for people that can't do a pull-up yet, so there's a lot of assistance work for pull-ups, and there's a lot of extra assistance work for just all the muscle groups involved in doing pull-ups. Everything from just doing extra lat work, extra scapular retraction, rhomboid lower trap work, extra bicep work, etc. to help get you to the point where you can do your first pull-up. There's a strongman accessory program where you can

be doing yoke walks, picking up stones, pulling heavy sleds, things like that. And then there's two more programs that are kind of a little bit higher volume. You could do them on your own if you wanted to. And you also can combine these. You could do Aerobic Monster and Aerobic Assault and My First Pull-Up all together if you wanted to, if you just wanted to add extra volume. But the last two, Open Prep is exactly what it sounds like. It just gets you ready for the CrossFit Open or other similar competitions.

You'll be doing a lot of Metcons. And the last one is barbell beginner to meet. It's prepping you for your first Olympic weightlifting competition. Each program is scheduled between three and five days per week. There's videos explaining all the programming. There's demos. There's technique explanations for everything. And then also you have access to the private Strug Collective Facebook group.

That way you can get advice from ourselves. We'll be in there hanging out. Our guests from our shows, we also have a bunch of athletes, coaches, and strength experts that are friends of ours that are in there too to help you out. If you're interested, since I've been talking long enough, you can go to strugcollective.com backslash vault for all the information. Again, that is shruggedcollective.com backslash B-A-U-L-T. That spells vault. Go there, check it out. If you have any questions, email help at barbellshrugged.com and enjoy the show. Welcome to Real Chalk, a Shrugged Collective

production. Mike Bledsoe here. Stoked to be launching this network so that we can introduce you to amazing content providers like Ryan Fisher. We'll be posting new shows every weekday, so be on the lookout. As a thank you for listening, Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get 60 bucks of free organic groceries, plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash real chalk. This is how it works. Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more plus free shipping. No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week, so just hit up Thrive Market today.

Go to thrivemarket.com slash realchalk to get set up. Enjoy the show. All righty, kids, boys, and girls. You guys are tuned in to the Shrug Collective. I'm Yaya, and this is the brand new episode of the Real Chalk Podcast. This is actually a really, really fun and exciting episode for us. It's the last episode we recorded while being at Paleo FX out in Austin, Texas.

And it actually has kind of a cool story to it because we knew that Mark Sisson was going to be at this event, but we saw him a couple times throughout the weekend, just kind of like passing by, and he was always surrounded just by a big group of people. So we were finishing up podcast on our last day they're on like three o'clock and the whole convention was ending at 3 30 so people were like wrapping up there were drills

going there were this everybody was breaking down a little booth this and right when we finish up the podcast ryan leads over to me he goes dude it Mark Sisson. So we look over and he's literally standing maybe 30 feet from us. And we walk over, introduce ourselves, and I just kind of went for it. I was like, Mark, do you have time just to do a quick podcast, maybe 30 minutes or so? And you could tell that he was kind of hesitant and he just also wanted to get out there. He was there all weekend. And he goes, well, where are you guys? And you were like – and I went, you're literally standing in our recording booth right

now like everything's set up let's just sit down and do it so while we're sitting there everybody around us is breaking down their booth is doing this is doing that and we're just trying to get a quickie in with mark if you guys don't know who Mark Sisson is, first of all, shame on you. Second of all, definitely look this guy up. He started as a distance runner, finished fourth at the Ironman in 1982. From there, he started Mark's Daily Apple, which was one of the first fitness blogs and is still going up until today. From there, he kind of took his writing skills and branched out wrote multiple books all great his newest one being the keto reset diet and then after that he founded not after the book but after starting to write the primal kitchen which is i guess the nutrition

food company to have everything from mayo dressing blah, blah, blah, all this. And basically, you guys are going to hear more about this in the episode. He just wanted to make the food that you're supposed to not have on a, in air quotes, not have on a healthy diet, more accessible for everybody out there. So he has like a healthy mayonnaise, a healthy ranch dressing, all that kind of stuff. And honestly, guys, if you've never tried it out, all that stuff is absolutely amazing. But even more amazing, this guy is 64 years old, and sitting in front of him, you wouldn't

think he's older than 40. Tan, shredded, looks great. Little bit of a man crush after this episode, for sure. Other than that, you guys always always know if you guys want to follow ryan and i i'm at ysv on instagram at ryan fish for fisher and our vlog is now also being posted on the shrug collective youtube account so go ahead and head over to youtube subscribe to shark collective and you guys are going a little bit more of a behind the scenes for our adventures in paleo in austin for paleo effects we went to venice we went to phoenix we went to san francisco um all that stuff is going to be coming up on the vlogs in the coming weeks

on top of that you guys can always follow us along and our workouts just head over to crossfitchalk.com sign up for the online programming and get just as shredded as Mark. From here, I'm going to let you guys take it, jump into the episode, have fun. All right, cool. That's recording? Yeah. Okay. All right, let's do a little chit-chat, make sure the levels are okay.

What did you have for breakfast today? Oh, so unusually uh you know normally i would have no breakfast but today because i'm uh gonna be going strong all day i had uh basic scrambled eggs and bacon awesome oh and a triple espresso with cream nice need the caffeine for sure yeah all right i think we're good we're set set up. All right, kids. Still at Paleo FX, sitting here with Fish. And we're literally just about to wrap up, call it a weekend, and then bumped into the man himself, Mark Sisson, and forced him to be on the show.

He's trying to get out of here, too. Against his own will. Against his own will. No, no, no. I'm happy to do this. He's tied to the chair. Most of you guys know Mark, I am sure, from Mark's Daily Apple, the Primal Nutrition Company, I guess, if you want to call it that.

Primal Kitchen. Fish always with the Primal Kitchen Ranch. I literally use your dressing every single day in the gym. And I really preach your product a lot. This is definitely not just because you're here and I want you to feel good. I'm such a huge fan. I'm fanboying out right now a little bit. I'm trying to keep it together.

If I could talk to anybody in this whole place, you'd definitely be my top guy to talk to. And I've been following you since I started CrossFit. I think a lot of you guys out there who've been doing CrossFit for a really long time, at some point you've come across Mark's Daily Apple, and you've probably made a recipe at some point that he was responsible for. And you've probably heard of keto, which is massive, and you have a new book called The Keto Reset Diet. Yep.

And there's a ton of things that are coming out. A lot of literature is coming out from this man right here. So this is the holy grail of of all of it so definitely i'm really really excited cool and yeah let's start talking about basically how you started the blog so um i was in the that everyone knows yeah so i was an athlete in my early days and then i started um i got i got injured and sick from the training and from the diet, so I pivoted and decided I was going to coach other athletes on how to be successful and not get hurt and not struggle and suffer so much. So I coached some professional triathletes for a while.

But all the while, I was also looking at ways in which to improve performance using natural, legal performance-enhancing substances. So I created a supplement line. In the early days, I was able to grow the company by appearing on television shows, talk shows with health and fitness and diet and exercise. What were some of the biggest shows that you got to get on? I mean, I wasn't on it. They were tiny, tiny, tiny shows.

Know the Cause, which is a guy out of Texas, Doug Kaufman, a great show, but on cobbled together cable networks throughout the country. And I grew the company appreciably for a number of years doing that. Then that model dried up, and I was like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? What was one of your first products that you came out with, like your flagship product, if you want? So I had a line called Extreme Cortisol Relief, Extreme Anti-Inflammatory, Extreme Liver Support. You get this theme of extreme in there. Yeah, totally. And, again, it was for athletes to naturally recover from their training. But what happened over time was that I had more people who weren't athletes,

who had read the literature or the magazines, you know, the life extension magazines, the anti-aging magazines, who were understanding how, you know, how well these particular nutrients worked and the science behind them, and they wanted to buy supplements like this, not because they were trying to increase their performance. They were just trying to live longer or be healthier or whatever. And so that became my new market, was just people who were looking to just improve performance in a normal life.

Yeah. So anyway, as the television market dried up in 2003 or 2004, and the internet was just coming on board, I thought, well, I'll try my hand at this blogging thing, and I'll build an audience on the blog, and then I'll be able to sell myself on the CBI. Yeah, you definitely started it at such a great time. Yeah. So actually, the first blog post I ever did was for Art Devaney.

I posted on his site, and it had to do with athletic performance. And I got such great attraction for that that I decided I would have my own blog. So I started Mark's Daily Apple. Did you have any experience with writing in general before starting to blog? I mean, yeah, sure. I'd already written a couple of books. I mean, I wrote in 1981, I wrote the Runner's World Triathlon Training Book. In 1989, I wrote Training and Racing Duathlons.

I wrote a couple of, one called The Ultimate Lean Routine. So I'd written a bunch of books. So I'd had experience writing. So, yeah, I started at Marks Daily Apple in 2006 to build an audience and to espouse my ideas on diet and exercise and fitness and health and training and everything else, you know, that came about. And, you know, thought I'd grow an audience quickly. I didn't grow it quickly.

I grew it eventually. It eventually became one of the top health and fitness blogs on the Internet. Well, I remember you definitely started out with a niche group, I feel like, with a lot of the CrossFitters, I think, was probably your first market. Yeah. But now would you say you're probably more of a worldwide brand now? Yeah, for sure. We have a lot of readers from all around the world.

And I'd probably say 65% U.S. and then the rest are international. And I'd love to come to events like this and bump into people from around the world, again, who come here because this is kind of the mecca of the paleo world once a year. Absolutely. And get a chance to exchange, you know, thank yous with them, likewise. Do you think it was important to start niche and grow your business outward? Or do you think sometimes when people try to just hit everybody at one shot, it doesn't really work quite as well?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because the concept of niche, I mean, the primal blueprint is a very broad approach to living. It's a template. It's not just a diet. It's about sleep and sun exposure and how we move and avoiding trauma and things like that. So, you know, while it was a niche in the paleo world and the ancestral health world, it was still pretty broad. But I've certainly expanded it outward from there. I mean, I had this idea that Mark's Daily Apple was going to be, it was daily because I was going to write something every day for a year. And at the end of the year, I'd written everything there was to write about health and fitness. And of course, every time I'd write an article, I'd get lots of comments about, you know,

what about this? What about that? What about? So as it, as the years unfolded, there was always something to write about, some new question that some reader had. So it's expanded outward from there for sure. Yeah, definitely something to always write about. And then I know the blog is still around nowadays as well,

but I know you also have a lot of other outlets. What are some diversifications that you had to go through to stay relevant? Yeah, the blog is a platform to this day. It's just like the TV show was back in the early 2000s. But as a platform, you know, we've launched Primal Kitchen Foods, which is just crushing it across the country. We're in 7,000 stores across the country now. We have 11 salad dressings and four flavors of mayonnaise now

and three bars and collagen powders, and we bottle avocado oil and things like that. So that's really doing very well. We have a Primal Health Coach Institute, so we train people to become health coaches. Okay. That's really taken off. We've had several thousand people go through that program. They love it.

They think it's one of the more robust health coaching training programs out there. So that's been ongoing now for about a year and a half. Still publish books. Primal Blueprint Publishing still does. We have about 40 books that we publish now. So, yeah. When you're making like a salad dressing, like the Primal Kitchen salad dressing, and you have avocado oil in it and it's like very minimal ingredients,

is it hard to go out of your way to create something that is such a clean product because every when you go to the grocery store and you look at the salad dressings i literally there was a point before yours came out where i was like i can't have any salad dressings unless it's up unless it's balsamic and olive oil that i make myself yeah there's nothing on this shelf for me to buy it's either oil soybean or whatever yeah so is it as a manufacturer i, you probably don't manufacture necessarily yourself, but is it hard to create a product like that? Or is it scary because maybe it goes bad earlier than others?

Well, no. They're shelf-stable, and they won't go bad because of the nature of the oils in there. Again, our products, our salad dressings have a 12-month shelf life at room temperature. But what makes it daunting is it's just so damn expensive. That's what I was going to say. 100%. That was going to be the point. These are the most expensive quality oils pretty much in the world and quality ingredients.

And that's the reason that other companies have become afraid of that. They didn't, you know, they want to make the cheapest, you know, great tasting but crappy ingredient product possible. And another thing is when you're cooking with avocado oil, how high are we talking about on the stove until it becomes unstable? 490 to 510. It's pretty high heat oil. Okay. So when you're, when you have like the low,, and hot, is it like all the way cranked?

Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Okay. All right. I think a lot of people get like that misconstrued and they want to know how hot they can go. Yeah. People always are interested in stuff like that. Going back to just people making products the cheapest way possible, if I'm a consumer, I go into the grocery store. What are some clear indicators on the labels that I know that this company cares more about making money than me? Well, I mean, the first

indicator is a price because there are some things that just cannot be made healthy at a cheap, cheap price. It's really about, you know, what can you, like on the label, high-fructose corn syrup, which has permeated the entire food industry for so long, there's a reason that so many products use it. It's just cheap. It's a cheap form of sweetener, and it has all these other properties. So there are a lot of other companies where chemical preservatives are used because the chemicals are cheaper to give the product a longer shelf life.

We like to say if it's got more than five ingredients in it, it's probably less healthy a choice. Yeah. Do you go by the rule, I know CrossFit preaches this a lot, to kind of stay on the outside edges of the grocery store? So you've got your produce section, your meats. Right. So the idea behind Primal Kitchen was to create sauces, dressings, and toppings that you could put on your food. So we want you to go to the grocery store and shop the perimeter and buy the produce and buy the meat and buy the grass-fed and buy the pastured.

And then in the center aisle, buy Primal Kitchen products to put on all those things to make them taste better. Okay. Yeah. All right. Sounds good. Along with spices and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, when you clean your diet up, when you get rid of industrial seed oils, you get rid of soybean oil, canola, and corn oil. When you get rid of processed grains and you get rid of whole grains, for that matter, when you get rid of legumes, when you get rid of sweetened beverages, you're left with a pretty small list of stuff that you can eat. Yeah, absolutely. So how do you make it exciting? How do you make it palatable so that you want to eat healthy every single day and not backslide?

It's how you prepare these meals. It's the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, the herbs, the spices, the methods of preparation. Because, like, I'll challenge you guys. You take a pad of paper. You write down 17 vegetables you're going to eat next year, right? Yeah. And of those, if you can come up with 17, I guarantee there's going to be three of them

that you're going to eat 85% of the time. Yeah, 100%. Always go back to the same thing. Five kinds of meat, right? You're going to eat beef, pork, lamb, turkey, chicken, whatever, maybe some fish. And then it drops off precipitously. So how do you make those things taste great? Well, chipotle lime mayonnaise, garlic aioli mayonnaise.

We've got a ketchup coming out that is unbelievable. Oh, I'm so excited. It's going to be a game changer. It's a door opener because it's completely unsweetened. It not only doesn't have high-fructose corn syrup, which most ketchups do, it not only doesn't have, you know, cane sugar or maple sugar as a, quote, you know,

paleo-approved sweetener, it doesn't have monk fruit, it doesn't have stevia. It's unsweetened, and it tastes like the ketchup you want it to taste like. So if I'm reading the label right now, what does it say on it? I can't tell you right now because now I don't want my competitors to know until it comes out. But it's a very clean label. He could tell me, but he'd have to kill me immediately. It says organic, organic, organic, organic, organic.

That's awesome. Yeah, but that's what we're about. So when a mom who's looking at feeding her kids vegetables or sweet potato fries instead of regular fries. So you can do sweet potato fries air fried in avocado oil dipped in Primal Kitchen ketchup. Absolutely. That's awesome. And I think that's such a big topic, too, especially for people who are just starting out on their fitness journey

and they're trying to find ways to eat healthier. Yeah, and they're finding out all the things that they used to love they can no longer eat. Absolutely. And then it gets boring. Then you eat the same thing every single day. You eat chicken and rice and broccoli. I mean, I'm sure we've all been there. I went through that phase.

I'm sure Ryan went through that phase where just when you're starting out, your options seem so limited. And I feel like from being able to eat everything in the world, then it comes down to your little three, four things that you can eat, and then you slowly start expanding outwards again. By the way, there's no harm in picking your top five favorite meals and eating them all the time. Yeah. Right? And that's what I tell a lot of people.

If you've got five things you really love to eat, like I could eat lamb chops every other day. Oh, my God, it's my favorite food. Lamb chops, for sure. So, and a big-ass salad. I can have, you know, I do eat a big-ass salad just about every day. So, I've got, like, you know, if I have breakfast, it's going to be eggs. You know, so what kind of eggs? It was scrambled or over easy or omelet, but it's still going to be eggs.

So, you know, it's, and I'm fine with that, by the way, you know. I'm glad to. It's the social aspect. Like, you know, when you, let you look at your girlfriend or your wife or you invite people over and they're like oh we already know we're gonna have freaking this this and that's gonna be the same thing we've been eating all the time so i don't want to go to his house forget it yeah i'm glad you bring up eggs too because it's one of those foods nowadays where people talk about like food intolerances and cutting out eggs cutting out dairy cutting

out this um and then another thing that people talk about a lot is, especially since we're here at Paleo FX, kind of going back to Primal, that foods weren't available year-round usually. Now you walk into the grocery store, you can eat bananas from January to December, no problem at all. Do you see any problem with something like eggs, having it every single day? Do you ever cycle on and off of foods? Yeah, so because I don't normally eat breakfast, I don't eat eggs except when I do eat breakfast, right? I don't put eggs on. I'm not a

hard-boiled egg guy for some reason. I don't necessarily put a hard-boiled egg on a salad. So the only time I really eat eggs is if I'm having breakfast, you know, a morning eight o'clock meal called breakfast. Other than that that I don't eat that much now people who eat 15-20 eggs a week which I know a number of people who do that might be overdoing it and some people

do have an egg sensitivity or an egg allergy my partner at Primal Kitchen Foods the president of the company she can't eat eggs so we made an egg free mayo just for her I mean, my partner at Primal Kitchen Foods, the president of the company, she can't eat eggs. So we made an egg-free mayo just for her. Love it.

And by the way, just for her and 40 million other people. Does it all come down to everything in moderation then, basically? I mean, look, that's an overused sort of cliche, but there's still a lot of truth to it. There's a lot of things that, like I use the term, people can get away with a lot of stuff. We all, as humans, tend to see what we can get away with. We kind of go right up to the edge of what we can get away with, whether it's how much food can I eat and not gain weight, or how big a piece of pie can I eat and not feel like crap. So all those things have to enter into this equation, which is if you have dessert, if you're full on paleo, primal, even keto, and you choose to have dessert once in a while,

so what? Enjoy life. A little bit of that whole moderation thing is like that's what life is about. I'm not here to be a monk in a monastery just uh sacrificing everything about my life just to follow a course of action that i think is necessarily the right way i'm here to experience life experience taste uh chew good food smell great stuff being cooked you know i'm i want to experience all all possible aspects of life i absolutely love that you bring that up, especially in the world, in the kind of bubble that we live in. There are so many people that are so extreme, and the quality of life goes out the window, and it almost goes so far to one extreme that it becomes unhealthy, where it's an obsession.

So what are some things, maybe not rules, but maybe something you live by to keep that balance alive. Well, you know, I came up with the 80% rule for the Primal Blueprint 15 years ago. And that basically is you strive for perfection, understanding that you will not achieve it. And at the end of the day, you come in at 80%, you're right where you need to be. You just don't strive for 80% and come in at 60%. Yeah, that's a good point. I like that. Yeah, so, I mean, I try to – I keep, I have goals and I have, you know, things that I want to adhere to, but I don't let life get in the way of them and I want to, like I say, I want to enjoy life.

If I'm, I'm in and out of keto all the time. So, I might have two days or three days when I look back at what I had the last couple of days and holy crap, I only had 30 grams of carbs the last two or three days. Hey, maybe I'll just keep that going for a couple of days, right? I'll just do a deep dive into keto for maybe a week or two. But then one day, I'm over it. I feel like eating a bit more vegetables and maybe some starchy carbs today, and I'm not going to be in full-on keto, but by eating 130 or 175 grams of carbs, the point is I'm so metabolically flexible I don't even notice the difference in energy.

Awesome. You know, that's the key. So people who are like keto all the time and then come out of ketosis and they say they feel like shit because they're out of ketosis, they're not metabolically flexible. I'm working on creating metabolic flexibility. I'm going to burn the fat on the plate of food, and if that's not around, I'm going to burn the fat on my thighs,

or I'm going to burn the glucose in my bloodstream, or the carbohydrates on my plate, or the glycogen in my muscles, or the ketones that my liver's making. Like, bring me all these energy substrates, and I'll be good at burning whatever's present. Running like a true hybrid car. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And not be holding to refueling carbohydrates every two and a half hours six times a day.

Yeah, 100%. No, I love that. I think that's super important in our world. And yet so many of, particularly the early bodybuilding community and even those that came into CrossFit pretty early on, you know, there's this whole thing about I have to, you know, i don't want to be go cannibal on myself i don't want to go catabolic and so they you know they the early days of crossfit was was all about tupperware right bringing the meals in with you and and you know not letting too much time go because i have to have at least 20 grams of protein at this meal and at least 20 grams of carbs and you know my healthy fats and use my oil sparingly and it's like that's

just too much it's actually a fair point because if you look at the world of bodybuilding there was times with Arnold when people were eating every two hours and now that the world of bodybuilding now that people are putting intermittent fasting in their routines and people are eating maybe two meals a day and they're still giant bodybuilders. Yeah, yeah. It just really all comes down to caloric restriction and just – Well, it comes down to manipulating your hormones and the upregulation of certain genes to reconfigure – like increase the amount of mitochondria. That's a real thing. You increase the mitochondria in your body.

You burn fat more efficiently. You tend to burn fat at an earlier or later stages of output. So you might be deriving 80% or 90% of your calories from fat doing 85% VO2 max work. That's pretty cool stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's cool that you say the whole fitness world kind of goes through these cycles, like now we're doing this, now we're doing that. Just walking around here at Paleo FX, I'm sure you've checked out a couple of the booths around here too.

What are some things that you see that you get excited about? Well, I mean, so now I'm a low-tech guy, right? So I'm not into wearables. I see a lot of wearable technology here. I'm not into some of these, the equipment that, the elaborate equipment that shortcuts the workout. So you can get, you know, an hour and a half worth of work done in 10 minutes. You know, I think that there's, that the body operates on a very ancient wisdom that is low-tech. And I use my main metric is how do I feel? Yep.

Or as Rob Wolf would say, how do I look, feel, and perform, right? And those are the key metrics. Look, I could be reading numbers all day long on my Fitbit or on my watch or on my ring or whatever, but if I don't feel great, those numbers are meaningless to me. Absolutely. Yeah. It all comes back to that.

Another thing that's big right now in the fitness world in general is nootropics. Do you have any experience with that or thoughts on it at all? I mean, I've been playing around with that for 25 years. I mean, you asked what my early products were. One of my early products was called Extreme Focus. I know. I actually saw a video about that and then had it over to your site. You guys don't sell it anymore, correct?

I haven't sold that for almost 20 years. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. But it was called Extreme Focus. And it was one of the early nootropic formulas that, you know, and it was initially it was designed for athletes to stay focused during workouts and during races. Okay.

But eventually students would buy it for studying and things like that. It was an elegant little formula. I even forget what was in it. Probably some L-theanine, some vinpocetine, some other things that are probably still on the market right now. But I don't do nootropics. I don't, not to say that I think ill of them, but it's not an area that I feel that I've been sufficiently compromised in that I require assistance. Because you think that through exercise and nutrition,

you're able to achieve the same effects as if you were to take supplements. You know, every morning I wake up and I get a cup of coffee, like a strong cup of coffee. That's my first nootropic. And I do five or six puzzles in the paper. I'll do a couple of ken-kens, a couple of sudokus, a word scramble, and a crossword, and a full-on crossword puzzle. And I can sometimes do the whole thing in under 20 minutes.

So my brain still works pretty well in that regard. So, you know, I don't know. Other than, you know, short of psychedelics, I'm not sure what I'm going to access with the current offering of legal nootropics. Absolutely, yeah. I actually like the segue that we're going down now. I know a lot of successful people depend on their routines and everybody has different things that they believe in. So let's start actually with what

you just said. You wake up, you have your coffee, do crossword puzzles. What are some other things that you like to do in the morning to set you up for success in the day? Well, those are the key ones. My son just did a, he read a book. I forget even the name of the book, but it was on purpose. And he said, you know what, dad, what, what gets you out of bed in the morning? And I said, well, actually, it's looking forward to doing my crossword puzzles in my KenKen. And he was like, wow, that's sort of interesting because it's not like to get out of bed and save the world. Yeah. It was at one time, but now it's just like to get into my routine because i know i'm going to save the world anyway uh you know as in the matter in the course of

normal business right so um you know and i i like to get a i like to get to the gym 9 30 or 10 o'clock in the morning and um you know have uh have my my uh have my time uh with other people. That's sort of my cheers, my happy hour kind of thing. So that's part of my daily routine. And I cut my work day into segments. So I might do an hour and a half at a time and then break and do something else. Hour and a half at a time, do a break and do something else. Yeah.

All right. I think I'm going to go into maybe the last question because I know i can tell you gotta go pretty soon here yeah but um let's just like a quick five minute crash course on why people should be switching to like the primal kitchen stuff because like let them know what's happening to their bodies when they're eating these products that have canola oils in them and soybeans oils in them just like in a quick crash course let them know like let them be a little bit more educated we've had an entire episode on just oils yeah that we talked like a little bit over an hour about right but yeah so so i mean i think one of the one of the more devastating parts of uh modern diet and particularly united states is

is this reliance on these processed industrial seed oils that are high in omega-6 fatty acids which are also pro-inflammatory but they've been processed using harsh methods. It may still leave hexane residue in there. They're typically non-GMO. There's all manner of reasons that these sorts of oils and then their uglier cousins, trans fats and partially hydrogenated fats and oils, make their way into those center aisles of the food store. Now, what happens to those fats? They don't necessarily get combusted.

Sometimes those fats get incorporated into cell membranes, and then they start to cause real problems with how your cells actually function, the integrity of the cell, the pliability of the cell, the method of transmission for receptor sites in those cells. And, you know, over time it can manifest itself in something as obvious as insulin resistance. That's one of the classic sort of things that we see. But there are other neurotransmitter issues. Again, cells talk to each other and hormones talk to cells,

and that can be compromised by a daily, regular, high dose of these less-than-ideal fats. What we look for in reconfiguring the diet, at least from the terms of fats, we talk about healthy fats. Certain types of saturated fats in moderation, is that a word? There you go. Are fine and acceptable. But then we look at monounsaturated fats. That's what the industry calls hard, healthy fats. Those are the ones that have more of a healthy impact on our biochemistry.

So the more we can find ways in which to consume monounsaturated fats would probably behoove most people to try that. Now, of the families of fats that we look at, olive oil is high in monounsaturates, but avocado oil is even higher. So that's why we chose avocado oil as the basis for our mayonnaise. So our mayonnaise is made with avocado oil, organic eggs from cage-free hens, organic vinegar from non-GMO beets, a little bit of sea salt, and some rosemary extract. And it tastes great, by the way. It really does.

Absolutely. On everything, too. Yeah, on everything. So now people who avoided mayonnaise, even the people who knew enough about these unhealthy fats and oils, could not find a mayonnaise. So imagine all the people whose lives were made much more enjoyable by having chicken salad, potato salad, tuna salad, coleslaw because of the mayonnaise. Now they had to give all that stuff up because they couldn't find a mayonnaise.

Well, what we've done is we've created mayonnaise that now addresses all those concerns. All those things are back on the menu. Plus you could dip fries in it and, you know, whatever. Salads. I'm a big fan of salads. I have a big-ass salad once a day. I put, you know, 15 different types of mixed greens and lettuce and cucumbers and carrots and celery and radishes and peppers or whatever.

I can tell you're getting really excited about this right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I top it off with some kind of quality protein, right? But how do I make it taste good well like like you were saying i mean you um you were saying you have to make your own dressing well that's right bullshit i mean that just takes too much time so i i for myself i said i got to design a design um a healthy dressing that the more i put on my salad not only does it taste better but it's healthier it's better better for you by virtue of the monounsaturated fats in it and the functional ingredients in it. So we created a line of salad dressings for that very purpose.

I made it for me, and now I make it available to everyone else to use. But we now have 11 flavors of dressing. I know. It's insane. I posted something on my Instagram about it, and someone on your team reached out to me and was like, hey, we're going to give you a care package, and they sent me literally everything you have. Nice. And I loved all of it.

It's been awesome. That's cool. I even had a couple of the bars. Yeah. Everything's really, really good, guys. The green goddess and the Caesar one and the ranch one are all really, really, really good. So let's talk about where they can find all of your stuff. Whole Foods, obviously.

Whole Foods, Sprouts. Now we're in Publix supermarkets. We're at Kroger. In Texas here, we're in Costco with our mayonnaise. Oh, Costco's in mayonnaise? Mayonnaise is in Costco? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got, and we're going to be going into other Costcos with our Greek dressing.

Costco picks us up regionally. We're in most reputable health food stores now. We're in 7,000 stores across the country. Now, you can get us on Thrive Market. I don't know if you're familiar with Thrive Market. They actually sponsor the show. Awesome. Yep.

There you go. That's Organifi. Yeah, so Thrive, I knew those guys from day one. I actually was one of the first investors in Thrive, so I'm a big fan of what they do. So we sell all of our products on Thrive. You can get it on Amazon. Our mayonnaise has been the number one best-selling mayonnaise on Amazon every day for the last two and a half years. Oh, yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah. And then where else can everybody find you? MarksDailyApple.com is the blog, but I'm also in a lot of my books that you can get on Amazon. The most recent one is Keto Reset Diet. It was a New York Times bestseller a couple of weeks in October when it came out. PrimalKitchen.com, you can find out about all the – you can read all the ingredient lists and all the reasons why all the products exist on PrimalKitchen.com. Yeah.

I'd love to ask you one more question if you have time for it. It's one of my favorite questions to ask, and especially someone with your experience level in the fitness industry. Yep. There are a lot of trends that we go through, and there's a lot of stuff that happens that is normal now that we look back in 10, 15 years. We're like, I can't believe that that was going on. The one reference I always make is just that at one point in time, doctors were smoking cigarettes during your examination and it was the most normal thing. And now we look back and we're just like, Oh my God, like I can't believe that happened. Yeah.

And take this anywhere you want. This doesn't have to be food related, fitness related, just something you see now that you feel like in 10, 15 years, we're going to look back and be like, I can't believe this was going on. Oh, probably statins and PPIs. So statin drugs for lowering cholesterol. It's just bizarre to me that we would address the issue of heart disease that way. And then proton pump inhibitors for people who have heartburn.

You know, in many cases, it might be the worst thing you could do. Okay. And yet they get like one of the most prescribed drugs of all time. So I think we're going to start, the medical community will start to recognize that at some point within the next decade and just kind of do a headbang and go, whoa, what were we thinking? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Cool. I'm going to guess artificial sugars on that. I feel like we're going to find out something gnarly about artificial sugars down the road. But that's just my guess, just to add in there. Yep. Or the whole technology side of things with the phones and the waves and the wearables, something that you brought up also. I think that could be a big awakening.

Cool. That was awesome. I literally got to talk to one of my favorite people on earth. So I'm really excited. Me too. That was so cool. It was my pleasure, guys. All right. Thank you very, very very very much thank you mark yep

and that will do it kids i know that was all over the place but like i said before the episode it was like a total last minute thing just super excited that mark took the time out of his day to actually sit down with us and answer a few questions if you guys have any more questions that we didn't answer just go ahead and hit us up. I'm Yaya at Yaya's View on Instagram. Ryan is at Ryan Fish or just Yaya or Ryan at CrossFitChalk.com. We're always happy to answer your questions, take your suggestions for topics, guests, whatever it is going forward. And that will do it, guys. We'll see you here next week.