Longevity & Wellness with Primal Kitchen's Mark Sisson

Welcome back to Journey to the Sunnyside. Today, I’ve got a true legend with us—Mark Sisson. Mark is the founder of Primal Kitchen and Peluvia, author of several best-selling books on health and fitness, and the mastermind behind Mark’s Daily Apple, one of the most respected resources in the health and wellness space. If you’re interested in living a life full of energy, balance, and purpose, you won’t want to miss this episode.

Mark’s going to share his unique philosophy on how to live with vitality right up until the very end—how he approaches health, fitness, and enjoying life along the way.

In addition to a lengthy discussion regarding Mark’s own approach to responsible drinking, we talked about other health topics, including his latest passion, foot comfort and foot health. Mark has a new minimalist shoe company called PELUVA and it is already gaining massive traction (pun intended) among active people, hikers, gym-goers and people just wanting a truly good-looking, comfortable shoe.. He has graciously agreed to offer a 15% discount to our listeners. Just use code Sunnyside15    https://peluva.com/discount/SunnySide15

Want to drink less with no pressure to quit? Go to https://ctbk.co/4doo5dq for a free 15-day trial.
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Disclaimer: This podcast is not intended as medical advice, and the views of the guests may not represent the views of Sunnyside. If you’re concerned about your health or alcohol use, please consider seeking advice from a doctor.

Creators & Guests

Host

Mike Hardenbrook

#1 best-selling author of "No Willpower Required," neuroscience enthusiast, and habit change expert.

What is Journey to the Sunnyside?

"Journey to the Sunnyside" is your guide to exploring mindful living with alcohol, whether you're cutting back, moderating, or thinking about quitting. While Sunnyside helps you reduce your drinking, this podcast goes further, covering everything from mindful drinking and moderation to sober curiosity and full sobriety. Through real stories, expert advice, and practical strategies, we’re here to help you find what works best for your journey.

Mike Hardenbrook is a #1 best-selling author and neuroscience enthusiast, dedicated to helping people transform their relationship with alcohol.

This podcast is brought to you by Sunnyside, the leading platform for mindful drinking. Want to take the next step in your journey? Head over to sunnyside.co for a free 15-day trial.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in our podcast episodes do not necessarily represent those of Sunnyside. We're determined to bring diverse views of health and wellness to our audience. If you are concerned with your drinking, please seek the advice of a medical professional. Sunnyside, this podcast, and its guests are not necessarily medical professionals and the content shouldn't be viewed as medical advice. In addition, we never endorse drinking in any amount.

49 transcript
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[00:00:00] Hey everyone and welcome back to Journey to the Sunny Side. I'm Mike Hardenbrook and today I have a true legend with us, Mark Sisson. Mark is the founder of Primal Kitchen. You've probably seen his famous avocado mayonnaise in the grocery store. He's the author of several best selling books on health and fitness, and the mastermind behind Mark's Daily Apple, one of the most well respected resources in the health and wellness space.

If you're interested in living a life full of energy, balance, and purpose, you won't want to miss this episode. Mark's gonna share his unique philosophy on how to live with vitality right up until the very end. How he approaches health, fitness, and enjoying life All the way to the end. So let's jump into it with Mark Csan.

Mark, this is awesome. Thanks for coming on today. My pleasure, Mike. Good to see you. Yeah, so we go back a little ways, almost 10 [00:01:00] years now. You came on a podcast that I used to run around growth and marketing. So you know, I've followed you all along and before you had your big hit with your avocado, mayonnaise and Primal Kitchen, you know when I'd mention your name, people would say, who is he?

And I'd say, well just go to any Barnes and Noble and go into the health and fitness. And you'll see Mark's picture right there. He's the, he's the guy with the six pack abs. It's over 40 before the TRT or testosterone replacement therapy was the thing, because he just was living so good and so fit. So it's awesome to finally come full circle and have you here.

Yeah. Great to be here. Well, I love one of your philosophies and it's about. Living long and drop dead. So you talk about live long until you drop dead. What does this mean for you? And how does it change the way most people think about aging and health? You know, uh, I think so many people today are chasing numbers.

It, you know, you hear this in the biohacking community a lot. You certainly hear it in the anti aging community that people [00:02:00] want to live as long as they can. Um, but. You know, I've always been a big proponent of, uh, quality of life being the major factor. Like, I want to enjoy my life every moment I can, as long as I can.

Which means I certainly would like to live a long time, but not if the last several years or decades are in a, uh, in a, in a sort of slow decline where the quality of my life has been compromised. Now, two major, major measures I have for quality of life. One is access to cognition, memories. So being able to converse with people.

Be present, um, you know, have a, have a conversation, remember things and be able to, um, repeat what, what you heard. Um, so just that basic cognition and the other is mobility. I, I think that, uh, the ability to move around this world, whether it's a walk next door to a coffee shop, get a cup of coffee or walk down the street to visit a neighbor or go out for a stroll or a run as a form of [00:03:00] exercise or to get on a plane and go to a Italy and do a walking tour.

The ability to move about, uh, without pain is also one of my definitions of quality of life. So as I look at, uh, what it's going to take for me to get into my eighties and nineties, I'm 71. I'm in my eight decade. I can't even believe that now, but, uh, so, you know, what are my goals? My goals are to be as mobile as I possibly can to be as, um, participatory as I can in conversation and discussions.

In creating things and using my, my brain. So with, with the understanding that one day when I least expect, expect it, maybe in my nineties, maybe in my hundred hunters, um, I'll have a quick demise. You know, I just, uh, and that was the, that was the, the, the Genesis of the t shirt that I, the first t shirt I ever did was called again, live long, drop dead.

It was sort of a play on, um, you know, Spock's words from Star Trek, [00:04:00] you know, live long and prosper. Anyway, um, that was where that came from. I love that because it's just, you could have a long life, but it might not be a quality life, you know, towards specific years, um, relating to age and so, you know, I think that one always spoke to me and I'm like, yeah, you know, live active until literally your last drop of whatever you have to take out of life.

Yeah. I know that you have sort of related this back to the hunter gatherers and you have your Primal Kitchen and Primal Brand Wine. Was there some insight there that gave you like in your research that made you think of this? Oh, it's been an inherent thought process my whole life. Um, you know, I'm, I'm someone who, uh, values the concept of mortality.

Like I, I think that our pending mortality gives meaning to our lives. And so that every day. When we wake up, we [00:05:00] ought to be in a position to be excited to get out of bed, have something that we're excited about tackling, some task or some event or some meeting. Um, and that, um, you know, that's, it's, it's the, it's the finality of life that, that implies that, you know, take advantage of every single day, um, as best you can.

And I've had that philosophy since I was in my teens. Like, I, I don't always honor it. I'm, uh I'm always reminding myself, yes, that's, that's the goal. The goal is to enjoy every moment. The goal is to extract the greatest amount of enjoyment and contentment and fulfillment and pleasure out of every possible moment that you can.

And even I, who use that as my sort of overarching theme, sometimes forget. Yeah, that's really what it's all about. Yeah. I mean, I think that leads into a really big overall theme here is that, you know, a lot of the people here don't want to [00:06:00] take extremes, you know, most of the time we talked about. Alcohol and mindful drinking and moderation, but at a brighter sense, you know, you can take that well beyond specific things and I think your approach to life is like a perfect connection, which is why we're talking here because it shouldn't be about extremes.

It shouldn't necessarily be about restriction, but something they can sustain and enjoy yourself. So I I love. Your take on life just in general and one of those takes is you, you talk about lifting heavy, moving often, getting outside. How do we see those playing into staying strong and energized as you get older?

I know you touched a little bit on that, but maybe you could elaborate on those specific. Yeah, you know, it gets, it gets more and more challenging as you get older. Um, you know, I, I like the sprint. I like to run and sprint. Um, I'm, I'm getting ready to go get a hip replacement because of all the damage I did to my hips as a runner, um, 40 years [00:07:00] ago, 30 and 40 years ago.

So I can't sprint now, so I have to find ways to replace the running sprinting with other activities. So today I did, uh, Eight times, uh, 45 second rope pull, all out. So I was able to figure out a workaround, a way to incorporate this philosophy of moving around a lot at a low level of activity, and then sprinting once in a while, and then lifting heavy things.

In terms of lifting heavy things, in terms of weightlifting in the gym, I'm not gonna set a personal record. Ever again in anything. So, um, there were days when I go to the gym and I'm like, okay, what am I doing here? Because I don't have a real, uh, I'm not training for an event, train for a race. I'm not training to break a record or whatever, but what I am training is to be able to get up the next day and do it all, do it all over again.

So part of my philosophy in the gym is to maintain, right. Is to, is to be able to hold on to whatever level of fitness I can in [00:08:00] the, in the indisputable face. Of a decline in aerobic capacity and strength as we age. No, no amount of training is going to overcome this decline. The only training that I, that I do right now is contemplated to stem that decline.

To slow that decline down. But you know, there'll come a day when I can't, you know, I can't play ultimate frisbee. And I can't, uh, um, you know, I can't go paddle board with the same velocity and enthusiasm that I do now. But I'll find something else. I mean, I, you know, I always have. I, I was a road cyclist for 25 years.

I was a really good road cyclist. Well, probably more like 20 years, but at any rate, when my son was born, I sold my road bike. Cause I figured that was how I was going to, I was going to whack on the roads of Malibu on PCH on Malibu. So I sold my road bike, did not ride a bike again for 25 years. [00:09:00] And then somebody introduced me to a fat tire bike on the sand.

And all of a sudden, I opened up this whole new world of excitement. I found something new I could do that challenged me, that provided a great workout, that gave me the opportunity to be outside. That was brutal in certain terms, because it's riding a fat bike in soft sand for an hour or an hour and a half in the bright sunshine.

And the heat of Miami, but damn, it's, it's great. It's, it's fun. It's, I go with friends. We keep, you know, we catch up while we're riding. We do, you know, all of these multitasking sort of things make it, um, an enjoyable workout instead of a chore. So I'm, my, my goal is just to continue to find these sorts of ways of.

Incorporating new movement into my life. Um, despite the, the inevitable decline in overall strength and endurance. Yeah, I love that. And I love [00:10:00] looking at your Instagram. You're always out, you're doing paddle boarding, you're running, you're biking. And I relate to that. You know, I'm 45 now, about 39, 40. I decided I wanted to really, I always had a love of care for bikes, but I wanted to start training and mountain bike, racing bikes, and it totally changed my fitness, like I went from being somebody that really, I never spent a long time in the gym, but I was religious about it.

But then I started doing that more often, getting outside, doing trips, um, planning, maturing around my writing. Where like, when I travel, I, I just started to want to maintain when I was traveling at first, you know, I, we traveled to Europe and be in Spain and they had the outdoor, uh, like adult, uh, what do you call it?

Jungle gym, basically that you could work out on doing pull ups, push ups, you know, as much things as I could. And what I realized is that I didn't lose any muscle compared to being in the gym. And so, yeah, I love the, the approach of just [00:11:00] something that you enjoy that maintains and keeps you going forward and not something that you're going to crash and burn on.

That's a good point. Yeah. You got to be able to sustain it over a lifetime. And if you can't, you find something that you can't for the next phase. Yeah. You can, you're always changing and growing. So. You know, a big part of what you talk about, not only is your fitness, but also around health and diet. What do you think's like the ratio of importance between the two?

Well, um, they're definitely related and, um, you, you can do one or the other relatively successfully. Um, but you get a real synergy if you do them both well. So I think 80 percent of your body composition happens as a result of your food choices, how you eat. So you can get 80 percent of your weight loss, um, [00:12:00] goals achieved through just through diet, uh, exercise by itself is a horrible way to lose weight.

So you don't want to, um, engage in some intense calorie burning effort to lose weight without absolutely looking at your diet as the primary means of burning off stored body fat. So exercise, um, while it's not a great way to lose weight, it's a great way to tone up once you've lost the weight. It's a great way to.

Um, accentuate some of the metabolic changes that have happened as a result of the changes in your way of eating. So there is this synergy where if you, if you realize that 80 percent of your body composition acts as a result of how you eat and that the rest, the sleep and the, and the, and the, and the training, the working out are adjuncts and will add to it.

Um, then you have a nice total picture. You also realize that you don't have to exercise that much if you have your diet dialed in. [00:13:00] So now recently in the last, yeah, in the last. A couple of years I've been talking about what I call the minimum effective dose of exercise. Like what's the least amount of exercise that I can do to maintain strength and fitness and, and immune system and, um, and, and get on with the rest of my life, not be trashed for the whole day because I over trained and then I needed to take a nap and, and it was basically non functioning for the rest of the day just because I got overzealous in my workout.

So what's the, what's sort of the minimum effective dose? Of exercise that will achieve this, you know, get you to 80 percent or 90 percent of where you need to be. And part of the longevity part in the diet part plays into what you eat, obviously, and I think I'll let you talk about your company because it's so relevant in this conversation for sustaining habits that are healthy for you, but taking a new approach.

So, you know, you have Primal Kitchen. I have a [00:14:00] jar of your mayonnaise and I have for years in my refrigerator, but you have so much more, of course. Um, along those product lines, but it seems like you were addressing a challenge in that this is the way you should eat, but it's not the easiest, most straightforward thing to sustain.

Yeah. I mean, my, the, the reason I started Primal Kitchen was I had written a lot about food and how, how powerful it was as a tool in achieving great health. And when you recognize all of the things you have to sort of get rid of, you know, the bread, pasta, cereal, um, any sort of processed grains.

Industrial seed oils, um, sugar containing products. You come down to kind of a short list of, you know, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, maybe some starchy tubers. Um, those are great. That can get boring unless you really know how to prepare them. It's the methods of preparation. It's the sauces, the dressings, the [00:15:00] toppings, the herbs, the spices, the way you cook them that make what's left on this list of things you can eat, um, delicious and sustainable.

And really the, the single best, or I would, as I'd say, the, the common denominator is the sauces. Like what, what can I put on my chicken or my steak or my broccoli or my salad to make it not just healthful, but really tastes good and healthful. And that was the reason we, we started Primal Kitchen. I mean, you know, I had written a cookbook early on called Primal Kitchen Healthy Sauces, Dressings, and Toppings.

And I thought, this is great. People are going to love this. Well, very few people bought the book. And I realized, well, okay, people want to put stuff. They want it, they want the sauces and dressings and toppings, but they don't want to do the work to make them themselves in their own kitchen. And then I realized that no one else in the, in the grocery store is making a healthy version of a mayonnaise [00:16:00] or any, any sort of condiment or pasta sauce or, or, or, uh, even salad dressings.

So I thought, well, there's a, there's an opportunity there. So that's what we did. We, we started Primal Kitchen. With the idea that I want to encourage people to eat well, to eat healthy, and if I can create the sorts of products that you can pour onto your whatever, uh, whatever meat or fish or, or, um, you know, baked potato or, uh, salad or vegetable with reckless abandon and think that it tastes great as a result of the sauce that I created, um, if that makes eating that way more sustainable over a lifetime, then I've succeeded.

The sauces are where all those hidden bad things are. So maybe if anybody's listening that doesn't know or isn't aware why you would want to find healthier options, what, what is it that we want to avoid in the tradit? Well, yeah. Most of the, most of the dressings, [00:17:00] for instance, sour dressings have had, um, either, um, soybean oil or canola oil, or some version of, um, some safflower oil or, or a blend of all of those.

Corn oil, uh, all of which are, have been sort of shown recently to be potentially deleterious to help and, um, and yet every, every salad dressing maker, including some of the more healthy options still used these types of oils. So we started using avocado oil as the primary ingredient in our salad dressings.

Avocado oil is recognized as a very, uh, healthy form of a fat, healthy fat, healthy oil. Um, mayonnaises have. You know, historically you've been told, look, mayonnaise tastes great, but don't put too much on your burger or your fries or your sandwich because, you know, it contains bad oils and bad sugars and you know, who, who knows [00:18:00] what else.

So for instance, I came up in the world of the paleo diet and, and paleo and primal were very much against these industrial seed oils. So for years, nobody who ate a paleo diet or a keto diet or a, uh, a primal blueprint based diet had. Anywhere to go to get a healthy mayonnaise. And so if you think about how many times in your life you want to have an egg salad or a tuna salad or a chicken salad or a coleslaw or something that uses mayonnaise, now you can't because there are just no healthy options unless you make it yourself.

So our first product was a healthy mayonnaise. It was based on avocado oil as the primary, as the only oil in it, the primary ingredient over half the product is, is all about oil, um, inorganic eggs, cage free eggs, and, um, you know, inorganic spices, um, you know, And things like that to create a mayonnaise, it tastes great and use as much as you want because it's the more you use, the better it is for you.

[00:19:00] I think about you saying that sometimes when I decide how much more I'm going to put on. Yeah. No joke. So another, another part of this and aging well is centered around mental health and you have some of the patients on. What's your approach to saying, to staying like sharp and then also like around the mindsets that'll keep you strong moving forward?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, well, a lot of this is just how you set your day up, how you set your life up. So I, I surround myself with, um, active people who are like minded in terms of our, you know, we're not necessarily politically like minded, but we're, and, and certainly not religiously like minded, but lifestyle and interest in, in life and joie de vivre.

Um, I try to surround myself with people who are younger. Um, at least energetically, um, who are interesting to speak with, uh, who are kind, um, and I [00:20:00] think that that's a, you, you, you hear all of these sort of adages about, uh, you know, you're the average of the five people you spend your time with. I think that's a, a fairly accurate statement there.

Um, I do, I spend the first 40 minutes of my day doing puzzles. I just, I'm a, and there, whether they're word puzzles, you know, crossword puzzles, um, Sudoku, uh, KenKen. Um, Wordle, Quartle, Setacortle. There are all these, uh, you know, uh, I don't know if you've seen any of those types of things. Uh, latest, um, Apple introduced Quartiles, which I'm having a great, uh, a really good time with.

You have to build, um, words out of four different, um, pieces of words. But there's 16 options, and you have to, anyway, it's a, that's my new, my new favorite one. I'm, I'm always, and, you know, then there's, Strands and connections. I mean, I'm doing them all now and it's, so I have this list of things that I have to get through before I start my day and I, I, I give myself up to [00:21:00] 40 minutes.

Usually I'm done in 20 or 25, but, um, and that's kind of gets my, with a cup of coffee that gets everything going, gets my brain. stimulated and sets me up for, uh, a day of being able to be on top of things. I think you're motivating me because I've been wanting to do that. My wife is really good at those.

So whenever we do one, that's a head to head kind of thing, I just get my clock clean. So do you get, do you get better with time with those? It depends on all of them. You do. But I mean, for instance, you know, I, um, you know, like the Sunday, uh, crossword puzzle. Um, is considered, you know, uh, sort of a barometer of, of, uh, of one's ability to do crosswords.

I do that every Sunday. Um, I don't do Monday, it's too easy. It's like, I'm, it's not even worth doing. So, I can usually do it in, I can't, I can't write fast enough to fill in the, to fill in the things. And I do it, by the way, I do it with an actual newspaper when I can and not on my computer screen. I just, I like that feeling of the [00:22:00] pencil.

And the eraser and the newsprint and I'm, I'm really old school in that regard. Well, that makes two of us. I'm old school. I mean, I even wrote my book longhanded and that was, that was a little bit crazy though. I won't do that again, but yeah. All my journaling, anything that I do, I love, I got Chen's people right here for us as we go.

Yeah. So I want to open it up before to a more general question before we end the episode. And that is, Somebody is just starting out on this path of mindful, healthy living, and a lot of people listening here are kind of new to this concept of mindful living through our, what we talk about with drinking and choosing your, how you move forward in a healthy way.

What are some small steps that they can take that could make a big difference long term? You know, I think, um, that, you know, the term make your bed has been kind of overblown over the past, over the past decade, but there's an element of. Reality and truth there. Um, [00:23:00] I would say finding a routine is, is one of the best ways to remain mindful.

Um, because you can, you know, knowing that you're going to go to bed within a certain time frame, wake up within a certain time frame, have a routine when you wake up so that you can, um, count on, on going into your day with a positive mindset. Um, I would say, um, Other than setting up your surroundings to, uh, for success, um, don't think, don't take things personally.

You know, I think we're, we get way too down this, um, this rabbit hole of, uh, victimhood and I think mindfulness, while the term I feel is being, you know, over, overused a little bit, I think mindfulness includes, um, A sense of response ability, the ability to respond. So as opposed to blame and victimhood, [00:24:00] recognizing a situation for what it's worth, um, not just, not taking blame for it, but taking ownership of it.

You know, some guy just, uh, this is not true, but hypothetically, some guy just slammed into me, rear ended me at a stop sign. Well, I didn't cause it, but my car is now messed up. I have to take responsibility. Ownership of what I need to do to rectify the situation and no amount of going back and yelling at the guy is going to, um, you know, alter the fact that I still have a list of tasks that I have to accomplish now that that happened in my life.

And if you, if you think about, you know, the, the, this notion that life really is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we respond. You, you just the recognition of that and the fact that you are. Often at the mercy of, of your thoughts and no one else has your, you're the only one suffering from your thoughts, right?

You're the only one who's making yourself miserable just by [00:25:00] ruminating or thinking or agonizing or worrying. That's the sort of concept of mindfulness that I would tell people. Look, you know, just enjoy The most out of every day, be kind, um, you know, use that as kind of your mantra to get through life in any situation, um, you know, maybe assume that any negative situation you encounter, the person on the other side, or is maybe having a bad day, cut them some slack, um, it, it's really, you know, but it's a, it's a state of mind that you can't just snap your fingers and get into, you have, it's like anything else, you have to train for it, you have to, you know, Recognize when, oh my God, I'm, I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Oh, Jesus. I just caught myself being, you know, victimized in my own, my whole life because of my thoughts. It's not, it's not magical. You have to be aware that this is happening and then be willing to recognize what's going on. Oh yeah, that's my, that's my [00:26:00] monkey brain. That's my chatter brain. Um, you know, going down this rabbit hole and I don't need to do that.

I could choose right now to change my mindset, my mindset. That's, that's what all that means to me. Wow, what a perfect way to end the episode. It's such good insight. I couldn't even summarize it was so good though because Anyone that's listening to that It's all, it's always going to be a work in progress.

It sounds like, even you have to remind yourself to be, uh, mind cool. You know, even though we throw that term around a little bit too much in your opinion, but we do, we have to just keep moving forward. So Mark, thanks so much for coming on, sharing your time and sharing your insights, and I really appreciate it.

My pleasure, Mike. Good to see you. And that's it for today's episode of Journey to the Sunny Side. Big thanks to Mark Cizan for dropping so much wisdom on how we can all live with more vitality and balance. Make sure to tune in to tomorrow's episode where he answers the question, Is cutting out alcohol completely necessary for a [00:27:00] healthy lifestyle?

If you want to learn more about Mark's approach to living a healthy, vibrant life, be sure to check out Mark's Daily Apple. And his incredible work with both Peluva and Primal Kitchen. On his website you'll find plenty of resources to help you live with purpose and energy just like Mark. If today's episode got you thinking about your own habits, head on over to sunnyside.

co and take our three minute quiz for personalized insights. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram at joinsunnyside for tips and inspiration. If you like what you heard today, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes. And until next time, keep taking those small steps towards a life full of energy and purpose.