The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Mark Sisson | The Blueprint For Primal Living

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Mark is the author of numerous books, including The Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal/paleo movement back in 2009. In 2017, he officially became a New York Times bestselling author with The Keto Reset Diet, which reached the #1 overall bestseller among all books on amazon.com for two days. Mark has written several other books, including popular Primal-themed cookbooks and lifestyle books. In this episode, Nick sits down with Mark to discuss the effects that heavy endurance training has on the human body, as well as some approaches to nutrition that can benefit our performance and lead us to a healthier lifestyle. More Resources: BPN website: www.bpnsupps.com Nick’s website: www.nickbare.com Nick’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness Nick’s Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition Follow Us On Social Media! Instagram: @thebareperformancepodcast Facebook: The Bare Performance Podcast Twitter: @BarePerformPod

In this episode of the Bear Performance Podcast, look, we, as a country, we eat way too much food. We eat way too much carbohydrate. We eat way too much processed carbohydrate, way too much sugar. And that's why 40 million Americans are either diagnosed as diabetic or are pre-diabatic because they have lost this insulin sensitivity. They've lost, A, the ability to, for their insulin to even speak to the cells, And so what happens now is when you lose, when the cells become insensitive, hey, we don't want to hear it.

La, blah, blah, la, la. The pancreas goes, well, fuck, we're just going to secrete more insulin. And now your insulin levels go way up. Well, with high insulin levels and with insulin resistance, now insulin is also inflammatory. So now you have sugar that's inflammatory, insulin that's inflammatory. There is a cascade of events that is a potential for disaster for a lot of people. Welcome back to another powerful episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Nick Baer, founder and CEO of Bear Performance Nutrition. Every week, we bring you insightful stories, knowledge, and inspiration to help you reach your full potential in life, fitness, and business. If you enjoy the message we're promoting in this podcast, we would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review on the platform you're listening to. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. that embody the go one more mindset.

All right, today we have Mark Sisson on the podcast. Mark has done a lot and is currently doing a lot. Co-founded Primal Kitchen, which me and my wife, Steph, love Primal Kitchen, condiments, marinated, sauces, author of the Primal Blueprint, the keto Reset Diet, Primal Endurance, two meals a day.

He has a very popular blog called Mark's Daily Apple. and is a very active man. So Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, man. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So I really wanted to kick off this conversation right away. I just finished reading one of your books,

the primal blueprint, the unabridged one on audiobook. Love the book. Love the concepts. It's something I've been diving into more so this past year. And from what I understand, you're what I would consider, one of the pioneers of this primal lifestyle.

And I'm curious, where you discovered this primal lifestyle and why you discovered it or how it became being such part of your life. Yeah. I was, you know, always interested in fitness and health and assumed that the fitter you were, the healthier you were, faulty assumption, number one. And, you know, from an early age, I started jogging, started running to school just out of, you know, It was faster than taking the bus both ways. So I'd run to and from school. By the time I was in high school, I was fit enough to go out for the track team and start winning the mile and two miles. So I got sort of pushed, self-selected, as it were, into a endurance path.

I found out years later that I have pretty good genetic attributes for a combination of strength and endurance, which would have maybe made me a better parkour athlete or a Spartan athlete. But be that as it may, I settled into distance running at an early age. And because I was interested in performing well, and I wanted to race fast and I wanted to race well, I read a lot of books on training. I read a lot of books on diet and how to maximize performance through the combination of diet and exercise and possibly supplementation. And over the years, I kind of went down this path of,

becoming a marathoner and then eventually an Ironman triathlet. And I had a pretty good career. I did well, but I was sick a lot. I was falling apart on the inside. I had severe irritable bowel syndrome. It pretty much dictated what my day would look like, the nearest bathroom, you know, where that was. I had upper respiratory tract infections. I had arthritis in my feet. I had tendonitis in my hips. I had, you know, all these, I had bad acne. I had all these things going on in my body that pointed to something being wrong. And yet, here I was trying to become the picture of health. I was trying to be that performing, high performing athlete.

When I had to retire at the age of 29, I think, from these injuries and from these maladies, I really kind of rededicated the rest of my life to looking at ways in which we could be, I could be strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, and productive with least amount of sacrifice and pain and suffering and all of the sort of negative attributes that we associate with what it takes to be fit or healthy. That took me down a path, sort of calling upon my background. I was pre-med in college, and I had a tremendous interest in evolutionary biology. So I started looking at, you know, the evolution of the human species. How do we get here?

How was it that we forged this genetic recipe that would prefer that we'd be strong and lean and fit? But somehow most of us never achieve that because of the inputs, the behaviors, the foods that turn on the wrong genes and turn off the genes that might, for instance, build muscle and burn fat. Meanwhile, we turn on the genes. It'd make us sick and inflamed. create the conditions for type to diabetes, et cetera, et cetera. So my career path went sort of down this track of looking for these hidden genetic switches that we all have, informed by two and a half million years of human evolution, what were the attributes that every human exhibited,

what were the behaviors that we all sort of went through and did over those two and a half million years to forge this recipe, this genetic recipe that would like us to be healthy. And that sort of turned into a template, if you will, a living template, which became the primal blueprint, the 10 primal blueprint laws. You know, eat lots of plants and animals, move around a lot at a low-level activity, sprint once in a while, lift heavy things, play, get out in some sun, get adequate sleep, you know, avoid poisonous things. It was pretty generic list. But over the years, over the decades, since I first published it, it's been refined to a much more. I think specific set of suggestions, if you will, of how to optimize your fitness and maximize your longevity and at the end of the day, you have the greatest amount of enjoyment out of your

life possible. Well, it seems like people that are revolutionizing these ideas that are that are more common or being argued and, you know, coming into the biohacking space or making these strives to help people achieve greatness and their full potential and health and performance, it's typically for what I'm seeing, people who have reached the levels of extreme. So they've taken one, you know, categories, say, for example, endurance training. I've seen a lot of people who've taken endurance training to the far extreme thinking that it was going to achieve.

his high level of health and performance, and then learning a whole lot through that extremity. And one thing I'm learning and realizing as I'm trying to push extremes is health and performance, they can depend on each other, but more times than none, they're independently, where if you are focused on health, sometimes you're sacrificing some performance. But when you're going after performance,

at the same time, you're sometimes satisfied. sacrificing part of your health? Yeah, I mean, in my first book on training, I wrote in 1981, the Runner's World Triathlon Training Book, I put forth this concept that health and fitness are these two these two parallel lines that start out improving in tandem together. but at some point, in order to improve fitness beyond an inflection point, you have to sacrifice health. And there's just no, there's no getting around that. Now, where is that inflection point for a lot of people? You'll never hit it because this really becomes, I think,

most important to elite athletes. Think Tour de France cyclists, top marathoners, you know, people who are really aggressively challenging the limits of human endurance, or, you know, top top age group athletes who maybe shouldn't be doing this, but are out pursuing their bucket list item of, you know, completing six Iron Man's in a year or, you know, 10 marathons in a month or some, some, you know, bizarre concept like that. So for those people, there is definitely a point at which, the pursuit of performance has a direct cost on overall health. Now, it might not be a long-lasting

cost. It might just be temporary. But when I was a top endurance athlete for the last 15 years of my career, I got colds and flu five, six times a year. I was all, I was had a running nose. I had some, you know, some low-grade infection because I had no immune system. I was eating the wrong foods. It was not supporting my immune system for my diet. And I was over training. I was, I was thinking that more was better in terms of mileage. So, you know, I learned from that experience that if you're going to pursue true excellence, if you're going to be, try to be a world-class athlete, you will sacrifice health. I mean, Mark Allen, arguably the greatest Ironman triathlete that ever lived. You know, he'll basically say, probably left 10 years of his life on the law of

fields of Kona, going to the well, digging so deeply that his brain forcing his body to override every survival mechanism that his body had just to get to the finish line. Those are the types of stresses that we can put on the body that can have an accumulated, well, they can certainly have an acute short-term effect on immune system, on muscle damage, on, you know, I personally suffer from some cardiac damage. I was a guy who ran my heart up to max four or five times every week for 30 years. And so I have scar tissue in my left ventricle, which is a very common effect that my generation of endurance athletes, which goes back to the 60s and 70s, has.

And it was, again, this, you know, kind of a badge of honor, badge of courage through. I'm going to, instead of dropping the pace, I'm going to pick up the pace. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to bring myself to a level of discomfort that is so great that everyone around me is going to have to drop out. So the top athletes in endurance contests know this, that the race is a race of attrition. It's like, how much are you willing to hurt yourself today and drag everyone along with you? So they all, they all say cry uncle, they all tap out. They all drop off and you're left winning the race.

That's the nature of endurance sports. So that's a tremendous stress on the body. And over a lifetime, it can have some deleterious implications. You know, in the short term, I mean, I know you're, you know, you're getting ready to do a marathon. I don't know what your training looks like, and we can talk about that. You're probably experiencing some of the minor negative effects of wrapping, focusing your training on just endurance for a while. That'll, you know, you'll, you'll do your race. You'll have a great time.

You won't have a great time. You'll do a great time. You may have a great time. I don't know. But that'll dissipate. And if you elect to not continue to become a career marathon, or you'll get back to this general overall level of fitness that, you know, that we all ultimately that I think that we all seek.

If you could go back and change anything about your, your endurance career, looking back at kind of the way you ate or the way you trained, are there things that you would have changed to maybe increase the longevity? of how long you wanted to become an endurance? Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. I think, given my genetics, I probably reached my true genetic potential. It wasn't as if there was four minutes faster

that I could have run the marathon, for instance. I just don't think that was in the car to me. I know my VO-2 max was my limiting factor. I mean, I was 5-10. I weighed 142 pounds. which was 30 pounds less than I weigh now, same body fat. But even at 510, 142 pounds, I probably weighed 10 pounds more than every other national class marathon in the country.

So if I did things differently, I would absolutely change my diet. I would absolutely change the amount of miles I did, how I did them. Every bit of my strategy would change. probably in my case the outcome would not have been an improvement of performance, but it's certainly to your point, would have been an extension of longevity. I could have done it longer. But then that begs the question. Why?

Like if I hit my genetic potential, why do I want to continue beating myself up for another 10 years or another 15 years? And I have friends who did this. I had friends who started out being almost professional triathletes and then did Iron Man every year for 25 years. Some of them are dead now for that very reason. But there was a point at which I said to myself, the decreasing returns, that whatever I'm going to get out of this competition, far outweigh the potential benefits. You know, I'm going to be 69 next month. I'm not going to PR on anything ever again in my life, right? So I'm not going to do a personal best bench press.

I was 52 when I did my personal bench best on the bench, so I was fairly old. But, you know, that's not going to happen. Well, when you're in your 30s and you're doing these endurance contests, you know, that you hit a point where your best years may be behind you. And the question arises as to what's, you know, what do I want from life? Do I, am I trying to, you know, prove over and over again to myself that I'm willing to go out there and hurt myself on a long distance event? Or is it time to look for something else? That was the premise behind Primal Endurance.

And so you open the show by saying, you know, that I've written about, you know, the concept that maybe this endurance. training isn't that great for a lot of people. And it's not. But it's certainly a good bucket list item for a lot of people to complete a marathon. If you do the training, if you have the ability to go through the training to run a marathon and you can do it in an appreciable time, let's just say if you're a man under three and a half hours, that's a great bucket list item. That's a great way of focusing your training for six months to get through that. But if you were to look at, and I have a lot of people that live in my community who are, you know, they call themselves marathoners.

And I'm like, well, that's great. How often you race? Well, I race, try to race six times a year. Oh, that's really interesting. Well, what's your best time? Well, you know, 342, 345. I'm like, I was a top runner and I've never run three hours and 45 minutes at one time in my life. know how you do it. I don't know how you are able to summon the mental discipline to do that.

And really, for what ultimate goal? So with that, that's why I wrote primal endurance. I said, okay, if you're going to do a marathon or you're going to do a triathlon, then I'm going to show you how to train for it in a way that's the least harmful to your body, in a way that's the most enjoyable in a way that probably will improve your health along with your fitness, along with your performance. And that was the reason for the private endurance book in the first place. It's interesting because I signed up for my first marathon. It was 2018 in my first marathon.

And for my first marathon, I got a little bug, I got the endurance bug. and I went from my marathon to Ironman triathlon and back to the marathon and then back to another Ironman triathlon. And I was like, okay, what's this 100 mile race scene? So I did Leadville 100 and I did Rocky Raccoon 100. Now we're back in a marathon prep. So it's been three years of race after race after race. And it's funny because people that follow me on social media or through, you know, we document the series on YouTube,

they kind of sometimes want to put me in this box and think that I identify as a runner, but I don't identify as a runner. I identify as someone who loves training and I love learning about the human body and what my full physical potential is. And after this marathon, which is in about a week and a half, I'm looking forward to still incorporating some sort of cardio in my life. And I'll always run, but I won't be running 70, 80 miles a week. anymore. It's, okay, what else can I explore and learn from? Because I've learned so much through

this endurance prep. How else can I optimize or improve my health and performance at the same time? So I find that interesting because you talk in, you know, your books and your blogs about the chronic cardio addict. And I found in the endurance community, there's so many of these chronic cardio addicts out there. Yeah. It's, what is it that's addictive? about this pursuit of pain. And it's not really pain. It's what I call managing discomfort, right? So, but as an endurance athlete, pretty much your day isn't about fun.

You know, you can say, okay, I'm going to go run with some buddies up in the hills and we're, you know, we'll run the trails and it'll be enjoyable and we'll be commuting with nature and we'll be chatting it up. But for the most part, you know, you're managing discomfort, right? You're seeing how far you can go at a certain heart rate. you're pushing the pace at sometimes if you're doing a tempo day. If you're on the track doing intervals, it's hard work. And so I sometimes wonder what the addiction is because I had it.

I mean, I had it so bad that after I retired, I was forced into retirement. I still trained like a maniac the same way for another five years. like I couldn't just let it go. I just couldn't say, okay, that was a great phase of my life. I'm going to stop now and go make money and build a family. No, I still had to train like crazy. I still had to push myself. And I, the interesting thing then is once that finally dissipated, after five years,

once it dissipated, I never got it back. So you either have it or you don't. I think if you have it in that addictive part, and I don't know whether the addiction is just habituation. Like, a true addiction is, you know, I have to have whatever it is or else my body falls apart. I get sick. I get the sweats. I get whatever. True addiction is a chemical addiction.

I think it's habituation. I think people are habituated to do this, to go out and do this. I think there's a mental aspect that says, if I don't work out today, I'm a piece of shit. I mean, that was certainly me. Like if the day wasn't a good day, a progressive day, a positive day, unless I had a workout, right? So I had to get that out of my system. And I did. And I got it out of my system to the point that I probably ran 100 miles a week for seven years in my, in the height of my running.

So I was a runner. I haven't run a mile in 20 years. I literally haven't put on shoes to go run a mile in 20 years. And I've tried. A couple of times I've said, you know, I was a good runner, and I could still sprint like crazy. I'm still pretty fast. And I'll do wind sprints on the beach and things like that. But yeah, maybe I'll put the shoes on and go run a mile.

I literally would get 200 yards down the road and go, what am I thinking? And I'd walk home. It's just of no interest to me. I don't have that mindset because it's not fun. Now, before we started recording today, I told you, I just got back from an hour and 20 minute. a fat bike ride on the beach with a friend of mine. I find that fun. You know, we're out in the warm air of Miami Beach.

We're riding on the sand. There's the views, you know, are spectacular. We're doing quite a hard workout. So it feels like, you know, we're getting that tough workout, that breakthrough workout in that I might do once a week. and once it's over, it's over, and it doesn't exceed more than, I almost never go more than an hour in 20 or 25 minutes. That's kind of my limit these days. And so my routine is now, and I feel like for me, put together the perfect routine. It's one of these bike rides every week. It's a hard paddle

on the water. So I go out with friends on a paddle board and I get a great hour long or plus upper body work out. So it's working the, you know, the abs and the serratus and the core and everything else. And again, it's out in nature. I'm seeing manatees or dolphins. It's pretty fun. And I'm in the gym, lifting weights once or twice a week. I do a leg day once or twice a week. I play, you know, ultimate frisbee. So I have this cross-training combination of upper body with paddling, lower body with the bike, weights in the gym. Much of it is contemplated to be a full range of motion, body weight type stuff. And from that, I feel like I'm now a combination of a sprint athlete, a strength athlete,

and an endurance athlete. So I feel like I could hang with anybody in, certainly my, anybody in a lot of different disciplines because I'm cross-training in a way where it all, comes together to enhance, not just my fitness, but enhance my health, because I'm not doing any one of these things to the detriment of creating stress hormones in one area. Or, you know, if I were just running and I'm trying to be a great runner, that's too narrowly focused on legs and it's too catabolic for the upper body, which I'm sure you've probably seen since you've been training.

Good news is you get it back. but, you know, on the other hand, you know, paddling isn't enough legwork. It's some legwork. So I found a way to put together the combination of strength and endurance and high intensity stuff. Actually, we just got a new, we got a new rope pole machine in our gym. Have you ever seen the Marpoe rope pole machine? I have, yeah. It's a beast. And so we, you know, I do, you know, just four sets of one minute all out as fast as I can go on that. It's horrible, but it's one minute times four and you're done.

And that's it. You walk out of the gym and you said, okay, I don't really, I don't feel the need to have to do anything else today. That was a sufficient, you know, stress and a pump from my upper body. So I find things like that that, you know, that combine all of these different aspects of the biochemistry of fitness into the actual application of fitness. Could you explain what happens to the body? Say when you were running 100 miles a week. And I mean, I'll see people post that, you know, they're on their, they're on their 100th week of 100 miles a week in a row. What is happening to the body when you're logging that many miles, whether it's on a bike?

I mean, you look at an Ironman triathlete training 18 to 20 hours a week. What's happening to the body during all of that chronic type cardio endurance training? Yeah, it's tough. I mean, there are stress hormones that are being produced, you know, a lot of cortisol coming out of the adrenals. there's a lot of reactive oxygen species from the from the inefficient burning of different fuel substrates. So one of the things you asked, what would I do differently? I'd go back and I'd eat keto most of the time when I was training.

So I'd re-configure my metabolism to be much more metabolically flexible. When I was a runner, it was all about the carbs. So everybody carb-loaded every single day. Anyone who's doing endurance in the 70s and the 80s, even into the 90s, was doing massive amounts of carbs, like 1,000 grams a day of carbs. And then going out and depleting them every day in the training, the good news was you could run pretty fast doing that. The bad news was you really didn't develop a particularly efficient skill set for burning fats. and you almost completely avoided the benefits of a brain that can run efficiently on ketones. So what I mean by that is a lot of times what happens in a race, when people say they hit the wall,

you used to think, well, you hit the wall because your legs run out of the ligation, right? And that's why you hit the wall. Well, you know, they do biopsies on people who have hit the wall. and the legs still have, you know, out of the total 500 grams distributed throughout the body, there were still 175 grams left in the muscles of the legs. So you didn't deplete the glycogen in your legs. What happened was you got such low blood sugar either from depleting the glycogen stored in your liver, which the brain was using to get you through that race,

or hours into the race, your stomach stopped emptying to allow the glucose that you've been taking at the aid stations to enter your bloodstream. And so the brain just said, fuck it, I'm done. And that's a brain that was dependent on glucose and nothing else. When you become fat adapted and keto adapted, you're able to run at a much higher rate burning a much higher rate. rate of fats, deriving energy from fats, and your brain is now able to function on ketones in what is effectively the absence of glucose. And so the brain is less inclined to shut you down and say time to go, you know, pull over the side of the road and take a nap. So that's been a real, I think, an area of great excitement and exploration in the research in terms of fat metabolism

Keto metabolism for endurance racing. You know, Zach Bitter is a good example of somebody who's, you know, training at a ketogenic lifestyle. And then we'll, you know, he'll train low, race high, train low carb, and then race high carb, meaning it doesn't hurt you to fill your glycogen stores up. It doesn't hurt you to carbolode the night before an event. You don't get kicked out of ketosis or anything like that. it's just one other source of fuel for you. So that's one of the things that I would have done is probably spent more time adjusting my diet to become metabolically flexible through the use of a ketogenic approach.

Yeah. Yeah, Zach Bitter was my coach for my last 100 mile race for Rocky Raccoon. And I know the keto athlete in the endurance space is becoming more popular. people are talking more about it. I think it would be important to talk about it because, you know, we're talking about being fat adapted. And I don't want people to think that, oh, I just like instantly start eating fats instead of carbs and I become fat adapted very quickly.

How long does it truly take to become fat adapted? How low do your carbs have to be? How long do you be in ketosis? What's that look like in that process? Well, I think if you're an athlete, I think, you know, the first phase of adaptation, which I would say is an 80% adaptation, takes place between three to three and six weeks of aggressive keto training, keto dieting and keto training. And by keto training, I mean, you're eating keto, but you're also cutting your work output

way back, not so much the total load, but the pace. So you're going at an aerobic pace. a comfortable aerobic pace 90% of the time while you're doing this, this adaptation phase using the diet. And what we say in the book in Primal Endurance is, you know, that's a pace that is 180 minus your age, not to exceed 180 minus your age. So, you know, if you're a 40-year-old athlete, you're going to limit your heart rate. to 1A minus 40, which is 140, and not exceed 40 beats a minute, pretty much for most of your training while you're going through this phase. People say, well, wait a minute, like, you know, but Mark, I can race at 157 beats a minute, or I can race at 160 beats a minute. Why would I,

like, I'm going so slow when I'm going at 140 beats a minute. Well, the reason you're going slow is you're not good at burning fat. And so the minute that your aerobic capacity shifts and you start becoming better at burning fat, that 140 beats a minute now gets you 10 minute miles instead of 13 minute miles where you were frustrated because you were limiting your, you know, and so as you become better at burning fat, you're able to your throughput of fat, becomes more applicable to the speed that you're racing. And so your times that you're running will drop, even though that max heart rate,

that 180 minus 40 to get you to 140 max heart rate, now instead of running, again, 13 minutes miles, now you're running 10 at miles. And then three weeks later, you're running 8 minute miles. And then you're running 7 minute miles. And that's indicative of the fact you're becoming very good at burning fat. I forget it was Zach or who else it was.

you know, they were realizing that he was getting like 97% of his energy requirements from fat while running 645 a mine. Like that was unheard of 15 years ago. 50 years ago, people say, well, that's, that's biochemically impossible. That's a human impossibility. You can't do that. Now, now that seems to be sort of the standard. But you have to eat ketogenicly in order to, you have to withhold carbohydrates to force your body.

to burn fat, to force your mitochondria to upregulate, it called mitochondrial biogenesis, to make more mitochondria in which to burn that fat. And then you have to build a metabolic machinery so your brain can take the ketones and thrive and not feel like it's missing out on glucose because you never experimented with going keto. Does the intensity at which your training, is that affected by being fat adapted at all? meaning, you know, say I'm doing a purely aerobic-based workout, a run below my max aerobic heart rate, and at that pace and that intensity, I am fat adapted.

I can use fats to, you know, as energy efficiently. As I increase that intensity, I'm running faster. Can I still use fats as efficiently? Absolutely. Not as efficiently, but the percentage of fats contributing to your overall output is greater. So if you did that and you said, okay, well, at six-minute miles, I'm deriving 75% of my calories from fat and 25% from carbohydrate. Meanwhile, the guy running right next to me, he's deriving only 50% of his caloric requirements from fat and 50% from carbohydrate. He's going to blow through his glycogen stores faster.

So, yeah, you can do the work together, but it's the percentage. of fat, you know, you want to be able to do as much, the highest level of work possible to to maximize your, your fat contribution to energy. And in so doing, you know, diminish the depletion of carbohydrate reserves, of glycogen reserves, because there is a point at which you will, you know, it'll start to get uncomfortable as your glycogen does deplete. But the idea that you could train to at this 180 minus your your age, up to that point, you would almost, you could argue that you're burning mostly fat, like 95 to 98 percent fat. And so if somebody says, again, Mark, I'm not running that fast. It's like, well, that's the point at which, that's the speed

at which all of your energy comes from fat. And if that's only 13 miles an hour that you're doing, because you were so you sucked at burning fat. You were great at burning carbohydrate. Look, I was great at burning carbohydrate. My whole career was about, you know, managing carbs. And I ran, you know, a bunch of subdued 21 marathons. And, you know, 218 was my best. And that was, you know, I could do that many times, but it was all carb-based.

You know, I wasn't like I wasn't deriving any of my energy from fat, but it was mostly carb-based. And so that now the idea that you could somehow train in a way that would maximize your fat-burning capability and offset the need to take in exogenous gatorade along the race or something like that, that's big. That's, that's huge, especially when you're talking about athletes that are, you know, a two-per-percent difference is the difference between first place in fifth place. Now, I know you obviously during your endurance training, you were strictly on a high-carb diet, and now it's more of a lower-carb diet with these periods of going into ketosis and,

you know, some keto diet aspects of your nutrition. I would love to explore and talk about the concept of insulin sensitivity and why that's such a strong foundation of everything you talk about in terms of the, primal blueprint. And just to paint some light on, you know, because obviously when I was bodybuilding back from the day, I got into bodybuilding and powerlifting before my endurance training. And I was just telling the guys at the HQ here, some of these stories where I was eating 600 to 700 grams of carbs a day.

I was 230 pounds. I was just eating as much as possible. And I would eat sometimes 200, 250 grams of carbs in one sitting just to get enough carbs in. And, you know, I'm eating all these carbs. which some are fine, like obviously I'm not eating 250 grams worth of sweet potatoes, but you take this massive load of carbohydrates, there's this blood glucose, and then your pancreas responds and sends all this insulin to try to clear this glucose down to your blood. What's happening in that reaction?

And what is the importance of improving insulin sensitivity? Well, so insulin is a nutrient storage hormone. it's virtually every animal secretes insulin. It's a way to take the caloric energy that you take in through eating and do something with it and distribute it either as glycogen in the muscle cells or fat in the muscle cells or fat in the fat cells or protein in the muscle cells. I mean, it's a nutrient sequestering hormone. So it's really, it's, you know, probably arguably the most important hormone that we have.

The problem comes when there's, when there's too much carbohydrate presented to the body, the pancreas which secretes insulin, tries to sequester it, tries to get rid of it, tries to, because all of the carbohydrate that you consume will convert either to a form of sugar. Typically it'll convert to glucose, although fruit, as we know, is fructose, but let's just talk about the glucose conversion right now. So all of the pies, cakes, candies, cookies, crackers, grains, breads, cereals, every processed food in the center of the aisle, center aisle of the supermarket, those all convert to glucose in your bloodstream. And glucose, glucose, glucose. And glucose, while it's a fuel and it's necessary.

In a healthy person, the amount of glucose in your entire bloodstream is the equivalent of a teaspoon full of sugar. It's not a big amount, at least in a healthy person. And so when you inundate your bloodstream with all of this glucose, the pancreas goes, shit, we got to, we got to get rid of this glucose. And so insulin goes way up. And insulin, if you can imagine it, it's a signaling hormone. It's signaling to try and open the gates and get.

get some of the sugar into the muscle cells. But if the muscle cells are already full, which in most cases with most people who don't exercise, the muscle cells are going, hey, we've got plenty. We eat no more room here. Send it down to the fat cells. So then the glucose will look for a fat cell and the insulin will open up the fat cells.

And the next thing you know, the fat is, you get more fat. The insulin at a high level of insulin locks fat into the fat cell. It's one of these laws of nature of the body that once, if insulin's high, it's not going to allow fat to come out because it's a, you're sort of demonstrating the presence of sugar and carbohydrate. So the problem, well, many problems arise, but if there's too much glucose in the bloodstream, that's where you get real.

serious issues. That's where you get the diabetic neuropathies and retinopathies and you, you know, the loss of the amputations because the tiny capillaries in the blood vessels get gummed up, literally gumbed up with this sugar combining with proteins and bloodstream and things like that. So it's bad to have high blood sugar, which is why your doctor will always test you for, you know, your blood glucose levels after eating and after fasting some of the blood. sometimes. So one way to make sure that the insulin is speaking to all the cells and getting things done is we talk about insulin sensitivity. If the cells are sensitive to insulin, then they'll hear the noise. They'll hear the signal and they'll say, okay, we'll allow more of the

sugar to get in or more of the amino acids to enter the muscle cells. If the cells are insensitive, if they can't hear the signal, then again, we have this problem where it backs up these things back up in the bloodstream. Now we have high blood sugar. We have instead of a normal 80 to 120 milligrams per deciliter, whatever the number is, now is 300 or 400 or 600, and that becomes very problematic for a lot of people. So look, we, as a country, we eat way too much food, we eat way too much carbohydrate, way too much processed carbohydrate, way too much sugar. And that's why 40 million Americans are either diagnosed as diabetic or are pre-diabetic because they have lost this insulin sensitivity. They've lost, A, the ability to,

for their insulin to even speak to the cells. And so what happens now is when you lose, when the cells become insensitive, hey, we don't want to hear it. La, la, la, la, la. The pancreas go, well, fuck, we're just going to secrete more insulin. And now your insulin levels go way up. Well, with high insulin levels and with insulin resistance, now insulin is also inflammatory. So now you have sugar that's inflammatory, insulin that's inflammatory. It is this cascade of events that is a, that is a potential for disaster for a lot of people. What do you do about it? Well, you cut the amount of sugar that you take in. I mean, you know, we've been talking about this for 15 years. that if you are a newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic, we can cure you in 90 days just through diet and

exercise. You won't need medicine. You won't need, you'll no longer be a diabetic, a type 2 diabetic. If you just cut the sugar and cut the access to the sweets and the pies, the cakes, and candies, and the grains and the, you know, the cereals and things like that, there are some other nuanced things. things. We're going to have you cut back on industrial seed oils, these frank and food oils like canola, soybean, sunflower, and things like that that are also involved in insulin insensitivity. But, you know, when you were bodybuilding, guys were shooting up insulin. They wanted more insulin because they knew that it was that it was a nutrient sequestering hormone and that they wanted to drive all this all this stuff into the muscle cells right it's it's horribly dangerous to have done that

but a lot of the bodybuilders were doing that back in the day and i suspect some still still do in terms of you know going full keto um or incorporating some carbs in your diet because i understand have you have you have you gone through periods of your life where it's been strictly keto for long periods of time or have you always incorporated some sort of level of carbohydrate in your diet Oh, I've gone, you know, I do weeks of keto on a regular basis. I do, you know, a sort of a, what I call a keto reset, right? So I'll just do a couple of days or a couple of weeks where I just don't have any carbs at all. And I don't have to force myself to do this. It sort of happens. I'll sometimes go three or four days. And I'm like, well, I haven't had carbs for a couple of days. I think I'll hang out here for another week or two and just do that. I don't stay keto because I like a wide variety of food. So I like the crunchiness of vegetables, although you know, you can be keto and still consume vegetables.

But, you know, every once in a while I like to have a sweet potato with some butter on it or a couple of bites of bread or something like that. But I would say I'm pretty keto-ish most of the time. I mean, I'm rarely over 100 grams of carbs in a day. even on a on a high carb day i'll never be an excessive 200 and are you still hitting even though you're not strictly on like you're still incorporating some sort of level of carbohydrate in your diet is your body still going into ketosis during the time no no so so what happens is once you ketosis is a weird word and i don't like the way it's been used in the diet community um

because the word osis sort of has a connotation of some pathology Like there's too many ketones in your bloodstream. That's what ketosis is. You know, if you have tendonosis, it's a pathology with your tendons. So ketosis describes an excess of ketones. Ketones are part of the fourth substrate, right? You have fat protein and carbohydrate. You really shouldn't combust protein at all.

Protein should go to repair, building muscle, building bones, making enzymes, things like that. You shouldn't be combusting. should be burning protein. So it kind of irks me that the science community has assigned a value of four calories per gram to protein. Carbohydrate, again, you know, you certainly can combust that, and you should combust it. You should burn off, I think you should burn off carbs on a regular basis. You know, you should do some glycolytic work, some high-intensity. work a couple of times a week. Fat becomes the preferred fuel for most people who are,

who are keto-ish. And then that leaves ketones. And people are new to the ketogenic diet who really haven't built a metabolic machinery to burn ketones. They produce excess ketones. And you can detect it. You can smell it in their breath or that you can see, you know, the purple color on a pee stick when they, when they pee into a ketone, you know, a test strip. Or you can detect it in the blood if you do a ketone blood test and you see that they might be, you know, five millimolar or six millimolar. And here they are bragging about how, whoa, you know, my ketones are so high. I'm, I mean, ketosis, this is great. I'm winning. Well, it's not how the body intends for you to make and utilize ketones. Ketones are a great fuel. They're a valuable.

fuel. They're an efficient fuel. The muscles can run on it. All they prefer, they prefer fat. Cardiac muscle likes ketones. The brain loves ketones. And so when you become fat adapted, the body says, look, the muscles know how to extract energy from fat really well. We've, we've increased the number of mitochondria. The throughput is great all day long while we're just at a rest of metabolic rate, all we need is fat. We don't even eat glucose at all or glycogen at all. If we're going to do a little bit of work at the end of the day, the muscles have enough glycogen in them to do a reasonable amount of work.

And then we don't even need the carboload for that to replenish over the next two or three days. And then the brain says, look, if you're going to be withholding carbohydrates, that's cool. I can build the metabolic machinery to really run. very nicely and efficiently on ketones. And the irony here is that if it's the brain that you're really only using ketones for and you've now become keto adapted, the liver can produce 750 calories a day worth of ketones. It's amazing the amount of energy that can be produced by ketones. The brain really only needs about 500 calories a day in most people. And the brain doesn't have these wild swings of energy demands.

Like if you go to the gym and you do a heavy leg day, your thigh muscles, your glutes, you're going to be doing 50 minutes, 50 times a metabolic throughput while you're doing that leg stuff, right? It's going to be the energy demands, albeit over a short period of time, are incredible. Meanwhile, while you're doing it, the brain is just cruising along on cruise control. The brain's energy demands don't go way up because you're doing a leg day, or they don't go way up because you're playing a chess tournament or studying for the LSATs. The brain's energy requirements are pretty steady state throughout the day. Well, the liver knows this. And so the liver,

once you become fat adapted and once you become keto adapted, the liver says, I don't need to pump out five millimolar and piss it out and waste it, you know, and offend people with my keto breath. I'll just make just enough ketones to keep the brain happy, five, six grams an hour. I don't know. What's the, yeah, five or six grams an hour is all that's required to keep the brain functioning probably better than on most glucose-based diets. And that's that nice little space that you get in. So what does that look like to somebody who's really fully keto adapted? You almost never test at a high rate of ketones on your little test strip, right? Because your liver's making just enough ketones to keep the brain happy, you might be at 0.4 mill.0.4. or 0.5 millimolic, barely into what they would call ketosis. But that doesn't mean you're not an efficient metabolic, flexible machine.

It just means that you've adapted to this new metabolic flexibility, this new utilization of substrates. So you're not wasting ketones and you're not running hot because you're over-consuming carbohydrates, for instance. since you found this nice little, like perfect area where your energy is coming mostly from fat, a little bit from ketone, and then there's enough carbohydrate to keep you, you know, interested in doing high-level work if you choose to do that. I'm curious of your thoughts on the keto space as a whole because, you know,

when I started getting into the fitness space, I was in college, I was studying nutrition. It's about 2012, 2013. And that's when the flexible dieting and if it fits your macros approach, started becoming very popular where people are tracking calories and macros and it was if it fits your macros, you can eat whatever you want. And then when I started being introduced and hearing about the keto space, you know, years ago, even though I know it's been, it's been popular for much longer time than that, from the outside looking in, it was people just eating whatever fats, using the excuse to eat more fats, whether processed, whether it was like kind of all this

junk. Do you think most people get the keto space wrong? I think most people get the keyers space wrong again. I think it's getting better, but I feel like, you know, and it started with Atkins who basically really never looked at the quality of food. And so people, you know, felt that they could eat all the fat they wanted of any kind. And that was a, that was kind of a first misstep. And then if it fits your macros came along and same thing. to this day, there's still people in our space.

Otherwise, you know, otherwise well-educated people who still think that this is a calories in, calories out, basic equation. And that was the whole, if it fits your macros thing, right? But, you know, 2,400 calories of Skittles is not the same as 2,400 calories of, 2,400 calories of grass-fed ribeye and steam broccoli. and I don't care, you know, what you think about, about thermodynamics. Most of what happens in the body happens as a result of hormonal intervention. And so it really becomes more of an equation of calories burned versus calories store. And if I'm going to burn calories, I want a certain hormonal configuration to prompt the burning of those calories appropriately, without causing,

reactive oxygen species or without causing some, you know, metabolic derangement. And yeah, so, I mean, it's the idea that you could look at a ketogenic diet and say, well, there's a company making keto desserts. And so, you know, they have a lot of alulose, and alulose is zero carb. Well, alialose isn't zero carb. For a lot of people, alulose is just like sugar. but it says keto, so I'm in, you know, I can eat that. I think a lot of people who increase their fat intake on keto do it with nuts.

You know, people think nuts are free on keto. And the truth is, I've watched people consume 1,200 calories worth of nuts in one sitting, you know, on their way to eating dinner. And I'm like, no, if your intent is to perfect your metabolism and maybe lose some extra. excess fat weight, that's not going to help. And even though, yeah, it sort of technically is keto, those are pretty inappropriate choices. I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to do keto, and the right way is to select foods from a list that are, you know, either natural or naturally derived, that are devoid of harmful industrial seed oils, you know, that are nutrient dense as opposed to just offering up a label that says keto-friendly or, you know,

keto-approved. In terms of calories in versus calories ounce, because, you know, you still see that argument where people are focused on calories rather than the quality of the nutrition. And really focusing that on fats and identifying industrial seed oils. It's crazy when, you know, This past year, my wife and I have kind of taken inventory of everything we'd be consuming and going through our fridge and the grocery stores and trying to find foods and items without these industrial food seed oils. And it's tough. I mean, they're in everything. I know that was the premise of you creating primal kitchens. When was it that you identified the problem that was caused by these industrial seed oils?

Because I feel like they are becoming, the issue is becoming more popular and prevalent, but it's still, you know, not talked about enough. I don't think so. Oh, it's huge. I mean, uh, there are a lot of, you know, people have been in the ancestral health space for decades who are now kind of coming around to say, you know, we talked about how bad sugar was for a long time, but we really overlooked something that may be even more insidious and pervasive and that's industrial seed oils. So Kate Shanahan, for example, is now, she's a massive bandwagon about these seed oils. I started to think about it 15 years ago, and I really started to rail on it about 10 years ago. And so I had a, in 2010, I came out with a cookbook, Primal Blueprint,

healthy sauces, dressings, and topics. Because I recognized 2006 and 2007, I started recognizing that once you get rid of the processed foods in your pantry and you come down to that short list of meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers. It's not a big list of food. It's good. It's great tasting. It's nutrient dense. But it could get really boring, really quick unless you figure it out a way to change the methods of preparation, the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, the herbs and the spices, the way you cook them. And with healthy sauces and dressings and toppings, you could come up with, you know, not an infinite number, but a big number of different ways to serve the same basic foods and maintain

a taste differential and a variety and an interest and a sustainability. So the book, I self-published the book, and it was on the heels of my primal blueprint, my original primal blueprint, which went to number two overall in the world of all books on Amazon for a couple of days. And so I thought, well, this is going to be great, this healthy sausage dresses the topics. This cookbook is going to crush it. And it didn't.

It was horrible. I mean, I sold like 10,000 copies, something like that. So I realized that people, while they were. recognize that they want healthy sauces dresses and toppings, no one was making, they don't want to make them themselves, clearly, and no one was making them from a, you know, a consumer package goods perspective. The closest, you know, I looked at it like annies tried to do it, but annies did not do a good job. And, you know, Newman's own, Paul Newman was a childhood hero mine. And, you know, you pick up a bottle of Newman's own extra virgin olive oil dressing. And the first two ingredients are canola and soybean. Oh, yeah, there's extra virgin olive oil as the third ingredient. But I mean, I'm like, dude, really? So I set about to create the sorts of healthy fats that people could put on their food with what I call reckless abandon.

In other words, in the old days, if you were into health and you were health conscious, if somebody said, here's some mayonnaise to put on your sandwich. it would come with the admonition that, well, just use it sparingly because it tastes right, but it's not very good for it. It's full of harmful fats and oils and whatever. Or, you know, Oprah used to, when she was on that diet kick, would tell people, here's how you eat a salad. You keep your dressing over here and you keep your salad over here. You take your fork and you put it, you dip your fork in the dressing,

and then you go stab some lettuce. I'm like, seriously, dude? Like, I'm a big, I used to be a big salad guy. and I would try and douse my salad with dressing. So I was not about to use anything sparingly. So I wanted a product that literally the more you put on whatever it was you were putting it on, the better that food became for you. And that was the original thought process behind Primal Kitchen Foods.

We have like 85 different skews now. We've, you know, we're 20 plus salad dressings and eight or 10 may. mayonnaise and and pasta sauces and barbecue sauces and steak sauces and dips. And we're really, I think we're transforming how people eat by providing these healthy fats in a way that they can appreciate and be confident that it's good for them. Yeah, I mean, I love the line. It's funny because it was probably about a year ago. I was looking for mayonnaise to make something for me and my wife. and I saw the mayonnaise.

I forget who made it, but it was on the shelf and said made it with olive oil. I pick it up, I turn it around. The same thing, it's like the first ingredient was like vegetable oil,

canola oil, and then it was olive oil. And I'm like, it's in there. It is, but it's not the primary ingredients. So I love what you guys have done with primal kitchens

because I'm the same way with my salads. I know you have like this infamous video on YouTube. It's like Mark's big ass. salad. And I love loading it up with the dressing. I don't want to be sparing with that. I want to load it up, right? I want those healthy fats. Yeah. And just the term vegetable oil is a missed. There's no vegetables don't have oil for the most part. So, you know, they are taking a generic, well, soy is kind of a vegetable and corn is kind of a vegetable, you know. And so they're they're taking poetic license with the idea

that these are actually graining their seed oils. And they've been, they've not been bred for their oil content. I mean, who, you know, a hundred years ago, who would have thought that corn was a source of oil? You know, you actually ate corn. Now, very few people actually eat corn. You know, they converted into all sorts of chemical dyes and oils and things like that. It's pretty crazy. But, yeah, just the term vegetable oil is false advertising.

I do like the way you opened up the primal blueprint talking about the 80-20 rule. And I heard you talk about this in an interview before where, you know, people hear about Marxists and your diet and, you know, the principles of your diet. And is there ever pressure when you go out to dinner, for example, and you're eating a piece of bread and so on sees you and so-one says, that's Marxist and eating a slice of bread? And you have an 80-20 rule. and I thought that was very refreshing because I think a lot of people who are especially high achievers you become very obsessive with things and with diet it's really easy to become super excessive

and try to hit that mark 100% of the time and if you don't hit that mark 100% of your time it becomes it turns into another type of eating disorder how do you practice the 80-20 rule and how do you help people practice that? Well the 80-20 rule means it basically strive for 100%

and don't beat yourself up if you make some mistakes and if at the end of the day you came in at 80-20, you win. Don't shoot for 80-20 and then find yourself at 60-40 or 50-50, but strive for 100%. I hang out with people a lot when I go to events and I go to large group dinners and things like that and people see that, you know,

I'm, you know, I live, I practice what I preach on both sides of that. I sometimes will have a piece of bread with some butter on it, right? I'll put, I'll put sugar in my coffee. I just, I'll order dessert, but I'll have two bites of dessert, not the entire thing. I don't think about grass fed steak when I go to a restaurant. I'm, you know, I'm living my life. and I want to enjoy aspects of it without being too tough on myself, certainly without invoking an eating disorder on me or anyone else around me. It's just an awareness. It's just an awareness of what it is you're eating and what the impact, short-term impact, might be if you eat it now or eat too much of it now or whatever. Just an awareness, an intuitive, sort of intuitive type of eating. I don't want people to think, oh, my God,

what would Mark say? What would Mark do? What would Mark order on this menu? I'm like, you know, no, just look at the menu and order what you want. And, you know, if it's in a restaurant where this happens for a fair amount, somebody said, I will ask, you know, what sort of dressing do you have for the salad? And I said, well, you have a great dressing. I said, what's the basis of it? Well, it's, you know, it's vegetable. I'm like, okay, bring me some olive oil and some, and some, you know, some, you know, some, some, you know, some. vinegar and I'll be happy. I'll be very happy. I'm not, but that's one of the areas where people really can fall down on the road traveling is restaurant. Virtually every top restaurant still uses crappy oils in the kitchen. And they can really, you know, destroy an otherwise very healthful, amazing, great-tasting meal by dousing it with some crappy oil. So just, you know, be aware of that of that possibility and ask if they can do something different in the kitchen. I'll ask if they can grill something in butter or, you know, or olive oil, whatever. It's, it's a, you just have to be sort of intuitive and aware, aware of your surroundings.

No, I'm embarking on a four-month European trip soon. And, you know, looking forward to that largely because I, I know that in most cases, they'll actually be cooking with olive oil wherever I go, you know, and the wine will be free of additives and the bread will be, you know, the European type of wheat, which isn't as gluten high in that offensive gluten content as U.S. weight. So, you know, be aware of also where it is you're eating. You find that other countries do better at that than the United States in terms of quality of nutrition, sourcing and these industrial seed oils, or is it everywhere? Yeah, I do. I do. I didn't know.

I do. I mean, I think, you know, Europe, if you've, if you've been to Europe, there's an olive oil orchard every other street corner. So, you know, they, they get it. They get, they have hundreds of years of experience in producing healthful oils for the most part. I mean, you know, there are, there are exceptions. Their meat is typically grown both more humanely and, you know, according to its natural diet. So the, you know, the lamb and the pork, the goat, the chickens are more pastured than you would come to count on in the U.S. And as to say, the wines in Europe, especially the off-label wines are typically, you know, local vintners who don't do massive irrigation don't add one of the 76 U.S. Department of Agriculture approved additives like

beaver anal glands or whatever it is they put into some of the wines here. The skins aren't over macerated to give you a deep, rich color. So they don't have the tannins and the histamines that we find in the U.S. So, and as I said, a lot of the grains that are converted into breads or baked goods are far less offensive in terms of, you know, like I can eat a piece of pizza in most countries in Europe and not be as negatively impacted as I would in the U.S. Well, I know you're about to go on this big trip to Europe, so I hope eating some good food and enjoy it, Mark, but I really appreciate the time today.

Amazing information. And do you ever find yourself in Austin, Texas, would love to do another interview. And there's a lot of things I'd love to pick. I know, we tried. We tried about a month ago. And sorry about that. It fell through. But I'd love to come to your space here. Yeah, no, I'd love to. There's a lot of things I'd love to pick your brain on. And I know you're full of information. It's, it's really refreshing. And more people need to hear more about it because it's, I mean, it can be game changing for people's health. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

All right, Mark. We're like with a marathon, too, man. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. What do you shoot? Give me time. I'm going for a 248. Ooh. Yeah, my last one was a 256. Yeah.

So we had a big training block. I'm coming off a lot of, like, low heart rate, ultra prep training. So I'm in the shape right now. We started the taper today, so I'm feeling good. Good. That's an aggressive, for a big boy, that's an aggressive time. I like that. I like the way you think.

No, thank you. I appreciate it. All right. All right. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Bear Performance Podcast. Please leave a rating and review on the platform you are listening to if you enjoyed it. It helps us to grow and reach more people with the intent of changing lives through the Go One More mindset.

If you are ready to take your health and performance to the next level, head over to BPNSups.com to take the first step.