Episode #3： Primal Living With Mark Sission
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Summary
Mark Sisson argues that we should ignore the modern approach to health and fitness and take a lesson from caveman. He s a fitness coach, author, and business owner who owns a sports nutrition company called Primal Nutrition and his latest book is called The Primal Blueprint, Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health and Boundless Energy. Mark also writes daily at his blog about Primal Living at MarksDailyapple.com and he lives in beautiful Malibu, California with his family.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, if a man wants to get in shape physically, he'll often do what conventional wisdom tells
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him to do. And that's, you know, eat low fat foods, count calories and spend hours upon
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hours in the gym until his body is wiped out from fatigue. But what if, what if conventional
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wisdom was wrong? What if modern man's approach to health and fitness is actually making him
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less healthy? Well, our guest today argues that we should ignore the modern approach to
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health and fitness and take a lesson from, get this, caveman. His name is Mark Sisson and
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Mark does it all. He's a fitness coach, author, and he owns a sports nutrition company called
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Primal Nutrition. And his latest book is called The Primal Blueprint, Reprogram Your Genes
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for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy. And Mark also writes daily
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at his blog about primal living at marksdailyapple.com. And he lives in beautiful Malibu, California
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with his family. Mark, welcome to the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Hey, it's my pleasure to be here, Brett. Thanks.
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Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. All right. So Mark, I have to say you make
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some pretty bold claims. You basically argue that what we've heard for years about health
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and fitness is wrong, and we should actually be taking cues from caveman. So what exactly
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is wrong with the modern approach to health and fitness?
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Well, you know, there's a lot wrong with it. And on the other hand, people will argue,
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look, I mean, there's guys at the gym who are getting buff and lean and they're, you know,
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they're getting results from doing all the work they're doing. So, you know, why would you argue
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with that? Well, my take on this is that I want to get as healthy and as lean and as fit
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and as productive and as happy and as functionally strong as I can on the least amount of work
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possible. And so there is an element of, I won't use the term laziness, but there is an element of
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efficiency to what I've chosen as the path to all of these wonderful attributes that we are all
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seeking. I mean, Lord knows we don't have enough time to do all the things that tend to distract us
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in this day and age. And there are tons of distractions. So my take on this is why should
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you waste your time running endless miles on a treadmill to try and burn off an extra few percentage
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points of fat? When I can point you to research that shows that that's not only not effective,
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it may be increasing the amount of body fat that you store. Why would you want to, you know, cut back
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diet down on your calories when I can show you historically through the record of the evolution
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of man over 2 million years that you don't need to cut calories as much as you need to alter the
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types of foods that you eat? I've been doing this for about 25 years. I started off as an elite
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marathoner and triathlete. I finished fifth in U.S. National Championships in the marathon in 1980.
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I finished fourth in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii in 1982. I was the consummate fit guy. Everybody in
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town knew me as the fit guy. But the problem was, as well as I could race and as fast as I could run
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and ride, I was not the picture of health. I was at the effect of the kind of training I was doing.
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I had upper respiratory tract infections. I had irritable bowel syndrome. I had chronic tendinitis
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and osteoarthritis because I was doing it wrong and I was going against what my genes, my human
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genes expected of me in the way of maximizing my health, my strength, and my fitness.
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Modern health and fitness, I guess, takes things very specialized and very compartmentalized.
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What you argue with primal living, I guess, is a more holistic view?
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Yeah, very much so. That's a good point. I was a great marathon runner, but I couldn't play
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basketball. I couldn't move side to side because I hadn't developed those lateral
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movements, those lateral muscles. I had no core strength. Again, I was very fit and on a list of
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somebody's attributes of fitness. Certainly, endurance is right up there, but I wasn't functionally
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strong. I was fit, but I wasn't healthy. What good is being fit if you can't race half
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the time because you're sick from catching the cold or from getting injured? One of the
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things that we note about the conventional wisdom, which would say, all right, if you want
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to be fit and healthy, you want to get out there and do a lot of aerobic exercise. The research
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that I've done for the last 25 years about which I started to write my book shows that, yes, humans
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evolve to be very efficient, slow-moving fat burners. That is, we can walk really well. We can run
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occasionally. We can migrate, forage, hunt, gather for hours on hours at a time and burn predominantly
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fat while we're doing this. We're also, by the way, pretty efficient, very, very fast sprinters for
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brief periods of time, 10 to 20 seconds. We never really evolved to be the kind of runners
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that you would see at a marathon. We didn't evolve to go out and run our heart rate up to 80% of its
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VO2 max for an hour or two or three hours at a time. It turns out that that is counterproductive
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to building muscle. It's counterproductive to building good health. I spent years as a marathoner
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and then I realized I was tearing my body down and destroying my immune system. When I went back and
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looked at the research, and I have a degree in biology and I was a pre-med candidate and I've been
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writing about diet and exercise and nutrition for 25 years, so this is nothing that's new to me.
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It's just when I put everything together, I realized, why do we assume that, as conventional
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wisdom says, that in order to be fit, we have to spend hours on a treadmill or on an elliptical
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trainer to get fit? Why do we assume that we have to go do these split routines multiple times a week
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on these bizarre pieces of machinery that isolate certain muscle groups, but in fact
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set us back because they're not using the compound movements that our genes expect us to do?
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Why are we eating a high complex carbohydrate diet when humans never evolved to do that?
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And as a result, I came out with all of these questions that I had of the conventional wisdom
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and it turns out that we have been doing a lot of these things wrong for the last several decades
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just under the assumption that because that's the way it's been done, you know, in the last 50 or 60
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years, that must be the way we should be doing it. I think a lot of it, I guess, would have to do,
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too, with the way we approach science. We're very analytical and so I'm guessing scientists said,
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oh, well, if you eat a low-fat diet, they saw some good results, but they didn't really look at the
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negative results of that. Well, one of the huge assumptions that conventional wisdom made a big
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mistake on was exactly that. You know, there are several books that have been written in the last
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couple of years, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is probably the best one, which looks at
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the history of government recommendations about what we should eat and the whole anti-fat
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lipid hypothesis of heart disease, which suggests that saturated fat and cholesterol are the cause
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of heart disease. It turns out that they're not. They're not significant in coronary heart disease
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or atherosclerosis, but even though studies for the last hundred years have pointed this out,
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a few key individuals in the science community who had their own biases convinced the policymakers
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that we should recommend that everyone eat a low-fat diet. And the next thing you know,
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that became the recommendation. Anybody who wanted funding for a study on heart disease could only do
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it if they were looking to prove that a high-fat diet caused heart disease. And the next thing you know,
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we've got this conventional wisdom, this paradigm, and everybody is now afraid of fat, afraid of cholesterol,
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when in fact there's nothing to be afraid about saturated fat or cholesterol. And it turns out that
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carbohydrate, a high-carbohydrate diet is really what's driving most of the problems that you see
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in heart disease and certainly in diabetes and probably in arthritis and most likely in cancer.
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So one of the things that I talk about on my site all the time, and I go into very heavily in my book,
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The Primal Blueprint, is how humans for two million years lived on a diet that was largely comprised of
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animal product, you know, meats and fats, and nuts and berries and seeds and a few vegetables and fruits.
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But nowhere in our history, until a few thousand years ago, were there anything like grains or
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appreciable amounts of sugar. So humans evolved to, our genes evolved to expect us to be eating a high-fat,
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moderate protein, low-carbohydrate diet. And when we don't do that, when we eat the way
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we think we're supposed to by eating complex carbohydrates and whole grains and six to eleven
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servings of grains a day, when we eat according to the conventional wisdom, we are setting ourselves
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up for weight gain, in some cases obesity, certainly setting ourselves up for metabolic syndrome and
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possibly type 2 diabetes, setting ourselves up for increased inflammation, which may manifest itself
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in arthritis and may also manifest itself in heart disease and other cases. And the record is
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becoming more and more clear on this, that things like sugars and grain-based starchy foods have no
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real place in human evolution. They just sort of entered the equation 10,000 years ago when our
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ancestors discovered agriculture and found a cheap and easy source of empty calories, you know, to keep
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So okay, so we kind of outlined what's wrong with the modern approach to health and fitness, but what are
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the basic tenets of primal living? How does primal living counteract that?
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So primal living counteract it because the assumption that I make is that we have mismanaged
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our genes. We have, our genes want us to be healthy. They want us to be fit. They want us to
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be lean. They want us to live a long time and be happy and all the things that we think we'd like
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to see in our future, our genes already want us to do. But we have programmed them with the wrong
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signals. And one of the things you have to understand is that the human body is changing and rebuilding and
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repairing itself on a minute-by-minute basis every single day. And it's your genes that are causing
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proteins to be made and enzymes to be made and cells to switch on or off. So if you can understand
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that genes didn't stop working the day you were born, genes didn't stop working that, you know,
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and only gave you blue eyes or brown eyes or blonde or dark hair or fair skin or sort of determine
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your height. But genes are these little on-off switches that are always working on your behalf.
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And sometimes the signals you send them are turning on genes that cause inflammation. Other times the
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signals you send them are turning on the genes that cause your body to want to become diabetic to save
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you from the sugar that you're eating. So when you realize that we have mismanaged our genes, but you
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also realize that there are certain key clues to be found in our evolution that would show us how we
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can reprogram our genes to do the things that we want them to do to allow us to be healthy. That's
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really what the primal blueprint is about. It looks back at evolution and says, okay, you know, what did
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our ancestors do for two million years that caused our genes to arrive at the exact point they were 10,000
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years ago before agriculture, before civilization? And what can we do today to cause those genes to
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make us healthy? And it becomes a list of 10 simple behaviors, one of which is eat plants and animals.
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Well, that means eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, berries, but it means avoid processed foods,
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trans fats, hydrogenated oils. It means avoid sugars. It means avoid grains, which have not been in part of
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our diet for a while. It probably for many people means avoiding most dairy because dairy is only a
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few thousand years ago. If you limit your diet to eating plants and animals, as the first rule says,
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your genes will eventually reprogram themselves to make you an efficient fat burning machine. You'll
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learn to, your body will literally learn to derive most of its energy from your stored body fat
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instead of depending on a regular constant supply of carbohydrate every three to four hours,
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like conventional wisdom tells us. I mean, don't you love the whole thing, the gym mantra,
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the guys in the gym who are trying to build muscle saying, oh, I can't go more than three hours without
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eating or else I'll lose math. Yeah. I've always figured that was a thing invented by protein companies
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to sell more protein, but... Well, you know, it certainly was promulgated by them and promoted by them,
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but it's just been the assumption that humans are grazers and therefore we should graze all day
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long. Well, humans may have been grazers, but we went days without any food for hundreds of
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thousands of years of our existence. There were long periods of famine and that's why the human body
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and our basic genetic constitution developed a process whereby in those particular times,
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we could take fat out of storage and burn it and live on it without any problems with blood sugar
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swings or mood or depression or anything affecting us. So that's part one of the primal blueprint,
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eat plants and animals. Another one of the rules is move around a lot at a low level of aerobic activity.
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So what it means is don't go out and lace up your shoes and try and keep your heart rate
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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
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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
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there, that's fine. But when it becomes this chronic daily repetitive sort of activity, what happens is
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it tears muscle tissue down so you can't really maintain the kind of lean mass that you'd like
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to. It requires that you consume lots of carbohydrates day in and day out because when you
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train at that high level of cardiac output, you're training too fast and too long to be burning
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predominantly fats. So you have to get your energy stores from carbohydrate and that means you have
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to eat more carbohydrates than you burn off. And, you know, so that's the reason a lot of times
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you'll go to the gym and, you know, among elite runners, you don't see a lot of body fat, but
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among the standard middle-aged age group runner, you know, you go to the gym and how many people
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have you seen at the gym every day or five days a week for the last three or four years on the
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treadmill, reading those, you know, those calories burned off, sweating their, sweat pouring off their
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brow and they still have 25 pounds to lose. Yeah. I see it all the time. You know, you see it all the
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time and that's because it doesn't work. You cannot, that the human body was not meant to be burning
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carbohydrate entirely and then go home. And I mean, the defense mechanism for the body is you get off
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the treadmill, you burn 500 calories, but your brain tells you to go home and eat 600 calories
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worth of carbohydrates to more than make up for it because your brain is thinking, what if this
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crazy guy is going to do this again tomorrow? So moving around a lot of, at a low level of
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activity means, means hiking. It means walking or it might mean jogging once in a while at 70% of your
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heart rate or riding a bike easily if you want to do that on a daily basis. And every once in a while,
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you can certainly go out there and crank, crank off a, you know, a hard seven mile or something
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like that. But it, the, the idea behind the low level activity is it, is it promotes the burning
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of fat and that's really what we want to do. So it's about, you know, parking your car away, far away
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from work as you can and walking. It's about climbing stairs instead of taking escalators. It's about
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standing up when you're doing an interview on the, uh, on the telephone and walking around the room
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every once in a while. It's, it's about moving around a lot at a low level of activity. One of
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the other laws of the primal blueprint is, um, sprint once in a while. And that's exactly what
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we, we teach people once a week. One of your workouts will be to, to do 30 seconds to 45 seconds
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of a very all out intense max heart rate sprint. And it doesn't have to be on the, you know, a running
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sprint. It could be on the bike. It could be on the elliptical, whatever it takes to get your heart
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right up into the, into the max zone for just 30 seconds, because it turns out that emulates
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what our ancestors did when they were in a fight or flight situation. Um, you know, eat it to either
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kill something for dinner or to, or to avoid being killed for something's dinner. We had to sprint once
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in a while and the mechanism by which the body recovered, it's sort of that Nietzsche, um, you know,
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uh, old, old, old line that that, which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. If you survive the sprint
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like that, because it was a life or death situation, your body produced human growth hormone,
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testosterone, and it built itself back even stronger so that you could withstand, uh, that same stress a
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little bit better the next time. So we tell people sprint once in a while, just once a week,
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you know, not, and it's maybe six to eight, uh, of these 30 to 45 second bouts with a two minute
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rest in between, but in, in 30 minutes, you'll have accomplished more than you would with a,
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a one hour, um, jog on a treadmill at, at 80% of your VO2 max. We're going to take a quick break
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for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And Mark, this, this all sounds great,
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but one of the criticisms, I guess I've heard of the, you know, the primal living or the paleo
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lifestyle is that it tends to romanticize the life of a caveman. I mean, these people argue, well,
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you know, didn't cavemen live short, hard lives. So, I mean, why should we emulate them? You know,
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how would you respond to that type of criticism? Well, I mean, that's a common, a common line. And
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the assumption is that, um, that they died. I think the lifespan of, uh, the paleolithic,
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the typical paleolithic person about 10,000 years ago was probably 33 years. Um, but you have to
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understand that that's an average lifespan. And that includes death during childbirth, uh, death
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from, uh, traumatic, uh, infection, death from, uh, you know, being killed by a, by a beast or falling
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off a cliff. Uh, and when you, when you realize that, that when you, when you look at any hunter
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gatherer from modern times and going all the way back, and the science is pretty, pretty
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solid on this, um, and you examine the skeletal structure, you find 65, 70, 80 year old people
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who were very robust, uh, very healthy at the time of their death, uh, who, um, you know,
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could, could, um, withstand stresses far greater than we could today. So they were generally healthier,
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uh, stronger, uh, leaner. Um, we don't know if they were, you know, happier or more productive,
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but we can, we can assume that, uh, that they, they probably were. Uh, so the, the average,
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in fact, there have been some scientists who have done some extrapolation and suggest that,
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that the maximum possible lifespan of those ancestors that you talk about was probably 92 or 93 years old.
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So they could have lived that long if they'd avoided, you know, the massive, all of the stuff that,
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that we take for granted now, you know, like getting eaten by a saber tooth tiger or something.
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Bingo. I mean, you know, or to put it another way, um, I'm 56, two years ago, um, I injured my knee
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in an ultimate Frisbee, um, in a stupid catch, if I have to tell the truth. Um, had I not gotten
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surgery on that knee, and had this been 10,000 years ago, you know, I would no longer be able to run
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away from danger. So I was probably dead meat at the age of having survived quite nicely to the age
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of, of 54. Um, you know, I, I probably wouldn't have been long for the world because of that trauma.
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So it's, it was all of this, this collection of all these possible ways of dying traumatic death
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that lowered the average lifespan, but certainly did not alter the maximum possible lifespan.
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And, and, and yet, as we say today, and we find in hunter gatherer societies today, you know,
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a 70 year old or a 75 year old hunter gatherer can still scamper up a tree and catch food and can
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still, you know, uh, have all the sex he wants and can still do all of the things that a, that a 25
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year old can versus looking at our society today where a 75 year old man is the typical 75 year old
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man is, you know, um, a far cry from that sort of robust health. Um, all of which goes to, to sort
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of point out that when you, when we talk about emulating our, uh, our hunter gatherer ancestors,
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we're just looking at ways to maximize the best possible gene expression. Uh, and when we get around
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to diet, uh, you know, one of the, one of the things that we talk about as one of the rules is avoid
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poisonous things. That was one of the things that kept our ancestors alive. I mean, if you,
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they had a very keen, acute, uh, sense of, of smell and taste. Um, we certainly have the, the means
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with, uh, with our ability to literally, um, to vomit if we eat something that's bad or our kidneys
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or our liver can filter out certain poisons. So, you know, we have that going for us, but, um,
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and that's what our ancestors rely on. But that, but today we have all these other poisonous things
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that we still need to avoid. Sodas, um, you know, uh, hydrogenated oils, um, processed food with
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chemical names that you can't pronounce and that have, uh, long-term potential consequences for
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ingesting them. Those are the sorts of things that we want to avoid. And that's why we, we, we say
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that it's, it's, it really is imperative to kind of emulate what our ancestors ate. And that means
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if it typically, if it has, if it has a nutrition fact label on it, it probably isn't worth eating.
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And going back to that, you know, you know, you say you eat meats and veggies, um, and avoid grains,
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but how do you do it practically? A lot of the, our readers are younger men, they're in college,
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so they don't have a lot of disposable income. It just seems eating just veggies and meat that can
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get expensive when the cheaper alternative is go to the supermarket shelf and get whatever has grains
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in it. You know, everything these days seems to have wheat or corn and it's cheaper than the
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healthier option. You know, how can you make the primal living lifestyle affordable?
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We have a lot of, uh, my readers at Mark's Daily Apple who, um, make a science of going to the
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butcher and getting end cuts and getting organ meats, uh, and getting the cheaper cuts of meat
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that are, that, that, that don't sell as well because they are fattier. When in fact, here I am
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suggesting that the fattiest cut of meat is the best cut of meat you can get. Uh, we have, um,
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people who are, have converted themselves into what we call modern foragers and who are, uh, you
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know, buying the value pack of, uh, the chicken legs. And, and instead of buying the skinless chicken
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breasts, which are twice as much as the ones with skin, they get the, the full on chicken breast with
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the skin because A, it's better for you. B, it's cheaper and B, it tastes better. Uh, when, when you
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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.