Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #74 Mark Sisson

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Mark Sisson is the Author of several books and the founder of the Primal Nutrition and Primal Kitchen. We discuss how Mark started on a ketogenic diet and the ways it has improved his health. We dive into training techniques, how to get maximum sustained power out of your workout and how and why to use a ketogenic diet to develop Metabolic flexibility.  We also talk about what selling his company to Heinz means for Primal kitchen foods and much more. Connect with Mark: Website | https://bit.ly/2IdhUP6 Primal Kitchen | https://bit.ly/2S06nHi Primal Health Coach Institute |https://bit.ly/2GGCGnP Marks blog | https://bit.ly/2F9tyYB Check out Mark Sissons’s books | https://bit.ly/2UzXRvR Show Notes: Paleo FX | https://bit.ly/2eSqORp Metabolic Health Summit | https://bit.ly/2E9Guwk Maximum Sustained Power | https://bit.ly/2N3qPBy Peter Attia | https://bit.ly/2qzsaFZ Sami Inkinen | https://bit.ly/2E7kkdX Westin A. Price | https://bit.ly/2I9oMct Arthur De Vany | https://bit.ly/2Eao6nb Dr. Satchidananda Panda | https://bit.ly/2AbdEvF Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit        Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to the Human Optimization Hour:   iTunes  | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher  | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify  | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

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Welcome to the show. We've got a legend in the game, the Silver Fox himself, a man who doesn't seem to be aging at all. For sure, someone I want to grow up to be like. Mark Sisson, author of Primal Blueprint, Primal Endurance, The Keto Reset Diet, and he's got another book on the way. We jump into all this and more with one of my heroes and somebody that I've learned so much from. You guys are going to fucking love it. Let us know what you think online. Awesome. Well, Mark Sisson has finally joined the show. You are a bucket list interview for me, so I'm fucking super excited to have you here. It's great to be here, Kyle. Good to see you again, man. It's been a while. It has. It's been a while. We met last year at Paleo FX, I think at a kettle and fire dinner that John Duranda put together. Yeah. And finally got to connect.

And you asked me why I hadn't had you on the damn show yet. Here we are. Well, when I first got on, you had just, I think Aubrey had just interviewed you out in Malibu. That's right. Yeah. We have so much to discuss today because you've been a huge impact on my life. The first time I went on Joe Rogan's, it was the episode after yours, and you were discussing Primal Endurance right as it had come out. And that book helped me get through my first and only 50K Ultra ultra and so we'll dive into that and some of the benefits of the concepts that you have in that book and then of course that was my first foray into ketosis so we'll get in the keto reset diet but let's get a quick

background on you and you were a marathon runner before distance runner yeah I mean I was a obligatory distance runner and by that I mean I wasn't very good at anything else. I was too small to play football, basketball, baseball, hockey. I grew up in Maine. And I sort of gravitated toward distance running as I think a lot of kids did in those days. It was like the last thing that you could do if you wanted to play sports. I actually use running as a means of getting to and from school so I could beat the bus home. And I wanted to get home, you know, as soon as I could after school for whatever reason. So that mile and a half each way every day was sort of the foundation of what became an endurance running career. And certainly in those days, it was apparent that cardiovascular health was an important part of being overall healthy.

And I was really interested in fitness and health at a very early age. So as I read Ken Cooper's book on aerobics, and I found out that what I was doing was good for your overall health and longevity. You know, I was, you know, you get, you got points, the more distance you covered, you got, the more points you got toward theoretically living a longer life, right? What's your mileage? How many miles are you putting in this week? Yeah. So, so, and then, you know, so a 50K would get you way up there, Kyle. But, you know, that's sort of the conventional wisdom of the day. And, and I fueled it with carbohydrates, which is again, what we thought we needed to do in order to close miles in. That was the standard.

And I, through high school and college, I became a better and better runner. I became faster. I sort of grew into my, my speed and my endurance. And that kind of just transitioned into a, you wouldn't call it a professional career because no one made money in those days in endurance running, but in the heyday of running, which was the 70s, the mid 70s to the mid 80s, when really all the good American runners kind of came up and were stars on the world scene, I wasn't there, but I, you know, but I competed pretty well. And yet I was falling apart on the inside. I got sick from the over-training. I got arthritis from, from the training and from the diet, uh, from the highly inflammatory diet.

I had irritable bowel syndrome. I had tendonitis all the time. I had colds and flu. I was, I was a wreck, you know? And so that was sort of the, the first aha moment I had in this realm that I, that I eventually moved into, which was how can I be strong and lean and fit without so much sacrifice and so much pain and trying to, you know, cram so many carbohydrates down my gullet? Is there a better way to do that? And that really informed the rest of my career, which was to identify these hidden genetic secrets that we all have that we can turn genes on to build muscle or make us faster or give us more endurance, turn off the genes that tend to store fat or make us

diabetic. And that really led down this pathway, which for me became the primal blueprint, which was a template for living an optimal life. And by say optimal, I mean optimizing gene expression through diet and movement choices and sun exposure and play and adequate sleep and all these things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely incredible. So you get in, Primal Blueprint is your first foray into this space. And obviously you're a huge name now. You're a speaker at Paleo FX.

This weekend, you're gonna be speaking at the Met're a speaker at Paleo FX. This weekend, you're going to be speaking at the Metabolic Health Summit with our CEO, Aubrey Marcus, who'll be there as well. Among great people like Dr. Dominic D'Agostino and a ton of other people that are kind of leading and pushing this field. Talk a little bit about once you hit Primal Blueprint, where you grow your companies. Because I remember you talking a bit on stage at Paleo FX about being a corporate guy and then getting into entrepreneurship. Where did that shift happen along with your health?

You know, evolution is sort of the theme of my life and it's the theme of what I write about. So it informs all of the choices that I encourage people to make. And evolution really is the theme of my business career. So I was an entrepreneur from a very early age. I tell my kids, you know, I worked 40 hours a week from the age of 12.

Not in school, but every summer, I just worked 40 hours a week, mowing lawns, painting houses, working in double shifts in restaurants. You know, I was just interested in cash money and what it afforded me. Over the years, I've had lots of different entrepreneurial adventures, shall we say, and a lot of failures. You know, that seems to be a theme also in social media today about all

the business coaches out there. You have to fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. And then, you know, you have to learn from your failures in order to, and it's true, but damn, there's a point at which failure sucks, you know, and you got, you know, maybe give up. But so with the primal, with the primal blueprint, with the, well, I started a blog in 2006, Mark's Daily Apple, and that grew a base for me. And that was in the early days of blogging. And from that base, I was able to disseminate this information on my daily writing. That morphed into a book, which was sort of an encapsulation of all the things I'd been writing about for the prior few years. Mark's Daily Apple. I knew from really from day one when I came up with the name, The Primal Blueprint, that it was going to be a brand that I wanted to expand on. And so, in addition to books, we did seminars. We did three-day experiences called Primal Con. I had a supplement company, which I'd started 23 years ago, which was doing very well. So I was making high-end supplements for athletes.

But as I wrote more and more about food and the lifestyle choices that we make, I realized that food was really where sort of the sweet spot was, not just as a business idea, but also as a means of educating the public. In other words, having a consumer product that people would pick up

if they'd never heard of me or never heard of Primal or never heard of Paleo or Ancestral or Keto, but they'd pick up a product and go, well, there's real ingredients in here. I can pronounce them all. It looks like it's a clean label is the term we use now. And we make products that taste great. And so that has converted a lot of people who were maybe on the fence or didn't know whether they wanted to ever go low-carb or keto or paleo or primal, but have bought the products. And now they're into understanding more about how their body works and how their body responds to the ingredients that are in the foods that they're buying.

And so there's this whole movement, this clean food movement that's kind of coming together right now. And I feel like that's really the greatest leverage that I could have exerted beyond just educating people was providing products that fulfilled that need. Yeah, and I thank you immensely for that because as you get into health and wellness, that's one of the thing, the common misnomers is that I'm going to sacrifice eating good food. I'm going

to sacrifice eating tasty food rather to eat clean. And that's simply not the case because you've pretty much reformatted the condiment industry and salad dressings. And you've made these not only healthy, but fucking delicious, which is a huge deal. Thanks. Well, it's interesting that if you go back and you look at the history of food in this country, and there's been a lot of, you know, big food has obviously gotten a bad rap for trying to make crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet, cheap, cheap products. But we, you know, we identified that there are a lot of people who would, who would really like to put things on their food that make it tasty.

When you get rid of the crap, when you get rid of the sugar, the added sugars, the sweeteners, the pies, cakes, candies, cookies, the crackers, and a lot of the gluten in some cases, when you get rid of the industrial seed oil, so all the processed foods that have corn oil or canola or soybean oil, when you start cleaning up the protein sources and get rid of some of the sketchy protein sources, you're not left with a huge list of foods that you could sort of use as the centerpiece of your diet, right? You got beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey, maybe a couple kinds of fish, 17 vegetables that you're going to eat over the course of the next year, maybe some starchy tubers. That's it. That could sound a little daunting to a lot of people and certainly lend itself toward a boring way of eating. How you prepare these is what makes the difference. The sauces, the dressings, the toppings, the herbs, the spices, the methods of preparation. That's what gives variety and excitement to a clean eating diet uh and that was what was

missing you couldn't buy anything off the shelf that you could use with reckless abandon on your salad or on your or on your steak or on your chicken or even organic ketchup was loaded with organic organic sugar yeah yeah crazy right so loaded so know, our first product was this mayonnaise made with avocado oil. And it was pretty pricey, you know, it was $9.95 for a 12-ounce jar. And I'm like crossing my fingers, like, are we going to sell any of this? And we made 12,000 jars in our first batch and we sold out in like two weeks. That was clear information to me. That was like, there's a public out there that's been wanting this. There's a demand there's a demand for this and no one's fulfilled it yet. And I think in the case of big food, they're just afraid to, you know,

to take that giant step to offering products in a category that they played for 50 years that are now three times as expensive as what people are used to buying. Now, we've brought the prices down and the disparity has closed down. And, you know, now we have a line of, we have 13 salad dressings. We have three flavors, now four flavors of mayonnaise. You know, we've got barbecue sauces, all unsweetened, organic, tastes great. So we check off, there's three boxes you have to check off, you know, organic, unsweetened, and tastes great. And taste great actually is the first one, right? I used to say there's two criteria to every product we make.

Number one has to taste great. Number two has to have clean ingredients. And then I thought, you know what? That's doing a disservice to our company. It's going to be 1A and 1B. So number one has to taste great, 1A. And then number 1AB is, or 1B, has to be,

you know, it has to have clean ingredients. Yeah. And, and, uh, you know, we've had such a blast coming up with, um, new products that fit the old model. So we, we identify products that people would like to be using, but are afraid to be using because of the, the sketchy ingredients that have been used historically in those. Hell yeah. Well, we jumped into the foods and we'll circle back to that. Obviously, you guys have just sold the company and there's big news there. But let's talk about Primal Endurance. And as I had mentioned earlier, I ran a 50KL, which was the only one that I've ever done. That book had just come out and I devoured it. And I really used that as a template for my training

leading up to it because I was 238 pounds and muscular, but quite a bit oversized. That's a good size boy to be running a 50K. For that ultra community. I remember people had asked my wife who was running with me, they were like, did you see that bodybuilder running without the camelback? And I was like, I'm not a bodybuilder. I look like a pencil compared to a bodybuilder, but compared to them, yeah, for sure. But really was this concept that less is more. You don't need to pound the pavement. You don't need to beat the shit out of your body. You can get a lot from doing high intensity intervals and really bulletproofing your body. And I hate that term for many reasons, but like doing the things necessary that will prevent injury and make you

stronger, pay dividends in something where you have repetitive stress like running. And, you know, as my wife joked, I think the furthest I ran and leading up to that, I had done some half marathons before, but in the 10 weeks leading up to that race, the furthest I ran was a 10K. So that's crazy, man. That was it. That's good stuff. That was it. And I had sprints. I would do depth jumps out of super training with Verkachansky and just really a lot of jump rope, a lot of mobility work from Kelly Sturette and didn't have a single injury in that race. Well, look, at the end of the day, the reason we train theoretically is to get better, is to improve performance.

And a lot of people lose concept of, they lose sight of that because they're training every day thinking the reason I train is to train. The reason I'm, you know, I'm a terrible athlete if I don't train hard every day. What kind of athlete am I if I can't get up and do it again? You know, especially in the endurance world. That was my, my, you know, driver for way too long, was every day got to get out there and leave it all on the pavement. And, and, and, you know, it, it, it cost me my running career. I had to quit pretty early at the, at the peak of my ability. And yet I, I, I stayed, I couldn't run anymore at the level of, at a national class level. So I just, when I do it, transitioned over to triathlon because I could ride a bike and I'd like to say I could swim, I could survive through the water. And then,

you know, that was just chasing that endorphin high again, which is not necessarily a good thing. But I still felt compelled to train hard every day. When I took a step back, when I finally retired from all of this pain management, which is basically what endurance racing is. It's not fun. It's just managing pain for a long period of time, managing discomfort for a long period of time. I took a step back and I just said, you know, what's, and I had lost a lot of friends to heart attacks, death, surgical interventions for heart problems because of overtraining. I mean, the number of people from my generation, that era of 70s and early 80s, were people overtrained with, you know, just,

like I say, with reckless abandon, they just would go out and it was all about the miles. They're suffering now, the results of that, whether it's hip replacements, knee replacements, heart surgeries, AFib is an epidemic in my group. I have premature ventricular contractions, PBCs, as a result of my having damaged my left ventricle from just figuring that the best way to train was to go out and max my heart rate three or four days a week for 30 years. Go figure. If you go to the gym and you try to do curls, and you're going to do 125-pound curls, 300 repetitions every day, you know, for two years. Is that going to make your biceps bigger? They're going to get frayed. They're going to get shot. They're going to get, you'll get all sorts of injuries. And yet we think we can do the same thing to the heart,

go out and just make it, max it out every single day. The heart doesn't really have a say in the matter. The heart is like this demand organ that's like reading signals saying, well, I guess I got to pump faster to make more oxygen and carry more fuel to the muscles because this fool is thinking he needs to move his legs faster. And in order to do that, I got to supply the energy and the oxygen. So the heart doesn't really have any nerves the way muscles do to get injured that way or to hurt that way. And as a result, these people tend to overtrain all the time. And so we identified with primal endurance that there's this no man's land, this area that people train in where it's

not slow enough to be generating a good fat-burning aerobic engine. And it's not fast enough to be actually creating any sustained power over time. And all it's doing is beating you up every single day. And that's what runners do. And that's what cyclists do. And that's what triathletes do, you know, to a fault. It's called the black hole of training. It's called the no man's land. I mean, now it's been identified by lots of scientists as sort of antithetical to what you're after. You want to get better. You don't want to just get hammered and get beat up.

So the book, The Primal Endurance, was my offering to all those people who said, hey, Mark, I know what you're saying about this training, but really, I still want to do a marathon or I still want to do an ultra or I still want to do a marathon, or I still want to do an ultra, or I still want to do an Ironman or any kind of triathlon. Can you help me? Can you give me a way to do it that doesn't beat me up,

that doesn't tear me down, but that actually supports my health along the way and makes the process more enjoyable versus waking up every morning and going, oh, geez, I got to do it again, right? So that was really the impetus behind Primal Endurance. And it's, you know, it's just sort of the greatest hits of all that research put together in a way that identifies, first of all, that the primary source of fuel from any endurance activity ought to be fat. You ought to be getting

85, 90% of your fuel from either your stored body fat or the fat that you're consuming during the event. And people would say, well, what about those, like those runners that have eight or 9% body fat? You know, they don't have much fat. And the answer is, yeah, they do. You know, if you weigh, if you weigh, you know, 120 pounds and 8% of you is fat, that's 10 pounds of fat. That's at 3,500 calories per pound. That's 35,000 calories at 100 miles or 100 calories per mile. It's 350 miles you could walk without having to eat. So there's plenty of this energy available on just about everybody. And yet we don't really tap into it. We don't, primarily because in the old days, again,

we used to think it was all about manipulating glycogen in the muscles. And to the extent that you could, yes, you wanted to burn fat, but you could never really get there if you kept cramming more glucose down your gullet every 15 minutes with a gel pack or Gatorade or whatever. Chews, whatever bullshit's for sale. Whatever the bullshit for sale. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think that the paradigm's changed quite a bit in endurance training. A lot of the top guys are now training using that sort of primal endurance model, which is being smart about when they go hard, doing a lot more work in the weight room, doing a lot more mobility work, and then absolutely cleaning up their diets. They're

reshaping their metabolism. They're literally creating metabolic flexibility to be able to tap into those fat stores and tap into that ketone production that actually runs the brain much more efficiently during a long event than if you're dependent on glucose. Yeah. I mean, we touched on a few things here that are really important, I think. One thing that blew me away was this concept that you can lift weights, and if you do it appropriately, it's going to benefit you in endurance sports. And that was really fresh to me because I thought, hey, I just retired from the UFC and I don't mind like devoting myself to this and I'll get strong later. But it was like, oh, I can continue to lift weights if I do it in the

correct manner and it's actually going to benefit me, which it did. So I forget the name. It was the Maffetone method. Can you break that down? That type of training style? So math, that's sort of this maximum aerobic function. That has more to do with the aerobic capacity and developing mitochondrial biogenesis, building more mitochondria as a result of the demand you're putting on your system, but not going into that glucose glycogen phase of training. So you just, that whole concept was based on 180 minus your age. That's the zone two stuff. Okay. Yeah. Okay. The other thing, MSP, maximum sustained power.

There we go. That was a, that's a concept that was really been, that has really been developed by my friend Jacques D'Avore. And the idea is every athletic event requires power. So if you're a power lifter and you're doing one repetition, it's all out and it's going to take four seconds or whatever. If you're a 100-meter runner, it's going to take nine point whatever seconds. If you're a quarter miler, it's going to take, you know, 45 seconds. And as it gets longer, if you're a UFC fighter, it's going to take, you know, five minutes.

You have to sustain, especially if you're in a hole that you're trying to escape or whatever that area of focus is. So it's all about power. Now, what happens is, so we develop power, and then we have to understand that based on the event, we have to distribute that power out over time. So how long can you sustain that power? Now, in cyclists, we see it, you know, you might have great leg power and be able to generate 1,400 watts for a very brief period of time, but how long can you sustain that power and how can you train for that? And you can't really train for it just going out and riding hills. So in the old paradigm of cycling, you would, you know, if you could go up the first hill at 100% of your maximum power and then down and then go up the next hill at 95 and

up the next hill at 90, you know, maybe that was better than somebody who'd go 100, 92, and 87% of max. But what if you could train to go 100, 100, 100 and sustain that power over time, over these hills? How do you do that? Well, you do it by building muscle that is adapted to that particular type of activity. Now, you could say, well, I can go out and do, again, lots of intervals on the bike, but that's, you know, now you're tapping into other systems. If you want to just truly develop real raw power and sustain power over time, there are protocols that you can do. Like you could do 80% of your max, whatever it is, you know, on a hex bar deadlift and do it, uh, uh, to do two repetitions every 10 seconds, you know, and then stop and then do two repetitions. So instead of

doing, um, you know, uh, maybe five reps and stop and wait five minutes and come back and do it again, you do this as long as you can do it. Or it might be a weighted jump, you know, uh, that's based on whatever your max is. If you can start doing these more at 80% of your max and then extend the time. So you're giving yourself a longer rest between repetitions, but you're stringing them together without a rest between the sets. And over time, Jacques has seen athletes, you know, go from like, uh, you know, a one 80, uh, uh, hex bar deadlift, which, you know, isn't, isn't that impressive, right. To anybody good for a runner, but for a cyclist, it's like, you know, to, you know, and being able to do one of those

or two of those to being able to do, um, you know, eight minutes of, of, uh, you know, two repetitions every, every 10 or 15 seconds, 15 seconds with sufficient rest in between. And then that becomes that maximum sustained power. Then when you get on the bike, you really feel it. You really notice because you've done it in combination with all of the math work, the maximum aerobic function work that you've done on the long distance stuff. So it's a, you know, it's a complex equation with some variables in it that you've done on the long distance stuff. So it's a complex equation with some variables in it that you have to pay attention to. And it's better if you pay attention

to all these variables than just pick one out and say, I'm just going to do the weights, but I'm not going to do the low-end training. Or I'm just going to do the training and the weights, but I'm not going to do the diet. You know, you really, it works best if you put them all together. Yeah, no doubt. And you touched a little bit on, well, not a little bit, you definitely touched on

the ketogenic diet in Primal Endurance. And then, of course, from there, you have the Keto Reset Diet, which, and I've, there's, everyone and their mom has a keto book right now. So to stand out in that space, I mean, it's by far my favorite book. And you incorporated all the greats that are in that space right now from Dr. Dominic D'Agostino is fairly well known to guys like, I think it's Louis Villasenor from Keto Gains that Rob Wolf's helped raise the consciousness of who's really been big into targeted keto and how to gain muscle mass while on a ketogenic diet. And I think that's huge because as I got into this space, I was looking at, you know, 100 mile, the Western States, 100 guys and people like that that are better doing ketosis. And you're like, well, I don't want to look like a beanpole. I like having size. I like having strength. How do I manage the two of those? And I think your book really pieces together a lot of the newer concepts that have come

out around ketosis. How has it impacted your life? And what are some of the key takeaways from that book you want people to know about? So, you know, I was the primal guy for 15 years and I've always maintained my muscle mass and I've maintained my energy levels and I've, you know, I slept well and I've had a great life living primally. So it's like, why, if it's not broken, you know, why try and fix it? But about four or five years ago, I started reading about people who are keto. Peter Attia was a good example of that.

Sammy Inconin, who's a friend of mine, another great outlier who just decided he was going to try this keto thing and train under that premise. And, you know, I've been chasing performance my whole life and I'm willing to experiment. So I thought, well, I'll try a keto program myself for a couple of months and see what happens.

And, you know, lo and behold, I lost a little bit more body fat. I was able to maintain muscle. I would say I could even put some on. I slept better, which was interesting to me. You know, I had more, you know, a little bit more mental clarity, although some of these things are really nuanced.

You know, you want to look for them. You know, a little bit of a decrease in inflammation. I thought, well, okay, there's a, you know, you, you want to look for them. You know, a little bit of a decrease in inflammation. I thought, well, okay, there's a, you know, there's another level of magnitude. We call it next level shit at, you know, Primal Blueprint. It's like, what's, what's next level for us? But mainly I thought, you know, if, if I had the sorts of results that I had thinking that everything was fine, imagine what results people might have who've been struggling with weight loss under a traditional paleo paradigm or under a traditional primal or ancestral or Weston A. Price. People who live in pain, people who have just chronic inflammation.

Myself coming out of fighting with all the traumatic brain injury Like I finally felt like my brain worked properly. Yeah. So that kind of led me to think that keto, and we can get into all the nuances around keto, ketogenesis, ketosis, ketoacidosis, but keto, which has now become sort of the thematic word, that keto was a good tool, a strategy that people could use to reset their metabolism. So for me, it's not about creating ketones. It's about metabolic flexibility. It's about how much energy can I get all day long from any substrate that's available. So how much, you know, from the fat on the plate of food that I'm eating right now, from the fat on my body, because I'm not eating now, from the carbohydrates on my plate, from the glycogen in my muscles, from the glucose in my bloodstream, from the ketones my liver's generating, from maybe even the amino acids because I've run out of everything else. But do I have that flexibility to cruise through my day and not notice a difference in how I feel based on a swing in macros one way or the other? So that's what I call true metabolic flexibility. So most people that, well, most

people you and I know these days are in that space, but most of Americans are in what we call a very confined space of being a sugar burner. They've been adept at consuming carbohydrates and then burning them in whatever activity they're doing and then reconsuming carbohydrates and then going on this roller coasteraster all day long, every day, their whole lives. So they never really develop metabolic flexibility because they're always presenting themselves a fresh supply of carbohydrate.

You know, people get up, they have breakfast, you know, glass of juice, toast, maybe, you know, and or a bagel and or waffles and or pancakes. You know, lunch is a sandwich with chips or fries or whatever, or a burger with a bun. And, you know, snacks are always pretty much sugary snacks. Dinner, again, mashed potatoes, you know, so there's a lot. Pasta, rice. Pasta, rice, yeah. Yep. So, there's a lot of carbs in

most people's lives. And so, they never really, because they're always presenting this fuel to the body in the form that turns into glucose, and the body wants to either store it or get rid of it or burn it, we never really tap into our fat stores. And so over years, we gain a pound or two or 17 a year. And it's an insidious weight gain. And it's a result of having lost this metabolic flexibility. Conversely, if you develop this metabolic flexibility, now you see that you can take fat out of your body fat stores and use it for energy whenever you want. You see a decrease in inflammation. You see a trend toward an ideal body composition. So you do burn off stored body fat. Probably the most compelling part of this is hunger, appetite, and cravings

no longer run your life. You know, you lose, you know, I think people sometimes are a little bit skeptical when I say you lose your appetite, but you actually lose that ravenous part of your appetite that says, I gotta eat. If I, you know, we can't meet at noon today, Kyle, because if our meeting goes from 12 to 1.30, that's lunch.

And I can't not eat lunch. So, you know, people have used this as an excuse to sort of orchestrate their schedules for, you know, the last several decades. So reestablishing metabolic flexibility, that's the key. That's the goal. That's the end game. It's not how many ketones can you register on a meter or how much acetone can you show on a breath meter. It's how do you feel? As Rob has said for 15 years, Rob Wolf, how do you perform and feel? And that's what I'm after. So the Keto Reset book was to take the concept of a ketogenic diet and dramatically reducing carbs, and then gently forcing that body into that reset where it turns on genes that build the metabolic machinery

to burn fats more efficiently. It turns on genes that build the metabolic machinery to use ketones much more efficiently. Because even if you're a sugar burner and you don't eat for three meals, you'll make ketones. And believe me, your friends will let you know that you're making ketones.

Because your breath. Because your breath and your sweat and whatever. But you haven't, the brain hasn't adapted to that fuel source. And it takes a couple of days, a couple of weeks in some cases to do that. So anybody can do this. But once you, and the keto reset diet

is basically a six week dive into keto. And once you've done that, you don't need to live your life in ketosis the rest of the time. It's a tool to reset your metabolism to achieve this metabolic flexibility. And from there, you might have, like I have days where I have 210 grams of carbs. And then I have days where I don't eat anything. And then I have days where I eat 30 grams of carbs. And then I have days where I eat three small meals. Then I have days where I don't eat anything. And then I have days where I eat 30 grams of carbs. And then I have days where I eat three small meals. Then I have days where I eat one big meal. I eat so fractally. And that's sort of my new thing. And again, I always go back to,

I learned this from Art Devaney. You know who Art Devaney is? I've heard of the name. Yeah. So Art was the original sort of caveman, even before Lauren Cordain, you know, he was talking paleolithic. He was talking, you know, all of these methods by which we can emulate our hunter-gatherer genetic experience, bring it into modern day and benefit from that style. He got sort of, you know, put down by people who were envisioning, you know, cavemen in pinstripe suits and camping out in your backyard and hunting your neighbor's pets for food. And, you know, it's like, no, it's, there are ways in which we can adopt some of these strategies. And so this idea

of fractal eating, not having three square meals a day, but sort of mixing and matching when you eat and how much you eat and the macros within the meals. Once you've developed the metabolic flexibility, that style actually enhances the metabolic flexibility. And so you don't need to stay keto. Again, it's really how do I feel? And I hear keto, supposed keto experts who say, you know, well, you know, if I have 75 grams of carbs one day,

I get kicked out of ketosis and I feel like crap for three days. I'm like, that's not how we're supposed to work. You know, if our ancestors a million years ago, you know, were keto because they, you know, didn't eat for a couple of days, then they came across a stash of berries and they overate the berries. I'm pretty certain they didn't eat for a couple of days. Then they came across a stash of berries and they overate the berries. I'm pretty certain they didn't feel like shit for the next three days and decide- They weren't complaining about finding the berries. And decide not to go hunting or whatever.

I'm really sluggish from this carb coma. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Natural fruit that I just found. Yeah, so anyway, so that's my new theme. Even since the Keto Reset diet has been used at as a strategy to achieve metabolic flexibility. And that's really what I think is my wish for everyone who follows me and listens to me. That's beautiful. And it's something that stuck out to me because I listen to a lot of people in this space and there are,

as with anything in life, like vegans, there's a lot of people in this space and there are, as with anything in life, like vegans, there's a lot of dogmatic approaches to how this is portrayed. And I've heard many top level people in the keto space say, this is a diet most people should do for the rest of their life. Yeah. And I think that's total bullshit.

Yeah. Right? But similar to Art Devaney and what you're talking about, like what can we extract from our ancestors and the way they lived that we can remodel? Well, if you think prior to refrigeration and prior to shipping containers, bringing in boatloads of bananas from Panama and berries from Mexico in the wintertime, there's a large population on the earth that didn't have access to carbohydrates every single winter.

So picking times in the year, and it doesn't have access to carbohydrates every single winter. So picking times in the year, and it doesn't always have to match winter time. I think there's research from Dr. Sachin Panna that we do better with carbohydrates in the summer. Most people do, blood sugar wise and things of that nature. But if we just chose to do a six-week reset every winter time, I think that would solve a lot of the issues with people. And just to touch again, on the way that you eat right now, it's very similar to the way my wife and I eat. And I would say we're keto-ish, keto 90% of the time. And then like last night, we had a ton of roasted beets with goat cheese. And I blew into an acetone breath meter that got one of these new little jobs that's Bluetooth to the phone, and I was still in ketosis.

So it's not an issue, and we're obviously active enough. too long and you start to feel like I can't eat that thing or I'm missing out on life because my friends are ordering pasta and I'm stuck eating a burger on top of lettuce, that's not going to last long for you. It might last six months initially, but it's a very hard thing to keep a hold of when you allow yourself room to say, all right, you know what? I haven't eaten carbs in a while. I'm going to have carbs. I worked out really hard today. I can afford to eat some really clean carbs. Maybe I'll throw some berries into some keto pudding or something tonight for dinner, and that's okay. Yeah. Look, the idea that we're engaging in this process of restriction to establish metabolic flexibility,

there's a fair amount of discipline involved in that. And I'd suggest people try that. But at the end of the day, I'm doing this because I want a better life. The theme to my company is Live Awesome. So Primal Blueprint, Live Awesome, that's been our theme. How do we get the greatest amount of enjoyment, satisfaction, contentment, pleasure, fulfillment, whatever you want to call it, from every possible moment. That includes when you're eating, pal. So when we

get to, you know, the end of the day and we're like, I can't have this, I can't have that, my friends are having this, you know, I'm like, you know, that, why would you even go there? You know, you want to enjoy your life. There's no reason that you can't be keto and have three bites of that cheesecake, not 33, maybe, and maybe 33, because I'm not going to judge. But to say I can't have, I can't do, I can't whatever, we're here to enjoy life. That's really what we've been given this time on earth. And, you know, I think, you know, for a higher purpose, if we want to serve and enrich other people's lives, that's what I want to do. But I also want to be a little hedonistic in the process, right? I want to, you know, enjoy sunshine.

I want to enjoy good health. I want to enjoy great sex. I want to enjoy great food. I mean, all these things are, they're like my Darwin given right, right? So the idea behind metabolic flexibility is just that. It's like, I'm setting you up so you can have some of this stuff once in a while. My wife and I have a restaurant that we go to in Miami Beach. And every once in a while we go and we get the pasta dish. And it is- I like how you looked around the room first.

It is unbelievable. And yet I know my limitations. So we get it. It's got a really creamy, truffle-based kind of Alfredo sauce on it. And we do the gluten-free penne, but it's so damn good. Now, I could say, look, I'm the keto guy. No, I can't have that. Why? I mean, I want to enjoy my life. And so we go, they have a big piece of salmon, and they have this, and we split it down the middle,

and we each have half, and it's great. And we do sort of stumble home, like, oh my God. But not in a bad way. It was like, that was so good. And, you know, we're not going to do it every day. We're just going to do, you know, as we see appropriate, given our desire to enjoy the most of life possible.

So, you know, again, if you have like somebody's, you're at a birthday party and somebody's got a great piece of triple chocolate cake, are you going to say, no, I'm keto? I mean, if you are, if you're deep in keto, God bless you, go for it. But if you've developed this metabolic flexibility, say, yeah, I'll have a couple of bites of that, sure. Yeah, your weight's on point, your inflammation's down, you're feeling good in life, you've trained that day, why not? And if you know where your limits are, like it's easy. Look, we're wired to eat sweets, right? That's part of this. The beauty of how this all works is we're wired to

overeat, particularly sweet things, because we have this amazing system that takes all that excess energy and converts it into stored energy on our body fat. So instead of having to carry five-gallon cans of gasoline around with us everywhere we go, we have this amazing ability to intentionally overeat. That's the wiring. Convert it to stored energy in the form of fat, deposit it conveniently in the easiest places for a bipedal organism to carry that right over the hips and waist and ass and top of the thighs. It's such an elegant design, right? Problem is, most of us are really good at that and then not so good at actually combusting that fuel when it's required. So, where was I going with that? Anyway, this idea of we can have a little bit of, if you know your limitations and you know what you can get away with, then I say go for it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I like that. I think it gives people, and certainly for those that are, you know, you gain 100 pounds during pregnancy and you want to get that 100 pounds back off. Yeah. Sure. You can be diligent for that time period. But once you get back to that goal weight, then, you know, being able to live a little, being able to enjoy life, being able to understand like, this is all give and take. And as long as it's within reason,

I'm totally fine to do that and to live the life that I want to live. I know where it's going with that. So, so we're wired to overeat. So then somebody big gives you a giant piece of cheesecake, right? And you go, oh, well, that must be what they think is a serving. I guess I get to eat the whole thing because it's a serving. You know, and somebody else gives you a little sliver of that cheesecake. Well, I guess that's what they think is a serving. Who's to say that three or four bites out of that isn't a serving? It is. You just, you don't have to finish the whole thing. And, you know, there's a, but your brain is wired to finish the whole thing, which is why so many people are like, well, they gave me permission. That's what they think is a side. Like if you go to Cheesecake

Factory or Duke's or something like that, and they give you a quarter of a cake. Claim jumpers. Yeah. Fucking six pound dessert. Yeah. And people finish it, you know? Yeah. You know, because, well, I only had one serving. So anyway, so it's interesting how we, you know, we see what we can get away with and just to understand where that line is for a lot of people. Because we do tend to see what we can get away with. And there are a lot of people who would be well-served by going, doing a keto reset or, you reset or training a different way. But because what they've done up to now hasn't manifested itself yet in gross overweight or horrendous pain, then they're not compelled to make a switch because they're like, I'm already getting away with it.

I'm already doing fine. I look fine. I got a six-pack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not worried about that shit. Yeah, exactly. Or I got a two-pack or I. I got a six pack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not worried about that shit. Exactly. Or I got a two pack or I have four pack or whatever. Yeah. So let's circle back then to food. Obviously you guys just sold Primal Kitchen to Kraft Heinz.

And I think it was for 200 million. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. And the good news is, I mean, a lot of people are just fucking elephant in the room is, oh, you guys sold out to the big company and the big company is going to change it.

And we're going to end up having a shittier version of that. And that's completely not the case. I think that's the knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people in the organic food industry want to believe, but it's not quite the case anymore. And we see giant companies all the time buying up smaller companies that are coming up that have a niche market that have done a very good job for themselves. And oftentimes, they leave those companies the same. Yeah. So talk a bit about that transition and how they've wanted to keep your company the way that it is. Look, the senior management at Kraft Heinz don't have 50 years experience in food.

They're business people. They're really good business people. I've gotten to know them very well. And they identified that we were stealing market share in all the categories that we were in from some of their iconic brands over the years. And the reason we were stealing market share is because we're appealing to a customer who is looking for a clean label. And we were the fastest growing, you know, condiment last year. We're fastest growing, you know, in Whole Foods. We're the number one condiment in Whole Foods, number one mayonnaise on Amazon every day for three years.

You know, we had five of the top seven best-selling dollar-volume salad dressings in the Natural Channel last year. I mean, we are demonstrating tremendous growth within that segment of the population that is looking for better-for-you products. Kraft Heinz, they saw that. They recognize that. And they go, we want that. We want to be able to say we're making the best products in the world. So it would be so ridiculous of them to buy a little brand, because in the overall scheme of things, we're a tiny brand with almost no traction thus far outside of those people who shop with an eye toward looking at labels. Why would they take a tiny bit and then mess with it and then dilute it and destroy it? It's just, it makes no sense. So people who have that sort of

knee-jerk reaction, it's like, okay, I guess we'll have to show you. So when Kraft Heinz bought us, they basically said, look, we're not going to touch you for at least a year, probably two years. So I stay on for two years. I get to say what's in every product. I help design every product. My name and likeness are on the label in perpetuity. So, it's like going to be me for the future. This is my legacy. I'm not going to let that get screwed up. Every employee stayed. There were, you know, no employees were fired. Not only that, they were like, please stay on. Crafts is saying, please have your guys stay on because we love what you're doing. We want to watch what you're doing. We want to learn from what you're doing. So, we keep our

offices in Oxnard. Literally, we're, you know, we're actually owned by Springboard, which is their investment branch, their investment arm. So that's really the connection there. And it's been a month and it's been great. We get along fabulously with all the people on the Kraft Heinz side. We're having a blast continuing to do what we do. Sales are growing. We just had a big product innovation meeting last week in Chicago. And the number of things that we have in the pipeline that are going to be just blow your mind about how cool they're going to be. Very excited. So the next, we have a real strategy for the next two years. Awesome. That's very exciting. So you're going to obviously going

to stay on for the next two years and continue to help that flower into everything it can be with the power of a giant company like Kraft Heinz behind you. What else do you have going on in your life? Are you working on a new book? Are you coaching people? What's... Yeah. So I'm always working on a new book. So I have one coming out at the end of 2019. It's an extension of this whole ketogenic... It's called Keto Longevity now, but we might adopt a different title because we're looking at how we speak to that group of people who is looking for not just living longer, but living better. And then we have the Primal Health Coach Institute. And that's something I started four and a half years ago. This is my opportunity to take what I know and all of the sort of intellectual property that I've gathered in here over the past three decades and create a program where people can learn to become coaches, primal health coaches.

So it's a certification program. It's an online learning experience. So you register. The entire course is online. We've had over 3,000 people go through the course now. People love it. We've had over 3,000 people go through the course now. People love it. We have doctors. We've had dentists, periodontists, you know, nurses assistants. Every, you know, in addition to personal trainers, in addition to, you know, women in their 60s who just wanted

something interesting and new to do and wanted to make a difference in the world. It's an amazing opportunity for people who are interested in really doing a deep dive into primal, paleo, ancestral, and even keto, and then take that information and be able to work one-on-one with people or work in a corporate health setting or work in a physician's office. I mean, one of the biggest frustrations I have with medicine today is doctors just have no time. They sort of identify the problem too late, and then they find Band-Aid solutions for it, when the real issue here is how do we prevent these problems in the first place? Or once we have these problems, how do we address them without having to go down that drug route, right? So this is a chance for people to sort of get in between

the physician's sort of dire warnings about you need to eat better and you need to exercise more. And we can't tell you how. And we can't tell you how. We don't have time. I can't, I don't have time to tell you how. I got seven minutes. Yeah.

Here's a prescription. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, so we just felt that there was a really great opportunity here for people to fill that void and to start working one-on-one and, you know, to be able to go into someone's house and do a pantry purge and clean out their pantry and get rid of all the crap and then go shopping with them and fill the pantry or fill the refrigerator up with stuff that really, you know, they can, they can eat as much as they want when whenever they want. Go to the gym and sort of observe a workout or create a workout. You know, all these things, go to a restaurant a restaurant and show how you can order off of any menu

and actually not be sabotaging, you know, your goals or your plans. It's real life stuff. And it's been very gratifying to see all these coaches, these primal health coaches, you know, come to some events. There'll be probably 150 or 200 of them at Paleo FX this year. Okay, very cool. In fact, we're having a master class at Paleo FX. So every once or twice a year, I have a three-day master class where I lead along with Christine Hasler, who's our coach's coach. We do three intensive days of advanced coaching techniques, business building techniques, because we want people to actually make a living doing this. Yeah. So it's been a lot of fun and I'm going to be able to spend a little bit more time now with that particular endeavor. Very cool. Yeah. Christine Hassler is a friend of ours.

Obviously, she's been a guest on Aubrey's show a number of times. Good friend, but that's awesome. It's so awesome to finally get to sit down and connect with you. Is there anything else you want to let people know about coming their way or? I mean, I think, you know, it's just so much stuff going on. You know, MarksDailyApple.com is the blog. It's still the original, you know, the OG blog there. And the Primal Blueprint is my first book. Keto Reset Diet, again, available wherever books are sold. Primal Kitchen Foods, pretty much in every store, you know, in the country right now. So if you haven't tried the salad dressings or the mayonnaise, you should give it a shot. We just won an award for not just the

best new condiment at Expo East, which is a big food show, but out of the thousands of exhibitors, we won the Consumer Choice Award for every product in the show, which is our organic unsweetened ketchup. Yeah. Have you tried it? Yes. Yeah, okay.

Our son loves it. He's three and a half. Yeah, he totally digs it. We made it for you and your son. Phenomenal. Yeah, cool. Well, it's been excellent having you on, brother, and we'll run it back here in the future.

Appreciate it. Thanks, Mark. Take care. Well, hey, thank you guys for tuning in. Please hit us up on social media. Let us know what you think of the show. I'm at Kingsboo on Twitter and Instagram. A lot of people, I noticed,

not many people are writing me online about podcasts. Unless I'm a guest on someone else's show, then I'll get people writing me. But write us about these podcasts. Let us know what you liked about it, what you didn't like, what you agree with, what you don't agree with. If you got questions, I got you as best I can. And as always 10% off all supplements at on it.com slash podcast.