The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever.

Hey, you guys. I get to interview my 50 some year old clone in today's episode. The Mark Sisson himself. I call him my clone because he and I share a lot of the same interests. However he is, he's much better looking. He's like the silver haired fox, whereas I am the big lumbering, gangly giant. But ultimately, Mark's a cool guy. I profess to be like him and in many ways. So we're gonna talk all about keto and no, it's not gonna be like the same old ho hum stuff you hear Mark talk about all the time because I didn't wanna do that to you guys. So we delve into some very cool things. I'll leave it at that in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

But our self testing is more like, okay, how long can you go without eating? Can you do a workout, a mild workout, without eating, and then not eat afterwards for a while? These are all indicators that you are becoming good at burning fat. And once you know that you're becoming good at burning fat, from there it's just a matter of finding another 40 grams carbs. During this 21 days, we don't recommend, you know, doing hard, intense workouts because your muscles have not yet become used to deriving a substantial portion of their energy from fats. They're still sort of carb dependent.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And a few months ago I interviewed today's podcast guest who is a former professional triathlete, accomplished marathoner, and now one of the most respected icons in health and fitness. In one of the. What turned out to be my most popular episodes of the entire year was called Primal how to Escape Chronic Cardio and Carbohydrate Dependency and Become a fat Burning Beast. Well, if you hadn't guessed, that guest is Mark Sisson of marksdailyapple.com and also Mark Sisson of the Primal Kitchen, which makes great mayonnaise by the way. And Mark just released a brand new book called the Keto Reset Diet Reboot yout metabolism in 202021 days and burn Fat Forever. And I decided after reading this book literally yesterday, I wanted to get Mark on the show to take kind of a deep dive into some of the principles and the practices and the concepts about ketogenic dieting that you've probably never heard before, especially when it comes to ketosis. And before listening in, I mean, please realize I have a ton of articles and podcasts I've recorded in the past about the basics of ketosis, ketosis 101, what ketones are, how you get into ketosis, all that jazz. So just in case you've never even heard of the term keto or ketosis before, you may want to go back and access some of those other articles and podcasts that I've put out about this particular topic. And you can access all those as well as the show notes for Today's show at BenGreenfieldFitness.com ketoreset Just like the title of Mark's book, BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ketoreset and Mark, admittedly I am a little bit guilty having you on the show today because for breakfast this morning I ate what my children were so proud of having made, but that was definitely not ketogenic. They prepared for me an oatless oatmeal made with squash and bananas and maple syrup. So I'm a little bit carb loaded as we delve into this discussion on ketosis.

Man, I love it. I love it. Hey, how can you not eat anything your kids prepared so lovingly for you?

Well, yeah, it was good. And they actually did put an entire can of the full fat coconut milk in there and they cut the maple syrup half and half with stevia. They're doing a new food podcast now called Go Greenfields. And so every week they make a new meal or they go review restaurant or they do a plant foraging trip. So they're really getting into it, but it means that I occasionally am just having to eat what they happen to make. So I'm not the dad who shoves my kids plates away with a turned up nose Anyways though, so this whole ketogenic diet, speaking of coconut milk, it has a reputation for being pretty restrictive, as you know. And one of the first things that you say in this book, when I was reading it yesterday, one of the first things that leapt out at me is you say that unlike many other ketogenic programs that require challenging restrictions and deprivation or offer misinformation, this presents a unique two step, scientifically validated Approach for going keto the right way. So I would love to jump off today by kind of expounding on why this book offers a different approach and how you came up with it.

Well, how I came up with it is I've been keto or close to keto for 10 years, and probably close to keto would be the more accurate term. So I've spent 10 or 15 years eating Primal, having already cut out sugars and grains and most legumes, having done the work, cleaning up the nasty fats and oils in my diet. So I was at a point where I was 130 grams of carbs a day and absolutely stunned at how well I felt functioning extremely well, maintaining or preserving muscle mass, all the energy I felt I needed. Sleeping well, never get sick. Hunger doesn't rule my life. So I was sort of like, okay, if this is, if this is all I do for the rest of my life, that's cool. I'm good with that. But having written about keto for the last decade and having observed a lot of what was going on in the keto world, and being the inveterate experimenter that I am, I thought, well, you know what? I'll do a two month keto deep dive for myself and I'll see what I notice. And it was pretty interesting. I, I noticed some pretty profound changes. I had more energy and I already had enough energy. I had, you know, I was able to, to thrive on fewer calories a day. Hunger, while I'd already had it under, well under control, even diminished even more. And that was a good thing. No cravings, you know, I felt kind of oddly that I could get by on less sleep per night. I think maybe that's the benefit of the brain doing its work on ketones versus glucose. So I found a lot of these benefits that I was able to access. Even though I thought my life was great. It was what I would call the next level primal stuff, the next level paleo stuff. And that's me always looking for the next thing. And I know you're that way too, Ben. It's like, this is a great life I have right now, but what's next, you know, is there more right?

You, you weren't sick, but you, you wanted to go from good to great.

Exactly. Or I wanted to go to from great to exceptionally great, you know?

Yeah.

That was the original impetus for me getting into this arena. Now what I noticed is that the, really, it was so easy for me to go keto because I literally only had to find an extra 40 or 50 grams of carbs a day to not eat. Right. It was about, gosh, it was about the night carbs that I was eating mindlessly, watching TV or something. It was about just a couple of starchy things that I willingly gave up to enter into ketosis that made the difference. So it was very easy for me to go from low carb to very low carb or from very low carb into keto because of the work I did in advance. And I thought, well, if that's, if that's my experience that it was so damn easy and the results were so profound, you know, maybe we take the average person who's never experienced anything, even low carb, and kind of stair step them down.

I gotcha.

And earn the right to go keto.

So basically you didn't get like this thing that a lot of people call the keto flu or, you know, experiences. Kind of like if you, if you'd bonked during a triathlon or a marathon, you made the transition pretty easy. Easy because of something you had done before. You actually went for like a full ketogenic diet.

I stair stepped my way down and of course I did it long time ago. So it was a really easy transition. But the idea is that in order to take advantage of all of the benefits of keto, and by the way, let's just back up a second and say that the whole point of keto is to improve metabolic flexibility. Now, that manifests itself in a lot of different ways. It manifests itself in the ability to extract energy effortlessly all day long from your own stored body fat. It manifests itself in building muscle even easier. It manifests itself in decreasing inflammation. Because of the metabolic efficiency, you're not throwing off as many reactive oxygen species or free radical damage. So the goal within the book and within my life is to improve metabolic flexibility and to improve metabolic efficiency.

Right. So basically you're trying to adapt your fuel oxidation to fuel availability in a scenario where the body is actually able to take what you happen to be putting into it from a macronutrient standpoint and use that fuel source very efficiently. The concept being that the body has the ability to switch from one fuel source to the next based on what you feed it.

Bingo. And for most people, most people who have a carb based diet, they're really good at burning sugar, they're really good at taking in carbohydrate, converting it to glucose, storing it as glycogen, or storing it as fat and burning that fuel in their workouts. Even in Their going about their daily lives, they're really good at accessing 120 grams a day from their liver to fuel their brain, either their liver or the meal that they just had. They're really good at burning sugar, but they suck at burning fat. Let's be very clear about this. Most people suck at burning fat. The converse of that is when you become really good at burning fat, you also de facto become really good at making ketones. And by virtue of the fact that you're good at burning fat and making ketones, you start to build the metabolic machinery that burns fat and ketones even more efficiently and unburdens you of having to take in literally any glucose, but certainly less glucose.

Yeah.

When you. When you're a sugar burner, that's all you're good at burning is sugar. But you don't really burn fats well at all. And you certainly don't burn ketones at all, as witnessed by the fact that if you're a sugar burner and you skip two meals, you've got pretty nasty breath because you're spilling out massive amounts of ketones that your liver is producing, trying to keep up with your energy demands because you haven't eaten the expected energy, and yet you don't have the metabolic machinery to burn that stuff. And so it comes out in your breath and your urine and your sweat.

Right. And it's more than just being stinky, by the way, you mentioned the liver. And from what I understand, when we look at the inability to be able to burn fats efficiently as a fuel, especially in someone who, just, like cold turkey, switches to a high fat or a ketogenic diet. One of the things I've come across is the induction of what's called lipotoxicity, which means that you simply cannot burn those fats well enough. You have what's called a low triglyceride turnover. And when that happens, you get accumulation of what are called ceramides and diglycerides, and those actually impair insulin signaling. So you can essentially, if you don't go about doing a ketogenic diet the right way, you can induce a form of toxicity.

Yep. In the old days of, you know, the Atkins keto program, it was go from, you know, 400 grams of carbs a day or 600 grams of carbs a day to 20 or 30. And it was such a shock to the system. The brain, which was used to getting 120 grams of glucose on its own and now is cut down to 20 grams a day. The brain has no idea what's going on and has not yet been accustomed to burning ketones. So the brain starts to frantically send signals to the adrenals to secrete cortisol. The cortisol goes out and strips the muscles of certain proteins and amino acids. Those amino acids go to the liver to become glucose just so the brain can be happy. You, by the way, suppress the immune system. You've done a lot of things and you feel like crap, your brain feels foggy because it's still not happening fast enough for that throughput that you required for the brain that was entirely glucose dependent. Now, if you go down the path of learning how to become fat and keto adapted and you build the metabolic machinery to accurate to more effectively and efficiently access stored body fat, burn it as fuel, make ketones in the liver, send those ketones to the brain, which the brain, by the way, seems to even prefer over glucose. You then get to a situation where you don't even need to take any glucose and you can, you can go the entire day without taking in glucose. I'm not suggesting that people do that, but that's, that's how we're set up. And it's an evolutionary adaptation. It's one of the most brilliant, elegant closed systems I've ever seen in, in biology. It's basically, we are wired. In Rob Wolf's book Wired to Eat, this discusses this at length. But we're wired to eat as much food as we can cram down our pie hole because we evolved over millions of years in a, in a environment of scarcity. It went three square meals a day. Are you kidding me? It was like when there was food available, like, okay, let's eat that. And, or, or if you, or if.

You were grazing, you were grazing on like, like nettle or mint or, or, you know, plantain or plantain leaf and not like, you know, apple chips with canola oil and cane sugar.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, so over the, over the years, this, this propensity to, to eat, eat lots of food and store it as fat was a good thing. It was a survival mechanism. So it's great that we are wired to overeat and then store that as fat. It's also great that given the right context, we can live for the next two or three days without eating at all. Take that fat easily out of storage, use it for fuel as a byproduct of that fuel, that part of the fuel partitioning, manufacture ketones, send those ketones to the brain to offset the need for glucose. As a result of that, the acetoacetate and the beta hydroxybutyrate, which are two forms of ketones, have strong epigenetic upregulating effects that increase the production of muscle. And do you not, under the right circumstances, do you not lose muscle mass? You can actually build muscle without eating for a couple of days if you've done the work, if you've done the metabolic work, if you've built the metabolic machinery to be able to handle all this stuff. And that's the beauty of the keto reset diet, which is to stair step you into this to get you to the point where you earn the right to go keto for six weeks.

Yeah, yeah. And I actually want to ask you about that muscle building thing in a moment, but first is this, the theory behind theone of the first numbers that you throw out in the book is 21 Days. Is that the idea behind 21 Days, that you're spending 21 days not going full ketogenic, but basically beginning to restrict carbohydrates?

Yes. So that's the introductory period. 21 days to reset your, or reboot your metabolism. 21 days to get rid of the sugars, the cakes, the candies, the pies, the sweets, the sweetened beverages, the lattes, and also the refined grains of the breads, the cookies, pastas.

Okay.

All that's, you know, so you're, you're, you're getting rid of those and what you're left with, you know, is a pretty attractive cornucopia of food. You've got meat, fish, foul eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, I mean, all kinds of vegetables. You've got all of the herbs and spices and sauces and dressings and toppings that you could put on them, obviously within the, that fit the profile. So you got some pretty amazing meals that you can consume for having given up though that, that other list, right?

Walk, walk me through what a typical day would look like on that first 21 days.

Then, you know, it's a, it's an, it's an omelette in the morning with maybe a frittata with some, some vegetables thrown in there, a side of cheese, bacon if you want it. Bacon is, by the way, not obligatory on any of this stuff. Could be even a side of sweet potato fries for breakfast. You know, lunch could be a gluten free pita pocket sandwich. Could be, could be a salad, which is my favorite. Go to lunch of all time. You know, dinner, afternoon snack, a handful of macadamia nuts, a couple of spoonfuls of coconut butter, piece of beef jerky, something like that. And dinner could be some chicken with some grilled vegetables and maybe even a root vegetable because that even, that doesn't exceed 100, 110 grams of carbs.

Oh yeah. I mean, what you just described, that, that's not, that's not much at all really.

I mean that's already really close to keto. And yet, you know, it's a, it's a pretty appealing menu, particularly for those, you know, people who think that there are certain things that they must eat on a keto diet and certain things that they must not eat.

Right. That's actually what you've just described is somewhat similar to my own diet. Still training and racing as a professional athlete, I am indeed doing almost like a glycogen replenishment protocol in the evenings. And that's not because I saw performance decrement doing a full ketogenic diet, which I did for a couple years on Ironman. It was more that I saw some hormonal issues which I didn't like. Just trying to, trying to use a quote, natural means like a ketogenic diet to achieve an unnatural end. You know, pounding the pavement for 10 hours in an Ironman.

No, that's exactly right.

Yeah. So for me, I still do that. So I'll do like sweet potatoes and yams and rice and stuff like that in the evening. And then I'll be ketogenic most of the day with. The only thing that I do is I do before that dinner, you know, I'll use berberine or bitter melon extract or something that'll kind of upregulate some of the glucose transporters to ensure that, that I am really shuttling that carbohydrate into muscle tissue pretty efficiently and that it's not creating oxidation or triglyceride conversion or things like that. But ultimately on these first 21 days, the big picture, if I understand correctly is you're not being extremely restrictive. You're not going to a traditional whatever 20 to 50 gram carbohydrate based ketogenic diet. You're instead going to ketogenic. Ish.

Yeah, you're going low carb, you're going primal Paleo low carb.

Got it.

And it gets your, get your brain used to the fact that some of its energy is going to come from glucose, but a little bit is going to start to come from ketones. It gets your muscles used to the fact that if you're doing a workout and during this 21 days, we don't recommend, you know, Doing hard, intense workouts because your muscles have not yet become used to deriving a substantial portion of their energy from fats. They're still sort of carb dependent. We're going to get there, but this is basically to stair step you down so that when you do get, and we have a midterm exam halfway through the book and you literally, you have to earn the right to go keto from there. And we don't use the numbers, we don't use ketone meters and strips and urine strips and all this stuff because we can get into a discussion of why that is later on. But we just basically go on how you feel. Like how do you feel when you wake up? And can you go X number of hours without eating and feel perfectly fine? That's an indication that you're good at, that you're becoming better at burning fat. Because most people who don't burn fat will, well, wake up in the morning and it's like, holy, I gotta have breakfast. You know, for them, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Because the brain is so used to needing that first hit of carbohydrate to convert to glucose. But our self testing is more like, okay, how long can you go without eating? Can you do a workout, a mild workout without eating, and then not eat afterwards for a while? These are all indicators that you are becoming good at burning fat. And once you become, we know that you're becoming good at burning fat. From there, it's just a matter of finding another 40 grams of carbs in that daily routine. 40 or 50 grams of carbs to remove, to start to pull you into ketosis. Now once you get into ketosis, now we are, we're in a situation where we've lowered insulin enough that ketosis is happening in the liver. Because the liver gets the signaling that there's not going to be any glucose or not much, that there's going to have to be some fuel provided for the brain in the absence of this glucose. And I don't know if you knew this, but you know how much ketones the liver can produce in a day?

I don't, no.

It's 150 grams.

Oh, that's a lot.

That's a lot, man. And if you take a look at the energy demands of the brain, for instance, it's that's way in excess of the, of the daily energy demands of the brain. And one of the things that happens when people get into ketosis initially is, you know, they start talking about the numbers, they start bragging about the millimolars, they're showing up on their measuring devices. And, and it's, you know, sometimes it's impressive. Some people can say, well, my gosh, I'm at, you know, 4 or 5 millimolar on my glucose or, excuse me, on my ketone strip or my breath meter. Well, we're not trying to have a contest about who can produce the most ketone. This is about becoming metabolically efficient. And this is about. Right, becoming, becoming really good.

It's burning fat and true efficiency. Because if you look at this from a biochemical standpoint, and Dr. Peter Attia has a great article about this, if you've taken chemistry in college before, you know that there's an energetic cost to the use of certain things for fuel. And glucose has a relatively high energetic cost, whereas ketones do not. And although ketones don't necessarily contain calories per se, that you can actually look up and see on a label. What'd you say, mark, is about 150 that the liver can produce per day?

150 grams. And I'm using, okay, I'm using a number that they, that each gram of ketone displaces about, about if it displaces a gram of, of glucose, it, it's probably providing about 5 calories.

That's, that's exactly what I was gonna say. Like a ketone is considered to provide about 4 to 5 calories per gram, which means, you know, if we were to conservatively say four, that's still 600 calories of fuel for you to rely upon just from, from ketones alone, which is, which is very substantial.

So not only it's substantial, but it's. Now it's a closed loop. Like if you, if you went a couple of days and didn't eat, which is, which is the ancestral experience to think that, that you have this stored body fat. So you might, if you pull, you know, 200 or 150 grams of fat out of storage, you know, that's 1200 calories worth right there. And then another, and then produced another 150 grams of ketones in the liver, you've endogenously created 2,400 calories in a closed system.

Right. And not to mention, you've also got the decrease in glucose utilization and production and the protein sparing effect, which you're not even including in that calculation. And so, yeah, I mean, it's incredibly energetically efficient. Efficient in terms of a state to.

Be in, which is, by the way, that's rule number one. Evolution like, how can I get the most work done with the least amount of, of energy and output?

Right. And honestly, you know, admittedly I break that rule all the time. Or like I'm a bow hunter. And if I really wanted to adhere to evolutionary principles, I would probably be a rifle hunter because it takes way fewer calories and you're bear crawling less and you're, and you're sneaking and stalking a lot less when you can take an animal at 200 yards versus having to sneak in within 4:40. But I bow hunt because I like it. Of course it's more fun, it's more challenging. But yeah, I get what you're saying.

Yeah. So we're back to talking about metabolically efficient human beings and metabolic flexibility, which then allows us to use whatever substrate is available to the greatest extent we can use it with the most efficiency. So if there's nothing available, then you use your stored body fat, you create ketones, you make a little bit of glucose through gluconeogenesis, you spare protein. It's a beautiful closed loop system. If you're eating and you're eating a high fat meal, then you're able to extract the calories from the fat first because you know how to do that. The body, you know, is because it's become so good at burning fat, it's become the preferred fuel, even preferred over and above glucose. To the extent that you take in glucose through, you know, just choosing to have a carb refeed or falling off the wagon and you know, and having a piece of somebody's cheesecake or whatever, it doesn't matter that the body, because you've built this metabolic flexibility, one of the things that happens is you don't go into this foggy funk. And so I exist in what I call the keto zone. So I'm not keto all the time. In fact, I'm not keto probably most of the time. But let's take a number of like say a hundred grams of carbs a day. I'm 50, I'm 50 points over or under on any given day. So some days I'm 50 under, in which case I'm totally keto, some days I'm 50 over, which means I'm 150 grams of carbs. But why does that even matter if I feel the same, if I don't, if I don't notice the difference? Because I've done the work, because I built the metabolic machinery to handle the fuel that I, that I give my body. Right? It's a really interesting space to be in. And I'm, I, I'm trying to coin this phrase and have it become kind of used throughout the industry here, which is the keto zone, which again, as I say, doesn't suggest you have to be keto all the time. It does suggest that you probably need to spend some time. It's almost like training. Like, you know, if I do six, I'm not going to just jump at a 10k. I'm at least going to train for six weeks and if I train for six weeks, I'll do a much better job at my 10k. Right, well, I'm not just going to jump into keto. I'm going to spend six weeks in keto training for keto so that I can jump into a keto day and have it be with grace and ease and not noticing a thing and not missing a beat or get out of a keto day by having some extra carbs and not thinking about it and not agonizing about it. Not beating myself up because, oh, I said I was going to be keto and now I'm not. It's really about how you feel. How do you feel?

Right.

That's the metric that we want to use throughout this whole thing because that's really, as you know that the tagline of my company is live awesome. It's really, how do you feel?

Yeah. I didn't know that was the tagline of your company. Live Awesome. I like it. Now, I'm the same way, depending on which day of the week, my wife happens to make a fresh baked loaf of sourdough bread. But you actually, you kind of talk about this concept that you were just touching on a little bit in the book when you talk about carb binging, which I think is different than what you just alluded to, you know, having a few extra carbs on a specific day. But you talk about a really interesting study, I'm not sure if it's yet published by Dr. Jacob Wilson, that was actually done on carb binging. Can you explain what he did in that study and what they found?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, some of them, the carb binges, the ones that really binged, tended to gain body fat quicker. And so that sort of speaks against this idea that one way to do keto comfortably is to have a cheat day. Right. And to just say that you can, you can go keto all week and be really, really rigid and then have a, have a massive falling out and binge on ad libitum on carbs. What they found Was it takes a lot longer to get back into ketosis if you were starting from, from that point of view. They also found that people didn't feel great. They felt kind of logy and they stored fat at a higher rate than just somebody who was just say just doing what I would call an appropriate carb loading, which would be something like you do the night before a hard glycolytic workout.

Right. Not an entire weekend of carb binging. I thought it was very interesting though how the group that carb binged, and this would be contrary to what a lot of people would have thought, actually not only didn't lose fat as efficiently, but they also lost lean muscle mass. While the group that was following the ketogenic diet without the carb binge, they gained lean muscle mass. And you touch on this in the book. You talk about something called a myogen. And I don't see myogens discussed very much in books on keto. Can you go into the link between ketosis, myogens and the fact that ketosis doesn't actually cause you to lose a bunch of muscle?

Yeah, so myogenesis is the formation of muscular tissue and these myogenic factors are upregulated. It's an epigenetic effect of ketones. They're upregulated in the presence of ketones. So there's literally this opportunity to build muscle when you're in ketosis that doesn't exist when you are eating a standard American diet or eating a high carb diet. And it's almost, it's almost counterintuitive because most people think, well, wait a minute, I've been in the bodybuilding industry, been paying attention to what they say. They say, you know, never skip your carbs, always eat lots of carbs. Muscles need carbs to grow, you need.

To fill them that are copious amounts.

Of protein and, or I mean it's both usually most mass gainers have, have a lot of both. But this idea that maybe all the good stuff that happens to humans happens when we're not eating, you know, maybe all of the upregulation of the anti inflammatory systems, maybe the autophagy that happens only in the absence of fuel, these are the good things that happen and they happen in the absence of food. They happen when food is not present versus when it's present. So this, these myogenic factors are one effect of a ketogenic diet. And so those, back to the study, those who stayed in ketosis maintained that myogenic factor release and therefore preserved or built muscle. Meanwhile, the group that went out of ketosis that in other words, carb binged. And when they carb binge, what happens is they just get out of ketosis. They just. Insulin. Insulin shuts off ketone production. So now you have this bizarre situation where your brain, which is now used to running on ketones, has now had the ketones shut off, has to go back to relying on glucose. Isn't as happy, believe it or not, with just glucose. 100% glucose now would prefer ketones to a certain extent. And there's this side effect of a release of hormones from the brain that causes the adrenals to create cortisol. Cortisol prompts, strips muscle tissue down to create a couple, to send a couple of amino acids to the liver to become more glucose for the brain and you literally lose muscle tissue. Yeah, so it's a bizarre. But that's the old, that's the entire sugar burning paradigm, which is if you're a sugar burner and you skip a meal or anything shifts on you, you are in deep stuff because the brain expects glucose, you're not giving it. Of course, we know the body doesn't store that much glucose in the form of glycogen. So you can't go a day without eating without suffering severe consequences. Yeah. So yeah, that whole myogenic factor, the myogens, is really interesting because it's so counterintuitive to what people think about, well, how do I. The only way I must build muscle is by packing in the calories, you know, lots of protein, lots of carbs, pack it in, I'll build muscle. When in fact it's not proven that the, that a ketogenic diet, a keto lifestyle can actually, you can put muscle on. I mean there are entire sites dedicated to it. Now, keto gains is one of the top sites.

Yeah, it's a great site.

Talks about how to build muscle on a keto diet.

Yeah. And that Dr. Jacob Wilson guy, he's a skeletal muscle physiologist down in Tampa. He also has done some studies that show that it. And this is probably why people who even consume lower calories on a ketogenic diet can still put on muscle, is that it can lower the threshold to stimulate protein synthesis compared to being in a carbohydrate burning state. So you basically need to eat less to put on muscle when you're in a state of ketosis. So yeah, it's really interesting how this kind of flies in the face of what a lot of people think when it comes to restricting carbohydrates or restricting proteins. But I mean, the research does show and I've tried this myself, my brother's done it. He packed on like 20 pounds of muscle on a full on ketogenic diet. I've got a whole story of it on my site. I'll link to it in the show notes for those you want to read. Or you could just google him. He's a model and you can see pictures of him. He's keto Zach Greenfield. And yeah, I mean he follows his diet and just maintains muscle very efficiently. There's something that's kind of controversial though when it comes to ketosis, Mark, and that's this idea about insulin resistance. And from what I understand, the argument is that a prolonged state of ketosis could somehow diminish metabolic flexibility in some people by causing what's called physiological insulin resistance. That somehow the muscles, because you're not producing enough insulin or something like that, they actually, they're unable to respond to the signaling from insulin. What's the idea behind that and what's your take on this idea that ketosis might promote insulin resistance?

Well, you know, there is discussion. First of all, initially ketosis does great at promoting insulin sensitivity. So initially people, particularly type 2 diabetics who have had insulin resistance their whole life, find that there's a, that there's an amazing resurgence of insulin sensitivity, that insulin becomes. Now it's much more easy to store glycogen, to store sugar as glycogen, for the muscles to take in nutrients. The idea, I guess from mother nature's idea, the theory behind why we would develop over time in insulin resistance is that you are now limiting the access to glucose through carbohydrate by your dietary choice. You're teaching the muscles to become really good at burning fat. You are increasing what we call mitochondrial biogenesis. You're literally increasing the number of mitochondria in the muscle cells and you're increasing the efficiency of those mitochondria so they become more and more adept, better and better at burning fat. Less and less reliant on glucose from any, from any source. Muscles still will, will store glycogen. There'll still be a restoration of glycogen after a hard workout. Because the truth is, you know, you can go 85 or 90% of your, of your max output, you can work your way up to that as a fat burner, but you still are going to need some amount of glycogen to make up the difference on those high, high efforts. So the muscles do have retain the capability of synthesizing glycogen. There may be a glycogen recycling process that Kate Shanahan theorizes. But what it means is, and as you initially go into ketosis and get keto, the muscles now not having access to glucose start, they're also yelling for ketones. Muscles are great at burning ketones if you give it to them. And so the muscles become good at burning fat, they become good at burning ketones. But over time, once the muscles become so good at burning fat, they start to go, okay, we don't need any more ketones. We'll save that. We'll save those for the brain. And so you see that there's a diminution of ketone production for those people who've been in ketosis for a long time, who've stayed in ketosis for years, they might not even register a 0.3 or a 0.4 millimolar on a test because their body is so good at producing the exact amount of ketones they need to run the brain.

Yeah, I've actually gotten to that point. The only way I can get my ketones now, I used to be able to just fast and they'd go up and back when I was doing it with Ironman, I'd test and it'd be one or three or four. Now the only way I can get that high is if I literally use exogenous ketones to just dump a whole bunch into my body. Otherwise. Yeah, I mean, I'm using them so efficiently, they're not even showing up in blood tests or at least in much smaller amounts.

And that's a good thing. And that doesn't make you a bad person for not putting out big ketone numbers. Ben, just so you know, you don't lose that game, you win that game.

I know I've been curling up in a fetal position and crying that I can't self quantify my ketones effectively. But returning to the insulin resistance, go ahead.

Yeah, so by way of explanation as to what's going on here. So it may be that the muscles are doing the same thing now with glucose and saying, well, you know, we're so good at operating without glucose that we don't need that much. And let's, you know, as a survival mechanism, knowing that red blood cells need glucose, that the brain needs glucose, let's spare what little glucose is coming into the body, let's save it for where it's needed and let's, let's make ourselves a little bit insulin resistant. So we don't soak it up as a sponge the way we would have in the old days. Because in the old days, the muscles are like the first ones to fill with glucose as stored glycogen, the muscles in the liver. So that may be what's going on. That may be this physiological insulin resistance, but I gotta tell you, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.

Oh, no. I mean, well, there's pathological insulin resistance, which is where you get disease or adverse health consequences. But if glucose is just rising in your bloodstream because your muscles happen to be using fatty acids as their primary fuel source, and the receptor sites due to this physiological insulin resistance are turning away glucose, then you'll store it as. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah, you'll store it as fat, but that gets back.

And then you'll burn it.

Bingo. That gets back to the original premise, which is, first of all, people have to think of storing fat as not a bad thing, but as an awesome thing. The fact that we store fat is awesome because it was the reason that we're here today. The only difference is that because food is prevalent at every corner and because we don't do much in the way of activity, we get caught up in the storing part of the equation and not the burning part of the equation. But the fact that we would be physiologically insulin resistant and shuttle those excess glucose calories into fat storage ought not to turn anyone off unless they tell themselves, well, I'm over this keto thing. I'm going back to where I was, but I don't see that happening. I mean, what I see from most people and what I see for myself is the reason I call this a keto reset diet, is I'm suggesting that six weeks that you spend in keto, the one time will benefit you for the rest of the year, that you will be benefiting from the increase in mitochondria, from the improvement in metabolic flexibility, even to the extent that you go off the rails a couple of times. Look, I'm not advocating that you do this and then just go whole hog with, with, you know, pizza and beer and ice cream every day. But I am suggesting that this is next level for a lot of people. For me, it's next level. So I'm going to do this. Well, first of all, I do it a lot. I find myself four days into keto going, oh, geez, I haven't had any carbs for the last four days. I feel great. Think I'll hang out here for Another week. Right. Then it becomes conscious. But the fact that it's available to me to even make the choice or not is a result of the work I did during the six weeks of deep keto that I have that metabolic flexibility to even to, to choose.

Yeah.

And, and like I say, whether I'm in or out of keto now, I don't notice a difference in how I think, how I feel, how I move in terms of my immune system because I have that metabolic flexibility. So I don't think metabolic flexibility is negatively impacted by physiological insulin resistance.

Yeah. Besides, if I'm going to cheat, I like to cheat on the good stuff. I'm, I'm kind of like a red wine, dark chocolate, sweet potato fry guy. But when it comes to vices, I am, you might consider this a vice depending who you are. A big fan of my giant morning cup of coffee that I'll usually have after I've woken up after an overnight fast. And I typically don't have breakfast until about 10 or 10:30am but I'll have a cup of coffee around 7 or 8am and you actually have a section in the book where you talk about Dr. Satchin Panda who I just happened to be with. We were both speaking at an anti aging conference over in Iceland and you talk about his laboratory research on circadian rhythm and restricted time, windows of feeding. And in that section you talk a little bit about coffee. What's the deal with whether or not coffee is technically breaking your fast and how would it be that that would actually happen?

Well first of all I have to say I, I also, I enjoy my morning cup of coffee 100 and and then of course a recent research, it was a private headlines a couple, a couple months ago about coffee drinkers live longer. So I had to, you know, I had to, I had to put that in my.

We're smarter too, more sophisticated. We read the New York Times put.

That in my column along with the red, red wine and everything else. I'm back to kind of a initial statement I made or one of the statements I made early on which suggests that the more time we spend not eating, the more, you know, the better our bodies are at doing the repair, doing the sort of anti inflammatory process, preserving muscle. It's those times when we're most deriving the benefits of a keto diet. So I like you do. Although I think breastfeeding window which is more like six hours a day. I eat from 1 o' clock in the afternoon till 7 o' clock at night. Not steady. I Mean, I eat at one, I have a salad and then I eat dinner at around seven and that's it. But basically what Dr. Panda was saying was that anything that you put into your body that the body has to work at to metabolize and caffeine is, is one of those things and some of the other components of coffee that has to be metabolized by liver enzymes in your intestines. And so that just kind of gets the processes rolling of digestion which then become a little bit antithetical to the idea of your fasting.

Right. With fasting somehow being like a longevity enhancing effect, which is what I know Dr. Panda does a lot of research on longevity and circadian rhythms and I know he talks about how meal timing and appropriate meal timing and especially like a restricted feeding window can assist with like the gut microbiome and insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial density and lowered levels of growth factors like IGF1 for reduced cancer risk. And I guess from what I understand, his suggestion is that anything like any of what he calls a xenobiotic substance, like a supplement or caffeine, herbal or anything, he says that jump starts your digestive system and results in a disruption of your circadian rhythm that causes you to lose out on a lot of the benefits of fasting. And so I kind of sort of see what he's saying. I don't think it's going to take you out of a state of ketosis or something like that, but I don't know, I'd have to see the bodies in the streets I guess to know whether or not that's true.

Same here. So same here. So I've included the research, it's actually in our appendix of like, you know, added, added stuff, higher level stuff, troubleshooting stuff. To be perfectly honest, I'm not going to give up my coffee. It's, it's, it's a critical part of my day. And you know, I could, I could, I could because I. On a bed, I could do anything, man. I can, you know, I could, I could go off anything. But.

Yeah, well, it returns that concept of who wants to live a long time if you're just cold and hungry and miserable for all 150 years. Right?

Yeah. Roy Walford, apparently. But you know, and he didn't live that long. And you know who that is? One of the original calorie restriction guys.

Oh my God.

Okay, yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, I mean like you know, 1200 calories a day for years at a time. By the way, much of it was carbohydrate which is a big mistake in that, with that low intake. But, but our point here was with keto, what if you could achieve all those, all the benefits of the calorie restriction society without the calorie restriction? And, and I guess one of the things we haven't talked on yet but is really critical to this whole thing is appetite, hunger and cravings. One of the greatest benefits of going keto is this diminution of appetite, hunger and cravings. And most people live their lives as wannabe gluttons. And I say wannabe gluttons. Many are gluttons. But you know, the thought goes through your head, well, what's the most amount of this meal I can eat and not gain weight? What's the most amount of this meal I can eat and not feel guilty? What's the most amount of this meal that I can finish and not be discomfort, uncomfortable? But that's how we live. We sort of, you know, you just serve me a giant piece of cheesecake. Is that your idea of a serving? Okay, if that's your idea of a serving, then it's just one serving. I'll finish.

Yeah.

Versus, okay, I'll have three bites of that cheesecake. And that's a serving for me. I got it. I got the taste, I got the sensation, I got the sweetness. You know, I don't need to finish it. I don't need to, to make myself uncomfortable, you know, and that's one of the benefit, the great benefits of keto and low carb in general is this, this mitigation of appetite as a, as a leash on your life.

Yep.

And, and, and how people live their lives from one meal to the next, which is especially.

It's hot on my mind right now because as we're talking, I'm tapering for Spartan World Championships, which is actually this, this Saturday. Right. So it's, so it's Wednesday of taper week. And I remember back when I'd race Ironman triathlon and eat a lot of carbohydrates. You know, my, my carb loading week of, you know, working up to a gradual intake of 90% carbohydrates by the Friday before Saturday race day, I'd be resting and not exercising as much, but still famished. And now when I eat a lower carbohydrate or a ketogenic diet, I can just bring calories from my usual intake of 3,500 to 4,000 a day down to about 2,000 to 2,500 a day. And I'M fine as far as appetite regulation is concerned simply because, I mean, the same macronutrient ratio, just fewer calories and yeah, it works wonderfully for that. But I think a lot of people really do know like it's, it's, it's not like groundbreaking news that a ketogenic diet helps you to regulate your appetite. But I think there is something else that you discuss in the book that I haven't seen talked about before and that's that the ketogenic diet might actually affect your genes. What have you come across as far as, as what can happen with, with the genes in the ketogenic diet?

Well, I mean, I've said this from, from the day blueprint, which was the tagline with reprogram your genes to, you know, for more energy and better health and longer life. I forget what the tagline is now. It was so long ago that I wrote the book. But the idea of reprogramming your genes is not, it's not a new one. Actually, it is a new one because most people thought for the longest time that, you know, that your genes were fixed and immutable and there's nothing you can do about it. We now know that most of what happens is a result of epigenetic factors that turn genes on or off. And all we're talking about here with the keto diet is that there are certain epigenetic effects of a keto diet or epigenetic effects of ketones of beta hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate and acetone that will again, like increasing these myogens is one example of upregulating a particular gene that preserves or builds muscle protein. Another gene that causes the body to want to preserve amino acids and muscle tissue so that instead of deaminating amino acids because there are too many of them in the body, and then peeing them out in the urine and starting over again with a new meal in four hours. The idea that we don't need that much in the way of a circulating amino acid pool, certainly not from meal to meal, certainly not from day to day. It's literally, I guess from week to week, if we could hit a certain minimum number of grams of protein intake, that we're fine. People think, well, I gotta have 25 grams of protein at this meal and 25 grams of protein at that meal, or 30 grams of protein at this meal. And you know, the amino acid sink in the body. This pool of amino acids, it's available for repair, for building muscle, for making enzymes. It's, it's a pretty flexible and malleable pool. That again, if, if you've cut back on the amount of protein you're taking in. And you, you actually alluded to it earlier, the fact that, that in order to turn on this muscle preserving component, this upregulation of that particular gene set, you literally have to decrease the amount of protein you're taking in.

Yeah.

And, and it's, that's the body's response, like, okay, if they're not going to be plentiful resources to build muscle, plentiful resources from the outside, let's, let's really preserve the resources we have on the inside. Let's turn this into a closed loop for a couple of days. Recycle those amino acids, use them sparingly, certainly build muscle. Let's not waste them, let's not pee them out. And that's another example of this sort of reprogramming of the genes. We're just telling the genes. Look, I mean, programming a computer is telling it what to do. Well, programming your genes is telling your genes what to do. And that's based on the information that comes from the behaviors. In large part here we're talking about food, the information that comes from the, from the food we eat that flips these certain genes on or off.

Yeah. One thing that I wrote about this a month or two ago, this idea behind ketosis, and in this case it was like actually using these, you know, these fancy ketone supplements, like exogenous ketones, and you know, these things that are being sold now to actually induce a state of ketosis. And they found this in rodent models. But I still think it's really interesting. There's this, there's this transcription factor called foxo, which is like a protein associated with longevity. And what it turns out to appear to be the case is that when you consume something like a beta hydroxybutyrate salt or BHB salt, or you increase your own production of ketone bodies, what happens is you may not do what's called phosphorylation of that protein, meaning you get increased activation of these foxoproteins or more of them in the cell nucleus. And they're directly associated with longevity and things like the destruction of free radicals. And so it actually looks like there may be, whether by inducing ketosis or taking in ketones, a direct effect on longevity genes.

Oh yeah. I mean, we take it back even a step further and say, imagine a cell in an environment that's, that's ripe with nutrients all around it and the Cell which has a propensity to want to divide, to replicate. And the cell thinks, well Jesus, plenty of stuff around here. Let's, let's divide, let's replicate, let's have fun, party everyone. And that's, you know, that's typical of what happens with people in general. But you know, animals in general, I guess, and people in specific. Imagine that same cell now without any nutrients around it thinking, oh my God, what are we going to do here? There's not enough food for me, let alone for two of me. So I definitely am not going to divide right now. In fact, what I'm going to do is I'm going to look inward, I'm going to engage in autophagy. I'm literally going to eat some of my stuff, but I'm not going to eat the good parts. I'm going to eat the bad parts. I eat the parts that were damaged proteins or damaged fats. I'm gonna eat, I'm gonna repair some of the DNA. And so there is this, this, this house cleaning effect from a dearth of nutrients. Now you've got not only the house cleaning effect and the repair of the damaged DNA, but the cells taking longer to replicate. Well, we know that certain cells have finite number of replications. So what we really want is we do want our cells to like exist as long as they can as that cell before they divide. And that may be one of the effects, the longevity effects of keto is that you create this environment where the cell is more inclined to do house cleaning, to repair DNA and not want to divide and therefore not speed up its inevitable end. Which is we can't ignore the fact that we exist to pass the genes along to the next generation. Really, that's. Humans are just bizarre permutations of, yeah. Millions of years of evolution of, you know, two strands of RNA and the primordial lose with a propensity to want to replicate. So, so right. It, so a cell thinking, okay, great. You know, there's lots of, there's lots of stuff around here, right. There's lots of nutrients. I can, I can replicate, pass the genes along to the next generation even sooner. That's, that's kind of evolution going okay, that's, that's my job just to pass the genetic material to get, to survive long enough to get the genetic material into the next generation. Yeah, we're kind of cutting that off at the pass with keto and saying, nope, nope, nope, we're not, look, we're not going there that we could do that if we Just were gluttons all the time and age faster and die quicker. But what we're going to do is we're going to clean house and become healthier and live longer and. Yeah, so that's the. If I were to anthropomorphize the mindset of genes, that's probably how I would do it.

Cool. I like it. And I guess that means just at the Mexican restaurant, grab the bowl of guacamole, spoon that onto your plate to live longer, skip the corn chips. And I'm always the guy people get pissed off at the Mexican restaurant because I take all the guacamole and the salsa and I eat that with a fork instead of using the chips as a delivery mechanism.

Try to double carne asada with guacamole. One of the best meals I ever eat.

Right, Exactly. And I was pleased to see that in the tasty recipes in the book, you give me a shout out in the bangin kitchen sink smoothie. And you have a ton of other recipes in the book. And for people whose eyes have glazed over at the deep science, here's a little fun stuff for you. Fun and tasty. Mark, what would you say? You've got six weeks worth of ketogenic eating in this book. What would be your top recipe that you would choose? The one that you're most proud of, or close to the most proud of in here, the one that comes to mind as one of your tastiest ketogenic treats or meals.

Macadamia crusted mahi mahi with brown butter.

I saw that one. That looks really good.

I mean, look, they're all favorites. I'm a pretty simple guy when it comes to eating. I don't mean to say that glibly, but I enjoy every bite of food I put in my mouth. But I have a kind of a favorite five. That's my kind of go to dinners and I don't stray often from that.

Yeah.

You know, in terms of my zodiac sign, I'm a cancer, which means I'm a homebody, which means I like my routine or whatever. But. But you know, I love a lamb chop. I mean, I could. I could like just grill lamb chops and. And broccolini would be one of my favorite meals. I have a wagyu short rib that I make that the local butcher carries here that's just literally to die for. It's. It's unbelievable. I'll make that with some brussels sprouts. You know, to this day, pretty much every lunch for me is a Big salad. And by the way, that's one of the interesting things about we talk about the keto diet. People say, wait a minute, you can't have a big salad on a keto diet. That's already too many carbs right there. Look, if you look at a big bowl of lettuce and, you know, chives and a little bit of onions and some celery and some carrots and some red peppers and some, a couple of cherry tomatoes, it's probably less than 20 grams of carbs, all of which are, by the way, locked in a pretty fibrous matrix. It's going to take a while to unleash itself. And then I put a, you know, 25, 30 gram of value gram of some form of protein, whether it's eggs or salmon or chicken or beef on top. And then I douse it with Primal Kitchen salad dressing, which is the healthiest fat you can put on a salad.

That'S just handy to have around. You put the mayonnaise, your Primal Kitchen mayonnaise. And by the way, those listening in if you do visit the Show Notes got a little surprise over there because I got a fat discount on the Primal Kitchen stuff if you go and go to the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com keto reset. But yeah, I drench everything in that. And speaking of your mayonnaise, Mark, I quit doing the big salad because I was finding that for my I work out usually between about 5 and 6pm or so in the evening. That huge bolus of fiber just started to get me during my workouts. So I've switched it up recently. And what I do is I take these miracle noodles, which still have a lot of fiber but a little bit easier to digest, insoluble fiber made from a Japanese yam. And I saute those up with some of a couple of things. There's this guy named Dr. Thomas Cowan who makes like an heirloom powdered vegetable powder in different flavors like winter squash and kale and threefold blends and low oxalate greens. And I do that. I do a dollop of your Primal Kitchen mayonnaise. And then I'll typically add like a handful of macadamia nuts or a can of sardines or, or something kind of like on top of it. So I'm literally just having like pasta for lunch. You know, I'll twirl it with a fork or I'll wrap it in one of these seaweed nori wraps. That's my latest thing. So I'm no longer doing the big ass salad. But yes, you make a good point that mayonnaise works well on just about anything.

Well and the other aspect of that is that people assume, well, I'm going to have bowel issues when I go keto because I, they're all thinking back to the days of, you know, bacon and eggs for breakfast, a burger with some plastic frank and cheese on top and whatever. No, there are a lot of vegetables in. I probably as a keto guy, I probably eat more vegetables than most vegetarian.

Yeah.

But when you break it down, most of these vegetables like, like I might eat three servings, what, what we would call a serving size. But you know, for me it's just a big heaping plate of broccoli. Of broccoli steamed with some butter on it. I mean seriously, it might be 12 grams of carbs in that entire broccoli thing. There's no, there are no grams of carbs in either the chicken or the salmon or the steak that I'm having for dinner. So it's quite easy for me to have a beautiful meal and maybe I'll top that off with a paleo dry farmed wine, red wine that has no sugar and lower in alcohol and tell me that I, that, that I'm somehow giving too much up by having, you know, a nice steak, some, some grilled broccoli or steamed broccoli with butter on it. Glass of red wine. Right, right.

Totally. Hey, million dollar question. What do you eat before ultimate Frisbee?

Yeah. So first of all, I don't eat before ultimate Frisbee. So here's what happens. I wake up that morning, it's Sunday morning. So I wake up, I do have my coffee around 7 o' clock and then just before the game we play around 10. So around 9:15 I do drink a ketone supplement I have found because I've built the metabolic machinery because I know how to burn ketones. I'm benefiting from those ketone supplements during my two hour sprintathon with these young bucks out trying to kick my ass on the frisbee pitch.

I like it, I like it.

So that's it. And then I, then I, I don't again, I get, I get home and I don't eat until probably 2 o' clock on Sundays. I, I feel so energized after the game, but I'm not hungry and I don't eat until I'm hungry, which again we might finish around noon, but I probably, I might not eat until 1:30.

Yeah, I'll have to send you a bottle if you don't have them. But one thing I've started to do before some of my longer workouts or more difficult workouts like that, you know, like the ultimate Frisbee workout that you do is I'll take those ketones, but then I use amino acid acids, not like a branch chain amino acid which has pretty high levels of leucine, which can potentially spike your blood sugar or induce a little bit of insulin insensitivity, but like an essential amino acids blend. And so I'll take on aminos, like about 10 grams of Aminos and then a serving of the ketones. And that's like a non calorie based rocket fuel when it comes to like a stack. So that's something that I'll do is same as you that like a ketones and a fasting acid stay plus the aminos. Very interesting. And for those of you listening in again, I'll put links to all of this stuff. The keto reset diet, Mark's ketogenic friendly food products like the mayonnaise at Primal Kitchen, some different articles and research studies on the things that we talked about over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com ketoreset Mark, if you have time for one other question, I know just in the week leading up to this interview, I wasn't going to ask you this, but I noticed you wrote an article on it, so I figured I'd throw it out there because it turned out to be relatively controversial. From what I understand, you talked about TRT recently on your website and your own experience with using testosterone, you got a lot of interesting replies and comments on that. And so just as like a complete aside, I guess not much to do with ketosis, but what's your take on trt? Cause some people say like it'll shut down your endogenous production. You got to be on it for life. And some people don't think it's natural. What's your take on it?

Yeah, well, first of all, I'm 64 freaking years old, right? So I'm trying to, I'm at the point where, you know, I want to maximize my fun and enjoyment of life from here on out. And so I started doing TRT when I was about, I think 60 or 61. I have an anti aging document friend who does a lot of research who's been advising people for a long time. And he, you know, he'd been doing it for a while and he said, look, you know, let's try. Can't hurt my Free tea, which is really the testosterone that's available to do was on the low side of normal. It wasn't below normal, but it was on the low side of normal. And, you know, his suggestion was, well, let's, let's maybe raise it up to, you know, the mid range or the, maybe even the higher end of normal. And I thought, well, that makes sense. Let's, let's try that. I've done a lot of the research. Like, I would not do human growth hormone. I wouldn't touch that at this point in my life right now. But I know enough about testosterone. My wife has been doing HRT, you know, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy for almost 10 years, and it's changed her life. And I just, you know, so. And I've been, I've talked about it on a bunch of other podcasts. So it's not a secret that I've been doing it, but I'm, you know, I'm an experimenter. I wanted to see what, you know, what kind of effects it might, it might generate. I'd say they're slightly noticeable. I just went off for 60 days just as part of the experiment.

Oh, you did, Interesting. So, I mean, did you just feel like crap for 60 days or did it turn out to be okay?

No, it turned out to be fine. I went off for 60 days.

Of course, you're living a pretty healthy lifestyle.

Yeah, yeah.

Which helps.

So. So, you know, and I wanted to see if I could, like, you know, where my endogenous production would be at the end of 60 days, and it was still at the low end of normal. So I hadn't, you know, I hadn't lost any of my innate ability to produce testosterone.

Yeah.

So it was, you know, I'm, I'm gonna go back on. I do, you know, I do an injection milligrams once a week, which is kind of the standard protocol for guys over whatever, you know, whatever age. You know, I. Look, I was an athlete for a long time. I never, not only did I not use any performance enhancing substances, I created my first company to create products that athletes could use to avoid getting tagged, you know, to enhance recovery naturally through vitamins and Minerals. I spent 15 years as the anti doping commissioner of the International Triathlon Union. So I. Not only.

That's right, I forgot about that.

I wrote, I wrote the drug testing rules for the sport of triathlon. I administered them. I oversaw every hearing for every positive test that ever came up. So I'm very aware of, you know, what people do and the benefits and so on and so forth. And so at. At some point in my life, I thought, well, you know, geez, I've been avoiding this because it's, you know, the stigma maybe of having been an anti doping guy. And then I thought, well, I'm not. What am I cheating at life, you know, if I want to. If I want to add. Add more, you know, like, is. Is taking creatine, you know, cheating and building muscle.

Right. It's kind of like our ancestors. Right. I know that there were. There were some of them and some that still do. You know, they'd eat testes and gonads and, you know, in the same way they'd eat liver and kidney, et cetera, and, you know, also use a mortar and pestle to make their supplements. So in a way, it's not really flying in the face of ancestry. I was just curious your take on it. You know, you're a guy I look up to, and I. Obviously, I can't use TRT because I'm still competing in USADA and water sanctioned sports, but it's something that, you know, if and when I do hang up the racing hat, I'm kind of interested in trying out. But I was just kind of. Kind of curious to get your take on it, and that's encouraging that you were able to get on it, stop and still feel okay.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the primal lifestyle is about living awesome, and it's about getting the most out of life. And for the most part, that means doing things naturally. That means staying, you know, off the medical machine, off the medical assembly line. It means. So that means, you know, not. Not getting involved in taking, you know, all of the, you know, painkillers. When there are ways that you can manage pain more efficiently through diet, it means, you know, not. Not taking antipsychotic drugs, because there are ways that you can manage that through diet and through other means, but, you know, taking a bioidentical hormone, something. I mean, look, we'll look at all the people now who. And you know them well, in the. In the community, in the Paleo community who take thyroid supplements. Right.

You know, is that thyroid progesterone? Yeah, you name it. Yeah, but thyroid's a big.

Yeah, no, but they're, you know, they're. They're depending on supplemental thyroid, even though they're doing everything else right. And to the extent that you can. That you can dial in the exact amount, the minimum effective dose is what is what I would say is the appropriate way to approach this. The minimum effective dose, then why not do that? It's a choice I've made. I'm happy with it and but I'm an experimenter. I'm always looking for the next thing.

Yeah, I love it, man. I love your experimentation. I love the book Keto reset diet. Reboot your metabolism in 21 days and burn fat forever. 21 days. And that's the unique part about this book. If you're listening in, it's kind of that transition from low, low carb to keto. It's got a lot of practical stuff in it, delicious recipes. It's got Brad Kearns in it as well. Shout out to Brad, professional speed golfer who co wrote this book with Mark or contributed to the book. So both great guys, chock full of both knowledge as well as time in the trenches. So I recommend you check this one out and I'll put a link to everything that Mark and I talked about. If you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com KetoReset Grab the book, grab some mayonnaise, leave a comment or question if you have one and I'll be sure to hop in and reply. And Mark, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this with us, man.

Oh, my pleasure as always, Ben. Take care.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Mark Sisson signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.