Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 518 - Intermittent Eating - Mark Sisson

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Mark Sisson recommends eating two meals a day and doesn't want us to call it Fasting nor Intermittent Fasting, rather call it Intermittent Eating. Mark Sisson is founder of Primal Nutrition, LLC, and Primal Kitchen, LLC. Mark is 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, he officially became a New York Times bestselling author with The Keto Reset Diet, which reached the #1 overall bestseller among all books on amazon.com for two days. Check out Mark Sisson's, "Two Meals A Day" Book: https://amzn.to/2Sk9ESV Keto Reset Diet: https://amzn.to/33ei3cJ Primal Blueprint: https://amzn.to/3xEVv37 Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

This episode is brought to you by Element Electrolytes. Now, Andrew, you recently started doing some fasting and you noticed a difference with Element by adding it to your fast. So how has it helped? Yeah, it's actually helped tremendously. So when I switched to a like strict high carb, low fat diet, I was eating on a like a more like scheduled regular basis. So like I would have breakfast where I normally wouldn't have breakfast. Then I would have kind of like something in between lunch, something in between dinner, that sort of thing. And so when I decided that I wanted to kind of try to cut a little bit, I started implementing fasting again. And dude, it was a lot harder than I remember. And I think it's because I was used to eating so often. So when I started implementing Element, it's really as simple for me as like, it kind of almost felt like I was cheating on my fast. Mark mentions you have to occupy your mind. And that's really what it was for me. I just, I had something, you know, something with really

good flavor, but it wasn't going to break my fast. But also like, it just kind of rejuvenated me. It sort of like gave me extra fuel to go further in my fast. Now that's kind of like the bro science approach to it. But for you yourself, you and Mark talk about some of the, like the, I don't want to say scientifical benefits, but there is something more there than what I'm just saying. Well, it technically does give you something to actually make fasting easier because a lot of the times when you're fasting, right, you will have those pumps of hunger during the day. But a lot of the times also you have pumps of hydration. So if you're not adequately hydrated, right, you're going to mix up your feeling of lack of hydration with feelings of hunger, which will make you want to go eat. But with element, obviously you're getting

the adequate amounts of sodium, potassium, magnesium, which will have you actually be adequately hydrated. Meaning that now you won't get those signals mixed up. You won't be feeling hungry as often because you won't be mixing up your signals of hydration or feeling lack of hydration and hunger. So it actually will help you get through a fast much easier. Yeah, the hydration, that definitely makes a ton of sense. If you guys are implementing fasting

and you really want an easier way to go about things, we highly recommend that you guys check out Element Electrolytes. And you can do so by heading over to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Check out the value bundles. We highly recommend that you pick up a watermelon flavor, at least one box, maybe two, maybe three, maybe four. Either way, you're going to pay for three of those boxes and get one of them absolutely free. Again, that's at drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Head over there right now. What up, Power Project crew? This is Josh Setledge, aka SettleGate,

here to introduce you to our next guest, Mark Sisson. Mark Sisson is the founder of Primal Nutrition LLC and Primal Kitchen LLC. Mark is the author of numerous books, including The Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal-slash-paleo movement back in 2009. Later in 2017, he officially became a New York Times bestselling author with his book, The Keto Reset Diet. The Keto Reset Diet reached number one overall bestseller among all books on amazon.com for two days. Mark has written several other books, including popular primal themed cookbooks and lifestyle books. He is also the publisher of marksdailyapple.com,

the number one ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category. On a side note, Mark is also an Olympic trial qualifying runner who back in the day would run well over 100 miles every week as part of his training. But that's a different story for a different time. Please enjoy this conversation with our guest, Mark Sisson. And when I say we, I'm talking about myself. Can't stop eating, no matter what about myself. Can't stop eating. No matter what we do. Pretty much just eating meat, though.

Hey, where do you want to go to eat? Yeah, or what do you feel like doing? I don't know. Let's go grab something to eat. That is true. Want to get DoorDash? Don't need to let us go anymore. We need some snacks.

We're going to watch a movie. We're going to visually intake intake something so we need something to eat what why is that a thing it's really pleasurable popcorn in a movie i mean you can't like there's nothing better i guess you could but you like don't get together and like masturbate you know so uh what the fuck else you gonna do are we are we rolling yeah we're rolling this is really where we began i just tried to to get things out of pleasure. You woke up and chose this today, huh? I did. Okay.

Well, it's always on my mind. Right? I mean, yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It's either my own parts or somebody else's parts or food. Yeah. Maybe a little bit of lifting, I guess.

To be safe. It's only your wife's parts that are on your mind because you are a faithful man oh well obviously that's implied that's a given yeah there's a wedding ring right here exactly so we're gonna say somebody contract and it's california i like that you said it's implied oh yeah oof hey y'all know Elon Musk

already has five kids no I didn't know that it's like five boys damn he's pumping it out yeah he's been

pumping it out I thought he only had the A- whatever that was coming what about he's gonna be on Saturday Night Live I think this Saturday

I can't wait for Dogecoin that's gonna be sick that's gonna be awesome that's gonna be awesome yeah i think he's just gonna like make fun of himself the whole time which i think will be hilarious and everybody like that you heard about that dogecoin shit right okay you don't know what dogecoin is i don't know what it is it's a meme it's a meme coin that's been exploding okay so dogecoin is this coin that like it's it's freaking uh you know this thing is like a little, but it used to be super cheap and something happened in like January where it blew up.

So it went from like point zero zero seven cents to like 20 cents and then 38 cents a share and Elon Musk and we're hopefully we can get to a dollar. Hello, people are going to make a hell of a lot of money and then $10 on one day Aren't people randomly like making all kinds of things like yeah, there's hella altcoins. Yeah, like the tweets and stuff They're all expensive. Have you guys heard about some of that? No, he might be talking about NFTs Yeah, people like buying like I guess I don't even know like gifts or memes sort of thing But it's still different and then there's now it's called bit cl guess, I don't even know, like GIFs or memes sort of thing, but it's still different. And then there's now, it's called BitClout. I don't know if you know about this one. BitClout?

BitClout, yeah. Oh, God. So it's basically like Twitter of crypto, but you and I can sign up. Well, I already have, and the IamAndrewZ coin is worth 40 bucks right now. Nice. What? I have no idea like i don't yeah i i didn't even invest in myself but i i posted something and then all money on yourself son yeah somebody else has way more faith in me but oh my gosh that's really cool and ethereum all-time

high holler at your boy anyway i can't wait for you on most of us now that'll be fun yeah i have no dogecoin so i'm not excited yeah anyway how do we stop eating so much food by eating plants ah there you go yeah no no that's the secret actually i got a friend of mine got this for me because i i have a few plants at home now and my thing is like i don't eat plants because i want them to live so i choose to eat meat because i'm in favor of saving the environment and not eating our plants that are working so hard to give us oxygen plants have feelings i mean don't some people like uh play music for plants and shit and like sing to them and stuff right my wife talks to our plants yeah see that's fucking awesome so stop killing plants kill animals yeah. Yeah. Listen to Mark Wahlberg. What was that movie called?

Woo! No! That was totally online. It was online. It was online. It was like eight feet short. Sorry for whoever listened on audio and had to try and shoot. They're fucking...

Next studio will have a trash can cam. Oh my God. I wouldn't have reacted quick enough. I'm liking today's show because it's great. We've had Mark Sisson on the show before. Obviously, a lot of people know who he is. He's been on Joe Rogan. He flipped the whole paleo kind of movement, him and Rob Wolf.

They flipped that movement upside down. He's reached millions and millions of people with Primal Blueprint. And then he wrote a, a book on kind of like a keto reset type diet. And he's just kind of delivered a lot of information on primal eating. And then he started a company called primal kitchen, which he's built up and sold to craft. And so the guy's a beast.

And then plus he's 67 years old. Doesn't look it. He doesn't look at it at all. And he's an amazing shape. And I think, I don't, maybe he still plays. I don't know if he still plays, but for a long time, he was playing ultimate Frisbee, which from what I hear, I've never played it and barely have ever seen it. But, uh, I heard it's very difficult.

A lot of sprinting. I guess it's a little bit like soccer, just a ton of running. And, uh, anyway, he's an absolute beast. And I can't wait to talk to him today because we can maybe learn some information about how we just eat way too much. I think most of us could probably reduce our food intake by at least a good 10% and manage that without really being hungry. You know, I think that's, maybe that's a little too high for a couple of people that already have things intact, but I think for most people, I think they could probably lower it without feeling really, really hungry.

And I wouldn't even associate a percentage with it necessarily. I just would try to eat a little bit less. But he wrote a book more recently. We're talking about eating two meals a day and we hear the OMAD diet. We've heard people talk about eating three times a day. And yes, it is a little bit of a gimmicky thing where he's just trying to introduce an idea and concept. But his main point is, let's try to basically fast without getting way too hungry.

And so that's how he has also come upon eating two meals a day. I also would have the understanding that Mark Sisson is not a big person. He's not huge. He's not heavy. He's probably 5'10", and he's not huge. He's not heavy. Uh, he's probably five 10 and he's probably about one 70, something like that. Maybe, maybe five, nine, one 60, something like that. But he's in shape, keeps a lot of muscle mass on, but he probably doesn't need a lot of food.

So if you're six, four and you're two 60, then, uh, you might need a slightly different plan, but I would love for you guys to, when you're listening today, to understand Marxism, in my opinion, talks very general. So we're not going to get real deep into the weeds of like science, although he knows that pretty well. But he's just going to be proposing a lot of information and ideas on just how you can simply kind of fast through the day, utilize some intermittent fasting without getting too hungry. When you said gimmicky, what exactly do you mean? He's just like, fasting is a hot button topic right now. Is that what you meant?

Yeah. I just meant like, it's just some wording. Like when he did the keto reset, it's like, you know, it's just, just a way to try to get people to invest in,

in opening the damn book. Yeah. And I think when people see something like two meals a day, they're like, Oh, I want to, you know, I want to check that out.

Or what, what is this all about? And that's not what the book is all, the book's not saying like, you should only eat two meals a day for the most optimal health. He's just proposing an idea of intermittent fasting is fantastic. The problem with any sort of fasting is that you can get too hungry. A big problem with hunger is that you can run into cravings. And then how do we kind of figure out a way to kind of stave that off a little bit? And hunger is that you can run into cravings. And then how do we kind of figure out a way to kind of stave that off a little bit? And you can, you can do that with two meals a day, uh, stuff we talk about on the show with, you know, getting in fiber, protein,

things like that. The thing is, it's like two meals a day. Isn't really that extreme. Like, cause you know, when, when we think about what people typically talk about, like the most normal thing that you've probably heard since you were a kid was breakfast, lunch and dinner, three meals a day, two meals a day is literally just tacking one meal off of that. A lot of people say, I don't have time for breakfast. I don't even eat it. So that would lead you to think that people are at like two meals a day. But this would be more like two meals a day with no snacks. Exactly. And that's that's where, you know, that's where a lot of the change happens.

But I mean, we talk about having no snacks on Exactly. And that's, that's where, you know, that's where a lot of the change happens. But I mean, we talk about having no snacks on this podcast a lot. It adds up to a lot of unnecessary calories. Um, I mean, quest bars and stuff like that, but all that stuff is pretty cool, but like it can really make a dent in terms of,

especially if you're trying to drop body fat, it can make a big old dent. What do you think about just kind of flaring up your taste buds? You mean making them real happy? Like you eat you like having something that's super uh like yeah super palatable yeah whether it's like kind of healthy or not do you think like i think i think for some i don't think it's a great idea uh and and i don't mean like forever and again what we're going to talk with mark sisson today about is just even being happy he talks about that side of it too so he likes to drink wine he likes to eat bread he likes to eat some different things here what we're going to talk with Mark Sisson today about is just even being happy. He talks about that side of it too. So he likes to drink wine.

He likes to eat bread. He likes to eat some different things here and there, but he just eats really small amounts of it. But I've had issues with myself personally. If I flip those taste buds the wrong way, then I seem to be kind of screwed. I don't have that problem anymore. So that's the thing.

I think we talked about diet stages. Like when you're at the start and you're getting everything going and your palate maybe isn't used to eating a lot of meat and not eating a lot of really, you know, really palatable junk foods. It might not be the best idea to keep those things included. But for me nowadays, I've noticed that I can go out, have some fun food or whatever, go to the next day and feel okay. Because that food is something that I don't have often. Right? So like, oh yeah, it's great in the moment, but I don't feel the next day of craving anymore, which I really did use that used to be pretty tough. Not saying it's non-existent, but it's something that's very, very easy to deal with. So in my opinion, like if you're at the beginning stages of your diet and you're just starting off,

switching things out, taking different types of foods out of your diet, it's probably not the best idea to keep reintroducing these things as cheat meals or cheat days or whatever. But as you get used to what you're eating, as you continue eating healthy and healthier, you might be able to get away with it or you might not ever be able to get away with it and you just got to be okay with it i think the two things that i think would be really helpful for a lot of folks would be to work your way into not have not having to track i'm not necessarily saying anything bad about tracking at all just saying i think that would be a great idea that way you're making better food choices and if you're making really excellent food choices there's probably not a lot of great reasons to track a top sirloin, a piece of chicken, some white fish or any fish for that matter. And so, you know, work your, I think working your way away from that, which would also mean doing that for a period of time so that you understand the amount of food that you're eating.

And then the second thing would be to work on, I really think that intermittent fasting is really, really crucial. So figuring out a way to eat. This is all, this is most of what we're going to be talking about today is in terms of weight loss and managing body weight in some fashion. And so if someone's on a bulk, you might want to do some different things. think intermittent fasting to assist with dealing with your hunger, getting used to it, and not buying into the fact that you are just, you know, so hungry that you can't control yourself. Another side of it, too, is what I'd love for people to work on is to really,

really think about the flavor of your food a little bit more so than just considering what the food is. I think every time you go to eat a certain food, you kind of automatically associate it with like being, it just being so good. But I'd like you to challenge yourself a little bit more and really like think about the flavors that are in that food. I have found personally that there's a lot less flavor in things than I thought. And they don't taste as good as I, as good as I thought either. There's other things on the flip side of that, that taste better than I thought when I paid attention. Examples?

An example could be something like some arugula, some spinach. It has like a nutty flavor, even some plain like almonds. I think sometimes you can't really, you don't taste those things because we're kind of desensitized as opposed to, let's say like a McDonald's cheeseburger or French fries or French fries is something I looked at like a long time ago. And I was like, you know, I really don't like these. I do like the salt. I do like when they're warm. I like a little bit of ketchup.

But after I just like nachos after I have them for a bit, I'm like, I'm pretty much over it. So I could eat a few of them and I can discard it. But at this point, I i'm like i don't really want that i don't even really need that no you you're right on that although when it comes to like spinach and stuff i don't know if i could ever really uh get used to that i used to drink that so um gross yeah it is what it is but no that, that does make a lot of sense. Now, let me ask you this. When it, when it comes to people cooking their food, um, do you think like, is there any merit in holding back seasoning or flavor in any type of way as far as your palate's concerned?

I think, I think there can be, you know, depending on the person, you know, because you, you can still get yourself into a position of overeating, just like any keto snack. I think we can all agree, if you're trying to lose body weight, it would be in your best interest, as much as I love the people at Quest, as much as I love Legendary Products, as much as I love all the people involved in that community, and people introducing like Allulose and some of these things into the market, to where these things taste really good. And they're actually pretty cool. Like if you're diabetic, you don't want your blood sugar to spike.

There's a lot of merit to these things, but I think we'd all agree that like it would be in our best interest to not eat those foods because they're going to encourage overeating. So if you take barbecue sauce and dump it all over something, that, that's what, this is what I'm talking about with investigating the actual flavor of your food. Like steak with a small amount of like butter on it or just some salt. Yeah. And maybe some pepper or maybe some seasoning that you like that doesn't add calories. You might find that good enough to plow through the food in a good, efficient way, in a way to get enough protein, but you're not like, uh, you're not eating it like in, in some sort of uncontrolled fashion as if it was, uh, Doritos or ice cream or something like that.

Or you could grab, what's that, that barbecue sauce brand? Oh, right. Sugar free. G Hughes. Sweet chili. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And some of the primal kitchen type stuff where it doesn't have the, uh, vegetable oils

and seed oils and stuff like that in it. Yeah, when I discovered sugar-free barbecue sauce, which was like last year, it changed my life. But just think about that. It gives you a change. Yeah, with the amount of people that like steak, including myself, right? There's a lot of different flavors of sugar-free barbecue sauce. That shit's amazing. Take some eggs, crack them open in a blender, throw in like a little bit of red hot, mix

up some seasoning or whatever you like. I like red hot sauce, but like throw in some different flavors that you like and you'll make something that's fucking unbelievable. You'll be like, holy shit, I can't. I made that like about three or four days ago and it came out this like just fluffy ass omelet. It was so damn good. I kind of had a little extra egg whites because I had like an egg white just mix in my fridge.

And so it was like, I don't know, probably the equivalent of like eight eggs total with like three yolks. Oh, man. A little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, some red hot sauce, just all just in the Ninja Blender. Through it in the pan. And because the Ninja Blender pumps so much air into it. It's got coffee as hell. Yeah, it was fucking unbelievable. No cheese, no ham, no bacon, no nothing in it.

Just eggs. It was awesome. Wow. That sounds good. I never thought about that. But having flavors like that can really be helpful. I use a lot of the I meals um uh what the hell seasonings there you go yeah uh those are really good i like those a lot they have a little bit of sugar in them but i don't really find for me that it's uh

really a negative like for me it's just encouraged me to eat the protein that's in front of me and i ended up digging it a lot. I was going to say earlier, another thing to work your way towards is to work your way towards, I think the entire concept of cheating and the entire concept of cheat meals and cheat days, we've talked about it before and the actual wording that you use, I don't think matters a ton,

but I do think for most people, I think that some form of going off the actual real particulars, if you were to write down the best ideas you have for a diet, there would be some stuff that would be off of it because it would encourage overeating, like eating bread and butter, things like that, or garlic bread or pizza or things like that. You're going to probably overeat calories. And so what I think would be smart for people to do is just to eat some foods that are like that just to enjoy themselves and have a good time here and there. Hey, what's up? Yo.

What's going on, Mark? Been a long time. Yes, it has. Yes, it has. Great to see you again. How's Miami? Miami is fantastic. I'm actually in my house in the Pacific Palisades. I have a place that I rent in the Palisades when we come back and visit our, our children and we're on our way back from Hawaii right now. So we're, we left Hawaii yesterday. We're in the Palisades today and we're heading back to Miami tomorrow. Awesome. I've, I was listening to some of your talks with Joe Rogan when you're on his podcast and you were talking about riding these fat bikes on the beach.

That's something I'd love to give a try to. That seems really hard because the soft sand probably makes for a really brutal workout, right? That's the whole point, man. You know, I was a runner for a long time. That was my thing. I was an aerobic kind of guy. And when my running chops got kind of ruined by the injuries and other issues that I had, I started riding a bike, a road bike and did triathlons for a while. And I got pretty good at cycling and I love being outside. And then when my when my son was born, my second child was born about 27 years ago.

my, um, when my son was born, my second child was born about 27 years ago. I'm like, you know, riding on the highways here in California is just like, uh, it's not going to end well. So, uh, so I, I sold my bike and, and I never got into mountain biking. And the main reason I never got into mountain biking was I just didn't like going so slow that somebody hiking up a hill could pass me so i yeah so i just stopped i stopped riding a bike and i rode you know i rode a life cycle in the gym and i was able to you know i never thought i'd go to the gym and ride a bike i thought i'll go to the gym and read a book and i'll happen to be riding a bike while i'm while i'm reading so i get to miami and uh this friend of mine is my next door neighbor says, Hey, I got these fat bikes and we ride up the sand and it's crazy. And it's, and it's fun.

And I'm like, all right, that's sure. I'll, I'll, I'll give it a shot. Well, the first time we went out, he just, he kicked my ass and I was, you know, I'm pretty fit. I'm still pretty bike fit. And, uh, I just, I, I was like, no, I i'm not having i'm not having this it's i mean they're going to never do it again or i'm going to get better so um i saw what a great workout like i like incredible workout because you're it's basically you're on a mountain bike a bigger mountain bike and you're grinding it out in the sand and sometimes the sand is is flat and packed and you can you know fly and and other times you're literally busting your ass to go two or three miles an hour and keep it falling over so um so i was hooked and

i got a bike and i started riding and and now i kick his ass which is the main thing and uh and it's and it's so i try to do it twice a week when i'm in miami and as i tell people people say what you like it so much why don't you do it all the time well if you do it right twice a and it's, and it's, so I try to do it twice a week when I'm in Miami. And as I tell people, people say, why do you like it so much? Why don't you do it all the time? Well, if you do it right twice a week is all, is all I can handle because it takes enough, uh, out of me that I, that I, that I need to recover doing that. But, um, you know, it's, you're in this, you're in the sun, you're getting fresh air, breathing salt, salty air. And, and, uh, you know, the sand

is great and you're getting some vitamin D and, and, um, you know, there's all kinds of women in bikinis and thongs and stuff like, so there's, that's not, that doesn't suck either. I mean, the view changes every day. So what can I tell you? You have a, an incredible amount of, uh, success over the years. Do you think you would have reached some of these levels of success if you didn't have your own problems going on? Like, I think you were in a lot of pain at a certain point and you started to investigate that and that's how you started to find out more and more about nutrition. Previous to running into some of those personal issues, were you successful from like a financial standpoint? Were you kind of kicking ass in the business world or did this completely change your life and change your route forever

in a different way? You know, it depends on your definition of success. I mean, I made a lot of money in my 20s. I was a contractor. I put myself through the last year of private school of high school, um, as a contractor, um, and then four years of college. And I was going to go, it's going to be a pre-med. And at the, uh, uh, the last minute I elected because I was running and running marathons and doing quite well at that. I decided I would, um, uh, I would take a couple of years off and not go to med school. And the next thing, you know,'m three years out of med school, not having gone to med school, and I'm making a lot of money and I'm traveling around the world. And so I liked my life and I thought, you know, that was a measure of success for me, that sort of freedom and making enough money to be able to do the things I wanted to do and saving some money. money to be able to do the things I wanted to do and saving some money. So, you know, I had some early minor success, but I wouldn't, you know, if you start to talk in terms of like, you know, I think massive change the world kind of stuff, that was probably a direct result of my own

that was probably a direct result of my own issues. So, so I was always, you know, I grew up in Maine, in a small town. Um, I was industrious. I was, I had that, you know, Puritan work ethic. I was mowing lawns at the age of 12. I was like literally in the summers when I was a seventh grader, I was, I was working 40 hours a week in the summers mowing lawns. And, you know, then I was painting houses and I was always making money and I was always industrious. And so that was really a, you know, that sort of put me on the path of a willingness to work hard. And then I would argue that, you know, having been an endurance athlete,

um, you know, I've, I've talked about this in the past that, that, that endurance competition and that sport, if you want to call it a sport, um, you know, it's not a game, it's not fun. Um, it's about managing discomfort is all it is. Um, and so train miles and miles and miles, you know, every day, every week, day in and day out with the only days off are sort of forced by an injury or an illness. Otherwise, you train through everything. The training is basically an exercise in learning how to manage discomfort. Some would say manage pain, but I would say discomfort. And so, you know, the top athletes are the ones in the endurance field are those who are able to manage discomfort to such a great level that they drag everyone else down with them and beat them up. up. And so you sort of show up at the, at the starting line on race day, you've got 20 guys here who win the race that day. They're, they're genetically, probably equally genetically gifted plus or minus they've trained equally hard. They want it as much. And who wins the race that day comes down to who's willing to dig deepest in their own soul and drag themselves down into this uncomfortable range so that everyone around them has to come with them.

And then it sort of sorts itself out, you know, in that regard. And whoever literally survives that discomfort that day wins the race. Well, that's great training for life, right? It's not fun. It's not, you know, it's not a game. It's not like, you know, playing NBA basketball or Major League Baseball or even NFL football where there are certainly moments of fun in a marathon. There's no point at which you go, shit, this is fun, you know. You know, so so long, you know, long winded way of saying my training in in that managing discomfort served me very well in competition. It also served me very well in business. So I was able to to, you know, sort of manage the discomfort of not just putting in hours, but also having the the ups and downs of business, and I know you've experienced that yourselves.

So business is tough. And in order to succeed in business, you have to have the fortitude to get past the really shitty times. Because there's going to be some great times, but there's also going to be some really, really, you know, crappy times. And there was a point at which I thought I might be bipolar because I was, you know, the highs were so ecstatic and, oh, my God, it was a big win. And we just opened this big account. And then the next thing you know, we can't fulfill the account because the manufacturers, you know, screwed up and shut down.

We're two months behind. And then we're out of business. So you have to be able to manage all of that. And that was the, I think that was the benefit of the, of, of all those years of, of training. You know, Mark, I'm really curious about this because there's a lot that we're about to talk about, but you mentioned that no part of your running experience was enjoyable yet. You always hear these runners are like, Ooh, I have the runners high. So like, did you, is that like, was that not existent for you? Cause when I personally think about running myself, I'm just like, nah,

bruh runners high that like, I can't imagine that. Did that not happen to you with all those marathons you did? Yeah. So there's a difference between, um, um, enjoy, enjoyable and fun, I guess. And because you said enjoyable, I think. And there were parts of it that were enjoyable in so far as it feels good when you stop. So, you know, there were times training with my friends. Most of the time I trained alone, but when I was training with my friends where, you know, we'd be out doing an, I quote, easy run and chatting it up.

And, and, you know, we're going to be on the road together for an hour, hour and a half, two hours sometimes. Sometimes up in the, I used to take a group up in the hills of Santa Monica here. And back in the days of when it was allowed, when it was politically correct, we basically all wore Speedos and running shoes and nothing else. And we would just go up as close to naked as we could be and run in the hills without talking to each other, you know, just sort of get into that. That was kind of a primal thing. So that was enjoyable.

So, you know, where's the line between enjoyable and fun? So there was that part of it. Absolutely the runner's high is a real thing. And the endorphin rush. orphan uh rush and it becomes um it becomes so addictive that it's not a it's not necessarily a feeling of pleasantness it's a feeling of of having literally been doped or drugged um it's a it's a sense uh that you get um and and i sometimes try to, you know, dissect what was going on in my mind. How could I do that every goddamn day for like 20 years? You know, get up and do it again and do it again and do it again.

And on the days that I was either injured or sick or, you know, recovering from a cold or something like that, feel guilty about not doing it. And so much of it is tied to the psyche. Much of it is tied to your mental, the view of yourself, to your ego. Like I'm a piece of shit if I don't go out and train today. So if I do train, then the day was, everything else that happens during the day is icing on the cake. But I got to get that training in to make my life worthy, to make my day worth having lived. It's a sickness for a lot of people. And it was for me. And it's not a, that's not a horrible sickness, but it's a, but it's a,

it's sort of a psychosis sort of a thing where you get into this, into this endorphin hole and, and you do seek it on a daily basis. And it's, it's the reason that a lot of people are successful in, in getting rid of a drug, say a drug addiction, a narcotic addiction with running because they are sort of replacing one addiction with another. They're just theoretically replacing a better addiction over the one that they're leaving behind. So the runner's high is a real thing. And yet, when I stopped, and here's the other thing, when I stopped racing,

I still trained hard for five years. I couldn I couldn't, I couldn't not train anymore. It wasn't like I stepped away from the track or stepped away from the trail and said, I'm done. It, it literally took five years for me to unwind the training element of it. And, um, and then, you know, and I was during that time I was coaching, uh, elite athletes. So I was on, I was on the road with them a lot. I was training with them a lot. So I, I didn't race much, but I, uh, if at all, and if I did, it was like an age group thing or something like that.

Um, but I was still very fit and I was still benefiting from that years later. I would find myself every once in a while going okay i haven't trained for a while let me put on the shoes go out for a run and see what it feels like and see if i can get back in the space and i'm telling you i would get like 200 yards down the road and go the fuck am i doing and then walk home i mean it was when i left it behind it was was such a different world to me. I didn't crave it. Not only did I not crave it, then I hated it. Then I was like, and I'm trying to think to myself, how did I ever get myself, my head, into that space of doing this every single day?

And so it's not good or bad. It's just that was the shift that happened with me. And it was really quite interesting to see. Like, literally, it's been 20 years plus since I've run a mile. Wow. And I go out and I'll play a game. I'll play Ultimate, which is my main game. And I'll run six miles during Ultimate.

And I'll be sprinting most of the way, right? Sprint, stop, sprint, stop, change direction. I'll hike in Aspen every once in a while and I'll, you know, run the flats for a quarter mile or something like that. It'll feel good when it's, when it feels good, but just to put on the shoes and go out and run to get, you know, a workout in has, has less than zero appeal to me. What do you find enjoyable now? You know, because it seems like there's, it seems like there's a good reason to for each person to investigate pushing really, really hard into certain things, whether it be lifting weights or or business or just really anything. It seems to make sense to go off the reservation or go off the map a little bit just to kind of find out where the edges of this map is. And to find out like, you know, getting to your destination,

it sounds like you've worked really, really hard over the years. What do you find like a lot of enjoyment nowadays in terms of just, I don't know, day-to-day stuff. I mean, you've reached a lot of high levels in terms of your fitness. You reached a lot of high levels in terms of being a great public speaker and a good figure in the fitness community. And then you've also sold your business, Primal Kitchen, to Kraft.

You reached some really crazy heights. So have you found that sometimes some of your day-to-day is almost too boring or too mundane? Or is the fat bike on the beach looking at thongs enough? You know, that's a great question and it's a really important question because the answer is some days i'm bored out of my mind um and some days i like so i think the term you know the new um gurus use is passion and purpose, right?

Like, I absolutely believe you need to have a reason to get up every morning, and there's something that you need to do. And so I don't, I never planned to retire. The question was, for me, how much ratcheting back of this intense lifestyle was I willing to take on, uh, you know, before, uh, before I,

you know, bored myself to tears and, you know, cause I'm, I'm going to be 68 in July. And it's like, all right. As I say to myself,

every time I walk off the ultimate Frisbee pitch, I'm like, I'm out there with 20 somethings trying to, trying to shit up with them on a long run to the end zone yeah man um you know when is this when is it inappropriate you know to be doing this um you know this because it's going to be a day maybe it's tomorrow certainly not when i'm 90 so it's you know there's going to be a day when it's like you know what it's it's like there's a you crossed over you crossed the line you're you know you're a you're

a hindrance to your team or whatever so um uh and and in the gym I mean it it crushes me that I can't set PRs anymore lifting heavy shit and I was never a really strong guy. Look, I'm a skinny shit. I weighed my siblings, my two brothers, who are my height, weigh 138 and 143.

I raced at 142 and 143 when I was a marathoner. I've weighed 170 maybe the past 10 years. Um, all of which is muscle I put on from, you know, lifting hard and not doing any aerobic shit. And boy, that's, that's the key right there, right? Aerobics just grinds you up.

So, um, so, so I got really excited about when I was 52 years old I set my PR on the bench press but those days are gone so now I can't set a PR in the gym now it's like okay all that's left to do is go to the gym and put the time in and hopefully stem the decline

well what the fuck how exciting is that so I'm trying to personally try to find things to do on a daily basis that, that on the one hand excite me, but on the other hand, riding fat bike on the beach, isn't, you know, that's not building anything. That's just kind of a fun little challenge. And I do some standup paddling and I, you know, that's part of my routine. So I have my routine, but that's, that's not enough. enough right so for me these days i'm an angel investor in 10 or 12 different companies

so i mentor those companies i'm still very much involved with craft i have a five-year deal with craft to continue uh creating product and building new private kitchen ideas and products for them. So that's that's quite exciting. But, you know, that's that's like I think that's the essential question for most people is why do you get out of bed in the morning? And one of the things I have to ask, you know, the young generation, it's just kind of, you know, in high school, getting out of, you know, getting out of college, just getting into the workforce is like, I'm really interested in finding out what motivates them. Like, what is it that is, you know, that is giving you the passion to get out of bed every day and go, fucking today's the day, man. Today, I'm going to, you know, make a difference and I'm going to feel like I made a contribution because I, I feel like we're sort of as a society headed down a, you know,

a road of, of, of, of entropy and sort of like, you know, too, too much ease, too much comfort, too much, you know, participation medals and all that shit. You know, this, I'm kind, um, you know, uh, participation medals and all that shit. You know, this, I'm kind of curious, you know, you mentioned you were 68, um, or you're about to turn 68. You still do an ultimate. You're still like your body, you're, you're jacked, right? Um, what do you think has been some, what are some of the biggest habits that you've had over the years that has allowed you to slow down the aging process so much? Because like a lot of people, by the time they're 68, they're freaking hobbled over. They're not running.

They're not biking. You know, they, they, they, they, they feel that that's done. But for you, it's like, like looking at what you're doing right now, 10 years from now, wouldn't be surprised if you're doing a lot of the same shit, just a little bit slower, or maybe at the same, at the same rate you're doing it right now. Well, definitely slower. I'll tell you that. And hobbled is a word I use occasionally. You know, it's back to the, you know, stuff in the gym. It's like, I, it kind of pisses me off that I'm as sore and stiff as I am after my gym workouts these days. And I don't have an answer for that. But I think to your point that probably the number one thing, and I've said this for 30 years, is diet.

I mean, diet is really sort of the critical component, the first basic element that you have to get right if you want to be able to do all the other stuff. Now you can get away with shit when you're twenties and thirties, but as you get older, diet becomes more and more critical to body composition to, you know, decrease risk for not just the, you know, the standard,

you know, heart disease, cancer and things like that, but also just trying to maintain energy levels and cognition and skin and all the superficial things as well that would appear to be markers of aging, just not markers of aging in terms of of disease and stuff like that. So the diet is is, you know, is a critical component. We can kind of talk about what that looks like. But but also and then just it's just moving and it's just like it's literally finding ways to move. to move throughout the day, every day, because I think as you get older, you know, I think there are two things that define quality of life as we get older.

And one of them is mobility. Like if you can't get around this world, if you can't travel, if you can't go visit friends, if you can't go hike, if you can't walk around, if you can't do the marketing and you're stuck in a sofa or a wheelchair or a bed, then that's a really difficult hurdle to overcome if you want to talk about quality of life. And the other thing is access to cognition, access to memory. So if you lose that part of your physical health and your mental health, that's a huge quality of life.

So this is the avoidance of dementia, of Alzheimer's and things mental health, that quality, that's a huge quality of life. So this is the avoidance of dementia, you know, of Alzheimer's and things like that, where you want to try and not just be able to travel around the world and be mobile, but be able to participate in conversations and recall memories and all of that. So back to the mobility thing, being able to move and just whether it's walking or lightweights or running riding a bike or whatever it is um certainly um uh maintains mobility and helps you maintain that that aspect of moving but it also maintains circulation and keeps up um uh you know um your your um muscle mass to a extent, all the lifting weights will do that too. So, you know, there are a couple of kind of key components that you cannot get away with not doing in that regard.

I am really obsessed with trying to figure out how to assist, how to help people. And I've heard you kind of make a statement that you would love to impact, you know, 100 million people. And you actually may have already accomplished some of that with a lot of the things that you've been doing. But what do you think are some of the answers for America in terms of how we can turn a lot of this around? There's just, there's so many unhealthy, convenient foods at our fingertips.

Now we're getting a nice surge because companies like Kraft are are understanding the value of the products products from people like yourself make. But a lot of people are dying. A lot of people are sick. Like we're still losing this race. Fatty liver disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all cancer, all these different kinds of things. Seems like many of them are triggered by the way that we eat and our complacency, not moving around. What are some things? I personally, over the next few years, want to start an initiative where I, this is my first announcement of this,

where I, this is my first announcement of this, where I started an initiative to talk to parents and to children, maybe in a school setting of some sort, and start to help people sort out their nutrition and sort out their diet. Because I just view so many people just going down this really terrible path. I lost my mother in 2020. She died just about a year older than what you are now. And I think it was the root cause of it was she was too fat. You know, people hate using that term and they're kind of afraid of that word. When someone mentions it, it kind of kind of pierces their ears a little bit. People talk a lot about fat shaming, but I think we might need a little dose of that because from what I'm seeing, most of the people are very sick due to the fact that they over consume energy too often and they start to gain a lot of body fat. What are some remedies to this with the work that you've

done over the last 20, 30 years? I mean, the remedy is don't eat so much goddamn food, number one. I mean, the remedy is don't eat so much goddamn food, number one. But I mean, it's a complex equation and it's the access. Let's talk about the don't eat so much goddamn food. Let's start with that. I think that's a great message. How can somebody who currently eats way too much damn food, how could they end up on the other side of that? What are some ways to, I guess, curb your hunger? Oh, is this the point where I talk about my new book?

Yes, absolutely. Two meals a day. So, you know, the notion that we have access to all this food is a great, you know, there's a surplus of food, clearly, in this country and a surplus of very appealing, crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet food that we all have access to. And, you know, we still have the genetics of a hunter-gatherer, every one of us. And so we, you know, people have to maybe have the genetics of a hunter gatherer, every one of us. And so we you know, people have to maybe understand that over time we haven't we haven't adapted to this this processed diet that we all have access to today.

So if we look at humans in general and how we're built, you know, we have this amazing ability to to take in food. We are wired to overeat because for most of human history, food was scarce. The brain is wired to overeat food whenever it's available. It's designed to take the extra calories that we consume and convert it to energy that we conveniently store on our butts and thighs and hips and bellies. And when I say convenient, it's like right over the center of gravity. It's just an elegant, elegant system where we keep this fanny pack full of extra calories and extra fuel that we can carry around with us wherever we go. And that served us so well for millions of years as we survived the rigors of a hostile environment and moved through the world. When we would eat, you know, one day and then maybe not eat for two days, our bodies would then take this extra fuel out of storage and combust it in the muscles and create ketones that the brain could use in place of glucose. Just a really, really elegant design that we all have, that we're all born with. I would call it our factory setting at birth.

And it serves us well, as I say. But what's happened is we've maintained this ability to take excess calories and storage, out of those areas of stored body fat, and combust it and burn it as fuel, and get along very nicely without eating for not just one or two meals, but one or two days, or sometimes one or two weeks. Because we never have the opportunity, we never give our bodies the opportunity to tap into that side of the skill set. So there are people who can get away with eating a lot of food. I used to be one. Like I say, when I was in my 20s and 30s and I was running 100 plus miles a week and training hard,

I would take in 6,000 calories a day, 7,000 calories a day. It was crazy. And I never gained weight. 6,000 calories a day, 7,000 calories a day. It was crazy. And I never gained weight. In fact, you know, again, I weigh 30 pounds more now or 25 pounds more now than I did in those days, the same body fat. So I never, I never gained weight. And how did I burn through those calories? Well, I could get away with it. I would, and I, by the way, I didn't run enough to burn off those calories. What happened was my body created this set up this system where my body happened to be one that said, we don't really like to store these extra calories as fat.

So we're going to figure out a way to burn those calories off every single night by making your heart race faster, making you sweat while you sleep, you know, running your body at a hotter temperature and trying to burn off those calories somehow. So we don't store them. So some people can get away with eating a lot of food. And that's not saying that it's good for them. It's just saying it doesn't show in those people. Other people can't get away with eating a lot of food and their hormone systems, their own set of DNA and genes would say, you know what, this is great. We love all this food and store this fat because we know how to manage storage of fat. So over time, what we see is people tend to eat what they can get away with eating. Not based on some macro profile, you know, protein, carbs, and fats, but basically how much food can I eat and not gain weight? Or how much food can I eat and only gain a pound a year?

Or how much food can I eat and not feel like a glutton or put myself in an uncomfortable, overfilled situation? Or how much of this dessert can I eat and not feel like a pig? And so we see what we can get away with. And that's kind of human nature. In a lot of areas of our lives, we see what we can get away with. We play it kind of human nature. We, you know, we, in a lot of areas of our lives, we see what we can get away with. We play it right up to the edge. It's just human nature. Well, a bunch of years ago, I had a little thought experiment. I thought,

well, I'm one of those guys that get away with a lot of stuff. So what if I took the opposite approach and I said, what's the, what's the least amount of food that I can eat and maintain or build muscle mass and still have all the energy I need and never get sick? And most importantly, not be hungry. That's the most important part. What's the least amount of food I can eat and not be hungry? And I did that for a while. And I'm like, my God, this is like, this is crazy.

I'm eating 30% fewer calories than I did. I mean, like, like, even five years ago, I'm eating 30% fewer calories, maintaining muscle mass. Again, lots of energy, not getting sick and not being hungry. And, and it really occurred to me that that's the problem that we, we all, even those of us who can get away with it, eat too damn much food. So if you did an experiment and you figured a way to parse this into macros and you said, well, I really only need like 75 grams of protein a day to maintain muscle mass and to build and to repair and for energy systems. muscle mass and to build and to repair and for energy systems. Yeah, I can eat 150, but I don't need 150. Or I could eat 200. Fine. I don't need 200. I only need 75 grams a day of protein. And, you know, you and I can argue as bodybuilders about that number. But the truth is so much of the protein that bodybuilders consume and overconsume gets deaminated and pissed out. It gets wasted. Or it gets combusted.

It gets burned. So there's that. Then if you say, well, I don't need that much in the way of carbs because I'm pretty efficient with my exercise, and I don't need to do a lot of glycolytic stuff and I don't train hard every day. So maybe I only need 150 grams of carbs a day. And then fat, if fat makes up the difference, I'm not going to need more than 100 grams of fat because I have all the stored body fat. So you start to realize you really don't need that much food on a daily basis.

that much food in a daily base on a daily basis. So when you do the, then, then I do the research. And then you, when you start to understand that from all the research on fasting over the past 20 years, 30 years, all the good stuff happens to the human body when you're not eating all the repair, all the rebuilding, all the house cleaning, all the housekeeping, all the DNA changes and shifts and all of the good stuff, all the housekeeping, all the DNA changes and shifts and all the good stuff, all the burning off of stored body fat, that all the good stuff happens when you're not eating.

Yes, you have to eat. The question is how often, etc. But all those moments when you're not eating, if you can figure out a way to extend that amount of time that you're not eating, then your body's going to be repairing itself better than if you were eating every couple of hours. Because every time you eat, there's a set of hormonal experiences that take place, whether it's insulin, glucagon, leptin, ghrelin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, all these different hormones are coming into play. The body is trying to deal with

this incoming fuel supply. Depending on what you're eating, there could be some inflammation in the companies. There could be some oxidative issues. The longer you go without eating, the better off you are. Having said that,

I don't like to starve. I don't force myself to not eat. I just force myself to be very comfortable not eating for extended periods of time. So we talk about fasting. Well, what's the length of time that a fast really needs to kick in? Some would argue that it's three days. My wife does the occasional seven-day water fast. I mean, I'm not going to do that. I mean, and, you know, I'm supposed to be the health guy, and she's doing these amazing seven-day water fasts. She does it once or twice a year.

So what's an appropriate amount of time? And I feel like it's 16 to 18 hours every day. So the two meals a day comes into play when you say, okay, A, if we eat too much food, the best way to cut back on that is to skip one meal. If we're going to skip one meal, that gives us this clean 16, 18-hour window of not eating where we can get other stuff done. I mean, every three meals a day plus snacks is a lot of downtime. It's a lot of time thinking about food, eating food, preparing food, buying food, cleaning the dish, doing the dishes, and all the other stuff that goes with that. So the two meals a day strategy is basically how do i become comfortable um with this reduction in the amount of food i take in and how and how can i make it not just pleasant but in not just enjoyable but but fun. So the idea is you have to kind of go back to your basic genetic blueprint and say, okay, how can I train my body to become really good at burning fat, become really adept at making ketones and using those ketones in my brain without being, by the way, without being in ketosis or ketogenic all the time.

I want to be very clear on this. You don't have to be in ketosis all the time for all these new skill sets to come into play. So the book is really about how do we, with ease and grace, how do we kind of slip into this, what I call metabolic flexibility. Now, metabolic flexibility just describes the body's ability to extract energy from stored body fat or the fat on your plate of food or the glucose in your bloodstream or the glycogen in your muscles or the carbs on your plate of food or the ketones that your liver makes. And most of us only depend, we're what I call sugar burners. Most of us are sugar burners because we never developed this fat adaptation, this keto adaptation. We're what I call sugar burners. Most of us are sugar burners because we never developed this fat adaptation, this keto adaptation.

We're just really good at burning sugar. And then any excess of it, we just store as fat. We're really good at storing as fat. So metabolic flexibility allows us to switch back and forth between burning fat and burning carbs. I'm really curious about this, Mark, because when you said 75 grams of protein, my ears perked up. I started doing fasting about two years ago, maybe a little bit more. The main thing I wanted to do it for was for focus because I didn't want to focus on food. I wanted to see if it helped my productivity, which it did. But I also noticed that I started getting leaner.

I started being able to control my hunger. My performance wasn't hampered. So I've been doing that since now I still keep my protein at like two 20 to two 50. Right. Um, but in your case, I want to know this because, um, as you get older, most people say like your, your ability to like protein synthesis becomes harder and harder. So most trainers say, Hey, as you get older, actually eat more protein. It'll help you maintain muscle. But you're doing half of that amount being 100 or I don't know. Yeah.

So let's clear that up. So when I say you only probably need 75 grams of protein, I eat 130, 150 every day. Okay. I see what you're saying. So what's happening, even in my case, is that I probably only need 75 for repair and maintenance. The other 75 are just enjoyable calories that I'm taking in. Got it. that I'm taking in that are being probably converted through gluconeogenesis or something like that are being utilized as energy.

A little bit, maybe more in the want category maybe than the need category. Is that kind of correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So when you fast, are you fasting for three days? How long do you fast? Me? Usually it could be 16 to 20 hours.

Okay. That's not fasting. Yeah, that's not fasting. So that's not going to tap into your protein sink enough to cause any issues. So you haven't had the experience of say a three day fast where I would really be curious, like, okay, what happened to Matt?

Did you lose, you know, two pounds of muscle and it did take you, you know, uh, three weeks to get it back. I suspect the answer would be no, even if you did lose two pounds of muscle,

most of that muscle was still water loss and you got it back the next week. Right. I mean, that's so so um i'm i used to be more open to the suggestion that excess protein was bad for you now i'm now i'm like i'm okay with the fact that excess protein is probably not bad for you it's probably not not having an impact on mtor and and you know some of these other concerns that people would have about risk for cancer, for instance. But if you look at what happens when you don't eat for four days, for instance,

the body goes into a really cool, what I call a closed loop system. So you don't eat for four days. There's no calories coming in. So you've got this fat reserve. Everybody has it. At 10% body fat, I have 16 pounds of fat on me. If I say that only 10 of it is available for fuel, that's still 35,000 calories of excess fuel that even a skinny shit like me has all the time.

So if you go into this not eating strategy for three or four days, the body will draw down its body fat. And what happens is because if you is because you've if you've become good if you've become metabolically flexible then the muscles are able to do whatever the hell they need to do deriving 90 95 percent of their energy from fat not needing glycogen not needing uh you know excess glucose or carbs so the muscles so you can go about your daily business and as long as you're not doing heavy leg days you know three days in a row you're going to be fine with that because your body will still even in those conditions your body will still

replenish like it's right so most of your energy um requirements for muscle mobility getting through the world will be, will come from the stored body fat. Now, because you're not eating glucose, because you're clearly not taking in carbohydrates when you're fasting, some of the fat will be converted to ketones in the liver. And as you become fat adapted and metabolically flexible, the brain, which normally would depend on glucose, now says, hey, ketones, that's my favorite fuel.

Bring it on. You know, so, you know, the brain takes ketones all the time. And with a little bit of adaptation, you get very used to the ketones. Some people say, well, wait a minute, not, you know, but now you're in ketosis, right? Well, if you become metabolically flexible, you're not even producing that amount of ketones. Some people say, well, wait a minute, not, you know, but now you're in ketosis, right? Well, if you become metabolically flexible, you're not even producing that amount of ketones. Cause you've already, if with that flexibility, your body has understood that, that the brain, that the, since the muscles don't need ketones because they're doing well on fat.

So there's a sparing effect where the muscles say, Hey, we don't need the ketones saving for the brain. And the brain does not have a significant shift in energy requirements throughout the day. The brain uses, I don't know, 500 calories a day, 20 calories an hour. And it really doesn't fluctuate that much, even depending on how hard you're thinking or how much work you're doing in the gym. The brain just kind of cruises along in a steady state. And the liver gets this.

The liver says, I don't even need to work that hard to provide enough energy for the brain. So now you're not eating for three days. So now your muscles are getting all their energy from the fat. Your brain is getting all the energy it needs from the ketones that are also a byproduct of fat metabolism. that are also a byproduct of fat metabolism. And then this crazy thing happens, which is just, again, part of the most elegant design you could ever imagine. You could not design a fuel system better than the one we have on us as humans. There's an upregulation. There's a change in genetic signaling that prompts the body to spare protein. And so normally, when you would

be eating 220 grams of protein a day, much of that protein, I dare say most of it, you're either going to be combusting or you're going to be pissing out, deaminating and peeing it out. Now, it's not a bad thing. It's just excessive. It a little bit a little bit too much so now we have this system where if the body is now taking the the protein it already has in in various storage places throughout the body and and and on purpose your net loss of protein in a day is 40 grams. But it's not some huge amount. So over the course of seven days, if your net loss is 40 grams, that's 280 grams. If your net loss is 40 grams, that's 280 grams.

That's basically a quarter of – it's a half a pound, right, a half a pound of net muscle. And that's sort of your worst-case scenario. And then you can build that – you can get that back when you stop your fast and eat again. So it's literally a closed-loop system where you don't need that many calories. You don't need calories coming in because you have the fat, you have the ketones. You even have the protein sparing effect of not eating. The not eating actually prompts your genes to turn on in a certain way that spares protein. So it's a really amazing design. And in that process, as I said, there's a lot of housekeeping that goes on within

the body the body looks at damaged cells what they call senescent or cells that are too old kills them off um it may take damaged proteins within cells and consume those proteins or consume those those those damaged fats um does some repair to the d And, and all of these are good things. So there's really nothing bad that happens during a fast, except if you're a bodybuilder, you lean out a little bit and then you get it back as soon as you hit the gym again. So does that make sense?

That makes sense. What about, I've heard you speak before about all your meals being enjoyable. And so what kind of foods are you eating to maintain a very, very healthy diet, but also one that's fun and enjoyable? Yeah, so one of my mantras is I never put a bite of food in my mouth. It doesn't taste great. Right. I don't, you can tell me that this kale salad with, um, vinegar and lemon on it is, is healthy for me. And I'm like, no, that ain't happening ever, ever, ever. Um,

even though kale is theoretically, you know, considered by most vegans to be the healthiest food there is. No, I'm, you know, as much as people see me as that guy who tries to convince them to eat less food, it doesn't mean I don't enjoy food. I enjoy the hell out of food. I just, I know when to stop. So with that in mind, I want to, I want to orchestrate my meals to be enjoyable. And I almost always center them around some form of protein.

Again, back to the whole protein issue. I'm not against protein. I'm for protein. I'm just suggesting that we don't need to eat that much protein. But here I am saying I love protein. So I would eat some form of fish. Like when I'm in Miami, I usually have lunch around 1.30. And it's usually some form of fish and a little bit of vegetable of some kind.

Maybe it's a salad, a small salad or something. I used to eat a big salad every day. I'm sort of gravitated away from that now. eat a big salad every day i'm sort of sort of gravitated away from that now um and and that was when i talk about or think about the things that i could cut out of my diet to eat less food that actually happened to be one of them so um i'll have sometimes i'll have two like two small fish courses um in miami just because the restaurants I eat at kind of specialize in seafood. And then at dinnertime, almost always some red meat. So I'm a big, you know, ribeye steak guy, lamb, New York steak.

And again, maybe some steamed vegetables with some butter on it, something like that. So if you really took a look at my diet it's it's it's trending toward carnivore mark just like you know you i know you did that for a while and then you sort of right i think i understood you pull back a little bit and said well i'm not you know you're like you're mostly carnivore right correct yeah i eat some uh like rice i eat some uh potatoes i'll have some i like vegetables so I'll eat some vegetables here. It's not so much that I like vegetables, I kind of just like to mix things up a little bit. That's where I'm at. I would be a carnivore, except I like other food too much.

I feel like carnivore is probably an appropriate way for a lot of people to eat, myself included. Again, I like the crunchiness of certain lightly steamed is probably an appropriate way for a lot of people to eat myself included but but um again i like i like the crunchiness of certain you know lightly steamed broccoli and and uh i do like a salad once in a while but just not a big ass salad anymore so um but yeah i and and when i at the end of the day when i look at what i've eaten i I'm like, wow, this is like if I cut out almost all the carbs and I've cut out some of the green leafy vegetables that I used to think were crucial to my diet. And I now think they're not crucial to my diet. They're just sort of helpful in me achieving a variety of taste sensations, if you will, it winds up not being a lot of

food. And yet I feel like I'm thriving and I feel like, you know, again, I have all the energy I want. My fight for muscle mass now is more one with about my age than it is about my diet. And when I say that, again, there is a point at which, you know, if you look at the decline of athletic performance over the years, I think they used to say that, that your aerobic capacity decreases 1% a year after the age of say 35,

but your muscle mass decreases 2% a year after the age of say 35 but your muscle mass decreases two percent a year after the age of 35 so it's it's much more important to maintain muscle mass and to do whatever you can to maintain muscle mass so if you're somebody who's 50 45 or 50 and looking at what you know what can i do over the next bunch of years to enhance my health? The answer will not be found in joining a running club and doing a marathon. It'll be found in either some combination of that or focusing almost entirely on the stuff you do in the gym. Did it take you a long time to learn how to control your food? Did it take you a long time to learn how to control your food? Did it take you a long time to, you mentioned you going to be getting rid of a lot of snacks. It's going to be very difficult.

People are going to feel hungry. They're going to feel cravings. If they haven't shifted yet to be metabolically flexible, it might even feel worse. But for yourself, how have you been able to adapt to this kind of concept of just figuring out a way to eat less? Yeah, it's a tough ask for a lot of people because I was one of those people, as I say, to get away with eating a lot. I mean, I would say for 10 years of my life, I finished off every day with a half gallon of ice cream.

Oh, wow. So I would eat copious amounts before that. This is the diet right here. Now we're getting somewhere. I never talked about this. I mean, mean i thought about how you do it uh g-o-i-c-a-d right gallon of ice cream a day uh but uh a half gallon half gallon no half gallon of ice cream every night and i thought there was a point in my life i thought i have a problem uh because i can't not eat ice cream right and then just literally one day i'm like you know i'd probably and i would not maybe tmi but every once

in a while i throw up in my sleep at night right i mean i literally like i get a little bit of you know backwash and surge in my in my throat from having, you know, overeaten, you know, way too much food and gone to bed uncomfortable. And again, I never gained weight from this. I burned it off somehow. But, and not only do you burn it off, but also because of my other issues, my IBS, there's a lot of, there's a lot of throughput in your digestive tract that just never gets absorbed right so because I was um I had IBS from the age of 14 to 47 and I realized that a lot of it was from damage I'd done to my intestinal tract with grains. So I had leaky gut syndrome and I had a number of other issues that probably allowed me to put a lot of food through my system

that would, you know, again, come out the other end undigested. So there was that too. But how do you control that impulse? That's really the key strategy here is to understand when you're no longer hungry versus when you're no longer full. So if I'm not full, if I'm not feeling full, as you probably experienced many times in your life, you keep eating until you feel full. It's way too late once you feel full. You've already way overeaten if you start to feel full. So one of the skills that we try to sort of develop is when is it enough? Like when was that – when am I willing to look at the empty fork I just took out of my mouth and go, that was great. Am I still hungry

for the next bite? Or am I okay setting the fork aside? Because I could eat the next bite. I could definitely eat the next bite and not feel full, but am I hungry for the next bite? And that's sort of the key skill and key strategy. And I think most people can identify with like, and you know i i think most people can identify with like you know if you if you're a person who likes chocolate cake for instance you say well there's a big piece of chocolate cake that you serve me and they serve it to me they must feel like that's a serving so i'm gonna you know i'm allowed to eat the entire thing because they serve me one serving i won't have two servings i won't be a pig about it i'll, you know, the first bite is like that, man. That's a 10. Holy smokes. That bite is incredibly good. And you savor it. And

then the second bite, wow, that's good too. And then by the third or fourth bite, you're like, well, I mean, this is really good, but it's like a seven now. It's like a six. And by the time you get down to four or five, six bites, you go, OK, I've had the experience of this amazing dessert. At what point is this this food that I clearly get as being not good for me a dessert? At what point have I satisfied my taste buds enough to say, okay, from here on, now I'm just being a glut. From here on, now I'm just making a bet with myself to see if I can finish it and not feel horrible. So you have to be really aware of a lot of things. That's why I've written 10 books on on diet and and how the body works, because you have to understand how the body works in order to to intellectually understand what's going on with your thought process as you're eyeing that next bite of food. Because we are wired to overeat, as I said, and and our our access to food is probably, you know, on the one hand, allowed people to survive, you know,

long periods of time, you know, over the millennia, but our access to food now in modern times has become a detriment. Now there's too much food and now the access is getting in the way of our health. And, you know, we opened the show segment by with the question, how do we change what's going on with people in this country and people who are fat? And, you know, you brought up a great you brought up a great sort of dilemma, the political correctness of using the term fat and calling people out for being fat. Well, I think we need to get back to that. I mean, we need to understand that fat in excess is not good for us. I don't care what your blood markers sort of show and how much you feel like,

well, I'm comfortable in my own skin. There's a point at which it's not good. And I'm not going to judge your life and how you go about your day and your enjoyment of the day and your joie de vivre in life and your ability to get pleasure and enjoyment and fulfillment. But there's a point at which it's still not healthy on balance. Can you help us understand a little bit more about what's going on with our body as far as the hunger? Because that's something you just touched on. I fast throughout the day when I'm here and I don't really find myself getting too hungry. Maybe it's because I'm just busy with things. But one of the things I love to

do is cook for my family. And on the weekends, I'm home and I start cooking for them. And so, I instantly get hungry because I'm around the food. So, I'm like, what the heck? We won't fast today. And even though I keep my calories just under 2000, whether I'm fasting or not, when I have that first meal by maybe early afternoon, I am like, I feel like I'm going to faint. I'm so hungry. And I can't figure out what's going on. And when somebody hears us talking about intermittent fasting or having a feeding window, they probably are freaking out thinking about how hungry they're going to be. But yet when I don't eat, freaking out thinking about how hungry they're going to be. But yet when I don't eat, I don't really get hungry. And then when I do fire up that boiler down in my stomach, I'm starving

throughout the day. So what the heck is going on when I feed myself, I end up getting more hungry than when I don't? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's that is sort of exemplary of the fact that when we eat three meals a day and we and we haven't really configured the diet in a way that was either cereal or toast or waffles or pancakes, donuts or oatmeal or some form of carb to start the day. And don't forget, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, not. That sets us up for being hungry two hours later and needing a donut or a coffee break at work, which sets us up for, and this is a, it's a, it's a, it's an artifact of the body's response to feeding, which is A to, to overeat, B to secrete insulin in response to particularly the sugary foods, but also protein. So the body, the body

sends a surge of insulin into the bloodstream to try and manage all of these excess glucose calories that have come into the body. Let's take a step back. So, yes, we need glucose to survive. But the amount of glucose in your bloodstream at any one time is about five grams. It's about a teaspoonful of glucose in your entire body so if you introduce a bolus of food that has 100 grams of of carbohydrates and let's just use the breakfast as an example and say pancakes which would be 200 grams waffles oatmeal orange juice um a day without orange juice is a day without sunshine oh man um and um the next thing you know so now your body's inundated with

all this glucose and the body does not like to have a lot of glucose in the bloodstream and so it does whatever it can to get rid of it because glucose is toxic over a certain amount. The whole point, the reason diabetes is so rampant in this country and so deadly is that diabetes is the mismanagement of blood glucose. That's all diabetes is. Your body cannot handle the glucose that it either takes in or produces. So the body has this mechanism where it secretes insulin and the insulin is a

hormone that is, that is now charged with the job of getting rid of these excess nutrients and shoving them into the cells. Well, it tries first to shove them into the muscle cells. So excess carbohydrates go into the muscle cells, but if the muscle cells are full and resistant to any more, they're resisting it, they're insulin resistant, then that sugar gets turned to fat. Now, when the sugar gets, when the insulin rises, it overreacts and takes too much glucose out of the bloodstream. So now if your brain was used to,

to working mostly on glucose and your brain has never become accustomed to the, the, the elegance of working on ketones, then the brain goes, Holy crap. We're out of the glucose. It's too low now because we over secreted the insulin from the pancreas. And now we took too much glucose out of the bloodstream the brain's going where's my glucose i'm getting woozy i'm getting hungry i'm getting hangry i'm hungry for the next meal so as soon as you eat that sets that whole thing in motion of this roller coaster of eating something in many cases produces hunger enough to watch you to eat two hours later or three hours later.

That's one of the reasons why this extended eating window, when we say your first meal is at 1.30 or 1 or whatever it is for you, 12, 12.31, I don't care what time it is. How long can you go in the morning without eating and be comfortable? That's really the metric that we use. So if your first meal sets you up for taking in some of this food, and if you've included some fair amount of carbohydrate in it, yeah, insulin goes up. Hunger goes up once the insulin takes all the glucose out. And now you start that roller coaster. And as long as, by the way, as long as you have your last meal at say seven o'clock at night or whatever, 7.30, you've eaten within that compressed eating window.

That's great. The hunger is definitely an artifact of maybe the food choices you've made. Maybe you're not fully fat-adapted or keto-adapted yet. The two meals a day is basically, okay, I can get by on two meals a day. But if I have a snack within that window, it doesn't derail me. All my eating is done within that window. So then on the weekends, if you get up and you say, well, I'm going to have a regular breakfast on the weekends, I'm going to make omelets and stones or whatever it is you'm going to make, you know, omelets and stones or whatever it is you're going to make. Then you're back into that pattern. And it makes, if you think about it,

it makes total sense that every time you introduce food, it sort of sets you up to want more food. So no longer you can go without eating food and be comfortable and not be hungry. And again, that's, I don't want anybody to be hungry here. So as we move down this path of, you don't just go from zero to 60 here. You have to ease your way into it. One of the ways of easing into it is starting by just cutting out the sugars, the starchy carbs, the industrial seed oils, and all those things and kind of refining your diet to what, you know, I used to call and still do a primal blueprint diet, which is basically real food. And still eating three meals a day and still eating whenever you're hungry. And don't worry about that. Just get used to eating real food for a while.

And then as you become adapted to that and as you cut out the starchy carbs and cut out the sugars and cut out all the stuff that was causing the problem, the next thing you do is you say, okay, like I'm going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to see how long I can go without eating until I'm uncomfortable. And as soon as I'm uncomfortable, I'll eat. And then whatever you're going to eat, make sure that it's not a high-carb food, not a donut, not a scone, but maybe some beef jerky or some chicken left over from last night or some nut butter or something that's kind of protein and fat but not carbs. And the longer you can extend that window, then you get to something a lot of people very within a few weeks go, wow, I can go to noon every day, wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, have a cup of tea, whatever, hit the day running, get a lot of work done, go to the gym, do a fasted workout,

and then feel great when I finally sit down to lunch at noon or 1230 or 1 or 1.30 or 2, whatever time it is, and feel like, wow, I feel light. I feel energetic. I feel, uh, you know, all, all the positives that we're trying to achieve here. Were you able to, uh, cure your, uh, IBS? I'm sure people are probably wondering about that. Cause a lot of people suffer from that. Yeah. So, so um the answer is

yeah i mean i when i was uh in my 40s i was starting to write a lot about training and diet and i'd done a lot of research on on diet and i and i knew about cutting out sugars and i'd i'd sort of long since um gotten over my ice cream habit. And I was still sort of holding to this theory that grains were beneficial to health. I've been indoctrinated into the healthy whole grain theory by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and everyone else. And yet I was reading a lot of research on grains and how sort of antithetical they were to health and how they contained what we would call anti-nutrients, gluten for sure, but, you know, phytates that bind with minerals and leaves them out of the body and lectins and a number of other sort of bad elements, if you will, that can be found in grains. And, and, and I was writing about that.

And my wife one day said, and I was 47 years old. My wife goes, you know, you're writing about all this negative aspects of grain consumption. And yet here you are having your whole grain breads with your, you know, with a, with a, on a sandwich in the day or, you know, steel cut oats or, you know, for breakfast. And, and why don't you just, and you still have the IBS. Why don't you cut out grains for a month and see what happens? And so it was my wife's idea and I did it.

And, and I had gone from like, would say, debilitating IBS. In other words, I did not plan a day without figuring out where the nearest bathroom was in case I got hit up by the urge. So, you know, if I had an 8 o'clock flight from LAX, I had to remind myself what gas stations were open with an open bathroom on the way to the airport. It was pretty horrible. And I woke up every morning of my life, I woke up with an urge to purge. So it was pretty debilitating. And all that went away. It literally went away in 30 days. Um, and that was really transformative to me. That was like, wow, if, if, if I had been clinging to the notion that my grains were good for me, even in the face of all the evidence that I'd seen contrary to that. Um, and if, and if I was still holding onto that, I wonder how many tens of millions of

people, you know, have the same issue that I have. And with some people, it turns out, you know, myself included. So I got like 90 percent of of the cure that I needed, maybe not maybe 95 from just eliminating grains. Then the rest came from over the over the over the years, I would say, from cutting out certain vegetables that were probably also antithetical, and ultimately from, I would say, and I can't prove this, supplementing with collagen. So the intestines are very collagen-based in their structure, collagen-based in their structure. And the repair of damaged colon and damaged intestines probably requires access to some collagen peptides and things like that. So I feel like that was sort of the final thing that I did that really fixed me up well for the rest of my life.

that, um, that really fixed me up, uh, well for the rest of my life. No, Mark, I'm really curious because you pay attention to a lot of trainers within the fitness industry or, you know, people that are into the nutrition. Um, a lot of the, there seems to be like two sides of things. There's one side that's like, you know, they see all the benefits of fasting, how it can help with habits, how it can make dieting an easier process and there's the there's the other side who are like well you know it's more of a fad there's nothing special about it all you need is caloric deficit to track and and fasting is just an unnecessary thing for people who want to just say skip breakfast right so so so my question is like what what for like when you're talking to individuals

like this, we're like, Hey, maybe it's something you might want to consider. Um, what are the things that fasting allows you or time-restricted feeding? I don't know how we want to term this, but how, how is it going to be beneficial? Because like the biggest thing for me is it helped me be able to come to terms into feeling hunger and then controlling it. And I, like you, I used to be able to eat a disgusting amount of food, but now I don't have that urge anymore. And I feel, I don't track, I just feel real control. But what are the other benefits that this will have on people's lifestyles that maybe just some trainers aren't understanding?

Well, first of all, I mean, two meals a day, day the concept that's not even fasting i don't even like the term fasting yes it's it's you know when you talk about time restricted eating i i call it intermittent eating intermittent eating okay you know intermittent fasting and um and and and this this window this compressed eating window, is very doable for everybody. I would say going 24 hours without eating or 36 hours without eating is daunting for anybody, for 90% of the people who would face doing that. And it would not be something that they would enter into willingly or with the idea that it was going to be anything other than 36 hours of misery. On the other hand, the compressed eating window is like most people who do this are like, like, oh, my God, I was like I was overdoing it my whole life.

Like I like this is convenient. I have energy. convenient. I have energy. Look, the number one benefit, you can talk about all of the fasting benefits and all of the fat burning stuff and all, you know, the ideal body composition that you trend toward because you're burning off stored body fat. Every time you don't eat a meal, your body's getting the energy from your body fat. But probably the number one benefit here is what you said. It's control over appetite, hunger, and cravings. It's literally understanding that your life, you are now empowered to go about your day without being tethered to mealtime. and without being beholden to what probably isn't even really hunger, but just some habituation that it's eight o'clock, it must be breakfast. It's 1230. We cannot plan that meeting for 1230 because

that's lunchtime. And if I don't have lunch, I'm going to get hangry. And I can't take that flight because they don't serve food on that flight and I'm going to miss hangry. And, you know, I can't take that flight because they don't serve food on that flight, and I'm going to miss a meal. And all of these things that we have tended to, you know, orchestrate our lives around, historically, haven't even been as much about hunger, appetite, and cravings as they have been about habituation to those. And so, you know, it's a Pavlovian response. When the 12 o'clock noon bell rings and you start salivating, it's not even necessarily because you're hungry. It's because, you know, well, you are now because the Pavlovian response caused the, you know,

caused the grailin and the leptin to, to, um, to kick into play. So the answer to the, to the trainers is, well, it's eating three meals a day is a fad. So that fad started during agricultural times when people had to get up in the morning and go out and work the fields. And because they they did, the people who are working the fields didn't have access to choice cuts of meat. All they had access to was carbs. And again, we know what happens when you eat carbs and eat carbs and eat carbs. Yeah, you have the calories and yeah, you burn them off. But you burn them off. And if you're working hard, like I was as a runner or like a field worker is in the farms,

and this goes back to the Egyptian days and even the slaves building the pyramids, they were well fed. They had to feed them three meals a day just to get the work done. So the three meals a day thing, whether it started in Egypt or whether it was an artifact of agriculture in the U.S. or whether it was the notion that once sugar was discovered prior to the Industrial Revolution, but in the 1600s, tea time in England became this time at four o'clock where you got some sugar, you got a cookie, you got a biscuit. Again, to top off the energy stores to get the work done. Right. So we don't we don't all work as as laborers anymore because we have computers and things like that. And yet we're still sort of beholden to this fad of eating an early morning meal, a midday meal, and an evening

meal. That's the fad. If you go back 5,000 years and before, there was not a morning, noon, and evening meal. That's not how our digestive tract was set up. Our digestion is set up to when there's food, we eat it. And when there isn't, we don't, but we survive. We thrive nicely because we have this elegant system that allows us to take the energy out of our stored body fat, combust it as fuel while we're looking for the next source of food. So it's three meals a day that's the fad.

And by the way, the training, and I know everyone in this room goes back far enough to where it was five meals a day. It was five small meals a day with some protein and carb at every meal. And you kept it in your Tupperware because, you know, God forbid you, you were away from your food, um, for whatever it was, you know, and, and literally, I remember people, you know, who were really into health and fitness, stopping a meeting and saying, keep going, keep talking. I'm just going to have my, you know, my, my skinless chicken breast and rice here. Um, cause I don't want to cannibalize my muscle tissue. Right. So, uh, that's the, that was the fad, um, not this idea that we can be metabolically flexible and, and take advantage of, uh, our store body fat and literally burn it off as fuel. Um, every time we don't eat a meal. That's not a fad.

That's our factory setting at birth. And most of us have just sort of gotten away from that. And we need to reset the dials. Living in Florida for a period of time now, did the pandemic have much impact on you where you were living? or it seemed like there's a lot less restrictions there? And so I'd like to know kind of your experience with that. And then now right now you're in California. So maybe you can kind of compare the two. Well, I mean, California has been a shit show the whole time. So I don't I don't have any anything nice to say about California.

No, even even in Miami last year, you know, I have this beautiful I live in a condo on the beach and I set it up. It's basically like a country club. It's it's a summer camp, spa, whatever you want to say. It's a resort. So we have beachfront. And when when COVID first hit and I think none of the governors wanted to be that guy who, you know, who said, go, go about your day. So the governor of Florida, you know, basically and then left it up to the individual communities as well. But the beach was shut down. So for a while there, I couldn't even walk my board across the beach to get into the water and go for a paddle. So it was shut down for a while, uh, last summer. Um, but my wife and I, uh, went to Europe. So we spent two and a half months in Europe last summer. So we went, we went to Turkey first where there was no, no restrictions at all. Yeah. And you know,

waiters wore masks and that was it um we had a we had a we spent the summer and we were in turkey um and then we were in the south of france uh for a while and again they just it was not it was not a big deal and we got back by the time we got back then then florida had kind of reopened so i i have to say i was very fortunate to have avoided most of the horrible parts of COVID. I mean, I got COVID myself. I finally got it. I got it in California when I was here for Thanksgiving. And it was, I mean, it's like, you know, a mild summer cold for me.

It didn't even last two days and that was it. I mean, it's like, you know, a mild summer cold for me. It didn't even last two days and that was it. So, yeah, I've had a real issue with the concept of taking healthy people and locking them indoors away from vitamin D, away from fresh air, away from exposure to soil and other things that would be beneficial to the immune system. It's the most mismanaged event in human history if you ask me. Yeah. It seems like we all got punished. You know, we all got punished for the maybe poor choices of many, many people, you know?

And like you said, healthy people had to pay the same price as unhealthy people. It doesn't make any sense. Were you ever like nervous about it? were you ever intimidated or scared about it or did you uh because of your friends in the circle you're in did you know more information maybe yeah yeah i mean i was never once intimidated i mean again i look i have to you know pay my respects to people who've lost loved ones um you know, this is a, this is an immune system issue. It's not a public health issue as much as it's a personal immune system issue.

And if you've, for the most part, if you've taken good care of yourself, you know, I mean, 90% of all people who get this don't die. You know, 99.9999991% of young people who get this don't die. So it's a very manageable issue if you have made

good choices throughout your life in terms of your food choices, your exercise choices, managing your immune system and things like that. I mean, as I tell people, I spent my whole, I've trained my whole life for COVID. So, you know, I'm, and to this day, I'm planning on going to Europe this summer. And I'm like, I hope I don't have to, you know, I'm, I had it. So I had the best vaccine you can get, right? So I'm not, you know, I'm personally not going to get vaccinated and I'm going to fight to not get vaccinated because I feel like I've got I've got one better. And yet there seems to be no. You know, no method by which people who had COVID and didn't have a bad experience with it can go about their lives, you know, in that regard with some, with that kind of a passport.

Is your family in agreement with you or do they think you're crazy? No, my family, 100% agreement with me. Everyone, every one of my family agrees with me. I know some families had like, you know, discrepancies, you know. Yeah, no, no, no. No, for sure. I mean, and I can see that. I mean, and I have seen it in other families too um but my family's you know 100 in agreement and

you know as i said i um i've been i've had my eye on this since since day one i've been following it i've been you know uh privately talking shit about it for a long time i haven't written a lot of uh that of what of what my thoughts were about it. But to my full circle of friends, I've been putting out a little newsletter. You know, I stopped months ago because everything I predicted came true. But yeah, I mean, it's just it's an unfortunate occasion in human history. And if we don't learn from this in terms of, you know, how we treat the root cause of every disease, I mean, every, you know, every disease, all the comorbidities that people are dying from existed before COVID and people,

so a lot of people are dying with COVID from these comorbidities. We need to get a handle on, on, on the root cause. We need to go back to, again, the original sort of statement here is how do we get people to be healthy and managing their blood sugar and mobile and, and have their immune systems firing on all cylinders. And we do that with a massive shift in how we choose to eat. And I would say part of that massive shift is in when you choose to eat

and what you choose to eat and how much food you take in and how much time you spend in the gym. And by the way, I've heard stories about people who are like, oh, my friend was a triathlete and he had a horrible experience or someone knows someone who was a triathlete who died. Well, you can overtrain and screw your immune system up doing that too. I mean, I was one of those people who was one of my issues was overtraining as a triathlete and as a marathoner and i got i got colds upper respiratory tract infections six times a year from over

training that is not that's not indicative of a healthy immune system that's indicative of a of a screwed up immune system so it's it's not like well you, you see, Mark, there are people who are training hard who are, who are getting this disease and are not doing well. So that proves that it's, you know, that it's indiscriminate. No, it's, it's pretty discriminatory against people who have not taken care of their abuses. Yeah. One of my absolute, probably the favorite, my favorite tweet that I read about all of this was stop calling us

asymptomatic. We're just healthy. Uh, that was fantastic. But I'm just curious. Yeah. I'm just curious. Um, did you get tested for it or was it just an assumption that you had it? No, I get tested for it. So, um, uh, I, uh, I was in California and I was, uh, uh, in a, in a closed, in a vehicle with somebody for an hour. And that person tested positive the next day. So I knew I had been

exposed. So I basically went back to Miami. My family was going to have a big family gathering and I didn't want to mess that up. Because we were not going to be wearing masks. And so I came back to Miami, and I just hunkered down. I'll tell you my symptoms.

It was sort of interesting. About four and a half days later, I woke up with weird diarrhea. It was like, where did that come gonna say weird, like diarrhea. It was like, where'd that come from? Like, Oh my God. That was like, it was like, like, did I eat something bad last night? Or, cause it was just, it was weird. It wasn't painful. It was just like, you know, just a squirt gun. Right. So, so that was it. And that was the only, that was the only GI symptom I had. The rest of the day I was fine, and I never had another GI symptom.

And that night I had a chest cough and a stuffy nose, so I took some antihistamine and I went to bed. But I knew what was going on, so I had a private concierge company come over and test me the next day. And that test was positive. So I knew I had it. And that night, again, I had a little bit of a cough and some and some stuff again, some congestion. Woke up the next morning was fine. Literally was fine. And the only thing that happened that was weird was I did lose taste and smell for about a week. So I lost about four pounds from that because food was not appealing to me. Steak tasted like chewing on rubber. It was just weird. And that seems to be a very common, one of the common symptoms of COVID is this messing with your taste buds and sense of smell. But that came back

within a week. And, you know, I didn't go to the gym for a couple of days because I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to mess it up and overtrain too soon. I wouldn't have gone to the gym anyway, but I would have trained outside or done something, you know, in the air and I just sort of laid low for a week, but that was it. And yeah, so, so I was a full on, that was my full on COVID experience. You know, Mark, I recently listened to Lex Friedman's podcast and he had George St. Pierre on. Mark mentioned that I should listen to it. It was really good. But when George was talking, he was talking about how he does intermittent eating nowadays.

And it's something that he really wishes that he did when he was a fighter. Because he feels like the mental acuity and just the benefit he gets from it as far as fighting without his stomach feeling full, feeling lighter, et cetera. He's like, I really wish I knew about this when I was a fighter. Now, I know all sports are different and have different demands from food, right?

But if we're speaking in general terms, do you think that there's any benefit in utilizing intermittent eating for different types of sports for different types of athletes? Um, I know it's hard to be general about this, uh, but do you see merit in that? Yeah, I think across the board, there's merit. It just depends on, on the extent to which you want to do this. Um, as an endurance athlete, if I had known about this technology, um, I would have, I would have dived right in. Um, this would have, this would have shifted my, uh, my have this would have shifted my uh my training strategy would have

shifted my eating strategy would have shifted my uh my race fueling strategy i mean when i was when i was running there was gatorade that was it um you know now now there's all sorts of um you know different things that you can consume during an event. But so it was all sort of based on carbohydrate, like maintaining blood glucose. Now there's a guy, I don't know if you've seen any of the interviews with Zach bitter, but Zach bitter is like one of the top endurance guys in the country. And he's, and he set records for you know, a hundred mile events where he's running under seven minutes a mile without any

food at all, where he's running under seven minutes a mile without any food at all, any sort of exogenous feeding for most of the race, if not all the race, and deriving 97% of his caloric needs, his energy, from fat. That's something that's not only amazing and impressive, that's something that the science committee, even as recently as 10 years ago, would have thought was physically, physiologically impossible, but now we're seeing it happen. So there is, and then you can train low and race high. So you can train, like if you're, if you're, if you're a fighter, you can train low and then you can carve up and top it off

You can train low and then you can carve up and top it off pre-fight and have access to the energy reserves of a full liver, a full muscle glycogen, which we're only talking about a few hundred calories either way. calories either way. But the adaptation is even in the minutes between rounds, you can recover faster. So if you're trying to make weight, it's a great way of making weight. It's actually a better way of maintaining muscle mass and power to weight ratio without having to balloon up in between fights. So if you're a wrestler, if you're a boxer, if you're a cage fighter, all these different modalities, all these different sports can benefit from some amount of dietary manipulation that teaches you to become better at burning fat. I would say that there's probably no sport where that wouldn't have some

impact from 5% to 100%. So it's as a training strategy, and it might depend on when you do it, it might you might do it in the off season, right? You might do it as you're trying to build metabolic flexibility off season, and as the season comes up, you know, you shift a little bit more toward your, your standard diet, but, um, but you still retain the benefits of having developed metabolic flexibility, including the brain's ability to, to thrive on, on ketones. Um, so yeah, I, I would challenge somebody to say, well, here's, there's one sport, you know, where, I mean, it could be, you know, uh, it could be hot dog eating. So maybe Joey Chestnut would, would disagree, but, where, I mean, it could be, you know, it could be hot dog eating. So maybe Joey Chestnut would disagree, but what sport would there be that would not benefit from some manipulation

using metabolic flexibility as sort of a keystone? Yeah. I think there's a big fear behind like not eating. Like I don't even know where I necessarily got it from. Maybe one of my coaches when I was a teenager, but I just always had this idea that I must eat two to three hours before doing any type of physical activity, whether it be lifting, whether it be soccer, whether it be whatever I have to eat two hours before.

And if I don't, I'd get in my head and think my performance was like not good. But obviously these days i found that that's not the case just need some electrolytes or something and i'm good to go but there's a legitimate fear not eating before you go do something it's ingrained yeah no it's it's ingrained and you know we you would say well um i could i could make a case for that back when i was a runner and i was so carbohydrate dependent and part of my carb dependency was centered around my choice of training level. So if I trained at a heart rate

of say 80 to 85 beats or 75 to 85 beats a minute for a couple of hours a day. It's what we now call the black hole of training. So it's not slow enough to be largely fat burning and train your fat burning systems. And it's not fast enough to be training power, sustained power or speed. It's in this area where all you're doing is practicing to hurt, literally. And in so doing, you would run through all your carbs you deplete the carbs in that race over the run in that training run 10 miles 12 miles 15 miles sometimes 20 25 miles in a day and so you had no choice but to consume carbs and eat a lot so you could do it again the next day right so this was all predicated on doing it again the next day if your training is centered around maximizing

the effects of training and rebuilding stronger then it doesn't behoove you to train hard every single day well if you don't train hard every single day um your glycogen reserves they come back you'll restore glycogen especially if you're consuming 220 grams of protein a day because a lot of that will be converted into stored glycogen so if you don't need to train hard every day you don't need to eat a lot of food every day to be able to do it again and again and again and again. If your training is predicated on improving over time and finding what Tim Ferriss would almost say is the minimum effective dose of training,

like what's the least amount of training I can do and get the greatest benefits. So with that comes not tearing down, not getting injured, not getting, you know, whatever. Now we have a situation where, not getting injured, not getting, you know, whatever. Now we have a situation where, okay, so in my old days of running and triathlon training, I would lift a little bit too. I was one of the few runners that would lift.

And so I would get home and I would eat a post-workout meal. Again, we used to talk about a window of opportunity of resynthesizing glycogen. It's 45 minutes post-workout where your body's most primed to resynthesize glycogen. And yes, you had to include some amount of protein. It was very scientific in those days. And with that, you would resynthesize glycogen faster so you could go do it again the next day. But if I'd known then what I know now, I would say one of the things that happens when you eat a post-workout meal is, yes, you resynthesize glycogen if you intend to work out tomorrow.

But if you don't intend to work out tomorrow, then there's no benefit to resynthesizing glycogen. And the addition of all of this carbohydrate, which shoots insulin up, the insulin suppresses the growth hormone of the testosterone pulse that you intended to get from the workout. So now you're actually sort of defeating some of the benefits or the purpose of the actual heavy lifting workout you just did by eating right after the meal or right after the workout because of the insulin rise. So it's kind of a weird, you get a choice. Do I choose to resynthesize glycogen so I can go beat myself up again tomorrow? Or do I choose to not eat and maximize this growth hormone and testosterone pulse that is going to build the muscle that was my real intention of the workout? Again, I wasn't working out to beat myself up. I was intending to build myself up.

So it's kind of a grid of like, what am I trying to accomplish? And where do these different food strategies fit into my ultimate goal? You know, if you're if you're a guy like like Zach Bitter or somebody who's training do long runs, you want to do them. You want to do them fasted and you don't want to eat for a long time after you do them. And you might even want to go out and do it again tomorrow because of your mileage. But that's a different strategy than building muscle in the gym or building sustained power output or the different variables that different sports require to excel at them. I think it'd be helpful for a lot of people to view carbohydrates as being performance

enhancing and also understanding that they hold a lot of strength. Like you don't need a lot of carbs to make a big difference. And some of the things you're out, you're outlining there with the post-workout meals and stuff, you know, sometimes people think they need to have 200 carbs, you know, post-workout to replenish this hard workout and to get to their next workout and so on. But I've learned for myself personally, 20 to 50 carbs, somewhere in that range seems to work great. I might do that twice a day. As you mentioned earlier, you might have about 150 carbs in a given day. I'll also go some days without just because of just training demands might not be as high on a particular day,

but that's been really effective for me. What are some of your thoughts on people just kind of utilizing kind of smaller, much smaller amounts of carbohydrates rather than trying to get in this huge surplus of carbs? I know. I think, I think that's a good,

a good analogy that carbs become sort of what, whereas, you know, protein is obligatory and fat is sort of necessary for energy. Carbs are sort of like electives, right? And you can use the carbs according to your particular strategy, not just overall for your sport, but from day to day, from meal to meal.

So, you know, understand that we can store infinite amounts of fat in our body. I mean, it's easy for somebody to store 100,000 calories worth of excess fuel on their body as fat. That's basically 30 extra pounds of fat, and that's 100,000 calories worth of fat. worth of fat. Conversely, the muscles can't store much at all. Even sort of the best, most adept carb management strategies would suggest that the liver can hold 100, maybe 120 grams of glycogen of carbs. And then the muscles throughout the body can maybe hold 500 total, maybe 600 total, but it never drops down below 175. People say, well, I hit the wall. I ran out of carbs.

I ran out of glycogen in my muscles. Well, no, that almost never happens. Your brain shuts you down way before that happens. maximum of 500 and a minimum of 175, that's only like 325 grams of glycogen that we can store between our best day and our worst day. That's such a narrow window that it's almost insignificant. Then if you add to that the fact that the body resynthesizes glycogen, whether you consume a ton of carbs or not, it just takes longer to rebuild the glycogen stores. And that's my point about if you're going to do it again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and the next day, then okay, there's some possible strategy for carb loading

every day. But if you're going to go on the basis of what's my workout tomorrow look like, I don't need a lot of glycogen for what I'm doing tomorrow. And so I don't need to eat any carbs today to perform well in the workout that I have planned for tomorrow because of what that is. On the other hand, you say, well, today I did a depletion day and I depleted all the glycogen. You say, well, today I did a depletion day and I depleted all the glycogen. And maybe tomorrow I'm going to go to the track and do sprints. So it would behoove me to have 200 grams, 150 grams of sweet potato for dinner tonight so that when I wake up tomorrow, I've got a little bit more in my tank. But I don't need to have 600 grams of carbs. And yet, that's what a lot of people, you know,

they think in terms of that. So if you've been putting carbs in as glycogen and then drawing them out as fuel on a regular basis, you've, um, glucose sensitivity. In other words, your, your, your, your, um, your muscles are, are, um, are insulin sensitive and they're, and they're allowing glucose to come in. And then they, and then you, you run it out because you're doing glycolytic activity once in a while, that's great throughput. And so it doesn't take that much for you to top off your glycogen stores even if you're carbohydrate loading the idea of again of of a 500 gram carb day is antithetical even even to ask you know endurance athletes and now we go back to the general population for whom 500 grams of carbs a day is like oh yeah that's probably what I eat. You know, sure, between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And I get, you know, because 500 grams of carbs, by the way, is 2,000 calories of carbs. Oh, and I cut my fat way down. I don't eat that much fat. So let's just say I have a little bit of fat every day. And then I have, you know, 100 grams of protein. That's 400 calories. Well, that's 2,500 calories. Some people are eating 3,500, 4,000 calories a day every single day.

And these are people who aren't even athletes. They're just like people who would consider themselves normal Jills and Joes going through their average day based on their hunger, appetite, and cravings and eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, snack. You know, just, just so maybe certain people can have an idea because I have, um, I have heard some people like mention, Hey, or DM say, Hey, I tried doing the low carb, you know, higher fat thing. And I, I just, I can't do it. I feel like my energy is such crap. I can't get used to it. Then I'm assuming there's an adaptation period for each individual. Like what, what,

what would you say? How long is a, is a good amount of time that it would take somebody to be actually become more metabolically flexible and be able to use fat as fuel within sport. If they haven't been doing that before, like what could one expect? Well, you know,

if you're an athlete of any kind and, you know, reasonably proficient in your sport, it won't take long, two weeks, three weeks. If you're, you know, a person who's been non-athletic and has been metabolically challenged and has dug a deeper and deeper hole for yourself over your lifetime, lifetime it's going to take a long time i mean you've done some metabolic damage there's a lot of a lot of stuff to undo there so it might take you know several weeks you know or or a month and i would say to those people look just don't make it unpleasant like keep surround yourself with healthy you know high fat snacks um again beef jerkyky, nut butters. My favorite is coconut butter. But just have that handy to take the edge off hunger. But don't let hunger derail your plans. Just know that your goal here is first and foremost to adapt to metabolic flexibility.

So phase one doesn't even include weight loss. Phase one is just getting rid of the shit, getting rid of the sugars, the starchy carbs, all grains of any kind. I'm pretty serious about that. Industrial seed oils. There are a lot of people who say, look, Mark, I tried your plan. I've been having a big salad every day with a lot of salad dressing on it. Cause that's bad. I'm like, what kind of salad dressing you use? Well,

the label says soy canola. I'm like, Oh shit. Well, you know, you just took a healthy, a healthy meal and, and turned it into a horrific meal. Like worse than if you just, um, you know, um, eight, you know, uh, I don't know, I didn't even want to, what to say as an example, but it was just like, you're better off not having had the salad than having had the salad that you just ate with that dressing on it. Um, because a lot of people, um, have become insulin, um, resistant as a result of the industrial seed oils in their diet.

In fact, there's now a whole body of evidence that suggests that these industrial seed oils, soybean, corn oil, canola, and the like, are maybe more deleterious to health, more dangerous than sugar for some people. They cause, you know, these are fat molecules that get incorporated. They don't get combusted that well. They don't get burned.

And they get incorporated into cell membranes of some important cells, and then they don't function the way they're supposed to. And so the cells become resistant as a result of that. So even some people think, well, I'm doing it right, Mark. I've increased the amount of fats in my diet, and I've cut back on the carbs, and I'm not feeling the energy, and I'm not feeling, well, I'm doing it right, Mark. I've increased the amount of fats in my diet and I've cut back on the carbs and I'm not feeling the energy and I'm not feeling, well, maybe your choice of fats was the problem. And so we have to really dial this in. And I don't want to make it sound that daunting to people. I mean, it's a whole list of stuff that you can eat and you keep that stuff in your house and then you get rid of all the stuff that you should not be eating. And you keep that out of your house. And then you try not to eat on the road

at convenience stores. And if you're in a restaurant and you have to order something, order steak, ask if they'll cook it in butter or no oil or olive oil. If you're going to have a salad, just say, bring the salad and I'll make my own dressing with the extra virgin olive oil. If you're going to have a salad, just say, bring the salad and I'll make my own dressing with the extra virgin olive oil that's on the table here and the vinegar. I mean, there are lots of workaround strategies for this. So it doesn't have to be this daunting kind of process. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be, again, it's supposed to taste great. I mean, again,, again, it's supposed, and it's supposed to taste great. I mean, again, don't eat anything that doesn't taste great to you.

Anything you're really excited, looking forward to coming out from Primal Kitchen that we should keep our eye on? We just shipped 11 48-foot truckloads of buffalo sauce to Costco. Oh, awesome. So can you have them just drop them off at my house? So the new buffalo sauce is fantastic, is is taking the world by storm. But we've always got some some amazing new products in the pipeline. And, you know, as I said, I wanted to change the way the world eats. I was very,

very sensitive to this idea that we eat the wrong oils and wrong fats. And so the whole company was predicated on what can I put on food to make it taste better and to be better for me versus the old paradigm, which is, you know, well, these, these, these mayonnaises and these salad dressings, they taste great, but they're not good for you. So use them sparingly. And, you know, well, these, these, these mayonnaises and these salad dressings, they taste great, but they're not good for you. So use them sparingly. And, you know, and if you don't, you're going to be screwed. That was the whole reason for the,

for Primal Kitchen starting up in the first place. And, and I think we've, when I say we want to change the way the world eats, I think we're doing that. And I think, you know, kudos to Kraft Heinz for recognizing that and for being with us on our mission to change the way the world eats and making healthy eating, you know, a pleasurable, exciting experience. Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. It's always great to have you on the show. Hey, great hanging out with you guys. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Take care. Thank you. Yeah. That was fantastic. Yo. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah it was it really was man he

he makes it so simple like it's it's really like the explanation's not that difficult it's very easy for somebody to just take a lot of that information and get things going i think it'd be really hard for someone to just kind of jump into that diet and that's why i think people should get his book that way they can see kind of exactly where to start. But he did, he did give us some good advice on kind of how to get started and kind of sounded like, um,

sounded like he would kind of put you on a lower carbohydrate diet for a few weeks. And then you'd probably start to introduce a little bit of that fasting that he was talking about or intermittent eating as he was putting it. And then you'd kind of be on your way. But if you started out of nowhere, then you'd kind of be on your way. But if you started out of nowhere, then you might feel what Andrew said he's feeling here and there, where it feels like it's going to collapse midday.

Yeah, it was rough. And we've talked about it before. Like, you know, as soon as you fire up that engine, like you just start getting hungrier. But, you know, I hadn't been fasting for quite a while now and then recently picked it back up again. And I do like it. I enjoy it when I'm here. I get a lot more work done. Definitely. I'm not stopping the flow to go and grab some food. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely also what you had said earlier in the podcast, Mark, like if you have something that tastes really good, you kind of like, Oh shit. Like the floodgates are open.

Um, Oh my God. It was only 600 calories, but I had French toast with, uh, Greek yogurt, blueberries and protein mixed in with the Greek yogurt. And I'm,

I'm learning a lot from Mark. So I put everything together, added a bunch of salt, like literally put the Greek yogurt on the toast. Which Mark are you talking about? Mark Bell. Okay. Yeah. Salt, sugar-free syrup.

And I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. It was so good. Like it was amazing. But yeah, I was like, no, I'm sticking to this calorie, you know, amount. And dude, like a couple hours later, I'm like, all right, I'm only going to have a couple ounces of chicken, a little bit of rice, and I'll be good. I ate that. And then by time dinner rolled around, I'm like, hey, like we need to eat now. Like I'm freaking hungry. Ate that, you know, it was a Piedmontese steak. Felt good. A couple minutes couple minutes later i'm like what is going on here like

i i'm so hungry and so what ended up happening was i was trying to have these small like because i'm not gonna have a snack but i'm having a smaller meal and then well i'm still hungry so i'm gonna have just a small meal again and i just kept doing that until dinner time and then after dinner i'm like well i just need another small little meal instead of doing like the two meals a day where I could have had, you know, one really big meal and been totally satisfied, totally full. And then maybe something after. But man, I'm like, wow, like I know this information, but now that I experienced it, like, oh my gosh, like, yeah, I can't wait to get back to fasting. it, I'm like, oh my gosh, like, yeah, I can't wait to get back to fasting. I think even something as simple as with that second meal, just having just chicken would have changed your tone a little bit.

And even just eating just chicken, but also just like eating a good surplus of it or just not having the French toast, but the French toast sounds like it's too much fun to not have. Yeah, it was so good. Yeah. And I mean, I literally couldn't stop thinking about it all day. I think your body's going to make up for, you know, lost food, you know. You know, I put it very plainly before.

Like, you know, you're trying to go from being a gallon jug of milk to a skinnier thing of half and half. You know what I mean? The skinnier, I don't even know what those are. Quarts? Quarts or something? Oh, yeah. But because your body is so used to being that giant milk carton, it wants that amount of energy. It wants you to fill all that up all the time.

And so you're going to keep wanting to do that and at some point whether it be at the end of the month or just six five six days into a diet your body's going to be like hey uh you know you're gonna gonna eat like normal dude or like what are you doing you're trying to fuck us over here we don't like this yeah and at some point uh usually your motivation and those kinds of things, they start to run out. And then you find yourself just ferociously hungry. Man, I can't stop eating. I had a solid leg day on Saturday, too. So I'm blaming that also.

I noticed the other way around, too, on this is that if you put out a crazy amount of energy, you'll have some days, whether it's the next day or two, three days later where you're just kind of blah, you're just, you just have lot. Like I did a seven mile hike with my wife on Saturday. Nice. We did this like hike in Tahoe and it just, it's an ass kicker.

We ran a little bit of it and stuff too. And it was amazing. And I did come to the gym right when I drove back here yesterday, but it wasn't a, you know, this is a minimal workout. And even today, like I did get my running in this morning, but I know that I'm going to have to kind of pick myself up to go into the gym to get a workout in today. That's normally not the case, but it's because that amount of energy that was kind of bled out on that one day, you know, my body's like, hey, you put out a lot of energy. You're good, man.

You shouldn't do that. And so it gets easy to talk yourself out of it. So great to learn that our brains burn about 500 calories a day. Yeah, just from sitting there. Like, damn, I could have another meal. 500 calories a day. Yeah, just from sitting there. Like, damn, I could have another meal.

I think he said about, you know, just how much he used to run and all that kind of stuff. I find a lot of that really interesting. And then also, if you're doing multiple workouts or you're doing a crazy amount of workouts in one day to get enough energy to get back into the game the next day. And that's something that seemed to be important with some CrossFit athletes. I know it's huge in track and field where they'll do multiple workouts. And that's why a drug like insulin is actually really utilized in things like track and field because they have to figure out how can they get to the next workout in the best possible state.

So if you're somebody that's doing multiple workouts, especially if the workouts are somewhat similar, you do have to figure out how to replenish some of that. And electrolytes are a good place to start. But some carbohydrates, I think, can go a long way. And I don't think we need a lot. You don't need as much as a lot of people are eating. But that's the same thing that goes on with me.

If I know I'm going to have a tough day the next day, my fuel comes the night before. Like, my fuel comes from the big meals that I have the day before. And then, boom, the next day I'm good. It doesn't come a few hours before I actually have to work out. It makes a lot of sense. It's not going to disappear. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like a lot of athletes get the hang of that.

Maybe they'll be able to have a little bit more flexibility and less anxiety when it comes around their food. But I really do like how he mentioned how, like, cause you, you know, you, again, you hear a lot of people like, oh yeah, three meals a day. Your doctor says the most important meal of the day is breakfast. Um, you know, I'm just like one of, one of our, uh, the guests that we had on James Smith, he's really like notorious for stuff like that on his on his instagram when he talks about stuff like fasting i respect him a lot just sometimes when he goes in on those tangents it's just like bro really but it is what it is anyway what i was going to say was i do like how he mentioned you know the the paradigm is three meals a day it's like it's that's the thing that's grilled into you and the cool the interesting thing is like when he mentioned uh uh, the lunch bell, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, absolutely.

Like from, from the time you were a kid, you know, you know what time lunchtime is. And it's like same time every day you hear the bell, you can go eat. Right. Um,

so it's, it's just kind of drilled into you. So you, you, you always under the assumption that this is the right way to do it. This is the right way. It's what we've all been doing. All of us.

Well, a majority of us. Well, a majority of us are fat. So maybe it's not the best way to go about things. Well, an interesting thing is that you can put anybody, you know, you can put any person on a diet where they eat, like,

let's just say like 500 calories. Like any of us could be on a 500 calorie diet for like a long ass period of time before you really run into any sort of issues. You might have hormonal issues and stuff like that, but you can survive on that and lose a crazy amount of weight. I'm not saying that's a great place to go because then you end up with what Mark talked about being like really hungry. There's all kinds of shit that happens, but just to kind of put that in perspective for people on the kinds of shit that happens, but just to kind of put that in perspective for people on the amount of food that we consume every day, how many times

a day that we eat, you could eat a one burger with some cheese on it every day and just eat, you know, half pound burger. And that would be plenty of food for nearly every single person to get along with that just fine without really and still having decent energy you know after a while that strategy is not going to be great but i'm just saying to put it in a perspective of how you know we eat so much food we eat such a surplus of food all the time and you really get away with something really minimal yeah what do you guys think are some uh acceptable excuses for something like the counter argument to that. Like, Mark, I can't do we're not saying do one hamburger a day, but Mark, I can't do that because I train in the morning or whatever it may be. Or I can't do that because my work schedule is crazy.

Is there any reason why somebody couldn't do something like that? No, I think it makes it saves time and money by not eating so um i think if your schedule is crazy that's great keeps you occupied keeps your meeting makes it easier i've said before you know like why and seem as that jujitsu he's not eating a sandwich you know he's not you can't eat like when you're when you're training in the gym i mean i guess you could figure out a way but you certainly don't want to or need to. If you're out doing like a run, these are all things that can occupy a bunch of time. And so the things that occupy time and keep you from really being overly concerned about food, those are, those are take the, take that road, you know, take that route.

I do understand that socially, sometimes things can be a little different. It's odd to not participate in doing some of the things that other people are doing. But I think you could find workarounds for that. I usually know when you're invited to a party. I usually know when someone's birthday is or holiday. Oh, you know, Easter's coming up or whatever the hell holiday is coming up. And you can kind of be like, okay, well, I know the family usually gets together.

It would just be easier if I just kind of ate with everybody. So I'm going to fast a little extra the day before, fast a little extra the day of, and I'm going to just enjoy the fuck out of hanging out with my family and eating like whatever we have that day. You know, I think, I think anybody can make these strategies work. Also don't be so tied to anything and so overly worried about it either. I don't think, I don't think being neurotic about it is a great idea either,

you know, counting and tracking and being so meticulous to where you're stressed out about it all the time. That kind of falls in that category of like trying, like it's easier just, it's easier just to be in it for the long haul and to be consistent and not worry about being fancy, as we always say on the show. um, a mixed, has some mixed macros in it. Um, and you're training hard and these kinds of things, you don't really need to worry a ton about post-workout carbohydrates. Um, some people like that. Some people like to have post-workout shake and some dextrose powder or something like

that, but you don't really need to do that. If you have like oatmeal in the morning, or if you ate some carbohydrates the night before as and sema's pointing out like those things they don't disappear they don't go away and actually i would say that i can't i don't i don't know how the human body works 100 but i don't think the oatmeal that you have at 7 a.m is doing anything for you at 9 a.m i think takes a long time for your body to break that shit down, especially something like oatmeal, which has a lot of fiber in it. It's slow. Maybe there's some sugar or something that you put in it. Maybe you'll get a little boost from that. But I would say the benefit of having food pre-workout is its attachment to electrolytes. The macronutrients help to transport the electrolytes through your system a little

bit better. So if there's any benefit to them at all, I think that's where it is. And it also just might make you weigh a little bit more, which might feel a little bit. You might just, you know what I mean? You might just feel like you have a little bit more substance to you and it wouldn't be ominous. Yeah, it wouldn't be a lot of weight, but the water and the food that you had, maybe you're a pound or two heavier. Like that actually might feel like something when you go and do a squat or

bench or deadlift, something like that. No, I totally understand that. Some people do feel maybe a little bit more fragile when they don't have food in their system. I know that was kind of what, what was going through my mind when I was focusing on eating beforehand.

I kind of just like, I just, I was, I was just more in my head than anything. And as an athlete, when you're in your head about something, that will affect your performance drastically if you don't actually trust what you're doing. If you had someone who came to you and they said, I really want to put on muscle mass, I want to be bigger. Would you say, hey, it would be a good idea for you to eat an hour or two before training, an hour or two post-workout?

Like, what would your thoughts be kind of in a scenario like that? The biggest thing would be figuring out what their appetite is like already. Because if this is someone who doesn't have a big appetite, then it's not a good idea to try to add fasting into the mix because now you're supposed to have your lack of appetite in a smaller window of time to eat a big amount of food. Just doesn't make sense. But if the person has a good appetite and they can put down a lot of food, I would first off make sure,

can you handle this amount of food? Cool. If they do want to implement some fasting or whatever, that's great. The post-workout stuff, I typically just tell people to have some, like a little bit of protein, maybe a little great. The post-workout stuff, I typically just tell people to have some, like a little bit of protein, maybe a little bit of carbs post-workout, but the difference it makes is so minuscule, honestly, that it really doesn't, it's not a big deal.

Oh, come on, bro. If you want to get those little percentage points. We got to stay anabolic, man. If you want to get those little percentage points over time. Five minutes away from being catabolic. Sure. Yeah, sure, you can do that. But it's not like that's going to be the difference between you winning, honestly, because I've heard people say, oh, it's the difference between winning a bodybuilding show or not. No, it's not. No, the biggest thing is getting in the total amount of calories you need in that day and making

sure that you're doing that day over day over day. I used to be a personal trainer and I'd go to the gym early. I would get my training done and then post-workout I'd have a shake, a shower, and I'd be ready to train people for the day. The only reason why I did that was the next time I'm going to get to food would have been at like one or two o'clock. So I just wouldn't have any food. And this is like, I didn't know anything about fasting and stuff like that either. But I still, you know, even if I was in that same scenario now, I would still choose to have the post-workout shake. That's where I think those kinds of things can matter a little bit is

if you don't think you're going to have access to food for a few hours, and I don't think it's an emergency necessarily. I just think it's another opportunity to shuttle some nutrients into your body, whether it be via, you know, some post-workout carbohydrates and or a protein shake. If you're somebody that's looking to gain some size, I think that you can't really afford to miss out on calories. And so that would be a great time if you're like, hey, it's going to be three, four hours, but by the time I get home, by the time I cook something, all those things start to kind of add up, then I think it makes sense to bring a shake with you or shaker cup with you, have some of these powders with you, boom, mix them up, and you have it within 30 minutes post-workout. Now you're on your road to recovering from that

particular workout or something like that. And this is what we're saying. We're not saying that there is no positive to the post-workout shakes or whatever it's not like not saying it's it's a it's it's not a negative um and it is a positive but is it a positive that's going to make a huge difference no we haven't never had anybody walk in this building and then we're like holy fuck dude what have you been doing and they're not like i switched over to doing, you know, being meticulous in my post-workout thing. You know, we haven't really, we haven't seen that. What we have seen though from people is, you know, we don't see each other for a minute.

Somebody's on the right track with their nutrition. And then we're like, damn, like your nutrition's really coming together. Like your shoulders look better. This looks better. That looks better. And that is through weeks and weeks and weeks of dieting, weeks and weeks of, you know, gaining control of your diet. It's not going to, you're not going to get some sort of crazy pop out of this post-workout

meal or whatever. Yeah. And then just, um, cause you had said, if somebody doesn't have a big appetite, you wouldn't want them to fast. It wouldn't be the first thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's just something.

Cause like you guys know, like my appetite growing up was, you know, I would consider myself to not have a big appetite. I never looked forward to really eating, but trying fasting, not picking things here and there to eat throughout the day that are super palatable.

Right. So by time dinner came around, I'm like, man, I really am not interested in that steak because i've already had you know like mark says you have some doritos you're not going to want to eat a steak so i was that person but when i said no i'm not going to eat the entire window whatever it is when dinner time did come around i was really fired up to eat so it kind of almost it sounds bad but to be like

it taught me how to be hungry that's a good thing yeah it's a good thing but but and this is from somebody who didn't have a big appetite so if somebody does and they they just heard that they're gonna be oh i'm never doing that that's they just got to make sure to get the calories in in that time period like you can't you can't have like a six hour window you're supposed to eat 2500 calories and you eat 1800 you can't call it a day eat that last 700 calories i think you also have to maybe back things up just a bit and say if you don't have a great appetite when it comes to and you've already been implementing healthy foods yeah you know what i mean because if you're i think a lot of people have crap appetites because

they eat crappy food they got those gas station taste buds that I talk about quite a bit. And it's easy to, to, it's easy to like not be interested in something healthy. Hey, would you like a salad? You want, you know, I got chicken, I got this, I got that. And they're like, no, I'm good. It's because they just ate a bag of chips. a bag of chips. You know, I think we run, a lot of people run into that with their children. They just drank a soda. They just, you know, they have all these great flavorful things. And then you're, you have some healthy options and they don't, you know, they don't want anything to do with it. Cause they're like, no, no, no, I'm good. They're not necessarily full. And it's not necessary that they're not necessarily not hungry, but they're satisfied and they don't feel like they need anything else. And so if you eat tacos or burrito or something really super delicious at like one o'clock, you're probably not going to be hungry or really care that much. Not necessarily not be hungry, but probably not going to care that much about a steak

at five o'clock. Yeah. And that's kind of what I was starting to get to was like, I would snack throughout the day. Therefore, I didn't have a big appetite but if you know you do take all of those away and you don't have snacks you you know you what you said it didn't seem like you had meals at meals from like i don't remember how you that's how you meals at meals yeah that was so important because i would be the person that would just eat all day long but none of it was healthy.

Or, I mean, maybe even if it was, it just wasn't enough food, but by time meal time did come around. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't really care for anything.

I just wanted whatever's palatable and whatever sounded good at that time. Yeah. Seems like it's all a little bit like training. You know, you need to brush up upon something that doesn't feel that comfortable. So we could use some hunger. Like if you don't really actually feel like real hunger, then it might be difficult for you to get in the proper food in the proper amounts. the proper amounts, if you are, if you're always staying comfortable and kind of falling to every craving that you have, you probably really won't be that, you might feel hungry

and you might get these sensations, but they're probably compounded by you not eating great foods because of, uh, you're not really ever filling yourself up with what the body actually really truly needs. And so it's, it's all a little bit of an illusion. It's hard to, it's hard to figure out, it's all a little bit of an illusion. It's hard to, it's hard to figure out. It's hard to really feel any of it. This might be really stupid.

I don't know. It just came to mind, but you know how like we, you know, over time we more technology, we have access to more things on our phones. I think like information on our fingertips, everything at our fingertips and getting all this screen time now.

And it's, we're seeing how it's detrimental. So now we're trying to move away from all the screen time. Well, I mean, this could be a similar thing with food. Like we have food like literally everywhere we want food. We can get it immediately. It wasn't like we have to actually work to get our food. It's right there. It could be door dashed. We have it in our fridge in our cabinet in our room in our mini fridge it's everywhere right maybe we need to take a step back from the

amount of like times that we're told to eat per day even mark mentioned it like i mean when when you back in 2010 2011 it was like an idea oh eat five to six meals a day to stoke the metabolism like you know maybe it might not be the best idea to be eating six meals a day to stoke the metabolism like you know maybe it might not be the best idea to be eating three meals a day maybe you should try something else again i'm not saying that you have to and i'm like when i mentioned james i respect him i like his information but when i do hear him talk about some of these things i'm like bruh like you gotta you i know you understand the nuance between with these things i know you understand that people that do this stuff they don't think it's magic like you you right but he

he just demonizes it which i just feel like is just like such a cool dude but that just seems kind of weird what are some things that we feel that normal people do like i'm out of touch with reality in some sense like when do you think most people most folks stop eating at nighttime and then go to bed like just a just a general just complete estimation guess normal people like just people that probably maybe if they're not paying attention to diet or that it's like not the fitness culture behind it i think they'll probably just eat right before bed too maybe have like a snack or something like around around nine or ten yeah nine or ten go to bed at 10 30 11 something like that okay so let's just let's just break some of this down let's say that you know a lot of people probably don't dedicate eight hours to sleep they

probably get like seven or six. Let's just let's just give say people get six hours of sleep. Right. A lot of people I hear a lot of people that skip breakfast, even friends of mine and people that I know that have aren't in fitness at all. They're overweight. They skip breakfast. They just don't feel like they have time for it. They don't care about it. And maybe this have like a coffee on their way out the door or something. And then their first meal, you know, comes at like,

let's say like 10 o'clock. So they went from like, I guess, let's just say 10 PM to 10 AM without eating. I think all that we're really trying to suggest here is that you spend an extra about four or five hours, waking hours, extending that out a little bit. And you really don't have to worry about too many other changes at first. You can go like, so just take that 10 o'clock, 11, 12, one. Let's, let's say, let's say you eat at one. Okay. Mark was mentioning one 30 and six 30 is like when he eats.

Yeah. Let's say you make it to like around one o'clock. Maybe after a while, once you get used to that, maybe you say, you know what? It's probably not a great idea for me to eat right before bed. Not that that does anything crazy to you or anything like that, but it's probably an area that you can cut out because that snack at 10 PM probably isn't healthy. Not doing much for you. Maybe pull back, see if you can stop at eight. Well, now we have some

actual intermittent fasting going on. You're spending more time every single day. There's 24 hours in a day. We're spending more hours in a day, not eating than we are eating. So like, can we, you know, can everyone be in agreement that we can like try to do that? Like, it seems to make sense. If you currently have four Coca--colas every day is there a way you can cut back to two is there a way you can cut back to only having it with a meal is there like there's got to be so we're just making a diet coke yeah yeah that would be amazing or just to be like you know what diet coke is disgusting to me compared to regular Coke. I'm just going to drink something different.

Find something different. Maybe find Element. Maybe you find, I mean, I find myself drinking those things at night sometimes when I'm having cravings. Yeah, same here. And I'm shocked because they actually kind of work. I'm like, that would not have worked on the former fat Mark Bell that I was. I was like, but this shit's kind of working yeah it's got some good flavor to it you know okay okay so uh what'd you do we got poop

not what i did so element is very useful electrolytes are very useful, especially at night. You guys have probably found yourself in situations where at night maybe you're cramping with some activity. You have your element right there. Drink your element. You're right back at it. Keep going. Right back in the game. Right back in the game. Time out 30 seconds.

Let's go. Element is great, not just as a performance enhancer, but for a performance enhancer. Telling y'all. Element. I mean, that doesn't motivate you. I'm serious, man. Pick up some Element. I'll always take a package of Element upstairs for me.

I love that you have. I don't want to get into it. You have like people on the side of the bed, like feeding you stuff. Let's go. Like, yeah, like you're a triathlete or something come on and see a couple more reps but i'm just imagining and see my hand down has this like big crate full of stuff like and she's like what's that for oh this is my kit that i need for what we're about to do and And there's just like element, you know, maybe some stakes in there or something. Rehydration. Oh my God.

I got six minutes to reel this one in. All right. What happened? I'm about to run out of hard drive space. Oh God. Wow. Damn. Anyway,

hopefully we gave you guys some useful tips. Hopefully, uh, some of the stuff from Mark Sisson you found to be useful. I'd say go check out his book, two meals a day and, uh, check out some of his products.

You know, he's got some great stuff. The primal kitchen stuff's awesome. It's at a lot of grocery stores. It's on Amazon. And the great thing about craft buying it, um, you know,

people, they get all crazy about when big companies come in and do stuff, but a lot of his products used to be really expensive. I don't think he had a choice but to sell them at a real premium price. And I'm not saying that there's not still, they still cost quite a bit, but I think one thing of ketchup used to be like $16 or something wild. And the prices have come down considerably.

So kudos to him and making that deal with Kraft and for Kraft recognizing like what a huge component health is to us. And having actually healthy options in stores and stuff like that. I found his barbecue sauce to be really good. He's got a teriyaki sauce. Some of the dressings are really good. So give some of that stuff a shot. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. I will. Yeah. And I'll just say that they have it at Walmart. So, you know, it's available and it's very affordable now at this point. Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. If you would like to get a

better grasp on like where your calories should be or kind of want to maybe maintain, slim down a little bit, we do have that newsletter that is available now. If you haven't subscribed to it, links. Oh, I added some text I can send to you, too. I wrote some stuff out. Perfect. I'll send it to you right now. Think about it. Check that out.

We're going to have another newsletter coming out then. So if you want those, please make sure you subscribe. If you already are, please check your inbox please make sure you're following the podcast at mark bell's power project on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter and uh shout out to element for sponsoring today's episode we've talked about it quite a bit during this uh today's episode so yeah drink lmnt.com slash power. Pick up a value bundle and make sure you add that watermelon salt because it's our favorites. Yeah. My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ and Seema, where you be? Don't forget, rate and review us on iTunes, peeps.

We're almost at 1,050. Going to get to 1,100 soon, man. This is going crazy. It's going crazy. People are reviewing like crazy right now. So thank all y'all. We love you. It's going crazy.

People are reviewing like crazy right now. So thank all y'all. We love you. And Seema Inyang on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok Clubhouse. And Seema Inyang on Twitter, Mark. Are a lot of the reviews about your biceps or your triceps? A lot of reviews are actually about Zaddy over here. Honestly, I see a lot about Inseema's voice. Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, wow. At least early on when you first joined the crew. Oh, cool. Reviews in SEMA's voice. We will do a meditation podcast with you at some point. ASMR. ASMR.

He actually sent me a bunch of his smooth pants or clips to stretch. I'm like, I just want to go to bed. And for some strange reason, touch myself. But that's a different topic for another day you guys probably don't want to hear about that strength is never a weakness weakness never a strength catch you guys later