675 Look Good Naked with Mark Sisson

“IF YOU'RE NOT HUNGRY, DON'T EAT." Health is one of the most important things to me. If your body isn’t operating at 100% efficiency then your mind can’t either. A lot of this really does come down to diet. On a good diet, you will burn fat efficiently. You’ll have a healthier heart, your brain will function properly, and your body will be able to repair itself properly. This last part is huge for those who are recovering from surgery, or dealing with various diseases. Plus, there’s an added benefit on top of it all - you will lose weight and look great naked. Who doesn’t want that? To talk about the importance of a solid diet and how it can make a huge impact on your life overall, I brought back this clip from Mark Sisson. Mark talks about the importance of diet, all of the problems he’s seen it solve, and some myths that even professionals have about diet, specifically with protein shakes. Learn all about how you can look good naked, on Episode 675. In This Episode You Will Learn: Where Look Good Naked came from (00:37) Why people really want to LGN (00:57) What a typical day looks like for Mark (1:46) If you should really have a protein shake (2:48) The difference between a sugar burner and fat burner (3:12) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Five Minute Friday!

• 0:09Speaker 00

  I had the chance to sit down with an incredible man. His name is Mark Sisson. He's the bestselling author of The Primal Blueprint and one of the leading voices in the evolutionary health movement. He's a former elite endurance athlete with a two-hour, 18-minute marathon and a fourth-place Hawaiian Ironman finish.

• 0:37Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so LGN is "Look Good Naked." You know, it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years. I think people have used it before, but we sort of made it a meme for a while. And it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is 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 who go to Primal Blueprint and to 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.

• 1:20Mark Sisson?

  So, the first thing that they recognize is, you know, their blood sugar normalizes, or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away, or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away, or their GERD, or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes away. And that's wonderful. And then they go, "Oh, 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.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Side effect, gotcha. So, what's a typical eating day look like for you? Like, what are you putting in your system? What time do you put it in?

• 1:49Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so I wake up in the morning, and I have a cup of coffee around 6:30 in the morning. I like coffee, I'm a big fan of coffee. I don't eat until 12:30 or 1. So, I use what we call a compressed eating window. Now, I will wake up, and I have plenty of energy because I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  So, you have the energy, you don't need it?

• 2:08Mark Sisson?

  I have the energy. I'm not in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that I was sleeping. Doesn't matter. I'm so good at accessing the stored body fat, I've got plenty of energy. In fact, I'll go to the gym at 9:30 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.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  You feel fine.

• 2:29Mark Sisson?

  Feel fine.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:30Mark Sisson?

  And then when I get home, I won't eat. If I get home at like 11, I still won't eat for an hour and a half. Partly because I'm not hungry and partly because I got stuff to do.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Right, right, exactly.

• 2:41Mark Sisson?

  But I'm not compelled to go, oh my God, I just finished my workout. I must eat a post-workout shake or something.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's so many people that say that, you know, have a protein shake within the first 30 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?

• 2:58Mark 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, that's kind of key. When you become good at burning fat, you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're 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 and or you're, you know, you're depending on carbohydrate. By the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate and sugar sort of interchange.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:32Mark Sisson?

  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. Cause 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.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  You need to fill it up.

• 3:49Mark Sisson?

  The brain goes, hey, something's off here. We gotta eat. And if we don't eat, then here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna signal the adrenals to create cortisol, which is gonna 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, your energy levels don't dip, your blood sugar doesn't, doesn't dip. And so you don't, you don't cut into muscle tissue.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Gotcha. So you can train really hard to try to build muscle.

• 4:32Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  And you're still saying you don't need this like post-recovery shake afterwards. If you learn how to eat the right way.

• 4:36Mark Sisson?

  Exactly, exactly. Now, if you're, 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 cannibalize some of the muscle tissue.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:50Mark Sisson?

  Because you're working on an entirely different operating system.