Transcript of Episode 202: Becoming a Fat-Burning Beast
With Dr. Daniel Pompa,Meredith Dykstra, and Mark Sisson
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode #202. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome special guest, Mark Sisson. We have a really, really exciting topic for you guys today, one we get questions about all the time, talking about ketosis and how to safely go in and out of it.
Mark just wrote a new book. It’s called The Keto Reset Diet, and I’m going to tell you a little bit more about Mark, but this is going to be a really fun discussion for all of you who call in, write in, want to kind of know the implementation of what this looks like to kind of safely incorporate ketosis into your life, so before we dig in, let me tell you a little bit more about Mark.
Ancestral health pioneer and ex-endurance athlete Mark Sisson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Keto Reset Diet, bestselling author of Primal Blueprint and Primal Endurance, and blogger at top-rated health and fitness website, marksdailyapple.com. He’s the founder of several companies, Primal Blueprint, devoted to designing state-of-the-art supplements that address the challenges of living in the modern world; Primal Kitchen, delivering uncompromisingly delicious, nutrient-dense foods that are always dairy-, gluten-, grain-, and soy-free and full of beneficial fats and high-quality protein, which I was just saying, I love your Primal Kitchen Mayo – it’s fabulous – Primal Kitchen restaurants, a franchise of primal/paleo-aligned restaurants that offer healthy, clean, and organic, fast, casual dining options; and Primal Health Coach, an unparalleled and fully rounded health coaching and business education program. Join Mark as he shares over three decades of research and experiential learning and unlocks the keys to building metabolic flexibility, becoming a fat-burning beast, and taming hunger and cravings forever.
Welcome, Mark, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to dig in.
Mark:
I’m so thrilled to be here.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Mark, your book – I should really show it. I have it here, and it’s such an amazing resource. I know that so many of our viewers and listeners are going to love it, because you give the 21 days. You literally lay it out, and that’s what people love, right? They want the recipes with the foods. Here’s what to do for 21 days. Yeah, and one of the things that I talk about is how we use ketosis as a tool, moving in and out of it, just like our ancestors did. I have to start hear, though, because I want to hear even about how this book differs from some of the other ones that I know many of our viewers have probably read. How did you get into this, man? You were an athlete. Kind of tell your story a little bit.
Mark:
Yeah, I was an endurance athlete, primarily marathons, in the late 60s, early 70s, and I –
Dr. Pompa:
Which probably is the opposite of what most people would think, right? Ketosis -inaudible-.
Mark:
Sure, sure, sure. No, that’s exactly right, and that’s what got me here. I was a pretty good marathoner and finished fifth at the U.S. National Championships in 1980, finished fourth at Iron Man Hawaii in ’82, had some nice success, but with all the training and all of the high-carb diet that it took to fuel all of the miles that I was putting in, I started to develop some ‘oses and some ‘itises. I had tendinitis and arthritis, and I had irritable bowel syndrome and got sick a lot, because my immune system was trashed.
After I realized that my original mission, which was to achieve fitness and health, had kind of fallen by the wayside in pursuit of just abject performance – yeah, so I looked good on the outside, and I was racing well, but I was falling apart on the inside. I had to retire, and I had to reexamine all of my methods and my lifestyle and kind of rededicate the rest of my career to finding ways to be strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive, all the things that we say we want without all of that pain and suffering and sacrifice, and that’s really what led me down this path of exploring ancestral health initially and looking at the – when paleo was just starting out as a concept, to try to emulate what our hunger/gatherer ancestors did and ate and the lifestyle behaviors that they exemplified, which, because I had an initial interest in evolution, kind of tied together nicely with the clues that come from evolution, maybe what the genes are expecting us to do to manifest this strong body, and then being verified recently by genetic science.
Virtually every study that looks at what’s going on when you change one of the variables in this human equation looks at what happens at the level of gene expression, so I kind of got into it at the right point, where I realize that there’s a lot of stuff that we can change about our lifestyles. There’s a lot of power that we have over how our bodies regenerate and renew and rebuild and recreate us on a daily basis. Heading down that path and using the hunter/gatherer paradigm as kind of an outline for how we ought to try and reconfigure our modern lives, and this included sleep – getting enough sleep, sun exposure, and play, literally going out in nature, listening to the sounds, getting our hands dirty, and exposing ourselves to bacteria and microbes and all the things that our hunger/gatherer ancestors did as a routine, on a daily basis, and didn’t think about it, and now we have to sort of think about it. How do I get these behaviors back into my life so that I can get the manifestation of that gene expression in the ways that we want?
Ultimately, a lot of this came down to diet. It seems to be kind of the initial jumping-off point for so many people, that you’ve got to get the diet right. You’ve got to figure out a way in which you can present information to your body in the form of food that manifests itself in increasing muscle tissue and improving immune system, in improving the ability to burn fat, access that energy, and create what we call metabolic flexibility, so all these things came together for me about 15 years. For the last 15 years, I have been eating a low-carb diet. I have been very happy with the results. My muscle mass is fine. The energy levels I have throughout the day, great. Cognition, great. I sleep well. I’m generally in a good mood. All the things I’m looking for are checking off the list.
You might say, well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why would you go keto? I’ve been writing about ketosis and a ketogenic diet on and off for the last 15 years, doing a lot of research on it, know a lot of friends who have been keto, have been keto myself. If you’re low-carb, of necessity every once in a while, you just do a little audit of the previous day’s food intake, and you go, oh, my goodness, I only had 40 grams of carbs yesterday. I must’ve been – that was a keto day for me, and I didn’t really even notice it that much.
I’ve been in and out of ketosis on and off but never spent a lot of time in it, so about a year and a half ago, I thought, you know what? I’m big on performance and experimentation, and I’m always looking for the next level of performance. Maybe there’s something – even though I feel great, maybe there’s something out there that’s a little bit one step up, one notch up, so I did a 60-day full de-keto experiment, felt great, felt like I actually added muscle in my gym work-outs, felt like I burned off a little bit more fat, felt like I was getting a little bit better cognition and had a little bit more energy throughout the day. I felt like I was sleeping better or at the very least needed less sleep, which I sort of chalked up to, well, maybe that’s – maybe because the brain works so well on ketones, maybe it’s doing more work in less time while I’m sleeping in the neural rewiring and all the things that it does.
Anyway, so I came out of the experience, and I thought, wow, I assumed everything was awesome in my life, and yet I found it could be even better if I did this, so I realized – and I think to myself a lot, when I do these experiments, if I got those kind of results, and I really wasn’t even anticipating that much, I wonder how many millions, tens of millions of people who are stuck in their diet, who are plateaued despite their best efforts, who are even maybe, in the ancestral paradigm, doing reasonably well but would like to do better. That was the impetus for writing the book, The Keto Reset Diet, and it’s become – in the last year, since I started writing it, it’s become a whole new level of performance for me, and now I live in what I call the keto zone.
What I mean by that is, because I did the work, the deep work, going into and doing a keto reset, I literally reset my metabolism. I made my metabolic flexibility that much more robust. I created that much more metabolic efficiency, to the point that I’m able to get more energy out of fewer calories being put into my body, and we’ll talk about that later, that now I live in this nice little comfort area where I don’t have to think about being keto. Some days, again, I do an audit at the end of the day, and I go, wow, I only had 40 grams of carbs today. Other days, I go, geez, I had 175 grams of carbs today, but the main, key point here is, I didn’t know the difference. I didn’t feel anything different, because I have this robust metabolism that can take energy from fat off the plate and burn it. It can take energy off the fat on my body and burn it. It can make ketones from the fat on my body and send that to the brain if necessary to replace the glucose that I didn’t consume that day, or in the event that I consumed glucose that day or carbohydrates to convert to glucose, that machinery worked extremely well.
It’s just a really nice, kind of comfortable area to be in, to know that as long as I don’t go way overboard and start taking in 350, 400 grams of carbs a day, day in and day out, that I can hang out in this zone and really use ketosis as literally a tool, as you describe and as I certainly describe in my book, as a means of reestablishing metabolic flexibility to give me this amazing opportunity to cruise through life and just not have to think about every little thing I eat.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep. Yeah, that’s one of the things I preach and teach. I believe that flexibility is an amazing state of health that you do have to adapt and get into, and we want to give some tips there, because look, I believe it’s actually healthier. I believe that increasing carbs certain days, mixing it up, the ability to do so, is actually better for you, and again, it’s imitating our ancestors. When they had more, they ate more. When they had higher carbs, they ate higher carbs. However, the base of their diet was obviously a lower-carb diet.
Look. When you look at studies today, a lot of the studies on low-carb diets are done at 150 grams of carbs a day, which you and I would be like, oh, that’s a high-carb day. It’s like, when I say I’m eating high carbs, oftentimes, it’s still defined as a low-carb diet, so we have to get our listeners to understand that, but give this flexibility that you’re talking about. In your book, you obviously give some tips here, but it’s like, give our viewers and listeners tips on how to achieve this flexibility, because I can tell you, it doesn’t happen for everybody right away, right? They don’t make the transition well, right? They switch over and have a carb day, and it throws them off. How do we achieve that faster?
Mark:
First of all, to your point, I know a lot of people who claim to be keto, but then, when they say if they have 70 or 80 grams of carbs in one day, they are kicked out of keto and feel like crap for three days. That’s almost the definition of metabolic inflexibility, so there’s a lot of work to be done there, right?
If you crave this metabolic flexibility, you do have to do the work. There’s not a pill that you can take. You can’t do ketone supplements and measure your blood ketone levels and go, oh, I’m 5 millimole, or I’m very successful at this keto thing, right? I say, and like Dom D’Agostino would agree, and he’s been one of my mentors in this field –
Dr. Pompa:
We’ve interviewed him a few times.
Mark:
Yeah. You’ve got to spend six weeks in keto to really get the benefits that will be long-lasting, and when I say long-lasting, what I’m projecting I’m going to be doing right now for the rest of my life is I’ll be doing at least a six-week, full-on, all-in keto reset once a year, just to – you know what I mean? Just the way somebody would do a cleanse, an annual cleanse or a new year, new you program, I’m suggesting that that would be a great way to do it. It would sort of emulate a seasonal opportunity that an ancestral – not an opportunity, but a lifestyle that was forced upon one of our ancestors, to – and what happens is –
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going to say, in your book, you talk about some of the benefits. I know you’re going into another point, so don’t forget your point. However, because we may have a lot of new people, talk about some of the benefits of doing that six-week with those ketones.
Mark:
Right. Yeah, so when you withhold carbohydrates to the extent that the brain initially says, whoa, there’s not going to be much glucose for a while, let’s figure out a workaround, and that workaround is hardwired into everyone. Everyone’s born with this amazing ability to create ketones and to burn them efficiently and to burn fats efficiently. We just never develop it. Because we’re surrounded by carbs from day one, we literally let that fat-burning mechanism atrophy, the same way we let a muscle atrophy if we don’t work out in the gym, so everyone has this ability.
What happens when you withhold carbohydrates for long periods of time, you’re just sending signals to these genes in the body, and the genes go, okay, well, that’s easy, we can fix this. We just need to spend a little bit of time up-regulating enzyme systems that take fat out of storage, that burn fat. We need to build metabolic machinery, which includes increasing the number of mitochondria throughout the body, largely in the muscle cells, so the mitochondria, which is where the fat burns most efficiently – actually, it’s the only place the fat burns. If we double the number of mitochondria in your cell, you’re doubling the fat-burning capacity. It’s a huge benefit, and by the way, those mitochondria then don’t just go away when you take two days, and you’re out of keto, right? They stay there, so as long as you don’t spend three weeks or four weeks sending the opposite source of signals, like injecting yourself with 300 or 400 grams of carbs every day, then the – again, the body goes, whoa, what’s the message here?
If the message is, there’s not going to be any glucose, we’re going to build mitochondria. We’re going to build a metabolic machinery that burns fats, to make ketones, to burn ketones. This is going to be awesome. We can handle this. It’s no problem, and then you can screw it up by going back and just saying, well, there’s going to be a lot more glucose. Then, the body, which then says, I don’t like to waste energy, so I’m not going to take my fat out of storage. I don’t need you. You’re presenting all this glucose, this carbohydrate, all the time, so let’s just burn that, and let’s just – that’s all we’re going to depend on. You get to choose how the body reacts or adapts to the signals that you’re giving it. It’s so empowering when you get this concept.
Now, when you spend six weeks in ketosis, you get this up-regulation of all these enzyme systems. You get this mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the building of new mitochondria. The mitochondria have their own DNA. It’s called mitochondrial DNA, and they get the message that not only are there going to be more of them, they have to be more efficient at their through-put of fat.
You get a decrease in inflammation, which is one of the biggest things that people notice going on a keto diet, even in the first couple of days. They lose weight, and they go, oh, this is weight. This is great. I must be burning a lot of fat. No, you’re actually decreasing the amount of water that you’re storing as a result of your systemic inflammation from your crappy diet. There’s a decrease in inflammation, which means a decrease in joint pain for a lot of people, which means just a feeling of wellbeing. There’s an increase in energy that a lot of people will report after, say, a week and a half or two weeks.
There’s a little dip in energy, and we talk about in the book how we can mitigate that dip, but there are all of these – and I think the number one benefit for most people and certainly for me is a decrease in hunger, appetite, and cravings, that the keto diet, the keto concept, which makes you so good at burning your own stored body fat and so good at making ketones – do you know the – whoever – I just found this out about, well, six months ago in my research. The liver can make up to 150 grams of ketones a day. That’s like 700 calories with an energy that is all used to replace glucose, so not only do you not need to take in a lot of glucose when the brain gets used to burning ketones instead of glucose, not only do you not need to feed the muscles glucose, because when they become fat-adapted, they become really good at burning fat, but you have this closed system that you can burn fat off your body, you can make glucose to the extent – or glycogen to the extent that you need to from the glycerol molecule or the glycerol end of the triglyceride, and then you can take the other free fatty acids and either combust them directly for energy or make ketones and offset your need for ketones. It’s such a great – it’s like –
You know, we talk a lot in science – I’m sorry I’m rambling on here, Dan, but I get so excited about this. We talk a lot in science about evolution and how evolution typically isn’t very elegant. Evolution doesn’t look for the perfect solution. It looks for the adequate solution for an organism to survive.
Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-.
Mark:
Yet, I would suggest that this whole fat-burning, ketone-generating system that we have is really elegant on the human body. It’s like, we’re wired to overeat, because our ancestors sort of – that’s how – they had this beautiful way of, okay, there’s food around. I’m going to overeat. I’m going to store the excess as energy on these fuel tanks that I carry around with me, and in the next two or three days, if there’s no food, no problem. I get to take it out of storage, burn it. I get to burn fat. I get to make ketones. I get to offset the need for glucose. I get all these great benefits, because I’m wired to overeat. That works – again, it’s survivor mechanism. That works beautifully, but in today’s day and age, we’re still wired to overeat, but we haven’t developed the skill to take a day or two and just extract those energy units from our stored body fat and combust them and live our lives, so anyway, I just – I get so excited about this.
Dr. Pompa:
I just kind of want to be clear for our viewers and listeners what you’re saying, because I think it’s so important. It’s incredibly healthy and beneficial to be able to switch to be a glucose-burner and a fat-burner. Here’s the problem. Most Americans have lost that ability, and I want to be clear on how damaging that is, meaning that they’re only able to burn sugar, so when they’re not eating, they’re either burning muscle into sugar, breaking muscle down, gluconeogenesis, or they are rundown, wiped out, craving carbohydrates, right? Their brain is going into an oxidative mode because of all of the – and their cells are inflamed, because all they’re burning is glucose constantly, which definitely burns with more oxidation, a little more dirt, if you will, a little more exhaust on the fuel. Ketones and fat burn cleaner. The healthy ability to go back and forth is the magic.
Zach Bitter, we interviewed him, and he’s – you know who he is. He’s a 100-mile or holds one of the 100-mile records, right? He talked about this. He said, you know, people think that when I’m doing the marathon that I’m only eating fat, but he says, it’s actually not true. I hijack, biohack the system. He’s like, I’m so fat-adapted, but marathon day, I’m eating the sugar in my –
Mark:
Just enough sugar, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I have all these mitochondria that are – just burn it right up, right? It’s like, so I get this extra boost of energy with my more mitochondria, and then, when he’s not eating, he’s fat-adapted, so his body moves back over into fat-burning, and he’s able not to eat as much. Everyone else has to constantly eat, so he’s getting a win/win, so that’s really the magic is that ability to go back and forth.
Mark:
That’s the metabolic flexibility that I think is going to – I want that to be the operative word for the next couple of years in medicine, because it really – if you were to boil everything wrong with our health system today and our medical healthcare system, it all comes down to metabolic inflexibility. It all comes down to diseases of civilization. It all comes down to the fact that we eat too much carbohydrate, which converts into sugar. It’s like it’s so simple, it sounds like I’ve reduced it down to something way too simple, but I would suggest that that is the answer.
Dr. Pompa:
I agree. This flexibility thing, and I see it’s unhealthy, because I deal with a lot of very sick people. They have no flexibility. It takes us changing those enzymes epigenetically to change those mitochondria. It takes time to do that, and you have a lot of tips in your book for that. That’s why I think your book is so good. This is the key. This, no doubt, is the key to living healthy longer is gaining that metabolic flexibility, and you go to the low-carb things, and they’re inflexible. They’re staying in ketosis, right? They’re not even utilizing that benefit that we have and they have, and I believe there’s massive benefit in that.
Listen, here’s another thing you tipped on earlier. This puts people in a place – when you’re burning fat and able to burn fat, you produce an enzyme called cholecystokinin, which decreases appetite naturally. You said it. You said one of the big benefits is just not having the cravings or eating less. When we look at studies, people who live long healthy, they eat less. In the United States, we think eating less is, I’m going to eat half my meal. It doesn’t work that way. You and I and Meredith, we eat to full. Believe me, I even eat a little beyond full, but the point is, at the end of the day, I eat less. No doubt, I need far less calories to function at a much higher level. That’s really the key to living longer. You end up eating less, because you’re not trying to push food away.
Mark:
Exactly, and this has been known for a while, and there have been a lot of studies done on lesser animals, which demonstrate that reducing the amount of caloric intake does lead to longevity. Now, the issue with humans has always been that the assumption that, if I’ve got to cut calories way down, there’s the calorie restriction society concept, and it’s like, that is so antithetical to what I’m talking about and what you’re talking about, because I want to make a point that I make sure I never go hungry.
Now, hungry, to me, is like, oh, my God, I’m hangry. I’m going to – now, I get to the point where I feel like eating, but I don’t even call that hungry, hungry. I just go, oh, it’s time to eat. Geez, I forgot to eat, and I’m going to eat enough to take the edge off the hunger, and that’s it. I eat till I’m full, but full for me, like you, is a lot less than I used to think was necessary to maintain muscle mass.
I think, in the next couple of years, we’re going to see a number of studies that show that it probably takes – you do a Benedict-Harris equation for your basal metabolic rate, and it comes out to be 2,100 calories for the day. I suspect there’ll be a time when people are really metabolically flexible when you think, wow, that’s just way too much food. I could literally thrive on 1,300 calories a day for a long period of time if they were the right calories, if I got 56 to 75 grams of protein and if I kept my carbs reasonably low and then used fat to kind of tide over the amount of satiety that I’m looking for.
I make a point that I make every bite of food that I eat – I enjoy the hell out of it, so I’m not – this is not a restriction program for me. This is one of enjoying food.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Mark:
You know what? If you look at the country as a whole, we are a country of excess. We are a country that has been blessed with a lot of opportunities, and one of the things that’s kind of grown out of that is this notion that people have, like what can I get away with? What’s the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight? What’s the biggest piece of cheesecake I can have and not feel bad about it? What can I get away with? That leads to this gluttony that we all have, like we’re seeing – we see – and I was guilty of that. When I was a runner, I could get away with eating 5, 6, 7,000 calories a day. Now, that was – in retrospect, that was horrendous for my body, because there was all sorts of thermal adjustment taking place in my body, trying to burn off this excess calorie if I couldn’t store it. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d have probably a sleeping temperature of 102 degrees like a mild fever, just because my body was trying to get rid of all of the calories that I was consuming, because I could get away with it, because I wasn’t gaining weight, right? I wasn’t getting fat. I was a 142-pound marathoner running 110 miles a week, so I was guilty of that same thing.
Now, oddly enough, I go to the gym today, and there’s guys on the treadmill and gals on the treadmill. It’s like, they’re doing 450, 500 calories in a work-out, and I’m like, why? Are you training for a 10K? Oh, no, no, no, we’re just here. Why are you running on the treadmill so much? The answer often is, because I like to eat. It’s like, whoa, wait a minute! You are doing all this work because you haven’t put a lid on your appetite? You haven’t gotten ahold of your appetite, hunger, and cravings. You’re trying to earn or deserve a couple of more bites of something you probably shouldn’t eat in the first place? You know how crazy that is to –
Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-. It doesn’t work anyway. I don’t know if you saw that Scientific America. They went out and spent time with the Hadza tribe in Northern Tanzania, one of the last hunting/gathering tribes. They measured these people who go out all day without food, by the way. They’re intermittent fasters. They go out all day, fat-adapted, so they were measuring their caloric output with the most accurate way, and on average, for a male, it was around 2,500, 2,600, no matter what. By the way, that’s the same as a couch potato. That’s the same as a person who’s sick. Your caloric output for the day sitting on your couch is still around 2,500, 2,600.
Mark:
Yeah, but that’s – you can look at it two ways. You can look at it one way, which is, oh, geez, what’s the point? I thought the whole point was to become wasteful with my calories and develop a high metabolism, a fast metabolism. Isn’t that what I want as a part of my strategy for maintaining optimal body weight? The answer is no, it’s not. If you could take a look at what’s going on inside the body and realize that, instead of seeing what’s the most I could eat and not gain weight and reversed it into what’s the least amount of food I can eat, maintain muscle mass, have all the energy I require, never get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry? Hunger ruins the whole thing, right? If you look at it from that point of view, and you say, well, what’s the least I can eat, and it’s a remarkably small number compared to what you think you needed in the old days, right? Particularly if – which is what I – I don’t know how you orchestrate your own eating schedule, but I eat two meals a day. I can’t eat three meals a day. It’s just too – there you go.
Dr. Pompa:
Interesting. There are days where my wife and I have gone on vacation, and we’re like, we’re going to eat three meals a day. We can’t. It’s like, we –
Mark:
Exactly. Yeah, I don’t eat breakfast. I have my first meal usually around one o’clock in the afternoon. I get up at 6:30, have a cup of coffee, but that’s it for the day, and I go to work. I do podcasts, I write, I go to the gym, and I work out fasted. I don’t eat any post-work-out meal. I come home. I eat around one o’clock, and then I have my second meal usually around seven, and it’s dinner. It’s usually when my wife says it’s time to stop work, so I work until seven usually, most of the time. That’s it.
You’re right. When we go on vacation, and we go, wow, geez, what are we going to do? Let’s have breakfast, so you have breakfast, and then you go, well, how could we possibly eat lunch four hours later?
Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, exactly.
Mark:
Yet, that’s how people live their lives. People live their lives thinking, well, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and not only that, but 10:30 break, bagel and coffee or donut and coffee in the breakroom, three o’clock in the afternoon pick-me-up snacking in front of the TV, watching Game of Thrones with a big -inaudible-, whatever. When you develop this skill, this metabolic flexibility, this ability to wake up in the morning and go, I don’t need to eat breakfast. I have all the energy I need to get the day started.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re burning fat. You’re still burning fat.
Mark:
You’re burning fat, and you’re doing it efficiently, so it’s not like – I’ve had nine, ten percent body fat for the last – for 40 years, so it’s not like I get fat and then don’t get fat. It’s just that I’m very efficient at how I either store it or take it out of storage, but if you come to that point where, first of all, you only eat two meals a day of choice – it’s not something I force myself to do. That’s how I wind up – I only eat when I’m hungry, and those are the times I get hungry. Sometimes, I’m hungry, and I don’t eat, because I’ve got work to do and stuff like that, but it’s almost impossible then to get to 3,000 calories a day or whatever.
It’s so easy to what I would say trend toward your ideal body composition in incorporating this keto ability, this sort of newfound skill to be metabolically flexible and to extract energy from whatever substrate is available at the time.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I want people to be clear. Mark and I and Meredith, it took time for us to get this efficient, so I can not even be in ketosis, purposely trying to increase my carbs, and before my first meal, if I measured my ketones, I’m far into ketosis without even trying, right? It’s like, that’s the point is we’re still benefitting from ketones even when we’re not in ketosis, because we’re that metabolically flexible that our body’s burning fat when it needs to. When we eat glucose or carbs, our body burns it, but I think you hit it, though. This is a big problem.
I went to Israel for a docuseries that we were filming, and they were eating three meals a day, and I was with the crew. I was stunned, Mark. It was remarkable to me, because I hadn’t been around that in a while. I felt like all we did was eat. It was like, it was the breakfast and the whole thing, and then it was like, just when the day got going, it was like they were going, okay, what are we eating for lunch? I’m like, holy cow, so we have to break now and go to lunch? Then, it was another hour for the lunch, and then it was a dinner. Oh, and then, in between on the bus to the next shift, there was eating going on. This is ridiculous.
I’m telling you, if you want to eat faster than anybody, simply eat that often, and you’re right. At the end of the day, you add the increased carbs to that. You add eating all of these things that we shouldn’t eat all year round to that. It’s ridiculous, and no wonder we’re in the shape we’re in, Mark. No wonder. Your book really gives some pointers to how to get to this flexibility, and I love that.
Mark:
Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting also that the people who were on the bus with you, because they’re sugar-burners, because they haven’t built the metabolic machinery to burn fat, because they’re not keto-adapted or fat-adapted, they needed to eat –
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Mark:
– on those cycles. When people hear about what we’re talking about here, keto, and they go, well, I could never not eat breakfast, I could never skip a meal, I could never go a day or two without eating –
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, they need it.
Mark:
The interesting thing is they can’t without an incredible amount of struggle and sacrifice and focus and concentration, because when you haven’t done the work, when you haven’t built the metabolic machinery, when you are carb-dependent, then you literally do have to eat every couple of hours, because the body either can’t store any more glucose in the muscle cells, so it stores it as fat in the fat cells – the amount of insulin that you just secreted in response to that overconsumption of carbohydrate has not only caused the body to try to dispose of those carbs but also has locked the fat into the fat cells, and now you are unable to take that fat out of the fat cells and actually use it as energy, which was always the intention that, as part of the elegant system that is created through evolution –
Dr. Pompa:
Jason Fung –
Mark:
You’ve got all these –
Dr. Pompa:
Sorry. Go ahead. Finish your point.
Mark:
No, no, no. No, I just – so that’s the reason for the last 40 years in this carbcentric America, anyway. People have said, oh, don’t go three hours without eating. Humans are grazers. Don’t go three hours without eating, particularly carbohydrates, and get a little bit of protein at every meal, because you don’t want to be cannibalizing your muscle tissue. The concept of cannibalizing muscle tissue only happens because when you do run out of carbs, or you are unable to access any more stored body fat, the brain, which needs – because it hasn’t learned how to burn ketones, the brain, which then only runs on glucose, goes, where are we going to get our glucose? I know. We’ll create a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol.
Cortisol will then literally pervade our bodies and look for muscle tissue to break down, send the amino acids to the liver to become glucose, so the brain can stay happy, and that’s this terrible catabolic treadmill, catabolic/anabolic, in and out on a daily basis, because you haven’t developed the skill that you were literally born with, which is to be good at burning fat and good at making ketones and burning ketones.
All that shifts when you become keto-adapted, when you do a keto reset. All that whole thing, you just throw it out the window. You’re not hungry. You don’t need to eat. You don’t feel the need to eat. You feel sometimes like three meals a day is wasting your time, like what are we doing sitting here? We’ve got fun to have and work to do or whatever.
Dr. Pompa:
I have a saying. Don’t eat less; eat less often. At the end of the day, you’ll eat less.
Mark:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
Jason Fung puts it this way, just to describe exactly what you’re saying. You’re eating, and you’re pushing the glucose in the cells, pushing it in the liver, which holds most of it. Then, when the liver’s full, then it’s pushing it in the muscle cells, and then it runs out of space. Then, it’s now fat. Now, we’re pushing it into the fat cells, so this is how America gets fat.
When you eat less often, what we’re talking about, and lower carb, now we’re burning – we’re giving our body time to burn those stores, so when we do eat glucose or carbohydrates, to say it like that, we have plenty of storage. Plenty, so we don’t get that damaging effect, and we’re definitely not storing it as a fat, but what happens is, when you run out of storage for the glucose, now it’s out causing damage, oxidative damage, damaging your cells, causing inflammation. Insulin is up, trying to get rid of it, causing damage, inflammation, but when you give your body – when you’re eating less often and lower carb, you have plenty of storage. You’re not getting the damage, so it’s just another benefit.
Talk about – okay, what did you learn from your first books to this book? How would you differentiate this book from some of your other books, which were fantastic? Take us through that evolution.
Mark:
You know, the first book, The Primal Blueprint, was a broad look at the lifestyle behaviors of our ancestors and in search of ways in which we could, again, try to recreate some of those experiences so that our genes would be happy, literally, and turn on genes to build muscle, support the immune system, and learn how to burn fat, and all those things that we kind of all list as things that we would like to achieve. The Keto Reset was basically next-level stuff. It was like, okay, how do I take what I learned from the first book and build upon that? I think one of the things that I got from the research was this concept that I wasn’t even quite that buying into the idea that we could eat less and thrive, that we could eat less and maintain muscle mass. I was more about, in the first book, shifting the macros around but keeping the calories the same, and by shifting the macros –
Dr. Pompa:
I like that book, so yeah, I gathered that. Yep.
Mark:
This was more of a – again, it’s kind of next-level stuff. How do I prove to myself and to my reader that it doesn’t take that many calories for you to thrive? I started looking at the human body as a closed system for days at a time, and thinking back to our ancestors and thinking – there were days when there was no food, and you couldn’t get hangry, right? You couldn’t get upset or moody or beat up on your spouse or yell at your kids. You just lived your life and moved on, and it wasn’t a big issue, because in this closed system, you take fat out of storage, you combust it, or you take some of the triglycerides, and you spin off the glycerol, and you make glucose, or you take the other part of it, and you make ketones.
It’s such a cool, closed loop that, for days or even weeks at a time, there’s no downside. There’s no suffering. There’s no loss of performance. In fact, in many cases, you would argue there’s an improvement in performance. You would argue that a hungry hunter is actually a more acute, aware hunter, certainly on point in trying to address the fact, the reality, that there’s no food. Am I going to get food? It serves you no purpose to be depressed about it, to be pissed off about it, to be like, oh, I give up, there’s no food. Hell, I’m just going to pull over on a side road and die.
This idea that we can be a closed system for long periods of time started to then lead me down that path of looking at the old calorie restriction society people. You’ve got the Roy Walfords of the world, who tried to keep the macros, whatever. They still had to keep their carbohydrate level high, because everybody assumed that you needed carbs, and yet trying to consume 1,200 calories a day for years at a time and miserable. If you ever talked to any of these calorie-restricting guys, they were fricking miserable. They were so trying to stay focused on what they were doing, but they couldn’t, because they weren’t quite keto-adapted. They were just kind of low-carb – I mean, excuse me, high-carb, low-calorie guys.
Dr. Pompa:
Horrid.
Mark:
Yeah, it was a good idea – right idea, poor execution, I think. How can you achieve the benefits of this low-carb strategy, and one of those benefits that everybody is seeking is this cell repair concept, which is an anti-aging concept, which means that, in the absence of lots of nutrition, a cell will look – I’m going to give it a little bit of a – I’m going to anthropomorphize the cell for a second here and say the cell is thinking, well, if there’s lots of nutrition, then why don’t I divide, because there would be lots of nutrition for two of me? Cells tend to want to divide. Cells tend to want to pass the genetic material along to the next generation. That is, after all, the ultimate expression of evolution. A cell that’s faced with lots of nutrition surrounding it says, hey, let’s just divide. Party on, everybody, and let’s have a great time. Cells that are also – cells that divide also, if you’ve heard about telomeres, there are a finite number of divisions that some of the organ systems in the body will allow the cells to divide into.
Now, a cell that’s facing a dearth of nutrients would like outside and go, geez, there’s not even enough nutrients for me, let alone two of me, so there’s no reason to divide. I know what I’ll do. I’ll start to do some housekeeping, some house cleaning. I’ll start to consume some of the damaged proteins and some of the damaged fats within myself. I will start to repair some of the DNA that may have been damaged by reactive oxygen species or free radicals that were a result of combustion of glucose when all hell was breaking loose and there was too many – there was too much nutrition around. The cell thinks kind of like, okay, I’m going to be protecting myself and repairing myself. There’s even this autophagy, which extends to senescent cells that just go, you know what? This cell right over here, we don’t even need it anymore. All it’s doing is causing potential for damage in either the mitochondria or in the DNA. Let’s just consume that cell. Let’s just get rid of that cell. We don’t need it anymore.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s sucking our energy, and more energy – you know, we’re –
Mark:
Yeah, so it’s a really – again, it’s an elegant housekeeping, anti-aging concept that not many people either know about or understand, but I think that’s where the new research is headed, because for the longest time, people thought that fasting has some benefits, and I’d like to understand what the benefits of fasting is. One of those benefits is, once you are fat- and keto-adapted, then taking two or three days of not eating can have some pretty profound anti-aging effects.
Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. No doubt about it. We promote that on this show. I believe a couple fasts a year or even just one extended fast is transformative. Autophagy – obviously, your body will, as you pointed out, eat the bad cells, but here’s the best part. You said it. The good cells get better. They get stronger. They get more fat-adapted. The mitochondria get more efficient. All of that occurs. Everything that you said takes place, so I believe in periodic fasting, even weekly. I’ll go a day without eating, because I’m fat-adapted. I’ll blow ketones up, and my body – brain’s using them, my body’s loving the fat, but what happens? Stem cells rise to create new and even better cells, and your body’s eating the bad tissue.
It’s that stinking intelligent, so we’re talking about feast days, and we’re talking about famine, and that’s my diet variation concept. It’s feast/famine cycling. Our ancestors were forced to do it. We kind of have to be a little more conscious about it, but I tell you what. It makes this all so easy, because when I know that I don’t have to worry, and I can eat a day of higher carbs if I desire – I’m metabolically adapted. I can do that, but also there’s days – I had one yesterday. I didn’t eat. I ate one meal. It was later. It was like five o’clock, and I’m like, oh, I didn’t even eat my earlier meal. I work, work, work, and that actually happened two days this week already. I didn’t even plan or try. It just happened, because I’m fat-adapted. I’m metabolically –
Mark:
That’s what I do. That’s how I do it a lot is I don’t really plan on these fasts. They just happen organically, because I’m busy doing something else and because I’ve gotten such a hold of my hunger, appetite, and cravings. Those don’t come into play, and it’s like you said, like, oh, my gosh. It’s oops, I forgot to eat. Oh, well. I’m better off for having forgotten to eat.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. Meredith, I want to make sure you’ve just – Meredith has, I’m sure, a lot of great questions, because she lives this life, that’s for sure.
Meredith:
Yeah, and I agree with so much of what you said and especially with the fasting. It’s such a faster way, I’ve found, to get into ketosis versus eating a lot of fat, just that restriction with the intermittent fasting, and some longer fasts are just really, really powerful. I’m curious, too, because although it kind of just seems simple, just the metabolic flexibility, and for us, having lived it and done it for a while, it really is, but I get a lot of questions about ratios of fat and protein and carbs and specifically proteins and working out to get muscle gain, so can you speak to a little bit about those ratios and maybe someone who’s just starting, how they could kind of go about determining that?
Mark:
Sure. First of all, I don’t like ratios, because that’s – ratios kind of pigeon-hole this whole thing into – they would vary from one person to another, based on their metabolic history and how efficient they currently are and what their goals are and things like that. What I’d rather do is start and look at each macro individually. When you look at protein, first of all, you don’t need that much protein. You don’t need as much protein as the rest of the world, particularly the body-building world, would have you believe. In some cases, it might be 35, 45 grams a day for some women. As it stands now, I can’t imagine anybody that I know of whatever size, if they are metabolically efficient, needing more than 100, 110 grams of protein a day. Now, you can take in 140 or 150 grams of protein, but then you’re starting back on this inefficiency cycle where the body says, well, I’m metabolically efficient, so I don’t need that much protein, and so I’m going to take the excess protein, and I’m going to either have to spend energy deaminating it and peeing it out, or I’m going to have to turn it into glucose. I’m going to use it as part of my gluconeogenesis efforts, and so it becomes counterproductive to take in excessive amounts of protein.
If you start with protein, and you go, well, on a daily basis, anywhere from 40 to 100, we’ll say 110 grams of protein a day, but the body is so efficient at holding onto protein, particularly within those parameters, that I don’t even look at protein on a day-to-day basis, certainly not on a meal-to-meal basis. I look at it on almost a weekly basis, like how much protein did I get in the week? The body is so good with this amino acid pool and this protein sink, and it stores it as muscle, and it does – there are a lot of things that the body does with amino acids that allow for a lot of leeway in protein, but in no event do you need to consume more than 100, 120 grams a day, no matter who you are, so let’s start with that. We start with 120 grams of protein as a max, max, max. That’s only 480 calories if we’re going to assign value to this.
When we talk about protein, we can’t assign – it’s weird to assign a caloric value to protein, because protein is largely a structural repair mechanism. You build muscle with it. You build -inaudible-. You build enzymes with it, and you don’t want to combust protein, so the idea that protein would even be assigned a caloric value is kind of antithetical to this whole process. It’s like, I don’t want to count my – particularly the first 40 grams. The first 40 grams you take in every day ought to have a zero caloric value assigned to them in my world.
Then, you go to the next level, and you say, okay, how much carbohydrate do I want to take in? If I’m going to try and stay keto, I’ll probably keep it 30, 40, 50 grams, if I’m an athlete, maybe 60, 70 grams in a day. At 70 grams, that’s only 280 calories’ worth, so we’re like at 800 calories, and then the rest is kind of topping it off with healthy fats, and that comes back to how aggressive or how gluttonous you want to be. My point is, you don’t need – if you look at the basic requirements, you only need a little bit of protein compared to what most people think. You only need – if you’re going to be keto, you only need a few carbs. By the way, if – Dan, you and I, a big carb day for us might be 175 grams.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.
Mark:
Right, and that’s 700 calories on a big day, on a big carb day, so the rest is fat, and fat has nine calories per gram, so if you look at your macro ratios, you would say, well, how do I use fat to kind of top off my eating so that I’m satisfied, I’ve enjoyed the food experience, I’m getting enough extra energy or whatever energy’s coming from the fat? I don’t look at the ratios as much as I look at one, two, and three. How do I put them together? I might look at a fourth macro right now, which is fiber, because I want to be sure I get enough fiber in my diet, because I want to be feeding my gut bacteria, and if I feed them appropriately, what are they going to be making? Short-chain fatty acids, right?
They’re going to be actually producing some fat themselves, and that’s why, on almost any given day, I have a big salad, and in that big salad, I put a lot of vegetables, a lot of fibrous vegetables. I’ll put some form of protein, 20, 25 grams of protein, on top, and then I douse it with some Primal Kitchen Salad Dressing, which is healthy fats, made with avocado oil and herbs and spices and things like that. Now, I’ve made this big, wonderful, tasty, crunchy, fulfilling salad that probably only has 20 grams of carbs in the entire bowl, because lettuce doesn’t have virtually none, right? It has 25 grams of protein. It might have 25, maybe 30 grams of fat if I put avocado and a couple of nuts on top. It is a perfectly keto meal, and yet somebody would look at a salad and go, well, that’s not keto. I thought keto was bacon cheeseburger with butter on it, and yet – so I’ve crafted this perfectly keto meal out of carbs, out of what people assume to be mostly carbs, right?
Anyway, so that’s my take on this thing is you have to kind of look at each meal and each snack and go, does that kind of fit the parameters here? I wouldn’t look at ratios or percentages, because they can be all over the place. I know people that have – what’s his name, at Hyperlipid? Peter at Hyperlipid. I don’t know if you ever followed his stuff. There was a time when he was – 90% of his calories came from fat. Most of that came from heavy cream. Geez, that’s a little bit overboard, and it kind of misses the point here, that I want to enjoy every bite of food I put in my mouth, so if I’m forcing myself to eat a lot of fat just because I think that’s how I’m going to be keto – and by the way, Meredith, to your point about ketosis and using fats to be in ketosis, one of the funny things, interesting things about ketosis, ketosis is basically a term that describes excess ketones in the bloodstream.
If people who enter this area that I call keto would say, well, I want to be in ketosis, and in ketosis, for them, is often defined as producing so many ketones we can’t use them. You look at your blood ketone level, and it’s 4, 5, 6 millimole, and you go, oh, I win the keto game. I’ve got the highest ketones. That’s not metabolic efficiency. That’s not metabolic flexibility. That’s just producing a lot of ketones. In many regards, that’s your body not quite being metabolically flexible yet and going, well, we better start producing a lot of ketones just in case we need them.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s true, Mark. The more efficient I got, the lower, when I was in ketosis, my numbers got, because your body oxidizes and burns them. Now, my breath ketones actually go up, but yeah.
Mark:
Yeah, your breath acetone goes up, but the –
Dr. Pompa:
The acetone goes up.
Mark:
Yeah. Correct. This idea that when you’re making a lot of ketones, you must be successful. Yeah, so you fit the definition of ketosis, excess ketones in the bloodstream, but the irony is, the people that I know that have been keto the longest, who have been 10, 15 years keto, they might get 20, 30 grams of carbs a day, and they might blow a 0.4 millimole on a keto thing, because here’s what’s going on. They’ve been keto for so long, the muscles are so fat-adapted that they – number one, they don’t need that much in the way of glucose, and number two, and more importantly, the muscles that are so fat-adapted go, you know what? We don’t even need ketones. Send the ketones off to the brain. We don’t need them. We’re so good at burning fat and a little bit of glycogen, we don’t need ketones. Send them off to the brain.
Now, the brain, which has a pretty significant daily requirement for energy – 20 to 25 percent of our daily energy is consumed by the brain, but when it becomes keto-adapted, it doesn’t – and one thing you need to know about the brain is the brain doesn’t have this dynamic range of energy requirements throughout the day. Dan, if you go to the gym, and you do a heavy leg day with squats and presses and deadlifts and all this other stuff, your energy requirements for that work-out might go from one MET to 20 METs, right? You might be burning 700 calories in that one work-out, most of it going to your legs, but the brain isn’t experiencing that same wild fluctuation. The brain’s like, I got a steady state kind of usage throughout the day. It might fluctuate maybe 2x, but it’s never much more than that.
When you get keto-adapted and fat-adapted, and you’re only producing ketones, largely to offset the need for glucose in the brain, then the liver’s going, I don’t need to pump out excessive amounts of ketones. That’s wasteful from an evolutionary standpoint. I don’t want to waste energy. I don’t want to waste ketones. I don’t want to pee purple on a strip and be raising that high, saying I’m successful at ketosis.
It’s almost like ketosis isn’t what you want. You want to be good at burning fat. You want to be metabolically flexible, and you want to be metabolically efficient, and so a metabolically efficient person only makes enough ketones to generate the energy in the brain as required. Because the brain doesn’t have this dynamic range of energy requirements, then there’s this sort of steady state production, low-level production of ketones by the liver all day long to just feed the brain. Again, it’s this crazy, elegant system, and if we can access it, and if we can do the work and build the metabolic machinery, we are all so much better off for having done that.
Dr. Pompa:
Mark, that’s why I think by taking exogenous ketones – look, if you take exogenous ketones to have this extraordinary situation, fine, but I believe that it messes with that elegant system that you’re talking about. The body gets messages it shouldn’t be getting. We have elevated ketones and glucose at the same time, and all kinds of bad things potentially can happen.
Mark:
Yeah, now, going back to your Zach Bitter example and other athletes, the use of exogenous ketones in a performance situation – I think the next real breakthrough in world records are going to come from a fat-adapted, keto-adapted athlete who’s using SuperStarch, which is a slow-burning carbohydrate, and maybe some MCT oil and maybe some ketone supplements in a race and just –
Dr. Pompa:
No, no, that’s a different kind of situation where I’ve taken them before a work-out, and I don’t knock that this works, but people take these things and go, oh, I’m in ketosis. It’s simply not true and -inaudible-.
Mark:
Yeah, you can’t hack your way into ketosis with ketones.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and it messes with that elegant system. We’re out of time, and I wish we could keep going. My gosh, that was fast, but that was extraordinary, Mark. We’re so in line, and I appreciate you coming on. Thank you.
Mark:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Meredith:
Yes.
Mark:
Yep. Thanks, Meredith.
Meredith:
Oh, yes. Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks for what you’re doing. This information is so important to get out, and I love the big picture perspective on it as well. I think it just – it makes so much sense, and I think it’s going to resonate with a lot of people, so thank you so much for what you’re doing and the amazing food that you manufacture as well. It’s awesome stuff. Thanks, Dr. Pompa, as always. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you.
