84: Shift Your METABOLISM for PEAK ENERGY and FAT LOSS with Mark Sisson

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Welcome to the Earn your happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, founder of The Bliss Project, 3 Time Fitness World champion, fitness expert and cover model, turned self love junkie, lifestyle entrepreneur and author.

Each week I'll bring you a guest.

Or a thought that will help you bust through your fears, connect to your soul and get focused and clear so you can elevate your life, business and relationships. We don't wait until we're ready for someone to tell us we're good enough. We take what we want and we anoint ourselves. Get ready to earn, own and unapologetically rock your happiness every single day. Are you with me? Here we go. Welcome back to the Earn your happy podcast and today I'm thrilled to have Mark Sisson on the show. He is a health and fitness expert and the best selling author of the Primal Blueprint. His blog, Mark's DailyApple.com has paved the way for Primal enthusiasts to challenge conventional wisdom's diet and exercise principles and take personal responsibility for their health and well being. His efforts to promote primal living extend to a line of nutritional supplements, a book publishing company and a primal kitchen line with healthy mayonnaise, salad dressings and other functional foods. And also he has primal kitchen restaurants, fast casual restaurants and chains. This man does not quit. He has got such a passion for health. And I just really loved our conversation because I love learning about health and wellness and fitness from all sides and knowing that there's a million different ways to get to the result that we crave. And really that's feeling happy and good and healthy and vital. So you guys listen in as we talk about a few different ideas. Some might be new for you, some might be old news. But I always like to say, the more that we can learn, the more that we grow and find what just feels good for us. And that is the whole point of this conversation. So let's get started. Mark, I'm so grateful to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's absolutely my pleasure, Lori.

You know, it's really fun because I got to meet you a while back through a mutual friend and also your name keeps coming up for me. So I was at dinner the other night with Arian Alexander and she was just talking about how much she adores you and your wife. So I'm so excited. She's amazing. She's like the master connector. So I'm so excited to chat with you today. So for those out there who maybe don't know what you do, could you explain a little bit about what you do and how you got into or on to your path.

Yeah, well, I guess what I do, because I do a lot of stuff right now, but primarily I consider myself an educator. I like to take the results of my life experiences and my 30 plus years of research and try and digest them and then regurgitate, if you will. We're going to use a dietary analogy there into no, put, you know, put up ideas and examples of ways that I think people might be able to extract the greatest amount of enjoyment and pleasure and satisfaction and fulfillment and contentment from their lives. So for the, for the first part of my career, a lot of this had to do with coaching people on how to train to optimize their. Their health and to optimize their fitness. And as I got deeper and deeper into that, I realized that diet was such an important part of that. So I started really researching how we are able to manipulate the way our genes rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate us minute by minute every day based on the inputs that we give our genes. And a lot of those inputs come from the food choices that we make. I sort of discovered this great little area that was sort of a combination of evolutionary science and then this emerging area of modern genetic science, which enabled people to take back their own health by making sort of the right choices in the foods they ate, the types of movement they chose to do, the amount of sun exposure they get, the amount of sleep they get, the amount of play they experience. And it's all kind of wrapped itself into this life way that I call the Primal blueprint. And it's basically a template for living.

An awesome life that is so amazing. I mean, you just said every word that I think everybody's craving, whether it's joy, happiness, just having phenomenal health and feeling good in our body. So what are some of your favorite tips or hacks that you've learned that you apply in your life?

Well, I think the first, like some of the overarching themes would be, this isn't about sacrifice or discipline or, you know, some struggle. This is about finding ways to incorporate some of the information that I have access to into your life that will improve the experience of tasting food, that will improve your energy levels, that will improve your strength and your mobility without, again, without feeling like this is about sacrifice. So I want people to arrive at a space where they're intuitively making the kind of choices that they feel good about in real time and that don't compromise their health in the long term. So, for instance, people will Say, oh, Mark, you gotta try this awesome green drink that I just made. You know, it's supposed to be healthy for you. And I go, well, let me taste it. And if it doesn't taste great, I'm not gonna choke it down. I'm sorry. I don't care how great something is, is supposed to be for me. I don't want to sacrifice the experience of great taste of, you know, of the mouthfeel of certain foods. So every bite of food I put in my mouth, for example, I want to be spectacular. Now that doesn't mean I eat, you know, rocky road and chunky monkey ice cream all the time and, you know, down Cinnabon, even though those do taste pretty good, I have to say. But the choices I make within a list of possibilities are all foods that I love to eat, that I have no sense of guilt for having eaten them, or even if I do occasionally have a bite of chocolate cake or somebody's dessert, I don't have to feel compelled to finish my plate. I can have three bites and go, you know what? That was awesome. I got the experience of it and now I'm going to move on. Some of these hacks would be, geez, I'm kind of going off on a tangent here, but I want to set the stage. I want to set the stage that this is about enjoying your life. It's not about agonizing or being OCD about what you ate or what you shouldn't have eaten or feeling guilty about it. It's about making choices in real time that serve you and that give you the sorts of pleasure that you, that you want to derive and not feeling like you've got to live your life just to be healthy. And all the stuff that I can't do because I want to be healthy or all this stuff that I can't eat because I want to be healthy. You can have it all. You can have, you can have both. And I want to, I want to get to that point where people understand that there are certain types of foods that taste great, that are good for you, that, you know, you can incorporate into your, into your diet. I want people to understand that movement, you know, doesn't. Exercise, doesn't have to be about this. Oh my God, I'm dreading going to the gym today, Laurie, because, you know, I got my trainer and he's going to put me through this 35 minute workout that's just going to knock me on my ass. No, I want to find ways to move that are fun so that you look forward to the workout and that the workout becomes this enjoyable experience, not this thing that you have to get through to get to the other side to feel good about what you just did. Does that make sense?

Oh, makes total sense. And you know, I got to meet you briefly and you truly radiate just health and happiness. It's a, it's a feel, it's an aura, it's a feeling. It's a thing that comes from the inside. And I, I believe that is from being able to get to this intuitive place of just doing what you know is right for you and what feels good. Because I believe that we are all programmed to know. It's just we've covered it all up with, you know, food or doing things that we hate or thinking things have to be a pain. So what are some of the things that you would add in first to someone who this seems so foreign to?

Right.

Because everything has been painful. What is something that first step that you would tell them?

Well, the first step is, is now I'm going to take back a little bit of what I just said. And the first step is, is you do have to eliminate a few things. So to get to the good stuff, you kind of have to be willing to get past some of the bad stuff and get it out of your life. So I tell people, look, you know, we have way too much sugar and sweet stuff in our lives and a little bit is fine, but you know, a lot or as a rule of thumb becomes very problematic. So I, in general, not necessarily your listeners, Laurie, but in general, the population of the US would be consuming lots of sweetened beverages, you know, lots of sodas and soft drinks and sweetened teas and fruit juices and fruit smoothies that they think are healthy and lots of, lots of sugar. And sugar is just not that great for us. Again, a little bit is fine, but to the extent that a lot of us have sugary stuff for breakfast and then a treat during the day and dessert and drinks, probably not a good idea. In fact, a lot of the doctors that I hang out with in this anti aging space would say that the less sugar you, you consume or the less sugar you burn over a lifetime, the longer you live and the healthier you become. So, so looking at ways that you can reduce sugar would be great. Then there seems to have been over the past several decades this tendency to go toward vegetable oils as some somehow being healthy and, and being a source of healthy fats. Well, what we know now is that a lot of these industrial seed oils These vegetable oils, soybean oil, corn oil, canola, to a certain extent, some of these oils are antithetical to health. And so we would be well advised to eliminate those from our diets. And then generally just overly processed foods. And for the most part that means grains that have been extremely processed to the point that they just convert to sugar in the body anyway. So to the extent that we can, that we can cut down our grains, our grain intake, even so called healthy whole grains, because there are aspects of grains that do not serve a lot of people very well. So when you kind of are willing to eliminate those, and then you look at the list of things you can eat, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruit, you know, that's a pretty, pretty impressive cornucopia of great tasting healthy foods. So I would say the first thing I do to add back in is I'd say, well, get some quality protein in there. You know, you got to feed your muscles. Let's get some healthy fats. There's been a complete resurgence in the dietary community back to recognizing that fats are integral to our good health. And yes, certain fats, the ones I just mentioned from the industrial seed oils, those are bad. Get rid of those. Get rid of the trans fats, get rid of the partially hydrogenated fats and oils that you find in some of the processed foods. But the healthy fats, the avocados from nuts, from coconut, coconut oil, you know, even butter and ghee are healthy sources of fats. Fatty fish, grass fed meat, those are all very healthy sources of fats that also, by the way, happen to taste great. And I'd start to look to incorporate some of those back into the diet. So getting rid of the, some of the harmful things, adding back in, clean proteins, healthy fats, and as always, lots of vegetables. Vegetables are still should be the basis of anyone and everyone's dietary eating strategy, right?

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So sugar I just want to get get back to that. Because for me took really learning about it a while ago to just really understand how addictive. I mean, sometimes for me it doesn't. It can be very little amounts of processed sugar where I, I can actually feel like a totally different person.

Yeah.

And then it's in your system and I, it starts this trigger, right. Of just cravings. It's like the domino effect I get a little bit. All I can think of after that is sugar. And it's like I can listen to and I can understand how much these fruits and vegetables and all these good fats are so good for me. But it's almost like it turns that part of your, your mind off. Right. All you want is just to get more of that craving. So if we're in that place, what is something that we could maybe do to interrupt or stop that pattern?

Yeah, that's a. So that's a tough one. Because the brain is hardwired to seek out sweet things. Human. All throughout human evolution, sweet things were pretty rare. It was, it was, you know, you didn't come across them on a, on a regular basis. And when you did, it was a treasure trove of honey or you know, a field of, of ripening fruit or something like that. But for the most part, there was not a lot of sweetness in the human diet for a long time. So our brains are kind of wired to seek that out. Now you cut to modern times when there's sweet stuff literally around every corner, Whether it's in your house, whether it's in your cupboard, your refrigerator, your desk drawer, your pocketbook, you know, I'm sure there's something sweet that you could, that you could reach for if you had that craving. So the idea is how do we, how do we diminish that craving? And the fact that we seek it out doesn't mean we all crave it. But there's a point at which many of us who get into this regular pattern of eating sweet stuff on a regular every day do develop cravings. And then it becomes kind of more difficult to reduce. So, so one thing is I'm just again, try to get rid of all of the processed candies and drinks and sweet stuff. And that means it includes the artificially sweetened sort of the non caloric stuff too. Because even those non caloric sweet tasting beverages, the things that have, you know, sucralose or stevia or even monk fruit, you know, they tend to, while they confer a sweet, a sweet taste without, without the calories, they're still feeding that part of the brain that says, oh, gotta, gotta have some. Something sweet. And you gotta maintain that, that intake. So get rid of all of the sweet stuff that you can. What's a go to alternative? Well, a lot of people that I know use coconut butter as, as a, you know, if you, if you feel the urge to get something sweet, have some coconut butter. Coconut butter has that sort of fulfilling, satiating mouthfeel and taste. It actually tastes a little bit sweet, but it doesn't have sugar in it. It's got that healthy coconut fat which takes the edge off of hunger, which is generally what you're trying to address when you're, when you get a craving for something sweet. You think you're hungry, but you're not really. It's just your brain saying, hey, we know it's nearby. Let's go get some, right? So also, I like berries. I like, you know, blueberries or raspberries. They are, they do have some, some sweetness to them, but they have some tartness. They're the healthiest form of sugar that you can take in. They have antioxidants and things like that. So they would be sort of a go to transitional snack, if you will. But ultimately, what we're trying to do is, and what I, what I teach at the Primal Blueprint is how do we unburden ourselves of having to take in carbohydrate in any form throughout the day to provide glucose to fuel the body? How can we alternatively extract the greatest amount of energy from our body fat? How can we become good at burning fat and not so dependent on having to consume carbohydrates for energy? And when you build this skill, when you develop this skill, a lot of things fall into place. When you become good at burning fat, you tend to burn off your own stored body fat, which is pretty much what everyone wants to do, right? As fuel. You tend to. Because you're, you've become good at accessing your own stored body fat. You're not hungry as often because you, your body doesn't care where the calories came from, whether it came from a plate of food or whether it came from your thighs or your belly. It's the body still getting the calories it needs to move ahead and create energy and to do whatever it needs to do. So when you become good at burning fat, you burn off your stored body fat. You tend to mitigate your appetite. So now you don't have that sort of feeling throughout the day like, oh, that was a great lunch. What's for dinner? Right now you can Go hours and hours and hours at a time without even thinking about eating because you're truly not hungry. Your body has learned how to get its energy from your stored body fat and not depend on you giving it a fresh supply of carbohydrate to create glucose every few hours. So we teach this skill. It has the effect of again, you trend toward your ideal body composition. You build or maintain muscle mass. Your body goes into a repairing stage instead of a sort of a destructive reactive oxygen species stage. When you put a lot of sugar through your system, you create free radical damage. That's part of the byproduct of burning a lot of sugar and burning a lot of carbohydrates. So when we transition over into this fat burning ability, we also are entering this kind of anti aging strategy where we're not creating as much of this free radical damage and we don't have to call upon our antioxidant stores to address so much free radical damage. And there are some other amazing benefits from being a fat burner that we can talk about in a little while that involve the use of ketones. We can have that discussion right now if you want. But I mean, a lot of, a lot of what goes along with being fat adapted and being able to burn fat efficiently is, and what's going on in the body is really quite almost magical. It's not magic, it's real, but it feels magical because you're literally, you're building metabolic machinery to burn fat and not rely so much on carbohydrate. You're, you're sending your genes signals through the food choices you make that the body needs to build more mitochondria to be able to put more fat through because you've chosen not to consume as much sugar. So these are just biochemical signals that you are sending your body by virtue of the choices you're making that are turning genes on, that build more enzyme systems that burn fat better, that prompt the body to go into a state of mitochondrial biogenesis, which means it makes more mitochondria, which are the energy plants in which the fat burns. And all of this is this amazing evolutionary adaptation that we all have and that we can all access based on the types of choices that we make in the foods that we eat and then the types of movement we choose to do. So one of the things that we do within the primal blueprint is we say don't go to the gym and feel like you have to struggle and sweat and grunt off 450 calories on the treadmill every day. That's not necessarily going to get you where you think you want to be in terms of weight loss or in terms of health. All it's doing is beating yourself up. Of course you go home and you feel good about the workout you did, right? But then people tend to overeat and over consume carbohydrates just so they can go back and do it again tomorrow. So a better choice would be to maybe cut the amount of work load that you're doing down and instead of riding the bike or running on the treadmill at 75 or 85% of your max heart rate, just go for a long hike, go for a long walk at lunch. Don't think about the calories that you're burning. Just think about the fact that while you're doing this, the only calories you're burning are from fat. You're not really burning any of the carbohydrate calories. And you want to develop that skill of being able to burn more and more fat while you're exercising and becoming less reliant on carbo loading and you know, goo packs and gel packs and things to fuel you during the workouts and much more self sufficient in terms of your ability to burn fat. Use that for fuel. And in so doing, you're not only becoming more efficient as an athlete and as a human being, but you're also losing the excess body fat that is weighing you down and doesn't really look that great on most people and maybe causing you some, some health issues. So there's every reason to become good at burning fat and not a lot of good reasons to keep, to keep going in this sugar burning mode that so many people find themselves in.

That's awesome. Thank you so much for all that info. So as far as getting good at burning fat, what are some of the things that you would tell people? What are, you know, what does your day look like every day when you eat? Because I know that you're all about making sure that you enjoy food as well. And was that an evolution process? Did you love what you're eating right now, right away, or did you have to adopt it slowly?

You know, Very good question. Because in the days when I was a top, you know, I was a endurance athlete, I was a marathoner in the 70s and I was a elite triathlete in the 80s and I kept doing that for decades. And it was all based on consuming a lot of sugar, consuming a lot of carbohydrate, because that was the conventional wisdom of the day. And you know, I was like an ice cream aholic. I had a half gallon of ice cream every single night before I went to bed. And so I was like, wow, this is awesome. I'm a distance runner. I'm running 100 miles a week. I weighed 30 pounds less than I weigh now and I don't have very much body fat now. I was just a skinny runner, right? And so I was burning off all those calories. Now the fact that I could get away with it didn't mean it was good for me. And in fact it pretty much, that diet pretty much cost me my career because it was very highly inflammatory diet. But I wound up enjoying. You know, my girlfriend at the time would buy me a loaf of raisin bread with, with icing on it and I down that and I'd get again I had all this like great tasting, sweet, nasty but sweet tasting food, right. So when I shifted over and I realized that that was not serving me at all. In fact it was really causing a lot of issues for me and I realized I had to go to a natural unprocessed diet. I didn't blink for one instance because then I could say, oh, you know what? I love lamb. Lamb chops are one of my favorite things. I get to have lamb, I get to have sauteed mushrooms with, you know, I get to eat grilled vegetables that are grilled in butter. Not. They don't need to be steamed and they don't need, you know, because when you eat this way you're eating healthy fats. So what you've, you sort of replaced the simple sugars with healthy fats. So Now I get 55 to sometimes 60% of my calories every day from fat. But you know, it's stuff that I love. Avocados and coconut, coconut oil and again grass fed meats and fish and, and, and vegetables that have been, that have been sauteed or grilled or whatever in a, in olive oil or avocado oil. I even have a company now that makes mayonnaise that's based on avocado oil and organic cage free eggs. So we make the world's healthiest mayonnaise. So I can put this mayonnaise on anything I eat. So I'm not sacrificing anything in the way of taste. I always enjoyed fruits, so I still get to eat fruits. I just don't eat the sugary stuff. I sort of focus on the berries which are, which I just, I like the taste of them anyway better and I, and they, they have pretty potent antioxidant properties and, and phytochemicals and things that we all, that we're all seeking from, from real food. So there was never a moment when I said, oh, geez, poor me, I'm. I'm shifting away from. Well, I guess I have to admit, Laurie, now I come to think of it, giving up the, the half gallon of ice cream every night took a little while, but, but that was just, that was just like almost a, you know, that talk about a craving.

That was a crutch.

That was, that was what was going on with. That was truly a sugar craving that I had. But, you know, I don't, like, I don't eat ice cream at all now. I mean, I went from 10 years of half gallon ice cream every night of my life to almost none. And if I have any, it's because I'm at someone else's house and they serve it as dessert. And I have two or three bites and I go, oh, yeah, I remember that. That tasted pretty good. But that doesn't. I didn't. I don't immediately go into that, you know, feeling of, oh, poor me, I gave up ice cream. My life sucks. It's just like, wow. I have all these other things that are equally as great tasting. They're not better or worse or whatever. They just, I think in my mind they taste equally as good, just different. And I, and I fill my diet with those.

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Yeah, I love that. You know, it's so interesting because I kind of. It's like when I started really looking at the food that I was eating, I look back on when I first started even learning about food, and of course, I just jumped into the deep end of fitness competing. Why not, you know, go into, like, the craziest way to learn about food instead of actually learning balance. But anyhow, I ended up learning.

Isn't that ironic?

It is so ironic.

Isn't it ironic that some of the fitness girls, and not guys too, but girls in particular, the health compromises as a result of being an iconic fitness figure. It's just a little bit divergent.

It's a little crazy. I look back at some of the things that I was doing because you are. Well, number one, you're restricting and you're looking at, okay, I'm gonna eat super clean, I'm gonna eat light, I'm gonn, you know, no fats, I'm gonna eat no sugars. Then all of a sudden it's like, all you're thinking of is, number one, what you're consuming, number two, what are the macros on it? Does it have sugar? Is this gonna be caloric? What is this gonna do? Like, there's so much fear around food that I would have just all out. It's like all of a sudden you develop a binge eating disorder and because your body is just craving nutrients, right? And you're working out like a maniac. And I just really think of this. It doesn't matter if you're competing in fitness or you're going on a diet, right? It's like, if we would just start viewing it as how can I nourish my body? Like, what are the best things that I can put into my body without thinking of, you know, the macros or calories or whatever that is. And when I started to shift my focus on that is when it's like, wow, I never had those. Very rarely do I have those moments of, oh my gosh, I just need more of this, or I never feel satiated, or it's amazing what I can. I always think, think, this is nuts. And we'll kind of talk on this. What I can actually get away with now and how much food I get to eat and enjoy without, you know, basically having those moments of overeating or feeling like I'm deprived or it's like, really?

Or guilt for having made a mistake.

Yes. It's so beautiful. So I really hope for people to get there Because I know when I first started, it was like, you know, maybe you add in a bunch of. I added in a lot more fats because I felt really good on fats. But then I was like, oh, this is so many calories, or whatever, because this is the way your mind is thinking. So how can we move past the guilt and just into nourishment?

I think it's education. I think that when people start to understand how amazing the body is and how it responds to the different foods that we put in there, and how every bite of food becomes a hormonal experience. So if you. If you don't judge food necessarily as good or bad, right or wrong, but you just. You make your choices based on, well, these are the foods that I'd like to be choosing to eat from regularly. And these over here are the foods that I think I want to avoid because I get a sense that they'll flip my genetic switches the wrong way. And so start with just easing into it and understanding that when you want to become good at burning fat, you do, the signals you want to send your body are that there's not going to be a lot of glucose for a while, and in order to get there, you have to cut back the carbs. Now, that doesn't mean you restrict them entirely. You know, if you got rid of breads and pastas and cookies and cereals and crackers and desserts, which I think we all know intuitively don't really serve us that well, you know, they might taste great. So if you got rid of all those in the sweetened beverages and you wound up with a list of, you know, I could have a nice omelette every morning. I could have a salad with some salmon on it or some steak or chicken. I could have, you know, a nice piece of meat for dinner with some grilled vegetables and maybe a half a sweet potato or, you know, some cauliflower rice or something that made for a delicious, complete meal, what you'll find is that is that within a few weeks, sometimes within a few days, the body gets the signal that there's not going to be a lot of sugar coming in. And so we better gear up to start to burn off some of our stored fat. And because the body can't store that much sugar, it can only store about 1200 usable calories worth of sugar at any one time, which isn't that much. But the body can store unlimited amounts of fats, as some of us unfortunately know. So why not get good at burning off that fat and having access to that unlimited store of energy and not have to rely on refilling that small gas tank of carbs every time. So over a period of a few weeks, the body gets the signal and starts to build the metabolic machinery to become really good at burning fats, to creating ketones from those fats and using those ketones to fuel the brain and, and cardiac muscle and even some of the skeletal muscle instead of using glucose. And you get to the point where sometimes you wake up in the morning, go, oh, they say Lori told me breakfast was the most important meal of the day, but you know what, I'm not hungry, I'm not going to eat. And so you start to get this sense that, well, I must be burning fat, I must be getting energy, because I wake up, I'm not hungry, I have energy. And so one of the first metrics that we use is if you can make it till 11 o' clock or noon without having breakfast and are functional, that is go to work and perform your job, and in my case, go to the gym and do a hard workout, you are becoming a fat burner. And what follows from that is one of the key pieces of advice I give people is if you're not hungry, then don't eat. And if you are hungry, then eat. I mean, I don't want anybody to feel like this is a deprivation program. So if you're hungry, eat, but recognize when you start to eat, when you, when you're no longer hungry, don't get to the point where, oh my God, I'm full, I overate, or oh, I finished my plate, so I must be done. Get to the point where you're not hungry for the next bite. And for a lot of people, they start to develop this skill where 10 or 11 bites of everything into a meal, they go, oh, that's it, I'm done, lunch is finished. I can box it up, I can set it aside, I can give it to my seatmate or whatever, but I don't feel compelled to finish this because I'm no longer hungry. That's one of the most amazing skills that we can develop. And you get to the point then where you see, as I've seen in my own life, where I can thrive on 30% fewer calories than I thought I needed five years ago because I'm doing it in a way that I've trained my body to burn fat. So there's always going to be some amount of fuel there. I'm a really fit 63 year old guy, I have 10% body fat. So I've got enough fat on me to walk 400 miles if I had to. It's not like even with low body fat you're ever going to run out of this option of your body to burn fat. But to be able to wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, go to work, take a break at 10 o', clock, go to the gym, do a hard workout, come home, not even eat after a hard workout because I'm trying to. Well, first of all I'm not hungry and so I don't feel compelled to have to eat a post workout meal. I can just go back to work a little bit and then look at my watch. Oh my goodness, it's one o'. Clock. I, maybe I'll have some lunch now. I feel, I feel hungry. I'll have a small lunch and then toward the end of the day if I'm, if I get hungry, I might have a handful of macadamia nuts, which are healthy fats, right? Healthy monounsaturated fats. And then dinner comes around and it's 7, 7:30 at night. So I eat between 1 o' clock in the afternoon and 7 to 7:30 at night. I have what we call a compressed eating window. So during those six hours I consume calories, but during the other 18 hours I don't really consume calories. Not because I'm trying to, not because I'm trying to, you know, lose weight or cut for, or look good in a wedding dress or, you know, whatever. Just because I don't feel compelled, I don't feel, I don't feel hungry, I'm not, I don't feel the need to eat. And in so doing, I'm giving my body an opportunity to repair itself, renew itself, regenerate, recreate and burn off any excess stored body fat that I want to get rid of. And a lot of the people who get into this fat burning space find that that's a strategy that works very well for them, that they can go long periods of time without getting hungry and therefore without needing to eat and in the process are burning off their stored body fat. Now if, again, if you are hungry, this whole thing falls apart. Because I want you to enjoy your life. I don't want you to be going, oh well, Sisson said, you know, Skip, don't eat for 18 hours. But I'm hungry for half of that time and I'm miserable, looking forward to the next meal. You're not there yet, you're not, you've not entered that fat burning that Fat burning sweet zone yet.

You know, this is, this is so interesting because I've been eating this way since January of this year. And if you would have told me that two years ago, I would have wanted to, like, tackle you. Like, now I'm never not eating breakfast. Like, I that person who breakfast was my favorite meal of the day. Like, it was my joy. But now I really look at. I look at it because I think I'm trying to figure out why I was truly attached to my breakfast. Like, do not take it away from me. I will drop kick you. And now I don't eat until 12 or 1 every single day. And I thoroughly, like, I thoroughly enjoy the foods that I'm eating in the way that I'm eating now. I get to enjoy a bigger time, dinner. My body's just set at this point, but that took me a long time to get to that space. So I totally love what you're saying, that if you're not there, you're not there yet. And you can make other changes within your diet. So what are some of those things that people can do? Is it really just watching the sugar, or are we trying to make sure that we get certain things at every meal? Or is it really intuitively listening to, if you want more fats, just add more fat to each meal? Or where does someone start if they're like, okay, I want to get good at burning fat? What does that even look like?

Yeah, well, you know, one of the mistakes people make is they. Is they hear what I'm saying and they go, oh, I like that idea about adding fats into the diet. So they start adding in healthy fats, but they don't cut out the sugars. And, you know, when you. The reason you're cutting out sugar, sugar tends to have this roller coaster effect throughout the day. And when I talk about sugar, I'm also talking about things like breads and pastas and cereals that convert to glucose almost immediately after they pass the gut. So whether you eat a bowl of Skittles or a loaf of bread, the body doesn't know where that glucose came from. It just knows there's glucose in the bloodstream. So when you cut a lot of these sugars and sugary sweets out, you're doing that largely because you just don't want to be feeding that beast of cravings in your brain. But you also do need to cut down on the processed carbohydrates and simple grains and sugars that convert to glucose in the bloodstream. You're trying to Cut the amount of glucose that enters your bloodstream when you do that. Well, conversely, when you overdo that, which people do on a regular basis, pretty much every meal, there's a rise in insulin. So insulin gets secreted because the body recognizes that too much glucose, too much sugar in the blood is toxic, and it wants to either burn it, store it in the muscles, or store it as fat. And if it can't, burn it immediately, which sometimes most often can't, and your muscles are already full of glycogen and there's no more room for them, then it goes right to the fat cells. So this insulin drives sugar into the fat cells, which is a big problem for a lot of people. That's one of the reasons people gain so much weight when they eat excess sugar, is insulin is a hormone that drives any excess nutrient into the fat cells. So by cutting back on the glucose, by cutting back on the carbohydrates that produce the glucose, you are dropping the amount of insulin you produce. And a lowered insulin automatically signals the body to say, hey, let's take some fat out of storage and let's burn that fat. So while insulin locks fat, high insulin levels lock fat into storage. Low insulin levels allow fat to come out of storage and be burned. And you want to again, get. Get to this point where by cutting the amount of carbohydrates, and this doesn't mean that you give up vegetables. So you can have. I'll give you an example. I mean, you might get up and a typical breakfast that we might. Or typical day that we might give someone is we say, if you feel you want to have breakfast, good. Have an omelette with vegetables in it and some cheese on it. Have a cup of coffee at lunchtime. Have a nice salad with a healthy dressing that's got olive oil or avocado oil and some healthy fats in it, a little bit of protein. Have a handful of macadamia nuts in the middle of the afternoon for a snack if you feel like you need a snack. And if you don't feel like you need a snack, then don't have one. Or have that tablespoon of coconut butter that we talked about a little bit earlier. And for dinner, just have a regular. You know what would be considered a healthy dinner? Some form of protein, copious amounts of vegetables. Maybe a glass of wine, if that's. If you like wine. And maybe some berries with whipped cream, which is a healthy fat for dessert. You've just had an awesome day of food, and you only had about 60 grams, total of carbohydrate, most of which was in the vegetables that you had, in the omelet, in the salad, and in the grilled vegetables you might have had on your plate. Now, dig that. Most people eat 3 to 400 grams of carbs a day, and that's what's causing this insidious weight gain over years and years and years. But if you can cut all of those sugars, sugared beverages, sweet drinks, sweetened coffees, teas, the cookies and crackers and cakes and pies and breads and cereals and waffles and pancakes and all that other stuff to the point that most of your carbs are coming from as much vegetables as you want to eat. You are now in a low carb, high fat, moderate fat, healthy fat, clean, protein eating strategy, and you are well on your way to directing your genes to build more of the mitochondria, to burn more fat, and to depend less and less on carbohydrates. So this takes, yeah, it takes a little bit of discipline for about a week or two to get into that space and to not go back to those comfort foods. But once you're there, this happens so often. People come up to me and say, you know, I just. I tried it. And once I get past that first week and I understood what was going on and I got rid of my old habits, my thinking cleared up, I had more energy. You know, I started to lose weight effortlessly. I didn't have to exercise to lose weight. Because a lot of people, Laurie, a lot of people are carrying around 10 to 20 extra pounds of weight in stored water because the foods they're eating are so inflammatory. They have what we call systemic inflammation. You know, when you sprain an ankle and it swells up, that's water going to that localized. That localized inflammation. Well, when you have systemic inflammation throughout your body, when you've eaten the foods that turn on genes that cause the body to go into a state of inflammation, the body holds onto water just like that ankle held onto water. That's why when you look at the shows like the Biggest Loser, which I'm not a fan of, and you see people, you know, dropping 20 pounds the first week, they didn't burn off 20 pounds of fat. That's impossible. They lost 20 pounds of water because they cut out so many of the inflammatory foods that were causing them to hold onto the water. Right. So you see a lot of these. Some of the initial benefit of people going on a low carb, healthy fat eating strategy on their way to Becoming good at burning fat. They're also getting some benefits immediately by reduction in inflammation, a reduction in water retention. So they look. They actually look healthier and less inflamed. More energy. It's a beautiful thing. It's very empowering.

Oh, my goodness. Okay. I love that because that's kind of how I started to shift was instead of focusing on my old thought pattern of what am I eating, how much measuring all that stuff, I let that go quite a few years ago because, number one, it's impossible to lead a social life and to travel with that kind of mentality. You put yourself in a prison, you'll be miserable the rest of your life. So instead I just focused on, okay, well, I wanted to start eliminating sugar because I just watched so many sugar documentaries and learned so much about it and thought, okay, I just. I want to feel really good. I want tons of energy. I just focused on how I felt instead of how I looked. And that was really freeing as well. And of course that comes in once in a while, but you can do some work around that as well. But as far as the meals, you know, you said amazing meals that people don't realize that they can still have, you said, okay, put some cheese here or have some cheese in the morning on your omelette and then have berries with cream. I mean, these are all things that are delicious that I think we've said no to because we might have that in our mind that these things can't go together. We can't have those fats or we can't have cheese, or we can't have this or we can't have that. Right. But I really believe that if we really are just watching the sugar, there's so much that. There's so much freedom in that. So when I did that, it's like I stopped focusing on how much. And I said, I'm just gonna do this and I'm gonna eat however much I want. And you kind of find this balance point, right, where it's just kind of. You don't eat too much because your body's so satiated. You may in the beginning just cause you're used to eating big portions, but it's almost just focus on the types of food, allowing yourself whatever within that. And I feel like your body balances itself out within there. What is happening when that happens?

Yeah, it's exactly right. Your body is balancing itself out. Your body is starting to get a handle on equilibrium and homeostasis between certain hormone sets. You know, we have all these hormones in Our body. Insulin, glucagon, leptin, ghrelin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol. All these different hormones are. Are talking to each other and signaling the body. And when you get to that point where you are. You're only eating as much as it takes to, you know, to satiate the hunger and not to fill you up, the hormones start to. They start to come back into alignment and they start to talk to themselves. You know, it's so funny that most of the world. And I was guilty of this, and I know you were too, Laurie, I'm sure. And that is. It's like, how much can I get away with eating and not get fat?

Yes.

How much can I eat and not gain weight? So that's kind of how we live our lives, or. And by the way, we live our lives that way in every other aspect of our life. So what can I get away with? I mean, that's just human nature. So. So when you eat that way, you tend to. And some people, by the way, can get away with eating a lot. I could, when I was an athlete, I could get away with a half gallon of ice cream a night, a loaf of raisin bread, and whatever else. Whatever other 5,000 calories I was eating a day, I could get away with it in terms of how I looked. But it still was not helping me out in terms of my health. It was tearing my health down as a result of that. So most of our lives, we say, oh, what's the most amount of food I can get away with eating and not gain weight? Well, about a couple of years ago, I thought, well, that's kind of weird that we live that way. That's definitely a first world problem, Right? So how do we shift that? What's the least amount of food I can eat and still maintain muscle mass or build, have as much energy as I want, never get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. Because this whole thing falls apart if you get hungry, right? But what's the least amount of food I can eat? And have all of those specifications met, and it turns out that it's a lot less food than you think. And I think that most people are eating more food than they ought to be eating, and I'm suggesting that we could be eating less. And again, as long as you're not hungry, this all falls into place. As long as you're not hungry, you trend now, you start to burn off your stored body fat. Now your cells start to repair themselves because there's not an excess of Glucose around that's causing damage. Now all of these things fall into place where your hormones regulate, where your energy levels stabilize, where your blood sugar stabilizes. So you're not. You're not in that. In that. On that track to get type 2 diabetes. Right. There are all of these different things that come to play now that happen as a result of you being good at burning fat.

Oh, I love that, because it just. It's so freeing when we can learn the foods that we can eat that make us satiated. Because when you feel. Feel good and you're not constantly thinking about food or you're not constantly hungry or trying to see how much we can get away with, I can't even tell you how much that conversation takes up people's minds. I'm sure you maybe know, but it. There's no room for anything else. And it's so much freedom when we don't have to think about that. It's like you actually get to realize what you're on the planet for outside of worrying about your body or your food or your. You know, that's a. That's a huge thing for people, and a lot of it is because of the food that we're eating. So I really just want. I want to go back to. I know that we've beat it to death, but I think it's such a huge thing. And go back to just sugar and give a couple tips for people or a couple reasons why maybe that we can grab onto what sugar is doing to us in our society and our brains and, you know, maybe one of the biggest reasons we should give it up.

Yep. So just for starters, I'm not talking about black and white here. We're talking about choices. We're talking about. This isn't about good or bad, right or wrong. Your life sucks because you're overweight and you eat sugar. And my life's great because I don't. I'm not gonna. This is not about judgment. It's about just taking research and digesting it and suggesting that maybe there are some choices that we could make in our lives that would benefit us if we took on those choices. So when I say, you know, sugar is generally not good for us, you know, a little bit of sugar, if that's gonna. Like. I put a teaspoon of sugar in my coffee.

Yes.

Because it sweetens it up, and it's just what I needed. And it's not artificial. It's pure, evaporated, natural cane juice. Right. Now, If I put 43 teaspoons of sugar in my coffee, which would be the equivalent of a large coke, you know, then I'd have a problem. So it's also about the nature of a poison. Has as much to do with the dosage as it does with the chemical composition. So a little bit of sugar, not bad. So I don't want people to get all crazy about, oh, because something has a tiny bit of sugar in it, it's to be avoided entirely. Having said that, so many people take in 50, 100 grams of sugar a day. Now, sugar is, you know, at any one time in the human body, there's 5 grams of sugar circulating in your bloodstream. So even when you have normal blood sugar in this entire pretty good sized body that you have, there's only 5 grams, a teaspoonful of sugar in your entire bloodstream. That's fueling your brain and doing all this stuff that needs to happen. So to the extent that you take in copious amounts of sugar throughout the day, the body has to look at it and go, oh my God, the sugar. We don't, we can't have more than 5 grams in the bloodstream at any one time because it'll. Sugar reacts with protein molecules in the bloodstream and can and can literally cause your bloodstream to gum up. This is what happens when diabetics who have high blood sugar because they can't control the amount of, where the sugar gets, gets deposited in the muscle cells or the fat cells and they can't burn it off. So the sugar runs high in the bloodstream. It then reacts with protein molecules and creates what we know later to be the visual problems with diabetics or the nerve damage, the neuropathy that's basically a result of capillaries being gummed up by too much, essentially too much sugar in the bloodstream. So it's not a good thing. We're lucky that if there's too much sugar in the bloodstream, we can deposit it in the fat cells. But who really wants that? We don't want to get fatter. We don't want the. Some people are lucky that they, that all that happens when they get too much sugar is they just get fatter and fatter and fatter and they never get diabetes. But some people who aren't able to store fat that way and even their fat cells are resistant, they become diabetic and they, they start to encounter those problems. We just talked about the retinopathies in the eyes, the vision problems, the neuropathies and all the other things and the loss of limbs as a result of circulation problems, you know, the amputations. It's. It's pretty. Pretty ugly and messy. So you want to decrease the amount of blood. Blood. The amount of sugar in your blood anyway. And the easiest way to do that is just to cut back on the amount of sugar you take in, you know, and become good at burning fat and become. Become less reliant on carbohydrates, which carbohydrates do convert to glucose in the bloodstream. So that. That. That white potato that you eat, that gets converted to glucose in the bloodstream pretty quickly. So that'll cause a rise in blood, blood glucose, as will the bread, as will the pasta, as will the pancakes and waffles and everything else if they're not. If they're from overly processed grains and things that convert rapidly to that form of glucose. So it's just sort of a mantra in the health field now that the less sugar you burn in a lifetime, the healthier you'll be, and the more robust you'll be, the stronger you'll be, probably the longer you'll live. Cancer. We could go into the whole discussion about how cancer loves sugar, right? And so a lot of people who have issues with cancer are now going on a ketogenic diet, which pretty much eliminates all sugar consumed and trains the body once again to burn fats really well and to be reliant on the ketones that are a byproduct of fat and not have to have glucose, because glucose tends to be something that many of many cancer cells feed on. We're seeing now there's tremendous results from kids who have certain forms of epilepsy who are on a ketogenic diet, that's a high fat, low carb diet, who go from having 300 seizures a day to no seizures for 20 years. So there's lots of. There are lots of these pockets of medicine now that are starting to understand how damaging the sugar that we take in can be. And again, how many of us can get away with it? I mean, look, there are people who live to be 80 or 90 years old or even 100, and who consume what we would consider large amounts of sugar. They're the outliers, they're the lucky ones. But for most of us, it's an issue, and I think it needs to be addressed. If you want to be that person who says, I want to be happy and healthy for as long as I can, I want to live as long as I can, but I don't want to be you Know, disabled For the last 15 years of my life because I could get away with consuming more sugar than most people because it didn't look like I was gaining weight, right. But there was some other stuff going on.

There's so much around food for me that it's really just. As I've gotten older, I've just wanted to feel better and to feel happy and to feel less anxious. And there's so much related to food that I can see now, especially once you clean up your diet and you just start eating, you know, less sugar, more natural, just amazing whole foods from the earth. It's kind of like when I add it in or go on a weekend or something where I'm like, I'm just gonna eat these extra tortilla chips and these margaritas. I come back and I feel those effects for a week. Whether I feel anxious, I feel a little bit depressed, I feel super lethargic. It's just amazing that I used to walk around that way all the time, you know.

Well, you know, it's. And that's, that's a double edged sword because when you clean your act up, when you start to eat clean and are aware of what foods you should not be eating just because they don't serve you well, and those foods that you can eat because they're not only great tasting, again, very important, but they're healthy. Then when you go off the wagon, so you've eaten clean, I use that term kind of loosely, but you eat clean for a couple of months and then you go have those margaritas and those tortilla tips and you, and you feel like crap, you realize, holy. I mean, this is, you said it just now, I went around in that kind of fog my whole life. Well, maybe you didn't. Maybe your body had adapted to it. But that doesn't mean that that wasn't going on. I mean, you didn't recognize it as a fog. You recognize it now because the difference is so dramatic between how you felt yesterday and then how you felt the day after or today after having eaten that stuff. Same physiological processes are going on as when you did it every day. But now you notice the difference so much you go, wow, if that's, if that's what I was doing to my body, then I, then I'm getting the message. This does not, this does not serve me well.

Oh, Mark, thank you so much for being on here. Clearly I need like two hours with you or more. So next time, next time we'll have you on to finish this conversation. But I Would love for people to be able to learn more about you. Where can we find you? Follow you, all that good stuff.

Yeah. So My blog is marksdailyapple.com and my book is the Primal Blueprint available everywhere. And I have a e commerce site called primalblueprint.com where you can get some of the books and some of the foods that we make too, because we make some foods that address the very issues we talked about today. The healthy fats, the clean proteins, and no sugar.

Awesome. I just want to acknowledge you. I always close with one last question, but I just want to say thank you so much for all that you do and yours. You and your site are just a wealth of knowledge that people can learn from. So thank you so much.

Thank you.

Okay, so last question. You are on an elevator and it's only a 30 second ride and someone looks over at you and says, how can I be happy? What would you tell them?

Them? Change your thinking right now. You are not broken. You don't need to be fixed. Just change the way you think.

So perfect. Thank you so much. And you guys, if you loved this episode as much as I did, make sure you share it. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye everyone. Thank you guys so much for spending this time with me on the earn your happy podcast. I am so glad that you stopped by. If you could take one second to share this episode with someone you think would love it, that would be absolutely amazing and we would be forever grateful. Also, please leave us a review if you feel so moved by going to itunes and leaving us an honest thought, an honest comment, tell us what you think, tell us what you want to hear more of. It would really help us out on our journey to helping thousands, thousands and thousands of people. Until then, don't forget to earn your happy. Thanks again guys. Bye bye.