← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
Tom Bilyeu
You're listening to the Impact Theory podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers. Join host Tom Bilyeu, serial entrepreneur and co founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success. Welcome to Impact the Hey everybody. Welcome to Health Theory. My name is Tom Bilyeu and I'm the co founder of Quest Nutrition and I am obsessed with actuating potential and living the best life possible. And I learned somewhere along the way that to do that mindset, while very important, actually comes in position three. For me, numbers one and two are diet and exercise and so really understanding health and its fundamental properties is absolutely critical if you want to do something extraordinary with your life. And that's why we've created this show. And today I'm I am joined by somebody absolutely extraordinary. You guys are going to love this guy. He is one of the most interesting intersections of mind and body that I've ever come across. I had a very good time researching him. He's a former endurance athlete, author of the Primal Blueprint. I should say best selling author of the Primal Blueprint. He's written several books, Primal Endurance, most recently the Keto Reset Diet and he's also the creator of a whole slew of amazing foods that you can find on Amazon's where I got them. I don't know if that's his recommendation recommended channel. I'm sure you can also get them on his website as well. You can also find him on marksdailyapple.com where he has blogged daily for 11 years, which is absolutely extraordinary. Go check him out. He's one of the most important voices in the space. Without further ado, please help me in welcoming Mark Sisson. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show, man.
- [02:47]
Mark Sisson
Thanks for having me, man.
- [02:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Very, very excited, truly, to have you on the show and researching you. So I knew of you pretty well because I'm in that sort of keto experimentation world. I understand. I've never been truly paleo, but I understand the world. And so you can't get that far in that universe without encountering you. But really going deep and researching you for this interview, I was like, wow. Like, this dude is really my kind of dude. So I want to start with.
- [03:13]
Mark Sisson
What do you mean?
- [03:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, the slogan of your company is Live awesome, right? What do you mean by that? How did that come about?
- [03:18]
Mark Sisson
Well, it came about because people wanted me to define what primal really meant. You know, is it paleo? Is it primary? Does it have to do with the caveman experience? Or does it have to do with, you know, some other primal urge? Primal scream, basically. Primal is about extracting the greatest amount of enjoyment, pleasure, contentment, fulfillment, satisfaction from every possible moment. And that's really what defines live awesome. How do you live awesomely? You do, though. You do that by enjoying every. Every moment possible. But in order to do that, there are some hurdles that we create for ourselves in this modern life, right? And they may be in the form of making inappropriate choices in how we eat or inappropriate choices in our sleep patterns, staying out of the sun instead of being in the sun, and all these different things that over the years, I realized, were critical to our experience of life, that if you make some of these decisions in the context of wanting to be strong and lean and fit and happy and healthy and productive, if you are mindful is the word they use now, of all these, of how your genes manifest each of those behaviors, then you have this great empowerment over your own life to manifest the body you want, the mood you want, the relationship you want, the productivity in your work that you want. You know, all these things are possible, but there's an element that goes back to the primal nature of who we are, and that is this amazing genetic recipe that we all have, but that we don't necessarily follow the instructions.
- [05:04]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting because when I got into health and fitness, it was entirely around my willingness to suffer. So I grew up in a morbidly obese family, So I saw what happened. I got sort of the natural evolution of where that was headed. And so I made enough sort of early reasonable choices. They were not great by my standards now, but like, reasonable enough that I wasn't packing on the pounds. But then in my mid-20s, I stopped eating fat because obviously that was bad for me and I wanted to keep the fat down because fat makes you fat. And I was eating licorice literally by the tub. And I remember somebody said to me, I think if you eat more sugar than you burn, it turns to fat. And I was like, that doesn't even make sense. How would that happen? And so that began this really confusing period in my life where I was eating less than I'd ever eaten in my life, but I was getting fatter. And I was like, what is going on? And so knowing that if I kept. And I thought it was just genetics, right? Oh, I, I've hit my mid-20s. Here we go. And then really diving in and saying, okay, I need to figure this out. I actually need to learn about this. But I didn't come to fat for years and years and years later and lived ultimately in this sort of rabbit starvation phase. But I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now. Used rabbit starvation to get lean. Like, I won't lie. If you're willing to suffer and you don't mind massive joint pain, like, you can get by on like ultra high protein, really low fat, and virtually no carbohydrate. Why is it that people need fat and what's the experience that you think that they'll get out of switching their diet around?
- [06:49]
Mark Sisson
Well, so that's a very complex question, and there's a complex equation behind it, but people need fat. Fat is a, you know, provides not just burnable calories, fuel, but fat. Certain types of fat play critical roles in the creation of cell membranes, in the, in the communication between cells in certain hormone precursor situations. Certain amount of body fat is just sort of requisite to be healthy in the first place. So we're not all striving to be 2%, you know, body fat people, but the, the idea that fat makes you fat has been long dispelled. I mean, this was like, that's a quote from Susan Powder back in the 80s, right? And, and it still somehow made its way into medicine for, for some unknown reason, because the research has been very clear. We need certain amount of fat in our diet. If you were to eliminate fat from your diet, which is what everyone thought we needed to do for the last several decades, you're left with carbohydrates and protein. Well, carbohydrates are sugars, Virtually every carbohydrate turns into sugar. Body can't burn that much sugar. Blood sugar, normal blood sugar represents about a teaspoon full of blood sugar in your entire bloodstream at any point in time. And yet we have this amazing capacity to take those excess sugar calories and convert them into, into stored energy, which is. Which is basically what fat is. Protein again. It's weird that people give protein, even a caloric value, because we're not really supposed to be burning protein. You can ascribe 4 calories per gram to protein, you know, and in any nutrition facts panel, you'll see it right there. But Maybe the first 30 or 40 grams of protein a day isn't intended to be burned. It's intended to be used to rebuild, to, to create new cells, to build muscle, to strengthen bone, to create enzymes, because all enzymes are, are derived from the amino acids that are in protein. I wrote an article years ago called the Context of Calories. And one of the things I would look at is, you know, if you're looking at creating a macronutrient, like profiling, how are my. That's the big thing right now. All the guys are talking about macros. What are your macros? Right. You know, it's far more nuanced than that because some fat you're not going to want to burn, you're going to want to incorporate it into cells. Some protein you're not going to burn, you're definitely not going to want to burn, you're going to want, incorporate it into cells. And that leaves, you know, carbs, which are just a source of quick energy in the form of glucose that we don't really, we aren't really that good at burning over the long haul. So we get into this weird kind of situation where we're like, in your case, you had the willpower to undergo a caloric deprivation, but it made you miserable. It was like literally struggling and suffering and sacrificing every single day, calorie counting, portion control, all that stuff, because you kept thinking it's all about the calories, but it's not. Sometimes it's about that, the individual nutrients and how you partition them. And that's kind of the beauty of keto, for instance, is that we, is that we look at how we can take this millions of years of evolution and harness it to become really good at burning fat, to become less dependent on glucose, to spare the protein that we otherwise would be burning for calories. And it's all part of this great system that we evolved. I Don't want to co opt your show here, but I want to talk to talk to you about something. Okay. We talk about metabolic flexibility a lot now in this new era of macros. Metabolic flexibility simply means that you are able to extract energy from the fat on your plate, the fat on your body, the carbohydrates on your plate, the glycogen in your muscles, the glucose in your bloodstream, the ketones that your liver makes. That's flexibility, that's getting energy from all these different substrates and not become dependent on burning protein to create glucose. Historically, humans didn't have access to food three times a day, let alone every day. So wired to eat overeat, store those calories as fat, and then a day later or two days later, take that energy out of storage and burn it and spare muscle and not have hangriness and all the other stuff that goes with that. It's such an elegant system to store it and to burn it. Well, most of us today are so good at storing it and then we've lost the ability. It's literally we're born with it, it's a factory setting at birth. And then we lose the ability to take that fat out of storage, combust it as fuel, create ketones, offset the need for the brain to require glucose, spare protein. So we get this great protein recycling system, take the opportunity to do a short term cellular house cleaning and repair all of this. And all of it comes down to the choices we make in our food.
- [12:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I want to go back to what you were talking about with the suffering. And so I got lean because I was willing to suffer and be at a caloric deficit and all that. And I really didn't understand something that you just said then. And it, it still bums me out now because to give you an idea, my business partners had to pull me aside and say, you no longer have a personality. Like, that's how bad it had got. Like, everything was about like, you know, can I eat, can I eat, can I eat? And so pushing that off and pushing it off really did like have a massive effect on my ability to be joyful, to express joy, to be fun and playful. And what I didn't understand was that what I consider a key insight for anybody that's just now getting into this, which is your body is so elegantly designed. Do you not wonder why it stores everything as fat? Right. And so if fat is like this beast that we're meant to be afraid of, like, why would we have such a readily, readily available source of body fat if we're not meant to use it as a fuel source. So that became one of the first things that really clicked me into experimenting with ketogenics. But I want to go on your journey for a second. So you start as an endurance athlete.
- [13:14]
Mark Sisson
Yes.
- [13:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Totally understanding the high carb world and how to use that and leverage that for some pretty extraordinary results. First of all, you were in amazing shape. You were doing very well. I mean, maybe not number one in the world, but you were a deep competitor.
- [13:30]
Mark Sisson
Yes.
- [13:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So if you had all that success, what made you want to move away from that?
- [13:34]
Mark Sisson
Well, so I had the success racing, and I had the success using old technology. So the old technology was you train your ass off until, literally until you can't train anymore. So it was a more is better, no pain, no gain concept. And then to fuel all that work, the understanding at the time was that you needed complex carbohydrate, that it was basically how you manage glycogen in your muscles that determine where the wall was when you hit the wall. So we recognized the utility of becoming good at burning fat. But because we were so dependent on carbohydrate all the time, every day, you know, you deplete carbs. Then you overeat carbs at night. We call it carbo loading in the days. And you carbo load every single day to be able to go out and do it again the next day. I mean, I ran 100 miles a week on average for seven years. Some weeks it was only 80. Some weeks, 125. And imagine how, you know, that's 20 miles a day in some weeks. To be able to repeat that, you sort of had to. If you hadn't learned how to really burn fat well and hadn't done the training and reoriented your digestive tract and your enzyme systems to become really good at burning fat, you relied on carbohydrate. One relied on carbohydrate. I relied on carbohydrate. Well, carbs are very pro inflammatory over the long haul, especially in 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, we thought the furnace will burn anything. So it didn't matter that even the quality of the carbs. And I ate complex carbs quite a bit. But I'd have pizza and beer and I'd have, you know, bread and rice and cakes and candies and cookies and, you know, anything that was carbs, I'd sort of take it in thinking, I'm going to burn it off tomorrow. Anyway, so I got really fast and I trained My butt off. But I started to fall apart at a very early age. I had arthritis in my. I had osteoarthritis in my feet. I had tendonitis in my hips. That ultimately was what shut me down. I had irritable bowel syndrome that ran my life. I literally, from the age of 14 until I was 47, was. It was devastating. I had, you know, upper respiratory tract infections six or eight times a year, just partly from. From. From having trashed my immune system with the stress, because stress is an immune suppressor, but also from the. Having trashed my immune system from so much sugar. Sugar suppresses the immune system as well. So on the outside, I was like the picture of, you know, fitness. On the inside, I was literally dying, falling apart. The running was a. Was a effort to do something that science showed would. Would improve my longevity. The diet seemed to indicate lots of carbs, go for it. But so at the age of like 29 or 30, I just said, this is not working. I retired from competition. I took a step back and I said, I'm gonna, you know, I still want to be strong and lean and fit and happy and healthy and productive. I just. There's got to be a way to do this without so much pain, suffering, and sacrifice.
- [16:36]
Tom Bilyeu
And was this based on science you were reading?
- [16:38]
Mark Sisson
No, it's partly based on science, but most of it was based on an intuitive approach to like, wait a minute.
- [16:42]
Tom Bilyeu
This just.
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Mark Sisson
It just can't be going back to my roots in college where I was pre med and I, you know, I got my bachelor's degree in biology. I was focused on evolution. Evolution was really starting to come to the forefront in the early 70s. And I thought, well, how, you know, what is it about where we are now in our evolution that would allow us to adapt to training and become stronger from. From whatever we choose to do. So I started to look at ways in which the body would respond to training. And one of the key elements that I think was overlooked for so many people for so long is you have to recover. You can't just beat yourself up every day. A certain round of training requires nutrition, and it requires some amount of rest and recovery in order to. To allow the organism to improve to the next level. Because if you keep layering on training and training and training, you go down this rabbit hole of over training and burnout, which is what so many endurance athletes encounter. Like a friend of mine, Johnny G. Who went on to create spinning Johnny was training for this race Across America. And he would be, he'd be doing 200 mile rides with avocado oil as his primary source of energy. I'm like, dude, in the 80s, yeah, like, dude, you are crazy. You, you, you know, you, this is, you're supposed to be managing glycogen. Everybody knows this, right? And he would go, no, you know, it's all about the fat. And I try to do the South African accent here. It's all about the fat. And, and the avocado oil. And he'd have these. He'd take 1600 calories of avocado oil and some emulsifier so he wouldn't throw up. And I started to think, this guy's onto something. It's like, it's really about how you. What's the highest level at which you can perform and mostly burn fat and spare glycogen from within, rather than having to keep layering glucose and glycogen by external feedings every 15 minutes.
- [18:31]
Tom Bilyeu
This is counterintuitive still now, today. This would have been so, like sacrilegious back then. One. How did he. Did he just have deep intuition about it and of one or.
- [18:42]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, I think he was intuitive about it. I think he'd done enough of his own research. I don't know where the research was coming from. Guys like Finney and Volek were starting to get their work published in those days. So there was a recognition that there was this thing called ketogenics and ketogenesis and there was a way in which you could train the body to be better at burning fat. But the question really was, how do you do that? Because again, up until five years ago, there was still this assumption you have to have glycogen. There are ways that we can go about extracting 95 to 97% of our energy from fat when we are performing at a very high level. Like for some runners, it could be 6, 6, 20 miles and get 95% of your energy from your stored body fat. But you have to teach your body how to do that. That's the development of metabolic flexibility that I teach and that I'm such a fan of because it manifests itself off over a wide range of benefits. More energy all the time, hunger being suppressed or mitigated to the point you don't think about what's the next meal and what's the next meal and what's the next meal? Because I guarantee you, in your day, when you were doing this rabbit starvation, you were always thinking like, okay, when's the next 247 calorie bolus that I can eat right?
- [20:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, yes.
- [20:05]
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- [20:12]
Mark Sisson
We've planned for the plot twists, so support is always available because a great
- [20:17]
Tom Bilyeu
trip starts with peace of mind.
- [20:20]
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- [20:50]
Mark Sisson
When you become metabolically flexible, one of the first things that happens is appetite goes out the window. You discover you're much more efficient. I talk about metabolic flexibility. I also talk about metabolic efficiency, which is the ability to extract energy at a much more efficient rate. So you're not wasting calories or wasting energy. Good to see.
- [21:10]
Tom Bilyeu
And what's the result of that? That you need to eat less.
- [21:11]
Mark Sisson
Yes. It's crazy. So most people who have been keto for any length of time will report back, dude, first of all, three meals a day can't even handle it. It's like, I couldn't eat three meals a day. It's way too much food. Number two, I probably get by on 30% fewer calories now doing all the same activities than I did before I was keto. What's that about and what that it's about? It's about metabolic efficiency. It's about, you know, less thermic effect of food. You know, sometimes we eat a large meal more than we should have and the body raises its temperature just to kind of burn off some of that fuel. Right, because it doesn't want that much fuel at one time. Yes. It tries to stash the glucose into the glycogen reserves in the muscles. If there's not enough room, goes to the fat cells. You know, yes, there is some protein, but excess protein goes to the liver. Gluconeogenesis gets converted to sugar. Same same issue with that. So all these, all of these elements of efficiency. Now you don't need as much protein because you're sparing protein instead of deaminating it and then peeing it out all the time. You don't need as much carbohydrate because you've learned how to make ketones from your own stored body fuel. Those ketones really reduce the amount of glucose that you need to make or you need to take in from the outside. You know, there's a statement that many people make in the keto world that there is no requirement in human nutrition for carbohydrate at all because the body can make enough glucose through gluconeogenesis and then offset the rest of the requirements with ketones. So the efficiency becomes again a very important aspect in reduction of inflammation because the efficiency also carries with it a reduction in reactive oxygen species from the inefficient burning of fuel to get rid of it. The house cleaning I talked about where a cell will look at the environment and go, geez, there's not enough substrate around for me to dive, to divide right now. So I think I'll stay where I am and I'll do some house cleaning and I'll literally consume some of the damaged proteins within. I'll consume some of the damaged fats. A cell might even say, time for me to give up the ghost, I'm going to die. Autophagy. The cell will self destruct based on the signals that it gets from the environment, which, and that environment is a dearth, if you will, of nutrients. Now conversely, if you're eating every couple of hours, you're eating three square meals a day, plus snacks in between, plus something before you go to bed, which most people do, the body goes, well, there's so much food around. This is amazing. So my cells, they can divide because there'll be plenty of substrate and food for the, for the two of me when I divide. But as we know from sort of the anti aging movement, you know, cells have kind of a finite number of divisions. That's what the telomeres are all about, right? And so if you can prolong that time from when one cell decides it's time to divide, and not only prolong the time, but then have that one cell start to do some house cleaning. That's a critical kind of theory behind the anti aging movement and the anti aging aspect of keto and of intermittent fasting and of long term fasting. So there's a lot of, it's like a new era of science that we're embarking on here that kind of has to go back and refigure the science because the science for the last several decades has kind of been based on body needs, sugar, fat's bad. Heart attacks are caused by fat and cholesterol. You know, you can, you have to do exercise to burn off all the calories if you want to lose weight. All these things have been shown to be inaccurate.
- [25:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Now one Thing that I think you have a really beautiful way of talking about because I know that some of the people watching this, first of all, they found me because they're interested in mindset. And so the health stuff always seems like something off to the side. But you've really talked eloquently about not judging regarding the food and eating in a way that's entirely pleasurable. So how do people reconcile the. What I was told was the first rule of nutrition, which was if it tastes good, spit it out. Which I always thought was really clever and seemed true, though if I'm honest, like in my period of rabid starvation, that seemed honestly true. So how do you walk people through that transition of I'm fed up, I've tried a hundred things, none of them worked. And I don't want to hate my life and I would rather be, whether it's overweight or joint pain or whatever, I'd rather do all that to be able to eat and drink and be merry. How do you help them see that they don't have to make that sacrifice?
- [26:12]
Mark Sisson
Well, first of all, I want to be clear. Every bite of food I put in my mouth, I enjoy. So there are certain things that you would say, hey, Mark, this is really healthy, you should try it. If it doesn't taste great, I'm not eating it. I don't care how healthy it is. So I only eat things that taste great. I only eat to satisfy my, you know, my hedonistic side, the amount of food I eat. I've learned that there's a point at which it doesn't serve me to eat anymore. So the quantity of what I would consider a serving has diminished. Now, does that mean I'm sacrificing because I don't eat till I'm full or I don't finish my plate? No, quite the opposite. It means I eat till I'm satisfied, knowing full well that a my body is really good at burning off stored body fat. So I got all the energy I need for days. So if I don't eat for another meal or two, I'm fine, but I can plan on eating at another meal. So I sort of adjust my intake on a daily basis to how do I feel? I don't look at numbers. I'm not one of those quantified self guys. I'm really operating off of how do I feel? And if I have the energy I want, if I'm maintaining muscle mass without any effort, if I'm never sick and if I'm not hungry, then what's the problem with how I eat. What does it take to get there? It takes some work to get there. Because I'm telling you the truth is there'll be no world in which eating Cinnabons all day is going to be healthy. Yes, you're going to have to give up sugars. So candies, pies, cakes, ice cream, cookies, you know, then you're going to have to probably give up if you want to go keto bread, pasta, rice, cereal. Now what can you eat? You can eat all the vegetables you want. All the vegetables. You want some fruit, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, lots of sources of protein, healthy fats, coconut oil, coconuts, avocado oil, nuts. And then within this realm of food, you can do all sorts of stuff to make it taste phenomenal. The reason I created my company is the sauces, the dressings, the toppings. If you can put those on the food and they're healthy and they add taste and functionality, you are so far ahead of the game. And the fact that you can't eat a basket of bread rolls before dinner comes or that you can't, you know, eat a massive dessert, I think most people get that. That's. That's a nice trade off. If appetite is controlled, if they get rid of hunger and cravings and appetite, if they trend toward their ideal body composition, if they have all the energy they need all the time, if they sleep well, then you've checked off all the boxes. And to have given up candy or soft drinks, to have given up some amount of grains was well worth it, provided again that you never go hungry and that you enjoy every bite of food you eat.
- [29:10]
Tom Bilyeu
So my journey to ketogenics was weird. And I do want to talk. So what got me into it at first was anti cancer, the potential that it had anti cancer properties. And so I try ketogenics and you've talked about how people absolutely should not go from a lifetime of being a sugar burner and try to just like cold turkey, go over to ketogenics, which I did. So I had keto flu, like, coming out my ears. It was total misery. And I was like, okay, nothing about this is pleasurable at all. Ketogenics is powerful if it has these anti cancer properties, but it's horrific.
- [29:45]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
And as I was going through it, I used to have to ice my wrists every day for 15 years because I had that much pain in my joints. And I in the middle of keto flu and all this, I was like, whoa, that's so Weird, My wrists feel perfect. And I was like, you know, just sort of in the back of my mind. And so when I did about three weeks of full blown measuring my blood, which you've talked eloquently about the dangers of paying too much attention to that, but super hardcore, I was even taking exogenous ketones. So I was a blood superstar. Felt terrible. And at the end of it I'm like, I'm never doing that again. But this whole wrist thing, I'm going to keep fat in my diet and see what happens. That was utterly transformative. But for a year people kept. After that, I was like, I'm never doing keto again. And people were like, no, no, no, it changes your relationship to hunger. And I was like, I don't even know what that means. And so for a year I didn't do it again. And then I thought, you know, let me, I'd been hearing more about managing keto flu and I thought, let me try it again because this risk thing is real. And I did it again, did it right. And it was amazing. And I came out the other side going, this is what it means to not be controlled by my hunger.
- [30:59]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
But I still don't know how to explain it to people. There are people in my life who I love more than you can imagine and they're going to die early because of obesity related complications. And I know that on the other side of something like the Keto Reset diet, where it wasn't painful, the food is fucking delicious and their relationship to change, their relationship to hunger changes dramatically, that they would be stoked that they did it. But I don't know how to explain how it changes.
- [31:28]
Mark Sisson
Well, you know, the reason I wrote the Keto Reset diet, we have a 21 day stair step program. So in order to earn the right to go keto in the book, for instance, there's a 21 day sort of elimination process where you're getting rid of the pies, the cakes, candies, the cookies, the breads, the pastas, the cereals. You're starting to incorporate more of the, certainly more vegetables. Because fiber and vegetables are not a no, no on keto. They're actually encouraged. Healthy proteins, healthy fats. Again, taste is critical. First thing I tell people when they embark on this program is don't let yourself go hungry. Don't set yourself up for failure. So if you do get hungry and you normally for a bagel in the middle of the afternoon or a donut or whatever, have some nut butter, have, you know, some artisana coconut butter. It's one of my favorite go to kind of take the edge off things or a handful of macadamia nuts or some beef jerky or something that that isn't going to go back to your old ways, but it's going to take the edge off your hunger, get you through that period while your body is learning how to burn fat. So the reason it's 21 days is when we eat food, every bite of food has a hormonal effect on the body one way or the other. You got insulin, you got leptin, ghrelin, glucagon, testosterone, epinephrine, norepinephrine. We could go on and on. It's all these signaling systems that are responding to the information that you're putting down your gullet. So when you eat sugar, insulin goes up, starts a whole cascade of events, shuts down testosterone, increases cortisol a little bit. On the other hand, you take a healthy fat in, no insulin. There's a different set of leptin, ghrelin interactions and hunger suppresses because fat is satiating. So there are all these different processes that happen as a result of your choices in food. What we're trying to do in 21 days is Rewire your body. So where I talked in my original book about reprogram your genes to burn fat, well, you're taking these genes, which are basically information sets, and you're up regulating certain things. When you say I'm going to deny glucose for a while, then the body goes, okay, I got it. I'm set up for that. So if you deny glucose, we're going to upregulate the enzyme systems to take fat out of storage that burn it in the mitochondria. And if you do that long enough, we're going to upregulate other enzymes or other systems that make more mitochondria, which is where the fat burns. So over time you reduce glucose. The brain, which is used to glucose, goes, jeez, there's not going to be much glucose. I better go to plan B, which is send some signals and convert some fats in the liver to ketones. So the brain is happy with fuel, doesn't need glucose. You know, increase those mitochondria in the muscles so they get much more energy from the fat. There's twice as many of these little factory powerhouses that are made in the cells because you sent the signals to your genes to do that. Now, that takes three weeks. It takes three weeks to get about 80% there. So if we stair step this down for the first three weeks. There's a midterm exam in the book and it's basically, how do you feel? So when can you wake up in the morning and not be ravenous for breakfast? How long can you go in the morning without having to eat, without getting hangry? Can you do a workout fast? Can you come home from a workout and not eat for an hour and a half? How's your sleep? We have all these. And if you pass, if you get a 75 on the exam, you earn the right to go keto. Now, in that process of stair stepping down, you get into this space where now you're literally. Now you've clearly sent the message, we're going to have to make ketones, we're going to have to learn how to burn ketones. So the body builds the metabolic machinery to burn ketones. And that is so cool because that's again, tapping into that factory setting that we all have at birth, that experience that we never get to have based on our heritage of two and a half million years of human evolution and then 100 million years of mammalian evolution before that, to be able to extract that fat from fat stores. So it's a stair step process. I want it to be as comfortable and satisfying as possible. Now, once you've become keto, once you've built the metabolic machinery, as long as you don't go back to 2, 3, 500 calories, grams of carbs a day, whether or not you're in ketosis, you still have that metabolic flexibility. So I'm, I use the word keto now because that's where I exist. I exist in the keto zone. Some days I get 30 grams of carbs and that's all I get. Some days I get 150 grams of carbs. That's what I get. The difference is I don't feel, I don't notice any difference from one day to the next because I've built that metabolic flexibility to extract energy from whatever substrate is available.
- [36:12]
Tom Bilyeu
And do you have a way of getting people to, like a short analogy or a description of what it's like to not be controlled by hunger, because the people that I've encountered, anyway, it's like they get it intellectually, but they're not moved emotionally to make the change.
- [36:33]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, that's a tough one, because so much of our lives revolve around hunger. I mean, I'll give you an example. Most people, you and I included, sort of live right on the edge of what can I get away with? How much Bad. Can I inject and get away with it? Right? And with food, it's basically, what's the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight? This is how people think, what's the most amount of that dessert I can have and not feel miserable or guilty? And so we live our lives that way and. And over time, we find that some of us even develop an exercise habit around that. Like, okay, I go to the gym and I see people on the treadmill all the time. And I'm always interested in, like, what? Like, you're there five days a week and you're doing 45 minutes. Why are you doing that? Are you training for a 10k or a marathon? And the answer is typically no. I just. I like to eat. I'm like, dude, you would rather be miserable for 45 minutes so that you could earn the right to eat something you probably shouldn't be eating in the first place? How ridiculous is that? So rather than go through life with this strategy of like, what's the most amount I can eat and not gain weight or not be sick to my stomach or not feel overfull, I did a thought experiment years ago and I said, what's the least amount of food I can eat and have all the energy I want, maintain muscle mass, never get sick. Most importantly, not be hungry. Hunger throws everything out the window. So if you can get to that point, Tim Ferriss would say, the minimum effective dose of food. Right? But it's basically like, how can I orchestrate my eating strategy so that I'm always satisfied? But I'm also, I know where the limit is. And if my limits are three bites of cheesecake or four pieces of a chocolate cake, or, you know, one bite of cookie, or in my case, you know, I have a grain gluten insensitivity, but I can have three pieces of bread slathered in butter. And that's kind of my limit. And so I know I'm not giving up bread. I'm just. I just know where the limitations are, and I'm happy to. I'm happy to incorporate those. So I'm actually playing right up to the edge of what I can get away with, but I know where that edge is. Does it make sense?
- [38:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, totally. Look, I don't judge choices. People shouldn't judge choices. You need to understand your body, where your limits are. And I love this idea. So, lgn, right? So your community knows. Well, look good naked. And you said there's actually been a recent shift to fgn. Feel good naked. And you said, I think that that's really important. Why is that an important shift?
- [39:14]
Mark Sisson
Well, you know, looking good naked for some people was like a primary motivator. Most people on Instagram apparently, but. But in the real world and in my world, most people initially came to the primal blueprint, my site, Mark's Daily Apple, because I was talking about alternative ways to achieve health. Looking good naked was a nice side effect. But damn it, I want to feel good. I want the joint pain to go away. I want to get off my meds. I want to lose, you know, 100 pounds and, you know, get to a decent weight, not lose four pounds and get to a, you know, a cover of Shape magazine weight. So feeling good naked is really about just, you know, like, okay, I just, you know, I have energy, I sleep well, I'm in a good mood, I'm getting along with my family, I'm productive at work. I'm enjoying as much of every moment as possible. You know, that's really what in my mind, that's why we're here, to get the greatest amount of real time pleasure in the moment as possible.
- [40:24]
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- [40:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Speaking about pleasure, I want to talk about IBS running your life for like 30 years, which is crazy. This show is actually because my wife was struggling with microbiome related issues, IBS type symptoms. But it got so bad that it got stuck.
- [41:11]
Mark Sisson
Scary.
- [41:12]
Tom Bilyeu
And there was a point where not to be overly dramatic, but I was like, legitimately you can die from these symptoms. And so I started getting really freaked out. We took her to every doctor. I mean, we were in the fortunate financial position where we could just throw money at the problem, threw money at the problem. And it didn't help. It didn't get better. So then I was really in a desperate situation and realized, okay, I'm gonna have to learn about this myself. I'm gonna have to become an expert in this. And started going down the microbiome path. It's completely changed her life. I would say we're still not finished, but it's so much better. What was that journey like for you, what is it that actually improved the symptoms for you?
- [41:50]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, so it was partly my lifestyle that began with emphasis on complex carbohydrates. So there are a lot of quote, healthy whole grains in my diet. So I always ate a lot of grains. I was, ate a lot of, of seven grain breads and whole wheat pancakes and buckwheat this and whole grain that, to the point where I was some weeks, some days consuming 700, 800 grams of carbs a day, sometimes 1,000 grams of carbs a day. And that was always assumed to be the healthy way to go about things. I got early on, sugar's not going to serve me as well as an energy substrate as whole grains that are sort of low glycemic, et cetera, et cetera. But what I didn't recognize early on was the potential damage that the anti nutrients in certain grains would do. So as I got deeper into the research, I still, up until the age of 47, was defending my right to eat grains. Even though I was reading about, I'd read some of Jared Diamond's work, I'd read other people who were, you know, indicating that the gluten in wheat, that the folded proteins, the gliadins, the, the zines in corn and all these different forms of protein were so tightly wound together that humans hadn't developed an efficient way of digesting them because grains have only been on the scene for literally about 10,000 years. But I kept defending my right to eat grains and throughout my life it was like I had to drive an hour and 15 minutes to get here this morning. Happy to do it, Tom, but I would have had to think about what gas stations were open along the way with a bathroom in case something went wrong. I mean, I literally lived in fear of like having to go to the airport for an early flight and having a 40 minute drive and no bathrooms along the way. I woke up with severe cramps every day of my life from the age of 14 to 47, pretty much sometimes when I was under stress. And it became so debilitating that I remember having to go sit in a, you know, in our hot tub at 4 o' clock in the morning, three or four o' clock in the morning, just to kind of ease the pain. My wife one day goes, she says, you know, I just gave up grains and I feel so much better. You should try that. And I'm like, wow, I hadn't thought of that, even though I've been writing about the possibility. So I gave up grains for 30 days, the arthritis in my fingers went away, some of the tendinitises that I had subsided, the upper respiratory tract infections went away, and most importantly, the IBS went away. It just literally went away. It almost brings me to tears today to think about how much I suffered simply by assuming that, well, since the rest of the medical world and conventional wisdom and certainly all the vegans think that grains are healthy, for me, that couldn't be problematic. Having given grains up, that was really what drove me then to, you know, write the primal blueprint to take a position on how important nutrition is for everybody. That whatever is ailing you right now may or may not have been caused by some nutritional choices you made, but certainly could be mitigated if not cured by alternate choices. I'm pretty clear on that. I don't purport to know what everyone is for everyone's condition, but I would say that my job as an educator is to offer up these opportunities. Like, here's what the research shows on reducing grain consumption. Here's what the research might show on skipping a meal a day or fasting intermittently, or here's what the research we talk about sleep and sun exposure and, you know, everything that has to do with diet, exercise, health, fitness and so on.
- [45:44]
Tom Bilyeu
When you were talking earlier about in the 1980s, already starting to look at fat and the people were writing about it and thinking about how insanely fringe that would have been, but now is really, and I'll speak n of 1, the transformative effect of fat in my life cannot be overstated. It literally can't be overstated.
- [46:03]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
- [46:03]
Tom Bilyeu
So it has changed so many aspects of my life. We haven't even talked about, like the, the impact on cognition, which is my obsession, in that when I get hungry now on a high fat diet, I do not have a decline in cognitive performance. That, that is just transformational in a way that I can't explain being able to. I once went accidentally without food because I was traveling for 24 hours, was like, Jesus, I haven't eaten in 24 hours. Like you, you couldn't have convinced me that that was true. So the thing that's on the fringe now, which is a little unfair, because this is, you know, fat maybe in the late 90s versus the mid-80s. But the microbiome, like every, everything that
- [46:44]
Mark Sisson
I look at, it's so funny you say that because I'm almost over the microbiome. Not in a bad way, in a great way, but I've been talking about it for three years now, you know, so I feel like that, and that's part of my being caught up in this, in this world in which I, I sort of sometimes preach to the choir with my readers. I'm surrounded by like minded thinkers. So a lot of us have been talking about the microbiome for, for so long, they were like, okay, we handled the microbiome, we're on to the next thing you know, I think again, it's some of the things about the microbiome, some of the measurements, like trying to, trying to discern three or five thousand different strains of bacteria and figure out which is which combination is good for you. That's a truly complex equation. Right. Or the idea that you could do a fecal transplant from somebody else and then derive the benefits from that in your own particular, you know, microcosm or ecosystems. How more old tech could you get than consuming a shit milkshake? Right. From somebody else?
- [47:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [47:52]
Mark Sisson
Right. So that's as old tech as it gets. Let's not downplay it either. I mean like on a ketogenic diet people would, would ask, well, how do you handle the biome? Because you're not eating much fiber. And I'm like, dude, I probably eat more fiber than most vegetarians. I have a, I have a big ass salad every day. It's got 13 different types of vegetables and lettuces and, you know, carrots and tomatoes and radishes, whatever. And I douse it with a high fat dressing and I put some protein on top. Right. The amount of carbs in that salad is probably only 18 grams total, probably 25 grams of fat, probably 30 grams of protein. And lots of micronutrients in the vegetables and lots of fiber. Like all the fiber my gut biome needs. So my gut biome does not require brand fiber, you know, to move it along. As long as I'm feeding my gut bacteria what they, what they truly need, which are these soluble fibers that you can find in plants and green, leafy plants, you know, vegetables, then I'm, I'm, I am providing my body the prebiotic fiber that a healthy gut biome would, would thrive on. So I don't want to, I don't want to overlook the importance of gut biome is huge and taking care of. But, but if you've, if you have a healthy gut biome, then literally all you really need to provide it are the fodmaps. Ironic that, that if you have an unhealthy gut biome, you get rid of all these things. But if you have a healthy gut biome, then all those fructool, oligosaccharide, disaccharide and so on become the substrate that those healthy bacteria use to create
- [49:27]
Tom Bilyeu
the
- [49:28]
Mark Sisson
short chain fatty acids and the precursors to neurotransmitters and so on and so forth.
- [49:34]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, I want to bring it all back around to living awesome.
- [49:37]
Mark Sisson
Yep.
- [49:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So what are some elements of that? Like you told a really cool story about your wife's assistant who had tried and struggled for, for years to lose weight. And you're looking at the results she's getting. You're thinking there's no way she's being honest about what she's eating. And then the result ended up being therapy. And I thought, wow, like that's that juxtaposition of your ability to talk about like just the hardcore biological science, but then go all the way to, hey, therapy may be exactly what some people need. What are some parts of living awesome that we haven't talked about?
- [50:09]
Mark Sisson
Well, I think play is an important thing. So play is a critical part of the human experience. We sort of ascribe it to, well, that's something kids can do until they're adolescents and then they got to be grown ups and they got to act mature. And then once you're a grown up, play is really a luxury that probably we don't need. Well, in fact, play is critical to our development not just as young adults, but also throughout our experience. I like to go stand up paddling. I have fun stand up paddling. There's never a point when I'm on the board, when I go, oh geez, when's it going to be over? Which was like, happened a lot when I was a runner or a cyclist. So I stand up, paddle. I like to, I like to snowboard. I like to, you know, I want to do things that are fun. I want to play. I spend. Now let's shift gears a little bit. Use your brain. I, my kids had this, read a book recently about orchestrating your life. And my son said, dad, what gets you up every morning? And, and I said, the first thing that gets me up is I can't wait to have a cup of coffee and do the crossword puzzle. So it's something as simple as that. Like I get to use my brain every day before I go. Use my brain for production and for work. Sleep, you cannot be, cannot be overemphasized or overlooked. Sleep is so critical to what we do and having a regular sleep routine. And that's one of the, that's a part of living awesome. Part of living awesome is not being apologetic for the amount of sleep you're getting, but being proud of it and enjoying it and reveling in it. Sun exposure. People think, well, I'm told by my dermatologist, I got to stay out of the sun. Well, no, some amount of sun exposure is actually a good thing. Is probably better for you than avoiding the sun. You have to know where the limit is for you. So in part of being out in the sun is actually being outside, which has its own sort of mood enhancing benefits of being outside in nature. Hearing the wind or hearing the birds or hearing whatever.
- [52:09]
Tom Bilyeu
That's amazing. All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online? Where can you find your book?
- [52:16]
Mark Sisson
Yeah. So marksdailyapple.com is the blog. It's been around for 11 years, as you say, ketoreset.com information about where to buy the book links to where we can get it online. I mean, all the. All the normal places. And then primalblueprint.com is our. Is our E. Comm site. If you want to look into the dressings and the mayonnaises that we. The healthy sauces, dressings and toppings that we. That we offer. Cool.
- [52:43]
Tom Bilyeu
And what's the impact that you want to have on the world? Why do you do all of this?
- [52:47]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, well, I do this because I want to change the way the world eats. Right. I see the power of food so, so intimately and strongly that I think that. That, like I've made these kind of blanket assertions that we could take a trillion dollars off the national health bill in the next 18 months if everybody ate the way you and I know we should be eating, without sacrifice, struggling or suffering. So my mission is literally to affect the health of 100 million people primarily through reorienting their way of eating in a way that develops metabolic flexibility. See how we brought that back?
- [53:26]
Tom Bilyeu
I like that. Awesome. Mark, thank you so much for joining me.
- [53:29]
Mark Sisson
Thank you.
- [53:30]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, guys, this is somebody that you are absolutely going to want to dive in. Go to his blog. In fact, I sent it around to my entire team because I think it does such an amazing job of walking people through exactly what they need to do, of making it accessible. This is somebody who understands the intersection of the science and the humanity of what you would want to change. The fact that his tagline is live awesome and not be shredded. You had me at hello. I think it's incredible that last bit that he just did of listing all the other things that we didn't really get a chance to dive deep on a. You're going to be able to dive deep into that in his world. And I think that they're all critical, not the least of which is play to have fun, to enjoy your life. That is the whole reason that this show exists, is to find ways for you to enjoy your life more, to get the potential out of yourself that's there that is unfortunately dormant unless you do something with it. And I really, really encourage you guys to go dive into his world. I think it is truly unparalleled in its ability to bring those two things together and to give you a blueprint, a primal blueprint nonetheless, for how to live your life in just a better way that is going to make your life better in a thousand ways. Alright, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to itunes, go to Stitcher rate and review us. That helps us build this community and that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible. And you guys rating and reviewing really helps with that. All right, guys, thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care
- [55:18]
Mark Sisson
of.