The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 168: Mark Sisson - How To Become A Fat Burning Beast

Episode Date: October 16, 2016

Episode 168: Mark Sisson - How To Become A Fat Burning Beast Mark Sisson is a former elite endurance athlete who has made health and fitness his life's work. In his younger days, he was on the track toward medical school for a while , but he got detoured by a different track—literally—and a dream of making the US Olympic team for the marathon. As the decades passed, he realized that his calling was as an independent researcher, critical thinker, motivator, and communicator—to get people to take responsibility for their health and fitness. Mark's mission is to change the lives of 100 million people with his Primal Blueprint movement and where he blogs at Mark's Daily Apple.    Episode 168: Mark Sisson - How To Become A Fat Burning Beast Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show "Your body will learn to burn fat if the glucose (sugar) is not there. Your body doesn't know if it's eaten bread or skittles." In This Episode, You Will Learn: Common themes in people who sustain excellence: Their ability to deal with stress Mark's health philosophy: Fresh, nutrient dense, high antioxidant, preferably locally grown/naturally raised food choices Daily activity—whether it's the gym or a walk along the beach, it all counts Plenty of quality sleep, sun exposure, play, and intellectual stimulation Avoid all sweets and sweetened beverages. Once you break free, they lose their allure Time for fun—don't take anything too seriously Ethical behavior—because what goes around comes around Taking responsibility for yourself and your life—openness to new things and ideas The importance of gaining muscle mass How we screw up our diet at birth We must get away from a sugar based life Eat meat, fish, seeds, nuts -- You'll be better at burning fat Have walking meetings, use a stand up desk, use a treadmill desk It is imperative that we get sunlight on a regular basis How do you become a fat burning beast? Carbohydrates create glucose, body burns it and stores fat. Don't eat pasta, cereal, bread, or crackers The body will burn fat if glucose is not there Why Mark is never hungry for breakfast Why you should get rid of grains Sugar is evil Mark's thought on "cheat days" The NY Times story discussing the scientist who were paid to say that fat was bad and sugar was okay How to maintain this lifestyle if you regularly travel Discussing vegans -- The success comes from what you give up more than what you eat A typical day in the life of Mark - Food eaten, workouts done, business meetings The 10 Primal Blueprint Laws "I will teach you how to become a fat burning beast." Continue Learning: Read Mark's Book: The Primal Blueprint Follow Mark on Twitter: @Mark_Sisson To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 071: Nate Boyer - Green Beret, Texas Football, The NFL Episode 073: Jay Bilas - World Class ESPN Basketball Broadcaster, Toughness, Fixing The NCAA Episode 107: Simon Sinek – Leadership: It Starts With Why Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Mark Sisson on the show, please don't hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell The Learning Leader Show is supported by Daor Design - Daor Design will help you build your brand like nobody's business. Most of their work falls into one of four categories: Logo Design, Print Design, Web Design or Digital Marketing. They pride themselves in being a trusted, valued resource for their growing family of clients.

Have never softened the stance on sugar, still think sugar is pretty damn evil. Now, does that mean I never have sugar? No, I have a teaspoon in my coffee in the morning. You know, I like my coffee to taste great. But I don't drink sodas that have the equivalent of 20 teaspoons. I don't drink the kinds of wine that have the equivalent of 10 or 12 teaspoons of sugar. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be

made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey and welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. This is such an important episode dealing with our health and wellness. My featured leader is Mark Sisson. Mark started Mark's Daily Apple on 2006 to fulfill his personal mission, which is to empower people to take full responsibility of their own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we've assumed to be true about health and wellness. You know, I think the greatest leaders in the world develop a deep understanding of what it takes to be physically fit, active, and healthy for the people that they lead. A few of the topics that Mark and I discussed.

How to become a fat-burning beast, specifically, he details it. Then the 10 primal blueprint laws followed up by how busy leaders can implement the primal blueprint to better their lives. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so important with Mark Sisson. Mark Sisson, man, this is a really important conversation I think is going to help a lot of people. Both for the individuals listening who already know about you and certainly for the ones who do not. So I have a question to get us going, man, and then we'll get rock and roll. And that question is around the fact that you've spent a great deal of time in your life, studying, I guess, for lack of a better word, how to live a healthy and meaningful life. And you spend time around others who do the same.

You're a researcher. You're a curious guy. And you do quite well for yourself. and you look great, by the way, physically too. I'm curious from your perspective, what are some of the most common themes or characteristics in people who you found to be the healthiest in the world?

Well, you know, there are a lot of, while there are a lot of variables that we could look at, probably the single greatest predictor of, well, this short list, one of the single greatest predictors is how you deal with stress. So worldwide, if you look at different populations and you look at their lifestyles and you look at their diets and, you know, some of them have a lot of meat, some of them have no meat, some of them have, some of them are smoking cigarettes every day or cigars or stogies that they rolled in the woods.

You know, some are drinking alcohol, some are not. But the single, probably the greatest individual predictor of longevity and health is how they deal with stress. literally whether they can let the bad stuff roll off them and move on. So that's kind of like my own personal pursuit because I don't do well with stress, right? I've sort of spent much of my life figuring out how I can get outside my head and live in the moment and not be caught up in what might happen, what bad things might happen or regretting the past. So I don't want to get too far down that path as the first talking point of the show, but that's probably one of them. Then if we get into more of the hard science that would look at muscle mass.

So one of the greatest predictors of health and longevity is muscle mass. As people get older, they tend to lose strength and muscle mass. And when you lose that mass, when you lose that living tissue that sort of dictates what all the organs in the body need to do to keep up with it. words, I make a decision to go work out, I make a decision to lift something heavy, that manifests itself in a stronger muscle. That muscle then pulls on the bone and causes the bone to get more dense. So I'm not only increasing muscle mass, I'm increasing bone density. That decision to activate that muscle requires a little bit of a higher heart rate. So now my heart is called into play. And my heart is being asked to keep up with the demands of the body. And maybe the lungs

are, it's required that you inhale a little bit deeper. So now you've got lung volume, you've got heart stroke volume, you've got muscle mass, you've got bone density, you might have some liver involved. And it's really, it all comes down to how much muscle mass you have that dictates your health and strength into your 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. So there's, there's, you know, two elements. I mean, one obvious one is don't smoke. That's probably, you know, the one that the rest of the rest of the, you know, the rest of

of the world thinks or you know understands that um one of the greatest risks for death comes from smoking so you know just just don't smoke um i'll leave it at that for now and let you let you ask the fall whatever follow-up question you might want to interject here yeah there's there's a lot there and and so i i you know came upon your work a few years ago um your your your blog marks daily apple and really i want to i want to talk about from the It's not like a diet. It's a lifestyle. It's your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your,

one, just the way you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, live it, which I assume helps with to negate some of that stress as well as then what the, the, the foods that you decide to put in your body, because while some might say there's, a, it's somewhat paleo, uh, you have a different, different approach than what I think, you know, I speak with a lot of people who I think are quite intelligent, not necessarily about nutrition, but about just business or leadership in general. And they have absolutely no clue about what to eat. I'm sure you find a lot of these types of people that are quite intelligent, but they don't spend any time learning about what they should put in their body. And I think as a leader, and this is called The Learning Leaders Show.

So, you know, nutrition is not, I don't typically speak with people like you, Mark, but it's so critical to be mentally prepared to lead groups of people to be physically able to do it. And some of the greatest leaders I've ever seen, they spend a great deal of time understanding what they're putting into their body, the type of workouts that they do. And so I wanted to really focus on that for this conversation so that maybe people that are listening are traveling all the time and they say it's so hard to eat healthy when I travel. It's so hard to get in the necessary workouts when I travel. or they just have a lot going on.

This gets put on the back burner even though it should never do that. So when somebody, Mark, that has never met you before, comes up to you and ask you, and they say, hey, Mark, it's nice to meet you, what do you do? How do you respond? Well, I mean, I'm not sure I understand the question. If we're going off the intro to that question, which is how do you eat, how do you, you know, orchestrate a healthy lifestyle as a business leader. I can tell you that, first of all, yeah, you have to understand that business performance is no different from sports performance.

You need to be at your peak to lead, to be able to make decisions on the fly. You know, Gary Vee sort of famously suggests that CEOs, all they do is wade through the crap. You know, all they do is handle the negative stuff because the positive stuff just keeps going forward without requiring any kind of intervention or decision. So you need to be on your game. And if you get sick a lot, let's just say you get colds and flu because you can handle the stress and your diet sucks and you compromise your immune system, you know, you're off your game.

You're out, you're in your head. You can't identify what the situation is that needs to be handled immediately. And that's just colds and flu. What about being run down? What about jet lag, the number of business leaders that I see who even a three-hour trip from, I mean three-hour, three-hour time zone change from New York to the West Coast can leave them fried for three days because they don't know how to handle jet lag, let alone a trip to Europe or a trip to China.

There are a number of people who I find even when they're on their game, need to be. to take a nap. They get, you know, take a quote, power nap at two or three o'clock in the afternoon because they haven't handled their diet appropriately. They don't, they don't know how to extract the greatest amount of energy from the food that they're eating or to, or to burn body fat, which is like this gift that we're all born with. You know, we are all programmed at birth to be really good at burning fat, but we screw it up because we start eating these sugar-laden diets that kind of shift all of our gene expression away from fat burning and toward a sugar-dependent metabolism. So, you know, there are strategies that I teach in the primal blueprint and on Mark's

Daily Apple that are designed to, number one, get you away from a sugar-based lifestyle and into a fat-burning lifestyle. We call it a fat-burning beast. And to the extent that you cut the simple sugars and the sweetened beverages and a lot of the refined carbohydrate and some of the process and even the whole grains and reorient your diet. And, and reorient your diet. it toward meat, fish, foul, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit. Basically, the food that we evolved to eat over millions of years, you find that you become better at burning fat. You're less reliant on sugar. Now, how that plays out in your life is that when you decrease the amount of sugar that you're required, that your body requires, you also

enhance your immune system because sugar is a huge immune suppressor. Sugar bombs throughout the day, whether it's waffles and juice or cereal and toast for breakfast and then a sandwich and some chips for lunch or a bagel at a snack time or spaghetti and pasta and whatever else it is for dinner. These things are big carbohydrate insults to the body that can raise insulin. And so you get these wild insulin swings throughout the day if you're dependent on sugar, which can lead to productivity swings to mood swings. they can increase the amount of inflammation. So you literally are more sore than you would have been had you dialed your diet in. So that's just – and that, by the way, Ryan, that's just the diet aspect of it. I suggest to people who are – even if you're in business, I mean, figure out a way that you can get some of your conference calls while you're walking on a treadmill or walking outside.

I mean, I got a billionaire friend of mine who does a lot of his conference calls on a – hikes. You know, he has a headset. He hikes. He gets the work done. Nobody knows what he's doing, but he's getting the work done while he's actively being involved in business meetings. Get some sun exposure. So many business people stay out of the sun because their doctor told them to or stay out of the sun just because they're deskbound or office bound all day long. And yet the lack of sunlight means lack of vitamin D for a lot of these people. vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins that actually should be more classified as a hormone, but it's involved in the immune system. So a lot of people get sick because they're low in vitamin D.

And they wonder, well, you know, maybe I should be increasing my vitamin C or I should be, you know, doing some other something else to improve my immunity. But in fact, it's probably a lack of sunlight. That's probably the key driver of that. A lot of business people I know have that kind of calm. mantra, which is, I'll sleep when I'm dead, right? I mean, people brag about getting four or five hours of sleep a night and being effective. Well, I guarantee you, after a certain number of days of doing that, you are not effective on four or five hours of sleep a night. Sleep is grossly overlooked by so many business people. So there are so many ways we could take this, Ryan. There are so many so many different aspects to peak performance that apply to business people who are who are trying

to you know carve out um make a name for themselves in this world or to or to change the world with their with their new app or their new widget or their new technology and and but you got to look out for number one first you can't be an effective leader if you're sick or if you're not at your peak How do you become a fat burning beast? Well, so here's the deal. So as I explained a little bit earlier, you know, we're born with this genetic recipe that wants us to be good at burning fat. It knows how to do it because it's the coding is in the genes from millions of years of humans having to fight for every morsel of food they ever put in their mouths and going some days without eating at all. sometimes weeks, and yet being able to maintain muscle mass, maintain energy, maintain cognition

in the face of this lack of food, the body developed these methods of taking fat out of storage and burning the fat for fuel and then using one of the byproducts of that fat metabolism, we call those ketone bodies, as an alternative to glucose. And so we have this information deeply coded within us. And all we have to do is turn those genes on that are ready to take fat out of storage and burn it. You know, we all have this recipe. We all possess it. But so many of us spent most of our lives with ready access to carbohydrates.

And carbohydrates, when you consume them, convert to glucose and the body, yes, the body burns glucose quite readily, but it burns it mostly because it's toxic in large quantities. so the body wants to burn glucose to get rid of it. It also wants to try and store it in the muscle cells and more insidiously to store it in the fat cells. So to the extent that we can cut back on the amount of glucose we take in, to the extent that we can cut back on the sugars, the sweetened beverages, the desserts, the candies, a lot of the things that convert to glucose,

like the pastas, the breads, the cereals, the crackers, and eliminate those or cut way back on those and just focus on healthy protein, healthy fats, some fruits and vegetables, we start to give the signals to our body that, hey, there's not going to be that much glucose available in the next couple of days. Let's start burning fat. Let's build the metabolic machinery to be better at burning fat because maybe we won't be getting that much carbohydrate.

So over a period of weeks, it doesn't take long, the body starts to upregulate all these enzyme systems that are involved in taking fat out of storage and burning it as fuel. The body starts to build more mitochondria, which are these little energy factories in the muscle cells in particular where the fat metabolism occurs. So when the body gets the signal that there's not going to be much glucose and we're going to have to start relying on fat, it starts to build more these furnaces. It's called mitochondrial biogenesis. And this is a great thing. It means that not only are you burning fat when you're working out or when you're under under stress, but even when you're just sitting around doing nothing, you're mostly burning fat. And over time, that, you know, we have a pretty

much unlimited amount of fat on us. I'm 172 pounds. I'm, you know, 9% body fat. I still got 40,000 calories of fat on me. So I've got a lot of fuel that I could be carrying around, that I could be burning off. And the practical applications of this would be, you know, you've got a meeting. It starts at 10.30 in the morning and all of a sudden it gets heated and it doesn't, and it keeps going. It doesn't break for lunch and goes till three o'clock in the afternoon. And that's no big deal if you're a fat burner because your body can take that, get all the energy you need. There's no drop in blood sugar because your, you know, your body knows how to take fat out of storage. It knows how to skip meals easily without any disruption of cognition or energy levels or anything like that.

So that's the kind of practical application. Or you're on a cross-country flight and they don't serve food. No big deal. You know, in the old days, I had to eat every couple of hours because I was caught up in that non-fat burning carbohydrate paradigm. And, you know, if there was four or five hours where I wasn't going to get a meal, I would get, you know, hangary, as they say now. I would get ready to rip someone's head off.

So once I develop the skill to become the fat-burning beast that I am today, I can skip meals all the time with no adverse effect whatsoever. In fact, you know, I'll wake up in the morning. I have a cup of coffee. You know, we're talking now. I just got back from the gym. I did a heavy workout. The gym. I haven't eaten yet today.

I've got a one o'clock lunch. That's the first time I'll eat today. So I eat in what we call a compressed eating window between one people. PM and 7 p.m. And then I don't eat outside that window. Partly because I know it's good for me, partly because I'm not hungry. You know, I don't wake up hungry. And I say to people, look, if you're not hungry, then why eat? Just because it's noon doesn't mean you have to have lunch if you're not hungry. So we, you know, we teach this skill of how to be really good at burning fat, accessing your stored body fat. And over time, what happens is you burn off that stored body fat

and you trend toward your ideal body composition without having to go to the gym and sweat for miles and miles and miles on the treadmill or the elliptical or the bike. Interesting. You know, I'm going to use the word like they say and that type of thing. I think you can understand what I mean by day,

maybe just things I've heard. I think I'm relatively healthy, played college football a little bit after college, do some triathlon stuff now, work out pretty much every day or most days. Maybe I'm overdoing it, actually now I think about it. But a lot of people say you got to eat breakfast because it kickstarts your metabolism. When you hear that, what do you think?

You know, I just think old technology. I think 30-year-old mantra that works if you are sugar burner. So here's the deal. If you've been dependent on carbohydrates your whole life and you haven't learned how to burn fat, then a couple of different physiological reactions. happen when you don't eat. The brain expects glucose and you haven't provided it because you haven't eaten and because you haven't become good at burning fat and you haven't become fat adapted or keto adapted. The brain doesn't know how to use ketones. So you don't eat for you skip a meal

and your brain literally starts a process that sends signals to the adrenal glands, the stress glands to go, okay, no glucose, a big problem. We got to start doing something about it. I know, let's give a pulse of cortisol, and that cortisol will then start to figure out ways to create glucose for the brain. And one of the ways it does that is it literally strips muscle tissue of some amino acids

that it then sends to the liver to be converted into glucose so the brain can function more clearly. So when you skip a meal, like, you know, if you're a sugar burn and you wake up and, and invariably if you're a sugar burner, you wake up, you're probably hungry. So if you don't eat breakfast, that whole stress process begins. And yes, you'll tear down muscle tissue. You'll start your day off rather poorly and it'll be a, you know, it'll be a shit show from there on. Now, if you're a fat burner and you've learned how to access stored body fat, you wake up, you're already burning fat in the morning.

You don't really, I wake up, I'm never hungry for breakfast. I'm not even hungry after a hard workout sometimes. I basically work out fast and come back and I'm still not hungry. It takes about two hours for the hunger to kick in because I'm so good at burning fat that, and I'm so good at accessing that fat for energy that I don't need it. And therefore, my brain doesn't get kind of frantic and start initiating this stress response to create the adrenals to send out cortisol to strip the muscle tissue. So all those things that happened when I was a sugar burner no longer happened because I'm good at burning fat.

So it's almost like, yes, that's true. If you're still a sugar burner, then breakfast is probably a good thing. Otherwise, you're going to start the day off at a disadvantage. But if you're a fat burner, if you're really good at burning fat, you don't, and if you wake up and you're not hungry, then don't eat. You don't need to eat. You're proof right there that you're, you're your body knows how to get energy from your stored body fat and doesn't require a meal, an exogenous feeding of carbohydrate to jumpstart everything. Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense.

I like to think I do a moderately good job of avoiding a lot of the bad food you talk about, although sometimes I eat like Ezekiel bread, but stay away from most grains, don't really eat pasta. This is because I've been looking at your work over the last few years. I've had friends who have followed the primal blueprint to a tea, and it's dramatically changed their lives and their family's lives because they've followed it. They've even had developed a love for cooking and making meals, which is really neat, especially from someone who's never done that before. And so I think, but for me, I almost felt like, well, I've got to eat, even if I'm not hungry for breakfast. And I usually do a workout in the morning without having eaten before. or usually just drink water prior to.

I'm not really a big coffee drink. I don't like coffee, but I like some teas. So I think part of what I want to talk about during this conversation, too, is what are some of the specific foods to eat and what not to eat? And I'm also secondarily want to talk about the amount of time, and I believe it's roughly around 21 days or so based on some of the things you've written, that it takes to if somebody right now, let's say they're a, they eat post. They eat breads. They eat dessert sometimes. They drink wine, beer, and they're saying, wow, this is like eye-opening to me. I need to really get a grasp on this.

And so those are some of the broader topics that I want to cover. First, let's start with some of the basic foods that a lot of people might believe are actually healthy, but are not. Specifically when we're, let's talk about grains, maybe fruit and then certainly sugar and go from there if you could. Yeah. So the grain thing, I mean, it's grains are pervasive in our society. They're everywhere. They take all sorts of shapes from cereals to, you know, bread, waffles, toast, baguettes, rolls, bagels, and then pasta, and there's all manifestation of pastas. And so if you, if you kind of take a look at your, do an assessment and audit, if you will, of your current diet, and you find out that there are a lot of grain foods in there. Typically, the best that you can say about grains are that it's kind of like a beige glop food that needs something on it to taste good. In other words, pasta probably needs a great sauce on it. Bread probably needs butter or jam or something on it.

Cereal needs, you know, sugar and milk and maybe some fruits on it. So basically, grains are a convenient way of getting carbohydrates into the diet. And that's the best thing that you can say about grains. because a lot of people, myself included, have some severely negative reactions to grains. My life was, I had irritable bowel syndrome until I was 47. And it wasn't until I got rid of the grains that I realized, dang, it wasn't that I was a stressful individual. It was the, it was the freaking grains that was causing this IBS on a daily basis that basically ran my life. and when I got rid of the grains, I mean, literally within 30 days my life changed forever.

And it was because, you know, my gut is really, really sensitive to gluten and some of the other protein forms that occur not just in wheat, but in barley and rye and millet and other in corn to a certain extent. So I think there are a lot of people. I mean, it was eye-opening for me. I thought, well, you know, here I was a researcher and having all right, you know, read a lot about how antithetical grains might be to the human diet, I was still kind of defending my right to eat grains into my 40s. Like I was not willing to see that that was an issue because

I wasn't celiac. I didn't test positive for celiac disease, but I was falling under that same assumption that, you know, whole grains were healthy, they were heart healthy. And finally, my wife, just who had already given up grains said, look, let's just give it up for 30 days and see what happens. Well, it was so transformative for me, life-changing, that I realized, wow, there must be tens of millions of people like me who don't know why they have IBS or polycystic ovarian syndrome or skin issues, rashes, or arthritis, or gastroasophageal reflux, you know, that sort of heartburn manifestations or they get colds and flu so often. And all of those things that I had, because I had arthritis and I had GERD and I had, I had, you know, I was getting upper respiratory

tract infection six or eight times a year. All those things went away when I gave up the grains. So I've made kind of an anti-grain crusade for the past 10 years that I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to give up grains forever, but man, if you've got any sort of health issues, why not go 30 days without as an experiment and see what happens? So just to recap, there's that, You know, there's that potential that you could have some physiological issues that result from the, what we call the anti-nutrients in grain. And then there's also just the basic fact that most grains convert to glucose pretty quickly. So your body doesn't know whether the glucose in your bloodstream right now came from a bowl

of spaghetti or a bowl of skittles. Once it's glucose in the body, the brain registers it the same way, it's the same glucose molecule, et cetera, et cetera. So that would be one reason to give up grains. We talked and then we talk about a little bit about giving up legumes Some people have issues with the lectins These are again is these are other anti-nutrients that are in legumes So these would be the kidney beans black beans lentils piece things like that

I've softened my stance on on legumes in the past couple of years As more and more information about resistant starch and the requirement to offer some kind of substrate to all of the 100 trillion healthy bacteria that are living in your gut and that you want to feed, right? So we've softened our stance on legumes a little bit. Have never softened the stance on sugar. Still think sugar is pretty damn evil. Now, does that mean I never have sugar? No, I have a teaspoon in my coffee in the morning. You know, I like my coffee to taste great. But I don't drink sodas that have the equivalent of 20 teaspoons. I don't drink the kinds of wine that have the equivalent of 10 or 12 teaspoons of sugar. Most people don't know that about

American wines, but a lot of American wines have a crap load of sugar in them. I certainly don't eat a lot of, you know, I don't eat candies and desserts and stuff. I'll have a bite once in a while. You know, if somebody made a great triple chocolate cake or some piece of pie, I'll have a bite or two, but I don't, I'm not, never compelled to finish what's on my plate. You mentioned a little bit about the alcohol and the beer. I've cut back. I used to be a huge beer drinker, but with the grain issues, I cut way back on beers, I started drinking wines as a substitute for that. Then I found out that I was drinking two glasses a night of wine. And while it didn't negatively impact me, and I was looking at all the research that suggested that two glasses of wine a night

was probably healthy, healthier than not drinking at all. Something in the back of my brain said, that can't be right. It can't exactly be, you know, ethanol is still toxic to humans. So I gave up wine for about a year and a half. And then I met a guy who was experimenting with paleo wines. These are wines that are low sugar, low alcohol, old growth vineyards, no additives in them. And he convinced me that the problem that most people had had with wines, and I was one of those, you know, the stuffiness, the headaches, the not being able to sleep or falling asleep quickly and then waking up at three o'clock in the morning. morning, all that kind of went away when I discovered that, yeah, there's some wines that you can drink that circumvent all of those traditional problems that we might have with wine. So now I'm back

to having a glass every one glass every couple of nights because I can. And you know, my, look, Ryan, my life isn't about some Spartan restrictive diet. I love to eat. I love to enjoy every bite of food I put in my mouth. I just have sort of a list of things that I don't eat. and I recommend that people not eat. And then I just got a big, long list of all the things that people can eat. And they're great, you know, awesome foods. If I'm sitting down to a rib-eye steak with a glass of wine and a big bowl of butter-sautayed mushrooms, do I feel bad that I didn't eat the bread basket that came before it?

No, it's not in the least. I'm savoring every bite. The other aspect of this, Mark, is you'll hear when people, or on some sort of diet or even a lifestyle change when it comes to what they eat, they will have what they call a cheat day or cheat meal where they will just go crazy. I've had systems in place that allowed for this where on Saturday there would be pizza and dessert and all of that type of stuff. I always felt terrible when I would do it.

But still, that was a part of it. What do you think from a moderation perspective about the whole thoughts of cheat meals or days? Pretty. I have a, I hope it's a funny analogy, but I, you know, somebody asked me this before and I said, okay, let's look at it this way. Are you married? He says, yeah, I'm married. Uh-oh.

Do you love your wife? Yeah. Are you committed to the relationship? Yeah. So what's your cheat day? You know, so if you're committed to this program, then having a cheat day, you know, isn't really committed. It's just, it's almost like, okay, I'm being a good boy six days of the week so I can be a bad boy on the seventh day, right?

Right. And I understand that, you know, that's how some people get through this. But this is not, you have to look at this as a lifestyle. This is what you're going to do for the rest of your life. And if you can orchestrate it in a way that's, that every day is enjoyable rather than, have a mindset that, well, this is just six days of hell, and then all of a sudden I get to go off the wagon for one day. And by the way, you said you felt like you didn't feel that great on your cheat days, right?

Terrible. Like even if you eat like dessert and pizza. No, I know. So it's like just like if you're married and you have a cheat day, I'm sure you feel terrible after that. But, you know, so. I haven't had one of those yet. Okay. Not I shouldn't say yet.

I have not how one of those. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's, to be sure. But the, but, you know, the point is life should be about enjoying every possible moment and getting the most out of it. So figure out a way to make those six days, the seven days, you know, so enjoyable that you don't need a cheat day so that you don't feel compelled to go off the wagon. Now, now does that mean that everyone's like, look, I just got back from Italy.

I was in Italy for 10 days. Yeah, you damn straight. I had a bite of pizza when I was over there, but I didn't have the whole pizza, right? I had a half a slice. It was great. Yep, got it. I got what that tastes like. It's pretty cool. But I wasn't compelled to, you know, stuff the whole thing down my pie hole just because I was in Italy. I have, again, I try desserts once in a while. I'm not compelled to eat all 1,700 calories of that big piece of pie that, whatever, that was put on my plate. Because at some point, after three or four bites, the gustatory senses have been satisfied. and you don't need every other, you know, the next 22 bites, right? It's a matter of degree and it's a matter of, I think, mindfulness that says, okay, I'm not

going to be draconian about this. I'm not going to say never, never, never, but I'm also not going to be caught up in letting myself, you know, go crazy. And I think when people get on a program like ours, I want to say the danger. well, I will say, kind of the danger is that you get so good at it, you get so clean that then when you do go off the wagon, like you mentioned, you do feel like crap. Yeah. Because you've, you've reclaimed a lot of the sensitivity in your body and you've tuned yourself to energy levels and hormone levels that are, that are, you know, more normalized because you're eating good,

healthy, wholesome food. And then you have a big piece of sugary, whatever it is. And you get an insulin spike and you get all sorts of maybe an adrenaline surge and you can't you start sweating and you can't sleep that night and and you go, Jesus, I did, I'm going through five hours of misery just because for two minutes of some gustatory pleasure. You know, it just I'm making a note to self, don't do that again, right? Yeah. And I think he noticed too, sugar is seriously maybe the most addictive drug in the world, man. I mean, I haven't tried others, I guess, but so I am not, I'm not the one to ask about that. But when you start, it's, it's so easy to keep, to keep eating it, whether it's a sour patch kid or a donut or something terrible. It just is like, it's like,

I don't know what it is. The chemicals, you probably do know what it is. That tells you to keep doing it. And then, and then again, you feel completely awful when you get done with one of those moments. And it's like, I'm never doing that again, you know. Until you do it again. Until you do it again. Exactly right. But it's such an addictive. It almost feels like a dangerous drug to because it's hard to stop.

And I could see why people, why this is an epidemic within our country. Well, it is. And it is addictive. And it's powerfully addictive. For a lot of people, sugar, you know, look, it's hardwired into all of us to seek sugar. Because for millions of years of evolution prior to the last 10,000 years, sugar was very rare. And if you came across sugar, you were sort of compelled to consume a lot of it, to store it up as calories and store it as fat. Well, that wiring still exists in a lot of us.

So we still have this feel-good experience when we consume sugar because the body, the coding in the body says, yeah, consume lots of it and store it as fat because you might not be able to, you might not be eating more tomorrow or next week or next month. So, of course, the problem is sugar is everywhere. And so we don't have that, that scarcity issue that we had for millions of years. So there's that hardwiring. Some people are even more addicted and have a, you know, a real issue with it. Interestingly, you know, you look at a lot of the addictive programs, a lot of people in rehab or out of rehab or people doing AA. You'll notice they have, you know, donuts and sugary stuff at the meetings. Yeah.

Because there's a, there's a sense that, okay, I'm not. shooting heroin anymore or I'm not consuming all the alcohol, but I'm replacing that part of that feel-good experience with sugar that's making it easier for me to go cold turkey on whatever the hard stuff that I was using before. But that's not necessarily a good thing. It just gets you past, it just, again, it replaces kind of one addiction with another. When you start to cut back on the carbohydrate load across the board, when you cut back on the breads and the pastas and the cereals, and the rice, all of which convert to glucose in the bloodstream, that lower amount of glucose is telling the brain, hey, you know, there's not a lot of sugar. Remember what I said,

the Skittles and pasta analogy that once it's in the bloodstream, the brain doesn't know whether it came from sourpatch candies or from dessert or from some whole grain pasta. So when you cut the load across the board, whether or not it's just the sweetened candies of beverages, but you also start cutting the unsweetened stuff that converts the glucose, that does reduce the load on the body, and it does start to lower the cravings, if you will, which are the big issue that so many people have. I mean, the worst time for a lot of people, particularly single people, is, you know, after 8 o'clock at night if you're home alone.

Ice cream, yeah. Yeah, it's just that tendency to reach for something sweet because, I don't know, there's just that craving, that compulsion. Did you see the New York Times article that came out recently where it stated the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down a link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead? Did you see that? Oh, yeah. Wow. Oh, that's, you know, I think it's a bit naive to think that that hasn't been happening in every area of science for the last hundred years.

That's scary. You know, so much, so much of public policy. policy goes back to lobbying and to, you know, paying off the people at the level of doing the science. Or maybe it's as simple as for the longest time. Once that saturated fat being the bad guy, the evil of saturated fat arose, then any government funding to prove otherwise was turned down. So the only funding you could get for a study was to continue to prove that saturated fat was the culprit. So yeah, I mean, it's, you know, look, I'm a cynic. Okay, I say I'm a skeptic.

It's probably a nicer way of saying it, but I'm a cynic. I'm pretty cynical about a lot of stuff in this world and certainly when it has to do with public policy and governments and the links between, you know, big business and their interests. So I look at everything with kind of a jaundiced eye and that's kind of how Mark's Daily Apple arose and that's how the primal blueprint arose as a trying to poke a finger in the eye of conventional wisdom and say hey you guys have gotten it all wrong and here's a different way of looking at it. How do you respond to the skeptic right now listening? He's right in the middle of a long car ride and they're saying who is this guy? Who does he think he is? Like where does he get off saying this? I think I have an understanding on what's

good for me. I'm relatively healthy. I lift weights and I can run 5Ks and I feel okay. And I like to, I love to eat, you know, lasagna and key lime pie and have beers. I mean, what do you say to that? Or maybe you could share some of your background of where this, where you started from as an endurance athlete to where you've come today. Yeah, well, first of all, to that person I say, go for it, man. If it works for you, I'm not going to judge your life choices. All we're doing here, we're doing a thought experiment and we're suggesting that there might be some choices out there that would that would lead to slightly different outcomes. But I'm not one to go, okay, your life sucks because you still eat pasta. You know, you're doing 5Ks and 10Ks and maybe you're not

sleeping as well as you might want to. But hey, if you're digging life, then go for it. I want, You know, I want some of that. But what I'm saying is for all those people who have had come to a roadblock, who've plateaued, who've not had success, who've been frustrated at the traditional advice that they've gotten from the medical community. And most people who come to Mark's Daily Apple, I mean, certainly a majority come because they are frustrated, because they've got they're overweight and they haven't been able to lose the weight, or they feel tired, or they've got Hashimoto's, or they've got type 2 diabetes, and their doctor told them they're going to be in meds the rest of your life.

They got polycystic ovarian syndrome, they got arthritis. They got issues they want to deal with. And none of us are really compelled to make a change in our lives if everything's going great, right? So it's really the ones who are the most frustrated, who are most receptive to this sort of advice and information. And those are the people that I talk to on a regular basis. And those are people I say, look, again, you know, I'm not going to tell you that I've got

the answer. a choice. I have an option that my research suggests might get you to your desired goal or your desired outcome with a little bit more ease and grace and less discomfort than what you're currently doing. Would you be willing to try that for 30 days? That's all. But, you know, I've got millions of people who will go, wow, you changed my life. That's unbelievable. I had no idea that this level of health was available to me. You know, the person you talked about is driving. in his car and he's doing 5Ks, he's lifting weights, and he's eating pasta, and he has drinks beer once a while. Yeah, maybe if that person did an audit of his or her life and

said, well, you know, I do have a little bit of joint pain when I wake up in the morning. That could be arthritis. I don't know. I do get heartburn. If I eat, you know, late at night, I do get colds and flu. Maybe I'm training inappropriately for the rest of my life. I do feel some stress. You know, it's really, you know, humans do what we can get away with, right? And if you're a person who eats a lot of sugar and doesn't gain weight and you can get away with that, then you're not going to change. But even when we do what we can get away with, we sometimes hit a point where like,

uh-oh, I can't get away with this anymore. You know, I've been gaining four pounds a year for the last 10 years. I'm 40 pounds overweight now. I better do something about this. I'm 50. This does not look good for the next. a couple of decades if I don't take charge of it right now. So that's what I'm here for. I'm here as sort of a just another option, another guy who's making a set of life choices that you might

want to take on if you're at that point where you're kind of, you know, ready to get to the next level. Let's get practical now. I actually had a conversation like this with Ben Greenfield. I know Ben said you and him have gotten together a few times and talked. He was a guest in this podcast, and I saw him at a conference and had a meal with him, actually. And this is one of the questions I asked him, so I'd love to ask it to you. So your lifestyle, I know you travel some, but you've designed, I think, a lifestyle to where, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not going into an office at eight in the morning and having meetings all day with a boss and things of that nature. However, there's a lot of people listening who do, or they are in their car in between appointments. They're traveling on airplanes.

They're staying in hotels. They're very busy. They, when it comes to their meals, there's a couple of different things that happen. One, they're either have very limited amount of time, so they're going, they're getting fast food or whatever. Or they're on the road, and it's tough, you know, eating in a hotel sometimes with a lot of appointments. and work happening. So I'd love to potentially help some of those people, Mark. What are some of the practical tips and advice you would give to the very busy,

constantly in meetings, traveling type of business professional that's probably listening to this podcast when it comes to specifically how they prep from a food perspective? Well, from a food perspective, first of all, you know, spend time becoming fat adapted. So get into that space where you're not carbohydrate dependent. Get fat adapted. When you get fat adapted, if you do need breakfast or even lunch, you know, every hotel has a restaurant where you can get an omelet. So you can always get eggs with some vegetables in them. And, you know, that's whether or not it was cooked in ghee or butter is sort of immaterial.

You know, you want to get the best possible solution for where you are at that time. Every restaurant in every city, I sort of have a challenge. Like, you can't put me in a restaurant where I can't find something that's either on the menu or that I can have a chef make for me really quickly that'll satisfy everything. I need to put me in a Mexican restaurant with, you know, with rice and beans and chips. And I'll say, give me a double carne asada with guacamole and a little dollop of sour cream. It might be the best meal I have that week. And yet somebody would have said, oh, it's Mexican food.

I'm going to have to go for the beans and the rice and chips. And here goes, you know, my diet's gone to hell. So there's, it's a, it's, it's literally learning how to forage off of any menu that you encounter and being creative in the absence of, if, if it's not on the menu, just go back to, you know, have the, have the waiter go back and say, hey, can the chef whip up four eggs with a, you know, with a little bit of onion and some, and some mushrooms and and a little side of cheese or whatever, or, you know, I'm sure there's a piece of meat back there that he can cook up for me with some steamed vegetables. All this stuff, what I find is that people get into that sort of excuse of like,

well, I'm on the road, so therefore there's no way I can comply with my otherwise strict diet, so I'm just going to go to hell. The other thing about being on the road is I find that a lot times when you're on the roads, especially if you're in a city, there's a lot of walking in the city, spend time walking, walk to the meetings, plan for that, walk up the stairs instead of the elevator. If you, if the hotel you're in has a gym, use the gym. If it doesn't have a gym, you know, I have this routine I do that might be 100 pushups and 200 air squats in my bedroom while the Today Show is on. And I'm done. That was a great, that was one of the, might have been one of the better workouts I did. I don't do them consequentially. I might do,

you know, five sets of 20 and 40 or something. But, but, but, um, and by the end of that, that little seven-minute routine or whatever it takes, 10-minute routine, I'm good to go, man. I've done my work. There's nothing more I could do in a gym that would lead me better, you know, having had a better workout. And I don't have to, I don't have it hanging over my head the rest of the day or the rest of the trip. I could even take the next day off and not feel guilty about not working out. So I just find that so many business travelers, you know, kind of use the excuse of, well, I'm on the road. I don't have the time. I can't do it. And I bet if we sat down and, you know, we really looked at the schedule.

There's plenty of time in-betweens. Yeah, I agree. I was speaking with a CEO recently who travels literally every week all over the world. This was a mentor mine. It wasn't recorded. And I asked him about this specifically because I knew this was coming up with you, Mark, this conversation. And this is a guy who's in incredible shape. And he described the planning that he puts in.

place both from a work. He's a CrossFit guy, which is even harder to do, I think, when you travel. The planning of all of the CrossFit places all over the world, literally, that he has mapped out to go to and built relationships with people there so he could show up at whatever time he needed to show up, as well as the meals then he needs prepared. It was quite impressive because of all people he could have easily given excuses. And I think that's a big part of it. So I appreciate you sharing that. Well, I'll go you one better on that and say that here's a guy who now he's got sort of this common theme that whenever he goes to a new city, he makes friends at a new CrossFit box. And it's part of an enjoyable part of the travel for him, not, and it's consistent in that, you know, it's comfortable for him.

And it's not something that he's, oh, fighting to make happen. He wants to make it happen. right exactly right yeah yeah and meeting meeting people developing and building relationships along the way which is which is important i think it's a healthy part of uh of living um another note that i wrote down that i was curious your take on i've never experimented with being a vegan how does that work or what are your thoughts on on being a vegan for those who are listening well i think it's it's tough um i can't i'm not going to say it can't be done in the context of the primary blueprint. I think there are a few vegans who are following the primal blueprint. I think whether

you're comparing diets across the board, vegans, pescatarians, vegetarians, massive carnivores, ancestral leaders, it's really if, and all of them will argue, oh, we got great results. Well, the results you got were from what you gave up, what you're not eating. So you're not eating the industrial seed oil is a processed crap, the sugars. You are eating, you know, whatever you're eating. And by the way, most or all of these are still plant-based diet. Even the primal blueprint's kind of a plant-based diet. It's vegetable-heavy, right? It's vegetable-centric. The only issue, the only difference is where you get your protein from. And to the extent that a vegan can get protein from some of the new vegan protein powders, then there's ways to maximize health and

optimize health doing that. So I would never take somebody to try to convince them to eat meat if they're a vegan. It's also an impossible task if you've ever talked to a vegan. You'll know it. You'll know it if you talk to one. I'm curious to get a typical, you don't need to share like the business side, because I think, again, the focus of this conversation is on the moving your body aspect as well as what you put into your body. So what is it like for you, Mark, typically on what time you wake up, what you do, what you eat at what times and then what physical activity you like to. incorporate. I know it's not the same every day, obviously, but curious are for you to share so that maybe other people get some ideas here. Yeah, well, for me, look, I'm a business owner. I have a lot of great employees, so I'm a huge advocate of finding the best possible employees

because that just unburdens me of a lot of stuff that I have to do. So I get up in the morning around 6.30. I have a big cup of coffee. I read two papers quickly. I do crossword puzzles and and pseudocos and Kenkins, but I do them really quickly. I'm pretty quick at that stuff. I just get my brain sharpened up. Then I hit the desk and email and work for about an hour, hour and a half. Typically break around 9.30. Today I went to the gym and did a quick bunch of push-ups, pull-ups, dips, dips, squats, lunges,

body weight stuff, mostly because yesterday I played a hard game of Ultimate. So I don't have, I'm not recovered from that yet enough to be doing any really heavy stuff. Came back, have this conversation with you. Got an 1130 lunch with an employee for an hour, got a meeting with a private equity group at 2 o'clock for the rest of the afternoon, and then come back and do some more emails, maybe write a draft of another post coming up in the next couple of days. I typically work until about 7 o'clock at night. My peak working in creative hours are from five to seven for some reason. Seven o'clock, typically my wife says, all right, time to stop work and get out of there.

And so have a nice dinner. That, oh, so the lunch today will, I guarantee, will be a piece of salmon, a side of broccoli and a side of wild rice. I won't finish the wild rice, but I have some tastes of it. And just to be real specific, I'll have a non-alcoholic beer. It's a Beck's non-alcoholic because I know the restaurant I'm going to, and that's my go-to. go-to kind of meal there. So that'll be what I'll eat today.

Why do you drink the non-alcoholic beer? All right, so I don't like water. I don't like... You don't like water. I don't like water. I want to get some form of hydration. I found, when I went through my wine, beer, wash-out experiment a couple of years ago,

I needed something that was sort of had that savory, fizzy thing that wasn't a cola or wasn't whatever. And I, so I've got a, so I have a non-alcoholic beer. What can I tell you? It's just, uh, isn't that bad from a grains perspective? No, it's not. So I've found, I found a couple that are what you would call gluten-free or low-glut. Okay.

So it fits all of the, I check off all the boxes on that one, right? Okay. Um, yeah. So then again, back to, back to, I'll go through the rest of the afternoon with meetings and, and, and whatever. Then around, um, seven o'clock, then I'll have a, uh, I've got a wag, I've got a nice piece of wag you short rib that I've thawed out for dinner tonight, probably some more steamed vegetables. I might have a piece of dark chocolate after that. I might have a glass of one of those paleo wines, and that's it. One of the things I've noticed over the years, it takes me fewer calories

to get through the day. And that's a good thing because I'm more efficient at this. And, you know, that works. If eating fewer calories throughout the day works provided, A, you don't lose muscle mass, B, you keep up your energy. C, you don't get sick. And most importantly, you don't get hungry. So I've really dialed in my hunger over the years. And I realize that I eat just enough to satisfy my hunger, not so much that I'm full. And I maintain my mass and my strength and everything on probably 30% fewer calories now than I did six or seven years ago.

And you're 62? Is that right? 63. 63. And you are shredded, ripped. People, if you haven't seen them, go look online. I'm thinking, how can I look like you right now? And I'm in my 30s.

And so that's why it's like you're living proof of it. And then there are, just to try to, this, I guess, would have been better earlier in the conversation, but to add credibility for the people who maybe are typical fans of my show that haven't heard of you yet, but will be now, obviously going to Mark's Daily Apple to read more like I've been doing. But you've helped millions upon millions of people and your goal is to help what a hundred million is that correct it was 10 million i make a joke that i said that but now it's

a hundred right yeah and now it's 100 yeah so how do you how do you measure that by the way well um i'm i measure it by people coming up to me out of the blue and and wanting to give me a hug for having uh change their lives yeah um i measure it by you know we have two million unique visitors a month on marks daily apple wow you know i so i've got we've got some metrics here obviously you can't, you know, you can't really measure it, but you can get a sense of it, you know, and I can get a sense that, uh, that, that the 10 million figure was probably too low as a goal. And I, and I'm not at 10 million yet, but I'm close. So I just decided to add a zero just for shits and giggles, right?

Two million uniques, uh, month though. I mean, that's, uh, it's quite a number. That's hard to do, especially from something that probably started from a blog that had one reader, I assume. That's, oh, dude. It was, I blogged every day for a year. And at the end of a year, I had a thousand uniques a day. I mean, a thousand visitors a day.

I thought it was going to be 100,000 when I started, oh, this will be easy. I'll get an audience. It'll be crazy. Well, a year. Wasn't, yeah. I love that, love that part, Mark, because I think there's a, there's a lot of people that are maybe thinking about doing this. And they're saying, oh, well, now it's easy for him because he's got this huge audience. Well, yeah, but at one point, there was an audience of one.

And it took a solid year before you really even had any type of traction. And I think sticking with it, understanding the importance of the message and what you believe in and consistently learning and improving yourself, then it shows. And now it's helping millions of people, which is incredible. Would you, for the people who don't maybe understand the primal blueprint laws, could you share those with me? Yeah, sure. I mean, I just have 10 primal blueprint laws. These are laws that govern human evolution for millions of years. They also, to this day, govern the expectations of our genes.

Our genes expect us to do certain things, and if we don't do those things, we get into trouble. So eat lots of plants and animals. That's, you know, our genes expect us to eat plants and animals, not a lot of crap. Avoid poisonous things. So clearly, historically, humans avoided toxic berries and rotted meat and things like that. but I'm suggesting that we avoid, you know, the sugars and the, and all of the additives, the artificial sweeteners and all that stuff. Number three, move frequently at a slow pace.

Every human for millions of years moved around a lot all day long, but they didn't go out and train for a marathon because that would have been antithetical to their existence. It would have sucked through way too much energy. So move around a lot at a slow pace. Then lift heavy things twice a week. ancestral humans lifted, you know, stones to build stuff, climbed up trees, carried babies, lifted brought carcasses back to camp. We need to replicate that in the gym if that's how it works out or at home. Sprint once in a while. So once in a while, our ancestors had to run like

crazy for their lives. And that sprinting resulted in a pulse of growth hormone and testosterone and a number of other beneficial, short-term beneficial acute responses. So, So I suggest people find a way to sprint once in a while, whether it's on the roads or whether it's on a bike or whether it's on an elliptical or whether it's in the pool. Number six, get adequate sleep. Sleep is really the most overlooked of all the health of variables for most people. And I'm a big fan of getting at least seven and a half up to nine hours of sleep every night. It just, even for, especially for a business person, it manifests itself in a lot more creativity and productivity.

And, you know, the reality is, Ryan, you know, most business people, get all their stuff done in an hour to an hour and a half a day and the rest of it is just filler. I'm sorry. I don't know who you are and I don't care who you are who is listening, but the real creative stuff happens in very, very short periods of time, right? Number six, play. The human brain was designed to play not just in childhood and adolescence, but throughout, throughout life.

It's part of our requirement for strategizing, for orchestrating, planning. And so, you know, your business plan, acumen may be a result of how well you play. Number eight, get adequate sunlight. We talked about that. Vitamin D critical. So people should get sunlight not just for their immune system, but for their mood. Number nine, avoid stupid mistakes. That's the sort of don't smoke, wear your seatbelt, wear a helmet if you're riding a bike.

You know, don't go bunging, jumping, you know, off when some guy is just getting started in the business. whatever, avoid stupid mistakes. And number 10, use your brain. You know, learn a language, play a musical instrument, do puzzles. That's why I do the Kenkins and Sudoku's and Crosswords for 15 to 20 minutes every morning. Use your brain in ways outside of that business pattern. And there's your 10 laws. Love it, man.

What do you think of it? By the way, it just came to mind a stand-up desk for people who sit at a desk all day. I'm talking to you right now from a stand-up desk. I've had it for eight years. It's wonderful. Everybody at my office, all my employees have not only a stand-up desk, if they want one, they have a tread desk. They have a treadmill under their desk where they can walk up as much as they want. Some people walk eight miles a day at 1.7 miles an hour.

Now, at that low level of walking, you could be on a phone call, nobody knows what you're doing. You can be writing. You can be typing. None of it is disrupted. And yet these people are getting enough movement throughout the day that they don't have that workout hanging over their head. when they get home at night, right? So this is just figuring out ways to incorporate all of this stuff into your life with ease and grace and not having it be drudgery and sacrifice.

Love it, man. Thank you so much, Mark, for being here, sharing your knowledge. I believe, firm believer, the best leaders in the world understand they take the time to understand what they put into their body is more important than just about anything else they're going to do. They understand the value of their health and what they can do. to be as healthy as humanly possible. And this is what you do. You study and I appreciate you sharing with me.

Mark, it certainly has had an impact on my life. And I really appreciate it. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Marksdailyapple.com. That's the place to start. Marksdailyapple.com. Thanks again for being here, man. And I definitely want to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man.

I hope to find a way to look like you someday, man. Sure. All right, keep up the good work, Ryan. Take care. Thanks, Mark. Bye. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show.