What up family? Welcome to another episode of The Genius life. It's episode 146. Let's go.
What up team? Welcome back to another episode of The Genius life. I'm your host Max Luke of you're a filmmaker health and science journalist. And the author of The New York Times best-selling book genius foods and the genius life today we welcome back Mark Sisson to the podcast Mark is the best-selling author of the keto reset diet the keto reset diet cookbook and the keto reset instant pot cookbook. He's a two hour.
18-minute marathoner and a fourth-place Hawaii Ironman triathlete talk about being a mastermind of nutrition and fitness Mark presides over a wide-ranging primal Enterprise featuring The Primal kitchen line of healthy condiments, which I happen to love the Primal health coach Institute a line of Premium nutritional supplements and numerous books and online education courses. He's been featured in a bajillion media Outlets including Good Morning America, the dr. Oz Show Joe Rogan's podcast people Health Men's Health First for women paleo magazine Mind Body green.
And many many other top websites needless to say, I'm pumped to have him back in the genius Life Studio in this episode Mark shares the keys to building what he calls fat-burning machinery and ultimately the Holy Grail of metabolic Health metabolic flexibility. We discuss the difference between fat oxidation and fat loss and how to break the chains of carbohydrate dependency Mark explains the simple but important mistakes keto novices often make and what frustrates him about the keto community and
Lastly we discussed the truth about corn is going to be avoided or is it a grain to love? This episode is absolutely fire. Every time Mark is here. He drops major knowledge and we always have a blast. So I'm excited for you to tune in new sponsor alert. Let's welcome blankest with open arms and ears. I'm so excited to introduce blankets to our podcast family blink just is my secret weapon for learning new things and getting ahead. See it can be hard to find time to sit down and read and learn more and that's where blankest comes to the rescue blink is is really unique it works on your phone your tablet your
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Guys, we made it to Wednesday after a two-week holiday break to be honest. If today wasn't podcast release day. I'm not sure I'd even know what day it was. How you doing you hanging in there? I hope so the week back is always rough and it feels like a last forever but we got this something that made this week a little bit sweeter for me was this amazing text that I received via the text community in regards to Monday's bonus episode with the great Sean Stephenson Catherine texted me. I really appreciate Sean's message on nutrition and how calorie counting is really detached from True health. I read his book.
Book sleep smarter around the time that I picked up the genius life. So the collab with you two on the podcast was really great. Thanks for all your hard work Max. Seriously Katherine. I have so many things to thank you for first. Thanks for listening to that episode so quickly to thanks for picking up the genius Life 3. Thanks for reading Sean's book sleep smarter and lastly but most importantly number 4. Thank you for taking the time to make your health a priority. I'm inspired by you. I love chatting with all you guys. Please keep sending me your thoughts feelings anything at all. I'm here join the community by texting the word genius, too.
310 2999 401 I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the free pdf supplement guide that you'll receive when you join my newsletter at Max look of your.com with New Year's resolutions being in full swing and supplement marketing a little more in your face than usual. I want to make sure that you can make your way through the fluff as always. You can opt out any time. Although I'd be sad to see you go. Don't forget to hit the follow button on our new Instagram page at the genius live podcast. We'd love to have you and with all that said let's now move on to episode 146 with the incredible Mark Sisson. All right, well,
Here we are Mark Sisson great to be here. Hey, what a great dinner we had last night, huh? It was so good to be again around people. Yeah, you know that was and that was you know back with David nurse who sort of organize the thing and another David nurse. Yeah, for sure and you know, we sort of agreed that six is a good number, you know, we've done 25 of these peop 25 people at these dinners before well and it gets out of hand. You can't really, you know be, you know have a legit intimate.
Conversation with anybody but the six of us participated in one conversation. So I think that's the number it's like a magic number. Yeah, the power of 6, we it was very funny. We at dinner we had a it was a quick discussion, but I thought it was a funny discussion to have with you about corn right because there's a lot of people sort of villain like the keto community and even though the Whole Foods movement that are like super anti corn. Yeah, but I've said some things on social media that I guess like have left people scratching their heads. Like I'm not against a nice corn on the cob, right?
How like how do you feel about that? Well agreed, you know as as the ancestral Health movement has sort of evolved it started in the early days and you know hats off to Loren cordain and the anti grain movement. I think Joe Mercola was one of the early anti grain guys as well. But you know this idea that all grains are antithetical to health all grains are bad for you. And and so you talk about wheat and rye.
In Millet and corn and corn is is considered a grain which it is. It's a grass seed. However, when we talk about the the properties of corn that were not that wild about the lectins and the phytates and the tightly wound Zayn the tightly wound proteins. We're typically speaking about the grain product that's derived from corn that used to make process Goods that you would find in cookies and crackers.
And core and and Brad and things like that, but sweet corn is, you know, it's a it's more of a vegetable in that vegetable category than it is in that grain category. And I've always I'm from Maine and really, you know, a man a main Clambake was Lobster clams and corn and it wasn't a clambake or a lobster bake without without corn without the corn. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not like I think a lot of people have
The documentary King Corn just the overall the I mean the fact that corn today is in everything. And so and that's I think a problem but like if you're metabolically healthy and your metabolically flexible, which is something that I'm going to talk to you about. Yeah, like I don't see any problem with having like a nice organic corn on the cob in the summer. I mean, it's not you know, like alongside your rib eye or whatever it is you're reading, you know, so, you know my take from the beginning has been that all these foods that we talked about exists on a spectrum. Yeah.
Some are wonderful and fabulous and fantastic for you and some of them aren't that good and for some people who have certain sensitivities it whether it's nightshades or whether it's a gluten sensitivity. Some foods can be, you know, damaging and and and life-altering if they go down that path but in between there are a lot of places that we can play. Yeah, and I like to look at it every food sort of, you know for its own Merit. So, you know, we can talk about so four things right you can talk.
Out broccoli and cauliflower brussel sprouts and all of the purported benefits that they have and yet some people have issues with these types of food. So at the end of the day, you know, we are all kind of an experimental one what I've offered with the Primal blueprint and I know you have what you need Foods is a template and from that template play around and experiment and observe and notice how you feel and that's really, you know, when this is all said and done.
Done. This is about enjoying life. We are here to enjoy life and if part of enjoying life is having great food with great company and great conversation. If great food can involve the the widest variety of taste sensations, then that's a good thing. Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I really appreciate that that message of balance, you know, because I feel like the the in the nutrition Community what we see is like there's all these factions, right? And they and they tend to be very religious about like their nutritional ideology. You know, it's whether it's vegans or
Carnivores are people who are like strict paleo. And so yeah, I really appreciate the the more experience. I have in the more exposure that I have to the sort of Internet nutrition world the more I appreciate like messages like yours. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. So metabolic flexibility is a term that that you here come up a lot and when you talk a lot about it, and I think there's a lot of sort of like confusion about what that
It means what it implies. What is metabolic flexibility? Well metabolic flexibility is this capacity that the human body has to extract energy from from a variety of different energy substrates. If you are metabolically flexible, you can derive energy from the fat that's stored on your ass or your or your hips your thighs your percent Mark. What are you trying to say? Not you in particular but ones yes metabolic flexibility not only means burning off store body fat.
But being able to combust the food on your plate the fats on your plate the carbohydrates on your plate convert them to glucose burn those that glucose in the bloodstream for fuel burn the glycogen that the glucose becomes in the muscles of the liver for fuel. Its it involves in the absence of glucose the livers ability to make ketones and use ketones for fuel. So if you're metabolically flexible, you not only drive energy from all these different substrates. The best part of it is you just
It's fluid it doesn't you don't have to think about it. You don't have to be conscious about. Oh, I ate this and now I can only do these types of activities the body adapts in a way that is seamless and doesn't care whether you got the fat from your plate of food or from your hips doesn't care whether the glucose came from a slab of bread that you just ate or the glycogen in your muscles. And it doesn't it doesn't even in any make it many cases doesn't even know that glucose in the bloodstream. It's available the muscles can use it so the metabolic
Flexibility part of this which seems to be kind of intuitively obvious to a lot of people the problem is throughout our lives while we have this genetic wiring that allows us to achieve metabolic flexibility our food choices from very early on typically dictated by our parents in the first place. If kind of led us down this path of carbohydrate dependency, and so when the when the body is presented with a lot of carbohydrate the car
hydrate converts the glucose the body doesn't like to have a lot of glucose in the bloodstream at any one time. There are a couple of mechanisms to get rid of it. One is to convert it glycogen in the muscles, if the if the muscles are full of glycogen another strategy is to send it to the fat cells and store that as triglycerides or fat in the fat cells and ultimately the body does what it can to try and rid itself of excess glucose. And that's fine. We know how we're all of us are very
Good at Burning glucose glucose doesn't require the metabolic Machinery that fats do so. You don't really have to have a lot of mitochondrial activity for muscles to burn glucose. It'll happen in the cytosol OR center of the cell. That's very interesting. You mentioned that the last time that we chatted and I thought that was a fascinating Insight that so you basically like strengthen your mitochondria by burning fat and right. So so just to take this one more step down the path of achieving metabolic flexibility when you don't
Cease to eat meals in other words when you eat three Square meals a day and you have carbohydrate at every meal and you don't let yourself go three or four hours without eating and typically that's because you are hungry or your blood sugar drops and you feel you know low and you need to have something to top off your blood sugar. That's sort of a typical scenario for most people of last several decades who are carb dependent when you do that you never tap into your body fat stores. And when you never tap in your body fat stores, the body says look, I you know, I don't need to build any
Machinery to burn fat because we're not burning fat. This clown is feeding me carbohydrate all the time, like every two or three hours all day long. It's a it's breakfast the most important meal of the day followed by a 10:30 coffee break followed by lunch followed by an afternoon pick-me-up or else I'll have to take a nap followed by dinner and then maybe something while you're watching TV before you go to bed. And you know, this is this is a problem with civilization that's made all this food so available and so handy and so tasty that we tend to
to kind of rely on that and and as such we never build this metabolic Machinery, so the way to do this in the way to develop metabolic flexibility is to cut the carbs is to reduce the amount of glucose that your body has access to in. So doing a number of genetic signaling devices take place and this includes more enzymes to take fat out of storage what we call mitochondrial biogenesis the the building of more mitochondria, which is where the fat actually Burns inside the cells.
Improvement in mitochondrial efficiency. So even the mitochondria that you do have become more efficient at extracting energy from fat and through all of this number of great things happen. First of all, you become able to generate energy all day long whether you eat or not so you because we all have this ability to store extra calories as fat as fuel that we carry around with us all the time and and as a result of that access to energy all the time.
Hunger appetite and Cravings kind of dissipate and it's and in many cases like almost disappear. You become so efficient at at burning calories bring energy in the absence of eating that you can do 80 85 90 % of of the work that you would do in the gym just burning fat just burning stored body fat. So it's a it's a amazing kind of adaptation that all of us have and it's really a result of millions of years.
Of evolution through a period of time when food was really really scarce when food is scarce. It's not like well, you don't eat three meals a day you only one meal a day know when food is scarce. It's like you eat one meal and then you might not eat for two or three days in our ability to survive that sort of those harsh conditions relied on us over eating that one meal because we had no means of storing, you know, there's no Refrigeration. There was no smoking and other other means of storing it so
we developed a system where we could overeat and turn the excess calories in the energy that we carried our around with us conveniently located right above the center of gravity. Hmm. So you don't even have to put your fuel in a five gallon bucket and lug it around or in a backpack. It's like a fanny pack literally right over your you know, your hips and that's so that's really one of the most elegant and amazing systems in the human body is its ability to store fast or fat and we all have that to the Chagrin of many of us.
And really now the challenge is to figure out a way to be able to combust that fat burn that stored body fat off use it for fuel not just to have access to energy all day long, but to achieve an ideal body composition to normalize blood sugar to normalize blood lipids reduce risk factors for cancer heart disease diabetes metabolic syndrome and all the things that we talked about. So in that regard, I would say that that the pursuit of metabolic flexibility really is the whole
Holy Grail of Health if you are metabolically flexible everything else falls into place conversely. If you're not metabolically flexible, it becomes more difficult to try and work your way around it by exercising your way into that that system or that situation, you know, we're taking medications, you know, like, you know, people are taking metformin for their blood sugar management and sometimes they're taking statins for their lipid management and these are all really kind of bass-ackwards way of trying
To reduce risk factors when in fact just achieving metabolic flexibility will get you there. Did you say bass-ackwards? Yeah, I did. I like that so word. No, but it's it really sets up such an elegant like operating system like the best the the people who were the most our ancestors that were most efficient at storing fat that got fat the easiest. Yeah. Those are the ones that survived survived they lived long enough to pass the genes along to the Next Generation. So it's literally you can argue that well, you know,
I would say well, you know, I'm fat because my parents were fat and and I inherited that that Jane well, you know good for you because if you go back far enough, that's the line of survivors and everyone else kind of died out a thousand percent. Yeah. Yeah. It's just amazing and and the amount of energy that we can store in our fat that for people to not be metabolically flexible flexible. It's like, you know, you're undermining Millennia of adaptation and evolution and
Election. I mean, I'm just going to do some math out loud. So you can store about 500 grams of carbohydrates in your body. That's it. Right like about a hundred and a hundred in your liver 400 your muscles. So that's like x 4 that's 2,000 calories. You can store 2,000 calories of sugar. Yeah, you know in your body but you store 3,000 calories and just a single pound of fat, right? Yeah, so I'm 10% body fat and I'm a hundred seventy pounds. So I have 17 pounds of fat. So let's say some of that fat is necessary for
Their functions Beyond Fuel and combustion. So if I have 12 pounds of fat on me times, you know, 3,000 calories per pound that is what is it 36 thousand calories or it's that's enough for me to walk 360 miles 360 miles without eating. Well, you know and without suffering the consequences provided that I metabolically flexible. Now, here's where it gets really kind of dicey people who are not
Haven't done the work to become metabolically flexible. They're still at the effect of this carbohydrate dependency. So if I go three days without eating
Because I've done the work in a metabolic and flexible. As I said my body really doesn't even know that I'm getting the energy from my body's fat stores and doesn't care and it doesn't there's no ill effects from it. I still you know, because I'm making ketones my brain is happy because the ketones I'm burning fat to do most of the work that's already on me and I have a lot of it as we just described even even at a low body fat.
And the one of the closed loop system Concepts that happens as a result of not eating for days if your metabolically flexible is that certain genes are turned on that spare amino acids in spirit protein. So you literally recycle proteins much more efficiently. So you don't even need an external supply of protein during this time, you won't so if you're metabolically flexible, you won't even lose much in the way of muscle mass if you go
Go days without eating now the converse of that is your if your carb dependent and you skip one meal your you know, you get angry and you get out of sorts and if you skip like two days of not eating because you have done the work and haven't built a metabolic Machinery. The brain kind of goes. Wait a minute. I'm supposed to get glucose all the time and you cut off my glucose. What am I going to do? I haven't learned how to burn ketones efficiently yet. And so the livers pumping out these ketones and you're spilling them out and your breath and your urine and
And your blood you dude, I mean ketosis I'm five millimolar. Mm6 millimolar doesn't matter. If you haven't done the work yet to do that you're sort of wasting that that precious fuel. So when you you know, when you don't eat and you're a carbohydrate dependent person and the body still thinks it needs carbs to run on a glucose to run on then the brain sends a signal to the adrenals the adrenal secrete cortisol.
Saul a stress hormone and you've heard maybe heard this when people you know do inappropriate fast and they haven't prepared for the fast yet their cortisol levels go well cortisone cortisol basically tears down muscle tissue throughout the body sends it to the liver so that it become can be made into glucose to fuel the brain and did these activities so you're literally cannibalizing your own body in a way that if you've again if you metabolic be flexible
Even an issue but if you haven't built this metabolic flexibility, that's why you get into problems with carb dependent people doing three day fast really fast and it's interesting because it's a lot easier and correct me if I'm wrong to create glucose from protein than it is from fat because I'm it's not as efficient right? Because in fact you can get the glycerol off of the triglyceride and so in the you know in the model that I talked about where if I were to go three days without eating or a buddy Peter attia would it which he does read?
Routinely this five-day facile time. You can say this is such an efficient system because the triglyceride that is the fat molecule that's being combusted those those three fatty acid molecules. They get combusted some get sent to deliver to become ketones, which is a fuel that the brain can use but the glycerol can be used in in the manufacture of whatever small amount of glucose is still required so you can go days without any any glucose at all and the body will make glucose from that.
And won't need to you know, cannibalize muscle tissue the way it would in somebody who is not fat adapted in Quito adapted. Wow, what do so there's I mean the the whole notion of like fat oxidation versus fat loss. I think sometimes comes up in like the fitness Community, you know, this the sort of evidence-based using air quotes Fitness Community. That's very calorie, you know, they tend to be very calorie focused. So what's that? What's the distinction between
I'm fat oxidation, which is like burning the burning of fat and fat loss for people. Is there is there a difference? No, I mean you have to you have to oxidize the fat in order to burn it in order to lose it. You know, we we talk a lot about endurance Athletics and and the idea that that the better you are at burning fat the longer you can go in terms of endurance Athletics. And so I was a marathon runner in the 70s. I was triathlete in the 80s did Ironman a couple of times?
And the idea there was as you said if you only have 2000 calories worth of glycogen in your muscles. And by the way, that's 1,600 in your muscles and a hundred in your liver. So it's even fewer available to the working muscles because the liver glycogen is pretty much reserved for the brain or more essential essential activities then then then locomotion
So the idea has always been to be as good at burning fat as you possibly could but the the Assumption was that it was still going to be about carbohydrate management. So when in the 70s and 80s and even 90s when I was competing in coaching, you know, those were the years that the Decades of carbo-loading so you always went out and carbo-load it you overload it on carbs because the recognition was that you're going to burn through them and you're going to be more of them immediately.
If you were training, it was carbo-loading every single day because you're going to go out and you know run 15 miles today and 20 tomorrow and 10 the next day and there was never really much attention paid to becoming really truly fat adapted in Quito in the last decade a number of athletes have done really well with this ketogenic training and becoming so good at burning fat that they can run literally six minute miles getting 97% of all.
All that caloric requirement from fat and not having to dip into their into their glycogen stores so much. Well as gives being in Quito is Quito like a sort of calorie restriction the medic and if so, I guess my question would be like for an endurance athlete who's chronically in ketosis. Wouldn't that be like?
Like a like a stress on the body. Yeah, it's definitely stress and I think you'll find a lot of stress for an endurance athlete.
Because an endurance athlete is doing something that is not a particularly smart thing to do for humans. And that is to run it a high at the highest possible output for the longest possible time, you know historically humans are designed to conserve energy and to not want to work that hard and to not want to run that long. If you go back, you know, 10,000 years and you suggest
Let's go for a let's go for a 10-mile run and your buddy says well, what are we hunting? And you said no, we're just gonna go out for fun and get a workout. Yeah, he would go you're crazy and saying, you know, you're it's all that's a life-threatening activity. So the idea of endurance competition and underperformance now is so antithetical to human health that you kind of again have to sign of got to put the component parts together. And you say well if you're going to do this
Then here's how you can do it with the least amount of damage. If you're going to do this. I'm going to train you to be metabolically flexible. So I'm going to use a ketogenic diet for some of that. I'm not going to do it all the time. And so a lot of the guys who are the top keto performers. They don't spend the whole time in ketosis that in fact, it's it's not wise for them to do that. They develop this metabolic flexibility through either ketogenic diet eating or time.
Feeding or a combination of the two or some amount of fasting and they literally train the body to build this more of these enzyme systems more of these mitochondria and kind of upregulate all of that fat burning capacity and then having said that they don't lose their ability to burn carbs. They don't lose their ability to burn glucose or glycogen. So at any point in time, they can top off their glycogen stores and and that's really what they
Do when they race is there's It's a combination of you know, a fat dominant Energy Systems, but also supplemented with some amount of carbs if that if it gets to that and now you're just trying to find where that fine line is where you don't hit the wall and have to drop out of the race. Yeah, because you never lose the ability to use glucose. Right? Right. You just enhance your ability to burn fat exactly what that ability to burn glucose when you need it is always gonna be there. No, it's you know, if you say you tell me well, you know
I went to a birthday party last night and I had you know a piece of cake and I feel like crap what if you like crap you first of all if you metabolically flexible, you don't it'll just get you know stored as as glycogen. Yeah, and if it's an issue for you go give me 50 are squads and we'll we'll handle that right away. Yeah, you know, but I get a little bit frustrated with keto Community who spends so much time measuring and this sort of
Of determining how good they are at Quito that, you know, you hear stories of people who say well, you know, I've been keto for two months, but then I had a day or two where I had 80 grams of carbs and I got kicked out of ketosis. I'm like, okay, what does that look like? Well, I felt like crap and I couldn't move or two does not like well that that's you were out of ketosis, but you weren't Matt. You're not metabolic the flexible yet because the point here is to always feel
And and did not really think about like what what gustatory mistake you just made and have to rethink it or feel guilty about it because you're metabolically flexible enough to just move on to the next thing and you've got access to these different substrates. Yo, we have ourselves another new sponsor and it's a fun one introducing bio optimizers this month by optimizers is helping me share my love for magnesium. Oh magnesium, you are special magnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral in
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So is getting metabolically flexible just a combination of like, you know, fasting and being in ketosis for a certain period of time before which you can then after which afterwards after which yeah sure. I mean, it's a tool I think itõs a strategy a tool and a tool box. The more time you can be keto the more refined you can be that you know, the better and Edge you can put on your metabolic flexibility some people spend a lot of
Time in Quito I'm I'm in and out all the time some days. I'm keto for four days in a row and other days. I might have, you know, a hundred and seventy-five or 225, you know grams of carbs if I look back on the day. Yeah, but for the most part, it's not just the macro element of my diets. Not just the the fat and the fat and protein and lack of carbohydrate. It's often my choice of when I eat some I go some days ago.
Go dinner to dinner without eating and some days when I have lunch. I'm like Jesus. I really didn't even want I didn't eat lunch. It's more habit anything else. I could easily go dinner to dinner to dinner and that's one of the sort of realizations you come to when you become metabolic inflexible as we too damn much food. I mean all of us do and even those of us who can get away with it, and that's the other you know,
There are a lot of people who don't ostensibly gain weight and look like they're at the effect of their food choices, but who are probably not as healthy as they could be if they took a real good hard. Look at what's going on on the inside. Would you say that hunger than is like a sign of metabolic inflexibility. Yeah. I would have to a point. Obviously. I mean you just there's a point at which you can go only so long and the body says hey do
Dude, you got to eat, you know. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I feel like you and I talked about, you know, the cold plunge is the cold plunge you can get in that water for 10 seconds or 15 seconds and it's brisk and you can get out that was that was wonderful. But then as you start to challenge yourself and see how long you can stay in four minutes and five minutes and seven minutes at some point. It's no longer a beneficial hormetic experience. Now, it's just now you just have a contest with your you know, yeah to see, you know, it's a long ball.
Contest basically about you know, how long and that's one of the reasons I like the cold because it's a mind game but yet be careful about where you set that limit and it's and it ceases being a good positive hormetic beneficial experience and now become something could actually put you over the edge. Yeah, and that's possible in eating to I mean you can you can go I have friends who you know do four and five day fasts a lot and I'm like, I think that's too much. You know, I don't I'm not
That means it's a little disordered. Okay. Yeah, you know, I'm not an expert in eating disorder, but I'm that's what I'm saying. So, you know a five-day fast or six day fast, you know once a year as a, you know, some sort of homage to your diet and some whatever that's great. But but there's a point at which these become as you said disordered. So that's probably I think what I try to teach more than anything else with the primal.
Print with marks Daily Apple with the keto reset diet is this notion of intuitive eating like there's a point Beyond which you will not get greater returns. And sometimes there's a point Beyond which it will start to diminish and you lose some of the benefits. So I want you to understand enough about how your body works that you can do some work. You can build some metabolic flexibility and then just freaking enjoy your life and enjoy every bite of food you ever
Eat and appreciate it for what it is and you know experience the world and don't get so caught up in the hacking and the measuring and the and the challenges of all this and and that's really been my kind of you know, my mantra for the company's live awesome. Right and and that's really what I at the end of the day. That's what we wanted want to do. We all want to get the greatest amount of pleasure and fulfillment and contentment and enjoyment out of whatever moments we can.
And to the extent that I'm struggling through another for day fast and trying to stay on this track of perfect eating that doesn't fit that doesn't fit the model of of an awesome life in my book. Yeah, I agree with that people always ask me if I've ever done any extended fast. It's like like more than 24 hour maybe a 30. I feel like the most I've ever done is a 36-hour fast, but people people have asked me if I've ever done any of these like three four day five day fasts and my answer is no
I'm just like in the ask me why and I'm like, why would I want to do that? I don't have any need to I'm out of body composition that I'm happy with, you know, my labs are always, you know, generally pretty good. So no, I mean other than a personal challenge to see if you could do it. Yeah, look I did, you know 50 marathons and and I've spent the last two decades try to convince people not to do marathons because they're bad for you. Well, you know, so there's a point at which I will say if you want to do a marathon I'll coach
You how to do a marathon, you know and and and we'll get through this and actually I let people do two marathons. I'll let you do one to see if you can finish and if you liked it and you think you can go fast or I'll let you do one more and if you do that one more and you're a man and you haven't broken three hours or you're a woman you haven't done 330. I'm like find a new sport but this is not for you. All this is going to do is just beat you up and just before we close the loop on the on metabolic flexibility. So will you say it's like about two weeks two to four weeks? Like what is that like induction period like like
Long does that take two to four weeks is a good number in my book the keto reset diet. It's basically a six-week program, but it's you know, it's six weeks kind of like once a year. It's a reset and which isn't to say that you go off the wagon after six weeks what it means is you've you know, you're pretty strict about the keto part of it for six weeks, but then the occasional meal that has some starchy tubers or some, you know, some some rice or something in it isn't going to derail it was going to be part of that whole Meadow
Moloch flexibility thing and as long as you do that in concert with an eating strategy that has you I do believe that that a Time restricted window for eating is is optimal. So I usually eat 1:30 or 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon. This is my first meal and then I'll eat dinner and last night. It was like the blue plate special for a bunch of old people we met at six o'clock at this at this restaurant, but that's great. It was and I am old so that I can talk about that and I do
But basically the longer you go in a day without eating the more good stuff happens in your body. I like that and I would agree with that. I had my first meal at noon today. Sometimes I have it at like 11:00, you know am but like noon today and then I try to kind of wrap things up by like 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. It doesn't always happen doesn't always happen. But I give myself between two like minimum 12 hours, but between 12 and 16 hours every day, we're not eating I think in our
Our community over the past decade one one sort of common theme is that people have are just realizing that breakfast is like a waste of time be not necessary see again too much food. I just think if you wake up starving, there's something you're not mad about the flexible educator if you're if you wake up starving then have breakfast. But but if you start to eat the right kind of foods for breakfast or avoid even more so the wrong kinds of food for breakfast. I mean you look at the
American breakfast is corn flakes. It's you know, or oatmeal and orange juice and toast with Jam. It's like a sugar Fest. What's a mark Sisson breakfast? Well the soil you break your fast with? Oh, well, I will break the fast with you know, an omelet at one o'clock or 1:30 or 2:00, you know today. I ate at two o'clock today and I had a burger without a bun and and literally a burger without a bun. That was it full stop. It's all I need. So one of the things that you you also start to
Guys, it's not only your three meals too much. But sometimes two meals to regular meals of what you used to eat are also too much food. So so I tend to make my my dinner my main meal partly because it's a social thing I want to do. There's a point at which I want to sit down with people and eat and discuss and enjoy and have a glass of wine. And so that's kind of my ceremonial nice meal and it's no bigger than then it then it would have been you know,
Bigger because it's the only meal if it's that's the case. It's still piece of steak grilled vegetables, maybe some cheese and a glass of wine, but I've recognized over the past five years that I've cut my total calories back 30% 35% from what they were five or six years ago and same, you know, same body fat same strength levels same energy levels.
So it's a real eye-opener. I did a thought experiment a bunch of years ago where you know, we tend as humans to see what we can get away with right so, you know your employees at work tend to see how little work they can do and still get paid not all you not you guys listening but and with food we tend to see how much food we can eat and not get fat or gain weight or feel guilty or feel like a you know,
Whatever gets sick, but it really pushes up to the edge for a lot of people. It's like that's kind of the finisher plate thing. You know, God bless cheeks cake factory for their giant portions on you know, but what it does is it tends to have people be okay with overeating because they just tend to it's like they see what they can get away with. So I a bunch of years ago. I thought you know, it's would be really interesting is to see not what's the most amount I can eat but and not gain weight.
But what's the least amount? I can eat and maintain muscle mass still have all the energy. I need never get sick and most importantly not be hungry because that hunger just ruins everything and if you can if you can consciously kind of go back and say you know, what's the what's the least amount of this meal I can eat and not be hungry later on you find that it said it's a demonstrable a smaller amount of food, then what you used to think you could get away with.
Not gain weight. Hmm. Wow, so interesting. Yeah, I yeah it is. I think I tend to wake up and I you know, like when I when I had my first meal around 11:00 and noon it always tends to be like, yeah, very protein-rich. I'm not big on like the I don't like use a lot of added fats or Oils. Like I'll use like extra virgin olive oil which I'm a huge fan of, you know, a tablespoon 2 tablespoons Max and then generally I'll snack throughout
Throughout the day why don't snack throughout the day. But if I do choose to snack, it'll be I'll tend to reach for protein, you know, protein-rich Foods. Yep, and then I have like my big my big dinner meal. You know, yep one thing I've wondered about you. So on the spectrum of like fully plant-based fully carnivore, like where does Mark Sisson sit on that Continuum, so I used to be in the middle and now I'm more toward carnivore. So I've really been intrigued by the work of
Paul saladino John Baker number of these people who are MDS and researchers in this field and every time I try to poke a hole in their argument, you know, I get a pretty decent response about you know, we don't not only do we not need to eat nearly as much in the way of vegetable matter and and fruit, but for some people that amount of vegetables is again antithetical to health whether it's nightshades whether it's oxalates,
Whether it's you know, what we would assume to be beneficial antioxidants are actually in fact plant defenses against us and they're manifesting themselves in some gut irritation with certain people. And and the reason I still continue to eat plants is I want to have the widest variety of food in my die just like broccoli with butter on it. I just I like brussels sprouts. I like green peas.
He's I mean it's and so I'm not going to not eat them anymore. I just my fear not just for me, but for people that are following me is that is that their diet we come to boring and I you know again, I want life to be exciting. I want everybody to food that I eat to taste great last night at dinner. I had a burrata salad, you know, I had that piece of baracci and and it came with peaches and I was like a novel concept for me. So I had a couple Peaches. I mean, that's not
And yes peaches are full of sugar. But I mean in the context of that and that New York state that I had and you had that to pound rib eye. Oh so good. Yeah so good. Yeah. What's the name of the restaurant? Again? Draycott Draycott? Shout out to add ricotta. Yeah in Pacific Palisades related really good rib eye. That's interesting. Yeah, I I tend to I like plants, but I also definitely
Or ties like the protein the meet the fish the eggs things like that. You know one thing that I see in the in the keto Community is a tendency to add extra fats. You're talking a little bit earlier about olive oil and then the tablespoon here there and I see this a lot in early keto adopters particularly people who are tremendously overweight and then went to Quito because
They were sort of given permission to have bacon and butter and fat and lardons. And and one of the dangers not a danger, but one of the reasons that they may be Plateau at some point is they're still thinking about this being a fat Centric diet the keto diet being fat Centric and it's it's not so much that as it's a, you know, a carb deficient diet. It's right. It's not that you have to add back a ton of fat. It's that you have to really cut the carbs.
And and another sort of I think erroneous assumption was that too much protein will you know convert to glucose and kick you out of ketosis well takes a fair amount of protein to do that and if people are having a hundred and fifty or a hundred sixty grams of protein a day, that's not too much especially if you're a you know a large person who's got a lot of fat to burn. So the notion that you would then want to add in more fat so that the ratios, you know came back into
To enter range what it does is you become good at burning fat. You just not burning off your own body fat by putting off your own fat. Yeah. I think that's it. That's a crucial distinction that you made that the Ketone fire hose is not a function of added fat in your diet or any fat in your diet. It's purely a function of the deficit of exogenous glucose IE, you know, mostly in form of carbs. Yes, but you're right Exotics glucose because it's you know glucose.
Is what raises insulin and Insulin shuts off ketosis, so that's you can accomplish this you could be a vegetarian and get into ketosis and you can get into ketosis with, you know caloric restriction versus just macronutrient manipulation. Yeah, but the easiest way is is to you know is to have a low-carb diet that's adequate in protein and then is not to over over the top in terms of fat.
At yeah, I think I think some of the carnivore people if I may share a theory, I think some of these guys were probably you ever you ever meet somebody who kind of has like, I'll just use man as an example like like you ever meet a guy who has like kind of a 12 year old boy diet. Like they like they enjoy Pizza. They waffles like a lot of my like like my brothers will tell me so like their co-workers they see kind of like the kinds of foods at their co-workers at you know, they'll eat like hot dogs and pizza and like things like that like that. Yeah. They're just your palette doesn't evolve your theory.
Theory about or your philosophy about how to eat them all and so vegetables don't really play a role in that. And so then you find a diet like the carnivore diet that like allows you to eat all the meat that you want and see good results from it. Like there's no doubt that and so I think the reason why it's so easy for some of these people to cut vegetables out of their dies is the a they never liked vegetables to begin with and I think that has to do with the fact that many people just don't know how to cook vegetables and make them delicious. So for me like when I think about about, you know cutting out,
Like the kinds of vegetables that I know how to make and you know seasoned properly to me that just seems like the most boring life because I've had delicious vegetables but some of these people in the carnivore Community, they're like, well, they don't they don't like vegetables. I don't like fruit or anything like that. I'm like what what that's a good theory. I like that the 12 year old boy dietary da ever meet anybody like that? Well, I'm sure a lot of people know it's the it's the you know, the frat boy diet or yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of
Females that like still love mac and cheese and things like that, you know pizza' mac and cheese like all these kinds of food. So yeah, it's nothing bad about those foods, but they just like when you build your diet around them, they're limiting interview right in terms of palette. Yeah. Well, that's interesting because if you if you kind of parse the diet in general of a healthy person if you've gotten rid of sugars, so that's pies cakes candies cookies if you got rid of grains that's crackers.
And Breads and and cereals if you've got rid of industrial seed oils so you got rid of sorts. So I corn canola cottonseed whatever else they might be using you come down to a pretty short list of food, man. You know, you've got five you've got beef pork lamb, you've got chicken and turkey and then you've got some fish and that your protein sources. That's really limiting. At least if you're eating vegetables. You got 17
Suppose that you're going to eat, you know, I know you can name 10, but when you get past 10:00, it's you start to have to pull in the rutabagas and yeah, you know, so it's a it's a it's an interesting challenge to be again to be an excited eater when you're limited in your the types of foods that you can eat are just meat. Yeah, right or maybe you're throwing some chicken in there are the most carnivores
consider chicken a very inferior Choice. Yeah the before the ruminants. Yeah. And again, we're back to you know, why are we here? We here to see how long we can go just eating meat or are we here to you know, optimize our our lifespan and or enjoy the most amount of every moment we can and in my book that includes, you know, pleasurable activities like like eating and that of necessity.
Wires some variety and you know the methods of preparation the herbs and spices the sauces the dressings of topics. I mean, that's why I started Primal kitchen. I started Primal kitchen because when I recognize that I got rid of all this other stuff and they were only gonna be five kinds of meat and 17 vegetables. Like, how am I going to make those palatable? Well for me, the first thing was I got I got 15 salad dressings. Hmm, so I can show you a bowl of vegetables raw vegetables that I will call a salad.
David and I got 15 different ways to make it flavorful. So that's you know, that's the notion of variety there. Yeah, and we've got, you know Red barbecue sauce and the gold barbecue sauce. We get pasta sauces now so you can have zucchini pasta so good. Yeah. Yeah. I like I live and breathe like your ketchup your avocado Mayo. The ranch is a staple. What else do I little lemon tumeric? Yeah thing is really good and and those are all things that you can put on an otherwise healthy.
The but sort of boring food and make them more excited. I just think a lot of people don't know how to like a they don't know how to cook vegetables. They don't know like that the you know, the low and slow method, you know, really kind of like breaks that you know the well that's a 42 second video. Yeah on how to cook vegetables. Yeah, I mean, but it should be done and should be done people people are also like very they don't like to use salt because I think that salts not good for you. So they don't make them as Savory as they should be. Yeah. Oh God, I have salt and vegetable God.
Have salt gotta have salt. I mean you got have salt on an avocado. Yeah, you try eating avocados are amazing. Try eating an avocado without salt. Yeah. Yeah, no bueno. Well, we're almost out of time dude. This was so fun. Thanks for coming here. You flew all the way from Miami to La just to be on this on this show, right if that's how you like to put it and absolutely I did that and I do it again Max man. Well where can listeners find you on social media and where can I pick up your latest book so cater for life.
Amazon now because a covid yeah Mark's Daily Apple is the blog has been for since 2006 every day and I'm on you know, we have
Primal Kitchen on Instagram Primal kitchen foods, and I'm Mark Sisson Primal on Instagram. Just a lot of shirtless shots of me. That's a lot of shirtless shots doing that. What is this slacklining black line and paddling? Yeah. Wow. So cool. You lead a rough life Mark Marky Mark. The last question that gets asked everybody to show. What does it mean to you to live a genius life to live a genius life.
Well for me, it is the currency that I get when somebody that I've never met comes up to me and says dude, I read your book and it changed my life. That's that's that's what we call psychic income industry. Yeah. Wow psychic. I love that. Yeah. It's such an amazing feeling we're so privileged to be able to do what we do. I mean you and you've been doing it for such a long time.
It's just such a gift, you know, well, thank you for being here later. Yeah, dude. Love to be able to call you a friend like you're a big inspiration to me as well as I'm sure many of my listeners to all you guys out there in podcast land. Thank you for tuning in. I value your time and attention text me to let me know what you thought of this show 310 2999 401 and I will catch you on the next episode Peace.
