Burn Fat Like a Furnace: Unlock Your Body's Biohack for Boundless Vitality | Mark Sisson EP 604

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11You have a specific lifestyle that I've always been excited about. When you came in here, you were talking about how I have the same stand-up desk as you, and I was like, yes, if I'm doing something that Mark is doing, I feel like I'm doing it right. So I just want to dive into what this philosophy is and how you actually live. My main goal is to live awesome. That's the tagline. That's the motto of our company. Primal Blueprint, live awesome. And what does that mean? It means extracting the greatest amount of pleasure, enjoyment, contentment, fulfillment that's possible out of every possible moment.

0:41Now, there are going to be bad times, of course, but to live in the moment, to appreciate the now, to appreciate the relationships, to have fun when you're working out, to enjoy every single bite of food you ever eat and not choke something down just because it's healthy. So it really revolves around orchestrating a life way of pleasure, of hedonistic experiences in the context of this modern world that we have here. Understanding that we sit here with hunter-gatherer genes that have certain sort of proclivities and expectations of us that we can meet either through natural means or through artificial means.

1:21And sometimes there's not a right answer, but it's about choices. So how do I make choices that serve me in the short term, that give me pleasure, that don't harm me in the long term? You know, as you drill down, as you boil it down and distill it down to what does it look like? It looks like, you know, what are the types of foods that we choose to eat that turn on genes, that build muscle, that burn fat? You know, how much sun exposure do we get that allows us to make vitamin D and get tan, but not too much so we get burned? How much sleep do we get? And by the way, sleep is a very pleasurable thing if you were willing to acknowledge that.

1:52How much sleep do we get in a way that reinvigorates us and allows us to be creative on a daily basis and not brag about how well we do on so little sleep? So how do we use our brain on a regular basis beyond just the rote stuff of checking the PDAs, but how do we do puzzles? Do we play games? Are we creative? Do we play musical instruments? Do we learn a language? How do we use our brain? All these things make the totality of the human experience, And I love to look at all the ways in which we can choose these behaviors that manifest themselves as pleasurable, enjoyable, providing contentment and fulfillment and build us toward a better human being.

2:33When did you start to take this on? Because you were a triathlete? Yeah, I was a marathoner in the 70s. Wow. And actually the late 60s and early 70s. Wow. And from there went to triathlon. I was always trying to improve myself. Optimize performance. optimized performance using the tools of the day, which are pretty rudimentary. It's like, all right, run a lot of miles and eat lots of carbohydrates, and you'll be where you need to be. Well, that's what we knew. That's all we knew, and it wasn't exactly appropriate. So over the years, I got injured. I got sick from the overtraining, from the diet, which was very highly inflammatory.

3:11It caused sort of – Pastas and breads or what. All that stuff that they said you had to eat. I mean, I had so many pasta meals and pizza meals and lasagna meals the night before every game. And I remember just being so exhausted in every game. High school, college, pro, it was just like exhaustion. Right. Yawning. I would yawn so much. That's a classic symptom of it. Why am I yawning? Right. I'm supposed to be excited about the game and pumped up. I wanted to take a nap. I wanted to take a nap. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we have these sort of old conventional wisdom technologies that we were using to improve performance, theoretically.

3:44And they weren't. So I basically ended my career early, prematurely. I was too injured to continue running. My health had suffered. I had arthritis and tendonitis and irritable bowel syndrome, and I got sick a lot, and I had heartburn and hemorrhoids, and I was like a real wreck. I mean, here's theoretically the picture of health because of the training I was doing, but I was falling apart on the inside. So I sort of rededicated my life to figuring out how I could be fit and strong and lean and happy and healthy at the same time without being, you know, without too much struggle and sacrifice and suffering?

4:22You know, is there an easy way, an easier way to be all those things I wanted to be that allowed me to have more pleasure in the moment and didn't sacrifice my long-term health? So that was the big shift in me. And it's been going on for 35 years and it continues to go on. So as soon as I made that shift, I started doing the research. I mean, I wrote my first book in 82 on how to train for triathlons. Even then, I was calling upon evolution as the main basis for how we train. And I was looking at the previous few years of triathletes because in 82, there hadn't even been a decade of triathlon training.

5:02But I already recognized that we were doing it wrong. We were training too hard, too much redlining the heart and the body. And there was a better way and an easier way to do it. I started thinking, well, you know, all of the science continues to show us that the old choice was probably a wrong choice. That reliance on carbohydrates and that intent of managing our glycogen stores in our muscles was kind of the wrong approach. And maybe we ought to come at it from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, which is how do we become really good at burning fat? and in so doing spare glycogen and in so doing unburden ourselves of having to take in so much carbohydrate in the form of pasta and breads and cereals and rice and crackers and cookies and all the other stuff.

5:46What's the most effective way to burn fat? 80 % of your body composition is determined by how you eat. There's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat. Really? Yes. So So as opposed to waking up, being hungry, having breakfast, being hungry at the 10.30 break, being hungry for lunch, having a snack in the afternoon, having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed, which is the sort of standard American approach, that was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate, had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to continue to work.

6:22It never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners. We are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat. So what we do is we shift the diet around. It's not painful. You get rid of the breads, the pastas, the cereals, the crackers, the cookies, the candies, the sweet and soft drinks. Well, it does sound kind of weird, doesn't it? But what you're left with is meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, things like that. Those are great tasting foods if you eat them right. And they're real food. And they're real food.

6:55And you can use butter and lard, and you can eat bacon on this program. And what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in and just sort of gently forces your body to upregulate all the enzyme systems that access stored body fat and burn it and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often. So now you get into this space where you become a good fat burner. You start to melt away. You're not as hungry. And you're not as hungry because you're always carrying around a meal. It's on your thighs. It's on your ass. It's on your belly, wherever it is.

7:31Your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories. It says, I don't need to eat. I'm really not that hungry. And that's so empowering for so many people.

7:48Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:38Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the daily motivation show.