The Art of Manliness - Episode #3： Primal Living With Mark Sission

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:21.860 Now, if a man wants to get in shape physically, he'll often do what conventional wisdom tells

00:00:26.740 him to do. And that's, you know, eat low fat foods, count calories and spend hours upon

00:00:31.700 hours in the gym until his body is wiped out from fatigue. But what if, what if conventional

00:00:37.200 wisdom was wrong? What if modern man's approach to health and fitness is actually making him

00:00:41.760 less healthy? Well, our guest today argues that we should ignore the modern approach to

00:00:46.400 health and fitness and take a lesson from, get this, caveman. His name is Mark Sisson and

00:00:51.660 Mark does it all. He's a fitness coach, author, and he owns a sports nutrition company called

00:00:56.660 Primal Nutrition. And his latest book is called The Primal Blueprint, Reprogram Your Genes

00:01:02.000 for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy. And Mark also writes daily

00:01:07.120 at his blog about primal living at marksdailyapple.com. And he lives in beautiful Malibu, California

00:01:13.660 with his family. Mark, welcome to the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:01:17.120 Hey, it's my pleasure to be here, Brett. Thanks.

00:01:18.800 Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. All right. So Mark, I have to say you make

00:01:23.000 some pretty bold claims. You basically argue that what we've heard for years about health

00:01:28.200 and fitness is wrong, and we should actually be taking cues from caveman. So what exactly

00:01:33.220 is wrong with the modern approach to health and fitness?

00:01:36.580 Well, you know, there's a lot wrong with it. And on the other hand, people will argue,

00:01:42.340 look, I mean, there's guys at the gym who are getting buff and lean and they're, you know,

00:01:47.240 they're getting results from doing all the work they're doing. So, you know, why would you argue

00:01:52.160 with that? Well, my take on this is that I want to get as healthy and as lean and as fit

00:01:58.740 and as productive and as happy and as functionally strong as I can on the least amount of work

00:02:06.360 possible. And so there is an element of, I won't use the term laziness, but there is an element of

00:02:12.260 efficiency to what I've chosen as the path to all of these wonderful attributes that we are all

00:02:19.080 seeking. I mean, Lord knows we don't have enough time to do all the things that tend to distract us

00:02:24.400 in this day and age. And there are tons of distractions. So my take on this is why should

00:02:29.920 you waste your time running endless miles on a treadmill to try and burn off an extra few percentage

00:02:38.060 points of fat? When I can point you to research that shows that that's not only not effective,

00:02:45.160 it may be increasing the amount of body fat that you store. Why would you want to, you know, cut back

00:02:52.360 diet down on your calories when I can show you historically through the record of the evolution

00:03:00.220 of man over 2 million years that you don't need to cut calories as much as you need to alter the

00:03:04.460 types of foods that you eat? I've been doing this for about 25 years. I started off as an elite

00:03:11.460 marathoner and triathlete. I finished fifth in U.S. National Championships in the marathon in 1980.

00:03:16.460 I finished fourth in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii in 1982. I was the consummate fit guy. Everybody in

00:03:23.240 town knew me as the fit guy. But the problem was, as well as I could race and as fast as I could run

00:03:30.600 and ride, I was not the picture of health. I was at the effect of the kind of training I was doing.

00:03:37.440 I had upper respiratory tract infections. I had irritable bowel syndrome. I had chronic tendinitis

00:03:42.600 and osteoarthritis because I was doing it wrong and I was going against what my genes, my human

00:03:49.460 genes expected of me in the way of maximizing my health, my strength, and my fitness.

00:03:57.160 Modern health and fitness, I guess, takes things very specialized and very compartmentalized.

00:04:03.760 What you argue with primal living, I guess, is a more holistic view?

00:04:07.560 Yeah, very much so. That's a good point. I was a great marathon runner, but I couldn't play

00:04:11.940 basketball. I couldn't move side to side because I hadn't developed those lateral

00:04:16.540 movements, those lateral muscles. I had no core strength. Again, I was very fit and on a list of

00:04:22.920 somebody's attributes of fitness. Certainly, endurance is right up there, but I wasn't functionally

00:04:28.340 strong. I was fit, but I wasn't healthy. What good is being fit if you can't race half 1.00

00:04:34.520 the time because you're sick from catching the cold or from getting injured? One of the

00:04:40.040 things that we note about the conventional wisdom, which would say, all right, if you want

00:04:44.700 to be fit and healthy, you want to get out there and do a lot of aerobic exercise. The research

00:04:51.500 that I've done for the last 25 years about which I started to write my book shows that, yes, humans

00:04:58.300 evolve to be very efficient, slow-moving fat burners. That is, we can walk really well. We can run

00:05:04.420 occasionally. We can migrate, forage, hunt, gather for hours on hours at a time and burn predominantly

00:05:14.580 fat while we're doing this. We're also, by the way, pretty efficient, very, very fast sprinters for

00:05:21.840 brief periods of time, 10 to 20 seconds. We never really evolved to be the kind of runners

00:05:27.500 that you would see at a marathon. We didn't evolve to go out and run our heart rate up to 80% of its

00:05:36.280 VO2 max for an hour or two or three hours at a time. It turns out that that is counterproductive

00:05:42.920 to building muscle. It's counterproductive to building good health. I spent years as a marathoner

00:05:50.520 and then I realized I was tearing my body down and destroying my immune system. When I went back and

00:05:55.380 looked at the research, and I have a degree in biology and I was a pre-med candidate and I've been

00:06:00.660 writing about diet and exercise and nutrition for 25 years, so this is nothing that's new to me.

00:06:07.180 It's just when I put everything together, I realized, why do we assume that, as conventional

00:06:14.120 wisdom says, that in order to be fit, we have to spend hours on a treadmill or on an elliptical

00:06:18.700 trainer to get fit? Why do we assume that we have to go do these split routines multiple times a week

00:06:26.040 on these bizarre pieces of machinery that isolate certain muscle groups, but in fact

00:06:31.360 set us back because they're not using the compound movements that our genes expect us to do?

00:06:39.160 Why are we eating a high complex carbohydrate diet when humans never evolved to do that?

00:06:45.160 And as a result, I came out with all of these questions that I had of the conventional wisdom

00:06:51.600 and it turns out that we have been doing a lot of these things wrong for the last several decades

00:06:56.560 just under the assumption that because that's the way it's been done, you know, in the last 50 or 60

00:07:02.700 years, that must be the way we should be doing it. I think a lot of it, I guess, would have to do,

00:07:08.680 too, with the way we approach science. We're very analytical and so I'm guessing scientists said,

00:07:13.540 oh, well, if you eat a low-fat diet, they saw some good results, but they didn't really look at the

00:07:17.300 negative results of that. Well, one of the huge assumptions that conventional wisdom made a big

00:07:23.380 mistake on was exactly that. You know, there are several books that have been written in the last

00:07:28.500 couple of years, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is probably the best one, which looks at

00:07:34.080 the history of government recommendations about what we should eat and the whole anti-fat

00:07:41.540 lipid hypothesis of heart disease, which suggests that saturated fat and cholesterol are the cause

00:07:47.900 of heart disease. It turns out that they're not. They're not significant in coronary heart disease

00:07:54.040 or atherosclerosis, but even though studies for the last hundred years have pointed this out,

00:08:01.380 a few key individuals in the science community who had their own biases convinced the policymakers

00:08:07.900 that we should recommend that everyone eat a low-fat diet. And the next thing you know,

00:08:12.600 that became the recommendation. Anybody who wanted funding for a study on heart disease could only do

00:08:18.720 it if they were looking to prove that a high-fat diet caused heart disease. And the next thing you know,

00:08:25.940 we've got this conventional wisdom, this paradigm, and everybody is now afraid of fat, afraid of cholesterol,

00:08:32.600 when in fact there's nothing to be afraid about saturated fat or cholesterol. And it turns out that

00:08:39.620 carbohydrate, a high-carbohydrate diet is really what's driving most of the problems that you see

00:08:46.100 in heart disease and certainly in diabetes and probably in arthritis and most likely in cancer.

00:08:53.460 So one of the things that I talk about on my site all the time, and I go into very heavily in my book,

00:08:58.380 The Primal Blueprint, is how humans for two million years lived on a diet that was largely comprised of

00:09:04.440 animal product, you know, meats and fats, and nuts and berries and seeds and a few vegetables and fruits.

00:09:12.300 But nowhere in our history, until a few thousand years ago, were there anything like grains or

00:09:17.860 appreciable amounts of sugar. So humans evolved to, our genes evolved to expect us to be eating a high-fat,

00:09:26.840 moderate protein, low-carbohydrate diet. And when we don't do that, when we eat the way

00:09:33.000 we think we're supposed to by eating complex carbohydrates and whole grains and six to eleven

00:09:39.140 servings of grains a day, when we eat according to the conventional wisdom, we are setting ourselves

00:09:44.560 up for weight gain, in some cases obesity, certainly setting ourselves up for metabolic syndrome and

00:09:51.040 possibly type 2 diabetes, setting ourselves up for increased inflammation, which may manifest itself

00:09:56.220 in arthritis and may also manifest itself in heart disease and other cases. And the record is

00:10:02.740 becoming more and more clear on this, that things like sugars and grain-based starchy foods have no

00:10:11.560 real place in human evolution. They just sort of entered the equation 10,000 years ago when our

00:10:19.160 ancestors discovered agriculture and found a cheap and easy source of empty calories, you know, to keep

00:10:26.740 people alive.

00:10:27.680 So okay, so we kind of outlined what's wrong with the modern approach to health and fitness, but what are

00:10:33.580 the basic tenets of primal living? How does primal living counteract that?

00:10:37.680 So primal living counteract it because the assumption that I make is that we have mismanaged

00:10:43.200 our genes. We have, our genes want us to be healthy. They want us to be fit. They want us to

00:10:47.140 be lean. They want us to live a long time and be happy and all the things that we think we'd like

00:10:51.740 to see in our future, our genes already want us to do. But we have programmed them with the wrong

00:10:58.320 signals. And one of the things you have to understand is that the human body is changing and rebuilding and

00:11:05.280 repairing itself on a minute-by-minute basis every single day. And it's your genes that are causing

00:11:11.740 proteins to be made and enzymes to be made and cells to switch on or off. So if you can understand

00:11:18.980 that genes didn't stop working the day you were born, genes didn't stop working that, you know,

00:11:23.880 and only gave you blue eyes or brown eyes or blonde or dark hair or fair skin or sort of determine

00:11:31.260 your height. But genes are these little on-off switches that are always working on your behalf.

00:11:36.860 And sometimes the signals you send them are turning on genes that cause inflammation. Other times the

00:11:43.060 signals you send them are turning on the genes that cause your body to want to become diabetic to save

00:11:49.180 you from the sugar that you're eating. So when you realize that we have mismanaged our genes, but you

00:11:55.900 also realize that there are certain key clues to be found in our evolution that would show us how we

00:12:01.500 can reprogram our genes to do the things that we want them to do to allow us to be healthy. That's

00:12:08.960 really what the primal blueprint is about. It looks back at evolution and says, okay, you know, what did

00:12:13.940 our ancestors do for two million years that caused our genes to arrive at the exact point they were 10,000

00:12:21.920 years ago before agriculture, before civilization? And what can we do today to cause those genes to

00:12:28.520 make us healthy? And it becomes a list of 10 simple behaviors, one of which is eat plants and animals.

00:12:35.500 Well, that means eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, berries, but it means avoid processed foods,

00:12:42.820 trans fats, hydrogenated oils. It means avoid sugars. It means avoid grains, which have not been in part of

00:12:49.960 our diet for a while. It probably for many people means avoiding most dairy because dairy is only a

00:12:55.440 few thousand years ago. If you limit your diet to eating plants and animals, as the first rule says,

00:13:02.360 your genes will eventually reprogram themselves to make you an efficient fat burning machine. You'll

00:13:08.720 learn to, your body will literally learn to derive most of its energy from your stored body fat

00:13:15.720 instead of depending on a regular constant supply of carbohydrate every three to four hours,

00:13:23.500 like conventional wisdom tells us. I mean, don't you love the whole thing, the gym mantra,

00:13:28.960 the guys in the gym who are trying to build muscle saying, oh, I can't go more than three hours without

00:13:32.240 eating or else I'll lose math. Yeah. I've always figured that was a thing invented by protein companies

00:13:37.420 to sell more protein, but... Well, you know, it certainly was promulgated by them and promoted by them,

00:13:44.040 but it's just been the assumption that humans are grazers and therefore we should graze all day

00:13:50.860 long. Well, humans may have been grazers, but we went days without any food for hundreds of

00:13:59.020 thousands of years of our existence. There were long periods of famine and that's why the human body

00:14:04.200 and our basic genetic constitution developed a process whereby in those particular times,

00:14:11.960 we could take fat out of storage and burn it and live on it without any problems with blood sugar

00:14:17.780 swings or mood or depression or anything affecting us. So that's part one of the primal blueprint,

00:14:25.420 eat plants and animals. Another one of the rules is move around a lot at a low level of aerobic activity.

00:14:31.000 So what it means is don't go out and lace up your shoes and try and keep your heart rate

00:14:36.640 at a 75 to 85% rate for long periods of time, day in and day out. It doesn't mean you can't do it

00:14:44.720 once in a while. Sure, it's fine if you want to go on a trail run and hit it hard for a day here and

00:14:49.980 there, that's fine. But when it becomes this chronic daily repetitive sort of activity, what happens is

00:14:56.660 it tears muscle tissue down so you can't really maintain the kind of lean mass that you'd like

00:15:03.700 to. It requires that you consume lots of carbohydrates day in and day out because when you

00:15:08.820 train at that high level of cardiac output, you're training too fast and too long to be burning

00:15:17.500 predominantly fats. So you have to get your energy stores from carbohydrate and that means you have

00:15:24.420 to eat more carbohydrates than you burn off. And, you know, so that's the reason a lot of times

00:15:31.600 you'll go to the gym and, you know, among elite runners, you don't see a lot of body fat, but

00:15:35.620 among the standard middle-aged age group runner, you know, you go to the gym and how many people

00:15:42.880 have you seen at the gym every day or five days a week for the last three or four years on the

00:15:47.840 treadmill, reading those, you know, those calories burned off, sweating their, sweat pouring off their

00:15:55.020 brow and they still have 25 pounds to lose. Yeah. I see it all the time. You know, you see it all the

00:15:59.940 time and that's because it doesn't work. You cannot, that the human body was not meant to be burning

00:16:05.340 carbohydrate entirely and then go home. And I mean, the defense mechanism for the body is you get off

00:16:12.440 the treadmill, you burn 500 calories, but your brain tells you to go home and eat 600 calories

00:16:16.520 worth of carbohydrates to more than make up for it because your brain is thinking, what if this

00:16:20.600 crazy guy is going to do this again tomorrow? So moving around a lot of, at a low level of

00:16:27.500 activity means, means hiking. It means walking or it might mean jogging once in a while at 70% of your

00:16:34.220 heart rate or riding a bike easily if you want to do that on a daily basis. And every once in a while,

00:16:39.100 you can certainly go out there and crank, crank off a, you know, a hard seven mile or something

00:16:43.540 like that. But it, the, the idea behind the low level activity is it, is it promotes the burning

00:16:49.560 of fat and that's really what we want to do. So it's about, you know, parking your car away, far away

00:16:55.540 from work as you can and walking. It's about climbing stairs instead of taking escalators. It's about

00:17:00.120 standing up when you're doing an interview on the, uh, on the telephone and walking around the room

00:17:05.560 every once in a while. It's, it's about moving around a lot at a low level of activity. One of

00:17:10.400 the other laws of the primal blueprint is, um, sprint once in a while. And that's exactly what

00:17:16.920 we, we teach people once a week. One of your workouts will be to, to do 30 seconds to 45 seconds

00:17:23.380 of a very all out intense max heart rate sprint. And it doesn't have to be on the, you know, a running

00:17:30.120 sprint. It could be on the bike. It could be on the elliptical, whatever it takes to get your heart

00:17:34.000 right up into the, into the max zone for just 30 seconds, because it turns out that emulates

00:17:40.360 what our ancestors did when they were in a fight or flight situation. Um, you know, eat it to either

00:17:48.120 kill something for dinner or to, or to avoid being killed for something's dinner. We had to sprint once

00:17:53.540 in a while and the mechanism by which the body recovered, it's sort of that Nietzsche, um, you know,

00:18:00.000 uh, old, old, old line that that, which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. If you survive the sprint

00:18:06.360 like that, because it was a life or death situation, your body produced human growth hormone,

00:18:11.420 testosterone, and it built itself back even stronger so that you could withstand, uh, that same stress a

00:18:17.900 little bit better the next time. So we tell people sprint once in a while, just once a week,

00:18:22.840 you know, not, and it's maybe six to eight, uh, of these 30 to 45 second bouts with a two minute

00:18:29.700 rest in between, but in, in 30 minutes, you'll have accomplished more than you would with a,

00:18:35.220 a one hour, um, jog on a treadmill at, at 80% of your VO2 max. We're going to take a quick break

00:18:42.060 for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And Mark, this, this all sounds great,

00:18:49.240 but one of the criticisms, I guess I've heard of the, you know, the primal living or the paleo

00:18:53.120 lifestyle is that it tends to romanticize the life of a caveman. I mean, these people argue, well,

00:18:59.040 you know, didn't cavemen live short, hard lives. So, I mean, why should we emulate them? You know,

00:19:03.060 how would you respond to that type of criticism? Well, I mean, that's a common, a common line. And

00:19:08.220 the assumption is that, um, that they died. I think the lifespan of, uh, the paleolithic,

00:19:14.580 the typical paleolithic person about 10,000 years ago was probably 33 years. Um, but you have to

00:19:20.040 understand that that's an average lifespan. And that includes death during childbirth, uh, death

00:19:25.520 from, uh, traumatic, uh, infection, death from, uh, you know, being killed by a, by a beast or falling

00:19:33.080 off a cliff. Uh, and when you, when you realize that, that when you, when you look at any hunter

00:19:39.280 gatherer from modern times and going all the way back, and the science is pretty, pretty

00:19:44.820 solid on this, um, and you examine the skeletal structure, you find 65, 70, 80 year old people

00:19:52.520 who were very robust, uh, very healthy at the time of their death, uh, who, um, you know,

00:20:00.940 could, could, um, withstand stresses far greater than we could today. So they were generally healthier,

00:20:08.180 uh, stronger, uh, leaner. Um, we don't know if they were, you know, happier or more productive,

00:20:14.220 but we can, we can assume that, uh, that they, they probably were. Uh, so the, the average,

00:20:20.540 in fact, there have been some scientists who have done some extrapolation and suggest that,

00:20:24.460 that the maximum possible lifespan of those ancestors that you talk about was probably 92 or 93 years old.

00:20:32.360 So they could have lived that long if they'd avoided, you know, the massive, all of the stuff that,

00:20:37.880 that we take for granted now, you know, like getting eaten by a saber tooth tiger or something.

00:20:42.640 Bingo. I mean, you know, or to put it another way, um, I'm 56, two years ago, um, I injured my knee

00:20:50.820 in an ultimate Frisbee, um, in a stupid catch, if I have to tell the truth. Um, had I not gotten 0.93

00:20:59.100 surgery on that knee, and had this been 10,000 years ago, you know, I would no longer be able to run

00:21:05.280 away from danger. So I was probably dead meat at the age of having survived quite nicely to the age

00:21:11.180 of, of 54. Um, you know, I, I probably wouldn't have been long for the world because of that trauma.

00:21:17.860 So it's, it was all of this, this collection of all these possible ways of dying traumatic death

00:21:24.200 that lowered the average lifespan, but certainly did not alter the maximum possible lifespan.

00:21:30.280 And, and, and yet, as we say today, and we find in hunter gatherer societies today, you know,

00:21:35.240 a 70 year old or a 75 year old hunter gatherer can still scamper up a tree and catch food and can

00:21:41.060 still, you know, uh, have all the sex he wants and can still do all of the things that a, that a 25 0.73

00:21:46.760 year old can versus looking at our society today where a 75 year old man is the typical 75 year old

00:21:53.400 man is, you know, um, a far cry from that sort of robust health. Um, all of which goes to, to sort

00:22:01.760 of point out that when you, when we talk about emulating our, uh, our hunter gatherer ancestors,

00:22:07.500 we're just looking at ways to maximize the best possible gene expression. Uh, and when we get around

00:22:15.580 to diet, uh, you know, one of the, one of the things that we talk about as one of the rules is avoid

00:22:21.100 poisonous things. That was one of the things that kept our ancestors alive. I mean, if you,

00:22:25.600 they had a very keen, acute, uh, sense of, of smell and taste. Um, we certainly have the, the means

00:22:32.660 with, uh, with our ability to literally, um, to vomit if we eat something that's bad or our kidneys

00:22:39.000 or our liver can filter out certain poisons. So, you know, we have that going for us, but, um,

00:22:44.900 and that's what our ancestors rely on. But that, but today we have all these other poisonous things

00:22:50.580 that we still need to avoid. Sodas, um, you know, uh, hydrogenated oils, um, processed food with

00:22:58.080 chemical names that you can't pronounce and that have, uh, long-term potential consequences for

00:23:03.800 ingesting them. Those are the sorts of things that we want to avoid. And that's why we, we, we say

00:23:08.140 that it's, it's, it really is imperative to kind of emulate what our ancestors ate. And that means

00:23:14.440 if it typically, if it has, if it has a nutrition fact label on it, it probably isn't worth eating.

00:23:19.000 And going back to that, you know, you know, you say you eat meats and veggies, um, and avoid grains,

00:23:25.620 but how do you do it practically? A lot of the, our readers are younger men, they're in college,

00:23:29.860 so they don't have a lot of disposable income. It just seems eating just veggies and meat that can

00:23:34.320 get expensive when the cheaper alternative is go to the supermarket shelf and get whatever has grains

00:23:40.040 in it. You know, everything these days seems to have wheat or corn and it's cheaper than the

00:23:44.820 healthier option. You know, how can you make the primal living lifestyle affordable?

00:23:50.260 We have a lot of, uh, my readers at Mark's Daily Apple who, um, make a science of going to the

00:23:57.720 butcher and getting end cuts and getting organ meats, uh, and getting the cheaper cuts of meat

00:24:03.720 that are, that, that, that don't sell as well because they are fattier. When in fact, here I am

00:24:08.940 suggesting that the fattiest cut of meat is the best cut of meat you can get. Uh, we have, um,

00:24:14.660 people who are, have converted themselves into what we call modern foragers and who are, uh, you

00:24:20.700 know, buying the value pack of, uh, the chicken legs. And, and instead of buying the skinless chicken

00:24:28.200 breasts, which are twice as much as the ones with skin, they get the, the full on chicken breast with 1.00

00:24:33.800 the skin because A, it's better for you. B, it's cheaper and B, it tastes better. Uh, when, when you

00:24:39.440 kind of cut to the chase on all of these things and do a little, just a little bit of homework, you

00:24:43.840 realize that we waste a lot of money on processed foods that are actually, um, not only not good for

00:24:51.280 us, but aren't as inexpensive as we think they might be. Uh, the first thing people notice about

00:24:57.360 switching to a primal type diet, when they cut the carbs, they realize that they're not as hungry.

00:25:03.800 As they once were, because carbs, carbohydrates do drive hunger. They drive appetite. They drive

00:25:08.920 up insulin and insulin is involved in, in, um, you know, storing fat and basically storing everything

00:25:15.440 as fat. When you reduce the amount of insulin you secrete, because you've reduced the amount

00:25:18.860 of carbohydrate, you don't store as much. You take more fat out of storage and burn it on a regular

00:25:24.280 basis. And, and as a result, you don't need as many calories to get through the day with,

00:25:30.880 with full energy as you did when you were a carbohydrate consuming beast. Uh, the, the end

00:25:38.600 result of that is it doesn't, it doesn't take as, as many calories, as many, um, you know, if you're

00:25:44.660 doing a cost per calorie analysis, it doesn't take as many calories to keep you going. And there are

00:25:50.320 all sorts of options. People look at, uh, how much they spend on diet soda, thinking that they can't

00:25:57.280 live without diet soda, but thinking that they're doing themselves a huge favor because they're not

00:26:00.680 drinking real soda. Well, diet soda is just as bad or worse than real soda. If you can wean yourself

00:26:06.600 off diet soda and, and get a simple filter for your cap, uh, and drink regular water instead of

00:26:13.900 diet soda. And by the way, they both have zero calories. Uh, you know, you might save yourself

00:26:18.720 15 bucks a week. Just, just doing that. There are all these little areas that we can look at

00:26:24.680 and go, wow, I just didn't realize how much I spent on my, you know, my Starbucks latte or my,

00:26:30.500 or my mid-morning, uh, cola from the vending machine or, you know, whatever else, my snacks.

00:26:37.740 And it, I mean, I've got people living on three or four bucks a day and eating a lot of meat and,

00:26:43.040 and, you know, getting their produce from a, from a farmer's market or trading it for something else.

00:26:48.600 It's, it's, it's part of the fun of living primally is figuring out ways that you can,

00:26:52.900 that you can, um, you know, do this on a budget and be healthier than the guy next door.

00:26:58.680 Yeah. And it also looks like there's, you know, some hidden ways you save money. I mean,

00:27:02.400 according to you, if you live the primal diet, you're getting sick less often. So that's a less

00:27:08.480 you have to spend on medicine, on doctor care, on, by the way, that's huge. Yeah, that's huge. I mean,

00:27:14.720 I tell people, you know, if you start going primal now and you don't get a type two diabetes as a

00:27:22.400 result of it and you don't develop in your fifties or sixties, some kind of heart condition,

00:27:26.180 or you don't develop some form of, you know, God forbid, some form of cancer, you, you could be

00:27:31.580 looking at that as a better investment than a 401k is. Yeah. I mean, especially today, but you know,

00:27:39.360 you can say that, that it's a cliche, you know, you invest in your health and when you have your

00:27:43.620 health, you have everything, but you know, ask some 75 year old who's just getting out of the

00:27:47.120 hospital having had a, you know, a quadruple bypass and had a $250,000 bill to face, uh, you know,

00:27:54.300 what he'd rather be facing, um, a little bit of a change in a lifestyle 20 years earlier, or,

00:28:02.100 you know, the bills and, and all of the heartache and sadness it comes with, and the loss of function

00:28:07.520 and everything else that's, that comes with not having taken care of yourself. The thing about the

00:28:12.520 primal lifestyle, it's, it's so, it's, it's so easy to incorporate and then to, and then to realize

00:28:19.780 that you can live this way for the rest of your life. It's not like it's a 60 day diet or a 30 day,

00:28:26.140 um, you know, regimen or a two week cleanse that you're going to do. And then it's going to,

00:28:31.560 you're going to go back to the way it was. Most people who adopt this style of eating and exercising

00:28:36.460 and sleeping and otherwise living, uh, the biggest testimonials I get are from the people who go,

00:28:42.500 look, I not only have a weight lifted from my gut, I have a weight lifted from my shoulders because

00:28:47.000 I, I can see clearly that I can live this way for the rest of my life and, and not only not get sick

00:28:54.880 or not only not worry about getting some disease, but literally for the next couple of decades,

00:28:59.640 I can improve my strength. I can improve my endurance. I can improve my, my mood. I mean,

00:29:05.320 it's really exciting for a lot of people. Yeah. And Mark, it sounds like the primal lifestyle is going

00:29:11.300 to be a big change for a lot of people. You know, you're, they're used to eating,

00:29:14.040 you know, carbohydrate based diet. They exercise on the treadmill, you know, every day for 30 minutes.

00:29:20.640 And for a lot of people, this, this could be a big lifestyle change. So what is your advice?

00:29:25.200 Should people make the changes all at once or should they do it little by little?

00:29:29.020 Well, I think people historically, we've been doing this for three years now on a site and we get a lot

00:29:33.940 of feedback. Thousands of people have taken this program on. I guess, I guess we only hear from the

00:29:39.520 ones who, who are successful. We don't hear from any who have said, I tried, it didn't work. I'm

00:29:43.660 out of here. So there's a little bit of a filter going on there. Maybe there aren't any, I don't

00:29:49.100 know. But for the most part, the way they do it is they usually start with a diet and it usually

00:29:55.600 starts with cutting sugars and grains and they begin to feel better. And they realize, wow, you know,

00:30:00.720 I just, all I did was cut sugars and grains. Mark said I could eat all of the lamb chops and pork

00:30:07.260 chops and fish and salads and eggs and meat and nuts and, you know, all this other stuff that I

00:30:14.560 want. But it turns out I don't even really want to eat that much because once I cut the carbs,

00:30:19.940 you know, my, my, my appetite went to a realistic appetite. That was all I needed to, to maintain.

00:30:26.800 They report that they'll lose a couple of pounds a week steadily for weeks at a time or a month at a

00:30:31.900 time depending on how much they need to lose. And then they go, whoa, if the, if the diet is working,

00:30:36.320 I'm going to try to, the exercise regimen. And the exercise regimen is, it's actually simpler than

00:30:43.260 what they're used to because they're, if they're used to working out six or 10 hours a week, now

00:30:48.020 they're, now they're working out three or four hours a week total and they're still getting stronger

00:30:52.520 and they're still burning the fat and they can see their abs. So they've got, you know, they're getting

00:30:56.220 the whole washboard thing going. And one of the things that I, one of my 10 laws is play. And I'm

00:31:05.120 really, I'm really adamant about that. We don't play enough. It has a stress relieving qualities.

00:31:09.040 It has, it has qualities that, that incorporate a lot of the, of the strength that you build in

00:31:16.060 your workouts. Now you can use it when you play to pick up a new sport. And so a lot of people find

00:31:21.200 that they're, they're able to get out and play with their kids or they're, or they're playing with

00:31:24.840 their, their college buddies or their point, you know, they're, they're playing touch football or

00:31:29.480 soccer or ultimate Frisbee or whatever it is. They're able to do something that they couldn't

00:31:35.120 do a few months ago because they, they might've injured themselves, but now because they're

00:31:39.680 learning how to spend more time working on their core or they're learning how to actually

00:31:44.960 train their feet in the, in the mode of barefoot training, which is one of the new offshoots

00:31:50.620 of the primal program, they're not getting the muscle pulls anymore and their, their speed

00:31:55.340 just picked up. Uh, and it, it, and it sort of snowballs, right? It turns into this, this

00:32:01.480 thing where the more they take the lifestyle on and the more they realize that it's easy

00:32:05.680 to do, that there's zero sacrifice involved. If anything, they're doing, you know, they're,

00:32:10.640 they're eating better than they were when they were, and they're enjoying their food more

00:32:14.600 when they were on their conventional wisdom diet, that they're working out. Um, they're

00:32:20.100 spending less time working out. Yeah. They've got, they've got a couple of workouts

00:32:23.160 that are ball busters here and there, but that are, that are actually, you know, doing the,

00:32:27.800 the building phase, but it doesn't take that much because once you cut the carbs, you don't

00:32:32.160 need to burn the fat off. Your body's already burning in a, in a fat burning mode, whether

00:32:36.940 or not you exercise. So exercise just becomes then a, a, you know, a, a functional strength

00:32:43.820 building routine, which doesn't take very much time at all. The next thing you know, they're

00:32:47.880 looking into their sleep and they go, wow, I, I realized now that I hadn't been catching

00:32:52.020 up on my sleep and how important sleep is. They're getting more sunlight because they

00:32:56.340 realize that, that this whole conventional wisdom advice to stay out of the sun is antithetical

00:33:02.560 to health. That one of the biggest, uh, factors in the increase in cancer in this country isn't

00:33:08.480 because we've spent so much time in the sun. It's because ironically, we haven't spent enough

00:33:12.640 time in the sun and it's time in the sun that causes the body to make vitamin D and vitamin

00:33:17.080 D is one of the most important elements in our immune system and particularly that part

00:33:21.780 of the immune system that kicks cancer out. Uh, and it's, and it snowballs and it becomes

00:33:27.120 a great lifestyle. And as a result, people wind up going onto my forums and my comment boards

00:33:32.820 and they, now they're, now they're, they're doing these, um, primal meetups in different

00:33:38.080 parts of the country where they'll, they'll get together and they'll have a barbecue and

00:33:41.400 exchange ideas for new primal recipes and they'll play, uh, you know, some kind of, uh, you know,

00:33:47.480 obviously between you and me, we know, we know ultimate Frisbee is the best game on the planet.

00:33:51.600 So they'll play some ultimate, you know, but, but it's, it's really, it is a, it's a kind of a

00:33:58.140 lifestyle that's easy to undertake, to embrace, and then certainly to support with other, with other

00:34:04.760 people. Wow. Well, this was a lot of great information today, Mark. Uh, thank you again for

00:34:09.460 speaking with us today. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. Indeed. Our guest today was Mark

00:34:14.900 Sisson. Mark is the author of the book Primal Blueprint, and you can order Mark's book at

00:34:18.680 primalblueprint.com and make sure to check out Mark's blog, marksdailyapple.com for more

00:34:23.620 information about primal living. Well, that wraps up this edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:34:28.820 And before we leave, I want to make a plug for our book. Yesterday was the official launch of the

00:34:33.200 Art of Manliness book. And thanks to you all, it was a big, big success. Thank you to everyone who went

00:34:37.800 out and bought a book. Thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about the Art of

00:34:41.200 Manliness book. We really, really appreciate it. And if you haven't ordered a book yet,

00:34:45.240 we really encourage you to go out and do it this week because we got a great deal going on.

00:34:48.840 If you order a book before October 12th from amazon.com, from barnesandnoble.com,

00:34:53.780 and you forward us the email receipt you get, we will email you a link to download a free copy

00:34:58.620 of our man's guide to the holidays. It's a cool ebook we put together to help make your holidays

00:35:03.720 manly or filled with tips like how to cut down a Christmas tree or how to start a roaring fireplace

00:35:08.280 fire. So do that before October 12th and we'll get you a copy of that free ebook. And that's it.

00:35:14.540 We really appreciate it. And until next week, stay manly.

00:35:33.720 Thank you.

00:35:40.600 You

The Art of Manliness - April 03, 2014

Episode #3： Primal Living With Mark Sission

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