The Joe Rogan Experience - #752 - Mark Sisson

Episode Date: January 26, 2016

Mark Sisson is a fitness author and blogger, and a former distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor. His latest book "Primal Endurance" is available now via Amazon.

We're good already? Damn, I didn't even see a countdown. Jamie, you're so fast. Thanks for doing this, Mark. Appreciate it, man. Totally my pleasure. I've enjoyed your tweets. I've checked out your website and Mark's Daily Apple and all of your, the different rules for the primal blueprint. And I found this really fascinating because it seems really straightforward. It seems like, oh, well, this makes like eat lots of animals, insects and plants, move around a lot at a slow pace, lift heavy things, run really fast. But what you've done essentially is created a guideline for optimizing your health and your body. Yeah.

You know, I've always wanted to be healthy from a really early age, like 12 or 13, and read a lot of books, wanted to do the right thing, tried to figure out the hacks before they were called hacks, and got to the point where I was, you know, I was doing a lot of running because aerobics was supposedly going to make you live longer. I was eating complex carbohydrates and a ton of them in order to fuel the aerobics. I became a pretty good endurance athlete. But I fell apart as a result of the training and the result, it turns out, of the diet. So the diet was very pro-inflammatory, as we say. So I started doing research into the ways in which I could re-access this health that I was seeking from the early age and not fall apart and not be decrepit and beat up.

And this became my mantra is how can I be strong, lean, fit, and healthy with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline, calorie counting, portion control, and everything else. And where it led me was down this path of looking at human evolution and how we got to where we are today, how we derived this genetic recipe that we all have that wants us to be strong and fit, combining the research only in the last 10 or 15 years with the modern genome and sequencing the genome and figuring out the actual mechanism of how lifestyle behaviors and foods and sun exposure and sleep turn genes on or off. And they can turn on genes that make us strong and build muscle. They can turn on genes that burn fat more efficiently than, say, glucose. They could turn off genes that cause us to be moody and depressed, turn off genes that might predispose us to get cancer.

And what I arrived at was sort of a simple set of guidelines, these 10 primal blueprint laws that not ironically emulate human nature and human behavior for the first two and a half million years of our existence. So the genome was forged in this crucible of eat plants and animals, avoid poisonous things, move around a lot at a low level of activity, sprint once in a while, lift heavy things. Every human that ever lived up until 10,000 years ago did that every single day. And that's how up until 10,000 years ago, did that every single day. And that's how those genes got passed along to the next generation to become us. Where we've screwed up is in the last, certainly in the last couple of hundred years, but starting 10,000 years ago with agriculture, we went from being hunter-gatherers and moving around a lot to being sedentary and sitting in one place and eating processed foods, not disposing of our waste,

lots of little things that sort of conspired to make us smaller and weaker and more susceptible to disease. So you were involved in triathletes and endurance activities, which kind of break down your body. That's one of the big issues that a lot of people have with that kind of training. It's just constant and brutal. Yeah, it's catabolic. It's a great pursuit. I wouldn't take back my years as an endurance athlete. I was a marathoner in the 70s, and then I was a triathlete in the early days of triathlon all throughout the 80s. But the training was, it's devastating. It really does tear you down. And the assumption was at the time that you had to put more miles in than anyone else to be one of the best. You had to dial everything down. You had to work harder. You had to suffer more.

You had to struggle more to achieve greatness or to win races. What we've discovered in the last five years is that it doesn't have to be that way. How crazy is that, that it's only the last five years? I mean, we're talking 2010, 2011. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of this new paradigm is based on science. It's been brewing for 40 years, but it wasn't, the findings weren't palatable to most of the athletes who were training. They certainly weren't palatable to the coaches who had been invested in training a certain way, putting in a lot of miles, eating lots of carbohydrates, managing glycogen throughout an event, which meant not only carbohydrate loading the night before a race, but seeing how many gel packs you could slam down in an hour to keep the sugar burn throughput going. And that's certainly what my generation of athletes

wound up depending on, and we all trained that way. And it was sort of, it was counterintuitive to think that you could learn how to burn fats much more efficiently, that you could possibly go faster by going slower under certain circumstances, that you could spend time in the gym doing heavy weights and have that manifest itself in better endurance. So these later sort of developments that come out of the laboratory and come out of the clinical studies, you know, they were sort of interesting to the people who are reading them, who knew how to read the studies, but it didn't make it into the mainstream training mechanism. What was the science based on where people had used carbo-loading and carb-loading and using all those gel packs and eating a lot of pastas and stuff?

Where did that come from? Like? What was the idea behind that? That came from studies that go back into the 30s and 40s, but it was basically this notion that the body needs to burn glucose to go fast, that it was assumed that you couldn't burn fat at a high rate of throughput. And if you couldn't burn fat, then the only thing you could do was manage your glycogen. Those muscles can store 400 or 500 grams of glycogen max, which is only enough to run 20 miles, let's say. And if you couldn't – so you had to learn how to manage that glycogen so you didn't deplete it in a marathon, for instance, so you'd hit the wall at 20 miles. So how do you get through the wall?

Well, you start to learn how to – I mean, Gatorade came out of this science. The Gatorade was the great first real performance-enhancing substance that athletes used. You could drink this sugary drink that had salt in it in a race and then stave off that wall a couple of more miles. So for years, for decades, the science revolved around continuing to try to figure out how to manage glycogen. So Tim Noakes, Professor Tim Noakes out of South Africa, was the go-to guy in this. He wrote a book called The Lore of Running. It's a 900-page tome. in this. He wrote a book called The Lore of Running. It's a 900-page tome. He was the source that everyone cited for decades when it came to carbohydrate intake and glycogen management and all of the things that had to do with fuel partitioning during an endurance event.

And about five years ago, he looked at the research, partly because he'd been a runner himself. He'd been employing the same strategy of carbohydrate intake and carbohydrate management, but he was a type 2 diabetic. He had become, despite his training, a type 2 diabetic. I think his uncle and his father had died as type 2 diabetics. So he got the fear God put in him, and he started to re-evaluate the research, and he literally had an epiphany. He goes, oh my God, I've been, I'm the guy that's been promoting this way of training for decades, and now I have to completely change my opinion on it and say what I told you was wrong. And the body is developed and was designed to be a great fat-burning machine

and not rely so much on carbohydrate and not rely so much on glycogen or glucose. And the guy is taking so much shit for it in South Africa. They're trying to run him out of the country. There's a trial going on right now. Really? Yeah. Here's a, you know, Professor Tim Noakes. And in my mind, that's the epitome of a heroic science, a man of science. He's gone down a path. He's dedicated his life to being the guy. And then he looks at the research and he goes, holy shit, I messed up. This is terrible. You know, I've been telling you the wrong thing, and I'm willing to basically follow my sword and tell you that because this new revelation is the truth.

Well, that's how it's supposed to be, right? I mean, that's what science is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be relying on this bad information just because you've taught it to people. It's supposed to be you find the new data. The new data doesn't correspond with the old data. You have to let everybody know. I know, but it's like, you know, that's like unicorn farts. I mean, it's a really—science is kind of dirty and messy, and there are no black and whites in science.

There's no absolutes. There's no right or wrong answer. There's just theories and opinions going forward. theories and opinions going forward. And if you're a scientist who's had an investment in your life's work being one way, you're going to defend that position, even sometimes in the face of new information. That really becomes a huge issue when they deny information just because it's bad for their ego or just because it's bad for their career. And they could just, I mean, he can, I'm sure, have just kept his mouth shut and just coasted, and everything would have been fine. Well, it would have been fine for a while, but the corner had been rounded.

I mean, enough other scientists had started to look at this. And he cited me as one of his influences in helping to turn that corner. But here's a guy, he was reading my blog posts and sort of having a new perspective cast upon his information and was willing to look at some of the research that I and Rob Wolf and a number of other bloggers in the emerging paleosphere were talking about, that we're born to excel at burning fat and we shouldn't have to depend on sugar. And in fact, the less sugar we burn in a lifetime, probably the better off we are. So for the longest time, when people were doing all this carbo-loading and when they were just following the old methods, they were creating extra inflammation because of this food?

were creating extra inflammation because of this food? I mean, when you're talking about simple carbohydrates, pastas and bread and such, they cause inflammation, correct? Yeah. So sugar is pro-inflammatory. If you have high blood sugar levels, that causes inflammation. But when you say that to people, explain to me, what do you mean by inflammation? You mean like joint inflammation? Good question. So inflammation is a process in the body that's designed to deal with an insult. So you twist an ankle, an inflammatory process begins. The ankle swells up because water accumulates there. The cells are being partly protected by the water. White blood cells rush to it to try and assess the damage and repair some of the damage.

There's a long process where the localized temperature of the air is raised. All of this is contemplated to deal with a short-term insult that hopefully over time it repairs. In many cases, it repairs even stronger than it was before. You know, you break a bone and sometimes where it broke is stronger. Or a callus is an example of, you know, a stronger skin from having been irritated. But the same sort of process happens if you get a bacterial insult, if you get a microbial insult, you get infected with something, and maybe by somebody. And there's a reaction to that infection, and it may happen in the bloodstream. If the bacteria goes into the bloodstream, then there's a response to that, which is an

inflammation, inflammatory response. Now, if you... And by the way, a lot of this happens as a result of genes within cells being turned on or off based on signals they get from their immediate environment. So genes don't work in a vacuum. Something has to turn the gene on or off. Something has to give the gene reason to build a protein or have whatever action it's going to have. So when you've got – So now let's go back to the food analogy. You've got certain foods that you can eat that cause the body to initiate an inflammatory, what we call a systemic inflammatory response. It just maybe emulates something that would have happened in an infection, but now it's caused by an overabundance of omega-6 fatty acids.

So you're literally turning on genes that are causing a systemic inflammation. Now, over time, in the short term, not a big deal. One meal here, some temporary insult, not a big deal. Some temporary insult, not a big deal, but over time, if your diet is such that you're continuously presenting these sorts of foods that would grain that we say are natural, but they're actually slightly toxic to the body. The industrial seed oils that are pervasive in our diet, that would be corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, all of these can have the effect of causing a systemic inflammation or systemic inflammatory response in the body. And a lot of times you'll see, you look at the biggest loser and you go, God, that dude lost 25 pounds the first week. That's unbelievable. How do you do that? How do

you burn off that much fat? They don't burn off that much fat. They lose that much water because by eliminating the pro-inflammatory foods, the inflammation, the systemic inflammation that was causing them to carry literally 30 or 40 or 50 pounds of excess water, that cause of inflammation goes away and the water goes away. The swelling goes down. So you could look at the cause of heart disease. Heart disease isn't caused by cholesterol or saturated fat. The proximate cause of heart disease, as we know it today, is systemic inflammation. It's an inflammatory response in the blood vessels.

So when you say someone looks puffy, like people who drink a lot of alcohol, they start looking puffy. That's actually literally water. They're inflamed with water. Yeah. They're retaining water as a result of an inflammatory response the body is having. So where we went to that from training, I don't know how we, you know, how we got down that road, but the idea of eliminating these pro-inflammatory foods – oh, so I'll tell you where it went. I had arthritis in my feet at the age of 27, 28. Just from all this hard running and biking? And from the diet because I had this systemic inflammation. I had this diet that was promoting an inflammatory response throughout my body, not just in the ankle that I might have just twisted or whatever.

I had arthritis in my hands when I was—even after I'd cleaned most of my diet up, into my 40s I had arthritis in my hands or my fingers that I thought was just a normal artifact of getting old. And the last thing that I eliminated from my diet was grains, which I found were causing, were a huge cause of issue for me. When I got rid of grains, the arthritis in my fingers went away. All grains, sprouted grains as well, Ezekiel bread. Yeah. I mean, you know, yes, yes. Let's, for purposes of this conversation, let's say all grains, and then we'll talk about what that means over time. But getting rid of all grains, I got rid of – I had irritable bowel syndrome most of my life that I thought was because I was a type A, stress-laden individual that couldn't handle it well.

And that – literally, that IBS had run my life. That went away. The upper respiratory tract infections I would get several times a year went away. I had lingering sinus infections after I'd have an upper respiratory tract infection. Those went away. And all these things I'd assumed were just a normal artifact of being human and getting older and part of life, doesn't everybody suffer these things? They went away. And that was a real epiphany for me to realize that if I had made, I'm basically a researcher, and if I had done all the research and still defended my right to eat grains in the face of the research I was doing, how many tens of millions of people, you know,

might be affected by this? So, and I don't want this to be an anti-grain crusade today, but I'm sort of suggesting that a lot of what happens to us in life, certainly a lot of the root cause of illness or the beginning etiology of disease has deep roots in what we eat or sometimes more importantly what we don't eat one of the things you said i think that's really fascinating is turning genes on and off and for most people like me who don't have a background in medical science don't necessarily understand genes the idea of genes being turned on or off by lifestyle, by dietary choices, things along those lines, it just doesn't make any sense to people. They go, well, no, no,

no, you got your genes, so you don't got your genes. You either got red hair or you got big feet and that's genetic and that's it. No. Exactly right. So yeah, there is a huge assumption that the genes are finished when we're born. And then we just grow and we have our eyes and we're doomed to be 50 pounds overweight because our parents are, or we're doomed to get breast cancer because our mother did. Genes are at work every second of every day, rebuilding, renewing, regenerating, recreating us based on the signals that they get. So genes are these little switches that cause the production of proteins that actually run our body. So it's the proteins they make that run our body, whether it's muscle protein being built or whether it's enzymes to cause certain reactions to take

place. And the genes are basically not doing anything until they get a signal from the environment. Now, when I say the environment, it might start from what we perceive as the outside environment, but eventually it's a biochemical signal or some sensation, some transmission of information that gets through the cell to the genes themselves and causes a gene to turn on, the switch to turn on, the protein to be built, and that manifests itself in whatever that gene is assigned to do. So the beauty of the primal blueprint and the lifestyle that I've been promoting for 10 or 15 years is this notion that we can discover these hidden genetic switches that we all have, and we can make choices in our lives that direct us in a direction of health

versus down this slippery slope of illness and disease and falling apart. They're not right or wrong. They're not good or bad. They're not black or white. They're just choices, and I'm not going to criticize you for making whatever choices you make. My job as a blogger, and certainly you for making whatever choices you make. My job as a blogger, and certainly running Mark's Daily Apple and writing the books that I write, is to offer you some educated choices that you might elect to undertake based on what you tell me your goals are. So, you know, if you say, well, I want to lose weight, and I want to get stronger, and I want to, you know, maybe participate in a 5K, we can look at a number of different strategies, whether they're dietary, and I want to get stronger, and I want to maybe participate in a 5K, we can look at a number of different strategies, whether they're dietary. I mean, the more the better because all of these strategies will have some impact.

But there are certain foods you can eat that will cause you to become better at burning fat and will cause you to build muscle more effectively. There's an amount of sleep that you'll get that will reduce the amount of cortisol that you secrete. Cortisol is an adrenal hormone that we secrete in response to stress. Cortisol tends to make us carry a little bit of extra weight, some of us. improve my sleep patterns and reduce cortisol, it all has an effect back at the gene level to get me closer to where I want to be. How much do you sleep? Probably eight and a half to nine hours a night.

Wow. Yeah. They say wow because that's a lot or that's not a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. You know, I have friends who brag about getting 10 and make no apologies for it. And almost more importantly is the consistency of sleep. So I don't like to stay up late because I wake up early.

I wake up at the same time every day. So if I stay up late. What time do you wake up? 6.30. Are you one of those get out of the house and go run around guys? No, no, no. No, I sort of mosey on down to the coffee pot and make a pot of coffee and read the paper. And, you know, I ease into the day and I typically hit the gym around 930 or go paddle or whatever it is I'm going to do for the day.

I don't do it first thing in the morning. I want to be kind of refreshed for it and ready for it. But then we can talk about sun exposure. And we can say, well, you know, so many people are vitamin D deficient. And they've been that way because conventional wisdom has suggested that they stay out of the sun, that the sun is bad for you, that any amount of sun exposure is, you know, is going to cause you to get or predispose you to getting cancer. Well, what we say in the paleo community is there are probably more people who have gotten cancer from having avoided the sun that never got cancer from too much sun.

And the reason I say that is because sun exposure, UVB light, that's the stimulus that causes cholesterol in the skin to convert to vitamin D. And vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins. It actually should be a hormone. But one of the implications is that vitamin D is strongly involved in cancer prevention. So the more vitamin D you have, the less risk, the lower risk you have for most cancers. Isn't the issue with people sun damage, though? Yeah, so if you go out and get sunburned, and I've never advocated that, but there's a difference between spending a little bit of time in the sun, unprotected, difference between spending a little bit of time in the sun unprotected um and going in and putting on a shirt or even if you want to stay out putting on some sunscreen at that point versus you know just uh rubbing baby oil and uh and uh what was it iodine we used to put back in new england yeah there was very little sun so you had to get a cram for that suntan. Iodine, huh? You didn't do that?

No, I did baby oil. Oh, baby oil with iodine was even, it was like turbocharged. Does it? It was like the buttered coffee of suntan lotion. That's what that stuff is. Yeah. What's the mechanism behind iodine? How does that accelerate?

I don't even know. I don't even know. But that was the, again, that was the old wives' tale convention. Oh, okay. I went, I was, worst burn I ever got, it was winter break or spring break. I went to Williams College in Western Mass. We drove from Williamstown to Fort Lauderdale straight through. Whoa.

Straight through in a BMW 2002. Those are great little cars. It was a great car. Four of us. Smelled like a goat farm by the time we got down there. And fell asleep on the beach at 9 o'clock in the morning and then just burned to a crisp. Oh, God. So from zero sun exposure, you know, all winter.

All the way down to Florida. All the way down to Florida. Right to the beach. Yep. Barbecue. There you go. Wow. Yeah, that doesn't sound like it's recommended.

No. barbecue. There you go. Wow. Yeah, that doesn't sound like it's recommended. No. Now, just to clarify, inflammatory response. So when you're eating grains, like say if you're eating a lot of pastas and things along those lines, what exactly is happening that's causing an inflammatory response? Your body's processing the grains and- Yeah. So pasta, bread, a lot of cereals, especially the processed cereals. Sugars. Well, so those grains turn into sugar. I mean, they turn to glucose really rapidly as soon as they hit your gut. And the body doesn't really know. It's glucose. It doesn't know the difference between a bowl of Skittles producing the glucose and a loaf of bread. It's just glucose to the body.

So if you raise that level high enough, you will have some issues. Now, if you introduce high fructose corn syrup, which is a frankenfood created in the 70s to provide sweetness at a lower cost, typically coming from corn. Now you're introducing yet another variable, another agent, because a fructose in and of itself is somewhat inflammatory. So that's the glucose portion of what we're talking about here, but then some of the grains have what we call these anti-nutrients in them that may cause issues with some people in their gut, may open the gut wall and cause it to literally leak fecal matter into the bloodstream.

Whoa. Yeah. So if you've heard of leaky gut syndrome, that's probably a reason why a lot of people have autoimmune diseases or, at the very least, a systemic inflammation. That's fascinating. And that's caused by your body processing too much glucose. Well, it's not caused by your body processing too much glucose as it is. It's a side effect of it. Yeah, because it's not the glucose that's causing that.

In that case, we've moved on from sugar and glucose being a cause of inflammation to certain elements in, let's say, whole grains that turn on certain genes that cause certain responses, one of which may be in some people to open the junction between the cells lining the gut and allow undigested food particles, shall we say, to enter the bloodstream. Now, the body sees those undigested food particles, shall we say, to enter the bloodstream. Now, the body sees those undigested food particles, which the gut is only supposed to really allow in free fatty acids, simple sugars, and amino acids, single peptides, dipeptides maybe. But if you get a large undigested food particle in the bloodstream, sometimes the body goes, hey, that looks like a bacteria. We better go get that thing and set up

an immune response to it. So you get an initial form of inflammation where the body's just saying, look, there's some foreign matter in the bloodstream. We don't recognize it. We're going to kill it. And that's sort of bad enough in and of itself. But if that continues long enough for some people, sometimes that inflammatory response, that immune response, now it goes to look for similar molecules, and it might see a beta cell in the pancreas and go, that looks just like that other thing I just set up a response for. Let's go kill this. Or it might do it with the cells in the joint, the chondrocytes in the joint, and you may get rheumatoid arthritis as a result of it. That's an autoimmune response. The body's setting up an immune response to itself. So when you hear people talk about gluten sensitivity and people are trying to go gluten-free,

do you think that a lot of what that is is the body responding to an excess of this glucose in the body? Excess of glucose in the diet? No, so two different things. So the glucose is one thing. The sugar is what it is. From breaking down breads and pastas. Or candy or cakes or pies or Snickers, whatever it is.

Or soft drinks, which is a huge issue because soft drinks are a large part of the problem. But gluten is an entirely different mechanism. Now we're talking about a protein. an entirely different mechanism. Now we're talking about a protein. It's a plant protein that's folded so densely that the theory is that humans haven't had enough, most humans haven't had enough time to adapt to the digestion of that type of a molecule. And as a result, it causes problems within the lining of the gut. Right. But what I was getting at was people always talk about having gluten sensitivity, but really what you're saying is that a lot of what people are having issues with is these simple carbohydrates. It's like breads and pastas. Yeah. So again,

sorry to be, that's just, there's like two parts to this equation and either part is kind of bad and together they're kind of like, why would you do that? So on the glucose side, and it's just unfortunate that gluten and glucose have the first GLU, but they're not related. So on the glucose side, that's the sugar, that's the thing you want to avoid, partly because one of the other things that happens is, even if you don't have an inflammatory response, it raises insulin. Insulin is a storage hormone that tends to take every calorie you ate at the last meal in excess of what you needed and store it as fat. Now, if you're a skinny East African marathoner, then you're going to burn it off. But if you're a typical American eating a couple hundred extra calories

a day in the form of this sugar, you tend to store it as body fat. And if you haven't built a mechanism to burn off the body fat, that causes problems over time. That increases your risk for cancer. That increases your risk for heart disease. That increases your risk for type 2 diabetes. I don't think I have gluten sensitivity, but I do know that when I decided to go gluten-free, I kind of quit it after a while, but I did it for about six months. My face got thinner. I lost body fat.

I had more energy. I felt better. And I attributed it – I was trying to figure out what it was, but I don't think I have a gluten sensitivity. I just attributed it to the fact that eating all that pasta and breads and all those things was just giving me all this extra sugar. Eliminating that from my diet made a difference. And so that is sort of the first line of defense for a lot of people who want to lose weight, is just by getting rid of those foods and, I won't say limiting yourself, but including meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, all the vegetables, a little bit of fruit,

healthy fats from oils and nuts. That's a pretty nice plate of food that you can offer yourself up. As long as you get rid of the carbohydrates, the simple carbohydrates, you're well on your way to reducing the excess body weight, which includes the excess retained water and the fullness in the face and all the things that we talk about. Now, if you give those up and you find that your joints work better or that your immune system works better, you don't get sick as often, which is what a lot of people notice, now we probably are looking at the fact that you might have some level of sensitivity to gluten. And gluten sensitivity exists on a spectrum of no problem at all to I'll die if I eat it. And you could be anywhere in the middle, anywhere on that spectrum.

I mean, this, again, sort of the operative mantra here, no right or wrong, no black or white, no good or bad, just choices. But if you're a person who really wants to dig deep and kind of make those changes that are going to get you closer to your goal quicker, that might be a choice you might look into. So there's no right or wrong, but there is a spectrum in terms of tolerance. Like your tolerance might be much better than mine, and some people just really shouldn't have it in their diet at all, whether some people can have a fairly good amount of it and really not have too many issues. Yeah, we say, you know, what can I get away with?

And that's sort of an interesting concept in and of itself, because humans, you know, we tend to see what we can get away with. You might say, this is really good for me or this is really bad for me. I'm never going to do it again. But if I don't die from it and there's no consequences, then I'm going to take it right up to the edge, sometimes a little bit past the edge. to the edge, sometimes a little bit past the edge. So there are a lot of people who can get away with eating a lot more carbohydrate than others, even though they don't train hard, and maybe not gain that much weight. There are a lot of people who can get away with consuming, you know, omega-6 oils and not get into that pro-inflammatory state as readily or as quickly. You just, you know,

as Ronald Reagan said, you know, man's got to know his limitations. Or was that Dirty Harry? Well, it was both, but. I think it was Dirty Harry. Yeah. I think Reagan restated it later on. Perhaps. Yeah.

So I was reading this article yesterday, and I talked about this yesterday in the podcast, about this woman who, she wrote this article about she's in her 70s, and how her whole life people have been shaming her for being fat. And she was sort of like trying to promote fat acceptance. And when I see articles like that, there's two reactions to me. One reaction is as a human being, I look at her and I say, that's a poor lady. What a fucking shitty roll of the dice she's got in life.

And she's been overweight her whole life, feeling fat and gross. And she's trying to get people to lay off her. Leave me alone. And she's sort of, it's a very biased account and not science or exercise physiology based where she's sort of describing all the various times in her life where people have said she's unhealthy. But meanwhile, she's been very active and she like lists all the different things she did, tree climbing and hiking, all this different stuff. Which obviously to a guy like you or someone like me who knows a lot about competitive

athletics and like the amount of calories she's actually burning out versus putting in, it's probably skewed. It's probably fucked up. And I don't, she didn't really discuss the actual, what she was actually eating. She was talking about very bland foods and a thousand calories a day that doctors are trying to put her on, which is the wrong approach, right? Yeah, absolutely. years old who's coming to accept the fact that she's overweight and it's no big deal and who you know everybody's got these you know ideas about body image that are based on skinny super models that are actually anorexic and yeah you should just leave me alone and i'm plump and i'm

healthy and everything's fine i don't buy it i i look at that and i say this poor lady has been given a bad set of directives. She's been given bad information as far as her diet. And you don't have to be fat. Like you can eat healthy foods and live a healthy life and your body would lose a lot of weight just eating healthy foods. That's absolutely true. And so that brings us back to this idea of good or bad and judgment. Yes. Because people self-judge, people judge other people. I have to be very careful when I look at people not to make that judgment.

I mean, my tendency is to say to myself, holy shit, I could fix that person or I could help that person. You know what I mean? And people resist that, too. Well, and I don't do it. I mean, I say it to myself because it's pretty clear that, you know, you have to want to change. And we talked about, you know, what can I get away with? Well, if I can get away with being fat and people still reasonably like me, then I don't have to do the work. And therefore, I'm not motivated to do what it's going to take to get to that point. But it's a slippery slope with talking

with people about, you know, like, what's the ideal body composition, right? The ideal body composition is where your body says back to you, Joe, man, I love what you've done with the place. This is phenomenal. You know, you've lost 50 pounds, not you, but, man, I love what you've done with the place. This is phenomenal. You know, you've lost 50 pounds, not you, but you don't get sick as often. You got all the energy you want. You maintain it without a lot of dieting or anything like that. You eat pretty much how you know you're supposed to eat, but you're never hungry. That's your ideal body composition, man. And if it doesn't look like the cover of Muscle & Fitness or Shape magazine, so be it. By the way, I can get you to that point for a lot of people where you are on the cover of Shape magazine or Muscle & Fitness. But it's going to cost.

And it's going to cost not in money, but it's going to cost in sacrifice and discipline and pain and hating life. So, you know, the science can get us there, but is it worth the life? The main thing we do at the Primal Blueprint is we try to live an awesome life. So, in fact, my tagline is Primal Blueprint, live awesome. Living awesome means enjoying as much of every moment, every day as you can, extracting the greatest amount of pleasure, whether it's movement, whether it's with friends, whether it's food, again, with the least amount of pain, but in a way that's sustainable. So it not only benefits you right now and today, but over the long haul, you're

going to live longer, you're going to be happier, you won't get sick, you won't tap into your 401k to pay for a $200,000 whatever operation. It's about how can I enjoy life right now today? Now, back to the overweight person who's trying to get to that point. And I see a lot of, you know, overweight people who are quite happy, I guess, but I see a lot of others who are maybe hiding it and going, you know, I'm the jolly, you know, fat person, but inside I'm, you know, I'm the sad whatever, the sad clown. You've got to deal with that. You know, there's a lot of baggage. So some of this stuff comes from the changes you make in your diet.

So there's a lot of easy things that we can do. I can write anybody a program that they'll love that says, you know, we're going to have buttered coffee for breakfast. We're going to have, you know, two eggs and a little bit of bacon. We'll have a salad with some salmon on it for lunch. We'll have whatever. And they'll never be hungry, and they'll start to burn fat, and life will be wonderful. And sometimes they'll get to a plateau, and they'll go, what happened, Mark? I did everything right.

Well, you know, you went from you're a woman. You went from 225 to 175. You know, you still have some work to do, but for right now, you're at your ideal body composition, because in terms of your body, the body, it's a survival mechanism. You know, if we get to this, you know, this sort of secular, or, you know, discussion about life and what we're after. The human body is a vessel designed to carry two strands of RNA, DNA into the future. And it's a bizarre permutation of several hundred million years of evolution. But the bottom line is the body is designed to survive long enough to procreate. And that's the reality of humans and evolution.

And the fact that we live longer and we enjoy life, this is all wonderful and icing on the cake. But from the body's perspective, your ideal body composition is that composition at which, again, you don't get sick, you move around great, you can meet a mate, you have all the energy you want, you're not hungry. So if's, and if it's, if you're a woman and that's 175 for now, you got to go, this is fabulous. I embrace this. I feel good at, you know, whatever. Now, if you want to get, drop the next 25 pounds, okay, now we got to look at refiguring the diet out and adding some sprints in there and doing some little tweaks in there, and we'll get down there. But it requires, number one,

identifying an appreciation for what you've done so far to get to where you are. Number two, it requires acknowledging any past insults in your life. And there's a lot of stuff going on in the mind, in the brain, that wants to keep people protected with armor, whether it's sexual abuse, whether it's verbal abuse, some scenario that happened in childhood. There are a lot of people carrying a lot of emotional baggage around with them that, in some cases, if you dealt with it in an appropriate manner, that might free you up to lose a little bit more weight. And I've seen this happen. So when you're saying armor, do you mean in terms of like emotional armor or is it the body fat that they keep on top of them?

Is it almost like a distraction or is it the food that distracts them, the overconsuming of food to sort of nullify the effects of the abuse or whatever trauma? It could be any of those and all of those. But I see it fairly frequently where people will do everything right and then hit a plateau and wonder what I need to get to the next level. And sometimes you need to really do the deep work. Yeah. Well, I try to explain to someone when they try to gain weight, when people are like, hey, I want to put some muscle on.

I try to explain to people that that is not an easy thing to do. And as a matter of fact, your body doesn't want to do that. Your body has a limited amount of resources, and it does not want to spend resources created on this extra muscle. And in order to do that, you have to be uncomfortable. It's the only way. And people say, oh, I've been doing all this lifting. I'm not getting any weight. Well, you're probably lifting not enough weight.

You're not putting in enough intensity. You're not eating enough. I mean, you have to get your body to say, all right, this asshole wants to do deadlifts four days a week now or squats. He's doing all this heavy stuff. We have to adjust accordingly because the environment in which we're existing in obviously changed. And now we're going to need a lot more muscle. Yeah. I mean, that's the, again, the nature of the human

body is to preserve itself, to pass the genetic material along to the next generation. Part of that preservation is I don't want to waste precious resources building something that I won't need. So in a lot of people, how that manifests itself is if you don't lift weights, you don't have any muscle. So you have this lack of muscle, this lack of muscle mass. And, you know, we say, well, what's wrong with that? I'm skinny. Well, you know, you could be skinny, but you could be what we call skinny fat. No muscle. You've got a little bit of excess fat. You're probably more prone to getting type 2 diabetes.

But almost more importantly, if you don't train, and as you get older, it becomes more and more important to maintain muscle mass. People don't die of old age. They die of organ failure because they just, you know, something wasn't keeping up with the body. But the concept of dying of, quote, old age is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. So the typical old age scenario is you got a 75, 85-year-old man or woman, hasn't done anything active for years, so there's no muscle mass. And because there's no muscle mass and they haven't done anything active, the bones, there's no bone density.

So the bones go, hey, I don't need to build a structure because this clown isn't going to the gym and doing anything to require it. So I'm going to save resources, not build bone density. The muscles are not building bone mass. Now the heart's going, hey, this is easy. I can pump blood all day at 5% of my volume or maybe 15% of my volume. The lungs go, hey, there's no requirement for excess oxygen. This clown's just sitting around in a chair all day or watching TV or doing minimal activity. So the lungs, they sort of cease to function at full capacity.

Same with the liver, same with the kidneys. And as you go down this path, then one night you get up to take a leak and you trip over the cat and you fall and you break your hip because the bone density sucks. And now you wind up in the hospital and you get pneumonia and you die because the lungs can't expel the sputum for the pneumonia and the heart can't keep up. So maybe you die of congestive heart failure. I mean, this is a very typical scenario for a lot of people. And it all goes back to creating a need for the body to want to change. That great Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston movie where— How dare you say that?

How dare you say that great Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston movie? No such thing has ever occurred. Oh, I'm sorry. That was a great line in a mediocre Vince Vaughn. But the one I'm talking about where they're having a fight and she says, honey, come help me do the dishes. He goes, no, that's all right. I'm going to watch the game. And she goes, no, help me do the dishes. He goes, no, I'm just, that's all right. I'm going to be over here watching the game. I'll just watch the game. She goes, come help me do the dishes. He goes, no, that's all right. I'm going to be over here watching the game. I'll just watch the game. She goes, come help me do the dishes. He goes, all right, all right, all right, all right.

I'll come help you do the dishes. She goes, never mind. I don't want you. He says, why? He says, I don't want you to help me do the dishes. I want you to want to help me do the dishes. Oh, Christ. Right?

Get a new chick. So the body, sorry about that. That was an arcane movie reference. But you've got to give the body, the body needs to want to change. Right. And you do that by using your brain to elect to go to the gym and lift weights or to embark on a more rigorous and strenuous regimen than you had previously encountered. Well, changing patterns is very difficult for people. That's why New Year's resolutions are always such a joke.

Because everybody, I mean, the amount of people that stick to those things that they prescribe on January 1st, like, this is it. I'm going to write it down. I'm going to, January 1st, from here on out, it's all salads and salmon and running up hills. And then come February 13th, it's's fucking over it's over you're right back to the same thing so sustainability is a huge part of this of a program like that and that's changing patterns and that's what we like about the primal blueprint is that the foods are

sustainable so i mean literally and figuratively the diet the eating strategy is a sustainable strategy rule number one is you never let yourself go hungry. You just, instead of eating a bagel in the middle of the afternoon, you eat a spoonful of coconut butter or something that's got fat in it that satisfies. You scoop coconut butter for a snack? Coconut butter. Coconut butter.

You know, like the peanut butter. Oh, hell yeah. You just take a scoop of that for a snack? But not coconut. People just checked out. They're like, this fucking guy's nuts. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are we talking about the same thing? Coconut butter. Yeah, like peanut butter. Yeah, it a snack? But not coconut. People just checked out. They're like, this fucking guy's nuts. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are we talking about the same thing?

Coconut butter. Yeah, like peanut butter. Yeah. It's the meat of a coconut. It's like, what's in an almond cookie? I want a fucking cookie, man. I don't want a candy bar. I don't want a goddamn coconut butter spoonful.

I'm telling you, man. Okay, so you got to suspend disbelief a little bit here and humor me. Go buy a jar of coconut butter and try it instead of a cookie or whatever. Do you participate in any sort of intermittent fasting? Not really, and I'll tell you why. This is, again, about seeing what we can get away with. And I'm pretty lucky that I can get away eating what I eat. Now, I have, on the other hand, a compressed eating window.

So you could argue that I intermittently fast every day. So I eat from 12.30, 1 o'clock to 7 o'clock p.m. And then I don't eat again. So you don't eat at all in the morning? There's no concept of the word breakfast for me. I have a cup of coffee and that's it. So I'll go to the gym fasted. I'll do whatever workout I'm doing, whether it's a heavy weight workout or whether it's, I mean, it could be a leg day.

It could be intervals on a bike. It could be a leg day, could be, you know, intervals on a bike, could be a two-hour paddle fast. Do you find that when you do that, that you have less energy than if you have like some fruit? The difference here is I'm really good at burning fat. So I derive my energy from stored body fat better than a lot of people, not because I'm genetically gifted in that way, but because that's how I've lived my life. That's how I've orchestrated my eating strategy over the past 15 or 20 years. So I wake up, I have all the energy I need. I don't need to tap into the stored glucose in the form of glycogen in my liver or in my muscles. So you essentially follow a ketogenic diet. Yeah, but it's not ketogenic. So it's a high-fat, moderate-protein, moderate-carb diet, but I have enough carbs. I have maybe 100 to 130 grams of carbs a day, which in no one's estimation would that be ketogenic. But I'm good at burning fat

because I've spent enough time in that sort of low-carb area. I've built the metabolic machinery to burn fats really effectively. So I have probably, you know, I'm just going to suggest that I have a lot more mitochondria in my muscle cells than other people do because of the restricting the carbs and restricting the sugars and forcing my body to become good at burning fat. How does that work? So how does that promote more? Please tell me. How does it promote more mitochondria? Well, it's called mitochondrial biogenesis. So when you're born, you're born again with this recipe that wants you to become really good at burning fat.

And very quickly, you change the script. So the parents feed you gruel and oatmeal and Zweibach and toast and whatever and uh and pureed vegetables and you become very dependent on on carbohydrate and the body says i don't need to burn fat because i'm getting fed carbohydrate all the time and a couple of responses are um i got to get rid of this excess glucose because uh if i don't it'll it's The body shouldn't have more than 90 to 100. Your blood sugar count should stay between, say, 85 and 70 and 100 max. What is the number of... Milliliters per deciliter. I forget what the exact number is. They're all over the place with cholesterol and blood sugar. But the point is that the entire amount of sugar in your bloodstream right now is probably a tablespoon,

you know, five grams of sugar. So it's not copious amounts. And if it rises above that, you start to get into problems. That sugar can interact with protein molecules and cause reactions that lead to clogging of arteries, a destruction of nerve tissue. That's where the diabetic damage comes from, just excessive amounts of sugar that are in the bloodstream. So the body wants to kind of keep that level low. And if you continuously feed it carbohydrate all day long, if you're not burning it off, if you're not running 20 miles a week, there's a tendency for the body to store it, store the excess as body fat. And over time, for some people, that's a real problem. For others who can get away with it, not so much a problem.

So many of us grow up depending on this carbohydrate as a main source of fuel. And, you know, you eat a carbohydrate meal, a high-carbohydrate meal causes a surge of insulin because the insulin is there to take the glucose out of the bloodstream and store it because, again, it's dangerous to have too much. But sometimes the insulin surge is so great that it drops the blood sugar, and then you get hungry again a couple of hours later. That's why you have these swings throughout the day if you're what we call a sugar burner. If you try and look at a different way to configure your energy sources, if you restrict sugar and restrict carbohydrate a little bit, you don't have to be draconian about it. But you start to create the need for the body to start to burn some of its stored body fat. You say, well, the

body goes, well, I've got to save some of my glucose for my brain because the brain runs on glucose and ketones. And I'm going to learn how to burn fat more efficiently. And in order to do that, I've got to build more mitochondria because that's where the fat burns, inside the mitochondria. And explain to people what mitochondria is. So mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. So every cell has, most cells have mitochondria in them. Muscle cells have lots of mitochondria that are creating ATP, which is the energy currency the body uses to move, to live, to exist.

What does ATP sound for? Denosine triphosphate. We're not going to get a biochem lesson right now. That's okay. But ATP is this currency of the body, and it can be recycled using different pathways, a glycolytic pathway, which doesn't require oxygen. And one of the pathways is using oxygen in the mitochondria. So that's a very important place to not only build more mitochondria, but improve the efficiency of

the mitochondria. And how that happens, and this is the elegance of this again, is that certain signals that you give the body by cutting back on the amount of exogenous carbohydrate you take in, those signals go directly to the cells that say, I've got to make more mitochondria. And then unique to every other organelle in the body, mitochondria have their own DNA. No other organelle within a cell has that, but mitochondria have their own DNA, and the DNA in the mitochondria go, well, we better be more efficient at what we do. So you upregulate the mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of more mitochondria, and you upregulate the efficiency of the mitochondria, all done at the level of gene, all done through a signal that you gave by, in this case, restricting carbohydrate. And it could be increasing the amount of low-level aerobic activity you do. And it can be both. And we

talk about that in my new book, Primal Endurance. Well, I want to read your new book and I want you to mark down the moment, what he just said, like the time on the podcast. What time is it here? Like an hour and 10 minutes in or something like that? 53 minutes in. 53, that's it? Okay. That's very important. I'd never heard that before. I did not know that your body can change the amount of mitochondria. Absolutely. That's incredible.

And that's just from restricting carbohydrates. Well, there are a lot of things you can do. There are certain forms of weightlifting you can do. Like what? You can do sustained maximum's certain forms of weightlifting you can do. Like what? You know, you can do sustained maximum power output stuff. So, you know, you've got a deadlift. What do you get, a deadlift max of 500? What's your deadlift max, Joe? Somewhere around there. Okay. Probably a little heavier than that. Okay. I'm kind of yoked. I'm kind of yoked., you'd do a workout in the gym where you do, um, 80% of your, of your max.

Uh, so you do 400 pounds and you might do it, um, four or five times and then rest a few minutes and then do it again four or five times and rest a few minutes and do it again and do it instead of doing three sets of 10 of whatever it is you're going to do. Um, you, you load this up, you load deeper and deeper into the fibers, the fibers to the extent that the workout's over when you can only do one. And you know you can only do one. You don't even try to get the next one. The workout's over.

And maybe that winds up being 15 sets by the time you're done. But you've maximally overloaded so much at a high, not 100% max, because now we're talking about danger. Tissue breakdown. But you know you can do 80% max and do it at three or four. So that's one example of how we can, and that'll prompt those muscle tissues to want to build

more mitochondria. Because as you probably heard, a truly effective weight session causes you to burn fat throughout the day, right? Yeah. Well, it's one of the best ways to get lean, and it's one thing that people sometimes aren't aware of. Most people, when they want to get lean, they think about cardio. They start doing a lot of extra cardio.

I know. It's weightlifting that really makes you lean. No, I mean weightlifting and sprints. As I say, nothing cuts you up like sprints. Hills. Yeah. Yeah. Hills really do it.

When you're talking about increasing mitochondria, how much of an increase are we talking about? Double. Double? Yeah. I mean, up to double. Wow. Yeah. And what are the other effects of having double the amount of mitochondria? What are the other positive benefits?

More energy throughout the day because now you're so good at burning fat, and you have all this machinery to burn the fat, that you're hungry less often. And, you know, it's interesting when we look back at how hunger runs our lives. And again, if you look at the carbohydrate sugar burning paradigm, you get up in the morning, have the most important meal of the day. It might be a bagel, some toast, whatever. Special toast, special K. Yeah, yeah. Special K, a glass of juice. Don't forget the juice. Oh, yeah. You got to have that instant sugar water.

150 grams of sugar before you head out the door. And you're not even supposed to have 150 grams of sugar in a day. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what most people say. I'm saying you're not supposed to have more 150 grams of sugar in a day. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what most people say. Well, I'm saying you're not supposed to have more than like 150 is a max amount of total carbohydrates that I have in a day. So sugar is a minor, minor subset of that. But then you get to work and 10, 30 rolls around and it's time for a break in the break room. Donuts. Somebody brought donuts today. Jelly. All right.

a break in the break room. Donuts. Somebody brought donuts today. Jelly. All right. And then, you know, where are we going for lunch? Let's go to, you know, get a pizza or whatever. And again, another break in the afternoon, then you get home and you have dinner and maybe you have some ice cream or something watching TV. And the next thing you know, you've, you know, you've taken in six, 700 grams of carbs in that day. Well, if you're good at burning fat, the first thing that happens, you wake up in the morning and go, I don't need to eat, really. I don't feel like I need to eat. I'm not hungry. And one of the things we talk about in the Parallel Blueprint, if you're not hungry, then don't eat. These are the signals your body is giving you.

And if you can get away with not eating, and when I say don't eat, it's important that we have to say, because I'm not hungry. If you're hungry, eat. But if you're not hungry, then move on. I did a thought experiment a while back, and I thought, you know, it's interesting, when I was in college, every one of my college buddies know me as Arnold. They don't even know me as Mark. They call me Arnold. Because when we were in college, there was a TV show called Green Acres. Yeah. And there was a pig on the show called Arnold Ziffel.

And I could eat more than anybody in the college I went to, including the football team. And so people would call me Arnold Ziffel. And so I became Arns, Arnie, Arnold for most of my life. Just because of the amount of food you ate? Just because of the amount of food I could eat. Did you have like contests or is this just like- No, but everybody knew. It's like, you're going to eat that dessert. You're going to eat that steak. I'll have that. But I was running a hundred miles a week. I was a skinny shit. I weighed 30 pounds less than I weigh now, but the throughput was where it was. And because I had a leaky gut, probably a lot of it just

went right out of your butt, went right out the butt, out the butt, Bob. So, um, uh, the thought experiment was that my whole life, I, I sort of was guilty of this. Like how much food can I eat and not gain weight and not be uncomfortable? You know, that's, and I think a lot of people look that way. It's like, all right, we're going to go eat lunch. How much food can I eat and not gain weight and not be uncomfortable? You know, that's, and I think a lot of people look that way. It's like, all right, we're going to go eat lunch. How much food can I eat and not gain weight? Or how much of that cake or that pie can I eat or whatever? People, I think, tend to, this is the what can I get away with part of it. Well, what if you shifted that around and you said, what's the least amount of food I can eat? And maintain muscle mass and maintain energy and not get sick. And most importantly, not be hungry. And you find if you do this experiment,

it's pretty interesting. If you become good at burning fat, your appetite so self-regulates and so mitigates that you find yourself pushing a plate of food away after a couple of bites or not being hungry or eating just the right amount of food to get you through the day. What do you keep your body fat at? You know, so I'm 62 now and- You look great. Well, thank you. I mean, my people would look at me and go, oh, you must be six, seven percent. No, probably nine, maybe nine and a half, maybe 10%. A lot of people lie about their body fat. You know, you hear these stories of the wide receiver that's, you know, 2.5%, 3% body fat. That's not even possible.

It's impossible, yeah. And even with the bodybuilders, the ones that get down that lean are so close to death. You know, that's dieting down the day before the contest to get there, and they better pack it right on afterwards. So, yeah, so the body fat thing is I've stayed at this same visible, I should say, body fat level since I was in my 20s. So this is a result of a lot of strenuous exercise, a lot of long-distance running, a lot of the different things that you participate in, as well as this body burning fat primarily. Because you're talking about if you've been in this same body fat percentage most of your life, you haven't adjusted. Here's what happens now.

You were in your 40s when you adjusted your diet? Yeah, I was in my 40s. So what happens now is I don't run at all. I was a career runner for the first part of my life, and I have not run a mile in like 13 years. What do you do now for exercise? So I lift twice a week. I do an upper body sort of full routine. I don't separate, you know, chest and tris and back and bis and all that stuff. I just do a full routine. I don't separate chest and tris and back and bides and all that stuff. I just do a full routine. That's a smart way to do it. That separating stuff is kind of malarkey. Well, it's separating stuff as if you don't have a job. Well, it's good for a bodybuilder, too.

You're going to go to the gym every day and do two hours and whatever. But I try to get some long, either a paddle or a hike in once a week. I do a pretty focused interval ride on a bike, but half an hour once a week. And then my big thing is... You mean like a stationary bike? Yeah, yeah, stationary bike. And then I go to the gym not to ride the bike, but to catch up on our reading. Oh, okay. You know, so I read while I'm on the bike and whatever.

Right. But then the big workout for me is my Sunday Ultimate Frisbee game. So you laugh. You get to some image of some pastoral hipsters barefoot. I don't even know exactly what Ultimate Frisbee is. It's the greatest game

I've ever invented. Look at you. You get all excited. We've got to get you out, Joe. Your whole demeanor changed. Got to get you out. Your smile widened. Your eyes lit up.

What are you doing? Ultimate is just a very fast-paced game. It's played on a field like a football field or a soccer field. Two teams trying to advance the Frisbee down the field by making completed passes to their teammates. When you're a passer, you can't run. But everybody else on your team is trying to get open. So they're running, trying to get away from their defenders. You complete a pass. And eventually, if you complete a pass over the end zone

or the goal line, that's a point. But if at any point in time... Oh, Jamie just put something on the board here. Oh, there you go. Look at these guys. Yeah, check that out. So watch. Here you go.

Yeah, so at any point in time... Well, they need some black people in this sport because, first of all, that white guy was running slow as shit, and the other guy would have definitely got to that. Anyway, it's a pretty athletic game. I don't know who this is. I'll tell you what they're not. Black.

Yeah, there is a good layout right there, okay. That was a good catch, actually. Yeah, but we have those every week that we play, a bunch of those. So it's a very fast-paced game, and if you lose the Frisbee, if it's turned over by your teammate, you either drop it or something, it becomes the other team's Frisbee going in the opposite direction.

And now you've got to get back on defense and defend the same guy that was defending you in most cases. Okay, so if you throw the Frisbee and the other guy doesn't catch it, then the other team gets it. Correct, and they've got to try and do the same thing. Interesting. So you're sprinting a lot on Sunday. A lot. and the other guy doesn't catch it, then the other team gets it. Correct. And they've got to try and do the same thing. Interesting. Okay. So you're sprinting a lot on Sunday.

A lot. I mean, we have soccer players come out and basketball players come out, and they go, dude, I couldn't walk on Monday after that game. That's just ridiculous. So no running except during the ultimate. Except sprinting, except eight to ten-second bursts. And how that plays out for me is some of the recent research is you go, instead of doing intervals like the old days where you do 60 seconds or a minute and a half interval as a marathoner.

I used to go to the track and do 16 times one half mile, you know, at race pace. So now we're doing all out sprints, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, maybe 20 seconds, but you're max, max, max the whole way. seconds, 15 seconds, maybe 20 seconds, but your max, max, max the whole way, and then a sufficient enough rest, and come back and do it again, and do it six, seven, eight, five, six, seven times, and you're done. That workout is over, and you have accrued the benefits probably at a greater rate than you would have had you done the old method of training, which was to do, you know, again, repeat quarters or 200s or whatever. So do you think that a lot of what the old methods were doing was just people getting through with mental toughness and you're getting some benefit of it, but you're also kind of breaking yourself down too much? Yeah, so most of endurance athletics is pain management.

And overtraining. Yeah, it's like half the races that I thought I was most prepared for, I sucked in because I was overtrained. I left everything on the training field. That's a big problem with fighters as well. With UFC fighters, it's a gigantic issue. Trying to figure out what is the right amount of work you should do. Yeah.

And especially with fighters because in mixed martial arts, they're dealing with different disciplines. You have your grappling, you have your striking, you have putting them all together, you have submissions, you have takedowns, you have a bunch of different things you have to train, as well as rigorous strength and conditioning programs. And there's a lot of debate as far as what should you put most time and effort into. And some of the more successful people, it's really kind of interesting, have been going away from skill training during camps when they prepare for a fight

and going almost exclusively to strength and conditioning programs with very minimal skill training where the strength and conditioning program takes precedent over everything else, which I find very fascinating. The idea behind that being you already know how to fight. So what they're going to do is get your body to a place where it can function at the highest work rate. And a big factor in that is maintaining a healthy heart rate and making sure that you don't overtrain, making sure that you have enough recovery time. 100% agree. We say that in training triathletes and runners. The amount of time you spend on the bike after you've been doing it for a couple of years, you know how to ride. So let's train the component. Let's break the race down into its component parts. hills to where your output on the third hill is essentially the same as it was on the first hill versus in the old days where you were 100% going over the first hill and then 90% over the second

hill and 77% going over the third hill because you hadn't trained that part in your regimen. One of the things we say to endurance athletes is, how many races have you finished where you were out of breath? And maybe you had to sprint, you know, because you were neck and neck with some guy. But most endurance athletes don't finish a marathon out of breath because long ago their form fell apart. Their muscle tissue started to break down because they hadn't trained for sustained power. And so the aerobic part of it was like, we could do this all day long. You're just going slow because you didn't train appropriately. So there's some strength training components, like even to something like marathon running. Absolutely. Yeah. So now we're

saying that the next breakthroughs in marathon running will come from somebody who has trained ketogenically, and we didn't talk about that yet, but has restricted carbs to the extent that they, cyclically, they know how to access ketones, which are a byproduct of fat metabolism, and they can use the ketones in place of glucose or glycogen. They can use the ketones to fuel the brain to will them to continue the pace. They've done the work in the gym where they can maintain sustained power output over 26 miles and not have it fall apart and not have form break down 22 miles into the race. And if you put all of these different component parts together now you – and do it with an elite, a world-class athlete you know now you look at at the next level of records being broken the problem is it's so antithetical to the way we train for the last 40 years that you take uh an elite um professional runner who's already had

some amount of success and you go dude uh we want to shift everything around it's going to cost you the next 18 months to adapt but there's a good chance that you'll be better. The guy's going to go, you know. It's so hard for him to change. Yeah, and it's so hard. Well, it's so hard to give up something that's working to get to that. I want to go back to something you said while you were just explaining that, that you get someone to train ketogenic. Yep.

And what do you mean by that? So now there are periods of time when you're restricting carbs so much that you're creating more ketones, which are this byproduct of fat metabolism. So you've already become good at what we call, you become fat adapted, as we say. You become good at burning fat. And now you're building further metabolic machinery that accesses ketones better. So now ketones, which we refer to as the fourth fuel, so you'd have proteins, fats, carbohydrates. Ketones are the fourth fuel.

The body, we evolved to use ketones very efficiently. There were times throughout millions of years of human evolution where it wasn't like you skipped lunch. It's like you skipped last week eating, right? And you had to maintain muscle mass and maintain thought capability and maintain speed and health despite not eating anything. And the only way to do that was to access the stored body fat that you'd stored from overeating or eating slightly more than you needed. At the last time, there was actually food present, which is why we're all wired to overeat.

And this ability to use the byproduct of the fat metabolism to fuel the brain. So ketones, actually, the brain loves to run on ketones. One of the things that happens, particularly in endurance contests, and I suspect it happens in MMA fights toward the end of the fight, is you feel gassed, and you're starting to run low on glycogen, and you're starting to really feel like the wheels are coming off. More often than not, it's the brain. It's a lack of glucose to the brain. The brain isn't being powered enough, and the brain goes, time out. We've got to pull over the side of the road and take a

nap. So it'll make you mentally exhausted because your body's running on glycogen and glucose rather than fats. Exactly. Exactly. So when you run out of glycogen and glucose, the old theory was, well, the reason that you hit the wall in any of these events, or you bonk, as they say, is because you've depleted glycogen so much the muscles can't function anymore. Well, the research now shows that you never really deplete the glycogen in the muscles. If you go from 500 or 600 grams total in the body, you never get lower than 150. So there's always some glycogen left. So what's going on? Well, it's the brain and its lack of access to glucose that is shutting

you down. And Tim Noakes, the guy we talked about, Professor Tim Noakes, at the beginning of the show here, he coined a phrase, the central governor theory of the brain. And he said the reason a lot of people hit the wall isn't because they're out of glycogen, but it's because the brain, as an override mechanism, says in order to prevent further damage, we have to stop. And it manifests itself as a sensation of tiredness and whatever. Now, if you could find a way to bypass that and keep the brain going, because remember, it's the brain running on glucose that once it runs out of that fuel says, I'm sensing there's no fuel, so we're going to pull over. So that's what ketones do. So when you become good at accessing

stored body fat and producing ketones, and you've built the metabolic machinery, particularly in the brain, to use those ketones, and we know from history and from genetics and from modern science that the brain runs really well on ketones. Now you've found a substitute fuel for glucose, so you can run out of glucose. And yet the ketones will keep the brain, you know, revving and guiding you at the same pace. Again, provided you've done the work in the gym to maintain the form and the power. And it's so, you know, this is all, I'm going to say kind of theoretical now because the real world records haven't been broken yet. Some are being broken in the ultra events, the hundred mile, uh, run. There are a number of guys doing ketogenic

and low carb training who are breaking records like crazy. Um, Zach Bitter, uh, is a guy who in the, in the lab has shown that he could derive 96% of his total energy running seven-minute miles from fat. So in other words, it's seven-minute miles, which is like race pace for – I mean it's – what am I saying? Race pace, sprint pace for most people. It's not that fast for a marathoner or even an elite runner. But it's a substantial pace. And for a guy running 100 miles, it's a pretty good clip. And to derive 95% to 96% of all energy from your stored body fat or from exogenous fat that you're eating and just a tiny bit required from glycogen or glucose.

I mean, I think 30 or 40 years ago, we would have said, not only was that impossible, that was like twice times impossible. Well, the benefit of that for athletes has got to be incredible in terms of motivation, in terms of enthusiasm towards the end of the race or an end of a fight or something along those lines, where your body would run out of the glycogen and the glucose. And instead, you have fat to burn. So your mind doesn't drop off as much. Your mind doesn't hit that wall. Right. That should be huge.

I mean, that alone should be motivation for people to at least attempt to pursue that. Yep. Now, when it comes to highly glycolic experiences like MMA, and you can't derive a substantial part of your energy from fat. That still has to come from glycogen. Why is that? Well, because there's a point at which your throughput of oxygen, you know, when I'm talking about endurance athletes, they're measuring their output over two, three, seven hours. You know, now you're talking five, five, five minutes.

Now you're talking five, five, five minute. Now you've got that same output is concentrated now and you're going at a fairly high rate. Although you see them, they're jumping around and dancing around and moving back and forth. So there's recovery periods in there. But you still have to have that 100% intense glycolytic output. So when you're in a hold and trying to escape or when you're, you know, you're trying to defend or trying to, you know, come in for a barrage, you have to be at 100% of output. But it's brief periods of time. So conceivably, you could train in the gym to access that part of your body that burns fats, that burns ketones. You know, almost the most important part would be

making weight. You know, if you're, look, especially in MMA, it's about power to weight ratios to a certain extent. I mean, there's a lot of, obviously, skill, but a power to weight ratio. If I'm, you know, 142 pounds, I don't know what the weight, what the divisions are, but if I'm carrying around, I'm at 165 and I have to cut down to 142 to get to my division, I'm going to lose power. But if I maintain that power and I never even get up to 165 anymore because I'm not gaining fat, because I've learned how to burn fat and I can stay effective and functional at the weight that I'm at, that has benefit. And it's a power-to-weight ratio concept. So you would have to have some sort of a hybrid diet then in something like MMA. Yeah.

So once you've built the metabolic machinery to burn fat and to burn ketones, it doesn't go away when you start eating carbohydrates. So you can do what we call the cyclical approach where you spend – in the early phases of your training, you become really good at burning fat and you do stuff that's contemplated to make you the best possible fat burner you can be. Then you might introduce some carbohydrates the day before a really hard glycolytic workout. That doesn't turn off your fat burning. That doesn't even really negatively impact your ability to handle ketones. If you do it for six weeks and you do nothing but carbs for six weeks, then it all shifts back. Again, upregulation and downregulation of enzymes based on gene input, gene expression. But if you built the metabolic machinery and you keep coming back to it,

then you can craft a strategy where you say, well, tomorrow we're just going to do 100% glycolytic stuff. Be prepared to puke all afternoon or whatever. You have, you know, 150 grams of carbs in the sweet potato for dinner that night. You topped off your glycogen stores. You're still good at burning fat. You have all the glycogen that you even could possibly have loaded if you'd just been a carbohydrate-based athlete ever since. You just pick the times when you're going to up the ante

with with extra carb intake and you make sure it's not sugar but it's you know a good um you know a starchy carb in this case something like a sweet potato or you know am or something like that so how do you regulate the amount of sugars that are in your body do you limit the amount of fruit that you eat do you uh or how do i personally you limit the amount of fruit that you eat? How do I, personally? Can you eat as much fruit as you like, or is that not a good idea? It's just not a good idea. It's just it doesn't – most fruit – some amount of fruit is good,

but I think what cracks me up is the number of people who say, I'm on a very healthy diet. I'm eating 12 servings of fruit a day, and I go to Jamba Juice, and I get a big fruit smoothie, and I go, dude, you're taking in more sugar than, you know, the guy is drinking two six-packs of Coke. So even sugar that comes from fruit is not necessarily healthy. Correct. Now, again, all these things exist on a spectrum. I might have blueberries every day because I love blueberries. Grew up in Maine, you know, picking them wild, so I love blueberries. But they're low in sugar. They're tart.

They've got antioxidants in them, and I don't overdo them. Do you limit yourself to like a cup or something like that? Yeah, I don't even limit. Look, at $4.99 a pack for organic blueberries, I limit myself based on budget, not on any other metric. How many servings of fruit will you allow yourself in a day? Oh, just because I don't feel the need to eat fruit. I don't have a craving for it. Maybe two servings is the most I'll eat in a day. Some days, none. But I don't, you know, bananas, some of the citrus fruits, some of these things can be way overdone pretty quickly.

And I'm not necessarily saying don't eat fruit. I'm just saying don't consider fruit the healthiest possible alternative to, you know, bread and pasta, and then replace all of the calories you got from bread and pasta and cereal and whatever. Don't replace that with fruit, but figure out a way. Like vegetables, for the most part, are the ideal source of carbohydrate in our diet. They're locked in this fibrous matrix. They're basically low glycemic index, so they kind of drip into the bloodstream at a reasonable pace, don't cause a huge surge in glucose. bloodstream at a reasonable pace don't cause a huge surge in glucose.

So celery with coconut butter would be a much healthier alternative than a banana. Again, healthier is the wrong term. I mean, we're making choices here based on what we're trying to accomplish. No good or bad, no right or wrong. But in a perfect world, celery with coconut butter is a great choice, and a banana at the right time is maybe a better choice. Like post-workout, a banana is a good choice, right? I mean, it depends on who you are. I fast after the workout, too, because that's kind of interesting. There's so much of these little nuanced science bits that you pick up. And I've been in the supplement business for 30 years,

designing supplements for other companies. And one of the supplements I made a bunch of years ago for a very large company today was a post-workout drink. And everybody loved it, and everybody thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever tasted. And it had carbohydrates, and it had some protein, it had some creatine, and it was a great drink. But the purpose of the drink was to recover from the hard workout you did today so you could do the bitch again tomorrow. And that's not how I train anymore. So I don't do two hard days in a row. So for that particular purpose, if you're going to

train hard every day and you want to replace glycogen, then that's a strategy and that's a choice. If you say, well, we're going to do some hard glycolytic work today, we're going to, for whatever reason, going to do some hard glycolytic work tomorrow, then let's have a post-workout high-carb, relatively high-carb supplement because there's this window in which the body manufactures glycogen, refills glycogen stores at a higher rate just post-workout. That was the whole reason for the post-workout meal. That's why people like to drink chocolate milk, right? Exactly, exactly. So if you're going to go from day to day, then that's probably a good thing. Now, another strategy would be to go really, really hard today, do a deep leg day, and then fast.

Well, what happens when you fast is you don't replenish the glycogen, but you preserve the pulse of growth hormone and testosterone that happens as a result of the leg day, which you would otherwise blunt by taking in a sugary drink. Whoa. Okay. So again, it's complex, and yet it's pretty cool. The science is pretty cool. So insulin has an effect on growth hormone and testosterone. It actually lowers it. So if you are eating a post-workout meal that's high in carbs, because you want to refill the glycogen stores so that you can do it again tomorrow, then the post-workout meal will cause a rise in insulin, which will blunt the glycogen, excuse me, the growth hormone and testosterone pulse that you got from that workout, but you'll have glycogen stores slightly more ready for the hard workout again tomorrow. Now, what are you trying to accomplish here? What I'm saying is I'd rather just do the workout really hard,

get all of the benefits, the growth benefits that I'm looking for, and not have to do it again tomorrow. I want to work as little as possible. If I'm going to do a leg day and puke because of it today, I don't want to do it again tomorrow. I want to work as little as possible. If I'm going to do a leg day and puke because of it today, I don't want to do it again tomorrow. I'm only working out to get the benefits. I'm not working out for the sake of working out. I'm not working out every single day because I just love to go to the gym. And some people do, by the way, and I'm not going to judge that. But I'm working out to get the most amount of benefits I can from the work that I've chosen to do, and in this case, that includes my strategy post-workout. That make sense? It does, but it's fascinating because I've never heard that before. There's a catch-22. So

refueling the glycogen levels actually depletes. Deplenishes? Thatpletes, blunts is the best word? Yeah. Deplenishes? That's not even a word. I like it. Make it up. Trademark it right now. Deplenishes.

Deplenishes. I just said it like it was real, too. But I've never heard that before. So there's got to be a catch-22 in there, then. It seems like, so is there a negative effect of having those hard workouts more than one day in a row? And would you be better off and would you gain more if you went the way you're doing it by not replenishing? I'm saying you do. Wow. Now it's... Even for an elite athlete that's competing in a sport, like say mixed martial arts or something along those lines? You know, it depends on what

the game plan is for the week and what the game plan is to get you into the ring or to get you to the starting line. And in this case, if we say, you know, you're doing, let's just use a leg day again, you know, you're doing hard legs, you don't want to do it again tomorrow. So there's no need to take the post-workout drink because here's what else. The other thing that happens is if you wait a couple of hours, maybe you have in an hour or two, you have a meal, but it's not even a high-carb meal.

It's just a regular meal. It's not high-carb. It's not contemplated to increase glycogen stores. carb. It's not contemplated to increase glycogen stores. But within that meal and within the next meal and within the next meal, your body will replenish glycogen. Eventually, it wants to do that. You're not preventing it from replenishing glycogen. So there's no immediate urgency to do it with a post-workout drink if the meals planned for the rest of the day or the next morning have some amount of carbohydrate, some of which will go to replenishing glycogen. So you might wind up, instead of having restored 275 grams of glycogen, you've restored 230.

Big deal. What about the benefits of forcing your body to do more work to up your conditioning level? And would that be mitigated or would some, like, what your strategy being to not replenish the stores after the workout and to not have those hard workouts two days in a row, if you instead had the hard workout, If you instead had the hard workout, went through your idea of allowing your body to have its natural uptake of testosterone and growth hormone because of that hard workout, then giving yourself adequate time to recover before engaging in the next hard workout, would you in fact have more progress than slamming your head up against the wall, which is at least with wrestlers and for mixed martial artists a lot of the time, that's the standard operational approach is to beat your body down, to be absolutely exhausted. And you think that's, in fact, maybe counterintuitive. I totally think I totally think that is. Wow. I mean, the the notion that and again, this is endurance sports and and mixed martial arts are very similar in it's about pain management.

It's about managing literally pain and perceived pain and exertion over time. So, you know, to the extent that you can train in the gym in selective areas that all come together in the fight, that's a legitimate choice. But another choice, and the one for the last 30 years is sort of the Rocky Balboa choice, which is just go hard every single day and build up the— because maybe when it comes— Mental toughness. Maybe it's the fifth round, and mental toughness really comes to play there,

and you're able to dig deeper just because you know how to beat yourself up. So it's not to say that one's better than the other. They're just alternative strategies. One of the greatest runners in the country ever produced, Steve Prefontaine, was fairly talented. He was not the most talented runner in the world. And he would go to the starting line, and he'd look at some guy who was clearly more talented, but they'd run similar times. And Prefontaine would look him in the face and go, dude, he said, you may be more fit and more talented than me, but I'm willing to die for this. I'm willing to hurt more.

And he was. And he could dig, dig deep. And maybe it was a result of his 120 mile weeks of training and beating himself up every day. I suppose there's value in that in a sport where, you know, from the time the gun goes off till the time you cross the finish line, you're never saying to yourself in a marathon, fuck, this is fun. Let's do this again. You know, you never, if you're at the elite level, you never say that. Right. So it's about pain management, and there's a legitimate strategy in maybe having some days where you do what I outlined and some days or some weeks where you do what you outlined. Are they mutually exclusive, though? Like, here's the question.

Like, do you have to beat yourself up in order to be mentally tough? Can't you be mentally tough just through meditation or visualization? Oh, I agree. I don't think you have to beat yourself up to be mentally tough. And the danger there is you literally beat yourself up in order to be mentally tough. Can't you be mentally tough just through meditation? Oh, I agree. I don't think you have to beat yourself up to be mentally tough. And the danger there is you literally beat yourself up. The danger is you over-train. And maybe doing that and trying to force yourself into these mentally tough exercises is actually a form of weakness because you're not able to look at your body objectively. You're not able to assess it in more of a scientific fashion. I mean, I'm telling you, back in the day when I was doing training for marathons and triathlons, I defined my self-worth based on the previous workout I'd done.

You know, and you skip a day and you feel like a slacker and a poser and a loser. And yet, I was chronically overtrained all the time. I wish I had those days back because, you know, my career would have been extended. On the other hand, if I had them back, I probably wouldn't have arrived where I am today through the pain and the suffering and the sacrifice. Right. And trying to figure out how to fix that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My friend Steve Maxwell, who's a strength conditioning coach, says that you should monitor your heart rate every morning.

And if your heart rate is over a certain beats per minute, it's over what it's naturally normal, five plus beats per minute, you should take the day off. That's one modality. That's one protocol. There's now heart rate variability, which looks beyond what the heart rate is. It looks at the time between the beats and suggests that if there's greater variability, if there's more time, or there's 0.8 seconds here and 1.1 second here and 0.7 and 1.1, that that's better than having 0.9, 0.9, 0.9, 0.9. It's sort of counterintuitive because you'd want the heart to beat metronomically.

Yeah. But if it's beating metronomically, it's a sign of overtraining. Really? Yeah. Overtraining? Yeah, it's a sign of— Even if it's a low heartbeat? Correct.

If you wake up and you've got 40 beats per minute, but they're all the same equal beats. Yeah, I mean, that's not going to happen. It's typically going to be higher if you've overtrained, as well as having a metronomic interval to it. But there are programs you can get. So you can wear your heart monitor and get these HRV, heart rate variability programs, and they'll literally tell you, they'll score you for the day. Do you use those? I don't, primarily because I have premature ventricular contractions. So I'm now, at 62,

I've been doing this for 40 years. Actually, 50. I started running when I was 12. Jesus. To and from school, just like that nut-brown African lad, you know, with my Converse, you know, sneakers on. So I've been doing this a long time, and I spent so much of my career stupidly, foolishly, maxing my heart rate out every day. So I've written about this for the last two decades about how training for endurance competition is somewhat antithetical to health, and certainly training the way we used to, which is accumulating miles and miles and miles at a heart rate that we call the black hole, which is it's too high to benefit on a regular basis, but too low to create sort of the interval training deal.

Again, I explain it in the book, but we spent years and years and years, decades, training a lot of athletes at, say, anywhere from 75 to 85 percent of their max heart rate for an hour, two hours, three hours at a time. Well, over time, the heart responds to that and it gets thicker. The heart muscle gets thicker and thicker. Partly it's like the heart doesn't have a say in it. So your brain tells your legs to run, right? And the heart goes, shit, I've got to keep up with this cat.

So the heart's pumping away and pumping away and pumping away. And if you do this enough, day in, day out, over years, the heart starts to get damaged a little bit. And in some cases, it gets thicker, the ventricle gets thicker. Is it thicker because it's growing muscle? Yeah, but it's not necessarily a good kind of thicker. So it may be stretched too much, it may not recover. When you go to the gym and you say, we're going to do, you know, 200 preacher curls of 75 pounds, you know, you're going to say, well, you know, my biceps, well, maybe your biceps can handle that, Joe, but mine can't. So, you know, because they'll fry, they'll shred, but they feel, you feel it, the pain is there. Well, the heart doesn't feel that kind of pain. So if you force the heart to have to keep up, and it's a demand organ.

It just feeds whatever the demand is from the body. And if that's held at too high a heart rate for too long over decades, it can manifest itself in problems. There's an epidemic of AFib, atrial fibrillation, in my generation of runners from that very problem. afib, atrial fibrillation in my generation of runners from that very problem. So anyway, having said that, so I have the occasional premature ventricular contraction, which is just a couple of cells in the heart, maybe a thickness in the ventricle that misfire every once in a while. It's not life-threatening. It's just annoying. But it makes my HRV look really good because I have this big interval between beats sometimes, you know, but it's a false positive. Wow. That's fascinating. So you don't necessarily monitor your heart rate

because of that? No. So you kind of more go on the way you feel? Yeah. And again, you know, I'm at my age, I just want to have fun. I just want to play. I don't, I'm not seeking to win any age group competitions anymore. Those days are long behind me. It hurts too much. It's too much. I'm trying to extract the greatest amount of pleasure out of my life. So when I go to the gym, it's pretty much contemplated to do as little as possible that keeps me looking good naked, but also keeps me somewhat immune from injury. They're very honest of you, by the way. Whatever, you know.

Well, I don't even care about that anymore. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm going to care about that until the day I die. But for the most part, it's about avoiding injury when I'm playing. So if I'm playing Frisbee, you know, I'm sprinting. I'm keeping up with 20-somethings on a long bomb run to the end zone, and then have to come up, you know, turn around and come back and get them on defense. That has some cost attached to it, some metabolic costs for an old guy like me. So the stuff I do in the gym is trying

to keep me from getting injured, knock wood. And then I spend time on the, you know, I'll paddle for two hours, and it's the best upper body workout you'll ever get. Paddling. Yeah. Really? Stand-up paddling. Yeah. And, you know, it's fun.

And I don't think, oh, God, when is it going to be over? I think, oh, shit, I've got to get back because I've got a meeting. You know, I'm out hanging out with dolphins and whales and looking down at fish and catching a wave once in a while. So I'm trying to have fun when I move, when I work out. I did some paddling a few years back. once in a while. So I'm trying to have fun when I move, when I work out. I did some paddling a few years back. I did a canoe trip down the Missouri River, and I was shocked at how tired my arms got.

I'm like, this is like a legit workout. I thought I was in pretty good shape. I'm like, it's going to be nothing, paddling, saying shit. No, no, no, it's hard. Take some good shots after paddling. And that's how, no, no, it's hard. That's take some good shots when you're, you know, after paddling. And that's how I, I, I treated it as a workout too.

I just decided like, okay, we're doing this for a couple hours a day. I'm going to go hard. I'm going to just, I'm going to leave it all out there on the river, you know, and we were with some other guys.

We're another boat. I was trying to kick their ass. So I was just trying to stay ahead of them the entire way and calling them pussies and yelling at them. Yeah, but it's great. It's lat workout. It's serratus, you know, at them. Yeah, but it's great. It's lat workout. It's serratus.

It's deltoids. It's everything. One of the big issues with jiu-jitsu competitors and people just practice even as a hobby is joint injuries, inflammation in the joints, and also spine injuries, a lot of bulging discs, a lot of things along those lines. injuries, a lot of bulging discs, a lot of things along those lines. Do you think that some of that can be mitigated by reducing the amount of inflammatory foods? You know, you've got such a trauma-based sport. Maybe a little, you know, if you're 10% less prone to getting the disc issue or the joint pain as a result. But a lot of that is just the brute force of the impact. And that's a choice that you make to be in those sports.

Well, not even impact. Like with grappling, a lot of it is just twisting and constant pressure. And just the day-to-day grind. I think jiu-jitsu is one of those sports where a lot of recreational practitioners, they get really addicted to it because it's really fun. You're essentially having a life or death struggle with someone, and you can tap out and then go right back at it. And it's very different than a lot of other martial arts in that way

that you can kind of do it full blast. Right. Whereas sparring, like kickboxing and things like that, you really can't do it full blast for very long because the body just can't take it. The head can't take it especially. Yeah. But with jiu-jitsu, a lot of guys are injured. Then they just wrap themselves up and kind of go back in. Or they say, oh, I'm just going to roll light.

And my neck's bothering me. Just lay off my neck. And I always wonder, like, is there maybe a dietary choice that could perhaps limit the amount of inflammation that you're experiencing after these brutal workouts? Depends. I mean, if the diet is currently horrendous, then there's probably some amount of, you know, management of that that could be increased, and pain management could be a little bit better and less inflammation for sure.

But if the diet's already good, then you're still putting the body through some unnatural torsions. I'm just amazed that when you were talking about your hands and arthritis deep into your 40s, that you were able to mitigate that just by changing your diet it was so powerful it was uh it was really that actually the most powerful thing for me was the ibs because it it literally ruined my life or ruled my life um but but the arthritis thing was like i mean i play golf with friends and i was like i can't even grip the friggin club the way i need to yeah And now you have no problems. And I'd meet you and I'd go, shit, is Joe going to try to out bro shake me? Ooh, that's gross.

And take me to the ground with a firm grip. How about when they give the tips of your fingers? Oh, Jesus. Those apples. It's over. Those tips of the fingers, guys. It's over. Shit.

I hate those fucks. Yeah. So that's very, well, I'm very careful shaking hands too because I know a lot of people with broken hands. Yeah. Fighters, especially like after fights, you have to be real careful. I give them like the most gentle handshake possible. What other ways do you think there are, dietary ways to reduce inflammation other than reduction of grains or elimination of grains? You know, I say if you get rid of the industrial seed oils, so you replace the soybean oil, the canola oil, the corn oil,

and look at the labels of the ingredients because they're all over the place. What's the different mechanism in the body as far as like the way your body processes soy or corn oil versus coconut oil? It's just the profile of fatty acids. These are polyunsaturated fatty acids. Sometimes they're partially hydrogenated. Sometimes they've been processed with sort of nasty processing agents like nickel. And they've undergone enough alteration that maybe they contain some trans fats. Trans fats are known to be pro-inflammatory.

The omega-6, by the way, omega-6 in and of themselves, they're not bad. There's omega-3, there's omega-6, there's 9, there's 7, there's 12, there's all these. The 3 to 6 ratio is the one that's gotten the most press over the last decade. there's all these, but the three to six ratio is the one that's gotten the most press over the last decade. Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish, krill oil or fish oil, things like that. Do you supplement with fish oil? A little bit, yeah. Not a lot, but a little bit. Couple of capsules every other day. Oh, really? Every other day?

Yeah. And I manufacture them too. I mean, it's part of my line of products. But because my diet is pretty much based on an otherwise healthy intake of omega-3s and, more importantly, a reduction of omega-6. So it's not that omega-3s are by themselves anti-inflammatory. They are. And omega-6 are pro-inflammatory. But it's this ratio. There's some requirement for omega-6 are pro-inflammatory, but it's this ratio. There's some requirement for omega-6 in the body, but when the ratio gets way thrown off, it tends to be a pro-inflammatory reaction.

And where do omega-6s come from? Those are the industrial seed oils that we talked about. And so there's a slight benefit to having some industrial seed oils? Well, no, no. There's a slight benefit to having omega-6 from other sources. What are the other sources? What are the other sources? You know, most fish will also have O6. You know, they're everywhere.

They're in any kind of fatty food. Nuts will have them. That's probably the source that most people on the paleo movement get the omega-6 from. But, yeah, it's about sort of the totality of the diet, and it's largely a result, again, of what you're not eating, what you eliminate from the diet that has the greatest effect, not what you're eating. So when people say, well, paleo diet, I mean, I've had such great results on the vegan diet, or I've had great results on some vegetarian diet. Well, you're not eating the same shit we're not eating. diet. Well, you know, you're not eating the same shit we're not eating. So the fact that you get your protein from, you know, plant sources, I'm maybe going to suggest you could have more protein, but it's not that big a deal. It's really about what you've eliminated that has the greatest

impact on your health. Yeah. I have conversations like that often with people that are vegan, where they start talking about all the different things they eat and how much better they feel. And I tell them, listen, I eat all the same things you eat. Like my diet is pretty vegan other than meat. Yeah. I mean, most of what I like this morning, what I had, I drank a kale shake. So I blend kale with cucumbers.

And I know it's gross, but it makes me feel amazing. I blend kale with cucumbers, garlic, celery, ginger, and a pear. I throw a pear in, and I blend that up. Oh, and a half a beet. I blend that all up, and I ate an elk steak. Nice. So the two things together, that's what I eat. That's my lunch. That's what I had. I didn't eat breakfast. I just ate lunch today.

How does the kale shake taste? Like shit. Yeah. It doesn't taste good. So one of my rules is I don't put anything in my mouth that doesn't taste awesome. But it feels good, man. I'm telling you. I eat that.

I get this burst of nutrients. I'm going to keep doing it. All right. Well, I'm not going to. It's not too terrible with a full pear in. Yeah. You know, because the full pear, I mean, it's a big Bartlett pear. It blunts a little bit of the garlic.

Yeah, it's very sweet. Yeah. But is that too much sugar, that one pear? It depends on what your sugar load is over the course of a day. If that's the only sugar you get. Pears are pretty high in sugar, but if it's a whole pear, I don't think it's. I eat a pear before yoga class, too. That's what I always...

That gets me through a yoga class, because I feel like... Is pears your favorite fruit or something? I like pears, man. Is that okay? Wow, good for you. It's totally good. You're the first guy I've known that's favorite fruit is a pear. Really?

I mean, I like a pear, but I... I like mangoes. Yeah. Mangoes are also my favorite. Mangoes are awesome, yeah. I take sliced mangoes. I'll do that. What would be better, pears or mangoes?

No, no, no. No difference? No difference. Difference. But fruit is what I usually choose before I work out. But now I'm thinking that maybe fruit is a little too high in sugar, listening to you, or I should limit the amount of it I have in a day. And again, if you like where you're at and everything's good and life is wonderful and you enjoy it,

then I'm not going to tell you to stop doing it. Well, I'm all about optimizing. I mean, if I can chug down those kale shakes, I'm obviously willing to eat some horrible shit to feel better. It's not that horrible. I kind of exaggerate a little bit. My tolerance for gross food is pretty high. I can eat it. Did you ever eat any of that shit on Fear Factor?

Yeah, I ate a bunch of shit. Oh, good, good. I ate eyeballs, sheep's eyeballs. I ate super worms. Those are those worms they use on cadavers to clean up bones. Yeah. I ate a tomato hornworm. That was pretty gross.

I ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach. That's the one I think I would have drawn the line at. That one was the easiest to do. Really? Yeah. It's all psychological. That's chewy, but it's very mild. It has almost no flavor.

It was all just in your head. That was no big deal at all. The really hard things to eat. It's really interesting. The smells were probably the hardest part. A big factor in the smell was they would add this really expensive cheese. They would go to this Beverly Hills, what is it, fromage? What is one of those fucking places called where they sell the cheese?

Formagerie? Anyway, it was a very expensive type of French cheese that just smells like fucking death. of French cheese that just smells like fucking death. Because cheese, a big part of what makes a cheese fragrant or interesting is the culture, which is actually bacteria. Yeah. So we would buy this bacteria-laden cheese that smelled so fucking bad. They would take it and they would open the little plastic tub in front of me and stick it in front of me.

I'd be like, oh! And they'd be like dude that shit is expensive really expensive and we would throw that into like a blender full of maggots and that's what would make it disgusting the maggots on the on their own that's really didn't have that much of a smell or taste it's more psychological than it is anything yeah a lot of the stuff on fear factor and then there was a lot of it was just the sheer volume. Like they would have to drink, you know, a gigantic blender filled with this horrible shit. And just the amount of mass that you're putting in your body and you have like three minutes to do it or whatever.

And keep it down. And keep it down. Yeah. I think we gave them like, they had to keep it down for like 30 seconds or something like that. So that at the end of that 30 seconds, they would sprint towards a- Would everybody hurl? Oh, yeah. I saw more people.

I've probably seen more people throw up than like a very small percentage of the population. Than most ERs, right? Yeah. Well, maybe ERs would have me. Like nightclub bouncers might have me. If you put in 20 years as a nightclub bouncer, you'd probably see more people puke than me. Because you're seeing it every night. For me, it was only one day a week.

But one day a week, I would watch at least two people just fucking hurl. Projectile vomit. But again, more psychological than anything. The actual taste of those things, especially the roach, was nothing. It's like really no big deal. If I was starving somewhere and I found a big batch of hissing cockroaches, those Madagascar ones, I would definitely scoop those up and eat them. Well, you know, there's a bar company called XO that makes their bars out of cricket protein. And I'm an investor in their company there.

And I'm fascinated by the concept that, you know, a billion and a half, two billion people around the world eat insects all the time and think nothing of it. Yeah. Well, that's what a lobster is. Yeah. One of the things that we found out when we did Fear Factor was if you have an allergy to shellfish, you also have an allergy to roaches. Right. We found that out the hard way because a guy who listed shellfish as an allergy ate a roach and got really sick. We had to take him to the ER. They got to give him an adrenaline shot, the whole deal. So the enzymes apparently are very similar. But you could eat those bugs and they're very high in protein

and very good for you. And they could also be an excellent source of protein for, an inexpensive source of protein for a lot of people. The cricket thing is very sustainable. It's like 20 times less resources, fewer resources, than an equivalent amount of steak. And also equivalent amount of amino acids. Oh, very good profile. Yeah.

That's really fascinating to me, that you could get really high-quality very good profile. Yeah. That's really fascinating to me that you could get like really high quality protein from bugs. Yeah. We're prejudiced against bugs. I guess. I mean, I'm trying not to be anymore. Do you eat your bars? Oh yeah. Do you? You eat them all the time? All the time. Do people like them? I should say all the time just because I don't use those kind of snacks. I make my own bar, but because the guys who started XO are really onto something, and they're trying to change the way the world thinks about sourcing protein. So the first hurdle you have to overcome is making a bar taste great and not turn people off because it's crickets. And there's not like heads and antennas sticking out of these bars.

It's powder. It's been ground down to a fine powder. And it basically looks and probably tastes the same as whey protein isolate does. Yeah. Once it's ground down, right? Once it's ground down. Do you lose any of it when you're dehydrating it or grinding it down or turning it into a powder? It retains its properties pretty nicely. So there's no benefit whatsoever to eating it fresh?

Not necessarily, no. I mean, if you can compact more into a—I mean, that's the beauty of, I think, insect protein powder is to be able to fortify foods that otherwise—rather than having 40 crickets on a stick, you know, to have the powder equivalent in a bar is kind of a neat way of doing it. I've eaten crickets like that, too, like roasted crickets. They don't taste bad at all. No, they're not bad. It's all in the head. It really is. It's all in your mind. Like, you chew them, they're crunchy, and they're roasted over a fire.

They're actually not bad at all. I mean, they're sold as delicacy in the streets of, you know, in Bangkok and most of Asia. Especially if you put some spices on them or something like that. They can actually be quite tasty, like maybe some butter or some oil and some spices on them or something like that, they can actually be quite tasty. Like maybe some butter or some oil and some spices on them. Yeah, we have these ideas about different things that are good to eat and not good to eat. And it's more based on custom than anything in a lot of ways. Yeah.

I wonder how many people that are vegan would be willing to eat bugs. You know, vegan, as far as I know, it goes against their religion. Well, they don't even want to use honey. No, it's crazy. That's funny you say that because we've got a bar that we introduced with grass-fed whey protein isolate. It's got collagen in it. It's a great bar. And we tried to make one for the vegan community.

And because it has honey in it as a sweetener, the vegans said, we can't eat because it has honey. It's bees. Those bees are slaves, man. Yeah, whatever. It's okay. Whatever they want. You want to go that way. Honey is awesome.

It fucks. Is there any nutritional benefit to being a vegan? Or is there deficits involved in it? I think there's probably some foods that you're not getting that would provide micronutrients, micronutrition that would be beneficial to you in the long run. And yet the human body is so friggin' adaptable to any sort of dietary strategy. body is so friggin' adaptable to any sort of dietary strategy. I mean, you know, you see eight-foot-tall Africans, you know, that go play in the NBA that grew up on, you know, 500 calories a day in cow patties. You know, during the Irish potato famine, people lived

for six weeks on shoe leather and seaweed. I mean, the human body is pretty adaptable. So you, shoe leather and seaweed. I mean, the human body is pretty adaptable. So on that one hand, you can't describe the perfect diet. So if you're choosing to be vegan and that's what you want to do and you're mindful about it and you're not militant about it and not trying to convince everybody else that that's what they ought to do, then go for it. Well, that doesn't exist. Yeah. There's so few people. That's almost a requirement. That's the unicorn fart. A requirement of membership. Yeah.

Hmm. What, like, what are the, there's a few plants that do have a full, complete amino acid profile, right? Like quinoa is one of them. Yeah, I mean, there's great plants. I don't know. I wouldn't say they have a full amino acid profile. It's-

What's lacking? Well, there's probably, if there's nothing lacking, it's great plants. I don't know. I wouldn't say they have a full amino acid profile. What's lacking? Well, if there's nothing lacking, it's the relative amounts that make the difference. So it's a protein efficiency ratio. Right. The protein amino acid score that really determines whether a protein is exceptional. And that's where the meat and eggs and that dairy eggs and, you know, that dairy and things. Yeah. Someone was trying to describe that to me, the amount of broccoli you would need to get the same amount of protein and amino acids as an eight ounce steak is something insane. It's like

two pounds of broccoli. Yeah. I don't think it's insane. I just think it's, because those same people will argue that there's, you know, that it's on a, I think it's on a per-pound basis. It's almost like it has the same amount of amino acids. I forget where I heard that. Some vegan cited that to me. And I know that broccoli does have some amino acids in it. You just have to eat a big bowl of it. And if you're a vegan, that's what you do anyway.

So I'm not going to criticize that choice. I just think that if you're missing certain amino acids, you better balance it with something coming from legumes or some other source. You have to figure out what amino acids are lacking based on what plant protein you're taking in. The human diet was always based on a wide variety of things that you were taking in. Not just one kind of thing, but something off of this shrub, off of this bush, out of this ground, and and a tuber here and some quail eggs here. And, you know, it was always 200 different choices within a five-mile radius. Or whatever you can just get. Whatever you get your hands on. And that's where the insects came in. That's where the,

you know, we don't talk about, you know, amphibians, but imagine living on frogs and snakes and eggs and, you know, and wheatgrass. It's pretty amazing the variety of foods that we can eat. So typically you start your morning off with butter coffee, with MCT oil. Is that what you put in it? I don't. I just eat regular coffee. Just regular coffee? I'll have buttered coffee every once in a while, but I don't feel like I need the calories to get my day going.

I just want the cup of coffee. You just my day going. I just want the cup of coffee. You just want the caffeine. I just want the caffeine, and I actually don't want to interfere with burning off my own body fat. Not that it interferes with it, but that's 500 calories or 250 calories coming out of the coffee that otherwise is coming off my gut. Interesting. So when you wake up in the morning, it's all dependent upon how hungry you are. Yeah. So if you're hungry, maybe then you'll have some butter coffee. Yeah. And if you're not

hungry, you'll just have regular coffee. Yeah. Black. A little bit of cream, but just enough to color it. Yeah. And like your first meal of the day is probably lunch. Yep. And what is that? your first meal of the day is probably lunch? Yep. And what is that? Usually a salad. I have a big-ass salad, I call it. And it's lots of greens and some form of protein.

It might be salmon. It might be chicken from last night's dinner. It might be tuna. And what size? Like an eight-ounce portion? No, no. No, I mean as far as protein. No, not much protein. That's the other thing that I've realized over the years is that we don't need that much protein.

And even if you're doing work in the gym, you know, you don't need 200 grams of protein a day. That's bullshit. You just can't process that. Well, what is that from? That's from the bodybuilder powerlifting mentality? Yeah, so that's from the muscle and fitness days. Right. And that's from Dave Draper and his freaking, you know, blender full of stuff.

Who's Dave Draper? Oh, my God. So Dave Draper and his freaking blender full of stuff. Who's Dave Draper? Oh, my God. You don't – so Dave Draper is before your time, man. So he was one of the original Southern California blonde bodybuilders. He was in every ad for shakes and mass gainers and things like that. Mass gainers. Yeah. That's all sugar, right?

Yeah. A lot of those things. Oh, that's nasty stuff. That's just like cheap-ass protein and high-fructose corn syrup. Yeah. There it is. Stay busy. Swole.

Yeah. On the beach. Hello, ladies. So that guy would advocate massive amounts. Yeah, but I mean that guy, when you can process, when you're taking in superhuman levels of steroids, you can process all kinds of protein. Look at him today. Is that today, Jamie?

More recent, 2005. Still looking pretty good. He's probably about 70 there. 60 what? 63. 63 right there. He's your age. Yoked as fuck.

Look at him. Maybe he does a little steroids, too. What do you think? What do you think you think could be huh but uh so people using needing protein it's you know maybe women probably need 50 to 75 maybe 80 grams a day um even guys you know training fairly hard no more than 130 140 grams a day now what is what's the muscle and fitness mentality or the power lifting mentality? It's like there's a certain amount of grams per pound of body weight that they describe. Well, that's all over the place.

So it might have been one gram per pound of body weight or 1.5 grams per pound of body weight. That's like 200 grams a day for me. Or, yeah. A gram, I'm 200 pounds. So I'd have to have 200 grams of protein. That's a shitload of protein. How much is a steak? Like a 12-ounce steak. 50, 60. A gram. I'm 200 pounds. So I would have to have 200 grams of protein. That's a shitload of protein. How much is a steak? Like a 12-ounce steak?

50, 60. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So I'd have to eat four fucking steaks in a day? Yeah. I mean, by the time you cook that down, yeah. Might be less, right? What about eggs?

How much is an egg? Seven or eight per egg. That's it? Yeah. That's why these guys would do a whole dozen eggs in their shake. That's why these guys would do a whole dozen eggs in their shake. That would be 70 or 80 or 90 or whatever grams of protein plus some powder in there. But what we learned a long time ago is the body really can't handle more than 30, 35 grams of protein at a sitting.

So the rest of it turns into— Farts. Yeah. So if you're eating, that's one thing. If you've ever been around people who drink a lot of protein shakes and eat protein bars, their farts are brutal, like bodybuilder-type dudes. And that's just, they just, they have too much protein, right? Among other things, yeah. Yeah.

A lot of that is, you know, they haven't, who knows what's going on with their gut bacteria, too. Yeah. That's a lot of protein to put in there. They're probably, if they're eating that much protein, they're not eating much in the way of vegetables. And those muscle milk type supplements, although they are delicious, there is a lot of sugar in those damn things. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. All those bars, a lot of bars have a lot of sugar in them. It's a giant issue.

Yep. Yeah. Hmm. yeah hmm so um you think that these guys these bodybuilder guys or powerlifter guys that are operating on that inefficient method of one gram per one pound if they had reduced it they would still have the same amount of gains and maybe their body would operate more efficiently are we talking on the juice or off the juice oh okay that's a good point you know yeah so um back to your on steroids yeah they could process it. Back to your point about I'm a hard gainer and putting on muscle is difficult.

Most people who are overweight don't want to hear this, but putting on muscle is much more difficult than losing body fat. You take a 165-pound guy and he says, I want to put on 20 pounds of muscle. Ain't going to happen. You know, might put on 10 pounds of muscle, might put on seven over a very focused period of time. It might have to work hard to keep it on. Yeah. Because that's the body also going, if you don't create on a daily basis, my requirement to continue to maintain this muscle mass, I'm going back down to where I was. Right. It seems to me that there's like a number of days or years or whatever it is that you maintain that body mass where it starts to become normal. Then your body says, well, this is what we weigh now.

Yeah. And then you maintain it. But there's this touch and go period, say if you weigh 165 and you put on that 10 pounds, like, boy, you got to keep pushing for a long time for your body to say, listen, this is what we weigh. Yeah. We need all this power. We need all this power. We need all this horsepower.

And we're going to be able to carry a lot of heavy shit all the time. Yep. Exactly. Did you bring your own honey? Is that what's going on over there? No, no, no. What is that? That's your honey.

I'm having some tea here. This guy's serious. Brings his own honey. No, no, no. But honey's good for you, isn't it? No. Raw honey? No. How dare you? I know. Who are you? It's serious. Brings his own honey. No, no, no. But honey's good for you, isn't it? No. Raw honey? No.

How dare you? I know. Who are you? It's not. It's not good for you. It's not going to kill you. That's one of those moderation foods. If you want to use it to, like in this case, put a couple of drops in the tea.

But I always hear it's really good. Like raw honey. Who do you hear it from? Not the vegans. We know that. People make honey? Yeah. I don't know.

It's just something that I've always heard. It's not bad. It's just- High in sugar. It's a form of sugar, and if you overdo it, then it's probably not as wise a decision as to cut it back. So we got to your lunch, your lunch with a big ass salad with a small amount of protein, so maybe like four ounces of protein or something along those lines?

Yeah. Okay. With a piece of chicken or a piece of fish or something like that. And then what about dinner? Dinner, I like to have a steak. I got this Wagyu short rib that I get. You like that stuff, huh? It is so good.

But it's all fatty. Yeah, that's the point. You like that? That's the point. Man. Yeah. Because you like fat. Yeah, no, my diet is probably 55% of my calories come from fat.

But Wagyu is a lot of corn-fed animal. All right. So I make a little bit of an exception there. I can get grass-fed when I look for it at PC Greens where I shop in Malibu. Or at Whole Foods or whatever. But this Wagyu is just such a great, it's so delicious. You like that. You like a nice, tender, juicy, fatty steak.

Yeah, yep. Is there any benefit, like what are the health benefits of eating grass-fed meat and using grass-fed cow's butter? Yeah, it's really interesting because one of the things I just kind of have to raise my eyebrows at is I hear about grass-fed whey protein isolate, right? So you have grass-fed whey protein. It's whatever they put in the drink. Well, the reason you eat grass-fed cows is because the fatty acid profile is a more desirable fatty acid profile. The protein complement is the exact same in a corn-fed steak or a grass-fed steak. You just can't tell the difference in the protein. It's the fatty acid profile that's different. The other difference might be the residual

hormones and antibiotics. So when they raise corn-fed beef and they start from an early age, that's not the cow's native diet. So the cow tends to get sick, get infected, and so they have to use antibiotics, and sometimes they use growth hormone just to get them off the lot quicker. But the reason they have grass-fed beef is the fatty acid profile is much more desirable. And yet it's still fat, so it's just a couple of different versions of stearic acid and different versions of the saturated fat that you're talking about. So it's not even like this life-or-death decision that you make, like if I have a wonderful cut of corn-fed steak, I'm going to die. If I have grass-fed, I'll live forever.

These are just choices, and if you can find a great tasting grass-fed steak, by all means have it. If you can find a relatively inexpensive, you know, line-caught wild salmon, that's probably a better choice for your stated goals than some farm-raised salmon. So yeah, the farm-raised salmon, it's problematic because of their diet, right? Yeah. But just back to the grass-fed thing. So when you get to grass-fed whey protein isolate, whey protein isolate is 90% to 95% protein. They took all the fat out of it. So it doesn't matter. All the good fatty acid profile that was in it because it was grass-fed is now gone.

So it's like a marketing strategy to call it grass-fed whey protein isolate. So it's not bad, but it's not any better. No, it's definitely not bad. It's not demonstrably better to have grass-fed whey protein isolate versus just regular. What about grass-fed butter? You know, grass-fed butter... There's fat in that, right? Yeah, absolutely. That's all fat. So that there's...

And there's an example of... That's the exact opposite. Now they took all the protein out of it, and now they're just giving you fat. So grass-fed butter is a great choice. And what is the difference in the profile, the fatty profile of a grass-fed butter versus... Same as it is with the meat. When is that difference? I can't cite the research, and I can't cite the breakdown of the fatty acids. It's just that they're more appropriate for a cow that was raised on its native diet.

Jamie, pull it up. Pull up what is the difference between the fat. Because I've heard it, but I can't cite it when somebody wants to bring it up. I prefer the taste of grass-fed meat because it's a leaner, more dense meat. It's more like a wild game than like a ribeye from a cow that's fed corn. But you're saying that like health-wise... A grass-fed ribeye is pretty good. Pretty good, yeah.

It's more of a fatty cut. Yeah. But you're saying there's not that much of a difference in terms of like the health benefits. If you can get, again, a humanely raised cow that was not given antibiotics or hormones, you're pretty close to where you want to be. And so I'm suggesting that the fatty acid profile isn't going to be hugely different. Isn't the issue with cows that when you give a cow grains, their body isn't designed to process it, so they develop a lot of infections? Correct. And that's why they use the antibiotics. Yeah.

So isn't that, I mean, just automatically problematic if you have a grain-fed cow? Not necessarily. So a lot of times you'll have a cow that was raised on grass and then finished with grain. Right. And there's different types of grains. So it's not automatically problematic. It could be. But if you look for the cows that were pastured up until a certain point,

and again, they might've been grass finished. Sometimes they'll say grass fed and they won't tell you it was grain finished. And when they say green finished, how much time do they spend feeding them a grain? Just a couple of weeks. That's it? Yeah. Okay. So they just fatten up for the last couple of weeks before the end. Yep. And so they don't have enough time to develop a lot of the massive issues that they might have if they were corn fed their whole life. In theory. Yeah. So you'll eat a little bit of steak. Steamed vegetables.

That's when I'll have my big plate of broccoli or broccolini or brussel sprouts or whatever. And what about drinks? What do you drink? Mostly just water? I used to drink wine at meals. I don't drink a lot of water. I'm soothing a throat today with this. But normally I wouldn't drink much water during the course of the day.

I let my thirst mechanism, you know, just sort of tell me what to do. And I don't get thirsty that often. I mean, I used to go on 50-mile bike rides and not get thirsty. Really? Yeah, yeah. Is that just weird, just sort of tell me what to do. And I don't get thirsty that often. I mean, I used to go on 50 mile bike rides and not get thirsty. So I've got to, yeah. Is that just weird? Just you? I know other people like that. Yeah. A lot of people are of the belief that you should drink water all the day. So you have to pee all the time because you're flushing your body. I don't buy that at all. I think it's unnecessary. It's probably, yeah. I definitely don't agree with

that concept. You might want to do it once in a while Just to do your own little cleanse But I don't think as a rule of thumb There's any particular health benefit to that What about the toxins man? Dude you're fleshing the toxins out man I didn't pee clear I need to drink more Yeah that's bullshit

I think so I know a lot of people who still do it. I know a lot of people at the gym bring their gallon jug of distilled water in or whatever the hell it is. Well, distilled water is real bad, right? ROS water, yeah. Yeah, because when you drink distilled water, there's no minerals in it. It actually robs your body of minerals because it takes the minerals out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So don't drink unless you're thirsty. No, no, no. I mean, that's my, yeah, yeah. So don't drink unless you're thirsty. No, no, no. I mean, that's my rule of thumb, and I don't. So what do I drink with meals? Until recently, I was drinking wine with meals. How come you stopped? So I'd written a lot about wines over the years and how, you know, the research shows that wine drinkers live longer than teetotalers.

Resveratrol. All that stuff. And there's a lot of good compelling evidence to drink wine. And yet at the root of the matter, wine is still a source of ethanol. Ethanol is toxic to the body. So you're putting a toxin in your body every time you drink wine. Started to look at that in my own case and realized that I wasn't sleeping as well as I wanted to. And sleep's a big thing for me.

But I was a two-glass-a-night wine drinker for 30 years. It wasn't dinner if I didn't have wine. And so I went on a 30-day, which I do often, I went on a 30-day experiment of one, see what happened, cut out the wine, felt great, slept better. And I was never really, I never woke up hungover. I mean, I've never – my kids have never seen me – my kids are 22 and 25. They've never seen me drunk. My wife has never seen me drunk. It's not like I was abusing anything. But I had this regular pattern of drinking wine.

So I went off it and I realized that I was benefiting from it. So for the last year and a half, I really cut back on the wine. I still have a glass or two. What was the benefit that you watched? I didn't wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and then not be able to get back to sleep for an hour. That was the big thing that I noticed for myself was I would fall asleep really easily. And then I would wake up two or three in the morning and have a tough time getting back to sleep. And that sort of subsided when I went off the wine. So that's the result of the effect of

alcohol. Your body processes the alcohol. The alcohol is a depressant. It knocks you out. Your body processes it. And then once it's done processing it, then your sleep cycle is disturbed, so you wake up. Is that what happens? Chinese medicine says that that's when your liver is working at 3 o'clock in the morning. So maybe that's when the real processing is starting to take place.

Or when the—I don't know what—I'm not a huge adherent of Chinese medicine. I'm not suggesting that it's not an important thing to look at, but in my case, the sleep benefited tremendously. Did you feel any better other than the sleep? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I didn't really notice, like I say, I never woke up hungover. I never, I always felt refreshed waking up, but I didn't like not getting that sleep and having to, and then in my case, because I'm not good at managing stress and I have a fair amount of stress to – and then in my case, because I'm not good at managing stress and I have a fair amount of stress, just business stuff in my life. So that's – when you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, that's when all the business shit kind of starts to

circulate in the brain. Right, right, right. You know, and how's this going to happen and how are we going to do that? So I didn't like that part of it. So a year and a half, I went without drinking wine, and I replaced it with, I used to be a prodigious beer drinker before I gave up the grains. And I started, I found a couple of non-alcoholic beers that I like. And so again, it was, for me, it was about the habit, the ritual of dinner. i needed i couldn't just drink water i hate i hate drinking water with dinner so i wanted to find something to replace the ritual part of the wine and i found these non-alcoholic beers i drink so i have one with

dinner uh at night maybe one and a half are these non-grain made no they're they're made with grains but it's not they don't affect me to any extent. And so that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. And then recently I came across a guy who was looking at paleo wines. And I'm going, dude, have you coined a new phrase? This is a marketing ploy. No, there's these wines. There are 300 wineries in the world among the tens of thousands that don't use additives or sulfites or colorants or formaldehyde or any of the shit that we from a nose perspective have all kinds of crap in them. And there's like 87 approved additives that the government allows U.S. winemakers to put in their wines.

And that's the shit that causes you to get the hangover and feel bad from drinking the wine, particularly the red wines, and wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to sleep. So this guy approaches me one day. Actually, I met him at a conference, and he started to tell me a story. I'm like, I'm not buying it. You know, you've got these wines that won't cause you to fall asleep or won't cause you to wake up in the middle of the night. He goes, I was like you, Mark.

I gave up drinking wine, and I love wines, but I gave them up because I didn't like what it was doing to me. And I found these new wines. So he sources wines from around the world that are made in wineries that don't use any of these additives. And he gave me a case of them to try different brands and different things. And none of them from the U.S. They're all from Europe or South America or whatever. And these are wineries that have been around for 300 years. They just never bought into the concept of adding shit to wines. Right. And, you know, I realized some of these wines I can drink and enjoy

and feel a little bit of taking the edge off and then go to bed and have no ill effects at all. So I'm sort of opening my mind to the fact that there's some paleo type wines out there that don't have the additives in them that consumed in moderation are probably enjoyable and potentially helpful. That term paleo seems to be a loaded term because people connected with the idea of the Paleolithic era and what people ate at that time but it's not we're not talking about that when you're talking about paleo wines i know yeah you know what i mean like it seems a weird it's a weird term yeah and he doesn't he doesn't really

use the term he uses um natural yeah um but but it the market to which he was catering at the time right itself the paleo community. The paleo community. It fits the paleo community, yeah. Yeah, it's almost like they need a better word than paleo, because it's not necessarily even what people ate during the Paleolithic era. You're just reducing grains or eliminating them and concentrating on fats. That's not necessarily what people ate during the Paleolithic, right? No, no, no. I mean, that's one of the great misnomers the general public has about the paleo diet is that if a caveman didn't eat it, then we shouldn't eat it.

Well, none of this stuff existed in caveman's time. Right. Nothing that we eat, even the stuff we get out of the ground or off the trees, didn't exist then. It's all been manipulated by farming and, you know, whether it was inserting genes. It wasn't inserting genes, but we still did genetic manipulation of foods to get them sweeter and more protein or whatever. Maybe it's a loaded term. Maybe we need a new term. Well, I mean, something like primal maybe?

Right. Well, primal blueprint. Whoa. Hey. That's a good one. Maybe you should run with that. I'll try it. Primal is probably better than paleo, right?

I thought from the beginning. Primal is probably better than Paleo, right? I thought from the beginning. I started my project writing the blog in 2006, and I knew early on I wanted a brand that was sort of unique and separate from Paleo. I thought Paleo had too much baggage from Caveman on it. And Primal sort of has a primary, you know, first importance kind of thing as well as going back to primal times and primal urge or whatever. So hence the term primal blueprint and my primal fuel and my food products, primal kitchen, they're all kind of based around that. So these additives that they're putting in wine, it's just from an economic standpoint?

It allows them to process the wine? No, no, no. It's from a consumer demand point of view. So when you get some of these, I don't want to name names, but some of my favorite, really expensive California wines that I used to love because of the way they tasted, thick and rich looking and, you know, oaky and all this, it's just additives, all crap they're putting in there because that's what the consumer thinks is going to make for a sophisticated wine.

Wow. And all that is chemical additives that fuck with your body? Yeah. I mean, enough that they all do. Wow, that's bizarre. I never would have thought that. When I think of wine, I thought wine is just fermented grapes, and they go through a process, and they store it.

Yeah. My friend Maynard makes wine. I need to contact him. You know the band Tool? Yeah. Maynard, the lead singer of Tool. He has an awesome wine company, Caduceus Wine. Do they make their own wine or they sub it out to somebody else?

He makes his own wine. He grows his own grapes. He's fucking crazy, though. I mean, I know a lot of people that grow grapes in Malibu, but none of them make their own wine. They truck it out to some distillery. And when they truck it out, this guy takes it and throws a bunch of shit in there. Well, whatever.

The grower of the grapes who's got his own label will say, I want it to have these properties. It's got to be this color and this thick. And sometimes if the grapes don't, can't in and of themselves provide that. I mean, a lot of the stuff comes from the, a lot of the tannins in wine come from the grape skin. And to get the deep, deep, deep, deep, rich color, you have to mash the grapes up and the skin up even more and more and more. So more of that tannin to get the red, the deep red colors in the wine, they have to provide more of the skin. And that's what's causing a lot

of the tannin. So for some people who have issues with the, you hear about the histamines in wine. Again, that's the marketplace demanding a deep red wine. So it's the color issue. Part of the color. It could be color, could be, again, some of the, you know, adding sugar to the wines. A lot of the U.S. wines have a lot of sugar in them, like a fairly high sugar content. know, adding sugar to the wines. A lot of the U.S. wines have a lot of sugar in them, like a fairly high sugar content. The guy I'm talking about here who led me down this road and sort of opened my eyes to this, he's been in ketosis for two years, and he couldn't drink wine because the sugar would take him out of ketosis, the sugar in wine. So that's sort of one of the reasons he got started

on it. He was a lifetime wine drinker, grew up in wine country up in Sonoma, and had dealt in the business and sort of left it because he got disenchanted and then came back when he discovered that there were these wines that have no sugar, that have minimal sulfites. I mean, all natural fruits and vegetables have some amount of sulfites, but not added. No added sulfites. fruits and vegetables have some amount of sulfites, but not added, no added sulfites. And none of these 80 or so approved added ingredients that can affect the color and the smell and the thickness.

That is really interesting. That's something I never even considered. I never even thought there was additives in wine. I just thought it was just grapes. I thought it was pretty simple. Well, is there American companies that do this? Is there anything local? I don't know.

I mean, the things that he's given me are all from other countries. That sounds so counterintuitive that we grow so much wine in California, but to get wine without any shit in it, you'd have to get it from Europe. but to get wine without any shit in it, you'd have to get it from Europe because we're so concentrated right now, at least this part of the country is, on natural foods and grass-fed beef and organic vegetables. The fact that we would have wines that almost primarily— Yeah. That's nuts. Oh, it is. And it may be that he hasn't sent me any that are from the U.S.,

but most of these are from other... And where would you order something like that? I want to try that now because I like wine. I love red wine. Dry Wine Farms is the name of the company. That's Dry Wine Farms. Dry Wine Farms. All right.

Dry. Yeah. I always think of dry as like, that's like the kind of white wine that people like, a dry white wine, right? Yeah. Hmm. I just never would have believed that it was the additives that are causing all those issues. Well, so now we're back to that initial discussion we had about it's what you don't eat that really affects you more getting, you know, you're eating appropriately grown cuts of meat and organic vegetables and you're cutting out the organic, excuse me, cutting out the industrial seed oils, cutting out the sugar, cutting out the processed grains and some of the other grains. And in their place, you're, and you're cutting out, in this case, crappy wine and substituting fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts,

seeds. And now we have, you know, again, if we want to enjoy life, and that's one of the things that we might consider an enjoyable part of life is partaking of a glass of red or white wine with dinner. Now it's kind of back on the menu for some people. That's interesting. That's really interesting. But it's not necessarily on the menu for you.

No. So, and having said that, I'm not finding myself back in that situation where I'm drinking wine with dinner again because I still recognize for myself that it's the ethanol that I'm not. Intuitively, I don't like putting that amount of ethanol in my body on a regular basis. So once in a while, as a hormetic insult, if you will, that's fine. The body will adapt to it and use it to its benefit, but on a regular basis, probably. So just the sheer alcohol content of wine was causing an issue. It wasn't just the sheer alcohol content of wine was causing an issue. It wasn't just the additives. No. So the additives were probably causing the issue because with these wines, I wasn't waking up in the middle of the night. So I felt as if I hadn't had the wine.

So what's the ethanol? Ethanol, that's the alcohol. That's the form of alcohol in the wines. Right. But it's not the additives. No, no, no. That's what you're trying to get at is ethanol is the alcohol in the wine. That's what gives you lit. Right. That's not what's being added. Right. So, but you had decided that it wasn't the ethanol. No, it wasn't the ethanol, but I still didn't like the idea. It's not about the issues as much as it's just, it's like I can consume a fair amount of sugar over the course of a day and not gain weight and not have it affect my blood sugar. I just choose not to because I know it's bad for me. Right.

So you know even like a glass of wine. Once in a while it's fine. Yeah, once in a while it's fine. But hasn't it shown that there's some longevity benefits too? Yeah. Do you think that's the resveratrol, which is an antioxidant? No, I don't. I think I could be wrong, but my interpretation of some of these studies is that you take two cohorts of people, each of whom have a shitty diet and are going to die of heart disease in large numbers.

And you give one of the cohorts two glasses of wine a night, and you give the other glass or the other cohort none. And over time, you look at the two groups, and you realize that the group that had two glasses of wine a night didn't have as many cardiac events. Probably because their blood was thinned from the wine or something. It's not that it's bestowing longevity on these people. It's that they're not dying at the same rate from their shitty diet because some my guess is it's probably some artificial blood thinning that's happening or something like that. Huh. But why is it a it's sort of conventional wisdom that it's resveratrol? components of wine, but you would have to drink 750 glasses of wine to get the amount of resveratrol that you can get in a resveratrol capsule. There's not a lot of resveratrol in wine.

There is some, and it's a well-studied component of wine. In fact, there have been companies founded on just providing resveratrol as an anti-aging nutrient. But there's not a lot of resveratrol in wine. And I don't think any of these studies have ever pointed to the fact that it's the resveratrol in the wine that you're drinking that's conferring longevity on this group versus that group. Do you think there's any benefit in consuming exogenous ketones? No, not on balance. I think if you're an athlete and you're looking to maximize performance, there might be places in which you could consume exogenous ketones. First of all, if you're not keto-adapted, it's a joke.

There's no reason to take exogenous ketones. If you're fat-adapted and keto-adapted, there may be a reason to take exogenous ketones in an event instead of sugar. Like, say, if you're going to run, do something, some sort of intense event. Yeah, yeah. But I could make that argument, and yet, to my knowledge, there aren't many great-tasting ketone salts. So now you've got a palatability issue as well with a lot of these things. Right. Have you tried them? No, I haven't. But I've been fascinated by ketogenic diets over the last couple of months. I've been really considering trying to... Yeah. I mean, there's some potentially good science there, but I can't give you a practical application

right now where it would work, other than in some elite event where somebody was racing all out for hours and was completely keto adapted prior to the event and was so good at using ketones in the brain that they could hold off bonking for another hour or two. So they would take some sort of a ketogenic supplement in their water or something along those lines? Yeah, yeah. Or not necessarily in their water, but some drink would probably be the easiest way to do it. So if you were going to recommend to someone to try to make your body more fat adaptive, what would be the first step?

Just radically cut back on sugar? Should you do it slowly? Should you taper off? Or should you just give them up? Either way. I mean, it's easier, I think, if you just give it up and just go all in. If you're somebody who's been depending on sugar your whole life and you're doing 400, 500, 600 grams a day of carbohydrate, then going down to 100 or 120 is going to be painful for the first couple

of weeks. And when I say painful, we have this thing called a low-carb flu. So you go from your body, your brain expecting to have you refuel every meal for every couple of hours every day with carbohydrate to then reducing it down to 120, 150 grams a day, the brain starts to go, what's going on here? I mean, the muscles haven't yet built the metabolic machinery to burn fat. They're working on it, and they're upregulating. The genes are turning on to create the enzymes, but they're not there yet.

It takes about 21 days to do this. So in the process, the body is expecting sugar. And if you're trying to work out at the same time, you're going to be screwed because now you have your sugar depleted and you haven't learned how to burn fat yet. And the brain is depleted. And so the brain goes, I'm foggy. I can't think. I've got a headache. I'm dizzy.

This sucks. I'm going to eat a bagel. That's what happened to me when I did the Atkins diet for a while, many, many years ago. A lot of people get derailed the first or second week. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to not train during that time. Not train.

Cut it way back. Don't do any glycolytic training. So just ride the bike easy, go for a hike, or do some stuff like that. But you can't really train hard when you're doing that. And how long does it take to adapt? So one or two weeks, people get through that fog, and then they'll be good. I have a book called The 21-Day Total Body Transformation. The 21 days is about how long it takes to get 80% of the benefits of becoming a fat-burning beast is what we call it.

A fat-burning beast. I like that. Yeah. So you've got to commit to it, and you've got to assume there's going to be an adjustment period. Yeah, yeah. And in that adjustment period, it's not going to be – I mean, for some people, it's minimal. They just feel a little bit low energy or whatever. Other people get headaches and woozy because that's the brain, again, recognizing that there's no glucose,

and it hasn't yet built the metabolic machinery to burn ketones, even though the body may be producing ketones. And when the body produces ketones, you can either burn them as fuel or you can spill them out in the urine and the breath. So a lot of people who have not yet become keto-adapted, like a sugar burner, a carbohydrate-dependent person, will still produce ketones if you skip two meals. You know, you wake up in the morning, you're basically fasted if you're a sugar burner, and you wake up, and if you don't eat breakfast, you might smell ketones on that person's breath, or they might, you know, pee on a strip, and it shows a certain amount of ketones in the urine because the body's just getting rid of the ketones because it can't burn them. It doesn't have to burn them yet. So consuming exogenous ketones doesn't accentuate a ketogenic diet or doesn't accelerate it?

I don't know enough about the clinical trials that are going on right now, but my assumption would be that if you take exogenous ketones and you're not fat-adapted to keto-adapted, it's not going to necessarily prompt you to become that unless you've done the dietary manipulation as well. Okay. So there's no shortcuts to that transitionary period between a glucose-based diet and a fat-based diet. There's just going to have to be a transitionary period. I think so. Because like I say, I think if you skip a meal, you're producing ketones.

Right. And you're pissing them out. So adding more ketones is just going to piss out more ketones. So you're going to show. By the way, you're going to be a superstar when you piss on the strip because you got your ketones plus the exogenous ketones. Right. But this all starts in great. But I feel like shit.

But the strip says I'm doing great. Right. Yeah. Okay. So the strip's not nearly as important as the actual physical performance and the way you feel. So no matter what, you're going to have to go through a trip. So if you, like, say, look, just me, a guy like me. If I had a shitty diet, I'm eating spaghetti all day, you would recommend that for a couple of weeks,

I just take it real light and make this adjustment. Make a commitment to making the adjustment in the diet, doing a fat-based diet with very low sugar, very low carbohydrates, cut out the grains entirely. You get all your carbohydrates from celery and lettuce and vegetables and some fruits and just make a commitment to it. Yeah. And part of that commitment is I'm not going to train like a banshee for the first two weeks. I'm just going to – I'll train, but I'll do easy stuff. first two weeks. I'm just going to, I'll train, but I'll do easy stuff. And that's what the first chapter in our book, which should be about diet, is about training and about low-level training.

And which book? The Primal Endurance book that just came out a few weeks ago. The first chapter should be about diet because that's clearly one of the most important parts. But we talk about training first because we figured enough endurance athletes would read the book that if they read the diet part first, they would continue training at the high level and embrace the diet and then fall apart. So we got to get the training dialed in first for those people and say, here's why you have to cut back. Here's why you can't exceed a heart rate of 180 minus your age for the first couple of weeks training when you're doing long distance stuff. And at that rate, you'll be burning mostly fat. So you'll be accentuating what's going on on the dietary side, which is restricting carbohydrates and providing more fat, more healthy fats for your

body and creating more mitochondrial biogenesis and upregulating those mitochondria to become efficient at burning fat. How long does it take before your body reaches the optimum level of mitochondria? I mean, we see athletes who are still, who get 80% of their benefit the first three weeks and then another 10% over the next six months. And then the final benefits kick in the last six months because sometimes you lose – your top-end power diminishes as you become fat adapted. So you've got to get that top-end power back, but that's what we build in the gym. So it's a longer process, but once it happens – so it's like 80 percent and then six weeks later another 10 percent and then six weeks later – could be six months later another 10 percent. So in the course of a full year, you're still slowly adapting.

Yeah, I think within a year, maybe a little bit more than a year, you can, if you do everything right, you can be this completely rebuilt engine. That's amazing. So, and then there's got to be some benefits in terms of longevity, in terms of your ability to do work over long periods of time? Well, one of the things that's most compelling is, again, coming from an endurance community where marriages fall apart because the guy would rather go for a 100-mile ride on Sunday morning than stay in bed and cuddle with the wife, you know, or would rather— That's why marriages fall apart? That's one of the reasons, but—

I thought it was money. Yeah, well, it is money, the $8,000 That's one of the reasons. I thought it was money. Well, it is money, the $8,000 bike to go on the ride. So where are we going with that? Longevity. Yeah. Marriages fall apart. Yeah, yeah.

So the longevity part, one of the things that happens is you train less. There's less total training time to get the results that you wanted because you're doing it methodically, and you're not just putting it all out there every day and crossing your fingers and saying, well, I'm training as much as this guy, so I better be as fast or faster than he is. You're doing an approach that's very scripted and detailed and methodical on one end of the spectrum. On the other end, it's also sporadic and fractal. It's like, I wake up today and I don't feel like doing what I had in my plan. Take the day off. Because if today's the day you're going to go hard and you feel like shit, do not go hard. There's no magic. There's no benefit. There's no points that you gain

from doing it. In fact, it'll take you down the toilet. So you learn to become intuitive about your training. And periodicity is one of the words we talk about, where you periodize. There's moments where you're, there's times when you're going very, make your longer workouts longer and slower, and your hard workouts shorter and harder. And in the middle of these, you know, be intuitive about how you feel. How much sleep did you get? Are you fueled appropriately for today's event? Is there a purpose to today's workout other than just go accumulate miles because I'll feel like shit, I'll feel like a slob if I don't? And if you could get around all that, you can start to see some amazing benefits with less pain and suffering and sacrifice, less being beat up, less burnout,

less time, and presumably, if you do it right, better results anyway than the old paradigm. So that's going to cause a real dilemma with people that are obsessed with the work rate, obsessed with just doing more than anybody else, obsessed with proving to themselves that they push themselves. They put in all those hours and accumulate and looking at it. They look at their, you know, a lot of people have apps on their phone that measure how many. I know. Oh, shit. It's nine o'clock at night. We just finished dinner.

Honey, I only have 16,000 steps. I'm going to walk back to the hotel or the house because I got to get to 20. It's bullshit. That stuff is so ridiculous. And yet, you know, I was there. I was one of those people who, you know, lived my life based on the amount of miles I accumulated and measured my self-worth on whether or not I could hang with everybody I ever raced or raced with in a workout. You know, I never let anybody half-wheel me on a bike ride in any workout. And it was fun, I guess, and it was part of my lifestyle. But it's not—you've got to go back to the essence of why are you doing this. If you're doing it just to hang out—people used to say,

Hey, Mark, you're so disciplined, man. You're out there and you're riding 60 miles, 100 miles some days, you're running 10. You are so disciplined. And the joke is, I'm thinking to myself, are you fucking kidding me? I'm not disciplined. Discipline is going to work and putting in a full productive eight hours and then finding a little bit of time to work out or maybe hang out with a family. It was so easy for me to get on a bike and go put some miles in or go for a run and shrug every other duty off. And that's one of the dangers of being an endurance athlete. It's addictive.

It's a very addictive pursuit. You are creating, especially if you're beating yourself up every day, you're creating endorphins, endogenous morphine-like substances that sit on those same receptor sites, the painkilling sites and the pleasure-giving sites that you would inject heroin to achieve. Now you're just doing it naturally and you're doing it every single day and you crave it every day. And if you take five days off, you feel like shit.

You go through withdrawal. So there's that part of it as well that we have to look at. Why do people do this? Yeah, the obsessive aspect of it. The obsessive aspect of it and the addictive aspect of it. Yeah. That's interesting, man. Well, listen, man, this has been probably one of the most informative and interesting podcasts I've ever done. I really, really appreciate you taking your time and coming here and sharing all this information. I'm going to have to listen to this fucking thing three or four times

to get all of it and your book. So please tell us the book again, the name and how we get, is it Amazon? Yeah, it's on Amazon. It's Primal Endurance. It's on Amazon. My website is marksdailyapple.com. So a lot of the stuff we talk about here has been broken down into blogs, 4,000 posts over the last 10 years. Yeah. And encourage anybody to give it a go. Well, I'm giving it a go, man. You've really convinced me. I'm sold. I'm going to radically reduce sugar. I'm going to cut out all my grains.

And I'll keep everybody posted. Cool. I'll hold you to it, man. Please do. Please do. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you very much, Mark. All right, folks.

We'll be back tomorrow with Hannibal Buress. See you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Ooh. That was good. I do have.