Welcome to Episode 402 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, hosted by Melanie Avalon, author of What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine, and Vanessa Spina, author of Keto Essentials: 150 Ketogenic Recipes to Revitalize, Heal, and Shed Weight.

SPECIAL GUEST MARK SISSON

Mark Sisson is widely regarded as the founding father of the ancestral health movement. His number-one-ranked blog and Primal Health Coach Institute have paved the way for primal enthusiasts to take personal responsibility for their health. Known as a market-disrupting, innovative entrepreneur, Mark’s Primal Kitchen enterprise introduced healthy condiments to the marketplace for the first time, and was acquired by Kraft-Heinz in 2018. As one of the earliest proponents of barefoot-inspired living, Mark proceeded to launch Peluva five-toe minimalist footwear company (with his son Kyle) in 2021, and is now busy “changing the way the world walks.”

Mark, 71, has a BA in biology from Williams College and is a former world-class endurance athlete, with a 2:18 marathon and a fourth-place finish in the Hawaii Ironman World Triathlon Championships to his credit. Mark lives in Miami Beach, Florida, where enjoys Ultimate Frisbee, standup paddling, fat-tire beach bike rides, and a walking-oriented lifestyle.

Website | IG | Book: Born To Walk

SHOW NOTES

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LINKS:

Vanessa's Tone Device: The Tone Device Breath Ketone Analyzer

Melanie's podcast: The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast

Vanessa's podcast: The Optimal Protein Podcast

More on Melanie: MelanieAvalon.com 

More on Vanessa: ketogenicgirl.com

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Original theme composed by Leland Cox, and recomposed by Steve Saunders.

Our content does not constitute an attempt to practice medicine and does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider for medical advice and answers to personal health questions.

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon

Welcome to episode 402 of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. If you want to burn fat, gain energy, and enhance your health by changing when you eat, not what you eat, with no calorie counting, then this show is for you. I'm Melanie Avalon, biohacker, author of What, When, Wine, and creator of the supplement line, AvalonX.  And I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Spina, sports nutrition specialist, author of Keto Essentials, and creator of the Tone Breath Ketone Analyzer and Tone Luxe Red Light Therapy Panels. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ketogenicgirl.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this show do not constitute medical advice or treatment.  To be featured on the show, email us your questions to questions at ifpodcast.com. We would love to hear from you. So pour yourself a mug of black coffee, a cup of tea, or even a glass of wine if it's that time, and get ready for the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Hi, friends. Welcome back to the show. Oh, my goodness. I am so excited about today's interview.  We have a very, very special guest on today's show. It is a legend. He almost needs no introduction, but I will give him an introduction anyways. And he has a new book coming out, which honestly was a complete paradigm shift for me personally, and I think is going to affect so many lives. So I am here with Mark Sisson.  Friends, I know you know who Mark Sisson is, but he is a legend in the primal sphere world. So he actually came up with the company, the Primal Kitchen Enterprise, which was acquired by Kraft Heinz, but people are probably pretty familiar with those products.  He's a multiple New York Times bestselling author, the Primal Blueprint, Two Meals a Day that I had him on recently, or a while ago for Primal Endurance, so many incredible different books. And his newest book is called Born to Walk, the Broken Promises of the Running Boom and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy One Step at a Time. And okay, friends.  So this book, I was really excited to read just based on the title alone. My personal history with running and listeners might have gathered this over the many years of me doing this show. But I am, I am not a runner. It's never really appealed to me. It doesn't make me feel good.  And I always sort of felt a little guilty about that, especially when I would, you know, I see people who are really into running, which I think is amazing. Well, I guess we can talk about that. I think it's amazing if it makes people feel good, and it has a healthy place in their life. So I've always admired and respected that I've been really intrigued by things like people doing marathons.  And at the same time, I was always a little bit suspicious about the health effects of things like marathons. All of that said, I also was a little bit aware of the barefoot movement and the minimalist shoe movement, but I really had no idea about the actual reasoning or science behind that.  So friends, born to walk is going to completely answer all of your questions and give you a complete paradigm shift with all of this.

Melanie Avalon

Should you actually be running? We're going to talk about that. So Mark, thank you for all that you're doing and thank you so much for being here.

Mark Sisson

Thanks for having me, Melanie. What an introduction. I love it. So let's get into it.

Melanie Avalon

Literally, I've been wanting and needing to read your books since I'm having flashbacks now to like, what was it like when they would make us run the mile when you were in elementary school? I honestly think that was my least favorite day of school every single year. It just felt wrong doing it for me, even though ironically, I was one of the fastest students.  But in any case, enough about me, you, your background with running. So you used to be a runner. Could you tell listeners a little bit about your background? Also, I am dying to know when was the last time you ran a mile?

Mark Sisson

Well, so, yeah, I was a runner. I was one of those people who gravitated toward running in the late 1960s, early 70s. Not because it was a fad, but because it was the only sport available to me. I was a skinny, scrawny kid, too small for basketball or football or baseball or hockey. I grew up in Maine.  I actually wound up jogging to and from school every day for years just as a way to get home before the bus could ever get me there. So it was a form of transportation early on.  When I was in high school, as a freshman, I went out for the track team, and I found myself able to win both the mile and the two-mile event in most of the track meets I entered as a result of my lifestyle, which was running to and from school, like some Rift Valley East African story you might hear. Over the years, I developed this ability. I was a runner.  I was somebody, one of the very few, it turns out, genetically gifted to be able to handle that amount of mileage in minimalist shoes. Because in those days, in the late 60s and early 70s, there were no cushioned running shoes. They were just Chuck Taylors. And eventually, there was a Japanese shoe called the Onitsuka Tiger, which was a very minimalist shoe.  It had a quarter-inch thick sole, and so you felt the ground every time your foot landed. There was no cushioning. There was no, you know, rear foot motion control, mid-foot stabilizers, or any of the stuff that they claimed to be beneficial in today's running shoes. So I was a runner, and I was one of many runners in the 70s who self-selected to be runners.  And I turned into a pretty decent marathoner. I finished fifth in the U.S. National Championships in 1980. I went on to compete in the Ironman Triathlon. But eventually, I had to retire because of injuries. I was injured largely as a result of the excess mileage I was doing, largely as a result of the shoes that I was wearing.  These cushioned, eventually, I started wearing these big thick cushioned shoes that Nike was developing. Those caused problems.  And I got to the point where I could no longer train at an elite level, and I turned my attention to other things in life, like figuring out how everyone could be strong and lean and fit with the least amount of pain and suffering and sacrifice and all of the negative words that we use to describe what we think it takes to become fit.  And that's what started me down this path of the Primal Blueprint and Primal Kitchen and writing books, you know, across the sphere of health and wellness. But I was, and to answer your question, I haven't run a mile in 30 years. And it was a recognition that humans are not really born to run, we are born to walk.  And so much of my strategy, my anti-aging strategy, my fitness strategy, certainly my health strategy over the past few decades has focused on lots of vigorous, robust walking, some time spent in the gym lifting weights, a little bit of time sprinting once in a while, and I will differentiate the concept of sprinting from regular running.

Mark Sisson

Running is a, you know, we're certainly born to be able to run, Melanie, but we're not born to run metronomically day in and day out at an eight or a nine or a 10 minute per mile pace over a lifetime.  The book sort of was born out of this recognition that there are so many frustrated people who took on running because they heard it was the best way to improve cardiovascular health or the best way to live longer or the best way to lose weight. And it's not any of those, it's a horrible way to lose weight.  There are 50 different ways, better ways to achieve cardiovascular fitness without the injury tendency that runners get. And there's a hundred different activities that are much more fun.  And your experience, which was one of, I think, a very common one, which was, gosh, I think I should be running because people around me are running and there's all sorts of hype surrounding running and how it's supposed to be this great activity. And yet you found yourself kind of second guessing it every time you went out the door.  And I, you know, I think a lot of people share this feeling like, okay, I'll do it. If I have to struggle and I have to suffer, I'll do it, but I don't really want to do it. There are things I'd rather do. And I'm here to give everybody permission to walk again. Walking is the quintessential human movement. It's what everybody should be doing as much as possible, as often as possible.  Anybody can do it from the least healthy, most pain-ridden person right up into an elite athlete. Everybody can walk and should walk.

Melanie Avalon

I was actually reflecting on walking yesterday because I was flying back from Vegas, so I was sitting for four and a half hours on a plane and then I was in the airport and I was just walking through the terminal and I was like walking feels so good. It was just like this intuitive moment where I was like it is doing so much good for my body right now.  So question about our evolution and the genetics and all the things because, and you mentioned this a second ago, but so we do have adaptations for running and you talked about this in the book. So we have like an upright stature ability. We have long limbs, narrow pelvis, slender frame, efficient thermoregulatory potential, lots of other things, powerful glutes, short toes.  So clearly evolution takes a long time to happen and presumably you have to be doing a lot for us to evolve certain features. So like you said, we did evolve with the ability to run. Why were we not doing it more than it sounds like we were doing it? And then for people like you who you said you did have this genetic tendency to run.  So is there a certain subtype of humans who were running more evolutionarily?

Mark Sisson

Yeah, so that's a great question.  So a lot of the hype around running and humans being, quote, born to run, there was a book came out in 2010 by Chris McDougall that posited that humans are born to run and described persistence hunters in the early days of Africa, these early humans who would track a beast for an hour or two hours or three hours and outlast the beast in the heat of the desert and then be able to walk up and stick a spear in them at the end of this long tracking expedition.  But bear in mind, number one, those individuals weren't running seven minute miles for three hours. They were walking and hiding and crouching and jogging a little bit and tracking and sprinting and combining all these methods that require a large human brain and opposable thumbs to make the tools to create the spears to be able to do this.  So that they could kill a beast and have food for a couple of days. They didn't do this every day. In fact, it was antithetical to life until about a hundred years ago that you would go out and run mileage every single day for no reason whatsoever. These were individual pre-humans and early humans who by virtue of their lifestyle, which comprised walking a lot.  But no chairs, no couches, no sofas, no TVs, they walked a lot. And that's what gave them the capacity between the walking and the lifting of heavy things. They carried stones, they carried logs, they built things, they climbed up things to look out and see what was going on. They carried babies, they lugged carcasses back to camp.  They were always lifting heavy things and they sprinted once in a while. Now when they sprinted, it was typically a life or death situation. It was like, oh my God, there's something trying to kill me. I better run away.  That's so that this combination of lifestyle where there was a lot of low level activity, a lot of walking around like literally minute by minute, day by day, that kept an aerobic capacity.  Then lifting heavy things, which was the compliment today is go to the gym and lift weights twice a week and sprinting once in a while, not every day, but once in a while they had to ramp their effort up to 100% of max to continue to live and pass the genes along to the next generation. So the idea that we're persistence hunters has been sort of glorified.  And I think the anthropological evidence has been misconstrued to suggest that we are born to run. We're born to walk clearly and we're born to sprint a little bit, but we're born to be able to run, but not run metronomically day in and day out and certainly not given the shape of 75% of this country, which is overweight. Now my own genetic capabilities.  So one of the things I say in the book is that probably only five or 2% of the population is even genetically capable of being able to run day in and day out as a form of, quote, recreation, end quote. But until 100 years ago, no one would have chosen to do that.  Even the fittest and skinniest humans would not have said, oh, I'm just gonna go run 10 miles for no reason whatsoever because I feel like it's gonna make me healthy.

Mark Sisson

It was the exact opposite. Expending that amount of energy in a world where energy food was scarce was completely antithetical to health and to survival.  So this idea that we can use running as a means of raising our heart rate and try to offset the lifestyle that we've created for ourselves, which has a lot of leisure time, a lot of sitting in chairs at desks, sitting on couches, watching TV, doing all these things that we tend to do, I guess it served a purpose in getting people off the couches.  But over the past 50 years, what's happened is, and I'll tell you, it's just a really interesting, perfect storm of events that happened to create this running boom in the first place.  As I said, in the 1970s, the only people who ran were runners, were people who were, like me, genetically gifted, skinny, ectomorphs, great lungs, a propensity to manage discomfort well, because running is managing discomfort. and they're basically masochists, it was almost always in pursuit of some goal like winning a race. So, up until the mid-70s, the only runners were people who were runners.  The only people who ran or trained or jogged were people who were actually trying to race and attract meat or had selected that as their sport. Now, this is where it gets interesting.  In the early 70s, Bill Bowerman, who's the coach of the Oregon Track Club and Olympic trials team coach, realizes that many of the skinny American runners who are trying to compete on the world scene are getting injured because the shoes they're wearing are not built for 80 or 90 miles a week of training, and that was what it was determined you needed to do in order to compete on the world scene.  So, Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, who eventually founded Nike, became the CEO of Nike, created a specific, very thick, sold shoe that would allow skinny runners with good form to be able to run more miles in their training so that they could compete on the world circuit. Okay, that's point number one. Point number two is around that time, Bill Bowerman had gone to New Zealand.  He had seen that the fit people in New Zealand were doing this thing they were calling jogging. They were going out and running miles for no particular purpose. So, Bowerman wrote a book called Jogging.  Then in 1968, Ken Cooper revolutionized the concept of cardiovascular health by writing a book called Aerobics, and the book Aerobics, which has sold, I think, 30 million copies to date, it posited that the more of an activity that you did that raised your heart rate, the better it would be for your heart's strength and the longer you would live.  And so, people started thinking, okay, I'm going to start doing this aerobic activity, and the easiest way to do this was running. So now, along comes, now we have the thick shoes, which are enabling people to run and not have their feet tell them that's way too many miles, because these thick cushioned shoes are absorbing some of the shock.

Mark Sisson

We've got books, and eventually Jim Ficks writes a book called The Book of Running, and he popularizes running. And the next thing you know, Frank Shorter wins a gold medal in Munich. Bill Rogers sets an American record in the Boston Marathon, and now everybody's excited about running as this new health pursuit. And remember, the 70s and into the late 70s and early 80s was the me decade.  It came after the counterculture of the 60s. It was now the me decade. It's all about me. It's all about trying to self-help and all the things that accompany that. So this cultural zeitgeist pushed everybody into running. But even in the 80s, we still didn't have the rates of obesity and overweight that we do today. So even in the 80s, more people started running. These new shoes came on the scene.  They started to allow people to put in more miles. It seemed like a good idea. I was one of them. It seemed like a good idea to me. I was still racing at a high level. But more and more people would started taking up this nascent sport in the interest of losing weight, improving cardiovascular health, some meditative aspects that were discussed.  They were all manner of purported health benefits to doing this. And yet, the number of running injuries increased. Why did it increase? Because people were running with bad form, and they were using these cushioned shoes to enable their bad form.  When you run barefoot, Melanie, when you run down the sidewalk barefoot, I don't care how untrained you are, how overweight you are, your feet automatically tell your entire kinetic chain exactly how to absorb the shock. And when you're running barefoot, you don't heel strike.  If you're running barefoot, you're running with a well-defined midfoot gait and doesn't last very long because you're not trained to do it, but if you were to take shoes off any untrained person, have them run down the sidewalk, they would run with pretty good form, barefoot.  Put some shoes on those people and all of a sudden you see the heel striking, the slapping of the pavement, the plotting, the noise and that's where you start to get the injuries. So running, even to this day, now we fast forward to today where we have these thick, thick, thick, cushioned, pillowy running shoes, there's no decrease in the amount of running injuries.  50% of everyone who calls themselves a runner is injured every year. And at any one point in time, 25% of all runners are injured. It's a worse injury record than ENFL.  So when we're talking about injuries, we're talking about bone bruises, we're talking about Achilles tendon issues, we're talking about plantar fasciitis, we're talking about chondromalacia of the knees, we're talking about tendonitis throughout the hips.  All of these are almost like, I would say almost all if not all, are related to the shoes they're wearing, the bad form and the tendency to overdo it because the mind goes, I'm a runner, I have to get out and do my three miles or my five miles or my six miles.

Mark Sisson

So now we have the spate of injuries. Then we also can talk about running as a weight loss strategy. It's horrible. Most, if you go to a marathon, which is the quintessential bucket list item for a lot of people, and you look at a marathon like Los Angeles or Chicago or Boston, you see 40 or 50,000 people lined up in the starting line, 80% of them are overweight. I got a question for you.  If you claim to be a marathoner and you've been training for this 26.2 mile event, why are you overweight? Why are you still overweight? Because the type of training you're undergoing is causing your body to burn mostly sugar and hold on to its fat stores so that when you finish a workout, your brain goes, we have to eat. We don't know how to burn fat.  We've gone out and we've trained too hard for the fitness level that we're at. And now the brain says we have to compensate by overeating calories. And so somebody might go out and run seven miles and burn off 750 calories in that workout. But the body and the brain immediately goes, oh, we're gonna make up for that.  We're gonna consume 800 calories because if this fool's gonna do it again tomorrow, we have to be ready. So over time, you will see people who have been running for a long time and still have the same 10 or 30 pounds to lose. I mean, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, right? So those are two examples.  I've got many more in the book of all of the reasons that running has a spate of broken promises, unfulfilled expectations, left people feeling guilty because they tried it, they thought they could do it, they didn't have what it took, and they moped away thinking they'd failed when in fact, if they had engaged in a well-thought-out robust walking program, they would have lost the weight, they would have felt better about themselves, their mood would have been elevated, their digestion would have improved, their mental clarity would be better.  I mean, all of the things that we sought from a running program and didn't get were always available from a well-thought running program that certainly combined two days a week in the gym lifting weights and a little bit of sprinting.

Melanie Avalon

So in the book you go through the entire history of running like you touched on there and there's also the myth of the of the marathon.

Mark Sisson

Oh, that's a great one. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Can you tell listeners a little bit about that?

Mark Sisson

You know, this is the, again, it's the metric a lot of people use. It's the bucket list item. There are people who, you know, have their marathon finisher medals, hanging at their desk at work. They're so proud of the achievement. And they should be it's an amazing achievement. But it was fabricated out of thin air.  So the original story, as was told, inappropriately by the industry in the late in the late 70s, early 70s, was that there's this guy Fadipides, and he was a hemorrhodromae, which was a messenger for the army. And when Athens, you know, there was a there was a the battle of Athens had happened in marathon.  And he had to run to Sparta to announce, well, the original story was that he, they had this huge battle. And after fighting for three days, he ran to Athens, 25 miles to Athens, and collapsed in the middle of the town square after saying, Rejoice, rejoice, we've won. And so the original story was this guy ran, he fought for three days, he, he ran 25 miles, he collapsed in the square.  And, and so that was the, that was the the heroics of the original story of Fadipides. The problem was that was taken from a poem by Robert Browning, who used a tremendous amount of poetic license to describe this hero and create a myth around him.  The fact is that this guy ran from the battlefield, 103 miles to ask for assistance, the town that he was at was having a that he ran into to ask for assistance was having some feast and they said, Well, we we can't go we can't we can't help you because we're in the middle of a festival. And we have to, you know, we have to wait three days, and it's going to take us then four days to get there.  So he has to take this guy, Fadipides has to take a nap and run all the way back to the battlefield to announce to the generals, yeah, these guys can't show up, they can't, they're not going to help us. So we're on our own. Now, they, they wound up winning the battle, but the guy ran 306 miles in 36 hours. That's the real history of Fadipides.  So if you really want to honor this guy, you would you would not be running 26.2 miles, you'd be running 306 miles. But then it gets it gets a little even weirder. So because of the original myth, the original Olympic Games in 1996 Olympic Games in Greece said, we should have a marathon run. And so they had a 26.2 mile, sorry, a 25 mile marathon run.  And that was that was the marathon distance, until the Olympics was held in London a few years later, and they wanted the event to finish in front of Windsor Castle. And in order to do that, they had to extend the race to 26.2 miles. So that's how the that's how the distance came to be 26.2 is because a queen wanted to see the finish, not because of the distance from from the planes of marathon to Athens, and not because of anything that this heroic guy Fadipides did. The point being that the entire distance is just a fabrication. It's it's drawn out of thin air, based on a poem by a 19th century poet, who wanted to honor this guy with his poetry. And yet, millions of people every year, pay their 300 bucks to enter this race, beat themselves up horribly.

Mark Sisson

And then, you know, take their finishers medal because they're they think they're honoring this this feat by this one guy. Anyway, this, we have a lot of these stories in the book about how, how the assumptions about what went before us created this running boom, that really ultimately was based on fabrications.  And I think, you know, later on, again, that the running shoe industry, marketing these thick, sold, cushioned running shoes as being better for you, may be the worst thing that happened to running because more injuries as a result of these bad shoes, encouraging bad form. So anyway, we're back to walking is the quintessential human movement is the best thing we can do.  It's the cornerstone of anybody's longevity program, for sure. I mean, even if you look at my friend, Dan Buettner, who I don't know if you know, Dan, but he's the author of The Blue Zones. Dan's my downstairs neighbor in my building.

Melanie Avalon

Oh really? What a building to live in.

Mark Sisson

Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, and Dan and I talk, you know, we talk a lot about it. But, you know, we argue over things like meat versus, you know, beans at the as the center piece of the diet. But we certainly agree that walking and outdoor activity is that is this probably the single greatest determinant of people living to 100 years old.  So if you're thinking about longevity, walking is a far better choice than running. We have a whole chapter in the book about how really good runners tend to get into cardiovascular problems after decades of running as a result of running too hard, too long, too far, you know, too often and raising their heart rate too much. So running is not even a great longevity strategy for most people.  And again, when I talk about most people, I'm saying there are some people like me and even I was on the cusp of being genetically appropriate for running. Most of your elite runners. Look, here's the thing, running is catabolic running tears muscle tissue down.  That's why even in the 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, even in the endurance persistence hunting group, they recognize that it was catabolic that it would that it would tear you down and you could only do it once in a while in search of sustenance of food, a protein that would build you back up. So the idea that early humans would go out and, you know, we killed an animal yesterday.  Our bellies are full. I know let's go out and run six miles. No, they never would have done that.

Melanie Avalon

It's really crazy hearing that marathon story. It's crazy just as a general theme in life, how many things we do today are based on really arbitrary, like random things. And it just becomes so important. And if we look back to the origin, it's not what we thought. And I just feel like I like learn more about that every day. We just was so many things in life. So yeah, no, that's completely crazy.

Mark Sisson

Well you and I have bumped up against this in the community that we're in right now, in the diet and nutrition community. Go back to the 1980s when fat was the enemy, eating fat made you fat, and that the best possible meal you could eat was boneless, skinless chicken breast.  You know, and all of a sudden cut to today when, nah, I need the skin on the chicken because I want the collagen, I need the fat on the meat, I need, you know, it's like but we assumed that fat made you fat and that assumption carried for 20 years even though there was no basis at all in fact on that. So you're right, so many of our cultural norms are based on myths, it's bizarre.

Melanie Avalon

Here's one for you, not related at all to health and wellness, but do you know why we have margins on paper? This blew my mind.

Mark Sisson

to be able to make notes. Not why.

Melanie Avalon

No. So like back in the day, living conditions were so horrible, it was completely normal to just have rats in your house. So rats would like chew at people's paper at night and like take away the words. So they started putting margins on paper so you could allow space for the rats to chew the paper.

Mark Sisson

That's pretty interesting. Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. But it makes total sense, yeah. Now it meant you connect the dots in reverse, right?

Melanie Avalon

You know, I've never looked at paper the same way again. Something else interesting about, just speaking about this evolution of humans, I was really interested to learn in the book that going back to when we were hunter-gatherers and you talk about the Hadza tribe that are still around today, apparently they burn the same amount of energy as like sedentary people do here.  And it's because we burn, you talk about this like inflammatory energy that people who are sedentary burn. Yeah, so what's happening with that?

Mark Sisson

Well, there's a couple of things happening with that. Number one, the Hadza spend a lot of their time not doing much, right? Low level activity. When I say not doing much, they're still walking around, but they're resting and sitting and walking. And then they do their persistence hunt, but they don't do the hunt every day, right?  So their average energy output isn't that much greater than an athlete training today or a sedentary person today.  Meanwhile, and we know this, you and I know this from the intermittent fasting community, from the metabolic flexibility community, that when you eat appropriately, you become more metabolically flexible, you become metabolically efficient, and you don't need as many calories to maintain muscle mass, build muscle mass, never get sick, have all the energy you need all the time, and most importantly, not be hungry.  So the converse of that is the people around us who go through life with this idea that I'm gonna see how much food I can eat and not gain weight. What's the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight? And so people tend to overeat in a way that their bodies respond to in one of two ways.  Either they eventually gain weight, or in many cases, the body says, I'm not prepared to store this as fat, but I don't wanna, this is too much energy, and so I'm just gonna rev higher all day long. I'm going to increase the metabolism, whether it's the thermic-effective food, or whether it's just increasing basal metabolic rate to burn off the excess calories that I'm taking in.  And so these people can take in 3,500 or 4,000 calories a day, maintain body weight for a while, not be that active. And it's pretty much on the equivalent of what the Hadza would eat in a very otherwise active day. Humans do have sort of a shared baseline set point, but they can manipulate it somewhat with exercise.  But what we see with even elite athletes is that there's this compensatory mechanism where, yes, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna run for two hours, and in those two hours, I'm gonna burn 2,000 extra calories, but then I'm gonna get home, and I'm not gonna do much for the rest of the day.  So my body's gonna cut back on its energy expenditure so that at the end of the day, I haven't really burned that many more calories than a sedentary person, which is another reason why this concept of weight loss, running for weight loss, doesn't really work, because, as I said, you go out, you burn the calories, and typically the calories you burn as a non-elite runner, as an avid jogger or a person who just incorporates running into their lifestyle, you go out and you burn calories, but most of them are sugar calories, most of them are glycogen stored in your muscles.  And so you get home, and not only do you tend to overcompensate by overeating and consuming carbs, you actually carbolode on a regular basis as a result of that, but then you compensate throughout the rest of the day by doing less.

Mark Sisson

Maybe you choose not to go outside and rake the leaves, or you choose to not walk your dog the mile that you normally walk the dog, but now you walk them down to the mailbox and back. Or your kids say, hey, dad, let's go out and throw the football, and you go, eh, not right now, I gotta rest up for tomorrow's run.  So there's all these compensatory mechanisms that, in many cases, they're not even conscious decisions, they're unconscious choices that we find ourselves making that ultimately wind up having us expending really, at the end of the day, no more energy than the average couch potato might expend.

Melanie Avalon

It's so crazy. And I think it really speaks to the power of the input side of things. So what you're eating, which especially I think we see that effect with intermittent fasting, how powerful it is compared to the trying to burn off the calories with exercise and things like that.  And also even with like, GLP ones, regardless of the controversy around them, I think they do show one thing they show that people eating less seems to be effective for weight loss.

Mark Sisson

Go figure, right? Yeah, but I think that's the greatest thing I learned from initially from Primal Blueprint and then from Keto and now from Accommodation of Keto and IF is that I don't need that much in the way of energy. Like I surprise myself on how robust I am and how much muscle mass I maintain on 30 or 40% fewer calories than I consumed even as recently as 15 years ago.  And it's just a testament to a couple of things. Number one, the quality of food you eat, the quality of the calories, the amount of protein you take in, but also the ability of your body to access stored body fat on a regular basis without skipping a beat, not noticing that you're hungry or hangry.  I mean, that's one of the most magical feelings there is, is to not be tethered to hunger, appetite and cravings. It is the best. It is, yeah, it is the best. And I wish I could give that to people. That's the superpower I wish I could give to people because it's so freeing, yeah. And, and, and, so now let's tie that in with walking. So walking is an energy efficient exercise.  It is 100% fat burning for almost everybody unless you walk so fast with a weight vest on uphill that you, you know, you start burning glycogen. But anybody who goes out for a walk is burning mostly fat. And in the book, we give a number of metrics on how to determine what your fat max heart rate is. Like what's the heart rate?  The maximum heart rate below which you are burning 90% of your calories are coming from your stored body fat.  And, and, and in that regard, one of the reasons that walking works so well for people trying to lose weight is whenever you do encounter a hunger episode rather than walk to the refrigerator to grab a snack, go outside and walk 15 minutes and feel your body releasing its adipose tissue and combusting it as fuel. And you will come back from that walk a little bit more energized and less hungry.  So it's an amazing hack, if you will, I hate that word but it's amazing hack for, for hunger.

Melanie Avalon

I have a two-part intuition question related to this. So one relates to this and one relates to the shoes, but they're both intuition. So you do talk extensively in the book about this Fat Max concept, and listeners definitely get the book.  There's so much information in it that we're not even remotely touching on, but there's a lot of ways to determine your level and measuring it, and there's all these things.  And so my question is, because you do say in the book that even you emphasize the importance of really monitoring that number so that you don't go above it in your training, and you say that even going above it like a little bit can undo the benefits you were looking for, I think. I might be paraphrasing a little bit.  But so my question is, how intuitive, if we want to embrace this type of movement that will best burn fat, and we are going a little bit faster than walking, because I'm assuming walking will keep us in the okay zone, how intuitive can we be with that? Do we actually really need to monitor everything, or can we be intuitive?

Mark Sisson

Great question. So one example would be, if you're jogging, if you think that you like to run, you want to run, you're defending your right to run, and you want to go out once in a while and run, and you want to stay within that fat max fat burning zone, one way to do it is to go with a friend and carry on a conversation.  And as long as you can carry on a conversation, you're probably at or below fat max. Once you are huffing and puffing and unable to carry on a conversation, that's an indication that your oxygen consumption has increased, and now you're into burning glycogen and getting away from the fat burning zone. Now, I don't want to tell people that you've completely negated all of the benefits of a workout.  What I'm saying is it compromises that training effort at staying in the fat burning zone. It doesn't negate, it doesn't destroy it doesn't oh my god, I screwed up and now I have to go back to square one.  No, it's just the more time you can spend at that in a particular workout staying at or below that fat max heart rate, chalk that whole workout up, or that long walk or whatever it is to okay, today I just worked on fat burning, then when you go do your high intensity stuff, which I do recommend, then you can go all out.  And you'll that now that's the time where you can really like hit it hard and nail it. The problem with almost every runner and I was one of the worst. And if we first talked about this in primal endurance, I don't know if you read that book, Melanie, but that came out a bunch of years ago, a while ago, like when it came out.  And the problem is that people wind up training in what we call the black hole of training or the no man's land, where their heart rate is is too high to be promoting aerobic capacity, capillary perfusion, fat mobilization and fat burning too high for that, but too low to be really focusing on VO two max and power and strength and speed. So all you're doing is practicing hurting.  And so, and it just makes me want to cry. Because I see these people who are out there huffing and puffing every single day. And they never get better. They never improve. And you'd say, well, you know, at some point, you stop improving. Well, look, if you're, if you're that slower runner, two things are going on. Number one, you better improve.  Because theoretically, you're doing this because you want to get better at your life, you want to run faster times in your 10 k's, your marathons. And if your whole life is based around, well, I do, and I hear this a lot, I do six marathons a year, I'm like, okay, that's interesting. You know, what, what's your personal best? Well, I've run 345, 344, 342, 346.  And my thought process is, first of all, I was a career runner, I ran 100 miles a week for seven years, I've never run that long in my life, I never spent that much time running in my life. So God bless you for hurting that much.  And number two, if you're not getting better, something isn't working in your program, why would you go repeat, no offense, a bad performance over and over again, just what to collect more hardware? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.

Mark Sisson

And in the meantime, you're getting injured, injured, you're courting injury, you're not losing the the body fat you wanted to lose. In fact, what happens with a lot of these types of runners is they, they shift their body mass from they decrease their, their muscle mass, and they increase their fat, even though their weight stays the same, they become what we call skinny fat.  Running is catabolic running tears you up. There's no question about it. So every workout you do running, running tears you up. Yeah. Now you go to the gym and you can build some of that weight back. But walking is anabolic walking is at the very least anti catabolic walking does not tear you down, it builds you up.  So you'll even see the best bodybuilders in the world who are very careful about not losing a single bit of muscle like this, they work so hard to put their muscle on. They'll walk after a workout to burn fat, they won't run. No way they won't run, but they will walk after workout because they know that it's not catabolic.  It is, it's at the very least anabolic at the very least it's preserving muscle tissue while they're burning fat.

Melanie Avalon

And to that point of people putting themselves into this seemingly unnecessary suffering, we do know there's this endorphin high and you talk about the different neurotransmitters in the book and it reminds me of the work of, I don't know if you know Dr. Loretta Bruning, but she's done a lot of work and I've had her on the show a few times about the different neurotransmitters and why we have them and like, but basically their beneficial role like serotonin and dopamine oxytocin.  She doesn't even talk about endorphins in her books because she emphasizes that the point of them is they're in a response to like pain and a problem. So they're not something we should be like seeking to increase.

Mark Sisson

So, you know, how did we animals in general evolve endorphin? Well it's probably to maintain a calm, peaceful attitude in the face of death or in the face of a life or death moment. So you know, you've tracked a beast through the heat of the desert all day for three and a half hours and you failed to kill the beast, endorphins.  Rather than lie down and wallow and die, the endorphins give you a little bit of sense of hope, a little bit of peace and calm, like okay, you know, try again tomorrow. Endorphins are released when, I hate to say it, but you see these nature shows where the lion is eating the zebra while the zebra is still alive, endorphins.  That's what endorphins are keeping the zebra from, you know, eventually the zebra says, alright, it's over, I'm going to die a peaceful death, endorphins. So the seeking of these endorphins is a, again, a false promise. It's like trying to recreate, chasing the high as they say, right?  So the first couple of times it's like, oh my God, it felt so good after the run and eventually you chase that high and the next thing you know is I was chasing the high and I got injured because I, I mean this is, this is, I didn't talk about it in the book, but this is what happened to me at the end of my running career. I was so high on endorphins.  I had five days in a row in 1980 when I ran 20 miles each day and each day I ran 20 miles faster than a previous day and I was so in the zone and so high and I wasn't recognizing that I was in a life or death situation and I wound up getting injured to the point I got hip tendonitis that never, it didn't resolve until probably 30 years later and that was the end of my, my, my elite running career.  Now, when I say elite running career, I could, I could still run really well as a human being, but I couldn't participate at a world-class level anymore and I couldn't train that hard because of what I'd done to myself and part of it was a result of the, not just the endorphins, but it was the injury that I got from the shoes that were, here's a story for you.  I'll take a side step here and say, when I first got my thick cushioned running shoes, they felt great. I ran a lot in them and I got severe chondromalacia, severe knee pains and I sat my senior year of college out cross-country season, walked around campus with a cane until I got orthotics.  I was a miracle cure with orthotics, okay, so I get these orthotics and now the orthotics are raising my arches up enough that the overpronation that I was experiencing from the shoes without the arches, that was prevented and so I ran for a few more years with orthotics until my hip gave out because what had happened was the cushioning and the lack of proprioception and input to the bottom of my feet,

Mark Sisson

the initial problem went all the way up to my knees.  I fixed that by putting a wedge in my shoes and then when I wedge my shoes and it bypassed my knees, it went up to the hip and this is what we see and this is part of the, one of the chapters has to do with footwear and why we get injured and why modern running footwear is so bad for people and it's definitely, and it's even bad for people who are walking and we'll talk about that.  Your foot needs to feel the ground, it needs, the foot needs to sense the texture and the tilt of the ground underneath in order to inform the brain of exactly how to orchestrate the kinetic chain from the bottoms of the feet to the point where the brain now says, okay, here's how much we scrunch the arch around that rock or here's how much we bend the toes over that stick we're walking on.  Here's how much we roll the ankle out a little bit to take pressure off the knees from having to bend sideways. Here's how much we bend the knee and it's normal, Sagittario plane forward and back. Here's how much we rotate the hip to absorb the shock. Here's how deep we bend the knee in order to absorb the shock of this jump.  All of this information comes from bare feet, from these perfectly formed organs that we have at the end of our legs, these feet that are our main contact with the universe. They're our main contact with the ground, with the universe and our feet want to feel everything underneath in order to orchestrate this perfect kinetic chain.  You put thick cushioned stiff sole shoes that enclose the feet and scrunch the big toe against all the other toes instead of allowing it to splay outward which is what it really wants to do and the next thing you know you you you bypass all that important information and the brain has to guess okay I guess I bend the knee sideways I don't know I guess I you know tilt the hip a little bit to absorb the shock but without that important sensory information people get injured you know an injury it's an injury is your body's way of saying you're doing it wrong so if 50% of runners get injured every year they're doing it wrong something's happening but that they're doing it wrong and I'm here to say nobody gets injured walking like unless you're you know hiking on a on a rocky path and you slip on a whatever but but generally walking nobody gets injured in fact when you're injured running how do you recover from your running injury you walk

Melanie Avalon

I'm having a flashback now, and I will say, the section in the book about the shoes, I don't even, okay, I don't like wearing shoes, I don't ever wear now, I don't ever wear running type shoes. I don't like my foot to feel constricted, so I mostly wear sandals, so we can talk about that.  But I'm having flashbacks to high school or college, and I wore these shoes, I think they were Skechers, and they were called Tone Ups, and they were supposed to like make you, they're unstable I think, so they're supposed to make your muscles better, but they actually really hurt my knees. I was getting flashbacks to that.

Mark Sisson

example of of a marketing hype that now here's how those came about this is really interesting so in the early 2000s there was a movement toward minimalist footwear I was an early adopter of minimalist footwear I was the original one of the original guys wearing the five toed shoes the Vibram five fingers I had 20 pair of them in my closet I had different colors and different styles I wore them everywhere to my wife's chagrin weddings and funerals you name it I was this is what I wore a lot of people were like-minded a book came out that year called born to run and that's where I got my title born to walk because I'm trying to refute what Chris McDougal wrote in born to run he's a great author and he's a great storyteller and much of what he writes about the book is accurate and one of the things he writes about is that modern footwear modern shoes are too thick and they are causing runners injuries so a lot of people went to to buy minimalist footwear there were several companies startup companies in the 2008 910 era and minimalist shoes were all of a sudden really big and people read his book and they they said wow I'm a good runner I'll go out and run seven miles my first run in these thin thin thin flat flexible shoes well people got injured they got injured at alarming rates because they've been spending decades running in thick cushioned shoes with their toes and feet atrophied and all of the work being done from their ankles up and now they put on these minimalist shoes expecting their arches to work in a way without any arch support that they've never done before expecting their toes to work in a way they hadn't really worked out and so people got injured and so there was a there was a point here where there was a backlash against minimalist footwear and people said well you know it's just it seems like it's not working well it didn't work because it wasn't sold appropriately should have been sold okay walking these shoes a lot if you're gonna run in them run a quarter mile the first day a half a mile the next time you run but do not under any circumstances go out and run hard in these until you have spent a year training your feet what happened was there was a backlash against the minimalist shoe movement and because footwear is such a huge industry a number of people said oh here's our chance if minimalist footwear doesn't work we're gonna make maximalist footwear and that's where MBT Maasai basic training shoes came in that's where Hoka got started that's where you know Nike and New Balance and Adidas and they all started making thick thick thick cushioned running shoes as as literally a knee-jerk reaction to the minimalist footwear movement having been inappropriately sold at the wrong time so Skechers comes along and they say okay if the concept of the minimalist footwear movement was legit which was we want to work your feet more we want the muscles of your feet to be working more and so we're gonna put them in a thin shoe with lots of room for the toes to move around and that'll strengthen your feet Skechers said what if we put your feet on a Bosu ball and now we don't now you're working the muscles of your feet but you're working them in a different way so it was a interesting idea but the execution was horrible and like you said so many people got lower back pains they got because again you remove all of the haptic sensory input to the bottoms of feet now you really remove it now it's really thick and rocker and now the shoe is forcing you to walk in a certain way and your brain has to guess like okay how much you know how much do I roll my ankle or how much do I have to bend my knee sideways to absorb the shock of this or or my lower back is is is hurting because my stabilizer muscles are overworking because I've scrunched my big toe against the other the other toes in the shoe and I've disengaged my big toe from my glute let's take a sidebar here Melanie let's talk about the big toe or what we call the great toe and the glute bodybuilders have recognized this for a long time there's a direct connection between activating fully activating the glutes and having your big toe be able to abduct to pull itself away from your feet So in the gym,

Mark Sisson

they will say, the saying goes, great toe, great ass. And what that means is, that's why you see bodybuilders and weight lifters and really serious people about lifting, taking their shoes off on days they do deadlifts and squats and lunges and things like that, because they want to engage, they want the big toe to splay outwardly in order to fully engage the glute.  They want to build the glute, the glute's one of the largest, strongest muscles in the body. You want to engage it. And if you're wearing shoes when you do this activity and you're compressing the big toe against the other toes, squeezing it against the other toes in a shoe or even in a tight sock for that matter, you are not able to fully engage the glute.  And then what happens is, when you do the work, when you do the heavy work of a squat or a deadlift even or any of these other lower body focused movements, when you do that, you disengage the big toe from the glute. And now the stabilizer muscles near around the glute have to take on some of the work. And that's where you start injuries there and you start to get problems.  So the big toe needs to splay outwardly. It needs to be able to what we call abduct. Abduct is taking it away from the body. Adduct, ADD, is pushing it into the body. Toes need to, they want to splay outward. They should splay outward. So barefoot is always the best way to go. But in the absence of barefoot, having a five-toed minimalist shoe is the second best choice.

Melanie Avalon

Speaking of the shoes and constricting the toe, that was another completely, I think, arbitrary thing. You talk in the book about the narrow shoes going back to peasant times and being rich or not.

Mark Sisson

Yes. So in the days of old where there were caste systems and there were peasants and there were nobility, peasants wore wide toed shoes. They wore wide toes because they were out in the fields working. They needed their feet to do work.  The foot was critical to any movement they did, whether you're plowing a field, mowing a field, gathering wood, chopping trees, whatever it was, you need a wide base to initiate whatever action it is.  Meanwhile, the nobility wore thin, tight, pointy shoes for no other reason than a fashion statement to tell the world that they were nobility, that they didn't have to work, that they were not peasants. And that's kind of how this, I mean, you go back to the Ming Dynasty and they were binding feet.  I mean, you've probably seen some of the horrible photographs of women's feet who were bound from birth and wind up looking like pointy triangles with no toes at all. That's the worst and highest iteration of binding feet together. But shoes do that. Bunions. People come to me all the time, oh my gosh, Mark, I'd love to wear your shoes, but I have bunions.  And I'm like, well, okay, I have a lot of people who wear my shoes whose bunions no longer bother them, like at all. They've regained function in their feet. One of those people is my daughter-in-law who at 19 had bunion surgery on one of her feet, didn't have it on the other one.  And now she's the marketing director for Palluva and she's kicking herself forever having had bunion surgery because her other non-surgical foot is completely fixed. So bunions, and people will say, well, but Mark, you know, bunions are, they're genetic. They run in my family.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask.

Mark Sisson

bad fashion choices run in your family or good fashion choices depending on if you get wearing Jimmy Choo's or Manolo's. But bunions are a result of bad footwear. Everybody is born with perfect feet. I don't care what they look like. I don't care if they're flat or whatever. Everybody's born with a perfect foot and a perfect kinetic chain, birth defects notwithstanding.  And this perfect kinetic chain works for you. So you may say, well, I have flat arches, I have duck feet, I have knock knees, I have wide hips. I don't care. As long as your feet can sense the ground underneath you, your brain knows exactly how to orchestrate your kinetic chain to absorb shock and impact trauma and ground forces perfectly every time you walk.  But it has to have access to that information without having that input from the bottoms of the feet to tell what you're walking on, whether it's cobblestones or dirt or grass or a rocky trail or sticks, whatever, the brain has to have that information in order to inform your particular kinetic chain how much to scrunch the arch, how much to bend the toes, how to roll the ankle, how deeply to bend the knees, how much to rotate the hip.  All of these things, they work perfectly. And you look at babies, babies have perfect feet, right? They're almost V-shaped, right? You look at the bottom of the heels, the bottom of the V, and then they go outward. Like, oh my God, they're so cute and they're so perfect. Well, we put them in cute little Mary Janes or cute little Nikes.  And the next thing you know, kids have foot problems and have shoe problems. Well, bunions as a result of a lifetime and not even that much time. I mean, when my daughter-in-law had her first bunion surgery, she was 19. She already had bad bunions at the age of 19 from footwear, not from genetics. You know, you'll get a genetic predisposition.  We talk about this in the intermittent fasting world a lot, right? You have a predisposition to storing some amount of body fat, maybe a little bit more than other people. So you have to be cognizant of that. But in general, your body works the same way everyone else's body works. And so in terms of intermittent fasting, it'll work for you.  It might not shed, it may not get you down to, you know, 4% body fat like it would someone else. But it'll definitely work for you if you tweak the knobs right. Same with footwear. If you are able to encourage good foot health, good foot form, resilience, strength, realignment at an early age, your feet will serve you for a lifetime.  And when we talk about feet serving you for a lifetime, one of the reasons people die, and this is a typical scenario, you know, somebody is 80 years old, they get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and they trip over the cat, and they fall and break your hip. And that's the beginning of a cascade of bad events, right? They go to the hospital, they get pneumonia, and they die.  All of these things happened initially, because maybe the foot wasn't strong enough to withstand, to catch yourself from tripping.

Mark Sisson

And maybe your balance was off because you hadn't done enough footwork in terms of the realm of balance to be able to even maintain good balance. Maybe you hadn't done enough outside work, footwork, walking, and lifting weights, so your bone density was compromised because you didn't do that work.  And there your bones, which would not have otherwise broken in that fall, now were so brittle because of lack of activity, that you broke the hip when you fell. It's this chain of events that starts with the feet. And my message, you know, my new mantra, my new mission is to change the way the world looks at foot health as being critical to overall health.

Melanie Avalon

I'm so glad. I was going to ask you about the slipping and falling. So I'm so glad we touched on that. I'm just so happy right now, Mark. OK, for a few reasons. One, the bunions thing, my dad had surgery for it. My grandmother had surgery. I was always told it was genetic. So I was like, am I just waiting? Like, is it going to pop up in my feet? So that's good to hear.  And then two, just to touch back on the tone up Skechers thing. One of my favorite things about having like podcasting and having this show is when I have an epiphany from something that I was wondering, you know, like decades ago forever. And and then like I'm who would have thought like two decades later, I'd be talking about toneups right now. And now I understand why I was experiencing that.  Another another shoe question. So the reason I was coming back from Vegas was I was hosting on the red carpet. Actually, no, last night, no night before. Wait, was it last night? Oh, biohack yourself. Yeah, yeah. Were you there at a forum? No. OK, it was fun. But I was I was hosting on the red carpet and all the things. And we were there all day. And we were talking about shoes and when to put our heels on.  And I was making a comment that I I actually love heels. I either want to be barefoot or wearing high heels, but are high heels horrible?

Mark Sisson

You're horrible, but Melanie, don't stop wearing them. They look fabulous.

Melanie Avalon

That's what Brad said.

Mark Sisson

He was like, they look fabulous. But yeah, they're the worst thing for your feet. So you earn the right to wear them if you spend a lot of time with either going barefoot or wearing toe spacers or going barefoot, walking around with toe spacers, or even better, getting yourself a pair of peluvas and walking around in those. Because the difference, you talked a little bit about sandals.  Do you wear the thong kind with the division between the big toe and the second toe? Yes. Okay, see, those are not great. So yeah, those are not helping you at all. You're better off going barefoot. What you want is, because what happens is you sort of have to scrunch your toes a little bit to keep them on under certain circumstances.  You know, they're not, I mean, they're better than, if they're wide enough, they're better than wearing, you know, regular restrictive shoes. Let me ask you a question. Did you see Ben Greenfield there?

Melanie Avalon

I so funny thing is he's coming on the show soon. We've had so many email exchanges. Yes. I met him for the first time in person

Mark Sisson

Was he wearing, was he wearing a paloubas?

Melanie Avalon

I didn't look at his feet. I wish we had done this conversation before. I would have been, like, staring.

Mark Sisson

He's so on board, he's so on board with Palouis. And I heard he was wearing him at the premier, but.

Melanie Avalon

He probably was.

Mark Sisson

Yeah, because we have, you know, great looking leather lace up Napa leather lace ups that look just like stylish shoes, you might find at Wolf and Shepherd or something like that.  Because we recognize pretty early on that once you understand not just the importance of toe freedom and and relaxing and realigning your strength at your feet, but once you get the feeling the comfort of this, you will not want to wear other shoes again, high heels accepted.  But actually, a lot of women who are who are wearing Palooas now are shying away from even wearing high heels because they just they recognize that the comfort, the discomfort of the high heels is so great that they're not willing to put themselves through that. So keep that in mind.

Melanie Avalon

Are any of the palubas, and this actually kind of expands on the flip-flop question, so you guys sent me a pair and it is enclosed. Are they all enclosed shoes?

Mark Sisson

Yeah. Do you know which ones we sent you? I'd have to check. And what do you think? What's your first impression?

Melanie Avalon

I don't normally put my feet except for heels into enclosed spaces. So it was a completely, it feels completely different.

Mark Sisson

Yeah, it's a novel experience for I get it. It's like, no, it's the difference between a mitten, a mitten and a glove.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I was like, this is a new, this is a new experience.

Mark Sisson

Yeah, these are gloves for your feet. These are gloves for your feet. So they take a little bit of getting used to for some people. Some people take to them immediately and go, oh my god, this is the best thing I've ever done. Other people say, they feel a little weird.  And then, you know, two days later, like, okay, I need to buy another pair because, you know, I needed another color and another style. So I think one of our sales objectives is to have people give them a day or two trial and, you know, before you say, it just still doesn't feel right. Or whatever. Because, you know, most people are okay with gloves, right?  I mean, most people would would put on gloves and say, yeah, I like gloves. Maybe even better than mittens for some certainly for some activities. Anyway, I'm just riffing here. We have a lot of styles and a lot of different uses for them, too. We've got we just introduced a trail shoe.  I've got a lot of off-road UTMB racing guys who are training in the shoe and loving it because normal racing shoes of that type are too thick and they can't feel the trail. They can't feel the rocks they're stepping on.  And so they tend to twist an ankle, partly because their shoes are too stiff and they haven't spent the time strengthening their ankle and partly because they can't feel what's going on underneath. So when they train with the peluevus, they feel what's going on underneath. And now when the ankle rolls, it rolls just enough, but also the knee bends just a little bit more to offset the forces.  And it's a great training tool for somebody who's doing that sort of thing. We tell people, you know, don't run in pelueus. Wear your running shoes when you go run, but train. Spend your day walking around in peluevus. Go to the gym in peluevus. Work. Spend the day working in peluevus if you're having to wear shoes at work.  And then when it's time to do your sport, put on your basketball shoes or put on your hockey skates or whatever it is you're putting on. And your feet will be stronger, more resilient, and they will thank you for having done that.

Melanie Avalon

No, I am so excited because I think so the order of my experience with the Paluvas and your book is you guys sent me the Paluvas because when did you launch the company?

Mark Sisson

Oh, it's been a year and a half.

Melanie Avalon

Okay, so I think it was around the time you launched. It was a while ago. And I hadn't read this book yet. I didn't have any of this education. And like I said, I don't even normally wear, like I pretty much just wear sandals and high heels. So I didn't understand, I did not understand until I read your book and talking to you now and all the things, I'm just like, wow.  Anytime it's applicable to my life, I need to be wearing these. And there are so many people in my life who just need these, like this could change the world.

Mark Sisson

No, I think you change the world. And now these are walking shoes. And, and, you know, again, I was the it's not a coincidence that I wrote the book born to walk on the heels pun intended of the shoe company because I'm so adamant about people walking but I'm adamant about them people about people walking well, walking with good form.  Now I will share with you today is day 14 of a total hip replacement for me. I had my hip replaced 14 days ago. I am I'm going to say 95% recovered. I thought it was going to take six weeks or eight weeks. I am 95% recovered two weeks into this. I did 40 minutes on the elliptical last night. I did yesterday morning. I did three miles uphill on a treadmill. I'm wearing the peluvus.  Now here's the important part of this. You know, I had a traumatic surgery, right? If they cut my the side of my hip open, they yanked my hip bone out, sawed the end of it off, put a medical metal L piece on it, reamed out my hip socket, put a ceramic cup in there, stuck it back together and sewed me back up. The next day I was I walked about a half a mile a day later.  I walked about a half a mile in peluvus in downtown Vail, Colorado. The next day I walked a mile in peluvus and I've been I've been increasing my output. But the important thing is with the peluvus, I am able to execute a perfect gate almost immediately because I'm waiting the heel and then rolling off the big toe.  We talked earlier about this big toe abduction, this ability of the big toe to splay outwardly. A perfect gate really requires that you roll off the big toe. And I'm I guaranteed my quick recovery.  And I'm going to I've already talked to my doctors about this is is in part due to the fact that my walk is not compromised by a restrictive shoe that is squishing my big toe against the other toes and causing me to over pronate and roll sideways off the shoe.  As happens in so many cases, you know, when you you angle your foot outward 15 degrees and then you kind of when you walk through it, you roll off the front instead of pushing off directly off the big toe. So I'm I'm really thrilled about and by the way, when I when I wrote to my surgeon and I said, I think we're going to revolutionize THA, which is total hip arthro arthroplasty.  He said, Why stop there? Why not? Why not knees and ankles and everything else? And I'm like, You're right. Exactly. So I think I think we're really I know we're really on to something here. I mean, we, you know, we already have tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of customers who are extremely satisfied, who buy multiple pairs, whose lives have changed, who are.  And in your case, Melanie, if you like to walk outside, that's the best use of palovas for you. And I have, I live in a building in South Florida, I told you Dan Buettner lives in my building, but there's a lot of sort of accomplished individuals that live in my building.

Mark Sisson

My wife has probably 15 friends that are between the age of 60 and 70. Many of them walk six to eight miles a day. All of them are walking in palovas.  And all of them at this point would not have another shoe to walk in because the the ground feel the the engagement of the full leg engagement, not just a glute, but every muscle up the leg as a result of this ground feel as a result of this toe splay as a result of this minimalist notion of the of the footwear. The ability to articulate toes.  I mean, we walk on cobblestones here and we call it foot candy. It's like it's it feels so cool to walk in cobblestones and and have it be put a put a smile on your face. You know, when you walk outside and you've had shoes on all day and you take your shoes off and you walk in grass and you can't not smile, right? Like you step in grass and all of a sudden the world is wonderful, right?  If you're barefoot, that's sort of the feeling we wanted to recreate with with palovas. We wanted to get this sense of when I'm walking, I want to experience the universe. I don't want to necessarily.  I mean, I sometimes I'll listen to a podcast, but most of the time when I'm walking, I'm experiencing the wind on my face, the sounds around me, conversations going back and forth, smiling at people as they walk by. This is this is real world, real time, real life experience. You know, all we have in this life is now. Yesterday didn't really exist. It happened, but I only remember it.  And tomorrow's not here yet. All we have is now. And so the more amount of time you can spend sensing the moment and appreciating the moment as a result of your tactile communication with Earth, I think the better off you'll be and the happier you'll be.

Melanie Avalon

This is so incredible. I have decided I am giving these to everybody for holidays. Yeah, this is absolutely incredible. And I just I found the one that you guys sent me and now I just lost it. It was the the women's it's one that came in all pink. Oh, the women's strand trainer. Yes. Wow. Okay.  So quick question about when people so people order palubas for themselves, a few quick questions about practically implementing these and a clarification question about the intuition. So, so if people were in palubas, do they have to worry about concentrating at all on their walking form? Or is this going to make them intuitively walk correctly?

Mark Sisson

I think that's it. I think you intuitively walk better. Think about your walking form. And if you've had, if your form has been compromised by years of wearing bad shoes and your feet are deformed, take it easy. Obviously, you know, walk around the house a little bit the first day, keep them on for an hour, see what you think, notice how your feet feel.  In many cases, what we tell people is if your feet slide right into your pelubas, you want these shoes. If your feet don't slide right into these pelubas, you need these shoes. So many people's feet are deformed from years of wearing narrow restrictive shoes or from the bunions or from, you know, loss of communication with their feet.  I mean, sometimes it takes people 10 minutes to get their pelubas on the first time to get each toe into the appropriate socket. That's an example of complete loss of toe awareness.  Like you've like the fact that you can't tell me that your toes are in each individual socket tells me you've lost communication with this most important, one of the most important organs in your body that is your main connection with the universe. So many people have tiny small toes, right? Their little toe, their pinky toe looks like a vestigial organ that's going to shrivel up and fall off.  It's been so, it's been so relegated to being squished against the next toe. No, you want to, you want to articulate that you want to, you want to separate it, you want to get it out there. I mean, there's a reason that 20 million pairs of toe separators have been sold in the last couple of years, the toe spacers. I think women in general know that their feet are messed up.  And so lots of women take their shoes off at the end of the day, they put on their toe spacers, they watch Netflix, you know, for two hours, and then they go to sleep. Well, that's a great start.  But I'm saying what if you lived during the daytime, you walked and you ran errands and you dropped the kids off at school and you went to work or whatever you do, you did the laundry, you did your, and the whole time you're wearing either barefoot or you're wearing pelubas.  So every step you take, you are reinforcing this positive realignment and strengthening and increasing the mobility and the resilience of your foot passively. Like you're not running, you're not doing specific exercises. You're just living your life, walking around a lot in pelubas or barefoot. Like I said, I'd rather people go barefoot, but it's just, if you're outside, it's just impractical.  You know, so much of our environment is hardwood, floors, marble floors, tile floors, pavement, concrete, things like that. We designed the pelubas to be, to give you the sensation of walking barefoot on a putting green when you're walking on a sidewalk, right? So it's not as squishy squishy at all, but it's also not thin, thin, thin.

Mark Sisson

So you feel everything and you're calling upon your metatarsal head and your fat pads to absorb all the shock. No, just a tiny bit of, just enough protection and cushion so that you could walk. And this was my, by the way, this was my litmus test so that I could walk 10 to 12 miles a day in Europe on concrete with these shoes on and feel better as a result of having done it.  Not get bone bruises, not, because the old shoes, the old five-toed shoes, the ones that I originally talked about that I wore, I couldn't walk two or three miles without getting bone bruises and then really having my feet suffer. So that was one of the first things I did when I reinvented, redesigned this concept from the ground up.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness. Okay, that explains a lot. So the first time I put it on, yeah, I had issues like getting my toes in and I thought I needed a bigger size. So I did get a bigger size. I don't know if it was both things happening there. Like I need a bigger size and I've lost intuition of my toes and my little toes gonna fall off.

Mark Sisson

Don't let that happen.

Melanie Avalon

Okay. Oh my goodness. And what about socks? Do people wear socks with these?

Mark Sisson

Absolutely we make socks we make a different size of socks and different we have a no show sock for people who don't want to have people see their socks we make an ankle sock and crew sock. They're all five toed of course you can't wear regular socks with these.  That wasn't your problem no no okay yeah yeah but but having said that i don't i don't wear socks at all and so i made we made the shoes we made the shoes for people like me who don't wear socks prefer not to wear socks so all of the shoes are.  available to be worn without socks it's just that some people insist on wearing socks and and you know, sometimes we have these try on events where people we will bring.  You know, a full kit of every size that people are gonna try on the shoes and then see if they like them, but if multiple people are going to try on the same shoe we we bring socks for everybody to try on that's just a sanitary thing but.  You know, some people absolutely want socks when I was in veil it was zero degrees when I was rehabbing my hip day one I had socks I wore socks underneath regular shoe and walking through.  The little town of veil on the cobblestones in zero degree temperature was fantastic it felt great they gave me crutches they told me you're going to need these crutches for a week at least i'm like don't tell anybody I throw them away after the first day i'm like nope.  Don't need crutches sorry this is not happening just further evidence to me of how critical the big toe is and toe splay and toe articulation is to orchestrating a good walking gate and then once you have that the more you walk the more you reinforce.  That upright stature that good posture that good mood that you know everything coming full circle back to the concept of walking born to walk, we are born to walk and I want people to walk as much as they can with good form with good footwear and you know extract the greatest amount of contentment enjoyment fulfillment and pleasure out of life as possible.

Melanie Avalon

Well, I am so excited right now. I think my game plan, now I'm looking at your shoes and you have so many more since when I first ordered. So you had this one at the time, but I think what I'm gonna get is the Miami casual loafer for women's for the day, like when I'm outside. And then you have a slip on. What does it mean that the heel goes down?

Mark Sisson

Yeah, you can either put the, you can, I have two of them, I'm wearing one of them right now. I just had to drop a package off down at the front desk in my building. And I didn't want to go down barefoot, I would, but it's, you know, not allowed, it's inappropriate here. So I jammed into my, my zen, these are my zen slip-ons zen, zen, they're quilted. And they have a flexible back.  So you can either pull the back up and keep them cinched and on. Or you can, it's a collapsible back, you could just step on it as if they're, I don't know what the, what the other term is, like more like a sandal. Like you don't, you don't have any, any back support or anything around it, but it goes both ways.  And when I was, this is the shoe I wore in Aspen, when I, in Aspen, in Vale, when I was, I'm going to Aspen next week, when I was in Vale, when it was cold.  And because I, I just come out of surgery, I mean, I couldn't really bend over to tie my shoes or to, or to cinch my shoes on, but I could step into them and step on the collapsed heel and walk around town with the collapsed heel and socks on, it was, it was great.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness. This is my shoe. Okay. I'm excited. I'm so excited.

Mark Sisson

Yeah, so I want you to keep me posted because you're someone I need to have, understand the concept, embrace it, love it, and promote it. Because I think you get, not just the science, but you get the sociology behind it, the anthropology behind it, and it's concurrent with an intermittent fasting-type lifestyle.

Melanie Avalon

I'm just so grateful and so excited because literally, I was thinking about this like today with your book. I'm like, nobody's talking about this.  Like I know there are other companies making like minimalist shoes and things like that, but like this book that you have, this education, it's absolutely mind blowing and then people can, well, A, read the book and make lifestyle changes, but then you have a practical solution where it's not like we're gonna have to, like we just talked about, people can just start wearing palubas and it's gonna really like help change things.  It's ironic because you're talking in the book about one of the problems with running being the low barrier to entry. So anybody can do it, but we shouldn't be doing it. And it's a lot of problems. This is low barrier to entry in the best way.

Mark Sisson

Absolutely. We had a team meeting today. In that meeting, I reinforced to my team that we are an education company that sells shoes.

Melanie Avalon

I love it. Well, listeners are probably dying to get a pair for themselves and for their whole family like I want to do now. So you're so kind. Listeners can go to paluba.com. That's P-E-L-U-V-A.com and use the code IAPODCAST to get a discount on your order. So definitely take advantage of that. That's the code IAPODCAST at paluba.com. Oh, by the way, where does the name come from?

Mark Sisson

Oh, so, you know, I've been very adamant about the word primal. I have 20 trademarks. Primal Kitchen, Primal Blueprint, Primal Health Coach Institute, Primal Fuel, Primal Fitness, boom, boom, boom, all down the line. I went to get primal footwear and somebody had carved out the word primal and there was no other iteration. So we had to make a word up.  So we looked through all of the languages and come to find out, and I have no affinity for Portuguese, but in Portuguese, PE is foot and luva is glove and you put them together and it's pe luva.

Melanie Avalon

That's amazing!

Mark Sisson

And it sounds cool, doesn't it, I mean, you got to admit it's a great it's kind of a luxury sounding name and we really like it.

Melanie Avalon

Well, you did a good job because a lot of times like made up words or vague words, they're hard to remember. Like ever since I learned about it from Brad, originally, I've never like, I've never like had to scratch my mind to like remember what it's called. Well, thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate your time so much. I was sad. I heard that you were at the, uh, eudaimonia conference briefly.  I was there too, but I did not see you.

Mark Sisson

No, I just I came down. I literally drove drove up from Miami Beach for the afternoon to just check it out. We were thinking about maybe exhibiting there next year. So I wanted to get just sort of the layout.

Melanie Avalon

I'm definitely gonna go next year. So hopefully I will see you there. And thank you again so much. Literally, you're like one of my favorite people. You're honestly one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing today. I've been following your work since forever. Like the early blog days. And I just can't express enough gratitude for everything that you do. So thank you.

Mark Sisson

It's my pleasure and thank you so much for that acknowledgement. That's really important to me to hear that people took the message and are, you know, the term paying it forward doesn't do it justice, but I appreciate the fact that you do what you do.

Melanie Avalon

Well, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day. Enjoy Aspen, and I will talk to you soon. All right. Thanks, Melanie. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember, everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice, and no patient-doctor relationship is formed. If you enjoyed the show, please consider writing a review on iTunes.  We couldn't do this without our amazing team. Editing by podcast doctors, show notes and artwork by Brianna Joyner, and original theme composed by Leland Cox and recomposed by Steve Saunders. See you next week.