Celebrity Health: Mark Sisson
As motivations go, Mark Sisson’s is hard to beat: “I want to find more opportunities to play,” he says. It’s a bit of a wonder that he has the time. Sisson, 56, is the founder of Primal Nutrition, a company that offers natural supplements and information for healthy living.
Sisson, a longtime health writer and editor, is a former marathon runner who earned a spot in the 1980 Olympic trials. He also served for 15 years as anti-doping and drug-testing chairman of the International Triathlon Union and was its liaison to the International Olympic Committee. He’s the namesake of marksdailyapple.com, an online community for “primal living in the modern world.”
It’s impossible not to notice that, for Sisson, what it means to be primal is a very big deal. For him and those who follow his recommendations for wellness, living a healthy life is all about taking cues from early man: how he ate, moved, slept and managed stress.
It is a lifestyle that evolved out of necessity.
From a young age, Sisson ran. What began as jogging home from school simply to get home more quickly turned into participation on the track team, which in turn led to finding success as one of the top marathoners in the country. “I was known as ‘the fit guy,’” he says, on the phone from his home in Malibu, Calif. “In truth I was falling apart because I was doing what conventional wisdom suggested I do, which was to run a lot and to eat a very high carbohydrate diet. I was eating 1,000 grams of carbohydrates a day in order to fuel my running habit.
“After a number of years of doing that, the wheels started to come off. I was very unhealthy on the inside. I had osteoarthritis in my feet. I had tendonitis in my hips. I had chronic upper-respiratory tract infections, six or eight times a year. I had seasonal allergies that were debilitating at times. And I had irritable bowel syndrome that I chalked up to stress. So, I was really the antithesis of a healthy human even though on the outside … I was a pretty healthy guy.”
Sisson, who earned a degree in biology, jokes that he decided – 31 years ago – to defer med school for a few years. But his predisposition toward science has served him well. “I’ve been doing research on fitness and health and nutrition and performance for a full 25 years,” he says. “Over 20 years ago, I found out that by reducing the intensity of my long chronic cardio workouts and just making them fun and intuitive, and by only occasionally doing a very intense sprint workout or an intense gym workout, that I could be healthy and fit on what amounted to a whole lot less struggling and suffering and sacrifice and pain and discipline and all of those negative words that we associate with having to be in shape.
“And that was a revelation. That was the point at which I said, ‘This is really going to be my life’s goal, to find out how I can get the most amount of benefit with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline, calorie-counting, portion control, weighing and so on.’ And to this day, that’s what drives me. It’s this notion that life ought to be fun and easy and enjoyable. And we ought to have all the things we want, the fitness, the leanness, the energy levels … with ease and grace and enjoyment.”
It’s impossible to argue with the results. “I say I’ve got the body of a 28-year-old and the mind of a 17-year-old,” Sisson says, playfully. In truth, he has a better body than plenty of 28-year-olds. And he’s sculpted it by having fun and eating.
“I don’t work out like a fiend,” he says. “I almost apologize about how little I work out because it’s, like, ridiculous how little I work out. Most of my body composition and what you see in a photograph is the result of how I eat.”
Sisson believes 80 percent of body composition is a result of what we eat [see sidebar] and 20 percent is determined by exercise. “I still do train and I train intensely when I do,” he says. “But it’s very brief amounts of focused, intense training. The rest of what I do is play.” Like golf.
“I used to make a joke about golf when I was an endurance athlete,” he says. “As Mark Twain said, ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled.’ But golf may be one of the most primal activities there is if you carry your own bag for 18 holes, if you stop every once in a while and swing that club then hoist the bag back onto your shoulder and walk some more, if you have to go into the woods and forage or gather or hunt for one of your lost golf balls.”
For Sisson, there are no restrictions on wellness. “At some point, people say, ‘Well, I’m 60. Is it too late? Have I already done the damage?’ And the answer is no, it’s not too late. It’s never too late. A lot of the 50- and 60-year-olds that start on my program lose 35 or 50 pounds or more and get into some form of playing a game, whether it’s playing golf again or playing pickup soccer with their kids.” But beyond that, Sisson says, “is the 50-year-old who was on the cusp of getting cancer or arthritis or type 2 diabetes who now does not get it. That’s huge.”
Sisson recently hosted his first-ever gathering of like-minded wellness enthusiasts of all ages, which he intends to make an annual event. “I had a 27-year-old tell me that he felt sorry for me because he’s 27 and he’s extracting all of this life advice from somebody like me who had to suffer for 15 years to get it. And I said to him, ‘Do not feel sorry for me, man. I’m in the best space of my life. I wouldn’t be where I am had I not gone through that process. So everything is perfect, everything works perfectly.’ ”
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The Primal Blueprint Basics
Sisson says he could convey the essence of his regimen in two pages, “but the human brain needs to know why. People need to understand the whys and the wherefores and they need examples.”
Here’s what you need to know to get started:
1. Cut out sugars “It’s a toughie,” Sisson acknowledges, “but there’s not a person in this country who would argue that that’s what they ought to be doing.”
2. Cut out grains “I tell people they need to cut out grains and sugars at the same time because grains convert to glucose in the bloodstream very quickly,” Sisson says. “The brain doesn’t know the difference between whether you just ate a bowl of table sugar or a handful of rice.” It takes about three weeks to down-regulate the genes that are dependent on glucose. “During those three weeks, your brain is still expecting you to be providing a source of glucose every three hours,” Sisson says, who suggests maintaining “access to some healthy snacks: a can of macadamia nuts, some beef jerky or turkey jerky, some celery with some almond butter handy, something so that you never feel like you’re depriving yourself, and if you do get hungry, you don’t need to reach for that bagel.”
3. Cut out all seed oils and trans fats “These are all the polyunsaturated oils, safflower, corn, sunflower, canola oils,” Sisson says. “Cut out trans fats. Really be diligent about reading labels. You’ll find most processed foods, most foods that have to have a nutrition facts label, have one or more of those.”
4. Get a lot of low-level aerobic activity “Not chronic cardio,” Sisson says. “Not the kind where your heart rate’s racing at 80 to 85 percent of its max. We have a saying here: ‘Make your hard workouts harder and shorter, and make your aerobic workouts longer and easier.’ ”
5. Absolutely pay attention to your sleep “Sleep is the most overlooked, underappreciated factor in terms of maintaining not just good health, not just good immune-system strength, but weight maintenance,” Sisson says.
While the list of “primal” foods includes a near-endless array of options, Sisson suggests five basics to have on hand:
- A refrigerator drawer full of salad fixings
- Some form of grass-fed beef
- A can of macadamia nuts
- A dozen free-range eggs
- Some form of organic butter
For those who might think it’s too expensive to eat this way, Sisson offers this reasoning.
“A heart bypass is expensive. If it costs you as much as an extra $30 a week – and I don’t think it does – to eat this way, and that’s $1,500 a year, and you have more energy, you get sick less often so your doctor visits are cut down, and you are essentially assured of not needing a major heart operation, or you’re virtually assured of not needing a litany of diabetic drugs or arthritic drugs or the drugs that are required to address the side-effects of those first drugs. That’s a pretty good investment.”
Sisson adds: “When you cut out the $4 candies at the movie theater, when you cut out the $5 sugar-laden coffee, when you cut out the processed foods, and you’re eating good, clean, great-tasting food, it may be that you save money.”
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