Listen
Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE
Transcript
- 03:46 About Mark Sission and the Primal Movement
- 06:18 Living within our genetic code
- 09:40 Losing weight by eating more fat?
- 12:23 The Three Square Meals Myth
- 17:29 Fasting
- 26:10 The Low Carb Flu
- 28:39 The Primal Connection
- 35:13 Exercise
- 40:06 Sleep
- 46:23 Most pressing health issue in the world today
- 49:44 More about Mark Sission
Wendy Myers: Hello and welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and I’m going to be your host today. You can find me on myersdetox.com. I’m so excited. Today, we have the paleo god on the podcast today, Mark Sission. He’s going to be talking to us about how to live a healthy, primal lifestyle – all about sleep, exercise and all the things that encompass living a healthy paleo lifestyle and working with our ancient bodies in today’s modern society.
Mark Sission: That’s about right.
Wendy Myers:Yes, there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot to it than you think. There’s a lot more to it. If you guys want to go check out the new website, I’ve got a brand new myersdetox.com up on the Internet. You can find new episodes of the Modern Paleo Cooking Show. You can also find it on YouTube at wendyliveto110. I’m so excited to announce that just a couple of weeks ago, I got a new editor for my book, The Modern Paleo Survival Guide. He works at Waterside Publishing. I’m very honored that he’s going to be editing my book and hopefully handing it to an agent at Waterside for potential publication. So I’m thrilled about that. And for any of you guys haven’t heard about my book, The Modern Paleo Survival Guide is all about diet, lifestyle, detox and surviving and thriving to 110 because I believe all those three components – diet, lifestyle and detox – are essential to live a healthy lifestyle, to live for a long, long time.
Many people eat a paleo diet and they find that it doesn’t take them all the way to meet their health goals and it’s because they’re missing a couple of the extra factors, lifestyle and detoxification, which I think are very important and that you hear me constantly talking about on this podcast. So today, our guest, Mark Sission is an American fitness author and blogger. You can find his website at MarksDailyApple.com, which I’m sure you already know about it. He’s got 350,000 subscribers. He also has another website called PrimalBlueprint.com.
Mark is heavily involved in creating all kinds of events to teach folks about paleo. He’s written five books about the paleo diet and living a paleo lifestyle, including the seminal, The Primal Blueprint and his most recent book, The Primal Connection. He provides so many ways for you to learn about paleo. He’s heavily involved in creating events like Primal Con Convention where you can go travel for a weekend in Tulum and Oxnard, California. He has a weekend retreat in Malibu. He also has a publishing company having published many books on the primal way including Denise Minger’s Death by Food Pyramid. I had her on the show talking about that. He now hosts the Primal Blueprint Podcast. He basically, I guess, doesn’t sleep. That’s a lot of activities going on. And so Mark, I’m so honored to have you on the show.
Mark Sission: Thank you. It’s very nice to be here. And speaking of sleep, I do sleep. That’s one of the most important criteria in The Primal Blueprint. So that is one thing I definitely make sure I get enough of.
Wendy Myers:That’s good. I’m sure you have tons and tons of help to make all these things happen. So many great events!
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in the primal movement?
Mark Sission: Sure. Well, I was an endurance athlete in my teens and twenties. I was trying to do everything I thought was required to be healthy. I was running a lot of miles and eating very complex carbohydrates-based diet. I’m really interested in health from an early age, which led me down this path of trying to become the endurance athlete because we thought at the time, the more aerobic exercise you did, the healthier you would be and the longer you would live – maybe to 110.
But along the way, I got very fast at running, but I got injured and I decided that manyo f the illnesses and ailments that I was experiencing on a regular basis were probably inappropriate to a lifestyle that was otherwise intended to be making me healthy. I was getting irritable bowel syndrome (which I’ve had since I was 14), I had lots of upper respiratory tract infections, I had sinus infections that lingered, I had heartburn. I had a lot of these ailments. I had arthritis in my joints, which was pretty antithetical to being able to be a fast runner.
And so when I retired at an early age (at 28 or 29) from elite competition, I sort of decided I really wanted to experiment with the lifestyle that would allow me to be healthy and lean and fit and strong with the least amount of pain, suffering and sacrifice. That really was sort of my overarching theme. It has to be easier to be healthy than what I had been led to believe by conventional wisdom. That began a 30-year oddysey in exploring the research and all of the studies that looked at how we can learn to become good fat burners and burn off our stored body fat and how we can reduce inflammation and how we can have full movement throughout our bodies and not be painful and stiff and arthritic.
It was quite eye-opening because a lot of the secrets that we identified were gene-based. They were genetic-based – not based on who your parents were, but based on the concept that you are a human who has a recipe that wants to make you a strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy individual, but it requires the right kind of inputs to turn certain genes on and turn other genes off.
Wendy Myers: Yes. So talk a little bit about the importance of living within our genetic code. What are some of the tips that you can give listeners, some of the very basic ones to help people understand why we have these ancient bodies and we have to adjust that into our hectic modern lifestyles that will produce disease?
Mark Sission: Sure. Well, probably one of the best exmaples is the idea that for 2 ½ million years, we evolved in a realm of scarcity. And so the human body was able to survive long periods of time without eating because it was so good at storing fat. It was so good at accumulating excess calories whenever excess calories were available and putting them on the body, so that when the reality of going without food for two days or three days or four days happened, there was no shutdown in the systems, everything worked perfectly because we were able to access our stored body fats, use that for fuel and continue to go about our way until we came across the next supply of food.
Well, those genes still exists in us today. Evolution hasn’t really changed that. The irony is that we’re confronted with a huge amount of food wherever we go – large portions, excess amounts, the wrong kinds of foods, cheaply produced crappy food that winds up being available to us at all times. Our bodies just don’t know any better when our minds say, “I’m hungry. I want to eat this. It tastes good. It tastes salty, crunchy, sweet or whatever.” We have this tendency to overeat at every meal throughout our lifetime, which causes us to put on excess calories, excess pound. So we’re wired to be storing fat, but what we try to do within The Primal Blueprint is acknowledge that and say, “We’re also wired to be able to access that stored body fat for fuel.” If we can tell the genes to down-regulate all those systems that depend on us eating sugar and carbohydrate and cheaply processed stuff and instead move over toward natural foods with healthy fats, a little bit more protein, a lower reliance on grains, we shift our whole metabolism into being good fat burners, what we call in The Primal Blueprint “fat-burning beasts”. We become very good at accessing stored body fats.
So over weeks and months and years, we trend toward our ideal body composition. We burn off that stored body fat. One of the other things that happen as a result of food choices is we take in food that decreases the genes or turns of the genes that would cause systemic inflammation and we turn on what we would call the inflammatory genes.
So there are a lot of these other choices that we make – sleep, [inaudible 00:09:10] – that would turn genes on or off that are related to [inaudible 00:09:14] and use it in a way. In the context of a hedonistic, comfortable, safe modern lifestyle, it’s kind of a way of hacking the genes to get the best of both worlds, to be able to live long and live well long into our years.
Wendy Myers: This is a question I think a lot of people have about the paleo diet. How does one flip that fat switch by eating more fat? How does that work where by eating more fat, the people are actually able to lose weight?
Mark Sission: Right. Well, it’s not so much eating more fat as it is eating fewer sugars and simple carbohydrates. So when you replace those sugar and carbohydrates and calories – we’re not suggesting that you go on a diet. So if you replace those calories, we’re suggesting you replace them with healthy fats.
The body has to learn how to burn off its fat. The irony of, again, modern times is that we have all of these meals in front of us all day long. There’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. The old mantra for the last couple of decades was, “Oh, you must eat several small meals [inaudible 00:10:33] so you don’t get into cannibal mode and start to cannabalize [inaudible 00:10:38].”
Well, that was [inaudible 00:10:39] to provide glucose to run our bodies, to run our brains. The reality is that we don’t need that much glucose to do all that stuff. If we can convert the basic resting metabolic rate to run mostly on stored fat and decrease our reliance on sugar and carbohydrate every couple of others, we can go longer in time without even having to eat and without getting hungry. That’s one of the great things about The Primal Blueprint is it mitigates appetite.
But this only happens because you have to sort of force the body into burning the fat. You have to withhold the sugars and carbohydrates so that the body’s only choice is to go to burn the fat. If all you do is just reduce the amount of calories, but still have a high amount of sugars and carbohydrates, the body still relies on these. It still expects these to maintain blood sugar every three or four hours. And then you get into trouble if you skip a meal because you become so dependent on a fresh supply of carbohydrates.
[Inaudible 00:11:51] a significant amount of body fat that it could use. Even with myself at 8% or 9% body fat, I’d still have enough fat in my body to walk 400 miles. That is an amazing fuel if you know how to tap into it. It’s also amazingly annoying and life-threatening if you have too much of it.
Wendy Myers: And so what about this popular idea that if people eat three meals a day that that tensd to be healthier because it seems counterintuitive to me (or even eating six meals a day, which I think is ridiculous) that people throughout time for millions of years, they did not eat three meals a day, they probably had one, maybe two and even went a few days without food. So how exactly do we need to copy that to tap into health and eat how our ancient body was meant to be fed?
Mark Sission: Well, first of all, the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day I think is farcical because I don’t eat breakfast and I’m as healthy as I’ve ever been in my life. I wake up in the morning. I’m good at burning fats, so I wake up, get out of bed and I’m burning fat and I have enough energy to get me through not only my work routine in my desk, but maybe a hard workout in the gym at 10 o’clock or 10:30.
So I’ll workout [inaudible 00:13:21]. I won’t eat immediately after the workout the way, again, much of the training community and exercise fitness community is always suggesting where you must eat right after a workout. No, I’ll probably have my first meal at noon or one o’clock. It’s healthy fats, maybe a salad (a big salad with some form of protein in it), I might have a snack in the afternoon. It might be a high fat snack. It might be macademia nuts or something. And then dinner, these are made with some grilled vegetables and maybe some berries for dessert. I’m able to do that.
Well, first of all, the idea again of three square meals a day is sort of an industrial revolution concept. They needed to feed the workers to be able to work the mills. And even before that in the early agricultural societies, to be able to work the fields, you needed the calories to get up in the morning and go out in the fields and work until noon. And then have more calories at noon. They think about making sure that the workers could produce enough to keep whatever business it was to get going.
We sort of carried that into modern society where people don’t really work in the fields. Many people don’t do a lot of physical activity throughout the day, so they don’t need all those calories. The other part about that was that because there was a dirth of healthy fats and proteins and there was access to all these cheap sources of calories (i.e. grains) that converted to glucose very rapidly, many people became dependent on having those calories from glucose every couple of hours to keep their blood sugar up, to keep their muscles going.
Now the hunter/gatherer didn’t have that experience. The hunter/gatherer, as you said, they went sometimes days without eating, but they didn’t eat a lot of processed foods, they didn’t eat a lot of sugar, they didn’t eat a lot of even complex carbohydrates (maybe 100 grams a day locked in some fibrous matrix, but not 300 or 500 grams of carbs a day like so many people in modern society do).
So the hunter/gatherer was good at whatever excess there was gets stored, but it could also access that stored body fat and burn it off over the next couple of days without any stopping of effectiveness, without any lapse of concentration, without any real negative aspects. So again, we’re trying to tap into that same hunter/gatherer experience. We’re trying to look at what do our genes expect.
And our genes don’t really expect us to eat three meals a day. It’s society that expects us to eat three meals a day. Our genes just say, “Look, if you give us the right signals to burn fat, we can burn fat all day long. We can go a day without eating.”
And so many people in the The Primal Blueprint community (in the paleo community in general) will purposefully intermittently fast. They’ll skip a day. They’ll go a day without eating. Not only does it not affect them negatively, it probably impacts them very positively with some anti-aging benefits. That’s a time when the body goes into a repair mode. If you’re good at burning fat, your cells will start to burn the damaged fats that are in the cells and use them as fuel. So at the same time as they’re getting rid of those toxic, damaged fat, they’re actually using the most fuel and they’re repairing DNA.
And so there’s all sorts of reasons that three square meals a day is old technology. The new technology is this ability to burn and access fats and be able to skip a meal and not have it affect your demeanor or productivity.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I totally agree with you because I was always ingrained to eat the three meals a day. I’m just doing it out of habit. When I really started to listen to my body and really started ignoring what everyone else is doing and just listen to me, I only need two meals a day. Like you, I have my coffee in the morning and I just eat when I’m hungry (usually , it ends up being 10 or 11 o’clock).
Wendy Myers:But let’s get back to fasting because I think that’s a pretty controversial issue. People don’t know should they fast, should they not fast. In my research, I found that about 24 hours is a good amount. According to Paul Jaminet, it says that after about 24 hours, the benefits will tend to decline. What is your take on that in your research?
Mark Sission: Well, I agree with that. I think that after 24 hours, if there’s a decline in the benefits – it’s like a lot of things that happen with, you know, you can exercise. There’s a little switch box for exercise. You exercise too much and there’s a decline in benefits. So the same thing kind of happens with fasting. I would almost argue that you and I eat on what we call a ‘compressed eating window’ that almost builds in 18 hours of fast every day. So if I go from seven at night until one in the afternoon the next day, I’ve had 18 hours of eating. That’s sort of a mini-fast.
Again, if you pay attention to the signals of your body, if you’re not hungry – and that’s a key, develop that skill to burn fat so that you don’t get hungry. I wouldn’t want anyone to just use the Jedi mind power and override the hunger pangs that happen. It’s a skill that you develop. If you’re able to go throughout the day and then say, “Oh, wait a minute. I’m hungry. Now, it’s time to eat” not because it’s 12 noon or not because it’s 8:30 in the morning. When you say, “Okay, I’m hungry, I could eat now” and then also having the skill to know when it’s time to stop because unlike the hunter/gatherer experience, we know that there’s a fresh supply of food any time we want right around the corner.
So one of the great skills with The Primal Blueprint, it’s kind of halfway or two-thirds of the way into whatever meal that is to be able to just sort of ask yourself, “Am I really hungry for the next bite?”
It’s not “Am I full?” because if you’re full, it’s almost two legs and we can probably determine that you’ve eaten too much. But if I’m no longer hungry for the next bite, then there’s no reason to continue eating really.
You push the food away or you package it up and save it for later or whatever it is. And then again, typically, the next time you’re hungry might be six or seven hours later and on the same principle, you eat according to your hunger not because somebody put a giant plate of food in front of you and you feel obligated to finish it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I liked what you said about how intermittent fasting is a practice because before I went paleo, I decided to do, “Oh, a 3-day juice fast because it’s so healthy,” which I don’t believe in those anymore. But when I tried to do a fast, my body was used to burning carbohydrates because I was probably eating a lot at that time and by noon, I had a searing headache because my body didn’t know how to burn fat. So I think as you do the paleo diet, you definitely become better adept at fasting.
Mark Sission: Well, we say it takes three weeks. I mean, in some people, it takes a week, maybe two, but in almost everybody, by the third week – I have a whole program called The 21-day Total Body Transformation. The idea is by eating paleo for 21 days, your body will get the signals. They will up-regulate all the enzyme systems that not only burn fat, but it will build the metabolic machinery in your brain to use ketones. Ketones are byproducts of good fat metabolism. Ketones are not a bad thing. They’re actually the fourth fuel. So when your brain becomes good at using ketones, it requires glucose.
Conversely, if you’re a sugar burner and you’re being dependent on this fresh supply of carbohydrate or glucose every couple of hours your life, then when you do my fast, you produce these ketones and that’s what causes that ketone breath that people experience a lot of time if they go to an ashram or to some 3-day live-away program. They get light-headed, they get nauseous, they get all these things that happen because they haven’t built the metabolic machinery to access the ketones.
They’re actually making the ketones 12 hours or 20 hours after not eating anything no matter whether you’re a sugar burner or fat burner. You start producing ketones. But if you haven’t up-regulated all the systems that can use the ketones for energy and unburden yourself of needing glucose, then it feels terrible.
So we actually talk about the transition period when people experience what we call the ‘low carb flu’. It’s not the flu, but it feels like you’re kind of moping around in low energy and maybe a little bit of light-headedness.. That’s because the brain is expecting to give it some glucose and lots of sugar.
You have been withholding it, forcing the brain (and all the other cells in the body, by the way) to up-regulate. We call it ‘mitochondrial biogenesis’. So these little powerhouses that each cell has, those are where the fat burns. If you’re not adept at burning fat and you become dependent on a lot of sugar and a lot of carbohydrate your whole life, a lot of that energy production takes place outside the mitochondria. So the cells go, “We don’t need to build any mitochondria. We’re not really using that much fat.”
When you withhold that sugar and those sweets and those carbohydrates and the processed grains and all that stuff and you force your body to start to burn fat, that’s what causes the gene to go, “Okay, if this person is going to continue to eat more fat and less carbohydrate, we have to build the metabolic machinery to burn more fat.” It becomes this wonderful situation where you increase the number of mitochondria, the number of energy powerhouses that are able to burn fat and ketones and you do it in a way that ultimately, again, it unburdens the body of having the need so much carbohydrate. You become at burning fat, you become good at burning ketones and what we notice is once you get pass that low carb flu (and some people don’t even have that, by the way), your thinking becomes clearer than it ever was before and it becomes this whole new level of energy and clarity.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I actually just spoke on Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Cruise. I definitely got a crash course on ketones. Jimmy Moore spoke about his book, Ketone Clarity. That’s out now. I talked to Dr. Eric Westman about – that’s the first I had heard about the low carb flu because in my experience with the fasting, I didn’t feel well. I felt really sick. That was many, many years ago and I thought, “Well, maybe the really low carb diet wasn’t for me. Maybe I’m just that person that needs that extra carb for whatever reason because we’re all genetically different. Yeah, I think that’s interesting. I already knew this, but I find it interesting that I just hadn’t developed that mechanism that you talked about to be accessing my ketones.
Mark Sission: Right! So there’s that period of discomfort for a couple of days that if you don’t know what it is and you don’t expect it would be awfully off-putting and would maybe prompt some people to say, “I need more carbs. This doesn’t work for me. It’s not going to work. I better bail when I can” when in fact, it’s sort of a sign that it is working well once you get to the other side of it. But this is, in all regards, really about training the body. You go to the gym, it’s a while to get stronger and stronger and stronger. You can’t just do a couple of days, a week training at the gym and hopetat you’re not going to be sore and that there’s going to be any changes taking place.
These are signals that we’re sending the genes every time. When you lift weights, you’re sending signals to the genes that are in the muscles to get stronger, to get longer, to get bigger. And if you don’t lift weights, the genes go, “Hey, there’s no signal. We don’t need to make any changes. We’re going to conserve energy. We’re going to store fat. We’re going to do all these things that we’re pre-programmed through 2 ½ million years of human evolution to do.” So once again, my job, my goal is to educate people on these hidden genetic switches that we all have and the things that we can do to turn them on or off according to our desires.
Wendy Myers: Note to self: Lift weights fast. That’s what I need to be doing more often.
Wendy Myers: So do you encourage people to push through the low carb flu or is it something where people just simply work up to by reducing carbohydrates or they just do a crash course?
Mark Sission: Like you said, everybody is different. Some people say, “I just want to do the crash course. I’m all in. I read it. I get it. I’m excited about it. For the first time, something in diet and nutrition makes sense,” so they’ll just push through. Other people might be better served – if you’re a person who’s been having 400 or 500 grams of carbs a day because you have orange juice and pancakes, whole wheat pancakes for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch with some kettle corn chips or some healthy blue maize chips or whatever (so-called “healthy”), you might have a bowl of whole wheat pasta for dinner, that adds up to several hundred grams of carbohydrates a day. So in that case, you might want to maybe take it down over time, drop it down from 400 to 200, from 200 to 150 and from 150 down to a hundred.
In my book, I talk about this range of carbohydrate intake. A lot of people can benefit by only consuming – I shouldn’t only — by consuming still as many as 150 grams of carbohydrates a day. That’s what Paul Jaminet would say, that is the sort of an ideal situation. I say that’s the high-end. But if you have allowed yourself to not eat bread, pasta, cereal, any kinds of processed grains (cookies, deserts, sugar, sugary drinks, sodas), these are all the things that we know we should be giving up truly.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Mark Sission: …and that you sort of limit the rest of your diet to meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a litlte bit of fruit, you can eat pretty much all you want to what we call ‘satiety’ of those. And even if you have a couple of serving of say berries a day and a big salad, you’re going to be hard-pressed to exceed 150 grams of carbohydrate because there’s not a lot of carbs, they’re not very dense in vegetables for the most part and some fruits.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what I spend my carb bank account on, my blue corn chips. I like them for the Selenium and rub it my thyroid a little bit.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about The Primal Connection.
Mark Sission: Yes.
Wendy Myers: What is that book about and how is it different than The Primal Blueprint.
Mark Sission: The Primal Blueprint started initially to look at – it focused really on diet and exercise. We talk a lot about sleep and sun exposure and using your brain and playing, but the main focus of the book was on getting your diet dialed in and how to do that and the appropriate styles of exercise that would create the strong, lean, fit body that we all want.
Within The Primal Connection, we started to look at some of the more tangential areas of the hunter/gatherer wiring that we have, these expectations of the hunter/gatherer genes. So we looked more deeply at play and how important at play is as an aspect of not just stress-reduction and in development with our brains, in games theory. That may even apply to investing in the stock market, for instance. Certain types of play apply to the most sophisticated types of business.
We look at the amount of hygeine that’s in society today, the whole germ theory that seems to now have created a generation of asthmatics, people who have asthma or allergies that didn’t exist in such great numbers 30, 40, 50 years ago. Because we’ve become so hygienic, we’ve removed all of the training from our immune systems. Our genes expect us to play in the dirt, to eat dirt, to be outside, to get exposed to all kinds of germs and bacteria and to learn from that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Mark Sission: We find that kids that grow up on farms and are exposed to, again, like grimy messes and mud and all forms of animal dander and hairs have fewer allergies, are not asthmatic, tend to be healthier and get sick less often as adults. These are all indicative of a lifestyle that’s become so hygienic because we’re afraid of germs when in fact, we should be selectively introducing germs into our systems.
One of the ways that we do that (and I encourage people to do that), get out in nature and play, garden. Get out in your backyard, work your hands in the soil, get dirty and let that be okay. Encourage kids to play outside. Also, take things like probiotics. Our ancestors ate dirt with every single bite of every single meal and that’s how we populated our guts with 100 trillion bacteria that live in our guts. Ironically, we have 100 trillion bacteria in our guts, there are ten trillion cells in us that are human, so 90% of the cells in you, Wendy are not you. They are bacteria. I’m sorry to say that, but it’s me too. It’s everybody out there. So we have these cells that live in us that expect us to feed them a certain way and in return, they take care of us, the good bacteria.
We also have bad bacteria. Sometimes, when the bad bacteria predominate over the good bacteria, then we get really, really sick. So that’s the new direction in medicine, it’s to look at the gut bio, these microecological biom that lives within the guts and figure out ways to feed it appropriately. That gets us into not just probiotics, but looking at some of the fibers that we take in and how resistance starch (which is a new thing in the paleo community) can feed the good gut bacteria so they proliferate and crowd out the bad bacteria.
Again, all of these, I sort of talk about in The Primal Connection as kind of next level items for achieving the kind of health and vitality that we all would like. Beyond that, certainly, just enjoying level. I mean, really, ultimately, it’s just about enjoying life. That’s my main goal, to wake up every day not depressed, not moody, but happy to charge at the world or my list of things to do with a smile on my face.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I like how you say that we don’t really need to be worrying about germs so much. Get out and get dirty. I’m a bit of a dirty bird myself because I don’t wash my hands very often. I don’t worry about that. We should be reading more about how we need to be exposed to bacteria to stimulate our immune system and have a healthy immune system. It constantly needs that stimulation. I kind of just kept on going with the not washing my hands as much. I know it’s probably not the wisest thing for probably contracting colds or what-not, but I don’t worry about it. I know that our bodies need that.
Mark Sission: I’m telling you, you’re allowed to not wash your hands, okay?
Wendy Myers: My husband will probably have his hair standing up on his neck right now, but I don’t care.
Mark Sission: Well, a lot of people have pretty severe skin problems because they wash too much. Our skin has this resident bacteria on it that protect us, that create certain antimicrobial benefits and oils that when you wash those off, you get the redness, the eczema, the dermatitis. Some of those things are a direct reflection of being too clean and washing too much.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I definitely tell a lot of my clients that they don’t need to use all these soaps and perfumes and all these things because when you wash away all the bacteria on your hands – I forgot where I was going with that…
Mark Sission: A lot of people have skin molds and fungus. Well, it’s bacteria that kills that mold and fungus. So rather than put all these ointments and Purell and try to scrub it clean, the best thing that you might be able to do is – well, first of all, fix your diet because some of that is happening from your diet as well, but also, just to let the bacteria do what it’s supposed to do. There are now some topical skin creams that use probiotics within the cream to apply topically to address those sorts of issues. So it’s a new area of medicine.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk a little bit about exercise because this is something that, like you said, so many people think that exercising five or six days a week or breaking a sweat every single day confers health. I have a lot of clients that exercise themselves into adrenal fatigue and mineral deficiency. They’re just going too nuts with it. So again, it’s one of those things where too much can have declining benefits. So what is your primal take on exercises? You write a lot about exercise and I think you’re the resource to go to to learn how to exercise healthy.
Mark Sission: Sure. Well, we have a free book on Mark’s Daily Apple, the The Primal Blueprint Fitness Guide. It’s a 92-page ebook. You can download it for free at my site. But basically, I created this exercise pyramid a few years ago, which has at its base just moving around a lot in a low level activity. So that means walking, hiking, if you’re into bike riding, easy bike riding, dancing, kind of these low level activities not so much to burn calories, but just to be moving your body through space because again, our genes expect us to be moving. They don’t expect us to be sitting still for eight hours a day and then going home and sitting on the sofa and watching TV.
So the basis of it is just about easy, easy movement. But then twice a week, I have people go to the gym or at home doing body weight exercise, but doing two intense, relatively into high intensity muscle resistance workouts. I like to have people do full body routine. I do push-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, lunges, that sort of thing, sometimes with a weight vest on, sometimes unweighted and putting my body through all ranges of motion.
For me, because I’m 61, I don’t recover from a hard workout the way I did when I was in my twenties or thirties or forties or fifties. So I need at least three days. If I’ve done the right sorts of exercise, I need three days before I can even do it again. If I do it the next day or the next day or the next day and get into this pattern, I just become over-trained and injured.
And of course, the reason we train and the reason we work out (even if it’s onerous for us), theoretically, it’s to get better at what we do, to get stronger, to get all of these benefits, not to break ourselves down, not to be able to say, “Yeah. Well, I worked out every single day for three months, but I feel like crap now and I’m sick and I’m injured.” That’s the opposite of the intended effect. The intended effect for my rulebook is what’s the least amount of exercise I can do and be strong and lean and fit?. So for me, it’s two days a week of lifting heavy and I found that for a lot of people – and I say ‘lifting heavy’. We started a joke. One of the Primal Blueprint laws is ‘lift heavy things… which includes yourself sometimes’.
And then once a week, I do a sprint workout. Now, sprinting doesn’t necessarily always mean running. It could be on a bike. It could be in a pool. It could be in an elliptical machine. It’s warming up enough and getting to that point where you go all-out for, say, 30 seconds so that your heart rate is as high as it can get for 30 seconds. And then you drop it back down and you rest and you walk or you jog or you get off the treadmill or whatever it is for two minutes (a minute and a half or two minutes). And then you do it again. You do that a couple of times during that workout. The effect of that is, again, to sort of emulate this hunter/gatherer experience where we evolved in a set of circumstances where once in a while, there is a life-threatening situation where you had to literally sprint all-out to save your life either away from something that was going to kill you or towards something that you wanted to kill and eat.
So we have this ability hardwired into is to benefit from that sort of activity. Every time you were chased by a saber tooth tiger and you survived, it made you that much stronger to get away in the next escape. That manifests itself once again by sending signals to the genes – operate your growth hormones, testosterone, build muscles, increase the fast switch fibers. A lot of these were just manipulating signals, but I’m not going to pay a saber tooth tiger to chase me down the street. I have to think to myself how can I replicate that experience. I can do it by doing sprints. I happen to do it on Zuma Beach at low tide, which is one of my favorite places to go to do a sprint or when I’m playing ultimate Frisbee on the weekend with my guys.
Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk about sleep. I think sleep is one of the number one things that plagues people today. They’re not getting enough sleep and eventually causes disease when they chronically have problems with sleeping. Can you give someone some tips about how to really tap into their ancient body and the mistakes that people are making that are preventing them from getting enough sleep.
Mark Sission: Well, there are a number of ways to go about getting sleep right. One of them is just to decide that you’re going to try for eight, eight and half, maybe nine hours of sleep and to do it on a schedule if you’re not a shift worker or you have otherwise sort of an impossible schedule to try and go to bed at a time when it’s not too late.
In my case, I usually go to bed around 10:30. I usually wake up around 6:30. That’s my 8-hour window. I sleep in a room that is completely blacked out. So I actually have roll-down storm shutters. I live in a hill where the Sta. Ana’s, when they blow, they blow mightily here. So the previous owners installed these metal storm shutters that are electric. We’ve used them now as blackout curtains for a long time. It’s fantastic.
We try to keep the room at 68°, 67° to 68° and quiet. I have a white noise machine. It’s a hepafilter machine that runs in a smooth sort of background noise that kind of takes off other possible distractions out.
Wendy Myers: I have one of those in my closet.
Mark Sission: Yeah! There had been times when the Sta. Ana’s had blown so strong, I’ve slept in my closet because that’s the quietest part of the house. And then it’s like avoiding these sorts of movies or TV shows that are violent or loud after 9:00 at night, so that your brain can sort of unwind. There are some hacks that we use where we install efflux on our computer that takes the blue light and shifts it to more of a yellow light because at some point, our brains want to start to produce melatonin to put us into that sleepy state, but we can produce melatonin if we’re being bombarded with blue light. Blue screens from television and computers emulate blue sky from outside, so the brain still thinks it’s daytime or from lights overhead or whatever it is.
So in our house, we put yellow lights, yellow light bulbs in some of the fixtures, efflux on the computers if we have to do work late at night. One of the hacks people use is they get actually amber glasses. If they’re going to watch TV, they’ll watch TV through yellow-filtered glasses. That sort of sets the mood when you do go to bed at whatever time it is, 10 or 10:30 or 11 so that the melatonin can start to be produced appropriately in enough of a quantity that it allows you to fall asleep easily through the night and then wake up rested in the morning.
Now some people wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep and they worry about that. And so a lot of people wake up and then they’re so worried that they’re not getting enough sleep that the worrying keeps them awake.
Wendy Myers: …or they get mad.
Mark Sission: But the reality is (and a lot of research have shown) that we are biphasic sleepers or polyphasic sleepers. There are several phases of sleep throughout the night. You complete these sleep cycles. And if you wake up at the end of one full cycle and you feel like you need to get up or go to the bathroom or go make some hot tea or read ten pages in a book, it’s fine to do that. It doesn’t count against your quality sleep. In fact, it will probably help you.
[Inaudible 00:44:01] around the world have been studied for their biphasic in many cases because there’s a family bed, eight of them sleep in the same bed. So there’s some wrestling, rustling in the middle of the night (maybe some wrestling too) and feed the baby, get up, walk around, go outside, whatever and then come back and do another sleep cycle throughout the night.
So there’s a lot of research that shows that you don’t need a solid, uninterrupted eight hours, but that whatever you do, you probably shouldn’t be waking up to a jarring, jangling alarm clock halfway through a sleep cycle.
I’ve developed a pretty good ability intuitively to know if I wake up too early or earlier than I want to get up, how much time I would need if I go back to sleep and finish another sleep cycle, so I never use an alarm. And even when I travel, if I set an alarm, it’s amazing how I wake up normally, naturally five minutes before the alarm is supposed to go off anyway.
But yeah, sleep is just so critical to good health and so overlooked and so taken for granted by so many people because there’s this [inaudible 00:45:17] nighttime being an exciting time. There’s so many things to do. There are parties, there’s music and there’s dancing and there’s binge watching of television to catch up on and all these other distractions that distract you from actually a good, healthy night sleep.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s not fun to go to bed. It’s boring.
Mark Sission: Well, it is… until you get to be my age. And again, if you are able to understand all of the nuisances of what goes on in life to make it a fulfilling healthy life, there’s a part of me every night that goes, “Ah, yes. I can’t wait to get to sleep. This is going to be great. I recognize that this is a critical part of my longevity. So not only am I not sacrificing anything by going to sleep. It’s going to be juicy and lovely and great and fantastic.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Mark Sission: So that’s just a mindset.
Wendy Myers: I’ve been really naughty. Usually, I give up my sleep and I’m working trying to finish up the site. It’s going to be up by the time this podcast airs, but I’ve been bad working on my site. I’m having fun. I’m having fun – and working on my blogs, et cetera.
Wendy Myers: So Mark, I have a question that I like to ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Mark Sission: Oh, diabetes.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Mark Sission: It’s 30+ million Americans either have been diagnosed with diabetes or don’t know they have it. It’s just increasing, increasing, increasing. The irony is, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s kind of a stupid disease to have because no one has to get diabetes. This is Type II diabetes I’m talking about. It’s such a lifestyle disease. It’s such a condition that is brought on by choices that could otherwise be made to completely avoid ever getting it.
In many cases, when a person has Type II diabetes, it can be completely cured by similar lifestyle intervention. Some people may be slightly more predisposed to getting Type II diabetes. All that means is that they more than most people have to be very careful about what they eat and how they move.
But simple patterns like cutting the sugars and cutting the industrial seed oils that have such an impact on insulin signaling and being able to orchestrate your exercise and movement patterns so that you do create insulin sensitivity through the exercise choices that you make can completely alleviate Type II diabetes and get people off their meds.
Not all people because some people have been down that road so far that they’ve done themselves permanent damage, but I’d say 80% – 90% of the people that have Type II diabetes could be declared free of it within 90 days if they follow The Primal Blueprint.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And it’s sad that the country with the #1 highest rates of diabetes is China and then India and then the U.S. is third. The top two countries are eating rice. They’re eating rice at every single meal.
Mark Sission: Yeah. And again, it’s sort of funny that the nay-sayers for the paleo diet that say, “Well, what about the skinny people in India and China who eat rice?” Well, that was partly a result of them taking in 1200 calories a day for most of their lives doing subsistence farming and hard labor.
Both those societies, India and China have gotten to a point right now where they’re emulating a U.S. patterned, standard American diet and they just happen to eat a lot of rice instead of a lot of French fries. But it’s still far more calories that they should be taking in the form of these simple carbohydrates that converts to glucose and they’re not spending more time on the computer and not in the fields. This is an artifact of modern civilization.
So without the exercise, with the increase in calories, with the increased reliance on really terrible industrial seed oils (they’re cooking with soy bean oil or they’re cooking with corn oil and canola and all of the other frankenfoods that had been created in the last 30-40 years), they’re not just catching up to us in terms of disease, they’re going to surpass us quite quickly.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. Well Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so good and so informative. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about some of the things that you have on the horizon, any events that you have coming up.
Mark Sission: Well, marksdailyapple.com is the website, Primal Blueprint is my product site where you can buy the books. We have supplements there. We have the events, they’re all listed there. We have an event coming up the end of September in Oxnard. It’s the 8th PrimalCon, our fifth annual Oxnard PrimalCon. It’s so much fun. It’s three days of living primally, hanging out with other like-minded people who are in this whole paleo world. I have the greatest trainers and nutritionists and chefs around the country – from around the world actually. My play expert is a pre-eminent play expert in the world. He comes in from London. And so it’s just a fabulous 3-day weekend. I encourage people to go do that.
Wendy Myers: How many people attend those events?
Mark Sission: Pardon me, how many?
Wendy Myers: How many people attend?
Mark Sission: A hundred and fifty. So it’s a good experience. We just had one in upstate New York last week. We had sixty people attend that. It was just phenomenal. I’m still decompressing from the love. The weather was fabulous. The people were fabulous. My daughter joined us. It was great. PrimalCon, again, you can find out all about that on Mark’s Daily Apple and the PrimalBlueprint.com.
Wendy Myers: So do you have any new books coming on in the publishing line?
Mark Sission: Well, my wife has a book called Primal Woman coming out that she’s been working for a year and a half. It’s coming out in about six months. I expect that to be a New York Time’s bestseller. It’ll talk a lot about what it means to be a woman and be doing this paleo lifestyle and looking at the different nuances of how much carbohydrates should I be taking in as a woman, how much exercise should I be doing, hormonal issues. It’s a whole new realm of information for the women readers of Mark’s Daily Apple who had been sort of subjected to my male point of view for so long.
Wendy Myers: Well, that’s interesting. I ought to check that out.
Mark Sission: Yeah, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Well, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Mark was such a gracious host. We had a couple of technical difficulties in the beginning, but thank you so much for coming on, Mark. That was great.
Mark Sission: My pleasure. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: And I’ll see you on the beach…
Mark Sission: Yeah, okay!
Wendy Myers: …because I live in Malibu as well. I’m hoping to see you around the farmer’s market. Do you go to the Malibu farmer’s market ever?
Mark Sission: It’s my favorite thing to do after yoga on Sunday, so yeah.
Wendy Myers: Okay. I thought I’d probably see you there at some point or PC Greens or something.
Mark Sission: I’m the one who shops at PC Greens, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Okay. Well, thanks for coming on, Mark.
Mark Sission: Alright!
Wendy Myers: And everyone, if you want to learn more about the paleo diet, you can go on my website, myersdetox.com. You can get a preview of my book if you give me your email and sign up. I’ve got a copy of five free modern paleo survival guides. I’ve created about 30 paleo survival guides, so you can quickly reference all the information I have in my upcoming book, The Modern Paleo Survival Guide. You can go download five free ones right now if you go check out. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
