Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 169 - Mark Sisson

Episode Date: January 19, 2019

Mark Sisson is a fitness author, food blogger, former endurance athlete, and New York Times Bestselling author with The Keto Reset Diet. He has also written Primal-themed cookbooks and lifestyle books, including The Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal/paleo movement back in 2009. He is the publisher of MarksDailyApple.com, the #1-ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category. He is also the founder of Mark’s Daily Apple, The Primal Blueprint, Primal Health Coach, and Primal Kitchen Foods which has recently been acquired by Kraft for $200 million. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots   Find the Podcast on all platforms:   ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2   ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp   ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr   ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project   ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell   ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining   ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell   Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject   Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

All right, so what's happening? I was on the Peloton treadmill yesterday. Uh-oh. And I'm doing my thing. I'm running. And that same goddamn mosquito that always gets you got me. Oh, dude. It's just one guy, right?

He's getting bigger, stronger, faster, though. He's angry. He's getting mad. He's feeding off of us. Yeah. Today's guest, really, really honored. We got Mark Sisson. We don't want to waste a lot of his time, He's like that. But then he came up with a lot of his own ideas and own concepts that were really fantastic. And one of the things he created was the Primal Blueprint. And he's also the owner of Primal Kitchen, which was recently sold to Kraft,

which that is a pretty damn big deal. And Mark Sisson's been a, uh, a savage for a long, long time. He's been, um, he's in his sixties and he's still ripped. He's still shredded, plays ultimate Frisbee.

Some people might kind of giggle about ultimate Frisbee, but, uh, ultimate Frisbee players have, uh, had tested out on, uh, Joel Jamison's,

um, uh, education test that he, that he gives out to people or education test that he gives out to people, or physical tests that he gives out to people, and they surpassed everybody from Mighty Mouse Johnson to you name it. NFL didn't matter what it was, but Ultimate Frisbee players were superior in these particular tests against other athletes that Joel has worked with. So it's nothing to laugh about.

It's a tough, tough sport. And, uh, Mark Sisson is a tough guy on top of that. Um, you know, he's had bestselling books, um, and he's published a lot of books, uh, not just written a lot of books. So he knows a lot. He knows a lot about business and I'm honored. Let's, uh, call him up and just dive right in. Hey, Sisson here. Hey, how's it going, Mark? Good. So good to have you on today's show.

There you go. Yeah, yeah. Hey, there you are. How are things going for you, bud? Very well. As you can imagine, extremely well. Yeah. Yeah.

So last we met up, I was at your house in Malibu and you since have moved to where are you at now? I'm in Miami. I'm in Miami Beach. And I've seen some of your posts online where you talk about how when you lived in Malibu, you very rarely actually went into the water. Is it a lot different where you're at now? It's 20 degrees. 20 degrees warmer every day. Yeah.

Yeah. Isn't that weird? You think being in like Los Angeles area, you always think the beaches are going to be nice and warm, but you get down to the beach and it's actually pretty damn cold, right? Well, it's not warm. That's for sure. It's, uh, you know, I think it gets up to 72 or 73 in the summer. And I say up to, um, you know, cause it can get in the low sixties in the winter time. But, uh, so for the most part, it's, it's wetsuit weather in California. And, you know, and if you're a standup paddler, just don't fall in. Right. I mean, if you do, so what it's right. Right. I do cold plunges,

you know, on a regular basis. So I'm not afraid of cold water, but in terms of enjoying the lifestyle, um, you know, the warm water is pretty, pretty damn nice. I have to say, you stay out of the things. Are you staying out of trouble there in Miami? Uh, it depends on your definition of trouble, but, uh, yeah, it's a, it's a fun place. Yeah. So you do. I've been here 13 months now.

My wife and I've been here 13 months and, uh, just absolutely digging it. And, um, you know, I tell people it's not, it's not better or worse than Malibu or some other place. It's just different, but it's different in a, in a way that I think is, uh, you know, exciting at a time in my life when I could easily get into a rut and spend another 10 years, uh, you know, in, in Malibu. Um, and then of course we look like geniuses for having moved because our house got damaged in the fires. So we wouldn't be living there anyway now. Right. Yeah. So it's going to be six or eight months before we can, um, re-inhabit our house. Uh, actually not even re-inhabit it, just get it ready to put on the market again. So.

I want to, uh, personally thank you because the points, you know, I call this putting up points on the scoreboard, but what I think sometimes people don't realize and recognize is the points that you put up and the points that I put up on the scoreboard when they're kind of in the name of fitness and in the name of health, it, it raises everything for everybody. So I commend you on that. You sold a primal kitchen. My understanding is to, uh, craft, which is a, that is like, when I saw that I celebrated, like I honestly celebrated and I was screamingly happy for you. Um, and obviously like, you're going to be jealous of, uh, of when friends are kicking some butt, like it's natural. That's a normal thing to happen. But I was like,

this is a huge breakthrough for all of us because now there's going to be more convenient, more healthy foods. When we go to the airport, when we go to restaurants, when we travel, we're going to just have more options. So why don't you tell me a little bit about how that came to be? Sure. So I'll take you back to the beginning. So I've been, you know, I've been writing about health and fitness a long time now. This has been my passion and my purpose to change the way the world looks at being healthy and being fit. And over the years, as I was writing my blog, Mark's Daily Apple, and writing my books, Primal Blueprint and Primal Blueprint Cookbooks, and Keto Reset Diet, and so on, I found myself writing more and more about food and about

like real food, clean food. And I realized a bunch of years ago that when you clean up your act, when you get rid of the sugars, the added sugars, the sweetened beverages, the pies, the cakes, the candies, the cookies, the things that we pretty much all know we should not be eating. When you get rid of the industrial seed oils, you get rid of the corn oil and canola and soybean and these highly processed, highly industrialized polyunsaturated fatty acids in the form of unhealthy fats, you come down to a fairly small list of foods that are real, right? Meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit. And that could be boring for a lot of people, but for the fact that there

are an infinite number of ways to prepare these foods so that they taste different every time. And that means the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, the condiments, the methods of preparation, the herbs, the spices, the choices of, the methods of preparation, the herbs, the spices, the choices of oils that we cook in. And all these things can add variety and literally and figuratively spice up a dish that would otherwise maybe become boring over time. And what I realized just only as recently as 2014 was that there were no companies that were really making very high-end quality salad dressings and condiments and things that you could, you know, put on food with what I would say reckless abandon and not worry about, not feel guilty about having made a poor choice, right? So I set about to do a food company that would provide these sorts of sauces and dressings and

toppings that would allow the average consumer who wants to eat healthy the option to shop the perimeter of the store and buy the grass-fed steak or buy the free-range chicken or the eggs, buy the organic produce, and then take that home and, you know, prepare it with a wonderful, you know, organic unsweetened barbecue sauce or put literally a mayonnaise that's better for you than any other mayonnaise in the world and tastes pretty damn good too, if I do say so myself, you know, on the burger or make a salad and not be thinking about, oh my goodness, I have to use dressing sparingly because my whole life I've been told that the salad is the healthy part of this meal and the dressing is what makes it unhealthy. And so you have to spritz it on or as Oprah used to say, dip your fork in the salad dressing over here and then

go stab a piece of lettuce. So that was just ridiculous to me. So I decided to make, again, the sorts of products that you could use with reckless abandon and feel good about using. And they took off. And as you know, I mean, you've been instrumental. Thank you for your support over the years and in telling your friends and your followers about that. It's been quite a ride, I have to say. We got into, you know, we were on Thrive Market very early. We're the biggest vendor at Thrive. We got into Whole Foods very early. But then we had started getting into conventional stores like Publix, again, much earlier than normal. going very rapidly and so quickly that there was a point at which we were going to need outside assistance, whether it was more money, whether it was distribution assistance, whether it was administrative assistance at the high end, at the C-suite.

So all these things kind of came together and we thought this is really the right time to look for a suitor, a company that we think could be a great partner in going forward and building this into the preeminent, better for you brand in the entire health food space. And that's really, that was the impetus behind the Kraft Heinz deal. And I think the team that they have there is exceptional. They're all in. The mission is really about changing the way the world eats for the better, clearly, in a positive way. We kept all of our employees. We kept our offices in Oxnard.

And so far, it's been a really great experience. Is this a New England Patriots craft or is this a different craft it's different craft different craft yeah um so they have times this is a brand that you've been um you know you've grown up with a lot of their uh a lot of their brands over the years it's basically a collection of about 50 brands um so in a sense i guess they'll be like battling some of their own creations, right? Some of the things they made years ago and now they're bringing on, are they, they're paying more attention to health and fitness, I guess.

Right. A hundred percent. I mean, this is, uh, this was the reason that they were interested in acquiring us. They realize that we, we have been stealing market share with, uh, in all of these categories, whether it was in the, uh, condiment space, whether it was in the dressings space, now we're in the collagen powder space. Our market share has been creeping up, and a lot of these brands that have been around for a long time, their market share is declining. And so the handwriting is on the wall, and it's a good sign. It's really a sign that the consumer, the buyer of food, is looking for a clean label.

They're looking for better-for-you brands. Of course, we have two very important criteria. It has to have a clean label. It has to have ingredients that you can stand behind, and it also has to taste right. And a lot of times, there are companies who can deliver on one of those but not both. And a lot of times there are companies who can deliver on one of those, but not both. And that's what I think we've been really good at over the years is creating great tasting, you know, exceptional ingredient panels that people feel really good about buying and serving to their family.

I think a huge question for everybody is like, they've been huge fans of yours. They bought your book. They brought the Primal Kitchen brand. And now they're probably fearful that this thing is going to get messed up that they love so much because you're the driving force. You're the brains behind the operation. So what could you kind of say to those people to ensure them that the quality is still going to be high? Just that, you know, this is my legacy. I, you know, I made sure that I have a two-year hands-on participation in every new product.

So all the existing products stay the same, made by the same co-packers that we've used all along, using the same ingredients that we purchased all along. And then any new products coming into the pipeline have to be approved by me before my name and likeness go on the label. And part of the deal was that my name and likeness are going to be on the label in perpetuity. So I have a vested interest in this remaining, uh, you know, true to its authentic, uh, origins and to the lifestyle that I've espoused for so long. Uh, so it's been, it was a, it was a very important, the most important and critical piece of this puzzle was to make sure that that happened. But I have to say there was never a doubt, uh, from, from the management and leadership at, at Kraft Heinz. They said, look, you know, the reason we're buying you is you know what you're doing. We want to follow your lead. We don't want to interfere. You know, we don't want to, you know, ruin the brand that we've bought. That would be so stupid

in terms of a business decision to, you know, to buy a brand that truthfully, it's a tiny brand in the overall landscape of food. So to think that you buy a tiny brand for the brand awareness, and then you somehow dilute it or ruin it by using crappy ingredients. Uh, it's just, it's just not going to happen. I can guarantee you that. What made you brave enough to jump into the food space? Like what a, what a terrifying thing to jump into. Were you just, uh, too stupid to recognize how difficult it might be? No more calls. We have a winner. Mark Bell just won. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I, I didn't know what I was doing. And, you know, if I'd listened to, uh, people who six months after we started, who said, Oh, what a, what a mistake that was. And make sure you don't, um, you know, don't launch with just one product. Well, we And make sure you don't, you know, don't launch

with just one product. Well, we did. Don't, you know, don't get into too many aisles at one time. Well, we did. And, you know, every time we did this, we were defying convention and the conventional wisdom. But, you know, in retrospect, we, you know, we, it was very successful. And I think if I'd listened to some of these early advisors, we wouldn't have, uh, gotten to where we, we, we got very quickly. You know, I think, uh, in today's world, it's, it's really easy to get real competitive with everybody, but the, uh, number one way to blow away the competition is to not try to be like them.

And in that way, you know, if, if Google is to think that they're a technology brand, uh, then they're really missing out because then they're, they're involved with everybody else instead of them, uh, you know, kind of being in the search engine world and they can kind of focus in and hone in on what they're good at. And so it seems like you kind of followed a similar, uh, footprint of like, you know, we're just going to make our own footprint. We're going to do it our way. Yeah, again, it was hubris mixed in with ignorance. And, you know, and I think also just more than anything, my own frustration with the fact that I couldn't go to a store and buy a product off the shelf that fit my own personal criteria or that fit the criteria that I was writing about on my blog and in my books. And I think what we discovered was there's a very good reason for that. And that reason is that these quality ingredients cost two and three times as much

as the standard commoditized ingredients that you find in most products. So when we launched a mayonnaise in, in February, 2015, uh, a 12 ounce jar of mayonnaise, it sold for nine 95 at retail. Uh, you know, we didn't know who was going to buy it. We didn't, I, yeah, the story I tell was I went to my co-packer and I said, what's the smallest amount of mayonnaise that we can make in this first run? Uh, because I don't want, I don't want to have, uh, you know, year old mayonnaise sitting on my warehouse shelf, you know, and, uh, you know, in 12 months. And, and he said, well, the smallest run we can do is 12,000 jars. And I like rolled my eyes and said, geez, all right, well, here we go. You know, crossed my fingers. Here we go. We did it and we sold out in 10 days. Wow. So that was really, you know, that,

that really set the stage for a lot of what transpired later on. We realize that there are a lot of people out there who are willing to pay more for demonstrably better product. That became the, you know, sort of the theme in our company is how can we identify things that people want to eat, but are afraid to eat because they're not well made currently. Again, they may contain some of these nasty industrial seed oils. They may contain too much sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial ingredients, quote, natural flavors, unquote. And we wanted to be the best in each category. And when I say best, I mean we want to be demonstrably the best.

I mean, we want to be demonstrably the best. When you go down the checklist and you compare all the people that we compete with in that category, we win with the greatest number of check marks. I use your products all the time, and I have implemented into my own children's foods and stuff like that, the things I make for my kids, the different mayonnaise and all the different products you have. We try to utilize it when we can, especially the steak sauces. Those have been, uh, ridiculous. I love eating steak and I love eating steak with just a pat of butter on it, but it is nice to be able to change it up here and there. But how do we get into kids' lunchboxes? Because there's just, I mean, I'm sure you got, you have ideas and stuff too, and maybe you can't talk about all of them, but, you know, I was just looking at, uh, my, uh, daughter's, uh, bars that she has in her lunchbox the other day. And there's these Z bars or by cliff bar. And, uh, you know, that's a, that's a huge company.

They've done a great job over the years, but it has like 21 grams of carbohydrates in it. I want to say like maybe 12 grams of sugar. And I'm just thinking to my head, like this stuff just adds up. It adds up quick. The kids are going to have it at school. Uh, maybe they're having an orange juice or a milk and you start to pile up the amount of sugar that a child eats. Um,

considering they're like a quarter of our size, half our size or, or what have you, um, they're consuming double, triple the amount. Yeah. They're eating so much sugar.

So how do we, how do we, how do we solve this? How do we get into schools and how do we get in some lunch boxes and stuff like that? Um, it's, it's crazy. I mean, we, uh, you know, that we have a couple of pilot programs. So we have, uh, one up into Panga. Um, Hillary Boynton has done a great job. Uh, she's the, she's the sort of the school lunch lady, and she sources organic vegetables. And then we've been sponsoring her with Primal Kitchen products, and the kids get a chance to eat organic vegetables and clean sources of protein,

and then have the flavor profile of a healthier sauce or a dressing or topping that you could put on that. So, I mean, and sometimes that's the best meal those kids will get all day long. So that's how we start. And that's, you know, I think how you get it into kids is you start in the home, by example, right? I mean, you live this way, and if you and your wife eat reasonably well and don't have a lot of junk food hanging around the house, at least when the kids are home, that's what they get to choose from, right? And what's cooked for dinner is what's for dinner, and there's nothing else. And it's not a punishment. It's just this is what it is.

And this is how we eat. And this is how the family eats. And this is how we're going to eat. And it's not really anything more than by example. Now, you know, when kids get to school and they start trading copies of War and Peace for a bag of M&Ms, you know, then you get into a different situation where your kids are still going to be affected somewhat by their peer group. I mean, you know, if you look at child psychology and what's going on with kids these days, I think the peer group has probably as much to do with how they turn out as anything. So there's not a lot you can do about the after-school sort of activity,

stopping by the malt shop and getting a, you know, whatever, an ice cream or something. But, but leading by example in the house is still the best way to do it, I think. And, and, you know, if you, if you're making lunches for your kids and prepare healthy lunches, um, and we've, you know, not to, not to toot my horn too much on this show, but, you know, we make a protein bar now that tastes like dessert and it's, you know, it's got healthy fats in it and it has protein and it's like five or six grams of carbs total and less than two grams of sugar. I'm impressed with the flavor profile of pretty much everything that you have. I even have been making meatballs lately because I'm kind of doing a little bit more of a carnivore style diet right now. And so I've been mixing in your ketchup into some of these meatballs I've been making meatballs lately because I'm kind of doing a little bit more of a carnivore style diet right now. And so I've been mixing in your ketchup into some of these meatballs I've been making.

And those are like, you know, to me, that's like a treat, you know. So, yeah, you've guys done a great job with the flavor profile. Can you give us a little bit of background on your your business expertise and how old are you? your business expertise, and how old are you? So I'm 65, and I've been an entrepreneur since I was 12. There you go. And I've done a lot of stuff, so from mowing lawns and shoveling driveways as a 12-year-old to painting houses as a 14-year-old and becoming a painting contractor as a 16-year-old and putting myself through the last year of private school and then four years of college as a painter. And then I did that a bunch of years later to support my running habit when I was a national class marathon competitor.

to support my running habit when I was a national class marathon competitor. You know, and then I moved into, I started a frozen yogurt shop in Palo Alto in 1981, or in the early days of frozen yogurt, when we thought it was a health food. And from there, went into a restaurant and lost a lot of money in the restaurant business. Uh, I've been a personal trainer. I was one of the first guys to make it over a hundred bucks an hour in the eighties training people, uh, was a great lifestyle, but you know, it's not scalable. Uh, ran the U S, uh, triathlon federation for three years in Colorado Springs as part of the Olympic committee. I was executive director of that. And then, uh, at the same time was, uh, head of the

anti-doping movement for the international federation. Uh, by then I had a wife and, and, and one child. And, uh, so I took a job with a friend who started a vitamin company. I was his COO for five years and then left to start my own company. So when I was 40, uh, 45, I left a good, a well-paying job with no money in the bank, a wife and two kids, uh, to start primal nutrition. And that was, and so I did vitamins and supplements and things like that for the first, uh, 15 years and did quite well and was, you know, had a, had a great business and could have retired on that. But, um, it was the food thing. Well, first of all, it was Mark's Daily Apple. It was

the blog that really relaunched my entrepreneurial spirit and rekindled a passion in me to affect the lives of as many people as I could with information about how to eat right and how to live right. And then, again, as I say, that sort of segued into a product company based around offering healthier food alternatives. Um, at, at 45, um, you know, 45 is fairly old to be messing around with the internet. So like what inspired you to, to, uh, to do that was like, uh, you know, I know like Tim Ferriss and some of these guys were kind of hot around that time. And you might have even been a little bit before that. Yeah. So, so when I left, um, when I left this job at the age of 45, uh, it, the internet hadn't been invented. Al Gore had not invented the internet yet. So,

um, I did television and I did TV direct sales of my supplements. So I grew my company on the strength of my television appearances, uh, on these little cobbled together cable networks where I would sponsor a show and then go on and talk about health and fitness and diet and exercise and medicine and whatever I felt compelled to talk about without crossing the line. And then, you know, sort of as an aside, oh, by the way, I had these great supplements. You should probably try them. And the company grew quite nicely on the strength of that television model. But that model ceased to work in 2004 for whatever reason. I think it was because there was the advent of Dish and Direct and 300 cable channels and no one interested in direct response television anymore for the most part. I mean, Home Shopping Network and QVC still work, but you don't see infomercials that much anymore. Um, for the most part, I mean, home shopping network and QVC still

work, but you don't see infomercials that much anymore. Uh, and the internet was starting and that was really the, uh, that's when it was really, you could see sales happening, um, purchases made online on the internet. And so when that TV model fell apart for me in 2004, um, I took one more year and I tried to make it work. I spent a year in 2005 producing my own television show. It was called Responsible Health. I shot 52 half hour episodes of this show and I aired it on Travel Channel at 830 in the morning. And I lost about a million and a half dollars that year doing that. So I was like scrambling, like, how am I going to resurrect, you know, this business and how am I going to pay for the house that I just bought and a number of other kind of, you know, very hair raising and harrowing experiences.

And I thought, well, I'll try my hand at this blogging thing. And I had written a guest post for Art Devaney on his site in 2005, I think, or 2006. And it really resonated with a lot of people. And I knew I could, I was great at creating content. I'd written these, these, uh, uh, scripts for these 52 half hour television episodes of, and every, every one was different. Every show was different talk about health and I had guests on there and, and, uh, I had a co-host. It was a really well produced show if I do say so myself. Um, but it just wasn't ready for prime time quite yet. Um, so, um, I thought, well, I'll try blogging. It's, it's, it's cheap. It doesn't cost a lot

to produce. Um, and you don't have to buy time on the internet like you do on television. When I was on travel channel, I had to spend $6,800 per day per half hour for my airtime. And then, by the way, I had negotiated that way down from like $15,000. But, you know, when you're on the when you're on the Internet, you're you're in a billion homes. A problem is there's there's 500 million channels. And so, you know, how are people going to find you? And I thought I'd be able to make that happen fairly seamlessly. And it is absolutely not seamless. It took me a few years to get to a level of readership that would be able to sustain a business.

And so, again, I suffered and struggled through a couple of years there where times were lean and money was tight and I didn't know whether my business was going to survive. But when I brought out the Primal Blueprint in 2000, late 2009, and it really it really took off. It would have been a New York Times bestseller, but for the fact that I self-published it and the New York Times does not care about self-publishers. And the New York Times does not care about self-publishers. So it was a you know, that was, again, another kind of epiphany that I had. There are a lot of people who are interested in this ancestral way of living and this ancestral health model. And paleo was just taking off. And at the time, it was just literally Art Devaney, Rob Wolf, myself, even guys like Richard Nicolai.

There are just a handful of us who had a blog that dealt with this. I mean, now there's tens of thousands of interest and the other people who are trying to become bloggers and influencers in this space. I got involved in this whole keto thing in like the mid-90s. My brother Chris got on a ketogenic style diet for a powerlifting meet, and then I kind of followed suit getting ready for powerlifting meet to make weight. I was able to still keep my strength and been kind of on and off of them pretty much the rest of my life. Part of my powerlifting career,

I had to kind of carve up to be a big and heavy to move around those, those big weights. But what led you to kind of discover this ketogenic diet? You mentioned triathlons and marathons and these different things. Um, we kind of always think that, uh, if we're going to expend a lot of energy and exercise as much as you do, I know you do a ultimate Frisbee as well, and you stay in really, really good shape. So, uh, how are you able to stay, you know, in really good shape and have the energy to,

to run a business, to have a family and to do all these other things. Uh, a lot of people would think we would need, uh, carbohydrates or sugar of some sort. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's called life and, uh, you know, most people, um, experience some, uh, manifestation of that. If they have an active life, if they have a business and a family and they, and they, you know, do any kind of sports activities or anything like that. It's, it's not, it's not anything superhuman. It's just, in fact, most of what I do is contemplated to be fun right now. Um, you know, I was a endurance athlete for most of my career. I, uh, I started, I was a marathoner. And then, uh, when I got injured from too much running and a highly inflammatory diet, I switched over to triathlon because I could still run enough to compete in a triathlon. I just couldn't train 100 miles a week at the elite level as I had been doing. you could call it swimming. I was enough to thrash around and survive in the water. So I did triathlons for a while. And again, all under the paradigm that more carbs were better and that you

somehow needed the carbs. There was a guy named Covert Bailey who wrote a book called Fit or Fat way back in the 70s. And his famous line was that fat burns in the carbohydrate flame. So even though as an endurance athlete, you realize you need to learn how to burn fat fairly well, you also always had this thought in your head that I can't run out of carbohydrate because then I won't be able to burn anything. And I'll hit the wall or I'll bonk or whatever the phrase is for whatever sport you're in. So for the longest time, I just bought into that. I even read The Lore of Running by Professor Tim Noakes, who was famous for being the world's leading expert on carbohydrate intake and glycogen management. And you know who Tim Noakes is, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So a great example of a guy who, after being the go-to guy in the field, his whole life realized he was wrong and basically recanted a lot of what he had said in some of the most prestigious books and papers about carbohydrate intake and glycogen management among endurance athletes. But anyway, the point was that as I stopped doing endurance stuff, because I just, I wound up realizing that it was way too much pain and suffering and not enough joy and reward. And I started transitioning over to more

fun things like I played soccer with my kids and then we kind of transitioned over to Ultimate Frisbee. And I love stand-up paddling and snowboarding and a number of these sports that are actually fun. You're not just out there hoping it's going to be over soon and managing pain like it is every day of training for triathlons and marathons. And I realized that – and I started reading research, of course, on diets and I, I realized fairly early on that you don't need as much carbohydrate as you think. And, uh, and I first experimented with the, with the, what became the primal blueprint diet simply by eliminating grains and added sugars and, um, and, and, and some fruit, uh, and got to the point where I

realized that there on, on any given day, if I ate this way, I'd be hard pressed to exceed 150 grams of carbs in a day. And so the primal blueprint became this way of eating that looked at different levels of carb intake with a max being 150 and anything over 150 sort of being either you're either you're really highly competitive athlete who's going to burn it up in a glycolytic workout the next day, or you're an average citizen who's doomed to gain weight insidiously a few pounds, a pound or two a year for the next 40 years. So 150 became kind of the max. And I, and I hung out in that area of a hundred to 150 grams of carbs a day for a long time. And, you know, maintained, um, my ideal body

composition, uh, maintain my mass, maintain my strength, had my energy. And so I wasn't compelled to make any changes at all. But about four now, five years ago, I started reading more and more about a ketogenic diet. Um, Don D'Agostino, you know, was, was putting out some great papers. Um, Peter Atiyah was experimenting with it. Um, Sammy Inconin, you know, was, was, was racing really well as a big boy and winning his class, uh, on minimal training and a ketogenic diet. So I started to do the research and thought, well, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a guy who's been chasing performance my whole life. Why don't I try a ketogenic program for 60 days and see what happens? So I did,

this is a couple of years ago now, and it was pretty eyeopening. I mean, I think I had, um, as, as much energy or more than I, than I had had before. Um, I slept better at night. I suspect that the ketones are probably a better brain fuel and more, more good stuff happens in the brain while you're sleeping than it does when you depend on glucose. Um, I maintain my body composition. I might even suggest I maybe put on a little bit of extra muscle. I noticed that hunger, I mean, almost to a fault, hunger dissipated so much. I had to remind myself to eat. And yet I didn't lose weight. And I'm a hard gainer, have been my whole life. So I'm a guy who, you know, at 168 pounds, if I stopped lifting for two weeks, you know, and did a little bit more cycling or something, I quickly dropped down to 160 or 162.

So I work hard to keep whatever mass I have on. And that was easy on a ketogenic diet. are true for me, a person who had always assumed that I was doing everything right and the best they could possibly do, and then realized that there's room for improvement, even for a guy like me, then how efficient and effective this might be for people who had stalled or plateaued, you know, in their eating strategy or in their weight loss strategy or in their goal to get off the meds. And that's really what compelled me to write the Keto Reset Diet was my learnings from my own experience as well as sort of a bit of eye-rolling dismay

at some of the programs out there, some of the keto intro programs where I think they were doomed to fail. So I wanted to write a sort of a kinder, gentler approach to keto, one that you could, you could ease into with, uh, with grace and, uh, not suffer the, uh, you know, the headaches or the keto flu or the depression or whatever the things that people sometimes arrive at by going from 350 grams of carbs a day to 20, right? And then just going to, you know, try and muscle their way through it. It's also the reason that for the longest period of time, that's why so much of Atkins was kind of spot on

in his theories, but the execution was faulty. And that's why a lot of people bailed on Atkins for that reason. They just couldn't, they couldn't of, a lot of people bailed on Atkins, uh, for that reason, they just couldn't, they couldn't handle a transition. Other people bail because the, you know, the, the choices of foods, uh, were still pretty, you know, even if it had fat, it was, it was okay. And so a lot of the foods had these industrial seed oils, you know, had corn oil, canola oil, soybean oil. And, and those were, I think those are even more insidious in the human health, uh, than, than, than sugar is. So. Yeah. With the, uh, keto reset, you know, when you wrote that book, um, I was like, I was really amazed by it because I've been tinkering

with the ketogenic diet for a really long time. And me and a friend of mine, Jesse Burdick, who's another, who's a fellow power lifter. He. And me and a friend of mine, Jesse Burdick, who's another, who's a fellow power lifter. He and I got in a lot of conversations as I was losing weight and I was trying to maintain strength. We started to kind of add carbs back in. We were just kind of fit, trying to figure things out.

So we were kind of mixing cheat days and we were trying to figure stuff out and we're like, okay, well cheat day, like for us, big guys is like way overkill. We're going to, we're going to really overdo it. We're going to be ordering pizza and going, you know, full blast on it. So that's not a great option. And then we just said, you know, I wonder what would happen if we just allowed a little bit of carbohydrates,

how about some fruit, maybe a little bit of something post-workout. And we kind of started to come to some of the same conclusions that were in your book. And we were looking at it and we're like, holy shit, this is amazing. This is great that someone else is, is, uh, starting to really talk about this. And so basically the principle, correct me if I'm wrong in your book is that, uh, you know, once you get your body fat adapted, you get your body used to fat being a source of energy, uh, you get your body headed in the right direction with a burning fat, uh, then you could start to add in a little bit of carbohydrates. Is that correct? Nope. There he is. Did you miss, did you miss out? Oh yeah. It was just basically saying,

uh, once you get fat adapted, then you can kind of add some carbohydrates back in. Is that right? then you can kind of add some carbohydrates back in. Is that right? Yeah. Look, the, the goal in my life isn't to be in ketosis. The goal is to feel good. The goal is to have energy, to have an ideal body composition, uh, to sleep well, to enjoy life, to enjoy food. Uh, and, and so the, how I, how I achieve that is by arriving at a point which we call metabolic flexibility. So you develop metabolic flexibility, which allows you the ability to derive energy from any substrate that's in the body. So you can derive energy from the fat on your plate, if it's bacon or eggs or, or a burger, uh, from the fat on your thighs or your belly or your butt. Uh, you could derive energy from the carbohydrate on your plate, uh, the potatoes, the, you know, starchy carbs or whatever, uh, or the fruit.

Uh, you can derive, um, energy from the glucose in your bloodstream or the glycogen in your muscles. You can drive energy from the ketones that your liver makes when you're burning fat and you can drive energy if you need to, um, as resort, from amino acids. So, metabolic flexibility is something that everybody is born with and then quickly loses because of the direction that their diet takes. And it's, if you have to blame anyone, you don't blame your parents, but they fed you mashed peas, mashed potatoes, cookies, Zweibach, crackers, anything that your little toothless mouth could gum or take down. And then that became bread and pasta and cereal, breakfast cereal, and lots of fruit and orange juice for breakfast and waffles and pancakes and sandwiches for lunch and maybe

some chips. And the next thing you know, you're a carb dependent organism who is going every couple of hours with a high blood sugar or relatively high influx of glucose in the bloodstream. And if your body works reasonably well, insulin then is called to action to sequester it and put it into muscle cells. And if there's no room left in the muscle cells to put it into the fat cells. So, um, this, this, um, this perfect metabolic machine at the age of one and a half or one or one and a half years old becomes a carb dependent, uh, you know, two cylinder engine that burns a lot of oil and, and, uh, and generates a lot of smoke and putt putts down the road over time. Now that's fine. You know, it's not fine, but it's, it's acceptable in a world where there's food around every corner. But I want to develop metabolic flexibility, so I don't want to be dependent on food.

I want to have access to energy when there is no food. I don't want to have my life run by my appetite, hunger, and cravings every couple of hours. I don't want to have to reschedule a meal because, or reschedule, excuse me, a meeting because it's going to go through to one o'clock and damn, if I don't have lunch, I'm going to rip someone's head off. You know, I don't want to look at my travel schedule and find out that there's a cross country flight that doesn't serve food. There's no way I can go four hours without eating. How is that even, how do people do that? even how do people do that right so so all of this stuff becomes um ironic and and comedic when you realize that the body is a is a very very tightly run machine and if you train it the right way if you build a metabolic machinery to burn fat to utilize ketones to offset the need to take

in glucose you can go first of all you realize that everybody eats way too damn much food. You know, that three meals a day is absolutely unnecessary and in some context, ridiculous. Our ancestors didn't eat three meals a day. You know, we could go back to the history of three meals a day and three square meals a day and, you know, people working in the fields who needed, you know, because all there was was carbohydrate because you couldn't give them expensive cuts of meat, you know, meat was expensive. So you had to feed them grains and bread and all this other stuff. So you had to feed them three times a day because they would exhibit the same tendencies that we have in modern society on a standard American diet, which is wild, you know, swings in blood

sugar. When you become fat adapted and keto adapted, all that stuff changes and you now become, you know, a metabolically efficient and metabolically flexible organism that can, you know, if you, like I wake up, I don't have breakfast, right? I have a cup of coffee, but I don't have breakfast. Some days I don't, some days I don't eat until dinner, but if I have another meal during the day, it might be 1.30 in the afternoon. So I might get 1.30 and I might eat again at 7 or 7.30. Some days I only eat one meal and some days I don't eat and I'm fine with that. And the irony is I get, you get so good at this metabolic flexibility that it doesn't, you don't think about food the same way. It's like, oh, oh, shit, I should eat. It's probably, you know, I've got a little bit of hunger, but I don't, it's,

it's not affecting my performance and it's not taking my mind off what I'm doing. I just, you know, I would like to enjoy the crunch, you know, the crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet of food. Um, but you're not, you're not compelled to have to eat all the time. I mean, that's one of the most freeing benefits of a keto program. Now, having said that, there are days when I eat 175 grams of carbs. So people say, well, Mark, that's not keto. You're not keto. Well, I'm not in ketosis, but I'm keto. And the reason I'm keto is I feel like, I feel the same on a day that I have 175 grams of carbs

as I do on a day when I have 20 grams of carbs. I feel the same on those days as when I have two meals. And I feel the same on those days as when I have no meals or three meals or one meal. So it's this metabolic flexibility. And guys like Art Devaney would say, that's in fact how you should eat. A little bit some days, none some days, twice some days, a lot once in a while. And you should eat kind of fract us into a rut is this exact at adherence to three square meals a day. And then the, the metabolism kind of gets, it narrows itself down and its abilities become very limited to just the processing of carbohydrates, the storing of glucose as either glycogen or fat, and then the release of those carbohydrates later

on, because you haven't really developed the skill of burning fat efficiently. Yeah. I've heard recently, like, you know, some of these, uh, when you look into how we used to eat versus how we eat now, um, you know, the average, uh, American, I think I read a stat at one point, the average American eats like 12 or 13 times a day that calories passed that calories passed through their mouth i mean it's insane but i was reading the other day uh that focaccia bread was actually created uh in italy um with the idea of these uh men were uh loading and unloading docks for 12 or 14 hours per day these these, these, uh, men and, and young, young boys were doing this all day and all night. And so they were given, they would give them bread and then they kind of found out the

bread's not enough. So then they dipped it in olive oil and tried to put some seasoning on it. So they eat a little bit more and that's what they ran off of. It's not meant for you to have, you know, first thing in the morning when you're cruising, cruising through Starbucks with a, with an egg on it and sausage on it and you know, everything else that's on it. So it's amazing how we kind of got to this point of, uh, this just overeating. I wrote a book not too long ago called the war on carbs. And it's, uh, similar to some of the stuff that you've written about. It's a ketogenic style book. Do you feel that America kind of needs to have that strong of a stance where they have a

war on carbohydrates? Because that is, uh, we have a tendency to overeat these packaged foods and these convenient carbohydrates that are just kind of everywhere. Uh, well, first of all, I like, I love the title of war on carbs. Cause it's like, there's no arguing what that means. Right. And, uh, uh, so, you know, you've established what you are. Now we're just haggling over price, I guess. But I'm sort of agnostic. I mean, I think that, you know, I want to give information to people in a way that they can choose to use or not. But I want to inform them in a way that they become educated a little bit as to the ramifications of their choices.

So my books and my blog have always been about identifying these hidden genetic switches that we all have and ways in which we can flip them on or off based on inputs that we give. And those inputs are largely choices in food, sleep, sun exposure, play, methods of movement, types of activity, exercise, things like that. So I don't really, I'm not a person who would say everybody needs to do this, or the government needs to take action on this, or the government needs to, you know, to tax sugar. I'm a, I'm very much a libertarian in that way. And I say, look, you know, everyone gets to make their own choices, but you have to stand by the consequences of your choices. So, you know, we, you and I could talk a little bit about, well, what that looks like downstream if we have, you know, single payer

insurance and everybody's, you know, tax bill and everything goes up because people, so many people choose to just ignore anything about health and just cram down the sugar and, you know, get type two diabetes and, uh, you know, heart disease and whatever. Um, I, you know, I, I would hope that people would, uh, enjoy life and want to enjoy life enough that they would take all of the information now that's been accumulated in the world in the last decade and employ it in a way that is, I think, still allows for hedonism and enjoyment and comfort. And as you identified early on in the show, I think it's not that expensive. You know, you can. It wasn't you. It was it was an email I got just before the show, I think, uh, it's not that expensive. Um, you know, you can, uh, it wasn't you. It was a, it was an email I got just before the show, Mark, when a friend of mine said, uh, he had visited, he's been keto. He's a keto, uh, recent keto convert, and he's

doing a lot of cycling and he went from 187 pounds down to 158 pounds, I think. And he's like lean and light and supple and strong. And, and, um, he and his buddy were, uh, did three days of keto in, in, in training and their food bill was basically for an omelet that they shared, uh, at breakfast one day. And the rest of it was sort of, uh, nut butters and MCT oil and, you know, uh, you know, buttered coffee and stuff like that. Yeah. Um, I've heard you kind of talk about a protein being almost like it should maybe even be considered like a free calorie, I guess, maybe a little bit the way that some people view fiber. Uh, why is it that you say that about protein? Well, you know, I, I wrote a post way back in 2007, I think called the context of

calories. And it basically just looked at this notion that we assign a heat value to every macronutrient. So we, you know, uh, the, the number of calories that are given off when you, when you combust a gram of fat or nine, and when you combust a gram of protein, it's four. And when you combust a gram of carbohydrate, it's four, but that doesn't necessarily tell a story or paint a picture, a complete picture. Protein, for the most part, is a structural nutrient, and we don't want to burn it for fuel, so you don't even want to necessarily consider that protein has four calories per gram. So maybe the first 25 grams of protein that you eat in a day goes toward the repair and maintenance of cells, of tissue, of enzymes, uh, of, of, uh, plasma,

of other parts of your body that, um, require a turnover of amino acids and you don't want to combust them. You don't want to burn them for energy. Maybe after you get to 100 grams a day, pretty much everything that you take in is going to be burned as fuel. And it may be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose. There's actually a pathway that some amino acids burn directly as well. So there are a lot of considerations there. It may be that when you have 200 grams of protein, the body goes into a, um, you know, it raises, uh, the temperature to try and deal with, uh, the excess amount of food that it has just taken in. Uh, and you start to, um, get into uncoupling proteins and, uh, the thermic effect of food and the, and the body

temperature goes up and the heart rate increases as the body attempts to burn off some of this excess, some of these excess calories. Same with too much fat too. So I feel like there's a range. And by the way, when I look at protein, which I used to look as most people do or did at a daily intake, like what's a daily intake of protein? Is it, you know, 45 grams at the minimum that the, uh, world health organization would say, or is it, you know, 75 or is it 0.8 grams per pound of lean body mass or, you know, all these different metrics that you find. And really the way the body manages amino acids is over a longer period of time than meal to meal or even day to day. So we have this amino acid pool, this amino acid sink in the, in the body. Uh, and, and depending on your way of eating, especially if

you are keto, the body conserves these amino acids, retains protein, um, recycles protein in a way that you really don't need that much intake. And so I look at protein, not so much as did I get, did I get a hundred grams yesterday? I don't think so. Damn, I'm going to have to get a hundred grams today. But, but really more like over the last four days, did I take in 300 grams of protein in whatever combination whenever I did? And I don't worry about day to day. And I certainly don't worry about meal to meal when it comes to protein. Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense. And I've, I've said on this podcast many times, um, your calories don't automatically reset because the

sun comes up the next day. It's, it's, it's a ridiculous notion. I kind of hate, uh, the idea of counting calories. However, I don't want to distract somebody from if they're following a plan and they are keeping count and it's helping them, then look, you know, do whatever you can that helps. But I agree with a lot of your statements and the calories in calories out thing is, uh, it complicates matters in my opinion, a lot of times because, uh, we're all interpreting these calories in, in many different ways. The way that you ingest a regular cheeseburger is going to be a lot different than the way that maybe my body handles it. We're reconnecting a little bit. There we go. I was just saying, we all kind of interpret these calories a little

differently from person to person, right? Yep. Yeah. And calories in, calories out. I mean, people try to call on the second law of thermodynamics and all these amazingly crazy metrics that don't work with wet systems like humans. stored would be a better way of looking at that because, you know, you basically store calories as fat and you basically, you know, burn off calories that, you know, in a similar fashion. So, but again, you're right. It's, this is more the effect of food having on the hormonal system. So every bite of food, excuse me, every bite of food has a hormonal effect. And so carbohydrates have a completely different hormonal effect than a high fat, um, moderate protein bite of food would have, for instance. So people should basically eat like once or twice a day is, is kind of your main recommendation,

or at least what's been working well for you. Got about 150 carbs. Again, these are, you know, this is based off of you and I'm sure people can slide this in whatever direction they need to, to adjust for themselves. Have you found particular fat amounts and particular protein amounts that, uh, fit your body type? Well, also in terms of grams. I mean, if you really want to build a macro schedule that way, you could work backwards from protein and just say, OK, what based on my body type, my size, my metabolic history, have I damaged myself, my activity level? You know, what would be an average number of grams of protein to take in in a day to maintain good health? And you come up with a minimum number there and a minimum might be, again, you might say 60, you might say, if you're a woman, you might say 50. If you're a weightlifting guy, you might say, you know, 105. But I think nobody should say 200, for instance. I think it's just,

that's kind of ridiculous, unless you're on the juice and you can probably take it up. But otherwise, you can't process that much. So, and by the way, just to divert to that, the old bodybuilding magazines, which were selling the mass gainers, you know, Dave Draper and Larry, and all those guys that were like, had those big blenders full of 3,600 calories. Yeah, of course you can process that much if your testosterone levels are through the roof and you bench in the morning and drink some of this stuff and shoot up and then set a PR again the afternoon, right? But people are different. So I'd say that you come at a fairly narrow range of protein requirements even across a broad range of individuals. So let's just say it's 45 to 125

grams of protein a day. Well, even at 125 grams of protein a day, that's only 500 calories, right? And then you say, well, what's my carbohydrate intake going to be, depending on the goals I have, if I want to be keto, then clearly they're going to have to be under 60 or 50 grams of carbs, then clearly they're going to have to be under 60 or 50 grams of carbs, which is only, you know, 240 grams or calories worth of carbs in that context. Or you could say I'm going to be, you know, basic primal maintenance phase, and that'd be 100 to 150 grams a day. But again, it's only 150 grams of carbs is only 600 calories. So now between the 500 there and the 600 there, we're only at 1100 calories. The rest is fat. And then we say use fat to make up the difference. But because you don't need an excessive amount of protein, like people say, more than 125 grams a day is probably not beneficial for 95% of people. You don't need a lot of carbs because if you're eating whole food,

for 95% of people. You don't need a lot of carbs because if you're eating whole food, you're going to be hard-pressed to exceed 150 grams of carbs a day, especially if you consider net carbs because most of those carbs that are in real food are locked in a tight fibrous matrix, and they'd be what we call slow-burning carbs. So then when you get to the fat and you just make sure you limit yourself to healthy fats and you say, well, I'm going to have a hundred grams of fat in a day, which is a lot, but at nine calories per gram of fat, that's 900. We're only, we're at basically 2000 calories for most people. Right. And you go, well, geez, that doesn't sound like a lot for a, you know, a growing, uh, a growing, you know, adolescent boy, or it doesn't sound a lot for a Mark Bell, but the truth is we have a huge amount of energy stored on us. We have glycogen in the muscles. We have ketones that we make that'll fuel the brain, and we have a crap load of fat. I'm 168 pounds,

and I'm 12, maybe 11% body fat. That's what the machinery tells me. Most people guess eight, nine, just so you know, Mark. But that's still enough to walk 400 miles pretty easily without any sort of cost to me and without any diminution of my size or my energy levels or anything like that. So we're always carrying a lot of energy with us. And I think over time, like I say, if you eat fractally a little bit at sometimes, even a lot at other times, that it evens itself out and you maintain this pool of energy that we call stored body fat. You maintain the ability to convert ketones at any point in time. that we call stored body fat. You maintain the ability to convert ketones at any point in time.

The body can make, I forget what the number is, I think it's like 150 grams of ketones in a day. Well, that's like 750, 800 calories worth of ketones. That's a lot of energy if most of it is going to fuel the brain. That's almost enough to fuel the brain. It is enough to fuel the brain pretty much entirely for the day. Now, it's not going to work if you're a sugar burner. You're depending on glucose. But if you built a metabolic machinery to burn ketones and use ketones and the brain prefers ketones and knows how to burn them, then this is this is it's a it's almost like a closed system. Right. You have stored body fat that you hang on. We've got going here. have stored body fat that you, hang on, we've got to go in here. Sorry. You have all this stored energy in your body and you can use it as a, you know, as a ongoing source of fuel. Instead of lugging around these five gallon canisters of gasoline with you everywhere you go, we have this amazing ability to

take excess calories, convert it to energy and store it in the most convenient location on our body, which is our hips and our thighs and our belly, right around the center of gravity as we're walking along. So with this closed system, once you take the fat out of storage, you combust the fat, you send some of it to the liver to become ketones, which replaces your need for glucose. You can actually make glucose from the glycerol that's in the triglycerides. The beta-hydroxybutyrate has an epigenetic effect of upregulating all the systems that spare protein. So now you go into that protein sparing mode, and you become literally a closed loop for days at a time without any negative effect. It's a pretty amazing survival mechanism that we all have. And yet very few of us tap into it ever. What you're saying makes a lot of sense.

And a lot of people are probably like, dude, like 125 grams of protein. How the hell am I going to survive on that? But it sounds to me like um first of all people have to understand you came to these conclusions uh after uh performing this style of diet and after thousands and thousands of people have utilized this diet with a lot of success and also um the people listening that haven't tried fasting it's a totally different ball game um when you're only eating once or twice a day it changes everything it's almost like a performance enhancing drug when you fast it sounds ridiculous and i know it's hard to wrap your brain around especially these power lifters and bodybuilders

that listen to the show they're like flipping out right now because they think i turned my back on them but uh fasting really is uh like a superhuman thing when you, when you get involved with it a little bit more and you wouldn't really know unless you, unless you tried it. But what I like what you're saying, and we haven't had many people that have talked about this, but what you're saying sounds like health and performance are completely interlinked with the message that you're giving me now which for the most part uh when we talk about competition we talk about performing and being a beast and being a savage

and being able to lift heavy weights and flip tires and do crazy things usually the health part of it kind of gets kicked to the side which is which in my opinion is a mistake because we need to sleep we need to still nourish ourselves, but we're probably just over, overdoing it with the nourishment. You know, we're probably overdoing the calories. So what are some of your thoughts on this, uh, on health and performance, uh, interlinking like that? Well, I mean, I, I have to say that at the elite level, um, there's a point at which if you really want to be the best in the world, you're going to have to sacrifice your health. Um, I, I haven't seen many instances where, um, those two graph lines continue to ascend into infinity, right? So, um, at, at some point now,

shy of being the best in the world, it's 100% available to most people to improve their fitness and their health at the same time. And aesthetics, aesthetics as well? Absolutely. Yeah. And aesthetics. So, but a lot of times, I'll give you another example. A lot of times, you know, aesthetics has to go out the window if you're going to be a

world-class performer, right? I mean, Vasily Alexeyev was one ugly guy, right? And he was a big fat guy with a spaghetti strap, white theater outfit on, right? You remember. And, and you know, he, he, he has the world record for world records. You know that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's got like records or something like that. Yeah. He's got some outrageous amount. Every time he'd set a new record, he'd go put another quarter pound on, Every time he'd set a new record, he'd go, put another quarter pound on. I want a new world record.

He got paid very well for it, yeah. And $50,000 every time by the Russian government or by the Soviet Union in those days. So anyway, but he sacrificed his health to be the best in the world in which he could have been the strongest guy in the world and cut a svelte figure and lived a long life. Right. So, um, but again, if you drop, if you drop, and the same goes for like, I did a piece years ago when I, when I took a look at the, the guy who was leading the tour de France on that particular day, it was like two weeks into the tour de France. And this was arguably the fittest guy in the world in terms of cardiovascular strength that day. He was leading the Tour de France by a long margin. It wasn't Lance Armstrong. It was before Lance. But when he took his jersey off, you saw this emaciated, skinny, scrawny, like, holy crap,

that guy, he's on his deathbed. He's, he's not going to make it through the night. And yet in the, in pursuit of performance, he had trashed his health, uh, to become the best in the world at what he did. So let's just, I've had a, a particular place in my mind and heart for that over the years, because I was the anti-doping commissioner for the sport of triathlon for 15 years. And I, and I, I know why people take, um, performance enhancing substances when they train. Uh, and yes, it's to get better at what they do, but, but most of the ones that are the most effective enhance your recovery. That's how they work. They improve your recovery. So I found it very ironic that you would take these best of class athletes around the world, beat them to

death, beat them up on training regimens that were inhuman, hoping to find one or two that would be gold medal candidates, but then finding 10,000 or 20,000 or 100,000 who almost made it, but got sick or beat up or tired or fell by the wayside. And then you denied them access to the medicines that you would give anybody else who was beat up, sick, tired, whatever, you know. So there was a bit of a hypocrisy there in the pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of, you know, human performance and so on and so forth. I don't want to get too far down that rat hole, but that was always an interesting subject to me. So having established that elite level athletics is probably antithetical to health, you drop yourself back a notch and you

look at people who are, you know, age group champions or people who are, you know, have found that balance between family and workout and they're able to compete at a reasonably good level, and, you know, win a medal here or there. But they're also improving their health. They're also at their ideal body composition, so they look good naked. They have all these other attributes that put a total package together and in my mind represents a more complete human than the freak who was the one outlier who won the gold medal to go, to go that route. But you asked our health and fitness, you know, sort of, is it possible to do them in parallel? And I think to a point it is. I first wrote about this in 1982. I did a graph where health and fitness went up together, from your perspective, went up together like this. And then, and then as fitness improved, health dropped off a little bit. And it was, you know, it was sort of a

theoretical graph, but it's, I think it's, it's, it's held up over time. Um, so I want to find that, that one inflection point on the graph just before the drop off in health takes place and be as fit as I can and as healthy as I can and as energetic as I can and enjoy life as much as I can. But because the other part of this is that at the elite level of athletics, there's a loss of joy for a lot of people. I mean, if you look at the worldwide, especially during in the in the Soviet days with the gymnastics program, but even in the US and the gymnastics program or in the swimming program where, you know, kids are taking their, their parents are driving them at five and six years old, getting them

up before school and taking them to the pool and two hour swim workout before school and then two hour workout after school and then get your studies done. And there's no, you know, there's very little joy in these lives for people who are, you know, destined maybe to become some of the best in the world at what they do. for people who are, you know, destined maybe to become some of the best in the world at what they do. So I think, you know, the bottom line is, is life is about balance and finding that, that nice sweet spot where you're, you're performing well, as, as, as Rob always says, as Rob Wolf always says, how do you look for him and look, feel and perform. That's it. Um, for you personally, have you at points in your life trashed your own health

uh at the expense of business or at the expense of uh anything else that was going on in your life have you kind of gone too far towards performance and uh you know gotten sick you mentioned running and then you ran so much you got hurt um have you kind of and even from a mental health perspective have you gone after business too hard a couple of times and just stressed yourself the hell out and said, Hey man, you know what? I need to, I need to find a different pathway here. Yeah.

So, um, the lessons I learned through, through sports, which is, I think you'll find a lot of high level athletes will say, you know, I learned, I learned a lot about life through sports. And in some regards, sports is a metaphor for the rest of your life. You know, how you do sports is how you do the rest of your life. So, um, I, I over-trained, um, because I just thought more was better. Um, I ate highly inflammatory foods because I didn't know any better. I was eating 700 to a thousand grams of carbs a day in my running heyday. And I was a skinny shit. I mean, I, like I weighed 30 pounds less than I weigh now, same body fat, right? So, um, I just couldn't keep any muscle on and I was burning it up. I was catabolic all the time.

That's the nature of the long distance runner. Uh, and I got osteoarthritis in my feet, tendonitis in my hips. I had irritable bowel syndrome from all the grains. I had upper respiratory tract infection six times a year because I trashed my immune system. I had lingering sinus infections. I was a fucking wreck. I mean, I was really a wreck in terms of, um, having wanting to, wanting to do the right thing in terms of like, I'm, I have the mindset. I can force myself to run a 20 mile run today and then get up and do another one tomorrow, even faster and another and do another one tomorrow even faster and another one the next day even faster. And I had that mindset. Well, that's a dangerous thing for some people. Uh, and so I, I ultimately, um, ran myself literally into the ground

so badly that I could never run again. Uh, I trashed my, uh, my joints in a way that, that it was not possible to, to continue to run at that level, probably ever again. And so when it when it came time now, years later and in business now, when I talked about leaving a well-paying job and starting my company with no money in the bank and a wife and two children, I'll tell you that I worked hard. But I went to every freaking soccer practice i went to every soccer game i spent weekends with my kids uh they're now 25 and 28 and they will tell they will um they will say that that's the favorite part of their lives was you know was like they'll remember boogie boarding when they were six and and nine with me in the waves at Zuma Beach, right? Or they'll remember the time we took a trip to a soccer tournament

and had to spend the night in Orange County. I mean, these are the times that your kids will remember about you as a parent. So I knew that. So when I was growing up, I was a veteran of 200 endurance contests, a mile, two mile, 5k, 10k marathon triathlon. My parents came to two of my events out of 200 events that I competed in. By the time my kids were like 11, I'd been to 200 of their events, had only missed two of them. By the way, it felt like crap because I'd missed the two of them. But, um, anyway, so I, I sort of had this thing in my mind, like, I'm not going to let that part of

my life get away from me. The whole reason I've got this business and I'm trying to make money is to create a better life for my family and my kids. And I don't want to just put my head down and ignore them for 20 years. And then when they're too old, say, oh, now we have this wonderful life and this wealth, and now I can spend it. And they're like, get away, dad, you know, it's too little too late. So I was, I was, uh, that was, that was the lesson I learned about overdoing business, uh, from, from the sports analogy. Um, when it comes to, uh, running and when it comes to, I think you're more of an advocate of a little bit more of hit training. Um, I think in one of your books, you talk about, you know, doing like sprints on a bike

and some different things like that, um, is, is like, is running, you know, like a lot of people will turn into like a cardio bunny. Like they'll want to like run, they want to hit the elliptical, uh, they don't want to eat. Um, and this is not just women, by the way, there's a lot of men that do this, that they, they, you know, start a new year's resolution and they're heavier than they want to be. And they're like, screw it. I'm just not going to eat.

And I'm going to like, you know, go running or I'm going to train. Like I used to train when I played football or whatever. Is that a productive way to lose fat or are there some, uh, better methods that people could use? Well, I think, you know, cardio is a productive way to lose fat or are there some better methods that people could use? Well, I think, you know, cardio is the worst way to lose fat. It's absolutely the worst way. Why do you say that? Well, if you, unless again, if you're, unless you're an elite, a real runner, uh, and you've learned how to burn fat and you probably be the reason you're a real runner is also because you are naturally genetically gifted to become a runner not all not everybody's genetically designed to be uh you know a gazelle and so what happens is if you're not good at that and you start running typically you're not good

at burning fat because of your diet and the height and the carbs in your diet you get into this rut this cycle where you you go out and you run 45 minutes on the treadmill or on the track, and then you come home and you're hungry because you burned through all your carbohydrates. You didn't even burn through that much fat. You burned through all the carbs. And so the brain goes, well, you know, we don't know how to burn fat and we're dependent on carbs, so we better start eating more carbs so we can get out there and do it again tomorrow. And so you get on this treadmill, literally, of eating carbs and then going to the gym the next day and burning them off and then eating carbs at night and burning them off the next day. And it's such a, it's such a rut. And I see people four or five

years into a program at the gym and they still have the same 25 pounds to lose, except now that now the weight is jiggly, you know, now it's, it's jiggling all over the place. So the way to do it is with high intensity training. It's with, yeah, a little bit of cardio, but not making cardio the focus of your program. And it's mostly training your body to become good at burning fat. So when you become good at burning fat, then you can start to do some cardio. And in my book, Primal Endurance, I recognized this huge issue. And I coach people on how to retrain the body to burn fat and to burn ketones. And then to train, when you're doing cardio, train at a low enough heart rate that you're always mostly burning fat. And the other thing that people do when they do cardio is they probably train too hard.

Their heart rate is too high. people do when they do cardio is they probably train too hard. Their heart rate is too high. And all of a sudden, a whole cascade of hormonal events takes place that, again, causes them to burn glycogen instead of fat and puts them in this what we call the black hole of training, where they're not going slow enough to burn fat and they're not going fast enough to build muscle and to build strength and speed and power. So in primal endurance, we say do the slow stuff slower and longer and do the hard stuff shorter and harder and shorter and faster. And that way you put together a well-trained sort of middle ground that gives you the aerobic capacity, the fat burning capacity, the power, the maximum sustained power, and the top end speed. And the heart rate, we're looking at what, 135, 145 for the slower intensity? So the heart rate we use, which is pretty, it's pretty reliable, is 180 minus your age

is the maximum heart rate at which you should do cardio if you want to just burn mostly fat. Now, people will say, well, geez, Mark, I mean, I tried that. I mean, I'm used to running seven-minute miles, Mark, but then I did your program, and when I do it, and I'm doing 180 minus my age, say I'm 40 years old, so my max heart rate is 140, I can only do like 12-minute miles. I'm almost walking. What is up with that? And I, well, my answer is, well, it's proof that you're really good at burning sugar because you can run seven minute miles when you want to at a high heart rate, but you suck at burning fat. So what happens is over time, the same person who's training at a max rate of 140, now he's running 12 minute miles, but

three weeks later, he's running 11 minute miles at the same heart rate at 140. So you let the 140 dictate the speed at which you go, right? And then three weeks later, he's running nine and a half minute miles at the heart rate of 140. And before you know it, he's running seven and a half minute miles at the heart rate of 140. Now, when he tries to go faster in his old heart rate of 160 now, or 165 or 170, now he's running six minute miles because he's better at burning fat and his efficiency has improved so that so that he's he's able to st, uh, and 10% from glycogen versus his old way of running, which was to get 65% of his calories, his energy from glycogen and only 35% from fat. And that worked as long as he could drink Gatorade the whole race or take gel packs the whole race. But at some point your stomach blows up because of those gels, you can't empty the stomach and,

and you get bloated and you pull over the side of the road and you quit. This kind of stuff is really fascinating too, because if you're in a, uh, if you're, if you're doing something for 12 minutes versus doing something for, you know, seven minutes, it's a longer duration and it has its benefits. When somebody's doing, uh, the HIIT style of training, when someone's doing a high intensity intervals, what is your recommendations for that? They go in like 10 seconds, real hard, 15 seconds, real hard. How's that look? There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's, um, it's, that's the beauty, I think, of, uh, of, of programs like CrossFit. Um, you know, and I have my issues with CrossFit in general, but I think, you know, the, the idea that you mix it up and you have, uh, you know,

10 second intervals, you have, uh, sometimes 30 second intervals with a one minute rest, sometimes one minute intervals with a two minute rest. You have Tabatas, you know, 10 second intervals. You have, uh, sometimes 30 second intervals with a one minute rest, sometimes one minute intervals with a two minute rest. You have Tabata's, you know, we were doing 20 seconds on 10 seconds off for four minutes. Uh, you've got a track work where you can run, you know, two hundreds, which is one of my favorite workouts to do. And then walk jog, uh, to, to do that. What's that? I said, Oh man, like that's brutal sprinting 200s. Yeah. Yeah. So I haven't run a mile in almost 20 years. Now I've run, you know, I go, I go to the track and I do, again, I'll do six, two hundreds, uh, all out. And boy, do I feel like an Olympic sprinter that whole time I'm doing that. Uh, or I'll play ultimate, you know, for two hours and

I'll do six seconds, sprint six seconds here, eight seconds there, rest six seconds back, you know, 10 seconds down the end of the field, four seconds to go cover someone. It's, it's an amazing, uh, interval workout. It's a high intensity workout with, with just rest periods interspersed and you're changing direction all the time. So I think the beauty of high intensity interval training is that there are so many ways you could take it and, and none of them are wrong and all of them are right. And mixing them up is probably the best thing you can do. And in, uh, this, this is, uh, um, this, it sounds a little bit like lifting weights to me. Like, uh, we either lift light and kind of lift slow and

controlled and have some good tempo. And we have, uh, we're trying to get some time under tension or we're, you know, we got high intensity, which is just the, it refers to the amount of weight we got on the bar and we're just trying to go like hell. Yeah. I mean, and you can do, you know, you can do pyramids one day and you can do, uh, you know, focus on body tests and abs. There's no wrong way to lift for the same reason. They all contribute. And I think the worst thing you can do is get into the rut of lifting the exact same, you know, sets and the exact same equipment and the exact same, you know, weights every time.

You want to, over time, I think you want to, if not progress, because I'm not going to set any PRs now, but you want to, you know, mix it up in a way. And like I train mostly to not get injured when I do the fun stuff, when I play, when I paddle, when I play ultimate, you know, ultimate. Um, one thing I loved about you when we went to your house, me and my brother went to your house is that, um, you know, you were, we were outside and you were like, Hey, let me see your abs. Like you're a total, you're a total meathead at heart. And I, and I find that to be, uh, I find that to be, you know, I find it to be really cool.

Um, what, what has, uh, kind of kept you so attached to, uh, the, the exercise side of this, because it seems, it seems to me that without the exercise, you would have never made it to where you're at. Like, uh, you know, both in pushing yourself and self-experimentation, uh, the research, all the reading, um, I'm sure you're knowledgeable in other areas of life as well, but it seemed like, uh, this whole time that you've been pushing your body has turned you into this, uh this entrepreneurial monster. And I know you mentioned doing some other things when you were younger as well, but it really seemed to align everything in your life for the future. I mean, I don't know how to put that in context other than when I was a kid and I was scrawny and too small to play football, basketball, baseball, or hockey, because hockey was big where I grew up in Maine.

You know, so I gravitated toward running. It was the only thing I could do. And I wound up going out for the track team and winning the mile and the two mile and becoming and getting the acknowledgement for that. And so it was the acknowledgement that, hey, you're an athlete after all, Mark, you're not some scrawny little, scrawny little shit that's going to, you know, be a nerd the rest of your life. So I, I, I found, you know, for better or worse, I find people judging me as being a good athlete, found comfort in that. And, and I might, you know, not advocate for that as a life coach now, but it worked for me. And for the longest time, then it became, uh, then, then it just became self-ingrained and now it was a contest

with myself. And then with all the research I did, I realized that athletics and, and sports and training was always going to be a part of my life. And I've, I've never gone more than a week without training. Uh, and I'm sure that that was probably because of an injury or, you know, an illness or an operation or something. So, um, you know, I've always, I've always trained hard. And the fact that, um, uh, I think training is, is such a part of my life that I'll stop working. I'll stop doing work to go get my workout in. Um, you know, and, and that's, I think that's part of a healthy balance more than anything. And, and even now it's like, I don't have anything to train for. Right. I'm

like, I don't even, sometimes I show up at the gym and I go, what the hell am I going to do? Why am I even here? I look pretty damn good for my age and I don't have anything I'm training for. Uh, so what am I going to do? And I usually always, I always find something to do. And then I go home and I get back to work and that was great. But I think for me, the gym, when I go to a gym, it's like my cheers, right? It's where everybody knows your name. It's where my, it's my social hour. And I get to catch up with people and I get to, you know, say hi and, and, uh, interact. Cause I work out of my house. I'm in a fricking dark room in Miami here. This is my office. Cause it, uh, you know, it's just the only room in the house that, uh, that, that I could, that I could commandeer for an office. Um, and so it's a little, you know, I'm, I'm a little, uh, pent up over,

over time and I need the release of, of exercise. And so that's always been a, a critical part of, of my life. And you know, why do I do it now? Probably vanity more than anything else. I just, you know, I told somebody 15 years ago, I want to show, I want to show people what 70 is supposed to look like. So if, so if, so maybe that's my goal, I don't know, but it's coming in, it's coming too fast. They can stop. I like, uh, some of the thinking because while it is cool to be able to push around some big weights and to perform some, some cool stuff when you're young, uh, how cool is it to say that you're still able to do these things? Even if it looks differently as we age, you know, I've always wanted you're young. Uh, how cool is it to say that you're still able to do these things, even if it looks

differently as we age, you know, I've always wanted to be able to still, uh, be squatting, still be deadlifting, still be bench pressing. I don't care what the, I don't really care that much about what the weight is. I still want to be doing it when I'm, I'm 42. I still want to be doing it when I'm 45 and 55 and 65 and 75 and so on, uh, until the, until the day they got to, uh, put me in the ground. What, uh, what's something that keeps you, um, so driven?

Was there something, you know, uh, were you just kind of born this way? You always wanted to kind of get after it or was there something in particular that, uh, I mean, cause you got your hands in a lot of things. It's pretty, pretty amazing. Too many. Yeah. Yeah. It's sometimes too many. Um, Yeah. I've always been driven and I've always been, again, I think, you know, entrepreneur, the entrepreneur mindset, I think it happens early in

people. And I think you develop it. And I think maybe it's, maybe there's part of it that's genetic. I mean, I remember when my, when I was seven, eight, nine years old, my dad, who was a very good golfer used to take me on the golf course. And I, you know, when I was eight or nine, I was able to carry his bag. So I caddied for my dad. And one of my favorite things to do, not his favorite thing, but my favorite thing was when he shanked one into the woods, I would, I would spend 10 minutes looking for golf balls. And it was like, you know, it was like an Easter egg hunt or something. And I would find these golf balls.

I'm like, oh, my God, these are up here. And there's nobody who saw fit to come up this far into the bushes and look for these amazing brand new golf balls. Like, you know, usually off the first tee, somebody just took out a title list and that was that. And that, I don't know, something about that, you know, these early experiences in one's life, something about that made me want to look for golf balls the rest of my life in a metaphorical sense, right? And so I became an entrepreneur. I sold, I made Christmas wreaths around Christmas

time in Maine and used to make 200 bucks as an 11-year-old, 12-year-old, you know, selling Christmas wreaths. I made, I stayed home from school one day, it snowed. I made 80 bucks shoveling snow, again, in eighth grade. I always had the motivation, the appreciation for money, the motivation to make it, combined with two other things, I think. One of those is security. So I didn't grow up with a lot of money. And my mother, my parents got divorced when I was in my teens. And she had no money, and my dad was a painter. And there were years when, later on, as a painting contractor, I made more money in a year than he did. And so financial security was a big thing for me. But the other thing was, as a scrawny kid, I got bullied.

Again, it was a fishing village in Maine. again it was a you know fishing village in Maine I got you know uh beat up on the way home from school uh very much like you'd see in in a Ralphie in a Christmas story yeah right um and uh you know that didn't sit well with me I suspect that's why I became an iron man uh and uh but ultimately you know I it's there's a chip there was a chip on my shoulder, like I want to show what I can do. So it's for better or for worse. And again, you know, a life coach might tell me those are all the wrong reasons for, you know, doing what you do. But, you know, I want to provide for my family. I want to provide security for my family.

I want to provide a nice life for myself. I want to enjoy life as much as I can. I want to play a role in changing the way the world eats. And I'd like to think that I'm having, you know, that I've done that with my writing on Mark's out of bed every morning and makes me want to hit the ground running for sure. Not running a mile, though. I have a co-host on the show here, our podcast engineer. I think Andrew is going to have a couple of questions, but I'm sure it's a little easier to get out of bed when the company is acquired for $200 million. Yeah. It makes things nice. It makes things nice.

That's for sure. Yeah. And that's actually what I was going to ask you about. You said you started, you know, your Primal Nutrition with nothing in the bank, two kids. What was more nerve wracking doing that or teaming up with Kraft for $200 million? I don't know what the thing is about this teaming up with Kraft. There was nothing nerve wracking about teaming up with Kraft. They were, you know, we had tense negotiations along the way, but much of it was about what I was going to do.

What was going to be, they wanted me to stay forever, basically. Right. So, and I'm like, no, I want to, I want to, you know, be able to pull back at some point and, and, uh, maybe play golf, uh, or maybe do an extra day of paddling. Right. But as it stands right now, I'm still, um, I'm a consultant for the next, uh, two years. Um, and it's, you know, hands-on creating new product. So the starting my business was a thousand times more nerve wracking than, than, uh, you know, this, this, uh, partnership with Kraft Heinz. A lot of, uh, a lot of people of today, uh, I just keep hearing this question over and over again. Um, and so I, I asked this of all of our guests, um, what are some, what are some things that people can do? A lot of people

are suffering from anxiety and depression, and I am a huge, huge believer that, um, you know, a, it's possible that, uh, some people are just born differently and don't have the coping mechanisms that maybe somebody else does, but, uh, I'm always going to be a big believer in fitness. I'm always going to be a big believer in nutrition. And I feel that nutrition and sleep and exercise are key components to fighting against these things. What are some of your thoughts on this topic? Yeah, 100%. I think that I read somewhere that antipsychotics as a prescription drug were this probably the second, maybe the number one or maybe second most prescribed drug in the country and perhaps the world. And I just, it blows my mind that people who otherwise have everything going for themselves in terms of their, their, um, genotype and their phenotype and their, their organic chemistry. They're just depressed because

they're eating crappy or they're sleeping bad poorly, or they're unable to cope with stress at work or in a relationship. Um, now those are all serious things and they're life, life altering for a lot of people for sure. I mean, they, there's, there's nothing worse than being depressed and or stressed, but the slippery slope that you, that you enter when you start taking some of these medications is pretty dangerous and, and, and pretty devastating for a lot of people. So I'm of the opinion that, um, for a lot of people. So I'm of the opinion that a large number, I'd say a vast majority of people who suffer from mild depression or anxiety would be well suited to going to the gym, getting on a program of, look, and keto. I mean, my goodness. I mean, you know, the way the brain runs on ketones, it's sort of a happy fuel for the brain. So there are people who've done the keto

reset diet who will tell me that their depression has gone away or is tremendously subsided. And, you know, in concert with sleeping properly, I mean, sleep is the most overlooked facet of good health by most Americans. And it's to this day, even though there's been a lot of discussion on sleep in the last five years, people still are like, you know what, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Or, you know, let's just stay up and watch one more episode. Right. And it's just, you know, that stuff adds up over time in a negative way. And some people it impacts because they gain weight. Some people impacts with an increase in depression or a decrease in serotonin.

So there are lots of chemical imbalances that are brought on by lifestyle choices that don't have to happen. And yet people try to fix those chemical imbalances with more chemicals. And that's where the problem really becomes, I think, insidious over time. How do you get enough sleep? How do you, you just kind of have a schedule where you're like, you know what, by this time I'm getting my ass in bed. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, I have never pulled an all-nighter in my life. That includes college. That includes, you know, any of my work history. I just value sleep too much. And, you know, I was, as an Ironman triathlete, I could go eight, nine hours, 10 hours, 100%. But man, you start to mess with my sleep. You start

talking about multi-day adventure races or race across America, I'm out. I'd probably be well-suited for it in terms of my physiology, but I'm out because my psychology will not go a night without sleep. So even in college, I would go to bed at 10 o'clock or not 10 o'clock, not 10 o'clock, but 11, 1130 at night. And people partying in the dorm rooms around me. I kept a big white noise fan in my room. I stuck to a very rigorous sleep schedule, even as a teenager. And I think that that's, you know, again, it's probably one of the life choices I made that's now manifested itself in, you know, the health that I enjoy today. Thank you so much for sharing all this time with

us today. We, we took up enough of your time. I really appreciate it. Uh, is there anything in particular that's on the horizon or anything that you want to share with people? Like where are you, where are you going to be next that people can come and listen to you talk or something like that? Um, I'm at the metabolic health summit, uh, in, uh, long beach, February, I mean, January 31st, February 1st and 2nd. I'll be talking about keto there. And then not much until I'm speaking at a private engagement with 600 people in February, but I'll be at Paleo FX, which is one of my favorite places to go. Have you ever gone to Paleo FX, Mark? I've never been. Where's it at? Uh, it's in Austin and this year it's the end of April. It's really, it's an awesome event. It's a, it's paleo primal, low, low carb, ketogenic people, some of the best in the world.

Uh, and so I'll be speaking at that. Um, yeah. And then, um, uh, we have, uh, because I'm working less at the,-suite level of Primal Kitchen Foods, spending a little bit more time with Primal Health Coach Institute, which is a company I started a bunch of years ago. So we train people to become Primal Health Coaches. We certify people, and it's an online experience. So I'm spending a lot more time with that. You can just Google Primal Health Coach Institute and find out about that.

I think we've put 3,000 people through the program right now. And that's how I'm leveraging my technology and expertise that I've accumulated over the last 30 years with other people. Primal health coaches, what does that, so are they versed in nutrition as well as training and things like that? Absolutely. So it's a full, it's the full Primal Blueprint suite of lifestyle choices. So lots of nutrition, lot deep dive into nutrition, um, but lots of movement, um, you know, whether it's a cardio, uh, hit, uh, weightlifting, you know, whatever, whatever suits your fancy. We have a way of, uh, incorporating that into your, into your lifestyle. Um, we talk about sleep and sun exposure and play, and it's a, we have a way of incorporating that into your, into your lifestyle.

We talk about sleep and sun exposure and play, and it's a, it's a, it's a sort of a life coaching philosophy. So when people become a certified primal health coach, they can coach other people to achieve the results that they're looking for. That's really interesting because that's what people really need to make the improvements that they, that are necessary. They need someone. You're not going to get it from the government or from, or from modern medicine today. That's for sure. They need people coaching them. Thanks again, Mark.

Really appreciate your time. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for, thanks for having me. Take care. You too. Damn, man. Guy's a beast, man. I could have talked to him forever.

I was just thinking like, I don't think there's a book on this dude but i you know i'm sure that's in the works too i he has books but i don't think there's like a book about mark sisson right yeah because he's i mean shit man no every answer he gave he went in for like five minutes we there was so good there's like so many other chunks of his life, too. He talked about self-publishing a book, but then his company ended up self-publishing a lot of books. He's just done it all. I really admire him, and I look up to him a lot. I was thinking, shit, he's going to be in Long Beach. I'm like, maybe he'll freaking fly down there yeah remember we were at his house he was like tight rope walking

oh yeah it's called yeah yeah tight rope walking tight tight roping i don't know what it's called whatever it is but here's this you know 60 year old dude yeah kicking everyone's ass it's like well we just kind of looked at it we were like we're not trying that i mean we could we would have been fine if we tried oh god well you know you he the stuff that he loves to do you got to be kind of good at that um yeah i'm just you know and you know a lot of people will like um there's people that might listen to some of that and as he went into like some of the science and stuff he's well versed in the science but he's not a scientist He's not a doctor by any means. And my thought process is like,

who the hell cares about some of the science-y side of things? Mark Sisson is well aware of studies and different things like that too. But I like that he didn't reference any studies. You know, he just talked about eating. Yeah. And we could sit here and argue about all kinds of things but but i i i was i agree with him largely on a lot of things

um i do think that the thing that he says about protein about it kind of being free i find that to be really fascinating because i do i I do think that he has, he has a really good point. And other people have said this on the show too. Uh, Lane Norton was one of them. He's like, protein shouldn't even really count for four calories, you know, and somebody should probably work on figuring that out. Maybe it should only be like three calories. Maybe it should be different than fat than a carbohydrate. Sorry. Um, but it is kind of an interesting thing that uh if you kind of look at protein it's just like your maintenance of like holding on to x amount of muscle and uh probably all of us get like a free shot at about 50 or 100 grams of protein depending on the size of the person i

guess but um it is kind of an interesting thing and then we didn't really get into it too much with him because i didn't want to hammer too much of a, just pure diet stuff, but you heard his stance against oil, the seed oil, vegetable oils. Um, these are things that all your foods are cooked in all the time at just about every restaurant. And if you want to make it a habit to not have them cook stuff in that, you can ask at most restaurants they they'll be open to uh try and something a little different um you can you can ask if they can cook it in something like olive oil which um you know can handle a little bit higher temperature you can also ask that it's not cooked in any oil and then you can just get butter on it i mean these are things that

i i try to do at most restaurants because quite frankly nowadays when i don't do that i pay the price man like my stomach hurts and i'm like fuck man like what i shouldn't have eaten that and it does taste good and i do sometimes just want to be like i'll just screw it i'll just get it whatever way they serve it but especially when it comes to like breakfast food um there's no way i'm gonna be able to to handle that. Yeah. I'll be on the toilet. Oh yeah. I'm just excited. The fact that,

you know, him and craft are teaming up. Cause I'm just hoping it, it makes the, um, primal kitchen stuff available more to the masses. Yeah. It's well,

what it's going to do is going to lower those prices. And especially that, cause I know what he said about, and it makes a ton of sense about, um, you know, when you compare a food bill from someone who's, uh, makes a ton of sense about um you know when you compare a food bill from someone who's uh on a ketogenic diet versus you know whatever and that

does make sense and it's it's very true like you can save a lot of money by not buying a bunch of crap by not buying a bunch of crap and then also in addition to that um just eating less because you should be eat like your healthy lifestyle you You shouldn't be eating so much damn food. And so therefore, you know, you should be saving. It's still hard though. When you look at, you're like, okay, grass fed beef. It's like X amount of dollars per pound. You're like, whoa.

And you get the steak and it's like 28 bucks. And you're like, that's just for me. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, that's just for me. Yeah. And you're like, that's expensive. But, but then it's kind of hard to say, okay, well I'm buying, you know, rice and potatoes and like, there's, they're just super inexpensive. Vegetables are usually fairly inexpensive. So, um, and by the way, he's a proponent of vegetables. He talks a lot about eating,

what he calls a big ass salad every day. So you could still kind of fill yourself with vegetables and proteins and stuff. But, you know, he does have a good point that you're going to overall be eating a little bit less food. Yeah. And then, you know, like what I was getting at was something like this is, yeah, you might be able to see the Primal Kitchen, you know, mayonnaise next to the, you know, run of the mill brand. And their prices will be a lot more similar as opposed to right now when they're kind of, you know, run-of-the-mill brand, and their prices will be a lot more similar as opposed to right now when they're kind of, you know, a little jacked up. I'm going to take a pee break, but maybe you can tell them about the ST Classic. Sure. Oh, yeah, you can hop right up there.

So we're still recording right now. Are you really? Yeah, but we're not not live so it's not that big of a deal so there's not too much stress but uh anyway the st classic is going to be going down february 9th and 10th here in sacramento at the sacramento it's called cal expo fairgrounds my bad at the total health and fitness expo mark's going to be hopping up on the platform. Even though I got sick, I'm still going to do my best to get up there and pull some decent numbers. Press something fancy. We'll see what happens. I know the jacked cameraman, Ryan Soper, is going to be competing in it as well. We're going to have a bunch of

awesome guests. We're going to have Jake Cutler. He's going to be speaking on Sunday, I believe. There's still rumors about Bailey's coming through. Our boy Luke Hawks is going to be here. Of course, the Meatheads, Sean Baker and Chris Borbell. Charity Witt. is she still coming? Dang. Charity Whit, that's not the one that just won the

Titan show or whatever, right? It is? Okay. So that's another thing you guys have to look forward to. Last year was a blast. We had, I mean, the whole expo was kind of centered around the whole lifting meet.

So it'll probably be the main attraction again this year. And like I was just telling the people, you're going to be hopping up on the platform as well. Oh, my God. I know. Did 405 for six reps today. That felt pretty good. And then moseyed on over to some flow pressing. So strength is feeling pretty good. And then, uh, mosey down over to, uh, some flow pressing. So strength is feeling pretty good.

Um, actually I was four 15 cause I threw on a fiver just cause, uh, I got weird like rules. So I just, I know what I, I know what four Oh five, I know what four Oh five,

I know how many reps I'm supposed to do with four Oh five, uh, to bench 500. So I didn't want to like not make that. So it's easier to just not know. Interesting. So I'm not going to try, I won't try 500 pounds. So that'll be something that happens on game day.

Yeah. I might not even bench more than like four, maybe 450. I might bench 455 or so in here just to take it for a spin and just kind of see, uh, what that feels like. And timing wise, when do you think you'll be doing that? I don't know. I don't know.

I guess we're, we're getting pretty close, right? It's, uh, yeah. How many weeks out are we? You know?

Yeah. My training is weird because I'm not really, it's not really like just once a week that I'm taking these heavy lifts. It's like, it's more frequent than that. It's almost, it's almost twice a week that i'm taking these heavy lifts it's like it's more frequent than that it's almost it's almost twice a week that i'm going pretty heavy so i still feel like i got kind of plenty of time but uh this sunday i might not lift at all and then maybe uh kind of load up for thursday i guess i have got, uh, at least two more workouts, if not three more workouts, or I'm sorry, three more.

Um, it's about three weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My, I can, I can sneak in it's February 9th. Right. So I can sneak in, uh, I guess I do have to lift this sunday so there you go i'm kind of forced to yeah because then it gives me an extra gives me an extra day well that's good

that worked out good yeah hopefully i feel way better by sunday you've been hanging upside down it sounds like yeah i told you that's how i sleep it's not working no All the snot is in there. Yeah. Um, you got it pretty bad. I don't know. When I get sick, I get sick like a, can't breathe. 90 year old, like just,

well, that was a good run, wasn't it? It's all over now. Damn. You get sick, uh, pretty often or not too bad?

Uh, I will say this past year was the least amount of sickness I've ever experienced, but prior to, yeah, I get sick all the time. Yeah. Uh, I would say this past year was the least amount of sickness I've ever experienced. But prior to, yeah, I get sick all the time. Cleaning up the diet and then just kind of, I don't know, not assuming that I was going to get sick. When I was fat, I got sick all the time. But I also, like, I was training like a fucking lunatic. And I was, well, I still travel quite a bit.

But there's something different about traveling to meet just gross yeah i know all the people that you just i don't know everyone's all sweating and it's it's a nightmare i think a lot of people get sick from from competing and then all the nerves of it too i forgot about that side of it i mean you're you're you're fucked up for a week beforehand and then you're all weird and twisted afterwards too because you're like don't know what to do with yourself and you want to kind of just get hit by a bus yeah i mean i was on tuesday morning i came in here and i felt totally fine i was i was feeling good and then i started dead lifting and i went for 305 and it didn't move and i tried it again and it kind of started to go and I, that was it.

But then I don't know, within an hour after doing that, I was like, my throat's feeling a little scratchy. Like, ah, nothing's wrong. Just don't even think about it. Here's a new rule. Like when you go to do a deadlift and it doesn't move, just like roll it off the platform and just be like, this is like, just make that look like that was the movement that you were trying to do. That makes sense. Like just shrug it off as if you weren't trying to actually pick it up. No, no, no. I was just trying to roll it and just like roll it at somebody as hard as you can. Whoever's filming. Yeah. Well, there was nobody in the gym,

so it was just me by myself. Yeah. And that's a rookie mistake. That's what I was telling, I can't remember who I was talking to, but I'm like, you know, yeah, that's, I rookie mistake that's why i was telling i can't remember who i was talking to but i'm like you know yeah that's did 295 it felt fine it looked fine he did at the end of the workout though too right yeah and that's the other thing is i did a lot of back work and then i went to the deadlift and 295 moved just fine and i should have went for 300 or i should have just left it alone but i was like no i want to go want to go for a PR. Let's go to 305. And it didn't, yeah, didn't go anywhere. I'm looking at some of this information on Mark Sisson and like there's things on here from like 1980 to 1982. How old is this guy?

I thought you said 65. He said 60, yeah. And he's still jacked. Not fair. It's crazy. Another guy that's implementing fasting and he looks great i also like the fact that he didn't even talk about fasting you had to bring it up you know what i mean because like he but i i like that i i think that the more that people really don't use the word keto i mean part of

the reason why i called the book the war on carbs was kind of to avoid that word because even mark sisson's diet is not necessarily a ketogenic diet a ketogenic diet is when you produce over 0.5 millimolars of ketones and you actually check your ketones uh with uh with a prick of your finger and you check your blood and that's uh clinically being in ketosis and that's a ketogenic diet but that when i've done a ketogenic diet and when i've been in ketosis like that and especially when i've done that for long periods of time i haven't been able to perform the way i'm able to perform now and i don't know what the difference is with the, um, I should measure my ketones and kind of see, but I think that my point is, is that he was talking about metabolic flexibility, the ability to, to, to be able to burn anything. And I kind of feel that that's probably where I'm at. Last night I ate probably, I don't even know, might've been like the equivalent of like three potatoes like three

whole potatoes because I was just like oh you know time to bench tomorrow and we're getting down to uh nitty-gritty time and it's time just to you know do that here and there so I crushed a lot of potatoes and um I ended up you know weighing a little bit more and just kind of holding that, uh, holding that water in the muscles and stuff. And it made me, made me feel good. But even, um, even after I've done stuff like that over the last couple of weeks, even on the carnivore diet, let's say, um, let's say I have some yogurt or let's say I have some carbohydrates in something. Um, I don't, um, when when i fast when i switch over to fasting

i'm not like oh my god i got the worst headache i'm not feeling like shit whereas when i've tried fasting before i'd feel like crap and even on a keto diet maybe i just maybe in the past i just wasn't eating enough that could also be a factor because like that was the focus the focus was a hundred percent on just like dropping weight i was like i don't care i don't know what happens and you just get when that happens i just got like stringy and weird and i'm like oh my god this is a nightmare and that's kind of right around the time honey came around right around that time that i i was just kind of cleaning some of that up so he came around the perfect time to switch me into some bodybuilding. Saved my life.

Bodybuilding saved your life. It saved my life. Oh, oh, oh, oh. You know, uh, you know, what's causing you to cough like that? I have no idea. Sucking too much dick. That's what me and my brothers would always say to each other it didn't matter what it was like you'd be like oh my god dude my neck is killing me and we'd be like

and the other one just be like okay just yeah you know screw you yeah or if you cough or choke or anytime you anytime you did anything really i've been fighting it too i don't want to cough see that's terrible i'm fighting the urge to anyway uh that's all the time we got it was awesome uh having mark sisson on on the podcast and um we'll meet up with him in person i had to get on the horn with him because i could use some uh consulting from him i got a couple ideas that I think, uh, could be pretty cool. So see what happens with that. But, uh, he's, he's just awesome, man. The guy's, the guy's a damn savage. He's in great shape. I admire him, uh, a lot. So awesome having him on the show. Check out some of his stuff. Just Google Mark Sisson and look up a bunch of shit from him. You'll find out more information. If you want to really find out more about his, uh, his style of diet, he wrote a book called keto reset. I think that's his most

recent book on the ketogenic or ketogenic ish style diet. Check all that stuff out. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.