In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Dr. Mark Wojtowicz to talk about his new book, The Primal Blueprint, and how it can help you live a longer, healthier life. Mark is a world-class triathlete, an author, a scientist, a podcaster, and a public speaker. He's also the author of a new book called "The Primal Blueprint: How to Live a Longer, Healthier Life" and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. We talk about how he got started in his career, why he created the Primal Blueprint and why it's one of the most important things you can do to improve your health and longevity. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to know how to be a better version of themselves and how to get the most out of their day-to-day lives. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please tweet me and tell a friend about it! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How to live longer, better, healthier 4:30 - What is a healthy life? 6:40 - How can I be strong, lean, fit, and healthy? 7:20 - How do I live longer? 8:00- What is the best for my health? 9:15 - What can I do to be more active? 10:00 11:30- What s a healthy lifestyle? 12:15- How do you know what to eat? 13:30 14: What s the best way to eat and exercise? 15: How I got here? 16:40- How I m going to get better? 17:20- What kind of food I should I eat and drink? 18:20 19:15 21:40 22:30 What s my favorite thing to eat & exercise 26:00 My favorite meal 27:00 What s your favorite meal? 26 - What do I m eating and how do I need to eat for a good night? 29:00 Can I lose weight? 32:00 How much water? 33:00 Do you like it? 35:00 Should I eat more? 36:00 Is it better than that? 37:30 Can I eat a balanced diet?
00:00:26.000It seems like, oh, well, this makes like eat lots of animals, insects and plants, move around a lot at a slow pace, lift heavy things, run really fast.
00:00:35.000But what you've done essentially is created a guideline for optimizing your health and your body.
00:00:41.000Yeah, I've always wanted to be healthy from a really early age, like 12 or 13, and read a lot of books, wanted to do the right thing, tried to figure out the hacks before they were called hacks,
00:01:00.000You know, I was doing a lot of running because aerobics was supposedly going to make you live longer.
00:01:03.000I was eating complex carbohydrates and a ton of them in order to fuel the aerobics.
00:01:08.000I became a pretty good endurance athlete, but I fell apart as a result of the training and the result, it turns out, of the diet.
00:01:17.000So the diet was very pro-inflammatory, as we say.
00:01:20.000So I started doing research into the ways in which I could re-access this health that I was seeking from the early age and not fall apart and not be decrepit and beat up.
00:01:33.000And this became my mantra, is how can I be strong, lean, fit, and healthy with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, Discipline, calorie counting, portion control, and everything else.
00:01:45.000And where it led me was down this path of looking at human evolution and how we got to where we are today, how we derived this genetic recipe that we all have that wants us to be strong and fit.
00:01:59.000Combining the research only in the last 10 or 15 years with the modern genome and sequencing the genome and figuring out the actual mechanism of how lifestyle behaviors and foods and sun exposure and sleep turn genes on or off.
00:02:15.000And they can turn on genes that make us strong and build muscle.
00:02:19.000They can turn on genes that burn fat more efficiently than, say, glucose.
00:02:24.000They can turn off genes that cause us to be moody and depressed.
00:02:26.000Turn off genes that might predispose us to To get cancer.
00:02:30.000And what I arrived at was a sort of a simple set of guidelines, these 10 primal blueprint laws that not ironically emulate human nature and human behavior for the first two and a half million years of our existence.
00:02:44.000So the genome was forged in this crucible of Eat plants and animals, avoid poisonous things, move around a lot at a low-level activity, sprint once in a while, lift heavy things.
00:02:58.000Every human that ever lived up until 10,000 years ago did that every single day, and that's how those genes got passed along to the next generation to become us.
00:03:08.000Where we've screwed up is in the last, certainly in the last couple of hundred years, but starting 10,000 years ago with agriculture, We went from being hunter-gatherers and moving around a lot to being sedentary and sitting in one place and eating processed foods.
00:04:45.000Palatable to most of the athletes who were training.
00:04:49.000They certainly weren't palatable to the coaches who had been invested in training a certain way, putting in a lot of miles, eating lots of carbohydrates, managing glycogen throughout an event, which meant not only carbohydrate loading the night before a race, but seeing how many gel packs you could slam down in an hour to keep the sugar burn throughput going.
00:05:09.000And that's certainly what My generation of athletes wound up depending on, and we all trained that way, and it was sort of counterintuitive to think that you could learn how to burn fats much more efficiently, that you could possibly go faster by going slower under certain circumstances,
00:05:27.000that you could spend time in the gym doing heavy weights And have that manifest itself in better endurance.
00:05:36.000So these later sort of developments that come out of the laboratory and come out of the clinical studies, you know, they were sort of interesting to the people who are reading them, who knew how to read the studies, but it didn't make it into the mainstream training mechanism.
00:05:52.000What was the science based on where people had used carb loading and using all those gel packs and eating a lot of pastas and stuff?
00:06:06.000That came from studies that go back into the 30s and 40s, but it was basically this notion that the body needs to burn glucose to go fast, that it It was assumed that you couldn't burn fat at a high rate of throughput.
00:06:24.000And if you couldn't burn fat, then the only thing you could do was manage your glycogen.
00:06:28.000Those muscles can store 400 or 500 grams of glycogen max, which is only enough to run 20 miles, let's say.
00:06:38.000And if you couldn't, so you had to learn how to manage that glycogen so you didn't deplete it in a marathon, for instance, so you'd hit the wall at 20 miles.
00:07:24.000He was the source that everyone cited for decades when it came to carbohydrate intake and glycogen management and all of the things that had to do with fuel partitioning during an endurance event.
00:07:38.000And about five years ago, He looked at the research, partly because he'd been a runner himself.
00:07:47.000He'd been employing the same strategy of carbohydrate intake and carbohydrate management, but he was a type 2 diabetic.
00:07:54.000He had become, despite his training, a type 2 diabetic.
00:07:57.000I think his uncle and his father had died as type 2 diabetics.
00:08:02.000So he, you know, he got the fear of God put in him, and he started to reevaluate the research, and he literally had an epiphany.
00:08:09.000He goes, oh my God, I'm the guy that's been promoting this way of training for decades, and now I have to completely change my opinion on it and say, what I told you was wrong.
00:08:22.000The body is developed and was designed to be a great fat burning machine and not rely so much on carbohydrate and not rely so much on glycogen or glucose.
00:08:32.000And the guy is taking so much shit for it in South Africa.
00:08:38.000They're trying to run him out of the country.
00:09:00.000I've been telling you the wrong thing, and I'm willing to basically follow my sword and tell you that, because this new revelation is the truth.
00:09:11.000Well, that's how it's supposed to be, right?
00:09:12.000I mean, that's what science is supposed to be.
00:09:14.000It's not supposed to be relying on this bad information just because you've taught it to people.
00:09:19.000It's supposed to be you find the new data.
00:09:21.000The new data doesn't correspond with the old data.
00:09:39.000They're just theories and opinions going forward.
00:09:41.000And if you're a scientist who's had an investment in your life's work being one way, you're going to defend that position, even sometimes in the face of new information.
00:09:53.000That really becomes a huge issue when they deny information just because it's bad for their ego or just because it's bad for their career.
00:09:59.000And they could just, I mean, he can, I'm sure, have just kept his mouth shut and just coasted and everything would have been fine.
00:10:06.000Well, it would have been fine for a while, but the corner had been rounded.
00:10:11.000I mean, enough other scientists had started to look at this, and he cited me as one of his influences in helping to turn that corner.
00:10:21.000But here's a guy, he was reading my blog posts and sort of I think we're good to go.
00:10:45.000The less sugar we burn in a lifetime, probably the better off we are.
00:10:49.000So, for the longest time, when people were doing all this carbo-loading and when they were just following the old methods, They were creating extra inflammation because of this food.
00:11:04.000I mean, when you're talking about simple carbohydrates, pastas and bread and such, they cause inflammation, correct?
00:11:33.000The ankle swells up because water accumulates there.
00:11:36.000The cells are being partly protected by the water.
00:11:39.000White blood cells rush to it to try and...
00:11:44.000Assess the damage and repair some of the damage.
00:11:47.000There's a long process where the localized temperature of the air is raised.
00:11:54.000All of this is contemplated to deal with a short-term insult that hopefully, over time, it repairs.
00:12:02.000In many cases, it repairs even stronger than it was before.
00:12:05.000You know, you break a bone and sometimes where it broke is stronger.
00:12:09.000Or a callus is an example of a stronger skin from having been irritated.
00:12:16.000The same sort of process happens if you get a bacterial insult, if you get a microbial insult.
00:12:24.000You get infected with somebody, something, and maybe by somebody.
00:12:30.000And there's a reaction to that infection, and it may happen in the bloodstream.
00:12:36.000If the bacteria goes into the bloodstream, then there's a response to that, which is an inflammation, an inflammatory response.
00:12:46.000And by the way, a lot of this happens as a result of genes within cells being turned on or off based on signals they get from their immediate environment.
00:13:59.000Refined grains can have that response.
00:14:01.000Sometimes even whole grains because of the – there's portions of the grain that we say are natural, but they're actually – They're slightly toxic to the body.
00:14:13.000The industrial seed oils that are pervasive in our diet, that would be corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, all of these can have the effect of causing a systemic inflammation or systemic inflammatory response in the body.
00:14:30.000And a lot of times, you'll look at the biggest loser, and you go, God, that dude lost 25 pounds the first week.
00:14:43.000Because by eliminating the pro-inflammatory foods, the inflammation, the systemic inflammation that was causing them to carry literally 30 or 40 or 50 pounds of excess water...
00:14:54.000That cause of inflammation goes away and the water goes away.
00:15:28.000They're retaining water as a result of an inflammatory response the body is having.
00:15:32.000So, where we went to that from training, I don't know how we got down that road, but the idea of eliminating these pro-inflammatory foods...
00:15:49.000Arthritis in my feet at the age of 27, 28. Just from all this hard running and biking?
00:15:55.000And from the diet, because I had this systemic inflammation.
00:15:58.000I had this diet that was promoting an inflammatory response throughout my body, not just in the ankle that I might have just twisted or whatever.
00:16:07.000I had arthritis in my hands when I was...
00:16:14.000Even after I'd cleaned most of my diet up into my 40s, I had arthritis in my hands or my fingers that I thought was just a normal artifact of getting old.
00:16:23.000And the last thing that I eliminated from my diet was grains, which I found were a huge cause of issue for me.
00:16:31.000When I got rid of grains, the arthritis in my fingers went away.
00:16:50.000I got rid of—I had irritable bowel syndrome most of my life, and I thought it was because I was a type A, stress-laden individual that couldn't handle it well.
00:16:58.000And that—literally, that IBS had run my life.
00:17:28.000And that was a real epiphany for me to realize that if I had made—I'm basically a researcher, and if I had done all the research and still defended my right to eat grains in the face of the research I was doing, how many tens of millions of people You know,
00:17:47.000And I don't want this to be an anti-grain crusade today, but I'm sort of suggesting that a lot of what happens to us in life, certainly a lot of the root cause of illness or the beginning etiology of disease,
00:18:03.000has deep roots in what we eat, or sometimes more importantly, what we don't eat.
00:18:09.000One of the things you said I think that's really fascinating is turning genes on and off.
00:18:15.000And for most people like me who don't have a background in medical science and don't necessarily understand genes, the idea of genes being turned on or off by lifestyle, by dietary choices, things along those lines, just doesn't make any sense to people.
00:18:30.000They go, well, no, no, no, you got your genes, so you don't got your genes.
00:18:33.000You either got red hair or you got big feet and that's genetic and that's it.
00:18:43.000You know, and then we just grow and we have our eyes and we're doomed to be 50 pounds overweight because our parents are or we're doomed to get breast cancer because our mother did.
00:18:53.000Genes are at work every second of every day, rebuilding, renewing, regenerating, recreating us based on the signals that they get.
00:19:03.000So genes are these little switches that cause the production of proteins that actually run our body.
00:19:08.000So it's the proteins they make that run our body, whether it's muscle protein being built or whether it's enzymes to cause certain reactions to take place.
00:19:17.000And the genes are basically not doing anything until they get a signal from the environment.
00:19:22.000Now, when I say the environment, it might start from what we perceive as the outside environment, but eventually it's a biochemical signal.
00:19:32.000Or some sensation, some transmission of information that gets through the cell to the genes themselves and causes a gene to turn on, the switch to turn on, the protein to be built, and that manifests itself in whatever that gene is assigned to do.
00:19:49.000So, the beauty of the Primal Blueprint and the lifestyle that I've been promoting for 10 or 15 years is this notion that we can discover these hidden genetic switches that we all have, and we can make choices in our lives that direct us in a direction of health versus down this slippery slope of illness and disease and falling apart.
00:20:18.000And I'm not going to criticize you for making whatever choices you make.
00:20:22.000My job as a blogger, and certainly running Mark's Daily Apple and writing the books that I write, It's to offer you some educated choices that you might elect to undertake based on what you tell me your goals are.
00:20:37.000So, you know, if you say, well, I want to lose weight and I want to get stronger and I want to, you know, maybe participate in a 5K... We can look at a number of different strategies, whether they're dietary.
00:20:48.000I mean, the more the better, because all of these strategies will have some impact.
00:20:53.000But there are certain foods you can eat that will cause you to become better at burning fat and will cause you to build muscle more effectively.
00:21:03.000There's an amount of sleep that you'll get that will reduce the amount of cortisol that you secrete.
00:21:08.000Cortisol is an adrenal hormone that we secrete in response to stress.
00:21:13.000Cortisol tends to make us carry a little bit of extra weight, some of us.
00:21:16.000So if I can increase my sleep and improve my sleep patterns and reduce cortisol, it all has an effect back at the gene level to get me closer to where I want to be.
00:22:01.000I sort of mosey on down to the coffee pot and make a pot of coffee and read the paper.
00:22:06.000I ease into the day and I typically hit the gym around 9.30 or go paddle or whatever it is I'm going to do for the day.
00:22:13.000I don't do it first thing in the morning.
00:22:14.000I want to be kind of refreshed for it and ready for it.
00:22:19.000But then we can talk about sun exposure, and we can say, well, you know, so many people are vitamin D deficient, and they've been that way because conventional wisdom has suggested that they stay out of the sun, that the sun is bad for you, that any amount of sun exposure is, you know, is going to cause you to get or predispose you to getting cancer.
00:22:36.000Well, what we say in the paleo community is there are probably more people who have gotten cancer from having avoided the sun than ever got cancer from too much sun.
00:22:45.000And the reason I say that is because sun exposure, UVB light, That's the stimulus that causes cholesterol in the skin to convert to vitamin D. And vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins.
00:23:16.000So if you go out and get sunburned, and I've never advocated that, but there's a difference between spending a little bit of time in the sun, unprotected, and going in and putting on a shirt, or even if you want to stay out, putting on some sunscreen at that point, versus just rubbing baby oil and iodine we used to put in the sun.
00:23:37.000Back in New England, when there was very little sun, so you had to cram for that suntan.
00:24:46.000Now, just to clarify, inflammatory response.
00:24:51.000So when you're eating grains, like say if you're eating a lot of pastas and things along those lines, what exactly is happening that's causing an inflammatory response?
00:25:00.000Your body's processing the grains and...
00:25:03.000Yeah, so pasta, bread, a lot of cereals, especially the processed cereals.
00:25:27.000So if you raise that level high enough, You will have some issues.
00:25:32.000Now, if you introduce high fructose corn syrup, which is a frankenfood created in the 70s to provide sweetness at a lower cost, typically coming from corn, now you're introducing yet another variable,
00:25:49.000another agent, because a fructose in and of itself is somewhat inflammatory.
00:25:55.000That's the glucose portion of what we're talking about here.
00:25:59.000But then some of the grains have what we call these anti-nutrients in them that may cause issues with some people in their gut, may open the gut wall and cause it to literally leak fecal matter into the bloodstream.
00:26:13.000So if you've heard of leaky gut syndrome, that's probably a reason why a lot of people have autoimmune diseases, or at the very least, a systemic inflammation.
00:26:24.000And that's caused by your body processing too much glucose.
00:26:28.000Well, it's not caused by your body processing too much glucose as it is a side effect of it.
00:26:34.000Yeah, because it's not the glucose that's causing that.
00:26:37.000In that case, we've moved on from sugar and glucose being a cause of inflammation to certain elements in, let's say, whole grains.
00:26:51.000That turn on certain genes that cause certain responses, one of which may be in some people to open the junction between the cells lining the gut and allow undigested food particles, shall we say, to enter the bloodstream.
00:27:06.000Now the body sees those undigested food particles, which...
00:27:10.000The gut is only supposed to really allow in free fatty acids, simple sugars, and amino acids, single peptides, dipeptides maybe.
00:27:22.000But if you get a large undigested food particle in the bloodstream, sometimes the body goes, hey, that looks like a bacteria.
00:27:28.000We better go get that thing and set up an immune response to it.
00:27:33.000So you get an initial form of inflammation where the body's just saying, look, there's some foreign matter in the bloodstream.
00:27:42.000And that's sort of bad enough in and of itself.
00:27:45.000But if that continues long enough for some people, sometimes...
00:27:54.000That inflammatory response, that immune response, now it goes to look for similar molecules, and it might see a beta cell in the pancreas and go, that looks just like that other thing I just set up a response for.
00:28:09.000Or it might do it with the cells in the joint, the chondrocytes in the joint, and you may get rheumatoid arthritis as a result of a—that's an autoimmune response, the body setting up an immune response to itself.
00:28:24.000So when you hear people talk about gluten sensitivity and people are trying to go gluten-free, do you think that a lot of what that is is the body responding to an excess of this glucose in the body?
00:29:04.000It's a plant protein that's folded so densely that the theory is that most humans haven't had enough time to adapt to the digestion of that type of a molecule.
00:29:17.000And as a result, it causes problems within the lining of the gut.
00:29:22.000But what I was getting at was people always talk about having gluten sensitivity, but really what you're saying is that a lot of what people are having issues with is these simple carbohydrates.
00:29:34.000It's like breads and pastas and inflammatory responses.
00:30:31.000That increases your risk for heart disease.
00:30:33.000That increases your risk for type 2 diabetes.
00:30:35.000I don't think I have gluten sensitivity, but I do know that when I decided to go gluten-free, I kind of quit it after a while, but I did it for about six months.
00:30:51.000I was trying to figure out what it was, but I don't think I have a gluten sensitivity.
00:30:55.000I just attribute it to the fact that eating all that pasta and breads and all those things was just giving me all this extra sugar.
00:31:01.000Eliminating that from my diet made a difference.
00:31:03.000So that is sort of the first line of defense for a lot of people who want to lose weight.
00:31:08.000Just by getting rid of those foods, and I won't say limiting yourself, but including meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, all the vegetables, a little bit of fruit, healthy fats from oils and nuts...
00:31:25.000You know, that's a pretty nice plate of food that you can offer yourself up.
00:31:28.000As long as you get rid of the carbohydrates, the simple carbohydrates, you're well on your way to reducing the excess body weight, which includes the excess retained water and the fullness in the face and all the things that we talk about.
00:31:41.000Now, if you give those up and you find that your joints work better or that you have, you know, That your immune system works better.
00:31:51.000You don't get sick as often, which is what a lot of people notice.
00:31:54.000Now we probably are looking at the fact that you might have some level of sensitivity to gluten.
00:31:59.000And gluten sensitivity exists on a spectrum of no problem at all to I'll die if I eat it.
00:32:05.000And you could be anywhere in the middle, anywhere on that spectrum.
00:32:09.000I mean, this, again, sort of the operative mantra here, no right or wrong, no black or white, no good or bad, just choices.
00:32:16.000But if you're a person who really wants to dig deep and kind of make those changes that are going to get you closer to your goal quicker, that might be a choice you might look into.
00:32:27.000So there's no right or wrong, but there is a spectrum in terms of tolerance.
00:32:31.000Like, your tolerance might be much better than mine, and some people just really shouldn't have it in their diet at all, whether some people can have a fairly good amount of it and really not have too many issues.
00:32:40.000Yeah, we say, you know, what can I get away with?
00:32:41.000And that's sort of an interesting concept in and of itself, because humans, you know, we tend to see what we can get away with.
00:32:49.000You know, you might say, this is really good for me, or this is really bad for me, I'm never going to do it again.
00:32:55.000But if I don't die from it, and there's no consequences, then I'm going to take it right up to the edge, sometimes a little bit past the edge.
00:33:02.000So there are a lot of people who can get away with eating a lot more carbohydrate than others, even though they don't train hard.
00:33:11.000There are a lot of people who can get away with consuming omega-6 oils and not get into that pro-inflammatory state as readily or as quickly.
00:33:22.000As Ronald Reagan said, man's got to know his limitations.
00:33:32.000So, I was reading this article yesterday, and I talked about this yesterday in the podcast, about this woman who, she wrote this article about she's in her 70s, and how her whole life people have been shaming her for being fat.
00:34:10.000It's a very biased account and not science or exercise physiology based where she's sort of describing all the various times in her life where people have said she's unhealthy but meanwhile she's been very active and she like lists all the different things she did tree climbing and hiking all this different stuff right Which,
00:34:28.000obviously, to a guy like you or someone like me who knows a lot about competitive athletics and the amount of calories she's actually burning out versus putting in, it's probably skewed.
00:34:41.000And she didn't really discuss what she was actually eating.
00:34:46.000She was talking about very bland foods and a thousand calories a day that doctors are trying to put her on, which is the wrong approach, right?
00:34:56.000When I see things like that, I don't see a woman who's like 70 years old who's coming to accept the fact that she's overweight and it's no big deal and everybody's got these ideas about body image that are based on skinny supermodels that are actually anorexic.
00:35:14.000You should just leave me alone and I'm plump and I'm healthy and everything's fine.
00:36:07.000I mean, I say it to myself because it's pretty clear that, you know, you have to want to change.
00:36:15.000We talked about what can I get away with.
00:36:18.000Well, if I can get away with being fat and people still reasonably like me, then I don't have to do the work and therefore I'm not motivated to do what it's going to take to get to that point.
00:36:28.000But it's a slippery slope with talking with people about, you know, like what's the ideal body composition, right?
00:36:45.000You know, you've lost 50 pounds, not you, but you don't get sick as often, you've got all the energy you want, you maintain it without a lot of dieting or anything like that.
00:36:54.000You eat pretty much how you know you're supposed to eat, but you're never hungry.
00:36:58.000That's your ideal body composition, man.
00:37:00.000And if it doesn't look like the cover of Muscle& Fitness or Shape magazine, so be it.
00:37:05.000By the way, I can get you to that point for a lot of people where you are on the cover of Shape Magazine or Muscle& Fitness, but it's going to cost.
00:37:12.000And it's going to cost not money, but it's going to cost in sacrifice and discipline and pain and hating life.
00:37:18.000So, you know, the science can get us there, but is it worth the life?
00:37:24.000The main thing we do at the Primal Blueprint is we try to live an awesome life.
00:37:28.000So, in fact, my tagline is Primal Blueprint Live Awesome.
00:37:31.000Living awesome means enjoying as much of every moment, every day as you can, extracting the greatest amount of pleasure, whether it's movement, whether it's with friends, whether it's food.
00:37:43.000Again, with the least amount of pain, but in a way that's sustainable.
00:37:47.000So it not only benefits you right now and today, but over the long haul, you're going to live longer, you're going to be happier, you won't get sick, you won't tap into your 401k to pay for a $200,000 whatever operation.
00:38:02.000It's about how can I enjoy life right now today.
00:38:07.000Now, back to the overweight person who's trying to Trying to get to that point.
00:38:11.000And I see a lot of, you know, overweight people who are quite happy, I guess.
00:38:16.000But I see a lot of others who are maybe hiding it and going, you know, I'm the jolly, you know, fat person, but inside I'm, you know, I'm the sad whatever, the sad clown.
00:39:02.000You went from 225 to 175. You know, you still have some work to do.
00:39:07.000But for right now, you're at your ideal body composition.
00:39:10.000Because in terms of your body, the body, it's a survival mechanism.
00:39:14.000You know, if we get to this, you know, this sort of...
00:39:20.000Secular or, you know, discussion about life and what we're after.
00:39:26.000The human body is a vessel designed to carry two strands of RNA, DNA, into the future.
00:39:33.000And it's a bizarre permutation of several hundred million years of evolution, but the bottom line is the body is designed to survive long enough to procreate.
00:39:43.000And that's the reality of humans and evolution.
00:39:46.000And the fact that we live longer and we enjoy life, this is all wonderful and icing on the cake.
00:39:50.000But from the body's perspective, Your ideal body composition is that composition at which, again, you don't get sick.
00:40:12.000Now, if you want to drop the next 25 pounds, okay, now we've got to look at...
00:40:16.000Refiguring the diet out and adding some sprints in there and doing some little tweaks in there and we'll get down there.
00:40:23.000But it requires, number one, Identifying an appreciation for what you've done so far to get to where you are.
00:40:34.000Number two, it requires acknowledging any past insults in your life.
00:40:40.000And there's a lot of stuff going on in the mind, in the brain, that wants to keep people protected with armor.
00:40:47.000Whether it's sexual abuse, whether it's verbal abuse, some scenario that happened in childhood.
00:40:55.000There are a lot of people carrying a lot of Emotional baggage around with them that, in some cases, if you dealt with it in an inappropriate manner, that might free you up to lose a little bit more weight.
00:41:17.000Or is it the food that distracts them?
00:41:20.000The over-consuming of food to sort of nullify the effects of the abuse or whatever trauma?
00:41:27.000It could be any of those and all of those.
00:41:30.000But I see it Fairly frequently where people will do everything right and then hit a plateau and wonder what I need to get to the next level.
00:41:39.000Sometimes you need to really do the deep work.
00:41:42.000Yeah, why I try to explain to someone when they try to gain weight, when people are like, hey, I want to put some muscle on, I try to explain to people that that is not an easy thing to do.
00:41:52.000And a matter of fact, your body doesn't want to do that.
00:41:55.000Your body has a limited amount of resources and it does not want to spend resources created on this extra muscle.
00:42:01.000And in order to do that, you have to be uncomfortable.
00:42:14.000I mean, you have to get your body to say, all right, this asshole wants to do deadlifts four days a week now or squats or, you know, he's doing all this heavy stuff.
00:42:24.000We have to adjust accordingly because the environment in which we're existing in obviously changed.
00:42:31.000And now we're going to need a lot more muscle.
00:43:20.000They die of organ failure because they just, you know, something wasn't keeping up with the body.
00:43:25.000But the concept of dying of, quote, old age is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.
00:43:30.000So the typical old age scenario is you got a 75, 85 year old man or woman, hasn't done anything active for years, so there's no muscle mass.
00:43:41.000And because there's no muscle mass and they haven't done anything active, the bones, there's no bone density.
00:43:45.000So the bones go, hey, I don't need to build a structure because this clown isn't going to the gym and doing anything to require it.
00:43:53.000So I'm going to save resources, not build bone density.
00:43:58.000The muscles are not building bone mass.
00:44:02.000I can pump blood all day at 5% of my volume or maybe 15% of my volume.
00:44:06.000The lungs go, hey, you know, there's no requirement for excess oxygen.
00:44:11.000This clown's just sitting around in a chair all day or, you know, watching TV or doing minimal activity.
00:44:17.000So the lungs, they sort of cease to function at full capacity.
00:44:21.000Same with the liver, same with the kidneys.
00:44:24.000And as you Go down this path, then one night you get up to take a leak and you trip over the cat and you fall and you break your hip because the bone density sucks and now you wind up in the hospital and you get pneumonia and you die because the lungs can't expel the sputum for the pneumonia and the heart can't keep up so maybe you die of congestive heart failure.
00:44:46.000I mean this is a very typical scenario for a lot of people and it all goes back to creating a need for the body to want to change.
00:44:55.000That great Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston movie where...
00:45:49.000And you do that by using your brain to elect to go to the gym and lift weights or to embark on a more rigorous and strenuous regimen than you had previously encountered.
00:46:02.000Well, changing patterns is very difficult for people.
00:46:05.000That's why New Year's resolutions are always such a joke.
00:46:07.000Because everybody, I mean, the amount of people that stick to those things that they prescribe on January 1st, like, this is it.
00:46:33.000And that's what we like about the Primal Blueprint is that the foods are sustainable.
00:46:36.000So, I mean, literally and figuratively, the diet, the eating strategy is a sustainable strategy.
00:46:42.000Rule number one is you never let yourself go hungry.
00:46:44.000You just, instead of eating a bagel in the middle of the afternoon, you know, you eat a spoonful of coconut butter or something that's got fat in it that satisfies.
00:47:57.000I'll do whatever workout I'm doing, whether it's a heavyweight workout or whether it's, I mean, it could be a leg day, could be, you know, intervals on a bike, could be a two-hour paddle, fasted.
00:49:23.000How does it promote more mitochondria?
00:49:25.000Well, it's called mitochondrial biogenesis.
00:49:28.000So when you're born, you're born again with this recipe that wants you to become really good at burning fat and very quickly you change the script.
00:49:37.000So the parents feed you The gruel and oatmeal and Zweibach and toast and whatever, and pureed vegetables.
00:49:45.000And you become very dependent on carbohydrate.
00:49:48.000And the body says, I don't need to burn fat because I'm getting fed carbohydrate all the time.
00:49:54.000And a couple of responses are, I've got to get rid of this excess glucose because if I don't, it's toxic.
00:50:02.000The body shouldn't have more than 90 to 100 calories.
00:50:06.000Your blood sugar count should stay between, say, 85 and 70 and 100 max.
00:50:54.000So the body wants to kind of keep that level low.
00:50:59.000And if you continuously feed it carbohydrate all day long, if you're not burning it off, if you're not running 20 miles a week, there's a tendency for the body to store the excess as body fat.
00:51:13.000And over time, for some people, that's a real problem.
00:51:19.000So many of us grow up depending on this carbohydrate as a main source of fuel.
00:51:27.000And, you know, you eat a carbohydrate meal, a high carbohydrate meal causes a surge of insulin because the insulin is there to take the glucose out of the bloodstream and store it because, again, it's dangerous to have too much.
00:51:38.000But sometimes the insulin surge is so great that it drops the blood sugar and then you get hungry again a couple of hours later.
00:51:44.000That's why you have these swings throughout the day if you're what we call a sugar burner.
00:51:50.000If you try and look at a different way to configure your energy sources, if you restrict Sugar and restrict carbohydrate a little bit.
00:52:02.000You don't have to, you know, be draconian about it.
00:52:05.000But you start to create the need for the body to start to burn some of its stored body fat.
00:52:10.000You say, well, the body goes, well, if I've got to save some of my glucose for my brain, because the brain runs on glucose and ketones, and I'm going to learn how to burn fat more efficiently.
00:52:52.000But ATP is this currency of the body, and it can be recycled using different pathways, a glycolytic pathway, which doesn't require oxygen.
00:53:02.000And one of the pathways is using oxygen in the mitochondria.
00:53:07.000So that's a very important place to not only build more mitochondria, but improve the efficiency of the mitochondria.
00:53:14.000And how that happens, and this is the elegance of this again, is that certain signals that you give the body by cutting back on the amount of exogenous carbohydrate you take in, those signals go directly to the cells that say, I've got to make more mitochondria.
00:53:29.000And then, unique to every other organelle in the body, mitochondria have their own DNA. No other organelle within a cell has that, but mitochondria have their own DNA, and the DNA and the mitochondria go, well, we better...
00:53:44.000So you upregulate the mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of more mitochondria, and you upregulate the efficiency of the mitochondria, all done at the level of gene, all done through a signal that you gave by, in this case, restricting carbohydrate.
00:53:59.000And it could be increasing the amount of low-level aerobic activity you do, and it can be both.
00:54:06.000And we talk about that in my new book.
00:55:02.000You'd do a workout in the gym where you'd do 80% of your max, so you'd do 400 pounds, and you might do it four or five times, and then rest a few minutes, and then do it again four or five times, and rest a few minutes, and do it again.
00:55:16.000Instead of doing three sets of ten of whatever it is you're going to do, you load this up.
00:55:22.000You load deeper and deeper into the fibers to the extent that the workout's over when you can only do one.
00:56:43.000You know, more energy throughout the day because now you're so good at burning fat and you have all this machinery to burn the fat that you're hungry less often.
00:56:55.000And, you know, it's interesting when we look back at how hunger runs our lives.
00:57:01.000And again, if you look at the carbohydrate sugar burning paradigm, You get up in the morning, have the most important meal of the day.
00:57:08.000It might be a bagel, some toast, whatever.
00:57:46.000And then, you know, where are we going for lunch?
00:57:48.000Ah, let's go to, you know, get a pizza or whatever.
00:57:51.000And again, another break in the afternoon, then you get home and...
00:57:54.000You have dinner and maybe you have some ice cream or something watching TV. And the next thing you know, you've taken in 600-700 grams of carbs in that day.
00:58:04.000Well, if you're good at burning fat, the first thing that happens is you wake up in the morning and go, I don't need to eat, really.
00:58:30.000But if you're not hungry, then move on.
00:58:33.000I did a thought experiment a while back, and I thought, you know, it's interesting, because when I was in college, Every one of my college buddies know me as Arnold.
00:59:54.000This is the what can I get away with part of it.
00:59:57.000Well, what if you shifted that around and you said, what's the least amount of food I can eat?
01:00:02.000And maintain muscle mass, and maintain energy, and not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry.
01:00:10.000And you find if you do this experiment, it's pretty interesting.
01:00:12.000If you become good at burning fat, your appetite so self-regulates and so mitigates that you find yourself pushing a plate of food away after a couple of bites, or not being hungry, or eating just the right amount of food.
01:00:51.000And even with the bodybuilders, the ones that get down that lean are so close to death.
01:00:59.000That's dieting down the day before the contest to get there, and they pack it right on afterwards.
01:01:05.000So the body fat thing is, I've stayed at this same visible, I should say, body fat level since I was in my 20s.
01:01:16.000So this is a result of a lot of strenuous exercise, a lot of long distance running, a lot of the different things that you participate in, as well as this body burning fat primarily.
01:01:29.000Because you're talking about if you've been in this same body fat percentage most of your life, you haven't adjusted.
01:04:03.000And if you lose the Frisbee, if it's turned over by your teammate, you either drop it or something, it becomes the other team's We have Frisbee going in the opposite direction, and now you've got to get back on defense and defend the same guy that was defending you in most cases.
01:04:17.000Okay, so if you throw the Frisbee and the other guy doesn't catch it, then the other team gets it?
01:04:34.000So no running except during ultimate...
01:04:36.000Except sprinting, except 8 to 10 second bursts.
01:04:39.000And how that plays out for me is some of the recent research is you go, instead of doing intervals like the old days where you do 60 seconds or a minute and a half interval as a marathoner, I used to go to the track and do 16 times one half mile at race pace.
01:04:57.000So now we're doing all-out sprints, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, maybe 20 seconds, but you're max, max, max the whole way, and then a sufficient enough rest, and come back and do it again, and do it six, seven, eight, five, six, seven times, and you're done.
01:05:11.000That workout is over, and you have accrued the benefits probably at a greater rate than you would have had you done the old method of training, which was to do, you know, again, repeat quarters or 200s or whatever.
01:05:23.000So do you think that a lot of what the old methods were doing was just people getting through with mental toughness and you're getting some benefit of it, but you're also kind of breaking yourself down too much?
01:05:44.000Half the races that I thought I was most prepared for, I sucked in because I was over-trained.
01:05:51.000I left everything on the training field.
01:05:53.000That's a big problem with fighters as well.
01:05:55.000With UFC fighters, it's a gigantic issue trying to figure out what is the right amount of work you should do.
01:06:03.000And especially with fighters because...
01:06:06.000In mixed martial arts, they're dealing with different disciplines.
01:06:09.000You have your grappling, you have your striking, you have putting them all together, you have submissions, you have takedowns, you have a bunch of different things you have to train, as well as rigorous strength and conditioning programs, and there's a lot of debate as far as...
01:06:22.000What should you put most time and effort into?
01:06:25.000And some of the more successful people, it's really kind of interesting, have been going away from skill training during camps when they prepare for a fight and going almost exclusively to strength and conditioning programs with very minimal skill training where the strength and conditioning program takes precedent over everything else,
01:06:43.000The idea behind that being you already know how to fight.
01:06:45.000So what they're going to do is get your body to a place where it can function at the highest work rate.
01:06:50.000And a big factor in that is maintaining a healthy heart rate and making sure that you don't overtrain, making sure that you have enough recovery time.
01:07:16.000How could you sustain your power over the next three hills to where your output on the third hill is essentially the same as it was on the first hill versus in the old days where you were 100% going over the first hill and then 90% over the second hill and 77% going over the third hill because you hadn't trained that part in your regimen.
01:07:39.000One of the things we say to endurance athletes is, how many races have you finished where you were out of breath?
01:07:44.000And maybe you had to sprint, you know, because you were neck and neck with some guy.
01:07:48.000But most endurance athletes don't finish a marathon out of breath because long ago their form fell apart.
01:07:56.000Their muscle tissue started to break down because they hadn't trained for sustained power.
01:08:01.000And so the aerobic part of it was like, we could do this all day long.
01:08:05.000You're just going slow because you didn't train appropriately.
01:08:08.000So there's some strength training components, like even to something like marathon running.
01:08:16.000So now we're saying that the next breakthroughs in marathon running will come from somebody who has trained ketogenically, and we didn't talk about that yet, but has restricted carbs to the extent that they...
01:08:31.000Cyclically, they know how to access ketones, which are a byproduct of fat metabolism, and they can use the ketones in place of glucose or glycogen.
01:08:40.000They can use the ketones to fuel the brain, to will them to continue the pace.
01:08:46.000They've done the work in the gym where they can maintain sustained power output over 26 miles and not have it fall apart and not have form break down 22 miles into the race.
01:08:57.000And if you put all of these different component parts together, and do it with an elite, a world-class athlete, now you look at the next level of records being broken.
01:09:08.000It's so antithetical to the way we've trained for the last 40 years that you take an elite professional runner who's already had some amount of success and you go, dude, we want to shift everything around.
01:09:21.000It's going to cost you the next 18 months to adapt, but there's a good chance that you'll be better.
01:10:14.000We evolved to use ketones very efficiently.
01:10:17.000There were times throughout millions of years of human evolution where it wasn't like you skipped lunch.
01:10:23.000It's like you skipped last week eating, right?
01:10:25.000And you had to maintain muscle mass and maintain thought capability and maintain speed and health despite not eating anything.
01:10:35.000And the only way to do that was to access the stored body fat that you'd stored from overeating Or eating slightly more than you needed.
01:10:43.000The last time there was actually food present, which is why we're all wired to overeat.
01:10:50.000And this ability to use the byproduct of the fat metabolism to fuel the brain.
01:10:56.000So ketones, actually, the brain loves to run on ketones.
01:10:59.000One of the things that happens, particularly in endurance contests, and I suspect it happens in MMA fights toward the end of the fight, is, you know, you feel gassed, and you run out, you're starting to run low on glycogen, and you're starting to really feel like the wheels are coming off.
01:11:15.000More often than not, it's the brain It's a lack of glucose to the brain.
01:11:19.000The brain isn't being powered enough, and the brain goes, time out.
01:11:23.000We got to pull over the side of the road and take a nap.
01:11:25.000So it'll make you mentally exhausted because your body's running on glycogen and glucose rather than fats.
01:11:32.000So when you run out of glycogen and glucose...
01:11:37.000The old theory was, well, the reason that you hit the wall in any of these events, or you bonk, as they say, is because you've depleted glycogen so much the muscles can't function anymore.
01:11:48.000Well, the research now shows that you never really deplete the glycogen in the muscles.
01:11:53.000If you go from 500 or 600 grams total in the body, you never get lower than 150. So there's always some glycogen left.
01:12:06.000And Tim Noakes, the guy we talked about, Professor Tim Noakes, at the beginning of the show here, he coined a phrase, the central governor theory of the brain.
01:12:14.000And he said the reason a lot of people hit the wall isn't because they're out of glycogen, but it's because the brain, as an override mechanism, says in order to prevent further damage, we have to stop.
01:12:49.000So when you become good at accessing stored body fat and producing ketones and you've built the metabolic machinery, particularly in the brain, to use those ketones...
01:12:58.000And we know from history and from genetics and from modern science that the brain runs really well on ketones.
01:13:04.000Now you've found a substitute fuel for glucose, so you can run out of glucose.
01:13:09.000And yet the ketones will keep the brain, you know, revving and guiding you at the same pace.
01:13:16.000Again, provided you've done the work in the gym to maintain the form and the power.
01:13:53.000It's seven minute miles, which is like sprint pace for most people.
01:13:58.000It's not that fast for a marathoner or even an elite runner, but it's a substantial pace.
01:14:05.000And for a guy running 100 miles, it's a pretty good clip.
01:14:09.000And to derive 95 to 96% of all energy from your stored body fat or from exogenous fat that you're eating, And just a tiny bit required from glycogen or glucose.
01:14:22.000I mean, I think 30 or 40 years ago, we would have said, not only was that impossible, that was like twice times impossible.
01:14:29.000Well, the benefit of that for athletes has got to be incredible in terms of motivation, in terms of enthusiasm towards the end of the race or an end of a fight or something along those lines where your body would run out of the glycogen and the glucose and instead you have fat to burn so your mind doesn't drop off as much.
01:15:08.000Well, because there's a point at which your throughput of oxygen...
01:15:12.000When I'm talking about endurance athletes, they're measuring their output over two, three, seven hours.
01:15:20.000Now you're talking five, five, five minute...
01:15:26.000That same output is concentrated now, and you're going at a fairly high rate.
01:15:31.000Although, you see them, they're jumping around and dancing around and moving back and forth, so there's recovery periods in there, but you still have to have that 100% intense glycolytic output.
01:15:43.000So when you're in a hold and trying to escape, or when you're trying to defend or trying to come in for a barrage, you have to be at 100% of output.
01:15:54.000Conceivably, you could train in the gym to access That part of your body that burns fats, that burns ketones, you know, almost the most important part would be making weight.
01:16:07.000Look, especially in MMA, it's about power-to-weight ratios to a certain extent.
01:16:12.000I mean, there's a lot of, obviously, skill, but a power-to-weight ratio.
01:16:15.000If I'm, you know, 142 pounds, I don't know what the weight, what the divisions are, but if I'm carrying around, I'm at 165 and I have to cut down to 142 to get to my...
01:16:28.000I'm going to lose power, but if I maintain that power and I never even get up to 165 anymore because I'm not gaining fat, because I've learned how to burn fat and I can stay effective and functional at the weight that I'm at, that has benefit.
01:16:41.000You know, and it's a power to weight ratio concept.
01:16:43.000So you would have to have some sort of a hybrid diet then in something like MMA. Yeah, so once you've built the metabolic machinery to burn fat and to burn ketones, It doesn't go away when you start eating carbohydrates.
01:16:55.000So you can do what we call the cyclical approach where you spend, in the early phases of your training, you become really good at burning fat and you do stuff that's contemplated to make you the best possible fat burner you can be.
01:17:09.000Then you might introduce some carbohydrates the day before a really hard glycolytic workout.
01:17:17.000That doesn't turn off your fat burning.
01:17:19.000That doesn't even really negatively impact your ability to handle ketones.
01:17:23.000If you do it for six weeks and you do nothing but carbs for six weeks, then it all shifts back.
01:17:27.000Again, upregulation and downregulation of enzymes based on gene input.
01:17:34.000But if you built the metabolic machinery and you keep coming back to it, then you can craft a strategy where you say, well, tomorrow we're just going to do 100% glycolytic stuff.
01:17:43.000Be prepared to puke all afternoon or whatever.
01:17:47.000You have 150 grams of carbs and a sweet potato for dinner that night.
01:17:55.000You have all the glycogen that you even could possibly have loaded if you'd just been a carbohydrate-based athlete ever since.
01:18:03.000You just pick the times when you're going to up the ante with extra carb intake.
01:18:08.000And you make sure it's not sugar, but it's, you know, a good, you know, a starchy carb in this case, something like a sweet potato or, you know, ham or something like that.
01:18:17.000So how do you regulate the amount of sugars that are in your body?
01:18:22.000Do you limit the amount of fruit that you eat?
01:18:32.000Some amount of fruit is good, but I think what cracks me up is the number of people who say, I'm on a very healthy diet.
01:18:40.000I'm eating 12 servings of fruit a day, and I go to Jamba Juice, and I get a big fruit smoothie, and I go, dude, you're taking in more sugar than a guy who's drinking two six-packs of Coke.
01:18:50.000So even sugar that comes from fruit is not necessarily healthy?
01:19:43.000But bananas, some of the citrus fruits, some of these things can be way overdone pretty quickly.
01:19:50.000And I'm not necessarily saying don't eat fruit.
01:19:53.000I'm just saying don't consider fruit the healthiest possible alternative to You know, bread and pasta and then replace all of the calories you got from bread and pasta and cereal and whatever.
01:20:04.000Don't replace that with fruit, but figure out a way.
01:20:07.000Like, vegetables, for the most part, are the ideal source of carbohydrate in our diet.
01:20:12.000They're locked in this fibrous matrix.
01:20:14.000It's, you know, they're basically low glycemic index, so they kind of drip into the bloodstream at a reasonable pace, don't cause a huge surge in glucose.
01:20:25.000So celery with coconut butter would be a much healthier alternative than a banana.
01:20:40.000But in a perfect world, celery with coconut butter is a great choice, and a banana at the right time is maybe a better choice.
01:20:49.000Like post-workout, a banana's a good choice, right?
01:20:51.000Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you are.
01:20:52.000I fast after the workout, too, because that's kind of interesting.
01:20:56.000There's so much of these little nuanced science bits that you pick up.
01:21:02.000And I've been in the supplement business for 30 years, designing supplements for other companies.
01:21:08.000And one of the supplements I made a bunch of years ago for a very large company today...
01:21:14.000It was a post-workout drink, and everybody loved it, and everybody thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever tasted, and it had, you know, it had carbohydrates, and it had some protein, it had some creatine, and it was a great drink.
01:21:29.000But the purpose of the drink was to recover from the hard workout you did today so you could do the bitch again tomorrow.
01:21:42.000So for that particular purpose, if you're going to train hard every day and you want to replace glycogen, Then that's a strategy and that's a choice.
01:21:50.000If you say, well, we're going to do some hard glycolytic work today, we're going to, for whatever reason, going to do some hard glycolytic work tomorrow, then let's have a post-workout high-carb, relatively high-carb supplement because there's this window in which the body manufactures glycogen.
01:22:08.000Refills glycogen stores at a higher rate just post-workout.
01:22:12.000That was the whole reason for the post-workout meal.
01:22:15.000That's why people like to drink chocolate milk, right?
01:22:20.000So if you're going to go from day to day, then that's probably a good thing.
01:22:28.000Another strategy would be to go really, really hard today, do a deep leg day, and then fast.
01:22:33.000Well, what happens when you fast is you don't replenish the glycogen, but you preserve the pulse of growth hormone and testosterone that happens as a result of the leg day, which you would otherwise blunt by taking in a sugary drink.
01:23:03.000So if you are eating a post-workout meal that's high in carbs, because you want to refill the glycogen stores so that you can do it again tomorrow, then the post-workout meal will cause a rise in insulin, which will blunt the growth hormone and testosterone pulse that you got from that workout.
01:23:24.000But you'll have glycogen stores slightly more ready for the hard workout again tomorrow.
01:23:29.000Now, what are you trying to accomplish here?
01:23:31.000What I'm saying is I'd rather just do the workout really hard, get all of the benefits, the growth benefits that I'm looking for, and not have to do it again tomorrow.
01:23:43.000If I'm going to do a leg day and puke, you know, for...
01:23:47.000Because of it, today, I don't want to do it again tomorrow.
01:23:49.000I'm only working out to get the benefits.
01:23:51.000I'm not working out for the sake of working out.
01:23:53.000I'm not working out every single day because I just love to go to the gym, and some people do, by the way, and I'm not going to judge that.
01:24:00.000But I'm working out to get the most amount of benefits I can from the work that I've chosen to do.
01:24:05.000And in this case, that includes my strategy post-workout.
01:24:41.000So, is there a negative effect of having those hard workouts more than one day in a row, and would you be better off and would you gain more if you went the way you're doing it by not replenishing?
01:25:52.000You're not preventing it from replenishing glycogen.
01:25:54.000So there's no immediate urgency to do it with a post-workout drink.
01:26:02.000The meals planned for the rest of the day or the next morning have some amount of carbohydrate, some of which will go to replenishing glycogen.
01:26:10.000So you might wind up, instead of having restored, you know, 275 grams of glycogen, you've restored 230. Big deal.
01:26:18.000What about the benefits of forcing your body to do more work to up your conditioning level?
01:26:26.000And would that be mitigated or would some...
01:26:31.000What your strategy being to not replenish the stores after the workout and to not have those hard workouts two days in a row, if you instead I had the hard workout, went through your idea of allowing your body to have its natural uptake of testosterone and growth hormone because of that hard workout,
01:26:52.000then giving yourself adequate time to recover before engaging in the next hard workout, would you in fact have more progress than slamming your head up against the wall, which is at least with like...
01:27:04.000For wrestlers and for mixed martial artists a lot of the time, that's the standard operational approach is to beat your body down, to be absolutely exhausted.
01:27:12.000And do you think that's, in fact, maybe counterintuitive?
01:28:12.000One of the greatest runners in the country ever produced, Steve Prefontaine, was fairly talented.
01:28:17.000He was not the most talented runner in the world.
01:28:20.000And he would go to the starting line, and he'd look at some guy who was clearly more talented, but they'd run at similar times.
01:28:30.000And Prefontaine would look him in the face and go, dude, he said, you may be more fit and more talented than me, but I'm willing to die for this.
01:28:40.000And maybe it was a result of his 120-mile weeks of training and beating himself up every day.
01:28:46.000I suppose there's value in that, in a sport where...
01:28:50.000You know, from the time the gun goes off till the time you cross the finish line, you're never saying to yourself in a marathon, fuck, this is fun.
01:29:33.000Maybe doing that and trying to force yourself into these mentally tough exercises is actually a form of weakness because you're not able to look at your body objectively.
01:29:42.000You're not able to assess it in more of a scientific fashion.
01:29:46.000I mean, I'm telling you, back in the day when I was doing training for marathons and triathlons, Define my self-worth based on the previous workout I'd done.
01:29:58.000And you skip a day and you feel like a slacker and a poser and a loser.
01:30:03.000And yet, I was chronically overtrained all the time.
01:30:09.000I wish I had those days back because...
01:30:15.000On the other hand, if I had him back, I probably wouldn't have arrived where I am today through the pain and the suffering and the sacrifice.
01:30:22.000And trying to figure out how to fix that.
01:30:26.000My friend Steve Maxwell, who's a strength and conditioning coach, says that you should monitor your heart rate every morning.
01:30:32.000And if your heart rate is over a certain beats per minute, it's over what it's naturally, normal five plus beats per minute, you should take the day off.
01:30:46.000There's now heart rate variability, which looks beyond what the heart rate is and looks at the time between the beats and suggests that...
01:30:56.000If there's greater variability, if there's more time or there's, you know, 0.8 seconds here and 1.1 second here and 0.7 and 1.1, that that's better than having 0.9, 0.9, 0.9, 0.9.
01:31:08.000It's sort of counterintuitive because you'd want the heart to beat metronomically.
01:31:36.000So you can wear your heart monitor and get these HRV, heart rate variability programs, and they'll literally tell you, they'll score you for the day.
01:31:46.000I don't, primarily because I have premature ventricular contractions.
01:31:53.000So I'm now at 62. I've been doing this for 40 years.
01:31:59.000Actually, 50. I started running when I was 12. Jesus.
01:32:03.000To and from school, just like that nut brown African lad, you know, with my Converse, you know, sneakers on.
01:32:12.000So I've been doing this a long time, and I spent so much of my career, stupidly, foolishly, maxing my heart rate out every day.
01:32:21.000So I've written about this for the last two decades, about how training for endurance competition is somewhat antithetical to health, and certainly training the way we used to, which is accumulating miles and miles and miles at a heart rate that we call the black hole, which is...
01:32:39.000Too high to benefit on a regular basis, but too low to create sort of the interval training deal.
01:32:49.000Again, explain it in the book, but we spent...
01:32:55.000Years and years and years, decades, training a lot of athletes at, say, anywhere from 75 to 85% of their max heart rate for an hour, two hours, three hours at a time.
01:33:05.000Well, over time, the heart responds to that and it gets thicker.
01:33:08.000The heart muscle gets thicker and thicker.
01:33:11.000Partly, it's like the heart doesn't have a say in it.
01:33:14.000So your brain tells your legs to run, right?
01:33:16.000And the heart goes, shit, I got to keep up with this cat.
01:33:19.000So the heart's pumping away and pumping away and pumping away.
01:33:42.000When you go to the gym and you say, we're going to do 200 preacher curls of 75 pounds, You know, you're going to say, well, maybe your biceps can handle that, Joe, but mine can't.
01:34:18.000There's an epidemic of AFib, atrial fibrillation, in my generation of runners from that very problem.
01:34:25.000So anyway, having said that, so I have the occasional premature ventricular contraction, which is just a couple of cells in the heart, maybe a thickness in the ventricle, that misfire every once in a while.
01:37:04.000It's lat workout, it's serratus, it's deltoids, it's everything.
01:37:07.000One of the big issues with jujitsu competitors and people just practice even as a hobby is joint injuries, inflammation of the joints and also spine injuries, a lot of bulging discs, a lot of things along those lines.
01:37:23.000Do you think that some of that could be mitigated by reducing the amount of inflammatory foods?
01:37:31.000You know, you've got such a trauma-based sport.
01:37:36.000Maybe a little, you know, if you're 10% less prone to getting the disc issue or the joint pain as a result.
01:37:47.000But a lot of that is just the brute force of the impact.
01:37:50.000And, you know, that's a choice that you make to be in those sports.
01:37:55.000Well, not even impact, like with grappling, a lot of it is just twisting and constant pressure and just the day-to-day grind.
01:38:05.000I think jujitsu is one of those sports where a lot of recreational practitioners, they get really addicted to it because it's really fun.
01:38:14.000You're having a life or death struggle with someone, and you can tap out and then go right back at it.
01:38:19.000And it's very different than a lot of other martial arts in that way, that you can kind of do it full blast.
01:38:26.000Whereas sparring, like kickboxing and things, you really can't do it full blast for very long, because the body just can't take it, the head can't take it, especially.
01:38:46.000And I always wonder, is there maybe a dietary choice that could perhaps limit the amount of inflammation that you're experiencing after these brutal workouts?
01:38:56.000I mean, if the diet is currently horrendous, then there's probably some amount of management of that that could be increased, and pain management could be a little bit better and less inflammation, for sure.
01:39:11.000But if the diet's already good, then you're still putting the body through some unnatural torsions.
01:39:19.000I'm just amazed that when you were talking about your hands and arthritis deep into your 40s, that you were able to mitigate that just by changing your diet.
01:39:30.000Actually, the most powerful thing for me was the IBS because it literally ruined my life or ruled my life.
01:39:36.000But the arthritis thing was like, I mean, I'd play golf with friends, and I was like, I can't even grip the friggin' club the way I need to.
01:41:03.000They've undergone enough alteration that maybe they contain some trans fats.
01:41:07.000Trans fats are known to be pro-inflammatory.
01:41:13.000By the way, omega-6 in and of themselves are not bad.
01:41:17.000There's omega-3, there's omega-6, there's 9, there's 7, there's 12, there's all these, but the 3 to 6 ratio is the one that's gotten the most press over the last decade.
01:41:25.000Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish, krill oil or fish oil, things like that.
01:42:34.000That's probably the source that most people on the paleo movement get the omega-6 from.
01:42:40.000But yeah, it's about sort of the totality of the diet, and it's largely a result, again, of what you're not eating, what you eliminate from the diet that has the greatest effect, not what you're eating.
01:42:52.000So when people say, well, paleo diet, I mean, I've had such great results on the vegan diet, or I've had great results on some vegetarian diet.
01:43:00.000I go, well, you're not eating the same shit we're not eating.
01:43:04.000The fact that you get your protein from plant sources, I'm maybe going to suggest you could have more protein, but it's not that big a deal.
01:43:12.000It's really about what you've eliminated that has the greatest impact on your health.
01:43:17.000Yeah, I have conversations like that often with people that are vegan, where they start talking about all the different things they eat, how much better they feel, and I tell them, listen, I eat all the same things you eat.
01:43:28.000Like, my diet is pretty vegan other than meat.
01:43:31.000I mean, most of what, like this morning, what I had, I drank a kale shake, so I blend kale with cucumbers, and I know it's gross, but it makes me feel amazing.
01:43:40.000I blend kale with cucumbers, garlic, Celery, ginger, and a pear.
01:43:49.000I throw a pear in, and I blend that up in a half a beet.
01:43:53.000I blend that all up, and I ate an elk steak.
01:43:56.000So the two things together, that's what I eat.
01:45:09.000But fruit is what I usually choose before I work out, but now I'm thinking that maybe fruit is a little too high in sugar listening to you, or I should limit the amount of it I have in a day.
01:45:19.000And again, if you like where you're at and everything's good and life is wonderful and you enjoy it, then I'm not going to tell you to stop doing it.
01:48:28.000If I was starving somewhere and I found a big batch of hissing cockroaches, those Madagascar ones, I would definitely scoop those up and eat them.
01:48:41.000A bar company called Exo that makes their bars out of cricket protein.
01:48:44.000And I'm an investor in their company there.
01:48:46.000And I'm fascinated by the concept that a billion and a half, two billion people around the world eat insects all the time and think nothing of it.
01:50:02.000But because the guys who started EXO are really on to something and they're trying to change the way the world thinks about sourcing protein.
01:50:11.000So the first hurdle they have to overcome is making a bar taste great and not turn people off because...
01:50:44.000I mean, if you can compact more into a...
01:50:46.000I mean, that's the beauty of, I think, insect protein powder is to be able to fortify foods that otherwise, you know, rather than having 40 crickets on a stick, you know, to have the powder equivalent in a bar is kind of a neat way of doing it.
01:51:02.000I've eaten crickets like that, too, like roasted crickets.
01:51:45.000No, that's funny you say that because we've got a bar that we just introduced with grass-fed whey protein isolate and it's got collagen and it's a great bar.
01:51:57.000And we tried to make one for the vegan community and because it has...
01:52:28.000I think that's probably some foods that you're not getting that would provide micronutrients, micronutrition that would be beneficial to you in the long run.
01:52:37.000And yet the human body is so friggin' adaptable to any sort of dietary strategy.
01:52:45.000I mean, you know, you see eight-foot-tall Africans, you know, they go play in the NBA that grew up on, you know, 500 calories a day in cow patties.
01:52:56.000You know, during the Irish potato famine, people live for six weeks on shoe leather and seaweed.
01:53:01.000I mean, the human body is pretty adaptable.
01:53:03.000So on that one hand, you can't describe the perfect diet.
01:53:09.000So if you're choosing to be vegan and that's what you want to do and you're mindful about it, And you're not militant about it and not trying to convince everybody else that that's what they ought to do, then go for it.
01:54:04.000Yeah, someone was trying to describe that to me, the amount of broccoli you would need to get the same amount of protein and amino acids as an 8-ounce steak.
01:54:42.000If you're missing certain amino acids, you better balance it with something coming from legumes or some other source.
01:54:49.000You have to figure out what amino acids are lacking based on what plant protein you're taking in.
01:54:53.000The human diet was always based on a wide variety of things you were taking in.
01:54:56.000Not just one kind of thing, but something off of this shrub, off of this bush, out of this ground, and a tuber here, and some quail eggs here.
01:55:05.000It was always 200 different choices within a five-mile radius.
01:57:35.000So that guy would advocate massive amounts?
01:57:39.000Yeah, but I mean, that guy, you know, when you can process, when you're taking in, you know, superhuman levels of steroids, you can process all kinds of protein.
01:59:23.000So if you're eating, that's one thing, if you've ever been around people who drink a lot of protein shakes and eat protein bars, their farts are brutal.
02:00:02.000So you think that these guys, these bodybuilder guys or powerlifter guys that are operating on that inefficient method of one gram per one pound, if they had reduced it, they would still have the same amount of gains and maybe their body would operate more efficiently?
02:00:19.000Are we talking on the juice or off the juice?
02:00:54.000Because that's the body also going, if you don't create on a daily basis my requirement to continue to maintain this muscle mass, I'm going back down to where I was.
02:02:11.000It's a form of sugar, and if you overdo it, then it's probably not as wise a decision as to cut it back.
02:02:17.000So we got to your lunch, your lunch with a big ass out with a small amount of protein, so maybe like four ounces of protein or something along those lines?
02:03:11.000What are the health benefits of eating grass-fed meat and using grass-fed cow's butter?
02:03:16.000Yeah, it's really interesting because one of the things I just kind of have to raise my eyebrows at is I hear about grass-fed whey protein isolate.
02:03:30.000The reason you eat grass-fed cows is because the fatty acid profile is a more desirable fatty acid profile.
02:03:40.000The protein complement is the exact same in a corn-fed steak or a grass-fed steak.
02:03:46.000You just can't tell the difference in the protein.
02:03:47.000It's the fatty acid profile that's different.
02:03:49.000The other difference might be the residual hormones and antibiotics.
02:03:53.000So when they raise corn-fed beef and they start from an early age, That's not the cow's native diet, so the cow tends to get sick, get infected, and so they have to use antibiotics, and sometimes they use growth hormone just to get them off the lot quicker.
02:04:11.000So, but the reason to have grass-fed beef is the fatty acid profile is much more desirable, and yet it's still fat, so it's just a couple of different versions of stearic acid and different versions of the saturated fat that you're talking about.
02:04:30.000Like this life-or-death decision that you make, like if I have a wonderful cut of corn-fed steak, I'm going to die.
02:04:38.000If I have grass-fed, I'll live forever.
02:04:40.000These are just choices, and if you can find a great-tasting grass-fed steak, by all means have it.
02:04:46.000If you can find a relatively inexpensive, you know, line-caught wild salmon, that's probably a better choice for your stated goals than some farm-raised salmon.
02:04:57.000So, yeah, the farm-raised salmon, it's problematic because of their diet, right?
02:08:31.000A lot of people are of the belief that you should drink water all the day, so you have to pee all the time because you're flushing your body.
02:08:41.000I definitely don't agree with that concept.
02:08:44.000You might want to do it once in a while just to do your own little cleanse or whatever, but I don't think as a rule of thumb that there's any particular health benefit to that.
02:13:01.000There are 300 wineries in the world among the tens of thousands.
02:13:08.000That don't use additives or sulfites or colorants or formaldehyde or any of the shit that we put in wine in this country.
02:13:17.000So if you look at how wines are made in the US, some of the more desirable wines from a nose perspective have all kinds of crap in them.
02:13:28.000And there's like 87 approved additives that the government allows US winemakers to put in their wines.
02:13:33.000And that's the shit that causes you to get to hangover and feel bad from drinking the wine, particularly the red wines, and wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to sleep.
02:14:32.000And, you know, I've realized some of these wines I can drink and enjoy and feel a little bit of taking the edge off and then go to bed and have no ill effects at all.
02:14:42.000So I'm sort of opening my mind to the fact that there's some paleo-type wines out there that don't have the additives in them that, consumed in moderation, are probably enjoyable and potentially healthful.
02:14:58.000That term paleo seems to be a loaded term because people connect it with the idea of the Paleolithic era and what people ate at that time, but we're not talking about that when you're talking about paleo wines.
02:15:42.000I mean, that's one of the great misnomers the general public has about the paleo diet, is that If a caveman didn't eat it, then we shouldn't eat it.
02:15:49.000Well, none of this stuff existed in caveman's time.
02:15:51.000Nothing that we eat, even the stuff we get out of the ground or off the trees, didn't exist then.
02:15:56.000It's all been manipulated by farming and whether it was inserting genes.
02:16:02.000It wasn't inserting genes, but we still did genetic manipulation of foods to get them sweeter and more protein or whatever.
02:16:58.000It's from a consumer demand point of view.
02:17:01.000So, you know, when you get some of these...
02:17:05.000I don't want to name names, but some of my favorite, really expensive California wines that I used to love because of the way they tasted.
02:17:12.000They were thick and rich looking and, you know, oaky and all this.
02:17:17.000It's just all additives, all crap they're putting in there because that's what the consumer thinks is going to make for a sophisticated wine.
02:18:56.000It could be color, could be, again, some of the, you know, adding sugar to the wines.
02:19:01.000A lot of the U.S. wines have a lot of sugar in them, like a fairly high sugar content.
02:19:05.000The guy I'm talking about here who led me down this road and sort of opened my eyes to this, he's been in ketosis for two years, and he couldn't drink wine because the sugar would take him out of ketosis.
02:19:20.000So that's sort of one of the reasons he got started on it.
02:19:22.000He was a lifetime wine drinker, grew up in wine country up in Sonoma, and had dealt in the business and sort of left it because he got disenchanted and then came back when he discovered that there are these wines that have no sugar, that have no, you know, minimal sulfites.
02:19:37.000I mean, all natural fruits and vegetables have some amount of sulfites, but not added, no added sulfites.
02:19:46.000And none of these 80 or so approved added ingredients that can affect the color and the smell and the thickness.
02:20:14.000That sounds so counterintuitive that we grow so much wine in California, but to get wine without any shit in it, you'd have to get it from Europe because we're so concentrated right now, at least this part of the country is, on natural foods and grass-fed beef and organic vegetables.
02:20:34.000The fact that we would have wines that almost primarily...
02:21:24.000You're eating appropriately grown cuts of meat and organic vegetables and you're cutting out the industrial seed oils, cutting out the sugar, cutting out the processed grains and some of the other grains.
02:21:37.000And in their place, you're cutting out, in this case, crappy wine and substituting...
02:21:48.000And now we have, you know, again, if we want to enjoy life, and that's one of the things that we might consider an enjoyable part of life is partaking of a glass of red or white wine with dinner.
02:22:00.000Now it's kind of back on the menu for some people.
02:22:05.000But it's not necessarily on the menu for you.
02:22:08.000No, so, and having said that, I'm not finding myself back in that situation where I'm drinking wine with dinner again, because I still recognize for myself that it's the ethanol.
02:22:25.000Intuitively, I don't like putting that amount of ethanol in my body on a regular basis.
02:22:29.000So once in a while, as a hormetic insult, if you will, it's fine.
02:22:35.000The body will adapt to it and use it to its benefit, but on a regular basis, probably.
02:22:40.000So just the sheer alcohol content of wine was causing an issue.
02:24:44.000You know, 750 glasses of wine to get the amount of resveratrol that you can get in a resveratrol capsule.
02:24:50.000There's not a lot of resveratrol in wine.
02:24:53.000There is some, and it's a well-studied, you know, component of wine.
02:25:00.000In fact, there have been companies founded on just providing resveratrol as an anti-aging nutrient.
02:25:08.000But there's not a lot of resveratrol in wine, and I don't think any of these studies have ever pointed to the fact that it's the resveratrol in the wine that you're drinking that's conferring longevity on this group versus that group.
02:25:19.000Do you think there's any benefit in consuming exogenous ketones?
02:25:26.000I think if you're an athlete and you're looking to maximize performance, there might be places in which you could consume exogenous ketones.
02:25:37.000First of all, if you're not keto adapted, it's a joke.
02:25:41.000There's no reason to take exogenous ketones.
02:25:43.000If you're fat adapted and keto adapted...
02:25:46.000There may be a reason to take exogenous ketones in an event instead of sugar.
02:25:52.000Like, say, if you're going to run, do something, some sort of endurance event?
02:25:59.000To my knowledge, there aren't many great tasting ketone salts.
02:26:03.000So now you've got a palatability issue as well with a lot of these things.
02:26:09.000But I've been fascinated by ketogenic diets over the last couple of months.
02:26:13.000I've been really considering trying to...
02:26:15.000I mean, there's some potentially good science there, but I can't give you a practical application right now where it would...
02:26:23.000Where it would work, other than in some elite event where somebody was, you know, racing all out for hours and was completely keto-adapted prior to the event and, you know, was so good at using ketones in the brain that they could hold off bunking for another hour or two.
02:26:44.000So they would take some sort of a ketogenic supplement in their water or something along those lines?
02:26:53.000Would probably be the easiest way to do it.
02:26:54.000So if you were going to recommend to someone to try to make your body more fat-adaptive, what would be the first step?
02:27:08.000Either way, I mean, it's easier, I think, if you just give it up, you just go all in.
02:27:13.000If somebody's been depending on sugar your whole life and you're doing 400, 500, 600 grams a day of carbohydrate, And then, you know, going down to 100 or 120 is going to be painful for the first couple of weeks.
02:27:28.000And when I say painful, we have this thing called the low-carb flu.
02:27:30.000So you go from your body, your brain, expecting to have you refuel every meal for, you know, every couple of hours every day with carbohydrate to then...
02:27:42.000We're reducing it down to 120, 150 grams a day.
02:27:45.000The brain starts to go, what's going on here?
02:27:48.000I mean, the muscles haven't yet built the metabolic machinery to burn fat.
02:27:52.000They're working on it, and they're upregulating.
02:27:54.000The genes are turning on to create the enzymes, but they're not there yet.
02:28:00.000So in the process, the body's expecting sugar.
02:28:04.000And if you're trying to work out at the same time, you're going to be screwed because now you have your sugar depleted and you haven't learned how to burn fat yet.
02:28:40.000So one or two weeks, people get through that fog, and then they'll be good.
02:28:47.000I have a book called The 21 Day Total Body Transformation, and the 21 days is about how long it takes To get 80% of the benefits of becoming a fat-burning beast, is what we call it.
02:29:07.000And in that adjustment period, it's not going to be...
02:29:09.000I mean, for some people, it's minimal.
02:29:11.000They just feel a little bit low energy or whatever.
02:29:14.000Other people get headaches and woozy because that's the brain, again, recognizing that there's no glucose, and it hasn't yet built the metabolic machinery to burn ketones, even though the body may be producing ketones.
02:29:42.000We'll still produce ketones if you skip two meals.
02:29:44.000You know, you wake up in the morning, you're basically fasted if you're a sugar burner, and you wake up, and if you don't eat breakfast, you might smell ketones on that person's breath, or they might, you know, pee on a strip and it shows a certain amount of ketones in the urine because the body's just getting rid of the ketones because it can't burn them.
02:30:03.000So consuming exogenous ketones doesn't accentuate a ketogenic diet or doesn't accelerate it?
02:30:10.000I don't know enough about the clinical trials that are going on right now, but my assumption would be that if you take exogenous ketones and you're not fat-adapted and keto-adapted, it's not going to necessarily prompt you to become that unless you've...
02:30:26.000Okay, so there's no shortcuts to that transitionary period between a glucose-based diet and a fat-based diet.
02:30:35.000There's just going to have to be a transitionary period.
02:30:37.000I think so, because like I say, I think if you skip a meal, you're producing ketones.
02:31:00.000Okay, so the strip's not nearly as important as the actual physical performance and the way you feel.
02:31:04.000So no matter what, you're going to have to go through a trip.
02:31:06.000So if you, like, say, look, just me, a guy like me, if I had a shitty diet, I'm eating spaghetti all day, you would recommend that for a couple of weeks, I just take it real light and make this adjustment.
02:31:19.000Make a commitment to making the adjustment in the diet.
02:31:22.000Doing a fat-based diet with very low sugar, very low carbohydrates, cut out the grains entirely.
02:31:27.000You get all your carbohydrates from celery and lettuce and vegetables and some fruits and just make a commitment to it.
02:31:51.000The Primal Endurance book that just came out a few weeks ago.
02:31:56.000The first chapter should be about diet because that's clearly one of the most important parts.
02:31:59.000But we talk about training first because we figured enough endurance athletes would read the book that if they read the diet part first, they would continue training at the high level and embrace the diet and then fall apart.
02:32:11.000So we've got to get the training dialed in first for those people and say, here's why you have to cut back.
02:32:17.000Here's why you can't exceed a heart rate of 180 minus your age for the first couple of weeks training when you're doing long-distance stuff.
02:32:25.000And at that rate, you'll be burning mostly fat.
02:32:28.000So you'll be accentuating what's going on on the dietary side, which is restricting carbohydrates, and providing more fat, more healthy fats for your body, and creating more mitochondrial biogenesis and upregulating those mitochondria to become efficient at burning fat.
02:32:43.000How long does it take before your body reaches the optimum level of mitochondria?
02:32:47.000I mean, we see athletes who get 80% of their benefit the first three weeks and then another 10% over the next six months.
02:32:59.000And then the final benefits kick in the last six months because sometimes your top-end power diminishes as you become fat-adapted.
02:33:09.000You've got to get that top-end power back, but that's what we build in the gym.
02:33:51.000Community where marriages fall apart because the guy would rather go for a 100-mile ride on Sunday morning than stay in bed and cuddle with the wife.
02:34:17.000So the longevity part, one of the things that happens is you train less.
02:34:22.000There's less total training time to get the results that you wanted because you're doing it methodically and you're not just putting it all out there every day and crossing your fingers and saying, well, I'm training as much as this guy, so I better be as fast or faster than he is.
02:35:42.000And if you could get around all that, you can start to see some amazing benefits with less pain and suffering and sacrifice, less being beat up, less burnout, less time.
02:35:55.000And presumably, if you do it right, better results anyway than the old paradigm.
02:35:59.000So that's going to cause a real dilemma with people that are obsessed with the work rate, obsessed with just doing more than anybody else, obsessed with proving to themselves that they push themselves, they put in all those hours, and looking at it, they look at their,
02:36:14.000you know, a lot of people have apps on their phone that measure how many...
02:36:31.000I was one of those people who lived my life based on the amount of miles I accumulated and measured my self-worth on whether or not I could hang with everybody I ever raced with in a workout.
02:37:36.000You are creating, especially if you're beating yourself up every day, you're creating endorphins, endogenous morphine-like substances that That sit on those same receptor sites, the pain-killing sites and the pleasure-giving sites, that you would inject heroin to achieve.