How To MELT YOUR FAT & Get In The BEST SHAPE Of Your Life! | Mark Sisson

mark sisson welcome to health theory this is round two for us thank you man for coming back it's such a pleasure tom it's been a while it has i was re-watching the first episode that we did which i had a great time doing and one of the things we talked on or touched on that i wish we had gone deeper was your whole concept of living awesome and i thought that would be a good place to pick up i want to give people something that's that's really prescriptive i know that you shy away from judging people uh i'll be in full judgment mode in terms of i'll make the assumption that people want to they want to be healthy they want to be pain-free they don't want to be starving all the time and anything that moves them towards that goal makes sense to me anything that moves away i will be highly judgmental of uh just because they're you know putting themselves in a a position of punishment i had done to myself for a very long time uh so in wanting to help them get there so let's touch on do you have sort of tenants of an awesome life that you think are relatively universal well yeah i mean um the i guess the basic structure here is um i want to extract the greatest amount of enjoyment fulfillment contentment pleasure uh out of every possible moment now look sometimes that's just you know not going to be feasible or it's not going to be possible but but to the extent that you can do it as much as possible throughout the day that's what i'm looking for so i want people to be as you said pain-free i want people to be able to move around i want people to be able to enjoy playing uh with their friends with their loved ones with their kids uh i want people to enjoy every single bite of food they ever eat uh you know these are these are the basic tenets and so my uh designing of my own life has been kind of structured around how do i create these opportunities uh to get that sense of satisfaction contentment fulfillment productivity can you define fulfillment you've been a pretty hard pushing um you said at one point you considered yourself type i don't know if you still do but as somebody who has successfully built and sold a company obviously you're you're very driven a marathon runner very driven what do you think fulfillment actually is let me tell you um when i when i discover what it is i will let you know uh this is probably the the essence of a type a personality so when i say i'm looking for contentment satisfaction enjoyment those are all sort of hedonistic um aspects of uh like real-time uh results right and i can talk to you about enjoying every bite of food i can talk about the pleasure uh you know of a great relationship or sex or you know even even a good workout fulfillment however starts to get into this uh realm of self-judgment and you open this with with the concept of judging and that's one of the areas that i'm really hardest on myself so i feel fulfilled uh when i when i feel like i've i've made a contribution to someone's life so i've been an educator for as long as i've been in business 35 40 years i've been writing books i've been doing seminars i've been doing a lot of podcasts and nothing ever is more fulfilling to me than when someone comes up to me out of the blue and says hey mark i can't believe it's you you've changed my life that's fulfillment to me uh and i get that you know i'm i'm i guess i'm i'm lucky enough to have that happen to me uh on on many occasions throughout my life uh so that's sort of a short-term fulfillment the long-term fulfillment thing as i say it's really kind of a self-judgment thing like what is it going to take for me to just say mark you're done you know you've you've done it you've done enough uh do you think you'll ever feel that way like wouldn't wouldn't that almost worry you no that's the point it's like so the fulfillment is now sort of uh just a carrot on a stick in front of me you know for the rest of my life and i think that's fabulous i mean i'm i'm chasing that high of fulfillment and as i said i get it in in brief moments but but at the end of the day as with all of this it comes down to you like are you able to recognize the accomplishments are you able to have the gratitude for what you've done and who you are and and and everything about your life you know are you able to con congratulate yourself for the accomplishments and forgive the mistakes that's really the essence of that sort of fulfillment and and it is in my mind an ongoing process so as i said i'm i'm i'm still i think chasing it and i i agree with you it's like will it ever will it ever happen i say you know check that box off probably not yeah that to me fulfillment is the one to to really focus on because what what i always equate to people so i get a lot of people that follow me or whatever because i've had financial success and my thing is look that that's the wrong reason to look at my life and and think there's anything interesting because the money didn't change how i felt about myself and so all of the insecurities or or struggles that i had i still had when i had the money and so you know the question i always ask people is how many billionaires have to commit suicide before you realize that money is not the issue and my thing is fulfillment is often born out of suffering and it really feeds into the only notion that i think is interesting which is how do you feel about yourself when you're by yourself so there's nobody hyping you up there's nobody trying to tear you down just like what do you think about yourself what do you to your point about accomplishment like you know have you served somebody else have you done something rad for other people and i'll even push it a little bit farther and say the thing that i find most fulfilling is when i've helped somebody in a unique way that was born of a skill set that i acquired through doing really hard [ __ ] and if the things had come too easily to me i will discount whatever impact they have on people if i'm only able to help myself i would discount it so you know it's this weird thing like you're talking about of it's a carrot that's sort of forever in the distance you might feel it when somebody comes up and says hey you impacted my life but then the next day you you want to live up to that again you want to keep pushing yourself and it's the sincere pursuit of that that i find interesting even more than getting something or you know crossing a finish line or winning a record or something like that it's just am i really going after it i mean that's exactly uh the concept and it's it's difficult to explain uh to some people um and and your you know your uh your notion of crossing a finish line you know the number of times that i've won a race or set a record um and that and the fulfillment lasted literally 10 minutes you know or a half an hour and then the mind immediately goes to okay you did that what's next so there's a lot of this what's next thing um again to your point i sold my company and i think the last time i cried was when i hung up the phone from the closing call right which if you if you've done that it's basically a couple of lawyers saying are you ready are you ready okay why are the money uh and and you know i i've been working on it for a long time i sobbed and then all of a sudden nothing changed i just had a lot of money in my bank account but i'm still the same guy and and it's almost like now you have to go okay you did that now what because you got a lot of life ahead of you and you know then this the the sort of the questions you ask are do i need to top that to you know to keep that carrot out there or can i pivot somehow laterally and still have you know the same sense of accomplishment but it's really interesting how how you know those i guess those of us type a's are kind of always chasing that high that we might label as fulfillment so it's um it's it's it's really quite interesting that it just comes back to who are you when you're alone with yourself i love that for sure so when you begin to break out some of the other elements of living the awesome life and i think about when i try to back into how did i have the energy to you know build the last company or the energy to build this company and to really see things through i always want the answer to be just mindset mindsets hugely important but diet and exercise have been these like massive weapons that i've wielded so as you think about optimizing and the reason for me is energy production right just breaking things down to atp the ability to generate at a cellular level the energy that i need to do something is critically important um as you begin to think about the role that diet and exercise play like so going back to wanting this to be super prescriptive for somebody right now is taking notes and like i'm going to live an awesome life and so here are the things okay fulfillment we understand that the money isn't going to be the thing how do how should they begin to think about optimizing at a physical level so at a physical level um you know you still need to be present in the moment and you still need to have you know strong cognition you need to be you know have your thoughts about you you need to have the energy as you described to get throughout the day you certainly don't want to lose down time to being sick or feeling just you know crappy because of uh you know a bad diet or a bad night's sleep so i think that a lot of entrepreneurs now recognizing that this health element of of entrepreneurship is a key component and it's not just some side thought that you have uh you know after the fact uh i did a um i did a podcast with a entrepreneurial coach yesterday and you know he spends two hours in the gym every day and he's focusing on his diet and that's part of his his thing and i said look it might be two hours a little bit too much uh and you may be you know over overdoing that there's a critical mass necessary to achieve good health but absolutely um you know my my focus throughout my entire career has been on my health and my my ability to be present whether it's for my family whether it's for my employees whether it's just to be present at the desk on the job uh and and this comes back to a basic prescription uh you know of diet and exercise which everybody sort of knows you know kind of intellectually i i need to eat better and i need to work out a little bit more so the focus of my efforts over the last 25 30 years have been how do i really tap into optimizing uh all aspects of my health and for me in the last even in the last two years my shift has come down to this concept of what i call metabolic flexibility so you know i was i was a high carb athlete high performance athlete in the 70s and 80s and part of the 90s then i sort of got my my act together and i was uh i created the primal blueprint which looked at just natural foods and and getting rid of the sugars and pies and cakes and candies and then i was a keto athlete which is even the highest level of that where you you get rid of a lot of carbs and you really train your body to become good at burning fat but what i realized about a couple years ago is that really what we're all after in terms of the like holy grail of health is this concept of metabolic flexibility it's this metabolic health that allows you to extract energy from any substrate that's available uh in your body at any one time whether it's the fat on your in your in your fat stores you know on your thighs your hips your belly whether it's the fat on your plate of food the carbohydrate on your plate of food the glucose in your bloodstream the glycogen in your muscles the ketones that your liver makes and the absence of glucose and all of these different energy substrates are available and we are wired to take to take advantage of them but we have to train our bodies to do that and so many of us have become carbohydrate dependent over the years that we've lost this ability to become metabolically flexible and metabolically efficient and we're going to give people the recipe on how to do that um restriction of carbs some restriction of protein i would imagine um reasonable amounts of healthy fats time restricted feeding like what are the what are the key there you go there you you said what i was going to say no it's basically those are the elements and the the other is the recognition that um you don't need as many calories as you thought you needed to thrive all right so why why do people get the belief is because i i will say it's probably driven by what you're taught breakfast is most important meal that kind of [ __ ] but then it's also at a physiological level people have eaten so ridiculously their entire lives they actually have the cravings they wake up and they're hungry as hell um so how do you is it just that is there more than that how do you see people getting better well you get beyond that first of all by retraining you know by building the metabolic machinery to be really good at burning fat by increasing the number of mitochondria by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of those mitochondria where the fat burns can you do that just your diet or do you have to bust ass in the gym you can do it just through diet now it helps to do it in the gym but i would say 80 to 90 percent of all you're going to achieve in that realm of of sort of reconfiguring your energy production comes from your dietary choices and not just by the way um you know macronutrients how much fat protein carbohydrate but how much of each of those you eat at a given meal how how often you spend not eating anything for long periods of time which then refines that mechanism yeah you got to go to the gym mostly to maintain muscle mass and to maintain strength and mobility and you know those other aspects of health that kind of define a healthy lifestyle and an awesome lifestyle that ability to move through life and enjoy movement and access to places and people uh without being in pain and without being uh you know bedridden or in a wheelchair but but yeah 80 to 90 of this do you know what's going on at a cellular level that makes because i if if anybody's ever said that to me before i don't remember it i've never i don't have any memory of anybody saying that through diet you can actually increase the number of mitochondria um what changes specifically in in sort of that quick list that we went down or if there's something else what is it that's triggering that and if you know the cellular mechanism what is it so first of all let's let's just be clear that you said do i have to spend you know hours in the gym grunting and groaning and and sweating and straining you still have to move right you still have to go about your life um moving throughout the day that's one of the sort of main focuses if you will of of this uh awesome lifestyle but it does not mean you have to grind it out in the gym uh to you know to get 80 or 90 of the results but what's happening is um you know your body is always requiring energy and if you continue to eat every couple of hours throughout the day and much of that is in the form of carbohydrate even if it's complex carbohydrate even if it's you know healthy you know whole grain whatever breads or things like that your body is still becoming dependent uh on this glucose supply and it's basically telling you're telling it through your choices there's when we're never really gonna have to tap into our fat supplies we're not gonna have to go any any period of time and and and use the reserve fuel that we've been building up over the years because you choose to continue to eat whether it's your learned behavior because you were told that breakfast was the most important meal of the day and you got to eat three square meals and going back to the 80s and 90s you know if you go more than three or four hours without eating you'll go into cannibal mode and you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue these are all things by the way this was like acknowledged in the science community um you know by those who didn't know any better for the longest time well it turns out that that you know carbohydrates and glucose which is what carbohydrates turn into uh is not the preferred fuel of the body the body prefers to burn fat loves to burn fat would like to burn ketones to fuel the brain uh but we just kind of never give it the chance because of access to food and again the three square meals a day so in order to um effect a change in the body you gotta kind of trick somebody in some regards because you know we're we're an organism that evolved over millions hundreds of millions of years uh to conserve energy so conserving energy for this body means i don't want to i don't want to build any structures that i don't need that are unnecessary i don't want to waste any energy doing stuff that is going to um you know not help me survive and so uh if you are presented with uh copious amounts of food all the time the body says basically i don't need to tap into the store and body fats that's like that's for that's for later that's my reserve that's my that's my ira account for the body right i don't want to tap into that there'll be great penalties for doing that that's what the body thinks because you're giving it food all the time so how to trick the body into doing this is you say well i'm going to skip a meal here or there i'm going to cut back on carbs i'm going to tell the brain there's not going to be a lot of glucose for the next couple of days and we're going to have to take advantage of all of the instructions that are in our dna that provide for this plan b in the event of a lack of food so you consciously choose not to eat carbs you consciously choose to skip meals once in a while and by the way you don't do this like again struggling and suffering i have i've spent decades teaching people how to do this in a way that's easy and graceful but you basically retrain the body to go well if there's not going to be that much glucose we're going to have to build a metabolic machinery to burn fat more efficiently and that's this mitochondrial biogenesis so the lack of glucose the lack of carbohydrates the the in at times the the timed eating window where you go 18 or 20 hours without eating these are all signals that our bodies you know that the genes within our body um use to say okay we gotta build more protein we gotta build more uh enzymes that take fats out of storage we have to we have to make the mitochondria more efficient and within a very like relatively short period of time like three weeks of doing this you can reconfigure your body so that it becomes very adept at burning fat very comfortable burning fat for all of your motor activities throughout the day your brain becomes very adept at using ketones for fuel instead of glucose and so in the absence of carbohydrate in the absence of glucose you start to develop this metabolic flexibility now keto has been like the big like tool in the toolbox to get there right but you can do it uh without going full keto you can do it with a with a much more aggressive time restriction uh again the body if you go 20 hours without eating there are a lot of adaptations that the body will make recognizing that um and by the way the body isn't like this is not new information the body this is how humans lived for millions of years you know you got you got one meal once in a while you are wired to overeat at that meal because first of all you couldn't save it you couldn't refrigerate the leftovers right you couldn't uh there so so we were wired to overeat and then we had this marvelous mechanism in our body that takes the extra calories and converts it to fuel that we carry around with us conveniently located right above the center of gravity on our ass and our in our in our hips and our stomach and our thighs and it's it's such an elegant design the problem is most of us retained this ability to store the extra calories because they're available all the time but we never developed the skill to burn off those extra calories metabolically one thing that was a huge breakthrough for me um and i think it behooves people to really think about why you and obviously a lot of other people use the term metabolic flexibility is your your body is now able to use different things for fuel so it's got it can use the sugar that you're intaking the glucose it can use the fat you have stored in your body the big breakthrough for me was asking the question why the hell do we store fat like what what is the purpose of that and when you were saying you can't store the food if you find it you actually can right you're storing the energy potential in your way you're storing it as fat in your body so if you think of the fat on your body as sort of a refrigerator that's keeping that that potential energy safe and in your body with you whenever the need might arise and i remember one day thinking oh my god in in western society for sure you have some people they could be in their 30s or 40s and never once have needed to click over into actually burning their body fat they are constantly feeding themselves and the the metabolic machinery doesn't exist the potential for it is there and they could still trigger those genes and kick it into use and i thought oh my god like the thought that i'm carrying fat with me now that i may have stored when i was a kid because i've never put myself into that kind of deficit to trigger that machinery to kick in to pull the fat out of the the cells and use it for energy i was like whoa this is how people really get into trouble and so having that ability to if you miss a meal or whatever fine you just click over into grabbing the fat is is profoundly transformative it is and and in many ways i mean it's certainly going to make you trend toward your ideal body composition as you as you burn more body fat but as you become so adept at deriving energy from restored body fat and using ketones one of the one of the biggest benefits of all is hunger appetite and cravings dissipate because get get the fact that now your body is so good at burning fat it doesn't care it doesn't even know you know your muscles don't even know whether the fat that they're burning right now came off the plate of food you just ate or off of your butt or thighs it doesn't care it doesn't know because that skill is is so good and so over time the the the panic sensation that the brain used to have of holy crap it's 1 30 and i haven't had lunch yet i'm going to die or i'm gonna get angry or i'm gonna you know i'm gonna gnaw someone's head off that that goes away and in its place you get this steady state of regular energy throughout the day which again fat is fueling most of the muscular activity and ketones are fueling a lot of the brain activity and and people get a little bit you know they a little freaked out when they hear the term ketones and they hear about ketosis and it sounds like a disease and you know ketoacidosis ketones are just this amazing super fuel it's like a superpower that everybody has and we don't most of us never get a chance to tap into it as you said earlier it's it's there it's available it's in the blueprint uh we can use it if called upon and to demystify what ketones are it's basically a byproduct of fat metabolism right you're pulling the fat out of the cells turn it into a ketone and then send it to the liver it gets turned into a ketone the brain can use it and and one of the things that i find like really fascinating is um the liver has the capacity to make 750 calories worth of fuel out of ketones every day and uh the brain you know you will hear people say well the brain uses you know 20 of the body's calories well um if you're you know if you're consuming 2500 calories a day 20 of that is is 500 calories that's about right um and that's that's a glucose thing so we have more than enough of the calories from ketones to fuel the brain but really the the exciting part to me is this notion that once you become metabolically flexible uh and you've used maybe a ketogenic diet to just manipulate for a couple of weeks to get there uh you don't have to stay you know keto for the rest of your life you just use it as a as a strategy to develop this flexibility one of the things you recognize is that the um uh you know if you go to the gym and you do like a heavy leg day right and you're gonna you're doing lots of massive squats and dead lifts and things like that your body's your leg muscles and the major muscles in your legs are going to use 30 or 40 or 50 times as much fuel to get that work done as they would at rest meanwhile how much fuel is the brain using just about the same amount as it was before so the the fuel demands of the brain do not vary wildly throughout the day it's just a steady steady state and so interesting i'd be i'd be curious to know if if that's true well so what's making me um hit the pause button there is they were looking at the um caloric requirements of a grand chess master in the middle of a chess tournament is something like 6 6 500 calories a day which is insane so i'd be curious to see like if having a steady state of caloric consumption by the brain is actually not ideal have you looked at anything that sort of looks at um cognitive load and its impact yeah i mean i i would love to see that study because that just you know you're you're talking about michael phelps type calories to fuel is said but what it amounts to is a sedentary albeit cerebral uh you know contest um no the brain the brain's usage of calories throughout the day does not vary wildly and in the event that um you know you've got a uh a chess master who's you know doing multiple uh games you i suppose you could argue that if you're sipping on a coca-cola all day you know and and wandering around and and nervous and building up all of this uh you know pent up energy so you're calling [ __ ] on yeah here here's the good news i could definitely uh it could be a [ __ ] study who knows whatever um i'm super curious to look into that so yeah all right so your [ __ ] meter goes off on that one off the yeah just think about that if that were the case where would where would those 6500 calories come from because the brain doesn't burn protein and it doesn't burn fat it burns glucose and ketones full stop so like i said you're you're either gonna have to down like you know uh a case of coca-cola to get that amount of glucose um you know and if the limitations of the of the liver are seven only i say only in a you know a joking way only 750 calories a day yeah so so we'll uh tom we'll we'll handle this offline okay so but in the meantime my point is that that the liver gets um comfortable making ketones at a steady state so in the early stages of going into ketosis or the early stages of uh of of a long fast for instance the liver tends to over produce ketones and those spill out into the bloodstream and into the breath and into the urine and you would see those as a as high numbers on a ketone meter on a ketone strip uh and you'd go oh i'm in ketosis because uh the definition of ketosis is you know 0.5 millimolar or greater and some people show 3 five millimolar and they say hey i'm in ketosis it's working i'm doing great but in terms of metabolic flexibility that's not great because that's the body wasting energy like i said doesn't want to waste energy and over time the body gets used to the the demands the workload required of it and so the liver starts to just kind of trickle out these ketones in a way that's much more conservative and still able to feed the brain fully uh and and that's the metabolic efficiency in addition the metabolic flexibility that i talk about and you know why is that good well over time you realize that jesus i didn't need to eat three meals a day that's just way too much food um and the meals that i do eat tend not to be as big as they were before and the good news is i'm not even hungry i mean i'm hungry look i love as i said every bite of food i eat i enjoy and i savor but i also with that comes another benefit that not many people appreciate and that is now you know when it's time to put the goddamn fork down and say that's enough you know it's it's the so now the difference between being satiated and gluttonous it becomes a very uh well-defined boundary for most people now let's talk about the quality of the calories one thing so first of all i love your weekly link love for anybody that's not following mark's daily apple get after it that that's one of my favorite things that you put out and going through recently you were talking about you were talking about in an older population but i'd be curious to see if you think this applies everywhere that animal protein is superior to plant protein for older people um one why is that true for older people and then does it apply downstream as you're younger uh so yeah it's it it applies across the board it just applies more as you get older because as you get older it's more difficult to to assimilate and to get that amount of protein in so is it the amino acid profile like what is it about it's it's the amino acid profile right so um you know it sounds simplistic to say like for like but if you want to build muscle you should probably eat muscle protein if you want to build collagen you should probably consume more collagen you know this is how the body similarities among mammals so so we consume meat we consume mammal mammalian meat or even fish it's it's fairly similar in amino acid profile to human muscle tissue so that's one of the reasons it makes it an ideal uh source of animal protein is an ideal source of protein now can you come close to it with some sort of a uh you know a plant-based concoction where you're mixing pea protein and and beans and rice and i mean yes but some of the major um some of the some of the major amino acids that are present in meat are not just you don't find them in any appreciable quantities can you give me a breakdown on amino acids so one thing that i've always heard is that the amino acid profile in plants just is inferior to the amino acid profile in um meats but honestly i i have never pressed hard enough to really figure out like what are amino acids doing exactly like what's their role well they're the building blocks of protein and so a lot of protein most of the human body is protein when your genes are taking the information and prompting the construction of certain uh structures and enzymes in the body uh almost invariably they're using amino acids to build these these structures so some of the structures don't require you know a full array of amino acids we have this group of of essential amino acids that we must get outside of the diet the non-essential amino acids the body can kind of manufacture uh on its own in the absence of of a dietary supply of them but of the eight amino acids that we must have uh there that's why we need to to consume um you know quality sources of protein so the amino acids in different proteins use different amounts of different amino acids so you know arginine ornithine tryptophan these are these are all amino acids that you know muscles require uh higher amounts of and if you don't if you don't get a full complement of them you're sort of rate limited by uh whatever the least prevalent of those ones required was hence this this notion that you can uh you know by eating animal protein uh you're going to do yourself the the best possible favor in being able to build muscle protein lean body mass and and repair some of the tissues and just really fast just to continue down that path so you've got is there a mechanism in the body where they essentially know okay these are the different tissues and i guess i'm rounding it to tissues these are the different tissues that we need to repair create build whatever and we know what the amino acid profile of each of those tissues is so if the diet coming in does not match the amino acid profiles of the things that we need to address then we just have to go well i guess we can't deal with whatever maybe it's connective tissue or we can't deal with muscle tissue at least not as much as we want no that's exactly right so i'll give you another example um recently um bone broth has come on the market right it's come on the scene and collagen collagen supplementation um i uh had my first really uh bad experience with that good experience with that um about six years ago i was i play ultimate frisbee and i and i played what exactly i'm sorry well so so um i after years of playing ultimate frisbee i was and i'm you know i was in already in my late 50s early 60s i was developing achilles tendinosis so thickening of my achilles um i wasn't able to tissue essentially like scar tissue essentially and i went to a doctor and the doctor said well like one of the best you know orthopedic guys in los angeles and he said well there's only one one fix for that and that is we gotta take you in and we gotta slit open the back of your heels and scrape your achilles down and pack you in a cast for three months and then do nine months of rehab and you'll be back to 80 85 percent and i'm like [ __ ] that i i'm you know i went back to the drawing board and i and i i i literally smh man i'm like uh wow i i realize that the achilles uh is uh you know a collagenous material throughout the body it's it's it's largely based on collagen peptides um i haven't been getting any i haven't been eating animals nose to tail which everyone in human history did until 200 years ago uh and so for the last again for for millennia humans have taken in the raw material to rebuild tendons ligaments connective tissue fascia cartilage all this uh all this cartilage based uh protein in the human body and in the absence of that raw material the body goes well you know you're not giving me what i need to repair the damage that you did when you went out and sprinted and played ultimate frisbee and so i'm gonna i'm gonna go to plan b which is i'm gonna build some scar tissue and i'm gonna put down a layer of protection because we can't build it back the way it was so i recognized this and i started consuming 30 40 grams of collagen a day and i actually undo the scarring it completely cured what was an otherwise untenable situation within four months i was completely cured and knocked with today my achilles both are probably my strong part of the strongest you know they're certainly not the weakest link let's put it that way did you get an mri or something that showed the thickening oh yeah oh yeah so and you had it it was visibly thick to the and you know i couldn't like like if i got a massage i would not let the massage therapist go anywhere near my achilles even just mildly touching them would illicit pain i was to the point where if i was you know gonna jump off the last stair in a stairwell i would think i was going to snap both both achilles it was it was horrible so the point is i i think what we're seeing now in in sports across the board uh is a generation of athletes who who don't eat nose to tail they eat the choice cuts of meat but they don't eat any collagen um at the very least when they were growing up they had jello jello was a source of of these collagen peptides but now with all of the you know associations with jello and sugar and sweeteners and cosby uh you know jello kind of fell off the fell off the uh the radar and so we've we've got a generation of athletes that haven't been feeding themselves the raw materials they need to repair mcl's acls uh you know meniscus cartilage fascia um and and tendons and ligaments and it's and it's showing up in these athletic injuries now one thing i've heard you talk about in terms of getting the collagen into the system which i've never heard anybody else speak to and i found this really interesting so there's very little blood flow or so they say and it seems to be bearing out in the research but there's very little blood flow to tendons and other parts of connective tissue so why do you take collagen before a hard workout so it's there's just one really cool study done uh four years ago five years ago now uh they labeled collagen peptides in a drink it was actually a gelatin drink gelatin collagen are sort of similar and uh and they did 15 grams i think 20 minutes before a six minute jump rope workout and they literally measure the uptake of these labeled collagen peptides into the achilles and it was like more than like double the uptake uh versus the control group when when they um you know they drank the collagen before the workout and and the theory is that because there's no blood supply and yet this is a uh the achilles tendon is a tendon like like most of them while it does have a blood supply it's got it's got water sort of in it it's got fluids in it and as you squeeze it the fluids come out and as you relax it the fluids come back in and it was almost by sort of this like massaging type thing that the the peptides had access to the interior of the matrix of uh of the tendon so that's that's really interesting for another reason as well which is when you get injured people tend to lay off it right to not use it and that can actually end up creating its own source of problems which sort of putting that logic together now that makes sense if you're not using it you're not getting that sort of um spongy effect yeah yeah you know opening it up to let things in that's interesting no it's interesting i mean again to further that that notion um physical therapy over the past decade has changed a lot you know it used to be uh you know rest ice compression elevation right right and and now it turns out ice may not be you know beneficial to most people because they're talking about inflammation yeah yeah other than maybe the first 10 or 15 minutes if it's if there's massive swelling and i've never responded well to ice for instance i've always responded much better with any sort of an itis or an injury a tendonitis to warmth to heat and the other concept was using it as soon as you can right up to the point of pain so now people have uh you know knee replacements and hip replacements and they're like they got to be up and walking the day they get the the thing done uh so it's it's uh i you know my mother um you know who passed away a year ago but she she had a serious lung cancer issue probably six you know six years prior to that uh and she had her a lung removed and a breast removed with cancer and they had her literally as soon as she woke up they had her walking around you know with with her iv stand so the the whole the idea of recovery now has shifted from bed rest to literally do whatever you can as much as you can up to the point of pain to keep that body in motion and to prompt those healing mechanisms uh to kick in yeah that's interesting to me when you think about the body as having the things that you already need i mean this goes back to metabolic flexibility right you have all of these abilities already in you and it's about turning those on flipping the the genetic switches or however you want to think of it um to jump starting that that's really interesting really interesting and you know when it comes down to injury laying off the body you're giving the body the signal that hey i guess we don't need this anymore and so you begin that process of atrophy um which is the exact opposite of what you want to do which is tell the body no no there's still demands in this you're going to need to address it you're going to need and then if you've got something like connective tissue where you need that that squeeze the tightening and the release to actually get the nutrients into it and then of course it's all started talking about animal protein versus plant protein make sure that you have the amino acid profiles that you need for the body to actually utilize those and and i want to actually go back to the animal versus plant protein for a second so was it eight essential amino acids or eight total amino acids um eight essential amino acids so these are the ones there's 20 20 22 some people say 21 but 22 of amino acids that the body uses and and eight of them are essential you have to get them from the diet okay and can we get all 20 like if we're hardcore about you know creating just the ultimate plant-based diet can we get all 22 or are is there actually some sure but you you're going to have to supplement like crazy you know you're going to have to go down to your i specifically mean without supplementation no uh it's you can but you don't again you don't get the amounts you don't get the ratios and the amounts and so you're sort of you have this sort of rate limiting effect uh you can and how how some people overcome it like some of the uh plant-based bodybuilders for instance who by the way got most of their size while they were eating meat and then decided they wanted to go plant-based because someone convinced them that that was the right thing to do they just eat a lot they just you know overeat like you know you might get 300 total grams of protein in a day of which you know only probably 75 or 80 grams is maybe useful for repair and building i'm actually pitching a reality show around called carnivore versus vegan because look i i don't care what the reality is i just want to know what the truth is and so what i want to do is lock identical twins uh in a house separated so you have one identical twin is going to be a carnivore one identical twin is going to be a vegan and then you put them through a battery of different things from uh strength tests conditioning just general you know like you talk about in your book how do you feel are you hungry are you um agitated like where are we at and then see like what what ends up happening to those identical twins it would be utterly fascinating and it's so controversial what do you think is the the um the real amount of time really that long absolutely and i'll tell you why um i mean it's not that long to start to you know parse out or tease out some small discrepancies in attitude or you know sleep behavior or things like that um but but here's the the good news is the human body is wickedly resilient i mean look we survived horrendous conditions for millions of years we happen to be pretty lucky in in our access to food and clothing and shelter and warmth and all the things we want right now but we're really resilient and so you know you go back to the irish potato famine when people lived on seaweed and shoe leather for six months at a time you know until they could get some actual source of calories into them the body is is very resilient and and the good news in that regard is that if you are someone who decides i've eaten animals my whole life i want to switch to a plant-based diet you might get a good six year run until stuff starts happening and some people you know i'm not going to say everybody you know is gonna suffer from a from a vegan diet but if you're really going to go vegan it's a full-time job to get that right and and i see now on the internet on you know you see a lot of these plant former plant-based bodybuilders who go back to consuming meat because they're like okay i just you know i got a nice run i was i got some some leeway i got some runway if you will for a year or two before i started to notice that i was not as strong or that you know things were starting to fall apart and that's again the resilience of a body that spent 20 years or 25 or 30 years building itself up to peak performance or a peak level or peak size at the age of 25 or 30 using animal products to get there and then kind of as they say coasting on a on a plant-based diet for a while so your experiment while it would be interesting would probably take a year to kind of manifest itself in in in obvious changes if at all i mean i'm not suggesting that it would that that's the way it would be but you know it's a it's a it's a certainly a good thought experiment yeah i mean this is the kind of thing that um it it part of why i want to do it is is there's a religious element to it um that i find very unusual so it's like there's there's an answer out there somewhere and look i get it from a sustainability standpoint um you know we probably need to think about farming just entirely differently uh certainly from an animal standpoint um i know you one of the links that you posted was about that then you know the potential advantages of smaller farms getting room in animals that kind of thing and you know look i am not saying that the way things are now is in any way shape or form ideal i'm just saying there is an answer like this is an empirical question um and and so there is a breakdown but human metabolism is so [ __ ] complicated and this is why i wanted to have identical twins because of course different people react to different things so it's like you know finding people that are genetically identical uh and then running them through it's interesting you're really [ __ ] me up though with the year thing uh that is going to be wildly probably what would you think it was going to happen in six weeks um not six weeks but honestly i thought we would get really interesting data at three months and i thought it would be very compelling at six months um i never i originally pitched it at six months people pushed back pretty immediately and i said okay we could probably still make this really interesting at three months um but there does need to be some element of real to it otherwise it's just people arguing yeah yeah no exactly um and i would say that you know um your your idea that there's an answer here that there there is not an answer i'll just tell you that right now there's no answer there's no right answer in in in diet would you define right answer then um the one way that works better than all other ways right do you think if we had a super computer that could run at down to every single cell as being tracked that there would be an answer and this is just a limitation of human and computer computation as of today or there really is for some reason no way to figure this out no i'd say there's no way to figure this out we're complex biological organisms and while we have you know similar uh processes that happen within each of us you know we all burn fat the same way we all build muscle the same way we all uh you know sequester uh um pathogens the same way we all deal with with uh you know immune issues the same way it's the degree to which we do that that varies among us and so with that notion that that there are varying degrees of potential outcomes here um one of the things we would have to ask ourselves is uh because you and again as a complex biological system um does optimum include um satiation fulfillment uh tastes better in pleasure centers uh you know or are we just going to be relegated to drinking uh um soylent you know and and saying i'm hoping two different answers right so here's one for the most hardcore [ __ ] on the planet and this is optimized for let's say longevity which would be my sort of thing and then there's here's the mark sisson you're gonna love every bite that you ever take but it's also you know good for some amount of longevity high performance that kind of thing right and and maybe even possibly not optimal um you know i i still drink uh red wine i love red wine you know ethanol is toxic to the human body although everything studies still on the dry the dry water dry farm dry farm wines yup yup love that stuff um you're gonna say every study you read probably something positive about red wine yes says something positive about red wine i'm like i'm looking for the one that says stop um one of your links was low-dose alcohol seems to be beneficial to mice yes what yeah now is that a hermesis thing or is it something if not if it's not it's not hermetic if it's a daily thing right if it's a daily thing it's not hermetic hormesis almost by definition of the is the short you know pulse of a potentially um you know acute uh insult if you will to to the human body that results in a positive uh outcome a positive adaptation if you will um so uh yeah but you know so the idea see this is this is the the generational difference between the two of us tom so so like you know you're looking for the hacks like what's the ideal how do i live the longest and how do i live uh you know and how do i optimize that and and i have to take everything together and i say well first of all i don't care if i live forever i don't want to live here i don't need to live forever because what i'm of that mindset that what defines my enjoyment of life right now is partly offset by the knowledge that it ain't going to be there one day so um i'm trying to you know meet out the um the pleasure over a finite period of time um again i talk about like if there's if somebody said look you gotta eat this mark it tastes like [ __ ] but you're going to live five years longer and you're gonna have to eat it twice a day i'm like i'm out i don't need i don't need to um to sacrifice the sort of short-term hedonistic experience uh that i crave you know whether it's a serotonin or dopamine it's just i want i'm looking for that and if you tell me that it's been proven by science it's going to help me live five years longer i'm probably going to reconsider whether you know it's worth the sacrifice of the of the immediate experience because you know as you get as we get down to this we can talk about what happens in 20 or 50 years from now but right now all that matters is is this moment i'm hanging out with with tom billy we're having a great conversation that's all that matters to me right now uh and i want to i want to be in that moment as often as i can um and it takes it takes work uh for it for as long as i can and not have to make a sacrifice of whatever today's experience or now's experience is because somebody did some research that said you know if you do it differently and and you sacrifice significantly you'll live longer i'm like well okay quality of life has to factor into the equation uh you know you can't just tell me i'm gonna live forever and then say but your life's gonna suck and you and you're gonna some you know whatever right so now i totally get it tom i'm rambling on here sorry about that not at all that that's super interesting to me i love that people come at this stuff from different angles um so to that point so you have a very specific way of looking at the world and you just laid it out for us if you could only have five ingredients not uh five meals but five ingredients so it could be uh filet mignon it could be asparagus what are the five things that that you would want if that was all you could eat for the rest of time and you wanted the the kind of life you have now so it's delicious but it's also you know cognitively it's great on and on no what's interesting is because um typically people ask me what like what are some of the things that you wish you could eat every day but you can't and to me it's peanuts and beer like i could live the rest of my life on peanuts and beer but amazing i can't eat i can't i can't eat peanuts because they're horrible for me and you know i i i still like beer but i i'm limited to like a half a glass once in a while um no i mean my my my favorite food of all is lamb so you know a lamb chop would be one um i'd probably pick if i had to pick a vegetable you know broccoli is probably my favorite vegetable if i had to pick um some sort of a starchy tuber uh don't don't think i'm weird but um like either turnips or rutabagas with butter i did not see that coming no nobody does um i like to i like the real bitter aspect of that um but i'm sort of picking one from from each of these categories right like a fruit if i had to pick a fruit it would be um like bing cherries i think are probably you know one of my favorite fruits um and uh you know and red wine and and i could live the rest of my life on those on those five things word those are some fantastic choices respect um so we talked about this the last time we met i was i did a rabbit starvation diet which was basically 85 or more percent of my calories came from protein took my fat as low as i could my carbohydrates were essentially zero my doctor love me was telling me i was going to live forever but i felt like [ __ ] yeah and when you talk about steer by how you feel and not you know worry so much about all the things you can measure um that seems wow there's a great way to get more into measurement than you uh feeling certainly trumps everything and one last thing i have to ask you about this so thinking of of how you feel so um i almost never drink but my anniversary was this uh in fact it was yesterday um but on the friday before my wife and i had some drinks to celebrate and i mix it with monster which is uh it's a no calorie drink but it's of course pickling me from the inside there's no question but going to how you feel so i i follow a very certain regiment when i drink i drink very early so i can sober up and have many many hours probably eight hours before i go to bed um and i'm i'm hydrating like crazy uh 100 i i don't [ __ ] with night drinking that to me is a total mistake okay because you're gonna you're gonna be hungover and i don't play with hangovers so but when i have it with monster dude i feel like a million bucks so when when i sober up i don't get any fatigue i don't feel tired whatsoever and normally i'm getting so tired like on a normal day no drinking nothing just my normal day by 8 30 i'm like i'm ready for bed and by nine it's lights out and this was i i didn't feel jittery nothing i felt so good at midnight i didn't want to go to bed and i was like what is it so why didn't you do it the next day and the next day and the next day well so now i'll answer that question so there is in terms of um fatigue it was amazing but it made my joints hurt so my hands ached uh my knees started to hurt and so from a it's clearly pro-inflammatory so i'm the alcohol's pro-inflammatory the monster though keeps me awake so i'm super curious i would love to isolate like do i and you probably just hate energy drinks so much you're not sure what's in them and neither am i quite frankly but i'm wondering if there's a supplement or something a b12 vitamin i don't know that would give me that same level of like no energy drop uh you know as i get later into the evening um just the the crystal clear focus like when when i speak on stage about 45 minutes before i go on stage i'll have a monster because it makes me so sharp no i mean i suggest i mean taurian is is typically one of the ingredients theratory and a little bit of caffeine but um no i mean i like if i'm speaking on stage i'll have a ketone supplement i'll have a beta-hydroxybutyrate because i know what it's going to you know it's going to have a short-term immediate impact on on my brain on cognition uh on being present on being in the moment so yeah there's a there's an explanation there's a reason uh that that works on the other hand that might be more again of that hormetic effect that you can do it once or twice once in a while but if you did it on a regular basis uh it would catch up to you i mean it's you know the examples are people who used to to use um ephedra to work out in the gym right and they just felt amped in the gym and they could do an extra couple of reps on everything they did but over time ephedra is an adrenal uh you know it just fries your adrenals so in the short term you get a mild benefit and a pump and but but you can't you can't incorporate it into a regular routine got it mark i always enjoy time with you and whether it's actually getting something like this where we're you know sort of face to face or it's just engaging with your content dude it's amazing um if you would tell people about your school it sounds absolutely astonishing well so i have a the primal health coach institute it's an online learning experience very robust we certified people to become health coaches i think if there were ever a time in this world where health coaches were necessary it is right now especially if we're talking about the concept of of immunity and shoring up your immune system um so just google primal health coach institute or primal health coach uh it's um you know i think we put like 5 000 people through the program but by now in addition to deep deep deep learning and a real deep dive into the science behind all of the stuff that i've talked about for 20 years we have some build business building modules if you want to build a practice or build a coaching practice uh and um very in-depth on how to coach how to work one-on-one with people so it's uh i'm very proud of this it's been years you know putting it together and uh so that's kind of the the focus i have now amazing man well thank you so much for joining me today dude i i could do this for hours and hours but i'm super grateful for the time uh always a lot of fun i look forward to when we can share some physical space again likewise thanks tom all right you got it all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 103,002

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Mark Sisson, Health Theory, Live Awesome, Primal Blueprint, fulfillment, primal diet, metabolic flexibility, calories, mitochondria, ketones, fat, protein, carbohydrates, amino acid, collagen, carnivore vs vegan, metabolism, coronavirus

Id: _PMedVdBFPQ

Length: 57min 27sec (3447 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020