Mark Sisson

Lewis Howes:                 This is 5-Minute Friday!!

I had the chance to sit down with and incredible man. His name is Mark Sisson. He is the bestselling author of The Primal Blueprint, and one of the leading voices in the evolutionary health movement. He is a former elite endurance athlete with a 2:18:00 marathon, and a fourth place Hawaii Iron Man finish.

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Mark Sisson:                   Yeah, so we all just want to look good naked, you know, it’s just a little device we’ve used for the last ten years, so I think people have used it before, but we just made it a meme for a while and it’s just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is that we want to look good naked.

And I think that happens. For a lot of people, that’s a subset of their greater goal, or, it’s a side effect of the original intent. The original intention, for a lot of people, that go to Primal Blueprint and Mark’s Daily Apple, my blog, is they’re frustrated, they’re sick, they can’t get off the meds, they’ve had health issues, and they’ve not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels.

So a lot of people come to me having had that experience, in the medical community, not a good one. So the first thing that they recognise is that their blood sugar normalises or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away, or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away, or their GORD, or whatever it is that they’re dealing with, goes away.

And that’s wonderful, and then they go, “Ooh, by the way, I’m losing some weight, too! That’s awesome as well! And I’m starting to look good naked.” So it becomes a nice side effect.

Lewis Howes:                 So what’s a typical eating day look like for you? What are you putting in your system? And what time do you put it in?

Mark Sisson:                   Yeah, so, I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee at around 06:30 in the morning. I like coffee, I’m a big fan of coffee. I don’t eat until 12:30 or 13:00. So I use what we call a compressed eating window. Now, I will wake up, and I’ll have plenty of energy, because I’m so good at burning fat, I’ve trained my body to do that, that I have the energy.

I’m not in a slump, waking up from having not eaten for the twelve hours that I was sleeping. It doesn’t matter, I’m so good at accessing the body fat, I’ve got plenty of energy. In fact, I go to the gym and 09:30 or 10 o’clock and I’ll do my workout fasted.

Sometimes it’ll be a heavy leg day, sometimes it’ll be intervals of some kind, again, I don’t…

Lewis Howes:                 You feel fine.

Mark Sisson:                   I feel fine! And then I’ll get home and I won’t eat, if I get home at, like, 11:00 I still won’t eat for an hour and half, partly because I’m not hungry, and partly because I’ve got stuff to do, right? But I’m not compelled to go, “Oh, my gosh, I just finished my workout, I must eat a post workout shake,” or something.

Lewis Howes:                 Yeah ,there’s so many people that say that, “Have a protein shake within the first thirty minutes of waking up to start your metabolism. Drink a shake right after a workout.” Why do they say that, and why do you think you don’t need to?

Mark Sisson:                   I think you don’t need to, because if you become good at burning fat, a couple of things happen. First of all you have the energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you’re good at burning fat, and you’re not hungry – I say if you’re not hungry, why are you eating? – if you’re not hungry, don’t eat. Because that’s kind of key.

When you become good at burning fat, you don’t enter that cannibalistic zone that the body builders enter, when they are dependent on carbs a lot, which is, you start to tear up your muscle tissue. Because when you’re a sugar burner, and you run out of sugar, or you’re depending on carbohydrates – by the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate, sugar, sort of interchangeably.

But when you’re a sugar burner, and you haven’t  eaten for a while, you’ve depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles, because your body’s expecting you to have sugar all this time, and that’s where you store it, but you don’t store very much of it.

So, when you run out of it, the brain goes, “Hey! Something’s off here, we’ve got to eat! And if we don’t eat, then here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol which is going to go tear down muscle tissue, so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver, to be converted into glucose, so I can fuel the brain.”

So, it’s like you’re tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build, because of your dependence on glucose. All that goes away when you become a fat burner. When you become good at burning fat, now, when you don’t eat, your body knows how to access the stored body fat, so your energy levels don’t dip, your blood sugar doesn’t dip, and so you don’t cut into muscle tissue.

Lewis Howes:                 Gotcha! So you can train really hard and try to build muscle and you’re still saying you don’t need this post recovery shake afterwards, if you learn how to eat the right way.

Mark Sisson:                   Exactly, exactly. And, again, if you’re the old paradigm, and you are the carbohydrate dependent athlete, then, yeah, you probably do want to eat a post workout meal, because you probably will cannibalise some of the muscle tissue, because you’re working on an entirely different operating system.

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