Mark Sisson On His New Book "Two Meals a Day"

[Music] it's time to discuss two meals a day all right we've been at this now for 12 years cranking hard cranking out books and every time we finish a book we say there's really nothing more we can say about healthy eating and supportive lifestyle habits but there always seems to be something more to say and with the with the concept that we're hitting on here it feels like a real breakthrough at a great time because people are starting to uh get frustrated and confused there's too many factioning and there's disputed messages and now we're doing something that's simple sustainable for anyone from whatever particular dietary preferences they have yeah i mean it's uh you know this is uh the natural evolution of uh our line of thinking which goes back you know 20 years in my case and then 12 years of writing books uh where we're trying to hit upon um you know not just an efficient way for one or two people in a crowd to experience benefits but something that that can be overlaying and be used by just about everyone and it started out with primal for us and primal was was clearly a better way of eating because it eliminated some of the crap right so that was like like phase one was just going back to a diet that were uh evolved to to consume kind of our you know the the sorts of foods that our guts uh are adapted to digest easily so we got rid of grains we got rid of the lectins we got rid of um the uh the unnatural uh industrial seed oils the processed sugars we came down to real food and that worked great and that and that's look that's a starting point for anybody and then we said okay what's the next level of this maybe it's keto maybe it's trying to um to get to a point where we eliminate carbs so much that uh we develop this ability to create ketones and offset the need for glucose and offset the need for eating carbohydrates on a regular basis um and it made a lot of sense because there was good research behind it in terms of neurological stuff in terms of energy in terms of uh you know just in general terms mostly the medical community was looking at at ketosis as a as a means of doing this you know and then we hit upon the concept of metabolic flexibility as kind of the holy grail so it goes now from paleo to primal to keto to metabolic flexibility and metabolic flexibility really kind of encompasses a lot of different ways of eating but the end result is that you achieve this ability to derive energy from whatever energy substrate is available in your body whether it's the fat on your plate of food the fat stored on your hips or thighs the carbohydrate on your plate of food the glucose in your bloodstream the glycogen in your muscles or your liver or the ketones that your liver makes in the absence of glucose and so the metabolic flexibility term became kind of the main holy grail of what we were seeking over the past several years and i've really emphasized the metabolic flexibility part of that and metabolic efficiency and being efficient in how you uh generate energy and how you go through the day with with a steady state of energy and not at the effect of hormonal swings and stuff like that then you know we we looked at um what's the logical way to allow most of the world to achieve metabolic flexibility is it through keto well that's one way but it's all also through the um sort of the smart use of fasting and intermittent fasting and and i think the term intermittent fasting has for a lot of people been um you know maybe a little intimidating right like like fasting by itself is like a word that a lot of people would say wait a minute i don't fast i can't go i can't skip a meal right so intermittent fasting is a little bit of an easier term um but you know it's still it's still a way in which we can um go for longer periods of time without eating and and use that as a way to develop metabolic efficiency and metabolic flexibility regardless of the way of eating so regardless of whether you're a you know a vegan or a vegetarian or a carnivore or keto or paleo or primal or ancestral or western a price or um uh uh you know fodmap or whatever there are ways in which we can develop this this uh metabolic efficiency metabolic flexibility by using periods of time that we're not eating right and that's really what got us to this concept of two meals a day so eating less frequently now turns out to be as important possibly more important than nitpicking every single meal perfectly and maybe overdoing it and snacking all day on keto approved snacks we see so many processed products now it's kind of funny from the starting point where you know the the science of uh ketone was from uh you know starvation yeah and now it's from uh a packaged snack that you you too can you know if it feels like the whole keto movement has gone toward what's the most amount of food i can eat and not gain weight what's the most amount of keto approved snacks that i can consume what's you know the nut butters or the chocolates or the drinks or the or the keto cookies or the keto cereals i mean they're they're everywhere and and it and it feels like that movement has gone again toward more on the side of as i say what's the most amount of food i can eat and not disrupt my gut and not and not uh you know uh gain weight and not feel guilty and and so keto foods become this sort of guilt guiltless pleasure like they don't have any sugar and they're you know they have all these these you know aspects of them that mimic the food that you wish you were eating like keto pancakes and keto breads and keto and all the stuff that we said keto desserts and it's like those are all the things that that we really shouldn't be eating in any context so to try to make them up as you know as as a fake form of comfort food misses the point the point is not what's the most amount of food i can eat and not gain weight and not be uncomfortable the point is really what's the least amount of food i can eat and maintain muscle mass and maintain energy and not get sick and most importantly not be hungry and you find that it's an amazingly small amount of calories and protein and fat and a little bit of carbs now i'm not suggesting that it has to be a tiny amount but i'm saying that that when you realize that we as a society eat way too much food and that probably three meals a day is one meal a day too many not that big a deal only only 33 too many meals yeah but you know now we're coming off of uh decades of having done this compressed eating window this this intermittent fasting concept where we go from you know dinner one night to lunch the next day and it's it's a routine for both of us right it's like like i would never almost never eat breakfast you know maybe if i'm on the road and it's a different time zone or whatever but i almost never eat breakfast the morning meal because i'm not hungry for it i have all the energy i want and i and i i trust that my body is going to get all the energy it needs from my stored body fat that's the reason we have this amazing mechanism that stores excess calories as fat the biggest issue throughout the last several decades has been we're really good at taking excess calories and storing them as fat we really suck at taking those excess calories that are stored as fat and burning them off as energy the way it was intended the way we evolve the way our genes expect us to do that because we keep snacking and eating and trying to control caloric intake and eating too little in some cases but eating too frequently and throwing off this magnificent ability to to pull from storage that's a great example uh you know for decades the mantra in the fitness community and health communities was eat multiple small meals throughout the day humans are grazers we're natural grazers and therefore you know uh rather than eat three square meals a day people were advocating carrying your little tupperware thing around with the macronutrients apportioned just so you know 12 grams of protein and 20 grams of carbs in this and some fiber and and eating five or six small meals a day never going two hours without eating and it's it's just crazy that how the pendulum swings back and forth and how that was probably the worst advice you could give a human being um it promoted hunger all the time it it promoted a uh a high level of circulating insulin all the time um it promoted a higher carbohydrate intake in order to balance out the blood sugar all the time it prevented the body from ever going into a mode where it was going to want to tap into stored body fat to burn it for energy it prevented the body from ever choosing to make more mitochondria to burn fat to have more energy all the time it it had like zero positive impact except that somebody in food science somewhere said blood sugar is the key and maintaining steady state blood glucose requires that you have insulin all the time it could be the american diabetes associated i don't know whoever it was that promoted this but it's it's this path down which we have gone that has caused so much pain and suffering for so many people as bad calorie control and portion control and and um sacrifice and again small meals and little debbie snacks of 100 100 calories you know maximum that seemed to be the you know again like some cut off magic cut-off point and what we're saying in this in this new book and two meals a day is this is ridiculous that like most of what happens that's good in the human body happens when we're not eating [Music] and the more time you allow the body to repair itself restore itself burn off excess calories upregulate enzyme systems that burn fat engage in autophagy which is basically cellular house cleaning housekeeping and dna repair that really only happens in the absence of food and the absence of glucose and the absence of insulin all these great things can happen when we get to a point where we are comfortable eating two meals a day and so we wrote a book about like how does that happen how do i get comfortable eating two meals a day and it's kind of a joke because it becomes very comfortable it becomes the most natural and comfortable thing that you could imagine and if you understand that that in only eating two meals a day and in some cases one and a half meal a day and in some cases one meal a day you are benefiting your body you're you're enhancing your uh metabolic efficiency and metabolic flexibility you are enhancing your ability to sleep better at night you are um you are shoring up your immune defenses your immune system uh you are probably engaging in some means of anti-aging strategy with the autophagy uh you know it's like it's such a uh it's such an all-encompassing strategy to be able to uh regardless of your way of eating to be able to engage in this concept of two meals a day and using intermittent fasting or as we like to say intermittent eating um as a strategy to to completely change your health completely change your body shape completely uh morph into that ideal body composition that you've always wanted yeah it kind of takes the pressure off too because those of us interested in healthy eating and diet and performance and optimizing we feels like we've been compelled to go looking for the perfect diet and the best foods and you know obsessing and stressing about and putting these pieces together and if you miss your super nutrition acai bowl breakfast well you're not going to get as many antioxidants that day you better go looking for some pills to replace that and now the stuff is now with science blowing it out of the water validating that the human works best in the fasted state the problem is if you have had a lifelong carbohydrate dependency paradigm you're going to feel like crap when you skip a meal and if you're reading in a book or watching a video or podcast people saying you work better in a fasted state it's not going to ring true so you talked about that a little maybe we can um move over to the the manner in which to do this properly so that it's graceful it's smooth you feel fine skipping breakfast you you emphasize that point that you may be eating fewer calories when you get healthier and that's actually a good thing yeah but it's it's all automatic and by default rather than this pain suffering and sacrifice approach that we've been socialized to think is the way to go yeah you know um no it's very interesting that again people tend to uh get caught up in an assumption that uh i need x amount of calories like i i figured my bmi and i went and got my my um harris you know score or whatever it was to plug in the amount of activity i do and multiple highest benedict equation you know 0.7 or 0.8 i can't figure out which it is because some days i run 10 miles and some days i run six you know all these all these different things are such minutia and it's so so um unimportant in the overall scheme of things and yet people have tended to live and die by the numbers by calorie counting by portion control by macronutrient you know this whole thing make it you know does it fit your macros is another mantra that came out of crossfit or whatever uh with an assumption that this was all about calories in calories out and it was really you know some some simple balanced equation it's it's far more complex than that but at the end of the day we we start to realize that the body is an amazing mechanism it's amazing machine it we we start to think in terms not of what's going to happen if i miss one meal or what's going to happen uh day to day if i miss my macros but we start to think more broadly in terms of um trust that the body's gonna handle anything i i give it today and tomorrow and the next day whether it's you know 40 grams of protein and a total of 1200 calories or whether it's 275 grams of protein and 3 500 calories the body once you become attuned to this way of eating the body adjusts and the body either stores or burns the fat according to a long-term strategy it has not a short-term strategy i mean i remember back in the days when people would say you know i'm on the treadmill and i'm burning 450 calories on the treadmill so that i can eat an extra 450 calories tonight for dinner as if there is this balanced equation right down to the last calorie every single meal and every single workout and this is not how it works people this is like the again we in the book we start to talk about maybe three and four and five day periods of time where if over the course of five days you get 575 grams of protein i don't care whether most of it came on one day or none of it came on another day you really look in in larger spans of time because the body is able to hold on to amino acids it's got an amino acid sink when you are fasted for any length of time there's an amazing uh up regulation of protein sparing systems in the body that allow you to recycle amino acids that you would otherwise have just deaminated and peed out because you ate too much protein one day and you know not enough the next so all these things come to come to play when you develop this skill and the skill is being able to go longer periods of time without having to eat a meal and and and being comfortable in the process of doing it because hunger ruins everything and anybody who's ever tried to die will tell you that i mean i can i can only will myself to cut calories for so long until my the hunger pangs take over and my brain starts to go crazy with with uh the idea that i'm going to starve and it's and it's bad for me so we can train the body to do that and this is again in the book we talk about the way to stair step yourself into a kinder gentler way of going longer periods of time without eating uh and and setting yourself up for success and not failure in so doing surrounding yourself with sort of the kind of the the healthier approved snacks that you can use to offset whatever hunger that is or maybe it's um using a strategy of of going for a walk instead of eating a snack and and trying to engage uh in some form of exercise it's gonna promote some mobilization of fuel stores there are lots of lots of ways in which we can achieve this lifestyle of two meals a day that ultimately that ultimately results in metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency well that was a pretty nice setup for the early part of the book maybe we can kind of navigate through the chapters and give the the listener viewer a complete experience but i think we we hit those those points pretty well that's not about calories in calories out and i have to say our timing is pretty good because this convergence of science uh with dr panda and the time restricted feeding and dr poncer with the amazing study of the hodza um tommy wood and rob wolf been talking about this for a while now that um jason fung has a lot of research in his books too that if you try to eat fewer calories and burn more calories you won't even lose weight yeah and the women's health initiative proved this with tens of thousands of women agreeing and being very strict for a few years of eating 230 calories less per day and exercising 10 percent more and the predicted calculation from the equations with that they would each lose 32 pounds and they lost like 0.6 right nothing happened right the body adjusts yeah by becoming lazier at rest uh less motivated maybe your your foot's tapping less as you're as you're working and you're just burning fewer calories feeling more tired there's so many complaints and we feel these emails from particularly a lot of females their thyroid's down regulated their adrenal function is downregulated because they're trying to go through pain suffering and sacrifice and and control their meal portions and exercise too hard yeah so uh i guess we can jump to the first step which is to get rid of the crap and this is also a wonderful scientific breakthrough that if you just stop eating the the big three we call them yeah um you're gonna you're gonna have an explosion of health and get way up there towards your potential and i hope by now that most people realize that getting rid of sugar is like you know like task number one in any in any eating strategy and any um plan that you have to to uh you know regain health uh getting rid of as much sugar in your diet as you possibly can and that's we've known that for a long time but what a lot of people don't recognize is how pervasive and insidious industrial seed oils are so you know we've talked about this over the past several years but corn oil soybean oil canola oil these highly processed oils that um that are first of all pro-inflammatory in nature for the most part so they're causing some some manner of systemic inflammation in the body they're they're not easily combusted so they're not the kind of fats that are burned easily but in fact they're incorporated into cell membranes and these are sort of dysfunctional molecules of uh omega-6 fats or omega nine fats that are that are then um interfering with the normal structure and function of of an otherwise healthy cell and and people don't get it because for the longest time we've we've been hearing the story that corn oil is heart healthy or that soybean oil is is heart healthy or that canola is heart healthy and and and they're not uh and so that's another you know sort of uh uh misnomer uh fake news coming out of the 80s 60s 70s and 80s that we kind of have to overturn and tell people look if to the extent you can get rid of these industrial seed oils uh you will be better off and what do you replace them with is uh olive oil extra virgin olive oil uh coconut oil avocado oil butter ghee lard you know traditional sources of animal fats and things like that yeah that's a big one uh just just to give the quick picture here if you're consuming these oils it promotes insulin resistance because your fat metabolism is messed up and so you're going to kind of need those quick energy carbohydrates because you can't burn fat well so you're going to eat those carbohydrates produce more insulin and so we have sort of these these these distinct objectives to get rid of those processed carbohydrates grains and sugars grains turned into sugars pretty quickly after you eat them you've been the grain crusader for so long and now the oils are really finally getting highlighted as um you know a big public enemy here yeah so if you get rid of the oils you are you are more likely to be able to get rid of the processed grains because you won't be as uh you know jonesing for them on a regular basis for that quick that quick uh hit of blood sugar blood glucose so if the the enthusiast agrees to do this there's different strategies there's different people habits behavior patterns but it's coming clear at least i'm going to put this on youtube it's becoming clear that a really devoted restriction period for at least 21 days like our book 21 day transformation you have to get these out of your diet to allow the fat burning genes to start up regulating and to make progress where if you try to cut back on sugar uh the the addictive properties of sugar dr robert lustig talks about that in his book dr william davis and wheat belly talking about the addictive properties of of wheat products will suck you back in they have they have strong addictive properties right yeah so so this is uh there's no escaping the fact that you have to get rid of these things it's it's an elimination diet for 21 days uh at the very least just to kind of reconfigure your metabolism and um it it it appears that although some of these changes take place in a shorter period of time and some people will adapt within a few days or a few weeks three weeks is probably a a good amount of time for it to really settle in and for the body to start to get you know used to fewer simple processed carbohydrates will not be expecting these processed industrial seed oils and will be better attuned from having your from your having eliminated sugars for instance the brain will say look i've got to build a metabolic machinery to use ketones because there's not going to be a source a regular source of exogenous glucose coming in from my meals every two or three hours and so the brain starts to get very comfortable burning the ketones and by the way the liver you don't ever have to have been in ketosis and you never have to be have been ketogenic to have a perfectly functioning liver that can crank out ketones all day long the liver the liver can make 750 calories a day worth of ketones if it needs to now most people would never even have anywhere near that requirement but the point is almost everybody has the capacity to be producing ketones what they don't have is the is the metabolic machinery in the and and the brain having gotten used to it so that's what takes a couple of weeks that what takes it that's what takes about 21 days to start to reduce this carbohydrate dependency and start to become metabolically flexible so that the muscles are start starting to burn a little bit more fat and not so dependent on glucose or glycogen so the brain is a little bit more used to burning ketones and so when it's low in glucose and blood sugar drops there's not an issue but if you don't do this work and then you you start to uh spend you know skip meals that's when you get the issues that people have complained about that's when you get what you know the keto flu or the headaches or the wooziness because you haven't you haven't methodically and systematically gone through a process that coaches the body into making the adaptations over time one day to the next so that when you finally get to the point where you start talking about skipping a meal here or extending the period of time where you're not eating it's it's it's done with ease and grace and it helps with that ease and grace to serve yourself some fabulous lavish high satiety nutrient dense meals so that we don't have to struggle or suffer and even if that includes uh consuming a lot of healthy nutrient-dense carbohydrates as you're trying to transition over and i think that's the big mistake we've seen is carbohydrates are evil cut them out of your diet go keto fight through it it's really tough you're going to get the flu but but don't worry it'll go away soon and that's complete nonsense so i mean i was one of those people when you took my cereal bowl away in 2008 my giant healthy grain granolas and non-fat yogurt and fruit but i had a ton of carbohydrates every morning dating back to my athletic days my whole life and that was my morning centerpiece well i had to trade that for a 6a gauntlet with avocados and salsa and cheese and veggies and bacon and oh my gosh it was delicious but that that meal sustained me for many hours now a year later i woke up on many mornings realizing i didn't need to make this gigantic thing to stuff down my face to get energy but to make that transition gradual and graceful as you say it means go ahead and enjoy healthy nutritious foods we'll talk later about your snacking habits because the goal one day is to sit down to two delicious meals a day and not need the other things but when those hunger signals come yeah you know and it's not just when they come it's like you know we're sitting here in my apartment where there's a refrigerator right over there full of full of things that we could go grab a handful of and you know and it's nut butters and it's paleo crackers and there's all kinds of like great tasting things that are they're right there and it's just my brain saying i don't i'm not hungry i don't need the energy why would i you know why would i want to do that so that's sort of what we have to kind of uh look at as well is how do we bypass that tendency to just mindlessly grab for a snack and because we could get away with it or because we know it's not going to in the overall scheme of things it's not going to be a a massive deterrent to what we're doing but but ultimately as you say if we can get to two meals a day which both both of which are delicious and almost hedonistic because some of the recipes that we're gonna provide in the book are like outrageously lavish and and sumptuous and um you know and tasty and and satisfying and everything you want from a meal i mean look i i've said this many times in many podcasts that i want every bite of food i ever put in my mouth it tastes fantastic so i'm not going to slam down uh you know a smoothie that's made with kale and and chia seeds because somebody told me it was good for me it's full of fiber if it doesn't taste great i'm not going to eat it so that's that's again part of what we're trying to do here is get to the point where we're not beholden to these snacks and we're not beholden to um you know to uh the hunger not even the hunger pangs but the thoughts of hunger like oh my god it's it's you know 1 30 and we haven't eaten lunch yet and isn't it lunch time don't i need to eat lunch and the answer is no you don't need to eat any meal really you don't need to um the fact that it's there and it's available and you can that's great but but i want to i really want people to get that intuitive sense that um my body's just gonna be you know firing on all cylinders i'm gonna be driving energy from my own stored body fat even if like you know i'm i'm eight percent body fat nine percent body fat i still have plenty of fat to carry me through a couple of days of not eating i'm not going to not eat because i love to eat but i'm just saying you know i i have the means to be able to do that you could walk to key west with that amount of fat on your body i definitely could i won't but i but i could so there is some uh important discussion now of making good choices within the ancestral food categories we've agreed to ditch the big three and now we have the the the famous list from from uh hunter-gatherer times meat fish foul eggs vegetables fruits nuts and seeds and certain modern allowances uh but within those categories we i think we and we start youtubers right now uh so i mean we can we can breeze through that maybe you can focus on the the animal foods which are so vilified still today and let's say for good reason if you look at the video of the pig farm the undercover video of the the nasty conditions and then we're we're looking at distinctions in the areas of uh the the most yeah i mean i mean that's a whole different discussion about the way the way animals are treated in terms of raising them for food and we object to concentrated animal feed operations feedlots and things like that but you know if you have a grass-fed or pasture-raged raised animal that should be in my mind the major source of nutrition for for everyone whether it's beef you know pork lamb uh chicken fish you know all of those are like critical to uh human health now if you're a vegetarian and those are things that you don't eat and maybe your next level of go-to would be i but i do eat some dairy products or i do eat some uh some protein powders that are made with dairy whey or maybe um you know i eat eggs or cheese um as which is what happened like my son you know he was a vegetarian his whole life but he got a lot of protein from eating eggs and cheese and and and and that sort of thing so he's you know a lacto-ovo uh vegetarian but but so we would start with quality sources of protein because i think this is really where food science has gone and especially in in this arena in the last year or two you hear um you know not just paul saladino and sean baker but rob wolff talks a lot about protein and and there are no more real restrictions on like too much protein it really gets down to like you know what is what is going to satisfy you at a meal really you don't have to overeat you don't have to under eat it's just like how much protein you want to have in a meal and going to feel satisfied and walk away from the table and go that was great and i feel awesome and now i'm good to go until whenever the next meal is whether it's in eight hours or whether it's in 28 hours so we start with the protein sources most of which now have some form of healthy fat so again if you've got a pasteurized animal the fat profile in that animal is going to be better than a than a than a feedlot operation animal would be if you've got a line caught you know wild salmon you know that fat profile that omega 3 uh profile's going to be ideal uh and then if you're supplementing with with some nuts or some you know avocado and that that's a healthy fat up and then the oils the butter ghee and the sources of fat are all um again typically animal sources but they can also be uh from from some of the um again extra virgin olive oil coconut oil um avocado oil and then we get down to the carbohydrate sources and the carbohydrate sources um as we've said could be you know in in some ex to some extent unlimited amounts of vegetables if you want to eat a lot of vegetables uh as part of a meal that's fine with us that's you know that's that's what i've been promoting the you know the big-ass salad for 15 years now um so any any sort of uh vegetables although we make a joke that like name me 15 vegetables that you will eat next year you know you get you kind of get hung up around that number 12 or number 13 because it's a there aren't that many and then it's like um if you want to supplement with uh sweet potato or starchy you know some uh white potatoes you know purple potatoes whatever i don't have a problem with that uh for the longest time we we eliminated uh legumes from the primal blueprint because we sort of were adhering to this notion that that the lectins were problematic for everybody turns out the lectins aren't problematic for everybody they're problematic for some people so we started to let legumes back into the diet so now there's i'll go out to dinner and i'll have some lentils once in a while right i'm glad i wasn't i'm glad i wasn't that strict all along this journey yeah because new information keeps coming the protein one yeah uh and we've we've written and talked about the dangers of consuming too much protein stimulating igf-1 and mtor and increasing your cancer risk but a lot of this research is coming from lazy assets who are sitting around eating crappy food all day and oh my gosh they got cancer and they had a high protein diet so i kind of like the reasonability that that you've come to over over the years and have always emphasized that and the personal preference that's always been kind of your your brand and your blog post say hey i'm not i'm not afraid to change my mind and we've had videos about your enthusiasm for the the carnivore nose to tail movement same here it's captivating it's compelling it's something to test out and try out and constantly tweak and refine yeah hoping that we feel good along the way yeah but if you feel crappy along the way while you're trying something something's wrong with your approach and those are words from the book like this should not happen we do not want headaches jitteriness uh binge backsliding and all these things that indicate a flawed approach yeah yeah so there so there uh and we you talked some about that superfoods but that's kind of a fascinating new uh strategy is to go and look for the most nutrient-dense foods on earth they both they often happen to be from the animal kingdom yeah and so there's a little bit of a trend toward emphasizing those pasture-raised eggs and grass-fed steak and maybe down emphasizing the giant piles of vegetables especially if you're a sensitive type yeah yeah i mean i feel like a lot of these uh different ways of eating that have emerged over the past two decades have tried to be as restrictive as they possibly could be and eliminate so many foods and and you know as you know on the other hand i've tried to be as inclusive as possible so i've tried to include even though i've recognized that certain types of food are problematic for a lot of people um as the research has has improved i've said let's let's maybe start to allow those in for people you know who don't have an issue with them whether it's night shades uh you know whether it's uh foods that have sulforaphanes or you know broccoli and cauliflower and brussels sprouts or whether it's those uh high anthocyanin uh um fruits like berries um you know find find a way to let them in and then if they're not problematic for you then then i would not see a reason to exclude them you know we talk about the carnivore diet and the fact that um in fact our buddy paul saladino who's like nope uh keep the keep the vegetables away from me and keep the the berries away from me um you know that's worth trying for a short period of time i guess if you want but i don't see that as a as a way to live i mean like i get what he's saying but i'll have you know i'll have a cup of raspberries once in a while or a cup of blueberries because i just because i like them and they're not problematic for me right and the enjoyment of the experience in itself contributes to a healthy diet we have some commentary from bruce lipton biology of belief we've long been fascinated by his work saying that your thoughts manifest your cellular function in your body at all times so if you're sitting down to a meal with a smile yeah and that's why we go to fine dining and get that full experience or watch the shows where the people are immersed in that if you if you can become more connected to your food source go to the farmers market talk to the people buy the ingredients come home prepare it it's a huge difference from sucking down the you know the horrible tasting smoothie like joe rogan reported to you and you you challenged him on that yeah it tastes terrible but i drink it every day it's like wait a second um you know we got to put that that smile factor back in the game yeah sure uh yeah so you know that brings us back to like cheese i mean some people have i don't know lactose intolerance many people who think they have lactose intolerance have an intolerance to casein or you know a1 casein in fact uh specifically um and yet i love cheese so i'm not gonna exclude it from my from my way of eating from my diet uh and it's a you know and i look at a lot of foods like that so again i've let legumes back in to part of my diet on the other hand i have now chosen from my own personal experience to exclude i don't eat a big salad that often anymore it's not something that that appeals to me and i realized you know when i thought my assumption early on was that it was the fiber it was going to be good for me i needed the fiber and now i realize i don't need the fiber because uh a lot of science behind a lot of science not just your personal peculiarity yeah and i found you know i'm looking back and i had i had gas when i when we did a salad you know i thought well that's normal and that's the fiber no it's not normal and it shouldn't be that way and and uh so you know i've i've adjusted my own eating my own personal eating template uh to account for this experiment of like eliminating certain things and bring them back in and noticing the effect that they had on me and then um making an adjustment to my diet that way right and you know we we can engage in so much debate and contention and and controversy but you could say what you want to say about any of this stuff if you're suffering in some way it behooves you to uh try some dietary strategies in attempt to heal and one of the one of the popular ones now is that the exclusion of plant foods and eating the you know not hard to follow because you're eating these high say tidy meals and it might be a 30 day trip for you that does does good benefit and then you can reintroduce some of these foods that might be bugging you right now or or choose not to but i feel like a lot of people are stuck not knowing that their baseline which they report is good is actually yeah and they don't even know what fantastic it is they don't know what it feels like same with their exercise patterns yeah uh yeah no it's it's interesting you're right how people uh how their pain um and their level of tolerance adjusts over time so so that uh and this is sort of a good news bad news situation but you know once you clean your diet up and you realize how good you can feel and you realize how much energy you have by going periods long periods of time without eating uh and or longer periods of time without eating and how much and how much you maintain muscle mass and how you don't get sick because your immune system is enhanced and your level of pain drops because you're not systemically uh inflamed all the time you you know you you get into this uh wonderful zone of comfortability and then if you go back to your old way of eating then you really notice it and that's that's the bad news if you go back to the way it was then you start to feel the bloating the the inflammation the joint stiffness the joint pain and things like that uh but but a lot of people are just oblivious because they've lived this way in this sort of pain look i mean when i was in my 40s i had arthritis at my fingertips and i thought that's normal that's just you know it's a artifact of being 47 or whatever it is and it wasn't until i gave up grains and the pain went away that i thought holy smokes i mean this is this is a revelation like what i was eating was causing a lot of my discomfort was eating was causing my bloating and and my ibs and my and my arthritis in my hands um and and my sinus infections and my gerd and and you know a number of things that literally went away when i cleaned up the diet now again the bad news is like i'll give you an example i had um my wife and i were we were in a restaurant uh down below here that serves an amazing pizza we heard it was an amazing pizza we didn't know because we don't eat pizza so last week we said let's get a pizza so we got a pizza and it was great and then i paid for it the next day you know so um you know you you when you clean up your act you clean up your diet you do uh hit a new level of awareness and a new level of of comfort that you can get just as used to the new level of comfort as you got used to the old level of discomfort you know what i mean oh sure and same with the hyperpalatable foods i mean uh yeah you know i've lived a lifetime filled with inhaling all kinds of delicious stuff with the frozen yogurt trips and the hot fudge sundaes that i'd make myself and even today i love those popcorn binges sometimes where i'm like this is great because i don't eat that much but i think if you can change from a habitual lousy eater to someone who really cares about and prioritizes their health and knows that hey once in a while we're going to celebrate we're going to enjoy the heck out of it with full intention and awareness and then go back to that baseline which if you've been watching from earlier is a fasted state yeah then then you're then you're fine great you're doing it yeah yeah well i think we transition now with a with a deep breath into the mindset part of the book and i think this is something that's really uh meaningful to to both of us because we've had the privilege of engaging with real life primal enthusiasts and i've seen them come up to you at the conferences sometimes with tears in their eyes saying mark i'm i'm trying everything it's not working i'm frustrated i'm in despair uh what do i do usually have a good quip for them like nothing cuts you up like sprinting but honestly there is a lot beneath the surface here where there's still the pain and suffering not not the type of uh bloating that you just described but something with the mentality and so i i felt like we could talk about that and and know that that's an important part of the book yeah and changing that mindset from that kind of self-critical person to a cheerleader who you know gives you that love and support you deserve as you strive to achieve a life transformation and a dietary transformation yeah yeah i mean i i feel like so many people um you know read the books and they intellectually get what they need to do and they make the lists and they stick to the lists uh and and but they don't really go deep enough into uh the why uh into you know what it is that um is prompting me to go off the rails when i do what is it that's causing me to even though i was good all day long to hit the refrigerator uh at 9 30 uh watching tv um what are the you know what are the um the underlying um emotions that are driving my tendency to to uh sabotage my efforts to clean up my act when in fact i know it's intellectually i know it's good for me i've read again i've read the material i know what to do i just somehow don't follow through or i don't know how to do it or i don't know um you know what i can do that will give me you know the willpower or the strength to follow through on this and that's really uh an interesting area to um i think for everyone to look at because um you know we've had a lot of success over the years with people who've done the programs the primal blueprint keto reset diet and so on but you know there are people who who show up and say i i think i did everything but i still have i still can't shed this weight i still can't you know get to the point where i'm enjoying my life yeah so europe you know you you've led the way in this chapter a lot with some of the techniques and strategies why don't you well that that the insights from bruce lipton and also deepak chopra talks about this a lot where we're arguably walking around uh just kind of uh unconscious or operating from flawed subconscious programming that largely gets programmed in in childhood yeah and if we get these these messages and carry them with us throughout our life even though we might be in denial in a lot of ways and that's what's fascinating for me i'm you know trying to trying to go back did i have a lousy childhood no my mother and father were great they were nice to me they thought i was cool but we walk around with stuff underneath the surface that we're not really conscious of how profoundly it affects our behaviors and our choices one of them especially in the in the health enthusiast scene is this sense of uh feeling undeserving and that you have to torture yourself with excessive exercise to the point of exhaustion right and food deprivation or you know spinning out because you weren't perfect on your diet so now you're uh sponsored by ben and jerry's all of a sudden uh just because you're not perfect and i see those patterns come up and we know from being in the endurance scene we should probably look at look in the mirror ourselves what the hell are we doing torturing ourselves like that to run a faster time for a marathon who wants to run a marathon anyway it's too far yeah well we you know we we were operating under a mindset that more was better that that if you did if you weren't willing to hurt by the way we we were in a in a uh unique field of sports which was not about having fun and playing a game and enjoying it with a teammate it was about managing discomfort so what you and i did for 20 30 years was go out and train to manage discomfort whether it was doing a 20 mile run or 120 mile bike ride or you know 40 sets of 200 in the pool or whatever it was it was always about managing discomfort and and and so that mindset um you know has served us well i think it served me well as as a competitor because with that mindset when you show up that day to the line to start that race you are lined up with 20 other guys who are equally as trained as you equally probably is genetically gifted who want it as much as you do and really that day and i know you'll you'll you'll agree with this that day the race comes down to who is willing to manage pain to the greatest depth so that everyone else around them collapses right well what kind of life is that right what kind of life is that which is why for the last 20 years whenever i work out i play games you know i'm up i'm paddling with dolphins i'm playing frisbee with my friends i'm i'm fat biking on the beach on the sand it's it's it's you know it's a whole different world for me now that i'm having fun doing it but the mindset spots were secure torture so it was mostly fun until you get into the really deep sand but we came out of the sand today we're going to film marxism someday on this workout it'll it'll rock your world you can't believe it but the mindset which which is to beat yourself up um that's that's a pervasive mindset that you don't have to be an endurance athlete to have that same mindset of beating yourself up like like you know this isn't going to work unless i suffer is one of the is one of the standard mindsets like unless i make myself suffer this isn't going to work there's no way this process of developing metabolic flexibility can be enjoyable it just can't be right and so the mindset then you prove it right and you just prove it right you make it difficult for yourself so there are some strategies about how to you know how to like lighten up a little bit and how to you know view uh you know how to how to keep against snacks in you know at close at hand so if if you start to derail yourself or go off the you know go off the deep end you can do that or how to just take a break and go outside and and and meditate or if you're at work and you're feeling hungry how to leave and do a micro workout and just do a a mini workout that not only takes your mind off the hunger it actually accomplishes a workout for the day and it pro it's it starts the process of your body creating renewed energy because it has to it has to get the energy from somewhere so there's there are all these there are a lot of these strategies that we talk about that are again designed to make this process one of uh enjoyment and ease and grace and not this um this arduous task that i have to get through and somehow on the other side when it's over you know i'll have lost all this weight this is really about reprogramming yourself with a mindset for the rest of your life to look at every time you eat in every meal as pleasurable enjoyable certainly fueling up but not something to feel guilty about or obsess over or or worry about or hunger for or anything you know it's like i don't i don't know quite how to describe it other than it's an intuitive realization that we come to that food is awesome and when i eat it i enjoy the hell out of it and when it's not there i don't even think about it yeah you're operating from a position of gratitude yeah and the research has become a popular topic now dr robert emmons and our boy ben greenfield wrote his gratitude journal and you hear the the term coming around and uh i i i appreciated some of your posts about this where um you know it's it's it's easy to kind of uh acknowledge that in passing but then when you actually sit down with a journal and write with your hand yeah things you're grateful for and making that exercise or i mean a lot of people say grace before they eat a meal maybe i should you and i should start doing that we forgot today but something in there yeah where you you remember how how much of a privilege it is yeah to be able to eat a delicious meal absolutely or you know yeah mindlessly running through your uh your house wolfing something down right you know or to be able to do a workout pain-free or you know have gratitude for those little things that you that you do tend to take instead of looking at your time and going damn yeah that was a crappy workout today no such thing yeah right right yeah you showed up um well you uh you're a fan of jack canfield i know you went to one of his masterminds and had that life-changing what was it a weekend retreat or something yeah so we put little plugs for him in there and these turnaround statements which is such a cool thing where you identify this area where you're struggling and you know make a uh make an actual statement and repeat it i believe it's several times a day for 30 days to make it stick and i know you're big on the the manifesting world and your wife's in spiritual psychology and it's it's part of the scene here um and maybe we could just uh mention that a little bit how uh you know you're ready to change you want to change it it makes sense what we're saying or what you're reading and then to actually execute and put those concrete steps into place how important that is for the human brain to to redirect and wire new pathways okay that's it it's as simple as that no you said it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah ready read about those turnaround statements people pretty fun yeah yeah and i'm i'm guilty of uh reading something and saying i got this that's not that's not a problem for me yeah i'm disciplined enough i don't have to worry about overdoing it with my workouts wait a second how can i keep overdoing it with my workouts i'm telling people all the time not to because there's too much fun out there and i get too pumped up but all these areas where we have room to progress yeah take take the steps you know take some take some baby steps and and make a commitment to really execute it rather than paying lip service to it and that's a really nice transition into the next section of the book about lifestyle and sleep is the number one most important thing and i can't i don't think i've met anyone that doesn't nod their head and acknowledgement oh yeah sleep's so important and yet it's probably one of the biggest major disconnects of modern life the first thing they drop out the first thing that goes when they're when they're making their schedule is sleep well i don't need i don't need nine hours of sleep i can get by on seven and a half yes i mean look sleep uh as we said from from the beginning the first book we wrote sleep is the single most overlooked opportunity to to re-access uh health whether it's mental health whether it's restorative health whether it's uh recuperation from uh from an illness uh whether it's just um keeping your sanity about you uh sleep uh is an important part of any uh health program and when i people ask me how much sleep do you get well you know sometimes eight sometimes nine sometimes nine and a little bit more oh and i don't and i don't apologize for that i'm like i'm proud of it you know some people are like you know uh they brag about getting four or five hours of sleep a night i brag about getting eight or nine you know okay i feel better now what do you get in the winter time i i i've i've noticed more uh lately i guess living in lake tahoe and having a true winter that i probably have an extra hour sleep tagged on um this great book called lights out sleep sugar and survival by form b and wiley uh are talking about that disparate need for sleep based on the seasons yeah and the length of light in the summer we can get away with less sleep and more activity even more carbohydrate calories and then in the winter we need to respect that shift even though we have 24 7 lighted yeah summertime like environment now but yeah yeah sleeping sleeping more in the winter and i'm hitting that nine hours and not feeling like waking up except for uh crap you know i got nine hours that's gotta be enough uh but i think not everyone can do this maybe more people now with the changing economy and society forget that alarm and sleep what you need to sleep yeah and the research is really strong saying um you know go to sleep at the same time yeah every night there's no makeup there's no makeup no it isn't i mean if i stay out late which is rare but if i do i get up the same the same time then the next morning that i would normally get up yeah i can't sleep in i can't say again so so for me regular sleep time has been a critical component usually it's 10 30 to 7 is like my like my you know my my guard rails and the sleep environment right so i sleep you know on a chilly patch the surface of my bed is 65 degrees the room temperature is 68 degrees i have a heavy cover on top i sleep on a firm mattress in fact my my wife and i you know we have a california king size bed she likes a softer surface so she she has a two inch thick foam pad on her side of the bed and i'm i'm on the stiff part of the the regular mattress and a different temperature chili pad oh my she doesn't have a chili pad anymore she's just great yeah she just sleeps on the phone so she sleeps you know warmer but i need that i need the coolness of the chili pad i need the um i need the the the coolness of the room i need we have blackout curtains i think that's really important uh we have white noise so we have usually have a fan going all night long or an air conditioning unit going all night long something like that that keeps the white noise going like i like my sleeping environment is so critical to me that when i'm on the road and i'm traveling and i'm like i will move a hotel room because i couldn't get the air conditioning fan to be a consistent noise it would be going you know we'd go pitta pitta pita pitter whatever so so uh it's really critical i think um it's certainly for me but critical for most people to have a really good sleep environment so that the whatever amount of sleep you get seven eight hours is is quality sleep uh yeah and i like that research talking about no clutter in the bedroom and how looking at a pile of unfinished work or an unfinished home improvement project merely looking at it will trigger a cortisol spike a stress hormone response that you're not even aware of it comes out tomorrow yeah yeah yeah and then we don't watch tv at all in the bedroom so even though we could there's a bedroom i mean there's a tv there you know we make sure the show yeah that's right it's actually covered up by by uh curtains now but um yeah so that's i mean again sleep is a very very critical component of of this i think people realize that by now we also talk about rest recovery rejuvenation in general and in particular the age of the mobile device not giving our brains any time to rest and relax and uh yeah here we're near you know your balcony where you could sit out and look over the beach and watch the boats come through yeah and i enjoy that change of scenery it's really really cool and i realized you could just sit here and watch the world go by and it would be enjoyable and incredibly soothing yeah and we used to do that in uh decades past well people now now we're like this yeah people used to sit on their porch right you know and watch the and watch especially young viewers what mark's talking about is that a porch is a thing in front of your house where there were chairs usually there was a chair that had a curved piece of wood underneath it and it would rock back and forth and people would sit on that chair and and they'd whittle and they'd and they'd have conversations yeah and people don't do that anymore yeah they have conversations but it's like you know with their thumbs yeah uh yeah the the the this digital device um you know uh uh addiction that we have gets more and more at hand uh in my mind and it's it's really going to have to come to a head at some point because the disconnect with uh with people today you know you go to an uh an event with eight people sitting around a table and they're all in their devices it's just crazy you know it should be having a glass of wine and chatting it up and they're just busy with that so yeah so we you know we obviously talked a fair amount about uh about how to address the um this addiction we have with devices and how to allocate time and and go on a device diet for uh short periods of time love it yeah uh and of course we're talking about the usual the primal blueprint followers are familiar with the exercise laws of moving frequently lifting heavy things sprinting once in a while and today it seems like they're more and more validated by breaking science and this important emphasis now on just moving more as probably the number one health objective beyond uh going and doing a devoted workout regimen where you're sweating in the gym it's crazy i mean you know the first move around a lot at a low level of activity aerobic activity that was a primal blueprint law number three i think and uh and and that's really what is that science is showing now that you don't have to do you know you don't have to count your calories you don't really have to wear a you know a device to show you how many steps you took it's just about moving through time and space it's just about the movement throughout the day it isn't about burning calories or or you know sweating or any of this stuff it's about the movement and then you and i have have helped to pioneer this concept of micro workouts and these small little breaks that you take uh so whereas you normally might have said well i don't have 45 minutes to go to the gym and there's no parking in the lot usually yeah i don't have uh exactly 20 minutes to drive 10 minutes to look for parking five minutes to get changed 45 minutes to an hour to do my workout you drive home take all that stuff no you the idea behind these workouts these mini workouts these micro workouts is you can take that 45 minute workout and and do it in little bursts throughout the day and have accumulated a workload that would have been equivalent of going to the gym and doing all this except you're doing it on your time you're doing it in breaks in between phone calls or you know moments of inspiration if you're writing and uh and you don't sweat because you're not spending enough time to actually do it to sweat but you're doing the work and the work is manifesting itself in strength and power and range of motion and mobility and all the things that we are looking for when we work out i think the best thing for me in my in my older age group now is that you're kind of uh flying under the radar in terms of the uh the risk of fatigue breakdown burnout from doing these difficult workouts and when you do a micro workout uh you know takes a minute or two minutes and um it's not you're not at risk of over training from that like you would be if you were in this gym pattern where you're meeting with your trainer and they're killing you for an hour and 15 minutes and yeah you're literally giving your you know your mindset to them and you're saying i give up i don't have any say in this workout i paid you a lot of money you got to drag me through this workout regardless of how i feel right versus and that's that's happens in the gym and it happens with whether if you have a trainer if you have a training buddy if you're in a group it happens a lot in groups in group training whether it's boot camps or you know crossfit stuff where you like got to keep up with the group versus you know the ability to self-monitor and and do a micro set or a mini set and then just sort of take a step back go how did that feel that felt great okay can i do another one or can i do another one in 10 minutes or or was that sufficient for today and what was the last thing we just i just read like four seconds four seconds of all out uh anaerobic activity as a sprint was just as effective as some huge ed coil out of texas just just just uh published this a few days ago like four seconds of full-on anaerobic you know all-out activity punctuated by a few minutes of rest and then doing it again a couple of times is really all you needed to to generate prompt the kind of uh changes in uh testosterone growth hormone output in uh you know myosin you know muscle fiber uh development and all these all these other things so it doesn't take a lot of work and i think just as we're saying it doesn't take a lot of uh calories and a lot of you know other a lot of food to keep you going and keep you energetic and and and and and healthy throughout your life it doesn't take as much as you thought it doesn't take as much exercise right to be fit as you thought right yeah we want to move as much as possible yeah walk around but that that in between area that you call chronic cardio yeah is now proving to be an incredible disaster and an epic fail when it comes to body composition yeah and yeah these these short bursts i have the carol bike it's an indoor stationary bike and the workout's eight minutes long and the guy on the on the website he's wearing a suit yeah doing this workout because you don't sweat yeah if it's less than eight minutes yeah but you do two two twenty second all-out sprints where you're trying to maximize your wattage yeah and it's tough and it's all it's all i want to do and you know sitting on a stationary bike for longer than that you can get bored after yeah after riding so many miles no i know yeah i i go to the gym to read to read a book when i'm riding a bike oh i happen to be i happen to be riding the bike but i mostly do it to catch up on my reading yeah because it's so boring to do that so we should uh probably yeah we've got a good trip through the book here um it ends with some really cool stuff like the advanced strategies for people who have really made a lot of progress and they want to want to want to cut up further and get that get that dream body going one of them's cold exposure which you and i are big fans of yeah we'll have a whole nother whole another episode about that probably uh but that that's a nice package especially for people that may be familiar with mark stegali apple and what we've been talking about for a long time there's a lot of fun fun juice in here that'll that you get you excited but i think also especially um you know if you are a big enthusiast and you've been doing this and you've changed your life from from primal living giving this gift to someone you know on the fringe yeah family friends loved ones it's very uh user friendly in that sense because we're not diving into this uh caveman style hole or keto right and a craziness right it's somewhat it's somewhat agnostic in terms of the way of eating it's mostly about how to achieve this metabolic flexibility using the strategy that that literally relies on the programming that we have in our genes in every one of us and that's always been the beauty of what we talk about in our books is how do we tap into this uh this power that we all have this super power that we have to achieve excellent health uh by figuring out the right ways to eat when to eat how to move how to sleep and i think you really enjoy this book i'm very proud of this book it's like it is the culmination of the 15 years that we've been working together two meals a day thank you for watching listening [Music] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Mark's Daily Apple

Views: 119,656

Rating: 4.9037642 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Sisson, keto, Mark Sisson keto, Brad Kearns running, intermittent fasting, Mark Sisson primal, Mark Sisson diet, Mark Sisson Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Mark Sisson, primal kitchen, microworkouts, micro workouts

Id: rSq-JpYIsCA

Length: 68min 3sec (4083 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021