Name: Mark Sisson on Achieving Metabolic Flexibility Through Fasting
Uploaded: 2021-03-26T17:53:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Sisson on Achieving Metabolic Flexibility Through Fasting' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Sisson on Achieving Metabolic Flexibility Through Fasting' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-26. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
You know, I've gone through, again, all these iterations of trying to assist
people with
the information that I've come across in my research on how they can achieve an
ideal
body composition, have more energy, maintain or build, you know, muscle,
improve their
immune systems, have better sex, be more productive, whatever it is.
These are the things that, these are what I'm trying to, the hidden genetic
switches
that I'm trying to uncover for people.
And in so doing, you can choose to do it or not.
I'm not suggesting you have to do this to have a great life, but here are some
of the ways
that we do it.
And it started with a primal blueprint and then sort of morphed into, well, the
primal blueprint
works really well for a lot of people and even worked well for me, but is there
something
else?
Is there a new, like, level I could get to?
And that was the keto.
So I wrote a book called The Keto Reset Diet since I was on here.
And I was into keto for a while, but then I sort of said, well, you know, ketosis
is not
a way to live your life.
It's a tool, a strategy that you can use to build metabolic flexibility.
Some people do think that it's a way to live your life, though.
Like, you know, Dom D'Augustino.
Yeah.
He does it all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, I have a lot of friends who do keto the whole time.
I'm just, I'm not a person who says, that's the way.
Keto's the, you know, the be-all and the end-all of how you should live your
life.
Because I'm more about achieving metabolic flexibility.
And that's a term that's come up in the last couple of years.
I don't know if you've heard it, but it basically describes your body's ability
to extract energy
from whatever substrate is available at the time.
So making it easier for your body to balance back and forth from fat to
carbohydrates does
not require so much of a gap.
Bingo.
Because usually the gap is, what is it, like two weeks or something like that
for you,
if you're a carbohydrate?
Yeah.
And if you're, and if, and if you never go down the route of, of keto, and all
you do
is eat carbs your whole life or have a carb-centric diet, you never get to the
point where you're
burning fat efficiently or effectively.
Right.
So you're, you're really metabolically inflexible.
Your body is just demanding that it continuously run on carbs and never tap
into your fat stores.
So you get, typically you get incrementally fatter and fatter.
And then if you skip a meal or skip two meals or try to go on some sort of a
fast, the wheels
fall off because you haven't built the metabolic machinery to, to burn fat, to
burn ketones,
and all, and all the things that go along with, with metabolic flexibility.
So it turns out metabolic flexibility is the holy grail and how you get there,
whether
it's, uh, primal, paleo, uh, vegetarian, vegan, uh, fasting, IF, whatever.
I don't, it's almost like it's, it doesn't matter.
What route you, you use.
If you can get to the point where you're metabolically flexible, now you have
this ability to, to extract
energy from your own stored body fat whenever you don't eat.
And how does one do that?
Like, what's the best strategy?
Well, the best strategy is keto.
So that's the best strategy.
For sure.
For sure.
That's the best strategy.
So, um, because, uh, as long as you keep feeding your body carbohydrates every
two or three
hours all day long, the body goes, Hey, I got, I got plenty of fuel, um, taking
the carbohydrates
in raises my blood sugar.
Blood sugar is a fuel, but I don't want too much of it in my system.
And so the body produces insulin, which tries to take excess glucose and
protein and fat out
of the bloodstream and sequester it in the cells.
Um, and in so doing your blood sugar drops because it's, it's, and then you
have to eat
again every two or three hours.
And it's this cycle that people enter into that they, that they're on for a
lifetime sometimes.
And, and the tendency over time, because you're not burning your stored body
fat is to accumulate
body fat.
You never get really adept at burning body fat and you never, because you never
take time
off to require that your body burns its fat.
You just keep accumulating it.
So how does someone go from being metabolically inflexible to metabolically
flexible without
going into keto?
That's difficult.
The way to do it is, is through fasting.
Um, and it's just keto is such a, uh, a better way to do it.
And the reason is you, you're trying to prompt the body into making changes
that it doesn't
want to make.
You know, when you go to the gym and you lift weights, you're prompting the
body to build
muscle that it really doesn't want to build, but now you're, you know, you're
giving it
a reason to.
And so when you withhold carbohydrate from the diet and sugar in particular,
but carbohydrate
in general, um, and the body senses that it's not going to get glucose for a
while, it starts
to go to, uh, a plan B, which is to build the metabolic machinery to start to
extract energy
from stored fat cells to burn that fat, to combust that fat in the muscle cells.
Uh, it takes some of the fat, sends it to the liver, uh, to convert into ketones
because
the brain works really well on ketones.
In fact, the brain works better on ketones than it does on glucose for most
people.
So the body has this built-in plan, this diagram, this genetic program that you're
born with to
be metabolically flexible and to be able to extract energy from fat and from
ketones and
from glucose.
Uh, and, and it would normally go that route, but we, we never give it the
reason to.
Now, how, how is that, um, plan?
How has it evolved?
Well, for most of human history, we ate and we didn't eat.
It wasn't like, you know, breakfast was the most important meal of the day or
make sure
you keep, you know, uh, little Tupperware things of, uh, a little bit of
protein and some
carbohydrate to eat every two or three hours or else your muscles will go into
cannibal
mode.
No, humans are wired to overeat.
And because food was so scarce, when we did come across food, we tend to, to
eat more and
certainly sweet foods like fruits was even more palatable.
So we probably tended to eat more of that, but, but so we're wired to overeat
and we have
this amazing, uh, design that allows us to take excess energy and convert it
into fuel that we carry
around with us all the time, conveniently located above the center of gravity.
So it's on the hips, on the butt, on the thighs, on the belly.
So, so we tend to carry this excess body fat as a survival mechanism from a
million years
ago.
That's why you carry it here?
Yeah.
That's sure.
It's like a, like a fanny pack.
Yeah, it's exactly what it is.
That's exactly what it is.
So, so, but, but again, if you look at evolution and how, and how things, you
know, work, we're
bipedals, we have to stand upright.
So, you know, if we had, uh, fat accumulating on our upper back or whatever, we'd
be, you know,
tipping over, so it's conveniently located over the center of gravity.
It's an elegant, elegant design.
The problem is it was designed so that when you didn't eat food, you could take
that same
fuel, take it out of storage, combust it, and, and not be any of the worst for
wear.
Not think of anything other than, you know, I'm still going to hunt.
I'm still going to do all these things.
I haven't eaten for five days.
I'm not hungry.
I'm not pissed off at my mate.
I'm just going to keep going with a great attitude that I'm going to find
something to
eat.
Now, what is the standard amount of time?
Is there a standard amount of time between, if a person eats a normal American
diet and
they just decide to fast, how long does it take before their body to, converts
to burning
fat?
If they're not going keto?
Right.
Yeah.
They're probably going to burn, they're going to probably use a little bit of
muscle in
the process because the body, if, if it isn't used to, to deriving most of its
energy from
fat because of a process that you've engaged in to, to use keto to, you know,
to, to burn
fat, it'll, it'll still seek glucose.
And if you don't give it glucose and you haven't done this work for the first
couple
of days, it's, it's, it's miserable.
And so people talk about the low carb flu or the, um, or, you know, if they go
on a fasting
thing at an ashram, you know, I saw, I saw Elvis, you know, two days ago.
Elvis?
Whatever.
Jesus.
Yeah, whatever.
What?
I saw Elvis in my, in my dreams.
Oh, you're saying, cause you're going crazy.
Cause you're going crazy.
Right.
So you're, you know, your, your, your, your brain is kind of frazzled because
you haven't
given it the opportunity to, to really thrive on ketones yet.
Your body's making ketones, but you haven't, again, you haven't built that
metabolic machinery
to use them efficiently and effectively.
And so the brain's still looking for glucose.
And as a result, what happens is the brain will send a signal to the adrenals
to secrete
cortisol.
Cortisol then, you know, goes throughout the body and strips amino acids from
muscle tissue
to send them to the liver to become glucose.
So you can feed the brain.
So it's, it's counterproductive over time.
And it's also, you know, one of the reasons why back in the old bodybuilding
days, in the old,
in the old training days, in any gym, this, this mantra about don't go more
than three
or three or four hours without eating, or you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue.
If you haven't become fat adapted and keto adapted, that does happen.
You do cannibalize muscle tissue when you go long periods of time without
eating.
Like say, when I say standard American diet, I don't mean junk food, but if you're
a person
who eats normal, eat a little bit of pasta, a little bit of bread, but you eat
mostly healthy.
If you decide that you're going to fast, your body's going to cannibalize some
muscle.
Not so much.
How much?
A few pounds?
Not even, you know, a few pounds, maybe.
A few pounds.
And you'll get it back.
You'll get it back.
But the idea is that if you can weather that storm, how much time are you
looking for before
your body starts burning fat?
Some people a week, some people two weeks, some people three weeks.
You'll be dead.
You can't fast for two weeks.
Oh, no, no.
You're talking about fasting fasting.
Oh, Jesus.
No, I'm talking about...
No, I'm not talking about...
No, no.
No, I'm talking about intermittent fasting.
No, that gets us to two meals a day.
Right.
But what if someone just fasts?
So give me a term.
Okay, so if you decide I'm going to go on a 36-hour fast.
That's probably the high end of what I would do, and then anything beyond that,
I'd be
a little bit concerned that I hadn't prepped myself with fat adaptation yet.
So when people go on these crazy three- to five-day fasts, they report all this
energy.
They feel great.
They feel amazing.
What's going on there?
No, they've got...
Their brains are using ketones.
Right.
So that's definitely where the energy, the feeling of amazing comes from.
Typically, if you're fasting that long, you're not working out.
Like any of these...
Like my wife does a seven-day water fast twice a year.
Oh, Jesus.
That's what I say.
Do you go on vacation when that's happening?
No, but I eat more.
I eat for her while she's gone.
Why does she do that?
She has this...
You know, she feels like it's good for her.
She's into the autophagy and some of the anti-aging...
Explain that.
It burns cells that are...
Yeah, so this...
When you're...
One of the many things that happens when you fast is that your body goes
into a different mode and it starts to realize that there's not going to be a
lot of fuel
around for a while.
And so in addition to burning stored body fat, in addition to making ketones...
By the way, ketones come from fat.
So some of the fat that you combust is also just converted into ketones that
your brain
can use.
It also...
The body also says...
Like if you were to be a...
If you had a brain...
If you were a cell and you had a brain and you thought, well, generally there's
a lot
of fuel around.
So my job is to pass the genetic material along to the next generation.
So there's plenty for two of us.
So I'll just divide and there'll be two of us.
That'll be great.
That same cell, in the absence of this sort of bathing in nutrition, goes, well,
there's
not even enough for one of me, let alone two of me.
So I'm not going to divide.
I'm going to repair what I have.
And so the cell goes into a repair process where it starts to consume damaged
proteins
and damaged fats within itself.
And it actually gets energy from that.
Starts to repair broken strands of DNA or whatever little things are going on.
It actually kills off senescent cells at that time.
So it's an anti-aging strategy that a lot of people use.
It's also a...
God, I hate the term reset.
I got to...
Why do you hate the term?
Because...
It's overused.
No, but...
And I used it in a book.
But all of a sudden, in the context of what's going on in the world and the
Great Reset,
like I never want to hear that term again.
Oh, the Great Reset, isn't that...
That's the conspiracy theory that the government is using this to change the
financial structure
of the country?
And everything else.
Yeah.
Do you hear that a lot in Florida?
Is that what's going on?
No, no, we don't...
No, no, no, we don't know.
But I read a lot, Joe.
I read the New York Times to see what the other side's doing.
The Great Reset.
Yeah, but so she will do these fasts, but she's metabolically flexible, so it's
easy
for her to do.
But if you're not metabolically flexible and you take on a fast of three days,
you can get
through it and it's probably good for you.
My whole thing is I want this to be, if you chose to do something like that, I
want it to
be...
Pleasurable.
Pleasurable and easy and graceful and something you look forward to do, not
something you dread
doing.
Now, is there...
Can you intermittent fast and get your body to be more metabolically flexible
in that
way?
Yeah.
And that's what I'm talking about.
So I'm not even into the multi-day fasting.
I'm into two meals a day.
So the premise of the book is once you've developed metabolic flexibility, to
engage in as much
time as you can of not eating throughout the day to maximize all of these
benefits that
we just described that come from not eating.
One of the things we say is most of the good things happen to us when we're not
eating.
Most of the repair, most of the recovery, most of the rebuilding happen when we're
not eating.
When we're eating, which we have to do, it comes with inflammation and it's a
necessary
thing, but the good stuff all happens when we're not eating.
So to the extent that we can expand that window of not eating and with the two
meals a day program,
which pretty much anybody who's keto now does, you just have an evening meal
and then you
don't eat until 1 o'clock, 1.30, 2 o'clock the next day.
So you have two meals a day and you have that 18-hour window.
That's what you use?
Yeah, an 18-hour window.
Why do you choose 18?
It works for me.
I mean, you can do 16.
You can do, I mean, anything less than, you know, 14 is back to sort of, you
know, where
you were before.
It's a little bit better, but it's not as, like I say, the more time that you
can go between
eating, the better.
And it isn't about so much a routine on a daily basis.
It's basically, I certainly use that as a template, but once in a while I eat
one meal
a day.
I'll go, you know, dinner to dinner to dinner.
And the beauty here is because I'm metabolically flexible, I have the
confidence that I'm not
tearing down muscle tissue.
I have, that my immune system is probably benefiting from it as opposed to
being somehow hurt by
it.
I maintain muscle mass.
Again, I have all this energy.
And most importantly, I'm not hungry.
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Mark Sisson on Achieving Metabolic Flexibility Through Fasting

The Joe Rogan Experience
You know, I've gone through, again, all these iterations of trying to assist
people with
the information that I've come across in my research on how they can achieve an
ideal
body composition, have more energy, maintain or build, you know, muscle,
improve their
immune systems, have better sex, be more productive, whatever it is.
These are the things that, these are what I'm trying to, the hidden genetic
switches
that I'm trying to uncover for people.
And in so doing, you can choose to do it or not.
I'm not suggesting you have to do this to have a great life, but here are some
of the ways
that we do it.
And it started with a primal blueprint and then sort of morphed into, well, the
primal blueprint
works really well for a lot of people and even worked well for me, but is there
something
else?
Is there a new, like, level I could get to?
And that was the keto.
So I wrote a book called The Keto Reset Diet since I was on here.
And I was into keto for a while, but then I sort of said, well, you know, ketosis
is not
a way to live your life.
It's a tool, a strategy that you can use to build metabolic flexibility.
Some people do think that it's a way to live your life, though.
Like, you know, Dom D'Augustino.
Yeah.
He does it all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, I have a lot of friends who do keto the whole time.
I'm just, I'm not a person who says, that's the way.
Keto's the, you know, the be-all and the end-all of how you should live your
life.
Because I'm more about achieving metabolic flexibility.
And that's a term that's come up in the last couple of years.
I don't know if you've heard it, but it basically describes your body's ability
to extract energy
from whatever substrate is available at the time.
So making it easier for your body to balance back and forth from fat to
carbohydrates does
not require so much of a gap.
Bingo.
Because usually the gap is, what is it, like two weeks or something like that
for you,
if you're a carbohydrate?
Yeah.
And if you're, and if, and if you never go down the route of, of keto, and all
you do
is eat carbs your whole life or have a carb-centric diet, you never get to the
point where you're
burning fat efficiently or effectively.
Right.
So you're, you're really metabolically inflexible.
Your body is just demanding that it continuously run on carbs and never tap
into your fat stores.
So you get, typically you get incrementally fatter and fatter.
And then if you skip a meal or skip two meals or try to go on some sort of a
fast, the wheels
fall off because you haven't built the metabolic machinery to, to burn fat, to
burn ketones,
and all, and all the things that go along with, with metabolic flexibility.
So it turns out metabolic flexibility is the holy grail and how you get there,
whether
it's, uh, primal, paleo, uh, vegetarian, vegan, uh, fasting, IF, whatever.
I don't, it's almost like it's, it doesn't matter.
What route you, you use.
If you can get to the point where you're metabolically flexible, now you have
this ability to, to extract
energy from your own stored body fat whenever you don't eat.
And how does one do that?
Like, what's the best strategy?
Well, the best strategy is keto.
So that's the best strategy.
For sure.
For sure.
That's the best strategy.
So, um, because, uh, as long as you keep feeding your body carbohydrates every
two or three
hours all day long, the body goes, Hey, I got, I got plenty of fuel, um, taking
the carbohydrates
in raises my blood sugar.
Blood sugar is a fuel, but I don't want too much of it in my system.
And so the body produces insulin, which tries to take excess glucose and
protein and fat out
of the bloodstream and sequester it in the cells.
Um, and in so doing your blood sugar drops because it's, it's, and then you
have to eat
again every two or three hours.
And it's this cycle that people enter into that they, that they're on for a
lifetime sometimes.
And, and the tendency over time, because you're not burning your stored body
fat is to accumulate
body fat.
You never get really adept at burning body fat and you never, because you never
take time
off to require that your body burns its fat.
You just keep accumulating it.
So how does someone go from being metabolically inflexible to metabolically
flexible without
going into keto?
That's difficult.
The way to do it is, is through fasting.
Um, and it's just keto is such a, uh, a better way to do it.
And the reason is you, you're trying to prompt the body into making changes
that it doesn't
want to make.
You know, when you go to the gym and you lift weights, you're prompting the
body to build
muscle that it really doesn't want to build, but now you're, you know, you're
giving it
a reason to.
And so when you withhold carbohydrate from the diet and sugar in particular,
but carbohydrate
in general, um, and the body senses that it's not going to get glucose for a
while, it starts
to go to, uh, a plan B, which is to build the metabolic machinery to start to
extract energy
from stored fat cells to burn that fat, to combust that fat in the muscle cells.
Uh, it takes some of the fat, sends it to the liver, uh, to convert into ketones
because
the brain works really well on ketones.
In fact, the brain works better on ketones than it does on glucose for most
people.
So the body has this built-in plan, this diagram, this genetic program that you're
born with to
be metabolically flexible and to be able to extract energy from fat and from
ketones and
from glucose.
Uh, and, and it would normally go that route, but we, we never give it the
reason to.
Now, how, how is that, um, plan?
How has it evolved?
Well, for most of human history, we ate and we didn't eat.
It wasn't like, you know, breakfast was the most important meal of the day or
make sure
you keep, you know, uh, little Tupperware things of, uh, a little bit of
protein and some
carbohydrate to eat every two or three hours or else your muscles will go into
cannibal
mode.
No, humans are wired to overeat.
And because food was so scarce, when we did come across food, we tend to, to
eat more and
certainly sweet foods like fruits was even more palatable.
So we probably tended to eat more of that, but, but so we're wired to overeat
and we have
this amazing, uh, design that allows us to take excess energy and convert it
into fuel that we carry
around with us all the time, conveniently located above the center of gravity.
So it's on the hips, on the butt, on the thighs, on the belly.
So, so we tend to carry this excess body fat as a survival mechanism from a
million years
ago.
That's why you carry it here?
Yeah.
That's sure.
It's like a, like a fanny pack.
Yeah, it's exactly what it is.
That's exactly what it is.
So, so, but, but again, if you look at evolution and how, and how things, you
know, work, we're
bipedals, we have to stand upright.
So, you know, if we had, uh, fat accumulating on our upper back or whatever, we'd
be, you know,
tipping over, so it's conveniently located over the center of gravity.
It's an elegant, elegant design.
The problem is it was designed so that when you didn't eat food, you could take
that same
fuel, take it out of storage, combust it, and, and not be any of the worst for
wear.
Not think of anything other than, you know, I'm still going to hunt.
I'm still going to do all these things.
I haven't eaten for five days.
I'm not hungry.
I'm not pissed off at my mate.
I'm just going to keep going with a great attitude that I'm going to find
something to
eat.
Now, what is the standard amount of time?
Is there a standard amount of time between, if a person eats a normal American
diet and
they just decide to fast, how long does it take before their body to, converts
to burning
fat?
If they're not going keto?
Right.
Yeah.
They're probably going to burn, they're going to probably use a little bit of
muscle in
the process because the body, if, if it isn't used to, to deriving most of its
energy from
fat because of a process that you've engaged in to, to use keto to, you know,
to, to burn
fat, it'll, it'll still seek glucose.
And if you don't give it glucose and you haven't done this work for the first
couple
of days, it's, it's, it's miserable.
And so people talk about the low carb flu or the, um, or, you know, if they go
on a fasting
thing at an ashram, you know, I saw, I saw Elvis, you know, two days ago.
Elvis?
Whatever.
Jesus.
Yeah, whatever.
What?
I saw Elvis in my, in my dreams.
Oh, you're saying, cause you're going crazy.
Cause you're going crazy.
Right.
So you're, you know, your, your, your, your brain is kind of frazzled because
you haven't
given it the opportunity to, to really thrive on ketones yet.
Your body's making ketones, but you haven't, again, you haven't built that
metabolic machinery
to use them efficiently and effectively.
And so the brain's still looking for glucose.
And as a result, what happens is the brain will send a signal to the adrenals
to secrete
cortisol.
Cortisol then, you know, goes throughout the body and strips amino acids from
muscle tissue
to send them to the liver to become glucose.
So you can feed the brain.
So it's, it's counterproductive over time.
And it's also, you know, one of the reasons why back in the old bodybuilding
days, in the old,
in the old training days, in any gym, this, this mantra about don't go more
than three
or three or four hours without eating, or you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue.
If you haven't become fat adapted and keto adapted, that does happen.
You do cannibalize muscle tissue when you go long periods of time without
eating.
Like say, when I say standard American diet, I don't mean junk food, but if you're
a person
who eats normal, eat a little bit of pasta, a little bit of bread, but you eat
mostly healthy.
If you decide that you're going to fast, your body's going to cannibalize some
muscle.
Not so much.
How much?
A few pounds?
Not even, you know, a few pounds, maybe.
A few pounds.
And you'll get it back.
You'll get it back.
But the idea is that if you can weather that storm, how much time are you
looking for before
your body starts burning fat?
Some people a week, some people two weeks, some people three weeks.
You'll be dead.
You can't fast for two weeks.
Oh, no, no.
You're talking about fasting fasting.
Oh, Jesus.
No, I'm talking about...
No, I'm not talking about...
No, no.
No, I'm talking about intermittent fasting.
No, that gets us to two meals a day.
Right.
But what if someone just fasts?
So give me a term.
Okay, so if you decide I'm going to go on a 36-hour fast.
That's probably the high end of what I would do, and then anything beyond that,
I'd be
a little bit concerned that I hadn't prepped myself with fat adaptation yet.
So when people go on these crazy three- to five-day fasts, they report all this
energy.
They feel great.
They feel amazing.
What's going on there?
No, they've got...
Their brains are using ketones.
Right.
So that's definitely where the energy, the feeling of amazing comes from.
Typically, if you're fasting that long, you're not working out.
Like any of these...
Like my wife does a seven-day water fast twice a year.
Oh, Jesus.
That's what I say.
Do you go on vacation when that's happening?
No, but I eat more.
I eat for her while she's gone.
Why does she do that?
She has this...
You know, she feels like it's good for her.
She's into the autophagy and some of the anti-aging...
Explain that.
It burns cells that are...
Yeah, so this...
When you're...
One of the many things that happens when you fast is that your body goes
into a different mode and it starts to realize that there's not going to be a
lot of fuel
around for a while.
And so in addition to burning stored body fat, in addition to making ketones...
By the way, ketones come from fat.
So some of the fat that you combust is also just converted into ketones that
your brain
can use.
It also...
The body also says...
Like if you were to be a...
If you had a brain...
If you were a cell and you had a brain and you thought, well, generally