The long-awaited release of the diet book to end all diet books is here! 

Two Meals A Day transcends the confusion and controversy about healthy eating and obsessing over strict food choices and meal patterns required with many niche strategies. Instead, you’ll broaden the focus to a simple and sustainable strategy that works for everyone. Emerging science reveals that when you eat is just as important as what you eat for fat loss, disease protection, and longevity. Even among those devoted to choosing the best foods or following strict macro guidelines, it’s possible to fall short of fat loss goals by eating too frequently and engaging in the surprisingly destructive habit of snacking. 

In this show, you’ll get a great sense of the content of each chapter in the book, starting with a detailed explanation of how to achieve metabolic flexibility — the ability to gracefully burn a variety of fuel sources as needed, with the emphasis on stored body fat as your preferred fuel choice. You’ll understand that our body works most efficiently in a fasted state, with autophagy, immune function, cognitive function, and inflammation control all optimized. You’ll also learn why simply ditching the Big Three toxic modern foods (refined sugars, grains, and industrial seed oils) will get you most of the way toward your potential. You’ll gain a deep understanding of how to make the best choices in the ancestral food categories, and form an empowering mindset by rejecting self-limiting beliefs and behavior patterns and operating from a stance of gratitude, mindfulness, and self-confidence. The show will also overview how to implement the important lifestyle practices of sleep, rest & recovery, increased general everyday movement, and brief, high-intensity workouts. Enjoy this highly informative conversation with Mark and pre-order Two Meals a Day here!

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad and Mark Sisson bring you up-to-date on the latest information on healthy eating. [01:58]

Their new book, Two Meals a Day will give you all that you need to get on that path for better health in a simple message. [06:43]

Metabolic flexibility encompasses a lot of different ways of eating. One can get there either with Keto or intermittent fasting. [09:14]

The point is really what’s the least amount of food I can eat and maintain muscle mass, maintain energy and not get sick? And most importantly not be hungry.  [11:32]

The biggest problem we have had throughout the last several decades has been taking in excess calories and storing them as fat. [14:40]

How can you get comfortable eating only two meals a day? [17:41]

People have tended to live and die by the number of calories, counting calories in and calories out.  That’s not how it works. [20:31]

Get rid of the crap. The big three: sugar, industrial seed oils, and processed grains. Try it for twenty-one days. [26:36]

Learn to do this systematically and methodically so that your body learns to adapt. [31:22]

We want all the food we eat to taste fantastic. We don’t need to be beholden to what someone says is “healthy” or to worry about hunger. [35:30]

Making good choices within the ancestral food categories: meat, fish, fowl, eggs, fruits, nuts, and seeds, does not have to be complicated. [36:51]

New information just keeps coming. Don’t be afraid to try something different. [41:18]

The enjoyment of the experience in itself contributes to a healthy diet. [44:20]

Sometimes you find out that what you have been eating is actually causing much of your physical discomfort like indigestion, arthritis, bloating and such. [48:10]

Many people listen to us and read the books and know what to do, but don’t understand why they fall off the rails.  What can they do? [50:27]]   

Sleep is the single most overlooked opportunity to reassess health, whether it’s mental health, restorative health, or whether it’s recuperation from an illness, or whether it’s just keeping your sanity about you [01:00:39]

Learn how to allocate time for social interactions, not on a device. [01:05:44]

Move more…not just exercise. Without micro-workouts, you are risking fatigue or breakdown.  [01:07:26]

LINKS:

• Brad’s Shopping Page
• Mark’s Daily Apple
• Two Meals a Day
• The Fatburn Fix
• The Circadian Code
• Burn
• The Primal Blueprint 
• Wheat Belly
• Biology of Belief
• Lights Out, Sleep, Sugar and Survival

QUOTES:

• “The point is: what is the least amount of food I can eat to maintain muscle mass, maintain energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry? We, as a society, eat way too much food. And three meals a day is probably one meal too many.”
• “For decades, the mantra in the fitness and health community was to eat 5-6 small meals a day. That was probably the worst advice you could give a human being.”
• “Most of what happens that’s good in the body, happens when you’re not eating.”

LISTEN:

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B.Rad Podcast

Brad (1m 58s): Hey, it’s Brad Kearns to introduce a wonderful conversation with my main man, Mark Sisson down in Miami. And it is to discuss the launch of our new book Two Meals a Day. Just when we thought there was nothing else to say about healthy eating and supportive lifestyle practices, we always find something new to say. And I think the, the science, the user experience in the ancestral health movement continues to grow and refine. And so we learn more. We second guess things, we rethink things, and that’s, what’s wonderful about trying to stay on the cutting edge and especially maintain an open mind and think critically about the information that we’re presented with. Brad (2m 40s): My favorite recent example is the increasing popularity of the nose to tail carnivores style diet, to heal inflammatory and auto-immune conditions, lose excess body fat, increase nutrient density of the diet. But a few years ago it sounded like something wild and wacky. And as I relay a lot, I dismissed the idea when I was first approached by Danny Vega in 2017, he was talking about the great results he’d had eating only foods that came from a cow. I’m like, yeah, whatever dude. And now boy, we have to sit back, take a deep breath and be open to new information. So in this show, we talk about the convergence of some really great science and great work by the leaders in the movement. Brad (3m 24s): Robb Wolf, and his book Wired to Eat, talking about the hyper palatable foods, being the main culprit of excess body fat and metabolic dysfunction. Dr. Cate Shanahan has some great commentary in her new book, The Fatburn Fix, especially pointing out the, the, the huge role that refined industrial seed oils has in messing up healthy fat metabolism. And therefore, if you can’t burn body fat, you don’t do very well skipping meals fasting, and you end up defaulting back over to carbohydrate dependency. And then the breakthrough ideas from Dr. Satchin Panda author of The Circadian Code, the promoter of the time restricted feeding concept that when you eat is just as important as what you eat. Brad (4m 10s): And also just smashing that dated notion of calories in calories out. Of course, we’ve been talking about this for a while, but now when you’re looking at the research from Dr. Panda and the research from Dr. Herman Pontzer in his upcoming book Burn, where he studied the Hadza in Tanzania, the primitive living peoples and measured their energy expenditure and is promoting this total energy expenditure theory whereby humans have a ceiling on the amount of calories they burn every day. And then when they bump up against it, a bunch of adjustments and compensations take place, such that the idea of eating less food and exercising more does not really equate with fat loss. Brad (4m 53s): Like you think it would on your online calculator. So I’m setting this up because we talk about some of these insights during this fast moving conversation. But I want you to kind of have armed with a little bit of background before we get into it, and we turn it over to the interview recording. So boy, I think you’re going to love this book. It’s got all you need to succeed. If you’re deep into this scene and you’ve been eating this way and studying and reading the books for years, I think it’s going to bring some interesting new insights and help you make sense of a lot of the confusion and controversy that’s still out there. And if you are trying to motivate, inspire, encourage family, friends, and loved ones to embrace this ancestral movement, get rid of that nasty processed food that’s causing all the disease and dysfunction in modern life, this is a great book to hand to someone else because we really provide that big picture and it’s an easy read, and it helps you really kind of zone in on some big picture goals that are doable and sustainable. Brad (5m 55s): Like, you know, cutting back to just eating a couple meals a day, doing away with this surprisingly destructive habit of snacking and how that interferes with fat metabolism and increases insulin production. So here we go, listen to the Sisson. Enjoy our discussion about Two Meals a Day and you can get that book wherever books are sold, you can listen to the audio book. If you’re interested in 13 more hours of Brad Kearns talking your ear off. Ah, I love listening to audio books, lots of fun. And look at Two Meals a Day book.com. That’s spelled out Two Meals a Day book.com for all kinds of information and resources and bonus items if you take advantage of the pre-order promo, thanks a lot. Brad (6m 41s): Here we go with the show. It is time to discuss Two Meals a Day. All right, we’ve been at this now for 12 years, crank and hard cranking out books. And every time we finished a book, we say there’s really nothing more we can say about healthy eating and supportive lifestyle habits. It’s been there always seems to be something more to say, and with the, with the concept that we’re hitting on here, it feels like a real breakthrough at a great time because people are starting to get frustrated and confused. There’s too many fractioning and there’s disputed messages, and now we’re doing something that’s simple, sustainable for anyone, from whatever particular dietary preferences they have. Mark (7m 25s): Yeah. I mean, it’s a, you know, this is the natural evolution of our line of thinking, which goes back, you know, 20 years in my case. And then 12 years of writing books where we’re trying to hit upon, you know, not just an efficient way for one or two people in a crowd to experience your benefits, but something that, that can be overlaid and be used by just about everyone. And it started out with primal for us and primal was, was clearly a better way of eating because it eliminated some of the crap, right? So that was like, like phase one was just going back to a diet that we’re evolved to, to consume kind of are the sorts of foods that our guts are adapted to digest easily. Mark (8m 16s): So we got rid of grains. We got rid of the lectins. We got rid of the unnatural industrial seed oils, the processed sugars, and came down to real food and that worked great. And that’s, and that’s look, that’s a starting point for anybody. And then we said, okay, what’s the next level of this? Maybe it’s keto. Maybe it’s trying to, to get to a point where we eliminate carbs so much that we develop this ability to create ketones and offset the need for glucose and offset the need for eating carbohydrates on a regular basis. And it made a lot of sense. There was good research behind it in terms of neurological stuff, in terms of energy, in terms of, you know, it just in, in general terms, mostly the medical community was looking at ketosis as a, as a means of doing this. Mark (9m 9s): You know, and then we hit upon the concept of metabolic flexibility as kind of a Holy Grail. So it goes now from paleo to primal, to keto, to metabolic flexibility. And metabolic flexibility really kind of encompasses a lot of different ways of eating. But the end result is that you achieve this ability to derive energy from whatever energy substrate is available on your body, whether it’s the fat on your plate of food, the fat stored on your hips, or thighs the carbohydrate on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles or your liver, or the ketones that your liver makes in the absence of glucose. And so the metabolic flexibility term became kind of the main Holy Grail of what we were seeking over the past several years. Mark (9m 53s): And I’ve really emphasized the, the metabolic flexibility part of that. And metabolic efficiency and being efficient in how you generate energy and how you go through the day with, with a steady state of energy and not at the effect of hormonal swings and stuff like that. Then, you know, we, we looked at what’s the logical way to allow most of the world to achieve metabolic flexibility. Is it through keto? Well, that’s one way, but it’s also also through the sort of the smart use of fasting and intermittent fasting. And, and I think the term intermittent fasting has for a lot of people been, you know, maybe a little intimidating, right? Mark (10m 39s): Like, like fasting by itself is like a word that a lot of people would say, wait a minute, I, I, I don’t fast. I can’t go, I can’t skip a meal. Right? So intermittent fasting is a little bit of an easier term, but, you know, it’s still, it’s still a way in which we can go for longer periods of time without eating and, and use that as, as a way to develop metabolic efficiency and metabolic flexibility, regardless of the way of eating. So regardless of whether you’re a, you know, a vegan or vegetarian or a carnivore or keto or paleo or primal or ancestral or Weston A Price, or, you know, FODMAP or whatever, there, there are ways in which we can develop this, this metabolic efficiency, metabolic flexibility by using periods of time that we’re not eating. Mark (11m 26s): Right? And that’s really what got us to this concept of Two Meals a Day. Brad (11m 32s): So eating less frequently now turns out to be as important, possibly more important than nitpicking every single meal perfectly and maybe overdoing it and snacking all day on keto approved snacks. We see so many processed products. Now it’s kind of funny from the starting point where, you know, the, the science of ketone from, you know, starvation, and now it’s from a packaged snack that you, you too can join the weight club. Mark (12m 1s): It feels like the whole Keto movement has gone toward what’s the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight. What’s the most amount of keto approved snacks that I can consume. What’s, you know, the nut butters or the chocolates or the drinks or the, or the keto cookies or the keto cereals. I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re everywhere. And, and it, and it feels like that movement has gone again toward more on the side of, as I say, what’s the most amount of food I can eat and not disrupt my gut and not, and not, you know, gain weight and not feel guilty. And, and so keto foods become this sort of guilt, guiltless pleasure. Like they don’t have any sugar in there. Mark (12m 42s): You know, they have all these, these, you know, aspects of them that mimic the food that you wish you were eating, like keto, pancakes, and keto breads and keto, and all the stuff that we cater desserts. And it’s like, those are all the things that we really shouldn’t be eating in any context. So to try to make them up, as, you know, as, as a fake form of comfort food misses the point. The point is not what’s the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight and not be uncomfortable. The point is really, what’s the least amount of food I can eat and maintain muscle mass and maintain energy and not get sick. Mark (13m 23s): And most importantly not be hungry. And you find that it’s an amazingly small amount of calories and protein and fat and a little bit of carbs. Now, I’m not suggesting that it has to be a tiny amount, but I’m saying that that when you realize that we, as a society eat way too much food, and that probably three meals a day is one meal a day, too many, Brad (13m 54s): Not that big a deal only, only 33%, too many meals. Mark (13m 58s): Yeah. We’re coming off of decades of having done this compressed eating window, this, this intermittent fasting concept where we go from, you know, dinner one night to lunch the next day. And it’s, it’s a routine for both of us, right? It’s like, like I would never, almost never eat breakfast. Maybe if I’m on the road and it’s a different time zone or whatever, but I almost never eat breakfast, the morning meal, because I’m not hungry for it. I have all the energy I want. And I, and I, I trust that my body is going to get all the energy it needs from my stored body. That that’s the reason we have this amazing mechanism that stores excess calories as fat. Mark (14m 40s): The biggest issue throughout the last several decades has been, we’re really good at taking excess calories and storing them as fat. We really suck at taking those excess calories that are stored as fat and burning them off as energy, the way it was intended, the way we evolve, the way our genes expect us to do that. Brad (14m 58s): Yeah, because we keep snacking and eating and trying to control caloric intake and eating too little in some cases, but eating too frequently and throwing off this magnificent ability to, to pull from storage Mark (15m 12s): That’s a great example, you know, for decades, the mantra in the fitness community, in the health communities was eat multiple small meals throughout the day. Humans are grazers, we’re natural grazers. And therefore, you know, rather than eat three square meals a day, people were advocating carrying your little Tupperware thing around with, with the macronutrients proportioned, just so you know, 12 grams of protein and 20 grams of carbs in this. And some fiber and eating five or six small meals a day, never going two hours without eating. And it’s, it’s just crazy that how the pendulum swings back and forth and how that was probably the worst advice you could give a human being. Mark (15m 54s): It promoted hunger all the time. It, it promoted a, a high level of circulating insulin all the time. It promoted a higher carbohydrate intake in order to balance out the blood sugar all the time. It prevented the body from ever going into a mode where it was going to want to tap into stored body fat, to burn it for energy. It prevented the body from ever choosing to make more mitochondria, to burn fat and have more energy all the time. It had like zero positive impact, except that somebody in food science somewhere said blood sugar is the key and maintaining steady state blood glucose requires that you have insulin all the time. Mark (16m 44s): It could be the American Diabetes Association. I don’t know whoever it was that promoted this, but it’s, it’s this path down, which we have gone that has caused so much pain and suffering for so many people. And it’s about calorie control and portion control and, and sacrifice. And again, small meals and little Debbie snacks have a hundred, a hundred calories, you know, maximum. That seemed to be the, you know, again, like some cutoff magic cutoff point. And what we’re saying in this, in this new book and Two Meals a Day is this is ridiculous. Like most of what happens, that’s good in the human body happens when we’re not eating. And the more time you allow the body to repair itself, restore itself, burn off excess calories, upregulate enzyme systems that burn fat engage in autophagy which is basically cellular house cleaning, housekeeping and DNA repair. Mark (17m 40s): That really only happens in the absence of food and the absence of glucose in the absence of insulin. All these great things can happen when we get to a point where we’re comfortable eating two meals a day. And so we wrote a book about like, how does that happen? How do I get comfortable eating Two Meals a Day? And it’s kind of a joke because it becomes very comfortable. It becomes the most natural and comfortable thing that you could imagine. And if you understand that, that in only eating two meals a day, and in some cases, one and a half meal a day, and in some cases, one meal a day, you are benefiting your body. Mark (18m 23s): You’re, you’re enhancing your metabolic efficiency and metabolic flexibility. You’re enhancing your ability to sleep better at night. You are you’re, you’re shoring up your immune defenses, your immune system. You are probably engaging in some means of anti-aging strategy with the autophagy. It’s like, it’s such a, it’s such an all encompassing strategy to be able to, regardless of your way of eating, to be able to engage in this concept of two meals a day and using intermittent fasting, or as we like to say, intermittent eating as a strategy to, to completely change your health, completely change your body shape, completely morph into that ideal body composition that you’ve always wanted. Brad (19m 15s): Yeah, it kind of takes the pressure off too, because those of us interested in healthy eating and diet and performance and optimizing, we, we, it feels like we’ve been compelled to go looking for the perfect diet and the best foods and, you know, obsessing and stressing about it and putting these pieces together. And if you miss your super nutrition Acai bowl breakfast, well, you’re not going to get as many antioxidants that day. You better go looking for some pills to replace that. And now this stuff is now with science blowing it out of the water, validating that the human works best in the fasted state. The problem is if you have had a lifelong carbohydrate dependency paradigm, you’re going to feel like crap when you skip a meal. Brad (19m 57s): And if you’re reading in a book or watching a video or podcasts, people saying you work better in a fasted state, it’s not going to ring true. So you talked about that a little. Maybe we can move over to the, the manner in which to do this properly so that it’s graceful. It’s smooth. You feel fine skipping breakfast. You, you emphasize that point that you may be eating fewer calories when you get healthier. And that’s actually a good thing, but it’s, it’s all automatic. And by default, rather than this pain, suffering and sacrifice approach that we’ve been socialized to think is the way to go. Yeah. Mark (20m 30s): Yeah. You know, no, it’s, it’s very interesting that again, people tend to get caught up in an assumption that I need X amount of calories. Like I, I figured my BMI and I went and got my, my Harris, you know, score or whatever it was plug in the amount of activity I do and multiplier has Benedict equation, you know, 0.7 or 0.8. I can’t figure out what it is because some days I run 10 miles and some days I run six, you know, all these, all these different things are such minutiae and it’s so, so unimportant in the overall scheme of things. And yet people have tended to live and die by the numbers by calorie, counting by portion control by macronutrient, you know. Mark (21m 14s): This whole thing makes it, you know, does it fit your macros is, is another mantra that came out of CrossFit or whatever, with an assumption that it, this was all about calories in calories out. And it was really, you know, some, some simple balanced equation. It’s, it’s far more complex than that. But at the end of the day, we, we start to realize that the body is an amazing mechanism. It’s amazing machine. We, we start to think in terms, not of what’s going to happen if I miss one meal or what’s going to happen day to day, if I miss my macros, but we start to think more broadly in terms of trust that the body’s going to handle anything I give it today, and tomorrow, and the next day, whether it’s, you know, 40 grams of protein on a total of 1200 calories, or whether it’s 275 grams of protein and 3,500 calories. Mark (22m 12s): The body, once you become attuned to this way of eating, the body adjusts and the body, either stores or burns the fat, according to a long-term strategy. It has not a short term strategy. I mean, I remember back in the days when people would say, you know, I’m on the treadmill and I’m burning 450 calories on the treadmill so that I could eat an extra 450 calories tonight for dinner as if there is this balanced equation right down to the last calorie every single meal and every single workout. And this is not how it works, people. Mark (22m 52s): This is like the, again, we, in the book, we start to talk about maybe three and four and five day periods of time. Where if over the course of five days you get 575 grams of protein. I don’t care whether most of it came on one day or none of it came on another day. You really look in, in larger spans of time because the body is able to hold onto amino acids. It’s got an amino acid sink when you are fasted for any length of time. There’s an amazing upregulation of protein sparing systems in the body that allow you to recycle amino acids that you would otherwise have just deaminated and peed out because you ate too much protein one day and you know, not enough the next. Mark (23m 40s): So all these things come to come to play when you develop the skill. And the skill is being able to go longer periods of time without having to eat a meal and, and being comfortable in the process of doing because hunger ruins everything and anybody who’s ever tried to diet will tell you that. I mean, I can, I can only will myself to cut calories for so long until my hunger pangs take over. And my brain starts to go crazy with, with the idea that I’m going to starve and it’s, and it’s bad for me. So we can train the body to do that. And this is again, in the book, we talk about the way to stair-step yourself into a kinder, gentler way of going longer periods of time without eating. Mark (24m 24s): And setting yourself up for success and not failure in so doing. Surrounding yourself with sort of that kind of the, the healthier approved snacks that you can use to offset whatever hunger that is, or maybe it’s using a strategy of, of going for a walk instead of eating a snack and trying to engage in some form of exercise is going to promote some mobilization of fuel stores. There are lots of, lots of ways in which we can achieve this lifestyle of Two Meals a Day that ultimately that ultimately results in metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency. Brad (25m 8s): It was a pretty nice setup for the early part of the book. Maybe we can kind of navigate through the chapters and give the, the listener viewer a complete experience. But I think we, we hit those, those points pretty well. That’s not about calories in calories out. And I have to say our timing is pretty good because this convergence of science with Dr. Panda and the time restricted feeding and Dr. Pontzer with the amazing study of the Hadza. Tommy Wood and Robb Wolf been talking about this for a while. Now that Jason Fung has a lot of research in his books, too, that if you try to eat fewer calories and burn more calories, you won’t even lose weight. Mark (25m 47s): Yeah. Brad (25m 48s): And the Women’s Health Initiative proved this with tens of thousands of women agreeing and being very strict for a few years of eating 230 calories, less per day, and exercising 10% more. And the predicted calculation from the equations with that, they would each lose 32 pounds and they lost like 0.6. Nothing happened, right? The body adjusts by becoming lazier at rest, less motivated, maybe you’re foot tapping less as you’re as you’re working. And you’re just burning fewer calories, feeling more tired. There’s so many complaints. And we feel these emails from particularly a lot of females, their thyroid’s down-regulated, their adrenal function is down-regulated because they’re trying to go through pain, suffering, and sacrifice and control their meal portions and exercise too hard. Mark (26m 33s): Yeah. Brad (26m 34s): So I guess we can jump to the first step, which is to get rid of the crap. And this is also a wonderful scientific breakthrough that if you just stop eating the, the big three, we call them, you’re going to, you’re going to have an explosion of health and get way up there towards your potential. Mark (26m 52s): And I hope by now that most people realize that getting rid of sugar is like, you know, like task number one in any, in any eating strategy, in any plan that you have to, to, you know, regain health. Getting rid of as much sugar in your diet as you possibly can. And that’s, we’ve known that for a long time, but what a lot of people don’t recognize is how pervasive and insidious industrial seed oils are. So, you know, we’ve talked about this over the past several years, but corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, these highly processed oils, that, that are first of all, pro-inflammatory in nature for the most part. Mark (27m 34s): So they’re causing some, some manner of systemic inflammation in the body. They’re, they’re not easily combusted, so they’re not the kind of fats that are burned easily. But in fact, they’re incorporated into cell membranes and these are sort of dysfunctional molecules of Omega six fats or Omega nine fats that are, that are then interfering with the normal structure and function of an otherwise healthy cell. And, and people don’t get it because for the longest time, we’ve, we’ve been hearing the story that corn oil is heart-healthy, or that soybean oil is, is heart-healthy or that canola is heart-healthy. Mark (28m 15s): And, and, and they’re not. And so that’s another, you know, sort of misnomer fake news coming out of the eighties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, that we kinda have to overturn and tell people, look, if, to the extent that you can get rid of these industrial seed oils, you will be better off. And what do you replace them with is olive oil, extra Virgin olive oil, coconut oil, or avocado oil, butter, ghee, lard, you know, traditional sources of animal fats and things like that. Brad (28m 51s): Yeah, that’s a big one. Just, just to give the quick picture here, if you’re consuming these oils, it promotes insulin resistance because your fat metabolism is messed up. And so you’re going to kind of need those quick energy carbohydrates because you can’t burn fat well, so you’re going to eat those carbohydrates produce more insulin. And so we have sort of these, these, these distinct objectives to get rid of those process, carbohydrates, grains, and sugars, grains turned into sugars pretty quickly after you eat them, you’ve been the grain crusader for so long. And now the oils are really finally getting highlighted as you know, the big public enemy here. Yeah. Mark (29m 30s): Yeah. So if you get rid of the oils, you are, you’re more likely to be able to get rid of the processed grains because you won’t be as, you know, jonesing for them on a regular basis for that quick, that quick hit of blood sugar blood glucose. Brad (29m 45s): So if the, the enthusiastic agrees to do this, there’s different strategies. There’s different people, habits, behavior patterns, but it’s coming clear. At least I’m going to put this on YouTube is becoming clear that a really devoted restriction period for at least 21 days, like our book 21 -Day Transformation, you have to get these out of your diet to allow the fat burning genes to start up-regulating into, to make progress where if you try to cut back on sugar, the, the addictive properties of sugar, Dr. Robert Lustig talks about that in his book, Dr. William Davis and Wheat Belly, talking about the addictive properties of wheat products will, will suck you back in. Brad (30m 27s): They have, they have strong addictive properties, Mark (30m 29s): Right? Yeah. So, so this is, there’s no escaping the fact that you have to get rid of these things. It’s, it’s an elimination diet for 21 days at the very least, just to kind of reconfigure your metabolism. And it, it, it appears that although some of these changes take place in a shorter period of time, and some people will adapt within a few days or a few weeks. Three weeks is probably a, a good amount of time for it to really settle in and for the body to start to get, you know, used to fewer simple process carbohydrates. We’ll not be expecting these processed industrial seed oils and will be better attuned from having your, from your having eliminated sugars. Mark (31m 21s): For instance, the brain will say, look, I’ve, I’ve got to build the metabolic machinery to use ketones because there’s not going to be a source, a regular source of exogenous glucose coming in for my meals every two or three hours. And so the brain starts to get very comfortable burning the ketones. And by the way, the liver, you don’t ever have to have been in ketosis, and you never have to be, have been ketogenic to have a perfectly functioning liver that can crank out ketones all day long. They leave our liver can make 750 calories a day worth of ketones if it needs to. Now, most people would never even have anywhere near that requirement. But the point is almost everybody has the capacity to be producing ketones. Mark (32m 2s): What they don’t have is the, is the metabolic machinery and the, and the brain having gotten used to it. So that’s what takes a couple of weeks. That one takes it. That’s what takes about 21 days to start to reduce this carbohydrate dependency and start to become metabolically flexible so that the muscles are starting, starting to burn a little bit more fat and not so dependent on glucose or glycogen. So the brain is a little bit more used to burning ketones. And so when it’s low in glucose and blood sugar drops, there’s not an issue. But if you don’t do this work, and then you, you start to spend, you know, skip meals, that’s when you get the issues that people have complained about. That’s when you get the keto flu or the headaches or the wooziness because you haven’t, you haven’t methodically and systematically gone through a process that coaches the body into making the adaptations over time one day to the next. Mark (32m 54s): So that when you finally get to the point where you start talking about skipping a meal here, or extending the period of time where you’re not eating. It’s done with ease and grace. And it helps Brad (33m 5s): With that ease and grace to serve yourself some fabulous lavish high satiety, nutrient dense meals, so that we don’t have to struggle or suffer. And even if that includes consuming a lot of healthy nutrient dense carbohydrates, as you’re trying to transition over. And I think that’s the big mistake we’ve seen is carbohydrates are evil. Cut them out of your diet, go keto, fight through it. It’s really tough. You’re going to get the flu, but, but don’t worry. It’ll, it’ll go away soon. And that’s complete nonsense. So, I mean, I was one of those people when, when you took my cereal bowl away in 2008 and that my giant healthy grain granolas and non-fat yogurt and fruit, but I had a ton of carbohydrates every morning, dating back to my athletic days, my whole life. Brad (33m 50s): And that was my morning centerpiece. Well, I had betrayed that for a six egg omelet with avocados and salsa and cheese and veggies and bacon, and, Oh my gosh, it was delicious. But that, that meal sustained me for many hours. Now, a year later, I woke up many mornings, realize that I didn’t need to make this gigantic thing to stuffed down my face to get energy, but to make that transition gradual and graceful, as you say, it means, go ahead and enjoy healthy, nutritious foods. Yeah. We’ll talk later about your snacking habits, because the goal one day is to sit down to two delicious meals a day and not need the other things, but when those hunger signals come. Mark (34m 26s): Yeah. You know, and it’s not just when they come, it’s like, you know, we’re sitting here in my apartment where there’s a refrigerator, right over there, full of full of things that we could go grab a handful of. And, you know, and it’s nut butters and it’s paleo crackers. And there’s all kinds of like great tasting things that are they’re right there. And it’s just my brain saying, I don’t, I’m not hungry. I don’t, I don’t need the energy. Why would I, why would I want to do that? So that’s sort of what we have to kind of look at as well is how do we bypass that tendency to just mindlessly grab for a snack and because we could get away with it, or because we know it’s not going to in the overall scheme of things, it’s not going to be a, a massive deterrent to what we’re doing, but, but ultimately, as you say, if we can get to Two Meals a Day, which both, both of which are delicious and almost hedonistic, cause some of the recipes that we’re going to provide in the book are like outrageously lavish and, and sumptuous and you know, and tasty and, and satisfying and everything you want from a meal. Mark (35m 28s): I mean, look, I I’ve said this many times in many podcasts that I want everybody to food I ever put in my mouth to taste fantastic. So I’m not going to slam down, you know, a smoothie that’s made with kale and chia seeds because somebody told me it was good for me. It was full of fiber. If it doesn’t taste great, I’m not going to eat it. So that’s, that’s again, part of what we’re trying to do here is get to the point where we’re not beholden to these snacks and we’re not beholding to, you know, to the hunger, the, not even the hunger pangs, but the thoughts of hunger, like, Oh my God, it’s, it’s, you know, 1:30 and we haven’t eaten lunch yet. And isn’t it lunchtime don’t I need to eat lunch? And the answer is, no, you don’t need to eat any meal. Mark (36m 10s): Really. You don’t need to the fact that it’s there and it’s available and you can, that’s great. But, but I wanna, I really want people to get that intuitive sense that my body’s just going to be, you know, firing on all cylinders. I’m going to be driving energy from my own stored body fat. Even if like, you know, I’m 8% body fat, 9% body fat. I still have plenty of fat to carry me through a couple of days of not eating. I’m not going to not eat cause I love to eat. But I’m just saying, you know, I have the means to be able to do that. Brad (36m 40s): You could walk to key West with that amount of fat on your body. Mark (36m 43s): I definitely could. I won’t, but I, but I could. Brad (36m 47s): So there is some important discussion now of making good choices within the ancestral food categories. We’ve agreed to ditch the big three. And now we have the, the famous list from, from hunter gatherer times: meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, and certain modern allowances. But within those categories, we, I think we, and we spend a lot of time. So I mean, we can, we can breeze through that. Maybe you can focus on the, the animal foods, which are so vilified still today. And let’s say for good reason, if you look at the video of the pig farm, the undercover video of the, the nasty conditions, and then we’re, we’re looking at distinctions in the areas of the, the most neutral. Mark (37m 32s): Yeah. I mean, that’s a whole different discussion about the way, the way animals are treated in terms of raising them for food. And we object to concentrated animal feed operations, feedlots, and things like that. But you know, if you have a grass fed or pasture raised animal, that should be, in my mind, the major source of nutrition for, for everyone, whether it’s beef, pork, lamb, chicken fish, you know, all of those are like critical to human health. Now, if you’re a vegetarian and those are things that you don’t eat and maybe your next level of go-to would be, but I do eat some dairy products or I do eat some, some protein powders that are made with dairy whey, or maybe, you know, I eat eggs or cheese as which is what happened. Mark (38m 21s): Like my son, he, you know, he was a vegetarian his whole life, but he got a lot of protein from eating eggs and cheese and, and, and that sort of thing. So he’s, you know, lacto, OVO vegetarian. But, but so we would start with quality sources of protein. Cause I think this is really where food science has gone. And especially in this arena in the last year or two, you hear, you know, not just Paul Saladino and Sean Baker, but Robb Wolf talks a lot about protein and, and there, there are no more real restrictions on like too much protein. It really gets down to like, you know, what is, what is going to satisfy you at a meal? Really? You don’t have to overeat. Mark (39m 1s): You don’t have to undereat, it’s just like how much protein you want to have in a meal and going to feel satisfied and walk away from the table and go. That was great. And I feel awesome. And now I’m good to go until whenever the next meal is whether it’s in eight hours or whether it’s in 28 hours. So we start with the protein sources, most of which now have some form of healthy fats. So again, if you’ve got a pasture-raised animal, the fat profile in that animal is going to be better than a, than a, than a feedlot operation animal would be. If you’ve got a line caught in a wild salmon, you know, that fat profile that will make it three profile is going to be ideal. Mark (39m 41s): And then if you’re supplementing with, with some nuts or some avocado, and that that’s a healthy fat up, and then the oils butter, ghee and the sources of fat are all again, typically animal sources, but they can also be from, from some of the, again, extra-virgin olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil. And then we get down to the carbohydrate sources. And the carbohydrate sources, as we’ve said, could be, you know, ito some extent, unlimited amounts of vegetables, if you want eat a lot of vegetables as part of a meal, that’s fine with us. Mark (40m 21s): You know, that’s, that’s what I’ve been promoting them. You know, the big ass salad for 15 years now. So any, any sort of vegetables, although we make a joke that like name me 15 vegetables that you will eat next year, you know, you gotta, you kind of get hung up around it. Number 12 and number 13, cause it’s there aren’t that many. And then it’s like, if you want to supplement with a sweet potato or starchy, you know, some white potatoes, you know, purple potatoes, whatever. I don’t have a problem with that. For the longest time we, we eliminated legumes from The Primal Blueprint because we sort of were adhering to this notion that, that the lectins were problematic for everybody. Mark (41m 5s): It turns out the lectins are problematic for everybody they’re problematic for some people. So we started to let legumes back into the diet. So now I’ll go out to dinner. I’ll have some lentils once in a while, right? Brad (41m 17s): I’m glad I wasn’t. I’m glad I wasn’t that strict all along this journey because new information keeps coming the protein one and we’ve, we’ve written and talked about the dangers of consuming too much protein, stimulating IGF one and increasing your cancer risk. But a lot of this research is coming from lazy asses who are sitting around eating crappy food all day. And Oh my gosh, they got cancer and they had a high protein diet. So I kind of liked the reasonability that, that you’ve come to over the years and always emphasize that. And the, and the personal preference, that’s always been kind of your, your brand and your blog posts say, Hey, I’m not, I’m not afraid to change my mind. And we’ve had videos about your enthusiasm for the carnivore nose to tail movement. Brad (42m 1s): Same here, it’s captivating, it’s compelling. It’s something to test out and try out and constantly tweak and refine, hoping that we feel good along the way. But if you feel crappy along the way, while you’re trying something, something’s wrong with your approach, and those are words from the book like this should not happen. We do not want headaches, jitteriness, binge, backsliding, and all these things that indicate a flawed approach. Mark (42m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. So there, Brad (42m 30s): So there, and we you’ve talked some about that superfoods, but that’s kind of a fascinating new strategy is to go and look for the most nutrient dense foods on earth. They both, they often happen to be from the animal kingdom. And so there’s a little bit of a trend toward emphasizing those pasture raised eggs and grass fed steak, and maybe down emphasizing the giant piles of vegetables, especially if you’re a sensitive type. Mark (42m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like a lot of these different ways of eating that have emerged over the past two decades have tried to be as restrictive as they possibly could be and eliminate so many foods. And, and, you know, as you know, on the other hand, I’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible. So I’ve tried to include, even though I’ve recognized that certain types of food are problematic for a lot of people, as the research has, has improved, I’ve said, let’s, let’s maybe start to allow those in for people who don’t have an issue with them, whether it’s nightshades, you know, whether it’s foods that have so for fans or, you know, broccoli and cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, or whether it’s those high anthocyanin fruits like berries, you know, find, find a way to let them in. Mark (43m 47s): And then if they’re not problematic for you there, then I would not see a reason to exclude them. You know, we talk about the carnivore diet and the fact that in fact, our buddy Paul Saladino, who’s like, Nope, keep the, keep the vegetables away from me and keep the berries away from me. You know, that’s worth trying for a short period of time, I guess, if you want. But I don’t see that as a, as a way to live. I mean, like I get what he’s saying, but I’ll have, you know, I’ll have a cup of raspberries once in a while or a couple of blueberries because I liked them and they’re not problematic for me. Brad (44m 20s): Right. Yeah. And the enjoyment of the experience in itself contributes to a healthy diet. We have some commentary from Bruce Lipton, Biology of Belief. We’ve long been fascinated by work saying that your thoughts manifest your cellular function in your body at all times. So if you’re sitting down to a meal with a smile and that’s why we go to fine dining and get that full experience or watch the shows where the people are immersed in that if you, if you can become more connected to your food source, go to the farmer’s market, talk to the people, buy the ingredients, come home, prepare it. It’s a huge difference from sucking down the, the, you know, the horrible tasting smoothie like Joe Rogan reported to you and you, you challenged him on that. Brad (45m 2s): It tastes terrible, but I drink it every day. It’s like, wait a second. You know, we got to put that smile factor back in the game. Yeah, Mark (45m 10s): Sure. Yeah. So, you know, that brings us back to like, jeez, I mean, some people have, I dunno, lactose intolerance, so many people who think they have lactose intolerance have an intolerance to casein or, or, you know, A one casein, in fact, and specifically, and yet I love cheese, so I’m not going to exclude it from my, from my way of eating from my diet. And it’s, you know, I look at a lot of foods like that. So again, I’ve let legumes back in two part of my diet. On the other hand, I have now chosen from my own personal experience to exclude, I don’t eat a big salad that often anymore. It’s not something that, that appeals to me. Mark (45m 51s): And I realized, you know, when I thought my assumption early on, was it, it was the fiber, it was going to be good for me. I needed the fiber. And now I realized I don’t need the fiber because Brad (46m 1s): A lot of science behind that science, not just your personal peculiarity, but yeah. Mark (46m 5s): And I found, you know, I look back and I’m like, I had gas when I, when I, we did a salad, you know, and I thought, well, that’s normal and that’s the fiber. No, it’s not normal. And it shouldn’t be that way. And, and so, you know, I’ve, I’ve adjusted my own, eating my own personal eating template to account for this experiment of like eliminating certain things and then bring them back in noticing the effect that they had on me and then making an adjustment to my diet that way. Brad (46m 33s): Right. And, you know, we, we can engage in so much debate and contention and controversy, but you can say what you want to say about any of this stuff. If you’re suffering in some way, it behooves you to try some dietary strategies in attempt to heal. And one of the, one of the popular ones now is that the exclusion of plant foods and eating the, you know, not hard to follow because you’re eating these high satiety meals, and it might be a 30 day trip for you that does, it does a good benefit. And then you can reintroduce some of these foods that might be bugging you right now, or, or choose not to. But I feel like a lot of people are stuck not knowing that their baseline, which they report is good is actually not the pain. Brad (47m 21s): And they don’t even know what fantastic. It feels like the same with our exercise. Mark (47m 28s): Yeah, yeah, no, it’s, it’s interesting. You’re right. How people, how their pain and their level of tolerance adjust over time. So, so that, and this, this sort of a good news, bad news situation, but you know, once you clean your diet up and you realize how good you can feel, and you realize how much energy you have by going periods long period of time, without eating and or longer periods of time without eating and how much and how much you maintain muscle mass and how you don’t get sick because your immune system is enhanced. And your level of pain drops because you’re not systemically inflamed all the time. You, you know, you, you get into this wonderful zone of comfortability. Mark (48m 11s): And then if you go back to your old way of eating, then you really notice it. And that’s it. That’s the bad news. If you go back to the way it was, then you start to feel the bloating, the inflammation, the joint stiffness, and joint pain and things like that. But, but a lot of people are just oblivious because they’ve lived this way in this sort of pain look. I mean, when I was in my forties, I had arthritis in my fingertips and I thought that’s normal. That’s just, you know, it’s an artifact of being 47 or whatever it is. And it wasn’t until I gave up grains and the pain went away, then I thought, Holy smokes. I mean, this is, this is a revelation. Like what I was eating was causing a lot of my discomfort was eating, was causing my bloating and my IBS and my, and my arthritis in my hands and, and my sinus infections and my GERD and, and you know, a number of things that literally went away when I cleaned up the diet. Mark (49m 3s): Now, again, the bad news is like, I’ll give you an example. I had my wife and I were, we were at a restaurant down below here that serves an amazing pizza. We heard it was an amazing pizza. We didn’t know because we don’t eat pizza. So last week we said, let’s get a pizza. So we got a pizza and it was great. And then I paid for it the next day. You know? So, you know, you, you, when you clean up your act, you clean up your diet, you do hit a new level of awareness and a new level of, of comfort that you can get just as used to the new level of comfort as you got used to the old level of discomfort. You know what I mean? Brad (49m 43s): Oh, sure. And same with the hyper palatable foods. I mean, you know, you know, I, I’ve lived a lifetime filled with inhaling, all kinds of delicious stuff with the frozen yogurt trips and the hot fudge sundaes that I’d make myself. And even today, I love those popcorn binges sometimes where I’m like, this is great, cause I don’t eat that much. But I think if you can change from a habitual, now’s the eater to someone who really cares about and prioritizes their health and knows that, Hey, once in a while, we’re going to celebrate, we’re going to enjoy the heck out of it with full intention and awareness. And then go back to that baseline, which if you’ve been watching from earlier is a fasted state, then, then you’re, then you’re fine. Brad (50m 28s): Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we transition now with, with a deep breath into the mindset part of the book. And I think this is something that’s really meaningful to both of us because we’ve had the privilege of engaging with real life primal enthusiasts. And I’ve seen them come up to you at the conferences sometimes with tears in their eyes saying, “Mark. I’m trying everything. It’s not working. I’m frustrated, I’m in despair. What do I do?” Usually have a good Quip for them? Like nothing cuts you up like sprinting. But honestly there isn’t a lot beneath the surface here where there’s still the pain and suffering, not, not the type of bloating that you just described, but something with the mentality. Brad (51m 10s): And so I’ve, I’ve, I felt like we could talk about that and, and know that that’s an important part of the book and, and changing that mindset from that kind of self-critical person to a cheerleader who, you know, gives you that love and support you deserve as you strive to achieve a life transformation and a dietary transformation. Mark (51m 32s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I feel like so many people, you know, read the books and they intellectually get what they need to do and they make the lists and they stick to the lists and, and, but they don’t really go deep enough into the why into, you know, what it is that is prompting me to go off the rails when I do. What is it that’s causing me to, even though I was good all day long to hit the refrigerator at 9:30 watching TV? What are the, you know, what are the, the underlying emotions that are driving my tendency to, to sabotage my efforts, to clean up my act? Mark (52m 19s): When in fact I know it’s intellectually, I know it’s good for me. I’ve read that again. I’ve read the material. I know what to do. I just somehow don’t follow through, or I don’t know how to do it, or I don’t know, you know, what I can do that will give me, you know, the willpower or the strength to follow through on this. And that’s really an interesting area too, I think for everyone to look at, because, you know, we’ve had a lot of success over the years with people who’ve done the programs, primal blueprint, keto, reset, diet, and so on. But, you know, there are people who show up and say, I think I did everything, but I still have, I still can’t shed this weight. And I still can’t, you know, get to the point where I’m enjoying my life. Mark (53m 3s): Yeah. So you’re, you know, you you’ve led the way in this chapter a lot with some of the techniques and strategies. Why don’t you Brad (53m 11s): Well, that, that the insights from Bruce Lipton and also Deepak Chopra talks about this a lot where we’re arguably walking around just kind of unconscious or operating from flawed subconscious programming that largely gets programmed in childhood. And if we get these these messages and carry them with us throughout our life, even though we might be in denial in a lot of ways, and that’s, what’s fascinating for me, you know, trying to, trying to go back. Did I have a lousy childhood? No, my mother and father were great. They were nice to me. They thought I was cool, but we walk around with stuff underneath the surface that we’re not really conscious of how profoundly it affects our behaviors and our choices. Brad (53m 51s): One of them, especially in the, in the health enthusiasts scene is this sense of feeling undeserving. And that you have to torture yourself with excessive exercise, to the point of exhaustion and food deprivation or, you know, spinning out because you weren’t perfect on your diet. So now you’re a sponsored by Ben and Jerry’s all of a sudden just because you’re, you’re not perfect. And I see those patterns come up and we know from being in the endurance team, we should probably look at, look in the mirror ourselves and like, what the hell are we doing torturing ourselves like that to run a faster time for a marathon who wants to run a marathon anyway, it’s too far. Mark (54m 27s): Yeah, well, we, you know, we, we were operating under a mindset that more was better. That, that if you did, if you weren’t willing to hurt, by the way we, we were in a, in a, a unique field of sports, which was not about having fun and playing a game and enjoying it with a teammate. It was about managing discomfort. So what you and I did for 20 to 30 years was go out and train to manage discomfort, whether it was doing a 20 mile run or 120 mile bike ride, or, you know, 40 sets of 200 in the pool or whatever it was, it was always about managing discomfort. And, and, and, and so that mindset, you know, has served us well. I think it served me well as, as a competitor, because with that mindset, when you show up that day to the line to start that race, you are lined up with 20 other guys who were equally as trained as you. Mark (55m 16s): Equally, probably as genetically gifted, who want it as much as you do, and really that day. And I know you’ll, you’ll, you’ll agree with this. that day. The race comes down to who is willing to manage pain to the greatest depth so that everyone else around them collapses, right? Well, what kind of life is that right? What kind of life is that? And that was just why for the last 20 years, whenever I work out, I play games. You know, I I’m paddling with dolphins, I’m playing Frisbee with my friends. I’m, I’m fat biking on the beach, on the sand it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s a whole different world for me now that I’m having fun doing it. Brad (55m 55s): I just spots were Archer. So it was mostly fun to get out of the really deep sand, believe them. And today we’re going to fill Mark Sisson someday on this workout. It’ll rock your world. You can’t believe it, Mark (56m 8s): But the mindset, which, which is to beat yourself up, that’s, that’s a pervasive mindset that you don’t have to be an endurance athlete to have that same mindset of beating yourself up. Like, like, you know, this isn’t going to work unless I suffer is one of the, is one of the standard mindsets. Unless I make myself suffer, this isn’t going to work. There’s no way this process of developing metabolic flexibility can be enjoyable. It just can’t be right. And so the mindset, then you prove it right. Then you just prove it, right. You make it difficult for yourself. So there are some strategies about how to, you know, how to like lighten up a little bit and how to, you know, view, you know, how to, how to keep against snacks, you know, at close at hand. Mark (56m 49s): So if, if, if you start to derail yourself or go off the, you know, go off the deep end, you can do that. Or how to just take a break and go outside and, and, and meditate, or if you’re at work and you’re feeling hungry, how to leave and do a micro workout and just do a mini workout that not only takes your mind off the hunger and actually accomplishes a workout for the day. And it it’s, it starts to process of your body creating renewed energy, because it has to, it has to get the energy from somewhere. So there’s, there are all these, there are a lot of these strategies that we talk about that are again, designed to make this process one of enjoyment and ease and grace, and not this, this arduous tasks that I have to get through. Mark (57m 32s): And somehow on the other side, when it’s over, you know, I’ll have lost all this weight. This is really about reprogramming yourself with a mindset for the rest of your life to look at every time you eat in every meal, as pleasurable, enjoyable, certainly fueling up, but not something to feel guilty about or obsess over or, or worry about or a hunger for or anything. You know, it’s like, I don’t, I don’t know quite how to describe it other than it’s an intuitive realization that we come to, the food is awesome. And when I eat it, I enjoy the hell out of it. Mark (58m 13s): And when it’s not there, I don’t even think about it. Brad (58m 16s): Yeah. You’re operating from a position of gratitude. Yeah. And the research has become a popular topic now, Dr. Robert Emmons and our boy, Ben Greenfield wrote his gratitude journal. You hear the term coming around. And I, I, I appreciated some of your posts about this, where, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s easy to kind of acknowledge that in passing, but then when you actually sit down with a journal and write with your hand things you’re grateful for and, and making that exercise, or, I mean, a lot of people say grace before they eat a meal, maybe I should, you and I should start doing that. We forgot today, but something in there where you, you remember how, how much of a privilege it is to be able to eat a delicious meal. Mark (59m 2s): Absolutely. Brad (59m 3s): You know, mindlessly shutting through your, your house, wolfing something down. Right. Mark (59m 7s): You know, or to be able to do a workout pain-free or, you know, have gratitude for those little things that you, that you do tend to take Brad (59m 15s): Looking at your time going, damn, that was a crappy workout today. No such thing. Yeah. Mark (59m 21s): Yeah. You showed up, Brad (59m 24s): well, you you’re a fan of Jack Canfield. I know you went to one of his masterminds and had that life-changing what was it a weekend retreat or something? Yeah. So we cook little plugs for him in there, and these turnaround statements, which is such a cool thing where you identify this area where you’re struggling and, you know, make a, make an actual statement and repeat it. I believe it’s several times a day for 30 days to make it stick. And I know you’re big on the, the manifesting world and your wife’s in the spiritual psychology. And it’s, it’s part of the scene here. And maybe we can just mention that a little bit, how, you know, you’re ready to change. You want to change it. Brad (1h 0m 5s): It makes sense what we’re saying or what you’re reading, and then to actually execute and put those concrete steps into place. How important that is for the human brain to, to redirect and wire new pathways. Okay. That’s it, as simple as that, no, you said it read about those turnaround statements. People pretty fun. Yeah. And I’m, I’m guilty of reading something and saying, I got this. That’s not, that’s not a problem for me. I’m, I’m disciplined enough. I don’t have to worry about overdoing it with my workouts. Well, wait a second. How come I keep overdoing it with my workouts? I’m telling people all the time, not to, because there’s too much fun out there and I get too pumped up. But all of these areas where we have room to progress, take, take the steps, you know, take some ticks and baby steps and make a commitment to really execute it rather than paying lip service to it. Brad (1h 0m 54s): And that’s a really nice transition into the next section of the book about lifestyle and sleep is the number one most important thing. And I can’t, I don’t think I’ve met anyone that doesn’t nod their head and acknowledgment. Oh yeah. Sleep is so important. And yet it’s probably one of the biggest major disconnects of modern life. Mark (1h 1m 11s): First thing, they drop out. First thing that goes when they’re, when they’re making their schedule is, well, we don’t need, I don’t need nine hours of sleep. I get by on seven and a half ish. Sleep, as we said from the beginning in the first book, we wrote sleep is the single most overlooked opportunity to, to reaccess health, whether it’s mental health, whether it’s restorative health, whether it’s a recuperation from, from an illness, whether it’s just keeping your sanity about you, sleep is an important part of any health program. And when I people’s asked me how much sleep do you get out? Mark (1h 1m 53s): I, well, you know, sometimes eight, sometimes nine, sometimes nine and a little bit more. And I don’t apologize for that. I’m like, I’m proud of it. You know, some people are like, you know, they brag about getting four or five hours of sleep a night. I brag about getting eight or nine, you know? Okay. Brad (1h 2m 13s): Yeah. I feel better now, what do you get it in the winter time? I, I I’ve, I’ve noticed more lately, I guess, living in Lake Tahoe and having a true winter that I probably have an extra hour sleep tagged on. This great book called Lights Out, Sleep, Sugar and Survival by Formby and Wiley, are talking about that disparate need for sleep based on the seasons and the, and the length of light and the summer, we can get away with less sleep and more activity, even more carbohydrate calories. And then the winter, we need to respect that shift. Even know we have 24 seven lighted summertime, like environment now, but yeah, sleeping, sleeping more in the winter and I’m hitting that nine hours and not feeling like waking up except for crap. Brad (1h 2m 58s): You know, I got nine hours. That’s gotta be enough, but I think not everyone can do this. Maybe more people now with the changing economy and society, Covid: forget that alarm and sleep what you need to sleep. And the research is really strong saying, you know, go to sleep at the same time every night. There’s no makeup, there’s no makeup. Mark (1h 3m 17s): No, it isn’t. I mean, if I stay out late, which is rare, but if I do, I get up the same, the same time, then the next morning that I would normally get up, I can’t sleep in, I can’t stand it. And so, so for me, regular sleep time has been a critical component. Usually it’s 10:30 to seven is like my, like my, you know, my, my guardrails. Yeah. And the sleep environment. Right. So I sleep on a chilly pads. The surface of my bed is 65 degrees. The room temperature is 68 degrees. I have a heavy cover on top. I sleep on a firm mattress. In fact, my, my wife and I, you know, we have a California King size bed. She likes a softer surface. Mark (1h 3m 58s): So she w she has a two inch thick foam pad on her side of the bed. And I’m, I’m on the stiff part of the regular mattress Brad (1h 4m 6s): and a different temperature chilly pad? Mark (1h 4m 8s): Oh my, she doesn’t have a chilly pad anymore. She just, she just sleeps. She sleeps, you know, warmer, but I need the, I need the coolness of the chilly pad. I need the, I need the, the, the coolness of the room I need, we have blackout curtains. I think that’s really important. I have white noise. So we have usually have a fan going all night long or an air conditioning unit going all night long, something like that that keeps the white noise going. Like I like my sleeping environment is so critical to me that when I’m on the road and I’m traveling and I like, I will move a hotel room because I couldn’t get the air conditioning fan to be a consistent noise. It would be, you know, we’d go pit a pit, a pit, a pit, a pitter, whatever. Mark (1h 4m 49s): So, so it’s really critical. I think it’s certainly for me, but critical for most people to have a really good sleep environment so that the whatever amount of sleep you get, seven, eight hours is, is quality sleep. Brad (1h 5m 1s): Yeah. And then like that research talking about no clutter in the bedroom and how looking at a pile of unfinished work or an unfinished home improvement project, merely looking at it will trigger a cortisol, spike, a stress hormone response that you’re not even aware of that tomorrow. Yep. Mark (1h 5m 19s): Yep. Yeah. And then we don’t watch TV at all in the bedroom. So even though we could, there’s a bedroom, I mean, a bedroom, there’s a TV there, you know, we make sure that the show it’s actually covered up by, by curtains now. But yeah. So that’s, I mean, again, sleep is a very, very critical component of, of this. I think people realize that by now, Brad (1h 5m 41s): We also talk about rest, recovery. Mark (1h 5m 44s): Yeah. Brad (1h 5m 44s): rejuvenation in general. And in particular, the age of the mobile device, not giving our brains any time to rest and relax. And you know, here, we’re near you, we’re near your balcony where you could sit out and look over the beach and watch the boats come through. Yeah. And I enjoy that change of scenery. It’s really, really cool. And I realized you could just sit here and watch the world go by. And it would be enjoyable and incredibly soothing. And we used to do that in decades past now, now we’re like this. Mark (1h 6m 15s): Yeah. People used to sit on their porch and watch and watch, especially Brad (1h 6m 20s): What Mark’s talking about is a porch is a thing in front of your house. Mark (1h 6m 24s): There was a chair that had a curved piece of wood underneath it, and it would rock back and forth and people would sit on that chair and they’d widdle. They, they, and they, and they’d have conversations and people don’t do that anymore. Yeah. They have conversations, but it’s like, you know, with their thumbs. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the, this digital device, you know, addiction that we have gets more and more at hand in my mind. And it’s, it’s really gonna have to come to a head at some point, because the disconnect with, with people today, you know, you go to a, an event with eight people sitting around a table and they’re all on their devices. Mark (1h 7m 4s): It’s just crazy, you know, it should be having a glass of wine and chatting it up. And they’re just busy with that. So, yeah. So we, you know, we obviously talk a fair amount about, about how to address the, this addiction we have with devices and how to allocate time and go on a device diet for a short period of time. Brad (1h 7m 26s): Love it. Yeah. And of course, we’re talking about the usual that Primal Blueprint followers are familiar with the exercise laws of moving frequently, lifting heavy things, sprinting once in a while. And today it seems like they’re more and more validated by breaking science and this important emphasis now on just moving more as probably the number one health objective beyond going and doing a devoted workout regimen where you’re sweating in the gym. Mark (1h 7m 57s): It’s crazy. I mean, you know, the first move around a lot at a low level of activity or aerobic activity, that was a Primal Blueprint law, number three, I think. And, and, and that’s really what is the science is showing now that you don’t have to do, you know, you don’t have to count your calories. You don’t really have to where, you know, a device to show you how many steps you took. It’s just about moving through time and space. It’s just about the movement throughout the day. It isn’t about burning calories or, or, or, you know, sweating or any of this stuff. It’s about the movement. And then you and I have, have helped to pioneer this concept of micro workouts and these small little breaks that you take. Mark (1h 8m 38s): So, whereas you normally might’ve said, well, I don’t have 45 minutes to go to the gym Brad (1h 8m 42s): And there’s no parking in the lot, usually. Mark (1h 8m 45s): Yeah. I don’t have exactly 20 minutes to drive 10 minutes to look for parking five minutes to get changed. 45 minutes to an hour to do my workout, drive home, take a shower, all that stuff. No, you, the idea behind these workouts, these mini workouts, these micro workouts is you can take that 45 minute workout and do it in little bursts throughout the day, and have accumulated a workload that would have been an equivalent of going to the gym and doing all this, except you’re doing it on your time. You’re doing it in breaks in between phone calls or, you know, moments of inspiration if you’re writing and, and you don’t sweat because you’re not spending enough time to, to actually do it to sweat, but you’re doing the work. Mark (1h 9m 26s): And the work is manifesting itself in strength and power and range of motion and mobility and all the things that we are looking for when we work out. Brad (1h 9m 34s): I think the best thing for me in my, in my older age group now is that you’re kind of flying under the radar in terms of the, the risk of fatigue, breakdown, and burnout. So I’m doing these difficult workouts. And when you do a micro workout, you know, it takes a minute or two minutes, and it’s not, you’re not at risk of over-training from that. Like you would be if you were in this gym pattern where you’re meeting with your trainer and they’re killing you for an hour and 15 minutes, Mark (1h 10m 3s): And it, it, it, you’re literally giving your, you know, your mindset to them. And you’re saying, I give up, I don’t have any say in this workout, I paid you a lot of money. You got to drag me through this workout regardless of how I feel right. Versus, and that’s, that’s happens in the gym. And it happens with whether, if you have to train or have training, buddy, if you’re in a group and it happens a lot in groups, in group training where there’s bootcamps, or, you know, CrossFit stuff where you’re like, got to keep up with the group versus, you know, the ability to self monitor and do a micro set or a mini set, and then just sort of take a step back and go, how did that feel? That felt great. Okay. Can I do another one, or can I do another one in 10 minutes? Or, or was that sufficient for today? Mark (1h 10m 46s): And what was the last thing we just, I just read like four seconds, four seconds of all out anaerobic activity as a sprint was just as effective as some huge event. Ed Coil out of Texas, just, just, just published just a few days ago, like four seconds of full on anaerobic, you know, all out activity, punctuated by a few minutes of rest and then doing it again a couple of times is really all you needed to, to generate prompt the kind of changes in testosterone growth, hormone output in, you know, myocin, you know, muscle fiber development and all these, all these other things. Mark (1h 11m 27s): So it doesn’t take a lot of work. And I think just as we’re saying, it doesn’t take a lot of calories and a lot of, you know, other, a lot of food to keep you going and keep you energetic and, and, and, and, and healthy throughout your life. It doesn’t take as much as you thought it doesn’t take as much exercise to be fit, as you thought, right. We want to move as much as possible. Yeah. Brad (1h 11m 50s): Walk around. But that, that in between area that you call chronic cardio is now proving to be an incredible disaster and an epic fail when it comes to body composition. And yeah, these, these short bursts, I have the CAROL bike. It’s an indoor stationary bike, and the workout is eight minutes long. And the guy on the, on the website, he’s wearing a suit doing this workout because you don’t sweat if it’s less than eight minutes, but you do two 20 second all out sprints where you’re trying to maximize your wattage. And it’s tough. And it’s all, it’s all I want to do. And, you know, sitting on a stationary bike for longer than that, you get bored after riding so many miles. Yeah. Mark (1h 12m 26s): I go to the gym to read, to read a book when I’m riding a bike. Oh, I happened to be re I happened to be riding a bike, but I mostly do it to catch up on my reading. Yeah. Cause it’s so boring to do that. So we should probably, yeah, Brad (1h 12m 38s): We got a good trip through the book here. It ends with some really cool stuff. Like the advanced strategies for people who have really made a lot of progress and then want to want to, want to cut up further and get that, get that dream body going. One of them’s cold exposure, which you and I are big fans of fan love a whole nother episode about that probably. But that’s a nice package, especially for people that may be familiar with Mark’s Daily Apple and what we’ve been talking about for a long time. There’s a lot of fun, fun juice in here. That’ll get you excited. But I think also, especially, you know, if you are a big enthusiast and you’ve been doing this and you’ve changed your life from, from primal living, giving this gift to someone, you know, on the fringe, family, friends loved ones. Brad (1h 13m 23s): It’s very, user-friendly in that sense because we’re not diving into this caveman style whole or keto craziness. Mark (1h 13m 30s): That’s right. It’s somewhat, it’s somewhat agnostic in terms of the way of eating. It’s mostly about how to achieve this metabolic flexibility, using the strategy that that literally relies on the programming that we have in our genes and every one of us. And that’s always been the beauty of what we talk about in our books is how do we tap into this, this power that we all have this super power that we have to achieve excellent health by figuring out the right ways to eat when to eat, how to move, how to sleep. And I think you really enjoy this book. I’m very proud of this book. It’s like it is the culmination of the 15 years that we’ve been working together two Brad (1h 14m 11s): Two Meals a Day. Thank for watching, listening. Thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support. Please email podcast@bradventures.com with feedback, suggestions, and questions for the Q and A shows. Subscribe to our email list to Brad kearns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful bi monthly newsletter edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with Apple podcasts or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. Brad (1h 15m 1s): It helps raise the profile of the B.ad podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called Overcast allows you to actually record a soundbite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much for spreading the word and remember B.rad.

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