The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Brad Kearns Co-Author Interview: Two Meals a Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Oh, my gosh. We're rebroadcasting live on Clubhouse. If you haven't followed us over there, we actually have been broadcasting live on Clubhouse for about a week now. If you're not on the app, you need to check it out. To see the video version of the interview we'll be doing today, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. And also, you can go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Starting point is 00:01:02 See all the books we're reading and reviewing over there. You can also go to facebook.com, The Chris Foss Show. There's a number of groups over there for the show. And also you can go to linkedin.com. There's groups over there as well. Instagram.com, 4chesschrisfoss, and The Chris Foss Show as well. Those of you who are looking to get healthier, lose weight, reverse aging, and deal with your diet frustration. I

Starting point is 00:01:27 mean, we've all been there, haven't we? We have a great gentleman on the show. And today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor Restream. Restream Studio is a web-based live broadcasting solution. You can live stream a Zoom meeting or webinar to up to 30 plus social channels and platforms at the same time. We're actually using it to do our live broadcasting. You can get $10 credit towards their services using our affiliate link at restream.io forward slash join forward slash Chris Voss. He's the author of the forthcoming book that will be on sale on March 9th, 2021. You can, of course, pre-order that book. The name of the book is called Two Meals a Day. The Simple Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever by Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Today, we're blessed by having Brad Kearns on the show and let me tell you a rundown on him. He is a longtime co-author of Mark Sisson. He's the host of B-Rad Podcast, an elite masters athlete. He broke the Guinness World Record in speed golf at age 53 is a number one U.S. ranked age 55 to 59 hyper jumper and former U.S. national champion and number three world ranked professional triathlete. He lives in Lake Tahoe, Nevada with his wife, Elizabeth, and enjoys a daily cold plunge in the lake year round. And I was laughing earlier because he's the same age that am at 53 and i'm like wow i really need to move up my game welcome the show brad how are you sir oh my gosh right now i'm excited from that amazing intro and the energy is high so we're ready to rock and roll there you go

Starting point is 00:03:17 i might need a nap though after reading your bio i mean that's a lot of stuff going on and we're the same age like i can think about the triathlete thing, but welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you coming by and congratulations on the launch of your guys' new book. I think you guys have done several books. Is that correct? Yes. Mark Sisson, one of the great leaders of the ancestral health, the primal movement. And I've had the great privilege of working together with him.

Starting point is 00:03:40 He's an old friend of mine. We're both old-time athletes in the triathlon scene, but we started writing together about 12 years ago and have put out some really popular books on this cutting edge ancestral health scene. And it's been really cool to see it grow in the meanwhile, because when we were first starting out, the first book was called The Primal Blueprint. And we were trying to explain it to major publishers in New York and got turned down by a couple dozen saying this stuff is ridiculous. And it flies in the face of medical science of America and the US government. And now finally, we've had this wonderful awakening of whatever you want to call

Starting point is 00:04:16 it, the alternative health scene, or the pillars of conventional wisdom that we followed blindly, thinking that people are looking out for our best interests are now being shattered. And people have done things like follow a high fat diet and lose body fat and all kinds of other crazy stuff that we never thought was, you know, legit. I usually stick to meth. That seems to be a diet that works for me, but is completely unhealthy. No, I'm just kidding. I don't do meth. Clearly, I don't do meth. You don't need it, man man you're pumped up enough i i'm trying to be but there's a there's some death wish coffee right here in the cup that's uh keep me caffeinated uh so give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and get to know you better oh my gosh you'll just be regaled by wild and crazy

Starting point is 00:05:01 videos and fun information at bradkearns.com. So go check that out. And as you read in my bio, I'm into all kinds of fun stuff. And I think mostly what I'm trying to stand for is to maintain passion and competitive intensity throughout life. And of course, we're old guys now. We're in the 50s. And usually we're sitting around telling stories of back in the day when you were all sectioned in football and no one could touch you and you tackled the quarterback every time and everyone

Starting point is 00:05:29 has their story and then we go back and sit down and watch Tom Brady win another Super Bowl. But my thing is I want to be out there participating and fighting that battle against the accelerated decline into old age and dysfunction that we're seeing now as the norm. And that's something that means something to me in a different way than when I was a professional triathlete and I was living and breathing, racing on the pro circuit and trying to win the next race. But that was a nice, fun, exciting phase of my young life. But then as the decades pass, it's like, what are you going to do now? I have no desire to go back on the professional triathlon circuit, fortunately, because that stuff's crazy and it's way out of my league. And it's not even that healthy to be an elite athlete for too long. But I can now pursue these

Starting point is 00:06:13 fun goals that are nicely aligned with anti-aging longevity. They build and support my health rather than break it down like things that you do that are too extreme. And so that's kind of the message that I like to share over at my website and all the things that I'm doing. I'm helping with this testosterone optimization project. We have a product called MOFO and that stands for male optimization formula with organs. So it's a, it's an organ supplement, but behind that, we have this whole lifestyle movement to try to help, especially men who are looking at this accelerated decline and the things you can do naturally with your lifestyle. But with regard to the book here, this is really an exciting project because we've been writing for so long. And a lot of it's been to this niche audience that's out on the fringes

Starting point is 00:07:01 of health, where they're paleo or they're keto. And you might've met one of these people sitting next to you in the airplane seat and they're into CrossFit and their muscles are bulging out of their female skirt. And you're like, wow, she's a one in a thousand. I've never seen anyone with pecs and traps and deltoids like yours. But now we're trying to take this very popular movement and this message further and further into the mainstream and help rescue people that have followed this really disastrously flawed advice for perhaps their entire adult life and can raise their hand as a serial failure with diet and weight loss efforts. And now we're showing you that, hey, there's a better way. It's different. It does not involve pain, suffering, sacrifice,

Starting point is 00:07:45 and deprivation. And in fact, what you're doing is you're making choices that are aligned with your human genetic expectations for health, dating back to that evolutionary model, that ancestral example of the foods we're supposed to eat are the foods that came from the earth, not from a box or a package or a wrapper. And same with the exercise modalities and the sleep habits and all these cool things that people on the biohacking scene and the far fringes of health optimization are all into. But now we have a kinder, gentler approach to where it's really doable for anybody. So I'm not asking you for hours and hours of your time to do these crazy workouts that maybe I like to do, but something that's really

Starting point is 00:08:25 doable and sustainable. So that's kind of where this book is targeted. And the message inside is all about making things, building on personal preference and making it comfortable and fun. I think what's, and that's great. I think what's confusing for a lot of people is there's so many different diets out there. There's so much misinformation out there. And like, I just basically keep a dartboard and I just close my eyes and I throw the dart of the dartboard and I go, Oh, I'm doing paleo diet today. There you go. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're funny guy, but it's, it's a very important and well conveyed point there, what you're saying. And there's a lot of frustration and confusion among the basic consumer. And I live and breathe this stuff every day, but I also meet up with my

Starting point is 00:09:11 childhood buddies and we get together and we talk about life and we have fun and someone brings dinner and there's chips and salsa or whatever. And I have this experience of associating with real people who are busy leading normal lives and not necessarily up on all the scientific research. And so people ask me my opinion, of course, I'm a writer, I'm an author, I'm a podcast host, but I'm always cognizant of that idea that everyone's pretty much confused and frustrated by all the controversy and the misinformation and the conflicting information among very knowledgeable and well-trained authorities. So I don't want to be the guy who's throwing down all this dogma.

Starting point is 00:09:51 And then the next week on your show, you get someone on who's talking about different things that are going to shut me down. Then we need to have a third show to sort everything out. So what I'm trying to do is find common ground that everyone can be receptive to that makes good common sense. And as soon as you try it, it feels better and you get a boost in your energy, your mood, your cognitive function, your appetite is stabilized, and you have a better day because you tried to implement some of these things that are simple and doable. So the premise of the book is to, of course, do a lot of different things for you, but two meals a day. What's the core values of that that you guys are espousing in the book?

Starting point is 00:10:32 Yeah, thanks. Good question. I mean, the thing is that we've been indoctrinated into this modern culture where three meals a day is part of our lifestyle for some reason. And I'll tell you the reason it's because of the industrial revolution, whatever, what is it? 180 years ago when we started working in factories and came off the farms. And so we had to have breakfast because then we were heading off to the factory. We needed to have lunch to take a break during the incredibly arduous manual labor that our great grandfathers and so forth engaged in every single day. And then you came home and you had dinner. And so today we're in this digital world where we're not very active. We have all these comforts and conveniences and luxuries, and we certainly don't need more than two meals a day. So it's a

Starting point is 00:11:13 catchy title to convey the idea that the widespread disease patterns of modern humans are a result of one, choosing the wrong foods and two eating too frequently so we have two disparate things that we can tackle and of course we're going to start out talking about making good food choices especially what not to eat so to help ease some of your confusion that you express in that first question if we can just discuss what not to eat you're going to fly so high and you're going to reach the highest heights of your 80% potential to longevity. And that's a quote from a very well-established Dr. Peter Attia, one of the great longevity physicians. He's got his own podcast. It's very popular.

Starting point is 00:11:55 He's deep into the science. He has a research team and he says, look, just, just cut out the junk food and you're 80% of your, the way to your longevity potential. The other stuff's refining and nuancing and things that people can spend more time with. But that's the first thing is to make those wise choices. And then the second thing is quit eating so freaking frequently and quit snacking all day long in the name of health. And some people have been told that maybe it's good to keep your blood sugar steady all day long and reach for this healthy energy bar that's now a multi-billion dollar industry. So we're trying to shut down some of these notions that are really damaging to the average person and kind of convey a more simple

Starting point is 00:12:36 approach where it's eating delicious, nutritious meals, and then going about your busy day, feeling comfortable, mood stabilized, appetite stabilized, and not needing to rely on food as your primary source of energy. And guess what your primary source of energy becomes? What it's been for the last two and a half million years of human evolution, and that is stored body fat. So we're really good at storing energy and accessing and burning it when we need it without regular meals. That's the story of how humans have made it to this day. But we've overridden that in modern life by constantly shoving food down our face, especially the high-carbohydrate processed meals that basically shut off your ability to burn stored body fat.

Starting point is 00:13:19 And that's what I tell people. I'm not fat. I just have high storage capabilities. Now, if I do this two meals a day, I live in Vegas. Can I go to the Bellagio buffet with these two meals a day? Yeah. I mean, we're talking about a feast or famine pattern that has been widely validated to be the healthiest way to exist as a human. And our bodies are really good at eating meals, digesting the food, storing it if necessary, especially restocking glycogen,

Starting point is 00:13:52 the storage form of sugar in the muscles and the liver. And so these are all good things that allow us to wake up the next day and have a high energy output and do physical work or whatever we need to do. It just happens that we're not active enough these days and we don't require that much food that you might find people chowing down at the Bellagio buffet. But when you make good choices and eat to your heart's content and to true dietary satisfaction at each meal, that is not a bad way to live and it's not too difficult to adhere to.

Starting point is 00:14:21 But we kind of ask some questions here about, are you really satisfied? Do you really need to eat another plate of whatever you're taking at the buffet and get these emotional decisions out of it or this reactive eating out of it? But when you make good choices and you've eliminated the junk food, we can talk in more detail about what the things we want to get rid of. You'll find that you're really nicely satisfied with the right amount of food. And I'm just going to make a comparison. Like we can all reference the idea of eating too much Ben and Jerry's ice cream. And oh my gosh, the pint's gone. Or I had the whole bag of potato chips.

Starting point is 00:14:56 I can't believe it. It's very easy to do with these modern processed foods. They're called hyper palatable foods. Now consider how difficult it is to overdose on an omelet in the morning, or having three steaks at the Bellagio instead of two, and now you feel terrible and you feel guilty. It just doesn't happen when you're eating these nutritious, deeply satisfying foods. And that's what makes a real difference. So what are some, you mentioned that there's some things we want to take out of our diet. What are the bad stuff? Okay. We call it the big three, and this might

Starting point is 00:15:28 be the easiest takeaway from the show for listeners to remember and really take action on. And these are refined sugars, grains, and industrial seed oils. And the seed oils are kind of a mysterious villain that a lot of people don't really take into consideration, but it's probably or likely the single most offensive food that you can consume in the modern diet. And these are things like the bottled vegetable oils, canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, safflower, sunflower. A lot of people still cook with them despite their being extremely toxic to the human immediately upon ingestion. And they're also found in all manner of processed foods. So if you look on the label of some box or packaged food that you're eating, you're very

Starting point is 00:16:10 likely going to find vegetable oil, same with the frozen meal. And you're also going to find it in most restaurant foods from fast food all the way up to fine dining in Las Vegas, where they're cooking your beautiful steak or your broccoli or whatever appears healthy, but they've cooked it in these cheap industrial oils that have a lot of offensive processing methods and they inflict immediate oxidative stress on the body. So the oils have to go. And then the sugars and grains, a little more difficult because they have really addictive properties when you're talking about wheat, rice, pasta, corn, cereal, all the grain foods that have

Starting point is 00:16:45 a lot of caloric impact, a big sugar spike, insulin response, but not a lot of nutritional value. And then of course, all the sugars and especially the sweetened beverages, because liquids fail to satiate us. And so we can consume a lot more of those. And it's arguably more offensive to suck down the Starbucks drink where you don't really feel like you just had 696 calories, but you did without noticing it. And then you're on this sugar burning path that's very difficult to get off over the course of the day. Meanwhile, your body fat stays on your body ready to be burned if you were to optimize your diet, but you just can't access it. Nice. How about coconut oil? Because I use that in my coffee. Right. So coconut oil is a highly saturated form of fat and it's been minimally processed because

Starting point is 00:17:32 it's high fat by nature. Same with olives and same with avocados, right? So to get oil out of a high fat plant, all you have to do, you see on the bottle, it's really quality olive oil. It says first cold press extra virgin olive oil. That's the gold standard. And first cold press means that they just press the olive one time, first time, cold without needing hot temperatures that damage the product. And then in the bottle, you have this really wonderful tasting olive oil that has a lot of nutritional benefits, the centerpiece of Mediterranean diet, lauded around the world, all that. So coconut oil is right in that same category. The Pacific Islanders have wonderful stats of lack of heart disease because coconut products,

Starting point is 00:18:14 not just the oil, but the meat and the other things you can get from coconut are part of the diet. And so coconut oil is a great choice to cook with and consume in other ways too. I just realized I need to move to an island because then I'll just live off of coconuts. And then there's probably not a McDonald's or an In-N-Out burger on that island. So I won't be able to get to my stuff. Unfortunately, the exportation of fast food culture across the world is doing some amazing damage to the stats. Like you might've heard of Okinawa's, this longevity hotbed. It's been lauded by the popular book, the blue zones and the longest live people. And now as they come in with more Starbucks and McDonald's, they're coming back on the curve back to the mean or the

Starting point is 00:18:55 average life expectancy rather than being this amazing outlying population where I think the females at one point hit 90 as an average life expectancy, which is six years more than the average female in America. So we're just bringing this stuff, especially things like cigarettes and soda, where Americans are starting to get wise to it. And so now they're heading down south of the border to Mexico, South America, and peddling this crap in other countries. Yeah. So one of the things we want to talk about is lifestyle practices, elements of healthy lifestyle that complement eating well and two meals a day. Do you want to talk about that? Right. So we have this objective out of the gate that we want to get cutting back on all that

Starting point is 00:19:36 sugar and all that processed food and start burning more body fat and all that's wonderful. But if you have these high stress lifestyle practices in place, it's going to be really, really difficult to adhere to a dietary transformation because when you overstress yourself and you, it's called the chronic overstimulation of the fight or flight response through a stressful job, through exercising too much, like being too much of a gym freak and doing these workouts that are really exhausting every single day and getting up and doing it again, or not sleeping enough. All these things kind of thrown into the mix make you essentially a carbohydrate-dependent human rather than potential to be a fat burner. So we have this major goal of escaping carbohydrate

Starting point is 00:20:22 dependency and becoming good at burning stored body fat. But there's so many lifestyle factors that play into it. There's a lot of research that sleep deficiency interferes with your ability to burn body fat. And so if you're not good at burning body fat, you're going to get tired as soon as you skip a meal and you're going to be looking for either a stimulant or something that gives you quick

Starting point is 00:20:45 energy like a sugar process product and that's because the human when it's tired and feeling drag ass you're going to reach for a quick energy and you're not going to be able to override that with willpower or discipline so we're trying to back into this goal of being a high highly energetic mood and energy balanced person by making good choices so that you truly aren't hungry at 10 a.m. Because if you are hungry, then you're going to go eat no matter what anybody says on a podcast or in a book. And so it's all about feeling good and doing things like getting a good night's sleep so you wake up with the potential to optimize what your body's offering you and the great magnificent gifts that you have

Starting point is 00:21:25 in your metabolic and hormonal system. I can affirm that because at 53, it used to be that I could always turn to something like sugar or caffeine to give me a juice or a hop up, and especially if I didn't get my sleep. But at my age, man, I'm like a bear, man. I have to get my eight hours or someone dies. And it used to be I could kind of cheat a little bit. I'd be like, yeah, an extra cup of coffee. But a lot of times, yeah, it just won't do it. In fact, I nap a little bit more than I probably, I don't know. I don't know if I should be napping as much as I do these days.

Starting point is 00:22:02 But yeah, the sleep seems to be the most important thing at getting reset. So if I do the two meals a day, is the other key to that, don't be doing the munchies, having a candy bar there and some chips here and doing that whole foraging thing that people do throughout the day? Yes, exactly. Because what we're going for here is to bring body fat to center stage as your primary source of energy. And of course, you can't fast forever. I mean, it's pretty healthy. People go on five-day fasts all the time and report back with good blood numbers and cell repair and improved immune function and all that anti-inflammatory benefits. But then at some point, you're going to be wanting to eat. So if you imagine this feast or famine concept, just like our ancestors faced, where when it's time to eat, ideally you're sitting down to a wonderful celebration meal where you actually experience hunger. And so you really

Starting point is 00:22:55 can't wait to eat and you're going to really appreciate that meal. And then it's when you finish the meal, you have attained total dietary satisfaction from the Bellagio buffet or what have you, a nice choice at delicious dinner. And you no longer have a need to throw more calories down an hour later, two hours later, three hours later. The main reason that we have to do that is because we're eating nutrient deficient meals where we really haven't given ourselves enough nutrition. And we've also spiked blood sugar most likely with a high carbohydrate, heavily processed meal. And then you get that insulin crash and response. And so you truly are hungry two hours after your big breakfast with orange juice, oatmeal, toast with jelly on it,

Starting point is 00:23:35 and all that that bomber stuff that's just going to spike blood sugar. And again, when you're hungry, there's nothing you can do. There's no amount of willpower that's going to say, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to reach for that energy bar in my drawer. You're going to do so because the brain wants to be sustained and alert and energized. And so the goal here is to have these fabulous meals and then be able to go for long periods of time without eating and feel great because you're tapping into stored body fat. And so as soon as you take a bite of a snack, you immediately shut off fat burning inside and you process the calories that you just consumed. So even a little grazing here and there where you have half your energy bar in the morning and half

Starting point is 00:24:16 in the afternoon or whatever it is, you're stopping body fat burning in its tracks. You're burning through whatever snack you've just had. And then you take a while to kick back in kick the cylinders back into gear and start burning fat again so if we can kind of space the meals out uh strive for eventually consuming a maximum of two meals a day and without snacking so that's like the the ideal there it might take some people a while to get there and in fact we talk a lot about making this transition easy. So one of the things I'll say out of the gate is, look, if you have these symptoms of carbohydrate dependency, where you really need three meals a day, otherwise you're going to get dragging and have the afternoon

Starting point is 00:24:55 blues and you can't get your work done. Okay, that's fine. Just shift those meals into more nutritious meals with less of the insulin stimulating carbohydrates. And if you have to snack in between meals, reach for something that's nutritious and it's higher in fat and lower in sugar. So if it's a handful of macadamia nuts or a can of sardines or a hard boiled egg or something that's really going to give you some good nutrition, snacking is okay for a while. And then ideally what you're going to notice is, hey, I'm not even hungry for a snack, because I'm really got my fat burning going now. I eat delicious meals. And I have a great lunch and a great dinner each day or a great breakfast and a great dinner, or whatever your pattern is, that's based on personal preference. We're not in here in this book telling you that at 930am,

Starting point is 00:25:38 we want you to eat two eggs and then test your blood sugar. There's enough of that out there where it's a little bit silly, and it gets kind of tedious and even frustrating and stressful to be tracking everything. So we want you to go by your natural appetite, eat when you're hungry, never deprive yourself when you're hungry, because that's going to cause all kinds of weird reactions in the body, like that stress response will light up and you'll start making your own sugar if you don't eat. So it's not about deprivation and struggle. It's just about being sensible. That's usually when I murder people because I'm hungry. I'm like that. No joke. I mean, you get mood disturbed and it's not a good practice because every time you go

Starting point is 00:26:19 without food when you're hungry, you're going to start making the cortisol, the prominent stress hormone spikes in the bloodstream, and you start catabolizing lean muscle tissue and converting it into glucose. It's called gluconeogenesis, and that will give you the sugar you need when you're in that cranky state if you don't eat. That's usually when I go full Chris Farley in the SNL scene where he grabs what's-his-face and he goes, I'm hungry. Tommy boy, something like that. On the road trip. Feed me. So one thing that's interesting about the insulin response discussion

Starting point is 00:26:53 is, as I know some people that are either diabetic or borderline diabetic, and they test their glucose regularly, and they have some concerns about some of these diets because they say they can't combine them with being borderline diabetic or fully diabetic. There's nothing wrong with their pancreas, but sometimes their sugar fluctuates. Is that really a concern for them to have or what's your thoughts on that? Well, one thing we've learned in this game is that

Starting point is 00:27:24 when you're talking about a medical condition, you don't want to be floating out their opinions when I'm not a doctor who treats diabetics. But in general, if we look at this disease differently, especially the presence of the massive increase in type 2 diabetes, which is the diet-related or the diet-onset, right? They used to call it adult onset diabetes, but now so many kids get it that they renamed it to type two diabetes. We know from research that controlled medically supervised fasting will cause an immediate or very quick correction in all these adverse blood values that diabetics suffer from on a daily basis. So we have wonderful

Starting point is 00:28:02 means internally to regulate blood sugar, produce ketones to burn in the brain instead of sugar when you're not consuming it in the diet. So if you go look on a success stories page on websites like MarksDailyApple.com, Mark Sisson's longtime leading blog for the primal paleo movement, these success stories are stunning where type two diabetics in a matter of weeks, correct all the blood values that render them a type two diabetic. And they land into the normal category and are able to let go of their medications or reduce their magic medications in a responsible manner. And it happens so frequently.

Starting point is 00:28:39 It's almost like a head nodding. Like everyone acknowledges this is an absolute reality for so many people who are brave enough to take the plunge and consider a dietary transformation even for as little as 30 days and have a massive improvement in all their medical factors that are causing them to pop so many pills and being led down this road of medical dependency and prescription drug dependency for the rest of their life so that's about as enthusiastic I get as far as I'm going to tiptoe into the medical scene. But if you're suffering from, especially like you described, someone who's got that pre-diabetic red flag, and the numbers are so ridiculous, like the number of type two diabetics in America, I forget, it's tens of millions. And then the number of pre-diabetics who have those adverse blood glucose values that give you

Starting point is 00:29:24 the warning sign is maybe another hundred million on top of that it's like almost all adults we know now that two thirds of american population are in the unhealthy category as adults and so there's so many people where if you just ditch that that that processed carbohydrate out of the diet and the seed oils because interestingly the seed oils render your fat molecules dysfunctional and so they interfere with the burning of healthy stored body fat and so when you can't burn fat and you try to go through a day fasting or eating a meal that's low in carb instead of high in carb you're going to go for only a few hours and then you're going to

Starting point is 00:30:01 fall apart because if you can't burn fat there's no energy left you're going to have to go for only a few hours and then you're going to fall apart because if you can't burn fat, there's no energy left. You're going to have to go reach for a quick energy food in the diet. So if we get rid of the oils and the grains and the sugars, even a pretty serious disease state has been corrected over and over again to the tunes of millions of people regaining their health. And that goes for all kinds of other inflammatory and autoimmune conditions that are driven by adverse dietary practices. Wow, that's powerful. I mean, I've seen, I've had a lot of friends that did that. They've been the doctors like, hey, man, you're borderline or type 2 diabetes. And they change their diet to get healthy.

Starting point is 00:30:37 They put some exercise in, but a large part of it is diet. And they end up better for it. So that's good. One thing you guys talk about in your book is the 12 day turbo charge. What is that about? So you always, I think it's a big priority for us in these books to bring the reader along as best we can on a dynamic shared experience rather than just punching a bunch of words up onto the page and crossing our fingers and hoping that you'll take it and run with it. We want to kind of get you out of the seat and really involved in a participatory manner. So after becoming educated by all the

Starting point is 00:31:14 various chapters of the book and the various topics, you go for this 12 day intensive experience where you have an assignment in each of five areas every single day. And it's food, fasting, fitness, mindset, and lifestyle. So one of the assignments might be, okay, for today in lifestyle, you are going to optimize your sleeping environment and get rid of all the clutter and the stress producing items that are in your bedroom, no screen. So you got to get rid of your TV and your computer. And that'll be a little assignment where you write a journal exercise about it. And it's a good way to kind of cement all the learning that's occurred over the previous chapters. And of course, the diet challenge day one of the 12

Starting point is 00:31:55 day turbocharge is to get rid of all the highly processed foods that are in your home environment. So you get the garbage can out and you throw away those pop tarts and those sweetened beverages and the Arizona iced teas and all the, sorry if I'm offending any sponsors of the show people, but we got to get that sugar out of our home environment at least. You talked about moving to an island, but you know what? You can make your own island at your home where you just make good decisions at the store and then you're much less likely to consume this stuff if it's not immediately within your reach that's great advice one thing i learned a long time ago when i lost weight i i became a vegan lost about 75 pounds the and i and i didn't realize at the time but it was intermittent fasting that was really making the huge amount of difference but i eliminating the crap my diet was important but the one thing I learned is if it's in your mouth,

Starting point is 00:32:45 or hold on, if it's in your house, it's in your mouth. Just don't bring it to the damn home. So what you mentioned by throwing all that stuff out is really important. Yeah. And for a positive example of that, I'm really excited about this concept called micro workouts. And I think it's going to be one of the great transformations that we've seen in the fitness industry in decades, because it conveys this idea that you can take a minute or 30 seconds or two minutes or three minutes and perform a brief bout of ideally explosive resistance type of effort right there in your home or in your office cubicle and achieve this little workout effect where it's not tiring. It's not time consuming. It's not going to mess up your big workout that's planned for the next day. And it's not going to leave you on the couch later. It's just a little burst of

Starting point is 00:33:35 energy that breaks up these prolonged periods of stillness that we experience in daily life. And this stuff is really troubling for becoming a good fat burner as well, that when you're sitting down for a long period of time and not moving, you sort of lose your ability to burn fat well, and you start to increase your appetite for sugar, and you become less glucose tolerant, they call it. And so just getting up and moving for one or two minutes every half hour, whatever it is, and if it's standing up in your cubicle and dropping for a set of 20 deep squats, guess what? Even if you're a fit person, you're going to start feeling the burn after 15, 16, 17. It's a nice little workout effort. And then when we talk 365 days later and you say, yeah, I've really implemented this micro

Starting point is 00:34:21 workouts concept into my daily life. You can see if you're watching on YouTube, there's a pull up bar right here on the screen in my entrance to my recording studio slash closet. And so my rule is when I first go under this pull up bar, I do a set of pull ups, no matter what, no matter how tired I am, or not tired, I am, I just throw in little tidbits of exercise throughout the day. And so that takes this intimidation factor out of it, which is so huge where you go into the gym, you see the bros clanking the heavyweights around and their tight shirts or whatever intimidations you feel when you walk into a gym that people are fitter than you are. And you're in this environment where people can see you and see how pathetic the number of plates are on the machine you're using

Starting point is 00:35:05 and all that stuff, you know, we can do away with and kind of focus on creating an optimal home environment, especially in recent years when we've been quarantined. But to make this home environment conducive to fitness is a really powerful thing. And our resident psychologist on our staff who consults with her on our books and stuff, Dr. Lindsay Taylor, she says, having it in plain eyesight is a huge, huge deal. So if you have a kettlebell, you put it right out there in view in between your living room and kitchen, and you go over there and you grab it and you do a few swings a couple times a day. And same with if you have little straps that the athletes use to work their legs. If it's there in view, it's way, way better than in a drawer even. Even though it's in the drawer, you have to have this stuff dangling right in front of you,

Starting point is 00:35:53 just like the delicious candy bar or whatever is dangling in front of you. The body is going to respond. So do some positive things and also get rid of the negative in that sense. You know, I did. I took the kettlebell and attached it to the door handle in the refrigerator. So I have to work out every time I open it. Hey, that's one idea, man. That's one idea.

Starting point is 00:36:13 There you go. Now, one question I do have about the oils and stuff. And that makes sense because I read some interesting things about some of these oils. But can you still use them for cooking? Like even if you're just like seasoning a pan so that doesn't stick or what what's some solution or alternatives that maybe you should be using well you mentioned the coconut oil so a a saturated fat the the chemical term saturated means all the hydrogen sites on the on the molecule are saturated and so they're more

Starting point is 00:36:43 temperature stable because they're saturated. And the oils are considered polyunsaturated fats. So the canola, corn, soybean, all those are temperature unstable. So as soon as you heat them up to cook with, they become an oxidized molecule. In other words, a free radical. So you're ingesting poison into your body

Starting point is 00:37:02 when you consume something that's been cooked in these unstable polyunsaturated vegetable oils or seed oils, technically term is seed oils. And so besides the fact that heating them up damages them, they've also been highly damaged during the processing method because it requires a lot of heat and high temperature processing to extract oil from something that's not really meant to yield oil like a corn oil soybean oil canola oil comes from the rapeseed plant and it's shocking that these things are still recommended and still for sale in stores because in five more years they'll probably be banned astute listeners will know

Starting point is 00:37:42 like how new york city banned all trans fats like 10 years ago. And so none of the restaurants could have this. And that's a small segment of the industrial seed oil community that are now banned. They are called partially hydrogenated soybean oil. You might see that on a label back in the day. And now you're going to see some different terminology, but it's the same nasty stuff. So that stuff just a big a big no-no and again these things have no taste right so you're not sacrificing anything in your diet by giving up these oils and switching over to cooking with things like saturated animal fats even lard or recycled bacon grease is vastly better to cook with than these beautiful organic bottled oils that you can still

Starting point is 00:38:22 buy at places like whole foods so throw away the canola oil, toss out all that stuff, and then start cooking with a temperature-stable oil. What about like butter? Yeah, butter is a saturated fat. And the way you can tell saturated to unsaturated is if it's solid at room temperature. So if you put butter out, it's still in a square. It's going to be soft, but it's still solid. Whereas if you put the oil in a bottle, it's liquid at room temperature. So if you put butter out, it's still in a square, it's going to be soft, but it's still solid. Whereas you put the oil in a bottle, it's liquid at room temperature. Olive oil and avocado oil are highly monounsaturated oils. So those will be liquid also. And those are pretty good to cook

Starting point is 00:38:57 with too. They're less temperature stable. So you don't want to be heating up things and cooking them like crazy in olive oil, avocado oil, a little better. But generally speaking, cooking with the saturated fats is the way to go. And butter is vastly superior health choice than margarine. And we were all convinced back in the 60s and 70s, the entire country, and then later the world, we exported that dietary advice to the world, was told that these polyunsaturated oils were healthier than the saturated fats because of this flawed hypothesis of what caused heart disease that's now been completely upended and corrected with recent science and virtually without dispute. You might find somebody that says margarine is better than butter, but that person will be stoned if they appear at one of the respected medical conferences and health conferences. It's interesting to me, the one thing I learned

Starting point is 00:39:49 when I was losing weight is your body knows how to process natural sugar, natural butter, natural products, but this manufactured chemical stuff, your body is going like, what's being thrown at me now? One thing that was interesting, I haven't validated this, so I haven't run it by snopes. I don't want to be the harbinger of misinformation, but I'd seen an article that I never have checked on yet that canola oil comes from Canadian. The Canadians used to use it in their cars as motor oil. Is that true or am I crazy or I just need to check that? I like it because that'll have a lasting impression on the listener. I like my quote

Starting point is 00:40:28 from one of the smartest minds in the scene, Dr. Kate Shanahan. She's the author of a few bestselling books. She designed and operated the nutrition program for the Los Angeles Lakers. So she's worked with top athletes in the world. She works hands-on with patients. So not only is she a big author and speaker, but she actually sees real people every single day. And so she's right there on the front lines of what really people are fighting this battle. And she said that the immediate disturbance to the cardiovascular system caused by consuming these refined industrial seed oils is so extreme that it's literally no different than consuming radiation. It's radiation

Starting point is 00:41:06 in a bottle. And she cites a really shocking study insight that they took a group of healthy young people, college volunteers, and consuming a single serving of French fries, a nice medium size fries, whatever, will cause a disturbance in healthy cardiovascular function for up to 24 hours. So their arteries will be less supple and smooth for up to a day from a dose of french fries. And by comparison, when you smoke a cigarette, the disturbance to the arterial function is about eight hours. So in terms of the immediate dose damage, french fries are worse than smoking to your poor precious arteries. That's not to say that a French fry habit is worse than a smoking habit for that immediate extreme toxic reaction. It's something to think about when you're weighing the choices out there.

Starting point is 00:41:58 Well, I pick up most of my girlfriends on Tinder advertising my supple arteries and that seems to work. So I definitely don't want to damage them. That makes a huge difference. In the book, you guys have lots of bonus materials, frequently asked questions, journal exercises at the end of every chapter, different recipes that you've given people. Anything more about the book that you want to plug or tell us about that we may have missed? Oh, thanks, Chris. I think the key thing is that we're advocating a comprehensive lifestyle approach. So even though it's a book with some meals on the cover and food as a centerpiece discussion, we can't talk about food

Starting point is 00:42:37 without putting the entire context of your lifestyle into the picture here. So we're going to talk a lot about exercise, sleep, of course, like you mentioned. And I also like to add when we're talking about sleep, everyone knows how important it is to get a good night's sleep and you shouldn't be binge watching on Netflix. And that's a bad idea. But I also like to add to the discussion today, the incredible importance of rest, recovery and downtime, especially from hyper connectivity and digital stimulation. And so guys in you and I are in that age group where we can reference probably half our lives or more than half our lives existing without the mobile device to constantly entertain us. So we had downtime where we were sitting around and maybe we were talking, rehashing the Superbowl in a very slow

Starting point is 00:43:23 and methodical conversation where we were just enjoying the sunset in Las Vegas and talking about how we're going to make up the money we lost on our betting on the next bet and just having easy time rather than having our nose in this device and having our brain working constantly from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed. So you're going to get an interesting, unique diet book in the fact that we expand the conversation tremendously to all these other imperative things that are all pushing you toward that direction of being a healthy, stress-balanced, fat-burning person rather than a sugar stress head. That sounds like a better place to be health-wise. So with the two meals a day, if I'm a keto person or I'm Atkins or all these different variations that are out there, using the two meals a day method is going to fit with pretty much almost any diet out there. Yeah, that's what's cool. Personal preference. I mean, we've been in this game a long time. We've helped a lot of people and heard from

Starting point is 00:44:20 a lot of people and received plenty of critical feedback and really listened to the real people out there fighting the real battle. And one of the things that is so obvious is that your lifestyle changes have to be driven by personal preference. And it can work for a short time if you go visit with Jillian Michaels and you join the show and she screams at you and you lose 50 pounds and you collect a big check. But the attrition rate is ridiculous when people are following ill-advised diet or fitness programming that's too stressful. So we want you to feel comfortable from the very outset that you're doing something that you believe in, that feels right to you, and that you're going to tweak and put the nuances in

Starting point is 00:45:01 there and the revisions that work for you and your personal lifestyle and your personal goals. And that one of those is if you have a certain dietary belief pattern that compels you to choose these foods and these. Now, vegan, vegetarian, we can't let that go with just a smile and a wink because we want to help people and tell the full truth. So I think the best way to convey that is that those are very high risk diets because you are excluding so many of the most nutritious foods known to planet earth and known to human evolution. Not to say that you can't thrive.

Starting point is 00:45:35 And I've had people that I interview on my own podcast that are very smart and have a very devoted approach to vegan vegetarian. But for the average person out there, you have a risk of long-term deficiencies and other shortcomings, including adherence to the diet because it's so restrictive. But in your story where you said, hey, look, you went vegan and you lost all this weight. What happened was you eliminated a lot of the offensive foods that weren't doing you any favors. And therefore you had an extreme, fantastic explosion in health. And then what we want to do is continue to assess

Starting point is 00:46:08 and reassess what's going to work long-term. Is a nice, delicious steak from the Bellagio going to throw Chris Voss back into the dungeon of weight gain and spiraling out of control? No freaking way. Nor is the omelet at the Paris buffet, which is the best omelet in vegas man i had i think i had three of those so i answered my own question three is my limit when i do the custom

Starting point is 00:46:30 homemade omelets but if you start to integrate these top foods these most nutrient dense foods you're gonna a lot of times people correct some complaints that they've had from having too restrictive of a diet yeah and i and i can agree with you there. Most of the weight loss, I didn't understand at the time. I was doing a thing where I would have a coffee in the morning and I would go as long as I could before I would have my first vegan meal. And then I would go as long as I could and have my second vegan meal. And I actually was doing two meals a day, come to think of it, because I would just stretch it.

Starting point is 00:47:02 But I didn't realize I was also doing intermittent fasting at the time either. I didn't realize that was probably a large part of it, but I actually did crash after three to four months and I was crashing hard and I finally had to go back to regular diet. So I can affirm what you're mentioned there. Anything we haven't missed that we want to throw into the show before we go out? Oh my gosh. You can go look at twomealsadaybook.com and get some more info about the book. We actually have these wonderful pre-order bonus materials, like an audio summary of the entire book. So if you'd like to listen to your content, I'll talk you through everything that's in there and really excite you to read the book when it comes. And I appreciate the

Starting point is 00:47:41 interest and the chance to share. And I appreciate your questions too. We got people thinking and listening, man. There we go. There we go. So we've got the.com. Do we need any more? I think you have a podcast in the background. Is that what I'm seeing? Right.

Starting point is 00:47:53 Yeah. You can listen to the Be Rad podcast too. And it's trying to broaden the conversation a bit. I've been in this diet and fitness scene for so long. And there's only so much you can talk about. And then you got to kind of look at the big picture of living a happy, healthy lifestyle. So in addition to all the content about the eating and the exercise and the workouts, I bring in different experts like relationship

Starting point is 00:48:16 experts talking about that and mindfulness and brain training and setting goals. And so it's been fun for me to kind of expand the horizons and share that with the listener. Some of my favorite shows, for example, a guy like Mark Manson, he's the number one bestselling author of the decade with his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F. I'm not sure if you bleep out your words, but everyone knows that book. I also had John Gray on there, who's the bestselling relationship author of all time with his series of books, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. So one week you're going to get

Starting point is 00:48:47 which foods to eat for breakfast. And then the next week, John Gray is going to tell all men the critical assignments of how to treat your female in order to have a happy, healthy marriage or partnership. And it's really cool to engage with that different content and learn from all these experts. So yeah, thanks for the chance to plug the Be Rad podcast and bradkerns.com.

Starting point is 00:49:07 You can learn more about me and watch the videos about the morning routine that I mentioned. And I really love listening from people. So send a note and we'll answer everything and like to connect. There you go. Guys, check it out. It's going to be coming out March 9th. You'll be able to pre-order the book, get the first copy there as it comes off, hot off the presses.

Starting point is 00:49:26 Two Meals a Day, The Simple Sustainable Strategy, Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from the Diet Frustration Forever by Mike Sisson and Brad Kearns. Brad, it's been wonderful to spend time with you today. Thanks for coming by. Thanks, Chris.

Starting point is 00:49:42 Keep up the good work on the show. Yeah, and I'll probably be reading the book and learning from some of the things you've espoused here. I definitely need to cut down from the 20 meals a day I'm having to two. So I just need to zero off. Yeah. Take the zero off your meals and add it to your income and then you'll be in good shape. Yeah. One of the best things for me was just getting rid of the Mountain Dew out of my diet back in the day too. That was another big feature for losing so much weight. So thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to YouTube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss, to see the video version of this interview.

Starting point is 00:50:13 Thanks to my Clubhouse audience for tuning in as well. You can go to Goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss, to see everything we're reviewing and reading over there. You can go to Facebook.com, Fortuness Chris Voss, or the Chris Voss Show. Same thing with LinkedIn, same thing with instagram.com. Wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Brad Kearns Co-Author Interview: Two Meals a Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.